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One of the many problems that comes with living aboard a multi-species spaceship is this: sometimes you just don’t get it. Sure, celebrating the birth of some god’s son sounds like a fine deal, but why, in the name of all that is holy (and not), does one need a tree with a kid impaled on the tip?
Pyra doesn’t get it. Aspen doesn’t get it. Jade gets it only because he’s a god and he’s supposed to get everything. Gale is fast asleep and therefore too far from the waking world to get much of anything.
As for Ionia and Aeolia, well, they’re the ones the rest of the crew are trying, and failing, to get.
Because what sort of tree, ceremonial, jovial or funereal, could possibly be worth this?
The corridor they’re trapped in is endless, and not in the figurative way that promises salvation and hope. It’s endless in the way a Möbius strip is endless, chock-full of despair, plagiarism and, well, endlessness.
In fact, the entire building they’re in is Möbius strip-shaped. Ionia thought it was an aesthetic choice and marched in unsuspecting. It took her quite a while to realize she couldn’t march back out again.
And anyways, since when do bipedal, bloodthirsty porcupines wearing authentic Scottish kilts ever put beauty above practicality? If they did, then they wouldn’t be wearing authentic Scottish kilts in the first place.
Ionia whirls around and lets off a shower of blaster fire, a decision quickly shrieked at by Aeolia when the bolts start to ricochet. One of them shaves too close to the tip of Pyra’s ponytail, which, already smoldering with annoyance, promptly bursts into flames.
“Ionia!”
“‘M sorry, Py!”
But really, it was all Aeolia’s fault.
She was the one who proclaimed that the best of all Christmas trees existed on this minuscule planet called Tarnum, so of course Ionia trusted her (too much). She also claimed to know the planet’s inhabitants, but whatever knowledge she has on these spiky killing machines, it’s definitely not stopping them or even slowing them down.
One tiny porcupine breaks Aeolia’s defense and launches itself at Ionia’s head. Claws sink into blue hair, shrieks are heard, then the very bemused porcupine is sliding down the hallway on a rising water slide. That’s just cheating, it muses rather sadly as the slide takes it to the back of the cohort, pride pricked but otherwise intact.
And that was just the beginning of what’s quickly turning out to be a very gruesome end.
“I thought you knew them?” Ionia screeches as she pelts down the hallway, shoulder to shoulder with the bane of her existence.
“I do know them!” Aeolia yells back. “I said, one chop to the neck, you deaf bat!”
“Bats are blind, Aeolia, not deaf,” Aspen explains mildly over their comms. He and Jade are fleeing a little ways ahead of them. Or behind them, if you’re a step-half-behind person. “You see, echolocation—“
Whatever fascinating secrets Aspen is about to divulge on the topic of batty super-hearing is drowned out by a sudden roar. The entire floor trembles, then trembles again, and one enormous, prickly paw followed by another enormous, prickly paw thuds into sight.
“Wow,” Aspen breaths. His awe is palpable even over the comms. “That is one fine a—“
“Aspen!”
“Arrière.”
Ionia sighs loudly. “How is that any better?”
“Dunno.”
“Hey, did you see that?” Aeolia suddenly asks, her eyes transfixed on a spot between the mega-porcupine’s legs.
“What?” Ionia snaps.
Aeolia shakes her head. “I thought I saw a cat.”
“Was it—“
Aspen’s voice fizzles out when the giant porcupine, in a kilt which seems to have shrunk in the wash, lets out a roar that sounds four parts murderous, five parts ravenous and one part baleful, bordering on wronged.
My friends, did you know its attire was deformed by their cleansing apparatuses? Jade pushes the question into their minds, clinically curious.
“That explains a helluva lot,” Aeolia grumbles as she backs away slowly, every step an accurate attack on Pyra’s sandal-shod toes.
Pyra’s hair burns a little brighter, though she doesn’t incinerate Aeolia on the spot.
At least not yet.
“Kids, now would be a good time to run,” Pyra suggests rather sagely.
“Where to?” Ionia squeaks. “We’re stuck!”
Indeed they are. They are hemmed in on all sides by chittering critters armed with bodily spears. The only choice they are left with is whether to fight one gigantic porcupine or a couple thousand minuscule ones. Of course, they do have the third option of fighting both sides at the same time, but none of them are keen enough on that idea to consider it.
