Jack Greene, AKA Old Jack

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IamLEAM1983
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Jack Greene, AKA Old Jack

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Name: Jack Greene
Age: 220 years old
Gender: male
Species: dryad

Strengths: being a dryad and especially one based on a relatively fast-growing plant, Jack's main advantage is what you might classify as partial immortality. His body and head can both be dispatched using slightly above-average means. If his seeds are planted, however, one of the resulting pumpkin patches will see him break out of the soil a few days later.

Anything he personally tends to will grow at supernatural speeds. Flower beds can go from planted seeds to full bloom in a few days, wheat shoots bend with ripe grain within a week, apple trees he's planted produce several dozen fruits per week – if it's planted and if he touched it, it'll sprout forward a supernaturally prolific and resistant version of itself. This allows him to go neck-and-neck with farmers who use genetically modified crops to achieve similar results – with the advantage that he doesn't exhaust the soil in record time while doing so. Considering, he oftentimes has several weeks' lead in terms of production, to the point where Hope's typical periods for seasonal fruits and vegetables tend to be one week longer and start one week earlier than elsewhere along the East Coast.

This even applies to farm animals, who visibly grow and expand over a scant few days. Even the three heelers he's tended to look like seven year-old dogs, at barely six months old. Magic doesn't play into it in a strict fashion, however, as he still is a local reference for the more mundane aspects of farming. He's received teaching position offers in Iowa, Oklahoma and Kansas, along with other agriculture-oriented States. To date, he's refused them all.

Of course, lots of people tend to identify dryads with what they can do with their surrounding plant life if forced to become aggressive. Greene is no exception, as digging his hands or feet into bare soil allows him to turn them into freakishly long tentacles of living bark and vines, or to coax surrounding plants into doing this if he can't do it himself. Easily summonable and disposable boggarts have also been used, as he's been known to wreath rocks, roots, clay-laced soil and grass together into temporary simian constructs that exist to lunge and lope towards intruders or unwanted presences. They're not quite golems, however, as they aren't animated by souls so much as by hard-coded directives Jack puts in place. It would almost be more accurate to consider them as biological and mineralogical androids, barely more than machines. He also uses them for most of the heavy lifting he might need to do.

He might lack in strength, but he certainly doesn't lack stamina. Eighteen-hour days of absolutely gruelling work tend to be his standard, which means he has a high level of pain tolerance for someone with such a small frame. If anything, he tends to fall asleep only when utterly and absolutely dog-tired. Considering, police work or your average office's five-to-nine routine would strike him as being unbelievably cushy, if not outright lazy.

Otherwise, he's a fairly decent shot with a double-barrelled shotgun and low-spread ammunition, although he tends to shoot blanks up overhead, so the bang at least scares the whippersnappers away. His carved head doubles as useful storage space for objects big enough to avoid falling through his eye or mouth holes, as long as he doesn't fill it entirely. If he does, then he's back to his pre-carved mental state of being forced to look at everything through a thick haze. He seems to have the minor ability to roll things around in his head for a few moments, using that to extract or deduce facts from it. Anything involving paper doesn't apply, however, as his fireflies would be likely to simply burn holes through it. Those very same fireflies gift him with a very low light radius in dark settings, enough to see just past his feet – or at least to read a book while standing in an otherwise darkened area.
Weaknesses: unfortunately for agricultural moguls, only one Jack Greene can exist at any given time. Plant his other seeds if you wish, all you'll end up with is a set of regular, albeit fast-growing pumpkin patches. If his current body dies, then the biggest available patch will typically be the one to see him rise from the dead – so to speak. Of course, if all his associated patches are destroyed – even those two or three generations down the line from his head's own seeds, he won't be able to resurrect himself. You'll have effectively cut off this dryad's ability to regenerate.

If forced to confront someone or something, his boggarts can and have taken bullets or explosives for him in the past. Unfortunately, he can't handle more than two simultaneous constructs and can't create root or vine tentacles while his two bruisers are active. Being big and strong, they're fast enough over short distances – but only to a point. While this hasn't happened yet, odds are a high-powered rifle would suffice to pierce and shatter his skull before his two “flower gorillas” could conceivably push him out of the way or leap in and take said bullet in his stead. The fact that he uses constructs like this also eludes to the fact that his affected age has sapped his strength. It isn't hard to see him as the kind of guy who used to shoulder huge sacks of manure or fertilizer something like a hundred years ago, but he'd be liable to shake uncontrollably and collapse under that same weight, now.

