Jarletta's Rainbows / The Funky Flower

Fast version: its petals contain a glowing juice that basically makes them little glowing rainbow flowers. The history section of this also doubles as a biography of Jarlena, who the goddess Jarletta came to be named after.

They're called Jarletta's Flowers or Jarletta's Rainbows because Jarletta, a popular goddess (note: while she's based off the real Jarlena who legitimately had great magic abilities, she was never a goddess), spirit, angel and saint in several different religions, is said to have created them when a child was sad that he/she couldn't ever actually touch rainbows and who then helped the flower grow and reproduce (note: the people that came up with this didn't quite get how pollination works).

An entire magic family was created with abilities much like and linked to this flower in an attempt to bring back the powers of Jarlena, as she was killed without having any children to pass her abilities onto, speaking of which no their powers aren't the same as Jarlena's.

These flowers are currently assumed to be extinct from overuse and deliberate extermination by the Jarlets, although it's rumoured that the Jarlets, the magic family with abilities built off of the Jarletta's, grow them in secret and use them to initially trigger their abilities in comparison to most of the more military-based families usually first using their abilities out of survival instinct while under extreme fear, pain or stress... this is a funny way to say that most magic families trigger the abilities of their children with beatings, trials and torture.

These rumours have resulted in multiple attempts to raid their homes for the plant which have generally ended in the deaths of the thieves, most notably there being one thief-boy who was taken as a "mandatory servant" of those he'd attempted to rob and him throwing himself off a balcony while covered in dozens of new scars. The Jarlets are able to deliberately cause effects just like and even more precisely than Jarletta's rainbows, but generally charge a steep price for their services.

Effects

Its most common effect is the reliving of a person's happiest memories in a several-minute trance. Those who've lived extremely unhappy lives will often experience extremely vivid, detailed and realistic (to the point of some suggesting that they're seeing alternative realities) fantasies of happier lives they could've lived if something had gone differently or they'd made a different choice at some point in their lives.

Taking Jarletta's Rainbows has often been the cause of people either completely turning their lives around, such as how it was quickly made illegal for being a common cause of divorce, or committing suicide. These memories and alternate memories generally come across as many individual moments, but these moments get longer and less numerous with each use, and this can be very addictive.

However, it may cause them to relive hurtful memories if those memories have been blocked off by trauma or brain damage. This makes it a valuable source of information for those suffering from amnesia.

Those taking Jarletta's Rainbows will often experience interesting dreams for several weeks after their initial consumption. These are sometimes further memories, but may also consist of more metaphorical experiences, often where someone is forced to confront something they don't like or try to pretend isn't the case about themselves, which can be anything from something as basic as being in the closet about one's sexuality or someone who deep down knows their actions have been awful but tries to come up with justifications for themselves. Dreams are always perfectly remembered as if they were real, and someone who is hurt in a dream won't receive a physical injury but will still feel the pain as if they had when they wake up.

The same effects of the dreams can randomly happen in visions when going about daily life. Typical symptoms are the person freezing on the spot or slumping and their eyes glazing over, and these generally last no longer than 20 minutes. They will not react to being touched or moved, and aren't generally tense during this even if the visions they're experiencing are straight-up torture, so it's easily to safely move them or change their position, which can be amazing or awful information for the person experiencing the vision depending on the situation and who's nearby.

People generally experience a constant mood swing throughout the weeks-long period of dreams and visions. This mood swing is generally a depressive one that also increases fatigue, and some people die of starvation, dehydration, doing nothing or little to save themselves when in danger, hypothermia and disease from poor hygiene, and so those experiencing it often need to be taken care of by someone else for the duration of their swing. That said, others have become more excitable during their swings.

It's generally assumed that the fact that most people aren't the same after first taking Jarletta's Flower is due to their personal experiences with it rather than traces of any chemical or magical residue, but yeah you don't relive memories, come face-to-face with visions of your insecurities in your sleep and at random moments while you're tryna do stuff and probably be completely reliant on someone else throughout this period and not walk away a different person. Some people don't want to walk away at all, wanting to keep reliving alternate or past memories either for a semblance of happiness or to investigate whether or not alternate realities exist. Those who've taken it once will always want more when it's brought to mind and especially if it's ever directly in front of them, describing it as an overwhelming curiosity and impulse.

Basic Information

Anatomy

Pointed leaf-like petals with a large pistil. Generally have fairly droopy stalks.

Genetics and Reproduction

They're artificially reproduced asexually by cutting off and growing new pieces, but in theory could be reproduced from pollination, but such flowers may be inbred cos they do be descended from 1 same flower and inbreeding causes problems for plants too.

