An Angel's Ingenuity

At the press of a button on my wall, two window panels parted open and let a calm breath of flowery fresh air enter the room. For at least a kilometer around The Hive, my home, a beautiful flower field rolled across subtle hills in the land.

Among the flowers were meter long hovering constructs, identical to Uncle’s bee form, hovering around and tending to the rosy looking flora.

“Good morning, my friends!” I announced to the honey bees. “Flowers and rainbows for everyone on my birthday! Lot’s of honey too!”

When they caught my voice, all the honey bee constructs turned in my direction and made a series of beeping sounds in response to my declaration.

“-Affirmative, young mistress Yalda!-” They announced in robotic tones, but simply turned back to doing their gardening work.

Whether they understood me or not wasn’t that big of a deal. As Princess of the Bees, or so I liked to call myself, I had a particular image to keep up.

“Alright.” Uncle flew forward and latched one of his little legs onto my shoulder, pulling me back into the room ever so slightly. “Had your fun? We’ve got a busy day ahead of us, so let's not doddle any longer.”

“Okay,” I said, stepping off my chair and following him out into the hallway. “What sort of special stuff are we going to do today?”

“Training!” he sounded all cheery, but it wasn't as infectious as he hoped.

“Not training…” I slouched.

Who wants to have a schooling session on their birthday?

“Relax…” he chuckled. “You’ll understand why when we start. It’s part of your gift.”

Now I was interested. He should have just started with that!

The two of us reached a metal ring in the hallway that hovered over a circle of light. I stepped into it, feeling physics warp and shift in the air around us. Then the metal ring closed in slightly on my body and forced me to descend down into the lower floors of The Hive.

As we touched down on the right floor we exited the gravity lift field. We were in a lobby with a large diamond shaped projection at the center of it, which was of The Hive. This lobby also led up to the control center, which was just beyond the giant hologram.

It was a pretty large room. Sometimes Uncle and I used it for training because of that.

“So, what’s my gift?” I eagerly bounced in place.

“Hold on…” he uttered. “You need breakfast first.”

“Aha!” I snapped my fingers. “The most important meal of the day!” He always made me a big breakfast in the morning. I’m talking huge! Waffles, pancakes, bacon and eggs… Lots of toast too. “It’ll help me grow up all big and strong.”

“Speaking of growth, you forgot to post the results of your morning diagnostic again,” he scolded. “Mind sharing the data?”

Oh shoot!

“Okay, Uncle.” I packaged up the data into a document, then materialized it into a holographic paper in my palm. With a few key folds, it became a paper airplane that took flight toward Uncle.

It phased right into him, confirming that he’d accepted the data.

Proud of how good everything looked on it, I struck a power pose and smiled.

“I bet you think I’m the best syntax life form of all time!” I confidently said.

“Synthetic life form.” he corrected me, causing a wave of depression to overwhelm my pride.

I guess I’m growing in all the departments other than vocabulary…

“You’re armour skin is developing properly, and your liquid mana blood quality is excellent.”

“That’s good,” I said, lightly tapping the purplish brown parts of the skin on my chest with a fist.

“However, your blood iron levels are a bit low.” he made a chortle sound and turned to me with a sly emoji on his display. “Perhaps we can put more vitamin rocks into your diet?”

Eew… Vitamin rocks were like eating straight up gravel.

“How about more stake?” I counter offered. “There’s a lot of iron in that.”

Heck, I’d even take a bowl of broccoli over those vitamin rocks…

His head shook, playfully. “Maybe. I wouldn’t want to spoil you too much, you know?”

I giggled. With how much he trained me daily, spoil isn’t the word I would use.

Speaking of spoiled, a horrible scent tickled my nose and made me grimace… Was that rotten eggs?

That's a fishy smell... And fish isn't a very good breakfast food...

If memory served, an element on the periodic table had that smell… Which was it?

Oh, duh! Sulfur! But why was I smelling sulfur?

Uncle took note of me sniffing around the air, curiously joining in with me.

“Uncle, what’s that smell? We’re not cooking with rotten eggs, are we?”

I was hoping he’d laugh at that, but his mood turned silent and serious.

He ordered me to use my nose to track the smell to its origin. At first I gave him a confused head tilt, but I figured out quickly what he was talking about, expressing that realization with a snap of my fingers.

-Activating Advanced Olfactory Sensors-

-Unique scent detected!-

One of the perks of my body was all the neat utility it has. My nose kicked into overdrive and linked up with my eyes, turning my vision temporarily gray scale and highlighting sulfur molecules in the air as a yellow gas.

The concentration around us was far too strong for this to be an anomaly. Something was wrong.

I established a connection with Uncle and broadcast my sight to his head, allowing him to see everything I did.

“Alright, keep that view going…” he said.

In the blink of an eye, I was picked up by a mafia looking man in a gray suit and fedora hat. He threw me up onto his shoulders and gave me a piggyback ride.

“Uncle, you're in your human form!” I commented. He looked a lot like daddy when in his human form, but more angry and he had black hair. Actually, they both looked pretty angry all the time for no good reason.

“This form has its perks, like being able to carry you,” he turned his head up to look at me. “Yalda, keep tracking that smell. Alright? Let’s call this part of your training for the day.”

“Roger that!” I saluted him. The two of us were going to get to the bottom of this sulfur leak.

One of the gravity lifts off on the southern wall of this big lobby had the highest concentration of gas floating up it. That one also happened to be one of the few exits to the outside, specifically the garden just below The Hive.