For all of his high levels of stamina, he still regularly exhausts himself. Tylenol and something like twelve hours of sleep only give him a partial sense of recovery; his nature as a dryad driving him to seek out healthy and rich soil, along with generous sunlight. In a process that's still poorly understood, he apparently needs photosynthesis and his few hours per day spent with his feet dug into damp earth up to his shins in order to be adequately nourished – that being on top of his normal food and sleep intake. If he can't satisfy one half of his needs, binge-planting himself won't fix much of anything. If he's kept too busy to have some off time with his feet stuck underground, no amount of food in the world will cause him to feel sated. With winter's dearth of sunlight, this explains why he's doubled the light sockets in his house and keeps one set of UV bulbs on top of his normal fixtures, typically wired to an entirely seperate power grid, in order to avoid power surges and potential accidents.

Otherwise, his having affected old age and working like a dog aren't working too well with his observable lack of a nose or muzzle... Jack seems to have severe obstructive sleep apnea, in that he can stop breathing for terrifyingly long minutes while asleep, only to break out a fit of short and thunderous snores, in compensation. This is more a drawback for anyone who might be stuck spending the night at his residence, for whatever reason that might be – or for his heelers and the more sensitive of his farm animals. Being immortal unless his head is adequately split open, he could stop breathing for hours that nobody would have any real reason to worry. Still, this means he's familiar with dreams of being strangled or of being unable to breathe, that his sleep is fairly poor and inadequate on average, and that this feeds his general grumpiness.

Above all, however, his biggest drawback involves the fact that if destroyed and allowed to “respawn” at one of his patches, he'll typically erupt out of the ground a blind, deaf, mute and dazed person, who needs to crawl or grope his way back home in order to painstakingly carve out the facial organs he requires. He understandably hasn't been so stupid as to hide a carving knife in each of his patches, as anyone could just use his absence's offered lack of vigilance and net themselves a free weapon, if he had. He also can't think too clearly as long as he hasn't emptied his head and tends to feel like someone who's been reduced to monosyllabics and bits of dribbling after a copious hangover. His normally sly and crotchety nature isn't really worth much until there's enough space for the eldritch fireflies in his head to start their lazy ballet.

If that happens too far from home, however, he'll have to find some sharp object that could sub in for a carving knife. Then there's the fact that for all of his deaths and resurrections, he's never felt the need to master knife-fighting. You'd figure the object that allows him to see, speak, smell and think would double as a decent last-ditch weapon, but he tends not to consider knives as being more than tools. Call it a racial deformation of sorts.

Appearance: standing at about five feet six for a hundred and forty pounds, what's immediately obvious is that apart from a bit of a tummy-shaped bulge in the large mass of vines that stands in for his torso, most of his weight is normally distributed in his head. Once carved, you can more or less whittle his weight down to a hundred and thirty-five, as he has to extract about five pounds of pumpkin guts and sacrifice a few seeds in the process. That's about two pounds more than your average human brain, which fits with the fact that his head is significantly larger than a human's. Still, Karthians largely have him and other gourd-headed dryads beat in this respect, with Anastasius' noodle clocking in at fifteen pounds...

Head-space aside, this ancient adoptive Greene is surprisingly reedy in appearance, but the outer vines that define his body seem to be remarkably sturdy around what we'd consider to be the neck and spine – far moreso than proportionately identical human bones. The end result is that his disproportionate head doesn't snap right off or wobble uncontrollably.

Typically, you'll find his eyes carved in curiously emotive and shifting shapes. You might cut out the typical isoceles triangles, only to see your handiwork bend and warp as he squints, widens his eyes or goes through various ranges of facial expression. No matter which form is carved out for his eyes, however, they always return to an inwards-slanted set of trapezoidal shapes as default. His nose is suggested by a pair of skull-worthy nasal slits, while his mouth tends to be initially carved into a horizontally wide grin that almost disappears around his head's curve, while still being fairly narrow, vertically. Like his eyes, his mouth shifts constantly. It even manages to momentarily fuse that slit closed and to pucker itself forward while he's absently whistling. In essence, his pumpkin's outer shell visually appears to have the consistency of rubber, but a few prods would get you to see you're touching an absolutely normal seasonal fruit. As for the sliced cap that's left on top, a peculiarly strong force akin to magnetism allows it to bob along with the rest of the head if he's jostled or forced to move quickly, but not to actually leave the head and fall off. You could tackle Jack to the floor from a standing position that the worst you'd see might involve his cap being slanted at a twenty-degree angle, like a pot's cover pushed aside to let steam out. Curiously, the only way to remove his cap is to actually reach for it or to have him reach for it. You could slug him in the metaphorical chin that the thing would still stick close to the hole it's been cut out of. He rarely wears any hats, considering the shape and size of his noggin, and typically settles with lifting his cap momentarily, as though it were a hat. He doesn't go so far as to doff his cap when entering someone's office or residence, however.

