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Lilian Rook     For all that people like to say about authority and people in power, it's an inarguable fact that repeatedly doing favours for the new feudal lords (same as the old feudal lords) of Japan in a direct and reliable way has strong benefits.

    Though ostensibly an exceedingly isolationist region (again) as a matter of course, the allowance for Elite presence has been lifted a great deal, as it seems that more of the daimyo have taken notice of this currently convenient, and at least moderately trustworthy, unallied resource. Perhaps, in much the same way as they might've taken notice of a newly established shinobi village taking on jobs from all courts with a fast-growing reputation.

    Maybe it's best not to think about how that comparison goes in a few years.

    In this case though, the 'offer' is almost phrased like a demand. After performing a service for the Hojo Clan, met with various levels of approval from three major 'voting blocs', for lack of better word, in the Fuji independent territory, the government oversight channel used to hand these things off to Multiversal institutions is slapped with a large volume of representation from the Oda Clan demanding that someone do something for them as well to prove the Multiverse's commitment to remaining non-partisan and fair. You can safely assume they're probably rivals, or have some bad history, or something.

    In this case, for once, it's something very simple. Very straightforward. No politics involved. No investigations. No clandestine tactics. No secrets to be withheld from the powers that be. There's barely even a non-disclosure clause. It *seems* exactly like that Elites are doing all the time with their spare 'adventure' hours anyways. It is a 'combat training exercise' double booked with a 'territorial patrol' with orders to 'search and seize any objects of interest'. Asking what constitutes an object of interest, you're told quite plainly by a man in a suit that doesn't entirely hide his tattoos 'If you're looking at it and think it's interesting, seize it'.

    You're instructed to arrive at the edge of a broad river which runs down from enormous swathes of forested mountains at one horizon, through green, partially flooded valley lowlands, and all the way up to where the opposite horizon abruptly disappears behind a wall of solid, pale white mist. You're also made aware that (as seems to be the pattern) you are substituting for some intermediate tier of trusted veteran staff in this (or else what'd be the point of having someone else do it?), and the most pressing reminder of this fact is that there is precisely one official-looking person around here at all, and otherwise just three lines of one hundred regular looking Japanese citizens trying their best to remain in the straight ranks they'd been assembled on standby in, looking variously tired, concerned, bored, fretful, out of place and nervous, while all endeavouring to not be the one who says so first.
Lilian Rook     The claim of 'combat exercise' certainly seems valid, given that all of them have been armed and equipped, and look to be physically fit and know where to stand at least. They're all geared up in what'd pass for the heaviest end of tactical gear by modern day standards, where kevlar and ceramic pads and inserts are instead replaced with smooth plates of black metal to bear the golden five-petal flower of the clan, with big, heavy, overbearing-looking rifles, which certainly don't scream 'throwaway conscripts', but the whole force cannot help but look picked off the street and fresh out of six weeks of training at the most, no matter how rigid and brave and professional they try their best to look for the visitors.

    The only person who looks as if they *really* know what they're doing is a lady standing around on the cold and humid field wearing a slimmed down, more advanced, and even more visually redesigned suit that immediately communicates 'general', wearing a pair of swords and a decorated, open-faced helmet. When it comes to her, there isn't even a proper period of greeting and overviewing the procedures and checking the plans. The second she sees you, she calls out "There they are! That means it's time to get moving! Fall out! Come on! Double time! Move if you want to get back before dark! That is if you think you can make it back at all after night falls!" She only gestures you over specifically once the whole block of people is moving, a pair of heavy transports that can't possibly hold more than a tenth of them grinding along behind. When the whole procession is just going dead on towards the impenetrable wall of mist, her first words to you are "Walk and talk. If you have anything to say, just get it out now and don't slow down."

    As for the intended route, all she has to provide is a set of coordinates that are only only useful to reference by plotting movement as you go. That is, any notions of GPS coordinates have been thrown out the window from the start, and the presumption is that there won't be landmarks to reference either, so 'where you are and where you're going' has to come down to tracking heading, speed, and time. The troops *have* little plug-ins for their digital maps to do it automatically, and there are spares available, but the lady in charge seems to be insisting on using a old analogue paper map. It's all probably because the plotted out route goes into the big fuckoff cloud of opaque white fog, then only gradually arcs back around out of it.
Roxas Roxas exists in his usual state of only /kinda/ seeming like he follows along with what's going on. The matter of seizing objects of interest causes him to lean over towards Xion and ask, "Hey... what do you think /isn't/ interesting?"

This is probably a prelude to some serious nonsense.

'Walk and talk!' says the official looking woman who whips the hundred or so soldiers up into action, getting a bit of a disappointed look out of him.

"Kinda Galbadian isn't it?" He asks, mostly rhetorically.

"I don't like that fog, though. That sort of thing usually means monsters." Roxas adds, scratching at the back of his head. That thought seems to prompt him to summon a weapon-- which he has rarely brought to bear here, casually or otherwise. An ornate white key materializes in his left hand, coming to rest against his shoulder as they get going.

All told, he probably looks like the opposite of the professional guys in proper armor with real weapons that an actual human being would consider using.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Take up quest from ODA CLAN

    Arthur Lowell is super, super fair. He's fair in that exact way that someone is fair when they say "I'm not racist, I just hate everyone!" Arthur is super, super, unfair. But so far he doesn't know what part of the partisan structure to be unfairly, shittily biased towards. It's time to improve that situation.

>Arthur: Examine general

    Arthur examines the general, primarily by way of hand-based asserted greeting. He examines her capacity to dap, pound, bump, and other similar maneuvers. By trying to do those.

>==>

    "Lotta LITTLE DUDES, or we hittin' a couple HEAVY ASSHOLES?" He asks about expected composition. "Any MAGIC DUDES up in this, or is my ASPECT-BOOSTIN' just USELESS on this?" They definitely don't have much machinery.

    He sits side-saddle on his broom, drifting alongside the walk-and-talk rather than do much walking. He does double the talking to make up for it.
Xion 'If you're looking at it and think it's interesting, seize it'.
These words are uttered to Xion, a weird girl in a black hoodie, grey shirt, leggings, and shorts. The action boots are, of course, buckled AND laced, because buckles are important and she has to make her belt quota somehow!

Joined at the river by a handful of scrubs in tactical gear, Xion puffs up her chest, channels the Chad Eyepatch energy of Xaldin, and...

Swings around her fist to her chest, jamming her thumb against her collarbone. "Don't worry, you guy - I'm a combat pro!"

This is true, but also, is coming from someone imitating a rough male soldier's voice who looks like a vaguely reedy fourteen year old girl. She's immediately visibly impressed by the Lady Officer, clapping and following along eagerly for the 'walk and talk' portion and keeping up the 'big stupid elbows-out puffed up important soldier walk' far longer than would be considered tasteful or reasonable for a joke bit.
Tamamo     Tamamo no Mae has arrived, though her purpose this time is unclear. Military exercises don't really seem to be 'her thing,' and the decidedly non-military, probably-religious garb she wears give more the impression of an accompanying observer. If the Oda wished for a show of non-partisanship, her visual at least fits this requirement. Whether she'll be useful to them in a more immediate sense remains to be seen.

    She has not gone so far as to bring cookies this time, though there is every possibility that the several thermoses, tied via cord like packed rations, contain hot tea.
Tomoe The work has been going well so far, all things considered and seemed to be very direct and to the point here. This time they would be doing a job for another clan and she could get the basic logic of it. Likely fairness of some sort and the groups almost certainly have something going on from being rivals, bad history or something else. That's not her place to dig for the moment, however. She got the wording of it and since she did want to keep learning more about this alternate Japan. She was willing to comply with it.

With the info on what falls under the class of object of interest laid out. Tomoe does a check to make sure her inventory is clear of anything not related the to mission kit. It seems this mission is simple enough from the sounds of it. It's a training exercise and a territorial patrol? It sounds like salvage and reclaiming land. Form the sound of it or keeping land reclaimed, to her.

It doesn't take too long to reach the location where she was told to meet up.

