attuning
some travelers (people who've undergone spaceflight adaptations and gene therapies and are candidates for interplanetary or interstellar spaceflight) develop some sort of psychic abilities with their "flower", although many underutilize their psychic abilities and are still, fundamentally, normal people...
well, if you can call a traveler a person. it's maybe more fitting to describe them as animals. they're treated as such by most humans. the rich will pride themselves on the creation of such a creature but never consider them their kin.
and nobody voluntarily agrees to become a traveler who understands what it entails.
when travelers are in a spaceship together, their flowers need to attune to one another, otherwise the isolation and the constant incoming radiation will create a psychic oscillation that destroys their minds.
to circumvent this, travelers undergo a period of attunement.
this is most important for interstellar flight, so this happens in the training facility on Pluto, in the center of Tombaugh Regio (the heart shaped region of solid nitrogen ice a thousand kilometers across)
locked in the icy heart, travelers know what lies beneath their feet, twenty thousand km away orbiting... it's Pluto's twin Charon
the dark moon nearly the same size as pluto, named after the ferryman for the dead. tidally locked so travelers never see it rise or set in the sky. the first time they see it is when they arrive at the facility
and the next time is potentially their last, as they see out their spaceship's window on their journey to the stars.
the attuning process is lengthy and painful and few understand it. it is nearly unsurvivable.
chicory understands it too well.
dandelion... dandelion is immature, reckless, and masochistic. if she understands the process, she doesn't respect it yet.
in fact only the attuned ever understand the process. some things just can't be explained, the theory must be felt to be understood.
but it's best described perhaps as a sort of tempering (extremely controlled heating of a metal to improve its toughness so that it does not shatter on impact, improved flexibility and reduced hardness/rigidity of the material.)
but in attunement, the travelers themselves are both the steel and the furnace.
(there's a reason no sane person would ever choose to become such a creature as a traveler)