A Beautiful Festival to You, And a Happy Anniversary

Summary: Carnival Gift seeks out entertaining stories during the night of Nevriset B’Xhadari. The stars listen with rapt attention.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Carnival Gift can feel it, every time a major holiday comes upon the world down below the sky. It happens gradually, at first presenting as the smell of a brewing storm in the air, then as a choir's song echoing through a vast cavern, and as it draws closer, the anticipation buzzes deep within Gift, making star’s bones vibrate with energy.

The Skyfire Festival in particular announces its arrival with the shine of blue sapphires and turqoise skyfire stones, with the whoosh and sway of dancers practicing for the Midnight Ensemble, and with a chorus of voices growing louder as the evening grows closer – voices that tell stories.

And Gift, more than anything, loves to listen in. “I will return with dawn!” star promises to star’s dear constellation, and then star hops and skips downwards, ears perked for individual voices in the chorus.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

One of star’s stops is by the sea.

Gift follows an excited, rambling voice into an apartment in Torini, and finds a group of young folks gathered around a projector and watching a short Xero with a pink bow and cat-eared headphones vehemently gesture to a series of characters projected on a screen twice her size.

Intrigued, Gift soundlessly hops through the window and sits in the small crowd, unnoticed.

This is a somewhat modern twist on the tradition of telling stories that the younger generations call a “presentation night”. It doesn’t necessarily have to only happen during the Festival, but it’s a great way to celebrate the holidays as a culture without any surviving ancient stories of their own, and Gift finds it rather cute, getting to share any topic they’re passionate about like this. The Xero currently speaking is talking about a game, one that, according to her, has wayyy more lore than people give it credit for. “So you can get around the question of ‘canon’ by simply saying that it’s a multiverse! Anything can happen and these characters can get pulled in from anywhere, and that’s how they can justify having them all in one place! But the thing is, right, with the TADC characters that got added recently, that gets a little messy, because in their original universe, those guys are already trapped in a digital simulation, so is this like, a game too, for them?? Because everybody else is either fighting for or against the destruction of a very real multiverse, right?? Spider-Man isn’t here for fun! This is real to Spider-Man!!”

Huh. Gift doesn’t know that one. “Who’s Spider-Man?” star whispers to the Xero next to star.

“Easy, it’s a man with spider powers,” xe answers in a hushed voice. “He swings around and fights bad guys and sometimes travels across different dimensions, it’s a whole thing. Weren’t you there for our last movie night?”

Star smiles apologetically. “I must’ve missed it.”

“You’ve got to come to the next one, then! When are you free?”

Gift hesitates. "Ah... around the Twilight Carnival?”

“Woof, that busy?”

“No, just.. staying at home a lot.”

The other Xero nods in understanding. “Well, next time you’re free, come hang out. Angel and I would love to have you.”

“That’s very kind.”

Neither the passionate presenter nor her partner covered in stars remember Carnival Gift once star leaves, hopping out from the same window star came in through. But the gesture is very nice. Perhaps Gift will take them up on the offer, anyways, and introduce starself next time.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Another one of star’s stops is not technically on the land of Aluriza at all, but instead high above, closer to Gift’s home.

Cackling and hollering turns into a strange rattling noise inside a spaceship, it mixes with the ever present hum of the machinery and engines that keep it running, and it contrasts beautifully with the silence outside of it. When Carnival Gift hops inside the ship’s communal space, it’s like surfacing from a great lake and being hit with the noise of a waterfall.

It is the voice of one creature in particular that draws Gift’s attention, and everybody else’s for that matter: a red and brown Xero with purple horns stands on a table, turning this way and that to face the crowd all around as he narrates. “Next thing I know, there’s two guards on my tail, so I obviously haul it outta there, on all fours, memory chip in my teeth, hoping I can get some distance in, when BOOM! Another ship crashes into the one I’m robbing at the moment, and I only JUST make it behind an airlocked door. The two guys, though? Vacuum pulls them right out of the hole from the crash and out into space. First time I got to see it happen for myself and let me tell you, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy!” He pauses, and then smirks. “Well, maybe just a couple of enemies.”

The crowd around him laughs again, some of them raising their drinks as a sign of agreement. “Tell ‘em, Ryker!” someone shouts, and this clearly encourages the Xero to go on.

“But you know what the scariest thing was?? I get out, I’m waiting for one of Jupiter’s guys to pick me up, when all of a sudden, a dozen or so army space jets pop out of hyperspace, guess they got alerted to the crash, and I get so freaked out I straight up swallow the memory chip. Yeah, the extremely expensive one that I just spent two weeks tracking down and stealing? Gone. Eaten. And I have to explain myself to the army of the Pan Galactic Alliance, and I have to go, ‘no, yeah, no chip on me guys, my name is Schmiker and I just work here, trust!’”

Gift can’t help but giggle alongside the crew.

