Amaravati. Amaravati...

The word, so familiar, but somehow unfamiliar, trickled down into Lieutenant Ametrine's consciousness.

Bēṭī.

She woke up. Her mouth was dry, as if she had slept the whole night through, but that just wasn't possible. Stirring, she looked around herself, trying to place her surroundings. There was... this was unlike anything she'd ever seen before. Well, no, that wasn't entirely true. She had made a couple of sojourns into forests, but this? It was remote, and, like the word from before, unfamiliar. Except that now she remembered that the word was her name. How strange to forget something so intrinsic. And yet... and yet. As she sat up, she realized that she was not in the clothes she had been wearing perhaps moments before. She'd just picked out a pair of really slammin' boots, and she had the presence of mind now to recall that she'd asked the cashier if she could wear them out of the store. So, no, this was not right.

It took her another moment to recognize that she was in her powered up form, as her pitchfork was not anywhere to be found. Well, then. Something had happened to her. Had she impacted another car on her way home? But Amara didn't believe in heaven. Wrinkling her nose, she decided that this was very definitely not heaven. Heaven would not have smelled so... so... organic. There was something solid under her hands, something real like earth.

That was quite enough of that. She got to her feet, and immediately she noticed that she could move freely. Her ankle, which had been injured before, was now whole. Huh. Well, that was new. Not unwelcome, but new. As she slowly became aware of her surroundings, it was little things that she noticed first. There were trees in the woods. Yes, yes, there were always trees in woods, but these trees seemed old, older than the sort of trees one might see in a private garden at some fancy estate.

More importantly, there was a rock lodged in the heel of her boot. Frowning, she bent to dislodge it, and nearly lost her balance. In the process, she managed to get herself dusty all over again, and that was just unfair. Ugh. Well, it was high time that she moved on. Maybe if she could just get around that corner, she would be able to see where the path led. Anything, anything at all to get out of this toad riddled (all right, there was maybe one toad, but that was beside the point) nightmare.

And she couldn't see the toad. That probably made it all the worse. As she made her way along the path, she came to realize that it wasn't the only path available. If she chose to, she could take another branch at the crossroads here, for all the good it would do her. She hated the great outdoors. No, really. Hated them. They were awful on her shoes, and her clothes and there were nearly always insects and snakes. Everything that crawled wanted a piece of her. Everything that slithered, well... well, she wouldn't get into that.

But she was done waiting. Feeling adventurous (and quite as though she had no other choice), she took one of those byroads, shrugging off whatever remained of her uncertainty. No, she was not going to let any old measly clump of trees get her down! Nature could take its bugs, and its rocks, and its dirt, and shove it. Feeling oddly distracted, she wandered aways, and paused when she could've sworn she saw a flicker of ... something. A campfire, maybe? She had almost trod off the path when she revised her decision. Leaving the path and stepping into the trees where there would undoubtedly be spiders seemed like a rotten plan.

That was it. This was the last time she let any old doctor proscribe her drugs.

Absolutely the last. Someone was going to hang for this.