Note on Trees, and Eldritch Horror

Erm...

I solemnly swear I was not high whilst producing this. 

It started off as a voice recording completed when I found myself fascinated by a tree whilst out on a walk, staring at it and almost unable to move. I've since interpolated some additional thoughts and edited the text for flow and comprehensibility, as well as adding the gameable elements at the end, but the core remains. If I had to summarize it, I'd say it's an attempt at using a short piece of xenofictional roleplay to put myself - and you - in the mindset to create more interesting and horrifying eldritch and unknowable beings, since the current crop of large squids, oozes with eyes and space demons fails, to me, to capture much of what's really interesting and horrifying about the Weird. The first two parts will hopefully be of interest to anyone who likes that sort of thing; the last is a creature based on the ideas therein developed, aimed at TTRPG GMs, Storytellers, Keepers etc.

Average read time should be ~25 minutes.

I couldn't find an attribution for this, but it appears to be Creative Commons.

One: Imaginings

'In his own fiction ... Lovecraft linked beauty to the strange and the grotesque, seeking to emphasize notions of the unknown. This ... also provides an explanation for the difference between the genres of fantasy and horror - namely, that horror, itself a sub-genre within the greater classification of weird fiction, is concerned only with reality.  When faced with horror, we must accept that reality is at least partly unknowable. ... And in this acceptance, this giving in to forces that are by nature incomprehensible, horror seeks to offer direct knowledge of the real. It strips away comforting or cosmetic surface realities and lays bare indifferent inner workings. How we feel about those inner workings, or what they mean to us, is of little to no importance. What matters is the glimpsing of the beyond, of bearing witness, and how this act alters our perceptions of what is or has been.'

    David Peak, Horror of the Real: H.P. Lovecraft's Old Ones and Contemporary Speculative Philosophy. 

Imagine, for a moment, being a tree. There's some discussion as to whether trees are in some sense sentient or not. I tend to be some sort of weak panpsychist; to think that all reasonably complex systems with input-output loops have enough subjectivity that they probably are sentient, or at least that saying they aren't is a faith-statement about human uniqueness more than an adequate assessment of their qualities. You needn't share that opinion (which is hotly debated by a lot of folks more qualified than I) to understand this post, though. Just imagine for a moment that it's true, maybe in some alternate world: trees are, in some sense, sentient, possessing an interior sense of self that can comprehend the stimuli and outputs that make up their system. And you are one of them.

Your roots reach out, you make optimization decisions about where to burrow. Your branches shift, you make optimization decisions about where to grow. You compete with the other trees around you. Possibly, if you happen to live in an area with a mycorrhizal network, you have some sense of them? (Though that's another prickly debate, it'd seem.) At minimum, you sense where the light is. You know that there are competitors for the light.

I suppose this isn't that different from the way that humans perceive other humans. You don't know that another tree is a being like you, necessarily - you can't experience some angelic contact that reveals, without sensory mediation, its interior tree-ness - in the same way that you-the-human-reading-this don't know that somebody else who looks at, looks like, you isn't a p-zombie buuut I know that they seem to want the same things as me. You-the-tree still know their roots strive for water. You know their branches and leaves strive for sun. And that inclines you to think that they are a fundamentally similar kind of being. 

There are other kinds of being, too. Grass in the soil about - barely a competitor in terms of light, but certainly you can feel it around your roots, or you can feel its effects on the composition of the soil. Same point as above applies. The mistletoe that clings to your branches is really quite different. It's probably not a light competitor on any significant scale, but you can feel it taking resources from within you, you can feel it doing something that you can't do. Even so, it interacts with a resource system that you can understand, needs the same things you do - it's just that it's getting some of them from you.

Now, if you will, imagine a human.

It's probably harder for a tree to imagine a human than for a human to imagine a tree. The scale is so different, in terms of time. A tree might only make small instinctive movements over the course of a day, might live for hundreds, even thousands, of years (though some of the shorter-lived ones are more similar to humans and other longish-lived animals). A human, of course, is gone in a blink of that, and moves so much faster. The senses aren't ideally tuned. It's not that there are a fundamentally different set of senses - not that humans are truly some extradimensional entity - but they might as well be.

