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Lilian Rook     For those who show up for the 'test' Lilian had mentioned the other day, ostensibly for the benefit of those familiar with it, but opened in passing for any hearing, 'where we're actually going' is a question essentially impossible to answer. Beyond the realms of 'some vague place that's difficult to pin down', the final Warpgate on the journey is the abrupt stop where GPS stops working, tracking signals cut off, topographical senses cut off at a sharp boundary a few miles away, and those obscure and forgettable bennies like 'sensing how far below or above ground' stop giving anything useful; in a very real sense, the vibe is one of a place that isn't *supposed* to be on a map.

    'The place that it is' is one that can only be carefully cultivated and controlled, however, if for no other reason than the fact that the air is charged so densely with so much mystic energy that it seeps into the individual as if by osmosis. The more magically (or at least equivalently) inclined one is, the more they experience it as a heady, invigorating rush, like breathing in morning coffee and post-rain scent. The less, however, the more it's experienced like tingling pollution, breathing in tasteless and odourless fumes. An ordinary person might actually fall some kind of 'magic-septic' from this, but it is an ideal condition for those with business here.

    he arrival is heavily displaced from the skyline, surrounded by a wide buffer of space filled almost entirely with aesthetically curated natural surroundings. Beyond it, loosely described, seem to be 'city', misty blue on the edge of the horizon, ostensibly occupying the space of a major metropolis, but its construction fills only a tenth of the space, the rest filled with natural features like streams and massively ancient trees, mixed in with the narrow stone paths and roads that weave between them, connecting 'blocks' more like facilities on a college campus. It all butts up against the foot of a mountain further away, and what is either a very large lake or possibly the ocean, bizarrely close if it is, geographically speaking.

    Even from that great distance, you can spot clusters of massive towers of ancient weathered granite or gleaming better-than-modern glass, grand archives and galleries set with fluted pillars and endless steps, shaded streets of ivy-clad manors and secretive stores with either fantastic displays or dark tinted windows. There are winding roads into wooded enclaves or up hard mountain paths to a myriad small temples and dojos, floating city blocks out in the water, and some construction even up in the air. Fire smoke and alchemical steam rises from a distance, not too far from private fields for cultivating who knows what. It's spacious, natural, full of private places, a little idiosyncratic, and buzzes with energy, where people live a lifestyle of bespoke marvels and cultivated talents, rather than mass production and hourly jobs. It can only be a glimpse of 'The Hidden Continent', as Lilian has called it.

    The site you're actually bound for appears to have two names: 'House of the Seven Worthies' in appealingly grandiloquent style, and in dry legal form, 'Administrative Offices of Enlightened Examinations and Permissions'. All that can be seen from outside is a gigantic hemisphere of honeycomb metal lattice and dark crystal panels, with a sprawling snowflake pattern of converging paths around it. Getting close on the approach to the heavily reinforced entries that permit visitors and business, you can faintly hear the sounds of field exercises far behind it, largely from the weird noises and frequent loud rumbles they make.
Lilian Rook     Letting yourself inside appears to be the only way to escape the intense outdoor air, where the ambient energy is normalized in a similar way to climate control. Cool lighting comes from the dimmed sunlight entering in through the crystal exterior, used so that warm lights stand out and can be used to guide attention around the wide and labyrinthine spaces to the points people need to be going. Most of the height of the dome is divided up into what must be a good fifty floors, sorted by how much space each one should require. After some checking with the desks, you begin with the first.

    "Let's explain this once again." begins Lilian as the group is lead down blued steel hallways to personal storage rooms. "As the name suggests, there are seven discrete steps in examination and certification. Why? Because people like the number seven. And thirteen. And five. And three." She begins counting on her fingers as she remembers the major cultural blocs in order. "In the spirit of 'humanity endures', you start and end with the two most grueling, so there's no getting over the hard part and coasting from then on. In as much as it matters, the seven virtues of worthiness go: excellence of the body, refinement of enlightenment, virtue of word, depths of knowledge, practical prowess, resilience of mind, and externalized arcana. Yes, in that order of testing."

    "Basically, the administrators will be testing your physical abilities, mystical force and control, conduct interviews and questions, test psychological resilience, and push your limits on your special abilities. The standard policy is to dispense with the virtues of knowledge and prowess for outsiders, since most of you would get pretty close to zero on the academia, and since 'prowess' in your line of work pretty much means 'combat', there's already so much data they can pull up that it's sort of a waste of time to go through the kill house set aside for it."

    "So, I'll tell you the same thing I always say, being a sort of unspoken, common understanding: consider what you show and what you don't. You'll receive a grade and certification based on the highest and furthest you can push, but plenty of people elect not to display *all* of their ability or knowledge, due to the way that things go here; whether that's reputation, wanting to keep trump cards, or swing for a specific position, plenty of people do it, and the examiners won't demand anything more, even if they think you're holding out on them. You don't *have* to do anything, is what I'm getting at. Maybe that might not matter to you, or even be counter to what you want --people will likely only trust you with as much as your card guarantees, after all-- but what you infer that you can do, and what nobody knows, might make a difference, depending on who you are." she finishes. "I'll be taking my annual at the same time, but if you need help, just give me a shout."

    Left partially to your own devices, you find that the first few floors are indeed for physical tests, and it quickly becomes obvious why they require the most space. You get the benefit of private space to store whatever you brought with you for the time being, having to do the first part with flesh alone to establish the baseline. There's no kind of medical poking or measuring, partly since basic biometric data is readily gathered by stepping through a sort of energy gate that takes those measurements right away, and partly because more invasive examination might infringe on trade secrets of various Traditions. Those who don't have suitable wear are all provided a choice of a few kinds of graphite grey, matte shine, perfect-fit clothes, ostensibly the most popularly used athletic wear judging by the other people at work already, even if it edges close to 'swimsuit-tier'.
Lilian Rook     The beginning is very ordinary in regards to the tests themselves. Lifting weights, running at speed, running for distance, jumping heights, throwing for length, point turning relay exercises and the like, are pretty standard fare, like an entry exam for an athletics club or military unit, save that the range of provided equipment can, eventually scale into absurdity; weights of many multiples of tons to lift, gel 'sand pits' cleared to chuck things or jump hundreds of meters, and clocks that go down to the microsecond instead of millisecond, for who god knows whose purposes.

    After those starters, it gets more esoteric. You're lead to handle courses of increasingly improbable feats of coordination, meant only to get as far as you can. What starts at 'climbing a difficult wall', gets to the tier of 'running across water atop tall and narrow poles spaced too far apart', and eventually total nonsense like 'sprinting across a winding rail that goes at multiple right angles while heavy objects are constantly being launched at you' impossible TV unfairness, recording which tiers are challenged. the point of failure, and/or finishing time.

    Given the usual line of Elite work, you get shown to series of dummies and pressure plates and blocks of material to hit, to wrangle into place, to launch off of, and similar, starting off with the expectation of someone being able to snap what amounts to a young tree in half or hop up to the top of a cluster of concrete blocks dangling from chains, and for the truly swole, it goes as far as smashing slabs of rock, steel, tungsten, and then esoteric magic materials, either to pieces, or as far back along pressurized tracks as possible.

    The worst parts are at the end, where you may elect to be subjected to several miserable little rooms. An atmospheric pressure chamber that amounts to placing more and more crushing 'weight' on you, where you're asked to express when the discomfort sets in, when pain sets in, and then when you want to stop, while the actual physical effect is also measured separately via scanners, and a pair of chambers that one especially 'characterful' instructure refers to as 'the hell chamber' and 'the hypothermia chamber'. There are professionals at every step making sure that nobody kills themselves and making sure to dutifully record the data, who are best described as, curt but helpful, and in stark contrast to a physical trainer, amply willing to accept 'I want to stop' at any time.

    After that, you get to go back to storage, take along any gear or use any enhancement magic or techniques you like, and do it all over again. The only qualifier is that you have to be able to fit and turn around in a cubicle's worth of space, and limit the 'area of effect' of whatever you're doing to the 'interior offices' scale.

    Of course the size is necessary to service an existing, large population with only one neutral center. As far as it goes, the people here are all over the map. A disproportionate bulk are young tryhards pushing themselves, but there is still a large number of older adults who have their air of this being a routine thing every few years for a re-cert. It's easy to tell apart the career aspirations of the crowd; people who look like they're here for the other tests are basically taking it like a gym day, while the minority young adults looking to get into elite roles are trying their absolute hardest to impress supervisors with crumpling steel blocks or running the movie martial arts training courses, stubbornly sitting in the endurance trials longer than they probably should. The spectrum in between is pretty wide as well; goalposts are set at 'formality' for people aiming to get more important updates for data-focused jobs, all the way up to unfair high for those few hoping to enter into Arx Zenith when coming of age.
Shinnosuke Tomari "Got it, Rook." Shinnosuke Tomari is here, as he nods to Lilian. When he's putting on his athletic outfit, he sets Mr. Belt in storage. "Be good, alright?" Mr. Belt frowns. "I wanted to watch, Shinnosuke!"

The tests begin. And there's something very noticeable. Shinnosuke Tomari is fit, yes. He is athletic. He is also a completely mundane human being. He does well with the ordinary starters, and climbing the wall is well, but he takes his time with the tall and narrow poles, barely not going in the dip. He's knocked off the winding rail by a heavy object after narrowly dodging the first one, simply because of weight.

The physical tests are different. The shallower dummies are easy, but Shinnosuke Tomari CANNOT break rock. He can climb the concrete blocks after a few moments of analyzing it, though.

The atmospheric pressure chamber goes 'averagely', as do the temperature chambers. He tries to hold out as long as he can, but eventually, he gives in. It's willpower, not stamina, that keeps him in as long as he does.

And then, he goes back, gets Krim, places him on, and transforms. He's standing waiting for a while.

This is because the tire has to fly from where he parked it all the way to his suit, travelling through and nearly getting lost on the way. Dimension Cab helps it out a few times. Eventually, it locks on, and he gets to work.

His agility tests are faster. The winding rail is still fucked up, but he doesn't get knocked off immediately, and actually clears, because he's much faster now. When it comes to smashing stuff, he breaks rock easily, and puts a massive dent straight in steel, but doesn't quite break it in one punch.

The pressure chamber has a longer lasting time, due to the suit pushing off some of the effort to resist for Kamen Rider Drive. The hypothermia and hell chamber do not - there is no built in heat or cold resistance.

Once he's done, he desuits, but keeps Mr. Belt with him. If any other Elites complete, he gives them a thumbs-up. "We're starting hard, huh? This is exciting."
Ioanna Langstrom      This is a place of superhumans.

     The only power Ioanna has here is her looks. Her confidence in herself here is skin-deep. So she turns heads with her athletic gear, a sports bra and yoga pants hugging generous curves, and her hair, loosed into a ponytail that goes all the way down to the small of her back. She wields the only power she's got in this place to turn heads because it's the only thing she's confident in in this place of gods and wizards. Because it lets her feel like she belongs, even a little bit. The multi-ton weights, the hundred-meter jumps, the clocks measuring microseconds - as she passes them she pushes her stride a little harder, pushes her chest out a little more, swings her hips a little more than she otherwise might. If there's only one thing impressive about her, one thing that lets her wield power over these people, even if it's just for a moment, then she's going to wield that power, so she doesn't have to think about these things made for titans.

