Buhuz-Carraptago rainforest.

The rain was coming down in buckets to the forest floor of the Buhuz-Carraptago rainforest. Birithefely and Mangourad manned the observation station. Birithefely had been transferring this week's observations from the floating data sentries to the three backup storage repositories on the mainland while writing in her diary about watching a busphengal moth last night undergoing its final post-chrysalis molt. Mangourad was  bored and had an old copy of Phusmapolis that he'd been reading. Birithefely had some caulkgress tea and was toying with the notion of adding more honey to it.

Mangourad had just gotten the part in Chapter 3 of Phusmapolis where the Ryphelzil Jongluers march over the Canstapbuil bridge and Krenthala Minyulk has the embarassing medical problem for the third time -- it's a hoot so he was rereading it as it was very silly. Birithefely called out from her diarying "get to chapter four already. there's much sillier sidebusters in it".

Four more years of variously manning the outposts of the Buhuz-Carraptago rainforest -- Yelsaris University had an awfully gigantic grant to study the rainforests of the Kulhu and Iraktagu islands after Pelho Moehdrius had outlined a series of ecological anomalies that got peer reviewed then confirmed after the publication of his first paper in Acta Thermographica some two centuries ago. Moehdrius had noted that despite the heavy industrialization and pollution in the Hylue Peninsula, that the Buhuz-Carraptago rainforest on Iraktagu and the Buhuz-Mohoneury rainforest on Kulhu had thrived. After a hurried series of papers by Ralsmon Chantzgrit and Neiheimbru Stolyaris it was determined that something really weird was going on with these two rainforests. There was a lot less biodiversity than you'd expect. There were only five species when there should have been thousands and millions. The soil housed one bacterial species -- Ruhulgo silembinensis, there was one and only one sort of tree -- the buhuz oak (Buhu megensis) , there was one lepidopteran, the busphengal moth (Atraharku golembinsii) which underwent a weird supernumerary molting after the chrysalis stage (rumour has it that continental insectologists went mad as a result of this), the screny lichen (Gelgaradib scholensis), and the muskmoose, a small mammal, (Schaktaunga maresii), and that despite the fact that previous generations of researchers would have introduced seeds and whatnot, none of these ever took, and so the mystery of these rainforests remained.

Birithefely and Mangourad were graduate students who were doing a summer in one of the observation stations -- well, nine weeks of time doing maintenance on the data sentries. Hardly anything, as the sentries were gravitically powered and required little in the way of maintenance, but the faculty of botanists, biologists, ecologists, and thermographers at Yelsaris steadfastly maintained that it was a good idea for graduate students to get in some field time -- not that there was much to do in the Buhuz-Carraptago forest -- the faculty usually paired the romantically incompatible and teleported them to observation stations. Often a good novel got written during one of these summer sojourns. It was believed that by spending time physically observing the peculiar ecosystems, the future biologists, botanists, ecologists and thermographers would have a better, more intuitive understanding of the absurdity of the Kulhu and Iraktagu rainforest ecosystems.