"Sssssssooooo if I need to navigate my way back to civilization from this, uh, not-road you've got us on..."

"You'd die."

"Okay, yes, probably, but can I have some basic directions for the smallest chance of not dying, in case something happens, along with just a tiny sliver of optimism."

"Make a smoke signal of some kind, probably by fire, and hope that whoever finds you is feeling charitable."

"That sounds like death but with extra steps."

"I did just say you'd die."

"Are there any landmarks I should keep an eye out for?"

"This is Noman's Land. There are no landmarks. It's just like this. We're navigating by direction and drivability of the terrain, and the landmarks will show up later."

"Okay, well, then what's that."

She points out of the window.

Is she pointing at the bodies strung up by the local gang as a warning to others....? She is. Damn it, city slicker. How little this woman has been outside her comfy little city walls and large scale, well organized and defended transportation? Don't answer that, he knows the answer already. He feels so very much like he's keeping a toddler from wandering off a cliff.

"That," he sighs, "is a warning to travelers not to cross the local gang, not a landmark. It'll probably be gone in a week, picked clean by worms and other scavengers, and they're a dime a dozen."

"The warning is waving."

"What?" He doesn't usually look too closely at any 'warnings,' and besides, he's driving. And he didn't think anyone that ran in this area were a bunch of complete psychopaths. Leaving people alive means leaving witnesses, and occasionally there's something resembling law enforcement in this area.

"... Then it's a trap."

"Someone's leaving one of their own guys out. In the hot sun. Upside down. Waving. As a trap?"

"I didn't say it was a good trap."

"Okay, well. Entertaining the hypothetical that it is not in fact a trap, can we perhaps weigh the risks of setting off an extremely desperate and self destructive trap, versus... leaving a man to die slowly, hanging upside down, in the hot sun."

And that is why a rather junky car pulls up to the trap anyway, Vernon muttering swear words under his breath and absolutely certain this woman will be the death of him. Damnation.

The trap is hanging upside down next to other people who are definitely way more dead than it is. It is shaped like a man with a shock of blond dyed hair atop a brown undercut, wearing large circular orange-tinted shades, a single golden earring on his left ear, and the most insane bright red hooded jacket. His left arm sparkles chrome in the sun, and he is indeed waving.

"Heeeeey! Over heeeeeeere!"

Yes, they know. That's why they're here at all. He points at his dumb city slicker. "You? Stay."

And then he gets his handgun and gets out of the car.

"Who are you and who'd you piss off!"

"Yooooou can call me... Z! That sounds cool, right? It's the coolest letter of the alphabet. And I don't know who I pissed off, they never told me their names, even though I asked!"

"Pull the other leg, pal, you can describe 'em even if you can't name them and their entire--"

"Sorry, hold on," interrupts his dumb city slicker who has absolutely popped her head out of the passenger window. "Whose blood is that?"

"Damn it, woman."

"Because that is way more blood than a human body usually contains." She points underneath 'Z.'

.... Huh.

Okay. Credit where it's due. That was a good observation.

He looks up—well, down, he's still hanging upside down—and gasps in very genuine-sounding distress. "That is absolutely too much blood, what the heck, where did it come from?"

“Mhmm. I’ve switched my assessment to ‘trap,’ sorry for the detour and thank you for humoring me.”

Back inside she goes.

Vernon… is actually now less convinced.

“You’d know better than we would, pal. What is this, a butchery site for cannibals?”

"Hmm, I don't think they were cannibals? Oh, oh, I remember now, they called themselves the 'Bad Lads Gang'. Or was it 'Badlands Gang'? One of those.

"Anyway, uh, suppose you could maybe help a guy out?" His arms are tied to his body by a tight length of rope but he sort of comically gestures at his feet with his head.

“It’s Bad Lads.” Which is who he expected to be responsible, but that now makes this make less sense. “But they usually only string up the dead or dying, so I’m real confused about your whole deal.”

"I'm very good at playing dead," he says, nodding sagely. "Very, very good."

“You look plenty alive to me. With… is that arm lost tech? Does it do some kind of stasis and then healing thing or something?”

"Oh! It must." He waves a bit with it.

“Hey, coppertop! Can you tell me if his arm or something does some kind of regen-thing-or-something?”

Out comes the redhead, who is wearing way too much white for a person wandering a desert to plausibly manage to keep clean.

“I haven’t heard of anything like that, uh, ever? Regeneration of a human body is absurdly complicated and requires a whole expensive med tech lab to pull off. That looks like it’s just a prosthetic, though… I haven’t seen anything of its kind before, that looks custom?”

“Would it make more sense for it to hold and give its host a replacement blood supply?”

“…. I’m not a doctor, but, uh, no??? It’s clearly articulated and connected with his nervous system, where would an absurdly large blood supply even fit.”

"Ohh, I think I've heard of tech that stores things in little extra spaces? I'm not sure how it works, exactly, but it's based on how plants work! I think."

“Holding open a gateway to the higher dimension plants derive their matter creation abilities from would take an absurd amount of power to sustain, not to mention that’s like, the worst thing to use that for, if we had access to it by means besides plants themselves we’d just make new plants like our dumb wasteful ancestors did…”

“English, please.”

“That’s some absolute bullshit that explains nothing and in fact makes more questions.”

“I was clear on that already, thank you.”

"I don't really know how it works... An old friend of mine gave it to me years ago when I lost my arm in an accident."

“This old friend of yours still around to answer questions?”

"Yeah, but he doesn't live in a city. He feels like people would misuse his work and try to disadvantage others using it. I can get to where he is, though."

“…. Can you talk your friend into at least disseminating the specs for your arm, because while obviously the kind you’ve got is far too expensive for the casual consumer to ever afford, I really feel like having a better idea of how to integrate cybernetics with the human nervous system would be on net better for the world at large.”

“…. Ehhh.”

“What.”

“There have been some rumors of a psycho who,” he waves vaguely, “does a lot of human experimentation to crack the code for immortality or whatever. Add cybernetics to the mix and I think we’re maybe ninety percent of the way to having a super soldier project of some kind.”

”That would be so wasteful and stupid though!”

