Heart of the Sun [2430-1-4 Thurs 4pm]

[Mai]

The fact that Blu had made all of this himself was so impressive. The ship in itself was amazing, but this working mini world inside of it, plants living all on their own... she could never have imagined it in a million years. He was a weird little fellow, but his mind astounded her.

Mai was surprised when he simply ripped the plant from the ground and started munching on it. It looked so dirty coming out of the ground dry. Was that safe with no water? Apparently, since he was doing it. She made a mental note of which ones were safe to eat for the future as he motioned around.

She ran her fingers along a tree trunk, amazed at the sight of it. "So... will we be going to the planets these come from??"

[Blu]

Blu nodded, "Of course! I don't think I have any moss from Glacies here, but we'll be headed back close to the sun to recharge the new batteries we'll be getting, and we can stop at all the other planets! Most of these are from Antheia, or old seeds from Terra, or a few of the wetter places on Heimdall!"

He really wasn't looking forward to Terra, but it wouldn't be fair to make them miss out because he had problems with his homeworld. Anyway, maybe he could wear a disguise so nobody noticed him. He could dye his hair or something, and then nobody would look at him! Maybe blonde?

Blu finished munching on his carrot and he got up, heading to the bin camouflage in the back. He lifted up the top and tossed the carrot top into it and then quickly shut it. A little of the smell escaped, like it always did, and Blu wrinkled his nose. "This is where the compose is!" He quickly told them, getting away from it. "It's where you put anything organic, so it'll rot and turn back into dirt. It smells pretty bad right now, but that's just because it's really fresh."

[Sonya]

Making careful note of which plants could be eaten, Sonya moved forward and began to examine them. She had to be sure she was using healthy ingredients. After all, what kind of cook would she be if she made the crew sick? Reaching down, she poked her fingers into the soil next to some tufted green plants. It was softer and wetter then she had expected. She rubbed some of the dirt between her fingers, lifting it closer to her and inhaling deeply. It smelled wonderful, something she’d discovered on her previous visit to the gardens.

Sonya examined the small green plant for a moment. It looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t remember what it was used for. Nevertheless, she reached down and tried to pull it up, which took surprising strength. After a minute of tugging, she examined her find. It was a carrot. Sonya stared at it in surprise. So that was where she had seen the small green plant before. It wasn’t a plant at all, just the top of a carrot. How strange. She shrugged, picking up the thread of Mai and Blu’s conversation as she set the vegetable on the floor next to her. “Will we be going to all those places?” She asked eagerly, distracted. “I’ve always wanted to see all the planets!”

[Blu]

"Of course! We can go anywhere!" Blu said as he headed away from the compost and sat down beside the lime tree. The fruit tree was large and bushy, growing wildly in all directions. He was going to have to trim it down, but he almost hated to do it. He liked the way it grew wild. "We'll see all the planets! But we'll have to be charged all the way up if we go out of Nox."

Nox. Blu didn't have anything against the planet, but he'd only been there once and that had been more than enough. It had been so dark and gloomy, and the sunlight so far away. Blu liked Terra more than Nox, and he spent most of his time on Terra wearing big sunglasses and hoping people didn't recognize him.

"We can do them in mostly-reverse order!" He told the girls, "We can stop on Glacies, and then when we go back in, we can go to Antheia, and then Terra, and then Heimdall! It'll be fun!" It would be fun. It had been a while since he'd had crew members as exciting about exploring as Blu was. There was all sorts of things they could do!

[Mai]

"Sounds cool!" Mai nodded, still inspecting the tree. Whichever planet this was from, she knew it was going to be her favourite. There weren't trees anything like this on Corus. They were thin and vine-y and nothing like this grand plant that stood before her, it's branches reaching out in all directions like it wanted to hug the whole garden, scooping it into it's big leafy arms...

She blinked in surprise at the thought, and then realized she wanted to let it. She glanced upwards, at the branch not too far above her head, brain already working. She reached up, grabbing hold of it and hoisting herself up into the tree. It was harder than she'd realized, and she could only assume there was a way to use her legs to help, but she was lucky she was able to walk on her legs, let alone use them to climb. The plus side of always swimming, however, is that a mermaid has a lot of strength in their arms, and that was what saved her from tumbling back down to the floor immediately.

