Episode 01A: "A Sparkling New Recruit!"

- Battlefield Initiation!

“For the love of—Hikari, do something useful instead of just standing there looking pretty!”

"R--Right! Sorry, Quinn!"

Okay, Hikari. Focus. You trained for this your entire life. You didn't nearly fail the seventh grade watching Sailor Moon re-runs to become a loser now. But why, oh WHY does this battle have to involve an army of seven-foot cockroaches!? Normal roaches are impossible to kill enough, but human-sized ones that can talk and think? A total nightmare! Oh, did I mention they can barf acid? Yeah, poor Kai lost half her shirt already. It's a good thing that she's flat as a board anyway. And Matilda over there, even she seems to be struggling with not being grossed out as emotionally disconnected as she is. I'll bet that she's glad she wore those extra chunky combat boots to this battle. Maybe Quinn can convince HQ to calm down on her uniform? She'd really like that a lot, I think. At least Avery looks like she's having some fun -- wait? Is she playing a VIDEO GAME? Like right NOW? While we're dodging beach ball sized globs of bug vomit, she's fiddling around with a Nintendo game controller? And it's an ancient one at that! Like eight-bit series! Where did she ever FIND one of those?

"HIKARI?!" Quinn shouted again, I swear she sounds just like a military drill sergeant.

"Quinn?" I replied, turning my gaze from Avery over to my left toward Quinn.

"Magic? Attack? Bug? Kill? Maybe?" Quinn said. Although I'm pretty sure she wasn't making suggestions or asking for advice.

"Working on it...." I replied.

Okay. Cockroaches. The normal-sized ones hate light, like, they totally scatter when I turned on the kitchen light at my Aunt Abigail's house when I was fifteen, so, maybe if I shine a really bright light--

"Any time, Hikari." Quinn said. Now I can tell she's becoming impatient.

Here it goes. My first real enemy. My first true combat. I hope this works! I pointed my staff at one of the giant cockroaches standing on top of a damaged tank, took aim, then a deep breath, closed my eyes and imagined the mana pooling all around my body and within me. I could almost touch the complex mathematical formulas swirling around in my mind. I could feel the sacred geometry made of pure golden light coming into form at my feet on the ground. Open your eyes, Hikari. Fire!

"Radiant BEAM!"

I could feel the magic energizing around me, the staff tingled, as though it was being electrocuted. A good feeling in this case. The magic will work. It has to! Then the discharge happened, and forced me to take a step backwards from the recoil of the blast leaving the tip of my staff. The brilliant white beam of light poured out in front of me, evaporating anything in it's direct path. It made contact with the tank, the cockroach standing on top, evaporated. I think I could hear it screaming, but I could have imagined it. The sound of the tank exploding into a million pounds of tiny bits of shrapnel muted any sound he...she....it, could have possibly made. Subconsciously, I felt a secondary pull of magic, as my Light Shield automatically activated to shield my new allies and myself from the flying debris.

"Awesome! That's one down....like five thousand more to go." I cheered

"Great job, but don't get cocky. And do that beam thing again!" Quinn shouted as she was wrestling with a bug in front of her.

I turned back to select my next target. Uh oh. I have a new problem. My single attack attracted nearly ALL of them onto ME, and they're all charging towards me!

"AIYEEEEEE!" I shrieked and ran, taking cover behind an overturned personal transport vehicle.

"Nice shot, Sparkle Girl. Now you’ve got the rest of them pissed off. You got a plan for that?", Matilda said crouching next to me as she loaded a magazine of magical bullets into a modified bazooka.

"Um, actually, I'm just kinda winging it right now."

"Maybe you should figure something out then, Sparkles.", Matilda said as she disengaged the safety on her weapon. It came to life with a quiet hum, its frequency shifting upwards in pitch.

I peered around the edge of the overturned vehicle. There was a group of six roaches coming around to flank us. At least, I think that's what they were doing. They were heading right for us! I ran out, aimed my staff at the group and yelled at the top of my lungs, "Photon Lance!"

A large spear of pure white light materialized in the sky in front of my staff, rays of sunshine collided in the center, the form growing larger with each moment. Five seconds later, it launched and impacted in the middle of the group of six roaches. The lance exploded with a shock-wave of thunder as a miniature mushroom cloud rose toward the sky. Greenish white bug guts flew all around, the head of one of the victims knocked over a fellow cockroach onto its back, and it began screaming as it flopped its legs in all different directions trying to flip itself back over without success.

