Death drags its spindly fingers against the hull of my ship, but death shall have no dominion. Even as we crash down to the Earth like an angel cast out of heaven, death is too weak to overcome us. It chokes the moon, blights the stars, envelops this planet in something darker than dark. As I struggle to regain control of my ship, I am made keenly aware that I am dying every second, faster than sleight of hand. Like all mortal things I am browning at the edges, my strength waning, infinitesimally. I can hear each grain of sand fall from the hourglass of my life, the hands of time ticking softly. There was a time when Celestial Beings lived for billions of years. Death took a blade to our lifespans; feeling generous, it allowed us to keep 30,000 of those years.

I have come to terms with my death a long time ago. I need not be reminded of it. I am always dying, every second. It is part of the deal I made when I dared to live.

With my thoughts, I steer the Aphelion through apocalyptic blasts that do not necessarily destroy, rather, they bring an end to what they come into contact with. Reality shudders. Time lapses around us like a skipped heartbeat. We are facing an extraordinarily powerful being with the ability to, without exception and without permitting any resistance, end the life of anything living. I recognize it, because its abilities are my own.

Focus is critical when piloting Spectrian vessels. The Aphelion and I are mentally linked, our bond like no other. It is an unbreakable covenant, a pledge, an unyielding power that Death seeks to bend. Though our fall is turbulent I remain stationary, a testament to my unparalleled balance. The Aphelion is only as strong as I am.

I glance at the panels that rush by me, the Aphelion’s emergency signals blaring in my ears. I smile—a reassuring, open smile as bright as a quasar. When the Aphelion sees the flash of my teeth, it concludes I am in no danger. Death and I are intimate. I can feel the shock of its desire in my shoulder blades, it will not let me go quietly. It wants to humiliate me, demolish me. My hip moves towards it a little, drawn to its irresistible pull. Its hands are wrapped tightly around my neck, my teeth deep in the sinews of its heart.

“Are you lost, Death?” I finally ask. To the Aphelion, my voice is as familiar as the star ocean, soft and deep as summer mud. “Of course you are,” I continue, exhibiting the poise and restraint the Aphelion knows me for. Even Death must be shown respect, it would be remiss of me to treat it with nothing less. “I needn’t ask. This is Earth, a third world planet. Your home is elsewhere. Begone.”

I cannot stop our inevitable impact but keep my promise: death will have no dominion. Sure as the day follows the night, spring follows winter and proceeds summer. Hibernating creatures will crawl out of their tombs and move and mix and mate again. Trees will blossom and the birds will sing and the earth will provide a plentiful bounty for all. Life overcomes death, time and time again. “Prepare for an emergency touchdown, Aphelion. My dearest girl.”

Death and I are two sides of the same coin. It knows I am a being of unhinged slaughter beneath my self-possession. When faced with an enemy that cannot die, I can, at the very least, inflict irreparable damage on them. This includes the conceptual and intangible, the immortal and ‘unkillable.’ It is not our crash-landing that will wreck the Aphelion beyond repair, but Death itself. It eliminates the bonds that hold the Aphelion’s molecules together, dissolving large chunks of my ship into nothingness. The de-atomization of my ship creates dangerous levels of instability in the area; Death has effectively turned my ship into a weapon unto itself. Our impact will not kill me. It cannot kill me.

Having my atomic bonds dissociated, however, will. 

Cosmic magic stirs in my veins, hiding the Aphelion from even clairvoyant sight. Next comes the silencing of our touchdown, then the separation of the site of impact from the rest of the world. Ours is an extraterrestrial collision, a major impact event that releases the energy of several million nuclear weapons detonating simultaneously. Had it not been for my reality warping, the Earth would have been destroyed thrice over. Had the Earth been a sentient planet, it would have been thankful for my ability to react quickly and effectively. 

“Aphelion, may I ask our location?” I ask in a low, pleasant, soothing voice. She is not particularly fond of crash landings, but she is also impervious to all forms of physical damage. I, too, possess the same imperviousness. I do not feel physical pain, and am immune to bleeding or loss of limb. It is not the impact that has rendered the Aphelion unable to function as it should, but Death’s attack. In the condition she is in now, the Aphelion is not fit to sail the cosmos.

“Kita, one of the eleven wards in the city of Kyoto, in Kyoto Prefecture, Japan.”

“Excellent. Time?”

“04:00 Earth time.”

