Scene #7548: Sixth District: City Hall

Owner	Pose
Operator	The City Hall of New Donk City was once a modest brick building with some tasteful extensions. Not anymore though. Now a mass of scaffolding supporting a multitude of new additions, never maintaining a consistent theme. A medieval stone tower stands in the courtyard a newly built wing in the shinden-zukuri style. A Baroque belltower juts out of a neoclassical villa. It looks hideous, slapdash, and most definitely a violation of several codes. The perfect summation of how Senator Wario handles things. DK stands out front, holding a small golden key delicately between giant thumb and forefinger. Deposed Mayor Pauline is with him, alongside the enigmatic figure of Great Gullet. Even in daylight, they seem cast in shadow. "All right, this is it," Pauline says to the assembled. "Thankfully, you won't have to deal with too many Enfarcers. Ever since you took down the police chiefs, they're not being produced, and some of the ones still active turn against the others. As far as I can tell, Wario's secretary is the only person in there." Great Gullet sniffs and speaks, again in that crackly voice. "Don't underestimate Mona. Everyone you have faced thus far was in it for their own ends. She is a true Wario loyalist. She won't surrender so easily." DK has already turned all this out as he approaches the front doors and gingerly inserts the key. Once again, Wario flies in the face of all common sense. The locks have not been changed. Pauline's key is still good. "Yes!" she says, clearly pleased. "If the locks haven't been changed, then neither have the passwords. Great Gullet and I will see what Wario has been up to, while you deal with his secretary."
Operator	The doors swing inwards, revealing a lush reception area, loaded with an assortment of crap. Buzzsaws and pendulum blades lay on the floor under disco balls, bulks orders of classical witch brew ingredients, sheets of metal and technical components, maps of the city's highway and sewage networks. It's a who's-who of things those assembled have seen elsewhere in New Donk. Behind the reception desk is a girl with her feet up and her face buried in a magazine, listening to a radio. The familiar voice of Funky Kong drifts from it, currently in the middle of a news update. "...nator Mayor Wario's approval rating has hit an all time low folks! Right now sitting at a whopping -1% (remember, there is a 1% margin of error)! Needless to say, folks are fed up, and why wouldn't ya be? Luckily, that baboon loon DK is on his way to the mayor's office right now to put that fat fool in his-" "Oh shut up!" the receptionist shouts, kicking the radio to turn it off. She slams the magazine down, revealing bright orange hair She wears a fashionable white jacket over a black suit with pencil skirt and grey tights, the classic office lady look. "Jerk just doesn't get how great Wario is... those bulging muscles, that charming voice... that nose for treasure!" Only now does she realize she has company. Face slightly flushed, she coughs into her fist and says, "Welcome to the office of Mayor Wario and his Council. I'm Mona!" she says, with the perfect retail smile. The one that seems genuine, but anyone who has ever worked retail can see the 'I really wish I wasn't here right now' in it. "And you're the ones who have been defeating the Council for their keys. Mine is right here." She tugs on the laynard around her neck with her ID badge and keycard on it. Indeed, there is a golden key right there. "And to be honest, I was just going to give it to you when you all showed up. I'm not much of a fighter, and I know Wario would beat you all when you got to him. But..." Her hand makes a fist, and she slams it on the desk. Her smile is gone now, replaced by a genuine, angry frown. "You all made Ashley and Ana cry. You wrecked Penny's dreams. You crashed Spitz and Dribble's prized taxi. And you made me have to look at Jimmy T's chesthair when he showed up naked! So I'm sorry, but I can't let you walk away from here without a little payback for them!" She sits, and the sound of a revving engine roars from behind the desk. She was not sitting on an office chair, but rather a scooter. And with expert handling, she peels out of the office, through the doors in the back to vanish deeper into City Hall!
Hellwarming Trio	There's a pair of unfamiliar faces present today, although it'd be pretty hard to mistake them for Wario's lackeys. Sure, they might not have been in this part of the world before, but they certainly aren't threatening the crew at the front of city hall. If anything, they're flitting around like curiosity-stricken children despite looking like anything but. Utsuho: "So there's not gonna be a fight?" Rin: "Nah, there's definitely gonna be one. She just said the secretary wouldn't surrender!" Utsuho: "How tough is a secretary going to be, anyway?" They find out sooner rather than later as they enter the building, gawking at their surroundings and trying to comprehend the colors, the decor, the secretary greeting them when they walk in. After returning her greeting with light waves of their own, the one in white gives the one in black a pensive look when Mona outright admits to not being a fighter. Utsuho: "Maybe we can just let the big monkey deal with it." Rin: "Yeah, but then what're we gonna do? Grab ev-" Wait. Mona's getting fired up. Raising an eyebrow with growing interest, Utsuho slaps Rin on the back firmly as she flaps her wings to take the sky. "That's more like it! Come on, let's see where this is all going!" With that, she chases after Mona while Rin climbs onto her wheelbarrow, following after them like a... Like a cat-and-human-eared girl on a suspicious flying wheelbarrow.
