(Yeah, personally Zash doesn't super jive with the "deserve" framing either, it's mostly scaffolding for the narrative he's familiar with and since it doesn't resonate with Siran himself Zash is more than happy to do away with it.)

(There's a certain flavour to those thoughts, too, that isn't leaking overtly into the thoughts themselves, that suggests Zash jives with the exact opposite of the concept of "deserving". What that exact opposite is isn't something Zash is explicitly thinking about and most certainly not projecting, but... "people deserve bad things" is almost the complete antithesis of Zash the Stampede.)

Zash also wants to observe another parallel: Siran's sword, and Zash's gun. The thought has some wryness attached to it, and Zash will project words alongside the feelings because unfortunately Siran does not have the telepathic equipment to be able to literally see the visual mental pictures Zash projects and Zash does not think this is the kind of thing he even can project, in principle, to humans.

[guns are a sort of weapon that creates a miniature explosion to propel a small metal object (a bullet) with such speed and force that it can pierce through bone and flesh and occasionally even solid objects such as wood and stone and metal. my gun is a .22 caliber, which is to say it's made for bullets yea thick, and this is relevant because it's a good caliber for precise trick shots and fast reloading and a bad caliber for killing people with.] And the reason Zash is amused by the comparison is the way he does use this supposed weapon of destruction almost exclusively nondestructively.

He's not suggesting that Siran make a magic gun, of course—if nothing else, he wants Siran to decide on what his aesthetic will be uninfluenced by Zash (though the mental image of the two pacifistic gunslingers roaming the realm getting into trouble together is very amusing to him, also)—just idly musing about the parallel, with a side observation that with some creativity one can often figure out (fun, interesting, cool, aesthetic) ways to apply tools to ends they were not designed for.

(Another part of Zash also observes a parallel between that and, again, Siran himself (and magic), though he rejects the idea that Siran was designed for anything. Siran is Siran, and who and what Siran is is up to Siran, no one else. But to the extent that Siran is (or was/has been) a weapon, well, sometimes you can creatively make weapons do things other than what weapons do.)

Ah, so that's what the fuck a gun is.

...he definitely sees what Zash means, about how cool it would be to make themselves a pair like that. But... he thinks he agrees, that he shouldn't decide on his aesthetic based on how glamorous a pair they would make. He wants to take time to think this over, and consider a lot of different possibilities, and not rush into things impulsively like he always has before. He wants to think about what kinds of things he could make, and what purposes he could make them for. Repurposing a tool meant for one use into another is definitely an interesting idea with interesting thematic implications, but since he's starting from scratch anyway, he might as well make something that does what he wants from the start.

Yeah no doubt. Does he have any preliminary ideas for what he'd want? And much of Zash's curiosity here is really curiosity about this magic and its artefacts and all of that.

(Also he's a teensy bit proud of this conversation which feels like it was good and useful to Siran. Eeee he helped!)

Cute. Cute. He did help, it's true!

The first most obvious thing for an anti-sword to do is healing. But of course healing is a lot harder than destruction; there are a lot of ways you can change something that will break it, fewer that will repair it. So he'd have to think very carefully about how to waste most of the power of all that spellfray on things that don't matter and can't get big enough to do any damage, and only let through the tiny fraction of it that actually wants to do something helpful. (That's an oversimplification. It's not that specific bits of spellfray 'want' different things; it's all sort of sloshing around wildly doing this or that, and if you're careful and clever and a little bit of a reckless idiot you can figure out how to bend it away from what it's in the middle of being about to do and push it into something else instead, but you can't get too far from its original purpose and you have to do it much too fast to be able to save any of it in the moment when you have a spell going wrong; his sword used layer after layer of redirection, to catch it all and funnel it into the destructive effect he wanted, but because 'destruction' is so much broader a target it only took a few layers, doing the same for healing would be much more complex and delicate work...) Anyway, the main trouble with healing is that you can only do it when someone or something needs to be healed, which won't be all the time, so his anti-sword might spend a while being overcharged and that's not a good way for things to be.

Then there's water, which is springing (so to speak) to mind because they're walking in a desert. Making water is probably easier than making healing, because there's a sense in which the target is broader—it's hard to explain why; it has to do with things he feels more than knows, his practiced sense of which ways magic is more and less eager to turn—but he's not sure how useful it will be. Well, obviously water is generally useful in a desert. But he's not sure how much water he'll get at a time, and he sort of feels like even in a desert, dumping out several wagonloads at once in an inhabited area is maybe kind of still a destructive act.

Then there's the concept of a shield, one that could potentially redirect these 'bullets' Zash mentioned to make them miss anyone in range. That would be tricky for a number of reasons, not least the fact that it would screw with Zash's trick shots unless Siran put a lot of work into figuring out how not to. But it's a pleasing image, and he thinks motion might be a fairly broad target as these things go, maybe broader than water. It has the same problem as healing, though, in that you can only use a shield when there's something to shield against.

