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Maricel Thorne      The warpgate here leads out onto a beach with coarse white sand underfoot, tinted orange by the very red setting sun. The sky overhead is a beautiful pollen-y yellow-green, and stings ever-so-slightly to breathe like you're developing some exciting new allergy. Further inland, the skyline is dominated by a line of irregular dark buildings stretching to the horizon at left and right, skyscrapers fused together into a solid wall; aurora-like lights and neon glows dance above them.

     Then there's the ocean itself. Zombies in every color and stage of decomposition roil and seethe as far out as one can see, heaving and scrabbling over one another in 'waves' that break against the coast before being dragged back in. Only a minority of them are recognizably humanoid; most seem bizarrely mutated, or were never humanoid in the first place. Black 'seagulls' in adorable little plague-doctor masks swoop in when the waves pull back, snapping up spare pieces of carrion and then darting back out of range of the grasping hands.
Maricel Thorne      Doctor Thorne herself, an almost jarringly "normal" figure in a landscape like this, is set up with an umbrella, a pair of binoculars, and a beach chair. She's an ordinaryish middle-aged woman in a labcoat and casual clothes, and seems positively cozy watching the tides. There's a cooler next to her with snacks and drinks in it. When she notices the Elites, she'll turn and give them a delighted wave before beckoning them over for refreshments.

     "Isn't it beautiful? I heard there was an Abnortis sighting the other day; couldn't help but see if I could catch a glimpse of it myself." It is, by standard Earth-human aesthetics, not remotely beautiful. At least the smell isn't as horrific as one might assume- it smells like formaldehyde and synthetic chemicals, not overpowering rot.

     With a bit of effort, she pushes herself up out of the chair, dusts her sandy hands off on her labcoat, and offers a handshake to the nearest person (woe betide her if that happens to be Arthur). "Oh, but how rude of me. Dr. Maricel Thorne, DS, DDO, SD, DA, ADD, GMO. Delighted to make your acquaintance this evening. I'm so glad you could make it."
Arthur Lowell     Arthur regards the "waves" of corpses in motion with the look of a person who isn't sure why they're not currently having a panic attack; it's that unique emotional context of someone who's deathly arachnophobic, just now learning that their best friend is a complex colony of eusocial mutant spiders. "What the fuck." He mutters. Must be the fact that they're still moving and most are nonhuman that keeps him from having one of his usual corpse freakouts.

    A hand reaches out. He fistbumps it gently as the wave rolls back out.

    But here's Maricel, and he's gotta greet her. She offers a handshake, and of course Arthur is all right over that. "Hell yeah, what up DOC T? Think I kinda REMEMBER YOU. I'm ARTHUR LOWELL! ROCKET-POWERED JERK, INTERGALACTIC HOOLIGAN, PROFESSIONAL ENTHUSIAST, all that GOOD SHIT." He says, in forcefully friendly tones while he barrages Maricel's hand with a series of daps, pounds, bumps, low-fives, finger-wiggles, slides, multi-angle grips, and a kind of weird twisty elbow maneuver that might only be possible with non-human connective tissue or exotic geometry. "BEAUTIFUL ain't the word I'd be using on an OCEANFRONT like this, for real. What's HAPS with ABNORTIS? Never heard the WORD."
Sumiko The portal opens up to this...

Mikoto looks out at the horror that surrounds her.  There is a moment where she doesn't immediately actually recognize anything, like her brain actively not trying to understand what it is seeing, but the reality is in fact far too harsh to ignore.  Rot does not assault her nose, but the chemicals of formaldehyde and other medicinal chemicals.  

It also takes her a moment to realize that wasn't a sea of corpses, but a sea of still MOVING corpses.  This seems to be the tipping point before the young woman turns away and pukes onto the beach behind the portal.  Blessed be that she did not eat much that day, or else this would be so much worse.  

With shakey stands back up only to hear Arthur handle this situation far better than she does.  Slightly jealous of having a better stomach than she does, she wipes her mouth with her arm and flings it, trying to clean it up the best that she can before slowly turning around and trying to engage the doctor.

Mikoto is dressed in a green dress and blouse, having had ditched her school outfit after school for someone more casual.  She uneasily stares back at the 'ocean' before turning her attention back towards the doctor.  "Uh...nice to meet you," she says, with a polite bow, though not too fast.  
Touta Konoe      So you know those times when you just feel like checking out that new restaurant that opened up on the corner or something of the sort? Well this is the equivalent of what occurs when Touta hears about a new warpgate in the Multiverse being presented. The young man arrives in the usual black attire he regularly wears, a black gakuran, black pants, and then a red t-shirt underneat to top it off. It's not just his clothes though, even the taichi he has resting on his shoulder and the spikey assortment of hair on his hair is a good jet black too. Though despite his gothic appearence, he seems like a bright and cheerful guy...Well, at least brighter and cheerier than the sun on this world. Sniff...Sniff...

     "Uh, what's that smell...?"

     Something smelled like it was dying, and he knows it's not him...Or at least he's like 99.9% sure it isn't him. He's not that kind of undead.

     Trailing along the beach front he can't help but feel an odd sense of deja vu to when he once had to deal with zombies. Though when he watches the...'Seagulls' fly in he can definitely feel this world's got some sort of gimmick going on. Continuing down the coastline he eventually makes it towards where Maricel and the others have met up just in time to hear her greeting and to see the less than happy to see zombie faces of both Arthur and Mikoto. He'd probably be the same if not for the fact, he's probably been that disfigured before...