“Where to?” Pyra asks, a little incredulously. “Down, of course.”
“Down?” Ionia glances down and finds nothing there but solid floor. “How the hell…”
“Catch.” Pyra tosses her a gadget that can only be described as a stick.
“What—“
“Red button. Press it.”
Ionia presses it.
Now there’s a cauterized hole in her stomach that should probably have belonged to the floor.
With a yelp she deactivates the glow-stick and chucks it back to Pyra, who catches it deftly and reignites it.
“Wrong side up, Ionia,” Pyra says lightly. Her face shimmers behind the waves of energy the glow-stick emits. “Be careful next time.”
Clutching at her guts, Ionia mutters something along the lines of “there’s a next time?” as she takes her place beside Pyra. Aeolia joins them, admiring the stick with fascination in one eye and fanaticism in the other.
Ionia sighs. Some night she is going to wake up and find Aeolia throttling Pyra to get her hands on the stick. Girl just doesn’t know how to ask.
“Ready?” Pyra asks the two kids hanging from her elbows.
“No,” Ionia says, and is utterly ignored.
“Three, go!”
Pyra spins full circle, the red glow-stick slicing clean through the metal floor. Down they drop, two screams trailing after them, one terrified, the other ecstatic. Entire floors disintegrate, chunks of wall and ceiling and porcupine fly this way and that. Amidst it all, Pyra merely goes on spinning, as serene as a well-fed otter, before finally bringing them all to a crashing stop on an unlit floor, whose infrastructure shook with the force of their impact.
Ionia is rather surprised when the whole building doesn’t immediately collapse on their heads. Most things tend to do that to them.
“You’re supposed to count to three!” Ionia gasps, rubbing at her chest to soothe her poor, abused heart.
“I did,” Pyra replies, shrugging.
“From one to three.”
Another shrug.
Ionia doesn’t know why she still tries this hard.
“Where’s Aspen ‘n Jade?” Aeolia asks.
“H-here. We fell in after you.”
Two figures step into the halo cast by Pyra’s gently burning hair. Once visible, Aspen collapses to the floor, a little pale around the face but largely unharmed. The slab of marble Jade uses as a face is shot with feathering cracks, but the god himself seems unbothered by it. A wave of his hand flicks on a switch somewhere, bathing them all in a sterile white light.
They’re in a damp bunker sort of room, with doors that seem to belong to bank vaults shutting them in on two sides. The other two walls are blank slates of white steel that remain firm even as Jade presses against them, half expecting the material to yield. Nor do the two vault doors surrender under Aspen’s tugging. The only way out of this bind is still down.
Has anyone been harmed by the descent? Jade asks, casting an assessing look around his haphazard crewmates.
“No,” Aeolia snorts. “But Ionia did run herself through with a glowy thingy, so there’s that.”
Ionia glares at her, silent. All that screaming during the fall burned away what remained of her lungs.
“It’s not a glowy thingy, it’s a razor,” Pyra mutters. No one pays her much mind.
Aspen?
The medic groans, head in his hands. “I’m on it,” he says anyway. He stumbles to his feet and grabs Ionia by the wrist.
He frowns. The skin is too burnt for him to reconstruct. Damn, he thinks, the “glowy thingy” Aeolia mentioned must’ve known what it was doing.
“Guys, I can’t heal this here,” he says slowly. “I can stabilize it, but I’ll need my acid tanks to avoid overgrowth.”
“Fine, do your best then,” Ionia grouches, looking down at the clean hole through her midsection. It doesn’t hurt, not at all, but that doesn’t mean she appreciates the new look.
And to add insult to injury, she just knows she’ll be on the receiving end of many “hole-y” jokes for the next few weeks, then possibly until the end of her life.
She’s definitely not looking forward to that.
A strange disturbance is felt, my friends. I’m afraid mischief is afoot. Jade’s thoughts unsettle the silence.
“No kidding,” Aeolia mutters. She too can hear a strange sort of thrumming coming from above.
No, scratch that. It’s coming from all sides except for below.
“I have a very bad feeling about this,” Ionia says. She watches with no small consternation as Pyra draws her glow-stick and presses the red button.
It doesn’t budge.
