I know you asked for no more prompts, but I can't help it, I just thought of this one and wanted to put it down before I forget.
A breakthrough, they found a way through this militant former vegan's rhetoric and zealotry. How? A basic lesson on how grass grows, and how natural soil forms, and without it, everything would be gone. The circle of life, after all, is as natural as the universe itself.
@internutter/challenge-03431-i143-leave-only-footprints -- The New Guy
Lass had a perfect body that only needed sunshine in order to persist. They did not need to harm anything. Which they believed to be an ascended state.
The Phlorans began to believe that nothing could be done to shake them out of their delirious, euphoric, delusions. Until Dymenscha hit on a perfect demonstration. An alteration of Lass' environment.
Bare, barren stone. Water. Some clay and a starter's kit of enzymes, and a simple task. "Make your plantlife paradise."
"I'll need soil," said Lass.
"You must first make the soil," said Dymenscha. "The soil that exists is impure. It uses insects, and other small animals to create it. If you wish a pure world, you must make it from scratch. We will provide you with learning materials."
The first steps, creating the riboneucleic acids, was simple enough. Lass graduated up to blue-green algae fairly fast. Keeping animals out of the equation was a problem. Too much algae made too much oxygen, and killed everything. They needed animals to eat the plants and consume the oxygen. Even the simplest kind of animals.
And the plants... liked to eat dead animals.
Lass tried again and again to rid their perfect environment of anything at all that was animal. Again and again, they failed. If they wanted the plants to flourish, they needed the byproducts of animal life. Biological waste products. Corpses. Exhalations.
"Life as you know it is a process of symbiosis, is it not? Or at the minimum, a circle of feeding."
"It shouldn't have to be. It's not fair. There has to be a way... for it all to be pure."
"There is no pure life. You have tried and tried to find it. Every ecology has something that feeds on other things. Do you understand?"
Lass threw a tantrum about it for weeks. Stayed motionless for months on end. Finally, after all of that, they said, "I have been terrible, haven't I?"
"To an extent. You are not the worst of your people, but you have been a bad example."
"I do not wish to kill so that I may exist... but... I still have to kill to exist. Even this..." they waved at their synthetic form. "Causes harm. Chemicals. Byproducts. Waste."
"Yes," said Dymenscha. "We can reduce the impacts we make, but there are still impacts."
Finally. A breakthrough. "I'm sorry I invaded your world."
It was a good start.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / dachux21]
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