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Main: complete Living Garden colony on the sea surface, communicating with chromatophores on the floating sails. Whorls of dactylozooid filaments, gonozooids, and gastrozooids are visible in series below. Top right: detail of gastrozooid, with the mucus-producing and digestive glands well visible around the coelenteron. Bottom left: detail of the tip of a stinging filament, and diagram showing the effects of a sting as the fraction of activated cnidocysts varies. Bottom right: localized pleasure (gastrozooids nibbling at anus and vulva) and diffused pain (embrace of filaments) in intercourse with a Living Garden.

Origins: A very distant worldline, in which cnidarians stumbled into a more efficient neural structure that allowed for higher intelligence, whereas vertebrates remained small swimming filter-feeders. Unable to live on dry land but needing the concentrated oxygen of air to fuel their diffused brain, floating at the surface became common. The ancestors of Living Gardens lived in complex coastal environments, like shallow coral reefs and mangrove forests, where the ability to see and avoid obstacles with active sailing and swimming. It was probably this complexity of environment and behavior that drove neural development.

Appearance: Living Gardens, like the Portuguese man-o'-war of our world, are Siphonophorae, whose body is actually a colony of hundreds of zooids, genetically identical, but specialized in shape for different functions. Their body is built around a central stem or siphosome, from which hang polyps of various shape. At the top is an elongated floating sac or pneumatophore, surmounted by a "sail" that can actively change shape by liquid pressure to move with the wind. This is not a head, of course (although most signal processing occurs there), but the sail carries chromatophores that can be used to communicate, forming glyphs or even imitating facial expressions. The pneumatophore is fringed with simple eyes, similar to those found in box jellyfish.

Beneath the floating sac there is a great mass of elongated gonozooids that produce eggs and sperm. The gonozooids can also move to steer, or even swim to some degree. Beneath that is a helical arrangement of gastrozooids, each of them little more than a plump stomach with a mouth slit, surrounded by a crown of thin tentacles. These are packed with glands to produce digestive enzymes and lubricating mucus that avoids damage from large chunks of food. Finally, dactylozooids hang from the edge of the pneumatophore, bearing segmented stinging filaments. The whole colony measures from 1 to over 4 meters, depending on age and location.

Lifeways: Despite their seeming fragility, a Living Garden can be very dangerous, for the dactylozooids are coated in venomous cnidocysts that can inflict a numbing, painful, or paralyzing sting depending on the amount of venom injected. This is how the Gardens feed: paralyzing aquatic animals (in their home world, usually swimming slugs) with a sting, and gnawing or swallowing them with the gastrozooids depending on the prey's size.

Gardens mostly communicate in pictograms or by their behavior, so it is difficult to get a good sense of their interior life. The ability to sense at distance and move deliberately as one is correlated with a sense of self. They easily discard polyps when they are damaged or to conserve energy; a colony can last hundreds of years, but a single zooid rarely more than a few. All the same, the polyps give considerable (inconscious?) feedback to the pneumatophore, affecting the behavior of the whole colony when danger or pleasure are in sight. To a degree, a Garden’s behavior is the result of a “vote” between the individual zooids as each executes its simple behavior autonomously.

Living Gardens mostly live alone, sporadically trading food with fishing boats. However, they've been known to have sex with vertebrate sophonts, for example by allowing them to penetrate the mouth of a gastrozooid, which has a slippery and elastic texture; damage to individual zooids is not painful to the colonial mind, and a broken one can be simply discarded and replaced by a new bud. The Garden will wrap its filaments around the partner, restricting their behavior, possibly inducing numbing or partial paralysis so that they are unable to move on their own, or even inflicting carefully controlled pain.

One might wonder what good is this to the Living Garden, who reproduces by spawning: in fact this kind of intercourse is deeply pleasurable because it simulates the sensation of trapping and feeding on a particularly large paralyzed prey. While most Gardens know better than to kill sophonts, it is advisable not to meet them alone.

The creatures seemed to tower all around Lund, stern and silent with formless nightmares on their brows. Truly these must be the gods of the sea to Whom her tribe had offered her. She remained quiet, not daring to speak when not spoken to, though a strangled grunt escaped her throat when another sting pierced her nipple like a red-hot needle…

The tendrils felt their way between her shoulderblades, down her spine, splitting around and between her buttocks, meeting again to crawl up her inguinal crease, climbing all the way up her front to brush their ends against her lips. Lund could no longer move; the bundles of tendrils, leaving their tingling trail, could move her at will like a hinged doll. She was folded up and turned around, for one terrifying instant almost pulled underwater, and then her front was pressed into the pillar of glassy vessels, which were raining a hundred little kisses on her, nibbling at her belly and thighs, tugging at her pubic curls.

The tendrils seemed to fill the sea, pulling back her decaying braids to uncover her face, wrapping around her chest, snaking between her buttocks, weaving into her toes and fingers, exploring with flattened tips her ears and nostrils and anus and navel. A clenching of muscles – how many kinds of pain could these beings produce, and how precise were they in imparting it? – echoed around her chest, and fire filled the veins of her belly. Now they were pulling her limbs in opposite directions, so that she lay like a floating starfish, her ribcage and pussy fully exposed to the cold water, open to whatever play they wished of her.

A/F] Inhabitants of the Delta: Living Gardens. (Art by The-Delta-Of-Worlds)