"Yeah. Beats the hell out of big shiny spaceships, laser beams, and evil laughs."

True Blue #1

Written by Cody MacArthur Fett

Edited by Cyclone, Bob Regent, and Shinzakura

German Translation by Ranma-sensei

The world was in a time of peace. After the conflagration that engulfed the planet during Second Impact and the weeks following it, humanity had been joined together in alliance under the United Nations directed by the Human Instrumentality Committee. In sharp contrast to the world before, there were no giant monster attacks, no bank robberies by criminals with laser guns, no alien invasions, no conspiracies to rule the world, no bizarre lab accidents, no robot armies, and no superheroes, at least as far as the general public was concerned.

That facade had come crashing down just a few weeks ago, and the multicultural mountain metropolis of Tokyo-3 on the east coast of Japan was the shatterpoint. A giant creature they called an Angel had advanced towards the city and killed many before being stopped by the equally giant Evangelion humanoid defense mechanism. Then a short time after that, disaster struck in the form of a crashing aircraft that would have killed thousands had it not been for the intervention of a dark-haired flying heroine called Supergirl. The Second Age of Heroes had dawned, with all the wonder and terror that came with it.

All of which was merely background noise to Horaki Hikari, Class Representative of Class 2-A of West Tokyo-3 Municipal Middle School. Literally. Another Angel was attacking the city, but her focus was on the other children in the shelter they were in. While the battle raged outside, she had to keep things calm inside.

"Hey, what are you two up to?" Hikari asked as she walked up to Tōji and Kensuke, having noticed them getting rather heated while checking in on how some of the newer students were doing.

"We weren't doing anything . . ." Tōji began reflexively before calming down and collecting himself. "Sorry, class rep. I'm just trying to find my sister, but she doesn't seem to be anywhere, so I was asking Kensuke if he'd seen her."

"I'm doing a human interest story about people's time in the shelters," Kensuke explained. "Didn't see Sakura anywhere either, though."

"Hmm, you said her name was Sakura?" Hikari asked, a hand on her chin.

"Yeah, Suzuhara Sakura, have you seen her?" Tōji answered with a bit of hope.

"No, but my sister Nozomi is in the same class as her. We could ask if she'd seen her," the class rep explained.

"Worth a shot. Come on!" Toji said as he ran off towards the younger students in the shelter.

"Wait! Toji! Let me talk to her! You don't even know what she looks like!" Hikari called as she ran after the jock, Kensuke following close behind with his hand on his camera.

"You! Are you Horaki Nozomi?" Tōji asked one of the children in the younger section of the school shelter.

"Nein, i-ich bin Mariko..." the little girl replied in German and with more than a hint of fear.

"Argh! How about you?" he asked the child next to her.

"I'm a boy," he replied with a fair share of annoyance.

"Suzuhara! Stop scaring the little kids," Hikari snapped as she came up behind him before turning to the little girl and making an apologetic gesture. "Bitte verzeih diesem Idioten, Kleine. Seine Schwester ist verschwunden und er ist krank vor Sorge," she told her.

"Oh! Ich hoffe, er findet sie bald!" the little girl replied with a wave as Hikari dragged Tōji to another part of the shelter.

"Idioten?" Tōji asked.

"You were the one scaring a small child," Hikari explained before stopping in front of another group of students and one in particular. "Nozomi?"

"What do you want, sis?" one of the black-haired students said brattily as she got up to address her.

"Nozomi, have you seen Sakura anywhere?" Hikari asked, shooting Tōji a look as she did so.

"Not for a bit," Nozomi shrugged. "Why do you ask?"

"She's missing, and we need to find her!" Tōji declared.

"Please, Nozomi, did she say anything that might give us a clue to where she went?" Hikari pleaded.

"Well, she did go on for quite some time about the Evas and the pilots, and then she said she had to go to the bathroom," Nozomi explained.

"Ha, bathroom break, a classic misdirection," Kensuke commented from behind the group as he snapped a picture.

