Chickenplant

The chickenplant is a locomotive meat plant of the poultry plant variety. The plant is widely cultivated for human consumption, playing a role as a major protein source for the mainstream Illuminatian diet.

The chickenplant is one of several meat plant organisms artificially engineered for the benefit of the Lucidus mission and its resulting civilization. The chickenplant was concocted out of Earth-native vegetative plant tissue imbued with genetic material from the chicken. The resulting genetically engineered organism was a plant that produced edible meat-like material that tasted like chicken and contained all of the nutritive benefits of meat, but without the fresh-from-the-slaughterhouse piquancy.

The chickenplant, as planned, was among the creatures evacuated from the Lucidus mission to the surface of Neonisi upon the mission's end.

The fruit of the chickenplant is the primary source of consumable meat plant food found on the chickenplant. The fruit of the chickenplant ripens twice per Annual Unit in most Illuminatian climates. One chickenplant organism is able to produce multiple fruit and produce repetitively, providing a constant harvestable source of sustenance for humans while also proving sustainable for the plant. The chickenplant can survive endless harvesting of its fruit. By contrast, the chickenplant is only able to marginally survive harvesting of the meat tissue of its extremities.

The chickenplant is a highly-mobile plant in the wild, detaching from its root system early in the organism's lifecycle. The mature adult organism's locomotive behaviors produce a meat-like vegetative tissue in the plant's extremities, which is cyclically siphoned through the organism's vascular system and deposited into the plant's developing fruit seasonally. Since the chickenplant—like all meat plants in Illuminatia—is considered to be a plant and not an animal, Illuminatians are able to maintain a vegan diet while benefiting from the animal proteins found in the chickenplant. The chickenplant—being a vegetative organism and not an animal—is not sentient and does not have conscious experiences, so therefore harvesting of this plant is considered to be perfectly ethical.

The chickenplant is a primary participant in the phenomenon of the turducken plant—a fellow poultry locomotive meat plant which develops only after a chickenplant infiltrates the fruit of a duckplant and the infiltrated duckplant in turn infiltrates a turkeyplant, producing a Turducken fruit. This unusual natural process only takes place naturally in specific regions with specific climates, however this process is reproducible in captivity, where most Turducken plants are commercially produced. While the chickenplant is considered a common food commodity, the chickenplant as part of the turducken fruit is considered to be of elevated status as a culinary delicacy.