Scene Listing

||

Scene Schedule

||

Scene Schedule RSS

Owner	Pose
Persephone Kore	The Sonoran Desert in Arizona is rocky, miserably hot, and so dry it could give you a nosebleed. It is almost, but not quite, devoid of greenery: cactuses and scraggly little bushes cling tenaciously to the soil, trying to keep the land alive. Unless you have a more convenient mode of transportation, the indicated spot is an hour's slog away from the nearest warpgate.      So it's forgivable, maybe, that nobody noticed the psychically-invisible monoliths until now.      They are rectangular pieces of black metal, as large in footprint as a house, spaced two hundred feet apart and easily a hundred feet tall. Bizarre inscriptions with a style that is "the opposite of memorable" cascade along them, but have slowly been eroded down into illegibility by the sand and wind. They stretch out in straight lines to the north, south, east, and west.      A handful of the least-eroded monoliths are still difficult to see for anyone without formidable mental defenses. They disappear when you look directly at them, only flickering back into existence in your peripheral vision.      Maybe the enormous obsidian pyramid at the center of the monoliths' convergence was once hidden in similar fashion. It is absolutely hidden no longer.      There is no visible entrance besides the ten-foot-wide, twenty-foot-tall ornamental double-door that opens to the west- the direction of the sunset. Despite its ancient construction, dark wires and magnets are just visible behind its seams. The door's mechanisms are powered and quite robust- it'd require both an electronic bypass of some kind and superhuman elbow grease to open it without just blasting your way through.      And destroying it really would be a shame. The door is lushly patterned with gold and cerulean against the dark metal background, depicting a whirlpool of ants circling around an eye. The symbolism is striking, but opaque.      A figure rests in the shade of the nearest monolith, slowly rousing itself to wakefulness at your approach. It's a humanoid robot with a mournful cyclops-like eye, digitigrade legs, and a cerulean chassis that must be modeled after ceremonial armor. Its left arm ends in a grasper, but has a heavy metal shield affixed to the forearm decorated with the image of a stylized hand cradling a flower. Its right arm looks to have once ended in a weapon, but untold years of weathering and neglect have rendered that limb useless.      Each movement it makes is attempted first with primary systems, fails, then with secondary systems, fails, and then with tertiary systems, which finally succeeds, all in rapid succession. This gives its motions a faltering, shivery character, like a doddering old man. It tries, repeatedly, to make a sound, but all that comes out is a quiet hiss of static barely audible above the wind. Still, it's easy to tell that it regards your party with an emotion akin to desperate hope.
Gawain	Gawain came on motorcycle. In his sidecar is Ioanna Langstrom, who he admires for her abilities as they start activating. Quick off-road tires help enough to 'get there', but it'll be useless inside the pyramid. The monoliths are flickering for him, as he has no actual supernatural mental defenses, but once he sees the figure... Gawain approaches the figure. They can't really move that well, or even speak. He crouches to make eye-level if they're lowered, and speaks. "Hello. We're going to stop the threat. Please don't worry. If you need help moving and want to join us..." Gawain offers to actually just carry the robot into the pyramid with him, outstretching. He's strong enough. And when they get to the door, if someone else can provide the Electronic Bypass, he'll offer Pure Gorilla Strength and elbow grease to try and open it up. Though, obviously, he's allowing Lilian to take point, and if he has the robot, he'll see what he can do so they're not in the way first.
Ioanna Langstrom	When she climbed into Gawain's sidecar, Ioanna Langstrom was a 5'6" woman with very generous curves in a nearly-form-fitting bodysuit covered in odd metal attachments, a large cannon slung over her shoulder, and a strange smartpad in a weird hexagonal shape hanging off her hip. The cannon also had a hexagonal motif, as did the patterns of light that occasionally pulsed along the suit. Her face was stoic and professional.      The instant they exit the warpgate, Ioanna Langstrom is a woman with very generous curves in a smart-looking professional tuxedo, a pencil skirt, and a pair of clean black heels. There's no sign of the hexagonal cannon - instead, at her side is a very simple pistol, and tucked into her breast pocket is what looks like a government flip-badge for a nondescript-but-menacing government agency. The smartpad has also disappeared, replaced by a pair of mirrorshades (which look very odd over her eyepatch) and an earpiece.      The transition is quite literally instantaneous. Between entering the warpgate and exiting it, the entire Alter Gear has already changed.      Her face is still stoic and professional.      Immediately upon entering the desert she is endlessly thankful that it's still (somehow) environ-sealed (She's asked the techs how that works - the best they can answer is a shrug and some nonsense technobabble she immediately tuned out of, working on faith that it will always be environ-sealed). Her fingers go to the earpiece.      "This is Agent Joanna Lang," she says on a local band, "I'm taking care of the desert anomaly. Tell Jack to keep off the grass on this one - this is my op."      That done, she leans forward to examine the door. Red lips purse. "Death spiral."      She straightens and adjusts her tie. "It's a hazard unique to ant-style civilizations, prominent in art predicting death and apocalyptic events. Ants follow pheremones - ants moving in a circle drag more and more with them, and eventually the whole colony starves to death. Lots of lost ant-type civilizations have been obliterated by this very pattern - hence the apocalyptic literature and the connotations thereof."      She taps her mirrorshades. There's a click. She glances at the robot, but Gawain's got that in hand. So instead she removes a piece of paper from her other breast pocket, sets it against the spiral, removes a pencil, and starts taking a rubbing to look for anything they might've missed - such as secret codes or imprints that might explain the robot's behavior.
Candy	There's another motorcycle. It looks like the great great grandfather of Gawain's bike, with no sidecar. The handlebars, seat configuration, gas tank and kickstand all suggest that it was made when motorcycles were a new idea. The slim tires struggle with the rocks, the engine undulating with the bumps in the road. Its rider wears simple attire likely sourced from the same era as the bike--     A newsboy cap rests atop dark, silky shoulder length hair that blows behind him in the wind. His brown eyes are protected from sand by a pair of dusty riding goggles--as if they would be necessary for the speeds this ancient thing can manage.      Until he speaks, Candy could easily be mistaken for a girl. Peering at the robot, he pulls the goggles down. Ioanna seems knowledgeable--but why not get it straight from the horse's mouth?      "Ey," says Candy, beckoning to the robot as he hops off of his motorcycle. The kickstand is a metal rectangle which has to be pulled back and behind the rear wheel, then under--but once that's done, he approaches with...      Where did he get a toolbox? That wasn't there before. "C'mere, you. I dunno what the fuck you are, but I knew you can't talk for shit till somebody fixes you. So let's see what you got, ah? Come, come, come."
Redshift Operators	A person in temperature-controlled astronaut gear pulls up in what's definitely sort of a cross between an all-terrain jeep and an astronaut's rover. Killing the engine, he waits for a gruff man in a blood-red hardsuit to emerge from the passenger seat, look around, nod once, and invite his cohorts out through a quick motion of his head. A woman with pure white hair emerges from the back, adjusts her respirator and gleaming goggles, and circles around to get the door for a seven and a half foot tall giant man in a candy-red hardsuit.     All four begin to approach the pyramid...
Tina Natsumi	When Tina arrives, she very nearly walks into one of the hard-to-see monoliths. Luckily, she doesn't slam right into the thing, but she does swerve at the last moment, perhaps from seeing it in her periphery and getitng confused when she's staring at nothing right in front of her. "Weird place. Think the robot knows anything about all these?" She speaks with less of a faux-western drawl than she'd probably be expected to considering the cowboy hat, but there's a bit of that accent honed from years of just doing that over and over. She turns away from the 'nothing', notices something, then glances back at the 'nothing'. "... Really weird. There might still be something out here, so keep your eyes peeled." She warns while heading towards the obsidian pyramid, snickering after a moment at watching Gawain just try and meat it open. She raises an eyebrow when Ioanna mentions a 'death spiral', then eyes the door again while approaching it and cracking her knuckles. "Well, since sh... He's got the robot taken care of?" She gestures towards Candy with her head, then rests a hand on the outside edge of the door. "Nice design... And colors, too. Either they've got some good paint on this thing, or this might even be relatively new. Would be a shame to bust the door it open, so..." She spits on her hands, then gets into position to add some extra strength and elbow grease to Gawain's efforts! Somehow, she seems confident that this will actually work.
Redshift Operators	"Not a fan of these colors." "Perhaps you are haunted by *your own* curse, now." "Our objective is inside, right?" "Looks like they might want a little help."     The gruff man motions the gropup's techie to the door. Reaching into a gray duffel bag at his side, he pulls out a complex device that looks like a blackberry phone beat a tesla coil in a dark room with a wrench until it gave up all its secrets. The techie moves to the door with an uncanny ability to completely ignore the two applying their elbow grease, and starts using high-level codebreaking and electromagnetic bypasses to disengage every bit of the security they can get at.     The seven and a half foot tall titan looms over Gawain and Tina, some feeling or another seeming to burn behind the scarred eye on one half of his helmet. Wordlessly, he grips the door. His powered armor emits a rattling noise like an unnerving scream as it strains to keep up with his outrageous musculature below.
Lilian Rook	After 'hearing' the bizarre message transmitted via uncertain means over the metaphorical airwaves, Lilian immediately decides that this has to be her op. Even Gawain nominally defers to her lead here. Her professional opinion: "The fact that 'speak our tongue' is a conditional means that it was long before whatever hapless Unification involves it now, and that it probably wasn't compatible with any other thought or language paradigm until now; significant odds are that whatever it is will just be translated for everyone to deal with."     It's not an hour for *her* from the Warpgate, but it is obnoxiously hot and also Arizona. *Her* bodysuit, of a fashion, is not environmentally sealed unless she wants to put on a helmet (which she doesn't, for many reasons), but it is at least designed to make these kinds of environments tolerable, if still not exactly comfortable. Though she has no pressing reason to believe she'll need it, the way these things go, she assumes it very much better to have and not need than need and not have. It is, at least, a maximum mobility and utility layout, with all the armour hardpoints either left bare or used for additional gear cases instead.     Upon landing and seeing Ioanna's assessment of the door motif, Lilian walks past saying "Well well. That expertise I was talking about has already paid off." Upon Gawain's insistence that this is supposed to be a completely average Earth, she shrugs her shoulders and says "Well, obviously it isn't." Coming up to the double doors, she gets halfway to drawing her sidearm when the robot activates, but when it seems completely incapable of even speaking, never mind posing a threat, she lets it be. Instead, she focuses on the lavishly embellished doors, staring at them critically for a little while, but allowing herself to think out loud. "It's definitely the script and not the materials. Hermetic seal. Magnetic seal? Transmuting it would be a pain. Plausible, but then we might lose anything impossible on it. Might become impossible to re-seal." She scuffs the ground with a heel. "Continues underground. No use in trying to dig." She reaches out with one finger, the tip of which crackles with black static, and then . . . pokes the door. "No go. Annoying. Really annoying."     Turning back around, she begins unlocking some of those cases, roughly the right size and shape for stuffing a handgun magazine into, though loaded with something else judging by the faint scent of arsenic and mercury, when she sees Candy and the others roll up. "Oh what the hell are *you* doing here. Go home. You're not cut out for this." She says to the former. "Aren't you supposed to be trying to shank el presidente in a dark corner of his luxury suite made of native American bones somewhere? This is serious, professional business." She watches the big guy and the *nerd* on duty though, not yet having a reaction to them. "Who are these? Do any of you know them?"     Since they're working the door problem though, she saves her own solution for when/if they fail. Instead, she finds a place in the shade of one of those monoliths, sits down, sprinkles something onto the sand, draws a number of complicated shapes with extreme rapidity, and begins . . . meditating? On those letters?
