Article written by Nico
The hollowing blight was a weird sort of disease that swept through our crops in year 3. We haven't seen it since, which is perhaps a good sign, though I personally find it a bit worrying. It started off normally enough, just plants with these weird little black specs on them. I thought they were some sort of bug at first, since they seemed to move about from day to day and were raised. They were in little clusters, not that big, but still not something I had seen before that year, so I made note of it.
A week in, the spots seemed to have gotten bigger. Still not huge, they would be hard to see if you weren't looking for them. I was looking for them, though, so I saw the little fuckers. I tried to brush them off some of the plants, because I still thought they were probably bugs, but they were really stuck on there.
Then, another couple days later, the spots were much larger. As big as the tip of Angel's pinky finger. This time I tried just ripping one off. Obviously, it just sort of tore the leaf it was on. Then I pried one off one of the melons we had, and the whole melon came apart in my hands! There were these weird black vines all throughout the melon, and it was like it was just rotting everywhere the vines had touched. I didn't touch the vines, I was freaked out. I went right to Jude, since he knows more about plants and stuff than I do. He was pretty worried about what I showed him.
Jude: Understatement, honestly. I was terrified.
Crystal: Why didn't you spot this before Nico did? Aren't you supposed to be the plant guy?
Jude: I was distracted. The spots weren't that big and I mostly left the crops to Nico for a couple of days. Not saying he somehow made this happen, just that there is a reason he's the one writing the article.
There wasn't really any saving the plants that were infected. At least, not that we could see. We had to burn down like half of our crops to keep whatever this was from spreading! Which did work, thank the gods. Still, we are a lot more meat that year than we normally do.
Crystal: A truly exhausting amount of hunting. I dearly wish you had gone to Jude earlier with this.
Angel: He's doing his best! He thought they were bugs!
Nico: Crystal, we appreciate your and Mina's hard work to keep us all fed that year. And you're not wrong. In my defence, I did learn from this mess.
Jude: Arguably, he's too paranoid about anything that seems even slightly strange with the plants now.
Nico: Better safe than needing to burn down all our food again!
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