CHAPTER 1 · PART II
Months 1–4 — Tools and Towers
My hands are turning into something between leather and scar tissue. My back makes new noises every morning. But as Month Two begins, I can finally say it:
C.C. Labs is not just a hole in a mushroom anymore.
The left titan now holds three distinct levels: living quarters at the base, a cramped workroom above that, and a half‑finished loft where I dream of putting an observation deck. The right mushroom, its twin, has gone from “distant aspiration” to “active construction site.”
With stone tools alone, this would have taken years. With what I discovered in the curtain‑leaf grove, it took weeks.
The discovery was an accident, like most of my better ideas.
I was foraging for more vines when one of the tall, slender trees decided to slap me in the face with its hanging foliage. I retaliated the only way a rational, sleep‑deprived scientist could:
“Watch where you flap, you overgrown salad.”
The leaves rippled… and then stiffened with a sound like a dozen glass blades being unsheathed at once.
The drooping green ribbons transformed into rigid, shining plates. Their glow tightened from a soft shimmer to a sharp, metallic sheen. One leaf detached and clattered to the ground at my feet.
I picked it up slowly.
It was heavier now. Solid. No longer a flimsy plant surface, but something closer to a grown blade—smooth, cool, humming faintly under my fingers.
I swung it experimentally at the nearest trunk.
It bit into the bark with almost insulting ease.
My laughter probably scared half the ecosystem.
Further agitation—ruder insults, louder tone—produced even stronger transformations. The harsher my words, the more rigid and resonant the leaves became. Gentle apologies reversed the effect, softening them back into harmless foliage over the course of several minutes.
Somewhere in this planet’s evolutionary history, sound‑triggered hardening clearly made sense. I don’t yet know why. I do know that I now have access to an effectively renewable supply of bio‑metal blades activated by verbal abuse.
For once, my personality is an asset.
With insult‑hardened leaves lashed to wooden handles, my arsenal jumped from “frustrated caveman” to “budget supervillain.”
- Mushroom flesh that had resisted hours of stone hacking now parted in long, clean strips.
- Dense interior fibers sliced smoothly instead of shredding.
- Vines, once a chore to cut, now snapped with a flick of the wrist.
I learned quickly that the leaves had moods—or at least, response curves.
- Mild insult: edges firm, good for scraping and shaving.
- Sharply worded critique of their structural integrity: edges sharpen, ideal for cutting.
- Full‑throated rant about their shameful lack of support and their disappointing photosynthetic performance: total phase‑shift into something near metal, edges dangerously keen, entire tree vibrating in shared offense.
I nearly decapitated myself the first time I swung one at full rigidity and misjudged the weight. I have adjusted my technique. Mostly.
By the end of Month One, the interior of the right mushroom looked less like raw, living tissue and more like the skeleton of a building. I began inserting insult‑hardened ribs as I carved—arched beams driven into the walls while they were still soft, then shouted into rigidity.
The mushroom groaned. I apologized, which probably confused it, then kept going.
Inside that new structure, I designated zones:
- Lower level: future sample intake and dissection area.
- Mid‑level: instrumentation and observation. (Fine, that means “table with things on it” for now.)
- Upper level: theoretical space for tanks and containment one day.
My tools spread to match my ambition:
- Leaf‑blades shaped into saws by mounting them along curved branches.
- Shorter blades set into handles to make chisels.
- Bark peeled and twisted into rope, then hardened with sharp language to add tensile strength.
- Fungal slabs dried and used as floor panels and shelving.
It is all wild improvisation and questionable engineering. If any safety inspector from the Council could see it, they’d faint. That thought keeps me going.
Month Two also brought refinement to my water and air systems.
The interior of a carved‑out mushroom tends toward “sweaty cave” as a default climate. Left alone, it would grow internal fungus on my internal fungus, which is a sentence I refuse to ever write again.
So I mounted rows of Cryosap fruits along the inner walls, each wired via thin moss strands that carry a controlled trickle of charge. At low current, the fruits weep cold water. At slightly higher current, they form beads of frost.
