STORY ARC 7: BEYOND THE ETERNAL FOREST
Escape From the Eternal Forest
A chapter of a ‘Choose your own Adventure’ story.
This is a collaborative series; you might want to start the story at the beginning, here. Want to go back one chapter? Click here. And please check out this article to find out how you can contribute to this and other ‘choose your own’ stories in this publication!
Buck reaches into a pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes, and he proceeds to light one only seconds after throwing his last butt out the window.
“Those things’ll kill you,” you mutter under your breath.
“No they won’t,” he answers back. “This is the Eternal Forest. The trees are eternal, I’m eternal. Heck, I can beat these kids all I want and they don’t die either!”
Buck proceeds to kick the stool out from under the poor kid, sending him and the stool flying across the wooden floor.
“Stop that!” you yell.
Everyone in the cottage stops their tinkering and looks directly at you.
You swallow hard as your saliva builds with the suspense. “What I meant was that even though you can’t die, you can still suffer, you understand? Being alive isn’t enough, it’s more like the bare minimum!”
Everyone present weighs your words like they have never been spoken before. You take in their confused — even dumbfounded — looks to mean that none of them have even considered an existence beyond what already is.
“Look, what if you left the Eternal Forest?”
Buck and a couple of the children shake their heads. “Can’t. Only customers can travel through the portals.”
You freeze in your best thinking pose for a moment, racking your brain. “That’s it!” you exclaim, snapping your fingers for added effect.
You know how to save them!
Well…maybe.
“Buck, you think you can help me release these poor kids from this cottage?”
“Sure thing, bub!” he answers, unsure. “You really think you can get us all out of here?”
You dodge his question by focusing on freeing the chained children. After carefully unraveling the chains, you’re able to release all but one of the children!
The kid who showed you his bionic robot arm isn’t chained like the others, but he’s looped through a piece of the workbench.
“Looks like we’re gonna have to leave ya,” he says as he draws another cigarette mournfully.
You jump up and rip it from his lips. “No! Let me at least try…” With the grace of a drunken hippopotamus, you raise your leg up as high as you can and bring it down onto the bench.
Nothing, aside from a pain in your leg.
You do it again, and again, and again, until your leg is ready to fall off to avoid the torture.
Finally, the bolt that was binding the chain to the bench falls out, clattering to the floor.
All eyes are glued to you as you pick up the metal bolt. “I’m a god,” you whisper. You turn to Buck. “Or a glitch in the Matrix?”
“The what?”
“Never mind, lead the way to the next portal, Buck!” You notice that he already replaced the cigarette that you pulled from his lips and is already puffing away on it, but to your surprise, he does as you request, leading the children down another narrow forest path, right up to a clearing.
A pair of railroad tracks cut through the forest. “The other portal is there,” Buck points across up the tracks. A train whistle can be heard in the distance.
“The train? But there’s no station or platform here — ”
Buck shakes his head. As the whistle and the tell-tale clickety-clack of the rails get louder, the train appears into view.
Along with the maw of a giant swirling portal at the front of the locomotive!
“You gotta be kidding me!” you cry as you pull the kids onto the tracks with you. “We just need to stand here, and the train will take us all away,” you say, trying to comfort the deer kids as much as yourself. At least half of them are crying, and you want to join them, but you have to put your faith in something, so it might as well be yourself!
“Everyone hold my hand!” you have to practically scream as the diesel engines roar just ahead of you. The feeling of many small hands grasping yours brings you a tiny sense of calm in this ordeal.
Buck places his hand on your shoulder and says something to you, but you can’t make out the words. As the portal-locomotive slams into you, you feel like you're being thrown across space and time itself.
You emerge triumphantly in another part of the forest, this one gloomy and riddled with gunsmoke. The “pew-pew” of laser fire can be heard in the distance and is increasing in intensity.
You take in a deep breath and quickly scan your surroundings. All the kids seem to be present, as is Buck, who looks even more surprised than you that you survived the jump.
There are robots running around everywhere. This is clearly the front line of some post-apocalyptic robot battlefield or something!
A deer-man approaches you, looking identical to Holly, only he has a nametag that reads “Cliché”.
“Come with me if you want to live.”
How do you respond?
- “Houston, we have a problem.” (Click here)
- “May the Force be with you!” (Click here)
- “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!” (Click here)
(Note: All of these responses were picked from AFI’s list of 100 best movie quotes. I’d like to nominate Bradan Writes Stories and FJCMontenegro to try their hand at one of these. But anyone else is welcome to join in as well!)
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