She seems to have misplaced her previous pond.

She’s found a new one, though! She even seems to have found herself in it, which is typically more of a third date sort of thing, although this narrator isn’t about to judge. 

The veil of night is crisp, and dark, and beautiful. Every star is perfectly visible, stars being the daring creatures that they are, and most everything else in the world seems entirely too shy to reveal itself; even the moon is absent. She can see the tranquil silhouette of a tree - or two, or three, or four, or actually she’s probably in a forest nevermind - and a faint shimmer of light on the surface of the pond, and those stars aforementioned, and nothing else.

The water is warmer, though not quite warm, and the stones seem less slippery.

...what.

She takes a couple seconds to catch her breath and give the situation a chance to resolve itself into something that makes sense.  When it doesn't, she climbs out of the water - a bit gingerly; she acquired a few scrapes and bruises - shucks off her coat in a heap beside her, sits down and hugs her knees to her chest for a few minutes while she gives everything a second shot at being in any way comprehensible.

Everything doesn’t seem like it’s in an especially cooperative mood.

Rude.

Eventually, she scoops up her coat, wrings it out the best she can, and picks a direction to start walking in.  She keeps track of at least three trees that form a straight line at any given time - or, she tries to; it's really dark and her attention span is not so great even when she's not trying to figure out the question of What the Fuck.  She might lose sight of the far one a few times, but it's hopefully enough to mostly keep her from going in circles.

She doesn’t notice herself going in circles! This provides very little evidence either way on whether she is, in fact, going in circles.

She doesn’t encounter anything more interesting than an unusually large toadstool within the next few hours of walking - especially since she’s presumably moving with all the frantic haste of a paraplegic snail, in this level of darkness and in a forest containing a reasonable amount of underbrush.

This is much more nothing than she was expecting, although probably that was dumb of her.  She considers ways she could improve the situation and doesn't come up with many that aren't obviously terrible wastes of magic.  Eventually she decides to take a break; she sits against a tree to rest and try to let her socks dry out some.

The tree fails to do anything suspicious. Her socks, the same. Perhaps they know they’re being watched.

A few fireflies start flickering, singing sonnets to their beetle beloveds in obscure codes of light and bioluminescence. A few more rise up, and a few more after that, and then a rather large number of them, all together, lazily drifting through the quiet nighttime air like little paper lanterns, rising up from the grass, stretching away in every direction, beautiful pinpoints of light. The forest is brighter - still held in the grasp of the gloom of night, but less oppressively so.

She may or may not know enough about firefly behavior to know that this isn’t typical.

They're definitely not acting like any fireflies she's seen before, but she hasn't actually seen that many, so what does she know.  They're pretty, though; she'll sit and watch them for a bit.  It's not like she has a better idea.

The fireflies continue to be pretty.

There’s a faint sound, in the distance, getting closer. Someone - playing a violin?

Excellent!  She puts on her socks and shoes again and heads towards it.

It gets closer rather more quickly than it would otherwise, then.

After a bit of walking, the sound of the violin abruptly stops; every firefly she can see immediately dims, and the night is once again perfectly dark. An amused, feminine voice drips down from a nearby tree -

“A stranger! I don’t often meet strangers. I don’t often meet anyone. I rarely meet myself, in fact, and when I do I’m always quick to run away. Do you often wander deep woods in even deeper night, darling?”

Aw, the pretty's gone.  Also she can't see again.  "Uh, sometimes?  Mostly in the afternoon, which to be fair it was when I started."  She cranes her neck to look up the tree that the voice is coming from and waits for her eyes to adjust to the dark.

This doesn’t immediately reveal anything. 

“But nobody ever wanders here! That’s why I’m always so busy, I’m always meeting nobody. It’s exhausting! But nobody appreciates me. Are you very lost?”

"I think so, yeah."

There’s a kind of synesthetic pout, felt more than seen, from the general direction of the tree.

”That’s no fun! I always like the nobodies who think they know where they’re going, since they never do. Do you need directions?” 

"If you're offering!"

“Wait out the night, walk towards the sunrise, follow the spot of white, and travel down the next river you cross. And don’t take the advice of strangers. Goodbye!”

