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Xion THE LAND OF DEP--
Wait. No. No, it's much worse.

THE LAND OF DETROIT

It's that much worse. Largely considered one of the worst big cities to live or work in, the RG - or 'Realground', the actual normal world - is a sleepy day of the last hours of Winter, before Spring takes offical hold. Clouds cover the sky and the sun is a dull haze dipping on the horizon, through the thick but not storming mounds of unfluffed depression.

Posted as an independent, Concord, Paladin, and Watch job simultaneously, the curious part of the posting is the nature: it just doesn't show up unless you've got 'nothing better to do'. A trick of some sort - magical or electronic - it's just not touted that well, or grabbing of the attention beyond 'huh, this could be interesting'.

It's probably because the job posting is for Detroit.

In the UG (Underground, the just-sideways spiritual world beneath the veil), though, the city is a different story. Shadows lurk and lurch from alleyways in both the sense of 'light that doesn't cast a shadow with strange, ankle-seeking tendrils' and the beady yellow eyes of the least among Heartless scarpering hither and fro. Above the city, the dreary clouds are actually compressed balls of Noise - supernatural manifestations of negative emotions and bad feelings, the junk random encounter of the Earth. All of Detroit is gripped by a terrible choking miasma, like a fog bank that doesn't restrict "vision" but instead, "vibrancy". Detroit is, to be blunt, a supernatural shithole with ambient magic malevolence so bad the "air quality" is likenable to Beijing in the RG.

Two vehicles sit in the parking lot of a Dennys a block away from an obviously condemned building - a panel van and a pickup truck. Sitting on the open side of the dirty white panel van (which, in the UG, is not just clean but sparklingly, absurdly marble-white) is a blond woman in a long black hoodie-coat, with two prominent hair deelies that look like swept-back antennas, playing with a cellphone. Laying in the back of the pickup truck is a male gangster-adjacent sort of person in a red hoodie with a black bandanna over his lower face and a pair of blue jeans and boots on, staring up at the noise. Neither speak to each other, but GOOGLE MAPS (or whatever you use to navigate to the site) guides you here - including happenstance, dark corridors of travel, or simply 'coming from the closest warpgate'. Which is actually in Ontario, because Detroit SUCKS.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur Lowell is here! The low-priority quest is on his questlog without much fanfare, but he's always looking to go on another adventure. He's not always looking to go to Shitty Magic Detroit, though, and so his presence here is equal parts sardonically contemptuous and grossed out. He's very abruptly in the parking lot, apparently having decided to forego the usual rocketry and just teleport at some point.

    "Why a DENNY'S?" He asks, with a broad, helpless gesture. "DENNY, whoever they are, they're a FUCKIN' MISERABLE SON OF A BITCH. DENNY'S is the kind of place you go at 3 AM because DENNY'S FOOD only sounds good when you're COGNITIVELY COMPROMISED by INSOMNIA. Surprised the place isn't a big-ass MANIFESTATION of whatever the fuck's" He jabs a finger up at the noise. "UP THERE."

    "So, what's those HAPS? Heard we were gonna get in some FIGHTS? You got HELLA UNDERLINGS up in this bitch, I wanna get my FISTS RED dawg."
Deelel The Land of Detroit.

Deelel saw the job posting and took it up this world had caught her attention. So she was quick to take up the job. From her last trip to this world, she had gained a very limited and basic understanding of the Noise. With the topic of the Heartless as well? Yes, she was going to want to learn more. The Gate doesn't go to Detroit, she got dropped off in Ontario Canada. It was wasn't too bad to summon her light cycle get on the local road and make for Windsor to then make her way to Detroit itself and the state of it had her on edge, quite a bit. It was not looking good at all. As she arrived the light cycle would be quite the sight as it turned to gold wireframes and vanished back into the baton which deelel shoves into one of her cargo pant pockets. Pockets? What an amazing human idea.

She'll call out.

"Greetings! the ID is Deelel and I'm here about the job posting."

It's a good thign though Deelel make use of Google maps.

SHe also pauses seeing Arthur agan and grin to see her long time friend.

"From the looks of it Arthur we got quite the brawl ahead."
Android 17 'Hey this has to be a mistake, the distcressionary budget is too large.'
'No, we got an investor, lots of money'
'Really?'
'Yeah, wants you to go all over the multiverse and bring back all sorts of animal samples'
'Eh, can't argue with that.'

    So blowing a bit of discressionary funds, once in Onterio, Seventeen blows this on renting a car. This is why...

Around the apointed time, a black Camereo zooms down the street, turns with a screach, and then pulls into the Dennies parking lot. Seventeen takes like three parking spots, before jumping out of the side and spinning the keys in one hand. That was fun, is all he thinks to himself...which is funny because he could have just flown here.

    "I didn't have anything better to do, so here I am. Also, this place is even more awful than the jokes would paint a picture of. Also the weird monsters everywhere."
Aranea Highwind     ARANEA'S SCHEDULE:
    Meeting with Ardyn and Verstael - 7PM.

    Up in the sky, Aranea sits on the open ramp-door of her dropship, legs dangling over a one mile drop. A ping on her phone catches her attention - decent pay, seemingly low-effort, opportunity to meet new folks. She sends a message out.

    Aranea: yo ravus
    Ravus: What.
    Aranea: cant make it tonight something came up
    Ravus: Are you leaving me alone with those two?
    Aranea: in a tunnel, losing signal, ttyl

    ARANEA'S SCHEDULE:
    Something Better To Do - Now-11PM

    Arriving at the shady parking on time, Aranea is already armored - taking chances with the Underground just wasn't worth it - though not totting weaponry around just yet. She has no issues just sliding right up to the blonde woman, crossing her arms and leaning against the side of the truck besides her.

    "So, who's paying me, the mob boss in the back seat or the mysterious teen with wi-fi hair?" It's a hello. A very casual hello, but neither of these two seem the type to care about formalities and politeness.

    "Yo, Arthur," she idly waves to greet the teen, too.
Roxas "Larxene, why are we in a Denny's parking lot in Detroit?" Roxas wonders aloud, immediately. He is currently seated in the back of the white van, which is probably alarming in and of itself, but fortunately Larxene is a reasonably attractive-looking woman so nobody is going to get too suspicious of the fact that they're milling around in a shady place in a shady vehicle with a guy who is probably in a gang in a vehicle adjacent to theirs.

Even Roxas knows that they're in a shifty-ass situation, and he's a /very/ innocent person when it comes to almost everything. But there's only so much overt creepiness you can observe before even an innocent person realizes their situation is a little compromised. The clouds of Noise are certainly one thing, but there /was/ something else that he noticed about this place.

There are /so/ many exits from the Corridors of Darkness here. It would be convenient if even Nobodies wanted to be in this city, but they usually don't.
Athela Valemore 'nothing better to do' is a terrible state of affairs for a knight errant. Especially one who is willing to go out of her way and dredge through the dullest of 'side quests' for the sake of helping someone out. So Athela doesn't really question the pecurliar vageness of the notice, it's peculiar presence that no one else seemed to notice, and doesn't know enough of the standard Modern World to know how much of a dirty and depressing place Detroit infamously is.

Most people would step into Detroit, experience the bleak slaghole, turn around and walk right back into said gate.

But seeing, or more accurately FEELING the elderitch ambience choking around the city, is part of what compels Athela to not be one of those people. There was something inherently on a paranaturally level -wrong- about this city, and now she wanted to know more about why. And the best place to start would be the meeting for this supposed job.

She may not know a lot of the modern worlds, but she knows what a truck is at least. And that bigger, boxier carriage like thing (the van) is some sort of group transport. There's two somewhat suspicious looking people present, but somehow that feels to fit in around here. Presuming they're the contacts she walks up... only to stop and gawk for a moment at Arthur being... well, his typical radical Arthur-ness.

After a moment she blinks, then looks to the other arrivals. "Does anyone know what the blue hell he just said?"
Axel In the back of the panel van, a spiky redhead in a black hooded-coat is napping, eyes shut as they wait. Or, he was, until everyone starts coming in and asking questions and generally being loud enough that he cracks an eye open and decides it's time to wake up. Sitting upwards, arms stretch out as he yawns, Axel listens to Roxas's question, nods in assent, thinks briefly about the fact they're teamed up with Larxene in Detroit and how this is probably punishment, with clear disdain on his face, before glancing out to those who came to 'aid'. "Looks like the cavalry's arrived."

Arthur in particular, being easily recognized for being the loud broom murder guy who does team attacks, get a nod in his direction if he walks near Axel's space. "Arthur, right? Welcome to Detroit. Enjoying your stay so far?" There's dry sarcasm involved, as the Nobody just waits for Larxene to explain why the hell they're there.
Staren     Staren COULD just beam down, but for once he decides to take the scenic route. It's not often a mission takes him somewhere he can see what this area looked like BEFORE the apocalypse. Hamilton is the most familiar sight, of course, except even that is now whole instead of swiss-cheesed with destroyed areas. Staren flies over the route one would normally take to reach New Lazlo (Ann Arbor) and it's just... freaky, seeing the mostly-same, familiar terrain, but with cities and people everywhere instead of monster-filled wilderness. And hey, Detroit isn't overrun by supernatural horrors! ...Well okay, but it's 'an actual city' instead of just a few ruined buildings. Wow!

    The sight-seeing trip comes to an end though, and Staren drops out of the sky to land next to the van. "Hey guys!" He nods to familiar faces cheerfully. They'd recognize the armor as meaning he's a robot today. "So..." he turns to the two by the van. "What's the mission?"
Xion "Job posting. Great." The blonde nods, not looking up from her phone as she uses her black-gloved thumbs to continue texting. It's that very 'yep, you exist, now stop bothering me' tone of business. She's definitely brushing everyone off.

"Roxas, it's for a mission. I'm trying to get Useless and the other kid to do their part by the time you get back." She shoots the questioning youth an answer, before getting up out of the side of the van (it's empty inside, if anyone checks) and taking a single step to...