"That's part of why my friend doesn't really like being public about his work," Z agrees. "But he is working on things to help people at large."

Something about that makes him sound... very bittersweet.

"Okay, but if there's a mad science immortality project, that makes the blood make much more sense!!"

"Do we want to keep arguing with the brightly wrapped mystery while he's hanging upside down, visible to all around here on the highest part of the nearby wasteland, or do we want to say this is out of our paygrade and leave before we learn all the answers we probably don't want?"

".... Point. Uh. If this is a trap it's a garbage one that we already fell for, cut our losses and cut him down to interrogate on our way to Jeneora?"

"You're asking that like you're not the one paying me."

"Oh, shut it, I value your tactical contribution, I absolutely want you to tell me if and when I'm being a dumbass."

"... Eh. If it's dumb it's the kind of dumb that might end up being worth it, with all the holes in his story and the things that don't add up. Could go either way."

"Then we're taking him, but he's staying tied up in the back of the car!"

He perks right up at that. "Oh, thank you! I love Jeneora Rock, we should go there."

"I am now filled with distrust and apprehension and doubt all of my decisions and also choices."

Vernon snorts, then gets to getting the brightly wrapped mystery down. But first he begins with checking him for weapons or bombs or the like before he gets anywhere near their vehicle.

He does seem to have a pistol in a holster attached to his right thigh.

"We'll give this back to you if your story ever starts making sense."

But, yes, this gun is getting taken from him. Why was it even left with him in the first place, actually? Just another question for their brightly wrapped mystery.

And then: their new friend can be lowered down from his perch (onto the long dried, too-large bloodstain), have his bindings retied to make sure he's not about to wiggle free, and then into the backseat he's (gently) dumped. It is nonetheless significantly more comfortable than hanging upside down in the hot sun.

"They left him armed?" says the easily distracted boss-lady, who had been investigating the blood stain itself. She sounds more offended than anything else. "Aren't people here supposed to loot and scavenge relentlessly."

"Just another thing that doesn't make any sense," agrees Vernon. "C'mon. Interrogate on the way."

"Yeah, thank you."

Into the car they all go.

"Do you want some water or something before I ruthlessly interrogate you?"

"I'd appreciate that, thank you."

Then he will be very gently fed water before interrogations can begin. She is in fact willing to let him have as much of it as he'd like.

He drinks... somewhat less water than one would imagine he'd need after being left in the sun for who knows how long. Inside that absolutely bonkers red coat.

"Thank you!" he repeats. "So, who are you guys and what twists in the river of causality brought you to this junction?"

She notices, but doesn't push. Maybe trying to prevent throwing up from imbibing too much, or something? Still. Odd.

"No, no. The questions go the other way, but nice try," she says, brightly. "Why'd they leave you armed?"

"...I genuinely don't know," he says, with the apologetic airs of someone who feels like this is a personal failing.

"He does have you there, doesn't he," says Vernon, as he adjusts their route to correct for the detour and make sure they're heading in the correct direction again.

"I suppose asking the victim of whatever that was for the motivations of their aggressor is rather dumb. Fine. Where are you from? Do you have family we could return you to?"

"I... no. Not anymore. I just travel."

Yikes, that's like she just stepped on a landmine. Now she just feels like a horrible person.

"Do you know anyone at Jeneora?" asks Vernon, instead.

He brightens up again. "Yeah! Everyone, I think. Well, not the little baby, Rosa was pregnant when I last visited but it's been a few years. And I imagine there'll have been other babies, I think Maria and her husband were thinking about it."

"How'd you get to know them? Lived there for a while?"

"Yeah. Not very long, but it's a small town, everyone knows everyone else."

"So you did some kind of work for them for a while, or...?"

He trails off, and squints at a couple of figures visible in the rocky sands.

".... Those look official. But not from around here. What is that, Julai...? What are they doing way out here?"

"Problem?"

"Not just yet, but we might be about to run into one. Brightly wrapped mystery, can you roll out of the seat and onto the floor for us, please."

He does not need to be told this twice. Onto the floor he goes.

"Coppertop, can you lift up his seat cushion and then pull up the little floor wall thing between the floor and the seat...?"

"Ooo--kay," she says, obeying without understanding why. "... Wait, my car has a secret compartment?!"

"Not very secret, but yeah. Brightly wrapped mystery, if you would please roll yourself into the not very secret compartment."

Once again, he does not need to be told twice. Not very secret compartment is a go, making sure his whole outrageous red coat comes in with him.

And it is then closed back up behind him, by someone who's a bit offended, actually.

"Why didn't you tell me it had a secret compartment!!"

"You would have filled it with expensive junk we don't need."

"I. I would, but, it. .... It would have been useful expensive junk!!!!"

"Ahuh."

The Julai Military Police is the branch of the Julai police that deals with external threats to public safety. They chase after criminals who have escaped and ensure only safe people are allowed in. So it sure is interesting when the little group, riding blue flightless bipedal birds the size of horses, signals for Vernon to stop as they catch up.

Which he will do, because he is a good, law abiding citizen who has never done anything wrong in his life.

"Liking this less and less. No talking, you, I mean it this time."

Blink blink blink, but she hums an affirmative.

And then he will put on the correct face of wary-but-cooperative and wait for the fucking Julai Military Police to come say hi.

"Officers? What can we help you with?"

"Citizens," says the captain, a man wearing a cap and a cloth mask that covers his entire lower face and only leaves his begoggled eyes exposed. "We are looking for a dangerous criminal that we have reason to believe came this way." And he shows them a "Wanted" poster for someone called "Zash the Stampede", with a picture of... well, Z. And a bounty of $$6,000,000.

Wanted Poster

"Dangerous? What kind of danger? Another one of those madmen with explosives or carnivorous bug mutants or something...?" He obediently takes the paper to look at it like he's trying to interrogate it for the secrets of its danger. Ahuh. Yeah, that's what he expected. "We haven't seen anybody alive out here, but maybe if we're lucky he's with one of the dead guys the Bad Lads strung up back there. I mean, I guess not lucky for the bounty, but. Uh, thataway, if you want to check. Any idea which town he's likely to be heading to?"

