[centre][h1]An Hour of Fright[/h1][/centre]
[hr]
After visiting the house of healing for the first time, Roja went back again and again. She had stopped drinking at the tavern and felt herself grow braver, stronger. She took initiative during her odd jobs and got more opportunities as time went on. The money she made, she saved to make more trips over to Jezzy, where they would sit down for tea and chats. She would share stories from before her time in the militia, of the people who had been around her growing up, of boyfriends and girlfriends, lovers gained and lost. The two of them shared in laughs and tears, and eventually, the shop became Roja’s second home. She would watch the store while Jezzy was out on errands and whenever she had to wait in line with other customers, she would chat them up and learn about their lives. People of all species came in with heavy hearts and left elated, their clothes always carrying that familiar scent of earthy smoke. They were never many, but so the shop was mostly empty, but the odd person would stroll in every now and then–often they were regulars–and ask for Jezzy. After a time, there came an evening just before Jezzy was about to close that Roja had finally worked up the courage to ask something that had been weighing her heart ever since she had come here for the first time.

“Jezzy?” she asked.

“What is it, Roja?” replied that familiar flannel voice as she took stock of the shelves. 

“Could, could I please start working for you?”

Jezzy balked slightly and turned around. “Come again?”

Roja swallowed. “I… I want to work here. For you.”

Jezzy stood dumbfounded for a blink. “R-Roja, I’m very happy you feel that way and that you’ve come so far, but… I could never pay you. I don’t make enough money to pay myself, almost. Y-you have been one of my best customers, I couldn’t possibly–”

“I’ll work for free!” Roja insisted. Jezzy sighed.

“Then how will you eat, dearie? No, it just wouldn’t work.”

“Please! Please, I beg you. You are the most important person in my life and, and I want to make it up to you for saving me. Please.”

There was a pause, within which Roja dared step a little closer. Jezzy took a deep, contemplative breath. “Alright.” Before Roja could skip into the air with joy, she added, “But you eat what I give you, got it? See if you can fit under the counter. If you can, you’ll sleep there.”

Roja was beside herself. “Oh, thank you, Jezzy! Thankyouthankyouthankyou!” She rushed over to the goblin and hugged her tightly. Jezzy chuckled and hugged her back. They stayed like that for a minute before Jezzy pulled away and flicked a small tear out of her eye.

“Oh my, ‘scuse me,” she said with a sniff. “Sorry, it just… It really makes me happy knowing my treatment actually helps people.” She beamed with pride at the elf, who blushed with a small smile. Jezzy clapped her hands and rubbed them together. “Well, newbie! Guess I ought to show you around.” She paused. “Well, you already know most of the shop, but a little repetition won’t hurt.” Jezzy thus showed her in detail all the items on the shelves, from floral oils to foot ointments. She pointed out each item’s specifications, its producers if it wasn’t herself, and ideal price range.

“If the customers start haggling, play along. As long as this goes for over five, you’ve made a profit.”

She then took her into the neighbouring room where they would drink tea. She showed her the cupboard with the different kinds of incense and explained in detail which she liked to burn at what times of day. The energising, citrusy incense sticks would be burned early in the day, then in the afternoon she would switch to deeper herbal notes, sometimes in combination with different spices. She showed her how to brew tea and how many leaves she would need per cup. She taught her how to make ointments at her workbench, how to grind with the pestle, when to make a poultice and when to make a salve. Finally, they arrived at the hatch in the back of the room.

“And for the grand finale, let me show you the most important room in this building.” She lifted the hatch and descended a small ladder. Roja followed right after and immediately smelled the musty odour of a dank basement. It was a pocket in the world tree, no larger than the room upstairs. The walls looked pocked as though worms had eaten into the wood, only that it had been no worm. The immediate sight that greeted her upon descending, was a miraculous marvel of red and cyan light. Mushrooms as tall as bar stools and as wide as shields filled the room with a dim, but radiating light. The cave had a draft, but it blew away from the hatch above–it was as though there was an unnatural wind in the room. The iridescent glow brushed over the both of them, and her nose filled with an almost oily air that immediately ticked off a reaction in her head. Memories, emotions and dreams all began to circle in her mind, a weaker but still potent version of the vision she had had the first time she had come here. Jezzy noticed her dazzled expression and chuckled. “You feel it too, huh? Yeah, these are the mushrooms that gave you your visions.”

Roja stepped over to one and brushed her hand over it. The mushroom expelled a gentle rhythm, almost like a heartbeat. The surface was slick and moist, and when she pulled her hand away and looked at it, a dim glow remained in the mucus in her palm. “They’re beautiful,” she whispered as she wiped the mucus off on the pant leg. Jezzy nodded proudly.

