Scene #6306: Arctic Warp

Owner	Pose
Zwei	The particular chunk of frozen landmass has either persisted for uncommonly long in the Soft Expanse, or the strange nature of the Soft Expanse has trapped it as it was. Despite what amounts to an island-sized glacier at mile or two deep being essentially 'suspended' in the silvering blur, it's storming out --still. The wind is fierce and deafening, the temperature is sixty below, the sweeping hail is fast and hard enough to draw blood from normal exposed skin, and all there is to see by more than twenty feet away is the trail of coloured lamps on poles, stabbed into the ice at thirty foot intervals. The outpost itself is a squat, squarish affair with angled corners and a flat roof, mostly comprised of very heavy, drab grey metals and surrounded by the ruined remains of a buffer tarp, a communications dish long since frozen solid at its top, dark and inactive. Steel crates of packed supplies have been half-buried under the shifting snow drifts, piled so high as to make certain doors only visible by their fogged over inset windows. For whatever reasons however, warm light spills from the tiny porthole windows, spilling circles of amber glow into the dark and the snow. The inside is basically as it was left before, for the most part. Ice core samples many meters tall line a still-powered freezer, though the basement generator, running on uranium, is apparently almost out of juice. The barracks are empty, the chemistry lab vacant and immaculate, and old bloodstains decorate the walls and floors in certain rooms, removed from several places where black, carbonized impressions of footprints or slumped bodies can be found neatly stenciled instead. Even the computers are still on, pinging around outdated screensavers on old monitors. The main difference is that all the doors are unlocked again, a blood-caked keycard still jammed in a lock and stuck there, with wet, slushy footprints leading into the freezer, then back out again. Though the impressions in the snow outside have filled in almost completely, they're blatantly leading to the mysterious tunnel found in the side of a raised chunk of the glacier, as if someone had been inside for months already, found their way out, braved the storm to come here, and then just went right back. The power station there and elaborate assembly to charge up the opening mechanism for a gate of some unknown, brass-green mineral has been . . . modified. Not by Zwei either; it's far too ramshackle and cobbled together, with huge plugs jammed into converters jammed into converters, and chunks of some crystalline fuel jammed into modified battery slots. The equipment is already heavily burned and damaged from being used repeatedly in a way it wasn't meant to, but the little power and monitoring station just outside, under its still-intact tent roof, was already a hackjob to begin with. The inside leads back down a set of ancient-looking stone steps, to an oddly oblong hub room of mysterious greened metal that somehow feels like one is at the bottom of a deep pool or tub no matter where they stand, with the construction of it always sloping up and away from them. Pipes carrying what can only be described as liquid night sky have ruptured in two halls, filling it with a disorienting mass of black and stars that feels as if one is upside down and staring through a hole in the ceiling. The remaining entrance leads much deeper down, but there are no more wet footprints there to provide direction.
Septette Arcubielle	True to her word, Septette arrives sans coat- but she does have a sporty cherry-red scarf and some earmuffs to complement her traditional shawl, for all the good they'll do her. Absent necessity, seasonally-appropriate attire is enforced by a sort of polite decorum. As she trudges towards the peculiar ice-cave, one of her drones splits off to search through the abandoned outpost, quickly discovering the obvious: lights on, power low, blood-caked keycard in the lock. The much-abused generator draws a passing glance from her, but the gate of unidentified metal garners more attention: she tests it with her fingers, trying to bend or scratch the metal to get an idea of its properties, and breaking off a small piece for later study if at all possible. Proceeding to the oblong hub room, she tests the metaphorical waters, dipping one finger into the starry liquid in one of the halls. If it still hyper-ages objects, she ought to be essentially safe- but with materials like this, it pays to make sure.