It doesn't take long for Tomoe to size up troops, oh yeah it's a training run from the look of it and there only seems to be one official person here form the sounds of it. At least from Tomoe's experience with actual military forces on her homeworld? The troops are well geared and are fit. After that, she does sense they do not have much experience. Tomoe flares out her wings as the order to move is given and she'll keep with some of the soldiers and make sure to have her defence buffs ready for the event they end up running into something hostile.

"My basic defence buff spells should be able to work on anyone's but if you have anything to help anyone who might be enlightened that could be useful Arthur."

She's not too far off the ground as she moves but she will be able to provide aerial functions at a moment's notice with her already having her wings armed and primed as they move.
Lilian Rook emit
    Despite the rather snappy start to it, once the group is actually moving, with the very semi-unified tromp of boots behind in three broad waves, and after the general is done no doubt repeating previous instructions amounting to 'keep the person in front of you, to your left, and to your right visible at all times' the air feels slightly relaxed. After mere minutes of walking, the sense of tension diminishes from barely contained anxiety to a kind of ambient nervousness. It's very palpable, that difference between standing still waiting and thinking, and it being 'too late to back out now'. Moving around and taking new orders gets the 'troops' to stop thinking so much. One might wonder if that factors into why you didn't even get a proper greeting.

    Likewise, once you're all walking, she upholds her end of the talking bargain, though the lady --in what is obviously meant to be as much of a homage to ancient armour as can be functionally and tastefully made out of postmodernized gear-- demands that you actually be pretty close. Despite the 'Galbadian' demeanor, once you're all together, she seems relatively enthused about Arthur's 'foreign greeting', in the partially reserved manner of someone taught not to be interested in it at all but who is anyways. She introduces herself as Nobuko.

    "That's the exciting part." she replies to him after. "There's no way of knowing. It's a new campaign every time! Well, more like a skirmish. Or an expedition when nothing happens, which is rarely." She points at a seemingly nonspecific area of fog. "Every year, all the way until we reach Nagoya! That's the goal out on the horizon." she says.

    "It's not about the enemy along the way, though it doesn't hurt to do our part in whittling them down as well. It's about a huge city like that, swallowed up by mists, still there, without a scratch on it. One year soon, that's going to be part of our Urban Center as well; a real city, where millions of people could live, with a bridge of green land unifying the old and new territory, stable and well guarded. What do you think of that instead?" Nobuka aims back at Arthur

    None of the 'troopers' seem the least bit reassured by Xion's attempts. When she keeps the strut up for long enough, there is a real, forlorn mental sigh of 'we're gonna die'. Most of the Multiversal brigade is made up of colourful, irresponsible-looking teenagers, so really it's only Tamamo they pay a lot of attention to, and Lilian of course along with her; that being the whole 'thing' that keeps getting people let into the country. Unfortunately, while they're looking, she can't sneak cookies, so instead she says "In order to do that, you'd have to be terraforming each piece of land you scouted every year. Charting it out, recording it, plotting major points where leylines could be repaired, geographic confluences powerful enough for the necessary stabilizations to take, bringing in supply routes, defenses against the antegent the process always attracts, high level specialists willing to do a lot of hazard time. Are you seriously backing this all yourselves?"

    Nobuko laughs. It's a real, hearty, take-no-shit laugh. "Is that surprising? Do you think you're the only one who knows how to bring people together? Or do you think that vision is an unattractive one? You're right, of course! Normally there would be an entire team of priests and occultic experts along with the engineering and military advisory teams, but because the Lord has a better, time sensitive use for them at the moment, you have me instead! As the second child and first daughter of Lord Oda, I'd be humiliated if I weren't able to get a feel for my own native land! Besides, aren't you all specialists yourselves? I see one knight, a sorcerer of some kind, and of course someone who no doubt knows more about purification than we ever will!"
Lilian Rook     Hitting the fog doesn't take too long. For a moment, it's so completely opaque that you wouldn't be able to see someone outside of arm's length. In fact, putting your hand out ahead of you renders your fingers invisible. It's frigid and damp to the point it feels like walking through a frozen waterfall. Then . . . it doesn't go away, and you don't get past it, but rather your experience of it gradually changes in a way that feels almost exactly like when your eyes adjust to the dark. The white slowly turns black, the impenetrable mist becoming a midnight background on now crystal clear surroundings, as if you were within the interior of some unfathomably vast underground cavern.

    The dirt under your feet turns to sand, silvery and glittering in iridescent colours, swept into strange geometric patterns instead of dunes. Vast swathes of the surroundings are occupied with endless fields of equally geometric, metallic obelisks, some tall and thin and spreading like thickets of bamboo, others more like huge slabs built to be memorials, others studding the ground like traditional gravestones, and even tinier, multi-sided formations sitting at the side of what is *unmistakably* a road of sandstone equivalent, like wayside shrines growing out of the ground. Though the colours and patterns vary, most things appear to be covered in a sheen of glass or metallic dust, and a great deal of them have been broken, snapped, bent, or shattered in a variety of exotic ways, many of which remain frozen mid-destruction, surrounded by hovering shrapnel or held in multiple floating pieces, and many of which look as if they were stitched back together with glittery golden sand-glue.

    As expected, navigation systems are totally borked. Magical positioning is exceedingly unreliable. Compasses stop moving entirely. It's needlessly dead quiet as well, though absolutely nothing echoes. The sandstone road seems to approximate where the river originally was, terminating way too abruptly to be as literal as the river having been somehow turned into stone; it was still flowing somewhere outside.

    The only exciting thing to happen thus far is passing by an unlikely, out of place fragment of civilization stranded out in the 'scape. A cheap metal roadsign, bent in the middle, covered in prismatic dust. The plate points arrows down each direction, and labels them as an incomprehensible series of bright red symbols that feel vaguely uncomfortable to read. What looks like an artist's posing doll of bismuth rods is collapsed at its bottom, leaning against it as a slack puppet would.

    "Odd. I don't see or sense anything unusual." Nobuko has the gall to say.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: GET HYP

    Do you mean get hype? I'm not sure you could tell Arthur not to get hype though, considering the situation. Aw yeah! A cool person! He has not met a single cool person here yet, aside from maybe that ninja bodyguard."ALRIGHT, NICE! We got that IMPROVISATION then." He says, his grin shooting from ear to ear with eagerness."Homeslice, after the SHIT I SEEN 'round here, I'm SO DOWN for some proper goddamn GOOD LIFESTYLE IMPROVEMENT shit, for real." He seems to think highly of this form of adventure.

>Arthur: Assist terraforming

    Purification? Terraforming? Is that something Arthur can do? He's formed terra before, so to speak, but working with planetstuff is like people: It's easy to draw a person, but hard to modify someone else's drawing of a person without messing some things up. Arthur resolves to help how he can, but also to not expect that his control over geometries will also grant him terribly much influence over geomancies.

>Arthur: Fondly regard location

    What's going on with navigation equipment here? Arthur can't help but get rather curious about the deal with space here. He sets up, at least, a small sun that will follow just behind him. At minimum, it should help be a bit of a guiding light to navigate with, even if it's only the most vague possible. He tries to understand what's going on with geometry and space here. What's going on in the fabric? Maybe magic to locate himself will fail, but what about magic to examine the magical principles and effects?

    "Real talk, it's SPOOKY AS SHIT up in this bitch." He says, chuckling briefly."That DOLL is some HAUNTED HOUSE stuff. But hey, dawg, if this is THE USUAL 'round here, SWEET."
Tamamo     Tamamo doesn't have cookies (unless they're up her sleeve, which many other things tend to be), and it doesn't look like they'll be stopping for tea, though one must forever hold to hope.

    She gives a small nod when addressed, even indirectly. Some moments later, her eyes go wide, and she blinks several times, regarding Arthur's light guide. This remains a curiosity, but her expression smooths over into one of more general curiosity, with deep undercurrents of concern, at the changes in landscape. To those, she comments, "It is not so much replaced as twisted strangely, no? A landscape perverted, being only passing like as it should be, perhaps much as it is only 'where it should be' in the sense that one may travel here and there."

    They continue on. "I would be pleased to assist in matters of purification, though the Antegent are more *foreign* than any other spirit of my experience. I should like to learn more of what has been done, so that it may be safely undone, and speak to those others with experience in the reclamation of these lands, besides."

