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joan_of_bark“As long as you don’t kill anybody, this is going to be the best weekend ever!”
Janet-from-HR was an optimist the kind of which Pam had never met before. She kept her mouth shut, staring out at the horizon, as their destination approached one mile at a time.
“Morning sun salutations, a juice cleanse, one-on-one aura consultations,” Janet babbled on. Something occurred to her at that point, though, because she looked up from her phone and said, “Can you please wait to burn it all down until after the juice cleanse?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” Pam said idly, looking out the window. “I smell high-end patchouli oil–”
“WE’RE THERE!” Janet bellowed, rolling down her own window with glee. “Look! Outdoor yoga classes!”
Pam pulled into the parking lot and turned off the engine. She followed Janet out, to the large outdoor stage labeled ‘Glop’, whatever the hell that meant. Janet’s wellness guru, whatever her name was, was already up on stage, rambling on about getting healthy and healing the earth to an army of mostly-women sitting in the grass.
She’d only been here for a minute, and she could already tell this had been a mistake. This was annoying, Pam reflected, as she sat down in the grass. But not malicious. The Green had no enemies here. Only half-conscious, misguided disciples.
“I have to listen to this for two days?” she sighed.
“Yeah,” Janet beamed. “Isn’t it great?”
Sure. Great. That’s why Janet’s big hero was up there, talking about how she was so devoted to the earth that her company used recycled fibres in its free tote bags. Consuming your way responsibly into a better earth? Sure.
“What a fraud,” Pam muttered under her breath.
Beside her, Janet’s head turned, confusion written all over her face. “What? Heal the earth, we’re all connected– isn’t this totally your jam?”
Jesus christ. Janet had no idea, did she? “My what?” Pam snapped. “You seriously think this overpriced self-care word salad is the same thing as what I do?”
“Well, yeah,” Janet muttered. “Only with less murder.”
“This is hell,” Pam muttered back. “I’m in hell.”
She needed to get out of here before she snapped and did kill somebody.
So she went for a walk. Strolled along the grass, and took in the complex - if you could call it that. It was mostly old farmhouses, dressed up for the occasion, a large field set aside for the yoga. Her eyes passed over all of it, thinking about the amount of money and resources would have had to go into setting up something like this, the wasted earth–
–and then her eyes caught on the slip of three gnarled wooden fingers, vanishing into a barn.
No. It couldn’t be. Woodrue was dead.
She broke into a run, yanking open the door to the farmhouse and slipping inside. Woodrue. Where–
“Can I help you?”
The server gave her a pointed stare, a collection of canapes on the plate in his hand.
“I saw a man– a tree– come into this barn,” Pam stammered, knowing just by the look on his face that he hadn’t seen a damn thing and she looked like a madwoman right now.
“A what?” the server said. “No one’s been in here but staff. And we’re technically not open for guests until lunchtime. So if you would just–”
Pam brushed him aside, ignoring his annoyed screeching as she turned to the barn. No, if Woodrue were here, there’d be more of a panic. He’d be obvious. So…
“I’m losing my mind,” she muttered.
“Hi.” This server was a tall woman, a professional smile on her face. “Gwen’s just finishing her speech, the rest of the guests will be here soon, so you can stick around if you want.” She held out a plate with a set of green drinks on it. “Would you like a glass of adaptogenic green juice while you wait?”
Pam looked up. “A what?”
“Maca powder, celery juice, and a proprietary wild-foraged combination of mushroom elixirs.”
Jesus christ. She swiped a glass from the plate. She had half a mind to just take all of them. “You have to be careful with wild-foraged mushrooms,” she said, eyeing the glass. “One wrong one and you’re in for a bad night.”
“We’re very careful,” the woman assured her.
She stared into the glass. Swipe them all, set fire to the barn, warn– okay. Maybe Janet had a point. Maybe she should loosen up. Unwind. Relax. Remember that the man who made her couldn’t hurt her anymore.
And, well. What was the point of being immune to toxins if you couldn’t drink some dubious green juice every once in a while?
She took a sip. Yeah… definitely dubious.
