It was something of a point of pride that Lustrous' family saw her as a caring, thoughtful doe. She'd always cared about the wellbeing of living things around her, from kin to animals to the plants that grew around. But recently, a stray thought had laid its eggs in the nest of her mind... thoughts of scarcity and abundance.
She, herself, had seen how certain things fell into seasons of ripeness, and how the appetites of kin around her could be stirred into a singular obsession, especially around festival times. Sunflowers, roasted and popped corn, and other golden-yellow treats had been a particularly sought-after treat as of late, and she'd learned a little about cultivation of plants.
With a tree, you could strip every fruit off of it and not worry about the tree's ability to thrive the next year. She'd just kind of thought that everything was like that-- merely slumbering away, deep in the earth, ready to come up like the little hibernating animals once it was time for spring.
But, as it turned out, some of the most wondrous things had to be cultivated.
Some flowers, as it turned out, took one year to grow. Others needed twice as long, with one growing season to establish itself to survive a hibernation, and a second growing season to make a second generation. Many of these plants died after flowering but the once, never to live again. And some of these were popular enough that they could all-but disappear from a section of the swamp if demand for them was high enough.
She'd learned these things from cultivators at the festival. They'd taught her some of their secrets. Observing a plant's ways, and keeping an eye out for when it bloomed, when it seeded. How it flowered.
And with the swamp's newest obsession being such a pretty, delicate thing, she'd wanted to make sure that they'd never have to deal with scarcity there, at all.
