Scene #7526: The Dragon's Garden-2

Owner	Pose
Lilian Rook	Some matters of fact had been settled on already when it comes to the strange, miniscule corner of the Japanese isles, currently desired by a certain Japanese goddess. Though the cause of its abandonment, and yet miraculous intactness, is still unknown, and the ultimate purpose and end of those who came after, yet vanished before you, is largely mystery and conjecture, the value of the nameless former village, sitting on top of an obvious wellspring of magical power and rare items, is obvious. The most significant, near-future threat to that would-be hamlet on the Dragon's Garden, is equally so. With an artificial Warpgate erected on the rise above the beach, at some expense, and evidently tapping into some of that wellspring to function, you're spared another three hours of kung-fu flicks in the back of Akihiko's seaplane. The sparse presence of imported essential equipment does little to make the enclosed valley feel more livable; more than anything, the filled corner of the yard and the cheap and portable modern accoutrements emphasize how much space hasn't been updated in a hundred and fifty years, and how much hasn't been cleaned or kept in forty. What's worth your attention is that swirling, silent mist at the periphery of the cliff tops and steep, forested hillside. With renewed and replaced wards of many varieties, the slow and steady incursion into the valley has progressed no further, but the fog has piled up behind it like a filled glass, creating the beginnings of a thick wall like the sky-high vista that surrounds you out to sea. There can only really be one reason for it, and it is one that could become more direly important at any time. Especially so if anyone seeks to actually stay here eventually, so the dress code amounts to 'come strapped'. There's not much military-grade hardware on site, which could indicate Lilian's limited access to it (plausible even for a rich girl) or the lack of expectation that it'll help (equally plausible for an Antegent with some time for research). What is primarily set up is some kind of aluminium telecom tower frame, with what looks like a router and small, last generation server bank plugged into the bottom, held up on hollow struts and topped with a swivel dish. The high, rocky flat it's been assembled on is covered in an elaborate carpet of delicately marked runes and geometrically placed burners, best not walked upon for risk of smudging something. She instructs you, straight away, to ditch your regular radios here for now, and take one of the identical earpieces she has to hand out, which seem to exclusively connect to that one tower. Annoyingly, there's about a quarter second delay on sending and receiving, even when you're five feet away from each other. You're also each given a steel pressed flare gun with a likewise heavily engraved red cartridge and green cartridge, and a length of local braided rope.
Miyamomo	"Oh, if I must~" Miyamomo says, taking the proffered radio. It takes a bit of fussing to affix the earpiece of her ears, finding a comfortable way to clip it on that doesn't muss her fur, but she manages in time. "Any particular reason my other device is no-good?" Upon getting an answer, she just kinda... goes and sits down in the middle of the area. The fact of the matter is this is a scientific expedition, and Miyamomo is no scientist. She can't tell you about /soil quality/ and the like. She lives to strike with her limbs. So really, by all accounts, she's kinda useless here. But that doesn't mean she's not doing anything. She smokes her pipe, violent smoke issuing forth. Her spirit essence leaks out, subtly, slowly filling the area with its invisible immensity. She feels the souls in the area; Lillian's still and deep, Tamamo's terrifyingly bright, Ben's refined yet begrimed. And so she reached further, beyond the fog, below the ground. Who is here?
Ben d'Tarkanan	The last time he was here, Ben had sent the soldiers and the priest to protect the clan's holdings. The soldiers would protect it in the martial sense, while the priest would see to the spiritual duties which death had denied him. Today, he was instructed to come strapped. 'Strapped' for him is thankfully still somewhat light. His sword and a treated leather jerkin are all he really needs. His radio--a thing of wood, brass and crystal, is turned off and discarded in favor of the earpiece provided by Lilian. The rope is threaded through a belt loop, the flare gun slipped into the pocket opposite his scabbard. "Well, Master Miyamomo, if I might hazard a guess," says Ben amiably, gesturing towards the radio tower, "I couldn't help noticing the runes there--I would therefore imagine there's a sympathetic connection between these," he says, tapping his new earpiece, "...and that tower." "Oh, that reminds me..." His sword is unsheathed. The pommel, a fanged, grinning many-eyed creature, gleams in the light. "Front and center!" His voice carries a weight, a certain raspy quality ordinarily absent, as if it is calling to something other than mortal ears. If those ghostly soldiers and their priest charge are still present, he'd hear from them how their efforts proceed and what threats may lurk besides the rather disconcerting abundance of fog.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Come strapped Can Arthur be strapped? Is it not perpetually a state of strappedness, to have a strife portfolio? Arthur has no idea what's coming up. I mean, the Dragon's Garden apparently didn't know shit about it! Arthur interrogated, and there was nothing. "So," Arthur wonders, examining a pile of captcha cards for his discarded smart-devices. "What's HAPS? We gonna get a SEPARATION type deal here? Or, we talkin' some kinda INFOHAZARD shit? Because HOLY FUCK." Arthur taps his radio. "That DELAY FUCKS WITH MY HEAD. It's like gettin' INTERRUPTED every time. You're LUCKY I got HELLA EXPERIENCE with INSOLENCE." He drifts into weightlessness as he captchalogues the flare gun, cartridges, and rope.
