Alter Aeon The Great Library

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Note - as with any topic, researchers should question the reliability
and veracity of these texts.  The library's aim is to preserve
documents, not verify accuracy.

AABN:  40408
Title: a biologist's notes on myconids

This notebook contains various notes on the different varieties of myconids
that the biologist was studying. He defines myconids as ambulatory
mushroom-like entities with distinctly vertebrate qualities. They have
thick, stalk-like bodies with large caps on top. They typically have two to
four arms, and their bodies are supported by several short legs. They
reproduce asexually, with the largest and oldest myconid leading the
colony. Occassionally mutants with extraordinary magical abilities arise.
One such mutant recently overthrew the colony leader in  a bloody coup. The
most recent notes are the most revealing:

"The coup had one positive side effect: it gave me a large number of
myconid bodies to study. My dissections have been most revealing: I
discovered partial internal skeletons, with floating ribs, arm and leg
bones, even small pelvises. They have brains -- branching structures below
their caps, as well as a remarkably  developed three-chambered heart to
pump fluids. It is flanked on either side by pulmonary structures that
resemble vertebrate lungs. There is a tangle of tube-like structures
beneath these that suggest a rudimentary intestines, though myconids lack
both a mouth and an anus."

"The most telling find was located just beneath the cap of three of the
specimens. In each I found a pair vestigial eyes. They are yellow and
globular, with distinct slit-shaped pupils. They instantly struck me as
resembling the eyes of murlocks."

"With this discovery, along with the internal organs and endoskeleton, I
can come to only one conclusion: myconids are descendants of a tribe of
murlocks that once lived in the Giftsmarsch. Following the pattern of known
murlock tribes, their biomancers and warriors must have taken on aspects of
the mushrooms that dominate the region's ecosystem. The rapid metabolism of
such fungi, combined with a murlock's sensitivity to magic, must have lead
to a chain reaction that caused them to evolve, over the course of
generations, into the myconids we see today."