Chapter Text
Frankly, our city would classify Rui’s garage as a fire hazard. Probably several fire hazards, now that I think about it.
“Rui… your toaster is moving again,” I refer to the thing that could barely be called a computer with my gaze.
“That means the upgrades were successful, Nene, don’t be so negative⁓!”
The… toaster —I said, I refuse— hums proudly on the desk before us.
Tsukasa points at it dramatically from where he’s sprawled across the floor, “behold! Humanity’s future!”
“The future sucks,” I mutter under my breath.
Emu gasps, “don’t say that in front of toaster-san! You’ll hurt his feelings!”
I hear Rui laugh quietly beside me while his fingers still fly across his keyboard. It’s annoying... but not in the way you think, it’s annoying because Tsukasa keeps staring at him when he thinks nobody notices. And by ‘nobody,’ I mean everyone notices, and neither of them will ever do anything about it. Cowards.
“Canary-san⁓”
I blink as Rui’s voice pulls me out of my daze. “Huh?”
Rui tilts his head towards my screen, “the pathfinding’s breaking again.”
Right, the game… focus, Nene, focus.
I scoot my chair closer, bumping into him as I lean over the keyboard. Onscreen, the enemy AI walks directly into a wall. Then… continues trying to walk through the same wall over and over. Relatable behavior, not gonna lie.
“You tied the aggression scaling to the wrong variable…” I tell him. Why did I accept his help again?
Behind us, Emu suddenly flops upside down off the couch, “Nene-chan! Tell me about the pink one again!”
“The villain…?”
“The pretty one!”
Tsukasa points accusingly, “you only like her because she flirts seductively… you’re getting manipulated by a fictional woman!”
“But she’s sooooo charismatic!!☆”
I sigh and swivel in my chair, “okay, so. Pink’s kind of the... emotional manipulator character? She’s elegant, seductive, really persuasive…”
“She weaponizes affection,” Rui adds pleasantly.
Emu clasps her hands, “SHE’S SO COOL!! ♡”
Tsukasa crawls closer across the floor until he’s leaning against Rui’s chair like a Victorian man dying of heartbreak… o-or the Black Death.
“You still haven’t explained why they’re color-coded though…”
Rui ignores him completely… Which would probably be more effective if he wasn’t absentmindedly playing with Tsukasa’s hair while continuing to code one-handed. Tsukasa freezes, clearly realizing it three seconds later.
…Unbelievable, this is UNBELIEVABLE.
Meanwhile, Emu has migrated next to me at some point without me noticing. She rests her chin on my shoulder to stare at the character concepts on my monitor. Way… too close. Not that I care, probably. Though… her hair smells sweet, like strawberries. This is terrible for my health.
“The blue one is so cool too!” she declares.
“Blue’s barely even written yet.”
“He looks kind, though…”
I glance at the unfinished character portrait. Blue is still mostly placeholder shapes and rough animation frames, but the expression’s already there somehow. Emu is right, he is meant to be calm after all.
“He’s supposed to stabilize the others,” I explain. “Red’s way too destructive on her own, Orange and Yellow escalate each other constantly, Pink manipulates everyone…”
“And Turquoise?” Tsukasa raises a thick eyebrow.
“She’s the center!” Rui proudly crosses his arms. “The others orbit around her, because the system starts falling apart without something connecting everything together.”
I lean back in my chair as he starts yapping again, stretching my arms above my head while code continues scrolling across the monitor. Truthfully… nights like this are probably bad for us.
Tsukasa should be home, memorizing lines for the theater production he's been obsessing over lately. Emu has eight million responsibilities waiting for her at Phoenix Wonderland… since it seems inheriting a theme park is a real thing that can happen to teenagers. Rui has robotics competitions to dominate as a future robotics engineer. And I’m… supposed to be finishing scholarship applications for game design programs.
Instead, we’re here at midnight programming fictional supervillains with a computer as old as dinosaurs loudly humming in the background.
“Hey,” Tsukasa says suddenly. “What should my hero name be if I was in the game?”
“You wouldn’t survive long enough to need one,” I answer immediately.
“YOU’RE SO CRUEL TO ME.”
Emu raises her hand excitedly, “I want magic powers!”
“You already act like you have magic powers, Emu.”
