WORK IN PROGRESS

small-mammoth enthusiasts, however, will avidly remind people that they are not in fact a dog, and their organs, although shrunken to the size of a dog’s organs, are still wooly mammoth organs. you actually have to seek out special vets for the small wooly mammoths because even though it looks remarkably like a dog to the untrained eye, when you’re faced with the internal anatomy it’s so far deviated from anything living today that it’s difficult to understand and work with. 

this is because there is, quite literally, no animal anatomy quite like the small woolly mammoth’s left alive on earth. this means that there’s no living approximation of how their organs work, or what the fuck is going on in there, even though they look like a dog from the outside. the closest living relative of the small woolly mammoth is so far deviated from it’s anatomy that’s literally of no help to anyone to compare the two, because the only thing they have in common is how they reproduce. scientists studying the wooly mammoth’s anatomy are forced to debate with each other constantly about what a certain organ might do, or what it at least used to do based on the fossils of the giant wooly mammoths that once dominated the landscape, but they just…have no idea. 

so the small woolly mammoth is not at all like a dog, even though it looks like one. how it works, how it reproduces, how it functions on a basic anatomic level are so utterly and completely prehistoric that they’re not at all like any other living animals. this makes them the subject of infinite fascination to paleontologists trying to approximate the biology and ecology of the giant woolly mammoths that once lived…but it’s incredibly challenging. it’s also incredibly challenging to explain why they’re different to people who just don’t care, or just see them as dogs because they look like them, because the significance of something like it is so easily lost when something looks ‘normal’.

isoetes –Quillworts– are that tiny wooly mammoth. their ancestors lived 400 million years ago and included the giant prehistoric spore-reproducing trees lepidodendron, which made up the bulk of massive prehistoric forests that were eventually compressed into the coal we’re still using today. they’re so old that the roots aren’t roots, they’re leaves, and it took botanists 100 years of bickering to finally confirm this. they’re so old that the change that weeded out all the giant 100+ foot tall members of the lineage was literally the original shifting of the continents, as in, like, when pangea split. they’re so old that it reproduces through ENORMOUS spores contained in spore packets on it’s leaves. they’re so old that we just have no fucking idea how to process it. 

quillwort anatomy is, quite literally, that of a comically small 400 million year old spore tree with the trunk squished into a woody structure so small that you could miss it if you didn’t know what you were looking for on a dissection. the anatomy of this genus doesn’t function like any other modern plant genus on earth. quillworts have organs and cell structures that we still don’t understand in the year 2019. 

quillworts are incredibly valuable finds to paleobotanists because they’re so easily passed over in botanical surveys, and their habitats are constantly being threatened, making a great deal of species endangered. although they’re still around on almost every continent– see the earlier point on them evolving before the continents split– there are a lot fewer of them out there now; like anything, they can be more common in some areas than others, but my state has only found one recorded colony in the past 50 years to give an idea of what we’re dealing with here. 

and yes. they look like grasses.

May I suggest, The Lot:

In the Infinite Ikea or Backrooms you can convince yourself there's gonna be a door round the next corner or behind that wall.

A new arrival realizing a they're lost

Scavengers systematically going through cars for supplies

A small farming community that dug up the asphalt to plant crops

More ideas:

Agriculture is impossible; all the food available is truck-stop fare, scavenged from cars. A group of people had the idea to dig up the asphalt to find dirt to grow crops, but the top layer is just laid down on top of a layer of an older kind of hardtop. At one point a group of people excavate a pit several meters deep, uncovering progressive layers of asphalt, concrete, tile, brick, cobblestone, etc. but they never reach dirt.

Since all food is scavenged from cars, groups have to stay on the move. Although, if you want, you could have unobserved cars reset according to some occult criteria, enabling cyclical migratory patterns. Or, if you want, you could have them have to keep moving outwards and hope they don’t cross a patch that’s already been cleared by someone else.

Any foods that actually contain any appreciable amount of fiber become the most treasured kind of food, as everyone gets constipated from eating only the most refined and processed of foods for every meal.

Part of the uncanny feeling of the place is that it is perfectly flat. It’s not immediately obvious because the only things you can climb to get a better view are lampposts, but there’s no curvature to the earth in this place. A cult forms around disassembling cars to build a tower to try and see to the edge. It’s unclear what’s going on with the sun, given there’s still a day/night cycle.

Maybe there’s never enough drinkable water; it’s mostly soda in the cars; most of the foods available are either very salty or full of sugar. After enough time in The Lot, everyone inevitably ends up pre-diabetic and chronically dehydrated.

Maybe we kick up the weather: black asphalt can get fucking hot at midday; hot enough to fry an egg if the sun is bright enough. Besides sitting in the cars (which may or may not be feasible depending on whether or not they can provide air conditioning), shade is in very short supply, and the abundant reflective surfaces of the cars means you’re gonna get sunburned, bad, if you don’t figure out what to do about noontime.

Conversely, blacktop radiates heat extremely quickly once the sun goes down, and with no plants or rivers to provide humidity the temperatures at night could easily get below freezing.

Flat topology also encourages cyclonic winds; regular, fully fledged tornadoes, flinging cars about and ripping people off their feet could be an actual serious concern.

Naruto: where were you born?

Sukea: *smiles* in a land not unlike Konohagakure, actually

Naruto: cool!

Naruto: where were you born?

Kakashi: somewhere

Naruto:

Naruto: when were you born?

Kakashi: a while ago

Naruto:

Orochimaru plays it off like he never intended to abduct Sasuke there and then but at most an HOUR later, he's telling Kabuto they need to kidnap Sasuke NOW while the curse mark is still influencing him, which indicates he very much was there to take Sasuke and got thwarted by Kakashi.