Seventh Ocean Media

THE UNTOLD STORY

Name	Boratio B. Bramber III, AKA “Bramber”
Species	Neverscapian free-form bramble tree
Occupation	Gatekeeper, nutrient banker
Friends	Juniper Squirrel-Caribou and Wilscott Caribou (besties), Bruno the Boar (rival; deceased) Gibby Gladdie and Garnish Gladdie (best friends; deceased)
Enemies	Hermit, Ross, Magnolia, Laddie, and Cello (formerly); Wasp Empire and Empress Slugly IV, the Quilliads (most hated enemies of all)
Powers	Can extract nutrients from non-sentient plants and store them in stones beneath the hill; can launch thorn projectiles at will; other powers he possesses have yet to be identified
Personality Type	Conflicted; disassociated identities; aggressive and prickly
Dreams	…Ask Juniper; he’d never tell us.

Bramber is the equivalent of a frat-boy jock who never even made it to college; his lot in life was to make others miserable, and lived a lonely existence up on Petalia’s hill. His greatest weakness was sunlight, and would often find himself stomping through the Neverwoods or sleeping through the entire day, but would still find some reason to come out to spite the sun and the others who worshipped it. Bramber himself does not even know how old he is, but he was a witness of Lady Sal’s Combination to Lady Galatea, at least that’s what his memories tell him.

Shattered from within

In the present year of 20XX+1, Bramber has come to learn of the part of his life that was lost to him for a long time, that he was keeping a secret from even himself, and it all started with the Gladdie Twins, Garnish and Gibby. No one had suspected that the twins were sneaking out of the garden at night to meet up with Bramber and his friends, nothing illicit; just a casual get-together for what would be akin to going to a poetry slam and eating scones. For a few months, this bi-weekly excursion was successful, until one night; the twins had decided to move the night of fun into the forest-proper, and Bramber was the only one there with them. The trio was guided by the full moon until it vanished into the canopy above them. Bramber tried to keep them together by holding hands/leaves, but this was ill-planned, as he had forgotten how sharp his thistles were. As the girls yelped in pain, Bramber lost his footing and fell into a deep fissure.

Morning had come, and Bramber woke up groggy, walking around in a daze before he remembered what happened. He raced back up the hill and scoured the forest for the twins, hoping that they had returned back to the garden. His worst fears came true when he watched a distraught Gertrude being transferred to a travel pot and into the refrigeration chamber. The scream that followed is still remembered to this day by the Nevertribe, and they each remember what they were doing at that exact instant. For the entirety of the day, which went from morning to dark as full-on rain and thunderstorms, no sunlight to be seen. Lady Sal and her fellow tribeswomen were traveling up the hill in the dead of night, and Bramber was terrified, retreating into the woods and hiding in the square-mile cascade of willow trees. This proved to be a misstep, as the enclosure that the willows protected was where Lady Sal, carrying two flower-sized caskets that were each engraved with the letter “G”. He had witnessed the funeral of the two friends he cherished; that combined with the fact that they were gone because of him, he suffered a breakdown.

About 23 Nevercycles had passed, and during that time a newcomer to the island, named Fyrefox, had become a benevolent presence for the creatures of the island, human, plant, and animal. Despite Fyrefox being a potted flower, she was able to travel via her combinoft’s magic, and had explored most of the island together. For a long time, Snow Tiger and Fyrefox had sensed a great sadness up on that hill, but whenever they tried to investigate it, Bramber made himself scarce. To his horror, he had inadvertently created a predictable pattern of movement for them to follow, and confronted him in his sleep when he thought he had lost them. What is known about this exchange is that Bramber was not given judgment from the duo, but compassion and comfort. Hesitantly, Bramber allowed himself to be visited by the human and flower couple, and little by little he started to feel like he was able to be forgiven, and this omen came when the three of them stumbled upon a little baby owl, lost on the forest floor. Fyrefox and Snow Tiger were captivated by the little white chick, and felt like she was the answer to their prayers for having a child together.

