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Bloody Revelations     Figuring out who or what was responsible for the incredibly convenient (read: impossible) ambush from before is an affair that hasn't taken long, considering that all of the ghosts that ran screaming out into the battle and were either obliterated or nearly so can be safely ruled out. At one point after his disappearance, Bloody Revelations has successfully dragged Never-Ending Silence --the nephwrack formerly 'in charge' of Orcinus Rex-- out of the figurative blue via ghost summoning ritual, interrogated him about his loyalty to the Silver Prince, summarily lost her patience, then lost her shit, and physically crushed him into a tiny soulsteel medallion she has been wearing since.

    Apparently able to freely access the ghost's thoughts and memories from there, she has grown extremely excited and irritable about something (more than usual) and between pacing, yelling, and muttering fits, assembled a voyage out to . . . what appears to be sweet diddly dick fuck all. Loading people onto a boat and setting out to coordinates known only to her, it looks like they've been sailing towards a blank spot in the ocean since half an hour ago --a nondescript tract of water in one of the darker portions of the mottled web of shadowlands that surrounds the Skullstone Archipelago like ambient weather-- and it still seems like a pointless blank spot of water even now. Is there something at the bottom of the sea floor maybe? Salvage? An enemy vessel? Some obnoxious minigame? She isn't telling, untill--

    The shore is suddenly right there. One instant there's nothing but steel grey sky, dark water, and silence so near-total that the faint, irregular slopping of the barely-there waves against the side of the boat feels all the louder and more pointed for it, and then the next instant, the vessel is hardly a hundred meters from dust white sands, rapidly grinding to a halt that would completely wreck a large ship with more momentum than a private yacht. There'd been no warp or point of transition. One second there was nothing, and another there is a whole island suddenly right there.

    From here, one can just barely make out the thin, black outline of land far out to sea, but which of the Archipelago's islands it actually is becomes very difficult to tell this deep in a shadowland. *Deep* deep, feeling only slightly different than the pure Underworld, while seemingly somehow more bleak. The Underworld has a washed out, somber, melancholy and faded air to it, but it's not usually so oppressively bleached and dead and tingling with hostile air. From the moment one's feet touch the shores, they feel as if they're under the intense, malicious, even 'hungry' gaze of some metaphorical burning eye atop a tower here.

    The main sounds here are that of industry. There's no other signs of settlement here; no living inhabitants on this island, clearly, as the Silver Prince wouldn't be stupid enough to try and get anything industrial done in a place so impossible to keep living workers fed and healthy enough to work labour, so the clanking and and sawing and the sound of chains and nails and oiled gears and hinges, must come from the dead, and so those must have dispensed with, or not been given, all pretense of houses and habits.

    It is a work colony and nothing else. Smokestacks of some variety belch thick, sulfurous fumes into the thick and smoggy clouds overhead, and the constant din of hammering, ratcheting, chain pulling, and eerie wailing can be heard for miles, like one would expect from a grungy and dangerous early industrial revolution factory floor, except with weird ghosts making weird ghost noises instead of soot-faced young men chattering and yelling.

    Nobody meets them here out on the shores. Not even guards. There aren't any towers or spotlights around this part at all. It's as if the idea of people washing up here shouldn't even be possible.

    It might not be.
Haguro Haguro isn't quite sure who she's supposed to be angry at or who she's supposed to be shooting. She's feeling rather neutral about the whole thing, having only heard bits and pieces about the matter. What she does know, however, is that her allies had gotten themselves involved in this mess with Bloody Revelations, someone (thankfully not one of them) had gotten themselves turned into a haunted fashion accessory, and now...

Now, an island just appeared out of nowhere. An island that feels more like an oversized factory, even, despite the eerie quiet surrounding it all. Although the Cruiser isn't fully aware of what's going on, her duty to her allies is enough to have her here today! "This place is kind of creepy, isn't it? Where is everytone?" She furrows her brow as she peers from off the side of the boat provided to them, not finding it odd in the slightest that she's a ship riding a boat.

It's okay to be lazy sometimes. Haguro keeps a hand on her tail to keep the heads down as her other hand holds up a pair of binoculars to try and get a lay of the land. To watch for some sort of movement in the distance that indicates that ANYONE else is out there.
Starbound Flotilla "Floran think, maybe goth friend isss crazy a little bit."
"The irrelevance of her instability is as persistent as your annoyance."
"No. Usually there's logic here. This time there isn't."
"Eh. If that's the case, she's just seeing what we can't."
"Stressed. The question is if she sees things properly."
"No reason to doubt. We're-- The hell?!"
"Alert. Sensor spike!!"

    The Flotilla are abruptly at the edge of the boat, looking at the mysteriously just-now-present shoreline. "What in the world..." Moonfin mutters, leaping overboard onto the shore. "Something is wrong here. This place has long since been owed the relief and mercy of plunging into the Underworld wholesale. It is as though it is suspended in its suffering. What /is/ this?"

    "A labor camp. A death camp." Albert conjectures, leaping down to his side. "With none of the downsides of either." He takes the lead on advancing towards the noises and smokestacks.

    "Huuuuuhhhhhhh... and here I thought the dearly departed were meant to be given some kindness and worship. This isn't much of a place of luxury at all. What did we just find under Omelas?" Pavo says, fluttering to the ground on mechanical wing. The rest leap down and begin to follow, heading in. What are they making? And, more importantly, why are they making it? There has to be no shortage of death and suffering here to bleach the atmosphere so bleak, and if this has something to do with the ambush, the Flotilla expects to need to break a strong supply line hard.

    George is already lighting up a cigarette. Must be a tense package of emotions to have roiling around, for whatever reason he might have for it.
Staren     Staren's sure Bloody Revelations is sending them somewhere important. Her actions -- at least, all tactical decisions like this -- have purpose. She's not the type to send people on a mission to nowhere just so it looks like she's doing things. Who would she impress? The dead in her thrall? The Neverborn? So there's surely something there, even if she's In A Mood and Staren's not going to ask her what it is more than once.

    An island that's invisible unless you look in the right place is a possibility that actually occured to Staren. Everyone* knows the capital of the Federation of Magic can't be seen or found from the outside unless you, personally, already know exactly where it is, or SOMETHING like that, so the idea of hiding something huge with magic isn't unknown to him.

    It's still sudden when the boat stops, though. Staren stumbles forward on the deck (an action that juxtaposes humorously with the skull-style faceplate of his armor,) then flies low over the water to the shore. As the feeling of being watched sets in, he draws his beam sword, though he doesn't activate it. Even though melee would be a terrible idea and he has guns built into his armor, he feels better having a weapon in hand. His fingers worry over the cylinder.

    He hesitates to move off the beach for a minute or two. It can't really be that easy. Can it? No it can't. But maybe noone was ever expected here? No, a Deathlord couldn't REALLY be that careless. Or could they? Bloody Revelations and her tactics are clearly something none of the deathlords ever expected. And yet...

    Eventually Staren remembers HE HAS SCOUTING DRONES. But then, it's not like he can expect people to believe they're insects in the underworld. He finally settles for sending a quadrotor up to mast-height to check the immediate area from higher up. It's not like any hypothetical guardians can't see the ship they just rode in on.

    At Haguro's question, he replies "Working. The dead don't need to do anything else."

    As the Captains muse on the nature of it all, he asks, "Do you really think there are ghosts here? I'd imagine most factory work could be done by mindless zombies. Although... with how souls work here I guess they could also use hungry ghosts and stuff, the lower souls."

    He looks into the distance. "Although... given who we're dealing with, I wouldn't be SURPRISED if the dead, true ghosts I mean, have been enslaved in endless toil. ...Maybe this is where most of the dead of Skullstone /actually/ go, while a scant few are elevated to objects of worship for everyone to aspire to."
Lezard Valeth Lezard, of course, was curious about the treachery that threatened their entire plan, but some things must come in due time. His own methods, really, would have functionally been the same as Bloody Revelations' anyway.

Lezard would say that the environment doesn't get to him, as familiar and as steeped in death as he is, but he is no Abyssal, he is no scion of the Underworld. Even he feels his skin crawl, his attention being driven forth and attenuated to the twisted world around him as they slip between holes in reality and make landfall.

He scowls as he considers the industrialized noises. "A hidden foundry?" He asks. "Staffed by the dead, no doubt. There is no way the weak living could remaind here for any significant length of time."

With a flick of his hand, he retrieves the Philsopher's Stone and incants a basic scrying spell, turning his attention outwards to begin looking over what there is to see here.
Starbound Flotilla     "No place like this can exist in absence of suffering." Moonfin says, in bleak tones, to Staren. "It has such a thickness of pain in the air. It suffocates. This is a place so bitter the Underworld itself may well be rejecting it, so unnatural and accursed it may be." He tenses. "And hostile, too; can you not feel it? It is as though it bristles at the offense of our presence, only slightly more than it hungers."
Wandering Dog The world is weird. So if they're heading out for something, even in the clear dark sea where they can't see anything, Wandering Dog will trust it for now. When they suddenly reach an island out of nowhere, with oppressive fog and feeling to it, the martial artist, dressed in his tunic, braces against the deck to not get thrown overboard. Returning upright, he moves to glance outwards with his keen eyesight, frowning at what he sees. An undead work camp, hidden from sight. What could they be building here? He steps out onto the shore, ready to just march in and Erase It, when the others start their scouting.