Growth Rate & Stages

Generally takes 6 months to grow in artificially hospitable environments.

Ecology and Habitats

Dark, damp areas with large amounts of iron and nitrates in the soil (this can be easily achieved with adding blood to soil).

Biological Cycle

The longest any lived was 4 years when it was being tested if they had further life stages, but the experiment was cut short by a fire.

Additional Information

Uses, Products & Exploitation

Traces of it were used in drugs. It itself is a drug. Used in the creation of the Jarlets.

Civilization and Culture

History

Click the spoiler button to be spoiled.

Show spoiler

Jarlena is the girl and later woman who would be adapted into many religions as a deity of things like kindness, soil fertility and plants, such as in the current Lamaran state religion in which she's the goddess of all those things and is also believed to have conspired with a god of trickery to save the human race when the God of gods decided our drip was fake and we had all lost our living privileges. Refer to the article on Lamara for more info.

The real Jarlena was physically weak, had brittle bones and was often sick or injured. Her family, struggling in poverty as farmers, came to view her as a burden who couldn't work on the farm and at one point intended to sell her as a slave to a local nobleman but apparently changed their minds for some reason, probably linked to criminal records being dug up suggesting he was a paedophile and they were trying to sell her to someone who'd make her scrub floors and trim plants (if she could be sold to someone who wanted her to open up rocks with a pickax or chop wood they wouldn't have wanted to sell her at all) not molest her.

She learned how to read and write from her older brother, himself having learned because he had wanted to join the clerics but was prevented by his parents as they needed him on the farm, and would write about her days by scratching the words onto plant skin she took from the nearby forest, putting the plant skin into extremely salty water from a geyser and then hid them by digging up and re-covering a hole just outside the barn where she slept.

Jarlena befriended one of the farm animals, a piglet that was regularly picked on by its siblings for being a runt, and learned from her older brother that it was going to be killed and its meat exchanged for bread.

She broke the pig out of the pen and let it escape, and was caught in the act by her mother.

Her ma then gave her the mother of all ass whoopings. It was the most savage beating of a physically frail child anyone could ever see. Her ma could've won child-beating championships if those were even a thing.

Anyway yeah Jarlena had numerous broken bones from that to the point where she'd limp for the rest of her life, and I'd bring up how mentally scarred she was but it gets worse.

Because fun facts with Thicc Shrek it's more mentally and psychologically harmful to a child to abandon them than to hurt them. Something about the fact that a kid in the ol' caveman days being able to survive being beaten so long as they were fed and protected, but if they weren't protected and provided for - such as being abandoned - then they were utterly fucked.

And Jarlena's ma forced her bloody-faced child out into the nearby wilderness, quite literally telling her daughter to die.

NOW you'll get to learn the fact that Jarlena would only ever look her mother in the eyes twice after that and on both occasions would break out into tears, as well as always flinching and avoiding being touched by her ma.

Jarlena, in the wilderness, collapsed while approaching a berry bush and woke up surprisingly comfortable.

She reached up to grab at a berry but was disoriented and grabbed just next to it on the stem instead, and the berry grew in size.

Oh yeah, it's all coming together, that part from the start about magic families activating the abilities of their kids with ruthless beatings is coming into play because Jarlena, seemingly due to a mutation, had a magic ability letting her make plants grow by touching them.

She gorged herself on comically oversized berries atop a bed of grass that had grown beneath her and passed out again from over-eating, waking up the next day completely enveloped in grass.

She went to her dad with a branch of berries she could barely carry the weight of and he accepted her back into the family, making a show of scolding his wife despite them having already agreed together that they were going to abandon their daughter in the wilderness to die (but Jarlena didn't know that until years later).

After feeding themselves on Jarlena's ability and noticing she could produce more than enough food for a whole village and, more importantly, the opportunity being presented, they presented her in front of the village while claiming she'd been gifted by the gods with the power to feed people. At this point, she was able to switch from writing onto plant skin to an actual book, which she sowed her plant-skin writings into.

Clerics came from all around, asking Jarlena about all sorts of things like her dreams and interpreting them. A cult quickly formed around Jarlena as it came to be believed that her dreams were given to her by the gods and that she could serve as a kind of prophet because of this, and Jarlena just ate up all that positive attention and approval while her family got rich doing things like buying children's clothes and reselling them while claiming they used to be Jarlena's and may be blessed with good luck.

As Jarlena grew up, mastering her abilities so that she could control whether or not her abilities were active and even how the plants grew to the point where she turned a twig into a sapling and then a crutch to help her walk, she saw things she disliked.

