The words rang in her mind like the screeching breaks of a train. Aya Ayad the spouse of our Calipha. Aloe felt her vision turn blurry. Black. Red.

  So that's why you didn't want to continue the story, huh? Aloe laughed to herself as she deciphered Naila's intentions. Her arms were trembling from rage, a boiling rage that moved her massive body like an earthquake and threatened to explode. In the end, you are just like your mother…

  As soon as Aloe felt like going over the tipping point, she heard a thud and a yelp. Her vision regained color, and she saw Nesrine the engineer on the ground.

  "Is there something wrong?" Aloe asked calmly.

  "N-no… not at a-all…" The young head of engineering responded with a shaky voice. It was then that she noticed her arms and legs were trembling as she pushed her back against the desk as if… trying to run away from her.

  "Oh…" The bicentennial druid moaned in realization. I wasn't holding myself there and she… she felt it. Felt what I was about to do. "Do not fret, Nesrine," she extended her hand to the woman and greeted her with a warm smile. "You are safe here, I'm not going to attack you."

  She had been on the verge of losing it, yes, but she had managed to recover herself.

  "R-really?" Nesrine inquired with a trembling hand. She wanted to grab Aloe's, ached to do so, but at the same time, she was scared.

  "Yes, do not worry about my outburst. I just remembered that… I will have to have a long conversation with Naila, but that's none of your business, so don't fret over it."

  The engineer's eyes shot wide open – now she saw that there were more cyan than light blue – but Aloe instantly understood the reason why. The fear had disappeared, she was just surprised how she had referred to her 'Calipha' by her name so casually. It was written over her face.

  Oh heavens, it has been a while since I have been able to read someone's face so easily. Maybe that sleep did do wonders.

  It took a bit of unspoken prodding in the shape of shaking her hand, but Nesrine finally accepted it.

  "Oh!" The woman with the glasses yelped as Aloe casually raised her from the floor. "You are… strong."

  "They tend to tell me that, yes." Aloe giggled. "But now that the introductions are over, we should get over with our business."

  "I… of course!" Nesrine recovered her composure with a jolt as she straightened her hunchback posture and pressed the bridge of her glasses against her temples. "Truth be told, I haven't been exactly briefed on what I have to do. They told me you have some plants to show me?"

  "That I do, but first, do you have somewhere where we can sit down?" This was courtesy as she wouldn't tire no matter what they did, but it felt weird doing an explanation whilst standing up.

  "Oh, right. Follow me, there's an annex room to this office." Nesrine made a gesture for Aloe to follow her, and she walked to a simple door that led to a simpler room once open. "I use this room for occasional naps, so it's free of the mess from the office, thankfully."

  The annex room was a small room that had a rectangular coffee table surrounded by two sofas on the long sides and an armchair on the opposite side of the door. The sofas, instead of being traditional Ydazi cushion sofas, were made out of leather like most she had seen in the halls of the palace or hotels and the airships. Modern Ydazi people seemed to prefer these seats, even if they seemed horrible for the skin.

  "Please take a seat," Aloe was thankful for her lack of sweat glands as she sat down on the opposite sofa as Nesrine, otherwise her lovely dress would be drenched and creased by the end. "From what I have heard these plants are like the 'monster' ones that are common in the Evergreen, except that they are new ones, right?"

  "Well, 'new' is a bit of a misnomer, but it's true they have never seen elsewhere."

  "How's that? I can understand finding a new specimen, but multiple of them? In plural? How?"

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  "Simple. I made them." She shouldn't have said that, but the confusion on Nesrine's face was so delicious that Aloe only wanted to see it amplified.

  And heavens, it was worth it.

  The young engineer's face contorted in a face of utter bewilderment as she digested the words she had heard. Her visage screamed "Have I heard it wrongly?" and that only made it better.

  "I…" Nesrine hesitated for a second. "What do you mean by that? That you… made the plants?"

  "It's a secret~" Aloe responded with a giggle and a finger placed on top of her lips. The gesture got a blush out of the engineer. "Maybe once I know you better, I'll tell you. For now, you just have to believe my words. Naila certainly did."

  The woman with the white coat raised her finger for a moment, only to lower it the next. She blinked twice, took a single breath, and her heart beat five times before she continued.

