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Bloody Revelations     With the end location they're after essentially pinned down, there's little where else to go, unless the group wants to wander the pitch black underwater ghost city for long enough to get hopelessly lost or eaten. The military administrative building build by the Deliberative of old that had been singled out by Moonfin's research is the best, most obvious, and really only specific lead they have, and one of the ghostly, thin, native Dragonblooded of former Saigoth leads them there with copious preparation, protecting himself with multiple layers of magic that is probably completely unique to this tiny little pocket of 'civilization', for dealing with the tremendous pressure, the strange waters of the Sea of Shadows, and for protecting his precious Essence from being sucked out by the Underworld.

    It isn't tremendously far outside the only bubble of light and life all the way down here, but it's far enough for day to day scavenging teams to not tread, and the swim/walk only begins as quiet, boring, and only slightly eerie, across grey-washed crumbling cityscapes. By the time they get close enough to even begin to see the towering 'shadow' of the building, black on black at this depth, they're already dodging ghost coral, glowing plasmic 'sharks', things that are all mouth that hang suspended in the abyss, and some more banal issues of unexploded ordnance, ancient razor fencing, and toxic and 'irradiated' sites of destruction.

    Successfully navigating the hazards without having to pull someone loose of a man-sized toothless maw or stitch their legs back on, their pallid guide turns back once they reach the hundred storey edifice itself, essentially triangular in shape, with rounded corners and an exterior of densely polished gold that has still yet to take on a crust of polyps. The area around it is badly levelled, but the building itself is one of the most intact they've seen so far, with all of its windows shattered but plugged anyways by dull, gleaming emergency barricades, and its entire superstructure using huge amounts of alloyed orichalcum and jade, once originally to ward against attacks, and ultimately only ever exposed to the fury of the seas.

    There is a good side and a bad side to this. The good side is that the inside should be un-flooded, if it's never been opened in all these millennia. The bad side is that there's no way to get in. The aforementioned windows are shielded, the entrances on all three sides of the building are heavily locked down with even thicker doors, with all the power drained out of the glassy orb sensors that might have once allowed people through with a passcode or ID card or facial scan. The foundations obviously run deep if it hasn't been completely toppled, and the area is still piled with rubble. There is at least no tentacled horror curled around the very roof of the building and looming over them, but the access to the stairs has filled in completely with some kind of ultra hard sealing gel, and the exhaust stacks for old magitech have been shut off and plugged up ahead of the utterly ancient tsunami.
Staren     Being a pressure-proof combat/exploration golem continues to be a good idea. Staren doesn't have to worry about that hazard, at least. Instead, he gets to worry about their guide, whose people they may not be able to help, and also Staren has a much more limited arsenal down here than usual.

    The trip of thinking about that concludes with a building that's actually intact and apparently impregnable. Staren groans in frustration, and tries to think of a clever way around this. They may need to come back with tools, but he wants to spend as little time as possible in this place.
Starbound Flotilla     Moonfin's re-equipped that deep pressure gear. Begrudgingly. He's going to take it with him and redesign its exterior sometime. For now, he plods along the lower areas, unable to swim to substantial height. He's going to try to find one of those windows! The plan, such as it is, is to construct an entire miniature airlock braced against one of those lower windows, allowing Moonfin to guide everyone in, drain the airlock chamber, and then...

    Well, hopefully draining the airlock chamber can release the emergency barricades. If there's no power to the scanners, though, he has to hope that hydraulic or pseudohydraulic systems are like underwater Hylotl cities, and that the lack of pressure can now let him crank it open with various power tools, since now nothing would be holding those emergency window-barricadfes shut! If that doesn't work, though, the old reliable method hopefully will; a mining beam that runs for several minutes can slice through a lot, after all!
Wandering Dog Wandering Dog's still in that deep pressure gear, as he follows Moonfin into the airlock. It's a better plan than his own, which was 'break it open with as much might as you can'. He's a very direct person in that way.

