Mr. Playwood & Great Tree

The life of Mr. Playwood commenced deep the branches of a Great tree – its history spanning millennia…

Every tree sprouts from a tiny seed, and the Great Tree is no different. One fine day, the greatest minds then alive realized that their planet is facing a grave inevitable ecological catastrophe. The only way to save humanity was to literally ascend to great heights which the noxious fumes would never be able to reach. Yet how to achieve this? The solution was found mere months before the catastrophe.

The scholars have brought together all things valuable and dear: books and paintings, music and movies, schematics and blueprints, and, most importantly, the genetic codes of plants and animals. All this data of monumental proportions was then diligently recorded using genetic modification onto the one and only seed. With utmost care, the seed was planted into the earth and watered with the last clean water drops. The Great Tree shot up at a breakneck pace – in just a few days its canopy punctured the clouds, and in a week all the planet’s residents rose up its boundless trunk to where the air was fresh and their lives were finally safe.

As decades passed, the inhabitants of the Great Tree have lost all memory of where their ancestors came from. Cities were literally wiped from the planet’s face – everything became engulfed by the woods and, looking down from above, people called it the Green Sea. The Tree granted them shelter, its branches protected them from the scorching sun, its fruits curbed their hunger and its sap – their thirst, its resin had curative qualities and relieved them of their illnesses…

Fragments of ancient books and blueprints of long-lost machinery manifested themselves on the surface of gargantuan leaves. It was the studying of those arboreal texts that kept the people as they are and provided the link to the foregone civilization. They built tools much needed for survival using the sturdy bark of the Great Tree. Yet the more complex mechanisms, the drawings of which they happened upon in the ancient blueprints, were out of their reach. And that was ever so, before the day Mr. Playwood was born.

Mr. Playwood, known back then simply as Playwood, was born to a family of common peasants. Three major tribes have inhabited the branches of the Great Tree at the time – the peasants, the scribes and the nomads. The peasants scouted for the tastiest and most nourishing fruits to feed the Tree’s population. The scribes collected ancient texts and drawings compiling the Great Arboreal Library. And the nomads – they travelled all along the canopy of the Tree delivering goods and mail. The tribe of the engineers had not come into existence yet – it saw the light of day much later, courtesy of Mr. Playwood’s actions.

Since his thumb-sucking days, little Playwood wasn’t keen on harvesting fruit and spent most of his spare time crafting toys from bark, leaves and twigs. His parents and peers thought him a crank: how, for goodness’s sake, can anyone waste so many hours tinkering with obscure devices? Yet Playwood had no mind for neither his parents’ reproaches nor his pals’ jigs. He chose his own path and that path led him to the land of wondrous clockworks.

When Playwood was six years old, inspired by the family’s favorite pet – a gigantic snail named Slipper – he assembled a mechanical piggy bank to store seeds which served as currency to the residents of the Great Tree. A year later he devised an elephant. The bot barely reached the boy’s knee with its trunk (the little boy had no knowledge of how large the real elephants were in the old days – he only had a sliver of a drawing from an ancient book for reference). At ten, he built a bona fide microscope – alongside the expected tree bark he also used bits of solid transparent resin and a meteorite chip stuck in the branches.

Fellow tribesmen finally ceased to treat Playwood as a worthless day dreamer, as everything he constructed was of practical use and made the tribe’s life better. For instance, the elephant could gather fruits and nuts on hard-to-reach branches, while the microscope was handy in detecting minute vermin. Now, every day people were asking Playwood for assistance: repair things, improve other things, dream up some novel practicable items.

Steadfast Playwood never denied anyone yet first and foremost helped his own family. To his father he presented a mechanical back scratcher, while his mother got a device enabling her to reach fruits on the remotest branches. His two brothers became proud owners of a wooden ornithopter which they dutifully rammed into the Tree’s trunk.

When Playwood just turned fifteen he single-handedly assembled a massive pedestrian bridge connecting the domains of the peasants and the scribes. The leaders of tribes residing on the Great Tree finally paid attention to the talented fellow and after acquainting themselves with his other inventions offered him to establish and take charge of the Academy of Engineers.
It was at the Academy that he met his first love… It’s a very personal story, though – it’s up to Playwood himself to tell it to you should he feel like it

From then on, our hero despite his tender age was addressed as no other than Mr. Playwood. The Head of the Academy and all his students gained unrestricted access to the Great Arboreal Library. The ancient blueprints inspired them to devise a plethora of astonishing structures and contraptions. “Where does Mr. Playwood derive his ideas from?” – you may ask. Left, right and center! They are all up in the air – you just have to have a keen eye for them

The crucial thing is to keep your eyes open and never fear the world ain’t ready for your inventions. The world’s never ready but has it really ever stalled the natural born engineers.