grace :)

hey don't worry? completely unrelated giant dump of heartwarming PHM doodles ok??

Rootbound by tak_cajaz

bloodymary • flowershop au • 7/? • 61.5k •

Ryland looked down at his clipboard, where he had written a reasonable script, supplied earlier that day by Adrian. Unfortunately, the moment his eyes landed on the words, his brain supplied only terrible ways to say them. He chose the worst one. “I need flowers with prominent reproductive structures.” The man went completely still. Ryland could feel his soul attempting to leave his body. “For a plant anatomy lab,” he added quickly. “For my students. Middle school students. Not–” He cut himself off, because there was simply no end to that sentence that would improve his situation. Instead, he just weakly smiled, and added “Science.” -:-:- Ryland Grace is brilliant with biology, awkward with adults, and far too invested in giving his students the lessons they deserve. Simon Fleischer is a guarded florist who trusts plants more than people and has no interest in being needed by anyone again. But when a forgotten school lab brings Ryland into Root & Thorn, their lives begin to tangle in quiet, unexpected ways – through flowers, roots, and the terrifying possibility of being cared for properly.

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Eridians' perception of the world relies on something that is completely absent in space — sound. They haven't been looking at the stars their entire existence the way we have. Their concept of aliens might only be as old as their discovery of astrophage. They made a bad ship, because it was their first one ever! Rocky himself says they rushed it, and that multiple (vital) things broke. Their mission was just as much of a Hail Mary pass as ours was — they had no idea what they were doing, if they could even travel in space safely. And, as it turns out, they couldn't.

Humans are the ones who have been doing it over multiple lifetimes. Mary is state of the art. We've been space farers longer than most humans have been alive. We can actually see through space. We are more likely to survive exposure to the void. We can encase our lighter, more flexible, more mobile bodies in a material that lets us walk outside of our ship, and, to a degree, we can get our bearings out there in a way Eridians just can't.

Stratt was a historian. She wasn't just pirating for the sake of entertainment for the astronauts, she was doing a full historical backup of the planet. Who knows how much knowledge and communications ability, how much art and culture and history, how much niche knowledge of how to make specific pieces of modern technology or modern medicines, was lost as the wars for resources isolated everyone, as the death tolls led to the deaths of specialized trade workers and scientists, as the power grids failing across the planet (or cut off, potentially) led to all the cloud servers going dark. Stratt was facing methods of combating extinction and she did her best to ensure that if/when the Hail Mary worked, it would send back not just the hope of the future in the solution to the astrophage, but the restoration of history and culture and knowledge.

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a visitor on the biodome!!