     Her athletics performance is aggressively ordinary. Sure, it's on the upper side of ordinary - she's a soldier, after all, and a lifelong one - but it's ordinary. Profoundly ordinary. Not peak human. Not pushing into superhuman. Ordinary. She can lift a fair number of weights. She can run pretty fast. She's flexible. But the minute the courses get improbable is the minute she's forced to face herself again, to stare into the mirror and think, 'at least I'm beautiful.'

     She literally cannot do any of them.

     The failure point being recorded is a flat zero. She doesn't even get onto the courses. Oh, she tries, of course. She wants to run across poles and sprint across a winding rail - but it becomes apparent very very fast that if she keeps trying she'll seriously injure herself.

     When they hit the atmospheric pressure chamber, she grits her teeth, and she refuses to stop until the technician warns them that she's going to injure herself. It doesn't take long. The same for the hell room. The same for the hypothermia chamber. She never says 'I want to stop', but the techs can almost immediately tell that it's pointless to go far.

     So when she gets out of the hypothermia chamber, shaking, it's not entirely because of the cold.

     Her hand tucked around her stomach, she goes out to fetch the Alter Gear. She's a professional. She's a professional. It's a mantra. She locks the MCM around her body, and the hexagonal patterns flicker to life on the bodysuit. She hefts the OC, the hexagonal cannon, over her shoulder. She picks up the FC and straps it to her waist.

     The gun is too big for the chamber. And she can't auto-transform it. So she just leaves it behind. She approaches everything with her bare hands, and she's good, now. Her reflexes are faster. Her feet are more dextrous. Her arms are stronger. She can hit harder. She can move faster. She can do all these things and more. She even has adaptive environmental controls, so she can sit in the chamber for as long as she wants, until it becomes clear that the Alter Gear isn't going to break at all.

     When she comes out, though, she doesn't look at her performance.

     It's not hers. It's just the suits.

     But she holds her head high, and she swings her hips against her ponytail's sway, and even if she has no other power, she can wield the confidence she doesn't quite feel, and she can capture the attention of more powerful people, and that, that alone, makes her feel a little stronger.
Kale Hearthward Kale isn't used to a lot of things in the multiverse (time since unification: 8 months). He's even less used to strange spaces like this. He looks visibly startled when they pass a certian boundary - he can't detect magnetic north anymore.

"Seven's fine, lots of stories that have 'seven' in them, yeah..."

He looks relieved that academic prowess isn't really going to be tested. And so the physical tests start...

... and Kale's baseline turns out to actually be lacking, compared to human normal. Without his gear, he's kinda lacking. Weightlifting in particular doesn't go well. He has endurance and a bit of natural speed, but anything that relies on pure physical prowess - not so much. He's solidly at the back of the group.

"Wait - *just* gear, right?" he asks halfway into the test. "I mean, it's just gear that's restricted, not magic?"

The re-dos go a bit better, now that Kale's paying a bit more attention to the instructions. There's an impressive set of weights being lifted with just breath power and hand gestures - about equivalent to that of a large automobile. He manages, somewhat clumsily, to get around nearly every obstacle course - albeit nearly falling into the water a few times as he tries to 'run' across the surface of it. It's kind of like watching a platforming segment in a video game that has you blowing a bubble around with a series of fans or grappling hooks - fraught, but workable.

"Wait - you go on top of the poles? I thought you had to weave around them while running on top of the water!"

The re-do of that test goes a bit smoother, once again.

And then he goes to get his gear on - his boots, in particular.

And then he *smokes* the course on the redo, the aerial ace practically (and in some cases literally) jetting around obstacles on dime turns and sudden stops.

In both cases, though, the various environmental chambers simply wreck him. The second time through he announces that he's at his limit in the atmospheric chamber *before they even turn it on*.

"That... was one of the hard ones, right?" he asks, rejoining Tomari at the end. "Looks like we're both a bit gear-dependent..."
Staren     Staren's been here before. But last time... She looked different. A robot body, to 'cheat' the physical parts of the test. (She's not looking forward to that now...) But this also means that this time she can *feel* the magic. Well, maybe she could on other visits, but she's more practiced with it now. She can't help but compare it to the experience of being near a leyline, and the similarities and slight differences in how it feels.

    As Lilian briefs she tries to remain quiet and respectful. They've had their differences but Staren's a guest here, after all.

    For the pure-physical tests she has a black bodysuit made of similar material to the local stuff. And... while in the prime of health, and kept from getting weak or flabby by technology, she's not physically *enhanced* compared to a human. At least her reflexes and hand-eye coordination are pretty good, and the use of a tail for balance and the ability to quickly switch between male, female, and cat forms might provide slight benefit on some tests, but nothing all that impressive. See's a bit self-conscious when others nearby pass her who are clearly more muscular, more trained for this. She accepted she'd look bad here, but still, it's frustrating. She tries to opt-out of the hell rooms, if they'll believe "I'm human normal in that regard..."

    Take two? Now she has magic enhancement and tools. Running faster than a car, LIFTING a car almost with ease, and with flight, grapple tools, and thrusters tackling all but the worst of the agility/mobility challenges. This improves her spirits a lot, compared to how she was doing before! Of course, she's got magic for the hellrooms too, although it too has its limits.

    All-in-all, she sees no reason to hide or be dishonest about abilities, and doesn't risk hurting herself by pushing too far. Let people trust her or distrust her as they will.
Taelveras Taelveras is not the sort to turn down an offer like this. She has very little perception of how anywhere else trains, or tests; she wants more information on how the others in the Multiverse act and compare themselves. And she is aware that, if she wants to be accepted anywhere, she's going to need to do something to *get* accepted. Being tested so they know how she can help and then doing it seems a good way to do that.

The smell of the place is intense. Tael does not consider herself a spellcaster because she does not, precisely, cast spells, but the martial arts she uses are certainly supernatural and she seems to be more invigorated than distressed by it. Not that she lets that show as she approaches the hemisphere.

And once inside, she listens. She never interrupts. She doesn't even speak, only gives Lilian a slight nod afterwards, turning toward the place to deposit her gear with a swirl of longcoat.

She has a lot to leave in there, as it turns out. Longcoat, sword (seemed unnecessary anyway), the concealed items *in* her coat (none of which she shows, but some of which make noise when she puts her coat down), two rings, her earrings, the rune-edged leather she wears, a whole bunch of straps and buckles and belts holding up various little pouches and knives... Taelveras disarming takes a while.

When she comes out, Taelveras has 'borrowed' a set of the gym clothes (she is probably not going to give them back unless they ask). She has no visible scars despite being a crazy (maybe) sword lady. She is also in very good shape, like a swimmer.

And once again... Taelveras waits. She watches what other people are doing, inasmuch as she is allowed to. Only once she has a feeling of what must be done does she do it.

Taelveras is fast. Not blindingly fast, but fast, and agile, and dextrous. She uses all of the above in her agility training, where she does best; parkour, evasiveness, climbing and running and jumping, these are all strong points for her. She beats the normal-human expectations in all of them. She can run across poles and bounce off or climb narrow ledges. She places less well with the tests that require brute strength. Tael is pretty strong and tall enough to get good leverage but she is not a muscle-bound hulk and it shows.

Endurance, though.

Tael is not actually ridiculously tough, but she does not complain. Ever. She does eventually tap out, when she needs to, but she does not express pain, because she long ago learned that expressing pain is a good way to be given more of it. She will run herself into danger without whining about it, even when she probably should. Hypothermia, hyperthermia, pressure - she takes it all without complaint.

And then, afterwards, she does it all again, except wearing her armour, her rings, her earrings, and her sword. (Even though she never draws the sword, and it doesn't appear to be magic in any way that would assist her in these particular tests, she insists on bringing it.)

This time, she feels entitled to 'cheat'. She darkens the room when she's running, or climbing, or balancing, or performing parkour - not so much that the staff can't see what she's doing even with normal human eyes, as it's about as dark as a shady day rather than interior lights, but enough to make herself more comfortable and let her reach into the shadows for support. Her balance is now absurd. Shrouding herself in shadow, she can take more abuse than before, somehow dispersing the heat and cold and pressure and impact and god knows what else. (It doesn't do much for her raw strength, though. She refrains from lifting anything absurdly heavy.) This isn't her gear, mostly, except for when the armour saves her from extremes. This is just her, using her abilities instead of raw physical talent.

She actually only teleports once, simply avoiding most of a course by stepping into the shadow cast by a climbing block and appearing out of a different one nearer the exit, and then says: "You can assume I can keep doing that." The point is made. She can do the workout.
Taelveras She actually only teleports once, simply avoiding most of a course by stepping into the shadow cast by a climbing block and appearing out of a different one nearer the exit, and then says: "You can assume I can keep doing that." The point is made. She can do the workout.

And then afterwards, she dusts herself off. She is more uncomfortable than she will admit. Instead, she says: "Challenging," to Ioanna, because she didn't see how well Ioanna did (or didn't) do.
Hellwarming Trio This is a familiar place! Sort of. Barely. Although neither Utsuho nor Rin have seen Lilian's stomping grounds, they've become vaguely familiar with her neck of the woods by virtue of listening to stuff and seeing things involving weird swords and technicalities that they barely (but technically do) comprehend. The pair wander along with the rest of the group while wearing their touristy curiousity on their sleeves: They gawk at fancy patterns, they take a long time to read signs, and they scramble over each other at the next weird thing in the distance to gawk at.

To make matters worse, the ambient magical suckforce seems to only be making them even more hyper. Thankfully, they're a little more behaved whenever Shinnosuke looks in their direction. They also look immediately relieved when Lilian explains that the knowledge and prowess sections won't be included here.

After changing into the provided clothing with moderate difficulty, moreso for Utsuho than Rin because of her wingspan, they're off to the races! Almost. They actually fill out those not-swimsuits rather well, although they don't seem to be all that aware of that fact. They're even roughhousing for a while to warm themselves up for the tests until someone scolds them and shoos them out of the storage area.

Lifting and throwing weights actually proves somewhat difficult for the pair at first, largely due to never having handled modern weights before. They've dragged and dropped bodies before, sure, but figuring out how to properly hold the weights takes longer than it should until they cheat by watching other people doing it. Utsuho has the advantage there, but only by a little.

Running, meanwhile, comes far more naturally for the pair. Rin beats Utsuho easily in that regard, although they both resort to running on their hands and legs after the first couple of seconds just to try and catch up/maintain a lead over the other.

Jumping takes a while for them to actually measure properly, mostly because the youkai have to deliberately remind themselves not to fly. This takes both of them about five tries each, with Rin just barely edging out Utsuho.

Climbing, too, ends up being difficult to measure thanks to their inclination to just fly their way up problems most of the time. Neither really has the advantage there when it comes to actually climbing, although Rin does somehow manage to eke out a win there while definitely not having an easier time hiding her flight abilities.
Hellwarming Trio The weird physical shit is where they reveal more stark differences. While Rin excels at the more agility-requiring tasks, such as sprinting on weird angles and dodging heavy stuff, Utsuho does far better with the tasks requiring manhandling or breaking stuff. Neither of them go as far as breaking steel or dodging projectiles by a hair's breadth, but they do decently well for themselves.

