The Tiara of a Thousand Lights and Accompanying Charge Pillow

"There’s a story out there, called the Legend of a Thousand Lights. It’s about a crest habitat that, after fleeing a pirate intrusion, found itself lost. They wandered into an ancient battlefield, and the habitat lost its life-support, communication, propulsion, and lifeboat systems all at once after a catastrophic collision with some drifting space debris. Rescue efforts were dispatched to find the missing habitat, but the junkyard covered millions of square kilometers. Some of these ancient ships still had power, making scans of the area completely useless. The 100,000 plus residents thought for certain that rescue would never come, and they resigned themselves to their fate. It was a young engineer who came up with a solution. The details are long and convoluted and require an understanding of both physics and chemistry I don’t have the time or inclination to explain. The short version is this engineer quickly devised a system where every resident of the habitat combined their home cooking sphere with a bioengineered farm animal called a cockrent—basically a space chicken that breathes methane—and they jettisoned the sphere-enclosed cockrents out into space. After a few minutes, the cockrents would explode, filling the pressurized, translucent spheres with bursts of colorful, burning, pulsating light that lasted several minutes each. The show of exploding space chickens was enough to attract the attention of a Syndicate rescue squad, and the habitat was saved. (They, of course, were fined so much money that the habitat was eventually repossessed and the vast majority of the adults were forced to indenture to pay off the debt, but this part is usually left out of the retellings of this legend.) To this day, the Legend of a Thousand Lights remains a tale of how an entire community working together managed to save themselves from certain disaster. Habitats celebrate their victory by jettisoning colorful orbs out into space once a cycle in commemoration. This item is fashioned after the Tiara of a Thousand Lights, customarily presented each cycle to the Thousand Light Princess, as voted by a habitat’s community. The young, lucky recipient of the crown wears the tiara and sits upon the Pillow of Lights on the day of the feast and celebration."