She had given herself a day to recover; to wipe the image of Harley-not-Harley's upset face and angry words from her eyes far enough that she could breathe. But as much as the island's questions intrigued her, Pamela didn't have a solid reason to stay, and a very powerful one to leave.

She didn't have much to pack. She threw the little garden - unfinished, and yet already beginning to sprout, to bloom - one last glance, and then slipped into Fandom's early morning streets. Walked onto the causeway, and kept going.

It didn't take her long to find a trucker puttering away along the road. Getting him to stop was child's play.

"Thanks," she said, flashing a reflexive smile with zero ounces of meaning behind it. "You're really helping a girl out."

"You're welcome, ho--" The trucker was an aging and heavy-set man with a few sparse grey hairs peeking out from under his cap. The terror in his face was almost comedic: eyes growing big, his chin visibly shrinking backward. "What the fuck--?"

Pam felt the creature before she saw it. She hit the asphalt a moment later, the heavy weight of angry fungus and mycelial muscle pushing her down. Another one of them, she thought. It was her only thought. The rest was instinct, her body twisting around as it twisted itself. Lamia slid up her body, crafting green tissue and fruiting bodies, working its way up into her hair and pushing it out into all directions.

She grasped the creature with newly-grown fungal talons and tore at it viciously. Ripped at its throat, yanked one of its long and terrible legs right out of its socket.

Distantly, she could tell the trucker had slammed shut his door. Was hitting the gas. "Goddammit--"

Poison Ivy hurled two chunks of the creature across the road, rising in all her terrible glory. Her voice thundered and twisted and grew and rotted as she bellowed, "What are you?! You should have perished at--"

It threw itself at her again. She pushed her talons in further, pulling, biting, snarling. It fell apart in terrible jagged pieces, fruit and filament and shapeless mass, dying on the asphalt, twitching inhumanly-- unlike any fauna she had ever seen-- before it finally relaxed into the rigor of death.

Ivy panted, stumbling backwards on the road.

They were still coming.

They were following her.

She tore her attention away from the fungal remains and looked at the town, with its strange inhabitants, with Adrian and Nell and their own affinity for the Green. Who might be able to handle a fungal invasion better than the people of nearby Baltimore, or Seattle. (Like Gotham would. Probably.)

She panted.

Maybe it's safer for everyone if I stay a while. At least until I figure out where they're coming from.

[[ establishy. nfb due to (slight) distance ]]