It continued to pick and prune, her pace made slower by the finesse required. This task required a presence, one that ripping and shredding didn’t- she let the sorrow she had refused a place in their mind leak out in the way they caressed the smaller plants, tugged gently at the parasites that clung. Unfair. They had not asked for this. They were undeserving.

Sprig too - all that hard work, gone. Uprooted, with everything they assumed to be safe, perpetual. Their progress halted, focus interrupted by a new worry, new guilt. They watched as he ripped and tore with fury she hadn’t been able to maintain- she did not feel satisfaction she had expected, watching sheets of white fall from the tree. All she felt was awful.

This was unfair.

They rushed over. ”Shit- I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have- I’m sorry.” they reached for his bloodied paw. ”I- I don’t have magic that can help. I can’t fix it- Gods I’m sorry - I can’t.” it’s own hands were shaking, and they felt something in their head recoil in disgust as tears dropped down stiff cheeks. It wasn’t just talking about Sprig, wasn’t it?

@Sprig

He didn't say anything, throat too choked up to speak. Sprig's eyes seemed to stare off into nothingness, lost in his own thoughts. In his own world where everything was okay and he didn't have to be here destroying fungus and his garden was growing just fine and he could spend his days free of worry collecting plants and cooking. And he blinked. He was back in the moment.

It seemed all the anger had drained from him in that moment, and he looked over to Adenium who was by his side. Another blink. The lion opened his mouth. Willed the words to come out. But the lump of sadness in his throat prevented him from getting anything out. Sprig paused, but instinctively turned his head to lick away Adenium's tears before pulling back. He had only ever done that with his family. And he wasn't sure how she would react. "We're- we're trying. It's enough. It will be enough." He hoped so. It had to be.

Sprig wasn't sure how it happened, but his feelings seemed to soak into the plants around him, and all of a sudden, he could feel what they felt.

Sprig's mind would be gently flooded by the brush of wind through leaves. The sense of moisture in a thousand roots; the taste of soil, be it sweet or rich or acid. The movement of light playing across their chloroplasts. The plants sensed all of these things.

There was no how; they did not feel, not as Gembounds felt. But there was a strange sensation going through them, one that Sprig would be the first to uncover: the march of Order through their forms at a cellular level. Not only were they straightening, growing in newly symmetrical shapes, and becoming slowly crystalline--but they, now, could feel as Sprig felt, through one anothers' leaves and stems and branches.

The towering oak to Sprig's left felt the interplay of mosses fifty yards away. A spread of ferns, turning slowly white, was aware of the pressure of footsteps over the roots of the berry bush beside a creek.

They were Hive.

They were One.

@Sprig

It was the strangest sensation he had ever felt. Although he had always considered himself connected the forest, the plant life around him, he had never actually experienced what it was like to truly be one of them. His senses became interwoven with those of plants. They had no eyes, ears, or even smell. But they had the gift of touch. He felt the wind ruffle his fur, and the very same wind tussle the leaves of the tree tops. He felt the moisture in the ground from how his paws sunk ever so slightly into the rich soil, and the very same moisture was captured by roots branching through the ground. He felt the light shining through treetops warm his body, and that very same light absorbed through leaves and transformed into energy, ever perpetuating life.

But there was something else. He felt it now. It wasn't natural growth, and may not even be called growth at all. It was rearranging. It felt artificial. The beauty of nature was in its imperfections, and now, these were being washed away and reorganized. Though now not only was he connected to the plants, but the plants were also connected to each other. But not in a manner that was... natural. What was happening? It must be the fungus. Not only was it eating away at the life in the area, but it was shaping it until it became unrecognizable. Sprig shuddered at the thought of walking into a forest where everything was white. And 'perfect'. Every leaf and every branch symmetrical, with no imperfections.

The lion pulled away from these other senses and back into his own body. "The fungus... it's reconstructing the plants." And he reached out to tear off a chunk of it from the tree, noticing that the grooves in the bark were, in fact, aligned. Parallel. Wrong.

@Adenium

Mossie's search for an altar had lead her to truly strange places.

She'd passed through Eridanus only briefly once before, but as she returned in a (probably futile) effort to find a correctly-shaped stone. But the landscape she passed through once more was utterly alien, now. White fibers and fungi threaded the plants, strange pale-eyed lessers rustled through the undergrowth, and the wrongness that surged beneath Mossie's skin bristled with alien rage.

A white-eyed thing, gaze blank, hops into view. It briefly startles, and as it turns to flee she spots a singular crystalline hoof. Chaos lights her nerves aflame and she gives chase with a furious hiss as she prepares her leeching magic, so determined to put the abomination down she's heedless of the fact that she's heading towards a pair of other gembound huddled over alien trees...

It stumbles and falls, crashing to the earth. Mossie's almost wary of killing it at first, minding the strange fungus. Normally she'd test the properties of unknown fungi on Lessers, but this one appears. Well.

But the rage within her demands the creature's death, and so carefully she pads up to its prone form and unsheathes her claws, tearing open an artery in one clean stroke. Blood sprays out, stark against the green-and-white ground, and for a moment the need in her is quiet. It is only then that she looks up, spotting the other gembound.

She pads away before calling out a moderately loud "Hello," not wanting to startle. Something about the moment seems too solemn for her usual approach.

