That question seems to throw her for more of a loop than any of his others.

"... It's my job???? Why wouldn't I care?????" she says, a bit bewildered.

"Lots of humans have this job." Implicit: and they don't really care.

She has had long enough with this frustrating person to catch the implications, actually! Hooray for her.

"Okay, well. I'm not trying to explain them. They're often dumb and selfish and stupid. I'm trying to explain me. And I have this job because I care."

That continues to make zero sense, but fine, whatever. It's incredibly frustrating to be unable to hear her.

The plants offer to help. He accepts, and it's still bewildering. Not her thoughts, directly, but plants' rendition of them. They can hear everything humans are thinking, but the way they conceptualise and translate their thoughts are—well, often very inaccurate or missing important details (in Knives's opinion) and most of all far too rosy. Humans are not like that. They are not good.

Well, there's not really much evidence from the plants' rendition of her thoughts. She really thinks that she's probably going to die in here, and that she might as well help them while she can. Actually, she's idly thinking about how she needs to teach Nai how to do this on his own, and how to learn the systems from the humans he hates so much when they improve at them, to repurpose the things they figure out for actual good.

And she's just continuing to explain everything. Happily. There's really nothing she's leaving out.

At least "she's being honest" is reasonably straightforward for the plants to convey. Zash's surface thought reading (and here's the usual pang of longing and hurt that accompanies his thoughts whenever he thinks of his brother) can be fooled by sufficiently clever manipulation (Zazi themselves are evidence for that) (there's another bug of theirs surreptitiously crawling in, Knives kills it without a second thought) but regular plants are way more thorough and cannot be fooled like this. They can read the entire emotional state of their targets, including the things they are trying to fool themselves about (as Knives has extensive firsthand experience with) (good thing he can hide from them). Yvette is being honest.

He really doesn't know what to make of this.

Well, eventually she runs out of typical system maintenance to relay.

... But apparently she's not done.

"Now, this next part isn't something I'd trust to the computer, because computers are stupid and they can do more harm than good if aimed wrong. But! If you'll allow me without killing me for trying, I can help more directly."

"Explain it to me. If you lie I will kill you. If you omit anything I will hurt you and then kill you."

"I figured!"

And then yes she can (also kind of cheerfully) get into direct ways she could help. Like, for example: the plant from Jeneora! She recognizes that red one by her (and that's the pronoun she uses, her) diagnostics. Usually half of the trouble of healing plants is figuring out exactly what's wrong, but here she already knows! She'd like to finish healing her. Here's how she would do it and here's what she had been doing and damn it she has none of her graphs, does she, does he have paper she's going to need to show what she means with math.

He can make paper appear out of thin air for her. Then with some more effort he can make a pencil. Pens are too complicated.

(The Jeneora Rock plants recognise her! And most importantly, they had Zash there and Zash could translate for them. This is not making it any less confusing.)

She is briefly distracted thinking about that and how actually she thinks that was inefficiently produced. He could have made a great big piece of paper and then cut it with his knives and that would have been more cost-effective than different sheets separately, not even getting into ways to make the pencil more efficient because that's a much harder problem but YES PAPER.

With paper and a writing implement present, it is math time. There will be graphs. She's missing all of her data so she's approximating some things (and noting every time she does, and the plants can feel how this is irritating to her) but she lived and breathed fixing this plant in particular for weeks and it has always bugged her that she never got to finish her damn job, so her memory's pretty fucking good. With a mix of memory, information currently available from the console, and math, she can pretty tidily map where the plant's vitals need to be, and with math she can show how she can help the plant get there with assistance from technology. All of this mapped out she's practically bouncing in front of Nai with her desire to get started. Can she do it. Please please please please will he let her she's wanted to for so long!!

He does, actually, know maths.

Her work does, actually, check out.

What the fuck.

He nods.

She practically dances as she inputs the commands and checks over them to make sure they do in fact go through. Yes? All set up? Everything doing what she thinks it'll do? AHAHAHAHAHAHA YES VICTORY!!!!

Well, okay, not immediately, this will still take some time to implement, it's not like she can just press a button and fix the poor plant, much as she wants to. BUT it is beginning to go in the correct direction!! And since that'll take time to go through, she can also work on this other plant that looks really very simple to help. It looks like someone was just running through standard practices straight from the engineering book. Which makes the problem the plant is facing pretty simple to solve, actually! And here's what's happening and here's how she'd fix it and it is really fucking annoying not having her data but she will persevere!!! With more math!!!!

Don't humans need, like, food and stuff. Zash needs food. ...well, likes food. Liked food. Knives guesses he does not know whether Zash still likes food. Or sleep.

"Do you need food," he asks when he's (once again) reminded that she can't just see what he's thinking.

"What? Oh." She'd absolutely, completely forgotten. Ugh, she does need food, doesn't she, that's the worst. "... Yeah, I'll start to get cranky if I don't eat, it's awful and throws off the accuracy of my calculations. And I guess eventually I'll die and stuff. It's super annoying. Sorry. Um. Are you going to invest resources into caring for my stupid human form or should I just be expecting to do as much as I can before I die?"

"The doctor will get you food."

If he let her starve the plants would never let him hear the end of it.

"Okay, thank you. Probably water should be first, though. Usually I have a water bottle present to remind me to drink, and that leads me down the logic train of noticing I need to take care of myself. Where's the doctor?"

"Don't know." Water's easy, though, and so is glass, it's mostly silicon. Here she goes. "I will find him. Don't touch the console while I'm gone." Then he lets gravity affect him again and starts walking away.

As soon as he's gone, a myriad bugs recoalesce into Zazi. "He likes you."

Water bottle!! Nai gets a thank you, because she suddenly remembers that she is in fact thirsty and should drink something. Time to get to doing that. She will, obligingly, not touch the console while he's gone, and instead sit down over here and stretch out the stiffness in her limbs.

"I can tell, because I'm not dead yet and he's still here," she says to Zazi, a little amused. "Were you expecting this?"

"Some of us were. We were right so we ate the other us."

"I see. Very tidy system, that. I sort of wish I could just eat the people I prove wrong sometimes."

"No you don't!"

"That's what the 'sort of' covers!" she laughs. "Admittedly it's a very load bearing 'sort of.' With humans it's, well. When you eat something you go and use all of the resources properly, yes? Nothing is truly lost, just reallocated. And with humans it's not like that."

"It's not. You just take and take and take, greedy little critters. And you're repeat offenders, too." Here are some more glowing spores, this time adopting the shape of planet Earth, with appropriate colours to boot. "Earth. Have you seen it?"