antifungal

<snip>
Locked and loaded, and with everyone in brand new shoes, the Dwarfers strode out to face the screaming fungal horde
</snip>

New boots clicking, purposefully, on the faux-marble floor, Cass trooped out of the shop and joined the others, fanning out across the Promenade.
The sound of screeching Funglings echoed all around them.
“Stay sharp people” Jay cautioned.
“Where are they?” Cass frowned, her eyes scanning the foliage, shops and restaurants lining the main concourse "Artemis?"
"There's too much plant life out here on the Promenade" he replied "My sensors can't pick up anything definite"
“Just take it nice and easy" Jay murmured "Point by point, let's head for the lift cluster over there”
“Aren’t we meant to take the stairs in an emergency?” Tanaka asked
“Do you really want to take three hundred flights of stairs?”
“There!” Cass pointed at the Fungling she had just spotted and, taking aim with her toy-like pistol, she fired.
The recoil nearly dislocated her wrist.
“Ow! - What the fuck!?”
Clutching her hand, she stared in disbelief at the blackened patch that had been the Fungling. The pleasant scent of fried mushrooms wafted on the air.
“Micro-railguns” Artemis beamed “What do you think?”
“They’re ridiculous”
“Yes, brilliant, aren’t they?” he continued, gleefully “One point two kilometre range and specially modified to accelerate silica to hypersonic speeds. Genius, eh!?”
“I wouldn’t go that far - You can’t possibly aim accurately over about seventy metres”
“Well, maybe not with your fleshy, imperfect nervous systems” Artemis drew himself up, or more accurately, bobbed a little higher “I, on the other hand -”
“Guys!” Jamie interrupted “Check this out”
He pointed at a paisley patterned Fungling that was busy marching down the centre of the promenade towards them.
“Plucky little bugger, isn’t it?”
Coming to a halt a couple of metres from the Dwarfers, the creature planted it’s feet, raised it’s tiny arms and threw back it’s bulbous head to let loose a shrill screech of anger.
Jay scowled down at the eight inch high penile menace “Are we meant to be intimidated by this?”
The Fungling took another step forward and, balling it’s little hands into fists, screeched at them a second time.
“Ah, screw it” Jay shot the creature, blasting it apart in a shower of mycenoid debris “Jesus - That recoil!”
For a moment, the Funglings on the Promenade all fell silent; then as one, they took up their dead comrades wild shriek of anger and started pouring out of their hiding places and charging towards the Dwarfers.
“Whoops” Jay turned and bolted towards the lifts “Time to move people!”

Hurrying after him, hotly pursued by a mass of angry Funglings, Cass briefly wondered if she should have mentioned that she had actually intended that they head down to the manufactories for the silica gel, but quickly dismissed the idea; the Promenade was way more fun, and besides: she had managed to snag a new, set of boots, so things were looking up. All she needed now was some underwear and she was laughing!

Jamie reached the lifts ahead of everyone else and frantically thumbed the call button “C’mon, c’mon...”
The lift pinged, just as the others caught up “Quick!” he yelled “Get in!”
Everyone skidded to a halt as the doors slid open.
“Er...” Tanaka shook his head “No”
A mass of purple tentacles slithered out of the lift shaft, blindly coiling around anything within reach and forcing Jamie to leap back, out of the way.
“Ah” Jay grimaced “I’d forgotten about that”
Plisken scowled at him “Seriously?”
"Well, I didn't know it was going to evolve tentacles"
“I say chaps...?” O’Malley piped up “The Funglings?”
Cass wheeled along with several of the others and, bracing against the recoil, fired into the charging mass of angry mushrooms; the weapons obliterating dozens of them, and reducing them to sooty streaks streaks on the floor.
“That’ll give them - Fuck off!” Cass kicked a grasping tentacle away from her and darted back, out of it’s reach. There was no way she was getting involved in any of that shokushu crap.
“Has anyone got a better plan?” Tanaka shouted above the gunfire “Only, the last one didn’t work so well...”
“It would have worked fine if we had gone to a different lift cluster” Jay protested
He would have said more, but the ship’s intercom interrupted their bickering.
“Bing Bong” Holly intoned “Alright dudes. I’ve got a message from the Captain, so listen up, eh?”
The monitors across the ship all flickered and changed to show a live feed of the Captain.
“Ferrington-Blonde” she said, brusquely “I’ll keep this short and sweet.
“As you are probably aware, this Fungling infestation has got rapidly out of hand, so we need to fumigate the entire ship before things get any more absurd
“Our medical department has kindly informed me that alcohol kills these pests-”
“I told them that” Plisken grumbled . He jumped to one side to avoid a purple tentacle and blasted a hole in it, eliciting an angry roar from somewhere deep in the lift shaft "Get off, you bugger"
The Funglings took this as a signal to renew their assault, with the result that next part of the Captains speech was lost amid the shouting and gunfire.
“-gas from a nearby ethanol nebula.” the she continued in a lull in the fighting “This means that anyone not in a quarantine zone needs to get to one in the next thirty minutes; or take a starbug and temporarily abandon the ship-”
“Take cover!” Jay yelled as, with a roar, the thing in the lift shaft surged upward, it’s tentacles buckling the lift doors and smashing their way out of the main shaft.
Debris showered everywhere
“-rendezvous at-” the Captain could just be heard before the power in the area went down.
“We need to get out of here” Artemis yelled
“Yeah?” Cass snapped “No shit?”
"Now, now children" Tanaka said, loftily "We don't w-Argh!" a tentacle coiled around his waist and lifted him into the air "Get this thing off me!"
The Funglings surged forward...


<tag>
time to wrap this one up
someone get us out of this situation and to a starbug - we've got 30 minutes before the Dwarf gets flooded with ethanol gas from a nebula (they're a thing - I checked)
after that, give us some starbug related disaster to deal with that means we lose the Dwarf - or some other situation - entirely up to you :-)
</tag>