“Yay!☆”
“That wasn’t a complim—nevermind…”
“Wait wait wait! What kind of powers would we have?”
Rui points lazily towards Tsukasa first, “him… something momentum-based. High speed, impact force perhaps. Very star-themed too~!"
Tsukasa stands on the couch with a proud hand over his chest, “INDEED!!”
“And Emu-kun…” he continues with a thumb on his chin. “Reality distortion through emotional amplification?”
“That sounds… horrifying,” I shrug.
Emu gasps happily, “I LOVE IT!”
“Of course you do…”
She turns towards me so suddenly our faces bump, "and Nene-chan?”
I immediately look back at my screen, “I-I… don’t know...!"
“Yes you dooo⁓”
“Nope..."
I feel her poke my cheek… That’s extremely dangerous. Rui answers for me before I can think too hard about the fact Emu’s face is still way too close, "she’d be the system monitor! The one who notices glitches first, maybe…”
Tsukasa points at Rui now. “Then what about you, mastermind?”
He just playfully grins like a feline, “the engineer behind the curtain, obviously.”
Before I can say anything, the sky starts flickering. At first I think it’s just lightning reflecting through the garage windows again, but then Emu suddenly launches herself off the couch.
“WAH!! ☆” that alone… yeah, is enough to concern me.
“What?” I tilt my head.
She points towards the tiny garage window with the intensity of receiving divine revelation or something… huh, that's something Emu would say, probably, “there’s sparkly stuff happening outside!”
“A cosmic event?!” Tsukasa gasps.
“Or a power outage…” I mutter.
Rui’s already standing by the window. There, a strange blue light outside catches across his face; a moving glow.
“Oh…” that gets my attention, Rui almost never sounds surprised.
We all end up stumbling outside in varying stages of… poor decision-making. Above us…
“...Oh my God,” Tsukasa breathes.
The sky is full of stars… m-more specifically, shooting stars. They slide gracefully across the darkness in clusters, scattering silver-blue trails behind them and giving the impression that the atmosphere itself is getting ripped open in front of our eyes.
Emu makes a tiny noise beside me and rushes to grab my wrist, “Nene-chan LOOK LOOK LOOK LOOK—”
“I-I have eyes, Emu!”
“WELL LOOK HARDER!!”
She’s freezing cold from the night air… and still stubbornly focused on getting me to look.
We end up sitting on the driveway because Emu decides standing is 'less magical'... somehow. I’m not in the mood to try and understand that. Tsukasa drops beside Rui, Emu sits next to me, and immediately steals half my blanket despite bringing her own.
Above us, another streak of light cuts through the sky. Then another, and another… It’s ethereal, it doesn’t even feel real. Like the four of us stepped into someone else’s dream.
“For the record,” my eyes follow another meteor burn across the horizon, “if aliens attack Earth after this, I’m blaming Rui.”
Tsukasa agrees, “your weird science aura would totally attract them!”
“My aura is delightful~…”
Emu giggles into my shoulder and my heart betrays me by exploding for no reason. Oh, awesome.
Tsukasa stretches his arms behind his head. “You know… if I ever get famous, I want interviews filmed during meteor showers!”
“You’re planning your celebrity interviews already…?” I ask.
“One must prepare for success!”
He says it proudly, too…
That’s kind of the thing about Tsukasa. Even when he’s being ridiculous, there’s something utterly sincere underneath it.
“I don’t want to be some huge superstar anyway… I just wanna make people feel… something, you know?”
“I think you’re already good at that…” Rui smiles without glancing away from the sky.
Tsukasa goes completely silent, which is horrifying. I turn slowly to confirm he hasn’t died… nope, just blushing. Unbelievable.
Beside me, Emu swings our joined sleeves back and forth thoughtfully. “I think making people happy is kinda scary, though…”
I blink at her. That’s… unexpectedly serious.
She keeps watching the stars. “Like, if you’re responsible for everyone having fun all the time… what if one day you can’t do it anymore?”
Oh, right… Phennyland. Future manager of an entire amusement park. I sometimes forget that Emu’s life is weird in certain ways.
Before I can say anything, she suddenly brightens again.
“But I’ll figure it out! Hopefully!”
“That’s a concerning sequence of confidence…”
Rui tilts his head back against the concrete behind him. “What about you, Nene?”
