A silent war against Simone and her crew had begun for Beth.

To win the war, Beth decided to take an advanced move. As soon as the afternoon classes ended, Beth and Julianna ran to the art studio at once. The art studio was now a battlefield, with Beth and Julianna early warriors, and pencil and drawing papers swords. Beth imagined a long dress decorated with lace and flowers and wanted to put what she imagined into reality. The two talked briefly about coming up with the design and making a model with studio materials before purchasing materials online. Then, they started brainstorming for a preliminary design. Julianna will work on researching design ideas and presenting them to Beth, while Beth works on illustrating possible designs.

Both of them were making slower and rockier progress than they had expected.

Julianna had her laptop in front of her, browsing through illustrations, photos, and color schemes to construct a mind map for the project. The words 'A Romantic Night Out' was positioned right in the middle of her mind map, with detailed sections titled 'decorations', 'dress shape', 'materials', 'budgets', 'final design', and so on. She imagined that every piece of detail in the mind map would eventually come together to formulate an intricate, well-made final product worthy of attention for the judges of the competition. The mind map building procedure was harder than she originally planned. As she opened more and more internet tabs, she felt as if she was drowning in the vast sea of information. For the flower decoration that Beth imagined alone, there were flooding examples of roses, daisies, poppies, carnations, lilies, and sunflowers. Let alone the number of examples for dress shapes, materials, and color schemes. A picture of a simple, yellow dress led to at least ten pictures of similar summer dresses of the same category. A picture of a prom dress or a lace cape, on the other hand, gave away websites and wedding dress advertisements all around the internet. With all these pieces of information at her fingertips to access, Julianna couldn't help but expand her mood board, unwittingly throwing everything she found relevant onto the board.

Meanwhile, Beth was having some creative blocks around the dress design sketches. She had already thrown away a pad of paper that had not many elements drawn in on each piece.

Thick and thin lines going all around the contour of a sketched mannequin.

Flowers on the shoulders crossed away with consistent lines.

Color schemes that don't seem to fit each other.

Thickly dotted grey circles and squares represented shiny sequins that got smudged by fingers.

In the end, Beth decided on creating a mint-colored dress that has ribbons made with flow-y silk stripes on the shoulders, some frills on the upper bust, a ribbon around the waist, and a lower hem that look like a blooming flower. As for the material, she thought about a lavender print or a rosemary print, but before she could purchase the print, she had to make a model to test if the idea works.

The prototype dress, which was half of the size of the actual dress, ended up looking messy and scruffy. With no petticoat and the cheap, thin fabric found in the art studio, the layers lower hem of the dress stuck together and dropped to the ground like a lavishing flower.

Just then, a pink figure walked into the art room, followed by an emerald figure, and a pastel figure--

Simone Chandler. Beth tried hard not to gasp. Why do you appear particularly at this time! Can't you see that we are just having problems with our design?

Simone took a seat at one of the tables at the art studio and opens up her laptop. Blondie and brunette sat beside her at the table, busy texting on their phones. She noticed Julianna and tried to say hello to her.

"Hi...Are you guys also here to prepare for the runway competition?"

"Yes." Julianna answered her, "Also, are you Simone?"

"Yee, and you?"

"I'm Jules and this is Beth. We are working together on this project..." Jules tried to finish her speech but Beth leaned toward her and cut her speech in.

"Yes, we are a team! Simone, are you working on your own or with your friends as well? Actually, we have just been working on some designs and I thought a dress with a lot of flower decorations could work well. I have seen many magazines where they had those dresses for weddings, so it would be cool if we tried something like that..."

"Ah, okay. That sounds nice." Both the blondie and brunette looked at Beth and Julianna with boredom and dismay and continued texting. Simone tilted her head and gave Beth and Julianna a curious gaze, but she said nothing.

"Beth, I don't think they are necessarily listening." Julianna interrupted Beth's speech and pushed her to the side corner. "I think we should get back to work."

Unfortunately, it was still not the best time for Beth to calm down and concentrate.

"Oh my goodness, this is so pretty! But can we make something that's like that?" Simone suddenly gasped as the blondie showed her a picture on her phone.

"Why should we have a problem here? Look, Simone, my dad knows someone who sells jewelry, so I can ask them about that." the brunette said.

"I can show them our design and ask tailors to help us re-design it or even make it." the blondie added.

"But is that a little dishonest?" On hearing the blondie and brunette, Simone hesitated and asked in caution.

"It's fine, Simone! We would like to see you being dazzling and beautiful on stage!"

Beth was shocked. That's some tea to spill. She exchanged a glance with Julianna while the scissors in her hands accidentally scratched the mint fabric she intended to cut, making an ugly tear in the middle of the fabric.

Before the school day ended, Beth and Julianna worked together on the dress design more. They made some improvements, but the design was still not good enough. The three girls stayed in the studio to work on their project as well. After an hour or so, most of the students who had clubs had already left the school building. As Beth and Julianna packed their stuff and headed out of the campus, they saw the three girls walking together and talking about them.

"Gosh, that dress design looks stupid!"

"Oh yea, did you see Beth's face? She was oversharing and no one was gonna hear what she said. She clearly didn't know what to say to us!"

Why are you even talking about us? You guys are attempting to cheat! A sense of anger triggered Beth as she heard what those girls talked about her behind her back.

"It's no use to confront them with words. We need to devise a plan and prove that we are stronger than them." Julianna said.

"But did you see that? They are clearly cheating!"

"Let me see what their next step is and make a decision. Meanwhile, we probably need to make sure that we have another concrete design tomorrow."

"Sure! Simone and her crew are just stuck-ups! Those people will not prevent us from doing my best job!"

Walking out of the campus, they noticed the beautiful sunset reflected on the large glass panels of tall Laurel buildings. The pink clouds were like light feathers and fluffy cotton, drifting across the mixed shades of purple and blue. Some clouds had a sharp edge and a light interior. Some had edges that merged with the dimming sky. Behind the clouds hid the crescent moon.

Beth looked up at the clouds and breathed deeply.

I wish I could be a giant bird. Then, when I look at the clouds, I could imagine myself flying through them, and sliding over the tip of them to reach the stars!

"Wait, Jules! Look at that!" running towards the setting sun, Beth pointed to a piece of cloud that looked a little distorted. "That's the mad face when Simone and her little group see our work a couple of days later! They can't defeat us!"

"Beth, you are so funny." Julianna can't help but laugh and chase Beth. She pointed to a piece of dispersing cloud above a tall building on the right. "With your imagination, what do you think that looks like, then?"

"Ah! That's definitely a flying horse running on a trail of fire!"

For these two young girls, the air was filled with laughter again.

"Jules, just now I had an idea. For our project!" Beth seemed to be stroked by a bolt of inspiration.

"Sure. Tell me what that is."

"What if we combined the shape of these clouds and the palette of sunset into our project? You know, we can use a red-purple gradient print for our dress, create some puffy layers around the bottom of our dress, even assemble some LED wire lights so the puffy parts could glow like sunset clouds!"

"That's an idea worth exploring!" Julianna gave Beth a confident look. "Nature is an artist in itself. Colors and forms are unique languages that nature and land speak. Let's get ready to develop our cloud dress tomorrow after school."