More panels appear, providing images of the surrounding area. Climbing rose arbors frame paths to stunning weeping willows and blooming fruit trees. A series of blushing plants swirl around the sidewalks, Japanese maples and green ginkgo trees that have stood for decades guarding wooden homes adorned with flowers. We have landed in the middle of a slumbering neighborhood almost too stunning for words, a sanctuary of bird and butterfly life that offers both beauty and bounty, thriving with love.

“The lion kills not, the wolf snatches not the lamb. Unknown is the child-devouring wild dog. A place of everlasting joy without death.” The Aphelion and I have kept this place precious. When I finally step foot out of my ship and into the proper dimension, I am immersed in nature.

As any astute Advisor would do, I scoured the archives for anything Earth-related before embarking on this retrieval mission. There is nothing particularly interesting about the Earth, no reason why Death should be here in person. I can only assume it is here for the same reason I am: the Summoner of Time, Spectra’s General, a cosmic weapon more destructive than words can express.

It is to be a race, then.

After clearing the Aphelion’s wreckage and assessing the damages, I tap my index and forefingers against the side of my head, activating my communicator. My communicator—in a flash of light—projects my comrade’s image on a large, floating screen in front of me. It seems D’ivoire was expecting my call, wearing a smug expression with his legs propped up against his desk.

“Well, well, well,” he begins, thrumming his fingers and leaning his head against his freehand. “What do we have here? A shipwrecked Spectrian in dire need of assistance…?” His eyes are a warm shade of brown, his lips full, and he has always been a sharp-dresser. He is as popular as he is handsome. I am not surprised he continues to leave me breathless despite having grown up together.

“I… appreciate your humour,” is my response, albeit clumsily given. “Was it the debris that tipped you off?”

“You already know. I’ve never seen her so beat up. You okay down there? I know you love that thing more than you love your own life.” He pauses, smiling faintly. “Sorry, didn’t realize I called her a ‘thing,’ caught it too late. Send my apologies to the lady, would you? Think you can fix her, or do I have to come down there and save you?”

“It’s peaceful here. Quiet. A trip to Earth is the vacation you never knew you needed.”

“Alright, well…” He throws his arms behind his head and swivels around in his chair, stopping only when he has finished his drawl. “It’ll probably be a couple of Earth days before I can get you. Boss man’s gonna want a report of your situation before I leave, so keep your communication channels open. I’ll watch your movements in case you need some backup ASAP and—in that case—maybe the Summoner there can get us to you pronto. You never know, she is a prodigy and all. Her magic affinity might have something to do with miracles.”

“The Summoner may end up saving us both. I didn’t crash the Aphelion, mind you.”

“Find that hard to believe, thing’s busted.”

“When your ship meets the same fate and we are both stranded here, we can discuss the legitimacy of my claim then.”

“Sounds good, hopefully you’ll have yours fixed by the time I get there.”

I have no doubt that he will save me, and repair the Aphelion himself if he has to. This is a man who is driven and goal-oriented contrary to the casualness he carries himself with that values success in his missions, in which he is more invested than anything else.

I made the acquaintance of D’ivoire when we were waiting to be interviewed by the Academy for admission. We were young, a little over five-thousand-years-old, with one dream at the forefront: to become the next Advisor, chosen out of thousands of Celestial Beings by the Commander. Before D’ivoire marched through those doors and told the officers why he wanted to become Spectra’s Strongest, he told me, a stranger at the time, his reason.

I could not understand why someone would subject themselves to ten thousand years of training just to ‘see what is out there.’ It was absurd, I thought, he could pick up any Spectrian book and read about distant planets and the universes that house them.

I could not, in good conscious, watch someone throw their life away for something so frivolous. He could easily replicate the experience of going to another world, of being on another world in the simulations he had access to even as a child. Even further, he could have asked the previous Advisor about what it was like to journey the cosmos. While Advisors are forbidden to part with what Spectra considers classified information, regaling a child with colourful accounts of warfare would not have been breaking the law.

My thoughts are interrupted by a heavy sound, like that of someone collapsing. My guess is proven half correct when I look down and find a girl of fourteen summers laying on her back, dazed from what looks to be a sudden impact.

Because of the aforementioned, I feel confident in my assumption that she fell out of the tree in front of us. There is further evidence to support my claim: the tree’s blossoms are still falling, its limbs are still trembling from being climbed ( and presumably being knocked into during her descent ), and her buns are disheveled, riddled with petals. I smile, chuckling at the absurdity of this situation. To think the Earth has greeted me with a girl falling out of a tree, it is nothing short of amusing.