Gaonoir	"This hodgepodge of architectual inconsistency almost looks like something four warlords with extremely polarizing thematics would twist together thinking they had to make their domain higher than any other." Erika pauses to push her glasses onto the bridge of her nose properly, then notices the stare Gaonoir is giving her. "What?" After a moment the canid just shakes his head and snorts. "Nothing." Better to not induldge her conspiracy theories any more than they already are. He reachs back to give the tails of his headband a tug to make sure it's properly in place. "Let's just get on with this case. It's not even the weirdest thing we've been assigned to." Fortunately the key works. Or unfortunately, depending on your point of view. There will probably be plenty of things to break later, so we'll let this one slide. Inside... is about as erratic as expected. Lots of differently themed materials, much like the outside construction, and a receptionist not doing her job in the most cliche fashion possible. While going on about... is she really talking about the same guy as the radio that she so rudely kicked off? Then spouts off a long list of so-called offenses. "Now, that." Erika waggles a finger at the woman. "That, is weird. Every one of those incidents certainly brought the results upon themselves in their madcap escapa--" Mona rips off on a scooter from behind the desk before Erika can get fully into a counter-argument. "Aauh! Why do they always have to make things difficult?!" Gaonoir on the other hand is instantly in pursuit, vaulting over the desk with ease and charging into the depths of the building after the scootalooing secretary with nary a second thought.
Liza Grier	Liza is on site and suited up, as always when it comes to this nonsense city. She has negative interest in Mayor Pauline at the moment, but Wario, as she's come to unfortunately accept, monopolizes the rest of it. The garlic-smelling bastard is just too weird to let it lapse. Seeing Donkey Kong trying to manipulate the ridiculously tiny key, she sighs, stepping up with the magic of CROWBAR at the ready. "There's no way he--" she begins to say, just before the lock clicks open. Even Liza needs a moment, then just drops the crowbar on the ground, annoyingly loud. "For fuck's sakes." she moans, gripping the mask with one hand. "So by the looks of this place, what's it gonna be? Stake traps? Flamethrowers? Giant pendulums? A fucking boulder trap?" Oh, they're just kinda . . . lying on the floor. Okay. The look of the secretary doesn't bother her much; not after all the four year olds and talking dogs at any rate. If anything she's uncommonly normal, and Liza is pretty sure she has her deal figured out after she kicks the radio off the table. In the very short, dramatic gap between 'I was just going to give it to you' and 'You all made et cetera', she manages to say "Smart move." and hold out her hand, and then makes one of those hard, Combine death noise-adjacent sighs through her helmet when it turns out the other way. Liza draws what looks like a stechkin pistol and fires it directly into the secretarial chair. The entire automatic burst mostly just hits the floor when the chair zip zooms away and whizzes through the back door at hyper scooter speed. With the smoke still drifting from the muzzle, Liza one-handedly thumbs the magazine eject, and slowly shakes her head while inserting a fresh one. "I hate this place." Still, she's not about to let her get a huge head start, in case the city hall turns out to be a giant transforming robot or something. She begins chasing after her immediately!
Maricel Thorne	OUTSIDE: Maricel twirls her protective parasol over her shoulder, twisting it back and forth- she dislikes, evidently, not having anything to do with her hands. The sun is shining brightly. The air is deliciously clear. It's- "Aaaabsolutely miserable," she opines to herself as she glances up at the unmitigated scalding yellow star, though anyone could be mistaken for thinking she's talking about the mangled and grotesque City Hall instead. "Somebody should reeeeally get up there and put on a dimmer switch," she adds as Pauline opens the lock. It's very very hard to tell if she's joking. ---- As Mona absolutely books it on scooterback, Maricel doesn't immediately pursue- instead, she takes the time to open a neon-staticky portal, disgorge a large heap of disorganized meat and tissues from it, and then whip it together into a coherent animaloid form in a blinding flurry of scalpels and stitches. The resulting thing is a little like a very red starfish, floating lazily a small distance above the ground; it's ringed with microscopic eyes and sickly actinic energy flickers along the translucent channels in its arms. Maricel perches on it primly sidesaddle, pats an open spot as a wordless invitation for anybody else to hitch a ride, and then- just a few seconds delayed, all told- points off in the direction of the fleeing Mona. After everyone's embarked or refused to, the starfish-creature takes off after her with a series of staggered teleports, each one covering twenty or thirty feet in a split-second lurch. Lacking any actual speed or momentum, it's free to take corners arbitrarily hard and just generally be a connect-the-dots picture without any of the lines drawn. What a thoroughly awful ride.
