▐▐▐▐ SUMMARY>> The fractured Pizzaplex is somewhere between a fantastical mall and a theme park that can only be dreamed of, but much like its Subverted owner, it is not all that it seems, and genuine dangers lie within its walls.
▐▐▐▐ THE TREE>>
This is no ordinary tree. The glade that it sits within is soaked in viscera and black tar-like gunk that smothers the leaves and chokes the struggling, gnarled foliage. The forest does not just die here but contorts and twists into bizarre, tortured shapes that feel like a fate worse than death for the flora and fauna in its grip.
Somehow, in defiance of the lack of food in the blasted clearing, rabbits seem to live here in large numbers, but disease runs rife through their numbers, and many have exposed or weeping wounds across their emaciated bodies.
Dominating the space, a vast baobab stretches up against the sky at the heart of the clearing. It is not a natural tree; inorganic and made of all the wrong substances, with golden bark in varying tones of yellow. It is composed of roughly textured metal that only resembles natural bark.
The tree's branches are a vast array of rainbow hues, with a kaleidoscope of sparkling and multicoloured branches defying anything found in the natural world. They are strung with lights and gleam with glass. The baobab’s roots are LEDs sustained endlessly by no visible power source that blaze even during the day, tangling with an array of twisted fibre optic cables that plunge into the earth around the tree.
The baobab feels like a growth on the limitless forest rather than anything that would live symbiotically alongside it, and in the heart of the trunk itself yawns a vast and dark doorway encrusted with the same bright lights as the roots.