Birdsong.

  That was the first thing Jason became aware of—birdsong, high and lilting, weaving through the air somewhere above him. It wasn't familiar. Not the cardinals that nested in his grandmother's backyard, not the robins that hopped across the lawn in spring. This was different. Layered. A chorus of calls he couldn't identify, rising and falling in patterns that almost sounded like language.

  His head throbbed.

  Where...?

  The ground beneath him was soft—not mattress-soft, but the yielding give of grass and soil. A breeze ghosted across his face, carrying the smell of green things, of earth, of something floral he couldn't name. Distantly, beneath the birdsong, he could hear the rustle of leaves, the creak of branches swaying.

  This isn't my apartment.

  Jason opened his eyes.

  Green. Endless green, filtered through a canopy of leaves that fractured the sunlight into golden shards. He was lying on his back in a forest clearing, staring up at trees that stretched impossibly tall, their trunks thicker than any he'd seen back home in Ohio. The sky beyond the leaves was a vivid, almost aggressive blue.

  He sat up too fast. The world tilted, his vision swimming, and he pressed a hand to his forehead as nausea rolled through him. His skull felt like someone had stuffed it with cotton and then set the cotton on fire.

  What the hell happened?

  The last thing he remembered was... what? His apartment. Late evening. He'd been on his laptop, half-watching something on a second monitor while he worked through a client's network issues. There had been coffee, gone cold. The familiar weight of exhaustion after a long day of site visits.

  And then nothing.

  Jason looked down at himself. He was still wearing the same clothes—dark jeans, a plain gray t-shirt, his work boots. His phone-shaped bulge was still in his pocket. His watch was still on his wrist, showing 2:47 PM, though he had no idea if that meant anything anymore.

  He patted his pockets with shaking hands. Phone—yes. Wallet—yes. Keys—yes, though what good they'd do him here was questionable. His over-ear headphones were somehow still around his neck, the cord dangling toward the portable charger in his pocket.

  Okay. Okay. Think.

  Jason forced himself to breathe. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The technique his therapist had taught him years ago, back when anxiety had been a more present companion. It helped, a little. The panic receded from a roar to a manageable hum.

  He pulled out his phone and pressed the power button. The screen lit up—54% battery, no signal, no data. The time matched his watch, at least. He swiped through his apps out of habit, confirming what he already knew: no calls, no messages, no connection to anything beyond this device.

  But Spotify was still there. His downloaded playlists, thousands of songs, sitting in local storage like a lifeline to a world that suddenly felt very far away.

  Jason almost laughed. Almost. Here he was, stranded in an unknown forest with no memory of how he arrived, and his first coherent thought was relief that he could still listen to Breaking Benjamin.

  Priorities, Cahill. Get them straight.

  He staggered to his feet, bracing himself against a tree trunk until the dizziness passed. The forest around him was... beautiful, actually. Unsettlingly so. The colors were too vivid, the air too clean, the sounds too layered and alive. It felt less like a forest and more like someone's idealized memory of a forest, rendered in higher definition than reality typically allowed.

  Something flickered in his peripheral vision—a flash of brown and cream, darting between the trees. Jason's head snapped toward it, but whatever it was had already vanished into the underbrush.

  Wildlife. That's... fine. Normal. Forests have wildlife.

  He turned in a slow circle, trying to get his bearings. The sun was high, suggesting midday or early afternoon, but he couldn't determine direction without knowing what hemisphere he was in. The trees offered no clues he could read—he wasn't a botanist, couldn't identify species at a glance.

  Pick a direction. Any direction. Standing here won't help.

  Jason was about to move when he heard it—a sound that cut through the birdsong and the rustling leaves. A cry, high and distressed, somewhere to his left. It wasn't human, but it was clearly afraid.

  He hesitated.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Common sense said to move away from unknown sounds in unknown forests. Self-preservation said to find civilization first, ask questions later. His grandmother's voice, weathered by decades of practical Midwestern wisdom, whispered don't go looking for trouble, Jason.

  The cry came again, more desperate this time.

  God damn it.

  Jason moved toward the sound.

  The forest floor was uneven, riddled with roots and rocks that threatened to turn his ankles with every step. He pushed through underbrush that grabbed at his clothes, ducked beneath low-hanging branches, followed the intermittent cries as they grew louder and more frantic.

  He smelled smoke before he saw it—acrid and chemical, wrong in a way that natural woodsmoke wasn't. Then he pushed through a final curtain of foliage and stopped dead.

  A vehicle sat in a small clearing, half-crumpled against a massive tree trunk. It looked like... Jason didn't know what it looked like. A transport of some kind, white and streamlined, with a logo on the side that his brain refused to process. The front end was crushed, the windshield shattered, and thin wisps of smoke curled from somewhere in the engine compartment.

  No driver. No passengers. Just the wrecked vehicle and the scattered cargo—crates and containers, some intact, some burst open, their contents strewn across the forest floor.

