Chapter Text
June in San Diego, CA always meant a few different things: tourist season and the crowds it brought with it, the June gloom that darkened the skies and made sure those crowds wouldn’t quite have the perfect trip, and for legions of students, it meant summer vacation. Youth across America could turn their energies from books, desks and lectures to staying up late, family vacations, summer assignments, or just kicking up their heels and recharging.
For a few of these vacationers, it meant the meets were on.
There were meets throughout the year, of varying size, formality and theme, but the summer and Christmas seasons were when the most magic users were free to gather, and they brought their wondrous flying machines with them. The gliding aerodyne, known only as “gliders” to just about anyone, had taken over the world and given the common man wings, and with freedom to fly came freedom of expression. Hot-rodders and customizers landed together in any open spot to share their builds and discuss ideas for new ones.
This glider meet, taking up a previously-empty parking lot and filling the surrounding shops and eateries, had a little something extra: celebrities. It was supposed to be a little on the small side until word got around that the Star Divers, heroes of the West Coast, were in attendance. People across the country were glad that the band of eight were magic users that rocketed through the skies, saving the day every time trouble reared its ugly head, but that was beside the point. For SoCal natives, the real draw was the fact that one of them, rail-thin, dark Chicana Maria Zaragoza, ran a speed shop at only 21 and supplied the Divers with their fleet of gliders, all present.
In a sea of carlike and airplane-like planform gliders and inline gliders reminiscent of motorcycles of all stripes, they stood out as a little island with one of Maria’s personal shop specials at the center, a heavyweight planform that was a North & Poole Bristol four-seater once upon a time, and remained a flying station wagon with an aggressive, bullish nose. The smaller and lighter pieces of their work flanked them on all sides, and all eight Divers were mingling with the crowds, talking shop over their custom machines.
The other seven Divers were a few years younger than Maria, about 17 or 18, but they stood tall amongst enthusiasts up to twice their age and with four times as much experience in the air. At every corner of the meet they visited, they commanded respect. Amongst lean European exotics and their well-heeled owners were the fair Alruna Cross and Minerva Bussard, Alruna impossible to miss with her big, sparkling eyes and long pink curls while Minerva was all mysterious, jet-black hair shrouding her like a walking shadow, cool wherever Alruna was cute. The two nonchalantly discussed the finer points of exclusive machines produced in handfuls by exclusive boutiques. The striking duet of Arthemis Metaxas, a tall, ivory-haired beauty with a pouty expression and a sort of pleading look in her eyes and the sun-darkened, blue-haired Mai Pham, short and flashy with her bright dress sense and wild, perpetually-feathered hair, checking out the wild lighting jobs on some flashy sporting planforms with kanji stickers and a rainbow of anodized aluminum parts. Arthemis curled up and covered her ears when the subwoofers of a nearby glider boomed, while Mai stood where she was and laughed.
With the serious hot-rodders, amateur racers and canyon-running weekend warriors were Maria, and the remaining three Divers. Clean-cut blonde and local tennis ace Kriemhild Wiedemann was chatting with fellow sportsmen about what tournaments the local scene was promising over the summer, and if the high-G regimen of the high-performance glider scene helped her train her body at all. The short, full-figured Jessica Zhao managed to stand tall amongst her fellow racers talking about the flying the Divers had gotten up to chasing magic items and thieves from one end of the Golden State to the other, describing their flying with equal parts lurid speech and complicated hand language, using her hands as a visual aid to adequately put a face to her blow-by-blow accounts. Maria was networking, taking photos and talking parts and suppliers, and happily engaged those that asked her about what builds she was planning next, or which events Zaragoza Aerodyne was planning to challenge next.
Away from the crowds and festivities was the first Star Diver: Akina Fukuda, an elegant, bespectacled brunette with long proportions and a glamorous air of refined beauty that neither her reputation as a hard-charging party girl, nor the thin scar running diagonally from the bridge of her nose down across her left cheek could disturb. Her quiet air and apparent desire to just stand alone by the Redshift, one of the ZA customs she knew the most, were fairly uncharacteristic, but almost everyone around her didn’t take notice, enjoying the action all over the rest of the meet too much to press the issue. Her standoffish nature seemed to offset the Redshift’s curvaceous shape, less like a car and more a dreamlike catamaran shape suggesting a car, with a wasp waist and twin noses that looked like they were pulled straight from a fighter jet.
