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Lilian Rook     There are only two things that strongly evidence that you've been 'allowed' in Japan. One is the simple name of the place itself. Never strictly called cities, officially, anymore, the Yamato Urban Center is obviously named after the country from long ago, and at least according to maps (as satellites or GPS are completely useless) it occupies the southwestern half of where Tokyo would be.

    Whatever the old city looks like now will remain a mystery to most; the coordinates of the place itself are blocked out by enormous, gunmetal grey sloped walls, at least a hundred feet high and miles around, broken up by gigantic buttresses every few hundred feet, with exactly one whole gate, and a wall-to-wall dome of some shimmering affect overtop of it, closing it under a sort of glittering broken glass pattern. A warm reception on the credit of a local is one thing in the former UK. Responders here are, in essence, the deniable assets of a neo-feudal lord, not to be seen nor permitted in city limits until they finish the job or die (or, predictably, bail, but there's no controlling for that.)

    The only other sign is famous Mt. Fuji, still briefly viewable from a flat and leveled no-man's land of cleared space around the city walls, a couple of miles across, seemingly meticulously ground flat as if by a sander and only repopulated by weeds, shrubs, and monitoring outposts. As a breath of fresh air, the mountain itself looks the same as on any postcard; a refreshing relief from the strange and inhospitable turns the rest of the world has taken. Sure, if you squint, there are evidences of fire, rockslides, maybe a few score craters as little blemishes on the lower third of the mountainside, but it's an invigorating beacon of successfully preserved natural beauty and cultural heritage.

    That view disappears quickly when heading northwest. Though the most urban, heavily developed and highly populated coastal half of Tokyo is, by some reasonable guess, still partially standing in some fashion behind those walls, the rest is not.

    There are miles and miles of prefecture that are completely abandoned, and the countryside, main highways, and attached satellite communities beyond that. It's smooth going over such a barren airgap between the Urban Center and the old city --it's so smooth you could take it in a family sedan and barely experience a bump-- but once you're inside the dark, corroded, bombed out husks of skyscrapers that millions of other people used to live, the sky itself is barely even visible.
Lilian Rook     In fact, crossing into the faded remains of asphalt roads, forests of bent and perforated road signage, dark or sputtering digital billboards or store signs, and the associated obstacle course of broken glass, concrete debris, and cars and trucks mangled up bumper to bumper, spilling over the sidewalks and into building fronts, the few remaining ribbons of sky take on a slightly unnatural, angry orange hue, like a smog-tinted sunset.

    A small mercy is that the gigantic 'ghost town' doesn't appear to be terraformed or stricken with large numbers of pockets of hazardous physics. Arcades and pachinko parlours flashing demo screens on the last dregs of city grid power, and the occasional sound of a sputtering and dying siren or emergency evacuation announcement are about the only things going on here, besides the constant, groaning creak of failing metal, and the occasional, distant crash of some chunk of compromised building falling to earth. Pigeons, rats, even cockroaches; there's nothing to find here.

    Except, apparently, some rich daimyo's son. With the whole revival of old culture, true to the warrior roots of those sorts of families, he'd apparently signed up for the Immunes training course and passed the entry sets, but in the first live exercise, where junior recruits cut their teeth on the numerous, weaker types of monsters that still obliviously gather close to Urban Centers, he'd disappeared.

    Off the record, he'd also disappeared with a retainer that the family technically shouldn't have sent. Given the old, old, bloodline connections of these families to the ninja clans that used to serve them, near the end of the warring states, though, it stands to reason the personal bodyguard would have, if traditional techniques survived well enough, kept a low profile and not been spotted by the training group.

    The question is, how does one even find two --possibly dead or vanished-- people in this depressing and nerve-wracking old warzone?
Tamamo     Tamamo no Mae has been spending time in Japan. That shouldn't be a strong statement, nor a strange one, but the Yamato Urban Center's environs are as strange a version of Japan as she's yet seen. It's a far cry, if an expected distinction, from the innermost city circle.

    She fits the bill of 'non-military, off the record,' a responder who can let a daimyo save face. If anything, a rescue by her hands would fall under that most unpredictable of clauses, for which no one can be blamed, nor expect prediction--an Act of God, and therefore not an impermissible interference.

    She picks her way quietly through the ruined city, cheerier than the environment should reasonably warrant, eyes darting now and then to a sign coming to life for the barest moment, ears flicking toward a siren that found enough power to blare, keeping safely off the street in her tengu-sized heels and stepping, or leaping, lightly over pieces of wreckage. Every so often, her fingers move, but the motion is hidden by her long sleeves, and her voice is low, calling little attention to the repeated casts of an active detection magic, looking for likewise magical sources.
Tomoe Tomoe checked a map of the region before she arrived and then stashed it away in her inventory. The nature of the region she arrives in leaves her taking a moment to get a feel for the place. It's very much a fortress. Which makes perfect sense to her given state of this world. She will accept the welcome she got she knows how it goes with jobs like this. Seeing Mt. Fuji is a bit of a bright spot seeing that it's endured and likely there were efforts to reclaim it too she would assume. It doesn't last long though as they keep on moving the rest of the place tells a story there's a lot of just abandoned area an echo of how this world used to be.

The ruins of the city is sobering to Tomoe, it's a stark reminder of what could happen to a world that was not ready to deal with.

Her boots crunch an old soda can as she takes a step forward.

"I'll take to the air and do some aerial recon maybe I can see signs of human activity from a higher vantage point."

Her wings flare out as she moves to take off and start to survey the region form on high looking for signs of human activity or even Antigen activity.
Arcadia It is amazing what Humanity will do for its own survival. Walling in a city and reverting to an older culture for stability and familiarity in the face of change and terrible loss is just one example. And of that example, this settlement is a fine example of. Trying to ensure saftey for the remaining population by invoking an older heritage. Preserving a future by revitalizing the past.

Alas, curiousity on what aspects of the historic culture have been reinvented will have to wait, they have a job to be done.

Said mission finding them amongst the dead bones of the city that had thrived here before, beneath a sky that looks well enough like it could still be on fire. So much broken, so much lost... And yet these people pushed on. They could still be saved hopefully, even if their world could not.

The sphinx's tail lashed a few times behind her as she took in the view, equally apalled and facinated by the scene sprawled before them. Finding two missing men, dead or alive, in this mess would be a challenge. Good thing she liked challenges.

Arcadia flicked her wings back open and engage the various magitek thrusters implimented in her armor, using them to rise up and hover farther above the urban wasteland. One hand tapped the side of her headgear to activate her visor, shimmering into form across her face in it's usual emerald shade. Then flickered a few more times as it switched to the infrared vision enchantment. If there is still someone alive in this wreckage that's the most practical means of trying to find it, for now.
Amy Rose Amy Rose was here for the shopping of course! But it becomes clear soon enough that she's wandered into the wrong place. The ruins get a stare, a bit of a long one in fact, "No one told me I'd be walking into a war zone!" No one answers because there probably isn't anyone in earshot who can.

She groans and turns on her heels to go back the way she came, "What a waste of time!" She takes off running and she is FAST. Not as fast as a certain BLUE hedgehog but she's a pink comet in her own right. From above she might be -almost- a pink blur even.
Strawberry Princess      Strawberry is here in her full pastel regalia, all yellow-and-pink and titular fruit, with only the visor over her eyes and the nuclear-powered wand slung over her back to give some impression of severity. She navigates the ruins with the kind of quiet sobriety that she brought to the war memorial; there may be no corpses here, but it doesn't take much of an imagination to realize that the burned-out ruins must be a de facto mausoleum.

     Something about the blasted concrete jungle must prick her nerves, though. Even sticking close to the Elites she recognizes, she instinctively reaches up and unslings the wand from her back, her thumb anxiously twitching near the ignition. Hit it too early and be useless. Hit it too late and be dead.

     Given the environment and their unique interaction, it's probably no wonder that she gravitates towards Arthur Lowell when he shows himself.
Shyra     Shyra has kept saying that she wants to help Lilian out. So here she is, trying to help Lilian out.

    The slight trembling in her stance as she looks out over the decrepifying land might hint at a certain mild level of regret. Regardless, she shows no signs of bolting and running at this point, immediately having attached to Strawberry Princess' back and following her around like the pocket healer she resembles. She isn't going to be letting herself get frightened off by a mere crumbling city... right?

    This place looks like it has seen better times... Shyra muses. But there is so much. I've never seen a city this big. Where would we even go to help the poor lost souls?

    At this point, she looks around at the others, the healer apparently lacking in brilliant ideas at the moment. Maybe I could help provide my flying machine so we can look around more quickly?

    Well, it's not a brilliant idea, but it's something. People seem to like the idea, so Shyra... produces her flying machine. Where did it even come from? She's not saying. The large finned boat pops into existence, floating in the air above them with a rope ladder to ascend up onto the thing. The flying machine is boat-shaped but with a large, unwieldy-looking tower taking up much of the mid-deck. There are finned oars on either side and a propeller on the front. She quickly shimmies up the ladder and pops her purple head over the side to look down over the group and watch to see who comes up to accompany her.

    Perhaps someone might! They'll get taxied around by Shyra, who drives the flying boat around so people can search below. She seems to natually drift to be near Strawberry unless given other directions.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur regards the massive lockdown zone with a critical expression, wrinkling his entire face into a frown. He doesn't like it. Not for some reason of it being done incorrectly, but for the reason of it being personally offensive in an uncool sense.

    The trip over this way is one he takes on an antigravity ride, following the others in a lazily weightless style, and acting as the mobile Fast Travel point for those who care to make use of one of his Gates. He follows the way a balloon might follow, though he plays considerably more DS games as he does. He lacks a defined thing he can effectively use to investigate this though, utterly lacking the necessary foothold. All he can do is find the LAST KNOWN LOCATION and scour for clues with his mundane human eyeballs. He plops down near one of the creaking buildings, frowns, and decides to maybe keep some antigravity magic in reserve in case of disaster. The DS is put away.

    A quick greeting to Strawberry Princess. Even in the deathly quiet here, he manages to quiet-yell his emphasis, greeting her with the standard "YOOOOOOOOOO" and a barrage of coolkid handshakes. "WHAT UP, PRESERVES? Man, I wish I had SEER SHIT right about now, I ain't know fuckin' ANYTHING about MISSING PERSON SEARCHES."
Arthur Lowell     Arthur transitions his coolkid handshake -- it's been ongoing, it hasn't stopped obviously -- into a quick bro-pound that leaves the knuckles pressed together. His body provides the FUSION POWER that strawberries crave in a constant, running charge on the surface of his skin, energy that seems to be eager to be spent. This should give Strawberry Princess what she needs!
Tina Natsumi There's a slight discomfort in Tina's gaze as she wanders through the city, keeping her eyes peeled for the missing parties. Going to Japan wouldn't be particularly noteworthy on its own, but it's not a regular Japan. It's Japan, but emptier!

