legionworld | Botany Lesson

Entry tags:

Botany Lesson

Who| Rocket and you!
What| Rocket attempts to train a pack of plants. Attempts.
Where| Training gym
When| Pre-Tinker Tailor Hero Spy
Warnings/Notes| None.

Technically speaking, Rocket's plant creations didn't really need training. 'Suddenly become aggressive and smack people with thorny bits' wasn't that demanding of a task, and it was pretty straightforward. But Rocket knew of at least one plant who could be pretty damn clever (when he wasn't drinking from fountains like an idiot, or completely missing important things like don't start the plan yet) and it was enough to make him curious about what his constructs could pick up.

So far, the answer seemed to be 'not a whole lot'.

"Okay, now this is-hey! Pay attention!" he snapped, causing the pack of flowers to stop shuffling around on their roots and perk up their petals instead. "This here's the training room. We're gonna see what you can-quit poking that, what'd I just say?!"

The chastised flower scurried back to the rest of the pack.

Rocket blew out a sigh. "We're gonna see what you can do; maybe do a little teamwork. You guys do good, we'll work on shooting next."

That couldn't go wrong at all.

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Someone's blond head just poked inside the training room, body still hidden behind the door.

"Did someone say shooting?"

Edited 2016-08-25 02:26 (UTC)

"Not yet," Rocket said, rolling his eyes. "Look at 'em. I'll probably have to get 'em to...I dunno, tangle together to even be able to pick up a gun. Even then, they might still go flying across the room."

Which admittedly would be hilarious, but would probably require some kind of padding on the walls first.

The flowers all turned at the sudden appearance of the newcomer, then scrambled towards the door in a mass of wiggling tendrils and petals. A few tried hopping up and down, with varied results on landing.

Flowers, it seemed, weren't exactly agile.

His suddenly widen at the mass of plants toppling his way and - Were those marigolds?! His hands clap together in barely contained excitement when he spots a chrysanthemum in the bunch!

"Are those flowers!? No one even told me we were having a party!"

Edited 2016-08-25 06:03 (UTC)

"Par-" Rocket paused, confused. "What? No. I'm training 'em. Or trying to, anyway."

They didn't look particularly well-trained at the moment. Donut's excitement seemed to make them more excited, so he was loosely ringed by a group of flowers trying to hop up and down, flailing madly. They seemed to like the attention, at least.

And Donut completely ignores him as he marvels at the flowers suddenly surrounding him en-mass. He starts talking to them, sounding utterly amazed by their every movement and when one of the tulips wraps its leaves around his wrist, the red soldier all but beams at the willowy hold.

"Wow! How'd you get your leaves to do that?!"

"Honestly? No clue," Rocket admits with a shrug. "I know how guns work, bombs work, all that-this new super power stuff? No damn clue. I just go 'yeah, let's get these plants moving and bitey', and stand back."

The tulip's response is just to wiggle its petals at Donut's excitement. Granting them the powers of speech is apparently a little beyond Rocket's abilities.

That draws him attention back to him. Guns? Bombs?

"Were you a soldier too? Back home?"

"Eh...think more mercenary. Ish." 'Ish' covered a whole lot of the not quite legal territory. "Go out, get the thing, or the guy, or whatever, shoot a couple people along the way, maybe blow up a ship on the way out, whatever works."

".........."

He loses his smile. He's in the middle of a war against a pair of mercenaries who were hired to do just that except they planned to wipe out the entire planet and very nearly succeeded.

"You don't plan on killing me, do you?"

Rocket's ears splay to the sides as he heaves a sigh, giving Donut his best 'really?' look.

"You got some kinda deal with mercenaries? No. Besides, they made me make all my guns 'non-lethal'," he says, complete with airquotes. "So unless I start trying to beat you to death with something-which I'm not-" at the moment- "-you ain't gonna die."

He shakes his head. "Sheesh."

"Oh thank god because I am so over almost dying. It's getting pretty cliche at this point." He turns to him. "Do you know how much time it takes to wash off all that blood! I had to use three different detergents and don't even get me started on the armor polish!"

"See, you use something with enough range, you don't get covered in whatever."

It's something of a consideration when you have fur to keep clean in addition to your clothes.

"Anyway. Why do people keep trying to kill you? You aren't that annoying. Yet."

"Well yeah. That's why I use grenades. They're cool!"

"Well, Tex wanted to be Queen of the Universe and tried to take out the competition early on, but," his voice lowers, "Oo-Ohh, I showed her! Then there was Sister who crushed me with ship, and later there was Lopez head with the gun rail, AND AFTER THAT the alien who tried to eat me. Can't forget about Wash or the army of angry Tex robots. Oh! And the time with Locus when I tried negotiating a deal in Spanish and...."

