Welcome to Gaia! ::

Somewhere off center of Gaia, Raife was busy already being a guardian. She had no plans for another. Certainly, her current ranks were giving her enough trouble. Not that it was any of their faults, no sir. Well, maybe not Mik's fault, sarcasm aside. But everyone else. She was too young to be getting tired of kids already, but she was. No more diapers, no more potty training, no more tossed binkies, no more. Even if she wanted to, she wouldn't bring in any more children into the situation she was already in, what with the poor, hunted halfling and the mess she was already working through with that.

For once, the house was blessedly quiet. Trance had taken the kids out for an afternoon at a playplace -likely that McDonalds' down the street, god forbid he paid a cent- and Raife was on her own. She missed quiet moments like this, and she missed the museboy that normally accompanied them. But she had bigger things to worry about than lack of quiet...

--

A cabbage sat, as fitfully as a cabbage could sit, on a counter, aching to be anything but a cabbage. Existing as a cabbage was a solely useless existence, especially a cabbage that would never be eaten. Somehow, the cabbage knew that outside of its self containment was a world to be explored. A world that he needed to know, with people he needed to understand. Less safe than being a cabbage, but never boring.

It attempted, briefly, to roll itself. It lacked the momentum and just sat, equally as still as any other cabbage existing. It wondered briefly if it indeed was meant to be eaten, its intelligence and sentience wasted by the need for ruffiage to accompany the salted corned beef. It wondered briefly how it knew of salted corned beef to begin with.

When it was no longer a cabbage -as it was somehow sure it wouldn't be forever- would it retain this knowledge? Or would it revert to an ironic anti-sentience much like how a cabbage should be?

And so the cabbage yearned.

---

What is true life? Is it merely the state of existing, or of some larger sentience? Where do we draw the line? Is there even a clear distinction between the supposed non-sentience of vegetables and where we begin to see life in insects? How do we know? We seem to categorize a sense of sentience by the ability to move and change. But maybe our vegetables are all just trapped in unmoving bodies, endowed with a intelligence we will never know.

These and other thoughts were on the cabbage named Torchwood's mind.

He wasn't sure if there was another cabbage like him -or how he even knew of the existence of cabbages- but he knew that he, very ferverently, did no longer wish to be one. He wondered if he could will himself into being something else. Anything else. Something that could move and talk and walk and interact and so neatly observe things that he couldn't see, eyeless flora. He tried to flex a hand. What hand? What was a hand to begin with? He forced himself to relax. It wasn't good to get all worked up over something he couldn't change.

So Torchwood, cabbage being, forced himself to consider the possibility of being a cabbage forever. Resigning himself to inactivity, thought alone within his shell. It seemed that the one benefit that was, by seeing nothing, his imagination seemed almost endless. He could imagine as he would, creating new worlds and non-worlds and planes of being that existed or not.

And he wished he could find out those real truths.