She just didn't quite expect it to be THIS empty. It's rather unnerving, but the streamer doesn't let it get her down as she stomps along with her usual padded cowboy boots. There's quite a few familiar faces which helps take the edge off, and seeing a few of them already taking to the skies or charging ahead helps keep things lively enough for her to get back into her comfort zone.

Thankfully, she's not streaming today.

"Big crowd tonight. Dang, if I knew y'all were comin' out for this, I coulda taken a break for a night." Laughing lightly, she pointedly ignores those few flashing screens that still function in favor of actually focusing on the task at hand for once. "But who says we gotta find them? Why not have 'em come to us?"

And with a flourish, she draws out her cell phone, snaps a selfie, shouts "Uncle Sam, come on down!", and a robot decked out in red, white, and blue coloration appears behind her. "Kiddo, you're up, too! We got a prize called gettin' the heck outta here!" The Persona's shoulders open, and two spotlgihts shine upwards from them.

They're star-shaped spotlights, of course.
Strawberry Princess      Strawberry takes a whole moment to forget her enforced somberness and gaze at Shyra's suddenly-materialized ship with appreciative wonder. The clammy atmosphere inevitably creeps back over her, of course, but not before she climbs aboard the Healer's Wild Ride. "Thank you. I don't- it's a bad idea, to use my flight if we don't have to."

     That, of course, is where she encounters Arthur! She matches his handshake and greeting barrage as best she's able with her zoomer instincts and weakly brave smile. "Heyyy! I hoped you'd make it. Thanks for coming along to help. They don't get many of these kids, so, you know, it's... I feel like this stuff's important. I might have a solution, but...

<J-IC-Scene> Hoarse, Strawberry Princess says, "Could you- give me the juice, if it's not a problem? I don't want to... you know, rev the thing, just yet."
<J-IC-Scene> Arthur Lowell says, "Oh, THE JUICE? Yeah, homie, I GOTCHU."

     Strawberry places one hand on the godkid's shoulder and lets out a quiet breath. Her eyes shut behind her visor. The wand flickers and blips to life as power runs through the contact point, its usual hard lifespan bypassed by the temporary infusion.

     88:88

     Outwardly, nothing appears to happen. But thousands of invisible fragments of Strawberry's spirit radiate outwards from her, spreading out in every direction at hundreds of miles per hour. Each is an independent set of ethereal eyes and ears, snaking through the ruins, worming into any space that they'll fit. Second by second, Strawberry's awareness flows across the ruined city like a ravenous amoeba, funneling anything of interest back to her...
Amy Rose The distance is closing between Amy and the others now. She doesn't know that anyone else is here but it just so happens that they have arrived near where she entered the sad ghost city. The sensor ability used by Strawberry will have picked up on her presence in the area pretty quickly. Amy certainly isn't immune to radar.. or magic.. or psychic abilities of any kind!

As she runs, Amy looks down at the palm of her hand, and closes it around the purple emerald. It's the one she always has with her for safe keeping.
Lilian Rook     Lilian, as asked, is here, because she'd pulled some strings and signed some forms and got a travel visa here in exchange for a two week on-call period to handle day to day issues. She has, in fact, been here a week, to made good on a request from someone to see the modern Japan. She is the only person here 'officially', as she is the only person whose name is all in order on an activity log (albeit insufferably transcribed with the characters for lily and crow instead of getting with the times and using the English, or at least the katakana) under 'private survey'.

    In essence, she is here on the daimyo's dollar (well, yen) to complete a standard 'search for things of personal importance in a mariner's law zone' contract, and nobody else exists or was ever here. Of course the client *knows* they were, but both of them are expecting no mention. This involves staying on the vanguard to maximize an amount of recorded report footage that doesn't include anyone in-frame. She's even told Tina to turn the stream off ahead of time (and save it for congratulatory after-action).That, and she'd probably recognize bad signs first.


She does, in fact, make a hold signal with her hand from in front, and relays back to Shyra and the other two, "Don't be in the air above the buildings for more than ten minutes at a time. Five minute intervals minimum between flights."

    Not that aerial reconnaissance proves as effective as one would hope. Whatever happened here, it was a long time ago, and hadn't escalated into some nuclear catastrophe. Most of the infrastructure has survived quite a while, being modernized and earthquake/storm proof in nature. A partial transition to solar power takes up lots of upper storey real estate, now covered in layers of dust, and the sheer height of the buildings narrows the view of streets below until one has to be pretty much perfectly in line with one to see all the way forward and back. It'll be meticulous combing, rather than a quick peek.

    Arthur can indeed reference the LKL; this is part of the mission package for any competent contract giver who wants to get any results. It's significantly further into the city, where the urban crawl is a little less jam packed and more prone to boulevards and train lines, but not far enough it'd be extremely risky to cross back to no-man's land in the event of an emergency.
Lilian Rook     Of course, the fliers can get there ahead of time, and find a long abandoned public park, grass gone brown and brittle, covered in potholes and burn marks, chunks missing from the few remaining art fixtures and the wreck of a children's playpark near one edge. There are corpses, but they're both badly degraded and non-human; mostly just bits and pieces of huge limbs, partial exoskeletal skulls, and fibrous organs here and there, with blue-purple blood having soaked into the parched dirt. General lanes of fire and streaks of gore coming from surrounding alleys and piling up into the park indicate a training squad was ambushed from all sides, broke through the side nearest the playset, then conducted a firing retreat down to the main highway overpass a few blocks over, and funneled the antegent into a killzone.

    Judging by the lack of human blood, they were very successful. Tamamo's detection spells find the lingering residue of magic only a couple of days old, largely in types she'd recognize, as a mixture of elemental sorcery, Japanese witchcraft, and the splinters of a temporary barrier or two being the only impressions remaining. Anything else, like enchanted weapons or qi, would have faded long ago by now.

    The use of magic stops at the overpass --an intersection between three other roads as well-- with only a few remaining wards, and then heads southeastward, down the road back towards the Urban Center. It'd be, roughly, the last place the group was roughly all together. There are no *magical* indications someone ended up anywhere else, which means they'd have disappeared on foot, used some mundane technique, or been carried off without bloodshed.

    A bird's eye view confirms only a few large features nearby, being a gigantic multimedia theatre with only *some* of the roof shelled in, a brand new nuclear power plant that must have been built after 2020 given it's Tokyo, and a large aquarium no doubt full of very dead animals.
Lilian Rook     Strawberry Princess covering huge tracts of city at once broadens the search web further. Most of the ordinary streets themselves are basically barren, host to only the relics of mass chaos, which look like they happened several times over different days and weeks, like after the initial rush of people all trying to hit the roads at the same time died down, parts of the huge metropolis were evacuated systematically in grids.

    Only the main junctions, wide open spaces, and places of public transit, like metro lines, appear to have been sites of pitched battles. Not beating around the bush, the remains of a great many JSDF members and their gear and mechanized attaches, easily forty years old now, are common as lingering monuments at transport routes, swamped in seas of brass and gunsmoke residue, and surroudned by small oceans of sticky iridescence and dried, porous, many-jointed bones. All the shelling and bombing is concentrated around these areas in certainly 'danger close' screens. The lines mostly *still work*, which rules out a vanished person sheltering there, or anywhere along a major thoroughfare or train route; they'd have come back to the city already.

    Lastly, there are multiple signs of more recent engagements over past years, where the spent casings are black, the streets have been paper shredded, and buildings have been stoved in by high velocity impacts, but all antegent salvage has been retrieved for study. They form a roughly radial pattern from the city center, over many previous exercises, arriving via, and regrouping at, a large metro hub, which Tamamo can tell is still powered by wards that have been renewed at least this year.

    There are also, her spiritual copies find, a fair few dark shapes lying statue still in alleys or in vacant upper floors, and an odd number of what look like beetles, the size of a small cat, transparent like glass except for their abdoments, which glow with so much yellow-white light that the whole bug glitters like a lightbulb. There are loose dozens of them scattered all over what must be ten by ten blocks, doing little in particular but clinging to walls and lampposts.
Arcadia Don't stay above the roofscape longer than five minutes. Duly noted.

Five minute flight time is still plenty of time for Arcadia, not even at her full acceleration.

The disaster of an urban sprawl is a bigger hinderance. When infrared doesn't turn anything useful up she switchs to ultraviolet, but there's still too much clutter and off-shoot signals from various broken remains of human occupation for her to get a clear sweep of anything. Which naturally draws her to a more open space and eventually the park.

It's well within the five minute limit that the sphinx lowers to the area. She remains hovering just off the ground as usual for her, but even that is enough to split and scatter the bittery dry and dead grass blades. She turns her head towards one of the park, then turns back the other way in a slow, sweeping manner with her visor's enchanted senses. The various remains of weapon/magic fire and battle do little to sway her. The broken statues and derelict playthings are noted, but nothing new to a post-apocalyspe

... It's when her ultraviolet scanner sweeps over the dried alien blood and clearly inhuman remains that she notibly recoils, wings flaring primaries in the same way a normal cat would raise their hackles. She hisses under her breath as she deactivates her magitek scans. "Sweet stars above and stones below." It's the same conclusion she had come to at the museum. Even with her experiences with strange and mutated lifeforms of various turbofauna... the Antigent are something else entirely, completely otherworldly and unfathomable. Just seeing it up personal hammers that point more than the elaborate displays of the memorial museum ever could of.

"Of all the disasters I have witnessed, this world is clearly the most fucked up."
Shyra     Shyra smiles as Strawberry boards the ship, and looks just as happy to see Arthur as well! The irrepressable COOLKID AMBIANCE combined with having friends nearby does seem to do a lot to help keep the extensively depressing and encroaching horror to a minimum.

    Lilian, of course, gets things right on task, and Shyra is informed to keep things on the downlow. It's hard to keep a ship from getting caught on cameras and such, after all. She understands perfectly.

    This does mean Shyra has to concentrate on navigating the thing down the streets, using the buildings as cover as indicated. She even has her tongue sticking out a little as she works to keep from running into buildings or going /too/ low.

    This, of course, means there isn't much to actually give much of an aerial view, but at least it's transportation. Once they get to the proper location, Shyra finds a place to hover for a moment. All right, it looks like we're here! Everyone, let's do our best! Once everyone disembarks, Shyra climbs back down. One moment the ship is there, the next it just... vanishes, as the craft goes to wherever Shyra keeps it when it's not being used.

