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Maricel Thorne                  =MORTASHEEN CITY=

     ... is a continental mega-metropolis the size of Australia, scraping the upper troposphere with its greatest spires and burrowing down to the mantle with its labyrinthine subways. Half of the buildings are towering, squarish, and blackened by centuries of corrosion and pollution. The more recent structures show few commonalities in construction; here a lean-to made of living meat, there a homely cottage with chicken legs, somewhere else the cobblestone tower of an aspiring Victor Frankenstein.

     Whether approaching on foot or from space, it becomes readily apparent to the visiting Elites that the city's layout makes absolutely no sense. The streets are more reminiscent of the folds of a brain or a living body's circulatory system than coherent infrastructure. Even the biggest boulevards aren't named or marked- if asked, the locals will give directions in terms of landmarks and coordinates.

     And the locals! They're the strangest part. Maybe one out of twenty looks human. Many more are humanoid; spliced with insect parts, cartoonishly mutated, cheerfully zombified, or just assembled into "two arms, two legs" shape out of totally inhuman parts. Just as many adopt wholly divergent body-plans, scuttling on dozens of legs, swimming through the air, or oozing along the ground. There's even a green blimp-like creature wearing a dapper hat. All are peppy and quite conversational.

     En route to the park, individual Elites might be challenged to 'monster battles' by particularly enthusiastic youths with critters like "duck-billed chainsaw-faced mummy raptors" or "maliciously exploding fanged pumpkins". The Route One Trainers won't pose more than a speed-bump to the Elites, though.
Maricel Thorne      The fenced-in park that Maricel indicated is one of the rare spaces where the towering buildings back off and give the negative space some room to breathe. There's grass and trees here, even... though one of the trees does have eyeballs and jaws on its trunk. Ech. Maricel herself waits by a food truck next to the gate, looking distinctly irritated and bedraggled as she munches on a suspicious kebab. Her expression softens to relief as she notices the Elites, and gives them a wave with her free hand.

     "Here's the deal," she says, immediately launching into her Questgiver Spiel. One can practically see the Exclamation Point hovering over her head. "I've been cultivating a symbiotic superpowers microbe for flu season. I turn my back on it for five minutes, and it grows legs and runs off to the one Fectoid Park in the entire city I'm banned-for-life from. Getting it back intact is ideal; getting back a sample is acceptable, but make sure to destroy the rest of it. It'd be the pink one. I can compensate you in money or shots, but I need it back before my competitors get word of this. Everything clear?"

     The park itself is maybe an acre in size, wooded, with a suspiciously-clear-looking stream cutting through the middle and enough picturesque boulders to break up line of sight. A variety of bubbly, spongy, floppy creatures are frolicking inside, attended by their apparent owners/trainers; they look like nothing so much as neon-colored warty slime-mold frogs with googly eyes.

     None of the ones immediately visible are pink, but a few tools suggest themselves: some birds resembling the Plague Gulls from the beach are chilling out on the telephone lines nearby, the kebab truck has a bug-man carving off fresh pieces of meat from a twitching and regenerating blob of flesh, and a particularly treacherous rock covered in snappy carnivorous plants seems to present the best vantage point over the rest of the park.
Sumiko Mikoto scratched her head trying to find the place, it was very complicated, confusing, and strange.  However, after some luck, and three challenges, to which she won a prize of a sandwich, a bone, and three front teeth.  Mikoto is not sure HOW she won three front teeth...and she is really not sure if she wants to keep them.  She puts them into the same pocket as the eye.  She can just forget that it exists.

Finally coming to see Maricel, she gets the lowdown of the situation...looking up at the mark that might as well be on her head, before looking back down to her face.  It's...pink?  Ok well...that...is probably easier to find?  

She hopes it is easier to find.

"Alright, so we have to find this pink thing, beat it only half to death, and then take it or a sample of it back to you," Mikoto doesn't understand the other stuff Maricel said, so she just pretends that she does and then never asks to follow up questions.  

She does not immediately transform into the outfit of a magical girl, instead, she notices the gull, and offers an arm to it like before.  If it is resistant to her attention, she holds up the bone.  "So hey, want this bone?  I am just trying to find this pink...creature thing.  It's pink."
Staren     Staren beams down to...