Jessica was the first to pick up on that as she finished telling her story, catching Akina out of the corner of her eye. “…could you imagine? That’s why you don’t spend so much time inverted; I thought I was gonna conk out just a few feet above the deck, and then what would’ve happened to me, right? Anyway, I’ll send you the videos; you really had to be there.” She left the group and walked up to Akina, seeing her leaning on the front quarter of the glider she brought, idly rubbing it with her hand. “Yo, buddy,” she said, greeting her with a quick wave. “You alright?”
Akina was absentmindedly looking up at the overcast skies, occasionally broken by a rip or two in the cloud cover, with the occasional glint of a star or moon. Hearing Jessica snapped her out of her reverie. “Huh?” She turned to Jessica and blinked twice, registering the look on her face. “Oh. Hey, Jess.”
Jessica walked up and put her hand on Akina’s shoulder. “You’re never this quiet when you show up to a meet. Wanna talk about it?”
Akina opened her mouth, then pursed her lips in a sigh. She thought about saying something, then thought against it. Jessica’s eyes were locked onto her, shifting bit by bit to read Akina just in case there was some tell she could catch. Akina tried to deflect the question. “It’s complicated. Like, it’s silly.”
“So am I,” Jessica said with a smile.
Akina nodded. “Okay. Ride with me,” she said. When Jessica nodded in agreement, she threw open the driver’s side door and then climbed in, before Jessica did the same from the passenger’s side. Everything closed shut around them with reassuring clicks. Then, Akina grabbed the controls, a very modern-looking HOTAS setup with a throttle at her left side and a flight stick with buttons on her right, both shaped and molded to fit her hands, and generously proportioned so she could grab them in a heartbeat. A whining noise filled their ears as the Redshift started up, its drive spinning up and cooling systems springing to life as magic energy flowed through the glider.
A presence greeted them in the form of a voice: Lone Star, a shikioji that took the form of an assistant shared amongst every glider the Star Divers drove. “Preflight check complete,” he said in a vaguely masculine, very robotic tone. “May I guide you to a destination?”
“Nah, Lone Star, I’ll keep it on manual,” Akina said, turning her head and nodding to her instrument cluster to acknowledge their phantom copilot. She looked up, and the Redshift nosed up as it lifted vertically. Finally, people took notice as this graceful white and red shape took off and got several feet above the guests at the meet, drive wheels for ground maneuvering still exposed. Akina added throttle, and the Redshift responded as their takeoff gained speed. She fiddled with a mousewheel-like input on the throttle handle, and the Redshift stopped lifting vertically and began flying horizontally, before the drive wheels were pulled in and covered by shrouds, which revealed themselves to turn the Redshift from a sleek magic car into an even sleeker flying machine. They kept climbing, and as they got to a few hundred feet up, Akina leveled off.
Jessica nodded. “Alright, we’re alone. Talk to me,” she said.
Akina banked the Redshift as she started a gentle turn. “…okay. You know how it’s summer, and how we’re all fresh out of high school, thinking about college, all that?”
“Only from riding shotgun with you the whole way, buddy.” Jessica internally noted Akina wasn’t flying as fast or as fiercely as she knew Akina liked to, but she knew nobody liked a backseat pilot.
“Colleges are falling over one another to get at Kriemhild.” Akina was wandering the skies, checking her instruments to make sure they weren’t wandering into air traffic. Gliders weren’t packing the airlanes as much as she’d thought for that time of night.
“They’re falling over you, too,” Jessica said. “I mean, I’ve seen you play hoops. Our high school’s got new championship banners hanging in the gym because you brought us there. You’ve got NCAA written all over you.”
Akina nodded. “Minerva might be going back to Canada.”
“Yeah, and?” Jessica said with a shrug. “If you’re afraid of us drifting apart or something, don’t be. You know better than any of us that wherever we go, we’re friends for life.”
Akina took a deep breath. “I know! I just…I dunno, I wish we could do something other than just wait until we’re all flying solo. Like…we’re all on vacation, right?” She banked again and turned, looking at the ground below and taking in the sight of San Diego at night. “I’d love to go somewhere over the summer. All eight of us. Nine, if you count Lone Star. To cap off getting through high school as the Star Divers.”
Jessica grinned. “You want to go on an adventure.”
“Yeah! Seriously, I want one more adventure as us. A victory lap, know what I mean? One last set of memories flying out together before we all start shining on our own.” Akina laughed and shook her head. “God, I must sound so lame! Here I am, talking about taking a road trip straight out of some stoner comedy…”
Jessica laughed right back. “Hey, what’s so lame about it, buddy? We already made it to the meet back down there, didn’t we? I could totally run it by the girls. Soren, too…”
Akina blushed. “Hey, don’t spring it on him!”