She managed to throw a leg over the branch and straddle it, leaning her back against the trunk and then looking down at the other two in triumph. "Wow!"

[Blu]

Blu couldn't help laughing as Mai pulled herself up into the tree. It would have been easier if she'd just used her legs, but instead, she just hauled herself up only by her arms. Blu was kinda impressed. There was no way he would have been able to do that with only his arms. Mermaids must have super upper-body strength! The only thing Blu had was super not-strong-at-all non-strength.

"Awesome!" Blu grinned at Mai, shoving his hair out of his face so he could see her better. The lemon tree was kinda getting in the way, so he scooted around it. "That's an apple tree from Antheia! You can eat the fruit on it!"

[Sonya]

“That’ll be great!” Sonya agreed, turning back to the vegetables, but keeping an ear on the conversation as well. She found some string beans and pea pods, beginning to think of making some sort of cooked noodles-and-vegetable dish. Some green onions would be good in that too, if only she could find them. They were probably here somewhere, but there was the slight problem that they could be just about anywhere. They could grow underground like carrots, or even in a tree. Much to her surprise however, Sonya soon found a bunch of familiar looking thin green stalks sticking out of the ground.

“Hey Blu,” she turned around, trying to tug the onions from the ground. “Do we have any…” Mai was in a tree. “Cool!” She cried, forgetting that she was seventeen now, and too mature to get so excited about such things. “I wanna try that!” She abandoned her battle with the onions, laying the vegetables she’d already picked in the dirt of the bed. Practically running to the nearest tree, Sonya wrapped her arms around a limb and tried to lift herself up. Mai had made it look easier that it was.

Her feet slipped on the bark and she slid to the ground. But Sonya hated admitting defeat, at least, when there were people around to see her do so. She tried again and ended up hanging upside from the branch by hands and feet, like some sort of strange sloth. Eventually, however, though she could not remember the exact motions she had gone through, Sonya found herself sitting upright on the branch, at the price of a scraped knee. She punched the air, grinning. “I did it!”

[Mai]

An apple tree? Mai glanced up in the branches and noticed red fruit hanging from them. Curiosity got the best of her and she reached for the closest one, plucking it from it's branch. She turned it around in her hands, inspecting it. It seemed safe. Plain, but pretty at the same time. Blu said it was safe to eat, so she did her best to take a bite. It was a lot harder than she expected, it not being a soft kind of fruit like she was used to, but it was sweet. She smiled down at him. "This is great!"

She glanced over towards where Sonya had followed suit and was attempting to climb her own tree. She laughed a little at the sight of her hanging nearly upside down, and then once the younger mermaid finally got herself up into the tree, Mai gave her a round of applause. "Oh Blu, this is amazing. How in the world don't you have more people here with you yet?"

[Blu]

Blu couldn't stop laughing. Mermaids up in trees. Awesome, so awesome. He clapped for both of them, beaming happily. Blu didn't bother climbing up, since they had the best trees and he was happy under his lime tree. "You're naturals! Nobody would know that you hadn't spent your whole lives climbing up things!!"

Why didn't Blu had more people with him? He shrugged, "I've had people before, but people tend to come and go. Family emergencies and stuff. My last cook had to leave because of one of those. But it's not bad! I always get to meet new people this way!" Blu loved new people. He loved old people too, but new people were always so exciting. You got to find out what things you both liked, like food and shoes and water and paints, and you got to do things with them for the first time! "This way, it's like it's always a brand new adventure every day!!"

[Sonya]

Sonya giggled uncontrollably, spreading her arms wide as if flying. She felt like such a little kid again, ecstatic at being praised. But it was Blu’s words especially that made her glow with pride. No one would know. She could pretend for the rest of her life if she wanted to, and no one would ever know. No one would look scornfully at her because she had some skill using legs, or because she carried a padd. Humans always did those things.

She was finally once and for all moving away from the Sonya she used to be, the mermaid Sonya, the child of the sea. She was a space girl now, just as she had always dreamed. Noticing that Mai was eating a piece of fruit, she quickly examined her tree for signed of fresh produce. A cluster of small, purple, teardrop shaped fruits caught her eye. She didn’t recognize them but tried to move toward them anyway. The branch under her creaked, and Sonya froze. The fruit was to far out on the limb, she wouldn’t be able to reach it without breaking the branch.

