The seedling has sprouted some by Monday morning (like everything else), but even after being watered, weeded, and cleared of pests, it still looks a bit... sad. Wilty. That's interesting. She hasn't had that problem before, but it makes sense that the plant to let her change species would be kind of high maintenance. Her major hint as to what's going wrong is that, even after watering, the mound of dirt is looking kind of pale and sad. Hm. It might need fertilizer, then?

Which she doesn't really... have... but she does have a lot of produce from her earlier harvests. And the internet says she can use organic things as fertilizer. Strawberries, parsley, and eggs and meat from her fridge are... possibly not the best fertilizers, but they are nonetheless chopped up and added to the soil around the seedling. If this kills the plant, well. She will find another fairy to request a seedling from, and try again, maybe after setting up a compost heap. She doesn't have the space for a compost heap, but, well. Maybe one day. Maybe after she moves. She's probably going to move.

There is in fact also a little trash seed, buried under the pile of trash behind her house that she bravely digs into after spinning into a pair of rubber gloves. It gets planted and watered, too, and then she can finally be rid of the trash in her yard. Only a day was far too long, okay.

And then it's off to work! She has more available organic materials to make experimental serums from, and has some ideas for how to leverage her massive pile of scanned data for upgrading her scanner. She will be making, scanning, and then testing so many strange substances, and she is going to be getting a promotion today!

Right, work? Promotion for the workaholic, pretty please??

Yes, sure, she gets promoted, why not.

~Yay!~

Back home to check on the fairy seedling in particular - wilted again, but it looks like it just needed extra water, and then it perks right back up. All is well.

She attempts to sweet talk her house into swapping out some decorations and maybe giving her an office and a laptop, has her traditional evening jog, fails to find any new plants to take home with her, has dinner and a shower, and goes to bed.

The rest of her work week is about the same. Her plants all stay alive, though the ones that are out of season don't grow, and the fairy seedling continues to be a prissy little princess plant that needs constant attention. She... thinks she can have flame fruit grown before the week is over? She's grafted strawberries to snapdragons to make dragonfruit, which is just about grown and ready for grafting. Dragonfruit combined with trash fruit is what makes flame fruit, and that combined with plasma fruit is what makes the life-extending-but-kind-of-uncreatively-named life fruit. It's going to be close, though, and flame fruit specifically only grows in the heat of summer. So. The dragonfruit gets a lot of fertilizer, and she quietly wills it to grow as fast as possible little guy!!!!!

On Thursday, she claws herself another promotion, and mails Caleb some fresh plasma fruit. She feels it's only polite, and he really did help her so much by helping her find out how to buy them. It's kind of odd, actually, because they seem so - weird and niche and complicated. Looking at the grafting tree for them (as explained to her by Oberon), they're about as complicated as flame fruit, at least to make from scratch. Just having them available has cut her life fruit work essentially in half. She wonders what happened there.

Caleb appreciates the fruit and links her his Simstagram food page with pictures of his cooked meals.

Awwww! Cute! She makes a Simstragram account of her own just to follow him. Friendship!!

... She'll probably end up posting obsessive gardening progress on here, won't she. Eh. More documentation is good for science, and she has already found some wild grafting combinations in just a single week of experimenting! (For example: carrot and taro root? Make potatoes! It's so insane, she loves it so much!)

Saturday morning she pokes her head out of her house to judge the progress of her plants, and do her by now traditional routine of taking care of everything. Hmmm... yeah, the flame fruit doesn't look like it'll make it to fully grown in the summer. Damn. That means she will not be able to make life fruit anytime soon without a greenhouse. That's kind of a shame; she might've managed it if she'd started gardening sooner, but oh well. She'll have to see about acquiring a greenhouse or something; she doesn't want to wait a whole four weeks to manage life fruit. In sims time, that's practically forever.

Next is checking on the fairy seedling, to see what weird thing it wants today. Is this an emergency retrieval of fairy dust situation? Because she's been expecting it ever since those pixies infested it a couple of days ago, she's lucky she had enough wine on hand to get them all drunk enough to leave...

There's someone inspecting her garden when she goes to check on it, a lady with pointy ears and green skin and hair wearing a dress made of leaves. She seems to be inspecting Yvette's garden critically.

It's perhaps obvious who this must be.

... is it? She honestly didn't even notice her, the green blended in with the greenery, and she was laser focused on how that damn stubborn flame fruit was doing. She blinks with confusion, and realizes she should say hello or something.

"Oh, sorry, I didn't see you - uh, hello?"

"Morning, dear," she says, not looking up from the plants. "You've been busy, haven't you?"

"Oh! Um. Yes." ... Wait, green, pointy ears - the fairy seedling was to attract the attention of - "Mother Nature, I presume? Good morning, I'm Yvette, it's nice to meet you."

"It really is! Good job, by the way." She finally looks up then walks over to Yvette and starts circling her and examining her just as critically as she was doing the plants.

"Um. Thank you." Oh dear, is she being Judged?? She doesn't know how to handle being Judged by Mother Nature. Should she talk about her plants??? But she just inspected them, so maybe she already knows all she needs to? But, then, Yvette doesn't know what else to do, and being examined while fidgeting is very awkward, so:

"- So I'm making a spreadsheet for the grafting combinations for plants and what they make," she says, because she's pretty sure that is the single most qualifying thing she could ever say to become a fairy.

It does make Mother Nature pause then look her in the face. "Go on."

"Um! Okay so here's my chart of all of the combinations I've tried so far," she says, pulling up her phone and navigating to the proper file to show her, "I'm a little handicapped by seasons, and think I'm still missing a bunch of things, and frankly I need to move so I have more space to work with for everything. But I have the time it takes for things to fully grow written down over in this column, and this one is for the season that I've confirmed it grows in - I know it's not complete, the gardening books were really unhelpful and there was only so much Oberon personally knew - and on this tab is what I've found so far - like, I've grown blackberries from grapes and elderberries, and I'm really curious if there are even more berries I could find..."

Mother Nature places both hands on Yvette's shoulders then pulls her in for a hug. "Oh, I think you'll do just fine."

Oh? Hug?? Sure okay?? Pat pat?

"Oh! Thank you!"

She pulls away a little bit and plants a soft kiss on Yvette's forehead. It feels warm and cool at the same time, and like it travels down her body like roots settling into her soul. "Go to Moondrop Springs, sweet one. You'll find what you need there."

Um??? Pretty lady kissing her??? Admittedly on the forehead, so it's not that weird, and Mother Nature is admittedly not reaper levels of emergency hot but, but, um?????

Blink blink. Blushing.

"Okay. Thank you. Um. I'll - do that." Blush blush blink.

She smiles then turns around and starts to walk away, until—

—it's like a visual illusion, like that duck that becomes a rabbit, and Mother Nature has become nothing more than a mound of earth covered in grass.

... eep.

Okay, um.

Well, first she's going to finish making sure her garden is all sorted, and then she. Guesses she needs to go find where Moondrop Springs is. She thinks she might know what it is, actually, if it's in Everdew? Which it probably is, because that's Fairy Central? But there was this spring that she remembered going past in her foraging adventures....