“I’ll try very hard, and believe in myself, and maybe one day I’ll almost be like a real wastelander!”

The last of the interior dirt and debris gets unceremoniously swept outside. Hm. She has run out of domestic chores to do in this area, despite her best efforts. Probably she should find something else to do, but now that she’s run out of tasks to accomplish, she’s confronted with her exhaustion. Yaaaaaaaaaawn, damn it not again, she should probably nap but there are people here that she can help and damnation she’s feeling a bit hungry, too, that’s so annoying.

[love, until we can get Nai here that'll be happening and from a purely scientific perspective I think it would be useful to know whether a nap does actually help even if he's not here, so... take a break?]

“Nevermind, he can nag me back,” sighs Yvette out loud, to Maria. But yes, yes, fine, point taken, she’ll go have a damn nap. After a snack.

"Mutual nagging, the best kind."

"So, uh, you sure you're holding up alright? You mentioned you're kind of in pain all the time?"

“It will not get better with bed rest, the super strength doesn’t particularly drain me or my time, and I will take breaks. I’d rather be doing something than not. And cleanup’s kind of novel! Usually I break things.”

Which… sure isn’t an answer about how much chronic pain she’s dealing with right now, is it.

But it's sufficiently salient as a surface thought now that he's touched upon it that he can get more of a gist of it and.

...and.

It's not pretty.

He's not happy.

(She's used to the pain, it's been going even longer than she's implied, she's got coping mechanisms for the pain—wait, is the smoking because of that? Shit.)

But he's not gonna let any of that show because it would be going against her wishes so instead he'll drop it.

"Just checking on you. I think we can probably leave this room for the Jeneorans after we're done with this bit and then go down that side street we walked past on the way here, I think it leads farther into the town and it might be good for the both of us to go wider rather than deeper to get a better feel for the layout of the city..."

She notices his reaction anyway, because she knows him and was watching for it, but she's not going to call him on it. Though he can pick up that she's a little amused at him finally realizing what the cigarettes are for, though. C'mon, man, you didn't wonder why the hell she always had them available? And her habit of always having one after a fight? On this planet? Where resources are scarce as fuck? Heh.

"Sounds good! We're after the big stuff, yeah? All of the little bits are for the normies."

"Mmhm. And I'm having the townies who can't help or can't help as much take this opportunity to get a really good map of the place so we can start our tactical planning. I'm hoping Yvette will be able to be awake to be on that end of things and draw—she's really good with diagrams—and relay stuff to me so we can go over things as they do that."

"I expect she'll be fine, it seems like she's just adjusting. Anyway! Whole big town that we get to put back together ourselves. I'm excited, c'mon, I don't get to cut loose with super strength in front of normies often."

She's always been a bit hard to read, but her emotions aren't very complex right now. Zash has had the same practice at reading her that she's had with him. She definitely means it, and is really, sincerely happy about getting to do something so nice and prosocial.

...man, he's going to miss her.

This is no longer Jeneora Rock, it is just Jeneora, and since it's not the same town it should not be the same town. Living in the handful of buildings they managed to salvage between the lame and the old and the young and the weak, when everyone who could leave left, is worse than living in a graveyard. The places that aren't completely destroyed have all of the memories of the people they lost in that very destruction. And they can't escape those memories, those ghosts, and they can't build new ones. Most of them had just... sort of assumed they'd slowly starve there, and that that would be better than whatever awaited them if they ever tried to leave. If they stayed there was a chance of some miracle, right? Or, more likely, of some hapless group of people who could be ruthlessly murdered and looted if they happened upon the dying outpost.

Well, the miracle came first. Two supersoldiers who can not only clear rubble but move things around, destroy and rebuild them, and refurbish everything are exactly what these people wanted and needed.

They have to prioritise, of course; Legato may arrive there at any moment so they need to at all times have some sort of good, defensible fallback. But within that constraint, the town metamorphoses into something new. Not made of new things, but new anyway. They can make it look new, and clean, and better, later, once they've had time to settle down; for now, it's enough that the streets they walk aren't the same streets their family and friends and lovers and enemies walked. At least, not quite the same.

