Burial festoon

The plant's stem can grow to reach 20 meters in height and it grows vertically, gaining bulbous growths every few meters. It is protected by a dark-turquoise bark while the insides are a desaturated dark-red. At the stem's peak, a final growth speckled with purple fluorescent spots is sheathed in soft stalks with droop low to the floor. In a mature specimen, these growths end in large white fluorescent pods, whose bottoms split into many small tentacle-like stalks. The tentacles are made of a specialised organic compound which can expand and contract, allowing them to move like muscle. Some of these tentacles end in keratin structures which resemble a trio of spikes, which the tentacle can retract and protrude with enough force to pierce flesh.

The Fool's Beacon's reproduction is unique, named by scholars as "substitution mimicry"; It begins with groups of migratory creatures passing through a forest of the plant. Upon any of the beasts entering in contact with the mechanoreceptors covering a mature specimens feelers, a reaction is triggered whence the stalks will lash out in the direction of the signal, almost always ending with the prey being stabbed by one of the spiky protrusions of the pod's tentacles. From then on, 2 phenomenon would simultaneously begin. First, the creature would be injected with a slow acting neurotoxin; and second, the spike covered in genetic material would be retracted and moved to the fluorescent pod of the plant.   Using the obtained genetic information of the creature, the pod would create a mimic, a simulacrum of the prey it had pierced. Not trully alive, a being made of plant like matter mimicking flesh and bones, as well as the behavior of the prey. Within a day it would be ready and expelled from the pod, upon which it would seek out the prey slowly dying from the neurotoxin, instinctively bury it, and then attempt to blend in with the creature's herd.   The creature's insides are composed of 2 main elements, a multitude of small Burial seeds, and sacks of a digestive enzyme acidic enough to melt most organic material within minutes. Upon the herd taking a rest, or 48 hours after its "birth", the doppleganger would enter a sudden metamorphosis. Its body would begin mass cellular expansion, its size multiplying fast enough for it to burst in seconds, spewing the acid and seeds within a dozen meters.   The seeds then thrive from the nutrients of the bodies of the herd being digested, growing quickly to a few meters as they deplete the bodies of all nutrients...

Thanks to its reproduction method, the buried corpses of those it mimics become additional nutrients for the growth the mature specimens.

Juvenile Festoon are a great source of food which grows much faster than common crops. It only requiring dead bodies as fertilizer has made some sentient species bury their dead with seeds of the plant to be harvested later on.   Mature specimens can be harvested for their fluorescent pigment, elastic as well as be used as lumber.

Burial festoons have specialised sensory organs known as mechanoreceptors that detect mechanical stimulation like touch and pressure. Fine hairs cover the tentacles at the bottom of a mature specimen's pods. When these hairs are touched they cause a shift in charged compounds from one side of the cell to the other which is detected as a signal by the plant. If this signal is strong enough, the plant detects this sensation and reacts accordingly.