[Backdated to 02/21/2025]

The sound of thunder woke Rowan from the oddly peaceful sleep she’d managed, curled up in her sleeping bag in a relatively debris free corner of the derelict house. She hadn’t been able to tear herself from this place, even with the hollow echoes of the past that reverberated around her. Being here felt right, even knowing that this wasn’t the place she needed to be. That the key to fixing her magic would never be here.

Her barely opened eyes watched the sky’s sudden transformation from the tired grey and blue of early morning to the sullen glare of unnatural purple. From the core of her being she knew that this wasn’t simply another of Tempesti’s unusual phenomena, though it was impossible for her to hazard a guess as to what it actually was.

Regardless, if it meant the approach of a threat she couldn’t face it as herself. She fumbled tremblingly for her henshin pen before managing to extract it from her pocket. The rising fear creeping up her back and tightening its hand around her throat, the hairs rising delicately from her arms and the back of her neck, they weren’t there. They couldn’t be there right now.

She had to focus.

She had to focus and then she could get out of this and go home and face this storm later. Maybe it would even pass before she was able to return

“Tempesti power, make-up!”
Her voice rang out through the emptiness before vanishing into the snarling of the sky. A slight surge of the magic that was growing more familiar by the day passed through her, but it was somehow muted, sputtering and receding before leaving her standing decidedly mundane in the ruins of the ancient city.
It took several seconds to register the pen’s failure, the panic gripped her chest well before she could fully realize what was happening.
A brilliant light mere feet from her, the smell of ozone and the heat.
Then she was falling, elbows landing hard on the stone floor as nausea flooded her and remaining conscious became a battle of wills against her own body. The storm of vertigo that rolled and sparked through her chased all other thought from her head as she dragged herself across the room, leaning heavily against the nearest wall.

After a few minutes? Hours? Days? the tornado within her subsided, leaving behind a persistent ringing in the ears.

The henshin pen lay on the other side of the small room. Rowan had no idea whether she had dropped or thrown it when the lightning decided to make a house call, but she hurried over to snatch it from its place on the ground. She might not be so lucky in the event of a second strike and she had no interest in remaining a moment longer.

With a steadying breath and a desperate sort of hope she clutched at the pen. If it didn’t work this time she had no idea how she’d get home.

“Tempesti power, make-up!”
The magic responded to her call with merciful quickness, apparently deciding that it was finally time for Rowan to let the senshi of harpies deal with this particular mess. Even if “dealing with it” meant “going home as quickly as she could.”

Calling her phone from the subspace Tempesti paused briefly. Whether this was connected to Chaos or something else entirely she needed to document something. She held it up, trembling fingers flicking across the screen to begin a video recording. The screen seemed so tiny, attempting to contain the view down the small hill toward the city gates, framing the violent sky and the pale weary stone of the ruins as lightning landed several blows in quick succession against the unwitting road.

Heart pounding, Tempesti closed the camera app and pressed on the home button with a bit more desperation than she would care to admit.

As the senshi materialized dizzily in her living room, she wished she could attribute the rumbling she heard to the aftereffects of being so close to a lightning strike, but she knew that behind her curtains lay another sea of purple clouds.