To Find a Toff Part Two

                In the rising sunlight of late morning, casting short shadows into a deep hole, stood three figures and half a dozen back packs. They’d been there for a few minutes, some of them pondering what was to be done and how to go about it, and others quietly containing vital supplies in their canvas bellies. None of them were making much progress in changing their circumstances.
                Standing in the centre of the group was Dr Monica Seetch. Doctors Without Maps couldn’t have hoped to hire a better medic; she was experienced, professional, level-headed, and capable of biting clean through a bandage if she forgot her scissors. If an injured party was capable of being rescued, and if it was at all possible to save them from their wounds or sickness, then she would be able to get them home.
                On one side of her was Kari McDermot, whose credentials as a guide were as long as a piece of string, and did about as good of a job of keeping Monica’s temper in check. She was joining the good doctor in a rousing stare into a shadowy abyss of roots, collapsed earth and miscellaneous formal attire, but her mind was as empty as that same void.
                 On Monica's other side, searching through her phone for the low light camera settings, was Taylor Gusto, first of her name. She was enjoying great success in her personal mission to create an engaging social media narrative, regarding their shared mission to rescue a pair of wealthy explorers. Colourful rainforest, bizarrely undulating plains and the imminent need to descend into a cavernous hollow made for a difficult rescue, but one heck of an exciting blog series.
                "Alright then, Kari," Monica said, finally breaking the silence of their vigil at the edge of the chasm, "you're the expert here. How do we get down there?"
                The guide scratched her head. Then she scratched her bottom. Neither activity spurred much cognition or comprehension.
                "Do we even have to? They might come back up to us. When you've seen as many root holes as I have, you learn not to climb into them if someone's heading the opposite way." she answered, in what might have been her best advice to date.
                "That would be very unlikely in my experience, but... it's hard to dispute that it's possible. Definitely sensible to consider it." Dr Seetch accepted, extending a begrudging olive branch. "So what do you propose in place of heading down?"
                Kari squatted down and scanned the edge of the hole. She ran her fingers across the dirt, sniffed at the air, pressed an ear to the ground, then licked her fingertips. This proved to be foolhardy, since they were covered in dusty soil, so she committed herself to spluttering and spitting for a few moments.
                "Great, you ate some dirt. That's a tremendous plan." sighed the doctor, the olive branch decaying in front of her eyes.
                "Actually, it tells me that they definitely passed down this way, and that the soil is too poor to grow crops, so they won't have settled into a subsistence lifestyle while waiting for us." the guide snapped back.
                Neither of the others really knew what to do with that information, if such a generous phrase could be applied in its description.
                "I don't want to just wait around here in the hope that they turn up; every moment could be precious if one of them is injured." the doctor reasserted by way of reply.
                "But if we meet them half way down like Kari said, then we'd all have to climb up again, and all of us would be at risk of a terrible fall." Taylor added, with surprising clarity and forethought.
                "A fair argument."
                "No, I wasn't arguing, I was agreeing with you. It'd make a great story, and we'd have amazing footage from an abseil. We’d be getting reposts for weeks with videos of a doctor swinging off a frayed climbing rope, one aristocratic dandy under each arm, and Kari hauling from the top.” she explained, with a series of emotive and cinematic hand gestures that genuinely helped. “I think we should get right down there, because either way it makes the eventual blog post much more interesting for the viewers. Clicks lead to donations. Donations lead to expeditions. Expeditions lead to… erm… perdition?”
                “That doesn’t sound right.” Kari said, having thoroughly de-soiled her mouth. “I think expeditions lead to eating soil.”
                "Oh for God's sake, look; we'll shout down to them and listen out for a response. If we get nothing then they're not nearby enough for us to worry about." Monica said, not sure of why she was explaining herself instead of just doing it. She quickly rectified that oversight. "Jebediah! Quentin! We're here to rescue you! Can you hear us?" she bellowed into the cavern. As was typical of caverns, it deigned not to reply.
                For five, then ten, then twenty seconds the three rescuers waited, listening intently for any 'tally ho' or 'tootle pip' or 'ra ra ra' response from the subjects of their search but, alas, they heard nothing. Toff and cavern were as silent as one another, and probably equally hollow.
                "There we are. They're not in earshot, so it's best for us to climb down."
                "Rookie mistake. They'll probably move into earshot while we're climbing. You need to call in a way that really carries to make that plan work." assessed Kari, despite having waited patiently alongside the others.
                "Fine. Let's hear you do a better job then."
                Kari shifted uncomfortably. She'd been expecting an argument, and now, irritatingly, she'd have to call her own bluff.
                "Alright. I will. I'm great at shouting, do it all the time when I'm telling the other guides how much higher up the mountain I am than they are. There’s a special technique to it that you won’t have heard of if you’re not a qualified guide, but it’s really deafening. You might want to cover your ears."
                Monica didn't bother replying, but held a hand out towards the abyss, in case Kari had forgotten which gargantuan void she would be addressing.
                "Ahem. Cooee! I said, cooooeeeee!"
                Kari strained to project the words through a throat coated in a thin layer of dust.
                "That's it? That was quieter than your speaking voice!”
                “No it wasn’t.” protested Kari, much louder.
                “It was, Kari.” Taylor agreed. “I think you want to give it something more like… er… Oi! You down there!?” she roared, in perfect pub-hooligan.
                “That sounds threatening!” Monica snapped. “We’re here to help you if you’re injured, and to make sure you get back home safely.” she called into the abyss, to clear up any confusion created by her colleagues.
                “They’ll never hear that weak, non-guide shouting. Cooee! Coooeee!”
                The guide’s whisper into the void was washed away by Taylor’s chanted chorus of Sweet Caroline, which was the loudest thing she had ever heard come out of a human’s larynx and was therefore her go-to for attracting attention. Dr Seetch felt forced to bellow further assurances of their professionalism and intent to provide medical aid, amid this auditory melange.
                Long they stood there, deep into that darkness hollering. Monica’s pleas to respond if they were hurt and Taylor’s faithful recreation of a Friday night crowd at kicking-out time did acoustic battle, while Kari’s wheezy and breathy calls of a sickly Tudor woman tried and failed to gain any audible ground. There was no hope that anyone would be able to parse the vocal nightmare, and after a solid few minutes of futile conversation with a hole, it was obvious that there was no-one around to hear it anyway.
                Monica sat down, panting. Every scrap of breath she’d been able to draw had been committed to yelling, and she had to relent to the demands of the rest of her body. Without anyone to fight against, Taylor likewise ceased her energetic rendition of What’s New Pussycat and took a seat. Neither of them could hear Kari’s continued efforts over the sound of their own ragged breathing, and she quietly gave up in the hope that they’d forgotten about her.
                “Well…” summarised Monica, “that was pointless. Or not. I guess we know they’re not close to us. We definitely need to get down there and look for them the old fashioned way.”
                “With less shouting?” asked Taylor.
                “With less shouting. Kari, I assume you have some climbing gear with you?”
                “Yep”
                “Great. I’ll let you get all that ready, then. Just need to catch my breath.”
                Monica laid on her back and stared at the bright blue sky, the sun’s ascent rendering it ever brighter, ever more saturated, and ever more inviting, as the sound of rustling backpacks and clinking karabiners rang out from her companions. It was a great shame to look upon such a cloudless sight overhead and then abandon it for the subterranean unknown, but adventure called them to wherever they were necessary. If that involved burying themselves among the lost, gargantuan root complex of some unknowable tree, then so be it.