    ...something like a weird, warped dream version of home. The variety of inhabitants is comfortingly familiar, although it's even more than Lazlo (which is maybe 40-45% human) and it goes in directions even Lazlo doesn't so much, like stitched-together undead. Everything else, though...

    It's like the city was built by mad scientists and somehow works.

    Staren dismisses the kids -- if they keep bugging him, he tries to shock monsters first before resorting to more extreme measures.

    He's armored differently than yesterday -- this is armor around his organic body, rather than a robot with a human face.

    "...if a microbe grew legs wouldn't it be too small to see? Or did it grow to giant size, or what?"

    After that's answered, he starts sending quadrotors up over the park. Given the sheer weirdness of the terrain, though, it might be slow going as he manually reviews feeds. He can't trust image recognition algorithms to deal with this scenery.
Maricel Thorne      These avians seem subtly different from the Plague Gulls in body structure- more compact, shorter wings, different feet. They're more like Plague Pigeons, maybe? Their voices are precisely the same, though: deep, rumbling, Gottfried-esque. "Mmm, yeah," the birdie says after landing on Mikoto's arm and pecking the bone. "Nice resonance, good marrow quality... Yeah, me and my buddies might've seen somethin' like that." It crunches on the bone she's offered, looking thoughtful for a moment. "Tell you what. You steal us a thigh-bone from that food truck over there, and we'll do everything we can to help you."
Maricel Thorne      Maricel doesn't recognize Staren until he starts talking, but then immediately perks up, nodding along while she finishes her bite of kebab. "Fectoids are like, ah... aggregate, colonial homosymbionts. Bunch of microbes get together and start pretending like they're a multicellular organism with eyes and legs and whatnot. 'Course, they can disintegrate again and revert to pathogenic form." The quadrotors almost immediately start getting harassed by the pigeons with plague-doctor masks, which seem to make a game out of swooping and pecking at them. They do get some useful data, though: the other Fectoids in the park seem to prefer hanging out near the river, and the pink one isn't anywhere out in the open that'd easily be spotted from a birds' eye view. That probably narrows it down to the quarter of the park where the river enters a small forest of trees.
Sumiko "Hm...specifically steal a thigh bone from the food truck?  Huh...it's been a few years since I've stolen from a food truck," Mikoto comments.  With a shrug, she nods, "Deal."

She lets the gull go, before walking back over towards the food truck, this time there is a flash of energy as her outfit shits from normal girl to MAGICAL GIRL OF ENVY.  Her jade sword in hand as she stabs it into the ground, and from the ground rise several dozen phantasmal rats.  

"Sneak into that food truck and steal me a thighbone," She comments to her minion swarm and hides out to one side watching through their eyes.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur JUST GOT DONE with showering off the nightmare that is MORTASHEEN CITY'S assortment of gross sensation. So when he shows up this time, he's converted his GODHOOD into something more like a BIOHAZARDHOOD. The black-and-white biohazard robes are a bit esoteric and weird, and they definitely won't lock out a persistent biohazard, but they're enough that maybe Arthur won't obsess so dang much about the cleanliness. ARTHUR, of course, winds up having to battle several youths using a minigame of deploying TRAINED IGUANAS.

    He immediately dives into the proper business. "THIS is the problem ya get with a place with NO STERILITY and all STERILIZATION." He says, grumping a bit, before he starts setting about the issue with his keen QUESTGUY'S MIND. "Alright, GUY-IN-THE-CHAIR me here a bit, I'm GOIN' IN." He hoists a large, idiotic-looking partially-humanoid IGUANA on one shoulder -- it's wearing a gas mask, you know, for protection -- and strides on into the park. As he does, he gets on his MESSENGER SUNGLASSES and starts chatting to Maricel.

