Chapter 11 Melodia

It had been a week since the fight under the bridge. I had spent most of it either at school or working on the three spells Pickati gave me. The only thing of note was that I managed to figure out how I knew Rashell. She was in one of my classes, history with Ms. Calloway. Unlike Anna, she mostly ignored me during class which I was grateful for.

All of this was to say, I didn't have the time to think about what happened last week with Break.

I laid down on my bed with a can of soda in my hand. I concentrated on the can as I drained a bit of magic from my flame and formed the concepts I needed.

[Gravity.

Object in hand.

Negate gravity.]

I let go of the can and let it float in midair. I watched it for a few seconds before putting my hand right under it and dropping the spell.

"Hey Pickati. The commander dolls like Break… how close to human are they?" I asked as I caught the can and started casting the spell again. The more used to this I got, the easier I would be able to cast spells in a fight.

"Nowhere close to human," the soda can floated in the air again as I felt myself relax. "If Break's a typical example, they're as inhuman as the dolls they control. As dedicated to freeing the spirit of destruction as they can be."

"Oh," there was something about Pickati's explanation which brought something else to mind. Something I'd been wondering about recently. "About that, you said the dolls needed to cause destruction in order to free the spirit right? So far, they've seen more worried about attacking us then actually causing destruction."

"Oh I can explain that bit, but you might not like it," he grimaced as he landed on the bed next to me. The soda can came down and I grabbed it out of the air as he started to explain. "From what Break said the first time Anna fought him, his plan is to take you girls out first so nothing can get in the way of his 'fun'."

"I guess that makes sense. Can't get a lot of destruction done if we get in the way," I shrugged my shoulders. I probably should have been more worried about monsters out to get me, but I'd managed well enough on my own so far. Plus better they go for me than everything around me.

"By the way," the thought of collateral damage gave me another question, "the spirit needs to cause destruction in order to get out, but how much?"

So far in my fights, I'd managed to destroy a park bench. If I needed to make sure to not do stuff like that, I was going to have to learn how to fight carefully.

"Honestly? Don't worry about it too much," he tried to comfort me as I set the soda can down on the bed next to me. "The seal is designed to start draining the spirit if it gets too powerful. As long as the fights don't collapse any buildings, the spirit should stay at a manageable level."

I felt myself relax again as I grabbed the soda can again. I got ready to cast it again as the concepts came to me.

"This spell is pretty easy," I said to myself as I put the soda can above my head and let it float there.

"There's a reason why I told you to start with that one," I ignored the 'told you so' grin on Pickati's face and focused on getting this spell done as quickly as possible. "Look on the bright side. Once you managed to get the gravity increase spell down, getting the other two took you no time at all."

As if to prove his point, I let my hand fall away and hit the bed. The empty soda can once again stayed in place. I was about to push it around and watch it fly around the room when I heard a knock on my door.

"Melodia, can I come in?"

"Sure," I said as I dropped the spell and caught the can in my hand. By the time Arturo walked in through the door, it was safely out of sight. Not that it mattered, because as soon as he came in, his eyes went over to the desk instead.

"Weird. I thought you were on your phone or something," he shrugged to himself before growing a big smile on his face and reaching into his pocket. "So I've noticed that it's been a while since the two of us went anywhere so…"

He took out two blue and red pieces of paper. My eyes widened as I realized what they were. I shot out of bed to get a closer look, just to be sure.

"You got us tickets to Legion Arcade?" I asked as I got close enough to read the word 'Legion' on both of them.

"That's right. I figured the two of us could go. It's been a while since we've had a brother-sister day like this," his smile faded a little as he gave a shudder. "Just don't ask me how I got these."

"Sure thing," if Arturo didn't want to talk about how he got these, then I didn't care, "when do we go?"

"Tomorrow" And with one word, it all came crashing down. If the doll didn't attack today, then it would probably attack tomorrow. And if it happened while I was with Arturo… Well I had no clue how I would manage fighting it without him noticing.

You know what, I could worry about that when the time came. Tickets to Legion Arcade were hard to come by and I wasn't going to give them up easily. The dolls weren't taking this away from me, I wasn't going to let them. If one attacked while I was at the arcade, then I would figure something out.

"Sounds great, I can't wait," I told him as he pulled me into a hug. I hugged back, doing my best to squeeze him a little. Despite my best efforts, I knew he wasn't feeling it.

"Don't worry about it, you looked like you needed this," I nervously chuckled.

"What do you mean?" Did he know something? Did he find out about Pickati and the dolls somehow? Was I going to have to explain everything now?

"I don't know, you've just looked… tired these last few days," oh, I guess that was true. With the dolls and school and everything else, I had been pushing myself these last few weeks. "Plus you spend your time in your room any chance you get. And when you're not in your room, you're in the park. Going outside every weekend is fine, but I'm starting to get a little worried."

