𝕭𝖔𝖔𝖐 𝕺𝖓𝖊
𝔖𝔲𝔪𝔪𝔞𝔯𝔶: A high-school project gone wrong sends Astraea Aphelion fifteen centuries back in time, where she has to face a world of dragons, magic, and evil sorcerers. Luckily, she is not alone. In between hardships, she finds a...
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📍 San Antonio, Texas
⏳ May, 2021
A trio of high-school seniors – Lionelo 'Leo' Hargrove, Mason Reeves, and Henry Pietersen – worked in perfect synchronicity as they moved around the old wooden barn that they had been lent for the important science project they had at hand. The space was lit by a warm old lightbulb that hung from a thick black wire that was attached to the roof, as well as several white-light lamps that the boys had brought in to enhance the visibility in the building. They had promised Gustab Aphelion that they would pay a percentage of the electricity bills until their work was complete, seeing as they'd also had to bring in several fans to keep the ardent Texas heat at bay.
May is a hectic month for every high-schooler on Earth, in between exams, final projects, and the stress of meeting expectations; but it is especially crazy for those about to graduate – which was exactly the case for the people in the barn. The burden was perhaps even greater for them, given that their school would be entering a state-wide science fair that would be taking place in mid-June. Everyone in their school had been forced to participate in an internal contest where three projects would be chosen for the bigger event, which would award a full scholarship at Stanford University to whichever team presented the best project.
While Mason and Henry adjusted some screws on the hexagonal magnetic platform, which was essential to their project, Leo turned to a fourth person in the room, holding back a display of frustration as he commanded, "Astra – pass me my notebook, I need to double-check the numbers."
A young girl of seventeen sat atop a stack of oat hay bales, her stolid forest-coloured eyes alternating their attention between the scene in the middle of the room and the game of Solitaire she was playing on her phone, and her right leg bouncing up and down as a voice inside her head taunted her, calling her useless and stupid for not being able to quite understand what the three boys were doing.
She started at the unexpected use of her name and she quickly rifled through a backpack that sat beside her, pulling out a grey college-ruled notebook that she had become very familiar with over the past eight months – even if she didn't comprehend its contents at all. Leo took the item from her and returned to his two friends.
Unlike her male teammates, Astraea Aphelion isn't at all scientific-minded, and she certainly doesn't share her companions' ambitions to earn the coveted scholarship. The only reason why she was stuck working with them is because she doesn't exactly have any friends at school, which meant that she'd been arbitrarily assigned a team and, much to her luck, theirs had been the only one with a vacant spot.
Astra would've been content with a Kindergarten-level project such as a volcano; or, perhaps, if more effort was required, she would've been interested in creating an A.I. system resemblant of Iron-Man's JARVIS; or perhaps in hypothesising a new way to power cars. However, the boys had come up with a much wilder idea – one that Astra was certain would not work out at all.
