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Skyfall (12) : Giant walls of clouds hover low above Destiny City, as if weighed down by the immense amount of water they are carrying. The air is cool, electric, and ominous, churning more like the ocean than the sky. And then, the clouds seem to collapse under their own weight. Dark masses spill from the sky in great, twisting columns of mist, stretching down towards the streets below. They descend like hands stretching from the heavens, enormous enough to swallow half a city block. Anyone caught within the descending clouds will find themselves surrounded by a frigid mist and powerful winds pushing down upon them. Visibility drops to almost nothing. The clouds spill over you, around you, like a waterfall, tugging at clothes and disrupting all sense of direction. Most people stumble out cold, soaked, and disoriented--and, sometimes, they don't even come out at the same place they went in. More than once, someone has disappeared in the cloud, only to wind up across town. Within minutes, the cloud pillars shrink, twisting like dying tornadoes, and drift back into the sky as though nothing happened at all.
Aquitania was ready for summer. Not for the break from school. Oh, no. The chibi was dead set on completing the summer reading program, and that meant loading up on all the library books she could read in a month, so the library could track her progress. She didn't do it for the prizes (which were, as always, a mixed bag, some good, some making her wonder why the organizers thought kids would be interested in that kind of stuff), she did it purely for the love of reading, and the fun of completing it.
That said, the chibi was aware she should keep patrolling Destiny City. Not so much because things had been dangerous lately, mostly because it was Starfest. And if there was one thing Aquitania had learned since becoming a senshi, it was that the big holidays tended to be magnets for weird and magical happenings. The last thing anyone needed was for a bunch of people who had no idea what was going on to get hurt.
And, thus it was, while walking to the main branch of the Destiny City library (where her mother was working today), while her brother was working on summer homework, and developing some new cosmetics, she had decided to turn the walk into a patrol, as the skies themselves seemed to lower and churn, like the sea at high tide along a series of tidepools.
Aquitania looked up warily. It wasn't out of the realm of possibility for the clouds, which were behaving oddly today, to be, in fact, supernaturally impacted. But, if so, what that would mean was anyone's guess. The air felt staticky, too, her bangs wanted to rise, as though rubbed aggressively with a balloon, and her hair was just not cooperating. It was a shame, really. If not for the almost electrical feel to the air, and the ominous clouds, today would be an utterly ideal day to go to the library, and then stay inside for the remainder of the afternoon with a cup of juice or maybe some cocoa or something. Maybe after picking up her first set of summer reading materials, she could pester Khaz to go with her to the nearest gas station to pick up an Icee. Sure, it'd be awfully cold on an already not-particularly-warm day, but it'd still be a nice thing to have to sip while beginning the serious task of summer reading.
Then, a pinging sensation in the back of her mind alerted her. A senshi. With a stronger energy signature than her brother. Maybe what had been called "eternal" senshi, or a knight, like Niflhel? Where were they? Were they on a patrol, too? The energy signal didn't feel icky and acidic, so they were presumably Order-aligned, too. The questions filled her mind, until she stopped walking, and stopped paying any heed to the ominous swirlings of the clouds above her head.
Finally, she thought she heard booted footsteps on the path ahead, and grinned, preparing to call out to them as they came around the bend. Unnoticed, the little sparkling wisp that had been following her for the last several months danced around the edge of her collar, as if trying to alert her to the behavior of the sky.
It was at that point that the clouds descended, as if it was a dam breaking loose. The clouds spilled downward, dark, wet, cold, reaching out to swallow up the unaware chibi, down into some misty abyss that lay in a part of the clouds that no light could ever penetrate.
Lena Roze
