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William Pauwel     The swamps of The Expanse are basically shit. Unadulterated, grade-A, monster-infested, plague-ridden shit. There's a reason that most of Iskandria's highway system is built at least several stories above the creeping sludge and trickling water of the region's enormous wetlands. But there are some regions that even they can't build; places that are so water-logged or so dangerous that they've all but been left to the wilderness. After all, there are only so many man-hours in a day, and trying to wring stone from water is about one of the hardest jobs there is.

That, plus the Gigapotamus herds is more than enough to isolate a place.

    But this is exactly why these regions of the Expanse are believed to be so rich with undiscovered treasure. Sure, it'd be a bitch to find them, but that's where innovation comes in. Innovation, and a lady named Emilia Melchior and her patented RuinDar!

Also her patented spider robot.

Spider robot?

SPIDER ROBOT.

    "It's not far now!" She actually came along! How could she not-- this IS, after all, what the 1996th Expeditionary Legion DOES. Emilia is seated comfortably atop a vaguely minotaur-shaped robot that is in turn squatting in front of the controls to what is essentially a large, spider-legged walker machine. It's even big enough to allow for a few passengers! Which is good, since the water below doesn't look too friendly. "I know you all probably have your doubts, but I'm confident we're about to stumble upon something EXTRAORDINARY."

    The woman is... She's the very image of Modern Action Scientist. There's a labcoat, there's some armor, there's a set of big old mechanical-y goggles on her head. Her hair's up in a bun tied back by what looks like a string with some kind of pointy fang strapped to one end. Everything is about what you would expect! Except for the grenade launcher she has strapped over one shoulder.

As to why you're all accompanying her, well.

    Tellus is filthy with undiscovered caches of Ancient technology. The shattered remnants of an incredibly advanced civilization are scattered all across the continent, and Iskandria has promised the League early access to any they might discover within their territory. And so, this expedition.

    The spider-bot shimmies through the pitch black water with eight spindly legs and a whole mess of searchlights. Not that they need them right now; it's only mid-afternoon! Something that looks like one of those bar-shaped spinning radar antennae whirls overhead and beeps periodically as they advance, until finally the thing crests on what feels like a hillside and abruptly comes to a halt.

    "Okay!" She says, grinning over her shoulder as the spider-walker lowers itself onto solid ground. "Like I said! Wouldn't be long, and here we are!" Pr...obably? The Action Scientist dismounts with a hop of her robotic ride, and lands with a squish on soft, loamy but relatively dry land.

    There is... Not really much around? Not at first glance, anyway. Plenty of plants, plenty of trees, lots and lots and lots of water and marsh. But there, just up ahead, what looks like... A strange formation of standing stones-- or pillars?-- sticking out of the bog. The trees seem odd, too. Overgrown here, more than they were just a little bit ago.

Also, the water is unusually still. Or perhaps shallow?
Kirikou     Kirikou hates spiders.

    Kirikou hates spiders even more than he hates snakes, and that's saying a lot. Snakes are nasty, snakes are vicious, but snakes have never actually brought him face to face with the Madness of Fear.

    That said, a giant spider bot really isn't terrible. It's much better than a horde of tiny buggers clinging to every surface. He has to wonder at what type of person would actually associate themselves with creepy nasty spiders, but it's not his job to wonder right now. It's his job to follow along and defend the Action Scientist.

    "Here we are?" the youth asks, looking around with a sneer possibly related to the smell. "Where's that? Looks like we're just in the middle of a swamp. And you know, I heard something funny once about hot, wet jungles... but this swamp's just plain nasty." he says with a grin.
Victor Xix      Victor has seen better days. In only a week's time, he hasn't fully managed to regenerate the gaping head wound he took during the last battle, where a substantial chunk of his brain was simply blown apart by William Pauwel's nasty weapon. It is largely for that reason - the still-present headwound, through which light occasionally shines - that he's riding on an unfamiliar device like this at all.

     "Not always," Victor rumbles as he looks at the standing stones and the overgrown trees, "Not like this."

     There's no note of sadness in his voice, though - Victor seems to simply /accept/ that it's so, without any real complaint.

     "What is it you hope to find here?" He asks the ACTION SCIENTIST.
Rhapsody     There are many ways to travel. By boat. By air. By land. And today's new craze, by spider. While not entirely comfortable with arachnids, being transported atop a machine that -looks- like one is far more interesting to her. She was able to imagine all the questions her brother would probably have asked as the vehicle made its way through the bog, but she didn't really bother with all that. There was a pretty simple reason for that.

    Even with the transport, the smell of the swamp beyond was headache inducing to Rhapsody. When the mech-spider stops, and everyone starts to disembark, the unhindered scent of it all hits the guildmaster like a truck and it's taking a lot of focus to not turn away from her allies and just introduce her lunch to the bog. It'd probably smell -better- considering it was more fruit than anything else. Thankfully, she has enough willpower to -not- put her stomach's contents on display and starts to peer out across the area toward the strange stones, trusting in everyone's power of observation to give her an idea of what they were in for.

    "Time for my brother to make draconic gas masks.."
Flamel Parsons     "Doubts are something we have recently." Agent Parsons says, keeping his MIB observer aesthetic as best he can while the massive spiderbot rocks and rumbles beneath him. He's no doubt just a bit sour at the secretive business surrounding the giant robot. Never as much as Victor would be, though, if Victor could be anything but inhuman. The man himself is clad in a sort of wilderness-ready version of his classic MIB suit, retaining all the black and white in the right places while still leaning more toward fatigues than towards something tailored and formal. It comes with an ominous gasmask, too!

    "But, it seems like you're definitely can dispell them! Establishing scanners of mysterious and unknown energies wrought by ancient creators to mark out areas to restrict from public knowledge and access, and then study in secret, is precisely what we ought to do." He says, dismounting from the spider as well. He glides down off of it, and begins to hover, keeping away from that awful muck as best he can. "Superior knowledge is what any taskforce from agencies furthering offworld agendas should try to find." He is the alien, it's him.

