Free Web NovelAriana's pen moved fast across the page, occasionally pausing only so she could ask Alyssa another rapid-fire question.
"And the water," she said, tapping the orange folder, "you mentioned a bucket. How long were you submerged?"
"All night!" Alyssa said proudly, as if this were an achievement worthy of a medal. "Sir Aaron let me!"
"Fascinating." Ariana scribbled something, then looked up at Aaron with an expression that was equal parts professional and faintly accusing. "You let a plant-based organism soak unsupervised for an entire night and didn't think that was worth mentioning?"
"She seemed happy," Aaron said, shrugging. "I didn't think it needed a report."
"Everything needs a report, brother, that's the whole point of being in a research facility." Ariana turned back to Alyssa, leaning in slightly. "Tell me, little one, did you feel any different this morning? Tingling? Stretching? Itchiness anywhere unusual?"
Alyssa tilted her tiny head, mushroom cap wobbling slightly with the motion as she considered the question with the seriousness of someone being asked to recall a dream.
"My head feels heavy," she said slowly. "And warm. Like sun, but inside."
Ariana's pen stopped moving.
"Warm like sun, but inside," she repeated, very quietly, mostly to herself. Then, louder, with the kind of barely contained excitement that Aaron had learned to associate with very bad things happening to his schedule: "Aaron. Pick her up. Gently. I need to look at her cap."
"Why?"
"Because mushfolk biology runs on photosynthetic and absorption cycles, and a creature describing internal warmth after a full night of water submersion is either describing the early stages of a growth spurt or the early stages of something considerably less pleasant, and I would like to determine which before it becomes the second one."
That got Aaron moving immediately. He scooped Alyssa up off the desk and held her at eye level, peering closely at the cap on top of her head.
It looked, to his admittedly untrained eye, completely normal. Golden, slightly glossy, the same size it had been yesterday and the day before that.
"Looks fine to me," he said.
"Looks can be deceiving, brother, that's basically the entire premise of my career." Ariana stood, rounding the desk with quick, purposeful steps, and produced a small device from her gown pocket — something flat and circular, with a faint blue glow emanating from its center. She held it close to Alyssa's cap without touching it.
The device's glow brightened.
"Oh," Ariana said.
"Oh is not a word I like hearing from you," Aaron said immediately.
"Oh isn't necessarily bad! Oh can mean lots of things. Oh can mean interesting. Oh can mean unexpected but probably fine." Ariana's voice had taken on the rapid, slightly manic cadence of someone whose brain was running faster than her mouth could keep up with. "Alyssa, sweetie, has anyone ever told you how big mushfolk typically grow?"
"Big as a fist," Alyssa said, holding up her own tiny hand and making a small ball with it. "Maybe two fists if very lucky and very old."
"Right. Right, that tracks with the literature." Ariana checked the device again, frowning slightly at whatever the readout was telling her. "Except your current mana saturation level is climbing. Actively. While we're standing here talking about it."
Aaron looked down at the mushroom person cradled in his palm. She still looked exactly the same to him — small, golden-capped, currently looking mildly alarmed at being the center of so much sudden scientific attention.
"Climbing toward what?" he asked.
"I don't know yet, that's rather the point of monitoring it." Ariana's eyes — invisible behind her glasses, but Aaron could feel the intensity regardless — stayed fixed on the device. "This facility has spring water piped in from a deep aquifer that runs directly beneath this entire mountain range. It's saturated with ambient mana, far beyond what you'd find in ordinary water sources. The bucket Alyssa used was filled from the same supply that feeds half this building."
"You're saying the water she soaked in all night was basically liquid steroids," Aaron said slowly.
"I'm saying," Ariana corrected, with the patience of someone who found imprecise terminology personally offensive, "that mushfolk absorb mana through both root-contact and submersion, and if the water source here is significantly richer than anything available in her natural habitat, her body may be processing an entire month's worth of typical growth in a single night."
As if responding directly to the explanation, Alyssa let out a small, surprised squeak.
Aaron felt it before he saw it — a faint warmth radiating from his palm, a subtle shifting weight. He looked down just as Alyssa's cap visibly swelled, the golden surface stretching outward in slow, fluid pulses, like dough rising in time-lapse.
"She's growing," Aaron said, somewhat unnecessarily, given that it was happening directly in his hand.