How does a tree sense a human? A momentary flash of additional reflected light, perhaps, on the underside of some leaves? Barely registering, if so. Like a flicker at the edge of vision, too quick to note unless they spend hours standing there. Even I, who at this point in the recording of this script had been stood under one tree for probably long enough to concern any human observer, likely hadn't registered to it at all, that dear old ivy-wreathed giant lung looming over a forbidden patch of ground.

In the longer run, the effects of human can be felt. The soil is different in its flavour. Perhaps there are crops, perhaps there is excrement. Think about excrement. A new fruitfulness, new flavours, the very earth changed by something that... appears to be in itself a thing you can understand but is in fact a manifestation of something almost totally beyond your senses, an abstract referent, like a demon on a moth's wing.[1] Or: crops. You recognize those, they're a kind of being you can sense more easily, whose motives you can understand. But they're different. More competitive, perhaps. Eerily homogenous. They seem to survive where the grass and weeds all perish. You don't necessarily understand that the field is a square, but you probably have a sense that it's edge forms a kind of shape, a straight line, that you're not used to seeing in your environment, a shape made of your-kind-of-being by something you can only faintly grasp. You sense the human through the things it twists, and the deposits it leaves, over a scale of time far, far greater than that on which it operates. And then maybe your roots brush up against strange shapes of other substances, too, stone and [fire-hardened-mud{2}] and... something that feels familiar. They push through the gaps in those eerily-regular, well-fixed substances, seeking the usual nutrition. You know that strange things are happening, and that resources are more valuable than usual if one wishes to survive strange times, but you do not understand the full scope of the danger.

And then it cuts you down. 

A moment, too quick for anything but instinct, perhaps faster even than that. And there is ABSOLUTELY NOTHING YOU CAN DO, no possible way that you can interact with this creature. You might harm it, but if you do it'll be through chance and its own carelessness. Or perhaps because you're poisonous, thorny, infested with other creatures - that is to say, because you have some natural quality that makes you repulsive to it, or because a being just about as alien as it is, if perhaps less immediately capable of destroying you, decides to intervene in the destruction of its own home. (Its home here being you.) Even then, the human can take precautions against all of those things. If they're smart and prepared, only one side is going to win that 'fight'.

You are severed. You feel yourself begin to die. As you die, you feel your skin stripped back, your form cut into pieces. Perhaps whatever fragmented, distributed mind remains realizes in those last moments the provenance of the strange materials it encountered before. Remember, trees live slowly. They die slowly. How long can you keep a branch before the leaves fall off? Imagine an arm, still twitching as it disassembles itself over long seconds.

SunnyClockwork's art for SCP-401 - A Palm Tree

Two: OK you're a human again - let's talk about Lovecraftian Horror

'Lovecraft's gods and monsters are employed to further such concepts as scientific indifferentism and the existence of a reality beyond human conception. As a result, the Cthulhu Mythos is populated by a series of gods who are perhaps best understood as symbols of cosmic outsideness, which refers to the reality of objects and entities outside an earthly, moral, or ethical understanding ... these Old Ones are unconcerned with human life. In fact, they are completely indifferent to it, perhaps more likely unaware of it. Any hint of malevolence is strictly the interpretation of the human who seeks an explanation for the unexplainable.' 

    David Peak, Horror of the Real: H.P. Lovecraft's Old Ones and Contemporary Speculative Philosophy.  

 

 A tree is alien to us, as we are to it. Although we inhabit the same material world, we hold the same sorts of abilities and needs - light, nutrients, water, sight, touch of a sort, taste of a sort, perhaps not hearing but then again we don't have that mycorrhizal network, assuming it exists - even so we have the power to destroy them utterly.

Humans and ants are often used for describing Lovecraftian horror. I can't help thinking that humans and trees might be a better comparison. They sense us in our twisting, in our cast-offs, in our slow, slow reflections on the world around us, and we also change that world in ways wholly insensible to them. We don't understand them; even if we can know them far more completely than they can us, their interior experience (if it exists) is almost unimaginable, and with it, empathy for them. if we feel any compunction about killing them it is because of the grand consequences for a system so much greater than themselves. Maybe a few people personify one, or two. But they don't then look at the wood in their tools and shiver in disgust, because to make that decision is to choose to return to knapping rocks, or to embrace microplastics in everything you ever eat again. That is, our priorities and concerns are so alien to the tree that, even if we feel some sliver of emotion for it, even if we might wish, on a grand scale, to preserve the existence of trees, the individual tree can and perhaps must be destroyed. Rendered down for lumber, all self lost.