    "Now, let's get to studying. If there's any facilities left behind here, and if nobody else managed to breach them, then maybe I can..." Agent Parsons starts, before putting his fingers to his temples. Then, he activates his ability of CLAIRVOYANCE! His mind spreads out, reading for psychic imprints in the environment. If anything sapient once entered or left structures in this area, even if it was thousands of years ago, their psychic footprints in the environment should still be retained, as long as they weren't overwritten by something catastrophic like a battle in the area.

    In this case, he's looking for literal footprints, in fact, or handprints, or similar, but any fragments of clairvoyant perception will do. He broadcasts whatever he finds to those around him telepathically, projecting shimmering light to represent whatever psychic data he can collect, and follow to open the entrance to this.
Flamel Parsons     Mel's body emits a soft light, and emits a low sonar 'wave' of light that flows over the loamy soil towards the standing stones, fading as it goes. Soft orange highlights something like "footprints", a visual approximation of psychic trails. They lead toward the standing stones as they're revealed, but once they get there, there's an ambiguous, unusual presence, represented in Mel's visualization as a sort of unformed glowing cloud or mist, around the stones. "That's all I can pick up here." He says. "I'm not sure what the presence is, but it seems current, not past. If you have non-physical interaction methods, try for the presence, otherwise try to investigate the stones, I think."

    He drifts towards the stones, and begins to emit more telepathic pings. The presence has a psychic signature. Is it sapient? Animalistic? He can't tell, but he can ping it with short psychic 'hello' signals. Which he does. Whether it directs any kind of reply his way is another matter, since he can only detect thoughts intentionally directed towards him. Keeping those fingers pressed to his temples as he approaches the stones, he pings at a slow, cautious rate, to investigate what sort of response might be directed towards him. The stones themselves, and deeper investigations of the presence, he leaves to the others.
Vatol Halftail Vatol hates a lot of things. Spider robots aren't one of them.

A lack of minions, though, /that/ he hates. Well, maybe 'hate' is the wrong word; 'strongly dislikes due to having fewer bodies between himself and danger.' Yeah, that's it.

The Warlock Engineer is here /without/ his usual full kit. His usual set of heavy armor has been left behind as a concession to the terrain. Instead, he's wearing thin brown wrappings, made of some kind of light cloth with a harness covered in latches and gear-hooks overtop. His usual mask and helm is gone, with dark-lensed goggles in its place. Short horns jut from his white-furred head like a ram's. They apparently weren't ornamentation.

Vatol jumps to the ground. A pair of green stone amulets like the one he gave to the Senator-thing dangle from his neck; his free hand clutches one tightly. His right hand is holding the wire-wrapped black-bladed glaive he usually carries, though the cabling is attached to a much smaller cylinder strapped to his back than usual. He's not terribly happy about it. He keeps his tail mostly out of the water, the mid-afternoon sun glinting off the thin brass prosthetic. Must be the source of his name.

"There are worse swamps," Vatol asides. He grins. "No lizard-things in this one." Hopefully. He starts towards the strange standing stones on the path Flamel lays out, sniffing the air, ears twitching. He doesn't have feeble man-thing senses... and he's definitely using them from the /back/ of the party.

Place of greatest honor, commander's prerogative, etcetera, etcetera.
William Pauwel There are certainly worse swamps. But there are better ones, too. Ones that don't smell like rot and the slow decay of fallen giants. But perhaps Vatol would find it more distressing how tranquil this part of the swamp is. On the way in, he would have been subject to all manner of awful noises: the sounds of churning water-beasts and writhing serpents. Here, though, it's... quiet. The place smells like swamp and plant-life. The reek of rot is pervasive here as it is throughout the bog, but only by proximity. This place seems... Cleaner, somehow? Quieter. An absence of predators.

The presence of something... Else?

    "I don't know," Emilia shrugs at the inquisitive supermonster. "That's the honest truth. To be honest, we've been searching for a while for the recipe to this one kind of cement the Ancients used to use. Really hardy against water. If we could find that, then we'd actually be able to use most of our land." And that means less war! Probably. "Also, I've ALREADY found my giant revenge robot army, so that one's already been crossed off my bucket list."

Apparently she's the one that found those things?

Huh.

    Meanwhile, Flamel is heading towards the mysterious set of standing stones! He is... Pinging the waters. Sending little blips of telepathic energies spiralling downwards into the murky waters. He receives... Something back. From one of the stones? A garbled response of something almost incomprehensible, like an uncountable number of whispering voices susurrating against the suface of his brain. It's almost like static, perhaps. Or something trying to tune itself to send a message; if maybe he would... tune back?
Victor Xix      Victor - whose senses are remarkably sharp to begin with - is either unaffected or uninterested by the smell.

     "I know little about concrete," Victor grunts.

     Flamel says there's something /below/. Something *intelligent*. Victor's stoney face slowly grinds into a frown. He does not like that.

     "There may be trouble. Be aware."
Rhapsody     As the others venture forth, Rhapsody seems content to stay on semi-solid ground, near the spider-mech, trying her best to breathe despite the overwhelming stench wafting in from the rest of the bog.

    When 'life' is reported beyond, the dragon can't help but groan, stare at the murk, and then start slogging after the rest of them. Only after folding up her red trench and tossing it back into the spider mech. The 'noises' that result are as nausiating as the stench... which seems to be fading as Rhapsody moves toward the stones..?

    "That's ... weird. The 'smell' is kind of fading closer to the stones.."
Flamel Parsons     "Oh, hey! It thinks back!" Parsons decides to engage first comtact protocols. "Hmmm, it needs to tune. Normally first contact with an alien mentality needs at least a hundred years of media brainwashing, we'll have to take the shortcut." He settles somewhere in the middle of the standing stones, crossing his legs under him in a sort of meditative pose. "If anyone else wants to try telepathic contact," He calls out, as he closes his eyes under the gasmask. "Think towards me. I'll relay anything I receive." He's like a living psychic phone!

