The soft mat of damp detritus within the shaded grove worked in tandem with the dense foliage to swallow sound almost as surely as it did light. Dark, warm, quiet, Liv could have come to like this spot, if not for the frustration of her slowed expansion and the time that reduced pace allowed for her to brood in her own thoughts. The mushrooms had proven to be less than ideal for her usual method of expansion, so her breakneck pace had been brought to a screeching halt and replaced with the monotonous slog of manually claiming every square inch by hand. With a sigh, she stood up and rolled her shoulders.
“Alright, Saboteur, let’s get back at it,” Liv said flatly, her tone almost mechanical.
The shrub slumped dejectedly and nodded. Of all the duties she assigned them, ‘census duty’ was the most universally hated. Somebody had to keep count of how many trees she claimed while she was pushing her borders, but spending time in the dark doing such a dull task was something they all loathed. Little Sabo had, in this case literally, drawn the short straw today.
Setting herself against the border, she frustratedly mulled over the potential reasons the mushrooms weren’t working in the same way as her grasses. Saboteur was loping up to count the newest tree trunks when a bone-rattling horn boomed out from the misty border. The distracted core was jolted from her musing with a yelp and the scare sent the tiny shrub diving for cover. Liv crouched, muscles tensed, looking into the mist.
“What the hell was that?!”
The closest thing she could compare it to in her mind was a trombone with a mute. Even in this sound-dampening grove, it had been loud enough to rustle some low-hanging leaves. She could just about make out the silhouette of someone crouching with their arms held oddly at their sides. She was about to call out for the others when a four-foot-tall bird strode across the border.
The ethereal punk’s confusion was swiftly subsumed by awe as she got a proper look at the thing. Covered mostly in glossy black feathers, the creature boasted powerful-looking legs and hooked talons. That, however, was where the similarities to any known ‘bird’ ended; because it also had a long tail and a slender toothy snout.
“Ho-ly fu-king shi-it…” Whelp, there went Defcon 1. She was pretty sure her mother would have understood, given the circumstances. It wasn’t every day one saw a flesh and blood DINOSAUR! The raptor-like creature walked into the clearing, head swiveling about in quick avian ticks. The prehistoric beast flared its nostrils, taking a few sniffs as huge yellow eyes scanned the dark. Fear forgotten, Liv just circled the creature in a slow walk, shamelessly gawking. There was a FUCKING DINOSAUR in her dungeon!!
Its long neck curved slightly bobbing its head back and forth as it walked, taking long strides till it reached a more open space. Standing up as tall as it could, the inky theropod tipped its head skyward and inhaled deeply. The predator’s black feathered neck inflated dramatically revealing strikingly bright blue skin beneath the midnight plumage, and the muted horn boomed once again. Two short blasts and one long, low note growled out from the swollen throat.
“What are you doing?” Liv whispered to herself. No way it was hunting, if there was game within a quarter mile it was probably hiding now. That horn sound was loud. She circled the mysterious monster again, utterly enthralled. She had so many questions! What was it? How was it here? Had the dinosaurs never died out in this world or was this creature a genetic throwback? Had this ancient species been brought forward somehow, or was it some modern descendant of those prehistoric creatures?
SO. MANY. QUESTIONS.
A deep rumbling sound came from the north, reminding Liv of a cold semi engine trying to turn over. She and the beast turned toward the noise in excited unison, and from the shadowed mists of the beyond stepped a second theropod. This one was significantly larger, standing nearly a foot taller than the first. The mottled brown hunter lowered its head and rustled its plumage, once again producing a bass chugging with a force Liv would have expected more of a locomotive than an animal.
Every moment only brought more questions! Was this some kind of mating dance? What were these things? Their three-toed feet had the distinctive sickle claws, yet they were way too big to be velociraptors. She wondered if they could be utahraptors, but dismissed that idea as they were too small. Gods, what she’d give for a smartphone right now!!
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The more colorful one stood up as tall as he could, bearing his throat and booming once again. When the larger female didn’t leave he began to shimmy from side to side. With another trio of booming calls, he extended his arms down and outward, revealing a hidden array of iridescent blue-green feathers that shimmered in the sparse dapples of light that managed to break the canopy.
All of her questions fled Liv’s mind, banished by a child-like wonder at this display of Cretaceous romance. The female watched this for a while, eyes roaming over the male as he danced and preened for her. He wove slowly back and forth, sliding in with each motion and closing the distance between them. With a chuff, the female seemed to come to a decision. At the next pass, she lunged forward and snapped her jaws just inches shy of the male's exposed throat with a terrifying speed and ferocity. Both Liv and the male instinctively scampered back a few paces at the aggressive display, before the female gave a warning growl and fled back into the mist.
