Griffie looks skeptical. They haven't told the crew what they are yet, and the crew probably hasn't figured what 'plant-construct' meant. "Suppose that I had an animal with augmented intelligence around. Would they attack the animal, or attempt to forcibly strip it of its augmentations?"

"…no one on this ship, I strongly expect, and even… there are some factions that… I wasn't talking about people attacking you or such an animal. The door statement… is typically metaphorical, and even the literal case would be someone banging on your door to yell at you! I can't say we are completely free from violence, there are… issues, but… even on most of the colony worlds people don't just go get a mob together and attack people like that?"

"So, if we're working together, it would be productive to discuss something sensitive. I've probably given you enough information to eventually guess it, but you seem to have not figured it out yet. Can I get a promise of … even if you don't like what I tell you, you won't hurt the entities I tell you about, or report them to international authorities, or whatnot? Or at least give me until your estimate of when you would have pieced it together. I think this is excessive paranoia, but I've caused myself problems by discussing the subject before, so I have to ask."

"Is someone in danger due to this?"

"…not directly? There's been conflicts about the subject, though."

"All right. Give me a moment."

She taps her tablet a few times.

"Go ahead."

"So. When I was trying to teach your sphere-constructs Celestial, because I had shown them Celestial at first due to thinking they might speak it, I drew a sphere, labeled 'sphere', a sphere-construct, labeled 'sphere-construct', some plants, labeled 'plant', and myself, labeled 'plant-construct'. Because I am a person which another person built out of plants using special tools. I wasn't born the way humans or animals are born."

"The way I was produced was by building a plant body, which was more human-shaped than most plants are, but did not have an intelligence, and then adding intelligence to it after it was fully complete. The details of this in my case get even more controversial in my world, but maybe this is the most controversial part in your world?"

"The general type of plant construct that is created by building a human-shaped plant body and then adding an intelligence formed from a combination of nature spirits to it after it is complete is a 'leshy'. I am an 'Erloria leshy', meaning that I was created by Erloria, using a variant on the process. When Erloria created her leshies, she included a bit of her soul along with the nature spirits. This is probably why the Erloria leshies are unusually intelligent for leshies."

"The most controversial part in my world is that Erloria taught her leshies how to reincarnate each other. When one of us dies, we build a new body for that person, and while it's growing we patch up the damage to their soul using more nature spirit material, and then we put them in the new body. Nature spirit material is pretty flexible and willing to be included in projects like that. But it turns out that this procedure is extremely controversial in my world. This procedure is the quality of my species that makes us in violation of the treaty with Charon. The psychopomps found out about it because I mentioned it while trying to argue that they should leave Zita Imbrex alone."

"…and they tried to kill you over this. So… some people in our world commit war crimes. Some people have said various reasons for why dying of old age is important. These are things in our world. But there isn't a… general advocate for war crimes. There isn't a treaty calling for everyone to die, and I don't think anyone would be willing to agree to one! When people call for someone to be killed, or try to kill them, it is almost always because they imagine some benefit or vengeance or higher purpose. Propaganda about how the group is responsible for everything bad in the world, for example. Not just because… they think the world needs more war crimes as a general rule? Sometimes people are willing to say very dubious things, but I don't think the people calling for, say, the removal of all technology would be thrilled to watch people die of the diseases we can cure."

"So. First, to clarify a specific point: The treaty enforcing aging is between anti-aging parties and Charon. The treaty requires some aging in exchange for Charon agreeing to not arbitrarily age empires full of people to death in minutes, that sort of thing. Furthermore, Charon plausibly has the capacity to restart the world-destroying war if he wants, so people have to work with him."

"The psychopomps and Charon are different. The psychopomps are not a major faction, and Charon makes no claims that death is good. Many psychopomps hate Charon. I'm not sure what psychopomps would think of claims that aging itself is Charon's work, I've never heard from them since evidence in favor of the theory came to light. Psychopomps are offended by the view that if daemons wish to de-age someone, it's an internal Abaddon matter. That came up in the speech the terrorists gave after the ruling on Zita Imbrex."

"And regarding the broader point: Yes. You have human-sized problems, and you don't have quintessence-powered factions. It's very rare for humans to mimic the non-selfish evil behaviors of fiends, unless they're doing so for religious reasons, and if you don't have Lower Planes deities you don't have religions around them. …though I'd like to know if there were any mysterious changes in the stillbirth rate that you can't attribute to any obvious cause in the past year, the thing I want to check for shouldn't be there but it's good to check a hypothesis. It is too bad that you don't have the Upper Planes, they're quite useful, but … if the people on this ship are merely unusually good but not shockingly so, for your society, you're probably doing pretty well anyway?"

"I see. If we were to make contact, would this mean that our own work in aging reduction would mean that your world would back him up if he decided to have us age all to death in minutes, and would he be capable of that?"

