Early new Petran world building.
A Nychter Dryad looks like a humanoid bat, with large eyes and wings that have more or less devolved into arms. They are generally on the short side, with taller and more aerodynamic weaker males and shorter, curvier females who are physically stronger. Their colouration and decoration is inspired by the plants that have contributed to their existence, meaning that they can usually camouflage themselves in their local environs.
The average Nychter Dryad is roughly five feet tall as a male dryadem, with female dryads being a few inches shorter. Dryadems grow larger wing membranes when the situation is right to reproduce - this enables them to fly. While flying, they collect pollen on their wing membranes, and they incorporate this pollen into their system. Their innate, quiet magic draws positive traits from the plants as a result, enabling them to pass these on to their offspring. A dryad produces a seed after a few months of pregnancy, during which time she journeys to find a likely territory and imbues the developing seed with knowledge of the area through walking and living in it. When the seed is complete, which is small and unremarkable other than being hard to identify as belonging to any particular plant species, she plants it and then returns home.
All Nychter Dryads are born knowing how to survive in the territory that their mother walked and able to speak their own language. They are immobile for the first couple of years, photosynthesising and relying on the resources of their area to grow. Once they can uproot themselves as children, they journey back to find their fathers, a journey that may take years. Their fathers raise them in small coalitions, teaching their creche of children Nychter Dryad society and culture. As teenagers, they go to their mothers to be taught astronomy, navigation and similar arts. They then return to their home territory until mature.
Nychter Dryads never take fungal form - they are strictly creatures of the animal and vegetable kingdom, and like all New Petrans are more or less human. However, they do use fungal networks to communicate, just as many trees do, and as a result they maintain strong friendship ties with each other despite their physical distance from one another. A male lacking in wing membranes through injury cannot reproduce, and a female who has lost her flowers is not in good enough health to sustain a pregnancy.
With application of the correct magic, a Nychter Dryad is able to sustain or contribute to a pregnancy with none of it's own genetic material passing through. This means that with donations of genetic material and through various complex systems they are able to act as surrogates for infertile sentients. Some Nychter Dryads use this ability to earn a lucrative career in large cities.
