Lucky Rabbit

Pandy scrambled backwards, tearing through cobwebs like damp tissue paper. Isidor froze, looking around for whatever had frightened her. Seeing nothing but dusty cobwebs, he frowned, then tapped the globe on his shoulder, which burst into light. Sudden illumination revealed a cobblestone street, as well as buildings to either side of them, some with glass still remaining in the windows.

“What’s wrong?” Isidor hissed, advancing further. He tucked the spider’s remains back into the front of his shirt, and leaned down to slide his knife from its sheath on his leg. A very faint glow was barely visible between the buttons of his shirt, but in the darkness behind them, even that tiny glimmer should have been like a beacon to Pandy’s sensitive eyes. That implied the radiance was new.

Pandy thought, and the moment she had her voice and fingers back, she pointed and said. “What is that?”

The boy’s frown deepened, and he carefully separated a few buttons to reveal what remained of the spider’s glittering eyes. “I didn’t have anywhere else to put it,” he admitted, then scowled at her. “You’re frightened of a dead spider?”

Pandy wanted to say yes. She didn’t squash spiders. In fact, she tried not to encroach on their space at all. If a spider moved in, Pandy moved out. She’d spent a month sleeping in her bathtub after finding a particularly hairy arachnid glaring at her from the ceiling above her bed. Eventually, she managed to muster enough courage to move the bed to the other side of the room, but only after the spider made its way onto a spindly spider plant – the irony of which had not escaped her.

Instead, she cleared her throat and said, “Why is it glowing?”

Isidor’s brows shot up, and he curled forward, peering into the gap in his shirt. At last, he turned back to Pandy, brows beetled. “It’s not?”

“It is,” Pandy insisted, only to go utterly still as other glowing patches began to appear all around them. They rose up from the webs, out of the windows of the long-abandoned buildings, dropped down from roots that had thrust through the rock entombing this forgotten space. Only when she saw Isidor’s complete lack of any reaction did she realize he couldn’t see them.

Pandy’s voice was locked in her throat, her eyes wide as one of the shimmering, luminescent things swooped in toward Isidor’s light, then pulled away as if burned. A few others swirled around the first, chivvying it backwards as it sank, and the whole mass of them gathered together. What before had seemed almost curious, questioning, became vaguely threatening instead.

“Isidor, what’s your light made of?”Pandy managed, mesmerized in the same way she might have been by a cobra gathering itself to strike.

He shrugged. “I don’t know what’s in them. Nature and Earth elementalists make them, and Light elementalists enchant them. They’re-”

“Put it out,” she said, moving between the boy and the cloud of angry elementals. Because she was quite certain that was what she was looking at. She thought she could probably even put a name to them. They had to be Duskins – Dark elementals who lurked in shadows and corners. The Gacha Love wiki said that they took lost and abandoned things, but could sometimes be convinced to give them back in exchange for something they liked more. Notes from the Far Side of Dawn offered a little more detail, however, saying that they were actually produced by dark and forgotten places. Places exactly like this one.

“What? Why?” Isidor looked rebellious, but he tapped the glass ball, making his light go out. The cloud of Duskins immediately began to separate, though it didn’t entirely dissolve.

“There are elementals here,” Pandy explained quietly, reaching out to touch his arm. When he jerked back, she realized that the darkness surrounding them was probably impenetrable without the soft luminescence of the Duskins, and he had no idea what had touched him.

With a sense of resignation, she thought, and Isidor’s eyes locked onto her as a pale light suffused her body. She’d never done this as a human, so she was fascinated to realize that it looked like she was illuminated from within, rather than surrounded by some external light.

Radiant Presence successful.

Radiant Presence is now level three.

So pretty!

You should use this one all the time.

May I suggest Wings of Glory to go with it?

No, you may not, Pandy thought, but hopefully not loud enough for the System to hear her. It was actually playing nice right now, and she didn’t want to send it into another fit of the sulks. Pointing to herself, Pandy said, “I can see what looks like a whole bunch of creatures glowing like this, floating around. They didn’t seem to like your light, which makes sense if it’s made by a Light elemental, since I’m pretty sure I’m seeing Dark elementals.”

Beneath the silvery glow of the Duskins’ light, Isidor’s brown skin looked gray, and at these words, the sickly tone grew distinctly paler. The boy began backing up, stopping only when he bumped into the massive stones blocking the entrance to the lost street.

“We have to get out of here,” he whispered, raising his knife in one hand, and Tempest in the other. The tortoise’s eyes sparked, but otherwise she seemed unconcerned. Could she see the little elementals, or was Pandy the only one?

Pandy started to follow him, but something like an ‘arm’ of elementals stretched out, reaching for Isidor’s chest. The first one touched the fabric of his shirt, but jerked away again, almost like they had when touching his light. Rather than retreat, however, this time they all swarmed forward together. Pandy shifted to get between them again, but she no longer had that sense of danger she’d had before. Now, she felt… sorrow? Concern?

“Give them the spider,” she told Isidor. Her voice was calm and certain, two things Pandy rarely was, but somehow she knew this was right. This was what needed to be done.

