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Lilian Rook     In any Earth with an capital city named any permutation of London, one would reasonably expect there to be Warpgates aplenty leading straight to it. Given the way they cluster around centers of travel and relative importance, it'd typically be easier than even flying. For whatever reason, that doesn't seem to be the case here --not just that there are Warpgates and they're off limits, but actually none that end anywhere near it geographically. It may have to do with the fact that, out of anything that could be considered one, it's being referenced as an 'Exclusion Zone'.

    So this entails rallying at a staging post. As Lilian had explained in slightly rushed, last minute terms, the venture into said exclusion zone is a recent sort of annual joint exercise, with the veteran and advanced trainee elements of two different armed organizations: the Immunes, of which Lilian is part, formed specifically to handle the worst of the time when that which is contained within the exclusion zone ran wild over the Earth, and the GDF, which, as it turns out, is a more recent baby, developed over the past decade and a half as a sort of 'advanced mundane' military front between pretty much every still-relevant nation, as a globalized replacement for the various armies that'd completely fallen to pieces decades ago, equipped and trained to fight outside threats rather than each other --or so is the idea.

    It's also, as people are told, not just a 'real combat experience' exercise in a relatively stable, decently well known post-Onslaught area. Each of the major task groups are given an objective corresponding to something some 'commission' wants studied or retrieved from the old city, apparently as the biggest annual excuse to launch research expeditions into the convoluted alien mess it's since become. Meeting up with the task force apparently short on actual veterans, you're quickly made to understand that the most concrete idea you actually have to go on is 'an energy source' nobody could identify, picked up as a grainy blob on satellite imaging in the past few months. It's not comprehensibly helpful.

    From there there's nothing much left to do but roll on out into the English countryside, with a decidedly anaemic convoy of two sixteen wheeled armoured vehicles, two smaller eight wheelers, a quartet of main battle tanks, a scout/extraction helicopter somewhere high up, and a support gunship somewhere *really* high up. It feels either mildly ridiculous, or quaintly WWII-esque, depending on one's point of view, to be kicking up dust on old dirt roads surrounded by green in an outfit like that, surrounded mostly by quietly nervous grown men in high tech body armour.

    At least, it stays that way for about ten minutes. After that, the green rapidly terminates, and then never appears again. The leg of the journey that could be considered 'English countryside' is little better than a fakeout. A laughable ruse. Soon the green vegetation is replaced with polarized extremes of violet and red, standing out against fields of black, as if your eyes were only attuned outside the visible spectrum and catching only the barest edges of ultraviolet and infrared. The wheels are sliding over glossy obsidian and grinding stones like mottled bone white shells embedded in the seafloor.

    The sky darkens with concentric rings of seemingly permanent clouds, stationary around the former capital in the distance, suffused with a sort of thin red haze that gradually reaches the ground as well, impeding visibility. Flakes of some unknown, glittering white substance drift perpetually down from above, falling in extreme slow motion, and disintegrating when they touch the ground. Any time someone pops the hatch to double check the sensor scope with their eyes as ordered, strange thrumming, ominous clicking, or weird alien whoops and hollers drift in.
Lilian Rook     Slowing the convoy to a halt at a row of university-owned crop research farmsteads (going off the sign anyways) by a road which finally develops asphalt and paint (when it isn't covered in growths of bloodred roots and jingling metallic 'fruit'), you're allowed to disembark into an atmosphere thick with a smell that is synthesia to licking a battery.

    For something called an exclusion zone, at least the mostly-recognizable city doesn't look like a husk ravaged by nuclear war or reactor failure. A rambling swamp of flats and staggered apartments, with the gravel lawns and overly optimistic saplings placed in them endemic to new construction put up to create a cheap housing bubble, lies ahead. Much further to the east, it begins to terminate into some sort of luxury tour route along the famous river (which, from aerial inspection, runs just as fast, but pitch black, and reflects weird iridescent rainbow splits of light cast on it), past which the first bridge is barely visible. Further to the west, a rather large university campus eventually breaks down into a mess of major highways.

    You can make out what they're meant to be, at least. Even if the place isn't a bunch of crumbling rubble and rusted rebar, patchwork portions of it have been rapidly overgrown by nature that doesn't belong, or converted into abstract blights of hissing crystal, mystery oil, or dusty bone. Much of the construction has just recently started to degrade with time, and the fact all (all) of the windows have broken and doors have been left open (or smashed down). The few electric cars left in the streets are junk.

    The inevitable reconnaissance from the air gives the picture that the considerable battle damage a place like this must have accrued is divided up into roughly eleven columns, from the edges of the city all heading in towards its center. In any of those paths, the terrain is pretty much completely obliterated, and still bombed beyond recognition a mile to either side. They stop roughly short of Buckingham and the Big Ben tower, the blocks around which are miraculously pseudo-untouched, albeit they're also the center of the gigantic inverse funnel of clouds, gaping overhead.

    You're not far off one of the lanes of massive destruction that follows the river, apparently one task force assigned to each lane. Your target is deep into the inner city, but you've no particular way to lock on to it, left going solely off coordinates. Theoretically, it's somewhere in Westminster. You're explicitly instructed to go no further than St. James park, center-ward from there.
Shigure     Shigure and Kuma, probably the most outlandish in the responders; seeing as they look like young women barely out of their teens, join the convoy and mount up on one of the heavier transports. Their rigging and gear is locked in a 'safe' position, and their eyes scan forward after the briefing, adding their own sight to the convoy. Kuma also launches her scout plane, the little 'RC Model' size craft lifting up to scout ahead of the group.

