The three sweepers gathered around the mushrooms. Declan, an oddly androgynous character who struck as a beautiful man or beautiful woman (depending) but invariably as beautiful, with long dirty blonde hair ponytailed, sans bangs, rising to 5’10”, assessed the five mushrooms available and said, “So no one’s taking the art shroom, right?” Sansan, rising to the precise mean height of an Ilnamese young adult and sporting medium-length hair (like a wild cat, say a lynx), studied the shrooms without comment. Squints, a haggard, robed, underfed young man in cowboy hat whose chest was decorated with what appeared to be a home-made sheriff’s badge, the metal possibly sourced from a bean can, began to quote from a text his mother had given him which he called The Good Book. In order to drown out this proselytizing, Declan shoved the now-empty glass jar back up the dead [[Old Man]] disciple’s rectum, stirring up accessory noises where the opportunity presented. After some deliberation, Declan took the sinewy [[higher ape]] mushroom, Sansan the [[mentat]] mushroom, and Squints the [[witch doctor]] mushroom. But they did not want to eat it yet, because they’d heard the shouting of coworkers pushing another cooler box into the room and also the grunts of men climbing down the chimney. The remaining mushrooms, [[artist]] and [[wood bender]], Declan hid in his backpack. Together they pushed the giant corpse on the cart down the tracks to the lower levels where the witch doctors harvested organs to send to [[Outpost B]]. At last the men descended the fireplace, which Squints and Declan had just made more dangerous to land in by adding wood to the blaze (Declan) and shattering shit-stained glass in it (Squints). These two men both wore suits. One was tall, full-haired, bearded, in tailored suit, known by some as Romance Star. Another was short, bald, plump, and wore a brown suit with Gold Trim, by which metonym he would forever be known by history. Romance Star snatched the fire poker and demanded to know where the body had gone, pointed the pointy end at each of the party members. Declan offered that the two men could follow the cart. At this time the other two sweepers arrived, pushing a new cart with a new body. Romance Star and Gold Trim climbed in, and Declan pushed them down into the lower levels. Together the party visited the staff lounge fountain area to wash their hands, where they (by breaking the etiquette of the fountain room in which one should always position the fountain between oneself and any strangers or other parties) overheard two sweepers, Deborah and Mark, discussing that [[Xena]] had become the favorite against [[Ivan]] in today’s deathmatch finals, even though Xena already has an apartment. Ivan of [[Ecklune]], the twenty-day champion, still had more cousins to win apartments for. Declan recognized Xena as the name of an old childhood friend, and learned from Deborah that Xena was in the challenger’s lounge. The party went with him to visit her, but not before first ducking behind the stone couch where sweepers were known to go for extramarital trysts or the exchange of contraband and eat their shrooms. Upon eating the witch doctor mushroom, Squints became aware, in the same way that elderly women become aware of impending storms through joint pain, of the magical weather, which that day was `Intoxicating Rain`. Sansan became aware of calculations of trajectory, gained an intuition for how to throw an object to hit a target. Declan’s ankles popped to a much larger and more hypertrophied form, then the rest of his joints, then his bones, then his pecs and abdominal muscles, then the rest of his tissues, rendering him 7ft tall. He retained his androgynous beauty and his standard-size head. They found Xena’s lounge door shut, and spoke to her by shouting. At first Xena denied knowing Declan, because the Declan she knew had been ten years old, not twenty-three, but after he reminded her thirteen years had passed, she admitted the soundness of his argument and opened the lounge door for them. She had been in the midst of insufflating a white powder on the glass coffee table against the spine of an 18+ magazine from [[Awast]]. Xena made her money delivering the heads of the hooded people who live in the ruins between [[Outpost A]] and [[Chenowth]] for bounty rewards around Ilnam. These were often offered and posted by wealthy businessmen who had been lured to the ruins in search of a novel type of brothel but instead became the subjects of experiments and left with one enlarged eyebrow or a left leg too long to collaborate with their right in the performance of a healthy gait that didn’t generate hip pain. Xena found it curious that Sansan looked just like the hooded people, who all looked like each other, but Sansan declined to answer any of the questions about her parents or childhood that Xena posed to make sense of this. She invited the party to meet her at her penthouse in Outpost B, at the top of the outpost tower, and urged the party to let her know if they ran into anyone they thought would be capable of killing her, to save her from her greatest fear of growing old in reasonable health. The party wanted to gather their things from the locker room, but on their way there from Xena’s lounge, they found their way blocked by Romance Star and Gold Trim. Romance Star tossed the body of the seven-times-enlarged disciple of Old Man on the cobblestone floor between them. “Where are the mushrooms?” he said, brandishing the fireplace poker, which he still had. Gold Trim, revealing himself as a woodbender, snaked out the tails of two mounted torches to ensnare the ankles of Declan, of whom he said, “Now I KNOW this one has eaten of the fungus.” Squints sprinted toward Romance Star, and Sansan sprinted toward a stack of barrels against the wall in the space between the party and their assailants. Meanwhile, Declan intercepted the snaking wood Gold Trim was telepathically sending toward his ankles. He attempted to hold the snaking wood vines at bay, but tripped, whipping one vine down upon the ceiling torch ring, sending it onto the defiled corpse of the former disciple of Old Man and igniting it, and another vine down upon the barrels Sansan had just approached, shattering them to reveal that they had been full of fist-sized furry spiders. These spiders poured out of the barrels and raced toward the now-flaming corpse of the disciple, searching for something in his lower half. Romance Star threw the fireplace poker like a javelin at Squints. Sansan, using her new mentat abilities, threw a torch from the wall at this projectile poker and knocked it out of the way, and she did do this, but Squints had also dodged in the same direction into which Sansan had adjusted the poker’s course. So the poker grazed Squints’ temple, scarring him but not endangering him. He tackled Romance Star to the ground, and Romance Star’s head split on the cobblestone. Meanwhile, Gold Trim had, in a panic, reoriented his attention to the spiders, and used his woodbending to enclose them again in the barrel wood. This meant he didn’t notice when Declan brought the wood vines down upon him like whips, and popped his body. Gold Trim exploded like a balloon stepped on, erupting blood into the hall. Just before this, the coworkers Deborah and Mark from the fountain encounter earlier had stepped out of the locker room which was the party’s destination. Deborah pointed at Declan and said to Mark, “I _told_ you I’d seen a hunking chonker hunking about!” Sansan took cover behind the disciple’s body, shy. Squints, understanding what was at stake if their coworkers reported them to stadium management, tapped into the magic weather to transform the raining blood from Gold Trim’s popping into red wine. Which he succeeded, actually over-succeeded at doing. Gold Trim’s raining blood, and organs, and body, all became red wine. And further, Deborah fell into over-acted lamentations about her wages and the housing crisis, a.k.a. red w**h**ining, and wept tears of rosé.