                For a moment there was silence, a space devoid of any bag rustling, clip rattling or discussion with Taylor, who was presumably videoing the whole process for some social network in which Monica had less than zero interest. Then there was muttering, a tentative, awkward muttering which quickly became urgent whispering. Dr Seetch wanted to trust that it was benign. At least, that's what she told herself, before recognising her own patterns. What she actually wanted, she clarified to her internal monologue, was to want to feel that she wanted to trust them. This hypothetical ideal was very different to the scenario in which she found herself, the one with a total certainty that there was either a problem of which to keep her ignorant, or a mischief being orchestrated at her expense. Neither was a welcome circumstance or a good use of their time. She sat up and faced them.
                "Where have we got to? Everything alright?" she accused.
                "Just stop right there, before you make some wild assertion that I’m a bad guide again. I don't need to hear it. Not that it bothers me, because I know I'm great, but you shouldn't be saying it about innocent mistakes."
                "Wh-"
                "Kari is right, Monica. We should approach this with kindness and as a learning opportunity. May even a team building opportunity that we could turn into a mini content update later in the year.”
                “Right, that sounds like a load of cobblers, but what is-“
                “Anyone could have done it, alright? Anyone. You especially. You forgot loads of things on the journey here, like to pack your own machete or not to be sour-faced all the time.” Kari snapped. Monica was well beyond the stage of suspicion, and firmly into the realms of confirmation, that she was being pre-emptively attacked by a defensive guide.
                “What happened?”
                “Nothing has happened, Monica, it’s all alright.” sang Taylor, dropping into the lilt of a lullaby that her grandmother used to sing. “It was a simple case of an overlooked item of inventory.”
                “What item?”
                “One that we can easily do without. It shouldn’t even be counted as overlooked. It’s redundant, if anything.” Kari said.
                “What. Item.”
                Kari muttered something which barely threatened audibility, as if the words were somehow embarrassed or ashamed of themselves. It sounded a bit like snow globe, but that didn't strike Monica as the sort of phrase which could be in any way relevant.
                "Pardon?"
                Another muttering, more aggressive but equally inaudible, came back at her. It could have been dough robe, but if anything that was less likely than snow globe.
                "I still didn't catch that."
                Kari scuffed her boot backwards and forwards through the dirt, exposing fine, hair-like roots connected to something much larger and much further down.
                "We have no rope." Taylor said, saving Kari the indignity of a third mishearing. "It's unfortunate but it's understandable and it's alright. Neither of us brought rope either."
                The inarguable but not necessarily relevant fact came oozing from her mouth like strawberry mousse, cloying with the tone of a primary school teacher clutching at the straws of mutual culpability. While Dr Seetch was swallowing just enough of her anger to make her response verbal, rather than physical, Taylor continued: "Luckily, I have something that's a close second best."
 
                Monica seethed while she climbed down. She'd seethed while she started her descent, she’d seethed while she strapped her bags to herself, and she’d seethed for the duration of their distressingly effective plaiting party. Lowering herself gradually down the makeshift rope of braided hair extensions, which passed slowly before her eyes like a rainbow drawn into a filament, she told herself that there was no sense in remaining angry; it would only impair her judgement and put the rest of the expedition at risk. Unfortunately, acting on that remarkably sensible piece of self-advice was very difficult when her hand squelched into something slick and oily on their ‘rope’.
                “Ugh! What’s on this?” she wailed. Taylor, above her at the edge of the chasm, leaned over.
                “Which colour are you at?”
                “Why does that… pale green, I guess. It’s hard to tell.”
                “Oh, you’ll be on the olive ones.”
                “I had olive hair once.” Kari said, sitting beside her. “Everyone thought it was great, so I dyed it back before I became too much of an icon and lost my peaceful, quiet life.”
                Taylor smiled, but offered no response.
                “Why are they oily?” Monica called up. Her oiled hand started to slide, so she gripped harder.
                “I wanted them to look authentic for the photos, so I soaked them in olive oil. Nothing can be more authentic to an olive than oil.” Taylor explained.
                “Have you lost your mind?! Couldn’t we have left these ones out of the rope?” demanded the doctor, who was discovering that no amount of gripping with an oiled hand would give it purchase. She began to involuntarily slide downwards, which had the unfortunate side-effect of delivering her other hand into the oil patch.
                “In hindsight, it does feel foolish.” the intern conceded, waiting for the next question from the doctor.
                Monica asked no more questions. She had become rather preoccupied in trying to arrest her sudden downward momentum, the kind that would reasonably be built up when hanging from an oiled rope. Between the lack of equipment, and then sabotaged improvised alternatives, she was starting to suspect that these companions had been specifically chosen to bring about her untimely demise. Her harness, made of the same plaited hair as the rope, had soaked up enough of the oil to also forsake its fail-safe duty; it was just one more let-down among her trusted crew and equipment.
                Try as she might to regain her grip, hands which were increasingly ready to be pan fried for ten to twelve minutes in mild seasoning did not share that lofty goal. It was all that she could do to wrap the rope around her ankles and try to at least tangle her way to a halt.
                "Hold on!" shouted Taylor, in case Monica hadn't thought of that.
                "Falling is quite bad for you. A doctor should know that." added Kari. "Try to break your fall by taking on the shape of a grasshopper!"
                Channelling her inner invertebrate leaper, for all the good it could do, Dr Seetch gave her legs a gentle bend so that they might only break agonisingly, rather than catastrophically, when they hit the solid root below. Letting go with one hand, as a grasshopper might in its inability to comprehend the situation, Monica began to furiously wipe her palm against her dusty trousers, creating a stain that would never leave and a much drier hand in the process. She clasped it back around the hair rope and, despite the thin sheen of oil left upon it by the harness and her other hand, she felt the welcome heat of rope burn start to build. Below her, the root on which she had been planning to land was approaching rather rapidly. Some frantic wiping of her other hand followed, sending her trousers further down the road of eternal laundry damnation, and into the realms of 'gardening clothes' or 'car washing clothes' or 'climbing the chimney to see if I can find evidence of chimney squirrels' clothes. This was a worthy sacrifice, however, for it gave Monica the ability once again to have rope burn on both hands, courtesy of cosmetic head prosthetics. It was with some joy that she felt soreness creep into her second palm, and a commensurate slowing, if not stopping, was now able to attend the festivities. When the moss and dirt covered root finally made contact with Monica's legs and back, it therefore merely winded and bruised her, rather than shattering her body. According to the lack of cracking, the absence of agony, and the total disregard for skeletal reconfiguration, there were no breaks or fractures to be found.
                "Are you alright? You didn't seem to keep holding on." Taylor called down. Against all the odds, her advice had been the poorest; it was something which Monica might have found grimly amusing, if not for the lack of air in her lungs.
                "That's not how you break a fall like a grasshopper; they always land on their feet to avoid things like impacts to the spine." Kari shouted into the hole.
                "Grasshoppers are invertebrates." said the intern to the guide. "They don't have spines."
