Baseejie

The baseejie is named for its crystal "leaves", which have a polygonal shape and strange shininess that brings to mind bad CGI. ("Bad CGI" is corrupted into "BA-see-JUY", which is how "baseejie" is pronounced) Each "leaf" grows in clusters of three. In laboratory conditions, the leaves look like perfect prisms, but in the wild, a few of a baseejie's leaves have obvious defects. These defects are caused by parasites such as sapshrooms, sappros, and microplaques. Baseejie roots are thick and sprawling. Unlike in the image above, they are usually underground. However, their wavy shapes means that some parts of the root poke above the soil. The heavy, sprawling roots anchor the baseejie in the soil, reducing its likelihood of being washed away in floods or blown away in storms. Neither phenomena is especially common in its environments, so this anchoring is merely a beneficial side-effect of the roots' size. The hard trunk is derived from its fungus-like roots. The trunk has extra-thick walls of chitin and is stiffened by sclerotin, which is also in the hard bodies of Earth beetles. Baseejies typically reproduce by aesexual budding from the roots, forming dense groves of clones in the process. However, when environmental conditions are unfavorable, it will produce spores in modified crystal "leaves". The spores are suspended in greenish sugar water---not quite nectar---inside the "flowers". The "flowers" have only narrow pores for accessing its contents. This is no problem for nectarivorous xenobees, whose narrow tongues slurp up the sugar water and later deposit the spores in their droppings as they fly. However, scarlet phylers will "cheat" to access the sugar water: they will crack open the "flowers" with their beaks and eat the contents. The spores have a much lower chance of germination if they end up in a scarlet phlyer's owl-pellet-like waste. Sailmails and cygeres aren't able to recognize the "flowers" as any different from the leaves, and will eat them "by mistake." (They quite intentionally eat it, but only because they misidentify it as a leaf.) The spores have a better chance of germinating in sailmail or cygere waste than in scarlet phlyer waste, but aren't transported as far as they would if xenobees ingested them. Due to xenobee transport, some of the spores from Drake Plains baseejies may germinate on the Drake Plains-facing edges of the West Drake Desert. Barring environmental fluctuations that make parts of the desert wetter, these baseejies can only be found in oases. Due to this, baseejies in the West Drake Desert are rare.