"I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing membranes. These membranes are aware, react to change, and collectively have the long-term health of the host environment in mind. The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex challenges." ~ Paul Stamets

I slid aside the simple stone panel I was using to conceal the entrance to the access tunnel and allowed Hakdrilda to enter. I'd disarmed the various traps I'd installed while waiting for her to awaken. That was an obvious welcoming step on my part, and frankly necessary since she didn't seem to have much awareness of the various triggers she'd have set off as she went. It wasn't until we were about 4 traps in and nearing the chasm that she finally noticed the murder holes in the ceiling containing an array of arcane boltcasters. She blanched as she identified them but realized immediately that I'd disarmed them.

"Ah, Vay? I'm noticing the trap in the ceiling here. Should I assume that there are other traps, and that you've already locked them down for me?"

I spawned in a mana light.

**GREEN**

"I haven't been paying enough attention to my surroundings, have I?"

**RED**

She groaned. "Did I...Did I walk through some other traps already?"

**GREEN**

"I can never let Norfoth or my mother know. I'd never get out of the city again."

That last one was muttered under her breath, so I opted not to respond, though I did note her paying more attention as she proceeded, spotting two of the final three traps before the chasm.

"Gods of the Underdark, Vay! There's a lot of traps here. Paranoid much?"

**GREEN**

She laughed, if a bit ruefully. "Yeah, okay, fair. I can see how, as a dungeon rooted in this sky island, you wouldn't want people messing around with the mana gathering array that keeps the island in the air. Just know that anytime people see this many traps, they're going to assume something valuable is being protected. I'm not sure how effective this will be at discouraging adventurer types."

**GREEN**

"Something to think about anyways. If you don't want to cut back on the traps, then you may want some valuable prize back here to convince people they've found what was being protected."

She sighed, but proceeded, albeit more carefully, until she came out on the northern side of the chasm. She peered around carefully, dark vision doing yeoman's work, but still eventually decided she needed an actual light to continue. She used a small firestarter to light a torch and enable her investigation.

She paced the length of the northern lip before sighing. "I know there must be a way to continue, but I'm not really seeing it. This would be a good place for whatever reward you might place. Can you give me a hint?"

I'd inset a small mana light at the top of the ladder to the bridge but buried it below a cm of squishy gray mud. I set it to glowing in a warm yellow shade, and it drew her attention pretty quickly. She wandered over, eyeing it carefully, then peered down into the chasm at the marked location. Since she'd been looking for it, her eyes quickly caught on the bridge, and from there it was a matter of moments until she located the inset steps. She eyed it carefully, noting that the concealment was fairly effective and she didn't really care for the idea of traversing the narrow bridge.

"Should I assume the bridge is also trapped?"

**GREEN**

"Right. Well, if it's all the same to you, I think I'll just skip it."

She grinned briefly and cast a flight spell on herself, smugly taking to the air to cross the chasm. I had my own smug moment and sent the storm myconid to do a quick electrifying pass just above her head.

She gasped momentarily but managed to bite back any reaction until returning to the ground on the far side of the chasm.

"Has anyone ever told you that you have an evil sense of humor?"

**GREEN**

"They're not wrong. Good you're prepared to combat flyers, I guess." She didn't sound entirely convinced, but I figured she'd come around eventually.

She eyed the array of mushrooms carpeting the ledge on the south side of the chasm a bit wistfully. "I can see a number of interesting mushrooms here, but I don't think it would be enough to explain the traps to an adventurer. I'd stop and pick some, but we should probably just keep going."

**GREEN**

She looked around briefly. "And how do I do that, exactly? Is there another hidden door?"

**YELLOW** I mean, it wasn't exactly a hidden door, but by placing the yellow light above the visually obstructed entryway, it led her where she needed to go.

This section of tunnel was shorter and not actively trapped, but she was forced to pull to a stop at the puzzle door blocking further progress.

As a dwarf, a mage, and an academic, the puzzle caught her attention fairly directly. I simply listened to her muttering to herself.

