This is a redone, edited, and slightly altered version of the original chapter 15 of Freaky Plants. Most of the changes were minor things, fixed typos or grammatical errors, words swapped out for better ones, superfluous phrases deleted, etc. The main changes of some importance are in the Epilogue.

For some time I've been unhappy with how I closed this chapter. I wrote it when I was at the very beginning of a burnout period, and I feel like it showed. It felt clunky and incomplete without even considering the big fat cliffhanger at the end. I've done some literary ironing, smoothing things out and making it feel more like a suitable "resting point" for the story. There is still a cliffhanger, one that's even more dramatic than the original in terms of scope, but I've done my best to make it more vague and flexible.

I've also done some retconning of old details, particularly how Melissa got pregnant. Yesterday I was struck by a terrible moment of inspiration and ambition, and I began actually typing out the next chapter of The Care and Feeding of Freaky Plants. I took a break to come back and edit this one because there were some details that conflicted with what I wanted to happen in the next chapter. While I do have an author's omnipotent control over the passage of time in my story (allowing me to have things like Radioshack in the present day) I want there to be more time between the events of chapter 15 and the main crisis of the Freaky Plants finale. It will fit with the events of the upcoming chapters more smoothly this way, trust me.

I'm eventually going to give the whole series this treatment, applying the knowledge of a more experienced writer to it, making it all come together more neatly.

Now, because this is more of an edit than a new or different story, I will be replacing the original chapter 15 in any DeviantArt groups with this new version. However, I will still leave the original up in my gallery, just in case anyone wants to read it for some reason

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