It's Staren's theory that worries the Dog most of all. "That's impossible. The dead either reincarnate or become ghosts. That's what he always said." Of course, Dog doesn't trust the Silver Prince, but he's trying to avoid thinking that his ancestors actually became labor workers, toiling for eternity and suffering.

And then, Wandering Dog cracks his knuckles, and waits at the shore. "I'll give you guys a few moments to do whatever scouting things it is you do. Then we march up in there and figure out what the hell's going on here, and probably blow it up, got it?"

He doesn't care if they say 'no'. When everyone's done scrying, or it's been Long Enough, the old martial artist marches further into the island, sifting between anything that can be used as cover and climbing and trying to find a good angle/somewhere key to go and get information. A head office, the source of that weird oppressive vision, whatever it is. The Dog does not like this whatsoever.
Bloody Revelations     As far as anyone can tell with binoculars or close scouting, the stretch of shore they've washed up on is completely barren, both in the sense of life, and in the sense of anything of interest. Grave-dust sand broken up only by pallid stones and gnarled black driftwood eventually turns into a soupy swamp of grey mud and dead bracken, too unstable to build on, too open and useless to particularly need guarding in any capacity more than a watch tower even if the island weren't somehow hidden, and too far away from the centrepoint of interest on the island to be useful to store anything in.

    That focal point would be the crumbling remains of a gigantic complex of interconnected buildings, partly ancient stone edifices worn away with weather and time, leaving heaps of rubble at their feet, but partly the tarnished, salt and moss encrusted struts and arches and girders of ancient jade and orichalcum, bared as white bones from a partially rotted corpse. Sat atop a steep plateau of jagged basalt, it is like an island within the island, and the remains of its ancient fences and bars and watch towers, as well as their newer, soulsteel replacements, make it very clear what it once was: a prison. Drones flying by can still glimpse manacles and racks through the barred windows of jail cells high atop the towers.

    Scrying spells put ahead of the advancing group locate the source of industry easily enough. Adjacent to the gargantuan prison complex, sprawling from its main gates on the northern incline all the way down to the shore, as if vomited from its rusted maw, is a near equally sized shipyard, less vertically imposing, but spread over several square miles of tightly compressed facilities, spidering out into the black ocean. This is the part of the island surrounded in soulsteel barbs and barricades, patrolled by shambling corpses and weirder things stitched together from them, watched by tall towers by gaunt and twisted spectres in the Bodhisattva's colours, and belching black smoke into the fuming sky.

    At the middle of it is a factory cathedral; even those unfamiliar with Creation's technology would call it one, because it looks exactly like both, with its black gothic gables and stained glass windows meeting towering smokestacks and furnace vents in equal measure. As guessed, the vast majority of the labour seems to be Skullstone's unusually finely preserved, physically capable, and 'mentally articulate' zombies, overseen by dozens of nephwracks --the first time seeing one of the Abyss-tainted ghosts out of the Labyrinth itself-- in the clear role of architects, arcanists, and savants. Massive quantities of imported commodities have somehow been diverted here without anyone noticing, going by the towering piles of lumber, iron, wax, leather, hemp, steel, turpentine, and burlap, all being put to constant use, but they aren't the real resource here.

    Entire yards are filled with soulsteel. Piles and piles and piles of soulsteel. Towering stacks of uniform, pitch black ingots the size of city blocks, made from what must be thousands of tons of rare Labyrinth ore, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of captured souls. It's easily ten times whatever the Mask of Winters had, and Elites present have *seen* his mines and his war machine. Yet, the Silver Prince possesses nothing but a handful of spartan islands and fine trade routes; there isn't even some hidden Underworld mirror land of great secret wealth here, since it all exists in Shadowlands where one can plainly see both sides.
Bloody Revelations     The need for it is as obvious as it being a shipyard, for exactly the same reasons. Whether in partial states of assembly, hung in drydock, or anchored out along the cost, the leviathan ships of black iron and soulsteel and necromantic metamaterials encountered before are absolutely prolific. The coast *bristles* with what must be roughly a hundred of the replica First Age vessels, powered by genuine engines, armed with powerful energy weapons, and armoured in slabs of soulsteel. Five of them at once had been a stiff battle even with the group's enhanced naval arsenal. A hundred or more would easily crush any and all fleets in the entire great Western Ocean. The Realm's with difficulty, but Coral's, Wavecrest's, even the Lintha's, with ease. It must have taken literal centuries to build this many, completely in secret, without even another Deathlord knowing. Without the people knowing. Without his own Knights knowing.

    Despite the obvious tactically crucial nature of the location, and its intimidating defenses, however, the source of the island's incredible toxic atmosphere --its depressing, bleaching, soul-sucking hunger and malice, the darkest of its magic-- comes from beneath the prison. It feels like being on the barest edges of a giant whirlpool, as the ambient Essence flows and eddies around oneself, turning inward and being drawn down and down.

    The Abyssal herself is barely less agitated than on the way here, though now less in the sense of bipolar swings between angry muttering and fevered anticipation, and more in the sense of being clearly ecstatic to be here, more than can be accounted for simply by getting one over on an enemy. She holds up the medallion she'd crushed Never-Ending Silence into prior, laughing at the top of her lungs. "Oh you absolute *cretin*! No wonder you stuck by that man despite knowing his 'New Order' philosophy was complete fiction! He had *this* under his hat! Unbelievable! No wonder only the Perfected Principle of Consumption was so quiet whenever I plied the Whispers for guidance. What kind of incestuous conspiracy did he . . ."

    Seeming to finally remember there are other people here, Bloody Revelations steps off the boat. "Welcome to what the 'Silver Prince' calls Island 5. The fifth island in the Skullstone Archipelago that nobody knows about, because it *doesn't exist*. Not strictly nobody, at least, since his ill-advised ally in the Labyrinth apparently did, and in his efforts to lead us into that ambush before, gave it away! This is where his *actual* plan is! All that trash about causing the slow death of Creation by leading people willingly into death as a lifestyle, utter fabrication! Here is the real sting! The fleet with which he hopes to dominate the entire Western Direction! The absolute bastard had everyone in the dark it seems! Oh how *predictable*, how *standard*, you turned out to be in the end, you militant egomaniac. World conquest through force of arms. Typical."

    "No wonder he wants those other idiots working for him. They allow him to project force without revealing he has any of these. He's obviously clued in the Alchemical, but I doubt the rest even know. All this soulsteel --take a guess where it's coming from. You get one. *That's* what his ridiculous religion is for."

    "More importantly though, this place isn't something he created. He's built his filthy, repulsive little factory on top of it like a tumour, but he isn't capable of even comprehending what he's found, nor is he capable of creating anything like what sits at the beating heart of this place." She points down, below the prison. "Forget the boats. They'll take forever to destroy. We're going that way."
Haguro      Aproaching the ocean-based target is somewhat nostalgic for Haguro. It's been a good bit of time since the last time she's attacked a proper naval /anything/, and the fact that she feels more excited than wary even with it being in Creation is worrying to the Cruiser.

     Even if she was made for combat, she shouldn't be excited for a fight. Why, then, does she feel at ease even knowing that their target is further below the prison rather than the shipyard itself?

     She'll have to mull over that later. The battlefield is no place to worry about personal motivations, especially in the middle of a mission! Listening to Bloody Revelations explanation of the situation, the Abyssal Cruiser nods slowly as her tailheads turn from side to side slowly surveying the immediate area. "If he doesn't know what he's working with, then there may be weak points in its defenses."

     Haguro adjusts the armored plates on her arms and legs, then checks her turrets to make sure they're secured before moving forward to start scoping out the area around their landing zone. "If things go bad, I'll try to draw their fire. Or magic. Or... Um... Wh-whatever it is they might use here besides that."
Staren     A ruined... prison? But if work is being done here, he'd expect the facility to be maintained. Once someone mentions a shipyard though, it comes together. "Ah. Now I kinda wish we'd brought like a big bomb or something... Unless we could take it over somehow." Staren looks at Revelations. "Can you just... take control of all the workers with Necromancy or charms?"

    But they're not here for that, apparently. Staren looks... down. At the ground. He has his drones search the prison for any ways down to... whatever, but in the meantime, he starts 'digging' with the matter manipulator, once he's found a spot with more stable ground than just the sand. Propping up his hole with striped-wood and concrete supports to keep it from collapsing. Everyone can fly, right?
Wandering Dog As they get their information, Wandering Dog is frowning. He's already starting to piece things together, but the prison, the factory, the shipyard...it's not good. He hasn't clicked it just yet, but is on the verge of doing so as they get off the boat. He listens to Bloody Revelations' spiel instead of just marching ahead. And it clicks as she gives him a single guess.