Operator	Mona hoons through the corridors, taking sharp right-angled turns with pinpoint drifts. The air of a pizza delivery girl who has toiled under a 'arrives in 30 minutes or it's free!' mandate. She peeks over her shoulder at the group chasing her, DK taking up the rear by rolling into a somersault that is gradually getting faster and faster. The secretary grimaces, and shouts, "No one likes annoyingly persistent people you know!" She makes a hard right, flying through some double doors that lead to a half-landing staircase. But rather than dismount her scooter, she bunny hops onto the handrail and starts driving up it, turning sharply to remain on it at every turn. When the group inevitably chases her, she shouts again over her shoulder. "So you've met the rest of the Council right?! They're /weird/ huh?! Kids, strange adults... none of them really seem like the type to set up the massive urban projects they had going huh?!" She hits a button on her scooter dashboard, and the whole stairwell goes to hell. Disco hell. Fog machines belch out blinding amounts of vapour, disco balls drop from the underside of the stairs to catch lights and lasers that are emitted, creating a blinding visual kaleidoscope. At the same time, thumping tunes emit from the speakers that make the inner ear canal buzz unpleasantly, distorting balance. DK has to stop and clamp his hands over his ears from it all. It's like Funky Park, but contained in a small area with the worst possible acoustics. "That's because it was all me! I'm the one who brought their ideas into reality!" Mona shouts from the top of the stairs with a boastful tone. Her engine revs once more as she wheelies through the doors at the top and out of sight.
Hellwarming Trio	Rin: "Of course it's gotta be difficult. You can't just jump straight to the big finale from the start!" Utsuho: "Yeah. There's unwritten rules about this kind of stuff, you know?" Rin: "Big boulders probably wouldn't do much, though." Utsuho: "Maybe not for us, but it could get pretty messy if that starfish thing got hit by it." Rin: "Or that chick on the motorcycle. It'd do a number on that key, too." As Utsuho and Rin keep chattering on, they glide through the corridors of City Hall at a rapid clip. Staircases are skipped by virtue of not having to deal with the ground, but corners are a bit harder for them to navigate thanks to Utsuho just taking up a fair bit of space with her wings and Rin having to steer her wheelbarrow with dramatic screeching noises coming from... Her mouth. She's doing this on purpose. Utsuho: "I haven't met the council!" Rin: "Me neither! We just heard there'd be a fight with a monkey or something!" Utsuho: "You think they'll let us on later if we make a good show of this?" The stairwell turning into disco hell catches the pair off guards far more than the secretary's anger. The vapor and lights alone wouldn't throw them off too much, but combined with each other and the disorienting noise from he speakers, they find themselves having far more trouble than they should. Utsuho slams into a wall and has to take a few moments to recover. Rin, meanwhile, actually manages to twist her wheelbarrow just so that she's riding it along the wall only to crash into the next wall immediately afterwards. Once they get their bearings straight again, however, they get right back to chasing after Mona. Utsuho takes the lead for the two, partially due to just being excited about seeing where this is all going and partially due to Rin having to shove some wayward fairies back into the wheelbarrow. As they reach those doors at the top, they don't simply charge right through and keep on moving. Rin: "Good show, sis! But you ain't the only one that knows how to get things fired up!" Utsuho: "Oh, we're burning the place down?" Rin: "Wh-NO. Just follow my lead." No, they're going to make it flashy as hell in keeping with what appears to be today's theme. Utsuho's wings glow a bright yellow-orange as the same light trails behind her like an afterimage, and Rin's wheelbarrow starts letting loose with upwards-firing 'bullets' that explode into little fireworks that would make any stage designer proud.
Gaonoir	Erika... just eyes at Maricel doing what she does best. "... Looks like I'm getting my cardio in today." Nope, even with her experience riding 'monsters' she wants no where near that thing, and instead gives chase on her own two foot. It's okay. If there is one thing she has gotten better at being a Digidestined Tamer is running -- both in chasing danger and in running from it. Right now it's the chasing part, even if she's not anywhere as fast as the other people, she'll get there eventually. Gaonoir, on the other foot, doesn't have much trouble at least keeping the scooter in sight. He makes the sharp turns with little effort by doing jump-kickoffs from the walls, changing his direction without having to sacrifice much in the way of speed. Mona reachs some stairs... and scooters up the railing instead of stopping. "Great Goddramon, she's worse on a scooter than Erika is." "I HEARD THAT" is shouted from somewhere in the back of the group. In typical fashion Gaonoir ignores it, and starts the vault up the steps. Until the steps turn into a smoke and mirrors laser light show from hell. The sudden blast to the senses is enough to get him to stop, at least for a moment, baring his fangs in a snarl of annoyance. "We don't have time to deal with this bullshit." He crouchs a moment to brace himself as energy spikes in his proximity briefly and a darkening aura engulfs him. DarkGaomon: Digivolve to the energy cloak shatters away as something more akin to a bear sized malamute emerges from it with an angry roar. DARKGAOGAMON "About time you got big enough to ride." Erika is promptly over the bad driving remarks as she catchs up, and hoists onto the back of her partner. Which is shortly followed by "DOUBLE DASH CLAW!" as Gaonoir leaps up and SLAMS one of the disco balls with his front claws to break it's reflect surface. At first he starts to drop back down, but then the ends of his scarf whip forward, reaching up the stairwell to grab onto higher steps and hault that by slingshoting himself upward. Allowing the clawed scarf to repeatedly snatch onto the structure and keep hoisting himself upward, Doc Octopus style.
