The settlement located where the branch connected to the trunk was far and away the largest I had seen in this world. They had been steadily growing as I approached, but nothing quite like this. Where the other settlements were like villages, this was more of a city.Despite the fact that travel between branches was arduous and lengthy, I could clearly get the sense of this settlement being a travel hub. There were far fewer children and plenty of people from other branches. I had seen a handful of people with different forms of growth in the settlements nearby, squirrels who had settled down after migrating, but there were more here, both in terms of numbers of people and in differences of growth.I had been interested in the people from other branches in the last few villages, but I had taken to racing through them even faster than I traveled between settlements, trying to avoid dealing with those hoping I would settle down in their part of the branch. It wasn’t like I really needed anything in settlements, so my journey had become a bit of a race to the finish, where the finish was the trunk.Now that I was here, I was going to slow down a bit. I hoped to talk to some of these travelers and learn more about the tree.From what I had heard, if a squirrel started traveling young and never left the trunk, they could feasibly travel upwards around a dozen branches in a single lifetime. There were winding paths carved into the “bark”, and rest stops dug out like the burrows squirrels lived in on the branches, though things sometimes shifted over generations as the tree grew and healed.Not many people actually pushed themselves that hard, though, since there wasn’t much of a reason to. That meant that information traveled up the trunk quite slowly. Conversely, a squirrel with patagia could glide downward quite quickly, though that wasn’t without some dangers. Gliding all day was fatiguing in its own right, and one had to stop (...)