I shrug. “Games, I guess.”
“Wow, an inspiring declaration..."
“You know what I mean…!”
I do know what I mean, actually. I want to build worlds. Places people can disappear into for a little while, that feel alive enough to matter. I want players to feel understood by something I made… even if it’s just for ten meaningless minutes.
“I think,” I mumble, “it’d be nice to create something people stay attached to…”
Emu squeezes my arm. “They totally would if it’s by you~!”
Another meteor flashes overhead. This one is so bright that, for just a second, the entire street glows pale blue-white... Rui watches it carefully as well.
“...What?” I ask.
He hums absently. “Nothing.”
Liar, there’s that look again. He gets it whenever his brain wanders somewhere strange and lonely...
“I just think… it’s funny how temporary all this is.”
“The… meteor shower?” Emu lowers her voice.
“...Everything,” Rui’s golden gaze seems to have traveled to another world.
I rush to throw a crumpled snack wrapper at his face, he blinks as it bounces off his forehead, "...absolutely not, we’re NOT doing this today.”
“W-What a violent reaction…!"
“Sure, clockwork.”
Tsukasa lifts his head, “...Clockwork? You called Nene ‘Canary’ earlier too! I-I assumed you two joined a spy organization without telling us!”
“It’s from the game,” Rui explains.
“The superhero one...?”
I nod, “when we first started building the system, it needed developer IDs. We chose those just because… didn’t give it too much thought.”
An even brighter star appears at the edge of the sky and Emu points at it excitedly.
“That one’s HUUUUUGE!!”
Tsukasa lifts a hand towards the sky. “At last, the universe recognizes my magnificence!!”
“The universe is trying to kill you specifically,” I mumble without thinking.
“Sh-shh, jealousy is unbecoming, Nene!"
Rui’s suddenlt gone quieter... I notice, because Rui is always quieter right before something weird happens. This falling star burns brighter than the others, leaving a thick trail of silver-blue light across the darkness. That’s… actually beautiful. Something straight out of a very expensive movie.
“Woah…!” Emu’s smile widens like a little kid’s.
The glow washes across all of us in pulses. Brighter… and brighter.
Tsukasa squints upwards, “...is it… getting closer?”
“Everything in the sky is technically far away,” Rui shrugs.
However, the light grows noticeably larger while descending too fast. The hairs on my arms rise as I notice that the temperature shifts without previous warning.
“...Oh,” Rui’s eyes open wide.
The alarm on his tone gets everyone’s attention immediately.
Tsukasa stands first, “w-wait…”
The shadows around us sharpen violently across the street.
“N-Nene-chan…?” Emu grabs my sleeve tighter as I stare upward.
My brain takes an embarrassingly long time to process the scale of what I’m seeing. Meteors are supposed to stay in the sky, that far away place humans could only dream about touching. This thing… is enormous.
“What the hell…” I breathe.
The sound of the atmosphere itself tearing open makes all of our hearts skip an awfully long beat at the same time.
“MOVE!” Rui stands up next.
“M-MOVE WHERE?!” I snap.
The light suddenly intensifies, causing the entire street to turn white-blue. Now… people are screaming somewhere farther down the neighborhood too.
“O-Oh my…!” Emu whispers, trembling.
“INSIDE!” Tsukasa shouts.
Rui grabs my wrist at the exact same time Emu nearly crashes into my side, trying to pull me towards the garage. We almost trip over each other instantly… and then another deafening sound rips through the sky overhead.
I risk one glance upwards, one I’d deeply regret later... it’s not a shooting star anymore, it’s a burning mass of fractured light tearing through the atmosphere directly towards us.
“W-We’re gonna die…!”
“DON’T SAY THAT!” Tsukasa yells.
The ground trembles as Rui shoves the garage door open so hard it slams against the wall, but before any of us can fully move inside…
Glowing debris breaks apart from the main object like sparks flying from metal. One of them whistles through the air somewhere terrifyingly close to us.
Tsukasa turns immediately towards Rui without even thinking about it, grabbing him hard by the shoulders and shoving him downward. At almost the exact same second, Emu throws herself at me, wrapping her arms protectively around my head as she curls over me like a shield.
“E-EMU—?!”
