Template:Featured Articles/6-2025

Moment of Awesome - Alison Blaire/Dazzler: The triumphant return of Ulysses Bloodstone is interrupted, and then eclipsed by, the Alison Blaire Half Time Show. Alison frowned. This wasn't working. She'd already pressed the speakers as loud as they would go, and she wasn't quite willing to abandon this song for something poppier just yet. Around her, as her power flared into fireflies of blue light, Alison abruptly remembered the soundsparks from the Askew World. They had been a physical representation of sound itself, a synesthesiac echo of waves of pressure. And in that world, where physics were wrong and yet somehow echoed, she had pulled the ambient sound into a single point to create her sabers of light there towards the end. She had pulled sound... It was like flexing a muscle she didn't actually have, but somewhere in the back of her mind that itch that she couldn't forget bounced back. She couldn't quite phrase it into words, because there were no words for what she was feeling, but suddenly two things happened all at once. First, that hollow feeling from the Askew World overtook her as every drop of sound in the surrounding area ceased all at once. The rivers of music and noise that kissed her skin were suddenly still, and the perfect silence rang in Alison's ears. Second, ribbons of light began to swirl around her, flowing like water into her clenched fist. It slipped through the gaps between her fingers like water down a drain. She could feel it as it gently built. It was warm, and light, and felt like hope and determination in equal measure. It kept building and then suddenly, Alison knew it was 'ready', although she couldn't say what 'it' was or what 'ready' meant. She threw her hand forward, forcing the light spiraling in her hand up to the skin. For a moment, a brilliant four-pointed star shone above the hedge maze before collapsing in on itself. But it didn't fade out, as the illusion covering the hedge maze finally broke. Growing like fire on a dry field, a ring of blue light almost gently consumed the sky as the magic was burnt away. Alison sat down on the roof's edge, suddenly once-again able to hear her music as it bopped through the chorus. The others could handle things for a while. Alison needed a minute.