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Priscilla You have been assigned to a being called "The Batter".
The Batter is on an important mission.
Be sure that it's accomplished.
We will let you out in Zone 0.
Good luck.

    Those are the words that ring in the aggregate heads of the the Elites so amenable as to be transitorily cooperative with their fundamental gist; that privilege belongs to those with the whimsy or gumption to so humour a certain supplication for far-flung collaboration in a task of most grave importance and ambiguous essence. Whether merely a distracting fancy in the routine of going about one's circadian affairs or a labour undertaken with most solemn and sober gravity, those without the sense to put such an intrusive thought from their heads, without ever paying it a moment's attention to deny it a foothold in tangible substantiality, are all brought here in answer to their incorrigible ways.
Priscilla ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ZONE 0 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Quick as a wink, you find yourselves standing under bright light, surrounded by the colour yellow and the rhythmic slosh of seaside waves in a porcelain sink. The ground beneath you is hard and flat, solid and smooth in texture, regular and hard-angled in dimensions, and regular saffron and marigold in colour, defying all description otherwise. It constitutes something of a small island --a perfect square no bigger than a three car garage-- surrounded by a seemingly endless sea of some silvery-grey-white liquid which gently washes against the sheer walls of the yellow spit of land with regular and oddly echoing rhythm. The corners of the ground beneath you are surrounded by much smaller islands, little more than pillars of hard land-stuff that support the illusory forms of translucent, levitating cubes, hovering quietly like the world's most boring holograms, yet casting a shadow beneath them, for it must be midday, but there doesn't appear to be much of a sky to judge by.

    You have company on your lonely island in the middle of an ocean of yet-uncertain composition. A tall man stands before you in a crisp and distinctive baseball uniform, white overshirt and dugout pants over black longsleeves, socks and cleats, classical billed cap on his head without a team logo or name to mention. Despite the hefty wooden bat over his shoulder, sporting only an old marker signature, he appears to be completely at ease; calm to the point of zen, with a quiet, patient, almost sanctimonious air about him.

    "You must be the Choir." he says, with absolute certainty, barely opening his eyes to assess the veracity of his claim with his own senses. "That's good. I have an important mission, and I won't make any progress without you. The ability to make decisions of your own understanding is critical here; even so, I will listen to what you have to say without hesitation. There are things that are your role to see that I can't, just like there are things that are my role to deal with that you can't. I'm depending on you."

    He only shifts to the side the slightest amount, but in doing so, a road is visible beyond him, though you might more properly call it a bridge, given it is just as flat and square as the rest of anything to stand on in the off-white sea. It leads quite a ways ahead, connecting to a much more considerable metaphorical rock of literal sunflower colouration, more suitable for hosting the several tall buildings inexplicably sprouting from its surface; merely a darker shade of saffron from the ground to distinguish them by, hardly possessing features other than rectangular doorways and square holes for windows.

    A tall ladder leans on one, and artificial lights are switched on inside another. The crude approximation of a 'path' or 'road' or 'sidewalk' goes between them, little more than a highly regular patch of bright daisy yellow on the unyielding marigold earth, to serve as some exceedingly basic reference of direction and distance between them. An especially and obnoxiously tangible cube of equally boring proportions to its illusory counterparts has rudely nestled itself right in the way of the door to the lit facility, while two more nuanced boxes of gold, striped with black, have sat themselves in slightly less obtuse locations outside.
Gilgamesh      This is most assuredly a distracting fancy in the routine of going about Gilgamesh's circadian affairs. The King rarely takes anything seriously in this modern world; the rare, remarkable moments that have caused him to take things seriously have without exception been world-changing for the people who experienced them, from the battle with Enkidu to the events of the Painted World. It is for the best that the King of Heroes does not, in fact, ever take things seriously - he would most assuredly be a much more horrifying force if he bothered to invest himself in things, not because of the overwhelming power he can bring to bear, but because of an unmatchable will that can and has shook the heavens and made the impossible possible.

     When the King gets the thought in the back of his mind, he permits it out of sheer curiousity. It is a novel thing. Novelty is something the King prizes very, very greatly, and this is a novel offer, a novel thing, and so he allows it, swept away to the square little island.

     His red eyes sweep over the field. They take in the cubes. They take in the liquid. They take in the little tiny islands, the pillars of land-stuff. Those red eyes, supremely confident and supremely bored, take in everything as a ripple in the air emerges, and from it, a golden chalice of heavenly-smelling alcohol. He sips from it with the refinement fit for his title as he listens to the man's pitch. Gilgamesh is a pillar of unearthly beauty in an alien place, a shining golden demigod, as perfect as if he had been crafted by a machine, and the clash between him and the land is palpable.

     "Hmph," the King says after a moment, "I am the King unrivalled. There is nothing I cannot deal with. You clearly don't know who I am, or you wouldn't say such a foolish thing in front of me. I've half a mind to cut you down for the insult."

     The King sips from his cup. "Still, you've given me some novel entertainment, so instead, I'll indulge you." The King begins walking down the road without hesitation, utterly certain of himself. He's heading for one of the boxes of gold.

     Of course he is.
Aoko Aozaki     The implication that Aoko ever needs a reason to go somewhere, accept an invitation, or meddle of her own free will, is so absurd that if presented before a jury, half would fall over in laughter, and the other half would end their lives on the spot, unwilling to accept an universe where someone actually thought that seriously.

    In other words, it should surprise no one that the walking, red-haired disaster in a bland white t-shirt and jeans is present, and not only that, but generally all-smiles and not even remotely out of place.

    "Sure, sure," she tells the coach, not bothering him with even one question. The road ahead is revealed! And so Aoko walks it, hands in her pockets and whistling contently. Reaching the facilities doesn't take long, but their path inside being blocked by a large box, the magus has no choice but to stop, no doubt right next to Gilgamesh, because he'd surely go for the largest, most golden of the three boxes.

    "Well, this in the way, isn't it, King? Should I blow it away? It's pretty rudely in the way!"
Staren     A vague call for help? Staren has lost count of how many of /those/ he's answered. And then...

    He looks around in mild alarm. Mild because his coping mechanism is to analyze, understand, and control. He tries to scan for dimensional anomalies -- maybe there's an invisible portal here. Also setting in motion programs to work on tracking his location through the Multiversal radio network, first through analyzing the signal then triangulating through local warpgates. If he IS in reach of the Multiversal radio system. If he's not... well, crap.

    There's someone here, though! "Where are we? How did we get here?" He tilts his head to the side slightly. "I understand that you have a mission, but so do we. It would be reassuring to know more about what's going on." Still, if the batter walks on without him, he'll follow. He produces a long black-and-white-striped wooden pole from the matter manipulator to poke the holographic/non-holographic blocks with. And the space around the bridge entrance. Weird that that wasn't visible a moment ago. Weird spatial things may be going on here.
Janine Liberi     Janine arrives. Considering her role in her home world, strange alien thoughts in the back of her mind are a cause for alarm. Is someone meddling in the Forest? But when the persistent idea leads her off-world, the idea becomes less likely, both to her relief and annoyance.

    It has been a long time since Janine Liberi has dreamt soundly, but everything about this place echos with the sensation of dreaming. The strange mingling of colours, the clear-cut angles, the seemingly endless void of water(?) that surrounds the spit of land. And the strange entity that greets him, like a old photo of a baseball player in his monochromatic hues.

    "What the ffffuck is that supposed to mean, Angel in the Outfield? Who even are you Why am I even here?" she demands of the man, but them immediately rethinks it. Everything about him screams taciturn, not someone who can be drawn into bantz. So, she gives up before she even really tried, and stops over to the structure and the shining door blocked by rows of cubes. She raises a foot, and gives the structure an experimental kick at the base, to see if there's any chance of it budging. Likely, no.

    "Right. Can't go through there, and I don't do ladders," she huffs, gesturing at her bandaged arm to prove her point. "So I'll see you all up top I guess."With that, out comes her smartphone, used as a black mirror to conjure up Biancabella, the bleeding visage of herself, to conjure up winds to bear her aloft, launching her from the ground to the top of the structure.
August Kohler August Kohler can't ignore something telling him he's helping someone on an important mission, even if he's unsure about it. So, in a flash, the redhead is brought from his cabin in the woods, dressed in a jacket, t-shirt, and jeans, all the way to this strange seaside 'island'. He's luckily armed - he just came back from hunting - though his eyes are widened in confusion. It takes August several moments to take everything in before he notices the tall man. And when he does, August takes a deep breath, swallows, and speaks up. Well, he can understand the score, sort of.

"Uh, I guess...you're the Batter? I have no damn clue what's going on, except that you have a mission and it's my - our..." He spots Gilgamesh first, and then other Elites, and rubs his brow. "...job to help you. Alright. Alright, we'll figure this out in play." As others start moving ahead, August gestures the Batter to come with them, still slightly overwhelmed, but...he has a duty, after all. As August moves forward, he spots Janine. Someone he knows, good. As Janine moves to launch upwards. "Hey, wait up!"

August moves for the ladder. The redhead moves to climb it rapidly if it looks like it'll reach the top of the structure, trying to get an idea of the area and scout ahead. If he can get up to Janine, too, he'll talk to her slightly privately. "Before you ask, I have /no/ idea what's going on here, but apparently we have a mission. A bunch of us, anyway. That Batter guy looks human instead of some horrible eldritch monster for a place like this...so we should probably humor him for now, since otherwise we wouldn't have been chosen, right?"

Part of it seems like August is trying to justify this to himself, too.
Aoko Aozaki     Having gotten the King's approval, Aoko's stance shifts slightly, and a blue circle of magic forms under the door-blocking golden crate. It spews out a column of brilliant blue light - enough force to send the crate flying, and enough heat to melt it, at least, both statements presuming it's Just A Golden Crate and not a greater obstacle. Sometimes, sequence breaking doesn't work!
Tina Natsumi      Without a lot to go off of, Tina's finally decided to strike out into the Multiverse for an honest-to-god mission! Job! Thing. She's not sure how she got the request to take this job(?) in the first place, but surely it has to be something worthwhile if she was picked personally by a mysterious someone.

     Of course, this is the perfect opportunity to get some views later by recording the whole thing. Her phone rests in a breast pocket with its top and the camera sticking out conspicuously, and her hat has a wire leading to said phone. Spotting who she can only assume is the Batter, Tina taps her hand to her head in a quick, informal salute. "Howdy, pard! That's right. What's yer mission, anyhow? I figure it'll be easier for us to help you with yours if we know what the game plan is, right?"

     Leaning sideways as the Batter goes the other way, she peers down the road and at the pair of boxes. Which box to choose, though?

     Neither. Instead, she's going for the ladder. With the familiar golden king and an unfamiliar magus going for the gold box while the cat robot guy goes for the striped box, that leaves her to join August. "Gotcha covered, Liberi! I ain't a fancy jumpin' bean like you there, so maybe this'll come in handy." And with that, after heading up the ladder, she's going to just try and take the thing with her.
Ryu     Ryu has arrived. He is fairly confused, and in his draconic shape. He lingers around the others for no, watching their actions and silently making expressions of uncertainty, while awkwardly scratching at the area near one of his long, elfin ears. One of his strange eyes close as he observes the others. He decides to fly slowly up to follow August for now, acting as backup in case something funky goes down... and because Gilgamesh makes him visibly uncomfortable just looking at him.

    "What the fuck is happening," he mutters to himself.
Starbound Flotilla "You know it's not like I don't agree with this."
"Just some other infuriating, stupid objection."
"Mr. Petrov, please. George, how do you intend?"
"To help them out and see how things spin."
"Conflicted. If it'll help you feel better, I don't mind, George."
"Floran can handle job easssy! Go do thingsss alone, human friend."
"Eh. Who knows, maybe you'll help this all work out."
"Maybe. Mostly it just sounds like the way that's a lot more fitting to me."
"Will you still be with us?"
"Always, Moonie."

    George is here. Was he brought the same way as the others? It's hard to say, but the man in the gray jumpsuit is smoking on the island. "There's plenty you /won't/ deal with, though," He says, to Gilgamesh. "Which is why it's good to have all the subjects and stuff, right?" He takes a long drag from the cigarette and blows it in the Batter's direction. "So don't be too hard on him if he wants to help." He rises, and looks to Staren, and then Janine, who are both asking similar questions. "Didn't you hear? You got assigned to the Batter. I dunno what other explanations you're looking for. Sometimes you just get given a job to do, right? Doesn't matter how you get the assignment, what matters is what you do. Whoever assigned you wanted you, so just do what you do the way you usually do and you'll do what they're after."

