Chương 20: Mushroom Crabs Have Better Manners Than You

The Capling's hands continued moving rapidly while Ophila watched the movements with her head tilted, her brows furrowing.

"Is that... is it doing something with its hands on purpose?"

"It's sign language," Lio revealed. She looked at him with wide eyes.

"Sign language?"

"Yes."

"The little mushroom crab is using sign language?"

"It isn't a crab."

"I know it isn't a crab." She looked back at the Capling, who had not stopped signing, its small fingers moving in graceful arches and bows.

"What's it saying?" Lio watched the signs. It took some time to translate, as the grammar of the language ran backwards from what most people would expect, the subject coming last rather than first, and the verb carrying most of the meaning. It wasn't exactly sentences and more like impressions then a subject. For example, Capling was currently communicating that freshness-east-water rather than the water to the east is fresh.

It had taken Lio a long time to stop trying to translate it into any sort of normal language.

"There's a new seep to the east," he said after finishing interpreting the meaning.

"So it's fresh water. Opened recently, it's saying, within the last day or so." Ophila stared at the Capling, cocking her head.

"How do you know it's saying that?"

"Well, for example, the sign for time is relative to the signer's body. Closer to the chest means recent. Further away means longer ago."

"That's," she started, and then stopped as the Capling began signing again, more rapidly and repeatedly.

"What's it saying now?"

"It's greeting me. The repeated signing is symbolizing recognition." Her mouth fell open.

"How long have you been coming down here?"

"A while," Lio said. She shook her head, letting out a nervous chuckle. Below, the Capling chirped again and changed again into a third sequence, this one more slower. Lio watched it without expression. These signs were ones he hadn't seen before—well, not in that specific combination. The individual components were familiar though.

The signs were for deep and different and then was the one that was the hardest to translate, a gesture where both hands started open and then drew slowly inward, not quite closing, which he'd only ever seen used in certain, special circumstances. He frowned. What was it trying to say?

"Well?" Ophila said.

"It says the water to the east is cold today." She hummed in understanding, seemingly not suspecting a thing. As she looked back at the Capling, she found that it was watching her now, those large dark eyes glistening with intelligence. Then it did something Lio had never seen them do to another Delver. It raised one small hand, palm outward, fingers together, and held it there. Lio's eyes widened a fraction. That was a greeting, usually reserved for true friends of the Capling.

Why was it doing the gesture to Ophila? Next to him, Ophila blinked. Then after looking at Lio for confirmation, she raised her own hand in the same shape. The Capling happily let out a short bright chirp and bounced back to the others with its thin, long legs. Ophila lowered her hand slowly, smiling softly.

"I didn't know they were that smart," she said, a look of wonder on her face.

"I mean, I knew they were clever, I'd heard that much. But sign language…"

"Yes," Lio said. She looked at him.

"How did you learn it though? Are you some sort of genius?" Lio offered an easy smile, shaking his head.

"It took a long time, to be honest."

"How much time?" He said nothing, giving a small shrug. She puffed out her cheeks and gave him an exasperated look. Then she stood up, brushed the moss off her knees, adjusted her pack straps, and said "Alright, east then," and started walking. As the hours went by, the forest changed as they moved, the tall pale Pillars beginning to thin and the canopy lowering as broader, wider fungi took over, their caps spreading overhead in overlapping layers.

The floor deepened underfoot, the moss thickening until each step felt bouncy and compressed. Though they mostly walked in silence, Ophila would occasionally speak up about her observations. Lio found that she easily noticed the small things most people wouldn't, like the way the fungi were arranged. She crouched beside a vertical row of small white shelf-fungi growing along a fallen stalk, and gave a small smile.

"I think this is to stop it decomposing too fast," she said, and kept walking. Lio glanced at the shelf-fungi as he passed. He had walked past that specific variety across hundreds of descents, and knew that she was correct. This species liked to preserve dead stalks, keeping it intact so the mycelium network beneath can still use it as a conduit. They stopped at the eastern seep when they found it, a thin sheet of water running down the wall face and spreading into the moss below.

It was cold, clean, with a faint mineral taste enhancing it. He refilled one of his waterskins, while Ophila refilled both of hers, then cupped her hands and drank directly. This was something most surface Delvers were warned against but in actuality, water sources in the upper floors were mostly always fine. If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

"It tastes like metal," she said, wiping her mouth.

"I think it runs through some iron deposits in the wall," Lio said.

"Hm." She capped her waterskin.

"Is that bad? Are we going to get metal poisoning or something?"

"No. This amount isn't enough."

"Whew." She looked at the water running down the rock face for a second, following it with her eyes all the way down to where it disappeared into the moss.

"Where does it go after the moss takes it?" Lio considered this.

"Well, the fungi use it. The mycelium network runs under the whole floor, so it distributes it." She looked down at her feet with lit up eyes, like she was seeing everything in a new light.

"So the whole floor is connected?"

"Yes."

"So the seep comes in from the wall and gets distributed by the floor." She looked from wall to floor to canopy.

"And the canopy feeds back down when it cycles." She nodded thoughtfully. He watched her do this with some slight amusement, until she picked up her pack and kept walking, and he quickly followed. The canopy light had begun its change by the time he started looking for a place to set up camp. He'd been calculating the time passively, using a small part of his instinctual brain to process the simple information. And as he did so, he began noticing the first signs of Ghenna's 'night' starting.

