Accessory Wars

Chapter 44-Felisa

            Kami could barely sit still as I wiped the sweat off my body. In ten days we'd be fighting in Trebbin alongside Garreld and Seline. I mirrored her excitement but managed to retain it. Although, I found myself grinning when I day dreamed of all the wonderful things that could happen. I got a few weird looks from my classmates. At least tomorrow was Tuesday, which meant I had one morning class and the rest of the afternoon to myself. Kami worked but she hoped to duck out early in order to maximize our training time. I would be doing individual training with Garreld and Seline until she arrived.

"Argh! It's so hard to tell which way the brackets will go!" Kami exclaimed as she looked over the paper chart for the fourth time since I got to the gym. With singles, you could tell which fighters had the upper hand with a few surprises thrown in. With doubles, far more factors went into play. Teamwork, individual ability, how well each fighter knew their partner, which opponents they needed to face off against. Doubles also covered all three tiers in each class bracket. I got cross eyed multiple times from staring at the brackets for too long.

I already memorized our bracket and I knew of a few other prominent names on the roster. Frances was there with his Elicit's team in the S-class singles. Donna and Valorie were in A-class singles and I wondered if we would have faced off again if Kami and I weren't doing doubles.

Our first match was against a metal and a water attunement. Due to Kami's armor, I needed to face off against the water attunement. I watched what videos I could find on our opponents and they worked in sync with almost every move. The metal fighter used magnetism to throw off their opponent while the water used fast, powerful moves like a shark.

From there, the brackets went a few different ways. Our next opponents would either be a pair of storm attunements or a molten and unknown attunement. It was rare for an A-class to not know their attunement but sometimes they weren't always clear. Some Accessories used more than one element but were still based out of one attunement, making it hard to pin down what abilities were in their roster. One example would be an S-class we saw in Bailey. While their attunement was water, their powers revolved around underwater volcanoes so they also used molten attacks.

"Did you see the prizes?" Kami asked, peering over her shoulder as I scrubbed off my arms with a towel.

"For the top sixteen?" I asked.

"That could be us, Felisa! A thousand dollars of pure pocket profit. Think of the prestige it'll give us in future tournaments! We might even get trading cards!" I forgot about tournament trading cards. The boys in grade school traded them during free time, often bragging about their rarities. Kami's eyes sparkled as she clasped her hands together, scrunching up her paper. "Think of all the children that will clamor to the stores with bills clutched tightly in their fists, eyes wide at the prospect of getting you in their card pack."

"No one's going to want to collect me," I protested. Not if they knew my secrets.

"Not true," Kami shot back, putting her hands on her hips, further wrinkling her page. "Jas and Penny love those cards. They'd be the first ones in line when the packs hit the shelves." I felt honored Kami brought up her sisters. She so rarely did. She once showed me a few pictures of Jas, short for Jasmine, and Penny from their social media pages. It was inspiring seeing them grown up after seeing them from Kami's memories. Jas was going to be a senior in high school come fall and Penny a junior.

"I wouldn't be a popular card," I tried to argue.

"Felisa, the unpopular cards are the best ones! There's a reason they print a lot of popular fighters. They're popular! While they get all the fancy foils, gold prints and holographic pizazz, it's the unpopular ones that are the rarest. Do you know how many packs we would need to go through to find one of us? We'd be lucky if we had one card in a box! That means we'd be ultra-rare and little kids eat that stuff up." Kami gave a nod and went to look back at her sheet. A look of horror came over her face as she saw how wrinkled it was and it made me giggle.