"It's weird how many parallels there are between your plane and ours when we're composed of different sorts of matter. I'm not sure if I should lean into it or not. If I was going to I would assume that photosynthesis consumes water while respiration creates it."

"That depends on what you mean by 'consume'. Many organic compounds involve a combination of fire and other components, including water, which get the fire to be fairly inert until it is needed. Photosynthesis captures energy from light and fire in a structure of mostly water and earth, while respiration unravels those compounds."

"Aha... I think that's what I would expect if we materials in your world corresponded to materials in ours. I wonder how far that correspondence goes. We don't have any beings like yourself, plants-based beings who can think to a significant degree but I wonder how much you resemble our plants anyway. Maybe I'm getting sidetracked though. It's always hard to know what's important when embarking on a novel project."

"I certainly resemble unintelligent immobile plants from my world, I was built from them. If you're … nicer and less desperate and thus less prone to irritating the wilderness … I suppose it wouldn't feel as much need to empower the occasional tree and the like, and then if you don't have any treants or dryads around you don't bother thinking 'what if we created something kind of like that'? Or, wait, you think your worlds have no positive energy, so do you have no spontaneous awakening of creatures and objects not born to intelligent parents or crafted by intelligent designers?"

"We don't. If forests spontaneously manifested protectors when threatened our history would be very different."

"Is there some specific historic failure mode you'd like to discuss or have me read about? And in my world, it's not as though forests manifest protectors reliably or they reliably win, if that's what you were picturing."

"That makes sense, I don't think there's anything specific unless you count the impact of the crisis. It's just a long history of ecosystems being destroyed either to make way for development or as a consequence of pollution. We're trying to rebuild the ecosystems on our first world but it's a long slow process."

“I can see why that might be more destructive without counterbalancing pressures. I can accelerate plant growth if that’s of interest to Starlight?”

Griffie pauses. “Though possibly not your plants, since they don’t have positive energy spirits.”

"It's worth testing whether your can use your magic on our plants... if you're limited to only a few spells a day though I don't think it would make a significant impact. Maybe it will help more if we can copy it. We can make exact copies of plants but extrapolating natural growth given different conditions and genetics is somewhat beyond us."

“…huh. Speak with Plants might also be soul dependent. I’d be happy to run some tests. I’m also not quite sure I understand what your goals here are, I think it’s okay for a forest to look silly for a little while and it’ll hit equilibrium eventually?”

She smiles. "This is a research outpost, nobody will mind the growth being a bit unbalanced if it's because of an experiment."

"I mean more generally. You can make exact copies of plants, but this doesn't solve your ecosystem problems because you … don't have enough plants to copy to fill out a functional ecosystem? You're impatient for results to look natural and don't want to wait decades for it? You want to mimic old-growth forests and you think they will be terribly unaesthetic if all the trees are still almost identically shaped a century from now? Your replication stuff doesn't handle root networks well? You're immortals, but you're recently immortal, so you think that setting up some test ecosystems with replicated plants to see if they approach the state of the previous system, waiting for results, and then making more of the working setups everywhere, takes too long?"

"I don't actually know, I'm not deeply involved in that project. I think the concern is that with literal copies it's harder to replicate environments with a lot of plants in close proximity without making each section identical which means changing the contour of the terrain and we're not sure what the long term implications of that sort of tiled uniformity would be."

"Ah. Yeah, that does sound complicated. Not sure how much I can contribute, my main suggestion to a society of immortals would be 'mimic the points in primary succession where seeds and such get brought in from other ecosystems, and otherwise wait' and it's not a very insightful suggestion."

"Yeah, I think a lot of it is aesthetic many of our people want to roll back the clock instead of letting nature build something new and that's much harder. Also, like you guessed we're impatient. We expect to live millennia but nobody actually has."

"…huh. That's an interesting aesthetic preference, but it suggests that people who themselves share the preference will be better at working on the project. I myself tend to like partially-wild places that are managed with a somewhat light touch, but not so light a touch that it's not obvious to people who are looking for signs of it."

"There's a lot of reasons, part of it is that the weapons used in the war that started the crisis caused a lot of collateral effects. Also before that we were changing the balance of gases in our atmosphere which was causing increased temperatures across our entire world. Some places were regularly hot enough that people would die of heat stroke just from being outside."

"Why did you change the balance of gases like that?"

"It was a consequence of a technology the people living at the time used widely. Alternatives existed but for a lot of reasons people didn't adopt them in time to prevent the consequences from getting out of control."

"Ah. And then you eventually fixed it because you got wealthier and so it was easier to solve?"

"In a sense, really it's because we got magic and that was both directly and indirectly useful for fixing things. Our industrial capacity is larger now than it was before the crisis but it took fifty years to get to that point."

"How'd you get magic?"

"Oh... we were experimenting with something like a gate. And we ended up in the Heart's plane. I say we but I was born after that happened."

“…that’s interesting. Can you recommend me any books about the Heart?”

"I like 'The Heart, its Library and its Magic' It's a fairly neutral take and it acknowledges the impact it's had on us."