Haguro	There haven't been many exploration opportunities for Haguro recently, so this sounds like it could be a nice change pace. As nice as something involving numerous hazards likely to result in death could sound, anyway, but being among people that don't want her dead on sight /is/ rather refreshing. She doesn't look quite at full capacity today, though, between her arms being taped up and a bandage wrapped around her waist, but she's still moving about like nothing's wrong! Mostly. The stupidly cold wind has Haguro shivering even with the coat she's brought along, and even having her skin turned white since changing doesn't mask the discomfort. She learns to ignore it (for the most part) as she heads towards the outpost, stopping at the raised part of the glacier and taking note the appearance of someone else being here. She takes a picture of that, of course, as well as the big oblong room and the liquid sky pipes. "That's a nasty spill.. Be careful." She warns Septette while peeking at the liquid, then starts trying to follow the pipes as best she can without having to actually step in the stuff. If there's a split, she'll go whatever looks like it's going deeper! Or to the left of where she's facing. Always left.
Arthur Lowell	Arthur's Gated his way here. His fast-travel still works, it seems. He's long wandered in, though he keeps the Gate available for those who are so inclined to use it. "So," Arthur starts speaking, staring into the inky night sky on the surface. "Normally, I'd just, you know, DIVE UP IN THAT SHIT. On account of it's obviously SPACE and I'm the SPACE GUY." He then cocks his head back and looks to Septette. "But apparently it's actually LIQUID TIME, on account of, you know, SPACE and TIME. And, you know, I'm not exactly bad about DECAY, but also TIME is kinda my ANTI-THING, it's my OPPOSED ASPECT. So, let's get this shit straight FIGURED." Pipes! Pipes are a relevant thing. Whoever was piping refined time through them must have worried about a burst one day. Was a drain installed? Something that can be reactivated? He scours around the available area, searching for any drains that might be above-"water", and seeing if there's any way to activate them. But... this main room, he stopped here before, to revive Zwei. And someone else was here. There's gotta be more relevant further down. If he can't drain more paths, he's going to follow the only one that a visitor could have followed. "YO! Anyone down here? Gettin' that ADVENTURE?" He calls out, sweeping a tiny star around to use like a tiny flashlight, just to make sure he can see the inky night sky before he touches it on accident.
Staren	Staren shows up with his robot body. That's... partial defense against freezing to death, melting to death, eyes bleeding, and probably protection against xenomorphs living inside him. Right? Not that he wants to spend too much time outside. So, the main unexplored thing is the area covered by the... starfluid. "Well, there's some kind of piping equipment here... can we pump it back where it came from? Where'd it COME from, anyway?" Staren starts trying to track the pipes, then... "Wait. Why hasn't it destroyed the pipes from the inside? Are the pipes made of something special, or...?" He sends a drone to go look closely at the breaks in the pipes. And, if the downstream pipeline is empty, to fly down the pipeline and see where it was SUPPOSED to be sending the starfluid. And while the drones do that, he can follow Arthur along the un-flooded route, to see if it's possible to find where the pipes come from/go to from the outside.
Reyes	It is a very good idea that Reyes has once again chosen to wear his ENVIRONMENTAL BATTLE ARMOR. The freakish cold is straining its systems, but the ice just bounces off the ceramic armor. Visibility, however, is poor. His progress through the freezing wasteland is slow and cantankerous... But by flying low and carefully, he eventually reaches the outpost and quickly heads inside for shelter from the storming weather. "What a place to put ANYTHING..." Since he hasn't been here before, just taking in the sights to start with is all he can really do. "Might be able to salvage some data from this, even if the computers are damaged..." He just has to find those. And they're the first thing he goes hunting for. Any kind of terminal, no matter how damaged.