For about 5 Neveryears, Bramber and the girls kept this rendezvous, and were granted good news when Fyrefox had germinated a seed offspring, Petalia. It would be a long time before Petalia would be born as a bulb, so Fyrefox held her in her leaves, rocking her like any mother with their newborn. By this time, Snow Tiger and Fyrefox had become mentor figures and friends to so many, including the troubled Cello and her friend Juniper. While Cello felt more comfortable around Fyrefox and Snow Tiger, Juniper was able to connect with their eccentric friend, Bramber. He maintained a tough-guy facade, but Juniper and her then-boyfriend Wilscott had managed to form a friendship, and this would be the one thing that would keep Bramber stable as was possible during the fallout of what would happen next.

Not What They Seem…

Months had passed since Bramber became pals with Juniper and Wilscott, and the three of them had finally decided on a date to have a shared night of fun with Snow Tiger and Fyrefox, who were going to invite Cello to join them. Bramber counted down the days, hours, and minutes until this would come to pass, but he was also spooked by the presence of movement coming from the Neverwoods, footsteps that he could not find or account for the sound of. It right before dusk when Juniper flew up to Snow Tiger’s cabin; no sign of them. An exhaustive search of the village turned up nothing. Fearing the worst, Juniper sought the help of the Nevertribe Lords, who had also lost track of the pair. Wilscott received a psicon from Juniper to come to her location, and convinced Bramber to stay put. Not a chance. He knew where Wilscott was going, and he knew secrets about that forest that not even Chief Sol was privy to. He made it to the coordinates via secret passageways, all the way out to Serpent Canyon. Far underground, in the granite caverns, Bramber made his way to the surface, and he heard a disconcerting laugh, believing it to just be the cobras watching some bloopers on a video orb.

The sighting was determined to be a dead end, and the Nevertribe continued their search, but that’s not what Bramber detected. Trace elements in the water near the rendezvous point told him that they were right there. Fearing the worst, he checked the ravines and cravasses that were hidden in the rock formations. What he had felt were secretions of Snow Tiger’s sweat and Fyrefox’s pollen; each with an active soulprint attached. One of Bramber’s rivals, a boar named Bruno, approached Bramber, who was ready to start another pin-missile fight at the sight of him. Bruno’s look of dread and the fact that he was there unarmed, told Bramber that Bruno had found something he needed to see, in the underground.

The two of them had gotten there just in time to see dancing shadows on the sides of the walls, and the sound of chanting. The ominous surroundings petrified Bruno, but Bramber slapped him out of it and told him that they needed a plan. Whatever was going on, the soulprints of the two missing ladies was at its apex at that exact chamber. Bruno retraced their steps, and launched a series of quills into the sky, ordering them to self-destruct with a signal; and in that same instant, the two Neverbeings he was trying to reach had made their way to him: Baxter Bee and his combinoft Demuria the Mousette. While not on speaking terms with the bramble behemoth, they sensed the danger that their mutual friends were in, and they raced back down to the inner sanctum.

Bramber and Baxter snuck in from one side as Demuria and Bruno took the other tunnel. The former had taken a wrong turn and were trapped in a prison cell of solid stone, with one other prisoner, who held a glowing glass jar in his feelers. The shackled prisoner uttered Baxter’s name, and right away the latter knew who it was: Earl Boston, his uncle. The Earl was dehydrated and difficult to understand. Taking advantage of his nomenclature as part-cactus, Bramber sliced open his own torso and instructed his old friend to take a drink of the water he was storing within. Boston told the boys that they were in terrible danger if they stayed, and that they needed to take the contents of the jar up to the Nevertribe. Baxter refused to leave without his uncle, so Bramber was entrusted with the glass jar, and to his shock, he recognized the precious cargo it held; the slumbering seed form of Petalia. Using a combination of Bramber’s thorned fists and Baxter’s throwing-stars, Boston was able to pierce the door’s weak spot with his prosthetic stinger.

As the three of them split up, Bramber was ordered to take the seed back up to Lady Sal, while they searched for Sal’s nieces. Lost in the labyrinthine tunnels that were now below the ocean floor, by Bramber’s estimates, he finally found a familiar-looking layout and followed it back. A few kilometers ahead, Bramber confirmed this by seeing the sight of Bruno’s silhouette awaiting him. He shouted to his associate that they needed to go back with more reinforcements’, but it fell upon the ultimate of deaf ears. Bruno was literally dead on his feet, impaled through his back, neck, and right eye. The same echoes of sinister laughter that he heard earlier that night, surrounded him. Horrified, he sprinted out of those tunnels and raced to his hill as fast as he could. By the time he got there, he had no concept of what was going on around him; his neural transmitters had taken more punishment from the horrors he witnessed than they could handle; he became catatonic from the shock.