He frowns, scratching his head. "Hmm... now that you mention it I have had a lot of close calls, but I don't know why." He shrugs. "All I've ever done was follow Sarge's teachings."

Rocket pauses for a long moment, taking this all in. Eventually, he just shakes his head. "And I thought I had people trying to kill me for weird reasons. Sheesh."

Then he tilts his head, peering at Donut. "Do I wanna know about the teachings? Because I got a gut feeling it's probably stupid."

"Well, I don't quite understand them all but that's probably because I'm still a Private. Sarge got promoted to Colonel and even Grif and Simmons made Captain." A frown. "Man, I am behind. I really need to start catching up before someone comes in and tries to usurp my place!" He sounds a little too worried.

"But how am I supposed to sharpen my skills in a place like this?! They don't even let us carry around live ammo. Man, this place sucks."

It was an off-hour. Sam had kind of been hoping the gym would be empty; since the mission to handle the Lanterns had ended, he felt a little more self-conscious than he ought to whenever he felt like blowing off some steam by hitting (or blasting) things.

Which was probably stupid. The ring was gone, it wasn't him, and just because he still got mad about stuff didn't mean he was going to hulk out and go full Red Lantern on anyone, but it still felt incredibly awkward to get mad in front of people. Especially the ones who'd been on the mission and seen him rage out. Especially the ones who'd only heard it secondhand and probably had even worse expectations because the imagination always made things worse, and...

...well, that was pretty much everybody. Getting mad was getting awkward, full stop.

So he was considering just turning around and finding somewhere else to be, but there was something pretty cool about watching a bunch of flowers doing drills, and he hung around the doorway for a few minutes, quietly watching them shuffle around and do stuff that plants totally weren't supposed to do. (Well, on Earth, but he'd been a few places...)

And then Rocket mentioned shooting, and he had to ask -

"Like you're gonna shoot and they're gonna dodge, or like you're gonna arm the entire greenhouse?"

"Arm the greenhouse. Or get them to wind together and then have that be armed, whichever works," Rocket said with a shrug. "I could probably make guns that small, but not like they'd have much punch. Plus these guys are light enough that they probably can't do recoil."

Recoil was a problem Rocket was all too familiar with. It came with the territory of firing guns as big (or bigger) than you were.

One of the flowers-the one that had been doing the poking around earlier-opted to start skittering its way over towards Sam, wiggling its petals at him.

There were two ways one could respond to that.

There was the one Grif had taken, and gotten his butt kicked over, but then there was -

"That's awesome." Flowers with guns, man. It was like Plants Versus Zombies on steroids. Sam crouched down to get a closer look at the flower, giving it a little wave in response to what he guessed the petal wiggling meant. "Do they have names?"

"Not yet. I just got them recently, figured it'd be a good idea to have some plants ready to go. Can't always count on fighting in a place big on gardens," he said with a shrug. Even if his preference was still just to shoot whatever was annoying and/or trying to kill him, having some planty backup was nice.

The flower hopped a bit at the wave-and landed, clumsily-then skidded to a halt, moving its stalk around like it was trying to get a better look at Sam, lack of eyes or not.

...huh. That, actually, raised another question.

"Can they see?"

There wasn't anything remotely resembling eyes on the flower, but Sam had seen enough weird aliens to know that that was hardly a guarantee of anything.

That earned a laugh-and another shrug. "No clue! They can't talk to me, so if they're stumbling around blind, I don't know about it. They get around okay, though, so I guess they're picking up on something."

"They'd have to make noises for sonar, right? Maybe they're like those purple bug-people from...ugh, I forget the name of the planet, but they don't see, they just have really huge tongues and they smell with them and use that to figure out where people are."

He still has no idea how it makes any sense, but they didn't seem to have any problem avoiding walls and each other, so they must've been doing something right.

"...Haven't seen one of these guys with a tongue yet. Thorn teeth, sure, that shows up, but no tongues." It sounded like an idea, though. If teeth on a plant were bad, the sheer weirdness of a petal-y tongue could only make things worse for whoever was being chased by an irate rhododendron.

"I'm not sure how much of this they'll remember, either. They're not what you'd call geniuses."

"Might be better that way. Imagine if a super-intelligent plant army decided to turn on you."

Grif's fate would only be the beginning, with a bunch of angry fauna on the loose.

"Yeah, that's something I'm gonna try to not think about too hard." One flower started hopping up and down next to him, and he lifted it up to set it on his shoulder. "Everything I know about plants, I learned from Groot, so I'm kinda winging it. Haven't pissed 'em off yet, I think."