Zwei	The material Septette presses at, as much as her microsenses can determine, feels like it could be metal or stone either; it must have some really non-standard molecular lattice. It is also extremely hard and inflexible, so much that scratching it is, for her, like cutting a flat, squared diamond with a diamond-tipped drill --that is to say, meticulous and slow work. One could fling any softer material at it at absurd velocity and the weaker would smash to pieces. Kind of completely unnecessary for a buried structure, by definition surrounded by tons of other material to handle impacts, though its odd carvings seem to have some kind of intangible, perhaps decorative, significance anyways. Septette dips her knife fingers into the glittering space liquid, and . . . finds it sort of syrupy and slippery, like liquid latex. Nothing actually happens to her imperishable skeleton, long stripped bare of its outer facade. Haguro turns left following the pipes, and quickly finds that all three corridors slant deeper, meaning that partway into the passage, it is completely filled top to bottom with the mostly opaque substance, necessitating going under if she wants to continue. Arthur gets no response to his exceptionally outgoing calls --only his own reflection echoing back at him, over and over and over again, an unnatural number of times. His search for drainage initially appears to be fruitless, as the fluid densely fills the passages it spills from, only level for the fact that the ruptured pipes themselves have been submerged. When he pulls out his little star though, the starlight shines through the substance and renders it semitransparent, leaving one able to make out dim and grey-tinted shapes beneath the surface and the twinkling lights suspended in it. He can make out that the doors at the bottom are actually sealed shut; they're an obnoxious obstruction, but that means the spill would be limited to the corridor itself, and the rooms beyond should be 'dry'. As far as Staren can tell, the pipes were meant to be sending it down, not pumping it up against gravity, so that verifies it hasn't bubbled up from below. If the drone touches it, it loses power immediately, falls in, and corrodes to nothing in minutes. Other than 'the next chambers', it's impossible to tell where they go, weaving in and out of the walls like braids of cable. Reyes lingering back at the outpost boots up the computers and finds them already pre-cracked, with full access to everything. He gets a tedious volume of exhaustive and pretty boring reports on climate measurements, weather patterns, ice formations, layers and layers of composition from drilling deep down, studying them for climate history in the arctic and the temperature and composition of the oceans over millions of years, but also discovering new and exciting microbial and simple life found preserved in the deeper layers. There are microbial and biological analysis reports, then some stuff about disease spreading in the personnel roster, a storm preventing medical rescue from arriving for days, and then no more reports.
Staren	Alright then. They'll have to follow the pipes... but Arthur has another idea, and it's one Staren probably shouldn't try to do anything else while Arthur flips stuff. So... he holds on tight while Arthur does the flips.
Septette Arcubielle	In anxious anticipation of Arthur's gravity-inversion, Septette tosses her clothes aside, dives beneath the surface of the starry liquid, and starts feeling her way along with every limb and protrusion she can deploy. Wherever she finds a ruptured pipe, she seals it by stuffing one of her little drones into the hole and magically welding it into watertight shape: they're just as timeless as she is, and considerably more numerous. It feels, on reflection, a tad bit blasphemous to use pieces of advanced magitech as glorified corks. Septette makes a silent promise to go back and retrieve them later, so they can be properly expended in battle.
Arthur Lowell	Arthur confers with folks on the radio, consulting with Staren, Septette, and other sources. After a while, he devises a plan, making sure to make it sound as dumb as possible. "ALRIGHT, who here's ready to get TURNT!" He shouts, flicking a broom out of his STRIFE DECK and twirling it dramatically. "Everyone find something to GRAB!" He shouts. "We going INVERSE!" He plants the broom hard on the ground, bristles first. There's a sound like something just locked in place, like he put the lever into a giant machine. The broom is even at a slight angle! "HELLLLLLL... YEAH!!" He shouts, cranking the lever hard. With luck, this will completely invert all gravity in the interior of the structure, as well as flipping the entryway's spatial orientation for consistency. If it works, he'll be able to hang onto the broom while the fluid drains out of the tunnels, hopefully into a pool on the ceiling, clearing the way so they can get to the doors. Mostly. He and his allies will need to navigate the new "ceiling" above a dangerous pool for this to work, which will mean jungle-gyming their way to the tunnels that should, ideally, now head up. Arthur will try to make it to one of the doors. "Yo, NEWBIE!" He calls out, hopeful to Reyes. "Check that DOOR for me? Saw it under the STARS, looked like a SEAL." He's gonna head on as much as he can from here.
Haguro	Finding the filled hallway, Haguro's not quite sure how to handle the liquid in front of her. Wading through it could be dangerous, but she's more spirit than ship, right? Although she's also made of... Something? These are probably questions she should ask Midway at some point. Feeling gravity start to invert, Haguro bites the bullet and just slams her hands and her tail into the ground, trying to find enough purchase in the floor-turning-ceiling to hang on and hopefully not age too fast from contact with the liquid! Her camera may not be as lucky as she is, if the spirit thing really is more of a thing than being a ship.