Redshift Operators	The armored leader then heads for the robot. He's flanked by the masked woman, who silently kneels down near the machine, speaking to it exclusively. "Be at peace. We've heard the broadcast. This spiral shall be at its end soon, I have seen it." No she hasn't. "This tomb shall be its grave, and I hope it will not be yours."     The gruff man winces a little, mutters something the hardsuit helmet doesn't quite pick up, and looks around. His hidden eyes settle on Candy. He checks something in his helmet's computer, nods once, and turns, seemingly disregarding most of the others, except for Lilian Rook's question. "Redshift Operators. My crew." The green lights in his helmet seem to narrow as he turns to look at the Death Spiral. "Here to make sure there isn't something worse running around than what I already hunt."
Redshift Operators	After a brief conversation on the radio, the gruff man heads towards the back of the rover-jeep, pops the back, and brings out a very large, unnervingly clean metal suitcase.
Ioanna Langstrom	"Thank you, ma'am."      Ioanna is used to being ignored by Elites. But when the gruff man goes to get the suitcase, she stands up from her rubbing. "Destroying this might just collapse the whole structure - and whatever it's sealing. Just blowing the door is reckless and amateur - we can get in and isolate the problem *and* leave the door in place to lock it behind us if necessary."
Redshift Operators	Red Giant hears some disagreements! He decides he's going to be very helpful! Clearly this wonderful friend just wants to make sure her expertise is respected and understood. Red Giant knows exactly how to helpfully tell her that his very good friend doesn't intend to recklessly collapse the structure on accident! He's here to make sure all her concerns feel heard and help make sure she knows everything will be fine.     The large giant speaks up to the others for the first time since he got here, briefly to Ioanna Langstrom. No strain creeps into his voice, despite the show of great and awful strength. He sounds like his throat is a gravel driveway. His one good eye shines terribly as he cocks his head ever-so-slightly. "It's not for the door. It's for the pyramid."
Ioanna Langstrom	Ioanna doesn't say anything as she stares into Red Giant's face. She's silent, just looking him in the eye, her green one meeting his. After a moment, she steps aside. "Roger that." She fingers the gun at her hip, but doesn't say anything else. She's got her orders.
Persephone Kore	Ioanna's rubbings discover subtle anti-memorable etchings on the door; finer, more delicate versions of what's on the obelisks. But those would only explain its invisibility- if there's a "seal", it must be inherent in the material, not derived from a pattern or sigil. (But isn't invisibility sort of like a seal for an idea, anyway?)      Without hesitation, the robot climbs up on Gawain's back- it's dense, probably at least three hundred pounds, but nothing that a strapping superhuman knight can't handle. It lets out a soft staticky hiss that almost sounds like a sigh of relief- this poor machine is clearly very, very tired. Who knows how long it's been locked outside?      When Candy presents his tools, the robot cranes its head down to allow him access. Its voicebox is more like an electronically-operated musical instrument than a proper speaker; it isn't general-purpose, but rather shaped to emulate in metal the resonances of a human voicebox. Candy can either repair it in kind, referencing one symmetrical half to fix the damage on its twin, or replace it altogether with a more conventional speaker. Jury-rigging its body to default to the tertiary systems off the bat will make its movements smoother, too, though its weapon-arm is beyond fixing. If he does get its limbs working more smoothly, it'll dismount Gawain to escort Candy instead!      Either way, it manages to speak after Candy's repairs are finished, though its androgynously synthetic voice is just as trembly as its body. "Thank you, honored foreigners," it says.      "I am a Preserver, effigy of Cimilco. My expression is limited, so that if I fall to the eater-thought, I will not be able to spread it. But I will help you however I can." It gestures up at the pyramid's massive doors with its stump-arm, clinging to Gawain with its other. "The other Preservers fell even before they could finish cremating the bodies. Their failsafes made them into beasts. They, and the eater-thought, still dwell in the tomb. Honored foreigners, have you come prepared?"      The techie releases the ant-door's electronic locks. Under the weight of multiple superhumans all putting their legendary thews into it, it instantly swings open with a resounding shriek and slam.      "I see," says Preserver Cimilco.      A "hallway" ensues, just to get through the thickness of the exterior walls. They're easily twenty feet of solid black metal here. The sheer amount of material- and the strength it must have not to collapse under its own weight- is alarming. You definitely can't get a cell phone signal in here. The air changes from the heat of the desert to the chill of the grave.
Persephone Kore	Inside is dark. You will need your own light sources. When properly illuminated, you can see that the floor is glass, and beneath the glass is a sea of bones. There are pipes and cables too, of surprising technological sophistication- presumably once the glass floor was intended to allow for easy inspection and maintenance of them. But now every empty space between the glass and machinery is packed solid with ancient skeletal remains.      Each of the remains has a little glowing light floating inside the skull. Near-invisible threads of darkness, like faint wisps of smoke, trickle upwards from those lights- or penetrate downwards towards them?- through cracks in the glass, diffusing into the darkened ceiling above. It is probably very much a bad idea to touch those threads, but navigating between them requires some seriously agile limbo, especially if you're a naturally bulky type.      At the far, far back is a staircase upwards, but between you and that are a handful of robots like Cimilco- physically more intact, as they've been kept inside, but mentally 'not there'. They move more stiffly, and instantly open fire on approaching intruders with continuous glowing laser-like beams that make slow, careful movement deeply unwise. They, of course, are unaffected by the soul-connecting threads.      "Improper burial-containment," Cimilco says mournfully. "Forgive us. I never knew it was this bad."
Gawain	As Candy repairs Cimilico, and Gawain has forced the doors open with the others, he turns to Red Giant. "Thank you for your help!" He's slightly intimidated, but it's good to be polite. When Cimilico explains the situation, and they begin entering, Gawain pulls out his sword with his free hand, lighting it aflame as a makeshift torch. Glass, pipes, cables. This really is a precursor society. And now it's full of skeletons. Skeletons shooting psychohazards out of them. Gawain wants to tread carefully, but then, the other robots with lasers make that difficult, so he asides to Cimilico. "One second." Freeing himself from robot burdens, Gawain, armor off, starts moving. Slow and careful is unwise, so he starts juking around the 'threads', weaving back and forth, shifting his torso forward and backwards as he starts speedily charging at robots with superior ability, cleaving through them with his flaming sword, aiming for bisection or decapitation where possible. With the others' assistance, the group can hopefully cleave through them all without touching the threads... And then Gawain can return to Cimilico, to help escort them to the staircase if Candy isn't already. "My apologies that you had to witness that. It's sad, to see your kin deteriorate."
Tina Natsumi	"Ah, so you're that voice from before..." Tina comments to the robot identifying itself as the effigy, managing an awkward chuckle before mouthing "Shit." She sighs lightly while rubbing her forehead, then gets her hands right back on the door. "So if this eater-thought's still down, there..." She doesn't finish that thought until after the door is opened, grunting and heaving to make sure she's carrying her own weight even with the more physically imposing Gawain and unidentified big red guy. "What are our odds if we just blast it the moment we see it? Doubt it'd ever be that simple, but it doesn't hurt to ask, right?" She pats the revolver at her hip, then flashes a reassuring grin at Cimilco. "Don't worry. We've got this handled. Wouldn't be here if we weren't prepared, right?" She even laughs briefly, but that lightheartedness drops rather quickly once she starts heading deeper into the depths. Her phone comes out, she snaps a picture of herself, and the flashlight is turned out to illuminate the path. There's an uncomfortable noise straining to escape Tina's throat as she sees the bones, although it doesn't startle or disgust her enough to stop her from continuing. What does stop her, at least for a moment, are the robots opening fire on the group. "I got this. Watch your heads!" A hand goes to her hip, and out comes a revolver with a fancy twirling spin around her index finger. She catches it, takes a quick yet impeccably aimed shot at one skeleton, swings herself around so that her other arm takes the brunt of a laser coming her way (with a strange metallic flicker at the point of impact, oddly enough), and she finishes that 360 degree spin before taking another shot at that robot next. It's a lot of unnecessary spinning, both of Tina herself and the revolver, but her aim's good, and she's focusing on eliminating those robots to make actually getting through the threads easier later.
Ioanna Langstrom	With the explosive disagreement taken care of (by orders), Ioanna waits for the door to be removed. She doesn't appear especially insulted by the sequence of events, as far as Red Giant can tell - if she is, she's hidden it very well.      As Effigy of Cimilico talks, Ioanna's frown deepens. Failed before they could finish cremating the bodies? Failsafes made them into beasts? They already knew the Eater-Thought was down there, but...if it's that bad, according to Effigy, then...      She suppresses a shudder. Her first mission as an Elite, and it's already this bad. Unknown operatives, a Watch agent, and an unrestrained memetic hazard.      They step inside.      It's dark. She hides a gulp in the darkness, quiet and undetected.      The dark's not too much of a problem. A tap on her earpiece and a subtle light starts glowing from it, projected outwards like a flashlight. She sweeps it over the skeletons caught between glass and steel. She crouches to look at one of them.      "Human."      "So it's a protocultural civilization? Something that devoured itself following a trail set down by this eater-thought...?"      When she notices the thread that she only barely missed being touched by, she falls backwards, eye wide behind her mirrorshades. She might've been killed, or worse, trying to examine that thing. Stupid! Amateurish.      She stands and wavers.      Limbo is the most effective way to go through. Another gulp.      It's a bad day to be busty.      With a deep breath and a sense of regret that she chose ROTC over Cheerleading or Gymnastics, Ioanna leans down like a runner and goes forward. She hits the ground, sliding in the pencil skirt along as low as she can go. There's a couple *very* narrow close calls. But she emerges on the other side, swings up into a proper kneeling firing position, draws her badge, and draws her gun. The badge-hand supports the gun-hand for aiming.      Gawain's slashing and Tina's shooting. The best path of action, then is to support other people coming in with suppressing fire. So that's what she does.      Literally.      She taps the badge and fires. And a blast of fire comes streaking out towards one of the robots' faces. It detonates shortly before into a haze of smoke. Swiftly she repeats the process across the others. It's not much, but it's covering fire so others can get through, and so Gawain and Tina have an easier time.
