The first thing that struck him was the extreme, almost painfully abrupt change in the air that took place between that moment of clarity he'd experienced on Earth, and his subsequent breathtaking arrival in an entirely new world. His boots had been planted on ground of some kind with a body-rattling thunk! and immediately he was aware of two things. One was the humidity: in direct contrast to the dry wintery air he'd gotten used to at home, it felt like he was practically breathing water instead. Or at least when he was able to catch his breath, anyway.

Because the second thing was how thin the air was -- so much that his ears had popped with such ferocity that it felt like he had endured an entire plane's ascent in only two seconds. For the first few minutes of his adventure on his supposed home planet, Sailor Atlas was crouched on the floor with his head huddled under his arms, reeling. He was dizzy -- he couldn't get enough air -- for a moment he panicked and hyperventilated until his common sense kicked in and told him he should try relaxing a little. Slowly but surely he came, albeit a bit shakily, to his senses, and carefully brought himself up to a standing position so he could take a look around. Everything around him was surrounded by an odd, cool fog that was just barely clear over his chest and started to thicken at his knees. Anyone who was even a tiny bit shorter than him would have been screwed for visibility, that was for certain.

It was difficult to make out the details of whatever he was standing on, but he could tell that he was standing on a wide walkway of some kind that stretched out and branched off into the distance. On one edge of his vision he could make out a shadowy, bulky shape of some kind a little ways away, that rose out of the fog in the sort of sloping fashion a hill might. Atlas had the impulse to call it an island in the back of his mind, but dismissed the thought just as readily; it seemed rather silly. Taking one tentative step, then another, he started making an attempt to follow the path over to where it was, his feet seeming to do more of the work than his brain.

Thin air, thick fog... hills nearby... maybe he was on top of a mountain? A little ways down the pathway, he came across a large circular node of sorts that served for an intersection. When he felt -- and heard -- his foot scuffing a little strangely over it, he looked down to note that there was a large symbol of sorts that had been deeply etched into it. It seemed important. It seemed familiar.

One gloved hand reached up to run through his hair, and on the way caught on his circlet. This caused a bit of a lightbulb moment, and he felt around its edge until his fingers got to the sigil on it that was always resting over the middle of his forehead. As his eyes traced the pattern on the floor, so too did his fingers over the circlet, until he had made several careful, disbelieving passes over the entire shape.

It was exactly the same.

Abandoning the node in favor of travelling further was a bit difficult. Part of Atlas wanted to stay there and stare at it, reassure himself it was actually there, and spend the rest of his time here wondering why it was, but he forced himself to wrench his eyes away from it and continue. This wasn't an opportunity he was supposed to take lightly, or waste. There were other things to see.

He'd gotten close enough to the hill now that he could feasibly jump down and walk around on it, if he wanted to risk breaking a leg and felt like climbing over the chest-high fence that bordered the walkway. The fence itself looked like it had been elegant at one time: there were hints that shapes and patterns of all kinds had been worked into the railings, and he had a curious inkling that if you walked along them in the right direction you might have been treated to a pictographic story of some kind. Nowadays, though, much of it was rusted over and rotted away and reduced to near-unrecognizability, most likely due to the humidity here taking its toll. Was it really this humid, this foggy, out here at all times? The thought was definitely odd. However, the thought of the weather here ever behaving otherwise was... somehow, even odder.

One of his hands carefully wrapped around the railing and, upon it not crumbling to rust between his fingers, the other followed. Gripping the top of the fence, Atlas leaned over it in order to peer at the ground below -- and in doing so was met with a sudden and terrible feeling of vertigo that caused him to recoil. He just about ended up curling up on the ground again. Leaning over the fence: bad idea. It was an implacably different feeling from what he got from peering down from the roof of a very tall building, though the intense feeling of possible danger was still there. Maybe it was because of how thin the air was.