"He's known as the Human Typhoon. He's killed lots of folks all over and he's running around destroying and stealing plants. He's a vicious criminal." The police captain shakes his head. "We've spread out along the paths to lots of towns but if he was going to Jeneora Rock you'd have seen him by now. Probably." He frowns. "What the fuck are the two of you doing here anyway?"

"On our way to Jeneora ourselves. I'm Vernon, this is my niece, Yvette Marlowe, from the big fancy city. Talked her parents into letting her have a look at the, auhm." He coughs, clears his throat, then leans closer to the masked man and lowers his voice. "... You know about the problems Jeneora's been having, yeah?"

"...with the plants? Not Julai's business."

"Right, of course. But I figure there's no reason not to get someone with some schooling to take a look at it. Before they front up the cash for someone qualified. Can I keep this? I can give it to the folks there for you, they could use the money if I ended up making this trip to show her what the real world's like and nothing else."

"Sure, whatever. If you haven't seen him then that's what I wanted to know. Good day."

And without waiting for a response he pulls away and he and the other officers ride off.

"You too."

He lets out a breath, shakes his head, and then they can resume their journey.

Yvette waits until they're out of sight of the officers, still behaving and looking very dumb and naive and stupid, then takes the paper and looks at it.

"Vernon. Why did we lie to the nice policeman and smuggle a wanted criminal in our backseat."

"Remember that mad science immortality project."

"..... It's based around Julai?" she guesses.

"Mmhmm. And they want him alive."

"Wonderful."

"Also they probably would've shot us," he adds, casually.

"What."

"If we'd seen him. No witnesses, you know."

Z—or rather, Zash the Stampede—pushes the lid of the secret compartment open. "Um."

"Hey, back there. You're welcome."

Someone else is still stuck on that whole 'they almost got shot' thing.

"But, they would've, even if we'd--but that's--"

"That's Julai. You knew it was a shithole, that's what a shithole looks like from the ground, kiddo. 'Police' can just be a fancy sounding official word for a gang."

"Fuck. Right. Okay."

"Still want to do this?"

"Obviously, just! Just! Give me a minute. Fuck."

"I'm sorry. And thank you. You didn't have to." He rolls out of the secret compartment and rearranges it into a regular car seat.

"Eh. We kinda did. I guess we could throw you out of the car now and be done with you, but. Wouldn't sit right. To hell with Julai."

"... Are you just untied now, is that just a thing that you did while you were stashed away where we couldn't see you, you know what, honestly, fair enough. Good job. Gold star."

He smiles weakly and flexes his hands a bit. "I couldn't have let them hurt you."

"From the compartment? With your gun up h--"

He looks.

The gun is gone.

"--huh."

He looks down at where the gun is back safely in the holster then grins sheepishly at Vernon.

Yvette follows Vernon's gaze, then Zash's gaze, and sees the now returned gun.

".... they did take your gun. Didn't they."

"I... honestly don't know if they did. I wasn't fully conscious. But it would've made sense."

"And they really, really thought you were very incredibly dead or close to death, and. All of the blood was yours. And the gun is. Also yours? And... regenerates by whatever mechanism you do?"

He winces a bit, and doesn't reply.

Is this the part where they figure out he's a monster and then throw him out of the car and flee, because it's looking like it might be.

"... Okay. Uh. Well, we'll get you to Jeneora and. Figure it out from there, I guess. Do you have a, a place you want to try to get to, or is it just 'anywhere but there'?"

He blinks at her and tilts his head, not following her logic very well. "I didn't have any specific plans. I just wanted to see if Jeneora was doing better after last time their plants were in trouble."

"One of them's gone red," says Vernon, flatly.

"Oh. Oh no."

"No, no, absolutely not. Put that back, 'red state' is an artificial designation made by our dumb wasteful forefathers who liked to toss things away and get new ones instead of putting the work in to try and fix them, it does not literally mean it's dying, that's just the textbook answer. It means designated by the system to be a net loss to keep alive. That could happen for any number of reasons."

"Here we go," sighs Vernon.

"Excuse me, I was going to leave it at that. I'm saving my intense and impassioned rant about the wastefulness and shortsightedness of a Last Run for if I need to actually argue anyone out of it."

Zash blinks a few times at her and then gives her a small smile again. "So you really are a plant engineer?"

She gives a little awkward smile back.

"Yeah. Actual certifications and everything, even."

He leans forward suddenly, recovering all of his lost energy all at once. "Could you teach me? I know a little bit, but rescuing plants from a red state is—difficult."

"I--I mean I would be happy to try, but it's very much like solving a puzzle when half of the puzzle is in another dimension and you can only make observations about it from careful observation of the history of the plant's treatment and reactions and how it responds to certain things. But. Sure?"

"...I think maybe I can help with that."

"Really? How?"

"It's complicated. I'll show you when we get there."

"... Just really set on keeping some of the mystery, huh. It's no fun that we've figured so much out already?"

"It really isn't! Half my charm is the mystery."

"I understand completely."

"So my cover story for you two is that you're married," says Vernon, conversationally.

"—eh? I'm not sure that's—not that I don't like her, but—we barely know each other?"

"Right, but why the hell would you be here if I'm taking my naive niece on a dumb get rich quick scheme?"

Yvette is spluttering.

"Why do you insist on having cover stories! Can't people just, just, be friends or friendly acquaintances and just, it is ridiculous to be called your niece, I look nothing like you."

"Much more explicable to travel with family than friends, out here, unless you've got a proper scheme with some real meat to it. And we don't want to pretend to have one of those."

"You just picked fake marrying me off because you thought it'd be funny! You're a terrible fake uncle."

"Guilty."

"I could be a bodyguard!" Zash suggests, fingergunning. "Pew pew."

"..... I want something believable, mystery man."

He pouts. "I can too bodyguard! I'm bright red and yellow, I draw all of the attention so no one goes for her!"

"Anyway, she's not supposed to be important enough to need a bodyguard. She's had several years of schooling and thinks that means she knows the whole entire world, but no tangible proof of any of it. If you're her husband then you can be just as dumb as she is, and want to protect her anyway."