Sun, water, dirt seemed to be working out okay so far.

Aw. The plants were pretty cute, doing stuff like that, and Sam normally wasn't one to coo over things. But they were like...tiny unruly vegetable children or something, but without all the crying and smelling bad and things that tiny human children did to counteract their efforts to be cute.

"I wonder if they've had anyone with that power in the Legion before. Maybe they've seen the whole 'stuff never to do' routine."

"Maybe," Rocket said, scratching his chin thoughtfully. "Guess I could ask around. Although if anything had gone really bad before, you think they would've had somebody running after me with a whole 'do not do' list."

Which, granted, might not stop him, but thought that counts, etc., etc.

"I dunno, sometimes people leave that stuff off because it seems so super obvious they think it goes without saying."

Like hey, Nova, don't go running off half-cocked and trying to fight the Hulk. Cap and Spidey didn't think they had to spell that one out for him.

(Cap and Spidey clearly didn't know him well enough.)

The Chief is a pretty common sight in the training room, given that it's his only hobby. He has a pretty good idea of what's supposed to be here, and packs of ambulatory flowers aren't on that list.

He pauses to observe for a moment, then:

"You brought flowers."

"Yeah, I did. Don't step on any of 'em, it'll probably make the rest mad."

Probably. He isn't sure how bright or vicious they are yet, though if there's any way to test that, that'd be it.

The pack of flowers all crane their stalks back to try and get a better look at the Chief. One falls over in the attempt.

Edited 2016-08-26 00:01 (UTC)

The Chief has seen a lot of weird things recently, so many that the needle on his weirdometer is completely burned out. Still, the little flower creatures register the faintest twitch.

"I'm not sure we have small enough weights for them."

He's being polite.

"I might be able to get 'em to wind together, make something big enough to pick something up. Course, I'd rather have 'em learn to throw things at people. Not like they can build up any muscle."

Because plants flinging heavy objects at people, nothing can go wrong there, right?

The Chief looks over the flower abominations, assessing them more seriously.

"Might be able to get them to plant charges. Small ones," he suggests, after a moment's consideration.

Just a second later, he adds, "Simple small ones."

Rocket lets out a cackle. "You, I like the way you think," he says, nodding as he looks over the plants. "Simple charges, that ain't hard. I can do that."

The Chief isn't sure if this was a good idea or a terrible one. Rocket's cackling is not reassuring.

"Hopefully we won't need that anytime soon."

"You say hopefully, I say I wanna see what the biggest thing they can blow up is."

Maybe mentioning this was a bad idea, Chief.

He regrets it. Oops.

"Just keep it to the homicidal supervillains," he advises. "Legion's not fond of loose cannons. Especially literal ones."

Uh.

OK. Weird.

Casey can't help but prod one of the flowers with one of his ever-present hockey sticks with a snicker.

"What happened, your army of caterpillars not work out?"

"I do plant control," Rocket says, looking mildly annoyed at the prodding. "Don't do that, you'll piss 'em off."

The prodded flower attempts to retreat behind its fellows, a few of which snap tendrils at the stick.

Casey puts his hands up in a mock innocent "who me" gesture, using the stick to clear his way through the crowd of plants. A little hard to be intimidated by flowers after fighting a giant man made out of swamp slime and moss, but you never know.

"Flowers though? Why not something cool, like -I dunno- a cactus? Or something poisonous!"

The clearing does nothing to settle the flowers down; a few start hopping up and down, trying to get Casey's attention.

Rocket, meanwhile, rolls his eyes. "I went with flowers because they're easy to get ahold of and ain't too picky in the care department. Plus, sometimes you don't want something big and nasty. Swarm of these little guys could be useful. Thinking I could teach 'em how to trip people up, if nothing else."

He doesn't notice them until they actually grab his clothes.

"Like, what, havin' 'em grab each other's roots and form a rope or somethin'...hey, quit it!" He swats one flower off, but three others have a tiny floral grip on him. "Go 'way. Whaddya want?"

"Rope, bigger thing that can slap somebody senseless, whatever works. I'm flexible." Rocket gives Casey a look. "I ain't an expert in plant-ese, but I know ones that think don't like being poked with sticks much. So maybe put the stick away."

The plants, for their part, just hang on, aside from the swatted one. That one pops back up, flailing its tendrils madly as it opts to take cover behind Rocket.

"Like some kinda combining flower mech?" Casey shrugs and slips the stick in the holster behind his back. "Aw'right, aw'right..." He holds up his hands like he's placating a dog: look, no more stick. His eyes go to the one currently hiding behind Rocket.

"...They're kinda wussy, ya know?"

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Botany Lesson

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