She wakes up lying on cracked, barren earth, under a cloud-strewn blue sky. There is no one and nothing around except a couple of small lumpy hills off to her left.

Elya groggily comes to. Her head is still killing her, and she's bruised in several other places besides. Lacking any clue of where she is or what's going on, she heads towards the hills.

From atop the taller of the two she can see... well, mostly she can see more of this wasteland. There's a glint over thataway that might be water on the horizon, though, and a smudge to the right of it that hints at something other than barren earth, and a taller smudge on the left that might just be bigger hills. In the water direction there is also precisely one extremely dead tree.

Keeping her eyes closed as much as feasible while still navigating this miserable hellscape, Elya trudges towards the extremely dead tree. She notices that in addition to her head, her pelvic region aches more than the current activity really warrants. After a minute of confusion, she vaguely remembers that before she fell through the portal, she had just finished nacreing a particularly nasty demon. She thanks the stars that she's not dealing with that on top of this.

As she nears the tree, the glint of water gets closer, and she can see more detail. It's a lake, shining in the sun.

Some distance past the tree, there start being other plants: low, scraggly shrubs at first, then slightly greener clumps of bushes.

A two-foot-tall man with cherry-red skin and short stubby horns and little bat wings and a spade-tipped red tail and an absurdly disproportionate penis leaps out of a bush and lunges for her, and, perhaps relatedly, she is suddenly swamped by a surge of overwhelming lust.

Elya is briefly filled with relief at the sight of water and plants, and then a distinctly different feeling when the bizarre little red penis man jumps at her.

She's used to working around her emotions, though, so despite the sudden heat and aching in her cunt and her difficulty removing her eyes from the absurdly large penis, she dodges to the left and tries to knee the creep in the face.

The bizarre little red penis man is not thrilled about this! She hits him successfully, but then he bites her leg. His teeth are sharp. She's bleeding now.

What the fuck! Ow!

Running is less of an option now, so while he is biting her she brings her elbow down on his head.

He yelps, scrabbles at her with his claws, does something that makes her even more uncomfortably horny, and bites her again. He is not actually very good at fighting. Possibly he's used to being able to make people too horny to function and then deal with them at his leisure.

Luckily for Elya, "make people too horny to function and then deal with them at leisure" is the one fighting strategy she actually has a fair amount of practice against. She heals the first bite and continues to pummel him in vital areas.

She ignores how the biting is making her increasingly wet.

He does not like being hit in his vital areas! He does not like it one bit! Bite bite flail flail claw claw and she gets him in the head again and now he's unconscious.

Elya considers her options. On one hand, she really wants to get off right the fuck now. On the other hand, she wants to get the heck away from the bizarre little red penis man before he comes to. On the third hand, she has no idea where she is or how to get home, and based on her headache, photosensitivity, and memory issues, she's pretty sure she's concussed.

She decides to broker a compromise between her conflicting desires. She checks whether the guy is carrying anything that looks useful and then heads towards the lake - but she plays with her nipples while she walks and lets herself imagine (as much as she can given thinking kinda hurts) what it would have been like to not fight back.

The guy is carrying a little pouch with a bunch of large sparkly gemstones in various colours, and a morsel of dark greasy bread wrapped in a dirty rag and shoved into the same pouch.

She gets closer and closer to the lake. Now she can smell the water.

Sure, those things seem like a reasonable repayment for her troubles. She'll take the pouch of gems and munch on the bread as she walks.

How does the lake smell?

The bread tastes moderately disgusting, kind of like it's been drenched in a combination of olive oil and blood. Up to her if she'd like to finish it anyway or spit out that first bite and give up.

The lake, by contrast, smells pretty nice! There's water, it has plants growing in and near it, a good time all round.

She's approaching a part of the shore where the long grass to the south (on her left, as the sun descends almost directly ahead of her) is getting sparser and giving way to scattered bushes and the occasional tree. In fact, farther north along the shoreline, the trees seem to be getting less occasional, and that distant smudge she saw earlier looks like it could be a forest.

She gags down the gross bread because nutrients are necessary for sustaining life or whatever.

She is grateful for the nice lake! She puts her feet in the water a little.

Given that the sun is going down, she should probably think about shelter. She wanders forestward while keeping an eye out for a good place to set up a fire pit.

The morsel of gross bread rounds out its grossness by having a weirdly seminal aftertaste.

A few seconds after she finishes it, when the aftertaste is just beginning to fade, she experiences a strange ache in her bones that comes out of nowhere and fades just as rapidly as it arrived. When the pain passes, she is... shorter? Yes, shorter. By several inches.

Wow what the fuck did that gross dude do to his bread??

She notices she is shorter with consternation. Only she is supposed to be able to make physical adjustments to her body! She'd undo it, but her head is more important. She'll deal with the height reduction for now and focus on any potential brain damage.

Another bizarre little red penis man descends from the sky, heralded by a wave of lust!

Another of these fuckin guys?

She realizes with some dismay that it somehow failed to occur to her to heal after her last encounter. She is really not at top form right now.