    He works on tuning. First, mutual signs of sapience. Tapping out a fibonacci sequence to teach it the mathematical nature of the mind contacting it. Sending various sounds and images to try to express a language-based mind. Sending the surface-level psychic traces he feels from his group to express a social mind. If it can orient towards these sorts of core elements of a human-type sapience, maybe it can... Do something? Be clear? Who knows! He's trying, though.
Kirikou     A bit lost in the point of all this, Kirikou isn't overly concerned. He's in the League to support the eggheads, not to be one. Still, he can probably contribute. Or rather, his twin Weapons can probably contribute. Currently in their metal glove-form, Fire and Thunder are happily doing their own thing in the conceptual space Kirikou shares with them. That tells the Meister that, whatever's going on here, it's not a corruption of the natural order of the Earth. They'd be upset over that, and probably bawling their metaphorical eyes out.

    <Hey guys.> Kirikou sends inwardly, sharing thoughts with the Twins. <The science guys are looking for some sort of underground thing. Large empty space somewhere underneath us, hopefully not totally filled with water. Can you tell where that'd be?> he asks. <And that guy says there's something up with the stones. Anything going on there?>

    The Twins nod, one scowling in Kirikou's mindshare but flipping a silent thumbs up, one grinning and nodding. Their powers are mostly instinctual, but they can also do some active searching. It's almost a shame no one else can see into Kirikou's mindshare. Well okay, a psychic could if Kilik let him into the bond. Which he won't, not without good reason. But the Twins start to dance. Not a stately dance, but an energetic bouncing and spinning more like that of capoiera fighters or breakdancers. They're not as athletic and trained in such things as Kirikou is, but they make up for it in enthusiasm.

    As for what they can find? Well, that depends. They only sense earth. They could sense spaces where the earth isn't, and presumably can tell natural from man-made based on whether the boundary between earth and not-earth is made of flat planes. The stones will be trickier. The twin shamans might be able to tell if the stones are the caps of massive columns going down deep into the earth or something, or if they have wires and stuff running through them, but their earthsense is very much limited to actual earth and stone - or its lack.
Vatol Halftail "This place is, rrr, clean-clean," Vatol mumbles. It goes into his radio, a little headset thing. "The rot is from outside-beyond." He gestures at the rest of the swamp with a flick of his tail. He moves up to the rocks, unhooking something from his belt. It looks like a short metal rod with a rock on the end, with some kind of glass tubing around it. There's sinew or something inside the glass, running into the handle.

Vatol pokes the water on the way to the rocks, then the rocks themselves. There's a little gauge on it with a needle that wobbles and flickers. He's mumbling to himself the whole time, though that much is multitasking: opening himself to the winds of magic, trying to sense if there's anything funky that's going on while his device does its work.

The meaty bits in the tubes, incidentally, are the electroreceptive organs out of something shark-like. He's made himself an electrolocation device. It was probably messy.
Kirikou     Kirikou goes a little glassy-eyed behind his glasses, trying to understand the Twins. He can empathise with them quite literally in this state, easier than he could tell their feelings when they're in humanform. They don't speak however, not in either form. Complex communication gets rather tricky, and trying to understand what they're 'saying' isn't going to be easy.

    After a moment he shakes his head. "This temple thing, it's not made of earth. It's not carved from earth. Metal. Like, I dunno, a buried spaceship or something." he finally says. He's not sure about that last, but something about what the Twins tried to communicate made him think of a kids show they'd watched.

    "Also yeah, those stones? Not stone." he shakes his head. THAT much, he could understand easily enough. "Gotta be artificial. And..." he pauses, listening inwardly. Why are they gesturing upwards, like Sentai Heroes posing?

    Abruptly he gets it, or at least a part of it. "Earth's moving up underneath. Like, a lot of earth. A volcano or a mountain or something. Uh... underneath us? Actually MOVING." he says, sounding a little incredulous. Kirikou shakes his head. This makes no sense to him, and he probably sounds crazy explaining it to the others, but he takes the Twins seriously when they're expressing themselves over this sort of thing. "Maybe some sort of troll? I dunno. If you can find out what's going on, do it... but otherwise get ready for something. I mean, if the earth moves for you, that's great and all. But I don't think this is the sort of place we should enjoy that sorta thing right?"
Flamel Parsons     SIMULTANEOUS WITH KIRIKOU'S SCAN...

    "Alright, signal tuned. Handshake complete, opening channel." Agent Parsons speaks up, opening his eyes. His brain seems to expand from out of his skull in the form of orange light. His eyes are glowing under that gasmask, filling the lenses with whiteness. Anyone who lets him send his psychic data link to them gets to see a visual and aural representation of the data he's receiving, and see unusual sights. There's spectral images swirling around him, ambiguously shaped and formed in misty lights. They are all screaming in unison, and this goes on for several seconds.

    The swarm of light and screaming stops. A large image of an aged face, ambiguous in the "signal noise" of psychic mist, is now conveyed over psychic link, laughing. Mel speaks up, tilting his head, and wincing. "Wait," He says. "Something's wrong. It's... Old, malevolent. Artificial? Sterile? Silent? No, it's a laughing silence? Wait, no no no. No no no no this is bad. Something's wrong. Something's wrong." He hunches over.

    The face, hovering in the image he's managing to still telepathically project above him, stops laughing long enough to speak. "So this is how it's done? Good-- another good excuse." Parsons shudders and the connection cuts, leaving his psychic link empty, projecting the psionic equivalent of [NO SIGNAL].

    "Augh! Victor! Quick! Did you recognize the face or the voice?!" Parsons' whole jokey MIB persona is utterly dropped in favor of a sort of panic, as they stumble to the ground, unable to maintain levitation in their disorientation. "Something bad's happening! Something very bad!! Something very deep is doing something very malicious!!"
William Pauwel One way or another, through one vector or the next, contact is made. An attempt to probe the depths.

Something is wrong.

