"Hush you, I need to show her how it works. So it boils into vapor and distills the water, input here, output there, it filters first here so there's slightly less crud to scrape out of the thing when you clean it..."

Rosa is now getting a crash course on how to use this very fancy (and expensive) bit of tech that could in fact be mostly replaced by someone just boiling the damn water themselves, but technology is for people, not the other way around.

Yeah, uh, Zash and Yvette did not actually have to worry about their cover story being blown, Rosa just actually buys it completely and can absolutely see it now. Also? His wife is great.

His wife is so great.

(Only one bit of that is a lie.)

Yvette finishes walking Rosa through how to use it, uses it to purify her own glass of water (it takes perhaps thirty seconds), sips some, and then pours the rest into her little plexiglass water container. And then the very expensive bit of machinery is casually passed to Rosa to use as she'd like for the foreseeable future. Completely for free.

"How did you make it to adulthood," wonders Vernon, just a little despairingly. Don't answer that, he knows. That thing isn't even that valuable in the big city, is it, it's a hundred years old and she picked the damn thing up at a garage sale for when rich people actually had to worry about water problems. Just not ones that ordinary folks could get into to see. He hates it.

"Statistically speaking, what is known as 'sheer dumb luck,'" says Yvette, brightly, still looking smug. "Anyway yes could I look at your plants please?"

"Yeah, uh. Yeah. Melissa, could you..." She motions to the device that is now the most expensive object in this entire diner.

Melissa nods and gets to using aforementioned expensive thing.

The facility the plants are housed inside is an enormous metal structure. A series of circular metal doors four times as tall as Zash serves as the entrance, and after walking past all of them they find themselves in the main chamber. Inside, a several-stories-tall glass cylinder with purple-glowing gas sits in the center, a spiral metal staircase surrounding it leading all the way up to the metal platform that serves as a lid. And on that platform are the plants, one glowing blue and the other red, both inside glass tanks of their own, immersed in liquid.

Plants (and Zash)

They're about as tall as a short adult human. Their lower halves are long and thin and look sort of like human legs, intertwined, but their upper halves are large bulbous opaque spheres. They pulsate softly, but the red one looks... almost urgent in its pulsating, and it does so much more erratically than the blue one. It looks... arrhythmic.

When they get there, Zash grows much quieter and more subdued than he's been. He walks all the way over the plants and just... stands there. Staring at them.

It's (academically) interesting that it's the water one that's one the fritz, with the comparatively much more chemically complicated 'food' job saddled with its fellow. That implies some things about their history working together, because if one of them were to fail first, it'd be the complicated one, not the easy one.

"That was the one you fixed last time, yes?" she confirms, pointing at the blue (and food associated) one. "And this one had been fine."

"Uh -- yes, did Zash already tell you on the way over...?"

"No, but it's what I'd expect." She heads over to the console and starts getting it to spill its secrets to her. This isn't very hard, all consoles like these are programmed to keep a record of actions taken and give diagnostics of plant status and history. ...and Rosa is staring at her like she's some kind of worm, so... okay, sure, she can talk while she does the boring 'tell me what happened and what's going on right now' work.

"Larger networks of plants always do better than singles. Even doubles and triples do so much better than singles that frankly anyone that's only got one plant by itself has burned the poor thing out by now, even asking it to do something very simple. But 'food' isn't simple. Humans are complicated, we need many things to keep working properly, it's -- taxing. If one were to fail first, it'd be that one, not simple dihydrogen monoxide. But obviously it didn't. Because when they're in a network together, plants will sort of... the easiest way to explain it is that they'll help each other out. And one of them will have been helping the other for basically their entire time together."

"So, what, it's. Tired?"

This elicits a vague negative hum from the resident nerd.

"Nnnnnnnnno I wouldn't say tired. Tired implies that you can just give it a break and it'll be fine. That is not what is happening here, a break will not fix this. More like it had been neglecting itself, or maybe habitually giving the portions of nutrients it needed to its fellow, so it could do the harder job. And now that -- yeah, see," She points at a graph of data she's made the computer spit out like it's as blatantly obvious to everyone else as it is to her. "The pattern is now the opposite. And fixing something that is broken, that's been, been sort of worn down over a century without really noticing? That's much, much harder than just. Give it extra portions and call it good. So the system set up by our extremely stupid ancestors is doing what it does best, and it's ruthlessly designated our poor little red friend as not worth nursing back to health."

"... What, so it's. Dying?"

"No," says Yvette, more forcefully than she perhaps needed to.

"The system is stupid. The parameters it's judging by are outdated. Back when we had all of our forefathers tech working, yes, it was in fact easier to just throw out the, I don't want to call it bad because it's not but that was the rhetoric, the red plant and get a new one, because they could just make a new plant. And we can't."

"Some reward for its service."

"Cold as ice, yep. We will not be doing that. It will be recovery plan and a very planty, uh, what's a human equivalent. Physical therapy, maybe? Mm. Doesn't matter, something along those lines."

"... but how long will that take?"

"It's going to take me days to wade through all of the data to figure out what exactly is wrong," says Yvette, flatly. "Longer than that for it to be completely fixed." If she can, but she will not be saying that, because optimism. "It will not be outputting the same numbers it had been, not for a while."

"Oh."

"And in the meantime you can keep using my water purifier," she says, smoothly. This is exactly why plant engineers don't often talk about their work, it absolutely freaks out ordinary people to hear things like 'The thing you have been relying on for generations is dying or might never be the same as it had been' or something. She sort of regrets explaining anything, now, except for how she doesn't because knowledge is something to be disseminated and hiding behind 'it's too complicated to explain' is for cowards. "It's graded to even purify worm viscera and output clean water if necessary. You'd just need to clean the input section more often."

At some point during this explanation Zash walked next to her to peer at what she's been doing on the console (and occasionally at her). At some point during this explanation his expression softened to a faint smile, and at some later point it spread into a grin. By the time she's done he's just beaming widely at her.

"It can definitely be fixed, and it can definitely come back to its previous output levels," he says. "They always can."

She at last notices how he’s looking at her and. Um. Um. Graphs. Data. Back to graphs and data and math, because those are comfortable and interesting and safe, and she doesn’t know what to do about being smiled at like that when usually she gets told she’s too sentimental.

… huh. That’s strange. She hasn’t even done anything and there’s been a slight positive trend. In the past minute, specifically.

“Right. It’ll just take some time,” she agrees, a little distantly, eyes briefly flicking to Zash, and then back to her work. He did this, didn’t he. She’s onto you, buddy, and she doesn’t understand it but she knows.

“Right. Have fun, don’t break anything, I’ll be with the car.”

Making sure someone doesn’t try to break into it to see what other expensive things this woman has stuffed in the trunk, but he’s not going to say that in front of Rosa.