His only contributions to the effort are offering up an artifact-equivalent of a battery charger full of some essence in case they find anything with just barely enough juice, as well as sticking to the rear of the group, maintaining guard in case any horrors try to follow them in. "This place is so gaudy. Making stuff out of gold doesn't make it better!" It kinda does, but Dog's biased.
Azure Armature Approaching the building with the same plodding 'power armor underwater', Azure Armature squints at the building, trying to make out the shape which slowly comes into relief.

It is a fortress wrought out of magical materials. As she trades some words over the internal comm about drilling the wall, Armature begins her (potentially useless) battery of scans to try and gain ingress via transmaterialization. Perhaps the wards on such places would be worn out or washed away by the stygic ocean's abyssal depths (ha)... But it was just as likely their wards against entry or scrying would be internal and still powered.

She does move out of Moonfin's way, trying to make heads or tails of the plan.

Blue was a little too in-genre to think of 'build an extra airlock'.
Bloody Revelations     There are two primary things of note to the first tentative attempts at infiltration.

    Moonfin is not exactly in luck. Because this whole place was built to sit atop an island, artificially wrought from chaos the Solars thought to control even as it was, the buildings are not meant to function underwater. The seals on all the doors and windows aren't really for keeping flooding out, but for soaking up blast waves and weapons fire from a theoretical insurrection.

    Lot of good those did.

    Creating a small airlock box works fine (as it can at the bottom of the ocean). For being the Underworld mirror of the Western Ocean above, the Sea of Shadows still physically moves and flows and generally functions as water, so that science holds. The window shutters are certainly the weaker link compared to the walls themselves, and appear to be predominantly steel with only some white jade in the mix, leading to an overall lower alloy resilience. Still, the properties of the five magical materials aren't endlessly jacked off for nothing, and it takes a considerable length of time for the mining beam to start making a dent, requiring tedious, repetitive focus to start cutting through. At least the water isn't sucking up the heat, and double at least it isn't red jade.

    Azure Armature is more in luck. The wards that once protected this place drew from the dragon lines of Creation, which pulsed beneath the earth and provided the whole island with the geomantic power needed to ensure its stability. Because they are now in the Underworld, and those lines of living Essence are long since dead, all functions with enough passive power draw to necessitate tapping into geomantic energy are now utterly useless. She can warp inside.

    That means she has several minutes to dick about while Moonfin cuts the way through for the rest of the group. The interior is indeed completely dry, and for that, better preserved than anywhere else in the city. Her footsteps click and clack over perfectly polished floors of seamlessly marbled metal and stone, their echoes dulled only by the thick banners that hang from vaulted arches and between orichalcum pillars, woven of imperishable cloth displaying the personal crests of the Solars who worked here. Everything from reception desks crewed by depowered automatons to glass and sapphire elevators platforms on levitating channels to the thankfully artificial plants and water features are perfectly preserved.
Bloody Revelations     The group has had a lot of run in with the First Age's leftovers for a while, but this is about as close as it gets to what it actually looked like: a swanky ivory tower of gargantuan proportions, studded with head-sized diamonds for wall lamps and covered in holographic signage and runic buttons and keys. Everything is of course shut down, but prodding around, the equipment inside has merely /run out/ of power, rather than been viciously drained by constant exposure to the Sea of Shadows, and can easily be reactivated so long as it isn't installation-wide, such as display signs and maps, civil service automatons, personal transports, armed security robots, or stupid little adhesive blue jade fiddlies that take your coat for you by floating instead of a damn coat stand.

    When Moonfin drills through, he lets people onto that is more or less an entire floor totally for show, easily accessible by people on the street, and thus presenting nothing but crystal fountains and floating benches and expansive murals featuring the sun a whole lot. Anything useful is either upstairs or downstairs. The exhaustive list of floors going upwards starts at things like 'reporting, conference, allocation, human resources, R&R', and so on, trends towards 'cartography, finance, equipment, personal offices, R&D' and similar midway, and then ends with a bunch of floors exclusively reserved for one person each, 'Yu-Shan relay', 'diplomatic accommodations', 'astrological charting' and other weird stuff.