The biggest of these was when, while visiting a major city at the age of 14 (at this time, that major city had a population of about 10,000 people), she saw a child slave, aged about 12, being beaten in the street by their owner. She broke the owner's club when an attempted blow onto the child instead hit a tree that grew around the child and claimed them as her slave instead.

The owner later demanded compensation and received 2 copper coins from the clergy. This was actually a hell of a lot at the time.

Jarlena continued this practice of buying slaves and adding them to her entourage, she eventually started saying outright that beating slaves and children (who were regarded as property of their parents) was wrong.

This was while the Lamaran religion, which at this point simply placed all the credit for saving humanity on the trickster-god Blunir and would add Jarletta later, existed and believed that non-Lamarans, who made up around half of slaves in Lamara, had to live in suffering for the sins of their ancestors so that the gods could be appeased and that Lamarans had to suffer every now and then as well to outweigh the new sins they committed to avoid falling out of the graces of the gods - with the Lamaran.

Claiming that causing the suffering of slaves is wrong and then that owning slaves at all was wrong when making the lives of other ethnicities suck was seen as a religious duty and that owning them was a right and reward for being descended from the sinless.

She tried to claim that the gods were satisfied with the suffering that had happened so far but slavery and the mistreatment of slaves continued.

When she was 16, an attempt on her life was made by a member of a group that believed her to actually be a demon using her powers to mislead people so that the gods would turn upon humanity once again. 2 of the slaves she'd freed leapt to her defence, the one she'd first freed and her girlfriend. Her girlfriend died from a knife to the heart during this before Jarlena could break them all apart by suspending them in the air with branches. Oh yeah also the religion said homosexuality bad.

When she was 17, she married the first slave she'd freed and, after learning he didn't have a name as he'd been sold earlier than he could remember and that she'd been unwittingly calling him by a racial slur from his homeland the entire time because that's what his previous owner had called him, named him Jarlet. Her diary writings show that this was an extremely embarrassing moment, and appears to have made her reconsider the marriage after realising she knew jack shit about her husband, but she apparently did it anyway.

They had a son, named Jarlet after his father (in practice referred to as Jarletini, meaning "little Jarlet"), who shared his mother's abilities.

Jarlena was pregnant with her second child, who would've been born a girl able to continue Jarlena's ability for generations to come (none of Jarletini's children would inherit his abilities, but the children of Jarlena's daughter would've as the magic ability would've followed a maternal lineage), when she was lured to meet with some clergy members under the guise that they were going to discuss how, since Jarlena's first child had inherited her ability and it was assumed her second one would as well, slavery might be phased out in the future.

There, she was stabbed from behind with a spear and fell atop a flower. She and that flower were in that puddle of blood together while she slowly died of bleeding.

For some reason, that flower became the first Jarletta's Rainbow, collected the next day, split into pieces and grown into more flowers by the one who'd killed her.

After the flower's properties were discovered, experimentation began on attempting to bring back Jarlena's abilities as her son, Jarletini, despite efforts by those who'd captured him, wasn't producing any children with his/his mother's abilities and it was realised that the same rules by which the abilities of the Krysa family were inherited were likely in place.

These experiments were performed on Jarletini's children, eventually creating the first member of the Jarlet magic family and only survivor as Jarlena's other grandchildren all died in the experiments.

This child would later be seized from the clergy by a petty king in a raid, during which the child almost died after being mistakenly shot with a bow and arrow, and raised as an adoptive child of the petty king, who also married them to his eldest son, but this child escaped and lead a mercenary company using all the skills they'd developed using the Jarlet powers, including being able to kill people with heart attacks at will so long as they locked eyes with her.

Her twin children fought for the mercenary company as well and eventually seized a small island for themselves and the families of the mercenaries by wiping out the most dangerous of the local fauna, and that there has been the seat of power of the Jarlet family ever since.

.

K but wot about the flower tho why are you telling us about some dweebs who established some stupid little island nation that just gets added to Lamara later anyway?

.

Oh yeah. One of them was stolen by a clergy member who was in on the experiments and he sold them to a herbalist. From there the Jarletta's Rainbow drug trade escalated.

Also the clergy said only they could have Jarletta's rainbows cos only they could properly interpret the godly visions it gave them, but that achieved nothing.

And then it died out from a mixture of it being used faster than it was being grown as its popularity grew and also that time tonnes of the houses where it was grown being burnt down by a gang of people who blamed it for various problems like their spouses leaving them.

EXTINCT

Scientific Name

Flos Jarletta

Origin/Ancestry

The plant that first became one was a relative of Earth's poppy flower, even if they looked nothing alike.

Conservation Status

RIP

Average Height

8 inches when fully grown. So several times longer than your-

Average Weight

2kg

Body Tint, Colouring and Marking

Rainbow