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To say that this morning's news didn't scare her would have been an outright lie. And that although it was anything but easy to trigger anything even remotely close to the feeling of fear in her.
To be fair, most of her classmates didn't seem any less concerned or scared. While the humans on earth were well aware of the existence of heroes, their enemies, super technology and even aliens at this point, and even though they had survived and somehow reversed the Snap that had rendered half of the known and unknown universe's population non-existent, the fact that, just a few hours earlier, a gigantic body had appeared in the sky over London in a suddenly developing, massive and unnatural wall of clouds and that the thing had then disappearing again mere seconds later as if nothing had happened was anything but ordinary. Even for earth. Even for what they knew and where used to so it came as no surprise that the strange occurrence was all over the news.
Anyway, Sprite, who had been sitting with some of her new classmates in the large break room of her boarding school when the news started on TV, nearly dropped her cell phone at the sight of the amateur footage flickering across the screen. Her sandwich froze halfway to her mouth and she had half the mind to put it down again before dropping it too.
Even though she had never actually seen her creator, this dubious honor had so far only gone to Ajak and Sersi, she nevertheless immediately recognized the being that briefly appeared from the shaky cell phone videos of screaming people who had been direct witnesses.
His glowing red eyes seemed to burn straight into her soul as if searching for something that hadn't been there anymore since the Day of Emergence.
Arishem.
For a moment that might as well have been infinity, those eyes dug deep into her, even through the screens.
The large break room faded, all her classmates faded into the background, into nothing as did the sounds, smells and impressions of her surroundings. It was as if she were utterly alone in the universe, face to face with the being that for millennia had been the only truly existing god for her.
Arishem.
The giant Celestial looked at her for a long moment and then, as if he had realized that what he was looking for no longer existed within her, it turned her way.
It felt like something inside her had been severed. No pain, no loss or anything like that, no, just a feeling deep inside her as if something had snapped right in two.
Then, as suddenly as it had come, the feeling vanished and Sprite found herself still staring wide-eyed at the television screen where reporters and experts were now puzzling over what the strange phenomenon in the sky could have been about.
The words Aliens, Avengers and secret military weapons fell. Neither of them knew how wrong they were about all of this.
All around her, her classmates were talking wildly but she didn't have the patience or time to try to calm down a group of school kids.
Sprite reached under the big table for her bag, shouldered it, and jumped up, her food abandoned as well as the people who tried to include her in their conversation.
In the general chaos she didn't attract attention anyway and so it was easy for her to leave the hall unnoticed, despite the teachers who were supposed to keep an eye on their students, they had enough to do with the uproar the news had triggered and their pitiful attempts to restore some kind of order.
She would have made it out anyway. Even without her powers. She was a trickster, and diversion or little pranks were easy for her.
However, she had more urgent concerns and besides, Kingo would probably be pretty offended if she managed to get a reprimand from the private school that he had spent a lot of money on so that she could attend.
A fact the Bollywood star never tired of mentioning and she was pretty sure he would rub it in her face for the rest of her life whenever the opportunity arose. Sprite passed up the right moment, slipped past a teacher who tried to calm a paranoid student and disappeared unnoticed through the door out into the hallway.
The corridors of the spacious boarding school building were deserted at this time of day. No wonder, after all it was class time and the students and teachers were either cavorting in large numbers in the various break rooms or in the classrooms.
She would be expected there in less than ten minutes too, but she wasn't planning on attending history class today.
In Sprite's opinion that was pretty pointless anyway, there was nothing here for her to learn that she hadn't witnessed or been instrumental in creating and so she hastily dug her phone out of her pocket and unlocked it as she walked briskly to the gates, tipping away a message.
Hopefully Sersi had some idea of what was going on here.
If anyone was to know what Arishem was doing on Earth, then it had to be the Eternal who was the only one able to make direct contact with the Celestial.
Sprite, on the other hand, only knew one thing with absolute certainty, and that was that no matter what had driven their creator to show himself to humanity for a few moments, especially in a spectacular show like that, it couldn't be good.
They should have known that the whole thing with the failed emergence and Tiamut's death was far, far from over.
If only she had known how bad it really was.