Chapter 23

When she saw the clouds ahead, the first thing she did was mark on her calendar how long it had been since the last storm to determine how long there was between this storm and the previous storm. She found that it was 182 days long. This number sounded weird to Adair, so she made sure to remember this number and determine why it was such an odd number while the storm was going and couldn't do much else.

The next thing she did was run to the blue tree and see what it looked like this time, and she found that it looked exactly like it did when the previous storm was going on. After realizing this, she started calling out for Hank because he was out doing whatever he was doing and wanted to make sure that he came back before the storm started.

She continued to call out until she had to go back into their shelter because the storm was starting. She would have continued yelling if it was a storm where it was snowing or raining, but this time it was a sandstorm, and it made visibility extremely low. That, along with the fact she was getting hurt a lot by the sand pelting her made her retreat back to their shelter.

One thing that confused her, though, was that there was a buffer of sorts around their shelter that did not allow any of the storm to enter by itself. Adair grabbed a jar and collected some of the "sand" by holding it outside the protected zone, and when she did this, she was able to bring the sand-like material inside their box.

This greatly confused Adair because when the snowstorm happened, some of the water was able to get in from that storm, but this time nothing was getting in. After a short while, she started to get worried about Hank because he still was not back, and her hand got all scraped up when she put it outside their shelter for just a few moments when she did her little experiment with the sand.

Eventually, after what felt like forever but was probably more like an hour, Hank made it back to their box and collapsed. This is when Adair saw that Hank was not only exhausted but also like he was gravely hurt. She started to clean Hank off, and this was when she noticed that there was no way that these injuries only came from the storm. This is because the wounds looked nothing like what someone would expect from a sandstorm. Hank had large puncture wounds on his side that looked like a creature tried to rip Hank apart.

She then she did everything she could to clean up Hank and realized that she couldn't do much else to help him. She brought him a few of the giant fruit he liked to eat in hopes that maybe whatever was in the fruits could help heal him. Once she brought them to him, she started to wonder if feeding him was even a good idea because what if she forced food in his mouth and he choked that would make a bad situation even worse. Luck appeared to be on her side, though, because when she set the fruits down, and started contemplating what to do, Hank, in one big motion, rolled over, opened his mouth, and bit down on the fruit.

When Adair saw this at first, she was shocked, but when she realized what Hank did, she rolled over the rest of the fruit and one by one Hank continued to chow down on them until none were left, and at this time, and when Hank noticed that there were no more fruits coming he properly let his head fall to the ground. This greatly worried Adair at first until she started to hear him snoring.

When Adair heard him snoring, she relaxed quite a bit and sat down and grabbed one of the bottles of milk out of the bag, and started to think about what happened to Hank to make his condition so bad. Her first thought was that maybe he got into a fight with a beast who was getting too close to their camp. While at first, this made sense, the more she thought about it, the more she didn't think this was the case.

This is because they really did not have many supplies, and the only thing that was not moveable was their box house, and while yes, they would be in a bit of trouble since the storm would hurt them, Adair was sure that if it was really necessary, there was a cave or something similar they could have gone to.

Adair's next thought was that maybe there was a monster in the storm and that Hank had to fight it in order to make it back to the camp. The only real supporting evidence of this theory was that she knew little to nothing about the storms and what was in the storms if anything. She really hoped this option was just her imagination going wild because if not what stopped that beast from following Hank back to their shelter and finishing the job it started, it wasn't possible to do before.

This thought especially worried Adair because if the beast beat Hank, then she really had no hope of being able to beat it. Even with all of her training that she had been doing since the last storm, all she did was get stronger compared to other people of the same race as her. No matter how much she trained unless she had some of the advanced weapons and equipment, there was no way she could beat something that was able to hurt Hank so much.

The last option that Adair thought of was that Hank got into a fight and killed the beast. This was the best-case scenario for them, but until Hank woke up and she was able to ask him in person, she wasn't going to just sit around and hope that this was the case. So she got up and started piling up all of the wood in front of the entrance to their home to make it so as long as it was a big creature, it would wouldnt easily be able to get in. Adair did not want to think about what happened if the creature that hurt Hank was a small one because if it was, that makes it even scarier.

This took a few hours of continuous work, but eventually, she was able to move enough wood that anyone, including Hank, would have trouble moving all of the wood out of the way. When she was done, she was very tired as well, and with the peace of mind that someone or something was unlikely to get into their shelter, she promptly went to sleep.

When she woke up, she found Hank still asleep, but when she did a deeper inspection of his wounds, nearly all of them appeared to be much healthier than they were when she fell asleep. The next thing she did was inspect the woodpile to see if anything or anyone tried to move it, and luckily, nothing appeared to be touched.

She then looked through the holes in the structure to see if she slept through the whole storm again, but this time it did not appear to be the case since she still saw sand flying through the air. When she thought about time passing, she started to wonder how old she was in galactic empire time. She then thought about it, and she recalled that it was 182 days since the last storm, and if there were the same amount of time in between each storm, and she quickly realized that 182 days was half a year, she would be two years old in the Galactic Empire.

She then realized that she missed something significant, the days in this world are twice as long, so that would mean that she was currently four years old. She realized that she was going off some assumptions that maybe there were more than four storms in a year, but the storms all seemed to reflect different seasons, so she was pretty sure there was only going to be four storms, but who knows, maybe the storms did not follow the seasons which would cause more than four storms per year.

The other thing Adair was assuming was that the time in between each storm was the same, and to her, it felt the same, but she was not keeping track up until recently, so she really had no idea if the time in between the storms was actually the same or if it was just close.

Adair then looked down at herself and tried to remember how she looked in the pictures she had of herself when she was four years on back in the Galactic Empire, and she realized that in this life, she was a bit shorter but a lot less chubby than how she looked back in the Galactic Empire at least from what she could recall.

After thinking about this, she did another checkup and cleaning of Hank to make sure nothing was infected and that he was healing properly, and while this was happening, he woke up.