@Adenium

They were distracted briefly from the misery when the liongrub turned to lick their face, now wet and salty with tears. They were not a fan of getting licked - while they had always been a bit more feral than the elven side of the family, this was were she drew the line. But the circumstances were uh, strange, lets say, and it felt rude to shove a grieving gembound away. She'd allow it, just this once, but the way her eyes squinted and body tensed was a quiet message that she wasn't entirely a fan of this.

Empty words - maybe she could believe them too. But that required repeated reassurance, the idea excercised like a muscle; She didn't have the energy.

"Its - what?" That hadn't sounded like an affirmation. Looking back at the saplings before it, it took a moment to re-examine them - where they different? Aside from the white that crusted them, they felt... wrong. If Adenium had the knowledge, it would've compared them to a plastic plant - but they did not, and had no way to express the uncomfortable symmetry. And the bark on the tree... "Did you do that?" She knew there was no way he could've. The grooves stretched all the way down, as if the tree had grown this way from the beginning, rather than having been carved by the rake of claws. Even then, it was too neat to be done by hand. What was going on here?

A rustle by them interrupts their focus again. A cat above a corpse, one smothered white and spraying red on the ground. "Hi." It wipes its face and sucks up whatever mucus had run down its nose. It had already cried in front of one stranger and it was unwilling to add to that list. "I wouldn't eat that if I were you, its part of the infestation - the one we're trying to get rid of right now. Want to help?" It tried to keep its voice flat, as if it hadn't crumbled to snot and tears moments before. It picked at the tree bark again, not wanting to stay idle too long.

@Sprig

Sprig sensed Adenium's discomfort, pulling away and turning his attention back to the tree. He wondered what was worse: to die, or to become reshaped into something that shouldn't exist. Even if they got rid of all the fungus, he had a feeling that the effects of the white growth on the plants would be irreversible. There wasn't exactly a spell that could, well, ungrow something. Only the new plants that sprouted after it was eradicated would be normal again. And that would take a while. "No..." Though he wished he had. If he had been the one to do it, he would've also been able to reverse it.

The lion was about to add on something else, but the sudden appearance of another gembound interrupted his thoughts. "Hello." he nods to confirm Adenium's words, "We're removing it from the plants." Though it seemed at this rate the plants were getting converted faster than they would be able to remove everything in time. But it was better than nothing. He preferred weird looking forest to not having one at all.

He reached out with his magic to bend down a branch of the tree, reaching up to remove the fungus hanging from it. It was just barely within his reach, and required him to strain in order to reach it. But it worked. The realization that the treetops were probably also infected made him realize how hard of a task it would be to eradicate it completely. You would need someone who could climb or fly to reach those heights. "Is anyone able to climb or fly? There is more fungus up there."

@Mossie

Mossie dipped her head towards the strange, flat-faced furless creature. In all her time in the caves, she hadn't seen a being quite like them--the closest being the Collector. She burned with curiousity, but sensed from the somber mood that questions would not be appreciated.

"Thanks for the warning," she said, "but I wasn't planning on it. I know there's a whole lot of these nasty white-eyed motherfuckers roaming out there, and I figured killing at least one might help, if only a little bit." She shuddered. "I'd be glad to help!"

She turns her attention towards the other Gembound, a catlike yet strange creature, with glowing horns(?) she finds endlessly fascinating. Still, they appear more familiar in form than the first. "I can climb," she says. That's one good thing about being relatively small.

She pads up to the base of a strange, glossy tree, but as she bunches her haunches to begin to bound up the tree, she nearly treads on a patch of moss coated with white mushrooms. To see her element perverted so stirs deep unease in her.

She holds a paw over the moss, acting on some unknown instinct. "I wonder..."

The fungi are drawn from the patch of moss, flopping harmlessly onto the substrate.

She gasps. "I think fungal magic can help clear this cave--and I don't even have to kill the plant!"

@Adenium

Huh. She hadn’t heard the word motherfucker in a while. She sniffed in that small amused way people sometimes - she liked this cat’s vocabulary. They watched as she bounded up the tree at Sprig’s suggestion, making easy work of climbing its length. It hadn’t taken long for her to prove herself useful - not that Adenium had held any doubt.

”Huh, neat.” Useful info, but it wasn’t like she could do anything with it. They were a one trick pony at the moment - and unless this fungus was scared of night lights, they couldn’t contribute much with magic alone. Having failed to remove more than a few flakes before, they gave it another go, though their focus drifted to and fro to the task and whatever the cat was doing. ”What’s your name stranger?”

@Sprig

Sprig watches as Mossie removes the fungus from the moss without killing it. "Whoa..." he breathed out, an amazed expression on his face. So there really was a way to resolve this issue without killing the plants themselves. But he had no such fungal magic. "That's amazing." He looked down at his paws, a bit sad that he wasn't able to do the same. It was a bit ironic how plant magic couldn't be used to clear the fungus, though it did make sense that normal fungal magic could clear it away.

The lion reached out with his magic once more, bending down another branch to remove the hanging fungus. Slowly but steadily, they were making progress. The area they had been working in was now noticeably less white than its surroundings. He looked over to the cat with curiosity as Adenium asked what her name was. He was curious too.

@Mossie