Scene #5961: Saigoth That Was-1

Owner	Pose
Bloody Revelations	For having secured the berthing Manse of the Brass Leviathan, things seem to have gone nowhere. Subverting the Animating Intelligence of the ancient, seafloor military outpost had taken hours, but no progress appears to have been made with the monolithic war machine of gems and gold, held captive in semi-drydock, in several days. The conclusion drawn from it has been both obvious and incredibly inconvenient, delivered in few words: The elemental that serves as the core of the Brass Leviathan has already been so thoroughly lobotomized -so extensively mentally butchered and mangled- that there isn't much left to subvert. The creature is almost entirely geass and contract by now, layered on over and over again until the Solar who created it had an obedient machine that almost certainly would have been easier to create from scratch. It demands command codes because that is what it is programmed to accept, and further mental deconstruction won't help. It's an obnoxious difficulty to indulge, but at least the individual the Elites in question are working for seems to be more familiar with sites that precede the current age than any place anyone actually lives. Dredging up command codes so old without actually setting foot in Luthe /requires/ tracking down a second run in with abandoned First Age ruins, and out in the Western Ocean, that isn't easy. It's for that reason that they aren't let to go anywhere until arrangements have fully been made for deep, deep, /deep/ water expedition. Though the Manse itself has ancient suits of synthetic materials and black jade enchanted for the exact purpose of EVA out on the ocean floor, that apparently still isn't sufficient, and all Elites wind up having more occult items of dubious nature foisted on them from the Deathknight's increasingly apparently deep stockpile, taking the form of a black jade lotus blossom each, about the size of the real flower, with tiny, actively writhing gold tendrils instead of stamens. Thus, the surprise is revealed. They aren't going scouring the Western Ocean floor -there are half a dozen major naval powers that have had that capability here for hundreds of years. They're going somewhere much less well known, and much more difficult: the Western Sea of Shadows.
Bloody Revelations	Most here have entered the Underworld once or twice, but never underwater. The transition is both more subtle and more dramatic than it has been on land. So deep beneath the waves, and even deeper still once the requisite miles have been traveled even further west from the Manse, there is very little to see actively shift and transform in such darkness and with such barren surroundings. What marks the change instead is entirely either felt, or visible inside the lights people have brought down. The water rapidly drops many degrees, plunging well below freezing without hinting at becoming ice, and sending an uncanny chill into sealed suits that even internal heating can't be rid of. The pressure actively increases, palpable on the body and audible on the groaning joints of equipment. The bubble of visible light gradually shrinks to half its original size, and the craggy shelves of stone and sand become perfect, monochrome grey, with the polyps, worms, and algae affixed to them disappearing from sight. They are left in a much darker place. Heavier. Colder. More isolated. The water is almost like black paint rather than inherently blue, and marine frequencies no longer penetrate it. The lights of bioluminescent creatures begin to appear all around, but they are completely white and at totally indeterminate distances in the gloom, resembling stars more than anything living. The ambient noise of the deep sea drops below human hearing, and becomes a faint thrumming felt in the bones. Moving around, searchlights fall not on swept plains of sand and rock, but on weird towering stones, stretches of contorted obsidian, and mazes of strange, feathery coral, growing impossibly at a depth the sun cannot possibly reach. Where the ocean of Creation had been extremely sparse this deep, motion trackers and otherwise can detect no shortage of things moving all around them here, just out of sight and out of reach, some beneath the bone white sand, some hidden in the strange formations, and others simply following, circling, or even hovering above them at a fixed distance, seemingly drawn to them in uncanny numbers, with nothing but the odd winking light, swishing current, or flicker of movement, to show for it. It doesn't take long to figure out 'why here' at least. They appear to be on the edge of a relatively level plane of undersea terrain that is filled with far too many hard, smooth, and angular shapes on sonar to be entirely natural. Wandering around, anyone would begin stumbling across places where the sand exposes ancient roads beneath it, where black kelp and ghostly coral pour from the broken windows of looming buildings, where the ground cracks open and exposes depths still deeper, filled with exposed tunnels and sparking lights, and eventually begin almost tripping over pieces of equipment apparently strong enough to survive the pressure, mainly taking the form of tools, jewels, weapons, industrial pieces, small artifacts, and odd, beautiful white masks that litter the streets -indeed they are streets, as there is no mistake the longer one travels, eventually discovering crumbled intersections, coral encrusted signage, and the drowned and strangled skeletons of massive, terrestrial trees.