Deliver a swift step-kick with her short heeled boot into the side of the pickup truck, causing the dozing occupant to awake with a start...

And a tagline.

"Like a bolt from the blue!" He begins, in a vaguely slurred way as he sits up, before trailing off, squinting at everyone else. "It's Dave."

On his back flutter two strange skeletal black wing 'tattoos' which are fully animate, as he leans over the side of his truck. "Eyyy, Larx, please don't dent my truck."

"Don't nap on the job, especially when *I* am the one doing *you* a favor." Larxene offers back, smiling pleasantly at the crowd in an utterly empty and meaningless way. "You're working with the local expert today. I'm just staffing.

Dave stands up, pacing back and forth on the back of his truck with a light 'thunk thunk' of boots on dusty metal. "So, the Noise problem is so bad in Detroit that there was an emergency Reaper's Game called, but most of the local Reapers woke up dead two weeks ago, so, y'see, that makes me the go-to guy in the area. And as the go-to guy, let me tell you."

Dave whistles softly through his teeth, pulling out a cigarette pack and tapping one up in a practiced motion. "Can't run a game with no ad-min. Which means I need to talk to the Composer and all the bigwigs regionally, which means, you know... Stuff. But I had ol' Larx..."

Larxene makes a face. It's not a happy face. It's more a 'push it and I'll kill you, and smile while doing it' face. It's a particular Larxene face.

"... post that job. See, I know who the guys who scrubbed out most of my coworkers work. So, you just go there, hose it down, bust the baddies, and double back for the fat stacks, yeah?"

Larxene gestures around. "More or less. If there's no questions -- Well, actually, I'd have torn you a portal, but this place is just too dangerous. So, it's just that big condemned building over there."
Solty Revant      Solty heard about something from Roy. A mission to an unknown world to eliminate monsters. He was confused about how it even came to be in the Hunter mission list, and even moreso that it seemed to disappear anytime another hunt came up, but either way it wasn't worth his time. Solty had taken it when Roy was off on another hunt.

     The short, green-haired girl with unusual pointed furry ears that stick off the sides of her head has made her way here to help, since it sounded like people could be in danger from these creatures. Solty doesn't know much more than that, but seems eager to help. When she reaches the meeting place, she waves to those gathered and smiles cheerfully. "Hello! I hope I am not too late to help!" she calls out as she jogs up, her twin ponytails bouncing as she moves. She gives a bow to all present, then smiles. "I'm Solty Revant! It is nice to meet all of you!"
Android 17 Seventeen looks towards Athela and cocks his head at her oddly, "You mean you can't understand what he said? I mean, I don't agree with the part about Denny's, cuz Denny's is the best place to go at three am when you got no where better to go, and a deadline on a paper to hit. I mean, it beats the Awful Waffle," He says with a shrug. Some people he knows, some he doesn't. He waves towards Roxas and Axel. "Man, you two seem to get all of the icky jobs, eh?" he says, with a smile.

    Looking towards Larxene, and the explanation from her and 'Dave' he scratches his head. "So...that building. That abandomed, easily explodable building is where the stuff is that needs to be cleaned out. The abandoned, explodable building?" he says, with a bit of mischeviousness. He /probably/ wouldn't try and blow it up, because that wouldn't be very fun. He's not ALTERNITIVE future 17. Or Super Seventeen. He's the one from the timeline where the writing didn't suck.
Athela Valemore Athela Valemore spends several minutes just staring up at the sky. She's listening to the explainations, its just that she can -feel- that ominously hideous presence overhead. Something was to be done about it.... but then somebody went and killed the people that were suppose to. Which probably only -fed- that morass of ickiness above them. That's how things usually go with this things isn't it?

"Then the matter must be righted." Even Athela has her doubts the city itself can recover from this state, but that unnatural miasma cannot be allowed to linger one way or another. Justice had to be served for those slain when only present to do their job(?) if nothing else. "Those felled shall be avenged."

It won't do much to correct how shitty Detroit is per say, but a wretched hellhole was no reason to not see the right thing be done, and make sure whoever is behind this slaughter doesn't prevent future efforts.
Deelel Deelel keeps her eyes on Dave and Larxene there' some important info.

"So our targets are the ones who have fouled up the system here? If I understand it, well then we should get moving but I need to ask just sort of force are we looking at to deal with?"

She turns to Staren and then to Arthur.

"You ready to get your GAME on?"

She looks over to Athela she recalls her and gives her a brief look over. "Greetings Athela."

Deelel says in her slightly digital warbled voice.

"So your here too."

Several new people such as Aranea Highwind and Solty get her notice.

To them she notes.

"Greetings! The ID is Deelel."

"Axel, Roxas."

She then sees Android 17 here and is glad to have an additional heavy hitter like him here.

"Seventeen."

She'll be quick to get a move on once Dave explains that he doesn't have the clearance to just nuke the building over the comm. She'll wait just long enough to get a reply one way or another about her question before she'll start making for the building.
Arthur Lowell     "YO DEE! How's stuff? We got AMBIENT BRAWL, but this might just be a GARBAGE ECOSYSTEM of TRASH BULLSHIT, who knows." Arthur starts, greeting Deelel. Then he heads to another greeter. "Hell yeah, homie." Arthur zips to Axel, immediately assailing his hand, or even hands plural, with a barrage of greeting coolkid handshake gestures that stretch the limit of reflexes, geometry, and common sense with its vast array of pounds, daps, bumps, low-fives, and other suchlike. "I enjoy pretty much EVERYTHING. Maybe I enjoy DETROIT a lot less than EVERYTHING ELSE though." He sticks his tongue out a bit. He gives Aranea the almost exact same treatment for her hand. "Workin' that new SUPERNATURAL MONSTER HUNTER thing? Or is that THE USUAL for ya?"

    He also scrutinizes "Dave", and squints critically. He has only one question, which is, "They WAKE UP DEAD here too? Thought that only happened where I come from. Fuckin' GAMES, I swear." He shakes his head. "Alright, RAD. Is the HELL-HOLE MURDER-LAIR a DENNY'S?" He seems quite disappointed when it turns out to be the condemned building. "Aww."
Aranea Highwind     "Go in, send a message, get out. Sure. Easy."
    She could use more simple jobs like that.

    "Any pointers on what these people can do? They killed your men overnight, I'd think there'd be something worth noting. Style of wounds, evidence left behind. Anything that makes it so we're not heading in totally blind into a building full of potentially powered murderers."

    Her rates might go up, depending on the answers.
    Gotta fill those pockets, even if this IS a great excuse to dodge a significantly worse appointment.

    "It's the usual. More supernatural threats than you can count, and even more people willing to pay to be kept safe from them. Or just to rough up someone's day. Never a boring day on this Earth. Don't know if all the other ones are similar," she answers Arthur, reciprocating the coolkid handshake because she's hip and young. At heart.
Lilian Rook     Lilian has never been to Detroit. She is, in fact, not aware of its notorious reputation either, due to not being American and also being born long after it was wrecked (again). Thus, she makes the mistake of actually taking on the job while bored and on low-priority alert for having metaphyiscally sprained both ankles a few days back.

    "Considering how deplorable the rest of this place is, I'll gladly take your word for it." Lilian says to Arthur, with the exact tone of someone who has never eaten fast food in their life. "I'm surprised I didn't have to shoot someone in a back alley on my way here. Or that nobody tried to sell me drugs." She looks meaningfully at red hoodie man. "Why on Earth would anyone live in this place?" A pause. "I'm talking about the real world, obviously. I assume they aren't aware that their parallel dimension is a hole too."

    "So, Roxas, are you going to introduce us to your girlfriend?" she then pokes while waiting and bored. She draws her sword while sitting on the curb, examining it up and down. It just looks like a pretty plain steel long sword. "And is your girlfriend going to explain what any of that nonsense means? Reaper's game? Composer? How do you wake up dead anyways? If you're dead you don't wake up."
Xion THE CONDEMNED BUILDING:

The thick supernatural smog (as opposed to normal smog) parts around the Dennys seemingly because of the gathering of people around their shady 'that's definitely a drug deal' setup.

Apparently, the Denny's parking lot, as Arthur asked, was just picked because it was the closest parking lot to the building. The site is a dilapidated five-story square 'office park' with largely boarded up windows, though some on the first floor are quite clearly smashed through. Inside is dark, and slightly damp, the first floor lobby and reception area dominated by a smashed-in front desk and two sweeping staircases - one of which is covered in rubble. To the left and right of the entryway are dilapidated offices and a few cubicles with detritus and trash strewn about. A number of sleeping bags, empty food cartons, rolled up newspapers, and personal effects are equally scattered in and around these floor one spaces, inside just deep enough to hide from the cold of Winter. There's even a large piece of plywood wet only on the face that is agains the wall that betrays that someone - or someones - even close the smashed-in front of the building up to keep the wind and rain out.

Once the facade of the entry, and the mouldering notice of condemnation stapled to the inside is bypassed, the first thing that hits the senses is the reeking of rotten meat. Not blood, but specifically turned flesh. Like a butcher's shop that hadn't hosed down or disinfected in years, it'd be sweet if it wasn't so rancidly sour.

The SECOND thing everyone notices is the sound, like just over their shoulder is a rasping child with laryngitis whispering.

"Get out. Leave. Begone."

It's not a command, and barely a cognitohazard for everyone present, but there's a distinct sense that the reason this place hasn't been strung up for demolition is that nobody wants to find the support beams in this Clearly Heckin' Haunted building.
Roxas "Useless and the other kid." Roxas repeats, uncomprehendingly. The more the explanation goes on though, the less that Roxas actually understands. He looks between Larxene, Dave, and back to Larxene. Then towards Axel. Eventually he settles on staring out into space as he parses the entire thing.

"So... you have a Noise problem..."

"... And a Reaper's Game was supposed to fix it..."

"... The other Reapers are dead, and you're the only one left, which means it's your job to try to do something..."

"... So you're going to pay /us/ to... what, kill the people who killed your co-workers? Or..."