Staren	Staren finds something to cling to out of the starfluid's way. Then, if all goes according to Arthur's plan, he heads down one of the previously-flooded hallways... being real careful about any doors, incase they have starfluid behind them.
Reyes	Reyes stores his findings to his personal computer - hey that data might be useful to someone - and, invited by Arthur, makes a beeline for the cave. This might entail some portals, or it might not. Wary of any more WEIRDNESS like people flipping gravity or liquids in places they shouldn't be touched, he enters the cave levitating, his flight pack faintly aglow and thrusters containing a soft blue light. Far from the rush of energies he usually displays, and pretty quiet. He just... floats along, headded through the weirdly-flipped zone and towards the doors to give them a looksie!
Zwei	Due to the fact that the main chamber is shaped like that aforementioned, incredibly disorienting, omnidirectional 'bath tub lens', when Arthur flips the gravity, all the fluid does indeed spill up to the ceiling, run down the sides, and create a deep pool in the oblong concave surface that is now the floor. Once it actually rushes out and settles, there's no longer any need to hold onto anything; the group is now on a bunch of stairs leading 'up' that are left bone dry due Septette welding her drones into the pipes themselves, only separated from each other by the new black and glittery swimming pool between them. Beyond those, the doors actually open automatically, parting down invisible seams laid deep into the sinuous etchings that cause them to split into threes and retreat into the walls, opening round ports to exit a hallway that had certainly started square, creating entries into the chambers beyond. They are mercifully dry of the hazardous night-stuff (and in fact, if Arthur wishes to let gravity go back to normal, all the fluid in the entry chamber will just splash into the symmetrical dip below it, being a swimming pool divide either way), but they are pitch black anyways, filled with strange 'furniture' seemingly hewn of dark, grey-green stone, covered in indecipherable designs and almost merged to the floor and ceiling, as if they'd grown out of it, or being very expertly blended. Some are tall cases the vertical size of each room, fronted with some transparent material that reveal the interior split into disorderly tanks of a myriad of unidentifiable liquid suspensions, preserving(nourishing? converting? growing?) biosamples of some kind of another, from tarry black webs, to swarms of what look like amorphous cells, to alien ocular organs, and what appears to very much be a human heart in one, still beating, despite being cleanly severed from its original chest. Others are tables that practically look like altars, no doubt from which the samples were harvested, carved as if for use with a sacrificial dagger, but with curling tendrils of mental ringed around them as though used for an MRI scan, tipped with faintly glowing glyphs or sigils. One room is plain and dry, the other has a not-insignificant quantity of dried human blood in it. Both contain extremely narrow ventilation(?) tubes set into the upper corners, which don't appear to be right angles, despite the geometry of each room seeming pretty cubic. Both are sealed by more of those circular, elaborately engraved doors, but neither one budges when approached. On closer inspection, their etchings have filled in with trickles of that piped night sky, somehow suspended in mere carved channels, somehow welding the cracks shut as some kind of esoteric locking mechanism --intentional, rather than broken. The pipes here have burrowed into the walls a while back, no longer visible or accessible. One thing does change though. When one gets close enough to the doors, a glyph-engraved panel in the wall, otherwise unremarkable, shifts and warps, extruding something from its reverse surface rather than just spinning around, and producing some kind of hand-sized emerald-glass orb shot through with veins, as well as a number of carved slots that appear to be fastening some sort of weapon in each, as well as a rack of vials and metallic canisters.
Staren	They split into threes? "What a weird door design..." Staren comments. And also, there's furniture on the floor AND ceiling? "What the hell?" He'd record all the designs for archaological purposes, but... his eyes already do that. And now look! Creatures, growing in tubes! "Okay. That's weird, they've been here all this time? I guess whatever's in those tanks must be a great preservative..." He sends some tiny drones to explore the ventilation tubes and help map the facility. Given the strange angles that are seen here, he wonders what that map will look like. He's modified the tacnet software in case of... weird space, he wonders if he'll have to use the modifications here. And hey, when he approaches a door, a bunch of things appear! Orb: Probably an ID check of some kind for opening the door. Weapon: If there's anything with extra security on it, it's this thing. Vials/canisters: Possibly just stored items? Staren tries to grab a vial and then a canister, examining them for any markings.