    There's something in the air. A shift. An excitement. Like a note of vibration far beneath the range of human hearing is rumbling through the molecules of the atmosphere and the swamp and the earth itself. The water begins to rise. Droplets of bog are flung upwards by the force of those terrible shockwaves. The standing stones quiver and shake. An earthquake? No, it feels different. An earthquake would be much deeper, much broader of a force. This is focused, close-by. It's still enough to make Emilia drop to a knee to keep her balance. This probably saves her life.

    The swamp shatters. It comes apart at the seams. From the center of the standing stones erupts a great, square obelisk, its frame twisted like a massive drill bit and meancing with uncountable, dancing, tooth-like spikes. A psychic signal washes out from Flamel. A terrible, oppressive PRESENCE descends on the swamp. This is why the animals had fled. They could feel it. Sense it coming.

    Fingers of something like frost begin creeping outward from the obelisk. The thing comes apart like a black hurricane, gathering enormous masses of long-buried steel and globules of rapidly congealing water around it, forming the material into a body. A massive, bulbous form of somehow solid but unfrozen water, wrapped by rings of steel and screaming swarms of black smoke, erupts from the swamp. Its body the size of a hillside and eight arms like tree trunks. It resembles a tremendous, grotesque octopus, one that seems to be anchored to the land itself. One that seems to spring from the very planet.

It emits a roar that drags itself across the inside bones of the skull.

                       --Herald of Pristine Depths--                        
                                --Tlarahim--                                

And then it attacks.

    The swarms of black gather moisture in the air and manifest, hardening into great, reaping tendrils of razor-sharp, molelcule-thick fluid. They sweep at the gathered elites, the thing appearing to recognize the threat they present, seeking to sever limbs and heads and bleed the life from fresh bodies.
Rhapsody     Step, step, squelch, squelch, rumble, rumble. Wait. That last part isn't supposed to happen. She wasn't a psychic by any stretch, so the telepathic information sent is missed. All the guildmaster seems to know is that the ground is shaking and she wants -nothing- to do with what is about to surface. "PROBLEM!" she calls out, likely a obvious statement, but she was used to having her guildmates around. Tonight, though, she didn't have any of them. At least her allies in the League were here.

    Thoughts of trying to stay out of the muck are completely erased. Rhapsody actually hits the deck with a splash as everything goes crazy. The monster before her is like nothing she's seen before. Words she had spoken the night before echo in her head and urge her to stand.

    This was a monster that demanded she take hold of her azure spellblade. She was going to need defense far more than offense. Though, at the moment, she wasn't even sure -how- to fight the terror that had appeared. So, not one to hide ignorance, she calls out: "If you have ANY IDEAS on how to hurt this thing, I am -all- ears!"
Victor Xix      The League has never seen Victor as anything other than an odd, inhuman, stone-faced monster of a supersoldier. They have never seen his expression change all that much, except for the occasional softness around Orta, the woman he's claimed as like a surrogate daughter. He is, ninety nine point nine percent of the time, wearing pretty much the same expression.

     So when the /thing/ arises, and Victor's expression twists into one of unbridled hate, that is probably an indicator that he knows not only what it is but exactly how bad news it is.

     Victor starts muttering to himself. Anyone listening particularly closely would hear him muttering the following:

     "Reflexes impaired by five percent. Injury may be invaded. Compensate."

     He tears a large piece off his already-tattered cloak and wraps it firmly around his head - specifcally, around his eyes, his nose, his mouth, and his headwound. He binds it tightly enough to be suffocating, and anyone watching can see that he's making it /really/ tight indeed.

     But Victor is not blind. Not at all. He reaches out rips the nearest heavy object out of the ground - be that the stone pillar, a tree, or some other wonderful hunk of large smashy-smashy - and /bashes/ the creature directly in the chest with it, as if he was swinging a baseball bat.

     "Compensate for loss of efficiency with massive damage," he mutters to himself.

     "Overwhelm tactics."
Vatol Halftail Vatol moves amidst the rocks. He taps the weird wand-thing to them, the dial jumping. He's elated. It works! And works well, apparently. "Some sort of charge... electricity-current. Here... here... here-there -- everywhere?" He waves it through the air. It makes the same needle-ticking motions.

Everything starts to go a little bit crazy.

Vatol beats feet away from the rocks and gets clear before the ground erupts and the body coalesces. He dives into the water, shrieking in fright, plunging into the swamp-water as the /thing/ roars. His entire body feels like it's rattling, coming apart --

Fluid slaps into the surface. Vatol can see it cutting into the water before coming apart, dispersed like projectiles. He thinks it missed him. It must have. He emerges some distance away, sluicing water off his oily fur like a river rat, his light clothing soaked. He grasps the grip of a weapon at his belt, dragging the weapon out of the tightly-wrapped oil-cloth and squeezing the trigger on the warplock pistol.

Nothing happens.

Vatol, stunned, stares at the weapon. He spots something: a cut, a narrow slice in the side of the barrel where one of the cutting waves grazed it... and broke the water-tight seal. The powder is wet, useless, ruined.

Vatol bravely advances towards the distant rear of the party. Screaming. Bravely screaming.
Kirikou     Kirikou's forwarned, or maybe forearm-ed. The eruption of the monster from the ground doesn't catch him off-guard. He bounds out of the direct path of the thing, guided by Fire and Thunder's frantic gestures within their shared mindspace. And then he waits, on guard, for the thing to come forth.

    He has no idea what the thing is, sadly. "Ugly mother.." he starts, before the Herald attacks with razor-whipping tendrils of water. He blocks most of it, guarding himself with his soul-hardened gauntlets. Some tentacles get past his guard though. He can't defend against everything, not when the weapon is as twisty as a whip, but luckily he can keep the attacks from cutting broad swathes across his flesh, or severing his limbs, or hitting his face. Besides he's tough, tougher than a typical victim. The damage is relatively superficial, even if the wounds bleed freely.

