Rising Shards

After Marmalade practiced some scenes with Lillia, she seemed game for our project.

“Can I have my notebook back, by the way?” Oka said. “I maybe have some diary entries in there I forgot to take out and put in my actual diaries.”

“When you say ‘take out,’ do you mean you just rip out the pages and tape them into the real diary?” I asked.

“You could just copy them over by hand.” Lillia said.

"Sometimes I do rip the pages out and tape them, but sometimes it's nice to copy them to not have any pages all weird and sticking out." Oka said.

“Why not just only write in your for real diary?” Kalei asked.

“Because I was in class!” Oka said.

“Then bring your diary with?” Kalei said.

There was a knock at the door to the study room. Iris and Maia let themselves in. The study room had a table in the center that we were all seated around, and some more chairs on the side of the room. As Iris and Maia sat down, Marmalade moved toward one of the side chairs.

“Marms, where are you going?” Kalei asked.

“Uh, I just…I dunno.” Marmalade said. “I can leave if you want.”

“Stay, you’re part of this!” Kalei said. “I mean, if you wanna go, you can leave.”

“This is off to a great start,” Iris said.

“Apologies,” Lillia said. “I was hoping we could maintain some level of professionalism here.”

“I’m plenty professional.” Kalei said.

“So what’s the deal here? You guys hiring?” Iris asked. “I could use some money if this is a paid gig.”

“Just for fun,” Lillia said.

“Hearing that from you is so weird.” Iris said.

“I’m plenty fun.” Lillia said.

Lillia pitched the premise to Iris and Maia. Since the two were there for our AU brainstorming session, they weren’t too hard to convince to join, though Maia immediately refused to act, preferring to stay on the production side.

“It is kinda weird that like with the free time we have without club that we’d basically be doing what we were doing in the club.” Maia said.

“Yeah, but not having to do dumb school commercials and do our own stuff instead is so much cooler.” Iris said. “I think we can come up with a better business than book publisher though.”

“But…Raina books…” I said, remembering how our office AU ideas had us working at a publisher that puts out Raina Starlight books.

“Maybe we can be an office that handles like interdimensional…demons or something.” Iris said.

“Or we’re the interdimensional demons.” Kalei said.

“That could be very interesting.” Lillia said, writing that down.

“And we manage the…” Kalei trailed off, looking out the windows at the back of the study room. “Crap…”

“What is it?” Oka asked.

Kalei pointed to a group of students from Wildfire Hearts walking around. “Pretty sure I saw Risa in there. Don’t think she saw me, though.”

“Have you written back to her?” I asked.

“A bit…” Kalei said. “But I dunno if I’m ready to really talk to her in person yet. And I dunno if I want someone I’m not even fully ready to talk to yet in the know about our project here.”

“What’s the deal with you and Risa?” Iris asked. “And who is Risa?”

“Risa’s my old friend,” Kalei said. “Then she dropped me when she found out she was famous. And then showed up when I was all kidnapped in the void last weekend. And now she’s at this school. Part of the reason I’m so in on this video deal is that it’ll take my mind off of her. And…other things.”

“Maybe discussing some ideas character ideas will be a good next step,” Lillia said. “Iris and Marmalade, do you have any ideas for who you’d want to be?”

“I wanna be an assassin,” Iris said. “A cold and calculating warrior sent to attack everyone at the demon office for some reason.”

“Oh damn, can I also be an assassin?” Kalei said. “Like me and Iris storm in wearing like suits and sunglasses, and we all get in this big fight, that’d be so sick.”

“I could be a spy,” I said. “My gut says to do a character that’s like Arlit, but I don’t know if I’m ready to take that challenge on. So I'm thinking a spy like Raina Starlight in Dangerous Spy Volcano Mission.”

“Or SpyYasmey!” Oka said. “We could do the war between the demon spies and the demon assassins.”

“That sounds so cool!” I said.

“What exactly do we mean by demons here?” Marmalade asked.

“We can work out the specifics later, but certainly something hellish," Lillia said. "Morally ambiguous characters would be my preference. I think that would be the most fun to perform.”

“But there’s still prolly some good demons,” I said. “Like the spies could be good demons, I think. And then Oka could be a spy, too?”

“Or, get this,” Oka said. “We’re on opposite sides of this here war. And we gradually fall for each other.”

“Oh…oh dang…” I said.

With the demon war idea in the mix (and a desire to have an office in there somewhere because we were all oddly connected to that idea), it felt like our brainstorming really took off. We didn’t have character names finalized, but by the end of our session, we had a rough outline for our movie, with enough ideas that it could maybe become a series. I imagined that the fun energy we shared was how the writer’s room was for Tower of Hate and Love, and anything we were doing that reminded me of my favorite show had me very excited for more.