Lights

Our hunt went fantastic! We ended up with like thirty big Pavan’s for the whole town!

Shockingly this food would only last a few days, so we’d need to ration it out. But who says it would be the only thing we’d be serving up all week?

“Look, Marek!” I plucked a big apple like fruit from a tree. “Can we serve the town this stuff too?”

“Yes.” He nodded. “We can also pick some berries from that bush over there…”

~☆☆☆~

I think we went a little overboard gathering food out here, because we ended up with tons of Pavan meat and fruit that we needed to lug back the town.

“How are we taking this all back home?” I asked.

“The old fashioned way.” Marek picked up at least twenty birds all on his own. He had the strength of a bear! “We carry it! I’m not sure what we’ll do about the rest here though…”

Some birds were left over, and we still had all the fruit too. I had a simple solution. Each of the monster bird carcasses had a tiny beam of light shooting out of them that only I could see, which meant that they had drop items I could collect.

A prompt appeared in my vision asking if I wanted to take all items from the pile. I chose yes. My virtual inventory filled up pretty quickly…

I went into the virtual inventory tab and checked out the mess. I had upwards of ten big hunks of meat, as well as fruit and stuff. It was so much that it filled up the last few available slots I had.

“Sorry, Anima…” I said to the chibi AI sleeping in the very last slot. “But it’s going to smell like cold turkey in there for a little while.”

At least I collected plenty of stuff, but apparently one of the dropped items from these guys were eggs. I left most of those behind to save space.

“Ssss…”

“Samael?” I gave a snoot boop to my snake, who was hanging off my hat. He was getting a little restless. “Oh…you want the eggs, don’t you?”

“Sss…” He hissed, jumping off my hat and quickly trying to eat the egg that was much bigger then him.

It’s no surprised a snake would be after that. Lots of nutrition for them, but he was way to small for that thing.

“How about I give you a smaller one once we get back to the town?”

“Sss…” He hissed. But he seemed really bent on this egg, even conking his head on it a few times before slithering back up to my hat.

Maybe I should hold onto that one, just incase...something about it seemed odd.

~☆☆☆~

Marek and I got back to the town, and it seemed like the others had done a really good job cleaning up the houses and streets so people could walk around. But it was getting dark and the power was still out.

I noticed that a lot of houses were decorated with Christmas lights and other festive things, but none of them were working. If only we could get those colourful things on, this place would be really festive…

We found Yamin and Indena at the central square by the church. Both had really wide eyes when they saw Marek approach with a ton of Pavan monster bodies in hand.

“Dude…didn’t you think to take a cart or something?” Indena asked.

“The snow was too high up. I didn’t want to drag one out there.” He placed the meat all in a pile, prompting a few very shocked group of people to start collecting them and dragging them away to the church kitchen.

“Amigo…these are heavy!" One brawny man said. "How did you carry them all?”

Although Marek was a little unsure how he got so physically strong, it definitely never failed to impress.

~☆☆☆~

For anyone who didn’t have night vision like me, it was getting really hard to see. We needed to think of a way to get at least the lights back on here…

Uncle said the power grid repairs weren't going so well, so that still wasn't an option.

“Oy, sparkle head," Indena called out Yamin. "Got any plan for this?”

“Funny you mention sparkles.” Yamin had a smug face, lifting a hand and letting the tip of her finger brighten up like a tiny star. “We’ve got all the lights we need right here.”

“Stardust!” I cheered.

A warm sensation filled my crystal heart, then flowed across my body and down into my hands. My palms were glowing a hot red, then white. A haze lifted from my synthetic skin and whilred around until solidifying into a glowing crystal orb resembling a lightbulb.

This lovely stuff is made when our bodies take in sun and star light. Not everyone can use it. Only Yamin and I can out of the whole group. Yamin has a few years on me though, since she’s been using it since she was a baby.

With Yamin’s creativity, she materialized tiny little Christmas bulb looking pieces and showed them off to us. They were really pretty and they had just the right type of light we were looking for.

“Hey, that’s not bad. Good thinking, Yamin,” Indena gave accolades.

“We’ll probably need to see if anyone in town can help us with this, since Yalda and I can only do so much.”

Our stardust reserves were finite. We’d be able to get a lot lit up, but getting others to help would put less stress on our bodies. The local priest was among the few who were helping us here.

We managed to enlist five other people who were stardust sensitive to help create crystal lights for the houses. A clever way that we decided to make coloured lights was by taking actual LED Christmas lights and filling the bulbs with stardust.

As we finished a few strands, everyone went around and began decorating the houses and plants again.

What was once very dark homes and skies now looked like a little slice of the North Pole. A big challenge was going to be getting the church decorated. It was really big, so it would take a while for the humans to actually set things up.

Human’s might have trouble, but an Exceed like me definitely wouldn’t.

FWOOSH!

My wings gust out and I took to the skies, reaching the tops of the church far faster than anyone trying to climb a ladder.

Rather then string up lights, I decided to simply grow stardust crystal on it, trying to follow a path that would glow pretty when fully in place.

There was a commotion down below. I didn’t realize something was going on, but people were shouting and singing like mad.

“Praise Deus!”

“He is mighty!”

“God save us!”

Why were they praying right now? I mean, good for them, but what caused this?

The twinkling lights I’d just framed the cathedral in were shining at my back, little sparkles of snow and stardust were carried by the wind, glittering through the air and gracefully raining down on them.

I slowly descended down from above, following the same path and landing on the very tip of the water fountain, since that was the only place where nobody was crowding around.

The people had very hopeful teary eyes, cupped hands, and shouting all sorts of beautiful things my way.

Goodness…what was this all about?

I turned to Yamin, who was also smiling and crying.

“Yamin, why are they all so happy right now?”

“Silly…” she sniffled, whipping the tears from her eyes. “We all just saw an angel light up the church.”

“Ooooh…” Now it all makes sense. I totally forget sometimes how special it is that I look like a real angel, especially with these fluffy wings of mine.