Wandering Dog	Wandering Dog doesn't like needing to be suited up in a special diving suit. He prefers being in his silk tunic, not wearing too much that gets in the way of his martial arts, but there's no other choice. Mixed with the occult artifact that he isn't fond of, he's not in the best of moods. When he was also told they were going to the Sea of Shadows, his mood sank even more...but he's the Wandering Dog, so he'd get through it. With a searchlight to navigate his way forward. The coldness in his suit causes him to frown within, and as various lifeforms disappear from sight, he braces for what they might find. The thrumming through his bones has him seriously on edge, and he keeps his guard against the bioluminescent creatures, but luckily, none of them attack. Luckily, it gets slightly less eerie and slightly more 'adventure time' soon enough, as the group finds something - Wandering Dog can only assume it's a city. As he spots the buildings, he moves towards the broken windows, trying to flash a light and see if there's anything inside, or anything useful on what this city might have been by looking inward. If that doesn't find anything, though, Wandering Dog will move to circle the buildings and try and figure out the 'biggest and most important' looking one from where they are, if there's any such thing. They're looking for access codes, so they must be inside somewhere, he wagers.
Azure Armature	Armature (or "Blue"), within one of the provided black pressure suits, trundles along the Underworld-Ocean floor at a steady, measured clip, sweeping her searchlights hither and fro in a standard search pattern. She had - before the party left - spent a few minutes inspecting the suits beforehand, picking one for her "size" even if they were all the same, and climbing in. The whirring and pressure wrench vrr!-vrr! like a Formula 1 pit stop that followed had seen her moving in the suit rather unimpeded by its bulk. Unfortunately, as soon as they got into the water, she was just as trundle-y and slow as anyone else in an EVA suit, water displacement slowing footfalls to ponderous and weighty thuds as she 'waded' in the water. "Fan out, but maintain visual contact with everyone else. To confirm: We are looking for codes, not relics or valuables. History lessons, and trivia, are secondary to tertiary objectives of opportunity at best. Try to find any central buildings that have intact structures..." The operative trails off. "Or anything else useful." She grumbles, a bit of guff entering her voice. "Report any contacts or equipment failures." Then she does the ponderous thing of trying to scan out the path of the streets and signage to FIND that central area. Certainly, if this culture had any sense, they'd place their records-area with their civics building, in a central and defensible location. Certainly. If anyone in the First Age had any sense. Anyone making decisions. In the First Age. Having good, solid, grounded sense.
Staren	The deep sea. Staren seldom goes here. It's not that, strictly speaking, robotic tools to explore the ocean floor aren't possible -- but it needs special design, and most of Staren's gear is good in vacuum AND atmosphere AND shallow water -- some of it's even good down to a few hundred feet, but there's only so much engineering you can squeeze into a single device. Well, Zwei's people can probably do it, but Staren doesn't have their tools and materials. He could hope that the First Age solars made gear that always works and never makes mistakes, but the thought of something going wrong and being suffocated and crushed is frankly terrifying, enough to make Staren devote some thought to the problem. The result is a modified version of the golem-robot hybrid he used in the Prospekt's caverns -- a golem is mostly solid-state, aside from the cyberbrain nanofabricated inside the head and connected to the sensors all over its body that give him senses -- even Essense senses, if he could imagine to attune to such devices as a machine. Of course, he can't really fight like this, he's had to leave behind some of his tools, and the golem is as slow and awkward as the suits are for everyone else. Overall, it has a shape reminiscent of Staren's power armor, except the visor only covers his optics and there's a speaker grille for a mouth. There are also a number of lights -- on the head, chest, hands, and feet, so that he can see what he's walking on and generally have lots of light -- relatively speaking -- to work in. The situation is so foreign and dangerous, the transition to the Underworld is almost welcoming. Almost. At least it's familiar. The devil you know, and all. It's in this state Staren finds the ruins... of an underwater city? <"People /lived/ down here? HOW? ...Maybe there was some kind of magical force-dome over the whole thing?"> Staren's chain of thought pretty much mirrors Dog's here -- find a building that looks important and check it out.
Starbound Flotilla	"I am quite certain you are right, Blue. But I believe you assess poorly in one aspect." Moonfin says, fanning out among the many others. He's entirely refitted his own EVA suit with Flotilla technologies, and seated that awful ominous abyssal artifact deep within an EPP module. "These Solars aspired to be as glorious as the Hylotl. In doing so, I have doubts they would indulge such absurdities as leaving their password on a sticky note, as is the habit of lesser mortals. It would be carved deep into the history and culture they show, made into riddles and puzzles for no other reason than an effort to elevate themselves." He bends down to examine the beautiful masks, prodding and poking. He seems fascinated by the beauty, but also by its common nature. Is there some unifying aspect here he should investigate? Signs of strange transmitting properties? Water-breathing apparatuses? What about those underground structures? Are those some sort of sewer, or perhaps something better, some form of bunker? He mutters as he goes, though. "It made far more sense for the hadopelagic zones to be an entry to the underworld than places like Thorns ever were. Take care of the creatures of these realms."