"You are just absolutely enjoying this chance to spin a narrative that paints us all as idiots."

"You bet I am. Acting stupid can get you further than you'd think, if you do it right."

"He got that one right."

"Don't you take his side, he's going to fake marry us off!"

"Yep, there you go, you're doing great. Just remember to leave the word 'fake' out and you'll be good to go."

"Rosa will never buy it," Zash says. "Nor will most other people in Jeneora, either, but Rosa definitely won't."

"Then it can be for other people," he sniffs.

"I guess we'll need to get their buy-in." He lifts one finger in front of his lips. "It'll be our little secret."

"Great. I've been forcibly married off to a man I just met. I thought this only happened in silly stories about the old world and the like."

Despite her words, her tone is a bit amused.

"Cheer up, you could do much worse than me. I even have a cool robot arm!"

"Yes, dear."

"But I don't know very much about your uncle, my love. I especially don't understand why he's with us, when it could be just the two of us, having a lovely romantic time while we rescue this poor backwards town's plants."

"Because unfortunately, he does actually know his way around this area, and occasionally has smart advice. Even as I want to strangle him. Often."

"Ahuh."

"And probably because my parents wouldn't let us have this crazy stunt unless we had a chaperone to make sure we don't get shot. You may form your own opinions of my fake parents, my real parents are lovely and are concerned but supportive of my ridiculous scheme."

"Your parents are lovely, and they really like me. I'm charming and polite and well-spoken and I am clearly so head over heels in love with their daugher." Accompanied by the sappiest, most adorably saccharine devoted look ever.

".... Now you're having fun with this."

"I'm more than having fun. Even your stick-in-the-mud uncle isn't enough to ruin our lovely trip together to a place dear to my heart. We will have the most delightful of times."

"Of course," she snorts. "Now let's not kill him with ambient sugar intake."

"Appreciated."

"But my love, wouldn't you say he signed up for this when he decided to accompany us? I think if he didn't want to suffer us he shouldn't have agreed to it."

Read: if Vernon wants to dump a fake marriage scheme on them he will have to deal with fake married people.

"I have been strong armed and am here under protest."

That causes Yvette to break and start properly laughing.

"Okay. Point taken. Yes, we can probably actually pull off your stupid dumb cover story."

Zash leans back, a grin still playing on his lips. "So, plant engineer with ideas about how to save a red plant?" he prompts.

"Right! Yes, of course. So you're already aware of the support system used to keep plants in suspended animation to prevent them from living out their usual quick burst, minutes long lifespan, and the careful balancing of nutrients they need but shouldn't make because if they started it'd start them on their self destructive spiral--"

What follows is a dizzyingly technical conversation about interrupting the aforementioned self destructive spiral by mapping out the likely end result the plants themselves want and heading it off by giving it to them early. Followed by a long, long aside about mapping out the destructive spiral paths (because of course, plants cannot be observed making these nutrients themselves, since this is all happening in a different dimension) and probabilities. She has graphs, would he like to see the graphs. Too late, the graphs are here, and they are in front of him. The data is neatly mapped from the past one hundred and fifty years of people of this planet being very motivated to keep their plants alive as long as possible. See, if you look at data from this set of (still blue state) plants, and this other set of (also still blue state) plants, and then also this data from plants that briefly flickered red state and then someone managed to flail at them back into blue state, the pattern is obvious if follow this algorithm and also account for the personal histories of the plants themselves and how they've been treated over their lifetimes....

...well, he was more asking about her motivations and stuff than the technical details but he supposes that "launches into an in-depth explanation of technical details revealing months maybe years of research" is pretty revealing of her personality, is it not?

Fortunately, the character he's playing here has already revealed he knows a little bit about plant engineering, so he can reveal that he can understand her explanations pretty well. And one of the times she mentions one of the "briefly flickered" plants he can't help himself and corrects her on one minor detail in her hypothesis about what was going on there, which... is showing his hand a bit, isn't it, but on the other hand she does seem legit and he's gonna be showing his hand even more when they get to this city's plants and he helps her save them.

She notices and immediately pounces on this. Congratulations, Zash the Stampede, you are now being interrogated by Yvette Marlowe, plant engineer. Where did you get your data do you have citations and can you back up your hypotheses with equations she wants crunchy crunchy numbers right this instant and will only grudgingly take no for an answer.

"...I don't have all of that." ...off the top of his head. He could derive the equations, he does actually know some stuff, here. Not nearly as much as she does, but you can't save plants if you don't know any engineering. "But I was there, for that one." As in he's the one that did it.

POUT but okay fine then he must tell her ALL HE KNOWS about that one right there that he was there for that happened a... decade ago, really? Wow he looks good for his age guess that makes sense doesn't matter tell her your secrets.

Heeeeee really shouldn't tell her everything. There are things that really never go over well and so he's leaving them out. But what's left of the explanation then will look a lot like lucky guessing, or some sort of intuition, or more plausibly both.

Well FINE but for the record she KNOWS there is something else going on here, he is clearly getting his magically correct answers from SOMEWHERE, but she will GRUDGINGLY LET HIM HAVE HIS SECRETS and instead (grumpily) use the given data to narrow down probability zones for related circumstances. This involves doing math equations while muttering to herself about dimensional drift.

“… so a decade ago, huh?” says someone who didn’t understand a quarter of any of that.

"Has it been that long?"

“How old are you?”

"I thought asking someone their age wasn't a done thing," he says in a teasing tone.

“You don’t have to tell me, I just… need to know what level of shit we’re getting into, here.” He glances at his boss, furiously doing math. “A plant engineer willing to leave their cushy ivory tower to help the little guy instead of just propping up the elites is… once in a lifetime, you know? One of mine, anyway, I don’t know about yours.”

He gets a sappy look on his face again. "I know. My wife is great, isn't she? I love her so much."

"Ahuh," he sighs, then raises his voice. "We're coming up on Jeneora Rock soon, try to wrap up anything you're in the middle of, if you can."

"Mmmrnmmrhh." Scribble scribble scribble. BUSY.

"Ooh," he says, leaning forward again so he can see the town in the distance.

