[OPEN] no such winds blow hither

[sans_harmony]

WHO: Diwaniya and anyone who'd be in the vicinity of the garden.
WHAT: Plants vs. Rifters
WHEN: At...some point after Di's arrival.
WHERE: The Gallows herb garden
NOTES: None atm.

It's been a long time since Diwaniya last stood under the shade of a real live tree. It's been a long time, come to think of it, since he even saw any sunlight strong enough to produce shade. Or flowers, or stone buildings, or people who looked at him with anything but mingled fear and loathing.

It's nowhere near enough to make up for the way this place has crippled him. He can't shake the feeling that no matter how green the garden blooms, it's all a facade, a sterile simulacrum of life and health, frozen and unalterable and doomed to stagnate with no Shapers to tend it. But it's something, if a very small something.

The herbs are all distressingly foreign to him. He could identify any one of the eighty-seven plant species unique to the Ashen Isles from across a room, fresh or dried, but even something as ubiquitous as elfroot looks utterly alien to him. He reaches for a plant growing in a pot, meaning to pluck a leaf for further examination. It doesn't occur to him that he might not be perfectly entitled to manhandle the flora.

Comments

[youwonscience]

"I wouldn't do that one without gloves," Cosima calls, the memory of her own misadventure with that particular plant overcoming any hesitation she might feel in butting in to a stranger's business in the garden. It's not like she's here so often herself, so maybe he's meant to be plucking it ... Still. Gloves.

"It's just, that's rashvine, and it's not false advertising."

[sans_harmony]

Prideful though he may be, Diwaniya knows when to defer to someone else's expertise. He withdraws his hand as if burned. He's already got one palm covered distressingly in weird green magic; he doesn't need to add a painful rash on top of everything else going wrong for him right now.

"What advertising? It's not labeled at all. If it's hazardous, there should be a sign." Not that he'd be able to read it if there were, but he is blissfully unaware of that yet.

[youwonscience]

"Figure of speech, sorry. I think they assume most people who use this garden know what they're looking at. I was out gathering stuff in the wild the first time I ran across it, someone local had to warn me too." She comes over a bit closer. "Were you looking for anything in particular? I'm not the most knowledgeable about local botany, but I've picked up some basics."

While he probably doesn't have the context to pick her out as a rifter on sight yet just by dress and manner, within the Inquisition's facilities, she doesn't bother with gloves; her anchor shard is plain enough to see.

[sans_harmony]

Her accent sounds more like his than any of the other strange ones he's heard here, and that alone is enough to pique his interest even before the glow of her shard catches his eye. Her clothes don't look any stranger to him than anyone else's, it's true, but his hopeful thinking would have pegged her as a fellow anchor even if she did have her anchor hidden.

"Nothing in particular except a grounding in the basics you've mentioned. Where did you learn them?" It certainly gives him some hope, if there are other rifters who know what they're talking about.

[youwonscience]

"Mostly the library," she admits, "though I've made friends with a few of the healers, and they're generally happy to talk if they have time. I'm actually here to grab a bit of elfroot because it's got some medicinal properties that interest me, but I'm still working with a whole different vocabulary than I'm used to. My world doesn't have anything to spirit healing, but on the flip side, I've had really limited success explaining basic genetics here."

Thedas is, generally, not quite ready for Gregor Mendel.

[sans_harmony]

Diwaniya perks up a bit at the mention of the library--poor sweet summer child--but looks far more excited still as she continues to explain. He knows already that this world has no Shapers--can't possibly have them, doesn't have the raw magical material necessary for their work--but there's far more to his life's work than just the magic of it, and while Thedas may not be ready for basic genetics, Terrestia's elite have been studying the subject for centuries.

They don't call it that, exactly, where Diwaniya comes from, but the translation magic seems to have mercy on him, making it clear to him that she's talking about his own field.

"That's not surprising," he says, "it's too complicated for a layman to be trusted with anyway, but--what do you know of it?"

[youwonscience]

"Genetics?" Cosima perks up a bit too, almost despite herself. "I'm an evolutionary developmental biologist. I was in the middle of my doctorate work when I ended up here. It's very kind, a lot of people are like, 'Of course you can find a way to do your work here,' but I work at the cellular level on the regular, we don't even have proper microscopes in Kirkwall."

[sans_harmony]

Perhaps it's not the Shaper educational system he's accustomed to, and he's not sure exactly what a doctorate is, but he can already relate to the well-meaning-but-nonetheless-infuriating promise of being able to continue research one no longer has any of the proper materials for at all. The things he's lacking are more magical in nature, but still--that much, he gets.

The rest is new. He has only the faintest notion of what she means by 'cellular,' exactly, and it stirs a memory--he remembers rumors, whispered gossip among colleagues notoriously secretive about their work, nothing concrete, nothing to take and run with, about some staggering breakthrough lost to the passage of time. He'd heard a senile old Shaper rambling once about tiny scrolls in the bodies of living things, invisible without the aid of powerful magic, containing the instructions for every trait ever painstakingly bred into the organism. He'd dismissed it as madness; everyone had--but he never had entirely forgotten it.

"Could you elaborate?" he asks, almost anxious. He doesn't want to reveal his own ignorance on the subject. Not yet.

[youwonscience]

His interest seems different, somehow, from even the more curios people she's encountered in Thedas. More urgent. (She squashes the thought of Maris, applying pressure to her fractured arm while asking about peptide chains.)

"Okay, well, I don't know what your baseline understanding of biological functions are, exactly, so stop me if I'm explaining something you already know. But cells are small units of living things, usually invisible to the naked eye." If you want to get pedantic, chicken eggs are technically cells, but that's a detour she's not going to take just now.

"My work, in particular, focuses on reproduction. It's easy to understand intuitively that a lizard is more like a snake than it's like a person, but scientist in my world have also figured out that it's more like a bird than it is like a dog. That's because, we're pretty sure, the lizard and the bird had a common ancestor more recently than the lizard and the dog did."

She's watching his reaction, evaluating. Even with non-scientists in her own world, she usually doesn't make it as far as her actual dissertation topic. "Epigentic influence on clone cells" is enough to make most people's eyes glaze unless she really takes the trouble.

[sans_harmony]

The trouble with combining magic and science is that often, when the magic is allowed to do some of the legwork for you, you wind up with the right answers without ever having known what the question was. Most of this sounds basic enough to Diwaniya, who's spent his career tinkering with the expression of different phenotypes in magical creatures, learning what he can through a sort of magic-enhanced animal husbandry. It's just...the notion of cells. That's the elusive breakthrough he's never come close to getting at before.

"Of course I understand how things evolve, or can be made to evolve, but...let's revisit what you were saying about these invisible units. How can you prove their existence, then? How were they discovered, and...what do they do?"

[youwonscience]

"They're not invisible with sufficient magnification. That's how they were discovered, actually. We invented a tool called a microscope that uses lenses to magnify subjects many, many times. A guy called Robert Hooke was looking at ... um, cork, I think, and saw it was made up of a bunch of tiny building blocks. Of course, in a cork they were dried out and not alive, but he identified the basic structure. As for what they do, it depends on what kind they are. Complex plants and animals are built of a ton of different cell types -- cells make up your skin or your hair or your blood or whatever. Some organisms are just one cell - organisms that give people food poisoning, for example."