Pyra mutters something and jabs the red button again. There’s a sudden flash of red light, then the mild-tempered lady is swearing so colorfully even Aeolia has to look away.
“I only have one operational tank, you know,” Aspen says, looking first at Pyra, then through her.
“It’s broken,” Pyra hisses, partly out of spite, partly because the newly opened hole in her chest is leaking air. “Now we’re sitting ducks.”
“Do porcupines eat duck?” Ionia asks aloud, suddenly pensive.
Aeolia torpedoes a porcupine quill at her head.
“I’m quite sure these do,” Aspen replies, a little concerned. “That glowing thing, it’s our only hope.”
“It’s a razor. But do any of you have other weapons?” Pyra asks, borderline desperate.
“No,” Aeolia says.
“Nope,” Ionia says.
No, Jade thinks.
“I’m a doctor, Py, not a weapons officer,” Aspen says.
“Damn,” says Pyra.
“Look, it’s just malfunctioning, not broken,” Aspen insists, wresting the deactivated stick from Pyra’s hands. “You turn it sideways and…”
A flash of light, then the satisfying scent of salted potatoes permeates the air.
“What is this, some sort of holy congregation?” Aeolia snorts, looking from one hollow friend to the next.
“Ha ha ha, why don’t you give it a try?” Ionia deadpans.
“No thanks.”
“Coward.”
“Try me.”
“Hypocrite.”
“Do you even know what that means?”
“Girls!” Aspen exclaims as if appalled. “We’re about to get barbecued by porcupines!”
Indeed the slight disturbance from earlier is now a full-blown, floor-shaking pounding. Ionia jerks away from her quarrel with a dismal frown and blinks, as if finally escaping a bad dream only for it to segue into another one. She shoots a glare at Aeolia to remind her that yes, this is all her fault, before retrieving the stick from where Aspen had dropped it.
“So this glow-stick—“
(“It’s a lightrazor!”
“But, Py, I’m pretty sure that’s not—“
“Copyright exists for a reason, Ionia.”
“Damn.”)
“—razor thing, it can now ignite at all angles, right?”
Pyra nods grimly.
“Then there’s always a chance, no matter how slight, that it will ignite in the angle we want, right?”
“Zero in three chance. Nice. I like our odds.”
“Shut up, Aeolia.”
Aeolia throws a chunk of enhanced steel at Ionia and sadly misses.
“As I was saying,” Ionia prates on, “maybe, if we give it enough tries, we’ll get it to work!”
A wondrous theory, Jade cuts in, this hypothetical energy beam may be considered to be simultaneously both correctly and incorrectly activated while it is unobserved, as a result of its fate being linked to a random subatomic event that may or may not occur.
“That’s a lot of thoughts,” Ionia mutters. She hasn’t understood a single word.
Aeolia scoffs. “The beam isn’t hypothetical, Jade. It just carved three of our shipmates into Jack-o-lanterns, and now we need it to carve this floor too,”
Very well. May I attempt it?
“‘Course. Can’t get any worse, can it?”
Her tone suggested things were about to get very, very worse. The sound of stomping paws by now is deafening.
Jade gathers them close and aims the razor at the ground. Aspen murmurs a soft prayer to the only god he knows (i.e. Jade) and Aeolia mutters something about his trust being misplaced.
All of a sudden there’s a clang of flesh against metal, quickly succeeded by another. One of the two doors now bears a couple of porcupine paw prints. It might’ve been a rather cute addition to the somber bunker if not for the following handful of quills the shoot through the door and land on Pyra’s feet.
Ionia yelps when the simmering fire on Pyra’s head rears its head and roars, too close to her face for comfort.
Another clang, then a screech not unlike that of a trampled cat is heard. One of the walls caves in, revealing the snarling snouts of hoard after hoard of irritated porcupines.
Along with a streak of white.
“I saw that, did you see that?” Aeolia blurts out, but the white flash is already gone.
“No,” her crewmates chorus.
“Now would be nice!” Ionia shrieks when one minute critter makes a lunge for her.
Jade inclines his head, then revolves on the spot. Strangely enough, the razor ignites and stays activated this time, and down they plunge again.
The fall this time is quiet, or, well, as quiet as a fall can be when three of the people involved are wheezing air the wrong way around. Jade deflects the occasional block of errant concrete and sends it hurtling away from them. The hole through which they dropped is now a pinprick of white above their heads, but still Jade does not stop.