The Blizzard’s Rampage

Juniper and Wilscott had received a distress call from Demuria that the bodies of the missing girls were found, and Bruno was still unaccounted for. When Juniper went to ask Bramber when he saw his nemesis last, she had found him in a deep sleep. The weather around them was starting to grow preternaturally colder, and her Fayscan indicated that he had no knowledge of what had happened, so she left him alone, bringing him a few leavesful of nuts and berries in case he was about to start hibernating. Far from it, his eyes were closed, but he was not asleep; he was in a fugue state, brought on by the trauma that he witnessed, and the post-traumatic stress of the deaths of his two Gladdie friends that had begun to resurface. While he slept, the whole island was abuzz at the deaths of Fyrefox and Snow Tiger. All that he could hear was a lady’s voice saying something to him, something about how “they” would need him now. By now, his body had healed itself, and the jar he had placed in the incision he made had launched itself out of him, shattering it and freeing the little seed. For the next couple of days, as the storm became worse, Petalia’s seed had rolled down to the Neverbeach, where Magnolia, her avian big sister had finally caught up with her.

Magnolia clutched Petalia in her talons, trying to get her to safety in the Nevertribe’s village 12 miles away, but the storm overpowered her, and the seed fell from her grasp into the white fog beneath her. It was by the grace of fate that Cello just happened to be mourning her mentors right at that very spot, because right then, the shivering seed had landed near Cello’s feet. Cello lit her flares, and fed the seedling her chocolate bar by melting it and having her stem absorb the sugars. Bramber was still a prisoner in his own psyche, which had completely shattered.

Aftermath

After he had awoke, the snow was long gone and a little sprout began to blossom near the tree at the hill’s edge. Cello and Laddie had been living together in that same spot for two months, and Bramber had no recollection of who she was, nor of the events of that terrible night. The only fragments of his memory that were still intact were of his friends the squirrel and the caribou; but only his passive fragment carried this knowledge, and it was only their voices that could bring him out of it. The behemoth persona had believed that it was the real Bramber, and that he only flourished when others suffered. For the next Never-decade and a half, that’s how he was; denigrating Petalia and her owl friend, trying to get a rise out of them; playing practical jokes, and causing trouble whenever he could. This all changed when Princess Mina Elechad and Prince Spencer Jones came to the island, and the reemergence of the spiny shapeshifters that stole Petalia’s mothers from this world… the Quilliads!

Relationships

Gibby and Garnish Gladdie: The first-born sprout daughters of Elder Gertrude, the twins were the first of a new generation of Magtis-apparent flower children, and were a mother’s dream. The two sisters had differing personality types, but they both loved each other and their newborn baby sister, Gardenia. At first it was thought that Bramber was just a witness to the curious Gladdies’ excursions into the Neverwoods at night, but they were very close with the behemoth. There were not that many Magtis flowers that were being cultivated at that time, and their garden was still brand new, so it was a comfort and a point of thrill for them to have other plants to talk to. It was because of what happened to them that a protection spell was placed on the soil, locking all flowers from coming up from the soil without the soulprint of an elder. That, and the aftermath that losing the twins inflicted on Gertrude, her sunny disposition was changed to a very cold and aloof matron, vowing never to let what happened to her firstborn twins ever repeat itself again. Although it was not Bramber’s fault, he has always had a feeling that it was something he did that changed Gertrude so much.

Bruno the Boar: A grizzled and hardened retiree of one of the black-ops factions of the Zetascape Special Forces, Bruno has been a silent sentry for a long time, trying to protect the Neverbeings of this and a few other Neverzones. Bruno’s distaste for Bramber comes from how a few of his permanent scars came from creatures who were similar to the behemoth: spiked plant elementals. IN spite of this, they have a deeply-hidden flicker of friendship amid the mutual respect they gloss it over with. They often paired up together when they were needed, as Bruno took it upon himself to be a guardian of the forest, trying to put his anger towards Bramber’s genus to practical use. For the past 1.5 Neverdecades, Bramber had forgotten about Bruno, entirely; but the reemergence of the Quilliads, and how they manipulated him to try to kill little Gloria Gladdie, it all came flooding back. His memories of Bruno before that fatal night were marred. Bruno died a warrior’s death in service of the innocent during his final mission with Bramber, but Bramber had carried the burden of his friend’s demise, and the unspeakable trauma of witnessing the aftermath was what caused Bramber’s psyche to shatter completely.

