Chapter 8: 8: Fateful Fruit

“Found another patch of blueberries,” Grace said as she jogged over to me. “It’s starting to feel like this place has just a little too much food you know?”

“Yeah tell me about it,” I replied, looking up at her from where I was digging in the ground with a trowel.

I was pretty sure this plant would have edible roots, but I needed to actually get to them first. We’d been at this survey for a week now, going out every day and finding an abundance of wild food just ready for the taking. It was strange and honestly downright creepy. Whoever had placed us here definitely intended for us to stay alive in the short term.

Things at Avonside had been surprisingly calm after the management gave us all purpose. People were finding a surprising amount of self satisfaction and happiness just doing their jobs and doing them well. We all missed things from before though, shit the psychology students and faculty staff had their work cut out for them just keeping everyone stable.

There were some suggestions floating around from their department about improving morale. Things like holding parties, or getting the codies to hack the cell towers and turn it into a new network for us. They were even talking about building the basis for a new, much smaller internet in the university. Anything to give us all a semblance of our old normal while we adjusted to our new normal. One thing was for certain though, we weren’t going to be starving in the short term.

Stopping my digging for a moment to have a little rest, I laid the trowel on the ground and leaned back. “Did you hear that another team found a field of wild wheat in a clearing yesterday? We’re going to get bread again one day.”

“Yeah it was Jillian’s team. She’s been bragging about it ever since,” Grace chuckled, plopping herself down next to me and offering a handful of blueberries. “These got cleared for eating a day or two ago, and oh my goodness are they good. Nothing like the tasteless shit they sold us in supermarkets back home.”

“Oh really? Yes please,” I said, taking off my glove and then cupping my hand for her to pour them in.

I took the other glove off too, then popped one of the little things in my mouth. It popped when I bit down and a sweet, but also slightly bitter taste filled my mouth. It was good, the flavour was about twice as intense as I was used to from blueberries and my jaw locked up from the sour portion of the flavour.

“Oh wow, you’re right,” I gasped after a moment, before popping another one in my mouth. “When they get that wheat going we’re going to have some fucking amazing pies. All the fruit tastes good around here, it’s crazy… even if they look a little weird.”

“Yeah well the shit back home was bred for looks and size first and flavour second, these are all the more wild variety,” she replied, a grin on her face as she watched me eat the berries.

“Yeah exactly,” I agreed, pointing at the little blue and grey berries in my hand. “I mean I wouldn’t buy these if they were in a supermarket back home. They’d look almost diseased next to the beauty pageant winners that they sold.”

I finished the blueberries by pouring them all into my mouth, then grinned at Grace and proceeded to try and talk to her through my mouthful. All that came out was a set of unintelligible muffled syllables. She laughed, scrunching up her face and turning away with a look of amused disgust.

“That’s gross Eli! Oh my god,” she said with a grin, picking up my gloves and throwing them at me. “Put these back on and let’s get whatever it is you’re digging at out, I saw some odd trees up ahead that I wanted to explore with you.”

I was almost laughing too much to swallow, but I got them down eventually, followed by my gloves. We worked together at the plant in the ground, digging up what eventually turned out to be a whole lot of nothing, much to my disappointment.

“You can’t win them all,” Grace smiled, pushing herself to her feet and stuffing the dirty gloves in her bag before taking out a clean pair.

I followed suit and motioned into the forest. “Let’s see these weird trees of yours.”

“Alright, follow me,” she nodded, and we moved off.

The forest was so peaceful, apart from the odd rapport of a rifle going off in the distance as the hunters carefully stalked their prey. We were being cautious with the hunting side of things from what I heard, aware as we were of the effect of apex predators on a forest.

It was a lesson hard learned back on earth, forests dying out simply because farmers were killing off wolves, which led to an explosion of the animals they had hunted. That explosion led to those prey animals eating all the slow growing little sprouting trees which in turn let grasses and other faster growing plants take over the forest floor, choking out any saplings before they could get a chance to grow. It was a little convoluted, but many forests were in the process of dying out due to this problem.

Because of the huge role that animals played in the health of a forest as a whole, Avonside was making sure not to hunt everything at first, relying on frozen meat from Earth to feed us for now. Portions were low, but until we had an understanding of the local ecology, we didn’t want to go shooting every animal in sight and destroy our hopes of surviving in the long term. I knew I’d rather eat roasts for several years to come than a bunch of roasts now and then none later.

“Here, look!” Grace exclaimed, interrupting my thoughts to point out the tree she’d found.

“Oh, now that is weird,” I breathed, walking closer to the first out of place tree we’d seen so far.

It wasn’t actually a tree at all, but rather a vine that had long since killed its host tree, growing a taproot of its own to continue independently of the original host. That class of vines had a name, but I forgot it in the moment, because I had far more important things to consider, like the fact that its leaves were blue.

They were a lightish grey-blue colour while the bark was a very light pink. All up the trunk were little branches that held fruits, although they didn’t look at all ripe. They resembled kiwifruit in shape and colour, but were smaller and smooth. The whole thing was definitely not something from Earth as far as I knew.

“There’s more, look,” Grace whispered, pointing further into the trees.

She was right, a few more dotted the forest ahead of us. All the same type of vine too, although I saw one with fruit that were larger and reddish in colour. Guessing those fruit were more ripe that the smaller green ones, I grabbed a sample of the small ones then rushed over to get some of the bigger ones.

