"I suppose you wouldn't be. Your sense of smell is pretty good, though."

"It is! I'm also stronger than normal people and think I have better vision, too, so, you know. That's nice."

Yvette seems to be having a moment, her head is buried in her hands and she's just looking horrified.

"Tragic backstory, part two? You did want it to be broken up into chunks."

"What, yours? Right now???? No!!! No, not right now, I need another fucking minute holy shit!"

"I mean, I'm curious, and I didn't get the part one, soooooo..."

"It's mostly because it's, you know, connected." He gives Morgan a soulful look and leans forward to take both of her hands into his. "Our pasts are intertwined~"

She gasps, and clasps him back.

"Are you my real dad after all?"

"...probably more like uncle? If what's going on is what I think is going on then whatever they did to you was research based on my brother."

"Aw. Oh well. I guess I can call you uncle Zash. I'll have to think about it."

"Okay fine just. Yes. Go. Tragic backstory part two fine fine just. Augh!"

It is her turn to thonk her head down onto the table. She is so unhappy.

"...how about we sleep, first, and do more tragic backstorying tomorrow instead when we resume our drive to Terminal? You look kinda miserable."

"No, no, now it'll bug me, just. Just. Go, it's fine. The world is wide and horrible and I knew it was both but I did not know how much."

"Alright. Well, about 140 years and change ago, I was living with some scientists from another ship—mine wasn't one of the surviving ones—and I was... helping the cities get started. People were abusing their plants even worse than they do today, they were constantly terrified that they were going to die, and I was trying to teach them how to... not do that, I guess. Listen, some, to the needs of the plants, and use them sustainably."

This causes her to soften and lift her head up from the table to give him a smile. "Right. The groundwork for what I do, with your psychic plant powers."

"...yeah. The plants themselves were a lot more... panicked, then. They were just as worried about the possibility that humans would die out. They were constantly so sad about the Fall... Some of it was just convincing them that it would be okay, that they could hold on and the humans would be fine. There was some give from both sides."

".... Aw."

"I was still very mad at Nai, and hurt. I hadn't seen him since the Fall. I had no idea where he was and I got to a point where I was too scared to go look for him in case I couldn't find him if I tried.

"The scientists were going through the crash sites one by one, teaching the engineers, but one day they managed to recover some recordings from ship 05 that suggested Nai was the one behind the Fall. I hadn't... told them about Nai, at all. One of them thought I had colluded with Nai, that we had both been..." Sigh. "I looked like a human does when they're eighteen but I was seven, I was just a kid, and I ran away and decided to try to find him then."

She bites her lip, then nods.

Morgan is watching silently and is actually quite entertained by how 'God' apparently did rip the ships from the sky! Neat. All of those sermons have literally any use at all.

"I didn't really have a plan to find him, mind you. I decided to just go to a city I hadn't visited, and I knew where February was, so I went there."

February is not one of the seven cities. It is one of the ones that didn't make it past the first few decades.

"... I don't like where this is going, but please go on."

"We can hear it when plants get into red state. They—cry out. Back in Jeneora Rock, Nai and I heard a scream, and I think that was when the bomber ripped the blue plant off the grid.

"When I got close enough to February I could hear dozens of plants crying out."

"Oh. Oh no, I -- I know about this. A little, from the, from the engineer side of things, not with the -- name of the place, but. They wanted to try and terraform just the area around them, to support life, and. Linked up all of the plants they could to make it as efficient as possible and. Their plan was that it would work and they'd live or it'd fail and they'd all die. All or nothing."

Either way, all of the plants would be dead. It was meant to wring all that they possibly could from them. As efficiently as possible.

“What, turn this bit of inhospitable desert into Eden-or-whatever?”