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Owner Pose
Priscilla     It's exactly as Zacharie said. Exiting the vault and putting your backs to its massive glittering piles of immaculate granulated sugar, the rooms of pipeworks and obnoxious ON/OFF switches you'd just left behind ten minutes ago are a scene transformed.

    The supervisors and individual workers of dubious merit are already in uproar, having broken from their inexplicable stations and tiny desks for running around in chaos instead, going nowhere in particular in their mad aimless sprinting around each station.

"The dessert is in danger! Red alert, this is important!" screams the supervisor, arms in the air. "I don't want to start anew!"
"The phantoms are nice, they didn't attack the sugar! You're lying, you're lying!" wails the shift supervisor under him.
"So fast . . . so fast . . . it runs so fast in the pipes." frantically mumbles the valve monitor.
"No . . . no the director said . . . the director said!" howls the safety inspector.

    The news has already spread too quickly, though it's anyone's guess how. There are no alert lights, or warning sirens, or comms stations, or even a PA system. It's as if all of them just *knew*, despite someone's understandable assumptions that a lack of workplace communication would keep them from doing just that. However Zacharie wove through this clattering and screaming jungle of hair trigger Burnt-to-be, not once, but twice, to and from the monorail, is a wonder.
Starbound Flotilla     "Christ, what'd you do to them?" George mutters under his breath to seemingly nobody at all. "Meat, metal, smoke, and plastic. Meat, metal, smoke, and plastic. Not this shit. How'd you..." He trails off, tensely pressing forward. "Can't tell how hard they're burning. Work with your intuition. If you think they're about to pop their top, shoot first. We can't afford the whole zone down our throats. We gotta make a break for the next area." Where was that again? George stops to ponder, trying to plot the layout of things in his head, with the three-bridge thing they went over before, is it just the opposite direction from that? Maybe... Well, if he can recall a good direction for the next Area of the Zone, he's gonna make a break for it.
Thomas Alva Edison "This has gone from bad to worse..." Edison states the obvious, the fact that these things were so addicted to something as simple as sugar was...obviously both hilariously simple, and horrifying.  The fact that, now, the Elsens are a hair away from becoming burnt, and they are in a group of them leads Edison to believe that they need to decide on a plan now.  

Edison also did want to have to deal with as few of these Elsens as possible, they were dangerous in their own right, and a horde of them could be very dangerous.  He just keeps moving forward, trying to think of a way to try and diffuse the situation.  

Without using sugar.  Edison could not let himself use an allegory for drugs as a tool.  With a sigh, he pushes forward, lamenting about the family destroying the power of such things.  How it can change a man completely, only in this case, far more literal than reality.

"How does he do that?" He asks rhetorically about Judgery just zipping in and out.
Doctor Strange      "Hey!"

     "The dessert is fine," says the Sorcerer Supreme with certainty. The sorcerer looks towards George in an 'I'll handle this' kind of way. He doesn't want to fight more Hulk Burnt, but he doesn't know exactly what to say besides vague corporate talk. "The director sent us to make sure of that. There's been some... organizational changes. The phantoms are no longer going to be employed here. They've decided... to pursue a career elsewhere. Just stay calm, stop spreading rumors. Okay? ..We'll get out of your... hair."

     Maybe not the best choice of words for a bunch of bald guys. Still, he reiterates to the best of his ability. "Like I said, the dessert's fine. Just... calm down."
Yuuki Kuran A wave of concern. A palpable aura of terrible fear, of anxious shivering need to blame and externalize and rationalize. Yuuki is sympathetic to the plight of these Elsen. Here, and now, she can speak, and be heard.

"The phantoms were neither nice nor were they mean. They approached the sugar, and some of the attendants attacked the Spectres to guard the sugar." Yuuki explains. "It was none of your faults - some of your colleagues merely broke the rules. The sugar is safe, and the spectres are not mad at you. You can believe me." She explains, in patient, friendly, understanding terms to the Elsen, her words dripping with an unquestionable surity.

And, of course, some Normal Charisma.

To George, Yuuki sighs with a shake of her head that ends her bangs wavering across her shoulders. "The usual, as usual."
Tina Natsumi Tina's looking a little confused as she watches the workers and supervisors alike scurrying about in their mad dash to... She's actually not sure where they're going. If anything, it doesn't look like they're even going somewhere so much as just running around because everyone else is doing it.

The fact that they're so close to becoming threats means she can't just stand there and watch, unfortunately. Following Strange's and Yuuki's leads, she pulls a pair of megaphones out of Uncle Sam's leg before tossing them over to each of them, then snatching one more for herself. "That's right, folks! Just take your seats, keep your heads down, and we'll get all y'all loaded up with desserts before you know it!"

A pause, and then she starts glancing around to see if any of them take the instructions while barely-whispering to her companions away from the loudspeaker. "Y'think they'll sit down and make it easy for us? I got a leftover candy bar somewhere in here, but unless someone's got a way to make copies of it..."
August Kohler August was busy last time, but he's here now, and there's a big problem. Burnt. As they usher out and the Elsen are going crazy, August summons Dietrich, and has the big sword on stand-by. George's words get a nod.

Everyone else is trying diplomacy. As they push forward, August following George for an exit, the redhead will use that massive sword to strike down any of the Elsen that become Burnt right when he notices they're going to blow their top, in a speedy burst of superhuman power.

"George, do you have any idea who the Zone guardian is? Anything we need to know about them in preparation? I assume we'll be fighting them soon, if we can get out of here."
Zero Kiryu As usual, Zero Kiryu lingers at Yuuki's shoulder. He has nothing to say to the panicking Elsen, but there is something he can do to help, even as Yuuki exerts her own supernatural charisma on the surroundings. A very fine, nearly-invisible powder spreads drifts away from his form, filling the air and inflicting a soporific effect on the Elsen in his immediate surroundings.

