A fungus is any member of the group of eukaryotic organisms that includes microorganisms such as yeasts and molds, as well as the more familiar mushrooms. These organisms are classified as one of the traditional eukaryotic kingdoms, along with Animalia, Plantae, and either Protista[7] or Protozoa and Chromista.[8]

A characteristic that places fungi in a different kingdom from plants, bacteria, and some protists is chitin in their cell walls. Fungi, like animals, are heterotrophs; they acquire their food by absorbing dissolved molecules, typically by secreting digestive enzymes into their environment. Fungi do not photosynthesize. Growth is their means of mobility, except for spores (a few of which are flagellated), which may travel through the air or water. Fungi are the principal decomposers in ecological systems. These and other differences place fungi in a single group of related organisms, named the Eumycota (true fungi or Eumycetes), that share a common ancestor (i.e. they form a monophyletic group), an interpretation that is also strongly supported by molecular phylogenetics. This fungal group is distinct from the structurally similar myxomycetes (slime molds) and oomycetes (water molds). The discipline of biology devoted to the study of fungi is known as mycology (from the Greek μύκης mykes, mushroom). In the past, mycology was regarded as a branch of botany, although it is now known that fungi are genetically more closely related to animals than to plants.

-Excerpt from a Wikipedia article detailing an overarching view of Fungi, accessed by an unknown IP address

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As I travel, having left the more abandoned parts of this place, I find more and more of those crystal outcroppings, and more and more dust-spore-things interacting with them. Some of the larger ones have up to a half-dozen of the things bumping against them, breaking them apart over and into a dust they collect on themselves over and over.

It's like being inside of the veins of some organism, taking resources from one point to another. Or maybe an old-school resource game, mining for supplies, all refracted through an idea of something vaguely fungal.

It's also beautiful.

I can't help it- I want to reach out and touch one.

Maybe it's the boredom, having spent so very long walking through an almost featureless series of fucked up hallways. Maybe it's my own rapidly dwindling self-preservation instincts (see, I have some self awareness, I know I'm fucked up). Maybe it's just the fact that I'm curious, and don't care enough to let fear override that curiosity.

I reach forward and touch one of the spore-clumps.

As it rolls away from me, bumped aside by the ever-so-slight contact, I see the tip of my finger drift away.

I blink.

Then I get behind the glass, waiting for the pain to arrive, waiting to stop my system from screaming and spasming.

…

I keep waiting.

It doesn't hurt.

I watch the little spore-clump drift away, a very small droplet of blood leaking from my fingertip along with it, and hum to myself. The stump where it was removed is both ragged and smooth, like it was cut along the whorls of my fingerprint but done so with an impossibly sharp blade, so sharp that even now it's still taking a second for the blood to ooze out of the wound.

Isn't what something.

Even seeing it, it still doesn't hurt.

An anesthetic on the spores? A predatory evolution? Maybe. It… it doesn't feel numb, though. And…

Hmm.

If I focus, I think I can feel the point where my brain stops imagining sensation and starts experiencing it. I think I can still feel the fuzziness of that little puff-ball as it floats away. I think I can feel the distance between the different parts of me increasing, the fingertip broken apart further and further by the spores, until all that's left is individual cells floating in a soup that was once solid, all of them somehow still a part of me and not.

Divided yet whole. Separate but intimate.

It doesn't hurt.

Maybe it can't hurt.

No hitpoints here. None of the mechanics of health or the stats of a "living" thing.

Just NUTRIMENTUM and AQUA. Food and water.

What more can something so simple care about?

What is pain, but a complicated system's response to damage?

What is a drifting spore, but one of the most uncomplicated complicated things there is?

What is change without pain?

Not damage.

I don't know what happens if I die here.

I find that I don't care.

I laugh, the exhale pushing some of the spores away- and then drawing them back again. Towards the origin of the breeze and the spittle and the water that touches their surface, landing amidst flecks of glowing crystal and alien material.

I don't care. Isn't that funny? I don't. Care. At all.

I feel empty inside. Like I haven't in a while. Like I'm not sure where I am anymore. Disassociation, but not of the kind I've so carefully cultivated. If I were behind the glass, I would care. That's what being behind the glass is all about. Taking the messy little animal that I am out of the equation so I can focus, so I can make the decisions that I need to make with the facts and instincts I can rely on. If I were behind the glass right now, I would care very much. I would find the best way to analyze this, figure out which part of myself I should sacrifice for it, track the sensations, analyze the data.

But I don't care.

Fuck.

Why don't I care?

What's changed between now and an hour ago? Boredom? Ennui? The long-form impact of the ongoing traumas I've had, going from mutilation to death to mutilation?