Below the gourd, you'll find an impressive tangle of roots and vines shaped into a humanoid body that evokes advanced age in how it's thin, hunched over and presents extremely localized areas of increased thickness. He has a tiny tummy, thanks to this, while there's an imperceptible bulge in his biceps and pectorals. As far as anyone knows, his vines have gotten a little thicker around his waist over the last few decades, his increasing surliness paving the way for a habitual, if still casual intake of beer.

His first few bodies tended to display carefully blunted grasping implements that almost looked to have been carved and polished, rather than simply grown. He seems not to bother anymore, the interplay of roots and vines that constitute his hands feeling a little crooked, definitely old and maybe just a tad unsettling. The sharp points of old roots wait at the fingertips and are now artificially blunted by a pair of gardening gloves he almost never takes off – except when he needs to bury his hands in soil either for nourishment or defensive purposes. If he went about without them, it's fairly obvious that he could inflict some fairly serious scratches – but not outright slashes.

You'll typically find him wearing an old-fashioned white fleece undersuit, which has the benefit of standing in for a shirt and of smoothing out his frame. He even has the expected Old Timey button-down “buttcrack window”, which he puts to use exactly like you'd imagine... On top of that goes a pair of battered denim overalls, the front pocket usually holding his pipe and tobacco, along with a few assorted hard candies.

As he wears an undersuit, socks don't really feature into his typical wardrobe. He'll simply shuck old work boots on, usually steel-toed and designed to give him the best grip on loose soil 1915's boot design technologies could buy. Most of everything he owns and uses is lovingly tended to, but fairly worn-out and even a little decayed. It's with the most palpable reticence that he'll drag himself out to invest a few hundred thousand dollars in a new tractor or thresher. A quick look at his overalls makes it clear he's also fond of spending as much time as possible with the same pieces of equipment. As far as agricultural implements are concerned, he could give any serious mechanic in this city a run for his or her money. Just don't expect him to have the same expertise to put on a Thunderbird as he does on a Deutz-Fahr 2015 tractor or a Deere Y2K thresher... He's very serious in this regard, and would be honestly insulted if any gearhead types had the gall to suggest that you could stick nitrous on a tractor in his presence. Speed and agility are the absolute least of his concerns – endurance is what matters most to him.

Seeing as Green Acres Farm has several different plots, he has several different forms of equipment to put to use. Expect to see him lugging the sort of machinery around that few people ever get to grow accustomed to. The only thing a farmer might have and which he doesn't is a heavy-duty rooter. He simply doesn't need one, as his nature allows him to cause surrounding roots to either dig deeper or recede away from what he needs to turn into additional arable land. He can't move stones, however, and has to resort to heavy machinery in the case of the occasional cumbersome and large interred boulder.

As explained above, he's not terribly big on obvious personal defense systems. A good lock and the mere sight of a serious shotgun-wielder tends to be enough for most folks, but he mostly uses blank rounds in it to scare carrion birds and snooping kids away. He does keep live ammo, but his using regular buckshot or even rock salt would be a fairly serious and unique event.

Otherwise, he's learned to use a surprising economy of move sets to turn a garden-variety shovel into a decent weapon. He really is no martial artist with one, however, largely settling with slipping out of sight long enough to be able to slam the flat of the curved metallic surface in a suspected intruder's face. This is typically enough, while a boot to a wrist while you're down after that haymaker of a shovel swing is a good way to pin you down. If active threats are ever required, the most he tends to do is rest the edge of the shovel's blade against the intruder's neck. A few messy thrusts would be all that he'd need to either gash your jugular or carotid arteries open – or potentially decapitate you. Most of the time, however, these things tend to be tricks he only gets to apply on the yearly or bi-yearly invasion of fairly weak zombie packs from the old private cemetary the Buck family used.

Sophia's managed to twist his arm into getting a suit purchased for him, along with a tuxedo. Unsurprisingly, however, Greene is largely known amongst the local Fae for his stubborn refusal to adhere to even Business Casual standards. Whether it's suit-and-tie or tie-and-tails, expect him to see him in full-on Farmer gear. If special protocol requires that he bring a weapon as part of his “regalia”, then his shovel is what he'll bring along.

