Sundance Square was a square smack dab in the middle of Fort Worth city. It was filled with boutiques, restaurants, and tourist traps for this originally, cowboy-themed town. Fort Worth has had a bit of an identity crisis in the last few years. Having separated the city from its roots in the stockyards, and moved the business centers across the river and urbanized. The urban city left most of the tourist traps and historic stockyards in the dust.
Rose, the college sophomore, was walking down Sundance Square with shopping bags hanging from her denim jacket covered arms. In her manicured hands were a bowl of ice cream and a spoon. It was one of those nice days in that window of time in the two weeks in northeast Texas where the weather wasn’t blistering hot during the day, but in the mornings it was brisk enough to make the natives think it was going to be a cold day.
Rose had just finished a midterm in one of her classes and thought it was a good idea to get rid of some of the leftover stress by going window shopping. Window shopping soon turned into actual shopping, which turned into eating, which turned into dessert.
Rose tossed her strawberry blond hair out of the way of her ice cream and took a bite. Her black plastic spoon held in her mouth by her front teeth as some guys about her age with water guns ran by, bumping her a bit. She dropped some ice cream on her nice green v neck shirt. She smiled at the stoic faces they had, taking whatever game they were playing way too seriously. ‘That's boys for you,’ She thought as she brushed off the ice cream from her shirt. Sundance Square was a lively outdoor shopping center on days like today, so people running around with squirt guns isn't that odd of a sight.
Rose felt more lucky than usual today. She slipped on the stairs due to her treadless horseback riding boots and was caught by this cute guy she had her eye on all semester. Then there were all those sales going on in Sundance and the fact that she found that extra hundred dollars in her wallet to use on them was pretty sweet too. Not to mention the last bit of her favorite ice cream she got from the street vendors just now. Today was turning out to be great.
While Rose bounced down the crowded street she approached an alley where she saw those guys with the squirt guns again. As the alley came into view, she saw the two guys with super soakers pointed at the last.
“You think you can get away with this? It’s over,” Rose could hear the last one say.
‘Man they are really getting into this game,’ thought Rose.
She turned to look into the alley with her curiosity peaked. The last guy she saw was holding some Asian girl in a white dress up against the wall by his forearm, and she hung by her neck about a foot off the ground. Rose may not have known what was going on, but someone was in trouble! Rose dropped her things, including her ice cream. She ran into the alley and tackled-shoved the guy holding the girl to the wall, to the ground, much to the other’s shock.
“What are you doing? We have her!” The one on the ground, a thin, dyed black-haired emo looking guy said.
“How did you even see us?” The Hispanic or Latinx guy in a hat asked looking between the two.
“Who cares, she's going to get away!” The tallest one, a bald black guy said as he approached the pair.
In a little bit of a panic, Rose grabbed the water gun off the ground and pointed it at the tallest one. They all took a few steps back with their hands and water guns up.
“Oh no, you don’t want to use that,” the one in the hat said nervously.
“What isn’t it just water?” She asked, giving it a little test squirt at the ground between them where some trash had blown into the stream’s path. The plastic trash started to disintegrate being eaten by the stream, it began bubbling and steaming.
“What is this? Acid!? Why? How?” Rose said in shock as she looked back up at them.
“It seems there is a spark inside of you,” the woman she was saving said, from behind Rose.
“Hum?” Rose asked as she had almost forgotten all about her at that moment. “Are you ok?” Rose asked her as she turned around keeping the acid gun pointed at the ground with one hand.
“No!” yelled one of the guys, as he and the others ran towards the girls.
The woman grabbed Rose’s wrist by the inside of her arm hard. There was an immediate searing pain that brought Rose to her knees. Rose screamed out as the guys grabbed Rose’s arm and tried to pry it from the other girl’s grip. Rose looked up at the girl’s face with pleading eyes, too overcome with pain to say anything. The girl just looked down at her with no emotion that Rose could see.
After what felt like an eternity, the girl let go. Rose’s eyes couldn’t leave her arm. Where the girl grabbed, there was a burn where the girl’s palm was. When her head cleared from the pain, the mark would remind her of one of those wax seals from the eighteen hundreds. It was a circle inside another circle with a four-leaf clover in it. In-between the two circles were the words “Lucky Half Spark.”
While she examined the burn, she heard a scuffle and was pushed away from the girl and into the arms of the guy in the hat. She curled up into a ball in this stranger’s comforting arms, feeling as if she’d lost someone important to her. She heard them yelling at the girl, though she couldn’t make out what was being said, other than a few insults. She might have been in shock, though she never knew what it was like. The sounds of scuffling went away and she finally looked around. There were places of wet acid on the ground father down the alley and there was a fence that was shaking like someone just climbed it and jumped off it.
She looked up to the guy in the hat and noticed that he was talking and tuned back into what he was saying.
“Can you hear me?” He asked.
“Yeah… now I can,” Rose answered. She lifted her arm and showed him her burn. “What does this mean?” She asked softly.
“Ah, she got you good,” he replied as he removed a sweatband from his arm to show a similar healed burn like hers on his own arm, except where there was a four-leaf clover on her arm, he had a strange symbol of curved lines and a leaf. She read his burn out loud.
“Wind Half Spark,” she read, “Is that from her too?” She asked.
He nodded.
“I’d rather go by Luis, but you can call me Wind if you need to,” he joked.
“I’m Rose. What does ‘half spark’ mean?” She asked.
“Well, that’s what we are, half sparks. We started with some kind of ability that she wanted and took half of it. Like me, I could control the wind. I guess you could control luck?”
“But I couldn’t control it, I was just lucky,” Rose complained.
“I don’t know how she knows, but she knows how to use our sparks,” Luis explained. “That’s what we think these abilities are called, sparks. We don’t know much about them, though,” he admits
Rose nods and closes her eyes. She just wanted to go to sleep at this point.
“Hey,” Luis said as he started to get up and carry her. “Let’s go back to the hideout and get you some water.”
“That sounds great,” She said as she is carried off.