Nege Trees
Nege trees are colonial organisms comprised of many zooids. On top of being a part of an ecosystem, they are an ecosystem unto themselves. For all their dangers and disorientation, Nege trees can make for rich habitats. There's no shortage of resources within Nege forests.
Explore the map of the Nege tree to learn more.
From The Accounts of The Adventines
It's very alien, being inside of another organism. You'd think it would be comparable to a forest, but no. At least in the deepest rainforests on Earth you can look up and see sky above the canopy. Inside of a Nege the only light is from biolume, and that comes from every which direction. It's like being in a city, at night, but everything is humid, and alive, and twisting.
I don't know how the natives live here, let alone thrive. I get motion sickness just looking around, yet they traverse up, down, and across the somacyst axons with ease.
Anatomy of a Nege Tree
Somacysts
Accounts of The Adventines
Putting these notes down before I forget them...
Nege trees are found above the aquifers and cisterns of the labyrinthine corralums. They begin as "whogs" probing their roots into the corralums in search of nutrients and water. If they find a good source, these hollow roots will grow in diameter to fill the entire tunnel, and will siphon water up. The natives call these "whog ways" and grow algae in them.
Where the sun strikes the outermost entanglement of somacysts, they form a bark-like skin and grow together into a shell around the entire system.
As the tree matures, the cysts diversify. Some become storage for water, while others secrete a digestive acid the natives call "slog", which is sticky and attracts insects and other small creatures to trap and digest. Tall vertical shoots develop fronds which capture and convert the solar energy.
There's a lot of ways they're not like trees, but they look close enough and so that's the name that stuck.
Whog
Stem tendrils
are shoots that grow out of the stem.
Axons are outgoing
Dendrites are incoming
Soma are the body
To call it a wilderness or a jungle is to belittle it. There are megacities which aspire to the height and sprawl of Nege trees. Some confusing mess of plant and creature, the Nege sink their roots deep into the earth and raise their fronds thousands of feet into the air, limbs reaching out, interlocking, holding one another up. Centuries of bark and peat buildup settle onto the interwoven branches, forming layers upon layers of chambers, each contracting in slow respiration, sucking air through intricate network of tunnels (called whogs) which attach them to the outside world. Because of the natural asymmetry of the whogs' air distribution, and a wide variance in humidity among chambers, it's not rare for one chamber to have an entirely different weather system compared to another, nor is it uncommon for chambers to become almost entirely sealed off, closed systems which show evolutions in creatures completely unlike their cousins just on the other side of a few feet of interwoven wood; veritable genetic islands.
Entangled Species
Although the Nege trees are themselves a life form, they cannot exist independently. The word itself, Nege in Saza, is one that translates into a word which represents connectivity and interreliance, a thing which its inhabitants see as a microcosm of the universe as a whole.The Nege excrete Slog, a viscous jelly bacteria with fast-acting enzymes that prove fatal to most bio matter. This digestive slime slowly filters down the tree, accruing more matter as it passes through the different chambers before finally sliding into a the sloggums, the methane-rich bogs which serve as the stomachs of the tree, and which are particularly potent.
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