Tamamo	'Prepared for battle' has unclear meaning to Tamamo no Mae. Her battle dress is a by-now familiar, to some, set of formal robes. It would look more appropriate in some old court, perhaps, but she somehow makes dextrous use of even sleeves of that magnitude. Her mirror, stock still in the air, is present. There is surely some reason for Lilian to have provided this equipment, so goes Tamamo's immediate assumption, and so she accepts a new communication device, the other items disappearing into her outfit. As she situates the ear piece and speaks into it a few words, "Now, let us see..." and then hears the delayed response, she goes, "Oh! How unusual." Unusual, and inconvenient, though it reminds her of something. "Is it as the Seekers used...?" Only a moment later, in looking about, does she realize that no one else here had stood on that particular beach, speaking through a minutes-long delay to some very unusually cautious fellows in a tower. Still, it's the only example that comes to mind. "Now, are we quite prepared for a hunt?" There aren't as many here now as there were some while ago, but Tamamo can clearly recall who was most enthused at word of an opponent, and that immensely present presence isn't the easiest to miss. "To merely encounter an enemy should not be difficult. It has only been waiting for more prey, rather than having gone into hiding, yes? Or no, I suppose we should call them 'victims.' It is not as if the Antegent kill for food, among all those I have yet seen. 'Enemies,' perhaps, if one supposes they, too, to be soldiers, of a kind." And that seems to reminds her, as Ben calls out to the shades. "Ah, sir d'Tarkanan. I did go and listen to the word of such family as these men may still have, not too far away, among those lands still occupied. 'Rest and closure' was their wish. I can most easily imagine 'rest,' but a soldier I have never been, and so I shall ask you, how and whether a soldier with service unfulfilled shall find 'closure.' Though they," she gestures subtly to the ghosts, "are a recent meeting and little talkative, have you thoughts on this?"
Lilian Rook	"Research." Lilian replies to Miyamomo, in that simultaneously clipped yet casually detached tone she always seems to have around these times, as if something couldn't be any more ordinary and yet couldn't be any more serious for everyone else. "This fog --the 'Mist of Souls' as it's been historically recorded-- is a known quantity. It comes from a Titan-class Cipher type confirmed eliminated in 2045, but it's all over the main isles in various stripes, so it's believed it may be secondarily Convergence classified; that is to say, if that mist is still spreading or moving, there are probably still subdivisions, or 'inheritor' units, left over. If it's not that, then it's sure to be another Cipher type with a shared plane of interaction, which is the same problem." She doesn't even need to point out the router tower. "Cipher types beyond the lower classes are pretty rare. Even with the originating Antegent dead, it's still a high density information hazard. It's almost definitely the case that unsecured communication is going to face severe interference at best, or become an attack vector at worst, so I'm having us rout all of our chatter through that array." She raises an eyebrow at Arthur. "You'll have to pardon the delay; it's necessary to thoroughly screen, interpret, and reconstruct something as complicated as speech. I thought that sort of lag might be familiar with you and those videogames." "Red flare for an emergency, green flare for having found something important. I can't guarantee the colours won't get mixed up without those protections on them. Likewise, use that rope whenever you find a landmark you want to navigate by. You don't have to keep it out all the time, but it'd be best if you use it to define ranges and distances from things that are visible from one position to the next." Though they feel somehow more 'distant' than last time, Ben's summons to order are well-received through the sympathetic context of battle against this enemy. Slim rows of translucent silhouettes form up behind him, wavering in the day. For what he is able to gather from them, they have indeed seen that fog pile up against the warded border for a couple of weeks now, and occasionally seen something moving around outside the periphery. It's never come near the old village shrines, for whatever reason, but seems to show some repetitive interest in the runes and talismans put down recently, which have occasionally needed re-maintenance. They've yet to find it physically present. However, one does report the oddity, in what quasi-words he is able, that the obsolete old stereo radio Ben had found at the town hall before has been playing of its own accord, albeit little more than noise.