Redshift Operators	"Glad we understand each other." Rumbles the giant, before the door is suddenly wrenched open. His armor releases a pained scream from the sudden de-strain. He doesn't stop staring at Ioanna for a long time.     Because he's hoping she's less worried now! Red Giant would just absolutely hate to have someone feeling grumpy on a trip like this. She's probably got a lot of important studying to do, and he wants to make sure she feels good while she does it! "Objective complete." "Roger. Get in behind me. White Dwarf, Red Giant, form up on me." "I'll make sure to help you!" "Nothing shall reach you through my blade."     Shrugging a heavy shotgun off his back, the blood-red leader loads his weapon's chamber and heads inside. His helmet emits a dull green light, just like his companions at his side, the woman with a sheathed katana and the scar-eyed giant.     That's when the gruff man takes a shot to the chest. No, he doesn't. That's when the gruff man *would* have taken a vicious laser shot to the chest from the sudden assault by the defenders. But that hasn't happened yet, because the door hasn't opened. That was, of course, only the white-haired woman's thoughts on what was likely to occur. "Be careful of defenders and their gunfire as we enter." She advises to the others, drawing her blade. The gruff man nods, readying to take cover... behind the giant. When they open fire, the woman is ready, lashing out with her sword to block several shots. With elegant flips, leaps, and spins, she whirls through the trails, pouncing on the attackers with full ruthless melee swordsmanship in seconds. The gun-toting leader returns fire with his shotgun, sometimes pulling behind the giant.     "We need to remove the obstacles to our objective. I need you to move them out of the way." The soft-suited astronaut pulls out a breach explosive and sets it on the glass, completely ignoring the gunfire shooting around him. Detonating it quickly, a hole will hopefully be blown in the glass to the sea of bones. The giant is the one who stomps into it. If they can't touch the threads, the next best thing is to rearrange the bones. Surging below the glass, the giant tries to help the others get through more easily by shoving fistfuls of skeleton to one side to rearrange some of the trails and make a more clear path.
Lilian Rook	Lilian rouses from her trance-alike state all at once when the tremendous doors slam inward all at once. Dusting herself off, completely pointlessly, in that purely habitually prim way, she returns to the doorway saying, "Christ almighty try using any amount of caution or delicacy at all. You have no idea what's in there." Evidently, however, she had heard the conversation with robot friend already. "Why are they all inside and you're out here?" she thinks to ask. "I don't see any defunct wrecks lying around." She glances to the rest. "Some of us." For once, that coming from Lilian doesn't sound contemptuous. It sounds exactly like what it means: That she very much thinks most of the group is not --cannot-- be ready.     Two steps into the interior, she snaps her fingers and summons a small group of hovering, pale green flames, like will-o-wisps. Another ten, and she stops to stare at the bones.     "A jealous god indeed." she mutters to herself, not meant for anyone else.     "Don't touch any of it." Lilian then directs at the group, as if anybody needed to be told. "This situation is worse than I thought. It's not just . . . written on a wall somewhere, or a funny picture or sound. It's actually here. This is-- These are *all* of them. And they couldn't dispose of them all fast enough. Couldn't free them. This isn't a waste dump, they actually locked it in here and tried to burn as much of its mass as they could." She turns just for a second to say "Lock the doors." She then keys her radio to say something else, keeping it down.     Advancing through the corridors, Lilian gains a more businesslike clip to her step. "Zero." she says to Tina. "Especially not you. You're going to be the most vulnerable to it. Our first order of business is to secure containment. The second is to finish the job they started. The third is-- Well, I can handle that. But it's imperative tha you understand that throwing around 'memetic hazard' isn't accurate anymore. You won't be able to just close your eyes and plug your ears if we run into it directly. It *has* them."     When they run into trouble, the first thing Lilian does, surprisingly, is hurl a polished stone half the size of a palm into the bone pit that the Giant breaks open, with an audible thwip-tink as it bounces harmlessly off his hardsuit and lands in the jumble. Without explanation, she then--                 -----[stop]-----     --Stares in intense, grumpy cat exasperation at the minefield of black threads. She's fairly sure that she knows what they are, and still doesn't want to fuck with them. Thus begins the tedious process of casual gymnastics through a densely woven web of black threads and blue laser beams, having to crawl and slide under them in places. She mutters to herself the entire time. "Ninth Code. Thou shalt not wear thy power gaudily. To do so is to sew familiarity, which reaps only contempt. Think of that." over and over again, before pulling herself up at the far end, stretching her limbs, and moaning "Fuck this gimmick sometimes, I swear to god."                 -----[start]-----     --mysteriously teleports across the whole hazard hallway. Glints of slicing red twirl about her, for a few moments, like ribbon dance streamers, bisecting fallen Preservers on either side of her. For some reason, she's exactly where none of the friendly bullets are aimed. "Up." she says. "Look for stairs. Or ramps. Or jungle gym bars, I don't know."
Candy	"That's a touchy subject, Limey," says Candy sincerely to Lilian. "...but I got ideas about it, sure. No rule says I can't do this and then kill the president!" That's not true, because there are lots of rules about killing presidents--but it is true that he wouldn't listen or obey any, once his mind is made up.      "Besides," He bends over in a decidedly unnecessary way, to retrieve his tools and begin working on the robot. "'Professional' can bite my ass, ah? I don't need a little shitty badge or worthless papers to do good work." They're all simple tools of a handyman--but he always seems to have one perfectly suited. Pliers and wire-cutters, screwdrivers of various sizes, insulated gloves, even a little mallet. That toolbox is like very well-hidden cheating. This thing is pretty, and he tries to keep it that way, because he thinks it's neat--so he cross-references one half to replace the other half with his best approximations.      "Now, what the fuck is this? Ho ho, that's how you move, ah? Well, my friend, it's beat to hell. Let's have you use this instead." He ends up jury-rigging it as expected, having it use those tertiary systems for locomotion, and replacing only what he has to in order to keep it standing and intact. "How's that?" The tool box is shut, and promptly disappears in a cloud of smoke. >Have you come prepared?      "Always, my friend," says Candy, as another cloud of smoke forms at his back. Strange lights flash and dance within it, until it blows away to reveal an olive drab backpack weighed down with supplies. He nods towards the unnerving looking briefcase--"And it looks like they did, too."      He's got light--a thick flashlight with a primitive battery no doubt supplying it. It clatters to the ground when the fighting begins, the bulb shattering. Candy is used to the darkness--used to letting it hide his movements. The laser beams allow him to track the robots in the dark--and he uses his knowledge of Cimilco's construction to make quick, calculated strikes with some sort of obsidian-toothed club.
Persephone Kore	Cimilco, with its restored body, moves like a proper warrior. The hostile Preservers don't aim for it due to some kind of residual IFF, but it lunges in front of their beams anyway to deflect them back with the mirrored surface of its shield, lessening the volume of fire targeting the Elites and even burning one of its degenerated kin down with reflected fire. It is smooth, confident, genuinely skilled. "Yes, honored foreigner," it says to Candy. "This suffices.      The hostile Preservers, Gawain and the others swiftly discover, are well-constructed- but without the honed instincts that Cimilco diplays, their durability can be battered through. Once staggered by a heavy blow, they take a moment to regain their balance; under a sustained assault, they can be eventually torn apart, whether by a flaming sword, repeated gunshots, mysterious ribbons of red, or even an obsidian-edged macuahuitl.      Once the giant hardsuited man has rearranged enough of the skeletons to provide a less claustrophobic path, Cimilco catches up- conspicuously, although the degenerated Preservers didn't bother avoiding the dark smoke-threads, Cimilco treats them like lethal hazards.      "Preservers are the ghosts of men, honored foreigner," it says to Gawain. "When the ghost has gone, there is nothing left to mourn. Mourn the unburnt dead here instead, if you must- it seems their souls do linger." Cremation as a cultural practice? Or merely as a containment procedure?
Persephone Kore	Up the stairway and through some unremarkable maintenance tunnels, the interior opens up into another wide-open floor. This one requires no foreign illumination: it is lit by the dull red fires of electric incineration chambers, left burning with no-one remaining to switch them off. Bones are heaped several feet high on stationary conveyor belts; the ones that are still moving long ago dumped their cargo into the infernos.      The end product is obvious at a glance, answering the earlier question: further down in the factory-floor-like industrial process, the fine cremated ashes were packed into containers of finely-engraved black metal. The smoke-tendrils still seek to get in, but seem unable to penetrate the sealed urns- but where the urns are shattered and the ashes spilled, the glowing spirit-orbs still linger, and the smoke-tendrils are tethered to them greedily.      "This pyramid is where we tried to destroy everything infected by the eater-thought," Cimilco says, and its tone is both proud and grim. "But that soon became 'everything'. We found dignity in this: from ashes, forests grow. You see yourself there are worse fates."      Here, the main hazard is the platforming challenge of the sheer density of the conveyor belts- the stationary belts have such a concentration of bones that their dense curtain of smoky soul-threads turn them into impassable walls unless they can be repaired or forced to move by hand, but the moving ones are brisk enough that they could catapult someone directly into the roaring bone kilns.      A swarm of glittering chrome dragonfly-like machines dart and zip near the ceiling, their beady little lens-eyes betraying a kind of instinctive malice. Their function quickly becomes obvious: they're repair-drones, for an extremely rude definition of "repair". Under their care, belts go offline for maintenance the moment you're counting on them to keep moving, or roar to life to shunt a lethal wall of smoke-thread-emanating bones into your path mid-leap; furnaces roar to life to spew ten-foot-long flames at passersby when a dragonfly interfaces with them via data-jack, and they'll even try to glue your feet to a moving belt with a metallic adhesive if given the chance.      The source of their malice isn't hard to pinpoint, though it is harder to reach, and harder still to figure out how to destroy. A levitating snarl of smoke-threads the size of a human head, with a spirit-orb floating at the center, is controlling the dragonfly repairbots via gossamer puppet-strings- it's in the far back, near the next staircase up. It can't be the eater-thought, but perhaps some kind of spiritual projection?      It drifts lazily like a jellyfish, easy to hit, but even powerful physical attacks simply phase through it. Destroying all the dragonfly-bots would be one way to end its influence, but it might just find new ways to be malicious.
