but it didn't matter cause no one was hurt

[espigeonage]

Who: Julien, and whomever wants to come along
Where: Christmas Island
What: Let's go look at the biggest mushroom! Probably won't end in cutting it up, but we'll see!
When: March 29 and 6PM Locke time, March 30 6AM on Christmas Island


Julien had organized this over the network. Everyone had to wear masks against the spores or whatever affected people who went into the jungle. No one else was to touch the biggest mushroom. Everyone was not to kill anything unless it tried to kill them first. He wasn't sure if they'd follow those directions, but it seemed better than going and poking at it alone.

Hopefully the time difference and warmth didn't throw people too much.

Comments

Jungle

[espigeonage]

It's partially cloudy, pleasingly warm, and maybe unpleasantly humid. The rainforest is noisy. Coconut crabs and birds are everywhere, but it's the mushrooms that really stand out. They're quite small and distributed thickly across much of the ground, but the closer one gets to the center of the island the larger they are, up to soccer ball size.

It's gonna take a while to get there on foot. You brought water, right? Better flag down someone who can fly to bring you some if not.

[scarlet_devil]

Perhaps too humid for Emilia's tastes, but at least it was around six in the morning. The rainforest was very noisy for someone with advanced hearing, so it it any wonder that parasol in hand, she's taken to the skies?

Well, it doesn't mean she won't give people lifts, if they need them, as well as water.

/forever late

[bythewaves]

Arnold all but bounces. He is here for one reason - well okay two reasons, but one big one. He has got permission to bring a coconut crab home. He has a hanky tied around his face in deference to the spores, and his eyes crinkle in a smile as he waves as Emilia.

"Miss Emilia! Hello! I was not expecting to see you here!"

[scarlet_devil]

Oh, it's the weird, pernamently cheerful guy that owns an art museum...

"Arnold? I didn't expect to see you around here of all places."

[radiantchicken]

Torin would have loved to fly around in the rainforest all on his own, exploring there, and making friends with the native parrots, but it just wasn't safe. Since he needed a mask, the easiest thing for him to do would be to transform into Kyoryu Silver. The transformation came with a mask, and then he'd be ready to fight if things came down to it. Not that he wanted things to get to that point, but it never hurt to be prepared.

It doesn't look like he can fly at the moment--he looks just like a man in a silver spandex suit wearing a silver helmet, but looks can be deceiving. He'll go around checking on everyone; just because he's at home in the jungle doesn't mean everyone else would be.

[notbloody]

It smells like Torin, a bit, but it definitely is not Torin. And she can't even properly sniff it because someone put a terribly weird thing over most of her head.

So instead she thunks her head against Torin's leg and peers up at him. What are you?

[radiantchicken]

"Hello there, little one," Torin says as he crouches to pat the puppy on the head. He sure sounds like Torin, helmet or no helmet. "Ready to see what we can find?"

Re: Jungle

[wingsister]

Areonwen is wearing the tack she echoed back almost a week earlier, mostly because the saddlebags are convenient for storing things like water and the book she'd also echoed back, this time while going through the portal.

Rather like a Gate, she thinks to herself. Gates were another thing she'd just recently remembered about.

The book clinched it, however, even more than the death memories. She'd either had two prior selves or been able to shift between human-like and horse-like once.

:Are you sure this mask is effective?: she asks to keep her mind off the topic. :I look ridiculous.:

She did. It had been a stroke of luck that the humans of the planet had once made gas masks for horses--but that didn't mean they weren't incredibly ludicrous.

[espigeonage]

Julien looks hardly less absurd. He had a kind of cone over his beak, secured with elastic. When he was above the treeline he tends to remove it, but down here he suffers with everyone else.

"I don't want anyone getting this spore effect," he says from a branch above, his voice a little muffled. "We could cut yours so it's just the snout part and wrap it tight? I think eyes should be okay."

[wingsister]

:No, it's fine,: she replies in a brusque, auntly tone. :You went out of your way to get me a mask, the least I can do is suffer through wearing it. But someone with hands will have to loosen it when I get thirsty.:

[brotimaeus]

Richard feels a tingle on the back of his neck and brings his hand up in a blur of motion to slap yet another insect off his skin.

"If nothin' else kills me while I'm here, I'm gonna get eaten alive by fuckin' insects," he mutters to no one in particular, before swallowing another mouthful of water. It's hot here - hotter than Texas ever was - even before the sun is fully up and he's sure he's sweating more than he's drinking.

"Remind me, whose great idea was this?"

He's looking at you, Julien.

[espigeonage]

"Some poor, doubtless good-looking soul," Julien says brightly, clinging to the branch of a tree above. He flies very quickly and would have to zag and loop over the party for a long time before it reached the central mushroom. Better to conserve his energy.

When he's not moving he's feeling it, though. Julien can't sweat. He dissipates heat with moving air and by panting, the air passing through hollow bones riddled with blood vessels and picking up heat to push back out of his body. This isn't as hot as his internal temperature, and as far as he can tell it won't get that hot, so he's functioning, anyway. "Want me to fetch you some bug spray?"