Juniper Squirrel and Wilscott: Bramber, when they first met, thought that he would never have friends again after what had happened to the twins; matter of fact, he did not allow himself to branch out. The younger Juniper was very bubbly and vivacious, and saw in him what her mentors, Fyrefox and Snow Tiger, saw in him; a troubled, yet gentle soul. Because of the behaviors that his alter personality displayed, it was next to impossible to try to get others to try to get to know him, so she had to covertly have time with him without arousing suspicion from Petalia or Magnolia. After the Combination Ritual of Mina and Spencer, Juniper learned the true extent of the horrific events that caused his psyche to split; and was named the godmother of the little seedlings that Lady Sal planted in the spot where Petalia once grew; full circle.

Petalia: Despite his boorish behavior and snide attitude toward Petalia and her friends, he truly loved and cared for her; he just never knew why it was so difficult to keep one train of thought going; torn between wanting to protect and befriend her and at the same time wanting to see her suffer. In his core, he still has the memory of holding her as a seed when that jar was shattered; the faintest of recollections, easily mistakable for a dream, but somehow, it seemed to distort his sanity the more he tried to go back to that memory. Whenever Petalia was helping others, the alter resented her; but the true personality would have been deeply touched at her devotion to her fellow Neverbeings. On the day of the Combination ritual, Bramber looked on proudly at Petalia and Gloria as they illuminated the skies in level of brightness that had never been achieved before. A repentent and integrated Bramber would finally be able to tell Petalia how he truly felt; but he did not have to say a word; she had always cared about him too.

Gloria: If there was ever any proof that Bramber’s sanity was warped, this was it. Never mind the programming the Quilliads implanted into him, he was best friends with Gloria’s eldest aunts when her mother was barely a sprout; so a normal Bramber would not so much as raised a thorn or a prickle against her. The whole ordeal was over for him as soon as it began, but the way he would later recall seeing the fear in the young Gladdie’s eyes, the ferocity of Cello and Laddie’s swordplay against him, and the look on Juniper’s face when she asked him if he had done it on purpose; he was at rock bottom, but on the day of their goodbye party, Juniper had told Gloria the truth about her aunts and Bramber, and that he had at one time been friends with Petalia’s mothers. Gloria and Petalia begged their Combinoft couple to take them to see Bramber, and both of them gave him the love that he had wanted for his entire life.

Gertrude: While she did not know it at the time, Gertrude would come to realize that another plant was the cause of her daughters’ demise, and the more she thought of it, the more she resented outsiders, to the point of xenophobia. Her snobbish attitude masked her bitter, passive hatred of wild plants like Bramber and Petalia, seeing the latter as more of a nuisance than a threat. However, what Gloria did, it made Gertrude realize that it was not anyone’s fault; not hers; not Bramber’s; not Garnish or Gibby’s, it was a tragic event that no one could have predicted or prevented. Since the night that Petalia and Gloria left, Gertrude has seen for herself that Bramber was a good father to his little seedlings, changing her opinion of him completely

Lady Sal: To Sal, all plant life was sacred as much as animals and people were, and Bramber, to her, was one of her children. Her interactions with him were minimal, since he was not a garden plant, but would later come to realize that he was avoiding her; starting from when the Gladdie twins were interred. That same sadness would later manifest the night he rescued Petalia and Boston from the Quilliad cultists; when he was traumatized by the murder of Bruno. She was revealed to have been the voice that he heard in his dreams, and that she was entrusting the burial site of both the Gladdies and Fyrefox, and its safety, to him. He has no recollection of this, but a third alter, a childlike one, had awakened from the control of the fugue state, and he was losing everyone he cared about; that he was the one who destroyed all these lives. This third persona was fragile and would dissipate into his deep subconscious, but it carried the flickering memory of Lady Sal comforting him and sharing her sadness with him. It was this personality that vowed to protect the sacred resting place of his three friends, vowing to never let Petalia find out of the willow enclosure’s true purpose.