    "Kuma, maintain scout patrol for as long as possible. I will maintain air watch in case anything gets past you." says Shigure, the blue-eyed young woman's voice is stoic, and lacking much in the way of emotion. Once the convoy stops and the troops debark, the pair link up and start to take point, once a route is determined.

    Kuma looks concerned as her scout relays back the devastation, and the anomalies with the terrain, relaying that to those nearby before the craft returns and lands nearby, being scooped up by the cruiser on the way past, using a little cable winch so she doesn't have to stop.
Reiji Arisu Reiji wasn't exactly sure what he was expecting, but 'blasted wasteland devoid of all sane natural order' certainly was not at the top of his list.

You know, it's funny. Reiji is used to /Wales/ being the wretched hive of supernatural horror in the British Isles. London was always far too... foggy, soggy and overall too stubborn to make an adequate home to the sort of paranormal activity any worse than an occasional Dracula incursion or the appearance of a particularly affectionate poltergeist.

But no. Instead, they are treated to a cavalcade of alien flora, blood-red plants that grow from obsidian soil, metallic fruits that jangle discordantly in the breeze. What little bits of proper nature do exist here are of little succor to Reiji's senses, but he at least appreciates that humanity's tenacity remains undaunted even here.

While the terrain is unfamiliar, eerie and frankly hurts his brain if he stares too long at it, the overall thrust of the operation is something Reiji Arisu is used to. Get in with a bunch of ground pounders, grab what they need to get, and then get the hell out before anyone gets eaten by something beyond humanity's capacity to understand.

It honestly reminds him of the old training exercises into the heart of Shinjuku, honestly.

...Though whether there are more or less spatial anomalies, he's yet to determine.

The exorcist slides his way out of one of the transports and quietly secures a protective mask around his face. It might not do much more than make the air slightly more palatable to his nose, but it's far better than huffing the cloud of battery acid that London's atmosphere seems to have turned into, "I'll watch the left flank. Someone a little more familiar with the area should probably take the lead. Let's do this quick and clean."

Otherwise they might get eaten.

Possibly by a grue.

Reiji glances at the two shipgirls accompanying them as well. Hopefully their spiritual nature doesn't leave them at risk to whatever corruption has seeped into the land here.

"So," he says to a nearby soldier, "Is this your first time in one of these things? I've can count the number of times I've seen anything quite like it on one hand, myself."
Staren     Staren decides not even to chance being alive inside power armor for this one -- Go robot, all the way. And since they're replacing over a hundred people, Staren shows up with a couple squads of constructs which don't fit in the transports. Oh. He collects some of their weapons and stuffs them into his bag as backups, at least.

    The countryside reminds Staren of Yuli Sin's work, but is clearly different. He does try looking at the black 'flora' in infrared and ultraviolet, but doesn't know what to do with that information besides take pictures.

    On the way, Staren also passes out AR goggles and ectos, or links everyone with similar equipment the access codes into his tacnet. The sattelite data is included, with a waypoint set at the coordinates given. And of course, Staren updates the map on arrival by sending up drones.

    He takes the right flank as they proceed ahead, and asks a nearby soldier what the deal is with the weird plants. "Did antegents that have since been defeated leave them behind, or is the source of this stuff still unknown?"
S6     Exclusion Zone has a similar ring to it as Quarantine Zone. A concept familiar to the android S6. Her boxy POD floats up over her shoulder as she looks down the corridor of destruction that this team had been placed in. Her eyes are concealed by an opaque black visor, and thus her stare is likewise concealed. The POD pings, distracting her, and she glances towards it.

    -SURVEY MODE. DYNAMIC SCANNING ACTIVE.-

    She hops down from the wreckage she had been standing on, an overturned and blasted out vehicle, and promptly takes the lead into the exclusion zone. The two swords she carries slide out of their scabbards, twirling once and assuming a position immediately behind her, floating, their crossguards surrounded by rings of golden runes.

    "I will take point. I am easier to repair; and ultimately expendable."

    Staren's map already occupies a portion of her HUD, augmented by Kuma's scout plane and the findings from her own POD's survey. S6 uses this to chart her course, though she does come to a stop to observe one of the crystal formations while her POD performs a deeper scan to try and identify it.
Lilian Rook     The second Reiji has his boots on the ground, he can feel that between him getting in the transport and out of it, the flow of energy in the land has somehow found a way to go in the opposite direction. Rather than any sense of leylines crossing over each other into the typically fairly magically potent nexus of most Londons, it feels like all of them are channeling it inwards into the city center, slowly circling it like a drain hole. The scout planes have picked up plenty of places where it looks like people have died before, even en mass in the streets, but a complete lack of bodies. Given the timeframe, they'd just be skeletons either way, but there aren't even bones.

    The GDF troopers line up about thirty men in body armour and visored helmets, with a full sixth of them being snipers, and an even more unusual sixth armed with heavy explosives. Another ten men lumber out of the back of the second transport, clad head to toe in extremely heavy duty powered exoskeletons, so that the whole unit can tote around multiple extra autocannons and missiles as 'infantry'. A few more specialists with powerful radio packs, scanners, medical equipment, and what looks like sampling gear show up in the middle. Both mega transports halt outside the city limits and raise recessed racks of surface to surface missiles, apparently going to double as artillery support. Finally, a pair of ten meter tall 'exoskeletons' (read, borderline mecha) are rolled out of the ramp as well, taking a vanguard and rear guard position along with the tanks to form wedges.

    Training exercise. Yeah.

    The soldier Reiji bothers looks relieved for an excuse to talk. "Is for most of us. Usually the captains get picked based on who's done the most tours around here." he says, thumbjerking towards another man only differentiated by his red helmet. "Last year was only a five percent casualty rate, so they say that they have the whole system down and not to be worried. Still, kinda hard not to feel nervous in a place like this, right? I wasn't old enough to walk when the last war business stopped."

