Chapter Text
Avernus
Travelling on one of the compact’s most luxurious ships should have been enough to keep Avernus occupied. Experts in Relaxation, Enjoyment, and Fun had spent centuries perfecting the absolute perfect intergalactic voyage for florets and their Affini alike. Every hour brought new music and dance performances from the vast cultures the Affini had domesticated over the years. That alone could fill a trip, but the expert minds in the REF department had more in store for its passengers. An ever-rotating cast of boutiques and restaurants adorned the ship, offering food, drink, clothing, knicknacks, trinkets, souvenirs ornaments… If a sophont were to want it, they would find it here, on Cornucopia. (Whoever’s floret came up with that must be real clever, Avernus thought to himself sarcastically.)
Failing all of that, the ship had some of the biggest sprawls of parks and forests in the fleet. If you wanted to simply run away from society, hide in the woods, and never be seen again, that was an option. Avernus could stretch his vines, maybe explore the botanical gardens and see what new creations they’d made since his last visit. Or he could simply admire the intricate mosaics of flowers that formed beautiful landscapes, letting himself get lost in their natural beauty, perhaps gaining a renewed sense of alignment and purpose in the universe. Avernus wasn’t interested in that. And he had never been especially interested in xenopharmacology, either. There were plenty of things Avernus should have been doing other than research his destination. He was not doing those things.
Perhaps a more patient Affini, Avernus mused, would be able to enjoy the journey for all of its uniqueness and beauty. They would roam the fields and forest, speak to their shipmates, make friends and socialise with the adorable florets. See the sights at each stop and admire the natural beauty of the universe. Go back to pet the florets again because they’re simply so cute. Have revelations about life and love and nature and purpose. That was not why Avernus went on vacations.
Avernus worked hard. He deserved a good vacation. Coming off an arduous century of research and development near the core worlds, Avernus wanted nothing more than to indulge himself in something pleasant. Give himself a well deserved break from hard work. Do something enjoyable, light. Refreshing, even! Avernus could use a refreshing. He had mused for at least a year near the end of his project on exactly what vacation to take. Of course he wanted it to be simpler, a way to relax. But it still had to be intellectually stimulating, or he’d go mad with boredom. He needed something like… studying the intricate beauty of a new, simple species of domesticated sophont. That would do nicely, he had decided. Take a year to peer deep into their physiology and uncover their secret inner workings. See what the cotyledon program had missed, or see for himself how effective it could be. Cut them wide open and put them back together piece by piece until he could…
Avernus felt the subtle shift of the ship's walls that indicated the ship had gone faster-than-light. “Good,” he thought to himself. “It should only be a matter of hours before I arrive.” Avernus wasn’t sure when he’d allowed his internal monologue to get so narrative. He was restrained with his language by nature, and preferred spending most of his time alone. Perhaps, in that time, he’d started to develop a flair for the dramatic. He’d have to investigate that further. He’d also have to brush up on his specificity. “A few hours” was a poor choice of words for a ship that could travel from point-to-point near instantaneously. What a more correct internal monologue would have said is “a few more hours of visiting plants punctuated by near-instantaneous jumps to the next locale, eventually ending up at my destination.” Avernus’ internal dramatist needed a physics lesson.
Perhaps this vacation would be a good opportunity for him to reconnect with his fellow Affini, while honing some of his own interpersonal skills. That would be the secondary objective, he decided. Primary objective would be to unwind while studying a nice simple sophont species. Secondary objective?, Make at least one new discovery in that species’ biolo-
Avernus realised that socialisation would have to be moved to at least priority Three. No matter. Avernus liked his hobby. More than that, Avernus liked his profession. His passion for his work had led him far in his life, and garnered him quite a following of young xenobiologists. Avernus never much cared for the fame his findings had brought him. To him, his work was much more important for keeping him busy rather than advancing socially in any manner. But he had to admit, between his older age and his research, he had quite the reputation. Plenty of Affini (“a near uncountable amount” Avernus reminded his inner monologue) were at least as old as Avernus. One hundred and something blooms was mathematically, a very common average age for his species. Age being relative, of course. Still, Avernus’ longtime expertise in his field could be quite useful.
A very long time ago, when Avernus was in only his third or fourth bloom, he’d studied xenobiology. He started to work with the local xenoveterinarian, an Affini who was his elder by at least fifty blooms. He had excelled quickly. The hardest part, Avernus quickly realised, was when the florets were awake. So many things could go wrong when the patient was awake. As soon as they weren’t, though, things became very simple. Biology was really just a set of patterns, Avernus thought. All beings were at least somewhat alike, and once you found the pattern you could fix almost anything. This thinking brought Avernus far. Before long, his mentor was recommending Avernus for frontline missions to distant galaxies, working on cotyledon programs and the like. While this challenge suited Avernus well, the untrained, easily frightened cotyledons did not. For all of Avernus’ strengths, he could not manage to master bedside manner. So, he pivoted his work to surgery and emergency xenoveterinary medicine. Things were much easier there. For one thing, he no longer had to talk to terrified sophonts, or talk to his patients at all. He could solve his little puzzles, stitch the patient back together, then move on to the next one.
With time, Avernus’ reputation brought him more important, but most importantly more difficult work. His knack for working with unknown biology became well-known, and he was often the first to publish comprehensive manuals on cotyledon biology. His longtime focus on medicine meant that he was well versed in the basics of about one hundred different species of sophont, needing only a quick refresher to perform the most difficult surgeries. After all, all he had to do was find the pattern and work from there. Easy. He didn’t even have to talk to the sophonts in question either, leaving that work to his more sociable coworkers. By the time he was in his fiftieth bloom, Avernus was a very busy Affini.