I did not think anyone would be out at this hour. It is much too late for a girl her age to be roaming about all by her lonesome.

My kindness has served me well as an assassin, and I have never believed it to be a weakness. “You make the concrete look comfortable,” I tease. I am long overdue for rest and relaxation myself. “Just how long of a nap will you take?”

Her response is a physical one. She takes on a childish expression, lips aquiver, brows coming down hard atop her eyes as she shuts them tight and mumbles. “Is it naptime already…?”

“Not quite. It is four in the morning, an odd time for a little girl to be roaming the streets.”

“Four in the—” Now she realizes I am here. Her eyes are like my own, a clear sign of her being Celestial. They are radioluminescent, glowing fiercely against the darkness. That she is of my kind there can be no doubt, the cause of her eyes’ frighteningly-bright glow due to the magic in her body reacting to mine. She is certainly the Summoner I have been sent here for.

Jolting up into a seated position and supporting her weight on the back of her hands, she crawls away from me. Her expression is one of horror, pointing at me once she has decided she has put a reasonable amount of distance between us.

This girl is awfully dramatic, retracting her hand and clutching her chest as if I’ve committed some horrible crime against her that has left her shaken. “You saw nothing!” she yells, waving her hands around indignantly, “you don’t know I’m here, and you’re definitely not going to tell my mother about this!”

“Lively no matter the hour. Is it reasonable to assume you are a morning bird?” Perhaps ‘bird’ is not the best animal to compare her to, what with her falling gracelessly out of that poor tree.

“Yes…?” She is trying to figure out if what I said was a trick question. It was not. I was merely speaking in jest. “—I mean no!” comes her vehement addendum. She decides to lay flat on the ground again, closing her eyes and sighing wistfully as she does so.

I wonder what she hopes to accomplish with suddenly deciding to stay silent. I will not leave, especially when I have reason to believe she is the Summoner I seek.

Eventually she understands that she will not be rid of me that easily and folds her arms behind her head. “Are you sure you’re not plotting against me…?”

“Merely curious. Speaking of curiosity… How is it that you managed to climb this worse for wear tree?” I do not remember the tree being this sickly a few moments ago.

She opens one eye to give me an incredulous look. “I don’t follow.”

“This tree is ill-suited for climbing.”

“Can’t be, climbed it.”

“You have the ability to thwart the impossible, the eldritch, the beyond comprehension, the divine and the unimaginable. Scaling a dying tree should be nothing to you.”

Again she relaxes herself, sprawling out in the same manner a lazy cat would. She is being defiant on purpose. Her long pauses, her flippant body language, and her refusal to look at me are all actions meant to rile me into retreating. She will find that I am of a phlegmatic temperament and, unlike her, am not quick to anger.

“I didn’t hear a word of what you said. …Except that last part.” Meaning she did not understand the mantra I spoke, but does not want to admit that. “See, normally I would chalk you up to being some stranger out of your mind, but.” But? “It’s four in the morning. You’re dressed like a Victorian vampire.”

If she has issues our uniform, she will have to take it up with the Commander. I, however, take offense to that. I personalized my own. “You look like one, too. …And your eyes are glowing.” —And hers are not? “It’s obvious you aren’t from here. Even your accent is strange. Either you fess up about who and what you are, or…” She sounds like she is going to threaten me, but is as threatening as a marshmallow. “Or…”

This girl is so committed to her rambling that she does not notice Death’s cool breath on the back of her neck, or its hands tying weather-beaten ribbons and half-dead flowers into her hair.

She drones on, and Death shows me a glimpse of its silhouette, a ghastly skeleton of a woman with an expecting belly whispering sweet nothings into the girl’s ear in a language she cannot understand. Sleep. You will be so tired when you embrace your role as Summoner. You will be sick of living, but there is no life in death. No suffering. You can be with me forever. I love you so much.

Knocked back on her hands and seized with terror, the girl avoids being skewered to death by a small margin, digging her fingers so deep into the ground that the earth is cracking where she has sunk her nails. A Shadow emerges from the darkness—one of Death’s underlings: an incredibly violent, vengeful creature that is only interested in either massacres or full scale planetary annihilation—answering the girl’s horrified pause with an eyeless stare, its gaze so penetrating that it chokes a frenzied cry out of her.

She instinctively begins to crawl away from this dark, amorphous, colossal mass lording over her in all its insanity-inducing horror, its body riddled with hideous faces losing cohesion and unraveling into masses of coiled, writhing tentacles. Its appendages whip around and leave a sticky residue on whatever they touch before manifesting into faces again.