I can’t finish my sentence, since the heat spikes so violently it's like someone opened an oven straight into my face. I hear Rui shout something, then Tsukasa yelling his name back.
The world turns blinding white, and through the open garage… I glimpse one glowing fragment tearing through the window, straight into the computer setup
CRASH.
The last thing I remember is the way the entire screen exploded into sparks.
I, Tenma Tsukasa, have a terrible secret.
Actually, I have several terrible secrets! One of them is that I still rehearse imaginary award acceptance speeches in the shower. Another is that I once cried during a dog food commercial…
HOWEVER!! The main terrible secret, the genuinely life-ruining one, is that three months ago, I got hit by a falling star and now I can accidentally destroy furniture.
T-This is… difficult to explain casually. Especially because the furniture thing is only one symptom.
“Tsukasa," I blink out of my trance. Nene is staring at me from across the fast food table, swallowing before speaking again. “You’ve been holding that cup for like… two full minutes.”
Ah, s-sure, the cup.
I feel my soul leave my body when I dare to look down: The plastic soda cup in my hand is visibly crumpling inward.
Oh no. OH NO NO NO NO—
Before Rui or Nene can notice, Emu suddenly kicks me under the table hard enough to nearly send me into another dimension. GOD, you too have to watch your strangth...!
“OW?!”
“Tsukasa-kun,” she says sweetly through clenched teeth, “why don’t you put the cup DOWN?”
YES. THE CUP.
I release it quickly, and the poor thing partially reinflates with a horrible plastic crunching sound. Nobody… says anything. Phew.
Emu laughs loudly, “h-hehe ☆! Tsukasa-kun spaces out suuuuuper hard lately!”
“D-Do I?”
“Yes!”
Nene points a french fry at me, "you’ve been weird ever since the meteor incident…”
My nervous system short-circuits, “the WHAT incident?”
Rui blinks and tilts his head, “the meteor… shower…?”
“Ah, right, that one… pfft, right, that was so meaningless I don’t even remember it!” okay, Tsukasa, nice, that was an incredible recovery!
“...I still think it’s weird you two recovered so fast,” Nene looks down at her fries again.
ABORT MISSION, ABORT FUCKING EVERYTHING.
Emu leans across the table in a way that makes her almost knock over at least three drinks,“N-NENE-CHAN, W-WHY DON’T YOU TRY MY FRIES?!”
“I literally ordered the same fries…”
“T-These are special! I… u-uh… I-I also ordered… uh… TRY THEM!!”
I slump back against the booth seat, trying very hard to act like a normal person… who is definitely NOT secretly capable of punching through concrete. Like, at all.
The worst part is that it didn’t happen immediately. If it had, maybe we would’ve understood things faster. Instead, after the meteor incident, things were normal… sort of. Well, as normal as ‘hospitalized after almost getting obliterated by cosmic debris’ can be.
I remember waking up in the hospital with bandages around my ribs. Rui and Nene had survived with minor injuries somehow. Cuts, bruises… the worst part for them was the emotional shock, forcing them into psychological sessions every week.
Meanwhile, Emu and I took the direct impact shielding them. So… yep, she was right behind me on another bed. Same pathetic state, which still sounds insane when I think about it too hard.
The doctors called it miraculous. We should’ve been hurt worse, or even be dead; that was the first weird thing.
The second weird thing happened four days later when I… accidentally ripped a door handle off. At first I thought: “Ah. Clearly I am dying.” Reasonable conclusion, am I right?
Then, Emu launched herself across an entire hospital hallway in one jump because she got excited about the nurses giving away pudding. T-That was… even harder to explain. Gravity seemed genuinely optional for her at the time.
Things just... escalated from there.
Sometimes when adrenaline hits, my body moves before I think. Something inside me seems to react automatically to danger. I caught a falling motorcycle once. Which sounds totally cool...! until you realize that motorcycles are HEAVY, and that the owner cried harder than I did.
Meanwhile Emu…
I glance at her across the table. She’s laughing at something Rui said now, with sunlight catching in her cotton candy-colored hair. Emu’s powers are… stranger. Mine feel physical. When it comes to her, things happen around her emotions.
Once, she got so excited at Phoenix Wonderland that an entire parade float lit up before being connected to power. Another time, she got upset and every stuffed animal in an arcade machine activated simultaneously.
