Stranded in Thoughts

Chapter 16 - The Strange Old Man

It was our second day of being stranded on this island, yet no rescue had come. We didn't find any locals as well. The sun was at its peak, indicating that it might be noon already. Rico was walking ahead of me, leading the way to the unknown territories. The foliage here was thicker and the coconut-looking trees were much taller compared to the ones at the beach.

Now that I had a good look at them, and for the first time that I ever gave focus and attention to the details of the trees, they looked familiar.

"Jelly, check this out."

Rico called me out from where he was standing, which I supposed an opening just outside the foliage. I quickened my pace and for the first time since being stranded here, finally found something beautiful and mesmerizing.

We were standing on a wide cliff, wider than the first one Alyssa fell from. The memory struck like lightning and got me sobbing again, but I nodded it off. I needed to always remind myself to move on. I might not be able to forget, but I needed to for the meantime to survive. I couldn't succumb to depression right now.

In front of us was a gargantuan waterfall—a beauty to behold. I gawked at the wonders of the little oasis that had been hiding here all this time. There was a big, colorful rainbow above it and some fowls circling the top, but the strange thing was that there was no noise that was coming from it. A waterfall this huge should be noisy; in fact, we should have heard it some meters away before we got on this cliff. It was like everything in it had been put in silent mode.

We could see some animals that could be commonly seen in the wild like deer and boars, yet the ones that had caught our attention were the strange-looking beasts. We spotted the butterfly-looking mosquitoes fluttering around a garden of Rafflesia-looking flowers at the corner of the hillside, just beside the falls. Some rhino-looking ones were indifferently grazing, barely giving us any attention at all. I could also make out some big-eared monkeys that were almost as big as an elephant. They were all huddled in a group like what players of volleyball would do before a match to lift each other's fighting spirit. I hoped we would never have an encounter with them up close.

What surprised me the most was the way I reacted. Rico was in awe with a gaping mouth, and I sure as hell could understand it. If a person's degree of shock could be vividly shown in his or her action, Rico might have dropped his jaw to the ground already. Everything here was surely something that he would never imagine being true. How I wished I could join him with his overt admiration. But they just couldn't surprise me even with how I expected myself to be.

Because I found them disturbingly familiar.

Almost everything was familiar—the mosquitoes, rhinos, monkeys, even the furries that were moving to and fro below the chasm, on a grassy hillside just beside the waterfall basin. They were all hazy in my mind, but they were there. The memory existed. The familiarity was unsettling. I couldn't see them clearly but somehow knew how they would look in detail if I were to get closer.

Rico grabbed my hand—maybe unconsciously, due to excitement—and pulled me near the edge of the cliff. In the middle of all of this, floating on the waterfall basin was a building that had a placard "Maximus' Hotel" on it. It was a two-story structure.

Now, this thing surprised me.

"What's that?" Rico started.

"Sure looks a building to me."

"What is that doing there? Same with all of them. What are all the things here doing on this island? Now, if I may recall, we got hit by a seaquake, got stranded on an unfamiliar shore, and found some strange-looking plants and animals. If this is not something out of fairy tale that indicates we got spirited away into a magical world, then I don't know what it is."