Jess seemed undeterred as she followed Ruk’s direction over towards the shed. It was crowded, with no shortage of competition for the best materials. Many of the others were much larger than her and had arrived sooner, so they were naturally occupied with struggling against each other for the materials they wanted. Jess, meanwhile, was a new arrival, small, and easy to miss among the crowd. Easy to forget. As much as it went against her nature, all she had to do was to stay quiet and squeeze through around the fringes of the crowd. There was no way she could compete for the most obviously useful materials without drawing unwanted attention to herself, so she focused her attention on the [i]less obviously useful[/i] pieces. It would be easy to take a look at her and assume she was just settling for whatever she could get her hands on, but in this place, she was right in her element. 

Senjen, by this point, was getting focused, especially once Ruk started giving him more concrete tasks. He made notes of her instructions as she gave them, then tried to picture what their plot would need to look like by the end of it. “I’ve been meaning to ask, how exactly do we get an aquatic plant to grow alongside terrestrial ones? Doesn’t it need to be submerged, or is there some way around that?”

The question was soon interrupted by the first attempt made on them at sabotage with a drone. It certainly spread a lot of seeds, but it did not seem to impact Senjen’s confidence in the slightest. He brushed away the seeds caught in his frame, away from the patch, then laughed when he returned back to Ruk. “Ha! They should have waited until we were done prepping the soil for that.” To take care of the seeds would be easy enough for him. He could just scrape away the whole top layer of their plot, since they were going to be replacing it anyway with their own medium.

Senjen took a few minutes to carefully remove and replace the soil per Ruknar’s instructions. Since they had not yet grown anything, Ruk could easily help with that step personally. Though, as he was working on it, he was already looking around the area and thinking on the next part of his own schemes. As they were finishing up with the soil, Senjen leaned in close and whispered into Ruk’s ear. “Keep watch over the plot for a moment. I’m going to try something.”

Turning himself towards one the plot of one of their neighbors, Senjen gave a laugh. “A drone, really? You’re going to have to try better than that.” He flicked a single one of the invasive seeds in their direction. He did not know, nor care, if that group was responsible for the drone, nor if it made him look like a fool to pretend that they were. If it did, all the better, because what he really cared about was the fact that Light and Pclendafuun were soon to be passing by their plot on the way back, and he would prefer their attention to be on himself.