Ben d'Tarkanan	Ben lowers his sword with a pensive frown. His right hand is brought up, thumb and forefinger rubbing at the corners of his mouth. "Here as in Sharn, Your Grace, your observations provoke much thought. I'm grateful," he sincerely adds. "These men are the ones who 'lived,' after a fashion. They're very much dead now, of course, but not because of any great battle. Rather..." That hand runs through his hair as he searches for words. "The priest appears to have died first, before the roads and shrines could be reconsecrated--" A sudden flash of inspiration alights in his eyes, and he wheels around, snapping his finger. "Burial rites! Of course. The ones who did die in battle were buried properly, but the others... they weren't able to fully protect the island with no priest and dwindling numbers. My first thought was to put them to work rebuilding the island that they might fulfil their obligation to the clan's holdings. That seems to have worked to some extent, as you no doubt see by their fading spectral cauls. But perhaps we need more. Not only must the island be brought back, and protected," he says, wagging an index finger excitedly, "Rut they must be given funeral rites fitting for loyal retainers of the clan once their work is done. They must know, beyond shadow of doubt, that they have satisfied their duty." "What say you, Your Grace? Would you honor these men thusly, once our work here is done?" He scratches his chin. "...assuming you haven't already performed them," he says, second-guessing himself and taking wind from his own sails. There's a self conscious clearing of his throat. And... a subtle change in his demeanor. He turns to address the ghostly soldiers. "We make for the radio first. The enemy can't be allowed to gain a foothold, and based on Dame Rook's description, that's precisely what I fear it shall be, if left alone. In the interest of safety, we will form a firing line around the building and out of earshot, like so," he says, illustrating a crescent-shaped formation in the dirt. "I shall melt a hole in the building through which we shall all destroy the radio at range with concentrated fire. I and the priest shall seal the site with magics arcane and divine, respectively. Then..." His jaw clenches, his grip on the sword's elongated handle tightening. "Then we will regroup with the others and join them in their hunt." There's a sharp whistle. A beautiful white horse canters over, fitted with a finely-made, slightly extravagant saddle, which Ben easily hops astride. Clicking his tongue, he coaxes the horse into a light gallop towards the indicated region, where he will attempt to do precisely what he said.
Lilian Rook	Pushing into the fog itself is no more pleasant than it has been, for those couple familiar with it. Though it immediately consumes all sight of the trees and surf and sun, it doesn't quite block all light; enough that flashlights or summoned magic flames are almost mandatory to illuminate the gloom, but never enough that one can't see the grey colour of the mist just ahead of them, and the ground a few steps to either side. Less like being blind, it is like being isolated, as if nothing outside your reach, or the beam of your light, really exists. The earth is, as ever, like ground glass. The surface has been completely silicated by some means, worn into smooth but uncomfortable pebbles that click and clatter with uncomfortably sharp sounds when disturbed. Nothing grows and nothing stirs here, though the fog itself seems to swirl slowly around you of its own accord, cold and heavy, like fingers weakly pulling on your clothes from somewhere at waist height. Your own voices sound different; it takes a little to realize that it's the absence of the subtle vibrations in the skull that make it sound different to the speaker's own ears. Miyamomo's violet smoke penetrates the area in a weak sense. No special force holds it back, but the smoke and the mist are like oil and mist, and there is a much higher ambient density and pressure of mist. Where it brushes up against Lilian, it only tinges black, with tiny embers of gold, revealing nothing in particular as is how it's supposed to go. Where it caresses the ground, it summons up the weak ghosts of faded green grasses, ghostly clear pools, silent cicadas and shadows of birds; the faint hum of traffic chases one like an echo, until stumbling forward enough eventually brings one to the long bend of a worn and crumbled highway road. Though bleached of its markings, its orientation means that it should pass right into the village behind you, though no such road is there. Beside it, is the remains of an old sheet aluminium road sign, its face scrambled into illegibility, like the letters had merely been drawn on in marker, and all melted and smudged around by a finger into meaningless new symbols. Eventually, reaching far enough in, the wisps of insubstantial smoke curl around the contours of a splintered steel scaffold, and are dyed with ashen red and white. Moments later, they are dyed in sound instead. The surroundings oscillate in a way that feels like a heat haze and a waveform visualizer at the same time, vibrating in an uncomfortable, queasy way. White noise subtly fills your ears, though not your radios, and you begin to hear the crackled sounds of many different voices, washed of their original tone and feeling like the wan and run-down road. "--you're listening to station AM 165 with--" "--the prime minister today said that--" "--population shrinkage has become a serious issue for job placement in--" "--A state of emergency has been declared. All residents of--" "--won with a score of nineteen to four in last Friday's--" "--repeat, all civilians are to shelter in place, away from all windows, mirrors, and screens. Do not look outside, do not--" "--our guest speaker today about his new book--" "--Japan's most famous natural park reserve has seen a record--" "--requesting final protective fire, danger close on my command, over! Confirming FPF1--" The noise trails off into a brief burst of incoherent screaming, and then the sounds of back to back 2000s era J-pop.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: "Why's it called the MIST OF SOULS?" "Is that just some TRANSLATION SHIT, or, what?" Arthur checks. Then he spends a little time scratching his chin, trying to figure out how to think about this. "So we're looking for INHERITOR UNITS or another CIPHER ANTEGENT. Hmmm..." >Arthur: Can you figure out a way to find something that damages information? Trying to gather information on something that damages information is like trying to gather specimens of a biohazard. It's meant to counteract the process to begin with. But finding it... You have to find the gaps, the things that get poisoned. He starts with an unusual pattern of ANALYSIS combined with TELEPORTATION. He gets out into the surroundings and starts spreading out micro-gates. They're constructed out of essential geometric information, and this seems to pollute and attack streams of information. By sending paired microgates out in every direction and judging their drift, decay, and damage. It's the equivalent of a series of geiger-muller tubes in radial configuration, creating what Arthur hopes will be a info-geo geiger counter of sorts. He's hoping he can use to determine the approximate directions of damaging information contamination imperceptible to the human eye, or to complex instruments. He just needs to get a direction. That's the hope!
