Too bad he hated his new posting.
There wasn’t much about it he didn’t hate, from the constant rain to the molds and fungi that matured so fast you could watch them reproduce on your supposedly spore-resistant clothing. Or on your face, if you weren’t careful. One poor simick who had gone hunting for a celebrated lotion-oozing slime mold about a thousand kelegs to the north of Taulau Town had been found only a hundred meters from the safety of his skimmer. Apparently, he’d become disoriented in the varzea and had wandered around unaware that the mold he’d collected had enthusiastically transmuted in the warmth of his collection pack into an ambulatory amoeboid state. Its potential lotion-generating properties notwithstanding, it had invaded his body right through the allegedly impermeable material of both pack and clothes, whereupon it had then proceeded to bed itself down nice and comfy inside his vital organs. Harold Tsukakaza, yeah, that was his name. He’d been lotioned to death.
Perambulating slime molds were the least of a person’s worries on lush, fascinating, deadly Fluva. There were fungi that put out toxic mycelia and actively hostile basidiocarps, rusts that gave new meaning to an old word (and class), and all manner of nasties that made their homes in the trees or in the waters of the flooded forest. The Viisiiviisii was no place to be marooned. Hard to walk out of the woods when the base of the tree in which you found yourself stranded was twenty meters or more underwater.