"...no. No, no, no, no.../motherfucker/!" Not a man known for cursing, Wandering Dog just lets it loose, as there's probably an excellent look of someone cracking from the realization on his face. "Everyone who didn't get to remain in Skullstone, they're now a bunch of gods-damned warmachines? They're suffering inside of metal instead of reincarnating. They're used for cannons and plating. They're used to destroy the world of the living. How many are my ancestors? My grandparents? My parents? Siblings? Their children? Their children's children?" He's mostly talking to himself, though someone could probably fuel the fire.

And then, as the idea continues to whirl in his head, Wandering Dog steels himself. As soon as Bloody Revelations gives him a direction, he's off. He doesn't talk to the others, as he enhances his body with essence, giving himself superhuman speed, and heads towards the prison spires. While the others may be trying to dig down...

He starts running up the spires with the essence in his feet, moving to climb towards the prison above. He's going for the ghosts. He needs to 'save' them.
Azure Armature It made sense, if you really thought about it.
If all reconaissance returned one truth, and the battlefield revealed another, it didn't mean the intelligence was wrong.

It meant that there were variables, more things being revealed from the fog of ignorance.

From Unknown Unknowns to Known Unknowns. The Silver Prince revealed his hand to gain an advantage. Now, the counter-intelligence operation to discover the source of his supplies uncovers the trove:

Literally.

After the boats land, Armature appears - melting out of the air with a ripple of high-tech thermoptic camouflage dissipating around her, crouched on the shore. It's unclear whether or not she had been there the whole time, teleported in, or simply hung out on the boat and just ACTED like she was here the whole time.

"The mission is clear then. Disabling the launch capability of these ships in a way that is recoverable later shouldn't take me much time, but shutting the entire factory down would be prohibitive. I'll join you in the assault, and leave time for the sapping."

The operative adjusts a holographic dial that hovers over her 'watch', before Wandering Dog comes to his realization and runs off towards the prison. "Ah."

A sigh. "That won't decrease our overall breaching ability too much - let's press on."
Starbound Flotilla "...Seen places like this."
"What?"
"Don't speak of that place again. The USCM is--"
"Gone. Gone for good, yeahyeah."
"Sad. I hope there's not anything left, like on those lunar sites."
"It'll be what it'll be. Plenty of misery to put them out of."

    "For something this secret, there can't be large-scale defenses that aren't left behind. Be careful anyway." The Flotilla armor up on Albert's command, and get out collections of assorted ruins-scavenging gear. Mobility boosters, mining beams, grappling hooks, and other exploration tools will be available on the way in and, presumably, on the way down. "We'll find the heart. Are we here to stab it, or rip it out?"
Lezard Valeth Really, this was basically to be expected. Given the obvious usefulness of soulsteel, anyone who was willing to enact the kind of treachery that one such as the Silver Prince usually enacts would of course hold up the pretty front with one hand while prepating the knife to shove into your back.

Lezard doesn't looks angry or irritated or excited at the sight. He looks /impressed/. "Goodness, this level of treachery is fascinating. I could only imagine the number of souls that ended up in that black metal. And to use it for raw, unmitigated militarism!" He simply laughs. "Very well. Lead on, and let us punish the Prince for his temerity."
Bloody Revelations     "Lord of the Dead." Bloody Revelations states to Staren as she brushes past him. "A Necromancy of the highest circle of the Void. I'm fairly certain that the Deathlords and I are the only ones who can use it. It ensures that for a full cycle of the sun and moon, any and all commands one gives are irresistible perfect orders to the dead. Even if bound by another necromancer, you could tell a mindless zombie to kill itself, and it would promptly jump off a cliff. That's what I've done before. I could likely do it again here, you're right, but stopping them from building doesn't remove the fleet from play. If he doesn't have a permanent naval force stationed here, he has some other means of launching these ships remotely."

    She then reaches out and ruffles Haguro's hair with her gloves fingers on the way past her as well. "Oh of course cutie. They'll probably use both. Be my guest~" Then she glances over her shoulder at Blue showing up. "Recoverable . . . would be ideal. You're a sharp one. You already see the value of this island."

    "If nobody knows about it but the Bodhisattva Annointed by Dark Waters and his closest allies, when we kill them, nobody will know about it but us."

    When Wandering Dog starts putting two and two together, Bloody Revelations stops and turns around, looking at him with a great deal of interest. "Oh? It bothers you that much, huh? I can imagine. You grew up in Skullstone, didn't you? That means you were taught that everyone reincarnates according to their sins and virtues by the New Order Philosophy, and those who are especially worthy get to stay behind as ghosts and serve the state, with all those special privileges. *Everyone* wants to achieve the honour of becoming a ghost, huh?"

    "But the real genius of it is that everyone in Skullstone *already* becomes a ghost. You'd wonder why nobody notices, right? It's because the instant they die, they end up here. In the blink of an eye, they're gone, before anyone notices the ghost manifesting. Every single person that's died here for the past several centuries has turned into a ghost, and by the looks of it . . ." she quickly begins visibly counting soulsteel piles with her finger. "Probably seven eighths of them are now soulsteel. Not just for ships, but for Skullstone society. Didn't you ever notice? The buildings have soulsteel girders. The pumps are pinned with soulsteel bolts. Those special zombies? Implanted with soulsteel wire. He has an infinite factory of the stuff, and nobody knows. It's *grotesque*, but crafty, I'll give him that."

    He goes charging past. She can't entirely suppress a grin as she calls out after him "Oh, *definitely* all your ancestors and family are soulsteel now. If you're a good boy, you can bring them back to me and I'll turn them back~!" Back to the rest of the group. "But aren't you curious how he does it?"

    Staren's drones go poking into the prison. It is very, very old. It was probably once secured by all manner of ancient First Age arcane locks and puzzles, but it's completely empty now, and the ley lines that powered it have long since run dead after this place became a shadowland. The inside dates it pretty well; the cells are full of grotesque dark stains from disease-melted flesh like Denandsor, denoting victims of the Great Contagion. On the first floor, there are occasionally stairs and doors leading down to basement levels, but they've either caved in, been filled with cement for many many meters, or they still have some standing doors or seals left of magical materials, making them annoying to get past.
Bloody Revelations     Exploring upward, the Flotilla mostly just finds an empty prison wiped out by plague in extremely short order, save one single skeleton that looks like it was torn to pieces and eaten. None of the texts or artifacts remaining place any real geographical markers on where this place was and if it was ever important, and the sole example of a map, chiseled elaborately into a giant plate of bronze, doesn't actually properly match the local waters anyhow.

    Just digging in with Matter Manipulators is an option though. Breaking through the rubble leads them down to dark, humid corridors sealed for so long that the first trickle of air is like a blast of rancid liquid to the face for the difference in air quality. Most of it is just the prison basement proper, with more corpses, that look as if they belonged to people who were quarantined down here in vain, but Staren's tunnel breaches into an area beneath even the basement that they can then home in on.

    A labyrinth of close, claustrophobic tunnels and caves seems to sprawl out beneath even the prison's foundations, so narrow in parts as to normally require crawling, others completely flooded. Some passages are completely bare, but others have glowing crystals set into the walls as eternal, if weak, lighting, and have been obviously maintained.

    Poking around is already far from eventful, as much as one might wish otherwise. Only a few tunnels in, Haguro has her foot fall through a section of floor that isn't really there and finds a deep shaft right below that is covered wall to wall in spiral blades fit to carve someone to ribbons as they spin down. Staren's manipulator breaks through a wall and into a trap tank that immediately floods his tunnel and douses him in necromantic acid. Wandering Dog charges ahead into more than a few explosively rigged collapse tunnels, light sources that turn out to be one-shot Essence guns, and standard mechanical traps trying to cut him up or impale him. Even Azure Armature is the proud finder of a stretch of floor where rivulets of water in shallow grooves subtly form a magical circle that instantly fills an entire chamber with pale blue hellfire, and Lezard ends up under a series of stalactites arranged in dark geometry that turns them into impaling lances of shadow. The remains of prisoners and previous intruders both frequently get up to attack people, but those are at least easily shut down by what the Deathknight had described.

    It's not long until anyone can figure out they've been going in circles as well. Space is fucked too down here, it seems, a little like the actual Labyrinth, despite the setting being a pale, but targetedly hostile imitation.
Staren     In any other context, discovering the fate of Skullstone's people would be horrifying, but... the surprise is dulled by everything else deathlords and ancient exalted have done. Staren initially chalks up Revelations' enthusiasm about it to her willingness to do things he wouldn't, but eventually he has to admit, "Okay, I can see how remotely snatching ghosts could be useful. For instance, you could prevent an enemy deathlord from getting an army of ghosts right after you kill their living army... Or foul up the plans of any death knights that were sourcing their soulsteel locally. ...Ohhhh, is that what we're digging for? Some kind of ghost magnet or remote teleporter? Hmm..."

    Staren pre-emptively turned off his sense of smell before leaving the shore of the island of undead. It seemed prudent, so he doesn't smell the tunnel. Trying to navigate the maze he digs into though is problematic. "I don't think these are transport tunnels. Maybe a ventilation system? The lights must just be for ancient maintenance workers..."

