Shroom for Improvement

As the crisp October air turns frigid, American grad student Anna Armstrong is plotting her escape from the Irish tour group she currently is on. Having come to Ireland to test for a theory she has in a graduate thesis study she is working on, Anna only began the tour with the others because it happens to pass the restricted forest she needs to venture into. But once she does, will Anna Armstrong ever return?

For many hundreds of years, Ireland has been a beautiful place of mysterious storied legend and myth. The belief in fairies and all manner of creatures has been a constant, and more than a few have reported sightings and experiences mere science can't explain.

But the beautiful blonde Anna Armstrong is determined to prove a remarkably reasonable theory she has developed, that rare and seldom seem giant mushrooms still exist in one particular forest where most of the more terrifying mythical creatures have supposedly been spotted. These mushrooms possess mind altering properties, and could have been leeching into the local drinking water for many hundreds of years. All contact with the mushrooms may well have affected the locals, even those who traveled and still told tales of the creatures they narrowly avoided deadly encounters with in these very woods.

But as Anna ventures into the woods, slipping away from her tour group, crossing an old wooden fence, darkness begins to descend. The shadows grow dense, and the mysterious landscape truly does seem capable of hiding things mankind has never seen.

Unfortunately for Anna, the two Irish leads of her tour group noticed her missing and came back to search for her, the older Liam and his nephew Noah finding her in the locally forbidden forest.

Fortunately for her, Liam and Noah seem reasonable and interested when she tells them there may be dangerous contamination of the local water sources by mushrooms. As she explains, it is all for her graduate thesis, and she never would have been able to afford the travel and equipment like her GPS mapping of the area, if not for a research grant from some supposedly local organization called Eunoch Polle Research.

With darkness descending, and Anna Armstrong determined not to leave, Liam and Noah have little choice but to stay with her until they can talk her into leaving the mysterious Irish forest.

One thing on the GPS scanning device that has Anna intrigued is the roof of what looks like a structure at the very center of this forest, but old Liam is not willing to entertain going there, telling of faery folk.

Both Noah and Liam talk about the dangers of venturing into the woods here, whether it is unseelie fairies, which are the evil mischievous ones who steal babies, or the Far Darrigs which wear red capes and carry sacks to terrorize in similar ways to leprechauns, or even the worst of the worst, something called a Pooka, a shapeshifting goblin bogeyman that often takes partial forms of a horse.

All of this just reasserts Anna's belief that the legends and fears are stoked by something in the water, likely something from nature, from science and not myth, and the mushrooms are exactly the likely culprit.

But what will happen when the three of them encounter one of those supposedly mythical creatures? Have they succumbed to the influence of the local shrooms, and will running to the stone structure at the center of the woods save them?

Waiting in that old home may be the most fearsomely manipulative creature in all Irish lore, a rhyming fiend like Anna's science could never possibly explain, and someone with a connection to her she never imagined... the one, the only... the finally returned Lenny the Lecherous Leprechaun!

Halloween with the Kreme brings back a long lost lech after years and years of hiding, and he's hiding no more, with plans of his own. After all, there's always Shroom for Improvement.