Chapter 21 Arturo

We spent most of the walk back in almost silence. Neither Pickati nor I wanted to disturb Melodia and she was too busy trying not to cry in front of us to say anything back.

A part of me still wished I had stepped in and stopped the whole thing while it was still happening, but Pickati had a point. My sister had told me she wanted to handle this on her own, and she had gotten me to agree to that.

Which meant that as soon as she was better, I was going to inform her the next time something like this happened, I would be interfering. It’s not a betrayal if you tell them it’s coming.

“I messed up again,” she finally said once we were almost home.

“I saw,” I put it as plainly as possible. The last thing I wanted to do was make things worse. “You want to talk to it?”

“Not really, not now,” she groaned, “maybe later, I want to go home and sleep.” I looked up at the sun hanging low in the sky. It was still an hour or two until nighttime, but I guess it was late enough for her to pass out. Especially with how much mana she had been throwing around.

I had only tried to awake it twice and I was already tired. If Melodia hadn’t lowered her weight to zero, I didn’t think I would have been able to carry her home like this.

We arrived home to Mom and Dad watching TV.

“Arturo, where’s your sister?” My dad asked before I turned my back a little so they could see my sister on my back. From her breathing and the looks on my parent’s face, she was already asleep.

“I’m going to go put her in her bed,” I started walking up the stairs before either of them could ask me about what had happened. As we got to the top of the stairs, Melodia let out what must have been the loudest sniffle in the world. I looked down at the first floor to see my parents staring daggers at me.

I turned back to the second floor and set the still weightless Melodia back onto the bed. Pickati flew out of her bag and landed on the bed.

“Melodia,” he whispered while nudging her shoulder with his paw, “you need to drop the spell.”

She cracked her eyes open and stared at us for a second. She muttered something under her breath before dropping down on her bed.

Pickati floated off the bed and up to me.

“It might be best to leave her be until tomorrow,” he wasn’t wrong.

“Wait in my room, it’s the one at the end of the hallway,” I gulped as I thought about what I had to do first. “I’ll join you after talking to my parents.”

“Good luck,” he chuckled before flying off by himself. Lucky fox.

I took one last look at Melodia sleeping peacefully and smiled before leaving the room. I didn’t even make it halfway down the stairs when I spotted my parents sitting at the kitchen table. They didn’t even need to do anything for me to make my way downstairs and sit with them.

“So what happened?” Direct and to the point, that was Dad all right.

“We were at the park when we ran into some girls from her school. They wanted to talk to Melodia and she wanted to try and handle it alone. It didn’t go well,” I looked down at the table and fought back a sigh, “she said something that she didn’t mean, they got mad, she couldn’t say anything back, and it all went downhill from there.”

“Oh my poor baby,” My mom muttered as I noticed my father tighten his fist on the table. I never asked him about it, but I was pretty sure he blamed himself for what happened that day and its effects on Melodia. I would have told him the only person worth blaming was whoever who raised that punk, but I wasn’t about to open that can of worms.

“And what did you do?” Dad quietly asked.

“What she told me to do and what she made me promise to do. Let her deal with it by herself. This is the last time.”

I told them about how I was planning on informing her that next time something like this happened, I was going to interfere. I got grunts of approval from Dad and a hug out of Mom.

The three of us ate a quick dinner, putting a plate away for Melodia for her to eat either later tonight or tomorrow. Depended on when she woke up, which could have been either one.

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After eating, I went back up the stairs and to my room. Mom and Dad had wanted me to stick around a bit longer, but I told them I was a bit tired and they let me go. And like I expected, Pickati was nestled on top of my desk.

“Took you long enough,” he smirked as I took a seat in front of him, “so, you want to try getting your magic going again?”

“Sure why not,” I sat back and tried to relax my body. I had done pretty well back at the abandoned training ground. Pickati had let me know that I had been making good progress before we had been interrupted by the doll attack.

We spent a good portion of the night trying to reach my magic. Despite my best attempts, I didn’t quite make it before it got too late to keep going.

If I was going to awake my magic, it wasn’t going to happen tonight.

“You are making progress,” Pickati reassured me, “the oldest most people can awake their magic is fourteen. You’re a year older than that, so you awakening your magic at all is impressive.”

“Still annoys me. I want to start learning magic already,” I rested my arms on my desk and put my head down on them. “Speaking about that, there was something I wanted to ask you about magic.”

“Ask away,” I got to my feet as I walked over to the TV and started up my console, “or are you going to play a game?”

