Quote:

In yet another part of the forest a young shaman was undergoing an essential part of his training. He had eaten of the sacred toadstool, smoked the holy rhizome, carefully powdered up and inserted into various orifices the mystic mushroom and now, sitting crosslegged under a pine tree, he was concentrating firstly on making contact with strange and wonderful secrets at the heart of Being but mainly on stopping the top of his head from unscrewing and floating away.

Blue four-sided triangles pinwheeled across his vision. Occasionally he smiled knowingly at nothing very much and said things like "wow" and "ugh"....

With superhuman effort the shaman recalled the correct sequence of movements for standing up and even managed a couple of steps before he looked down and gave up, having run out of legs.

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"But there's some big mushrooms under it. Can you eat them?"

Rincewind looked at them cautiously. They were, indeed, very big, and had red and white spotted caps. They were in fact a variety that the local shaman (who at this point was some miles away, making friends with a rock) would eat only after first attaching one leg to a large stone with a rope. There was nothing for it but to go out in the rain and look at them.

He knelt down in the leafmould and peered under the cap. After a while he said weakly, "No, no good to eat at all."

"Why?" called Twoflower. "Are the gills the wrong shade of yellow?"

"No, not really..."

"I expect the stems haven't got the right kind of fluting, then/

"They look okay, actually."

"The cap then, I expect the cap is the wrong colour," said Twoflower.

"Not sure about all that."

"Well, then, why can't we eat them?"

Rincewind coughed. "It's the little doors and windows," he said wretchedly, "it's a dead giveaway."

morrowasted said:

srsly geiz

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psi said:

When I saw this thread I assumed morrowwasted had just created it, surprised it's almost a decade old. I've heard of these books but never read any. I'm getting back into fiction lately after many years of not being able to keep focused on it. Might see about checking these out in ebook form.

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twighead said:

either ya get it or ya dont

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