Sparkly

Yellow

Darius dreamed he was walking through a field of bright yellow sunflowers under a crystal blue sky.

The scene looked pleasant, but there was a definite stink in the air coming from the sunflowers.

"Are sunflowers really supposed to smell...?" Darius wondered, but his voice came out as the high voice of that weird girl he could transform into.

Uncomfortable, he brought a delicate hand to his mouth. How could he transform back in a dream?

"A new member of the Squad... You're Amber, right?" a girl's voice said.

She was garishly bright blue, surrounded by crystals that reflected an excessive amount of light.

"Who are you?" Darius said, cringing at the voice coming out of his mouth.

"I'm Crystal. For some reason, people who have gained a gem's power tend to find me in dreams. I don't know where this power comes from, but other people with this power have gathered. On sunday at noon, on top of Trace Mountain, is where we're meeting next." She smiled, looking slightly stressed. "Welcome to the Gem Squad."

Darius shook his head, his ridiculous braided candy colored hair bouncing.

"I don't want to use this power." he said.

It was an evil power, he could feel it in the stink of the sunflowers, in the way all the darkness in him rose to the surface when he took this form. Which meant...

"I don't trust you, you know. If you mean to harm me, come at me now." Darius said, but the weight of his words fell flat in the high, young voice of his current form.

He pointed a hand in front of him and materialized his magical energy into a sword. It shone with the uneven, soft texture of amber, but he could feel a lurking malice in it. An energy that would lash out at anything, even himself, if he wasn't careful.

"That is not my intention." Crystal said.

She floated into the air, letting off blue light almost too strong to look at.

"I can't force you to join us. But we're doing good for the world, and I believe we can do more good together. We find bad people by searching for information in our own time and sharing it, and then we punish them together. But it's not just about that, we try to talk them out of it. We clean places up with out magic.

If you want to know more about us, you know where to find us.

Trace Mountain, at noon on sunday." as she rose her voice grew fainter and fainter, until she was gone from Darius' dream.

The stink of the sunflowers grew stronger, and Darius felt trapped and suffocated in the girl- Amber's- skin.

He tried, desperately, to transform back.

Darius woke up, gasping. He was sweating and his heart was racing.

In the comfort of his own skin, his heartbeat slowed down and he reconsidered Crystal's offer. He wanted to know more about the power of these gems.

Nobody had asked him about the gem when they'd been congratulating him on capturing the sword. They hadn't mentioned it and he hadn't brought it up. He assumed the sword and gem were unrelated, but then what on earth was the gem?

When his father sent him out into some war for the sake of some ridiculous pride, Darius would no longer have time to learn anything.

He was deeply wary of this power, but he at least wanted to know where it came from.