This one is both quicker on the uptake and a better brawler; he notices that she's not as impaired as usual and punches her very hard in the face to see if that improves her disposition any.

Elya was not prepared for this and her head was already not doing great. Her vision swims and she staggers.

The bizarre little red penis man dives into her chest, attempting to knock her to the ground. He gropes her along the way, because that's the sort of thing you do when you're a bizarre little red penis man, apparently.

Elya loses her balance and falls to the ground. She tries to initiate a punch or something, but when he tugs her nipples she finds herself distracted and moaning.

She feels super horny. What was she trying to do? Maybe this guy has a demon in him that she needs to get inside her... that might be it?

Well if that's the case then this is her lucky day, because she is about to get closely acquainted with his bizarrely disproportionate red penis.

Wow that was fast.

It's okay, she tells herself. You've done this tons of times. Not normally so big, but... you can make room. Probably.

He has a lot of enthusiasm and very little care for her comfort and way too much bizarrely disproportionate red penis, and also he keeps pinching her nipples.

She does her best to make room but he's still bigger than comfort permits. The nipple pinching helps, a little.

She realizes partway through that not only has she not done the nacring invocation ritual, she can't, because she already did this month. She desperately attempts to sense if this guy actually feels, like, demon-y at all, since she apparently failed to think to do that extremely basic step earlier, also.

Well he sure feels something-y, and it's not a good something, but it's not exactly like the demons she's familiar with, either.

Elya you stupid fucking idiot this is how you die.

No, apparently, once he's had his way with her (and left her dripping with a substance that has the same slightly-wrong feeling as the rest of him), he grabs her pouch of gemstones and takes off.

Fair's fair, she guesses. At least she's not dead.

Once she's done lying on the ground (which takes a while) she gets up and tries to clean off in the lake.

The lake is calm, the water cool and refreshing...

...and she still feels slightly wrong when she's done.

Gross gross gross gross gross.

She tries to will the wrongness out of her body, or concentrate it the way she would a demon, or or something.

It's not quite embodied enough to handle that way, at least not straightforwardly; it's possible she could get somewhere with it, but not in the first five minutes of trying—

—and that's about all the time she gets before she hears someone coming up the path from the south.

Please let it not be yet another bizarre little red penis man.

She ducks as much under the water as she can and tries to find some reeds or something to hide amongst.

Nope! This person is also short, but she's green and has huge tits and if there was a penis under that ragged leather wrap-skirt she'd have a tough job hiding it. She looks cheerful. Maybe she's not as into sexually assaulting strangers as the last two people Elya met around here!

Maybe not but Elya is not feeling her most social right now.

She is going to stay right here and hope the green lady with the great tits does not see her.

The green lady with the great tits walks right on by.

Phew.

Okay. Maybe a camp site right at the edge of the water won't be as safe and secluded as she was hoping. Are there any natural features around that look uninhabited and relatively defensible?

Not within immediate view. Her choices of direction here are east into the wasteland, west into the water, south into the long grass, or north into the forest.

Long grass sounds soft. She can go lie down in the grass and it will probably be tall enough to hide her from view and she can worry about a more permanent encampment when everything is less bad.

The long grass gets taller as she travels further into it; after a couple of minutes, she's in grass deep enough that she could probably conceal herself in it without much trouble, although she might like to cross this path in front of her first and get far enough away from it that passersby won't see her through the stalks. Or, alternately, she could follow the path.

Yeah, Elya is going to take the path less traveled by. Which is to say, no path. She is going to head into the grass and try not to leave an obvious trail behind her and then she is going to curl up in it and stop being awake.

That is super valid.

No one sexually assaults her all night! Hooray!

Elya is deeply grateful for every night of her life in which she is not sexually assaulted.

The rising sun warms her grassy nest.

That path is still there, or she could keep following the shoreline, or she could curl up and sleep all day, although if she does that last thing she's going to get hungry eventually.

Elya would love to lie here all day but she does in fact need to eat to stay alive. She makes her way back towards the path and decides to see where it leads.

It winds through the grass for a couple of minutes, past a scattered stand of trees, around a low hill, and finally deposits her at the end of a long lane leading up through assorted small crop fields to a charming little farmhouse. There are fences at the edge of the property but no gate barring the path.

Well, here's hoping that it's only the people out and about who like to randomly sexually assault strangers and farmers with charming houses are hospitable and friendly. She heads up to the front door and knocks.

"Just a minute!" calls a voice from inside. It sounds like a woman, probably somewhat older than Elya, friendly and cheerful.

Promising! Elya waits patiently and takes this time to regret not attempting to fashion some sort of grass skirt for herself.

The woman who answers the door has the head of a wolf.

Not exactly—her skull is mostly human-shaped, with a wolf's grey-furred muzzle and triangular ears but a very humanlike mop of curly black hair.

She's wearing dusty denim overalls and sturdy leather boots, and her furry black eyebrows lift in mild surprise when she sees Elya. "Another one!" she says. "—I'm sorry, where are my manners?" She smiles, an odd expression on her canine face. "My name's Lily. I was just about to start the morning's harvest; I'll trade you some clothes for your help bringing in the apples, if you like."