Roxas is so perturbed by how he parses this that he misses new introductions. He rubs at the back of his head uncomfortably, trying to figure out exactly how much he wants to be a part of this. It's a lot different from his usual monster-busting.

It's not until Lilian's remark that he seems to snap out of his introspection. He blinks, and then gestures towards Larxene, "She's Larxene, No. XII. But she's more of an older sister, I think?"
Staren     Staren turns back to Dave and Larxene after exchanging greetings with the others. "Reaper's game? Noise? Look, I don't know what's going on around here... this is a mission to destroy a bunch of monsters in an easily-destroyable building, yes? What's this about sending a message?"

    "It's an expression." He clarifies for Lilian. "It means they died, yes. Presumably unexpectedly."

    People are moving on to the building, though. Staren turns on flashlights on his helmet and one of his fingers. He tilts his head and frowns a bit at the evidence of homeless people sleeping here. "Hey, will our fighting here make anything happen in the 'real world'?"

    He doesn't notice any smell. He's a robot right now.

    He does notice the whispering, though, and looks around for its source, then sighs. "Oh great."
Xion TO VARIOUS QUESTIONINGS:

Dave scratches the back of his head through his hoodie jacket. "Right. I'll tackle this one, 'cuz Larx looks like she's going to kill me. The Reaper's Game is put on by Reapers - guys like me, who can see the UG, and sort of put on challenges and organize supernatural events - for Players. Uh... Dead folk? They get given powers and can fight Noise. If they win, they get a wish, so, that's cool. Anyway, that's what normally happens."

"But the town's so bad these days that there's not enough Reapers to run normal games. We sort of do what we can, yanno?"

As for 'being paid to kill the things that killed his coworkers. "Oh, well..."

"Yeah?" More headscratching, before he finally lights his cigarette, just sort of jamming the filtered brown bit against his bandanna and smoking through the cloth. "It's probably not a 'people' problem anyway. Good luck!"
Android 17     Walking across to the building, causes the Seventeen to keep a close eye on his surroundings. It did kill several of these 'reapers' and he assumed they were not complete inept chumps to get such a job title. Seventeen no longer keeps his hands in his pockets, as they hang at his side. The smell is rancid, and his nose scrunches up in response to the smell, but the voice gets his attention. He tries to listen in, focusing on his improved hearing capabilities to try and focus in on where the sound came from, if any.

    Still, he continued to walk, trying to keep his wits about him.

    "Your older sister? Huh. I guess you can't choose your family."
Solty Revant      Solty's ears lower as she listens to all the talking. People were killed by the things in there, so that's one point which means they need to clear it out. But, it could be a person? She hears the word Composer and tilts her head. "...so...an orchestra killed your friends?" she asks, almost as confused as Roxas.

     She looks over as Deelel introduces herself and offers a bow in her direction, then...just stares in facination as she watches Arthur with that super complicated handshake. She tries to mimic some of the motions but gives up after a few moments. She also looks confused at the use of 'woke up dead'. "...if someone is dead and they wake up, doesn't that mean they are a zombie?"

     When the building is approached and opened, Solty immediately covers her nose with a gloved hand and lowers her ears. It seems like anytime Arthur is involved there is something very gross to deal with. Granted, her experiences are a bit skewed since she's only been near him twice. Her ears twitch at the whispering, and she frowns. "We can't leave. People got hurt, and you guys in there hurt them. So, give up or we will have to come in!" Solty declares in a firm voice, fists clenched.
Athela Valemore The rancid stench assaults Athela's senses as soon as she steps inside the building. She mutters and scrunches her nose, it is certainly a foul filth permutating this location. But she's endured the poisonous marsh back home and she will endure this.

The impression to make them leave, on the other hand, has exactly the opposite effect. She grabs the tasseled hilt of her weapon and draws it to be ready. Resolute Blade was not the typical looking sword, with several hooked prongs on the back of the blade and a shallow curve of an indentation in the cutting edge -- both traits designed for snagging, snaring and hindering foes or their weapons. Though it does in general look like a sword, so maybe less weird than some of the other weapons posessed in this group.

Athela grips the hilt in both hands, holding the weapon at her side and prepared to strike. "Be on thy guard. This place carries the stench of great evil." A pause. "Figuratively and literally."
Arthur Lowell     "Huuuuuuh, you're NATIVE? Kinda didn't EXPECT IT. Guess I kinda don't EXPECT IT for a lotta people around here. You guys sure got the ADVENTURE TOURISM look on ya." Arthur rambles a bit to Aranea, on the way to the building. Lilian gets a laugh. "Shit, princess, you ain't never even been near a DENNY'S. I can TELL for sure, on account of you've got MONEY and a whole lot of lack of DEEP DESPAIR. Ain't nobody gonna sell someone like you DRUGS aside from some CIA MOTHERFUCKERS usually."

    Arthur strides on into the interior of the building. He knows dangerous ghosts, he knows terrible monsters, he knows their hideous danger, and he knows their all-consuming hunger. So as he gets on in there, and starts making noise. He bangs his broom on the ground. "DING DONG! DING DONG!!" He calls out. "HERE'S DINNER, MOTHERFUCKERS! Everyone get REAL HUNGRY! I've got a HEAD FULL OF SHOUTING, a SOUL full of LIFE, and a FUCKIN' IRREPRESSABLE URGE FOR HEROISM! Who here in this club got some TEETH and some HUNGERING?!" He lights the room up with a miniature star, in which he conveniently left a few flaws that can make it suddenly ominously flicker out. He's gonna try to get sort of towards the heart of it.

    He hates the smell here. He's already worried about the idea that there might be /corpses/. He hates that possibility so much.
Deelel Deelel seems to utterly understand Arthur says and just grins at him for a moment. Dave gives some more information and she takes note of it. She also notes Dave seems to get he can't take on whatever did this too. So he was smart enough to call for help

"Well then shall we?" She pauses looking at Lilian.

"Either they want to try the task of fixing it or do not have the means to leave, or nowhere to go. Or just too stubborn as humans often are."

Leaving the horror that is Denny's behind them she will now make for the building she takes note that people have been taking shelter here at one point or another and the smell of the meat? That gets a horrible look on Deelel's face she does not yet summon a weapon.

"Get out? Not happening."

Deelel notes to whatever it was that said that her eyes are darting about still. She also keep an eye on Solty too a she starts to press on. Hopefully Seventeen is right and it's just something rotting away.
Aranea Highwind     "Blonde hair aside I'm not seeing the family resemblance," Aranea muses at Roxas, taking for granted this is all the information they're getting out of Dave so they may as well get a move on.

    The exact specifics of what was going on didn't really concern her - Reaper's Game or not, a job is a job. The haunted nature of the building does cause an eye to twitch, if only because the absurd test from Lilian's world is still entirely too fresh in her mind.

    To Arthur, Aranea laughs. "This? Military uniform, not tourist clothes. Somehow it's less attention-grabbing than the alternative."

    She likes the blue armor, but it stands out infinitely more than her Niflheim gear. It's a sometimes food.

    Oh, now he's shouting.
    At the ghosts.

    "I'm guessing you're entirely too used to this?"
Axel Axel is confused at the first half of the handshake. He makes up the second half by trying to fit into it and doing his own daps and stuff. Deelel gets a nod in her direction as she greats him, and 17 gets a shrug. "I deal with it. How are you doing?" Just generally being friendly where he can as they wait to head off. When Lilian calls Larxene Roxas' girlfriend, Axel squints and then moves to watch Larxene's reaction, expecting it to not be pleasant. Roxas' explanation will probably work, though.

And then, soon, they're heading into the building, on a job to presumably avenge these Reapers. "Well, alright, let's get to work then." Moving through the entrance of the building, he pulls out his phone and turns on his phone light, sticking it slightly out of his pocket, as he sniffs, smelling the horrible stench of rotted meat. "Ugh. Smells like a butcher shop, but it's clearly an office park." When the voice comes, though, Axel first prepares in case there's actually something behind him to elbow back, and when there's not, has a decent theory on what this is, even if he has no experience with what he thinks it might be. He keeps his theory to himself, mostly, as everyone else shouts and yells at voices. Axel sticks near wherever Roxas is going, though he does try and see if the rotted meat smell seems to be coming from anywhere specific, or if it is just a pervading scent.

If there's somewhere it seems to be coming from, Axel starts that way, gesturing to those with him to come along. Introducing teenagers to what are probably rotting corpses being a bad thing never /really/ crosses his mind. If it isn't coming from somewhere...well, he decides to go up, through the unblocked staircase. Best to not just linger in the lobby, right?
Lilian Rook     Lilian slowly puts on a bigger and bigger frown as Dave keeps going, her eyes darkening with each word. "Giving powers to the dead? To play games? And giving the dead wishes? Who came up with this- . . . how many dead people are floating around waiting to be given wishes in the first place? This is ridiculous. No wonder you're in such a mess. You brought this on yourselves."

    Actually entering the building makes her gag. It's not even at the awful smell of meat or the tingling rasp of the supernatural; those two things are pretty normal for her job description. It's the revolting sight of rock bottom homeless living, imagining people actually sleeping in those bags, eating that crap boxed food, trudging around in the wet and the mold, ekeing out a living here. "At least have the decency to go survive in the wilderness or something."

    By contrast, she seems actually relieved by the creepy voice in her ear. Instead of being spooked, there's a release of tension in her shoulders and a subtle breath out. "Come down here and make me bitch." Lilian says out loud, less trying to sound tough, and more like hoping whatever it is comes to the first floor so she doesn't have to keep going through this moldering dump. She runs her fingers down the length of the blade, and the glamour is lifted to reveal the black iron, translucent edges, and scarlet fuller, starting to radiate its own competing aura of bad juju and dry winter cold, with an imagined scent of recent rain and coppery blood.

