He hugs her closer. "Yeah. They don't really do... strategy. They see the here and now, the people needing them this moment, and do what they can."

Huff. "Right. Okay. Probably there's... some way of making it seem the most helpful to everyone right then to unfurl and be pretty and human shaped, but. Not here, not with these monsters, and not now, because." Sigh. "Right now I need my brain for raging against the dying of the light instead of. Plotting how to manipulate plants into fucking taking care of themselves at all. I guess."

"I don't know, I'd think by now you'd have a lot of experience wrangling plants into taking care of themselves."

She snorts.

"Okay, smartass. Put your face back on. I'm going to run diagnostics on what you just did and see if I can reverse engineer any of it to figure out more ways to help her."

"Yes, ma'am." And he begins the tedious process of not looking like Zash the Stampede anymore.

Yvette gets back to work, her job made just a teensy bit easier by having the plant-human hybrid helping her cheat the system.

(But not enough to save this beautiful plant. Not on this trajectory.)

That's not the last time Zash does it, and there's definitely a cumulative effect this healing causes on the plant. This is going to add a measurable amount of extra lifetime for her!

...but given the way Zash looks for a while afterwards, the healing may be stealing those resources from somewhere it was being otherwise used. At least Zash's own source of energy seems inexhaustible, because despite the toll it obviously has on him he does bounce back after a few days.

Yeah. She didn't expect it'd be without cost. That's just not how the world tends to work.

He cared for her when she was self destructing a little on day zero, she can care for him, too. Mostly by touching him and holding him, he doesn't have dumb human needs like she does, but he definitely is... sad and lonely. That is something she can help with. They can comfort each other as they systematically shred pieces of themselves to try to buy just a little more time for the most innocent and well meaning being on this entire ship.

The plant's communication methods continue not to be the most human-friendly ones, but despite this one can get somewhat used to them. A lot of it involves zooming out of the specific things they're talking about to the overall patterns and concepts exemplified by them. Humour is various different humans making jokes, laughing at things, self-deprecatingly and mockingly and good-naturedly; friendship is humans making promises to each other, sticking with each other through thick and thin, occasionally stabbing each other in the back; family is parents and children and siblings and cousins, it's the people you come back home to and the people you find who go with you wherever you go; red is blood, apple, Zash's jacket; gun is Zash's pistol, the guards' rifles, gangs' machine guns, Morgan's enormous cross; and so on.

Learning to understand plants is learning to extract meaning from those snapshots of human life, and the emotional attachments to them, and the connections being drawn. It's kind of exhausting, but it's the kind of thing that improves with practice, and little by little Zash starts interpreting less and less and letting the plant talk to Yvette directly, serving only as a physical medium for the communication.

It’s really quite fascinating, and she enjoys it. It’s a nice window into a happier and simpler state of being, and she needs that kind of gentle comfort during... … This. This job she is doing because she didn’t have any better ideas and this seemed like the best one to give her any leverage to help fix something, somewhere.

(Except for how she doesn’t feel like she’s fixing anything, like this.)

So she and Zash can spend a lot of downtime, with her holding him and him letting her talk to the plant and all of them together working to feel a little less sad and lonely.

Above deck, someone is smoking a cigarette. She’s been, you know, around. Learning how this side of the coin of humanity lives, what’s going on. A little bit about how to be a real human person instead of just… Something to be used. There’s lots of things she could say about her traveling companions and their inability to notice their feelings, take care of themselves, or see things that happen outside of that plant room of theirs, but they’ve never, ever wanted to use her. It’s very sweet, actually. When she said she liked them, she meant it.

Which is sort of why she has to do this, isn’t it.

Morgan tosses her cigarette overboard and watches it hit the sands below, then gets a different thing to put to her lips. She has a very tiny whistle that someone from Old Earth might recognize as akin to a dog whistle, but which of course is a bit different. There’s a pause for internal confirmation, does she really want to do this, is she sure, because she can’t take it back, then. Silent to most types of ears, she blows.

Then she waits.

Zazi the Beast has mastered dramatic entrances, clouds of worms glowing in the night and coalescing in a grand crescendo until they appear from there.

But that is not the only way Zazi can make an entrance.

They walk around the corner from some unseen bit of the ship and walk over to Morgan, hands in their pockets, looking for all the world like a human kid. "Well, we have to say we're curious. We thought everything was going according to plan, was it not?"

She glances down at the kid, and rolls her eyes.

“Yeaaaaah, I’m sick of this. I’m calling it. This boat might be going in the right direction but damn if it isn’t depressing.”

They pull themself up onto the railing and take a seat next to her, bouncing their legs back and forth. "You'll need to be a bit clearer, Punisher. What do you want us to do, exactly?"

“Don’t call me that, it’s a stupid as fuck nickname and I don’t want to play by the doctor’s or our fucking missionary’s games,” she snaps, irritated. “What do you think I’m asking. Have whoever’s been waiting in the wings for dramatic swooping to hurry their asses up.”

"Why? The timetable's looking so neat, right now... We'll have Stampede back in no time~"

“Poke poke poke poke poke, that’s all you ever do, huh? Because they’re miserable, that’s why. And this thing’s slower than you are, so what kind of timetable are we talking about, here?”

They gasp enormously. "Could it be? Are our little antennae misunderstanding? Is Morgan the Punisher going soft for the humans?"

“Oooo, mockery! Except it still needs work. But keep at it, bug, one day you’ll figure out how to make any of those barbs land. I’m the same as I’ve always been.”

They grin. "Waoooo... Zash the Stampede is a charmer but we're surprised the human also wormed her way into your heart. ...get it? Wormed."

“Yep. I get it. Well done. We’re all impressed. Will her resemblance to worms get you to make sure she doesn’t get squished?”

"No promises! ...oh, fine, some promises. We'll do our best to help your friends. Toodles~"

They lean forward and let themselves fall and fall and fall but before they can hit the ground they disperse into a myriad flying bugs.

She rolls her eyes again, and stalks below deck.

She might want to steer clear of their room, though. Zash and Yvette are being disgustingly sweet at each other, Zash lying on Yvette's lap being petted while he serves as a medium for a conversation with the plant.

(Morgan has, for the most part, been steering clear of their room, yeah.)