Xaviers!

Shane sat cross-legged on the grass next to a flower bed, staring intently at a wilted tulip. Holding out a hand, he sent thin roots into the soil at its base. He gently weaved them into the roots of the flower, attempting to become one with the plant. Slowly, he felt the sun on their leaves, the aphids biting into them, and the dew that weighed them down. He grinned broadly as he willed fresh life into the flower, bright green and red returning to the plant.

"Ha! Take that entropy!"

(open)

"That's a pretty big postulate of broken physics to put on such a little thing." Amy attempts to joke, having stopped on the nearby path when she heard Shane's exclamation.

Concentration broken, he looked to her and said, "Well it was dying before I got to it.

The flower was still slowly growing.

"Well yeah I was just... it's... nevermind." she says, shrinking into herself a little.

"Relax, I'm not mad or anything," he assured as he pulled his roots back into his fingertips. "It worked, so I was done anyway."

"Right. Yeah. It's pretty cool though. Making it bloom like that."

"I used to be able to do it more or less by thinking about it. But my powers changed and now I have to cheat by temporarily making the plant part of me. And even that was a theory until I figured it out just now."

The flower was still slowly growing. Was it speeding up now?

"Your powers changed? How? Why?"

"Survival mechanism," he said before again telling the story of his car accident that he seemed to always end up telling people.

Were tulips supposed to be that big?

"Oh my god, that is---uhm... Are you still doing this?" she asks, interrupting herself at the still-growing flower.

"Doing wha..." he began as he turned his head, "That... shouldn't be happening..."

"It's still going!" she says, alarmed and taking a half-step backwards. "Is this related to everyone shrinking the other day somehow?"

"I doubt it. I... uhh... kinda made it part of me to make it heal... and I can grow however I want..." he answered. "Maybe I can fix it."

He again extended roots from his fingertips and into the soil. After a few moments, he frowned.

"Shite. It won't let me this time..." he said, straining.

The surrounding flowers began to wilt. Shane immediately withdrew as if bitten and scrambled back.

"Bloody hell... you ungrateful little bastard."

"What do you mean it won't let you? Did you make an Audrey!?" she asks, watching with wide eyes as the tulip grows to three, then four feet tall.

"How was I supposed to know I could?!" he answered.

"I... I don't know, it's your power, isn't it!?"

"Not like... "

The flower angled at them, spreading its petals like the mouth of a worm. A mouth full of thorny teeth.

"... that."

Amy lets out a shriek and actually jumps backwards, except her feet never hit the ground, she just floats a couple inches off the ground, a white glow blooming around her hands. When she notices she seems even more startled somehow and points her hands at the plant. Averting her eyes she fires a foot-wide beam of brilliantly white light at the tulip-monster, tearing chunks out of it before carving a gouge into the ground behind it. Amy whips her hands up, beam of light slicing a clean path through the branches of a tree before she manages to get the beam to shoot straight up and finally die down.

Floating in the air she pants, still surrounded by a faint nimbus of glowing energy, fists clenched, too focused on keeping her power under control to take note of how the plant monster is doing.

The missing chunk of the flower-head was already re-growing. Aubrey II reared back like a snake and emitted a chittering hiss as it continued to increase in size.

"Well, what are you waiting for? Burn the shite out of it!" Shane urged.

"Don't yell at me!" she shouts, although it's more panicked than angry. Even her hovering flight becomes erratic as she kind of jerks to and fro a couple feet at a time. "This is hard..." she tries to explain her outburst as she brings her hands up again to unleash another beam of light at the Tulip-Terror and this time she keeps it leveled at it, tearing through it along with the trunk of the tree behind it, sending tiny wood chips flying everywhere. Followed by the tree toppling over.

Aubrey II found itself severed at the stem. Both halves thrashed wildly, with the severed segment eventually ceasing. The remainder, however, slowly began to regrow.

Shane cursed and kneeled, shoving his arms into the ground. "Keep it busy, I'm going to attack the roots."

"You're way too close, I'm gonna hit you!" Amy hesitates as the plant regrows.

"I need to be as close as I can without being directly in the way. Don't worry. If you haven't gathered from Junior there, I'm really hard to kill."

"How reassuring..." she mumbles and aims smaller blasts at the regrowing plant in kind of erratic bursts, too hesitant to try and control anything beyond that. The destruction she's caused to the landscape is bad enough as it is.

A stray beam punched a steaming hole in Shane's left shoulder, but he was too focused on his task to notice. His vines threaded around the tulip-monster's roots and began strangling the life out of it.

The plant shrieked from the combined assault and shot vines of its own at Shane.

"Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck, I'm sorry!"

The vines began wrapping around him. "I'm fine!" he said, "Just keep it off me a few more seconds!"

She aims one last careful blast at the Tulip and obliterates it's regrowing bulb.

The grasping vines gave one last squeeze before the entire plant went limp.

Shane released a held breath, or maybe he simply forgot the vestigial reflex for a moment, and pulled back his arms before flopping onto his back.

"Well, that could have gone better."

"You don't say!" she exclaims, falling out of the air and landing awkwardly.

"Are you okay? I got you pretty bad. Can you breathe?"

The hole in his shoulder was already half its original size and visibly shrinking.

"It'll... take more than that to hurt me," he said, "Just... spent a lot of energy strangling that thing."

"Jeez... okay, good. I'm glad. Still sorry I blasted you but this whole thing was your fault to begin with." she frowns, trying not to look too hard at the furrows in the ground and the felled tree.

"How was I supposed to know I could create bloody plant monsters?" he responded grouchily.

"That... that's fair..." she admits.

He sat up and looked at the damage to the grounds. "Bloody hell, the gardener is going to be furious," he said, laughing a little.

"Oh god... that's not funny." she says with bit of an anxious laugh.

"It's a little funny," he insisted. "But as you said it's my fault, so it's me he'll be cross with. Besides, I'm used to people being angry with me."

"You do this kind of thing a lot?"

"Not exactly. I just have a habit of rubbing people the wrong way on account of being irredeemably cantankerous.'

"I don't know, making flowers bloom doesn't seem very cantankerous to me."