Miyamomo	Miyamomo doesn't immediately respond to Ben. She is, for the moment, quite literally not all there. She is touching the fog and wilting, feeling the grass, hearing the communique of days gone by. Pop culture and current affairs mingle with state of emergency declarations and calls for bombardments. Eventually, she does snap back to herself and says, "Ah, well, I leave that kind of thing to the people of today. An old woman such as me couldn't even begin to understand~" She stands up and dusts off her robe before pocketing her pipe. "Well, I think it's about time we just cut to the heart of things." She ties the rope around her waist, securing the other end near the tower, and walks towards that thick forest, where the edge of the barrier is holding back the fog that roils against it. She considers the rope and flare gun she's been handed. "Let's see... you pull this while pointing it in the air... okay." And with that, she tries to stride into the mist.
Tamamo	"Though it is a priest's role to know the supplications of spirits and consolation of the bereaved, I, too, am familiar with these things," Tamamo says to Ben. "I shall see to this when the moment is opportune. It is only uncertainty for their wishes that did require I hesitate. Though I have not their perspective, and may not understand, I would not wish to deny any the choosing of their last moments, whether they wish them to pass swiftly, or in some final service. Do you understand my meaning?" There is that tone of uncertainty, despite the dignified grace she usually presents, an overt acknowledgment that there are motives on which she's reluctant to intrude, the earnest desires of military men among them. Lilian's explanation provokes some thought, "Is this name purely artistic, or shall we expect souls, or perhaps the mere appearance of souls, within the mist?" Tamamo slides the flares back out of her sleeves to be sure she has the colors straightened out, as Lilian explains their purpose. "Moreover, if the same name is applies to mists throughout the isles, should we expect to see the instigators so spread about, as well?" Momentarily deflated, "How troublesome, that might be. I shall hope for no more than a local herd." At Ben making for the radio, however, Tamamo asks, surprised, "Is it so needed? These 'Cipher-class' are a mysterious variety of curse, and the measures against them likewise, when placed against radio and other modern convenience. I suppose we must first ensure our safety." The level of appropriate response to possible technological vectors of an infohazard are difficult for a 12th-century fox to intuit. Tamamo concludes, after a few moments, that Ben's reaction is the correct one, and also that he'll be able to handle it. That being the case, she turns to walk after Miyamomo. Politely, "Ah, please allow me to accompany you." Tamamo doesn't create a fire to light the way so much as a hot, shining light, a miniature impression of the Sun that floats along above, carrying equivalent mystical significance. It does seem unfortunately unlikely that this fog will be especially vulnerable to solar elements, but that is the undeniable flavor of her essence, and tapping into that essence is remarkably more effective than mere magecraft, as far as her own techniques go. "How peculiar. This was moved here, or else reconstructed, but for either case, I cannot yet name a purpose."