He had managed to get a good look at the hill, fortunately, and even from the distance he was regarding it with now, he could still make out the ridges and outlines of the shapes he had noticed a few seconds before. The first thing that crossed his mind was that if this was a mountain, it certainly didn't look like one. Not that he'd ever really seen one up close and personal, but the characteristics of the ground below were nothing like any rocks he had ever seen. It looked unnatural. Or, at the very least, it looked unnatural as far as mountains were concerned. It looked... almost bizarrely... more like the base of the very large tree if a lot of it had been unearthed, with large masses of roots tangling over each other.

Roots... something clicked in Atlas's head... they were roots! It was a tree. Looking further down, they faded into invisibility beneath the fog. But looking up and ahead, he could see them leading up into a trunk... and then branches that ended in florets of unusual, colorless leaves that wafted a little bit in the breeze. How strange. How interesting. Atlas's features cracked into a small smile, and breathed a sigh of relief: that's wonderful, they're still alive --

-- and he paused, taking a surprised step backwards. It wasn't so much the thought itself that startled him, his instinct said it was the right thing to think. What was strange was how naturally it had been thought, to the point where he was barely aware of it until it had been finished.

Stepping back a little more, he took in the sight of the enormous plant in from of him, and then noticed that there were other, similar shapes around it. There were more of them. He was in a forest -- no, that wasn't it, he was in an orchard. The walkways wound their way carefully around each and every one of them he could see, some getting close enough that anyone on the pathway could reach up and touch them. As Atlas followed the walkway further into the orchard, he was able to note that there were even stairways and ladders that would have granted people access to nearly all of their branches. Many of them had decayed beyond their usefulness, much like the fences had.

The rusted remains of a large, heavy-looking handcart threatened to obstruct his path, but there was just enough room available for Atlas to carefully, nervously sidle around it. It had been tipped over, and upon getting on the other side of it he peered into it to see if there was anything inside. No luck... whatever had been in there had either fallen out or decayed into dust and blown away a long time ago. There were other handcarts nearby (scattered all over the place, really) that told a similar story. It was almost as if whoever had been using them had dropped what they were doing and abandoned them in some sort of rush, or some sort of panic.

This felt wrong, and very jarringly so. Those carts had been the first sign Atlas had seen that made him begin to truly believe this place had once been habited, as Sailor Merope had claimed. But the story his teammate had ramblingly told him was one of flags and desks and furniture and other obviously manmade things: he had an entire pirate ship, even, which implied pirates or people of some kind. Atlas had fog, and strange and winding walkways, which he supposed had some humanity in them as well -- but not as much as tools, things he could clearly imagine people using in their day-to-day lives, and it struck him that they were not supposed to be haphazardly scattered around like this. Not now, not back in the day when they were being used, not ever.

Something bad had happened here. Worse yet, he felt like it must have been something he should have been able to do something about. He had failed... they all had failed. At what, he honestly couldn't begin to say, but the feelings of guilt pressed down on him regardless. The trees had survived them all, silently keeping vigil over the fog and the walkways and the decaying handcarts, almost as if they had been waiting for him to come back all this time.

And yet, there was a strange characteristic to this whole place that managed to nag at the back of his mind. He couldn't quite place what about it was so odd, until his eyes turned downward again to regard the walkway. There was definitely something off... he squatted down onto the ground, traced one finger over the stone, and upon lifting it back up discovered that his glove had come off the surface almost completely clean. No grime whatsoever. He blinked, and looked baffledly back at the masses of tree branches above him. Shouldn't there have been leaf litter of some kind on this pathway? Or dirt, or dust? There was absolutely nothing here, save for some spotty mold blooms that could be credited to the humidity. Even the carts were almost entirely bare of anything that should realistically have settled into them. They were practically immaculate. Too immaculate for this environment, especially considering there wasn't exactly a cleaning staff around to keep the walkways clear. So, how...?

Atlas walked on, bothered by that little mystery but also aware he did not have access to its solution. He figured that at this point it was a better use of his time to learn what he could here than dwell too much on what he couldn't. And upon that decision, he did instantly learn something else: another glance over all the handcarts showed that their numbers were greater in one general direction than they were in all the others. It was easy to imagine a grim scene of people frantically heading that way, trying to get all the carts there before it was too late -- then, perhaps, someone barking at them all to forget them and leave them behind to they could get to safety faster.