     So he walks over waving to those that he's familiar with and returns a proper greeting back to Maricel. "Name's Touta Konoe, uhm...UQ Holder #7." She was giving titles so he figured maybe he should give one cause why not! "But hey doc, what's the deal with the Dead Sea over there?"
Maricel Thorne      Maricel's eyes go wide as she tries to follow the handshake- but, somehow, follow it she does, slowly syncing up to the flow of the movements until she's almost Arthur's mirror image. The bizarre elbow-movements included, though when she does those, it's with an uncomfortable popping-clicking noise in her joints. "Aaarthuuuur. So good to see you again! But ah, you're right- 'beautiful' is insufficient; so shallow for a monument to history. An Abnortis-"

     She's instantly distracted by Mikoto throwing up. Piercing yellow eyes lock onto her like a hawk eyeing a rabbit. Maricel reaches into her labcoat and pulls out a syringe of glowing yellow fluid. "Ah, please- do let me help you, dear. I've got just the thing for nausea and seasickness right here."

     Without waiting for Mikoto to accept or decline, her eyes flit back to Arthur. Were her pupils dilated just then? "... Abnortis is, we believe, a failed attempt by the zombie virus to propagate itself to other planets. Every few years, an enormous creature rises up from the Corpse Sea and into outer space. Nearly all of them are deformed and disintegrate in the upper atmosphere- that's an Abnortis. Flawed though they are, it's a miracle to witness, isn't it?"
    
N'Raha     There's more than a little grossness to be expected when one is visiting a place that's known for... oddities. Though nominally this was a place for an 'ally', so Raha is coming out here on his best behavior. He's even in his proper Scion's outfit, that snazzy green and black blazer getup complete with a tie! He's OFFICIAL.

    And all of that goes out the window a he sees This Place and watches Mikoto puke right in front of him as he gets out of the warp gate and he... Ughs. Ugh. A dainty side step around the puke, and he slicks his ears back, watching the grotesqueness unfold. "...Well. It's not the worst place I've had to visit in an official capacity..." The Light of his being is actively telling him to start beating up ashkin. His brain remind the rest of him that he's Off Duty.
Sumiko Most people, if given that offer may have just started screaming in horror and started running away from the woman back into the portal.  Others might have turned her down.  Mikoto looks at the liquid, then hearing what the doctor said, gives a light shrug, "I'm not a fan of needles...but I am fond of seasickness even less.."

Of course, she's not fond of the sea of corpses still writhing out there, but it MIGHT not make her sick?  Because right now she was feeling quite awful. "Sure..." she ascents to the injection.
Maricel Thorne      "The Corpse Sea," Maricel gently corrects Touta, "predates modern civilization on our planet, young man. It's been seething and percolating and mutating even before Mortasheen City was built- modern scholars disagree on whether the apocalypse that spawned it came between the Clown Meteor and the Ancient Robot Uprising, or if it was contemporaneous with the Ectosaurs. Either way, it's an amazing piece of living- aha, pardon me- history, is it not? Some people say there are even cities at the bottom- the strangest things wash up on the tides."

     She finds a vein on Mikoto's arm without even looking, then sticks her with the needle in a practiced painless poke and stows it in her jacket. True to the doctor's word, it almost immediately removes her nausea, perhaps leaving behind only the nagging thought that she ought to be nauseous.
Maricel Thorne      N'raha gets a wave with Maricel's free hand before she's even finished sticking Mikoto. "So glad you could make it. Come on- sit down, have a sandwich." One of the Plague Seagulls tries to land on the catman's shoulder. It fixes him with a disconcertingly intelligent gaze, giving the vague impression that it's assessing him for his bones.
Touta Konoe      "Huh,so this world's always had this 'Corpse Sea' around for ages. Man...I don't think I'd get use to a view like this that easily. But uh, I guess you get use to it. So this zombie space astronaut, uh, 'Abnormal' thing you were talking about, are you sure it's going to be popping up today at all or...?"

     Touta looks back towards the Corpse Sea. He just really can't imagine what a zombie going into space would look like, well...That's not true, just not one trying to fly into the sky out of nowhere though. Cause that's definitely weird!
Rean Schwarzer "Uh....."

Rean kinda just stares at the literal sea of undead, like his brain just decided 'nope, I'm gonna shut down now, bye.' Also, why the heck did it smell like a hospital? Arthur's loud introduction and Mikoto throwing up snap him out of it though, and he carefully edges down the beach to where everyone else is gathered. He gives Mikoto, Arthur and Touta a quick wave, then looks over at Maricel, pieceing together who she was pretty quickly from her behavior and voice. "O-oh. You're the mad scientist lady from the other day, aren't you?"
Arthur Lowell     Arthur's grin remains indefatigably broad when he listens to Maricel's explanation; it was slightly less indefatigable when he was listening to her joints. "WOW! That sounds HELLA GRODY." He says, keeping that cheerful look. "Like DAMN. Well, I'm down to WATCH some ROCKETRY, for real. You think anyone will get SALTY if I try to RIP THE THING if it hits EXOSPHERE? Like DAMN. That's some DANGER."

    For his part, Mikoto Shimizu shouldn't bee too terribly envious. He might have resisted it because they're mostly not human corpses, but he's still got a little NAUSEATION GAUGE displayed above him. It is oscillating, occasionally. He fights it off by keeping his focus on other business. "How the fuck they gettin' THRUST ENOUGH to get SKYWARD? I mean, I'd figure they're gonna start RATTLING APART before they get off the SURFACE, dawg. They got some SUPERBONES in there they can make a THRUSTER NOZZLE out of, or what the fuck?" He sounds genuinely baffled by this absence of rocket science.
Maricel Thorne      As for Thorne herself, she reaches deep into the cooler and pulls out... compact fishing rods? Oh, no. Each of them has what appears to be a tiny fake rubber brain on an oversized hook. "No, Mr. Konoe, there's no guarantee the Abnortis will even breach the surface. They're not like eclipses or meteors or nuclear explosions- frightfully unpredictable and unreliable things. So I've brought some other forms of entertainment! Who's up for fishing?!"