Janet manifested herself back into the room a few moments later, enthusiastically rambling on about Gwendolyn’s stupid wellness routine. Pam rolled her eyes through it, muttered, “If I had to listen to five more minutes than that, I would’ve turned somebody into compost.”
“Sometimes I wonder if you actually mean half the things you say,” Janet said, and downed her own weird green juice. (At least Pam would be able to look out for her if they had made a mistake with the mushrooms.)
You couldn’t blame people like Janet. Not really. Everyone wants the solution to this to be easy. To save the world by drinking smoothies and recycling. Because the disruption required to create real change is frighten–
Was she seeing something from the corner of her eye? A strange blur of red on the edge of her vision…
“Does it look weird here to you?” she said, cutting through some rambling about chia seeds.
“Weird how?”
“I’m getting some peripheral distortion.”
Janet held up her hand. She stared at it. “Now that you mention it… I do feel a little weird.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. The mushroom elixirs. Pam poured the remaining measure of green juice onto the floor. “I knew this was a bad idea.” Never listen to people telling you to relax. “Stop drinking that right now.”
“But it’s so good!” Janet protested.
Except when Pam looked up, Janet’s face was grossly distorted, bulging, twisting. She was rambling something about how it was good to give up control sometimes, to let go. Well, getting high on mystery mushrooms wasn’t high up on Pam’s list for that.
“Seattle and Fandom were letting go,” she said flatly.
“Those were you punishing yourself!” Janet snapped. “They were you hiding! Not just from me, but from everybody!”
“Who’s in charge here?” Pam said, pulling herself away from Janet - and the whole stupid conversation. “We need to do something before all of these people get a critical dose of what’s in that juice…”
“It’s okay to let people in,” Janet said, following after her. “You think it’s only Harley who cares about you, but it’s not.”
Of course not.
There was Adrian, too.
“What if I’ve been hallucinating this whole time?” Pam wondered, “What if it started when I thought–”
A hand fell on her arm. Janet yanked, pulled, and then there were soft lips on hers.
Oh.
(Wasn’t this getting familiar?)
“What’s all this?” Pam croaked, staring into Janet’s big blues.
“You must know how I feel about you,” Janet said. “I’ve wanted you since you stood over me in the wreckage of that chemical plant, deciding whether I would live or die.” She looked down at Pam’s hand. “Please. Let me in. Just for a little while.”
They were high on mushrooms, Pam thought distantly. This was a very bad idea. Her thoughts drifted to Harley, both Harleys, poor Harley-not-Harley who she left standing on the steps of the store all by herself– and around her the world twisted, confusing, acid green filtering into her perception–
She and Janet were kissing again, she realized dimly. Somewhere in the flurry Janet’s shirt disappeared. Someone yelled ‘I’m weird but I’m free.’ Someone was kissing. Someone walked past in a horse mask. Everyone was kissing.
(Harley would understand. She knew what it was like to get caught up in the moment. She’d tell Harley about it. They’d laugh about it. Harley, Harley, Harley… Warm hands and the guilt creeping into her skin…)
“You’re like… this whole other world inside the body of a beautiful woman…”
Harley? No. Janet.
And Janet’s arms around her, pulling her close.
“I wish I could stay like this forever,” Janet sighed, her mouth warm against the line of Pam’s neck, and Pam sighed, and held the back of her head, and thought: there is no forever.
Thought: everything ends.
Thought: this will be over soon enough.
Thought: there’s always a plot twist.
(This time, it wore white. Gwendolyn Caltrope, sweeping in from the back of the barn, a knowing smile on her face.)
Thought: this wasn’t a mistake. This is part of something bigger.
“I hope you’re all enjoying yourself!” Caltrope called, her face all smiles as she looked at the mess of an orgy she’d just orchestrated. Pam wiped at her mouth and looked at the woman still plastered all over her. She felt a measure of disgust– not for Janet, but for this.
“Part of the Glop mission is realizing we’re all connected,” Caltrope said. “Like a mycelial network, each person is a unique node of existence, reaching out with tendrils of thought and energy towards every node around her. Mushrooms have so much to teach us!”
