It was a quiet day for the restaurant opposite of Char Life. Quiet in a ruinous kind of way. Not much a customer base. It was a pathetic sort of quietness. Only a faint yammering and grumbling from the restaurant’s Boss occasionally dispersed the silence.
“Boss” had a general uneasiness today. He had been in the attic in the morning, to fetch some needed utensils. The attic was adorned with a single round stained-glass window. It looked dreamy and somewhat unfitting. But still there was some strange beauty in it, and it had given the building some more character. It depicted a landscape with a cloudy sky. Boss liked to come up here and view it, as it always gave him a kind of hope that things might turn out alright in the end, the window just carried such a magical aura. But when he had come up today morning, something was off. The window felt foreboding. Boss had carried the uneasiness throughout the day. If he’d looked closer, he might have spotted a tiny colorful butterfly depicted in the glass image.
Right now, Boss was cleaning, mood even worse than usual for evenings as this. The quiet made him half-crazy. Something strange was afoot. He first heard it very faintly. It was like a far-away whistle. The sound quickly came closer. The whistling became mixed with a loud rattling. Boss looked up to the ceiling. It came from somewhere diagonally over the building. Then it happened.
A loud explosion of glass and wood and other materials. The restaurant shook violently. In one swoop everything that wasn’t nailed down jumped up from the excitement of impact. Furniture was knocked over, tableware was ejected and shattered, splintered wood and glass shards exploded from the ceiling. For a moment Boss felt weightless. Then he was crushed by a falling table.
Then it seemed over as quickly as it began. It was a mess. Broken stuff everywhere. Lying on the floor, Boss could see a precious vase spinning on a cabinet. In a moment of desperation, he prayed for its safety. It fell, but as to a miracle it landed upright and stood intact. The moment of glory was short. Boss turned his head up, and noticed the big hole in the ceiling. A kind of rotor blade was spinning wildly, slowly calming down.
But then to all horror, the show continued. Whatever big chunky thing had just crashed into the attic was now slowly crashing in the attic floor, sliding down. Boss could make out what looked like the wrecked remnants of a vintage colorful aircraft. It slid further, the ceiling split open wide, and the invasive vehicle remains came crashing down, initiating a surprise phase two of reckoning. The precious vase was ultimately crushed.
From behind the whirling cloud of dust two figures tumbled out of the carcass of a vehicle. One was lanky with big peachy wings and a ghostly stare with milky eyes. The other one was shorter, and looked more squashed, wings lime-green. They had a lazy eye and a sly expression.
The lanky one sat op and spoke in a hazy voice. “I saw a sign outside that said Fallshaven”. The stout one grumbled. “Smartass fate…” They looked around.
“Kass… we intruded on another’s domain and broke-”
“Shutup! Don’t tell me about it!”
“But that means we will be indebted to-”
“I said close your upwards! No-one here needs to know that. I always tell you, be on the initiative. We’re fey. We make em scared and uncertain. They’ll be asking us to spin gold for a newborn, or something like that.”
“Do we provide the gold or the newborn?”
“If we act smart we do neither and get both.”
Kass spotted Boss on the floor and put on her best snakeoil-saleswoman-smile.