  "Believing is not part of my job," she answered professionally. "I have been ordered to inspect the plants you have to show me. Whether you have 'created' them as you have proclaimed, it is not my intention nor my job to prove it otherwise. Having stated this… where are these plants of yours?"

  Aloe couldn't help but giggle at Nesrine's words. Not only because she had instantly gone against her word as she accepted they were hers, but because she would have to show her something amusing. The druid pondered if to take the grown plants out of her chest if just to embarrass the young engineer, but instantly chose against it. As amusing as that would be, she wanted to keep the Slowtide hidden. It was one of the plants she didn't want to show. Instead, there was another amusing thing she could do.

  "Here," Aloe said with a smile as a sprout surged from her plant. The sprout grew and grew, from a sprout to a bud, from a bud to a long stem, and finally a flower. A puffy flower the size of a head with a stem of a meter in length.

  "Oh…" The growth had been so fast that Nesrine only managed to react once it was fully grown. "I… didn't expect that. I suppose you are not going to tell me how you did that."

  "You guess correctly," the druid's smile intensified. "But it's not as hard to divine how I did it unlike with how I created them."

  "I'd rather leave those questions for later. My job is to seek applications from these plants. And taking this into consideration… what does this plant do?"

  "Can you switch off the lights?" Nesrine frowned at the petition, but without making a fuzz she stood up and switched off the only Myriad light in the room. As this annex room was without windows, the place instantly submerged into darkness. Or at least that was what should have happened.

  "Oh, bioluminescence." The young engineer's glasses reflected the soothing light blue light of the plant. "But this is far from an uncommon thing. Maybe in plants, but lots of fauna and flora present this characteristic. I wouldn't classify this plant as a monster."

  "Give a nudge to the flower on top," Aloe ordered again.

  The head of engineering frowned once more – the room was still dark even with the light of the flower, but that wasn't a problem for Aloe's superior sight – but she still didn't protest.

  "It's a finger flick alright?"

  "Go for it." Aloe nodded.

  Nesrine flicked her finger, and multiple seeds were sent away from the crown of the flower. At first, they descended slowly as expected but a moment later they stopped. Not only that, but they also started orbiting the main plant.

  "Oh~" The fairer-skinned woman mused in amazement.

  "This plant is called Moonlight's Tooth, and as you have seen it has faint bioluminescent capabilities that resemble the light of the moon, but its seeds can also orbit the main plant for an undefined amount of time."

  "…What do you mean by 'undefined'?"

  "Well, I have never seen seeds fall to the ground without external interference."

  "Oh," Nesrine brought her hands to her head as if she had heard the most moronic statement of the century. "I… am flabbergasted, to say the least. How sure are you are of that claim?"

  "Not much, but you can trust that these seeds can stay at least one month floating in movement."

  "I see…" The engineer slowly traced back to the light switch and turned on the Myriad light. She almost tripped, but not out of the darkness, but out of lack of concentration as her mind was elsewhere. "This gives me ideas, but nothing definitive. From what I'm seeing, these seeds have a linear acceleration thanks to their circular movements, but their speed is small alongside their weight, so the amount of work they can exercise by themselves is trivial. I would have to first run tests, also crunch numbers as this is a closed-body system. It all would depend on the magnitudes of the resulting centripetal acceleration, I think. Maybe."

  The spout of words that came from Nesrine's mouth made no sense to Aloe, but she kept her smile as her confusion and amazement were truly enjoyable, nonetheless.

  "I'm glad you are enjoying the plants. Truth is, the Moonlight's Tooth is the most inoffensive of them, so I wasn't expecting anything from it, but it seems you can see further than me."

  "Yes, I can see some applications for this Moonlight's Tooth in kinetics, but as I have said, until I have numbers, I can't say anything for certain. And besides, kinetics is not my strong suit, an average industrial engineer would have a better time at it. It also wouldn't be the first time the scientific community has gotten excited about the discovery of a new phenomenon, only to realize that it only applies to very specific conditions, and it would never be possible to replicate, let alone be useful, in standard settings." She had taken her glasses off and cleaned them as she spoke. She only continued once she was done and put them back on her nose. "Alright, show me more."

  Nesrine's eyes shone in cold analytical prowess but also child-like wonder, not different from the one Aloe had experienced when she had first found out about Evolution centuries ago.