He could, he supposes, also try combining all of these effects into a single item. He's not sure what shape such an item should be. A... shield-wand-cup?? Well, the shape doesn't really matter to the magic, except to the extent that it makes Siran's work easier by making him feel like it's more naturally inclined to the purpose he intends. Anyway it would be a beastly amount of work to set all that up and have all the different parts work without interfering with each other, but if he got it all set up just right, it'd help make up for the comparative narrowness of all these targets. He suspects, though, that if he did it this way it'd be harder to avoid the big obvious problem of any spellfray-absorbing artifact: the fact that inevitably a little bit will leak out around the edges. With the sword that wasn't so bad, because the sword's job was to obliterate things and it didn't matter much if in the brief final moments of their existence it also turned them purple or made them burst into song. Rather less convenient to have random magic effects on the several wagonloads of water you just dumped in the middle of the street. (He's imagining a rainbow flood singing thirty songs at once and it's quite the mental image.) And he thinks, the less unified in purpose his artifact is, the more it will tend to do random things and the bigger those random things will tend to be, unless he puts a whole lot more work in to mitigate that.

...let's table those thoughts for the moment because Zash thinks he should probably explain plants, he feels like their existence and context is probably important to Siran's plans too.

👂

(Siran is also very cute, for the record.)

So, uh, plants are—well, the sapient nonhuman species that Zash is technically a specimen of, though Zash is very very noncentral in many respects and many things about him should be ignored when thinking about plants. Most humans think plants are machines or artificial organisms created by them, but Zash's best guess is actually that plants are from another dimension—(here's a small mental package with a superficial explanation of what "another dimension" means)—and found humans and decided that the fact that humans die was an ongoing moral atrocity and decided to help. Most humans also think plants are not sapient, or even sentient.

Due to not being from this dimension, plants can typically not stay in this dimension by default; it's hostile to them. If they try, they usually die very quickly. In order to counteract that, humans have created machinery that can stabilise them here and keep them alive. In order to survive, they need to be in these vats filled with nutrient fluid, being managed by various automated systems that keep them from popping like an overcharged light bulb. Plants can reach into their origin dimension to bring matter and energy over, as far as anyone knows with no limitation in quantity, only in throughput. Each plant has a "gate", a personal portal to this other dimension, which is one-way only, and which for most plants has a fixed size and ability to transport matter.

Plants are absolutely necessary for humans to survive here. Remember how Zash mentioned that humans had cursed their planet of origin? It was to the point that it was beginning to become unable to sustain them. And plants are basically a solution to this, because they can create water, and food, and minerals, and electric power, and gravity, and air, and chemical compounds, and on and on and on, without limit. They are what allows humans to be able to live on a planet as inhospitable as Gunsmoke (which is arid desert and wasteland everywhere, there is not a single lake or river on the face of this planet).

With him so far? Any questions?

...huh. Maybe wagonloads of water at a time wouldn't be so bad after all, unless that much water started messing up other things about the planet, or something. Anyway he's good, go on.

This planet would absolutely benefit from wagonloads of water.

Anyway.

So, plants... well... they're really hard to explain without meeting one in person, but... they love everyone. Everyone. They want everyone to have everything that brings them joy, to live their best happiest most fulfilled lives, to do everything they can so that others can thrive. And they are very very bad at self-care, and there is actually a limit to how much and how often they can use their gates before it starts being tiring, and then painful, and then injurious. And humans will... occasionally just use them to death, suck them dry until they become dust.

And they die happy knowing that their life was put to good use and they've made humans thrive more than they otherwise would.

The place Zash is going to is in fact a town he visited five years ago to heal one of their plants, to check on them.

...that seems... sad? But sad in a complicated way, like—it's good that they get to do what they want and accomplish what they care about even though it kills them, but it's still sad that it kills them. He thinks. He's not used to being sad about people dying.

—also, if the plants are the only source of water on a whole world without it, isn't killing them also... very... stupid...???

Oh yes it is. It is very, very stupid. But...

...well, most qualified plant engineers died on the Fall, and the remaining ones had to rebuild their technological base from scratch. And dealing with plants is very complicated, the automated systems are good as far as they go but if you just rely on them and don't optimise your usage of plants' outputs you end up inevitably hurting them like this. And while in many big cities they're learning how to reduce the rate of that happening, they're not really... doing so in a very sustainable way.

Humans are not very good at consuming their resources in a sustainable way. That's how they fucked up their original planet.

The most forward-thinking humans are hoping they can rebuild enough of their technological base to be able to create (or fetch) new plants before they run out of the existing ones but most people aren't really hopeful; with the rate of population growth and plant usage, most realistic projections do not end with humanity surviving.

...okay. So. His first impulse, obviously, is: fuck that, he'll make this world livable.

That's a stupid impulse; if he tries to just make it work with a wave of his hand and all the magic he can bring to bear, the world will probably turn out livable but it'll also be inside-out and backwards and filled with people turned to stone or struck by eternal slumber and monsters that sneak up on you and devour you or ask you strange riddles and turn you into a worm if you can't solve them and odd floating bits of magic that make you dance for a hundred years at a stretch or lose all your memories or explode.