Liza Grier	"Nobody likes Wario either." It's barely a retort because apparently it's an objective fact according to Funky Kong's census. It's also the first thing that comes to mind while being obnoxiously persistent. Liza is a veteran of too many shitty hallway chases, too many annoying planetary procgens, and too many chaotic OHS-noncompliant alleged 'work sites' to be shaken off that easily. To avoid slowing around corners, she runs straight into, and then up and along and back down, the walls, magnetizing to the nails and struts. To avoid slowing on stairs, she jumps ten steps, pulse jumps another ten, triple jumps another ten, and thruster vents the last chunk. To avoid having to go down and back up in lobbies, she fires her tether cable into the ceiling and swings across. At one point, she makes a seemingly very ill-advised jump, a forcefield flares around her, and she sort of bounces back up. This is a woman who has chased locker-dragging lube-spraying bana-hurling assholes through zero G and back again like a terminator. The degree to which her breathing crackles through her hot mic mostly just reads as 'menacing' rather than a reliable indicator of exhaustion. She staggers, finally, When !Green Hills Zone ~ Nightcore Bass Boost begins blasting through her acoustic receptors, switching them off and still hearing it thumping through her sealed helmet. The optics shut off all at once, leaving the lenses dull and black rather than blazing green, then boot back up in ominous purple. Given all the smoke and lights, she instead focuses on the glowing heat and electrical transmission lines she can read in the walls and ceiling from the electrical grid necessary to power all this bullshit, getting a solid read of the dimensions of the upper landing and corridors in glowing tron lines. She then hits her blink teleporter to get the fuck out of that nightmare staircase and up to where Mona had just vanished from, smashing the doors out of the way with her reappearance. Without spending a moment to check, she cocks back and pitches a syndicate EMP detonator the entire length towards the scooter's emission. She probably won't get a straight shot just moments after a teleport on a moving target like that, but a directionless blast of radiation will probably more reliable fuck up a power scooter.
Maricel Thorne	Maricel's Warp Starfish has its primitive neuro-heuristics baffled by the overwhelming power of disco. It tries to teleport her in a half-dozen directions at once, clips itself into a couple of walls, and spins out halfway up the staircase- it's a minor miracle of doctorly dignity that she manages to dismount with grace, instead of getting flung back down the stairs with its catastrophic failure. Maricel herself, though, is surprisingly composed. She uses her parasol to block out the lights. She uses her telekinesis to push away the vapor, as if waving it away with her hands. And she- actually, it's hard to see what she does for her ears in all the chaos, but judging by the new stitches and the slight amount of blood smeared down her cheeks, it looks like she just replaced them wholesale. "But why would you do that?!" Her own pursuit, now that she's robbed of her Warp Starfish, is considerably less elegant than anybody else's: she's just booking it on foot as fast as she can, supplemented with neon-staticky portal shenanigans. They yawn open ahead of her in matched pairs, and she sprints through them like boost panels to gain a bit of extra distance each time. "Even for someone as dashing as this 'Wario' sounds... is it reeeeally worth it? Isn't there a better way to win his heart?" She's still scheming even as she tries to strike up a conversation, though- once she gets a clear sight-line on Mona's scooter, her hand is wreathed in that now-familiar sickly energy. The scooter's front wheel is too, and with a twist of her hand, it's telekinetically wrenched off-course.
Operator	Liza's Hail Mary EMP strikes true. Mona, fortunately, is a bit more environmentally conscious than Wario, and so rides a hybrid scooter. The EMP shorts out the electrics, causing it to rapidly slow down. The secretary, taken by surprise, bails as she rides through another set of doors. This set leads to a dining room ripped straight from the Song dynasty, handsome wooden furniture with extravagant trappings of dragons and firebirds and saints. However, if one was expecting Mona to be on the ground with an injured leg or something, they are sorely disappointed. Instead, she has converted all that momentum into a series of fast backflips down the length of the long dining table that cuts the room in two, cumulating with a twisting leap that ends with a three-point landing. All that in a pencil skirt and heels! "Don't underestimate cheerleaders! If there's one thing we know, it's falling with grace!" she boasts. "But this next thing? It's all game development experience." The room explodes with traps. Pendulum blades swing back and forth, missing the table by a hair. Ominous clicks foretell the unlocking of trapdoors. Sawblades spring up at the edge of the room and begin running back and forward. Parts of the air suddenly seem to glisten with barely visible tripwires. "Kat and Ana had a lot of questions about how to set up their mall, and I had to teach them some game design. Every trap has to be avoidable, you know? It's not fun if there's no way pass them. They took to it with gusto. But this here? I went against all game sense, and just made it as unfair as possible. Good luck!" And with that, she vanishes through a trapdoor into the depths of the building, leaving everyone to deal with Kaizo hell.
