Welcome to Gaia! ::

Letting your frustration or anger get the better of you was never a good way to operate. Oh sure it could work well if you were the kind of person that was a melee fighter, swinging their way through the fray with boundless energy. Yet if you had to attack from a distance, as Mairea did, then you needed a cooler head. A sharper eye. You had to remove yourself somewhat from the happenings around you so that it didn't affect your control or your steady hand.

It didn't matter that she felt like the best archer that ever lived, what mattered was that the lilac-haired girl was only fourteen. She couldn't have been very experienced, could not have known what to do in an actual fight. Really, Mairea couldn't have told anyone if she'd ever done more than shoot at targets before! She knew the effect of her magic, yet had she ever been in a battle before? Was that why she'd volunteered to fight?

So many distractions. Enough that when she used an icy breath arrow, the archer child chose perhaps the most unwise of them: her strongest. Nocking it in the bow, taking aim, she didn't realize that her hand was shaking with adrenaline. "Glacialis Sagitta!" Crying out, the arrow was loosed from the bow...and swerved horribly away from her target. Almost from the moment she had released it had taken a sharp dive downwards towards the dirt, striking next to the Shade but not actually on it.

The second strike wasn't as effective. She reprimanded herself for her mistake, reminding herself that she would have to take care of it this time. Landing in the back and retreating temporarily, she began to recite the incantation that she knew.

"A feast to the sweltering heat begins and thus it shall reach the temperature of the sun."

As the incantation advanced, her sword lit up with burning flames. It encircled her sword like giant tendrils of a dragon, increasing the power and weight of the sword a dozen times over at least.

[Will be edited for epicness :'D /too dead to think this late at night]

Unfortunately, you could not execute such a showy attack without gaining some kind of notice. You would have thought, with everything going on and the Shade constantly advancing on the girl, that it would have been easier to hit, not harder. Confidence and poise had so much more to do with the shooting of a bow than she had apparently initially thought, and her fear (not to be confused with FEAR) had taken so much away from that.

Like she was some kind of bug to be squashed, a tendril reached out to whip at the archer. Mairea had tried to dive away from it, yet it grabbed her around the waist, throwing her in the opposite direction. Everything blurred as the girl flew through the air, screaming at the top of her lungs, the scent of flowers coming off the thing that had attacked her not comforting at all. Strange certainly. Comforting never.

Skidding back down on the pavement, almost where she had originally begun her awakening not so very long ago, the girl tried to catch her breath. All she could smell for a moment was flowers. Bright golden eyes refused to focus on anything, the whirl of colors she'd once described as nauseating now fulfilling their prophecy. Looking down, looking away, everything felt...faint.

As if there was nothing at all to her. As if she were nothing. Wait. Who was she? Fingers closed around her bow, her item of security. It was her only identity in this strange place, the only thing she could truly rely on. "Mairea. Mairea the Archer." Shakily rising to her feet again, she noticed something glimmering not far from where she'd been thrown.

What the heck?

What was Jamie's wish? The question crept into her mind, teasing the deepest part of her soul. A picture appeared in her mind--a family, she thought. She had wished for... something about a family. But before she could figure it out, the fuzzy guy was gone.

The monster attacked and, much to Jamie's surprise when she thought of it, she grabbed her sword like she'd been fighting for her entire life and slicing deep into the monster. Whether she remembered how to fight or not didn't seem to matter. Her BODY remembered.

And it looked like she was damn good at it, too.

Falling back grom the major attack, she landed on the ground, skidding backwards from the force of the witch's blows. Blood dripped from the slice on her arm, a tendril having injured it in the force of her attack. That scent.. was it flowers..? She asked herself. But her thoughts were interrupted by a faint sense of nausea that overwhelmed her - staggering in it all. "What..?" It subsided but an anxious feeling lingered within Luka.

Something dropped..? What was this? A crystal? Her slightly trembling hands reached out to pick it up, but when she withdrew, the creature once again appeared.