Lilian Rook	Excerpts of important discussion, from Lilian's end.     "Don't let those people move exclusively at our backs. It'd also be best if Tina stayed in the middle. It's unfortunate I have to say this, but there is an extraordinarily high likelihood one or more individuals will be compromised before we leave."     Count to thirty in your head, then name something you have, and then tell yourself you appreciate having it. A possession, a friend, an opportunity, whatever. Then count to thirty again, and mentally recite a song lyric, a passage from a book, or a date and time related to it. Then repeat."     "It's not so simple as some kind of illusion or mind control. They died while still being mentally present in reality. You can't 'wake yourself up from it'. And it plays favourites. It *had* favourites. I can only loosely speculate that it may have brought its favourites here; or they may have come together on their own."     "If I have to, I can rig up protective measures for you, but they aren't quick and they aren't mobile."     As they leave the corridor behind, Lilian marks something on both sides of the corridor walls with the tip of her sword, cutting shallow, geometric slashes into the metal. Snapping her fingers twice like a detonator remote, the runestone she'd dropped into the pit at the beginning ignites into a substantial amount of fire. The blaze is extremely intense, but mundane in all ways save that it seems to spread across the bones like wood; even if they're human remains, bone is a creation of nature, and thus well within that purview. It probably melts the glass too, but a lumpy and uneven set of footing on the way back is a much lesser concern.     At the same time, the stacks of runes she'd engraved into the black metal itself softly light up, mirroring twins near the entrance, and between them, generating . . . Visibly, nothing in particular. But Lilian is very much hoping that a hasty Moon Ward will show some kind of effect; such that a more thorough one might help later.     She seems very satisfied with the effort while continuing on though. When the Preserver keeps talking, she interrupts her own thoughtful musing to remark, "Oh? You're a person?" A pause. "You know what I mean." A shallow sigh. "That's rather unfortunate. I'd have liked speaking with a few more ghosts." And then, again, in that 'like she read it in a book tone'. "Of course. It would not relinquish their souls. Death wouldn't bring them any closer to what they lack." Them returning to her usual, absorbing the answer to her question across the band. "I can't imagine going through that. I suppose you could say that all the living who remember might be your kin. Thankfully, they know nothing of you. We're the first, and if we can finish this business, I'd like to record it."
Gawain	As they get past the threads and up the stairs, once Gawain's upstairs, he starts counting in his head. One...two...three... Conveyer belts. Dragonflies. Cimilico was once human. They tried to destroy everything infected...? Everything. And a giant murderous spirit-orb jellyfish thing. Controlling the dragonflies. The furnaces spew flames at Gawain, burning his nice suit, so he summons his armor instead. Once armor is up, the fire has trouble breaking through, allowing him to push forward even while being blazed. The thread bones, meanwhile, have Gawain rolling out of the way. Fatrolling, of course, but still. Thirty seconds go by. Bercilak. That's the name that comes to Gawain's mind. Something he appreciates having, a friend. He starts counting to the next thirty... And his sword slices through a dragonfly. "I'll try and lower their numbers!" He shouts out, as he goes from dragonfly to dragonfly. He burns through them... Some metal song he heard off Bercilak's bike. He recites the lyric in his head, as best as he can remember, and then repeats. Over, and over. He needs to try this exercise for Lilian's purposes.
Lilian Rook	Once Lilian enters the chamber above, and sees the sheer quantity of bones still heaped high, all her satisfaction for cremating the previous remains bleeds away immediately. It's rare that her shoulders fall like that for any reason, but not only the scale of the problem unaddressed compared to her paltry efforts, but the sheer scale of genuine human misery that once have must existed here is briefly overwhelming.     And yet, there isn't time for that. Her tactical analysis brain kicks in immediately. What some might call survival instincts. What she might call killer instincts.     §It doesn't seem like the maintenance drones can be Preservers too, but they're clearly compromised as well. Interface ports? We don't have anything compatible. Overriding them one at a time will take too long; only one person here can do that. Conveyors are far too large and heavy-duty to destroy if they're still running after all this time. Drones too numerous; they'll probably reinforce from elsewhere; there's no way this is the only cremation chamber in a facility of this size. Transmuting a bridge or crossing won't help; the bones are too high; they'll spill over. The furnaces are the least of our worries; people can be extracted from those. The snarl will get them first. Nobody here can make contact with that thing. Can't allow it. What about the remains? It even has the souls in the *ash*. Urns? They--§     "Cut down the drones! Clear the bones! I'm going in for it! *Do not* approach directly; if that thing touches you, it's over!" Lilian calls out. What she means isn't initially certain, because she's waiting for a direct --even if highly circuitous and inconvenient-- route through the room to open up, watching the mess of flying drones, the gouts of cascading fire, the tangle of black threads, for just the right alignment of openings. Then, when she has it, she--                 -----[stop]-----     Lilian books it. The moving conveyor belts don't matter because they aren't moving anymore. The remaining drones don't matter anymore because they can't change their targets until she says so. The threads can't change position while the bones and ashes are on pause. She races to the other end of the room. She kicks over one of the heavy, black metal urns, looking for one that hasn't been sealed yet, and then grabs it, lifts it, and--                 -----[start]-----     --teleports to the end of the room, securing one of the black urns, leaps up over the snarl, and dunks the urn overtop of it like a bug net, slamming the lid on after.
Persephone Kore	<J-IC-Scene> (NPC) Preserver Cimilco says, "I remained outside to do just this: guide those more capable than us to finish what we could not. I may be the only thing of our civilization still free of the eater-thought." <J-IC-Scene> (NPC) Preserver Cimilco says, "Tell me, honored foreigners. The world outside. Does it remember us at all? Have we any kin among the living?" <J-IC-Scene> Redshift Operators | Red Dwarf mutters, "I know how you feel, phone-line. But, no. Censored yourselves right out of the world to take the bastard down." <J-IC-Scene> Ioanna Langstrom hesitates. "...there's still people like you." <J-IC-Scene> Ioanna Langstrom says, "They don't remember you, but there's still people who look the way I think you looked." <J-IC-Scene> Gawain following Red Dwarf, "We won't forget your people, once this is done. I promise." <J-IC-Scene> Redshift Operators | Red Dwarf says, "Got nothing but respect for the kind of man that would make that choice when they get their hands 'round the throat of an egregore like this." <J-IC-Scene> (NPC) Preserver Cimilco says, "This is bittersweet. We fought very hard to ensure we could be forgotten. I am half-glad that we were." <J-IC-Scene> (NPC) Preserver Cimilco says, "Perhaps, when the eater-thought is dead, it can be safe to remember." <J-IC-Scene> Ioanna Langstrom says, "...I hope so." <J-IC-Scene> (NPC) Preserver Cimilco says, as if reassuring itself: "I will tell you stories, then, when it is done. Everything I remember." <J-IC-Scene> Ioanna Langstrom says, "I'd like that." <J-IC-Scene> Redshift Operators | White Dwarf says, "For your efforts, memory is deserved. A grave less painful than this is well-earned."
Ioanna Langstrom	The ghosts of men. When the ghost is gone,     there's nothing left to mourn. Mourn the unburnt dead instead -     it seems their souls do linger.      It sounds almost like poetry.      Later, she'll scribble it into a notebook. She'll put it somewhere safe and special, and perhaps in the dead of night, she'll open it and think of this on her bed. She'll put her finger on the page, and let it linger in her mind. That when the ghost is dead - that when no one remains to remember you - there's no point in anyone feeling sad that you even existed.      She'll think of this, this memento of her first mission as an Elite, and try to remember the faces of those she's stood to defend, and imagine the faces of those who put those words in Effigy of Cimilco's heart.      But that's then, and this is now. Now, there is not poetry, but monsters. The dragonfly flames lash outwards. The repair drones move rapidly, trying to push the group into the bones, into the threads, into death. Ioanna drops to one knee again. It gives her more flexibility to start moving, more flexibility to stop. It means she isn't caught off-balance when the conveyors start shifting. It means she's got clear shots.      But she's not taking them at the drones.      She's shooting the equipment. Specifically, she's shooting the motive spots of the conveyors. Wherever someone's standing, she's already shot it. When Lilian asks for a route, she's already starting to shoot the conveyors that would give her the most trouble to get over, so that Gawain can go and start cutting without fear of the fire or the threads.
Candy	When there's a moment of peace--probably through those unremarkable tunnels:      "What you gonna do when we're done here, ah? Besides tell the stories." There's a note of concern in his voice. Candy doesn't want Cimilco to be alone.      In the cremation room, Candy tries the conveyor belts for exactly as long as it takes-- for him to get pissed off. He tucks and rolls, after one of those malaicious stops causes him to nearly fly into a pile of bones. Instead, he slams his shoulder into the ground, biting his lip and casting a glare towards the maintenance drone, frozen in place with those beady little eyes fixated on the conveyor. Wisps of smoke linger, halted inches from his face. *Ho ho, I have got something for you little bastards. That's a fact.*     As he gets back to his feet, he has to readjust the backpack. It's heavy. He doesn't have to jerk a middle finger in the direction of each and every repair drone he can see, but he does. He waits, then, his eyes following Lilian, who's frozen (from his perspective, but very likely not hers. Time is weird) in pursuit of that... head-shaped orb upstairs. Candy stifles a sigh. *Can't be mad at them, can I? Well... these bones gotta go, no matter what.*      Time resumes. -There's a thump near Candy's position. -A sound like something shifting around in a backpack. -Several whipping noises like thrown knives. -Playing cards stick into the bone-piles. They ignite one after the other in rapid succession, fireballs attempting to swallow and incinerate the bones on the spot. -A gas-generator kicks up. -Is that a fucking industrial fan? Don't get your fingers too close. This is from before they had protective casing.
Redshift Operators	The gruff man gets to the top of the stairs and through the tunnels, and sets down his Shiny Briefcase as he reloads. It's not long before mutters something resentful to Lilian as she gives orders to them. Something like, "You're no Grier, orderin' me around." But he begrudgingly goes along with it. "Sure. Giant, get the bones with Newt. White, on me, let's cover them." The others quickly assent and surge into action. A combination of the techie's navigation with the giant's pure, massive strength means that they can get in among the belts and just start smashing piles apart. The powered hardsuit screams from the strain of the bone-crushing violence the giant is capable of. It's not because these are weak, aged bones. It's because *this is what he does with all bones.*     And the only way to get them through is by surging along Ioanna's seeds of pathing, those halted belts where things are stable and along the thin areas of the swarm Gawain cut down, and for various reasons both of them seem to flat-out ignore the fiery dangers of Candy's attack to work to carve its opening even deeper. The gruff man and the woman with the sword thin the swarm around them, one with a blade so precise it cuts five in a single slice, and one with a heavy shotgun and several carefully cooked airbursting short-range EMPs, which are tuned to obliterate as much of the interference as is mathematically and geometrically possible for any grenade to.