    He heads on to the ladder. "Hey, Gus! Fancy seeing you here. How's the head been settling since the Ghirapur business?" He's always so easygoing about August, seeming interested in his progress. He's gonna be following Janine Liberi and Tina Natsumi, discarding his cigarette at the base of the ladder and leaving one of the few marks that a person can leave on this pristine environment.
Thomas Alva Edison     And so, Thomas Alva Edison is here.

    Looking about himself with a odd thoughtful expression. They were apparently someone called the Batter? Well, sure, but it's not his name, but a man in all white with a batter's helm, is infact, the batter. Well, that does make sense, perhaps they just missheard, and infact The Batter seems to clear things up. They were apparently operating in the capasity of 'The Choir'. Interesting...this is odd, but at the same time, familar. Everything was just...something, he could see the streams of logic about him, but at the same time it was just...slightly out of focus.

    He looks towards Gilgamesh, as he gives his ascertion of who he is, and while it is usually annoying to have to deal with, also good to have someone reliable. Of course, it would be more comfort if he knew more about the red haired woman with them, who is better known as chaos incarnate.

    Hmm....Edison looks at one of the boxes, perhaps there is something in them that will shead light on the mystery. He moves to open one, and then the other if nobody else has beat him to them. This is followed by a laser that nearly sears his fur off, and a foul look towards Aoko.

    "A little warning next time?" he says, but regained his composure.
Reyes     There's a figure here that only one person here might recognize. A person clad in heavy robotic armor. Not the sleek suits of some superheroes - a bulky, cumbersome-looking suit of HEAVY armor that's easily twice the bulk of whoever's in it. Thick plated joints, large and wide legs covered in compartments and detachable gadgets, and broad wrist-forearms that no doubt are similarly stuffed with tools and gadgets. Powerful vent-grills near the groin and the shoulders. It's not carrying any obvious weaponry, but the full-covered, sealed helmet has some funny antennas and optics. What looks like a jet pack's mounted to its back. This doesn't appear to be a terribly combat-capable robot - or whatever it is. For those who recognize it, it's an NG-MRU886 'Grease Monkey' and it's looking left, right...

    And finally at the Batter.

    "... What the HELL."

    States a man over the speakers.

    That's apparently what he has to say.

    He wasn't supposed to be here. But...

    The Batter aside, the power armored man asks those around him, "You guys just appeared here too?" He doesn't waste a lot of time, since he has no idea where he is. The only thing to do is investigate this. Meanwhile, Reyes quietly does a comms check and sees if he's still in communication with Paladin or Tomorrow Legion networks...

    All while making his way across the bridge.
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki Kuran was ever the sort to decide whimsically to participate in things. The sessile urge of the royal apex predator to sit brooding on the throne was unbecoming of a girl such as her.

A weakness of constitution, or simply her habit to go stir-crazy after too much being put-upon.

And so, she was here! It was confusing how that happened, but here she was. "Well..." Yuuki begins, adjusting the fluffy collar on her snow coat down, as it's neither cold nor especially warm. "I guess everyone's here?"

Everyone being here means it's an adventure. The mystery of 'how' being impressed on her Actually Negative casual attention span for such things is ignored utterly. The Party is here, and there is a clear motivation.

"It's nice to meet you, Batter. Is Choir because we're you're... back-up singers? Like a church. That's neat." She asides to the strange man. Having only distantly experienced SPORTSBALL distantly to not-at-all in her strange shoujo life, the Batter simply seems like a warrior, or maybe a kendo star.

Or an IMPORTANT CHARACTER!!! How usefully illustrative.

The boxes are interesting, but also there's people checking them out - so Yuuki Kuran goes to the 'ocean', wonderment and curiousity glimmering in her eyes. "Huh! This is..." She begins, but doesn't continue. The Batter, and the Place, is a mystery. Is this water?

Crouching down to prod and poke at the water is a manner befitting a terrible queen of corporate directorship, and not at all beneath her ears that hear, her eyes that see, and her nose that smells.
Zek A mysterious voice giving a mission, intruding on thoughts uninvited?

Yeah, okay. That tracks.

Zek sits up. More specifically, Zek's Warframe sits up. The thing is a faceless figure of patched, slightly off-color armor, sitting on the square patch of 'island' in the middle of the endless 'ocean.' It's sitting in a half-lotus position when the Batter addresses them all, and the thing's visor is fixed on him while he does it.

"Understood," Zek says. His voice is a little tinny, issuing from a small speaker on his upper chest. "I'll do what I can." He stands, unfolding himself and rising to his six-and-a-half foot height. He starts walking immediately, heading across the bridge with a steady stride, and, without missing a beat, goes to see what's on top of the structure(?). There's a ladder there, right?

He's acting like this is totally normal. Maybe for him it is.
Priscilla     If this being who can only be the aforementioned 'batter' feels anything in particular at the thought of upsetting the King of All, it isn't shown. The strange man in the baseball player's gear is too transcendentally calm to show much of anything, borderline as if he were dreaming. Even when Janine briefly explodes from alarm, he waits patiently through it. Only when George explains the current business in unthinking and unhelpful turns, he nods, and that's about it, as if that's exactly how it should be, and it should be exactly like that.

    "You're in Zone 0." he says, not too helpfully but quite literally to Staren. "You got here because you came here. You are suitable to helping me complete my mission." he says to both. 'Where' isn't an easy question. As far as Staren can tell, there is no warpgate anywhere nearby. No sign of portals or dimensional rifts either. As best his triangulation can place him anywhere around the Superplanet, his equipment guesses that he's somewhere so deep into the Soft Expanse that there is no reliable infrastructure to go by; a depth into the Multiverse's strange and mutable silver interior that very few ever dare for fear of being in the wrong place when it ceases to exist, or is replaced by something else.

    As soon as August gestures for the Batter to come along, the implacable man moves from his spot, trudging down the long path of saffron Ground at a regular pace, as if just permitted to leave the little spit he had been ostensibly waiting on. "That's right." he says, still not exactly verbose, still seeming to think the context is obvious or unimportant.

    Gilgamesh finds one of the more brightly golden cubes comes up to roughly the bottom of his ribs, corners rounded instead of distinctly not childproof. The black band across it cuts into its surface, and a single square panel of gold in its middle, like the buckle of a belt, can be hit to pop it open at the seam, opening it like some sort of chest or crate with no discernible mechanism. For taking on the shape of something that is a container of valuables however, the container must be more valuable than the contents, as he finds, sitting at the bottom of a box of solid gold, a single, lonely-looking ticket of some sort; quite literally a paper slip of admission, hole-punched and with red borders, with a single word written on it in bolt, and a short sentence on the reverse side.
    The ticket says: LUCK on one side, and on the reverse, it says Recovers 50 HP, whatever that means.

    Edison goes and opens up the identical chest, likewise with no machinery or magic that actually opens it as far as he can tell, at the bottom of which he finds something that looks like a chunk of flawless silver, but when he picks it up, it has the texture and consistency of a lump of raw meat, leaving a thin sheen of meat goo on his hands, as if fresh off the butcher's block. It has no helpful note attached to explain its dubious purpose; at least not immediately visible yet.
Priscilla     Aoko goes to just blow up the more boring and obnoxious cube parking itself out in front of a lit doorway. She blasts it dead on with a considerable amount of magic, and finds that it is essentially welded to the floor. Nailed? Glued? It's not really clear, it's just kind of Stuck There. It melts heapishly, becoming a similar-sized blob of white-hot slag, but one that is still obnoxiously blocking the door. The worst part is that it's not even *blocking* blocking it. Someone could reach over it and stick and arm through for god's sake. It's like a bollard meant to prevent cars from entering a bike path, except for people and doors. Someone who feels like belly crawling across white hot unknown-material-slag might squeeze in under the top of the doorframe.

    "That's right." the Batter says to Yuuki. "The Choir, the Batter, and the Judge; all three parts of the trinity are necessary. If you weren't suitable to be in the Choir, you wouldn't be here." He hovers over her shoulder as she goes to poke at the water, and finds that it's . . .

    Plastic? It's liquid plastic. Like what would find in a factory injector, ready to go into a mold. Don't drink it.

    Quite a few people head up the ladder, and find that the tallest building is far taller than it had first seemed, easily exceeding a hundred feet or more. It has a rest spot halfway up, for two halves of the latter might be dangerously fatiguing for the less physically inclined prospective climber. When they arrive at the top, they find that the plastic ocean seems to stretch on all but infinitely; the world is entirely confined to the block of buildings, the tiny arrival island, and one more identically shaped bridge beyond the cluster of buildings that had obscured it from the ground, at the end of which something bright red, garishly standing out against the shades of yellow, sits importantly.

    There are stairs in the bare, square roof, where the daisy-coloured path reappears at the top rung and draws itself across the top of the building like a chalk scribble to direct one's attention to the similarly top stair, heading down inside. No sooner do they arrive at the conclusion that this is probably the only way inside this particular building, they run into a second thing: a cat.

    A white cat, specifically, of some domestic breed. It is a very large white house cat though, as the tip of its ears reach waist height on most. It is a very strange looking very large white house cat, as its head is almost cartoonishly oversized, host to enormous, staring eyes, and a toothy grin that splits its face from end to end, baring a grid of pearly white teeth and tremendous fangs with the dry humour of a particularly amused skeleton. The cat purrs.

    "There cannot be any other living beings in Zone 0, so I must assume that you are only a mere figment of my imagination." the cat says, wandering past them, tail swishing.
Ryu     "..."

    Ryu flits to a slow landing on the rooftop, and looks back, disoriented by the strange spatial distortion he felt... like the building was bigger than it looked at first. Or he's just losing it. Then he looks back to the roof, and spots the stairs. And then the talking cat. He approaches the cat and crouches to get on eye level with it, after it speaks, and tilts his head. And then, in a peculiar display of animalistic behavior, he leans in to sniff at the cat. Trying to determine whether it is real, or if there's something strange about it.

    "Hi," he says, with the distant, overwhelmed tone of a lucid dreamer. "What, never seen another living soul around here before?" he wonders, while distressingly close to its face and its unnaturally large mouth. He doesn't seem worried, somehow.
Zek Zek does not have any problem with the ladder. He actually gets tired of climbing it partway up and does a sort of swift scramble, taking it four rungs at a time until he gets to the top. There's a sweet flip when he gets there. It seems kind of superfluous when a perfectly servicable ladder is right there.

The Warframe tilts its head to regard the path. Zek follows it as if he was on rails, striding down the stairs. He pulls what looks like some kind of fancy spear off his back while he descends, holding it at ready in both hands. There's movement--!

Zek does not instant hell murder the talking cat.

"That sounds right," Zek says, nodding at the cat. "Which way is the next nearest zone?"
Janine Liberi     Janine rises, and rises, and rises some more. Luckily, the platform halfway up the structure gives her a place to stop and launch herself further up to the top. From there, she looks out upon the horizon, and also checks down the sides to see if there's a way to circumvent the blocked door. But more importantly, there's a cat(?)

    She stares at its freakish proportions and snaggletoothed grin as it speaks to them in a purr, before bursting out into a fit of laughter. "Cheshire, if you dreamed me up, you got a real twisted mind in that giant head of yours," she says before bending down and trying to give it a half-pat, half-bonk on the head. "But no, we're here with Babe Ruth himself, the uh... Batter. You know anything about... well, anything?" That's maddeningly vague, and Janine can already tell she would get nothing useful out of the eloquent thing with that.

    She ponders questions about the Batter and his mission, but interrogating him directly might be better. No, best to keep this about the cat. "Who are you? What are you doing here?"
Staren     A ticket? "I guess save that, we might need it later." Staren comments. Silver meat? "...What is that?" Staren offers a sample bag to store it in.

    He considers the door-blocker. He tries to disassemble it with the matter manipulator. If that works, he's ready to go in (as long as the Batter or someone else goes with him) -- otherwise, he asks if the Batter can climb, and if so flies up to the top of the building. "Oh. A talking cat. So what is Zone 0 and why can't there be any other living things here? How do you define living things, anyway?"
Starbound Flotilla     George takes a smoke break on the way up. He doesn't seem to have any trouble breathing, which is odd for a chronic chainsmoker, but he IS an older man. He moves further on up, and eventually encounters the cat! For his part, he isn't too terribly interested in interrogating it, and instead fishes around for a chunk of unspiced beef jerky in his Matter Manipulator to toss forward. Cats like that, right? "Well, if you've been imagining me, gotta thank you for the real vivid imagination." He says. "Good work, my guy." He knows the others are going to handle the rest of the interrogation, so he decides to check out the stairs and take a seat inside to finish his second smoke break, and also to observe what's inside the top area past the stairs, and to keep the group moving in and onwards.