The chilled droplets collect in channels carved into the mushroom walls—simple grooves that guide them down into basins on the floor. From there, I drink some, store some, and let the rest evaporate slowly, bringing down the internal temperature by a few degrees.
The result is a kind of bio‑climate system: fungus‑house cooled by electrosweating fruit hooked to nervous moss. It is absurd and, infuriatingly, it works.
The last major structural feat of these months was the bridge.
Walking back and forth between two enormous organic towers on a narrow strip of mossy ground full of questionable holes and occasionally hostile small animals is not my idea of efficient lab design. So, obviously, I decided to string a walkway between the twins high in the air using improvised rope and offended plants as anchor points.
The early prototypes were… unconvincing. A single strip of bark does not become a rope just because you yell at it.
But if you strip the bark into narrow strands, braid them together, then memorize exactly the string of insults that triggers maximal rigidity once they’re tensioned between two points, you can get something remarkably like a cable.
I anchored four such ropes between the two stems, driving insult‑hardened hooks into each mushroom’s outer flesh. Then I laid fungal planks across them, lashed everything together, and tested it by crawling over on my stomach while whimpering quietly.
It held.
Standing upright on that first completed version of the C.C. Labs Bridge, I could see the valley from a new angle. Glowing moss patterns traced river‑like veins between fungal forests. Trees with shimmering leaves swayed and shivered. And, far beyond the immediate area, I could just make out the broken silhouettes of other titan mushrooms in the distance.
It was beautiful. Terrifying. Full of opportunity.
I felt like the world’s only intern in a lab the size of a continent.
Of course, the planet was not content to let me enjoy the view for long.
Halfway back across the bridge one evening, a sound rolled through the air like the sky clearing its throat.
The boards under my feet vibrated. The ropes creaked. The mushroom stems shuddered.
Far below, the moss lit up in a spreading wave as something enormous disturbed it.
I froze, clinging to the ropes, and looked out toward the dark line of the deeper fungal forest.
There—between the glowing trunks—I saw it again. A colossal silhouette, moving with slow, terrible confidence. Not lumbering blindly, but purposeful. Heavy limb after heavy limb planted with enough force that even at this distance I could feel it through my makeshift architecture.
Lightning flickered along its outline as it brushed against charged growth. The air trembled with each step.
“Hello, problem,” I whispered.
It never turned toward me. Never seemed aware of my presence. It simply moved along a path that the world seemed to make way for, then disappeared behind the hills.
But now I knew for certain: whatever rules govern this place, there is at least one apex organism nearby. Something big enough to shape the landscape just by walking through it.
I am not ready for that. Not yet.
To interact with something like that—to harvest samples from it, let alone challenge it—I will need more than sharp leaves and creative swearing. I will need instruments that can handle their biology, systems that can harness their energy, containment strong enough to hold their components.
I will need a lab worthy of a god‑killer.
For now, I restrain myself to the smaller things.
Electric beetles that kick up sparks when startled. Soft‑bodied burrowers whose blood clots into rubber when exposed to air. Feather‑scaled lizards that change color when near certain fungi.
I keep them in small cages in the lower lab, behind bars of hardened bark and leaf beams. I observe, I poke, I get bitten, I take notes.
Early results:
- The beetles’ internal organs appear to store charge in layered structures, not unlike capacitors.
- The burrowers’ strange blood could be useful as a sealant or flexible casting medium.
- The lizards’ color shifts seem correlated with trace chemicals emitted by particular mushroom caps.
Individually, these are curiosities. Together, they are hints—the first threads in a much larger pattern.
This world runs on bio‑electricity, phase‑shifting materials, and biochemistry that laughs politely at what I used to call “fundamental” back home.
Somewhere in that mess is the key to powering my eventual revenge: a Personal Portal Gun strong enough to tear a hole back to the Council’s front door.
But I cannot jump straight to weaponry.
First, I must understand.
So I carve. I reinforce. I wire. I harvest. I prod. I fill C.C. Labs with samples and sketches and half‑finished instruments. I listen for the giant steps in the distance and imagine, over and over, what kind of skeleton could make the whole valley quake.
One day, I will go looking for it on purpose.
For now, I build the tools I’ll need when I do.
End of Chapter 1 – Part II.