“Yup! They’re my most important asset. Just a pinch of this in a bowl and some heat, and the customer can meet their dead friends and family, see themselves as gods, experience what it is like to be someone.” She gave Roja a gentle pat on the shoulder. “Then they can put their efforts into making that dream a reality.” Roja nodded and grinned from ear to ear. Jezzy, meanwhile, went over to a small table and took a large knife. She picked up a sharpening stone and gave the knife a few good rubs before she walked over to one of the mushrooms which seemed to have been cut a little before. It glowed a little weaker than the rest. “So,” Jezzy said, placing the knife just over the edge of the cap, “should I ever need to send you down here to prepare a poultice, you will take this knife, make sure it is nice and sharp, and cut a piece no bigger than your thumb–like so.” With expert movement, she cut a finger’s worth of mushroom and caught it in her hand. “Make sure to always cut from the top, as that way, you smear the cap mucus on the inside of the piece. It has a floral smell and intensifies the visions.” Roja paid the utmost attention, taking mental notes with gusto. “After that, you take a pestle,” she made a twisting motion with her hand, “grindgrindgrind and then you tap the side of the bowl, and it’ll begin to conjure heat. It really is that simple.”

After that, Roja took to her tasks quickly. She cleaned and stocked the shelves, took care of the customers while Jezzy tended to her patients. At night, she slept under the counter and for her meals, she drank and ate what Jezzy served her, which was, perhaps not unsurprisingly, much better food than she had been eating up to that point. Vegetable broths, porridges, pottages and stews–Jezzy was a magnanimous host to her, and Roja kept taking mental notes of all the kindnesses she could never repay.

One day, many weeks after she had started, Roja was manning the shop alone. Jezzy was out on an errand, but at this point, this was quite routine. She expected that maybe one or two customers would come by to check in, see if Jezzy was in, but she would just tell them to come back later unless she could offer them any assistance herself. Jezzy had began to teach her simple runes, so to pass the time, Roja would read the modest selection of scrolls on the matter that Jezzy kept in her shelves, practicing how to draw runes with charcoal on the floor. Sometime around noon while she sat behind the counter drawing, she heard the familiar patter of footsteps in the alley outside–a little heavy, perhaps, but it was likely just the shesnouter who was coming back for a second vision. Her first one had encouraged her to leave her current husband for her lover, and Roja couldn’t help but snicker to herself thinking about what it could be this time.

“Welcome to Jezzy’s house of healing,” she presented in a sing-songy voice as she arose from her squat. “How can I assis–”

Her eyes fixed on the shadow opposite of the bead curtain. Against the outside light, it looked like nothing she had ever seen. A pair of round, radiating eyes glowed through the curtain, and the creature entered. It looked like an enormous cylinder, wearing as it did from head to toe a drape. Its eyes were in the middle, so it looked like a walking tent. In all her years, it resembled nothing she had ever encountered, but the eyes awakened within her an uncanny and gradually more panicking vision of the last time she looked into a pair of viciously glowing eyes. 

“C-c-can I help you?”

The creature said nothing. It simply walked up to the counter and stared at her. Roja felt herself shrink. The eyes drilled through her skin and into her soul–it felt literal. It was as though her mind was laid out on the table and the creature flipped through it like a book. She grabbed at her head, her hands pressing against her skull to level out the pressure of an oncoming migraine. It was as if her heart was in her ears, a thundering drum thumping through her mind and rummaging around in search of something. Then the sensation lessened considerably. The creature turned away, the drape now concealing its eyes. It stormed for the tea room next door. Roja was still recovering, but managed to shout, “H-hey, you can’t go in there! Hey!” The creature ignored her completely and stormed through with such vigour that it tore the bead curtain separating the rooms and knocked over a shelf. Vials and jars of oils and ointments shattered against the floor and panic set in for Roja. This creature–she had to subdue it somehow. In the neighbouring room, the creature seemed to squat down to the floor and look around frantically. It had come to steal the mushrooms! 

