Chapter Text
It’s a sunny summer Saturday in Ahten City, the sky spotted over with only the occasional puffy cloud. The streets of the commercial district are bustling, filled with the clamor of performances, friendly conversations, and intermittent noises of traffic. Local Corestrike arenas are likewise filled with the noise of raucous cheering for a long-anticipated match of many fans: a rematch between Frostfire and SSR, two recently formed teams that have gathered quite the following for their impressive showings.
The day is a beautiful one. A far cry from the dimly lit, cluttered room where the supportive star of the local league finds herself. The space is filled with bubbling beakers set up across lazy arrangements of tables, and corners filled with haphazard piles of papers covered with messy handwriting. It’s not a pretty sight, but it’s a second home Era’s made in the depths of the HQ of the Ember Monarchs.
Back when the team was formed and the members’ roles established, Kai offered to include a uniquely designed room in HQ (a remodeled luxury home owned by his family) for each of his teammates to hone their skills and match his pace with the best they could offer. For himself, he set up his own small-scale arena to keep his corestrike skills up to speed. For X, they’d put together a gym area with nothing less than world-class equipment, which his phenomenal performance was only enhanced further by. And for Era, all she needed was a small area to remodel into her own personal paradise: an isolated laboratory used to practice and theorycraft her magic.
She eventually spent more and more of her time there as the days had passed by, often making use of the space as a way to get away from the extra press and recognition she’d rather not receive after her matches. Even if her teammates held some concern over her occasionally holing up in the small space for days, they never voiced it, as her plays on the field showed clear results from…whatever she decided to get up to in there. The same couldn’t be said for her friends in what little social life she had. She’d frequently receive texts from Rune reminding her to take breaks whenever he got word of her overworking, and from time to time when Juliette made a stop by to spar with X or practice with Kai, she’d make sure to drop off some extra snacks from her and Dubu for the team along with a reminder to make sure that the local witch had some.
And Ai.Mi…well, Era couldn’t blame her for the way she must feel. They’d known each other for well over a year, and since their relationship began a few months prior, the feline striker hadn’t been able to help constantly worrying over her lavender-haired girlfriend.
Any time she heard Era wasn’t properly taking care of herself, the witch’s phone was blowing up with a texting speed humans couldn’t even approach, and the other members of the Monarchs had to deal with her constantly showing up at their front door for personal check-ins. Even worse, she’d occasionally make use of her glitchy abilities–which nobody had been able to figure out the full extent of–to bypass the front door entirely, leading to some very chaotic run-ins in the lobby.
The enchantress let out a sigh and returned from her thoughts to the experiment sitting in front of her. She could worry about her lover’s overprotective habits later. For now, her biggest priority was right in front of her: a volatile, concerningly fizzy violet liquid dispersed through a few different quartz vials. Her recent trials had been on ways to improve the potency of her magics. She needed to keep the gap between her teammates and their opponents as wide as possible with the support she provided, and that was only becoming even more difficult with the recent rise of the many rookie teams in Pro League. Enemy bruisers could hold their own against X more often, and even Kai’s normally impeccable defense had started to crack occasionally under the pressure of some especially dedicated forwards. Taking it slow with her own improvement wasn’t going to help the Monarchs at all, and despite her apparent apathy, the last thing she wanted was to fall behind her team and the competition. So she found herself here, taking drastic measures.
The cylindrical beakers lined up in front of her were the result of several late nights and early mornings, each and every one a success preceded by a plethora of failed trials. Within each of these quartz glass containers was a filtered, undiluted, pure liquid form of each of her spells. Both her most common choices on the field…and a few new ones she’d thought up but hadn’t had the courage to try out yet. Shimmers of blue, pink, and magenta danced across the surface of the vials, reflecting a dim glow over the walls of the lab and Era’s utterly exhausted face.
The enchanter girl let out a long, deep, groaning sigh that filled the room with its sound. She could test what the use cases for these alchemical products were later–she’d already spent long enough simply getting to this point, and hopefully, it would prove that her effort has all been worth it. Tomorrow, though.
She would finish up this fixation tomorrow, after a nice, warm shower and a much-needed twelve-hour nap. Sleepily, she pulled out her phone and turned it on while averting her eyes somewhat from the piercing light it gave off. Taking a second to let her eyes adjust to the glare, she couldn’t say she was entirely surprised at what the screen read: a rather bleak 3:23 AM.
A smile flitted across her face, though, as she took a bit longer to soak in the wallpaper she had set on her lockscreen: an image of Ai.Mi flashing a peace sign to a camera, captured in the highest definition that Era could get access to. The day that had been taken, she’d had to concede all kinds of things to get her girlfriend to take that kind of cliche pose. At the end of it all, the result had been well worth it in her eyes, no matter how mundane a photo the pink-haired feline would insist on calling it.
“...mm?”
The witch couldn’t help a small noise of confusion, staring at the screen somewhat more intently. Shifting her phone from hand to hand, she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and returned her gaze to the display, unbelieving of what she was seeing. Small distortions, pink and blue and in the exact colors she’d expect from a certain cat’s tail, peppered across her screen. Slowly but surely, the odd artifacting across the image grew denser and more obscuring, and a weak panic began to grow in her chest.
Something was definitely wrong with her phone, and she had no idea what.
The pixels flashing bright colors in front of her only grew brighter and brighter until it all seemed to mesh into a technicolor static, and as it suddenly began to vibrate loudly, the only instinctive reaction that came to her was to toss the phone away…right into the stand housing her newly made potions.
“...oh, no–”
Those two words of regret were the most she could get out before the room erupted in a flash of light, accompanied by the unpleasant, jarring noise of glass shattering into pieces. And in the brief moment before she could shield her face with her arms, she saw the strangest sight– Ai.Mi, wholly present with vivid pink hair, cat ears, and a pair of flailing arms and legs seemingly warping out of the screen of her phone–as glass shards and bubbling magic hurtled everywhere.