After finishing up with Rins' stuff, you realize that the time has come. The three-hour block set aside for Mitl has arrived. You seriously consider giving up your resolution to help with the move early and going to hide in your new room until the screaming has stopped.
You are not looking forward to working with Mitl. It's not that Mitl himself is particularly unpleasant—he could be reasonably described as 'nice,' if very absent-minded. The problem with Mitl is that he's almost completely oblivious to his surroundings. This goes double when he's focused on something. His tunnel vision would be a minor character quirk, except that he regularly works with two incredibly dangerous things: deadly plants and necromantic energy. Also, as previously mentioned, he does not tend to warn anyone before he starts combining them in new and explosive ways.
Unfortunately, if you don't go help Mitl with shifting all his plant samples into the correct spaces, there's a good chance that he'll end up tracking poisonous pollens and seeds everywhere. You don't want to see something like Venomar Carnivorous Grass start taking over this moon. Which means you need to help him get his things in order.
Joy.
Lesson one of dealing with Mitl Es Talis: do not sneak up on him. This is less because he might lash out—Mitl is not a particularly violent person most of the time—and more because he might be about to set off what he describes as 'a contained explosion' and you call 'a localized apocalypse.' So instead of just teleporting into his quarters on the ship, you teleport outside the very locked door, knock gingerly, and then immediately scoot to the other side of the hall to wait. And then further down the hall for good measure.
Several seconds pass before you hear the door click. It slides open with a loud squeak, the equivalent of incredibly rusty hinges. Mitl pokes his head out. His bangs are even more ruffled than usual and he's wearing his work goggles. The dark glass is smoking. His whole body is wreathed with necromantic power. It feels like he's just finished a fairly sizeable spell. Behind him, there is screaming, which definitely backs that impression up.
Yeah, you're very glad you didn't just teleport in blind.
"Zaiyu!" He beams at you, fangs glistening. It's not a threat. Sure feels like one with all that necromantic energy rolling off him, though. "What can I do for you?"
"It's what I can do for you, actually!" you chirp, grinning back. You refuse to show fear. Not to him. He's the only person on this ship who can't read people to save his life and you are mercilessly taking advantage of this. "Chop, chop! Time to get off the ship!"
"Really? I thought I'd notice when we arrived. Did we arrive?"
"Sure did! Now the base is set up and Rins is done, so it's time for you to move in. Quickly now!"
He reaches up to adjust his goggles and leaves a smear of black soot and fine grey ash across his cheek. Ugh. Your fingers itch to wipe it off. And attack him with a hairbrush while you're at it. "When did we decide the order we were moving in?"
Oh, come on. "The Captain marked this on the calendar."
Mitl frowns. "Was there a print-out?"
"It's in the shared UI, Mitl. Just look under Today's Schedule. Now, what are you planning to bring inside—"
"I need a print-out," he insists.
You very carefully do not scream.
---
Once you finally badger Mitl into motion, lesson two of dealing with him comes into play: don't touch anything in his space without asking first. Again, this is less because Mitl is a possessive guy and more because everything he comes into contact with has a way of becoming poisonous or worse. If you think you recognize a plant as harmless, no you don't. This means you spend an awful lot of time floating very still in his lab, pointing at things and asking what harm they can cause the unwary.
"Pointy green leaves, little yellow flowers, hissing quietly?"
"That one's poisonous, but it's a contact poison," he says as he bundles a load of floating plant samples together. "Don't touch it with your bare hands."
You use a charm to carefully levitate it onto one of the little floating carts Mitl uses to transport his plants. It's a lot slower than teleportation, but most of his plants have nasty defence mechanisms for when they feel threatened. Apparently, being moved unexpectedly counts as threatening.
"Also, the flowers explode if you startle it," he adds belatedly.
"Thanks for not telling me until after I moved it." You snatch your hands away and move on to the next plant. "Red fern, with the—wow, you have a lot of these."
He seriously does. Mitl somehow managed to turn his quarters into a tiered greenhouse for the trip, and the entire floor is just the same red fern with tiny, insectoid eyes glistening on each pinule. They're compound eyes so they can't really track you as you drift above them, but you still feel watched.
"That's a new hybrid! I'm really proud of how they turned out. They're basically a biological security system. If they spot something that isn't supposed to be there, they emit a really loud siren."