    The soldier Staren bothers is more wary and taciturn, and probably a good five years older. "Little of column A, little of column B. Good ol'e London held out until year twenty-five and then got attacked by eleven different Titan-classes all at the same time one day. Miracle they salvaged as much as they did, but there's plenty of weird shit still left here. The ghosties like to pay for it when they can swing the favour. Triple so if its their little clade that left it behind back in the day. Most of this was probably done right after, but no doubt plenty more moved in since. See the little patches? This is as comfy as it gets for those sons of bitches. Maybe they like being reminded of eating people."

    To S6's POD, each patch of weird crystal seems to be made of a similar substance, involving perfectly mundane silicon, oxygen, iron, and trace elements, but arranged in a lattice that actually isn't physically possible given any knowledge of this hot new thing known as valence electrons. It crackles where touched, and releases a lot of heat where the fragile surface breaks. Stepping on it would cook flesh instantly. A dark, blurry shape the size of a cat scurried out from underneath some when the POD scans it, moving through it like lemming tunnels under snow.
Shigure     The two shipgirls glance back at Reiji when he glances their way, but don't say anything to him just yet. Instead, they remain on duty, faces set seriously as they stand in the vanguard... and look ridiculously out of place amongst the tanks and pseudo-mecha. Despite probably sporting as much, if not a bit more raw firepower as their larger mechanical companions.
Staren     Staren spent nearly a year as an active member of the Lazlo Defense Force before transferring to the Union. He understands full well that when you're a mecha pilot in a defense force you /take every damn opportunity you can/ to actually go out in the thing./ Given that giant monster attacks are fairly rare (perhaps less so here,) in peacetime 'training exercises' are the only chance mecha pilots will /get/.

    He nods at the soldier's explanation. "I've never seen my London. Explorers say England is now full of fairies and stuff, and there's some guy modeling himself after King Arthur ruling from New Camelot with a bunch of knights. ...Are you from around here? I'm from... Lazlo is a city that grew out of the ruins of old Toronto. It's one of the techno-wizardry capitals of the world, so... actually probably the nicest place to live on the planet since it accept magic, technology, and people of all species. I'm lucky, I know."
S6     Scan results file down S6's HUD, and she tucks it into a small corner window. If this is indeed a survey, all that data will be needed. Though the behavior the crystals exhibit when handled do give her pause. Mundane analysis is turning up ordinary elements, even if they're arranged strangely. So this must be... "Pod."

    -COMMENCING MAGICAL ANALYSIS.-

    The floating device extends a new antenna from its top, pausing to examine the magical properties.

    A shadow moves. S6's eyes dart towards it. Her twin swords sweep forward into readied positions. The POD ascends slightly, clicking on a mundane flashlight to identify the shadow charging at it.

    Just because you're surrounded by a magically twisted hellscape is no reason to assume everything that dashes out of hiding is a monster. And S6 will only strike if this cat-sized shadow is not, in fact, just a cat.
Reiji Arisu Everything here is wrong.

The things 'living' on the blasted hellscape are one thing, but the very flow of the world's energy has been subverted here. It feels almost like standing next to a storm drain in the middle of a flood. The leylines have all been aligned in a singular direction, but-- that doesn't make sense. What flows in must flow out. So then where is all this energy /going?/ Is something still at the heart of this place, feeding on it like some kind of planetary tick?

Reiji's lips pull into a thin, pensive frown.

"Five percent is pretty good when it comes to things like this," Reiji says with a shrug. The fact is that if they're coming away with exchange rates like that, someone in charge must be doing something right. And yet, complacency often comes just before defeat and a hop, skip and a jump from death. "It'd be better if the number was lower, though. I'm sort of new around here, though. Mind if I ask if you know what happened to the huge monsters that tore through this place?"

He can't imagine they just... /disappeared./ Likely their remains were carted off, but are the distorted leylines a result of the creatures stomping their way to the heart of what used to be London, or is it the fault of whatever it is they're pursuing today...?

"Any chance people are looking into reversing the damage here? This is all pretty grim."
Lilian Rook     Staren's new 'friend' answers "Would bloody prefer fairies to all this. Last of those were kicked out probably two hundred years ago. I dunno. Depends on which of the magical types you trust. Couldn't be any worse I think." Once Staren says 'I'm lucky, I know.', he adds "I didn't ask." S6's 'friend' turns out to not be a cat. It is, however, apparently harmless, or else wise enough to not bother attacking a huge armed convoy. Maybe some sort of native prey species?

    Reiju's actual buddy answers him "Anywhere and everywhere. Most people alive remember growing up in these places, and would love to have them back. Heck, I'm from Sussex, or so I hear. Loads of people are all behind the big push to start retaking the planet. Problem is, just because the ghoulies out there stopped throwing themselves at the walls or inventing tricky ways to sneak past, doesn't mean they've gone anywhere. There's still probably as many of them as us. It's just that they can't, or don't, or won't, replace their numbers. That's the big thing our guys figured out near the end of the whole mess that lead to us scraping it out. Us humans reproduce and rebuild and come back better and stronger, so in terms of attrition, we'll eventually burn them all out, until generations later they'll be just a memory. Point is though, for the time being, trying to run heavy over them might just piss the whole horde off."

    Also, it turns out there already is a tacnet. A fairly substantial one. An amalgamate radar of some kind is already tracking multiple red blips in the area, sized vaguely appropriately, and projected onto visors as little 'quest marker' icons in the corners of one's view, as well as the direction and distance to each squad commander. The ammo reserves of the support units are kept on too, as well as real time information on the temperature and windage, radiation, and suspiciously, very finely kept reminders as to what rate of acceleration gravity is, and the fact it goes down. Hazardous areas are marked red, most of the time. The lines along which the soldiers are pointing their weapons are visible as fake laser sights.