"I should be able to pacify those immediately around us, at least a little." He asides to George, a little uncertainly.
Priscilla     Diplomacy turns out to be a mistake. Trying to sooth and misdirect the Elsens with words in Zone 1 had proven occasionally successful at penetrating their depression and stress, and rarely done the trick in Zone 2 at carefully and temporarily soothing their deeper seated crushing anxiety. Here, there just seems to be no place for it.

    The Elsens that'd seemed so remarkably functional and calm compared to the other two are so much worse now. Like a fairy tale immortal withering to dust once the magic breaks, the looming threat of lack of desserts sends the Elsens falling back into the incoherent screaming hysteria that they probably would have arrived at a long time ago without the constant rewards of sugar.

    Trying to talk them out of it results in Strange's most well-meaning and Tina's . . . best, efforts being met with "You're lying! You're lying you're lying!" "It must've been you! You attacked the dessert!" and being narrowly saved from a point blank mauling that follows the explosions of black corruption on their faces by an ABSTRACT TRAGEDY from the strange new Add-On liberated from the vault, stamping burning white mask-stigmata over the wave, followed by a few bloody and silent bat swings of gut-churning violence.

    The director's methods work. The Director's methods work. Regardless of what one might like to think of it as, the equivalent of drugging and hypnosis is about the only effective non-violent tool left at this point. The Elsens grow exhausted and confused as the torpor struggles with their mania, and the soothing authoritative voice tells them what to do. "So much of it spilled . . . so much" "There's too much white in my head . . ." "Uh . . . Huh . . . It's . . . It's only time . . ." they mumble incoherently. The Batter stares long at each one he passes by and steps over, tapping his bat against his shoulder, but makes no move on them. The faint inclusion of even the slightest rare body language in his posture makes it feel like         has less interest in fighting than he does, and the Holy Mission for him right now is an unskippable cutscene where the Choir is doing everything.

    Weaving back to the Monorail is less of an impossibility after that. It certainly results in less pitched and bloody battle against this Zone's yet-even-worse Burnt, and that in of itself is a relief given how strong they've gradually (rapidly?) gotten. The grainy copypasted monorail/tram cart still seems to shudder with tension on the way out, its formerly smooth ride now clattery and bumpy like a more groundbound modern train, as it speeds unrealistically quickly across an ocean of dull plastic to another part of the factory that is Zone 3.
Priscilla     Even stepping back out into the silent, safety orange outdoors, you still don't quite feel safe yet, or at least not simply because of distance, time, and quiet. You don't see anyone else outdoors here, which could mean anything. For a second, it seems like it's snowing, but you find that the tiny white flakes that sparsely drift down from above are ash. You're not far from the tremendous smokestacks that'd been partially visible from everywhere else.

    In fact, that seems to be most of all there is to Area 3 of Vesper. There are plenty of buildings and sub-buildings and offices and maintenance passageways and pipe rooms and power rooms and steam rooms, but no matter how much you rummage through them, you don't find anything even slightly noteworthy. Not even a nice plastic chest like in the pipeworks before. At least no employees, but it all seems so very much for show.

    The only sign of activity comes from the thin, trickling haze of smog that escapes the tippy top of the enormous smokestacks at the center, to which all outdoor paths lead. Their height is even more deceptively ridiculous up close, to the point that their open tops almost brush the clouds they're creating. There's quite a few of them, all bunched together, though only one has a ladder built into its side. There is, of course, absolutely no reason anyone should want to climb a ladder to the top of a smokestack, in the real world or here. The fact that it's been built right in, rather than at least temporarily added to some non-existent scaffolding, is uncanny.
Doctor Strange      "Guilty," says Strange under his breath with a slight grimace. Yeah, that was a total lie. At least the Batter was prepared for it.

     Some time is spent searching. With all the tools at his disposal, he can rummage and scavenge pretty efficiently. It therefore doesn't take him long to find that there is nothing worth finding here. He arrives back at the monorail exit with a thin mantle of ash resting upon his shoulders, and a matching crown settling upon his black hair.

     With nothing of interest left but the smokestacks--or rather, the building from which they sprout. Just for curiosity's sake, Strange opens a portal. He leaves the exit high in the sky, and attempts to put the 'entrance' all the way down to the source of the smoke, to the best of his ability. In essence, he's trying to clear the smoke without clogging the mechanism.

     Once he feels like he's done it, the sorcerer casts a scrying spell to try and peer into the smokestack. He's got to see if there's actually a point to that ladder or if it's just more industrial decor.
Thomas Alva Edison Edison isn't sure what was more unnerving, the near break down of the Elsen back from where they came from or the eerie silence of this place.  "Good thinking, Ms. Kuran," He says on the side...while it wasn't something he entirely LIKED, it was worth keeping them from becoming monsters and having to fight their way through.  Who knows what would happen to Elsen if too many burnt formed?

Pushing forward, Edison started to explore with the others.  Nothing seemed to be the only thing they received.  Even as ash rained down on them like snow, causing him to cross his arms and think.  What was the path, or the way the area seemed to push towards?  The land always seemed to guide...

Of course, eventually, all roads lead to Rome.  Looking up at the building Edison just kinda makes a frown and then just speaks.  "But why though?" he asks, motioning towards the ladder.  "Why would anyone put this here...?"

Rubbing his forehead, he shrugged his shoulders.  While Strange looked inside, he looked around the building for an alternative way in.  
Tina Natsumi It was worth a shot. "Can't say we didn't try, huh?" Tina chuckles awkwardly as she readies herself topull out a pistol to keep the mad Elsens off of her, holding back only when the Batter and his friendly Add-On take care of tha tparticular issue. It's still somewhat surreal seeing those Elsen being popped so easily in front of her, and that blood on her face feels all too real, but...

No, it's easier to just bottle it all up for now. She still looks visibly shaken from the whole thing by the time she joins up with the others at the Monorail and even still at the smokestacks after that. The suspicious ladder has her pausing to approach it, giving it a few nudges to see if the thing is actually stable enough or outright attached to the smokestack.

