Six Weeks Later...
Reaching for her glasses, Botanica climbed out of her bed, and making her way to the bathroom, preparing herself for the day ahead. Hopefully, we can get those new seedlings planted today, she thought, while fixing her mane. Suddenly, she paused. Wait a minute, am I looking FORWARD to working here now? The question hung in her mind for a few minutes, as the mare realized the truth. Though a prisoner in the palace, she really was beginning to enjoy her work in the botany lab.
Of course, having a willing assistant made it that much more inviting.
He was waiting outside her door, just like every morning. Zarkin, the Vectin guard, who wished to work with plants himself. She had taken to teaching him about botany during her time working in the palace. It was turning out that he had quite the green, well claw, she supposed, glancing at the long claws on his hands. Stepping out, she smiled and greeted him, just as she did every morning.
"Good morning," she said, careful not to put too much friendliness into it. Something he said about the way the other guards would think about his duty, getting to close to the prisoner and all. She thought it was silly, but he insisted.
"Come," he said, following his own morning pattern, and led her through the palace to their laboratory. Well, that was how she thought about it, anyway. As usual, he entered behind her, and closed the door.
"Shall we start with the new seedlings?" she asked, indicating a tray sitting off to the side. "I want to get them potted before I go over the growth chart on last months bio-pod yields."
"Very well," he agreed, but instead of moving the tray to her, he was fiddling with a pot in the corner. Straining her neck to look, she noticed that it had a sickly looking weed growing in it.
"You've been working with that for a while now," she commented, "what are you doing with that weed?"
"Personal experiment," he said, adding a bit of water to the pot. "It is grafted with flower from home-sphere. Flower is week, cannot survive most places." His raspy voice was doing better with her language, picked up over the past few weeks. "Weed resilient, grow anywhere. I graft together to make flower stronger."
Botanica frowned. "I'm not sure it's working. That plant doesn't look very healthy to me. Are you sure it is taking the graft?"
"No," he answered, and she could hear the disappointment in his voice. "Will die, as attempts before have." He stood up, gave it one last look, before turning to fetch the tray of seedlings she mentioned earlier. "But that private job. Work need to be done."
"Of course," she said. While his idea had her interest, and she wanted to help, one thing she had learned was that Vectin did possess a sense of pride. Allowing him to solve the problem on his own would show his botany lessons were successful. Sometimes, the teacher has to step back and let the student handle it, she told herself, taking the tray from him and setting it on her work bench. Let him keep trying, he'll figure it out eventually. "Well, in that case, hand me some small pots, and let's get these planted. Once they've grown strong enough, we can send them to the fields." This was a new strain she was working on, to increase the yields of bio-pods grown on each plant.
"What about making plants grow faster?" Zarkin asked, head slightly tilted to the side.
"One step at a time," she replied, moving a hoof gently among the seedling leaves. "One step at a time..."