[Danny]

As promised...

***

Forest Mudokons
Around the middle levels of the Great Forest, there might be found large villages among the wide branches. Most buildings are built on top of the branches, although many are hollowed out inside the branches themselves. This is the realm of the Forest Mudokons. Shorter in stature than plains mudokons, they have dappled brown-green skin to aid in camouflage among the dimly-lit leaves of the great trees.
Socially, Forest society is very similar to that of the Plains – a single breeding pair [usually found in a hollowed-out breeding chamber within the branches, or possibly even inside the trunk itself] produce all of the children, which are then brought up by the sterile workers of the village. There is a Caste System of sorts, as children will generally be brought up to perform the same duties as those who brought them up, but it is not rigid; it is possible, and not at all rare, to change your position totally, such as from being a Carpenter to being a Warrior.
Their diet is a varied one. Foragers find fruits and other edible fauna among the branches [Note: The Great Trees do produce fruits, but they can take years to mature before they are ripe, at which point they can be several metres across. When a fruit like this does fall, it can cause disaster in any mudokon villages unfortunate enough to be positioned below… Fortunately, the probability of this is rare. As a result of the amount of time the fruits can take to mature, and of their size, the mudokons do not generally eat the fruits of the Great Trees. The fruits they forage for are the fruits of smaller plants, which grow on the branches of the Great Trees, and exist Commensally with their giant hosts.], while Hunters kill unwary Nokkims [q.v] and Kitu [q.v.]. They are also able to grow some crops on the branches, as the forest provides plenty of organic debris that can be used as effective compost. They have been known to herd Nokkims, but this is rare, as meat production is less efficient and less nutritious than crop production.
Life, however, is not easy, and there are lots of dangers for the unwary. Branthis [q.v.] will eat Mudokons every chance they get, and swarms of Kikkits [q.v.] can pass through villages, decimating crops and picking the flesh from the bones of any mudokons they find in the huts. The danger of falling from the trees is negligible above the age of 1, since children learn to be careful near the edges, and develop the reflexes to catch themselves.
With all these dangers, the mudokons tend to live fast and die young.

Kitu
The Kitu are a perfect example of how nature adapts to the absence of light. These neurotic creatures have vestigial eyes, but they no longer have the ability to see. Instead, their ears have developed to act as the primary sense. Their noses produce a continual stream of clicks, not unlike those of bats, that act as a kind of radar for them to find their way around.
Kitu are primarily vegetarian and insectivorous, feeding on moulds and lichens on the branches, as well as the insects that share that diet. Continually poised for flight, the Kitu’s long, slender, muscular limbs can hang on to almost any surface. Their sensitive ears alert them to any nearby movement. Sudden sounds or movements of any kind will send them to flight off up the trunks and branches to a safer spot. Their ears can fall flat against their skulls to make them more streamlined. This is their main weakness, as their hearing is not as good whilst this is happening, making flight fairly blind, and operating mainly on instinct and a good sense of the space around them. This could make them easy prey to a small group of experienced Mudokon [q.v.] hunters, who could drive Kitu towards each other. Fortunately for the Kitu, the mudokons tend to live considerably higher in the trees than the Kitu, and are generally unused to the extreme darkness in which their intended prey live, so the mudokons tend to stick to other higher-living creatures. As a result, the Kitu have no regular predators, and their numbers are kept down mainly by their fairly short lifespans.

Kikkits
Never more than two inches long, these insects do not seem very threatening, but they are one of the Great Forest’s more dangerous predators. Their bite is extremely poisonous – one bite [in the right place, such as in the eyes or an exposed wound] can bring down even the gigantic Bracks [q.v.], if the Kikkit is lucky.
For most of the time, Kikkits are solitary, and live in the lower levels of the trees, where they feed on almost literally anything [a single Brack corpse can provide a food supply for billions of Kikkits for years, and the fungal growth on the forest floor provides a literally unlimited supply of food]. However, once a year, in the breeding season, the Kikkits gather into huge swarms. These swarms can sometimes rise up through the trees, stripping their path bare of anything vaguely edible. Mudokon [q.v.] crops are devastated; animals that do not flee or hide are stripped of all flesh and left as totally clean skeletons. In Forest terms, this is as devastating a natural disaster as the falling of one of the Great Trees. Fortunately for just about everything, Kikkit swarms do not embark on these upward voyages often.

Bracks
Strangers to the Forest would find it extremely hard to believe the scale of life here. Apart from the trees kilometres high, with branches up to a hundred meters thick, there are also the Bracks. These huge creatures can grow up to three hundred metres long, and fifty wide. They resemble maggots from a distance, but are in fact vertebrate, simply with many stumpy legs and an extremely fat body. They feed on the huge fungi that grow on the forest floor, and have no natural predators except for the occasional lucky Kikkit [q.v.]. Nothing is known about their breeding, and the possibility of a Brack Queen hardly bears thinking about, since the ordinary Bracks are bigger and fatter than the queens of most species.

[ December 19, 2001: Message edited by: Rettick ]