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“Don’t!” Garin raised a hand, still gasping and panting. “Don’t come any closer. We don’t—” he ducked his head as he hacked “—don’t know what this is.”
“Are you hurt? Did you break anything? Can you breathe?” Sazahk forcibly glued his boots to the dirt floor, rapidly cataloging everything in his field of view.
“No, no, and yes. Mostly.” Garin climbed to his feet in a cloud of glowing particles the same hue as the spongy fungus-looking structure that had cushioned his fall. The tiny particulates zipped up Garin’s nose as he breathed.
“You shouldn’t be breathing that.” Sazahk watched the particles settle on Garin’s hair and clothes, softening his outline with their glow. The frilly structure continued pulsing with light as Garin untangled himself from it, but already the light from the far side of the cavern faded.
“Too late.” Garin stumbled out onto open ground, keeping his distance from Sazahk. He brushed at his clothes and everywhere he touched, the dust lit up again and fell off. “What the hell is this stuff?”
“Spores, I think.” Sazahk lifted his shirt to cover his nose and mouth and approached for a closer look. “I believe you landed in the fruiting body of a mycelium-based fungus.” Sazahk experimentally brushed Garin’s chest, and the spores lit up again. “Their bioluminescence is triggered by external stimuli.”
“And what the hell was that?” Garin looked up at the shaft and the frayed end of their rope, swaying far out of reach.
“An animal of some sort, but that’s all I can say with any amount of certainty.” Sazahk’s cheerful fascination with the glowing spores took a hit at the reminder of his failure to observe anything of note on the only fauna he’d come across, but he shrugged it off. “Let me sample you.”
For some reason, Garin blushed as Sazahk grabbed his wrist and dragged him to their bags.
“You said you can breathe?” Sazahk launched into questions as he pulled out his kit. “Normally? Deeply? Shallowly?”
“Um.” Garin took a few experimental inhales. “All of the above.”
“How’s your vision?” Sazahk swabbed one of Garin’s eyebrows and picked up the spores caught in the dark hairs. He gave up on covering his own nose and mouth, the vast majority of the particulates having settled out of the air.
“Fine. I can see normally.”
“Sense of smell?”
“Intact.”
“Taste?”
“Normal, I think. Hard to tell.”
Sazahk circled Garin, prodding at his sides and tilting his head to get a look at the spores gathered under his collar. His skin was hot to the touch, but Sazahk wrote that off as typical human heat.
“You getting what you need?” Garin stayed obediently still as Sazahk swabbed different patches of skin.
“Almost. I just want your nose and mouth.” Sazahk held up two more cotton tipped sticks and Garin grimaced but tilted his head back for Sazahk to swab his nostril and opened his mouth for Sazahk to get the inside of his cheek. “Wonderful. Truly fascinating. I couldn’t have imagined a better introduction to this cave system.”
“I could have,” Garin muttered as he pulled his pack on.
Sazahk snapped his kit closed with a guilty gray coloring his fingers. “Right, of course. I didn’t mean that I wanted you to be exposed to an unknown organic substance or to be attacked. You truly are feeling normal now, though, correct?”
Garin didn’t meet his eyes as he adjusted the weight of his pack on his shoulders. “Normal enough.”
Sazahk shouldered his own pack with a frown. “Garin, are you experiencing symptoms you haven’t disclosed to me?”
“No.” Garin deliberately made eye contact and shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
Sazahk gave the man a once over. He stood the same as he had before. He had no obvious limp and didn’t favor any one side. He was dirty and sweaty, but that was to be expected. All the remaining spores on him had stopped glowing. He looked normal, but the tension around his eyes made Sazahk uneasy.
“If you don’t want any samples of this room, we should get going.” Garin jerked his head at a gap in the far wall, lit by faintly glowing tendrils. “That rope’s done for, so we have to find another way out of these caves.”
“I thought you already planned a route with an alternate exit.” Sazahk lead the way toward the passage, stopping next to a small thread of glowing green to snip it off and stow it in a plastic tube.
“I did, but I was hoping to preserve a confirmed exit.” Garin trailed after him. “I don’t know how accurate these maps are.”
Sazahk decided not to take on that particular concern. Garin was capable of being more than concerned enough for the both of them. Instead, he busied himself with snapping photographs with his tablet of the mycelium crawling across the cave floor and clipping samples from everything he could get his hands on.
