Cordyceps Eighteen
Cordyceps Eighteen
We had a free period after Wandsmithing. I stayed in the class as long as I could, however, chatting with the other students, and especially Alexander Blackwood. Unfortunately, he wasn’t terribly talkative, and I didn’t get much out of him, especially not the sort of undying friendship that would lead him to inviting me into his unguarded home.
Oh well, I wasn’t expecting it to be easy. In any case, I had a whole year to get closer to the boy, so for now a nice, neutral relationship was a good place to start.
Once Cain got tired of us and ushered us out of the club room, I slowly made my way back to the dorms. The last period on Monday was open for me. Some of the other Dragons no doubt had electives in this timeslot, but my schedule was nice and free.
Free time was going to be a premium, I imagined. We hadn’t been given homework yet, but that was only a matter of time. Too many brats with too much free time would be a nightmare for the staff, so I imagined they’d want to curtail that.
In any case, I could use the time for my own projects.
But first, I needed a place for those.
I didn’t return to my rooms in the dorms. Instead I wandered around the first floor, nodding politely to upper-year students and pushing a small but steady amount of mana into my stealthier skills so that I wouldn’t be noticed.
How had I ever lived without [Unnoticeable]?
On the other hand, that same skill was making some of my more introverted tendencies significantly worse. Oh well. I’d have to just make a conscious effort to avoid pushing that too far.
Finding a good place to grow mushrooms in the dorms was proving tricky. There were some larger, communal bathrooms on the ground floor that were humid enough. I opened the tank at the back of a toilet and fished out some select spores to spread within.
I was using more common ones for that, however.
The utility closet on the second floor had some mops and buckets and such, and it was nice and dark within as well, but the space was tiny, and I didn’t want to put anything lethal in there.
In the end I ended up outside, walking a big circle around the dorms until I noticed a door at the rear that I’d almost missed. It had shrubs growing on either side of it, and no clear path leading to it. No windows, nothing to make it stand out.
It was, of course, locked. But locking technology in this day and age left a lot to be desired. I had a small paper-clip like piece of wire that I could maybe pick the lock with.
But that would take time. So Instead I twisted the handle hard, then wedged the hard front cover of one of my notebooks into the gap between the lock and the door, pushing in the latch. That was a little trick that Grey had shown me once, and it worked perfectly here.
The door opened up into a staircase leading down, with several spiderwebs hanging across the low ceiling and a yawning chasm of darkness at the bottom.
Shrugging, I stepped in.
Another child might have worried about the monsters in the dark, but not to make too fine a point of it, I tended to think of myself as that monster.
Still, when I reached the bottom of the stairs and looked around, I found that I was in a basement with a ceiling that would force an adult to stoop uncomfortably.
There was something making a strange, rumbling noise to one side, and plenty of pipes. I spun as one of them rattled and water sloshed through. Had someone above flushed? Interesting. The air was warm and a little on the dry side, which I found unusual for a basement, especially one with a dirt floor and stone walls like this one.
Ducking down, I moved closer to a small, dirt-stained window in one corner, wiping webs away from my face as I went. With that bit of light, I was able to find one of my mycelium containers and I placed a small length of it in a crack in the wall. The walls were cooler than the air in the room, more humid as well.
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Perfect!
Pushing a healthy amount of magic into the little mycelium, I encouraged it to grow, and I could feel its little tendrils pushing up and out and deeper into the wall. Very soon, there was a small lump that carefully, slowly, grew.
I continued to coax magic into it over the course of a long half hour until I had a small mushroom that I carefully plucked free and chomped down on.
[Purple Capped Night Watcher] Rare
This rare mushroom is only found in areas with a particular kind of predatory animal, notably creatures who stalk and predate on others using magical means in unlit environments. While very mildly poisonous, this mushroom allows those who eat it to see in the dark, amplifying natural night vision. Used in several alchemical concoctions.
One of my go-to mushrooms, and one whose flavour I’d grown to enjoy. At this point, the mild toxicity of it was a joke to me.
I blinked a few times, scanning the room even as I saw the shadows receding.
“Ah,” I said as I noticed what had been making that noise. There was a large boiler of some sort in the corner. A big all-metal thing that I imagined was a pain to fit into this basement.
That explained the dryness of the air.
I wandered around the basement with a lot more surety now that I could see my way around. The space was respectably big, with several brick pillars and a few walls dividing the space up. Those nooks tended to be filled with old handyman supplies. Cans of paint and oil and whatever. There was a very peculiar smell down there too. Burnt dust and old mould, especially next to the cistern in the far rear corner.
There were some pipes leading into the cistern from the wall, and I guessed that it was being filled from rainwater, as well as from what looked like a pump with hoses going to a capped well in the opposite corner. A plunger mechanism seemed to activate the pump.
It was damned near perfect. If this was being used as water for all the sinks and showers and baths, then I could poison half the school’s population with one misplaced mushroom.
But that wasn’t my goal down here. What I was looking for was a place to start a modest little farm.
This basement would do it.
I found some old boxes, shifted them around to create a more enclosed space in one of the darker corners, then I planted some mycelium that I knew would agree with each other in that hidden little spot.
Soon I had a fresh crop of some of my favourites growing. Deadly poisons, far less deadly poisons, a few healing mushrooms, some hallucinogens.
I’d let the last spread their spores in the air. Just enough to make the dust down here more interesting, but not enough to contaminate the cistern. That way someone coming down to explore would quickly find themselves jumping at shadows.
It was a decent plan, I decided as I wiped my hands free.
The last thing I did before leaving was taking a small sample of fresh Dead Man’s Spore dust in a teeny tiny little sewn together packet which had once been a tea bag. I could keep that in my back pocket for a rainy day.
I left the boiler room, brushed off a few cobwebs, then made myself presentable before circling around and reentering the dorm.
“Hey! Gunther!” Montgomery said as I entered the main room. “Want to play a few hands of poker with us?”
“I, ah, don’t know the rules,” I admitted.
“That’s fine, we’ll teach you. We’re not betting anything.”
“Yet!” Milo said. He was one of four boys around a table, looking eager as another that I wasn’t as familiar with shuffled a deck. “Join us, come on.”
“Sure,” I said as I put on an easy smile and joined them.
I could probably use a little break anyway. And an alibi. Those were always terribly useful. We sat around a study table, doing anything but, and Montgomery taught me the rules of poker, then Milo retaught them to me when Montgomery got them all wrong.
Montgomery still ended up taking the figurative pot by the time dinner rolled around. The kid was shrewd that way.
It was fun, and I found myself chuckling along to plenty of immature jokes that nonetheless felt funnier than they should have with this company.
Dinner came around, and then the end of the day.
The next day would have its own challenges, but for now, things were going alright.
***