"I can see that, brother, I have eyes." Ariana had already abandoned her chair entirely and was crouched directly in front of them, device angled toward Alyssa with the rapt fascination of someone watching their favorite show. "This is incredible. This is — Alyssa, does it hurt? Tell me immediately if it hurts."
"It tickles," Alyssa said, her voice climbing slightly in pitch, somewhere between alarmed and delighted. "It tickles a lot!"
Her body was lengthening now too, not just the cap — tiny limbs stretching, her overall frame expanding steadily, smoothly, like watching a balloon fill with slow and deliberate breaths. Aaron had to adjust his grip every few seconds as her proportions shifted, careful not to squeeze too tight or drop her as she outgrew the comfortable curl she'd settled into.
"This is well beyond a typical growth spurt," Ariana muttered, mostly to herself, scribbling notes with one hand while holding the device steady with the other. "At this rate she'll have at least tripled in size within the next few minutes. Possibly more."
"Is that dangerous?" Aaron asked, an edge of genuine concern slipping into his voice now, the scientific curiosity of the moment giving way to something more immediate. He'd grown rather fond of the tiny, indignant mushroom critter who'd taken up permanent residence in pockets and cleavages alike, and watching her body rearrange itself rapidly in his palm was doing nothing for his nerves.
"Unknown," Ariana admitted, which was somehow worse than a confident no. "But her vitals are stable. Heart rate elevated but not concerning. No distress signals beyond what sounds like enthusiasm rather than pain." She looked up at Aaron, sunglasses catching the lab's overhead light. "Set her down. I want to see how this plays out without restricting her movement."
Aaron lowered his hand toward the desk, and Alyssa — now noticeably heavier, noticeably larger than the palm-sized creature she'd been minutes ago — climbed off onto the metal surface with visibly increased confidence in her own limbs.
By the time the growth began to slow, several minutes later, Alyssa was no longer palm-sized.
She stood roughly the height of a housecat, her mushroom cap now a rich, glossy gold the size of a dinner plate, her limbs longer and more defined, proportioned in a way that suggested whatever growth process had just occurred wasn't random expansion but something closer to actual maturation. Her face, while still recognizably hers, had lost some of its rounded, infantile softness, replaced by sharper, more deliberate features.
She looked down at her own hands — now properly hand-shaped, fingers long enough to count individually rather than the stubby little nubs she'd had before — and let out a sound that was somewhere between a gasp and a delighted laugh.
"I'm BIG!" she announced, spinning in a small circle on the desk, nearly knocking over an inkwell in the process. "Sir Aaron, look! I'm so big now!"
"You certainly are," Aaron said, staring at her with the particular blankness of a man recalibrating his entire understanding of a creature he'd been carrying around in his pocket for weeks. freewebnσvel.cѳm
Ariana, meanwhile, had gone very, very quiet, her pen hovering motionless over the page as she stared at the newly resized mushroom girl with an expression Aaron couldn't quite place behind the sunglasses.
"Ariana?" he prompted, when the silence stretched a beat too long.
"This," Ariana said slowly, finally setting her pen down, "changes the entire scope of this research."
"How so?"
She looked up at him, and for the first time since he'd met her, the playful mask slipped entirely, replaced by something that looked almost like genuine, unguarded excitement.
"Brother," she said, "if a single night in mana-rich water can do this to a mushfolk, I need to know what it would do to you."
Aaron held up a hand before Ariana could get any further down whatever mental road she'd just sprinted onto.
"No."
"I didn't even finish my sentence."
"You didn't need to. I could hear where it was going." Aaron crossed his arms. "I'm not climbing into a vat of magic water because Alyssa got taller."
"It wouldn't be a vat, brother, that's needlessly dramatic. A tub, maybe. A reasonably sized tub." Ariana was already pulling a fresh folder toward her, flipping it open to a blank page with the eagerness of someone who'd just been handed a much better research proposal than the one she'd shown up with.
"I'm not getting in a tub of magic water either."
"You haven't even heard my reasoning."
"I can guess your reasoning. It's the same reasoning as the cameras, the blood, and the sunglasses thing. The reasoning is 'I want to see what happens.'" Aaron gestured at Alyssa, who had abandoned the conversation entirely in favor of marveling at her own fingers, flexing them open and closed with the fascination of someone who had just discovered they came with that many joints. "That's how we ended up here in the first place."
"That's an unfair generalization of my scientific process."
