What angle?

Flora.

But also they have a lot of plants who are all working together, they know Zash and Nai are independent plants and so Zash has explained to them all the everything about how plants are actually sentient and whatnot, they've devised some clever (if low-throughput and low-fidelity and high-latency) ways to communicate with the plants using their matter creation abilities, and they haven't had a single red plant in the last hundred and forty years.

Not all ways plants can hurt makes them go red—

They know. Everything Zash knows, they know. They're trying their best. They don't have any plant engineers because Yvette is—maybe not unique, but very rare, in how she cares and can be trusted—so they're limited in what they can do, but that means they're more careful, not less, because they know they don't have the know-how to make efficient use of plants without hurting them.

They're humans.

You've met Yvette, dude.

She's special!

In profession, education, opportunity, and having the correct mix of ability, stubbornness, and personality to attract them both, but otherwise, not really! She feels she lucked out that her profession turned out to be such a morality nightmare and needed someone of exactly her qualities. Lots of people really do spend their lives helping others, and part of her plan to get humans to treat plants better is to make them realize that they're people. Because that'll do a lot of the work. Not all of it, humans often suck, but a lot. Just a lot of those people don't also become plant engineers, because plant engineers require a lot of (expensive) education to make, and it seems much easier to just do direct charity work instead of going through all that trouble.

Doubt.

[just trust me? please?]

Plants' lives are on the line—

Here's a whole fucking package of memories, in the typical plant-fractal fashion that Nai is used to, about everything Zash has observed inside Brad's arcology, every conversation, every diagnostic, everything about the plants there, everything.

[please, even if you don't trust that my long-term goals are the same as yours, please just trust that I am dealing with Knives fairly. if Knives doesn't want to trust my assertions about the goodness of humans, can Knives at least trust that I'm being honest and genuine in my expectations that he will not regret having dealt with me?]

Fine. He promises he's not going to mess with this arcology of Zash's, pending reevaluation later when he decides whether Knives should die or not.

Thank you.

Yvette's a little tempted to be irritated at how Nai (Knives, maybe?) clearly hasn't been engaging with her arguments, but... no, actually, she gets it. Probably because she's a bit in his brain right now, but still. He is not discounting or dismissing her stance, he just wants to process them later when he's less of a mess. As someone who also had to deal with her entire world being upended, that makes perfect sense. He wants to handle it properly, carefully, with all of the weight and thought it requires. And he really hasn't had much of a chance to, because everything has been... very. Just very. Pick your own adjective, lots of them could fill the space.

[Thank you] echoes Yvette, along with a sense of willing-to-be-patient.

(Though also the sense that if he fails to ever engage with them she will hunt him down and beat him with her brain again until he listens.)

Come on, give him some credit, he'd totally beat himself up too if he didn't follow up on it, it's important. He's gonna, just...

...you know.

Later.

When he's less being snuggled and Yvette is less being competent and fierce in his presence and Zash is less being, being...

Being adorable while nuzzling Nai?

Yeah. That.

Yes. Very reasonable. Though, she sort of did give him credit on the trusting him to do it himself front, didn't she? She just also acknowledged that she's the kind of person to follow up later.

She pats him, because he's very cute, and then she goes back to work because of course she does. With access to all of Conrad's files she can continue picking out the best locations to put plants! She has more information to work from, now! Yay!!

And Zash can properly think about the locations of the dead drops (honestly if Nai had really wanted to he could've learned those already, it's not like Zash can properly hide those thoughts, just try to not explicitly think about them) for Yvette to get them. These three places here are the ones they'll have left their new schedule if it's changed, and if it hasn't changed then these other places here are where they want to leave a message. Probably what they want to do is try to set up a proper meeting? If Zash vouches for them they'll be able to go with no issues. It might even be a good idea to get Nai there, to help convince him that actually lots of people don't suck.

Look, he's said this before, it's not really that important if there are individual humans who don't suck, because regardless of that humanity as an entity is what's hurting plants: some individual humans do suck, and the horrible incentive systems set up are such that even if—

Nai you have to make up your mind, either you want to argue about this while being snuggled or you don't, but you don't get to give everyone a piece of your mind when it suits you and then refuse to listen if they argue back.

He does too listen.

...but fair. Sorry.

ANYWAY yeah arcology people.

Arcology people! Okay, fine, she'll focus on that instead of the new and shiny problem that's directly in front of her, she can be directed. Just also having a lever with which to directly save lives is something she actually really wants to use, and use well.

She's already done a lot of the work for consolidating her data so it can be handed off to the general scientific community, which makes it easier to wrap up. And... it looks like Conrad was picking through her work? Even doing it while she was out of commission??? He even wrote in questions and did careful documentation of all actions taken, all of which were reasonable. His questions and immediate conclusions when presented with what she already had are useful for figuring out how to present everything. That's... all so damned helpful she's honestly surprised? She hadn't been expecting decency of him, holy shit. Maybe that speech at the start actually did something, and when presented with work that was just actually unquestionably good... well. Good for him.