ORIGIN

First things first, Giggle thought to herself, standing beside her bone pit.

She'd decided to grow whatever fungus she could, to learn what each variety did--and then to deeply imbed various types into the bone pit and nearby den that she called home.

Giggle was not a fighter--not because of her hyena heritage (for hyenas could be formidable fighters) but simply because she felt that once a situation had fallen to fighting, one had already lost. Well, that and she found fighting stressful. Frightening, even, assuming it was a losing fight--and the three-headed pup that had gone for her had been a formidable challenge.

No, she preferred to stay back, to use her cunning to win what she wanted. And after the near-catastrophe that Kerberos had caused, she wanted to ensure that she wouldn't be attacked in her own "home" again.

"Right," she muttered to herself, looking around. Then she continued her thoughts in silence.

I have to do the bone pit. Then the boulder, up above. I need to do the den and the watering pools--and I may as well trap the rat runs, too, if I have the energy left at the end.

She sighed through her nose. All in all this would be a daunting process, but now was as good a time as any to get started.

Right, I need to start by figuring out what those mushrooms were.

She turned, picking her way back down at a trot to her den, and then a bit beyond. There, piled up in an oddly neat fashion, and held in place by being half-sunk into a mound of mud, were a good number of bones. They weren't picked clean, though; no, many were rotting, with flesh still clinging to them.

In other places there were bits of rotting wood sticking up.

And through it all--some clustered in the mud, some ranging over the wood, some sprouting from the rotted flesh--were various types of fungus.

This was Giggle's other magic, her non-fortunetelling-magic, or so she assumed; her magic of rot and filth and decay. On the one hand it was the magic of life: the ability to cause something to grow and to flourish. On the other it was death itself, for fungus fed upon the dead. She had thought more than once about this duality, and she wholeheartedly embraced it. Balance between all things was good.

Looking between the various mushrooms, molds and other fungi, she first picked out a spread of orange stalks with thin, pointed, long caps. Raising one paw to place it very delicately beside them, and closing her eyes, she focused--and tried to get a sense of what they were, how they grew, and what they did.

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Roll the bones.

Hmm.

This was hard. She herself had gathered these, brought them back here, and grown them. Still, though, she had never learned--or not yet, anyway--how to simply sense nearby fungal growth. She had to project herself directly into mushrooms that she already knew were there, and even then, it was a risky prospect.

These, she could sense, were feeding from the dead flesh beneath them. They would probably rot something away, or so she guessed. So the bone pit was no good--chances are someone might threaten her from down there, but she herself would be up on her boulder, if fighting broke out.

She'd put them at the boulder, then, and if someone attacked her there, she'd grow the orange mushrooms in a vicious wake over their bodies, forcing them to feed from their flesh.

She grinned.

First, though, she had to get them there.

Giggle turned, and moved off. This would take preparation--and anyway, while she got things ready, she could rest from her last use of magic. Using it too much all at once, she knew, could tire her out quickly.

So instead, she went to her den--a flat area of dirt, honeycombed between several small pools of water--and lifted up a bone. This still hung with clinging orange flesh, stringy and rancid, and she carried this up to lay alongside her boulder. It took her a few minutes, round-trip, and then she did it again, and again, until several bones lay side-by-side--coated in old meat--beside (and touching) her boulder. Giggle nosed them into place and then stood back, critically eyeing her work.

Hmm. That'll do. I'll need to bring more meat up here regularly, but it will keep them growing.

Satisfied, she trotted back to the mushrooms, a hyena on a mission.

Once there, she carefully lifted the one of the bones with the orange mushrooms on it. She carried it back to her boulder, laid it alongside the other meat-bones. Then she planted her paw on the bone, just beside the mushrooms, and gazed down with deep focus--trying to call her magic.

She would need to coax the orange fungus to grow, spreading it over all of the bones, so that there would be enough to swarm an enemy should she be attacked, here.

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Roll the bones.

The orange fungus spread only slowly. Giggle frowned, leaning down to briefly nudge them with her nose; they were tiny, and sporadic, barely covering enough to even be noticeable.

She could do better than this. But she'd get the other fungi set up first--this one was settled here now, at least--and come back. She'd half turned away when another thought struck her.

I spend a lot of time here. Best to get it right now. It'd be a shame if I were attacked here tomorrow, and the fungus wasn't quite enough to save me.

The hyena sighed through her nose and turned back again, planting a paw once more beside the orange fungus. Then she focused, brow knitting as she concentrated on thickening the mycelial growth, strengthening it, and making the mushrooms flat-out larger.