Elya is at least as surprised to see Lily as Lily is to see her, but once she gets over her lupine appearance, she's more than happy to accept the offer.

"That sounds great to me. Thank you!"

"Over here!"

She leads Elya around to an orchard. Many of the trees are unrecognizable, but the two rows of apple trees seem to bear a perfectly ordinary mix of green, red, and yellow-red apples, each shiny and delicious-looking. Lily grabs a basket and hands one to Elya and demonstrates appropriate apple-picking technique.

Elya picks apples! If it's okay with Lily, she also eats apples.

She can have a few while she works. They're tasty and have no bizarre side effects!

As the sun climbs the sky toward noon, Lily calls a break, invites Elya in for lunch, and gives her some clothes to go put on while Lily makes lemonade and serves stew. The stew and the lemonade are both delicious. The clothes are nothing special—shirt, pants, underwear—but definitely a lot better than nothing.

No bizarre side effects is Elya's favorite kind of apple!

She is so incredibly grateful for the lemonade and stew and clothing and thanks Lily profusely.

"Happy to help," she says. "You're not even the first human in need of clothes to come to my door this month. Though the other one bought my spare backpack, so you'll have to chase him down if you want to bargain for it."

"Are naked humans coming by a particularly common problem in this area?"

"Not usually! I'm not sure I've even seen a human this year besides you and Torok. It's not a popular look."

"Huh. I've played with my look a little, but I've never been anything other than human."

"Whatever works for you, I guess!" she says, swishing her long furry tail.

"Well, where I'm from pretty much everyone is human. I fell through some sort of portal or something yesterday and I have no idea where I am or how to get back and not long after I got here I was attacked by these little red men and, and..."

She looks increasingly upset as she babbles on - by the time she trails off, she's on the verge of tears.

Lily looks sympathetic. "Yeah. Welcome to Mareth. The red guys are imps; I can tell they haven't corrupted you too badly yet, but watch out, they've got a factory at the south end of the lake and you don't wanna get caught there. The rest of the lakeshore is pretty safe, though, maybe the safest place west of Tel'Adre. And if you do meet a few too many imps, I hear the bee-folk in the forest have ways of dealing with corruption, though you might not like the price."

"I'll... keep an eye out and steer clear of any lake factories I see. Thanks for the advice."

"Anytime," she says. "D'you have somewhere to stay? You can kip in my barn for a few days if you keep helping with the harvest, but I don't take guests any longer than that."

"I don't have anywhere to stay, yet. I had been planning on building a camp somewhere out of the way. I'm happy to help with the harvest, but... you mentioned a place called Tel'Adre?"

"It's the closest city but that's not saying much, there aren't many cities left. It's a ways out in the desert, past the other side of the wasteland."

"Is there a safe way to get there from here?"

"Depends what you mean by safe. If you bring lots of water and don't get lost and don't run into any witches you'll be fine, probably. It's not the worst place you could go."

"Sounds like probably not the way for me, then." She sighs. "How'd you come to have a nice place like this of your own?"

"I came here when the demons got my hometown, because I heard the lake was safer than most places," she says. "Turned out to be right, at least if you stay north of the demons. And I know how to grow things, so I set up here and started doing that. I wouldn't mind you for a neighbour if you wanted to do the same."

"Huh. So none of the land around here... belongs to anyone? It's alright if I just find a spot and make it home?"

"Some spots are dangerous, and anyone with a house might have opinions about you building one next to it, but the whole wasteland is empty and nobody claims any land by the lakeshore except me, the demons, and that girl Palla with the fishing hut." She frowns thoughtfully. "Mind you, I wouldn't swear to that, there used to be at least one village around here and someone might still be living in the ruins, but if they are they're quiet about it. Anything north of the demon factory, south of the forest, and not in sight of anyone's home should be fine."

"That's good to hear, thank you. How much of the day would you need me helping with the harvest to make good on that offer of your barn? I'd love to help out, but I think I'd also like to spend some time scouting for a promising place to set up in."

"Half days will do fine." She smiles.

"In that case... I'll head out scouting now, aim to be back here around sundown, and plan to get up bright and early to help out again tomorrow?"

"Suits me!" she says cheerfully. "Good luck!"

"Thanks!"

Elya sets out in her new clothes with a belly full of stew and lemonade and a feeling like maybe things can be alright. She tries to remember all the advice Lily has given her about where is safe and where isn't. A spot along the lakeshore would be nice, and a good source for water, but would also make her a bit easier to find than she might like. She decides to investigate the forest, and heads off in that direction.

The forest is pleasant and pretty and over there is a satyr having sex with a flower in a grove of suspiciously suggestive plants.

That sure is a sight to see! Elya will leave the satyr to his fun and make a mental note to not set up camp near any suspiciously suggestive plants.

There's a loud rustle from some distance behind her, and a sound as of something scraping between two trees that isn't quite small enough to fit but is using enough force to make it through regardless.

She glances in the direction of the sound.