Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #90 - Dormant

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Dormant

In our world when the conditions aren't right, quite a few species have the ability to go dormant. Bears and other mammals hibernate inwinter. Trees lose their leaves and appear as bare lifeless stumps (even through they are busy growing roots underground through the winter). Dry a tardigrade out and it can be dormant for as long as 30 years. Drop a nematode into permafrost and some species can be unfrozen and revived after 40,000 or more years. Freeze a man and stick him on a slow ship to Alpha Centauri... yeah, he'll die, we haven't quite mastered that technology yet.

Tell me about dormancy in your setting. What goes dormant and why ? How long does it sleep ? What enables it to wake up again - an environmental change, some internal clock, or does it need outside help ? What happens if it is disturbed ? Does it play any part in the science or folklore of your setting ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.