Jeneora Rock can barely be called a town, really. It owes its name to the huge rock it was built around—which, despite its precarious-looking condition, has stood tall since the town's founding decades ago—and it was made from the remains of one of the colony ships that mostly didn't make it a hundred and forty eight years ago, when humanity was first arriving on this planet and all of the ships were suddenly sabotaged at the same time. Most of its useful technology has been scavenged and brought to the bigger cities, but it somehow managed to retain two plants: one for water generation, and one for food. Both are vital to the survival of the people in the town, so if even one of them dies, they'll have to face the choice of dying with them or trying to go somewhere else.

It goes without saying that the kinds of people who live in a town this poor and small don't really have much means to go live somewhere else.

Jeneora Rock

Nobody officially stops them at the gates, but there sure are a lot of people now staring at them suspiciously as they find a place to park. At least he doesn't have to pay a damn toll for it, like in a city. It's just dirt (well, sand and rocks, really), they can in fact just park wherever is free and out of the way.

"All right, he who knows everyone here. Where are we heading to first? Diner?"

"I want at their plant I have ideas," mutters Yvette, still half buried in her equations, but bravely trying to extract herself.

"Shh. We'll handle it, just not too loud."

"Diner, yeah. Plants can come later. I want to see how they're holding up."

Also, people start getting alarmed if strange folks show up and start asking where their plant is and if they can have a look at it, and sometimes those people are alarmed with lead. Good intentions are often rarer than water, these days. Or, really, any days on this godforsaken dustbowl they call a planet.

So, yes, diner first.

It's about the same as any eatery in a small town, which is to say, the minute people they don't know walk in, everyone turns and stares.

But of course, there is in fact one that is recognizable. The bartender (a pregnant and severe looking brunette) brightens from her worn scowl and calls, "ZASH! We didn't think we'd see you again, welcome back! Come on in, sit down."

"Rosa! A second one, is it?" he says, walking up to her and giving her pregnant belly a huge grin. "And how's the husband?"

"Goodness me, looks like! And I threw his lazy ass out," she says, with a smug little grin.

"Did you! Good on you. And where's the first one? I haven't met them yet! —ah, sorry, I shouldn't be so impolite." He takes a step back to gesture at the other two. "This is Yvette, my lovely wife, and this is her uncle Vernon."

"Oh, Tonis is our resident worm catcher, he'll be by in a jiff to show off -- wife? You!?" Rosa sounds delighted. "I didn't know you could even flirt but -- oh she's gorgeous, I can see why you'd learn, hello my dear, it's a pleasure to meet you!"

Oh apparently it is being hugged time, that is what time it is. Uh? Okay. Sure. Also she thought the fake story was for people outside of the town?? Maybe there were conversations while she was in math land. (She is maybe still a little bit in math land.)

"Pleasure's all mine, hello, um, thank you it's, um. Um. Yes." She looks at Zash pleadingly. Help. Help her, please.

He grins even more widely and steps right beside her to take her hand into his own. "She's a plant engineer," he says in a stage whisper. "She's ridiculously intelligent and talented, I'm so lucky to have met her."

Rosa gasps.

"And so you got her to come here? Zash! Zash you shouldn't have, but we will absolutely not ever refuse, absolutely get your pretty brilliant wife to look at things!!"

It's not hard to tell that she's relieved.

"I -- honestly thought this would be much harder and that I'd need to show my credentials or, um, something."

"No, no, Zash himself fixed up one of our plants years ago, if he says you can do it I believe him!"

And also she really, really needs this to work.

"Oh, but I'm being a terrible host, aren't I, I'm sorry, you've come such a long way, would any of you like anything to drink? Maybe eat?"

"Um. Water?"

"Whisky. Coppertop, I know you're a lightweight, but alcohol's safer, 'less you like having the runs."

"Oh. Right. Of course. .... No, no I stand by my decision, water please, and also ha wait here be right back."

And then out of the diner she goes and to her car, smirking.

Zash blinks after her and then turns his smile to Rosa again as he walks over to the table to take a seat. "Bet she's about to do something smart. ...but I'll have the whisky, too."

Rosa snorts, and gets two glasses of whisky, and one glass of (slightly murky) water. That would be from the plant that's on the fritz.

Soon enough, Zash's 'wife' returns, carrying a complicated looking technological thing and looking the most smug. She sets it down triumphantly on the table, giving Vernon a look.

(The entire bar is now, of course, staring at her. She hasn't noticed.)

"..... Okay, I'll bite, what's that."

"Useful expensive junk we didn't need," she sniffs, smugly. "Also known as a water purifier."

Sigh. Of course she would. Damn it, woman, are you trying to get mugged.

"You can use it while we're here, as long as you clean it afterwards!" she then adds brightly to Rosa, a picture of innocence.

Rosa herself is. More than a little shocked. And also staring.

Zash, though, just looks completely enamoured as he leans forward to place his elbows on the table and place his chin on his hands to stare at Yvette. "So lucky," he sighs dreamily. "You're the best thing that's ever happened to me."

"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.

Rosa nonetheless notices, but doesn’t seem offended.

“I’ll leave you to it, then?” Except… she’s afraid to ask about payment but she should, it’s not just Zash, so — “How much do we owe you…?”

Blink blink.

“At the moment, absolutely nothing. When the plant is back to full output, I’ll want one percent of that output to be under my purview for the next decade. But, um. I’m a reasonable person who cares about your town and your people and don’t want to wring you dry, I just. Also want to invest in the future.” By having the plant contribute to the ongoing project of ‘make the world not be such a shithole.’

“Good lord where did he find you,” snorts Rosa. “Thank you.”

"In the middle of the desert," Zash says brightly to Rosa, in a tone of voice that suggests this is some inside joke, then winks at her.

“Excuse me, I found you,” she snorts.

There’s another couple of thank yous, then the laymen get going and the apparent happily wedded couple are left alone to geek out in peace.

“You did this,” she says, pointing to the little barely perceptible positive trend. It’s not a question. “And you’re not going to tell me how, are you.”

He peers at where she's pointing. "I didn't touch that console," he points out. "How could I have done that?"