All this, I think, parallels the Great Old Ones and their various Weird cousins pretty well. These are beings that share a reality with us - Lovecraft, of course, was not usually one for the truly supernatural outside of the realm of dream - and, one day, their true natures might be revealed by 'The sciences, each straining in its own direction'. That's unlikely to do us much good, though, because their ways of thinking and being are so alien to ours that such a perspective shift will render us all but incapable of interacting with them, leaving us, in the words of one ranting Cthulhu cultist 'free and wild and beyond good and evil.' [Both quotes from The Call of Cthulhu] Just as we might one day understand the Great Old Ones to our detriment, we might be able to harm or repel them, but we run the uncomfortable risk of attracting their attention if we do, and our agency is so much lesser than theirs that when they engage with us seriously, not surprised by our thorns or poisons or the fallout of our destruction, they are unstoppable. Some of them don't care about us (Azathoth,) some deal with us for their own benefit (Cthulhu, Yig, Chaugnar-Faughn), some seem to be seriously interested in us as people, but from a detached, superior, amoral perspective (Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth), and some will even protect us (Nodens).[3] We're a different class of being within the same (cold, uncaring) cosmos, and one they can easily dismiss when we aren't needed for them. That's a good thing, because when they do consider us they aren't doing it from the point of view that we have any inherent value, that our concerns such as 'bodily integrity' or 'a sliver of hope for the future' should be taken into account. Given this, it's easy enough to see the temptation to paint them as villains, but truly I think this does them a disservice. IF they have a system of morals, it is not one in which we have been invited to participate any more than the tree has in most of ours.

I've referred to Lovecraft's gods and boring misuses of his ideas a lot, but I also think the human-tree comparison helps illustrate some places where his work also failed to nail the ideas it was aiming at. The humans, buzzing about in their tiny, fast, short little lives, resemble a Great Old One's scope and scale only in aggregate, and it seems to me that the aggregate humans-are-the-virus approach is the wrong one to take for the horror to hit best. You-the-tree are not being destroyed by a hive of individually-mindless ants. You're being destroyed by one, two, three, four, sentient systems, who exist within and are at times driven by larger (possibly-sentient) systems of their own. Any single one of them, properly prepared, is still a terrifying threat against which you have next to no defence. I don't think you need to be large to be frightening. A single virus introduced into the bloodstream might be fatal, and might grow to become fatal for thousands of others. I don't think you need to be slow, or aeons old, to be frightening. An atom bomb, the phenomenon of the atom bomb, is born and dies in a couple of seconds. Is it not of a similar magnitude of difference? Perhaps, but then it isn't sentient. Or so we think.

Part Three: The Lumberjeses[4]

'To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.'

                    H.P. Lovecraft, Letter to Farnworth Wright, quoted in David Peak, Horror of the Real: H.P. Lovecraft's Old Ones and Contemporary Speculative Philosophy. 

What are they?

It's their world, now. How long for? Well, it's a little hard to say. They've been changing it for a lot longer than humans might imagine, but only those who live on the fringes have ever noticed: those who find themselves pushed to the edge of the empty places where nobody goes, and then asking 'why are those places empty, anyway?' 

They have a lot more senses than you, but they can't hear, and their sight is limited at best - very close-range, not usable for navigation. They do enjoy looking at things. They could spend seconds looking at you, in which case you might notice them as a faint flicker on the edge of perceptibility. Their proprioception is very powerful - they know exactly the dimensions and scope and relations of their bodies - but that isn't much good in providing a common basis for communication, because those bodies are spatially about the size of a tennis ball and comprised of things you can't interact with. They're not spectral or anything - they definitely exist within the material universe, just part of it that's not accessible to the human array of perceptive options. Maybe they, and the fraction of the world they primarily interact with, provide some explanation for the existence of dark matter?

At any rate, they spend most of their lives living alongside humans, but perceiving you as nothing but part of the background, absorbed in what to you are wholly intangible concerns. They only live about two and a half years, each of them, but they move much faster within that span, out of all proportion to the difference in duration. Skipping back and forth about the world, covering hundreds of miles on a mere whim, playing at whatever games and politics concern such creatures. They have tools, infrastructure and so on, but none of these are really things you can interact with. If you can perceive them in some way, which is sometimes the case, you still can't use them; the controls aren't of any sort of matter you're able to make contact with, and at any rate are designed with alien priorities. The objects might look like a surprisingly heavy rock, or a long forked needle uselessly twisted. They communicate and co-ordinate at unbelievable speeds through a medium which might as well be a form of telepathy, wholly inaccessible to us apart from perhaps by using lab equipment to observe tiny changes in particle behaviour caused by its passage. In all probability, nobody has done this yet. 