    The basement is only marked for the first couple of floors, covering 'maintenance and supplies', 'engineering', 'summoning cells', 'sorcerous experimentation', something referring to an 'engine' for some reason, and then past that it's all 'off limits high security' that nobody would be dumb enough to put on an elevator-side plaque readable to a civilian.
Staren     Normal tools actually worked? Huh! Staren takes in the directory. Yu-Shan relay? That's interesting, that there might be another way in and out of this place... although Yu-Shan's probably not the BEST way to evacuate the locals.

    Now, Staren is torn between searching for the codes first, and seeing what they were researching here.

    If someone else heads for the basement, Staren heads that way too, although he stops to check out the 'sorcerous experimentation' area in hopes of finding something interesting.

    If the others decide to search personal quarters for the codes (or keycards) instead, he'll go that way and stop by R&D.
Starbound Flotilla     Moonfin doesn't think the area is /great/ because Moonfin doesn't think anything that isn't high Hylotl art is great, but he does admire the fact that this area is dedicated exclusively to self-aggrandizing aesthetic, which is properly in line with the way Hylotl do things. He's gonna find the elevator shaft, and see if he can call anything down that way. But he's rather suspecting that it's not going to be powered or usable to get down there on its own, especially with their clearance.

    If it comes to it, he's planning on getting out one of those grappling hooks, forcing his way into the elevator shaft, and just rappeling down the side in an elegant motion more reminiscient of an aerial silk dancer. His logic is that the /mind/ was likely "constructed" down here, and here is where he'll get the codes.
Wandering Dog As they head inside, Wandering Dog hates this place, even if he also thinks the technology is kinda cool, mostly because it fits his world-view to hate it. He heads over to the signs to read them once they're powered on, glancing for a specific name - Seralin, the artificer of Luthe. If Seralin has his own floor, that's where Wandering Dog's going to head to search for the codes. If not, the Dragon-Blooded's going to join Moonfin down the elevator shaft, because that's more his speed and somewhere he can help.

Over the radio, Wandering Dog posits a question. <"So, if this place is so old and sealed, you think anything could still be alive in here? Like a mad science project or something? Creeping me out just thinking about the possibility.">
Azure Armature Armature has a few extra moments inside the area to stare an hateful stare at the WATER FEATUREEEEEE UNDERWATERRRRRRRR (this time it's not the water feature's fault. THIS TIME!), and bring online the essential power as Essence sparks to her touch. She has a few moments to cogitate while Moonfin cracks in, and the party finds the operative meditating (while standing) closed-eyed at the directory.

"I suppose we're splitting up then. Remember, the codes would be issued to the deliberative - but operation schematics and failsafes are useful to. Announce if you make contact with the enemy." She suggests, before heading up, towards the Heavenly record and communications.

"If there's anything consistent about bureaucrats, the communiques with outside agencies should be regimentedly banal. Indexing should be simple."
Bloody Revelations     The Solar Wandering Dog is looking for does indeed have a floor in this building. Whether it's his office floor or whether an entire floor is reserved for 'if he feels like visiting' is uncertain, and frankly the difference might not be all that much considering what he knows of the Deliberative. They're on one of the higher floors, conveniently only six or so floors removed from where 'Blue' wants to head herself.

    The elevators are really just smoothly finished channels penetrating along the building's vertical axis, of which there are eight arranged in an octagon, spaced out around the one-section first floor. If charged, platforms of solidified Essence carry riders up and down to wherever they please at the touch of an Old Realm number shallowly carved into a silver pad, but though it'll take Wandering Dog and Azure Armature to where they want to go in short order, without worrying about having to force open doors to get out, it'll only take Staren and Moonfin as far down as the experimentation floor the former wants to see. Moonfin is on his own from there, having to play the stupid elevator game where you send it upwards but then jump off quickly to get underneath it.
Bloody Revelations     Seralin's floor still isn't any clearer when Wandering Dog charges the doors with his little battery just enough to open it. It's all absurd sofas, a magically powered fire pit full of jade pebbles, huge paintings of himself more than any other subject, and one of those in-summer house bars that stretches the whole length of a room, with the opposite wall being a giant screen that no doubt used to display a perfect view of the outside. Meandering about, further halls take him to trophy room and personal studies, as well as a locked office which can be easily forced open, but mostly contains piles of missives and personal letters and documents about a long-dead bureaucracy and rivals he particularly hated.

