OCTOBER 4th, 2022

“Jacob. What did I tell you?”

Dr. Jacob Kola, Site-87’s Senior Containment Specialist, gave Bailey a blank look, nearly appalled. “I did exactly what you told me to do.”

Site Director Tristian Bailey had been constantly tip-toeing the tightrope between calm in the eye of the storm, and being the storm himself. He had Dr. Kola arrange a proper quarantine room, so that whatever had tricked his old friend from thousands of years in the past to visit their reality was guaranteed to not be the work of Site Director Tristian Bailey. He was to be sealed, and any command from Site Director Tristian Bailey was to be ignored until the end of the month, with no substitute. Departments were to continue as they’d been instructed, and that was that.

There was a code word, in an emergency situation.

It was memetic, and the password was locked within the consciousness of five people: the man it attempted to seal, the two memeticists that had created it, Dr. Kola, and the Head of Security at 87. If Bailey were to say it aloud, that would be the call to immediately free him from his cellar. He’d spent quite a portion of the emergency October budget trying to ensure that the codeword was made in the highest security possible.

The room was lined with white tile, had a mattress in the center, and a few bookshelves lining the walls. None of them had been from Bailey’s room, they’d all been fished from local bookstore dumpsters. The Head of Security laughed at them when the room was getting set up on that fact alone. Bailey had allocated his minutes into simply resting on the simple white mattress, clad in nothing but a bedsheet and a cover, his hands over his heart, still like a pharaoh in a coffin.

Bailey had been in the room for roughly 15 minutes.

And then Kola opened the door, asking Bailey what was wrong.

Dr. Kola was approaching his sixties. He was on the short side, and had the slightest limp on his left leg from where a stump met the rest of his artificial shin-- the measurements had been wrong, initially, but even with the insurance to cover the rest, he’d insisted on keeping his slightly lopsided posture. Bailey still wasn’t quite sure why; It wasn’t for anything anomalous, nor did it offer any obvious advantage.

Kola’s skin was a soft brown, his hair and eyes a handful of shades darker. He was beginning to bald, his wrinkles the more prominent measure of age. His lab coat had little leather elbow pads sewn in despite the many patches and replacement sewing jobs that’d been done on it time and time again. His jeans were a pair he’d owned since highschool, his polo and vest combo having come from closing sales when his daughter was a newborn.

Kola had Bailey’s respect, sure, he was the reason the few anomalies that remained contained never moved an inch, and the facility’s machinery never went haywire, but his adherence to his haphazard look did nothing but confuse Bailey.

“I said the codeword.”

“Yes, sir.”

Quiet thoughts in the back of Bailey’s head that offered rational explanations.

You said it unconsciously, Tris. You whispered it under your breath and that’s all. Jake might’ve just heard something and thought it was you. Even though that’s not possible. It’s likely he just wants to check that nothing has happened to you. If you got killed by something hiding in the bookshelves within 2 minutes of being in here, it would make him look incompetent. You’d look incompetent.

One thought rolled over all of them like a steamroller:

Be advised.

Heat not a furnace

for your foe so hot

That it do singe yourself.

We may outrun

By violent swiftness

that which we run at

And lose by overrunning

“We’re fucked.” Bailey said. “We’re fucked, Jake. Get Ewell. I need to talk to him.”

Dr. Jacob Kola did not feel like a request for elaboration was necessary.

Bailey wordlessly exited his cellar and back into the ring that called for his blood, the imaginary audience awaiting his grand introduction that would never come. He supposed it was a good thing that he hadn’t tried to instill an acting director in his place; a 15 minute shift just sounded sad.

“Somehow it knew I was in there. It knew what I was trying to do. It could have killed me. It could’ve killed J- Dr. Kola, or any other person. It’s showing us that it has power over us. Whatever you see, whether it’s in the corner of your room, in your bookshelves--”

Dr. Christopher Hastings was half-listening to Bailey.