With the hallucinations fading, it was much easier to get a sense of the room. People in the corners seemed restless. Alarmed, even. Good. Not that it seemed to stop Caltrope, who was sweeping through and sharing her bullshit with everyone, talking about…
Wait.
There was something on her arm.
Pam frowned, nudging Janet aside. Yes. There. Right in the middle of Caltrope’s middle arm, a perfect pink bud of– lamia.
Shit.
This really was part of something bigger.
The plot twist was Pam.
Across the room, people started to scream, to shriek. Bubbles of lamia fruits and hyphae burst out from exposed skin, rapidly multiplying. There’s a reason I had trouble resisting the hallucinogenic properties of that green goop, Pam realized. “Wild-foraged mushrooms…”
She looked at Janet and blanched. The blonde, too, was covered in lamia, tendrils winding their way around her wrists, her arms. Yet she didn’t seem shocked, she just poked at it gently. Talking about how it felt like the first time she’d met Pam. About how lucky everyone else was to get to experience it.
Shit.
“Damn it,” Pam cursed. “Damn it.” She pulled her overall back into place. In all her wandering, in all her vanity, she’d forgotten something critical about the laws of nature.
“Did I do something wrong?” Janet asked, grabbing for her shirt.
“No, I did something wrong,” Pam said, as she pulled open the door.
“You mean sleeping with me.”
“... Okay, I did several things wrong,” Pam said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “But I was thinking of something else. Something I should have figured out a while ago: nothing you cook up in a lab stays in a lab. Things taken from nature will find a way to get back to nature. The strain of lamia that’s been adapting and evolving inside of my body… it’s gotten out. It’s growing wild.”
Which meant they were all fucked.
“I feel a second high coming on,” Janet said weakly, her eyes drawn to her hands again.
“That’s your liver,” Pam said, quieter. “The chemicals in the lamia that make you hallucinate go through your liver twice.”
And Janet wasn’t alone. Around them, all those lamia-covered people, they were being swept up in it again. Their panic fading. A man rolled and rocked around on the ground. Women grabbed at each other, held each other, hugged.
“Why can’t it be like this all the time?” Janet asked dreamily. “Why does it take mushrooms for us to be nice to each other?”
Pam really should do something soon. She sighed. “Do you want the poetic answer, or the scientific one?”
“I don’t know,” Janet said. “Both?”
“The scientific answer is that we need a lot more dopamine than our brain usually supplies to be this cooperative,” Pam said wryly. “The poetic answer…” She watched the lamia drift past her. If it wasn’t such a deadly fungus, she might even agree with Janet. That it was pretty. Nice. “Is that we’re so bound up in our own nonsense that we need permission to be this nice. And chemicals give us permission.”
“Maybe we could just stay like this…”
That was the last thing that came out of Janet’s mouth. She slumped to the floor, a blissful smile on her face, lamia winding its way up and up and up around her body.
“Janet!” Pam shrieked, diving down to her side. “Get up! Come on! Open your eyes! Stand up!”
The lamia was a deadly fungus. But it didn’t usually work this fast. What had they–
Abruptly, Janet’s body jerked. She pushed up to her feet, her motions wooden. Unnatural. The sound that came out of her smelled like the forest.
Pam took a step back. Lamia mushrooms. The poisonous little things..
She heard another noise, a wet ungh, and she twisted around to face it. Face them. An army of party animals, standing upright, staring at her with empty eyes. As if they were waiting for instructions.
Shit.
Caltrope had said something about the mycelial network. The neural interface of a fungal colony. And Woodrue had warned her that the purpose of the lamia wasn’t deadly– it was surveillance.
It suddenly made sense.
A mycelial network allows the colony to communicate in ways humanity doesn’t understand. This strain of the lamia might have escaped into the wild– but clearly, it was still connected to her. Pam was its center. Its mother.
With all her little children now arrayed around her. Obeying her every command.
She could think of a few ways to use them.