    For now, she focuses on trying to pin down the source of the whispers. Not by ear, of course. She knows that's useless here. She's playing hot-cold by sweeping a metaphorical magical sonar wave around herself and looking to see where the spectral presence is strongest. "Don't worry about the smell just yet. A butcher's shop has a different air than a slaughterhouse."
Roxas "In the 'real world'? They're both the real world. They're not /sharply/ divided, but the regular people won't actually see things as they occur. Um, for instance, if I were to use Fira somebody might see me firing a gun instead." Roxas replies to Staren, gesticulating vaguely with one hand as he goes.

To Aranea, he replies, "We're not relatives in that way. It's just the sort of relationship we have, I guess."

He takes a moment to get a better look at Aranea as she explains her uniform. Something seems to click into place, because his expression brightens a little. There are only so many people /quite/ like her out there, after all.

He lags behind the overall group, meandering into the condemned building with Lilian and Axel. To her comments, he replies, "That's just how it is for some people. A lot of them /can't/ survive in the wilderness. This city is especially bad about it, but I don't understand why. Maybe it's just because that's how everyone thinks it should be, so that's the way it is?"

"... Um?"

He reacts to the disembodied voice last. Roxas turns around on the spot, looking for something. The reaction might be familiar to Lilian, if she saw any of his test's contents or results. He asks the surrounding air, "Are you... okay?"

"This is a pretty rotten place to want to be alone in..." He remarks, glancing uncertainly towards Axel.

"Is all of this... normal, Axel? This Reaper stuff? We've never done a mission with them before, have we?" He asks the older Nobody.
Xion See, anyone who had been at the first 'open call' mission would be familiar with Noise, and the fact that they're basically floating malevolence in various half-drawn half-physical forms.

Anyone who had been at the second would understand that Heartless are basically awful malevolent entities of darkness, who consume something inside of people ('Heart') and kill them, and are bad.

The decrepit building yields few secrets. Those that inspect any papers (beyond the clearly newspapers) declare it to be some law firm or other semi-useful building for professionals. No longer, of course, as derelicts seemingly occupy it.

That scent only gets stronger as people move inside, the lobby quickly taken up by nearly a dozen adventurous sorts with too much time on their hands. Finely tuned senses, detective instincts, battle honed reflexes, genre savvyness, and even just grit and a good once-over are levied against 'important things' and the strange haunting that brushes coldly against their ears, but the source isn't visible - not simply unmanifested, but potentially too weak to be more than an apparitionous voice.

The cieling above yawns and yaws with a creaking kk-k-k of overburdened crossbars that hadn't seen maintenance in a dog's age, cracks spidered across the structure of the broken and stained horizontal barrier.

Something, to enhanced senses, stalks around the floors above, and the cieling threatens to give out, but something more interesting happens before that: In the dark, the ghost appears, sitting at a reception desk. A woman with tightly bunned hair and a fake service smile flickers in the broken shade of a chair that no longer exists.

"I tried, you know. To get you to leave. Well, welcome, anyway. Sorry... but nobody's in today. Just the new tenants."

The ghost points a single hazy and see-through finger up into the cracked cieling...

Before the whole thing comes down on top of the reception desk, most of the 2nd floor collapsing onto the first, and the source of that awful scent becoming clear - mangled and exsanguinated meat of various makes, some clearly animal, some clearly Not. A giant rotten feasting pile, and most of the actual physical bulk of the cieling's support under it, falls out onto 'the group', and from it, indistinct dark humanoid shapes with long tongues, toothy maws, and sharp claws and talons in place of nails leap out to claw, and bite, and tackle, and otherwise 'spend their not-really-surprise round' getting all up in everyone's business.

Now, specifically, these things aren't Zombies, or even the undead. They're Ghouls - sharply intelligent abhuman creatures of the Nevernever who eat... a lot of meat.

They're also right bastards and hit like trucks with razor-sharp appendages.
Android 17     Seventeen stops to look at the receptionist. There is a momentary pause, and then: "Of all the places to haunt, you...decided to be a ghost receptionist?" He says, a bit surprised because of the fake smile. However, the ceiling cracks, "Well...thanks for the warning, but we got sent here on a job to take care of whatever that is." he comments to her, before it comes crashing down on them. However, the Cyborg is ready, instinctively producing the ANDROID BARRIER, a green barrier that covers the man for a brief moment, protecting him from the majority of the collapsing roof.

    However, what comes down after causes his face to scrunch up in horror. "What in the HILF are those?" he says, but isn't shocked enough to not move, one of the claws getting a close call on his side, causing a bit of blood to be drawn. However, he moves to cath the thing's arm, pull back and send a powerful kick square into one, with enough force to (hopefully) send him flying into another. Seventeen drops into a martial arts stance, and starts to loosen up, cracking his neck just a bit to get ready.

    "Well. Guess we're here to destroy these guys. Don't think they'd respond to trying to talk it out?" he asks Lilian, before towards Athela he says, "Alright, you were right. I am fairly sure that was the smell of evil after all."

    "So hey, really creepy guys. Are you intelligent enough to talk this out, or are we doing this the hard way?"
Aranea Highwind     "World's big. There's a lot of stuff you wouldn't think is normal that turns out to be an everyday affair," Aranea responds to Roxas, in lieu of Axel, not minding her own business in the slightest. "Best to keep your nose out of the stuff that doesn't immediatly concern you, lest you end up with your fingers in so many pies you don't know where to spend your energy anymore. The mundane masses are usually happier not knowing about all this stuff."

    That's how she feels that goes, anyway.

    The conversation is put on hold when ghost, then ceiling, then Ghouls, in that order. Aranea's spear flickers into existence from a misty red flash of particles, its thrusters immediatly active to take her upward. Through the collapsing ceiling, and through the falling Ghouls too.

    She halts once past, twirling the spear from upright to downright, placing her foot on the large, mechanical spearhead.

    "Ghouls! Don't let them get ahold of you, they're a lot stronger than they look!"

    She crashes back down, spear-first, to try the simplest approach of impaling one of the things through and then cratering it into the floor. Maybe into the basement(s), for good measure.
Axel "I've never had a job deal with this kind of stuff, so I'm unfamiliar as well. But guess the Noise have dedicated specialists. Makes sense." Axel replies to Roxas, before continuing ahead.

Well, Axel's theory is wrong, it seems, as an actual ghost shows up and 'greets' them, having tried to warn them to get out. Axel is about to reply to the ghost, try and maybe reassure her of why they didn't leave, when...

The roof falls on them. As soon as it starts cracking and collapsing, Axel slides backwards, avoiding getting covered in meat but getting hit by support beams that throw him backwards, knocking him unsteady long enough for one of the ghouls to claw into him. It hurts, damaging the Nobody, but it's shallow enough to not be a real problem because in a blink of an eye, Axel summons his chakrams in a wisp of darkness, and the silver and red disks are suddenly slammed forward into one of the ghouls, before they begin to spin rapidly in his hands.

He's about to call out what they are, when Aranea saves him the effort. Instead, the spinning wheels are suddenly wreathed in flames as they grind into the ghoul, moving to burn it as it gets ripped into. If this is enough to knock it back. He'll move to start trying to get some distance.
Athela Valemore "That not be very reassuring," Athela asides to Lilian for the butcher shop/slaughterhouse difference remark.

She partially ignores the ghost receptionist, if only because her attention is drawn upward. The creaking of the strained wood is not quite the same as that of a damaged ship hull, but it is close enough to jab her spacial awareness like acute splinters. Her focus refuses to be swayed by the spectre's words. When the floor actually snaps and breaks away she thrusts up with her sword, splitting in half the piece of second flooring that would of otherwise fallen on top of her.

The passengers upon the collapsing infrastructure is another matter, as ghouls surge in the resulting rubble and lashing appendages into her that screech their sharp bits across her chestplate.

Athela steps back with the strike, taking it in stride and digging a heel back into the floor to rebrace herself. "By Cobalion's beard!" Her apall at the horrid sight is short-lived though due to the eminent danger. "Strike the fiends down, was them from this forsaken land!"

Wash isn't just metaphoric. When Athela steps forward and swings a wide arc before her with Resolute Blade, it's elemental brand releases a slashing stream in its wake, for the moment looking more like a whipsword made of water than a literal blade.
Deelel Deelel will keep note of what Roxas said to Staren, as they go deeper things just gets worse, she now seems on edge very much on edge.

"Something isn't compiling right here."

She notes looking about and then it comes.

Then comes the Ghost it speaks to them for a moment she stares.

"The new tenants you ...."

Deelel is cut off as ceiling starts to collapse and then does so, she leaps away getting out of the worst of the harm but only to find a ghoul coming for her. She's hacked at and it hurts she does not bleed it leaves a strange brightly glowing blue line where it cut through her clothing and into her body.

Her ID disc is a close-up weapon, a fight like this? Against Gouls who have nasty as all get out claws and fangs? She's going to need it, in one deft motion it's off her back humms to life and she's now locked in close combat with at least one or more of the ghouls it's blade humming as Deelel makes her attacks or uses it in attempts to deflect attacks against her. If by some miracle they will listen to Seventeen she will back off but right now she's trying to not get carved up.
Staren     Oh hey ghost lady! "That's fine, just point us to them." Staren looks up where she's pointing, then runs for the door. Not to actually run away, but to get out of the way of the collapsing ceiling. Although it also means he's a little further away when the ghouls show up, dodging wildly as claws juust scratch into his armor, narrowly avoiding more damage.

    "If they were smart enough to talk they'd have tried it as soon as they saw we couldn't be killed so easily." Staren answers 17. Aranea identifies them as ghouls. "Noted." He continues trying to keep his distance, blasting ghouls with the dual beam cannons on his right arm, firing pretty much whenever they cool down enough to sue again (every few seconds). Will the ghouls be smart enough to learn that pattern, he wonders?
Solty Revant      Solty blinks in surprise when the ghost receptionist appears and gives them a fairly friendly and business-like greeting and warning. The creaking of the floor above them worsens and Solty looks up slowly...just in time for the 2nd floor to give way. "Look out!" she shouts before...actually leaping upward and crashing through the incoming debris and creatures and...meat. That last thing causes her eyes to widen as she is splattered with grossness. "Eeeeeeeeewww!" she cries out before getting pounced by one of those scary creatures!

