Cavern

I press my back against the pillar, stuffing the glowing crystalline lantern into my bag to cover its light. The cavern goes dark. Then, from the other side of the room, there emerges a warmer, orange light. I resist the urge to peer around the edge of the column to see their beautiful oil lamps. Only rich people--or guards--have the privilege of oil, or wax. People like me make our way with the naturally luminescent minerals embedded into the limestone of the caverns.

This particular cavern is riddled with tiny cracks and holes. That's why I have to make my best effort to be completely silent--any word I utter could bring the cavern roof crashing down, and then it wouldn't matter whether the approaching guard heard me or not.

Finally, the light fades as the guard continues through the tunnel into the next cave. I breath out a quiet sigh of relief, then feel for the entrance to the smaller, hidden tunnel. Lying on my stomach, I can just barely squeeze through to the cave adjacent to the one I'm exiting.

Before crawling out through the last few feet, I send out a couple pings to make sure that it's empty. I can't sense anything, so I stand up and reach into my bag for the crystal.

The crystals were developed by scientists years ago, and created so that there could be a natural, fast-growing crystal that did not require black light to emit light. Then, crystal "seeds" were planted in caverns a hundred years before the climate collapse. By the time humanity was ready to move in, the place was literally glowing.

I wave it around, searching for my "secret entrance", impossible to detect with pings and near impossible to detect with light unless you're looking for it. Finally, I locate the rusted steel hatch and unlock it. Below is not an ordinary cave--this is a huge metal shell, one I dug out myself over the course of five years from its metal hatch protruding into the cave. Now, with more friends to help me, and since I'm much stronger(imagine a seven year old, four feet tall, with a five foot shovel) it has turned out to be huge. I still don't know how big it is.

I was born in a settlement, too, but a much smaller one. Well, it used to be small, anyway. It was mostly old human, but with a few neohuman families--one of them my own--living at the edges. The old humans were angry that the neohumans got the same amount of rations as the old humans, since neohumans have evolved to better survive in the caves. They told us to leave, and we did. I was six then--it happened six years ago. Since then I've befriended a couple other "lone star" neohumans living off the caves like troglobites.

When I enter the main chamber of my secret "bat-cave", the steel hatch hissing shut quietly behind me, I meet Kaede, who is two years older than me. She's hunched over her sprawling map of the caverns--as far as I know, it's the only one that covers so much of the caverns.

"Roisin!" she says, surprised. "I was just working on the map... I just got back from an expedition to Southcrawl."

"Southcrawl?" I ask, astounded. "You went all the way to Southcrawl and back in one day?"

"Well, no... Southcrawl was the original destination, but I got a little... sidetracked."

I groan. "Guards?"

"No, actually," Kaede answers. "I noticed an interesting growth along a narrow pass off one cavern... I couldn't say if it was rock, animal, fungus, or all three. I was taking samples, and--"

"Let me guess. You just couldn't wait to get back here to test them, so you pulled out your Porta-Lab right then and there."

Kaede blushes, and looks down. "Yeah... By the way, have you seen Loki? I asked him to get some morels, or proceras, or something. You didn't see him?"

"I didn't see anything. There were guards."

"No pings?"

"If there had been a ping, you would have heard an entire cavern collapsing."

"Ah," she replies. "Mamosi, then?"

"Yeah. The guard must have been from a rich settlement--he had a real oil lamp," I tell her.

Kaede grimaces. "That's just stupid. There could be any number of flammable gases floating around in this place. Why can't they just use crystals?"

"Because they're fools who just want to prove that they're better than us, that's why." I look up--it was Loki who said this. He stands on the ladder down from the hatch. Kaede rises up, storming towards him.

"Where are my proceras, eh? I've been waiting forever!" she yells, remembering halfway through her sentence to keep it down.

"Kaede, I hate proceras. I picked up something different instead--I got Chinese truffles. Have you heard of them? The merchant said they were--" Loki is cut off by Kaede.

"I needed proceras, Loki. Couldn't you still have gotten some?" she protests.

"Um, what's Chinese?" I ask.They stare at me blankly.

"Well, uh, it's when..." Kaede tries to explain.

"Chinese is a type of truffle, you fool!" Loki says, smirking. This is the only topic on which he is more intelligent than Kaede--food.

"Well, um, it's also, um... How dare you question my intelligence, Loki?!" she retorts. I giggle, quickly stifling my laughter when she turns and glares at me. Then, she gathers up her maps and stomps off to her chamber. After the hatch closes behind her, I release my stifled laughter. Loki smiles, then holds up a paper sack with a bulge in the bottom.

"Come on," he says. "I'm cooking today."

<a*n>

Hy.

I got the general idea for the setting of this story from science class, and other research(mainly concerning mushrooms) is from Wikipedia, the NI Fungus Group of the UK, and ChineseTruffle.com. You can look there for more information regarding truffles, edible and poisonous mushrooms, and what exactly a procera is.

-emiki

</a*n>