Night 66: Greenhouse

[ninelivesonce]

[from here]

"Your turn," Taura said, pulling Goku down off her shoulders and setting him carefully on the ground. "Anything we can do to help you find the plant?" Getting out of the way was probably the best thing she could do, and she hopped up on one of the re-planting benches, high enough that even her feet swung back and forth a foot above the ground.

The greenhouse was pitch dark, and smelled only like dirt, to her normal-human nose. Lightning flickered outside the glass roof, and thunder rattled the windows. Pretty, but a few panes of glass weren't much protection. "You been all right, Rita?"

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[monkeyboy]

"Nope!" Goku said simply, taking off as soon as his feet touched the ground. It may have been a small jungle, but the sights and smells were a comforting backdrop as he waddled across the dirty cement walkways in search of this elusive smell. There was a loud clatter in the corner as he jumped up onto a table covered in potted herbs and small plants, sending one terracotta bowl shattering to the floor.

"Whoops... Sorry, plant!" Just in case, he bent over the table and gave the dismantled plant a sniff. Thankfully it wasn't the one he was looking for and so he kept moving, stepping over anything in his path. "Where are you, smelly plant?! We need to find you for... uhmm... Hey, Taura!" Goku shouted from the other side of the greenhouse, his squat body and chronically disheveled hair making him look like one of the plants in the dark. "Why're we looking for a plant?"

[overlimit]

Rita shrugged at Taura's question. "About as well as I can be, in a dump like this. My wounds are pretty much healed now." Other than that one bit of good news, the past few nights had been terrifying, humiliating failures, but those details were best left untold and forgotten. Rita certainly wished she could forget.

She was about to return the question to Taura, but Goku's interjection left her so baffled by his thick-headedness, all she could do was stare for a moment before planting a palm firmly on her forehead. Even without being explicitly told what they were doing, Rita had picked up enough hints to figure it out. Goku, on the other hand, was at the center of all this, and he... what, forgot? Unbelievable.

"You'd better take this," she groaned to Taura from behind her hand. If the brat needed their objective beaten into his head, Rita was far too tempted to take that task literally.

[ninelivesonce]

"It was a clue." If the leaves were all they needed, maybe they could have just taken one from the pile, but what for? Medicine? Taura didn't have the slightest idea how one went from turning a leaf into a drug, even if some things still stubbornly resisted out-and-out synthesis and were still grown on plants rather than vats. "If we can figure out what it was, we might be able to help people."

"You...keep looking over there. I'll see if anything over here looks worth a sniff." Goku was making enough noise to scare out anything that might be lurking, but that also meant she'd hear it if something went wrong. "It had oval leaves, about this long," she said to Rita, holding her hand out with the fingers a couple of centimeters apart. Softer, trying not to catch Goku's attention, she kept going. "D'you think we ought to go back to the basement? When all this is over?"

[monkeyboy]

"Oh." Did that sound familiar? Goku's blank face said, no, it didn't ring any bells. "Okay!" But his own vacancy didn't really change anything as he continued searching as avidly as before. If it was going to help someone, then that was good enough reason for him. Frankly, any reason would have made sense to Goku.

Climbing off the end of one table, the young boy found another to scale and poke around on. Hands grimy with damp soil, he pushed two large plastic crates out of the way of another flavor of plant. In fact, it smelled like the perfect flavor. Tilting his head with a questionable squawk, he picked off a leaf and sniffed. It was a definite match!

With how large some things seemed to grow in here, Goku was surprised to see how small their prize was. One of the pots was small enough to hold between his hands. "Hey, guys? I found it..." Whatever it was. It looked like just a regular flower to him. Nothing was special about it at all.

[overlimit]

Taura kindly took care of the explanations, and Rita’s temper was assuaged for the moment. She nodded at the description of the plant, committing the details to memory. But it seemed that that wasn’t the only thing Taura wanted to talk about. Matching the softness of Taura’s voice, she replied, “The basement? Hmm. There’s another lead I’m pursuing right now – a secret passage. If that doesn’t work out, then maybe…”

Before she could even finish, Goku called out to them, having apparently already found their prize. There wasn’t much choice but to go take a look.

“That was fast. You’re sure this is it?” Rita’s first reaction was, of course, doubt. But she had to admit, while she couldn’t count on the boy to use his brain for anything, his nose had been surprisingly reliable. There was a high chance that this was the same plant that had been left in the Medical Wing. The bigger question at the moment was what to do with the flower, now that they’d found it. “I don’t suppose the clues mentioned anything about how this is supposed to be used, did they?”

[ninelivesonce]

A secret passage? She'd never found out what had happened to Homura's key; with it lost along with the History Club's leaders, would it still be a betrayal to mention it? No, she decided, but Goku broke in before she could say anything about it.

Taura shook her head at the new question, hard enough that it set her braid swinging. "Nothing. There was a painting of a woman holding a severed head, but there weren't any plants involved. I don't think it was a suggestion.

She reached out and took the little pot; the last thing they needed right now was for him to change and break it. There was a little plastic stick with writing on it -- St. John's Wort, which sounded less like an instruction and more like a name. "My medical training stops when the bleeding does." That wasn't exactly true; she had most of the Dendarii medical staff curious, and they'd called in outside experts to try to hold her metabolism back. And before them, the lab doctors; they hadn't ever bothered to try to spare her the details. But she didn't have a gene sequencer, or the knowledge that went with it; she hadn't wanted to know.