[Survey] Wish's First Lantern Fruit

“You seem stuck.”
Wish jerked his head back and upward. His expression brightened at the sight of his older friend, Rhys. Well, one of his only friends. He fancied him as something of an older brother, but he didn’t dare say it out loud. That brightening didn’t last long though.
“I can’t think of what to carve for my Lantern fruit!”
“Uh, isn’t the Twilight Festival a few weeks out?” Rhys asked, taking a seat next to Wish at his table. They were in a classroom with a bunch of other Xeros, everybody at their own table with a little handheld tablet for each of them. Rhys was here to visit a little bit, but the instructor had asked him to supervise the class for a few moments while they left.
“Yeah, but they want us to go ahead and plan out what to do. But I can’t figure it out! Everything I draw isn’t connected, so it would mean a bunch of the chunks would have to float in the air, but I can’t do that! That’s not how physics works!”

Rhys snorted and shook his head. “No, it isn’t. Let me see what you’ve got, huh?”

Before Wish were three different pages, each with… no more than two or three strokes of his little touch pen. Rhys tilted his head and asked, “Well you can’t see if it’ll work without drawing it, right?”

“No,” Wish answered, starting to pout. “But I already know in my head it won’t work. It just… it isn’t… it doesn’t look right!”
Rhys slid the tablet closer to his little friend. “Just try it.”
“What? But it’s a waste-”
“Just try it, Wish. Look, there’s some tools on here, I want to show you something you can do that’ll help. But you have to draw it first, right?”

Wish narrowed his eyes and glared at Rhys. “You promise this isn’t another ruse to show me that I’m wrong and overthinking it?”

Rhys shook his head and pointed to the tablet again. “I can’t promise that, I don’t know what you’re thinking of in your head. But I do promise I’m telling the truth, I think I can help.”

Wish hesitated another moment, but grabbed his touch-pen. “Fine.”

The real issue became apparent very quickly. Wish wasn’t doing great at drawing. He sort of was, he had a perfectly steady hand and fine wrist movements, he just clearly had no idea how to make his drawing look the way he wanted.

“Stop for a second.” Rhys cut him off and gently grasped Wish’s wrist. “Here, watch this.” He guided Wish’s paw, and the pen, across the tablet to tap one of the sidebar buttons. Wish’s drawing lines all changed color. “Wait, what?”
“Watch.” Rhys tapped the pen on two points on a line, creating a little white circle in each spot. Then, he touched down between the two dots, and dragged, causing the line to warp.
“Wait, what?! That’s a thing you can do?”
Rhys laughed. “It’s not just a pen and sheet, it’s an editing program! You can do all kinds of neat stuff with it!” He released Wish’s paw and leaned back into his chair, watching the little Xero go crazy. He was awkward at first, learning how the bending behavior worked depending on the shape of a line, and where he made the “anchor points,” but within a short time, his drawing was looking much better. Wish even remembered to tap the button again to re-enable regular drawing. And as he watched, he realized with a bright blush on his face why Wish was getting so upset with it.
“E-er… does my… does my hair really look like that?”
“Huh? No, that’s the problem, I can’t make it look right because it has a gradient, and I can’t make it look like your ears are glowing brighter than the rest, so-”
“Hey! Relax! It already looks great, it doesn’t need to be perfect!”
“I know but it’s still gonna bother me!” Wish’s pink ears and antennae shifted to slightly more magenta shade, seemingly “burning” with color.
Rhys’s heart thumped extra hard. He knew the answer, but he was startled by just how easily that answer came to him. Darn it, Wish, why do you have to be so charming all the time…? “What is it that you’re always saying? It’s not impossible, you just don’t know the solution yet?”
“I say yet cause that means I already know the answer exists and I don’t know that it does here.”
“Wish. It’s a lantern fruit carving. You’re an engineer. You’re trying to make one part glow different from the rest. What’s the answer?” Wish stared up at Rhys. “Well, the only way to make it look different is to carve it at an angle, but---oh. Ohhhhhhhhh.”
“See? I told you you could figure it out.”
“It’s so obvious! I’ve been trying to do this with just a single layer but I can’t plan lighting for a 3 dimensional object in a 2 dimensional space!”
“...Obviously.” Rhys said, half rolling his eyes as if he knew what Wish was talking about. The little bluish colored Xero looked up with a shark smirk. They both knew Rhys didn’t know the answer until Wish said it out loud. He just knew how to get Wish to think about it the right way.