    "Okay DOC T, gimmie that DIAGNOSIS. FECTOID PARKS, these things got plenty of HOSTS around I gotta LOOK THROUGH? Or am I lookin' for OPEN PINK on this homeboy? Also, what's their BEEF? Got all SALTY you wouldn't let 'em get to makin' MUCOUS, or what's the deal? DISEASE ain't gonna just RUN AWAY without a REASON, yeah?" He heads towards the woods, following Staren's directions. "Kinda thing leavin' any TRAIL, or what? Gimmie the GOOD HINTS, Doc."
Maricel Thorne      Maricel's remote-chat interface displays a picture of a brain with various glowy hotspots that pulses as she talks. "Let me think... since this is an unfiltered and untreated Fectoid, it could bond with anything, but it'd still be very obviously pink at a glance. You don't need to check anybody's gums or anything. Probably won't leave a trail unless it's injured. I suspect it ran away because I was trying to induce antibiotics resistance- for its own good, you know, but they love that like a Mongrunge loves a cold bath. It might be heading for the river to wash the residual sarxacillin off." The river flows east to west, from a crack in one of the boulders all the way down into the miniature forest. It's crystal-clear, but the surface is foamy with a kind of queasy iridescence- maybe best not to jump in.
Sylvi Getting directions to the park is easy! All you have to do is go 'where's the park' and then when challenged to Legally Distinct HorrorMon battle, punt the bill-billed platyshark with skittering insect legs into orbit or whatever and note, in a firm outdoor voice, that you didn't ask for a scrap, you asked for /directions/.

See? Easy!

Arriving at the fenced-in park in a white short-jacket trimmed in blue, long sleeved black shirt, and jeans, Sylvi cruises in.

With her hands jammed in her jeans pockets, and having hands with five fingers and no obvious defects (or Enhancements(TM)), Sylvi is easily spottable as a filthy OUTSIDER. The food truck draws her eye, but so does the explanation of things! Normally, people don't talk straight, but a nice clear QUESTGIVER TUTORIAL is always welcome.

"So bring back the pink thing, and you'll pay in shots?" Sylvi considers. "Shots of what? Better be good shots. I'm normally a whole bottles kinda person." She snorts. "Well, as long as I get my hands on it, won't be a problem. You can... grab it, right? It's not a goo? Goos are the worst."

"How'd a doctor like you get banned from a park? If you make superpowers... thhhhhhings, sounds like you'd be real popular."

Sylvi considers, for a moment, fingers coming up to stroke her chin. "Unless that's what everyone does here. Anyway, I'mma get up on that stupid bitey rock. Should be able to spot it from there."

With the questioning out of the way, Sylvi goes to climb up the SNAPPY PLANT BLUFF, using stems as grip-holds as necessary because truly, bullying is a language universal.
Staren     ATTACK BIRDS. Staren gets what he needs to, though, at least from aerial drones. <"I don't see anything pink from the air. I'm going to look in the wooded area."> He walks into the park on foot to check it out. It's a park so it probably doesn't have things that will try to eat him, right?
Maricel Thorne      The good doctor pulls a luminescent pink syringe out of her jacket and taps the glass cylinder with a fingernail, making a satisfying 'ping'. "Oh, alcohol? Well, I do know a pretty good brewery, but I meant theeeese shots. This combo is..." She squints at it for a moment, trying to jog her memory. "Ah! Right. 'Animate blood', 'laser eyes', and 'regeneration' for a couple of hours. From the last batch I cooked." She slips it back into her pockets, bunching up her shoulders in a shrinking shrug.

     Mount Snappy Plants might be dangerous for someone less hardy, but the flytraps' grabby jaws are unlikely to leave a mark on her through the ascent. The view from the top is breathtaking, apart from the shitty plague-pigeons that are making occasional swoops at her, but there's only one really noteworthy thing she'll be able to see up there that Staren's drones didn't spot: from this angle, there's a large shadow moving under the surface of the water beneath the canopy of trees. Park goldfish don't get that big, do they?
Maricel Thorne      From the perspective of Mikoto's phantom-rats, the food truck is like an intimidating dungeon. They can find their way in through the haphazard machinery on the underside of the carriage, but once inside, they meet with their true nemesis: KEBAB TRUCK BUG-GUY. He's a six-foot-tall roach dude in an apron, brandishing a sharpened skewer and a carving knife, and he immediately notices the minions with his bulging compound eyes. "Hey! Hey! Get out of here! It's not Mouse Monday yet!" He lunges for one of them with the skewer, but the others can likely get around him and to the prize- a gleaming, cleaned-off bone stashed in the trash bin in the far corner. Now to exfiltrate it!
Sumiko The mouse at the head of the vanguard looks up, being assaulted by the man with the knife.  The true final boss of this dungeon of food.  The mice squeak adorably in fear and all runaround, scattering to try and distract the man...he can follow one group, but not a lot of different individual mice.  

Mikoto, back behind the place shudders in disgust.  Mouse Monday?  Ugh...

