I am Basile Clark, It is my 1500th day living on the surface of an exoplanet and today is the day I escaped.
I made myself a calendar inside my refuge, my cave.
I carved an analemma on the cave wall to mark days through the year.
Series of notes that I made from piths of alien plants write about my predicament.
I wrote them to pass the time and come to terms that I will die alone, probably out of starvation.
I shall re-type all of them into reddit.
Military took up most of my life as a younger man, mandatory conscription and all that, and then I got discharged after a year.
I am, or was- a pawnbroker.
A strange man dressed in an old morning suit with a bowler on his head visited the pawn shop where I worked at.
He presents me a strange device, starts bullshitting and monologuing about it’s authenticity and says something about teleportation.
I didn’t like the way he carried himself and the way he spoke, he had the vibe of two kids in a raincoat trying their best to mimic an adult.
Something about him felt off.
I tried authenticating the item, looked at it with a magnifier, then everything went to shit.
The item flash-banged me, and then I found myself in a strange, forest-esque environment.
I look at the sky, there were two suns and a big ass moon, this definitely wasn’t my planet.
Some sort of disembodied voice telepathically said to me that I shall reside here for 1500 days, no more, no less.
My first day was a nightmare, I prayed to whatever god that oversaw this planet to alleviate the direness of my situation, and desperately tried finding a shelter as it was storming. I find a cave in which I would live for the next 4 years, and started a fire through friction.
The next few days, with the storm abated, I started studying the organisms, and which would be the easiest to kill and eat.
The first creature I ate was a strange one. I deduced by the look of it that it lived near trees, I took it to be some sort of bug, a big one at that.
It’s back was covered by something resembling tree bark, which acted as an armor, it’s underbelly was vulnerable.
I flipped the creature on it’s back and stabbed it with a knife I sculpted out of some sort of rock, similar to flint.
These things always made me constipated until my stomach got used to them, and it’s the only thing I ate for the last four years of living here.
As for the water, I didn’t want to take a gamble and drink it without purifying it first.
After a few days, I tried to improve my living conditions. Whatever shrub I found, I used it to cover the stone floors of my shelter.
I made myself a table and a chair to accomodate my needs. I was no carpenter so the furniture was less than perfect, but it was mine.
I was satisfied with how my new home was looking, and I left it at that.
My daily routine was to find water, food and keep myself warm. It’s what kept me busy all these years.
I never strayed too far from my cave, which was surrounded by a forest of alien-like trees.
Entertainment was very minimal, and I was extremely bored. As far as survival situations go, I was very lucky and pretty much got it made.
Nothing posed much of a threat to me, but I was a potential threat to everything. I terrorized every organism near me with my presence, everything ran from me.
I was at the top of the food chain in this new ecosystem.
What killed me was a lack of human contact, on the flipside.
With a two-ply yarn, I made a noose to kill myself with, but changed my mind at the last moment.
As animals started disappearing from my hunting grounds, food was becoming harder to find. Quicker animals I lamed because they were too fast.
I was lucky it was the 1500th day today, when the suns started to set, A portal opened.
I leaped in without hesitation, and found myself at the same pawn-shop I worked at, with no strange man in sight.
Fellow employees mistook me for a homeless man, and threw me out.
I am considered legally dead while I write this.
What the strange man’s intentions were, I don’t know.
First thing I’m going to do after posting this is reunite with my extended family.
If you see a strange man in a morning suit and a bowler, do not take anything he offers you.