Saw this posted on tumblr and wanted to info dump about the world the Vycotans live in but didn’t want an unwarranted and unrelated reblog, so here goes
Imagine for a second that the entire world you lived on was made of benign sleeping masses of flesh. The ground—the buildings—the technology—all of it was sourced from the sleeping behemoth you lived on.
This mass of flesh gives you everything, shelter, food, and most importantly replenishes the population. Some babies grow from trees, some grow from long vines snaking along the ground, and some grow underground like tubers.
but not all parts of this body produce offspring, some excrete substances that harden, some just seem to stretch endlessly forward like reaching grasping hands.
So, how would you make buildings?
In the world of the vycotans everything is made from vycelium or something excreted by it. So, the way to make a building is not by gathering up materials and putting them together, but by encouraging the tendrils of (non-reproductive) vycelium to grow in a very specific way.
In that way those who work in building construction have a very different approach to the making of a structure. More like hedge trimmers than builders because they 1.) have to understand how vycelium as an organism function and 2.) learn how to coax and correct without causing undue harm.