    When they get a chance to look around, Shyra winces. Ooooh, this looks unpleasant... She observes the obvious. Again, she stick close to the duo of Strawberry and Arthur, keeping an eye out and watching people's backs in case there is some kind of ambush potential. You never know. Arcadia makes an observation, and Shyra looks over, nodding to the speedy sphinx in agreement. Did you find anything useful? She asks. It looks like there was a battle here, but there is no way that anyone involved would still be nearby... right?
Amy Rose Amy Rose feels like she's getting lost at this point. The city keeps going on.. and on.. and on. She finally stops on top of a two story, ruined building, "Where am I?" Piko Piko hammer suddenly appears in her hands, "Might be able to see if I get a look from up there." She gets a running start and twirls her hammer.

It's semi-helicopter effect and she goes up.. up.. up.. around two hundred feet high..

"...it just goes on forever.." She groans again as her momentum fades and she starts to glide back to the ground slowly."
Tomoe Tomoe takes heed of Lilian's warning about flying, this is her world she knows how to operate here better than she does.

"Got it."

Given what she has seen of the Antigens she suspects its likely something to do with how some of them hunt humans. So shifting her plan for how she's going to recon she will keep lower and take keep an eye on her flight time, also her downtime. So it becomes a bit like a game of flying leapfrog. She will go over the streets looking searching until she hits the park.

"What do we have here looks like there were some signs of combat here, it looks like it's all Antigen corpses too."

She notes over the come as she's looking for the signs of the people who did this and she will end up.

"Looks like they pulled out."

She will finish up her break time on the ground before she takes flight again keeping to the same pattern of ten min up, and at least five me down on the ground.

The looming forms of the multimedia theatre, the power plant and the aquarium all are noticed.

She doubts they'd be hiding out in the aquarium its be mostly long-dead animals.

She takes a moment to make up her mind, but when she does? Tomoe will keep leapfrogging her way to the theatre to see if she can find anything of note there. She also keeps on her guard as she's well aware there are still Antigens in the area even if she herself has not seen any yet.

She would reply on the comm to Arcadia.

"It's really taken a beating, I'm going to go check the theater out to see what I can find there."

She also does see the signs of Japans fight it just drives home what she saw in the memorial in the UK.
Tamamo     Tamamo wasn't near Shyra, Strawberry, and Arthur, but she seems fine navigating on foot, and there's some inherent danger involved in getting too high up, after all. "Oh, please do be careful. You might wish to move swiftly to your destination, and disembark once there, rather than to stay aloft."

    Her cheer disappears at around the point they find the first evidence of battle, though the flesh left behind is unlikely to include a single friendly figure, if only at this particular site. She studies the scene in silence, but continues to move forward, now tracking the residual traces of magic that form a clear path.

    Clear, but not to their destination. Those here continued on toward the city, and there's not enough left to say the exact point at which their number reduced by two. She searches, but nothing is of immediate use. "Wherever they have gone, they did so quietly, so that none would notice their exit." She can't even say for sure that they weren't whisked away by magic, if it were days ago, and a particularly stealthy sort, but 'stealthy' doesn't describe the Antegent she's seen so far. Their Otherness has been loud against her senses.

    She hears a mention over the radio, and responds. "A power plant? Ah, you have spotted this from above, no? Are there other sites that come to mind? We do look for a place where, we hope, the living survivors might hide."

    After hearing the response, she gives a troubled look. "A theatre and an aquarium? I would like to see the former, but now I expect there will be little left of even the stage. An aquarium, in the meantime, may hold only seas of rot, at most. Would that we might hope they had let their charges out to sea when the chance stood present."

    For a bit longer, she examines the wards at this forward staging point, currently unmanned, looking for anything out of place. Some sign of tampering, some incompleteness of the protection, or even an inexplicable pattern of maintenance. Should she fine nothing, her next stop is the aquarium.
Amy Rose Amy Rose is also heading in the theater/aquarium direction but doesn't realize it. It's only now that she too has begun to see the violent remains but by the time she gets to that area, everyone else would likely be closer to the theater unless they stopped long enough.

Amy is definitely not used to seeing that kind of gore and stiffles a gag, "What the..??" She is oblivious to the radio chatter at the moment as her radio is safely tucked away and off at the moment.
Strawberry Princess      Strawberry is in a thousand places at once; invisible eidolons flitting across the city, forming a vast composite experience. She is standing inside buildings, atop roofs, walking through alleys.

     ('How far and how many?') "Eiiigh..." ty-seven, exactly. "-fair few." One of her ghosts is measuring a beetle against the length of her forearm. Nine and a half inches. "About chihuaha-sized." An eidolon flits back and forth, tracking the distance. Four seconds' flight away. "Maybe- half a mile out." ('Any other characteristics?') Dozens of eyes scour the area for other irregularities; size upon the lurking dark shapes. Dark things lying in wait. "Some weird shadows, I guess. Not moving."

     Finally, she takes her hand off of Arthur's shoulder and gives him a little hair-scruffle as her reactor dims once more. "Thank you. You've been a big help, you know." She stows her wand, draws her Glock, and hops off of the airship in one motion, landing with bent legs next to Shyra before straightening back up and gesturing in the direction of the Antegent swarm.

     "Think I've got us a lead, maybe. That way, a few minutes' walk. Lilian says to expect glass bugs that might do weird stuff and dark shapes that might jump us. Hope that's not where our folks went, but... you know." She grimaces a little as she looks back over her shoulder, already walking that way. "Want to rule it out, right?"
Arcadia "Only farther confirmation how not of this, or any known world, these entities are," is Arcadia's solemn reply to Shyra. "There are likely sites like this all over the remains of the city," she holds out a paw in a gesture towards the remains and riddled ground. "A testiment to their horror, and Humanity's tenacity to fight on despite it. Or in spite of it. To survive. A most basic yet extremely crucial trait."

Then Strawberry drops in, so to speak, and mentions detecting an active swarm of Antegent. "While we would hope not... it is entirely possible they were searching for similar activity that got them seperated." A pause, considering their supposed target of rescue. "Or an oppritunity to prove themselves."

The sphinx nods, and starts gliding after the princess, already in the process of powering up her magitek combat systems fully. Though it's only evident in a few trace lines racing across her armor from the various glowing crystals imbedded in it, and the faint shimmer of the shield ward. "At the very least, we should be certain the search is not disrupted."
Tina Natsumi Tina's behaving, at least. No streaming today! Yet.

Sadly, when nothing comes out to greet them, Tina adjusts her hat as she turns down one of the lights on Uncle Sam's shoulders. "So much for that idea. Hm... No signs of anythin' comin' this way yet, huh?" She rubs her head lightly while moving along at a brisk pace, squinting at the remains of battle still littering their surroundings in that park and hanging around near Tamamo and Lilian.

When the shadows are brought up, she nudges her Persona into sweeping the remaining spotlight across those dark corners. As it does that, Tina draws a handgun, keeping her weapon trained a good few feet back from where the light shines over. She's ready to fire, but she doesn't look particularly worried considering Strawberry Princess' assessment of their lack of movement.

""Don't peek into the alleys too close. Gonna flu-aaash 'em out in case anything's waitin' to get the jump on us." Chuckling lightly at that barely-a-pun, Tina signals to Uncle Sam vaguely as the Persona starts firing flashbangs into the alleys while the group advances. Tina calls out "LEFT!" or "RIGHT!" ahead of time to warn the crew in advance, still keeping her revolver on hand while moving along.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur cannot see what's going on with Strawberry Princess. "You good, Strawbs?" He asks, squinting. "You're DOIN' SOMETHING but I sure CAN'T SEE WHAT." Probably for the best. The hair-scruffle gets Arthur to softly, indignantly "hell yeah" for a moment. "You get MAXIMUM SHIT DONE with ME." He follows the magic, critically examining each site of battle and wishing he could be a Seer of Time or something.

    Then the trail goes cold, like they vanished. Arthur tenses and scratches his head. "These motherfuckers don't CLEAN UP or KIDNAP, they just KILL, right? Where could they'a..." He trails off. There's other business. Strawberry Princess says she has a Lead, which she refers to in ways that seem just ambiguous enough to sound like something Arthur can pursue! Hopefully there's even /fighting/. He's going to join her in this effort, though he can't get this out of his brain. A high-level ninja and an heir disappear on the first assignment... did the heir get cold feet and bribe the ninja, maybe? This situation is jammed, in his brain, like gears that lock together but refuse to move.
Lilian Rook     Even in the park, thermals aren't super useful. Had the request been a lot sooner, there might be lingering heat residue from footprints or opening doors, but there'd be no way to even know someone was missing mere hours after they didn't report back. What it does illuminate is largely in the form of where power lines are still working, mostly due to those underground being completely fine, and those aboveground worn down enough to have various transformers running at their limit. Roughly as expected, all remaining energy is coming from the nuclear plant, though no doubt from enormous emergency batteries meant to power the city itself for a short while, and not so much a very small fraction of it for fifteen plus years.

    Arriving at the park area, obviously, Lilian herself, currently staying ahead of Tamamo, isn't particularly moved by any sight of it. After all, she'd have gone on numerous live training exercises herself over the last year. Pointing at the adjoining roads, where most of the attack damage has been dealt and the blue oil-slick blood has built up, she traces the path inwards and out to the highway junction, and concludes "Well, he wasn't killed here. No sign anything here was 'exotic' enough to kill without leaving a drop of blood or an intact body'. Driven off from the group, most likely. If he didn't run with the pack when they broke the perimeter over there, he'd have been force to squeeze through some other gap in the charge."

    She barely glances to Arthur, set on looking ahead. "You can't rule out the kind that drag people off. They don't eat, sure, but you've seen at least one that 'repurposes' human bodies, right?" Back ahead again. "Still, even if he was a rookie, he still passed the initial screening and stayed in for four months. He wouldn't have been easily overpowered by something of Beast class, like these all are."

    The ward Tamamo first finds at the intersection is sort of familiar to her, though with obvious modern twists and improvements to make a ward strong enough to physically keep things out available to a journeyman sorcerer. It's a burner circle; talismans have been thrown down in a dome area and left behind to turn away while, it seems, the group would have escaped underground, keeping enemies from using the entrance it had encircled. It's rough work, but nothing is especially wrong with it.