Yvette's not any kind of city planner, but she nonetheless is drafted for the task. She's the one with the writing utensils and absurd (to other people, to her it's perfectly reasonable) amounts of paper, the psychic connection to one of their human-shaped avatars of destruction, and is generally easy to find and even easier to boss around. Add in her desire to have a plan, have a copy of what Jeneora currently looks like in its half-dead and mostly rubble state, and to organize the things that people want from the new Jeneora, and: yep. She's the closest thing they have to a city planner. Add it to the list of things she is totally not qualified for but doing anyway. At least for this one she can show the diagrams to people and get actual feedback. That the feedback is often unhelpfully critical without offering actual alternatives for her to work from is a bit inconvenient, and this is much more social pressure than she's accustomed to, but it's not too bad of an adjustment. If she has to put her foot down and angrily tell people that no, she is not drawing another fucking plan of this thing, not unless they have a concrete alternative, then, well, it's not the fucking sand steamer. The stakes are lower and the people she's interacting with are much less actively infuriating.

Morgan's prediction of her health seems to be broadly correct. She seems... fine, with one caveat. Her appetite has become insane, and she feels a bit bad about eating for what must be four people in front of people that were recently suffering starvation. On the other hand, her sleep schedule is perfectly ordinary once she actually starts regularly sleeping again. At some point someone (Carl, to be specific) asks her to test if she also has superstrength, and. ... Nope. Not even a little. Just as much of a pathetic nerdy lightweight as she'd been before. She just eats a lot, and sleeps a regular amount, and has a psychic connection to Zash, and that's about it. Regeneration is probably also present, but so far she hasn't tested that one, and sees no particular reason to rush it. Generally the consensus in Jeneora is that she's got the least useful fancy superpowers present, and that no, they don't want what she has, it mostly seems to be made of caloric consumption they would absolutely not be able to sustain.

Fortunately for all of them, she planned Jeneora's food reserves based on its previous population levels, and. .... those were in fact too hopeful. She'd known they would be, that was kind of the point, but. God it hurts to see, even if it turns out to be useful now. Still, it does mean they have even more reason to get the plants here sooner rather than later, so as soon as the plant factory's set up to be able to hold them: yeah, time for them to show up. And, presumably, Nai with them, which. ... Will be interesting.

(Morgan also thinks that 'when the plants show up' is the most likely time for Legato to strike, because it'd be just fucking like him.)

"Should we, in fact, bring the plants over as soon as possible? I mean this honestly, I'm not sure." He's made sure there are no bugs in this room, and no one other than the three of them. "If Legato would want to do this as soon as we get the plants then that's reason to delay, especially if we can get fortifications. But on the other hand, they'd definitely be a great early warning system for Legato, and would help the city a lot."

"Plants come with Knives, yeah? Because I absolutely just want to throw him at Legato if at all possible. So sooner rather than later, especially if they'd be a warning system if I'm wrong."

"That's... fair.

"Second order of business, I am really not sure how to present the existence of Nai to these people. He killed a lot of their loved ones, some of them personally, and..."

"... Yeah. Um. I do think not telling them, and them finding out would be worse. But. Yeah he should maybe be gently shuffled into the plant factory and speak to no one and interact with no one. I... think they're practical enough to handle it okay if we tell them directly and explain what's going on?"

"Mmhm. It just feels so, so wretched that there's not a better way. He took so much from them."

"He... did, yes. But I don't..." she sounds frustrated, "I don't know how to deal with that squishy feeling stuff and still get anything done?? And we need him, and it'll be worse if we don't tell them he's here, and. We can get him a concealing cloak or something so they see as little of him as possible while still knowing he's there??"

Zash sighs and wraps his arms around Yvette. "I know. Sorry. I know. I guess I'm just too used to... not telling people things."

She leans into him and sighs.

"Yeah. It'd be much easier if we didn't, but I don't think that's better, that just. Passes the buck. We'll make sure they know they can just... refuse? But that Nai is required if they want the plants, because the plants are... god I hate saying it like this because they're theirs but in cold rational terms they're his, right? He's letting them use them."

"Wait just like, pack up everything and go if they don't want to put up with the scary murderer man that killed their families??"