The healer eventually wakes up. They seems quite bewildered.

Relay tries to explain where they are. He goes through how he thinks they've been transported, and how there's a nice woman who's fetching some seeds, and he doesn't know how they got here.

The healer, Bond, wants to go, wants to go find some people they recognize. Relay explains that it's probably not easy to get back to people they know, that there isn't anyone in his range and the people here seem to be humanoid but definitely not humans.

The healer doesn't seem to get this. They seem to think he's either lying or mistaken, even though he doesn't seem the type to lie.

They don't seem to hear him when he repeats that he can't contact anyone he remembers, that there probably isn't anyone around, and that his range is back to what it was before. He's not sure how they can get back.

Instead of paying attention or focusing on Relay at all, the healer pokes around the room and doesn't pay any attention to Relay as he asks them for some names or faces.

The room contains hammocks, blankets, Relay, a desk, and a chair. The desk is a long piece of wood, held up by vines from the wall growing through holes along its edges. The desk is covered with sheets of tan, pentagonal paper, filled with densely painted ink symbols, and labeled diagrams of vines and bizarre things that might be bugs. There's also a thin paintbrush, and a wooden cup of thick black liquid. The chair is a three-legged wooden stool, topped with a thick teal cushion.

Through the window, he can see tall trees whose branches converge into cubes before reaching out again, with rope ladders hanging from holes in the sides, and trellises holding up flowering vines, and bushes with tiny red-glowing berries, and paths of empty soil lined in glowing teal grass. The sky visible through the dense leaves overhead is a dim reddish-purple.

The healer decides they need to get out of the room, get down a tree if they're in one, and then run off into the distance and find where the nearest less-crazy society is, and they did not sign up for a disaster that included terrifying hallucinations and/or illusions.

Relay tells them to just stop and listen and show him what they see and heal his legs because at this rate he can't do anything but talk to that woman who's gone to fetch some seeds –

– and there's a little mental click as he does it –

– and then all in one go, the healer stops moving and sends what they see and starts healing his legs.

The woman is back, with the seeds. She waves to the other person, who seems to be awake and uninjured.

"I have some simple seeds for you to try. Will he also understand if I think to him?" she asks aloud and sends.

– I can relay it, he sends back, looking at the healer.

The healer is not doing much of anything. They are standing and they seem slightly greener than usual but are otherwise standing quite motionlessly.

Not enough to look like a human, though. Weird. Do people like you change colors often?

She walks to the talking-person and holds out a seed to drop into his hand.

It's part of my power, says a voice in her head (after a few moments) that sounds plausibly like it could have come from the healer.

"Thank you," says Relay, looking at it. "What do I do with it?"

"Oh, okay. You- you're definitely touching it, right? There should be a pattern you can feel, and push changes into?"

He looks at it, observes he's touching it, and tries poking it.

... She sends him the sensation of feeling the patterns of a seed. Maybe he just is somehow not noticing them?

Or it could be something his kind of people just can't do.

He cannot in fact notice those. Would she care to just – keep sending that, while he works out if he's just not used to noticing them?

Sure. The feeling of the patterns of that particular seed, the feeling of pushing changes into the patterns of similar seeds. The much fainter feeling of the patterns in the wood of the floor, in case that helps?

Yep, if she can just keep sending that, that'll be helpful.

She's probably not very practiced with this form of communication. Would be a shame if she was leaking any other information, such as her opinions about him, if she happens to be lying about not knowing what or who he is, that sort of thing.

She sends a sense of what each of the components of the pattern of the seed she's holding does, and what effect different changes she could make to it might have.

