-Limbo, sometime into the fifth year, Jade-
The first time I heard the tree say ‘mom’ I thought I had imagined it, but now moving into the fifth year is where I started to regain my senses when I finally noticed and acknowledged the very fact that I wasn’t alone.
-Break, Fizzle-
“Wait a minute… stop right there Jade!” I narrowed my eyes at her, she looked like she was trying to dodge something. “You skipped a year. What happened during the fourth year Jade?”
“It’s nothing imp…” Slapping a hoof down on the table, this cut Jade off from dodging the issue.
“Again, what happened. You’ve already told me you started cutting yourself, bled yourself out horribly numerous times, you went raving mad and you were basically mentally mulched!” I was happy to have Jade back, ecstatic even, so why did it feel like she wanted to keep something from us? “I can tell you’re trying to keep something from us.”
We’ve already seen how bad she got when she did that rendition of a play using five hundred or more extremely well crafted sand sculptures. Jade was apparently an idiot savant at making sand structures while she’s insane.
“Can I please skip the fourth year, you really don’t want to know what I did during that time frame. It was about as insane as everything else I did and it’s completely unimportant.” Narrowing my eyes at her further, Jade couldn’t look me in the eyes. “Okay, it’s actually quite horrifying beyond belief, nobody would want to hear about it and I really don’t think it’s all that important.”
“Jade… you’re important. Not only to me, Maries and your mother, but a lot of us felt like we got our collective hearts ripped out when the consideration of your death was on the table!” I raised my voice slightly and she winced. My snuggle cat better come clean or else any marriage we have is going to start off rocky, also I’m planning to take that nice military position Twilight is offering me as I don’t technically have a steady job outside of being the Storm Queen when the Storm Creatures have need of me. “So please, tell me what you did to yourself this time. I promise that I want to help you through the trauma. I can’t promise that I won’t judge you, but any judgement from me will not be nearly as harsh because frankly I’ve done some things I’m not proud of either.”
“Yeah, running the hippogriffs out of their homes was fairly nasty… not nearly as horrible as some of the stuff I got up to, but that comes later.” Jade seemed pensive and fearful. “I’ll only tell what happened in the fourth year if everyone here promises not to panic, overreact and only if there’s a unanimous decision that you absolutely want to know.”
“Jade, I would be delighted to hear everything that you have to say.” I was being honest, she had gotten beautiful with age and I can see some resemblance to mom in her. I wondered if I looked like my biological mother personally, aside from the broken horn and various scars of course. “Maries and I will still love you no matter what you possibly did in the past, it’s the distant past for a reason. I’m worried about the Abyssinian that made it to the here and now, I know that you’re still the same cunning jerk of a brave cat named Jaded that I love. It’s okay, we can take whatever it is you have to tell us and we will support you to the best of our abilities.”
“Everyone, we would like to make a decision as to whether we want to listen to what Jade did in her fourth year of complete lunacy. We, Maries, are of sound mind and want to hear it. What say you?” Began Mara eyeing everyone sternly. Maria followed up. “Does anyone have any objections? Besides the fact that it’s almost lunch time and yes, Matriarch La Perm will be cooking soon.”
Everyone chimed in and agreed that they wanted to hear it.
“Well okay, but don’t say I didn’t try to warn you!” Inhaling through her nose, I watched Jade close her eyes and sigh. “So… around the fourth year, I didn’t pay much attention to the voice that I now know to be Icky Dress. Despite my ignorance of the fact that she was talking to me and my inability to notice it, I continued to teach my tree about life, death, the universe and what real worlds were like outside the realm we were in. Might have told her my dreams of getting back to my loved ones with her in tow, I also continued to exercise and practice in the moments my sanity could almost be considered regained.”
“Let me guess, you disemboweled yourself or something metal like that?” Arizona intoned with a small chuckle on her lips.
“I wish… what I did was far worse!” Jade said seriously.
