Conversation goodness!

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Dinner was a very uncomfortable affair. All sat squeezed in around Anne's kitchen table, Anne and Meryl sitting by Mark to keep him from feeling too uncomfortable. No one wanted to ask Anne why she had left so precipitously, not with Mark at the table. Or at least, no one with tact.

"So why did you have to leave before I even got out of the bulb?" asked Ace. "What was so important that you couldn't have stuck around an extra week or two? You didn't know about all this stuff in December, didn't know that the plants needed your help right now and all that. So why leave?"

"I had to," she said simply.

"But why?"

Anne sighed and put her fork down. "I was… I needed to go off somewhere safe and have a nice nervous breakdown. This, all of this, this planet, being a plant, knowing you guys, it was all too much for me. I needed space to sort it out. Space, time, and I wasn't willing to trust that Knives wouldn't try to recruit me for his favorite crusade. And even beyond that, I wasn't willing to trust my ability to say no. I never thought, never believed, that I would be gone this long. I thought I would come to December, figure out how things worked here, try my hand at some research, have a breakdown, and then go back home. Gone a few months at best. And if things held me up here, I figured that you would have gotten the barrier down a few months after I left and, if you cared at all, you would come after me."

"So what stopped you from coming back? Didn't the fact that no one came after you at all clue you in that things weren't right?"

"I guessed that you decided life was simpler without me. You wouldn't be the first people to think so. Life ended up keeping me here, anyway. I had my nice little breakdown; that went as scheduled. But… what I found here, it held me."

"Why December? Why not some other city? Why did you have to come here?"

Anne shrugged and swallowed before replying. "I had been here before, and I'm a city girl. I like being in cities, like the anonymity that being just one of a crowd supplies. I wouldn't get that in a small town. That, or the access to materials that I have here."

"So why not Augusta? It's a good sized city again. You could have gone there."

"December is biggest."

"Bigoted-est."

"Not… exactly. From what I understand, and Mark would know more about this than I would, but I think that the Lost Ship folks are pursuing a similar line of research into the capabilities of plants."

Mark paled a little as the attention at the table shifted to him. He took a quick gulp of his water before trying to speak. "She's right. They say that they just want to neutralize the threat you possess, but here in December we're more of a splinter faction, a little more willing to find a permanent solution. Instead of saying neutralize, we say kill. Mr. Herman actually came from the Lost Ship, was hired as manager because he knew things about the lost technology that we had forgotten. It was back… oh, fifteen years ago, before my time, but he and a few of his friends joined up with a group of fanatics that had been eliminating plant children all over Gunsmoke."

Vash paled. "Lost Ship? They… they're trying to kill us?"

Mark shook his head. "No, not them. Not kill… they'll just put you in a bulb that you can't get out of."

Knives barked out a laugh. "They could try," he said dryly, then grew more serious. "What plant children?"

Mark shot him a puzzled look. "You… didn't think that you and your brother were unique, did you? Twenty-three other plant children have been gestated since the Great Fall. Twenty-two have died. Most of these were at the hands of the Brotherhood of the Engineers, a group of men based out of the December plant who were sent out to service plants that didn't have engineers of their own. When they found a pregnant plant, or heard about troubles in power supply that were indicative of pregnancy, they would dispatch one of their own to take care of the problem."

"But… why?" asked Meryl. "Why kill them?"

"The Brotherhood, as one might assume about any group that calls itself a brotherhood, was fully of slightly crazy people. They thought that the plants were harnessing demonic energy from between the astral planes, and that plant children were demons sent from hell to destroy the world."

"Do you believe that?" asked Alex.

"No. Like I said, they were before my time. No, Mr. Herman got into contact with them when he first came to the plant, and he sort of morphed their organization into what we have now."

"What do you believe?" inquired Alex politely.

"Honestly?" He looked about the table, at all the blonde heads and intent gazes. "I would rather not say," he continued uneasily. The gazes grew a little more pointed, and Anne cleared her throat.

Mark sighed. "I don't trust you people with the power you have. The humanoid typhoon and his crazy brother intent on wiping out humanity? Do you honestly feel that I should think having more of you people running about is a good idea? Two cities were destroyed, completely annihilated while you two squabbled. All those lives lost, families destroyed, and for what?"

"You act all affronted that I don't like you, but why should I? Anne says that you aren't evil. Fine. Even assuming she's right, you don't seem to care about the impact that you have on the lives of others, and I fail to see why you should be allowed to carry out all your whims when people suffer at your hands."