The mouse being attacked jumps back, and then attempts to run up the man's arm, trying to get behind him and cause all sorts of discomfort and distraction as it tries to distract him the best that it can.  It's a HEROIC mouse, no fat man running a food truck is going to beat him.  He has to protecc his brother and sister mice!

A pair of mice run up the side of the can, grabbing the bone, while the other mice aim to help lift it up.  The last pair of mice try and open the counter window so that when the bone is pulled to the counter the group can grab the thighbone and run right out the window and towards Mikoto.

Outside, Mikoto sheds a tear for the brave mouse fighting the cook.  Truly, it is a sad day for mouse kind.
Sylvi The awful snappy bois on MOUNT SNAPPY PLANTS give Sylvi's clothes a good chomp, but demititans are made of stern stuff, and even if they draw a few smouldering droplets of vital fluid in the ascent...

Sylvi's blood isn't that desirous to messed up plants either way, most likely. It IS Mortasheen city, the lucky(?) plant(s) may spontaeously become a necro-titan something something super-whatever.

If the only reason that the streets don't have signs is because they didn't grow one, anything's possible.

Spotting the weird shape moving under the water, Sylvi cups her hands around her mouth. Her voice practically booms out, lacking any subtlety or an iota of clandestine nature.

"HEY SHOWER WIZARD! STOP MUCKIN' AROUND OVER THERE, THERE'S A SHAPE UNDER THE TREES OVER THAT WAY! NO NO, THE OTHER WAY. YOUR LEFT. YOUR OTHER LEFT!!!"

That accomplished, Sylvi just leaps off Mount Snappy Plants and lands among the trees, stance loose as she moseys down to the river by the trees.

"I'm startin' to get a little bored! Come out like a good pink whatever so Sylvi gets new superpowers!"
Maricel Thorne      Nothing tries to eat Staren, no- though as he rounds a tree he does come face-to-face with a cyan blubbery warty frogthing, with absurd lolling googly-eyes and a floppy tongue. It comes up to maybe his mid-thigh, and looks incredibly dopey. Probably somebody else's runaway Fectoid, judging by the collar and tags around its... neck?? SIDEQUEST DISCOVERED!

     It stares at him for a second or two, then- assuming he hasn't immediately fled or fired on it- rears back on its froggy legs and tries to lunge at him. Presumably it's intending to form some kind of super-symbiosis, but even if it manages to pounce successfully, it won't be able to find any exposed flesh on him to meld with.
Maricel Thorne      Roach-cook is completely unprepared to deal with murine squad tactics. He takes a couple of swings at Comrade Rat as it heroically charges him, but once it's on top of him, he drops the knife and starts flailing aimlessly. It's not until the other mice start pulling the bone out the window that he regains his wits and lunges over the counter for it- too late, as they scamper out of reach with their prize. "Hey! HEYYY! That was for the soup!!"

     A circle of the Plague-Pigeons congregate around the glorious femur once safely out of earshot of Roach-dude, each individually examining it. One of them speaks up- maybe the first one Mikoto hailed, maybe not; it's hard to tell them apart. "Yeah, girlie, this is the real deal alright. You really came through for us here. Now me and the boys, we're gonna pull through for you. Just you watch."

     They immediately take off into the sky with a flutter of shed feathers (how they manage to dramatically shed so many without getting mangy is a mystery), and disperse over the river. A few of them heed Sylvi's instructions and scope out the dark shape... which lunges twenty feet out of the water, grabs one of the Plague Pigeons in its jaws, and slams down on the bank of the polluted river with an earth-quivering growl. It's a two-story-tall eyeless albino crocodilian creature, with blotches and veins of neon pink covering its body and googly eyes on stalks sprouting from the densest clumps of Fectoid symbiont. The bird, of course, screeches indignantly and immediately begins pecking its nose to precisely zero avail.
Arthur Lowell     The river! Arthur's paratexual narrative interface mechanisms almost call it the riber, and considering the nature of Mortasheen, that's almost exactly accurate. With that particular hint, Arthur decides to immediately act! He's on the way-- Then Sylvi shouts his way! "!!!" That's exactly what he says, word for word, before he looks to where Sylvi is pointing, almost exactly. As if Sylvi were, for a brief moment, being able to use her pointer finger to select objects in the environment from an unusual third-person view.

