Before it got dark Caruso set himself up a place to sleep. Mang offered one of the prisoner cells but Caruso politely declined. Instead, he walled himself a small room that tacked on to the study room. He got Mang to take down one of the study room walls so he could replace it with his own and then could come and go as he pleased. For bedding, Mang pointed him towards a shroomtree she had recently chopped down. It had multiple pink caps and its stalk was large and squishy. Caruso cut himself a big thick slice of the stalk which he then padded his floor with. For a roof he dragged over one of the shroomtree caps, and after a couple of attempts using his walling, managed to get the thing to rest atop his four walls. It was surprisingly cozy inside.
Caruso spent the next day sat at the study room desk reading through the journals. He did nothing but read. By day’s end he’d barely made a dent in the towering stack. The next day he did the same, and the day after that he kept reading, page after page after page. Thousands upon thousands of experiments, all ending similarly to what Caruso had witnessed on the first day. Every possible combination of man and animal had been tried, multiple times. He’d hoped there would be some some of pattern in the experiments, something that indicated why some worked, and why most failed. This was not the case.
He focused on the tiny sample of successful experiments, of which there only three. He memorised everything about them. But nothing stood out. All the exhaustive details seemed meaningless. All the intricate sketches, pointless. There was no pattern and even less hope. But Caruso never let himself believe it was impossible.
Mang was of little help, and rather annoying. When she wasn’t in the experiment room she would potter around, always mumbling to herself, asking Caruso inane questions like ‘Should Mang make a new boar pelt?’ ‘Should Mang go hunting?’ ‘What should Mang do now?’ He didn’t know how to deal with her.
Every morning she ran an experiment. They were always unsuccessful, but that didn’t bother her. Afterwards she would come in with sketches of her latest creation, displaying them like a proud cat dropping a caught bird at its owner’s feet. Before each experiment she would always check first with Caruso, as if she needed his permission. At first he simply agreed with her choices. He assumed she knew what she was doing, but he got the impression she was just choosing experiments at random or for fun. She had no theories or hypotheses, no insights or ideas. If she was the Forester’s most experienced researcher, it was no wonder they hadn’t come close to figuring anything out. Caruso wasn’t sure what to do other than assigning her useless experiments, at the very least it kept her busy and gave him space to think. He suspected Mang picked up on this and with time she became less and less energetic and enthusiastic about everything. But Caruso had more important things to worry about.
He turned back to the journals. He was sure there was something, somewhere. There had to be. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he was determined to find it.
He kept reading.
While learning, Caruso would often jot down theories: maybe the subjects had to be in perfect health; maybe it only worked if both subjects were from this world, or if neither were, or if only one was; maybe they had to be the same age, or have the same diet; maybe it was something to do with the slimekey. But as he made his way through the journals, one by one every theory became disproved, multiple times. Caruso was running out of places to look.
He kept reading.
He learned that when two subjects ingested the animashroom, the order was very important: the first to eat it became the anchor, the second, the passenger. As soon as the passenger ingested the animashroom, they would disappear and instantly merge with the anchor—who stayed in the same place. The anchor always kept their brain, their mind, their shape—but picked up a few enhancements from the passenger. In Daniel’s case, he was the anchor—his pet frog, the passenger. He gained the frog’s mucus covered skin, heavily muscled legs, an extra joint beyond his ankles, and the frog’s vocal sac. Daniel kept his facial features and personality, although acquired a new appetite for insects, and an irrational fear of birds. Exactly how much of the passenger’s mind remained was unknown.
He learned that Mang was a skilled butcher but a frightfully bad cook. Many times he was tempted to run back to the compound just to sneak in through the back of Miranda’s kitchen. Some nights Caruso did the cooking—he wished he had taken more lessons from Miranda.
And he learned that the blue stem of the animashroom could be used to reverse a merging, but only if it came from the same animashroom, and only if it was eaten shortly after merging. Mang didn’t have much use for this. She kept the more successful animas for study, and the less successful ones died immediately. But Mang insisted on showing Caruso how it worked. He watched her force feed a freshly merged anima—a horrific prisoner/bird merging—with the animastem. The anima instantly unmerged. The bird flapped out of the cell while the prisoner was secured back inside. The prisoner looked terrified. Caruso felt sorry for him but reminded himself he was probably a murderer or a rapist.
After four days Caruso had read exactly half of the journals. He saved time by skimming over all the internal sketches, he knew nothing about anatomy, and only needed to look at the external renderings and Mang’s notes to judge how successful a merging was. He kept a growing list of plausible theories, but many of them were unlikely to be disproved from the journal notes alone. Early in the morning he was sitting at his desk, pondering his theories when the dividing wall lowered. Mang walked in bleary eyed and stretching. Caruso strongly suspected she slept in a boar pen if not one of the prisoner cells. He wasn’t sure how many prisoner cells were unoccupied—he didn’t want to know.
She walked up to Caruso’s desk, she was about the same height as Caruso when he sat down. Caruso noticed one of the mummified rats had come loose from the ceiling and was tangled in the thick mat of her dragging hair. ‘Can Mang do an experiment?’
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
‘Mang, you don’t have to ask me. You are free to run your own experiments…’
Mang looked troubled. ‘What experiment should Mang do?’
‘Before you do any experiments, I have some theories that I want to run past you.’
‘Yes! The brain figured it out!’
‘We’ll see about that. I have three main ideas. Tell me what you think. The first and most obvious one is that the subjects must share a certain bond—friendship, love, that sort of thing.’
Mang was quick to answer. ‘But Daniel merged with a frog. Frogs don’t bond with humans. Mang knows animals.’
