On Thursday, November 24, 2022 at 4:36:03 AM UTC-5, Gustavo Wombat, of the Seattle Wombats wrote:
> Kup and Arcee were already at the stream when Hot Rod drove up with Daniel.
> Hot Rod opened his canopy, and Daniel hopped out and rushed over to see
> Kup.
>
> The old Autobot looked up from a small patch of mushrooms, greeted Daniel,
> and turned back to the mushrooms and explained that he would finish the
> story later.
>
> “You’re telling stories to mushrooms?” Daniel asked, somewhat concerned.
> Kup had taken a blow to the head during the last battle with the
> Decepticons, and he had been told to watch for anything odd that might be a
> sign of malfunction, but with Kup that was difficult.
>
> “They’re good listeners,” Kup said and then smiled.
>
> Daniel giggled slightly, relieved that the ancient Autobot had been joking
> with him.
>
> “Where’s your pole?” Kup asked, tilting his head at his own fishing rod.
>
> “I can’t today,” Daniel said. “I have to finish a book for school.”
>
> “What book? Maybe I could just tell you what happens?” Kup offered.
>
> “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Daniel said.
>
> “Kup, do you remember what happened when you helped Daniel with his
> biology?” Arcee asked, causing Daniel to quickly say “Hi Arcee,” before Kup
> talked over him.
>
> “The boy learned things about the Tasmanian Devil that no one in his class
> knew, and his teacher was so impressed that she called Daniel’s parents,”
> Kup said, proudly.
>
> What had actually happened was that Kup explained that Tasmanian Devils are
> marsupials, who give live birth to a litter of twenty babies, but have only
> four nipples. The babies then have to fight for the nipples, despite being
> weird little nubby things with underdeveloped limbs, lungs, lymphatic
> systems, brains, organs… underdeveloped everything except their claws,
> which they used to tear apart their siblings as they struggled to get to
> the nipples. Daniel’s entire class had nightmares for weeks.
>
> Kup had followed that up by explaining the Ukrainian proverb “the less you
> know, the better you sleep.”
>
> There was a general consensus that it was better when Kup simply made
> things up.
>
> “I’ve read nearly every book published on Earth, and even a lot of the ones
> that haven’t been published yet,” Kup said, trying to sweeten the offer.
>
> “It’s ‘The Time Machine’ by H. G. Wells,” Daniel said.
>
> “Daniel,” Arcee warned, “don’t let Kup do your work for you.”
>
> “It’s fine,” Kup said. “I only got about halfway through that one. It was
> just so inaccurate, I felt dumber the longer I read it.”
>
> “It’s fiction,” Daniel said.
>
> “Oh,” Kup replied. “I guess that explains all the inaccuracies. But even
> fiction should get the setting right. The Morlocks and the Eloi never
> happened.”
>
> “Those are in the future,” Daniel explained.
>
> “Your future is always someone else’s history,” Kup countered. “I’ve been
> to the future, and it wasn’t like that at all.”
>
> “You’ve been to the future?” Daniel asked, with a mixture of excitement,
> doubt and concern.
>
> “Yes,” Kup said, somewhat offended that Daniel didn’t seem to believe him.
> “Given the number of times the Arielbots have been to the past, and
> Decepticons have been in King Arthur’s Court, doesn’t it seem likely that
> someone would have traveled from the future? How do you think I got so old,
> lad? That’s from living through the future and then coming back.”
>
> “I just figured you were built a long time ago,” Daniel said.
>
> “Kup and I were created on the same day,” Hot Rod said. “We were protoforms
> together and there was a litter of twenty of us, and only four Energon
> nozzles…”
>
> “Don’t listen to him,” Kup said, “he’s just teasing you. Protoforms weren’t
> a thing yet… in fact, they still aren’t.”
>
> “Does that mean there are two of you now?” Arcee asked.
>
> “At least two,” Kup said. “He’s on the other side of the galaxy right now,
> in a prison for corrupting the youthful prince of Manginoor. When I was
> him, I was eventually broken out of jail by an older version of myself,
> which I guess is going to be me in a few years.”
>
> “So, you know everything that’s going to happen?” Hot Rod asked.
>
> “Not really, lad,” Kup answered. “I was on the other side of the galaxy the
> first time through, so most of this is new to me.”
>
> “How hard did you get hit in the head?” Daniel asked.