Septette Arcubielle	Septette would absolutely love to investigate all these things at once- but unfortunately, her drones are still a bit tied up. She settles for swishing between them at high velocities, examining each curiosity from a variety of angles and burning the details into her memory while trying not to get in Staren's way. "I don't think they've been here for that long," she tells him in passing. "Some of these are human. Outpost staff turned 'cultist', started growing stuff and dissecting people?" The strange emerald orb's appearance drags her attention away from the samples and dissection table. "You keep poking at that," she calls back over her shoulder. This device seems less likely to yield to technological analysis- a better fit for her. Septette conjures up an array of luminous purple spindles above her palm like the wires of an abacus and places her other hand a few inches from the orb, trying to pry into its arcane 'structure' and functions. What inputs does it accept, and what outputs does it produce? What does she need to meaningfully interact with it?
Arthur Lowell	Arthur UNTURNS things. But he does it gradually this time, lessening the exertion of his gravity so that things sort of float back down to the ground instead, settling into place. Once more, the entrance of the ruin flips as normal gravity reasserts itself. "Hell yeah." He says in a self-satisfied way, striding forward and lighting up the star again. Then he peers at the "glass" himself. "Only need PRESERVATIVE if it ain't DEAD, homie. Check it. This shit's still LEGIT KICKIN'." "Someone came through here." He says, looking around. "Probably. And they didn't turn to VINTAGE SHIT on the way through the TIMEFLUID. So we're lookin' at someone probs IMMORTAL coming around here." He looks about, trying to examine more of what there is to take here. "So if I was someone WANDERING UP IN THIS SHIT, I'da TAKEN SOMETHING if it was my goal. Just ONE THING, though, or maybe a COUPLE." He looks around for gaps. Are there any gaps in the samples? "Or maybe moved right along." He checks the doors, noting their function but leaving the decoding to Septette when she asserts. "Gotcha, homie." He says. "I'm great at POKING." He heads to the things that look like... Scanners? Let's see. What happens when he scans himself, placing an arm on the "altar"? What can be done there? Maybe scanning items, like the broom? Or power sources, if he forms a tiny star on it? Arthur has to sort of figure this stuff out experimentally, and he's using puzzle-game logic, rubbing random things from the room on other things.
Reyes	Deeper and deeper... curioser and curioser... and, well, more and more disturbing. Reyes comes to an abubpt landing in the weird bio-experiment chamber far from any of the altars. A hiss comes across his speakers. A sharp intake in breath. Might be a good thing one cannot see his face through that helmet... But he's checking those altars out for any residual magical energies, since they look related to blood sacrifice more than medicine. "What the HECK is this place supposed to be? And why is it RIGHT NEXT to that environmental observation station...?"
Haguro	Lucky! Haguro doesn't have to worry about testing the limits of her body as the liquid flows down the ceiling, hanging off the floor by her hands and tailhead teeth. She starts on the way back to the central chamber to regroup with everyone else, taking note of the tube creatures and the furniture scattered all around. How strange. So strange. She takes pictures of the biosamples from multiple angles, studying them despite not knowing a thing about biology or science or any of that. She'll leave that part of the analysis to actual scientists. The altars get pictures of them taken as well, and she gets in real close to make sure she can get clear shots of the glyphs as well. Haguro even takes a few pictures of those same things once things are right-side up again, and some with the flash on to see if regular old light does anything. She doesn't expect it to, but animals are weird.