“Nice dodge, but I never said you touched the console. I said you did it.” She raises her eyebrows, amused. “And I have some guesses as to how, but if we’re playing mystery games I’ll keep them to myself for now. To keep things interesting, mystery man.” She winks.

“Besides, I’d rather focus on,” and she motions to their red and sickly friend.

He grins at her again but then: yeah, they can geek out.

Despite Zash's goofy persona and dumb affect, and despite his earlier demuring about how much he knew about this exactly, it becomes extremely clear that he knows a lot. Not as much as she does, and especially not in as quantifiable a way as she does, but he can easily keep up with her and offer his own useful mysterious insight. It's soft squidgy feelings insight but at least directionally it's helpful.

Ahuh.

Well, she will just quietly accept his mysterious insight without question, and instead just happily work from it as if it’s concrete fact. It makes her inner scientist itch a little, to not properly test something she's then relying on so heavily, but that’s just her own geekery, not anything important. She understands there’s something more going on here that she doesn’t see yet. She’ll play along. That probably makes her a bad scientist, but she’s an engineer first, and engineers care about application over theory.

They will in fact make marvelous progress figuring out what exactly is ailing the red state plant, and furthermore she’s clearly having fun.

He is also clearly having fun. His speech style becomes more animated, and animated in a different way than before. He speaks quickly, gesticulates wildly, paces, occasionally walks over to the plant and adopts a distant look in his eyes before turning back around and giving some weird sideways suggestion for an avenue of exploration that nevertheless turns out to be surprisingly relevant in some nonobvious way. From his mannerisms it almost sounds like he's... well, a doctor, or maybe a nurse—as contrasted with being an engineer, that is. He doesn't sound like he's talking about a machine to fix; he sounds like he's talking about a patient to heal.

And compared to his previous shows of energy, this feels a lot more focused and, in a certain way, genuine. Before, he was cheerful; here, he looks happy. There's a difference.

Well, a patient to heal is perfectly logical. Plants are, and have always been, alive. If anything, treating them like they're machines instead of living things is just a dumb coping mechanism humans have forced upon them, because humans like things that are simple. Fit into the box, follow the dotted line, make the quota set before you. If you've done it once, you can do it again, so do it again. Even when things aren't always that simple.

It's very telling, though, the way he goes distant and blank and then comes back with a mysterious insight or sideways suggestion. Sort of like someone who, instead of playing an eternal guessing game, just asks, what's wrong? She herself has wanted to ask this exact question hundreds of time in her life, but never been able to, instead having to figure it all out from mapping trends and using algorithms and data from other plants in similar situations.

But of course, she's not bringing nothing to this relationship, either. He can learn a number of things about the state of the art of plant engineering, too. She's more than happy to tell him, and happier still that he understands. Along with the general breakthroughs of the unending march of science: a lot of the reason she can figure out what's happening with plants in red state at all is because, over the hundred and fifty years since the SEEDS ships crashed out of the sky instead of sensibly colonizing the place, the various nerds of the world have updated the systems taking care of the plants. On modern tech, this plant would not be considered red state yet, because pompous narcissistic genius engineers do not want to admit defeat. There are, in fact, instances of plants in the big cities that had numbers worse than these now, that floated above the arbitrary 'red state, throw it out' line, because someone kept moving that line down. And then, since it had clearly been fixed, obviously the line can just stay down there. Everyone else can have more breathing room and less scary red lights that frighten people into doing stupid things.

But also, they've been there for hours and someone eventually comes to check on them.

"Hey uh, have either of you two lovebirds eaten," calls Vernon, who was kind of expecting this of them, really.

Zash blinks up at him from where he'd been staring at the screen with a deep furrow of concentration to his brow and then grins sheepishly. "Whoops," he says, not really sounding regretful at all. "We got a bit distracted."

"Oh. Yes we did, and no we have not eaten or. Really done many things to care for our human forms. Since you left. Oops."

... That does explain why she was starting to get a bit cranky with the data, doesn't it. Damnation, she was just hungry. Figures. Right, they can go care for their mortal forms. ... Well, she can go care for her definitely still mortal form, and Zash can present the illusion that he is doing the same. It's not clear if he needs to eat, but she's increasingly suspicious that he doesn't. She needed a bathroom break, awkwardly realized uncomfortably late, and he has not.

Yeah he uh did not remember to pretend to need the bathroom until she needed it herself and at that point he just decided it would be a waste of time when she seems so on board with how inhuman he is. He'll need to take care not to get too used to it and slip up around other people but she seems... fine? She seems fine with it.

He also does indeed not need to eat, but at least to the people of this town he should keep up the pretense.

Fortunately, there is an establishment in these parts that is equipped to feed people. They can all go there, and be fed, and there isn't even any fussing about money because honestly Yvette has paid for everyone's meals several times over by loaning out the water purifier in a time of water crisis.

"... So?" asks Rosa, anxiously, as she puts their plates of food in front of them. "What do you think."

Right, she should update these people on the state of the thing they stake their livelihoods on. That is an important thing to do when one is fixing the thing they stake their livelihoods on. Yes, very reasonable. Also, she can't help but notice that this diner is more crowded than it had been, and that also all of its occupants are staring at them. She will just carefully pretend like this is perfectly normal and does not unsettle her in any way. But she will make sure her voice carries, when she answers, since they all seem to care so much.

"Better than I was expecting, actually. We still don't have a time table, but it's looking really good."

"We managed to mostly stop the water plant from feeding the food plant," he says in a less carrying voice, since it was only Rosa that was there for that part of the explanation, "so unless we mess up we will probably be able to keep it from getting any worse, and from there we're optimistic." Zash himself does not seem to have any reaction to being stared at by the entire town. Or, if he does, he is not showing it at all.

"Good. I'm so glad. Thank you both so much. Oh, I'll stop hovering, let me know if you need anything."

As they're eating, someone very small clears his throat. He is carrying a rusted cage with a couple of flying bug-like things inside, and looking very serious.

"—oh, you must be Tonis! Hi, little guy! Is that for us?"

"Ye."

