A survivor of a plane crash casts a bottle holding his message inside into the outgoing tide in the vane hope that it will be found. Unfortunately for him, it is… -- Deathshead419
Priorities.
Care for any injuries. Find clean, fresh water. Food. Shelter. Then figure out ways to get help. Arbin had patched himself up after returning to consciousness halfway up a tree. He'd thought he was dead when his seat was sucked out with him in it. He was lucky to be alive.
But he was also stuck in the middle of nowhere with little to hand but his own knowledge and the wits he possessed. Plus side, nothing broken. Minus side, a couple of sprains, some bleeding and bruises. He could keep the sprains rested once he got a branch as a crutch and used his tie as a sling.
Clean fresh water flowed from a spring. Good. He even had some things he could collect and keep water in. Scattered all over the place on this island. Food... was plausibly the plantlife he could recognise and any fish he could catch once he had the tools to get any.
Theoretically, he was almost set. Shelter was the struggle, but sending a message out would only take a few minutes. Arbin had a sealable bottle. He had paper. Thanks to fire, he had charcoal.
He wrote, "Fell out of flight 546 from PNG to Mazatlan. Stranded on island. Send help."
He might have got a third sprain in the act of hucking that thing out into the waves. It was worth a shot. Arbin could get on with an SOS on the beach after he managed to single-handedly construct something akin to a hut.
Literally single-handedly, since one of his arms didn't like too much strain put on it. With part of his airplane chair as a sort of axe-machete hybrid, he could cut wood in a way. It was no log cabin, but it would keep his body from losing heat to the ground or losing health to weather.
Water and gathering took a lot of time out of his days, but he was scraping some survival out of the environment. Recovery was slow, and building the SOS on the beach took some time. Wood was better for cooking or light, and the local stones were hard to shift. Heavy and irregular to move. Truly difficult when they got onto the sand.
He got as far as "SU" when someone responded. Arbin was levering another stone towards the top of his intended 'O' when he saw... figures in the surf perched on some of the rocks that stood out at low tide.
As far as last words are concerned, "Mermaids are real!" are pretty cool ones to utter.
Unfortunately, they were sirens.
[Photo by Rowan Heuvel on Unsplash]
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