…we do not talk about that incident. I’m genuinely traumatized.
“Tsukasa-kun?” Rui’s voice snaps me out of it.
I realize everyone’s looking at me again. Dangerous… “H-Hm?”
“You’re staring into space dramatically. Something wrong?”
…I am going to pass away.
Emu suddenly kicks me again under the table, with rosy eyes that remind me to stop dissociating, for God’s sake.
Hm... that’s the other terrible secret.
Sometimes, ever since that night, it feels like there’s something inside me listening whenever Rui’s in danger. And I don’t know what scares me more. The fact that… w-well, it happens… or the fact that Emu feels it too, when it comes to Nene.
Ah, Rui and Nene, speaking of which…
It’s no secret that hospitals are strange places. They stretch time weirdly, and make people start saying things they normally wouldn’t at three in the morning. I saw a lot of it myself, during my childhood.
And when you almost die protecting someone… it becomes very difficult for that person to look at you normally afterwards.
I remember waking up properly for the first time after the worst of it. I think… clarifying that everything hurt would be too obvious.
My left arm was wrapped in enough bandages to qualify as some kind of modern art, my ribs felt pulverized, and I’m fairly certain my soul briefly detached from my body when I tried to sit up. H-Holy…
Across from me, Emu looked exactly the same. She had bandages around her head, one arm immobilized, and so many blankets piled over her. The moment she noticed I was awake, though, her entire face lit up.
“Tsukasa-kun!”
It was… pretty disturbing, I must admit, to see Emu like that. As if I just saw gore of my favorite childhood character.
However, even more shocking than that… was seeing Rui, Kamishiro Rui, burst into tears. And by tears I mean silent, horrible crying. Some tense chord inside him snapped the second he realized we were conscious.
Rui never cried. W-Well, no, not never, he’s a human being... I think...? With organs and emotions! But... not like that.
“R-Rui?!” I had said.
Then, his shoulders shook once before he laughed. OH, SO NOW WE WERE LAUGHING, completely psychotic behavior, God must hate me so much to make me have a crush on this… thing.
“My apologies…” his voice had cracked despite the smile. “That was rather undignified of me…”
Meanwhile, Nene was standing between our beds with both hands over her mouth. Her eyes were bright red… or well, Rui’s too, as if the two of them hadn’t slept properly in days.
The second Emu reached for her, Nene started crying too. Quietly, though… seems even emotional collapse has to be soft-spoken with her. And Emu, despite looking three seconds away from disintegrating into a bunch of medical paperwork, immediately panicked.
“N-Nene-chan?! Why are YOU crying?!”
I think that sentence shortened everyone’s lifespan. Emu, oh God, you couldn’t be SERIOUS.
Nene made this awful tiny sound that haunts me to this day, and grabbed Emu’s hand with both of hers. There… it landed on me, that Rui and Nene’s only thoughts were that they almost watched us die for them.
Another thing I remember, regarding them, is the first time I felt this pressure on my chest. Just a few days after… that door handle accident.
Rui had visited that afternoon. Emu was asleep beside me for once, miraculously unconscious after spending the previous hour trying to convince a nurse to let her decorate my crutches with glitter stickers, and Nene had gone downstairs to buy drinks, meaning it was just Rui and me sitting there.
Looking back, he already seemed exhausted… t-though Rui almost always looks drowsy, I mean mentally exhausted! He kept fiddling with the edge of his sleeve while talking. Most people probably wouldn’t notice that kind of thing; well, I AM NOT most people!
He was about to leave, I recall him standing up and adjusting his scarf, “well then… I should allow you to rest.”
“Tch, fine, but return tomorrow, okay? The nurses here refuse to actually engage in a conversation with anybody!"
“I shall do my best⁓!”
And then he left. I-It was as simple as that, the door clicked shut behind him like any other day.
About an hour later, around 5:12 PM, was when my entire chest seized. Actual, horrible pain, so much that my vision immediately blurred around the edges. I’m not going to lie, my first thought was ‘Ah. The meteor injuries have finally claimed me.’
Then… things escalated VERY quickly.
Nurses rushed in, and one of them shoved oxygen at my face while I sat there wondering if this counted as a dignified final moment for a future star. Spoiler alert: no.