Liv panted, hand over her heart as she recovered from the scare. The male, however, seemed undeterred and proceeded to give chase. As the second theropod vanished into the mists, the lonely core was left standing in the shaded grove staring after them.
“Wow…”
She felt a familiar spark within her. An almost chemical spike that pierced through her recent malaise like the sparse Jacob’s ladders that speared the leafy blanket above. This place wasn’t the whimsical fantasy she’d hoped for, true. It could be dark, terrifying, and awful. But she’d only seen one tiny little piece of this amazing new world. There was still so much she wanted to discover and explore. She had so many more questions in need of answers.
Liv turned back toward the border she’d been working on, smiling for the first time in days. Saboteur was hiding there, posed as an innocent shrub beside a small patch of white-capped mushrooms. She was about to tell him it was time to get back to work when her eyes drifted back to the mushrooms. The things hadn’t been useful for quickly spreading her territory, so she’d dismissed them. Now, though, she felt the familiar itch to explore something new. The border could wait a bit…
“Come with me,” she beckoned her little shrub. “I want to do an experiment.”
—
Liv lay comfortably in the soft loam, staring intently at the roots of a mangrove nearer the creek, allowing Saboteur to sun himself a bit. Of all the things she’d seen so far, these mushrooms were the only one she’d found that seemed to be capable of tying the threads her second sight revealed to OTHER organisms. She watched now as those same shimmering lines of magic slowly pulsed back and forth between the pale fungal tendrils in the soil and the sturdy root of the tree. The two were definitely sending signals or energy of some kind back and forth.
She remembered some random YouTube science channel she browsed talking about fungal networks and trees distributing nutrients or something like that. Was that what she was seeing? There were definite input and output threads, each one signaling in one direction. Shaking her head, she cleared her vision. The thousands of connections were too complex to study. She needed to simplify it.
“Fern,” she said casually, tossing a few SP to grow just a tiny little leafy plant in the sunlight. “Mushroom.” The fizzle-pop of a new entity preceded the emergence of a pale mushroom cap emerging in the shadow of the tree a foot away. Liv pinched her fingers as if holding an invisible brush and let the fibers of the imagined tool gently paint a shimmering thread into existence from fern to fungus.
She watched in curious amazement as pulses flowed down her new thread from the fern, causing the mushroom cap to subtly thrum. Licking her thumb, Liv smudged the thread out of existence. The thrum flared into a glow all its own.
“Huh… Mushroom.”
A second white cap sprouted in the dark, damp soil, glowing identically to the first. Liv painted a new thread, linking the first mushroom to the second. The first sent gentle pulses down the line, and the second dimmed and thrummed just as the first had done. What was going on here?
With a flourish, she swiped her mental brush along the fading glow where the first thread had been. As the brighter flow of energy flowed from the fern to the first mushroom, it dimmed. The trickle flowing to the second mushroom slowed, and that one began to glow with life once again. A distant flicker of an idea was forming in her mind now.
“Saboteur! Come here, buddy!!” Liv waved energetically to the shrub, which came to her side with a questioning look. “I want you to stand over this little fern and shade it,” she explained. The shrub looked confused but did as asked, casting the leaves of the tiny plant in shadow. The flow slowed dramatically, though didn’t disappear entirely. As it did, the first mushroom flickered to life, and the second dimmed. Saboteur looked up at her, wondering just what all this meant.
“Stay there. I need to try something.”
Liv smudged out the first thread again. The mushrooms remained unchanged. Replacing the thread allowed that tiny trickle to return to the first mushroom, and they flipped.
“Okay, step back,” she whispered, grinning. As sunlight returned to the fern the mushroom got a more potent flow of energy, yet the state of the caps flipped once again. Liv pondered the new lifeform, ticking off what she knew on her fingers.
“So it can form connections between itself and other entities,” she explained, touching her pointer finger. “It can relay signals from one entity to another,” Liv’s expression was growing more excited now. “It has two states, AND… it detects changes in the connected organism and signals when that state changes…”
Holy shit. Suddenly she felt bad that she’d blown Defcon 1 on a dinosaur because if she was right then this was WAY more important. Liv’s Cheshire grin was accompanied by an almost giddy snicker. To think, she’d almost dismissed these little guys! Saboteur was looking at her like she’d lost her mind, obviously failing to see what was so interesting about the silly mushrooms.
“Those fucking cultists won’t know what hit them.”