You can imagine how most Fae tend to react, with only Eirean and Percival being known to show some leniency towards him.
Behaviour: dryads, like any other sentient being, tend to be shaped by their living conditions and how society informs them or shapes their outlook on life. Jack could be considered as a textbook example of what happens when you leave a life to develop in the hands of ignorant and abusive individuals who felt entitled to the abuse they dished out. The end result is a rather convinced misanthrope who values his solitude and who has a rather hard time finding qualities or noteworthy aspects to anyone. He's judgemental, verbally aggressive and generally hateful on most days, but the nature of his charge and occupation, along with the effects of his years of abuse, keep him from expressing more than verbal contempt towards others.

In a sense, he views himself as being too old to bother with strong displays of force that would result in injury or murder. The worst he's ever done is earn himself a few fines because he fired shotgun blanks at kids from the Sound or Old Hope.

Jack Greene is known in town as being the quintessential agricultural curmudgeon, the grumpy old farmer who seems to have love and care to expend only towards his farm animals and crops. The various pumpkin patches he keeps around his fields are typically used as nonlethal booby traps or as elements in basic scare tactics. As a rule, if he hasn't called you or asked you to come over, you're unwelcome – no matter if he's come to grudgingly tolerate you. This is a pity, as Jack also is Hope's best producer of crops and local perishables. Other farmers sometimes try and ask him for advice, only to find him generally blind and deaf to their pleas for assistance.

Unfortunately for him, this also includes agronomy students frorm outside of town, or the occasional mage who's chosen plant life as a focus for his studies. Dryads have always been seen as mentors and tutors for those seeking to thrive or profit from Nature's bounty, but Jack Greene is known in town as being chronically unavailable. The best he's liable to tell you is to get the Hell off his property and go back to your damned books.

It won't be a surprise to anyone to know that this has led many a prospective botanist or biology student to try and dig outside of their field of expertise and into the Sound's history. If dryads are supposed to be generally patient, reliable and available for consulting; how the Hell does one go from being that to being a curmudgeon who'll use thick vines to shove you off his lot, or who might scare you with an upwards shotgun blast from behind?

Keep digging, and you'll find more elements to his misanthropy – specifically that it seems to be largely geared towards those of the arcane or neo-pagan persuasion. While the creation of dryads is largely a Sidhe art, that has enabled them to more or less bleed into the set of figures and concepts associated to white magic in most of its forms; especially Wicca. Coincidentally, Greene loathes Wiccans.

The problem is that his body isn't terribly good at bearing scars or telling a story through visual clues. His mind might feel like a battered and burnished piece of driftwood that's seen a dozen different uses, but there's nothing in his physicality that suggests the kind of treatment that would justify his legendary loathing of certain types in town. Once you've found out about his association with pagan cults, you're only a few almanac issues and library research binges away from figuring out what makes him tick.

Like Sophia, Jack is one of Hope's magical pillars – something like its second-biggest bulwark against the miasma of Samoset's curse. Then how come he doesn't act like it?

Once you do figure it out or get him to angrily spew a compressed version of his life's story, then you can feel, rather than see, the scars he keeps close to heart. He was created as a much-needed helping hand, a living incarnation of Samhain's spiritual and material principles. Parts of his sometimes morbid tricks used to scare interlopers away elude to some kind of former cheeky playfulness that might have involved moonlight and howling at Colonial kids who ran away screaming out of equal parts hind-brain terror and general amusement; but these days are long past.

The truth is someone took to the Reaping Season and Celtic magic a little too seriously, someone thought dryads wouldn't mind if their nature was exploited and forced into a cycle of death and rebirth, and someone introduced Jack to levels of indigence and of denial of his personhood that justified his final and rather extreme rationalization – which is that dryads exist to be exploited. Gratitude is something moochers and sycophants dish out in order to get a few nuggets of power, and he has the hardest of times believing in the principle of selflessness. Nobody is ever selfless in his book, so what honestly would discourage his being selfish?

With that in mind, he hoards his own power away and takes a fair bit of mean pleasure out of rubbing it in the face of the rest of the local farming community. He makes it a point to come to town to meet with John Deere or Komatsu representatives, or to buy some of his garden seeds in one of the two Wal-Marts in town. He purposefully comes into Hope with his battered truck and its shotgun rack because he wants to make it as clear as possible that he has power.