     Rean gets a little wink as she presses a rod into his hands. "Of course I am! First person in my family to go to Mad College. It's quite an honor."
N'Raha     The catman glances at Mikoto getting stucks... and she seems to be doing okay. Another uneasy look to Mari, before that weight lands on his shoulder.
    He looks up to the Plauge Gull, and then back to Mari. "Yes. Hello again. I would like a sandwich." His face is saying this is fine, this is all fine. He's okay. But the bird, on the other hand, will get a red-eyed glare from the Warrior, a flash of aether, and a very predatory lion's growl, deep in the miqo'te's chest.

'Fishing' on the other hand, gets his ears to perk, even as he sees the brain lure on that tackle. His eyes glance out over the surface of the mob. "...are you trying to jostle up the Big One?"
Arthur Lowell     FISHING MINIGAME! FISHING MINIGAME!! FISHING MINIGAME!!!

    Hope Maricel brought enough for everyone, because even the weird circumstances don't stop Arthur from immediately engaging in FISHING MINIGAME, grabbing up a rod and immediately having his videogame interface start getting involved, as bars fill up to bright greens and precision notches have to be hit in timing minigames to get that perfect cast out to sea.
Sumiko Ok, this place was so bizarre, but now she's no longer sick ill.  Though she feels like she SHOULD be?  That's weird, but hey, she's not sick and she can ignore nagging feelings.  After all, those are things that she doesn't need to address now and can be safely left alone and will not explode into horrible monsters at all.  Nope.

Feeling much better, she positively beams at the doctor, "You sure know your stuff," Of course, she is then trying to get the seagull's attention, offering it an arm to sit on.  She is quite good at making the noises, though of course it really is of her native world.  She likes animals.  

"Fishing...but...what would you catch here?  Zombies?"
Maricel Thorne      "Unfortunately, nobody's ever managed to get a good autopsy going on an Abnortis," Maricel explains off-handedly as she passes N'Raha a sandwich. It looks superficially like a ham sandwich, except the ham has holes in it like swiss cheese, and the lettuce is a perfect square, and the cheese is ruffled like lettuce. Is that even really cheese at all? "We beliiiieeeve that they operate on some kind of conjunction between psychepneumonic thrust and lighter-than-air floating, but the absence of a viable system for breaking orbit might be why they detonate. That, or it's just some orbital defense grid that nobody remembers about blowing 'em up. Either-or.

     The bird, for its part, looks appropriately spooked by N'Raha. In a very quiet, but extremely deep bass voice, it says: "Whoa man, what the hell. Okay. Keep your bones." Then it darts away, landing on Mikoto's arm with a very soft huff and an indignant ruffle of its feathers.
Touta Konoe      This is weird...This is very weird. Touta's not going to refuse to take a rod but the moment he sees rubber brain on the hook he knows that this place is just /weird/. At the very least he sees they aren't using real brains. Though when he stops to think about it he coooould....

     "Naw...That'd freak them out too much."

     He'll just go for the casual 'fishing' experience.
N'Raha     Raha snorts at the bird, as he takes the sandwich and shuffles over to sit next to Arthur. He may not be 'fishing minigame' but the miqo'te knows as well as anyone else that 'fishing' as an activity is better with more people. So he pops the 'sandwich' into his mouth and pops a proper slav squat next to the SPACE KID. "I just... well. This is a lot of ashkin or voidspawn or mutants or whatever you people call them here. I just can't imagine this much... darkness in a place turning out something as cheerful as you, Dr."
Maricel Thorne      FISHING MINIGAME!!!

     Sample loot:
     A seal-shaped zombie!
     An old shoe!
     A tiny zombie IN an old shoe!
     A fish that seems to be made ENTIRELY of garbage!
     One of the Plague Gulls' masks!
     A priceless and beautiful bauble from a lost civilization!
     A zombie that bears a remarkable resemblance to somebody you hate!
     A bonus sandwich!
Maricel Thorne      Maricel positively puffs out her chest at Mikoto's compliments! "I'd certainly hope I do! I've got so many mad degrees I gotta use 'em for wallpaper." She ambles over to N'Raha and Slav Squats next to him too, shrugging affably. "I dunno what you mean by 'darkness', man. Different worlds have different metaphysics, right? I don't see anything wrong with this. It's just the way we like it."
Sumiko Mikoto pets the Seagull, giving Raha a mean look.  "Geeze, way to be mean to a perfectly innocent animal...who has a very deep voice.  It is still adorable," She defends Seagull-Chan.  Looking back out at the waves, and the radio conversation causes her to look up into the sky as a daydream.

A witch falls down, writhing as SUPER MAGICAL GIRL ZOMBIE MIKOTO hits it /really/ hard.  And then tries to eat its brain.  

She shudders, "I think I'm good."
Rean Schwarzer Marciel shoves a fishing pole with a (fake) brain on the end into Rean's hands, and he stares at it for a second before asking, "Wait, Why is there a brain on this?!"

He sighs, and then squats down next to Arthur and Raha, casting the brain into the sea of zombies.

And then the conversation started to drift towards trying to see if Mikoto was immune to becoming a zombie. Rean looks over there in horror like "please do not perform testing on people", trying to figure out what to do before they ended up with shambling Mikoto corpse.

