It was a day like any other; they blended together in a familiar, calming way that having a routine gave Zoey. It was her roots, like the garden she tended, that kept her grounded. A way forward, even though it was almost suffocating in how monotonous it could be. Busy hands were better than idle ones regardless, idle ones would fester and bleed thoughts that made homesickness look appetizing comparatively. The last thing she wanted was to run away, even if sometimes the grass seemed greener back in Eridanus. She stayed. She gardened. She worked for her family, and sometimes, there were things that reminded her why.

She did not notice the Doctor in the low hanging branch, not at first. Even a low hanging branch was considerably out of eyesight for the upside-down monster, though she did pause at the edge of the garden to rear up and survey her garden with a clear view, scanning from east to west for anything that looked out of place. Sometimes a lesser would come by and nibble on the fruit that was growing, going as far to uproot some of the precious plants that she tended to. It was important to locate problem areas first, to save what she could.

It didn't seem like the garden had been particularly disturbed today, however. Settling back down on to all six limbs, Zoey started her slow trek down the rows to look for harvest ready fruit and vegetables. She checked for signs of disease among her plants and threats like lesser bugs that might be nibbling away on leaves, carefully using her mandibles to inspect the crop.

Zoey froze at the sound of a large bird thumping into the dirt nearby. Too large-- likely-- to be a local lesser fauna. She swung around, rearing up to see with a row of golden, faintly glowing eyes who had nearly ambushed her.

The familiar face of Doctor sent a ripple down her belly of quills. She stared as he collected himself, offering an apology and an explanation, and it was then that she noticed that his gleaming silver eyes were not what they once were.

They looked... Flat, stitched on. Zoey did not know what buttons were, she had never experienced them, but they did not look organic. They looked deeply wrong.

"I--," she began with a clack, "I remember. Hello," she greeted softly. She hesitated, not wanting to impose on him to explain what had befallen him. (An experiment gone wrong?)

The sight of the vulture filled her with a dread and a guilt that she couldn't place. She lowered herself to the ground, angling her head back to continue to meet his false eyes as if to feign polite procedure.

"Are you alright...?" The answer was obvious. The question may as well have been hypothetical. All the same, she asked out of concern. And once the words left her jaws, she winced with shame. It was not what she had intended.

So, she tried to amend herself, her words quiet and hushed, as though asking something she shouldn't: "... is there anything I can do to help?"

Zoey blinked, an awkward tingle in the back of her brain telling her how uncomfortable it would be to have those strange objects in her eyes, making her incapable of blinking. It made the creature want to raise a talon to scratch at her lids, a sensation that she ignored by instead digging her claws into the loamy soil under foot.

Company? It was such a simple request. It pulled at her insides, twisting painfully in her stomach. "... It's alright," she said to his strangled apology, one that he didn't need to give.

Awkwardly, the conversation shifted back on to Zoey, away from the pained physical condition of one and into the strained emotional condition of the other.

"I am good," a simple response. "I tend the gardens," she explained, automatically jumping to her go-to explanation of her current life status that was as natural as breathing. "To feed the Chaos Forge. Are-- can you eat plants?" Her memory paired the strange vulture with injured rats, and she couldn't recall if he ate those experiments.

Regardless, there was enough to share, and even if the Doctor was only a sometimes recruit for the Forge, she was confident that Master Vargas would want him to be treated well, as a guest. He hadn't done anything to mark himself as a traitor... Even if he had, Zoey wouldn't want him to suffer.

If he preferred meat, Zoey could... Well, she would make do. Assuming he was hungry-- but judging by his haphazard appearance, he wasn't doing amazing for himself. He looked an inch away from returning to his chrysalis...

The Doctor ate meat, naturally.

Zoey's jaws opened to speak, and shut with a near silent click as he trailed off. The offer to hunt for him seemed... Insulting, perhaps. It would be better offered at another time, or... Or, she could just do what she usually did, and bring him something later without a word. If neither party acknowledged the gift, it was like it didn't happen. A pride could be maintained. A lie between liars could continue to grow like weeds.

It wasn't healthy, of course. Just another little coping mechanism created by the cogs of the machine that inhabited Draco.

For now, the conversation moved to the garden, and Zoey was happy to oblidge, turning away from the vulture to admire her work. There was not a lot she was proud of, but the garden was one of them.