[brotimaeus]

"I was thinkin' more along the lines of 'some feathery asshole'," Richard shoots back, pausing mid-step to take another drink of water and to rub his wrist over his forehead. God damn, it's hot.

"Bug spray's gonna be like tippin' a cup of water over a wildfire at this point," he says then, resigned to his fate. His skin itches all over, though he's not sure how many times he's been bitten. "We got much further to go?"

Maybe it's friendly!

[espigeonage]

"Here we are," Julien says unnecessarily, a little muffled by the cone-shaped thing put over his beak.

This mushroom is fully the size of a car. As large as the others have gotten near it there's a massive jump between any of them and the central one. Its stalk is too big for one person to reach around, and its cap is massively thick and solid, the gills on the underside fine and prominent.

"I think this is the only one sporing. There's this dust... Everyone keep your mask on. Let me go ahead." He moves up slowly and carefully, head bobbing a little to keep steady, and gets within touching range of the giant mushroom. Nothing happens. He circles it. Still nothing, which is the same thing that happens when he actually touches it, tentatively and then more firmly. Sterile swabs rubbed on it and poked into its gills, even a tiny blade shaving off a little bit of the cap, produce no effect. Neither does Julien circling it again and hopping to land on top of it, wings partially spread.

He folds them again. "Anticlimactic," he notes, and tenses in case that is what sets it off. It is not. "Umm... okay, no one else poke it, it might just not think I'm a threat, but... what if we just walled this off so no one could bother it?"

[notbloody]

"I can bark at it!" After all she is a dog, and all kinds of beings are scared of dogs!

[espigeonage]

Julien does a stupid thing and hops just a couple inches, bouncing on the mushroom cap. It yields a little, springy, about like what he would have imagined a ridiculously huge and long-lasting mushroom would be like.

Landing on it didn't seem to bother it, voices didn't. "If you want? I don't think... if it can hurt us I think it doesn't want to."

This is weird. Considering the others he knows about a giant mushroom that just sits here and is an excellent perch is ludicrously normal. This really is anticlimactic, and he steps on the part of himself that is disappointed. It could just be waiting, building up.

[notbloody]

She runs a circle around the thing (which isn't really easy because of large roots and similar things in her way) to find a good point to do this from, and when she is satisfied she sits her butt down and starts to bark loudly.

For a while.

Nothing happens. She'll stop eventually and peer up at the mushroom, unsure of what else to do.

[scarlet_devil]

"Nothing happened. Hmm..."

Emi was watching him work, of course, expecting the thing or something else to attack him.

"I'm all for walling it off... and not destroying it. Something tells me that's not the best idea." Something being, of course, Saretha's latest post.

[espigeonage]

"Yeah." He's perching on a giant mushroom, he thinks, and his tail shakes from side to side in a bird laugh. What an image. "Hey, can you take a picture for me? But yeah, I'm thinking like, a helicopter with sort of a little greenhouse, and putting that over like a cup. Minimizes the number of people tromping through here maybe disturbing things."

[scarlet_devil]

She doesn't so much as perch, but stand on another large mushroom that can take her weight.

"Of course. Got my phone right here." And her parasol.

[brotimaeus]

"Don't have to tell me twice..." Richard mutters, carefully adjusting his mask for the dozenth time to make sure it's fully on his face. When Julien had told him about this thing, he'd had a good idea of just how big it really was, but nothing he could have imagined really compares to the reality of it.

He has a katana resting against one shoulder and a pair of sunglasses shielding his eyes from the morning sunlight, but he's not here to cut this thing down. Not unless he has a good reason to. Their talk had made him think of something else, too - what if this thing was the very thing they needed.

"Sounds good in theory, but in my experience, tellin' someone they can't do a thing just makes 'em want to do it."

[espigeonage]

It's tall as well as wide, and just thick. There are sizeable trees around them with smaller trunks.

"True! Fortunately this is a good ways out into the jungle. You guys only found the way here because you knew where to go, and that took a while. Going and constructing proper walls would call in a lot of attention and let people know where, and destroy a lot of these littler mushrooms," he notes.

[brotimaeus]

"Pre-fuckin'-cisely," he says, tapping his katana against his shoulder and - for now - clamping down on the very sincere urge to poke the mushroom with it to see what happened. If Julien's right, and Julien seems like a smart bird guy, then they're being led into these kinds of situations and he'd be playing right into the puppet master's hands if he did that.

"We got Numbered people who can do magic shit, right? Maybe one of them could hide it."

Re: Maybe it's friendly!

[wingsister]

:I could try to Speak to it, Mind-to-Mind?: Areonwen volunteers. :If it has any sort of simple intelligence, it may talk back.:

She stares at the mushroom. :O' Mushroom, are you friend or foe?:

[espigeonage]

"Go for it!" Maybe the best place to be is not on top of the giant mushroom, but he can take off in a hurry if he has to, he tells himself.

'o mushroom' makes him laugh, a bird's laugh, silent with his tail swishing left and right. Oh dear. Stop that, he tells himself, he has to hold still and see if there's any response.