Alice swore under her breath as the branches in front of her whipped into her face once more, stinging her cheeks and damaging further her already wounded pride. She contemplated just shifting half way and simply removing any offending branches, “But I wouldn’t want to ruin the forest for the preppers, now would I?” she chuckled wryly. 

Truth be told, she had no idea what had possessed her to grab her jacket, knife, and a flashlight and go frolicking in the woods. 

She’d lost the flashlight already, dropped in a muddy ditch after an impressive windmill impression, and she was now navigating by the ambient light left over from the last vestiges of sunlight. The lone sliver of moon in the sky wouldn’t provide any meaningful light. At the very least she could’ve half shifted and set some stick on fire as a torch or something, but for some reason she’d decided not to. 

“Probably some subliminal ‘challenge yourself’ thing, who knows what Uri brought from Israel?” she rasped to herself, not that there was anybody else to talk to out in the wilderness. 

Unless you were such a hippie you believed that trees had souls or something.

She hopped over a small brook, “eep”ing slightly as her foot caught a dark root that had been concealed by the growing darkness and she went sprawling on the ground. Luckily she hadn’t sprained it or anything, but of course, physically being able to walk didn’t help when you couldn’t even see the ground. 

“Well isn’t this grand?” She deadpanned, looking around for somewhere she could bunker down for the night that would be safer than trying to hike all the way back. She could’ve flown, but she didn’t want to risk being seen, or flying into a tree. She was tough, a fully grown oak was tougher.

To hell with it, she would sleep out here.
__________

Alice gasped as the smell of smoke met her nostrils. Her eyes shot open, and she screamed as a burning piece of timber crashed down next to her. The worktable she’d fallen asleep at was a flaming wreck, and her own clothes burned, most of them already not much more than smoldering powder. The bare wood of the structure around her blazed just as fiercely, sparks flying with wild abandon as pieces of the roof plummeted down to the floor, exploding in bursts of glowing orange. 

She couldn’t move, could barely breathe, and it hurt, it hurt so much. A massive chunk of flaming wood had pinned her to the table by the neck, and by some virtue she was still alive.

Oh, and on fire. 

It wasn’t the excruciating agony of burning objects pressing into her flesh like she would’ve expected, but the open flames still bit into her skin, blackening the…

Were those scales?!

Alice cringed in pain as a chunk of flaming 2x4 crashed down on her hand, spraying sparks everywhere, including her left eye. 

Why couldn’t she scream? Couldn’t cry out from the pain, only lay motionless as everything burned down around her. She saw the fire from her breath, making the connection was all too easy. 

Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed a charred body slumped against a door, the door itself barred by a fallen piece of sheet metal. The body was familiar, too familiar. Her father had rushed in to pull her from the fire, and been trapped, dying in the flames as he tried to clear a path.

A tear finally rolled down her cheek as the floor opened up into a yawning black abyss. 
__________

 Sunlight slowly filtered into Alice’s eyes, forcing her to scrunch them tight to keep it out. 

“Why couldn’t I have the night shift…?” She grumbled, cracking open her eyes.

And promptly falling out of a tree with an “Oof.”

It wasn’t too long of a fall, it appeared she’d been sleeping on a low branch, for some reason. Why she would want to sleep on a branch was completely baffling.

It was only then that she noticed the other people surrounding her on all sides, and the cacophony of snoring. She propped herself up on the tree, rising on shaky legs. She noticed some other people who were awake, they seemed to be walking around, slowly rousing people from their sleep.

Alice half stomped, half stumbled her way over to the dark brown haired woman who for some reason wore a light blue dress, and the other people with her. 

“Who are you, what is this place, and what are all these people doing here?” She demanded, finger raised in the air in emphasis.