“Jade?” Ionia pipes up after a long while. “Where are we going?”
We shall know it when we arrive. Life always finds a way.
“That is so helpful,” Ionia mutters.
Thank you.
Sarcasm, as always, has failed to find a kindred soul in Jade, so Ionia turns to Pyra instead.
“Seriously though, where did you get that thing?” Ionia asks, jabbing a finger at the razor circling them.
“I got it from Terra, actually. Guy named Erwin sold it to me.”
“Nice dude?”
“Quite.”
The conversation peters out into a new, stilted silence.
At length they crash to a stop. The razor embeds itself in what seems to be bedrock and refuses to go further. By its dim glow Aeolia discovers the lack of lighting in the cave they’re in, a finding quickly verified by Jade’s sprawling senses.
“And I said, let there be light,” Aeolia declares suddenly. A cold sensation trickles down Pyra’s spine, but it’s not enough to warn her.
Aeolia stamps on her foot.
Pyra’s hair flares like never before. The vines crawling across the cavern’s roof catch fire, banishing darkness with the rage of light.
Only, the darkness wasn’t the only thing banished.
“Has anyone seen Aeolia?” Ionia asks all of a sudden.
“Yeah,” Aspen groans, pointing at a small heap of ash on the ragged floor. “There she is. She’s dead.”
Ionia pats Aspen’s shoulder sympathetically as the latter bends down to collect Aeolia’s remains into a small ziplock. “‘M sorry, Aspen. I know you hate working on holidays.”
“No kidding,” Aspen pouts. He pockets dust-ified Aeolia and straightens up. “Now, where are we?”
An ancient cavern, my friend. It throbs with much life withheld. I sense the future, ours and theirs, hewn into these very rocks.
“He means there might be a way out,” Aspen explains. “C’mon, let’s move.”
They move out, Pyra in the lead, Jade bringing up the rear. Hands tracing the cave walls so as to not lose their way, they continue forth in this manner for a while before Pyra realizes they aren’t going anywhere.
“I’ve tripped on that ridge for the fifth time,” Pyra exclaims, kicking said ridge and stubbing her toe. “This cave is still a loop. We aren’t—“
“Very astute, mes amis!” A voice interrupts all of a sudden. The crew whips around and finds themselves staring at the single most stereotypical Frenchman they’ve ever seen.
Not that any of them, except for Ionia, Aeolia and Jade, know what or where France is in the first place.
The jovial fellow in a striped Marinière and a beret grins at them, mustache jiggling. He jogs across the cave, flats slapping loudly against the rocks, then he tilts his ridiculous hat and points at Pyra.
With a baguette.
“Eh ben, now that you’re here, no point in wasting time. You, mes amis, are about to face the most terrifying ennemi you have ever seen! Meet Pierre Le Pain, greatest of all swordsmen!”
“Can we feed him to the porcupines?” Ionia asks. “I think they eat bread.”
“Bread, yes,” Aspen replies. “But not a hundred kilos of total idiocy. Risk of infection, you know.”
“Ah.”
Oblivious to the exchange, Pierre rattles on. “Et vous, vous êtes, ben, honoré to have the chance to fight me! I, five time champion of Les Jeux des Dieux! I, a mortal, surpassing the immortal!”
This is rather insulting.
“I know, Jade. Hey, Aspen, Pyra, can I commit violence?”
“Sure.”
“Go get him.”
“‘Kay.”
Pierre’s speech is still ongoing, his baguette waving about like a conductor’s baton. “Now stand and fight! And finish this game quick, for I shall emerge victorious! Célérité! Efficacité! Stand and f—“
Bang.
Ionia watches the little guy freeze, then tumble backwards and disappear into the darkness.
“Well,” she says. “That was weird.”
“And quick, thank the space,” Pyra grumbles, clutching at her head as if to stave off a headache. “That’s a nice gun. Aeolia gave it to you?”
“Nah. I bought it off a smuggler. Guy had a weird name. Oak or Ox or something, can’t remember. Occam, perhaps. He said this gun ‘keeps things simple’.”
Pyra shrugs. “Fine.”
They march on for a while in silence, Ionia contemplating happily the ease with which her gun managed to shave off an unwanted encounter. Her hand touches its barrel, and she smiles.
