Soma
Snake/spider-taur hybrid character description
Soma's organ garden had seemed like a good idea at the time. When the snake thought back on the many sacrifices that had been performed on the site he first planted his magicked seeds for it in, his greatest regret about them was that since there was no such thing as actual gods, the sacrifice victims would have had nowhere to go, and their deaths would have been for nothing. Since he didn't have the ability to bring them back from the dead, he figured that the next best thing for him to do would be to make the best possible use of what was left of them that he could come up with. So the seeds he planted grew, first into saplings and eventually into heart trees, lung trees, stomach trees, kidney trees, intestine trees and even a few brain trees.
He'd first gotten the idea of combining the concepts of vat meat, organ transplants and hedge witchcraft thinking it would simply give him an infinitely regenerating supply of replacement organs for the patients that his advanced medical training would give him to ability to heal without having to take organs from anyone else. He thought that it'd be useful for students of medicine to be able to study organs independently from organisms containing them so that organisms wouldn't have to be damaged by their study. He lived in a world in which organ theft was a dangerous social ill, and figured that if there was a source of free organs that was readily available for people who needed some to be able to get some from, they'd have been likelier to come get them from him than from other sources that may have been being encouraged by their purchase to continue getting them from unwilling donors.
Looking back from the present, he regretfully thought that the problems with his approach should have been obvious to him from the get-go, but he was far in enough that he knew there was no going back for him from then on. At first the fact that people came who didn't need organs themselves but who were getting them from him for free only to sell them to others for a profit only annoyed him, because he didn't like the thought of people having to pay for the fruits of his labor since he hadn't intended for them to have to do so, but he still tried to rationalize it to himself as being merely a less perfect solution than the one that he'd originally intended for it to be.
That was before the unsavory characters who ran the organ racket showed up in his organ garden with axes and chainsaws threatening to clear cut the whole place down if he didn't stop ruining their business by granting people free access to the source of their own income. It was also before others showed up to try to intimidate him into revealing the secret of his magicked seeds, and that a chill went down his serpentine spine as he realized that, if the secret of their fabrication got out, the original sacrifices that he'd been trying to make up for would pale in comparison to the mountains of sacrifices that would be made in the immediate future as organ sellers would be planting organ gardens all over the world. He knew that from then on he could no longer afford to leave the garden, and that he'd have to settle for helping the patients who could be brought to him where he was, so that he could keep guarding the garden as he healed them. He'd trapped himself out of his own misguided good intentions, but he eventually accepted that this would have to remain his responsibility for the rest of his life.
Soma knows how to use roots, herbs and leaves to feed people, to treat their wounds, to cure their diseases, to make them go to sleep or to temporarily paralyze invaders. He can sprout from 1 to 4 spider legs from his back, turn his forked tongue and hands into mini-Venus flytraps, turn into a spider-taur, secrete green ropes that are mixtures of disinfecting spider thread and vines, sprout pine needles all over his body, and create antidotes to various poisons by diluting his own fangs' venom with water. He uses pine needles and spider thread to sew up wounds, branches as crutches, vines as slings and leaves as bandages.
He uses his thread-vines to build safety nets he installs for people to land into if they fall off cliffs, to swing from tree to tree, to throw down so that people can use them to climb up cliff sides, to make nets he can drop down on invaders from treetops, as lassos to snatch axes and chainsaws out of invaders' hands, as snares he hangs over tree branches to pull them up when invaders step on them, as tripwires he extends between tree trunks, as bolas to wrap around invaders' ankles and as whips he can wrap around invaders to tie them up before doing his own version of 'catch and release' with them. He sleeps in hammocks he hangs between treetops made from those very same thread-vines.
Soma knows that drugs that have been targeted as harmful by the Pharmacratic Inquisition have often been used by a whole slew of lesser known groups who knew what they were doing at least as well as modern doctors do and that were no more harmful in responsible hands than those the latter used either, as covered up as that knowledge has become since then. He believes that the mycelial root network uniting thousands of mushrooms over extensive surfaces are connections that have formed between the neurons of Mother Earth's brain which transmit their encrypted knowledge to those who consume them. He believes in 'first do no harm', in 'waste not want not', and that we're made of flesh and blood and bone and sinew. He's dug a network of tunnels under the garden that he knows his way around in filled with underground dens that complete the nests and vine rope bridges he's built up in its treetops.
He climbs trees, sits on branches, hangs from branches by his legs or arms, crawls concealed by high grass, sits back against trees in their shade, plays cat's cradle, makes string figures, ties and unties knots of every shape and size. He privately believes that the reward for not having bitten the apple in the garden of Eden should have been being allowed to leave, and that the punishment for biting it should have been being forced to stay, rather than the other way around, because of the way that his perspective on it has been influenced by his own situation. Then again, he realizes that it's really his own attachment to the value of other people's lives which is keeping him where he is more than his magic on its own, and yet that he would still rather stay where he is than leave because this attachment is more important to him than anything else that could be out there. Despite everything, he still wouldn't want to have to live in a world without it.