And who knew? Maybe she would even discover his age for her little sister. That would most certainly be a treat.

She licked her strawberry red lips in anticipation. This was going to be fun.

***

"You know, sister, I've found something very strange about the files you gave me concerning this garden," Sedriil said from the top of the tall brinefruit tree. It was almost as high as the Royal Klidnas, but branched out more evenly where the Klidna trees simply shot up out of the ground like a spear, and grew a small amount of plumage at the top.

"What might that be?" Mericlou said, avoiding a tiny brinefruit as it fell to the ground. Extremely salty, its juice was once used as a preservative, but since it grew best in the wild and resisted all attempts at cultivation, its availability could not keep up with the demand, and the trees went extinct.

"Watch your head," Sedriil said as he gently shook the branch. A shower of brinefruit rained down. He then scurried down to the cavern floor and began helping Mericlou pick them up and put them into a large wicker basket.

"So are you going to tell me about your 'strange discovery'?" Mericlou said.

"Sorry," Seriil said, remembering his train of thought. "You know how you explained to us that all these plants are extinct species?"

"What about it?" Mericlou asked, grimacing and spitting at the taste of a bit of the berry juice that ran down her cheek and into her mouth.

"This work is most definitely not what I'm used to," Sedriil commented as he and Mericlou carried the now full basket to the entranceway. "But anyway, when you lent me that data disk, I found some … rather interesting things about some of these plants." He nodded towards a particularly odd-looking one that was about Mericlou's height. It had twisting blue leaves, and a single, giant gray blossom that sprung up from the ground, like a near-monochrome sunflower.

"That one, for example, the gray Borska flower, was said to have been extinct for ten thousand years. As a matter of fact, the only records of that plant are kept in the Republic Botanical Academy libraries. It took me hours to hack their system for any kind of match before I found it. The file was very obscure."

"Hmm … that is strange," Mericlou said, masking her concern at this new information.

"Not nearly as strange as what I found next," Sedriil said as he went to wash his hands in the stone basin beside the entranceway. Mericlou followed, and afterwards, he led her deeper into the garden towards an unremarkable-looking plant. It looked like any variety of hedge that humans would use to decorate their lawns, except that its leaves were tipped with gold, and it grew clusters of an odd type of fruit. They resembled bite-sized orange bananas.




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