"This could be a total waste of time. If any o' y'all see any other ways to get in, lemme know so I don't waste too much time goin' up, huh?" She flashes her companions a quick grin at that, then (assuming the ladder is actually there and not just painted on or something silly) starts the ascent!
August Kohler The Batter and the Add-On have it handled. August nods as they take the train, slowly tapping his fingers against each other as they wait...and frowning at the chaos of this. These guardians are going to be troublesome.

August goes through each building, and finds nothing. Instead, there's only a ladder. He's considering going up himself, when Tina makes the decision and ascends, so August sighs and joins her. "I'll be back-up." He warns her, so she doesn't reach the top and get startled by him and fall in.

At the top, he'll also try and see if they can see any unknown landmarks or anything in the distance, or if the smoke's in the way. Tina can look for treasure or entrances or whatever.
Zero Kiryu Zero Kiryu turns his mental focus towards the Batter, attempting to read him as he exhibits body language that suggests a clearer preference than is being acted upon. Perhaps he can get an idea of what's going on with the thing /behind/ the Batter if he looks at what's going on 'between' them right now, if anything.

Once he's gotten a surface-level read on what's going on there, he asks the Batter, "Is there something that makes you want to fight these more than normal?"

While THE CHOIR moves, he continues to exude soporific powder, which drifts off him more-or-less invisibly unless the light should catch them just so, revealing a faint purple coloration. He otherwise prioritizes Yuuki's movement, only stopping to assist ascending the LADDER if she should choose to go that way.

He accomplishes this, if necessary, by making his own vine ascent parallel to it, shaping a thin spiraling vine staircase that uses the original ladder as a support structure.
Starbound Flotilla     "Snazzy work, Yuuk'. Wish I could do that." George says, keeping a wide berth from the subdued things as if his cigarette smoke might wake them up. As they get on the monorail, he answers August. "Big guy isn't someone I can name names on areas, you know, legally speaking. Practically speaking too, really. Stuff's pretty static, but you'd be surprised how weird it looks from different angles. We're counting up, and bigger bosses like bigger numbers, right? Plus, hey, ever seen those stories with smokey Mount Doom kinda things going on?"

    He disembarks, keeping a tight grip on his shotgun as they move through the area. George, for his part, takes a short break. Enough climbing nonsense! "You head up. I gotta take a smoke break, this shit is too much for my joints." Honestly, at this stage, that's sounding more authentic than anything else. "You shout down what you see up there or something, huh?" He takes a seat at the base and digs into a pack.
Yuuki Kuran "We should leave." Yuuki offers, after pacifying the Elsen with her Extremely Normal, Reasonable Words. Certainly, the others played to the higher concepts, to idealistic purviews where she leaned into the words around them, the words of an Addict.

A princess of Addicts.

The Monorail gives Yuuki time to stand quietly in her corner, being reserved and drawn back after her speech, mostly leaning on Zero with a dialed-down melancholy.

Her first reaction is to the ash-like-snow that falls upon her, shielding her eyes from the twinkling fall of the smoky motes. "What purpose could they have for ash... from burning? If that is normal, then what is off about it?"

Well, there is a ladder. "What's the chance this is exactly where we need to go?" Yuuki wonders, before starting to climb the enormous ladder at an entirely normal pace.

She gets about halfway up before Strange makes his portal at the top, and scrys through... With an annoyed little 'tisk-ing' of her lips and tongue.

"Now I really hope this is the way to go, or Stephen will have made me quite the useless."
Priscilla     On the way through to the monorail, Zero dares another peek and the signs he can glean from the opaque and mirror bright surface that is the Batter's thoughts. Like carefully adjusting a stellar microphone, he has to focus very carefully to pick up anything specific past the solar radiation of extreme, absolute, unwavering, saint-like surety. He doesn't detect any presence of mental friction, but rather a sort of natural disinterest. A disinterest in avoiding surrealist struggle and lethal danger. A lack of care for Yuuki's way of resolving it.

    At the same time, from the fractured and limited bandwidth of The Other, he senses the opposite kind of disinterest, even impatience, with grinding through the Elsens. There is some other dominating urge weirdly reflected in a million little pieces through the countless tiny filaments of the Puppeteer's miniscule strings. The closest he could compare it to is a sense of curiosity. Morbid intrigue, perhaps. Impatience. The Elsens are a mere distraction to them. Again, it becomes more disorienting and vaguely unhealthy the longer he tries to read it. His perspective drifts away from him slowly, somehow feeling like he's watching himself externally, pale and bereft of detail, until he stops.

    On the way off of the monorail, he asks the Batter his question. The Batter doesn't respond with much, as usual, but says "There isn't much time left. It will get worse for you the longer we leave it." Zero has the general sense the 'you' is a plural nonspecific. The Batter rarely addresses people as precise individuals. He has some kind of reservations about skipping the hard part to make things easier for now.

    As the group walks past the monorail kiosk on the way out, the superfluous Elsen at the counter doesn't say anything about how fabulous the monorail is at all. He glances nervously to the Batter, and quivers ou "You should not make so little noise when you walk. It's abnormal . . ."
    Arriving at the industrial towers, Strange can't quite prevent all of the smoke from leaving the stack without portaling the bottom so broadly that it becomes physically impossible to reach due to the inherent issues of how portal gates work, but he gets most of the job done after some shuffling the location by feel. It continues to snow ash for the next several minutes, as the quantity already up in the air still has to slowly, gradually, quietly, drift back down on its own, but for Tina and August climbing the ladder, they aren't forced to breathe in the steadily rising haze of it.