    It seems like the entire floor is just there to serve as accommodations to entertain him should he deign to visit from Luthe. It would probably be exorbitantly fancy and pretty, if it weren't covered in thick layers of grey dust that make Wandering Dog's steps almost inaudible to his own ears; if the lights hadn't blacked out and left him to wander around shining whatever small beams he can on flaking old paintings, slowly decaying furniture, and certainly rancid contents of the bar, it'd be very nice.

    There is one final room he has to force open, which happens to contain something at least relevant to Luthe. As some kind of Admiral-Architect, the room is practically a trophy shrine to his accomplishment, with huge scrawls of white on gold schematics cut up into sections and covering the walls like frescos, and with replicas of intricate chunks of the station stood around as statues, to be walked around and admired like an art gallery. Wandering Dog gets about twenty paces into the room before winding up kicking a pile of bones tangled in the base of one of these sculptures, and then has about half a second before a ghastly grey-white figure leaps out of the dark behind him to wrap its skeletal arms around his throat, screeching and snarling like an animal in his ear.
Bloody Revelations     Azure Armature's time is more boring. 'Relay' of course does not mean Gate, and there is no proper route to Yu-Shan anywhere around here. There are a number of fanciful devices that look like they might be useful for communiques though, something like light desks with moonsilver arms affixed to them, articulated to use a selection of quills and scribble down words on rolls of paper that have long since rotted away, derived from what look to be small dream stones slotted in. Overall it's a much more plain and boring floor, with no space dedicated to anyone in paricular, and mostly rows upon rows of storage rooms, switchboards, filing shelves, and similar bureaucratic garbage. There are no remains anywhere here, but checking out anything related to the Brass Leviathan, she will be able to find a fat folder of records regarding the entity 'Isli' they know is involved in its construction somewhere. It's stamped 'INCIDENT REPORT #457-1B7C"
Bloody Revelations     The sorcerous experimentation floor is less exciting without sorcerers. As far as Staren can tell, it's mostly set up as its own space to quarantine the probable explosions and demonic incursions that happen when a Solar forgets to carry a two. The aesthetic is predominantly green, with weird curved architecture that doesn't collect dust nearly as well as the rest of the facility, and with heavy windows that are at least a couple of inches of transparent sapphire into every room, with no completely private spaces. Huge sections are just basketball court-sized areas to try out a spell to see if it detonates or inverts reality inside, strapped up and down with huge arrays of identical calligraphic runes, quasi-mathematical figures, and gemstones along the lines of emeralds and sapphires, with one room filled with diamonds instead, using standardized scaffolds.

    Piles of bones can be found in various rooms, but they aren't human; they are those of various demons summoned to the building for whatever reason, that were then abandoned here when Saigoth was swallowed by the ocean, and eventually died on their own. All records are hard copies kept on little panes of crystal, like empty picture frames with thick gold corners and a couple of buttons to turn them on and off. No paper records here. The predominant interest dated to the 'last' 30 years has to do not with demons, but with binding and controlling Terrestrial gods, of all things, as well as some dissection studies of aquatic behemoths.
Bloody Revelations     Going further down than that, Moonfin quickly hits the off-limits area. It is not all that off-limits anymore, because he can spot no less than eight layers of sensors, laser grids, equipment disintegration gates, auto-blasters, and similar, which are all now completely useless. The bulkhead past that is basically a formality, and can be cheated by going through the floor or ceiling adjacent to it, since anyone who can get past those while active should clearly be someone unbothered by a simple blast door.