Gaonoir	Gaonoir isn't the fastest being in the pursuit, but he is persistant. With a final heave he hurtles up and barrels past the last flight of stairs with all that momentum to slam heavy paws slam into the floor. The only reason he doesn't resume charging straight ahead is seeing Liza throw some manner of EMP weapon after the scooter, followed by Maricel trying to yank the vehicle right out from under its rider. Seems like they all had a similar notion in mind. It's no surprise that Mona doesn't take the results lying down. Zealots never do (Gaonoir knows from experience dealing with, and from -being- that kind of zealot once upon a time), and as soon as she's charging into the next room so is he. Which turns out to be boobytrapped to hell and back. Erika eeps and jumps off his back to land by the doors, because she is not going to try and ride him through that gauntlet when she knows what he's going to do. "Go get her!" Without passenger Tamer to worry about Gaonoir lunges forward to avoid a floor trapdoor, seeming to do a somersault despite his size. Except that somersault -keeps- spinning, suspended in the air a moment, as both scarfes and waves of dark energy course around him with the revolutions. "Gaogao.. BOMBER!" And that big spinning ball of black and purple HURTLES into the trap-riddled room like a screaming comet! It's not pretty, as pendulum blades and charging saws slam into the Digimon... but in doing so they're going to break as much as they are doing harm to him. At least he's the monsterous tank that can take the abuse to help clear a path for the others. Yeah, he is that type of edgelord jerk, ruining your fun by not playing fair and just smashing everything in his way. Collaterial damage concerns is for wimps.
Maricel Thorne	Maricel seizes one pendulum on its downswing with her mind powers, teleports past a series of tripwires in an eyeblink, plummets neatly down a trap door she didn't see, and cheekily warps back up to escape it. She's cheating very, very hard- even sparing some of her Cheat Juice to try and protect allies who aren't clad in heavy armor or giant monsters- but those psychic powers do have a wind-up. When a half-dozen sawblades bite into her limbs, neck, and torso with no warning, she can't cheat her way out of it. But she can cheat her way through it. Even as the sawblades chew through candyapple-red flesh and moon-white bone, she's reaching into her pockets for her glittering tools. Watching Maricel "fix herself" is really bewildering and kinda nauseating and just a tiny bit beautiful. Solve for the digits and limbs you can't move because the muscles and tendons are severed. Solve for every nerve and blood vessel that's been transected by steel. Solve for every drop of blood you've lost; catch them before they hit the floor on the flat of your scalpel, pour them back in. When you stitch wounded flesh to flesh and bolt fractured bone to bone and pull every thread taut with one final yank, you're breathing life and shape into a plate of delicatessen meats; playing God by turning spare ribs back into Eve. No healing magic could be faster or more thorough; Maricel's hands work as quick as any lips could breathe an incantation. But she can't fix the impromptu haircut the blades give her, and that's what she's bitching about as she dives down the trapdoor after Mona. "My bangs are ruined," she shouts into the void with her newly-reassembled throat. "It'll take months for them to look that casually messy again!"
Hellwarming Trio	That's quite the landing there! So much so that Utsuho and Rin, having honed their human-studying techniques over several weeks now, respond in the best way they know how: Golf clap. Rin, of course, has to ruin that with a big popping cheer, but they do at least seem more interested in following her around and seeing what's coming next rather than outright catching her. That, of course, leaves them with having to see all those traps springing out of everywhere. They both let out a quiet "oooh" as they approach, although Rin's the first one to stop. Rin: "Wait a sec. Didn't she say she made it as unfair as possible?" Utsuho: "Yeah, so?" Rin: "So that means it's okay for us to go around all this stuff, right?" Utsuho: "Pfft. No. I'm not a wimp, and I can take it!" With all the headstrong dumbassery of herself, Utsuho braves the path of traps first while Rin hangs back to watch everyone else have a go at it first. The hell raven still doesn't worry about falling into anything, at least, but the sawblades keep nicking and catching her from multiple angles while her wings and head keep getting caught in the hidden tripwires before she can even see them. It takes a while, but Rin finally heads in as well, armed with the knowledge of where she might and definitely won't fit! She ends up pulling ahead of Utsuho, even, and resumes the chase after transforming into a cat to make herself just that much harder to catch with yet more traps. "I'm comin' for ya, sis! What else you got for us?"
Liza Grier	Liza pounds after the half-fried scooter without slowing. One footfall is heavy enough to warp and flatten the metal bottom when she just stomps on it instead of leaping over. The harsh static of her comm bellows "If you taught them everything and set it all up, then you can take responsibility for their playtime like an adult. Involving all those gullible idiots and lowlives was your own damn idea, and your own damn fault." When hell ~~M~~Wario begins, there's a loud, cursing moment where Liza considers calling for heavy ordnance, like on the speedway, to abbreviate the issue, but she realizes right away that it'll just be an expensive way to hinder her in the spaces beyond here. Instead, she ignites her e-sword and shield at the same time, blazing blue on one arm and red in the other hand, like some kind of sci-fi knight, and charges along the table herself. She sweeps the sword ahead of her to cut through wires she can't otherwise see, slides beneath pendulum blades with the shield held overhead to deflect them off of her, hurdles the saws as best she can, and otherwise stumbles and tanks through everything she can't deal with at once, until the shield bar in her HUD is flashing red and screaming at her to let it recharge; a good thirty seconds she doesn't really have. But she knows Mona has trapped this route the least, since she was able to flip through it, and she's seen the specific places where the woman was able to stand and jump. Leaping from the end, Liza orients herself over the trap door, then fires all her EVA ports at once, launching herself straight down at considerable G force and two-foot slamming through the doors at dangerous burn.