My friends, I believe I have found a draft.
“Great! Where?”
Jade points at a crevice in the floor. Ionia steps closer and sure enough, there’s a hairline crack in the rock with cool air trickling from it.
She frowns. “Aren’t we supposed to be underground?”
“Maybe it’s just another string of caves,” Pyra suggests.
Aspen nods sagely. “Quite possible.”
“‘Kay, but we do have to go somewhere,” Ionia says, keeping an eye on the crack as if it might come to life and swallow them.
“There’s reason enough in that. Jade, do the honors.” Pyra hands him the razor.
Pleased, my lady.
A familiar flash of red light illuminates their faces, and then they’re falling again.
Not into new stretches of darkness, no, but into free, blue, breathable sky.
“What.”
“The.”
“Kriff.”
“You know, Aspen, swearing in Star Wars doesn’t make things PG.”
“You’re ruining the mood, I.”
So they fell, one after the other, and soon the stretch of blackness from which they came from is replaced by pale blue. The ground, if it even exists, hasn’t materialized yet. The initial panic of discovering themselves in midair dissipates quickly enough, and once their internal organs catch up with the rest of their hurried bodies, the sensation of falling becomes quite breezy and enjoyable, in fact.
“Maybe we can learn how to fly!” Ionia suggests a couple of minutes into their free fall. “I read a guide book once, it sounded really easy.”
“Yeah? What’d it say?” Aspen asks, genuinely intrigued.
“When you’re this close to hitting the ground,” Ionia says, pinching two fingers together, “forget about falling.”
“That’s… it?”
“Yeah.”
Aspen shudders. “Forget it,” he mutters. “I’ve only got one tank.”
After that, they seem to fall a little faster, though Ionia wouldn’t know, as she falls asleep mere minutes later.
A spark of molten lava drags her back to the waking world brutally. She blinks, disoriented by the light in her eyes. It takes her a while to realize she’s stopped falling and is now lying on what seems to be a nondescript stretch of whiteness.
There’s a speck of red staining the whiteness. The longer she stares, the more specks appear. When she finally regains enough sense to look up instead of down, she sees Pyra’s hair, which by now has become a blazing canopy of crimson-gold. She shuffles around a bit until she manages to see something that isn’t burning.
And immediately regrets it when one gigantic zebra-coded quill plunges into the whiteness two fingernails away from her left ear.
With an alarmed shriek she leaps to her feet, singeing a few hairs along the way. The whiteness shrinks, revealing itself to be the roof of the building they spent their last few hours fleeing for their lives in. Casting an eye around, Ionia sees Aspen, still on the ground but stirring already. Jade, hands out, manipulating what looks to be a baseball bat-shaped conglomerate of all chemical elements ever to have existed. Pyra has spread out her hair to act as a shield, though Ionia suspects the contorted expression of pure fury adorning her face is by far the more useful deterrent.
To Ionia’s great surprise, Aeolia is also there. A few spidery cracks still line her skin, but she looks solid enough and her face is set. Two blasters roar in her hands, red bolts delving into the crowd of porcupines. She’s grinning too, but it’s not a good grin. It’s a grin that belts out Highway to Hell a semitone off while promising everyone in a five-kilometer radius that yes, we’re all taking a little field down said highway.
Ionia is more than a little concerned. For herself.
She gathers her strength and reaches out. There’s a pond some distance away, but it’s a bit too far to be useful. She can, of course, extract the water out of the porcupines’ blood, but there’s always the chance that these crazies don’t run on blood. Draining herself over nothing doesn’t seem like a viable course of action, considering the circumstances.
Whatever, she thinks. She can always do this the Aeolia way.
Now there are four blasters dousing the roof with open fire, yet still the porcupines carry on their attack, as relentless as middle-schoolers clamoring for lunch. Jade’s bat sweeps aside sturdy pyramid of spikes, only for another one to take its place.
“We’re fighting a losing battle!” Ionia screeches as one porcupine sails past her, blows her a kiss then stabs her in the ribs. The physical wound is easily healed by Aspen’s touch, but the one on her ego stings like hell.
“Wow, sharp observe,” Aeolia snorts. “We’re all gonna die.”
Have faith, my friends.
“Easy for you to say. You’re a damn god.”