    She gives a particular, narrow-eyed stare to those uncomfortable symbols on the sign.
Tomoe Tomoe keeps pace with the group not flying faster than people are moving generally and she will keep with Nobuko as she introduces herself and explains a few things. She gets the basic details of the plan are to reach and one day fully secure the old city with access between both. So there can be a good deal of more living space for the people. Sure the benefit in production, taxes and all the other things that those in power would gain. Still, it seems more everyone winds sort of deal to her. Well long term at the very least, she also got it would be a trial by fire for these troopers too.

"There would be no one left if you could not bring people together. We are in various areas I mostly combat focus but many of the teams members like Arthur have skills in other areas."

She looks to Arthur Lilian and Tamamo.

"If you need help from me on anything you need to do here just ask."

at the very least Tomoe can help clean our things so the people who can fix it can work without horrors jumping them.

She looks to Tamamo for a moment.

"As I said if you want or need help I'm more than willing to help you with this as well."

Tamamo has made a good impression on Tomoe so far it seems.
Xion Xion really is excited to be here, though she's not immune to being grinded down by the situation. The hearts of the DOUBTERS.

Her walk gets more dejected over the travel, until the doubts of others becomes her own. Incrementally more slouching posture, incrementally more trudging steps. It gets bad enough that without Tamamo's mood-buoying cookies, Xion pulls out her own little packages of raspberry fig bar squares and starts loudly unwrapping and chewing on them as the group continues their traversal of terrain.

"Making a new home sounds nice, though..." She observes dully. "But it sounds like you fight for every inch of it. It must be hard, fighting your very hardest to have a home for your people. But it's very noble, too... Well, it can't be helped - can it?"

Xion continues to work through fig bars until they find the thick fog. Xion looks to Roxas first, to check if he's donning his own coat (and donning her black cult robecoat if he does), and then to Tamamo, to see if the woman who professed being The Sun could banish the fog with sunlight.

It sounded good on paper!

True to her mission, Xion extends bare fingers to grab at the floating bits of existential detritus, disappearig a few bits of '???' into her inventory for later, and --

--Chewing on another, curious as to the taste. She'll be fine. Probably.

"Oooh! Those crystals are really interesting!" Xion crouches near the bismuth-like rods at the bottom of the sign, entirely ignoring the Uncomfortable Text in favor of the much more interesting SHINY THING.
Lilian Rook     Nobuko is, of course, straight away immensely pleased by Arthur's reaction. "All the way to Nagoya it is! Then to the next city! And the next! All the way from shore to shore until we can call it Japan again!" She starts repeating bits of it with emphatic fist pumps over her head, until it finally catches on with the 'troops', their marching step tentatively improving as they go.

    A tiny sun is still a sun. In fact, opposite to most types of 'advanced magical darkness', Arthur's light seems to cast way further than it should, lighting up the landscape to a considerable degree, and causing the fields of unnatural floating and shattered crystal geometry to glitter in an almost pretty way. Geometry and space are at odds, in that they're certainly consistent as far as Arthur can see, but there's no real sense of anything outside it. It doesn't feel like some kind of pocket dimension or warped space, so much as everything within the mist is Here and everything outside is There, in the way a wall divides a building from the outside in a conceptually agreed upon manner.

    Arthur says 'doll'. Xion starts fiddling with the weird bismuth mannequin slumped at the bottom of the sign right away. The crystals taste like tears; that isn't a metaphorical or poetic thing, they literally taste like tears one reflexively licked off an upper lip, and they're way too hard to get much pleasure out of chewing on. Lilian slowly starts to grimace, her foot snaking out and lightly kicking back and forth against the sheen of silvery sand, and beneath it, partially uncovers a nylon jacket with a wallet falling out of its inside pocket, complete with a Japanese driver's license.

    "Saying 'it can't be helped'-" Lilian actually says the 'sho ga nai' "-is a way of maintaining dignity. The fact that something can't be helped doesn't make dealing with it any less noble." Nobuko visibly smiles and picks up her step. "Or any less deplorable. You're resolving to deal with life's difficulties, not excusing behaviour. I wish more people knew that." Nobuko looks slightly unsure now, perhaps not quite decided on how to take it, before shrugging it off with a little rattle of armour. Lilian falls silent again after being that oddly insistent on a point of life philosophy.

    Nobuko also continues keeping up her promise of 'walking and talking' while the procession tromps around with surprisingly little resistance. "When it comes to terraforming, well, that's just the modern word for it, right? It's sci-fi even. But it's not inaccurate; what you're seeing doesn't just happen naturally by Antegent being around. It's the deliberate work of those of them with the power and desire to reshape their landscape, whether it's instinctive, unavoidable, or somehow strategic. What you've seen everywhere is the result of usually two to four powerful Antegent of the Architect variety having had their way with the landscape, either in the middle of nowhere or compromised areas, making it too late to stop, or because they were so strong that they weren't taken down until much later. The patchwork limits you see are from when they ran up against each other's boundaries. In many more places, it's a slurry of scores of different influences all running together and self-perpetuating."
Lilian Rook     "Indeed, purification isn't so simple as what we're used to! Our ancestors discovered and passed down the rituals and rites to be rid of foul magic and evil spirits for centuries, but this is a new problem! At least, we know you can divide it into three categories: The type where the alien has grown over and strangled the original in some way, where it must first be cut down and burned. The type where what existed before has been removed or transmogrified entirely, where new forms of what was once there must be summoned up and brought back. And the type where the land has been tainted or infected and turned into something else from within, where the hard word is separating what you can in the fire of a suitable crucible, and completely leveling the rest!"

    "After that, restoration needs to be done by carefully fixing up damaged leylines, rejoining broken ones, and encouraging their healing by accelerating their flow with large amounts of outside magic, until the natural vital energy of the Earth reasserts itself. Of course, depending on how bad it was, you might have to plant seeds and fly in water yourself. Now, guess which of the three this one is!"

    As fun as that might be, Tomoe's flying around has finally spotted something in the distance. An extremely tall, cylindrical structure she can just barely make out against the dark by the unusually far cast of Arthur's sunlight, just enough to dimly suggest its outline. Around it, she can see the occasional glint of something like silvery string hanging down from above, and a number of small moving lights around the base.
Tamamo     Tamamo might be smiling behind her fan. Maybe. There's a hint of that, at the rousing cheers. "Well, well." It distracts her from other matters, along with Lilian's words, but she soon returns to the previous point of interest--Arthur's small sun. With a waving gesture of her hand that doesn't actually touch anything, she slings the enormous mirror that habitually follows her up into the air, sending it above the mini-sun, where it sticks at a steady, synchronized distance, before angling outward. The angle sweeps about, reflecting far more light than it should be taking in from just the surface area, magnifying the effect like a spotlight, once the general efficacy of the thing is proven.

    To Nobuko, Tamamo paraphrases her own, previous comment. "It is 'transmogrified,' no? I can think of little reason for the Antegent to create such an odd roadsign whole... and yet, I have seen little sense in their sense of decoration or rightness of place, even outside such."
Arthur Lowell     Good thing Arthur makes an effort to not pay attention to things, and be so cool and aloof that he can't figure out that the "doll" is actually a converted human corpse! Instead, he listens closely to the terraforming discussion. "Right... right, makin' LOTTA SENSE." He says, nodding several times and harassing his own jawline with contemplative motions. "Kinda the same challenges as gettin' your COLONY on up in some ALIEN PLANET."

    He looks to Tamamo, and shakes his head a little. "Naw, naw. Ain't gonna be SENSE in the NORMAL WAY of having SENSE. This shit's very... NOT FITTING on NORMAL PARADIGMS. None of it has SENSE the way we'd say SENSE, we're like CHESS PIECES lookin' at CHECKERS PIECES and sayin' they're WEIRD DUMB BISHOPS." He seems to lose a bit of the thread before he's done.
Tomoe Tomoe gets some more lessons on the Antegents too, notably those who warp the land into something out of an alien nightmare. That's good to know it could come in useful but for now, she's taking to the skies shortly after that. After all, she's been paid for a job and she's going to do it. Giving the boots some air recon will likely help them out a lot and for a while, it could be seen as fun, yes she loves flying. However, it's on the clock and she's more paying attention to the ground below she will call in her finding.

