Welcome to Gaia! ::

Joy's impulse had been to ignore the little calls for assistance. She had no desire to get embroiled in all this world-eating nonsense, any more than she'd had a desire to get embroiled in Destiny City Bullshit in the first place.

But she felt the ability to return to the Garde opening like a door within her - some other downstream effect of the strangeness in the air - and while there was nothing that was forcing her to use that open door for anyone but herself, she felt herself plagued with that inconvenience of a guilty conscience when she considered walking through it selfishly. The idea of simply not walking through it at all did not even occur to be dismissed.

So she had, as before, taken the precaution to conceal her civilian identity before she powered up - hiding her hair and her face in a hat and a mask - just in case she, as some others apparently had, found herself suddenly thrust back into civilian form. It was the nearest thing she had to protecting herself.

She arrived at the appointed meeting place, feeling out the energy signature of an ally - it felt strange to realize that it felt like it might possibly be smaller than her own; she still felt, even in her squire garb, quite new and tender - and calling out into the darkness as they met: "I've got a sinking feeling we're in for a tempest tonight."

It wasn't clear whether she was referring to the Destiny City weather - which was blustery and fitful, with the promise of rain in the night sky - or if she was referring to what was ahead of them. But it was absolutely a shameless, awful pun either way, and she beamed as she said it, with a face that seemed designed for smiling: all dimples and soft edges, with bright red lips that seemed jarringly modern sandwiched between hair and uniform both distinctly medieval.

She cheerfully responded by extending a hand for a handshake that was remarkably firm and professional. She glanced at the messenger bag with a raised eyebrow, but said nothing, although she could not help a moment's irrational paranoia that perhaps the senshi was deploying this mundane method of carrying things because she wanted to carry weapons.

Well. She'd chance it.

"And you as well. Seems pretty surreal to be worrying about fender-benders when there's, you know-" she waved a hand vaguely at the sky, summoning the totality of everything that was churning around in the cosmos right now "-but if there's anything that can make the apocalypse worse, it's having a busted tail-light, I imagine."

She added: "Also, I know my name's a mouthful, and I'd never subject anyone to that much French, so Joy is fine with me if it's fine with you." She made an expressive face, nose wrinkling, and hesitated before adding: "You're gonna find me pretty unprepared on this whole thing. I won't lie to you, I'm mostly just trusting other people to sort it out. So, thanks for being one of those people. I owe it to you. You ready to go?"

"You'll have to tell me more about that," she said grimly. "I've seen some strange things too."

It was the first time she had ever made any attempt to determine where they would arrive, exactly, and she didn't know if she had managed it, or if the Wonder itself simply did what was needful: rather than arriving on the usual ruined curtain wall, Tempesti and Joy found themselves in the gloominess of the keep. Amid high stone walls and arched ceilings, covered with scraps of painted plaster mostly fallen away and before an unglazed window - save for one beautifully-painted pane - they arrived amid the unmistakable sound and feeling of a storm already raging.

Joy visibly flinched, scuttling away from the window and with the instinctive reflex of a habitual Mom friend taking Tempesti by the arm to pull her away also. The walls and corners were piled with old ivy; beyond the window in the storm outside trees were being tossed in ominous creaking noises. Her host stooped to pick up two flashlights from a little pile of supplies on the ground, holding one towards her visitor.

"If we power down, I'd appreciate it if you didn't look at me any more than you had to," she said grimly, although there didn't seem to be any immediate danger of that. She was looking around with a vaguely anxious air. "There's - the former Garde should be here - somewhere - normally he's just here when I show up. But I think the storms make it weird."

She was sweeping her own flashlight beam around the room as she spoke, letting it settle on an impressive spiderweb in the corner where, sheltered from the chaos outside, a large spider was reclining. This earned a look of vague satisfaction - as though she had been worried for the spider - before she turned back to Tempesti, smiling thinly as a bolt of lightning struck the building, her hair standing a little on end. "There's big ********' metal poles on the roof," she said apologetically. "But we're probably safer in here than outside. We should have gone underground, but I don't know how to - to start there. I guess this way we can watch."

She flinched at a very near bolt of lightning forking through the sky, momentarily illuminating the hall in an eerie purple glow.

"No - I think the storms - I think they ******** with how he manifests, or whatever. Not like. Instagram girlboss manifesting - I mean he's dead. He sort of. Shows up. Maybe we need a ouija board," she added drily.

