Chapter 26

Their living situation stayed the same for the next few days until one day when Adair was drinking her daily bottle of lake water and watching the rain hit the ground outside, she noticed a path where it was not raining just outside of their home to who knows where. Since Adair just woke up when she noticed this path so much to Hanks's annoyance, she woke him up to see if he saw what she was seeing.

While frustrated by being woken up again he also saw this path and was concerned since this was something that did not appear in the previous storms as far as they were aware. Adair and Hank then proceeded to write about what they should do and the danger of following the path through the storm. The first thing they talked about was potential reasons why the path appeared. Their first guess was that it was an anomaly that just happened to be next to them.

This seemed unlikely, though, since when Hank did a brief exploration of the path, he found it leads explicitly from the entrance of their house to an unknown destination. So Hank tried to find where it leads, but it just seemed to go on forever deeper into the forest.

The next thing they thought it could be was this was a trap, and that the only person or being that could open up a path like this in the storm as an ability of sorts and he or she did this to lure out unsuspecting victims to a tragic end. Hank was the one that brought this idea up since some people have special abilities in the Otto Empire, and while this would be a strange ability, it was not out of the question for someone to have this ability.

Adair countered that if said person had enough power to affect such a powerful event like the storm then there was no reason for the person not to just directly affect them instead of just having them create a path that potentially led to a trap.

They wrote back and forth about the last option because this path was like something the storm controlled and opened up to guide them to some type of treasure. Hank started laughing, though, when Adair brought this option up because it just seemed too random and unrealistic for a random path to open up by the heavens and guide them to some long forgotten treasure.

Hank then followed it up with how nice it must be to kid and have such a great imagination.

When Hank explained his views on the option Adair brought up, she realized that maybe she had read too many reincarnation novels back when she lived in the Galactic Empire. So she quickly dropped the last idea. However, they were still stuck with the problem of whether to follow the path or not.

Eventually, they decided that its occurrence was too random and couldn't be trusted, so they decided not to follow the path and just wait for the storm out. However, as the days continued through, the path persisted, and while Adair was tempted to follow it to see where it led, she agreed with Hank that it was just too risky.

Eventually the storm clouds then started to retreat, and finally, they could escape their small enclosure because staying in the same space for so many days on end just got annoying eventually. As Adair watched the clouds retreat, she once again saw the lightning fly overhead. This time though, there was significantly more lightning than in the past and it also seemed to be getting closer.

She then noticed that it actually was getting closer and instead of flying overhead as it did last time, it continued to be getting closer until "Boom!" lightning struck down on their small house. Adair was shocked to only see some charring on the wood when the lightning stuck, and nothing to be significantly damaged.

While she was shocked that the lightning happened to strike their house instead of something taller or frankly anywhere else, she at least expected everything to be over now that it had struck their house because before she had only seen one volley of lightning in the sky. Little did she know that this was just the beginning.

As if the lightning was angry that something dared to withstand its might, dozens of lightning strikes came. At first, when Adair saw them, she really hoped that they wouldn't be coming again for their house, but it was as if she jinxed it, and they came directly to their wooden structure again. After they struck, there was a tiny hole above where Adair was sitting inside the structure.

She also noticed that the wood that made up their house looked much darker and older than before. She had little time to examine the change in the wood, though, since another volley of lightning came down and this time landed right on Adair.

The pain that she felt when the lightning landed on her was nothing like any pain experienced before. It was as if someone was chopping you up into tens of million pieces while on top of being fried on the world's hottest grill. When Hank noticed the pain Adair was in, he immediately moved her away from where the first lightning struck and deeper into their house, trying to get her away from the strikes.

This did not appear to work, though, because there was another volley of lightning, which made a 90-degree angle once entering their house and struck Adair again. However, this time instead of just striking Adair, it set her ablaze. The fire did not seem to be hurting her, though, as it just burned around Adair. Hank tried to cover her with himself, smothering the flames, but he started to catch fire and burn as soon as he touched her and the pain was very much real for Hank.

Interestingly enough, Hank was able to roll around and try to put out the flames, but for some reason, when Adair was rolling around on the floor, the flames just wouldn't go out. Hank realized that maybe if she was underwater, then maybe the flames would go out, so he picked her up and ran towards the lake as fast as he could, and once he got to the edge, he gently put her in the water.

To Adair, though, it was as if Hank was trying to kill her. This is because lightning somehow was targeting her and it was well known that water and lightning work well together, and the likelihood that the water was not conductive was so low it didn't matter if it put out the flames.

Also, in her current condition, she couldn't move, let alone swim, so the likelihood of drowning was very high if the lightning did not kill her first. And Hank had also moved away from the only protection she had from the lightning their house and was now placed in the middle of an empty lot and was clearly an easier target to hit.

The lightning continued to strike Adair this time, though just as she worried, she felt the electrical shocks all over her body, and with each progressive lightning strike, the main zapping through her body, the pain just got worse and worse. But somehow she was not dead.

When the fifth lightning struck, she was in so much pain that she didn't even know if anything worse could come. But by the eighth, her pain receptors just seemed to be shutting down because she couldn't feel anything anymore. When she started to feel nothing, she started to think that this was the end of her time on this planet. She started to reflect on everything she did and didn't do in this life and what she would have done differently until she started to feel something again.

This time though, instead of being pain all around, it was a pain in her back. She first thought that her last memory of this world would be a pain, but as the pain grew stronger and stronger, she realized that maybe she wasn't dead somehow.

Then all of a sudden, the pain started to go away little by little until eventually, all of the pain disappeared. She was very confused by this, so she opened her eyes to see a blinding light around herself. She then thought that if she was in the afterlife, why did it have to be so damn bright? As she squinted, looking around, she could make out a burnt bear with a look of confusion on his face.

At first, Adair wondered if Hank was in heaven with her and if the lightning took him as well, but as she looked around, she noticed that she was not in heaven but still on this planet where she had reincarnated on.

She then started to wonder why Hank was giving her such a weird look until she turned her head around and noticed that she was no longer floating and the lake had seemingly vanished, and all that was left were hundreds of different-sized fried fish. Somehow some of the fish appeared to still be alive through all the lightning, but even they appeared to be living their last breaths. Adair then looked to see if more water was coming in via the waterfall, but that also seemed to have dried up. She did notice that there was an extra weight added to her back.

She tried to roll over to see what this extra weight was, but she could not do so. Finally, however, she noticed a bright light coming from behind her, and she wondered if this light was making her back so heavy. While the weight was enough that Adair could not move by herself, Hank could pick her up with a bit of struggling.

When Hank moved her, she realized that the light was coming from her back and not the ground behind her and once Hank put her back on the ground again she asked him what was making the light, but it was so bright that it was hard for Hank to read what she wrote, but eventually after awhile he was able to see her writing and responded with that when he picked her up, he felt a boney thing poke him, so they assumed that that is was causing the blinding light. Because he himself couldn't look directly at her without worrying he would go blind doing so.

This light persisted for several days until, eventually, it dimmed enough for both of them to see what was causing such a bright light, and they found out that Adair's wings had grown. These wings were about twice as big as her mom's, which shocked Adair since she had thought that the wings would grow naturally like hair, or maybe they would only grow once she hit a certain age, but apparently that was not the case.

It also made sense why she could not move since her wings were just as big as her mom's but since she was so much younger she had a much smaller body. Now that she knew that her wings had grown, she tried to move them, but it was as if the muscles did not work because they did not move at all. With all of the added weight, she started to wonder whether she would be able to walk anytime in the future, but at least for the current time being, the answer was no.