“Or did you want to go on your own trip, alone with your boyfriend? I could ask if he’s free,” Jessica slyly said, a singsong tone in her voice as she pulled out what looked like a smartphone – a Projector, a magic device that was half-smartphone, half-magic wand. No worries about signal or interference when it worked off the tiny Reel installed inside that fed it a suite of spells.
Akina turned a lovely shade of vermilion as her eyes widened and her body stiffened up. “Are you serious?! Don’t call him; that kind of thing’s private! Lone Star, go to autopilot! You have control!” she barked as she tried to grab Jessica’s Projector.
“I have control. Holding altitude and bearing,” Lone Star said. “Please refrain from physical altercations inside the vehicle,” he added, as conversationally as anything. Even if he wasn’t using a physical form, Akina could just sense Lone Star waggling his finger at her.
Jessica laughed. “Relax, relax, I’m joking! But seriously, we’ll grab the girls and see what they think.”
Akina took a short breath and grabbed the controls again. “Sure, no problem. Lone Star, I’m switching back to manual.”
“You have control,” Lone Star said, crisply authorizing a handover.
“I have control,” Akina said. “And…thanks for listening.”
“That’s what friends do,” Jessica softly said. “So, imagine what besties do, right?”
“As your assistant, I am always ready to receive your input,” Lone Star added. “I will always do with it as you wish.”
Jessica nodded. “See? You are absolutely not alone. We’re all friends, and we’ll all stay that way. So, whatever you want to do while we’re all hanging out together, we’ll do it. I mean, it sounds like you got a plan, too, so just make sure you act on it.”
Akina shrugged. “Yeah, I’ve got a plan…maybe half of one,” she said, sharply banking the Redshift and making a course back for the meet. Akina’s maneuvers got a little of that energy Jessica thought was missing. She throttled quicker, turned snappier, and with a friend that trusted her flying enough to ride shotgun, she was comfortable pushing it up.
The meet took notice when the two girls returned. The Redshift hustled back to the parking lot, and Akina whipped its tail around before she poised it for a smooth vertical landing. She got observers snapping photographs and even applauding and whistling for coming back in style. When the two Divers disembarked, Akina felt refreshed, but she still looked like she was distant, staring up at the sky as she thought about the road ahead that she’d picked. One last trip…
As Akina searched the sky, she noticed something. The skies were clearing, and she could make out black sky, twinkling stars, and a little something extra that she was sure she would have caught if it was there earlier. Her eyes narrowed, and she could swear there was a glint of very out of place color flashing in the sky. Jessica took notice. “Something bugging you up there, buddy?”
Akina nodded up to the heavens. “You see that, Jess?”
Jessica’s gaze narrowed. It took her a moment to see what Akina was seeing as the clouds continued to part. She searched back and forth, and then… “Not over SoCal, I haven’t,” she softly said.
Unbeknownst to the pair, the other Divers noticed this, bit by bit. All of them took incidental little glances up at the sky that inevitably turned into longer glances, until they were all staring. All of a sudden, without having to utter a word, the Star Divers all had the same plans later that night.
Hours passed. The sky continued to clear, the aurora intensified, the airlanes emptied, and the Star Divers took to the skies. It didn’t matter how young they were, the experiences they shared had made them all pros. From across the city, the Divers formed up, making a sort of V formation with Akina at their head, and Maria bringing up the rear. Everyone had gotten into costume, a collection of sleek, body-hugging outfits meant to easily let them slip into a planform cockpit seat or ride easy on the seat of an inline. They read more like leotards with skirts and copious decorative accessories than anything too substantial, and bad guys from coast to coast learned the hard way that they were far more protective than they looked, enchanted to project waves of energy that would absorb the force of a crash or any more intimate violence with equal ease. Everyone had a generous visor which fed them all the info they needed to fly where they needed and keep track of any targets.
“Looks like we’re all here,” Maria said to herself, her Bristol airborne and the driver’s side seat full of displays and readouts tracking the other Divers. Then she addressed the girls openly. “This is Diver Chrome; Star Divers, check in.”