And then there's the actually sucky rooms. Utsuho proves to have a better tolerance to the atmosphere room than Rin, the latter already sweating uncomfortably and screeching to stop by the time the former mentions that it's starting to hurt. The hypothermia chamber, meanwhile, has them both complaining rather quickly once the room hits Canadian-brisk levels of cold.

The hell chamber, though, is where they just hang out for way too long. They even seem to be relaxing in there, as if using it to take a break from the hypothermia room. They also use that opportunity to make taunting faces at anyone else that bows out of there early, although Rin's eventually the first to exit from there if the techs don't force the both of them out early for looking like they just aren't mentally registering that the room is supposed to suck.

Eventually, though, they regroup with the other Elites that have come to test themselves here. They don't bother changing back into their usual clothes yet, either, nor do they grab what little gear they came with (Utsuho's corium boot and control rod, Rin's wheelbarrow of corpses and/or fairies). Spotting Shinnosuke, the two hurry over as of expecting some kind of praise.

Utsuho: "Hey, Teach! We aced it out there!"
Rin: "Yeah! We stayed in that hot room for like an hour!"
Utsuho: "Pretty sure it wasn't that long. It got boring."
Rin: "Yeah... Still, better than most of the chumps we saw in there!"
Utsuho: "You did pretty good, too. I mean, you did way better in the suit, but that's normal for humans, right?"
Rin: "Yeah, you and that hot lady with the eyepatch! Hey, is she your type?"

Naturally, Rin tries to guide Shinnosuke's attention towards Ioanna at that last part.

Utsuho: "Looks like we got all sorts of people out here..."
Rin: "Yeah.. Fast ones, strong ones, machines ones..."
Utsuho: "Does a machine count? Were we supposed to hide some stuff in this?"
Rin: "Who knows? Not like we got any cool gear like that."
Utsuho: "Yeah... Hey, isn't that the guy from... Uh. Bird Island?"
Rin: "I thought it was named after the racoon guy."
Utsuho: "And that one all in black?"
Rin: "No idea. Looks like her and eyepatch lady might know each other, though."
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Visit the Hidden Continent again

    Sure thing, boss. Arthur's there again, behind Lilian. Today, he's looking kind of beat the hell up, still visibly bruised and battered from his work over the weekend. The worst part is his Aspect, though. Thankfully, heading in, he can drink in the atmosphere a little. The way it's all so charged with intense energy... The grayed-out portions of his Aspect bar slowly recede as he gets to the door. It seems to fix some of his magical issues, though the sense of exhaustion on him remains.

>Arthur: Run them like last time!

    His flashy grin and eager chatter run a little hollow, but he pushes himself. "Haven't seen any FOUR ONE THREES around, have ya?" He laughs a bit, as he heads in. "Yeah yeah. I HEAR YA LOUD AND CLEAR, yo! Only the ABSOLUTE COOLEST will SHOW OFF EVERYTHING, so I'M GONNA!" He's not. Cool, that is, or going to show off everything.

    Like before, it's time to test baseline. Arthur Lowell is finally one of the few here who can work with this! Albeit, his superhuman properties are mild at best. Raw lifting strength remains just above average, endurance remains pretty good, and jump height irrationally high -- even if you don't count the triple-jumps. Agility and coordination, particularly, with wallruns, dodgerolls along rails, and things like that.

    Most notably, just like last time, the obvious displays of prowess are seen as videogame UI. Minigames at each station, lifting or dashing with rapid A-presses, getting jump height off timing games, and scores tracked without measuring equipment.

    Once more: Total inability to strike the blocks and dummies. "NO STRIFE PORTFOLIO" declares his UI, with a big red X over his B and Y buttons any time he gets near the slabs and dummies. "Sorry yo. Still no dice here. Gotta get my gear on for a hit!" And then, once more back into pressure, hypothermia, and hell. Arthur does much better with those, since his ability to gauge his own damage level is way more precise with his Health Vial, and he's tremendously resilient to space-related environmental hazards like temperature. He's also got a huge amount of willpower, pushing well past pain when it comes time to stop.

    He's not very gear-dependent beyond striking, though. It gives him extra style, certainly, and improves his speed and maneuvering even more to have his rocket-broom. And, of course, defends high-score entry tables that nobody else can seem to interact with. And, much like everything else, his strikes, now that he can do them, are entirely gamified, measured once more in Health lost, never newtons.

>Arthur: Okay, you already did all that once before though. Wrap this up.

    Yeah, there really just isn't a meaningful change from last time. Given that Arthur's already at his maximum level, he can't get more athletic. It's literally impossible for him to get any better at the physical side of things than he already is. "Damn, y'all got that HARDCORE GEAR FOCUS. Last time I ran this shit, it was piles of ANCIENT HERO-GHOSTS and MAGIC WARRIORS and shit, with CRAZY PHYSICAL STATS for real. Glad my CHAD COOLKID PHYSIQUE ain't bein' shown up by the MAGIC ROBOTS or whatever, now."
Tamamo     Tamamo no Mae has been to the Hidden Continent before, so she's somewhat familiar with how the atmosphere behaves. For her, it's quite invigorating, and she's in no particular hurry to get in and out of the sun, though she obviously must, as these tests are the specific thing currently nagging at her curiosity.

    And Lilian. If anything, Tamamo may be more interested in seeing Lilian's results than her own. In regards to this specific location, the House of the Seven Worthies, and these examination, it's Tamamo's first time.

    Though her usual clothing is something she actually prefers for all manner of physical activity, Tamamo sees that others are changing, and assents to changing. She completes her wardrobe transformation instantly, dark blue robes being replaced with an outdoor exercise set -- white jacket, safety-neon-bright stripes down the center and up her socks, pastel-colored sneakers, and spats. ('Compression shorts,' in most places.) She retrieves a pair of ties from a pocket, using these to tie back her hair, then warms up, or perhaps breaks in new shoes, with a few short jumps, flexing just her feet. One spin around, and she pronounces, "Yes, this will do well enough, I suppose."

    Her physical performance is what would normally qualify as superhuman, but clearly isn't the sort of thing too unheard of in these circles. She's not an especially athletic woman (excepting maybe the tone of her legs), and certainly isn't muscular, but she can leap, from nothing, quickly enough that it's her favored form of sprinting, barely touching the ground as she clears tens of meters at a time. Stopping that momentum is a little harder, and involves waving her arms out straight while making a sound like "Ohhyo!" before managing to straighten.

    She does pretty well leaping between poles over the water, though that still does involve a lot of wobbling about on one foot, at times. When she gets to something with things being launched at her, Tamamo simply gives up without trying it, declaring, "Oh, no, I think that would be quite too much for one of my ability."

    'Hitting things' is somewhat less her speed, along with 'lifting,' and other matters of raw strength. Tamamo barely gets into the 'elite' obstacles before yelling "Ei!" at a block and failing to mark it with a punch that shows a complete lack of combat training.

    At the pressure and environmental chambers, she stops when things get too uncomfortable, though what she says is that it was too painful, a claim the examiners, with their scanners, may correctly suspect she was absolutely lying about, no matter how very insistent she is on that point. She still lasted awhile in the 'pressure' portion, and 'the hell chamber' she treated like a sauna, until they cranked it far enough up.

    She doesn't have any equipment with which she intends to retry the course, so that is largely moot. Going and watching Lilian work out is much more important.
Taelveras "It isn't a gear focus," Taelveras replies to Arthur, though not before looking at him to see if she knows him (she does not). "I thought we weren't supposed to use anything but physical technique on the first run."

She adjusts the sleeve of her coat. "Though I suppose it never hurts to wear what you're used to."
Strawberry Princess      For the walk over, Strawberry Princess is dressed as she usually is, even if "as she usually is" isn't conducive to heavy physical activity: a comfy surplus jacket, black jeans, and a white button-up shirt. Her wand is stowed in a slender carrying case on her back, like one would use for a camera tripod.

     A pair of Reignition Project technicians, in simple dark utilitarian work-clothes with sparse magenta highlights, follow behind her with a fridge-sized lead-lined cart: one pushing it from the back, the other pulling it from the front. They seem quietly familiar to her, enough that they don't feel the need to converse. They're too busy grimacing at the unpleasantly prickly magical energy, anyhow.

     The intense ambient magical energy makes the crystal at its tip gutter and flicker erratically even with the reactor off, making a just-audible sparking noise. "It was- like this, at your graduation too. Wasn't it?" she says to Lilian, gesturing vaguely at the air. "It's weird. But I think I like it."

     When she emerges from the changing room, she's transformed despite not being transformed: her hair's tied back in a neat, functional ponytail, her neat-casual attire with sneakers has been shed in favor of a black sports bra, loose black exercise pants, and running shoes.

     The only accessories remaining are a littlesilver bracelet and a strawberry pin affixed to the sports bra.

     Lilian... you've never made me feel like I don't belong. But the circles you move in- even your parents- they're like aristocracy. You've put so much into me, even though I'm not important like that. Even though I almost wasn't special. Is it silly of me to want to vindicate you? Probably it hasn't even crossed your mind. But I still feel like I need to.

     Strawberry is a baseline- even scrawny- human in the magic-less tests, despite her imposing height, although she throws her back into them until she's panting and sweaty. The agility courses are the only part she really nails, showing off a persistent, dogged, and inventive kind of improvised acrobatics- the fruits of uncommon motor coordination and a brain well-adapted to three-dimensional maneuvers.
Strawberry Princess      Then, after running herself ragged just to post an overall 'average human' profile, she transforms properly, booting up her wand and shifting into her full magical girl regalia.

     04:59

     She's no stronger than she was before, but the obstacle courses are aced. Strawberry can accelerate to hundreds of miles an hour in a couple of seconds, and barely needs to slow down while weaving between the obstacles. When it comes to the striking-plates, she slams into one of them with a diving two-legged kick, converting that speed into enough crushing power that it'd shatter her femurs without her Shimmer Aura to diffuse it.

     The various durability chambers- heat, cold, and pressure- she tolerates to a moderately superhuman degree, holding out until her Shimmer Aura is engulfing her in a shell of nearly-solid pink and well past the point of vocalized pain.

     And at the end...

     00:00

     Strawberry de-transforms. Her wand's reactor clamps its control rods down. She hands it over to the technicians, still breathing hard; they get to work like a pit crew, pulling out the spent fuel core, pumping in new coolant, and opening up their bulky shielded cart to slot a new core in.

     She's sweaty, lightly bruised, her skin pinked from the convective heat of one of the Hell Chambers. But her posture's still conspicuously, heroically upright. She's still ready to be 'Strawberry Princess' a good while longer.

