After nurturing this plant for a few years nothing seems to happen. You are starting to suspect that the shop owner had ripped you off and given you a plastic plant. Though finally you decide to test what happens when you pick off one of its little branches.

At first it seems fine, but then the tree starts to shake as if a hurricane was passing through. Where the branch was starts to glow, brightening the whole apartment far more than you are comfortable with. It goes on for hours and you eventually decide to just let it do its thing while you get on with your day.

After a while you check back on it and the branch seems to have grown anew. The one you broke off had been set next to the tree, and had a new leaf sprout from it, seemingly being granted new life. You decide to bury the little branch near the entrance of the building, for science of course.

Pretty soon you see a sapling of similar quality grow from the little plot that you had used. The landlord hadn't noticed yet but if it got any bigger you were sure it would be cut. So you decided to see if instead you could break the branch off of the original again and plant it somewhere else.

As you grab the branch it glows under your touch, and things start to warp around you. Might be a self defense mechanism? Almost ad quick as it started the warping stopped, but you were in a whole new area! Well not new, it was where the other sapling was, but still was quite a new turn of events.

Immediately after you contacted the shop owner to see if this was common with this plant, and they seemed to have never heard of it or sold you any of the sort. So being the scientist you were you tried a different branch, but nothing happened, so you broke it off. After some consideration you planted this new branch in a pot at your office, seeming to get the same results. So far none of the saplings seemed to have grown much, though they did start getting bigger after losing a branch. The second one warped just like the last, and you regretted not trying this sooner. Then the possibilities came to you all at once.

This could be faster than light travel, or even instantaneous entirely! You Immediately brought it up to the nearest laboratory you could, since you never were very good at research. They studied it and found it extremely revolutionary, though it had one caveat - it only had nine branches(and roots). So they took the ones already potted and dug up the one in front of your apartment for testing, and soon employed one of the plants in orbit to see if it could survive in low gravity.

It worked! And better yet, the measurements of the distance between confirmed it was FTL! So with your permission they named the new travel system after you and sent the first plant to Mars. It made transport so much easier, and given your request they named the new colony around it Vanaheim for its possibilities.

Sooner than anyone imagined the solar system was colonized all because your little shopping spree and a few dedicated years of nurture.

Sorry for everyone reading, this is basically my first attempt at second person, and it kinda got out of proportion quickly.