[[ taken and adapted from G. Willow Wilson’s Poison Ivy, issues #10 and #11. Nfb, nfi, tw for nonconsenting use of hallucinogenics. One more post to go for this one! ]]
Janet-from-HR was an optimist the kind of which Pam had never met before. She kept her mouth shut, staring out at the horizon, as their destination approached one mile at a time.
“Morning sun salutations, a juice cleanse, one-on-one aura consultations,” Janet babbled on. Something occurred to her at that point, though, because she looked up from her phone and said, “Can you please wait to burn it all down until after the juice cleanse?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” Pam said idly, looking out the window. “I smell high-end patchouli oil–”
“WE’RE THERE!” Janet bellowed, rolling down her own window with glee. “Look! Outdoor yoga classes!”
Pam pulled into the parking lot and turned off the engine. She followed Janet out, to the large outdoor stage labeled ‘Glop’, whatever the hell that meant. Janet’s wellness guru, whatever her name was, was already up on stage, rambling on about getting healthy and healing the earth to an army of mostly-women sitting in the grass.
She’d only been here for a minute, and she could already tell this had been a mistake. This was annoying, Pam reflected, as she sat down in the grass. But not malicious. The Green had no enemies here. Only half-conscious, misguided disciples.
“I have to listen to this for two days?” she sighed.
“Yeah,” Janet beamed. “Isn’t it great?”
Sure. Great. That’s why Janet’s big hero was up there, talking about how she was so devoted to the earth that her company used recycled fibres in its free tote bags. Consuming your way responsibly into a better earth? Sure.
“What a fraud,” Pam muttered under her breath.
Beside her, Janet’s head turned, confusion written all over her face. “What? Heal the earth, we’re all connected– isn’t this totally your jam?”
Jesus christ. Janet had no idea, did she? “My what?” Pam snapped. “You seriously think this overpriced self-care word salad is the same thing as what I do?”
“Well, yeah,” Janet muttered. “Only with less murder.”
“This is hell,” Pam muttered back. “I’m in hell.”
She needed to get out of here before she snapped and did kill somebody.
So she went for a walk. Strolled along the grass, and took in the complex - if you could call it that. It was mostly old farmhouses, dressed up for the occasion, a large field set aside for the yoga. Her eyes passed over all of it, thinking about the amount of money and resources would have had to go into setting up something like this, the wasted earth–
–and then her eyes caught on the slip of three gnarled wooden fingers, vanishing into a barn.
No. It couldn’t be. Woodrue was dead.
She broke into a run, yanking open the door to the farmhouse and slipping inside. Woodrue. Where–
“Can I help you?”
The server gave her a pointed stare, a collection of canapes on the plate in his hand.
“I saw a man– a tree– come into this barn,” Pam stammered, knowing just by the look on his face that he hadn’t seen a damn thing and she looked like a madwoman right now.
“A what?” the server said. “No one’s been in here but staff. And we’re technically not open for guests until lunchtime. So if you would just–”
Pam brushed him aside, ignoring his annoyed screeching as she turned to the barn. No, if Woodrue were here, there’d be more of a panic. He’d be obvious. So…
“I’m losing my mind,” she muttered.
“Hi.” This server was a tall woman, a professional smile on her face. “Gwen’s just finishing her speech, the rest of the guests will be here soon, so you can stick around if you want.” She held out a plate with a set of green drinks on it. “Would you like a glass of adaptogenic green juice while you wait?”
Pam looked up. “A what?”
“Maca powder, celery juice, and a proprietary wild-foraged combination of mushroom elixirs.”
Jesus christ. She swiped a glass from the plate. She had half a mind to just take all of them. “You have to be careful with wild-foraged mushrooms,” she said, eyeing the glass. “One wrong one and you’re in for a bad night.”
“We’re very careful,” the woman assured her.
She stared into the glass. Swipe them all, set fire to the barn, warn– okay. Maybe Janet had a point. Maybe she should loosen up. Unwind. Relax. Remember that the man who made her couldn’t hurt her anymore.
And, well. What was the point of being immune to toxins if you couldn’t drink some dubious green juice every once in a while?
She took a sip. Yeah… definitely dubious.
