Alright, here it is...
...the first chapter of what I am tentatively calling Dueling Hearts.
There is a bit of episodic...ness(?) to this, but it is supposed to be taken in all at once overall, so details will be revealed over time. And nothing much happens in this chapter. And I should really post another one pretty much immediately. But I won’t.
Anyway, here’s...
Chapter One
Joanna Sieger
It was a Friday morning in Checker Township, Ohio, a suburb in the northeastern United States. Alongside a moderately-busy road, only a guard rail, and a thin bar of trampled grass, littered with faded, decaying paper wrappers, and dirty bottles separating its front lot from dusty asphalt, stood a building about the size of a corner mini mall, with big windows lining the front. They were textured, but still allowed plenty of light through.
Above the windows, with the tail end hanging above the single glass swinging door, was a wide light up sign that read “Wilson’s Dojo”, along with some phone numbers intended for interested parties. It was an unassuming building, its brick walls due for a spray down, and its once-white siding tinted sandy brown. It was an easy place for one to overlook, unaware of the amazing things that routinely went on inside.
Within the building, a young man stood across a broad blue mat from a smaller figure, while an elderly man in thick, horn-rimmed glasses watched, his arms crossed, his expression somewhere between amusement and true interest. The young man, whose frame was broad and full, with large and defined muscles, stood in a ready stance, his chest rising and falling quickly, sweat dotting his brow. His opponent was shorter, and of a slimmer build. You might not notice right away, because her hair was messy, and her clothing was unflattering and boyish, but his opponent was a girl about his age. She stood calmly with her hands hanging at her sides. She was barely paying her opponent any mind, despite the difference in size between them. After all, they had already clashed twice, and the girl wasn’t even winded.
“You bored?” The young man asked.
“Yeah, a little,” the girl replied, almost offhandedly. Which was a mistake, as it inspired her larger opponent to charge her. For the first time, she gave their sparring match her full attention, stepping back into a back stance that was precise, but also loose and relaxed, as if she was ready to change stances at a moment’s notice. Powerful muscles flexed beneath her skin, a testament to years of physical training. Her opponent swung a big, hammy fist at his smaller opponent’s head, his hand flying so fast that the eye could barely track it. The force of his blow was great enough that it actually stirred up the air along its trajectory. Yet the fit young woman, with barely any discernible effort, stepped back, leaned, and ducked slightly. Her opponent’s fist missed her head, and sailed above her shoulder.
Her counterattack was precise and practiced. Before her opponent could retract his arm, the smaller fighter wrapped her right arm around the large young man’s wrist, and thrust upward with her left palm, catching her opponent in the elbow. There was a loud pop, and the larger fighter staggered backward, gripping his right arm in his left hand and moaning. His opponent waited patiently as he checked that his arm still worked, and then, in a fit of anger, lashed out this time with his left fist. His strike was slower than the last, and sloppy. Avoiding it was again a simple matter. The girl did so without even needing to step back so far to be unable to reach her opponent’s torso. From inside her opponent’s guard, she gave her opponent’s celiac plexus a swift punch. The air flew from the larger fighter’s lungs, and he staggered back, toppling backward onto his butt.
“I don’t have time for this, Keith” the girl said, turning to leave, nodding to the elderly man as she did, but she stopped as she heard her opponent shuffle back to his feet.
“Screw you, Jo,” the broad-shouldered young man, Keith, exclaimed. “This place is shit. I came here to get stronger, but none of the stuff you’ve been having me do has made a difference. It doesn’t help that hardly anybody trains here.”
“You’d actually get results,” the girl, Jo, said harshly, “if you weren’t too stubborn to try anything that doesn’t make immediate sense to you. You seem to think that you can unlock the full potential of your Sol just by forcing it, but you can’t.”
She said it as if she’d made an indisputable point, so she was surprised when Keith chuckled. “You keep saying that, but I have proof that you’re wrong.” He held his right arm out straight, pointed at the floor, with his palm facing straight down. There was a clear look of strain on his face.
Suddenly, the air within the room became charged, literally sparking, and started moving seemingly for no reason. Static jumped off of Keith’s body, as he reached deep within himself and, with concentration, drew out a huge reservoir of energy. Static followed that energy as it flowed from the core of the young man’s body, down his right arm, and out passed his right palm. With a flash, a ball of reddish Sol energy, about the size of a soccer ball, took form there, arcs of electricity rolling off of it and striking the floor around Keith’s feet.