“Faith incarnate.”
Jade hates it when Aeolia and Ionia band together against him. Aspen would be proud to see how human he’s become, not that those two strutting ladies would ever believe him.
They’re slowly but surely herded together, corralled into the center of the roof. The porcupines close in, guns and bats and garlands and is that a Yule log raised and ready to blow.
They never get the chance.
For at that very moment, it starts raining cats and… more cats.
No, literally.
Cats of all kinds, white, black, purple, pink, fall from the sky in furry droves of destruction. Claws sink into armored backs, fangs into bucking necks, heedless and reckless as they turn the planet into a full-blown war zone. A particularly fierce one takes on three porcupines at the same time and emerges victorious, white fur stained red, vampiric teeth glinting.
Aeolia greets it like a mother welcoming home her wayward child.
Ionia’s too overwhelmed to find that weird anymore.
Aided by the cats, they push back the porcupines. Each blow, each shout of exertion gains them ground. The roof is almost fully theirs, and already cats are rappelling down the sides of the building, hissing venomous revenge as they chase down the fleeing porcupines.
Then the earth thuds. One. Twice. As if the planet has grown a vigorous heart. The horizon darkens, the sun quivers, and the air itself seems to thicken as a pungent smell of decaying salmon fills it to the rim.
Out of the blue distance steps a massive…
Platypus.
It takes one look at the carnage.
Shrugs.
Turns around.
And disappears once more.
“That was anticlimactic,” Ionia whispers.
“Maybe it’s too tired to fight,” Pyra suggests.
“Or maybe it just doesn’t care,” Aspen adds.
My humble opinion is whoever bade it appear has grown too tired to assume command of it.
“Jade,” Aspen says patiently. “Have some respect for her, will you? She’s not you, she needs her coffee breaks.”
She needs to make haste and complete her homework as well.
“I’ll tell her that.”
“Hey Jade!” Ionia calls, gesturing at the blood-soaked cat sat regally before her. “Translator, please?”
Of course, my lady.
This is truly degrading, Jade thinks. The only one who hears him is Aspen, and he earns himself an amused but approving glance.
“And cut back on the adjectives,” Aeolia adds. “That’s just bad writing.
I shall tell her so.
“Good, now come on.”
Idrilda—
“Who?”
The white cat.
“Oh.”
As she was saying, she thanks you for your assistance in liberating her homeland. She wishes to gift you the First Sapling, as a gesture of eternal gratitude and devotion.
“That’s, uh, a bit—“
She does, however, have one small request.
“Ask away.”
Though Tarnum is the land she hails from, she, at heart, is a child of the stars. Now that she has fulfilled her promise to her ancestors, she wishes to be returned to the home she once had and now misses dearly.
“We can go anywhere, you know. Where do you wanna go?”
Where a youth by the name of Pavel Chekov resides.
“Sure. Coordinates?”
Somewhere in the Mutara Nebula.
“I know where that is,” Pyra cuts in as Ionia opens her mouth, no doubt to ask another stupid question. “We can do Christmas along the way. Let’s go.”
Hands laden with a sprightly pine, baubles and no small amount of porcupine quills, the Haven’s crew make their way back to their humming ship. The cats wave goodbye with flicks of their tails, mewls and purrs rising and falling in perfect harmony with the growls of the ship’s engines. Ionia waves back, as does Aspen. Gale descends from the bridge to greet them, having delegated the ship to Otto the autopilot. Pyra smiles and Aeolia shrugs, though Ionia can see the threat of a grin tugging at the latter’s lips.
A good grin this time. The sort that sings Stairway to Heaven while promising everyone in a five-kilometer radius that yes, we’ll all be heading up said stairway someday, but not today. Unless you anger the wrong person, that is.
Artificial night falls on the Haven now bound for a distant nebula. White lights mellow to a buttery yellow and a saintly scent fills the ship, barging rather rudely into Ionia’s hungry nose. She follows its beckoning down to the kitchens, where she almost trips over Idrilda, who is manning, or rather, catting the oven.
“What’re we having tonight?” Ionia asks.
Pyra, her hands wrapped around a cookie mould, smiles over her shoulder at the bright-eyed child. “Just the usual,” she says. “Now go find Aspen and patch yourself up.”
