Mei stepped through the college halls, her nose in a book as she often did on her way back to her private study from lunch. A couple fellow students ran by laughing, but her deflection spell kept them away. They wouldn’t see her and would naturally veer away from her, avoiding any sudden collisions.

It wasn’t that she disliked, or wished to avoid, most of her fellow students, but many of them didn’t seem to take studying magic at this premier magic university all that seriously. A shame, given how much the town seems to have sacrificed to make it a reality.

Summer vacation had arrived, so many students were more rambunctious than usual. Learning magic seemed to charge some up, and especially the men, pressured by society into taking charge, would issue challenges for duels.

Soon in the summer heat fireballs would fly, an easy offensive spell to charge the air to burst aflame, and soon after the forests would burst aflame too.

Every year more and more forest surrounding the town disappeared. From what Mei understood, the town used to have quite the logging industry, but it began to dwindle not long after the university opened.

Her direction spell dinged, and she shut her book. She’d arrived at her private study, her lab where she conducted experiments with magic.

She wanted to give back to the town that had given up so much to build the university she now attended, so she wanted to find some way to produce a faster-growing plant, something that could rejuvenate the forest only weeks after most of it would burn down.

When she opened the door to her windowless study she gasped. The main table where she started to grow the new experiment this morning was covered in a spreading, spiraling plant with a bulb as big as her head. She shut the door and rushed to examine the new plant, which broke out of the pot she had planted it in as if trying to escape.

“Look at you!” she said. “When I last saw you, you weren’t much more than a sprout! Magically splicing you with, ah, those nutrients did the trick.”

She tried not to chuckle at the vibrant pink of the—vines? roots? stalks? They looked like tentacles and seemed to spread out from the bulb’s stem at random, but root seemed most fitting for the structures, even if the thinnest was still as thick as her arm. They, and the stem and bulb, were striped as pink as bubblegum, which seemed ironic considering the male source of her “nutrients”.

Sweat and semen, neither sweet. Mei didn’t like to think back on how she got the samples. All that time hiding in the laundry rooms, swabbing dirty bedsheets . . .

Mei started to go through the test plans in her head. She wanted to make sure this new plant was safe, after all. It certainly seemed to pass the growth test—it grew before her very eyes, as if creeping towards her.

A memory passed through her head. Something about this plant seemed familiar. She’d never seen it before, but she felt like she’d seen it depicted in art.

A soft squeeze curled around Mei’s hand. She looked down to see the plant’s tentacle sliding around her wrist. With a gasp she pulled away and stepped back. Was that a coincidence, or did it sense her as warmth or nutrients or something? She smirked.

“Don’t be frisky, now.” She chuckled, surely the plant wasn’t coming on to her or something.

The bulb shook. Mei opened her eyes wide. Was it about to bloom or something? She stepped closer for a good look.

The bulb slid open, almost like a globe with a hidden center, but there was no flower, and it wasn’t hollow. The outside exposed a round inner layer, which pulsed with pink rings like ripples in a rosy pink pond. Mei stared, eyes wider, and she leaned closer towards the outstretched bulb.

“Wow,” she mumbled. “What is that?”

It didn’t look like a flower. It didn’t have the pleasing aesthetic of a flower, but it had a pleasing aesthetic that made her want to look at it more than a flower.

“That’s so pretty . . .”

She leaned forward on the root-swathed table, her hands sliding down causing her to lean forward. She stopped in place when her hands sank against a soft root thick as her body, and an arm-thick root curled under her chin and over her shoulders to hold her in place. Warmth spread through Mei’s body as the plant wrapped around her.

That fleeting thought of familiarity Mei had, that wasn’t a coincidence. She had seen the plant before, in fact, in ancient paintings and a few (inaccurate) modern depictions.

As it turns out, Mei had resurrected an ancient, extinct plant.

Those ancient drawings had a major theme in common, and archaeologists widely concluded the plant was harvested in ancient times for its aphrodisiac properties.

They had the general idea right, but they were off about its exact relationship to people.