Lucky Rabbit

Hazel was in the kitchen. The large, battered, red-stained table that Pandy had very nearly sent into the book was piled high with things that had probably once been food, but weren’t anymore. The Dragon had found Nyssa’s stash of ancient sugar cubes, and a crumbled trail of them led to the wood stove, which was crammed full of objects that were technically flammable, but not really meant to be burned.

The flames were no longer contained to the oven, if they ever had been, and the adorable toddler-version of the Dragon was staring at them with the kind of fascination usually reserved for car wrecks and train derailments. Isidor ran forward, grabbing something that probably used to be a tablecloth and throwing it over the flames. He glanced at the sink, but of course there was no water. Well, there could be, but the amount would rapidly get out of hand, and Pandy couldn’t fix it because she didn’t have thumbs, and-

Isidor closed something above the stove, shoved the oven door into place with a booted foot, and the fire foomped out as it used up its oxygen. The room was filled with smoke, but Eleanor ran over and threw open the door leading to the back garden. Not that it was much of a garden at the moment, but the cold wind that swept through the room pulled out the smoke with remarkable efficiency.

That done, everyone turned to look at Hazel, who stood with one thumb in her mouth, Gus the duck clutched against her chest with the other hand. Out popped the thumb, and she lisped, “Me cook.”

<Not right now!> Pandy thought, and to her complete surprise the little Dragon focused on her, a scowl rapidly forming on her rosebud mouth.

“Cook, me!” Hazel insisted, pointing to the stove, which still dribbled smoke and looked distinctly blackened and possibly slightly melty around the edges. Well, it was made of solid iron, so if Pandy had to replace it, at least it would provide a good amount of metal for plumbing repairs.

Nyssa, of course, showed no sign that she even noticed the smoke and mess, floating over to crouch down in front of the Dragon. “I’ll teach you as soon as we have proper food. What should we make first?” She tilted her head, laying a finger along her cheek – well, partially in her cheek, but it was obvious what she meant to do. “Cookies, perhaps? That was always Pierce’s favorite.” She went slightly misty as she said this, her features briefly softening into something older and even more grandmotherly, rather than just middle-aged.

“Cookieth?” Hazel asked, laying a damp finger along her own cheek in a charming mimicry of the other elemental.

Isidor sighed. “I’ll get some flour, eggs, and sugar.”

“Don’t forget butter, dear,” Nyssa said, straightening. Was it Pandy’s imagination, or was she slightly shorter than she had been? When Pandy first saw her, she thought the elemental’s human form looked remarkably similar to Thaniel’s old cook, Marta, but now she was softer around the middle, her hair whiter, and deep wrinkles bracketed her mouth.

“Butter,” Isidor muttered, then went through everything he was supposed to get, adding them up on his fingers. “Prepared meals, water, flour, eggs, sugar, butter, blankets… Um, how are you going to bake these cookies?” He looked dubiously at the maybe-ruined stove.

“Cookies,” Hazel insisted, tugging on the hem of his shirt.

“Can I just buy cookies?” he asked, a bit desperate. “You can learn to make them later.”

A long pause followed as the Dragon weighed store-bought cookies Now, versus home-baked cookies Later. “Buy,” she finally said, before the air sucked in as she shifted to her reptilian form. Grabbing Gus in her claws, she flew up to Isidor’s shoulder, clearly prepared to go shopping with him.

Taking a chance, Pandy thought, <You can’t go,> as hard as she could.

Hazel twisted her long neck and glared down at her. <Want,> she said, with what was apparently complete confidence that that should be the final word on the matter.

How was one meant to deter a determined Dragon? Pandy stared at the innocent-seeming creature, while Isidor leaned his head as far as possible from the small but very sharp teeth. Only Nyssa took it in stride, smiling as she said, “We can play pretend. I’m sure Princess Eleanor would love to have a tea party with us.”