Bloody Revelations	Starting to examine the buildings, Wandering Dog, with his long experience with adventures on the seas, would immediately recognize something rather outstanding. Where he shines his light and crunches through wreckage, he finds that the urban landscape around him absolutely has not been broken down slowly by the passage of time. There are no real signs of rust or rot, here in this surreal, ice cold sea. In fact, it looks as if most of the infrastructure hasn't weathered much more than a century or so. Instead, the colossal, city-ruining damage he surveys appears to be entirely in the form of violent trauma. Streets have been split open by surges from below, windows have been broken and interiors trashed by storm winds, and buildings snapped, knocked down, and washed together in jumbled piles by crashing waves. It looks like the wreckage of a coastal city after a tremendous storm or tidal wave, except this isn't a town of stone and thatch or cement and bamboo. He's looking at the husks of First Age domiciles and skyscrapers. Those of them made heavily of magical materials are what remain standing, and cast their looming shadows across the monochrome graveyard around them, with their gleaming skeletons largely exposed as all other materials were stripped away, and their insides bare after their contents were ripped from their fixtures and sent violently swirling away. Unlike some ruins he may have seen before, there is no hint of functioning power here at all. Any dragon lines involved are completely dead, and all Essence batteries have been sucked completely dry. There isn't a drop of juice to be found in anything mechanical. This is tremendously inconvenient for the search itself, since all of the civic signage would have been running off of minor illusions, and anything so much as a secure door requires a tiny charge of Essence to open. Scouring the streets for a civil layout, things get weirder. Azure Armature would recognize the vast majority of artifacts lying in the streets, and at least half of them are for fashionable or utilitarian air travel, not water. Stumbling around, Staren manages to find what looks like a leisure park, benches covered in growths of ghastly polychaetes with face-like patterns across their extended fronds, water features filled with a heavy, black ooze, and gargantuan trees and flower gardens having drowned to death and been colonized by tiny, glowing, ghostly arthropods, that buzz in great swarms like fireflies. There's no sign of any kind of pressure dome, and if some ancient magic had allowed these land-based flora to survive down here, it has stopped operating forever ago. Moonfin quickly finds everything wrong with this. Looking through the fissures, he finds structures for pumping water out of the ground, and looking at the buildings, he finds none for pumping it outside. There are no signs of passages connecting anything to anything above ground level, and a distinct lack of 3d engineering. Everything here is coloured in either gaudy golds and silvers, or bright, warm colours that only appear washed out and off underwater, rather than hues harmonious with marine lighting. He can also find no evidence that this city was ever walled in, when he finds a plain old (albeit gorgeously ornamented) road stretching out of what amount to 'city limits', and winding far out of sight to some other urban hub miles away. The only consistent detail between all lookers is that the city appears to get taller, more dense, and less thoroughly wrecked the further west they go, where the ruins better compete with 'nature' here, for lack of a suitable word. The streets grow wider and join together, and empty Essence-powered devices, from toll barriers to elevators, become more obtrusive and impeding.
Bloody Revelations	Wherever they go, they are followed. Deep sea lure lights hang over their heads at a distance of 'not far enough'. Motion in the corner of the eye is a constant, as things that flicker like startled fish but slither like worms dart through their peripheral vision. The ground bulges and shifts in places where some buried thing retreats. At one point, a chunk of signage that had appeared functional detaches and swims away when Azure Armature draws close. It's always just out of the edge of their lights -just beyond where the Sea of Shadows will permit them to see. That is except when Moonfin picks up one of the masks on the floor. The thing is gorgeously sculpted, and made of white coral of such texture and hue that it looks like fine ivory or porcelain, and would surely be incredibly valuable, but no sooner does he have it in hand, a jet of water shoots out of its back, and it begins /swimming away/. The other masks in the area pick up shop and shoal together, drifting insubstantial tendrils behind them as they suddenly become something like jellyfish at take to the water. Where they pass, the translucent coral begins flexing its feathery fronds, and anyone stepping near is immediately in danger of the reef itself sinking intangible ghost-filaments into them and draining away their blood, visible through the coral structure like a drinking straw. The masks themselves swarm at the same set distance as everything else seems to down here, their faces barely visible at the edge of the lights, blankly staring from the blackness all around. The 'activation' of the coral is most relevant to the other three in different ways. A wall of the stuff blocks Wandering Dog's path into a central plaza, with some sort of enormous orichalcum monument he can barely see, but which is clearly meant to be highly mechanical. Staren stumbles across the wreckage of what appears to be several Warstriders and half of an airship cluttering a section of the park, halfway buried under coral. Azure Armature discovers what looks to be some sort of rail system, with sealed passenger pods, rendered useless by coral mounds on the tracks. None of them are strictly necessary finds, but the inconvenience is repeated and seemingly almost intentional, following a consistent pattern.