                "That also helps them avoid spinal injuries, yeah. Evolutionary trick to make falling safer. The doctor down there landed more like a salmon, who only do that when they're in water. I've seen it myself on trips that I have definitely led so there's no need to question the veracity of my claims." Kari clarified.
                Taylor paused for a moment. As an intern she told herself it was her job to listen to, and learn from, the more experienced members of the expedition. However, accepting Kari's wisdom was directly contradictory to following Monica's example of disregarding everything the guide said. She went to her mental fall-back position of taking a photo of Kari, and then one of Monica at the bottom of the rope.
                "We should probably climb down after her now. Make sure she's OK."
                "Yeah. I was going to suggest that, but good guides know when to hold their tongue."
                "Then why were you taking your hair harness off?" Taylor asked innocently, using the terminology that Monica had expressly forbidden upon first hearing it.
                "To... er... check it for oil. Looks like Monica made the classic mistake of wearing lubricated safety gear on a dry climb. You only want oiled harnesses on a descent where slowing down is dangerous, like a skydive or fleeing an eagle. Happens all the time to me. That's why I use the slipshod knot to be able to untie myself at a moment's notice."
                "Right, OK. Thank you." answered the intern, uncertainly. "I'll go down next, I guess? And I'll be careful with the olive oil bit."
                From her position below, once again staring up at the sky from her back, Monica was mercifully not privy to the details of the conversation on the surface. Being spared the minutia of a salmons flop versus and invertebrate's clever lack of a backbone was instrumental in her rapid recovery; she would only have wasted what little breath she'd regained by shouting at Kari.
                As her lungs deigned to re-inflate themselves and she greedily gulped huge mouthfuls of air through her nose, somehow, she watched Taylor making a slow and methodical descent. It seemed that she had less trouble with the olive extensions, opting to keep her hands off that section, so that her total abseiling time was much longer, and her landing involved the feet rather than the lumbar and thoracic vertebrae. A sensible technique, as any climbing instructor would agree.
                "Are you alright, Dr Seetch? That looked painful."
                Monica, who had by this time managed to sit up and wince, couldn't deny it.
                "Why did you use oiled hair in the rope, Taylor?" she asked, softly. Devastatingly, the tone wasn’t angry, but disappointed and heavily bruised.
                "I... didn't really think about it. But the job specification also didn't say we needed to consider the impact of oils on our day to day work, just the impact of our work on how much oil is used, and the environmental implications thereof." Taylor said, recalling the lip-service literature she'd been given during her induction.
                "I think that some things," Monica winced again as she shifted herself, "are sufficiently obvious that they don't need to be written down."
                "And some obvious things are only obvious to other people. If a system has flaws that lead to failure then it is the system to blame, not the people who use it."
                Dr Seetch grimaced at Taylor, who she had believed to be a twenty-something intern and not a mid-fifties engineer.
                "I saw someone post that advice the other day, written on a photo of a pizza." she explained. "I think they were trying to say that it's alright to order a no tomato, no cheese, no base, barbecue sauce pizza if the online order form lets you."
                "What?"
                "You don’t have to explicitly pay for the sauce on your pizza, so by cancelling all the other items they were effectively getting free sauce from the takeaway, and-"
                Monica held up a hand.
                "I don't care anymore, and to finally answer your question I'm fine, I think. No major damage that I can feel."
                "Great. Shall we let Kari know to co-" was as far as Taylor made it through her sentiment, before the guide went careening past them, swinging on the rope like a pendulum. Her dirt encrusted boots, which, on this close inspection, appeared to be boot-style slippers, narrowly avoided clipping Monica's nose as they soared uncontrollably through the air, containing as they did the feet of an inept climber.
                "Professional technique." she wailed. It seemed that she had managed to avoid the oil trap, at least, and was simply victim to more harmonic forms of motion. "Lets me choose a landing spot anywhere below me." she shrieked, knuckles white as she clung on to a tasteful purple plait.
                "Hold on, we'll catch you!" Taylor yelled, leaning outwards before Monica grabbed her and pulled her to the floor.
                "We will do no such thing. If she just keeps still on there then she'll eventually come to a stop and can step off."
                "Yeah. I don't need your help anyway. It's under control." sobbed the guide, confidently. What followed was a length of time estimated to fall between one and thirty minutes, punctuated by little wails and occasional yelps, as an increasingly tired Kari swung in decreasingly sized arcs above the root. When her range of motion had been reduced to a small circle, no larger than a border collie on a standard skateboard, she released her locked-up hands and gently plopped onto her feet.
                "Textbook landing." she said, wiping away the tears.
                "Would you like a sit down for a moment, Kari? I imagine your arms must be tired from that. It will give us a chance to plan our next moves." Monica said, offering yet another ill-deserved olive branch and then realising that she suddenly despised the metaphor. The robust telling off that she had been planning felt a little needless now; Kari’s pendulous trauma had been punishment enough.
                "A sensible but unnecessary suggestion." said the guide, immediately collapsing onto her bottom and rubbing at her biceps. "I'll do it to make you feel better, because you medical types are always worrying too much about straining this or tearing that."
                "Wonderful to know you're so empathetic." Dr Seetch said flatly.
                "It probably is a worry though, right?" Taylor asked. "I suppose that kind of thing is why you're retiring; all this physical strain and potential for injury on top of the emotional burden of caring for everyone."
                "Something like that, yes. I'm growing increasingly tired of putting myself in danger to bail other people out of their bad decisions and obvious mistakes. We know that Jebediah and Quentin are in a mess because they tried to drag a whole formal wardrobe with them, just so that they could be in a dinner jacket for the evening and tuxedo for lunch."
                "That's totally incorrect. Tuxedos would never be worn before eight p.m., way after lunch has finished." Kari panted, still tending to her ravaged arms.
                "Whatever. Any kind of suit is wrong for this environment, and bringing multiple changes for the sake of fashion or etiquette is plain stupid. And this isn't even the most egregious display of inadequately equipped exploration that I've been forced to remedy."
                "Tell us about some of them. It'd be great contextualising information for my blog series."
                "Should I start with the one where the guide forgot the rope and the intern oiled their improvised solution?" Monica said before she could stop herself. Part of her wondered if she'd still have said it after she'd stopped herself, should the situation have arisen.
                "I can cover that myself." blushed Taylor, apparently feeling partially responsible for Monica's undignified descent.
                "Jolly good. Then there was the trip I had to make to the Atacama to rescue a hot air balloon pilot."
                "Amazing! I guess they'd they lost their way?"
                "They'd also lost their balloon. Before they set off. They were too embarrassed to mention it to anyone so they just tried to walk it instead, still carrying the basket and the burner with them.” Monica recalled with a deep sigh. “He was half-dead of exhaustion and dehydration when I finally caught up to him."
                "And you had to drag them and their stuff back?"
                "Them? Yes. Their stuff? No. I left it out there because who would try to drag a basket across a desert twice?" Monica pontificated. "Oh, I gave him such an earful on the journey back. I had two survivalists with me to carry the stretcher, so I could really concentrate my efforts soley on explaining, in minute detail, how utterly reckless it was to perform extreme physical activities in the blazing sun of a desert, how ridiculous he looked all parched and dry like that, and that he was a living embodiment of the wages of pride being spent on a dimwit."
                "Wow. Tough love can be a kind of thorough care, I guess… but his basket and his burner; they're still where he fell? As a monument?"
