QUOTE (Kagetenshi @ Dec 30 2010, 01:36 PM)

I, um, sorta forgot about KarmaInferno.

Nothing to see here, move along.
Not really, insofar as there's a big lump of over two thousand people with the same join date (due to non-migration of earlier join dates).
Or rather, they correspond in the way you indicate, but it's not 1:1 (bijective); lower member number -/> earlier join date.
~J
The 2000 or so members who have the same join date is either from when we transitioned over from Deep Resonance to Dumpshock or from switching the board software over to IP.Board (The latter, I think). We just transferred over the member data base, so I *think*, more or less, that most of the member numbers are still in order. A lot of the really LOW numbers accounts are the original Deep Resonance Founders and a bunch of Shadowrun names that we created accounts for to "lock them out" (I'm not even 100% certain why we did that back then, honestly).
Kagetenshi: Which were rumors? The Diablo, or the "Healing tree"? I assume you mean the latter, since the Diablo got a whole write up in YotC (And the Diablo is an Awakened tree

)
Basically, there is a real life tree today, called the Sangre Del Drago (Blood of the Dragon) that grows in the rainforests and jungles of South and Latin America. Natives of those areas have believed for centuries that the tree's sap has healing properties, and today the tree's sap is harvested by a couple pharmaceutical companies that extract certain enzymes for use in medications.
The Diablo is a twisted, evil, semi-toxic variant of that, created for Year of the Comet partly to fit in with some of the stuff going on with the Yucatan plot, with the idea of the very earth awakening to defend itself (in abstract, anyway), and partly because Mike Mulvihill wanted an "Evil, Sentient, Carnivorous Tree". I made it as tough as possible, and gave it the compulsion power to give it a way to be effective at range, since as a stationary plant it wouldn't normally really be that much of a threat. But in a dense jungle, you'd be within it's range before you were able to see it through the trees.
The Draco (Which, in my head, I'm translating as Blood of the Drake, since the mundane one is Dragon) is a somewhat natural further extrapolation of that idea, going back to the original plant and the myth surrounding it. I also like the idea that it's camouflaged by resembling the Diablo.
I'm slightly biased, obviously, but I don't really have a major problem with the general idea as presented in
War! The idea of seeding basically a treeline of these is interesting, and would make for some good ground defense, especially if they're more or less spread out so that they overlap a bit. Stagger a couple lines of them, and ground forces would have to go through several of their compulsion fields to get through.
Of course, this should only be one part of a larger strategy, obviously. Even a massive treeline with hundreds of these things aren't going to be able to stop everything, and they're still trees at the end of the day, so they can be dealt with safely.
Now, as to why the Amazonians would be unhappy about this? These trees are bad mojo. They're effectively a toxic plant life. Miles of these plants would completely destroy the biosphere around them, as they killed and devoured all animal life that came through there. This is not a long term sustainable idea, because eventually the trees themselves would starve. These are not trees that naturally grow in groups.
In my head, they reproduce naturally by growing flowers only at the very top of their branches, so that when they spawn seeds, the wind carries the seeds away from the current tree. They also do not produce that many seeds, and the conditions have to be right for them to naturally take root. (I worked up a lot of this stuff for YotC, but when you only have a few hundred words to work with, you need to keep it to the point).
<shrug>
Bull