Shadow Slave - After the Third Nightmare - A different Story

Return to Chained Isles

An Awakened woman entered the Nocts Sanctuary. A few days ago she appeared before the local Saint with the purpose of registering her new activity.

What job? It was pretty simple. She was supposed to open a little shop in the Sanctuary of Noctis, do some advertising, and offer things like drinks, snacks, tea, spices, etc. Then ask about who's from the NQSC, and if there are some things they want to bring there from the Dream Realm.

She summoned a Memory that appeared in the form of a chest made of alloy, and was handed to her by her boss. She read the runes:

[Poor Coffer]

'I guess the craftsman wasn't especially prideful about his creation.'

But who cares. It's not like everybody is gonna see that 'poverty'. From the outside it would seem to be like a great artifact. If this is poor, what is she? Even more poor? The description was even stranger.

["What do you mean, you don't want to use it?" said Shadow showing his friend a magic chest that he made for her. For some reason she wasn't satisfied. "It's not fancy, but you could show it in the Bastion." He was wondering why she doesn't like the little present. "So what it's a random military storage box that I found in Antarctica? I can tell you. No one has such a chest."]

'Was that meant for me to read?'

She didn't notice that while she was reading a shadow left the alloy chest, and moved towards the edge of the island. It moved swiftly, and silently.

No one saw it. Soon it appeared on the edge of Sanctuary Island, hid himself, and waited for a few hours lying still. Then it turned into a human, that almost instantly dived into shadows again. Then the shadow, in which he was 'diving' turned into the shape of a crow.

He still didn't know how he was supposed to travel between the Dream Realm, and Waking World. Because of the Nightmare he conquered, his anchor could be located in the desert, which was a scaringly bad possibility. Sunny didn't want to risk returning there at all.

So what were his options? He could use the Gateways in Antarctica to appear in Bastion, and then try to spend weeks or even months traveling through the Dream Realm. He didn't like that option. It would be very time consuming. He could ask Tyris to get him to the Chain Isles. But then would see he's a Saint, which would put him in an awkward position. When he was about to give up, and start experimenting on his own, Aiko started talking about making that commercial network.

Sunny didn't have the attitude to go big so he left all managing to Aiko. However, when he came to terms with the idea he's going to make a bigger business, it occurred to him that the Aiko's network could be actually very useful for him due to specifics of his spellweave.

All chests he crafted shared one special characteristic he borrowed from Effie's locket. Every single one was able to carry living beings. Normally such a thing would be useless. Without a source of breathable air living beings were doomed to suffocate inside.

Unless they didn't need air to live. Shadow helpers met the criteria just right.

The problematic part was the timing. He couldn't transform his shadow helper into an avatar till the chest was summoned, and opened. The chest was filled with commodities, and the attempt to displace them could end up only as a mess. While the shadow was in the chest, he couldn't use its vision, as it was 'out of range'. In this regard he could only trust his shadow helper that it would leave the chest on its own as soon as possible.

Yet... Sunny could trust his shadow helpers this much so he was left with only one thing: That still doesn't address the question about timing. When should he use his transformation?

The answer was pretty simple. In a few hours from the moment the employee fell asleep in the waking world. By that time Sunny could guarantee that his avatar wouldn't wake up in the chest.