#but they're fluffy warm-blooded not-snakes that lay eggs and sweat milk

[kariachi]

Since I’m on this sort’ve shit right now (I should be writing fic, I want to write fic, but here we are)- let’s touch on another Erinaen fruit, because that list of them I threw up a few years back was far from all-encompassing.

Now large animals need large foodstuffs, or at least a lot of foodstuffs, and given the largest land-dwelling critter on Eri is a 14 ton herbivore you can guess how much food these bastards need. You can guess how big some fruits can get. Now the largest of these are restricted to something closer to ground level, where the largest of herbivores are (because yes there’s some nice delectable leaves way up in canopy but even on a world with lots of magic running around nature has it’s limits and a 300 ft reach is beyond them), but you can still get several ton herbivores and omnivores up in the trees, so you can still get big-ass fruits that live to take advantage.

One of the larger of these grows on a comparatively small, stout tree- gotta make sure you can take the weight of your top seed distributor- though by Earth standards it’s still really fucking big. Red-brown in color, these largest of these fruits can dwarf even the jackfruit at an easy 40 inches long and 26 inches across, weighing over 150 lbs each, forced to grow directly from branches and trunks by a thick stem just to stay on the damn tree.

This, my friends, is what is most commonly translated as the ‘basket fruit’, also called ‘pot fruit’, ‘black-eyed fruit’, and ‘dragon’s meal’, depending on the area.

The rind of basket fruit are thick- at a quarter inch- and very tough. Inside, the meat of the fruit is extremely aromatic- some varieties smelling more like lavender cheesecake than anything-  and flowery in flavor, but also very stringy. Sort’ve like if a peach met pumpkin guts in texture, not necessarily pleasant, gets stuck between your teeth, not everybody’s cup of tea. It’s also studded with large, shiny black, seeds, one to three inches across depending on the variety. These seeds are edible and have a very rich, oily flavor, but they require cooking first so, you can guess how common they are in Erinaen cuisine.

Really, while the seeds are useless to Erinaens outside of like, decoration, and some necromancers like to use them as a base for some of their ointments, and the meat of the fruit is really only any good fresh and even then is very much a love it or hate it thing, it’s the rind that Erineans hunt these things down for. And they do leave them to grow properly wild, this isn’t one of those ones the bastards bring over to the colony. The rind itself is watertight, and when cleaned out and dried can be used as a container. A container made from a whole, large fruit can hold up to 70 US gallons! Or one can cut the rind into pieces and piece together/form those into smaller containers before drying, to fit various needs. You can also dry pieces of the rind in molds to get shaped bowls. (Can get an easy 20 cereal bowls out of one large fruit that way.)

One tree can easily make several hundred fruit per year, which are eaten by a variety of small animals that specialize in getting into tough fruits like this through gnawing or cutting or there’s one variety of small critter collectively called ‘keenal’ that’s hard to classify in Earth terms but actually burns it’s way through with an acidic goo it creates it regurgitates. But the big two Families the trees are gunning for are ‘ling’- a Family of serpentine, omnivorous monotremes, the largest of which max out at nearly 5 tons and almost 90 ft long, these are also why Erinaens don’t bring these trees home, they will eat an Erinaen and are perfectly capable of getting into a colony, major Erinaen predator- and ‘olzie’- a flightless avian that refused to leave the trees, the largest of which- the ‘urree’, named for it’s call in true bird fashion- can reach up to 4 tons, they’re primarily herbivorous, though they’ll take small animals or large bugs if given the opportunity, and use their shortened wings to maintain balance and to help them climb, they’ve evolved sharp, sturdy claws at that last wing-joint which they use in climbing and to get into tough-skinned fruits like the basket fruit.

#erinaens #you know how sometimes nix talks about dairy dragons? #yeah the ling are certainly a thing #you can't farm the fuckers- or at least erinaens can't #but they're fluffy warm-blooded not-snakes that lay eggs and sweat milk #and live in trees #please picture having a 5 ton not-snake covered in fur drop on you out of the sky #life it tough for erinaens they don't have to worry about food or war or illness but also they are quite small #not by human standards but by the standards of their homeworld #erinaens *handshake* galvans *handshake* arachnochimps: being quite little guys with many very large predators