    And then they get to the trapped sections. Staren offers Haguro a nanobandage to help slow any bleeding from the blades, but soon his own trap sends him flying back to a (known safe section of) flooded tunnel to try and wash it off! "Augh, what IS this stuff?!"

    Staren's mapping software can deal with a certain amount of space fuckery, but once it's clear they're going in circles, Staren radios or seeks out Bloody Revelations. "The local geometry seems hostile. Would that tunnel thing you do in the Labyrinth work here, or is it different?"
Haguro "B-both? Cu...?" Haguro freezes up at that overly familiar gesture and language from Blody Revelations, getting a little flustered for a few moments as the reveal of the Silver Prince's forces being capable of both magic and fire going right over her head. Once she calms down enough to process it, though, she manages a quick nod as she switches one of her turrets to non-explosive munitions.

Even if Bloody Revelations is the only one that would conceivably be able to utilize the factory, that doesn't mean the Concord couldn't get some use from having her on their side by the time this is all said and done.

And then Wandering Dog goes running off, and the reasons why are conveniently explained in an easy-to-understand package. Haguro doesn't call out to stop him, and she doesn't move to stop him. He has his reasons, and she'll just have to focus on her job to make sure he can do what he needs to.

First step: Stopping the heart of this place. Haguro starts running after Wandering Dog as quickly as her legs can carry her, screeching as she nearly falls entirely through that section of floor. Her leg gets cut up a fair bit even with the armor plating, some of those blades cutting through the armor itself. She only narrowly avoids falling bodily through that passage of blades by catching her hands on the floor in front of her and biting down on the floor behind her with her tailheads, taking a moment to breathe before pulling herself back up.

"Th... That could've been worse. Thanks, Mister Staren." Breathing in slowly, she pauses to staunch the bleeding with the offered nanobandage before advancing once again. "Ah... Watch out for traps, everyone!"

In case anybody needed reminding. It makes her feel helpful, at least!

Bringing up her explosive-packing turrets, the Abyssal begins firing on any of those traps she actually sees to try and disable them before she or her allies can fall prey to them. She tries to keep pace with Wandering Dog, though, even without having much hopes of catching up to him. He's an ally, after all, and he helped her out before when she was in her own dire situation all those months ago. Of course Haguro's going to watch his back now.
Lezard Valeth Lezard lets the other breach the tunnels. He has a /feeling/ that he wants to keep his flesh firmly intact in this place that devours souls, and so perhaps he is a little more cautious than he normally would be. Simultaneously, he has dispensed with using his normal focus and has brought out a heavy staff of what looks like a gnarled, dead tree, black and withered with age, stained with the touch of an Abyss itself. Lezard strides forward with it in hand, letting the oppressive energies of the dead curl around the Catalyst.

"And no one has ever thought to ask where all of the soulsteel has come from?" Lezard chuckles. "I suppose if one is kept ignorant... But even the name of the material is evocative, is it not?"

The traps, however, are a problem. The sudden surge of power above stalagmites causes Lezard to pit his own power directly against some of the hazards, creating a dark shield to deflect the bolts harmlessly into walls, several of them slashing at his body and leaving grazes from the reaction times needed being not quite sufficient to prevent it comepltely.

"Well. This is certainly unpleasant." Lezard states... And then he begins examining the area more intently. With a wash of blackness, he calls up a number of small spheres of blackness with gleaming eyes, and sends them wafting out, examining the surroundings intently as he begins to make marks on the floor with the tip of his staff, runic inscriptions. "This environment is twisted indeed. If Bloody Revelations does not have the direction in mind, perhaps a little effort can be spared to determine just how it bends so we can navigate it."
Azure Armature "It is a massive war asset, and even if Skullstone is disabled, a tremendous cache of magical materials. Recovery should be our primary objective, with denial a distant second. Making sure that the enemy cannot escape with it should we have to leave..."

Armature shrugs, adjusting her scarf with thumb and forefinger up to hid a slight, knowing smirk. "Is just tactically sound."

As the group engages with the trapped areas, though, Armature offers an unhelpful 'stay alert' before shit starts going off. Deadfalls, of course. Acid - a classic.

In fact, every trap doesn't annoy Armature at all, a cold appreciation and a determined narrowing of the eyes at the challeges presented - being sharper than the designer was just part of being a scout.

And of course, it's not the clever trapmaker that Armature triggers, but geomantic magecraft - a light footfall stepping into the water-line of spellwork and roasting her for a brief eternity of pain before the operative combat rolls through the trap with hellfire clinging onto her body and clothes, rolling on the deck like a Boston Dynamics robot going through a stop-drop-and-roll procedure.

"Processes... here are very different!" She complains, as if that would explain away her blindness to traps of a particular bend.

Peeling off scorched to uselessness layers of clothing and a layer of armored plate, the stripped down alchemical shows a bit more skin, heavily sprinkled with pale blue sparkles. "Watch for... that."

The challenge of the MAGIC OF FUCKY LABYRINTH MOVEMENT gets the operative to check her watch again. "Locational analysis may prove useful. Staren, Albert see if you can detect the most likely 'true' direction a power source would be in, and then perhaps we can use the Flotilla's skills in terrain reconfiguring to simply drill to the target directly."
Wandering Dog Wandering Dog doesn't make it to the top of the prison, because apparently it's empty, so he focuses on going down as they're supposed to, into the labyrinth of traps. Haguro is there to watch his back, and as there's no ghosts to rescue, he doesn't have any big moral choices to make. For him, this is black-and-white: they shut down whatever teleporter he's using or suborn it, and then once they have a chance, they might be able to mess this place up. Wandering Dog wants to destroy the ships eventually. He doubts they'll be allowed to, but at the very least, the Silver Prince not having them is a major benefit, as is freeing his relatives from soulsteel-hood.

Wandering Dog's zealous charge means he gets shot by traps. A tunnel almost collapses on him, forcing him to slide forward as rubble smashes onto him that he needs to throw off with strength, bashing into him. One of the light source guns blasts into his shoulder, sending him back into a tunnel wall, and he and his tunic are cut up and nearly impaled several times, drawing blood, sweat, but no tears from the martial artist.

And eventually, Wandering Dog speaks up, as the famed adventurer. "We're going in circles. Someone find us a path further." He takes their going in circles as a time to calm down ever so slightly instead of rushing, and start actually navigating for more traps. If they're going to push on, they're going to know what's shooting them in the future and have a better chance to defend themselves from it. He tunes his senses of sight and hearing for things that look and sound off, for detection purposes.
Starbound Flotilla     The Flotilla, at least, are aware of the dangers and hazards. They're used to it, in that flighty way of being used to an abusive husband's fits of drunken violence. With an assortment of gasmask filters, they dive and adventure. They desperately hang over pits with their grappling hooks, suffering potentially lethal blades as dents to their leg armor. They have to rapidly dig drain systems as their environmental defenses corrode under necromantic fluid. They have to defuse or evade explosives. They have to dive around mechanical traps, or catch them on Seft's heavy shield. They coordinate to manage their formation away from dark lances. And they accumulate the damage of a dungeon-run in ways that are precise, strategic, distributed, and managed by a constant flow of medical supplies.

    It's fucking exhausting.

    "Mmmh." Albert nods to Blue. "Star Three. Scan, emissions and caves."
    "Dutiful. Right away." Seft says, bringing out a heavy handheld scanner, all brass and glass and shimmery lights that show the layout of nearby "caves", and search for energy emissions of all sorts.
    "The rest of you, direct dig. We're going to cut a line." If Azure's plan works, the five other Flotilla members will all direct their mining beams dead-on for whatever short path they can find... That isn't blocked by Soulsteel, anyway, which they very very likely can't dig through.
Bloody Revelations     Rather than being interested by the traps, Bloody Revelations has been wandering around ostensibly deep in thought, though still with that constant habit of quietly talking to herself when not paying attention to anyone else. Every so often, she looks very surprised, even 'wowed' by some sudden revelation, and then her excitement grows, until even she, in her persistent distraction, is hit with a soulsteel spike launched from a blind corner at great speed, rammed straight through her chest. She stops, stumbles a half step back, looks at the small lance punched straight through her heart, grabs hold of it, and wrenches it free, tossing the bloodstained spike into a corner. The normally fatal wound seamlessly flows back together in reverse, faintly smoking black. Turning to look, she finally acknowledges the group's existence.

    "You don't realize it yet, but this island is the most important thing you've ever seen in your lives." Bloody Revelations state with exactly the right tone to start a cult indoctrination speech. "The reason this island can't be found . . . it isn't protected with any kind of concealing magic. Magic can be detected. An island that disappeared off the map would be known to Heaven. Known by other Deathlords equally as ancient. Being in a shadowland, it can't be a trick of the Wyld, because the chaos and the Fair Folk shaped of it cannot enter shadowlands --at least not without rapidly falling apart. It's not a fabrication, because the Bodhisattva doesn't have the power to raise an entire island from nothing. It has no mirror in Creation, despite Creation predating the Underworld. Why is that?"

