She… honestly wasn’t expecting that. Not knowing what to do with it, she’s just going to. Not engage with it and move on.

“… Well, I’m flattered to be remembered. And yes, help. You can hear them, and I know they’re terribly easy to take advantage of, but you’d know better than I. Am I actually helping?”

He looks around, then looks at her again, looking even more suspicious. After a few seconds of that he suddenly makes a frustrated noise and says, "Why are you here."

It’s pretty clear that he’s frustrated because he can’t just cheat and read her.

She points at Zazi. “They did it, not me. I don’t want to be here.”

Zazi lifts a hand and grins. "Guilty!"

"I'm going to kill you someday."

"No you won't~"

Knives's blades shoot at Zazi and, when they disperse into bugs, he kills every one of those.

"Helping the plants isn't going to save your life," he tells Yvette.

She takes a deep breath.

"I know. But if I'm going to die anyway, I might as well do some good first."

"What good?"

"What I'm doing right now. Helping the plants. I consider that good, don't you?"

"Yes," he says, then looks frustrated again. "You're human."

Well spotted, Nai.

"Yes," she agrees, instead of being sarcastic at the scary psycho with telekinetic control of knives. "Do you want me to explain everything I'm doing and my reasoning behind doing it so you can make sure I'm not doing anything you wouldn't support?"

"You'd lie."

"I wouldn't," she corrects, a little irritated, "but I acknowledge that I could. If nothing else, having a good idea of what exactly I did would be a good start for undoing it."

He sits cross-legged and cross-armed mid air and gives her a look.

"... is that a yes..? Or just that you're going to sit there and watch every single thing that I do for awful human intentions?"

She can't help it; this is frustrating, and it’s starting to leak into her voice. It’s not like she got kidnapped from the best of circumstances. She’s not even sure what happened on the sand steamer, and she’s worried about Zash and how he's probably freaking out right now. Instead of being able to handle any of that, to know anything about anything of the people she cares about, she’s here, trying to bridge this frustrating communication gap with a person that thinks of her as scum.

"Yes," he says, also frustratedly.

In typical language usage, that's not actually a confirmation of either option she provided. However, due to current circumstances and also ambient frustration levels, she's just going to take it as 'talk to me.' That seems the most likely answer, and she can always just stop talking if he'd rather just stare silently like a weirdo.

"Okay."

So she then begins explaining. Because he wasn't here for her walkthrough with Zazi, it does mean she has to start a bit from scratch and explain the basics again, but that's not so bad. Compared to trying to exchange words with a mind reader who despises humans and can't read her, it's soothing. And then they can get into the particulars of what she's doing and the logic behind it and how these new updated supportive maintenance operations actively help instead of just. Leaving the plants on standby.

They can help each other, why would they need a support system from humans.

Well if he doesn't ask that question out loud, she's not going to know to answer, and will instead just happily continue on how to make the support system ~*~more efficient.~*~

Ghhhh.

"Why. Does this work. Humans made it. Plants help each other."

"Oh. Yes, you do. But it's... you can only help one plant at a time. Setting up a system that does it instead means that they all get helped, at the same time. And then you can go and help the more difficult cases that the system won't be able to sort out."

Grump. "Go on."

So she does! Quite happily in fact.

She is really extremely dedicated to her job, very knowledgeable, and brightening considerably as she goes.

Knives gets, if anything, grumpier over time as he watches her. Eventually he gets fed up and says, "Why do you care?"