Well, that sounds incredibly annoying, but not the worst thing in the world.
"And if you touch them, they release a cloud of toxic spores. Death within six hours!"
You nod and fly in the opposite direction. "Tell you what, you like them so much, you get to pack them up."
He nods seriously and takes your place above the ferns. As you watch, he gives the nearest deadly frond a gentle pat, like a beloved pet. "Thank you, Zaiyu."
Ugh. How does he get away with being so genuine when he's also such a flake? You don't know but you hate it. "No big deal. I'll handle the—what even is this."
Is this even a plant? It looks like a lump of white crystal.
"That's my sample of Crystalvine!"
"How is this a vine?" It's like a foot tall and shaped like a slightly wonky cone. You don't poke it dubiously, but you very much want to.
"I convinced it to clump up for travel," he says absently, already surrounded by hovering ferns. "It shouldn't have any effects in this state."
"Okay, cool. But if it did, what effects would they be?"
He hums thoughtfully for a moment. "If you make too much noise around it, you might be subjected to complete petrification. Why?"
You look down at the lump of crystal. "No reason. Where should I put it?"
"Oh, it has its own case. Let me show you—" He gets up and leaves the ferns half-collected. Three aren't even secured to anything.
"No," you hiss as loudly as you dare, "Finish your ferns first. I insist."
Mitl makes several other attempts to get up and leave his deadly, deadly ferns half-gathered and go do something else, but with you riding herd on him, you manage to get everything collected and safely packaged up within two hours. That leaves another hour to be dedicated entirely to getting all the plants safely off the ship. Which brings you to lesson three of dealing with him: Mitl can be trusted to know how to care for two things, his plants and himself. Absolutely nothing else makes the cut.
So when Mitl stops in the middle of lugging a floating cart outdoors, eyes wide, and says "Ah," you immediately throw up your strongest shield without hesitation. Because Mithos knows Mitl sure isn't going to remember to shield you.
Right on cue, an enormous swirl of pitch-black energy erupts under his hands. The energy of death crackles around you, a deep and unrelenting absence that swallows up everything. Light. Heat. Taste. Texture. For a long and terrible moment, you float inside a fragile little sphere surrounded by emptiness.
There is nothing but the void, and the void is hungry.
Then Mitl wrestles control back over—whatever caused that—and the world snaps back into focus. "Whoops!" he says with a sunny smile, spinning around like a little kid inside his small, one-person barrier. His bedsheet fwooshes out around him playfully. You want to hit him. "Sorry about that!"
"At least you remembered to apologize this time," you say sourly. "How many times is this gonna happen?"
The answer is 'six more times,' which six times too many. But Mitl does apologize every time one of his plants suddenly tries to kill you and he forgets to expand his shield to fit you. That's something, you guess.
He also keeps up a steady stream of chatter, which you encourage. You don't particularly like being alone with your thoughts when your life is in danger. Also, sometimes he has something important to say, like 'oh, I think this might explode actually,' and then you get an extra three seconds or so of reaction time.
"I'm really looking forward to terraforming earth properly," he says brightly as he tethers another load of ferns outside the ship. The fronds reach out in his direction after he lets them go. "I have so many ideas about how to get the temperature higher. Give me five years and I'll have the arthropods a decent size."
"Aren't you the plant guy? I didn't realize you did bugs as well."
"You have to understand bugs if you want to understand plants. Nature is a system. Everything inside it is also a system. It's all connected." Mitl tilts his head back and smiles blissfully at the stars. "I can't wait to see earth. I can only imagine how many changes the life there has gone through to survive the last four million years…" All of a sudden, he's looking at you with that almost frenzied joy. "You're thinking about it, too, right? An entire planet! One with the mana network to actually support us, not just another dead mudball that leeches the life from everything it touches. The space to create things that are important instead of just necessary. We could build something new, Zaiyu!"
This is the first time you've seen Mitl's toothy grin aimed at anything that didn't have thorns and incredibly toxic properties. You're not entirely sure how to respond to that much intense feeling being directed at yourself. It's… kind of overwhelming, honestly. Suddenly, you can empathize way too much with the Captain's decision to just ignore Rins, and you're pretty sure Mitl doesn't even know what his bright eyes and unashamed honesty are doing to you.
