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In Love's name and for Love's sake, I assert that I will employ the Art which is its gift in Love's service alone, rejecting all other usages.
I will spread joy and ease pain. I will fight to preserve what loves and rejoices well in its own way, and I will change no object or creature unless its joy and love, or that of the system of which it is part, are threatened.
To these ends, in the practice of my Art, I will put aside despair for hope, and hatred for love, when it is right to do so-- Until Universe's end.
Y/N
wen ning is the erogamer
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boy-are-you-gigo
"--wait. Trees are people? WE CUT DOWN THEIR BODIES AND TURN THEM INTO CELEBRITY GOSSIP MAGAZINES."
"--Okay, yeah, that isn't good."
Now he feels bad about all the university textbooks he bought and read four pages of.
boy-are-you-gigo
"We need to go talk to a tree right now! --We need to put on pants and then go talk to a tree right now!"
...this is a moral emergency that needs pants and dealing with now. Even if he would rather not.
And pants and shirt are put back on so there's no public indecency charge.
boy-are-you-gigo
Hurriedly putting pants back on! Skipping the shirt and shoes because there's no time! Going to go FIND A TREE
And he can follow after him to... talk to a tree. With his vocabulary of mostly thank you and emotion words.
Here is a very nice tree of... some species. Wen Ning is not a tree expert.
Well, the manual didn't specify a specific tree species, so it should be fine?
"I can try just talking with it, though my vocabulary is pretty limited--" he flicks through the manual. "Though I do have a meditation that might help? ...if you don't mind waiting twenty minutes."
To change something, you must first describe it. To describe something, you must first see it. Hold still in one place for as long as it takes to see something.
He can try that, even if that's a very vague instruction. He stands a reasonable distance from the tree. (Do trees have personal space?)
And he looks.
Wei Wuxian is fiddling with his phone, and Wen Ning is trying not to be too distracted by it.
The tree is more or less alone, surrounded by grass of an equally mysterious species. The side walk is covered with cracks from the heat and rain and being more trouble to repair than its worth.
It's quiet, but not silent. There's constant traffic noise, and wind rustling through leaves and making clotheslines creak. And intellectually, he knew things were never silent-- but it's something to realise how much sound he was ignoring.
And how much visual detail, too. Each clump of grass is unique, the same basic shape and parts arranged in infinite combinations, spreading out and out until it's an undefined whole but really it's all individual, unique pieces--
<<None of you people can listen. I feel like I've been waiting for fifty years and I'm only forty years old.>>
<<It's about time. --You're very pale, you know. I like the brown ones better. They look barkier.>>
<<But then we cut them down?...Do you approve of whatever causes more trees, regardless of what happens to them afterwards?>>
<<Of course, it's not good to cut them down, but if you didn't cut them down they wouldn't exist at all. So paper is much better than the alternative.>>