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Path to Nowhere (14) : There are many parks in Destiny City, and if you’re willing to venture to the outskirts of the city you can find an incredibly vast forest system. It’s unlikely that anyone has explored every inch of the forest, but it’s still odd when a strange path into the forest suddenly appears in an area that you thought you knew pretty well. Where there was once just a wall of trees, now there is a faded wooden board with an old fashioned, thatched roof with a thick layer of moss. Pinned to the board, behind broken glass, is yellowed paper. The portrait of a woman wearing vintage clothes watches you with an eerie smile. A map used to be here; you can see where the corners are pinned, but someone has torn it out. A few dried flowers are pinned to the board. Someone has pinned a message that says ‘DO NOT ENTER’ and ‘DANGER’. The path is eerie but doesn’t appear dangerous otherwise. Dark shadows fill the space between the trees, and sometimes you can make out mushroom covered logs in the distance. Many flowers grow but they all appear half wilted or dying. The path winds on for what feels like forever once you are on it. If you’re lucky you can turn around and find your way out, but once you start walking, the path seems like it forever winds. You can walk until you collapse, or until you fall asleep. If you make it into the heart of the forest, you will find a giant tree with branches so heavy that they droop towards the ground, and a strange, bright-eyed owl that watches you from the branches. It’s too dark to see beyond that; regardless of the time of day it was when you entered, it always appears to be nighttime here. A slow breeze disrupts a sea of half-dead dandelions, and suddenly white wisps swirl around you and your vision fades. Whether you exhausted yourself trying to get out, or if you made it to the heart of the forest, you cannot escape the wave of sleep that falls upon you. When you wake up, you’ll be in your bed but you won’t remember how you got there. You can find the path again, if luck wills it, but all trips end up the same.
Naeria was almost constantly out in the woods. This was the best place to observe species in their natural habitat. Summer wasn't the active season for most mushrooms, although she could find chicken of the woods growing at the bases of dead trees, and sometimes chantrelles, but there were other species that were also beginning to catch her attention. Slime molds were fascinating, and she wanted to study them farther.
Insects loved this time of year, though, and they were what had most of Naeria's attention today. She knelt at the base of a tree, gun slung over her shoulder, just in case, and she watched the way that multiple flies had settled on the body of some small rodent. These were the first line of defense in Earth's efficient system of decomposition. Later, fungi and bacteria and maybe plants would take over, but not until these creatures had had their fill.
If she was going to introduce a system to break down waste on Velencya, would it be helpful to include some of these? This was the thought that had her taking notes on her ComTech for a good quarter of an hour before she looked up, and that was when she saw the most beautiful lichen that she had ever seen. It had to be at least a foot across.
With a soft gasp, she trotted over to it, walking past the Do Not Enter sign, and the strange drawing, which she disregarded, as she always did. Humans were wrong, thinking they could own land.
tatterpixie