“Chest pain?”
“Y-Yes?!”
“Difficulty breathing?”
“OBVIOUSLY?!”
“Heart rate elevated…”
“I CAN-AH-HEAR THAT!”
Poor Emu woke up halfway through the chaos… it’ll take years for me to forget the genuinely terrified look in her eyes.
The pain only lasted maybe thirty seconds, forty at most, and then completely vanished. The doctors kept me under observation for hours afterwards, but every test came back normal. No cardiac issues, no complications… really, nothing.
One doctor suggested stress, and I found it deeply offensive, because, yeah sir, I AM ALWAYS STRESSED!! THANK YOU FOR NOTICING!!
Still, by the next morning, I’d almost convinced myself it was some weird recovery complication that probably wouldn’t happen again.
Then Rui walked into the room, like he promised… with his right hand completely bandaged. I sat upright so fast I nearly recreated the heart attack manually. Oh, you masochist.
“W-WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU?!”
“Good morning to you as well⁓”
“RUI?!”
He looked genuinely surprised by my reaction, that’s the worst part. “Ah… one of my prototypes exploded yesterday evening. About an hour after I got back home…"
Yesterday evening, an hour… something cold crawled down my spine at the connection.
Nene, who was carrying coffees behind him, seemed deeply unimpressed. “You say that way too casually..."
“The combustion was relatively minor, Nene…”
“Your hand looked like raw meat.”
“W-WHAT?!” I think my soul briefly left my body again.
Rui sighed theatrically and carefully unwrapped part of the bandages. Asking was… a mistake I made. I saw one second of burnt skin before gagging.
“PUT IT BACK!”
“Tsukasa-ku—”
“NO, PUT IT BACK! PUT THAT HORRIFYING THING BACK!”
“It truly isn’t that severe…”
Emu had started peeking over from her bed by then too, gasping in horror, “R-Rui-kun!! T-That looks super painful!”
“Only him would describe third-degree burns as a minor inconvenience…” Nene shook her head as she sat down next to my bed once more.
They continued yapping about their day… but I barely heard the rest of the conversation.
5:12 PM, huh.
Unfortunately, my dramatic internal monologue is interrupted by something soft hitting my forehead. A french fry slowly slides down my face.
“…N-Nene?”
“You were dissociating again,” she says flatly while reaching for another fry. “I wanted to see if your soul would come back.”
Across from us, Rui smiles into his drink while Emu giggles hard enough to nearly inhale a chicken nugget and make a whole mess.
Our table probably looks insane to normal people… Just four teenagers sitting in a fast food restaurant after school while two of them hide unexplainable cosmic powers from the other two.
Emu suddenly perks up, “oh! Rui-kun, didn’t you say you and Nene-chan still have your partner assignment?”
That makes Nene groan and slump against the table, “don’t remind me…”
“Ah, yes,” Rui sighs dramatically. “The educational system continues its relentless assault upon my free time.”
“You literally suggested we wait until the last minute.”
“And yet here we are, aren’t we? Visionaries, truly⁓”
Nene points another fry at him accusingly, “if you make me stay up until 3 AM fixing your formatting again, I’m unplugging your entire garage.”
“Well… If we do not leave now, our grade may perish horribly.”
The four of us eventually stand up, throwing away wrappers while Emu rambles with Rui about some Phennyland mascot’s warfare.
When we finally say goodbye to both of them… Emu freezes beside me so suddenly that I almost walk directly into her. At the exact same moment, a sharp pain stabs through my chest hard enough to steal the air from my lungs. Not even my ribs this time, straight into my lungs.
That same horrible pressure from the hospital...
Beside me, Emu makes a tiny startled noise and grabs the sides of her head, “W-Wah…?!”
The little antenna-like strands near her face are lifting upward slightly, crackling with static.
…oh, no. I already know what this means.
Across the parking lot, Rui is still yapping while adjusting his scarf, completely unaware. Nene’s beside him scrolling through something on her phone. I try to move, but the second I lunge forward, another wave of pain crashes through my chest violently, nearly making my knees buckle beneath me.
“GHK—”
“T-Tsukasa-kun!”
