Magical Burst 0.1 (Par's)

A quiet afternoon rolls by in an unassuming city on Ohio.  The streets are peppered here and there with various students walking back from school, though not as en-masse as a half-hour ago when classes let out.  These are the few held up by the occasional trip to a teacher’s classroom, club meeting, or after-school rendezvous with prospective lovers…
As the students go their separate ways down different streets, one high-school girl runs down the sidewalk passionately, looking no way but forward and certainly not backward.  For whatever reason her backpack is clutched in her hands rather than slung over her back, but one look at her face tells that she is clearly too shocked to care.  She has just seen something… un-seeable, on the school roof.  Even though the run from campus to her house is a good quarter-hour, she has still not been able to make any sense of what she just saw.
She runs up the steps of her cookie-cutter template of a home and only then realizes she’s been carrying her backpack this whole time.  She fumbles the door open and steps inside.  Once the door swings shut behind her, she relaxes for only a short while, leaning her back against the yellowing paint.  Her backpack dangles limply in her fingers and her lungs work to catch up to the run they’ve just been subjected to.
A voice calls from the living room.  “You’re home later than usual, honey.”
Dorothy gasps to catch her breath as she looks at her father reading the paper from the living room.  “You’re… here, earlier than… usual too, Dad,” she responds.
“There was unexpected server maintenance at work, or something like that.  Had to log everyone off for the rest of the day, and there’s really not much to do without the computers.  I’ll make up for it next week.”
“More overtime?” she asks pitiably.  Dorothy has grown accustomed to her father working long hours at no one’s bequest but his own.  There is work to be done, he said, and he might as well do it while he’s able.  While it puts good food on the table and helped them enjoy more comforts than average, his absence weighs heavily on the girl, who has already lost her mother and spends many dinners in an empty house.
“Just for a few days, sweetheart.  It’ll be all right.”
Dorothy lets the subject drop, heart still racing from what happened after school.  With a stuttering “I’ve, got a, a lot of homework, sooo, uhh, I’ll be, down for dinner” she whisks herself away to her room, shutting the door behind her. A cluttered room, full of the remnants of old hobbies and interests now discarded.  An old garage-sale guitar rests on top of a dusty clarinet case, an angled desk once used for drawing is now littered with half-read books and half-played video games, and a shelf that was meant to proudly display arts, crafts, and models is now just a resting place for whatever litter and miscellany Dorothy can’t find a better place for.
Dorothy lets the bookbag tumble unceremoniously to the floor and climbs on top of her bed, shoes and all.  Her back thuds against the headboard as she clutches a gigantic purple plush dragon for comfort; a memento of unexpected victory against a partially-rigged circus midway game.  The plush is now lumpy and the fabric has lost most of its shine, but it is her dear friend, her faithful Violet.  In a life riddled with failures and mediocrity, she clings to her feeble successes just like stuffed animals...
She mumbles to herself, her spoken words as broken as the thoughts that provoke them.  “What… what, what, what was that?  What, it… it doesn’t, make any sense, I…  I saw it, I, I THOUGHT I saw it, at least…  That, it can’t be… REAL.  Special, special effects…?  Some, did I, was it, like a, a movie set or something?  Reality TV show?  I mean, I guess, I guess they could do that sort of… stuff, without computers…  Oh God what’s going on here?!”
She attempts to dismiss it as some elaborate joke; she WANTS to dismiss it as an elaborate joke.  In recent years she’s been so predisposed to her pessimism that she begins to shut intriguing ideas down before even giving them the benefit of the doubt.  What seems to be fantastical and enjoyable never ends up being that way, to her.  So what if those strange lights and sights on the roof WERE some kind of reality television show, or movie in progress?  She knows she wouldn’t be any sort of important character, and besides, she knows she can’t act; she’d be of no use to them.  Either it was some sort of mistake, or they purposely called her up there because they wanted an authentic reaction of someone who had absolutely no idea what was going on, which is exactly what they got in her opinion:  a teenaged girl scared out of her mind, cowering against a wall…
“…Bet those other girls were just plants or something.  Do I know them?  Gah, can’t, can’t remember.  Might’ve seen ‘em around.  Might not’ve.  No one can just see all that weirdness and just ACCEPT it; they’ve got to be in on it.  Just another big thing I’m not a part of…
“Oh god I hope I’m not crazy.  I saw what I thought I saw, right?  R-right…?  Un, unless…  No.  That’s even stupider.  Someone sneaking LSD into my drink or something, that’s just conspiracy paranoia.  I’m not important enough to matter like that to anyone.  And I’m too boring to be schizophrenic, anyways.  It’s got to be just some weird movie thing…”
Dorothy slumps onto her back, sighing.  Just a weird movie thing…  Some freak mistake that doesn’t concern her…  She sits the dragon on her chest, looking into its plastic cartoon eyes as if it’s the only thing she really trusts in life.  As her heart slows and her panic fades away, the nearly-inaudible nagging in her head finds the room to whisper its message to her again.  That ever-present, ever-optimistic message of hope:
What if…?
“What if, Violet…?  What if it’s, y’know, actually…  What if something like that could actually HAPPEN?  I know, Violet, I know, it won’t, and it doesn’t, and it’s stupid, and I shouldn’t even be thinking about it.  Get my hopes up again…  Thought I stopped believing in kids’ stuff a while ago…”
She rolls onto her stomach, encircling her fluffy friend in a hug and resting her chin on her pillow, sighing once more.  “Probably wouldn’t be any good at it anyways.  What were they even talking about again?  Magic, something about, what… demons?  Souls?  Superhero stuff of something, fighting evil, clichéd crap.  That’d be the only thing worse than being a living testimony to mediocrity:  being a living cliché.  And of course it’s not real anyways; superhero television show’d mean you’ve gotta do what they tell you to.  No living your fantasies, nope, just stick to the script and do as you’re told.  Garbage…”
The story of her high school life, told in microcosm in a single afternoon slump on her bed.  Just as soon as she can start dreaming about some new path her life could take, she shuts herself down, hiding behind half-valid justifications and telling herself that the grass will never be greener.  Even dreams of magic and miracles fail to enrapture her anymore; to a child that has made herself grow up too quickly, they are shallow escapes that only take, and promise emptily, and never give back.
“Still…  If it existed, something like that might be fun to try once… you know?”