    Mostly because he knows the cat will try to get underfoot on stairs, so it makes a lot of sense as a way to keep the group walking and talking.
Tina Natsumi      Letting out a light huff as the ladder climb finally ends, Tina turns to help anyone else that might need a hand before turning back to the daisy path. "That sure is convenient. I wonder how expensive it'd be just to build a place with all these colors and keep 'em that way..." She muses to herself and heads for the stairs.

     And then there's a cat. A big cat. It's a talking one, too, which certainly makes things a little surreal for the streamer. "That's right, lil bud. We're just lookin' for the..."

     What /would/ they even be looking for, anyway? They're the Choir, the Batter is the Batter, so perhaps something church and baseball related? Or an artifact of some sort, if it's not nearly as stupid as that idea. "... Y'know. The /thing/. The big one. You got any idea where we might be able to get our hands on it?"
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki can smell the plastic. It reminds her of the factory she passed once, on a train tour, down the frigid mountains of her home. It was not a new scent, but it was one that was mildly comforting - like unformed little baubles and dreams. An infinite, reaching ocean of plastic possibility.

Yuuki can see the plastic, on and on, out to the horizon, an ocean of plastic. An unlimited ocean of formless memory.

Yuuki can taste the plastic, the scent filling her nose, at the 'water's' edge meaning that basically she's getting beaten in the face with plastic, causing a little scrunch of the nose and the brow, like she had stuck her nose in a container and the smell was both expected and powerful - not unpleasant, but simply overpresent.

Wicking her pinky finger through the ocean of plastic, the touch of it finally confirms.

Yep. It's plastic. So, Yuuki Kuran scrapes her finger on the marigold ground and stands up, first with her torso, then at the knee in a quick two-stage rise. "Batter, if we're the Choir, and you're the Batter, what's the Judge's role? To watch? Officiate? Like..."

She squints, searching for the word. Concentration fills her eyes. "A... referee?"

She was looking for 'umpire', but there are more important '-pires' in her life to come up with that word without great effort, a tip-of-the-tongue impossibly hidden behind her twilight existance.

"Well, we should join the others. We're missing all the adventure!"

She gestures for the Batter to lead the way towards the ladder, following behind (or despite, if Chivalry is alive and well) to the boxes and the LONG LONG LADDER.

"Batter, is the adventuring part our job? The boxes and the ladders and the puzzles?"
Gilgamesh      The King doesn't even bother hitting the object. A sword simply launches itself out of a ripple in thin air, full of incredible magical power. It cleaves into the panel, popping the thing open, and Gilgamesh looks inside.

     Well, this is Odd and Unique.

     It's treasure.

     Gilgamesh takes the ticket and deposits in the Gate of Babylon as naturally as breathing. Aoko and anyone with them gets a glimpse of the Gate's ripple and the ticket vanishing into thin air as Aoko blows up the doorway. He is, in fact, quite pleased with this acquisition, as well as his company's eagerness for violence, and so his bad mood turns to a good one quite rapidly.

     "Very good," Gilgamesh says to Aoko at the end result of her hard work, "Power is far more beautiful than any appearance."

     The King considers the slag. Well, that's a new obstacle, but he can deal with that, too. He briefly asks Aoko if she wants to do it, but then he decides that he might as well enjoy himself a bit. Besides, he never turns down an opportunity to show off, especially around beautiful people.

     Aoko is the only one here so far. His criteria is very specific.

     Somewhere, in another world far away, Merlin is having the worst day.

     A staff falls out of the Gate of Babylon. It's coiled, like a group of serpents wrapped together and stretched up to the top. The Noble Phantasm throbs with an unusual atmosphere as the King raises it, then brings it down, hard, in front of him.

     The slag splits. In four cardinal directions away from him, the plastic around the island splits, too, though probably not all the way down to the bottom. The slag, and the plastic, are split straight down the middle; the King simply walks through the line and into whatever awaits beyond.
August Kohler August is athletic, but not extremely. He takes a pause at the rest stop, catching his breath, before finishing the climb up the ladder to find...a talking white cat, in front of the stairs down into the building. August replies to George while he has a chance. "I'm doing better. Thank you for asking." He's a little terse, but not overly - still kind of concerned about the way George was in Kaladesh. It seems he didn't understand the older man as well as he thought. When everyone talks to the cat, August is sort of at ease. He likes talking cats, even if they bring back bad memories.

"Hey, cat. Name's August. Do you have a name?" After asking that, the others are asking important questions and will get any answers, so August waits to see how the cat replies, and then heads for the stairs with George. He grabs his phone and turns on the flashlight, moving to navigate into the building. "I'm going in. We'll find more answers the more we move, and if we all spend time talking to a cat, well, we'll never get anything else done. Let's see what we can find, shall we?" A gesture to George.

Even if it becomes a walking conversation, August is okay with that. He just wants to head inside either way.
Thomas Alva Edison     Edison picks up the lump of meat. He thought it was silver, but no...it was infact meat. He sniffs it once, thinking about examining it throughly. Infact, he could make the equipment he needs to do this right now, but at the same time...is it really necissa-

    Oh they're leaving him. Well!

    He walks after them, examining the silver meat can wait until later, he puts the meat away, wherever inventory he has to hold it there will suffice. He considers the door, which is now...uh...blocked by very hot melting piece of metal. Which is then split by Gilgamesh.

    Hm. Well, he goes forward...so Edison will move up. At least exploring the path around which they seemed to be filtered is a good idea, and if Gilgamesh exposes the hand trying to push them along, well that too is one way to deal with things. Putting eggs in one basket is not good, at least by his ideas.

    Yuuki confirms it's plastic. "Fascenating." he says, climbinb up the latter and following until there is a talking cat.

    "Figment? I daresay that is a insult, dear rotund feline. I am Thomas Alva Edison, well spoken man of similar herritage. What might your name be?"
Aoko Aozaki     A rude, very tough box. Aoko doesn't push her beam further, because past a point she might bring the building down trying to open its door, and as amusing as that is, it's counterproductive.

    At least until knowing what's inside.

    She's content enough seeing Gilgamesh's fabled Gate in action, not to mention the sight of that staff. She whistles, impressed, and will proceed into the factory if the slag parts as easily as the seas.

    "So how is it, being King of Everything? How do you keep yourself from getting bored? When you've seen and owned everything?"

    It sounds awful.
Reyes     Seeing everyone rushing off without him fills Reyes with a bit of frustration. How's everyone possibly able to be so chaotic? Who's supposed to be in charge of this venture either? Ugh... "What... a mess. Guess I'll have to make the most of it." Normally, there's people giving orders. There's a goal. This is pure weird chaos. He'd like to bring some order. Except...

    Well. People.

    And so, he activates his jetpack and swoops straight up to the roof of the building with the others, landing in time to hear the cat's amazement.

    "Yeah. A lot of weird things are happening today." He agrees with the creature, albeit somewhat sarcastically.
Priscilla     "You are for certain a protruding and peremptory kind of cognitive illusion aren't you." the cat says to Ryu when he gets close enough to literally sniff. "But of course I've never laid my fastidious gaze upon another living being in Zone 0. Zone 0 is empty, devoid of life, thus I I am compelled to entertain and be entertained by these whimsical circumstances that so demand I see and hear the mannerisms of a most memorably queer and multifarious cast of characters for today."

    The cat looks to Janine. It doesn't blink at all, so it's more than a bit creepy when it stares at her with its giant, lamp eyes, all white sclera and black pupil with no iris. "Indeed, some highly particular sort of cerebral aneurysm with a peculiar sense of humour must have me in its grip to be hallucinating a gaggle of colourful creatures such as yourselves." Then to George. "But I must admit an aching curiosity to know the doubtlessly evocative and amusing names that I am to assign to these bizarre figmentary actors. For the sake of this most diverting imaginary recreation, I will introduce myself." Then to both. "I am the Judge, and I would be delighted to hear of you in kind." Didn't August and Thomas *just* introduce themselves? With their actual names? The Cat is still waiting patiently.

    "Ahh, the Thing." the cat says, in response to Tina. "Yes, of course, the Thing. It would seem my imagination has most conclusively bankrupted itself in the process of fabricating your absurdity faces if these were the most compelling of inquisitions left to ask. You won't find anything important here." it says, looking to Staren. "Zone 0 is utterly devoid of life because I have quite thoroughly explored it for a very long time and determined that is decisively positively so. It's not as if it's very big, my highly unoriginal friend! Zone 0 is but an erstwhile leftover without the opposite of a lack of common sense required to wink out of existence!" Out of grinning Cheshire good humour, its tail pokes towards the red blob in the far distance. "To reach the other Zones, you would need to comport yourselves in an earnestly thataways vector, but notwithstanding the salient fact that none of you exist, you would in hypothetical terms require the correct card to access its important operations."
Priscilla     When a couple traipse down the stairs and enter the building proper, they find an all but blank room awaits them, just as urgently yellow as everything else, without direction save another set of stairs directly across from them at the other end, without adornment save a number of yellow cubes, two that float by the ascending staircase, two that float by the descending staircase that comes second, and three obnoxiously welded to the ground in a way that walls those stairs off in a piss-poor attempt at security that looks like a placeholder more than anything, spaced apart far enough that someone could stick their arms between them or get their fingers between their tops and the ceiling, even if not actually proceed. A window looks outside from the ascending stairs and their two cubes, and a window looks outside from the descending stairs and their two cubes. The numbers 1 and 2 are painted in bold stripes beside the former, and the numbers 3 and 4 are painted beside the other in equally spartan and incomprehensible obtuseness.

    The room seems to serve no function except to have numbers and cubes in it. How annoying.
When Gilgamesh and Aoko just blast their way through on the ground floor, having to use excessive force to squeeze by an excessively persistent boring block in the ground half-assing a real obstacle, they enter an equally bare and useless room at the very bottom. A whole gaggle of cube hovers all around them, three rows of three, as if that had some significance, which they must maneuver around to reach a set of windows that look out onto the exiting bridge to the final tiny island and its blot of offensively garish red. They can see it from here, but it doesn't seem particularly reachable unless they each shrink three feet and crawl through the tiny, boxy window holes. The only feature aside the still-mysterious cubes is a plain yellow bowl of cat food at their feet. It's just a bowl of cat food. It's just there.
Staren     "If there's nothing else living here, how do you survive? What do you eat?" Staren points out. He can think of possible ways the cat could survive without eating, of course, but he wonders which it will claim all the same. "And where would we find this keycard? Do you want to come with us when we leave?"

    Unless the cat directs him otherwise, he heads downstairs after the others and starts poking and prodding at the cubes, looking for any signs of underlying structure.
Priscilla     When Yuuki does the thing and makes motions towards the Batter, just as serenely as before, he goes with the flow and ascends the ladder ahead of her, albeit waiting for her to arrive before taking it himself. Popping up behind the rest of the group, the cat looks up, and the two share a moment of strangely relevant eye contact.

    "Would you be the Judge?" says the Batter to the cat.
"That would be a hypothetically correct assumption" says the Judge, who is also the cat. "Who would you be?" it asks in return.
"I'm the Batter. I've been assigned to a sacred mission." says the Batter.
"Given your characterful attire and career-appropriate choice of bludgeoning implement, I am given to assume that you would indeed be the Batter your curious entourage speaks of." it continues. "However, it is not the puppet I was addressing, but the puppeteer controlling it. What is your name, dear puppeteer?"
"She can't talk to us." the Batter clarifies unclearly. "However, she can see and hear everything."
"Even though you too are but an inexistent apparition in my eyes, let it be said that I am delighted to meet you as well." says the Judge to nobody.

    "That's correct." the Judge then says to Yuuki, even though she asked the Batter. "If I am meant to be twisted by the ear to imagine a Choir such as yourselves filling such a lofty role, your path of forward progress would indeed involve many challenges, both to that tired organ bathing flabbily in your cranium, and of most exciting life-threatening peril and violence. I would have to assume you have a competence bordering genius in both arenas, as well as a certain drive and perspective surpassing that of the picturesque frame of reality around us. if you are qualified to sing."