Tina Natsumi	"Z-zero? You could've been a little more.." Tina starts with a joking tone towards Lilian, stops herself, then takes a deep breath and clears her throat as she (finally) finishes making her way through the threads with her revolver safely back in its holster. "Yeah, probably. I'll have to come up with some kind of defense against that before we get down there, then." She continues, actually maintaining a more serious tone. "Or... Keep your distance and fire all at once. If it tries controlling my mind or something, my guns only go so far, and I'll have to reload sometime." There's a hint of resignation in her voice, too, but it helps keep her focused. Tina starts moving roughly in the middle of the group next once the threads have been overcome, and she starts muttering to herself. Anyone even barely trying to listen will notice that she's counting upwards to thirty. Then she's talking about her hat. Then she's counting again. Then she's mutter-singing something about McD****ds and books. She seems to be focusing a bit too much on that, even, that she very nearly walks right into one of the conveyor belts. Inhaling sharply at that, she takes several moments to look over the conveyor belt bone hell that's before her before turning to Candy and Neutron in particular. "Don't suppose either of you got any plans on how to get those bots on our side instead of... Probably trying to screw us over and ash us, eh?" She doesn't even bother forcing a chuckle at that, although it's heavily implied in her tone and grin. When she hears Lilian shouting out how to potentially deal with this, though, she switches gears and steps closer to the edge without getting on one of those hell belts (especially with Ioanna working on dismantling them). "Alright, how'm I gonna do this without it looking too stupid...?" Wrinkling her nose, Tina turns to Gawain and Ioanna while pointing at her eyes. "Hey. Better not laugh at this." She sounds dead serious, but there's still a grin on her face as she turns to stare right at the bots. She takes that phone back out, purses her lips at the NO RECEPTION sign on the top bar, then taps the power button twice to get the camera on. "Come on out.. Persona!" An indoor-appropriate-yet-mildly-defeaning roar comes out of somewhere in front of Tina as a weird floating snake thing takes shape in front of Tina. It starts looking less snakelike and more like some kind of spiky lizard as it continues forming, metallic scales and star-shaped spikes lining its back, tail, and most of its head. Once it fully forms, it throws its head back once before belching out focused beam of white-hot fire at the dragonfly-bots, moving from one to the next and even pivoting towards the repair drones when they get too close.
Persephone Kore	"Of course, honored foreigner," Cimilco answers Lilian. It can't contribute much in this room, with its own ranged weapon still disabled, but it manages to at least crush one of the dragonflies against a wall with its shield when the drone tries to swoop close. "I am... restricted, as precaution against the eater-thought. But as you are now, so once was I."      The individual dragonflies take minimal effort to disable- unlike the humanoid Preservers from earlier, they aren't built for combat at all. But unless effort is taken to destroy them thoroughly, another can swoop in to repair its fallen comrade in moments after you've moved on. Fortunately Tina's persona and Gawain's sword have enough power behind them to casually finish the job.      Between them, Ioanna, Gawain, and the Redshift Operators thoroughly obliterate the platforming hazard. The conveyor belts are all broken and ruined, but that doesn't matter, because the bone piles they were designed to incinerate are utterly destroyed too. Even pulverized and burned, those spirit-orbs remain, and the smoke-threads trailing upwards from them remain a hazard- but the ashes and orbs are blown away to a far corner by Candy, making their threat irrelevant.      When Lilian puts the vase over the snarl, the effect is instantaneous and dramatic. All of the dragonfly robots freeze and drop to the ground simultaneously, literally puppets with their strings cut. A few seconds later, they reboot and take flight again- but now they're innocent, milling about like the dumb little robots they are and starting to effect genuine repairs. One of them even touches up Preserver Cimilco's chassis.      The snarl's malignant influence can't escape the jar, nor can it speak, but the silent aura of seething hatred radiating from the sealed urn is palpable. Better not take the lid off.      "An impressive display," Cimilco says as it steps over the stilled conveyor belts and spares a glance towards the fan-blown ash. "But conserve your strength, honored foreigners. We have nearly arrived."      "The highest areas of the containment pyramid," it continues as it walks up the stairs and through another 'breather hallway', "were the first to be filled. In the early days we did not realize the gravity of the threat. We believed we could treat the afflicted gently, as if they had a tragic disease. Containment was poor."      "You have seen the desperation of our last days in the mass graves of the base. You have seen the determined extermination of the middle period in the crematoria. Now, bitterly, I must show you the decadence of our earlier, happier times; the iniquity which invited the eater-thought's corruption. Here its evil is strongest."      Cimilco pauses before the last door. It reaches up to its cyclops face and digs one finger right through its own robotic eye, with a crack-kssh of shattering glass. The optics are destroyed. Then, and only then, does it continue through.
Persephone Kore	This layer is not a place of incineration, nor a hasty mass grave, but a luxurious prison. It is beautiful. In the communal area, artificial streams trickle through artificial meadows, extinct grasses lush with exotic shades of green. There are hand-carved wooden benches and ancient, wizened trees tended by chrome dragonflies and gentle artificial lights imitating the sunset sky overhead.      The "cells" are actually little houses scattered throughout the meadow, themselves shaped from black metal and wood, made in the style of foreign but comfortable summer cottages. Clearly this was a community intended for rehabilitation of the afflicted- a breathtaking innocence, a vast generosity. And it was, just as clearly, cruelly abused.      Some skeletons lie out in the open- three of them clustered around one destroyed humanoid Preserver, where obviously the prisoners fought with the guards; their smoke-strings are unusually intense. More are entombed in the little cottages that were once their homes, when the madness that afflicted them inevitably tore them apart. Through the cottages' windows are visible crazed etchings, drawings in blood, sculptures, statues. A recurring motif is a smile with a missing tooth, sculptures emphasizing a hollowness, paintings emphasizing negative space-      "Do not look," Cimilco says with the utmost severity. "Shut your eyes. These ideas are irradiated. Their symbology is lethal." It is, itself, still blind, but seems able to navigate the area by memory. "I have been here before. Take my hand, or follow my voice, and I will lead you to the staircase."      This works. Navigating in total darkness is possible for several moments, even if one risks stepping in a shallow brook or bumping into a cabin. And then a voice that isn't Cimilco's makes itself heard.      "Dear guests," it says. Its voice is robotic like Cimilco's, but static, rehearsed; one can immediately tell it isn't a *person*. "It is night-time. Please return to your homes." A slithering, creaking metallic noise; hydraulic hissing, surrounding you on all sides. "Warden, let us pass," Cimilco says, its voice trembling slightly.      "Dear guests. Return to your homes, or force will be used. Please." Audible sharpness and crackling electricity surround you on all sides.      To those brave, or mentally defended enough, to confidently open their eyes, the Warden appears like a globe of metal the size of a human being, gleaming with a dark iridescence. It is supported and surrounded by arm-thick extensible cables of all kinds like an enormous metal octopus, which terminate in crackling prods and harrowingly sharp blades; its limbs are long and numerous enough to encircle the party all around.      When it pounces, all those multifarious weapons converge at once in an omnidirectional attack.
Gawain	Gawain realizes he needs to shut his eyes as Cimilico blinds himself. He does so, not even looking as they enter, instead following his familiar scent, and takes his hand when offered. But when the Warden starts talking, starts crackling with lightning, Gawain's senses light up. Oil. Gasoline. Like an engine? Over there. Crackle. Hiss. Press. Gawain's sword moves, as does his body, to put itself in the way of the prods. His body is volted up, electricity gunning through him, but he grimaces through the pain, as he starts slicing into those armored tendril-prods from the tips and trying to disable them. An attacking defense... But focused more on the defense than the offense. If he's the only one being majorly hurt, then the others can tear the Warden to shreds faster.
Ioanna Langstrom	It puts out its eye.      Ioanna's badge goes to hide her mouth. Her stoic professionalism breaks, there, just for an instant. She's been through that. She *knows* what that's like. She knows the feeling of something digging into the eye, digging into the nerve - the sudden shock of pain as the light goes out forever, as a part of that which lets you interact with the world ceases to be. She's felt it.      In the burning corridor, in the falling building, she's felt that.      So when the Effigy of Cimilco rips out its own eye, even though it's just a machine, a ghost, she can't help the look of sympathetic horror, the open mouth, the wide, hidden eye behind the mirrorshades, the twisting of muscles in shock.      When they enter, she's told to shut her eyes, but...she can't. She just *can't*. This is something she has to remember. Something too beautiful not to remember. Something breathtaking, gentle, wonderful, and lost. Paradise, Lost, in the most literal of senses.      Paradise, Mad. The crazed etchings, the hollow sculptures. The negative space. Quietly, in the back of her mind, she's already running through metaphors. Negative space. Missing tooth. Drawings in blood.      Containment?      She doesn't close her eyes because she *can't*. She can't...not see this.      So when the Warden appears, she's one of the first to see it, and probably the first to draw back in horror. Old instincts. Floating monsters that cut through people like saws. These are the sort of things she's fought and the first thing you do is you shoot and you pray that someone's on the way.      But she's the someone now.      But her expertise isn't best used *here*. It's best used *there*. Near the paintings. And, well...she has the expertise.      And she's expendable. Nobody else here is.      So she goes running. Warden Gawain says he can give her an opening. She trusts him on that. She's had to deal with worse odds than having an Elite directly protecting her, after all. She runs, arms pumping, heart pounding. <J-IC-Scene> (NPC) Preserver Cimilco says, "Kill it first. Then look at the paintings. Or you will go into the furnace."      "That's,"      She dives directly past Gawain. He'll hold it off.      "Nothing..."      She rolls to her feet, whipping a kick around into one of the attacks that gets near her. "New!"      "For me!"      Ioanna stops in front of the paintings. She's running her fingers along the etchings, touching spots on the statues. She doesn't look maddened. She doesn't look crazed. She looks like...      Well, like someone studying art in a college setting.      It's actually sort of funny. She sits down, her lips tight in focus, in that pencil skirt and suit, tapping the pencil she took the rubbing with against her lip. She really does look like she'd be in college - well, a nice college. She levels the pencil at some portions, thoughtfully, muttering something to herself.      "That's interesting," she says, "Very interesting infection vector...explains the jealous god motif. No wonder...but where did it *start*?"      Over her shoulder, she calls at Cimlico, "Before you tell me to close my eye again, answer a question for me, sir. Did this infection start here? It can't hurt; I'm going in the furnace, right? So you can answer my question freely."      She stands, chewing on the end of her pencil. Whether it started here or not, the oldest painting, or sculpture, or etching - that would probably imply the first person in the, at least, localized infection.      So she starts walking along, tapping her pencil against the ideographs, and walking, perfectly normally, along, still muttering to herself.