<<Got a structure of some sort ahead looks cyldind9iral I'm going to try to get a closer look and strange lights are moving about it. I'm wary. Either way, I'm going to take a closer look.>>

Tomoe won't rush it blindly but she will fly in closer on the strange target to try and get a closer look
Arthur Lowell     Arthur tilts his head. His sunglasses pop on abruptly from his sylladex and he taps a finger against the rim. "CYLINDRICAL?" He kicks off his rockets, ascending. "Lemme get a GOOD LOOK. Yo, NOBU, there's SOME SHIT up ahead, let us do the SCOUTING and FIRST ENCOUNTER?" He blasts off, heading towards the strange thing. He needs to identify one thing most of all: Is it composed of that same strange, vanta-black light-absorbing material? Are there any signs of a red gem? He'll likely fall into formation with Tomoe on his broom-ride.
Xion "Is it... the second one?" Xion guesses, having decided that taste-testing... Is stupid.

"Blech. Sadness salt." She spits lightly, moving up from her inspectatory squat. "It's very cool that you're literally expanding your world like this! It feels..."

She grows quiet for a few introspective moments, a quiver in her lips as her brow furrows in thought. She's concentrating on something - trying to grab hold of a thought.

"... It's not quite good or bad. It is... nice, though? Yeah."

"It's nice." She finally decides, the corpse not seeming to bother her. "It's too bad the Antegent want to kill everyone. I guess it can't be helped."
Lilian Rook     "Indeed!" replies Nobuko. "So why is it that the city of Nagoya still exists . . . mostly intact!" She flicks the sign. "As you can see, this man made object only requires a thorough scrubbing and a fresh coat of paint to be its old self again. Yet even the sky is gone." She chuckles at 'sadness salt' as the whole group marches on by. Scarcely a look goes to the remains that've sat there for so long, even from the three hundred 'volunteer' troopers. Most of those that do are a blend of fascination and worry; a 'I'm glad it's not me' rather than any kind of sympathy.

    Multiplying the power of Arthur's tiny celestial body with a mirror that embodies The Sun results in a search beam that goes all the way out to the horizon, though that itself is strictly defined by the curvature of the Earth. Sweeping that beam, Arthur can see earlier that his theories, and perhaps concerns, are verified immediately. The thing on the horizon is a tower of mysterious black material wedged into the earth at a near right angle, at least ten storeys tall. The light catches in a glassy sphere held in the crux of an unraveling double helix at its highest point, filled with smouldering, dull redness. Lilain catches it immediately, saying out loud what a couple of others might be thinking: "Another one of these? On the opposite side of the world, even. What the hell are they?"

    There is a more pressing detail. The lights moving around the base aren't something so mysterious and magical, but the personal helmet lights and still-functioning electronics of what must be easily twice the party's number of identically dressed and equipped Oda troopers. Identical, save for the faded clothes, dusty armour with thin streaks of blood rust, faces like they'd been on an IV drip in a hospital for years, and the radical alterations to the clan Mon, in much the same way of the sign.

    They appear to be massed around the base of the construct, engaged in digging and carrying chunks of terrain, having already churned up what must be a kilometer's radius worth of land, painstakingly arranged into waves of complicated intersecting lines, carved into the ground and lined with meticulously arranged crystalline rods, which in of themselves have been transplanted to create a vertical design reaching up to the bottom third of the giant spike, a visual palindrome in of itself, looking the same from every angle. Getting into range, verified IFFs pop up into the tactical network. Nobuko orders the procession halt with a hand signal, then a series of other hand signals has the three lines of the now-trembling unit arrange themselves as they'd practiced, the first row prone, the second kneeling, and the third standing.

    Scrolling through her own holographic list, Nobuko's pretty face is twisted in a grim expression. "These names . . . I recognize some of them. They've all been declared MIA. Some of these were two years ago."
Arthur Lowell     Arthur listens to the situation. Various muscles in his face gradually condense and compress towards the middle, a slow rise of concern. And soon he's kicking off again, blasting through the air at significant speed towards the group. He knows, for the most part, the nature of the spire -- and not to unsettle it too much, at least right now.

    But what he doesn't know needs to be addressed. What's happened to the people here? And what is that design? Arthur tries to process its geometry in his mind, and analyze its potential implications in his understanding of magic, space, and energy. He'll swoop low, for a moment, cutting into the war-group to offer to give a ride to Tamamo, who said she wanted to get ahead as well. Then, blasting off towards the base of that spire!
Tamamo     "What, then, may be the defining interest, between that which is 'tainted,' and that which is 'transformed'? Are they not both 'that which is changed'?" Tamamo muses, continuing from Nobuko's line of explanation. "Or is it a matter of 'what is left unchanged?' Disease eats away at its host, yet must of that host remains, long until their life is lost. Yet, a tree's bark is not so easily returned, once it has become the scrolls you carry. One might need the secret to /unboiling/."

    While she speaks, Tamamo walks forward. "I should like to see what can be done, before it comes time for soldiers and violence," she says, adding, "I hold sufficient expertise in the removal of curses." Directly to Nobuko, "Do not hurry after me. Once I have learned the state of things, I shall return," she smiles, "unassisted, but perhaps in company."

    With that, Tamamo continues on until she can come into contact with the MIAs. She more than a few relevant skills, but her first act is necessarily to observe and analyze, preferring a focused analysis to find 'what is wrong' rather than a more spread-out detection ability. She needs to know what is afflicting the soldiers, and whether they really are still alive in any meaningful sense, while she leaves the question of 'how many are there' to the others. Once she has an idea of where to start, she can put her not-insubstantial skills at the removal of curses and the granting of blessings to work. Even if she has to fill in some missing pieces to bring a functionally human subject out of this mess, she's prepared for that. It just depends on what she finds.

    She hops along with Arthur for the ride, once offered, directing the mirror-over-sun to shine the way ahead. This, despite 'riding with someone else' being a fairly new experience.
Tomoe Tomoe is pretty sure she knows how it is going to go down with the MIAs. Though with Tamamo on the team there might be something that can be done. Or at the very least guard the troopers they came out with. She converses with Xion, Arthur and Tamamo over the comm for a few moments. A very basic plan is formed. It's to go in and see what they could learn, Tamamo might be able to get something too from this. As Arthur rockets off she'll floor it herself spreading her wings and moving to take point to be able to defend Arthur and his passenger as well.

"Here we go."
Xion "It's like... a lynchpin, isn't it?" Xion wonders, casting her gaze down towards the tower as the giant scrying-enhanced awareness dual-tech between Arthur and Tamamo reveal more about the structure - and the people near it.

"Like a pushpin in one of those stuffy wooden display cases, holding down an insect."

She can imagine it, the strange tchotchkie of a hobby she didn't quite understand. Observing the dark spire with bracketed thumbs and forefingers in a picture window, she tilts her whole body - less her fingers - to straighten the image in the sky. "Do you think it... thinks? It feels? I wonder if it has a will -- or a heart?"

While not capable of flight, Xion can leave the party of fresh soldiers in the dust with a "Scouting ahead!" and a full-on anime set of leaps and sprints across the terrain after Arthur.

Reaching outwards with her senses, she feels around for an intelligence: a Will or Heart among the pylons.

She also probes the fabric of darkness around the lynchpin, seeing if she can just corridor to the top of the pillar and check it from the summit. Really get handsy with it.

Because getting intimate with the hearts of giant god-pins is an excellent idea! Tell your friends!
Lilian Rook     "You have it right away." Nobuko replies to Tamamo. "Though, one could argue those examples are the other way around, depending on how they choose to view it. In any version however, one can be solved by the introduction of new elements, or the repair of the old, and the other can only be purged and rebuilt atop of. It isn't the clearest distinction all the time, but it's common to get a sense for it, with enough experiences. Japan is in the situation of being covered in the clashing bands of work done by different enemies; the three worlds painted on and into the true Japan serve as coincidentally perfect examples."

