Morgan's been hanging around, generally attempting to make use of the forced downtime. Play chess with Zazi, tune up her gigantic gun (it's fine, but she can give it a proper cleaning and replace one of the panels that got dented from how she keeps using the damn thing as a bludgeon), sew up the holes in her clothes, get some sleep, look up some med specs, break all of Conrad's horrifying equipment, and make sure that there definitely really are no humans in the human experimentation cells. There were not, apparently Nai's plan was close enough to fruition that the doctor didn't bother acquiring his next round of subjects. The cells also get very extremely broken.

She's currently in the middle of sewing herself a replacement outfit, when she looks up to see Conrad.

"Oh, that was fast." She was expecting them to need approximately a full week devoted to fucking or something. This is pleasantly ahead of schedule. Maybe she didn't need to start sewing new clothes to keep herself entertained after all. "Yeah, sure, going."

She arrives in the plant room without too much fuss.

"Hey I hear you're not locked in a bedroom, congraaaaaand you are all in a cuddle pile in front of the console. Okay. Sure."

It's not a cuddle pile, Nai thinks a bit irritatedly. It's only Zash who's being cuddly and hugging his leg, Nai is sitting cross-legged there and Yvette is using the console and not cuddling at all.

Zash helpfully provides Nai with an external picture of what the three of them look like, fetched by the plants from Morgan's mind's eye.

[this is a cuddle pile, Nai]

Is not.

[is too.]

"Hey, Morgan," he says, that whole interaction having taken only a fraction of a second because telepathy is nice like that. "Do you want to be our Zazi consultant?" His face is still kind of visibly the face of someone who's been crying nearly nonstop for several hours and who might start crying again any minute now.

"I mean, I feel like Zazi is the best Zazi consultant available, and can hear everything we're saying right now, but yeah sure? Are you actually doing planning and shit there? Because I have no fucking idea where Legato and Elendira went off to, I've been looking, and I'm concerned."

"We are doing planning and shit here! We mostly want to be allowed to try and save the world without Zazi interfering to make it less boring," clarifies Yvette.

".... Does Zash's fancy secret arcology have, like, a library of DNA of stuff from Old Earth?"

"...yeah? Pretty sure every species that still existed on Earth for the, like, half a century maybe a century prior to the Exodus had DNA samples stored in the ships and the arcology doesn't have all of them but it has most."

That's not every species that ever existed; many were extinct before humans even came to be, and many more went extinct afterwards, a majority of them by humans themselves. It's still a hefty amount, and most certainly more of them than this planet's ever seen.

Zazi is a bad Zazi consultant because Zazi is untrustworthy.

"—also Nai says that Zazi is a bad Zazi consultant because Zazi is untrustworthy."

(And they can hear the sound of buzzing laughter coming from nowhere in particular.)

"Uh huh. Hey Zazi! You want to give the nerds a chance to fix the world or whatever without meddling to make it more entertaining or something if they give you cloning equipment and a library of Earth bugs? And tell us if this arrangement stops working for you in advance instead of just, like, surprise I was bored?"

Oh that's clever. Zash wouldn't have guessed it because he actually doesn't know Zazi personally very well but this implies some things about Zazi's personality that make it sound like this'd be a great form of bribery.

Zazi decides to make a body for better communication. They are very good at body language, they feel.

"A whole library of them?" they ask, sounding delighted. "Yeah!"

"There you go. Might unleash a plague of locusts on the world or whatever, but."

"... I guess the large scale ecological change to add insect life is really much better than a war with a hivemind," muses Yvette. She's also thinking that they should go through the library before handing it off to see about maybe not unleashing really annoying bugs on the whole of Gunsmoke.

Still unconvinced.

Any particular reason?

The plants can't read them. Zash can't read them. They lied to Zash once, right? They could do it again. They're even worse than humans in that respect.

That's... fair... and brings up that other point Zash mentioned.

"Can you make promises for all of you?"

"Nope!"

"...what can you make promises for, then?"

"This us!"

"You're only answering my questions piecewise to aggravate me, aren't you."