%% date:: [[2024-08-25]] %% # [[016_20240825 Megafungi]] ![[016_20240825.svg]] ## Session Summary > [!tldr] [[016_20240825 Megafungi]] > ^summary %% ## Video [Video]() %% --- ## Recap ![[015_20240818#^summary]] --- ## Log %% [[Rezin Nelson]] is going to rejoin us! %% We're about to go into the tunnels! We open the hatch and it's a vertical passageway. There are metal rungs that go down. It's like a maintenance tunnel. We go 30 feet down. We hear rumbling from one side of us. It's like the rumbling that we'd hear when we're on a subway platform. We see a giant ant next to us! It's menacing and rearing up over some of the boys, who are turning and running. Ash somehow gets stuck in the tunnel, and Eric tries to help but makes it worse. Calliope applies grease to them and gets them out of there, then follows suit. Tarrin's talking to the boys. There are three of them, but they say one of them is missing-- Billy. Ash looks into the tunnels. He realises we're in the middle of a large colony of ants under Newfaire. In the other direction (away from Tarrin and the kids), the darkness gathers. He feels that the Bleed is concentrated and growing. That is also the direction of the Oak Pillar. Eric realises we're on the defensive ring of the colony. The ant that Tarrin scared away was a guard. There's also a moldering smell towards Tarrin and further-- something damp. The ants themselves are not eldritch and their growth is not recent; the tunnels and their size seem to have been that way for a while. The moldering smell is coming from mushrooms. Billy is hiding behind one of the mushrooms. Billy is the same kid who had said to Ash, "Wow, you're old!" in the previous game. It's a larder where mushrooms are grown and stored. Billy was the runt of the gang, not one of the leaders. He just followed the other boys there. They knew that there were giant ants there and wanted to see them. He's like 10. The other boys were like 12 or 13, a little older than him. His dad was killed in a factory accident and then his mum "just wasn't there". She couldn't deal with taking care of him by herself and gave him up. He doesn't know where she is. He feels he wasn't good enough for his mum. Eric examines the mushrooms. The giant ants are megafauna. The further down we go, the more specimens of megafauna have been found in scientific journals. There's a world beneath our world that is bigger than our world! Eric isn't sure if the mushrooms are poisonous or not. Another day! Eric finds a crackpot named [[Xaverina Twill]]. He and I go to talk to her. - She's in an apartment near [[Briarbank College]]. She doesn't have tenure. She's like an associate professor for a no-tenure, no-security, off-campus role. She's got a dingy apartment. - She's disheveled, forgetful, and has a sweater that she hasn't washed much. - She has student office hours but nobody ever shows up. She's so eager to see us. She's also a bit wary of us because she's used to people not thinking positively about her work. - She's very passionate about this topic-- over personal grooming, politics, social ability. She likes thinking about megafauna. She says ants are not the only ones-- termites, wasps, etc are possible. She's more focused on insects. They don't have access to the sun, but the megafauna have evolved differently. The mushrooms are one way to get nutrients from the sun. - She's interested in megafauna because it's a separate world (or that's how she thinks of it). She thinks we don't have to kill the things down there. She thinks we should just live and let live. We keep disturbing that strata-- we build subways and dig up relics from [[Oldfaire]] that disturb that environment. She says they never come up so we don't have to worry about it. - Don't send people down there. - She doesn't really know how to coexist with them. Maybe we could pass ourselves off as an ant. - We could disrupt their ecosystem by disrupting their colony so they have to build elsewhere. - Eric asks about why they might be taking metal things. She thinks that if that's the case, there's something wrong. There is a protest coming up. Tarrin wants to talk to [[Lim Dae]] to see if there is a better way to get to the source of the Bleed than going through the ant nest. %% # Text Elements # Drawing ```json {"type":"excalidraw","version":2,"source":"https://github.com/zsviczian/obsidian-excalidraw-plugin/releases/tag/2.0.25","elements":[],"appState":{"theme":"dark","gridSize":null,"viewBackgroundColor":"#ffffff"}} ``` %%