Operator	Be it by brawn, by skill, or by simply putting yourself together after getting mulched, everyone clears the trap room and descends after Mona. Fortunately, she's set up a crash pad at the bottom, like those that stuntpeople use to break falls. The bad news is that it's in the sewers. The rancid stink of waste, so familiar from that race against the taxi duo... Speaking of, the taxi is right there, partially repaired and reassembled, held up with a clamp. The rocket engine they used to overtake the other racers is exposed, the exhausts pointed right at the crash mat. And Mona is in the driver's seat, turning the key. The roar of flame fills the tunnel as the world's worst flamethrower goes off in the faces of the invaders. "Hah! See how you like it!" Mona shouts over the flames. "All seven of y-wait. Where's Donkey Kong?!" It's... true. He wasn't in the trap room at all. Did he get lost in the disco stairwell? No. As the walls shake, it's clear he's where he wants to be. The sewer tunnel wall erupts as the great ape jumps through it, standing in front of the taxi. Mona is now caught between he and the others, and now a look of panic fills her face. She disables the engine and raises her hands. "Heeey, uh... no hard feelings, right? They all got through it okay! R-Right?" she calls over her shoulder. But even as the engine shuts down, the rumbling continues. If anything, it only gets worse. "Uh... what did you do up there?" the secretary asks DK. His only response is to dust off the thick dust and tiny chunks of debris caught in his fur with a proud grin. It's clear, he went through many a wall before this one. And now the structure above is starting to give way. "You came in with two others, right? The former mayor and the cloaked guy?!" Mona asks, real concern creeping into her voice. Down here, they'll probably survive a collapse. But anyone still in the building...
Gaonoir	Gaonoir tumbles to a stop at the bottom of the trapdoor. He stands on all fours, gives himself a shake, and then grabs a chunk of broken blade in his teeth to pull it from his shoulder. Spits it back out again. Quite a few cut marks contrast against his dark colorations, but being a creature lacking actualy biological structure they doesn't seem to do more than feel painful. And Gaonoir learned to just not let pain get into his head a long long time ago. His living wrecking ball maneuver has left him a little dazed but no more worse for wear. Until an improvised flamethrower goes off pretty much right in his face. "GRRAWR!" he yowls, stumbling back a few steps. More from the intense proximity than the actual flames, but that was still a shock. But then the woman is trapped thanks to DK taking an alternate route. She gives up... and everything above starts to shake. "Really?!" And here he was at least careful to not smash any walls for once. "Excuse me." The others will have to deal with Mona, as he jumps back up the trapdoor passage. That spike of energy and a rattling reverb can be heard within, and he erupts out of the top of the trapdoor in his flight capable Perfect form, hovering over the now busted traps to scoop up his Tamer. Who gives him a stern look. "If this is about leaving you behi--ow!" He's cut off by her bopping the side of his head with a hand. "No you dingus, the Mayor might still be in the building!" "Oh... Oh, right." Not being the one to usually care about more than himself and his human, it takes a moment for it to sink in. "Ugh... But she IS an important political figure, and all this is for naught if she's not alive to take back over afterwards." Erika cradled in one arm, his booster jets flare and Gaonoir dashes off through the likely about to collapse building to find the Mayor and her ally.
Liza Grier	Liza rebounds off the crash pad with that 'bounce field' again, albeit with a much heavier and less impressive thunk. Sensing that damn sewer again, she quickly switches to internal air without thinking twice. "The speedway again?! Did you come up with everything those assholes were messing around with?! Were the keys your idea too?!" she shouts in furious exasperation. "If everything I've had to go through here was your idea, I'm going to work you over!" Actually yeah, where is the big guy? When DK smashes his way in, Liza does her favourite thing to do with the great ape, and gives him a big unga thumbs-up. Noticing the intensifying rumbling shortly thereafter, she pauses to consider the issue at hand. After a few seconds of thinking, she resumes advancing. "Not my problem." Liza shrugs. "Gimme the key and I'll let the Doctor ask you some questions. Make this any more difficulty and I'll be the one 'asking' them." Of course her callous disregard for the mayor is largely irrelevant with other people running off to save Pauline, so focusing on not letting this one get away feels about right. She can, after all, teleport out.
