The Apprentice (CONTEST: A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words - 12/24/2021)

The crunching echoes bounced unimpeded through the moonlit street, each step as alien as the lone stranger sprinting through the night while most others where tucked up in the warmth and safety of home and bed. Every excelerated inhale stabbed like a knife to the chest. Every exhale sprayed out like a magical vapour granting momentary relief from the pain. Ted ran as fast as his little legs would allow, all the while being bogged down with the extra weight of the tools needed to fix the sleigh.

Of all the nights for things to go wrong, it had to be his first on the job. It wasnt even technically his job, at least not yet anyway. Ted was just an apprentice. Bob the senior head sleigh mechanic had taken terribly ill. A lot of the elves had, and so they were now down to an inexperienced bare skeleton crew. But it was christmas and the show must go on, the toys still needed to be delivered. Its Santa who gets all the credit, but there's a whole team working behind the scenes to make the magic happen.

Ted followed the trail of destruction that the sleigh had left in its wake, a downed christmas tree, broken multi-colored flashing lights strewn across the road, and reindeer hoof imprints dancing chaotically in the otherwise perfectly, serene, newly landed snow.

The big jolly man was waiting impatiently by the sleigh. His suit a darker shade of red than usual, from a leaking cut above his left eye. Uncharacteristically he was in a foul mood. "Hurry little elf, we've no time to waste and we're already behind schedule, go, go, go" Ted set straight to work assessing the damage and figuring out the cause. Luckily the damage was minimal, nothing more than scratches and dents. The problem had been, that the reindeer needed more magical elf dust, to keep them airborne. Who ever had fed them this year, had miscalculated how much was needed for Santa to circumvent the globe. I suppose thats what happens when the apprentices are left in charge, Ted thought to himself.

Alls well that ends well, the reindeer where fed and Santa got on his way again and christmas was saved. "That was 200 years ago, my first day on the Job" Ted said to his new apprentice. " Don't be nervous, I made it through, and so will you".