Then the end of his fishing rod twitched. A perfect distraction!

"-Hey, Dr. Marciel! I think I caught something!" Rean shouted, reeling in...A sandwich??
Maricel Thorne      "Entirely innocent," the Plague Gull reiterates, like some kind of tiny hype-man. "Hey. Hey, miss, hey. You got any bones in those sandwiches over there? Gimme one. I got something good for you." It sounds like some kind of hybrid between Gilbert Gottfried and Tim Storms. Is a weird talking bird really to be trusted...?
N'Raha     Raha sighs a bit, as he lifts a little jar of some sort of jelly from his pockets and smears a bit under his nose. Then he goes back to eating the Similar To But Entirely Unlike A Ham Sandwich. "Hmmmmm. Yeah I suppose. I really do need to get out more, maybe. But lately I keep ending up in places fulla dead stuff so."
    His ears wilt a bit as he watches Arthur and Raen and Touta get to FISHING MINIGAME.
Maricel Thorne      Maricel stuffs her hands deep in her labcoat pockets and walks over to Rean, squinting at the thing he's hauled up. "Well, I'll be damned," she says quietly. "Let me look at that." Peeling up the top layer of bread reveals... a flat, patty-like creature with two googly eyes staring up at Rean and Mari. "Yep, that's a stray foodbeast, alright. Must've escaped from one of the farms near the cost. Go on and take a bite; it regenerates from the crust nobody ever eats."
Remilia Scarlet     Someone had heard about going to the beach. They'd only been to a beach once, and that was on the moon. They had obsessed over it for a while, making an indoor beach for a week, and promptly forgotten about it ever since. Now that someone had reminded them that was a thing, they've instantly made it a Thing, and dragged along The Help.

"No no, the sun here is just perfect. That's nearly the perfect shade of scarlet. Now if only it would go down a little faster." says Remilia.

"The air quality is rather poor for a beach though. Be careful you don't inhale too much of it milady." says Sakuya, a handkerchief pressed to her mouth with one hand, and the other on a parasol which she is holding over the pair of them with the sort of casual precision of a waiter of 30 years of experience balancing a tray on his fingertips.

"Don't worry. My body is far too strong for something like this to cause a problem. It does kind of smell like Patchouli's alchemy set though." says Remilia.

"Yes; we wouldn't have such use for any of those chemicals in the storage room." says Sakuya.

    Neither of them have commented on the glaringly outstanding feature of a literal ocean of zombies. Is that some kind of act, or are they just like that all the time?

    Remilia listens in on Maricel describing the Abnortis, and does so with a thoughtful finger and thumb to her chin and several imperious, approving nods, apparently making up her mind about something. "To think that even the common and ignoble zombie could aspire to reach outer space; that really is something beautiful! Of course, they've got a long way to go to catch up to me, but even a zombie that doesn't give up might one day walk in the footsteps of the Scarlet Devil! Romantic, isn't it?" she says. "Indeed milady it is." says Sakuya. "Though I wish they would work on that smell before tackling the problem of space launches. It's like a poorly chosen aftershave."

    Sakuya begins rolling out a beach blanket, setting up a second umbrella, getting out a basket of supplies, and insisting on sunscreen which Remilia starts disagreeing with like a fussy little kid, citing that the sun is going down anyways and she doesn't want to. It's not actually clear where Sakuya gets any of this from. It just sort of appears whenever nobody is looking.

    Eventually, after the two of them decide that beach outfits are unnecessary given the lack of water, Remilia's head turns instantly (perhaps a little too far) in N'raha's direction when the plague mask seagull flies off, and then definitely without enough time to think about it, she proclaims "I want one."
Arthur Lowell                                   YOU HOOKED                                  
                             "DREG OSTEICHTYES"!!                            

                                  200 POINTS                                  


    Arthur reels something in after fighting with a truly fucked up bit of timing shenanigans, and snatches a GARBAGE FISH. He does a pre-animated holding-it-up-while-it-floats animation. Then it CAPTCHALOGUES itself into his SYLLADEX. "Ah-- FUCK!" He shouts, trying to snag it before the TREE MODUS abruptly buries it deep in his inventory. "SON OF A BITCH, gonna take me WEEKS to get that thing out of there."
Rean Schwarzer "N-no thanks, I already had dinner before I came here." Rean said, smiling /way/ too hard for the situation he was in. He gently placed the sandwich on the ground next to Raha and then casted his line again, with no bait.
Sumiko "...A food beast?" Mikoto asks, unsure.  Then again, she'll try anything once...and if she likes it repeatedly.  However, something about eating a sandwich in a group like this.  She just feels...strangely nostalgic.

Grabbing a sandwich, she looks for a bone to give to the gull, before eating it herself.  Not eating the crust as instructed so that it can grow back.  Yum!
Maricel Thorne      No sooner have the words left Remilia's mouth than a Plague Gull lands on Sakuya's beach umbrella. It's followed scarcely a second later by another... and another... and another. Soon there's a tiny mafia of the little fellows. A representative hops forward to the very edge of the parasol and stares at the spoiled vampire with its beady little eyes. "Guys," it croaks in its deep little voice, "She smells like blood."

     At that precise moment, Remilia is swarmed with shitty little gulls like she's carrying the world's tastiest bagel on a cheap boardwalk.
Maricel Thorne      Maricel shrugs ambivalently at Rean, picks up the foodbeast sandwich off the ground, dusts it off on her sleeve, and takes a big ol' bite out of it. It makes a noise like a squeaky toy. "Eh," she says to nobody in particular. "Kinda gamey." And with that, it gets chucked into the ocean.