     "Okay. What's- what's the next one?"
Arthur Lowell >==>

    "Yeah, pro'lly. It's gettin' that PHYSICAL BASELINE." Arthur replies to Taelveras. He wanders over and barrages her hand with a series of daps, pounds, bumps, grips, grabs, finger-wiggles, twists, turns, and an elaborate elbow maneuver. A coolkid handshake! She didn't know him before, but she knows him now: An absolute idiot. "I turned off the RAD GRAV up in that shit too. But, like, ECHELADDER RUNGS are basically REAL, right? You got HIGH RUNGS, yo?"
Staren     Magicced-up, Staren is superhuman, but there are others who are *more* superhuman, clearly. It's unclear how much gear is in her bag, but the spells are in her coat or in other wearable devices, activated with a slight push of magic. Afterwards, She nods to Arthur. "I was a robot last time..." She looks to Taelveras. "You used magic. Almost all of us had *something* to use on the second run." She looks around, kind of uncomfortable at this... prolonged state of being hot and sweaty. It's not something she usually has to deal with thanks to machines doing all the work and staying in climate-controlled rooms or armor most of her life. "Do we get to wash off before the next test? I was a robot last time so I didnh't pay attention to that..."
Taelveras Taelveras very clearly has no idea how to respond to Arthur's powerful multistep hand-shaking technique but is trying to go along with it on the off chance she's *supposed* to know. She is trying to look impressively cool and detached but there is only so much you can do when someone is trying to wiggle your fingers and rotate your wrist.

She draws the line at being elbowed, though (she may have mistaken his intention), and steps back out of range of it.

"I'm honestly not sure," Tael says, because she isn't entirely sure what Arthur just asked her, either. "Possibly? I would like to think so." She understood the ladder metaphor at least.

Her gaze shifts over to Staren when she's addressed. "I used power," she agrees. "Not a spell, but the same energies. When I felt what it was like outside I assumed that was the purpose."
Ioanna Langstrom      Ioanna maintains her stoic face as Tael says challenging.' She says, "Yes, ma'am. It was very difficult."
Lilian Rook     For Lilian's own part, she has to ask Tomari, after a long and awkward pause, exactly what the hell he is waiting for before the tire shows up. She doesn't even pay Ionna any mind, for better at worse. She has a few laughs at Kale's comedic misunderstandings. She actually takes time to watch Staren put in a real effort instead of flexing robo toys. Likewise as Taelveras shows off for the first time she's seen, though the proctors need only dim segmented portions of light. She seems to think "Shouldn't a cat be much better at climbing than a bird?" at the two youkai, and then insist their question for Tomari is inappropriate. She's seen Arthur's minigame sequence, but still tells him that he really should fix that god damn Strife Deck nonsense. She even tells Strawberry "Not a bad look. Like I said, you'd look really good if you just started lifting. Girls with scars and all, remember?" However, no shortage of unsubtle sneak peeks are spared for Tamamo.

    Those in return confirm that, this time, she is absolutely on the uppermost end of this group, and not just for familiarity with the courses. There are little pauses here and there where she dials it in further, and increases the circulation of magical energy through her body. Certain segments seem to be specifically reserved for 'people who go outside the Urban Center walls', very much designed for people with specific mobility or combat training. Curiously, she skips every single entry with a DEX check on the second run; they literally don't even bother to call her. Reflex tests at most replace those. Airguns dialed up in increments of thirty meters per second. Various charts confirm small but significant improvements from last year, and very marked ones from two years ago.

    Blessedly, this place is not as huge and expensive as it is without some goddamn showers.
Lilian Rook     After being given enough time to cool off and grab the rest of your stuff (and probably shower a little), the next couple of floors up are broken up into an assortment of sealed chambers, containing near-identical setups, overall built up to capacity to handle probably at least a thousand people going through on a busy day, thus marking this as probably the most in-demand step there is.. Just the one of them is reserved for all of you, given that it's something which can apparently be taken in turns. The reason there are sealed doors becomes pretty obvious, when the inside is clearly lined with heavy layers of materials that should be capturing basically any kind of radiation, traces of magic, sound or shock, to isolate everything from every other room, ostensibly for the sake of capturing fine measurements.

    The isolated room is defined by a series of circular steps leading up to a pedestal of sorts, the size of a small, round table, made primarily of various metals and visible mechanical extrusions, but seemingly having no machinery more complicated than a watch, and certainly not materially optimized, using such things as gold, jade, diamond, and traces who knows what. The main fixture is a perfectly spherical, polished stone set into the center of the top surface, filled with something visually like grey fog or desaturated static, big enough to lay two hands on. That appears to be the purpose, as Lilian reconvenes with the group to lead them through it, apparently being very simple and not requiring a supervisor.

    "Some of you should remember this one. For those who don't, this is the standardized setup we use for what I told you about yesterday; the Seven Stations and Five Hues. They're a lot more reliable than the portable devices." she says once you're inside. "Before testing the execution of any specific powers, these are keyed to receive whatever energies you can direct, and to comprehensively gauge the quality, quantity, and degree to which you can control them, on a more fundamental scale. As I said before, the Stations aren't a sequence of named 'power tiers', but a cross-culturally agreed on idea of the journey from apprenticeship to mastery of the mystical paradigm. They don't do anything so crude as just take a raw number of your overall; there's a trick to each of them I'll go over."

     Lilian demonstrates by putting her hands on the big glassy orb, and straight away the grey fog becomes a shining white light, pure and untinted, which causes tiny sensors in the walls and ceiling to gleam. "There are five Hues to each Station, cycling in stages, which this setup displays based on colour. Like everything else here, the meaning behind them is a little flowery, and I don't want you to get the wrong idea of what they represent."
Lilian Rook     "White is where everyone starts. White light contains all other colours and kinds of light, not being any one thing, but containing the potential to be just about anything, once it's focused and refined. It illuminates the world around you, but reflects back the qualities of the things that you can now see, more than it illuminates yourself. The intensity here is usually seen as latent potential."

    The white light then becomes a deep, shifting, shimmering silver. "Silver is what you progress to. White becomes silver as insubstantial light becomes a metal, hard and defined and tangibly interacting with the world. Silver is a substance associated with purity and driving back evil things, indicating mastery enough to keep out the potential for all the worst facets of any power from coming back to you, but it's still a somewhat fragile metal, and can tarnish or break if neglected or used poorly. That's a metaphor for mystical talent still, obviously. The brightness here is interpreted as how diligently you're maintaining and refining your power."

    The silver then becomes brilliant, glimmering gold. "Gold is where it has matured and revealed its inherent value and worth. It's now solidified into something weighty, permanent and imperishable. It's malleable like the metal, easily shaped without breaking, as mastery over power allows you to skillfully craft it into any form you need. The degree of shine here is typically interpreted as how much work you've put into polishing and molding those talents."

    The light then loses its metallic cast and becomes bright, glaring, fresh blood red. "Crimson comes after gold, and indicates when power has ceased to be something external to you, which you appraise and polish and sculpt and define, and has been developed into something truly internal to you. Crimson represents blood, where power becomes an integral part of yourself that is no longer just a talent, but something vital and fundamental. If it is diminished, it diminishes you. If it is lost, you're all but dead. You know better than to expend it without reason. Its flow and structure is something palpable rather than abstract, which you unconsciously feel rather than effortfully imagine. The intensity of the colour here is usually thought of as hinting at your inner capacities."

    Finally, the light is sucked back in, and the room goes dim. The orb becomes a sphere of pitch blackness interspersed with tiny, glittering stars. "Lastly, black indicates that there is nothing new to internalize at your current state of enlightenment. You've transcended the metamorphosis of power into a part of you, and achieved a glimpse of the 'beyond space' from whence the power originates. It's revealed its deepest, blackest secrets to you, and opened a vista where you can see the stage of Enlightenment beyond this one, like seeing stars in the sky --in sight but not yet in grasp. The number and brightness of the stars you can see here is supposed to be how close you are to further Enlightenment."

    The 'tabletop' then begins making a loud series of ratcheting clicks and glassy chimes, gradually rotating, reconfiguring, exposing new surfaces, rows of esoteric gems, raising small structures, and then turning the white of a single star into a whole orb of shining white all over again. "Then it goes back to white again, when you breach into a new level of Enlightenment. That's when everything beforehand is mastered and internalized, and now you're working on yourself anew. It takes raw power to reach a new stage, but also a different kind of control and mastery, and commensurately, the input changes. You can have a ton of latent power, but be at a lower station to someone with less raw energy, depending on that road of personal betterment."
Lilian Rook     Lilian gestures to the exposed gems. "The jewel is the first station, representing where inner power is searched for and first discovered, dug out of the ground, the metaphorical dirt cleaned away, where it's appraised and polished, and you begin to have an idea of what's within yourself, and gaining access to that priceless core of power deep inside."

    After cycling through a full white to black sequence, the setup rotates and clicks again, going completely flat and exposing concentric surfaces of polished, glassy diamond. "The mirror is the second, where you can access your power at any time, but are working on gasping its full shape and dimensions, and coming to understand it and yourself. It's the station of self-reflection and understanding, polishing yourself and your skills until you know who you are and what your power is."

    More mechanical swiveling and reconfiguring follows the next white-to-black sequence, where the edges raise, the center depresses, and the pillar narrows, like having hands on a bowl on a pedestal. "The station of the chalice is third, which is supposed to represent 'questing'. It's when you know what and who you are, and is the time at which you're supposed to go out seeking challenges and knowledge and new things; to achieve and to better yourself, bringing you up from your beginnings to greater experience and maturity."

    White chalice through to black chalice, and the table flattens again, slowly unfurling rings of silver blades around itself in sequence. "The station of the blade comes after that. This is where your 'questing' is over, and the best way to achieve further Enlightenment is to take on a cause. Best, an immutable purpose, or an ironclad goal. You'll make no more progress by changing yourself until you take your first steps into changing the world around you; yours is to go out and conquer and control, but also to bleed and at times to suffer. Not a lot of people reach this station at all."
    There though, Lilian is able to push the orb all the way to the limits of blackness and the twinkling cosmos within, until the pillar will react no further, and upon her releasing it, it returns to grey mist and cylindrical shape. "After that comes the crown, and theoretically the throne and the tower. The crown is where you've supposedly achieved the pinnacle of human development, where you're no longer learning, but leading; pushing forward the boundaries of what is possible and inventing new aspects and dimensions to yourself. Few people ever get that far. If the mirror is learning a martial art, the chalice is taking it out into the world to fight and to master it, and the sword is crushing all the others to prove its perfection, the crown is where nothing less than inventing a brand new art is meaningful to you. People who go beyond grandmaster and into inventing new schools; it's about that rare"

    "The throne is where you've transcended the humanity inherent in that power and become something that sits above humans. Most people don't even have the theoretical potential to do that. It's where the height of possible human achievement is internalized, and you're pushing what should be possible at all. Allegedly defining the new 'impossible', leading the collective progress of human Enlightenment into new eras and paradigms. Geniuses, basically. Teslas. Musashis. Herakles'."