But... with time and care and effort, lots of it... he's pretty sure he can make a difference without wrecking everything? He might have to bend the project of his anti-sword toward the cause, but... it wouldn't be so bad, he thinks, to design his anti-sword with this sort of thing in mind. Hard to think of anything that's more the opposite of destruction than taking a whole world full of people doomed to die and giving them life instead. And it'll help the plants, too, if people aren't relying on them quite so desperately. Maybe he could even help the people by helping the plants. Less fragile, more powerful plants seem like they will just make everything better for everyone.

Eheheheheheh so about that ahahahah.

Zash (and his twin, Nai, whom Zash hasn't been explicitly thinking about until this point but whose existence has been sort of colouring everything else) have been termed "independent plants". They were created by plants aboard one of the generation ships a century and a half ago, appeared fully formed as infants in the plants' room, and then they aged very rapidly to adulthood (they looked the way humans look when they're seven at one year of age, and when they were seven they looked sixteenish) and haven't aged since. They are extremely thoroughly immortal as far as Zash can tell; he tried to, um, kill himself, because of reasons, very very hard aboard the ship, and failed. They also have better-than-plants ability to generate matter with as far as they can tell no noticeable drain or injury, they have very thorough telekinesis, and their telepathy is not as good as plants' but with some effort Zash has managed to get superficial thoughts and emotions from a distance and somewhat-less superficial ones when touching plus project (which Nai can't do at all, but on the other hand Nai can completely hide from psychic senses which no one else can).

(Aaaand there's another related bit there where Zash can no longer do TK or matter generation because of mumble mumble mumble but anyway it's doable in principle.)

So, "less fragile, more powerful plants" is actually a known reachable target! But it's only been reached via creating them from scratch, he is not sure it's possible to do so to existing plants.

A whole lot of things are possible with magic that aren't otherwise, in Siran's experience. But, also in Siran's experience, if you want to solve a problem instead of creating several more you have to go slow and know what you're doing and not bite off more than you can chew.

...also he's surprised how many feelings he has about Zash attempting suicide. That's sad??? That's sad and he's sad about it??? He's glad that it didn't work but also that's complicated because presumably past Zash had good reasons, but also that's complicated because Siran certainly remembers wandering despairingly into a cursed city and 'reasons' were not so much a feature of his decisionmaking process at the time.

...nah, he didn't really... have very good reasons, and he's... mostly... glad that he survived, too. He was just a kid. He was extremely traumatised and self-loathing and felt like the world would be better without him.

(He is not, entirely, certain that it wouldn't be. Most of the time he thinks it wouldn't, but in his darkest moments... well.)

Consider: without Zash, Siran would not have gotten hugged today. Siran thinks this is a pretty solid argument in favour of Zash's existence.

Zash grins and... nuzzles him, a little bit. Look, hugs are nice, okay, and Siran is cute.

Anyway, Zash just meant that, like, there exists already a potential target for "making plants stronger" so if Siran wanted to aim for that it would be a remarkably solid choice. But there are probably other targets to aim for that Zash isn't thinking of because he's too used to thinking of independent plants.

(But what if Zash is cute, what then. What then.)

The example of independent plants is definitely a helpful one to have in mind! But probably he's going to start by just trying to find ways to make plants more resilient, harder to hurt, better able to live in this world, better able to use their own powers to sustain themselves, that sort of thing. And he's going to try to be really cautious about it.

Fair enough, Siran is the expert here.

So one last thing about plants is that, like Zash mentioned, humans don't really know they're more than machines and the majority of them think they were created by humans so they often act pretty... well, callous. And then when you point out that plants are actually sapient they by and large tend to rationalise it away as either lying or justified because if they didn't abuse plants they'd die anyway and if it's between them and plants, well.

And the plants themselves see this and so mostly prefer that humans therefore not be made aware of the facts because they're... very bad at long-term planning and strategy and getting them to cooperate with sustainable usage is very difficult. A single plant can sustain dozens of humans for decades if left alone with the automated systems and over a century if minimally cared for and they mostly see this as a worthwhile tradeoff. Trying to swap to a sustainable system would involve lots of deaths in the short term and they're horrified by the idea.

Well, maybe they'll feel better about it if Siran can bridge that gap by helping them keep people alive.

Yeah, they honestly probably would. Zash is having slight feelings that Siran might be the best thing that's happened to this planet.

That is not really what he would've expected before landing here. And he still might fuck everything up! Never discount the possibility of Siran fucking everything up! But... he really hopes he can help? It seems like a better thing to do with his life than lie in the sand feeling bad about his terrible decisions.

Yeah, speaking from experience here lying in the sand feeling bad about one's terrible decisions loses its charm very quickly. If nothing else it's horribly boring.

So boring! Very few hugs! All in all not a good time.

Zash hadn't really thought about the lack of hugs as a noteworthy feature of lying in the sand feeling sorry for himself but—