    Moving from there, the one at the staging point, almost equidistant between the three places of interest, is a much larger, more professional affair. Due to the lack of notable terraforming, the leylines here appear intact, if somewhat weak, and it's clearly drawing power from them on a permanent basis, checked up on, if she had to guess, every few months. It would, in fact, physically prevent the group from entering at all, and probably provide considerable protection from firepower, but not from the inside out. There's likely some procedure to entering it, or else some wearable access talisman or another. It won't be useful as an egress route, if theoretically needed.
Lilian Rook     Lilian stops briefly to consult with Strawberry Princess of the swarm she's seen out in the open. The 'glass animal' description is a rare but repeated 'clade' of antegent, with a limited, but still varied, pool of threat vectors. The guess she relays back is that the swarm is likely all one antegent collectively, and either Cipher, Delusion, or Supplicant class; infopowers or psychohazards. A 'be careful' isn't even worth uttering.

    Lilian's low estimation of the antegent skulking nearby, at least, appears to be accurate. Given that this area had *just* been host to a regular sweep, nothing extraordinarily menacing is lurking; if it were, then the pros would have been called in on a search and destroy. Many of Tina's spotlights and flashbangs into dark corners are only responded to with cacophonies of tipped trash cans, crumpled dumpsters, and scored stone, when the targeted creature escapes into the cracks of the city, no doubt still alive due to knowing not to challenge a large, armed group.

    Only a couple are flushed out of their holes; something like a dark fluttering cloth swoops out of an upper parkade, gracefully swirling in the wind around gunfire and trying to settle on Uncle Sam's head, oozing some kind of acid from its silken surface and attempting to strangle slash snap the neck of something it doesn't recognize isn't human. A pair of spindly dark brown things with too-broad shoulders, arms four times as long as their legs, running on knuckles more than toes, with short tails, huge sickle talons, and eyeless heads full of anglerfish fangs, are driven down the street at speed, bounding over wrecked cars in seconds, caving some of them nearly in half in their scramble, but are more easily cut down.

    Tomoe heading towards the theatre finds roughly what she might expect. Some large, heavy object had smashed the ceiling in across three different screening areas, unfortunately resulting in some skeletons pinned under the rubble. There are no signs of combat inside, however, the concession looks to have been repeatedly looted --a small part of it *recently.*

    Tamamo chooses the aquarium, and Lilian follows. Sadly, essentially all of the small or wall tanks are clouded pools of opaque muddy brown, glowing only faintly from their backlights, due to the decomposition that'd fouled the insides. There are no signs of shooting inside, but getting out to the areas closer to the river, there are a few crushed and cloven skeletons wearing the tatters of uniforms and surrounded in reddish rust, belonging to a couple of extremely dedicated staff who'd ignored the evacuation warningslong enough to haul whatever seals, otters, dolphins, maybe even orcas, had been outdoors in a beach rescue truck, for what must have been five or six runs, before being hunted down and slaughtered.

    Also more importantly, several tanks dedicated to containing --by their plaques-- jellyfish, blowfish, lionfish, sea snakes, and other poisonous creatures, have been emptied, recently enough that there are not-quite fully dried damp spots around them.
Amy Rose Amy Rose speeds up once again, the pink blur rushing past all of the destruction.

Amy certainly doesn't want to see anymore bodies. She is blissfully unaware of the antigens, acid, and talon'd monsters lurking about for the moment as she blazes towards the theater/aquarium. Those heading in that direction might even start to hear something cutting through the wind/air resistance really fast.
Lilian Rook     Half a mile away from the park, as Strawberry had located, the others indeed come into view of the several blocks around littered with yellow-white glowing blobs. The creatures appear to have no interest in taking flight, though they do occasionally flutter their wing casings with loud, unnerving, shaking wine glass chittering. There aren't that many to one street, but they're very easily visible from far away, like blots of luminol sprayed across the city facade.

    Furthermore, they don't appear to be immediately hostile. When Arthur and Strawberry approach by foot, the only reaction they get is the aggravated, increased tempo of clacking wings, but when they stop moving, the din dies down after a few seconds. Experimentally, they seem only to respond to loud noises, and perhaps proximity. Walking around, they seem to have settled on a certain amount of territory like snow, inside of which is a series of mostly intact apartment buildings, less damaged the closer they are to the center.

    When Arcadia approaches by air though --even the slightest bit above the ground-- she has a different experience. Glass beetles take off all around her, zipping overhead and side to side, some even coming close enough to make a doppler whine in her ears. They mostly seem to gather in front of her, crawling all over the face of a few buildings dead ahead, hopping and scuttling and moving in little bursts of flight, until they present an image sort of like uncannily reminiscent at watching the stars in a certain section of the sky.

    And the minute they complete doing so, she is hit with an unbelievably intense, stabbing pain behind her eyes. The visor doesn't help; it feels like she'd stared at the sun for an hour straight and only just now blinked. Like red hot thorns had poked through her retinas. Even after looking away, there's an intense feeling of heat and pressure inside her skull where it shouldn't be possible to physiologically feel pain, like her brain is being squished inside a pressure chamber. There's an accompanying wave of nausea, like being on the verge of throwing up, and intense eye watering.
Tamamo     Tamamo confirms nothing at issue with the wards, apart from that the larger defensive position would not make an obvious point to move back toward, without a key. A key that the students may or may not have possessed. Hm. "That would be a question for the local soldiery, I should think, as to whether those who are missing did possess the means of entry, penetrating that warded area some distance ahead. But then, they would not allow the untested to travel far from the city with something so valuable as to harm the city's own defenses, no?"

    She continues on toward the aquarium.

    Arriving, the state is not surprising. Not until she comes closer to the river, and covers a gasp. Some quick steps take her perilously close to the line-of-sight of Lilian's recording, and up to the uniform-clad corpses. It's been decades since it happened, but immediate understanding of what their last moments must have been like, driven by whatever combination of duty and passion, still clouds her eyes. She barely notices the missing tanks of jellyfish while taking the time to pray over the remains, providing her acknowledgment of a noble death, supplicating those spirits that may be listening, down to the land itself, and offering her support for their ascendance through the cycle of rebirth. There's something of a combination of the Shinto and Buddhist traditions visible in her words, but that may just be because that formed the basis of this land's traditions for a thousand years.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur strokes his chin. He really wishes he could grow facial hair to get a cool beard to stroke, but instead he's got this. He avoids making noise, and instead elects to chat via PESTERCHUM. His nature comes through regardless of the fact that he's silent when he slips on his PHONE-SHADES. "These some ANTEGENT? Think these BANDITS fuckin' MADE OFF with YA BOY?" They don't look like the kind that are likely to display the kind of space-warping powers necessary to cleanly remove a human being, though Arthur makes sure to magic-frisk them for warping powers or other magical things regardless.

    Then Arcadia arrives. Arthur's next reaction will depend on hers!
Arcadia Curse her habit of hovering so she can move and take off quickly. Arcadia doesn't even think of it as flight at that point, but apparently the unworldly creatures feel differently.

The group's solemn approach is disrupted by a sudden and shrill caterwaul (pun not intended but fitting) from the sphinx as she's assault via senses other than lots of shooting. She reels back from the swarm on the wall, expression scrunching up in a failed effort of blocking out whatever it was that made her eyes sting mostly because it's already crushing like a singularity of a headache. Her technorganic physiology shouldn't even be able to -feel- sick like that, yet it does, that's how unearthly the power of these monsters is.

It's a good thing she was indeed only hovering just above the ground and not flying overhead, at her capable velocity that would be a disaster for her and the remains of the city to crash into!

An unorthadox attack is still an attack, and Arcadia's aggressive reflexes kick in to counterstrike. She shrieks in pain, but it turns into a brief thunderous roar as a powerful blast of air is whipped up by her arcane abilities, responding more on instinct than any composed spell, aimed at the swarming beetles at source of the hideous aggrivation in a crushing concussive shockwave aimed at scattering the swarm to break up the assault. Or smash the wall down on them. Or something. It's more like a wounded animal lashing out angerly. When that wounded animal has elemental forces to lash out with.
Tina Natsumi "Could've escaped with his bodyguard or whoever, if that's the case." Tina comments on Lilian's observation while looking towards the highway, tapping a finger on her elbow idly. "What're the odds some kinda giant bird Antegent nabbed our guy? Just... Swoop, caw, snag 'em like a hawk on a possum?" She brings up one hand to swoop it downwards for emphasis, but does it somewhat half-heartedly as she visibly avoids staring at any one spot for too long.

There's those things jumping at her and Uncle Sam, after all. The clambering isn't particularly worrisome given the big-ish robot's lack of human bones and token resemblance to human anatomy, but the acid is dangerous enough even with the robot's durability that Tina has to switch gears to actually shoot the thing in the... Cloth?

Cloth. She likely misses it entirely, but the Persona is good enough at reaching upwards that it'll try to just pry the thing off and start pulling it apart. Tina can't realy make out what the approaching things are supposed to be, either. "Are those... Like... Mantis gorilla gators or somethin'?"

Less thinking, more shooting. Once Uncle Sam's head is freed, Tina goes right back to shooting, aiming to take the knuckles and talons out from under the approaching things wherever possible. "Let's see if we can take any of 'em alive. Might be useful for research or somethin', right?"

It's probably for the best that she's getting her blood pumping shooting things instead of actually looking closely at those corpses or anything. That, or she's just really trying to distract herself and not stare. Whatever the case is, she's going to focus on clearing the whole pack out on the way to the aquarium.
Amy Rose Amy Rose catches up to Tamamo, at this point being only yards away. She happens to slow down after passing the area before the aquarium. She is now running at a slower pace and her boots click clack on the ground. The three foot tall pink hedgehog may or may not stand out amidst everything and everyone else.

As she too arrives near the river and the corpses, the sight of it leaves her speechless, and she can only stare wide eyed. In all her time fighting Eggman, she's never seen a massacre like that before.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur can barely keep track of the swarm, since it isn't trying to move in front of /his/ vision. Arcadia suffers badly, but in her pain she doesn't make it clearer /what/ exactly happened. As such, his first instinct is to arm up and get the KING BROOM out of his STRIFE DECK. He brandishes it and intends to begin immediately firing at whatever caused the damage, though he can't tell what it was.

    Does this effect work at different angles? Arthur may well be at risk of it then, despite the length of time he's spent staring directly into cognitively hazardous void and the eight hours daily he spends in close proximity to the songs of noble horrorterrors he just isn't /immune/ or even especially /resistant/ to any of that. Here's hoping that the angle kills the effect... or that someone can interrupt his sight as he opens fire with his heavy broom-rifle, blasting rapid, precise kinetic bolts with the intent to shatter the glass creatures in clusters.

    He stays close to Strawberry Princess though. "POWER UP!" He calls out in his voice now, offering a shoulder for her grip when she gets a chance, just in case she'll need it if it comes time to block something.
Tomoe Tomoe finds much of what she expected as she will make her way into the ruins of the theatre. There is a small pause at the human remains, she hoped it was quick for them and she continues on. She finds no signs of combat here, which is honestly expected what is not expected? Is the concession stand has been looted, well no it would make sense but a small part of it it looks recent. She will pause to take a closer look at what was taken and for other signs of whoever did this. It could be recent enough that their target or someone from their team looted supplies here.

