One should easily have a clear picture of The City from this basic overview alone. A sludgeful city that covers its citizens in emotional waste and palpable grudges while consuming what they produce, whether it be emotions or materials.
Nothing was supposed to change. People lived lives filled with joy and sorrow before they returned to the earth with all of those emotions dispersing along with their lives.
But, something did change just a little more than a decade ago.
A bright beam of light burst from within the city. As if to reject the current state of the city, it burned a hole through the smog and the sky above and spurred a foreign feeling of hope from the people. This impossible pillar of light remained as a safety net for people's positive emotions for a short three days before disappearing, only leaving a palpable feeling of sorrow, loss, and despair.
Yes, this incident was called the White Nights and Dark Days. An event that entrenched both positive and negative emotions deeper than the City has ever experienced before in its citizens. Emotions that distorted the bodies and minds of people, leaving their barest selves revealed as nothing more than Distortions.
And it was an incident that was a prelude to another incident. A repetition of before: a beam of light that fired from the same place only a few months later.
However, these incidents that should've roused the city to great change only affected it slightly. It took the abnormality in stride all while adapting to it and forcing it to go at its own pace because that's the type of being The City is.
And you're just another person in the city, trying to make something of your life.
Spark of Light is an online quest run by Parasection on SpaceBattles.com that began in 2021, and it's set in the same universe as Library of Ruina, with the story beginning some years after the game's Golden Ending. The protagonist of the story is a Fixer named Michael Armstrong, who recently got promoted to Grade 8 after leaving his old Office behind. He then decided to go back to his birthplace, District 9, and to create his very own Office to try and bring back his District to it's original glory after it's catastrophic destruction by the hands of The Pianist. And it is your job to help Michael accomplish his goal while also keeping him alive from The City's general weirdness. Good luck... you'll need it.
Spark of Light contains the following tropes:
- Combat Medic: Michael can stitch someone back together just as easily as he can slice them to bits, which the first of is very needed when he takes up a contract at a hospital. Time will tell if the second becomes needed as well. He is a great doctor for someone with the education of the Backstreets, especially when he eventually gets to the point where he can revive people from otherwise-fatal wounds if he’s quick enough.
- Covert Group: The Dawn Syndicate. Five members, of which Michael is part of while still being a Fixer. They have various individual motivations, but their main goal is to topple the Head to change the City. If they get found out, they will most definitely die horrifically.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Michael vs the Graverobber Round 2. In their first battle, Michael and his higher grade Fixer overseer Zohar get tortured by the Graverobber hitting them with the Sound of the City, but manage to eventually get up and chop off his head. When he comes back, his frequency of the Sound is much stronger and Michael only manages to get back up by mustering his will and forcing a partial manifestation of E.G.O.. Even then the Graverobber creates an altered version of Michael’s new weapon on the spot, then exchanges equal strikes with Michael until Michael knocks him into a building... only for him to be completely undamaged. Then he promptly reveals that the whole time he was toying with and using Michael as a test subject to discover the truth of his own creation and abilities because of Michael’s abnormal mental resistance to his Sound-based attacks, then concludes that he has acquired all the data he needs to. Then he breaks Michael’s new weapon with one slice, dismisses his altered version, and one-shots Michael with a punch empowered by a Sound frequency so strong it destroys the inside of his body and prevents him from moving because of the loss of the BODY PARTS needed to move.
- One-Man Army: When it comes to the various Syndicate members or even the Sweepers, Michael is more like a beast than a human being. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that even as a Grade 9 Fixer he’s capable of destroying a Syndicate by himself.
- Shock and Awe: When Michael needs to fry someone, he can always remember the fact that apparently magic exists, and use Keraunos to electrocute them.
- Sociopathic Hero: Michael starts out as this, but slowly moves away as he grows as a person through his ventures as a Fixer. He originally starts as a person who doesn’t empathize with anyone he kills, seeing them as no more than living scum, and openly smiles at seeing the fear of his enemies and killing them. He is willing to do whatever it takes to bring District 9 back to the old days of joy, no matter how downright evil some acts he considers are. However, as the story moves on, he manages to grow as a person and becomes more compassionate to others, eventually rejecting the City’s way of dismissing the dead and starts caring about even his enemies, while he kills them to boot. He opens his mind to those who formerly repulsed him like his old friend Frederick, and even helps a girl in the hospital not for the purpose of money or arbitrary means to make District 9 great again, but for actual, moral, justice. He still doesn’t quite have the mindset of a normal person though, as when he decides to pick a SYNDICATE LEADER named Enoch over fellow Fixers, and kills them all to let the criminal escape. Fortunately this turns out well.
- The Cavalry: Michael, while strong enough to handle most enemies while only taking minor damage, even soloing a Syndicate leader who was able to use the strength of the many dead he had slaughtered as magical blood weapons, he just is no match for Sephiroth. In his second fight with him, he gets toyed with and one-shotted. He nearly gets choked to death before a Rat Leader named Gregorio comes around and saves him by literally backstabbing Sephiroth, which allows him to escape. In his third “fight” with him, he’s already weary and injured from fighting a horde of Sweepers to protect the Backstreet civilians, and then Sephiroth comes out of nowhere and stabs him right through. Luckily, a strong fixer friend of Zohar happened to be nearby, who was impressed with Michael’s determination to keep fighting, and fought Sephiroth long enough for Michael to escape again.
- The Rival: For Michael, it’s the Graverobber. He sees him as an expression of the City’s hierarchy in how because of what and who he is, he can do virtually whatever he wants with no real consequences while people below suffer, while he in turn has to answer to corporations above him, and the Head. The Graverobber in turn sees him as a fascinating human that has strong mental resistance which allows him to accomplish much others in his District haven’t managed to, and gains data from conflicting with him on how to improve himself and achieve true self-actualization. A chain of puppetry that leads to the Head, who is responsible in part for the damage to Michael’s home district. They were mostly equal on their first fight but Michael managed to win, but in their second fight he was toyed with and then one-shotted. Justified, in that the reason the Graverobber is so strong and why Michael sees him as an expression of the City’s cruel hierarchy is because the Graverobber is a LIVING, TALKING Singularity called Sephiroth. He is the incarnation of the pinnacle of a Corporation’s work which grants them hegemony over a District. He can fix and upgrade himself from virtually anything given materials and data, can wield the Magic of the Eldritch Outskirts beyond the City limits very easily, has a connection to the Abyss, extreme strength and speed beyond most augmented humans, can copy E.G.O., and can wield the Sound of the City so well he can one-shot Michael, who ALSO knows about the City’s Sound and is a musician himself.