     The green-haired girl kicks out instinctively to get the creature off of her, then follows it up with a punch that likely sends it sailing into its kin. "What's a Ghoul?!" she asks whoever happens to be nearby as she keeps punching any that come near her.
Roxas "Uh... I don't think ghosts really 'decide' to be a specific thing, I think they sort of... have to? Based on how they died, and what was important to them." Roxas half-guesses, half-explains to 17. He's not really completely certain of all of this, except-- that he's quite sure that ghosts have to be anchored in a specific way. He's sure they have choices about /some/thing.

A blur of motion accompanied by the collapsing of the ceiling gets a sudden, reflexive movement out of Roxas that carries him through the falling debris and prevents the ghoul that took a swing at him from landing dead-on the way they might have otherwise. His coat is still torn in passing, leaving -- less of a gash than you would rightfully expect, actually.

"I don't think you're supposed to put your fingers in pies at all, Miss!" Roxas shouts back at Aranea, simultaneously whipping something out of his coat. There is a momentary pause as something red and brilliant erupts and momentarily fills the surroundings with flames.

"Oh-- sort of like Xion and I with the Heartless," Roxas observes in response to Axel, "I guess that makes sense."
Lilian Rook     "It can't be much harder than this." Lilian replies to Roxas, completely ignorantly. "The food has to be better, and at least nothing is going to collapse on you or give you asbestos poisoning. Nobody to steal your stuff either." she continues, completely ignorantly.

    Lilian continues to react to things in especially counterintuitive ways when the ghostly receptionist appears, floating in her non-existent chair. Her stance lowers a little, the point of Night Mist drifting towards the floor. "Oh, it's just a ghost." she says, apparently thinking that's a huge difference from some other kind of apparition.

    "That's fine. We're here to see them anyways."

    From her first few words, Lilian is conversing with the dead receptionist not only as if she were a completely normal person, but as if this were a completely normal office building. The appearance of a hazy spectre acting out the motions of life appears to have her completely at ease. "Sorry for calling you a bitch, by the way. I thought you were something else. Do you remember your name?"

    Well, that conversation doesn't go on for long, because the roof collapses and--
                -----[stop]-----
    Lilian ducks out from under the falling support struts, concrete, and rebar feet from her head, swatting aside a cluster of crumbling tile and drywall with the outside of her arm, and sprinting out from beneath the avalanche as fast as she can on the wet floor, taking a second to get traction. Knowing she can use maybe sixty seconds safely today, she turns as she approaches safe distance and snatches a tactical knife from her belt, slipping it free and hurling it arrow-style underhand in the same motion.
                -----[start]-----

    -Lilian is by the front door again, sliding back as something matte black and extremely sharp whips through the air without crossing it all and experimentally whams itself at the nearest ghoul head, seeing how well six inches of steel does the job.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur is immediately crushed under the weight of a buffet of ghouls and a buffet of food. He can see animal meats, not-animal meats... THEY'VE BEEN RAIDING THE DENNY'S! And then he determines that the ghouls are certainly no corpses.

    PERFECT.

    He's immediately struck hard by a heavy lancing impact. Blood sprays. His Health Vial drops. "Don't worry, homie." He mutters to the ghost. His eyes fill with light. "We're here to EVICT SOME MOTHERFUCKERS." Arthur's lancing wound blasts with light, as he bleeds a tremendous supernova directly into the body of the ghoul. "WHO HERE'S HUUUUUUUNGRY?!" He screams. "I'M ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY POUNDS OF FRESH FUCKING KNUCKLE SANDWICH DELIVERED TO YOUR DOOR IN THIRTY MINUTES OR LESS GUARANTEED, YOU LONG-TOOTH KNIFE-FINGERED CORPSEFUCKERS, COME GET SOME!!"

    And the bleeding boy is a whirlwind of violence more suddenly than anyone could expect.

    He smashes at one hard, trying to knock it flat under Aranea's lancing strike from above. He matches Axel's grinding with his own blender-broom, surging in to work in tandem on his own target. He leaps among the battle, bouncing sometimes off of Athela's blade and crashing brutally into foes caught up in the whip. At one point he tries to dual-tech with Deelel, leaping to stake his broom into the ground right through her ID disk and them use that to swing dramatically around in a wide kick before launching her powerfully through the assaulting barrage, then linking with Staren to cover his brief moments of needing to cool down with his own starlight blasts.

    Seeing Solty's tactic, he even starts trying to bunch them up with gravity bursts so she might get to smash more into their kin, and trying to distribute them into the AoE attacks Roxas made. He can do little for Lilian's tactics, but he's already queueing up more of those gravity-compressions to help her time-tactics for later. Arthur himself is just eager to dive in and /brutalize/ these guys, though, wanting to surge into the heart of the building, and up through its structure!
Xion The ghost receptionist looks entirely like a receptionist who is a ghost. Her tether may in fact be that she was worked to death in a BAD OFFICE ENVIRONMENT. It's a little irrelevant, though.

Nobody is crushed under the weight of an interfloor cieling being dropped under them, a mess of drywall and insulation and cieling paneling and the overpowering stink of Nondescript Meat.

Arthur may be on to something - this sure is 'meat' without a strong single source! They're probably stealing from Dennys. Or wherever else has BULK MEAT. It's certain that there is, at least, more not-animal meat than a few human corpses would provide.

Android 17 tries to strike up a conversation after his Barrier deflects the cieling collapse, fighting back one of the numerous Ghouls with a powerful intercepting kick that sends it bowling into the heap of MEAT - and another Ghoul!

Aranea is wise to what's going on, more or less, with her history as a supernatural mercenary, and puts her own special trick to things, using her heightened agility to pierce the chest of the frenzying Ancient Sumerian cursing monster and bear it down into the floor, where it -- grabs at the spear and flails around, trying to claw off Aranea's arms! How rude. There's a howl of pain as she disengages, the gory wound left by her spear seemingly debilitating the Ghoul worse than it expected.

Axel follows up with Aranea's ghoul, sending burning and grinding chakrams into the body of the deblitated ghoul, cooking the monster quickly in searing lines of buzzing flame, causing it to slump over.

The other ghouls seem perplexed by one of their number being brought down so quickly, but many are committed to their attacks and don't break off -- yet.

Athela strikes out with a waving sword, holding off the fierce and rather heedless-of-damage Ghoul attacking her with expert swordplay, slicing off chunks of the monster that start filling in rapidly, but further progress isn't really made by the attacking bug-eyed monster: the whipping blade has more range than even the Ghoul's misshapen arm, and its fellows fare little better.

Deelel fights back in unwise CQC with her ID Disc, but her literally unmoored ego proves to be weapon enough to hold off this derelict clan of nasties, snapping teeth and swiping claws harrying but not going for a kill - the mood in the room is quite different than the atmosphere earlier.

Staren's attacker snorts and rasps as the inventor disregards their actual vocal intelligence even as he gets tackled into but narrowly avoids lethal hits. His roaring beam guns tear ionizing holes in the pile of meat, and punch two holes in the chest of the Ghoul attacking him which, of all things, doesn't kill it - but certainly does worse than 'piss it off'. Like a cat hit by a spray bottle right on the face, his ghoul just buggers off, leaping back up to the second floor.

Solty fares very similarly to Seventee, kicking her ghoul into the same pile and matching force to force, yet another 'not lethally answered in the opening attack' member of the party, her Ghoul grabbing meat and almost throwing it back towards the young girl before instead eating the chunk of rotting flesh, burrowing into the pile deeper to avoid getting fried or kicked more.
Xion Roxas Jack-Dodges the powerful claws and retorts with a glimning blast of heat and flame which sends the surrounds into a bright relief, an impression that there is at least a dozen Ghouls all in various states of 'getting sent back' or trying to get their licks in. The one that Roxas specifically fries screams in Sumerian swears and pain-noises, writhing around and trying to pat off magic fire. Protip: It's MAGIC fire.

Lilian's big ol' knife sent straight into Roxas' (having lost the attention of the Ghouls during her Timey Wimey So Sublimey John Woo Moment) Ghoul's forehead, cutting out the vocal utterances as it stands transfixed -- before a big paw moves up to grip the knife and tug it out, gasping like someone just revived from being drowned, and staggering about. Is it... regenerating its own brain?

Arthur, less Expertly Adoroit than Lilian, instead goes MAXIMUM HAM on the ghouls (who, probably also are eating maximum STOLEN ham), his own attacker gets freaking vaporized by his Supernovic force. His oath of thirty minutes or less is almost a joke, as his initial burst simply unmakes one of the absurdly hardy monsters, leaping in to shred, brutalize, gravity-shut (joining Solty and Seventeen) and otherwise crowd control the ghouls. The result?

Instead of 'like nearly a dozen people put into body bags by a bunch of creepy Nevernever denizens', nobody on the 'just passing through' take is down, and two gouls are just out of it, with the other ten-or-so wavering and uncertain.

There's chatter - again, in rasping ancient Sumerian, which amounts to 'they should be dead!' and the Pre-Ruining equivalant of 'BAKANA!!!' before another voice, entirely atonal to the rest, cuts through.

"Be quiet." Rings out a rasping, vocally fry'ed teenageabout girl's voice. "I was sleeping. All that noise... It's fit to wake the dead."

"So the idiot who got away found friends. Such powerful friends, too. Poking their noses in where they're not supposed to. Poking their fingers into the tank, and wondering if they'll get a bite..."

From above, on the second floor, dangles a single bare pale leg, and black toenails - lacquered, not naturally black - going up to a pair of black shorts and a black MEGADEATH t-shirt, whose stains are hard to make out, but are present. The girl is conventionally pretty, but pale, a touch gaunt, and 'off'. "Detroit is ours. It's not much, I know, but I can't have people messing up a good thing, can I?"

