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Origin Story: The Sprout in the Melon Meadows
Every legend starts with a seed. Dax's started at dawn, in the Melon Meadows, during the Blossom Parade.
The dawn sprouting
It was the first morning of Sproutime, and the Blossom Parade floats were still being petaled when the pickers in the eastern Melon Meadows heard it: a small, determined pop, followed by giggling. There, in the middle of the prize patch, a giant watermelon had cracked clean open — and sitting in it, blinking at the sunrise, was a baby with a perfectly round watermelon head, dark-green rind stripes, and a smile already practicing for crowds.
The pickers did what Fruitopians do: they wrapped him in a picnic blanket, named the blanket his first cape, and carried him to Sunshine Vale. The blanket-weavers took him in, and by his third summer the whole Vale knew two things about young Dax: he could nap through a thunderstorm, and he could organize a picnic before he could properly spell it.
The first picnic
At three summers old, Dax dragged his blanket to the middle of Lemonade Creek's swimming meadow and announced a picnic. Six neighbors came out of curiosity. Sixty came when they smelled the watermelon. The tradition never stopped — it just got bigger, until one Harvestime it became the Great Picnic, and Dax Rind became the name everyone shouted when the blankets came out.
The champion years
Dax entered his first Rind Games seed-spitting contest "for the free lemonade" and won it by a full melon-length. He'd win twice more, set the record they still call the Seed-Spit Heard Round the Vale, and retire from competition undefeated — "while I'm still cute," he said, "and before someone younger and spittier shows up." He now coaches every sprout in the Vale who asks, which is all of them.