    Actually that's literally exactly what's happening. Sylvi has to not just point but metaphysically click on the precise spot in the water, at which point Arthur will immediately lock on like a fucking cruise missile. "HEYYYY, YA LITTLE INFECTIOUS SON OF A MOTHERFUCKER!! GET OVER HEEEEEERE!" He dives.

    He comes back out, arms around a stalk on the back of the creature. "HOLY FUCK!" He shouts. "This motherfucker's goddamn SWOLE! What the shit!"
Maricel Thorne      Out by the park's entrance, Maricel- still forbidden on pain of HOA censure from setting foot on this sacred ground- loads a pneumatic revolving dart-gun with a hasty handful of pink syringes, squints through one eye, sticks out her tongue, and fires a few shots across the park! Anybody who asked for one will (probably) get a successful injection of Powers Juice. The 'regeneration' and 'blood goblins' work just as one would expect; the 'eye lasers' actually ionize a thin column of air with invisible rays before firing a jolt of searing bioelectricity down the shimmering pathway a fraction of a second later.

     It's not hard to tell where the latter power is derived from- as the Troglodyle roars and tries to buck Arthur off, the Fectoid eyes scattered across its body project scything beams of the same electro-plasma like it's a deadly disco ball! The Plague Pigeons have started to gang up on it in earnest, though: soon after the barrage of eye-beams starts, they force it onto the defensive by harrying the eyes until they have to close.
Staren     Staren's headed to the forest when... someone's lost pet fectoid comes up to him. He glances over it, but lost pets aren't his problem at the moment (He's not ACTUALLY an RPG character lookin for quests to do.) And then, OH SHIT ALLIGATOR. Staren whirls on it, beam cannons ready, but since it's not attacking him (and he doesn't know the bird is sapient) he takes a moment to survey it as the fectoid rears up... and then he runs off towards the alligator just as the fectoid pounces where he was, blasting it with particle beamsbefore pulling out an SMG with smart-material rounds to compare whether energy or bullet attacks work better.

    Once it's hurt and weakened, THEN he can collect a sample!
Sumiko From her spot, Mikoto stands up as the gulls gather around the bone.  They pledge themselves to make sure they come in for her and go scattering to the winds to find their pink problem.  The mice disappear, finally dismissed as she turns to hear the sounds of squawking and roaring.  

"Oh wow, that was pretty fast," Mikoto says, with a nod before she is jabbed in the back by a needle.  "OW!" she says painfully, running around trying to get the thing out of her back.  However, regeneration does that for her, getting the thing out and well...now she has laser eyes.  

"Ok, this is pretty cool.  If only I could fly," Mikoto says, and shrugs.  "Oh well, I'll have to check into that later...for now..."

Then taking on a blue streak, she speeds at /SONIC/ speeds as she tries to close the distance between herself and the lizard with the pink monster on it.  Literally running over water and following the squawking of the gull, she runs right towards it, blade at the ready as she swings in a massive arch, trying to cleave through the thing.  

"Forgive me, crock-chan!"
Sylvi Sylvi is having a great time. Snappy plants! Cute. Forest of weird monsters! Cute!

GIANT MEGA-TROG!

Huh. Pink veins, must've--yep. There's the answer. "I wonder, does she want the thing back if it's also a trog? Man, details."

Moving through the forest at a brisk pace, Sylvi alights on the blue Fectoid with the collar. "Hey little buddy! You lost?"

Sylvi crouches down as Staren heads off to engage the giant Trog-Toid with particle beams. She's got time. This is pretty normal.

It's only a giant monster.

"Heyyyyyy, buddy! You lost? You wanna go home to mommy, daddy, or nonbinary parental-doctor?"

Sylvi spits on her hand meaningfully, rubbing her palms together to get a thin coating on the inside of her hand before reaching over as if to pet, turning her head back to the crack of dartgun fire by the entrance, and gauging the wind with a slightly spitty finger. "Right."

In one swift motion, she grabs the frog by the mouth, using her fingers and base of palm to clamp down the dopey mouth so it doesn't re-open, and spins once to hammerthrow the Fectoid parabolically towards the entrance and over the fence.

"FOUND YOUR BLUE FROGDOG!" She calls, to Maricel.

She doesn't even really care if it's Maricel's.

