Acubens ws distraught
Distraught didn't cover it.
She was shattered. Destroyed. Eviscerated.
Everything had been taken out of her.
She knelt in the fresh mud next to her plot in the community garden and wept bitterly, still holding a limp tomato plant in her hands as though it might spring back to life. She'd never lost a plant. Never. Not since she'd started gardening. She'd believed that she had a supernatural talent for gardening, that she was infallible. And now she was mourning a plot of dead and withered food crops.
Perhaps she was being punished for that hubris. The universe had seen her ego and her pridefulness and had beaten her down for it. But couldn't that hubris be punished in some other way? A way that didn't annihilate an entire swath of living plant life? Beyond just the surface death of a living thing... a whole season of work and love was out the window. It was deflating, to say the least. But then for there to be no obvious explanation... it gutted Acubens.
Had she done something wrong? She counted back to when she'd last watered and she was certain it was nowhere near long enough to cause this devastation. Had she used the wrong fertilizer? No, she'd been meticulous. So why had this happened? How? In lieu of there being a natural explanation, Acubens turned then to unnatural. The human. If nature had not done this, then someone else must have.
Someone like the order signature approaching her.
She stood and turned to meet him, the dead plant still in her hands.
"Can I help you," she asked flatly when he came into view, her expression deadpan.