    The standard route forward has to unfortunately wind around the Thames. The plan calls for not crossing it at all, which adds kilometers onto the trip. Rather obnoxiously, the first district sign you pass, covered in creeping black foliage, is 'Gravesend', where the bottom two feet of every single building, sign, car and fixture is burned black, for some reason. This includes the rusted hulk of a busted up Challenger 2 tank, covered in what look like teeth marks, giving some frame of reference to when this all happened.

    Things are tensely 'eventful' along the way, but nothing catastrophic occurs for many hours.

    Twenty minutes in, Kuma feels something clutch around her ankle, and will look back to find about twenty feet of horrendous, multi-legged, iridescent worm-thing trailing out of a manhole she'd just passed with its four scissor-like jaws clamped on her, which tries to drag her down into the sewers.

    Reiji is called to a storefront by the immediate impression of a very well-defined ghost, though the second he passes by it, the shadows inside quite literally snatch out like the hunting tentacles of a squid and attempt to crush the life out of him, despite being entirely intangible.

    At one point, another Staren shows up at the rear, walking in line with the powered exoskeletons, and it takes about twenty seconds for someone to realize what just happened before Staren 2 blitzes for Staren 1, desperately attempting to make physical contact for some unknown but very bad reason.

    S6 finds herself suddenly sinking up to the knees in perfectly ordinary pavement, slowly noclipping into the ground with the feeling of dozens of hands pulling at her ankles, and physical evidence of her legs being chewed on when extricated.
Lilian Rook     The group is stalked for a long ways by loping black quadrupeds with palindromic shapes, black carapaces, and weird folding legs, clicking and howling in weird distorted cadence, until about two dozen of them gather and attempt to overwhelm the convoy with twelve foot folding limb claws and explosive organic 'darts'. Another time, enormous, spined arms descend from the overhang of a leaning skyscraper and start clawing and snatching up bodies to drag away and consume. A building uproots itself, sheds its brick facade, curls into some kind of ball, and attempts to flatten the whole procession front to back under a featureless, borderline indestructible tarnished silver exterior. Some of the red haze around Ebbsfleet starts trying to physically fill throats and lungs and choke people to death.

    You're harassed by less than physical problems too. There's an hour long period where various soldiers keep cross-reporting a woman that only a couple of them at a time ever see, repeating everything she says to the captains, until whatever it was seems to give up and leave. A hacking attempt happens on the POD, but only gets as far as the words I WANT TO EAT before terminating. The convoy stops at a fairly well preserved red, octagonal stop sign, and ends up waiting around for another ten minutes, until someone notices it actually has nine sides, and doesn't actually say stop, at which point the prime fixation becomes why anyone stopped in the first place.

    A full half of these threats and more are fairly well obliterated with overwhelming firepower. Anything that slips past you is either shot to pieces by the huge concentration of heavily armed soldiers, or painted for air strikes from the overpowered gunship at high altitude. The other problems definitely support the fact that Elites needed to be present. It's telling that the soldiers in of themselves are trained to at least use their words and senses and frequent insanity-checklist self-examination for this.

    The checkpoint that roughly delineates the halfway is the old Bluewater Shopping Centre; an artificial island, surrounded by crystal clear, glass still water, between four major highways, with its own spiral of roads. It's a mountain of panoramic, fully glass walls and ceilings in various geometric shapes, merged into austere grey blocks of sheltered building, accessible via scening bridges and walkways, all lit up. All the lights are still on after years and years, giving it a glittering, pristine, postmodern chic vibe. It *is* right across from a huge power station closer to the river. Conversely to everywhere else, none of the windows here are broken.

    This is supposed to be the midway where the task force meets up with the Immunes advance scouts sent along this route, but it seems that said scouts have already encountered something else. You can see a huddle of people dressed in faded consumer clothes against the inside windows, staring out at you tepidly as the convoy rounds the highway. Crates of stamped military supplies have been brought in and piled up around them, then systematically emptied. Many of them are wearing reflective blankets and sipping mugs of coffee in quiet circles, surrounded by empty food cans years old. An elderly man in a christmas jumper nobody ever bought is flashing an also unpurchased camplight through the window at you, quickly recognizable as morse code for an S.O.S.
Shigure     Kuma jerks as she's grabbed, but unfortunately for the worm-thing, it grabbed at her torpedo tubes. The long cigar-like explosives peel away in the jawclamps, and with a dismissive flick of her hair, detonate once the worm monster has them in the draincover, causing a minor shift in the terrain from the compression blast. She also drops a couple of shells on any remaining visible part for good measure before resuming her position in formation.

    "Check. One. Two. Three. Alpha. Bravo. Charlie." Shigure seems to fall into a bit of a daze, focussing inwards for a few moment, then unhitching her cannon backpack and joining in the fussilade against a threat.

    One of Kuma's fairies starts flashing a floodlamp back in standard international light-signs. <"We Are Kuma. State. Designation.">
S6     A small animal, spooked off by a show of force. The POD's defenses warding off an attempted hack-- S6 relays the data obtained from this interaction without hesitation. Further observations are catalogued and relayed. She spends a moment staring at the tank, an alien vehicle to the android, and it's at this point she finds herself sinking into the street.

    S6's swords whirl loose and thrust downward at opposing angles, their blades shining with blue light. These then move in a circular pattern, carving the street around herself free of its surrounding pavement. With both hands, she grabs onto the Odachi's hilt and hauls herself free in an arc-- pavement and all. When fully inverted, the android wrenches her sword free, striking at it with both in rapid-fire slices. By the time S6 has performed the 360 rotation of her maneuver, her legs are free.