That's a good thing, because the other sense they have that makes sense to us is touch. They can feel the material world, feel it in fact with far more sensitivity than we can not just through that strong self-location (which is, after all, mostly in relation to human-insensible phenomena existing alongside us) but through something closely approximating our own surface-sensitivity to pressure, heat and so forth. They can even manipulate physical objects, though the nature of their bodies and motions means that most creatures can't feel them as a physical thing in turn. They also throw in a precise 'skin'-perception of radiation contact and wavelength, and some other things that don't make a lot of sense to us, the most banal of which is the presence of consciousness. And with that touch comes their greatest ability to perceive and interact with the bits of the world we live in, and with that comes the possibility of those bits being useful to their alien concerns... a possibility which, in fact, frequently becomes reality.

What do they want?

The bodies of various animals, primarily mammals and certain species of fish and insect, have certain qualities that have no effect on our phenomenal world, but are extremely useful - in certain configurations - to beings existing within that of the Lumberjeses. Many of these are aesthetic - they want a creature to be in a certain place where those qualities will be pleasing to it, or to be removed from a place where they will be intrusive. That at its simplest requires a lure, which they have learned they can create by providing certain stimuli. Conveniently, some of their waste products tend to seep into the liquids in an area, making creatures that consume them slightly larger and more healthy, and therefore often attracting the specific ones they want. They can also just... move a creature, interact with it to shift it about, but given the types of force they can apply that often isn't possible with large mammals (10-year-old child and up, roughly) without pretty horrendous physiological damage. As such, they'll tend only to do this to adults in extreme circumstances, with a lot of them co-ordinating to bring tools and transportation. With children, one or two of them can generally manage it. The places they'll move a being tend to be ones where it can survive, but not necessarily ones which are apparently accessible from anywhere in its previous observable universe. Finally, if they want to clear a lot of creatures out of an area they can release a kind of impulse over a few milliseconds that triggers massive strokes, which they've found causes the bodies to be removed and the area vacated soon after. Some seem to enjoy doing this on a smaller, controlled scale, deriving a kind of comfort from feeling a rat's faltering consciousness as it twitches and spasms.

The next big use they have for beings you can sense is food. They tend not to eat humans - the qualities aren't right - but they find certain other mammals, usually smaller ones, palatable. They are most interested in their gametes, and in some cases their blood, all of which they find delectable; in some cases they will also consume significant parts of the reproductive and digestive systems, and sensory organs such as the tongue and eyes. The rest of the flesh is thrown aside as these parts are nigh-instantly stripped down to nothing. The staple of their perceptible diet, though, is the larvae of insects - ants, termites and other hive-dwellers especially, and most of all wasps. Wasps's nests are very common in the places where they come to be; where the environment is not right for them, they ... alter it, doing something in the bits of the sensory range we aren't privy to that makes the climate warmer or cooler as needed and causes the wanted creatures to grow especially large and wriggly. Humans who pass into or out of one of these altered areas - which tend to be quite small and largely filled with a nest or hive - might feel a slight shift in pressure and resistance, though it can be broken through if effort is applied. Sometimes, they might find that some selective breeding has taken place, and the creatures are substantially larger, with strange colourations and (increasingly) unusual new traits which they didn't previously possess, inculcated in the name of unseen contributions to alien societal benefit or science.