Power that nobody will ever take away from him. Not ever again.

Sophia being closer to the city's denizens, she might recognize that carapace of sorts as being the sort of mechanism abuse sufferers have been known to erect in front of their more raw or gentler emotions. As she's not part of the citizenry in the sense that Jack would understand it, she stands as one of the very few people he dials his hostility down for. He shares a gruff, slightly rough-and-tumble friendship with her; the kind of relative closeless that allows him to insult her outright and for her to see past this and react to these serious barbs as if they were harmless prods to her ego.

Past that, his almost supreme loathing of “city boys” once again applies, even if he takes it down a notch in front of Three, thanks to his brief stint as a city-appointed gardener. The young man apparently knew enough to not speak of local or mundane politics in his presence, as Jack tends to honestly not give a damn about anything that doesn't directly involve his produce or dryads in general.

Still, his disregard for Archie is complete, and he doesn't shy away from expressing his disgust at Bucky's excused gluttony. Most of anyone who has the supernatural or superhuman ability to shovel large amounts of food in one sitting causes him to express that disgust; as he breaks his back to produce individually perfect elements of food – elements which oftentimes aren't tasted or that become de-natured by the processed foods industry. He'd be surprised, then, to see that for all of Cordatus' gargantuan meals, he and most other dragons tend to savour each and every bite they take.

His rugged personality also causes him to lack compassion towards himself. He'll try and shrug off serious injuries or refuse to show pain or weakness, he'll exhaust himself from dawn to dusk and sometimes well beyond, if he feels his fields aren't being productive enough for the current season. In the worst cases, it isn't uncommon to find him with an adapted trucker cap's bill lowered over his eyes, his feet dug into the ground and his body leaned on a securely dug-in shovel or rake, finally succumbing to a standing-up nap after twelve to sixteen hours of consecutive work.

Just as Sophia could be considered as a decent entry point towards his softer core, the same can be said of certain children. Not every kid around Old Hope or the Sound is bratty enough to try and throw stones at the living scarecrow, and his roots in Samhain have made him a bit of a hard candy aficionado. It's the bratty, snot-nosed types he really will try and holler or run out of his property; the quiet and shy ones typically poke thier noses past his front barrier's stone wall and simply stare at the strange plant-person for a few minutes to an hour. He's been known to hand out some SweetTarts or Jolly Ranchers from his overalls' front pocket to those rare kids who didn't pester him with questions.

Considering, he's occasionally surprised a visiting Sophia by merely grunting at a peeking little pair of eyes, instead of shouting at them to shoo or scram. He's not the best babysitter ever, however, in that his idea of keeping an eye on kids involves telling them to stay put, or else he'll make roots and vines tangle around their legs. In the case of really patient kids, he's been known to push his relative displays of kindness to the point of chucking a can of Coke to those mites and allowing them to sit on his porch – quietly.

Avoid pressuring him, allow him plenty of time to let his own handiwork soak in from the comfort of a few wooden steps in front of his front porch, and he might dispense a few arcane and professional tidbits at his leisure. Only kids seem to have any luck at recognizing a fellow feral spirit, while adults figure that poking and prodding – sometimes with a court order or a subpoena in hand – consistently works. He, simply enough, exists as the worst possible foil to anyone whose job it is to snoop around.

As that kind of childlike wisdom is sometimes carried by atypical adults, the surprisingly wordy Amazo is one of the few faces in town, apart from Sophia, who manages the centuries-old martial art of Shutting Up and Sitting Down. It's led to the fairly surprising image of a lizard Archmage with his white bowtie undone, cape removed and shirt buttons undone at the top, elbows resting on knees as he and Jack simply stare ahead at the wheat fields and swig cans of PBR. That might have to do with the fact that considering his attained level, there really isn't much reason for Francis to pester Jack about anything technical.

Where this surprises most people is in how Jack tends to use that silence to read others. If he tolerates you enough to introduce you to the timeless art of staring at grazing cows, chances are he'll surprise you half an hour later by landing a surprisingly astute comment about what seems to be troubling you. He's a good judge of character and could be of tremendous use to those people who pressure him for assistance, but you could compare him to an oracle of sorts.

There's an unspoken ritual involved in the process of getting Jack Greene out of Curmudgeon Mode, and today's wired and instant lifestyles tend not to be compatible with it. It takes a certain clarity or a bit of a penchant for Zen to see what you need to do and how you go about doing it. Shen Long, who's at least somewhat aware of the local dryads' general activities and pursuits, tends to joke by saying that there's such a thing as a “Tao of Jack Greene” - forged and molded into place by a fairly terrible life and the understandable hostility that stems from it.