I continue to watch without getting involved. The Shadow knows it cannot disturb my composure and, as a result, has ignored me from the start.

The girl no doubt takes offense to this. I expect her to complain shortly after the Shadow’s… performance, assuming she has not gone mad because of it.

“You must stand.” My words are blunt, ringing clear against the distorted screeching that blares from the Shadow’s body. If she is the Summoner I seek, she has heard me in spite of its cacophony of cackles, snickers and screams. Her level of hearing is unbelievable by most extraterrestrials’ standards, especially by human ones. “Your planet will not protect you.” Her cat-slit pupils are now the size of saucers. She is unable to look away from the writhing, oily abyss despite her best efforts to tear herself away from it. “Be strong.”

The Shadow rips the tendril meant to skewer her out of the earth. The retraction of its arm snaps her back to reality at a great cost.

A wave of death lays claim to everything in a half mile radius. Flowers wither away into nothing, and birds drop down to the Earth in a soiree of corpses. Even the tree she climbed is not spared.

“It is preparing another attack.” The Shadow is gauging her mettle. I would be a liar if I said I were not using this opportunity to do so also. Homes have been destroyed. Families, gone. I wonder how hard the realization that people have died will hit her.

She looks at me with a pained expression, tears swelling in the corner of her eyes as she makes angry demands of the Shadow. She is certainly aggressive, so easily offended and ready to bicker even when her life is being threatened. I am counting on that belligerency, how she is prepared to stand and fight the smallest thing that makes her angry.

There is courage in that over-sensitivity, her willingness to settle scores with complete strangers who are noticeably stronger, faster, and smarter than her. I want to tell her that there is no difference between myself and this Shadow. If she can challenge me, she can challenge it, and if she is the Summoner I seek, I firmly believe she will emerge victorious.

“Come now, girl. This is a matter of life and death.” Her tears do not move me. They do, however, excite her assailant. “You have to save yourself.”

There is something murderous in the curl of her lip: I’ll make you eat those words, I refuse to be beaten by something as silly as a Shadow.  

“You really think I believe you can’t help me? When this thing isn’t even looking in your direction?” It is as I thought, she is throwing a temper tantrum because I am not being given the same attention by our friend. Her behaviour is silly and immature, but I can expect nothing less from a child.

The Shadow raises its arm and, thereon, morphs it into a massive, ornate axe. If she is the Summoner I seek, she will be unharmed by the Shadow’s next action.

The Shadow slams its arm down on top of her with the intent to cleave her in half. She squeaks, closing her eyes and throwing her arms up over her head in an instinctive attempt to block the attack.

Any other person would die on impact.

Fortunately for this girl, she possesses an immunity to almost all forms of harm and ailments, including extreme force and high temperatures. An axe poses no threat when she can withstand the collapse of universes. She will achieve feats of immeasurable magnitude. So incredible, this girl, that her arms lessen a blow that would have otherwise seen the Earth shattered. The ground does collapse beneath her, however, and she begins to sink into the resulting chasm, unwitting to the ensuing chaos. Buildings falling, sidewalks turning into shrapnel, vehicles exploding via shockwaves from the attack, et cœtera, et cœtera.

In the chaos I still see her, arms intact without a scratch. The Shadow is thrilled by the girl’s resilience. Again it raises its axe.

This time the girl is prepared, keeping her arms where they are because she knows they will protect her from the incoming assault. The Shadow remains one step ahead, its other arm transforming into a similiar axe to deliver a crushing blow twofold. It strikes her over and over again with all the force of a meteor crashing into a planet.

With slimy, dark-coated fingers, it grabs the girl by her shirt and lifts her high into the air so that they are eye-level. In a decisive move, she tries to wrap her hands around its wrist but they seep through it. Angered by the Shadow’s sudden incorporeality, she begins to kick and scream in protest while the Shadow licks its several-hundred, newly-manifested lips.

“This is your fight.” She looks at me, fuming as one might expect, making tightly-wound fists before I can finish my statement. “The first of many,” I continue, stifling a chuckle. How can I not laugh when she is cartoonishly angry, as though smoke will come billowing out of her ears at any moment? Her expressions and body language are so exaggerated that words would fail to describe the intensity of them. This one is certainly histrionic. “It would be rude of me to interrupt.”

“…Our fight!” It is an outcry of strong disapproval. I cannot tell if her face is red from crying, or from screaming. “Don’t think you get to worm your way out of this! I’m dying”—she emphasizes her last word in both a sudden change of tone ( one of great sorrow ) and the drooping of her shoulders—“and you’re just standing there!”