A thought strikes her as she looks for more clues if there still power in some places, maybe the old security cameras might be on and could have recent footage?

She will call in with what she found before she'll go see if there is still power if there is? She'll check for a security office if not she'll depart the Theatre to go try and link up with Tamamo.
Shyra     Shyra has been dutifully following along with Arthur and Strawberry like a good healer. She isn't making a lot of noise, just sweeping along as she looks around for some sign or idea of what to do next. She doesn't seem all that impatient... Almost like she's used to wandering around dangerous places with heavily armed allies for long periods of time to find some obscure thing.

    Still, when the Arcadia issue goes down, Shyra immediately snaps to attention. Oh no! We're under attack! Be careful! Her silver cross-staff is raised, and glowing lights swirl around the Holy Healer as she invokes her trademark abilities. A surge of healing energy washes over Arcadia in a wave of green sparkles, accompanied by a number representing the amount. Hopefully, it will relieve some of the problem. It might be a status effect, however, in which case she'll have to switch tactics next action.
Lilian Rook     "Those ones, I doubt." Lilian replies to Arthur, in her not-quite-expert but still obviously more expert than anyone else right now opinion. The various trash mooks don't really give Tina much grief; she gets the distinct impression they're the type to be skulking around like that as 'scavengers', or essentially ones with little purpose but to menace and pick off ordinary humans. Anything really aggressive would have joined the ambush before.

    Unfortunately, she definitely doesn't have the means to take anything alive. Heedless of pain or dismemberment, even crippled out at the arms, the low level gorrilla-shaped but weasel-proportioned things made of fangs and teeth do their Black Knight-esque best to tear her throat out when coming within arms reach, until summarily executed. Anything so suicidally dedicated to 'killing humans and nothing else' would be its own job by necessity.

    Tomoe surveying the concession finds that the only things taken were the intersection of 'as far away from candy as possible' and 'liable to not go bad after thirty years', which is a narrow choice. Bottled water is the only thing that's disappeared from a long dead cooler too. Surprisingly enough, though, the shitty lobby cameras are mostly fine. A couple have succumbed to age, but she's able to pull the data off the server and put it through her amusphere-expy.

    It's not very exciting. Someone clad in dark, dusty grey and brown clothes, cowled and with runner's wrappings and tape tied around sleeves and shins, arrives quietly, rummages around behind the counter, constantly glancing over their shoulder, slings a number of items into a shoulder bag, exits the door, and then finally makes it interesting by jumping a building across the street and taking off in the direction Arcadia/Strawberry/Arthur are headed.
Lilian Rook     At the apartment block, Arcadia reflexively lets loose on the constellation of glowing bugs. The shockwave shatters several of them immediately, pulverizing them into delicate shards stuck to the side of concrete by puddles of luminol. This kills them outright, and immediately turns out to be really, really bad. With each one that breaks, she sees a bright, searing flash of light inside her eyes, even squeezed shut, and feels an explosion of pain in her head, going off like a series of little bombs since she'd broken several at once.

    It is, in fact, bad enough to bleed from the eyes, ears, and mouth. Those symptoms can be fixed by Shyra, but whatever's going on, the pattern somehow has some kind of cognitive hook in Arcadia. Arthur would be accidentally making it worse for about two seconds until the problem becomes obvious. Glowing bugs from several blocks down flock to him. As he strafes around, they chase constantly, trying to form a different, specific configuration in front of him, keeping on all sides to make it impossible to simply look away.

    He *definitely* gets the impression 'it's like stars'. Ones that vaguely feel like he's seen before, specifically.
Lilian Rook     When Tamamo reacts to the sight of the old remains, Lilian turns and reaches out to grab her, getting halfway through saying "Hey we really shouldn't st-" before freezing up. A strained look crosses her face, fingers faltering halfway to Tamamo's shoulder. After a second, she slowly lowers her hand, of all things, suddenly not having the heart to pull her away for praying for three dead men and two dead women. Two of them look like they were teenagers, and two halves of a grown man suggest he threw himself over them.

    Despite the tragic and violent manner of death, Tamamo at least feels that there aren't any especially strong grudges or resentments left over. An intense sense of sadness imprinted on the stones, the plaques, the glass, and tacky carpet, but no regrets. A vague, spiritual presence that lingers around when she focuses to pray, but not quite a fully formed ghost, and one that dissipates throughout her ritual.

    Hearing boot click-clacking in the halls from a metaphorical mile away, Lilian hits the chip at her collar to check her FoF indicators, then unholsters the sidearm at the magnetic hardpoint on her hip, aiming it preemptively at the exit door to the exhibition pools and the defunct rescue truck. Since a person that isn't supposed to be here is suddenly arriving, and she doesn't sense any magic that'd indicate it's the daimyo's wayward son, the second Amy approaches the door, she fires. Since she doesn't know that the stranger is necessarily an enemy, she intentionally misses, blowing out the glass door inwards and putting a smoking, cherry red pothole in the concrete wall ahead of Amy before she even sees her, as a warning shot (albeit, two feet higher than Amy is tall). The clink of black metal hitting the ground rolls off into the distance.

    "Stop. Identify." she calls out, though vexed --almost bored-- rather than threatening and intense. She doesn't expect anyone seriously threatening would wander out here solo, for various local reasons. "And are you the one who's been scavenging anything with a vemon sac here? What are you even concocting? Suicide pills? You know those poisons don't work on antegent biology, right?"
Tomoe Tomoe makes note of what was taken, judging from what was taken? It looks like stuff that would at best be still consumable and water. Much to her surprise, she finds there's still an intact camera and it doesn't take long for her to use her amusphere-expy. With the data reviewed in a pop-up window, she will make note of just where the figure was going. Okay, then that's the way she should be doing. She will get out of the ruin. Then start doing her leapfrog flying again to make for the location where Arcadia/Strawberry/Arthur are heading as well. Hopefully, she can make it there in time to lend them a hand somehow.
Arcadia It's the going directly for the mind and overwhelming the senses that gets Arcadia. It's a method of assault that, despite dealing with both technical and magical threats, she has never had to contend with. It's not even tripping her defensive wards because it's not an external attack.

The jolt of healing from Shyra helps physically, but it doesn't do anything against the exosensory assault. Which goes off with a renewed frevor of Exploding Head Syndrome as several of the beetles are shattered. Fortunately that's not literally an exploding head. Just feeling LIKE one, but for Arcadia, that and the sensory overlord is more than enough. She gags as she cluches her stomach, her body not knowing how to deal with this nauseating overlord because it's not a sensation it's suppose to be able to feel (getting sick and disoriented at multiple times Mach speed would be disasterous, as previously stated). The sphinx gasps and snarls, dropping to her knees... and heaves a few times before wretching on the pavement.

... Well, she's mostly cat. Probably not a surprise that she vomits something not unlike a large, putrid hairball.
Lilian Rook     Extremely concerningly, at the point Arcadia gives into the urge to be sick, her spit and bile are flecked with glowing streaks of that same yellow-white luminol substance either contained inside the 'beetles' or splattered on the buildings.
Amy Rose Amy Rose freezes and blinks. Yep she's been shot at before.. many many times. But she was NOT expecting anyone else to be here. THe bodies are suddenly forgotten as Lilian fires at her, "Whaaaaa?! Poison? Suicide pills?! What are you even talking about?! I was just trying to find the strip malls! Clearly I've taken a wrong turn somewhere and I have no idea how I got here!"

Amy looks up at the other two females, "I"m Amy! Amy Rose! I'm not a looter! I'm a tourist!"
Tamamo     Tamamo completes the words and motions, as much art as ritual, though not for the benefit of any onlooker. There was no great danger of vengeful dead, and these were only a few of the countless number who lost their lives that year. To her, still, it was necessary.

    She does, after that, eventually spot Amy Rose, but as she had already spotted Arcadia at an earlier point, her immediate assumption would be that this is a multiversal responder of ordinary appearance, and one who may pass without mention. That assumption doesn't actually get made, being interrupted by gunfire

    After a few steps back over to Lilian's side, and a tilt of her head, she finally notices some details of the drained aquarium tanks. "Amy Rose, is it?" Amy Amy Rose, possibly. "That is a most unlikely explanation, no? One would need enter through those great walls to find the shopping areas of this 'Urban Center.' Only those seeking such monsters as roam this place, the seekers of the seekers, and some itinerant spirits would be found outside, as we are." She turns, then approaches the former jellyfish housings, searching for something. But if this was the work of shinobi, it's little surprise that she can't find traces of magic. Her radio picks something up, and she looks about, eventually focusing on the direction Tomoe pointed out, lining up the buildings against the directions.

    To Amy, she says, "If you seek markets, you would be best served to be anywhere but here. I wish you safe travels." She doesn't actually say anything aloud about the possibility that Amy is making up stories. It wouldn't be polite.

    To Lilian, "Shall we join those others? There is the suggestion of violence."
Tina Natsumi That suicidal dedication isn't lost on Tina. As the first few keep charging despite their injuries, she's forced to start taking kill shots, and eventually just shifts right into double-tapping and headshots between herself and her chunkier, faster-gunning Persona. "Sure are a lot of these buggers... How the heck are there so many if they ain't got a survival instinct?!"

It certainly gives her some perspective into why things are as screwy as they are in this world. Despite being sturdy enough between herself and her robotic psyche ghost, though, Tina has to resort to switching the Persona to shotgun duty for all the creatures getting in close. She's looking emotionally shaken by the time the last of the creatures coming for her gets finished off, and she's still keeping her eyes peeled as she hurries to catch up with the group.

Of course, that means having to see all those bodies and having to forge ahead while explicitly not looking at the bodies, inadvertently making her think even harder about the bodies. The only thing that gets her attention off the bodies is the soudn of a gunshot from up ahead, and Tina hurries over to see...

Lilian interrogating a pink thing calling herself a tourist. "... Huh." She looks over at Tamamo to gauge her reaction to Amy first, then shrugs once before turning back to the hedgehod.

"Just stick close, lil lady. Ain't gonna be good on the conscience if you end up like..." Her dumb grin and cowgirl facade falters briefly as she's reminded of the dead again, then nods once at the talk of violence. "Much as I ahte to admit it, that /is/ one of my specialties." She forces a laugh a bit too hard, then goes into a brisk jog to regroup with Arcadia, Arthur, Shyra, and Strawberry Princess.