He knew the jist already: Melbourne told Kim, Kim told Reynolds, Reynolds told Sinclair, Sinclair told Pike, Pike told Mattings, Mattings told Partridge, and Partridge told Hastings. And then Melbourne blabbered to it in more detail to Hastings directly afterwards, like he always did.

Some things got lost, inevitably, but with something as important as the Site Director’s health, most of his coworkers felt entitled to know more.

Hastings felt a little bad for being concerned for Bailey purely in a professional sense, but after how holier-than-thou he’d come off the day prior and in the prior months in an unexplained bout of corporate-clad hissy fits, Hastings blamed his lack of empathy on Bailey himself.

Once upon a time, back in October 2017, Hastings had been the one, alongside Bailey, to discover the beginning of what would become many tumultuous Halloween catastrophes. Five years and a girlfriend later, Hastings was the only one still on the frontlines. In spite of promotions, Doctors and Commanders were typically just as much on the prowl as their subordinates.

Hastings supposed it was pointless to hold it against the man whose job was so traditionally to sit in a chair and be the guy in charge of those in charge, especially considering Bailey accepted the position in the first place. Accepted, not forced.

So what, if he didn’t do what Former Site Director Weiss wanted him to do. She was old, he wasn’t, he had plenty of life to live, no point becoming Site Director if he still wanted to have fun. Does he even know what fun is? Is he still with his girlfriend? Does he talk to his brothers anymore? What about his mom? Is his mom even around?

Does Tristian Bailey have a life at all nowadays?

Melbourne hadn’t betrayed him nearly so much. Melbourne thought like Hastings, saw a smidge of rationality in his thought process, gave credence to every thought that made its way out of ‘the hamster wheel dungeon’-- Melbourne’s words were funny enough that Hastings only took a fraction of an offense to them.

Agent Ruby Williams, against Hasting’s mild chagrin, made her usual comedy routine while walking down the soil trail before them. “You’ve got to tell him, it’s not a hamster wheel dungeon. What you got in there is gerbils.”

Although Ruby had been at the Foundation long enough that she technically would’ve been promoted to Lieutenant, she’d denied it. How Agents worked at Site-87 was tricky; they did field and specialized work, similarly to a lot of research cohorts, but they were also regularly expected to aid any encounters that required a force and obey a militaristic format. Both of the Wonder Twins (as they were colloquially called) were Stealth Operatives, meaning that while they were flexible in terms of wherever they were stationed, they were best at anything rogue-like. Thus, her regular work uniform was typically a skintight suit, with necessary protections: gloves, a sturdy vest, protective footgear, and plenty others. When it came to much more relaxed scenarios, like helping Hastings survey the outer trails of the town in the depths of woodland for Suspicious October Activity, she did often wear a layer or two. This time she had her regular green parka that she wore regularly off work. The furred hood itself wasn’t used until winter months, so her bright red bob had plenty of space to breathe.

“Have you ever seen a gerbil? In your life? Ever?” Hastings spat at her, picking up the pace to block her from going forward, craning his chin up at her. He could feel the corners of his mouth curling against his will.

Ruby bent down ever so slightly, the familiar shit-eating smirk that always froze Christopher Hastings in place. “Your head’s too small for poor lil’ hamsters.”

Even though he’d listened to her voice on a daily basis for literal years of his life, the ways in which her accent popped up were few and far between, incredibly easy to blink and miss. Some months into dating during mid-2019, Hastings was finally able to pinpoint that she had an accent in the first place. Ruby finally prompted him to guess where she was from. Upon realizing that he meant ‘New Jersey’ absolutely seriously, he was rightfully trapped in a headlock like the smitten fool he was. He never stood a chance-- Hastings was from Missouri. The Williamses hadn’t grown up in a specific place anyway, hence their accents being relatively neutral, but their parents were native Bostonians.

Melbourne couldn’t come on the patrol with them, because he was exhausted after an entire night of trying to make a codeword that just led to him getting a small bonus in his next paycheck. The man needed more sleep, power to him. Hastings and Ruby had sleep figured out already.

Regardless, Hastings had learned to take the little blessing of alone time between the two of them as little dates.