    What a climb, too. One doesn't normally think of climbing a ladder as all that difficult, but then they rarely ever have to be on one for more than a dozen rungs. After two hundred, the repetitive motions start to get wearying to the arms and legs, like taking ten flights of stairs, making the ultimately precarious position of hanging off the side of a perfectly vertical tower of improbable height feel more and more vertigo-inducing. It's a full one thousand to the top, though --at minimum. This time George may actually not be bullshitting them. It kind of sucks even for limber teen joints not yet worn down by age and failed new years resolutions to get in shape.

    Unfortunately, that much seems to be unavoidable without the power of flight or teleportation. The smokestacks defy all of Thomas Edison's good engineering sense by apparently having no attached building to rise out of. There is neither sight nor sound nor smell of an actual facility to walk into, irrespective of level of security. It's as if they'd just grown out of the ground and decided to vent ash from the Earth's core --if such a thing existed here.
Priscilla     The view from the top reveals a gargantuan sprawling factoryscape off in every direction, not unlike the pink city of Bismark as viewed from the Library tower. Perhaps not unlike the many green island cities of Zone 1, had the Alma office an open rooftop. At such a height, the size of the factory sinks in as large enough to convincingly replace New York, though at the same time, it quite convincingly asserts that there is nothing outside of it. It is alone in an endless, uniformly rippling ocean of white plastic.

    The scryed view of the interior is scarcely more informative. It is entirely possible to drop in from the top of the smokestack. It is a very wide, very open, very *long* tube of progressively darkening orange. Near to the bottom, it grows almost pitch black, and becomes impossible to really see much of anything. Strange can at least hear the sound of a crackling fire, like a stove more than any kind of furnace, and hear dry scraping and wet squishing, with the occasional faint clang of someone moving up and down metal stairs below.

    Without reservation, the Batter climbs to the top as well, guided by the others and the Other as if there were nothing more natural. Where he arrives at the top, a bobbing orange arrow mysteriously appears over the cleared mouth of the smokestack, and just like that, he jumps in, going beyond a leap of faith and into some kind of cosmic leap of transcendent zen not giving a fuck. If someone is standing directly in his way, they will in fact just be shoved in as well.

    Thus begins a ridiculously, improbably, absolutely silly long fall; it is much longer than even the time it took to come up via the ladder by an order of magnitude, despite speeding past at terminal velocity, watching rings of smog-stained metal fly by at breakneck speed. The Batter seems to have no problem with this, spread eagling out into a controlled skydiver fall, and then moving back side to side, up and down, with uncanny aerial falling agility. It does, in fact, via some strange artifact of the rising ash heat, become surprisingly easy to adjust one's direction when freefalling.

    It's a good thing too, because the smokestack is *infested* with Spectres. Whether they're rising from below or the fall is just that fast, they come flying up at an entrant from below, at first one at a time, but then in waves of formations and patterns grinning with skeletal fangs and empty eyes, causing tremendous damage should one fail to angle out of the way of them. Inexplicably mixed in with them are glowing white rings of light, and connecting with them seems to incrementally slow one's fall in sequence. Absolutely unquestioning of the bizarre logic of why this two minute long high velocity skydive is filled with Spectres to avoid and rings to fall through, the Batter zigs and zags back and forth to do both, threading the needle down the entire pipe, entrusting his body entirely to the Puppeteer, or else a very bloody splat at the bottom.

    For those who have to skydive in, falling through ten or so rings is enough to hit the bottom with just a painful thump instead of a fatal crunch. Those of whom insist on flying or climbing down instead have to deal with being mobbed by the voracious swarms of gaunt and starving Spectres that fly up the tube, menacing people with much lower downward speeds like packs of flying killer dogs.
Priscilla     Regardless of which method one arrives, they do find what effectively confirms the results of Edison's search: a relatively small, dark, closed off basement room, with the bottom of the stack itself being little more than a grated metal floor over blackness, frosted with layers of caked on white ash in little piles. There are some stairs leading further down, a great big hole in the wall easily large enough for someone to climb into the pipe beyond without crouching, and a single Elsen in a hard hat wielding a shovel. He keeps slamming it into piles of ash and throwing it into the giant pipe like shoveling coal into an old steam train furnace. He looks like absolute shit as well. Even with his traditionally pasty and minimalist features, his face evokes hollowed eyes and cheeks and an unnatural, open-mouthed rictus grimace as he works tirelessly.
August Kohler The climb is exhausting. August wills himself up, but his joints hurt at the end, and he's tired. He moves to crouch and rest for a second as he overlooks the view, before the Batter climbs up and just freefalls into the smokestack. Well, okay.

August takes a breath, resummons Dietrich, climbs onto his back, and then jumps. White rings and spectres inside. August is a gamer, so he knows ABSOLUTELY what to do here, which is to land inside the rings. Thrusters fire up on Dietrich's back, not allowing flight but allowing August to better control his mobility and maneuvering. A spectre that comes flying by gets sworded,in mid-air, as Dietrich lands through the rings and-

There's nothing safe to land them. Oh shit. Luckily, it's just a thump, but August still grimaces. "Augh!"

As he picks himself up off of the pile of Dietrich on the ground, refusing to touch the ground with his shoes. August, for his own purpose, ignores the hollow-eyed worker, and takes the stairs downwards, looking to see what they might find. "Does anyone want to check out that pipe?" If Tina got down, he eyes her as he says it. Hey, it might make good footage!
Starbound Flotilla     After a while of his smoke break, George gets up and wanders off.

    When the group arrives at their destination at the end of the rigmarole, George is already there. He finishes up his cigarette and flicks it into the grate, where it can join the other ash. "Joints." He says, succinctly. Hey, not everything's a menacing thing with him! Sometimes, a man just really doesn't want to climb a huge ladder and skydive through rings because he's getting too old. "I'm not liking the look of this place. The pipe smells all wrong, don't it?" He looks down the stairs, and grits his teeth awkwardly. He hasn't been down there, it looks like, wherever it was he came from.
Tina Natsumi Tina was feeling pretty good for the first hundred. Tired by fifty, sure, but she's still young. She can't complain about being worn out that easily! And then there's one hundred fifteen. One hundred thirty. She loses count by one forty, and even being used to long slogs of tedium and repetition can't really prepare for a ladder THIS long.

