If I only had a brain
You know, there's been some times in Harvest Moon that I wished there was a scarecrow on the farm. A scarecrow so that one day Jack would be working out in the fields and it could club him over the head and take his place, because hey, it couldn't be any dumber than some of the Jacks in HM fan fiction. A smart, if pumpkin-headed Jack would be fun to write about, but since there's no scarecrow in any of the games I've played, I guess if we want a smart farmer Jack, we're going to have to start from the beginning.
Chapter 1: New Jack
"Do you think you're going to just sit there at the computer all summer?!" Mother shouted, in Jack's room, next to Jack's desk, next to Jack's ear.
"Yes." Jack said simply.
"Oh? And why do you think that is?" Mother asked, and she was tempted to add "you retard." But she was still Jack's mother and she would wait to hear the explanation, before she called it stupid.
With a sigh, Jack leaned forward onto his desk and stood up from his chair and the EGG he'd been sitting on! A white egg the size of a man's head!! With a silent ta-da, Jack indicated the reason why he was not going to get up from his chair anymore than absolutely necessary. At least until school started.
Jack's mother was also completely silent. I mean what exactly do you say to something like THAT? Once she almost thought of something, but as she opened her mouth to speak, Jack butted in with "If it was a regular egg, I wouldn't be able to sit on it."
That forced her to ponder a bit more. Finally she just broke down and said, "So, you're a girl after all."
"MOM!! LAST TIME I CHECKED HUMAN GIRLS CAN'T LAY EGGS!!"
"I KNOW but, I mean, how could this have happened?"
"I don't know either! It happened the night school ended, after that end-of-class party where I invented the eggroll burrito and the 31 flavor soda. I fell asleep at my desk, woke up with a load in my pants, and this was the load!"
And so, despite being almost as idiotic as Old Jack (if not more so), he (she? New Jack anyway) convinced Mother and Father to let them stay inside all summer, rather than going out to boring camps or dragging them along to meet dull relatives. So it was just Jack and Eggy inside at Jack's desk, and Jack read comic books and played video games until he was out of both. He requested more from Mother when she came to bring him his meals, but she brought library books and his summer reading instead. So when Jack started school that fall, he had two secrets: number one, he had finished all his homework for the next four years, and number two, Jack had hatched his very own baby dragon.
At first, he kept his baby with him in his backpack, but a few close calls and near discoveries convinced Jack to let go a little, and leave it home in the care of "Grandma." Jack's Mother was obviously less than thrilled about facing a grandchild so soon, so her care amounted to sliding increasing amounts of food under Jack's door. The little dragon lived on that, at first under the desk, then inside the closet, and finally under the bed. Then, one day Jack came home just as the dragon was deciding it was too big for the bedroom.
It shoved the wall out of its way and took off into the air! Jack's parents ran into his room, took look out the side of their house at the neighborhood going up in flames. "Sooo... that's what hatched from your egg, huh?" "Yep" With the police sirens chasing, the piled into the family country and fled their city...