"-I'm doing it this way for a reason, actually. Do you want to take over?"

"...No. Very well, my bad."

"A mutation is when we randomly change some words. It happens naturally, sometimes, and most of the time it just makes nonsense- 'Sota stands Green and Tooth', or something. Or it's about the same good for growing, just different. If the instructions for how to be alive are nonsense... The plant doesn't grow at all, or not very well. But rarely, the random change actually makes something better. Wheat that grows stronger, or that is poison to certain kinds of bugs but not to people, or that tastes better. The chance to get better crops is worth a lot of up front effort. So that's what drakes do for the most part. We try to make plants better."

"The effect on well-balanced heirloom seeds is useful too, if not exactly consistent."

"...Huh. But only one wheat would have the new thing, right? Is it a new species? And what's 'heirloom'?"

"Only one wheat has the new mutation. But it's not a new species- As long as it can still make seeds with other wheat plants, it still counts as the same species. So what we want to do then is try and make seeds that all have the new trait we want. Larian?"

Larian waves Nico over to the sand table. "Heirloom seeds are plant strains that are notably resistant to drakebreath. That doesn't happen on highly engineered seed lines. If we take a certain mutation and do careful work to make it breed true, and stack multiple mutations onto each other by controlling which pollen goes where, like with Garosmaize, that plant ends up -- delicate, I suppose. There's a lot of very specific mutations in Garosmaize to make it grow so large and so quickly, and breaking even just one will ruin the whole plant, so drakes breathing on them almost always just kill them or make runty useless maize instead of anything useful. But heirloom seeds aren't like that, they'll turn out mostly fine with one or two little mutations, and they'll also grow much faster than non-drakebreath plants because of the other magical effect drakes have, so you can actually farm this way. Anyway, here's a basic square diagram. It's a demonstration of one common trait pattern. I assume Tanno wants to tell you about it."

"...I don't think I understand about Garosmaize. It's more delicate because it already had a lot of mutations?" He comes over to the table.

"Garosmaize isn't useful here anyway. It's meant for high-density chartreuse farming."

"Sort of- There might be one mutation that makes it make more sugar, and one that makes it grow taller, and one that makes the stalk thicker, and three different ones that make the seeds bigger but only if all three are there- That's what the 'fruit' of maize is, it's seeds- And if it doesn't grow tall it dies, and if the stalk is thin it dies, and if any of the three 'big seed' mutations are missing the seeds are tiny or taste awful. So, it's more like a tall tower of blocks instead of a smooth square of them. You can put a new block or take one away from a pile on the ground, but if you do that to a tower, it falls down."

"Ooh, I should ask Merta for some blocks." Bounce. "That's amazing! You should also be trying to turn tower-block-plants into more stable ones, right? Are you farming heirloom plants or ummmm 'engineered' ones?"

"Yes, we do that sometimes too. I'm mostly working on making engineered plants! All my fields are for research and new kinds of plants, not growing food. Kef's paying for it, hoping to get more good drydark-plants."

(Larian glances longingly towards her book, left well away from the messy sand.)

"You don't do this with animals, right? Just plants?"

"No, that would be pretty awful!" Well, some drakes do it with actual animals, he's heard. In carefully private labs. Mostly insects, not anything more complex. Maybe even frogolds, though he's not sure if that's just a horror story. He doesn't see how they can stand it.

"This square diagram," Larian starts rather loudly, "Is a demonstration of the basic concept of dominant and recessive traits and how such mixtures of traits display in offspring. You can see we have two bean plants here, one that is green and one that is yellow. The physical trait of being green or yellow is the phenotype. There is also a genetic trait, the book of instructions, and for complicated reasons I don't want to explain right now almost every living thing visible to the eye has two copies of most genetic traits..."

And Larian will go on to explain Mendelian genetics to a fascinated Nico with additional comments from Tanno. He asks many questions. She has a nice dry-lecturer tone, and Nico doesn't mind the attitude. He kind of likes it, actually, it feels... Honest.

("I'm happy to teach sometimes, he's bright, he's absorbing a lot," Tanno mentions to Calsa. "Do you want a book to look at in the meantime? I have some histories, a poetry anthology, The Travels of Mortikesh...")

"If you don't mind, I'll have a look at the poetry! Maybe I can set some of it to dance. Thank you!"

He gets Larian to stand in front of a little dumbwaiter-thing and lowers the book down. It's a blocky thing by Nico's standards, but a relatively slim one by local standards, especially compared to thin stone sheets. Paper is not so common, and carefully preserved bark and leaves are a lot less compact than processed and pressed paper.

The conversation gets technical pretty quickly. How they choose seeds to test, what the schedule is like, how they vary the growing conditions. Some plants need wind. Some plants need to be positively flooded. Larian has ideas about breeding tank-algae to produce some useful material, kept warm and bright and moist in shallow beds by catfolk. Neither of them know especially much about animal or people genetics, and they demur from the few questions Nico asks on that topic.

Nico suggests creating air and water inside pressure vessels to Larian, and she goes outside to demonstrate the limited agility and thrust kappas can get from their ability by creating water forcefully.

Larian excuses herself after a little while, and goes back to writing some other report. Nico keeps asking about how plants work, with digressions into geometry and some showing off of his light tricks.

Nico has to resist telling them about Green magic several times. It might be obvious to Calsa when he almost suggests doing something magic, but stops.

At length, Tanno yawns. "Okay, I'm getting kind of tired- My rest shift is coming up soon. I'd go pick out a seedling for you but I can't come down while you're still here. So, any last questions?"

"Oh, sorry. I'll go now, I don't want to make you stuck any longer."

"-I'm not any more stuck here than I was in the chartreuse. I'm less stuck, even. We had little drake towns but it got old fast, it's crowded everywhere in the chartruse, all farms or lakes or towns and cities and the farms don't want us messing with them by breathing on them. But here in the drydark as long as I schedule it I can go outside the walls. Lots of empty space."

Aaaaah... Tanno is even more trapped than Nico is. Because he's dangerous. That would be a much worse kind of magic to have than his.

He is going to figure out a way to help Tanno. This is a fact. It's probably blue.

"I'm going to figure out a way to help you with that," he declares seriously.

"It's really alright. I don't need the help as much as some people."