    When Arthur decides he's going to pick up the kitsune and fly off ahead where Tomoe had seen, and Xion just teleports, and also Lilian (after reluctantly deciding it's okay for Tamamo to take second saddle on the broom again) flies off after them, Nobuko looks back to her line, visibly struggles with whether to stay behind with the slow trudge of foot troops or advance at speed herself, glancing back and forth rapidly, and then finally yells "Conduct your intelligence gathering swiftly, scouts! The battle line to Nagoya waits for no one!" and then starts having the triple lines double time it to something like a firing range, aiming to stop at the very edge of the 'decorated' scenery.

    Hovering closer to the designs, even more visibly elaborate from the air, it certainly seems as if the MIAs are alive, and not reanimated corpses, despite looking rather sickly and frail --or possibly because of it. There are roughly twice as many as under Nobuko's command, with three or four stages of 'dusty disuse' between them. None of them speak, not to make time pass, and not to coordinate their work, going about it more like ants in a colony.

    Signs of a traditional 'curse' are completely absent, but both in a geometric and in a magic sense, the massive array below is extremely auspicious. It's a known fact that the Antegent don't use magic, and their transformation of the planet actively damages the ley lines, but it looks as if this array is designed to do the opposite, meant to dredge magic up from the damaged dermis of the planet and draw it inwards. It is both geomantic and geometric in a recognizable but perverse way, somehow like a machine translation of a sentence rather than a holistic understanding of the language.

    Beaming the sun on them, which seems to have some resonant power in this surreal world of 'night', reveals here and there the glimmer of hair fine threads of silver, seeming to rise off of some --probably all-- troopers and simply up and up and up into the sky and out of sight. Some stretch between failed soldiers and connect several in patterns that must be intangible if they're able to navigate the maze of crystalline columns, revealed only in the sun.
Lilian Rook     Xion's examination of the Corridors equivalent finds that they are dragged into the piercing spike, becoming a crush of extremely dense entrances and exits immediately around it, and very sparse for miles outwards. Any sense of people's Hearts, or even Wills, is so faint here as to be nearly invisible. The palest, dustiest, most gaunt and thin of the men barely register, while she can still feel a faint impression of hopelessness from the portion with some colour still left in them. She can also feel that beaming the sun on the whole agitates them immensely; rather, agitates *it* immensely. In some nonspecific space that is somewhere and everywhere in the constructed array, she feels the impression of a deep seated, almost instinctive enmity with the people flying in bearing sunlight --true sunlight. Without a sight or a sound, she can feel the sharp, metaphorical buzzing of some danger-alert signal passing like firing neurons all around her.

    As for the spike itself though . . . the best she could describe it is 'tired'. If it is any kind of conscious at all (still dubious), it is a cold, still, hibernating thing, frozen through like a wood frog, in being rather than living tissue.

    They all, of course, immediately come under attack. The silently labouring would-be soldiers drop their work all at once and fumble for weapons that may have been disused for years, withdrawing bulky rifles --which really do start to look like arquebus when covered in dust and dirt and stripped of their shine and markings-- taking knee and firing upwards as a mass. Streaks of blueish light shred angled through the air, poorly aimed but heavily massed. For some reason, the lethal sight seems somehow artsy. The crackle pop of gunfire echoes mistily for miles here, the tracer lines are fast enough that telling up from down becomes too difficult and the massed fire looks like glowing rain, and the garden of sparking muzzle blooms, far below, ripples back and forth like fields of wheat in the wind. It'd almost be mesmerizing were there not hundreds of bullets.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur stops long enough to get a look at the geomancy, to understand what's going on, to... have his sun and Tamamo's sun-mirror draw direly negative attention. Before long, he's gotta be in motion again! Diving and weaving, the near-theatrical display of dense walls of fire are, in a way, familiar to him. Familiar in the kind of intense risk and pain they present, not familiar in the sense that he can perfectly dodge them. But his high-speed rocketry evades alright! Of course, help from Tamamo and Tomoe might prevent those few times the shots threaten to rip through his body, though he'll survive if they're otherwise occupied.

    As the plan is resolved, Arthur finds his path of retreat. "Express elevator, goin' up!" He swerves the broom, angling hard vertical and shifting his stance to something less seated and more agile on his feet. He'll wait long enough for Tamamo to get a good grip and not one second more. Anyone else need a ride up, like maybe Xion? Jump high and grab his offered free hand!

                          --------------------------                          
                         |                          |                        
                         | THRUSTER MODES           |                        
                         |                          |                        
                         | [ ] DASH                 |                        
                         | [ ] CRUISE               |                        
                         | [ ] CHARGE               |                        
                         | [ ] SPRINT               |                        
                         | [X] ESCAPE VELOCITY      |                        
                         | [ ] UNSTOPPABLE FORCE    |                        
                         | [ ] PLAID                |                        
                         | [ ] UP A GODDAMN NOTCH   |                        
                         | [ ] LET'S DO THIS SHIT   |                        
                          --------------------------                          

    Blast-off. Arthur rushes up the side of the spire at high speed, flaring his sun bright and trying to follow the strands. Is there some geometric or magical pattern to them? Is there something he can disrupt gracefully, with more and more solar light?
Tomoe Tomoe has the rough idea of what they are going to do, Arthur is going to floor it and she's going to follow him as fast as she can go. Tamamo seems to have some idea of how to handle the puppet master. So she's going to need cover and protection. So she can focus on that task the warning from Lilian about using magic on the pylon directly as well. She keeps pace with Arthur and Tamamo as best she can. She is going to pop her defence buffs on Tamamo as they do this as she makes ready for whatever horror is pulling all those people's strings down there.

Just what sort of horror will they face? She doesn't know but she knows they are about to find the heck out, as she keeps pace with effort with Arthur.
Tamamo     Tamamo has several things to do, one of which she has mostly outsourced to Tomoe. Those attacks not blocked or evaded otherwise, she deflects upon her deployed, magical shields, the mirror flying out from its present position to rejoin her and add to that defensive ability. It's not a fully effective means, something that's effectively feedback imparting a much smaller portion of every shot against her own body, but that's after its mitigation by the deflective angles, and Tamamo no Mae never walks out the door without a full stack of healing items. Riding together with Arthur, her defense is also his defense, for the moment.

    With Lilian's assistance, Tamamo links up her communications with Nobuko, and attempts to give the quickest possible effective explanation, subject to her own peculiarities of speech, as counter as they run to that goal. "These soldiers yet live, and may yet be saved. The Antegent hates the light of the Sun, and so we shall rouse the more fitting target. Pray, and allow the path of survival."

    Holding on while Arthur rockets up is no trivial feat. Just as well she doesn't really need her hands free to control her mirror, then.

    While this does break the earlier combo, she's building up for a replacement for it as they move. The height helps considerably, as this vantage point lets her toss her talismans toward every compass point, and ensure a large field will be covered. The paper strips fly out without regard to crosswinds, dragged as if pulled by rockets of their own, and certainly faster than unweighted paper should fall, to strike the earth. Each flares to life, but without burning away, setting up her own array covering as wide an area as possible, a bounded field just to contain, and thereby magnify, what happens afterward.

    It's a quick solution, with minimal preparation, but when she's doing something so simple that it's not even, strictly speaking, magical, and definitely not magecraft, it doesn't need much more than that. All she has to do is shed layer by layer of her mortal guise, as she's done before. When one 'Is The Sun,' all you need to do to shed True Sunlight in every direction is to stop pretending you're something more mundane (like a kitsune). A high, brightly shining light, banishing darkness, actively combating it, acting out the coming of The Dawn that Banishes The Night.

    This may not, in every small respect, look like what is literally happening. It might look, if one were so minded, that she is still a three-tailed fox woman, even if those tails are made of solar fire. It might look like she is only some hundreds of meters up in the air, rather than far above the clouds. These details are as unimportant as questioning how Izanagi could have created islands by stabbing the sea with a spear. Divinity does what mages wish they could, and skips the 'how' to create effective reality as it is declared to be. Dawn comes becomes the Sun has risen.
Xion Xion is quick to zip and zap her way around, but when she opens her awareness to the heart of the beast, finds a slumbering thing. A quiet thing. Drinking, drawing, like a redwood tree - tall and hungry. A yawning maw. Like a baby!