>
> “Pretty hard, lad, pretty hard,” Kup said. “Nearly made a Headmaster out of
> me.”
>
> “A what?” Hot Rod asked.
>
> “A school teacher?” Daniel asked.
>
> “I think a headmaster is more of a principal, Daniel,” Arcee said. “But I
> still don’t understand it.”
>
> “Oh, right,” Kup said, “that’s an expression from Nebulos, where the
> principals are notoriously dumb. If you ever go there, you’ll understand.
>
> “I think I get it,” Daniel said.
>
> Kup laughed a somewhat unsettling laugh. “Anyway, no Morlocks and Eloi in
> the future, and eventually there’s not really any real class struggle.”
>
> “The communists win?” Daniel asked, setting the book down..
>
> “Not exactly,” Kup said. “Eventually, there is a plague. Or a war. Maybe it
> was a war with biological weapons. Every plant and animal is killed. Fungi
> are still there. I think the Protozoa survive, but I’m not sure about the
> Chromista.
>
> “The weird thing is, the fungi miss the people, plants and animals, so they
> start forming into the shapes of what was missing. A building might be half
> demolished, and the fungi would slowly grow to fill the hole.
>
> “The fungi recreated whole ecosystems, as best they could remember. Forests
> with deer with a hundred eyes on their antlers, snakes that slithered
> across the forest floor while being a part of the forest floor, and
> colonies of fungi in the shape of the heads on Easter Island. An
> uncountable majesty of things recreated as well as fungi could remember,
> which wasn’t always exactly right, but who knows what a fungi finds
> important?
>
> “Except where there was once a planet of near infinite diversity, now
> everything was fundamentally the same, just with different shapes and
> colors.
>
> “There were factories, with workers being exploited, but they were just the
> appearance of factories and the shape of workers being exploited. The
> workers, their tools and the factory were all one.
>
> “The fungi had discovered nostalgia.”
>
> Daniel stared blankly at Kup for a moment. “That’s not going to help me
> with my book report.”
>
> “Kids,” Kup said, slightly exasperated. “They are so transactional.
> Everything has to have immediate value.”
>
> Daniel looked at the book, and then looked at the bag with his snacks. He
> reached for the book, hesitated, and went for the brown bag, and began
> unwrapping his sandwich.
>
> “Eww,” the boy said. “I got my dad’s sandwich by mistake.”
>
> “Can’t you just eat that?” Arcee asked.
>
> “I’m supposed to get a PB&J and his has mushrooms on it and I hate
> mushrooms.”
>
> “Mushrooms like you,” Kup said, unhelpfully.
>
> “Your father eats a PB&J with mushrooms?” Arcee asked, incredulously.
>
> “Yeah, it’s weird.”
>
> “Can’t you just pick them off?” Kup asked. “We can put them with their
> friends over here.” Kup gestured to the mushrooms he was talking to
> earlier.
>
> “I guess,” Daniel said, opening the sandwich, and peeling slices of
> mushroom from the peanut butter and jelly.
>
> Daniel humored Kup, by gathering all the mushroom slices and nestling them
> with the mushrooms under the tree, where they rot and slowly be consumed by
> the living mushrooms.
>
> Kup smiled. It was a good day by the stream. They didn’t do a lot of
> fishing that day, but it was nice. He looked into Daniel’s eyes, and for a
> moment he could see the spark of life that animated humans, but just for a
> moment.
>
> The boy’s eyes were mushrooms, as was the rest of him. And the tree, and
> the grass, and Hot Rod and Arcee and Autobot City off in the distance.
>
> And Kup although Kup wasn’t quite sure that the mushrooms were sentient,
> they certainly mimicked sentient beings well enough that he was sure he
> hadn’t been lying — the mushrooms really did like Daniel.
>
> Daniel had returned mushrooms to the mycelium, along with bits of peanut
> butter and jelly. And that moment was somehow important enough to the fungi
> that they recreated it day after day.
>
> Kup tried to get up, but remembered that his mushroom legs couldn’t support
> his body, even if his body was mostly mushroom by now. He was old, so very
> old, and his body had been collapsing for ages.
>
> Kup would be gone soon, and wondered if the mushrooms liked him too. He
> hoped so.
>
> ——
>
> No, I have no idea what prompted this.

Great story - keep em coming!