She doesn't intend to send pity that he's injured and might be unable to do the objectively most fun and interesting thing ever, or consciously suppressed revulsion and nervousness (what sort of horrifying disease would turn people that color?  But it's not a disease they're just weirdly humanoid aliens, her instincts can hush). Nor does she mean to send guilt that she didn't ask the not-Relay-Formed person their (his?) name and now it's too late to not be possibly-insulting, and they might be sending all sorts of cues she hasn't noticed that she's actually harming them or being appallingly rude and that her housemate would be better at this but can't, and that she thinks she has a way to make tifozhe more productive and stop them from just undoing it but she needs to figure out if they'd still be light enough to float and trying to visualize the other effects of the changes she wants to make without writing it down or pausing too much in sending the changes she could make to the simple vine.

After a bit of trying to study the seed, he asks her how to actually modify the patterns, how you would try to enforce your change.

The other person, the not-Relay person, is not really moving. It's somewhat conspicuous.

Maybe it's a healing thing? Or something that kind of person just does? (They were standing up and sending thoughts to the Relay-Formed person, they aren't horrifically diseased or injured, they're just an alien.)

She nods and starts sending the specific sensations of transforming each outer piece into each of the others, then the inner pieces, and branching pieces. Then the sensation of forcing pieces to move or grow where they weren't before.

The other person is really weird and kind of creepy but she shouldn't judge. She continues to methodically send the feeling of pushing each change while trying to envision the effects of the changes she wants to make to the fozho vine. She's distracted from the design with the thought that if someone were unethical and blasphemous enough, they might make something like the alien people to protect them from malicious random editing in a smaller village. Obviously the tradeoff wouldn't be worth it if it meant they couldn't edit, as it seems increasingly likely that poor Relay-Formed can't, but she didn't feel any patterns at all when she helped her housemate apply the casts, as lifeless as clean water.

The aliens are apparently made of something else, not patterns, they could probably just walk out in the wild safely. Well, not safe but safer. She could probably make someone with the same protection, not a lack of patterns but something dead outside, like scaley plates of bark or fingernails. But that would be gross and bad and wrong and she shouldn't even be thinking it, so she forces her thoughts harder into the repetition of sending the feeling of pushing different changes into a nice abstract pattern. After a bit of this she asks "Is this helping?"

It's such a shame Relay forgot to warn her about all the leaking thoughts. Just such a shame.

"I don't think I can do it," he says, observing the seed that he is pretty sure he's been unable to change. "Is everything made out of these patterns, or just seeds…?"

Poor Relay-Formed. It would be so awful to not be able to even feel the patterns, or change them and watch the results grow. If it happened to her, she would probably - but it won't because it's an effect of the kind of thing he is.

"Everything that is or was alive is made out of patterns, but humans can only change the patterns in seeds. There aren't patterns in rain, or soil, or air, or things that have been really thoroughly burned."

"That sounds kind of like DNA," he comments. "Except we can't change it without technology or – some sort of power, I guess. My planet is definitely spherical, and the atmosphere – we don't call it a god, it's just a natural thing that does stuff."

"Your planet is bizarre, and your atmosphere-god inadequate, but I'm glad it mostly works for you. For what it's worth, it feels like you actually don't have patterns? I helped my housemate with the casts." She should have told him earlier, if he were a normal person he wouldn't want to talk to her again, she's an engineer and it would've been so invasive, but he doesn't have patterns she can sense so maybe it doesn't matter? (Maybe she could do that, if a human could have a layer of flexible shell like a slonde, but entirely dead and slowly replaced, like bark? Making the pattern unreadable by naturally having a layer of soil, somehow? And wow immediately after one violation of ethics she's contemplating another.) She tries to send a sense of apology for doing something that might have let her sense his patterns without permission, and not telling him about it.

"Genetic stuff isn't developed to the point you could do that so casually, back home, so there isn't really – etiquette on it. But thanks for being careful anyway."

Well. There are some benefits to the people of his world being unable to edit. Not that it's worth it but it does mean that it was less bad.

"Glad it wasn't as bad as it could be."

Nod. "So you can't edit the patterns of living creatures, past the seed stage?"

"No, some creatures can, but humans can't." Everything that moves edits at least slightly differently, and it's not clear why.

"… Are you able to edit– gametes?"