“You know who’s a hamster? Mackenzie could make a nice hamster. You and Melbourne make good gerbils. And... Hm. I think Ale makes a good dormouse.”

“And you’re a rat.” Hastings poked her cheek, walking along the trail they’d walked down.

Ruby’s laugh had almost a kick-step beat to it, loud yet short. “Yah know, me and Blake actually had a few rats growing up.”

“Wait, really?”

“Pretty little things. Our parents expected us to be little monsters to them, went and promised us a dog if we could show we could take care of something as little as rats. But the minute they ate from my hands I understood the heart of the horse girls in my class, those soulful little eyes, the way they’d run up our hands... Depressed me to hell to graduate highschool without any pets. There was this big baby grey and white rat we had, Pixie— eh, she was technically mine. We had her during middle school. I managed to teach her to roll over, and she’d always watch TV with us. Made us both smile during really shitty times, she’s really all I can think of whenever I see Spongebob. Our parents hated them.”

“You never got any dog.” Hastings avoided mentioning her parents directly.

“Mhm.” She smiled. “You had fish, yeah?”

“Well, yeah, several. My family never liked anything with fur, and my mom was so laughably allergic. So, we got fish. We had this one beautiful red-blue gradient betta when I was a wee baby, ‘Conan.’ My dad’s still got photos of him—”

“You ever tried to scoop them out of their cage and eat them?”

Hasting’s eyebrows furrowed. “You said I was a gerbil, Rubes. Not a cat.”

“Yeah, if you were a rodent, you’d be a gerbil. But! If you had to be any animal, you’d be a cat.” Ruby’s hands found themselves around his small head, scratching around his scalp like the two parts of his hair that went upwards were his ears. “You’re my little meow-meow. My little meow-meow that really needs his rabies shot.”

“Hell no. I’m feeling good today, I wanna save vaccines for after October.”

Hastings would rather die than admit he liked it when she made any kind of cutesy gestures at him. Luckily for him, Ruby knew him far too well, and knew exactly what to look for in just about anybody.

And in learning about him and sharing so much time and energy with him, Hastings thought that Ruby had done an impeccable job keeping up with botanical wonders, anomalous or not. She’d practically revitalized his love for everything to do with the natural world, especially after getting his doctorate.

The outskirts of Sloth’s Pit was a gentle world, with only a sparse few boot-worn trails that cut through the suburban underbelly of the Nexus, where even the pavement was touched and sprinkled by moss. The angst of the town was quiet here— or maybe it’d been quiet for so long that it didn’t feel so angsty, it was difficult to tell. Ruby’s enthusiasm towards wanting to go on quiet walks with him, surrounded in nothing but greenery, at any point in the day, brought an unignorable… healing to Hastings.

Something caught her eye as they walked down the wooded trail.

“Hey, Chris.”

He followed the direction she pointed in, although upon realizing what she’d seen it felt almost unnecessary. Some yards away was a wart upon a sea of green. Amanita muscaria, fly agaric, fly amanita-- but it was better known for the way it looked rather than its names:

Red with white spots.

The toadstool to end all toadstools.

“Shit.” Hastings approached it cautiously, fishing his brown gloves from his lab coat pocket and slipping them on. “Good catch, Rubes. Patrolling around here was a good idea. Get me one of my baggies, and keep your nose closed.”

“Pollination bag?”

“No, the plastic ones.”

Reaching into one of the numerous zippers on his tablet-sized satchel, Ruby revealed a small plastic bag dispenser that was running low. Not questioning the fact it was just the right fit, she pried it open and gestured it to him. “These are poisonous, yeah?”

The mushroom just barely fit as Hastings slid it in, careful to take his gloves off as she sealed it shut. “And psychoactive. Fly Agaric, Ruby. They like acidic soil and dense wood, so theoretically speaking, it shouldn’t be surprising that they’re here...” He exchanged a look with Ruby before finishing the sentence, lips pursed and eyebrows arched. “But we can’t have jack shit for anything in this town.”

Ruby’s phone shutter went off as she took a good handful of photos of the mushroom in the bag. “How much do you know about mycology, Chris? What the hell do we do with this thing?”