    "They're very experienced." assures the Batter, as if he somehow knows them. "And what are their names?" asks the Judge again, still redundant, yet more insistently this time.
Thomas Alva Edison     "...I think I was just ignored, now see here feline which I share a heritage with," A beat, "For some reason." He says, with another beat, "You ignored what I was saying, including my greeting of you. Could it be that you have been here such a long time that you have forgotten how to properly speak with someone? For someone who speeks so eloquently, it is a shame. However, I, Thomas Alva Edison, shall help you readjust to people once more. Well, The Judge, as it is your name, I will also inform you that we are here with 'The Batter' and we have been named 'The Choir'. It is not a manifestation of your inner insanity, but people in the flesh that have come here to...help? Yes, help. Apparently you are to assist the Batter on his mission, and we are to assist him."

    "Didn't...we have more people here a moment ago? I have a feeling SOMEONE is getting into checanery. I have not heard things exploding in an unfun way yet, so it can't be all bad."

    However the batter comes up to also have the conversation, but a bit more indepth.
Reyes     Yeeeeeah. Reyes hears what the cat has to say.

    And, without a word further to the sarcastic creature, turns about and FLIES OFF on a plume of mystical blue light spewing from his flight pack's nacelles. Towards the distant bridge and off on his own.

    Apart from a few people, this group's so weird he doesn't know how to engage with it. Doesn't want to even try. So he'll just antisocially grouch off by himself until things have calmed down. In the meantime, there's INVESTIGATION to be done!
Ryu     Ryu returns to being perplexed, like his nose is going to start bleeding if this cat keeps talking, overwhelmed by the Judge's peculiar perceptions of the possible. He slowly gathers himself to a stand.

    "Name's Ryu," he says, for lack of anything better to say, following conversation between the Batter and the Judge. "I'm good at violence, and undoing violence. Not so good with the thinking part. Obviously." He thinks that part is obvious because he looks like he has a migraine. The dragon rubs both sides of his head, ruffling his long ears, trying to rub the disorientation out of him.

    "Wait... does that mean I'm not really 'here'?" he wonders aloud. "... nah..." He shrugs off the existential mental backflip for now.
Gilgamesh      "I do whoever and whatever I please," Gilgamesh replies automatically, but his opinion of Aoko quietly ticks up another notch, "And submerge myself in endless pleasures, mastering all of them that exist between Earth and Heaven."

     He doesn't say anything, but his tone certainly suggests that it's actually pretty boring.

     He glances around the room. He takes a cube for himself, tossing it over his shoulder into the Gate of Babylon. It's a fine toy for a crystal spider. Otherwise, he steps back to watch Aoko work.
Janine Liberi     Janine looks around at the swelling crowd coming up to the roof to check up on this weird cat and starts to feel uneasy. She makes room for the Batter as he arrives, and the exchange between them reveals something... interesting. Immediately, she marches up to him and glowers up at him.

    "Who is the puppeteer?"

    She stands there firmly, only looking away for a moment to answer the Judge distractedly. "Janine." Then her hard gaze returns to the batsman before her. "If you're possessed, or following someone else's agenda, we need to fucking know. If you want my help, spill it. What's your mission, and who's pulling the strings?"
Zek "Ah. A key. Okay." Zek nods. "Thank you. If you find out who else is imagining us, it'd be nice to know for sure." He lingers (lurks, maybe) in Yuuki's vicinity. He seems to have assumed she's his partner now. After the odd exchange, Zek cocks his faceless head for a second, and then turns ninety degrees to the left, looks slightly up, and raises his hand to wave politely at... nothing.

Okay, sure.

"Are there any other titularly-named individuals within convenient travel distance," he asks the Judge.
August Kohler After August moves down the stairs and finds the cubes, and the numbers near them, he decides to take a picture with his phone camera for reference later, before taking a second to see how firmly the cube barrier on the stairs is. If it feels like it'd be too tough to move with the superhumanity of his Persona, August lets Staren continue to study down here, before returning up the stairs after he hears interesting conversation.

"I said my name was August. August Kohler, Cloak of the Watch." He adds his title for good measure, a little frustrated at the cat. Janine raises a good point, and August galnces to the Batter. "We're here to help you. And to do that, we need to work together. Can you tell us everything you know?"
Starbound Flotilla     "Most people give this particular peculiar phantasm of mental malfunction's manifestation the name of 'George'." George says to the Judge, in easygoing tones, trying to keep pace with the way he speaks by adding a little spice to his own. "Hey, you comin'? Sounds like there's something downstairs for you, J." He heads to the cubes, and calls out to the Batter: "Hey, you coming too, Innings? Won't be much mission to do up on that roof, I'm guessing. Whatever your deal is."

    As per the norm, he decides to finish off his smoke break by popping a squat on one of the cubes, kicking his legs a little and dragging from the last of his cigarette. The interior space is filled with the smell of a hospital in the drifting smoke. Hopefully the cube isn't especially sensitive to shenanigans. Or maybe hopefully it is!
Aoko Aozaki     A bowl! For a cat!

    Aoko takes a small bag of cat treats out of her pocket, a safety measure ever since she tried to make that troublesome familiar of hers. She leaves some in the bowl, because she's nice and thoughtful like that.

    Then she examines the cubes in the room, wondering what this place's fascination with cubes is. She taps one a few times, tries to push it to see if it's stuck in place or if it's freefloating and easy to maneuver around, and eventually gives up on this extremely scientific research to look at the tiny windows and the bridge past them.

    And the King who asks her to handle it.

    Well, she learned her lesson from the cube that blocked the entrance, so this time it's excessive force from the word go.

    "Barrels, set."

    A dozen blue spheres form around Aoko, rippling with energy and patterned in a circle. She snaps her fingers, and beams of blue light fire towards the windows and the wall. Then the spheres start rotating, as the beams keep coming. This is less blasting open and more cutting open.

    Her head tilts back, to look at Gilgamesh as he stores a cube away. "All the pleasures, huh? I guess that's one way to keep things from getting boring. Don't you miss out on a lot of surprise and discovery though?"
Gilgamesh      "Yes," the King says without hesitation, "Though occasionally I get lucky."
Yuuki Kuran UP THE LADDER WE GO, THANKS TO COURTESY AND STAGE DIRECTION!

THINGS ARE REVEALED!!!

Oh.
The Batter is Zero, but not grumpy.

Kuran Yuuki, Normal Girl with a Normal Hoverhanding College SO, decides unilaterally that all realities now conform to her own worldview.

She's well-experienced with strange boys and psychological trials, as well as leading said strange boys around by the nose.

Yuuki stares down at the Judge with her red-brown eyes, and the Judge explains things. That there's a puppeteer. Is she the puppeteer? It's unclear. For a moment, she led the Batter along, so... "Oh, hello mister Judge. I'm Yuuki Kuran."

Her eyes twinkle. "And you're a --" Kitty! Yaaaay kittycatcatkitty (you know, the form of mental retardation that some people get when shown dogs and cats. Yuuki is That Sort.) "--very smart looking cat, aren't you?"

"I'm sure Gilgamesh of Uruk and Mister Edison will be able to handle the problems. They're suited for it. So, Judge..."

Yuuki reaches over and scoops up Judge into her arms and begins attempting to >Pet the Cat. The Cat may resist. It is allowed to.

But Yuuki is That Sort.

"I've only sang a few times, but being part of the Choir where I'm from is more about joining together in the experience - of faith, I guess, but still. Part of it is the heart of things, and we've got a lot of adventurers. Like this guy!"

Yuuki turns bodily towards Zek, still Enforcing Her Dire That Sort Will on the Judge, Who Is Also A Cat. "He's a space ninja! Do you sing, Space Ninja?"
Thomas Alva Edison     "I feel I am being volintold here..." Edison says, shrugging his shoulders while giving Yuuki a sideways glance. Who is now attempting to scoop the judge into a kitty embrace. That poor, poor cat...or that poor poor woobie should the Judge appear to dislike such attention.
Zek Zek turns to look at Yuuki. He taps the side of his helmet. He has no mouth.

"Everyone sings," Zek finally says via little speaker. "I think I'm part of everyone. So I sing, too. Right?"

That's how that works.
Yuuki Kuran Zek has no mouth, and yet he sings.
It's not LIKE THAT PAINTING AT ALL.

"Of course." Yuuki beams. "Everyone sings. And you're part of everyone, but more importantly, part of our little group. So..."

She nods firmly. "Yep. Definitely Chorale material."

That's how it works.
Tina Natsumi      What a curious thing. Tina's pretty sure the cat-Judge just called her ugly or dumb, but she can't stay mad at it for long. There's more weirdness afoot, after all, especially knowing that there's now a Batter, Choir, and Judge in play.

     And a puppeteer, apparently.

     "Name's Tina, lil feller." Eyeing that blob in the distance, she whistles softly before turning back to the Judge and readying herself to walk backwards once the group starts moving again. "What kinda card are you goin' on about, anyway? You know where we can get ourselves one o' those?"

     She pauses to take a quick headcount. "... And some extras, in case any of us get lost helpin' the Batter here out on his job?" Another pause. "Actually. You know what he's supposed to be doin' here, anyway?"
Priscilla     "The reason for that, my good phantom of entirely possible cerebral hemorrhage, I have already stated." the Judge says to Thomas. "My most sincere apologies if I were unclear, but I had meant to ask the puppeteer, not the puppet." it says, staring at him in an increasingly unnerving manner; expectant, anticipating something that seems so wholly obvious as to be utterly inconceivable. "They don't know." says the Batter all of a sudden. The cat flicks its ears, almost in disbelief. "So much the pity." it says. "Or perhaps that's for the best. Very well, Thomas Alva Edison it is, spectral being of good humour and impeccable taste in wearable heads." It looks to Ryu. "I must confess that I find you quite tangible for a phantasmagorial being."

    "Her name is        " the Batter answers Janine. "She can't talk to you, but she can see and hear you. Her agenda is helping me with my sacred mission; the same as yours." He says it with the exact same air of Buddha-like disconcern with the reality of the situation, or with whatever it means to have a 'puppeteer'.

    "Oh there are several more individuals of titularly self-evident importance around here." the Judge says to Zek, engaging him in a more ordinary manner. "None are convenient to access, and none are within a distance of any sort in the way as you and I know it. One would have to quite voluntarily enter the Nothing before they would have any visceral conception of the axes on which to move towards something less uninspired as Zone 0. No need to worry; I travel between the other Zones all the time. You'd only need the key, were you possessed of the necessary solidity to operate objects of such physical necessity." it says, even while the building literally rumbles beneath them from Gilgamesh and Aoko blasting away at it from inside. "Far be it from the current state of my manners to say that you aren't especially convincing, however."

    The Batter takes a long look at the Persona users in particular, answering no questions about what they're supposed to do. After a moment's thoughtful serenity, he turns back to the Judge, nodding slowly.
"I believe we're in need of your services" says the Batter.
"Many people are in need of my services, you know." says the Judge. "Everybody loves cats. We rub ourselves against their legs and purr in the most insistent manner. They adore that."
"I'm not talking about that kind of help." the Batter clarifies.
"I see . . . but what sort of service could I offer to an ectoplasmic entity?" replies the Judge.
"I have a sacred mission to fulfill." the Batter asserts. "I must purify the world."
"Ah, then there is no objective more laudable than yours." the Judge judges. "Please accept my most humble and contrite of apologetic gestures for delaying so much time with idle prattle, if that is the case. Likewise be the recipient to my commensurately heartfelt and genuine sympathies as to the unruly state of your Choir."
Priscilla     August rams on the blockade cubes, and finds that the solid blocks so rudely in the way and so aggravatingly lazy and cut-corner about it are far beyond his capacity to force out of the ground, going almost from floor to ceiling, and made of the same mysterious yellow matter barely describable as some hard and heavy metal. When George pops a squat, Aoko goes poking, and Gilgamesh attempts to collect, the floating cubes however, they find that on the slightest physical contact, the levitating polygons turn as ghostly and insubstantial as the sequence they had landed in the middle of, and remain like that even when they withdraw their hands, now bouncing in a thoroughly agitated 'activated' state. It's all so infuriatingly vague, like they were supposed to be something important, but someone never got around to describing their appearance or properties besides their sole critical function, whatever that is.

