Part 3 begins with…THE GET FAMILY
Get the third
Most of the time it seems that Get, Grandson of the of the founder of this village, is always sitting in the stump chair that his Grandfather built on top of Get Hill. This is the man the villagers call Get the Third. But they do not call him “The Third” to his face. Since all the Get men down through 4 generations have had the same single name, it is the only way the villagers can keep track of which Get they are talking about.
The original Get founded the Village that is named after him. He settled on the hill and surrounding lands next to the escarpment river and the Zom river. Generations of Gets have lived there ever since and tilled the valley below. Get the third sits where his father and grandfather sat for years.
The original Get was the first explorer who made it as far up the Zom River to the Escarpment falls, but he never attempted to go further up and over those lava escarpment cliffs that borders the Western side of Get valley. That was because the Invisibals, the people he respected most in the world, and whom he called family, told him not to.
The Invisibals believed that to ‘become jungle food was an inconvenient death.” They told Get that in the jungles above and beyond the lava flow escarpment that the natives called the “Grandmother’s skirts,” awaits a “Mean and wasteful death” for any and all two legs, including the Invisibals.
That advice from them was good enough for him. After he befriended the Invisibals, they took him into their tribe as a a friend, an equal and a son. They gave him the woman who loved him and they taught him all they knew. Get then passed onto the new settlers of the valley, all of the Invisibals knowledge that they could absorb and use to survive and thrive in this deep jungle. Or as the Invisibals would say “living in Gods hair.”
Get the third, like his father and grandfather before him, was not a talker, he would never use a sentence when one word would do. He did not take kindly to social company and never did small talk. Most of his real friends were the native Invisibals whom the villagers almost never saw, but whose tribal populations inhabited the Zom Jungle that surrounded the Get Valley.
We have never found out if Get was his first or last name. All of his male offspring have the one same name, and neither will they tell you if it Get is their first or last name.
From his perch on the hill, Get the third has a complete view of the valley and all the activity that happens in the village and the fields. The village is involved in it’s fourth and last harvest of the year and Get likes to watch all the processes of harvesting, preparing, packaging and loading the end result onto the trade ship that awaits at the Zom river dock.
Get is paying particular attention to his three sons working in the fields below him, That is because they have the same tendencies as he and all the Gets before him. That tendency is to disappear into the jungle to hang out and play with their Invisibal native friends instead of doing the field work required for harvest. Besides the Temple witches, Budoka Guards, and the local woodsmen, the Gets are the only other people who can go into the Zom jungle with some degree of safety. To most people the upper reaches of the Zom Jungle is a killing field and a death trap, especially as one goes deeper into the jungle towards the dragon’s lair.
THE GET BOYS
In this picture you see one of the Get triplet brothers harvesting plums, while the other is hauling a full crate of plums to the dock to be loaded on the trade ship. In the background you can see the Get Hill, the farmers cottage built by the village founder with the founder’s grandson sitting in the stump chair under the palm tree watching over the valley.
Get, the founder, married a jungle native “Invisibal,” as did all the successive Gets. In these meetings and matings of the two different cultures, the pioneer blood continues to mix with the Invisibal’s blood line. The result is that the succeeding generations of Get boys continue to look less like their fathers and more like their mothers.
We don’t know if there has been any girls born into the Get family tree. The Invisibal tribal women of the Gets are rarely seen as they live with the tribe. There is speculation that the Gets have an agreement with the Invisibals. The Gets keep the boys in the village and their invisibal tribal women keep the girls in the jungle.
Although the Gets have been very generous in passing onto the villagers the horticulture and survival knowledge that they have received from the natives, they have kept some secrets to themselves. This is why it seems that only the Gets can grow tobacco and jungle melons in the village. They are also the only ones able to successfully transplant and grow jungle fruit trees. Their orchard has plums and apples. Even though there are many fruit trees to be found in the jungle, none have been successfully transplanted into the valley and “tamed” except the ones in the Get’s orchard.
