Ardent Dawn — Roleplayer Guild

Seras walked quietly at the head of her float, blending in with the rest of her cosplayers and basking in the cheers and applause from the crowd. Although it was impossible to make out individual words, with thousands of excited voices blurring together, the sense of awe and wonder at Tantalus’ lightshow was palpable. See, this is what happens when you ask people nicely. Granted, there hadn’t been a lot of asking involved – and a questionable amount of niceness if you wanted to be picky – but Tantalus had come through all the same. She’d never imagined that having a rival could be so incredibly fun.

From on top of the float, Charity didn’t glare down reproachfully per se – her eyes had been closed for the last 15 minutes, eyelids faintly glowing blue while she channelled her Calm Mind. But their telepathy made her disapproval entirely clear. “You aren’t going to let him have this moment, are you?” she groaned.

Seras grinned wickedly in response. “Not in the slightest.” She’d originally intended to force Tantalus out of his comfort zone, setting aside his fragile ego for the sake of the public. But a challenge had somehow been issued between them, and while outright beating such an impressive display was a tall order, she fully intended to match it blow-for-blow.

While the crowd craned their necks to watch Tantalus’ float, she surreptitiously formed another three pebble-sized gemstones from the air, dropping them into the bowl of another one of her cosplayers. All of them had deserved some gesture of gratitude for joining the parade with her, but any jewellery would have been disrespectful towards their hand-made costumes and there simply hadn’t been time to prepare personalised statuettes for each of them. She’d considered making something ornamental to mark their involvement, something that could be displayed at home once the parade was over. Something that would always remind them of their involvement. One wild mental leap lead to another, and a plan was quickly brewing.

Each of her cosplayers carried an ornamental bowl made from cherry-pink diamond – large enough to cradle in one arm and shaped like a blossoming flower, with each petal sculpted in meticulous detail. Instead of riding her floats like most of the other avatars, she’d spent the first half of the parade filling each of their bowls with pebble-sized diamonds, produced in bulk without any particular shape or form. She’d long since lost count of exactly how many gemstones she’d made, but with almost 30 cosplayers and dozens of gemstones each, the number was well into the hundreds.

Her cosplayers had understandably been rather bemused when she’d presented them with bowls. But as soon as she’d explained her plan, all of them had begun grinning conspiratorially. After all, you couldn’t pay for a chance like this.

Finally content with her preparations, Seras broadcast a message towards Charity. “You feeling ready for this?”

“I’m going to have an awful migraine this evening, but I don’t think my powers will get any more focussed. And you?”

“My cosplayers are fully armed and operational.”

Charity sighed. “You’re enjoying this far too much.” Seras couldn’t really deny that, so she settled for grinning even wider instead.

The two of them had discovered the power interaction last year, a few weeks after Seras had splurged out on a Dazzling Gleam TM to improve her art displays. Charity had been repositioning one her diamond statuettes using Psychic while Seras maintained her Dazzling Gleam on the display – much to their mutual surprise, the statuette was enveloped in a magnificent technicolour aura as the light from her Dazzling Gleam was diffracted chaotically through the psychic field that outlined it. 

Naturally, she’d begun experimenting. 

The effect was unquestionably pretty, but not especially noteworthy when used on large objects – the light-blue aura from Psychic was reasonably thin, meaning that the effect was reduced on objects with lower surface areas. An equal mass of pebble-sized diamonds gave decent results, while wafer-thin fragments worked pretty well. An entire cloud of wafer-thin fragments was simply magnificent.

There were a few major limitations once you began scaling things up, though. The first was a matter of concentration on Charity’s behalf – no matter how light each of the fragments were individually, controlling that many objects at once was an absolute nightmare. They’d quickly given up on any level of fine control or even keeping them airborne, but simply slowing down their fall was still a Herculean task – it took almost peak results from Calm Mind before the gemstones stopped falling like literal rocks, which made the whole endeavour rather impractical for all but the most important of occasions.

The other limitation was a matter of raw power. Creating that amount of diamond wasn’t an especially easy task, but getting it airborne was even more of a problem – with Charity unable to spare any of her attention and Seras conserving as much power as possible for her Dazzling Gleam, neither of them had any way of getting their ammunition into the air without outside assistance. Given that both of them had been travelling alone for the last two years, their wonderful yet impractical idea had been more-or-less shelved indefinitely. Today, on the other hand, they had almost 30 pairs of willing and exceptionally eager hands.

It’s like 18 birthdays just caught up all at once.

With a deep breath, Seras began channelling her Dazzling Gleam. Each of her cosplayers were lit in unison by a cherry-pink glow, while her own necklace and earrings shone like streetlights. Murmurs rippled through the crowd as people turned towards her float, faces lit with eager anticipation. Seras stepped forwards from the ranks of her cosplayers, heart pounding like a drum, and raised one hand far above her head. After a nerve-racking pause, she swung her arm down like a guillotine and bellowed at the top of her voice.

“Fire at will!”

Grinning maniacally, each of her cosplayers grabbed a pebble-sized diamond from their bowl and hurled it high into the air above her crowd. With a tremendous shove from her power, the sky was ripped apart by a maelstrom of gleaming diamond fragments. The crowd erupted into both shrieks and cheers at the sudden firework display, but as Charity seized each of the fragments using Psychic, all of them fell into a uniform hush. Rather than plummeting to the ground, each fragment floated gently downwards like cherry blossom carried in the breeze. But that wasn’t the most impressive part. At the interface between Charity’s Psychic and Seras’ Dazzling Gleam, the gemstones erupted into a wondrous spectrum of shimmering lights – predominantly green and pink, with occasional traces of deep pink or ocean blue. 

As her beaming cosplayers hurled more and more gemstones, the air was soon full of gently-drifting pinpricks of light. And while the strain on her power was enormous, both from maintaining Dazzling Gleam and detonating each of the gemstones, Seras had never felt more alive. None of us are ever going to forget this.

Seras led her float down the streets, the Northern Lights following in her wake.
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