Staren	By the second or third skeleton, Staren's started looking over his shoulder for undead (well, metaphorically speaking -- more like making his attention give nervous 'glances' at the rear cameras every time he thinks he sees movement. The strange arthropods are oddly comforting -- a seemingly not-malign life form, reassuring that life can thrive even here. The city's design is puzzling. Staren tries to think of possibilities -- was it teleported here from elsewhere? No, the road should cut off. Did this whole AREA sink somehow? Maybe... Perhaps it was powerful magic that made water act like air within a domelike area. He wonders if the ghosts here might have somehow been transformed into marine creatures. Can that happen? Not as far as he knows, but it feels... possible, somehow. And then the masks and the coral start waking up, just as Staren's starting to examine the warstriders, wanting to check if pilots inside indicate this place ended in battle. Staren doesn't wait to find out what they do to him -- frankly, the possibilty they might suck the magic and electricity out of him is pretty darn obvious -- he pulls away and, if the coral somehow pursues him (or he's too surrounded to get away), he starts attacking it with underwater-tuned lasers on his right forearm. Not as strong as his usual weapons, but hopefully enough for lower-level hazards. If that works, he starts making his way back to the others, deciding that staying together is now important. If that doesn't work, he starts screaming for help and firing mini-torpedoes engineered to create steam explosions!
Wandering Dog	No power. That's a shame, because that makes things so much more difficult to deal with. Wandering Dog swims forward as the group realizes that this used to be some sort of land city, one that he thinks must have 'died' in its prime, since it doesnh't seem to have rusted, and continues on his search for something important. And then, he finds it. A city center. And it's behind horrible man-eating coral! Wandering Dog considers what to do, and looks up at those lures. He could go through it, but he doesn't know how strong it is. But around it's also dangerous...but he has a plan. He's a very mobile guy, and good at swimming. So, charging his essence through him, Wandering Dog moves to suddenly launch upwards through the water, hopefully over the coral, and then as soon as he's above it, launch again in a diagonal arc downwards, hopefully avoiding getting eaten by whatever the lure belongs to. Just in case it decides to pursue him, he'll land in a fighting stance, ready to do some underwater armored martial arts if he has to. Wandering Dog's completely confident about this, too. Which might be a bad decision, because he's weighing 'whatever is up there' as 'something he can deal with'. He's the protagonist of his story after all, right? He'll be fine, or so he thinks.
Azure Armature	There is another water feature, under water. It is filled with ooze and darkness and not water at all, but as they are under water, it still prompts a quiet, internal snort. These people have toooo muchhhhhh moneyyyy. Cue laughtrack. Armature moves deeper, following signage. A promising one turns out to be local ambush flora, but then the rail tracks are discovered. A massive win! Using this, clearly, Blue will be able to use this to go between IMPORTANT PLA-it's blocked. Armature's visual scanners barely pierce the inky soup, and her visual HUD barely can figure out what's floating debris, coral, and potential threats. It turns out the stupid vanity masks are threats, and blocking her way. The divesuit leaps 'up', such as it is, rising in slow motion as Armature heaves it up, moving away from any seeking tendrils and uselessly up into the water. From her "Vantage", she sweeps the area with her ligts, painting the various masks internally with target markers before firing a spray of energy blasts from her suited right hand. Thankfully, that still works. Staren also is distressed, and landing once more, Blue is accosted by the life-sucking masks, wrestling with them while trying to blast them. Once she can clear at least some personal space, her personal reserves drained from mashing X to Not Die, she settles by the railway, kneeling down near it. "I'm going to try and send a charge through this rail, to see where it terminates, like a sonar pulse. Hopefully, it should light up an area map better than these useless lamps."
Starbound Flotilla	Moonfin's exploration provokes the undersea creatures, and he seems just as fascinated as he does on guard. A katana is drawn, and while he can't swim at such depths, he moves through the water as if it were over land, an expert in both EVA gear and water movement. He's not in reach of the coral, which gives him an advantage in dealing with this. Warstriders, airships -- all of these are fallen, and in a way, they can make a map. The growths and masks need to be avoided, it seems, because the masks are scouts for the coral, but... He presses on, intent on examining the pattern. It's almost intentional, isn't it? Artistic in a way. He examines not only the civil engineering, but the military engineering -- fallen though it may be. Where were the warstriders facing? What direction did the airships crash in? All these military resources, what were they defending? A command center, is what he expects; the hope is that he can examine them as he moves and gauge roughly where he needs to go to find a command bunker or some similar structure, something he can look through to find what he needs. He has to do this by surging through, though, and that means trying to avoid losing all his /blood/! If he can get a rough direction, he intends to rush with area-carving strength, using both mining beams and katana to carve through barriers in massive swipes! If he can, he'll try to tear right through the ancient defenses and the newer seafloor dangers, but just alone he couldn't ever keep himself from losing a considerable amount of blood in such an effort.