She hesitated. "I already reported it to that database thing, but if you're taking notes - normally he can't touch anything. Ghost, you know." She made a wiggly motion of her fingertips, as if attempting to tell a scary story, in apparent illustration. "But for a second, when the lightning got bad last night, he got kinda real for a second." She looked extremely uncomfortable as she said this, as if she was speaking something that maybe she shouldn't be. "Might happen again, if he shows up at all." She paused, adding: "Use the camera all you want - are you filming the lightning? because good god there's a lot to be seen from the window if you don't get too close - just don't point it at me if things go haywire, I guess. Point it at me all you want to until that moment," she added indulgently. "But get my good side. Oh wait, they're all good sides." At this last, she struck a couple of poses, although the playful demonstration was scuttled by the lightning making her jump.

"This s**t is hell on my nerves." And then: "Have you learned anything useful yet? Not here, I mean in general."

This, of course, she already knew. But she listened closely, her eyes narrowed in concentration as she processed it, just in case any new information might slip through - and to determine, of course, the limits of Tempesti’s own knowledge. It was good to hear the information from someone more involved in the observation - good to receive it in a fresh shape.

But at the end she only sighed, waving a dismissive hand. “Yeah. I don't know what the ******** I'm doing either. But you've heard that old joke about the guy who defused bombs for a living, right? They asked him whether it was stressful, and he said no, because if he ******** it up, it was someone else's problem.”

She smiled here, a bit grimly. “I guess it won't be ours, either.” She no sooner said it than she lifted her eyes to something just past her visitor, and reached out a hand as the lightning snaked down with sudden violence. A ghostly shape - very tall, barely visible in the dim keep - seemed to take it, although there was a disjointed air of the movements that made it clear that this was only a make-believe - the ghost of the ruins, apparently, still could not touch or interact with her, but this did not stop him from going through the motions of lifting Joy's hand to his lips, in a formal little gesture with no affection in it whatsoever, made with the familiarity of habit. To Tempesti, he only gave a grave nod of acknowledgement as Joy spoke.

“Tempesti, this is Gouvernail - Gouvernail, Tempesti. She's here to study the -” she jumped again as the storm raged on “- lightning.”

Aside from the nod, he made no acknowledgement. Whether this was a consequence of the storm or a habitual silence was unclear, but it was probably the latter, as Joy promptly ignored him in favor of returning to the conversation with her guest. He took up a post near his protege like the world's least effective bodyguard, an insubstantial shadow of a man.

“Have you been hit by any of it yet?” She gestured at the storm. “I've managed to avoid it, and apparently it's nasty, but not like normal lightning?”

She leaned in to look. The ghost did not follow suit, simply remaining still at his silent post just behind her - and why should he? Even at the best of times he was probably a picture of futility. Joy, attention fixed on her guest, was behaving as if she'd already quite forgotten him entirely - oblivious to his standing there and to the way he reached out a hand towards the small of her back, a protective little gesture that, because it could not be felt, she did not perceive or react to. Instead she looked at the phone screen, shading it with her hand from another burst of light outside.

To describe her expression as a wrinkling of the nose was an understatement. Her brows got in on the action, and she scooted a bit further away from the window as she looked, as if to confirm that she wanted no part of whatever had left that kind of mark.

“No thanks!” She said briskly. “I'll pass.”

She hesitated, and then made a grim sort of laugh that was almost a bark. “Is it weird that I take comfort in the fact that it already faded for you? Like - I don't know - the impermanence is reassuring. You know?” she glanced back towards the window. “Like maybe it'll blow over the same way. Just a little bit of pain to grit our teeth through, and it all goes away just as quick.”

"Oh," she said. "Better and better. Because that means that either it's weaker, or we're stronger." She made a bit of a face as the last words escaped her mouth - the extremely legible expression of someone who has said something and wished almost immediately that she hadn't. But if she was worried about the feelings of the specter standing behind her, he at least showed no outward signs of being offended. Then again, he wasn't showing outward signs of very much of anything, save for that one motion of his hand. "But I wish someone woulda told me that earlier. I mighta been more motivated to get those big ********' lightning rods off the roof if I thought we were at risk of sudden death from them." She made another face.

"Anyway. If kicking up all that fuss in the sky is wearing it out, it's welcome to keep going as long as it wants to, even if my nerves are shot and even though I'd love to have shown up to nothing exciting, so I could at least show you around." She paused. "I was telling someone last time - it's weird that it can come here. Earth wonders are sort of - out of space and time, I guess. In little pockets of reality. But it's thrashing around up there anyway."

She gave herself a little shake, as if to dispel a sudden unpleasant thought, and clapped her hands with a brisk, schoolmarm gesture. "Well. Go ahead and do any observation you wanna do. Take notes. Ask questions. We're both ready to answer," she said, speaking for her ancestor easily. "But as far as I'm aware he doesn't know any more than I do about this thing, which might as well be nothing." And she glanced back, finally, as if to confirm this. He had already, perhaps anticipating this, withdrawn his hand, pressing it to his side as if looking for a sword to rest it on that was not there, and he gave her the smallest of nods to confirm.