“Do you think these are properly alien?” I asked, turning the ripe red fruit around in my hand.

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“Maybe,” Grace said, glancing around at the trees with wonder in her eyes. “They don’t look like they want to kill us yet, which is nice, but better keep gloves on just in case. I think I’m honestly relieved to find these things, it was almost weirder to find Earth species rather than alien species on this ring, even if it’s helping us to have the familiar stuff.”

“I know what you mean,” I nodded, wholeheartedly agreeing with her sentiment.

I was going to add something more to our conversation, but my thoughts stopped dead in their tracks when I saw something far more incredibly strange than anything else in my life, even the ring world.

One of the plants was moving.

Frantically motioning towards the thing, trying to get Grace to look at it, I watched as the creature moved slowly through the trees.. It wasn’t like the vine-trees, but something else entirely, far closer to a normal plant in colouration. Mostly just brown bark with a few sprigs of green foliage reaching off it. It was also humanoid in shape, the limbs almost comically long compared to its torso.

Glancing over to see if Grace was seeing this and finding her staring with wide eyes, I turned back to the thing. We watched it bend down to touch a shrub, some plant that looked much like any other random forest floor shrub, except that now that I was looking at it, I saw that the stems were entirely black.

The plant creature caressed it with almost infinite care, then waved a hand slowly over the top of it. Green light fell from its open palm like glittering mist to wrap around the shrub, appearing to have no effect.

“What the hell?” I whispered, my mind racing as I tried to find any sort of reasonable explanation for what we were watching.

The plant creature moved through the grove of odd vine trees almost randomly from what I could tell, bending down every now and then to sprinkle strange green light over the top of more of those little shrubs. It looked like it was taking care of them. The plant creature was gardening!

We kept watching, too afraid to move as it drew closer. It was definitely gardening, bending down to pluck weeds out of the ground with gentle ease, getting the entire root system every time. It was a pretty damn good gardener, although I didn’t actually know much about the subject despite my interest in ecology.

“What’s that?” Grace murmured into my ear, her breath trailing across my face. Wow that was distracting.

Following her pointed finger, my eyes widened when I spotted something glowing orange, mostly hidden behind foliage. I took a step towards it, then another. I wasn’t sure what had me moving towards it, but a part of me needed to go to it, to touch it. I wanted it.

As I slowly stepped over towards whatever was glowing orange, the plant creature looked up, its glowing green eyes trailing my path with curious interest. It didn’t seem to mind that we were here, but I made sure not to step on any of its plants anyway. It was just the nice thing to do.

“Eli!” Grace hissed behind me, rushing forward to catch up with me.

“Don’t stand on any of its plants,” I told her idly, my brain all fuzzy now with the call of the orange glow.

“What are you doing?” she asked desperately, trying to pull me back and away from everything, her long fingers wrapping around my forearms.

I felt a frown crease my forehead and I turned to look at her. “Please let go of me.”

“Eli!” she pleaded, worry ruling her expression now as she got a look at me. I don’t know why she was so worried, it was just an orange glow after all. Nothing to be afraid of. “What is going on with you, stop making that weird expression!”

“Please let go,” I sighed, feeling tired more than angry for her trying to stop me. “It’s very annoying, it makes it harder to walk.”

It just did though, why was she making it harder to walk for me? I just wanted to see what the orange glow was.

Before either of us could say anything more, the plant creature was suddenly next to us, gently prying Grace’s hands off me. We both stared at it in shock as it shook its head at her, then motioned for me to continue. It didn’t speak, not even in another language, not even a sound, just the creak of its limbs and the gentle whisper of its leaves.

I turned to look at my friend, her eyes worried and pleading, and for a brief moment I considered stepping back like she wanted. But no… I needed to see the orange glow, I needed to see what it was.

I carefully moved further, pushing the low plants out of the way. I heard Grace following, still trying to convince me to step back, although her words were beyond me now, my ability to process speech had disappeared again.

The glow, when I got close, turned out to be a large fruit, a little larger than a mango, although it shared the same swollen shape and colour. Except, obviously, it was glowing. The plant that bore it was small, only barely large enough to handle the weight of the thing. Little wisps of orange light floated around it, just like the plant creature’s energy stuff. It was beautiful, alluring in a way that made my heart beat wildly with anticipation.

I couldn’t get my gloves off fast enough, and once they were off I threw them haphazardly to the sid, reaching out towards the fruit. My fingertips grazed the soft skin of the thing, then my whole hand closed around it. The clearing seemed to freeze as I clasped the fruit, still attached to the plant that bore it. It like the entire forest was waiting to see what I did next.

I picked it.

Light exploded out in a rush, every colour of the rainbow swirling out and around me as an almost opaque mist, enveloping me in a maelstrom of clashing colours. I felt a pull, not a mental one like before, my mind was terrifyingly clear now. No, this was a physical pull. As though gravity had been warped and bent to some otherworldly will. I fell in towards the fruit, sucked in my extreme forces, and the last thing I saw before my vision went black was an image of Grace. Her expression was one of terror and desperation, her arm outstretched as though to try and save me.

Then the world closed with the sound of branches breaking under high stress, and everything was dark.

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