Isidor wasn’t having it, though. He brought his knife-hand in close to his chest, covering the gross lump she couldn’t unsee now that she knew it was arachnid-related. How could he stand to have that thing touching his skin? “No,” he said, curling protectively around the thing. “Blackwood needs it. You said yourself that it’s the one that bit him. They can use it to find a cure-”

“I think,” Pandy said slowly, watching the agitated swirling of the Duskins, “that I can tell them what’s going on. Or at least I can give the right people enough information to figure it out. But please, Isidor, you have to give it to them.”

Isidor stared at Pandy’s glowing form, and his fingers flexed around the knife. “He told me to trust you,” he finally said, and Pandy felt her cheeks burn as she wondered who, exactly, had told him that. The dragon? Or the enigma that was Augustus Blackwood?

This time, when Pandy held out her hand, Isidor slid his knife into its sheath, his turtle into a pocket, and took out the spider. He had to dig around inside his shirt for another leg, which had fallen off sometime between now and whenever he placed it in there, presumably back in the basement of the Rabbit’s Den. At last, however, he placed the sad remains of the spider in Pandy’s hands, and somehow she didn’t drop it.

Instead, she turned to the Duskin and held the glowing spider up, offering it to them. The light it produced was disturbingly similar to the soft glow that came from Pandy; clearly cast by something inside the spider, not its outer shell. That light was small, faint and fluttering compared to the luminous shine created by the others.

The Duskin descended on her hand in a mob, but Pandy felt nothing other than a faint, pleasant coolness until the slight weight of the corpse lifted away from her skin. Little hairs on its abdomen and remaining legs had been prickling her, but that, too, vanished, and the whole swarm of elementals swirled away from her.

Soft sounds reached her ears, and the webs surrounding her feet shivered as something began to patter against them, like small pieces of hail striking an awning. Each individual Duskin only produced a little light, but all together the glow was enough to obscure what they were doing, so it wasn’t until a leg bounced over to her that she realized they were tearing the body apart. Shredding it into pieces so small that they were like pebbles, or perhaps like the little pieces of glass left when a ‘shatterproof’ window broke.

“What’s going on?” Isidor asked, his voice cracking a bit on the ‘ing’. When she turned to him, she could see that his eyes were huge, and both Tempest and the knife were back in his hands. Even the tortoise looked slightly disturbed, with her beak gaping as she stared directly at the cloud of Duskin.

“I’m not sure,” Pandy told him. “But it’s good. I think.”

The gentle patter of spider-bits ended, and the cloud coalesced into a solid mass, denser and brighter than ever before. Then they burst apart again, leaving a single Duskin behind as the others spun away from it, some seeming to drift away as if they were done with it all now that the excitement was over, while others hung nearby, circling the solitary Duskin like many moons around a single planet. A sense of peace filled Pandy, and she took a deep, involuntary breath, just as she would have if she’d stepped outside right after a rainstorm.

The single Duskin wobbled forward, and Pandy raised her hand, allowing it to land on her finger, like a phosphorescent bird. It was dimmer than the others, and almost instinctively, Pandy thought, She felt a wash of something leaving her, and the Duskin brightened noticeably. Behind her, Isidor gasped, but Pandy didn’t look around.

Minor Heal failed.

It doesn’t exactly have a body to heal, you know.

Not since you killed it, anyway.

It did take thirty-six Corruption Points, though, so there’s that.

You have gained Dark Affinity: 1.

Remembering what Keros had said about how Affinity increased her ability to control the elements, Pandy couldn’t help but wonder if that last was a good thing. Yes, she’d been using Innate Magic to do Dark things, and Dark magic wasn’t innately evil – at least according to the primer she’d read and the story of Prince Emerson and his friend – but she was supposed to be the Demon Queen. What if raising her affinity somehow pushed her toward fulfilling that role?

It was done now, though, and the Duskin that had been inside the spider rose from her hand as some of the ones she’d thought had wandered off now swarmed back. They swirled around Pandy’s outstretched hand, and she squeaked as she felt something heavy and fuzzy land in her palm. Had they found her a replacement spider? That’s what Duskin did, wasn’t it? She’d given them something they wanted, so they’d given her something they didn’t want any more.

But when she pulled her hand back, she found that it held a pouch made of some fuzzy cloth, a bit like wool, except even more abrasive. “Thank you,” she told them, more out of habit than any belief that they would understand, but they swirled happily before vanishing back to where they’d come from. Only one remained, circling almost uncertainly before finally bobbing up and down, then flying off through a cracked window, into the dark building beyond.

“What just happened?” Isidor asked, his voice hushed. Either Pandy’s light was fading, or the absence of the Duskin had allowed the shadows to deepen, but it was hard to make out his expression as he said, “I thought… Did I see…?”

Pandy could have smacked herself. Yes, she’d told him they were elementals, but if he’d only seen the one – and she was almost certain he had seen it, for a moment, at least – then it would have looked like an undefined ball of ethereal light. In other words, “A ghost?” he finally choked out.