𝒘𝒉𝒊𝒓𝒍𝒘𝒊𝒏𝒅 𝒐𝒇 𝒏𝒊𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒎𝒂𝒓𝒆𝒔 ... 𝘁𝘄𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 (𝘁𝘆𝗹𝗲𝗿 𝗼𝘄𝗲𝗻𝘀 𝘅 𝗼𝗰)

𝒑𝒓𝒐𝒍𝒐𝒈𝒖𝒆: 𝒊'𝒎 𝒔𝒐𝒓𝒓𝒚 𝒊 𝒅𝒊𝒕𝒄𝒉𝒆𝒅 𝒚𝒐𝒖... 𝒏𝒐𝒕 𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒍𝒍𝒚

Despite her toughened and harsh demeanor, Maria Rivera was surprisingly quiet and concentrated as she sat in the back seat of the pickup truck that belonged to the Tornado Wranglers YouTube crew, carefully sketching in her notebook despite the vehicle constantly bumping up and down along the road. Her glasses were nearly knocked off of her face and she had to hold them up on the bridge of her nose as she glared up at the rearview mirror so she could see her friend.

Tyler Owens just glanced back at her with an innocent smirk before directing his eyes back to the road. "Somethin' on your mind, Sphinx?!" he called back to her.

Maria just gently rolled her eyes and directed her attention back to her notebook, trying to ignore the slight blush that crept onto her cheeks from the nickname. She didn't say a word, which was very common with her whenever she tagged along with the crew. Despite being thirty-four and considered the mom of the group, she never had the tendency to act motherly around those like Boone or Lily unless they were in serious situations.

In today's case, potentially chasing down forming tornadoes in Oklahoma. How wonderful.

It just made her feel too old for her liking and she always cringed when being called out for being a nineties girl.

Speaking of Boone, he sat in the passenger's seat and was adjusting one of the phones that they had brought along with them after having left Arkansas. Maria briefly examined his struggle with today's technology and couldn't help but quietly laugh at him, mainly since she found it amusing how she was older than him and yet he couldn't quite master the camerawork just yet.

"You an artist?" asked the much older man sitting next to her in the back of the truck. Well, he wasn't that much older than her, maybe forty-two or forty-three. He had been even quieter than her when they had begun driving the couple hour long trip but he had exchanged a polite smile with her from time to time. Now that he was actually speaking, Maria instantly noticed the thick British accent in his voice and grinned.

"You could say that, I guess," Maria replied, the slightest hint of bashfulness in her tone; she was never very fond of showing off her artwork. It was more of a hobby than anything but she had slowly begun to claim the trust of everyone else in the group over the past two years. Even this new person – Ben, she believed his name was – seemed respectful enough. Because of this, she paused her drawing, which was that of a flowery field, and flipped the page. The previous drawing had been that of an EF3 twister that she had seen back in Kansas a few months prior. "Saw this while with the others out in this field right by Wichita."

"Blimey, that's impressive," Ben replied, adjusting his glasses to look at the drawing more closely. "You sure you're a part of this group?"

Maria chuckled and nodded her head, closing her notebook and peering out the window. "Yeah..." she murmured a little distantly. "Just somethin' I do on the side, really..."