She hops up, striding along a broken piece of rebar that juts out over the area in her Full Cutscene time. "Instead of a tete-a-tete, let's make this simple. You can call me 'Contessa'."

She claps her hands once, and the 'light' (in that, natural light, visual light, and light generated by people of the party not dedicated to pushing past a momentary Literal Cut TO Black) goes out.

"And then you can die for me!"

The ghouls vanish, instead the classic 'spears of darkness from nowhere' erupting from multiple angles to spear and stab and murderlate the entire party.

Ohhhhh yeah, she's definitely a Vampire of some sort. It's the toothy, fangy grin between her cupid's bow lips, where you can certainly Tell.
Android 17 Seventeen is surprisingly agile, moving back and forth as almost he knew where the spears were coming from in the dark. While he doesn't avoid the spears, he DOES prevent them from getting a clean hit. More cuts, more vicious this time from on his arms as he moves to block, and his shield erupts to push the more accurately dangerous attack away. His eyes come up over his arms as he slides back only a bit. He takes a sharp intake of breath, "So I don't think talking this out is going to work, eh?" he says, "Also, you all can die? Seriously? What are you, Cell?" He says, making a reference probably nobody will get.

Still, he moves to run at her, before bursting forward with so much speed he becomes a blur of motion, too fast to see without special senses. He appears to her right, aiming to send a kick right into the side of her head, before doing that same burst of speed to appear once more in the direction the kick would send her, aiming to send both arms down into a hammer blow.

    His hands then come down, as electrified balls of energy fly down towards the Vampire. Now floating, Seventeen crosses his arms, looking down at the vampire with the same calm and collected tone. "Also, you didn't say please. It's important to be polite. It might be the cornerstone of if you get out of a bad situation or not!"
Arthur Lowell     Arthur takes his ready stance the moment the vampire shows up, letting her speak extensively just because she seems like she might be real cool. Like maybe this whole encounter is leading up to one of the people here approaching her with an offer to join a faction arbitrarily fast, so he needs to make sure not to attack her and interrupt it. Sadly, he's misunderstood the nature of this situation entirely, and instead just spends multiple seconds not attacking while spears ready to strike!

    One of the spears dead-on. It blunts a bit on his gravity barrier, but strikes true, lancing through his body the way that only a spear of energy could safely be expected to phase into it, and leaving a short spray of lost Health Vial. "Guh!! FUCK!" Arthur cries out. His body flares with sudden starlight, coursing more and more, shining though his veins and eventually out through his skin and eyes. "Hey, hey, hey, lady!!" He roars, aggressively. "You know what you're doing here?! Listen RIGHT THE FUCK UP, asshole!" He calls out, suddenly projecting the light of a very tiny sun indoors.

    "I may be a goddamn INCORRIGIBLE HOOLIGAN, but I cleaned out my ears enough to at least figure the BUSINESS HERE. You a NOISE, blood-drinker? 'Cause the only reason THESE MOTHERFUCKERS rolled on your TURF is the NOISE ISSUE! If you weren't gettin' your GRAVE SLEEP on or whatever the fuck you were doin' instead of keepin' NOISE outta here, you wouldn'ta had the PROBLEM in the first place! You and whatever DARK COURT or whatever the fuck better get your RESPONSIBILITY, otherwise we ain't FUCKIN' OFF!" He matches the spears with his own strikes; a tiny galaxy arrayed around his back like a halo begins to lash out abruptly with bolts of starlight, focused on producing illumination as well as being a convenient point to blast the spears, as well as fire bolts of the fusion energy right at the vampire, if he can see her! The halo rotates like a chaingun as it blasts away.
Aranea Highwind     "It's a metaphor, kid!" Aranea shouts towards Roxas, as the Ghoul she decided to stab contests her clash with its strength. "It means don't spread yourself too thin!"

    The Ghoul's claws bounce off a red field around Aranea's arms, suddenly surging out like lightning. Magitek shielding! It's subtle, until you slam your face into it.

    Aranea blasts away, not wanting to find out how long her shield can hold up. This works out, because moments later the threat changes entirely.

    She makes a mental note to charge extra.

    Continuing her conversation with Roxas, she adds to what she said: "That's a metaphor too. It means don't try to solve too many problems at once, because your time and energy are finite resources."

    That should be easier to understand.

    When the lights go out, the dragoon trusts her instincts. She blasts through the spears, zigging and zagging through the deadly darkness. The mechanical tip of her spear ejects itself to reveal the blood red blade underneath, which gleams and guides Aranea to her target. She doesn't need to see, her spear's driving, leaving a trail of red partcles behind like she's a bolt of lightning.

    And right for the heart it goes.
    Time to find out if it's black or red.
Athela Valemore "Spare us your diatribe," is Athela's only retort to the vampire girl. Heavens forbid this turn into a lengthy monologue.

It is thankfully not that long. Unfortunately that means it turns into a blitzkrig of an attack all the sooner. Darkness lancing out from all directions, too many angles and too fast for her to try to dodge with limited space indoors.

So instead Athela slams a foot to the floor, sending a pulse of water out from the impact that forms a ring around her feet and then surges up around her to envelope in a manner not unlike a Water pokemon using Withdraw. Several of the shadow spears slam into the elemental shield and break off, but just as many manage to puncture through due to being large magic spikes. Those at least are kept from skewering the young knight through completely. It is still a very unpleasant experience, and when the barrier finally drops Athela isn't as unscathed as she would of liked. She exhales sharply, then growls as she grimaces and grips her magic sword even more tightly, to the point that the joints of the metal protectors over her gloves can be heard creaking from the strain of her knuckles.

Then a swell of water burst from her aquamancy again, this time backward to boost the knight forward. The tip of Resolute Blade scrapes briefly against the floor before Athela swings it forward from low and arcing up, at the same time using another jet of water to launch herself upward. Upward to slice at the Vampire of whatever she is!

But as the first slice passes Athela abruptly swings back down with the weapon, putting it's unusual design to use to try and catch the foul woman in curve of the weapon and use her own descent to slam the fatal femme back to the ground.
Staren     The ghoul Staren shoots runs away! So, it's not dumber than an animal, at least!

    And then... someone else is here. Someone who looks and sounds human, so they're probably a fairly powerful mage or something... or vampire, Staren decides as he sees more of her. Definitely vampire.

    As the lights go out, Staren activates his forcefield, the spike shattering the outer layers and making a couple of the discs on his chestplate spark and burn out.

    Staren considers reaching for silver bullets, but... wait, is silver for vampires on this world? He asks. Apparently no.

    So instead he pulls a large revolver from the bag, with a chrome finish and a triple-M monogram. And just shoots at her, because why TELL her before you shoot?

    *BLAM!*

    "Nah." he answers her commands after firing.
Roxas "Uh, well, actually--"

Roxas knows enough of the world to correct Lilian, but he's immediately distracted by somebody talking from above. He looks up towards the gothy girl rambling about people poking their fingers in strange places -- the second weird girl to do that in the last half hour -- and simply blinks through the darkness as she engages in some... monologue. Then all light is extinguished, and he can't see /anything/ at all.

He doesn't know where the attack will be coming from, but he does know it'll be coming. That's a Boss Arena move if he ever saw one, and that's definitely something Roxas has seen enough of during the course of his life. Again he springs forward, spears of darkness jutting out to catch him in the sides, the back, his arms-- shoulders, but never quite a full dead-on strike.

But there's a /lot/ of them, and they layer on enough middling gashes that Roxas is starting to feel a little bit woozy at the end of it. Woozy, dizzy, and to boot it's as dark a "night" as any he's ever experienced.

Roxas raises both hands. There is a momentary pulse of power, a flicker of unnaturally imposed light that fades-- and then returns, resurgent. Columns of Light burst from the ground, illuminating the surroundings and quite likely throwing back the shadows that had stood around the young Nobody. They burst up in a spiraling pattern that surrounds Roxas, rotating outward in a spiraling pattern that brightens the building-- though only to a very specific dimness.

It grows no brighter than the distant glow of the sun sinking beneath the horizon.

Once light is re-established, the effect escalates. More columns of light burst into being and sweep the area, ultimately swivelling and converging on the vampire girl.

They're all a bit wobbly, possibly because Roxas /himself/ is wobbly.
Axel The ghouls are shouting in a language Axel doesn't know (though helpfully somewhat translated), as he and Aranea slay one of the ghouls. She's a local, and seems to have more general monster-slaying experience than he does - he's not experience-less whatsoever, but most of it is 'Heartless' and 'Noise' and 'knowing that vampires suck'. As the ghouls scatter away, though, and the vampire girl wearing a...Megadeath t-shirt (Axel actually squints, but he doesn't betray his combat readiness) arrives, Axel doesn't say anything. He keeps the chakrams wreathed in flame, waiting, and then...

The lights go out. His flame is briefly lightless, but after it's over, Axel is able to get some light back, right as spears of darkness come right at him. The Nobody slides out of the way with an accelerated dash of movement, but a spear grazes heavily through his side, drawing blood and nearly impaling him. Another hits his shoulder, nearly knocking the chakram out of his hand, but Axel keeps himself steady.

"Alright, you've made me mad. Let's light you up." Despite his choice of words, Axel doesn't actually seem all that angry. Just annoyed. The flaming chakrams are thrown at Contessa, moving to slash into her, but Axel wouldn't be surprised if she sees them coming and can dodge or block them. So he snaps his fingers, and around the chakrams, large spheres of flame ignite, moving to try and engulf the Contessa lightly. She'll probably need to be mobile if she doesn't want to be burnt up!
Deelel Deelel is perhaps hitting Gilgamesh level ego for a moment here if she thought about it but she does not she's to busy fighting and doesn't have time to think of how bad this has been for her. This is quite the fight that's going on here all things considered. She also is aware of the ghost but there's not much she can do there and since she's keeping out of the fight it doesn't bother her too much and Arthur pulls off a serious combo with her.

Then someone else shows up and her ego start o fade a bit as she's going to shift tactics now.