    He doesn't end up in any sort of workshop, but an area where the entire floor has been turned to deep blue marble that is cut with intricate channels showing the geomantic lines beneath Saigoth as one walks around the level, only one of which glows very very faintly between the center and southeastern corner. There are board rooms with big, slab-like projection tables, some still frozen in tactical maps, some paused amidst games that look similar to shogi, or some form of chess with vertically stacked boards. The very end of it expands into a double-tiered 'mission control' room, with a deck for someone to stand on and look very important, and wall to wall screens now left completely dark, hovering over free-moving chairs on articulated, ball-jointed arms to move around the hollowed out space.

    Going by the map currently burned into the glass on the top deck by Essence radiation, like an old plasma TV, it was last used to assess the island and contact several other nearby naval bases. One of them appears to have been Luthe, last it was around here, but another is the base previously dedicated to operating the Brass Leviathan. High-level authorized communiques are sitting eternally on the outgoing list, requesting assistance, giving orders, and issuing coded overrides to anything within a few hours sailing, no doubt for passage off the island. For whatever reason, it seems aerial transport at the time was highly unsuccessful, and almost all tracked airships ended up like the one they saw outside.

    Moonfin is alone in that room for a good long time before a trio of translucent, pale, waxen faces pop up from the lower deck, grossly distorted and wraith-like in appearance. Clawed fingers reach up to grab hold of his ankles, attempting to pull him into a deep, dark recess at the bottom, where a trio of savage, eyeless ghosts start trying to viciously pry his suit open with elongated teeth and nails, dressed in the spectral tatters of brassed uniforms.
Azure Armature Armature takes her time pawing through files even with her optimized Bullshit Detection Algorithms and Generalized Object Observation Grid Locator Eye search. Indexing them, she pulls a number of useful-looking files, ending with the Incident Report and starting to leaf through it while moving through the room to get all the useful tidbits. 'Useful tidbits' are relative - she's as interested in minutae and Solars talking to the Deliberative or Yu-Shan as anything else. Exhausting her bureaucratic powers and observational analysis, she walks with her file over to the Yu-Shan correspondence and astrology sectors, having some business there as well. Certainly, it's all old... But she's got a mission.

"Why are you such a wobbly cog, incident report? What secrets do you have?" She muses, flipping through it.

This is awful and requires three very delicately-manipulating power armor fingers.

Autocthonians have ever mastered manipulating forms with power armor. There's probably even magic powers for not ruffling the page. Magic Bureaucratic Power Armor Spells.
Wandering Dog The charger has some success! Once inside, Wandering Dog pockets it, and then moves to explore. He finds...really nothing of interest, until he forces open that last room. A shrine to Luthe, with schematics that the scientists involved might find in handy. Wandering Dog steps forward, peering with his light to look around, when he kicks the bones, and suddenly gets lunged at by a skeletal figure, screeching and snarling at him and wanting him dead. As soon as those arms reach his throat, he's being choked...but Wandering Dog doesn't go down easy, especially as the creature gets into close distance. Using elbow strikes and essence-backed strength, Wandering Dog moves to try and force himself out of the grip while damaging the monstrous attacker, trying to activate a technique. He attempts to turn, force distance between himself and the ghoat with a strong artmstrike, and then lunge in immediately after with a glowing golden-white finger strike, the power of Golden Janissary flowing through his strikes. Muttering a prayer, Wandering Dog speaks up. "Pass on, evil spirit!"

And then, if the finger strike connects, holy undead-slaying energy is attempted to be channeled through the ghost, radiant flames emerging from its body if successful. Wandering Dog hopes it is, but is willing to impact even more pain, though he's not sure how strong it is...or if it has friends lingering around.
Staren     Shining flashlights in the dark looking around a weirdly-shaped room is an... experience. Fortunately Staren is missing his biology and so the creepyness is reduced. Unfortunately, it seems the lab is just a lab and they weren't right in the middle of some epic experiment when everything ended that he can find evidence of. As he's making his way back to the elevator, he spots some demon skeletons and THAT, while wandering alone in the dark, is just TOO CREEPY, which reminds Staren that he's all alone in the dark exploring a ruin in Creation that could have all sorts of ridiculousness (mainly weird undead because, by the way, they're actually in the UNDERWORLD oh right!) in it! He gets on the radio to suggest regrouping, but... apparently Moonfin is in trouble!