[Blu]

Blu winced as he heard the creak. He didn't need to tell Sonya to be careful, the tree was doing that for her. He hurried over, stretching up on his tip-toes and swatting at the cluster a few times before he finally managed to break one off. From there, it was easy enough to toss it up to Sonya.

A broken tree was a bad thing. It took a lot of energy for them to heal up and they'd stop making fruit while they did, since they couldn't waste energy on seeds when they had basically a whole arm yanked off. They might even get sick and die. Blu didn't say any of this because he didn't want to panic Sonya or Mai or make them feel bad for climbing up the trees.

Instead, he said, "Just wait until you guys see real forests. They're so much better than this. This is just a garden, but forests are huge! They go on for miles! And they're alive and breathing and everything!"

[Sonya]

“Thanks!” Sonya called down to Blu as she caught the small fruit he had tossed up to her. The branch under her creaked again as she bent sideways to pluck the tiny purple teardrop from the air. Realizing she was still to far out, Sonya quickly moved back along the limb. She could have sworn she heard the tree sigh with relief. She reached out and patted the trunk. “Don’t worry tree. I don’t want to hurt you.”

She lifted the small purple fruit to her mouth and tried to take a bite. The skin was tougher than she’d expected, and it took a few tries before her teeth punctured the surface. Chewing was also a somewhat slow process, but the fruit was sweet, the inside almost jelly-like and full of small seeds. “Mmmmm…” She murmured, “This is really good!” She turned, as much as one could when sitting in a tree, and smiled at Mai. “How do you like your apple?”

[Mai]

"Oh I guess that makes sense," Mai nodded in response to Blu. "I can't imagine why they wouldn't want to stay, though. Are they people who don't like gardens, or space?" Maybe they were people who grew up with trees, Mai realized. Just like she grew up in the ocean, the ocean no longer felt special to her.

"Apple... is that what it's called?" she asked Sonya, and then glanced back at the fruit in her hand. She took another bite, mulling over it in her mouth for a bit before swallowing. "It's... crunchy, but sweet. So strange!"

The more she pondered what Blu had just said, the more it worried her. She glanced closer at the tree branch she was sitting on, running her fingers along the bark some more. Did the tree have a face somewhere? "Breathing? Trees breathe? ...am I hurting it by being here??"

[Blu]

Blu sat underneath the trees, sprawling out on the grass and staring up at the pair. "Oh yeah, there are lots of people who hate space and gardens. Some people have allergies, or they're just not used to them. And space can be scary, I guess. Or they just like living on planets better." He rattled on, listing off reasons people would leave. "People sometimes decide they just want to go somewhere else because they've got friends there, or relatives maybe, or the pay's better, or they want to go somewhere else."

"No, the tree's okay! It'll let you know if you're hurting it. It'll creak, or crack, or make some other noise." Blu assured Mai. He didn't want either of them to be afraid they'd hurt the plants. After all, you could always replant things. And he knew they'd be gentle with the trees. "They don't actually breathe, not like animals do. It's complicated. They like... breathe with their skin. Only their skin is the leaves, and the roots. And they breath in dirt and light and air. It's like... they get their food from the universe!" He spread his arms wide on the grass at 'universe'. Sometimes he wished he were a tree too. But it might get boring, and Blu didn't handle boredom too well.

[Sonya]

“How could anybody hate space, or gardens?” Sonya stretched her arms out, grabbing hold of two sturdy branches behind her and leaning back. She was relieved not to hear any creaking. “This is seriously like, the best thing in the world! Or, off any of the worlds I suppose. But honestly, being here is the best thing that ever happened to me!” She sat up and grinned at Mai, feeling rather smug that she knew what an apple was. Mentally, she began to list all of the things she knew how to cook with apples.

Most of them were dessert type things, the stuff that cooking instructors liked to teach early on to get younger students hooked to the idea that cooking was about making sweet, yummy food. Now that she was thinking about it, maybe she’d try making an apple pie soon, although the recipe was actually a lot more complicated that most people seemed to think. “Oh, I’m glad I’m not hurting the tree!” Sonya patted the trunk again. “I’d hate to be harming something so incredibly awesome!