“And yeah, they let me go because they couldn’t find the chip on me, but listen, the real scary part ended up being me having to convince Jupiter that he didn’t need to vivisect me to get the memory chip back! I was like, ‘hey man, just give me one of those lunches they’re sending with us as rations, I’ll hork the chip right up just at the sight of it!’”

The crew bursts into a roaring fit of laughter, raising their mugs and glasses once more, and someone even offers Gift one. It smells... dubious, but also unlike anything Gift is familiar with, and so star takes a sip, and finds the liquid inside surprisingly spicy. Not too terrible, though. Maybe star will have to check out more spaceships and their drinks.

The crew doesn’t notice when star abandons star’s emptied glass and sneaks out of the ship. And though the Nothing between the ship and the planet can only hold silence, Gift and the stars shake with small fits of giggles long after they’ve left Ryker’s crew behind.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The evening goes on and turns into night, and Gift is lured towards a beautiful bonfire by a desert city. There are entire groups of tents put up here, and plenty of sleeping mats and blankets simply laid out under the wide and clear sky. Some of the people here could not fight against the encroaching darkness and have long since gone to sleep, but many more still sit around the bonfire, passing around a sizable piece of skyfire stone as a prop to determine speaking right. At the moment, as Gift finds starself a spot in the massive circle of listeners, the stone is in the paws of a small Xero with big ears, and she is, in a hushed tone, narrating a story of her travels through the very desert they find themselves on the edge of.

“I swear to you, I swear, it’s the fifth V-Pet I found in the desert that day, and I hadn’t even been out for more than a couple of hours yet. Obviously, I thought to myself, ‘huh, that’s weird,’ so I followed the trail and I kept finding more, and anybody who’s used to foraging in Kubai knows that that’s weird. The desert doesn’t just give you this much stuff all at once, not unless a plane passed over and just dumped its entire cargo for some reason.”

“Yeah, normally you can find like three items a day at most,” somebody mumbles next to Gift.

“And eventually, this trail of V-Pets leads me to a cave, of all things. On one hand, sure, there are caves out in Kubai, I know, but usually it’s just small empty holes in sandstone! When I looked inside this one, it went deep. Deeper than I’m used to, honestly, and there’s marks on the cave walls, like... claws.”

Gift finds starself leaning in. The crowd around star follows, or perhaps leads, all of the circle leaning in at once, closer to the bonfire, closer to the storyteller, closer to the story.

“At that point, I got a little worried. It looks dead out there, but you all know it’s not, if you live on the outskirts of B’Haddu or if you forage out here. All sorts of things can be out in the sand. But the V-Pets were just so strange to me, so I snuck my way in, deeper, and deeper, as quiet as I could be, following this trail, and you would not believe this – at the end, in a huuuuge cavern, there was just– a Xero! In the middle of nowhere, in a cave under the ground, and it’s not like they traveled there, like me, there was furniture around! There was a brick furnace and a little bed and everything!! There’s just a guy living out there, and I took all that in, and they looked at me, and I looked at them, and I realized – they were sitting there with a pile of wires and a box full of batteries and, get this, A MASSIVE TRASH BAG OF BROKEN V-PETS. And then I asked, ‘what in the world are you doing with all that??’ as one does, and they just RAN at me like they were rabid! I made it out of there with a handful of V-Pets, and I ran all the way back to B'Haddu, and I swear I never saw that cave again. I don’t know what happened to it, or to them, and you know what, I don’t want to know. That was the creepiest thing that ever happened to me out here.”

The crowd exhales in unison once the story is over, and as the tension dissipates, so too does the suspense of disbelief. “Come on, Sahara, that’s crazy,” someone calls, even though the skyfire stone hasn’t been passed to them. “No sane person is gonna go out and live in the desert permanently.”

“Who said anything about them being sane?” another person speaks up from the other side of the bonfire. “I think I’ve seen them too, this little red Xero, just out there in the sand. I think they come here to sell stuff they find really far out.”

“So do the rest of the foragers, doesn't mean you live out there.”

“Yeah, except... this guy always runs out into the dunes. Never seen them stay long in B’Haddu.”

Carnival Gift is gone before the argument can conclude. As far as the people around star are concerned, star’s seat has been empty for that entire story.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

There isn’t a story being told out in the Kubai desert, not out loud, but Carnival Gift can smell a story out there anyway, the same way star can sense upcoming holidays. The skies above urge star to venture farther and farther, until star sees a dark silhouette of someone lying down in the sand. They don’t seem bothered by the air growing cold out here.

“You’re going the wrong way,” the small pink and red Xero says without even looking up. “You’ll only wade deeper into the desert like this. All the celebration is over in that direction, closer to B’Haddu.” It points, and Gift can see tiny flickers of the bonfire on the horizon where star has just been, where people have now begun singing. Music carries over the sand strangely, echoing and curling like a wave, arriving before them as a softened, layered version of itself, a sharp stone smoothed down to a pebble. Star allows starself to listen, lets the music wash over star, and then turns star’s attention back to the curious creature sitting before star. 