    She leaves a pause, but it isn't for serious contemplation. "In the ancient, ancient days, at the height of the Solar Deliberative, the fools sought to expand Creation's borders. They'd already usurped and killed or lobotomized and enslaved the true architects of Creation --the only ones capable of generating true reality-- and so they sought to do so themselves, with their own, inferior powers. They shaped the Wyld into new substance, pushing it back after their war had destroyed the old Creation and let so much of it in. They used sorcery and their vaunted 'Reality Engines' to turn Wyld into more Creation, but being only the Solar Exalted, none of it was truly *real*. Solid, but stable only due to the engines and geomancy that kept it that way. A shared hallucination made of the primordial chaos --potential shaped into land-- that could only exist as long as people *believed* it existed. You've seen this kind of thing once before, some of you. Saigoth. That continent that sank beneath the waves when Creation rejected it."

    "So, when the Great Contagian wiped this place out, and everywhere around it, nobody serviced the engines, and nobody was left alive who remembered it existed, except one. Everyone knows a tiny minority of humans had an innate resistance to the Contagion, and so at least one prisoner here survived. When the Wyld flooded in and unmade this edge of the universe, turning it all back into seething chaos, this little island survived, because one man's perception gave it substance. Since the *place* it existed no longer *did*, it was shunted into the one ocean in Creation *correctly* created by the ancient Primordials --into the shadowlands here. No doubt he eventually starved locked in a cell, or was killed by hungry ghosts from the plague victims, but even when *he* disappeared, this place *didn't*."
Bloody Revelations     "Do you get it? This island doesn't exist in Creation. It doesn't come from the Underworld. It was never real, and no longer is. Nobody knows of it because it should have been erased. Heaven can't find it on their ridiculous Loom because it *doesn't exist*. It ceased to exist millennia ago, yet here we are! Where something was spared from the Wyld but met with the impossibility of complete dissolution --of oblivion-- it's become something else, invisible and impossible for anyone to know about. Oh how I *wish* I could write about this. Proof positive that I was right all along, and I can't even rub it in their faces. Ahhh . . ." After a full minute of forlorn sighing, the Abyssal runs her fingers back through her hair, slaps her cheek, shakes her head, and then stops trudging along in that almost daydream haze. "Hmm? Ah, that." she says to Staren, touching the bright red sash around her waist and producing what looks like some sort of compass or pocket watch, with a finish like solid mercury. Flipping it open, she reveals the interior is full of nonsense, showing various arrangements of stars, arcane symbols, elaborate gears, and amber and silver gems, between three different black hands.

    "People tend to assume the Deathlords just 'have it'." she says offhandedly to Lezard while consulting the nonsense compass. Is it making a ticking sound? "They have a near-monopoly on it already. The Underworld trades in it like Creation does in iron by now. It's conceivable that the ordinary parts of Skullstone come from him buying it in the Underworld, but not that shipyard. Not those vessels. Not that fleet. Though, most people know nothing about soulsteel in the first place."

    Staren pokes about the magic effect. She snaps the compass shut and lets it back on its chain. "Those are strategic applications, but you've already forgotten about the *existential* ones. We're talking about something that *guarantees*, one hundred percent, that anyone who dies within its sphere of influence becomes a ghost and enters the Underworld. No reincarnation. No Lethe. No recycling of souls. If it's snapping them up and leaving them vulnerable to being turned into soulsteel, no hungry lower souls either. A lodestone might be a perfectly adequate comparison, drawing them in like iron filings and sticking them to it until they're processed as metal or released none the wiser back into the populace." She seems to remember something. "So don't die, actually. It'll definitely suck your soul in."

    Seeing a few other people harmed in various degrees by the traps, she groans, upturns her palm, snaps her fingers, and then a small, narrow necked bottle of black jade spiraled around glass materializes in her hand, filled with some faintly glowing red liquid. She flicks it over her shoulder towards Haguro. "Take a sip and then pass it around. Don't gulp the whole thing or you'll probably die." Whoever does so find that it tastes thick and syrupy and horribly sweet at the same time as it tastes like rose hips and blood, but it starts mending their injuries fairly quickly.

    She snaps twice more, as if impatiently beckoning a waiter, and then materializes what *definitely* looks like a rifle, slender and gothic and styled of black jade with thin lines of red where the internals are exposed. Still true to creation though, it's definitely not set up with a real action or well, instead having a glowing green rod inserted through its core axis, where a bolt would be. She tosses it in Staren's direction, then snaps again and tosses a similar pistol towards Pavo, then something like a slightly old-fashioned shotgun towards George, and some sort of wide-mouthed launcher filled with twisted grooves and a big globe of green to Albert. "You'll probably want these when we find it." she says, unhelpfully.
Bloody Revelations     Seft identifies sources of more, and more powerful, magic emissions below which are almost definitely traps. When the rest of the Flotilla begin digging, they quickly find that their tunnel doesn't ever line up with where Seft is detecting them, getting even more twisted for trying to create a shortcut. Consulting the compass, Bloody Revelations points, and if they're willing to follow her totally unintuitive directions (including at least one loop), it somehow works out, and they open up into a much larger cavern below, wide enough to park a score of cars, with an oppressively low ceiling, most of it waist deep in water.

    The far end of the broad, low chamber exposes a section of carved wall from the natural, water-worn basalt, covered top to bottom in what must be millions of teeny tiny runes, so fine that they present the optical illusion of *squirming* on the wall, like the march of a million little insects coating it. In the center is set a massive, circular vault-style door of soot and salt and dark moss-caked Orichalcum, rather than soulsteel, with mechanical wheels levers embedded all over it. It looks like a straight shot of safecracking to get in.

    Lezard's Pursuers have other ideas. Moving any further into the room, where the water starts to get even deeper, the white eyes immediately break off from him and spiral madly into the water, where they plunge into the briny black and explode with that dark, muffled, incendiary whoosh. There's a second where Wandering Dog's finely honed and focused senses will spot the deep black shape against the oily black water by the slight swell of the surface, moving rapidly towards them and lunging up from beneath the visually impenetrable underground lake.

    Massive snapping jaws, easily large enough to tear a small sailboat in half, come at the group wholesale. In the brief flash of the bite, they look like they belong to nothing more than a hill-sized mound of rotten algae and exposed, sea-bloated bodyparts, like a mound of corpses dumped overboard in a swamp. Its teeth are sized like forearms, though, and made of dense black bone rather than enamel, easily punching through steel. The creature surfaces as it bites, launching itself into shallower water like a crocodile, and exposing more of its rotten body, albeit only half of it can even fit into the chamber. It looks like some kind of horrendous zombie mosasaur, bigger than even the biggest recorded in prehistoric Earth, blind and eyeless, reeking of necromantic energy.
Azure Armature As if on cue, after the revelatory party and exploratory note reaches a full creschendo, Armature's watch starts beeping. A digital be-be-beep quietly set to alarm the user. Then again, she could probably have set up something to vibrate into her wrist or go off in her head - the alarm may be 'for everyone else'.

With the shortcut dug, Armature looks back up. "With Revelations here, the forward team should have enough power to punch through any defeses, especially when there doesn't seem to be much in the way of personell here. I will translocate back to the surface and begin my work."

Drawing up, she gives a short two-finger wave. "If you work slowly, I should be back to assist. If you do not, then I praise your efficency in advance."

With that, she disappears in a flash of light - almost certainly to begin her operations on the 'surface' of the island with the much more boring 'making sure the other guys can't get it and the team can' mission.
Staren     The theory behind this place IS fascinating, and Staren listens attentively, although the faceplate remains an expressionless skull. "No lower soul... no hungry ghosts." He echoes. Staren attempts to sip the drink if Revel indicates he should -- if it works by magic it might repair his armor anyway, after all. He takes the weapon without comment, looking it over briefly to make sure the way to operate it is clear, and trying to give it at least a brief examination with essence sensors.

    When Bloody Revelations warns of his soul getting trapped here... Staren experiences a mental shiver, if not a physical one. Would it work that way, if his cyberbrain is damaged too much to sustain consciousness? What if it were only temporarily shut off somehow? Or would his cortical stack act as an anchor?

    Hopefully, he won't have to find out.

    He doesn't comment on Revel leading them in a circle. She knows what she's doing, and he can certainly concieve of the true path including some loops just to fuck with people.

    He barely has time to take in the chamber, and to think about that orichalcum vault that is probably trapped and warded six ways from Sunday, before MONSTER. As soon as there's movement he starts shooting with the weapon Revelations gave him, though he has to actually sight and aim it like a pleb. And try to stay in the back of the group, magic wings pulling him back with extra speed if the thing gives chase and finally just using his forcefield to try and hold its jaws open for a few seconds while others get it off him if need be!
Haguro Is it truly that important? If so, Haguro isn't quite feeling it, but that's largely due to unfamiliarity than it is to indifference or anything like that. She doesn't even recognize Bloody Revelations' tone for what it is, and the history lesson doesn't get a huge reaction out of Haguro at the start.