Akina took up the head of the V formation, replying “This is Diver Red; standing by.” She was behind the wheel of another glider from the ZA catalogue, this one a single-seater called the Redshift-D. It looked like the normal Redshift in the voluptuous twin-hull shape, but the side-by-side compartment had been swapped out for a single cockpit that had all the language of a fighter aircraft, complete with the bubble canopy and enlarged empennage to match, perfect for slicing through the sky. Every surface had an aggressive sweep to it that just screamed speed.
Jessica was next to report, off of Akina’s right wing. “Diver Green, standing by,” she said, giving a thumbs-up and a grin while straddling her Erne, a custom inline glider from Maria’s shop with brutish, angular lines, somewhere between a top fuel drag bike and a cruise missile in its body language, and lavishly painted with a green and gold paint job of curling flames that would have made any old-school hot rodder happy to see it. She took up a posture making her lean very far forward, and she tipped from side to side as she quickly scanned the ground below.
“Diver Pink is on station,” Alruna said, adding a courteous little giggle before tipping her wings and taking up position off Jessica’s side. Her ride was another planform, a North & Poole Talladega wearing pink stripes that was modified with a cockpit like the Redshift-D’s, which only magnified the model’s all-business, race-ready looks. From the angular inlets to the diamond shapes around the wings and other control surfaces, it wore its visual allegiance to American airpower with pride.
“Diver Black, on standby,” Minerva quietly said as she formed up behind Alruna in what looked like another Talladega with the ZA custom cockpit, but the closer one looked, the more differences one saw. The little changes all added up and the black paint job were the icing on the cake, all making this masterpiece of Maria’s, the Fontana, look that extra bit more alien and menacing.
Arthemis checked in next, pulling up off Akina’s left wing. She nodded and clearly said “Diver White, on station and at your service,” stopping just short of asking if everyone was okay with that. Her planform glider, a mysterious number called the Dyna Edge, was the most advanced-looking of the bunch, a finned wedge that ruthlessly cut out any of the already tenuous visual connections to anything terrestrial that gliders normally kept up. White on top and black on the bottom, the craft looked like a shrunken down spaceplane or some kind of UFO, and promised the performance to match.
“Diver Blue, ready when you are,” Mai said, practically shouting as she swerved into place off Arthemis’ wing. She took after Jessica with a bright blue inline that took after Arthemis’ extreme wedge shape, punched up with a huge shooting star emblem. Her Dyna Arrow fit the name, looking like a booster the Dyna Edge discarded.
The last one to check in was Kriemhild, forming up off Mai’s wing. “Diver Gold, in formation.” Her Golden Swan looked the name, a single-seater planform with an elegant shape dominated by long, forward-swept wings that tapered to points and spread wide for slower flying, boasting wingtips coated in gold that made the glider shimmer as the lights of the city below reflected off them.
With all the Divers present and in formation, Maria, or rather, Diver Chrome, gave the girls a quick briefing. “Listen up. We’re going to be flying up as close to that aurora in the sky as possible. According to Diver Red, that’s been covering the sky since the clouds parted. I don’t know about you, but an aurora being visible this far south doesn’t seem very natural. Get as high up as you think you can go, then start sensing for any magic you can. Call out anything you think is really out of place. If that’s trouble knocking, we’ll be the first to greet it. Any questions?”
A chorus of “no’s” and “negatives” greeted Diver Chrome. She nodded and then gave the order. “Okay, if there’s no objections, then…Star Divers, commence mission!” With Diver Chrome slowly gaining altitude behind them, the other seven Divers pointed for open sky and roared into the heavens. None of them worried about the altitude or speed – their costumes’ interlocked systems of enchantments made sure they could operate even in a vacuum if they had to. The girls naturally paired up into flights, the one in the rear covering the one up front. Diver Chrome watched as Diver Green covered Diver Red, Diver Blue covered Diver White, and both Diver Gold and Diver Black covered Diver Pink.
Diver Red watched the numbers on her visor-mounted display climb as she accelerated. She was gaining speed and altitude as she went nearly vertical and hurtled towards the kaleidoscopic display filling the sky. Once up there, she didn’t see much of anything, simply seeing more aurora where there really shouldn’t have been any. To try to cover a wider area, she began zigzagging by pulling S-curves, one after the other, hoping to run into something with Diver Green on her tail. A few minutes of this passed, and Red could see from her sensors that the other Divers were having similarly rotten luck.
Red decided to put her head together with Lone Star. “Lone Star, can you analyze your sensor readings from once I got to altitude?”