Speaking of gormlessly yawning maws, her own!

Xion is shot in the chest and goes down *hard* when she eats it, tumbling into the salty faux-dust silicate in a big showy crater. Pierced with flinders and missing a chunk of her chest, she gasps and groans. "This... feels really bad. I'm going to go with 'bad'. That's my decision. Cura?"

She claps a gloved hand to her chest, her hit points refilling as her wounds close. She hears Arthur before she sees him, recovering in her crater of sadness. "Alright. Time to do like Roxas says. Pick myself up, and-!"

With an acrobatic leap, Xion reaches the shaft of Arthur's broom in a single anime bounce, hanging onto it one handed as he rockets about. She gets an excellent feeling from Tamamo, like floating in a pool in summer, but the moment comes and goes; Xion uses the granted momentum to flip from broom onto the side of the pillar and begin sprinting upwards in flagrant disrespect for gravity. Granting two targets to be shot at, with the mild disadvantage of travelling alongside the body of the pillar.

With her shoes and all.

Once she clears the summit she skids heels-and-windmilling arms to a stop, killing her momentum comically while the Sun rises in the sky.

"Alright, pillar. We're really alike. So please don't take this the wrong way - but I'd like you to open up your heart to me!"

With a flourishing cast-out of her hand a metallic 'shwink!', she summons her blue-hilted Keyblade to her hand and taps it against the top of the tower. Focusing, she delves deeply, trying to draw out the tower's power - to experience it, and take it into herself. "Let me understand you, tower!"

This may be a *terrible* idea, what with the situation, but if you don't reach out when it's hard, you can't call yourself 'a person who reaches out'!
Lilian Rook     The saving grace of this plan is that civilians with six weeks of training, who then hadn't touched a rifle in maybe years, under the control of a vastly less conscious strategic commander, are far less lethal than their equivalent weight in veteran soldiers. It's still six hundred rifles with overtly lethal ballistic characteristics, but by concentrating on high speed evasion, defensive buffs, shield blocking, and divine mirror protection, the airborne group is able to ascend to a height significant enough for the massed fire to dramatically lose effectiveness, and then drop off altogether when Tamamo becomes a blazing icon of sunlight itself.

    The geomantic array is completely obscured as the sun bounces between countless crystal faces, turning the design into a blinding bonfire of light, leaving captured troopers blindly staggering out of it and firing reflexively simply at sources of sound and the direction of the intense warmth from above. Within the bounds set by the talismans, the eerie, edgeless dark that is 'comfortable' to the Antegent disappears, though there is little but sheer brightness left to fill it in lieu of a blue sky. The countless interwoven threads show up as gleaming lines of silver now, wobbling like a spider's web caught in the wind, remaining connected but losing their geometric cohesion.

    Arthur has risen so far up that he can see the sunlight cast fully on exactly what hates it so much. A painterly blot of blackness hovers not too far above him now, previously completely invisible in all respects against the darkened non-sky, and now visibly contracting in a spasmodic way under the light, like a human pupil after being hit with a series of flashbangs. The silver threads hanging taught from it --or through it, as it seems-- are all bunched up as its perimeter narrows, though this only seems to limit the range the enthralled soldiers can move.

    Given that it's now completely impossible for ranks of blind fire to hit the flying group now, the lost troopers now turn their attention, dazzled and in disarray as it is, on the signs of the advancing Nobuko-lead group. Those looking from within the light can see the triple ranks now flinching away from the bounded field, others struggling with the prospect of raising their rifles against their own, even as shots fall in their general direction and punch through the terrain. They'd already been barely prepared to shoot at a monster, never mind fellow, living humans.
Lilian Rook     Nobuko draws her sword. The deep azure blade, mirror polished like the surface of a deep pool in the day, catches the reflected sunlight and casts a dazzling aura over her surroundings. She sweeps the blade through the air, and without prompting or sense, all of her men begin a rousing, thunderous battle cry, now charging fearlessly into the fray behind her.

    Well behind her, though. She herself runs an order of magnitude faster than them, the random bullets that find her smashed to pieces on flicks of her sword. It looks like she's going to just plough straight into their ranks and start slaughtering former civilians, especially with gunfire from her own ranks backing her up. Where she charges into the array though, flashing cerulean streaks cut through the missing troopers without any kind of injury, leaving them to mill about in a daze for several seconds, before dropping their weapons, collapsing over, or crawling into one of the myriad trenches to just wait things out. A few actually turn around, pulling down their helmet visors to shield their eyes from the sun, and begin shooting, however barely usefully, at the black hole high in the sky.

    Lilian herself produces her own blade, a pitch black shadow against so much light, defined almost entirely by its luminous scarlet designs. Launching the rest of the way to the shrinking blot, she thrusts into it and drags her blade through the edge, tearing a deep black line through thin air like splitting a film of paper, paradoxically increasing the Antegent's 'area to be shot at' rather than diminishing it as the sword burns its substance.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur snaps his free hand and everything in a sphere around him briefly flashes black, leaving the area Tamamo occupies weightless so that she can continue in this battle without keeping to his broom. She is putting on an absolutely /tremendous/ display as The Sun, and Arthur, who is at most merely The Stars, has some thematically logical reason to keep distance from the intense domain of daylight. He lets her off so she can wrap up her own work. "TOP FLOOR: SPACE-HOLES, SUNLIGHT, and a WHOLE LOT OF ASS-KICKING!"

    The other reason he's letting Tamamo off is so that she doesn't have to be dragged into melee with him while she does her rather important work. He loops a wide loop, shifting to a "surfing" stance, and swoops down towards the thing. A glance is spared to Nobuko's mirror blade, so far down below. A brow quirks -- she's not killing though. Arthur increments his ALLEGIANCE SYNOPSIS slightly towards the ODA CLAN end.

    Encouraged by what goes on below, Arthur amps up what goes on above. "ALLLLLLLRIGHT YOU SON OF A BIIIIIITCH!" He calls out. He's analyzed this thing. The work below was to draw power into the spire. But having examined two such spires and comprehended some of their magical energy intake, and getting to see what may well be a hole in space, he takes a very peculiar approach. "You feelin' HUNGRY FOR SOME GEOMETRY?! TRY A REAL MAN'S MEAL, YOU FAT FUCKIN' SPACE ASSHOLE!!"

    Assess the energy it's taking in with the geomancy. Assess the space-hole and its contours. Understand the darkness it has affinity for. Counter-pattern. Destructively resonate. Overload everything delicate, and light up the night. His rocket boosts hard as he surges as fast as he can straight at the blot, and attempts to plunge far, far too much stellar-fusion energy directly into dark conduits and foundations of space-time breaching that seem much more averse -- to overload every energy-managing and space-warping system therein. "EEEEEEAAAAAT THIIIIIISSSSSS!!!"
Lilian Rook     Xion rising to the top of the spire and hitting it with her Keyblade causes an immediate reaction. The dully, stagnant redness that occupies its vaguely jeweled tip abruptly stirs to life like a new heartbeat, shifting, swirling, flowing. It grows bright like oxygenated blood, contracting around a core of blackness that swiftly turns white, then violet. She can feel the surge of 'activity' beneath her teen boots. Perhaps better described, she feels a surge of activity somewhere within it, in the way that one is hit with the warmth and light and noise and moving about within the inside of a house when they open the front door.

    Without an actual application of magic, though --that is energy being fed into it-- it lacks of the appearance seen before of coruscating storm clouds, crackling with arcs of energy and swirling with embers of power. While 'active', it lacks the basic energy necessary to perform any functions, as a strict reality.

    The feeling is chaos. It's like a hundred million different impressions all slam into her at the same time, many familiar, many completely incomprehensible, drowning her in a crashing tide of sensations and impulses that are so dense she couldn't possibly catch or act on any one of them individually even if she wanted to.