"Hmm. We have a number of straight copper wires of varying lengths, roughly twenty different colored stones. The stones look to be color coded to shades of mana, and the board built into the door suggests a bed for some kind of pattern to be built. Oh! Does this model the mana gathering array? Making it easy to visit if you know what you're looking for already?"

**GREEN**

"Do I get unlimited guesses?," she asked sounding pleased and hopeful.

**RED**

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Her face dropped a bit. "I suppose I should just have you open it for me, then. Wouldn't want to get locked out, after all. " She sighed. "Let's just press on, shall we?"

**GREEN**

I unlocked the door manually, carefully not showing her the correct answer to the puzzle.

She peered through the door, noting the different gauge and aesthetic of the original access tunnel. "Different here. Is that on purpose? Or did you just find an existing access tunnel?"

That was mostly irrelevant, and she hadn't framed it in a simple yes or no structure, so I just ignored the questions, not feeling like it warranted the use of my logbook function.

She stepped through the oddly angled doorway into the new tunnel, finding it sized correctly for dwarves, if not quite meeting the exact standards used in Daekaran construction. That gave it a vaguely unsettling property, in that it wasn't alien, but it wasn't quite RIGHT either. She brushed off the feeling, then looked both to her left and right trying to determine which way to go. There weren't any obvious indicators, but some quick thought had her recognizing that if the array were closer to the edge, then she needed to turn right.

I took that as an indicator that dwarves generally had a good sense of direction, even in the absence of any obvious visual cues. I even wondered if they had a sensitivity to localized magnetic fields, knowing that many birds, for instance, used those fields as a means of directing their migratory flights (in conjunction with the night sky and physical landmarks, of course). That set me to wondering whether mana flows were used in navigation as well, but as Hakdrilda neared the main array space I shook off the mental aside.

She extinguished her torch as the glow coming off the bioluminescent mushrooms and the various crystals offered enough light for her to see by. She spoke to me briefly, "The light patterns here might be an integral part of the array, or simply a side effect of it, but in either case, it's better to be able to see even some fairly subtle variations. My first impression isn't super helpful, I'm afraid. I don't recognize any of this, though I have at least seen runic arrays using crystals to structure the flow of mana through them. The mushrooms, though... I've never seen anything like that, and I'm not clear how you could even get them to maintain an array like this without either dying off or expanding to fill the whole space. At the same time, they're transparently an integral part of whatever this array is doing."

Logbook Entry: One reward I received from my divine quest was a skill called Fungalmancy.

"Well, that would certainly seem to suggest that you'll need to be able to work with these mushrooms. I'm afraid that I can't even really tell you what the array is doing, though the name is certainly indicative. My general impression is that the crystals in the ceiling are directing mana from the surrounding area into this main fungal and crystalline array here. I'd guess that the array here is regulating the flow of mana, maybe smoothing out irregularities in its intensity and composition and sending it on back alongside the tunnel we came through to somewhere in the center of the island. There's a lot of guesswork in that statement, though. To be clear, I can really only get a good sense of the air-aspected mana, which is mostly entering the array through that big, bluish crystal over there."

She pointed out a large blue and violet striated orthorhombic crystal (roughly rectangular in cross-section, that is), glowing faintly and with a color that seemed to shift slightly when viewed from different angles. "Pretty sure that's the biggest damn hunk of Wind Iolite I've ever seen. Makes me wonder if those other crystals aren't managing streams of other kinds of aspected mana..."

My mana sight had me generally suspecting she was correct in that basic assessment, though I also suspected she wasn't able to see the complex, yet tiny, runic inscriptions carved into each of the component crystals – not just the half dozen major crystals, but the numerous smaller ones all directing aspected mana flows from the ceiling to corresponding crystals in the floor that seemed to serve as collecting nodes that the wildly diverse range of mushrooms seemed to draw from. Even to my rather detailed perception, it was tricky to assess whether the mushrooms were absorbing mana radiating from the crystals, drawing it through the underlying mat of mycelia, or some combination of both. There was a border to the array, with it apparently delimited by a constraining line of some unrelievedly black powdered crystal. There was a single crystal seated on that boundary at the edge closest to the access tunnel, pulsing visibly in my mana sight, but utterly inert in the visual spectrum. I was guessing this was where the processed mana was ultimately gathered for transmission to wherever it was being sent. I was fairly confident I'd have to figure that out eventually.