                "Nope. His idiot friend took his own balloon out to pick it all up, found that they couldn’t fit two baskets under one balloon, and then walked the whole lot back to civilisation themselves."
                "Not on his own? Surely?"
                "Oh no. He brought a pig with him for company. So he had to drag pig feed and water too. It took him nearly a month, but Doctors Without Maps weren't interested in saving him because they didn’t have a vet available for the porcine patient." Monica explained.
                "That's... a shame."
                "I know. I could have given him such a thorough bollocking as well. I could have told off both the fool and the fool who followed him! What a treat it would have been."
                "Who else did you save?" Taylor asked, trying to steer Monica away from glorifying the practice of berating the injured.
                "Ever heard of Countess Delbago?"
                "No."
                "Nor had I until she tried to complete the first barefoot descent of Mount Thornhill. In case you're unaware, Mount Thornhill is a mountain completely covered in thorny flora; a conservation site designed to have self-enforcing access control, because no-one would be enough of a dullard to deliberately go into something literally made of spines."
                "I've been up and down it twice. It's easy." Kari chimed in.
                "No you haven't.” Dr Seetch replied, without skipping either a beat or a chance to berate Kari. “The countess wanted to prove that she wasn't a spoiled brat or pampered aristocrat by living 'like the people do', which apparently means constant downhill suffering with lacerations all over the body. She'd been airlifted up to the top by a helicopter pilot with loose morals and definitely no permission from the conservation trust, and left with everything she'd decided she needed for a hike; a small bottle of sparkling water and a packet of pink wafer biscuits in case she should need to feed the birds. Then it was time to trample a site of special scientific interest with her delicately blue-blooded feet, which bled quite red, I might add, for the cause of showing that her money hadn't rendered her any different from you or I."
                "I don't understand what you mean by blue-blooded."
                "And I don’t really care what I meant by it, so no need to worry. She was supposed to report back that evening but, predictably, failed to do so. Enter muggins here with the task of delicately picking my way through precious and rare plant-life while wearing protective gear that made me roughly as wide as the average refrigerator."
                "With or without a chilled water dispenser?"
                "Without. I had to climb upwards to get to her, because no-one wanted to pay out for another pilot to take me to the top, and it took two full days to find her lying prone among the thorns, unable to move on account of her, and I quote, 'utterly ruined pedicure'. It wasn't an inaccurate statement, but it did slightly bury the lead."
                "I don't follow."
                "It was hard to recognise that what she had left were even feet, let alone ones with chipped nail varnish."
                "Oh my god. That's gross." Taylor said, grimacing.
                "If you think that's bad, you should have heard what I called her once she was lucid." smiled the doctor. "I won't repeat the worst of it because neither of you need to be exposed to that kind of language, but I did remind her how little she deserved what little ankle she had left. I called her a cracked walnut under a dozen bin bags, a vapidly selfish oyster nurturing the pearl of incongruously narcissistic banality, and two left shoes on one right foot, which was particularly cutting because of, well, how cut up her feet were."
                Monica sighed contentedly while Taylor made notes.
                "I don't know about either of you, but I feel much better after that."
                "What does incongruously narcissistic banality even mean?" asked the intern.
                "Who knows?" smiled Dr Seetch, standing up again. "Anyway, let's get moving again . We've got a careful climb ahead."
                Trembling arms, oil stains and drafted blog series respectively accounted for, the expedition once again began to make slow, cautious progress into the depths. The root on which they had landed was as broad as road, and curved gently downwards into the dark, like a gigantic bramble vine. Under, above and around it, often well out of reach, were several more just like it, woven together like a child's drawing of several hopelessly entangled Loch Ness monsters. As they moved out of the spotlight formed by the opening above, the amount of soil packed into the roots thinned and dissipated, until they were walking in the fissures and furrows of floral growth left unchecked. Rapidly, the darkness grew thicker. Their vision faded to black and white as they picked a path along the root, its curvature growing slowly but consistently steeper.
                Monica, ever-prepared to shine a light on those who needed reproach, reached one hand behind herself and pulled a torch from the webbing around her backpack. A gentle press on its rubber button powered up the narrow beam of bright light; it disappeared completely into the darkness ahead. Dr Seetch twisted the focus to spread the beam, and angled it down ahead of herself. Imperfect though it might have been as an illumination solution, they could at least see where their feet would or would not be able to land.
                "Hah, a battery powered torch is that?" Kari snorted. "Those batteries will run out within the hour and then you'll be stuck in total darkness."
                "They last for over ten hours, actually. And I have spares. And a solar charger."
                "A lot of good solar charging will do you down here. And even up there it's unreliable because condors often fly in front of the sun and block it out." Kari retorted, not to be dissuaded from her judgements.
                "Yes. Flocks of condors blotting out the sky. The air was thick with them, if I recall. Couldn't so much as see a shred of blue through the mass of feathers above us."
                "Exactly. Which is why I have something much better." Kari agreed, either missing or leaning into the sarcasm, as she pulled out her own torch. With a distinct clunk she pressed the power button, and a weak, yellow haze was spilled like milk over her legs.
                "Oh, great. That'll be our lighthouse in the deeps of the earth."
                "You non-exploring folk would never understand. I can keep this on perpetually, because I have the only truly reliable power source: myself." she said. Monica wasn't sure what she meant, until the whirring, electronic sound of a dynamo rose from the twilight. Turning her own torch on the guide, Dr Seetch saw with despair a wind-up torch being frantically charged by the already limp-armed guided. In fairness to the torch, its light did approach the level of 'respectable' with the guide's zealous rotation, but the exertion of already ruined muscles was plain to see on Kari's face.
                "Marvellous. Did you pick that up at the market?"
                "Yes! How did you know?"
                "Just a hunch."
                "Well, luckily for you two, it was three for two, so there's one for everybody."
                "Great, thanks!" Taylor said, excitedly holding out a hand. Monica pinched the bridge of her nose. She had a guide with three soon-to-be-broken torches and no rope.
                Awed silence and quiet contemplation was replaced by the periodic sounds of feverish whirring as they continued their descent. It seemed that the wind-up torches could hold their charge for an impressive three-to-five minutes before needing a top up, and the otherworldly peace of their root void was augmented by soundscape of a fridge that can't settle on quite when to run its motor. Regardless, it allowed them all to keep moving.
                More than once, as they descended, they were forced to seek out and drop down to a lower root, as their existing road became too steep to traverse. Often, this meant they had to backtrack to find a suitable spot. It was the arduous work of an hour or more, but finally they could see the ground below themselves by the light of Monica's torch beam, and much later by the variable glow of Kari and Taylor's. When they finally touched down, leaving a network of multi-coloured ropes, with or without olive-oil enhancement, behind them, the light of the opening was long gone; either it was too distant, or the roots had woven together like a condor migration and blotted it out. They were truly encapsulated in darkness at the heart of the abyss.
                "Well, OK. This is progress, I guess. I don't suppose either of you can see any sign of where Jebediah went? Come to think of it, how did he and Quentin even get down here? I didn't see any ropes left over from their climb."
                "Maybe they channelled their inner grasshopper like I told you to. They're probably real explorers too, who know at least a little of the manifold secrets of exploration that I hold." assessed Kari.