Most recently, he had just finished the cotyledon program for a rather unique species of sophont. Much like the Affini, they were plant-based. Not especially anomalous, especially given the vast genetic diversity the Affini had already encountered. What put Avernus onto this project was a key difference in this species’ biology: where the Affini have long been able to graft new material onto themselves, the bodies of these sophonts violently rejected any kind of foreign material.
Their similar physiology also proved to be a challenge, as each cotyledon the compact had rescued was a different shape and was composed of different plant life native to their homeworld. Instead of audible communication, the cotyledons used a series of spores and pollens, which took a team of expert xenolinguists and grafting specialists several years to fully understand. Avernus usually liked to keep himself lean, with only several sharp implements and a few basic xenodrugs grafted to him at any point. He never had much need for anything else, and he found having multitudes of cosmetic and seldom-used grafts to be quite distracting.
Avernus felt around his body for the grafts he’d been given for communication purposes. He had yet to remove them, as they were quite fickle. The only reason he’d gotten them at all was because one of the cotyledons happened to be a doctor. Despite his general distaste for talking to patients, Avernus found that cotyledon particularly impressive. Avernus remembered back to when he first figured out this bit of information. It was an important breakthrough. The cotyledon’s name, when translated from spores to Affini, was something like “Impressive Wise”. The xenolinguists hadn’t yet figured out the spore combination that referred to medicine. As soon as they did, though, Imp’s insistence on shooting spores at Avernus started to make sense. He was trying to share information! He recognized Avernus as a senior doctor and wanted to share.
Imp, as the Affini started calling him, sped up Avernus’ pattern recognition process quite substantially. His help shaved at least ten years of work off of the project, so the slightly uncomfortable spore grafts were allowed to stay on Avernus’ otherwise plain body.
Avernus would eventually remove these grafts, he knew, but right now he was in no rush to do that. In the fifty years it took for Avernus to create a haustoric implant that wouldn’t be immediately rejected he’d grown quite adept at using their strings of spores and pollens. It then took another forty to refine the implant until it was ready for the general public. Ten years into a successful transition out of the cotyledon program and Avernus was finally ready for some time off. Pruning could come later, when he was properly situated.
Avernus spread his many thin, root-like tendrils through his habitation unit. He had long ago stopped bothering to maintain the facsimile of a form when he was alone. It was much easier, he found, to spread out in a dizzying collection of limbs and go from here. Reach for something on one side of the room while grabbing something else on the other side. His habitation unit was very sparsely decorated for this reason. Avernus far preferred function over form, and this carried over to nearly every aspect of his life.
If you were to look at Avernus’ habitation next to one of his Affini colleague’s, you’d immediately spot the difference. Where most Affini homes were lavishly and meticulously decorated, or at the very least very fully furnished, Avernus’ home looked more like an empty storage container than anything else. Soft dirt made a perfectly serviceable floor, and the room was without any furniture or decorations to speak of. There was no need for furniture when one could simply spread out onto the floor, after all.
Besides, Avernus spent much more of his time in his office near the veterinary surgery centre. That was a room with much fancier fittings that may as well have been Avernus’ home, given how much time he spent there. It had a large desk, some shelves for storage, and even a few chairs. The heights of luxury, as far as Avernus cared. The office was, of course, also travelling with Avernus, as he found it much easier to simply transplant from one spot to another rather than try to uproot. Seeing as he rarely brought guests, much less non-Affini, to his home, Avernus considered this lifestyle to be very practical and well-suited to him. A life with minimal distractions gave him the freedom to truly indulge himself in his work.
In the last thirty years or so, Avernus had been hearing more and more about a particular new species of sophont. Apparently, they had put up an adorable resistance to pacification and made excellent florets. Avernus never paid these stories much regard, chiefly because all sophonts tended to make excellent florets for one reason or another. When the first of the human florets had travelled as far as the Core Worlds, Avernus took an afternoon to go observe them. They didn’t seem special to Avernus at first: bipedal with average strength, fixed limbs, some redundant body systems, and a restriction to specific environments. Still, Avernus had the opportunity to watch a haustoric implant being placed, and he saw the appeal. Granted, it probably wasn’t the same way as most Affini saw the appeal of humans. What they saw were shy, empathetic creatures with adorable little habits like dyeing parts of themselves bright colours or collecting shiny objects. What Avernus saw was much more…physical. Humans made a prime candidate for study: simple, beautiful creatures Avernus could spend a few years studying before he moved on to something bigger and grander.
The Terran Proctoreate was mostly centred around a yellow dwarf star in the Milky Way galaxy. Avernus had settled on one of the stations orbiting the star as his new temporary home. Its travels through the solar system brought in a diversity of sophonts that would make excellent candidates for study. He would deal with some difficult, exotic cases for a year then move on somewhere else. Avernus highly doubted it would take him more than a year to learn everything there was to know about this species. After all, compared to his last project, humans were dead simple. A simple circulatory system, immune systems that were easy to fool, and a relative ease of access, for lack of a better term.
Avernus leafed through a copy of the most recent medical reports regarding humans. This specific issue regarded the human respiratory system. It was… well, it was a very simple set of organs, really. Sufficient for its purpose, but frankly inelegant and wasteful in its design. Avernus could improve it easily in several hours, and given several weeks could overhaul the system entirely and make it at least twice as efficient. But that was hardly in the spirit of vacationing, now was it? Avernus would make do with the humans’ natural physiology, at least until he had an excuse to improve it. A soft pling! noise brought Avernus’ attention to his tablet: a short notification blinked on its screen, indicating that the jump to the Sol system was complete, and docking procedures with the Sol Living Station were underway. “Good,” Avernus thought to himself a low hum. He carefully closed his book while once again cursing himself for letting his internal monologue get so dramatic. Soon, Avernus could get to work.