THE GET MELONS
In this picture, The Get boy that you see is one of three triplet brothers whom no one can tell apart, and whom all are named Get. This Get brother is harvesting the famous Get melons. Next to the Get boy on the fence that surrounds the melon patch, you can see the mini-warding lamps. The Get witches as taught the villagers how to maintain the mini-warding lamps on their own to keep the smaller non-predator jungle animals, rats, birds etc. from eating their produce.
Get the third is the first Get that we know of that has had triplets. So there are three Get the fourths. But don’t tell that to their faces.
The advantage to the villagers, is that they don’t have to tell them apart since all three of their names are the same. Besides, the Get Brothers do not interact with the villagers much. When they are not working in the tobacco field, the melon patch or the apple-plum orchard, they cross the escarpment river behind the Get Hill and go play with their friends, the Invisibals.
It is harvest season in Get and the Melons are ripe. There are four harvests a year because the village sits inside the magic of a dragon’s realm. The Gets have the only Jungle Melon patch in the valley. The original Get brought them out of the Jungle and raised them. Many Get Villagers have brought the Mellon plants out of the jungle with the intention of cultivating them in the valley, but they all have done so without success.
There have been many types of Zom Jungle plants that have “Died in captivity” under the hands of the Get Villagers, but the few types that have been successfully transplanted have become regionally known for their size, quality and taste. The Get mellon is the most famous and most prized.
The Get Melons are by far the most unique, succulent, juicy and sweetest tasting fruits found anywhere. These melons will not be put on the trade ship and sent down the river to Port Atune, except for two or three melons for the ships crew to share. The melons would not make the trip successfully, because any of the melons that would be not consumed by the ships crew during the trip would start to rot by the time the ship made it to the seaport city.
The only way you will be able to taste these sweet succulent mouthwatering fruits, is to take the one week boat ride, 350 miles up the Zom River to Get the village and order it at the Hogsmead Inn or the Mansion Hotel in the village center, and some people from Port Atune do just that.
The Gets trade the melons amongst the villagers for what ever supplies they might need that the jungle can’t offer them. Most of their apples and plums go on the trade ship to the Port Atune Market and they give away the tobacco they raise to villagers and to their friends, the invisibals.
THE INVISIBALS
In this picture you see a delegation of Zom jungle native invisibals that live within the Dragons realm and around Get Village.
They have come to offer Get a bride for his oldest boy. (Oldest by 2 minutes. )
It seems that even if we can’t see the natives when they make themselves invisible, a camera can still capture their image.
Zohnjon wanted to take a horizon to horizon picture of the Get valley with his camera, a very new invention. To do this, he decided that he would have to take a number of pictures from the same place while showily turning in one direction. Then he would cut and paste the pictures together into one long horizon to horizon montage. To do this he decided to shoot the pictures from the Horn tower which, other than Get Hill, was the only place to see the whole valley. He climbed up to the the crows nest in the tower, took a series of shots from the East River all the way over to Western Escarpment Falls. He also absentmindedly took a few close up shots of the Get hill and other points of interest.
When he took the camera home and developed the pictures, Zohnjon found that he had accidentally caught some Invisibals visiting Get in his shot of Get Hill.
With each generation of Get pioneer blood getting more mixed up with the jungle blood of the natives, there is a chance that the grandsons and daughters of the Get the 4th triplet brothers, will be hard to spot. Unless you looked twice. They may be more of an invisibal than a villager.
How do the natives make themselves invisible? We don’t know and probably won’t ever know.
If the Get witch knows, she’s not talking.
Even though the villagers can hear the invisibals in the jungle, most of the sightings of the Jungle natives have been when they are visiting Get on his hill.
Just as Get can see the whole valley from his hill, the whole village can see Get sitting in his stump chair.
Many times, a villager would be working in the fields, stand up to stretch his back and see some invisibals visiting Get. A common sight. But then they would look away from the hill to call someone else’s attention to the natives and when they looked back at the hill, the natives could not be seen. Even though, the villagers in the field would see Get still talking to the air in front of him.
