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“Anyone want to help me decorate the lobby and outside?” Jay asked one day when they were all gathered in Lloyd, Nya and Kai’s apartment.
All of them, surprisingly, agreed but Nya was the one to ask “Why us, specifically?”
Jay shrugged, “Dareth asked me if we would, I said yes,”
Dareth, their rather landlord, who always wore a brown suit and gold chain around his neck (and a Christmas hat during December). Every December, he went all out for Christmas with all the signs, lights and jazz on the market.
“Why not? It’s not like we have anything to do for a while with school done for the year,” Echo asked. That was mostly true, Zane and Lloyd did have a few holiday shifts at Mystake’s Shop.
The next day, the eight of them collected the many boxes of decorations from Dareth’s apartment.
“This is a lot of stuff,” Kai complained as he set down the last of the boxes, making a total of eleven boxes.
“You can say that again,” Echo agreed.
First they set up the lawn decorations: Santa and the reindeer, giant candy canes and gingerbread men (which Kai insisted they don’t put up). That was the easy part.
“How are we meant to hang all these up?” Zane asked quietly, he was pointing to the boxes of lights.
“From the stairwell windows?” Cole asked.
“That might work but there’s too many,” Zane said.
“We’ll find somewhere to put them,” Jay said.
To go with the eleven boxes of decorations, Dareth had also given them an utterly ridiculous amount of double-sided tape. In the remaining boxes, they soon discovered, was not one kind of lights but many: icicle, multicolored, star, little tree shaped, coils, you get the idea.
They decided to split up so what would have been a many-hour job was only one-hour long.
One hour and many roles of tape later, they were done. The leftover lights they put up in the lobby.
“That’ll send Dareth’s electricity bill sky high,” Nya commented as they all stood outside the apartment block, examining their handiwork.
“Won’t that mean Ronin will be hanging around more?” Lloyd asked. Nya shivered at the mention of Ronin’s name.
“Ugh, don’t remind me that creep exists,” she complained as they headed inside through the now very Christmas-ified lobby.
Dareth had gone all out in there also, with themed carpet, stuff on the walls and on the entry table, and even small dispensers of eggnog and hot chocolate.
“Why hot chocolate? In 40-degree* heat?” Jay asked as they passed the dispensers. [*A/N: 40 degrees Celsius , because I’m not American and we have hot Christmases here]
“It’s Dareth, what did you expect?” Lloyd asked, rhetorically as they got to the stairwell.