open post: pollen science

[peaklordshen]

After his conversation with Sagramore, Shen Qingqiu had taken a long, hot shower, mainly for the novelty of it, and then gotten dressed again in his robes—although he wore fewer layers than were truly proper for a peak lord, and he'd forgone his guan in favor of just braiding his hair in a thick coil against his neck. He leaves the two looser loops at the front—he still can't find his fan, and it felt wrong to not have any frame to his face at all. He's not thinking about why he feels loath to fully don his Shen Qingqiu persona. He's not thinking about much, about the last few days. Instead, he's thinking about pollen.

He's in the greenhouse, carefully laying out a sample cut from every plant in the place, as well as every plant he can imagine producing pollen of any kind from the grounds. Grasses, flowers, buds, leaves, even a few species of harmless-looking mushroom. He's using a pair of tweezers he found to gentle separate them so he can examine the internal structures. Some he recognizes as entirely harmless - Earth flora; others are stranger, more alien. Some even look similar to plants from Proud Immortal Demon Way, though thankfully none are obviously aphrodisiac in nature. Shen Qingqiu is wearing his gloves and mask again anyway—he doesn't want to breathe in the wrong pollen; normal sex pollen would just increase his normal desires and make him hyper-straight, totally defeating the purpose.

He has his notebook open to a fresh page, and is making meticulous lists.

Comments

[peaklordshen]

"I would love some help," says Shen Qingqiu. "On your world you work with... spores, in some way, is that correct?" He's saying on your world, he realizes, instead of in, as if it's a separate planet, rather than one of an increasing number of fictional dimensions, even though, as far as he can tell, SecUnit is the only one from a sci-fi setting. "Are you familiar with any that change human behavior, or... preference? Desire?"

[sporesprouter]

"Yes, spores." Tress frowns thoughtfully. "I... haven't visited every sea yet, and so I'm only really familiar with the spores most used on a ship, plus the midnight, but none of the ones I know do anything like that. Is that what you think a plant is doing?"

Tress's tender sensibilities seem unoffended.

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu nods. "It would be subtle." Subtler than most sex pollen, which has a very blunt, immediate, and, uh, obvious effect. This doesn't even seem to increase sex drive, really, just... shift it. "Do the spores on your world occur naturally, as part of plants or other organisms?" Maybe that's why he thought about planets, before. Something about spores feels very extraterrestrial.

[sporesprouter]

Very extraterrestrial indeed. "They fall from the moons. Each moon hangs in the center of one of the seas, dropping spores at the lunagree."

[peaklordshen]

The moons! "Oh, right, Laertes mentioned you had an unreasonable number of moons," he says. He squints at the table. "You don't suppose the moon over the Mansion is dropping spores, do you? "

[sporesprouter]

"If it is, they're not spores like the ones we have back home. Those come down in a solid stream you can see from fifty or so miles away."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu sighs. "So if it is moon spores, they're invisible," he mutters. "Man, I hope it's not invisible moon spores."

[sporesprouter]

"I'm... pretty sure we're not in a sea of invisible spores."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu nods. "Me, too," he says, "but it's nice to have the confirmation." He sighs. "This would be so much easier on my world. Everything is so—" badly-written, "—obvious there. The plants that do certain things are usually shaped like... well, organs that have to do with those things."<sup>1

1</sup> He means dicks. Exclusively dicks.

[sporesprouter]

The slant of the conversation leads her to pretty readily intuit his meaning. "Your world sounds..." She tries to think of a polite way to finish that sentence. "... different."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu snorts. "It's—yes," he says. "If I tell you it's as if it was written by an absolute hack, alone at a computer, selling out to a bunch of pervert men with more time than sense, will you accept that as nothing but a weirdly specific metaphor?"

[sporesprouter]

"Well, since I didn't even understand a good bit of what you were saying, I guess I'll have to."

[peaklordshen]

"Sorry," says Shen Qingqiu. "The point is—my world is stupid, on a fundamental level. Not the people—" not all of them, anyway; Qi Qingqi, for example, would skin him alive for even suggesting the idea, "—but the actual world itself." Except for the frustrating moments it's not, where Airplane actually had a good worldbuilding idea, and then totally ruined it by only mentioning it once. "But, on occasion, conveniently obvious." He frowns at the plants.

[sporesprouter]

Tress nods slowly. "So now that you're here, which isn't as conveniently obvious, you're finding it harder to figure out what's going on when you're looking for it?"

