There was no one left in the hallway but Chase. This was it. The moment she'd been eagerly anticipating for days and tremendously dreading for nearly half an hour. She barely heard Alicia call for the next girl over the sound of blood pounding in her ears. Taking a deep breath, she put on a smile and walked into the room.

The gymnasium was a strange place. The floor was made of polished wood, streaked with large, colored lines. Hanging from the ceiling above the half court line was a huge four sided thing she later found out was a scoreboard. On either end of the court was a hanging board, each with an attached hoop and an open, hanging net. Chase had never seen anything like it before, but she assumed they were snares of some kind and stayed well away from them. Chase had no idea what function the metal bleachers could serve however, as they were collapsed when not in use and did not presently resemble anything she could identify.

The other girls in the gym, both the cheerleaders and the would-be ones who were waiting for Alicia and Victoria's decision, saw her looking around and being careful not to walk underneath the basketball hoop, and immediately noticed there was something different about this one. She came to a stop in front of the table.

“Hi there!” said Alicia. She gave her a quick wink. “Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself before you start?”

Chase nodded nervously. “N-n-ni hao! Name Chase!” she said, waving timidly to the seated cheerleaders. “Chase new here. Like cheer, good at jump and kick. Want on squad, want be friends. No eat you, I swear.”

“Did she just say she swears she won't eat us?” asked one of the cheerleaders, Brittany.

“She's... she doesn't know too much English yet,” stammered Caitlin.

“So, she IS going to eat us?” asked Nicole.

“N-no, I mean, she didn't intend to bring up the subject of eating you or not eating you at all,” Caitlin replied.

“Is she a foreign exchange student?” Brittany continued.

“Not really. She's more like a foreign refugee student,” said Lindsey.

The girls gasped, astonished.

“The old country was hard for her. Every penny, every meal, every day still breathing, she had to fight for,” said Caitlin. “She heard stories of America, of the freedoms we had, of the cheerleading we took for granted, but she thought it was a myth. When she was six, her brother was executed under suspicion of being an imperial spy. When she was nine, her mother met the same fate. Suffering was all she knew. She couldn't imagine life without it.”

Lindsey decided to give it a try. “She agreed to be sold into the tyrant king's harem if he allowed her family to keep their farm. A hard winter was coming, and without the food and income the farm provided, the family would surely starve,” the blonde said gravely. “The king kept his word. For about a week.”

The girls covered their mouths in horror. “That's... that's terrible!” gasped Rebecca.

Melissa J. started to cry. “I've... I've never heard a story that's made me s-s-s-sob so hard!”

Victoria was not very happy about this at all, and not just because she typically liked to be the one making girls cry. “Yes yes, very sad. Heartrending,” the petite girl said curtly, glaring at Chase. “I just hope your routine is as well rehearsed.”

“Daaaaaamn,” said Melissa J.

All that was really left was for Chase to prove that yes, it was. She did her routine. All throughout, both the cheerleaders and Chase's competition gasped and offered scattered applause. Her combination of acrobatics and hillbilly martial arts was a breath of fresh air in the gym that day, and her endless well of enthusiasm for the sport was easily readable on her beaming face, in her mighty shouts and chants, and in the spring in her graceful step.

When she was done, a final round of applause capped off her performance.

“Wow!” praised Alicia, clapping loudest of all. Chase had thrown in a few moves even she hadn't seen. “Very good!”

“Yeah, it was... really original!” commented Samantha.

“But I dunno,” added Danielle. “It was also sort of... sort of...”

“Original.”

“Yeah.”

“There were some regular stunts in there, but then she was, like, fighting and stuff,” agreed Heather. “Fighting is not a very cheery thing to do.”

“Yeah, it was really aggressive.”

“Backtracking a little here, but did she say 'ni hao'?” added Tiffers.

Lindsey stepped in to defend her. “The IDEA is to be aggressive, you guys! Why, we even have a chant about it!” she insisted. “There was so much intensity! Those kinds of moves will really get the crowd pumped up, and get our Fighting Cacti ready to prick some ass!” She punched the air a couple times with her pom poms. “Prick some ass! Prick some ass! Fighting Cacti prick some ass!”

Caitlin cringed. “I thought we agreed we were removing 'prick some ass' from our repertoire.”

“You agreed to that,” Lindsey clarified.

“One person can't agree to something. That isn't an agreement.”

“What's wrong with 'prick some ass'? Cacti have needles. They prick people. It makes perfect sense,” said Lindsey.

“That's the problem. It makes too much sense. It makes sense that way, and it makes sense another way,” said Caitlin.

“I don't really care for 'prick some ass,'” volunteered Tiffers.

“Thank you, Tiffers,” nodded Caitlin.

“Wow, Tiffers. Way to take her side,” said Lindsey, annoyed.

“Silence!” commanded Victoria. “It is the captain's and the assistant captain's place to discuss the merits of this routine. Your input is teetering on the line between not required and troublesome.”