Follow that Tao and you just might attain slivers of extra arcane power, an alliance – or maybe even a friendship.

Goals: ideally, to be left alone. If forced to defend his farm, then to kick the offending asshats past the State lines using a few animated vines and forcefully induced terror. If goaded into a friendship or a partnership, to make sure that the other parties understand that everything will unfold on his terms. He's still patently convinced that some idiot could potentially figure out that blowing his brains out and claiming his seeds for himself could be useful.

History: pumpkins aren't natively part of the Old World's ecology. Eirean and Percy came very much from Europe, however, and the notion of dryads as expressed in Celtic myth is understandably Western in its composition. Before Jack, or Old Jack, could grow forth from a few magicked seeds, a few generations had to pass. The Dutch and English settlers were introduced to the bright orange gourd by Native Americans, while those descended from Celtic corners of the world brought their customs and legends with them.

For most of recorded history prior to English rule and American independence, the Celtic tribes of this world had used turnips and hardened potatoes as spiritual and supernatural lanterns of a sort. Druidic customs had always kept them well aware of the existence of the Shadowlands and of other generally spiritual planes of existence, and Druidic lore acknowledges the fact that the barrier between the world of the living and that of the dead grows thinner on certain nights of the year. Samhain (SAH-Win), which marks the end of the reaping season, stands alongside other darkened hours of the year for a wide variety of reasons. Beltane marks Midsummer and sees the Fae of the Brightest at the peak of their personal and cultural potency, while Yuletide marks the apogee of Warmest Winter. Samhain stands somewhere in-between and is sometimes referred to by certain Wyldfae as the Autumnfest. It's a time where things can be a bit of one thing and a bit of another. It's a time of transitions and mutations, the one night of the year where changelings can tap into both their natures equally, without extinguishing one or the other. As spirits and ghouls can roam that night as much as ordinarily indeterminate Sidhe at the peak of their personal abilities, the mortals eventually came to embrace the chaotic and yet still generally cheerful nature of the tail end of the reaping season. Masks were worn first out of fear, then out of pleasure. Candies that started as spiritual food became treats given to little hellions that weren't as supernatural as they appeared.

Of particular interest is those carved turnips from earlier. The New World's pumpkin offered much more real estate to work with, turning the crude eyes and grins of Celtic lore into the ornate masterpieces of today. As you could expect, the Countess and her Viscount didn't remain blind to the potential this humble fruit offered.

Now, Sophia's Tree had sufficiently grown by 1795, allowing her to dissassociate herself from it on a corporeal level and to join with the rest of Hope's residents. In the five years that would follow, she and the rest of the local Fae would notice that for all of her efforts, the Southwestern point of Green Island was a corner she couldn't reach, figuratively speaking. The city's granaries depended on those small fields and orchards, while Samoset's curse seemed to be only kept from entering the city proper. While Hope was flourishing, bakers and grocers were beginning to complain of a stark drop in their goods' quality. Grisly and suspicious accidents began to plague the local farmers, which caused Sophia to understand that she couldn't extend her reach far enough to assist them. She needed help, or else Hope would be stuck with decaying farmlands along its southwestern finger of land.

Petitioning Eirean and Percival, she understood that very few European dryad seeds had followed her. It would be some time before the native populations would find the changelings in their own numbers, before these changelings would show some number of fully matured Fae, and until these Native American Sidhe essentially understood the process behind the creation of local dryads. Until then, steps needed to be taken. Pumpkins were chosen because of the fruit's North American prevalence, and the complex process of weaving spirits of nature inside these budding life forms began.

By 1805, Eirean's preparations had ended. She left Hope's borders for a few weeks and scoured the farmlands, looking for a suitably strong, if comparatively minor convergence of via she could rest the city's other appointed supernatural protector's roots in. As luck would have it, the son of Dirk Greene, a man called Henry and of strong ties to the recently implanted anglo-Celtic community, was sitting on top of such a convergence. The promise of financial aid and support throughout the generations was offered, Eirean not being willing to make an outright geas out of it as she suspected what might happen to the Greenes' farming lifestyle once the new dryad would take hold. Any form of abuse and in any direction whatsoever would be grounds for the relocation of this new dryad's personal Nexus.