So he had figured out something was going on, just not what it was. And I doubted his first assumption was going to be 'my little sister is fighting monsters'. All I needed was another white lie to throw him off the trail…

"I'm just trying to focus on my studies. Walking around the park helps me clear my head," yeah, that was believable right? And I wasn't even really lying. I had spent the last week studying. It hadn't been schoolwork, but it had been studying.

Was I going to have to do really well on my next report card in order to avoid suspicion? It was starting to look like it. Maybe I could try that cramming thing I always saw people on TV talking about?

"Well, you still need a break every now and again," he smirked before reaching up and rubbing the top of my head, "or you'll burn out this big brain of yours."

"Hey quit it," I tried fighting off his hand, only for him to use his larger size and reach to keep it there. He kept going and soon we were both laughing together. He left me alone afterwards, leaving me wishing the doll would hurry up and attack before the day was over. If it came fast enough I'd be able to spend my day at Legion arcade worry free.

The next day I stood in front of the Legion Arcade with one doll attack still waiting in the wings. I looked up at the building and tried to guess the odds of a doll attack in the next few hours. No matter how much I wanted to fool myself, I knew the answer was near one hundred percent. All I could do was enjoy myself until it happened.

"You ready for this?" Arturo walked us into the building as I stared at the area beyond the lobby. The place where all of the people and games were.

"No, but I'm going to do it anyway," I grabbed his arm as he took us into the arcade proper.

Legion Arcade was set up just like I had remembered it. The bottom floor had all the modern arcade machines like the basketball games and the air hockey tables. All of the really big machines basically. The middle floor was where you had all the really cool games. The light gun games, rhythm games and simulator games were the best ones. And the top floor… well that was where the fighting game machines were.

My brother and I didn't go there very often. Something about me walking out of there knowing four times as many swear words as when I came in and my brother not wanting to be responsible for that. Jokes on him though, I had stumbled up there once by accident and had heard everything.

I had a full arsenal of swears, I just chose not to use them.

Normally all of these games would have required tokens bought at the entrance, but not for us. Not today at least. Because today we had tickets, and that changed everything. With these tickets, we could get unlimited plays on any game we wanted. The only trade off was we wouldn't be able to win any tickets.

And even that wasn't too bad. More than worth it if you asked me. I never got anything better than a cool pencil from this place anyway. The only machines in here which gave a lot of tickets were either impossibly hard or rigged.

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I did my best to ignore the eight year old girl walking past us with a giant bear in her hands probably worth more tickets than I had won over the course of my entire life.

Like I said, all of the games giving out a lot of tickets were impossibly hard or rigged. The tickets were practically a scam and the only real reason to come to Legion Arcade were the cool games on the second floor.

Which was fitting since the second floor was where we headed to the second we came in. Without a word between us, we made our way through the crowd on the first floor and headed up the stairs to find the game we always started with. Night Frighters was our go to light gun game. We always started every visit of Legion arcade with a trip through the haunted mansion filled with killer dolls.

The normal kind, not the ones I fought every other week.

Unfortunately we ran into a bit of a hiccup this time.

"Oh come on," Arturo scowled as he looked at the currently off Night Frighter machine. There was a paper notice on the screen informing anyone who read it that the game was currently under review by Legion Arcade for 'frightful imagery'. "Looks like we'll have to find something else."

I looked around the room, going from machine to machine. I saw a few crane games, some racing games, more light-gun games… oh that one was new. I grabbed his arm and pointed over to the machine in question.

"Oh hey is that a new one?" He echoed my thoughts as we walked over to the strange new machine. It had two booths on either side of a big sign with the words 'tank commander' written on it. On the sides of the booth were art of a futuristic tank and two people sitting next to each other in the booth playing at the same time.

"Do you want to give this a shot?" I was already inside the machine before Arturo had a chance to finish his question.

The machine had two sets of controls. One of them looked like they were for a driving game, and the other had a big joy stick. I sat in front of the stick as he came in from the other side and got into the driver's seat.

He swiped the tickets as the controls appeared in front of us. The idea was simple, one player was the tank driver and the other one was the gunner/commander. That meant Arturo moved us around and I was in charge of the map, abilities and shooting. I was more than okay with this set up as I settled in to shoot some bad guys with my tank's big gun.

The two of us dropped onto a beach as a whole bunch of little dots appeared on my map. The words, 'get to the roads' appeared in big flashing letters in front of us.

"Here we go," Arturo started the machine as the first of the enemy tanks came into view.

"Keep us steady," he nodded as I aimed the joystick until the screen lined up with the first of the tanks. I fired and switched to the next one as the shot flew across the beach. I fired again as the first tank went down.

We fought our way through the beach and into some hills until we reached the main road.

