“They are not people when they are sold.
They are arrangements.”
The Bloom Peddlers are a clandestine yet widely tolerated collective operating across Rootworld’s shadow markets. They trade not in weapons or secrets, but in their own kind—Floroids cultivated, conditioned, and sold like rare plants.
To outsiders, the practice is shocking.
To many within Rootworld, it is old, normalized, and legal enough to ignore.
The Bloom Peddlers do not sell slaves.
They sell specimens.
Floroids offered by the Bloom Peddlers are grown, pruned, shaped, and conditioned from early sprout-stage. By the time they reach market, they are presented as living art objects, their identities subsumed beneath lineage names, aesthetic categories, and rarity metrics.
Each individual is:
Root-bound in ornamental vessels or nutrient pots
Tagged with bioluminescent valuation glyphs
Catalogued by bloom pattern, resonance hue, and growth symmetry
Names are optional.
Function is emphasized.
This is not an underground atrocity.
It is closer to:
A historic slave market
An antiquities auction
A luxury nursery
Floroids are purchased to:
Adorn noble courts
Anchor estates with prestige growth
Serve as living centerpieces
Be gifted as symbols of alliance or wealth
Buyers speak of “care requirements,” not freedom.
Direct sale to Surface-Kin is explicitly outlawed.
This law exists to preserve appearances, not ethics.
In practice:
Bloom Peddlers sell through intermediaries
Specimens are “lost,” “stolen,” or “gifted” off-ledger
Floroids are quietly trafficked into Surface research channels
Everyone involved knows.
No one intervenes.
Bloom Peddler markets operate in dim, bioluminescent caverns beneath major cities.
Visitors walk narrow aisles lined with:
Softly glowing pots
Slowly rotating pedestals
Floroids posed in curated growth forms
Bioluminescent price-tags pulse gently:
Green for compliant growth
Blue for aesthetic purity
Violet for rare lineage
Some specimens react to passersby.
Others have learned not to.
The Rootbound despise the Bloom Peddlers more than the Surface.
“They did not misunderstand us.
They perfected misunderstanding.”
Rootbound will sabotage markets, free specimens, or assassinate handlers without hesitation. Rootworld often looks the other way when this happens.
This is one of the few cases where violence is quietly tolerated.
Publicly, the Celestials denounce the Bloom Peddlers.
Privately, their estates are filled with legacy specimens acquired generations ago.
They justify it as:
Preservation of endangered lineages
Cultural tradition
Stewardship through ownership
Rootbound call this heritage laundering.
The Bloom Peddlers and Bloom-Betrayers overlap—but are not the same.
Bloom-Betrayers sell Rootworld natives to Surface-Kin for experimentation.
Bloom Peddlers sell them to their own society, which is worse in a quieter way.
Some individuals operate in both circles.
Those individuals never live long.
This is the dystopia.
Rootworld tolerates the Bloom Peddlers because:
The trade does not destabilize ecosystems
Population loss is slow, controlled, and distributed
Growth cycles remain intact
Rootworld does not intervene because the system remains balanced.
Suffering, here, is acceptable.
Bloom Peddlers never say:
Enslaved
Captured
Sold
They say:
Transplanted
Curated
Rehomed
Stabilized
Language makes the practice survivable.
Some pots crack themselves.
Some specimens refuse to bloom.
Occasionally, a market goes dark—every light extinguished at once.
When this happens, no one returns to that location.
The Bloom Peddlers traffic their own kind as living art, selling Floroids in ornamental vessels through shadow markets normalized by tradition and wealth. Though officially barred from selling to the Surface, their trade quietly feeds off-world exploitation. Hated by the Rootbound and quietly patronized by the Verdant Celestials, they persist because Rootworld does not correct suffering that preserves balance.