“Actually, I came to see you,” Gift smiles, sitting down next to it. “You were here all by your lonesome, and I just couldn’t have that.”

It huffs, disturbing the sand under its snout. “That’s on purpose. Leave me alone.”

Gift can’t help but laugh. “Well, I don’t know if B’Xhadara would approve of that.”

“B’Xhadara? ...you mean, the sky?”

Star tilts stars head in amusement. “I believe the proper title is ‘The Honorable Heavens’, but I’m sure the stars will forgive you for using the common name for them.”

It scoffs again. “I don’t care for the approval of the Heavens.”

“No, you don’t,” Gift agrees, “but you do care about... something. There is yearning in your eyes.”

It squints doubtfully at Gift. “Is there.” And there is. It only becomes more visible now that the Xero is making eye contact.

Star doesn’t mind the doubt at all. “Does it maybe have something to do with sitting out here, instead of joining in the celebrations?”

“I don’t like being around people,” it says bluntly. “The celebrations are too loud and everything is expensive.”

That’s certainly not true, because Gift has been handed many things for free tonight. Drinks, snacks, seats, stories. Then again, maybe Gift is an exception to the rule on account of being easily forgotten once star leaves. “So it’s about the people..?”

Silence settles between them for a moment. The other Xero sits up, pawing at the sand as a way of fidgeting. It’s hesitant.

“They’re celebrating an important anniversary,” it says, eventually. “The Project XERO people. The people who made us.”

“Oh, there’s an anniversary?” How the time flies. It feels like yesterday that Gift has been born, it feels like this morning that star has been reborn. “I must’ve missed that.”

The red Xero smirks in a bitter way. “Yeah, I never could. The news reaches me even out here sometimes.” It doesn’t look happy about it.

“Not keen on celebrating that, either?”

It grimaces a little. “Would you judge me if I said that I’m not a fan?”

Star hums in thought. “I wouldn’t judge you, but I would be very curious.”

It sighs, tilting its head back to look up. The stars look back, curious and quiet and listening intently. Not that this stranger can tell, and Gift certainly won't interrupt to tell it that at the moment, but it's good that they're in agreement.

“I don't think they understand what they’re doing,” it says, in the tone of someone sharing a secret. “I don’t think they’re aware that they’re reviving a people, I think they just threw themselves into reviving a species.”

“And those are different?”

“YES! Well. No, but also yes. You know, when you’re trying to bring back an extinct animal, you sort of do your best mixing different pieces together until you compose something resembling the original, and as long as the major pieces are from the original animal, you can totally do that. But we’re not animals, are we? We’re people, and we get brought into a world that doesn’t remember us, and isn’t for us, and we’re just... Made on a whim!” It throws its paws up in the air in sudden frustration. “There hasn’t been any rhyme or reason to the creation of Xeros, we’re just! Curiosities! And so some of us come out shiny and sparkly and slimy and big, and some of us–! Some of us come out common and boring. And it’s just a game of chance.” Its eyes turn down to the ground, away from the stars. Perhaps it could no longer bear the sky that was looking back. “I don’t think they should’ve done it.”

“Oh,” Carnival Gift gasps, more curious than ever as star realizes what the underlying tone in its voice is. “You hate them for it.”

At first, it closes its paws into fists, brows furrowing as though it plans to argue, but then its shoulders sag a little. “Maybe I do. Maybe I do hate them. They could’ve done so much with me, they’ve done so much with others. And instead they just made me ordinary. And what for?”

“Ordinary?” Now, that just doesn’t seem right. “You think you’re ordinary?”

“Not for long,” the other gives star a small smile. “Only until I find a way to fix that.”

“Fix..?”

“Yeah. Until I become the Ultimate Xero, you see?”

And there is the story, Carnival Gift realizes. That yearning briefly turns into craving, into hunger, as the red Xero speaks. Something is brewing out in the Kubai desert, and Gift has stumbled upon it. How curious. How intriguing. How fun.

“I think I’d love to see you try, Rad Red,” star smiles, and Rad’s eyes widen.

“How do you know my... who are you?”

“Oh, it’s simply a gift.” Star looks up to the sky. There are plenty more stories to gather, though none as interesting to Gift as this. But the stars will ask for more stories than only this one in particular, and so it’s time to go. “I think I’ll have to see you again, Rad Red.”

It scowls at star. “No thanks. You’re kind of really weird right now.”

A shame. “Then I’ll do my best to make a better first impression next time,” star promises, and Rad forgets their entire conversation by the time star is up in the sky again.

What a curious creature, Carnival Gift thinks, and the stars quite agree as they continue to listen to the chorus. Soon, the world will celebrate Midnight, and then they’ll welcome a bright new dawn.