    "Indeed you are quite uncommonly on the money with such a frank assessment of the critical truths of clerical harmony." the Judge says to Yuuki. "The Choir is indeed all about faith. Putting your trust in that which you can't prove exists, much like I am right now!" Then she reaches down and pets the very large very strange white house cat, and it makes a perfectly normal cat purring noise that its grinning fanged trap of a maw shouldn't be able to produce. "And see how my faith is rewarded! In a way that is relatively bizarre, I bare my thoughts once more, for you are the first living being I was given a chance to encounter in this lieu, as it would seem from the perspective of myself or any outsider. I had consciously concluded that Zone 0 was an empty land. obviously I was misled." says the Judge, apparently finally convinced of Yuuki's solidity. "So I imagine that rumbling I have felt through the pads of my trustworthy paws for the past several minutes must be equally genuine. You spoke no mistruths to me in your analysis that there is a wide range of brain to brawn in the ranks of your do re mi fa so ensemble."

    Down the stairs, Aoko (at Gilgamesh's irresponsible encouragement) do seem to be taking the brute force option. The walls appear to be even harder and more obtuse than the cube that had blocked the door, erected with some greater assumption of permanence rather than meant to be some undefined 'thing' that exists to go away at some point, even if that banishing stimuli were not blasts and parting waves of magic. It's like taking a high-powered cutting torch to a bank vault door; effective, but time-consuming, requiring slow and steady focus and progress to burn through each inch, slowly opening a way down the last path to the only thing that dares defy the unwritten decree to be a shade of yellow by unconventional adherence to the philosophy of the Gordian Knot, or so the Judge would probably put it.

    "Oh, the key is mine to hold; how else would you surmise I visit the other Zones, oh faceless phantasm?" says the Judge. "Of course I would be glad to share part in it, should you be able to assuage my understandably apprehensive heedfulness to the competence of your menagerie, as Zone 0 is hypothetically meant to ascertain by the nature of its exceptionally bland and straightforward mien. Certainly so basic a display would be a trivial chore for esteemed titans of strangeness as yourselves. I'm afraid your sporting friend will be of no help; the role of Batter precludes the capacity to tell you what you cannot already figure out on your own."
Thomas Alva Edison     Edison nods at The Judge, who has now both acknowledged his best features, as well as acknowledged their solidity. There is a nod from the Presiking, as there is conversation...more starts to be unvealed to them, and with a small smile, he grins. "Of course, of course...sure we can at least play along with this interesting adventure you have set out for us. As for our...companions.." he sighs, "Yes, well. I speak not for the Red Haired one, but it is of my opinion she is about as stable as Nitrogliceride. The man in gold is uh...not a fan of the modern ways of things, to say the least, but respects those who can give proper deference. Usually." He says, with a shrug. Walking with the group to the first puzzle room, he notices George already on the case. Yes, George, because the only thing he expects from the acting leader of the watch is a room full of fire.

    "You seem to have been messing with this the most, what appear to be your thought son it?"
Aoko Aozaki     "Still sounds like it'd get depressing pretty fast. See, me, I say I want to SEE all the things, knowing I probably won't. There's always something else to see, another place to go, more faces to meet! It's not a kingly life, but it works."

    After some time, Aoko manages to cut a round hole in the wall, or rather, around a section of wall, which falls down with a loud slam to reveal the bridge and the red area ahead. Lucky for Aoko, blowtorch approach or not, fuel doesn't concern her, and time isn't a resource they're short on right now!

    But she's certainly taking notes.

    "This place is really sturdy. It's like a dozen magi got together and put all their efforts into damage-proofing everything. I wonder why?" To be pests, surely.

    Too bad the blocks can't be taken along. Might have made a nice base for a familiar, given durability.

    "Ah well! Shall we, King?"

    Let's see what life beyond this building is like. That last bridge and the incredibly red area!
Janine Liberi     Janine hears the name, yes. The Batter certainly said something there, but it just went in one ear and out the other. She maintains that serious look just to hide how much that rattles her. She gets an answer to her other question soon after. The Batter wants to 'purify the world.' She snorts and looks around. "If there's other zones are anything like this place, I dunno how much purer they can get," she mutters.

    But now they're being challenged. Janine could also feel the building trembling underfoot as those below attempted to just brute force through things. "All right, fine, we'll play your game. But even if he can't tell us the answer, he has to sit through it. Come on Batter," she grouches, before going stomping down the stairs to where August started slamming on the walls.

    She sees cubes. She sees numbers on the wall. The number of cubes is equal to the amount of numbers and the highest sum among the numbers on the wall. She also sees people pounding on the building like it owes them money. "Are you fucking serious?" she asks, rolling her eyes before going to the cube on the floor that corresponds to the 1 on the wall and kicking it. Then the one that best corresponds with 2. And then the same with 3 and 4.

    "This is a fucking baby puzzle, you aren't smart for trying to brute force around it, assholes!"
Tina Natsumi      A rounadabout way of getting the mission statement, but good enough! "Purifyin', eh? That's... Sure is somethin' alright." Tina comments, looking uncertain as to whether that's a good thing or not. Too vague of a word to really get a good feel for, but if the Batter's obeying them on this, perhaps it couldn't be /that/ bad.

     She hopes not, anyway. "Looks like doin' stuff the straightforward way is right out, then. Not a problem! I'm an old hat at puzzle games, and this here's about as puzzlin' as they get." Grinning broadly, she turns to Yuuki while making a cradling motion. "What say we take the Judge here with us, then?"

     She turns back to the cat, still grinning that same grin. "Whadda ya say? There ain't nothin' else to do here, right? Worst case, you'll kill some time and have fun watchin' us stomp around for a good while. Like.. Uh." She looks down as the ground shakes. "... Yeah. And best case, you get to see us succeed at this whole purification business on a time limit, if all that bangin's any indicator." She gestures towards Janine actually trying to solve the thing at that last part.
Zek Zek hums. He does so in a generally musical way, because Yuuki put the thought in his head. It's got a tune to it instead of being annoyingly tuneless. It's still sort of electronic because of the speaker. "That tracks. My first reaction is to bypass the challenge by exsanguinating you," Zek tells the Judge conversationally, "but my second thought leads me to believe that wouldn't be a really good idea. I'd still like that key, though, so..." He trails off, turning to look across the blank room.

Zek wanders over to the windows. He peers out it (probably; no eyes, either) and then looks to the cubes nearby. He extends a hand, willing his Warframe's systems to interact with the object via typical augmented reality display provided by his somatics. It just seems... natural. Touching it might work too, but that feels clumsy compared to pressing a button that only exists in a specific layer of perception. He activates them in order based on the window displays: one, two, three, and then four. There.

Zek looks up and (probably) stares at Janine, who is much more violent about doing the same thing at about the same time. "That seems sorta unnecessary. Can't you just...?" He makes a meaningless gesture with one hand.
Starbound Flotilla     George flops through the cube, thumping onto his ass in the middle of a ghostly cube. He lets out a sigh, and then decides to put his cigarette out on one of them. "Ooof. Guh. Well, there you go. That's what those cubes do, I guess." He says. "Well, looks like these are more ghost than we, J." He says. Then he answers Presiking Edison, planting his hands in his pockets and grinning widely. "Well, fuzzy, if I had to guess I'd guess they're one-way switches. You do something on this end to turn them on, and you do something with the rest of this that turns them off. Maybe if you mess up. Since you can't really touch 'em much after you start them, it's gotta be a one-way switch."

    He gestures to Janine. "See, she's approaching this about like would make sense. This stuff kinda reminds me of puzzles from the Cultivators." He looks to Janine's results, seemingly ready to work with them, and sort of wordlessly working with her guidance. If what she did doesn't work, he'll just try pressing each cube some number of times indicated by a wall-number, or converting the wall-numbers to binary and fitting them into the cubes with modulo, or who knows what else, please let's all hope Janine's solution was the right one, because George is being /mathematically silly/.
Thomas Alva Edison     "To be fair, I was talking with The Judge, apparently conversation is dying in the Modern Era as well, " Thomas says as an asside towards Janine.
August Kohler August tests the walls. They're too strong. As Janine's kind of a jerk at him for doing that, August rolls his eyes. "Well excuse me for trying to test how strong they are, Janine!" He's a direct person. And certainly not in the mood for puzzles. But he watches how she moves to handle the puzzle, hoping it works. If it doesn't...

Well, August brings up the mirrored bracelet. If it doesn't work, he's going to attempt to burn through the environment with his Persona, because he doesn't have time for puzzles if three people attempting them can't figure it out. While he's doing so, he talks to the Batter if he comes down.

"So, purifying the world. If that means good things...then I'm all for that. You don't seem like a bad guy. We wouldn't be assigned to you if you were, would we?" A light chuckle from August. Guys, please solve the puzzles.
Gilgamesh      Gilgamesh says nothing to Aoko's commentary, but he says, "It isn't a kingly life because you are not the King. Leave that responsibility to me." at her statement on her own life.

     There's something about the way he says it, but it's gone as she pushes down the door. She mentions the sturdiness of the place, and the King nods slightly. "It is a remarkable amount of effort for what is apparently lived in by a single cat and a mad batter, whatever that is."

     He follows behind her, stepping through the hole and inspecting it as she goes. He casts an apathetic glance to Reyes, then heads over towards the bridge. He's more interested in looking at it than blowing it up, surprisingly.
Reyes     Reyes makes a landing on the bridge, apparently skipping tons of puzzles to land near the distant Red Thing. Whatever it is, it's got to be more interesting than the abundant walls of yellow making up this godforsaken zone... right?

    The telltale rumbling of TROUBLE from Aoko's LASERTUNNELING is met with a simple act of will. A flick of a switch, an injection of power...

    And with a blooming of mystical energies, Reyes is suddenly sheathed in an animate, superimposed... wireframe of transluscent blue armor-plating that takes a vaguely knight-like appearance. Odd indeed when transposed over the power armor he's currently wearing.

    "What's going ON over there?" He'll keep his head down for now, confident that a little alertness and the Armor of Ithan enchantment will keep him safe while he goes to look at the crimson... something or other. EVERYTHING NEEDS A CLOSER LOOK HERE.
Yuuki Kuran Carrying the Garbage Judge around in her arms becomes Yuuki's grand job, as Tina suggests. This is good, yes.

"Well, the Batter is on a sacred mission, and you're the officiator, and the Puppeteer is handling things. This all makes a sort of sense! And so, if we are the Choir, I will take this on the faith it is given in." She replies, having happily fallen into the role of Cat^h^h^h JUDGE wrangler.

"Well, this all seems fine."

Janine goes for the BABY PUZZLE, FOR BABIES solution, while George waits in the wings for MATH SILLINESS.

"Well, maybe if we do this puzzle and I scratch your ears, we'll earn the key?" Yuuki barters, but barters badly.

She starts scratching the Judge's ear without actually WITHHOLDING PAYMENT. She is, as before, That Sort.

"Ah, I know. I've learned to listen, too."

So she uses her STILL-WORKING RADIO to talk to people in another room - another REALM!

"Gilgamesh, if you do the puzzles like an adventurer, then the Judge will give us keys. You'll have to restrain your great power, though, because this place is simple. But, well, everything is easy at the beginning of the story, isn't it?"

Yuuki hasn't read a lot of realistic stories. But then again, Gilgamesh is probably the same sort of person with the same sort of stories as her, but...

With more abs and gold chains. Probably.
Staren     Staren looks between the cubes and the people blasting the wall. It may not /matter/ how this dumb puzzle works. He rolls his eyes at Janine... it can't be that simple, can it?

    Of all people... he agrees with George, when he sees George trying to put binary numbers into the cubes. "Oh, good idea!"
Priscilla     "The other Zones are different." the Batter stoically assures Janine. "They are also full if impure spirits. My sacred mission is to purify each of the Zones." he then says to August. The Judge actually just nods to Tina. "Indeed, rambunctious spectres of the decisively vicious and disorderly sort have become a central part of the current transtemporal zeitgeist. A qualified Purifier and co. would not go amiss in these phantom-plagued times. As much as I believe it to be resoundingly impossible to be rid of impurity for good, dealing with it every now and again is never a bad idea to have, and it the ideal of cleansing it is a noble one to hold to one's variably tangible bosom. You may count on whatever trifling aid I am able to dispense in the capacity as a Judge, if you would find it helpful in your mission."

    The Batter seems unbothered by Janine's insistence he sit through the puzzle solving. In fact, there is a faint air of patiently amused approval about him, almost imperceptible to the point that it might be imagined, as she goes about kicking the cubes in order, as if he had likewise surmised the puzzle's nature as barely more than a litmus test of ordered consciousness, and had been only politely tolerating the delay in someone figuring it out.