[peaklordshen]

"Exactly," says Shen Qingqiu. He sighs, dispirited. He's starting to think none of the things he's gathered have BL pollen in them at all. "I also... am used to having a certain meta-level understanding of the world at large," he admits. "But here I keep being wrong about everything. The—beats are wrong, somehow. People don't act the way I expect."

[sporesprouter]

She nods slowly. "I think that if people always acted the way we expected, the world wouldn't be as interesting. It would be easier, sure, but... people are people. And that means strange and mixed-up and sometimes contradictory. It can be frustrating sometimes, yes, but I'd rather have it this way then know what was going to happen all the time."

[peaklordshen]

The thing is, Shen Qingqiu knows Tress is right. Or—she would be right, if they'd been in the real world, and half the people Shen Qingqiu had met here hadn't been from Hamlet, or weird alternate universe fantasy novels, or Arthurian myth, or apparently the Bible(??). But they are, and Shen Qingqiu himself is here by way of fiction, as well, and in fiction, people aren't people, they're characters. Puppets for an unseen author. He's used to blaming that author for the things Tress is outlining: inconsistencies, contradictions. He's used to dismissing all of that as hopelessly, depressingly OOC.

But—even before he'd left Proud Immortal Demon Way, that had been changing. Luo Binghe hadn't been spending nearly enough time with his future wives. People at the Immortal Alliance conference had died, and Shen Qingqiu had known they would, had been expecting it, had enjoyed this arc, the first time around, and he'd still felt...the hurt he'd caused Binghe, as inevitable as it had been, had still felt...

He'd attributed it to being overly sensitive on his part, sentimental toward these automatons he was surrounded by. But then he'd found out Airplane was there, in PIDW with him, no longer controlling it from the outside. He'd still written them all, they were still composed of the building blocks he'd cooked up in his feverish, perverted little brain, but now they were just—acting and reacting, bouncing off one another like tops that had been spun and released.

And the same was true, here. Everyone here had been spun up in some other world and released into this one, and in the wake of their release they were... changing. He'd been hyper-focused on the big changes¹ but they were changing in smaller ways, too. Luo Binghe had released Claudius from his blood parasites with only slight coaxing, and was making platonic friendships with women. Lan Wangji was making friends with ruthless bitches and Christian demons. People were learning from one another - skills, life lessons. Hell—he glances down at himself, barely decently dressed, no guan, his fan nowhere to be seen. Transport him back to Qing Jing right now and he'd be nigh unrecognizable.

"People," he says slowly, "are people. You're right."

¹ He means becoming gay.

[sporesprouter]

"I know it sounds a little obvious," she says, blithely unaware of Shen Quingqiu's copious skills of internal monologue, or the very real ways that it couldn't have been obvious to him without directly pointing it out. "But I think, on the whole, it's still a pretty good thing."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu lets out a slow sigh. "Maybe so," he says, and gives her a small smile. "Speaking of people—I believe we said we'd compare notes on this place, and unfortunately all of my notes are about people - the Mansion itself remains frustratingly inscrutable."

[sporesprouter]

"I have some notes on the Mansion itself, but it changes a lot so I'm not sure how useful it would be. We can still compare, though!"

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu nods. He pulls out his notebook, and the map he'd started to make with Yuri. ¹ "We were actually trying to determine whether there was any pattern to the changes," he says, "but haven't had any luck so far, except that it feels almost—" he remembers the walls seeming to laugh at him, after his disorienting almost-exorcism and return to adult form. "—malicious. In contrast to the suggestibility of the kitchens and libraries, which seem more helpful."

¹ In a thread that's still happening right now, but shhh.

[sporesprouter]

"I haven't gotten all that much malice here. Well, aside from once, and that was kind of a small thing anyway. Frustratingly unhelpful, yes."

She pulls out her own notebook. "I had also made a lot of star charts, but I've given those to Janet. I didn't really see anything particularly notable there anyway, not that I'm an expert."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu blinks, impressed. He hadn't even thought about charting the stars. "Is the sky very different from yours?" he asks. "I suppose it must be—no big spore moons."

[sporesprouter]

The star charting was entirely Janet's idea but Tress certainly did throw herself into it with a bit more enthusiasm than warranted. "Oh, very. The sky was what made me most uneasy when I got here. Even know, it's still very strange to me."

[peaklordshen]

What was strangest to Shen Qingqiu was—and still is—the people, but they've been over that. "You're used to navigating by the sky, I'd imagine," he says. "It must be bright as daylight, with twelve moons. Can you even see the stars?"