Wiping her hands off on her pants, she turns to the giant supertrog battle. "Pretty sure I can't just toss that out of the park. Heh heh, though I could certainly give it a 'home run'."
Maricel Thorne      Staren's weaponry tests discover a weakpoint duality: the Troglodyte's body itself is more vulnerable to energy blasts that scorch through its white hide, while the Fectoid clumps- predictably, given their own 'energy' attacks- hisses and recoils where they're struck by ballistics. Maximum damage, of course, comes from shooting the 'dyle when its mouth opens for a chomp, or the Fectoid when its eyes open for lasers! The Plague Pigeons are starting to back off from the fight, but putting out some of the Fectoid's eyes will pick up the slack in dampening its offensive.
Maricel Thorne      Cleaving through the Troglodyle, especially in its enhanced state, is a bit too much to hope for- but Mikoto's slash still strikes true, carving through its side as it shrieks in pain or rage and nicking its spine before coming to a halt in some bone or other. The cut oozes dark red blood that boils and coagulates into a pair of awful little hemo-goblins, which grow scythe-like claws from their stubby arms and pounce out of the wound towards Mikoto! Of course, if she's hurt, she just might 'grow' short-lived monsters of her own.
Maricel Thorne      "MY WHAT?" Maricel cups her hands around her mouth and yells back- and then she's practically flattened by the gross microbe-frog landing on top of her. It tries to bond with her, but she's probably already immunized or something, so it devolves into a cartoon-like furball of frog-mauling and scalpel-stabbing. The doctor is not having a very good day today.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur holds onto the back of the thing, both arms wrapped tight. "C'MON!" He shouts. "C'mon! OPEN YOUR MOUTH! SPIT IT OUT, whatever you got! BAD! BAD!! SPIT OUT THE FECTOID." Instead of blasts, he does something weird. He starts fucking around with gravity. He doesn't actually know how much of the disease is found inside the creature, but he knows one thing: Vomiting fights infections.

    And so, of course, the best thing to do is to fuck around with the gravity, to make it /dizzy/, until it gets so nauseous that it's forced to hurl. He clings onto the stalk, shouting and glowing and flooding the body of the creature with repeatedly-shifting gravitational magics, to make it experience the equivalent of spinning around /really really fast/ while looking up, until it just fucking vomits up its insides, and ideally, as many undissipated chunks of fectoid that could have been left.
Sumiko The Troglodyle is not cleaved through by the jade weapon.  

"Oh.  That's not good.." especially when it starts bleeding mini-monsters that come after her.  She moves her blade to deflect the HEMO-GOBLINS, which is the worst thing until she takes a few stabs of her own and balls back with a cry.  

Until her own HEMO-GOBLINS join the fight, attacking the other HEMO-GOBLINS.  She looks on, confused and disgusted.  "This place is so messed up..." she mutters and then looks at the Troglodyle.  Taking a breath, she decides that swinging wildly is the best plan.

In fact, she does so, using her SONIC SPEED to dash by the thing, making cuts all along the beast as she tries to zip along, trying to be too fast to be caught by any little shits that fall out of his body and turn into goblins.
Maricel Thorne      Arthur's Spinning Teacups Ride isn't doing much to impair the Troglodyle's eyebeams ravaging the park- but it does finally succeed in nauseating the staggering beast until it wades fully out of the river, leans forward, arches its back, and dry-heaves. Nothing comes out of its mouth, but the Fectoid peels off of it like a shedding skin as if repulsed by the sheer wash of discomfort and pain from accumulated injuries and insults, collapsing into a quivering pink pile beneath its head.

     The croc gives Mikoto an irritated swipe with its tail before retreating back to the river to soothe it wounds, but the Fectoid itself doesn't seem quite done- reconstituting itself as an independent organism with a dozen googly eyes on stalks, it silently commands the remaining hemo-goblins that sprouted from the Trog to lift it up like wobbling pall-bearers. They awkwardly try to cart it off deeper into the forest while the Fectoid itself covers its retreat with sweeping beams from its remaining pupils, leaving the googly eyes open to attack.
Staren     Oh, huh, the fectoid can SEPARATE from a target? Good to know. Staren chases after it, dodging and using his forcefield against the sweeping beams, then dropping it to return fire. Presumably once it's disabled, they can collect the sample easily.

