Tiny Towers: A Nirnroot Theory

Alrighty folks, time to put on our tinfoil hats and brainstorm up some interesting headcanons. Today I will discuss the deep and profound conspiracy that is the existence of Nirnroot.

Now I know what you're all thinking: "There's no conspiracy! Nirnroots are just odd plants that make noise and sit the edge of lakes and streams, right?"

Wrong.

What the people of Tamriel dismiss as simple plants with a history of evolutionary adaptation and a quirky tendency to emit ringings sounds are in fact the product of highly complex Hist bioengineering so as to stick their fingers in the metaphysical pies of other provinces without inciting awareness and intervention in those foreign nations. The Hist have toiled to create a strain of organic micro-Towers (not unlike the Green-Sap Towers of Valenwood, albeit smaller), and the Nirnroot is the fruit of their efforts.

That horrible ringing that lets you know a Nirnroot is near? (SFX: BWEEEEEEN, BWEEEEEEN, BWEEEEEEN) That's the sound of a Tower at work. Each Tower is like the maestro of an orchestra or, to make a more modern analogy, a radio tower selectively broadcasting songs into the music of the Aurbis. You aren't just looking at plants, you're looking at a four-inch tall vegetative radio tower bred by exo-kalpic spore trees that communicate with hallucinogenic sap and hop in their blink-root-ships for a low and slow Sundas drive around the cosmic neighborhood while their pet root-plants blast out phat beats. But I digress.

Now you may be wondering why the Hist of all things would be connected to the Nirnroot. The sap-trees' alteration of Saxhleel biology already sets a decent precedent, as does the unusually adaptive nature of the roots themselves. Take a gander at this map of Nirnroot distribution in Oblivion. The most Nirnroot rich areas are clustered around the Imperial City(!) and the swampy waters of Blackwood near the borders of Black Marsh. I have reason to believe Nirnroot fares better in such waters due to them being its native habitat, the land in which the plant species' original strains were bred and adapted to.

Examine this example of a Nirnroot's structure. Note how the roots of the plant itself are decidely fibrous in appearance. While the name would cause one to expect a Nirnroot to resemble a beetroot or other taproot-based vegetables, this is not the case. An interesting property of fibrous roots is their ability to act like an anchor, net or lattice for soil that holds it together, weighs it down and protects it from erosion.

Now let's shift gears for a moment and contemplate the geospatial fineries of erosion and noisy plants. Erosion comes in many forms, but the most common by far is soil being detached and worn away by water. And as has been pointed out time and time again, water is memory and Nirn's oceans are the waters of Oblivion. And where are Nirnroot always found? At the water's edge, anchoring soil from eroison with their roots. Just as Towers reinforce the structure of Mundus at large, these microcosms of Towers reinforce the a smaller subset of Mundus, the wheel-within-the-wheel that is Nirn.

Nirnroot. Nirn-Root. A root that holds Nirn together. Makes sense now, doesn't it? Now the question remains: just what do the Hist intend to do with these Tiny Towers?