More than a Few Troubles with Mold
Since I released my guide to our travels through the doors, the scientists have called upon our adventuring group for a new problem: Mold. The door scientist we usually worked with introduced us to another one of these scientists, one who “specializes” in mold, who needed us to collect samples from the mold to make something called a “vaccine”. We were told that this would allow us to not be affected by the increasing mold once we died, a problem that had the potential to stop us from being able to revive our fallen friends.As we were transported between rooms through the aid of some sort of machine, we learned the following about the various types of mold present in this place: Black mold had a tendency to move slowly but catch easily onto whoever it comes in contact with, resulting in a sticky situation as we had to cut ourselves and our friends free while trying to collect samples. Green mold tends to act in a more active manner, attacking us until we managed to cut it down in a specific but always changing order so that we could collect those samples. White mold tended to be exceptionally quick, flying around the space and harming only those it ran into as it dropped samples throughout the room. And lastly, yellow mold would send spores flying throughout the space, with the only way of keeping the spores in a condition fit for being a sample without being harmed was by catching them on top of shield and pieces of fabric.
While waiting between the transports, we continuously found the mold scientist to be a bit more obsessed with the mold than one would consider normal, and as we later found out this was due to the fact that the scientist was in fact not an actual scientist and got removed from the job. I also had an odd box appear to me from some group called “The Board” that contained a large number of the hope sources that we had found in our previous adventures, which we were able to use to improve OOP’s abilities in casting magic to be able to contain second circle spells. A final bit of information we happened across while speaking to the door scientist again is that the doors, which to my previous understanding had acted as portals between a lot of various places, were actually primarily connected to a place called the “Fortress of Doors”, so I will refer to it as such moving forward.
A few weeks later we were called in again to deal with the mold breaking out of its previous places. With the previous mold scientist having been fired, we met with a new mold scientist who claimed to be working on some fancy education thing called a “Ph.D” for the mold. While also rather obsessed with the mold, this scientist instead focused their fascination into having a machine that would clear a space of the mold. The machine needed time to turn on however, during which the mold would flock to its place to try to stop it, so they needed us to keep the mold away from it. Before turning it on, we had a bit of time to move items around the space to hinder the progress of the mold. During the first of these times, thanks to our previous success with the mold samples, they were able to give us the vaccine thing to keep us from being infested with the mold.
A few highlights from these encounters that are worth noting: First off, the mold had started mutating. Some of the mold types were merging with others, causing some mold to even be incorporeal with most of us (excluding one friend who in these regions picked up a spell to turn incorporeal) unable to affect it. Second off, I learned that the conga line we had previously encountered within the OOP is not solely the OOP but rather a spirit that it is possible to commune with, with which I was able to revive many of my friends before it vanished again. Thirdly, as we had collected more sources of hope throughout these spaces, towards the end we had counted the sources up to supposedly be just short of how much we needed to energize the OOP even more. Through the course of multiple attempts to find if there was a way to gain the last bit that we needed, my attempt to have my familiar Floof find the path to the source instead resulted in us communicating with “The Board” that had previously spoken to me when giving me the previous source. While we are still quite unsure of who they are and what their exact purpose is, they seem to have quite a bit of interest in our group as they know a lot of what is going on with us. We eventually came to the realization that we had a sufficient amount of source due to a miscount, which has now enabled us to have the ability to charge OOP with a third circle spell.
Editor's Note: Thursday Night Questing is a series of mini events for newbies. For more information, please visit https://sites.google.com/view/smas-tnq/home.