"We can get started on that right now!" He barrels forward. "You're the first one down to the planet, so you can get away with doing all sorts of things in the guise of research! If you want to bring back all sorts of fun plant samples, the Captain can't tell you otherwise! So please, Zaiyu, collect some samples of earth's new flora for me while you're gathering fauna. We can make wonderful things together!"
There are many ways you could react to this. The Crystalvine sample you're floating decides to take the choice away from you.
Mitl's smile drops at the same time his eyes go wide. "Oh no. That was a bit too loud for Crystalvine, wasn't it?"
All at once, the lump of crystal floating over your hands explodes into a mass of glittering, lashing vines. You have only moments to react before they touch your skin.
Magic roll: 5 + 8 + 6 = 19/100
In your defence, you are still very frazzled from a close encounter with Mitl's stupid grin. That's why, despite knowing the three rules of dealing with Mitl by heart, you don't get a single shield up in time. At least your array of charms take the brunt of the attack. You feel rather than see them petrify, one after the other, delicate little arrays of moving gears and bright colors suddenly frozen in crystal. They weren't meant to tank hits from something like this, but there are a lot of them and they're very well-made. Only a few hits make it past your defences.
Unfortunately, Mitl was not exaggerating when he described the side effects of contact with Crystalvine. The moment one of the glowing translucent vines touches the hand you were floating it above, your whole arm starts to stiffen up. You can't drop the plant for fear of making this worse. You can't destroy the source of the magic currently invading your body for the same reason. You can't even smash Mitl face-first into the moon a few times because you're actively being turned to stone by a glorified weed. The only thing you can do is grit your teeth, try to keep the invasive power contained, and hold on as your fingers stiffen up.
Finally, the Crystalvine stops flailing about and settles down into a posture that resembles a wreath. You know, if wreathes were made of gently undulating crystalline tendrils that sparkled and shimmered with light from within. You very carefully set it down and leave it hovering about a foot above the ground. Then you take stock of what's happened to you.
From the tips of your claws to halfway up your shoulder, your right arm has turned to white crystal. You can move the shoulder easily enough, but the muscle becomes sluggish below that. You gently run a claw down toward the transmuted skin and discover that your sensation is dulled, too. By the time you hit rock, you can't feel the pressure of the nail at all. The arm itself is frozen with the forearm slightly extended, fingers in the loose grip you usually have while maintaining a levitation spell.
Bad habit, that. Your teachers would tell you that you probably had this coming for being lazy enough to cast a spell with gestures instead of keeping your arms at your sides where they belong.
You extend your senses quickly and confirm that, for all intents and purposes, you no longer have an arm. What you do have is a stone statue of an arm neatly grafted onto the rest of your body, with a slow gradient back to flesh at the upper arm. At least you can still channel magic through it easily enough. When you carefully shift it, you find that you can even see the stream of power pulsing through your arm, glowing like a vein of light under a crystal shell.
When you raise your eyes, you find Mitl fussing over the Crystalvine, trying to convince it to go back into the lump. It is not cooperating.
"Mitl," you say very calmly, "I am going to kill you."
He glances up with a confused and hurt expression. Then he spots your arm. After several seconds of blank staring, he manages a very weak smile. "Maybe I should carry the rest of this."
"Yes. You should."
Mitl wants you to gather some fun samples of earth plants.
[ ] I CAN HAS GREENHOUSE
Whoever said misery loves company was 100% correct. You are miserable and you are going to make it everyone's problem. Enable Mitl in his quest to fill the moon base with hazardous plant life and get ready to watch the fireworks. Add finding Mitl dangerous earth plants to the top of your priority list.
[ ] HOW ABOUT SOME SAFE, BORING PLANTS INSTEAD
After one of his existing samples turned your arm to stone, you know exactly what he means by 'fun': incredibly dangerous. You're not giving him more opportunities for collateral damage. Bring back some nice flowers and grasses you spot on the way back from your actual missions.
[ ] NO PLANTS FOR MITL
Your arm is a shiny rock because of Mitl. He's not getting anything from you until you can move it again. Maybe this disappointment will finally teach him that actions have consequences.
I would apologize for the re-roll that got you this, but the original roll—before I messed up and had to delete the whole post—was a 14. You would've gotten partly petrified either way. Mitl's plant collection is dangerous. At least the crystal is pretty?