    "The Tower is borderline theoretical. I won't even bother. You'd have to be Jesus Christ or the Buddha to claim the Tower. Just try it out." Despite that rather dry ending, Lilian seems immensely pleased. "I suppose I'll need my card updated, after finally reaching black. Usually, a little celebration in order too. That'd be nice."
Lilian Rook     Indeed, she didn't speak incorrectly when she said it's more nuanced than just jamming raw magical energy into it. The table readily soaks up energy at the jewel stage, so long as you can bring it out, but the mirror stage, it starts only accepting power into increasingly fine and specific channels and patterns. At the chalice stage, it starts actively resisting you doing so and requires the ability to sense or figure out which will work. Anyone getting to the blade stage finds that it requires tremendous focus and zen-like clarity to do much of anything, and becomes extremely painful if slightly mishandled, capable of forcing hands off and ending the test prematurely. Someone theoretically getting to the crown stage finds the blades reorienting to indeed take a crown-like shape, exposing the gems of before along its sides, and they find that it no longer accepts energy in anything but a single, atypical, uncommunicated pattern of esoteric manipulation, different for each individual, requiring keen intuition derived from all previous stages and ample experience to mentally construct. The throne is even more esoteric, taking on a tiered vertical appearance and flat out requiring so much raw brainpower and focus that no amount of 'talent' will help any longer; one is a magical Stephen Hawking or the black hole just doesn't make any sense."

"These are calibrated to display personal 'alignments' as well, but given where you're all from, it turns out to be pretty useless. It's esoteric imagery at the best of times. You know. Professionals come along and interpret it like a doctor with a medical chart; that sort of thing. I heard they've been updated for some basic Multiversal compatibilities, but . . ." Eventually she just shrugs.

    That part is, as stated, is highly inconsistent. There's a solid chance it just won't work for some people. Others might be able to call up within the colours of the orb, some manifestations of some particular element, meaningful runes or glyphs or symbology, emblematic icons or creatures, elaborate light shows, or really deeply symbolic displays or occult iconography that somehow corresponds to said 'enlightenment' or inner nature. Or nothing at all by deliberate intent. The benefit of doing so is unclear.
Ioanna Langstrom      There is, for a moment, a brief hope. The orb measures potential. It measures whatever you've got inside. For a brief moment of hope, the idea that Ioanna might be special runs through her mind. She's here! Lilian even said it's not like she's someone to be ashamed of. She *earned* her way here. Maybe there's something inside her even she doesn't know about. Maybe-

     The orb remains grey.

     No change.

     'Teslas. Musashis. Herakles.'

     Yeah.

     She doesn't hang her head. She was prepared for this, right? She was prepared for this outcome. It's not like *everybody* here is magic. It's not like *everybody* here has power. Has potential. Tomari probably doesn't, right? He's just a cop.

     ...no he's not just a cop. He's a cop who was chosen.

     Still. She holds her head high. She knows better than to show anything other than her professionalism.

     This isn't the last test. There's more tests. She hasn't failed yet. And she did better than some people, physically. Even Elites aren't necessarily perfect at everything.
Shinnosuke Tomari The orb measures potential, right. It measures you channeling your energy.

If it was based off willpower alone, it'd do great. Tomari knows that. But no matter whether he does it suited or unsuited, the orb remains grey. It remains in the base. He has no energy to channel.

When he desuits, he's frowning, but he steps over to Ioanna, noticing her professionalism but also wondering if she feels the same way as him. "Hey. This is a test for a magical world. Don't worry about it - us 'normies' can still beat them when it comes down to a test of will and ideal, right?" He's trying to cheer her up, but doesn't know her very well. Hopefully she appreciates the sentiment.
Kale Hearthward Eventually, some technician just hands Kale a cheat sheet to refer to during the test.

"Alright, the jewel..."

"... Raw potential, right?" He focuses, and exhales. His hands 'catch' his breath - it becomes faintly visible in his hands - a ball of looping, swirling wind, that he presses up against the machinery.

"Potential to spare..." he says to himself, and finds himself quickly working through the colors till it reaches black.

"Hey! First one down already!" he calls over. "Bet you're already at like the third stage, though, right Langstrom?"
Ioanna Langstrom      "Yes, sir. Very probably, sir." She smiles. Okay, so she's not just a stoic machine. She pats him on the shoulder. "Here's hoping, sir."
Kale Hearthward "Okay, and then - yeah, the mirror..."

He works out what exactly it's asking of him, mentally and emotionally pushing through...

"All I need to do is know myself, right? Self reflection, understanding," he says, referring to the cheat sheet. "Easy. I know who I am."

He forms a fresh spell, and the orb shifts from gray to a bright white, and then to a silver....

... a dull silver. "Okay, it stopped there - just need to work through it..."

He focuses. "Who I am..."

The silver shines up a little bit... and then fades back to a dull metallic hue.

"..."

"Hey, uh... I think mine's broken," he says. "It's not going past silver on the mirror."
Hellwarming Trio Utsuho: "She should, right? Heh."
Rin: "I'm just not good at climbin' weird walls! Gimme a bunch of rocks or somethin', and I'd do way better."

Thankfully, the presence of the showers mean the youkai aren't left to stink up the joint for too long. They're even getting better about behaving well, too, not throwing a single thing while they're getting cleaned up. They rejoin the rest of the group afterwards in their usual clothes, looking considerably more comfortable and just as eager to go as they were before going through all those physical challenges.

When it's time to begin doing... Something in the next room with all the metals and stones, they take considerably longer trying to process what Lilian explains. It seems to go over their heads even as she demonstrates with the first orb, although Utsuho does at least nod slowly throughout the explanation. There's a vacant look in her eyes as she does, but she is at least moving and physically conscious while Rin just stares at the stones uncomfortably the entire time.

Utsuho: "So... We just need to pump power into it, right?"
Rin: "Pretty sure that's not all it does, but.. Yeah, whatever. We got this!"

The orb stage is easy enough to pass, but the mirror gives them some trouble. Try as she might, Rin can't quite get the mirror to progress past the white stage. Utsuho does a little bit better in getting the mirror to turn silver, but any further gold or red colors are more a result of her just creating fire instead of actually pumping power properly into the thing.
Tamamo     Tamamo watches in rapt attention, then claps her hands together as Lilian turns the sphere black. She's never seen this happen, but she's heard the terms, often enough to remember them, and remembers how Lilian's introduced herself, before. "Oh, so you succeeded! Such progress itself is unusual, yes? Ah, 'beyond the rarity of those who reach the station,' is my meaning." She probably did hear the explanation, as well, but her focus is clearly elsewhere than the matter of her own examination.

    When it comes time to her turn at the pedestal, Tamamo's moves instantly to the jewel phase, almost skipping to gold, then stutters, before again making steady progress. Red like blood, a starry night sky, and the rmirror appears. Here, she keeps up an even pace, completing the cycle, and transforming the stand to the form of the chalice. More slowly, then, she continues, and more slowly yet, though the third stage also completes, and the blades appear.

    White, then silver, and with great care and invisible effort, a brilliant gold. She takes so long at that point, it seems like it might not change at all, but she persists until the next change, becoming a brilliant crimson. It's a few seconds after that that she removes her hands, and shakes out her fingers, as if cramping from the tension. "Ah, what a curious device. It did take some time to even understand what it asked of me," she says, though that's not the sort of delay she displayed.
Taelveras Taelveras takes a goddamned shower. You can't stop her. She's not a barbarian. When she shows up again she has somehow managed to dry her extremely long hair in about five minutes flat, because as it turns out there *are* ways.

Once again Taelveras' strategy is to listen. She's not shy, judging by the fact that she *does* speak sometimes; she's distant, sometimes, but she's also more clever than some people ever seem to expect out of a duelist or a thief. Clever enough to know when to learn, anyway.

She also lets someone else go first. Politeness, or attempting to gather information? You decide. Lilian doesn't count. She's done it before. Nor do the people who cannot move it at all.

But eventually Taelveras steps up. She taps the sphere once, causing it to ring like a chime, and only then rests her hand on it. For a few moments, nothing happens as Taelveras doesn't actually channel anything. She just rests her hand there.

*Then* she cycles it. The Jewel goes surprisingly quickly, white-silver-gold-crimson-black, and Taelveras lets it rest for a moment as the station clicks and shifts itself to the Mirror. That she has power is not a question. Taelveras intentionally does not even try go quickly through the Mirror because she is getting a feel for it. She has to dim the room around her again, leaving her in the shade - it seems to make it easier for her.

But she can get through all five steps of the Mirror too. She knows herself that well, and the power she commands, and how they fit together. She takes longer than Lilian (no surprise); Tael does not hurry. She lets it rest again as the station forms into the bowl-like Chalice. Questing...

Is that what she's doing here and now? By leaving Sekamina and coming to the Paladins? Her momentary mental hesitation means she does not make progress on the Chalice for a time, but she she can reach into it. She can feel how the station is something like a light against the shadow she's manipulating, and she can fill the crevices, the place where the light *isn't*. Or that's how she visualizes it. She knows herself, or she thinks she does.

Taelveras pushes the Chalice through white into silver, and then into gold. Crimson seems to elude her for a time; nothing happens aside from her pressing the sphere more tightly, until she says something to herself under her breath, over and over - it's a mantra, it's not in English, and it doesn't translate. But it seems to focus her enough to slowly stain the gold with red. She continues the effort, and it slowly streaks to black.

But it does not become the Blade. Tael can feel around the edges of it but she cannot progress - not now, anyway. She's lost in this world - these worlds. She knows what she is, but she does *not* know how she fits into anything else.

Despite this, the words that come out of her mouth when she releases it, having left it with a black chalice, are: "I like this test." By which she means, she likes the process of enlightenment. It makes *sense*, even if she's not as far along on it as she assumed (she had expected to reach the Blade).
Strawberry Princess      THEN: Strawberry nearly drops the weight she's trying to lift when Lilian comes by to comment. A nervous laugh ensues. "It's not- maybe?? Maybe that could be nice." She is absolutely in Girl With Scars territory; in addition to the one on her face, the exercise clothes reveal a couple of weirdly-shaped scars on her forearms and one three-inch-long torso scar from something that pierced between her lower ribs.

     "... If you think it'd look good, I can give it a try."
Strawberry Princess      NOW: Post-shower, Strawberry's gotten back into her casual dress-clothes and jacket, although her hair still isn't quite fully dried. The wand's back in its carrying case. "That's amazing, Lilian! You were at 'Blade, Crimson' before, right? I think I remember you saying so. I'm proud of you!" She really, genuinely is.

     To Tomari and Ioanna: "Yeah! Don't put too much stock in it, okay? It can't measure what makes you two special. I don't even know if it'll work for me either, yet."

     When Strawberry's turn comes, she lets out a slightly shuddery breath, shuts her eyes, and places both hands on the orb. The magical energy suffusing this place gives her 'heart' tiny glimmers of life, where the wand can stoke it into a blinding light- but tiny glimmers are enough for this test, so she doesn't need to make a whole production out of booting up the reactor. It isn't measuring quantity.

     Is it weird if this is the one that scares me the most? Not because I don't know who I am. But because I think I know it really, really well. If this orb can see into my soul... what if it sees something that doesn't fit with 'Strawberry Princess'?

     The orb shifts to a Jewel, cycling slowly through white, silver, gold, red, and then black. I wouldn't feel so bad if I failed right here. If it doesn't recognize my magic at all, if I'm too burned-out to register... then it wouldn't be saying anything about 'me'. But I guess it can pick up something, after all? Here goes.

     A shiver visibly runs up her spine as it clacks and metamorphoses into the Mirror. That, too, shifts- although a little less steadily, as she takes trial and error to puzzle out exactly what it wants. Of course I know who I am. I knew from the day I turned twelve years old. My name is Strawberry Princess. Don't tell me I still have to discover myself! I won't accept that. And she doesn't have to: after she figures out how to give the Mirror what it wants, it cycles through to the Chalice, distorting and reshaping.

