OOC: Side sim - just a quiet hour in the Arboretum. Come say hi, and perhaps help me save my plant. :)

IC:

The Arboretum on Deck 9 was, in Ensign Selvane’s assessment, by far, the most logical place aboard the Ogawa to spend an off-duty hour. It was quiet, it was warm. The air carried the smell of soil and growing things rather than recycled corridor atmosphere that most of the ship carried. Further, the lighting had been tuned to something close to a planetary afternoon. For a man raised under a hotter, brighter sun than most of his crewmates preferred, it was about as near to comfortable as the ship got.

He was seated one of the many benches along one of the winding garden paths. Across his knees, a shallow planting tray balanced, and a small collection of tools arranged beside him in precise order. In the dirt was a single plant from his homeworld, or what he deeply had hoped would become one. The seeds had been a gift, pressed on him before he left home, and he had followed the cultivation instructions with what he believed to be exacting care. Everything that he could think of, from Soil composition, to watering schedule, and light exposure, all of it measured and logged.

But, the plant had a different idea and was dying anyway.

Selvane was not one easily frustrated, but the decline of his plant was very slowly getting under his thick vulcan skin. The leaves had gone from a healthy pale green to a dull grey, and no adjustment he had made in the past six days had done anything significant to reversed the decline. It was, he reflected, an illogical thing to be bothered by. It was one plant. He was a physician, not a botanist, and the ship’s databases held a hundred hardier species he could grow instead. “No”, he thought to himself. He wanted this particular one to live.

“The variable I must not have accounted for,” he murmured to himself, “is the one I cannot identify.”

He set the probe down and looked out over the Arboretum, at the various food beds, winding paths, and the handful of other crew who drifted through the space on their own individual errands. Someone here, he reasoned, very likely knew more about growing things than he did. It would be a simple matter to ask.

The difficulty, as ever, was the asking.

Ensign Ian Selvane, M.D.
Doctor - USS Ogawa