When the fog came, Elsa was not prepared.

He was pout patrolling, as always, bundled in his warm cloak acquired from the alien merchant that summer and glad for the way it drove away the early autumn chill. He was sure, of course, that he would need it even more in the coming weeks and months as things got even colder, but even now, it was nice to have. He'd been lucky, hew knew, to have gotten something so eminently useful, and he had to admit, he had suspicions about its origins. Perhaps it was a coincidence, the antlers on the clasp, but...well. Elsa had never seen the homeworld he was named for. It was likely, he suspected, that he never would. So he would never know for sure, since it was inaccessible to him, as a Senshi of the Dark Mirror, but perhaps....perhaps this was a piece of it. He couldn't prove it, and he was pretty sure he would never be able to, but that didn't mean he couldn't believe.

It gave him a little extra comfort to think so.

Not that it could protect him from everything, but it was still a rare, precious treasure, and he had absolutely no intention of doing anything foolish like letting it get damaged. He swept it up carefully around him as he jumped from rooftop to rooftop, keeping it off the ground as best as he could. It was hard to guess, after all, if a magic cloak could just....go in the wash, or if it might clean itself. That was, though, a fairly esoteric problem, and one Elsa recognized it was unlikely he would have an answer to until something happened. Hopefully it wouldn't be anything too bad--he'd hate to have this magnificent thing stained badly, or torn.

Perhaps, he thought, he should leave it at home until things got unbearably cold; it would be safer then, but, he realized, it would also be useless. What was the point of having a magic cloak if he didn't actually put it to use? Plus, he felt better with its warm weight settled around his shoulders.

He sighed, pausing on a rooftop and gazing out at the city. Everything was quiet, the way one might expect this late at night in the residential area he was wandering. It wasn't anywhere particularly near his own apartment complex, and he knew that it wasn't a good place to drain, but draining wasn't his goal, not really. He just wanted to wander, walk the streets--or, rather, rooftops--of the city and en joy the air. Get a look at people's Halloween decorations, which had started to go up on balconies and storefronts. Get an unfortunate look at the people who couldn't even relegate Christmas to its appropriate place after November 1st, which was always a little grating, but at least most people were in the appropriate spooky season spirit. This, Elsa had to admit, had become one of his favorite times of year ever since Awakening as a Senshi--with a nasty nightmare monster as his sphere, it felt especially appropriate to him to be out and prowling around this time of year.

He moved to sit at the edge of the rooftop, sighing contentedly and letting himself take in the scenery. This was a pretty good night, all things considered. He’d had an easy time draining earlier, so now he just got to wander, and he could enjoy the silence and the comfort.

That was when he noticed it.

The weather report, Elsa was pretty sure, hadn't called for fog, and yet he swore he could see it rolling in. It moved fast, faster than he expected fog to move--not that he was exactly a meteorology expert, or that he had tons of time spent observing fog, but it still felt off, somehow, in a way that he was hard pressed to describe but simply could not ignore.

He frowned, and slung himself off the roof and down onto a balcony a few floors down; from there, he leapt to the street below and took a few steps forward, watching the fog move closer.

Suddenly, even with his cloak wrapped around his shoulders, he felt a cold chill crawling up his spine, something far beyond the natural autumn temperatures.

He didn't know how he knew, but there was something wrong about that fog. Something strange and frightening. And it was rolling towards him, much faster than he could get away. There was no point running--he knew that, it was more thna obvious.

Elsa hated the feeling that overcame him. Helplessness. Paralysis. Fear. He prided himself on being ready to meet any challenge, magical or mundane, but here he was, standing in the middle of a deserted, quiet street lined with apartments and surrounded by sleeping people, watching something he could not stop and could not escape come towards him. He wondered, briefly, if it would leak through the windows, somehow, and--

--And what? It wasn't as if Elsa had any idea what this was. Maybe he was just paranoid. Maybe all his strange, magical experiences had gotten to him, and he was seeing something sinister in something perfectly mundane. That would certainly make sense, he supposed. Destiny City was so weird, it was easy to read malice into anything strange--

No, that wasn't it at all. Elsa knew, somehow, some way, that this was trouble. That the cold this fog brought was more than what nature could do, and that whatever was about to happen, as it came upon him, he wasn'[t going to like it.

He only had a few moments, really, to realize all of that, because it swept forward, a tide of unstoppable, strange, chilling magic.

When it settled over him, Elsa felt chilled to the very depths of his soul. It was a cold so far beyond anything mortal or known, it was as if the very depths of space had reached for him and wrapped him up--

And then, in an instant, Destiny City was gone.

[1020 words]