                "Or they somehow pulled their ropes down after themselves." Taylor added. "Not sure how they'd be planning to get back up, of course. Or how they'd make a rope that could both come down after them a pull, and also holding their weight while they climb. It's confusing, but it makes for a great mystery. Every narrative needs one."
                "Or they just fell and they're lying down here, somewhere, broken and in need of help." Dr Seetch said, ever the optimist. They sat with the thought for a moment. "We should scan the ground down here until we either find them or some sign of where they went."
                "Split up and cover more ground?" Taylor suggested.
                "No, that's too dangerous because we might not find each other again af..." Monica said, pausing when she heard Kari's footsteps sprinting off into the darkness. "Kari!"
                There was no answer, and not even an echo. The roots and the dark swallowed her words whole, or at least chewed them below the level of hearing.
                "I think she went this way." Taylor said, sheepishly. Monica rolled her eyes, and motioned for Taylor to lead the way. When she remembered that it was too dark to see the gesture, she told her to lead the way instead.
                The ground level of the chasm was uneven but smooth, leading them to believe it had been a hollow for a great many years. Smaller roots protruded here and there, making the perfect snare to snag a boot and break an ankle, and bare stone occasionally made an appearance through dense clay. The air was cold and damp.
                Flashing one light around themselves and keeping the other on the ground, Taylor and Monica made slow progress after Kari, who was presumably still sprinting her way through the chasm. Dr Seetch would normally have found this to be frustrating, since it meant she was losing ground on her target, but if Kari was the only loss of Kari's poor decision then it somehow didn't bother her as much.
                "Look!" Taylor said, pointing uselessly in the dark. Monica's heart fell at the thought that Taylor had spotted the guide. "Ahead and a bit to the right. Is that another monocle?"
                Dr Seetch squinted into the blackness; there did indeed seem to be another suspicious glinting, like that of an eyepiece.
                "Maybe." she said, nurturing a wonderful seed of disapproval in bringing multiple pointless articles of eyewear on an exploration trip. In their measured and trip-cautious way they approached the reflection, and found that it was indeed another plain glass monocle.
                "Well that's... very lucky of us." Monica said, a little taken aback. Normally these kinds of search operation took days of careful scouring, inch-by-inch. To walk almost sightlessly through a web of roots and find exactly the path they needed was jarringly convenient.
                "Yeah, but it was also the direction Kari ran in, and she is our guide. I suppose she had the idea that they'd gone this way from... er... her guiding instincts?"
                "She has as many guide instincts as you have scent glands." Monica muttered to herself, which was rather rude when there was someone else to whom to speak.
                "At least it means we're not wasting our effort, and hopefully Kari will be up ahead somewhere."
                "Or she won't." Dr Seetch said, clinging on to her sad hopes a little longer.
                The monocle discovery did not remain their only sign of life for long as they continued onwards, trying as best they could to maintain the rough trajectory that Kari had taken.
                "What's that, over there? A light?" Taylor said, having mantled a thigh-high root in a calf-high boot.
                "Your eyes are much younger and better than mine. I can't see anything. Another monocle, maybe?"
                "Straight in front. Looks... blue?"
                "Blue?"
                "Yeah, you know, like the colour. Third one down in the original rope."
                "Yes, I understand the bloody concept of blue, thank you." Dr Seetch snapped, tripping over that same root. "Oof. Sorry, shouldn’t have snapped. I meant that I understood the words but was expressing surprise that we'd be seeing a blue reflection from a white light."
                "Probably not a reflection then."
                "It's not the yellow of Kari's wind-up torch either?"
                "Nope. Definitely blue. I too understand the difference between colours."
                "I deserved that. Still can't see it, though."
                "You can't miss it! Dead ahead. Bright blue."
                Walking and squinting, which did nothing for her ability to notice and avoid trip-hazards, Monica stared intently ahead of herself, wondering if Taylor was playing an uncharacteristic, ill-judged and totally unnecessary trick on her. And then she noticed a dim blue glow.
                "Bloody heck, there it is. That's a blue light."
                "Told you. Looks to me like there are a few of them all clustered together. Do you think that Jebediah brought some fairy lights with him?"
                "At this stage it would be tantamount to a reasonable decision from the goon. At least light, as a concept, is helpful. A whole collection of plain glass monocles? Give me strength. He'll be getting an earful from me on the matter, I promise you that."
                Against a backdrop, as well as a front drop for that matter, of perfect blackness, it was impossible to tell whether the blue light was small, far away, or both. They just kept on walking in its direction, stepping over, into, or around the many obstacles in their path, which loomed gradually from the darkness in the meagre, dispersed light of their torches. Just as Taylor had promised, Monica began to see many blue lights, not just one, and she wondered how many more Taylor could see now. It made her think rather bleakly of her own mortality, as indicated by typical ocular degradation. So many years of good eyesight had been spent using it to find the kind of people who threw themselves needlessly into danger, and now, here she was, being led along by a child acting like a seeing-eye dog. She decided not to think about it anymore. It hardly mattered anyway; she too would see whether there were or were not further blue lights in the vicinity soon enough.
                 The moment of further illumination, in a manner of speaking, came upon them when the torchlight fell suddenly upon those blue pin pricks directly. They were set into a great wall of wood, its fissures running left to right, as if it were a branch or root or trunk that was growing sideways and spreading itself out beneath the earth.
                “OK, so they’re small. Small and bright.” Monica summarised. A shutter sound gave away the focus of Taylor’s attentions. “Are they part of the roots?” she continued, reaching out a hand tentatively and brushing her fingers gently along the blue light. It wobbled, resting like a lightbulb at the end of a short, thin, leaf-like growth. “It’s some kind of bioluminescent moss, or part of whatever grew all these roots, maybe.”
                “If it’s part of the growth then these would all still be alive, right?” Taylor asked. “Something that’s able to grow roots bigger than buildings, and make hills for miles…”
                Suddenly, in the shadow of the idea that these roots still fed something enormous and unknown, they both became acutely aware of how tiny they really were, creeping and crawling their way among the enormous wicker basket of cyclopean wooden limbs. They were specks of flesh like the specks of blue light had been, rattling around in a void of a giant plant’s creation.
                “I suppose so, yes.” Monica finally said. “Whatever they’re attached to didn’t seem to make itself obvious up above, though. We would have seen a tree that was…” she looked around herself, at the scale of the root mass, and tried to make an estimate, “a few hundred miles high?”
                “Yeah. We’d have seen that. I can see next door’s oak from my bedroom window easily, and that’s way less than a hundred miles high.”
                “The glowing is pretty, though.” Monica said, in a rare concession to aesthetic appreciation of anything.
                "Right?! They're so pretty! I'm making a background set for our video content back at the office, and these little lights would be great for adding some sparkle. They even fit with the colour palette! Do you think we could take some back with us?"
                "Maybe leave the mysterious, gigantic root and its glowing moss alone for now, especially until we know what it's connected to and whether or not it's dangerous."
                "Oh it's only a root and a bit of light. What possible danger could there be?" Taylor said, seduced by the potential for the moss to act as low-cost fairy lights.
                "For one thing it might be poisonous. And for another, why do you think it needs to glow?"
                "Uh... to attract a mate?"
                Monica sighed. Taylor had sounded so wise and grounded when trying her hand at conflict resolution.
