232. Amy Gets Carried Away
Amy can’t resist seeing what this strange plant feels like. She carefully reaches out her right index finger and pokes the bulb in the middle of the stock.
Fsssssh!
On contact the bulb breaks open and spews out a small cloud of yellow spores. Amy takes a few step backward, but not before inhaling in surprise.
Ah-CHOO! Amy sneezes as some wayward spores tickle her nose.
“Well, that’s a fine how-do-you-do! Alright, time to get out of here.” Amy heads out of the greenhouse. As she walks out the door back to the Grand Hallway, she gets a really strange feeling, one she’s never had before. It’s a sort of dissatisfaction with… being so close to the ground? Coupled with a strange urge to get higher. And to get outside. Amy walks to the front door of the mansion, but finds it locked. Not satisfied, she walks into the sitting room and punches a hole in one of the large windows looking out on the outside. Ignoring her bleeding hand, she climbs out the hole in the window and begins frantically searching the outside of the house for a way up. Eventually she finds a trellis and begins climbing. She maneuvers around a stone gargoyle, climbs over the gables, and scrambles up the roof tiles.
“I have to get higher!” Amy keeps thinking to herself. After about half an hour of climbing, Amy manages to ascend the spire that tops the turret at the front corner of the house. A smile of pure contentment spreads across her face as she slumps over and falls unconscious.
Several days later a small sprout pokes out the top of Amy’s long-deceased head. Over the next week it will grow into a rod similar to the one Amy found so curious in the greenhouse. Eventually the spore sack will burst and spread more spores throughout the forest, and the life cycle that propagates the ophiocordyceps unilateralis gigantis will go on.
Amy is in no condition to continue this adventure or her life.