Crash's book of Tweak

Tweak has a bit of an interesting past. Her first four or so years were spent in utter bliss, believing she was going to be the next park ranger and helping her dad look after the Everglades since she could hop. Her mother had died when she was too young to remember her, so while the loss hit her father hard, Tweak wasn't ever really sad in this period of her life.

She met a lot of creatures and had a lot of fun and helped a lot of animals and for the longest while life was the best.

I guess she never really lost her spark for helping creatures.

Anyways, she was about six when their rusty old boat broke down, and they had to get it fixed. An engineer came in--one of Ranger Marsh's old friends--and Tweak was fascinated by the tools he brought, and the magic that he performed on the old cruiser.

He wasn't an engineer, to Tweak he was a wizard.

Engineering became Tweak's second life. Her Pa was a bit worried by this for two reasons. Firstly, her grades were slipping and it didn't look like she'd make it into any university for engineering. And, well, if he was being honest, he was worried she'd want to be an engineer and not a park ranger like he and all his fathers before him had been.

But the first problem was a big one. 

Tweak finally admitted she was being bullied in year 3--turns out she'd lived with it since kindergarten. Some of the older kids bullied her, and called her a "stupid swamp monster," and teased her for her minty-green skin, which was something no one had ever quite figured out about Tweak and her lineage.

Our favourite green bunny was subsequently getting pretty poor school results, consistently below average, and her teacher advised Ranger Marsh that his daughter should repeat fifth grade.

So Ranger Marsh took her out of school and homeschooled her. He got out all the schoolbooks that hadn't been touched in decades and taught his daughter everything he knew about anything. He got advice and lessons from some old friends and people he was randomly in contact with through his job.

And then the time for uni came. Tweak had no high school credentials or anything, but she sat the test for one of her local unis and she got in. 

She and her Pa had a long discussion about it one night, about whether she should go or not.

Things got... heated. Words flew a bit, but they had made it up by the time they finished, late into the wee hours of the night.

Tweak left home and went through uni, and completed her degree in engineering.

And then, someone who had a bit of a hand in her education, Professor Inkling made a visit to the ranger station one day in the holidays when Tweak was back at home trying to figure out what to do with her life.

It was a super ambitious project, but Tweak took it without hesitation.

Thus began Operation Octonauts.