Once there, she first tries to solve the problem with copious amounts of bullets. When that inevitably leads to painful inside-head flashing, though, she switches gears to trying to slow them down with lights of her own. Namely, rapidly flashing and excessively bright strobe lighting courtesy of Incle Sam's shoulder-mounted lights!
Arthur Lowell     Arthur stops firing, and focuses on dealing with the situation. It's taken him a moment, but recognizing that this is trying to Create Patterns means he should approach it the way Arthur Lowell approaches everything: Disruption. Something about the pattern of stars hurt Arcadia, and killiuung the bugs made it worse. What if he does something else? Instead, he begins mustering a huge amount of stellar energy, shaping it, crafting it, and ejecting it into the environment. Looking at Arcadia, he starts to recognize this is more dire than it seemed at first. "Shyra! You got the amps to check her insides with your heal-power?! Figure her shit!" Arthur is less commanding and more hopeful. He's never commanding, though.

    His shaping goes off. Small stars blast through the area, bouncing off of skyscrapers and attempting to disrupt the pattern. Meanwhile, Arthur, on some level aware of the cognitohazardous effect, starts to try to devise a star-based counter-pattern. Where are these stars? Where does he remember them from? If he can think of somewhere in the history of stars or the entire Void surrounding the multiverse where this pattern of stars can be seen, can he find an opposite? The other side of the superplanet, perhaps? A re-arrangement? Arthur doesn't know memetic kill agents, but he DOES know space, and this is distinctly space-based, which falls exactly under the umbrella of his CLASSPECT-endowed SKILLS.
Lilian Rook     As Tamamo expects, there are no signs of any magic being used on the tanks. The locking pins have been neatly undone, the pumps cut, and the water drained, with no signs of discarded cadavers. In some places, neat holes have been sliced into the glass, as it would be more quiet than working with the rusted or damaged manual lids. Though the animals were obviously pretty definitely dead a while ago, it would be *possible*, if unlikely, the contents of the tanks --the sheer chemical mixture automatically cycled in over and over again with no maintenance-- would have preserved them. It reeks not dissimilarly to formaldehyde and chlorine. Likely failing that though, there might have been some mystic worth in the bones of notoriously poisonous Japanese sea creatures.

    Meanwhile, a three foot tall pink hedgehog isn't really what Lilian is expecting to see. Amy is, in fact, so far out there, and looking like something that'd be a mascot from one of Strawberry's mahouganda films (she'd looked into them) that the Immune can't even find the steam to remain strict and suspicious. Her wrist slackens enough to cause the split barrel of the angular firearm to drift downward dispassionately.

    "Trying to find strip malls? Here? If you're not a looter then what do you even expect to do with them? Are you blind? Obviously there's nobody here, right? How *did* you even get here? Japan is an island. And why would a 'tourist' come to a place that's on the black list of Multiverse travel zones? You-- Actually, you know what, I don't have time for this." Lilian sighs in exasperation, putting the gun back against the hardpoint on her hip. "There's nothing important to steal, and you're not on my escort list, so I don't really have to protect you. Whatever you're doing here, it doesn't concern me." If she were going for a good cop bad cop routine with Tamamo, it'd be a pretty good one, though the difference in attitudes is purely incidental.

    "Yes, I'd really prefer we do that." she says to the fox woman, quickly checking her map display as Tomoe sends the coordinates through from the theatre, marking the glowing map projection with a pulsing dot, not too far away.

    "I *hope* they haven't run into anything they're not prepared to deal with but . . . well, if you'll allow me." she says, making an incredibly vague and kind of meaningless gesture in Tamamo's direction, before insisting on picking her up in a bridal carry, for the very specific reason of vanishing and reappearing at the battle site.
Amy Rose Amy Rose blinks at Lilian and Tamamo, "An island?! Well I definitely didn't swim here if that's what you mean. Japan? Is that what this place is called? Before I found this bucket of rust I was running through Spagonia and then everything went white! I thought I ran into one of those giant rings that transport you... to..."

She just... stops... "Does any of this even make sense to you? This multiverse things -still- gives me a headache! Black listed? This place? I'm not even surprised at this point. I am guessing that I can't just jump into another ring.. or something to get back to Mobius can I?"
Strawberry Princess      As soon as the glittering glass-beetles take flight, Strawberry- momentarily forgetting Arthur's offer- draws her pistol and starts to track one of the closer insects. Despite the smooth aim that comes with well-worn habit, her tracking locks up immediately once they start displaying that awful pattern: beyond even the agonizing pattern element, something freezes her with uncertainty for a critical moment.

     I am 13, staring into the many eyes of a shining thing. I can't move.
     I am 17, lying back under the stars. My legs are numb. I can't move.
     I am 23, watching Antegent do something... familiar. I can't--

     Shouting. People are shouting. There's something going on, and it's... important. The world comes back into focus. Seemingly on no external cue, Strawberry 'unsticks', whirls around to turn her back on the beetles, and then empties all fifteen shots of her pistol backwards into them without looking. An improbable number of them connect.
Lilian Rook     Arthur's astrological knowledge, after wracking his brains, unexpectedly does provide exactly useful. The pattern he got to see from a slight angle is, as far as he recognizes, what the constellation Bouenkyouu --Telescopium-- would have been several thousand years ago, down to such exact proportional accuracy as to be totally invisible viewed with the naked eye.

    Tina flashing her big bright blinding spotlights on it, quite mundanely, does ruin the effect. The light catches and diffuses in the giant bugs' glass carapaces and splits into a rainbow of eye-searing colours. It doesn't *do* anything to them, but whatever hazardous information is conveyed in that pattern can't be relayed in that state any more than a sign can communicate anything when plastered with mud.

    Trying star-based patterns of his own, Arthur goes through a couple of permutations until, as tried, 'what would be on the direct opposite side of the planet' causes several of the luminol stars to snuff out like candle flames, and drop the glass beetles to the ground, either crawling away or stuck rolling on their backs, harmless for the time being.

    It doesn't really help Arcadia much, save that Strawberry princess putting bullets in the 'deactivated' antegent both kills them outright and *doesn't* inflict any more horrendous psychic brain trauma on her.
Strawberry Princess      Finally, after all the scouting and fighting and problem-solving, Strawberry flicks the switch on her wand as she looks up at the relatively-intact buildings once guarded by the beetles. She spares one glance over at Shyra and Arcadia- "You'll be fine, right? I'll be right back, I promise!"- and then wings of white sparkles erupt from her back, beat once, and launch her into the air with g-forces just barely tolerable to the human body.

     04:54

     She makes a cursory show of positioning herself directly above the cluster of most pristine buildings, as if to watch for anyone fleeing out one of the exits. Of course, that isn't really what she's doing. That invisible fractal of expanded awareness cascades off of her again, flitting through doorways and open windows to permeate the buildings and scrape them room-by-room for the two fugitives.
Tamamo     Tamamo is swept off her feet. She will, alas, not be able to deliver any further answer to Amy. Instead, she disappears.

    From certain perspectives, she reappears near a battle. She is still halfway through voicing some sort of protest when Lilian is already ready to set her back down again. Tamamo acts as if she should be ruffled, yet her appearance is as impeccable as any could be while traipsing about a post-apocalyptic city for hours. It's the principle of the matter. But at least it wasn't a fireman's carry--that would be unforgivably undignified.

    She has some words on the star patterns and shares a few words, while withholding others. More to consider at a later date. As Arthur said, not all the pieces of the puzzle are present. Even this curiously suspicious point has several perfectly reasonable explanations.

    Finding the lost pair and rendering what aid they can is more important. Between her healing charms and Shyra's spells, they have a wealth of aid to offer.
Shyra     This is getting messy! Shyra alternate between healing magics and recovery magics, trying to counter the debilitating effects of the Antegent working their way into the minds of the two flying members of the party. But she can't cleanse cognitohazards. At least, not that easily... That's not right... She says as she sees the way Arcadia is vomiting up glowing light. What's happening to them!?

    People continue to gather, Shyra doing her best to offer support as best she is able. Arthur directs her to figure out what's wrong with Arcadia.

But how? She doesn't have any other healing magics. How could she figure out what's wrong with Arcadia?! Panic grips her as she wracks her mind...

But then she remembers something.

She isn't just a Holy Healer. She /can/ look deeper...

With a flick of her hand, her staff vanishes, and she takes a deep breath. She's never had to do this in this kind of a situation...

                        DEV TOOLS > CHARACTER EDITOR                        

    Screens begin to pop up around her, displaying esoteric and arcane information through the medium of a... character editing dialog. She indicates Arcadia, and the information begins filling out. She immediately begins getting an idea of Arcadia's current status, abilities, health, and other attributes in intricate detail...

    But then something happens, and she blinks and gasps. No... How could that be happening? She clenches her teeth, staring at it, the way the data shifts and changes... The way it has periodic, intense deleterious movements as Arcadia's mind and gut surges from the infectious vector. Her hands dance over the different screens, trying to pin it down, but she simply doesn't have the background knowledge needed to prune it from the Sphinx.
Shyra     But Arcadia said do whatever is necessary. So in desperation, she sticks out her tongue in concentration... and begins changing things. I'm sorry... She says, apologizing even as she gets to work.

    It only takes a minute or two, but the effects are... basic.

    Very basic. The good news is Arcadia's mind has stopped attempting to terminate itself.

    The bad news is for a little while, she's also not Arcadia.

                                 <DATA ENTRY>                                

Name: Arcadion
Sphere: Brawler
Personality: A brave and challenging feline warrior from a far away land, Arcadion has come to the Multiverse to take on ever greater challenges, working alongside her allies to defeat the evil forces that have destroyed her hometown. Though never lacking for enthusiasm and chafes alongside her slower friends, she is nevertheless a dependable person who gets things done when it's all on the line.
Goal: Revenge Against The Evil Forces That Destroyed Her Hometown
Likes: Exercise, Cookies, Going Fast
Dislikes: Dogs, Losing, Waiting

                                   <SAVE>                                  
Arthur Lowell     Arthur breathes a heavy sigh of relief. What WAS that geometry? He can tell he didn't interact with hostile geometry so much as some form of geometry-based interface to a much more exotic system. And yet... why did it have a /defuse/ code? That, Arthur worried about deeply. What was that?

    He shakes his head. Strawberry Princess is right, it's time to move. He whips his broom out, yanks the ripcord on the engine, and blasts off. He's summoning up a GATE, queued to extraction. If he can find Strawberry Princess' target once she sights them (he assumes, wrongly, at long-distance) then he can hopefully rush down and offer them a portal out of all this!

    After all, they don't know if there's more of those beetles, and they're /flying/, so there's undoubtedly going to be more trouble very, very soon. That, and they need to get Arcadia to local experts to undo the damage caused to her!
Tomoe Leapfrog flying continues for Tomoe as she will make for the location she' discovered and link up with the main bulk of the party. She's found something to help in locating their target, she now needs to get her winged behind back to the rest of them.