She'll even have to call down for August to hold every now and then, if he's still going after she slows down to take much needed breaks. "Watch yer head for a sec! Goddang, I ain't had to do this much stuff with my arms since that pull up contest!" She laughs at her own rather shitty... Joke? It's probably just the fatigue speaking.

Once they finally reach the top of the smokestack, Tina takes a moment to just collapse by the side of the ladder. She rolls onto her side to still catch that view of the factoryscape spreading out below them, but it takes her a little while longer to really appreciate the view after wearing herself down that hard.

Appreciate might be the wrong word there. Acknowledge it, at the very least. "That's a... That's some weird shit out there, huh? Not too surprisin' after what we've seen already but-hey. What're you...?" Raising an eyebrow as the Batter approaches the hole to the smokestack, she only gets to see the orange arrow for a few moments before the Batter just plunges in there.

"Should we...? Ah, hell with it. Not like this place can get any weirder!" Tina tempts fates as she forces herself up, groaning from the soreness in her limbs while still managing to hobble towards the hole. She takes another moment to make sure her phone is recording and safely tucked into her jacket's breast pocket, then dives in as well!

The screaming that follows is a mixture of excited and fearful. On one hand, she's never gone skydiving before, and moving that fast is kind of terrifying. On the other hand, what other opportunity would she have to do so without a parachute? She mimics the Batter's falling technique on the way down, following August's lead in going through the rings to ensure she doesn't become a smear on the ground, but landing facedown still has her laying there for several long, painful moments.

The question about checking the pipe gets a thumbs up from Tina, and it's only a minute after that does she finally get up. She doesn't have a single clue what's going to be in that pipe, but... Screw it. Someone else can think about what they find. "Mmrf... Does smell kinda funky, but it's a lead. Besides, there could be good footage in here!" Tina laughs and winces simultaneously, making sure her phone's light is on to make sure that footage is (relatively) crisp and clear for the viewers at home as she goes right in!
Thomas Alva Edison "Hm...there appears to be no other way in, it is like this place just grew here.  Much like everything else in this world, it has some sort of weird internal logic, but not much else...wait what are yo-.." Thomas says as the Batter just ups and throws himself off the side and down the stack.  Edison, truly at a loss for words shakes his head.  

Leap of faith, indeed!

Instead of jumping down like a madman, he flies up to the top and then flies down.  Which of course, gets him assaulted by Specters who just wanna gnaw on his flesh.  Edison fights back with BIG D(i)C POWER, and zaps and punches things that come at him on the way down.

Of course, when he lands, he is nice and bloodied, because he just outright refused to make a leap of faith, and instead take the harder way down.  Stubbornness and the desire to take his own path and the desire to deny faith at every opportunity burns too brightly to just take the simplest path.  

At the bottom, now roughed up and with a specter chewing on his head, he frowns and punches the thing off of him with a resigned sigh.  The kinda sound that Side Show Bob makes when he steps on a rake.
Doctor Strange      Satisfied with his effort to keep the others from breathing in ash, Strange takes to the skies and ascends. For those that are ground-bound, the Sorcerer Supreme offers assistance. Anyone who's on the ladder and beginning to tire will find that the rungs of the ladder move impossibly upwards, as if it were an elevator. Said party members need only hold on to the rungs.

     When Strange himself reaches the top, he crosses his arms and surveys the isolated industrial landscape. The arrow is indication enough as to what must be done. He flies straight up, making an abrupt change in direction. Strange shoots down the smokestack. Like the Batter, he seems to have a high degree of agility, though it looks more as if the sorcerer is being moved by some external force than taking advantage of the air currents.

     At the sight of the spectres, Strange calls forth two burning orange mandalas, one for each hand. They illuminate the smokestack slightly. They also illuminate him, which seems to draw the attention of a few spectres. "Not today," mutters the sorcerer, narrowing his eyes. As the wind rushes past him, he strikes out and shatters the very air. A palm thrust sends a wall of broken reality racing towards the pack, aiming to spit them out somewhere in the MIrror Dimension.

     A few manage to avoid it, and Strange is forced to fight the rabid fliers off with other means. The smokestack is illuminated in dramatic flashes of multicolored energy, each one further down, each time the Sorcerer Supreme a little worse for wear from their dogged attacks. When he lands, Strange flings one of the portals he'd opened towards the last few of them, chucking them into the air far above the smokestack. The walls of the structure spit out a cement lattice at his urging; a filter that allows the smoke through while presenting a barrier to any spectres still in pursuit.

     Strange lands without need of the white rings, dusting himself off and making use of brief healing spells to stitch up some of the cuts he sustained on the way down.

     "George, if you ate better and stopped smoking, you wouldn't have that problem. Everybody /else/ good?" He takes a look around. "Anyone need a little patching up?" His hands are held up. They glow brightly enough to conceal his scars. Once he's sure everyone's fine, he turns his attention to the stairs. Without explaining himself, Strange makes for those stairs, and decides to see where they go besides 'down.'
Yuuki Kuran Climbing up the ladder isn't difficult for Yuuki, and the strain clears far more quickly than it builds. She takes no shortcuts nor does she press herself, with folks both above and below her on the ladder. She doesn't make it to the top by the time the Batter, or August, or Thomas jump down, but the yellow arrow is indication enough.

Heaving a mid-sized black wolf (dog? it doesn't seem to be 'drawn with eyes', and the features are indistinct) out from 'behind her back', Yuuki dropping the wolf-dog down the smokestack and watching its descent with some interest, through the cloud of spectres worsens things.

Stephen Strange's grand Majykks do make things easier on the nose, the arms, and even the eyes as he blasts his way through the spectres.