"Good things he called us from the looks this Contessa."

Then comes the spears of darkness from nowhere, Deelel has some experience with crazy attacks, thank you SCRUB and she does not get full on pieces she's hit several times but she grazed or clipped and it's still pretty bad and she's got a number more blue glowing wounds on her body as a testament to the damage.

She will now take her armed light disc and throw it at the vampire, but it's more of a distraction for what Deelel is doing she's muttering something and a moment later she does say a very clear word.

"Firaga!"

Sending a torrent of flame at the vampire, Axel was right lighting light the vampire up!
Solty Revant      Solty blinks in surprise as the creature she punched doesn't come at her again and instead grabs a quick snack before backing up along with the others. "...wait, they just stole this from somewhere?" she asks, relaxing a bit and looking around. "...well...that isn't -that- bad. Maybe they just need a home?" she says. What kind of young girl wants to give monsters a home?

     She looks up as Contessa starts speaking. Solty listens to all of it much like Arthur, then blinks a few times as the lights all go out and she doesn't hear the ghouls anymore. "What ha-"

     Her ears twitch and she flinches just in time to avoid the worst of the spears. One impacts against her side and strikes some sparks as it cuts a shallow wound into her side. The metallic sparks are soon accompanied by small arcs of electricity over the slash. Solty yelps and holds a hand over the cut much like any human would, even though there is no blood. "So, you killed those guys? Did those ghoul things help?" she asks before she starts leaping her way up toward Contessa. "Either way...you need to be stopped!" she exclaims as she practically flies upward. Or perhaps literally after a few hops. Her fist starts to glow with orangey-yellow and blurs like it is vibrating rapidly. "So...go away!" she shouts as she spirals her way upward and aims a powerful punch right at the head of the vampire girl!
Lilian Rook     Lilian's eyes subtly widen, her stare becoming more wakeful and alert, as the ghoul she'd hit actually manages to wrench the knife out of its brain. She's learned not to totally write off small and mook-looking supernatural enemies, and has seen the regeneration from the rest of the group, but even things that can fix their own brains tend to be shut down until someone pulls the stake out.

    "Immediate regeneration of the prefrontal and cerebral cortex. Motor capacity retained to the point of being able to save itself too. That's more than I expected from things camping out in a slum like this. I would imagine they'd set up somewhere more advantageous, rather than on the edge of nowhere, if they're that tough. Normally, only the bottom of the food chain and the omegas of the pack take territory like this." she says aloud.

    One of those seems to turn out to be true, in the end. Her eyes flick up to the legs momentarily dangling out of the hole in the ceiling like a girl hanged, and then follow the vampire(?) on the way down. "Oho. So they're your minions, huh? They must think you're pretty tough~" says Lilian, twirling Night Mist through her fingers and snapping it into a forward-high stance, gazing down the length of the blade to Contessa's face in line with the point. "I'd say 'you first', but it seems like you've already got that covered. I'll have to decline either way. Rule Thirteen: Thou shalt never heed the words of that which has consumed the flesh of man. I don't show mercy to anything that thinks of human beings as prey. Protect your heart as well as you can~!" Once again, she seems glad for the excuse. Not nearly so much as before, but still.

    The lights go out with a clap, and Lilian is plunged into blackness. The dark around her is alive --she can tell that much just by feel-- but an assault could come from anywhere in the blackness. She peers around for Contessa, for any sign of attack, and gains nothing from it. She doesn't bother to get out her thermals --they won't warn her.

    What does, is a branch of possibilities that collapses at an exponential rate. Contessa from behind. From above. Shadow spears from below, through the legs. From the back, through the spine. From the front, through the chest. From the flank, through the neck. Contessa is still too far by the time her window to attack closes. Just the spears now. Various futures exist in which Lilian is ready for them, half populated with last minute parries, others with superficial to severe injuries. Glimpsing those futures alters it again, narrowing down as the seconds elapse. Fuzzy blobs of temporal potential contract and grow defined in four dimensions. She can see the long snake that is her path of movement through it --the gaps where she steps sideways out of it and begins a new one.

    That hereditary gift of prophecy always comes in at times like these, as if awakened by a certain minimum saturation of potential futures in which she ceases to have one. Lilian knows both to trust those split second flashes of insight, and enough that the fact she's just had one means that the vampire is dangerous.
Lilian Rook     A spear of shadow comes flying from the left at her head, and with preternatural swiftness, Lilian leans out of the way, letting it rush past her. A second comes at ninety degrees to the legs while she's off-center, and--

                    -----[stop]-----
    Lilian hops backward over it, turning towards the new point of darkness she can see just forming out of her surroundings.
                -----[start]-----

    --she teleports a foot back and past it and smashes three consecutive spears out of the air in the blink of an eye, spraying pale white sparks from her blade with the sound of ringing glass. One comes at her directly from behind, between the shoulders, where--
                -----[stop]-----
    She turns to face it on the spot, assuming a defensive posture, conserving her endurance by not prolonging the stop.
                -----[start]-----

    --she's suddenly already facing that direction and sends it spiraling off course with another ringing clash. She ducks low under more at collar height, spins below two aimed for her waist, dives through two more from a blind angle,--
                -----[stop]-----
    She makes sure to land while the points that had come at her, timed while she was in the air and unable to dodge normally, are still frozen.
                -----[start]-----

    --and pivots three feet away as a cluster from all angles stabs into the space she was just in. Leaping over a row aimed at her knees, she twists through the last of the barrage, and lands dangerously close to Contessa, somehow having navigated the volley completely blind without taking a scratch.

    That is to say, her proximity is dangerous for the vampire.
                -----[stop]-----
    Lilian rises to her feet with a sweeping upwards slash, aiming to take out one of Contessa's arms, then whirls sideways through a backstep to bring the edge biting down into the opposite shoulder, attempting to disable both. Completing the revolution with another backstep, putting her further than arm's reach away, she lunges forward, ending the stop just slightly before making contact as she feels the strain intensifying, gambling a little bit on how quick the vampire.
                -----[start]-----

    One of the vampire's arms comes spiraling off in a spray of blood, and the opposite shoulder is cloven through the bone as if it'd snapped, rendering her completely unable to guard. Contessa experiences it. The sight. The sound. The pain. A lot of pain. It's already happened --and yet it hasn't quite stuck. At the exact moment Lilian's sword appears an inch before her ribs, she's already seen and felt her body hacked to pieces, but there's just a fraction of an instant where cause is decoupled from effect --time split with a hairline gap where the two ends take just a moment to stick together continuously.

    Externally, there's a streak of lurid red, and it looks like Lilian's just nothing personnel'd someone. It takes a bit of a second for the eye to realize she's not in the place it was looking at a second ago and the brain to update and scrub the afterimage.
Xion In the Contessa's eyes, this is a simple thing. She does her trick, everyone gets stabbed a dozen times to death in the dark with her Special Boss Power of Cutscene Darkness, any of the survivors (if any, and really, who could survive that?) would stumble and stagger around and beg for mercy and be very amusing. She could see it. Ahhh, to live in that wonderfully dark future a few seconds from now...

The Contessa stands there, balanced upon a single jutting bit of unbent rebar, arms out, palms up, and cliche red eyes lidded in an exultant, expected victory.

Until someone asks her a question she cannot possibly answer. A single seeking eye pops open, looking at where Seventeen 'was', before she's send flying into PRIME AIRJUGGLE POSITION by the blade of his foot as it cracks against her neck and sends her flying, Seventeen zwees across to hammerblow her downward into the pile of meat and rubble, and then bomb the rubble with explosive balls of ki, detonating into the pile of meat with spectacular detonation. A truly Destructive Finish.
Xion A hand bursts free from the rubble, and Contessa growls as she pulls herself up out of the crater, smoking, with her head cocked at an unnatural angle. "Look. You're supposed to-" Arthur cuts her off with his confusing, scattered recital of HOT BLOODED SHOUTING GREIVANCES. An entire galaxy forms scintillatingly around the vampire, each point of light spearing her with solar radiance in microcosm, blasting her in a nearly inescapeable rotunda of pain, burning ashen black wounds into her corpus and causing her to run screaming headlong into--

Aranea's crashing spear, the Dragoon completely avoiding even the initial blast of blind dead angle darkness spears with her Ultra Bolgstinct, bearing down in a searing comet (apropos for Arthur's setup) crashing through the universe and detonating the entire deal in a barb of red and a super-(ultra-?)nova of light. When the brightness clears, Contessa is on one knee, covered in horrendous wounds and 'tanned' in a way more like leather than flesh - cooked, in the way only a vampire can be from such attacks of light. In a snap of a leap, she's back on the second story, ready to retaliate. "You... maniacs! You shouldn't even be here, and I'll--!"

Valemore's rising slash catches her perfectly, the first slash 'bisectig' her vertically with a deep gouge of yet another bane - literally running water - that is reversed with a focused tsunami of force back down on her, searing her just as certainly as an entire constellation of solar fury and causing her to not run, but specifically fall backwards, her skin sloughing off and regenerating in time, though in a slow, bloody process that reveals the pitch-like blood that smears the ground and the surrounds with its ichorous drek. She no longer tries to start new smart words, instead just trying to clap her hands together.

She doesn't even get to do that, as Staren unleashes yet more egregious firepower, this time in the form of an unassuming chrome revolver. Not a missile, not a plasma cannon or a beam rifle, but a revolver. The hole it leaves in her, however, is a sucking wound of meat and blown-out muscles in a grisly spray behind her, coughing and hacking and trying to summon up some magical reserve of power. Her wounds close, certainly, and potentially amusingly (or frustratigly) for Aranea, the damage Gae Bolg inflicted upon her while telling and highly wounding, is being overcome by more and more compounding wounds that also are painfully regenerating, a sort of pain-and-ichor orchestra.