Tomoe keeps an eye out for anything that might ambush her on the way. Rather than sit still Tomoe keeps moving on the ground. She will engage anything that tries to impede her movement, otherwise, she'll keep moving, vaulting and bouning over wreckage, old cars and the like as she goes.

She will arrive during the ground cycle of her movement with the party should there still be any Antigants that she can engage she'll start lobbing spells as needed otherwise she's going to aid in searching for the two they have come to find.

"Sorry I'm late!"
Lilian Rook     Checking out, as best as it can possibly be interpreted for her, Arcadia's fluctuating SPHERE, draining HP each time it flickers back to normal, simply overriding it herself with a competing mental influence seems to . . . do the trick. The pain stops being a fresh hell of constant suffering, at least. Arcadia's metaphorical HP bar remains stable, then refills when Tamamo gets to helping her.

    "Good work. Lowell. Shyra." That's what Lilian says on arrival, taking in the situation instantly. Picking out the shattered bugs Strawberry Princess had left, she zeroes in on the rest of them and begins blowing them away with extremely rapid blasts from her own handgun --fast enough that the blue cross-shaped starbursts make it look automatic, until the remainder of them have finally dropped.

    There's still a large block of tall, prefab, extremely Japanese middle income apartments to search. Strawberry Princess finally does it just about instantly. Able to peek through every single window in minutes, if not seconds, she finds what they're looking for immediately: an occupied room in an upper middle eastward facing wall.

    One person in it notices her spiritual intrusion, however subtle, instantaneously. A figure with a dark dusty cowl and wraps around their wrists and shins to keep sleeves and pants from catching on anything; the same figure Tomoe had caught on the security recording. They glance up instantly, somehow feeling 'being watched' with senses far beyond human acuity, and dropping a nearly empty bottle of water in a heartbeat, grabbing hold of a short blade at their lower back and producing a fistful of burner talismans from a pocket, not unlike the ones Tamamo had found earlier.

    Otherwise, she can only hear the sound of a second person, who appears to be oblivious. Even Arthur can hear it when he gets close. Yelling. Thrashing. Inarticulate, incoherent screaming. Masculine. It's coming from a back room, which hasn't been locked or barricaded. Outside of concession crap on a far table, there is an unfolded paper with weird little spherical pills, a tiny apothecary of ground up animal bones, herbs, and tinctures, and a full sized katana, sheathed and propped up in a corner.
Amy Rose Amy Rose watches the other two females leave, "And thanks for all the help!" She groans and turns around to look back at where she entered this area, "Just have to find the first place I remember seeing on this planet.. dimension.. whatever.." She sprints off in a pink blur away from all the fighting.

Amy will later on find her way back to Mobius in a similar way that she found her way here. But then she's always falling into and out of trouble. Either way it isn't long before the pink hedgehog is shopping again back in one of Star Light Zone's many malls!
Arcadia What did we learn tonight kids? Don't take anything -- ANYTHING -- in this world for granted.
At least Arthur got some useful(??) information out of the ordeal? Maybe? Not like she could really pay attention to what else was going on.

Not when she's hunched over on the ground, barely croaking out a response to Shyra while trying extremely hard to not expunge internal structures for what feels like the umpteenth time while her state of being is essentially eating itself inside-out. Exsistance snuffing psychohazards was most definately not something she had a means of readily defending against.

Fortunately Shyra and Tamamo are there with curative magics, and when that isn't enough, Shyra pushes herself to dig deeper. To cut the corruption off at the point it was threatening at. Not entirely sure how /devtool hax work. Maybe it helps that while she is a living, sentient being Arcadia is technically a created one crafted of both magic and biology, and there's some manner of integeral metaphysical 'code' in there that can be found to use. No one is really in position to try and extrapulate how backends to reality work.

And then it doesn't really matter how it worked, just that it does. Something snaps back into place and stops trying to eat itself into non-existance when Shyra temporarily overrides Arcadia with Arcadion. The sounds of dry heaving stop, but it takes a few moments and another charges of healing magic or two before a final weeze escapes the sphinx. "I very much do -not- want to do that again."

She stretchs out from the hunch, in the way you see cats usually do so, and pushes herself off the ground. Notibly she just stands, her wings collapsing into themselves and their more organic 'sheathed' formation as they fold to her back. Part of that 'Brawler' reclass has her, at least for the moment, prefering to be on the ground.

That doesn't stop her from bounding over, still quite quickly, to give Shyra a bit hug. "Don't know what you did, but thank you."
Strawberry Princess      The ninja's senses may be sharp, but they can't possibly have prepared them for what happens next. Strawberry's invisible 'eyes' cluster around the apartment from every direction, coordinating her motions as if with a perfect three-dimensional map. Odds the ninja would listen to reason are exceedingly high, but not "three-and-a-half minutes" guaranteed.

     A ghostly pink eidolon of a faceless seventeen-year-old girl, with a frilly skirt and wand, materializes in front of the ninja, and a split second later encases them both in an opaque magical bubble with a quiet pop. It won't hold under a dedicated assault. It doesn't need to.

     A beam of searing light follows in the same heartbeat, ever-so-delicately shaving the exterior wall off the backroom and baring it to open air as Strawberry swoops down at gut-dropping speeds. The man inside is probably in some horrific, Antegent-afflicted state; Strawberry doesn't spare him an examination before encasing him in a similar, smaller bubble, and gently lifting him up to hand him off directly to Arthur!
Tomoe Tomoe in's quite sure what Shyra did to Arcadia nor Tamamo but between the two powerful magic users, they seem to have to save Arcadia's mind from eating itself from whatever mental influence was trying to devour her. Mayhaps it's lucky that Tomoe didn't fall prey to whatever sort of Antigants those were. She will head over to Arcadia or is that now Arcadion? Along with Shyra and she says "Well you seem to be okay now we just need to find the ones we came for..."

Strawberry Princess then informs the party there's another in need of Shyra's help. Right after that, she calls for a portal. This has to be serious and she'll get back but if she needs to restrain the subject she's going to do so.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur dives and pops the Gate. It forms and links space between here and a safer zone nearer the Yamato Urban Center. He makes sure it'll reduce the speed they emerge at too, just a bit, because undoubtedly that'll be a bit of a mover. Where Strawberry Princess is too fast, Arthur calls out, at least, "HELPIN' OUT, HOMIE!"

    It is probably super, super unconvincing. He also has no idea what just happened up there. The second rescue, he probably shouldn't bother to shout to. Regardless, he still does. This is the prime advantage, here, of his fast-traveling shenanigans.
Lilian Rook     Lilian, walking past, pats Arcadia on the back while she gets back up. A sort of 'there there' mixed with a 'good job' and a 'tag out'. "I was waiting until one of you ran into something like this." she says. "I assumed it was only a matter of time until we stopped lucking out with purely head to head combat hazards. You survived. Now you've all learned. Good work on so much quick thinking."

    Ninja ambush senses are pretty trope, and frankly to be expected from such a narrow speciality of still-relevant Enlightened discipline, but the proceeding sequence of events is pretty far out. He appears to be watching ghost-Strawberry intently, waiting for any cue from her first, scrutinizing her eidolon with intense closeness to discern any trace of whether she be sorceress or antegent lure. He is not prepared for bubble and laser extraction.

    The back room wall is torched right through. In an old, dusty, lower middle class bedroom, furnishings left where they were, there is a younger, more heavily built man, still wearing a moderately damaged style of Lilian's previous year combat suit, armour pieces having already been taken off and visible wounds already treated. Unfortunately, he also appears to have been tied up, in the excessively intricate and stress-diffusing Japanese way, for his own good, due to the fact that he is caught in agonized convulsions and random incoherent screaming.

    Yet, it instantly becomes apparent that he isn't possessed with blind agony, because when the wall falls down, he instantly looks up to Strawberry. His eyes open up, and they're two blinding bright pits of yellow-white luminol glow. He opens his mouth to walk, and the same unwholesome light spills out of it, as well as globs of what could be spit or blood, but is now all just the same luminous fluid.

    Even while being grabbed up in a bubble, he manages to yell "I SEE IT! I SEE IT! PLEASE GOD EVEN WITH MY EYES CLOSED! I CAN'T LOOK AWAY! CAN'T YOU SEE IT?! IT WAS THERE ALL ALONG! THE WHOLE TIME! IT WAS ALWAYS THERE! GOD PLEASE TELL ME THAT YOU SEE IT TOO!" thrashing wildly as he's grabbed. His bodyguard, trapped in a different bubble, immediately begins striking the inside, having no idea what's going on, but responding without thinking. "Wait! You can't take him back! You don't know what you're doing! If you return him, he'll die! My one and only mission is to see to the young master's safety! I can't allow this!"
Arcadia "Yeeeeah. Head on combat is kinda my thing, so it was a new experience." One she really doesn't want to do again.

Oh, yeah, they've got more probably injured incoming. Arcadion lets go of the hug so Shyra can be free to get to work once Art and SBP get back with whoever they found. They'll just have to wait.

... It's about half a minute before she's rocking back and forth from one foot to the other, tail twitching. "Hope they don't take too long. This place is still giving me bad vibes...."

Waiting was never one of her strong points.
Strawberry Princess      Strawberry pauses, right before Chaos Dunking the embubbled 'young master' into Arthur's gates. Something in the plaintiveness of the retainer's cries instinctively arrests her. The ghostly eidolon in the bubble with the ninja dematerializes, followed an instant later by the bubble itself vanishing- a subtle ordering that achieves the sleight-of-hand of nobody outside getting a chance to glimpse the eidolon for themselves.

     Carefully setting the young master back down, Strawberry dismisses her wings and perches neatly on the edge of the building. Even with the top half of her face covered by a visor, her expression is visibly tense with worry. Arthur's portal, once intended to transport the afflicted man to Shyra, now instead allows the rest of the group to see the scene.

     "You're right. I don't- know, what I'm doing. I'm sorry," Strawberry says, holding her wand inoffensively off to one side. "We want to help him too. Please- tell us what's wrong. Maybe we can save him together."
Lilian Rook     Finishing pummeling the inside of Strawberry's dome, the bodyguard audibly sighs in relief, before pulling back his cowl. He looks a lot older than the Immune recruit. Possibly in his 40s. He clearly hasn't shaved in days. He doesn't screw around either; whether through a long-held propensity for brief and to the point reports, or some amount of operational risk assuming that antegent might converge on their location if they aren't quick, he gets straight to the point without introducing himself or asking who Strawberry Princess --or anyone else for that matter-- is.

