In some works of fiction involving psychic powers, some creatures have names like "a sea breeze" or "the feeling of sunlight at dusk" or whatever.

That's not what's going on here.

"Yvette" comes from a word in an Old Earth language for "yew" but it doesn't mean "yew" and it doesn't refer to "yew". Gunsmoke doesn't even have yew. It is, now, a collection of letters and sounds that society associates with this here redhead. "Zash" is even more like that, it does not (at least as far as Zash himself knows) have any meaning other than this here brightly-coloured independent plant.

That's more like what that plant's name is. It's a collection of mental impressions, of building pieces that maybe you could rearrange into something that has a referent or a meaning, but which here is just an undefined intellectual and emotional sense that happens to refer to the ship's plant.

"I don't have a good way to convey our conversation even like this," Zash says, sounding apologetic. "She can hear you just fine but plants mostly don't organise their communicative streams linearly at all, especially given the extra attentional capacity. I can ask her to slow down or focus on some simpler concepts but when I said that she wanted you to know her name what I actually meant was more that she had some feelings and hypotheticals related to names and the thought-streams related to that that crossed with the thoughts referring to you had positive feelings attached. And then when I actually formed the intention to tell you about it she focused on it and sent me positive reinforcement to confirm."

"I'm glad just to be able to hear her at all," she says, sincerely. "She has a pretty name and the way she thinks is beautiful and..."

... And she's now so scared for the plant and wants her to be okay and she's not... sure she can make that happen long term, but she's going to try and honestly maybe Nai should show up and fucking steal her, actually, if this is how they treat her.

Sniffle.

"Shit. Well I love her and am very sorry to get my complicated human emotions all over her now, when this should just, be, a good thing."

"Tell me if you want me to try to put her thoughts to words but," and he can try to convey a bit more of the complex thought-stream thing, filteredly.

She loves Yvette right back! Yvette is so good. A good human (all humans are good) (this one is extra good) (all humans are extra good) (yes but they are extra good in different ways and the way in which this human is extra good is unlike the extra good ways all other humans are extra good)

(no disagreement there)

who is trying her best and she loves Yvette (this here human) (likes her) for it (the human is so curious and devoted) (like this other human she saw once, they should be friends!) (that one would probably not be good friends with her though) (but that's okay, not everyone needs to be friends) and is very thankful (if she can live longer she can help even more people!).

(Does she like Zash? Zash likes her. Zash likes everyone, because everyone should be liked, but he extra likes her.)

She extra likes Zash, too! Zash is so good (kind) (patient) (dutiful) (forgiving) in a way that is unlike the way humans are good because Zash isn't human (not exactly a plant either) (yes a plant but one that can walk) (same species, different genus?) (that is not how the word "genus" works) but he is good, she likes him.

She's never met Nai! She's heard of him (a myriad thoughts from her sisters and from Zash all building up a fractal of who Nai is, the good and the bad and the ugly and the beautiful) (she loves him) and she'd like to meet him

(not be kidnapped, though) (unless he helps other people with them?) (she wants to help)

Even as information-dense as these thought packets are, Yvette might get a sense of the thing Zash meant a while ago when he said that it's not entirely clear if plants are all here. She seems to have exceptional memory for some things and absolutely garbage memory for others, she can do a lot of parallel reasoning but almost no serial reasoning and any chain of thus and therefores longer than three nodes has a big chance of being lost somewhere. She lives very intensely in her senses and emotions, and not very much in any abstracts; all of her thoughts are comparisons to things and people she's seen, she doesn't form any concepts from scratch but rather draws from fifteen different analogous situations and shows them all at once earnestly and goes "like this!!! see???" about them. There's something childlike in all of it, even while the whole thing is a bit too alien to properly liken to how humans do it.

It's a bit hard to follow but also so incredibly cute and she is so charmed. She does see what Zash means, though. This is very charming and adorable and she loves plants so much especially this one but wow they are so easy to take advantage of.

(Like now. By this ship. That she is technically working for. Which feels BAD and WRONG and she DISLIKES IT but it is to help this precious precious plant so she will in fact tolerate it even though BAD.)

"I kind of want to now immediately run off to the plant room and get to work," says Yvette wryly. "She's so cute."

"I suppose I'll have to accompany you. It wouldn't do for you to go anywhere without 'the help' here on this ship, would it."

"Actually, no. Usually plant engineers are extremely proprietary about knowledge and don't want anyone else figuring out how to do any part of their job. It will be very confusing for me to let anyone in at all, at a shitty dead-end job like this, but I will pretend to be such a spoiled brat that I do in fact need my serving boy around at all times."

"Your serving boy," he repeats, and then he offers her the associations the plant has immediately made with previous times she's seen someone saying something like that. Some of them are innocuous, some are extremely not.

This causes her to burst out laughing.

"Yes. Congratulations. You are no longer my husband, you are my serving boy."

"I am a plant, after all; I live to serve. And how may I serve milady today?"

"Please take a shower," she snorts. "And I'll go handle the plant on my own and lay groundwork for wanting to have a serving boy along and you wait until Morgan gets back with new clothes and repaint your arm. Because you really do stink."