Tina Natsumi	The dragonflies go down, and that's one obstacle taken care of! Thanks to all the destruction and fan gimmicks, meanwhile, Tina can finally advance unimpeded! "Nice work, everyone. That's two crap rooms dealt with, so-" She freezes briefly when the dragonfly robots come back up, but lets out a relieved sigh once they prove to no longer be a hazard. "I've still got plenty left in the tank. But if anyone needs a breather, don't be afraid to speak up." She says with a quick glance around to see if anyone does need said breather. She'll even stick around to wait for anyone that needs it to refresh, using that time to reload her guns and have the giant lizard Persona loitering behind her ominously. Once it's time to move again, she gets right back to listening to Cimilco's story and hovering around the center of the group, sticking to her instructed spot. "Who wouldn't do it that way? If the problem can be solved be doing as little as possible, of course that's what most people'll do. Nobody expects it to turn out like this." Upon reaching the final door, Tina raises an eyebrow as she looks over towards whatever Cimilco is doing. She opens her mouth to say something when it just wrecks its own eye, inhaling sharply through her teeth before finally remembering to do that counting exercise again to distract and also prepare herself. She reminds herself about Alberichstadt. She mutter-hums something that sounds like the tune of a children's cartoon. Did that school even have a dedicated song to it? If it did, she can't remember it, but she remembers the cartoons of her youth vividly enough. It doesn't quite distract her from just how extravagant and depressing the whole place looks, but it helps to center Tina at least a little bit. How much that'll help, she's not sure, but getting instructions helps to keep her focused. She closes her eyes, and she shuffles along to make it a little easier to know where the shifts in elevation are however slight they may be. No sense letting herself get surprised by something dumb like a sudden step into water, after all. She hears the Warden, and she exhales sharply. "No can do. You're not our... Anything. We don't know you." She states plainly, listening to try and figure out which way the Warden is. She can't just fire blindly around without the risk of hitting someone, but just shooting in a random direction probably won't help. After weighing her options, she opts to throw caution to the wind and draws her submachine gun while opening her eyes wide to get a clear look at the Warden and where it's main mass seems to be. "Aim for the impact noises!" And with that, Tina starts spraying lead at the Warden, just trying to buffet it with bullets and all the potential noises that might entail. Perhaps realizing that the gun itself might be too loud, though, she even goes as far as having her Persona just fling itself right over that main body, relying on its weight to make even more noise in the Warden's general direction.
Redshift Operators	Things are clearer. The gunman goes back to retrieve his shiny briefcase before moving on soon. The woman reaches out with her right arm -- it's actually, it seems, an entirely mechanical proshesis. Peacefully, she invites one of the dragonflies to land and pay respects with her to the fire. Or maybe fix some dents, who knows.     The giant and the astronaut move in first. Each cover their respective helmets' vision options, and invite the others to do so as well with mask and helmet. They're blind by the time they go through the prison area.     Here's the thing. The giant is of such a full and wonderous heart that it's nearly impossible to afflict him with any sense of longing at all. And, furthermore, his memory is so absolutely dogshit that there's a good chance that he can't even remember enough of this all at once to understand the idea. That has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he disabled the wrong vision port on his helmet, the vision port for his busted eye rather than the functional one.     So he's the only one of the four operatives who had an eye open. And he's the one who wraps his arms around his companions to shield them, enduring the brutal slicing and electrification all on his own. When the barrage abates as Gawain takes the lead, he stands further up at his full seven and a half feet, turns around, and his eye *gleams* horrifyingly. Tina told him he needs to break this thing before he's allowed to ask more questions. He *loves* to help!     All two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle, plus a hundred pounds of strength-enhancing armor, is suddenly completely dedicated to removing every single arm of the monster, and punching through layers of armor to rip out components, simply enduring whatever impacts Gawain doesn't draw away and letting them fall on his body, as he punches with the kind of strength usually reserved for a meteor impact. He, himself, is totally silent. His armor wails the wail of the damned, screeching in unearthly strain and sparking brutally as he just goes to town on this thing. It's automated, so that's okay! It's not technically "violence!"
Candy	"Huh?!" Candy cups a hand to his ear, glancing towards the robot friend. After a moment, he cuts the generator off, and the fan dies down. "Oh, yeah," he says, to Cimilco a moment after. "You're not too bad yourself, my friend. It's good you're here to show us around, ah?"      Iniquity is not a word Candy knows--he's not the sort to throw around words like that. Decadence, too, might be a little lofty for him. Candy frets over Cimilco following the cracking of its eye, climbing up its form to tear a portion of his sleeve off and 'bandage' the 'injury.' He continues to hang off of the robot by its shoulder as they enter into the place of 'decadence' and 'iniquity'--      "Oh." There's a pause. "I'll just free up the space then, my friend," says Candy--but he doesn't close his eyes, as he slides off. There are three Others, in his mind. They seem like him, yet not--one with the sibilance of a snake, one with the shrill squeak of a bat and one with the derisive laugh of a coyote.      Anything that tries to worm its way into Candy's mind is pestered, misled and mocked, badgered in triplicate by the three presences to a relentless, unceasing degree. Their fangs make convincing arguments even when their words fall on deaf ears. Candy himself has a will of iron, a diamondine certainty of who he is and what his wishes are that withstands attempts to pervert his mind like rocks against the sea--it would take a very long time indeed to make any meaningful change.      His body, however... that's more vulnerable. He very much cannot withstand being sliced to ribbons. "We're not prisoners, Squidball. Why don't you use one of those things to make yourself a working pair of eyes, ah?" Of course, he would choose to belittle an evident authority figure before anything else--but he's still getting used to dealing with robots. This thing has no sense of pride to impugn, and has no qualms about using those blades, which he finds out quickly when one cuts a long gash across his shoulder. Candy hisses as the backpack's strap is cut and it falls to the ground-- Candy's blood halts in midair. Blades and prods freeze mid-swing. Ioanna's kick is held in relief against one, knocking it away. Sparks illuminate the point where Tina's bullets impact with it... *Not a bad idea.*      Time resumes. -A cacophony of metal tapping, ratcheting, slotting, assembly. -A water-cooled, early twentieth century heavy machine gun assembles itself. -Sandbags hit the ground around it in a heap, weighting the tripod down. -It fires. Three to four second burts. -Each one ends with the gun jerking to the left or right, or an adjustment of elevation, trying to suppress those limbs.      The gun won't be a perfect solution. It's an obvious target, and Candy's use of it depends on those limbs staying in the same place they were when he stopped time. So that's why he adds in something of his own. He appears from behind a cloak of mimicked invisibility, flinging razor-sharp playing cards with a bloodied arm, and another handful with the other, straight towards the point where Tina's bullets impacted.
Lilian Rook	Releasing her breath in a quietly relieved sigh, Lilian finds somewhere in the corners, with the urns that haven't been moved in the longest amount of time, to set her particular charge down, and then make a quick weld of its lid and walls with a white point point of magical heat; it's very thin and not even close to professional work, but who cares, it's just to seal a jar so that a drone doesn't accidentally tip it over. Then, still crouched down, she pats the top of the metallic urn like the head of a faintly annoying child, and says, "Don't worry. I'll figure out a way to kill you later. You piece of shit." To the seething malevolence within.     Ideally it'll just go away on its own once they're done here though. Lilian really doesn't want to go tracking more of these things down, even if she has them dialed in.     She also weighs the Preserver's latest words with considerable gravity. With what she's seen so far, her outward expression has already gone through several different cycles, but now she seems to settle on a kind of robotically trudging, distantly thoughtful, and gravely focused Fey Mood. "It isn't a sin to want to believe that things will be alright. It's not 'decadent' just to be . . . wrong about something. Those people, back in those days, had family, friends, children, lovers; it's obvious that they'd try to save them. That happy people wouldn't agree to give up on that happiness so easily. I don't think badly of you for wanting to help them, at first."     Before the final barrier, where the Preserver breaks his functioning optics, she stops to uncork a vial of something that smells extremely toxic, and then wipe some silvery substance in a trio of simple patterns below each eye and on her forehead. She says, out loud, with the recognizable tone of someone who has decided they understand something very important just a little bit better, like making progress on a Koan of some kind: "Those who die for the greater good hath their reward. The many outweigh the few. The righteous outweigh the unjust. Stay thy hand not for unnecessary persons." A beat. "I'm sorry your people didn't survive to write that one. All of us marked like that carry those regrets. If we'd only acted sooner, more decisively, more ruthlessly; but it doesn't work that way."     Lilian enters the top floor with her eyes open. She has to. It's something 'only she can do'. What good is she as an Immune if she can't handle this. As the group's point of vision, she narrates for them as they move, but though she tries to make it sound detailed and unusual, she still gives off the vibe of having seen it once before. "It's a rehabilitation center. A pretty one. Residential housing. Artificial comforts. I think these trees might be extinct now. Not all of it is made of the black metal. There aren't that many wards."     "There's nobody here of course, don't worry. I don't think there are guards either; it looks as if the afflicted might have tried to fight their way out. There are bones, but I can't tell if they starved or committed suicide or were put down without examining the bodies. The connections are still visible here; they're the oldest and strongest, I think. I'll say something if you're about to touch one, but they're far out of the way, so don't worry. They've definitely tried to escape, long ago. Tried to spread the word. They've created art. Pictures, symbols, sculptures; they attempted to convey the idea they couldn't describe in the only ways available to them. Even in their own blood. But it wouldn't let go. It's not something you can escape, and they weren't trying to run from it. It's something they had to go *to*. They needed more people. To spread the word. To gather together those close to them and all go together." She pauses, then directs her voice at Gawain. "Sound familiar?"