    He doesn't have the time, right now, to close the wounds. Channeling pain and rage into soul energy, synchronizing with Fire, Kilik leaps for the beast trying to slam it with his own massive blunt object. That is, with his flaming fist. Not that it'll likely set anything on fire... the flame is more spiritual than real. But the mighty blow contains plenty of fire's essence with it, no doubt adding to the harm if this beast is particularly vulnerable to fire. And if not, well, getting hit by Kirikou's steel-clad fist is just never a fun time even if you're immune to the flame.
Flamel Parsons     Parsons falls back on his ass when the massive structure crashes out of the ground, swearing as he does, and then slides back rapidly, establishing a panicked levitated retreat. "Run run run RUN RUN RUN." He calls out when he hover-dashes away, then turns soon enough to see the massive monster form, stressing in a far more human way than he was before, no longer so artificial and passive. His body hums with a red light that shines over his skin, a psionic defense field that's soon tested. As he skids to a floating "stop" and puts one pair of fingers on his temples in a defensive position, the horrible reaping tendrils lash out aggressively.

    "Grrrrhhhhhh!!" His voice strains as one slams against the field, as if to saw him in half. He has to concentrate on making sure it doesn't open any wounds, or so Victor said, and that means that preventing the cut wins out over more efficient defense. Sparks of psychic energy and light blast out like a spray of blood, and a heavy bruise forms under his clothes. He can't take too many of those hits. "Rrrrraugh! It's /sharp/!" He plants his pair of fingers firmer on the right temple. "Okay! Overwhelming tactics it is, if you say so Victor!" He boosts his height to a solid six or so feet, eyes shining with orange light, and plants a hand out. His body roils with aggressive mental energy, the purified emotion of 'intent to inflict harm', and the light shines up to his forehead and then out to a flat palm pointed ahead.

    Instead of one massive strike, he'll go for the psionic equivalent of bullet hell. A wide spray of elaborate, painful patterns of harsh orange light, projected and rushing forward, trying to rip and tear through matter, annihilate integrity in all aspects. Beams, bolts, and blasts strike all along the body, probing for weaknesses and trying to inundate the being with a storm of shining damage.
William Pauwel     Victor knows exactly what this thing is. He knows exactly how dangerous it can be, the threat that it represents, the implications surrounding its appearance here. The zeal with which he goes to execute his strategems is commendable. A cloth to protect his wounds, a set of tactics that could achieve victory. He reaches for a weapon to use.

    ...Something comes away with the sound of shearing metal and a scream of "MY SPIDER." But a giant spider-walker robot leg is good enough as a club, and the Original Greaver has more than enough strength to smash it, hard, into the ancient monster. Tlarahim's strange, viscous body ripples at the impact. The steel rings bend and twist around the sparking limb and droplets of water spray out the back end of the creature, briefly freezing in air before whirling back inwards.

    Kirikou joins in the assault. Heavy, burning fists pound at the creature, spewing flames which, because of the fact that it's mostly water, seems to largely shrug off. But as he pounds into the creature, he might notice wisps of black smoke bursting from its watery form and burning up as they meet his fists.

But then there are ones that do not.

    Tlarahim's fluid body flashes. Thick black contrails streak out from the creature's ruptured body. They lance at his open wounds, trying to penetrate the body within, to try to invade and subvert. Victor was right-- open wounds are a potentially lethal liability.

    From further away, Flamel unleashes his fury. Bolts of wrathful psionic energies streak in, pouring forth in a cascade of blinding orange light. They smash at the metal rings, sending spiderweb cracks across the surfaces. They plunge into the congealed fluid, diffusing and diffracting through its body before emerging elsewhere in great gouts of steam and sprays of foaming water, threatening its cohesion, its very structure. The creature seems to scream in protest at the assault.

And counterattacks.

    Four of its enormous limbs plunge into the swamp. The water seems to churn and bubble and broil as it's drawn into the octopodal monstrosity. The remaining limbs swell, straining against the constraints of the steel binding them-- and then erupt, unleashing lances of cutting fluid pressurized to hundreds of atmospheres upon the assembled Elites. The jets are enough to cleave through sections of the land itself. To make contact would be... Dangerous to say the least.
Rhapsody     Enough was enough. The guildmaster was tired of hiding behind friends, allies, and guardians. She wanted to be able to help in the situations that had seemingly become a part of her day to day life, and even if something went wrong today, at least she could say she fought alongside her allies rather than behind them.

    Still well away from the melee, Rhapsody takes a step back when so many of the creature's tentacles drive themselves into the ground, the rest of the beast swelling with the strain of an impending attack. She had already felt the whipping tendrils cut across her form as she hoped to hear a reply on how to attack the monster. Being told that open wounds would be a liability, she had taken a moment to rip at the lower hem of her shirt to bind the crimson mark across her forearm, while mimicing Victor and drawing another piece of cloth across her nostrils. None of this, however, had prepared her for the assault to come.

    The jets of water are given their fair share of urgency. The trigger on the guildmaster's mizzium spellblade is pulled, covering her in a sheen of silvery metal for a brief moment, something that the water would hopefully not pierce. As the defensive spell fades, the parting jet still slices at her muck-covered pants, though barely missing opening another wound. A moment earlier she said she could conjure up some lightning, or some fire, and now she would keep her promise. The spellblade is tucked away, the crimson scales along her head and neck start to glow, and a ball of flame starts to appear, sparks and embers flowing into a sphere above her open palm. She was still trying to work on controlling her newfound ability to channel red mana with little trouble. As she hurls the sphere, it lurches off more like a drunken missile than a proper fireball. At least its size had grown to well beyond the size of a basketball. She could only hope for one thing! That it actually hits.

        "Incoming!"
Kirikou     The moment Kirikou feels the invasive presence, he knows he's made a mistake. Fire was doing okay, feeding well off the aggressive offensive needs of the fight. With his synchronization with Fire being so high, his weapon was considerably more effective even though Tlarahim's body is too watery to be vulnerable to the soul flame.