     Mikoto's Plague Gull is vastly more well-behaved. There's one sandwich in the cooler that's entirely one comic-book-perfect bone between two slices of bread; the bird takes it under its wing like some kind of treasure, then nods a couple of times like a shrewd merchant haggling successfully. "Yeah, yeah, this'll do it. Real nice. Here you go, girlie." It reaches inside its mask with a wingtip, pulls out a perfect glass eye (doubtless stolen from some zombie's socket), and presses it into her hand. "Don't spend it all in once place, now." And then it's gone in a flurry of feathers.
Maricel Thorne      Maricel sidles up beside Touta. "Hey, you said something would 'weird people out'," she says in a distinctly sly tone. "Are you holding out on some premium brain, here? You know what they say- you get out of it what you put in."
Sumiko Mikoto gets an eye.  

Yay?

She looks at it oddly and then just...pockets it slowly.  "Haha..." she says, with an oh boy look to her face.  Like this place is super weird.  Like, she has seen very little of the multiverse but has had lots of experience in Witch's labyrinths, and even these pale compared to this place.

"Well...at least the gull was cute."
Touta Konoe      "Talking seagull, that's different no wait...We have talking animals in my world...Kinda?" He's not sure if the certain animal he's thinking of would be even considered as such or not for certain reasons. But these guys don't know that!

     So for the majority of the time he's casually just waiting for something to hook onto his line. He doesn't really expect to catch a bite at all. So for the most part he's just casualy keeping track of Arty and Rean as they pull up their catches as well as the new arrivals. They sound familiar but he can't really put a finger on it. That usually meant he probably heard them over the comms or something but considering they were just setting up, he could bother them later.

     And that's when it happens. "Uh, hold that thought, think I got something!...It's a lil heavy." He starts tugging a bit more but it feels like he's getting a bit of resistance. "Ah yeah, no wait, no, I mean... This one's got a bit of a grip...Alright! I guess I'll put a bit of oomph in it!" He's going to pretend he ever mentioned that first thing!

     And 'oomph' he does! He pulls up on the line and surprisingly doesn't break it...And something flies out of the water so high into the air, maybe someone might even mistake it for that space zombie! That's till it makes a landing. It's two things that land. On the line there's a hooked zombie, but it's weird, at least for Touta. It's got the face of someone he's quite familiar with and as he looks at it he can't help but begin to twitch a bit... A young man's face but an emotionaless expression that would seem lifeless even by 'zombie' standards, though it has white hair down to its ne...The remainder of its neck. We say remainder cause the second thing that lands with it is a decapitated body. Maybe he tugged too hard...
Remilia Scarlet     "Milady, you already have a pet."

"Yes but Tupai doesn't talk. Those birds are adorable, so I'm going to have one."

"Wouldn't that mean they aren't pets, but people?"

"Don't be an airhead. Everything talks in Gensokyo anyways."

"I suppose that's true. I hope they're clean birds."

"Of course they are! Look how organized they are; they're lining up there to choose who will be my pet!"

    This discussion continues for a little while, once again completely tangential in context to the incredible strangeness of the situation, focused on approximately 90% things that don't matter and not concerning any of the really important stages of disbelief, suspicion, or wariness. Even the entirely normal-looking maid seems to have the most mundane possible complaints.

    Then the shitty seagulls behave exactly like shitty seagulls do. They swarm all around the vampire who absolutely does have that subtle bit of blood around her, and right away she's swatting her arms around her going "Stop it! Be patient! I haven't finished choosing one of you- damn it you're really annoying me!" She gives the Plague Gulls just a second longer to stop being incredibly obnoxious, before yelling "That's it!", and before the maid can salvage the situation (indeed, the maid has taken this as a cue to step back) the vampire stomps her foot, throws out her arms, spreads her wings, and a three hundred and sixty degree spherical wave of 'bullets' of sharply crystallized blood explodes off of her, accompanied by a shockwave of ruby red lightning. "How's that for blood, you obnoxious pests?!"

    It's not actually *her* blood. It's magic. It's also high collateral damage, because there are only so many slow seagulls and they can only absorb so many bullets before flying knife-like blood shots are peppering a good portion of the beach. The umbrella Sakuya had set down is struck by red lightning and turned to ash instantly. She carefully replaces it with a new, identical one.

    "You!" she points to Maricel. "How do I catch one of those? Or actually, would you sell one?"
Arthur Lowell     Arthur gets barraged by the sphereshot. "Yo! Hey, chill with BIRDSHOT, homeslice! Just TELL 'EM to FUCK OFF, they're CIVILIZED SCAVENGERS, dawg!" He shouts, while behaving sort of like Remilia had just hit him in a beachfront splashfight. He'd probably gravity-sling water at her in response if most of the available fluid weren't gross corpsestuff of assorted origin. The advantage of an abstracted health system is that a little team-damage is just accepted as kind of a thing that happens, and also that he can just kinda sit around while he has blood-knife-shot stuck in him. Hey, it stops the bleeding, even!

    The lack of hassling Remilia is mostly because he's so busy trying to dig the fish out of his inventory, which is a very large tree-shaped series of cards that the thing has gotten into the root of. "Anyone got a lot of OBJECTS starting with G on-hand? Christ, I don't wanna dump all this on the BEACH, fuckin' TIDE COMES IN and a bunch'a ZOMBIES will HIJACK MY SHIT."
Arthur Lowell     Remilia Scarlet has a small popup form over /her/ instead of Arthur, now. "FF PENALTY", it declares, seeming to take "-200B". Apparently friendly fire caused her to lose 200 BOONDOLLARS.