Bloody Revelations	Staren gets at least a few moments to check out the mess of military equipment before things get weird. Scanning over the sunken remains, they are extremely fine and exquisitely ornamented designs, far more advanced than the functional but plain examples he's seen before, and have matching weaponry, rather than upsized medieval arms. They don't appear to be damaged in any substantial sense, but more like they've been intentionally disassembled -rapidly field stripped down to bones and with scores of critical components taken out. It's too precise and too irrespective of value to have been raiders, so actual engineers did it. As with everything else, the power supplies are completely flatlined, or non-present. The bones he finds around them aren't even in the cockpit or at the helm, but clustered around them. He'll have to re-tune his lasers though. The wavelengths that common knowledge holds travel furthest underwater don't seem to work that way here, making the beams visible and colourful in the grey-black surroundings, and creating huge plumes of steam and flash boiled water where he fires, sucking up most of the heat. The coral reaches a number of delicate, feathery clusters after him, but cannot give chase, and close range laser blasts cause several croppings to snap and crumble away. The laser strobes are too brief to really navigate by, but unfortunately not brief enough to spare him from the thunderstroke split-second glimpse of a broad, sprawling, inky mat of oily tendrils hanging over him like a ceiling. Where Moonfin gets to take a look, he finds that the signs of military traffic are almost identical to that of civilian traffic, as well as the condition of the city. The further he bounds west, the more dense the wreckage and litter is, and the less scattered it becomes. All of it appears to have been moving in the same direction -away from the eastern edge of the city- all at the same time, and that which hasn't crashed or been thrown around appears to have been torn to pieces for magitech parts, which would have happened either significantly before or significantly after the rest. Going by the looks of it, a bunker or some other such central safe area would be a likely bet at the end of this. The plasmic coral isn't much of a match for his Matter Manipulator, and is swiftly carved up and broken down into cubic chunks and drifting flotsam, which in turn is immediately swarmed and consumed by the tiny, see-through arthropods. One chunk at least a meter across suspiciously disappears from his far left field of vision, spirited away by something long and black in an instant.
Bloody Revelations	The coral masks don't put up much of a fight before Azure Armature. They're surprisingly swift despite having the hydrodynamics of a human face, and many of the smaller ones manage to evade her shots for a time, but after enough of them are smashed to pieces, the rest scatter to a longer, safer distance. A couple completely drop off her targeting list as something else gets to them, pounced on in the dark by something lurking beneath a displaces section of pavement, and one other suddenly being reeled high, high up, as if caught on a fishing line. When she lowers herself to the rail, she finds it in perfectly functioning order otherwise, and readily accepting of her Essence. When it fires off down the orichalcum tracks however, the strength of the pulse very abruptly ebbs once it leaves her bubble of visible light, and dwindles away to nothing after only a few hundred meters, illustrating only a few city blocks before being snuffed out. It takes minimal diagnostics to confirm. The water itself is sucking the Essence out. All magical energy is drawn out of its source and bled away into the thirsty ocean, dissipating like heat, and nothing here appears to be built to insulate and retain a charge from the dark, hungry water. It is entirely plausible that they themselves have not been drained dry the same way due to the gently twitching and writhing lotus icons they have to wear, glowing very faintly in the water. Leaping into the plaza, Wandering Dog clears the built up plasmic coral without issue, soaring a narrow foot from its furthest, grasping fronds. Just when he is suspended high enough that he can no longer see the floor outside of his light, something cold and slick, which he can somehow appreciate through the suit, snaps tight around his ankle, coiling up his leg. Another frigid, clammy appendage latches to his wrist, drawing him upward and away from the seafloor where he can more easily maneuver. The enchantments in his pressure suit flicker and start to fail as Essence is sucked away from it, and the lights uncomfortably near him grow brighter and more numerous as it is. Something sharp audibly scrapes against the black jade plate on his back, begins to press, and then abruptly ceases with a brief, water-muffled shriek and percussive impact somewhere behind him, causing the water around him to swirl with dark blue blood. He dives back to the plaza in one piece. There, he finds a number of other roads that branch off in many directions, as well as part of the rail system coming through from the east and elevating up into the air as it soars westward, but also a great number of complicated machines in various states of disassembly, covered in mats of coral and littered with ghostly masks. The monument at the center plaza is recognizable on two levels. On one, there is a great stone that has been chiseled to a ludicrously fine extent and inlaid with gold, which provides an artistic, physical map of the city (they are roughly two miles east of its center). On the other, the thing stood atop it is a massive orichalcum and moonsilver statue of an imposing man with a gigantic trident and odd, spot-like markings on his face, neck, and chest, surrounded by an equally massive figure of an orca, ostensibly built so that the orca would normally magically orbit around him, and probably do some fancy water manipulation too. Of course, its power is also dead, and the Old Realm script naming the public work has been burnt away.