Lilian Rook	After a lingering pause, with just the group's footsteps and the trickle of water to hear, she finds the most 'right' words she can think up in such a short time, and speaks for the whole group to hear. "The idea that humans, people, are somehow fundamentally incomplete, lacking something, lost without it, and looking to fill that hole, is hardly new. But it's such a vague concept. You can theorize it, try to put names to it, tell it to people, and they can decide to agree with you, and decide to chase that thing. The pursuit of meaning, or connections."     "But that's just a means of us placing our insecurities, our failings, our fears, our unhappiness, into a clump and imagining there must be something wrong somewhere in the middle of it. That they wouldn't leak into our lives if there weren't a hole in the hull somewhere. That kind of question isn't *meant* to be answered. People aren't supposed to *know* that there is a hole, and they especially aren't meant to know *what* it is. I think that if you somehow thought the right thing, described the concept just right, explained it just perfectly, maybe you really could find something that people actually do, fundamentally, need, but don't have, or have lost. And then how would people react? How would you act if you suddenly became conscious, for the first time, of something so terribly wrong with yourself? Like, the adrenaline wearing off and noticing you're missing a limb. How would you sleep at night, in that state? It'd eat you alive, wouldn't it?"     "And what would you do if someone not only pointed exactly to your injury, your agonizing deformity, but also told you exactly how to fix it? How you could be healed? And what if they told you that you couldn't heal it alone? Or that you couldn't heal the people you care about; that only they could heal themselves once they understood? What do you think you'd do then?" One last pause. "And then, what'd you do once that understanding, so much clearer than any moral or philosophy or myth or scripture, replaces God? *Becomes* God?"     Then the Warden appears, and Lilian doesn't need to tell anyone anything at all. Nothing but one fact, which she could confirm even without looking at it. "This thing doesn't even look . . . I think it's just *like* this. It was always like this." Taken to mean that it isn't a snarl-possessed heap of malevolent thought-horror. It's a robot authorized to Use Force, with very clear cut and uncomplicated guidelines, to be as robust and catchall as possible.     §It's just a matter of time at this rate. One of them is going to get hurt, and they're going to look, and they might just Get It.§
Lilian Rook	Rather than engaging with the Warden, Lilian breaks off and, without explaining, begins *extensive* work on the surroundings. She maintains enough range from the Warden so that she doesn't have to focus on it, but she works like a woman possessed, using the water, the trees, the stones, and the other fortunate inclusions of nature to her advantage, moving from path to path to home to home to end to end of the stream. Submerging gleaming stones, carving living symbols into wood, casting out mercury, salt, ash, sulfur, arsenic, burning clover, holly, mistle, cherry, splashing and drawing ink. Iridescent acids that melt slightly into the road, golden leaves that smell like incense, fresh blood and black water. Will-o-wisps and hanging stars and conjured magic. Boundaries marked by stones and incense, arrays drawn in sanctified inks and arcane toxins, sacred geometries invoked with celestial metals, and arcane powers drawn by the heavenly substrates.     She can only make it so big. She can only *carry* so much, and she's already straining herself making ten times as much work as should be possible to get it done so quickly, even then only just barely useful while everyone else is soaking the combat encounter. Without real leylines, she has to create temporary, artificial ones, and in such a desolate environment, most of that energy has to come from her. The bounded territory is only large enough to reach the 'back yards' of two cottages directly across the same street, perfectly circular; not a lot of space to move around in. Or rather, spherical. It's completed by her making 'ritual', or rather somewhat symbolic, cuts through the tendrils of thought-smoke that fall within the area.     "Don't stray far." she says, panting a little with exertion. "It'll be fine."
Persephone Kore	The Warden robot is far larger than any of the Preservers were, but its armor isn't as tough- it was built to shrug off the improvised weapons of corrupted prisoners, not genuine weapons of war. Pruning back or ripping off its arms proves eminently feasible, but is only a temporary reprieve- whenever one is removed, it always seems to have two more, ready to electrocute, constrict, or decapitate.      When the blades whicker close enough that you can hear them slicing the air, or the electric shocks course through your body with arcing convulsive pain, or something snags you that you can't see and squeezes hard enough to crush, it is terribly unbearably hard to tell your eyes to stay shut.      Pummeling its body, as marked out by Tina, is difficult as long as it has tendrils to shield itself with- but as those are temporarily trimmed back, bringing it to a permanent end becomes much more feasible. The spherical shell of its main body cracks open under the accumulated damage, and then finally splits wide, spilling out electronic guts. Its thrashing grows more erratic as it's pounded- even Preserver Cimilco, blind though it is, pitches in on pulverizing ithe redundant components with its shield.      Finally, it goes limp and dead. A pair of dragonflies swoop down to perch on its silvery body, examining the damage with their glittering innocent eyes- but there's no need to shoo them away. It'll be weeks or months before they could possibly have the Warden working again, after a beating like that.      The cognitive effect of keeping one's eyes open- especially of observing the art intentionally- is subtle, gnawing, and awful. The prisoners' artwork naturally, mundanely suggests a specific thing is missing from humanity; something that could be named, something that could be grasped, something without which we are all woefully incomplete. It is a deep and heartfelt yearning. It is the cusp of a realization, on the tip of your tongue.      The Monty Hall Problem is not a problem at all. It is a simple, uncomplicated mathematical fact. But 90% of human beings will immediately, viscerally disagree with it. Intuition screams that the math is wrong. The brain's hardwiring rebels. It is a falsehood more immediately convincing than any truth; a stark reminder that what seems *right* is not always *real*. The fact that the eater-thought is immediately, overwhelmingly self-evident once it is articulated does not prove it's true. But it does prove that human brains have a blind spot.      That feeling is intensified the longer you keep your eyes open, diminished by keeping inside Lilian's field, and blunted considerably by mental reinforcement. But it's the answer- the eater-thought itself- that is truly intrusive; the question that suggests it, being asked by the artwork, is wholly mundane. Psychic barriers may not fully keep out that nagging tip-of-your-tongue feeling, even if they keep out the horrible "realization" at the end.
Persephone Kore	All of that ebbs away, if only slowly, upon heading up the penultimate staircase. It's like being decontaminated from radiation. There's one more rest hallway before the top; from here, the malignant presence of the eater-thought's prime embodiment at the top is nearly palpable, but it offers some relief from the horrible artwork of the rehabilitation meadows below.      Preserver Cimilco halts there, leaning against the wall. It is still blind, still moving by memory and feel, but it follows Ioanna's voice and walks back towards her.      And then it strikes her across the face with its shield, not quite hard enough to crack an ordinary person's skull, but still more than enough to bruise. The noise is harsh, abrupt, resounding.      "Foreigner," it says, dropping the 'honored' for the first time, "you would put your people's blood on my hands through your foolishness. Destroying our *own* civilization is enough guilt for us to bear; you would have us shoulder more? I hope that is sufficient to clear your mind of what you saw."      It's probably not wise to tell Cimilco that she wasn't the only one to keep her eyes open.
Ioanna Langstrom	And Lilian gets it in one.      Nobody can see the pencil slip from her mouth into her fingers. Nobody can see the tightening of her hand around the badge. They're preoccupied. Busy. They can't see her calmly stow the pencil back into her breast pocket with shaking fingers. Her expertise, vital? All she's done so far is tell people that ants die in a circle and talk about classical music - and those four mercenaries had someone who already knew it, too.      She doesn't belong-      CRACK      It's a good thing that the MCM protects her head, even though it doesn't appear to. That might otherwise be a broken nose. Instead she just hits the ground from the slap.      She wants to say something, but it's right, isn't it? It was arrogant of her. And it wasn't even needed. Lilian already knew it all. Probably all of them already knew it all.      She's so small, here. Standing among giants, and she thought she was important enough to make a decision like that?      She tucks her arm under her breast to support herself and whispers, "I'm sorry, sir."      And once again, she's thankful for the mirrorshades.
Gawain	The robot goes down. Once they're up there, leaning against the wall, Gawain doesn't expect what happens next. Preserver Cimilco smashes his shield into Ioanna's face. As much as she did something she shouldn't have... "Preserver, please, forgive her. If you are to blame anyone, blame me, as her commanding officer. I deeply apologize." He doesn't once blame her, or say 'for her actions'. But at the same time, it's sincere. He bows as deeply as he can, even if Cimilco can't see it. "For now, we all need to work together. Let's progress forward and destroy this phenomena, once and for all."
Redshift Operators	The rest of the Redshifts have kept their eyes closed. And when they all get up the stairs, they take a short breather and reactivate their vision. Even the giant reactivates his, albeit it's the broken eye. The shorter, angier man checks the contents of his briefcase, as if to make sure, and then checks his shotgun to be doubly sure. The woman with the robotic arm attends to the bruises and burns in her huge friend.     The astronaut remains unnervingly silent, unnervingly still, standing and staring. Even during the dramatic exchange atop the stairs. And five seconds longer. Then they nod solemnly. "Good. You finished your containment objective and you finished your learning objective." Their voice is definitive, as if rendering an assessment of a machine. The astronaut's uncanny sense of goals being completed just tunes to the bright side. "Good work. Do you have any injuries that'll obstruct you from finishing your objectives here? My friend is a field medic." They turn to look at Cimilco. Look the robot up and down. And pause motionlessly for another five seconds.     "I don't think she can help you. Sorry."
Candy	Candy hadn't looked at the paintings, or pictures. His 'houseguests' might protect from willful threats, and his sense of self might protect from insidious passive influences like the one here. But that doesn't mean that such influences can't be felt. *I know who I am. I know what's gotta happen, for things to be right.*     Candy turns away from Ioanna and Cimilco alike after the robot chastises her, wincing after his fingers touch upon that gash on his shoulder. He sucks in a breath, and kneels down to retrieve something from the backpack. A spool of wire and a wooden box with two metal nodes and a plunger handle. *Fuck this thing. Trying to make me question. Worse than the goddamn eggheads and the book-reader bullshit mind games. I can't put it to words like the Limey can. Or trace the history like the girl with the pencil. But I can goddamn get rid of it.*     "From your lips to God's ears, knight," says Candy, as a bundle of dynamite appears under the crook of his left arm. *Maybe the space people, they have something for that too. Well, I sign my name anyways.*     "Hey, medic," he says, to the woman with the robotic arm. "You mind taking a look at my shoulder?" *I wish the doctor was here. Then I'd feel better.*
Lilian Rook	Lilian, secretly grateful for a breather, is more than savvy enough not to bother explaining anything further to their robot ghost friend, nor reveal anything she doesn't have to. Gawain is already doing the chivalrous thing, apologizing and taking responsibility like a big man. She herself remains standing and impassive, only having a few words before walking past and up the stairs.     "I understand your feelings." she says to Cimilco. "And I'm aware you made them abundantly clear just minutes ago. However, I hope I am respectfully understood when I say 'that was your One'." She doesn't stop to help Ioanna up; she's a grown woman and can do that herself. "The circle below is our fallback point. Consider it the only marginally safe zone there is. The chance we might need to cycle some members out into a tactical retreat and recovery is not-insignificant. One of our few advantages is that our objective is trapped up here, and we police the only way out. There's no need to overcommit and get killed. Or worse, then killed; by me. Let those words live in your head for a little while; we don't need bravery from here on."