Zwei	Haguro leans down to start taking pictures of the glyphs. Even through her camera, when she gets real close to examine them, it feels . . . bad. A deep, pulsing headache sets in behind her retinas, and her eyes constantly refuse to really take them in clearly, making it difficult to tell if she's point the camera correctly, until the increasing pain persuades her to take her best shot and leave it at that. As far as Septette can tell, the big green orb that looks like glass but is full of a nucleus and veins structure is indeed some sort of scanner --specifically for organic material-- and almost definitely verification as Staren surmises. Rather than checking for a specific handprint, heat signature, or identifying characteristic, it seems to be set up for screening some kind of chemical component. Drug test? Weapons detector? Who knows what whoever built this place might keep in their bodies and consider it normal (or a hazard to be kept out). It scans on touch. Staren picks up the canisters and finds that they fit snugly in his hand, but where he might expect a button at the top, there is instead a narrow depression, like those tiny little holes that one pokes a sharp object into to reset cheap electronics. No doubt it's meant for someone with hands more like Septette's than his, more comfortable poking into a slot than distributing force over a flat surface. The markings on them, unsurprisingly, don't match to any known language he has access to. The vials are filled with yet more green hue, this time some sort of gel, apparently alive, in the sense that blood plasma or tissue grafts are. The canisters don't expose a button at the bottom of the depression unless the cap is twisted --a safety feature, so probably not wise to use at point blank. Arthur finds plenty of gaps in the containment shelves, but they seem to be yet-unfilled rather than recently taken; they're extra space, for whatever comes after humans. The rest of the stuff is certainly, as Septette theorizes, much older than the climatology outpost outside. As far as he can tell, they're in original mint condition; that is to say the human organs are, so presumably these aren't mutagenic samples, but reference examples. When he sticks his arm on a table, the glyphs on the tips of the curled metal tendrils light up, and sweep waves of tingling light over the length of the limb. A depression forms in the top of the table as if it were jelly, the exact depth and shape to prevent him from moving it in any direction but straight up. At the same time, a puff of vapour issues from one of the shelves, filling a tank with liquid, as if in preparation.
Zwei	Reyes doesn't detect magic. Instead, when the 'altars' are in use, it trips his telemechanic senses instantly, as if it weren't a machine a second ago, but now it is. He knows straight away that there are a lot of functions that Arthur really doesn't want his arm to be there for, apparently only possible to activate with telepathy, as far as methods he knows about. The tanks are indeed for storing organ samples and stimulating them as if in their original owner and nothing else, so this area was used some time in the last year if it's received fresh human tissue, but since then, damage has occurred outside. Staren sends his drone through the tube, which quickly branches out into a 3d nexus of capillaries throughout the metallic structure, to the point it may well be some kind of fire suppression or gas system rather than air cycling. Just turning the drone around to see what's on the opposite side of the door, he finds the power is no longer knocked out; instead the area is bathed in a dark, sea-blue-green colour from nodes on the ceiling. The floor is a sticky carpet of congealed fluids, some of it old blood, but swirled in with a mosaic of other unsanitary spills, growing pale mold that extends wiggling flagella. There is significant damage to the walls and floor, continuing across the entire chamber that joins the two medical rooms, and down a very wide ramp that is plastered with the wasted remains of what appear to be body parts, partially digested by the looks of some of them. Random gear is scattered between them as well, most of it unidentifiable, but a couple recognizable as being from the outpost; several are the core containers for ice samples, now empty.
Reyes	Seeing Arthur head for one of the tables, Reyes barks a wordless noise of alarm and beelines too.. and so... is close enough when the thing comes alive. A look of horror begins to play across his face... but it can't be seen. All anyone else can tell is his posture stiffening and SHIVERING in place. "DangerdangerDANGER -hand away- out out out!" He sounds PANICKED but it might be okay...? Because he reaches out with his mind and attempts to tell the machine 'return to standby mode' or the equivalent, while scanning through its functions and trying to mentally digest them. "The heck... this thing REQUIRES Telemechanics to use...?!"
Staren	"I'm not sure the /crew/ did this. Might've been whoever was here... before." Staren replies upon hearing that theory. "Ohh, that's never good..." He mutters, putting the video of tentacles growths on the tacnet (anyone who doesn't have an appropriate way to display the tacnet is offered AR glasses, now that he thinks of it) He looks over at Reyes, slipping the vial into a sample bag and putting it in his bag for now. "Unlikely, but possible. More likely, maybe its creators were natural psionics, and so designed it to interface that way?" he offers. "Why, what's it telling you?" Staren also offers the canister to Septette. "Do you want to try testing this? Somewhere... away from us, I mean. I'm not sure if it's a weapon or not." He scratches his helmet. "Geeze, this place is weird. No hint of records... experiments on humans... obviously designed for a not-humanlike species... Makes me think of those memes about aliens abducting people and experimenting on them, you know? Hey, if they WERE psionic... what if there's no paper or electronic records around because that's not how they did stuff? What abous /psionic/ records? What would those even look like?"
