The time is the near future. The situation is critical. Each new pandemic raises the threat level for the continued existence of civilized society, indeed even humankind itself. There is, however, a prodigious panacea that could alleviate the dire prospects for the planet. There is one problem, a major one. The cure-all is a mushroom of the toadstool variety, a member of the Fungus Family, that comes and goes wherever and whenever, at the whim of Mother Nature. Almost a decade earlier, Dr. Goran MacLeod, a highly trained medical anthropologist, and his former lab partner and current paramour, Dr. Maresol Beacher, an experienced free-lance bioprospector, discovered the magical mushroom, aptly named "the Cure." They recognized it as a potent phytopharmaceutical, historically known as The Hellgate, that had been used for centuries to protect and prolong the lives of a community of third gender children, sheltered in a Colony embedded in the rugged backcountry on the Dominican side of the borderlands with Haiti. Drs. MacLeod and Beacher tracked down the secretive Colony and saved the children from gangland marauders seeking the source of the botanical bounty. Now, they must find a way to control and cultivate the Cure while keeping it safe from the forces of darkness in its new abode beneath the Mountain of the Red Dawn.