That next morning Truffle was ready to leave and had them getting up and moving early. They had no sun to tell them it was early, but they could feel it in their bones and muscles as they ached."Why don"t we have the cart to ride in?" complained Mikey, rubbing his eyes as they left the town.
"It was destroyed and we"re not waiting for that woman to get it fixed," said Gia, hefting her backpack higher to tighten its straps. They were loaded down with water and food to get them the rest of the way through the forest.
She kept a close eye on Vonn, as he seemed to be doing so much better than she thought he should have. Was that salve the mushroom man had put on him magical? If so, she almost wished she had thought to take her parents to him. Her mom had finished the tea from Bob, and her legs were doing great, but it was still a lot of walking when they weren"t used to it. Tom was getting better about not tripping, and trusting Carla to lead him, but Gia still worried.
It was several hours before the mushrooms transitioned from the dangerous hairy ones, to shorter, more broad mushrooms. Up ahead, a huge purple capped mushroom man was making his way over the steppes that Truffle had mentioned the day before. Gia had hoped the mushroom steps would be flat, like flagstones, and they would just have to step carefully across them, but watching the huge guy make his way across carefully, she realized that wasn"t the case.
The thick purple stalks of the steppe mushrooms were good and st.u.r.dy, but their blue caps weren"t entirely flat. Some were leaning to the side, making their tops be at an angle, instead of even with the ground. The few that did line up well, had a slight rounding to their tops, almost as if they had grown thicker to handle the stress of being walked on.
"I don"t know how we"re going to get Tom across this," worried Carla as she looked it over.
"Don"t worry, I"ll help him," said Vonn, taking Tom"s arm.
"This looks like fun!" cried Mikey, rushing onto the mushrooms, before the mushroom guy could finish crossing.
As the oversized mushroom gave out a cry of panic and surprise, Truffle cried out a warning, and they watched horrified as one of the mushrooms the guy was standing on collapsed.
Cries of alarm rang out as the deep snapping sound of the stalk echoed from the valley below them. The mushroom man waved his arms and threw himself forward, landing mostly on the solid ground, but the mushroom he had been standing on leaned to the side. The blue in its cap fading to a dark brown as they watched.
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Mikey, who was already half-way across the flat mushroom caps, turned to see what was going on, and slipped. Gia cried out in horror as he slid off the edge of the mushroom and out of sight. Rushing over the soft steppes, she slid to a stop on the mushroom he had disappeared from, and saw him hanging from a mushroom just below the lip of the one she was on. His arms were too short to reach back up, and the drop to the ground stretched dozens of feet below him.
"Gia! Help me!" he called, seeing her peeking down at him.
"Oh, Mikey! Why did you rush ahead like that!" she growled, reaching an arm down to grab his hand.
"It looked like fun! I didn"t mean to cause any trouble!" he moaned as she pulled him back up onto the mushroom.
"It"s going to take a while for that steppe mushroom to grow up into the missing place," said Truffle, looking at the dead section.
"I"m just glad I made it across," said the mushroom man in a deep gravelly voice. "It will be far more interesting to cross now."
"Are you alright, Mikey?" called Carla, stepping across the mushroom steppes as if she were afraid they would attack her or break under her weight.
Vonn followed behind her, moving carefully with Tom on his back. Gia held Mikey"s hand as she finished crossing, and then turned to watch as her parents came across with Vonn. The intense concentration on Vonn"s face made her wonder how painful it was to carry her father, but Tom seemed to be having a grand time.
"I wish I could see, to know what it was we are walking on! The ground feels soft and squishy from up here, but at least it"s more comfortable than the cart!"
"Oh, you!" grumbled Carla, too intent on where to place her feet to glance up at him properly.
"What are these small green mushrooms? They have glowing spikes sticking out of their caps!" laughed Mikey, already moving on to the next section of their journey.
Gia sighed and said, "Mikey, please stay close and don"t touch anything! We"ll get going again, as soon as everyone is across!"
"Oh, Gia! I"m so tired of just walking! I want to go and play!" he whined, stomping his foot and crossing his arms.
"Mikey, you can"t just go running off. Once we"re out of the mushroom forest, maybe we can pause and rest some with the dwarves," said Carla, reaching the ground with a look of relief.
"Do you think there will be other kids I can play with?" he asked, perking up.
"Maybe," said Tom as he slid off Vonn"s back. "But we don"t know what dwarven children do for fun. We"ll just have to wait and see when we get there."
"The dwarves may not want us to stay, since we"re human," said Gia, worried, as they all gathered and prepared to continue.
"You can see the edge of the purple-blue section over there," said Truffle as they started walking again. He was pointing to their right, at a section of mushrooms that were poking up higher than the surrounding mushrooms. "We"ll avoid that section, because it"s already started sporing."
"What"s sporing?" asked Mikey, kicking the ground as they walked. "You keep using that word."
"Well," said Truffle, scrunching his brow adorably, "It"s a lot of different things, I guess. When we"re talking about the big mushrooms, it"s when they release their funglings, which are baby mushrooms. If they land on the ground, they"ll grow into big mushrooms, but if they touch someone who"s not a mushroom person like me, they"ll be spored, which means they"ll become like Fungee. A person with mushroom traits and growths. I"ve heard it"s really painful, so I"m glad I was born a mushroom person."
"You were born?" asked Carla, who then shook her head, "I mean, you didn"t grow from a spore, or a fungling?"
"Oh, no!" he chuckled. "My ma had me. It only took me a year and half to sprout."
As they all glanced at each other, trying to decide what they were going to say to that, there was a crash up ahead of them, near a fork in the road. The fork was where they would turn right, if they were going to the part of the forest they had been told to avoid. A huge multilegged creature, with blue-purple spikes and mushroom caps growing all over it crashed out of the forest ahead, and paused in the middle of the road.
"Uh, oh!" whispered Truffle, holding out his hand. "It"s a wildling! They can be really dangerous!"
"I can imagine with all those spikes!" cried Carla in a hushed whisper, grabbing Tom"s arm tightly.
"Just don"t let go of my arm, dear," Tom said, patting her softly. "If you run, I want to know that I should run, too."
"What do we do?" asked Gia. "It"s blocking our path!"
"Are we going to have to go through the purple forest after all?" asked Vonn softly.
"We may have to. If we go near that thing, it could spike any of us," said Truffle, glancing towards the forest to their right.
"Why would it do that?" asked Mikey.
"Anything it can spike, will feed it as a kind of fertilizer," said Truffle.
"I am not going anywhere near that thing," said Carla with a shake of her head.
"If we do go through the purple forest, what do we need to keep an eye out for?" asked Vonn.
"The funglings will be floating through the air. If any of them touch you, then they will root to you immediately. But it would be faster to go that route. The Dwarven Gate is just on the other side. Do you all want to try it?"
"Do we have any other choice?" asked Gia. "That wildling, thing, doesn"t seem like anything we want to mess with."
"It"s really not. I"ll have to let the Guardshrooms know that it"s near the path. They normally keep a pretty good eye out for them, but this one must be new. That can happen if a lot of funglings all attach to the same creature."
"Let"s go, before it notices us," said Gia. "Everyone keep a close eye out for those fungling things, and dad, I think you should be in the middle, so we can keep an eye out for you."
"I"m so glad someone remembered that I was blind," he laughed softly, as they moved forward, turning to go towards the purple-blue forest.