I've suffered more in the last few weeks than the human animal is designed to by a pretty wide margin. Maybe that's having an effect.

Maybe I'm just tired.

You know, the funny thing is, there's probably real answers to all this bullshit somewhere. If I guess just right, I can probably figure out exactly what this videogame metaphor is covering up, what it's simulating, what the mechanics are. I don't think I have the data to actually figure it out, I don't know how I'd go about finding it, all I have are instincts and dream-logic that's keeping me afloat, but there should be answers to all this somewhere.

Normally I'd be curious.

Right now I don't particularly care.

I have my objectives still. Let's just drop all the other shit.

I start walking forward.

The spores gravitate in towards me, ignoring the flickering torch in my hand almost entirely. Seeing as it's fungus-fire that's all pixelated, emitting no smoke, barely any heat, I don't blame them- it's hardly all that enticing. In body temp alone I'm sure I surpass whatever they've got going on here.

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They bump into me, and peel away, like cute little bumblebees, all confused.

They take my pieces, and drift off down the hallway.

Most of the pieces are small enough that they don't bother me, barely tickling as they are pulled further and further apart. Some of them are larger, spores bumping into the one contacting me and pushing it in deeper before they can bounce away. I see part of my stomach lining drift away, dully intrigued by what it actually looks like outside of a medical diagram, and then they swarm into the breach and I get to see what my lower intestine looks like too.

A bucking animal part of me wants to vomit. Wants to panic. The space behind the glass beckons, promising me the mindset I need to analyze this, make deductions, to retreat from even the nothingness I'm feeling into something close-enough to true objectivity for it to almost count.

Instead I just keep walking, as bits and pieces of me float away all around.

The deeper I go, the less and less of those crystal outcroppings pop up. Wherever I was in relation to the wider tunnel system, it seems that that area was just a node, rather than growing richer the "deeper" in I go. They're collecting resources to bring back someplace, not cultivating more of the glowing material, and as the furthest spores begin to outpace me, I let the sensations of severed flesh echo back to me.

The spores deeper in take something bob and float and drift, but always with purpose to their actions. They move away from me, in towards where the lights get a little brighter, where the air feels a little warmer.

I walk for long enough that when I look down, I notice my shin bone is missing. Not partially chewed away, not half-carved, just… missing. A whole chunk of my leg, gone.

My foot is still there. My knee is still there. When I step, the empty space still holds my weight.

It is not the only thing gone in a cloud of drifting crimson spores.

There's no pain. Just a distant sensation of being tugged at, lightly enough to tickle, and then a sense of distance as I am pulled further and further away, bit by bit.

Down tunnel after tunnel, over and over and over. Some of them are better lit than the one I came down, and have even more of the torso-sized cotton-balls drifting about through denser clusters. Others are barren, the lights low and flickering, quiet and strange.

I feel my heart beating insistently as crimson flows through my body, expressing a sense of unease and comfort at once. The BLOODLING is here, with me still, even as we are pulled apart. The Glove is here, with me still, even as I am pulled apart. The parts bound to Me.

That's a funny thought. Not to my body, not to my "equipment". They're in my sheet, further down than even my organs and the mechanics of being "alive". They're bound to Me. A part of Me.

That feels right.

When you live in a mind like mine, there are very few things that feel right. I decide to hold that feeling, and keep walking.

I feel my heart keep beating even as my ribcage drifts away from me on a dozen little clouds. I feel my lungs breathing even as little pieces of them reflect pink and crimson as they float apart.

There are rooms in these hallways. Places where the spores drift to that are not towards the main center of this place, little chambers made for the accumulation of resources. There are structures there, there are creations there that I do not understand, which look like pixelated chests and strange bubbling cauldrons. One of the spores takes part of my eye, and I let my attention drift, batting away the vertigo that comes from having my vision split in so many directions at once, and then they look altogether different. Fuzzier and covered in strange spires and growths and coral-like things, all clumped together and shivering and breathing out new clouds that accumulate dust into more and more moving clouds of spores.

I make a note of them, scratching it into the glass for me to look at later.

I keep walking.

I keep walking until I can no longer tell where my body begins and ends. I keep walking as they take my hips and my spine and my ribcage and my joints.

I am surrounded by a sea of crimson clouds, heralded on a floating red carpet made up entirely of myself and that which is bound to me.

The Glove remains, wholly intact.

The Bloodling remains, in almost as many pieces as I am, cradling that which it touches, reassuring me and reminding me I am not alone, even if I can't feel that right now.

The tunnels end as they began, in grey-rock bricks that are not bricks or rock or anything but Grey, and I look up out of eyes that swim in disconnected droplets far ahead of me.

