Mycology Seminar - Class Six-and-One [Tuesday Evening, 13th of January]

[tolpen]

This fine evening you are returned to your home classroom. Gone is the festive decor, including all the elephants which can now be assumed thoroughly refuted. The posters with your artwork done during the first class remain, although they seem to have switched places here and there. The paper certainly seems newer. On the other hand, the bowl of apples has returned. The apples are smaller, darker and lumpy. They taste sour, and try as you might, the brown juice will drip down your chin, it is entirely unavoidable. They are also very fulfilling, you don’t have to eat too many to feel full.
As you mingle and find your seat – God gracious, have you forgotten your usual spot over the course of the winter break? – there is something odd in the air. It takes you a moment to put a finger on it.
The teacher is absent!
Actually… The teacher is late. By ten-and-something minutes. You’ve known the Soft-Eyed Mycologist to be most punctual, at least for the class.
He does arrive though, and with him he brings the trolley cart you’ve come to learn to love, or at least get higher expectations as to what is going to be the practical portion of the class. Today it holds small round aquariums – the kind in which you are not supposed to keep fish long-term. The interior is full of something dense and white. Milk or sentient fog would be a fine guess, but the contents do not slosh nor swirl like a fluid would. A particularly homogenous cotton?

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