This girl is easily the most dramatic person I’ve met. Histrionic perfectly describes her.

“When you are older, you will thank me for not getting involved. You will understand, then. I do not fault you for being unable to now.”

“Oh, so you’re one of those people that think I’m too young to know what’s good for me.”

I was told she was a prodigy. I had imagined her a thoughtful, quiet girl with sound judgment and common sense. This girl wants for all those things.

“I’ll have you know,” she begins, closing her eyes in a self-satisfied manner. She waves her index finger around in tandem to each word being said, a reprimanding—and emphasizing—gesture too casual considering the circumstances. “That I know that you know that I know you don’t know that I think someone who can save me saving me is a better option than… anything else you think I’d prefer if I were older.”

The Shadow flips the girl upside down, her buns unraveling in the sudden motion. Its attack was cleanly executed, a lone tendril catching her by the ankle as to stop her inevitable descent. The girl waves her arms out; it is likely she is reaching for the Earth she cannot see, because the Shadow has made itself wider mid-morph.

“Don’t let it eat you.” It is all mouths now, thousands of them, snapping, slobbering, slowly lowering the girl into the shrieking voids of its body. “As confident as I am in your defenses, being eaten by a Shadow will kill you.”

The girl, spurred on by my words, curls her body inward, performing an inverted sit up. From there she latches onto the tendril she is hanging from and attempts to slither out of the Shadow’s grasp by climbing it. The Shadow is only amused by her actions, lowering her further into its depths and cackling mad with fervor as she tries—in vain—to free herself from it.

That this girl is special there can be no doubt, though the question still remains: in what way is she different from a standard Summoner? What is it that makes her prodigious?

“Perhaps your talent lies in weathering the worse as opposed to offense.” I am running out of time. She has sunk deep into the Shadow, enshrouded by tar-thick tendrils shifting into sticky, teetering hands.

“You’re wrong.” I am taken aback by the sound of her voice. She should not be audible when the top of her head is the only thing that is visible. “I can fight.” Nevertheless, I challenge her until the bitter end, speaking her own childish language.

“Prove it.”

She disappears in its darkness. The Shadow has snuffed out her brilliance, and ended her life just as I thought.

Unfortunate as these events are, I must press on.

I want to turn on my heel, to leave the girl and the Shadow behind and return to the Aphelion to continue working on her repairs, but the Shadow violently implodes, cleaved in several directions by an outpour of light that  bursts from its center.

She is covered in gelatinous bits of the Shadow sucking at her skin like ticks. Scowling, she brings her hand up to her forehead and flicks away the gunk that plagued it. Her eye twitches, the constriction of her already-thin pupils followed by a subtle quirk of her nose expressing her disgust. I am pleased, smiling a bit wider this time, praising her for her improvement.

“You are learning. That is good. Your refusal to die is important.” The Shadow lets out a loud, piercing cry as it tries to put itself back together. It cannot maintain cohesion, ergo, it keeps falling apart and is largely distraught by it. “Finish it. You must attack it while it is weak.” It lashes out at the girl, half-cohesive, half-coherent, shooting pieces of itself like bullets at her, a barrage of oily pitch seeking to tear through her with hurricane force.

One of her elementary skills as a Summoner is bullet perception, her mind and body able to process information at such absurd speeds that time slows down, enabling the girl to perceive what would normally be moving too fast for the average extraterrestrial to see. As a result she quickly positions herself away from the path of the Shadow’s attacks, dodging them accordingly.

Once the Shadow exhausts itself, she stops where she last set foot and moves her left arm slightly behind her back, wearing a determined expression as she readies herself for another attack, moving with the fluidity of champions. “I’m not going to pretend to know what you mean,” she says. She does not break eye contact with the Shadow, and—despite her short stature—is sizing it up, seeking to intimidate it into surrender. “But if that means I can beat this thing then that’s good enough for me. How do I do that, exactly?”

“I will not explain your abilities to you while your life is still in danger. There must be some manner of magic within that body of yours.”

“Oh? With magic?” She blinks profusely, her heroic stance relaxing. “Why didn’t you say so before?” It is only after several seconds that she realizes the difficulty in what I said and her reaction is no less exaggerated, turning sharply on her heel to glare at me with a deep frown proceeding a pout. “Wait… What do you mean with magic?” She shakes her right hand and opens it as if dropping something, emphasizing that there is nothing there with her dramatic gesture. “Hello? What magic! I don’t have any magic, and as you’ve acknowledged, there’s this thing conveniently ignoring you and trying to kill me! Can’t you do something? I’m sure you have enough magic,” she stresses, dual flexing her index and middle fingers to draw quotation marks in the air, “for the both of us.”