He caaaaarefully leans up on his toes to place the cage on their table. The little creatures inside skitter around their cage, then settle back down. In the dim light of the diner, they glow slightly.

Yvette blinks at them. Huh. She hasn't seen the juvenile form of the planet's major fauna (colloquially known as worms, for the way the adult form is a giant worm) this close before.

"Well thank you very much," she says, smiling at the little boy. "I haven't seen these so close before, they're very neat."

Also kind of ooky and gross, but, well. The bio-luminescence is cool.

"I heard you're a great and brave worm catcher, is that true? I've never caught worms, maybe you could teach me sometime!"

"..... mebe."

This seems to be the entirety of the interaction this small child wants to have at this time, because he then departs. They now have a cage of small insect-like creatures on their table. One starts trying to reach for Zash's food through the tiny bars of the cage.

"Bye! It was nice meeting you!" he calls after Tonis.

Sure, the little critter can have some of his food, he doesn't mind.

Nibble nibble nibble, goes the little critter. It even passes some food to its fellows shortly after eating some.

"Aw. How prosocial of them," says Yvette, of the creatures, amused. "Add that to the list of nice things about worms, I guess."

He lifts both eyebrows. "You have a list of nice things about worms?"

"I guess I hadn't been thinking about it in a direct list form, but... I do actually admire their adaptability?" She fishes a tiny bit of crust she doesn't personally want to eat and offers it to one of the critters. "A bunch of aliens crashed out of the sky onto their planet, set up shop and declared the whole place actually theirs, built cities, started terraforming it, so on, and. Instead of the mass die offs like on Old Earth, they went, 'Yeah okay, we can eat this.' And then did. Their biology's changed over the last hundred and fifty years, did you know? I mean the bones of it are ultimately the same, but when we first landed there was just nothing of them humans could digest at all. Which I guess makes me sound a bit self serving, 'I like that we can eat them now,' but. You know. Casually and easily adjusting to a strange new thing like it's nothing at all. Pretty cool." Pause. "Also the swarms of them are very pretty in the night sky. All bright and glowy and almost magical. While we're on self serving things I like."

"Ah huh. That's... an interesting way to see it. Very you."

"... Thanks?? I think??"

He grins. "You're welcome!"

Yvette's original assessment about the difficulty of the task was roughly correct; gathering the necessary data does take days. Probably fewer days than she'd expected, though, because Zash can in fact get the answer to the question "What's wrong?" directly in a way she cannot. He's not exactly advertising this fact, but he's not doing a ton of work to hide it either. The couple of extra times she prods him gently about it he dodges the question equally gently and she doesn't do it again. However it is he can communicate with them, to whatever extent they have their own form of intelligence, his contributions continue to make this work be less time-consuming than it otherwise would be, and surer of success besides. Zash is in fact very adamant about the fact that they absolutely can fix everything, here.

So they progress, slowly and steadily and reliably, until on day 4 their little peaceful time is interrupted by the arrival of the Julai Military Police, fronted by the same police captain who stopped Vernon that first day. "Haven't seen him, huh?" asks the captain of Vernon, loudly, pointing his gun at Zash where he's seated at one of the tables in the diner. Two police officers are flanking him and also pointing their guns at Zash, and two more are outside the diner for potential support.

..... Yeah, he was afraid of that. He didn't want to shake the happy couple out of their efforts to save a town full of people, because they really needed the help, but uh. In retrospect he probably should have pressured the red and yellow half of it to keep moving. Instead of staying near where the Julai Military Police had been sniffing around.

"Well, I hadn't, but then he just showed up. Decided I didn't need the money, though. 'Specially not from some trigger happy punk from Julai. You really want it to get out that you came in and shot up a whole town after one guy?"

Yvette is currently sitting next to Zash, her now habitual array of proofs and equations taking up approximately half of the table. She looks nervously between all of the variously armed people, and wonders if it'd be dumb if she shrunk down to hide under the table. Maybe? Maybe. She's just going to try looking like wallpaper.

(At 'need the money,' someone at the bar twitches a bit. She'd been reaching for a weapon, before, but the prospect of a reward gives her pause....)

Zash finishes chewing his food, puts his cutlery down, then turns to look at the three men pointing guns at him with mild interest. "Gentlemen, would you mind if we took this conversation outside? I believe we're disturbing the locals."

"This isn't a conversation, Zash the Stampede. You will come with us, and you can choose between doing so after a lot of shooting or not."

"The reward is for delivering me alive," he points out.

The captain smiles. "We can make sure not to hit anywhere important."

"--Uh," oh fuck she's talking why is she talking does she want to die why is she so stupid sometimes, "even if you shot somewhere unimportant, he could absolutely bleed out before you got him anywhere you could patch him up. Unless you have a med kit stashed somewhere?"

She's clearly trying so hard, and she's even pretending to be dumb like a proper smart person, and yet. Still so far to go.

".... Implication's that he could shoot other, less important people," sighs Vernon.

"Oh."

Zash sighs. "Very well. I'll come quietly, if you promise not to disturb these people."

The man's smile widens. "We're only here for you."

He gets up, slowly, lifting his hands above his head, making sure to make no sudden movements that will spook these people, and he starts making his way out of the diner.

"But--!"

"Shh. Down," says Vernon, with his hand on her shoulder.

"I'll be fine," he tells her, with a small smile, sounding like he genuinely believes it.

"We'll see about that," says the police officer, stepping out of the way to let him leave the place and then following him out.

Approximately a second after they're outside, every other person in the diner --

-- Except one, who is confused and alarmed --

-- absolutely pulls out their weapons and starts plotting a counterattack.

Not that this is all that obvious from the outside, of course.

They're professionals.

They know this town, they built this town, and some faraway idiots have just shown up and acted like they own the place and get to wave guns around and get whatever it is that they want in the blink of an eye. Maybe that garbage works around Julai, but here? No sir.

Those with long ranged suited weaponry go above and prepare a proper ambush that will put each and every one of those entitled city fuckers under the ground, and those with smaller, more easily concealed weaponry cover the available escape routes so that there will be none of that either.

Vernon, for his part, is sticking right by the very woefully unarmed woman who is not at all prepared for this kind of situation. He half drags her behind a bar and watches the entrance, pistol drawn.