    She takes a moment to examine the damage to her clothing and skin. Something sparks occasionally. The POD puts voice to her thoughts.

    -DAMAGE IS NOT CRITICAL.-

    "Mmm," Rising from the inspection, S6 lifts her gaze towards the shopping center and its apparent inhabitants. With all that's been occurring on this trip, she has every reason to wonder if this, too, is some kind of trap. And yet against all logic, the android's gaze shifts to the causeways feeding into the mall, gauging their condition.

    She couldn't do anything about the soldiers up until now. But maybe...
Staren     "So, I'm not suggesting we change route, but just because I'm ignorant of the hazard and it might matter later: Why can't we cross the river?" Staren asks.

    His armor does have rear cameras, plus the drones overhead, giving him a warning as a doppelganger rushes him! He takes to the air with thrusters and energy wings, heedless of sudden acceleration dangers that might hurt an organic and eluding the doppelganger's charge by a split second (hopefully, unless it can fly too...)

    He fires at it with the particle beams and (if that doesn't immediately finish it) a pair of tiny, magic-marker-size missiles that pack something like three times the energy of a 20th-century grenade into shaped-charge warheads like a miniaturized anti-tank missile. Further weapons may follow. "Look out! What is that?!"

    The pack of predators gets missiled when they attack -- Staren asks for assistance with reloading his missile racks from nearby soldiers after. He does his best to sever the spined arms and recover anyone grabbed -- if it's too late for someone but he can revive them he takes appropriate action.

    The Not-A-Stop-Sign makes Staren groan when everyone realizes what happened, and he really wishes Septette were here. He'll have to send her the video record of this place after.

    And then... shopping center! "Were the windows intact last time? Where are the immunes? How do we know these survivors are even real?"

    He'll approach cautiously, sending drones to tap the windows and look for a way inside.
Reiji Arisu "They can't reproduce?" Reiji frowns, running a couple of fingers against the scar on his forehead. "That's... Are there just a /lot/ of them? If you eliminate them all now, will they eventually return?"

These kinds of things don't just... /go away/, do they?

How many times does this make it that Reiji is suddenly glad for all the time that he's spent in Lordran? Not just because he has the perfect weapon to deal with an intangible darkness that seeks to crush the life from his body, but also because he is /way/ too used to dealing with that sort of thing for his own good. The shadows sweep out to smother him-- only to be met by the scything edge of Darkdrift, the immaterial, invisible blade.

These things, limited in number though they may be, clearly know how to lure in their prey. Even so, Reiji Arisu is an experienced exorcist, he can deal with this much.

What he apparently can't deal with is a stop sign. He ends up waiting right alongside all the others, tapping his foot and occasionally checking the time on his phone-- until he realizes that the sign isn't actually a stopsign. It's as if even the streetsigns have wavered and lost their meaning, here in the shattered city of fog...

Fast forward a short while, and having finally negotiated their way through several living buildings, including an ambulatory version of London Bridge, and a handful of what appeared at first glance to be some form of retro new-age hippie before revealing themselves to in fact be horrible beetle swarms with human faces and bad bowl cuts, the party finally makes it to... this... place.

This strangely, abnormally normal glass mall filled with what seem to be people.

People flashing SOS signals through their very normal glass windows.

Reiji's frown deepens. On the one hand, this could be some kind of horrible monster. On the other, there could very well be people in need of help in there. But... Then why wouldn't they just say so...? Are they afraid of letting something out here /in?/

"Kuma," Reiji asks the morse code-ing shipgirl, "Mind if you ask them something on my behalf? I'm wondering if that old man knows a few things. What country we're in, what the name of the river is that runs through the city, who the last prime minister was, and..." Reiji's brow furrows. What would be unlikely for a doppelganger colony to be aware of, but that the local soldiery almost certainly knows by heart...?

Beat.

"Ask them when tea-time is," he says with a solemn nod.
Lilian Rook     Weird duplicate Staren's forcefield jumps up and flickers when actual Staren strikes him with a barrage of particle beam fire and missiles, slowing him just enough to get out of reach. The duplicate Staren goes to fly as well, except instead of the energy wings Staren gets out, actual, physical insect wings unfold from his backpack, and carry him briefly upwards, before he's lit up by assault rifles, anti-materiel rifles, miniguns, rocket launchers, autocannons, missiles, even apparently railguns from the tanks. It ceases to exist real quick.

    The bobbit worm thing lurking in the sewers has its head blown off completely by the torpedo rack, slithers back towards the manhole, then begins rapidly regenerating its head, surging back at Kuma before being further shot to bits, and a smoke grenade thrown down the hole resulting in a 50mm cannon strike from above, collapsing the tunnel. Darkdrift is indeed actually the perfect thing to deal with Reiji's particular problem, apparently immune to all the bullets being shot at it. S6 jamming her swords into the uncanny ground around her feels feedback similar to cutting meat, and then is blasted with an incredibly unpleasant riot of agonized screaming from below, from what sounds like forty different people. Her blades come away drenched in blood, sticky and blue. Pitch black fingers slide down their edges and turn to ash on the ground.

    Shigure flashes her light back, and the people inside the Only Place With Intact Windows turn to start conferring with each other, inaudible across the glassy moat. They gather around what looks to be, to Staren's drones, a shitty little plastic camping book, and he comes back and flashes, phonetically, G.E.R.A.L.D. Interrogated by morse code messages, he incredibly impatiently flashes back E.N.G.L.A.N.D, T.H.A.M.E.S, S.Y.L.V.I.A B.A.R.T.O.N (which a soldier confirms is true), and N.O.W.