"I shall do as milady instructs," he says, bowing deeply.

"You dork." Eyeroll. "Okay. I'm going to go tackle the gigantic mess they've left me in the plant room. Ugh. I'm going to be doing such boring scut work." She sighs, then looks down at herself. Will going in the robe help her ice queen role? Probably, and it'll almost certainly make some people question or affirm their sexualities, which makes it easier for her to get what she wants, so she's fucking doing it.

She grabs her credentials, identification, and room key, and gets going.

It is about what she expected. Which is to say: a fucking travesty.

The basics of the setup are not... completely stupid. Clearly an actual engineer was the one to arrange it. It's just they haven't had one around since. In theory, that'd be fine, if they weren't fucking stupid about it. Unfortunately, they are being fucking stupid about it. Since that engineer left, all of the requests for stuff getting made are just this... awful inefficient jumble. While the automatic system has done its very best to neaten things up a bit, it's woefully insufficient for this horror. Especially without anyone to categorize anything it didn't already know about, which for some of these requests: yeah, no.

The real problem is making all of these... different things. Without any rhyme or reason or overarching plan. Make these polymers, follow these weird guidelines for it that don't apply elsewhere, now make this obscure type of fucking candy, then water, then those polymers again, and on and on and on. This sort of thing is exhausting for plants. Discrete tasks are the way to go, reliably making things at their simplest and then having the rest be done by (comparatively) much cheaper human people putting the pieces together. Having a plant go and make an obscure type of candy is just, it might not literally be the most wasteful thing she's ever seen (she did meet that bomber) but holy shit. Intellectually, she understands why it happened, because she bets that the managers of the vessel made quite an absurd amount of money from actually doing that for whichever rich person paid for it, but holy shit.

She is, in fact, stuck doing boring scut work. That is: grouping together like things and having these stupid things they want go in packages of like objects, and plan out matter creation patterns better than the computer can do it because she has forward thinking, and fucking hell can she throw some of these requests entirely out. She bets she can, if she's bitchy enough and has a graph about it and talks about saving percentages in double dollars. But that'll be her long term attack plan, right now she is just going to sort all of this garbage that wasn't properly fucking categorized and get things slightly! More! Efficiently! Made!!!!

This sort of thing was always kind of offensive to her, it's one of the reasons why she has this job, but god damn. Now that she understands the inefficiency comes at the cost of the pure and sweet and adorable plant??? Well she's going to do her job, and she's going to do it well, and if she does not sleep tonight because she's still got more work to do, then that is fine by her.

Morgan returns before Yvette! With new (black) paint and new (black) clothes and laundry deposited, but not retrieved, because that takes actual time she'll pick them up the day after tomorrow, and all the rest of the things she was sent off for.

She verifies where their nerd is, shrugs at the answer, and then goes to bed. Because she's clean, and fed (she ate in Terminal, like a sensible person), and tired, and in a safer space than she's used to, so clearly that means it is sleep time.

His shower is again methodical and efficient. Get rid of those "clothes", unstick the gunk, stop smelling so much, make sure to clean the dirt and dust and blood and sweat from under the various metal plates keeping bits of his flesh from getting ripped apart (that's happened a handful of times, it was very inconvenient). Thankfully he does not have any organs that produce biological waste (he could, if he wanted, but he really doesn't) so that little source of discomfort is absent.

His black shirts and pants go in the laundry because they are inconspicuous but the same cannot be said about his bright red jacket. That one he also washes in the shower and then hangs to dry, so that he can later stitch the bullet holes and other bits of damage it's suffered.

He hopes this ship's piping is up to the obscene amounts of stuff that it's now having to deal with from this one suite. It would be a chore to have to get a plumber.

He doesn't pace, and instead just sits down and chats to the plant. She has absolutely no idea what Yvette is doing, there. Not even just the technical jargon—though that doesn't help—but also the very concepts. What is "efficiency"? What are "graphs"? She just makes the things the people on the ship ask of her, and sometimes those are more tiring than normal or even hurt a little bit.

She's used to it.

When Morgan arrives he starts reapplying his disguise, once again careful and methodical and efficient, and eventually he's a less gunky more presentable version of himself. He likes his shades, so he's keeping those, and he misses his face, but you gotta do what you gotta do. Morgan is long asleep by the time he's done.

After several hours there's a knock on the door.

...that mind is unfamiliar. It's... human, almost certainly, and they feel anxious and exhausted for some reason? Not a threat, probably. He opens the door. "How can I help you?"

The man has a reaction many people often do to him, which is slowly raise their eyes all the way up and boggle at just how tall he is (easily some six foot four). Then he shakes himself and recovers. "Is this, uh, Yvette Marlowe's suite?"

"Yes."

"I, um, we..." The professional façade breaks and he takes on a pleading tone. "Can someone come fetch her, please? Or, or do something? She's yelling at anyone who enters the plant room, she's in a bath robe and had us fetch her stuff and she's been in there for seven hours and. Help?"