Pam let out a soft huff, her eyes opening up and that expression - very correctly assessed - falling into something more wryly amused. "You're not wrong," she said. "I'm not as connected to the Green as I once was, but I can still hear it speak. Sometimes that's enough."

Pam's mouth wanted to tug into a wry little smile. It also wanted to become a frown. So it wound up somewhere in the middle.

"There was a time when the Green and I were almost one," she said. "I--" almost, "--could--" did, "--have brought cities to their knees with a thought, by stirring all the things that grew below."

A small filament of fungus curled outwards from her ear, forming a shape against her cheek.

"I miss it, sometimes," she said. "But this is probably less of a headache for all of you." A joke? Sort of. (She did miss it. All the little things that grow.)

"Useful," Pam said, and some of the faraway look vanished from her eyes. "How about here? You... said something about having your own land here, didn't you?"

She wasn't sure. A lot had happened over the past week.

Pam-- hadn't been about to go there. But now that Nell had, herself, she looked down at the girl (woman? she felt like a girl, in some ways), and thought about what Adrian had told her. (And the vehemence and anger he felt about it, which had turned to annoyance when she hadn't immediately joined him in it.) "He said sometimes it makes you violent," she noted.

She rubbed the back of her neck. "It might not be a bad idea to clean up whatever soil you don't need."

The difference between Adrian and herself, Pam reflected, was that she had done enough violence in her life that she didn't always and immediately feel the need to judge. (The difference, she supposed, was also that she was older, and he was young and quick to anger-- passionate in a way she recognized, perhaps, but as of yet unburdened by experience.)

So she listened to Nell before she said anything. Thought about it, too.

"If it was fully absorbed, I don't think you would've felt it as strongly," she noted. "Some part of you, of your forest's microbiome, however big or small, is still out there in the woods."

She shook her head. "It doesn't matter," she said. "What does matter is whether it would hurt you if anyone moved it again. And for how long."

She looked at Nell. "Is it still hurting? Or have you recovered?"

That little whisp of fungus crawled further along her skin, swooping down to curve neatly around her cheek.

She nodded. Reached up, and plucked that little fruiting fungus from her skin. "Good," Pam said. "There aren't enough of us who actually care about the earth. I'd rather we don't harm each other by tripping over things we don't understand."

Like Nell's soil, in this case.

"Well, we didn't plan it that way," Pam said wryly. "I didn't even realize Adrian hadn't been here that long."

... Pam wrinkled her nose.

"God, I hope not."

"I am absolutely not having kids," Pam said immediately. "Humans already overpopulate the planet and use up its resources. I'm not bringing another one into to the world."

"Most people think that they're the responsible people," Pam pointed out.

"That's up to you," Pam said, with a light shrug. "I'm not interested in burdening the Green."

Could she even have children, after everything Woodrue put in her system? She had no idea, and no interest in finding out.

Pam's shoulders relaxed a little bit. She scratched absent-mindedly at the lamia winding its way around her wrist. "It's science," she said. "When I was younger I studied under a man who wanted to create plant-animal hybrids. But he had bigger ambitions than that."

Her mouth curled. "I was his lab rat," she said.

She looked at Nell. "And what's your story?"

Moving on quickly from her own, yes.

"There's a test for being a witch?"

Pam had to ask. That was... funny, in a strange, messed-up way. (All of that sounded messed-up, to some extent. But who was she to judge? Just a few months ago, she'd eaten the man who made her.)

Pam snorted.

"They don't actually need an excuse," she pointed out. "They always find something if they really want to go through with it."

"Children," Pam echoed.

"I suppose I shouldn't be surprised a church would be willing to sacrifice their children," Pam said.

She wasn't as sentimental about kids as many people were - their deaths were as much a part of the cycle of life as any other. But paternalistic institutions? A pox on them.