I work in a building where there are some people who spend all day underground in labs with no windows tediously aligning optics while trying to collect data to attain the ever elusive goal of graduation. I thought it would be nice for these poor haunted graduate students to have something alive in their lab (other than themselves, and even that classification can be dubious on some days). Unfortunately, a lab with no windows isn't very friendly towards plants--they would slowly die from lack of sun.

Luckily, a friend of mine had a potted plant that she hated so much that she ripped all it's leaves off and left it in a closet for 3 weeks while she went on vacation, intending to re-use the pot for something else when she returned. When she got back, she found that it had sprouted new leaves and was doing fine (albeit a bit white) with no water and no sun. This was the prefect plant for my mission! Not only could this plant survive the lack of sun that these graduate students endure daily in their lab, but it could also survive the lack of water that would surely befall it under the care of physicists.

I acquired this plant, transplanted it into a nicer pot, watered it, and put it in the sun in my backyard. I wanted it to be nice and healthy before I gave it to the lab. Unfortunately, it soon began to whither. It turns out that this plant was not happy being well taken care of, and it finally just died on me, and I was unable to resurrect it. My original mission was now impossible to complete without a proper vampire plant.

I began looking around for other places that may need potted plants, and decided that the office I share with 10 other people was as good a place as any for a potted plant, as it can be dreary and lacking life at times (never mind the squirrels that come in through the windows). I also realized that I would need a plant that was very hard to kill--even if the owner didn't water it for 6 months. Jade, it turns out, is one such plant.

The house I live in had a large jade plant (70 pounds? big.) that wasn't being appreciated, so I moved it to the office and began planting it's offspring in smaller pots whenever branches fell off the main plant. This had the immediate result of sprucing up the office, but also the much slower and overwhelming result of slowly filling my office with jade plants, that one by one have been distributed onto my coworkers desks. A year later, there are now over 15 pots full of jade covering many of the windowsills, bookshelves, desks, and other flat surfaces in the office. Grad students aren't the best at caring for living things, but these Jade plants have proved very hardy--the only one to die was the one on Loki's desk.