A Council of Bats Underground

A two-storey burrow home for a colony of small cloaked bats, with side doorways opening onto green daylight. Upstairs on the left, councillors sit around a round stone table spread with a world map, under heraldic bat shields. In the middle room a bat judge in a black robe presides at a wooden bench while two cloaked bats stand before him and others hang upside down from perches. On the right a robed owl hands a scroll to a bat at a desk, among flags and animal portraits. Below, a bat doctor in a white coat treats a young patient beside injury charts. The centre room is a garden of mushrooms, flowers and an orange tree, and the last holds a family tree painted on the wall. The orange tree and the painted family tree glow among the colony's earthy rooms, two warm spots to start from.