     Strangely, she seems to relax when the Chalice is reached. If you tell me that I'm not 'experienced', I could accept it. It wouldn't sting. Those five long years before, and the two years since... they felt like forever, but some people have been doing this a lot longer. But I don't think it's true! I can push this further. And that relaxation is exactly what she needs to solve the stage's puzzle: she leans and angles and tilts her head, 'feeling' out the specific channels of magic the orb with her kinesthetic magic-sense, and steadily pushes it through Black into the Blade.

     She's moved on, now, from solving it to earnestly baring her heart. Where previously she wasn't daring to breathe at all, now her breaths are coming deep and slow. We've made it this far. So I trust you, little orb. This is who I am. This is Strawberry Princess's heart. Judge me fairly, okay? In a state of zen acceptance, Strawberry picks a single magical 'feeling'- the grasping, reaching magic she uses to manifest her Heart Ability- and feeds that into the Blade. By chance or by design, that is exactly what it "wanted".

     Strawberry finishes at 'Blade, Black'. The stars in it are numerous, but they form a constellation: an abstract, branching, angling, curving symmetrical shape, meaningless to anyone but her, and perhaps Arthur, Tamamo, and Lilian by extrapolation.

     She takes her hands off of it voluntarily, sensing that she can't push it into the Crown. But she flashes Lilian, particularly, a shaky-happy smile, as if to say: I did good?
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Hey, can you get your lost Health Vial back?

    Yeah, there's a save point in the showers. Arthur stops in.

>Arthur: Sweet. Head over to the next station

    Arthur's on the way now. This one is one he dreads. He already looks a little pale, on the way in. This isn't one he's *comfortable* with. He fidgets through the whole explanation, trying to sort out something or another with his arms and hands, sweating a little. This isn't going to go well. It didn't last time, and it'll be worse this one. He repeats his opening words from the last go around: "This is gonna be some horseshit."

>Arthur: TEST AGAIN
>Arthur: YOU CAN'T DENY WHAT'S HAPPENING TO YOU FOREVER

    Once again, palms meet orb. Once again, his display appears: "ALIGNMENT ABSTRACTION". Bars and numbers, displaying the hues, scale up. Menus come up, and an esoteric cursor picks through them, amping up each bar until the Jewel is satisfied. The mirror's concentric surfaces show wheels of levels, colors brimming. Arthur peeks one eye open, sees something he hates, and grits his teeth. They're grinding, loudly, painfully. The ALIGNMENT ABSTRACT's taken on an octagonal multi-menu setup with dozens of tabs, each brimming with five colors. His motion and mind doesn't seem to have any interaction with that cursor as it selects its options.

>Arthur: CONTINUE

    ALIGNMENT ABSTRACTION reaches its Chalice level, displaying titanic backlogs of quests, linked with exotic flowcharts and tracked with huge numbers of stats. The whole thing splits open, brimming with a five-color array of individual per-action stats in five submenus per quest. The Chalice is moved past, and it's the Sword that provokes the most unnerving display yet. The ALIGNMENT ABSTRACTION's menus and displays were an unimaginably dense user interface before, but now there's no way this would be useful to any user. Grids, node-investment systems, complex graphs, geometric upgrade-slotting mechanisms, and all manner of labeled systems with esoteric terminology that look like they're straight out of JRPG hell split into something like a fractal tree.

>Arthur: CONTINUE

    He hits black, and the minute he does, his Health Vial pops up, flashing red. The fractal tree turns towards a big eight-pronged crown-shaped whorl, a vast construct of information that looks like the most mind-bending thousand-angle super-puzzle of an interface, the nightmare fever-dream of a game designer channeling the will of secret gods. It flickers to white while the ALIGNMENT ABSTRACT bends into a hypercrown.

>Arthur: Okay, that's enough, pull out

    Arthur pulls his hand backwards. It doesn't come loose. That's not a property of the orb, but rather, a property of his magic.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: THE ODAS WON'T TAKE YOU BACK IF YOU'RE UNLICENSED
>Arthur: YOU WON'T BE ABLE TO MUSTER HELP WITH THE LUNAR DISASTER
>Arthur: YOUR OBJECTIONS TO THE LETTER AGENCY WILL RING HOLLOW
>Arthur: YOU HAVE TO DO IT RIGHT
>Arthur: CONTINUE

    It begins to scroll through laws of physics and their esoterica. Fractal submenus go into citing specific minutiae of how radiation functions, essential rules of geometry, how gravity works within singularities. Arthur's Health Vial flashes again. White surges. Silver surges. When the gold metrics in a million sub-trees rises, his Health Vial starts flashing and doesn't stop. His breathing gets tense, pained, stressed. He is crying.

>Arthur: No. Seriously, stop
>Arthur: THE ODAS WILL TAKE ANY EXCUSE TO REJECT YOU NOW
>Arthur: STOP

    The four-dimensional hypercrown is graphing the initial conditions of a new universe, surging with crimson and eking out the last parts of black, when it cuts off. Arthur pulls back. There's a few tears sliding down his cheeks. "No. God dammit. God dammit." He whispers. "Thought it'd only be silver by now, not as bad as--..." Which is odd. The HIGH SCORE BOARD that pops up indicates he only got as far as CROWN WHITE last year, and beat it with CROWN CRIMSON this time.

    He waves it away, stumbling back. He breathes hard, his Health Vial still flickering red every so often. He swears under his breath, trying to find somewhere to sit and hold his head. He mutters under his breath, "This was a mistake, shouldn'ta come back to that damn thing."
Staren     Thank goodness. Comfort is restored, and Staren shows up to the next event in her usual clothes. For all the complaints of others, she hasn't gotten around to finding something else, and it's what's comfortable. Those with an eye for such things might notice that the clothes she's been wearing since her return *are* fitted differently than they were before; she cares at least a little.

    Anyway: Magic. Last time, Staren tried to hack the test. This time, she shouldn't have to. She watches the others with interest, suitably impressed at those reaching the Blade. She sets her hands on the orb and focuses on channeling PPE into it. The jewel is powered through easily. The mirror turns white, then silver, then... sometimes it starts to shift slightly, but it rebounds. She can't quite push through, and looks at least somewhat frustrated, after the show others have made. Eventually, the image of golden gears, interlocking and turning, surfaces in the silver, which makes Staren smile when she thinks it's a color change, and then look disappointed that it isn't. She's frustrated that her progress seems to be arrested so relatively early.

    ...if allowed, she gets out the toys. Sensors built into glasses and portable camera-like devices assist in probing, predicting. With this aid, she pushes through jewel, then mirror, and into chalice... the orb glows white, then silver, and then... "Ow!" Staren recoils, pulling her hands away. She'll try again if the atmosphere is receptive to it, but is stopped at the same point as before, just short of gold. Her brow is furrowed, but... she accepts this. She tried honestly, and knows she's no master mage.

    Only after a bit more thought does she realize others did quite a bit worse. Does she... does she actually have something to be proud of, magic-wise?
Lilian Rook     Of course Lilian is sure to preen about her 'level up'. Everyone who notices, she says is automatically invited to an announcement party. She congratulates (backhandedly) Staren on 'giving half a damn this time', tells the youkai "It's not a weight to lift you barbarians", and then even snaps a little photo of Strawberry's 'inner stars' on the side.

    However, she spends a while frowning over Arthur. "Is there something you should be telling me? That's a huge improvement to make in, what, two years? Insane, even. There'd be, like, a whole ball and everything. Scouts too, probably. Maybe some rival employers 'taken out back'. Are you really that resolved to make yourself miserable about talent?"

    But, Kale insisting it's broken for him, mostly just gets one eye-roll-delivered remark from her. "Of course a bird would have the most trouble with a mirror."
Lilian Rook     But, after all of that, what you're lead to next is shockingly mundane. After being acclimated to the esoteric, it feels weird to go back to reality. Offputting, even. Lilian splits off again, and you're all taken to individual rooms, where you're literally sat at a desk, and at first given papers to fill out with a pen. It looks basically like a written exam, save that it only ever asks odd, open ended, yet strangely particular questions. Somewhere in this building, this is someone's favourite part. That person has no friends.

    The written material concerns itself with personal questions first, largely revolving around describing oneself and their experiences, then gets into sort of abstract 'ink blot'-esque interpretations of metaphors, thought exercises, parables, and koans, a few of which are probably familiar to some (the Original Face, a version of the Trolley Problem, the Ship of Theseus, and things like that). It eventually culminates in asking for what amount to fifteen minute 'essays' on three major questions, regarding 'the nature of power and the responsibilities of those who have it', 'the nature and purpose of human beings', 'what defines a person/consciousness', and 'what is right in the universe and what is wrong in the universe', all with vague moral undertones, but with the sense they're not really about ethics. At least not in a right or wrong sense.

    The second half is equally mundane, but with a sort of uncanny element to it. Each person, after having their papers finished, has a trio of people brought into a room with them. Qualified examiners, no doubt. They're different for each person, but there are always three, and they appear to have a certain pattern to them.

    The trio of judges begin an interview. As in, like a job interview, almost. Questions where they're looking for correct answers, and closely scrutinizing how well, how promptly, how sincerely (or convincingly), how consistently, and how coherently they're answered. For a while, they're basically all the same questions as the written portion, with some twists and alternative takes that might disguise them as a different question with a different answer. Soon, they cease being 'answer the question', and become actual debates, where you're supposed to argue and defend an outcome. The roles of the three only become somewhat more obvious with time.
Lilian Rook     One is always assigned to be hostile and critical, attacking the validity of answers, skewering professed ideals, and doing their best to rattle and shoot down everything one says.    
    One never objects to much of what you say at all. They're always accepting, seemingly interested in or impressed by your answers. They repeat your conclusions for verification, asking 'if they've got it right', but always subtly not right. They provide 'outs' whenever you seem stressed, or offer slightly differently worded alternatives to your points that are immediately accepted by all three, despite not quite being what you're insisting on. One challenges every answer with a question. They meticulously record everything you say, and then constantly refer back to it, throwing your own words in your face, citing your own scripture to argue against you, and demanding that you justify everything with proofs, throwing out examples and hypothetical cases that they then put through elaborate and confusing hoops that track back around into the answers you've given, slowly becoming more tangled as the volume of 'things you've said' obviously increases as the interview continues.

    There is one more trick to it too, though likely few will figure it out. One is always, mentally, fairly mundane. One is always on guard against manipulative efforts and passively resilient to glamours, compulsions, and the like. One is always especially trained to be practically immune to all forms of non-verbal suggestion and command, and to veil their thoughts from being read. This is intentional. There is always a weak link, always an anchor, and always a middle ground. They *expect* magic, psychic ability, or other unfair advantages to be leveraged here, secretly and without saying so. It's the second layer of the process that is revealed to someone who tries to 'cheat'. Cheating is, in fact, a measurable score.

    Also one of them literally just openly sighs when Staren shows up.
Arthur Lowell     "Is there something you should be telling me? That's a huge improvement to make in, what, two years? Insane, even. There'd be, like, a whole ball and everything. Scouts too, probably. Maybe some rival employers 'taken out back'. Are you really that resolved to make yourself miserable about talent?"

