Waleria looked out the window of an intercity electric train as it left the suburbs of her home city and snaked its way along the Inland Sea coast. Outside, the landscape was passing by in its reliable manner. The forested area the train was driving through, with the light falling through tree crowns and birds flying from one tree to another, gave place to a big, old town, ones that felt like they were frozen in the times before the Overcast Era; quaint old buildings, front yard gardens, and hundred-year-old trees that made less obvious the presence of wood and concrete electric poles, post-War automobiles in aerodynamic body shapes as well as tiny microcars, and even the rarer appearances by technologies of tomorrow, like solar cells baked from mystic minerals. Then, the town left the view, and a couple of industrial sites drifted in; a few warehouses and rail spurs, and a small factory or two that produced construction supplies like bricks and cement. After the train passed those, Waleria could see a big grassland, with open vistas towards the shining sea, with the infinite blue horizon visible beyond the rolling meadows dotted with bushes, standalone buildings, and grazing herds, as well as crisscrossed in some places by roads and high-voltage power lines. Those pictures were familiar to her, and yet, seemed new just because she got out of her home city so rarely.

Waleria turned away from the window for a few minutes, and observed the inside of the train car instead. And it was just as picturesque as the outside landscapes it passed by. It was a classic intercity train, with a centrally-located passage flanked by soft benches wide enough to seat four human-sized passengers or two beast-folk, and luggage shelves located over the windows. On either end of the car, there were large plant pots, with the green vines crawling up the walls of the train and green leaves framing the information bulletins. And then there were other passengers, of course; a crowd of humans, beast-folk, Arboreous, and even a trio of kobolds chatting loudly on a bench right next to Waleria and Levi. After some time, Waleria arched her back, smiled, and turned to Levi with a question on her mind.

"Hey, so I was pondering the Inland Sea geography just now, and I wonder," Waleria said.

"About what?" Levi asked.

"Do you figure mushroom farming is ever going to be more than a niche in the region?" Waleria asked. "It feels much less relevant than in all the cities with impressive catacombs."

"Well, I did write an article about mushroom farmers across the country, some four years ago," Levi replied. "And yeah, it is a very region-dependent business."

"Oh, an article?" Waleria asked.

"Yes," Levi told her. "I covered mushroom farming in places as different as Kolossalstadt, the Meadowlands and Karst Waterfalls, Delvenstad - and it was an enriching experience just to see it all for myself." He jogged his memory for a few seconds, then continued. "Of course all those places are wildly different... and I mean it, it's wild. In the Meadowlands, people just descend into the cavernous chasms and plant mushrooms there, using the mineral-rich soil. In the Karst Waterfalls nearby, the kobolds have massive multi-level farms where they grow all kinds of fungi for consumption and export. In Delvenstad, many people just have their basements open into the cavern system beneath the town, and farm mushrooms for themselves. And in Kolossalstadt, the underground infrastructure is so well-developed that the concrete caverns of the city become a perfect location for urban farming... I saw people growing culinary mushrooms in converted parking garages, in crevices next to subway routes, and in the utility tunnels that route water and heating pipes, all legally arranged with district councils. And of course each place has its own varieties, too. The Meadowlands are ever satisfied with their ochre-caps, the Karst Waterfalls has a profusion that includes oysters, white-caps, and saffron chanterelles, and Kolossalstadt loves the Greyanvil mushrooms that were introduced from the iron-rich lands west of it; those pass iron through their systems as a booster to growth, and can be eaten safely despite this metallic metabolism."

"See, I didn't even know half of that from the TV I watched," Waleria mused.

"There's a lot you won't know from just watching TV," Levi retorted. "Have you ever even thought of going to the Karst Waterfalls or to Kolossalstadt?"

"Not really, no," Waleria said.

Having said that, Waleria turned back to the train's window as the Inland Sea landscapes passed by it. As she looked on, a planned town of several sizable districts that was perched amid the grasslands and woods floated into view; newly-built out of large-panel prefabricated buildings, with streets and buildings arranged in elaborate patterns that held back the oceanic winds in the winter and provided shade to tenants in the summer, with television antennae and ghost shielding towers rising from among them. Next to the town, she could see a large industrial zone, and further off a few freestanding buildings. Across the parcel of land, there were another grain elevator, more warehouses and a large railyard, and a bevy of small factories that, unbeknownst to her, produced all manner of goods: chairs and tables, ammonia and ethanol, fruit jam and canned fish. The coastal areas of the Inland Sea had to be seen to be truly understood; they were wealthy beyond imagination, and more than just in money and commerce. They were wealthy in local color and taste of life, they were wealthy in their ability to support one another, the future prospects of the new planned cities, the resilient infrastructure to fall back on.

Waleria looked over again at the other passengers as the train passed a particularly mundane patch of woodland. People got on and off at the major stops, but some were still there, including the trio of kobolds. She looked closer at them, and how they chatted among each other, creating an impression of a big rowdy group despite only being in a group of three. One of the kobolds was wearing the clothes of a mining engineer, complete with a hard hat that had a lamp on it, colored in blues and tans; the other two were wearing ordinary street wear with regular pants, shirts, and shoes, but one of them had a small aquarium with a live emeraldfish inside it, riding right next to him. Waleria couldn't know it of course, but the emeraldfish was a gift to the kobold's sibling, who was two years younger and a dedicated aquarist - he already had a few emeraldfishes, but the one the kobold was carrying had a unique pattern of teal-colored spots, and would be a great addition to the aquarium system the kobold's sibling had running. Moving her eyes, our hero has noticed someone else on another bench: a bureaucrat with an open suitcase that served as a document storage and portable desk to her, with both that desk and the tray table between the seats filled with papers and the bureaucrat diligently writing, comparing, and tabulating records. They all had to do with the matters of the occult, but not relevant to our heroes' quest in any way whatsoever - she was a classic example of a "hero of another story".

Time passed, people came and went, and in just three hours, Waleria and Levi were more than 200 kilometres away from Waleria's home city, approaching the town of Spokojny Brzeg. The summer breeze drifted gently through the windows of the electric train as it slowed down on its arrival to the city. Out the windows, Waleria and Levi could see the town's buildings hidden amid all the greenery, some made of brickwork and others of wood paneling in different colors. Above the town, they could see the television antennas and a few water towers, and seabirds overflying the town or nesting in the tree crowns. Then, as they arrived, they saw the station building: one wing that was clearly a pre-War building, with large arch windows, a couple of gargoyles, and weathered, greenish copper railings along the roof, and then a Constructivist add-on of bold geometric, glass-facade brick structures as the central building of the station. In-between the station and the platform, there was a lawn a few metres wide, with aspen trees growing into the sky and giving shade to the passenger benches under them. As the train slowed to a stop, the doors opened, and Waleria with Levi stepped out onto the platform, suitcases in hand and ready for their weekend mini-adventure.