Foramen was about to fall off the edge of his home planet. Uh, star. Whatever.

Not usually religious, Foramen found himself praying to God, Queen Serenity and anyone else he could think of, that the thousand-year-old barrier that separated him from a total vacuum held up for a short while longer.

It had seemed like a great idea at the time. Go, visit your home planet that you apparently lived on one thousand years ago in your past life. Oh, we didn't mention any of that before? Hahaha, and just where did you think the Senshi of Foramen came from anyway?

Answer: from Foramen. Which he'd Googled the moment he had a working Net connection after BP, and discovered that unless he was the senshi of really awesome grills (thank you, Google auto-correct), he was named for some far, far away star. Like, a couple of galaxies away. So that was the last Foramen had worried about that, filing it away under 'irrelevant' and 'taking up valuable brain cells for no good reason'.

Except now apparently all the senshi could use their phones to travel to their old home worlds, no matter the distance. Foramen wasn't sure how that worked, especially for those whose home 'worlds' were giant balls of flaming gas, but everyone else was doing it and for once Foramen decided to ******** individuality and follow the rest of the lemmings over the cliff. At worst, it was a great test to see if senshi magic could keep him alive in the center of a sun. Thankfully, it hadn't quite come to that.

Living alone made it easier to find the quiet, undisturbed place that was recommended by the others. Power up, activate new feature on the phone, and Foramen was suddenly on the strangest, longest rift ride he'd ever had.

Lights greeted the senshi of Foramen home. For reasons he couldn't explain, Foramen's heart rose in his throat. The multitudes of bright lights close by and lighting up the distance felt like the equivalent of returning to his apartment when his mother had forgotten that lightswitches had an 'off' setting. A warm (if inanimate) presence, something soothing that said, 'Welcome home, I've been waiting for you.'

Blinking, he turned a slow three sixty degrees. He was in a street, unmarked by any lines but clearly edged with sidewalks. Tall, steel buildings towered above him, lights filling the windows. Along the sidewalks, flashing signs of different colours beckoned. The occasional sign for a street name, or perhaps a pointer to a landmark, was visible in the distance either way along the road. The only problem was, nothing was in a recognisable language. For a moment, he thought the phone had simply dropped him in Tokyo or another major foreign city. Eventually he noticed the decay.

There was a flickering to the lights in some of the windows high above him, and others were blackened completely - turned off or long burned out, Foramen couldn't guess. Several signs were damaged in ways that no business owner would tolerate for long. Foramen walked up to a window on street level, the glass shadowed and reflective, but cracked with tiny lines that spiderwebbed the entire pane. He traced them gently, pensive as he tried to guess how old the damage was. Decades? Centuries? ... The full thousand years since his supposed first life?

There was no sign of life. Foramen honestly hadn't been expecting any - surely otherwise he would have been reborn here, not on earth. But the city seemed so alive that he almost expected people to spill out onto the street and bump into him anyway. Well, alive in appearance. Apart from the faint thrumming of power (and accompanying scent of ozone) when he moved close to a neon sign, the loudest thing in the entire city was Foramen's footsteps. He had trouble ignoring the thundering of his own breathing, used to cities that generated noise. This one was eerily quiet.

He began walking. Along the way he came to several realisations. The first was the sidewalk was similar to the moving belts in airports - designed to roll continuously, shuttling people around without the need for exerting themselves. It was broken now, none of them moving as far as Foramen travelled. Entry to any of the buildings was also impossible. Doors blended into walls, and when Foramen finally learned how to look for the seams, he found no handles. If they'd been automatic, that function was as broken as the moving walkways.

After a time, Foramen came to the conclusion that he'd appeared in the least damaged section of the city. He passed crumbling structures, buildings collapsed inwards or - in one case - onto the street, blocking Foramen's path and forcing him to backtrack around the block. Almost an hour had passed since his arrival and Foramen was about to call it quits when he rounded a corner and spied something new. The smaller buildings died off. The fewer lights out this far reflected off... something... in the air. Beyond it, nothing. Intrigued, Foramen continued on.

It was only when he was upon it that he realised - this was the edge of the world. Jerking to a halt, Foramen cursed and glanced wildly about. There was no fence or warning, just a halt and... that something... humming in the air. His nose almost pressed to it, he could see that beyond was not nothing - it was space. A light dotting of stars were ignored in favor of the glowing ball of fire looming in the 'sky'.

"Holy crap," Foramen breathed. He stared at the star, Foramen, from which he took his name.

It was about this time, while fearing that he might fall off into space, that Foramen finally worked out that his straight-out-of-sci-fi-movie city was floating in space. He wasn't on or in the star, he was on a man-made city that was parked next to the star like some kind of spaceship. If the spaceship was a futuristic city covered by an almost invisible, humming barrier. That explained the atmosphere - air, gravity, all fake. Foramen was besieged by images of just how wrong everything could suddenly go. He tried to focus on the barrier (but feared he was just going cross-eyed), pleading with it, "Please keep working for another decade. A year. Hell, even just another hour would be great."

One hand toyed with his senshi phone in the folds of star-dusted material sashed around his waist. Scientific consensus was that someone had between thirty and sixty seconds before they died in outer space. He kept his phone handy in case the worst did happen and he needed to make a speedy escape.

Perhaps he could blame his distraction on the attention being paid to the near-invisible barrier and his phone. Whatever the case, Foramen didn't notice the sudden brightening of his surroundings until it was upon him. He finally registered the fire when it lashed out at his face. Yelping, Foramen threw himself backwards. His tailbone was going to kill him later, but for now, Foramen was too busy scrambling backwards, grabbing for his phone. Wide eyes remained locked on the barrier, Foramen fully expected it to crack or crumble under the attack. When nothing happened, apart from the barrier holding the flames at bay, he slowly, sheepishly, staggered back to his feet.

It was a very cautious Foramen who approached the edge of the floating city a second time. Golden eyes followed the flare back to ohgodtooclose sun. While Foramen worried, the star sent out another pulsing flare to replace the first. As though the star could detect it's chosen warrior, the flare pushed gently against the barrier before Foramen. Again and again it pressed, joined by smaller tendrils of flame and light.

It dawned on Foramen what this behaviour reminded him of. A laugh escaped as the image of the solar flares as a cat rubbing its head against an owner in greeting (read: possession) after time apart. If that laugh was a touch hysterical, well, who could blame him?

Wonder beat out worry. Foramen pressed against the domed barrier protecting the city - the only thing seperating him from certain death and a star that he was almost certain was happy to see him. Delusional, maybe. Or maybe, he thought as a thin pulse of flame licked at where one hand rested, nothing any more strange or supernatural than a star having a chosen magical warrior who could tear rifts in space. Time passed unnoticed as, after a thousand years apart, the two Foramens greeted one another.