Hello, I started and finished a book about mushrooms today. Whipped up something real quick about it.
[doc]
--
"What do you see, Myriad?"
Colmea's voice came from far away, muffled by layers of soil, rot, creepy crawlies, and whatever else made up the living ecosystem under foot. At the same time, though, his voice was all around. Stern, authoritative as it always was. Commanding the attention of all his surroundings.
"It's dark." Myriad replied.
And wet, and claustrophobic.
Something tried to get into her mouth, but with no way in, it settled for crawling over and around the length of her body. The sensation used to freak her out, but this wasn't her first rodeo. Instead of paying attention to the beetle, or worm, or centipede that must've called its friends over to join the party, she focused on Colmea's voice as it echoed impossibly loud, unbearably muffled.
"I need you to really try with me here. What do you see?"
It was hard, disappointing Colmea the way everyone else in the world seemed to. His disappointment was seldom aimed in her direction, but it felt suffocating when it was. Like the whole world around her was closing singularly around her body, compacting her into nothing.
Myriad's eyes were open, she knew that they were. Open but unseeing, like a freshly unearthed mole flashbanged on a moonlit evening.
She wished she was outside, staring up at the twin moons. Nothingness blotted her vision like a cold and uncaring oblivion.
"I can't see anything, Colmea."
He sighed, the earth shifted to accommodate for his frustration.
"I told you, not with your eyes. Find another way to see."
Myriad took in a deep breath, and this time the world surrounding her moved into place as if inviting her home. The mealybugs, or soil mites, or gnats started to congregate against her base as if to take shelter from Colmea. She, too, wanted to take shelter from the coolness in his voice.
The anger he would never outwardly display poisoned the earth with a sigh.
She tried to focus instead on seeing, stretching and feeling through the dirt for any sort of connection she could exploit.
It was easier when the connection came to her, sprouting across her mind like a spore cloud, the fungus eager to deliver whatever message it was they had for her. Down in the dirt, though, it felt more like she was an intruder. A child digging her fingers into something sacred, that didn't want to be disturbed.
Colmea didn't understand what she was saying when she tried explaining it that first time. Insisted that, "It cannot be a one way connection, that would make less sense." So, she didn't bother trying to explain it anymore.
Something scurried out of the way of her hand, or what felt like her hand, as it hungrily sifted through the soil around in search of something she didn't understand, but knew intimately.
For a long while, no instructions came from overhead, and she could imagine the old man sitting and watching attentively, a takeout container of dumplings long forgotten going ice cold as he jotted down his observations. She wondered, if she asked, if he would share his notes with her.
Colmea always seemed to see things he shouldn't have ever had access to.
Suddenly, with little warning, an image of the man fills her mind. Not from her usual vantage, but from the other side of a glass. From far above him, and he looked so much less daunting from that angle. His back was to her, haunched over a scrawny little thing on the table he loomed over. He scribbled something down.
"I see you!" She finally said, her voice sounded far away, then she let out the breath she didn't know she was holding, and watched the tiny thing under him deflate. "It's not a memory!"
Beyond the glass Colmea stilled, turned his head to survey the colonies. A small smile on his face like a blessing. Relief flooded her system.
He always looks at us like that. Something at the back of her mind said.
Down below, she felt her hand, her fingers, tangle into a nest of some sort only it was rubbery and wet... Something fleshlike, something that wants to be flesh but couldn’t get the texture right. Another hand that tangled into hers, holding on tight enough that it suddenly became impossible to guess what tendrils sprouted from which hand.
The image of Colmea and that impossibly small girl fell away, the world outside her connection to the monolithic colony in the lab became a blur.
Hi! They said all around and through her. The greeting traveled from tendril to tendril with palpable enthusiasm.
We have been waiting to meet you.
It was so lonely before.
Welcome home!
Something ice cold, a thrill, filled her veins, the ecosystem she projected herself into alive with more than just the hustle and bustle of critters.
And she did feel at home. Nestling into the comfort of their embrace.
"Is this forever?" She felt herself ask so very far above, muffled by soil and glass.
Maybe.
We aren't sure.
Do you want it to be?
They felt young, as young as she was. She could tell, though, that they were attached to something much older. An extension that flooded through to the core of Alternia, older than anything she could comprehend. The idea to try to get past these infant gatekeepers to tap into that infinity appeared and disappeared before she could voice it.
She felt lightheaded.
Oh, we aren't ready for that.
If you're not careful we can get lost in there.
He would miss us.
“I would miss him too.”
Go back.
Come back when you’re ready.
Tell him we said hi.
They released her hand and with a snap she was alone, back in her body above ground, on an operating table staring up into Colmea’s eyes. She could feel the connection stronger than ever, as though her heart stayed down below, pumping life into her from that old thing that hurt her head to comprehend.
“Welcome back.” He said, any excitement in his voice gone as he returned to writing in his notes. He wasn’t disappointed anymore, though. “What did you see?”