    But all offense and no defense is bad, and Kilik's going to pay for the mistake. Given the nature of his power he can sense the invasive attack on a spiritual level, rather than merely seeing the tentacles trying to invade him through his wounds. "Augh no! Totally not into tentacles!" he cries out in disgust.

    The invasive attack requires a shift in priorities, in tactics. Fortunately for the Meister, Thunder is his defensively-minded Weapon. It's easy for Kilik to shift his emotions, to synchronize quickly with either or both of them. He's the best at such synchronization; the best in a generation. He channels his fear, and anger, his disgust, as well as his eager pulse-pounding excitement. He channels those emotions Thunder shares, feeding power through their synchronized link. His right hand extinguishes while his left crackles, and he grabs for the attacking tentacles.

    This time, electricity is his soul weapon. And his attacker is using water, which probably conducts electricity pretty well. He doesn't punch; he simply closes his gauntleted fist around the watery tentacles and releases his power into them. His own body lights up with the power, but Thunder isn't trying to hurt HIM. It sparks through his hair, lights up his bones to the point of visibility through exposed parts of his skin. It even hurts, but the pain's vastly preferable to the attempted subversion. The boy gives a rictus grin, sparks flashing from his gleaming teeth. And when the energy has peaked, when his electrical assault begins to wane, Kirikou heaves, intending to rip watery tentacles clean out of the monster and leave IT bleeding. Or if they're already disassociated from the electricity and he's no longer under any direct attack, he can always slam a single fist into the fleshy bulk of the octopus-thing itself.
Vatol Halftail Vatol is now at a reasonably safe distance. He doesn't want to get murdered by some water elemental. This is not a fight he brought proper weapons for. The water is a hindrance, and it's... it's...

...wait.

The Skaven stops some distance from the battle. He looks back. There's a moment of contemplation. If he stays away, his survival is guaranteed. If he goes back, he could... maybe he could /help/. That's a strange concept. They're his allies, yes? If he helps, he could... /do/ things. He's having a hard time thinking of the word. Build something. A t-word. What is it?

Probably not important, that's what.

Vatol circles around. He extends one hand upwards, mumbling arcane words. He looks up a tree trunk, and scrambles upwards and outward, skittering above the swamp. He closes back in, approaching in an erratic fashion, looking down at the monster. Vatol takes a deep breath --

-- and jumps out of the tree.

The rat hits the water and plunges into it. His feet touch the ground underneath, body jarred, and his hands follow. He grasps at the soil beneath the water, exhaling a cloud of miscolored bubbles, like the magic was warping the air he was breathing. There's a ripple from where he's submerged.

The ground cracks and splits. Fissures rush towards the monster, yawning rips in the earth that water rushes to fill -- like the fluid that makes up its body, maybe. And besides, didn't someone say there was some kind of cavity under there?

The swamp might be about to get /slightly/ messier.
Flamel Parsons     Agent Parsons can dodge environment-scale threats, but he can't dodge them THAT well. He can leap and dash and float and generally evade the massive scale of assault. But he can't do it perfectly. In fact, he can't even do it that especially effective. He slides and skims over the surface rapidly, but when the blades come down, the splash damage, the sheer mass, and the fact that he's having to rapidly change directions so often and so severely, he's sustaining tremendous bruising damage, but also tremendous g-force damage, creating a huge drain on his endurance.

    As he attempts to platform between the shattered, exploding segments of the ground torn up by the storm of blades, he maintains his bullet hell. Over time, it begins to concentrate and to narrow down into a beam, into a sustained laser-like blast. It's the rotating metal rings that he begins to focus on, trying to keep it concentrated on the sites of the damage on the rings. If those shatter... Theoretically, this awful creature ought to fall apart, right? Right? He's hoping, in his stressed, swearing, panicked state, that it will.
William Pauwel     One might ask himself 'why is it that pure elemental fire didn't seem to phase this thing whereas a fireball might?' Elementary. One is fire. The other is red. There is a very distinct but incredibly subtle difference here, and one that many wizards often forget.

    Rhapsody is lucky. The thing she's shooting at is large. Huge. Tremendous, even. The thing of water and steel and parasitic machine-life is so large that it's hard to miss with even a drunk and/or hungover fireball. The projectile collides with the thing's side and erupts in a tremendous burst of heat and light. Pure red mana surges across the landscape, one normally bereft of such things. The creature reels before the assault, its body roiling as water turns to vapor and wafts in great clouds from the gaps in its steel armor.

    Its incursion into Kilik is cut short by a surge of electricity powerful enough to appear to be nothing less than a man-sized electrical storm. Lightning surges into the horrible creature's tendrils. A sudden burst of agitated electrons arcs across its slender tendrils. Water boils off and turns to mist. Little black drones, smaller than needlepoint, convulse and then fall apart at the smallest of scales. Its tentacles explode from its main body with an eruption of steam and the distinct scent of ozone. Tlarahim seems to convulse in agony-- or maybe that's just the electricity?

    Flamel continues his assault, though perhaps continuous combat is not his forte. His psychic focus hones to a single cohesive beam that blasts into the cracks forming around the beast's metal framework. One ring begins to glow red, then orange, then white before exploding in a blast of thermal shock. Beneath, its body seems to visibly tremble, as if struggling to not flood out through the gap in its armor.

And then...

And then a rat dives into water.

Tlarahim somehow looks confused at this latest development. Vatol is lucky that he avoided the lightning, the boiling blast of red mana, the psychic blast. Perhaps he is not so lucky as to avoid the creeping encroachment of a trillion tiny mechanical cells attempting to flood into his body. Or perhaps luck has nothing to do with it? Perhaps chaos has everything to do with it. The tendrils that approach him seem to fizzle and lose cohesion before forming again elsewhere to attempt their assault anew.

They're too late.

    Cracks split the earth. Magic shatters the soil. Suddenly the swamp begins flooding /downward./ There IS a void here, an empty vault hidden beneath the bog. Tlarahim screeches as it suddenly surges DOWNWARD, unable to fight the force of gravity over such a large area. The thing maintains its cohesion, and takes advantage of the suddenly much greater concentration of moisture in its suddenly much more constricted environment, honing the bog into incredibly sharp lances of congealed water to impale its foes upon.

