Yggsdrasil
Arbor Day
Breachpoints normally open on the ground. This opened a few hundred feet up, within the branches of an immense tree. The ground was not visible through the tangle of branches, so someone climbed up to get a look, and saw only endless forest, with occasional flocks of birds launching or landing, and somewhere west, thin wisps of smoke. The team watched carefully, ready to retreat in the event they landed in an imminent fire, but the smoke didn't expand or move. Someone concluded it was controlled, a sign of civilization, and they began to move towards it.They found... or rather, were found by a village of arboreal humans, or near humans. They had long limbs, and toes approaching prehensility. They seemed to have preternatural balance, but it was not clear if that was due to biological changes or training from birth. They were suspicious, but not immediately hostile, and seemed open to the idea of travelers from far away who might not know their language or customs. The first-in team was watched closely, but were able to get enough conversation in to build a vocabulary and grammer primer for the linguists to work with.
It was the botanists that had the key breakthrough. The 'forest' was a single organism, an immense tree that reproduced by spreading new stalks through its roots. It stretched a minimum of hundreds of miles, and quite likely more, and the inhabitants considered it the world.
But it was more than that. It possessed a unique genetic adaptibility, so that many other species could be grafted to it. Scattered among its branches were those of other species, often fruit-bearing, providing a range of edible products. The locals seemed quite skilled at tending and controlling these branches, creating 'orchards' 200 feet above the ground.
Furthermore, left anywhere other than glass and some metal alloys, scraps of the tree would rapidly send out exploratory roots, developing, by some form of genetic alchemy, enzymes that could break down everything from sand to ceramics to plastics, and worm its way in. When the full range of its capacity and slow destabilization became apparent, BREACH's lead botanical researcher issued a 'kill it with fire' order. Their conclusion was that it was not a natural product of biology, but was something engineered in the world's past, that clearly got out of control. (How "clear" this is depends on who you ask, of course.)
The promise of harnessing some of Yggsdrasil's properties to turn any world into an agricultural resource, with the risk of having the same lack of control, has tempered exploration. Explorers also learned it was simply good luck the first-in team chose the path they did and found a generally friendly society; a team traveling a few miles down a different route were attacked without warning and had to shoot their way out. There's an amazing variety of cultures, enough to keep a thousand dendrianthropologists employed for life, but, of course, there's about a dozen or so BREACH operatives with the appropriate skills (and more than a hundred worlds demanding their attention), and so far academia is just beginning to teach it as a speciality to allow non-breachers to pick up some of the slack.
Somewhere under the cultural and sociological questions, and the agricultural ones, lies the one thing that's attracted deep, but quiet, interest from the real string-pullers: If the theory this was an artificial creation is true, then, somewhere far below the canopy... or perhaps on another continent, or at the poles, or somewhere... are the remains of whatever civilization had the technology to create it. At the first hint of such ruins, there will be quite a race to get there first.
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