Story Mode!

Eri took a minute to think over Zhaya's question. It was a lot of little things, but there was one defining moment for him that got him hooked. Like his friends who got hooked and were preparing to be rangers now. 

He leaned forward to speak, "Well, it was the day someone in town who left to become a chasmjumper came back to visit. They had all kinds of specimen jars. I was interested from a young age, sure, but I also thought it was fun to play rangers and wondered what it would be like to be one as a kid. Going to the park, playing at restoring monuments and catching people who damaged them, anything we heard as news in passing we did. But when the town's famous chasmjumper came home to visit? That burning desire sank into me and wouldn't let go. 

"They had these neatly specimens, some in jars, others stabilized in glass boxes. My favorites were the plants and invertebrate ones. Each had a tag with where they were collected, when, what season it was locally, the species, and who they were collected by. Everything they collected. When they weren't chasmjumping, they'd go to other worlds. So many species of plants. Ones that I couldn't even dream of. Then, they did something unexpected, they let us handle some of the less fragile specimens. They had this little, tree from earth, Said it was from a rain forest. And as a cub, that completely blew my mind. A forest where it rained so much it was called that? A place that rained more than a handful of times a year? I struggled to imagine such a thing. 

"Anyways, this tree, they said normally it would grow to be incredibly tall, but they'd learned some techniques from Humans to grow it as something called a bonsai. Wiiiith some gene tweaking they admitted. I thought they were lying at first, because surely no plant could get that tall, not even in a rain forest! Surely even a rain forest didn't have enough water to have a tree grow that large! And multiple! A whole forest! There couldn't possibly be that many trees. As only kids can, I blurted that out with full innocence that surely they were lying, or making things more extreme than they were. Like a fisherman saying a fish they almost got was huge. That's when they pulled out the videos with a smile. 

"I was gobsmacked. I got as close as I could to watch the videos of them. Rain dripping down from foliage so rich it seemed both fake and horrifying. I'll admit, it scared me to see so much greenery and water. Suffocating amounts of foliage. Water pouring down like that? I thought it would surely flood everything within minutes! I asked them about it, and they said that while it did flood seasonally, this was one of the 'calmer' days for rain while they were there. I was entranced. They handed their screen player to me, and I went through all the videos and pictures. The videos had information, and so I went around the tables of specimens, and matched everything I could to places in the video. Having names for the plants I was seeing, and matching it with something I could see for myself abated my fear, and turned it instead into curiosity. Not everything they had was from Earth, quite a bit was actually from the chasm and other planets.

"After that, fascination took root like the towering trees, and hanging vines. What at first looked like a suffocating number of plants, became an interest in how all those different species could live so closely together. Surely they must compete strongly with each other, and sure enough, they did. It was like someone yanked the well off my curiosity, and it just flowed and flowed. No matter how many questions I asked, that well didn't stop flowing. And the more learned, the more I wanted to know, until the chasmjumper couldn't answer my questions anymore.

"That's when I realized that if I wanted to learn more, I'd need to seek it out myself to share." Eri finished, voice hoarse.