  And there, huddled beneath an overturned crate, was the source of the cries.

  Jason's heart stopped.

  It was small—maybe a foot and a half tall—with pale green fur and large, frightened eyes that caught the light like polished garnets. A tuft of darker green fur sprouted from its head and curled around its face like wayward bangs. Its body was feline, vaguely, with a build somewhere between a housecat and something wilder. A long tail curled tight around its trembling body.

  It was a Sprigatito.

  That's a Sprigatito.

  Jason stood frozen as his brain tried to reject what his eyes were telling him. Sprigatito wasn't real. Sprigatito was a Pokémon, a fictional creature from a video game, a starter from the Paldea region in a franchise he'd played casually since childhood.

  Sprigatito was currently staring at him with wide, terrified eyes, pressed so far back against the crate that it seemed to be trying to phase through the metal.

  "Sprig..." It—she?—let out a small, broken sound that wasn't quite a word, wasn't quite a cry, but communicated fear more clearly than any human language could.

  "Hey," Jason heard himself say, his voice rough and strange in his own ears. "Hey, it's okay. I'm not going to hurt you."

  The Sprigatito flinched at his voice. Of course she did. He was a stranger, a large unknown creature in an already frightening situation. She'd clearly been through something traumatic—the crash, the disappearance of whoever had been transporting her, the chaos of the scattered cargo.

  She's alone. Just like me.

  Jason lowered himself slowly, carefully, until he was sitting on the forest floor. He made himself as small and non-threatening as possible, keeping his hands visible, his movements deliberate.

  "I know you're scared," he said softly. "I'm scared too, if I'm being honest. I have no idea where I am or how I got here. Woke up in the middle of the forest with a headache and a whole lot of questions."

  The Sprigatito's ears twitched. She was listening, even if she didn't understand the words.

  "I'm Jason. I don't know if that means anything to you. Probably doesn't." He let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "I'm talking to a Pokémon. I'm sitting in a forest talking to a Pokémon like that's a normal thing to do. Because apparently this is my life now."

  This is real. This is actually real.

  The realization hit him like a physical blow. Not a dream. Not a hallucination. Not some elaborate prank or hidden camera show. He was in the Pokémon world—somehow, impossibly, inexplicably—and there was a frightened Sprigatito ten feet away who needed help more than he needed to have an existential crisis.

  Later. Freak out later.

  "Okay," Jason said, more to himself than to her. "Okay. Here's what I'm thinking. You're lost. I'm lost. Neither of us knows what's going on. So maybe... maybe we figure it out together?"

  The Sprigatito's trembling had lessened, just slightly. Her eyes were still wide, still wary, but something in her posture had shifted. Curiosity, maybe, beneath the fear.

  Jason reached slowly into his pocket and pulled out his phone. The Sprigatito tensed, but didn't bolt. He navigated to Spotify with practiced ease, scrolling through his playlists until he found what he was looking for.

  Something soft. Something calming.

  He selected a song—Josh Groban, "You Raise Me Up"—and let it play at low volume. The music drifted through the clearing, gentle and warm, impossibly out of place in this strange forest and yet somehow exactly right.

  The Sprigatito's ears perked forward. Her head tilted, just slightly, as she listened to sounds she'd never heard before.

  "Music," Jason said quietly. "From my world, I guess. It helps me when I'm scared. Thought maybe it might help you too."

  For a long moment, nothing happened. The song played on, strings swelling and falling, Groban's voice carrying through the trees. Jason sat perfectly still, barely breathing, waiting.

  Then, slowly, hesitantly, the Sprigatito crept out from beneath the crate.

  She moved toward him in stops and starts, freezing every few steps as if expecting him to lunge. Jason didn't move. Didn't speak. Just let the music play and kept his hands open and visible on his knees.

  She stopped about three feet away, close enough that he could see the fine details of her fur, the way her whiskers caught the light. Her nose twitched as she sniffed the air, taking in his scent.

  "Sprig?"

  "Yeah," Jason said softly. "It's okay. Take your time."

  She took another step. Then another. And then, with a hesitance that broke his heart a little, she reached out one small paw and touched his knee.

  Jason let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding.

  "There you go," he murmured. "See? Not so scary. Just a confused guy with good taste in music."

  The Sprigatito looked up at him, her red eyes searching his face for something—threat, safety, understanding. Whatever she found there seemed to satisfy her, because she let out a small, exhausted sigh and pressed herself against his leg.

  She was warm. Warmer than he expected, with a faint herbal scent that reminded him of fresh-cut grass and something almost floral. Her fur was impossibly soft beneath his fingers as he carefully, gently, rested a hand on her back.

  "Okay," Jason said, his voice thick with emotions he didn't want to examine too closely. "Okay. We're okay. We're going to be okay."

  He didn't know if he was talking to her or to himself.

  The music played on as the afternoon light shifted through the trees, and two lost souls sat together in the wreckage of one world and the beginning of another.