Janet manifested herself back into the room a few moments later, enthusiastically rambling on about Gwendolyn’s stupid wellness routine. Pam rolled her eyes through it, muttered, “If I had to listen to five more minutes than that, I would’ve turned somebody into compost.”
“Sometimes I wonder if you actually mean half the things you say,” Janet said, and downed her own weird green juice. (At least Pam would be able to look out for her if they had made a mistake with the mushrooms.)
You couldn’t blame people like Janet. Not really. Everyone wants the solution to this to be easy. To save the world by drinking smoothies and recycling. Because the disruption required to create real change is frighten–
Was she seeing something from the corner of her eye? A strange blur of red on the edge of her vision…
“Does it look weird here to you?” she said, cutting through some rambling about chia seeds.
“Weird how?”
“I’m getting some peripheral distortion.”
Janet held up her hand. She stared at it. “Now that you mention it… I do feel a little weird.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. The mushroom elixirs. Pam poured the remaining measure of green juice onto the floor. “I knew this was a bad idea.” Never listen to people telling you to relax. “Stop drinking that right now.”
“But it’s so good!” Janet protested.
Except when Pam looked up, Janet’s face was grossly distorted, bulging, twisting. She was rambling something about how it was good to give up control sometimes, to let go. Well, getting high on mystery mushrooms wasn’t high up on Pam’s list for that.
“Seattle and Fandom were letting go,” she said flatly.
“Those were you punishing yourself!” Janet snapped. “They were you hiding! Not just from me, but from everybody!”
“Who’s in charge here?” Pam said, pulling herself away from Janet - and the whole stupid conversation. “We need to do something before all of these people get a critical dose of what’s in that juice…”
“It’s okay to let people in,” Janet said, following after her. “You think it’s only Harley who cares about you, but it’s not.”
Of course not.
There was Adrian, too.
“What if I’ve been hallucinating this whole time?” Pam wondered, “What if it started when I thought–”
A hand fell on her arm. Janet yanked, pulled, and then there were soft lips on hers.
Oh.
(Wasn’t this getting familiar?)
“What’s all this?” Pam croaked, staring into Janet’s big blues.
“You must know how I feel about you,” Janet said. “I’ve wanted you since you stood over me in the wreckage of that chemical plant, deciding whether I would live or die.” She looked down at Pam’s hand. “Please. Let me in. Just for a little while.”
They were high on mushrooms, Pam thought distantly. This was a very bad idea. Her thoughts drifted to Harley, both Harleys, poor Harley-not-Harley who she left standing on the steps of the store all by herself– and around her the world twisted, confusing, acid green filtering into her perception–
She and Janet were kissing again, she realized dimly. Somewhere in the flurry Janet’s shirt disappeared. Someone yelled ‘I’m weird but I’m free.’ Someone was kissing. Someone walked past in a horse mask. Everyone was kissing.
(Harley would understand. She knew what it was like to get caught up in the moment. She’d tell Harley about it. They’d laugh about it. Harley, Harley, Harley… Warm hands and the guilt creeping into her skin…)
“You’re like… this whole other world inside the body of a beautiful woman…”
Harley? No. Janet.
And Janet’s arms around her, pulling her close.
“I wish I could stay like this forever,” Janet sighed, her mouth warm against the line of Pam’s neck, and Pam sighed, and held the back of her head, and thought: there is no forever.
Thought: everything ends.
Thought: this will be over soon enough.
Thought: there’s always a plot twist.
(This time, it wore white. Gwendolyn Caltrope, sweeping in from the back of the barn, a knowing smile on her face.)
Thought: this wasn’t a mistake. This is part of something bigger.
“I hope you’re all enjoying yourself!” Caltrope called, her face all smiles as she looked at the mess of an orgy she’d just orchestrated. Pam wiped at her mouth and looked at the woman still plastered all over her. She felt a measure of disgust– not for Janet, but for this.
“Part of the Glop mission is realizing we’re all connected,” Caltrope said. “Like a mycelial network, each person is a unique node of existence, reaching out with tendrils of thought and energy towards every node around her. Mushrooms have so much to teach us!”
