Making a Splash!

"Making a Splash!" is the fourth episode of StarLight. Written by Ryan Nurse in 2013, it was the first episode to be written. It was later polished, expanded, and posted as part of Project 20:15, and later published to FictionPress and SparkaTale between 24 August and 21 September 2015.

"Making a Splash!" was the first StarLight episode not to be chronologically tied to the previous ones, and the first not to introduce any new characters. Taking place on the first day of summer, it follows Sanae and Amaya as they fight together to win a school water fight.

Plot
On the first day of summer, both Sanae and Amaya spend the morning preparing for an annual mass water fight that takes place at their school. The rest of the cast is also seen to be preparing for the battle, with the exceptions of Kousen, who does not see the point and remains at Sanae's house, Kage, who cannot take part but is nonetheless excited, and Kazuo, who fears the fight is part of a conspiracy and locks himself inside a storage cupboard.

When the fight begins, Ryouichi is immediately soaked, while Sanae and Amaya swiftly take out a group of girls who had taunted them earlier. The two are then separated by a small first-year who targets Sanae; after a protracted battle, Sanae corners the girl, who forfeits by spraying herself. Sanae then rejoins Amaya, who has been pinned behind a bench by the White Star Fan Club, who are using a flamethrower-like device to soak everything in their path. Sanae defeats the Fan Club using a water balloon she had stuffed down her bra, and before long Sanae and Amaya are the last students left. They intend to duel to decide the winner, but before they can, Inaba-sensei soaks both of them with a water balloon and claims victory.

As a sodden Sanae heads home, she hears a monster attack in the distance and reluctantly heads off to fight it. Finding herself confronted by a black gelatinous blob, White Star is confused about how to fight it, as her attacks have little effect and the monster has no visible weak spots. After consulting Mio, and drying off the White Star Fan Club's clothes, Sanae tries dissolving the monster by firing a water gun at it, but it merely absorbs the water and grows larger. Realizing the monster is mostly composed of water, White Star engulfs herself in flame and dives into it, heating it up and evaporating it.

Upon returning to her house, Sanae finds that Kousen had borrowed her laptop while she was gone, and had been scammed into giving away Sanae's credit card details and then tricked into deleting the laptop's System32 directory, causing it to crash.

Cultural references
The episode draws heavily on the concept of "Chekhov's gun", invented by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov as a principle of minimalism; the term has come to mean any object or person that has little to no significance when first introduced but later becomes pivotal to the plot. Early in the episode, Inaba-sensei and an unnamed student are both referred to as having "Chekhov"-branded water guns. Inaba-sensei goes on to win the water fight, while Sanae later uses a student's Chekhov water gun to try and dissolve the monster. When this fails to work, she remarks aloud, "I guess Chekhov's guns don't work on this thing."
 * After Sanae loudly declares that she is not wearing panties, Amaya objects that "This isn't Seitokai Yakuindomo!"
 * At one point during the water fight, Sanae paraphrases Dirty Harry's famous "Do you feel lucky, punk?" monologue.
 * Upon seeing the blob monster, Sanae disparagingly remarks, "What next, a floating blue octahedron?" This is a reference to Ramiel, one of the villainous Angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
 * When Sanae fires the water gun at the blob monster, she expects it to melt "like the Wicked Witch of the West".
 * Sanae making a quip while putting on a pair of sunglasses is a reference to Horatio Caine from CSI: Miami.
 * After Sanae tells her not to believe everything she reads on the Internet, Kousen asks, "So that singing man really will give me up?", a reference to the famous "rickrolling" phenomenon. Kousen having been tricked into deleting System32 is also a reference to a popular Internet trolling method.