"Come on, let's go!" the jock exclaimed as he bolted off towards the bathrooms, Hikari and Kensuke close behind. The trio arrived at the bathrooms and Tōji slammed open the doors to the woman's stalls. "Sakura!" Tōji yelled into stalls, getting no response he then sprinted to the nearest blast door entrance of the shelter, it was open.

"Oh no," Hikari moaned as she realized the implications.

Toji immediately rushed outside, calling his little sister's name, with Kensuke by his side, the mad otaku's camera clicking rapidly as he tried to photograph everything at once. However, Hikari lingered at the entrance, unable to make her foot move.

The class rep told herself that Supergirl wouldn't just leave a child out there in the middle of a war zone. The Girl of Steel would save her, but Supergirl wasn't around right then. In her absence, it fell to normal people like her to be heroes.

Still, she couldn't quite make herself move. She would have to make a choice to run out there or return to the shelter soon, and Toji and Kensuke were already putting a lot of distance between themselves and her.

How would you feel if it was Nozomi out there? she asked herself.

That did it. Swallowing, the class rep charged out into the chaos of the two titans' battlefield. "Wait for me!" she called out to the two boys. She ran out of the relative safety of the shelter and her ears were filled with the sounds of battle, and her eyes were left wanting for a sight of a little girl. She did see the boys, though, and quickly caught up.

"If she wanted to get a good look at the battle, she'll have headed for higher ground," Kensuke yelled over the din of battle.

"Up there!" Hikari pointed to the top of a path that led up the hill.

The trio advanced with great rapidity up the pathway, sparing no heed to the terror that surely awaited them. They reached the apex of their climb, and for a moment, their breath held still. It was a sight both terrible and awe inspiring, two titans locked in a duel to the death that dwarfed everything around them, and darting between the two, the harbinger of a new age fought with a form that seemed to them as small as it was loud.

"Sakura!" Tōji exclaimed suddenly, running towards the little girl that he had just spotted. "Sakura! What are you doing out here?!"

"Oh, hi there, big brother! I just came out to watch the Evas, and then that loud man came out here and started screaming something about 'showing them all', and then . . ." Sakura was cut off by her big brother's arms wrapping around her.

"Don't you ever do that again!" Tōji sobbed. "Do you have any idea how much I . . . don't ever, ever, ever go out of the shelter again! Do you hear me?!"

"Big brother, it's okay. We're okay," Sakura said softly into her brother's shoulder.

Hikari was touched seeing the two of them together, the scene reminding her of the fact that despite his dumb jock exterior Tōji was a sweet and caring boy. It was something she wished she could see under better circumstances. Now, if only she could make up the courage to . . .

"Run!" Kensuke shouted with a finger pointed towards the sky.

Hikari looked up just in time to see a gigantic chunk of ferrocrete flying towards them. It was something that she barely had time to register before it was caught by a blue and red blur. Supergirl had saved them, but the euphoria was as short-lived as the terror. A massive bang sounded behind them, and the four students suddenly found the man in a weird black and white suit standing in a small crater and blocking the way down to the shelter.

"Run to the sewers!" Supergirl yelled over their still ringing ears. "Go! Now!"

The four wasted no time in barreling down the path on the opposite side of the hill. Tōji carried Sakura in his arms, and Hikari grabbed onto Kensuke's wrist to stop him from taking more pictures. Down the steps they ran, the sounds of the two supers duking it out booming and drowning out all other sound. They ran as fast as they felt they could and a little bit faster, their lungs burning with effort like fire.

In their haste, they failed to consider all the variables though, and Hikari slipped on a rock and fell. She let go of Kensuke's wrist and rolled the rest of the way down the hill, eventually coming to a stop against a trash can by the side of the road.

"Hikari!" the others yelled at the top of their lungs.

At the base of the hill, Hikari moaned, but managed to get the strength to bring herself to her feet and lean against the trash can. "I'm all right!" she yelled back. "Go on without me! I'll find another way into the sewers, but you need to get Sakura to safety now! We'll meet up after this is all over!"

