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

[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?"

[sporesprouter]

"Some. Not as many as you can see here, with a moon taking up a third of the sky, wherever you are." She shakes her head. "But it's not nearly as bright as daylight, they glow but not that much, and you're only ever under one at a time."

[peaklordshen]

"That's fascinating." Shen Qingqiu keeps getting distracted - from sharing his notes, from BL pollen - but learning about cool worldbuilding from the other Mansion residents is really one of his primary joys, and he's been too caught up in drama to indulge in it in days. "They—revolve, then, around your planet?"

[sporesprouter]

"Oh, no, they... well, I suppose since the world turns, they revolve around with it, but they stay in the same place¹."

¹ If she knew the term geosynchronous orbit, she'd be using it here, but she doesn't².
² No, those moons are not exactly natural. No, she does not know this.

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu has to consider this for a moment. "Wait," he says. "So—when you say you're only under one at a time, you mean because you move around the world? Each moon hangs over a specific part of the planet, all of the time?"

[sporesprouter]

She nods. "At the center of its sea. You could see the Verdant Lunagree from where I grew up."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu flips to Tress' entry in his notebook and writes this down. "And the moons release - constants streams of spores, into the seas? Or is it intermittent, like tides?"

[sporesprouter]

"It's constant. The sea level actually rises a bit when you get closer. It's almost like sailing uphill, a little."

[peaklordshen]

Sailing uphill sounds like a metaphor for the absurd to Shen Qingqiu. "Do you have a favorite moon?" he asks. "Is that a strange question?"

[sporesprouter]

"The Verdant. I grew up there. Even though I've seen so much more since then, it still reminds me of home."

[peaklordshen]

Shen Qingqiu smiles at her. She sounds so sincerely fond. "What's your home like?"

[sporesprouter]

"Well, home's more my ship now, but that said... it's a little saltrock island in the middle of the Verdant, just big enough for a little town and the duke's mansion."

[peaklordshen]

"The duke?" Shen Qingqiu asks. "Is he in charge of the Verdant?"

[sporesprouter]

"The duke's in charge of the island. There's a king in charge of the Verdant." She frowns. "I'm not really very fond of either of them."