The main giveaway was that the air near his ankles was becoming significantly warmer than the air at his face. This phenomenon was called 'temperature inversion'. That concept was one of those things that newcomers to Floor 1 almost never understood until it was already happening around them. The mechanics of it were simple enough though.

See, Ghenna's deeper floors generated tremendous heat, and that heat rose slowly through the dungeon in long convective columns, warming the stone floor of Floor 1 from below over the course of many hours. Meanwhile the ceiling, cold and impossibly far above, drew that same warmth upward and killed it. The two competing temperatures met somewhere in the middle of the air column and produced a dense and heavy mist. This was what night looked like down here.

Not real night, as the sun was probably just setting on the surface right now. But Ghenna didn't care about the sun. It followed its own cycle. The lengths were roughly the same, which was the strange part. Ghenna's day and night both lasted somewhere between six and eight hours, close enough to the surface. But the start and end times were completely misaligned.

So it was entirely possible to descend in the middle of a surface night and arrive at Floor 1 in the middle of a Ghenna day, or to sleep through a full Ghenna night and emerge back onto the platform to find the surface sun just barely rising. Ophila also noticed the temperature change around the same time he did. She pulled her coat tighter around herself and looked up at the canopy, reading the deepening amber with a small frown.

"We should find a spot soon," she said.

"Yes," Lio agreed. A few minutes later, they found the perfect spot. It was at the base of a Pillar wide enough to serve as a windbreak, with a natural ridge of raised root-matter curving around three sides of a small flat clearing. The moss inside was thick and good for insulating, while the lower layers were dry and soft. He stopped there and took his pack off, cracking his neck and back as he stretched.

Ophila set hers down as well and began unpacking immediately, pulling things out in the order she'd clearly packed them with careful thought. First was a tight bedroll sealed against moisture. Then a folded groundsheet. And finally, a collapsible iron-rod frame that could be quickly assembled into a low shelter structure, with a treated canvas panel angled across the top. Smoothing and rolling them out, she began working quickly and without procrastination.

Lio watched her for a moment, then walked to the nearest Pillar and drew his knife.

"You can share the shelter," she said without looking up as she nailed the frame into the ground.

"It fits two."

"I'm fine." She paused.

"You brought a bedroll?"

"No." She looked up at him, her expression confused.

"What do you…" She trailed off as a look of genuine curiosity flashed through her face. Not paying attention, Lio continued cutting into the Pillar's outer bark. He'd learned to do this a few hundred loops ago, during a long run of loops where he'd stripped his surface equipment back deliberately, pushing further on less. He had met a survival expert in this subject, and learned all he could from the man. Then, what had first begun as an experiment had quickly become a habit, then a preference.

After all, less weight meant more speed, and in the end, speed was the only resource that consistently mattered down here. He cut out four equal panels of the soft fungi and carried them back. Setting them down, he began fitting them together along their natural edges like puzzle pieces, forming a shallow concave bed-shape roughly the length of a person.

He pressed the lower edges into the moss, packed the interior with a dense layer of the drier underlayer, and laid a final angled piece across the top to redirect condensation away from the sleeping surface. Ophila had stopped her own assembly work and was watching him with wide eyes.

"That's better than mine," she observed.

"It's alright." She looked at her canvas panel. Then back at his bark construction. Then she folded the canvas back up.

"Show me," she said excitedly. And so, he showed her. She just asked two questions, and nothing else. She was a quick learner, and by the time the canopy had gone fully amber, both of their shelters were assembled side by side against the Pillar base. She had also added one thing he hadn't suggested, weaving several of the long hanging filaments—careful to not choose the ones with aphrodisiac properties—from a albino mushroom species through the upper panels in a loose lattice.

Studying it, Lio found that it would hold against the wind better than anything he'd done before. He had never thought to use the filaments that way. Meanwhile, Ophila quickly settled into hers and sorted out what she'd kept in her bag. Ration kits, waterskins, and medical supplies formed a small pile next to her. She'd packed the iron frame away, but she'd kept the groundsheet and laid it flat beneath the moss for insulation.

Lio sat at the entrance of his own and ate one of his rock-hard stale loaves without tasting it, watching the canopy finish its change to night. The amber was deepening toward a color that simply didn't exist on the surface. This was a color that only existed down here, rich and dark, seeming to come from inside the fungi rather than from them.

"It's beautiful," Ophila said quietly, looking up. Lio looked up at the canopy too, cocking his head to the side. He'd seen this exact color tens of thousands of times. The appreciation of this supposed 'beauty' of it had long since dissolved from his heart, like ice near a fire. He wasn't sure what she was seeing that he wasn't anymore. And soon, the fog arrived on schedule.

It rose from the moss in slow coils, like albino snakes, exactly where the heat pooled thickest near the floor and the cold pressing down from the canopy came to meet it. It thickened fast, the white filling the spaces between stalks and they couldn't see anything beyond 10 feet in front of them. Ophila watched it roll in with a small smile, pulling her coat tighter.

"Cozy," she remarked simply, and settled back into her shelter. Lio said nothing, looking out at the white.