Emu catches my arm before I eat concrete in the middle of the parking lot. It feels like every nerve in my body is screaming at me to move towards something… someone. I already know it, and Emu does as well.
Her pink eyes snap towards the street Rui and Nene disappeared down only seconds ago, while static crackles through the strands of hair near her face. Tiny sparks jump near her sleeves as well.
“T-They’ll be in trouble!” she straightens.
“I KNOW?!”
“Then why are you standing weird?!”
“BECAUSE MY ORGANS HAVE DECLARED WAR AGAINST MYSELF!!”
My heartbeat stutters so hard I clutch the front of my jacket. O-Okay, yep, definitely not stress. Stress does not uuuuuusually come with the overwhelming certainty that your best friend —crush— is about to get flattened by infrastructure.
Emu looks equally alarmed, shifting anxiously on her feet while the air around her keeps popping with static electricity.
“…H-How come your warning sign is cute?!” I yell. “Why do you get magical spark hair while I get supernatural cardiac arrest?! You look like an anime protagonist while I look seventy years old and minutes away from death!!”
“That’s not fair, Tsukasa-kun, my hair feels weird!!”
“YOU’LL SURVIVE, MY RIBCAGE IS COLLAPSING!!”
A streetlight flickers somewhere farther down the block, and I force myself upright again despite my chest still throbbing so hard that even breathing feels annoying.
“W-We panic later!” Emu declares with determination. “Right now, we do the thing!”
Ah, right! The thing!
Listen. LIS-TEN. I KNOW how this sounds. Three months ago, if someone had told me I would eventually possess a magical transformation sequence tied to meteor-based superpowers, I would have laughed directly in their face before recommending psychiatric evaluation. And yet…
…life is cruel.
“Fine,” I sigh dramatically while straightening. “Let us once more abandon dignity in the name of heroism!”
Emu gasps excitedly. “YAYYY!!☆”
“We REALLY need to work on your reaction to danger once this is over,” I mumble as I summon the energy.
It starts beneath my skin first, flowing through my veins, and then golden light flickers across my fingertips as the pressure in my chest FREAKING FINALLY surges outwards instead of inwards.
I hear Emu laugh beside me as pink light bursts outward from her in shimmering ribbons that scatter through the parking lot like prism reflections. Her costume would be beautiful if it wasn’t attached to our increasingly concerning lives… I have to admit.
However, my own transformation crashes over me harder. The same light from before wraps around my arms in sharp streaks of gold and white, forming resistant black fabric beneath it piece by piece.
Regulus... God, that name still sounds ridiculous in my head.
Across from me, Emu spins once as her magic gathers into sparkling geometric shapes around her body. Her outfit forms in layers of ribbons and crystalline fabric, then Prismabelle lands dramatically beside me with a cheerful pose.
“…How are you making this look fun?”
“M-Maybe the sparkles…?”
“Of course it’s the sparkles…”
Another metallic groan echoes from farther down the street, so without another word, both of us run.
We turn the corner fast enough to nearly take the laws of physics hostage, and… oh dear. The street ahead looks straight out of a movie.
People are shouting, backing away from the sidewalk while a delivery truck sits crooked across the road with smoke curling from beneath the hood. One of the traffic lights sparks violently overhead, showering orange light across the pavement.
And right in the middle of all that disaster… Oh, yeah, WHO ELSE would it be?! Those two have the survival instincts of a koala!!
…Oh. Oh my God. THAT is a car. An actual entire car, about to land directly on them both.
“T-THEY'RE—!” Prismabelle screams.
I don’t really... use my brain after that. The world blurs gold around me as I launch forward, cracking the asphalt beneath my feet due to the impulse. I vaguely hear Rui shout something as Nene stumbles backwards against him. I hit the car first before it manages to crash on them, and the impact detonates through my arms violently enough that the entire street shakes beneath me…
…Oof. Cars are HEAVY. Why are they SO heavy?!
My entire body strains as momentum keeps forcing the vehicle downwards despite my grip. O-Okay, yeah, my arms are shaking and my skeleton one bad decision away from collapsing, haha, this is sooo fun! Fuck my entire life since the moment I took my first breath.
“YOU TWO,” I bark, “MIGHT WANT TO MOVE?! MAYBE?!”