After a moment, she could see the color spreading--but it was faint; and indeed the growth of the individual mushrooms was miniscule. With a huff, she drew away. Either she needed more practice with this spell, or these fungi were particularly hard to grow.

Shaking her head, Giggle turned away once more. She'd just have to come back to them and try again once she'd tried out other ones; and if it turned out to be the fungus that was the problem, she'd replace them. She needed mycelia that would save her in a pinch, not take hours to slowly coat an enemy.

...Though even that might have its uses.

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Roll the bones.

She rested for a time at her den, lapping at water and laying her head on her paws, until she felt her sapped magical energy returning. Oddly, when it welled back up inside of her, it felt stronger than ever.

Perhaps it's like a muscle, and gets stronger with use?

Musing over this, she picked her way back to the mushroom garden she'd gathered and grown.

This time, when she eyed it over, she picked out a relatively plain fungus. This one was dull tan-brown, with a conical cap and a pale, thin white stem. She'd found them growing in dung--in a pile of her own making--but had found that they would also grow in simple dirt and mud. She leaned forward, carefully plucking one out with her teeth and laying it down. She sniffed over it, thinking.

She could bring it to the bone pit, and try to grow them around the edges? Even in the pit, though they might get crushed by the thrown bones. She could--oh, but that was odd. The mushroom's pale stem was growing dark and inky blue where she'd bitten it off.

Giggle leaned down, nosing it, then shrugged; a color-changing mushroom did not help her all that much. Instead she focused on the ones that were alive, pressing her senses through them to try and get some idea of what it is that they did.


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Roll the bones.

For awhile, Giggle felt around the mushroom's environment from their point of view. They seemed to like the damp, and the mud. She was torn, a little, by the horrible feeling of "dying" coming from the plucked fungus--when she cast her senses into it, she could feel life fading away. Still, she couldn't really tell what they did.

She plucked up the dying mushroom, and took pity on it, carrying it back to the bone pit with her. She'd plant this one, and see if she could get an idea, there, of what it did; perhaps it would be clearer when farther from the others.

Carefully and gently, Giggle dug a tiny, thin hole with a claw and used her jaws to place the mushroom. It took awhile, because she was big and relatively clumsy and the thing was tiny and delicate, but she did manage. It sagged to one side, wilted, but her magic could fix that. She hoped.

Giggle lay down with a soft huff, the mushroom positioned between her front paws. Dark eyes trained on it, she focused, willing it to strengthen, to grow healthy again--and to propagate swiftly all around her. She could feel it working, and satisfaction filled her.

Perfect.

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Roll the bones.

The spotted hyena--well, once spotted; now instead smudged and clotted with filth and rot--revelled in her success. The mushrooms were spreading, neatly ringing the area of the bone pit just before her. She'd wait, before finishing the job, until she could--

Is that a hyena...?

Giggle blinked, staring ahead. Across the bone pit, barely visible in the darkness, another spotted hyena was standing staring at her.

Its coat was shiny and soft, clean, its eyes bright and pale. Slowly, Giggle rose, feeling as if the world around her was spinning ever-so-slightly.

She blinked, and now its coat was hung with rot and gore, and its eyes were dark--and it was huge, twice as big as she was. Its teeth (which she could somehow see through its closed jaws) were crooked and broken, and blood coated its muzzle, chest and paws. The air before it shimmered, as if with heat.

Giggle hesitated and then stepped back, but in the direction that would take her around the circle more closely toward the stranger.

"Who... are you?" she asked, and her voice sounded alien and twitching, like a cold dying ant.

The stranger didn't respond, but she heard a voice coming out of her own mouth, and even as she did so, the stranger again changed.

Now the hyena was hung with bones--little teeth and claws hung around its neck on some sort of brown twine or leather, and its ears and nose were pierced through with bones. Now its eyes glowed red.

"I am you," she answered herself, and her voice was deep, and harsh, and growling.

Suddenly the rocks and bones in her pit began to twist and rise, and fear thrilled through her. The bones would protect her, but they were clawing toward her, and she took this as a sign to flee--and so she did.

Bolting back toward her den, Giggle called on her magic frantically. She could hear the stranger, this monster pretending to be her, chasing her. It was gaining on her, and all she could think of was to cover herself in those strange, slick black frills like she'd used against Kerberos.

But her focus couldn't possibly hold in this state, and it flickered and failed. She instead careened head first through her den, into a rock, and knocked herself out; just before she impacted it, and as she fell to the ground and into unconsciousness, she heard the voice murmur inside her head.

