Counting the Stars

Chapter 18 - Ignited Dream

The New Addition to Smash Ultimate

For the past several months, the Mario brothers have been in active search for someone new to join the fighting team at a company known as Smash Ultimate, a scheme of competitive combat. As stated earlier on, Mario was particularly fond of the idea of someone who "has the strength and pure will to bring [S.U.] to greater heights." Word has quickly spread of someone new starting to show her face around the headquarters, a new fighter that it seems Mario handpicked himself.

Smash Ultimate has brought a new fighter to the light, one by the name of Isabelle. Isabelle is a twenty-year-old Shih Tzu dog with an unknown background and the crowds are waiting in bated breath to see what she will bring to the future of the company. With Mario's enthusiasm to present her, we can deduce that she has incredible talent just waiting to leap into sight and we can't wait to witness it for ourselves.

"I strongly believe in waiting for the right opportunity to come around rather than taking the first one you see," Mario announced on the topic of his newest recruit. "While, yes, this process might have taken much longer than I would have liked it to, I have high hopes that [Isabelle] is exactly what we need here at Smash Ultimate. I've seen her work drive and it's impressive, to say the least. I think she'll fit right in here with the other fighters."

It's clear that Mario thinks very highly about this new opportunity, as he called it. We might not know much about this most recent fighter quite yet, but we hope that she fulfills the grand expectations she had since set for herself and proves herself to become the lift into the brightest future.

I requested the day off from my work at the shop the night prior. I boarded the plane at eight fifty in the morning and it landed at last at a quarter past ten. The sun was already positioned high up in the sky when I took off from the airport, sitting in the middle of an almost cloudless blue sky. The sidewalk projected out from the airport soon divided off into a paler pavement, leading further and further through well-trimmed grass to deliver me to the Smash Ultimate headquarters. I nearly reeled in passing by a human shuffling the other way on the pavement, a young man around my age tossing back inky purple hair with an array of freckles splattered across his pale face—I couldn't reach far back enough in my memory for the last time I had stumbled into someone who wasn't an animal—But I was quickly proven that this was the least of the surprises waiting for me.

Within ten minutes of leaving the airport, the building of the main headquarters loomed overhead. The area was more populated right at the source, almost swarming with visitors nudging into and out of the main glass doors. It was the sight of the building I found myself absorbed in before anything else, a colossal silver building sporting tall windows fixed in a row all across the front and catching the generous shine from the sun beaming above. With its size, its commanding presence, and the glow it was bathed in, the sight was almost unreal by how stunning it was. A numbness instantly washed over me in utter awe of the image before me.

It was as I drew nearer that I fully comprehended the crowds that dispersed from the glass doors, quite abruptly smacked with a certain discovery like I had just run headfirst into a wall. It wasn't even just humans and animals that occupied this space, though both were clearly plentiful. I witnessed and watched, each ducking through the doors, a blocky robot that slid smoothly across the pavement, a cluster of human-like figures in full-body battlesuits with the glass helmets that had been paired with them, even an especially pointed-face pale-colored animal that I failed to identify. To say that there was certainly diversity was a criminally vast understatement.