(10) Upon Arrival...

Icy hot.
Those were the only words Jay could think of that could accurately describe how his body felt as he fell out of nowhere into a freezing pile of snow. Immediately his senses hit him full power, and the intense cold around him sunk in.

"Whoa!!" Jay pushed himself upright, patting down his now ice-reddened forearms.
"Brrr..." He shivered, "Where am I?"

All around him, as far as he could see, were pine trees and bushes, not to mention lots of snow, both on the ground and steadily falling from the gray sky above. Wiping a few flakes from his cheek, Jay could not think to do anything except walk forward in a random direction. So he started forward, trudging through the thick, ankle-deep snow at a sluggish but steady pace.

After about ten steps, Jay felt a tinge of oddness in his mind. Something was missing. Then it hit him, rather painstakingly: Rufus!

Whirling around, Jay scanned the clearing for any other signs of life. A fox was running into the trees on the opposite side of the clearing, but no other signs of life seemed to exist. Suddenly the altercation before his transportation flooded back into his memory.

Rufus knocked me toward the orb, tried to grab my hand, to no avail.
He fell backward, and... He must've not made it through!
I... what do I do now?

The dull pain of confusion made his temples throb with a kind of soreness. He quickly shook off the subtle emotional response and thought out loud.

"I have to figure out where I am. Then I have to get out of here."

He continued walking and, after pushing through several thickets of small pine trees, he came upon a gigantic lake. It stretched out farther than the whistling blankets of snow would allow him to see. In the distance, right about where the landscape faded into white, he could see some semi-truck sized icebergs bobbing violently in the nearly frozen water.

"I'm not going to last long in this weather," Jay said to himself, pushing forward. He shoved his hands in his pockets and felt the left connect with his cell phone. He pulled it out, crossed his fingers and flipped it open.

It was powered off. Restarting it, the words 'NO SIGNAL' blinked in bright red letters, before the phone died again with a hiss from an electrical surge. "Weird..." Jay closed the phone in dismay, trying to think of the positive in the situation. "At least I know where I am - in the middle of nowhere."

This notion did little to brighten his spirits, but he kept walking forward. Eventually the snow thinned out a bit, but he was so tired from the walking that he'd done already that walking at all was exhausting. He shook off the pain in his aching leg muscles and continued forward.

It seemed like an eternity that Jay walked, sloshing through the disheveled snow-coated landscape, which was like walking through quicksand that didn't want to pull you down. Jay's entire body ached with a vehemence, but somehow he was able to ignore the frost developing on his face and press onward.

Thirty minutes later, Jay found himself almost half way around the lake, and on the brink of collapsing. His limbs were almost completely numb from the cold, and he was about to give up when, ahead of him, he saw a relieving sight - a group of people. They were shuffling in his general direction, slowly at first. Then, as one of the posse apparently spotted him, the whole group shot forward with a burst of speed.

Jay lost control of his legs and collapsed to his knees; it was an uncontrolled response to seeing his possible rescuers. As the group neared him, Jay stared at these individuals with a combination of awe and caution. Two looked like a normal guy and girl, about his age, except the blond-haired girl was dressed in clothing fit for a ninja, and the guy sported the attire of an army jock. The other two were a male and female, but they had bodies that were a combination of human physiology and robotic components like armor and weaponry.

Is this some sort of crazy hallucination? Jay wondered, struggling internally against his exhaustion.

"Quickly, we need to warm him up!" the robotic girl hollered, rushing to his position.
"Got it covered," the blond girl replied, kneeling down in front of Jay, just before he passed out.
...

When Jay awoke, the group was hovering around him. They had lain him on a large, fallen tree trunk and somehow warmed him up significantly. Even his legs felt substantially less strained than before. Regardless of the help they'd given him, Jay kept a weary eye on this out of place group of individuals.

"Hey! He's up." Jay recognized the blond girl's voice.
"It's about time," he heard another voice say, "he's been asleep for almost eight hours."

But before he could say anything, the robotic girl stepped up to his side.
"Hey, you're alright. That's awesome! By the way, the name's Lara. Who might you be?"