“Mattings might know more than I do, ‘specially anomalously.” Hastings said, the image of a salt-and-pepper haired man with coke bottle librarian glasses and a resting bitch face in his mind. “For a long time, people didn’t even realize that fungi weren’t a type of plant, much less that they belonged to an entirely different kingdom. But the studies are a little intertwined, sometimes. I bet if I go look for my old notebooks I can find my old notes from college.”

“Tell me about it.” She photographed the stump of the fly agaric at a bad angle since her eyes were busy being trained upon his own.

Hastings’ eyes sparkled for a second, as he clutched the bag carefully, a little closer to his heart. “What’s the biggest living thing on earth? Non-anomalously speaking.”

Ruby paused, sliding her phone into her pocket. “Hmm, that’s a tricky one...It’s not a Blue Whale? Is it seriously a mushroom?”

He held a finger up to slow her thoughts. “For mammals, it’s the Blue Whale. For plants, it varies. It could be giant Sequoias based on height, but aspen trees are particularly special. Giant sequoias are self-explanatory, aspen trees are trickier since an entire “forest” of aspen trees are actually all connected, and have the most mass collectively-- You remember Pando, right?”

Ruby facepalmed so hard that Hastings thought she might just blow a head through her face. “Oh, duh! When you went on that hard cider rampage last summer, yeah, I remember a bit now. Uh, it’s around 100 acres. And it weighs way more than the Blue Whale..”

“The largest Blue Whale ever recorded was about 200 metric tons, and about 30 meters long. Pando is roughly 100 acres in size, making it 6,000 metric tons. But what outclasses both of those...”

“Please tell me they named it something funny, Christopher. Please.”

He hadn’t even told her yet, and she was already pressing her lips together. Hastings supposed it was a sign that he was failing to contain his laughter.

“The ‘Humongous Fungus’.”

Ruby’s boisterous laugh filled the air again. Hastings adjusted his arms accordingly in order to not drop the baggy.

“So, Pando is thirty times the weight of some of the heaviest blue whales.” Hastings continued speaking as he left the baggy on the floor for two seconds and held his hands up like he was holding a small box. “The, uh, Humongous Fungus, actually may not have a totally concrete species in mind, but mycologist theorize it’s a honey fungus-- it’s a miracle they can even figure out how big it is in the first place since they’re not sure how connected the entire colony is. But while Pando is about 100 acres..” He pulled his arms apart. “I don't think my arms are long enough to represent just how incredible 2,000 acres is.”

“Goddamn. Why isn’t that more well known?”

“Probably because they don’t even know how connected the entire colony is, and that would negate the mystique. The entire point is the size and awe, so if they can’t comprehend that size and awe, what’s the point?” His eyes got wide at her, again. “But, can you imagine that, Rubes? Most people only ever see fungi in small quantities, and that amount is still incredibly small within anomalous numbers. Because so much specialty is required for even just Foundation mycologists to ensure fungal security. Have you ever seen a fungus the size of a sofa? Or even half a sofa?” He lifted the baggy up again, quickly. “This thing is a fraction the size of a throw pillow! An entire football field is about one acre. Imagine two thousand football fields. And that’s why they call it the Humongous Fungus!”

Hastings didn’t realize it until he’d finished, but he was right up close and on his tip-toes, still some distance away from her collarbone. His feet strained ever so slightly as the soles of his shoes met the ground again.

“At least they didn’t call it The Fungus Among Us.” Ruby snarked.

“Eat shit.” Hastings punched her lightly. “But Pando is older by a thousand years or so. It’s one of the most anci--”

Unlike him, Ruby was utter muscle. Which meant that her idea of a light punch was enough to send Hastings to his feet, ragdoll-style. She was gentle enough that all it did was push him down clumsily, but regardless, the poor man was as defenseless as a turtle on its backside, dropping the baggy from his hands.