But, there, inside the thing's flooded body, Vatol would see...

A tremendously shiny crystalline sphere, pulsating amidst the roiling waters.

Its glow beckons at his ratty instincts.

DOES HE DARE!?
Rhapsody     Once more with the cutting water jets. And to think, the dragon had been celebrating when her lazy fireball not only made an impact, but certainly seemed to open up a hole in the beast big enough to reveal it's weakspot. Someon should surely shoot the core for massive damage! Or just steal it. Either would work.

    When the water jets come slicing across the area once again, Rhapsody's caught rather clean, pulling the trigger on her azure spellblade a hair too late since she had to sheathe it to cast her spell. While it prevents her from being cut in half, it still leaves a bright red slash across her chest. Thinking about what was said earlier by victor, and seeing that everyone else is busy with the beast, the dragon heaves a sigh as her scales start to glow again.

    "This is really gonna hurt.."

    A moment later, said palm goes to the slice along her chest. Lacking in scales, the dragon's resistance to fire isn't as great as her brothers, allowing her to quickly cauterize the cut. Her teeth grit, her eyes jam shut, but once it's done, she decides she's had enough of the monster and all the damage its dealing to this horrible, awful, pungent, wretched swamp.

    ... Maybe she should just let it rampage around.

    Nah. Instead, the dragon swaps azure for crimson, points the spellblade at the creature, and unleashes all six charges of 'lightning bolt' that are stored within the blade.
Victor Xix      Victor weathers the hundreds of lances of cutting fluid well. They stab into his concrete flesh, punching through and digging into his body. He does not have time to rip them out, so he does the next best thing.

     He dives into Rhapsody's fireball to incinerate as much as he possibly can.

     This has the unpleasant side effect of *frying him*. This is acceptable, as far as Victor is concerned. Cauterizing the open wounds is fine. The cloth burning his face is more than fine - it is an added layer of protection.

     As the thing falls, Victor takes the mechanical spider in both hands and leaps down after it. If he was it - with its capabilities - he knows what he would do.

     It does it.

     Victor impales himself on those spikes. He is still on fire - this is a calculated risk, to give him a chance. Both claws jam into the interior, to rip as much of the thing apart and expose the crystal for as many people as possible - even if it means Victor standing in the way of lightning bolts and Warp Horror and whatever else may be conjured, Victor is going to /not allow that wound they made to close/.

     *Fanatically*.
Kirikou     Okay, not good. The thing getting blown up, electrocuted and falling into a vault? That's good. The bastard now having more water to make attacking tentacles with? Not good. Definitely not good!

    Kilik's up and on the move quickly. Standing there hunched defensively is one way to deal with those attacks, but not with this much area of effect. Fortress defense only works with attacks coming from a single direction, not with things that can probably curve. He's just not going to risk it. Instead he cuts across the attack, charging obliquely to make himself a difficult target, to get out of line of sight as fast as possible.

    As he runs, Kirikou's fists pick off lances of water that get close. He doesn't pump them with much soul power, though they have enough to enhance them properly. They're not blazing with soul energy though. Just enough so that when enhanced fist meets water, fist is going to win.
Vatol Halftail Vatol's descent through the hellish crossfire seemed to be luck. In all likelihood, it was. Of course, that's discounting the weird and the wyrd, the power of the physical substance of chaos that he wears about his neck. The stones glow in the inverse, a glint of green and a haze of darkness that it seems to pierce. Things just slide away from him. It's uncanny. It's... unnatural.

It works.

Vatol remains planted by his hands as the bog pours into the cavity beneath the ground. He starts to get dragged forward, and his tail lashes out, the metal prosthetic curling around the roots of what remains of an ancient tree in a whiplike fashion. The strain put on the point of contact with flesh and metal is terrible, but it could be far, far worse. He stands the height of a man, but he doesn't weigh anything near the same as one. Skaven are light; flexible; fragile, in their way.

He bursts from the rushing water as the flood of nanomachines comes at him like a wave. It's the second, but he doesn't know that. He hauls upwards on something with one hand, the other grasping at the belt of his equipment harness, twisting and pulling. He yells into the roar of the bog, a scream of equal parts fear and fury. The haft of some weapon emerges --

The black metal head of the Warp Blade bursts out of the churning waves into the deadly cloud. The Power Accumulator on his back whines and shrieks as it comes to life, pumping arcane energies through the cables that connect the glaive to the backpack. Runes explode into a haze of limelight, like-colored electrical arcs leaping into the cloud and driving it back.

Vatol's scream becomes a laugh. His laugh becomes a noise of confusion. There's a sharp crack like a rifle's report -- and then the wood he's clinging to gives way. He's swept into the tide, pulled inward, where the sharp spikes rise to meet him. He sees lightning, and fire, and his end. He sees... Victor?

The rat moves without hesitation, driven by survival instinct and the sort of self-serving calculus that comes naturally to his kind. He plants his feet on the monstrous man, crashing into him and kicking off of him, forcing him into the mass. He uses the momentum to spring off of him, levelling the Warp Blade as he's catapulted into the midst of the enormous monster. He screams again, his voice growing hoarse from the overuse. Maybe one day he won't feel the need to.

Vatol hits the sphere with the edge of his Warp-powered glaive, and does his absolute damnedest to fling it and himself clear out the other side of the monster before it can do anything to stop him.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel is having an okay time. He's strained and clearly outclassed by the higher-tier combatants he's taken the field with, and the threat that is causing trouble even for them. He can't last much longer. Luckily, the fact that he has these allies on the field with him means he won't have to. Well, he wouldn't anyway, but that means it's the good kind. His expiration date is lowered, though, rather sharply, when the earth below him gives out entirely. He plunges immediately. He can levitate, but he can't /fly/. That means that when the ground gives out, so does his floating, and he falls sharply. Before he can establish his psionic glide, up comes the water in huge spikes. "AuuuuAAAAAHH!!" His faux man in black persona is totally gone now amid the plunge. His shield concentrates hard on the spikes, and...

