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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.
"Of course," she snorts. "Now let's not kill him with ambient sugar intake."
"But my love, wouldn't you say he signed up for this when he decided to accompany us? I think if he didn't want to suffer us he shouldn't have agreed to it."
Read: if Vernon wants to dump a fake marriage scheme on them he will have to deal with fake married people.
That causes Yvette to break and start properly laughing.
"Okay. Point taken. Yes, we can probably actually pull off your stupid dumb cover story."
Zash leans back, a grin still playing on his lips. "So, plant engineer with ideas about how to save a red plant?" he prompts.
"Right! Yes, of course. So you're already aware of the support system used to keep plants in suspended animation to prevent them from living out their usual quick burst, minutes long lifespan, and the careful balancing of nutrients they need but shouldn't make because if they started it'd start them on their self destructive spiral--"
What follows is a dizzyingly technical conversation about interrupting the aforementioned self destructive spiral by mapping out the likely end result the plants themselves want and heading it off by giving it to them early. Followed by a long, long aside about mapping out the destructive spiral paths (because of course, plants cannot be observed making these nutrients themselves, since this is all happening in a different dimension) and probabilities. She has graphs, would he like to see the graphs. Too late, the graphs are here, and they are in front of him. The data is neatly mapped from the past one hundred and fifty years of people of this planet being very motivated to keep their plants alive as long as possible. See, if you look at data from this set of (still blue state) plants, and this other set of (also still blue state) plants, and then also this data from plants that briefly flickered red state and then someone managed to flail at them back into blue state, the pattern is obvious if follow this algorithm and also account for the personal histories of the plants themselves and how they've been treated over their lifetimes....
...well, he was more asking about her motivations and stuff than the technical details but he supposes that "launches into an in-depth explanation of technical details revealing months maybe years of research" is pretty revealing of her personality, is it not?
Fortunately, the character he's playing here has already revealed he knows a little bit about plant engineering, so he can reveal that he can understand her explanations pretty well. And one of the times she mentions one of the "briefly flickered" plants he can't help himself and corrects her on one minor detail in her hypothesis about what was going on there, which... is showing his hand a bit, isn't it, but on the other hand she does seem legit and he's gonna be showing his hand even more when they get to this city's plants and he helps her save them.
She notices and immediately pounces on this. Congratulations, Zash the Stampede, you are now being interrogated by Yvette Marlowe, plant engineer. Where did you get your data do you have citations and can you back up your hypotheses with equations she wants crunchy crunchy numbers right this instant and will only grudgingly take no for an answer.
"...I don't have all of that." ...off the top of his head. He could derive the equations, he does actually know some stuff, here. Not nearly as much as she does, but you can't save plants if you don't know any engineering. "But I was there, for that one." As in he's the one that did it.
POUT but okay fine then he must tell her ALL HE KNOWS about that one right there that he was there for that happened a... decade ago, really? Wow he looks good for his age guess that makes sense doesn't matter tell her your secrets.
Heeeeee really shouldn't tell her everything. There are things that really never go over well and so he's leaving them out. But what's left of the explanation then will look a lot like lucky guessing, or some sort of intuition, or more plausibly both.
Well FINE but for the record she KNOWS there is something else going on here, he is clearly getting his magically correct answers from SOMEWHERE, but she will GRUDGINGLY LET HIM HAVE HIS SECRETS and instead (grumpily) use the given data to narrow down probability zones for related circumstances. This involves doing math equations while muttering to herself about dimensional drift.
“… so a decade ago, huh?” says someone who didn’t understand a quarter of any of that.
"I thought asking someone their age wasn't a done thing," he says in a teasing tone.
“You don’t have to tell me, I just… need to know what level of shit we’re getting into, here.” He glances at his boss, furiously doing math. “A plant engineer willing to leave their cushy ivory tower to help the little guy instead of just propping up the elites is… once in a lifetime, you know? One of mine, anyway, I don’t know about yours.”
He gets a sappy look on his face again. "I know. My wife is great, isn't she? I love her so much."
"Ahuh," he sighs, then raises his voice. "We're coming up on Jeneora Rock soon, try to wrap up anything you're in the middle of, if you can."
"Ooh," he says, leaning forward again so he can see the town in the distance.
Jeneora Rock can barely be called a town, really. It owes its name to the huge rock it was built around—which, despite its precarious-looking condition, has stood tall since the town's founding decades ago—and it was made from the remains of one of the colony ships that mostly didn't make it a hundred and forty eight years ago, when humanity was first arriving on this planet and all of the ships were suddenly sabotaged at the same time. Most of its useful technology has been scavenged and brought to the bigger cities, but it somehow managed to retain two plants: one for water generation, and one for food. Both are vital to the survival of the people in the town, so if even one of them dies, they'll have to face the choice of dying with them or trying to go somewhere else.
It goes without saying that the kinds of people who live in a town this poor and small don't really have much means to go live somewhere else.
Jeneora Rock
Nobody officially stops them at the gates, but there sure are a lot of people now staring at them suspiciously as they find a place to park. At least he doesn't have to pay a damn toll for it, like in a city. It's just dirt (well, sand and rocks, really), they can in fact just park wherever is free and out of the way.
"All right, he who knows everyone here. Where are we heading to first? Diner?"
"I want at their plant I have ideas," mutters Yvette, still half buried in her equations, but bravely trying to extract herself.