Lilian Rook	"I'm not a native speaker or anything. People give these kinds of things names that catch on before, or catch on better, than the official name. That's how it always is." Lilian says to Arthur. "I wouldn't expect any literal souls of any kind. That's a distinctly high magic kind of thing. I suppose it'd be more like 'the essence of things', or things that bring to mind 'spirits'. Or maybe something like that 'ghosts in the tall grass' saying." she adds for Tamamo. Ben, separated from those venturing into the mist, is guided in as much as it matters by the barely-there daytime shades of his ghostly contacts. He arrives in that dusty, vacant assembly hall, with its low stage, faded mats, scarce chairs, long counter, and defunct equipment. Before he'd need to get very close, he can hear the described, grating radio whine wafing through the open windows, hissing and squealing as old wires do when picking up random or disorganized waves. He also hears several other things, bereft of tone or character. "--leave that kind of thing to the people of today.--" "--instigators so spread out--" "--looking for INHERITOR--" "--couldn't even begin to understand~--" "--that just some TRANSLATION SHIT, or--" "--how troublesome, that might be.--" "--Research. This fog--" "--the others...--" "--died first--" "--MIST OF SOULS--" "--face severe interference--" "--should not be difficult--" "--What's HAPS?--" "---It's like gettin' INTERRUPTED--" "--if I must~--" "--become an attack vector--"
Lilian Rook	Arthur saves everyone a lot of trouble. It is in the manner of causing trouble, but that was a foregone conclusion. He already knows that his attempts to gate into this general area go poorly, so throwing out gates left and right is simultaneously a no-brainer and yet requires a big nerd brain that Lilian, somewhat astonished, pays a compliment to, in the form of "I wasn't aware you were involved in the sciences at all, never mind cryptography." The microgates scatter in a seemingly semi-random fashion, somewhat like rounding errors somewhere in the endless cascade of decimal numbers that measure points in space, though not nearly as greatly as his larger transport gates. The error that he picks up, with roughly compass-like direction, is that the visual aspect of what he can see and feel beyond those gates is scrambled with a certain amount of 'grain', wherein the erroneous metaphorical pixels, rather than being streaks of off-colour, are coordinates belonging to the area proximate the town hall and obsolete rooftop radio mast. It's impossible to get a clear read on where the gate leads or the alternate destination. Part of that seems to be obvious enough; there are miniscule flickers of visions and senses of energy, more perceptible to the kitsunes, of the roadside statue; the shrine to the god of roads and boundaries. More apparent to Arthur, significant grain where the highway should, and doesn't, connect to the valley. It gives him a functioning hot-cold machine though. Better. It guides the group well through the mist, across vast, vacant, dark and silent fields between snaking ribbons of asphalt and eerie nonsense signage --the only things that seem to have been spared being turned to some form of silicate-- until it arrives at a major nexus of eight different roads, on a two level overpass with all the worst kinds of spirals and ramps.
Lilian Rook	Once meant to try and direct intersecting traffic across competing lines to different ends of the province, the shadow of the overpass now only harbours a dense tangle of pitch black crystals with an oily, iridescent sheen, reaching jaggedly outwards down every direction of approach, like walls of pikes meant to menace away cars and travellers. In amongst them, piercing the crumbled second level highway itself, is a silica-like lattice that reaches at least twenty meters, webbed together in a crude, if not entirely coincidental, facsimile of the tower Miyamomo's mist had touched earlier. It is also surrounded by ranks of barely humanoid shapes, ten to twenty deep, filling the roadsides in all eight directions. Long lances of oily black glass strung together at hair fine points, in irregular imitations of people. Having no correct joints in the first place, they are found sitting on invisible chairs, warming point-hands over invisible drums, reclining a foot off the road in an invisible driver's seat, holding invisible phones up to their triangular heads, and reading invisible maps before their faces, many stooped and laden down with invisible backpacks or dragging invisible wagons. A bizarre, frozen pastiche of 'people that might have once passed by'. They're frozen up until the group approaches closely enough. Sparks of light arc between the main lattice and the ranks of perfectly still crystal mannequins. A high-pitched cutting squeal causes the air to vibrate, and then the grainy, inflectionless words resonate: "--I'm not a native speaker--" "--will regroup with the others and join them--""--these things--" "--catch on better--" "--Now, are we quite prepared for a hunt?--" The rattling of a hundred and some individual bodies all animating at once is drowned out by a hiss of static and the loud, crystal clear tones of the #1 chart topper 'Phantom Minds' by Nana Mizuki, which continues to blithely play at maximum volume while you're swarmed by the Dark Fighting Polygon Team, all of which get to bend all of their joins 360 degrees, ignore losing limbs or body chunks, stab right through body armour and halfway through most barriers, fly through the air, and explode into razor sharp shrapnel.
Ben d'Tarkanan	The horse nickers outside as Ben instructs the ghostly soldiers to form that firing line. "Guns at the ready," he says quietly. But there's... something about that second bit. Translation shit? Haps? It's as if the words have been scrubbed clean of any identifying inflection, but there's only one person here he knows who would speak that way. It gives him pause. Enough to cause him to think of that long string of snipped-together phrases as more than just gibberish. A chill runs down his spine. "Fire," he says urgently, loosing a gout of highly corrosive acid from the point of his blade. The acidic lance spears through walls and furnishings alike on its path to the radio, leaving a hole large enough for the ghostly soldiers to fire their weapons. Of course it's not going to be physical bullets. But he's not taking any chances. "Priest, seal it!" A sound-muffling spell is hurled next, without even checking to see if the acid has melted the radio. His knuckles white as he grips the sword in a panic, his other hand darts to the radio. "Something is in the fog," he stammers with anxious breathlessness. "Hello? Hello?! Can you hear me? It knows we're here and it knows what we're doing." The necromancer motions for the ghosts to follow him and hurries out to his horse, racing back towards the encampment to enter the fog from a point he imagines closer to his allies. I can do this. I can do this. I can't let it get them. The rope, there, on the tower! I can follow that. At least, he can attempt to. This is the bad kind of fog. Whether it will distort Miyamomo's rope, he doesn't know. But it's something. The horse gallops through the mist and arrives in time to rear up in view of the oily black polygonal humanoids just as they stir to life like crystalline puppets. "Open fire," he hollers in a panic. "Kill them! Kill them now!"