“I mostly heard. And felt.”
“Felt?”
“Big. And little. At the same time. I’m sorry.. I don’t have much, it was brief. They said I wasn’t ready.”
There was a heavy silence between them, he didn’t look up from his book.
We can try again. She felt herself almost say. It came out as, “I’m sorry. I wanted to go for Big Mama…” as she indicated the mushroom covered jellyfish that floated serenely in a tank behind him. It felt like she, too, waited anxiously for answers pulled up from the soil.
“Oh, dear, Myriad.” he started, discarding his notes to swipe the container of dumplings from the desk. “You’ve done excellent. There's nothing to be sorry for. There is still work to do, but this is a very big first step.”
All of the colonies surrounding them seemed to relax as she exhaled the breath stuck in her chest.
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"My lusus? I imagine that an ocean dwelling fungal parasite needed a host and attached itself to what was available at the time. There are a lot of places to hide in a jellyfish of her size.
Over the sweeps it grew and assimilated to her nerve net. Fungal parasitism becomes a convenient means of growing a central brain where one is not.
She would not be what she is without one or the other."
And I do solemnly swear that this is the last set of new trolls I make for a long while.
So what’s the Colmea guy’s deal, anyway?
[doc]
--
“Now you’ve really done it.” The child, and she can’t be more than five sweeps old, smiles around a juicebox from her perch. “He’s not going to be happy about this one little bit.” Her warning fills you with just enough dread that it roots you in place.
The he in question is, for the short time that you’ve known each other, very particular of the fungal colonies that throng throughout the lab like a great big web. Some of them in larger terrariums cobbled together and the others in their much smaller quarantines. He was more protective of these small quarantined batches than he was of anything else, even the aquarium that sits nearly ceiling to floor and across the back wall of the lab, housing a handful of species of jellyfish, with the largest, and need for such ample volume, being his overgrown lusus. Nemopilema nomurai, he once whispered into your ear when he caught you staring at her.
She is quite the daunting thing, with what must be a ten or fifteen-foot diameter and countless feet of long sprawling tentacles, tendrils, and tangles of some sort of marine fungus weaving around and within them. He never offered a scientific name or approximate for it, and to be fair, you never asked.
Conversations with the man always centered around his research, his precious colonies, that you’d been helping him with. The science he always mumbled, mostly to himself, was difficult to parse on a good day, on a bad day he stopped pretending to try altogether.
Your role, as far as he was concerned, as far as you understood, was only a very small part.
A collective consciousness. The only colony that survived the interaction with your mutation to the point that you started to become one. Once again, the science of it all was lost on you, something about parasitic symbiosis or some other, but the piece of it he’d gotten into you somehow took root and you’d found yourself actually talking to it.
Making decisions with it.
It was only natural you’d want to get a closer and better look at it, right?
“It was a mistake.” Is all you can manage, staring at the ground that almost glitters with the way the ambient lights of the tanks shine off of the glass of one of the smaller, now shattered, terrariums that litters the floor. Many of the stray shards lance through the colony in places that look fatal even to the untrained eye.
“It was a mistake.” She mimics, not quite getting the cadence right, but the road work is there, so there’s maybe a future in ventriloquism for the kid. “I think he’s gonna feed you to Big Mama.” She indicates the tank with the massive jellyfish in it, punctuating the thought with the insufferable sound a straw makes when it reaches the end of a drink.
Colmea couldn’t be that unreasonable, could he?
As if summoned, and you don’t think she sent for him, the door opens as soon as the fear creeps up on you.
There is a severe way that the doctor has about carrying himself, a stern expression attached to whatever it is he lets his gaze fall on. Right now that is solidly on you. The gravity of the situation and the weight of the girl’s words leave you incapable of removing yourself from the scene of the crime, after all. You’d only reached a harmless hand in to touch it, how could you predict this outcome?
“It was a mistake.” You whisper desperately as he fully enters the room, the picture of serenity, taking in the scene before him. He does not regard you or what you’ve had to say for yourself.
Even if the colony was not sliced through as it was, the abrupt displacement from its aquatic habitat would have done enough on its own to paint a grim scene, splattered across the floor like an abstract painting. He surveys the damage quietly, a ponderous god, visage poisoned by the blue and pink glow of the lights within neighboring tanks. Now his gaze flits about from shard of glass to shard of glass, as though looking for answers in the mosaic they make up on the floor.
Everything in the lab has become remarkably still, even the girl in the corner has ceased vacuuming the bottom of the juice box in favor of savoring the silence that smothers the room, deafening even over the bubbling of the surrounding tanks.
Colmea does not rush in, ready to collapse to the floor and mourn the loss of his experiment, instead he is carried further into the room by slow and deliberate steps, each one a soft tap against linoleum that crushes the glass beneath it. The answers to questions that he does not bother voicing slotting into his mind as he advances, and if those answers change any part of his expression, which you suspect it doesn’t, it goes unnoticed when his contemplative steps take him into the shadow of his colossal lusus.