Finally managing to clap her hands, and draw out some arcane rune with the black ichor pouring out of her pores now, across the second floor but still visible, central to the overall layout of the building (perhaps on some leyline), a large black coffin trimmed in red and silver appears in a puff of smoke, and the vampire staggers towards it.
Xion And directly into one of Roxas' mighty BOSS BEAMS (Roxas why is your answer to every problem BOSS BEAMS?) that scythe around and through her, yet more Light being pounded against her darkness, boiling away her ichorous 'blood' and searing against her form. It's more, and more, and more, her staggering path towards the Telecoffin hemmed in by having to DODGE MECHANICS, while Axel and Deelel sling powerful fire spells down at her, causing her broken body to involuntarily jerk, jump, or scarper away from the flames, sending her into Roxas' beams - or Roxas' beams cutting off escape routes from the consuming flames of Axel's chakrams and Deelel's spellery.

It's a small mercy when Solty appears, vibrating and glowing with a tremendous kinetic power, striking the vampire in a bits-liquifying strike that sends her deeper into the cubicles on the second level, deeper into relative safety from the MECHANICS OLYMPICS: FEATURING FIRE AND SOLAR RAYS AND MURDERSPEARS AND EXPLOSIONS, merely causing an excruciating, absurd level of physical damage.

It's Lilian's hungry advance through impossible feats of agility and absurd parkour that are physically impossible (without HEAVY abuse of time stopery, which she possesses) that land her as the final obstacle between the Contessa and escape. Bereft of her advantages, but long since numb to further pain, the vampire lurches more like an animal in human shape than a person, a claw-like hand seeking flesh, a shoulder to check the woman with a sword, to clear the path before--

Cause and Effect

--take hold.

In a spray of ichorous black pitch and lurid red sword-contrails, the right arm splits free, the shoulder strike and blade-flow not as effective (in connecting) with the change of reaction, the change of momentum, the raw change in variables, as the Contessa... drops to a knee and headbutts Lilian square in the belly, armless, and then lunges the rest of the way into the Telecoffin.

Which, in a snap of darkness, disappears.

There's only one question left!

What's that... thumping on the first floor wall off to the right?

Bursting through the door there are two people in black coats - a lanky man with sandy blond hair and a strange blue sitar, and Xion, wielding a frying pan.

"Heartless beware!" Xion shouts.
"Anyway, here's Wonderwall!" Demyx cries. Both of them stand down upon seeing the end of the group's final attacks. "Oh, hey. Did you know, the Dennys connects here? We were cleaning it out - for a base! Wow, you guys did a pretty, uh..." Xion searches for a good word. "Gggggggood job here?"
Staren     "Guh!" Staren grunts angrily when, despite the IMPRESSIVE display from everyone here, what's left of the vampire manages to make it to a coffin and teleport(?) away.

    He shrugs to Xion. "We killed some ghouls and drove off a vampire, but I'm not sure that means they'll stay away. You want to make a base here? I guess I could help with that. ...You'll need to fix the upstairs floor, though."
Android 17     "Something tells me she was surprised by everything that happened. Huh...did she think we'd just die easily like that? I mean, when do people ever die so easily? Kinda silly really," Seventeen says, landing as Xion bursts through a wall with Demyx. He looks at Xion for a moment before, "Xion...you probably shouldn't make a hidden base inside a Denny's. Apparently in your world eating too much Denny's either turns you into a Ghoul, or a vampire." he shrugs. "A shame."
Xion Xion shakes her head. "No, no. We're making our base the Dennys. Do you guys want waffles? Maybe some pancakes!"

"Oh, wow, a Vampire! That sounds..."

Demyx leans on his long sitar. "Super bad."

Xion nods with a smile. "Super bad!"

"Also, no, eating too much Dennys means you're up at three or so and probably really craving the most okay-est food that's open. Demyx loves it."

Demyx smiles. "They're really the only place open."
Staren     After 17's words, Staren turns towards him suddenly. "Wait, are you saying that restaurant is serving people /human meat/?! We... we probably should stop that, then, before it makes more ghouls and/or wendigos."
Android 17     "I am pretty sure that's...not the case. I was making a joke." Seventeen says. "Eh...sure I'll have some waffles."
Axel The Contessa is burnt, battered, shot, bludgeoned, speared, and finally, disarmed (literally) before escaping into her coffin and teleporting away. Axel waits a second to make sure the threat is truly gone, before dematerializing his chakrams and taking a second to catch his breath. He moves to check his bleeding wounds, and throws his hand up, shouting out a spell. "Cura!" In a flash of golden bell-shaped flowers above him and twisting green energy, the wounds start to heal themselves, having been shallow enough.

And Xion and Demyx appear! Xion is...holding a frying pan. Demyx is being Demyx. Axel sighs, stretching out, but at least Xion is okay and Demyx...did...work? "Well, glad you two didn't get ganked. Base in a Denny's, huh? Do we really need a base in this city?" The answer is probably yes, seeing how horrible the monster infestation is.

But, screw it. Axel will accept waffles. Staren gets a squint, though. "It's probably not serving human meat. Possibly rat or something, but not human meat." The rat thing is a joke. Maybe. Probably, since Axel immediately follows it up with...

"Yeah, let's get some waffles."
Athela Valemore There isn't even enough time to contemplate that the vampress has barely escaped with her unlife as another wall breaks down. Athela spins on her heel, sword at the ready.... but it turns out to be more allies. They are allies, right? They're dressed similar to some of the others.

She stops, blinks a few times, and then lowers her weapon. "Apologies. Thought for a moment that could be another attack."

She twirls her sword once to dispel the lingering aquatic energy from it, and resheeths it across her back beneath her cloak.

"... A meal after an intense battle is not a bad idea."
Aranea Highwind     "... you want to set up a base at a Denny's?" Aranea says, looking at Xion and Demyx with mild confusion. Or disapproval. Or both. Probably both.

    "Well, I can... see the allure of living in a fast food joint, actually."

    Well, since the vampire's gone, there's not much else to do here but get paid. "Anyway, guess that takes care of the problem for now. Not bad work for a ragtag team of misfits. Vampires'll make a mess and a half if you let them."

    Then, to Roxas: "You make sure to look up what metaphors are sometime. I'll bring you pie if you do your homework, though pancakes sound good right about now."

    Late-night pancakes? Don't mind if she indulges.

    And to Arthur: "Nice light show, by the way."
Deelel The battle comes to it's pitch the Vampire and her minions flees In the nd well those that remians and she catches her disc, returning it to wher eit belongs she looks to Staren "If I have a says. "Maybe in Windsor might be a better place for a ba..."

IT seems that's not going to be the case thanks to Demyx. "Waffles are good!" She has no idea what she's in for. She looks to Xion with a grin. "Well you seem chipper today Xion."
Roxas Roxas finds himself staring into the sheer madness of what's going on, even before he's done projecting Light everywhere. It's disorienting, really. His eyes slowly track to Xion and Demyx bursting through the wall, sliding over towards Axel immediately afterwards, and then moving back 'round to settle on Aranea.

"Cura." He says dully, with a raised hand.

A wave of green particles wash over himself, Aranea, and Lilian.

"I... think I understand, but I'll do that, Miss."

He strips off his largely-ruined coat, glances at how badly tattered the clothes underneath are, and issues an irritable little sigh.

"I don't know about waffles," He says, "but I'll at least have something to drink. I'll go... I'll go get us a table."

With that, Roxas wanders off to the nearby Denny's. To get a table.
Lilian Rook     "Big fish and small ponds, guy." Lilian says to 17. "When all you fight are weaklings, you begin to believe you're just that strong. Humans are unfortunately fragile compared to most of what's out there. If they don't come prepared with the right weapons and techniques, they don't last long." she says, straightening up after the disappointing coffin rush and snapping her arm out so the black blood goes dramatically spraying from the length of the sword and across the floor instead.

    "Still, there were almost a dozen of us and only one of her. She wasn't weak; she was outnumbered and surprised. Granted, we didn't expect her either, but I wouldn't expect it to be that easy next time. Not many people see through that even a little." She picks up one of the vampire's severed arms, sarcastically making it wave in Xion's direction, still dripping blood. "It went fine. Certainly wasn't Noise, though. I know perfectly well what a vampire is. I can't track her coffin now though. It's worth considering if she'll migrate to a new base, or try and go for round two."

    Still holding a dismembered arm, she makes a grossed out face at the thought of living out of a Denny's, dropping the limb with a wet splat. "How do any of you still have an appetite? A giant mound of rotten meat just fell out of the ceiling."
Arthur Lowell     Arthur settles down with his machine-gun shenanigans. Looks like they drove her off without so much as an opportunity to justify herself, which is why Arthur makes a mental note to see if he can track down local vampire organizations and figure out what the business is with the Noise and with Countessa. Or be here often enough in the middle of the night that Countessa feels too sorely tempted to attack. Maybe wandering around alleyways, shouting, "Boy, wow, I sure do have a lot of spare blood filling up major arteries close to the surface of my skin! Mmmmmm! Can almost smell it with my oblivious human senses, wow! It would be such a shame if something bad happened to it!" Might be a bit racially offensive to some facheads, though.

    Meanwhile in the present, though, Arthur regards Demyx critically. "Homie, you gotta get a BASE in like," He gestures vaguely. "At LEAST a JIMMY JOHN'S or something. FUCK." He also calms down his combat mode, and so is available to immediately offer Aranea a fist-bump as response to her compliment. "HELL YEAH, dawg, I bring that FUSION. And RESPECT for the ROCKET-SPEAR STUFF, as the USUAL."
Solty Revant      Solty finally appears from the Denny's. If her pigment wasn't artificial one would easily think she looked pale. "S-sorry everyone. I had to...um...w-well it seems that even though I'm an android that my tummy can feel bad." she says before giggling in an embarrassed, self-conscious way. "That meat was really gross." she adds, rubbing at the back of her neck.

     Her ears twitch at the mention of getting food, then lower as she puts a hand over her mouth and belly. "..um...I think I will wait until I get home." she says, then quietly adds, "..if even then." She apparently agrees with Lilian on the food issue.