Jack Greene erupted from the ground on that year's Halloween, Eirean greeting him as required and informing him of his appointed charges. As long as he tended what he was to consider as his lands, the blight forced upon his fellow farmers by Samoset would have nowhere to go. It wouldn't stop the occasional zombies or other freak supernatural occurrences from trying, but at least no one would lose their livelihood or their lives from them. Nicholas Buck's grisly and deplorable fate would be entirely constrained to his own lineage, effectively freeing all of Hope. All of which that mattered, at least.

At first, Jack's collaboration with the locals went along swimmingly. Henry Greene was a kind and patient tutor, while Jack was a fittingly quick study. Problems arose once the Sound's recently established Elves and other Little Folk, along with those Scots and Irishmen that had close ties to them, recognized the pumpkin's pattern of efficiency and saw it coincide with their ancestral holidays.

It wasn't much the dryad couldn't handle for the first few years. One bawdy party here, a party-time pyre there, someone breaking out the fiddles, steins and beer kegs... The Greenes themselves were fairly muted Irishmen by descent after Dirk Greene's interrupted Dutch bloodline, normally more content with prospering and leading quietly comfortable lives. As the Emerald Isle's influence came to supersede the Netherlands', however, the local Tir Na Nog expatriates seemed to grow ever more inclined to forcefully underline Jack's nature out of a growing belief that the reaping season wouldn't be complete until its most prolific agent was put to rest...

Today, this line of thought would shock and horrify most nonhuman rights activists connected with the widely recognized Vienna Accords. Back then, however, the concept of a small community of agrarian families owing their prosperity to a dryad was just as mind-blowing as Jack himself was and is supernatural in nature. Jack wasn't so much a person to the residents of Absalom, Rhode Island, as he was a sort of biological fixture, a plant-based gopher boy you referred yourself to during a specific period of the year. Henry Greene and his sons would try to stifle the pagan displays that dipped well south of venerable Celtic mysteries and veered into sheer barbarism, but none of their efforts would stop Jacob Kilkenny of Absalom, along with his Elven friends, from bashing Jack's head in with a heavy stone after a particularly boozy Samhain celebration. The year was 1809, the ground was already too cold for another patch to adequately grow, and it was agreed that Jack's seeds would be planted in late July, the following year.

Halloween 1810 saw the exact same thing happen, this time by the hands of the Flanagan boys, six particularly inebriated Elves. Halloween 1815 forced Jack to see death coming, in the form of a hunting carbine held by the usually ever-so-sweet Maggie Isley, the resident baker. Almost every year for the better part of two centuries, Jack faced an attempt on his life that was usually successful. If he defended himself and killed or injured whoever had intended to kill him, then he was deemed unsafe. He was usually chased by an angry mob of farmers into the Sound's woods, the thirty-against-one odds making it difficult for all the constructs and vines he could dish out to keep him safe. Sophia would regularly visit Absalom in the hopes of being able to talk some sense into the locals, but the twisted take on reverence and drunken amusement seemed to apply to her, as well. The proud Scottish and Irish matrons associated her to the goddess Blodeudd of Irish fame and replied in terms that felt just short of outright worship, while the men who happened to know a thing or two about the arcane were frightfully correct in assuming that her bark and pulp could be used to create magical implements and poultices of exceptional power. In a sense, for any dryad to visit Hope in these decidedly antiquated times was to feel like a particularly plump foreigner dumped in Papua New Guinea...

Sometimes, Sophia and her friends managed to help a bit. In some occasions, especially near the earlier years, Jack's exasperation and emotional fatigue got the better of him. Modern diagnoses would have included a serious onset of post-traumatic stress that never went away, leaving him a jittery and weepy mess that couldn't do much more than angrily pace about the Green Acres, hoping that shaking his fist at any Mick with a bottle of whiskey or schoolmarm with Golden Bough-worthy esoteric leanings would extend his current lifespan. The effort of keeping him safe all but killed the Greenes, which forced the sixth generation to move inland and call it quits. Jack inherited the farm in 1902 and was forced to fend for himself. No-one in the vicinity wanted to be hired by him, either pushed by old familial shames or general bigotry.

Sophia saw her friend and compatriot change over the years and centuries, from the initially childlike and playful sort that he'd been into the kind of man that had a painful, hard-won kind of maturity to lean on. For each rebirth, he felt increasingly less youthful and lively, looking more and more like an embittered adult. His initial empathy and gentleness were buried under thick layers of paranoia and general mistrust that sometimes veered into the exact same kind of blind aggression that had manifested in his human and anthro killers and cost him his life. Only through constant visits and regular contacts with him did she manage to coax a grin here or a joke there, a happy memory here or a laugh there. By the time World War One's theatre was set, the toothy grin Jack had initially displayed had turned into a permanently surly pout, the leather and rubber-like reactions of his shell etching out expression wrinkles that hinted at an incredible amount of endured pain.

