"So, what's up with those ladies?" asks Leosin of Elfo, after the latter has returned to their camp.

"You don't want to know," says Elfo, but Leosin does want to know. "They were a little too friendly, and they offered us some soup."

"You didn't eat the soup, did you?" asks Leosin.

Elfo doesn't answer, but the look on his face gives away his answer.

"Oh man, that was dumb," says Leosin. "You don't know who they are, they may or may not know who you are. Somebody could be trying to poison you!"

"No, they were just nice ladies," says Elfo, but he's beginning to doubt, himself.

The adventurers bed down in their tents by the side of the road. The weather is frightening, pouring rain and thunder all night. In the morning, Bilbo is the first to awaken, and she steps outside the tent. The weather seems to have calmed momentarily, but the ground all around is covered with some sort of fungus. These mushrooms sprouted up during the night, and blanketed the area everywhere. They are just a couple of inches high now, but growing and spreading while Bilbo watches.

Still in the doorway of the tent, she pulls out her greataxe and strikes an area of fungus in front of her. The mushrooms pop like balloons, letting out a puff of black spores and a horrifying shriek of pain.

Noohar, their boss, pokes his head out of his tent. Seeing Bilbo outside her tent, he calls out, "What are these things? You know anything about them?"

"Not really," says Bilbo, "but they break when you strike them."

She demonstrates by striking them with an even wider stroke, and the shriek is terrifying. Noohar seems petrified. "Do you think you can clear a path to the carts?"

"Yeah," says Bilbo, but she isn't quite sure. Noohar disappears back into his tent.

Elfo has awakened from all the noise and stepped out of the tent with Bilbo. He checks his book of lore, which indeed has an entry for this "Fungus Humungous". According to the book, it will traumatize you with its death-shrieks, and it is not recommended to breathe the spores for reasons that it doesn't explain, but the fungus is generally not deadly. Elfo reads it to Bilbo, and to the others, who are waking up and beginning to peer out of the tent.

So they all step out and start to clear out a path to the carts, sweeping the fungus aside with whatever implements are available. The screams, however, are traumatizing, and Karat, Elfo, and Black Barry just can't take it, and crawl back into their sleeping bags, plugging their ears. Only Bilbo and Hooflepoof manage to continue the job. They find that the fungus only covers an area around their tent and the road for about 50 feet in every direction, approximately following the shadow of a huge gloomy tree which must be responsible for seeding the fungus somehow. In about three hours, they are able to clear the area around the carts, and enough of the road that the carts are able to move forward. Some of the other carts in the caravan are behind them, and call out to them from the edge of the fungus patch, apparently not knowing how to get past it, but the adventurers ignore them.

By midmorning they manage to get the carts back on the road, but both Hooflepoof and Bilbo are traumatized by the experience. Over the course of the day, they can't get the sounds of the tiny screams, and the smell of their spores, out of their minds. Especially Hooflepoof.

At that point, all the rest of the carts in their caravan have continued north and left them behind, which has Noohar quite concerned. Even with a strong team of warriors, this is a dangerous road, especially here in the Fields of the Dead. It rains most of the day, with spells of wind and lightning. Noohar presses them all day to move, move, move, as fast as they can, hoping to catch up with the rest of the caravan before nightfall. But as dusk approaches, they still see no sign of the rest of the group. He stops and asks the adventurers what they think: should we press on in the dark, or batten down for the night?

"We can't lose the cultists," whispers Hooflepoof to his companions.

"And besides, we might die out here," adds Leosin.

It's nearly unanimous that they shall continue. They don't have much light, so Karat uses her cantrip to light up some rocks, and they station themselves ahead of the horses and around the cart to light the way. They press on. More than an hour after dark, there is a sharp crack, and the carts lists to one side and stops. In the poor light, Noohar's brother Selvek, who was driving the cart, failed to see a hole in the road, and broke a wheel. Luckily, there is a spare in the cart, and Hooflepoof changes it quickly and they lose only about a half hour. They press on.

About two and a half hours after dark, they see a campfire in a clearing off to the side of the road. They pull the horses to a stop, and Hooflepoof cautiously approaches the campfire, around which he finds two female humans - fortunately, not the twins they met the night before.

"Are you with the caravan?" he asks them.