Bloody Revelations	The masks here don't rise, and the coral doesn't attack. This is because there is one other thing he would recognize, by the hypnotic iridescence of its glittering flagella and liquid translucence of its myriad human-hand-tipped tentacles, wrapped in a convoluted web around buildings and posts and the monument itself, to support the central, jelly-like 'orb' where light and shadow play together in bizarre ways to give the impression of a feminine figure within a feminine figure, paradoxically embracing the other. It appears to be 'slumbering', in the sense that it floats motionlessly above the plaza grounds, surrounded by drifting motes of marine snow that glitter with every rainbow colour of oil. The illusion is quickly dispelled as one of its many tendrils retracts closer to its main body, carrying with it a bloody chunk of black flesh that drifts right past Wandering Dog, which is then passed into the 'bell' of the center, and fizzles away into nothing, consumed entirely. He can literally kick at the coral masks if he wants. They're all dead.
Staren	The lasers don't work! Well, shit! Fortunately, Staren's able to get away from the corals... but there's something with tentacles /above/ him! He just runs (well, plods) for the others. The mini-torpedoes will be a last resort, IF those tentacles are attached to something that attacks him. He did bring a blade, but he's not optimistic about his chances that anything that lives down here will be so easily dissuaded. In a (relatively) calm moment, he soft-disables the lasers so he won't waste power by trying to fire them in a panic later. He should be out of here long before he has to worry about serious power drain, but who knows? If something DOES suck enough electricity out of him, the extra battery for the lasers might be the difference between continuing to function and his cyberbrain shutting off. At least Azure lighting up part of the city makes a great landmark to navigate to.
Azure Armature	Azure Armature is a pathfinder. A long-range tactical operator, specialized in solo stealth infiltration and finding shit. Finding and 'fixing' that 'shit'. The pulse of light along the rails immediately starts attenuating, and then disappearing. She had noticed some mild degradation of her Buster's energy blasts, but... Disconcerting. Armature turns to the group, waving with a light in their direction. "I'm going to follow this rail - it will either take me far off-course, or potentially lead me to an important location. I suggest you go a different direction, and we reconnoiter at the manse in..." "One division?" Then she turns to go tromping off, mind made up. What the fuck is a division? Is it an hour? Is that what hours are called in stupid tactical dumbass land? Maybe.
Wandering Dog	As Wandering Dog leaps and is grabbed, he sort of expected this, but the the tendril is strong enough and draining essence fast enough to be a danger. He's considering what to do to try and survive when there's that horrible shriek, and he's able to launch himself back downwards. He takes a moment to catch his breath, check his suit and make sure it's secured, and head on forward towards the plaza. The big statue causes him to try and consider who it may be, and the map is certainly of interest. The martial artist spends several moments trying to take in the map and memorize anything important on it, before moving towards the orb. The orb is interesting. Wandering Dog considers. Could it be eating the masks? It's a horrible underwater undead monster, though, so instead of being happy about it, he's even more creeped out. Having the map now, though, he can try and figure out where a base would be, and he considers 'near city center'. So, Wandering Dog's going to take one of the paths and try and see if he can find anything nearby, or alternately a non-swimming upwards way of regrouping with the others before he decides to punch through coral, and then be done with this place for the day. Also, he absolutely kicks one of the masks. Those things suck.
Starbound Flotilla	Moonfin's getting west! It's looking like he can make progress here, though his keen vision catches the glance at something large and dangerous. Now, how should he handle that? This whole place can't be hostile to just him, nature has its own business to deal with. So if he can keep creating those chunks in an extensive, diverse zig-zagging pattern, so that they're always drifting where Moonfin is not, perhaps he can keep from drawing the attention directly of the entity responsible for that. Whatever it may be, Moonfin has no desire to antagonize it. Some communities are built tight-knit and they don't let a current pass through; there are ecosystems that are built close and tight like a birchbark canoe. But the ocean floor eases itself and makes its own comfort, or so Moonfin has often learned; as long as the surface tithes its steady stream of disintegrating corpses to the seabed, all the giant squids and megalodons have no interest in assaulting simple sailors, or in antagonizing undersea scavengers. At least, that's Moonfin's hope. And so, as he heads west, his hope is to emulate that same old relationship: Let the ocean floor feed as it does, and move on through nature's path. He does start scanning those lower crevices for bunkers, though, or those larger buildings, for something carved in more military styles. And of course, the first thing to do is to try to find as many statues, carvings, or historical monuments as he can, and work through elaborate eastern-style poetry systems to see if the things he finds could turn into something that sounds like a valid command code.