“That away!” I pointed.

“Sss!” Samael hissed, supportively.

Uncle bolted off toward the lift, then we hovered down it once he stepped in. The further down we went, the stronger the smell became, all the way up until we were lowered outside into the garden.

It was coming from somewhere in that area. I turned all around, seeing pretty plants of all kinds with fruits and vegetables growing on their vines and branches, but not quite able to trace where the smell was originating from. This garden wasn’t small, and it sure felt like the smell had time to waft around.

But that wasn’t all. Now I was detecting carbon monoxide along with it. What, did a volcano open up around here?!

“Yalda, any clue which way to go?”

I was a bit flustered while trying to pinpoint exactly where we should go, but I took an educated guess and pointed down one of the paths. “Try that way!” There was a lot of gas coming in from that way, so it seemed pretty logical.

Now the warning alarms were going off all around. Bee constructs flew in fast from all directions to contain whatever was going on with this gas.

The path I’d chosen was the one leading to the center part of the garden. This area was supposed to look just as beautiful as the flower field, maybe even more pretty with the different wooded plants and trees… But now things looked much less healthy.

Plants here were turning strange colours and withering away. A gross smog was lifting up out of where their leaves and petals had fallen, collecting up in the air. As the organic material decomposed on the ground, a sludgy material was left behind. Uncle and I were both equally very concerned.

But the chief of all the issues had yet to be seen… Right at the core, propped atop a little hill was a very small tree, one that normally had berries that tasted like a mix of honey and apple. It was a 3 year old Boni sapling.

Unlike its normal healthy green appearance and full foliage, All the leaves had crinkled up or fallen from its short branches and were scattered across the ground. As they decomposed quickly, they were the main cause of all this sulfur and smog being carried around in the air. Making things worse, the ash they crumbled into turned hot and seared with a light flame, much like coal on a grill. It almost looked like the ash was starting to wiggle around on its own.

Uncle commanded the bees to contain the tree in a hard light energy field. A barrier of energy circled around it and trapped it inside, forbidding any contact with the outside world.

As an added precaution, the bees collected all the charring remains of the leaves into containers, preparing them to be analyzed. The quarantine zone extended outward to catch any other plants affected by this weird decomposition.

“What’s wrong with the tree, Uncle?” I asked, worried that it was sick. I’d never seen a sick tree before.

“I don’t know,” Uncle said with a furrowed brow. “But We’re going to figure that out.”

-☆☆☆-

Through a very thorough analysis, Uncle discovered that the Boni tree was suffering from an illness known as Low Mana Affliction, meaning that it wasn’t taking in enough mana from the air, like all plants should have been able to do.

Mana was life. It was what our spirits were made out of. Normally our bodies generated endless amounts of mana energy that kept us alive. The crystal heart embedded into my chest did that for me. Uncle had a crystal heart of his own too.

Plants and animals didn’t have the luxury of being able to generate their own mana and needed to pull it from the air or eat plants to get some. Normally the air was filled with endless amounts of spirit energy, but apparently there was a pretty noticeable drought… At least according to Uncle’s measurements.

It wasn’t enough to cause every plant to wither yet, but the Boni tree needed a lot and pulled an especially large amount in for itself, even stealing it from neighboring plants. That's why things around it were dying.

Uncle leaned his back against the wall of the analysis room, rubbing a hand against his chin in frustration. A clear solution to this problem wasn't showing itself no matter how far he dug into it.

“Why’s all the mana gone, Uncle?” I asked, taking a bite out of some toast. “I thought it never runs out.”

“It shouldn’t,” he stepped forward, spawning a virtual data screen in front of him and typing away on it. “Paradina produces mana infinitely for the whole world to use. The atmosphere should be flooded at all times.”

This was so weird. No matter how he crunched the numbers, it always showed the amount of mana in the air was significantly less then it should have been.

“Well, I can confirm that the mass mana generation system isn't failing…” He pressed the little X button at the top of his screen, making it disappear. Then he turned to me. “There's likely a problem with the Elysium redistribution grid. So I'll need to go and recalibrate it.”

“What happens if that doesn't fix it?” I asked.

“Then all the life in the world is going to end up looking like the center of the garden did.”

Yucky… The world would look like a big sludgy mess and smell like rotten eggs.

“Does that mean we get to go to Elysium?” I asked, excited for the chance to visit that magical place.

Uncle didn’t quite share my enthusiasm, but confirmed that we’d be making a trip there.

“Yay!” I cheered. “But wait…” my joy left me. “Does that mean we can save the Boni tree?”

Daddy and I planted that tree before he left. It would have been horrible if this tree died suddenly.

Uncle wasn’t sure if that would be possible, but he might have known someone who lived in Elysium that could help us. He wanted to pay her a visit too, since she knew that place better than anyone.

“I hope we can save it,” I said. “Do you think God will let trees go to heaven, Uncle?” I asked.

“I can’t say for sure, Young Mistress,” Uncle kneeled down. “You’re really worried about it, aren’t you?”

It felt a little embarrassing, but that tree was the last birthday gift dad ever gave to me. Parting with it so suddenly just wasn’t a good feeling.

Uncle was encouraging though, saying that there was nothing to be embarrassed about. The tree was special, and thinking it was shameful to want to keep it around was ridiculous.

So instead of sulking away my passion for the tree, I put a prayer in my heart and ignited hope that we’d find a fix for the lack of mana in the air.

-☆-

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