Instinct overtook her. Roja grabbed a large jar of dry beans and sprinted into the neighbouring room. The creature hardly had time to notice her coming before she hurled the jar at its eyes. The jar pulled the drape off and shattered against the place where the eyes had been. The creature stumbled back in a daze, tried to recover its balance and then tripped. It fell onto the hatch which, being built out of thatch and twigs, snapped under its weight. It tumbled down the ladder and Roja heard a dunk at the bottom. She ran over to look, but stopped halfway as she noticed something familiar among the jar shards and the dry beans on the floor. Were those… Mushroom fibres? She continued over to the hatch and looked down. She could barely keep herself from gagging. There, at the bottom of the ladder, laid some sort of amalgam between a mushroom and a humanoid. It was glowing, just like the mushrooms in the cave, and its glowing eyes had been shut close. Roja descended quickly and inspected the body. The creature had no mouth, but it did have a round spot on its stem on which its eyes sat, giving it an almost face-like feature. Its body plan seemed lithe between the joints, then thick towards the end of the limbs, like it was wearing cones for gloves and shoes. Then there was the cap, which grew out of its head for an additional meter almost, and nearly twice as wide as the body. No wonder it had looked like a barrel under the tarp.

Roja felt her breathing accelerate. She had just killed someone again. Or something. Either way, the Deathguard would come for her soon. For ten minutes straight, she laid curled up on the ground, trying to control her breathing just like Jezzy had taught her to. After that, she paced around, using every fraction of her mind to think of a plan. She eventually got some linen sheets and tied up the creature just in case it would spring back to life. After a while longer, she pushed and pulled it into a corner of the cave. Then she sat down opposite of it, armed with a sharp shard of crushed pottery. 

After what felt like half a day, she heard frantic footsteps upstairs. “Roja?! ROJA?! Roja, are you downstairs?!”

“YES!” she shouted, “AND THERE’S A MONSTER!”

Jezzy came down swiftly and said, “A monster?! What do you–WOAH!” The sight of the mushroom person made her nearly jump her own height into the air. As she moved over to inspect it, Roja began to cry.

“I, I didn’t know what to do, and, and, and it just came in and it was covered and, and then it just stared and me and then it, it just ran into the tearoom and I didn’t–” He broke down when Jezzy came over to console her.

“Oh, Roja, it’s okay. It’s okay.” She pulled her into a tight hug. “Thank the Gods you are alright. When I saw the shop, I worried something awful had happened, and…” She cast a glance over at the creature. “... It seems that it did. I am so sorry, Roja.”

Roja shook her head. “No… No, it’s my fault, I–”

“No. No, this isn’t your fault. This… This is mine.”

Roja blinked and wiped her swollen eyes. “Huh?”

Jezzy let her go and walked over to the creature. She scraped a palmful of dim mucus off a nearby mushroom and drew a set of runes in a crescent around the unconscious creature. “... I have encountered this creature before.” When done, she twisted her hand and bars of light shot up from the runes. “There… That should keep it from escaping.”

Roja furrowed her brow and frowned at her. “Wait, so you’re telling me you know this thing?”

“No, not… Exactly. I don’t know [i]what[/i] it is, but… I know what it came here for.” She gestured around to the mushrooms in the room. “This is its home.”

Roja balked. “What?”

A sigh. “Years ago, I had just opened my shop here in Arbor, but back then it was a leatherworker’s shop. See, my father–Voi preserve him–had a shop in the Underground, making all sorts of tunics, vests, aprons and whatnot. He taught me the trade ever since I could hold an awl.” She glanced to the side. “But here in Arbor, well… Leather comes from animals and that means that at some point, that animal must have died. Now it’s not illegal to work or wear leather, but you know as well as me that it’s a bit… Unsavory.” Roja conceded a nod. “So that’s why I set up shop here in the alley, where only clientele who knew who I was, would ever think to look.” She then pointed to the hole over which the hatch had been laid. “Then one day, in that exact spot, I stepped on a moist part of my floor. Before I knew it, the floor gave in and I fell down into this hole. It was here that I, uh, found the colony.” 

She took in a deep breath and walked over to sit down next to Roja. She patted the ground for her to join her, which she did in a sheepish manner. “I remember the exact moment I fell. I held a length of linen in my hand–part of a tunic I was reinforcing–and as I fell down, the air was just greasy with this earthy musk, the very same that you smell when making the mushroom poultice. This place must have been overflowing with spores. That’s what the grease on the air is, I think: spores.” As if to demonstrate, she shook one of the nearby mushrooms and they both watched it release a dimly glowing cloud. “Then came the visions, oh the visions. I saw my birth, then a hundred different lives, then a thousand different deaths. I was a queen, a beggar, a warrior, a leatherworker. I was a priestess of Allianthé, I fought alongside Jaxx, I rode rolly pollies in the desert. And in one of my lives, I was a mighty runescribe.” A pause. “At the time, I suppose I must’ve found the vision interesting, because I delved deeper into it and learned of all my inventions and contraptions: I made runes for heating homes, obelisks that formed shields around settlements, self-moving carts, and so much more! Then the memories stuck around and when I woke up, I suddenly knew–I knew!–rune magic!”