Whatever it was, I was ready for it. I would try to love and tolerate her no matter what horrible thing she’s done to herself.
-End Break, Limbo, approximately fourth year, Jade-
“Milk or nutrition is not always blood, everyone gets nutrition in different ways. Here in this realm we don’t need nutrition. Outside of here, you’d need soil and sunlight to survive to be a big strong tree and trees are nice because they help beings like me live just by living themselves.” Yep, I started treating the tree as if it could hear me and talk back. I was entirely ignoring the fact that it did and would respond to my inanity. “So as you can imagine, being a mother of life is hard. We are both life, even if we are different. Despite our differences, that doesn’t mean we can’t have love in a familial way. We give affectionate gestures by gentle contact or saying things like I love you Icky Dress.”
As ran my left hand over the trunk of the small tree tenderly, she responded.
“Love mom!” To think that I had outright ignored Icky saying that despite all my attention and love being directed at her for the time being as my only friend and possible child.
I’m just going to state this now. It is quite impossible to replicate the feat of making a sapient magical tree quite like Icky Dress by accident and requires purposefully almost killing oneself several times over to achieve.
For it to work all of the blood, sweat and tears have to from a single individual. A tree will not mutate like this if it is getting nutrients from several sources at once, it requires a constant source from one person that would kill them several times over were they try to do this normally. The easiest method would be to get a unicorn that specializes in preservations spells or at least fill a bag sustained bag or pack from my mother or me with jars of blood over the course of at least thirty five years.
My little Icky Dress grew pretty fast given how well I kept the pool of my fluids filled and how much she drank from it, feeding her once every other day was still rough on me. I believed it to be a worthwhile endeavor.
-Break-
“Actually jade… since you were in limbo. You likely bled enough to kill yourself more than once every other day for the entirety of a few years after the tree sprouted… it would actually require something in the equivalent akin to three hundred years of blood from a single individual to do the same thing safely given the recovery time between each donation of blood is at least six to eight weeks to fully recover.” Staring at Tianhuo with a bit of shock, Jade looked a little horrified. “Most being don’t live that long, don’t have the patience for it if they do or even the life span to achieve it aside from noble beings like the venerated dragons of the dragon lands. Where in the world did you learn how to do math?”
“Aye, that would be mostly accurate, but more like three hundred fifty or four hundred for the lower estimate with how much she lost.” Dr. Bones nodded to Tianhuo. “Putting that much of your life into a tree couldn’t have been healthy anywhere else but there.”
“Well Jade has… a minor… okay it’s a pretty bad problem with Dyscalculia! I can’t even sugar coat how bad Jade is when it comes to math, it actually needs to be seen to be believed!” Fizzle stated loudly and bluntly while trying to not look Jade in the eyes with what she was about to say. “She was completely fine with everything else when it came to learning, but whatever you do, don’t trust anything she calculates even if she is given something to calculate it with. That honestly only makes her math skills far worse. She can count and do simple math… for the most part. Let’s just say that Maries is the one that will be handling our finances when we eventually decide to upgrade our herd status to married, we will never trust Jade with anything more complicated than the simplest stuff.”
“I only made two plus two add up to fifty seven that one time!” A few people just stared at Jade with disbelief. “Why can’t you just let that go? I know it’s four now, my addition isn’t nearly that bad. It’s like how I can multiply just as well, two times two equals eight is my best example.”
“How could you possibly mess up something so…” Maggie was stopped by Velvet putting a hoof on her shoulder, the reindeer slowly shook her head no.
“You never tell Jade the odds and she’ll get away with a lot things.” Velvet clearly conveyed and stated everything with her eyes, it was better to not pursue this train of thought to its logical conclusion. That way lied the madness of trying to teach Jade how to do math correctly, a complete effort in frustration that inevitably ends in failure.