                "No, plants don't typically get involved in courting one another, but I guess you're close. They want to attract something to eat their fruit, or to be eaten itself."
                "So... you're saying the plant might eat us?"
                "I don’t know. Maybe. Or there might be something else living down here that will."
                "If it's following the lights to eat the plant, then why would it eat us? Giraffes eat trees but not people. Horses eat grass but not people. Cows eat grass but not people. Sheep-"
                "Yeah, thank you for listing grazing mammals, but maybe these creatures will take whatever they can get, since they're living in an enormous hole in the ground."
                "Or maybe they'd be grateful for the company."
                Monica rubbed at her face. Dissuading an intern from pruning an exotic plant had spiralled into a debate about the social habits of hypothetical animals, and neither topic was productive.
                "For the sake of our health, and catching up with Jebediah and Quentin-"
                "And Kari!" Taylor added with a smile.
                "Yes, and Kari I suppose, we should avoid tampering with anything else for now and keep moving. It seems reasonable to assume that Kari would also head towards these lights, and that she'd try to follow them to our toffs."
                "They keep going along the wall, look." Taylor said. Monica did as she was told, because it had distracted the intern from trying to harvest unknown biohazards, and saw that the blue, glowing tendrils extended into the darkness along the wall, running like something's gargantuan network of veins. Overhead, too, they had apparently been sprouting.
                "They must only grow far away from the light or something." Monica thought out loud. For someone who planned to use foul language at so many of her patients-to-be, thinking out loud was a dangerous habit to form.
                "So you don’t think I'd get one to grow in the office?"
                "Seems unlikely, doesn’t it? Let's go." Dr Seetch said, hoping that literally moving on would help Taylor to do so figuratively as well.
                Whatever the wall to their side was, a trunk, a root, a limb, or otherwise, it didn't seem to have an end. Complete with its runway strip-lights of softly wafting blue pinpoints, it led them further and further through the hollow in the depths of the earth. The deeper they went, the denser and brighter the lights seemed to be, and the more of them appeared on the roots that stitched their way over and around them; before long,  they were marching through Santa's blue-hued grotto of megaflora, as Taylor's eventual blog post would describe it. It was by the light of these that they made their way ever deeper into the terrifyingly cavernous abyss of the hollow, eventually growing bright enough to grant Monica respite from the perpetual sound of torch winding that accompanied Taylor. And it was by the sudden lack of these lights, missing in small, scraped-off patches, that they stumbled upon Kari.
                “Ouch.” said Taylor, picking herself back up. “Sorry, Kari. Didn’t see you down there.”
                This response was irksome to Kari for two reasons. Principal among them was the lack of surprise and relief to find her alive and well; the doctor and the intern should have been worried sick without her, both for themselves and for the fate of their beloved guide; to speak so casually upon reuniting with her was, frankly, an insult.
                The second reason was because Taylor had kicked her right in the gut while tripping, and to find that irksome required no justification at all.
                “That’s because you haven’t got the sharp, eagle eyes of a guide. I can see bodies that might trip me up from hundreds of metres away.” she said, rubbing at her stomach.
                “Always striding around among fields of bodies, are you?” Monica asked, flicking her eyes down to Kari as her sentence ended.
                “When I have to, yes.” replied the guide. She watched as the doctor’s expression changed from derision and disgust to shock. It didn’t stay there for long. Its more familiar friend ‘anger’ soon took over.
                “Why is your mouth glowing?!” Dr Seetch roared. “You’ve been eating… is that what all these missing patches of moss are? How much did you eat!”
                “I already told you that I feed myself by scavenging, and I was fine before. I proved that I know what mangoes are.”
                “Mangoes don’t glow!”
                “And no, I didn’t eat all of this. Most of it was missing when I got here, and I worked out that someone else must have eaten it, so it must be safe for me to eat.”
                “That could not be further from a logical sequence of observations and conclusions.”
                “I reckon it probably could.” Taylor argued. “I mean, I’m with you that eating the glowing stuff seems a bit silly on the face of it, but we don’t need to exaggerate to prove our point.”
                “I swear to god you pivot between being a world-wise seventy year old and a ten year old at a moment's notice.”
                "She’s right though, exaggerating would be silly.” Kari said. "I ate, like, way less than half or what's missing here. There was loads scraped off. It wasn't on the ground, so it hasn't been spat out or vomited, and that means it must have been eaten, so it must be edible. You’re just looking for fault now where there is none."
                “A convincing argument if you assert that neither bags nor pockets exist.” said the doctor.
                "All these scrape marks look sort of fresh.” Taylor announced, changing the subject to keep the peace. “I mean, I don't often age moss scrapings, but it does look like these are all the same. Do you think it could have been Jebediah and Quentin?"
                “They are the only other people here who could have been that stupid. I suppose. The only other people here at all, actually."
                "That’s exactly why I came this way, and why I lured you two here as well. I always lead you in the right direction. I’m a great guide and dare I say it I'm very attractive."
                In lieu of any productive response to that statement, Monica simply started walking again, and the expedition continued their trek through the blue-hued hollow. Occasionally Kari would let out a burp, which somehow glowed, leaving a trace of undefined luminescence hanging in the air like breath on a cold day, but emitting light and smelling faintly of earth. It was the sort of thing that would really have put Monica on edge had she been travelling on a tube train at the time, and it definitely, in her medical opinion, wasn't the kind of thing that should normally happen when expelling air from the stomach. However, taking any action on the subject would involve engaging with Kari, so it definitely wasn’t worth it.
                With a literal dotted light into follow now, courtesy of Jebediah and Quentin's alleged wall-feasting, they were able to travel more quickly, albeit with the continued need to dodge the nightmarish knot of roots. But all good nightmares must come to an end, as the saying goes, and the three explorers soon saw the end of theirs clearly before themselves. Standing out brightly in an inky void of tangling roots and winding sounds, the culmination of their efforts was lit up like a lighthouse in disguise as a Christmas tree.
                 Ahead of them, a monumental beacon glowed with a luminance approaching daylight in the darkness of the hollow. Millions or maybe even hundreds of millions of tiny blue glowing orbs traced every surface, every edge, every crevice and every fold of a staggeringly, dumbfoundingly huge flower. Its stem, which was roughly as large as a midsized family dwelling without an extension but with a reasonably generous plot that allowed off-street parking for at least two cars, was blanketed to the point of smothering in the glowing, mossy growth. Rising like a mottled beam of light, it had  dozens of vast leaves which loomed outwards like the accumulated awnings of a disused caravan park. Hanging overhead, they threatened to blot out the sky using their own star-scape of tiny blue orbs, and would have managed it that same sky hadn't already been ably blocked out by the earth up above it.
                Staring open-mouthed at the monolithic flower, bedecked as it was in a million points of shimmering light, Dr Seetch said, simply:
                “Oh.”
                “Is… is there a point where a flower becomes a tree?” asked Taylor, whose knowledge of botany had never felt troubling in its inadequacy until now.
                “I think… when they’re this big…” Monica mumbled, her brain failing to commit sufficient resources to the task of speaking. Taylor’s counterpart was committing no effort at all to listening, so there was no harm done.
                “It’s in the top ten of the biggest flowers I’ve seen, I guess.” Kari said. It wasn’t a lie, but it didn’t do a good job of relaying the truth. “Definitely top ten of the year.” she added, not contributing any more information.