Tōji looked pensive for a moment, but Kensuke was the one to yell something back. "We'll go! Just make sure this isn't a heroic sacrifice sort of deal!"

Hikari watched just long enough to confirm that they were moving again before bolting off towards the old part of the city as fast as her aching legs could carry her. From what she knew of local history, the old parts of the city, the ones minimally affected by the remodeling from Hakone to Tokyo-3, were the only parts that had the sewers that doubled as bomb shelters. There was a chance that some bureaucrat might have extended the sewers into the newer parts of the city, but that was a long shot, considering that the main reason for the remodeling was to install elevators for a bunch of skyscrapers and God only knew how many armor plates into the Geofront's ceiling.

If it wasn't for her survival instinct, she would have stopped right then and there to ponder the absurdity of it all. She didn't know why she never realized just how strange the city was before. Maybe with Supergirl and Batgirl on duty, this city could become something resembling normal, Hikari thought, reassured that something sensible was going on.

Her calm was interrupted by part of a building sailing over her head to crash into another. She hit the ground, and hugged the sidewalk she had been running on before like she was the character of some espionage film about World War II. Within a moment, the dust cloud from the destroyed building completely covered her and turned the world brown and gray.

When the initial gust of debris had subsided, Hikari got up and continued running. At least, that's what she tried to do. The dust in the air had combined with the abuse her body had already taken and her lack of physical training to slow her to a crawl. She couldn't go on, she just couldn't, but . . . but she had to. She wanted to. She wasn't going to let the last thing Tōji ever heard from her be her saying that they'd meet up later. That was just too painful, and she couldn't do it.

So she continued on. Her body felt like it was burning, but she continued on. Her lungs were drawing shorter and shorter breaths, but she continued on. She had lost track of what road she was even traveling, but she continued on. She continued on.

Eventually, though, another gust of wind blew by, and she emerged from the dust cloud. There she could see the end in sight. She could see the goal that she had been striving so hard to get to.

Admittedly, a manhole cover wasn't the most epic of goals to reach, but it was her goal. She had reached it, but now a new problem had raised its head. How was she going to get it open?

She tried the traditional knock, but didn't get anything. She could be pounding "shave and a haircut" into that hunk of metal all day and not get anywhere. So her head darted around, trying to find something to give her some leverage to open up the manhole cover herself. Her eyes fell upon the nearby destroyed building, and she decided to find out which wreckage that hardware store sign had come from.

She loped over to the rubble, and began looking for a crowbar or something with a thin end that she could lean on. Nothing seemed to be there on the surface, so she started trying to move aside pieces of rebar and concrete. She tried, and failed. Even if her body hadn't been a wreck, she just wasn't strong enough to move all the debris aside to find what she needed.

Just as she was on the verge of giving herself another motivational speech, however, she caught sight of something blue glinting in the rubble. She carefully climbed over to it and attempted to dislodge it from under the rubble that had fallen over it. It took an excruciatingly long minute, but soon, she was able to yank it out from under the piece of concrete.

It was . . . not at all what she was expecting. She wasn't sure what she had expected, but a bright blue scarab made out of some weird feeling metal definitely wasn't it. She shouldn't have been holding it, she should have laid it where it was, but that left open the possibility of it being stolen by unsavory characters. She could have returned it, but to where? The rubble she was standing in was caused by two buildings crashing into each other, and she didn't get a good look at the flying building before it hit.

Thus it was, in Hikari's estimation, best if she held on to it for a little bit. It was just until she found out who it really belonged to anyway, no harm in that. So she tucked the blue scarab into the custom pocket on the inside of her jumper and went back to looking for a lever.

She didn't have to search long though before the all-clear siren started sounding. It was then that Hikari realized that the sounds of battle had stopped long ago, and that she had been trying to get into the shelters for nothing. So she let out a bitter laugh and started out on her new quest: getting back home.