"Now what?" I heard Arturo mutter as he looked around the screen. We both jumped a little as a big red 'warning' flashed on the screen. Everything faded to black before a cutscene started.

Coming down the road was a huge tank with spider legs and turrets on its back. I gulped as I got ready to take aim.

"You have been challenged!"

I blinked as the words filled the booth and appeared on the screen. The game had been paused and on the screen were two options. We could either fight whoever had challenged us, or keep playing.

"What do you want to do?" He asked me as I switched between the two options with the joystick before finally firing on the 'fight' option. The screen transitioned to an open plain during sundown. Far off in the distance I could see another tank.

"Keep our distance," I commanded him as he turned the tank and started moving away from the other tank. Instead of being careful, the other tank charged right for us.

Were they really that dumb? I waited a few more seconds before opening fire. As soon as I did, Arturo hit the brakes and reversed at an angle. The enemy tank shell hit the ground in front of us as our shot hit them straight on.

Looked like they really were that dumb.

The rest of the fight went pretty much the same. My brother's better driving kept us alive while my slow and careful shots kept landing. A few minutes later, we were looking at a winner's screen. The screen faded to black and soon we were back in the game where we had left off.

"Oh hey, winning the fight gave us back our health," he pointed out as the spider tank cut scene played again. I glanced at the display while we still had time. Looked like we also got all our ammo back too.

The cut scene ended as the spider tank got ready for us. I gripped the joystick and got ready to wreck it. The words 'secure the roads' appeared on the screen as a health bar appeared at the bottom of the screen.

Long story short, we got destroyed.

There must have been some sort of trick or something we missed, because we could barely hurt this thing before getting blown up by the missiles on its back. We marched out of the machine not sure how to feel about the whole thing.

"Well that was fun," Arturo chuckled as he stretched his legs out a little.

"Until it wasn't," I added as I noticed two girls approaching us from the other booth connected to ours.

"Oh hey, were you two the ones in the other tank?" It looked like we weren't the only sibling pair out here today. In front of us were a pair of sisters, one around my age, the other one around Arturo's age.

Both of the sisters were pale white with blond hair and blue eyes. The older of the two had her hair down to her back while the younger one had hers in a pair of pigtails held up by blue clips and wore glasses. She also looked a little familiar for some reason.

"You got us good. Looks like I'm no good as a driver," the older one laughed, getting a grin from my brother.

"Why did you keep charging right at us?" Arturo asked as the older girl kept laughed.

"Hey charging forward is the best way to live life," the older girl smirked, her cheery attitude infecting the atmosphere.

"But maybe not the best plan for a tank battle," my brother was starting to get a smile on his face. It wasn't a big one, but I raised an eyebrow at it anyway. Maybe I'd tease him about it later.

"Especially when you have such a good gunner," she laughed as she glanced over at me. I gulped and moved back a bit. Please don't let this go badly, I was having a good day so far.

"Yeah you could say that," he seamlessly moved in front of me to block me from view. "My name's Arturo and this is my little sister Melodia."

"Nice to meet you. I'm Wendy and this is my own little sister Claire," Wendy grabbed the girl in question by the shoulders and pushed her forward. She looked less than pleased with this. She frowned at my brother before glancing back at me. There was a little look of recognition in her eyes, and there was no way that was good news for me.

"Oh hey, you're that girl from first period English right?"

Wait… did I know her? She sounded like she was in my class. Why does this keep happening to me?

And now everyone was looking at me. My eyes bounced between Wendy, Claire and my brother. Each of them had a different look on their face. Wendy looked a little confused. Arturo looked a bit worried.

And Claire was giving me a glare. The exact thing I didn't want to see today.

I turned around and walked away. Was it a good move? No. Was it my only move? Yes. I kept going and made it all the way over to the stairs which led to the first floor when he caught up to me.

"You okay?" He pulled me into a little hug as I let myself calm down a little. "I haven't seen you get that bad in a while."

"It's worse when someone's mad at me," I admitted. "I don't really remember a lot of the people in my class. So when she said she did, I didn't know…"

"You'll be okay," he tightened his hug when I stopped talking. "Do you want to leave?"

I leaned down and shook my head. I wanted to stay and play more games and put this whole thing behind me. I wanted to not have to deal with all this. I wanted to go back to being the kind of person who could talk to other people.

"Okay," Arturo brought me back to the present. "It's getting kind of late, do you want to get some lunch now? Maybe play more games later?"

"That…" It took a second for my voice to come back. "That sounds nice. What are we getting?"

"I think I saw a Five Dudes in the mall outside. You okay with burgers and fries?" Well, at least I'd get a burger out of all this.

"It's okay," I told him as we started heading downstairs. Halfway down the stairs, I felt something rustling around in my bag. I froze as I felt three tugs in my bag, one after another.

Rustling followed by three tugs was the signal Pickati and I had agreed on before we left.

The doll had appeared.