Guardian of the Pumpkin Patch

Jerrik Hatherhorne, a dark brown mouse with a beige stomach and paws, had known at a very young age that he was going to be a farmer someday. It had all started when his mother had purchased several seeds from the market, located in an alleyway on the north end of the mouse city of Verden when he was still a pup, only a season old. She'd planted them all in hopes of bringing more life into the house. "It'll really liven the place up!" she'd said. Hibiscus, wood sorrels, begonias, bromeliads, laceleafs and more. She'd planted them in little thimble-sized pots in all the corners of the pale-blue tiled bathroom in the fifth floor apartment building that their family had claimed as their home. The bathroom was significantly large for their little family, but then again, most once-human dwellings were. Gone were the days of mice having to cramp into little holes or behind walls. Now, with humanity extinct after the fourth World War, space was so abundant that mice families could take up as much or as little room as they pleased.

At first, they'd grown, as if by sheer force of will. But over time, the fact that she didn't actually know how to care for plants showed itself. They began to yellow and wilt, making their oncoming deaths all too imminent. Jerrik, who had taken a liking to the plants, refused to let them go without a fight. While his sister took to spying on the clerics and their medicinal practices, and his brother Del took to absolutely nothing noteworthy, Jerrik embraced the plants as his personal project, working to keep them alive as if it were his own life he was attempting to save.

And he did it. Jerrik was a natural horticulturist, saving each and every one of the dying flowers. His mother recognized his gift, as mothers often do, and went out to buy more seeds, as well as a book for him to study—The Very Thorough Book of Crops. It was written by a farm mouse named Galidola Punkny, and it covered all manner of crops: how to care for them and how to turn a profit on them. Jerrik consumed the tome as though he were parched in the middle of the desert and its pages were water.

Before long, Jerrik was growing plants in every room of the apartment, not just the bathroom, much to the chagrin of the other mouse families who lived there. The apartment, being once a human home, was quite large, but the plants quickly invaded everymouse's space, causing the very walls to feel as though they were encroaching inwards. Wheat, sugar beets, corn, lettuce heads, pumpkins and barley—the apartment was fast becoming something like a plantation. At long last, the three other mouse families who shared the apartment—one in the living room, one in the bedroom, and one in the closet—voted that it was time for Jerrik to give up this hobby or get out.

As soon as he became old enough to strike out on his own, he packed his seeds, hugged his mother, father, sister and brother farewell and headed out of the Southern Gate of Verden, into the less tamed Mouselands where he would eventually come upon an enormous army tank, left over from the last human war. The war to end all wars...and all humans. His brother Del, who was obsessed with human pop culture, might have noted that the tank looked like a great war machine out of one of the Terminator films. Its black-steel alloy plating was overgrown by weeds and foliage and time, only barely surrendering its name, the paint having chipped and fallen away slightly from every letter: Descimater Mk III. Where most mice might see ancient junk, Jerrik saw an opportunity. He took the tank as his new home, living within it as he farmed its many surfaces, using the years of dirt which had mounted atop its steel structure as a bed for his very own farm. Eventually, he spread the farm to the land around the tank as well. After all, a potato or yam needed far more earth to grow then wheat did.

The following summer after founding the farm, he fell in love, and in Autumn, he married a ladymouse: Sindla Reethfall. Together, they had three children, two boy pups and a girl pup. Morto, Juker and Selver were his world, and the only thing that he was more proud of than his farm atop and around the old war tank.