While getting away from the lake edge was good, there was simply no dry area to sleep on.
At all.
Where it was not straight up boggy wet, it was muddy, soft, and cold. You coudn't even dig in the stuff to build it up. Not a quality stone to be found either. Even the trees looked unhappy here, draped in their curtains of dripping moss. The very notion of dry leaves was a farce.
Jack was *very* displeased. While he liked mama well enough, wallowing in the muck with her did not sound at all pleasurable, and to be fair, she did not seem terribly pleased with the spot either. Not that it mattered, because every spot was like that in this damned muddy hole.
All around, the faces he saw spoke to the same displeasure and distaste. Hell, it would be one thing if they had a damn boat to sleep in or something-- Sure was wet enough!
--And the bugs. Gods the little bloodsuckers were more relentless than taxmen.
.. What they needed to do, was get higher up. The trees were stately, but offered no real purchase with their gnarled roots beneath otherwise featureless smooth bark going up high overhead before the first branches appeared. Cypress, he thought he had heard them called at one point.
At this point, he was ready to try anything-- He hadn't practiced the magic at all-- only read it.. But he was gonna try anyway. Gods Damn it, he and Mama were gonna sleep on something DRY tonight.
That anger-fueled determination saw the old bastard through a long, arduous slog through the muck, hunting for tree seeds.
The effort was not well rewarded. The trees here were indeed in a bad way, and had not shed seeds in a long time. The ones he found were clearly more than a year old, waterlogged, and probably no good. Keeping only the most promising from among those he found, he had about 4 or 5 total.
Maybe he could make it work anyway.. He was so angry, he didn't really care anymore. In red-faced frustration, he stuffed them into the soggy earth, and tried to coax them to grow... Only a single one sprouted, and it was sickly, and refused to grow bigger than a sprout before succumbing to whatever malign influence was at work in this poor forest.
Sinking back in the mud in crushing defeat, he leaned back against one of the tall trees, and bonked his head on a stiff, hard protrusion sticking out from it. Irritatedly, he turned to see what it was, to see that it was a woody (and totally inedible) shelf bracket mushroom. Normally he would not be at all interested in such a thing-- Not really useful for much; Sure, you can turn them into kindling cloth if you have the time and expertise, but here? No--- No, what excited him at this discovery, were the images he had rushing through his mind, several days ago, back in town-- when he managed to grow giant mushrooms. A giant version of one of these small fungi? A person might JUST be able to sleep on top of it! AND it would be DRY!
Excitedly, he yanked the mushroom off the side of the ailing tree's trunk, then hunted for suitably compromised trees to work with. Given that this would probably kill the trees he did this to, he wanted only the sickliest, and least likely to survive this catastrophe to begin with-- Depending on how you view it, it was arguably a good thing, as he found a cluster that fit the bill.
Grinning like a crazy old fool, he cut small slivers from the base of the sample mushroom, then cut notches into the trunks of the trees he had picked out, shoved the slivers into the notches, and then poured everything he had into them.
Almost violently, huge shelves of woody fungus erupted from the sides of the trees. Nicely sized too. Definitely big enough to sleep on.
Perhaps it was best to stick with what you knew.
Mama had been watching his furious rummagings and crazy slogging through the muck, wondering about his sanity. She was still looking at him confusedly, not understanding the significance of giant mushrooms that you cant eat. He cradled her soggy wet head, and gave her a big kiss on her forehead, then climbed on top of one of the mushrooms, and laid down.
[Nice and dry]
he broadcast at her, with a devious smile.