Roja recoiled in disbelief. “What?!”

“Yeah, it’s crazy! I woke up and all of a sudden I could make stones produce light, clay boil water–”

“No! I mean–what about the story about your apprenticeship as a novice of runescribing?! About your lover who went off to fight with Jaxx?!”

Jezzy frowned sheepishly. “Well, I had to make something up! I couldn’t just say ‘I snorted a ton of spores and suddenly knew rune magic’, now could I?”

“Y-you could have just said that you had learned it!”

Jezzy sighed. “Those kinds of stories don’t work, Roja. If you tell people you’ve learned rune magic, they start asking questions like ‘oh, from whom’ or ‘oh, what for’. No, if you don’t want people to pry, attach the lie to another tragic story, like a heartbreak.”

Roja chewed on her words and couldn’t help but agree, though her nod was reluctant at best. “Well… Then how did you meet this thing?”

Jezzy cast it a glance again. “It lived here when I came in. After I came to, I had already seen me and was approaching. When you said it had stared at you, I immediately understood what you meant, for I still remember those eyes. I remember the terrible headache they gave me. I did not feel welcome in the slightest. However…” She held up a finger. “... The creature hadn’t accounted for my newfound ability, and luckily, it seems it didn’t know what rune magic was. So I drew up a trap for it as it approached. As soon as the creature touched me, I had it transported to a far off place, never to be seen again.” She frowned at the creature behind the bars. “Or so I thought.”

Before Roja could follow up with questions, Jezzy added: “After that, I experimented some with the mushrooms and realised what we both know: that they have potent hallucinogenic potential, and that these hallucinations are not just in the head–they can manifest in reality itself. So I refurbished my shop and opened a house of healing. I wanted to share this gift with the needy, the people whose world had come crashing down, those who needed to realise that salvation was just a dream away.”

Roja furrowed her brow. “Then… Why are you taking money for it?”

“Well, I couldn’t just give it away, could I? To my knowledge there are no substances like this in the known world–this could be the only colony of these kinds of mushrooms! If I told everyone about it, it would be chopped down and snorted in an hour–not to mention how the Deathguard would react to Arbor’s populace exterminating a rare species!”

Still, Roja couldn’t wrap her hand around it. “B-but… This is wrong! This, this is this creature’s home, isn’t it?”

Jezzy nodded with a sad frown. “Yes, it is, and what I am doing is terrible to this one individual, but… Roja, think of all the people we are helping! Think of where you were before your vision! These mushrooms, they improve lives, they heal broken souls. I… understand if you think I am a monster, but please know that all I’ve ever wanted was to help people. The visions I saw, the lives I could have lived–they showed me that nothing in the world matters more than being there for someone else. Out of all my thousand deaths, the ones that haunt me in my sleep are the ones where I died alone. I would not wish a lonesome existence upon even my worst enemy.”

There was a silence. Roja’s eyes shifted between the mushroom creature and Jezzy. The silenced reigned for a while longer before Roja said, “I don’t think you are a monster.”

The next day, they opened the store as usual.

[hider=SummaREE!]
We return to the house of health! Roja has become a regular and eventually works up the courage to ask if she can work there. Jezzy is like “alright, but I can’t afford to pay you” and Roja is like “sure, as long as we can hang out!”. And that’s what they do. Roja is shown the ropes and the cellar, where Jezzy keeps a mushroom colony. This is where the mushrooms that give the weird visions come from. They are her most valuable asset.

Some time later, a mysterious creature shows up when Jezzy is out and starts harassing Roja. It storms into the tearoom and Roja knocks it out before it can reach the mushroom cellar. This reveals that the creature is a cantar, a myconid who has come home to its colony. Roja panics over having potentially killed something again and curls up on the ground.

Jezzy later shows up and Roja freaks out. Jezzy explains that she has seen the creature before and that this shop used to be her old leatherworking shop, but when she one day fell through the floor and into this cave, she immediately snorted years of built-up cantar spores. Having gotten a huge dose of Lumen, she had a vision of herself as a runescribe and thus became one in real life. With her magic, she teleported the myconid away and turned the workshop into a house of healing, using the mushrooms to give people visions that can help them improve.

Roja freaks out over the fact that she lied to her, but Jezzy points out that while it’s wrong to deny this myconid its home, she is also helping people, including Roja. Roja relents and the two open shop as usual the next morning.
[/hider]