She resisted the urge to hit the creature that spoke again. "You talk about a goddamn wish. Wishes, wishes, wishes! Shut the hell up." Why did that white creature annoy her so much? "

"We don't need you anymore."

"Why did you turn out this way?"

Voices echoes inside of her head. Whose voices were they? Why was she hearing them now? I didn't do anything wrong!" She spoke before she realized it, her purple eyes contorted with pain. What was it that she was denying so much? There was no reason for her to feel this way, was there..?

She might have looked strange to the other magical girls. 'Calm down.' She told herself, taking deep breaths. Not that she had done her final attack, she would like to become acquainted with some of the other girls here. There might be someone worth knowing in the crowd.

Fingers reached out to grab the glimmering object, turning it over in her palm. It was a small crystal that had barely any substance to it, yet there seemed to be some sort of energy that she could even feel through the glove on her palm. Almost as if it had been waiting for this moment, the Critter returned from wherever it had fled during the crucial moments of battle to give direction to one of his many young female minions.

Touch it to her core? Was something wrong with it? Scrambling for where she had cleverly hooked the thing on her belt along with several other charms (none of them as important however), Mairea cried out in dismay as she saw the hairline crack darkening it. Was that why she had been so ineffective against the monster? It hadn't been her lack but something else's? Or had the damage been done when she was thrown?

Moving to touch it to her crystal, she did feel better. It gave her that rock-solid focus back though she couldn't have created another arrow even if that focus had made her want to turn around and fight longer. Mairea was exhausted by her No Holds Barred attack that had gone so horribly wrong, the counter-attack she'd barely dodged, and now all she could do was hope that someone else could finish the thing off.

< Speaking of Fear, do you remember your wish now? >

Wishes again. Why were wishes so important? As a teenager, Mairea had a lot of wishes. "Critter, you have to give a girl a little bit of help here. What kind of wish was it? Is that why I'm here? Did I wish to fight or something?" It seemed like a waste of a wish really. She could have wished for anything. Right? Anything, and she'd chosen this? Boy, maybe she was better off forgetting if she'd been so stupid.

Deciding that there was nothing to be done about it, the pale-haired girl stood and started calling out encouragement to her 'teammates'. If Zelda, Vatachi, Taika, Macy, Willow, Jamie, Melony, and Aria needed her moral support then they were darn well going to get it!

Okay, if she had to be honest, a lollipop cannon with acidic peppermints for ammo was seriously badass. And Alice knew it. She seemed like a totally different person, jumping around and squealing and reveling and the sheer awesomeness of it all, and dammit, this bag had better have some super-special-awesome mecha form or she was going to be so pissed.

"Talk to it, huh?" Tanith looked down at the little red bag. "Okay, you. You're my weapon, right? You've gotta be cooler than this! Come on! Change! Transform! Shoot magic beams! Do something!"

The bag remained still. Tanith shook it violently, the cat keychain jingling and flailing wildly. "Huh? Is that not good enough for you?! What... you seriously do want some cool attack name, too? Okay, fine! Super Cannon! Hyper Beam! Mega Star Cat Explosion! I don't ca--"

Suddenly, the bag trembled. It shook, slowly at first, then again, and again, until it seemed to rumble, and the cover shot open and Tanith twisted it away from her face before she got a face full of whatever was going to come out.

As it turned out, there were cats. Lots of them. Plushie-sized things about the size of the keychain, all smiling... all soaring through the air like missiles and bombarding the creature in a rapid assault. Tanith could have sworn she heard a "meow" with each explosion. The stream of happy cannon cats was brutal, quick, and utterly bewildering, and when they stopped coming, Tanith stared blankly at the cloud of smoke in front of her before whipping her head back down to the inside of the bag. Nothing. She reached inside, fingers touching something cold... round... and heavy, when she tried to pick it up. She thrust both her arms in to haul out a very large and very active bomb.

Tanith shrieked and flung it at the monster, holding her hand up to cover her face from the resulting impact. When the smoke cleared, Tanith tried to squint through it, speaking slowly. "We... did it... right?"