There’s a vague sound of movement, in the tree, and then yet more arboreal rustling in a tree next to it, and so on. The sound of a fiddle being fiddled with resumes, and becomes too far away to hear in short order.

She debates calling or running after her for long enough that those options disappear.  Looks like it's time for Leaning Against a Tree: Part II, this time with added intention to hang out there for quite a while.  She arranges her stuff to dry again and settles in.

Nothing particularly interesting happens for the rest of the long, dim night.

That's so boring.  Ughhhhhhhh.  She can't sleep through it - not only would that probably be dumb in unfamiliar wilderness, but also she only woke up like an hour before setting out on her initial walk and isn't remotely tired.  She didn't bring her phone, which is really the worst part; it'd be easy to kill however-many-hours with that even without any signal.  She really wishes - well, she wishes she had it in some alternate setup where having brought it with her wouldn't've left it waterlogged and useless, and if she's going for that much she might as well just wish she was back home.

She plucks lots of blades of grass and picks at a lot of moss and wrings out her stuff as thoroughly as she possibly can and takes out her shoelaces and puts them back in in a different pattern.  She attempts to weave something out of the underbrush and gives up in pretty short order.  She tries to climb the tree with bare feet and then with her shoes on.  She gives a lot of thought to trying to teleport home, and almost does, but determines that there's way too many ways that could go wrong seeing as she's never done it herself before, even over very short distances.  (Unless she somehow did it accidentally in the pond, which would actually probably be evidence against.)  She considers practicing porting a few feet away but decides that that's probably a waste of magic, then gets thirsty and hungry and determines that fixing those probably isn't, and fixes them.  She tries wrangling with the underbrush again a few times.  She scratches dried mud off her clothes with her fingernails.

And eventually...

The sun rises! In the east, one can only imagine, although she doesn’t have any external point of reference with which to check.

Birds chirp in cacophonous melodies of love and lust and danger, vividly green and terribly tall trees sway in delicate winds, flowers unfold from their nightly hiding places, spiders dangle in ornate webs framed by the light of the sunrise, gaps in the tree cover reveal merry little cumulus clouds and a cheerful orange-pink-blue sky, shrubs reveal their plump purple berries, and so on and so forth.

Fucking finally.  She sets out the instant it's bright enough to be certain what direction the sun's in.  The nature stuff is all really pretty and she probably enjoys it even more than she would otherwise because it is Not Boring.

Trees! Bees! Shiny little flowers and dainty little reeds, cluttering up ponds less water than weed!

And, eventually: a doggo.

A pure white dog, in particular, of some indeterminate breed, standing out like a pristine patch of snow on an otherwise springtime landscape, fluffy tail merrily awag.

It hasn’t yet noticed her, being utterly enthralled by a large praying mantis in the midst of viciously murdering a half decayed leaf.

Puppy.

She scuffs her foot on the ground audibly in hopes of being noticeable but not startling.

The dog - or, rather, the puppy, exclamation point exclamation point etc etc etc - looks back at her; their tail starts wagging with a vengeance.

”A person! Hot take, forests should have way more people and way fewer trees. I’d apologize to the trees for that but trees are dumb and they wouldn’t understand me and it’d be, like, super pointless? You can understand me! Who are you?”

"Uh!  Ari.  Ariel Parker.  Nice to meet you.  ...Are you a dog who got person'd or a person who got dog'd?"

“I’m a person who got resleeved! And I liked the name Spot, so it’s mine now. Do you feel like throwing that stick to your left.”

Ari is sad for a moment since someone who started out human probably does not want to be petted, but updates this to hopeful as they convey increasingly doggy preferences.  Also okay yes 'spot of white' she gets it now.

"I do!"  Hwup goes the stick, as far as she can manage in this dense of a forest.

And so does an elegant whoosh of floof! It whooshes, floofily.

Spot deposits the stick in front of her, having retrieved it from the ligneous clutches of its shrubby captors, and stares at her expectantly. Wag wag wag.

"Thank you!"  She picks it up and hefts it again.

In fact, she's probably willing to do that more times than they want to chase after it, unless they have rather more energy than most dogs she's encountered.

“You’re welcome!” 