                “Hey, there are missing patches of moss on the trunk! Looks like Jebediah and Quentin found this flower too.”
                “Found it first.” corrected Dr Seetch, pressing her palms into the sides of her head. She collapsed into a seat on the floor, her stomach feeling hollow and chest starting to shake. “They might have genuinely found something incredible.”
                Taylor looked down at the doctor, confused as to why her reaction to a successful exploration mission was to collapse and start hyperventilating.
                “Yeah, they have! It’s great! An amazing twist for the story of their journey and for our rescue. What’s wrong?”
                Monica stared into the middle distance, into the black gap between spots of blue light that looked as empty as she felt. All this time, all this journeying and all this danger, had only felt worth it for the promise that she could berate a spoiled dunce for putting himself unnecessarily at risk. For achieving nothing more than stroking his own ego at the cost of nearly dying, nearly killing their friend, and pushing a rescue team into that same crucible of peril.
                “They can’t discover anything. It has to be pointless. It has to be meaningless.” she said, feeling saliva pooling in her mouth and tasting something like blood or metal. “They can’t actually do something important by coming here, unprepared and unworthy.”
                “Uh…” Taylor said. She looked at Kari, who shrugged. Her teeth were emitting a faint blue light, which only served to distract the intern’s efforts to understand and calm the doctor. “Right. Why is that bad?”
                “Because if they were right to come here, and if they’re heroes, then how can I give them the telling off that I deserve to unleash upon them? What was the use in me putting up with oil ropes, and a foodless guide, and abseiling into the unknown, if I can’t righteously let rip on someone powerless to walk away from me?! What’s the point of it?!” she growled, her voice cracking and frying with the betrayed fury of helping someone who actually deserved it for once.
                “I mean, saving a life feels like it’s good enough. And that life belonging to someone who did something important is a nice bonus.”
                “But it also means that a bad thing happened to someone who was doing good work. Bad things happening to people who make bad decisions is great, but happening to people who make good choices? Choices with beneficial consequences? This isn’t what Doctors Without Maps were supposed to sign me up for.”
                Unsure of how to proceed, Taylor turned to Kari for help once again. After powering through the next shrug, she used desperate mime to communicate a desire for the guide to at least try to do or say something.
                “We haven’t even found them yet, probably because I haven’t called out to them with my special guide call. So they might still be fine, meaning that our trip was completely pointless. Then you can shout at Doctors Without Maps, because you’ll probably like doing that, you sicko.”
                It wasn’t quite the motivational and comforting message for which Taylor had been hoping, but seemed to stir something in the doctor. Her breathing slowed a little, although that may just have been her lungs getting tired of working so hard.
                “I would, actually. Sending us here without due cause for concern would be pretty irresponsible.” Monica said, a glimmer of hope playing at the edge of her voice.
                “Say, hello down there! Did you say that the good fellows at Doctors Without Maps were looking us? That’s just smashing news!” cried the voice of a Victorian calligrapher from above. It took the three of them rather off guard, because they weren’t knowingly nearby to a writing desk, nor was it 1890.
                As is customary when searching for things that seem to be coming from above, the members of the venerable aid expedition, even those who were wrestling with the dread octopus of despair, looked upwards. Peering down at them with a broad smile that held far too many teeth, sitting below three monocles and a remarkably stable top hat, was the unmistakably aristocratic face of Jebediah Torshank. He’d lost weight compared to the photo that Monica had seen, possibly due to walking for a couple of weeks through the wilderness while carrying a full wardrobe, and was leaning over the edge of the gigantic leaf on which he sat.
                “Jebediah Torshank?” Dr Seetch called for confirmation. Regardless of who he was she was going to try to rescue him, but it always paid to be sure of who they were addressing; she’d had a narrow miss in rescuing the wrong person a decade or so earlier, and was not going to make that same mistake twice.
                “The very same! But I’m afraid you have the advantage of me; I don’t know whose household you serve so I haven’t seen a roster of their staff. Whom am I addressing from my perch on high, as it were?” Jebediah asked. The urge to throw Taylor’s wind-up torch at his equine-tier teeth was rising in Dr Seetch.
                “You’re talking to Dr Monica Seetch, who serves no household but her own. I’m here from Doctors Without Maps with Taylor Gusto and Kari McDermot, and you’ve put all of our lives at risk by coming here.”
                “Ha! I do suppose that I have! And that of dear Quentin. He’s up here with me, by the way; having a bit of an awful time of it as of the last day or so, I’m afraid, otherwise he’d be greeting you himself with his cheeky grin and affable manners.” he conveniently confirmed. It saved a further interrogation or any unnecessary searching on Monica’s part. “But hoy, did you say that you’ve a Kari McDermot with you? Put some light on her face, would you?”
                Dr Seetch scowled hard in the direction of Kari, who was obviously feigning ignorance to something. It was harder for her to feign anything when a torch like the light of the sun was directed into her eyes.
                “Agh!” she yelped.
                “By the lord, Kari! What are you doing here?! I thought you’d still be up at the Torshank Tower taking care of business!”
                “You know each other?!” growled Monica.
                “Know each other? We practically live together! Kari here is my favourite and most trusted financial advisor; handles all of my investments, turns my chicken-feed land income into enough wealth to have a really nice time and good biscuit whenever I please.”
                The doctor’s head turned slowly, like a car gradually starting to roll through its weak and under-applied handbrake.
                “I knew it! I bloody knew it! You’re not a guide at all!”
                “Yes I am! He’s lying. Or mistaken. Or ugly. And I’ve not worked been in Torshank Tower for over a month because I moved my office into the penthouse of Durle House.  It has better access to the croquet court.” Kari said, her defence falling over somewhat between the start and end of her statement.
                “Ha! There’s that McDermot wit. I tell you, she made me millions by buying up school catering contracts for me, putting the competition out of the fight with some marvellous monopolising, and then raising the prices to a much more satisfying margin once we were the only trusted game in town. A real stand-up friend.”
                “You were lying about being a guide this whole time and you put us all in danger!”
                “Oh, get over it. We’re all fine, aren’t we? I just had to make sure that my benefactor here would come home lucratively.” Kari admitted, finally giving up the pretence.
                “Don’t you mean safely?” asked Taylor, her innocence apparently completely unbreakable by the machinations of humanity.
                “He doesn’t need to be safe to keep paying me.”
                “You make me sick, but this isn’t the time.” Monica said, which constituted biting her tongue, given the circumstances. As much as these revelations would make excellent ammunition for a telling off, they were, strictly speaking, Kari’s foul deeds. Jebediah had still made an important discovery here. She couldn’t write him and his expedition off as selfish and pointless so easily. She could, however, change the subject back to the task at hand. “How did you get up there? I don’t see any ropes or climbing gear.”
                “You know what? It’s unclear even to me. But we have been up here a little while so it’s expected to forget that sort of thing.” chuckled Jebediah.
                “No it isn’t! How can you not know how you climbed up a giant flower?”
                He laughed again, without malice or insult.
                “I’d forget my own head if it wasn’t attached to my, er… you know… neck! That’s the one. Knew it was in the ol’ noggin somewhere.”
                “Have you had a head injury?” Monica demanded. He was certainly at risk of one when she got in reach of him.
