The apocalyptic storm stubbornly hammering the city refused to allow Rowan to push it far from her mind, even chasing her into her dreams. Reginald was proving to be an excellent remedy for at least some of the soul-numbing terror she was just barely keeping at bay, even if he spent most of his days on crime sprees throughout her apartment. He seemed no worse for wear following his lightning based misadventure and was happily settling into life as a housecat.
It took effort, but she managed to keep him away from her latest project. She was not sure how accessible Tempesti would be, but the dream she’d conceived for the planet kept her focused on the future she kept forcing herself to see. Since she’d first seen life peering shyly through the cracks in Tempesti’s long abandoned stone, the idea of nurturing that cautious hope had left her soul suffused with an almost alien longing. Healing the planet’s heart felt like a long distant fantasy, but bringing forth what green she could seemed like it was just out of her grasp.

Rowan had spent her life surrounded with plants of all kinds, and while she didn’t see herself bringing her mother to an alien world any time soon, the botanist spent years teaching her daughters how to cultivate and care for flora. While Laurel and Willow had little interest in applying this knowledge, the dozens of plants that filled Rowan’s apartment left little doubt in the love these lessons had instilled in her.

The walk-in closet was one of the only spaces where she could keep out a furry orange menace with relative ease, so it became the place where she stored the materials she’d prepared for her study, though her clothes and shoes no doubt objected to sharing their room. Carefully filled plastic canisters of homemade fertilizers for soils of various kinds sat on a tiered plastic shelving unit against the closet’s back wall, safely situated behind a baby gate should Reginald breach the first line of security. Her partially packed rucksack sat crammed in beside it, its smaller pockets loaded with small gardening tools, notebooks, sketchpads, writing and drawing utensils, and dozens of soil testing kits and tools. Smaller empty jars, each with a blank but carefully applied label, sat waiting and ready to receive samples of the planet’s soil and water. Similarly, small resealable plastic bags awaited samples of some of the plants themselves. With luck and speed, she’d be able to replant them for study on Earth.

Despite her enthusiasm, Rowan couldn’t help but recognize that she would be stabbing in the dark on a lot of this. She had no way of knowing Tempesti’s seasons, weather patterns, or anything of the sort, but there was no way to learn any of that without experimentation and, most likely, a lot of failures along the way. It was impossible to eliminate the possibility that recovering more memories, hopefully clearer ones, might help her a bit on that front. Still, that begged the question of if she wanted to regain them. But then, there was no way to know but to try.