Spot seems content to play fetch for a reasonably dog-shaped amount of time in a reasonably dog-shaped sort of way, and then -

“Do you, you know, have a reason for being in the forest, or do you just wander around in search of dogs who need of a throwing arm. If it’s the later I appreciate you on behalf of all of my canine brethren but that doesn’t seem incredibly likely.”

"I'm very lost."

Spot lays down and rests his head against his paws; his fur continues to be unnaturally pristine, in spite of his assorted interactions with lush underbrush and foliage in the process of playing fetch. Wag wag wag.

”This seems like the part where I’m supposed to ask you cryptic questions, but I’m new to being an animal and I’d do it wrong. Could you ask me a cryptic question, instead? It’s okay if you’re bad at it, I’m not, like, judgey.”

"Is asking cryptic questions like, a thing, for animal-shaped people?  - That wasn't my question, just something I wanted to know."

“It’s not not a thing. And I want to fit in at the meetings.”

".....The meetings?  Do you mean like, parties - er, balls, that is - or a different, more-organized-and-less-fancy thing."

“Whenever a second full moon appears, everyone hangs out at the lake and eats magic mushrooms! The magic mushrooms are nice. Sometimes the animals are, too. I still think that one dove did a flyby on me deliberately.”

" - About how many people is 'everyone'?"

Spot rolls over - incidentally flattening a poor little petunia that’d never hurt anyone in its life - and stares at her; he doesn’t have especially human facial expressions, but there’s still a certain air of puzzlement around him - like someone took the feeling of watching a hamster wearing a tuxedo juggle three oblong blue spheres and turned it into a perfume.

“... no?”

"Is that as in 'no, I'm not going to tell you', or did that count as my cryptic question?  - Or is it just that I forgot to specify people as anything that's a certain amount of smart, instead of meaning like, human-shaped."

“That last one! I used to be a person, but that’s what falling stars take away. Now I’m a dog. And I’m a very good dog, but if I was still people then I wouldn’t need a quest to turn back into one, see.”

".........Oh.  So you aren't - you have - hm.  Uh, explain more about falling stars, maybe?"

Spot rolls over again; another innocent flower is unjustly imprisoned under the weight of an incarceration system know only as ‘the floof’.

“Sometimes, you know, your betrothed gets engaged to someone else and your best friend ditches you and a ton of other things happen that you don’t want to talk about! And then you’re hit by a meteor. And then you’re a dog. Sometimes when you lose enough - pieces - the stars take away the rest, and when you aren’t a person anymore there isn’t anything else to do but be an animal. But I like being a dog! I’m super good at it and I’ll get to stop eventually.”

"And this is a thing that people generally know can happen?"

“Yeah.”

"I think I'm much more lost than I thought."

“That’s not something I hear every day! I only hear it every week and twice daily on Saturdays. Do you much remember whatever dumb coincidence brought you to the forest and then to me, I’ve interacted with a lot of weird backstories and I’m, you know, prepared for you to do your worst.”

"I was out for a hike and then I fell in a pond, and then when I got out of the pond it was a totally different one.  And then I walked for a while and then gave up and sat for a bit, and there were fireflies, and someone playing music, so I went towards it, and they told me to chill for the night and then walk towards the sun, which I did, and to follow the spot of white, which," she gestures at him and then to the rest of him.  "Also they said to go down the next river we find.  - And to not take advice from strangers, but I've been assuming that was a joke or something."

“They might be doing a thing where they layer metaphors dishonestly and you’ll actually end up falling to your death down a waterfall. But it mostly doesn’t sound like they’re doing a thing with layered metaphors, it mostly sounds pretty straightforward! Also, were they a jumping spider with a tiny violin, I know them, they’re really good at pond ping pong.”

"I didn't see them!  It was violin music though, yeah."

“Talking to mysterious strangers who are also invisible is kind of dumber than talking to mysterious strangers in general. Sometimes they, like, reveal their true form later, and they’re actually an eldritch demon trying to collect your soul. Or your evil twin. Or an eldritch demon trying to collect the soul of your evil twin.”

"Uh, good to know I guess?  That doesn't so much happen where I'm from.  Also it was like, dark; I dunno if I'd jump to 'invisible' just from the fact I couldn't see them."

“You’re probably fine.”

"Cool.  So, uh.  Now what?"

“I was, you know, traveling vaguely west, do you want to come with?”