    Undoubtedly she has several billion, so this is irrelevant.
N'Raha     Raha looks up from where he's day dreaming a bit, chewing on his sammich and having 'an episode of the Echo' to look at Arthur. "Here. Hold on."

    He reaches into his own Inventory, and pulls out two stacks of Grenade Ash, a piece of Griffin Leather, a Grade 2 Infusion of Dexterity, and a package of Golf Balls.
    A wiggle of his ears, and then he leans forward, looking over into the sea of the dead.
Sumiko Then Remilia said, let there be damaku.

"Uh oh," She says before a hasty transformation sequence happens, and she whips out her jade sword in a swing to try and protect herself from bullets.  She breathes a bit surprised and shocked at such a dangerous attack from such a girl.

She pauses on this for a moment, considering what might be happening.  "OH I get it, she's a Vampire Magical Girl."
Remilia Scarlet     Apparently unfazed by what'd just gone on, the maid is at Arthur's side. "Let's see . . . green tea, gold coins, gauze, gravol . . ." Yeah she's actually just pulling out a list of G items.
Maricel Thorne      The Plague Gulls don't merely die under the danmaku barrage- they explode themselves like they're under intense internal pressure, each showering a small radius in sharpened pieces of bone, microserrated feathers, and horrifically toxic bio-plague goo. The onslaught prunes back the zombie ocean for ten or fifteen feet before it resurges a few seconds later, aggressively overcompensating for the void and spilling mutant undead crawlers onto the beach.

     Maricel nearly loses her arm at the elbow to a bullet; it's hanging by tendons and skin. Rather than hit the deck, she lights up with a kind of disconcerting glee and jabs herself in the shoulder with a green syringe before sewing, stapling, and re-locating it back into perfect form with her remaining hand faster than ought to be humanly possible.

     Then her eyes laser-focus on Arthur. For a split second, enormous limbs of red meat sprout from her upper back and launch her across the sand- then they're gone, and she skids along right next to him. While still in motion, she pulls a stapler and a hemostat from her labcoat and does some kind of minigame-quick-time-event with TAS-perfect execution to top off his healthbar in a fraction of a second, then finally comes to a halt.

     "I don't know," she replies to Remilia cheerfully while rubbing her fixed arm, as if absolutely nothing unusual had occurred. "Try just grabbing one yourself and placating it with offal? They respond well to that."
Touta Konoe      After releasing said zombie into it's natural environment in the most humane manner possible, Touta's attention had been drawn in by the assortment of 'seagulls' that had begun accruing on the beach. Guess real vampires are more interesting than the fake ones. It's only after he notices her maid starting to step back that Touta realizes that he's in the 'splash zone'. He finds himself quick on the uptake though taking his sword to try and repel off any that came his way and for the most part he thinks he got most of them, which gives him a sigh of relief.

     "Phew, that could have been pretty bad-" Drip. Drip. Drip. Okay he missed one...In his forehead. Well if anything he's probably the first hybrid vampire-unicorn now right?

     He quickly pulls it out, there's blood bleeing out profusely at first...Before the wound just closes up like it was nothing. Yay immortality? Though looking at the blood knife he can't help but look back at Remilia, "The way she talks, the way she acts...It's almost like a second Yukihime..."

     What a possibly frightening thought. Hopefully she's not as easy to piss of- Oh wait we just saw that. Never mind...
Sumiko The explosions of Seagulls cause the magical girl to do the only thing she can right now.

She jams her sword into the ground, as spikes come out of the ground to protect her from explosions.  Inside, she sits on her butt and hugs her knees to her chest.  Elder Vampire magical girls, a sea of zombies, and exploding seagulls.

She's so out of her depths here.  She didn't think she was afraid of anything, but this is absolutely terrifying.  The spikes don't retract right away.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur kind of flails throughout the entire split-second surgery, shouting in surprise. "Woah woah woah gyyyyyyaaaaaAAAAAAaaaaah what the hell holy shit!!" He shouts, suddenly realizing he's gotten surgeried at a full half-second after it happens. "Wha-- did you just do... surgery something at me? Jesus, lady, what the hell! I mean-- thanks? But holy shit! Don't ya got... heal... beams or something?" He's so used to things not being so... fundamentally visceral?

    Remilia, Arthur remains uncertain about, but Sakuya is a little easier to deal with. And she's got so much useful shit! So thankfully he can force the fish out of his inventory and into a leaf more easily now, or at least into a branch just below a leaf.

    He removes the branch -- it's the gauze -- and the fish is immediately launched out of his sylladex at incredibly high speed out into the sea. It fires off at least several hundred feet before it hits the surface. What the fuck is going on with that inventory system?
Remilia Scarlet     The Plague Gulls all explode and it's totally unfair and illegal because instead of going *pichuuuuun* they actually blow up into their own bullets and we all *hate* those specific kinds of enemies.

    Remilia keeps the goo off of her more by reflex at how icky it looks than anything else, beating her wings once and throwing up a ridiculous wall of high pressure wind, which knocks most of the feathers astray as well, which is well enough given that she's at ground zero and all. She gets a great big horrible barrage of bone pieces and serrated feather shards flung into her from all directions, now stuck like an absolute pincushion through layers of poofy and frilly dress, way too many holes put through her wings to remain flight useful. No limbs hacked off or holes blown through her though, so she's made of tough stuff.