As George - and those already at the bottom - see a chewed-up black dog-like mass of shadows splat against the ground below, fizzling into a haze of black smoke and shadows.

Well, after 'scouting out' the smokestack, Yuuki has no problem hitting every single ring, knowing where they all are preturnaturally.

She even lands in a Superhero pose! Which, after So Much Falling, elicits a dull popping and cronching. "AGH! My joints! George was right!!!"
Zero Kiryu Zero doesn't keep observing the Batter and his ride-along's minds for long. It's just too uncomfortable, and he's not good enough at this to try to probe deeply. He grunts an acknowledgement at what the Batter has to say about the method being used to advance, and replies, "I hope that you're used to it by now. People like us don't tend to make decisions that are in our own best interest. I'm sure that just hearing, 'This will make it harder.' is encouraging some of us to continue as-is."

"That's... fine. There's value in that."

The climb isn't a real problem for him. He just 'rides' the outside of the stupid shojo vine staircase that he made as it is built. Zero glances towards the big orange arrow, and then towards the Batter as he jumps into the smokestack.

He sighs, and waits.

It's not until Yuuki makes her own leap that he follows. His solution is simply to follow the blip of her position on his radar, adjusting towards the end so as not to just end up landing on her.

He also doesn't follow her choice of landing poses, but he does take a moment near the end to fire some vines out to slow his fall further and land lightly.

He strolls over next to Yuuki, folding his arms over his chest and looking down at her with lifted eyebrows, as if to say: Really? Your joints?
Priscilla     Meandering around at the bottom of the smokestack, you find that there isn't much of anywhere to go. Despite the outlet pipe's impossible depth, it's less than a minute's bothered pacing around its edges to come right back to where you started, shoes crunching in piles of granular white ash that'd condensed and drifted back down. The grate rattles slightly when it's walked on, echoing from whatever room lies below, and fairly clearly meant to allow the smoke up through it. Nothing is burning up here, after all. There's just the lone, silent, gaunt, haunted-looking Elsen perpetually shoveling ash into a giant pipe.

    When Tina gets near the pipe to climb into it, she can actually hear him start to fervently mutter under his breath.

"The . . . su . . . The . . . sug . . . The sugar . . . . . Put the sugar in the tube, the sugar in the tube! . . . in the tube." he mutters, over and over and over again.

    What August and Strange hear when descending to the basement level isn't any better. Whereas the dry shovel scraping had come from above, the wet squishing comes from here, in a deep green underground chamber turned ruddy orange by the glow of a fire, high walls shot with winding clusters of branching arterial pipes climbing all the way up and into the walls of the smokestack. The sole source of light, without even the odd, ambient sort of diffuse lighting that often appears indoors in the Zones, is the sickly reddish blaze that glows through a low, narrow rectangular opening in the front wall. The ground all around it is slick with sticky smears of fresh red blood. Yuuki and Zero can smell it upstairs, wafting through the grate.

    As they arrive, the Batter pushes past them, walking straight into the center of the room. His entry causes the sole Elsen on this floor, hollow and haunted as well, to turn to look at the three of them, and only utter: "You . . . What . . . Where did you come from?"

"I'm the Batter and I jumped down the chimney." the Batter replies without the slightest hint of forethought for his own part.
"Ah." says the Elsen.
"What is this place?" asks the Batter.
The Elsen remains suspiciously silent, glancing slowly away sideways.
The Batter turns his head in the same direction, his Add-Ons floating up and away, casting pale light on a small, brutally bloody pile of mangled Elsen corpses stacked up against the opposite wall. The floor is still oozing red.
August Kohler As August steps forward, he can feel the blood on Dietrich's feet, and grimaces. This is eerie, and gross. As they move towards the light,a nd towards the Elsen, August listens to him talk to the Batter, and then looks.

There's a look of disdain on his face, and a bit of nausea that he's suppressing, from all the brutal and bloody corpses. They look so...real. The floor is bright red. August turns to the rictus-grin Elsen, and asks simply.

"What killed them?" There's impatience and frustration to his tone.

If the Elsen indicates that he, somehow, killed them, though August isn't really expecting it, he'll draw his revolver. He won't shoot, yet. But he'll want to be protected against this guy...and possibly avenge the rest.
Thomas Alva Edison With some help from Dr. Strange, Edison is feeling much better and less like he fell down a flight of bears.  Which given what happened, is more accurate than he would have liked.  He limped to get to Strange to get the juice, and now that he's healed he's better again.  There is a sniff from Edison's lion nose...

The Singular Elzen in the way stares at them but is uncomfortably silent.  As the batter lights up the way, Edison helps, his shoulder bulbs blazing brightly to also help shine some light on the truth of the matter here.  

Edison is horrified by what he sees.  He's caught at a loss for words for a moment, eyes looking around at the stacked corpses, and a room covered in blood.  

Swallowing, Edison speaks again towards the Elzen, "What is this place?" he asks, repeating the Batter's question. "What is going on here..?" What nightmare did they just step into?
Doctor Strange      Strange goes downstairs, along with August. The squelching doesn't quite register at first. He hears it. But at first, he takes it to be just the machinery of this world's odd metaphysics. Perhaps it's literal machinery, like some kind of Meat-powered generator.

     It isn't until he gets closer to the light source that he realizes what it is. Blood. He, too, follows the Elsen's gaze. He realizes then what the ash is. What the soot is that coats his face, rests upon his shoulders, itches against his hair. Strange heaves a resigned sigh. He can't unknow it.

     "I'm sorry," says Strange to the Elsen. Or perhaps to Elsen. He's aghast, inside. But he's only just gotten here. "How long have you been here?" He can't imagine the toll it would take to do this for whatever constitutes a living around here.
Tina Natsumi As Tina travels further into the pipe and listens to that muttering from the Elsen, she quickly starts to regret heading into that pipe in the first place. Still, she needs to see it through, especially if that sugar is being put into the tube despite the Elsen's clear addiction to the stuff.