With the hallucinations fading, it was much easier to get a sense of the room. People in the corners seemed restless. Alarmed, even. Good. Not that it seemed to stop Caltrope, who was sweeping through and sharing her bullshit with everyone, talking about…
Wait.
There was something on her arm.
Pam frowned, nudging Janet aside. Yes. There. Right in the middle of Caltrope’s middle arm, a perfect pink bud of– lamia.
Shit.
This really was part of something bigger.
The plot twist was Pam.
Across the room, people started to scream, to shriek. Bubbles of lamia fruits and hyphae burst out from exposed skin, rapidly multiplying. There’s a reason I had trouble resisting the hallucinogenic properties of that green goop, Pam realized. “Wild-foraged mushrooms…”
She looked at Janet and blanched. The blonde, too, was covered in lamia, tendrils winding their way around her wrists, her arms. Yet she didn’t seem shocked, she just poked at it gently. Talking about how it felt like the first time she’d met Pam. About how lucky everyone else was to get to experience it.
Shit.
“Damn it,” Pam cursed. “Damn it.” She pulled her overall back into place. In all her wandering, in all her vanity, she’d forgotten something critical about the laws of nature.
“Did I do something wrong?” Janet asked, grabbing for her shirt.
“No, I did something wrong,” Pam said, as she pulled open the door.
“You mean sleeping with me.”
“... Okay, I did several things wrong,” Pam said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “But I was thinking of something else. Something I should have figured out a while ago: nothing you cook up in a lab stays in a lab. Things taken from nature will find a way to get back to nature. The strain of lamia that’s been adapting and evolving inside of my body… it’s gotten out. It’s growing wild.”
Which meant they were all fucked.
“I feel a second high coming on,” Janet said weakly, her eyes drawn to her hands again.
“That’s your liver,” Pam said, quieter. “The chemicals in the lamia that make you hallucinate go through your liver twice.”
And Janet wasn’t alone. Around them, all those lamia-covered people, they were being swept up in it again. Their panic fading. A man rolled and rocked around on the ground. Women grabbed at each other, held each other, hugged.
“Why can’t it be like this all the time?” Janet asked dreamily. “Why does it take mushrooms for us to be nice to each other?”
Pam really should do something soon. She sighed. “Do you want the poetic answer, or the scientific one?”
“I don’t know,” Janet said. “Both?”
“The scientific answer is that we need a lot more dopamine than our brain usually supplies to be this cooperative,” Pam said wryly. “The poetic answer…” She watched the lamia drift past her. If it wasn’t such a deadly fungus, she might even agree with Janet. That it was pretty. Nice. “Is that we’re so bound up in our own nonsense that we need permission to be this nice. And chemicals give us permission.”
“Maybe we could just stay like this…”
That was the last thing that came out of Janet’s mouth. She slumped to the floor, a blissful smile on her face, lamia winding its way up and up and up around her body.
“Janet!” Pam shrieked, diving down to her side. “Get up! Come on! Open your eyes! Stand up!”
The lamia was a deadly fungus. But it didn’t usually work this fast. What had they–
Abruptly, Janet’s body jerked. She pushed up to her feet, her motions wooden. Unnatural. The sound that came out of her smelled like the forest.
Pam took a step back. Lamia mushrooms. The poisonous little things..
She heard another noise, a wet ungh, and she twisted around to face it. Face them. An army of party animals, standing upright, staring at her with empty eyes. As if they were waiting for instructions.
Shit.
Caltrope had said something about the mycelial network. The neural interface of a fungal colony. And Woodrue had warned her that the purpose of the lamia wasn’t deadly– it was surveillance.
It suddenly made sense.
A mycelial network allows the colony to communicate in ways humanity doesn’t understand. This strain of the lamia might have escaped into the wild– but clearly, it was still connected to her. Pam was its center. Its mother.
With all her little children now arrayed around her. Obeying her every command.
She could think of a few ways to use them.
[[ taken and adapted from G. Willow Wilson’s Poison Ivy, issues #10 and #11. Nfb, nfi, tw for nonconsenting use of hallucinogenics. One more post to go for this one! ]]