    Too much of it doesn't make any sense, representing 'feelings' that aren't like anything she can process in the slightest. The remainder are still enough to be overwhelming, incoherently approximate to all sorts of things. Confusion. Pain. Loneliness. Rage. Hatred. Hunger. Cold. Despair. Bloodlust. Spite. All throughout it though, like a subtle, persistent backdrop, briefly audible through scattered, random dips in the noise, is a deep, gut-dropping sense of miserable bafflement, isolation and abandonment, and a feeling of deep betrayal and anger. This singular composite of impressions is more cohesive and slightly more tangibly proximate to the human emotions she interprets them as, but seems to have no particular source or cause or being of origin; it just is.

    There can't be a strong conception of how long those impressions come flooding through. The sense of a scale of time seems to be absent in them. Like a dream, a truly conscious awareness of them can only be had after waking up and remembering them. That 'wake up' comes suddenly, when the raging storm clouds of jumbled and incoherent alien negativity are split through, clean and sharp, with a heart-stopping lance of overwhelming, unbridled fury that goes beyond fury. A white hot gamma burst of bottomless, boundless hatred, invigorated and elevated to the point of being emotionally searing, blinding, with a perverse and worrying sense that feels distantly close to 'righteousness'. Spite without scale. Scorn without end. Sheer, murderous animosity beyond measure, more than anyone could possibly absorb.

    What feels like a 'second' later, the chaotic tide of impressions falls away completely, and Xion is shot with a series of jumbled but excruciatingly clear images and sounds and strange tastes. A celestial body of pulsing scarlet light. A tapestry of shattered continents, inside out and upside down and painted in infrared and ultraviolet. A cessation of gravity and a feeling of acceleration turned backwards inside herself, like all her blood is rushing back to her heart. The dull, crackling roar of fire and broken speakers and the jumbled fragments of whalesong and tumbling glass shards. She tastes battery acid, salt, wet grass and coppery blood. Throbbing subsonic vibrations hit her inner ear in some patterned way that sounds like it should be meaningful, peaking and receding with tastes and smells of hot iron. All of it tries to cram itself into her brain in the space of a couple of instants, and then abruptly shorts out as the pylon's 'capacity' seems to run out, its active churn sputtering and dying out, slowing back down to nothing again.
Tomoe The fire from the controlled MIA soldiers is still dangerous just form the sheer volume of fire from them as they come under attack as the rise as they get higher and higher. Soon with Tamamos becoming a blazing icon of sunlight itself? Tomoe has taken several hits keeping them from connecting with Tamamo and disrupting what she had to do. She hurt, but thankfully she didn't get hit anywhere vital. Even then with the high powered rounds it's still injured her and left the visible sign of jagged red lines as a sign of the impact. She grits her teeth a bit and is thankful the fire has stopped, soon Arthur is getting to work now.

as Nobuko looks like she's going to heck with and charging it takes Tomoe a moment to realize from her vantage point she's cutting the strings from the looks at it. Lilian has also joined fight using her family's sword.

As Arthur charges in she wants to join him, in close combat. However, her task prevents that, on the other hand, it does not prevent her from giving him support in the form of casting spells at the puppet master.

The chant she uses is in Norse, her accent is a bit on the bad side, but the blasts of light she starts letting off each time as she finishes should lend Arthur some aid as she times them to keep the chance of hitting her friend, low.
Tamamo     "And so, we do find the villain. My, but I did worry that miss Nobuko had not heard me, for some moments." Tamamo looks down with some concern, but when a few of the formerly-missing turn their weapons on the black hole in the sky, she turns her own gaze upward with relief.

    "You have my thanks for the list, Mr. Lowell. It is fitting, in a way, is it not?" She doesn't explain exactly what she means. She's certainly hot and bright from this close up, but someone who deals with massive space-objects probably has the right inherent defenses for being near small suns. Not looking directly into the fiery bits remains a recommended practice.

    Then, Arthur flies off, while Tamamo remains. That could be terribly disconcerting to someone with no predisposition toward 'being in the sky.' For her, of course, it's no particular bother. Not while she's doing the Sun Incarnate thing. She focuses her attention on the one figure that's already flown up to that enemy. "My Lilian. I have prepared the field, and you have my gifts, do you not? Above is an enemy of not only the World, but of the Sun." She reaches out, while the space around her burns. Her mirror, now at her side, tilts upward, scattering her light above like a weapon, but it's not something that's especially focused. It's mystically pure sunlight, not lasers. The task of focusing all that righteous solar fury falls elsewhere.

    It falls, in this case, and by Tamamo's words, to Lilian Rook. The two had already formed the necessary connection, granting that limited measure of divine authority, enough for measures of protection, blessings of fortune, and the natural right to slay the enemies of the Sun. That the Antegent is also an enemy of Earth, and an enemy of Humanity, is beside the immediate point.

    Those blessings are now in full force, readied for an act of enforcement.
Xion Amazing, fantastic things happen. Two blades - one red, one blue - are unsheathed and carve paths through space and reality. The Sun Itself burns down upon the land and hates with a singular fury. God, The Creator, pushes past reason into screaming truth. A warrior of legend strikes with impunity.

And a dork stands atop a tower and taps a giant obtuse key against it.

The forced-out feelings, the weaponized ill humors, pour into Xion like a tidal wave and a set of shooting spears both, visually 'striking' her in the chest. She drops to a knee, gasping, as she holds her left hand over where her heart should be, sobbing quiety.

It's the physical shudders, the echoes of feeling so bad it must be expressed outwardly. A Feeling she only understands vaguely. Her fist closes, tightening around her coat and something more - an ur-flash, a small eruption of darkness.

Opening her eyes, misted with tears, Xion removes her hand from her heart and looks into the object in her palm. "I'll wake up with a better answer for you. I will. But for right now, I need to help my friends. I'm sorry for hurting yours - but you need to give back!"

Xion's keyblade disappears in a sworl of darkness that consumes the entire length of the blade, curling and coiling. Where silvered metal had formed the haft, now a single length of obsidian rises, splitting into a set of coiling and combing patterns reminiscent of the tower's lower area. At the tip the coils meet, and rework themselves into a single point. A keychain of gold hangs from the butt, instead of a star or a crown having a tassle of the same obsidian in a clothlike texture that flutters as she swings the changed weapon up.

"If this tower's power is to take and change energy -- all I have to do is use it to take back the energy for Lilian's friends!"

The length expands and the tip unravells, going up, up, up, and out, out out, seeking stone vines that draw in the 'Antegent magic' back down, away from the 'black hole'.
Lilian Rook     Despite the Antegent being's best efforts at trying to close itself off completely --to be drawn in on itself and disappear in a pinprick of negative space-- the Night Mist in Lilian's hands somehow keeps carving through the substance it isn't there, opening a gaping black void for Arthur and Tomoe, and even the massed soldiers, to fire into. Blasts of magical light and hypervelocity bullets puncture the void like a solid thing, blossoming flowers of startlingly red blood.

    The energy of Space, conveyed in stellar fusion and the flash of cosmic creation, catches in the fractally sprawling geomentic array, bouncing around its myriad connections and melting down the crystals caught in it, breaking down the disturbing pattern by degrees, until straight lines refract through rods turned translucent by heat, and curve into a kilometer wide spirograph. The sheer feedback from the energy that goes shooting back upwards seems to crack the sky, entering the bloodied void and causing the space beyond it to vibrate outward and flash muffled white, black seems splitting in the air, like some enormous invisible thing was fractured by an explosion within it. Bits of sky crumble and flake away, exposing a negative behind it.

    Copying and reversing the blueprint that siphons Earth Magic and gives power to the Other, Xion's newly patterned Keyblade reaches skyward, and from that exposed blight of pitch blackness, draws down countless threads of glittering silver insubstantiality, tenses and creaking like razor thin steel wires, pulled to her Keyblade as if being steadily wound about a reel. In much the same way, the threads of Antegent drawn in skated wildly across its surface, tearing up thin trails of welling blood as its own power is peeled away from beneath its 'skin', monopolizing eliminating its ability to wield its control against any of the Elites.