And from above, there are many, many eyes on Zash and his new 'friends.'

After walking a bit Zash stops and says, "Please don't shoot!" very very loudly.

"...what? What are you talking about?"

Yeah, no, he's not being obeyed. This is only a little bit about him.

Bang bang bang bang, come well aimed shots from various abovewards directions.

Oh, damnit. He supposes that's fair, really.

Anyway, he moves.

You'd be excused for thinking what's happening is less "movement" and more "teleportation". It takes less time than anyone here has to properly process visual input, but here's what happens.

He starts dashing towards the policemen in front of him. While he does that, he literally breaks two football-sized chunks of rock from the ground with well-aimed kicks; those chunks break into pieces that just happen to successfully intercept many of the bullets coming their way. Then, he reaches the policemen before the first bullet has had enough time to reach them and pushes them out of the way.

And as for the remaining bullets that would have hit the officers behind him, those he shoots straight out of the air.

"DAMN IT, ZASH," yells someone who is now extremely annoyed with him. "This is our town!! Let us handle our business!"

There are more bullets, but these are less well aimed, and with Zash's interference, just as unlikely to hit their intended targets.

Talking isn't going to help. He's probably at minimum dislocated some bones of these officers, with the rapid movement, but it's less dire than it looks: his movement isn't just fast, it seems to be slightly precognitive, with him seemingly knowing where people are going to shoot before they decide to do it.

The officers are extremely confused and terrified, but Zash doesn't have time for that either. He's going to find shelter, is what he'll do, so that they're less sitting ducks.

Hopefully the Jeneorans will decide to conserve their bullets once it becomes obvious they will not succeed. Bullets are very expensive; you can buy two whole slices of pizza for the price of one.

Yeah, fine, they'll stop. But there will be some more yelling. From various sources in various directions.

"My kid lives here, those fuckers aren't allowed to just walk in like they own the place and threaten to shoot her!!"

  "If we can't kill 'em we're absolutely getting their stuff, fuck Julai!"

    "And let 'em wander home naked to teach 'em a lesson!!"

"Nah, shoot 'em, it's been a while since we've had heads to mount on pikes, Julai Military Police would scare the scavengers off for weeks!"

This continues to be fair enough, and Zash continues to not want anyone to die on account of him. He lifts a finger to his lips to make sure the officers will sit tight and be quiet and then he'll attempt to go back to where the Jeneorans are, via a circuitous route that will hopefully not allow them to find their quarry.

There are absolutely a couple of the short range folks who'd cut off escape routes that are trying to do so, so he'd better head them off, too.

The rest are generally agreed that even if Zash is going to demand these people make it out alive, they will not make it out with all of their stuff. Or their clothes. There's currently a hotly contested argument about who gets the captain's sunglasses. Some others are still pushing for DEATH.

"There's a $$6,000,000 bounty on my head," is what he says after this argument's been going for a while.

That shuts them all up.

"Hell, we could buy a whole new plant for that..." observes one.

  "And then what, huh? You think we'll find anyone else that will fix it again after we sell the last guy who did off?!"

"He did a shit job of it last time! Hasn't been five years and the damn thing's busted again!"

    "It don't matter if they were promised a one way express trip to Earth itself, you don't fuck with Jeneora!!!"

  "I STILL GET THAT FUCKER'S GLASSES."

He knows what he'd need to say. He knows these people, he knows what each of them care about, he knows how he'd convince them, what to argue. He thinks he probably wouldn't even need to threaten anyone. It's just that...

...he doesn't really deserve it. He doesn't deserve to try to convince them. So there's only one thing he can say.

"Just please don't kill them. They're here because of me, I know they were assholes who tried to mess with Jeneora but if it weren't for me they wouldn't be here. It's my fault. So just... don't kill them, please."

"Zash, you're too damn idealistic for your own good. Those slugs don't deserve your martyrdom," says Rosa.

"I mean, who cares about those idiots now, there's $$6,000,000 on the line --"

  "Yeah? And you think you can take him in, genius?"

"Look at him! He'd probably let us if we wove him a sad enough story!!"

  "But then his fancy wife would kick up a fuss and then we'd have citygoers sniffing around all over the place--!"

"... Uh, hey," says someone, who has heard the yelling and poked his head out to solve it now that the shooting's stopped. "It does no one any good to stand here arguing while the Julai fuckers maybe start sneaking off, yeah? Does stripping them but letting them keep their canteens and birds and telling them to go tell everyone who the hell kicked their teeth in sound fair enough for everyone?"

There's a heavy sigh.

".... It's no heads on spikes, but I guess it'd be good enough..."

  "If we're going to maybe sell Zash off we might as well follow his wishes about his weird moral hangups, right?"

    "He does have a point about them sneaking off, better to present a united front."

"And then you can all work out whether or not you want to sell a man who helped you to be experimented on by mad scientists who have been stealing and murdering children on your own time."

"Fuck, man, why'd you have to go and put it like that."

They will in fact go debate about that later, but for now, they can all agree to strip the Julai Military police stark naked, give them canteens and their birds and the tale to never fuck with Jeneora Rock again.

"We'll be in the diner if you need us, you know where our car is if we try to skip town, yeah?"

And then he can escort Zash out of there while the townsfolk argue about money, pragmatism, and morality.

...yeah, fine. He supposes that works. The police officers are that-a-way. If the Jeneorans kill them, Zash will... well, be very sad. He's not about to threaten them.

For now, he'll just rest his head on the table and mope a bit.

Yvette sits next to him and pats his back, because, um. She's not okay, too, really.

"... So I'm still not entirely clear on... what all just happened..."

"Locals were pissed that Julai Police walked in like they owned the place and were going to kill them for threatening them in their own home, Zash didn't want anyone to die on his account, and the thing about his bounty got out, and they're all now arguing about what to do about it. Julai Police will probably get to live with a very embarrassing story, if they're not too stupid."

"Melissa had a grenade launcher!!"

"Eh, just for emergencies, and I think she's twitchy about using it because it makes a fun boom. It didn't look like it got used."