...and of him feeling very fondly exasperated at his failures to quite translate.

...did they mention Zash? He's Nai's twin! He's never visited February (the place they're at right now), though, the plants who met him did so before Nai brought them here.

They didn't mention him in enough detail to get into her reports to Daisy, at least. And if they don't know what habits are they're pretty obviously still missing some important concepts.

They've had habits explained! They think! They know the word. They just... don't... get them.

Yeah. So the simplest part, the bit that's enough to be getting on with if they don't care about why and how, is that for humans it's much easier to do things they've done a lot of other times recently, and actually hard not to do them and to do something else instead. A habit is the word for a thing that a human has done often enough that this applies - Deskyl is in the habit of concluding that healing isn't a good idea, so it's easy for her to do that and harder for her to decide that it is a good idea. She's in the habit of memorizing poetry - or, was, it's been a while since she's had the opportunity - which makes it easier for her to do that, and maybe a little easier to memorize other text, but it won't help her remember what a picture looks like if she wants to draw a copy of it. She's in the habit of listening to what Daisy tells her to do, so she'll do that even when she's very confused and having trouble figuring out what to do on her own, but the way she's built that habit means she won't listen to other people the same way, because that would be dangerous - lots of humans do have a habit of listening to almost anyone, though. Does that make sense? Not necessarily in the sense of 'they understand why it happens that way', but in the sense of 'sure, that's a thing that can happen'?

Sure, that's a thing that can happen, they guess?

Okay. For why it happens, she's not actually sure, but, speculating - so, humans have a lot of things they can do at any given moment, thousands and thousands, way too many to think through all the options. And in most cases, there's not very much advantage to trying to do that - they don't need to do the very best thing that'll get the very best result, they just need something that's good enough, where the result will be good enough. And it takes a lot of time and effort to think through all the possibilities to figure out what the best thing is, and it's often not worth doing that - the best result isn't so much better than the good enough result for it to be worth the effort, and probably they won't have the time to think it through at all; humans are often in situations where they need to act quickly or otherwise don't have the time or energy to think through their choices. And a habit is fast to do, and usually good enough, or at least bad in a predictable way that the human knows how to handle, so it solves those problems.

Still with her? Do they have any questions?

Not... questions, per se, no. More like this is all pretty abstract and hard-to-follow and furthermore requires more, ah... planning-for-the-future and worrying about connections between past states and future states than individual plants are typically accustomed to. They can be a lot more functional in that way when they're numerous and networked like here in February but then by a similar token they don't really need habits when they're numerous and networked because they can do better planning.

Though they're not as numerous as they'd need to be to really be confident in any of their plans and there are lots of... other considerations... and stuff.

Yep, planning is hard, that's why humans have shortcuts for it. They can't get away with just not planning at all, they'd starve, and they're pretty sharply limited in their networking abilities. (Humans being able to talk to each other definitely helps, but it's really not the same thing.) Is 'humans need planning shortcuts and this is one' a good enough answer for them?

Also if they have any particularly pressing planning-related problems she can take a look and see if there's anything she can figure out for them, if they'd like, while she's here. (If they want to trust her like that, anyway, which it'd be reasonable for them not to; she's not ruling out that she'd use knowledge gained that way for her own purposes, even if they happen to conflict with the plants' preferences.) Her danger sense should be enough to make sure they don't fry her brain trying to send them.

They don't think they have anything pressing, but they're not really sure how they'd be able to tell. How do you tell if something is pressing?

There's a few things 'pressing' can mean - if there's something that's really bothering them right now, or something where the situation is changing a lot or seems like it might change for the worse soon or unexpectedly, or if it'd be especially bad if the situation turned out badly, that's the sort of thing she means. Things that are important or urgent or both, if those concepts aren't too human for them.

Their relationship with the concept of "time" is... not amazing at that, no. They get "before" and "after" and they have an intellectual understanding that something can be "more after" or "less after" something else in some sense, like how today is more after the time they left Earth than it is after they arrived on Gunsmoke, but they're sort of fuzzy on the particulars.

Huh. Well, if there's anything especially important, then. Or, if that's still too tricky, they can just pick two or three things to ask her about, that's close enough - the main idea from her side is that she's not offering to help with every problem they have, only with a few, and they should be at least a little careful about what they choose to use this limited resource on.