I raise a brow at her. “Is the prospect of being capable of casting magic yourself so impossible when you are being pursued by a Shadow that may or may not be your own razing everything in its path?”

“Yes.”

The Shadow makes a final, desperate attempt to defeat the girl while her guard is down, lunging at her with all that is left of itself in a sudden, brutal attack.

The Summoner I thought I would meet is now standing in front of me, fearless and determined to win. She closes her eyes and deeply exhales, searching for the magic that was latent inside her up until this moment.

The girl allows the Shadow to get close to her and, once it has, throws her arms out, her magic ready to be unleashed in planet-destroying fervor after being pent up for so long.

When she opens her eyes again they are dazzling. Massive chunks of the earth begin to float, and waves of sky-cracking pressure undulates from where she stands. Initially I believed this planet would swallow the Shadow by way of the girl conjuring what I could only assume to be an actual earthquake, but when she shouts “Freeze!”—her voice booming, commanding—the very fabrics of reality bend to her decree.

She has stilled the Shadow in place by way of temporal freezing, an application of time manipulation. What is interesting to me is that time was not the only thing she manipulated while trying to manipulate it. Along with the seismic activity and the sky roaring as if it would rain lightning, the temperature around the Shadow dropped and a thick blanket of ice surrounds it. Suffice to say, none of those things are the abilities of a chronokinetic. This is a vital piece of information apropos to unlocking her the true potential.

The girl walks up to the Shadow and examines it. “Woah…” She straightens her posture and places a hand on her hip, her mouth forming an ‘o’ as she crouches down to get a better look at her frozen foe. “I did this?” she asks, pointing at herself and looking back at me, smiling. With each passing second her smile gets wider. She is very proud of herself. 

Her smile is contagious. I smile back. She is looking for recognition and I am all too happy to give it. “Yes, you did that. You stopped time, which has confirmed my suspicions. You are the Summoner of Time and Space and we”—I say, gesturing to our surroundings—“have a lot of work to do.”

“We? Hard pass. I’m going home.”

“You misunderstand me, I did not mean we were going to clean up the area together.”

She stops walking and looks at me from over her shoulder, turning around slowly. I had not even realized she started to leave. Not only is she fast, she is quiet as well. She has the footsteps of an assassin—she reminds me of myself. “I’m listening.”

“We are partners, you and I, and there is much to discuss. Although I am curious as to why you don’t seem shocked about any of this.” I am not sure if it is apathy or if she is just exhausted at this point. She cycles through emotions so quickly, I can barely understand her.

“To be honest with you, I already know how this goes. Let me guess, you’re some kind of alien?” She is feigning disinterest, preening her nails and frowning as she does so, but unbeknownst to her I have read that the people of Earth have a great interest in extraterrestrials. I see no reason to deny her the information she seeks. She is a Summoner after all. The girl is as much of an extraterrestrial as I am.

“I hail from another universe, yes. From you I can keep no secrets.”

“Ha! I knew it! All those stories were true, I—!” She trails off, her enthusiasm fading into silence. “Ahem…” With her gaze glued to the ground, she holds her hands behind her back. “Well…? Where do we go from here?”

“I need to tend to this mess as to not alert the people of this planet of your skirmish.”

Part of an Advisor’s job is damage control. It is very important that I erase all evidence of there being a fight here, or it could have grave, cosmic-scale consequences. “Other than that, I have to continue repairs on my ship.” Her face lights up when I mention the Aphelion. Perhaps we have something in common after all.

I use this opportunity to my advantage, I must know the name of my charge. “My name is Hiroyuki D’Accardi.” If the girl had manners she would give me hers, but she does not. “Feel free to call me whatever you like. And yours?”

She bites her lip, weighing her options. “If…” The girl is still dazed by the mention of my ship, held rapt by excitement. “If I tell you my name, will you show me your ship?”

“Perhaps. Weren’t you going home?”

“Yes, but…”

“It may be in your best interests to do so, your parents might be looking for you.”

The mention of her parents snaps her out of her pouty mood. “It’s Outtaike Kohana,” she says, turning on her heel again and running in the opposite direction. “I’ll be back tomorrow after school, looking for you in this exact spot! Don’t forget!” I’m sure I won’t. Who could ever forget her?