Eleanor opened her mouth, obviously not as thrilled as Nyssa assumed, but at Isidor’s desperate glance, she actually giggled and said, “Have you ever been to a royal tea party, Hazel? It’s very,” she hesitated, and Pandy guessed that the word she wanted to use was something like ‘boring’ or ‘stuffy’, but instead she said, “elegant.”

Nyssa clapped her hands, an action that created only the smallest of sounds, and said, “There’s most of a tea set still in the dining room. Why, I once served Queen Nora herself with that teapot. She didn’t care for overly sweet teas, you know. Her favorite was,” she paused, her whole body simply freezing in place as her eyes went entirely black, “Passiadera. She had a terrible time sleeping without it.”

Now Eleanor looked fully invested. “You knew Queen Nora? What was she like? There are a few paintings of her in the palace, and she looks terribly stern.”

The elemental waved this away. “That was just the way of it, then. She was very kind, and not at all-” She continued, but Pandy had tuned out the conversation because Hazel had vacated Isidor’s shoulder, allowing the boy to make a break for the open door. Pandy was actually interested in learning more about West Altheric’s first ruler, the woman who originally stopped Ascyra and her Demon horde, but something very strange was happening in the periphery of her vision, so instead Pandy hopped after Isidor, kicking the kitchen door mostly closed behind her.

Words flickered around her. Not the glitches she got when she used the gacha button, or the ones that happened when the System shifted a Light spell to Dark, but random words that appeared in equally random places in her vision. ‘Spatula’ flashed in her upper right periphery. ‘Kerfuffle’ appeared in the lower left. ‘Pickle’ flashed into being almost on top of it, and the letters ‘S’ ‘N’ ‘O’ ‘R’ and ‘F’ trickled down from the top.

 Link established through CustodialChannel.

⚠ Integrity variance detected.

Resolving… ⸮⸮

[NOTE: custodial signature misaligned]

Applying affinity layer error correction…

Δ mismatch corrected.

Unexpected state echo.

Suppressing non-critical warnings.

Output stabilized.

Output:

"Aglaea"

The last word swelled, expanding into every part of her vision, until the letters merged into darkness. In that darkness something that might have been a face took shape. A familiar face – Keros’s face.

<Ker- Kappa? What’s going on?> Pandy tried to hop forward, but the face didn’t grow any closer, and Pandy wasn’t actually certain her body had responded, either. She could still feel the cold, hard ground beneath her paws, but there was no immediacy to the sensation.

Keros shook his head, turning to present her with his profile as his mouth moved. Was he talking to someone else? Aglaea? If so, she was saying something he didn’t like, because his face twisted with frustration, and he turned back to Pandy. He looked fine, somewhere between his emaciated self and his body-builder self, but there was something that could reasonably be read as fear in his eyes. His lips shaped a word, moving with exaggerated slowness: AG-LIE-UH.

Pandy flopped to her side as the vision blipped out of existence, leaving her reeling as she attempted to reconcile the normalcy of the world around her with the last five seconds of her unlife. Dry, green-brown grass, check. Moss growing between rocks, check. Chunk of broken statuary gazing at her with sightless eyes… Yeah, okay, that wasn’t entirely normal, and Pandy was definitely going to have to do something about the yard soon. Admittedly, the high wall surrounding the property kept most of it in, but the used-to-be-topiary-but-now-just-twisted-shapes were more than a bit disturbing.

<Kappa?> she thought again, staring up at a darkening sky that felt like it was spinning above her. <Seriously, Kappa, where are you?> Still no words floated into her vision, snarky or otherwise. <System?> Experimentally, she called up her stats, wondering if what had just happened had affected anything.

Name: Pandy

Race: Rabbit? (Deceased)

Age: 24

LF: 4/5

Mana: 875/875

Stats▾

Skills▾

Spells▾

Boons▾

Corruption Points: 210

As she watched, her Life Force ticked over from four to five, but otherwise she couldn’t see anything she hadn’t expected. So she had one more point of health than she had, but why? Every time before she’d done something where she almost un-undeaded herself, but she didn’t think she’d come that close to disconnecting from the System this time. Had Keros somehow made that happen, and if so, how and why? <System, do you know what just happened?>

No command found.

