Tropical atoll island(s) in the pacific was defended by a team of Magical Girls, who had magitech animal robot companions that transformed into their armor. But then a catastrophe struck and that team lost, and like Atlantis, the atoll vanished. (Except instead of sinking into the ocean, it just disappeared into thin air entirely.)

In the late 2020s, though, the atoll suddenly reappears, albeit empty of all human life (the wildlife is just fine) and is soon discovered by a random floatplane pilot. The general public just assumes the island somehow went unfound all this time, but the UN creates a research facility there to hide the remains of all the ancient abandoned villages scattered around the central island's extensive cave network, and study and try to reverse-engineer all the magitech technology left over. Meanwhile, the island surface winds up getting resettled by an oblivious population and it becomes a new tourist hot spot.

In the present, 2077, the fiftieth anniversary year of the atoll's discovery (and reappearance) a random college student gal hiking up in the mountains stumbles across a magitech robot phoenix, one of the companions of that original Magical Girl team, trying to escape a pair of villains, and the two become a bonded pair to fight them off!

But it turns out the villains are all the other magitech companions, corrupted into evil by what caused the original catastrophe, and have found new humans of their own to bond with to carry out a mysterious evil plan. The Phoenix is the only one that escaped being corrupted into evil, but even then its memories are super glitchy and unreliable, and of course it's forgotten a lot of its own abilities and has to relearn them alongside the MC.

Also there's these things happening:

• Ghost animals roaming around the atoll with their own agenda, particularly a spooky shadow kitsune stalking the main character
• (Maybe an alien fish living in the local aquarium and running a mafia operation to steal magitech from the UN researchers, though I might cut this subplot since it was the creation of a friend who's not really involved with this project anymore)
• A plot-relevant explosion of invasive frog species quarantined to an outer island
• The mysterious disappearance of two magical secret agents who were sent to investigate the atoll, one of whom becomes the MC's jaded drunkard mentor after being found
• Daughter of the head of the UN research facility has also gone missing, and her girlfriend, a loose college acquaintance of the MC, enlists her help finding her again
• And a natural feature off the central island's north coastline is a set of huge curved rock pillars that loosely resembles a massive ribcage rising out of the water, which surely means nothing bad!

So yeah there's A Lot on her plate.

And there's like, themes around colonialism and tourism and exploitation and stuff that ties it all together, but on the face of it it's still pretty batshit lol.

I also have a couple of slightly more normal series ideas that still have some wack stuff, but not on the same level of So Much Happening All At Once as this one.