Bloody Revelations	Moonfin's thoughts are close enough here. No doubt, he and all the other members of the living here look to be incredibly tasty, Essence-rich prey in an ecosystem that so jealousy hoards the sparse magical energy it can consume and insulate from the Sea of Shadows, but as these things so often go, food is food is food. Where he carves up the plasmic reef, it not only sends chunks of the ghostly substance spiraling into the water, but disturbs shoals of masks, swarms of many-legged creatures, and scatters dark, slithering things where their cover crumbles away, shooting off into the pitch black waters as if ahead of a wildfire. This deep down, the splashes, snaps, and crunches, and much stranger sounds still that follow, are only infrequently audible, and even then only just barely, but he can feel more than see the many hungry eyes and mouths converging around him, following in his wake like sharks circling beneath a chum boat, eager to devour the Essence made available by Moonfin interrupting their perpetual game of blind cat and mouse. Most of the public works he finds aren't useful without much broader context. City leaders, famous inventors, war heroes, and similar, all bearing some caste of Solar marking upon their brow, are the most numerous statues, followed by non-functional artworks clearly fixated on the sea, but also corresponding to significant battles with beings he wouldn't recognize, but which have clearly nothing to do with the ocean. There are replicas of famous air and sea vessels on display, and occasionally a decommissioned version of the real thing. What eventually might catch his interest is a sculpture of the Brass Leviathan itself, in perfect, articulate detail, written with a peculiar plaque, specifically a 'dedication to', something about an admiralty, and then solely 'Leviathan', rather than any information about what the Brass Leviathan is meant to represent according to the creator. It is at least dated, and with the creator's name listed as 'Sunset Leaves of Autumn', but presented as if the machine were an artwork to be admired by the public, rather than a cutting edge super-dreadnought battleship. There is still a distinctly military bent to these monuments the further he carries on, including, eventually, an intricate scale model of Luthe (as another would have to recognize it).
Bloody Revelations	After not much squinting, Wandering Dog can figure out that statue man is a Lunar Exalted. As with all the Solar statues, they've made sure to include the caste mark as a point of pride, so the identity isn't exactly obscure. The map indicates that he's on a central, commercial boulevard leading into a major naval center, archive complex, and further beyond that, training ground, and then an entertainment district. It actually displays dragon lines etched in silver which no longer exist. He gives a coral mask a good kick. It makes a sound like hollow bamboo when struck, swirling upwards on the current he kicks up, and then gradually fluttering back down to the sea floor. Walking a short distance forward, he seems to have made a mistake, as several more, much larger coral masks suddenly rise up to block his way, leaping up to eye level and arranging themselves as a small crowd of humans, slightly different heights and all, but the moment he approaches any more closely, he finds out that they aren't swimming, but that their 'fleshy' reverse sides have been completely hollowed out and consumed, and that they are merely being held on the end of the ghost collossi's tentacles, like morbid finger puppets. "You did not find this place by yourself, did you?" the masks all utter in near-unison. The sound is entirely localized to them, not ostensibly magical in any way, as if their wearers were just behind them. "Nobody has come to the Saigoth that is since the death of the Saigoth that was." The masks fan out slightly, spreading to block Wandering Dog more substantially. "Our bloodstained mistress has commanded that I not consume your soul. Nevertheless, this place is mine." The words are entirely intelligible Old Realm, in a small variety of female voices, issuing from the masks' floating mouths. "I have not been commanded to prevent the littler things of the Sea of Shadows from devouring your flesh, however. I do so at my pleasure. So speak."
Wandering Dog	A Lunar Exalted. Could it be...? Wandering Dog files the thought away, that since it was with a giant whale and has markings, that it may be Leviathan. Not going to tell anyone that, thogh, because it's not really too important, and it's solely a theory. But as he kicks a mask and heads forward... Something comes forward to interrogate him. Inside his suit, Wandering Dog grits his teeth as he listens. When he speaks, the attitude that he gives off is that he isn't really afraid of this thing, and is certainly going to stand up to it threatening him. "Yo, horrifying masks. My name's Wandering Dog. I'm the greatest martial artist there is." "Taking a step backwards, but not taking a fighting stance, Wandering Dog continues talking. "I had directions, yeah. Got led here by someone who could probably kick your ass in a heartbeat. Looking for old Solar command codes. Doubt you want to help me. But if you just fed me to the fishes, that'd be pretty boring, wouldn't it? Especially since the rest of my comrades aren't with me. I think you should let me through, personally. It's the best option you have. If you don't..." Underneath the helmet, the martial artist smirks. "I'll tear anything you throw at me apart. So come on, why don't we be friends instead? No need to get ripped apart here, yeah? Be a wise guy." Wandering Dog is threatening the horror controlling the masks. This may go horribly wrong.
Staren	While Staren's trying to work out a safer way to get through... a bunch of masks rise up where Dog is... but they're not jellyfish-masks, but rather, puppets of BR's... servant? That's been so much help to them so far. Staren approaches. "Don't mind him. Anyway, in working for your mistress to secure the Brass Leviathan, we have reached an impasse, and require command codes to control it. She directed us to search here. If you know the codes, tell us and we can get out of your... tendrils. If not... We're happy to heed your advice as to how we may search without in any way taking part of 'Saigoth' from you."
