You are a benign incorporeal spirit roaming the Earth in search of opportunities for harmless mischief. What do you do?
You haunt the Keibler Forest in the eerie, lonely dead of night. Calling on your mystical powers, you replace all of the ozone in the local boundary-layer atmosphere with neon and krypton. You know from your atmospheric chemistry course that a diurnal cycle of N02 and ozone photolysis renders ozone basically inert at night in unpolluted areas, so this will not harm the local ecology. However, you hope that if the Keibler Elves use neon lighting to make cookies and merriment during the evening, or apply active electrodes to the Pillsbury Dough Boy in an effort to get his secret recipes, the air around them will explode with colors, and they’ll finally be able to see you silhouetted against the sky. They’ll probably interpret you as a swamp gas anomaly or the Ghost of Christmas Past, but it doesn’t matter. You’ll finally have some interaction with another sentient being, however fleeting. It’ll be even better than that time Lazarus dipped his little finger in a stream of Paradise and set a drop of water on your tongue!
Alas, despite your silent entreaties, the Elves use nothing but candles for lighting. How odd for creatures that live in trees! Maybe they aren’t so sentient after all. As dawn approaches you feel opportunity slipping away, and, though you are mildly amused at the antics of the Elves, the despair you feel at the thought of continued loneliness is tempered only by anguish and a rising bloodlust, which is in turn tempered only by the basic gentleness of your spirit, the descending torpor of despair and anguish, and mild amusement at the eternal homeostasis implied by this inner equilibrium of your emotional state.
Your reverie shatters under the glare of a bright light in the distance. Lightning! A thunderstorm approaches on a swift, cool breeze from the east! A full moon reflects off the boldly ascending cloud tops, which in turn reflect off the Keibler pool, and a wolf howls in the distance. Your soul is comforted. While the Elves have long since hit the hay (they punch piles of hay right before bed), a night so beautiful could never be regarded as a total loss.
Suddenly, the air sizzles with energy. Lightning fills the forest with pulses electric, sonic and photonic. The Krypton and Neon are set aglow, and you are gratified and mortified by what you see. Thousands of creatures fluoresce for a thousandth of a millisecond as the shadows of the moon and the morning star reassert themselves—thousands of creatures in the throes of death. With their wilting plumes of radiant energy and tendrils drooping toward the earth, they look not at all like the vibrant airborne jellyfish they must have resembled a moment earlier.
Every two tendrils meet in a crude imitation of hands—these creatures have arms but no elbows, fingers but no palms. They are able to grasp but not to hold, to gesture but not to wave. They gesture toward you now, and by some strange spiritual resonance they communicate more to you in an instant than I could write in a thousand years. They call themselves the Nightglow. They tell of their race’s emergence each dusk from clandestine daytime hibernation. They tell of the ages of microseconds they endure in their accelerated perception of time before the light of consciousness and memory awakens as the light of twilight fades. They tell of wars and rumors of wars, of loud struggles and silent joys, of confusion and deceit, wisdom and clarity, of their cultural development, their philosophy, and the culmination of each of these in a destiny they now welcome with open metaphorical arms. They tell of their physical vulnerability to photons, their fearful anticipation of the Daybreak they knew must come, and their acceptance and eventual embrace of this fate. They thank you for an early release from this life. Their spirits will now ascend through the cloud tops into the heavens, and their bodies, not truly dying after all, will fall to earth only to reemerge as their progeny in a few billion microseconds, when night falls again.
It is as though Lazarus had emptied a waterfall onto your tongue. Waterfalls either are or are not; they are never empty. So it is with your time among the Nightglow. You accompany them to the brink of space, but you speak no farewell. Suddenly they are gone, and you look down upon a world with which you are just as suddenly at peace, as you look forward to your next night of harmless mischief.