Summercrisp

Summercrisp

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At the end of the growing season, when harvest comes, somebody has to make sure the harvest is being taken care of, to make sure that all the harvested food is being documented, to make sure the reaped rewards are being preserved properly. Somebody has to oversee the harvest. That somebody is Summercrisp, who works tirelessly and toils away through every waking moment of the harvest season.

Of course, that doesn’t mean she doesn’t do anything throughout the rest of the year. Summercrisp is probably the closest thing to a manager that the gardeners get, as she’s the one always breathing down their necks about checking their numbers and recording their progress. She’s always racing around with a tape measure, carefully measuring each and every plant to make sure their growth stays regular. “The fruit trees must be knee-high to an Imperi-all by Thundercrack Carni-vall!” Summercrisp thinks two steps ahead of everybody else, and has plenty of emergency and contingency plans for any possible scenario that may arise. What if the harvest is too early? What if the harvest is too late? What if the clan has a hatchling boom, and we don’t have enough food? What if we miscalculated? What if, what if, what if?

All this makes the other gardeners perceive Summercrisp as a bit of a worrywart, or bossy. While she can be a bit harsh, she has really good intentions. It’s just that she can go about it in a slightly misguided way. She doesn’t prefer to think of herself as anxious. She thinks of it more as being prepared for every possible situation, all the time, just in case the worst ever arises.

Summercrisp always operates under threat of famine. She doesn’t even want to have to consider the possibility of putting the clan under strict rationing just to survive, and to her, the idea of starvation is like a ghost standing behind her with a hand on her shoulder, breathing heavy. It is her greatest fear, and the driving force for a lot of her quirks. “Famine” has become a forbidden word in the gardens; her fellow gardeners refer to it in a hushed tone as “the F word”, which never fails to make visiting hatchlings giggle.