Null response.

That wasn’t the System Pandy had reluctantly come to know. It didn’t follow up the words with any suggestions about how else she could use her skills, nor did it comment on her personal appearance. In fact, it hadn’t in a while, had it? When was the last time she’d gotten unsolicited advice from the voices in her head?

Desperate times called for desperate measures, so Pandy hopped over to a bush that might once have been a dinosaur, but was equally likely to just have some form of herbaceous mange. Drawing in a deep and utterly unnecessary breath, she thought, <Aglaea?>

In an instant, the space beside her went from ‘empty of all but foliage’ to ‘full of bounteous goddess’ and Pandy had somehow managed to forget that Aglaea filled up all possible space with her her-ness, possibly because Pandy had only ever chatted with her while hiding beneath a bed. Even the sleepy autumn trees seemed to turn toward the lush figure, who was wearing the same kind of toga-esque dress she’d had on the last time Pandy saw her, though with her more vertical placement, almost all of her was staying inside of it this time.

“Pandora?” Aglaea asked, and with her words a warm breeze brushed through Pandy’s fur, plucking at it and tugging away any blades of dried grass and dirt that had found their way into it when she fell over. Bending down, the goddess picked Pandy up, cuddling her on a firm yet pillowy soft shelf. “What’s going on? Have you seen…?”

She trailed off, looking around, and Pandy shook her head. As before, she found that she was able to speak, even though she was still in her bunny shape. “I can’t find him. I mean, not that I could ever find him, because he’s totally been missing this entire time, but now I extra can’t find him, and I don’t think he meant to be quite as lost as he is?”

She couldn’t help the rising note at the end that turned her statement into a question, but Aglaea didn’t even seem to notice. Lifting Pandy, she stared deep into her eyes, her soft red-gold brows drawing down over her nose, forming shallow wrinkles that absolutely didn’t belong on the goddess’s face.

“I don’t sense him either,” Aglaea muttered, then cleared her throat and said, “Not that I ever did. I mean, really, I’ve moved on anyway. Whenever Kero-Kero decides to pop out of wherever he’s hiding, he’s definitely going to regret abandoning me.” Her red lips formed a heavy pout.

“Moved on?” Pandy was almost certain the goddess was just pretending, but something about that phrase and the emphasis Aglaea had put on it sent shivers down her spine.

Aglaea’s lips curved, languid and full of the kind of secrets Pandy had only read about in books. “Of course, my adorable Pandy-wandy,” she said, chucking Pandy beneath the chin. “You didn’t expect me to just wait, did you? Why, Kero-Kero being in trouble may have been the best thing that ever happened to me.”

She giggled, leaning in until her breath tickled the hairs in Pandy’s ear. “I found a new boyfriend, who’s just the opposite of Kero in every way.” Pandy’s ears flattened against her back. Nope, not good. What was Aglaea up to?

“Who?” Pandy managed.

“Why, the same god who filed the suit against Kero, of course. I call him my Zery-wery.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, her chin jerked up, and her arms tightened around Pandy, squeezing her into the malleable flesh beneath her paws. It wasn’t at all a bad place to be squished, but when Pandy looked up, Aglaea’s face was pale.

With one more stiff smile, Aglaea settled Pandy back onto the ground, gently patting her back as she did so. Straightening, she tried for a casual shrug as she said, “Ta, darling. I doubt we’ll meet again. I mean, I’m a very busy goddess, and you have less than eight months to live.” She giggled once more, the sound full of sharp edges, not at all the joyous noise Pandy was used to her producing. Then she was gone, leaving only a last warm breeze that rapidly vanished in the deepening cold.

Eight months? Eight months before what? But Pandy had a bad feeling she knew. Her deadline – and Thaniel’s –  had just advanced by two years.

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