    It scarcely needs two of them to do it, never mind as many as there are cubes, but it proves at least that it isn't a fluke of randomly sequenced cube hitting. When they're touched, or even simply 'accessed' via what passes for a metaphorical 'X button' by Zek's standards, and made to become translucent and violently bobbing figments of their former selves in the indicated 1-2-3-4 sequence, the giant blocks at the far end which block the stairs abruptly disappear. Really abruptly. As in they just don't exist, like whatever architect built this place or whatever god created this reality were too lazy or too pressed for time to fill in the actual mechanics of how and why they're related to the cubes and what operates their removal, and had skimped on everything but the basic relation between puzzle completion and progress.

    The floor beneath that is two rows of four cubes and the numbers 1 2 6 8 2 3 painted on the equally featureless wall as the floor above, and given the iota of brainpower displayed by the group so far, that too is trivial in removing identical copypaste cubes from identical copypaste stairs. This continues until they reach the ground floor, which Gilgamesh and Aoko have already forced through. Only the semi-final floor involved multiple iterations like George was thinking of, so no doubt the three rows of three involved something more indirect before they were ignored.

    "Well it would seem that you possess the cognitive capacity for me to verify your existence as individually conscious beings, as opposed to collections of fanciful matter and sounds most convincingly deceiving this unsuspecting cat of their validity through impossibly coincidental patterns of cosmic noise. You've even demonstrated the good judgement of making no attempt to strike an innocent feline for the idea that it might suit your purposes." The grin on that one is a little too wide to be comfortable, despite how adorable Yuuki seems to feel the Judge is in spite of its cryptic strangeness.
Priscilla     Gilgamesh, Aoko, and Reyes, off on their own, advance down the last bridge of land into the ocean of gleaming plastic, and arrive at yet another cube. This one is not only bridge red, but has at least one more touch of detail to distinguish itself: a silver medallion in the center bearing a sequence of dots and lines that at least one of them (possibly all three, given its mystic significance) will recognize as the constellation Leo. Hovering in a spot of 'pathway' yellow tone, it certainly seems to be the only thing out of place here, having its own 'otherworldly' sort of air, but when approached too closely, the cube suddenly spins on its axis, becoming uncooperative to being touched once within arm's reach.

    After a second of spinning, the cube builds up a black sort of aura around it, expanding as if the yellow view surrounding it were being dragged away somehow, and from out of that blackness, it vomits a swarm of what can only be liberally described as 'ghosts'. The flying entities that the square platform suddenly swarms with are little more than white blobs with speech bubble tails, adorned with holes of equal blackness for eyes, and mouths as distinct and believable as ones carved into jack-o-lanterns on all hallows eve; a borderline pencil-sketch representation of some minor apparition of the grave, each barely larger than a human head, flying about in a mad frenzy as they pour out from nowhere in particular.

    The eyeless, bodiless, colourless, weightless blobs of spectral substance turn towards the three on the platform, and fly straight at them. The behaviour is weirdly and pointless, as the spectres pass right through them on contact, but where they swoop into them, they come out the other side along with sporty little splatters of blood, as well as little puffs of battery chemicals and magical energy, ripping small but important quantities of tissue, components, and magic circuits out of their quarries with each pass, now resembling a swarm of feeding piranhas rather than creepy cartoon ghost heads.

    The puzzle group arrives just in time to get a look at it, whereupon the Judge slowly turns his massive head like an animatronic owl in Yuuki's arms. "Right on cue, the consequences of improperly tampering with a transporter manifest themselves as the theatrical flair necessary to make my point. In the other Zones, the risk of hostile individuals attacking you in the most violent manner is quite high. Your sacred mission will likely depend on the art of violent conflict. Pleasantly purify these persistent pests with perfunctory precision, and I will indeed consider the matter settled, and see our pictorial heroes on their way."

    This time, the Batter finally moves without anyone gesturing, asking, or suggesting that he do so. On his own, he metaphorically and literally steps up to bat, advancing along the bridge until he stands alongside the three unfortunates, and tapping his bat on the side of his shoe as if just about to receive a pitch.

    "Okay."

    PURIFICATION IN PROGRESS . . .
Gilgamesh      The constellation gets a glance from Gilgamesh. Despite his apparent brute force attitude, he's quite a smart man, and well-versed in mystic arts. When the ghosts come surging out, however, the King's response is completely unlike any reasonable creature's. He starts laughing as the weird little things tear at his flesh, ripping chunks off him. He's still beautiful even with the damage, and his laughter rings through the area. "At last! Some proper entertainment. Well, mongrels...!"

     The King snaps his fingers. The Gate of Babylon opens - for real this time, not just one little artifact. Swords, axes, spears, daggers, arrows, and other, more bizarre things peek forth from countless ripples in the world. For every ghost there's at least three ripples, maybe more. The laughing King crosses his arms as the deluge begins - a literal waterfall of powerful artifacts flung around like bullets.

     "...entertain me!"
Tina Natsumi      Tina looks quite pleased (and mildly) surprised that trying to convince the Judge to join them actually worked. Yuuki gets a thankful nod at that, and Tina even reaches over to pet the catjudge herself after a moment. "Mighty pleased to have you with us, then. Anythin' you want us to call you besides 'Judge', or is that okay?"

     Sometime later, there's ghost blob! Things. Tina's not sure what they are, but she knows one thing's for sure: It's time to show off! Whipping her smartphone out of her pocket, Tina poses for a selfie as she shouts "Uncle Sam!", calling forth a large robot decked out in guns, flags, setting off fireworks, and all colored red white and blue. It gleams as the Persona-user starts cheering the Janine on, all while the Amerimech starts firing wildly!
Aoko Aozaki     "Another puzzle...?" Aoko says, looking at the cube with the obvious Leo socket, as if demanding some kind of key or obligatory talisman to pass. Then it... glows. And now it's spewing out GHOSTS. That's rather abrupt escalation! And Gilgamesh throws open the doors of his treasury. Aoko is visibly distracted by the golden shimmers of magic, every single weapon a Noble Phantasm. HOW? That's... even to her, that's something.

    Well now. Better not bore the King, at least. Aoko's right elbow lets off a howl like a jet engine as her Magic Circuits fire up at full speed, blue flames gushing out in a wide beam when she punches. It's an incredibly simple spell, but mastered to deliver maximum output for minimum investment.
August Kohler As they solve the puzzles (meaning no fire yet) and arrive in time for a fight, August summons his Persona, the Tin Soldier, appearing in a flash of blue light, a robot soldier in a military dress uniform, which moves to join the battle. "Let's do this, Tin Soldier." As the horrible monsters come out, August gets ready, and the gun-leg on the 'robot' lifts up, moving to spray fire on the swarms. It's a white-hot blast, hopefully using enough sheer heat to burn through them and keep them off the others.

"This is what you're purifying, huh? Yeah, I'm all for this!" August shouts to the group. "Let's purify the world, then."
Staren     Staren slumps when Janine is actually right that it's a baby puzzle. "You gotta be kidding me." He sighs as subsequent puzzles are solved in the same manner, and follows the group to the bridge where...

    "Why are these 'phantoms' here?? Oh, we're no strangers to violent conflict..." With the two small particle beam cannons on his armor's right forearm, he always has weapons close at 'hand'! But will they work on ghosts? He steps to the side, trying to fire around the group, or using flight to shoot over their heads if necessary, at the swarm of ghosts!
Thomas Alva Edison     "Yes, congratulations are in order. We are apparently basic human beings with the basics of rational thought," Edison says, with perhaps a glance towards August. Reguardless, he walks with the group trying to piece together this strange world. Apparently some of the mechanics are working like a videogame...but this stage is... He snaps his fingers. Tutorial level! Thats it...!

    Then ghosts pass through the three on the bridge. Raising an eyebrow as well, people start going nuts. Well, he thinks, and he charges in, hands glowing with electrical energy before he strikes at the creatures, before bringing his hands on either side of him...and releasing a massive beam of RED, WHITE, and BLUE energy!
Zek Zek seems pretty content to fuck around with puzzles. He's also super focused on it, ignoring basically everyone and everything to do it. Weird.

Once they get to the more destructive part of the party, he partly snaps out of it. He's actually only deterred from seeing if he can do something with the whole mess by the presence of the piranha-like swarm streaking around. Zek's spear -- something he's been holding onto since they entered the building -- comes up in a guard position. He watches the swarm for a few seconds, gauging its movements and the positions of his allies.

His Warframe dispenses a metallic sphere into his free hand. Zek flicks it into the middle of the room. A pulse of blue-white light expands outward from the center of it, building a fence-like grid of gently pulsing horizontal and vertical lines that outlines the side of the stasis field bubble. It doesn't do anything to anyone but the phantoms, which it tries to freeze in place for ease of destruction.
Yuuki Kuran Kuran Yuuki is an expert cat-holder, scritching the absurdly cheshire Judge with a sure yet idle hand in the ways that all sure-yet-idle cat-afficianados do. It comes from practice, and also, the tactile autopilot of scritching an animal.

"You see, Judge, I understand that. And perhaps if you were to take each one of us, each one of our joined voices individually, and apart we'd fail some test, but if you wanted to challenge anything..." Yuuki shifts a hand to indicate Gilgamesh, who casually unloads upon the Purification Target with a tremendous, casually dominating power.

"You'll probably not want to call something that is solved by hitting it a challenge or a consequence. That's just the way most of our 'voices' work."

Yuuki dismisses the strange 'target' with a wave of the hand. "George, go ahead and show the Judge our power."
Starbound Flotilla     The moment Yuuki waves her hand, George steps up like she flipped a switch. He yanks out a heavy welder's mask from his matter manipulator and straps it on. He shoves it over his face, though he's painted a smiley face on the front to substitute for his grin. "Probably not a bad idea to do like the Romans when around here in Rome, so," He pulls a welder into one hand and a wrench in the other. "Let's see what purification looks like for you, Innings, and I'll do my best to match."

    He moves in, swinging with the heavy wrench like a club in one hand, and lashing out with blistering white-hot light with the welder in the other. He could bust out his armor and fancy guns, but if the right way to purify around here is to be a Batter, then it stands to reason that calling up his old nature as a capital-E Engineer is a little more fitting to the tone and the nature of things. He'll rush in with high-power industrial melee just as he expects the Batter will. It's a brutal, elegant, stylish, and above all else well-practiced approach, as though he's spent a lot of time dealing with jamming welders directly into head-sized targets before.
Reyes     Reyes is smart enough to not rouch WEIRD obviously magical stuff on a pedestal. Not directly. Not when he has greater powers to work with! For the moment, Gilgamesh and Aoko are ignored - the former with some disgruntledness that can't makeit through his mask of a helmet, the latter...well, she's with HIM.

    Hopefully those two aren't problems right?

    Then, reality barfs GHOSTS at him. "Are you KIDDING me?!" At least he'd already put up his extra layer of shielding! The Armor of Ithan's battered by a swarm. Many 'ghosts' are deflected by the magical shielding projected through a gadget Reyes wears under the Grease Monkey suit... but a few get through. Sparks fly from the power armor as they rip away with bits of it and a horrible intake of breath's gasped over the speakers.

    The problem is that he doesn't really have much in the way of WEAPONS with him. He appeared in this getup...

    "Oh right." With a CLUNK a panel on the suit's leg opens up, and out flies a little metal cylinder with a gleaming array of small gems of varying colors set into one end of it. It rather looks like a --

    *FZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZAAAATCH!*

    -- Energy saber, if that energy saber was made purely out of sizzling, controlled lightning. The electrified blade sizzles and crackles at the air but seems to maintain cohesion around a twisting serpentine core of white-blue ELECTRIC DEATH.

    Reyes attempts to use this to batter away more of the ghosts as they swarm at him, while reaching out with Telekinesis... because if he can GRAB THAT MEDAL and get away from the cube and the ghosts, he totally will.
Priscilla     The swarm of ghostyheads is immediately splattered by the Gate of Babylon. There's absolutely no way they can stand up in the face of being blasted without about a trillion superpowered magical weapons of legend. The instant the storm of swords and axes and spears makes the slightest contact with the vicious piranha-ghost-things, they crumple like a wad of wet paper, splatting against the yellow earth with much the same sound. Half a dozen of them are swatted out of the air, burning on their way down, by a single swing from Aoko, even just from being close to her flaming fist. They're ripped in two like cotton fabric where Reyes swings his saber through them, hardly a challenge for any of them involved.