Caruso was dubious. Mang knew her animals inside and out, but she didn’t seem the type to keep pets. ‘Are you sure? I heard he spent a lot of time with frogs.’
‘Mang knows animals. What about the experiment thirty years ago with the man and his little white dog? They had a bond. But when they merged, the spine branched and the dog’s femur punctured through the man’s abdomen.’
‘The prisoner had a dog?’
‘He was a civilian, followed his dog into Zone 3. They were found together. Mang confirms they had a bond.’
That certainly disrupted his theory. Mang continued to list several more examples of bonded subjects that ended in failure. She had an astonishing memory, recalling experiments from over three hundred years ago with uncanny detail.
‘But perhaps,’ Mang said. ‘We can get a mother and her baby. They have a strong bond. Can Mang try it?’
‘That’s okay. I think you’ve disproved that theory already.’ Caruso decided to move on to the next one before Mang got fixated on that idea. ‘There’s nothing in your notes about the quality of the animashroom. What if it has to be a perfect specimen or of a very specific ripeness or picked from a certain location?’
‘Mang has used old shrooms, new shrooms, good quality and bad, and has picked them from everywhere in Zone 4. There would be more successes if it was that simple.’
‘That’s a fair point,’ Caruso conceded. That specific theory had appealed to him, but he crossed it off the list. ‘Okay then, my third idea is about intention.’
‘Whose intention?’
‘What if it only works if the subjects want it to work?’
‘I don’t think subjects want it to fail, usually they dislike that immensely.’
‘Okay, but all your experiments are on unwilling subjects. When Daniel merged willingly, he succeeded. There must be something to that.’
‘There was a Forester named Kim who willingly bonded to a cat, their spines didn’t combine properly and they died.’
‘Maybe the animal has to be willing too.’
‘Animals don’t know what’s going on.’
‘…Are you sure? Because I noticed they always avoid the animashroom. They don’t touch them in the forest, and you have to trick them into eating it here. Maybe they know what it does.’
Mang shrugged, ‘It doesn’t matter. At the end of last world, two Foresters—Kieran and Teal—both willingly merged next to the Godshroom. It wasn’t successful.’
‘They died?’
‘Almost. Mang thinks their spines branched. But before dying they fell into the Godshroom, so both woke up in the next world no problem.’
‘They both woke up unmerged?’
‘Yes, next to the Godshroom is a popular place to run tests. No matter the result, the merged body is left behind, and the two souls travel separately, like normal. Mang also watched two pairs of Urchins do a similar experiment. One pair failed and fell into the Godshroom, the other was a success, but they didn’t enter the Godshroom for some reason.’
Caruso sighed. His three leading theories disproved so easily. ‘Are you sure you saw correctly? The two Urchins both willingly ate the animashroom, and the merging failed?’
‘Mang saw it clearly. And Mang never forgets. One woman ate half the shroom, then passed the remainder to the other woman. Neither were being forced. The merging failed. Mang guesses the spine separated and broke through the sternum.’
Caruso ignored the grisly details. He shook his head. He had more ideas, but they seemed a lot less likely. He ran through his list anyway: maybe only a set number of animas can exist at once, like slimekey holders; maybe it only works during a lightning strike, or a full moon, or some other planetary alignment; maybe the merge has to be in service of the Godshroom. Each one Mang refuted, recalling old experiments to offer as proof. By the end, Caruso was thoroughly defeated.
—
Caruso returned to the journals, he still had half of them to go, and only five days until Ferris would take him back to the compound. There was no choice but to keep reading and learning.
Serene showed up with another Forester Caruso didn’t recognise. They were on patrol, and asked Mang if she needed anything and if she’d seen any Urchins. Mang replied no to both, and invited them inside. They both adamantly refused and left in a hurry.
Mang was getting more annoying. Ever since he proposed his long list of theories to her, she hung around him for more, like a dog waiting for scraps under the kitchen table. He told her he was out of ideas and needed time to read. She just said ‘Mang can wait.’ So she stood there breathing loudly, looking over his shoulder, offering irrelevant details on whatever experiment the journals were open to.
One day, tired of Mang’s constant interruptions and distractions, Caruso took the remainder of the journals and walled himself away in his room. Through the walls he often heard Mang talking to herself as she ambled around the study, but she seemed to get the message and didn’t try and disturb him.
For three days he did little besides read and think. His mind swam with ideas, often he would wake and jot down theories in the middle of the night. He became more efficient at reading the experiments, knowing exactly what to look for and when to move on. His knowledge steadily grew. But as his knowledge grew, his list of theories steadily diminished until finally, when he was ninety percent of the way through the journals, he realised he had nothing, no theories, no ideas. It was futile to hope the remaining ten percent would have anything. He got the feeling he was searching in the wrong place, that the answer wasn’t going to be found within the minutiae of details.
As he continued through the last journals, he found his gaze landing more and more on Mang’s sketches. He knew there was no point trying to study all the intricate depictions of vivisections and autopsies. To Caruso they were little more than a jumbled mess of organs and bones. Learning in greater detail why a failed anima died wouldn’t help him discover why it had failed in the first place. But there was no place left to look.
So he forced himself to take in the sketches, tried in vain to wring some semblance of understanding out of them. But his lacking knowledge of anatomy was too much of a hurdle. He needed Mang’s help.
He lowered his wall into the study room—she wasn’t there, nor could he hear her muttering to herself in the experiment room. She wasn’t out in the clearing, and she didn’t answer when he called out to her. He felt a moment’s worry before remembering she usually hunts in the afternoons. Normally she would always ask before leaving, but then again Caruso had locked himself away and ignored her for the past few days. He felt a rush of guilt. He went outside to get some sunlight and fresh air and wait for her to return.