"That sure sounds better than staying here alone in the forest till I starve or something!"

Spot starts slowly trotting vaguely westward.

”Starving! Can’t recommend it. Terrible, really. Starving: don’t do it. Starving? More like starve’nt. A spot a day keeps the starving away. - that just, like, makes it sound like you should eat me. You shouldn’t eat me but if you did I would be delicious.”

She follows.  "I totally promise not to eat you!  - Uh.  Like, I mean - well - yeah, no, definitely no immediate you-eating plans at the moment."

“You’re really not very good at being reassuring. That’s okay, though! Most people are pretty bad at most things.”

"....I can explain?"

“No pressure.”

Trot trot trot.

"O...kay?  Uh, it'll probably come up anyway unless I find a way to get home pretty quick."

“- if you don’t want to explain the thing right now then you don’t have to. If you want to then you can. You met me, like, an hour ago.”

"Normally it would be a secret but you already have magic here so I think it's probably not as big of a deal - are vampires like, a thing that you've heard of?"

“There are people who used to be bats who used to be people! I don’t think you’re talking about them, though.”

"Yeah naw.  So, uh, where I'm from, most people don't have magic or know it exists.  But it does!  And there are people who get some of it when they drink someone else's blood, and so does the person they drink from.  I have kind of a lot of it - enough to vamp me, and then some - but I can't get any more without another vamp unless I do that.  So if I did, I would need to drink somebody's blood to get magic, and also like, it does have to be somebody, not just something, right; regular animals don't work back home, and I'd be curious to find out which way my magic counted you.  And like, obviously that would only be if you're down for it, and it would only be a little, but like, I'm in a fairytale magic forest or some crap and it seems dumb to go around phrasing things as promises when by the literal interpretation that might not be what I mean."

“People who used to be bats who used to be people have some of those traits but not all of them. If you want to drink some of my blood you can, I don’t need all of it to be in my body. Strangers in forests can have little a blood, as treat.”

"Well, not for a bit, thanks though.  - Also, you've been totally comprehensible this whole time, but there was kind of a hiccup there and now I'm realizing it would be pretty weird if you were speaking English; do you have any idea what's up with that?"

“I don’t, like, have human vocal cords. I’m just talking.”

".... Huh.  Do you think I'd be able to speak with other - people, then?"

“You could probably talk to people who used to be animals who used to be people! I don’t think you could talk to people who used to be nothing. People who used to be nothing can’t do very many interesting things, it’s very sad.”

"Hm.  - If ex-bats are vampire-like, what will you be like when you're an ex-dog?"

“Ex-dogs are more common than most other kinds of former animal and they have more variation! I don’t know what former Great Pyrenees can do. Most people who used to be dogs who used to be people can do some protective magic and have to keep up social contact to do things, I’ll probably get something like that. I hope I don’t run on love, I like most people but I don’t really love anyone.”

"Totes legit.  - Were you walking more towards the west or away from the east?  Or just like, wherever."

“I was following a trail, actually, I met a super suspicious fish and, like, I would’ve let it be if it’d only been mildly suspicious, but a super suspicious fish is probably up to something bad or something good. Also it was swimming through the air and that was weird. And I was bored. Trail’s pretty cold now, though, so if you really wanted to go in another direction we could.”

"I definitely don't know the area well enough to have opinions.  Plus I'm supposed to be following you, unless, again, they were malicious and so I shouldn't, but you would still know better than me.  I was mostly just trying to make conversation.  - What sort of fish was it?"

“Flying. Not just because it was actually flying. It was also that kind of fish. I think. - what’s it like, where you’re from?”

"If it's all like what I've seen - less whimsical, I guess?  Less people know about magic and there's really only people-shaped people, for the most part."

“I’m still not a person. I’m, you know, a dog who used to be a person.”

(He briefly rolls around in a particular thick bit of underbrush, shakes off the resulting debris, and resumes trotting along, for emphasis.)

"Human-shaped sapients?"

“You’re not wrong but I’m not super sure you’re right. Is it more of a forest or a desert or an ocean or a mountain?”

"A forest!"

“Forests are definitely better than most other places! This is an objective fact, for reasons, and not just a personal opinion that I have because of circumstance.” 

"Well, it sure is convenient that we have all this forest here, then!"