    Staren's drones tapping on the windows mostly just get people sullenly looking at them. Given the size of the shopping centre, it's certainly *believable* that a small group people could have lived there for a couple of decades, if they aren't more recent arrivals, and the fact that the windows aren't broken might mean that, for any reason, the Antegent never got in. He can, in fact, pick up low degrees of spatial distortion magic around it, old and fading. The way in is just a push door. The drone flies in and . . .

    Finds the inside exactly the same, sans people. Supply crates are completely empty. Blankets lie crumpled on the floor, old and dusty. Empty cans collect dirt. A flashlight drained of battery lies on the floor, surrounded by equally dead, older replacements. Half the lights as a whole aren't on anymore, even long-lasting eco bulbs having burned out. There are streaks of rusty probably-old-blood dragged up and down the tiled roundabout floors in long trails.

    There are also a couple of huge mangled heaps of meat and broken carapace around the same spot, and two actual humans. They're both immediately identifiable by wearing the same tactical bodysuits as Lilian's newer one. One is a young asian man, roughly twenty, with short hair and anomalous blue eyes and built like a brick outhouse, cleaning off stained knuckles with an old survival blanket. The other is a skinny pale lady with a lot of old blood traced out into an elaborate circle slathered in slavic runes, focused on a set of burning candles and the bones of a dead raven.
Staren     Staren considers this for a moment. Finally he projects on a holoscreen the recording from the drone, showing that inside and outside are out of sync, then words: SORRY. IS THERE ANY INFORMATION THAT CAN HELP YOU? WAIT, MAYBE WE JUST NEED TO TRY ANOTHER DOOR.

    He sends drones out searching for more doors.

    Meanwhile, through the drone already inside he asks, "Hello! What happened here? Have you found any more information regarding... whatever the hell is going on with the people we see through the windows?"
Reiji Arisu "Huh," Reiji scrubs his chin vigorously. "Yeah, okay. That guy's British alright." You can tell because even the Morse Code somehow comes across swarthy and ill-humored. "I think it should be safe to--"

Wait, is that Staren's drone broadcasting a holographic image of the inside of the mall? Reiji turns from the old man to the image back to the old man. "This... Is this some kind of strange temporal anomaly...? But. Hm."

Presuming that Reiji, something of a minor expert in space-mucking geomantic magic, can detect the traces of arcane energy surrounding the building, he'd immediately set about trying to figure out what is actually up with all this. If it /is/ a time pocket and the magic maintaining it is dwindling, then... Well, those people don't have much time.

If not, it might just be some kind of illusory magic.

"I'll be inside in a second," he says to the others. "Just going to take a closer look at this magic quick."
Shigure     Coordinating between the two of them. Kuma and Shigure ask all the questions Reiji suggested, and translate back the answers as they come... Then it's revealed that the building is some kind of temporal trap and those are just ghosts, bygone phantoms. This makes the destroyer frown a little, betraying some of the emotion running deep under her professional exterior.

    The shipgirls remain in formation with the GDF units. They're here to protect the convoy, not go chasing after ghosts, but brown and blue eyes track Reiji as he goes in, brown open wide with curiosity, blue narrowed with deep thought.
S6     S6 shifts, glancing towards the screen Staren produces. Her eyes are covered by that opaque visor, and so her reaction is more subtle than it otherwise would have been-- the only sign being her grip on the hilt of her sword tightening to the point where the material of her gloves creaks. She's already on edge due to all the ambushes and the terrifying experience of freeing herself earlier, this is not sitting well in the least.

    Arisu mentions magic, and S6's attention shifts to him for a moment. She then glances towards her POD, "Scan for any anomalous magical activity in that building."

    -SENSORY MAST EXTENDED.-
    -COMMENCING SCAN.-

    Maybe something of use can come of it. Or maybe it's not magic at all.
Lilian Rook     The fact that the energy still infusing the building can be described as magical at all is a fairly obvious tip off that it was done by humans. Nothing Reiji has encountered this whole way has utilized any kind of mana or spiritual energy. It seems vaguely like a ward, but a hastily constructed and fairly old one, probably accounting for the building being mostly fine --any survivors probably died or attempted to flee before the ward ran out, or else the main, gigantic force that finally wrecked the city had moved on by then. Anything past that is beyond his realm of familiarity.

    As far as S6 can tell, it isn't hooked up to any kind of power supply; someone, possibly a couple of people, cast the spell a while ago, and have since left. She can also pick up the passive magical signature of a man inside, and the active, fairly broad and high key ritual being conducted by the young woman, contemporaneous with the survivor group, despite the fact she can't see both at once from the outside.

    Doors aren't hard to find. It's a shopping center. Additional drones enter through other doors and find the same, dusty, vacant, old interior. Following trails of decades old blood finds dark storefronts that have been smashed in, imploded and crushed, covered top to bottom in petrified webbing, drenched in glistening oil, or unfortunately piled with corpses and turned into some form of gross, meaty nest. He discovers something not dissimilar to the Bone Malus from the one emergency call he went on before, save seemingly made of sinewy heart tissue. Without any people around, it's effectively harmless.

    "Hey, try and be quiet." the first Immune whispers to Staren's drone, glancing over his shoulder at the skinny girl. "Sascha's trying to pinpoint our destination while we have somewhere pretty free of pollution. Don't interrupt." He then gestures to the pulverized heaps sitting a few feet back away from the 'campsite'. "The den in here is pretty old. Mostly Beast class, and most of those moved on when survivors looking for refuge all stopped appearing ages ago. Some of them ate each other. We dealt with that pod of Delusion-class Antegent just before you showed up. I don't know why the outside look isn't gone. We assumed it was to lure rescue teams in, but I don't deal with ghosts or anything."