Hastings felt good, hearing her laugh. Had anybody else been there, sure, they’d likely get reprimanded for goofing off after finding something so critical. Hastings knew the pain Octobers delivered. It nearly killed him time and time again, as it had for her. Both Williamses had dimples, and he hadn’t noticed them until he’d begun dating Ruby. The little scars that dotted her body, her legs, her arms, her hands. Her big strong arms that clutched him like a weighted blanket. Her big, calloused, muscled hands wrapped around his, clutched, what should’ve been clutched in his hands--

The bag was gone.

Hastings sat up. He hadn’t crushed it, or kicked it. Not a single sound in the forest could’ve disguised the sound the plastic bag would’ve inevitably made from getting moved. It just suddenly wasn’t where it had been seconds prior.

Ruby immediately scanned the surrounding area. “No fucking way.”

Hastings flipped himself around, on his knees and hand clutched around the trees. His heart was beating so fast that he could practically feel the little biomedical scanner in the back of his neck thump against his skin. “Hey, Nexus. Sloth’s Pit. Buddy. Buddies. Friendlies. We’re trying to protect you, here, and we don’t know from what. We don’t know why that mushroom was here. We don’t know what it means. It could put some of the citizen’s lives at risk. Where’d the toadstool go?”

Years of patrolling the natural woodland of Sloth’s Pit, analyzing natural life and sustaining the anomalous ecosystem meant realizing it had a language of its own, and that it was never easy to figure out when it was feeling conversational. The bark beneath Hasting’s hands that had been strong against the tree a second earlier snapped beneath his fingers. Releasing his grip, the bark clattered onto the terrain gently.

Hastings’ heart skipped a beat.

The hell does that mean?

“Nexus, I don’t know what this means.” Hastings lifted the bark up from where it’d fallen, his heart skipping a beat as the rest of the little thoughts in his head immediately sought the worst.

The Humongous Fungus was primarily underground, who was he to assume that the majority of Sloth’s Pit was being overtaken beneath their noses? What if that was how the Tin Lizzy had been able to literally sink through the asphalt like it was nothing? What if I'm stepping on the underbelly of the beast? What was stopping it from swallowing us up, too?

Ruby could tell Hastings’ heart was skipping a couple of beats too many, putting her hands on his shoulders. “Chris, breathe. We’re going to be fine. I can call Blake, if we really need to.”

As if to assure him he would’ve heard the crinkle of plastic, Hastings heard a familiar roaring sound, hardly audible as Ruby was speaking to him.

The mirror of all courtesy.

“Tin Lizzy.”

Ruby tilted her chin up. “Shit. Where’s your car, Chris?”

Hastings’ mind was flooded with thoughts of the direction of the revving. The forest, this time, gave him much clearer directions, in the form of a ‘wave’: where all the trees seemed to sway, as if some impact had compelled the wind to waver, or they’d been turned into some kind of sonar.

Not a word came out of his mouth as he sped towards the west, closer to the roads that pulled into town that had been built ever since the S&C Plastics building had been established. Hastings often felt stubby next to Ruby, but even she was struggling to catch up with him now that he’d kicked his legs into full gear.

The revving was constant in one direction, unmoving and becoming louder and louder as the pair approached. He wondered if it was a lure of sorts.

Yet now he could see the Tin Lizzy much clearer.

It was primarily black, the white had served mostly for fancy trim. The car was slick and shiny, despite everything it’d been through, explosion and all. He couldn’t tell much about how different the car was, as he didn’t know much about cars in the first place.

It was parked along the side of the lonely two-way road, facing away from the town, the engine chugging in anticipation. The driver stood up from where she’d been crouching gopnik-style, adjacent to the open car door, half of her body obscured by the angle she was at.

She was a little shorter than Ruby, although her stick-like body type played into an illusion of height. Her helmet was on, obscuring her head in a shroud of hard plastic and stickers. Her racing suit was standard, colored primarily black with white and teal trim, save for the Hawaiian flower patterns that raced down the sides of her legs in a white-to teal ombre. The brands up it were not, like Robert said, with one exception that caught his eye:

D&G.