Logbook Entry: Think you're right. Other crystals in the ceiling and on the surface seem to focus mana down to these.

She grunted in acknowledgement. "Yeah, makes sense. They're clearly handling a massive amount of ambient mana to keep the island aloft. Wonder how many of these arrays there are? There's a lot moving through here, but I don't think enough to hold the island up by itself, much less power other things."

I thought back to what Mayphesselth had said about nodes in the mana flow before responding.

Logbook Entry: Dragon info suggests 4-7 of them. 4 mana nodes on this plane, 3 vertically through the center of the island.

"Hmm. That tracks, I guess. At a guess, the four on this plane should be similar and would gather a lot of mana – possibly enough to support the island and even have some redundancy. The other three might also be for mana gathering but might have some other purpose. At a guess, the central most one would be important, and likely served as a central distribution point for the gathered mana."

That tracked with my own guesses, though of course we could both be wrong. I had no sense, after all, of how much mana was coming in, how much mana was needed to support the island, how much redundancy was built into the system, or where the problem lay. Finding the array and getting at least a rudimentary sense of how it worked was a good first step, but it was ONLY a first step. I heaved a mental sigh at just how much work figuring all this out was going to be. I consoled myself with the thought that the Goddess of Knowledge had said I was ahead of the curve, suggesting I had some time to work with.

In the end, we spent perhaps three hours simply observing the array. Hakdrilda spent most of her time sketching out as much of the array as she could make out, with a particular focus on documenting the positions of the primary crystalline nodes in the basal array and the positioning of the various kinds of mana-enriched fungus within the array, and particularly their placement relative to the crystals.

I divided my time in half. For the first half, I mostly spent my time trying to let the mana flows through the mushrooms inform the understanding of fungalmancy I'd been provided. It was, obviously enough, several levels of complexity above anything I could really understand, but I began to get a sense of how the mycelium was used to channel and structure the mana flows, while the fruiting bodies above ground were used to provide both dampening effects for the radiant mana thrown off by the crystals and a purifying effect for the primarily mono-aspected flows of mana through the mycelium. Interestingly, the use of fungus allowed for significant self-repairing functions and for the mitigation of variable mana intensities entering the system. The crystals were more durable and more effective in storing and focusing the mana flows but were vulnerable to major fluctuations and slower to repair any damage.

For the second half of our session, I followed up on a growing suspicion that we were missing something by expanding my domain farther down. That served to confirm that the pattern of focusing crystals I'd encountered as I expanded down from the surface in fact was reflected in more focusing crystals below the basal array. As a whole, the array was largely symmetrical in three dimensions, with the exception that at the basal level, all of the gathered and purified mana was focused for transmission coreward.

Hakdrilda wasn't exactly shocked by my discoveries, though it made her shake her head in envious wonder. "Damn. This is seriously impressive. It's pretty clearly the result of a fully developed alternate system of runic technology and the symbiotic inclusion of fungalmancy to stabilize, purify, and provide self-repair functions is brilliant. Studying this could easily be the life work of a team of researchers."

She threw up her hands, though. "Not me, I'm afraid. I'd be giving up on everything I was pursuing for the last 20 years. This might make my reputation, but frankly it'd be just as likely to see me assassinated by the various business interests this would upend. For that matter, I'll probably need to be careful about even mentioning some of this... Maybe I can sneak in a new idea or two."

She grinned. "Thank you for this, Vay. Whether or not I get to ever mention this, it's at least making me recognize some of the flaws baked into our own runic magic system."

Shortly thereafter, we gave up for the day, bringing Hakdrilda carefully back to her living space to jot down some additional notes and ponder ideas for how this might be used to inform her research.

I let her know I was turning the traps back on, then went back to following the original access tunnel back towards the core.

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