    The vampire lets down her arms and makes a big, angry, frustrated huffing sound, apparently more mad and upset about being stabbed in a hundred places than 'aaaa! my blood!. The wounds trickle little bits of black smoke rather than that, and make a hissing sound as they gradually begin closing up, forcing Gull shrapnel out of flesh, littering the beach around her with a lot of clattering bone noises.

    Sakuya is . . . fine? Somehow? She was like, right there. The aura of unconcerned mundanity astounds. She watches Arthur get TAS surgery'd with the kind of look that takes a few seconds of blinking to understand what she just saw. "My, that was rather quick wasn't it? Are you sure all the bits are still where they're supposed to be?" She prods arthur like checking a roast in progress. "My apologies for the fuss." is all she has to say on that subject.

    When Arthur then launches the fish way out into the ocean though, she turns to watch it with her hand over her eyes to shield it from the sun, like tracking a baseball. "Was . . . that what you intended to do?" she asks, a little hesitantly. "I need the tea back, so please don't eject it a mile out to sea. Or rather, please warn me when you do."

    "How much offal do you think I carry around?" Remilia huffs at Maricel. "A high class vampire doesn't just munch on heads lying around in a picnic basket. Besides, I've changed my mind. If those birds are the kind that make that much of a mess, then I don't want one around the mansion." Sakuya audibly breathes a sigh of relief at hearing that. "And I heard that you know!" she turns to point at Touta. "I have the devil's own ears! If anything, that person must be a knockoff of me!"
Maricel Thorne      The mad doctor lets herself relax, hands back in her labcoat pockets, after patching up Arthur and scanning the crowd for any further injuries. She seems terribly casual about the crawler zombies- they're close enough to 'a local pest' for her to not be alarmed in the least by them, aside from giving one a swift kick in the blubbery head when it lurches in her general direction. "I fit the treatment to the patient," she says, in a tone equally soothing and breezy. "Next time try to hold still for my benefit, ah? Or don't. It is more challenging if you move." Her tone gives no indication that she believes that to be a bad thing. "And of course they're all in the right places. I'm a doctor."

     She makes her way over to Remilia at a more relaxed clip, carefully avoiding the puddles of green plague-ooze, and making a slightly sour face at the way those injuries close up. "Are you positive you don't need a bit of help yourself, miss? Let me have a look at you." She tries to put the back of her hand on the vampire's forehead as if checking for a fever; another holds up some occult-looking brass diagnostic device.
Maricel Thorne      Meanwhile, one of the crawler zombies repeatedly bonks its blubbery mutant head on Mikoto's spike-wall. From the outside, it looks positively ridiculous- but behind the barrier, it's an incredibly ominous "thunk-thunk-thunk" punctuated by piteous moaning and the scrabbling of stubby little claws. Poor Mikoto.
Sumiko After a few moments, there is a shout from inside the Jade spikes. "Is everything done exploding out there? Or is the blood dripping from the moon now?"
Touta Konoe      Ooops. She heard that? And doesn't seem happy about it too. "Ehehe, That so? Well, either way meant it more like a compliment." Depending on who you ask at least...

     Sounds of shouting continue on from the assortment of jaded spikes which overtake any further attempts at conversation. Near said spikes is some mutant head which Touta promptly punts into the Corpse Sea just as he did the first one before turning to the barricaded individual.

     "No moon blood! I think you're safe to come out."
Arthur Lowell     "Hey, weird heal energies fit me! I used to hang out /all the time/ with someone who had hella weird heal energies! I guess they were mostly stolen, but still." Arthur vaguely protests to Maricel. "I couldn't hold still 'cause ya rushed me down with it! I didn't even know it was gonna /happen/." He wrings his hands dramatically, but not wringing them hard enough to tear open any stitches.

    "Yeah, all clear! We got shit FIGURED OUT! Aside from..." He shouts to Mikoto, then he has to start puzzling out how he's going to get the GREEN TEA out. This involves GIVING several objects to Sakuya, in order to constantly re-balance his auto-balancing tree modus. The assortment is mostly from the opposite side of the alphabet. A disturbingly extensive collection of sunglasses, for example, or some vast amount of phones. God, what a mess his inventory is.
Sumiko The ground rumbles as slowly as the spikes withdraw themselves.  The jade sword in her hand is placed on her back with a flick of her wrist, as the magical girl is on guard because of all of the suddenly dangerous stuff is going on.  On the positive side, she's not rocking where nobody can see her anymore.

Weiry, but still here she looks towards Remilia, deciding that is a bad idea waiting to happen, and speaks to her anyway, "So...where did you get the magical powers?  I got mine from a magical wish-granting rabbit."
Remilia Scarlet     Sakuya pokes Arthur a couple more times to be sure. "I suppose they are. That's the fastest I've ever seen someone put back together like that. Usually I only see them being taken apart." Wait what- "Wherever did you get that inconvenient-looking storage decide anyway?" she asks Arthur, taking piles of ridiculous objects into her arms as if this happened every day. It might. "Wouldn't a simple wardrobe or backpack have sufficed?"

    "I'm completely fine." Remilia half-huffs, half-boasts at Maricel. "This is completely ordinary." she says about the odd little trickles of black smoke. Indeed, she wrenches a particularly stubborn sliver of bone shrapnel out from the metacarpals of her right hand, and the injury doesn't really bleed, just looking oddly 'burnt' inside. The flesh doesn't so much flow back together or anything as it 'fills in', healing like un-burning paper. Whatever her diagnostics want to check, they come away with pretty blatantly non-standard physiology. Some phantasmal magical bullshit that's all kind of interchangeable and theoretically morphic. How else does anyone turn into a bodymass-conserved swarm of bats and back?