There was a moment of silence as Lone Star crunched some numbers. Then he reported his findings across the Star Divers’ whole comms network. “Anomalous output of magic energy has been detected from the start of maneuvers to this moment. Ambient energy expended is on average 277% higher than reading over the last 14-day period.” Another pause, as Lone Star ruminated on that data. “Heightened energy emissions appear to have no impact on environment or flying conditions. Continue mission at your discretion.”
“Thanks for that, at least. What about a point of origin; you got one of those?” Diver Green asked.
“Negative. Signal appears to be scattered across a segment of sky roughly analogous to the San Diego area.”
That bugged Diver Green, who decided to take another tack. “Hey, Chrome, getting anything on your long-range sensors?”
Diver Chrome looked at her readouts, checking all sorts of factors simultaneously and studying them all with a furrowed brow. She read maps giving her readouts on the sky that came back to her as splotchy graphics, blue where things were as normal and orange where things weren’t. She looked at the orange spots giving her a shifting Rorschach test of the skies above. “Nothing Lone Star’s not already saying, Green. All I can tell is something up there’s not right. There’s energy readings scattered all over the sky.” Something in her tone sounded reserved. She was stumped and everyone could feel it.
“If the source of all this is really up there,” Diver Black said, sitting back and rubbing her chin with her thumb and forefinger. She watched and followed along as Diver Pink nosed over and leveled off, effortlessly following her up and guiding herself into place with just one hand on the controls.
Diver Pink shook her head. “I don’t know, if something got to the ground, don’t you think we’d have seen it come down?”
“What, at the meet?” Diver Blue was about to dismiss the idea when she looked at Diver White ahead of her. “…actually…that doesn’t sound like such a crazy idea. It’s not like we were all stargazing until Red and Green came back. We were all hanging out for hours, and there were all kinds of distractions to keep our eyes glued to ground level.”
“So, something could have touched down where we wouldn’t have been able to detect it,” Diver White said, searching the skies. “Could someone check down at ground level?”
Diver Pink started rolling for the ground. “Black suggested it; I’ll check it out. Gold, Black, come with me.”
“Diver Gold, wilco,” Gold said as she banked after Pink.
“Understood,” Black replied as she did the same. The three-glider element dove quickly for the ground, and the three Divers noticed they were flying out towards the ocean, and sharply turned to follow the shore.
Diver Pink looked behind herself and saw Black and Gold tightly chasing her, like they were slipstreaming her and meant to do some kind of brazen overtake. “Hey, guys? We should spread out. I don’t want us to miss anything.” She saw them split up to her satisfaction, Diver Gold taking up position over a nearby seaside highway, and Diver Black flying out to sea, silently cutting over waves like a moody nocturnal bird. Pink flew right on the shoreline, at the point where sea met sand.
For her part, Diver Pink’s thoughts turned from the mission to how lonely and eerie this witching hour was. She slowed down to make sure she didn’t just blow past anything suspicious, and thoughts filled her head. It wasn’t like anything else felt wrong atop the weird aurora and elevated magic energy in the air, but the fact something was wrong at a time when San Diego just felt like it was as asleep as it was ever going to get weirded her out. The roads were empty, the street lights were watching over nothing, and the other lights that were on at the seaside were seemingly there just to remind people that this part of the world was alive. Light and electricity were like a city’s heartbeat, and there was no denying that even the heartbeat of a normal person was still creepy to listen to. For a moment, Diver Pink wished that trouble had at least decided to strike in the middle of the afternoon, or right after breakfast, or something like that. The Talladega seemed to agree, its control surfaces twitching and its drive and coolant systems rumbling. It was a machine not designed to fly slow, and even if it could hover just fine even at a standstill, it flew as if resentful of the idea, subtly begging Diver Pink to pour on the throttle again and go fast. She couldn’t answer, not yet, and that only ratcheted up the tension for her.
Then her thoughts were suddenly filled by something else entirely as her sensors started barking at her about something else. It was filtering into her cockpit as audio, and the longer she listened, the more concerned she was. She was about to answer the ‘Dega’s wishes and go tearing forward, but reason grabbed her at the last minute and she called it in.
“G-guys? GUYS.”
Diver Black was the first to respond. “Diver Pink? You alright?” She banked a little for the shore, ready to turn that into a swerve towards Diver Pink if she was really in trouble.
“I’m picking something up. Listen to this,” Pink said as she broadcast what her sensors were picking up. Everyone paused, practically holding their breath as they processed what Diver Pink was beaming to each of them.
Dumbstruck silence was broken by Diver Red. “…music?”