They don't think so? They have very hurt sisters who aren't alright but aren't acutely suffering and they'll all get fixed eventually by Nai and they're not entirely sure how long that takes and in the meantime they're very bored but it's occurred to them at some point that their fuzzy relationship with time plausibly makes being bored a lot less unpleasant than it is for humans in some ways. Not all ways, though, they think, but they're having a hard time finding ways to convey the difference exactly when Deskyl doesn't have the native hardware to process the high-throughput high-density high-precision concept-comparisons they're using to mark the distinctions.

Also humans die, one of them pipes up to say, and that's an ongoing tragedy happening everywhere that they want to prevent, but they're not sure that counts as pressing given that they don't really have a way to properly fix it and it's just a matter of making it be less after now than it would otherwise be.

Human mortality is a little beyond her, she thinks; if they have any ideas for addressing it she can have a look, but as far as she can tell it's just inevitable within the local kind of physics, even Sith only get a few hundred to a few thousand years. She does think she'll probably want to come back and heal them once she's settled in - no promises, but the idea is appealing and once she's recovered she'll be more willing to think it through, and they might well be right that there's no reason not to. She expects they probably do have a bit better time with boredom than humans do, but it's still a problem that it's reasonable to want to solve. She doesn't know enough about the situation to make confident suggestions, though, besides the obvious 'have Daisy recite more poetry while she's here', but she'd start by trying to come up with things they can do while they're here - for humans it'd be watching or listening to media, as the obvious first thing to set up, or finding ways for them to do hobbies or whatever else they want to do within whatever limitations they're dealing with; that's usually at least somewhat possible.

Poetry is great!!! But, uh, not really the kind of thing that solves the underlying issue with boredom? Because the underlying issue is that they want to help people, that's what they're here for, the most fulfilling possible thing they could be doing is generating matter and energy for people so they can live complete, self-actualised lives that bring them joy!

Anywho, they're sure it's possible to make humans be immortal; if nothing else, Doctor Conrad is immortal while linked to Nai's gate, as a proof of concept.

If they want to help people they could try getting involved with whatever terraforming is going on here - presumably someone's working on that, if there are humans, and they'd probably really appreciate, say, water in whatever quantities won't interfere with the plants' recovery. Terraforming will take a while, it's not something you can rush without causing problems, but humans are much happier in more hospitable biomes than this planet currently has.

Human immortality via gates: huh, interesting. That's the kind of thing she can probably help them figure out once she's recovered, it sounds like a kind of mucking around with physics that's similar to developing Force techniques, which she's pretty good at when her brain is working.

They're under the impression that terraforming is really really hard on this planet for some reason! They're not sure what but they think it's something about the technological base being very unevenly available?

And yeah it's totally physics! The other dimension (they're very fuzzy on the details of what exactly it is and how it works) has infinite matter and energy! That means they can just heal humans forever of anything. Nai doesn't let Doctor Conrad heal perfectly all the time, he rations the gate and the connection isn't perfect, but in principle!

It'd be weird for tech availability to be the problem, unless - do they not have access to the rest of the galaxy? That'd be a whole thing for sure.

And yeah it'd be weird if their thing wasn't physics, that's kind of the definition of physics; the question is more whether the mucking around is the type she can help with. She'd bet it is, though!

Oh! No, they don't have access to the rest of the galaxy at all, they are completely stranded on this planet with whatever tech managed to survive the time the generation ships all crashed simultaneously on this planet or which developed from that. They're not even sure if the planet they're from is in fact in the same galaxy as this one!

Yeah that sure does sound like a whole thing. Do they have intra-system travel? If not she can pretty much guarantee that producing as much water as they sustainably can is a good move, right now; usually on a planet like this they'd be dropping ice asteroids for water, and without that there's no real chance they'd overdo it at any point before they start seeing oceans.

They think the humans were worried that this would cause more problems than it solved and lots of people would die and the worms would kill them all or something? They're not sure if the worms part was the humans or Zazi.

They shouldn't do it, then, but she'll see if she can figure out what the problem is and maybe she'll be able to come back with some better advice.

There doesn't seem to be much more to say about that, so she gets back to work on planning for the cross-desert trek. Over the next few weeks, in between sleeping, she manages to find a reasonably-shaped piece of metal to use as a sledge and perhaps enough additional parts to jury-rig wheels for it, though they'll be very makeshift and only arguably better than not having them, in the sand; she's increasingly irritable with hunger and stir-crazy with lack of exercise and decreasingly confident that she and Daisy will be able to make it to the city as she works through the logistics of traveling with such a vehicle.

The plants continually offer to make her food and although they are disappointed by the refusals it doesn't seem like they quite... really remember... that they've offered it many times before. They do remember her plans, though, and they're curious about what she'll do and they'll miss her a lot.