Bay 12 Games Forum

Floating island, tree in the middle on small island, water in circular lake around tree perfectly clear. Outer ring and tree full of flower buds not yet bloomed and fruit bearing plants, which are incredibly sweet and delicious, as well as having a time delayed effect causing paralysis, slowing, and sleep. Island has a number of small holes along the outer edges, the number of which varies based on the creature's age.

Between feeding periods, the flower buds remain closed and the island is quiescent, floating along peacefully. When awakened, either by hunger or by someone eating some of the fruit, the flowers bloom.

Within the flowers are clusters of grasping pseudopod surrounding a toothed tube. All of the things are capable of stretching out to an incredible degree and are almost perfectly agile, as well as being able to freely merge with each other to increase size, strength, speed, and length, linearly. As well as having easy access to the open area above and around the open top of the island, they are capable of falling in on themselves and pushing themselves along the flower's root system, which leads to the holes along the edge of the island, from which they erupt and cover the area below.

The tree is the main body, which is... honestly, basically a shoggoth -- largely amorphous form, many eyes, many mouthes, etc. The creature is rather intelligent, being roughly on par with the average illithid and possessing similar mental capabilities, when it chooses to use them. When inactive, it appears as a normal tree; its skin feels of bark, it has flowers and fruit, by all measures (including magic, advanced sensors, etc.), it is just a tree. When active, it is a pillar of writhing flesh and screaming maws, lashing tentacles and extra feeding tubes dominating the nearby airspace. There are also extra tubes on the main body, which are capable of launching the fruit, primed to explode into a very debilitating gas, a significant distance (at least twice as far as its tentacles can reach).

As for what it is, what it does. The beast lives primarily on love. It does this by floating by the occasional village and allowing the population to feast on its fruit, rendering them all immobile.* Afterwards, the pseudopods gather the still living bodies and place them within the feeding tubes, where they are consumed in agony over the course of several weeks, their flesh slowly being rendered down into materials to help the island grow as their emotions, particularly the brighter ones, are fed upon. The victims are kept alive until the very end, their conscious minds being fed upon during the process. These emotions are distilled and used to create the fruit the tree uses to trap its victims, the sweetness and wonder of the fruit coming literally from the distilled and condensed positive emotions of the island's previous victims.

*Of course, the island is perfectly capable of saying "Screw it" and just psionic tentacle monster of doom rampaging all over the bloody place, which is also what it does when the fruit doesn't work for whatever reason. The beast prefers to use the honey trap as the fruit itself, beyond incapacitating its eater, primes their minds to produce the emotions the creature feeds upon.