    "The young master was deployed here as part of the Arx Zenith year one Gamma training group. He became separated during an ambush, and conducted a fighting retreat back here. I intervened and slew his pursuers. Then he was afflicted by the hotaru --those things-- outside. My task was to ensure he was protected, and I was unprepared to defend him from this manner of attack."

    "His mental preparation wasn't strong enough. He has been like this for the past three days, and his condition has worsened. I cannot force him to eat or drink --he will only survive another two weeks at most. I can only provide physical medical attention and consecrations and pray that he pulls through on his own. If not, I have gathered the necessary materials to end his life through poison as a mercy, and then my own. If you are to return him now, he will either be killed immediately as a contamination hazard, or else his father will have him disposed of and he will be recorded as dying valiantly in battle. Either way, it would be my delivering him into certain death, and an unacceptable failure to serve as we have for generations."

    He does, eventually, gesture to the katana in the corner. "At least, please return this. It belongs to the main family."
Arcadia Arcadia takes a few steps back. She'd just be in the way of the healers and space wizards trying to correct this madness. Her experience was bad enough, this poor guy was far worse off and they would need all the time and space they had to try and save him.

The most she can do is be ready to stop anything that interrupts, so she'll just be in the backdrop of the scene on overwatch until they're ready to head back to the enclosed city. Hopefully successful.
Tomoe Tomoe is going to keep back but is ready to step in to help if Shyra or Arthur need it. She will, however, look to keep watch as she said. Tomoe's keenly aware that there could be other things lurking out there that might attack while Shyra and Arthur are working. She also will cringe at the retainer's words. This is a bad situation and the team's efforts seem to be the only chance for this to end in anything other than tears. Also, the horror of the antigents and how they work is hammer home in a new horrific way.
Strawberry Princess      Strawberry visibly blanches as she takes in the retainer's words. There's, notably, no incredulity- she understands perfectly, exactingly well the reasoning and circumstances under which the young man would be put to death. That doesn't make the pathos of it any more tolerable. "I'm so sorry," she says, her voice croaking slightly as she steps unobtrusively to the side. There's none of the hesitation that'd go with a carefully-planned condolence. It's just wrenching kneejerk.

     "We have healers with us. They'll- we'll see what we can do. But thank you." She turns her head to make it abundantly clear, even with the visor in the way, that she's giving him a Painfully Earnest Look. "Even if it's your job. Even if it's 'what you do'. You've been so, so brave for him. Preserving his life. Arranging a- a, decent death. I think you're strong."

     She doesn't quite close her mouth after saying that, even though she retreats into a corner while the others work. The muscles in her face are competing to make a coherent expression, with none altogether winning out.
Shyra      Shyra is hovering (figuratively) over Arcadia as she suffers the depredations of the mind-melting cognitohazard. The Holy Healer does what she can, effectively groping blindly to try to save her from the Antegent's effects...

    But it works. Arcadia (now Arcadion) stabilizes, and Shyra closes the windows as if she was just touched a hot surface... And suddenly she finds herself being hugged! W... What!? I mean, um...! She flails a bit in the big hug, but quickly calms down, sparing a moment to smile and give Arcadion a hug back. Thank you... I'm glad you're all right. Now let's get going, Arcadion! We're almost done!

    Despite her confidence-boosting attempt on the cat-warrior (Sphinx), she suddenly finds herself being told that she's going to have to do it again. What? Again? R... Really? She doesn't seem like she's all that enthused about the possibility despite having just met with success.

    The man is delivered to her through the gate, and Shyra stares in horror at the sight of what is happening to him. It's just like what was happening to Arcadia... But worse. So much worse. She recoils as those eyes open, as she is shrieked at. The desperation is intense. The horror threatens to encroach on Shyra's mind... But she's needed. She has to do something. She can't let him die. I can't let him go... Not like him! Not again!
Arthur Lowell     Arthur, unfortunately, can do little for this pal and his horrible magic eyes. Despite his deep understanding of esoteric space magic and geometries, only Shyra has a proven solution to actual infection rather than just decoupling or defusal. It's probably imperative that she get that /done/, because Arthur is currently trying to calculate solutions. "Shit! Shit, dude, holy fuck, you got that /bad/ geometry in you! Maybe I can... maybe I can /turn those stars off/ or somethin'? Maybe reverse their atomic shit?" No. No, don't do that. This is Bad Heroism. Do not do the Bad Heroism.

    There's probably a bunch of magic people who depend on those stars.

    "Look, we'll fix this shit! We'll get it /fixed/. We're /heroes/, we fix this shit! Here! Here, Shyra! Lemme give ya a counterpattern. Try to do /somethin'/ with it!" He frantically jams the handle of his broom directly into the ground -- despite it being pavement instead of dirt -- and draws a clear counter-pattern of the opposite-side-of-Earth stellar formations. As if Shyra can somehow use this information.

    Aaaand now he's panicking and summoning up a gate to go fight the magic stars themselves, specifically. It'll take a bit, but hopefully she can solve this before that.
Shyra DEV TOOLS > CHARACTER EDITOR                        

    Again, the data screens flash to life. But while Arcadia was bad, this is worse: The data is a horrible jumbled mass of data, incomplete and clashing as alien information has begun overwriting the data. Shyra sets to work, trying to overwrite it, working quickly, taking as much input as others might have to give as she works. Desperation overrides her natural aversion to this action, the Holy Healer using the skills she wrenched from her own world to try to save someone from another world. Arthur provides some information, and she tries to work that counterpattern into the data somehow, crudely drawing it into the data using lines and slashes and such under the other information. It's not much, but maybe it'll help?

                                 <DATA ENTRY>                                

Name: Marcus
Sphere: Blademaster
Personality: A driven but young artist of his craft, a tragic accident has left Marcus separated from his family and home. He wanders the land, attempting to ply his trade as a mercenary to hone his skills and find a way to make things right. Even in his current state, some habits of his upbringing occasionally surface through his rough and tumble exterior, hinting at his true nature beneath the pose he maintains.
Goal: To redeem himself to his family though success.
Likes: Money, Family, Apples
Dislikes: Stars, Forests, Bugs

                                   <SAVE>                                  
Lilian Rook     Her first time dealing with genuine shinobi --not movie or anime ninja, but someone from an unbroken lineage of a clan thought extinguished by the end of Sengoku, serving the same role for four centuries in the secret world elite-- tells Strawberry everything she needs to know right away. The man understands her. There is not even the slightest release of tension in his face. He does not sigh, he does not smile, he does not cry, he does not even give her a grim laugh. His eyes are those of someone who understands, keenly and intimately, that the value of his life is the value of his work, nameless and unknown. He has no intention of going back if he fails here, whatever soft modern ideals may think.

    But, still, he adopts the tone universally recognizable as an adult telling a half-truth to an earnest kid that they don't want to dissuade. "We all have to be strong. The young master wanted to be strong too. He wanted to leave the walls and see Mount Fuji on his own two feet. I would only he had waited a year or two, until his training at home was complete, instead of becoming starry-eyed at honour and heroism at such an early age. Too young to fully understand the burdens he has yet to grow into, and unsatisfied with the old heritage --the old glories-- of his ancestors. Proud and enamoured with that place."

    "He wanted to be strong like his father, and like his retainer . . . like me."

    Shyra's work is, meanwhile, an absolute mess. Fixing one thing changes two other things, playing a Lights Out game with the bits and pieces inside a badly fragmented young man's mind, working fast or working hard not much helping. It looks like hours and hours of trial and error, slipshod work, at best; but the 'defusal' pattern Arthur has figured out --the exact opposite stellar concept-- when worked into her 'code', even messily, even as the equivalent of crappy ASCII, stabilizes it greatly. Serving as an anchor point where the attributes inside it can't be changed by the blinding, nauseating glow she herself can see through her eyelids, radiating from behind the menu at all times, it allows her to slowly correct until the metaphorical HP and MP bars aren't doing ominous fluctuating scrolls.

    Shortly thereafter, the young man rolls over in her arms and pukes a steady stream of yellow-white glowing liquid --more than should fit in a human stomach-- mingled with blood at the end. Hacking and heaving, he regains some measure of lucidity, both eyes shot red in the way that indicates capillaries inside had popped. Wheezing and panting as if fresh off a hundred mile marathon, he stares at Shyra with the fever of a boy possessed, tripping over himself to speak.

    "Oh thank all the gods . . . thank . . . oh god it's gone . . . but . . . it's too late now . . . oh god it's far too late . . . did you see it? Did you see *them*? We're . . . we hurt her and it's . . . we hurt her and they're never going to forgive us . . . every single one of them . . . they'll never forgive us! They're coming . . . coming soon! They're going to realize we're not dead and then it'll be . . . oh god we're all going to die and it's all our fault! I *saw* it!"

    He's only able to sustain the exertion for that long before finally lapsing into unconsciousness, feverish and sweating, dehydrated, exhausted, and internally bleeding in places that have to be patched up. The nameless ninja retainer comes to the edge of the building and drops down, skipping all of the stairs ten storeys up. He holds out his arms to Shyra in a gesture to pick the young man up, katana strapped to his own back.

    "I take it none of you were here." He says. "I am already so indebted that I could never repay you in this life and the next, but I must ask you one more favour."

    "I wasn't either here either."
Strawberry Princess      "'We all have to be strong,'" Strawberry reiterates quietly, as she looks at the horribly retching young man. She repeats it like it's a bad joke that she's trying to wring a punchline from. "Yeah. I don't think... that anybody, is ever ready. Not the way you'd hope. There's always something you're too young to understand."

     Her words are punctuated by another splatter of luminous puke from the young man.

     "But that doesn't make it right, does it," she continues solemnly. "Doesn't mean- we can't wish they'd be a little wiser. ... I hope his fire doesn't go out. I hope he doesn't stop trying to be like his dad. To be like you. Even if it's... tempered."

     Her wand hits 00:00 as the ninja jumps down the building; all of its control rods bolt in as it goes dark and cold. But she walks to the edge anyway, just to give him a wave goodbye. He doesn't need it. But it's more about the giving than the receiving.
Tomoe Tomoe looks to the ninja for a moment even she gets this is the real deal, not the cultural imprint they left on Japan and the world at large. She looks to the ninja she listens for a moment at his word and she nods.

"Right, we were not here and you never were."

She pauses for a moment thinks.

"I'll purge the old theatre security cameras, it's how we helped find where you were. One was still working somehow."

She notes. She looks to Shyra with no small bit of awe at what she did for this young warrior. Gave someone who otherwise didn't have a chance? A chance to survive. She'll head out when it's appropriate and go to purge the old theatre's cameras. She will then link up with the others and leave.