If there's any leftover on the pipe itself, she'll even pick up a bit to sniff and feel if it is close enough to regular sugar.

She's not crazy enough to taste it, at least. Tina follows the trail to see just what footage she can get from further into the pipe, and assuming that doing so doesn't kill her? She'll double back to rejoin the others and share the results of her detour, making sure to gather up some of that precious-ish sugar in a glove for research or distribution later.
Yuuki Kuran The scent of ash had blinded Yuuki to the truth for the long descent, coating the walls of the smokestack. A flash of pain - and the joking conversation afterwards - hides it, but the smell was empty and thin to start with. With her friends - her beloved bodyguard, her chainsmoking advisor, and the others of the party - so close, and with her senses idle, it was easy to let go of a distant surface-level of the scent.

But the pile of corpses, and the liquid pooling underneath them, is fit to cause Yuuki to gasp, clapping both hands over her mouth and nose. Her eyes squeeze shut, but one lambent red eye cracks open as if a child peeking out.

"Is... is the sugar actually..." She wonders, having never tasted it. Her fingers tremble a bit as she goes for the blood, and then re-routes, to taste the ash lingering along the wall near the fire. She wants to know, now.

"This whole place is..." She doesn't finish the word, but 'awful' is what her lips sign.
Starbound Flotilla     George, for his part, is looking tense, like he knows enough about this situation to know it's bad, but not enough about it to know a solution. "I think... I think we're looking at a Third Option. Fifth, actually, but who's counting? You're seeing how the sausage gets made. This... I never thought this was gonna be going this far. How high does this go? There some half-burnt motherfucker in charge of this? Did the /Guardian/ start this?" George isn't being very clear, but then, who around here /is/ very clear? He's at least not being aggressively interrogating, it's half to himself and half a query to the Elsen.

    The corpses, he looks at uneasily, wincing. He's never felt stressed about corpses before, but the unique circumstances of the situation put him ill at ease. "Alright, E." He mutters to the Elsen. "Gimmie the lowdown, what's the most important here?"
Zero Kiryu The smell of blood attracts Zero's attention downwards almost immediately. It's an abnormal quality in these places. It's only recently that he would describe the blood of creatures in this place as having gained any sort of graspable, clear texture. It's still dull, uninspired in a way, but not quite empty in the manner that the first Elsen he sampled of was like. Or at least that's what he took away from things not that long ago.

It didn't matter much. Nothing in this place seemed like it was altogether 'safe', and considering the way they act and the parallels that Yuuki herself has drawn to how things work here, he imagines that these Elsen might actually be altogether toxic.

He meanders around until he locates the entrance to the basement used by the pair who descended already, simultaneous with Yuuki.

He does not taste anything.

"More horrible than usual." He finishes Yuuki's thought.

"If it did," Zero asides to George, "we'll have more cause than usual to do away with niceties."

Since others are asking questions, Zero instead turns his mind's eye on Elsen to see how he's reacting mentally to everything going on-- and his general mental state. His default assumption is 'not good', so he immediately starts exuding soporifics again to reduce the chance of all the 'excitement' reducing in a summary transformation.
Priscilla     Standing alone in a cramped, dark room, on an industrial factory floor sticky with smeared blood, helmet on his head, shovel in head, gaunt face cast in deep shadow by the flickering furnace light, the Elsen turns slowly to the pile of his dead fellows, then turns back to the overwhelming question being thrust in his face, staring a thousand miles into the far distance for several long moments of silence.

    He reaches into his starched white shirt pocket. He pulls out a wad of paper, slowly and gingerly unfolding it, crumpled and creased as it is with age and disuse. The rustling paper sounds echo tremendously in the dark and hot little metal room, smelling of copper and sulfur. When he finishes unrolling the pages, he turns and presents the crinkled images to the group, displaying a series of grainy black and white diagrams fit for an old-timey projector or outdated library book, illustrating all sorts of pumps and pipes and cranks and pistons, labeled in french, as if cut out of five different non-fiction magazines.

    It's exactly the same sort of diagram the foremen of Zone 1 each had, somehow meant to illustrate the workings of the Smoke Mines of Damien, the Metal Farmsteads of Pentel, the Plastic Administration of Sachihata, and the Meat Fountains of Alma. He holds it aloft, turning it towards Edison's electrical lights, and says:

    "Um . . . You're here in the Sugar Ovens of Vesper, the northern part of Zone 3. Here, we burn the corpses of people who have died, and, thanks to an ingenious sewer system, transform the vapour into sugar. The tubes which traverse the factory walls direct it to the Treatment Rooms, where it is washed and purified from the remaining ashes. Then, the sugar is distributed to all employees as a reward for the work they do every day."

    "It's a secret element . . . the fifth element . . . the most important element . . ."

    "Because without sugar, people could no longer bear reality, and they would go mad."

    The ashes piling up in the smokestack don't taste quite like sugar. They don't glitter and gleam in the same way as the refined treasure in the vault. Where they should taste like dry and burnt flakes of carbon, however, they taste . . . sweet. Sickly and chemical, but bizarrely sweet. The pipe Tina just crawled into no doubt leads to those sewers, though the better description, from what she can see, would be more like 'water processing'. "It runs so fast . . . in the walls . . ." the muttering Elsen up above chants, the only 'we' to which the furnace worker could be speaking of, if he is even aware of his existence. "Put the sugar . . . in the tube . . . Su . . . Sugar in . . . Sugar in the pipes in the walls . . ."

    The lone foreman doesn't seem to even comprehend the question about 'how long'. He zones out after expending the barest effort trying to think about it. He barely blinks at August asking how the people died. "I don't . . . Accidents maybe . . . They bring them here when they're dead . . . Are you . . . you bringing me sugar?" he asks instead. "No." immediately replies the Batter, not brooking any allowance for deception. "Who is responsible for this?" he insists instead.

