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pinkgothic:
When she next saw Mateo Kasun, he was moving between rows of snake plants. He looked at least a little rested, radiating a regular tiredness, rather than the kind that came with delerium and mental dishevelment.
They were all accustomed to the thin light of the sun here, but any people coming in more recently usually remarked that a Martian day felt like twelve odd hours of twilight. Some of the plants needed artificial light to help them thrive, the energy for the powerful lamps gathered from solar farms just outside the base, but the snake plants were happy with the illumination, and good producers of oxygen, to boot.
Mateo sat down between the plants, gently wiping accumulated particles off the imperceptibly breathing leaves.
Nymphetamine:
Leila was already hard at work, pruning one of the plants for optimal growth. The flower buds had to go, as they wanted the plants to concentrate their energy on leaf production. The more greenery, the more photosynthesis, which would in turn help more oxygen be released. It was a hard job, as all these plants seemed to want to do was reproduce, even though their only polinators were really the people themselves. The snake plants were her favourite, though, as they seemed to be the least problematic. Humming to herself, she had hardly noticed that she had almost intercepted Mr. Kasun, nearly running him over. Removing her headphones she began to stammer out apologies and then she realized who it was. “Oh. It's you.” As if the favour of taking in his cat had somehow allowed her some leeway when nearly stepping on him. “Sorry about that, wasn't paying as much attention as I should.” Some sort of dance music could be heard loudly playing from her headphones, which she hastily turned off with a mute buttom. “Did you get some sleep at least?”
pinkgothic:
Practically all physical work that needed doing on Mars could also be done by robots, but given what a heavensent it was to leave their handful square metres of living space and physically move, the Martian community hadn't bothered to instruct their little helpers that way. In no small part, paranoia was part of the reason - leaving everything tended to by automation might mean missing a slow degradation somewhere that was a catastrophe waiting to happen.
Mateo smiled up at her - a tired, but nonetheless sincere smile - and nodded. “Yes, thanks so much for taking Haffy, I slept like a log. Still feel a bit run over, but–” He gestured to the snake plants. “–able to make myself useful outside of textbooks and theories. I hope she's not been too much of a handful.” He dropped his gaze to the music player, smiling lightly, a non-verbal acknowledgement of the music. “Did you get the phosphorus drain in section five under control?”
Phosphorus was how they'd first met - Mateo was responsible for replenishing it if they ran out and it was a crucial element to keeping the soil fertile - and it kept cropping up. About a week ago, they'd tried to puzzle out together why the soil in section five seemed to be losing phosphorous at a faster rate than the other sections, theorising a bacterial imbalance in the soil. They'd settled on scavenging some soil from a different section and mixing it in to see if it might help stabilise the corner they were trying the intervention on, but Mateo wasn't equipped to check the status.