Persephone Kore	Preserver Cimilco has only a shattered socket for a face now, but its body language is as clear as any living human's: indignation with Ioanna falters into surprise, then uncertainty, and finally settles into a kind of awful, deep guilt. It tries to look down at its own hands as if to express 'what have I done', but it's lacking several of the necessary parts.      "No. Oh, gods, the fault is mine. We conceived that thought. We built that village. Our culture..." It falls silent. Its body shudders, not from mechanical malfunction but intense, inarticulable emotion.      "You've been so brave already. So much braver than any of us ever were. Than I ever was. Please, honored foreigner. I was so afraid for you, but I had no right to turn to anger. Me least of all."      It looks up, its eyeless face trying to meet where it believes Ioanna's head is. "I cannot ask your forgiveness, but I am sorry."
Persephone Kore	The rehabilitation village below was built on idealism and naivete, a genuine and innocent hope that the victims of the eater-thought could somehow be healed. If what Cimilco said was true, the upper chambers of the pyramid were the first to be filled. One might expect the apex, therefore, to be even more innocent and unsecured.      Not so. Even back then, they knew that the eater-thought's embodiment had to be secured. The last set of doors is unbelievably heavy, four solid feet of black metal in an interlocking powered airlock design and swimming with inscriptions that are hard for the eyes to focus on. The doors open at Cimilco's hesitant authorization with a grinding, shrieking of components that haven't moved in thousands of years. Behind it is a short hallway and a second, identical door, airlock-style.      "I am not strong enough," Preserver Cimilco says, steadying itself against a wall. "I was not then. And I am so much lesser now." It lifts its useless right stump-arm for emphasis.      "It is the greatest virtue to leave a better world for one's children. So this my people's greatest sin: that, at the end, we should leave you a burden and not a gift. I cannot ask you for forgiveness. I can only tell you... how proud I am, that people like you should inherit the Earth from us. We do not deserve successors so noble."
Ioanna Langstrom	Ioanna is in fact a grown-ass woman. She doesn't need any help standing up. She probably wouldn't take it, at this point, though she wouldn't bat the hand away like a child or something stupid like that. Instead, as Gawain starts speaking, she stands, shaky, her knees wobbling just a bit. She's not injured, clearly. If she was injured that easily the MCM would have to go right back to the drawing board and a whole lot of scientists would get a whole lot of earfulls from a whole lot of government budgetary oversight committees about wasted time and wasted effort.      Her hair is still hiding part of her face when Gawain apologizes. They can't see her. She's too composed to start shaking like a little girl, too composed to start shaking or crying over the weight that's just settled over her shoulders, over the feeling of being so helplessly, utterly wrong, of showing your superiors how helplessly, utterly wrong you are on the first impression. She might break down later, but right now, she can't afford to. It's no different than the trenches during a kaiju attack. You bite your lip, you keep your head down, and you shoot when you get a chance, and when the guy next to you gets-      The Preserver starts talking, and she shakes her head. "It's fine. You're not wrong. I'm sorry, sir. You don't...you don't need to ask anything. You waited here, right?"      "You...waited here for who knows how long. For...for ages, and ages, and ages. Sitting here, knowing that you were the last, that you were the only one who remembered. You waited here and you sat and you wondered if help was ever going to come, if anything you did meant anything, if..."      She bites her lip, tightly.      "You waited."      "All alone."      "Just to give us a chance to save ourselves."      She raises her head, and she's smiling, and her voice is trying to be bright even though it's cracking just a bit, because it's not for her, it's for the Preserver. "Thank you."      "I just want to make absolutely sure that you're remembered. Even if it's only by me, even if it's just in my memories, that what you did...that who you are, and who you were...is remembered."      "Thank you."      She hugs the robot. It's a soft hug, a warm hug. It's a tight hug. "Thank you," she whispers again, patting it on the back.      Then she laughs and brushes the hair back, except for that damn ahoge, which she just can't get rid of, no matter how hard she tries. "From one cyclops to another, let's call it even, okay? Forget about it. You didn't even hurt me. See?" She reaches down to grab the robot's hand and press it against her face. "Not even a scrape. If anything, you helped me out, right? I'm testing...well, don't worry about it, okay?"      When Cimilco tries to steady itself against the wall, Ioanna just wraps its arm around her shoulder, and says nothing as she steadies it, as she takes in what they've been looking for all this time.      "Thank you for trusting us."      Her voice gets a little more firm, though there's a tiny bit of a waver there. "We'll make sure to live up to your expectations, sir."
Redshift Operators	The woman with the robotic arm pulls back from the back of the massive strongman and wipes her forehead over the goggles she's wearing. To Candy, she pulls out her medical scanner and twirls it like a cowboy doing a trickshot. A quick scan, and then the arm unfolds. She's got an entire surgical toolkit in there! Flash-sprays of medi-foam, intensive stitching, and so on, and then she applies nanogauze in an overdramatic motion, a healing effort that took all of a dozen seconds at most. "Through these dark energies, may your wounds be obliterated and your flesh made whole." Somehow the respirator gives her voice an intense sound.     There was literally nothing supernatural about that. It *was* expert doctoring, though.
Persephone Kore	In accordance with Lilian's plan, the first airlock is jammed open. And the second airlock, ahead of you, is forced open against protocol. What lies beyond is predictable and terrible.      The eater-thought's psychic impression on space here is so intense as to be physical. The aggregate belief of so many deluded souls, even in death, makes it real- perhaps even more real than anything else. It is a hideous knot of shifting smoke surrounding an unbearably bright soul-orb, immortal and yet nearly helpless: an ancient spike of black metal runs through its precise core, nailing it to the floor. Its corruptive influence on spacetime and on minds is palpable, nauseating, an aching gap like a missing tooth.      But that influence is counterbalanced by something else. There's an equally strong, or maybe stronger, sense of warmth and acceptance- the psychic equivalent of an infectious smile, utterly foreign to this place, impossible to pinpoint the source of. Did it just arrive? Or was it blocked by the pyramid's insulative walls until now?      Quietly, gently, the entire opposite face of the pyramid is shredded away, giving the answer. Every floor is flooded with daylight at once. Twenty-foot-thick blocks of metal, thousands of aggregate tons, are obliterated into dust, as their permission to exist is simply rescinded. The pyramid now has only three faces. You can see the out to the horizon of the Sonoran Desert through the hole. The structure groans and howls, but avoids gross collapse. Smokelike tendrils shriek and wail as they flail in the air- this isn't the eater-thought's doing.      A woman floats in the air, maybe thirty feet away from the top floor's now-open edge. Her hand rests on her cheek thoughtfully; her eyebrows are raised in mild surprise. The metal dust from the entire shredded face of the pyramid orbits around her at an angle like the rings of Saturn.      My eyes, a brown so vibrant they're almost orange, glitter with warm anticipation. Why shouldn't they? It's so good to get to meet you all! They're kindly, but maybe scary at the same time. She's so unbearably 'solid' that everything else feels like a hollow plastic toy by comparison. "Oh! Were you here to get this too? Haha, and you made it really far, even. But I can't let you take it, you know? I promised Dr. Carpathia I'd bring it back to the lab."      "Is that okay? Or are we going to have to fight about it?"
Gawain	As Cimilco breaks down much like a human does, Gawain allows Ioanna to be the one to comfort them. Gawain, instead, pushes forward as the doors open, and- Instead of the eater-thought, it's another psychic hazard altogether. The Pyramid's been ripped open. Daylight everywhere. A threat. Daylight everywhere. Gawain's confident. "Persephone, was it?" Gawain looks so much smaller in person. But a lot more confident than on TV or in an action figure. "I apologize. But we're here to destroy the eater-thought. It looks like we're going to have to fight about it." He readies his sword. "I'm not going to kill you, of course. Can I expect the same treatment? You seem like a kind person, even if you're our enemy tonight." She's terrifying. He's confident but she's terrifying. The only reason he can remain this confident is the sun's kiss. It blesses him, makes him stronger, faster, and tougher than he was inside the dark pyramid. Even so... This will not be an easy fight.
Redshift Operators	"Wow! This is a 'triangular pyramid' now!" "Fuck! Back, back from the wall!" "She's here to stop us from reaching the objective." "I... did not predict *this*."     All four of the Redshifts pull into tight formation. First the blood-red gunman, then the swordswoman, blade drawn and the giant titan at each flank, and the astronaut behind them all, all four of them steadying as best they can in the chaotic crashing. It takes some time for it to settle...     The gruff man tosses his shiny briefcase backwards to the astronaut, before he speaks up to the intruder. "Here for that thought too. You can't let us take it, huh? That's fine." He grits his teeth under the helmet. "You can stop anyone you want from taking it. So long as I turn that fucking egregore to *slag and ash.*" The heavy combat shotgun racks in his hands like it has a life of its own. Four helmet sensors glitter in the fresh sunlight.
Candy	"Thanks, Medic. You're weird, but you're alright, ah?"     It might be supposed, by one without such formidable mental defenses, that having them allows one to exist in the presence of such overwhelming force without issue.     It does not.     Even a rock feels the weight of the ocean. And even a rock, though it may keep its shape over years, feels the force of two opposing currents, lifting it, tossing it asunder.     Candy knows who he is and what he wants when he enters that room. But does it help? Does it stop the pit from forming in his stomach? Does it keep him from agonizing, whether that pit is from the oppressive, hateful energy, or from the realization that he will certainly have to fight Everything stops. *Fuck. Why the fuck did it have to be her, ah?* You don't have to hurt. Lie to her. Tell her you'll leave, but use the invisibility while you still remember. Trick her. Follow her to this 'Carpathia' and destroy it. Then she keeps her word, and nothing happens. He doesn't want to do that. You should warn her! Make her understand how vile this thing is. *It's not gonna work. None of it. Even if she hadn't seen me come in with this shit in my arms... I'd feel worse doing any of that shit than just fighting her. Son of a bitch.*     Time resumes.     There's nothing. But Candy is suddenly very tired, when he addresses Persephone. "Ms. Sunshine, sometimes you make promises you can't keep." He nods. "We're gonna fight. You made a promise to somebody you love, and we... we're somebody's last hope. I'm real sorry, Ms. Sunshine, no matter what happens."