Rather than insist that she wasn't busy, she instead began to, well... ramble. In the spirit of someone who was quite enthusiastic to share what she knew. "It's doing well," she told him, "it is the same plot of land you might remember, but there's pumpkins now. There's some that are bigger than you... They are an orange gourd, round and wider than they are tall, with warty skin and stringy flesh with large, flat seeds." She explained this to him, not knowing if he knew what a pumpkin was, but... If she couldn't see, she would like someone to explain it to her.

"We had melons ripen a few cycles ago, but those have been harvested. There's berry bushes lining the far side... But some of them have thorns, so be careful if you go over there." The thorns didn't do much to her tough exoskeleton, but she wasn't made of fluff and feathers.

... What else? "There's some fruits on the near side, and some fruit trees that have been getting bigger... But I don't know the names of all of them. A gembound named Diot brought the seeds--" Had they met? "-- the fruits are sweet and colorful. We have a mango tree." They were delicate, and she was always worried about crushing them in her talons when she went to pick them.

"Sometimes there is an infestation of bugs, or a lesser steals our hard work," she went on, "but the farm is doing well. I use magic to help any of the plants that are struggling or injured." Her head swung back toward the Doctor, meeting those lifeless button eyes. Her weight shifted from one limb to the next, uncertain and plagued with a guilt that she couldn't place.

She wanted to help him like she helped the plants... But she didn't know where to begin.

Zoey visibly perked up when the Doctor mentioned magic that could "stop plants from rotting"-- it was the first plant magic she ever learned, imbuing plants with some of her magic, similar to the magic of baubling, so that it stayed in stasis, never rotting.

Doctor spoke of the old tunnel, and a pang of nostalgia and painful memories reared their ugly heads in the back of her mind. Sometimes, she considered going back... Back to where she had been born. It was a long trek... And only to make herself feel... Feel too much. Too much of something she didn't know how to describe.

This would be a good excuse, though, wouldn't it?

"They have fruit and seeds in the middle," Zoey replied, "but you can scoop it out and get a decent shell. It should hold other things well, with preservation magic." Though the Zoisite did not normally have much emotion in her clacking tone, the way the words stumbled forward in rapid, sharp clicks could maybe, just maybe, be described as excited or enthusiastic.

"Especially for water," she agreed. Clean water, stored in the larger gourds, would be useful. The idea of putting soil in a pumpkin to plant other plants in was a curious one. Could she get a foreign plant to grow in Draco? But that wouldn't be as practical as the farm, so it would be a personal project more than anything else.

Zoey shifted from one set of feet to another and another, shuffling in a way a more energized way than normal for her. The eagerness to try, manifesting in pure kinetic movement.

"We all work together," she echoed in the affirmative, pacing down the row towards one of the large pumpkins, and snapped her false mouth down on the stem, cleaving it free from the roots. "Master Vargas had us learn reading and writing," she brought up out of the blue-- had the Doctor known about that?-- "and build shelters. We are a community." The word "family" stayed in the back of her throat. "And I am proud to help us... Not just survive, but thrive." She said these words as she rolled the medium-sized pumpkin down the row back toward Doctor, stopping short of him.

Come on, she encouraged herself, almost missing the Doctor's softer words. As the magic worked its way through her body and out into the gourd, her attention jolted back to the present, and his words caught her off guard.

A gift for words.

It was one of the kindest things someone had said to her, one that made her freeze from jaws to false-jaws. She-- she was only being earnest. It was the kind of description that she would think Khavur would give Maximus, the one who practically wrote poetry in their free time. Not a lowly gardener who just...

... she did think flowers were pretty, though, and wanted a pretty name like Mary to go by...

Did those kind of things lend her toward a gift for words? She didn't think so. She didn't really...

But her jaws clicked open and shut a few times, and like a factory reset, she managed to get the frog free from her throat long enough to respond: "I was only telling you what I would want to be told. Thank you." It was such an unbelievably kind sentiment, one that sent a quiver through her quills.

"I brought over a pumpkin," she went on, "It's just in front of you, here. Do you think it would be a good size to hold water in?" Considering he was blind, it might be helpful to have a source of water somewhere convenient. It could gather rainwater, too... Transportation might be an issue, but there was magic that could move and gather water...