    ". . . The director is responsible." the Elsen finally answers, slowly wadding up his papers again. "He . . . He's in Area 4."
Priscilla     As far as Zero can tell, the Elsen is just barely lucid. There's certainly much, much less sugar in his system than anyone else they've met here. He's haggard. Worn thin. Frayed. Kept in this small room with such a menial task, he could probably last like this for quite a while before finally losing it and becoming Burnt. He seems to have some vague idea that the worker before him was thrown into the oven, and he'll be next if he doesn't keep working.

    There's something very familiar to him though. Where the blood, to both vampires, smells an unhealthy and noxious kind of recursively sickly sweet, as sugar is fed into Elsens who are turned into sugar, to the Elsen himself, it's a faint mirror of the same kind of maddeningly tempting, addictive scent that real blood is to a vampire. He detects the faint compulsion to try eating some of the ash himself, or maybe chew on a body, to see if it's sweet, but some frayed moral compulsion to not do that still remaining. For now.
Thomas Alva Edison Edison has nothing more to say about this.  This is disgusting, ones who rail against modernity might say this is just another reason why it is wrong.  In reality, this wasn't the kind of place he would fight for. In fact, he would fight against it with everything he had.  If he could be sick to his stomach, he would be sick right now.  

The director?  Was it the person who ran this zone?  Or was it someone else?  The appeared to not be in this zone either, which means are they beyond their reach?  Or do they simply have to wait them out?  A sharp breath comes in from Thomas before he looks towards Strange.  

"I may have felt bad about the first, but not this one."
August Kohler Well, he's just a worker. Okay. August sighs, and then asks one last question, as he prepares to find an exit. "How do we get to Area 4?"

Once he knows, he'll look for an exit, or ask the Elsen where if there isn't a clear one. They need to get ready to head there and kill the Guardian. This won't stand, even if the Elsen are so odd.
Starbound Flotilla     George taps. He paces. He's already smoking again. "So, Sugar was the fifth. I never got told. On account of there was never supposed to /be/ any mass production on number five, y'know?" He scratches at his beard as if it's made of bugs. "Something's wrong. This is off-rails. Hell, even if this goes this far off-rails, the Captain assigned to the Guardian is supposed to keep the Queen updated and keep the Guardian focused. And I mean, if they get /really/ bad, worse than Japhet."

    He paces more. "I dunno what they're doing, but it's past the duties the Flotilla's got. Hell, worse, I dunno what the Guardian is doing. We were already off-rails with the Batter, but now this too. Christ." He drops the cigarette and stamps it out. Went through that /fast/. "We need to get this stopped before the spectres get worse, but it's the Burnt we'll need to worry about even more. Gears are grinding bad and we were already running out of time before, this is just more of worse."
Yuuki Kuran It's not a high-tier taste for the sanguine, the incredible willpower of a lord, the sunny disposition of a princess, or the Intense Normalcy that Yuuki Kuran has that makes her able to resist rolling around in the stuff.

It's the chemical taste, certainly, but repulsive on every level. And still, she's drawn to it.

Burying her face in Zero's arm for a moment and half-sobbing, half-gasping, she clutches at the outside of his jacket like a totem or trophy, before finally peeling herself away, clearly woozy, both eyes shut. "If there's only four zones... why are there five elements? George, what happens if we run out of time? If we..."

Yuuki shudders, her heaving sigh wavering and staccato. Her breath on the return is shallow, measured, as slow as possible. "... Waste our opportunities. What do we do, George?"

"Please."
Zero Kiryu "The prior foreman was thrown in the oven. This one is barely coherent." Zero says, of what he was able to discover. There were other things but, he thinks, not as important as that. He weighs what they saw on the way here, and the behavior of the other Elsen in this Zone, especially when exposed to the notion that their sugar might be threatened.

He's about to meander out of Elsen's earshot when Yuuki buries her face against his arm. Zero looks down at her, remaining motionless, and /pretty clearly/ uncertain as to exactly how he should respond in this specific situation.

After a moment he settles on wrapping an arm around her shoulders, remaining near at hand and available without really getting inconveniently entangled for the situation. She may have withdrawn already, but he has the sense that what's going on in her head isn't quite that shallow.

It doesn't hurt to show support.
Starbound Flotilla     "I dunno, Yuu'. I'm pretty sure we can keep this from cascading out of control, though. Or... buy a bit of time." George rubs his mouth awkwardly. "If we purify this thing fast, we might be able to hard-reset enough stuff to keep the center of things stable for a couple more hours, but these spook'ems are riled up real bad with all this sugar in the air. Genius to seal it off from 'em with pipes, but it couldn't last forever."

    He gestures out. "If we can stop this from keepin' on the way it's keepin' on, and do it before too long passes, we'll be able to push through this, I think. If we run outta time... Well, it'll be tougher to get past the last bit with the Queen and get to the worst business at the end. We'll just have to go for it."
Doctor Strange      Strange shares a meaningful glance with August, Edison, and Tina upon the Elsen's statement that sugar allows people to bear reality. His eyes briefly flick towards Yuuki and Zero. He responds to Edison first. "Remember what we're here to do," he says cryptically.

     Next, he addresses George. "As long as I'm here, we have time," says the Sorcerer Supreme plainly. "Let's focus on finding the director for now. Yuuki Kuran... Zero Kiryu. When we're finished with the Director, I'd like to have words with you. As I said... we have time."
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki considers for long moments, her nose buried in Zero's coat. George lays things bare, and Stephen Strange is... cryptic.

The consideration paid to her by the sorcerer is given a slight cant of the head. "Stephen, you've got more than time around your neck. You are Sorcerer Supreme. Could you and Thomas, here, with the pipes, remove or change the sugar? To flour, or sand, or anything? To..."

"... Well, I would appreciate it. With your powers combined, you could do it."