                “No, no. I’m perfectly well aside from the broken ankle, but Quentin’s not got it in him to go any further. We’ve been waiting here until he feels better, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, truth be told. It’s a bit of a pickle, really; or it was until you arrived! Now you can carry my suits for me, and we’ll see what else is about, eh?”
                “That wasn’t really the plan, Mr Torshank.” Taylor said. “Besides which, I think we need to tend to Quentin if he’s hurt, right Monica?”
                “Yes, obviously. And to splint Jebediah’s ankle. We need to get you both down.”
                “I’d rather not. It’s much more the idea to go higher and look at the petals.” he protested.
                “Tough. You’re coming down here, and we’re taking care of your ankle and Quentin’s… what’s wrong with him?”
                “Oh, just the vapours I’d imagine. Or ill-humours from this stale air. A good rest and perhaps some seaside air will set him right as rain, so there’s no need to worry.” he assured them, with all the authority and gravity of a dandelion.
                “I need to examine him. Urgently. You’re helping us get him down, we’re taking a look at him, and then we’re all leaving so that he can get the care he needs.” the doctor instructed.
                “Oh, very well, if we simply must. We’ll be down in a jiffy, old bean.”
                “Do we have any more of that braided rope, Taylor?” Monica was asking, when she heard a shuffling above her head. It sounded, as far as she could imagine it, like a body being slid along the surface of a massive leaf.
                “Mind your bonnets! He’s a lump!” Jebediah cried, mirthfully. They had just enough time to look up and see the prone form of Quentin Durle being pushed carelessly off the leaf by a pair of brightly polished black evening shoes. His limp body plummeted to the leaf below with a heavy, muffled ‘flump’, and then slid down off to a lower leaf, and then another, and then another, until he crashed, bottom first, onto the floor by Monica’s feet.
                “WHAT THE HELL DO YOU-“ she roared, before leaping out of the way of the similarly descending Jebediah. Unlike his unconscious friend, he fluffed the landing on the final leaf, and ricocheted his head off the stem on the final stage of the downward journey. He landed with a grinding crunch on his already broken ankle. Monica was unconcerned by the development.
                What followed was, understandably, a period of frantic assessment by Dr Seetch, demanding that Taylor held torches here, bandages there, helped with manipulating the limp body of Quentin, and slapped Kari hard across the face at any opportunity. The intern chose not to follow the latter of the demands, on account of the car-door machete that the guide/financial advisor still possessed.
                Quentin, against all the odds, did not appear to have any broken bones or physical injuries more severe than a bit of bruising. His hands were a little coarse and calloused from the rigours of exploration, and his dress shoes had suffered at the hands of dusty earth, but otherwise he wasn’t in bad shape. He was, however, deeply unconscious, and leaking a familiar bright blue from his mouth. It also seemed that his cheeks were starting to sprout roots, which definitely wasn’t one of the signs of a healthy man. Pushing up his eyelids, she saw that his eyes had taken on the bioluminescence of his sustenance, staring off unfocused and unfeeling, but shining brightly all the same.
                “Have you two both been eating the moss?” Monica demanded.
                “Oh, goodness no. I swore off it right away, because foreign tuck always gives me an iffy tummy. But Quentin has the kind of iron constitution that lets him eat half way through a marble statue before realising it’s not chef’s biscotti.” he laughed, maintaining a lot of composure for someone whose ankle had been, to put it gracefully, annihilated by several falls. "Absolutely gorged himself on the stuff; couldn't get enough of it. A bit of a rum do that he's taken ill now, because I found his newfound floral persuasions quite amusing."
                Monica could feel the swell of a thorough telling-off rise again; Quentin was seriously unwell and being assimilated into an unknown plant, and Jebediah had just let it happen. But, frustratingly, Quentin had chosen to come here, and had chosen to continue eating moss even after seeing what it was doing to his body. Blame was irritatingly well distributed between the two of them, so no telling off was warranted.
                The pupils of Quentin’s blue laser eyes still dilated and constricted when she shone a torch into them, and after a while she decided that it was probably more cruel than diagnostic to continue checking. He seemed stable enough for the time being.
                “I have no idea what’s going on with his body; it looks like he’s being colonised by something parasitic, or like the moss didn’t die when he ate it and is taking root.”
                “Quentin always was one for following a trend. I mean, who else could I have convinced to come on this trip with me at such short notice?” assessed Mr Torshank.
                “Is that going to happen to me?” Kari asked, horrified, while staring at Quentin’s cheek growth. Monica ignored her, and started to take a look at Jebediah’s ankle.
                “You mean he didn’t come here because he wanted to?” the doctor asked,  feeling the embers of hope reignite.
                “No, not really. He’s more the stay-at-home sort, and I’m a man of adventure! I think he only really came along to shut me up. But, I’ll give him his due, he can carry a suit bag like no other, and he can eat a lot of vegetation when he puts his mind to it.”
                “And why did you need to come here so desperately?” Monica asked, ostensibly still looking at the way the ankle now seemed to rotate by a full three hundred and sixty degrees, although her mind was elsewhere. It seemed like a satisfying amount of blame was regrouping around Mr Torshank’s shoulders again.
                “Oh… you know… to finally get a decent encyclopaedia entry on what's here, really. And, if I’m honest, I thought there might be some riches here to fund a new wing on my home, or at least to show off on my mantle-piece.”
                “Vanity, then? You didn’t want to discover anything like this?” she gestured around at the glowing plant life with one hand, while trying to manoeuvre a splint out of her bag with the other.
                “Not in so many words. This is passably interesting I suppose, but I wasn’t planning to mention it to anyone because I can’t see how to sell it. What’s the point?”
                “Then you see no merit in what you’ve found? No scientific or personal interest in it?”
                “Hadn’t really thought about it, but I suppose it would get me some recognition. I mean, I’m due it, and I’m well behind my school pals. You know, I really feel like the weak-link in my circle of old educational companions. Most of them have achieved marvellous things already, such as bankrupting a council, or removing right of way to over a dozen public lavatories, while I languish on minor corruption with school meals. Finding something really expensive out here to bring home would put me on a better pegging with them.”
                Monica’s calm, expressionless mask of medical assessment began to crack, as the edges of her mouth curled up into a smile. She kept her head down, her eyes on focused on the ankle, to avoid betraying her emotions.
                “So, to clarify: you came here because you wanted to steal something to impress your monster friends. You see no value in sharing the discovery of this underground garden with the rest of the world. Your financial matters are handled exclusively by the kind of lying sociopath who would deceive a charity into thinking that she’s a guide. You willingly coerced a man into attending you, and laughed as he got sick on parasitic moss, and then you pushed him off a high ledge because you couldn’t be bothered to lower him down safely?” she asked.
                “I don’t see what that has to do with fixing my ankle, but yes, that’s about the fill of it.” confirmed Jebediah.
                Monica, mouth now beaming with a smile and eyes staring with pure death, looked up at his earnestly awaiting face, feeling a sense of justified anger that she hadn’t tasted in years. This would be her magnum opus, the moment to which all of her previous aid expeditions had led. Retirement would surely await her when she got home, and now, finally, she could go into it easily, with open arms. Drawing in a deep, sanctimonious breath, she steeled herself to give one final, glorious, genre-defining and unnecessarily personal devastating toff bollocking.