“Going to do both,” I explained as I got a controller, “fighting games have always been weirdly calming for me. Helps me go to sleep.”

“Strange, with the word ‘fighting’ involved, I would have expected the opposite,” he chuckled before landing next to me, “but if you claim it helps, then I’ll believe you.”

“Thanks, and it does,” I picked arcade mode as the character select screen appeared in front of me. My hands acted out the muscle memory to move one to the left and then hit the confirm button.

It was how I reached the slot where the main hero was. The big knight that was on the box.

I stared at the screen as the game gave me the option to change the character’s color. Normally I picked the default red color, but for tonight I’d mix it up. I went through a few of the colors until I got to the last one. It switched his red and gold for purple and black.

“How far can I go?” I asked as the first fight started. “With my magic I mean.”

I made it halfway through the first guy’s life when Pickati spoke up.

“Realistically, it’s more of a question of how much time and effort you’re willing to put into it. Gravity magic has too many facets and avenues of growth to predict how strong you’ll get,” I beat the first character and went to the next match, “but somehow I don’t think that’s what you actually wanted to ask me about.”

I let myself get lost in the fight for a few seconds before cutting to the heart of the matter.

“Will I ever be stronger than Melodia, or even strong enough to help her in the doll fights?”

The room went silent except for the sounds of swinging swords and grunts.

“No,” I gripped my controller, eating a combo that I could have blocked, “you won’t.”

“Somehow I figured that,” I got in one last lucky hit right before I would have lost, getting me to the next fight.

“You have to understand, this is a two pronged issue,” I frowned at the next fight. This was usually where I lost. “Not only are you starting from a lower place, she has the power of the stars boosting her growth.”

“And both of those together mean she’ll grow that much faster than me, right?” I blocked a hit only to get grabbed and thrown to the ground.

“To be honest, if the battle with the dolls takes long enough for you to catch up, we’ll have bigger problems to deal with,” I frowned as I got kicked up against the wall and took a super that brought my life to zero.

I leaned back as the words ‘game over’ filled the screen. The option to continue appeared right below with a countdown starting at ten.

“If you had to guess, what will I be able to do by the time this is all over?” I clicked the button to rush past the countdown, the announcer saying all the numbers in succession.

“Well, I would say reaching the level Melodia is at now without the power of the stars would be a realistic goal,” I was sent back to the character selection screen. “You might be able to pick up a few tricks that she doesn’t have, but that’s not the most likely outcome.”

“I see,” I glanced over the roster as my eyes fell on one character in particular. Not the hero, but one of his friends. A supporting character that got a few hits in before the hero came in to save the day.

I picked her this time as the fights started again.

I actually went further with her than I had with the hero. In fact I was pretty sure I made it closer to the final boss than I ever had before. There was something about her moveset that felt more right for me than the hero’s ever had.

“Pickati,” I got up and placed the controller down on the stand next to the console before powering it off, “I want to give awakening my magic one last try before I go to bed.”

“Understood,” I sat down crossed-legged on my bed as Pickati floated in front of me. I closed my eyes as I felt the now familiar sensation of something reaching into the deepest part of my soul for my magic.

As the magic came to me I slowly brought my hands up and pictured myself trying to hold it. It appeared in my mind, a pale orb filled with jumbled images.

I reached my hands towards it and braced myself from the deluge to come. I crossed the line and was almost overwhelmed by the flood of memories erupting out of the orb. The first time my dad had let me drive the car on a road trip, my mom helping me practice for my first talent show, Melodia and I playing at an arcade for the first time. All of them coming at me like a waterfall.

The first time I had tried to do this, I had gotten lost in the memories and failed to awaken my magic all the way. Not this time. I turned away from the individual memories in favor of taking them all in as a whole. I focused on the warmth and comfort the memories provided as they merged and became a new sensation. The feeling of welcoming back an old friend.

I fully wrapped my arms around my magic as I brought it closer into myself. With one final push, I melded with it. The flooding subsided, and in its place was a strange churning, like water in a whirlpool.

I opened my eyes as I felt a rush of power going through me. Pickati was giving me a wide grin as he floated around me.

“Congratulations Arturo, you are now officially a magi,” we both had to make sure to not make too much noise while celebrating.

I went to bed that night feeling a little better than how I had when I woke up. Melodia still had her troubles and the dolls were still out there, but I had my magic.

It was small and weak, and I had been oh so close to losing it, but now it was in my hands. And I was never going to let it go again.