[Freezair]

It was strange, being a cook without color.

You didn't really realize what an impact color had on taste until that color was gone. Cherry sour balls somehow weren't cherry enough unless they were bright red. Chocolate felt pasty if it wasn't brown. And without some kind of color to give you direction, all fruit leathers seemed to taste the same. It reminded Kane of his youth when he'd been baking a birthday cake for his sister Noel. She'd wanted it to be purple, but when he'd put in the red and blue food colors, it looked... wrong. He'd added a few more drops of this and a dash of that, and every bit made the batter grow closer to the color of a bruise. Noel had called the color "burple." And even though he'd used that very recipe before, the burple cake never had tasted right.

Nothing tasted right.

[Freezair]

In trying times like these, Kane knew people needed sweets more than ever. People were prone to eating their emotions, and whenever bad things were in the news, he always saw an uptick in customers. But he'd never had such problems filling orders before. He was a perfectionist, and with all of his candies tasting wrong, how could he declare them fit for sale? He knew that his recipes hadn't changed, but try telling that to his heart and tastebuds. Gray bonbons just weren't right.


He had been moping about his shop, wondering if he should put out that particular tray of fudge, when he'd noticed the jar.

[Freezair]

It was a jar of silver sugar dragees, squatting in a purely decorative position on top of a high shelf. He'd put several containers of brightly-colored plastic bits up there to help the ambiance of the shop--it was far too high a place to keep regular product, but jars of multicolored translucent bits were just part of what a candy shop was meant to be. The dragees were the only theoretically edible thing up there, though he'd heard you weren't REALLY supposed to eat the silver ones.

Normally he never paid them any mind. They were, and were always meant to be, visual background noise. But since the color had vanished, they suddenly seemed... different.

[Freezair]

He stood on his hind legs to peer at the jar.

He'd thought at first that they'd barely changed. Silver wasn't really all that different from gray. But there was something... more than gray about this silver. He thought he'd imagined it, but he rotated his head and there it was. A flash of blue, a glimmer of yellow--colors! This gray was fuller than the other grays! It had depth and shimmer the other grays didn't have.

He waved a paw in front of it. The buffed surface of the sugar pearls wasn't exactly reflective, but he thought he saw a blush of pink in the light reflecting off of them.

[Freezair]

A new spark of hope settled into his chest. He sprung down from the shelf to find something, anything, he knew to be brightly colored in life. There was a scarf in the display in his window to add some color--he grabbed that and drew it up near the pearls.

Faint spots of green and gold glittered across the surface of the dragees. They reflected not the grayness that was there, but the colors as they should have been.

The corners of Kane's mouth rose into a smile.

[Freezair]

He remembered hearing on the news that not ALL the color had gone from the world. Allegedly, every place in Evelon still held one color all to itself. Green still lurked deep within the Tengel rainforest. The soil in the Sekudui farmlands was still a rich, chocolatey brown.

Yet despite these claims, he'd never seen evidence of it in his hometown. He'd looked up into the sky, hoping for blue. He'd made trays upon trays of grape-flavored lollipops in the hopes of finding a splash of purple. He'd eaten an orange with breakfast just in case... well, the idea was obvious.

But the color hadn't been.

[Freezair]

Kane had begun to suspect that the claims of color elsewhere were merely hallucinations. Much in the way one seemed to see blooms of purple and green whenever one shut their eyes too tightly, the color-starved brains of the Evelonians were creating them where none existed. He hadn't been traveling, so as far as he knew he was right.

But what if. What if.

What if Nabias's color had been hiding all along?

He was on lunch break, so he had time to dash upstairs. He dropped the scarf right in the middle of the shop floor and ran up to his own, personal kitchen.

[Freezair]

The was a great clatter as he yanked open his own silverware drawer. He threw the contents of it out onto the table and rushed to look.

And it was true.

When he looked into the bowls of his spoons and the sides of his knives, the things he saw reflected back were... colorful. Not hugely. But there was the red on his shoulders! There was the brown of his wingblades! It was pale and distant, but it was there! It was captured in silver for all to see!

He scooped a handful of utensils up his mouth and burst outside.

[Freezair]

"AH FOUND NABIAS'S COLOR!"

Normally, in a busy place like this, someone shouting in the street would not have attracted too much attention. But the phrase "found color," in this climate, turned heads. People slowed in their walks. A few cars abruptly hit the breaks. Pedestrians grew close, wondering what had caused the normally relaxed Kane to behave so.

He pointed to the jumble of silverware sitting on the steps to his shop.

"Look, look!" he said. The crowd of people was as silent as crowds ever got.

"Nabias got... we got silver!"

[Freezair]

It was a surreal moment. People were jostling and shoving one another, each eagerly trying to get a look at a couple of spoons that had been flung at the ground. Yet there were smiles on those faces that hadn't been there before. People's eyes were wide. The energy in the air was electric, wild, and hopeful.

One young man yelped in happiness as he peered into a spoon and saw a bit of the blue in his shirt reflected. A Kamee picked up a fork in her claws and grinned at her own green reflection. Knives and forks got passed around with a reverence that was almost comical.

A voice rose up in the crowd. Someone pointed to the metal pole holding up a stop sign, or the hubcap of a car. People began to realize that these metallic objects weren't just--gray--the beautiful, reflective silveriness of them was all around, in bits of metal everywhere they looked. Voices rose. A laugh or two came from somewhere.

And for just a moment, Kane Peppermint felt as thought all the color was back.

[Color Harvested]