    Shigure and Kuma enter. Bright lights, clean and waxed floors, and glittering storefronts greet their every echoing step, the PA playing pleasantly bland top 10 music on loop. Half the place seems to be decorated for commercially early Christmas, judging by the glimmering gold and silver stars and tinsel on everything. A lonely cleaning drone wanders around the hall, looking for messes that won't ever be made again. The campsite by the windows has disappeared. The two of them instead hear people chattering around the round counter of a gigantic, 'upscale' Nandos eat-in, where a score of adults are laying out supplies plundered from an outdoors shop, hunting weapons, a piecemeal transistor radio, and a couple more are dragging in orange-stamped emergency crates from outdoors.

    Reiji enters in 'eventually'. His footsteps squish and rasp as he steps through semi-fresh blood, sticky like spilled beer. The lights flicker constantly, under sustained brownout conditions interrupting the power, blasting him with broken fragments of shitty Christmas music at grating, nerve-wrackingly high volume, leaving automatic doors and rotating storefronts irregularly jerking and stop-starting. Low, bent shapes skitter around the blind corner ahead of him. Iridescent oil leaks from a teen clothing shop to his left. He can hear the thumping of some massive, beating organ beyond the elbow bend, and hear slithering through the vent overhead.
Lilian Rook     Outdoors with S6, the GDF troopers set up a comms beacon and begin relaying their position, the all-clear, their progress report, and a double check with the adjacent task forces, set up in the adjacent two of the twelve intact 'hands of the clock' of London. Everything *appears* to be fine. The radio signal from inside still works too, as I.2.O Chu Xiao and I.2.O Sascha Alexeev join the network.
Shigure     For whatever reason, the two shipgirls follow after Reiji a moment or two later. They don't know the reason, but they felt drawn in.

    The time paradox continues... Staren showed an almost contemporary 'dead world' within... the kanmusu see it when it was just about to be overrun, or so it seems. They say nothing to the people, leaning on the potential that they're just a temporal illusion, or some kind of trap.

    They check the bracelet trackers they took from Staren, and radio out. <"It seems this place is full of layers... Kuma and I have arrived at a seemingly much earlier timeframe."> says Shigure, looking around and frowning faintly at the cleaning drone.
Staren     Staren's working hypothesis -- that the glass has some weird temporal anomaly that's sending light between now and the past -- is blown open by the shipgirls' video feed and report. Staren groans in frustration, and sends a few inside-drones to check if Reiji is in the 'Now' or a THIRD timeframe. He starts constructing seperate automaps of the different time period(s), the past one in grainy black-and-white except where it could be seen from outside. (Their data is tagged seperately though, just in case they're in YET ANOTHER time, so he can split it again later)

    "Ugggggggh. This is not good, but maybe you can at least help those people." He hopes the two don't end up trapped in the past, but he doesn't have enough information to come up with a surefire way to prevent it.
Reiji Arisu How old /is/ this ward...? Reiji's brow furrows as his fingertips brush against the blasted earth. That it's been able to function for as long as it seemingly has speaks volumes for the skill of the mage who erected it. But if it was protecting this place, its ability to do so has clearly deteriorated over time. After a few more moments of study, Reiji picks himself up and makes his way toward one of the doors, only to find--

         JinGLe BeLls!! Ji-ANglE belLS!! JInjO alL l0nG dayyyyy~!!          

"Ghh--" Reiji snarls, desperately wishing that his earbuds came with a noise-cancelling mode. "Arisu here. I'm in... Ugh, gods. It's like Christmas threw up and the devil himself set up shop in the aftermath. I'm going in to take a closer look. Kuma, Shigure, be careful. If the images we saw were a result of ghostly activity, then you might not be in a different time but rather perceiving the area as a spirit might. Stay sharp."

/He/ certainly doesn't need the reminder, considering how utterly awful everything here is. But Reiji Arisu is not a man who shirks from danger just because something looks super spooky. Half his official Shinra duties involve hunting what are basically Japanese horror movie monsters, after all.

He heads toward the source of that throb-throb-throb up ahead, but his eyes flicker at the vents and his hand hovers cautiously over the myriad handles of his many weapons...
S6     S6 turns slightly, verifying the status of the convoy. Her gaze shifts back to the building and the people in the windows. No power. Whatever ritual was performed is quite old. And only two people, discounting Reiji, Kuma, and Shigure. Those would be the agents depicted on Staren's feed, then. Turning further, she moves until she's oriented herself behind Staren where she can get a good view of the holoscreens and multiple maps he's producing from the feeds he's receiving.

    The grisly nature of some of those images has her tightening her grip on her weapon again. The POD chimes, and S6 suddenly tears her gaze from the screens. She'll stand there with her back to the catman, for the time being, intently focused on ensuring her breathing isn't erratic.
Lilian Rook     Shigure and Kuma aren't bothered by anything other than the advanced roomba swerving around their feet and hoovering up their dusty footprints behind them. The group at the emptied out fast food bar seem to be discussing the viability of some kind of attempt to locate, reach, and come back from, a pharmacy, given that the one in the shopping center is apparently way too small and poorly stocked with insulin to last much longer.

    Looking back out the gigantic glass walls, the two of them see the city outside is barely much different, still permanently encircled by the reverse, ascending vortex of clouds, though the red haze on the streets is thicker, and the growth of unwholesome flora is far less advanced. Something dark and indistinct is hunched outside, twenty feet tall and sitting patiently on the curb. The people inside seem to have stopped paying it any notice a while ago, though they hazard theories as to whether it'll actually move if they go out. None of them seem to have any clear idea as to why the shopping centre is still safe, or for how long it will be. The rescue was apparently supposed to come months ago.

