Chapter 44

Being slowly boiled alive while not feeling pain was a very weird experience. I was continually and slowly losing my ability to facilitate water to the affected areas.

But I felt like I should be panicking more than I was, honestly. The fire was step by step destroying more and more of myself but i found myself not really caring as much as I should have. And I don’t think this was shock either.

I think its because I know for certain that ill find a way to survive and move past this.

I was a mushroom but most of my substance and most of my being was squirrel-ed away underground. Sure my birthplace/log along with my original mycelium I was born into would inevitably be burned to char but that was exactly why I grew more of myself beyond that log.

I’m sure that bit of me still in that log, if it was still sentient, would be slowly rocking back and forth and weeping, but in between growing the the mushrooms around buttons and the animal, I briefly connected to my mycelium still in that log and it just felt like when I used to drop spore-filled mushrooms at the edge of my log to grow more of myself in the ground: like a limb I was reattaching to myself.

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There were no memories of being alone and being in despair. Which raised some very interesting questions about what exactly makes me, me.

As I mused about my very nature, I finally hit that water balance sweet spot in one of my spores. I knew because the wind picked up and hit the bde monument in just the right way that it detached from the mushroom and carried it elsewhere.

There were a lot of factors here that I had to consider and some of them I couldn’t really control like the wind and weather and how it affected that balance. How much a spore could be filled with water was easy to find out as that was basically the whole premise with the raining mushroom.

So I couldn’t fill them up past a certain point and I couldn’t find a generic sweet spot to hit with every single spore. It was annoying. Too little and while it does detach in the wind it would basically be just more fodder for the fire. Too much and while the damn thing also detaches it doesn’t go too far and lands within spitting distance of the mushroom. I knew because the damn spores impact the sensory mycelium.

But this last one was perfect the wind picked up in just the right way that the spore detached and I’m assuming landed on a plant or tree.

Despite the success here I found myself losing hope. So many factors had to be just right for even one of my water filled spores to do any good.

The wind detecting mushroom I was attempting to grow from the detached stem would help determining at least one factor but I don’t know…

I was losing hope fast.

My poor buttons was doomed.