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Leaf hadn't intended to end up in the city, but the faint scent of trees had attracted her. And if there was a chance of finding some sort of green on the ship, she was interested in it. She missed proper landscape-there was always the sensorium, but she still didn't entirely trust it. This, at least, smelled like it was permanent, and not something that would fade away.

She made her way through the scab cautiously, her ears splayed out and her hackles up as she tried to ignore the buildings looming overhead. As the scent of trees got stronger, she picked up her pace, finally breaking into a lope in hopes of finding natural shelter faster. But once she found it, she skidded to a halt, eyeballing it warily.

The entwined trees of the temple smelled as they should, that was true. But seeing them entwined to form something made her uneasy. Leaf stepped closer to the temple entrance, then stopped just outside it, peering in and flicking her ears back and forth uncertainly.

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"What?" Leaf's ears prick up and she lopes over to where Bella is, baring her teeth a little again. "What is it?"

"Look."

Bella moves over. There's an opening in the temple's roof, allowing the city's artificial sunlight to filter in through the leaves.

In the center of the room is something almost like an altar, constructed of living foliage.

In the center is an orange flower, larger than a wolf, sprawling in the dappled sun.

They can smell it now that they're this close. The lack of even a breeze has kept its sickly sweet scent from permeating to the rest of the temple.

Leaf growls to herself as she walks forward, her hackles rising higher. The sniffing doesn't tell her much-all she can smell is that sickly-sweet odor.

"Have you ever seen a flower like this before?"

She circles around the altar, eyeballing it warily and attempting to keep her feet clear of any vines-just in case.

"No. Flowers do not get this big in my forest," she says. Bella circles around the flower. She gives up on trying to pick out any important scents in the overpowering cover of the flower.

"Do you think it is very important? It looks important from where it grows."

"Most likely," she agrees, stepping closer to the altar and shifting her weight from foot to foot uneasily as she does so. She's still leery of staying still for too long around the thing.

"The plants it is on remind me of the trees, but the flower itself grows like it is wild."

"Maybe it is a holy thing," says Bella. "Maybe it has a spirit."

She's tempted to touch it, but this seems like a bad idea...

"Wait for me. I have a plan."

And with that? Off she runs!

Leaf pins her ears back momentarily as Bella runs off, but she listens anyway, turning her attention back to the plant to watch it suspiciously as she waits.

The plant is deeeefinitely alive. It has a sort of presence. Like something older and wiser... just... not very animate.

Bella returns in a matter of minutes, carrying a familiar object in her big Hispo teeth.

The axe. The big one.

She shifts her grip nearer the blade and nudges the flower. Slightly.

It... doesn't do anything.

Huh.

"Prod it again," Leaf offers, circling around again to get a view of the plant from the other side. Perhaps it would look more active from a different angle.

"Perhaps it did not feel it before."

Bella acknowledges with a subtle movement. She's a wolf, a wolf is not hampered by carrying a blade in her mouth!

She nudges the plant more sharply, closer to the base...

PWOOMF!

There's a SURGE from the flower. It CONVULSES. A cloud of golden spores rises, settling on the wolves and the ground around them. Bella JUMPS back in alarm, managing not to drop her axe. She snarls, ready to pounce on the plant if it moves.

A massive sneeze dislodges the axe.

Leaf leaps backwards as well, surging up into crinos with a roar. She lets out a roar of fury at the plant, claws ready to strike...

..and stares as the spores just float down gently, without any attacking vines or pods suddenly showing up. She sneezes as well and attempts to shake the spores off, snarling to herself.

Bella shakes herself like, well, like a wolf with plant spores all over it.

The flower is rapidly shriveling where it sprawls, dying before their eyes.

Bella is stiff and silent, bristling like nobody's business, growling, and baring her teeth, but...

There's nothing to fight.

"I think we broke it."

Leaf shifts back down to hispo and drops to roll around on the ground, attempting to get the spores off. Mostly that just sends more spores flying in every direction, and as she gets to her feet again, she settles for shaking.

After a moment, she sniffs the air again. "It does not smell as if it released anything harmful."

Bella takes a whiff in and just ends up sneezing. She then tries again, less zealously.

"It does not."

She picks up her axe with surprising delicacy.

"I think we should leave."

She doesn't like looking at the shriveled flower. She feels like she's done something wrong.

Leaf pins her ears back briefly, then sneezes and turns away. "Yes. We have explored enough."

And by 'explored' she means 'destroyed'.

Leaf lopes out of the temple, moving out at a much more rapid pace now that she's reasonably sure it won't try to attack her. Once she's outside, she drops and rolls again.

Bella leaves a little more cautiously, still sort of hoping for a fight. There's more golden dust drifting out of other chambers. Other flowers, maybe? Green patches appear on the ground where it mingles. More starts settling in Bella's fur though, which finally prompts her to run.

She joins Leaf in trying to dislodge the worst of it.

Meanwhile, the plant temple is stiffening. Drying out. Dying, perhaps.

Except for the beginnings of green...

Leaf finishes rolling and gets to her feet, baring her teeth for a moment as she watches the temple shrivel. The beginnings of green, however, make her pause.

Slowly, her ears prick forward and her tail begins to wave a little. "Look!"

Bella does look. She's not sure what she's looking at, more than a little discouraged by the state of the plant temple. It is dying. She killed it. She poked it and it's dying and she killed it and it is bad bad bad.

But...

"Growth!"

This demands wolf sniffing!

"Yes!" Leaf bounds back over to the remains of the temple, sniffing madly. Green, and it's spreading! And there's no order to it, either.

That's what particularly makes her excited-the temple isn't reforming itself into its disconcerting shape. The green is simply growing on its own, with nothing constraining its growth.

Bella slowly, hesitantly, but surely starts to wag her tail.

"It is alive!"

This makes her feel much, much better. The trees that made it up are drying and creaking, they'll likely soon start falling. The temple seems to be going through a dramatically sped up cycle of death and rebirth. Vines are climbing the old trees and the new sprouts are growing larger and bolder.

It's slowing down after the initial surge, but definitely moving!

"We made it grow!" Bella concludes brightly.

And sneezes again. Dangit, it's going to take forever to get this fully out of her nose.

"And it is growing right this time," Leaf says, sounding more than a little pleased as her tail continues to wag. "There is nothing like the Weaver here now. It is as it should be."

She lets out a sneeze of her own and then looks up, eyeballing the other temples thoughtfully. "Perhaps it will spread to the other parts of the scab and break through."

"But they are stone," says Bella. She hates to be the downer, but this is true. "Stone does not grow."

"But at least this place is as it should be."

"We have done good!"

She's happy enough to conclude that.

"Plants can break through stone," Leaf says confidently. "It simply takes time. But yes, we have."

Her ears and tail up, she turns and begins trotting back through the city with a much more self-assured pace. "We should tell the Gnawers."

Bella follows her lead without even thinking about it. Leaf is boss wolf, Bella follows.

"Yes. They should see. We did good in the scab and the Gnawers would do well to learn from it."

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