>Arthur: Explain

    "This isn't good." Arthur mutters. He tries to keep his voice low, keep chatter away from the ears of most others. "I'm sick. Expiring, still. I was supposed to get all *enlightened* or whatever, but I don't wanna. It'd fuckin' suck. Shit's gotten worse the last couple years. Like, yeah, I'm not gonna die. But you don't get past Crown without bein' something else when you're past it. I can't stand bein' that. I need to stay *this*." He stands up. "As long as I can." He taps a heel urgently. "Fuckin'... Secundus. Got my head even worse than it would be. Gotta finish that damn thing soon."

    He wraps his arms around himself and heads over to the next part with urgent steps, trying to restore his usual Coolkid Mannerisms as he goes, as if limbering his arms up for the bout of writing.
Taelveras Taelveras, who was not here last time, is unaware that Lilian has 'leveled up'. Nor does she know the protocol about it. No congratulations here! Not yet.

Tael does give the ones who surpassed her - Tamamo, Strawberry Princess, Arthur - surprisingly long looks. Especially Arthur, who seems more unhappy with his than happy, for reasons she does not understand - inexperience, again? Or at least, lack of knowledge that she should have about all three of them.

She feels slightly adrift. Taelveras covers for this by standing straight and pretending she isn't, because sometimes that works. "I suppose I will see you later," she says, when she's sent into her own individual room.
Tamamo     Tamamo waits through others to finish, stretching her arms behind her, fingers interlaced. The results cover a wider range than she was expecting, though that's largely to be expected, given the breadth of worlds the group is from. One she hadn't even seen before now, though she at least recognizes Tael's voice.

    Like Rin, and perhaps like anyone else paying any attention as the stand progresses to the station of the crown, she has a less than celebratory look for Arthur's state. Still, he did say he was fine, and it would be rude to merely (directly) repeat the question. Instead, she comes up to him to ask, without having to raise her voice over the room, "You seemed most serious, at this point, and though that is expected for the people on this world, was there some reason that so motivates you? You were not raised among those so concerned with this particular aspect of culture, no?"

    She may have misunderstood the reasons for his reaction, but she knows there was a reason, and is only moderately willing to pretend to believe that it was something like a gamer's pride.
Kale Hearthward "- I mean, it's... a righteous conquest, right?" An almost cartoonish bead of sweat drips down the back of Kale's forehead as he faces the examiners. "That's the measurement. If you take over a country, and the country sees a net improvement afterwards, then the - I mean net improvement in standard of living, and quality of life, and economy and industry, and having a better culture-"

"- What do you mean, 'what measurement are you using for 'better culture''? Like, better is better, obviously -"

Kale flounders hard. This part of the test is his to lose - in the sense that he's likely going to come out of this with the lowest scores of the group, by a healthy margin.
Arthur Lowell >==>

    Arthur's response to Taelveras's long, long look is a wink and a pair of fingerguns. His flashing Health Vial not withstanding, one could be forgiven for still finding him an obnoxious idiot considering the fact that he makes sure to reflect every available light-source into a quick glint off his teeth straight into an observer's eye. It's an outrageously constructed effort to look like the obnoxiousest punk of a jerk-bully anyone ever intentionally existed as.

    Tamamo's question gets a bit of a falter in the grin. He's known her for about half the time he's known Lilian, or thereabouts, right? Timespans at this scale get so weird. He shakes his head free of the pondering. "Oh, yeah, just some WEIRD THINGS about that READ. It's... not *all* the time you get good at something means *good* is happening. You ever seen someone lose weight from, like, a parasite infection? Seen a dude get all swole from hypertension? Not... all improvement, not all improvement's good. That don't make sense, but, like, whatever. You get it. Right?"

    He continues his walk to the next section. Maybe it's not something anyone else gets.
Staren     Staren quietly accepts the backhanded compliment. She deserved that and she knows it. She manages to hold in the laugh at 'a bird having trouble with a mirror', but that she got the joke shows on her face.

    Now for the written exam! All alone, not watching anyone else do it.

    Honestly, Staren didn't study or anything. She only vaguely recalls what she wrote last time. Original Face... she didn't look it up and realize it was a zen reference, so as before she writes, 'I have resting bitch face so probably an angry-looking face,' but, this time, she amends it with "but I don't think that's what you meant. I may not understand it." The trolley problem? You throw the switch. She doesn't have to justify it unless asked. Instead of waxing on what is a person, this time she writes that the ship of Theseus is like the tree falling with no one to hear; it depends on what purpose you're asking the question for -- someone who's recieved a transplant is the same person in many conversational ways but now may have different medical needs, for example.

    At the bit about people she SIGHS as she remembers her past self. She's not sure responsibility always comes with power, unless granted with an expectation, but respect sure doesn't accompany it unless responsibility is shown, and power that becomes a danger to others may be dealt with. She's not sure where to draw the line, psychologically, on humans, but most of them seem to have a lot in common; Their purpose is theirs to decide. Consciousness and personhood is defined by itself. Right and wrong is determined by people, so it's whatever people agree and disagree with in the universe.

    And now the oral exam. For her part, as the examiner sighs, she also does at the memory of how she used to be. Although, perhaps the part that bothers the examiner isn't the part that's changed...

    Staren admits, to their surprise, she doesn't know. She can go over her old beliefs and reasoning, but also admits they weren't working and that she's still figuring out what will work, and why. She still doesn't truck with anyone changing her words and precisely picks apart the changes in meaning, acknowledging misspeakings and imprecision and laying out how her manner of speaking frustratingly moves between 'incorrect in details to get the point across' and 'technically precise and correct in ways MOST people misunderstand for no reason she can comprehend', sighing and clarifying intent in such cases. Growing increasingly frustrated but refusing to give up, although now she at least offers, "I don't acknowledge that as the same meaning but we can move on if you want" as an out if THEy want to move on.

    It still never occurs to her to use even mundane persuasion techniques, let alone cheat. That was not presented as an aspect of the test, so it's taken at face value.

    Once out, she just needs to relax and NOT debate for a bit. "I feel like the written part got easier, but the talking part got even harder... I guess if they're testing the strength of my beliefs, accepting old me was wrong and I don't know what the answer is makes me look worse..." She's put out about this but clings to hope that maybe honesty is somehow weighted in the score.
Hellwarming Trio Utsuho: "Well, duh. That's why we weren't lifting it."
Rin: "Yeah, we were shootin' it!"

After that goes right over their heads like several other things, the youkai finally give up while blaming the mirror for just being wrong somehow. Whether they're actually informed otherwise is another matter, but they remain defiant at least on this part.

Arthur's apparent breakdown, meanwhile, has the pair giving him confused looks. Rin approaches him, but stops when "Hey... Uh. You okay, dude?" Rin asks, somehow having enough sense to mirror Lilian's questions there. "I mean, if you've been here before and did better this time without seeing this weird thing the whole time, then..."

She's not sure where to go with that. "But... Yeah, we're here! So... Yeah!" She tries to offer some form of support with that, at least.

The essays that follow all those tests have the youkai groaning audibly. "I thought there wasn't supposed to be a knowledge part." Utsuho grumbles, although neither of them are pleased about having the write anything. It doesn't mean they won't do it, though, just that they're not going to be happy about it.

Rin has surprisingly good handwriting. Both of them are basically complete idiots, of course, but they're actually trying pretty hard to understand what little they can of these questions.

Then comes the interview portions. Despite their lack of book knowledge, they're actually pretty consistent in their logic, going from point A to point B in easily traceable, if somewhat large, jumps in logic. They're more likely to be completely wrong about whatever side they're taking, but there's definitely an effort to try and keep up, at least in the sense of answering questions instead of just glossing over everything.

They take the bait of the second interviewer pretty easily, of course, not even realizing that some of the conclusions are slightly off enough in favor of just going with what sounds right enough because that is definitely what they said earlier.

The first and third interviewers, meanwhile, get considerably different results from both of them. Utsuho, being more willing to admit her lack of knowledge on basic concepts, frequently asks the first interviewer to clarify things more simply until it's at such a level that even she can bolster what she's saying in the simplest terms possible while being so certain that she's right that any attempts to rattle her just bounce right off because of how totally right she (thinks she) is. The third interviewer, though, gets on her nerves fairly quickly for repeating the same stuff she just said over and over.

Rin, meanwhile, has the opposite reaction. While the first interviewer gets on her nerves easily for challenging her and gets her to just say the same thing louder, the third interviewer actually boosts Rin's ego each time they speak. Clearly, it's because the third interviewer has a thing for her. Why else would they be paying such meticulous attention and hanging onto her every word?
Strawberry Princess      There are only two parts of the overall exam that Strawberry can probably expect to get unimpressive marks on. The first was the "unaugmented physical", but that barely counted- it was just to establish a baseline.

     This is the second one, and it absolutely does count.

     Under questioning, Strawberry eventually reveals two separate sets of ethics: one that she considers it reasonable for other people to conform to, and by which their actions can be judged; and one that she holds for herself, for "being Strawberry Princesslike", which are generally stricter and less consequentialist.

     Should an ideal, abstract person pull the trolley lever? Certainly. Should she? Maybe, but she can't. Is it okay for an ideal, abstract person to steal out of necessity? Of course. Is it okay for her? No, that wouldn't be "Strawberry Princesslike".

     Strawberry is not particularly well-read (many of the old chestnuts are unfamiliar to her) nor unusually eloquent, but she is heartbreakingly earnest and sincere, a hundred percent of the time. That works both for and against her; she's easy to verbally judo, incapable of 'feinting' or being guileful. Her convictions are ironclad, and she sticks to them no matter how many times they're circled back to, but it's a gentle firmness- she's not willing to be vehement or intolerable about them. When the questioner asks if they got it right (despite clearly getting it wrong), she always responds with: "Yes, but..."

     Some of the things that she says: "If something bad happens to you, it's right to feel hurt by it. If you close yourself off to the hurt- if you let yourself get hard and cold- then you'll never really heal, I think." "If something is necessary, but bad, it should still- weigh on you. If you can do 'necessary evils' and not let your heart feel heavy... that's a poison." "I can't let myself be cold. I've spent too long doing that already. I can't afford it anymore."

     She comes out of the exams clearly droopy. "My wrist hurts," she complains softly. "I haven't written that much since school."
Shinnosuke Tomari Tomari handles the written portion specifically. His Trolley Problem is that 'I don't know, but I'll decide when it happens'. His Ship of Theseus is 'no, it's not the same ship'. When they're looking for the right answers on the test, he still gives his answers - his ideas of the responsibility of those who have power are probably obvious, being a cop, his definition of a personhood is shaky as he's currently in crisis about that but it involves sapience, and what is right and what is wrong in the universe get a lot of black and white answers and 'I don't really know'. Tomari doesn't try to cheat the test, or prove he's right, despite arguing back lightly. In the end...

"This is what I believe. That's what matters, most of all."
Ioanna Langstrom      If there's one thing Ioanna knows, it's herself. If there's one thing Ioanna Langstrom *is*, it's academic. And if there's one thing Ioanna *does*, it's keep her cards close to her chest.

