For many religious groups, the discovery of the wormhole and the subsequent discovery of Poseidon, a habitable and indeed life-bearing world, beyond proved to be a moment of deep crisis or epiphany or both.
Unbeknown to the vast majority of their flock, a secret conclave at the highest levels of the Roman Catholic church identified the existence of the water world as a sign from the Lord and in turn concluded that it had to be the original Earth from before the Flood.
In the years since, the Vatican has dispatched teams of loyal priests, charged with collecting the necessary evidence required under church law to verify this biblical connection.
Recently, though, these secretly operating men of the frock have been led somewhat astray.
Following up on reports of wondrous phenomena in the Endeavor islands, they have stumbled upon what some of their number believe to be not merely proof of Poseidon being the location of biblical lands before the Flood, but the very Garden of Eden itself.
According to their preliminary findings, there seems to exist an area within a main system rainforest on one of the islands of the group, where fierce predatory animals lie peacefully with what otherwise be their prey under a tree bearing the most luminous of fruits.
While some of the priests press to make pinpointing the suspected Tree of Knowledge their mission’s top priority, other members of the group take a far more sceptical stance, dismissing all of it as rumours and questioning the very existence of the alleged tree.
In reality, neither the sceptics nor the believers are right, though the latter come closer to the truth of the matter – for the trees exist indeed, and animals do behave in peculiar manners in their vicinity.
The fruit of the not yet described species are laden with addictive and mildly neurotoxic substances, which induce lethargy in animals eating from them. At the same time, the nutritional content of the fruit is extremely low – enabling the trees to produce a high volume of them without actually expending a lot of energy. On the contrary, the plants, while not actively carnivorous, use the fruit to supplement their own diet, by luring in animals with their fragrance and addictive properties. Those creatures then may succumb to starvation or other hazards in the immediate vicinity of the trees, with their quickly decomposing carcasses fertilizing the ground.
With German bloggers collectively considering the topic of “setting ecology”, turning our eyes once more to the rich ecosystem of Poseidon appeared as somewhat of a no-brainer for us at d6ideas, so we were reluctant to actually go forward with it at first. Only by chance did we remember about the Vatican mission to Poseidon mentioned in the books – and this then provided the hook and twist we felt we could hang a more worthwhile ecology article from.