17 Back To The Store

"Try not to wake me up today, alright?" Ash asked with a yawn as they were about to trade shifts for the bed.

Ruby nodded. "Sorry. I'll do my best. Sleep well."

She saw him putting the earplugs she bought in before lying down and closing his eyes. She very softly closed the door behind her feeling a bit guilty. It had been her fault he hadn't slept well for the past two days.

If her plan to fix the windows worked she might be able to make it up to him. She would need silica sand for her project. That could be purchased at any home improvement store but first she had to get more money.

She checked on the state of her still somewhat frozen food before letting the cleaning fairies in to do their work. They were professionals and she trusted them so she figured it wouldn't matter if she was gone for a few hours, especially since they knew Ash was still here.

Summoning jewels and other raw materials to create jewelry, driving into town to get them appraised, shopping for clothes and sand, buying a freezer like the ones used to hold ice cream at the grocery store, and dropping by the witches' coven to get electricity replacement items took most of the day.

By the time Ruby got back, plugged everything into the gadget Blair had created to generate electricity without any wiring in the walls for portable use, and moved all the food she leaned against the wall tiredly. Lugging all of this by herself was absolutely exhausting.

She was lucky the kitchen was on the first floor of the castle because it would have been physically impossible to move that freezer up the winding staircases. Unfortunately that didn't prevent her from having to lug the giant sandbags around.

The stairs weren't going to work. There had to be something she could measure the window with.

Ruby wanted to scream but it looked like she needed to go back to the store. She had forgotten to get those electronic camping lamps that were battery operated anyway. That had been one of the first things on her mental list too. This was why you had to write everything down!

She hadn't always been this scatterbrained. All the stress must be getting to her.

While she was out for the second time she got those lamps, a tape measure, window putty and a trowel for smoothing it (she hadn't accounted for that part before), a little notebook, and some pens.

Ruby wracked her brains to see if there was anything else she was missing. Nothing. She should be good for the rest of the day this time.

She made it back a little after 2 PM and the cleaning fairies were still hard at work. She gingerly scooted around them in her elf glamour, careful not to let her wings brush them, so she could get those broken window measurements.

Jotting them down carefully in her little notebook, Ruby was sure to account for which window was in which room. She wouldn't be able to do anything fancy like make them open because she knew nothing about hinges or sashes at first but she could get started on the smaller windows that didn't need to be opened first.

She didn't have internet access but she was sure if she went to the library the next day and looked things up online she could get the hang of it. Her powers allowed her to shape anything that came from the earth as long as she had the raw materials and a clear picture of the dimensions in her mind.

Ruby dragged one of her electric lamps down to the dungeon with a bag of sand. It was so heavy that she sort of had to roll it down the stairs with a whole lot of nudging. Nobody would bother her down here.

She spent the next hour and a half conducting experiments on getting the dimensions of the glass right, crushing and reshaping it dozens of times before she was satisfied. Then she took the tiny window she had created for one of the castle's turrets and set to work with her putty and trowel.

This would be the tricky part because she had never tried to install a window before. She had to do it very carefully and make sure the angle didn't get messed up somewhere so it would set properly.

When she successfully got it in she scraped away the remainder of the putty ever so slowly to be sure it wouldn't affect the glass and stepped back to admire her handiwork. One window down, approximately twenty to go.

Not every window in the castle was broken but there were an awful lot of windows because of the size of this place. Nearly every room had at least one.

Ruby wondered why vampires even cared about having windows since they could see in the dark, didn't like the sun, and didn't need fresh air to breathe. Maybe a non-vampire had been the architect.

Whatever the case, she needed to fix these windows as part of her deal with Ash. She had promised to restore the castle to its original glory in exchange for a temporary place to hide.

She headed back to the kitchen to make herself some Pop-Tarts feeling a strange sense of accomplishment. She had just made a real window all by herself!

Wendy found her there a few minutes later. "We're all done for today, Leia. We'll be back the same time tomorrow if that's fine with you."

Leia was the fake elf name she had given the Gales when she hired them. It might be the name of a space princess in a human movie but it was the first thing she could come up with. "Yes, it is. Thank you! Have a nice rest of your day."

Ruby watched them all leave the barrier before heading back to the basement. She could probably knock out a few more of the little ones before Ash woke up and she was on a roll.