In both of the above cases, the creatures are largely left alive if possible (at least until eaten in the latter). It hardly matters if they move a little - they are all so slow that they can easily be moved with or contained where need be, with just the occasional nudge every minute or so (read: every year or so in their view of things. The buzzing reactivity of a housefly excites all the condescending awe of a human watching a mimosa pudica curl its leaves). The last use that they have for animals, however, is construction, and this, as well as being the purpose for which they most often make use of humans, is invariably fatal. This is likely merciful; the structures the Lumberjeses need creatures to form do not look like anything that would make any sense for human purposes. They are extremely angular, spiky almost, forming curious helixes and spirals according to patterns rarely found elsewhere in nature. When they need to do this, they locate a mammal - the larger the better really, though quality is also a concern, so perhaps a bear, whale, or human - and they use certain implements to cut off its selfhood from its body. The consciousness provides an annoying anchor for certain traits that'd prevent the creature being properly made use of, so it needs to be severed. A sort of out-of-body experience ensues, (usually permanent even if the victim is somehow rescued) and the person watches as, over several seconds, their form is hurtled across reality. Their skin all but evaporates and muscle and bone is carved faster than normal sight into stars and whorls, un-needed elements simply cast into piles to rot, be used later for some other purpose, or be mulched to feed the Lumberjeses 'livestock'. It is this 'woodcutting' procedure which gave the creatures their nickname amongst a few terrified survivors.

The other thing they do, alongside the above, is study other types of being. Often, naturally dead ones are best for this, since the processes that normally get in the way have stopped. Their flickering can sometimes be seen about a funeral procession for just this reason.

Dealing with the Lumberjeses a Lumberjes or three, tops

The best protection against the Lumberjeses is them not wanting to touch you. Often this is for political or 'ecological' reasons, which they couldn't explain even if they thought we were sentient, but some people are also mildly dangerous to them. They need to take special precautions, which might take a significant fraction of a second, before interacting, and may well decide it isn't worth it.  Or sometimes another creature capable of interfacing with them, perhaps a god or demon or Great Old One, depending on the setting, takes a particular interest in some person. They can probably shoo these things off - they are the real apex predators - but they have to respect them, so they may decide it isn't worth it. Finally, incautious interaction with a human can be dangerous to them in certain specific circumstances. Sadly, these aren't things you can really control - something to do with the backlash of severing a consciousness from a body can sometimes harm them if they aren't careful, but it really isn't something humans can significantly steer unless they have some kind of soul-affecting magic.

They act so much faster than you that in order to even realize you're in danger you'll need to be either a genius of incredible proportions or dealing with one that has lots of reason to delay whatever it's doing (whilst still signalling what it's going to do somehow). Or both. Both is good. If you do notice this, your best bet is probably to run. Set up somewhere a long way away. If they were only interested in a human, or better yet an animal, they likely won't follow.

If, somehow, you've worked out that the Lumberjeses are around and have some time to plan, you might be able to harm them by forcing them into interaction with certain forms of matter. Projecting lumps of flesh or certain types of radioactive elements at significant fractions of the speed of light should do it. A nuke will definitely work if they're within the fireball. Alternatively, if you have the means, start randomly severing consciousnesses and hope one of them backlashes in a way that hurts them. Realistically, though, you should still be running.

If you're dealing with a significant number of organized Lumberjeses, or with dedicated 'professionals' who for one reason or another are planning on taking you specifically apart, you're pretty much just fucked. Unless you can somehow speed yourself to engage with them on their own level, I guess? Your options here will very much depend on game, speaking of which.

Fons Heijinsbrok, 1994, Trunk

Using the Lumberjeses as a GM

• Obviously, just killing your PCs is unlikely to lead to a fun game, so consider how the Lumberjeses are influencing the PCs' world. They have their own concerns, schemes etc., but none of them would make much sense to us as humans. The PCs are perceiving the consequences, usually unintended, of whatever they're doing, and struggling to deal with them. If they are trees in this analogy, the action is crop planting and the consequence is soil erosion - that is to say, even the consequences are often really fucking bad.
• You don't need to fully know what their goals are. They are almost a force which sets things in motion. You need to know what the weird thing they're doing that interfaces with our reality is, what its knock-on-effects might be, and how the PCs can discover the reality of the beings behind it for that lovely finishing dose of cosmic insignificance.
• That lovely finishing dose of cosmic insignificance is non-essential. Don't force knowledge of what the Lumberjeses are down the PCs' throats if they don't look in the right ways or places. In all likelihood, they will remain mostly ignorant. The simple sense of underlying coherence beneath the individually spooky features like swarming, oddly-coloured insects, spartan frameworks of flesh, strange flickering etc. is likely to be more than spooky enough.
• If you're planning on having a 'lumber operation' as part of the plot, or having the PCs intrude somewhere where they'll be a nuisance, have a disposable NPC or two along for 'warning shots.'

