#plant!reader

Flambae things Reader’s powers are dumb and useless, growing plants, like who cares? How is that going to help in a serious mission? So of course he gives them a lot of shit for it. Burning their favorite plants, drying out the water, etc. Taht is up until he sees Reader strangling an enemy with an oriental bittersweet vine, (picture attached) it can reach up to 8 inches in girth and is very hard to break through. Okay so maybe….maybe their powers might be a tiny bit useful.

Though they can try to communicate to humans using their natural telepathy, the act itself is incredibly painful to the humans it’s directed to because their brains are simply not wired to understand the mental language, and instead it causes massive migraines.

Over time, plant!reader finds that it is much easier to learn how to communicate through other means, which has led a lot of unsuspecting folk to assume that they are simply mute, and thus over time they have picked up a simplistic form of sign language that is accentuated with very gentle nudges of their telepathic voice.

Since this has worked well enough, they have never bothered to learn to speak—so you can imagine the complete shock from plant!reader when they realize out of the blue one random day that there is someone who not only doesn’t keel over in agony under the weight of their thoughts, but also has the ability to respond to them in kind. It’s like finally being able to breathe, finally having a gag removed from their metaphorical mouth.

Let’s see, we got:

- Wingfic a la mangaverse plant designs

- Plant courtship?? Aka when Vash and/or Knives can’t explain the strange protective urges they have towards the reader or the desire to constantly have their Attention(tm)

- Breeding kink. That’s it. Repopulation time boys

- What if plant!reader straight up has fucking terraforming powers. Like. They were a higher secret experiment on a SEEDS ship or somehow by the miracle of I Said So they were born by another plant on Noman’s Land and they have the ability to slowly terraform the planet into something actually livable

- “Reader has two hands” meme and each hand is for Vash and Knives like come on boys you’re not alone and they can fix BOTH OF YOU

I’m just imagining the two of them are just fighting constantly, meanwhile plant!reader is slowly manifesting a lovely little flower garden around them, either completely oblivious or confident that the brothers will work out their differences one way or another.

Thank you!! I’m absolutely feral about exploring and developing fictional species, since it’s a ton of fun to throw ideas at the wall to see what makes sense—especially when it comes to romantic behaviors and such :3c Sci-fi is my preferred flavor of worldbuilding after all, so the idea of Stampede plants being explicitly non-human aliens offers up so much potential that I just can’t leave it be 👀

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I prefer to think that plants, like humans, are fully capable of evolving to better suit their environment—perhaps even faster or more drastically than what most people would expect from them. This could easily account for the birth of Vash and Knives, as it would make sense to develop an appearance that allowed them to better blend in with humans; this could be interpreted from the perspective of prey trying to escape the attention of a predator, or perhaps even the opposite: a predator trying to hide among its unassuming prey.

Given the lacking records of non-independent plants becoming aggressive to the humans who rely upon them, most people tend to believe the former opinion, though there has never been any hard evidence either way. A majority of people—even prior to the great crash—don’t even believe plants to be sentient creatures.

Some people theorize that plants were not truly created, but instead originate from a parent alien species that humans had come into contact many generations prior to the SEEDs ships departing earth. Other people even think that plants aren’t from our dimension at all, which could explain why they are capable of creating all manner of organic material from basic forms of energy in a way that seems to defy the laws of physics. The truth has long been forgotten regardless, lost in dead memories or destroyed computers when the ships crashed upon Noman’s Land, and most people don’t have the time or energy to research such useless information.

Nonetheless, these details may point to plants trying to evolve past the tools they were originally created to be, perhaps if only to communicate with humans themselves; its hard to tell if the relationship is truly symbiotic or not, especially when plants themselves are so alien that few people have actually never seen one’s face before. Do they want to protect the people whom rely upon them for their livelihoods? Do they yearn for freedom from the boundaries of their glass enclosures? …Could they even survive the world beyond it?