She swept a long lock of blonde hair behind her ear as she looked down at her clipboard. “Now then. Chase. While I found your spirit, shall we say... ENDEARING, your actual execution of the routine was drastically unpolished, and included many unorthodox stunts unfit both for this squad and for civilized society as a whole. Cheerleading is about passion, but it is also about grace. While watching you perform, I thought, for the briefest of moments, that I was watching two rail workers having a bar brawl. Obviously, this is unacceptable. I don't want to say your dreams of being a cheerleader are unrealistic, but, well, when you left the old country you probably should have packed something more practical, like a dictionary.”

Victoria took a drink of water, then looked at Alicia. “Alright, that's all of them. Let's wrap this up.”

Alicia snapped out of her stunned silence. “A-a-are we already done?” she asked. She looked at the doorway, and saw that it was empty. Chase was the last one. She addressed Chase and the other cheer hopefuls with a grateful smile. “Wow, that went by quick! Thank you all for trying out! It's going to be really hard to pick from such a promising group. Victoria and I will go over what we've seen and post the results on the bulletin board outside the main office tomorrow morning. Good luck!”

Victoria gave a dainty yawn. “If it's all the same to you, Captain, I'd rather hurry this along. We're only choosing one. Let's just do it now and get it over with.”

Alicia was caught off guard. “But... but if we do a note then I don't have to reject anyone to their faces.”

“I like that she didn't dance around her reasoning this time,” commented Lindsey.

“What do you mean, 'have to'?” asked Victoria, confused. “You GET to reject people to their faces! It's one of the most pleasant and rewarding aspects of being captain!”

“That may very well be,” said Alicia, getting ready to grasp at some straws, “But if we do it now, then we're denying these girls the joys of waiting! The thrill of anticipation!”

The aspiring cheerleaders assured her this was no problem, though, so Alicia had no choice but to ask them to wait out in the hall while they deliberated. Chase looked over her shoulder as she went, and Lindsey gave her a discreet thumbs up.

The door closed, leaving the gym occupied by nothing but cheerleaders once again. Alicia tried once more to smooth her hair, hoping it would somehow compose the rest of her as well. She hadn't expected this. She thought she'd have more time to convince Victoria to let Chase on the squad.

“So... did you have anyone in particular in mind?” she asked warily.

Victoria shrugged. “I don't really care. None of them really stood out to me.” She pretended her next thought just suddenly came to her: “Oh, except that attention seeking Chase lunatic. Definitely not her.”

Caitlin stood up. “What? But she was clearly the best one!”

Lindsey stood up as well. “Yeah, Chase was great!” She turned to the rest of the squad. “Isn't that right?”

The rest of the squad definitely seemed to agree that Chase's routine was the most convincing.

“Infectious energy!” said Erin.

“Think she'll teach ME some of those moves?” gushed Kristen.

“Plus, you have to admit,” accused Lindsey, pointing at Victoria, “She's super hot.”

Victoria didn't want to agree, but she knew if she didn't, her beauty sense would be called into question. “I suppose she has a sort of... COMMON charm,” she conceded.

“Well, if we're both in agreement that she's good and she's pretty, I don't see the problem,” challenged Alicia. “That's what counts, is it not?”

The small girl frowned. She looked from one face to the other and saw she was alone in her opinion. This annoyed her, but she realized something that made it easier to swallow her pride. “Tch. Fine, she can join. Whatever.”

Alicia looked surprised, then relieved. Lindsey and Caitlin gave each other a high five.

Victoria fell in line, this time. A strategic retreat. So, Chase joined the squad. So what? It wasn't a big deal.

All she had to do was get Chase kicked off.

…..

Meanwhile, up in the stands, a man in black tactical dress watched the proceedings. He frowned, and touched his ear. The boss wouldn't like this. “Big Chief, this is Little Dragon. Come in, Big Chief.”

Chief McBride's voice spoke through his earpiece. “Go ahead, Little Dragon.”

“I am continuing my covert surveillance of the target,” said the young man. “There have been... unsettling developments.”

“What sort of developments?”

Little Dragon hesitated. He thought of wording his report in a way that would soften the blow, but he knew from experience this rarely worked on the chief. “She's... joined the cheerleading squad, sir.”

McBride cursed. Little Dragon heard a BOOM, a sound the man recognized as one of the chief's mammoth fists meeting the top of his desk at high velocity. “I expected her to keep a low profile. The more she exposes herself, the harder it is for us to act without showing our hand to the public. Damn, she's good.”

“Your orders, sir?” asked Little Dragon.

The chief thought about it for only a second. “We move up the timetable. As of now, the reconnaissance phase of our mission is over.”

Little Dragon was shocked. “You mean...”

“We nip this in the bud, Johnson,” the chief replied. His voice was cool, unflappable, the sort of eye-of-the-storm calm voice that immediately follows a fiery outburst and likely precedes another one. “And we do it tonight.”