    Held paralyzed and beaten down by the light of the Sun now shining directly on it from the divine mirror, the Antegent is a wide open target for Lilian, spurred on by Tamamo. Little bits of gold scripture shine at various points on her body, the light drawn in around her hands, and suffusing the gold-black spell circle she summons before herself, gaining a rainbow corona that converges to a white point at its center. She directly turns Tamamo's sunlight into a killing weapon, both the bane of the Outsider and of the things of Dark. The darkened sky spits forth a torrent of blood and a stench of burnt flesh, and then the silver threads split away with molten tips and fall to ground. Something dark and heavy falls from the void, lands on the point of the spire, is split in half, and disintegrates into so much fog.

    A thunderous cheer goes up from the ranks of the fresh meat, not only excited by their victory, but inspired by the power of their allies and the overwhelmingly decisive nature by which they'd obliterated something so threatening. They wade fearlessly into the eldritch trenches and glowing hot crystals melted like candle wax to see to their missing companions, bringing out their rations and water and squad medical kits to see to those who are years MIA and no longer on the Antegent's begrudging life support. The land rovers are called up from not far back. Nobuko contemplates her gleaming azure katana, then sheathes it in the traditional way with a clean snap.

    "I'm both impressed and convinced!" she says. "Though the irony doesn't go over my head. We left with three hundred, and now we're coming back with nine hundred! What a mess!" She taps her cheekbone for a few seconds. "No, no, this is fine. Perfect, even. With this much manpower, we could tear down that thing no problem and drag it back! It looks important after all. A small personnel problem is nothing compared to how valuable this must be. Yes, yes, that's how it is. Clearly this victory is worthy of prestige.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: OBSERVE VOID

    Arthur turns back to the foe as it disintegrates. Something gnaws in his stomach. Every other Antegent he's encountered thus far has had only one specific awareness of humanity: That they should be killed, and that, self-destructive or not, all efforts should be dedicated to their death. But this one demonstrated knowledge of humans. Medical knowledge, vital knowledge, maybe even spiritual knowledge. The constellation Antegent, one could forgive for having neurological knowledge of humanity. But this... implies something worse.

>Arthur: Celebrate!!

    Arthur Lowell sets off a raucous series of fireworks. Triumphant shouting always helps clear his mind of troublesome thoughts that are likely to get him acting all weird and nerdy and concerned with the implications of broader human survival. "YEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!" He screams. "NO ANTEGENT CAN STOP YOOOOOOUUUU!!!" There's plenty more of that shouting, and Arthur does it all. His ECHELADDER would have gone wild, since his personal morality system values saved lives over almost all else, but instead it just dumps a variety of COSMETIC CONFIGURATION BOXES into his queue.

>Arthur: Descend

    You forgot someone.

>Arthur: Captchalogue Tamamo in your Sylladex

    Well, no, she can't fit in his SYLLADEX, so instead he just goes and grabs her like a normal person to convey her back to the ground. He'll also offer a hand to Xion, who can probably avoid fall damage through double jumping but he'll stop by just in case it'd be polite! She seems to be in a Bad Mood. "Hey, girl, you ALL GOOD? Sounded like you pulled some BAD JUJU outta the SPIRE."

>Arthur: Descend

    Arthur descends, chatting with Nobuko as he sets down. "HELL YEAH, I only get the most CONVINCING shit around, and I only do the most IMPRESSING stuff!" He flexes, and this one time, he doesn't wind up flexing a bullet out of his body; for once he avoided getting shot.

    "But, uh, just eff-why-eye? That shit, the big tower, it's got deep-ass connections with the Antegent. It makes 'em, or it summons 'em, or they use 'em like warpgates, or whatever, I dunno. But, like, put it somewhere /ultra/ safe, or break it with something not-magical, 'cause it powers up with magic pointed at it. All sound good?"
Tamamo     As Tamamo no Mae, Bunrei of the Sun Goddess descends, she returns about two-thirds of the way to her previous look, dialing down the blinding light, the summer heat, the otherworldly presence that marks one so clearly as 'something else' that one risked inspiring bloodied stone temples and fanatical cults by walking about in bygone eras. There's less risk of those, now, but even less reason to risk them. She's gotten rather comfortable with shortening it all to 'Tamamo,' in comfortable company. Lilian, recent avatar of her will in battle, and far more immediately effective in applying that prowess to precision effects, truth be told, gets a warm smile, there amidst the cheering.

    Between Arthur's mobility and Tomoe's interference, there was little need to dip into her ever-present healing stash. Thanks to Arthur, in particular, she doesn't have to make a crater when she lands. She'd be fine, but what if someone was close to the impact site? Horrible to even consider.

    And so, Tamamo looks to Xion, in particular, to see if her complaints of ill-feeling were the result of some injury, physical or otherwise. "Are you quite well?" she near repeats. "I possess charms for injuries physical or spiritual, though I must admit, with the heaviest regret, less experience in matters of wounded hearts."

    Tamamo will go to check with Nobuko right afterward, though it seems like they did bring along sufficient, basic medical supplies. If that's the case, she can leave that matter to them.
Lilian Rook     "Indeed! I will make sure to report back that you can be counted on as a trusted allie of the house of Oda!" Nobuko replies enthusiastically to Arthur. She turns to contemplate the spire again. "You don't say? Well, that doesn't change anything. Castle Oda is the safest place in the country, besides Mount Fuji or the Yamato center. And if it needed to be destroyed, well . . ." She rests her hand on the hilt at her waist. "I'm positive that one of the Forty Four Muramasa Grave Blades. Perhaps not mine, since her nature isn't that which cuts physical things, but certainly another one possessed by the family."

    She of course, immediately profusely thanks Tamamo, giving her a really good bow of respect and deference, and encourages her to check on the relief effort if at all possible, given that she has no way of knowing what state of health people missing in action for several years on alien life support could be in. She already has a mob of adoring fans, as another reminder of there being only one professional warrior amongst them. Lilian tags along pretty much immediately, having no talents in healing, but sharing an interest in 'seeing to people' all the same, for some semi-mysterious reason, and using the time to accelerate how many people can be checked over, and to talk besides.

    Counter to what could be expected, she insists that Xion come with them. Probably figuring that having something to do, and being around a lot of elated, or at least relieved, people will take her mind off of whatever happened.
Xion There's a lot of terrible things that happen. But all she has to do is be a conduit. She doesn't even need to think or feel. All she has to do is be, and hold her Keyblade, and the power she had borrowed would return the power the floating Antegent had 'borrowed' from the earth.

S Celebrate!!

Xion's eyes are filled with a awesome in the classical sense cacophony of light, and colors, and radiant beauty. And then those 'people' - Tamamo no Mae, and Arthur Lowell - come down and ask her what's up. "Oh! I'm fine. I feel better after the celebration!" She smiles, and stands up more straight, offering an 'I'm fine!!!' empty laugh and dismissing her '''new''' keyblade via releasing it from her grip and letting it 'shwink!' back into her inventory. "Of course you have the power to heal my feel, Tamamo! Cookies are great. Really, a little food therapy solves everything. I'llllll be fine. I've reached out to feel some pretty wild stuff before!"

Yep, filling your emptiness with other things that are actively committed to your destruction is always healthy. Always!

"Thanks for the ride, thought!"

On the ground, Arthur tells the team to be careful with the spire. It gives Xion an odd, distant look. "It's... Lonely. Be gentle!"

Then she pulls a candy bar out of thin air and starts Snickers-ing.
Tomoe Tomoe does finally let up in her magical assault once she sees that the Antegent is taken out by the combined efforts of Arthur, Tamamo, Lilian, Xion. Her attacks did do some damage form what she saw as well she seems pleased even more so that Tamamo seems relatively unharmed.

Tomoe flies down to rejoin everyone else on the ground she does join the troops in their whoop of victory. This was a heck of a show today even by elite standards. Tomoe will look to Nobuko with a faint grin.

"Well this certainly counts as something of interest."

She seems in a good mood looking to Tamamo, Xion, Lilian and Arthur in turn.

"Hell of a thing, that one wasn't it?"

Seeing Tamamo is tending to Xion for a moment.

"I'll go help with the recovery ops."

At least for a little bit, there are a lot of Oda troopers who just got free of the Antegent. Still, it does seem like they mostly have it in hand with their more recently trained fellows.