Mint Garden

## Overview

A Mint Garden is the complex creation of Akkaz, a Soaring Pulsekaw. Though Mint Gardens have been well-documented in the past, they are still shrouded in endless mysteries. Unravelling their true purpose has been the sole focus of the Minthunt Combine since they formed. Each Garden is home to a singular Pulsekaw, awaiting Human visitors to guide to their greatest comfort. Some Gardens are in easier locations to access, and thus are visited much more frequently than others. Some have never been visited at all. The total number of Mint Gardens is currently unknown.

There are many unique aspects to the Gardens, some of which are not fully understood, and perhaps many more yet to be discovered.

* Only Humans and Pulsekaw are permitted to enter through the gates spread throughout Reality.
* The gates can be found absolutely anywhere. From the bottom of the oceans, to the tops of trees, inside mountains, or the bottom of chasms. Some even require certain Pulses to be used in order to enter, such as a method of shrinking.
* The gates emit the stinging scent of Mint to help guide visitors to them, though it is feint, and much more suited for Pulsekaw than Humans to follow.
* While inside a Mint Garden, time slows dramatically.
* While inside a Mint Garden, inhabitants cannot die, or feel pain. They can however experience other biological responses, such as hunger, or fatigue.
* A normal Human cannot remember their stay inside of a Mint Garden, only what happens before and after the Garden forms their greatest comfort.
* Inhabitants may give birth inside of Mint Gardens. These children are known as "Mintborn", and are capable of remembering their stays within the Garden fully.
* Initially, the Mint Garden is a bland white room, with a circle of mint on its floor, and a few simple tables holding a guestbook and a pot of flowers.
* When the guest dreams of their greatest comfort, the Garden shapes itself to match the place they wish to be more than anywhere else. (A dream, a memory that the guest treasures, a place they wish exists, a place they long to see even once, etc.)
* For the guest to leave their greatest comfort, they must imagine something very real to them.
* In order to leave a Mint Garden completely, one must have their name written inside the guestbook.
* Items from the Mint Garden are able to be taken back to Reality. It is not known if there are any limitations to this.
* Days inside the Mint Garden appear to repeat.
* There can be multiple visitors inside the Garden at once. These guests can share the greatest comfort of a single person, or experience their own individually. It is not known if there is a limit to how many guests a Garden can support at once.
* When the guest reenters the white room of the Mint Garden, a map will manifest on the wall, indicating the rough location of another Mint Garden. Each Garden only has a single location marked, no matter how many times one enters and leaves. These locations are known as "Sister Gardens".
* The Pulsekaw within the Mint Garden cannot leave under normal circumstances. They must attune themselves to Reality, which can only by done by attuning a pen with the ink of a Pulsekyn Mushroom. When the ink is from Reality, and not the Mint Garden, the Pulsekaw may write themselves out of the Garden.
* The Mint Garden will erase itself if it detects the Pulsekaw have become "wayward" - an unexplored term.
* When the Pulsekyn linked to the Garden is killed, the Garden's collapse speeds up exponentially.

## History

Mint Gardens first manifested in Reality with the Soaring of Akkaz, 2,251 years before current events. This event instantly brought the Pulsekaw Era to an end, and ushered in the current, Human Era. Every highborn Pulsekaw was locked within their own individual Mint Garden, while the remaining lowborns felt the constant tormenting pull of Akkaz. It took some time for Mint Gardens to be discovered, but once they had been, word quickly spread about them, and the Minthunt Combine formed roughly three years after the Soaring of Akkaz.

In the early days of the Human Era, hunting for Mint Gardens, sharing information about them, and taking extended stays inside of them were a common occurrence. The Lorekeeper took an interest in them for some time, devoting many years to assembling all known information about them into a famous print known as, "Mint Doors". This book would receive many revisions over the following few hundred years, until The Lorekeeper grew impatient with the Humans' increasing possessiveness of them, and devoted precious attention elsewhere.

About 400 years after the Gardens appeared, powerful and influential leaders of gangs, city-states, and kingdoms started claiming certain discovered Mint Gardens as their own, spawning some internal conflicts within Human society as a whole. These skirmishes rose to their peak in year 777 of the Human Era, known as the start of the Soil War. This never truly ended, but the Formea Wyrm Crisis in year 1240 completely changed the priorities of Human society. Wars over river water became more important for continued survival, and the vanity of the Mint Gardens dwindled to something of an afterthought.

The Formea Wyrms nearly caused a mass extinction event, and as kingdoms fell, so too did the knowledge about the Mint Gardens. Much of what had been documented within "Mint Doors" was lost, as well as many locations of discovered Mint Gardens. Even the Minthunt Combine had dwindled into obscurity under the immense stress of surviving the Formea Wyrms.

The new Minthunt Combine, reformed officially in the year 2198, restarted with only scraps of historical knowledge. It is the only organization investigating the Mint Gardens as of current events.

## Theories

It is speculated that Mint Gardens are small individual planes, completely separate from all other planes.

The original Minthunt Combine were fully convinced something fantastic would happen if each Mint Garden was visited by the same person. Since every Mint Garden has not been discovered, this theory remains untested.

Mint Gardens have been known to "collapse" occasionally, but in nearly every documented case of this happening, its inhabitants are killed in the resulting calamity. The Lorekeeper believes this is intentionally designed.