    So down the shaft he goes, following Moonfin's signal! The security system does slow him down as he tries tossing bones into it to make sure it's deactivated JUST TO MAKE SURE.

    If Moonfin hasn't dealt with the ghosts by the time Staren shows up, Staren remembers that lasers should work just fine in air and hopes that ghosts don't like concentrated light!
Starbound Flotilla     Codes. CODES! Moonfin is immediately heading for that, eager to find his solution. If those high-level communiques are still burned in there, maybe, just maybe, there's something here that could have those codes left behind! He moves in, and starts looking them over, extensively examining each one as much as possible, hoping that one was left open.

    And then GHOSTS! Oh fuck. Oh shiiiiit. Okay, Moonfin has to draw his blade and get moving NOW! He really wishes he'd unequipped the heavy gear and gotten his proper swordfighting stuff on here when he had the time. He's slower, too slow to keep out of their grasp, but he's as fast as he can be, and his blade makes him even faster. In a second, he's swiping as hard as he can around his feet, in a barrage of bladework trying to clear himself of these ghosts enough to get onto one of those tables, and get a better view of what he was looking at!
Bloody Revelations     The Hungry Ghost that Wandering Dog runs into could be there for any number of reasons. Why someone would be locked in this building when Saigoth sank beneath the waves and chose to eventually die in here is question that could need a lot of investigation to find out. As it goes though, despite being a very very old, and very nasty Hungry Ghost left here to stew for uncountable years, it doesn't really stand a chance against an actual master of the Golden Janissary style, and is annihilated pretty much immediately when Wandering Dog turns on it. It's not as if he isn't free to do whatever he pleases with the remains being right there. Not an ambitious ghost.

    The communiques 'Blue' finds are, obviously, insanely outdated, and obviously every single Solar mentioned in them is dead. It starts some time nebulously after the construction of Luthe, charts its major movements and deployments and requisitions, its retrofit into more of a city than a military base, and its use against several fleets of Lintha unknown to the modern era, dictating battles of significant size against all manner of sea demons and Behemoths. This is largely what is reported to the central Deliberative at the heart of Creation, as far as Solar military action in the West is concerned.

    The Incident report is a clusterfuck. It regards 'Admiral' Seralin's case to have the elemental dragon Isli tried and executed for a storm that interrupted his 'business', and a strong rebuff of the call, for the fact the storm was regularly scheduled ahead of time by the Bureau of Nature. It goes into meticulously kept records of thinly veiled histrionic threats, and then a notice filed from one 'Kechop Kajak' regarding his illegal assault upon said employee of the Bureau of Nature, and the messy dispute following it, in which the matter was eventually escalated to an absurd level over the course of a multi-year campaign, before Seralin was assassinated in the Usurpation anyways. Apparently his demented idea of making the god a component of the Brass Leviathan was a deranged renegade call unpopular in Heaven, and only possible due to him having the artificer's talent to complete the whole project by himself. Funny how it was resolved in the end.
Bloody Revelations     Moonfin has to deal with the Hungry Ghosts of lesser captains, going by their uniforms. Since it seems no Solar ever had a title that wasn't Admiral here, they were probably Terrestrial Exalts in life, but they carry none of their former power in death. They're merely physically strong, quick, and alarmingly durable savages, clawing and biting at him with supernatural ability, but with no shred of tactics or intelligence of use of magic. Locked up in here, they haven't even managed to master the abilities unlocked to ghosts.