It was more than an hour later when she finally stumbled back home. Her body had nearly given out at least a dozen times on the way there, but she had forced herself to go on. She just couldn't give up then, and it looked like her perseverance had paid off. She was finally home, and she had only two more steps to do before she could finally rest.

Reaching into her jumper's pocket and past the strangely warm scarab she took out a pair of keys and held them aloft. Checking to make sure that she was holding the right one, she attempted to unlock the door. It took her several tries, but soon was able to do it.

Once she was inside, she automatically slipped off her shoes and locked the door again. Then, it was just a simple matter of getting over to the phone. She had to call Tōji, she had to know if they were all right.

Once at the phone, it took five minutes of struggle before she was able to remember his number from the list of student phone numbers she had seen earlier. Then she just had to type it in, a task far easier than she thought it would be. That finished, she waited as the ringtone on the other side played until the other end picked up.

"Moshi-moshi," Tōji's voice came over the line.

"Tōji! Oh, it's so good to hear your voice," Hikari said without thinking about it.

"Hikari?! You're alive! Where are you? Are you all right?" Tōji asked, the worry clear in his voice.

"I'm fine, Suzuhara. I'm home right now. I'm just a little tired," Hikari said morosely. "Are you all right? What about Sakura and Aida?"

"They're both doing great. Ken ran off to continue reporting as soon as the all-clear came through, and Sakura's right here with me," Tōji replied with a sigh. "Are you sure you're all right, class rep?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. I just need to clean off," the dust-covered girl told him in what she hoped was a convincing tone.

"OK then, rest up, Hikari. We'll see you soon," he said with a hopeful tone.

"Good night."

"Good night."

With that, Hikari started moving to her room, realizing along the way that it wasn't night yet. Still, she lurched into her abode and threw off her clothes like she did every night. She then went into the wash closet and turned on the shower.

She stood in there for a long time, just standing under the water and letting it run down her body. It came down like rain, and washed away the dust and grime that had accumulated on her body. After standing there for what felt like an hour, Hikari took a bar of soap and went through the rest of her cleaning ritual. When she reached the point where she was almost ready to rinse the shampoo and rubble out of her hair, she noticed that bending and moving around like she had was a lot less painful then it was or should have been. She might have been in some kind of shock, but it also could have just been a natural reaction that reduced everything to a dull ache.

So after drying herself off, Hikari went into her room and considered getting dressed for all of five seconds before falling down on her bed. She was asleep before she had even hit the covers. She stayed like that for some time until her father and sisters came home, her sister tucking her in so that she wasn't mooning anyone who walked through the door.

Hours later, when the rest of the household was asleep, something came alive in Hikari's room. The scarab still in her jumper awoke and started to move. It crawled out of the jumper and onto her bed. Up and then across the covers, it crawled until it eventually reached the thirteen year old girl's exposed head and neck, still face down where she had fallen.

It crawled onto her spine, and then emitted a blue light down onto it before moving beneath the covers. Up and down her spine it traveled, leaving a trail of blue chevrons as it went, and Hikari's body started to break out in sweat, even as her face contorted into a grimace like she was having a bad nightmare. On the third pass, though, the scarab grew in size to the size of a small backpack and dug into the space between Hikari's shoulder blades, the metal fusing with her back.

After all that was done, her face, ironically, took on a look of peace, and for the rest of the night, Horaki Hikari slept soundly.

Cody's A/N: This was actually the first story I wrote all by myself for SOE, with this and two more chapters being done a little over a year ago. Seeing it finally out in the open is simply grand for me. Also, while it may not look like it now, this is going to be a more lighthearted story compared to some of the other SOE offerings. Y'all will see what I mean next chapter.

General A/N: This week marks the last time simultaneous updates will be given. At least one update a week will still be given out, or we'll try to at least, but our team needs to have time to do other things. Four (soon to be five, and then six, and then seven) updates a week is just crazy as far as a schedule goes.