SC ARPG Fills

Hess hadn’t particularly thought about mushroom hunting before Dahlia brought it up. It was strange to be creeping through the woods looking down at the ground and peering under logs. Hess was paying a lot more attention to where he was putting his feet than he usually did. He wasn’t the kind of person to ignore the little things. He spent a lot of time looking at moss and small flowers and interesting rocks that happened to catch his eye as he was wandering around. He’d even spent a good hour looking at a tiny cluster of white mushrooms on the side of the road before, but he hadn’t quite made the connection between the mushrooms themselves and the ones he sometimes enjoyed eating. He wasn’t even sure if those mushrooms in particular were edible.

He was more than happy to help Dahlia out of course! In any way he could! But he hadn’t really considered where it was mushrooms came from before you cooked them. Clearly they were grown. They were a plant! S…sort of? They were a grown thing. A thing that was grown. But they weren’t an animal. Which meant they… were probably a plant…? Dahlia called them funguses. And a lot of them looked like the cute little cap his spore wishing weed friend wore. Backslide wasn’t exactly a plant either.

Thankfully when she sent him out on his search, Dahlia sent him with a guide book to help him. Hess knew you couldn’t eat every mushroom out there, and he had no other way to tell what was safe to take back with him and what he should very much leave alone. The guide was a good start, anyway. Hess was sure Dahlia would do a final sort through anything he brought back and decide what made the cut on her own. Not only to make sure she didn’t start growing something inedible! There were definitely some standards that the mushrooms he brought back would need to meet. He wasn’t sure what those were. There was a lot going on here that he was unsure about!

Hess all but fell over a large log that suddenly appeared in his path. Maybe not suddenly. Maybe he’d just forgotten that he was supposed to be paying attention to where he was going so it seemed like the log came out of nowhere. Oh maybe it had appeared out of thin air! There was no way to know for sure. Hess paused where he was and knelt on the ground, leaning down to look under the log. The ground was soft under his knees. He put a hand down to steady himself and the dirt was cool and damp on his fingertips. It was a nice feeling, dead leaves crumbling at the slightest pressure from his hand. In the shade of the log there was a small blanket of mushrooms. They stood out from the crumbling bark like a wild collection of balconies on a single long building. Or the most haphazard array of stairs Hess had ever seen. It looked almost like the log was a house of some sort. Hess half expected one of the bits of bark to swing open and a tiny creature to poke their head out and scold him for tripping over their house. What kind of creature would live in a mushroom-log-house? A tiny worm, maybe… 

Hess shook his head and dragged his thoughts back to the present. He sat up, dusting his hand off on his leg so he could take the guidebook out of his mushroom collecting basket without completely covering it in dirt. He flipped through the pages, looking at the pictures and holding them up to the mushrooms one at a time to compare them. The guide had a lot of really interesting information that Hess had a hard time figuring out how he was supposed to apply it in the moment, but one thing that it came back to repeatedly was that different kinds of mushrooms liked to grow on different kinds of wood. Unfortunately, Hess had no idea what kind of ex-tree this particular log was.

As near as he could tell, these mushrooms were shitakkes. Which was exciting! He’d eaten those before, so he was a little surprised he couldn’t definitely recognize them, but he hadn’t seen them in the wild before. He carefully picked a few and placed them in the basket—on top of the guide so they wouldn’t be squished. It would be a bit of a hassle to rearrange every time he needed to pull the guide out, but he wanted to make sure Dahlia got her mushrooms intact.

Hess pushed himself to his feet, dusted off his knees, and headed deeper into the forest to keep looking.