    Presumably.
Sumiko The tail sends Mikoto flying, crashing into the ground and bouncing once.  She flips mid-air, and skids to a stop...oh wait, it's free?  Yay!  She doesn't have to end Crock-chan!  However, she hurts from that, luckily she is healing rapidly!  

EYEBEAMS.  Mikoto turns on a dime, and this time the jade sword cut through the beam as the eyestalks try and sear her.  She glares at the retreating thing...

Her own pair of eyebeams fire out towards the hemo-gobblins, trying to burn them away before they can carry the thing off.  She laughs, "I was just EYEING to see you!"
Sylvi As an eyebeam scythes by Sylvi's side while she watches hazily as Maricel gets into a comic scuffle with a frog-dog Fectoid, the silver-haired weirdo finally realizes...

Oh. Right. STILL doing a thing.

"You all doing ok? Seriously, like, just crush it or something. Use your arms! Just... Ugh! I've gotta do EVERYTHING, don't I?"

Moving through the trees by the toxic riverside, Sylvi considers her options. Trees are nice, but she doesn't want to be banned from every park in this stupid city for pulling out the embankment and ruining the water table or whatever other stupid hippy-ass problem would occur. The giant croglodyte splitting and buggering off means she can't drag it - by its STUPID TAIL - back out of the park, but that leaves the Fectoid!

"Alright, you pink sack of garbage! Let's go home to mummy so she can pay us in sacks of drugs and dollars. Preferrably a mix of both."

Moving in to flank with Mikoto as the haemogoblins (HAH) are blasted, she tries to get a good solid grip on the pink Fectoid.

To give it THE CLAMPPPPP.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur is kind launched off the body of the creature, slams into a shallow part of the river, and then gets up, staggering a bit. He... wanders to the crocodile, nauseous as it is. "It's alright, buddy. LET IT ALL OUT. Trust me, homeslice, I FEEL YA." After it nauseously heads out, he solemnly nods, watching it go. "BIG MOOD." He says, nodding awkwardly.

    Beams! Arthur takes a chunk of his HEALTH VIAL off. "FUCK!" He shouts, wincing and stumbling. "HEY! Hey, get the fuck BACK HERE!" He lashes out both hands at the fectoid. He doesn't want to thrash it that directly, considering how deleterious to stable genetics most starfire is. But he can try to nab it with GRAVITY EFFECTS! Trying to pull it back! And, specifically, if the others can wound it enough to keep it from gripping the ground, hopefully even slingshotting it straight to Maricel!
Maricel Thorne      "Man," the Troglodyle says to Arthur as it eases back into the water, "I just wanted that bird to give me back my money." And then it's gone beneath the surface, to sulk and brood.

     The retreating Fectoid's crackling eye-beams sweep off of the force-field to little effect, and Staren's return fire prunes back a few more of its wobbly jelly-eyeballs! It's getting steadily less active and 'restless' under his ballistic fire, even without any discernable organs apart from the replaceable eyeballs, so it seems as though they're getting close!

     It's in part due to that fatigue that, when it intercepts Mikoto's eyebeams with its own lasers in a dramatic clash, the tennis-like flux of energy is slowly but steadily forced back into its court with a high-pitched energetic whine. The resulting explosion shears off a good chunk of its now-washing-machine-sized body and destroys enough of the hemo-goblins that the remaining ones break for cover and flee into the woods.

     The Fectoid tries to grow claw-tipped arms to pull itself out of Sylvi's range- but Arthur's gravity-pull drags it right back, its claws leaving comical furrows in the dirt as it scrabbles for purchase! Apparently it's CLAMP time, whatever that means. If Sylvi's gonna crush it between her hands, she'll probably find it trying to squeeze out between her fingers like some particularly gross flavor of Play-Doh.
Staren     And that's that! Staren runs up to try and slam a sample container down on the thing, then lift it up and put the lid on before the portion in the container can escape. "Got it! She said to destroy the rest..."
Sylvi Sylvi's hand CLAMPS down, her incredible, absurd strength...

Making Fectoid goo ooze between her fingers awfully as her hand squeezes right through it. "GOD-BOTHERING SON OF A PIECE OF GARBAGE!" She shouts, kicking no-doubt hypergrass and riverbank silt into a cloud. "I SAID IF IT WAS A GOO, I'D BE MAD!"

Staren apparently has a washing-machine sized sample container, which is startling, if impressive.