Safety... that thought, as much of a flight of dark fancy as it was, was enough to make him think that the right direction to go was the one in which the carts got more numerous. There had to be something there!

It gave him a small wave of excitement to think about, but it didn't stop him from being careful. Not only would that have been against his nature, but he also really, really did not want to slip or stumble and accidentally fall off this walkway. Even with those tree roots looking like they'd make for decent ground to walk around on, something about it was viscerally horrifying. And the risk of falling appeared to grow with each step he took: a lot of the fence was gone entirely, perhaps implying that a few carts had been shoved through it with such force that they took the railings along with them. The numbers of the handcarts were thickening so much that they were completely crowding over the walkway, and at some points Atlas had to resort to climbing over them in order to get through, shaking like a violently windblown leaf all the while.

Fortunately, after what felt like countless hours of shuffling around and carefully crawling over the damn things, Atlas finally reached what would serve for a destination. He could see several other walkways, also full of overturned and broken carts, that led up to the place, and looking back he would wonder why he hadn't noticed this much earlier; the sight had been so obvious. It was a tower. Enormous, imposing, and hewn from stone that had endured countless years of whatever the elements had thrown at it, it dominated the senshi's field of vision, and made the trees behind him seem ludicrously tiny in comparison. Slowly, awestruck, his eyes traced up his base, for the simple purpose of figuring out exactly how tall it was.

But his neck was not nearly flexible enough at the distance he was standing from it: there was too much tower. He had to back up at least a few yards. Hesitantly, he turned back around, and clambered back around and over several of the carts he'd clambered around and over just a few minutes ago, in an attempt at gaining more distance. At periodic intervals, he would look back up, only to discover that there was still no top for the tower in sight, and he had to back up even more. It got to the point where he was several feet back into the orchard before he could finally climb the whole thing with his eyes, and even then he had to kneel on the floor to do so, his hands on the ground behind him.

Needless to say, it was tall -- incredibly, impossibly, dizzyingly tall. The tower continued to push its way up into the air, to the point where it was only as big around as Atlas's own wrist, and it continued to shrink into the distance for a while yet until it... collided with the sky?

Atlas blinked, rubbed his eyes, and looked again, lying flat on his back this time to focus purely on what was above him. If that was the sky he was looking at, it was horrifically drab in color. Curiouser yet, he could make out little patchwork shapes and ridges where there should have been clouds and deepening blue (or deepening whatever-color). He could see what appeared to be barren canyons and valleys, and even the edges of an ocean on one side. But that was impossible. He was looking up. This was all above him... but as hard as he thought that, it all insisted upon continuing to look like satellite images of the Grand Canyon or some other unspecified badlands. How was this even remotely possible?

Clouds --

He started to his feet at a speed that made him yelp a bit in surprise, but he was quick to return a hard gaze to his immediate surroundings again. It was clouds. All this time he thought he'd been walking through fog, it had actually been...

Which meant that, this whole time -- this entire time...

From the very moment Atlas had arrived on his world he had been walking around upside-down, on walkways built on the underside of the clouds. There was no better explanation. It made everything he had seen make sense: how his ears were still aching, how no dust or debris had fallen on the walkway -- the trees had grown straight into the clouds somehow, but trying to jump down onto them would have been one hell of a death wish. The walkways themselves must have been made of some sort of technology (or magic?) that couldn't be found anywhere on Earth.

Though, all that did for Atlas was leave him utterly terrified there was a chance they would stop working and he would spend the next ten minutes plummeting to his demise. With an unusual lack of hesitation for the normally careful senshi, he bounded, panicking, up and over all of the carts and down the path, rushing towards the tower's entrance in a one-man reenactment of what he'd imagined had happened here before. He didn't even stop to take a good look at the tower's interior, once he'd made it in. His plum-and-mint senshi phone had already appeared in his hands with a sparkly pop! and with frantic fingers he dialed Earth, abusing the poor button with his index finger until it finally sent him back to his dorm in Sovereign Heights.

And upon reappearing there he promptly curled up on his floor, groaning and reeling from his ears popping again.