After escaping reach of the imperial guards, the party found themselves in the [[western woods]], home to the smart-slow [[sirens]]. [[Bemo]] changed out of his dress (he'd been dressing as an adolescent girl, in the garments he stole from [[Sherman]]) and developed a new perversion of drugging forest rabbits. The party was complicit in his perversion. Together they fed rabbits [[mushroom]]s and created new body horrors never before known. After one rabbit named [[Gregory]] by Bemo grew an elongated neck and let out screams of existential pain from the abyss we all emerge from and one day will return to, [[Yuzu]] fed him another mushroom and he acquired the power of language. The party sent him off to the hut of an old couple who lived at the entrance to the western forest. Somehow, in the party’s thinking, this diversion with the rabbit was related to making a choice between the two paths into the woods, both marked by signs. One path's sign promised safety and the other threatened the presence of many sirens. After watching the couple interact with Gregory for a bit, they robbed the couple poor, acquiring from them a set of portraits of the (supposedly) talking animals who once saved the old man’s life when he ventured against the admonitions of his father deep into the woods across the threshold where the ground turns from burn to purple and the trees instead become tall mushrooms (the [[Lion Lands]]). The party fed Gregory a fourth mushroom and he assumed his final form as the [[Philosopher King of the Western Rabbits]], able to communicate with them from a distance without speech and command their perfect cooperation. To avenge the two rabbits Bemo killed before Gregory with his experimentation, whose blood Bemo had soaked himself in, Gregory challenged Bemo to a deathmatch, but when Bemo, after eating a second mushroom to acquire more powers to help him win the fight, fell to the ground with cramps and shat himself, Gregory took pity. After taking the old couple’s cryptic advice to "intransitively trust in the form of a trinity", taking it to mean they should follow the sign promising safety three times, the party emerged at the western shore where a crew of loggers were working. Their captain recognized Bemo as the estranged son of the [[Duke Marshal]], forcing Yuzu and Eithan to concede to Bemo that he had told the truth about his noble lineage. The captain offered passage to [[Paleon]] in exchange for six felled trees. Back in the western forest’s interior, Eithan tried to transform six planks into trees they could use for payment, but the sudden expansion of the objects sent explosive ripples outward that knocked over all of the trees between them and the shore, some of which crushed the dock and sent loggers into the sea gravely injured. A scene of chaos unfolded in which the captain and those few still uninjured tried to pull everyone who’d fallen in the water back onto the shore or into the boat before the tide took them. When the captain rescinded his offer to ferry the party, Eithan attempted to transform the plank under the captain’s feet into a tree but failed and sprained his own (only) ankle. They had to find their own way to Paleon. To make the journey easier, the party took mushrooms, in spite of [[Old Man]]’s warnings not do so before finding him again, in order to acquire new powers. Eithan acquired the [[Shadow Clone]] power, but only from his waist down. Bemo lost invisibility but gained the power to transform into any dead being he had a portrait of, for up to ten minutes. Yuzu’s super aim acquired the catch that whenever she used it to fire a projectile from a device, such as a crossbow or bow or canon, she would teleport to its point of impact. Crossing the western woods to Paleon, through the domain of sirens, would be a grave challenge. Next: [[elder's path 7]]