Though it wasn’t the sore thumb, or the shining crown, of the suit-- that title belonged to the massive inscription that took up most of her chest that otherwise would have remained blank.

It was a challenge to comprehend, as he couldn’t tell if the sleek yet detailed design was a company logo or some kind of eldritch rune. It was symmetrical, surrounded by circular... lumps, and smack dab in the middle was what looked like an indent, or an eye. He was sure that even if it wasn’t on fabric he’d have just as hard of a time trying to discern anything from it.

She made that same chin-jutting movement that she’d done to Robert.

“The hell do you want, you...”

She revealed her right hand. The baggy crinkled in her leather-gloved grasp. She tossed it into the open car door without turning the rest of her body, landing it squarely on the front passenger seat.

Hastings jumped a bit as Ruby smacked his shoulder, finally having caught her breath behind him only to shoot it back into his ear. “Do not.”

Ruby was the only person to have had a proper long-distance weapon at her disposal, sitting at her thigh, but from the tension alone it was as if she was the only one who hadn’t prepared enough for the gunfight.

Hastings took a breath.

The Driver’s chest hardly moved.

Hastings took another breath, and then sprinted directly at her.

The second he’d taken a foot off the ground, she was a blur. The car door’s slam seemed to echo, the acceleration getting louder and then quieter again as she sped off down the road at a pace that would shatter a speedometer before Hastings could even reach the spot the car once stood.

Even as it dissipated into the distance, the industrial oil smell wafted into his nose, keeping him from taking another breath.

Ruby walked up to him leisurely from behind. “Fun.”

“Very.” Hastings sighed, his eyes transfixed upon the distance. “She made sure I saw it.”

The trees around the road became still as the road got quiet again.

“Let’s get to my car and go back to the site.” Hastings walked in the direction of the town, down the middle of the street. “We report. And then we nap.”

“Is there still Shiner in your minifridge?”

“Yeah, three.”

“Good, ‘cause I already took some sleep meds last night.”

Ruby had an admirable level of self-moderation, despite her liberal habits with alcohol.

A year or so into their relationship, during the pandemic, Hastings’ insomnia had nearly gone FUBAR. He’d resorted to trying to steal her meds right from the bottle when he was running low, until he realized that Ruby had been doing the exact same. In order to not become dependent upon them, Ruby proposed a pact of mutual moderation. By the time summer had ended, the only reason Hastings betrayed his normal sleep schedule was to work on his doctorate, and the only reason Ruby betrayed her sleep schedule was to keep him in check. After 2021 had begun, the pact turned into a weekly nap time somewhere in the work week, with record-breaking times for how quickly they were able to pull each other to sleep.

A droning sound that reminded him a little of his fan came to his mind. He checked for planes heading to Duluth or Superior. He then paid closer attention to the droning sound, and came to his senses.

Whipping his head around, perfect to be met with a blaring sound that screamed DANGER, Hastings decided that neither of them were going to be meeting their makers today.

Before either of them could say anything, Hastings yanked Ruby by the arm as hard as he could, darting back towards the right side of the road. It helped that her adrenaline always seemed to be steps behind what Hastings had, so that her muscles had relaxed and her posture was off-balance enough to overpower her despite her size and weight advantage. Ruby’s eyes were wide as she knocked into him, just out of the way of those vicious and thin rubber wheels.

The roar of the Tin Lizzy engulfed his senses, as if it was a massive train, not helped by the obnoxious and rampant honking, as if they were pedestrians not paying attention to a busy street. All he could feel was her weight on top of him, until the noise quieted down.

Hastings poked his head up to see Tin Lizzy racing in the direction of Sloth’s Pit, albeit much slower than it had been during the fakeout, still honking from where it came. Ruby lifted her head up a few seconds after he had, her heart rate having definitely jumped up quite a few digits, wordlessly watching the metal menace race back into enemy territory.

“Hey. Chris.” Ruby chuckled in shock. He could feel her heart racing as she leaned on him for stability. “She used the left lane. You think that was intentional?”

“Bitch.” Was all Hastings had to say in the direction of the Tin Lizzy.

It seemed to honk in response.