    She looks at Mikoto as if the girl were having a stroke. "I always had them of course. My bloodline traces all the way back to Dracul himself! Who ever heard of a non-magical devil?"
Arthur Lowell     Arthur looks at Sakuya, squinting at her like she just said something that the translation effect totally failed to identify. He sounds out the word as if trying not just to understand its meaning, but understand how any human being could have ever said it in the first place. It is abject confusion.

    "'Back pack'???"
Maricel Thorne      "Look, you need to learn to be less twitchy," Maricel says over her shoulder to Arthur, while banging on her diagnostic device with the heel of her hand to get it to stop saying nonsense. "Most things aren't out to get you! You can just chill out and let stuff happen, and it always turns out fine. Mortasheen just isn't a dangerous place."

     It is at that exact moment that an enormous gestalt zomboid monster erupts from the corpse sea several hundred feet out, clutching Arthur's garbage-fish in its horrid jaws, and shudders with the palpitations of unlife as it begins to ascend into the sky. Gore and discarded body-parts slough off it and fall back into the ocean as it lazily rises, moaning with a sound halfway between whalesong and a zombie's guttural wheezing.

     "Usually is not a dangerous place," she corrects herself, bringing up her binoculars and staring at the enormous creature.
Sumiko Mikoto Shimizu says, "Huh.." Mikoto says curiously, "So you're a natural magical girl?" seems to more ask rhetorically than actually ask.  Thinking on this for a moment, how does one become a maguca without selling their literal soul?  Maybe she would know?  

"So...how do you become a natural magical using magical girl?""
Arthur Lowell     Arthur kind of puffs up his cheeks at the /mere accusation/ that he could be "twitchy". "I ain't twitchy! I'm fuckin', I'm super /cool/ and /chill/, dawg! I just don't wanna let stuff /happen/ when I got that hella attachment to, you know, my human stuff stayin' all normal, considering everything's-- WOAH!!" He shouts, seeing a perfectly-timed ascent of a vast necro-craft. Or... necro-being? He's gritting his teeth in a weird way. "Jesus Christ. Yeah, see! Fucked up! That thing gonna break the exosphere, you think? Or it gonna rattle apart before it hits, like the other ones?" He looks a little... overwhelmed by it. Woah!
Remilia Scarlet     Nope. Maricel has to deal with ~magical anatomy~. A demon powered by nonsense and bullshit. She doesn't have the good dignity to present like, normal brains and stuff like Touta does, even if she doesn't heal as quickly, since it's more of a morphing thing. Shoulda been obvious with the huge wings, honestly.

    The two of them fussing over their individual things, including Sakuya opening her mouth to begin explaining what a backpack is, abruptly halts in the face of the rising Abnortis, and the both of them stop and turn to look with the exact same appreciative posture and attention as a spring flower viewing, watching the horrid abomination all the way up into high atmosphere with a kind of appreciative excitement that is oddly very close to Maricel's own displayed for the subject.

    "I see it now! The most noble of zombies who reaches for the stars! Proof that even a shambling corpse can grasp the heavens." Remilia nods. "That feels like inspiration for a Spellcard? Or maybe just a regular spell. Actually, I should bring some of this back for Patchouli to study. Maybe we can have our very own space zombie?" Sakuya fishes out an old-timey flash-and-develop box camera from somewhere, and takes several snapshots, before then flipping a slender knife out from her hand like a magician, and says "Very well milady. I won't be but a moment."

    Remilia once again looks at Mikoto as though she has a brain problem. "You don't *become* anything natural. The fact that you weren't already means that it's not natural! Have some common sense."
Maricel Thorne      "No way this one makes it," Maricel says almost reverently, still laser-focused on the creature through her binoculars. "There's only been one viable interstellar ascension. This one- it doesn't have the exoskeletal plating needed for final void hibernation, even if it did have the propulsion. Best-case scenario, it freezedries in outer space. Worst-case, it blows up."

     True to her word, half of the Abnortis's body calves off and falls back into the Corpse Sea, already set upon by dozens-if-not-hundreds of Plague Gulls. It continues to rise, but it's already disintegrating by bits and pieces, its structure too flimsy to hold together outside of the churning pressure of the zombie ocean. One Plague Gull brings back a scrap of its flesh and lands on Maricel's shoulder; she wordlessly places the scrap inside a test tube and gives the Gull a bone.
Sumiko "Ugh..." Mikoto says, frustrated with the vampire princess.  Is pestering her until she gives up her secrets going to give her anything fruitful?  Probably not, but she instead just shrugs and with a flash of lights and maguca particles returns to not magical girl.  

Of course, the horrible monster in the background flying towards space is very repulsive and frightening.  But it's not like she can do anything about it from here.  With a sigh, she sags her shoulder and plops her butt on the sands.  
Maricel Thorne      The Abnortis swiftly acquires a 'halo' of circling Plague Gulls, a dark and scattered ring spinning clockwise around its drooping head. One of its gas-balloons ruptures with a jet of fire and it stalls, tumbling slowly around its new center of balance. After a few moments, a white jet of psychic energy materializes facing downwards, silently propelling it with a burning light- but before it can climb even a hundred more feet, the jet gutters and stalls.

     A moment later, its head explodes in a silent burst of the same energy, followed by blossoms of white light cascading across the pockmarked remnants of its body. It falls back into the Sea with a distant crash, and the 'halo' of birds disperses. "Well, that's a wrap," Maricel says, dropping the binoculars and clapping her hands together in residual glee. "Really wish it'd left enough to cut open this time. Better luck with the next one, I hope."

     But, ideally, not too much better luck. Don't want to be cleaning up that mess on another world.