    Their corpus is tangible in the Underworld by default, so chopping their hands off works perfectly fine, drawing pale, faded pink blood and effectively maiming them, but without the ability to feel or process pain or fear, they keep coming at him anyways, wrenching pieces of railing free as crude weapons until he has to chop them to bits. Staren swooping in to blast them with his laser finds that it works perfectly well; nothing complicated about shooting a material ghost with a gun. There aren't really any doubts about what would drive a bunch of Solar underlings locked in here to the mindless post-death rage of a Hungry Ghost and all.

    The command table isn't individually powered, but not drawn from the dragon lines either, hooked to an emergency generator that apparently never fired when the whole island decoupled from reality. With some mechanical engineering, he can get the room restarted completely. Since the admiralty had last 'logged in', nothing currently at their fingertips is encrypted or password locked in any significant sense. The retrieval orders to the Brass Leviathan are there, and the authorization code is appended automatically to each and every single one. "Aleph Gemini Six Fifty-Seven, YD61482 slash Nine-Fifteen, 'Setting Rays on Blood and Verdigris in the Water', code K.I.M.B. 34,217 Beta Blue-Gold." It's like they made it as ludicrously discombobulated as possible solely so that someone with supernatural guessing power or something couldn't luck into it.

    Is that a thing?
Wandering Dog Once the hungry ghost is down, Wandering Dog sighs in relief, crouching over its bones. "Rest now." He pulls out a more-modern radio from his equipment, moving to use the camera features inside to record the schematics in the shrine, but he's not going to linger long. Once he has what he needs, he's going to call Seralin's floor a wash, and head back to the others. Luckily, the others have found codes, even if he doesn't know it yet.

<"I'm done up here. Status?"> Wandering Dog radios to the others. Best to keep in touch.
Staren     Ah right, being in the underworld means ghosts are physical. Hooray! Staren doesn't comment about them. They're just lower souls.

    Analyzing the computer systems gives a chance to find the generator, and with the Captains' expertise in power engineering and Staren's more general skill, they can surely get it working.

    Getting eyes on the code almost seems anticlimactic. "Wait. Is that... is that whole /thing/ the code?"

    He has a brief mental image of the Cold House's master being prompted to choose a password. Sounds about right, when you look at it that way.

    "This is it? Finally? We can go home?" He slumps in the chair, as if this body /needed/ to relax for even a moment. "...What about all those people?" He turns to Moonfin.
Azure Armature Armature goes over the incident, thumbing through it with her metal sausage hands as delicately as possible. She does not think to DISENGAGE her overwrought (or exactly wrought enough) diving suit to help her accomplish this, because quite frankly the worst case here is a doozy of being hollowed out as a person and ceasing to be in the same state as before.

Shaping defenses don't deflect death, and all.

She finds the report a useful anecdote about chains of command and following plans, and the aesop at the end of violent uprising and revolution is the cherry flavored cathode on top.

In the Yu-Shan room, Armature busies herself trying to hunt down as much as she can about access to heaven and legitimate correspondence, taking the hopefully-wise tack of 'while I'm here, may as well check if there's anything useful vis a vis that other objective instead of having to come the fuck back here later'.

Minutes into that she recieves Wandering Dog's all-clear, raising a hand to her own ear to tink on the side of the suit's helmet. <"Thumbing through records. Some of use, mostly minutae.">
Starbound Flotilla     "The people can be dealt with." Moonfin says, going over the password and making sure to commit it not just to digital storage, but to his normal memory. "Once we have a grander industrial foundation to work from, we can devise a grander solution. Perhaps there are manufacturing facilities here that can assist, or perhaps there are other solutions yet unexplored, but for now, we must attend to the most important matters." First of all, the damage applied to his suit has sort of precluded heading out safely for the time being. Second of all, he needs to get beacons and such down; he's already at work on trying to set up teleporter infrastructure by the time he's done talking to Staren, to see if this will work.

    If it does, well hey, maybe Staren and Wandering Dog can get done what they need to get done with the men and women of the underwater society. For now, at least, they have all they need.