This in the end leads me to an interesting concept; a non-independent plant metamorphosing into a form that appears to be human, but only on the surface. Like a chrysalis, it is simply to protect them from the harsh world beyond their cage—the only environment they were ever designed to thrive in. Imagine this plant having to learn how to be human, but also how to hide their abilities from those who might try to use them like a tool—perhaps this plant has inadvertently evolved into something incredibly powerful, capable of creating not only water and food, but terraforming swaths of the desert landscape.

Perhaps this plant is the next step in the natural progression of their species, which itself has somehow decided that the next step is not simply surviving on their new host planet, but transforming it into a truly habitable planet according to what very well may be written in their DNA.

I especially like to think it’s something that the reader has essentially no control over, and they don’t really understand the social meaning of it either—to them, manifesting their wings is simply something that happens whenever they’re emotionally-charged, particularly when they’re nervous or flustered. At first there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to it, but over time it becomes more and more obvious that their wings manifest largely in the presence of Vash or Knives—and always in a dramatic flurry of loose feathers, much to the reader’s further embarrassment.

Vash simply tries to ignore the implications as best as he can, though not without plenty of stuttering and half-hearted attempts to hide the heat blooming across his cheeks. It’s not so much that he is embarrassed for the reader, but instead that he’s flustered over how much their ignorant nonverbal messages are affecting him; the last thing he wants is to break a boundary because they didn’t know what they were doing in the first place. That said, he is absolutely terrible about bringing it up even in casual conversation, leaving the mutual pining completely I communicated.

Between the two of them, Vash is the first one to make a move—it’s difficult to tell the difference between his motions of courtship and those that aren’t, as he is a friendly man to almost everyone he meets. Finding the occasional trinket hidden amongst your things was curious, but it never once struck you as something worth mentioning. Once you had found a shiny piece of sculpted metal made from several spent bullet casings, and on another occasion there had been a necklace placed perfectly so you’d come across it after waking up, crafted from a rough-cut gemstone that glittered like the full moon.

They were nice and lovely, but there was a particular gift that made your heart flutter upon finding it: a clean, fresh flower. There was something about seeing it, vibrant and in a full bloom, that made you incredibly happy—perhaps it was because the flower, though plucked, was something truly alive. You could feel the gentle hum of its energy flowing through the stem and petals, could sense the fertile soil where it had been so lovingly grown. The instincts of your true form were hardly needed to understand how precious the anonymous gift was, and you made sure to keep that flower alive for as long as you could spare the energy and attention.

Vash, of course, eventually commented upon it. He must have thought he was being sly, but it wasn’t difficult to figure out that it had been him who had gifted it to you. Despite the desire to know where he had gotten it from, there was something that had kept you silent; it felt like a game between the two of you, and somehow you instinctively knew that the game had to play out properly.

What that entailed was entirely beyond your conscious thoughts, since you understood your plant self about as much as you understood your human form: which is to mean not at all. Instincts and innate muscle memory are what led most things for you, like faraway whispers that tried to help you know what to do when all else failed.

You wonder if this is how your people—how plants so many generations back, before perhaps even human influence—had courted one another.

When Knives begun to follow suit with his brother, the notion became even more clear. One flower had become two, then three, then several more. You kept them all alive and at a full bloom, though you aren’t sure how. Instinct demanded that you treat them as precious things, wonderful things, but it was eventually infeasible to simply carry them in a bundle.

So, for no reason that your mind could offer, you started to weave them together. The motions themselves seemed familiar and comforting despite the fact that you had never been taught them; the stem of one flower braided alongside another, over and over until items formed that you could wear instead of carry. A bracelet of bright blossoms, a crown of beautiful blooms; these things somehow felt right to make of the brothers’ gifts, though you couldn’t place a particular reason as to why.

Was it the act of perceived creation which impressed you so deeply? The idea that they could produce something so fragile and beautiful on a planet that didn’t otherwise allow such things to grow?

They're just vibing happily on the ground with a bunch of blossoms sprouting around them as the others just watch in confusion and awe and Vash is just. Generally pleased about the whole thing.

Wolfwood: What the hell are you doing?

Plant!Reader, from beneath several layers of flowers: I'm photosynthesizing!

Wolfwood: You're doing WHAT?