    It might be easy to miss in the middle of all the commotion, given their sheer number, but a short while after taking obviously fatal damage, the squashed, burnt, and bisected spectres start to reassert their forms, their tattered white pieces coagulating together again into a rumpled, burnt, ripped, or otherwise imperfect whole, but one good enough to wobble back off the ground again and lurch at the Elites all over again. Struck down a second time, they straighten themselves back out like smoothing out crumpled paper on a flat surface, and rejoin the fight. A third time, and it becomes obvious that not all of the damage seems to 'stick'; they get up over and over again, distinctly worse for wear each time, but relentless in their assault.

    The Batter steps up to plate.

The Batter uses Wide Angle

NAME: Proto-Spectres
Insubstantial spectre-predecessors that are created by improper use of a Transporter.
No weaknesses or resistances.

NAME: Gilgamesh
CLASS: King
STATUS: Pure

NAME: Yuuki Kuran
CLASS: Pardoner
STATUS: Pure

NAME: Thomas Alva Edison
CLASS: Reformer
STATUS: Pure

NAME: Staren
CLASS: Crusader
STATUS: Pure

NAME: August Kohler
CLASS: Inquisitor
STATUS: Pure

NAME: Reyes
CLASS: Alchemist
STATUS: Pure

NAME: Janine Liberi
CLASS: Serpent
STATUS: Pure

NAME: Zek
CLASS: Traitor
STATUS: Pure

NAME: Aoko Aozaki
CLASS: Archangel
STATUS: Pure

NAME: Tina Natsumi
CLASS: Missionary
STATUS: Pure

NAME: "George"
CLASS: Stigmatic
STATUS: Pure

NAME: The Batter
CLASS: Saviour
STATUS: Pure
Priscilla     Wading right into the flat out storm of flying Noble Phantasms, actual Magic, and assorted other attacks joining in, the Batter somehow gets right into the middle of the fray without being hit as if he weren't even trying, taking a literal batting stance in the middle, and starts swinging away with his wooden bat at the vicious proto-spectres. Each time the bat connects, it does so with an incredibly loud, satisfying, wood-tinted *thwack*, and expels a huge quantity of bright red blood from each target, splattering scarlet gore from each facsimile of a ghost all over the ground, painting the yellow platform startlingly violent red. The ones killed with his bat drop dead and *stay* dead, slowly losing tangibility and fading away, very quickly answering what his purpose in all of this is, outside of his apparently unnervingly fearsome ability to beat things to death with a sporting tool. Canny combatants will notice that he is intentionally focusing his efforts on those already 'killed' by other Elites, eliminating the wounded in a single hit, one after the other, batting one thousand as if stood in the cage and completely in the zone.

PURIFICATION IN PROGRESS . . .

    "I am impressed by your shameless displays of hypercompetent forceful disassembly of any entity that so displeases you." says the Judge, quite relaxed. "Nonetheless, you should be aware by now that violence alone is no substitute for a proper and thorough Purification. To proceed in your mission, you will have to Purify each foe that possesses ill-enough fortune to cross your path, or else you'll make little progress at all. Just as the Batter requires you to overcome the insurmountable odds most impolitely placed in his righteous path, you will require the aid of a Purification specialist to see your goal to its satisfactory end. If you are able to provide guidance, strategy, support, a cooperative spirit, and a critical eye in matters both cerebral and murderous, you will find your way eased quite considerably, but be on the lookout for means of increasing your Purification efficiency that may crop up along the long and obtusely serpentine road of fate you intend to trudge along all the same."

    Caught in Zek's stasis field, things could hardly be easier. Twin Personas join the frenzy as fire support, blasting proto-spectres out of the air with whistling hails of bullets and howling torrents of fire. Particle beams pick them out of the air like shooting targets at the range, causing them to burst like popped bubbles. Electricity arcs from ravenous apparition to ravenous apparition, blowing them out just like chains of overloaded lightbulbs. Even when George jumps into the middle of it and starts swinging his wrench and torch like a murder engineer ballet, the Batter seems to have no difficulty somehow always not being in the way, and the proto-spectres die by the scores. Their obtusely tranquil and level-headed companion in black and white stripes lethally splatters each ghost in order of their 'death', batting the uninjured ones away from himself to keep up an ongoing conveyor belt of 'Purifying' the spectres that have been mortally wounded by the Choir.

    There's still plenty of them left, though. Just as the others join, they are soon assailed by more of the wide-mouthed, empty-eyed spectral swarm predators, swooping in on them like a tide, washing through them to bite and tear out bits of their vital essence, fluids, and components, adding to the general high fidelity carnage all over the previously peacefully boring and minimalist landscape.
Janine Liberi     Fire and lasers burn, wind buffers and blows strike home. And yet, among the carnage, the Batter is the only one making them bleed and die for good. Making them bleed /a lot/ honestly. Enough that Janine can't help but make a face. But the course becomes clear. The Judge comments on finding other ways to 'purify' them, but right now, they have one reliable method just sitting right there with a perfect batting record.

    "Batter! 4 o'clock!" Janine shouts before manifesting her Persona, this time directly behind a spirit that is slightly behind and to the right of the purifier. It conjures a gust of wind, launching it directly towards the stoic figure, Janine banking on him to turn and 'knock it out of the park.'

    "8 o'clock! 2 o'clock! 6 o'clock!" Janine rattles off, each shout followed by a spirit being fastballed towards the Batter.
Aoko Aozaki     The first time, Aoko had been surprised, and the ghosts had managed to draw blood and even some magic out of Aoko. They'd have found her a rather poor snack, magically - it seems despite the amount of magic she's hurling around, her body barely stores any. It still hurt, though! The second time, she was actually ready for it, and only allowed the beasts to clip her as she dived to the side.

    "Means to increase our Purification ability? Like what?" she asks the Judge.

    It might be important to know WHAT to look for.

    For the time being, though, it's time to knock these things towards the Batter. Blue wisps of light form around Aoko, and with a simple "Fire!" the half a dozen sparkling blue dots shoot across the bridge towards a handful of the ghosts. They're grenades! Grenades intentionally putting the ghosts between themselves and the Batter, to send the ghosts flying straight at him.
Thomas Alva Edison     Well, it appears that there is only one among them that can actually fight this enemy. Taking a thinking moment, while he can hurt them, they can not kill them. These things, which terrorize the world around them. He does, however, have a plan...both to ascertain the true nature of these creatures, but to also provide their ally some aid in his quest.

    Around him, magic flows as he prepares his power...before the lights turn out.

    When they turn back on, Edison is standing on a new sign.

        EDI
        SON
20th Century Ghost Buster

    Suddenly a spotlight is on the ghosts, but also The Batter himself, as the light shines brightly down, The Batter will feel EMPOWERED to do his job...and the ghosts will feel morality's bane upon them from everyone else.
August Kohler So, the group can't kill the monsters. Not permanently. But the Batter can. They take them out, the Batter purifies them...it all makes enough sense to August. As the monsters come at the Tin Soldier, tearing into its metal and causing both it and August great pain, the Tin Soldier throws punches, smashing into the creatures with superhuman form and moving to knock them back. Those it 'kills', it grabs, and throws in the Batter's direction.

"Batter up!"

If the creatures aren't entirely almost-dead mid-flight, though, the Tin Soldier raises its gun-leg and fires psychic bullets to take them out in mid-flight so that the Batter can interact with them.
Gilgamesh      Oh, so this, too, is a puzzle. The King barely tilts his head enough to notice; the Gate of Babylon continues to pour its unrelenting rain into the world. He leans his head back slightly, and the Gate, by nothing more than his will, starts directing the ghosts into ridiculous pinball situations, bouncing them off multiple legendary blades before sending them flying towards the Batter. The King doesn't bother to give heads-up. He just trusts the Batter's capacity to do his job properly.
Zek "The ticket," Zek tells Aoko suddenly, in lieu of Judge advice. "Treasure. It's meant for him."

The Bastille can't hold all of them. It slows and stops quite a few, but even more get through, swooping in at Zek's Warframe. He skips backwards in a quick motion that seems somehow floaty, skating briefly across the ground in a sudden sidestep that makes the ghost-things glance across his body instead of hitting him head-on. Flashes of cyan alight across the points of contact. The shield holds, but it doesn't totally prevent them from ripping at the surface beneath.

Zek responds with his own batting. He channels energy into his polearm, whirling the weapon in both hands and swatting at the ghosts. He sends them flying towards the Batter, intending on lining them up and sending them cleanly across the plate. Or whatever the appropriate sports metaphor is in this circumstance. Zek only knows about the 'blood' kind.
Staren     Staren thinks Zek has the right idea -- trapping the ghosts so the Batter's job is even /easier/! He grunts as some of them fly through him, though -- the damage isn't much but it seems they can go right through his armor, irritatedly. Like some sort of %HP attack. And for some reason, they phase through /him/ but not his /attacks/. Curiouser, but something he can exploit!

    Which is what Staren aims to do: He starts firing foam missiles and tossing flasks that explode into fast-growing vines into the swarm of ghosts where Zek hasn't already got them contained, trying to set up easy chances for the Batter to hit whole swathes at once!
Starbound Flotilla     George suffers a pretty hefty bite, before he manages to jam a crowbar in that maw and clear it out so he has less to deal with. Lot of blood there. "Guh. So much for purity. How're you wearing white around here, man? You've got a whole lot of guts or nothing resembling guts, Bats." George calls out, wincing and grunting from pain. He jams the welder into its mouth, blasts as hard as it can blast, and then pulls away, cauterizing his own wounds as fast as he can with the welder.

    "This is super unhygienic. Do you know how unhealthy a mouth is? It's /full/ of germs. Is that what purification is about? Should I be washing my hands more?" George rambles. He cranks his wrench wide, then swings hard, intent on clamping the heads of these things. His hope is to render them immobile for easy head-crushing from the Batter, just like what Staren and Zek are doing in their own ways. He's a good striker, but he is far more of a grappler for very good reasons, and seems to have some experience in using oversized wrenches for just such a purpose, among his various wrestling skills.
Yuuki Kuran George is a whirlwind of forceful application of brainy brawn. He is highlit, in his whirlwind attack and battle prowess at Doing As The Romans Do.

Kuran Yuuki is quite pleased with this, and is holding a cat, and those two things together abate her terrible bloodthirst. That, and George really is doing a great job.

"Oh, now I understand, I think. It'd be too easy for the Choir to just 'do everything', but that's not really our role, is it? I guess we sare rowdy..."

A small, knowing smile spreads across Yuuki's face as her nose dips under the puffed collar of her snow coat. It's very much an 'aren't I a dumbshit' smile, a self-owned sort. "I'm sorry, Judge. I guess I'm used to being the main character, even when trying to help others. It's a failing. Just another bit of aid on the Batter's sacred mission. Purification..."

"'There are things he cannot do, that we can. There are things we cannot do, that he can.'" Yuuki repeats. The sprays of crimson gore are attention grabbing, as are the Batter's predilctions to sure 'Home Runs' of coup de grace'ing downed enemies.

For her part, Yuuki doesn't do anything fancy like attempting direct feeding, but more simply expands her 'power', the almost invisible force of kinetic pressure bearing down on the various ghost spectres to hold them, slow them, bear them down for others to maneuver, or the Batter to take his mighty swings upon.
Reyes     "Purification..." Reyes isn't so sure that word really applies here. What exactly are they purifying? Of what? These ghosts?! Ghosts... are they even that?!

    Because the Batter's SMASHING BLOOD OUT OF THEM. Ghosts don't bleed... right?!

    "None of this makes sense. Guess I'll have to learn the rules of this wacky place to accomplish anything." Even though he's not so sure what there is to accomplish.

    Reyes activates his magic rockets and LOOKS up and around the conniving and disturbingly resilient ghost-amalgam.

    While it's true that he only has the sword on him at the moment, it's not as if he truly NEEDS a weapon to manage things. The thrusters of the Grease Monkey engage to hold him steady above the battlefield and...

    And the armor-clad man begins to chant and gesture slowly and carefully. It's CLEARLY casting a spell... although, in power armor. Not a terribly great idea. Not even remotely typical. But blueish energies congeal as he focuses. It's a slow effort - he's clearly not used to just casting a spell raw like this. Let alone in the armor...

    And yet, after about ten seconds of this awkward magery, he aims down...

    And unleashes a brilliant forked bolt of LIGHTNING MAYHEM.It dances from downed foe to downed foe and also through the ranks of the active ones!
Priscilla     "The most dependably true-blue companions in speeding your progress will unquestionably take the form of whatever phenomena our dear Batter is able to make use of, as a being without physical order like your own." says the Judge. "Perhaps additional accomplices capable of Purification may wish to battle at your side for whatever inscrutable reasons that minds unhinged in ways similar to your own might possess. I've heard tell of stranger things still! Without a doubt you will recognize anything of such consequence long before I would be able to so crudely tell you so with mere spoken words! The Choir should have a natural sense for things related to Purification."

