you will decide to be kind or poisonous

At half a year old, her siblings were growing like weeds, yet Fuji was still dwarfed even by her golden cat companion, Kenta, who stalked along at her side now. Her nose wrinkled as she took in the dusty scent of the woods and deftly dodged the ivy that covered the ground here. She probably shouldn’t be out here alone, but Chips was flying from perch to perch above her doing a terrible job of being stealthy and she had Kenta, with a bag borrowed from Otis slung over his hip. She would be fine!

The girl eyed the creepers and took in their scent, it wasn’t a familiar one from her mothers herbs, so she moved onto the next patch of greenery of interest. At the base of the widest oak the girl had ever seen, she spotted the familiar leafy growth that sprouted above ginger and she used her dexterous paws to unearth the root and brushed it down before securing it in her companions bag.

Next on the list was a type of mushroom that grew on the sides of trees. It was supposed to be goldy orange in colour on the inside, but the outside would look like a burnt and bulging bit of bark. The trees here seemed quite strong, and they trunks grew straight and true, so she would need to travel further into the woods to find what she was looking for.

The canopy closed in overhead and it was different from the shading offered by the bamboo. Strange bird calls echoed overhead and some of the trees bore strange markings. Some even looked to have symbols carved into their trunks. Her shoulders pulled closer to her ears as she kept going. She wasn’t gonna be scared off by some creepy carvings.

Ahead, light streamed down from where one of the giant trees had come crashing down. It must have happened a long time ago, for already smaller plants were duking it out as they raced towards the sunlight. The tree had been a behemoth and it seemed impossible to the girl that it may have fallen down. She looked at the other trees surrounding it with suspicion. Would they fall on her too?

Kenta continued to saunter on ahead, jumping up into a hollow she hadn’t even seen until he leapt for it. The cat paused and looked back at her expectantly, after all weren’t they here to do a job? He was right, and if nothing else, served well to keep her on track. She bounded forward to catch up with her companion, barely clutching the edge of the trunk when she jumped to try and join him. With her chunky body, her front legs screamed with the effort of pulling herself up, but after a few ungraceful grunts she finally managed to haul her ass up to explore the inside of the fallen tree. It may as well have been a cave for the cover and protection it provided. Everything was muted in here.

What her eyes fell upon was not the mushrooms she had been sent to fetch but another type entirely. She knew the scent so knew her mother used them, though what they were for, the girl had no clue. They were stored on the high shelf, which meant they might be dangerous, and so the girl used care to remove them from the rotting wood beneath her paws and placed them in a different pocket to the ginger. She would have to ask her mother about them when she returned home.

There was also some old mans beard growing across the outside of the tree, so with less care than she had shown the mushrooms, she grabbed a mouthful of the air growing plant and stuffed it in with the ginger. It didn’t hold medicinal properties on it’s own, but could easily be used as part of a dressing, which reminded her she would also have to swing by the bay and collect more seaweed (and try to find somewhere to dry it where her older brothers wouldn’t be tempted to eat it.)

Jumping down from the hollowed out tree and back into the clearing she finally spotted the black bulging fungus that had bought her out here in the first place. Unfortunately for her, it was way too far up the trunk for her to have any hope of collecting it. She turned to her companion with wide eyes and forlorn expression, to which Kenta just rolled his eyes and leapt what felt like to the diminutive girl, half-way up the tree! He used a powerful back leg to kick chunks of the fungus down on her as she looked up and caught a face full of falling debris. Her protests could probably be heard half way across the woods.

Once her cat returned to the ground, she shot him a dirty look and stuffed his back with the chaga mushrooms too. “We better get home before it gets much darker.” The girl spoke words that didn’t need to be said, and the pair retraced their steps back towards Manatee Bay.

“Speech”