The elderly man became apprehensive, his stance becoming more guarded, but Jo barely reacted. She became suddenly more tense, her expression indicating greater investment in the situation, but she didn’t even turn back to face her opponent again.
“You see that,” Keith said, triumphantly. “All on my own, without help from any of your ‘learn about yourself to find your true power’ bullshit, I managed to learn how to make attacks from Sol energy! Before long, I’ll be able to create an aura, too. No thanks to you idiots.”
He shot his opponent an evil grin, and spat, “Hey, if you’re so fast, then dodge this why don’tcha.”
He straightened up, and kicked the ball of energy right at the back of his opponent’s head. It spun wildly, but it’s course stayed true. It flew with enough force to punch most of, if not all the way through a brick wall. Being hit by it would be devastating, but this time, his opponent didn’t dodge the attack. Instead, she spun so fast that Keith didn’t even see her body start to turn, and she reached out and caught the orb. It pushed her back, and she had to visibly strain, but in the end, the orb was stopped, held firm in the female fighter’s outstretched hand, which was itself wrapped in a burning aura of black and purple light. A few seconds later, the orb dissipated, and the light around Jo’s hand faded away.
“An aura like that one?” The elderly man asked Keith, his stance once again relaxed now that the danger had passed. He chuckled, and Keith fumed.
“Fuck you guys,” he spat, shooting them both dirty looks before storming out, followed by a pair if amused smirks. As the door swung shut behind him, Jo sighed heavily.
“Good riddance,” she said. “I mean, it was kinda nice having a sparring partner, but that guy was just awful. At everything.”
“You could have been a little nicer to him,” the elderly man replied.
“Maybe,” Jo replied, rubbing her right hand, which had been left raw by the ill-advised, yet dramatic, catch, “but come on, Wil, you know as well as I do that it wouldn’t have mattered. So I ran him off faster than I could have. Please don’t expect me to shed any tears.”
The elderly man, the Wilson of “Wilson’s Dojo”, shook his head and sighed, “You call him stubborn, but you, Joanna Sieger, are, in your own way, one of the most stubborn fifteen year olds that I’ve ever met. The way you insist on dealing with people, I’m surprised that you don’t get into even more trouble than you do.”
Jo laughed, “That’s not stubbornness, that’s charm.”
The two laughed again, and then Jo said, “Well, it was a good thing that I ran him off when I did. I’ve got somewhere to be. See ya later, Wil.”
Without another word, she moved swiftly out the door, and started down the side of the street at a jog. She was completely unfazed by the events that she’d just been a part of, because that’s just how things were for Joanna Sieger. Sure, she found most people to be insincere and annoying, and just not worth her time, and so she tended to be a little brash, or just plain rude, but most people could tell that she wasn’t a bad person.
And yet trouble seemed to follow her around, like something dangerous was creeping up on her, just out of sight. She'd learned to take it, but she had always wondered if she had bad karma or something. She did have a pretty short fuse, but she had that under control. Could the universe be testing her? It was a silly question, but one that she’d asked herself before, and that she asked herself again after the events of the day. Just like every other time that she’d asked herself the question, she didn’t come upon an answer.
From Wilson’s, Jo made her way home. The walk wasn’t a long one. Her house, a nice two-story with a barn roof, was only a few blocks from the dojo. It was only ten minutes away, by car, from where Jo’s closest friend lived, and likewise only twenty minutes away from her extended family. The area mall and towne center, and all of the recreational facilities situated around it, was only twenty minutes away by bus. The house had a large back yard, and Jo’s room was more than large enough to sleep in, and to store her things, which is really all that she used it for anyway.
Jo approached the house with the same kind of calm that she’d shown in her fight. She was nearly to the door when she heard voices from around behind the building. With a little half smile, she changed direction, walking to the front corner of the house. She jumped gracefully over the chest-high chain link fence, and moved to stand just in view of the spacious back yard. In the middle of the flat, grassy, rectangular space, a fit, middle-aged woman with a back-length ponytail of red-brown hair, and a pretty face, stood before a group of three children, sitting upon a pair of red sparring mats.