Hellwarming Trio	The crash mat goes unheeded by the pair of youkai as they stop themselves just before landing on it. Although they avoid splashing themselves with the sewer juice, they still appear thoroughly disgusted by the stench and nearly forget about their chase. That is, until the taxi's afterburners kick in and Mona starts taunting everyone just in time for DK to show up and put an end to their game. Utsuho: "That was pretty fun, wasn't it?" Rin: "Was it? I almost got my tails chopped off!" Utsuho: "But you didn't, so it's okay." After a bit of grumbling in annoyance, Rin transforms back into her human form and looks up as that rumbling grows louder. "Isn't that yours? Like a... Ya know. The boulder trap she mentioned." She waves in Liza's general direction, glancing at Mona again before looking back up once the former mayor and cloaked guy are mentioned. Utsuho: "Are they important?" Rin: "Uhh... She said 'former' mayor, right? So probably not." Utsuho: "Yeah, I guess. But if Master hears about us being here and a bunch of humans happened to die..." Rin: "... It'll be fine if we just bring them back, then!" After sorting out their thoughts, Rin heads right back up that passage to start scouring the building, flying this way and that to seek out people that might have trouble escaping. Utsuho, meanwhile, remains in the sewer with Mona and Liza and DK (possibly Maricel as well), seeming content to just keep an eye on things and try to comprehend what threats are being made and Mona's reactions to said threats.
Operator	Gaonoir, Erika, and Rin leap into danger, scouring the massively expanded City Hall in hopes of finding Mayor Pauline and Great Gullet. As expected, the place is coming apart. Many DK-shaped holes have been left in load-bearing walls, and thanks to all the renovations being absolutely not up to code, they come apart far too easily. Rin finds Pauline in the Mayor's Office, resolutely sitting behind the desk typing at a computer, even as the place shakes apart around her. Beads of sweat form on her forehead as she prints off page after page of spreadsheets. As the catgirl flies in, the mayor acknowledges her arrival by grabbing the chair she sits on and throwing it through the window behind her. "Catch me!" she yells with all the force of a reasonable authority figure before grabbing the printed pages and leaping through the broken glass. Though, she's not out of the woods yet, even if Rin catches her. That medieval tower is about to collapse on her. It might take some fancy flying to get her out. Gaonoir meanwhile, finds Great Gullet in the kitchenette. They seem to have found a planner. A yellow one, with a purple W on it. "I knew it... I knew it!" they hiss angrily, totally ignorant of the building collapsing around them. It's only as the Digimon arrives that they snap out of it. "Whaaaaaa?! Hey, you! Get me outta here!" they yell, leaping to cling to Gaonoir's fur. They are mercifully pretty light, but the fastest way out is flooded with myriad witch brew ingredients, mingling together to create dangerous mists that explode at random. Meanwhile, in the comparatively safe sewers, Mona is caught between Liza and DK, an unenviable position. Sweating lightly, she sighs and surrenders the key, which the great ape claims with a grin. "It really wasn't me. The ideas were theirs, I just... made sure they worked as intended? I mean, they weren't great ideas, I agree, but Wario said to give them everything they asked for." She seems to be telling the truth. "The keys? No, those were actually Wario's idea. Honestly, most of us really didn't want to hang on to them. Because we figured he" she gestures at DK, "or his friends would come looking, but he said we didn't get the job if we refused."
Hellwarming Trio	"There you are! We've been lookin' all over for ya, sis. What're you-" Rin stops in mid-sentence as she steps into the Mayor's Office, only then noticing the reams of paper and all that furious typing. Is this one of those corporate espionage things that humans seem so fond of? Or maybe it's a political thing. She can't really tell without any time to look at those documents, and she probably wouldn't be able to tell even with time. Thankfully, she doesn't have to worry about that as she instead has to worry about Pauline hurling a chair, then herself through a window. "Oh. See ya later, I guess!" A beat, and then Rin lets out a startled shriek as she promptly hurls herself out of that window as well. "I ain't taking the fall for you going splat!" She yells after Pauline as she hurtles downwards. Luckily, being a seasoned flier means catching the former Mayor is a simple enough task, although maneuvering through the collapsing tower is going to be another matter entirely. Unlike before, however, she's all too eager to just cheat her way through the actual danger here. Smaller debris gets blasted through her own firepower along with those of the fairies riding along in that wheelbarrow of hers, letting them focus their actual evasion efforts on the bigger stuff. "Whatcha even got there, anyway? Is this bribery?" Clearly, Rin still has a lot to learn about human things. Utsuho, too, but things aren't nearly as exciting for the raven as she floats around those in the sewer while eyeing that key with mild interest. "So you're the thinker for however many other people there were, huh? And this is all because of that Wario guy?" Utsuho scrunches her face briefly, looking from Liza to Maricel to Donkey Kong, then back to Mona. "But... You're the only one that sounds like you're really into this guy. How do you know you like him so much and not just the job, anyway?" She speaks with a genuinely curious tone rather than a taunting one.
