#or wouldn't it be fucked up if a flower had 7 petals. trientalis borealis don't @ me

[1ore]

before i went to bed last night, i was a cocktail of ambient stress and black humor about the state of the world, and i was like. man. let me stress dream a sign or something to interpret so that my pattern-seeking brain has something to dissect that isn't itself.

anyway, i had a dream that i was a nervous little botanist man working in the rockies to recover a tree called Acyl pentatonic, and its more obscure relative Acyl fentanic, which was mysteriously disappearing despite aggressive forest restoration efforts. they were identical except that A. pentatonic typically had 5 petals to a flower, and A. fentanic had 7, and for some reason the flowers had parallel veins like a monocot leaf, but this did not bother me in the dream. and i guess the pollen grains were different under a microscope and there was speculation that they speciated by becoming polyploid, but for some reason nobody would confirm this. anyway, it was dire. The forestry service long suspected that A. fentanic was extinct in the wild, but had preserved seeds to raise in captivity. except it turns out the person who collected them had misidentified them, and they were actually A. pentatonic seeds, because the adults reared from the seeds flowered with 5 petals and not 7. it's chaos. the whole office is screaming and crying and throwing up. we lost A. fentanic we had ONE JOB!!!!!!!!!! im losing my mind. im considering crossing A. pentatonic hybrids to play stupid plant math to recreate the mutation that gave 7 petals, knowing full well it will not be the same.

in the pits of despair i stumble across a forest fragment with what appears to be an A. pentatonic sapling growing in the sunlight. this strikes me as odd because they're supposed to be shade-growing trees. it has flowers, and would you know it, they have 7 petals. unspeakable euphoria. apparently A. fentanic wasn't a genetically separate species, but a phenotypical variant that only appears in saplings reared in full sun. occasionally they would flower with 7 petals instead of 5. the reason they had become obscure to the point of functionally "extinct" is because nobody had logged here for years. nevermind that this doesn't make any sense.

so like... there's your sign, i guess.

reconstruction of the criminal ^^^