Using thepromptfoundry’s Ominous October list and Chicago Spirit OCs borrowed from krakaheimr
CWs for body horror, torture, captivity, Wheels being a horrid freaky nightmare of a man
***
It’s been remarkable to see how far the garden has come.
As he does every day, Wheels waters his plants, administers painkillers, and then examines them, hands skimming carefully over stems and leaves, trailing over the skin of the pot to check for issues. The lavender has developed bed sores. Wheels bandages those carefully and starts thinking about ingredients for a balm.
The lily…has scale.
Hm.
He sits back on his heels and ponders the wonder of this while he studies the extent of the infestation.
Scale! Here! Marvelous. Nature really does find a way.
Wheels dusts off his hands and levers himself to his feet with his cane, shuffling over to his work bench. He has rosemary oil here somewhere…
Ensconced in the deepest depths of the Crook’s strange little pocket dimension, locked far away from nature as most people would understand the word, you would think that the garden would be a fiercely controlled environment. In many ways, it is. Wheels is the only living thing that’s down here on a regular basis, aside from the plants themselves. But there is no controlling nature, even in the bowels of the Crook. Maybe especially in the bowels of the Crook, tucked up against the Nocturne, where Wheels isn’t even sure the natural laws he’s familiar with preside.
Nature truly is greater than humans can understand. In his old life, simpering for God’s love, he thought he understood miracles. But this is the real thing: the force of life itself, too vast and determined to care for categorizations like ‘normalcy’ or ‘preternatural.’ It will go where it pleases, and adapt as it must to survive and thrive there.
He has planted his little plants in these repurposed humans bodies. He has tended to them as they grow, watched them evolve beneath the strange, soothing green light of this place, partaking of its strange nature to become suitably strange themselves.
He has watched new forms of fungus pop up in his little microcosm here, their mycilia tangling in amongst the roots and nerves of the plants and their pots to establish their own tiny, contained ecosystems.
He’s even discovered he needs to weed. Sometimes the plants self-seed in one another’s pots. Sometimes, whole new plants he’s never seen before arise. Those, he allows to grow until they’re big enough that he can excise them, carefully cutting their roots free with a scalpel and moving them to a new pot so he can watch them grow and learn about them.
And now, he has pests. Delightful and mysterious. The excitement tingles in his fingertips as he hunts through his supplies for… Rosemary oil—ah, here it is! This makes for an excellent pesticide.
He’ll start by rubbing it on the visible infestation, but as he carries it back to the lily he realizes he’s going to need a lot more. He’ll have to douse the plant and the pot too—scale insects are mobile when they’re young, the little buggers could have made quite a mess by now. He’s going to have to kill back the infestation to keep it from spreading, but maybe he can find some specimens to collect so he can study what they’ve become here in the garden’s strange radiations.
He slips on gloves and begins rubbing it on the insects he finds fastened on the undersides of the stem. Oh, and there are some behind the pot’s ears too. He applies some there. The little scale insects flare their bodies in protest—they can’t flee it, as adults they’re locked in place—and the pot screams a garbled, muffled scream. It can’t kick or thrash, bound into its chair as it is, but it rocks and tosses in protest, the lily’s stems tossing where they grow from the soil of its flesh.
Wheels hums to himself in surprise. Oh, this is going to be interesting. He gets up again to find an empty vial and a scalpel.
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