• Remember, beyond very simple guesses at manipulating their incentive structures (food, liquid, uhh... they seem to aggregate into clumps?), a Lumberjes can't communicate with the PCs in any meaningful way. Nor does it likely want to. About 20% of them barely think of animals as alive, another 50-odd% don't see them as intrinsically valuable life, maybe 25% see them as intrinsically valuable for reasons that can be best approximated as 'religious veneration of life' without seeing them as sentient, 4% or so think they might be sentient on the level you or I think of a worm, and less than 1% see them as fellow, albeit alien, sentient beings.
• That said, if the PCs want to try to communicate with them they will be astonished, and likely engage. Imagine how awed we would be if a tree started - slowly, ponderously, haltingly - growing branches that consistently displayed patterns resembling basic language, let alone spelled out letters. If such a thing is reported, it might be one of the few things that slows the Lumberjeses down - imagine how long it would take science and society to verify and accept such a thing, then begin trying to respond.
• If there are lots of them, it's probably a place where non-cultivated animals are fairly rare. The deep and possibly-inhospitable wilderness - for us. For them, sprawling metropolises, only certain small parts visible in the arches of bone and long rippling fences of varnished tendon. These are the most dangerous places, because there are a lot of them, and a person will likely be 'pruned' long before they near the centre.
• If the PCs can benefit from their cast-offs as 'treasure' at all in the long run, it's once again in unintended ways. They don't care about everything we care about either, so sometimes they might create something unintentionally useful. It's pretty rare, though. I hope you're getting the idea by now: think about something a human could make that might be useful to a tree. Most of the options I can think of fall into the very basic - 'thing to anchor around,' or 'thing to eat (hopefully non-toxic)'.

Closing Thoughts

First proper post! That's quite cool! Is the phrasing too pretentious? Eh, that's true of about 50% of TTRPG bloggers by volume, you'll live. C&C still very welcome, though. It could probably be better edited, especially the last section, but we live, we move, we need to go to bed. Truly astounded by people who write 40-minute reads regularly, this took basically an entire afternoon not counting the original recording time. I wanted to do tables of plots, locations, and maybe-useful items, but I didn't have time. I will in a future post! Maybe a one-page scenario featuring them so as to give a sense of how they might be used, too? No promises.

I think the main takeaway here is not so much 'wow use this cool alien entity I made' as 'deliberately trying to put yourself in the headspace of something non-human and then imagining something that thinks of the human like that is a good way to make your own cool alien entity.' That said, if you use the Lumberjes in a game please do let me know! I probably won't get the chance, since I suspect many of my regular players will end up reading this blog. (Although... knowing they're the 'antagonist' in advance may actually not spoil too much in this case.)

Finally: if you get a chance, read Peak's essay Horror of the Real. I've only 'spoiled' a few bits of the first third, and very little of the actual discussion of the ties between Lovecraft and speculative philosophy. I promise you'll find some things in there to set your mind a-whirring!

Alrighty, ta-ra!

Footnotes

[1] Alike in the sense that it's an indirect reference to another being, though in this case designed to induce a positive response (more growth of manured plants) or none at all, rather than a negative one of predator-repulsion. This comparison seems like much more of a stretch now than it did in the tree-madness, but that False Machine article is one of the things that made me confident enough to share my thoughts on TTRPGs in the first place, and may have directly catalyzed the thought process that led me to this, so... here you go!

[2] Fire is something the tree probably knows well enough. For some, of course, it's a source of life, an active interactor. For most... occasionally there's an imperceptibly-fast event and your neighbour is suddenly horribly damaged, dying, dead so quickly, and there's a certain flavour to their remains where they sink into the earth. Sometimes, somebody survives, even if they bear the scars for the rest of their life. Think of fire a bit like a tree-stroke, but, you know, highly infectious.

[3] I'm ignoring Great Old One/Outer God/Other God/Elder God distinctions here, because Lovecraft never explains them clearly anyway.

[4] -jes is just a name I think makes a good gender-neutral Jack/Jill. These things probably have a name of their own, but you don't have the right senses to be able to perceive it, let alone the right letters to then render it visible on a screen. You'd end up writing some transcribed version of a slowed-down form of the waste noise released made when it communicates it, and it'd be something like khhhhh, and make no sense to the Lumberjes at all. Some people might understand it, might have some strange form of synaesthesia that translates the sounds into juust  the right [sense-you-don't-otherwise-possess] experience, and they will be called mad.