I am you.

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Roll the bones.

So I know what the brown ones do.

Her thoughts were wry and irritable, and as she thought them, she lifted one paw to swipe again at her face.

She wasn't sure how long she'd been out but she suspected it had been hours, if not days; the light-orbs were glowing differently than they had, and she felt parched and sore.

The hyena lowered her head--wincing at her headache--and lapped again at the water.

I suppose if I alter them somehow, maybe force them to give off spores when needed, or combine them with those air-infesting ones, I can force hallucinations on someone...? It might be useful. Hell, it might even be useful for when I'm fortune-telling.

That last was more of an idle thought, though; her hallucination had been vivid and terrifying, and that wouldn't really help do anything but startle and potentially chase off an enemy. It certainly wouldn't help dramatic effect when soothsaying.

With a sigh, the hyena made her way--blinking slowly, wincing at the light, as if hungover--back toward the bone pit. Just to be sure, she sniffed around the edges of the far end; there was no scent, and there were no prints.

She had been alone. It had been the fungus.

The hyena approached the brown-capped mushrooms with a wary sense of respect, now, and when she placed her paws near the small patch she'd grown, she was very careful not to touch them.

Whatever the case, they'd be useful to her, and so she'd grow them here. She could work out the details when her head didn't feel as if it were being hammered and thrown into the pit.

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Roll the bones.

Gah.

No good. She'd have to rest, and come back to it again. There was now a thin ring of brown fungus around the outer edges of the pit, but they were thinly-spread and puny.

She shook her head--then winced with regret, the headache sending a sharp pang through her--and made her way slowly back to her den.

Here she drank a bit more water before heading to her garden. Now, she knew that Bones, the wild dog pup, might sleep at her den from time to time. She also knew that he might--as she'd invited him to do--eat meat from the bones scattered around the area.

Therefore, she couldn't leave anything too dangerous here--and indeed the worst enemy she was likely to find here would be someone who'd smelled her stash and come for the food.

She had resolved to spread that disgusting crimson fungus that the raptors had found so appealing--and after biting into it, so repugnant. It smelled like carrion and rot, appetizingly mouth-watering to a carnivore or a scavenger, but it tasted like dry chalky filth.

She would grow it on the meat bones--the ones she'd nearly scraped clean--in a ring around her den; this way, if she were attacked, or if someone tried to steal them, she could use it on them.

Giggle lifted one of the rotting, meaty bones, one already inundated with the stuff, and carried it to the other bones. She arranged them carefully, end-to-end so that the fungus could spread more easily, and then focused again. This time she wasn't expecting much, feeling rather dejected about her attempts so far, but she was grimly determined nonetheless.

With a sigh through her nose and a great deal of concentration, she focused on trying to coax the mushrooms into spreading throughout her den.

This time, it worked--perhaps because she'd had lots of experience with that particular fungus, or maybe it was just easier to grow, but it blossomed and bloomed all around her den, and within it. It would ruin a lot of the meat she'd left for later, true, but it would provide a much-needed source of protection should she need it.

With another sigh, she again laid down, head-on-paws, to rest.

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Roll the bones.

It stank.

It always did, mind. Of rot, and bones, and all-sorts, but this time it stank more than usual. The pup padded along towards the source of the scent - as if he didn't have an idea of who it was already.

As he approached a den with pools of water nearby, he noticed the mushrooms. Orange..ish, that admittedly didn't smell too bad, but Bones decided to ignore them anyway. He shouldn't touch stuff if he didn't know what they were. He lingered slightly before he quietly barked out, "Mom?"

He kept his huge ears pricked as he waited for an answer, sitting on his haunches at a distance from the shrooms. Just in case.


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Giggle lifted her head from her paws, blinking blearily. She thought, she wasn't sure, but she thought she'd just heard someone calling for their mother.

She yawned--careful to be silent, and stood, emerging from the thick patch of ferns to peer around. Almost at once she spotted the wild dog pup, Bones, that she'd looked after for the last few days.

"...Bones?" she asked stupidly, at first, since she was still half-asleep. Another (louder) yawn left her blinking blearily once more at the pup. Then she sauntered forward to give his head an affectionate nuzzle.

"Is everything okay?" She'd been a little worried about the pup's notable absence during her scuffle with Kerberos, but here he was, safe and sound. Good.

She sat back on her haunches and peered at Bones, licking her jaws and yawning a third time, waiting to hear how he was.

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Roll the bones.