They Are Made From Lightning

TEN (十)

recap: tora fights rebound at wing's. during the match, she spots someone under a hood at the door with glowing eyes. tora and angelica are absolute babes - they enjoy some good ol stargazing, and then they head home because angelica gets a phone call. tora returns home to the bonsai, and cleans up. the power suddenly goes off, and she sees her wall splattered with bioluminescent bacteria in the darkness. 

p.s. big note at the end!

十

ten

Tora

She knew that the glow on the toilet walls was because of the bacteria that she'd probably brought back from the bioluminescent boulders. But she couldn't help but feel like it was something else. Walls splattered with a bioluminescent blue, like a wayward sky. Like a fragmented future. She felt like she could see everything, even if it was just for a moment.

She stood there for a second, paralysed. Her limbs wouldn't move. Her eyes stayed attached to the sight of the wall. A neon, luminous night painted across the wall of her very own bathroom.

It was like God – or whatever deity people believed in these days – was sending her a message. A cypher that she couldn't decode.

When her sensations had returned; when the lightning had begun to pulse through her veins once again, Tora pushed the toilet door open, and walked back into her room.

Everything was still dark.

What had happened to the light?

It was a question that she asked frequently. However, she usually meant it in a sense that was more metaphorical than literal. Today, however, it was very much both. The power had gone out in Equatorial city too many times to count – because apparently, powering a whole city in the midst of an environmental collapse was a risky task. The power outages, however, did not discriminate. Everyone was affected, because everyone relied on the same solar panels that sat on the edge of the city. And she would know because she passed them on the way to the bioluminescent boulders every other night.

See, at least there was something in this world that seemed equal and fair.

But tonight, the power outage was accompanied by the low rumble of thunder in the distance. She knew that a thunderstorm was about to arrive. It was all over the radio, over the news. It was just that little edge that made the power outage feel more like foreshadowing of something bigger that was about to descend upon them.

Or, logically, maybe her mind was just making up these skewed, unreasonable connections.

One thing that she could be thankful for was staying in the basement of The Bonsai. This meant that the switchboard was also stowed down here, easy for her to access. She grabbed a small flashlight that she always kept in her pocket, and made her way towards the box.

She opened the switchboard cover and flipped the switches. But the power still stayed off. She knew what this meant – it'd happened several times before. If the switchboard didn't work, it meant that the problem didn't lie within The Bonsai. It lay within the city's power grid.

Just then, something smashed in the other corner of the basement. It sounded like a flowerpot (or so she assumed) that had just been pushed off a shelf where Mr. T kept the spare stock. Or maybe it was the crash of glass breaking.

The first thing she thought was about the logical explanation for this. Mr. T was not an incredibly calm and orderly man, and this could be seen not only in the way he burst into fits of rage at sporadic, irregular intervals – but also at the way he organised the shop. Flowerpots of all shapes and sizes were scattered throughout the basement, arranged in stacks consisting of pots of different sizes. Mr. T hadn't bothered stacking pots of the same sizes together. His philosophy was that: if it wasn't broken, it worked.