"So. The last time Charon is known to have aged civilizations to death in minutes, it was via a mechanism of aging he was intimately familiar with, and using a specific, powerful device he built, which he no longer owns. I would hope that should he wish to design a method of doing the same to the people of this world, it would require either significant design effort or accumulating power in a detectable way such that other deities would be obligated to make a preemptive strike. I don't know the full extent of his capabilities, however."

"I don't know whether your work in aging reduction would be treated as legal or not. You are likely outside of the area Axis successfully attempts to exert jurisdiction over. All the Lawful planes appreciate being voluntarily contacted and Heaven is Good. Both Axis and Heaven would attempt to cause you to not regret contacting them. Different things are legal in different worlds."

"I don't know what Axis would consider the baseline for your two species in terms of aging rates. I don't know whether you are even considered alive for the purposes of the treaty."

"…one more concerning thing to add to the list then. Now, where… ah yes, electricity or animal testing."

"Animal testing sounds more important, but electricity testing seems like something we can do quite quickly while your organization is still figuring out what we should do if we get an intelligent animal in a world that isn't used to them."

Cornelia sends a copy of the animal testing plans to Griffith's tablet!

Given that Griffith's spells have so far ranged from 'harmless' to 'augmenting more than expected', and friendliness seems important, they are proposing that animal testing be done on the ship's shared companion rodents. The crew are prepared to offer the rodents increased access to public areas of the ship and more complex activities should this become necessary.

Procedures call for Griffith to make contact with several rodents, for exposure testing, and only cast spells on fewer of them. They encourage Griffith to be in close proximity to the rodents for an extended period. 

Cornelia and the others who worked on this plan recognize that Griffith's spells may be hazardous to animals in a way that they weren't hazardous to plants. They consider the importance of test results to be worth it compared to the risk to the animals.

For spellcasting tests, they call for Griffith to begin with the disease diagnostic. Cornelia expects that Griffith would prefer to attempt to speak with an animal before casting with a chance of modifying the animal, and the testing procedures account for this. Subsequently, the rodents are to be exposed to varying amounts of undirected positive energy, as well as disease removal. 

Cornelia also sends Griffith information about the rodent species. They're from the mercurial homeworld. Griffith doesn't recognize them, but they look somewhat like neotenic rats. The mercurials have had a long time to selectively breed animals for roles including companionship, and these rodents have also been genetically modified. The most visible such alteration is that they have oddly colorful patterns, some of which glow under ultraviolet light.

The rodents' capabilities and tendencies have been fairly exhaustively measured, and will be measured again after spell testing. Loss of original personality is considered a priority to check for, and more testable with rodents than with chamomile.

The rodents will be brought in restrained such that Griffith can touch them, but set up to be rapidly released into larger enclosures after spellcasting. Procedures for this are designed such that it would be quite difficult for a rodent to bite Griffith, as while they have checked their reactions to fake 'animated plant creatures' made to resemble Griffith, they are not sure how well their response of 'peaceful confusion' will generalize to the actual Griffith or the experience of having a spell cast on them.

Griffith considers the plans to be reasonable and thoughtful. They are ready for contact testing and Speak with Animals testing now, and will be ready for positive energy testing after fifteen minutes of meditation.

Also, wow, the crew got a nonmagical and spiritless succulent plant that looks quite similar to Griffie's base species, somehow sculpted it rapidly to look like Griffie without scarring, induced color changes, and animated it a bit with some kind of electrical mechanism? That's pretty weird, but cool. Griffie kind of wants to poke it.

Cornelia sends in the rodents.

Speak with Animals targets Griffie, not any individual animal, so it's going to be relevant to the rodents just doing contact and proximity testing anyway. Griffie casts it.

The spell informs Griffie that there are no animals nearby, and without a soul it cannot translate.

The spell also informs Griffie that there are things that look a lot like animals, probably illusions, and it will as a less reliable fallback try just reading their body language under the assumption that they are made to imitate actual animals.

Most likely, their body language indicates that they are nervous about some impending event, but confidently expect it to be worthwhile shortly after some unpleasantness.

"My Speak with Animals spell says that there are no animals nearby, and translation is soul-dependent. However, it's a very advanced Speak with Animals variant, so it is making its best guesses about your rodents based on body language. They … plausibly think this is a medical appointment after which they will get treats, if that's an animal-handling method you do with them? They expect the near future to be unpleasant but expect it to be overall worthwhile … hopefully it will be worthwhile for them and not just the rest of us. Also my spell speculates that the rodents are likely illusions. I don't think the designer ever considered utterly soulless living rodents not made of any of the four elements or quintessence."

"Yes, they get treats after medical appointments, and those little restraints are ones used for some of the more unpleasant appointments. The treats are at least supposed to make it worthwhile in ways they can understand, though I'm not an animal expert."

"Sounds reasonable to me. If the rodents are alive afterwards we can give them treats this time too, right? Shall I get to poking the ones doing contact-only tests?"

"I would expect so, assuming we have treats that work for them after any changes that occur? And yes, please begin."

Griffie gently pokes each of the rodents doing contact tests.

The rodents squirm a bit at this strange poking but do not seem alarmed.