“Is your name really Candra?” Todd asks, sitting cross legged and at ease on the cool blue tiles. Randall has his knees up, Candra has got more of a side tuck thing going on, and Joe is rocking a seated position Todd can only really describe as a ‘Power Squat’.

The young woman is taken aback, having been lost in thought. “Is that really what you want to know?” She snaps, a little more impatiently than needed. “Don’t you think there’s heavier shit to worry about right now?”

But Todd shakes his head emphatically. “I got one single thought in my head which isn’t completely, world crushingly insane, okay? And you know what?” Todd puffs a pinched face and sucks air sharply through his nose. “I am going to cling to it.”

Candra seems to deflate a bit, but still darts glances carefully around. “I… It’s Cassandra.”

“Why not Cassie?”

Candra sicks out her tongue and makes a gagging face. “And I don’t like Cass either, and I won’t be caught dead as a Sandra, so...” she shrugs as if that answers the question.

Todd replies with a slow nod, then a faster one as it’s clear she’s got no more to add.

“We’d better find more water soon,” Joe sighs, playing nervously with one of his shin guards and not paying much attention to the others. “That might mean checking out one of these other rooms.” This grim truth shuts down the conversation for a few uncomfortable minutes, but Joe isn't wrong.

Todd’s earlier suspicion that there were other groups through the side alleys had been well received. An electrician and a dental assistant had volunteered to scout out the adjoining areas, but had quickly discovered the way through was sealed with a six foot wall made out of the same taupe stone as the squares. Vaulting over would be possible, but people generally agreed to hold off for now.

“This isn’t really a room.” Todd mumbles, checking his shoelaces again for the dozenth time.

“What does it matter?” Randall murmurs, his face turned up at the black sky and eyes serenely closed.

The clarity of word choice matters to Todd, though. “Doesn’t have a ceiling,” he insists. “It’s a plaza. Or maybe an amphitheater.”

“Amphitheater is a circle,” Joe practically whispers, absently. “Courtyard is a square.”

“Oh my God,” groans Candra. “I don’t ca-a-are,” she drones. Then as a mid-thirties aged man in a button down shirt and slacks walks past, she raises her hand absently. “Yep. U Memphis,” she chirps.

The man acknowledges her, but still stops at the group with an inquiring look.

“The insurance lady already counted the rest of us,” Todd explains. “U Memphis.”

The man nods and continues carefully to another group to continue the ongoing census.

Not being able to move has been a stressful, but necessary precaution to keep the current headcount accurate. By now, it’s clear the aliens don’t have anything particularly sinister planned and it’s amazing how fast they’ve fallen out of mind.

The latest greatest pastime of the gathered crowd seems to be griping about the administrative efficacy of their small, provisional, impromptu, volunteer government.

“Did that guy double count us?” Todd asks incredulously. Randall shrugs. Joe frowns, at attention now that he’s presented with a problem which can be fixed. Candra sighs, then kicks out her feet from under her and flops onto her back, careful not to knock her head on the stone.

“I think he double counted us,” Todd repeats, oblivious to his friends’ lack of shared urgency.

At this moment, after an hour and a half of coordination, planning, logistics and diplomacy, just when it finally appears that civilization is about to miraculously, boringly reassert itself, the subsonic churn stops.

A familiar, cheerfully ominous chime sounds through the plaza, and the hovering overhead prompt, long having overstayed its welcome, finally closes to make way for a new one.

Tutorial Guides Prepared

Custom Rewards Materials Allocated

Spawning Pixies

The calm of the crowd breaks with a rising, uncertain clamor. There are seven seconds, seven seconds for speculation, conspiracy, prayers, and cheers before the arrival of the Pixies tears everything apart again.

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It starts with a keening, metal-tearing sound from far away, combined with a warbling, electro-plasmic cacophony. People start leaping to their feet in alarm, as four bright lights coalesce in the air above the square, each over a different quadrant of the place.

That means one of them is nearly right over Todd’s head. He and his friends scramble to back away from under the light, which turns abruptly into a hole, like it was punched into the fabric of space itself. Raging, fiery energy coalesces deep on the other side of the menacingly non-Euclidean pit, and for a second, an eye-blink nano of a moment, Todd thinks he can see streamers of energy knit themselves into a skeletal body, contorted like it’s in agony as it screams into existence.

Then an amiable popping noise delivers a pretty, floating glowing girl into reality and the hole is gone.

“Whoo boy! Am I glad to be here!” The girl cheers, in a way that Todd finds irreconcilable with his traumatizing glimpse at the manner of her birth.

Gasps from the crowd, fear and wonder. Awe.

Like some kind of mix of stardust and lightning bolts, the girl suspended over their heads is made from a purple-pink-orange of flickering impossible. Her face is remarkably human, along with her hands, which are constantly active and expressive. Large sparkling eyes and a broad honest looking smile evoke an image of trustworthiness and optimism. The rest of her features are roughly defined, losing solidity and definition as they trail off to her legs and end in hazy wisps. Her hair streams out like the white blazing corona of a neutron star adrift in a lazy river.

