Because she was the first to open her eyes, the first to bloom and rise up... Amanita is considered the leader of the plant-born eight. She is as lovely as her name sounds - fair skinned but with snowy white hair and glimmering eyes. She chooses an elegant mode of dress, almost out of place in their dragon-housed dens.
At times, she would walk the halls of the semi-abandoned hospital. There were still patients there, and she looked at them with pity and comfort in her eyes. "Here," she said, "I brought you some soup. You'll like it. It's mushroomy."
Of course... half a day later no one could tell the symptoms of the already-hospitalized from her own special disaster-mix. A concoction of her own flesh - well, something like that anyway. Any part of her was toxic, so naturally a hair or a small shred of skin was nothing to scoff at. Perhaps the afflicted would recover.
Most did not. A day later, of course, anyone with already existing liver or kidney damage would be dead within days. Healthier members of the population, a few days longer their pain would last...
And she relished it with the same glowing passion that her father did. Virus was as proud of this daughter as any of his first born, and they too greeted her with ease and as one of them. She looked upon her youngest brothers with a bit of disdain... Their activities are so rarely fatal.
How boring.
Amanita strolled through the forested area past the dragon dens, looking for places to spore. Having claimed an area nearby her mother's garden, each of the children would have space - but she wanted something special. It would take a nice amount of forest litter to bring her own little children to life. When she found a dark and cool area, Amanita waved her hand and left a falling trail of barely-visible spores. A powder to take root and grow upon the moist soil.
She smiled peacefully, and turned back to the dens, waiting for more news of illness from the hospital.
***
The search riders didn't much care for the way that Amanita looked at them. Normally of course, the men would be adrift in love or at least lust - but she had such a dangerous look in her deep green eyes that they stayed well clear of her.
At first, when she was accepted to the sands at Tripaldi's hidden area, Amanita seemed eager to help.
Shortly, help was the last thing that most of the normal folk wanted from her. The whole of the SCZ was going to be hip deep in mushrooms and toadstools, if she wasn't kept busy elsewhere. First the kitchens - they discovered that their meats were just packed with polyps of some kind. Then the laundry - you don't even want to know where she felt it necessary to put mold.
Everywhere in almost any weyr, was perfect conditions for her little spore children.
So instead of asking her to be inside all the time, the leaders and candidate masters decided perhaps Amanita should be doing other things - things that occupied her mind. Keeping her away from the books and scrolls (oi! what a mess that would be! with paper being so rare!) they could afford to put her outside with the animals - who knew better than to eat any of the spores she planted. They moved her around and kept her busy enough, drilling her with the same energy as all the other candidates got on the life cycle of dragons, their structure, their care and feeding.
She learned at a fantastic rate, though. So it was vital that every day someone be assigned to keep the young white-haired plant-girl busy.
Until the day that she'd be having to take care of a dragon, if she bonded, she challenged everyone's patience. Virus had warned her that in fact, people would get a bit testy about it.
So eventually, long before any hatching, she calmed herself down into a more normal human seeming routine.
There would always be a trail of toadstools and mushrooms wherever she remained, though...
Amanita is standing at the Special Clutch Zone at Tripaldi
***
The first batch of eggs hatched, one after another. And not one of the beautiful and stunning hatchlings went to her side.
Not. One.
So in her anger, Amanita lashed out. There were stores of grain - all of them spoiled. The salted meats? Moldy. The dragonry had to call in an entire fleet of riders to get the food they would need to replace it all. Of course, she did this unconsciously on the sly.
It had been a moist, warm summer. Not everything spoiled at once. Things in the back started first - they'd been there the longest, right? Maybe the food was contaminated when it got into the pantry.
Sure they suspected her. But the whole of the weyr was also very busy tending to the young dragons. And their food came straight off the hoof or out of the lake, so they were safe. Amanita had nothing against the dragons. She would not harm them. They'd never done anything to anyone.
But ... well, yeah, they had. They hadn't bonded to her.
***
It wasn't much long after that when many weyrs... began to vanish. A few at a time, then... almost all of them. Some came back, some returned under other names, but none remained alive long enough to really satisfy the needs of candidates like Amanita. She returned in disgust and anger to their hospital home, and found that her parents both had developed a liking for another dimension's habitat: Carramba High School, on an odd place they called Twoarth.
They explained that it was a good location for education, for spreading themselves into magnificence... Though she was a little put off by the rules they imposed. Too many rules about 'not harming people' and 'don't destroy stuff'. Her father was confident, however, with how well she could behave if she put her mind to it. But inside her mind, she would always believe he'd gone a bit soft.
There were gods and wizards, superheroes and pirates on this planet. Furries - humans - robots... Whatever? Well, she did fit right in with some folks, that was certain. She concentrated on working with instead of against. It was harder than she wanted to admit. Also hard, watching her younger siblings all connected to their dragons... And yet for years, YEARS, she would go unbonded and friendless.
Only Typhia, still bondless after all this time as well, would be able to sense that feeling of isolation and loss, yearning. Perhaps the pair of them... well, they would wait a while longer before there were dragons. All their siblings... had kids? Had lives? Before either Typhia or Amanita found their bonds.
But when Amanita did, it was like an entire world opened to her. This other world, another Earth, another dimension, fighting off alien enemies, had more than enough to go around. Introduced via the instructors at Carramba, the dragons had been paired up either at will over time, or during this weird 'Hallowed Silk' project that was built up by none other than Baeris Kshau, and some crazy blond by the name of Melissa.
The dragon looked familiar enough with her big crest and curved horns: there were features on this dragon that strolled up to Amanita that she'd seen on numerous others around. But this one... This one came to her. At last.
"Let's do some damage," she said. "All the damage."
Though they would most certainly have gone through Twoarth and just ruined it, instead by that time, she'd seen how important it was to maintain actual allies, maybe even 'friendships', even with people thinking she was evil. She was. And though this dragoness wasn't 'exactly' evil, she was not 'nice'.
And that suited Amanita just fine. Because after all this time, she needed to get out and absolutely fuck something up out of more than a decade of frustration. This other world, the 'Rookery' Earth, would do. She had a clear directive sent from the Rookery's flight and combat leader Paxton Fettel - damage things only after they were cleared for it, and if she were to bring death to any of the Rookery's riders or associates... it would spell the end of her and the dragon - and he meant business.
Soma's sire was one of Paxton's dragon bonds. So... Soma was willing to put up with that instruction, take it to heart. Amanita would learn to love it too. Finding a place to invade with deadly spores, while Soma spat acid all over enemies? Oh yes. This would do just fine. They live among the North Aperture group, but are not generally allowed where they could accidentally harm anyone.
