The Tree-House, home of guardians

[MatrixTamer]

OOC: This is the first thread of Kalen and DORUgamon's journey.

IC: A soft breeze rustled the leaves in the trees, gently stirring the canopy of the Eastern Forest. Every once in awhile, a creak could be heard as two branches rubbed up against one another. The forest was peaceful, but it was not still. Not in the least. But amidst the groaning of wind and root, there was another energy running through the forest--a certain part of the forest, at least. It wasn't electric; not a man-made sort of energy used to power inanimate objects. Rather, it was the energy of a presence, a presence not normally felt in the Digital World. Indeed, there was something fresh and robust about it, while at the same time being sturdy, established, anchoring itself to the forest like the trees that resided there with a strong will to not be moved. No, it wasn't crafted by human hands. It was better. It was human.

Her named was Kalen Hina. Kalen being a shortening of Kalena, the Hawaiian variant of Karen which is derived from Katherine. Her presence had been felt in this forest for what was coming to be two years, so the freshness of her presence might have been oddly felt to the informed stranger, but in a world where savage beasts run amock, where cities have been floored in destruction and history has been forgotten by their former inhabitants, and where wilderness has covered any evidence that might reveal that past, it couldn't be that surprising. Here was a young girl, looking for an escape from a harsh reality, who brought all the inventiveness, resourcefulness, and constructiveness of the human species to this savage wasteland. She was a light in the darkness for these creatures, and for one creature especially, a DORUgamon who embarked on a partnership with Kalen that would change their lives.

In the boughs of a great oak tree there was built a house: small, crude, but indistinguishably a house. Access to this house was granted via a rope ladder, but could also be denied by simply pulling the ladder out of a ground-bound trespasser's reach. Within the house, crude weapons were stored: wooden spears, arrows, and the like. There was also a storage of a meat plant's product, and a bed made from leaves. Along the outer limbs of the tree, ropes were tied, stretching to other trees and holding up wooden planks, for foot support, to create a makeshift catwalk. On other trees there were platforms similar to the ones the tree-house was constructed on, and these were scattered about Kalen and DORUgamon’s area of the forest to provide easy transport for Kalen. Where there weren’t catwalks there were zip lines, and on one platform a new project—a cage, it seemed—was underway. Somewhere in this forest, the human, creator of all these ingenious specimens of architecture, was going about her daily business, guarding the inhabitants of her forest kingdom with her partner by her side. But where? That was the question.

[Samuel]

Suddenly, the peace of this tranquil forest was suddenly broken by the sound of a large thunderclap, and yet there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The sudden break of the sound barrier, however, had a source nevertheless, and it was in the form of a small blinding light in the sky. The light suddenly expanded, a small black region forming in the middle as the light became a ring, a hole in the very dimension. Suddenly, something dropped out of the hole, falling, falling, falling into the forest below. The object crashed into the canopy of the trees, and the callings of birds cried out as they quickly flew away from where the object fell. With its load dropped, the strange portal disappeared as mysteriously and as suddenly as it appeared, leaving no trace that it was ever there.

In the canopy below where the portal was, the object it had dropped was actually a person, a boy. The boy groaned as he slowly came to, putting a hand to his head as he tried to stabilize his spinning mind. “Oh…my head…what happened?” he murmured as he slowly put his hands onto the surface below him to hoist himself up.

Suddenly, his shift in balance changed drastically, and before he had a chance to react, he found himself plummeting from the tree branch he was on, falling like a rock. Quickly aware of what was going on, the boy let out a loud scream, his scream echoing for a large distance around as he continued to fall.

As he took a breath for another scream, the boy slammed into a wooden bridge, a loud grunt issuing from the boy as all of the air was forced out of him. He gasped as he clutched his stomach, having taken more damage there from the belly flop onto the wooden plank bridge than the rest of his body. His sore body slowly recovered from the slam, but as he rolled over to get off his stinging stomach, the boy failed to notice how close to the edge of the wooden bridge he was.

By the time he had a chance to consider what his actions could lead to, he fell off the plank bridge, falling toward the forest floor below. The boy let out another yell as he plummeted to the ground, twisting and spinning in the air as he fell. As he hit the ground some seconds later, a loud thud can be heard. The boy then laid there, either unconscious or in too much pain to move.

After a few minutes, the later was confirmed as the boy took a deep gasp, the air once again forced out of his lungs from the impact. He grimaced and groaned he tried to handle the pain, and after a few minutes, it began to subside for the most part. Silently, the boy slowly began to move again, and as he took deep breaths to get his body moving, he slowly got to his feet, kneeling as he rubbed his body where it was sore. Finally, after a few more moments to allow the pain to settle again, he opened his eyes and looked around.

Wherever he was, it wasn’t home. The entire forest was unfamiliar to him, and nothing looked right. Looking up, he could see the wooden bridge he had fell on earlier, but it was pretty high up in the canopy. After such a fall, the boy was surprised that he didn’t get worse injuries from the huge fall. As he examined this forest, he wondered how he had gotten here from the park. All he remembered was that he was in the park. Then there was a fog, and then he was falling, and then nothing.

He sighed as he got to his feet, looking around some more before he began to walk along the forest floor. He wanted to get out of this forest and to get home, but first he would have to find out where he first was.