Moments after my victory, I heard plasma fire being discharged from Matilda's massive bazooka behind me. Several glowing red orbs flew through the air and landed about 50 feet away, leaving large craters in the ground where they exploded. Flaming puddles of greenish goo were all that was left behind.

I turned to look around. There's still too many of them! Matilda is reloading again, Avery is still playing with her Nintendo controller, Quinn is ... drinking coffee?? Oh My God! And I don't know where Kai is. Hopefully she's changing? I mean the timing is really bad, considering we're getting our asses handed to us. And Obsidian Way is a complete utter disaster! It'll probably take weeks for crews to clean this slimy mess up!

"Hey, Hikari, what's your personal record count of using that Radiant Beam attack?", Quinn asked while standing on top of an overturned bus, still holding her half empty coffee mug.

Honestly, I don't really know, I never really kept count. Like, why would I? I shrugged.

"No clue, but I could probably do it a lot."

"Okay. Ya wanna find out?", she replied with just a hint of curiosity. She snapped her fingers and casually said, "Time Waltz, Mass Area Effect."

I felt the effects of a magical bubble form around me, the slight tingling of someone else's mana interacting upon me. Meanwhile all the giant bugs appeared to nearly stop all movement. Upon closer inspection, there were moving at an extremely slow rate.

"Alright, time to shine, ladies ", Quinn said, taking a sip from her mug.

I noticed Matilda, now standing next to me lower a pair of darkly tinted sunglasses. She cocked her bazooka and took aim, squeezing her left eye shut.

"Now it's time to have some fun.", she said quietly, and just for an instant I saw the corner of her mouth turn upward.

"Three-thousand-eight-hundred-fifty-seven targets locked on. Standing by.", Avery said, her thumb hovering over one of the two red buttons on her ancient controller.

I looked over the battlefield and now noticed that hundreds -- no probably thousands of the cockroaches were painted with a crimson red hue.

"Your spells auto-target?", Kai asked rhetorically, appearing from out of nowhere, wearing a freshly ironed button up shirt, complete with a royal blue neck tie. Like when did she have the time to iron and put on a tie, correctly?!

"Yes? Um, Kai, that shirt really doesn't match your skirt...", I replied, still concerned about her sense of fashion choices. Why am I even thinking about that right now?! Dammit, Hikari, focus!

"Okay, since you're the newbie, just focus on the enemies not highlighted in red." She replied with her laid back and casual tone.

"That should be easy! Especially since they're not moving.", I said and inhaled deeply, raised my staff and took aim. "Radiant Beam, Auto-Fire Mode....FIRE!"

One shot after another of pure light flew through the air, exploding on its intended target with the sound of low pitched flatulence, like that of a balloon loosing its air as it flies through an empty room. In fact, the air quickly turned stale with the odor of burnt methane and rotten eggs that lingered over each of the bug corpses.

Meanwhile, Between Kai and Matilda's coordinated assault, thanks to Avery's targeting, hundreds of solder bugs dropped where they stood. After a few minutes of magical ballistics exploding all across the battlefield, the fight was over. Thousands of corpses littered the main street of Eclipston.

"Ah, the sweet perfume of victory." Quinn said, then drained the last swig of cold coffee from her mug.

"More accurately, stench, Commander.", Matilda replied as she waved her hand in front of her nose.

I guess even emotionally deprived goth girls like Matilda still can't hide their feelings about unpleasant scents. I surveyed the street-scape before me and I couldn't help but pity the people responsible for cleaning up this disaster. Piles of decomposing cockroach guts and goo painted the pavement, and that goo was very acidic. The once ultra smooth roadway was now mired in potholes and resembled gravel in some spots. And I'm not even sure how anything is ever going to remove the stench! Like, imagine a dumpster filled with raw eggs that have been sitting in the hot summer sun for weeks at a time, and combine that with a legion of pissed on skunks by rabies infested dogs and last night's Taco Bell mis-digestion bathroom run at two-thirty-seven in the morning. Yeah, it's worse than all that.

"Well, I wouldn't worry too much about that, Lieutenant. I've known Dex for years, he'll ensure that his SPLAT has everything tidied up in no time."

"Splat?", I asked.

"Yeah, SPLAT. Specialized Post-battle Logistics Aftermath Team. Haven't you read the operations manual yet, Hikari?", Quinn replied, then stared down at her empty mug. "Come on, let's go get debriefed.", she turned and carefully sidestepped a puddle of steaming goo as she lead us down what remained of Obsidian Way.