The woman was Jo’s mother, Shannon, and this was one of her rare Sol lessons, and training sessions. Rare only because her tutelage was so sought after that if she didn’t limit the number of classes that she offered, she would never have any time for anything else. She and her students wore workout clothing, but they all looked completely fresh. The lesson had only just started, and as far as Jo could tell, she had a new student today, which made it easy for Jo to guess what was coming next.
“Since a new student has joined the class,” Shannon was saying, “I think we should go over the basics. Starting with the definition of Sol. Can anyone tell me what Sol is?”
Two small hands shot into the air. Shannon nodded to one of the eager children, a little blond girl, and the girl stood up and spoke.
“Sol,” she explained, “is a power that all people have inside them. Some start out with a lot more of it, but anyone can train their Sol to get bigger and stronger and do really amazing things with it.”
“That’s right,” Shannon agreed, “but that’s not all. Someone who knows how to control the energy of their Sol can mix it with the life energy in their body to make both much greater for a short time. More life energy makes a person quicker to heal when they’re hurt, and more Sol energy can be used to augment a person’s body, making them stronger and faster, or it can be turned outward to attack. Some people can even make enough Sol energy to wrap their body up in it and become stronger still.”
“Aura,” the little girl said. Shannon nodded, and smiled.
“People who have a lot of Sol, who have trained themselves to use it well, compete in big fighting events to test themselves, and to learn more about Sol and its powers. An entire new kind of sport has been created where Sol wielders from anywhere, with powers of any kind, can face off one-on-one in fair matches without any real risk of hurting themselves. Matches like this are called Heart to Hearts.”
She looked to the other child who had raised their hand, a young boy with dark skin and curly black hair, “Can you tell us about the history of Sol? About where it came from?”
The boy replied, “Sol appeared thirty years ago. But I don’t remember where it came from.”
“That’s alright,” Shannon told him. “Sol did appear thirty years ago, but that wasn’t the first time that people had Sol. Thousands of years ago, people had Sols as strong as the ones that people have today. The people of the time called it different things, like magic, and chi, and it’s the reason why history tells stories of humans who could do miraculous things. Then, suddenly, Sol disappeared from most people, and even the people who still had it didn’t have as much. For a long time, historians didn’t know about Sol, and so they thought that ancient stories of magic and miracles weren’t true. Now they know better.”
“And you found Sol,” the third student, a brown-haired boy with freckles, blurted. Shannon laughed, but she caught herself after only a moment.
“That’s almost right,” Shannon told him, blushing as she usually did when someone sparked a conversation with her about herself. “When Sol suddenly returned thirty years ago, I was one of the first people to learn about it, and learn how to make it stronger. I’ve never been very strong in terms of my body, so I used the principles and ideas of martial arts to make my Sol stronger, so that it could make my body strong, and I came up with a whole bunch of techniques that others can use to do the same thing, too. People with the right Types of Sol anyway.”
Upon hearing that, Jo, who had watched the entire exchange, lost interest. A smile of contentment was replaced by a slight frown. She felt like she’d been slapped in the face, but she shook off the sensation, and walked back around in front of the house, swung the front door open, and stepped inside. Fuming almost imperceptibly, she climbed the stairs and took a single shallow corner to her room. She changed out of her exercise clothes. She had somewhere to be, and even though her match with Keith hadn’t pushed her too much, it had worked up a sweat. She tossed her loose black tank and sweats aside, and stepped into a pair of dark blue jeans, a white t-shirt, and an old, faded black overshirt with tattering along the edges.
She turned to look at herself in the tall mirror on the back of her door. Her clothes were nothing special. The kind of thing that she wore every day. Her dark brown hair was even messier than usual, casting a shadow over her equally-dark brown eyes. She seemed so unassuming, so much so that one could hardly even tell for sure what gender she was, and that was the way that Jo preferred it. She would show off when it was appropriate, but in day to day situations, she preferred to be as nondescript as possible.
The right Type, Jo thought. Her frown hadn’t left her face, and it deepened at the remembered words. A familiar feeling crept into Jo’s chest, a dark feeling made of pain and anger, buried deep and unaddressed. A feeling that would continue to go unaddressed, as Jo buried it again, and forced a smile back onto her face. She had things to do. As casually as ever, she made her way back outside, and set out from home once again. Unaddressed feelings aside, she had a lot to be excited for, and she intended to be ready. To do that, though, she had to gather her friends. So she set out toward a nearby park to find her best friend, Tucker.
Onward to Chapter Two