“Just the usual” turns out to be the single most ridiculous understatement Ionia has ever heard. When Pyra pokes her head on bridge and summons the Aeolia, Ionia and Gale to dinner, Ionia follows her expecting three replicated dishes and century-old bread. Instead she finds the pitiful dining table groaning beneath the weight of food that could probably feed a small town. There’s chicken, beef stew, extraterrestrial delicacies that glow with violet luminescence, and even a braised rat for Idrilda’s refined tastes.
“Tuck in, kids big and small,” Pyra says as the entire crew takes their seats around the table. In a corner of the room stands their hard-earned Christmas tree, pruned by Aspen himself, decked out in splendid lights and tinsels. Bound to the top of a tree is the prone figure of a de-quilled porcupine, dressed in a tutu and a tiny crown.
(Aeolia insists that the porcupine is dead, but Ionia doesn’t really believe her.)
Laughter comes easily tonight. Even Jade’s marble slab of a face softens as he absorbs his food by means of thought. Gale is awake enough to listen to Pyra ramble about their mishaps on Tarnum. Ionia asks Idrilda for tales of her adventures and is gladly indulged. Jade translates for her, and Aeolia listens in from time to time, offering a raised eyebrow whenever Idrilda’s story veers from the eerie to the downright ridiculous.
“Your ship’s first officer climbed a tree?” Aeolia asks at a lull in the tale.
I think it was the fault of some spores, but I wouldn’t know. The doctor doesn’t trust me, I think. He doesn’t tell me much and waves hypos in my face when I wander too close.
“His loss,” Ionia grins, slapping Idrilda on the back a bit too hard. The cat faceplants into her bowl of stew.
Though the number of dishes is great, the appetite of the famished crew is far greater. Barely a ship hour has passed before they’re staring down at polished dishes, all perfectly satiated yet still craving just a bit more, to “fill in the crannies”, as Ionia likes to say.
“Do we have—“
“Yes,” says Pyra. “Up you go to the bridge. I’ll be right there.”
A little curious at what Pyra could possibly be planning, Ionia drags the rest of the crew up to the bridge. They don’t have to wait for long, though. The lights go out all of a sudden, but before Ionia gets to pull the red alarm, a burst of color erupts beyond the windows lining their bridge.
It seems, my friends, that Lady Pyra has choreographed an impromptu pyrotechnic show.
The lady herself comes up to join them, the tips of her hair burning slightly as she concentrates on directing the cannons and the charges within. Another splash of color lights up the crew’s eager faces and Ionia laughs, grabbing Aeolia by the collar happily. Aeolia sniffs, but she does not pull away.
Pyra squeezes her baby brother, who’s eyelids are already in close quarters combat against each other, and rocks him until he falls asleep. Gale’s a nice weight in her arms, sturdy and well-fed. She watches the fireworks explode quietly, her chin resting on his pale green hair.
Aspen settles down in a hammock of his own making, vines twined together with the occasional flower peeking out here and there. Idridla curls up on his chest, purring contentedly. Beside this odd pair stands Jade, one hand resting against the tangled vines, the other tugging aimlessly at his cascade of golden hair.
“This is the best Christmas ever,” Ionia whispers.
“There’s one thing we haven’t done, though,” Aeolia replies, pensive.
“What?”
“The song, idiot.”
“They don’t even know the words!”
“They can learn.”
“You teach them.”
Aeolia turns to Jade.
Thought planting is considered to be impolite, Jade admonishes stiffly.
“Just this once!” Ionia pleads.
“I don’t mind,” Pyra says.
“Neither do I,” Aspen adds.
Jade sighs in his thoughts. If you insist.
Pyra and Aspen’s eyes widen fractionally as the melody and lyrics of a new song seeps into their minds.
“Wow, uh, nice song,” Aspen says with a cough.
Ionia’s eyes narrow. “You don’t approve, do you?”
Aspen shrugs.
“Whatever,” Ionia says. “Now, on the count of three—“
“Three!”
“Pyra!”
“We wish you a—“
Merry Christmas.
“We wish you a Merry Christmas!”
“We wish you a Merry—“
“Aspen you’re off-key, dammit—“
“—Christmas!”
“And a Happy New Year!”
…
…
…
“When’s New Year?”
“Shut up, Asp. You ruined a perfect ending.”