The village woodsmen have stories of walking carefully, ( Always carefully), through the jungle and stepping so close to a native, without seeing them, that they stepped on their toes. The woodsmen were scared to death as someone, who they could not see, screamed into their ear in pain and ran away through the jungle. The woodsmen never saw the native, even after he had stepped on the native’s toes. All the woodsmen saw was the branches of the bushes being swept aside and foot prints being left in the dirt as the native escape to safety. Thus the villagers name for the local natives is the Invisibals.
SHOOTING THE VOLCANO FALLS
The invisibal natives “Shooting the falls.” Notice the Crocodile waiting at the bottom of the falls. Although he is waiting for food to fall down to him, he does not perceive the invisibals to be food or pray. We do not know why.
The natives playing in the jungle, can be heard all the time by the people in the Get Village. The Invisibals voices; talking, yelling and laughing waft across the east and west rivers into the valley every day. It is obvious that the Invisibals are not trying to stealthily sneak around undetected. In fact, Most of the native sounds that emanate from the jungle is that of playful exuberance.
In the jungle behind the Red Tent is the volcano water falls on the Escarpment river where the invisibals regularly “Shoot the falls” with their canoes. We know this, not because we see them do it, but because of the sounds of laughing, yelling, splashing and the sounds of the canoes crunching against the rocks below the falls. Every once in a while an empty native canoe will end up at the mouth of the west Escarpment River as it flows into the Zom River just below the huge Escapement falls.
The fishermen of the village retrieve the canoes in their nets to keep them from floating down the river Zom, and beach them at the mouth Escarpment Falls river. The canoes are always gone the next day.
ESCARPMENT FALLS
The Escarpment Falls
The massive lava flow escarpment cliffs, just West of the Get village, rises above the floor of the Zom jungle. The escarpment runs North and South in either direction. How far? No one knows. We do know that it at least runs more than 75 miles South, past the dragon’s lair mountain and the Goddess Temple that sit beside it.
The water of the huge Zom river literally falls off of the top edge of this escarpment to the Get valley 50 feet below. No ship can go any further up the river. This is where humanity stops. Although many explores have tried, to this day, any one who has gone up and over the escarpment, past the falls to explore further up the river, has never come back to talk about it.
The villagers and woodsmen of Get Village took heed of Get’s warning that certain death awaited anyone who would dare venture into the up lands past the escarpment wall. So far that statement has been tested many times and appears to be true.
The mystery of why it was so deadly dangerous on the other side of the escarpment wall was finally solved. We knew for a long time that the few species of dinosaurs that are on this planet live within the proximity of a dragons lair. It was not until later that it was determined that nearly all dragons live in or around extinct volcanos. The radius of the volcanic lava field at the volcano’s base determines the extent to where the dinosaurs can wander. This is because as long as they remain on top of a lava field they thrive. When they wander off the lava fields onto dirt and earth they will eventually wither and die.
The 50 foot escarpment next to Get village is the giant lava field of the great grandmother volcano that is 250 miles further up the Zom river. That volcano is home to more that one dragon and is also the meeting place of the Crone Dragon council.
If you could climb to the top of the escarpment cliffs next to the Get Valley you would be standing on the largest lava flow and the largest dragons realm known . So on the maps of that day, next to “Here be Dragons” there should also be an inscription that reads; “Here be dinosaurs”.
Dragon realms, can and do, over lap.
THE PLAQUE
The plaque at the foot of the Zom River Escarpment Falls
Many outside explorers, dragon slayers and adventurers have ignored the Get villager’s warnings. There is a plaque at the foot of the Zom River Escarpment Falls that bears the names of those men who came through Get village to disappear up and over the falls, never to be heard from again.
If after the village council’s warnings, a person is still determined to “Go up over the falls,” The council asks that person to sign their name on the plaque as they leave the village, and to cross their names off of the plaque if they ever return.
None of the names have been crossed off.
There is still some room on the plague for a few more names.