“Ah, one of those types… gotcha.” Maggie nodded to her daughter-in-law in understanding. “Kind of like the odds of me constantly surviving explosions going up despite the numerous times I’ve been caught in concussive blasts that partially ruptured my insides. Some people say you can’t strengthen you’re organs against internal attacks, but I proved them all wrong haha!”
“Maggie really is an expert at explosive situations.” Grace said softly from her seat next to the boisterous bruiser of a cow. “I’m sure everyone was fine after the first hundred or so incidents. I mean Calloway and I were, and we were near Maggie for most of them.”
“Someone remind me to steal my mother’s explosives after this.” Arizona intoned while sending her mother a look. “I want to take a preventative measures to stop any incidents from happening around here.”
“That really doesn’t work, Calloway’s tried to do that many times before.” The soft spoken Grace would always be great friends with Maggie. “Maggie still somehow always finds ways to make things explode even without explosives on hoof, it was sometimes fun trying to guess how she’d do it too.”
“Getting back on track… though you might not like where this is going given the recent subject matter.” Jade still look rather pensive about something. “I’ll just skip teaching a tree how to speak, how to write, how to do science, what history is about and go to the end of our art lessons.”
-End Break-
“That’s why squid’s ink sacks can be used to create art!” Don’t ask for the context of this one. “Though the squid might not appreciate it and do the opposite of what is nice, which is bad. Touch can be soft which feels good, pain is when things hurt and feels bad.”
I taught little Icky Dress about pain and tickles, I did scratch her a tiny bit with my claws so she could understand what pain was and that she should never try to enjoy it. Though I did teach her that pain was something that tells you that you are still alive. I would know, I felt pain every time I feed her and told her as such.
It made Icky a bit sad that I had to be in pain to make her grow, but I taught her the idea of what my sacrifice meant and what the word ‘sacrifice’ itself means. She didn’t like it much from my recollection.
Mind you, all of this is before I recognized the fact that she could talk or even respond to me. Here’s where you’re all going to get angry at me.
“Okay, I know I’m not exactly the best at this, but bear with me on this one Icky Dress… I’m going to teach you how to do math!” I stated.
-Break-
Everyone that knew how bad Jade was screamed in absolute horror, Fizzle tried to keep a calm look on her face and she was failing quite badly to keep it.
“Jade… please tell me that you didn’t just say that you tried to teach a tree how to do math.” Fizzle’s voice strained, her face had slipped slowly into an absolute look of horror. “Please, for the love of the goddesses and our herd, tell me that you didn’t do what you just said you did!”
The ones who didn’t know Jade that well were curious.
“It wasn’t that bad, I actually think things went pretty well with the math lessons.” If things went well then Jade shouldn’t have been so pensive about discussing it. “Though there could have been a little less fire involved...”
-End Break-
“Tell me, do things seem a little warm to you Icky?” Random portions of the dimension were on fire at least thirty minutes into the lesson. At least Icky Dress managed to avoid being lit on fire and this would actually prove to be a fairly good thing later on. “So anyway, plus adds one and minus takes one. One times one is a district all its own and it should equal two because we’re talking about two ones here!”
“Wouldn’t a one multiplied by itself be a one mom?” The glowing tree queried. “Also, doesn’t most of this sound wrong to you somehow?”
For some reason I felt like she was better at math than I was and I was the one teaching the concept to her, I honestly don’t know how that works.
“You’re a one and I’m a one, so we’re a two together!” I told her brightly. Despite the fact that I responded to her, I still wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders or realized that she had actually asked me something. "Do you want me to do the hand puppets Icky?"
"Yay!" Replied Icky.
-Break, Fizzle-
I take it back, I wasn’t ready for this.... not by a longshot.
"Meep!" A horrified Paprika whimpered.
This was actually one of the worst things that Jade has possibly ever done! It tops her making me beat the crap out of her.
“I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or scream again in complete and utter terror.” I wondered what Jade eventually did to that poor defenseless tree.
“We can do all three at once, we’ll just need to figure out which of us does which.” Said Maries blankly.