Gaonoir	When Gullet jumps to grab on Erika grabs onto the cloaked figure to help pull him onto the Digimon. "That's what we're here for." For a moment Gaonoir doesn't have much to say, but there's audible electronic sounds as various bits of information flicker across the HUD on the inside of his visor. He wouldn't be too worried about the chaotic concoction now contaminating the corridor as far as himself is concerned. But with two humans (or whatever Great Gullet is) to also consider, he can't just bombast his way through. Much the same reason Erika didn't ride on him into the trap gauntlet. "You two better brace tight. This is gonna be a rough ride." The thrusters on his back can be heard thrumming back up to speed, but the jetpowered wolfman doesn't take off immeadiately. Still need to do something about those mists. Well, he is wolf-like, so the course of action taken might not surprise someone that knows their fairy tales. Swirls of energy can be seen forming near his mouth as the digimon seems to take a deep breath... "Dark.. Mach.. SPIRAAAAL!" Then release it in a howling blast of wind and dark energy that, thanks to the cyclonic motion giving it the 'spiral' part of it's name, helps to sweep the worst of the mists to the sides (and not blow it out into the streeth thankfully) and make a corridor that's just wide enough for him to rocket through with his passangers and escape back outside.
Liza Grier	Even if Liza is doing some kind of 'is this some bullshit again?' squint-stare behind her faceplate (she is), it doesn't register behind ominous helmet glow (which is part of why she prefers it). It just leaves the other party to sweat, and potentially just keep running their mouth, which is additionally helpful in her gauging whether they're telling the truth. In this case, it seems she ultimately has no urge to aggressively disbelieve Mona. Honestly, at this point she's mostly just disturbed that someone could be doing all of this complete bullshit because they really really like Wario and not because they have any plans or ultimate goals of their own. Of course she takes the key. It stacks in her inventory slot with the other keys. There is the feel of a metaphorical piece of heart completion jingle without anything actually happening. "Okay big guy." she talks to DK just right over Mona's head now. "You know the place we'll be seeing you next. Let's finally get the old man back." Then she picks up the secretary she was just ignoring and throws her over her shoulder in a really obnoxious fireman carry. "Liza Grier, exfiltrating." Bweeewww.
Operator	Pauline bunches up as much as she can in Rin's arms as she blasts through the tower, minimizing her profile so that she doesn't get clipped. Once they're out and safe, she begins answering questions. "Bribery? No! Well, maybe. It's the recent financial reports generated by all the spending Wario and the Council have been doing. The Council has had many insane projects around the city, but what worries me is how quiet Wario has been." She points across the skyline, to the Historical District on another strut. Specifically, at a new-looking gleaming silver spire there. "That's what he's been working on, and I have no idea what it is. So I'm hoping the financial records will give me a hint, once I eliminate what was bought for the rest of the Council." But even amidst this intrigue, she finds time to smile at Rin. "Thank you for the rescue by the way. Probably the second most dramatic one I've ever had." Gaonoir unleashes a cyclone to clear a path and screams through the concoction, blasting through the opposing window. The taint of magic follows in his wake, only to be smothered by a falling rafter. They safely touch down, and Great Gullet lets go and crawls away to puke. The sound of vomiting through a vocal distorter is not a nice one. They dropped the planner along the way, and the two who rescued them can see the page they bookmarked. It's not in the future, but rather in the past, predating Wario's takeover of New Donk. Quite literally, something has been scribbled out on one day and replaced with 'TAKE OVER NEW DONK CITY' in Wario's messy handwriting. But any further investigation is hindered by Great Gullet snatching the planer and slipping it under their cloak. They stride off without even a 'thank you.' In the sewers, DK gives Liza a thumbs up. He looks very excited. Mona meanwhile answers Utsuho from her place over Liza's shoulder. "Because he's the best treasure hunter there ever was! And I want to be a treasure hunter! So you bet I'll learn from the best!" She says with real enthusiasm right before they port out.
Gaonoir	Vomiting sounds bad enough. Vomiting with a vocal apparatus... is both worse sounding, and far enough different from the normal sounds that it doesn't trigger that 'barfing makes other people want to barf' effect. Or maybe Erika is just distracted by getting a glimps at the planner and her conspiracy theorizing tingling. So this has been planned for a lot longer than expected.... even though this Wario weirdo seemed to be more the quick get rich short con type. Still... But Great Gullet recovers, and snatches it back up before anyone can get too nosey. Then skulks off into the shadows of the city. There's a long, somewhat awkward silence. Partially because normally this would be the sort of thing that Gaonoir himself does. Which would be why he finally snorts softly. "Okay, you're right, that is kind of rude."
Hellwarming Trio	That sure is a lot of words, but Rin looks.. Pleased? Yes, she looks pleased with herself, since it actually seems to be clicking in her head! Not so much the whole situation, but there's at least enough dots being connected that she can nod slowly like she's someone far smarter than she really is. "I get it... Well, you'll figure it out sooner or later, sis. You were able to get all this stuff outta there while everything was on fire, so I bet you'd get plenty more outta these when there's no fire around!" With those words of encouragement, she looks over at the indicated spire with a glint in her eyes, then finally remembers to set Pauline down while grinning widely at her thanks. "Heh. All in a day's work! And if you ever need some bodies taken care of..." While Rin tries to sell Pauline on corpse disposal services, Utsuho's listening intently to Mona! "So that's why you're into him? Huh... Wasn't expecting that." She scrunches her face, deep in thought. "So humans usually go after their teachers, then...?"