    Reiji squishes his way through an inch of partially congealed blood, down the long trail made by hundreds of dragged corpses. It seems like there's way too much gore to have been a time period *after* what the Kanmasu are seeing, given there are only twenty some people, yet it doesn't make much sense the other way around. The sound of stretching and contracting meat draws him to a great big elbow bend, where a decorative fountain endlessly circulates the same foul-smelling pinkish water through its isolated pump over and over again, over which a man hung himself from the sprinkler, and was gutted open at some later hour --seemingly from the inside, judging by the shattered ribcage.

    He ends up at a storefront to which most of the thickest blood trails lead to, where an outdoorsman's shop has been packed with the warped and fused remains of an unspeakable number of people, thankfully no longer recognizable as more than a vaguely human-textured interior cave, grotesquely dripping and moist. Black blood vessels beneath a translucent red membrane throb and pulse, channeling through veiny webbing into a ball of slowly growing heart tissue suspended in the middle, reeking of the darkest sort of occult power.

    The vent overhead breaks in, and something wet and slithering crashes out of it, missing him by less than a foot. It makes a horrific symphony of scratching and screeching noises the second it hits the floor, mostly by digging way too many claws into the tiles to try and bring itself upright. It lunges at him, barely visible in the few flickery frames of light he gets to see its rubbery limbs in.

    The locus of gathered magical energy radiating from the ritual point that S6 can sense inside, suddenly disperses, breaking up and washing outward in a wave. About when it does, Shigure, Kuma, and Reiji, can all see 'Sascha' seated at her circle in the exact spot by the 'present' campsite, displaced into their particular vision. The bird bones burst into blue flame and melt at her crossed ankles, and with it, their surroundings melt as well, dissipating into so much fog around them. They're properly in the same building as Staren's drones.
Lilian Rook     Those outside, attempting to communicate with the older survivors they see from the other side of the glass, see the elderly man scribble on a notepad, before the vision jarringly flashes to Kuma's version (where he's back at the counter, loading a shotgun) and then Reiji's (where he is hung over the fountain), then an awful mishmash of the two where he stands gutted with a broken neck on pristine tiles, holding up an open christmas card that he's written 'there are three of them' inside.

    The GDF outside has received the confirmation signal that all other teams have reached their designated points on time, with only one medical evacuation run so far. The pale woman indoors awkwardly rises from her dark little ritual circle, rubbing her temples and pushing her overly long hair out of her eyes. "We missed one." she says to Chu. "Probably went into hiding after you killed the other two. Those people are probably seeing things we aren't. They're not trained for this." The young man cracks his knuckles. "They're fine. Aren't you?" He directs his last words to the two girls and the exorcist, whom he's apparently seen wandering around in the halls this whole time.
Shigure     "Time paradox. Not real... or was once real." Shigure muses to herself, wincing as the disparate timelines start to break down, merge then finally rectify. The two kanmusu nod to Chu. "All stations report green." she says, glancing to Kuma who just nods enthusiastically, though she casts her gaze out to where that large black figure was hunched over in their version of the building. "Three of them, three of what, kuma?" asks the cruisergirl, looking from Chu to Sascha, and back again. "Tracking, kuma? Kuma can do tracking, kuma." she adds, equipping another scout plane on her launch rail, but not actually launching it. That would be a dumb thing to do.
Staren     "Visions? But we're still seing this..." He looks briefly confused and alarmed as the man cycles through. But... if the people are just a vision, how are they able to respond...?

    Staren considers.

    I'M SORRY is displayed on the holoscreen, followed by a playback of what they just saw the old man cycle through. He doesn't freeze it on the mixed vision, but blanks the screen after. THREE OF WHAT?
Reiji Arisu It took some doing-- Reiji has seen a /lot/ of awful shit in his time-- but a shopping mall made of meat kind of takes the cake, even above and beyond some of the nastiest stuff he's seen in Lordran. The exorcist's expression darkens as the pulse-pulse-pulse of dark magic throbs across his senses. The attempt at suicide above the fountain, apparently unsuccessful given the looks of that wound, is the grotesque blood-cherry atop the undulating organic meat-and-evil sundae.

He approaches the storefront. Already, he's made his selection. His blades will do just fine for burning this corruption out, but...!

Something drops out of the vents! A thing with far too many chittering legs, far too many spindly arms, and writhing flesh rife with displaced eyes and mouths and other unspeakable orifices. It lunges at him, but his arms are already in motion. Karin is swung, filling the air with swirling whorls of flame and cinder-- but it's joined in a heartbeat by a new blade entirely. A cloud of freezing air floods outward as Reiji swings the frigid blade Sorin, and--

A wave of magic. Reiji sees the source emerge seemingly from nowhere as spacetime abruptly turns in on itself...!

And suddenly, he's back in... a relatively sane place and time. The exorcist blinks as proper reality reasserts itself. That corpse... it was the old man all along. He makes an uncomfortable sound, then shrugs at the man with the Chinese name. "I've been worse. Reiji Arisu, exorcist. And you?"
S6     -ALERT: RITUAL ENERGY REACHING PEAK LEVELS.-

    Prompted by her POD, S6 turns back towards the building, keeping Staren's screens out of her peripheral vision. She actually starts briefly when the man they'd been communicating with shudders through various versions of himself, letting out the softest of shocked sounds.

    -RITUAL COMPLETE.-

    S6 considers the situation for a moment. She decides to leave Staren to do the mission control thing-- She's a Striker. Standing around isn't her thing. With blue-bloodied swords floating behind her, the android at last steps past the catman and approaches the mall herself.

    -CAUTION: INSTABILITY DETECTED.-

    "If there's something in there that did this, I will help exterminate it."