    Shatters. One of the thinner ones plunges square through his midsection. "AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHGH!" He cries out, screaming in pain, clutching at the wound and desperately reasserting just enough shield, JUST enough, to try to prevent a massive nanotechnological infection. Victor can take an impalement and keep going. Mel can't. "K-kill it! KILL IT FAST! AAAAGH!" He cries out, streaming... blood? Through the water. It glows a strange orange, as do his wounds.

    He can't muster enough aggressive mental energy to summon another PSI blast worth even a little. But he CAN do something. What he can do is what he did before, what he did first, specifically. Valtol is somewhere inside, heading with his warp blade to the core, the others clearing the threat and still assaulting the creature, he hopes, will make sure this core is cracked like an egg without his meager help. With his last gasp of coherent clairvoyance... He intends to grab a snapshot of the core's psychic imprints. Just enough data to get some hints at the relationship between this horrible creature and that voice that he awoke. Vatol's near it. When the blade comes down, Flamel intends to have that reading ready, to snag any data coming off of the thing as it comes apart...
William Pauwel     Victor Xix has fought beasts like this one before. They were the vanguard of the Enemy. Its lieutenants in the field. Hard points of resistance and coordination distant from its own reach, with which to subvert the very weapons levied against it. Years ago, such a maneuver as the one he now executes would have been unthinkable, suicidal, to go with no weapons into the maw of the enemy was foolhardy. The weapons of the era were great, yes, but to come away from such an intact was considered almost impossible.

And yet he still does it.

    The creature shrieks, as if perhaps in fear, when Victor reaches in and tears its body open, exposing the gleaming crystalline heart within. Lances of hardened water fling themselves at him, but are shattered by the raw kinetic force behind Kirikou's fists. Lightning surges in, six bolts firing round rapid at the protective waters shielding the core, causing layer upon layer to dissolve and peel away under electronic assault.

But still the core remains intact, gleaming hatefully like a constricted pupil at the form of its ancient foe.

It doesn't remain so for long.

    The final blow comes from the most unlikely of sources. Who would call a rat brave? Perhaps that's not the right word. A cornered rat can kill a cat. Fear can be as much of a motivator as valor or wrath. This world, to Vatol, would seem virginal, pure, untouched by the powers of Chaos. It does not know them. This place is characterized by pure, uncompromizing physical law, leaving little room for sorcery and even littler still for Chaos. Perhaps that's why his glaive strikes true-- because this world, this creature, does not yet know enough of its power to counter it.

    It feels like piercing a glass ball. Vatol's glaive penetrates the crystalline orb. The thing flashes frantically, its body churning in ever more unnatural ways-- maybe it's the warp, maybe that's just how one of these things looks when it dies. Vatol runs it through, emerging on the other end damp, soggy and probably with his tiny ratty heart beating faster than it ever aught to. The core is skewered around the tip of his glaive. It flashes weakly one last time before its light finally dies.

    The form of Tlarahim the Herald of Pristine Depths shudders. The metal rings fall away into the now quiescent water. Its liquid body wavers, then comes apart, flooding the chamber another two feet. The lances dissolve, freeing Victor and Flamel both from their grasp. The water below them is... Dark. Murky. Black.

    Blackness that begins to rise in contrails of disorganized, smokey clouds. They begin to gather, perhaps in an attempt to reform into something capable of defending itself. As Victor said, now is time to set it all ablaze.

    Meanwhile, as Flamel recovers, he might reflect upon the brief insight he retrieved from the core as it broke down. A signal was sent somewhere else- though to which direction exactly, he can't say. Distributed Operations Node Tlarahim: Neural reunification with master unit-- failed. Physical reconstitution-- failed. Data compilation and transmission-- successful, 99% of packets delivered and verified. Mission terminated. All functions frozen. Shutting down. Or so the sphere said to that distant voice.
Vatol Halftail Vatol emerges from the far side of the aqueous orb. He lands on the far side of the fissures, on a spit of muddy ground that is what most closely passes for dry land right now. His loose clothing is stuck to his white fur; his goggles are fogged, cracked in one place and otherwise askew. Light glitters off the orb at the end of his spear-blade.

It hurts to look at. Everything else hurts, too.

Vatol staggers away from the collapsing form, half-turned to look up at the cloud. He swings his weapon away from it protectively, unwilling to give up the treasure that is this thing's brain.

He doesn't have any fire to throw. He doesn't know if his lightning will work. He raises one hand, frowning in concentration --

The metal tank on his back sputters and dies. The light on the glaive goes out. Vatol looks at the chain gauntlet on that hand in irritation. Give him a minute. Or... you know, just... blow it up without him.

Yeah. That's the ticket.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel's glowing wounds are sealed with harsh red light. He can't muster the strength to float, but he can manage to prop himself up on the water, whispering in a stressed tone. "Alright, alright... Burn the thing, burn like he said, ergh... Can't help with that one." He strains, wincing against his wound. "I'll just bleed here a bit, get me medical whenever you can."

    He's got his data. He's survived. That's enough for him! He's gonna let the others handle the burning, and wait for League medical assistance.

    He does flag down Victor, though. "Victor." He calls out. His friendly, faux-MIB persona is trying to reassert itself. It's failing, with that battered gasmask and his gaping wounds. "I've investigated the situation. Tell me--" He breaks into a fit of coughing. "Tell me everythying you can about... the 'Master Unit'." He explains, in a friendlier, slightly less MIBish way. "If some or all is classified, I'll understand. But that was attempting a--" He winces and clutches at his wound. "Ghhh! ...A neural reunificiation, and a physical reconstruction. What does that mean?" He seems to just assume that Victor knows naturally; the idea that he might not know much about this hostile nanohazard doesn't occur to Agent Parsons at all. It might inform Victor, though.