Miyamomo	The Fighting Polygon Team appear. Miyamomo says "Finally. Something I can contend with." She assumes a stance - legs spread, her left arm extended far out, the right held close against her stomach. And the violence begins. She had said 'Yes' previously to Tamamo asking what kind of style the 'nameless' style was. It's now apparent she meant it in the sense that it encompasses everything. It's hard to follow her movements, but she lingers long enough from place to place to create brief glimpses, some of them almost playing simultaneously, like her mastery has freed her from the flow of linear time. She grabs a crystalline arm and bends it, turning force against the arm's owner to throw them into a crowd of their fellows, but then follows up with a fast and hard corkscrew punch that redoubles the spinning force and sends them flying and spinning, pushing that crowd into further crowds. She juggles one in the air with a flurry of kicks that make the air hiss like a pit of snakes before planting the unfortunate figure into the ground with a reverse bicycle kick that drives her leg down upon their head. Her fingers dance against the belly of another, each touch creating a clear, pure sound out of their crystal bodies. And when the little melody is done, they instantly crumble into tiny shards at her feet. A chop severs a head and impales it on another's spike, nullifying their incoming attack. A one-inch punch creates a hole. One is grabbed, and cracks apart in her hold. She's not slowing down. If anything, she's getting faster. Unfortunately, she has a long way to go as a bodyguard. Any time she intercepts one menacing someone else, it never seems intentional. Her mind is not here, with her companions. It exists only in her strikes and her targets. All else is ancillary in this moment.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Hey woah she knows! "Shhh! Keep it on the down low, yo! It's, uhh... I picked it up from some nerd I saw doin' it. Never learned it." Cough. This is an absolutely awful lie. "Thanks, though." The guide at least works, helping the others through the mist. >Arthur: Don't read the signs!! What signs? Arthur makes sure to ignore the nonsense on flat surfaces, though, rather than try to make any sense of information therein. He's got some smarts. Smarts doesn't get him far enough here. What gets him far is rumbling. The ability to dive in with broom and bloodlust. Which, thankfully, he has plenty of! These are monsters, not people. He brandishes his broom and howls a battle-cry. >Arthur: Strife! Hell yeah. Arthur revs his broom, ignites his rockets, and rushes. Stabs and slashes rip through chunks of his Health Vial, certainly, but he can negate some of their key advantages. He blasts areas with AoE antigravity, leaving Fighting Polygon Team drifting and weightless, unable to exploit their 360-degree range of motion for maneuvering, and leaving them exposed to Ben d'Tarkanan's soldiers and guns, and potentially the ranged options Tamamo might have. He slams faces, and crunches spines. He can set his broom to a high setting and rip them apart without guilt. He can't keep up with Miyamomo, and so he doesn't try. He knows how to operate on the field with a Bard-class fighter's tactics, and so he rushes through her wake, taking up her tailwind and widening the gash she carves in the enemy clusters with his own brutal, grinding strikes. In a way, a blender has finally found one of the ideal enemies. Reducing these bodies to chunks is probably the most effective way to get rid of the risk they present. "Come at meeeee, get some HURT in you, you LOD DOA SOBs! Show me the SHARPEST CORNERS YOU GOT, motherfuckers!"