"You just... have those? On you?" Sylvi asks incredulously, wiping her hand off on Mikoto's shoulder. "Alright. Cool. You guys take the stupid thing back. Easy."

The Hemogoblins buggering off get a Kill Bill glance. "She said no survivors. HEY, SHOWER GUY! BIG MOOD THE STUPID RUNNERS!"

Sylvi jogs after one of the hemogoblins to deliver a flying dropkick to it, because she was told to indiscriminately murder everything related to Maricel's fectoid and she wants the full bag of dollars and shots, not the half-full because she didn't do the job right.

That's just sloppy. Sylvi is only sloppy when it comes to... mmmmmost things. BUT NOT VIOLENCE!
Sumiko THE CLASH IS EPIC!  

The energy collides in the air, but today, Mikoto's Damaku is stronger, overpowering the creature and helping contain it long enough for Sylvi to GIVE IT THE CLAMP.  Then it goes into a trashcan, I mean, container.  

The /large man hands/ of Sylvi comes down to wipe off on her shoulder.  She looks aghast at her and then her shoulder.  Her face says it all, 'but why though'.  

She WAS going to help with the stuff, but now she's thoroughly done with this and starts heading back towards Maricel.  She is so done with this.
Maricel Thorne      The hemogoblins don't put up much resistance to Sylvi and Arthur- they're only concerned with running, but they're already starting to coagulate and slow down even without spacemage tugging, so it's like playing Tag with toddlers if tag typically resulted in gratuitous violence.

     Back at the entrance to the park, Maricel's positively beaming despite the cyan stains on her labcoat- under one arm is a clear canister full of blue goop with googly eyes smooshed up against the glass, and under the other is a goodie basket full of glowy syringes and just about anything that could be used as currency. Vials of blood, bits of radioactive rock, vouchers for vials of blood, scraps of gold, snack cakes, and microbatteries charged with a few hundred dollars' worth of electricity. "Here you go, folks! Go ahead and take a handful. Don't be shy." Easy for her to say; she's not the one reaching into a basket with refined uranium.

     Off in the distance, up on Mount Snappy Plants, a flytrap-like monster with blackened and thorny greenery heaves itself up out of the ground and roars a challenge to the heavens. A chunk of earth comes with it as it pulls itself out of the ground and walks on thrashing prehensile roots, stomping down the hill like a miniature kaiju. Parkgoers scream and flee in terror. Red dots train on the beast from a half-dozen nearby rooftops as six different junior mad engineers' automated death-rays spin up for an impromptu weapons test.

     Maricel takes one look at that, accepts her contained Fectoid, puts down the goodie basket, and begins briskly walking away.
Sylvi Oh yeah! A bag of currency!

Sylvi reaches in to the goodie basket and rattles around in the bag of uncapped syringes, enriched uranium, and batteries to pull out a fistful of snack cakes. "Ooh, unmarked. It's like a mystery in every bite!"

Sylvi gets a hefty fistful of snack cakes (and gold scraps, and bits of radioactive rock, and at least one battery), jams the lot in her mouth, and starts chewing.

"Zesty." She observes, before the screaming starts.

"Huh. Hey, is that one you-"

Maricel is booking it off in the other direction. Huh!

"Well, I guess you all can grab some stuff. That was kinda fun. Wasn't really a rampage, but it was entertaining enough. Man, I should get some kebab, before I go."

There's plenty of blood and syringes left in the basket!
Sumiko Mikoto grabs whatever scraps of currency she can grab, as well as a few syringes of whatever medical stuff she can and pockets it. This was the weirdest payment method she has sever gotten...she has half a mind to introduce Maricel to paypal.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur swaggers back to the entrance of the park, looking exhausted but proud. "FUCK." He declares. "What a MESS. Least you're not gettin', what, COMPETITORS jackin' your GENE-SWAG? DAMN, dog, this be HEATED COMPETITION." He sort of works the pain out of one of his shoulders. "Lemme get up in that GOOD BUSINESS."

    He approaches the Bag. A large SLOSH MACHINE appears briefly; three large vials and a vast array of rotating reagents allow for the mixing of an amount of GENE GRIST! The SLOSH MACHINE dispenses several hundred GENE GRIST directly into Arthur's hands. He has not touched the bag, and yet, Maricel will have the distinct feeling that something was taken from her bag, and that Arthur has been compensated for his time.