Haguro	@emit Haguro tries her best to ignore the headaches, but it only lasts so long before she settles for taking random shots and backing off hastily. She still watches Arthur messing with the table and the glyphs on it, though, but makes sure to keep her distance as she stands back up unsteadily. "I think the... We shouldn't get too close to those tables. I got a bad headache just going near it." She weighs the risks of putting her head near it again to test that theory versus not having to deal with even worse things than headaches, and the latter ends up winning out briefly when the table's structure changes with Arthur's attempt to move it. "I... Guess it doesn't want to be moved." After that comment, Haguro lets out a thoughtful/annoyed grunt while rubbing her forehead and turning to watch Reyes when he issues that warning. "Tele...? Um. Is that good?" She sounds confused, but she watches the altar again with her hands on the camera, ready to take more pictures while her tailheads remain pointed at it in case something starts exploding. "Whatever it is you're doing, can you find anything about causing headaches for anyone getting too close?" Of course, the idea of testing the headache proximity theory hasn't gone completely, and she starts moving closer to it headfirst to see if it's because of the pictures or because of her head just being near it. THere's no other way to find out!
Septette Arcubielle	Septette is blissfully oblivious both to poor Haguro's suffering and Arthur's danger- or perhaps she simply thinks it's well in-hand. On a whim, she grabs the container with the beating human heart (assuming it isn't wired up to anything) and holds that right up to the emerald scanner, trying to get a response out of it. Any dice? Regardless, she takes the canister from Staren and stuffs it into her satchel. "I'll give that a test later, unless we reach a dead-end. Not sure I feel comfortable deploying it in an enclosed space with squishies, y'know?" Then, finally, she turns her attention to Haguro, trying to just sliiiide past the boatgirl and interpose herself in front of the peculiar glyphs. It's entirely possible that the headaches are the message, but is there anything a clearer pair of eyes can reveal about the text?
Arthur Lowell	Arthur pokes about. First idea: Ventilation. Can he fire a Gate through the tube to somewhere else? No, probably not, his experimental jab at a Gate blast opens over the vent tube instead. Reyes seems insistent that he not further activate the scans. He ponders, peers, wanders... And then spends a little while thinking. Decay systems. That's like UV light. Scan systems, looking for something. Medical facilities... outside the decay systems. He looks at the tubes. Something meant for very... inhuman designs. Thin, rigid. Robotic? He thinks. Dangerous psychological hazards, the nanomass Septette found before... His mind flashes urgently. "Quarantine?" He mutters, thoughtfully. He walks over to Septette. "Not sure, but there's a solid chance that heart won't work. This shit all stinks halfway of quarantine protocol. But it was the nano-thing on the outside, and the glyphs fucking with brains, right? It actually feels like it's quarantine in reverse. If that doesn't work, maybe it'll pop open with /more/ contaminant and not /less/? Or... no, that doesn't make sense. This is some weird shit."