"This coudl be a good place to hide rare materials, then. Or... High value VIPs? I-if it wasn't for the danger of everything else, I guess."She does let out a few thoughtful murmurs as things start clicking together, though, largely around this place's continued existence despite the impossibility of it.

Theoretical impossibility. Or... However that even works in Creation. Even trying to comprehend all of it is rather difficult for the cruiser despite Bloody Revelations explanation, although her talk of strategic applications of it somehow manage to make sense to her.

Sort of. 'Don't die' is incredibly easy to understand.

Haguro lets out a surprised noise as she catches that bottle of red mystery juice, peering at it for a moment before taking a quick sip and passing it over. "It tastes... P-pretty bad, but in a good way?" With grievous bodily harm being a rather huge risk, she'll have to be forgiven for forgetting any hygienic issues about sharing drinks in such a way in favor of speed and not thinking too much about what it is she's even drinking.

Also, because a giant set of teeth comes after the group not too long thereafter. Haguro's first instinct is to fire on it, but she hesitates briefly as she remembers to NOT use her explosives with her allies in the blast range. She falls back quite from the creature's first charge, keeping her guns aimed forward and her tailheads poised to fire even as she leap upwards to avoid getting bitten right in half.

One of her legs does get caught in the attack, though, and the armor cracks and breaks underneath those corpsey teeth. Crying out in pain, Haguro uses her close proximity to start firing at it point blank, trying to punch holes right into its stupid corpse zombiesaur face!
Starbound Flotilla "It? What isss ssspooky friend knowing even more?"
"Enough to see through the gaps in the fabric of the narrative of this world."
"Weren't wrong about the suffering, that's for sure."
"Hmph. Thousand times worse than the moon-prisons."
"Maybe. Still reminds me of them."
"Worried. I just hope that if we're dealing with the heart, we'll help stop more stolen souls from Skullstone too..."

    Some of the Flotilla gather up new arms anmd armor. Albert tilts his head with some moderate confusion, but readies the launcher without question, giving just a short affirming grunt. Pavo holds the pistol by the midsection, ready to shoot and to bash in equal measure. George catches the thing and moves with it easily, as if he's held it every day of his life.

    When they finally wrap up the digging, the sort of mining-dwarf approach to getting to an objective cave, they are ready as soon as they see the waist-deep water. Moonfin is the one who stops them, and takes point. "Test your arms. I shall be the bulwark against this one." He draws his katana and strides forward, readying a defensive stance. And when the beast strikes, he moves like flowing water. "First Sea Hylotl Style: Corpses Upon Rapids!" Where jaws snap down, his sword lashes forward to intercept teeth head-on and force Moonfin back, or force the beast back in turn, trying to hold it back. The crashing dents his arms and his hands, strains his shoulders, and crashes him back against the wall. He won't be lasting for long as a solo-tank.

    George, Pavo, and Albert line up. None of them dislike Moonfin even a little, and so when he calls out, "Strike! With great force!" They open fire like a firing squad, blasting away to see what their weapons do, and to turn the thing into whatever non-corpse remains that these weapons can reduce it to, as fast as they can manage.
Wandering Dog Wandering Dog is upset enough that he just sips what is handed to him when he normally wouldn't, helping mend his injuries, and then passes it off. He glances at the orichalcum vaults as they reach the cave after their weird travel, listening to Bloody Revelations as they do so, clearly frustrated. When they move through the cave, he suddenly stops, seeing something...

And in a flash, he's leaping backwards, right as the zombie mosasaur surges out into a bite. It narrowly misses him for the first bite, due to his examination, but it'll have a solid chance of hitting him in a moment, as he surges towards its face and moves to start striking it with reinforced fists. He has no idea where the weak points on a mosasaur are. He doesn't need to know.

Radiant holy fire starts surging from the mosasaur after a several second delay, the Golden Janissary style being employed where it works best. Though, the monster can easily charge him or throw him back if it survives the initial volley, and it's probably going to hurt.
Lezard Valeth "Of course they just 'have it'. It's no major feat to simply melt down a few hundred souls where no one is looking." Lezard replies. "It is pure ignorance. Nothing comes from nothing. Though I suppose the people here get the 'just rewards' of their service to such a snake." Bloody Revelations does in fact confirm what Lezard had already assumed, however, which is... slightly problematic. There are things /worse/ than death, after all. Still, the nature of this location... "A location that should never have existed, and died instead of disappearing... Fascinating. Forcing a location to slip through the cracks in such a manner can have its advantages."

Lezard looks over the fluid for a moment and passes it on. His wounds are not serious enough to warrant consuming an unknown liquid. Call it paranoia if you will, but let's just say an empire had a demon problem recently using the same tactic.

Revelations, thankfully, gets things pointed out, and the non-Euclidean environment gradually bends to their desires. They get to the deepest vaults, and Lezard finds himself half-submurged. He grimaces at this, considering something, clearly, when his Pursuers flare and chase into the inevitable local horror. "Gah! What a creature!" He says, the hardened necromancer reeling in the face of the massive pile of necromantic horror.

He's not going in after the beast. Thankfully, Lezard is fully capable of handling things at a distance. He rapidly retreats as the maw clashes down, looking back and watching Moonfin go in hard. Well it would be poor of him to allow Moonfin to go in unsupported. There is a flash of light as Lezard casts a quick enchantment. "Guard Reinforce!" He calls out, and a magical barrier begins shaping itself around the Flotilla, providing a buffer against physical damage. It will hopefully buy them a little more time before he turns his considerable magical might to offense.

The Catalyst crackles down as he considers the beast before him, and cries out, "DARK SAVIOR!" As he does so, shadows form into long blades of dark energy and are hurled into the horror, attempting to use those same energies to begin shredding it apart. Time will tell if it becomes a matter of trying to kill a fire elemental with fire or not.
Bloody Revelations     Staren can tell right away that the firearm is magic. It's more or less a custom firewand, mostly made of Underworld black jade, and not a complex ammunition-loading firearm. It has some sigils he won't recognize, and the elongated profile of a panther or tiger emerging from the etched barrel coil, where there would probably be some eastern dragon according to the more archetypical ornamentation, but otherwise looks like something between a tanegashima rifle and a lee enfield. Doesn't seem to be necrotech though, but more generally magic. No organic parts and no overt necromancy on it. Two types of jade-steel alloy and whatever that green rod is. The others are the same, save that Pavo's has a sort of raven wing motif, Albert's looks like it has an upraised fist clenching the reservoir, and the wide smoothbore George got looks to be backed with a skull wreathed in coils of smoke.

    He'll have to trust it when the jaws crunch into his forcefield, because in the moment he has the field strength to obstruct the creature's mouth and hold its jaws open, before it crushes him like a marble in a vise, it's what he has on hand. Pulling the trigger results in a massive muzzle plume of ghastly green and black fire and sparks, and then puts what appears to be a solid slug of pyre flame into the back of the creature's throat, compressed and refined, so that instead of sticking and flaming like napalm, it furiously burns inward like a bullet made of magical material-eating white phosphorous. Has a real nasty kick though. No slide or bolt.

    Predictably, the Flotilla's operate in much the same way, however more custom tooled to their styles, with Pavo's having a flintlock-esque kick and trajectory to it, George's spitting out a fiery wall of high velocity globules, and Albert's launching a sphere that explodes into a wide field of crude pyre flame. They weren't specifically designed for *this* challenge, but they're horrendous all the same, punching burning holes in the monster and then eating away at it from the inside, except where Albert's just turns the whole area into a hell zone.
    Haguro is a walking pile of battleship guns herself, though, and what those do to a giant corpsey liopleurodon goes without much saying. AP rounds bore huge tunnels through its unnatural flesh and bone, erupting back out the other side and fracturing its skull and jaw while Moonfin fends it off. Rotting algal matter pours into the black water where it is gored open, oozing the dead vegetation of a swamp poisoned by fallout rather than blood. Dark magic has nothing to do with this one. Lezard's lances pierce into it with ease, nailing it to the bedrock with the weighty, physical Dark of Human substance. After a glance, his trained necromancer's eye concludes that it isn't actually undead, but some sort of creature native to this plane of existence that adopts the form of so much death and rot as its flesh.

    It still sucks to be it when Wandering Dog uses the martial arts style *specifically designed* to murder things from the Underworld. Golden fire blossoms inside its gnashing maw, and a horrid, gurgling, boiling kettle shriek issues from its ruined face as the holy-tagged sunfire chars it down to its broken bones, slipping back under the surface and swimming away, instinctively expecting the water to put out the flames (it won't (the golden ones or the pyre ones)). The way is clear, and the wait time is very little.
Bloody Revelations     That is because Bloody Revelations herself didn't bother with the plasmic. That's straight up what the Help is for. Where the jaws surge towards her, she steps forward, her body flickers into writhing shadow, her scarlet eyes flash and paint a glowing trail forward, and she passes through the monster in a burst of motion, ending up by the vaults. While the battle rages, she fiddles with the arcane machinery, pausing to stare at the insides of her eyelids for inspiration, and working the wheels and levers in blind faith. She puzzles through the esoteric process while all the terrible lights and noises and yelling goes on over her shoulder, focused on saving time by efficiently splitting labour (and not having people badgering her when trying to listen and divine the details of what she's meant to do with the complicated sorcerous machinery).