“Let’s get this show started! You’re gonna have so much fun, I’m super jealous!” The girl giggles, then executes a tight airborne loupe-de-loupe. Against the backdrop of the empty sky, she dances like a living constellation, and sparks drift like gentle fireflies downwards from her hair. Todd stands agape with horror, unable to understand why the people below fail to move out of the way. One choice idiot even sticks his tongue out, like he’s gonna taste the little mote of energy. Don’t these people know what radiation is?

Todd shares a severe look over at his friends, then on some shared brainwave, zeros in on a sparse dozen strangers in the audience who have the wherewithal to stay alarmed. But their concern is drowned out in an instant by a gleeful chorus of impressionable, overawed voices. Caught up in the spectacle, the crowd hollers an enthusiastic welcome, which gets even louder as the other three Energy beings appear to have noticed their sister, and then with preternatural grace, shoot rapidly over to join her.

“Are these our baby Cultivators?” One of the new arrivals asks. Todd turns to Randall to ask a question about this ‘Cultivator’ word, but the sound of his voice is almost entirely muted. Frowning with concern, he looks back up at the four creatures overhead. He remains barely aware that his senses are being conditionally suppressed, both light and sound dimming for everything except the four dancers in the sky. Even his sense of touch is numb, and though his body can still move, he’s almost afraid to. Without the sense of his feet to tell him where the ground begins, a single step could be a difficult accomplishment.

“You betcha!”

“Oh there are more though!”

“Where? Oh, over there!”

The girls seem to have noticed the aliens, far on the other side of the yard. A dim illumination highlights the aliens, and they seem almost to cower. Then the light dims again.

“Instructional unit 4-D,” the first girls scolds her sister playfully. “That’s your section!”

“Aw, do I have to?” Pouts the fourth Pixie.

“You should be proud to instruct the Ishiate, sister! Their base physical statistics are thirty percent higher than the average human, and their natural raw cultivation is far more responsive to Cosmic Energy than a human too!” Two of the other girls nod in eager agreement.

“But they’re booooooring!” Wails the fourth sister petulantly. She spirals in a flashing, impossibly fast loop of a tantrum and stops just as fast. She brings up her hands in a very Italian looking finger purse gesture and shakes them emphatically. “Where’s the passion? Where’s the bloodlust? Who cares about base stats, if you haven’t got the killer instinct to use them?”

The other three girls hang immobile, smiling and silent in a supportive formation. Todd gets the immediate sense that they have allied to avoid an undesirable assignment, rather than out of any kind of real commitment to principle. But the fourth girl sighs, drooping in defeat. Then her body is overcome by a brief wracking half second of seizure, which a perceptive audience might suspect as far more painful than it had looked at first glance.

But it is over so fast that most of the humans have barely followed along, and the girl faces her sisters again with a completely new face. This time, her features resemble the animalistic alien Ishiate instead. After a soundless approval from her peers, the girl swoops off and away towards the far corner and is gone.

“Now that that’s settled,” the leader wrings her hands eagerly.

“We can begin the Tutorial!” Shouts a second one, pumping her fists excitedly into the air.

The third floats closer into view, though having not moved an inch, is somehow now holding open a large heavy book made out of the same star stuff as she is, with a sparkling silver set of reading glasses that she adjusts in a perfunctory fastidiousness. “We have a great deal of regulations to review, and we are woefully behind schedule,” she expounds in a tone of deadpan severity.

“But I don’t see the harm in bending the rules a bit,” the leader continues, splaying her hands out in a generous kind of motion.

“We are provided a certain degree of independent latitude when prioritizing the program,” the serious one admits in a thoughtful tone; her reluctance a plainly transparent charade.

“Hooray! Live fast, die crazy! That’s my motto!” Giggles the bubbly one, now literally bouncing around her sisters in excited somersaults.

“Besides,” the leader raises a finger to quiet her sisters. “Isn’t this what we’re all really here for anyway?” A sentiment the others nod at emphatically.

One after the other, the girls draw out toothy, wolfish grins like knives. Their eyes flash with a bloodless, hungry dispassion, and Todd finds himself shaking so violently his knees start to knock together.

The lead pixie stretches out her hands, and the sound and brightness bleeds back into the plaza. Distracted by a new glow on the edge of his vision, Todd looks down to his feet. A simple, solid red line runs in a wide circle that rings around him, and over to enclose his friend Randall as well.

The two young men look up from the ring at each other, and neither of them have a single happy guess for what comes next.

The pixie’s streaming hair achieves a painful brightness, whipping skyward with the urgency of a hurricane. Then she looms forward and practically snarls:

“Let’s cut to the fight.”