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Vernon is regretting directing his boss to buy this hunk of junk ostensibly known as a vehicle. Not very much, but a little. Mostly because she then made him drive it, and this is a finicky and temperamental beast that keeps listing to the left, but in amounts that change a bit on every single bump. They are driving through what is colloquially called 'the wasteland,' which is a desert about half as hospitable and twice as rocky as it sounds. He is having to adjust often. It's annoying. Not very, and honestly, having a functioning vehicle that is not potentially going to explode is a bit of a novelty for him, but enough that he will think fondly of that other vehicle boss-lady had been eyeing before he steered her this way. That sure would have been nice to drive. It would have been painting a gigantic target on their backs, but still. He can dream.
"To the people of civilization who aren't, themselves, willing to help the common people."
"Not directly or quickly, but if the information on how to fix them is more easily available, then it will be easier for someone else to. For the common people to figure it out themselves or for corporate sellouts to think it's financially worth the risk, either one."
He shakes his head. "I understand the logic but that's not quite what I meant. Someone like you is much more likely to be able to serve as a force multiplier on that data. If you just collect data until something happens to you then, sure, eventually people will use it for good. But wouldn't it be better if you collected some data, didn't die, and then went on to use that data for something better?"
"Well, sure. And I will obviously do that if I see an opening, I'm not stupid. But realistically it might not happen, I might not get lucky enough to pull it off, so."
He smiles again. "My apologies, I should have assumed you'd have thought of it."
She snorts. "Eh. It's fine, I like people questioning my logic and telling me if I'm missing something. Speaking of."
She holds up several data points from the past hundred-odd years. The ones where plants blipped red and then back when someone happened to flail at them the right way to get them fixed again.
"Zash. Were these you?"
"Ahuh. Which ones were you, and can you give me additional information about them and what was going on?"
"I don't remember all of the details of them all," he says, which is only not a lie because that would be many and he does in fact not remember them all. He remembers most, though. "But I can try." Starting with the more recent ones.
"Okay. That'd be appreciated, thank you."
Does she just so happen to have a template made for him to fill out for each instance? Yes. Yes she does. In about a dozen copies. Here he is, get writing, bud.
Technically speaking she is not going to breathe a word about how he's probably over a hundred years old to the general public. So whatever trouble he's in will not be of the 'people calling him a monster' variety.
But she will be over there, smugly going back to work. She knew it.
"I can hear your smugness, you know," he says from where he's working on her worksheets.
"I'm not trying very hard to disguise it, but I don't see how it could possibly be audible."
"So I've noticed! Is there a trick to it so that I could hear when plants tell you what's wrong?"
"Don't worry about it."
He can keep filling these out because they are nice and distracting yep.
But unfortunately, his hearing is not so good that he hears the chittering of a small device sneaking into the room and hiding itself under Yvette's bed.
Yvette herself similarly has no idea whatsoever. She eventually finishes up, has a quick meal, gets ready for bed, and then is asleep in little time at all.
The townies don't particularly seem to think that what happened with the Julai Military Police should impact... well, anything, really. After the initial awkwardness they basically go back to what they used to be like, some more friendly than others, some more interested in the outsiders than others, with their relationships and spats and drama and everything else that makes life worth living.
Since the first day, when Zash politely asked the water plant to stop feeding the food plant and they dealt with the most pressing issue, they haven't managed to improve the conditions there much, but that's because they've still mostly been spending their time in data collection to figure out the best avenues of improvement. A lot of the work is actually kind of just tediously waiting around for various diagnostics to run, but a good chunk of the rest is doing hard analyses on the results of these diagnostics. Soon enough they can start actually doing things that will help it recover, using some feedback systems to revert some of the energy the food plant uses to help the water plant as well as some built-in energy converters that use solar power to fuel the whole thing. It's not exciting work in itself, but it's good work, and it's pretty clear that they will, in fact, be able to get this plant back on its feet, so to speak.