Far too long passes before he is standing directly in front of you. Very briefly, a crack in his veneer provides a view into the ever-feared high blood rage bubbling beneath the surface.
“Myriad,” he addresses the girl, still up on her perch by the edge of the jellyfish enclosure. “The colony?”
Myriad makes a face like she is seriously concentrating, an expression you’ve come to understand means she is reaching into her mind to find her natural connection to the fungal colonies that surround her. Not as a member of the collective, but as an eavesdropper. Her game goes on for too long and it is clear that she is only playing up the dramatics, reveling in your dread, when the pensive god clears his throat.
“Dead as a doornail!” She reports, cheery as she was when she delivered her taunts moments before his arrival. It should hurt, but you already knew. You felt it, a part of you, die the second the tank hit the floor. “No survivors, wiped out!”
The ghost of something horrific crosses behind his eyes.
He nods.
His demeanor does not betray him and there is no warning when he strikes, just the stinging feeling left behind by a backhand that causes you to lose your balance. With a hideous crunch, your knees fall into the ruin below, the salty remnants from the enclosure mingles with the fresh wounds and sends a significant shock through your system. So significant in fact, that you make neither a move nor a sound.
Colmea shakes his hand loose, the anger that boils just beneath but never quite breaking the surface places a dangerous dose of malice behind his eyes.
“Myriad, find me a broom.” He commands, and as soon as it leaves his mouth, her feet hit the ground right behind you with a crunch that makes you wince. A stifled giggle followed by her plodding along tells you it was an intentional assault on her part.
His hand is wrapped up in your hair before the door closes behind her and he lifts you up to meet his eye line, all the while winding more and more of it up until he finds scalp, as though he is handling something that weighs about the same as a stuffed animal.
There is no growling, no deep orange eyes signaling danger, just a furrowed brow and a deep sigh. “I had such high hopes for you.”
“I,” you start to plead your case, tears welling at the corners of your eyes at the realization that your mutation did not make you special enough, but he does not give you the opportunity to continue. Instead, your face is acquainted with the glass of the aquarium with such force that it rattles the base of the enclosure and causes some of the smaller species of jellies inside to send off bright sparks of light, in hopes of startling whatever predator they assume has invaded.
All they really succeed in is disorienting you all the more, your face making contact a second and third time before stars start to decorate your vision and the edges begin to blur. Something cracks, and it is not the glass.
Still, the angered god does not growl or snarl. Nor does his reflection, warped by a myriad of things between the forming concussion and the glass of the aquarium, broadcast anything beyond his mild indifference.
Your face hits the glass a few more times before the girl returns from her quest and he finally relents, dropping you to the floor with a sigh. In the same moment, the stars in your vision become angry black splotches, eagerly rushing out to meet those blurred edges.
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Send me a (🗣️) + two muses (one has to be mine!), and I’ll make them have a conversation whether they know each other or not!
--
Colmea never considered himself the type to have friends, not any that were particularly close at any rate, and because of that, he always finds it jarring when the people that consider him a close friend find excuses to come visit him.
He stands in the doorway, chewing on that thought, eyeing the pair of sharply dressed twins that summoned him from his research with their intrusion.
The blue eyed twin speaks first while the red eyed one looks around to see what’s new, deciding very quickly to duck under Colmea’s arm and enter his home without asking.
Naturally. What else was he expecting?
“We need your help.” Castor says, following closely behind his brother into the hive. “It’s not really that important, but we need you to weigh in.” Pollux finishes the sentence.
Colmea sighs, he wonders if they realize how annoying their manner of speaking can be, but he also knows better than to assume that they’ve ever cared about being a nuisance to the people that they are surrounded by.
“Come on in.” The sarcasm slips from his lips before he can catch it, though he hardly tries.
“Thank you.” They say in unison.
“Mm.” He closes the door and turns to face them. “What is it that you need from me, exactly?”
“We want you to try the recipe.”
“You want to cook for me.”
“We want to cook, yes.” Castor corrects, the pair already setting up camp in his kitchen. He didn’t even notice that they were carrying their own knives and ingredients for whatever they wanted to do in his space. “In your kitchen.”
“I got that. Why my kitchen?”
“If we cook it in our kitchen,” Pollux starts. “It will be cold by the time we bring it to your kitchen.” Castor finishes.
Colmea runs through all the reasons why it might be, that they desperately need to have him try whatever it is that they’re making. It isn’t as though they are particularly close. Sure they share notes and sometimes they would watch Myriad for him when she was younger. Neverminding, even, that he was in attendance at their graduation, he is certain they are not that close.
Close enough to spring a new recipe on him?
“You seem confused, Doctor.” Castor observes, Pollux pulls up the necessary seasonings in the meantime.
“I am confused. Why are you so adamant about bringing food here at all?” He feels the furrow in his brow deepen.
“Well, where else would we celebrate your wriggling day?” They say at the same time.