    A few moments after the ruined and bleeding plasmic monster vanishes into the soupy and reeking depths, the vault assembly releases concentric rings of bolts with reluctant, groaning clanks, exposing the gleaming gold untouched on their inside surfaces. The door jerks inward, then rolls slowly into its frame, exposing a set of gates that split open and recede, and beyond that, interlocked bars and mesh that retract and fold down. It allows them straight into a corridor of burnished bronze and gold, less marred for time and wear, but with its ornamental iconography deliberately defaced by more of those crawling runes, making it feel like walking down a tunnel filled with millions and millions of writhing centipedes covering every surface, black from the corner of the eye even though gold when directly looked at, as if chased by a dark fog.

    The feeling of 'hunger', of dispassionate, hostile, thoughtless, insatiable devouring, is at its strongest here. The sense of the burning eye staring down is so direct now it's almost skin-blistering. The sense that the Elites aren't wanted here is a palpable force, pressing them back as they might strive to go forward, and yet at the same time, they are pulled towards it. Something about the air has a subtle tug to it, tingling in their bones, at first seeming like merely a lure, but then becoming quite physical, pulling on them as if walking downhill, and then, in the way of trying to go down too steep of a hill, pulling them so hard as to make it difficult to do anything but go forward fast enough to maintain balance.

    It's just like a magnet. It feels just like what Staren had compared it to. It's like holding something iron in one's hand and feeling it pulled towards a powerful magnet, except the iron thing is their soul, and that's attached to the inside of their body (in a sense). When the corridor ends, it takes a great deal of exertion to simply stop from sliding forward, into the center of the rounded room beyond it, or more likely, into the pitch dark pits it is suspended over.
Bloody Revelations     A domed ceiling of black quartz ribbed with soulsteel arches overhead, converging to a central steeple from which a beam of ridiculously intense necrotic Essence descends, forking on a transparent orb at its center and falling back down into the abyss below it. The orb has been set up at the center of a whole, small temple, central stairs, blue-flamed candles, occult reliefs and all, sat upon something like a soulsteel throne, though it hovers there. Inside it appears to be nothing more than some small black pebble of rock, barely larger than a thumbnail, though it is intensely disturbing to look at.

    While it is the center of the horrid aura, like Nidhogg gnawing eternally at the roots of Yggdrasil rendered into a palpable form of radiation, it is not quite where the Elites are being pulled. Arrayed all around the top of the mini temple like a crown, are a number of huge soulsteel plates shaped into hollow-eyed, gape-mouthed masks, as if sucking the party up with their breath. They're incredibly thick and solid, pinned into the masonry by orichalcum chains just to keep up their weight. These things are the magnets --anyone can feel it. What happens to their soul when they're finally stuck to it like flypaper, and it keeps pulling and pulling and their body can no longer move, well . . .
Wandering Dog Once the beast moves to escape, Wandering Dog knows the 'fire' won't be put out by water. He doesn't focus on the monster, because their entrance is made. He steps inside...and feels himself being pulled by the soul magnet. As they're inside, and about to be sucked into a terrible pit, he focuses his essence through his legs, and moves to just walk /back/, struggling to keep his body moving away from it. As Haguro gets closer, he reaches out an arm to grab her and keep her tethered, which makes him lose some of his footing, but hopefully, he can prevent them from getting caught up in the void. "Hold on!"

And then, he turns towards Lezard and Bloody, the occult experts. "Do we smash it, or do we try and turn it off? Just give the word." Wandering Dog wants to smash it...but this isn't the time to break the 'rules'. He still needs his shot at the Prince. That's what matters here.
Haguro      Haguro nearly topples over as she lands on both feet, her re-injured leg seeping blackened blood through what's left of the nano-bandage. She takes the opportunity granted by all of the doorway's various mechanisms opening to try and just shrug off the pain.

     It's very hard to try and shrug off that pain. Haguro's conditioned for battle, but pain still hurts! She hides the limp as best she can with her tailheads acting as a pseudo-cane against the wall, heading further into the vault corridor with her turrets at the ready once more. The hostile aura surrounding the Elites has her shivering lightly, but Haguro doesn't allow herself to be cowed by those awful feelings. She's got a job to do both as a member of the Concord and as a hero-in-training, and no amount of horrible necromantic ritual rooms will stop her!

     Still, that horrible necromantic ritual rooms is pretty strange. She feels herself being oddly drawn towards those plates, and Haguro stares right at those hollow-eyed masks. As uncomfortable as she looks, though, she keeps pproaching them, and she even reaches towards one as something tells her to just try it out. On? Either or.

    Luckily, Wandering Dog is there to keep her from being drawn too deeply to the plates, and she jerks back towards him after a moment of absent-mindedness. "Gh.. S-sorry! What just...?" She sounds bewildered, but her senses seem to have come back to her as her turrets all take aim at that magnet. "My guns are ready to fire if we just need it destroyed. U-unless anyone has objections...?"
Staren Well, that was a thoroughly unpleasant beast, and it broke his forcefield. They didn't even kill it, it's /running away/, but now he can't get a clear shot. Staren doesn't /entirely trust/ that what's been done to it will kill it if it's still able-bodied enough to escape. He gives Haguro another bandage, which may stop bleeding but won't knit her flesh back together.

    But Revelations has opened the vault and is moving on.

    "What are these runes? How did they get in here?" Staren wonders. He'd assumed they were added by the Silver Prince as part of the (lowercase l) labyrinth around it... but they extend INTO the vault? Or were they always here?

    He may or may not notice the black -- his current vision isn't divided into a fovea and peripheral vision, he simply sees whatever light hits his sensors and can focus his attention anywhere in his field of view he likes. If he does notice it though, he doesn't find it notably odd considering everything else.

    Something's watching him. It wants him to leave. He can push through with willpower, for a time. He's reminded of Denandsor, and before that, of being awake at four in the morning and braving the dark hallway even while something inside him warns that there are skeletal monsters in the next room.

                                Won't you stay?                                

    He's hit with a sudden sense of horror and loss, but it slips away, leaving only a vague unease subsumed beneath the Watching. Staren stops, shudders, and shakes his head, and moves on.

    When he notices he's being pulled, he tries to slow down. "Hey, doesn't this feel like a trap?" But... they're all together, and Revelations is leading the way, and she /probably/ knows what she's doing, so it's alright to keep going, right?

    The sight of the bottomless(?) abyss in the floor before them is enough to give him pause and make him stumble to a stop, back away, and try to grab onto... anything, like a wall ornamentation. If there isn't anything, he'll sit down in the hall doorway and occasionally scuttle back a bit, still feeling like he's sliding down a slope that isn't there.

    He's not sure how long he's focused on fighting it himself before he remembers there are other people here, and they have a mission. "Now what?! Do what you have to do and let's get out of here!"
Lezard Valeth The monster is dispatched without much trouble. Lezard grimaces at the brackish, dark liquid. What other horrors are lurking down there? Still, that isn't something they have to deal with... A living creature that has adapted to the horrors of this environment. Something like that might have been worth dragging back to his laboratory for research, but for now... They have bigger issues.

The almost anticlimactic death of the creature is countermanded by the problem of the contents of the vault. He steps inside, and he grimaces at that constant pull. Thankfully, his soul is well-anchored within its fleshly vessel, and he is in no true danger at the moment.

However, the mere existence of this place requires some... reinterpretation of certain things. Lezard's world is expanded, seeing proof of new and terrible and intense necromantic workings in ways he never considered before. The pang of having his worldview shifted in such a manner only lasts a short time, instead quickly becoming fascination. The non-glow of the entropic force almost reflecting off of his glasses as he steps into the temple, carefully keeping the Catalyst before him to help focus and moderate the necromantic energies around him. He is no Abyssal. The powers of the Underworld do not flow through his essence, and as such he has to be more guarded than perhaps others that would find this more 'natural' to them.

His protection, however, does not extend to the others. Keeping himself guarded is enough of a task for him. He carefully begins probing the environment, working to determine how best to deactivate the equipment...

Intact, of course. This isn't something he's going to let go to waste if he has a choice in the matter. He has /ideas/ already.
Haguro      Staren's offered nanobandages, meanwhile, are once again put to good use! Even keeping Haguro's blood/oil/shipghostjuice is better than letting it spread everywhere, and it'll help keep the ground from becoming too slippery should a hasty escape be necessary in the next several minutes.
Bloody Revelations     Bloody Revelations barely glances at the runes on the way in. "The unspeakable words. Carved to properly channel prayer to his master, no doubt. To project his power into the void and amplify his master's reach." Even she is skidding forward on her heels when the group enters, however. A soul is a soul.

    "Of course it's a trap. Soul magnets are usually only possible in the most powerful of Manses, but of course they'd be easily set up here." She points towards the tiny little pebble sitting on the throne pedestal. "I want that." she states with all the confidence of a child who's never been told no in their life. Her finger drifts up to the magnets. "Do what you will with those, and do it quickly."