Starbound Flotilla	Sunset Leaves of Autumn. There we are. Clearly a respected craftsman, even if his great works are devoid of artistic meaning, apparently. Now, where in the world could he start with this? Unfortunately, it's looking like these vast statues don't give much to work with when it comes to names, but Moonfin does have some bearing on where to go. So now he has a name, and he has a general idea of a core creator. If he puts those together, maybe he can get somewhere relevant. He has to look for two things specifically: Solars that look like craftsmen, which is a hard search to do with these massive statues being so obfuscated by the dark, and a concentration of them in anywhere that looks like a military industrial zone. His hope is that Solars are at least a little bit like Hylotl: They'd want to wake up, go out onto their balcony, and see a big-ass statue of themselves. So if he can find where Sunset Leaves of Autumn probably made their residence, he can seek out the source of this, and find where to start the more concentrated search for clues. That means finding, in sequence: Which Solars are craftsmen (reverse-engineering the Caste mark meanings), where they're concentrated, where any monuments to Sunset Leaves of Autumn might be (which will no doubt mean trying to decode engravings and such), and what locations were nearest or facing them. He should probably be over there negotiating with the masks; after all, he's the Flotilla's diplomat, and Staren and Wandering Dog are far from negotiators. But, then again, Moonfin's kind of a smug piece of shit, so it's not smart to assume he'd do much better.
Bloody Revelations	"The greatest there is." the crowd of masks repeats in its slightly mismatched set of voices, tilting inwards in a way that makes all of them simultaneously affect doubt. "On this very spot? Perhaps. Otherwise, such a young and egotistical creature should be considered fortunate, that he voices something so absurd to one without his 'martial pride'." A second series of mask corpses wriggles free from the seafloor behind him, adding their old voices. "Leaning on the inventions of your ancient kings. Using the works of the old savants that held your leashes to your ends. Pilfering creations you cannot possibly understand, and wielding them as cudgels against other vicious, ignorant savages. Slaves tearing the throats of slaves, shedding blood over the scraps left by the masters they themselves murdered. Obtaining the power solely feel a little less terrified of their utter insignificance and killing others to sit atop the heap of ruin they've created." The masks pause, before taking on a vaguely satisfied (and intensely creepy) cant. "You are an exemplary Dragon-Blooded. You do your part in sending your world spiraling into madness." The coral effigies of faces judder up and down as if laughing, but the effect is far too uncanny, given that their different voices all manage to somehow merge and jumble into the exact same, cold, feminine, and profoundly empty tone. All of a sudden, they swivel simultaneously to look Staren in the eye, making the water loudly swish around them. One tendril flicks at the end, and sends a mask tumbling quite a distance through the water, where a second darts out of the dark and catches it near to Staren, and speaks from there. "Why would I know such a disgusting thing? The mind of the Isli creature was butchered without artistry, her soul flayed open and grafted with golden codes. The Isli creature has no say in anything she does or says, and so could not respond to my embrace. If I had such repulsive knowledge, you creatures would have no need to look, and interrupt me while I am dismissed from service." A different tentacle across the plaza uncoils itself, and strobes of offputting, faintly nauseating light pulse up its length, concentrating in something like an eye pattern that illuminates a rising alley at the southwest edge of the plaza. "Read their putrid books if you must. You will find them in the hands of creatures even more fearful and violent than you. Creatures that have finally begun to understand once again, that not one thing in this hole has even the slightest value. That all of this 'treasure' is trash when the living must look inside at what they are. I enjoy them. They know what beauty really is." Most of the masks then fall off the end of the tentacles, leaving just two still speaking. "Do not think that the other three would be as lenient on you creatures as I am. They do not appreciate the perversity of your existence as I do."
Bloody Revelations	Moonfin ends up the only one with the easy time. With so much pride put in Solar markings, it's easy to track down the Twilight Caste statues by their half-lidded sun markings, and to chase the line to a distinct that appears to be centered around a decrepit, dark, and most certainly haunted factory cathedral deep into the naval district, centered around what was definitely a ship assembly yard some time ago, and now just looks utterly ridiculous under uncountable fathoms of water. The quarter-finished hulks of First Age warships are still there, halfway complete, all of their non-metallic components having long since floated away. A lack of any memorials or monuments to his particular man is as telling as anything else: the Solar must have still been alive when whatever this was happened. Considering his known accomplishment is building a ship, and this place's main craftsmanship was building ships though, it seems like easy addition to assume he worked here. Scratch that. The tech here isn't quarter-finished so much as incredibly stripped down -scavenged to the bare skeleton. Here, everything of useful magitechnological complexity has disappeared, and the power sources aren't drained so much as non-present. It looks like the whole factory cathedral has been cleared out completely a long time ago, and all of its pieces and energy used to- Probably do whatever is responsible for the light Moonfin can faintly locate yet further west, sending rays of gold weakly shimmering into the pitch black waters, as if the sun were absurdly trying to rise from the crushing depths. His sensors detect a pocket of severely abnormal pressure, and the telltale signs of functioning machinery, buried in the deep, deep corner of the city.