In Russia they were speaking the language of war and in the United States they were speaking the language of civil war. Tom Groff was looking at a world gone mad, a world in which people in their desperation were taking leave of their senses and supporting whomever was speaking through the loudest megaphone. Tom had been campaigning for months and was still at a loss for what he needed to do to break people free from the fever that had taken hold of them. He didn't judge them, it was perfectly understandable for people to be afraid and anxious when there were so many bizarre things happening around the world that nobody had a good explanation for, but somehow people needed to be made to see that Jim Balmer and others like him weren't offering any actual solutions, they were merely capitalizing on people's fears to advance their own ambitions which were entirely self-serving. Tom didn't have the answers himself but he did believe that his faith offered more of a pathway to understanding these strange phenomena than Jim Balmer's sermonizing did.

Tom was a member of The Church of the Golden Goose. He had discovered John Lafferty's published material years earlier and was convinced enough by the archaeological discoveries that underpinned John's theories to become a member of the church. Tom kept his faith a secret, it was too far outside of the mainstream; if it was made public that he was a member of the church it would mean the end of his political career and a life of social exclusion. As much as Tom wished to explain to everybody that it was possible that all of the freak events taking place all over the world were the product of the Guardians exerting their power he couldn't, all he could do was to continue campaigning and hope that his policy message broke through.

Tom had been branded as the far-left candidate in the Democratic field because of his campaign's focus on the environment as the most important issue that needed to be addressed. With the collapse of the country's agriculture industry being the main issue that voters were concerned about, Tom felt that the responsible thing to do as a candidate was to put forward an actual plan for how to deal with it despite how much support the public was showing for Jim Balmer's evangelizing. Tom's message to voters was that the crop infection was inevitable as scientists had been warning for decades that it was dangerous to continue to mistreat the land by depleting it with petroleum based fertilizers and to continue to compensate for the declining nutrients in the soil by increasing the degree to which crops were genetic modified. Tom's proposal for how to best respond to the agriculture crisis was to overhaul the agriculture industry in its entirety by switching from industrial agriculture to regenerative agriculture, a form of agriculture that involved grazing cattle and growing perennial food crops that pulled carbon out of the air and stored it in the ground, nourishing the soil. Tom's Democratic opponents criticized his plan for being too big, saying that it would scare away voters, while the right criticized him for being a pussy vegan environmentalist. Tom didn't care about the criticism that he was receiving, his plan would work, and the farmers and ranchers that had been wiped out by the infection that he had been speaking to believed so as well. Tom's problem was everybody else, the people whose Christian faith demanded they view the events taking place around the world as the divine wrath that Jim Balmer was telling them it was, rendering them immune to any kind of sensible ideas about what the best way to navigate these challenges was. The forest was a perfect example of this. Jim Balmer routinely referred to the forest as the work of witchcraft and vowed to sign an executive order on day one of presidency ordering the whole thing to be cut down, a pledge that all of his fellow Republican candidates had joined him in. Tom was doing his best to explain to people that the forest was a gift, doing the job of being the lungs of the earth that the Amazon rainforest used to do before it was lost to deforestation, as such it should be protected and federal land elsewhere should be opened up for farming and grazing, which, if done in accordance with the regenerative techniques that he was advocating for, wouldn't damage the land the way that agriculture had damaged the land that the forest had since taken over, but, as with everything else, people were more interested in Jim Balmer's appeals to their religious fears.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Tom toyed with the idea of getting in touch with John Lafferty and working with him to formulate a message that they could use to explain to the public the role of the Guardians in all of this but lately The Church of the Golden Goose had been publishing strange things on its website which led Tom to believe that John Lafferty had been gotten to by someone. To try and obtain some proof of his own Tom had paid a secret visit to the forest in the hopes of finding and snapping a picture of the Goat, but there was nothing in the forest, the Green Corps was gone and despite exploring the forest for hours Tom wasn't able to find any trace of the Goat. He'd ventured all the way to the centre of the forest to the oak tree that towered over the rest of the forest like Ygdrasil and found nothing but a few derelict structures there. Tom's deduction was that the Goat had been here but had since left, after which the Green Corps had all left. There were two possible explanations for this: the guardian had either been awakened or it had moved on to green a different part of the world, though there had been no reports of forests miraculously springing up overnight so the former was more likely, meaning the pilgrimage was underway. Tom believed that the Goose would prevail over the Raven like it had done in the majority of their meetings, he just had to make sure that he was still a contender by then, because if the Goose prevailed it would be a disaster for Jim Balmer, at least that was the feeling that he got from the blue dove perched on his shoulder.