Tamamo	With their path now guided, Tamamo continues lighting the way. Remarking upon the signs and their indecipherable, nonsense labels, "I wonder at those particular differences, the points where the similarity ends, giving the rough, impressionist appearance of a thing, but without the details that give it meaning. How needlessly precise, at times, as if in caricature, yet wholly careless or ignorant at others." They arrive at a crossroads. "Here, see, yet more of the same of which I speak. Oh, but it seems the time for rambling is at an end." Specifically, because the thing is threatening them. Tamamo clicks her tongue. Purposefully speaking to her oddly-delayed radio, Tamamo responds to Ben, "We have found it. Can you see...? Oh, yes!" She begins backing up, at the same time one of the flare guns from one voluminous sleeve. Aimed to the air, the trigger squeezed, she fires the red light up at an angle in front of her, shot over the triangular, glass heads of the opposing fighting team. An army would be useful here, for the massed fire to break apart the glass before it reaches. Or else, perhaps, the speed and good CQC sense to avoid being struck at all. Lacking either of these, Tamamo relies on her usual combination of caution, an effectively indestructible mirror to deflect blows, and some quickly erected barrier magic. With dozens of quickly (and strangely) moving enemies, well-geared for piercing armor, and without the usual cover to which she has, perhaps, become too accustomed, this quickly proves a poor choice. Before she can think of a way to deal with the central problem, that thing past this mob, enough of the sharp-cornered enemies have reached her that she can't ward every angle with her mirror, can't swing it without exposing itself, and-- Hissing breath. Clenched teeth. Tamamo kicks off the ground, hard, her mirror following up after her, then becoming perfectly still in the air once more, providing a panel from which she can kick off a second time, altering her angle to avoid that flying interception. One hand clutched to her side, the other rooting for the appropriate healing talisman from her fortunately-ample supplies, she angles her path in-between Arthur's anti-gravity fields and the field of the ghost's guns. Between the two of those, and a handful of blood-specked thundering-curse talismans that drop behind her like landmines with aerial triggers, she aims to catch any pursuit in one of the above, and regain distance. She does not, quite, say anything for a short while. Then, "That central form. The web of dark glass, that lattice-work tower. Focus upon... this, if you please. These are only... a mockery of memory."
Lilian Rook	THEN: "I've seen all kinds of things. Even I can't say that I'm such a quick study that I can pick up something like that just because I've seen someone, somewhere, master it." Lilian says to Arthur, now very much in the sarcastic, knowing faux-compliment range for a moment, before descending back to dry, semi-private honesty. "I'm sure you have the potential to do even better than that. Put in your best efforts, and who knows where you might be in a year or two. That, and stop thinking it'll be the end of the world if someone happens to think you know what you're doing." More conversationally to Tamamo, Lilian says "There are a great number of theories on whether Antegent possess the concept of language. Or rather, it's generally agreed upon that they do, and they must, for the fact that the function and existence of information must be universal --otherwise you just have a realm of endless, incomprehensible chaos-- and the theories have to do with why Antegent cannot comprehend ours. That is to say, those intelligent enough to do so often display a consistent recognition of language, but none of its content; as far as we know, it's all just 'humans communicating' to them. Enough study went into it to determine that code phrases and radio silence are widely unnecessary outside of Cipher-type threats." She spares a glance for the sign, but only that. "We've tried cracking those before. Either they're just artifacts of the way they interact with things, or it's a form of communication we can't even possibly conceptualize. I personally lean on the former; after all, who's going to be out here reading something like that? At best, there might be a sense of intent --you've heard some of them make pain-adjacent noises when damaged, or repeating sounds when alerted-- but I doubt there's any intent to communicate with us behind it." She bangs her knuckles on the sign disrespectfully as they pass. THEN: The walls of a humble town hall of a rural Japanese hamlet are no match for Ben's magic. The stereo is swiftly turned to so much acrid mist, and the antique hardwood and old, dusty tatami go with it. His first experience with ghosts firing guns like this is an odd one, as he can neither hear nor see the gunshots, but see the pantomimes of carefully managed recoil, and scores of deep holes walk their way across the wall and roof, causing the mast to crumble to bits along so many invisible lines as if disintegrating of its own accord. The braided rope is his to follow, though it is tied to another donated one along the way; certainly it must be blessed in some relevant local way, for it to exist both inside and outside the fog at once.