    With the situation a little cleared, teamwork naturally emerges. The pile of extremely skilled combat-capable Elites take on a role of dedicated crowd control, wounding, redirecting, and setting up clusters of ghosts to be mown down by the hardwood bat of the reaper. Bounced from blades and poles, caught in winds and flames, propelled by bullets and beams, launched by explosions and wrench blows, caught in vines and kinetic vices, proto-spectres go flying in droves to meet their maker. Empowered under Edison's spotlight, the Batter is an absolute machine, swinging away with speed and power far beyond human limits, becoming an uncanny caricature of a mythical pro-baseball player in fast forward, blasting exploding-watermelon sprays of gore here and there without the slightest hint of care on his face, looking on as if politely listening to a sermon on Sunday.

    The mayhem is absolute, uncanny for its noise and violence juxtaposed with its selective surreality and nonsense aesthetic, but easily reminding you of being very real by the very rear wounds that the careless suffer for their lapse in attention. With that concentrated effort on the incursion of proto-spectres, however, they didn't stand a chance from the beginning.
Priscilla PURIFICATION COMPLETE

    "Impeccable. Your mastery of battle borders on brilliancy my dear. But there is one thing we have not yet addressed." the Judge says, finally wiggling his way out of Yuuki's arms as cats have a way of doing. He struts through the field of absolute carnage laid across the formerly yellow --now bright red-- platform, padding without concern across thick layers of disturbingly vivid and real blood, contrasting the vague and insubstantial world it's liberally painted all over. Arriving at the red cube, the Judge sits down and begins licking his paw, still somehow talking at the same time.

    "Here is an accessory that is going to be especially helpful to your purifying quest, dear enlightened students and sportive friend. It is a cube, hovering in midair, as you have likely noticed. Nevertheless, you will be able to differentiate it from similar ones by the contrast of bad taste it imposes on your view of its clashing colour, defying any sensible course of plastic arts. However, do not just it too quickly, because despite its criticizable appearance, this red cube is of undeniable use. Aside from rendering you the entirety of your good health and honest exertions, it is capable of sending you to the Nothingness."

    "The Nothingness is a lieu of transition outside of space itself, where you can travel from one point to another at the speed of light. I now invite you to try it out, in order to discover locations more populous than this deserted land. Open your wings, my dear companions, and hurry away towards the following Zones without hesitation! Your only enemy is the fear that will grab you."

    "Okay." says the batter again, lowering his bat to tap against his shoe once more. Somehow, there is not a speck of blood on his pastiche of a white uniform. "Thank you." he adds, after a moment's thought, towards you all.

    Yuuki will look down to find that in her arms, vacated by the cryptic cat, she now holds a sort of keycard, patterned with a Lion's head. The relation of the Leo Card to the Transporter cube is obvious, and goes without saying.

    "Be on your way now, and I will see you again soon!" says the Judge. "Or more accurately, in no time at all. The meandering thread of one linear event to the other here is far different than how one perceives the laughable face of time we delude ourselves into believing when out in the Nothing. Take a breather!"
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki had engaged in a vice-like grip of ineffable dramatic Normal Girl holding a cat-ness before, but with battle happening, it's inevitable that the Judge, who is also a cat, could slip free. Indeed, it was supposed to be: it was inconvenient to fight while holding a cat, and so as soon as it was convenient again, the Judge had nothing to do with it that shit and escaped posthaste, as Cats do.

But Yuuki has a ZODIAC CARD, and so dutifully raises the card to peer at it, before shrugging.

"Well, you said you'd give us the key once we proved ourselves, so..."

Yuuki dutifully RUBS KEY ON TRANSPORTER.

Her KEY ITEM HOLDING duties discharged, Yuuki smiles at the batter, before crouching down to poke at the blood. It's definitely blood!

A finger wicks some, the same as she did when inspecting the Plastic 'water'. She hears it, sees it, touches it, smells it, and even pops the finger in her mouth to taste it.

"Mmm. Still can't figure out what kind of blood this is. It's disappointingly empty, really."

She stands up, in that same torso-then-legs way, giving her knees a dusting as the puff of her snow coat's bottom hem drips gore, and her bright red eyes twinkle thoughtfully. "Well, you're welcome, Batter. Onward and upward, I suppose! I hope everyone's good with puzzles."
Thomas Alva Edison     Edison looks towards the Batter, "So I have a question. How is it that your bat is able to kill the ghosts, and we are not?" He asks simply. Edison, rather he gets a answer to his question, considers both the Golden King, and August. This is going to be a very long long trip. He can already feel it...but at least ONE of these people acts with consistancy as far as he is concerned. Still...

    "Well, my feline friend, I hope to see you in the future, hopefully, on good terms as this time." he says to the Judge.
Janine Liberi     Janine inspects the absolutely pristine spot of floor around where the Batter stood, an island amidst the sea of blood created by his perfect batting. "Christ Almighty, not a drop on him," she remarks, putting her sword away and lifting the hem of her dress to wade through it all.

    "I still don't know what's going on with you and the puppeteer," she says to the Batter, frowning. "But you certainly pull your weight, so I'll cover you. And puppeteer, since you can apparently see and hear us, if you fuck with us, I'll track you down and choke you with your own strings."

    And then, as if she hadn't just issued a death threat, she says to the Judge, "Thanks Cheshire. You gonna be stuck here by giving that to us, or do you got a spare?"
Aoko Aozaki     Ghost status: PURIFIED.
    Whether that's fundamentally different from DEAD is something Aoko would like to figure out, sometime. The difference between dead and purified might be very important! Or it might be meaningless and just a matter of saving time. Something to consider. Something to test! For SCIENCE. Reckless, magical science.

    Aoko turns to Gilgamesh, contemplative. "Hey, do you still have that ticket we found in the... cube?" She wanted to say chest. "I think it might be useful for the Batter, but I'd understand not wanting to part with your treasure for free!"
August Kohler As the Batter obliterates the swarm, August is in awe, and also covered in some blood from the purification. As the group gets the keycard, Yuuki Kuran using it on the teleporter, August glances to the Judge, nodding, and then glances to Edison, frowning. He's frustrated...but he moves over to the Presiking to say something. This mission is important enough for the group to have gotten teleported for it.

"Look. You don't like me. I respect you for who you are, but I don't think I like you, either. But we're part of the Choir. Our overall methods and life-goals may be different, but we don't have to jab at each other constantly when we're trying to work together, now, do we?" The 'I respect you' is emphasized, before August moves over to the teleporter. "Mr. Edison, let's just try and help the Batter purify this world, alright?"

And then, if the teleporter works...well, August is gonna take it, of course.
Thomas Alva Edison     Edison looks towards August as he speaks to him. "You are right, Mr. Kohler. We should act with professionalism to each other, and for that I appologize. We do not have to like each other, but we should work together. As for...the goal...Mr. Kohler. The problem I have with you steams from your words now. Do not simply fall through with a goal singlemindedly...but watch. Listen. Observe...think. Make a decision with as much as you can, but do not be...like others and wait for all of it. There is a middle ground between impulsive behavior, and acting informed."
Gilgamesh      Aoko asks him for his ticket. The King of Heroes considers this for a long moment. It is, in fact, the treasure from this world. It is an interesting and worthwhile gewgaw that, despite being of no use to him, is clearly of value. The King does not, ever, part with treasures once collected - *certainly* not for free.

     She has nothing to her name.

     So Gilgamesh simply sweeps in and steals a kiss from the red-haired Magician. It's a pretty damn good one, too. He's not kidding about mastering all the pleasures of the world.

     He steps back and snaps his fingers and the ticket falls into the Batter's hands out of thin air. Then he heads for the teleporter.

     "The look on your face," Gilgamesh says over his shoulder, surprisingly playfully, "Was compensation enough. Savor the memory."
Staren     Staren might get blood all over his armor, but eh, that's normal. He'll scan it later to see just what's IN ghost blood, anyway. "Sometimes worlds are just weird. ...Not usually this weird, though." Staren offers, to Reyes, and waits for Yuuki to unlock the FAST TRAVEL CUBE so he can see if... somewhere more connected to the Multiverse is one of the destination choices.
Aoko Aozaki     !

    Aoko isn't someone who startles easily, and certainly not someone who flusters easily, but it wouldn't be a lie to say of the many things she's gotten used to, love in any form isn't one of them. Not for a very long time, at any rate! There was a guy, in her teenage years, but...

    Well, all that to say, she is nearly as red as her hair and quite shocked for a moment, but once that passes she's not exactly repulsed by it either.

    Who can say they kissed the Gilgamesh of legend, really?
    Something to put on her resume.

    "I... sure, sure, I think I'll do that," she answers the King, before looking at the Batter.

    "I think that might be important so don't... use it right away. Save it for a tough spot!"
Starbound Flotilla     George finishes up, stretching and working some bandages around his arms. "Ugh. What a mess." He gives a quick thumbs-up to the Batter. "Us old-timers gotta help each other out. Or, uh, I guess you're young. Sure do seem like a proper old soul though." He steps to the cube, and leans while Yuuki authenticates them.

    He's taking another smoke break, one he seems to sorely need, and seems to be a little less wounded-acting when he's partway through the hospital-smelling cigarette. It's where he relaxes to watch August. An eyebrow goes up, and he seems... Like he's made an opinion, though there's no clarity on what, exactly. He's gonna stay here and then head into the Nothing when Yuuki finishes what she's doing.
Priscilla     "Indeed I did, and so it is so." the Judge says to Yuuki. The Leo Card, when touched to the silver medallion, makes all the stars of the constellation Leo light up, and causes the cube to expand by breaking slightly at the seams, revealing slivers of glowing white light within.

    The Batter looks to Edison with a moment's pause for thought, before replying: "Probably because I'm the Batter. Impurity can't be cleansed with violence. Only a completely pure spirit can cleanse an impure one." He leaves it at that. How the ritual of Purification differs from 'violence' when it involves startlingly graphic baseball bat murder must be academic.

    Another pause after being spoken to by Janine. "She's fine with that." he says. The Judge only laughs at her question. "Of course my dear! As you have correctly identified me as the proverbial Cheshire Cat in this disappointing vision of Wonderland of yours, I can go wherever I please, whenever I please, never you mind how and when and if it should be possible."

    The Luck Ticket is given to the Batter, who accepts it with a solemn nod, stowing it in his breast pocket like the stadium seat ticket it now immediately resembles to anyone who has ever been to a baseball game. The Judge wasn't kidding. It's instinctively obvious now. "Of course. I can trust you to see the mission through." The Batter says, with an uncanny amount of absolute certainty towards George.
Priscilla     Those eventually laying hands on the cube find that both subsequent claims of the Judge's were equally absolutely true. A sudden, fleeting spark of ineffable and indescribable energy flicks through them, like a jolt of static or a skip in a television programme that briefly renders their world in shades of black and white; it is as ameliorating as it is disorienting, as they find that before they've regained the ability to notice, all of their wounds are gone. Holding contact with the Transporter cube for a bit longer sees the energy return with a loud, phony-sounding hum, and a sudden wave of bright white light washing up from their feet to just up over their head, disapparating them in a circular ring of ascending radiance. They disappear from Zone 0 instantaneously, with no sense of inertia or travel either physical or mental.

    They're surrounded by nothingness. The Nothingness, most likely. There is indeed nothing around them. There is a point of white light that vanishes rapidly behind them, but it seems to pull away on its own, rather than their making any effort to leave it. Out in the depths of the blackness, without even the ringing in their ears to keep them company, they briefly lose all use of the radios, perfectly functional until now. The sound is replaced by the nearly imperceptible babble of countless whispering voices, so quiet as to be impossible to hear were there anything else to listen to, and so numerous as to be incomprehensible over one another, with only the odd broken word or two popping into focus from a variety of different foreign languages. For whatever of the reason, many of the voices are telling the others to be quiet, or audibly shushing one another, as if they know that you're listening.

    It's no Warpgate, but thinking about the Multiverse does work. In fact, without sound or ceremony, it drops one right where they were before they left, not even dropping them out of the sky or having them step through a door, but suddenly just *being* exactly where they left off, with no evidence they hadn't just imagined it all, except a dozen corroborating stories from their fellows, like a uniquely shared hallucination.