That finally snaps the two shocked koalas back to reality, and Nene immediately grabs Rui’s sleeve hard enough to almost dislocate him.
“RUI, MOVE!”
They stumble backwards together, holding each other, just the moment I can let the car fall. Since fate hates me personally, the second Rui gets out of the danger zone, the pain in my chest abruptly vanishes.
“REGULUS-KUN!!” Prismabelle bursts into motion before another vehicle I didn’t see can fully crush me. Her wand’s light explodes across the street in a shower of energy as the vehicle slows in the air.
Nearby streetlights flicker bright pink as Prismabelle lands beside me and shoves her wand upwards, “NO CRUSHING PEOPLE ALLOWED TODAY!! ☆”
When they’re officially —hopefully— out of danger, I can hear Nene’s voice behind us.
“…W-What?”
…a truly incredible question. I don’t know either, Miss Kusanagi, thank you very much.
Prismabelle waves both hands excitedly, “hiiii!! ☆”
“T-That doesn’t answer anything!”
Rui’s still staring at me with narrowed eyes, I deeply distrust that thoughtfulness.
“...y-you intercepted the falling vehicle before impact...?” he squints despite the fact we all almost died thirty seconds ago.
“...mhm,” in my defense, Regulus has this habit of possessing me and turning TENMA TSUKASA into a man of few words.
Nene whips towards him, “W-Why are you talking like this is normal?!”
Prismabelle bounces slightly beside me, "we’re heroes…! -Sorta.”
“H-Heroes?!”
“...Regulus,” I fix my lower face mask. “Vigilante.”
“And I’m Prismabelle!” she chirps proudly beside me. “Magical girl defender of smiles and friendship! ☆”
“…Friendship?” Nene echoes.
Rui hums thoughtfully, “curious naming conventions…”
OH, YOU HAVE NO IDEA. YOU DON’T.
I’m spared from further conversation by the sound of laughter echoing down the street. At the opposite end of the intersection, a streetlamp suddenly explodes in a burst of sparks. Civilians nearby scream and scatter backwards as another lamp erupts beside it, showering burning glass across the sidewalk.
Standing directly beneath the raining sparks… my eyes manage to catch a woman elegantly dressed up in red. She laughs delightedly again while lazily twirling one hand through the air, making another streetlight detonate in response.
“O-Oh my…” Rui stands up.
The woman’s crimson coat sways around her as she steps over fallen debris without even glancing at it. Beside her, stands a girl with bright turquoise pigtails.
Unlike the woman in red, she isn’t smiling. Her eyes sweep across the ruined intersection with precision while taking in everything they possibly could. Her gaze passes directly over me and Prismabelle, making me feel cold immediately.
The woman in red groans dramatically. “Booooring⁓! None of these are them either….”
The turquoise girl tilts her head. “None of these subjects displays Clockwork or Canary’s resonance, Cadenza.”
My stomach drops. And, based on her body language, Prismabelle’s did as well. Clockwork and Canary…
Somehow, Rui himself doesn’t react at all, neither does Nene. The civilians screaming nearby probably drowned the conversation out before they could hear clearly. G-Good for them, good for them…
The red woman sighs loudly before pointing towards another cluster of civilians trying to evacuate farther down the block. “Maybe if we shake the city harder, they’ll finally appear~!”
Then she snaps her fingers, and three streetlights explode simultaneously. One man nearly falls trying to shield his child from the raining debris while electricity whips wildly overhead.
I can feel the fear burning in my chest transform into that adrenaline I ended up growing used to. Beside me, Prismabelle’s expression sharpens too.
Nene looks between us rapidly, “W-Wait, what’s happening?!”
“No time!” Prismabelle says immediately.
I step backwards, feeling momentum gathering through my limbs again. “You two need to leave. NOW.”
Rui’s eyes narrow. “Regulus-kun…”
“That wasn’t a suggestion, GO.”
Another explosion erupts down the street, causing the woman in red to laugh louder.
Despite the danger and the chaos… Prismabelle grins beside me, and I grin back. Somewhere along the way, near-death experiences have permanently damaged our survival instincts.
“Prismabelle,” I declare while golden energy crackles around my gloves again, “shall we commence heroic operations?”
She points towards the burning street with enthusiasm.
“LET’S GO SAVE THE WORLD!! ☆”