Lilian Rook	NOW: Lilian grimaces faintly at the mass of enemies. "I can already tell that's way too many of them for this to go smoothly. I'd advise against trying to kill every single one of them. That is unless you think you can just burn the whole place down in one go; feel free." Immediately recognizing the futility of trying to gun them all down with conventional means on her own, she likewise moves to the air at her first opportunity, assembling an offensive spell circle for a wide area bombardment, only to see the runes blur and smudge and jumble into uselessness as fast as she can conjure them. "Tch. Really? So the sword is the only option?" It should be said that the level of prowess Miyamomo displays in hand to hand combat is far and away outside the bounds of what her opponents can deal with. Despite their numbers, despite the way they move nothing like humans, despite their unconstrained speed, the individual is far enough beneath her that the limits of how many can attack her at once make their prospects basically irrelevant. The issue is that any she doesn't reduce to fine gravel, after a few seconds of inactivity, reassemble themselves within moments. Given they were a bunch of rocks floating in space in the first place, being divided into smaller rocks is essentially relevant. They certainly can't be considered 'the Antegent' themselves. Arthur is almost literally on sweeping duty, trying to use his battle broom to grind up the enemies reforming in Miyamomo's wake, himself coming under attack at the same time when they surround him. The antigravity field, previously a highly effective tactic, seems to have no real use here. Though the horde is initially cast up into the air in a disorganized jumble, it takes them little effort to reorient themselves in a dizzying, kaleidoscopic way, and descend once again. Many of them even begin to take off after Tamamo and Lilian, simply spiralling through the air as collections of loosely connected jagged shards. Many are blown to smithereens by Tamamo's talismans, but the remainder of the mines quickly decay into blurry, ink-smudged worthlessness, and the excess assault has to be handled by Lilian diving aggressively into the oncoming ranks, her sword effectively invisible in the dark, save for the leaping red streamers that split them down the middle. The melee is going nowhere fast like this. Worse, the scores of entities that cannot engage in close combat begin to rise up onto the overpass, and then discharge their crystals at incredibly high speed, feeding on the greater cluster to quickly replace their spent mass and fire again, placing foot long silicate spikes too accurately for comfort. Even worse than that, when the group grinds through an appreciable portion of the ranks, that massive cluster of dark and menacing spikes begins breaking off on its own, assembling new soldiers from the several tons of crystal clogging the entire intersection, ensuring that the number of enemies steadily goes up rather than down. Ben arriving at the last minute with considerable reinforcements seems to change the situation. Not only are ranks of ghosts with inexhaustible spectral automatics considerably more useful at crowd control, and not only are they poetically quick to respond with an obvious adaptation of their clan's most famous warlord's favoured three line tactic, but the spectral priests themselves are able to lay down an imitation of their magics in life, for the silence of their blurred lips. With the crowd beginning to be pushed back, and the rows of snipers picked off, by a wall of invisible gunfire and curses, both Lilian and an appreciable number of the ghosts appear to agree with Tamamo.
Lilian Rook	Lilian, with the power of flight, advances immediately on the 'tower', with a path held open by streams of spectral suppressive fire. The moment she gets close, that sparking light runs up the entire lattice column, and explodes from the top in a sort of radial pulse of static grain, riding the edge of a huge, expanding cloud of grey mist. When the fog hits, the most intense feeling of static electricity imaginable follows, pricking all the skin of one's body and filling the ears with a skull-piercing whine and ghastly squeal. The radio sounds retreat to a dull, purposeful burble, like several police scanners running over each other in the distance, and everything beyond arm's reach disappears into the mist. All the other sounds go with it. It's just the mist and the road. A road, singular. There were several of them, but for each individual within the condensed mist, there is just one. A road that stretches into the dim, foggy distance. Processions of shuffling shapes retreat far into the distance, with signs of flashing lights and meaningless radio-like noise dimly beyond them. You feel something terrible on your heels; something too big and vague to envision, but too menacing to ignore, making it more and more uncomfortable by the second to stay. There is hope ahead. Hope and also fear. To stay is to be alone. To move ahead, along the road, is to find safety and reprieve from whatever it is that chases you. All you have to do is follow the road. No signs, no markings, no directions, but it doesn't matter; just go forward. You have to. It won't be able to get you if you can just get past the end of the road. The whole thing breaks apart with a terrible, burnt-cable squeal of tortured electronics. A lifeless rendition of Arthur yelling "--HURT--" "--HURT--" "--HURT--" "--HURT--" plays on a glitchy, rapid loop, then breaking into "--HURT in--" "--the sword--" "--HURT in--" "--the sword--" and degrading into "--Fire--" "--Fire--" "--Fire--" "--Fire--". The wave of fog passing reveals the lattice tower cut through on all four corners, its tips smouldering bright, lurid red, whilst it topples over top from bottom. The parade of polygonal fighters quickly seizes up in waves of paralytic spasms, and stop getting up again once struck. The glowing red from the clean slices through the tower is creeping down its pillars, disintegrating the black crystal as if it were catching fire in slow motion. The radio noise returns, for a minute more. Just enough to gasp something roughly comprehensible through the distortion of a dying wire. "--careless or ignorant at--" "--Something is in the--" "--endless, incomprehensible chaos--" "--someone, somewhere--" "--HURT--" "--couldn't even begin to--" "--contend with--" "--too many of them for--" "--Kill them now!--" "--possess the concept of--" "--the end of the world--" "--Kill them!--" "--humans communicating--" "--wholly careless or ignorant--" "--mockery of memory--" "--can you see?--" "--year or two--" "--Fire--" "--kill every single one of them--" "--the end of the world--" "--sword is the only option--" "--posses the concept of--" "--for--" "--for--" "--for--" "--for--" Falling out of its erratic loop, the remainder of the dark, menacing hulk disintegrates into red sparks, playing the notes of hit y2k Japanese single "Neo Universe/Finale" until they gradually fade away into a mere echo, and then nothing.