Zwei	Just putting her head near the table doesn't seem to do anything to Haguro; it is very specifically the act of staring at the glyphs (or trying to read them?). Septette doesn't get the same effect; it just looks like squiggly lines inside of squiggly lines instead of . . . it's 'written' with intentional recursion, down to a level of detail even she can't pick out. Reyes yelling at it to stop with his mind works fine though. The morphic mineral surface returns to normal, and the scanning waves disappear. The Tank remains full, on 'standby' rather than 'shutdown'. Pressing the heart up against the scanner seems to get it to activate, washing waves of green light from its many interior tendrils, but it remains completely unhelpful to her after that. Arthur wandering over to talk instead gets a gross, cold, clammy little sentence pushed through his brain, vaguely to the throbbing effect of the sample being clean and a demand for presenting for security scanning too. Septette will also be ironically unhelpful for that too, given she's a piece of machinery. His theory is correct once again. It doesn't seem like it's checking for a specific biosign so much that it's checking anything pressed on it for contamination of some undefined variety. The stuff by the door is almost definitely for a security team of some kind --a psychic, alien, possibly malevolent security team with inhuman anatomy and incomprehensible motivations, but it's in prime position for people to take before heading into an area locked down with temporal distortion fluid seals. That much is corroborated when the door suddenly BANGS from the other side, the substance not vibrating the tiniest bit, but the sound coming through clear anyways. Staren's drone catches sight of a very large shape on the opposite side, probably nine feet tall or so, hunched and glistening, huddled up against the door with a trail of swept blood behind it. It looms up against the sealed portal such that its whole body basically encompasses the entire doorway, as if preparing for something to try to run past it, or else intentionally blocking out all the light in the next room. It's a total cold spot on infrared, no different from the background, but he can tell it's alive. He can see it breathing. Possibly the same air as it has been breathing for years. Decades. Centuries. Millennia.
Arthur Lowell	"AUGH FUCK!!" Arthur screams, actually falling down on his ass when the door jumpscares him, scrambling away slightly backwards until he slams into the table. Then, after a few seconds, he says, "This isn't right. It wants security scans, something for..." He blinks several times. "Wait. It doesn't want us unarmed." He sucks in through his teeth, hard. His eyes are wide and tense. "No, that can't be right. This /is/ backwards. It's the other way around." He rises, theorizing intensely. "Hold up. Sept, you're mostly unscannable, right? But you can easily get picked up? Let me try..." He presses forward, on his feet now. "Reyes. Try to yell at it that we've got a big weapon on-hand. Sept, can you flare that big-ass floodlight of a reactor you got? Staren, Haguro, bring up your biggest guns. I think... I dunno, but I think I've got an idea of what this is all about." He checks for one of the alien guns. He can't use it, it doesn't fit his KIND ABSTRATUS. But he grabs it and holds it in one hand while pressing the other against the orb. "Hey! Motherfucker, let us through! We're not /weak/, we're tough sons of bitches, some real-ass security for your facility to deal with quarantined biz."
Reyes	Hearing that BANG also causes Reyes to jump in place. "GAH!" The Techno-Wizard turns to look that way, another shiver striking him. "Well aren't we in the friendliest territory possible... uh." He finally has gotten an idea of what the table DOES and so he calms down regarding it... for now. Instead, that door, the weird security system... "You're REALLY SURE you want me to open something that's noisily BANGING? Sounds like a monster or wave of goo's back there..." Presumably, though, people insist anyways. And if they do, Reyes will walk over, extend a hand to maintain maximum distance from the door (and while definitely standing off to the side) and attempt to interface with the security system. Override it, if he has to. And can.
Staren	Staren jumps at the sound. "What the?!" He aims his arm at the door, and after a moment, directs his drone that way... Allowing everyone to see a video of The Thing. And then... Arthur makes an interesting conjecture. "I'm not sure that's it. And if it IS something these creatures sealed away for being too dangerous..." "...Okay, we'd probably poke it at some point anyway." he pulls the RAISER rifle from his bag. 'Which weapon is nastiest' depends on what he's fighting, but it feels like the answer that is likely to scan best. or not scan at all because Zwei's people used some kind of crazy shielding, who knows? Speaking of which... "hey, where the hell is Zwei? She called us here, and then..."
Haguro	"I-it's expecting us to... Fight it?" Haguro's tail tenses up in front of her as it readies its guns, the cruiser it's attached to backing away from the table as well when her experiment helps clarify the table's oddities. It's starting to make more sense now, though. The heavy security setup, the weird biological bits, the odd guns, and even the liquid? Haguro... Still doesn't quite get how that last part fits into all of it, but Arthur's guess is better than anything she could have come up with. "We won't know what's in there until you do. B-besides, we'll be ready." She tries to reassure Reyes with an awkward chuckle while getting her turrets loaded.