    Indeed, the pull is starting to grow more intense by the second. The faint sound of gushing wind and sibiliant moaning fills the chamber as dark Essence rains down from the steeple. That seems to be the obvious power flow when Lezard inspects it, but clearly chaneled in some way by the geometry of the tiny temple itself, rather than put into conduits of any kind.
Starbound Flotilla     The Starbound Flotilla forms back up, stepping into the water. Not like they like it, but they've well learned to tolerate the awful experience. Heading into the hallway gives them many of the same unnerving feelings that they often get around Cultivator artifacts, but in an inverted, gnawing way. They don't like it, they all collectively and wordlessly decide!

    They approach, and something gnaws inside. More and more, Biteblade hungers, in particular, but she keeps it in her jaws. They're soon swapping iut for hazmat armor, heavy protective scientific gear that does little, if anything, to resolve the heavy soul-sucking force. It seems... To Pavo, particularly, the masks seem to draw her attention. "You want the throne then? Or is it the manse?" She thinks, for a moment. "But... not the masks. Not the masks... How would they work outside here? Would they?" She turns, quite ominously. Her eyes are wide and eager. She puts one hand up, briefly, to Haguro. Hold, a minute, she says, silently. She looks at someone else though.

    "Staren." She says, with the only kind of hunger she can have. "I have an idea about something we should work together on. You don't happen to have much knowledge on how to grab up minds. What if we worked together on a way to fix that problem? And broaden out that... /specialty/ of yours?"
Staren     Staren is all but ready to blast the masks like the others except that he thinks Revel might want them. When she doesn't, though, he waits for someone else to make the first move.

    Pavo's proposal, though... That's a direction he wasn't thinking about, so focused was he on his soul being tugged around. He slowly gets to his feet. "I'm listening... but do you have an idea about how to safely transport these?" He focuses on trying to... get his brain out of AAAGH I'M GETTING SUCKED IN mode and back into analytical problem-solving mode.

    Could it be as simple as keeping the masks facing away from you? That seems problematic though, they'll too easily face others...
Starbound Flotilla     "Pseudochalcum might transport it safely. I think I could try blessing you with... one of them. If our friend could point me /up/, at least." Pavo glances to Bloody Revelations. If she gives the affirmative that this could be used as such... The Flotilla gets to work. Even Seft doesn't seem too worried, at least by the idea of something like that being in Staren's hands. They rapidly assemble what looks like a very small, very heavy drill-pod with rocket-boosters on the bottom. They make extensive use of their unique pseudochalcum plating, esoteric durasteel alloys forged with orichalcum-like mirror arrays around exotic radioactive stars. One hopes it might faraday-cage the mask until they can get it into a lab. For now, they intend to drill the thing up and send the thing literally into orbit, where they can pick it up later and shove it into an isolated space-lab for extensive study.

    Hopefully that's going to get done quickly, and moreover, Pavo suspects use of the mask would be the sort of thing Bloody Revelations would like in her own idiosyncratic way. Looks like they're about to finish up with the pedestal and throne business soon; the Flotilla's on-call to help with any matters related to that as well, of course.

    If that can get sorted, though, they intend to start putting high-intensity mining beams on the masks, and just /gunning/ them until they puncture or explode.
Haguro     'Not the masks'. That's good enough for Haguro! She can't hold out against the magnetic force forever, and it doesn't look like her allies are faring particularly better than herself. With the Flotilla turning their beams on the masks, Haguro follows their lead by firing AP rounds to help destroy the crap out of them and reduce the burden on the others!
Wandering Dog The masks are safe to destroy. Well, alright. Wandering Dog flexes his hands, and begins to build raw essence up, forming around his fists. Before he can get sucked in, he fires it at one of the masks getting mined that needs more support, punching out what is basically just a ki blast. It seems the martial artist has some generic ranged attacks to go with his more specialized melee attacks.
Staren     Staren watches Pavo assemble the pod with interest. When it takes off, he asks, "How high up does that go?" And when Pavo points out it goes to orbit... "Wait! I've BEEN in orbit over this place, I can't see it! I think the wyld might be in the way! Also, we're in a Shadowland and it might end up in the Underworld! ...Do you have more of those pods?" Staren would really like to get as many of these for study as he can, but if they can make it out of here with even one... he'll turn his weapons on the rest, seeing if beam cannons are enough or if these are going to require a concerted effort to destroy.
Lezard Valeth Lezard moves in. The others will, no doubt, destroy or steal the magnets. He works his way forward, resisting and warping the energies around him as much as he can to mitigate the situation. He approaches the orb, pulling on a glove. The thick, alchemically-treated leather creaks as he flexes a hand within. He takes the Catalyst, then, and thrusts it into the flow of necrotic Essence, trying to break the flow to the orb, trying to create a new flow and control the path, guiding it around the orb... And when it is clear, reache sout to grasp that orb, pulling it off the pedestal and moving back and away, releasing the Essence flow to let it pour down on the empty station.
Bloody Revelations     "The *stone*!" Bloody Revelations insists, pointing with increased agitation beyond all the stuff that's remotely fancy to the pebble sitting in the middle. "I don't care about the soul magnets! They're only byproducts of the Foundry of Souls, not what I actually *need*." Getting sick of having to explain this, she stabs both heels into the bronze flooring and flares all four of those cold, starry midnight wings, ephemeral feathers sucked towards the masks and dissipating into black motes in the air. Her hand falls to the scabbard at her side, her thumb pushing the guard with the faint click of steel despite only the shadow of a blade suggesting it exists, and then the chains fastening one of the heavy masks to the masonry, as well as a chunk of the masonry itself, explode into a million nail-sized fragments, stippling the walls, cracking the ceiling, and careening into the abyss.

    The falling mask is captured immediately by the drill pod, grinding up through the damaged black quarts and then easily through the basalt from there. With the direct solution seeming to be acceptable, massive amounts of high calibre battleship cannonfire, powerful ki blasts, beam cannons, and combined intense mining lasers, make relatively short work of the rest. It isn't the masks that break first, despite how much the soulsteel might redden and glow and wail in torture, but inevitably the foundation it's connected to that slags and melts away, dropping it down (probably what the pyre guns were for). Disconnected from the flow of Death Essence, thin pillars of necromantic energy erupt from their edifices and begin boring into the walls, but are no particular threat to someone crossing to the shrine.

    The Manus Catalyst turns out to be surprisingly well-suited to dealing with the absurd energy it is jammed into, gushing noxious quantities of flesh eating black and white smoke from its wood, but not actually any worse for wear. If Lezard weren't certain, it seems like it'd actually started to *grow* a bit, shifting very slightly, like a ball of vines caught in a slow time lapse. When he removes the orb and allows the circuit to resume, the beam just shoots straight down into the blackness, and all power shuts off to the lights, the magnets, and presumably the traps and doors.

    Inside the glass orb, he gets a better look at the unassuming but inherently disturbing pebble. On closer inspection, it actually appears to be a teeny tiny piece of architecture, knocked off the corner of a building. He can see the spots where extremely elaborate etching and grotesques originally faced, and the spots where it was cut, but those spots don't stay in the same place or proportion. The longer he looks at it, the more he sees the little piece of debris' dimensions and ornamentations shift and alter over time, new features and designs folding out of nothing and then sinking back into nowhere in unsettling fractal ripples, as if he is only ever able to glimpse a tiny fraction of the pebble's entirety at any one time. Moving it around to look at different angles only makes it worse. He won't see the same square centimeter twice.
Bloody Revelations     The Deathknight snatches it almost immediately. Despite how insanely bad of an idea it seems, she squeezes the orb until it cracks under her fingertips, and then crushes it in a heartbeat, taking the tiny stone into her hands. Clutching them together, she goes as far as to rub her cheek against it, sighing in relief as if she'd just recovered something soft and comfortable and sentimentally valuable from hanging over a fire. "Oh finally . . . finally finally . . . you're mine now~ You belong to me and not *him*! I'm so sorry I didn't even know you were here . . . it's alright now, it's alright~ . . . Oh you'll warm up in time, don't worry~ You had to put up with him for so *long*, but don't worry, I'm here . . . you deserve to be with *me*."

    Apparently getting over her Moment, the Deathknight's eyes snap back open in a glare, as if to silently ask 'what are you still doing here?'. "We're going. That sloppy imbecile will notice his Foundry of Souls no longer works soon enough. Days at the very most. Your friend Blue is already doing half the work up top. Get a move on. Chop chop. Anything you want from here or the prison or the shipyard, do it now. Go!"
Staren     "We know that! We're getting them out of the way!" Staren replies, when Revel 'reminds' them that they're here for the stone.

    Which looks weird and which she acts all creepy towards. Okay, whatever, she's like that. Now it's time to go... and frankly, he has no reason to spend lots of time here!

    Once back outside, he'll pay the shipyard a visit. Just /seeing/ it might provide some useful intel on what sorts of ships and weapons the silver prince's navy might yet be holding in reserve, after all.