The chamber I am in stretches high, and is even less artificial-looking than the rest I came in through. Even without GLIMPSE BEYOND, even without my altered vision, I can tell the difference, the seams where brickwork falls apart and turns to something like a cave wall. I see slime and oils and stuff that looks like it is crawling on itself but is still but is moving, shimmering and rippling like water like twitching muscle fibers of orange and beige and purplish and red and so many colors that it looks like a rainbow all its own.

There is a thing standing there. A tall, billowing thing, which stretches high above me, which is everything and nothing in this place, whose veins become stone become brick and whose breath exhales and is a thousand thousand clouds of life that is not alive that is not machine that is not flesh and that is all of those things all at once just one step to the side.

My eyes are drifting away, and out of the bits of cornea that still transmit despite falling upwards like rain, I see a roiling mass of rippling tissue and growth and hunger.

I am so small here.

I am so small everywhere.

This has been here so long that it is this place, or this place is it. It has sat here a million million years or maybe a bare blink and either way it is so much larger than me that even spread apart, even pulled open and painted onto the world I am like a speck of paint against a skyscraper that billows and bellows and exhales, all without ever speaking, all without making any sound but the faint hiss of spores.

It's beautiful.

One some level, it is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. Dug deep into layer after layer after layer, past the real world, past MEAT, this thing sits here and does not see me and sees everything about me, because I am pulled apart, but I am whole because that is what being pulled apart means for this thing, it means nothing.

I feel my heart beating even as the remnants of my skeleton walk, free of organ tissue. I feel my spine bending and my body shifting even as gaping holes make up more of my framework than physical structure. It is a different system than the one I know, than the one I am, and all that I have to hold on to is the fact that I still exist.

I can't think about this. I can't feel about this. If I did, I would break. I would go mad.

I hide in the cracks that make up my Me and care about nothing at all.

Instead I just look up at it.

I stare and experience and feel, even as I see the glow of my character sheet dimming, as the symbols beneath NUTRIMENTUM and AQUA begin to tick down.

I'll make it out of this. And if I don't…

I don't care.

The Bloodling stirs. Individual cells clump together, trying to halt the flow of the clouds that have divided me, holding me in a cumulonimbus of myself, but it's temporary. The Bloodling is small, and it still reminds me of something young, or weak, like an infant. It cares about me and is me and a distant part of me aches for how it tries to hold me together against my wishes, but the whole of me does not care.

Only when the cloud fails to break immediately, held together by a valiant little drop of crimson, does the towering spore-maker "look" at me.

There are no eyes. There is no mind. This thing is not alive in any sense I can recognize, and yet it can't be anything else.

The clouds of spores shift. They drift apart from me, and the Bloodling frays, but holds on, holds on, keeping every ounce of me that it can reach together and apart.

I stare up at the first god I've met in person, and wonder what I'm doing here. Why I kept going deeper. Why I'm still alive.

It has no answers. Instead, it begins to grow.

Tendrils of mycelial ripples extend, connecting to the stone and to the brickwork like mineral veins and then like mortar between the bricks, expanding out. Patterns that were always there but didn't exist before this moment roil as they are remade and remembered, a feeling like time stuttering hitting me and making me want to vomit- but all that I could vomit is already drifting around me and a part of me. The Spreader of Spores inhales, a process that is not about intaking air but about closing itself and redirecting itself- and then it breathes out, a process that is not about air but is a flow of that same glow that has been harvested by its sub-selves out into a network that is in and of itself the very same life form.

It passes through me, and for a moment, I am two-dimensional, flat as a picture, and the spreading veins travel through everything.

And then they pass over and above me, and I know that I am not two-dimensional after all, and I feel nothing.

It passes over me like a wave and through the spores that make up the crimson cloud that is me- but it does not touch my parts except as a tickle and a thought that isn't mine, but which I do not recognize.

It speaks to me, and I am too human to understand it. Even now.

Another pulse. A third. It tries, over and over, bathing me in the attention of something I can't comprehend or conceptualize, and every time, I feel it enter me and pass through me and leave only the barest hints of itself. It is alive and not and I am only alive, and I am only human in spite of all I ache for, and it cannot touch me.

And the Bloodling is fraying.

And I can't find it in myself to care.

I'll come back.

I believe it because it's the only way to stop the parts of me that scream and gibber and hope and cry from being the whole of me, and I cannot stand that. In that alone, I care.

The first few pieces of me begin to drift. The edges of the cloud that is me, of the separated wholeness that still clings to itself that I am, begins to fall apart and drift inwards towards the mycelial god that towers here above all things.

And then, a sharpness. For the first time since I arrived, since I vomited up the remains of the last interface, pain.

And a thought, injected through the sharpness and into my head.

H3ll0 Fr13nd!!!!

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