He'd already stopped crying by 1815. His complaints stopped by 1865, while the seriousness of his responses to attempts on his life thankfully plateaued with his breaking the nose of Gerald Kilkenny in 1813. When Sophia asked him why, he replied that he didn't want to give these “degenerates” the pleasure of killing them. If they wanted to act like stupid cavemen for the sake of extracting a little extra via out of him on special nights, they were welcome to try. He wouldn't give them the satisfaction of lowering his head for the knife or machete, however.

Hope's constabulary eventually had to take notice. Seamus Mac Loch managed to make it painfully clear to his fellow Mertown residents that he'd personally jail and kick out whoever had the gall to raise a finger against any dryad in town, and he did so long before becoming the head of the small island's police service. Out of fairness, however, they couldn't remain ignorant of Jack's sometimes vicious responses to Neo-Pagan attempts to celebrate Samhain in the old-fashioned way. The road to equality saw him be pinned with a slew of assault and battery charges, to which he typically replied with an angry spit of tobacco rinds or a silently fuming puff of smoke from his pipe. Hope's second dryad did his time at least three times between 1815 and 1900, the sheer savagery of his retaliatory assaults gradually convincing the local Celtic pinheads that basic trick-or-treating would be a better idea. It did cause Sophia to have to handle a few brazen fools who tried to cut up a few of her tree's branches on the sly during Halloween for the purposes of carving wands, and she did have to contend with at least one of Jack's crazier customers, in 1920.

Jack was beyond fed up. He was so fed up he honestly didn't care anymore, simply looking to the last day of October of every year with a surly pout and a grunt. Sophia had the honor of being able to handle the more noble side of Samhain celebrations, but it wouldn't have been much of a surprise to see that Jack was usually a no-show. 1925 saw Jack spend one night in the pokey for getting himself plastered, throwing overripe gourds at Martin Kilkenny's door and leaving a cleaver on his welcome mat as a sort of drunken dare. 1956 saw him spend another Halloween in jail after repeatedly hectoring a Wiccan whose only fault had been of driving past his farm with an upwards pentagram drawn on the windshield. In 1962, he gave a black eye to one of the local rabbis after the Jewish priest dared to address the similarities of Kabbalah and dryad creation.

By 1975 and the Accords being ratified, a still-awake Archie had enough active days to empathize with Sophia and heave a huge sigh of relief. From then on, anyone who attempted to assault either dryad would be liable to charges of attempted murder. It didn't stop overnight, of course, the sudden existence of serious criminal ramifications being enough to jolt a few sickos into giving a shot. Being a Wiccan didn't even need to play into their alibis anymore, although it still was convenient. Jack's case disturbed the American Wiccan community to such an extent that press releases and communiqués were needed to reassure the masses that most White magicians were in no way, shape or form represented by those who attempted to destroy other sentient beings. Extremist factions would form over the years, riding on the unavoidable pockets of maintained bigotry, but Jack soon stopped receiving more than the occasional death threats mailed to him in deliriously joyful Irish Gaelic.

As far as Seamus Mac Loch knows, the conveniently immortal Flanagan boys haven't really matured much since the city's inception, so maybe their quirky Elven brains still think that bashing in a talking pumpkin's head would be a good idea to while away the Samhain doldrums.

In any case, popular morality eventually caught on with the established laws. The eighties and nineties saw wide publications of other cases of dryad-related abuses or general hate crimes, the masses reacting with increasingly earnest shock, disgust and sympathy. By 2025, the idea of simply razzing at an unknown dryad is as much bad taste as it would be to pull your tongue at a complete stranger. It doesn't stop older kids with a bit of a stupidly cruel bent from daring their younger friends into throwing stones at the snoozing, living scarecrow in the field, over there, or from thinking that leaving a partially carved pumpkin with a knife still wedged in on Jack's doorstep is a fun practical joke. Consider it a dryad equivalent to bags of flaming poo...

Today, the more worrying and aggressive leanings Jack Greene had developed have largely lessened, if not altogether receded. He's still not friendly and he still thinks everyone in town ought to choke on it – but at least he's less keen on breaking your cheekbones with a good swing.
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