     So she doesn't pour her heart out onto the page. What she does do is a clinical, academic examination of her life. A discussion of conflicts she's been involved in. A discussion of courses she's taken. An examination of her work, and her experiences. She highlights various things she's faced down. Various enemies she's had to hide from, or stand her ground against, or hold the line against. There's nothing special or heroic in her paper; even the descriptions of the battles are matter-of-fact and straightforward. She doesn't talk herself up. She doesn't talk her comrades up. She makes mention of seeing the incredible and awe-inspiring power of Elites up close, in a little bit of flowery, persuasive language, but not much else. But it's equally noteworthy that she doesn't talk herself down. Her confidence is higher, now, thanks to Tomari. Even if the Kamen Rider was chosen, he still tried to cheer her up. And she excels in this particular field. Hell, she *grades* papers.

     The metaphors, koans, and parables, too. She is absolutely incredible with them. Each one gets underlines, explanations, comparisons to various drawings of other cultures, meanings scribbled across three to five different civilizations, her own thoughts, and then some. Her answers to the philosophical problems are very clinical, referencing various forms of thought on them throughout the Multiverse and citing several works by several prominent philosophers arguing against the logic of them. The Trolley Problem she pays an especially large amount of time to, explaining that it's a soldier's duty to stand on the tracks and try and hold the trolley long enough for others to pull the others away, even knowing that, in the end, the trolley's going to run them over. She also adds more citations and commentary from military philosophers to underline this and support her work.

     The nature of power she skips. Utterly. She just leaves the page flat blank.

     The nature and purpose of selflikes (she literally scratches out 'human beings' and underlines 'selflike' twice, with a note in the margin that it's the accepted academic multiversal term for 'an intelligent being that's understood to be of your general species cluster') she's a bit more thorough in. Again, she references artwork and philosophers, but this time she doesn't actually anwer the question until the end: The Highest Good. Nor does she define 'the highest good' - it's just the last line in the page.

     The definition of a person gets the double-underlined 'selflike' again, and then describes several Multiversal variants with different standards of selflike-ness, including several that don't even consider themselves people. It's a very raised-in-the-Multiverse answer from a very xenoanthropological stance.

     Finally, she also leaves the last test blank, save for a poem.

     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.

     She cites Effigy of Cimilco at the bottom, and then moves to the debate.

     She's an *academic*, for God's sakes. She's working on a doctorate. This, at least, is *child's play*. She has these kinds of debates all the damn time. God, if she couldn't do *this much*, she might as well hang up her armor, settle down, and have two-point-five kids.

     She doesn't cheat because she can't.

     She gets tripped up. She's not perfect at it, after all. She can defend her theses and she can cite her sources but she's not always got a perfect answer, and when pressed on anything she left blank, she just point-blank says, "I'm sorry; I'm a soldier, not a philosopher."
Taelveras This is... less familiar. Taelveras was never tested on academics in quite this way, and never tested on philosophy at all. Still, she's literate, she thinks, so how hard can it be?

Taelveras is willing to write about herself... to an extremely limited extent. She gives her name as 'Taelveras' without a surname, and only gives an extremely edited version of her history; she was born in somewhere called Zirnakaynin, she went to school at 'Harrowspire' (with no explanation of what that is), she chose to leave over what she calls 'personal opinions'. She writes nothing else on that topic.

She does better, or at least writes more, on the rest of it. Taelveras is not an academic and did not study philosophy in this sense, but she has begun to think about what she believes. She's had time for this.

So her responses are not tempered by academic reading or prior knowledge but are, quite possibly, the first and only time she has been able to speak (or write, at first) from her heart in her entire life. So the essays, at least, are honest.

Taelveras is not entirely sure what the nature of power is but is sure what it isn't: selfishness, the acquisition of power and wealth solely to have it rather than to use it (though she isn't entirely sure what it should be used for), internal conflict, the desire to cause pain and dominate to no purpose. She doesn't know what the nature of human beings are and is not afraid to say so; she is much better at handling the definition of consciousness and what is right.

It is clear that, despite everything, she believes people can be better than what they are, and that order helps those who may not be able to figure out how for themselves. The interviewers may get the idea that she puts herself in that category. She reads as much younger than she is, like someone who has never thought about these things until recently and is still figuring them out.

Tael is better with her pen than her words, though. Her unwillingness to show weakness in person comes out not with the hostile interviewer (who clearly makes her angry, but she can control herself well enough that they may not even realize she *is* because she knows it's a test) but with the third one, the one that records what she says and does. She retreats verbally in several cases, ceding the point in favor of being manipulated into points she didn't intend to make or, sometimes, withdrawal and cold silence. She is weak to being talked around and her only defense is to stop talking.

She may be accidentally proving at least some of Strawberry's points, though she is completely unaware of the other woman's conversation. At least, until after.

She also never cheats. Whether that is because she won't or because she can't is an open question; she doesn't.

"I agree," Taelveras says. "I'm not a scribe. But the written part was... easier than the spoken."
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Alright, let's get some questions done

    What comes next is easier to deal with. Oneself and one's experiences is easy; Arthur can describe Sburb, and even does more of those goofy doodles. The interpretations receive Arthur's aggressively non-intellectual voice, injecting whatever piercing insight he can but always, *always* being as aggressively Xbox-Live Bro-ish as he can. The fifteen-minute essays are a little less heavy on Arthur's usual bullshit. His answers remain the exact same as last year:

    The nature of power is a nature of respect. As you gain power, you distance yourself more and more from the people who are going to be affected most by that power, and the more and more you suffer less consequences for inappropriate use of that power. Accumulated power, he says, is therefore an expiration date; the more you have, the closer you are to disconnecting entirely from responsibility. This year, his emphasis is more intense. His writing is a little more focused and frantic. Perhaps a bit obsessive.

    As for the nature of humans, Arthur is surprisingly terse; he thinks that consciousness doesn't really have an objective measure, and that you have to focus on keeping a subjective measure of who qualifies as human or conscious that works well with your context and with the others around you who you already know for sure are conscious. The purpose, he says, is...

    He has drawn a small, fully functional menu. When one presses buttons on it with their fingers, its display works perfectly, though it still remains just drawn on paper. It is the interface for a high score table of people who have been alive, presumably the top ten people who were the best at being alive. Only their initials are displayed. However, notably, it has been completely updated. AAA, who was the top score in the last time Arthur got here, has been entirely replaced by new high scores, orders of magnitude higher than the previous. Some guy just entered his highscore-initials as "8". What does that mean? Figure it out.

>Arthur: Great answers. Next one?

    Arthur's recovered most of his coolkidism by the time the examiners speak to him. His beliefs remain strong, and once again, his representation and justification of those beliefs is done with the most nonsensical, inane ideas possible. Xbox Live habits for the antagonistic. The curious one, once again, finds Arthur insisting on *not being right*, and constantly avoiding an intelligent position. The challenger always finds him trying to give just barely under-threshold answers, intentional efforts to be just a little too insolent-punk-ish for the thresholds they demand.

    And once again: Three social bars, measuring abstract depictions of Arthur's conflict with them. The mundane one's bar is clear, the resilient one's is only based on his expression, and the trained one has a bar that basically doesn't mean anything accurate; it shows off the limits of Arthur's interface as the limits of Arthur's own perception, rather than linking directly to reality. Arthur himself has zero awareness of the bars, and they are seen exclusively by the three examiners.

    Not much has changed since the last time. This is pretty static, for Arthur.
Tamamo     Tamamo is asked to answer a number of questions. She takes this opportunity to be as excessively roundabout as possible, answering with literary allusions to poems that were obscure a thousand years ago, and form a carelessly incomplete picture even if fully understood. Her handling of parables is closer to encyclopedic, if funneled through the same layers of obfuscation, forcing a likely reader into hours of homework just to meaningfully translate that she got something like a 'correct' answer. At least one common thought exercise is answered with "None can know what will become of a world that shall never come to be," followed by a blank page.

    Having this repeated by actual interviewers allows for the same approach to be challenged, but Tamamo is perfectly willing to talk in circles or politely stonewall faces as well as anonymous writers. She's apparently impossible to upset, and refuses, without ever admitting to having done so, to speak in such clear specifics as can be effectively used against her. This much is an old, old game, and she's very used to it, though that familiarity is unrelated to the real reason she never tries to turn up the Charm.

    'the nature of power and the responsibilities of those who have it'
    "It is such an odd question, is it not? All know what power is, though some ask not because they wish to know the answer to the question, but because they wish to know the means of power in which another is interested, and gauge the importance they place on each type and category. The second is like the first only in its deceptiveness."

    'what defines a person/consciousness'
    "A person is a person, but that is of little interest. Did you mean to ask of spirits? To explain a distinction of colors to the blind would be an arduous task, but if one can see, then why should the question be asked, at all?"

    'what is right in the universe and what is wrong in the universe'
    "Rightness is not of the world, for a wrong world is one that does not exist. A path is wrong if it leads where you wish not to go, but can you say that it is truly the path that is wrong, or that you are wrong for the path? The path is not defined by your discovery of it, but your journey is defined by your choices."

    'the nature and purpose of human beings'
    "Oh, no, you cannot simply ask that! It is a grand secret."

    
Lilian Rook     As Lilian had said at the start, it'd be pointless to try and grill people on academia and arcane knowledge regarding a world they're not actually from, as well as the step after that, where their ostensible focus in violent crisis situations as part of the factional Elite forces is so known a quantity that the information can simply be requested. So, two tests are skipped, and you get to go up another many floors to the virtue of 'mental resilience'. A floor where the translucent walls are partially blacked out, there are marks everywhere demarcating how far to stand and what not to cross, and where absolutely nobody appears to be having fun. Nervous chatter at best.

    This too is a sealed chamber affair, but each is very small, private, and dimly lit. You have to go into them individually, rather than being able to share one in turns. Each one is connected to an intercom system, where a professional on the other end with a calm and soothing voice tells you that the process is very simple: you sit in the middle of the room, and every so often they'll ask you if you want to continue the test. If you say yes, they clear the stage and start you on the next. If you say no, they cross off the stage you're on. You don't get points for finishing a stage but declining to go to the next. There are seven stages in total. Good luck.

    Why this setup exists as it does becomes really obvious really fast. Though there's nothing really in the room except a single chair to sit in and a door that locks ominously from the outside, you're immediately aware of the presence of Something Else in there with you. That something isn't visible. Isn't tangible. Isn't human. But it wants you to stop the test.

    At first, it's the mental equivalent of 'asking nicely'. A gentle mental presence pokes and nudges to call it off and just leave right now. It isn't very powerful, but it is both fairly pervasive and able to effectively push and prod, in a subtly missable way, to answer no when the instructor asks five minutes later. Not too bad. A totally mundane person would unfailingly answer in negative and then go 'wait why did I stop?' a second later, but it's no worse than that.

    The stage after that is much more insidious, even. For the most part, it feels like a break. Did they say there'd be breaks between? What bubbles to mind is much like a normal set of intrusive thoughts, coming in out of sheer boredom of sitting in a chair for five minutes before anything happens. This is sort of dumb. What's the point of this? Does this actually matter? It can't affect the grade that much. Wouldn't bailing out early be convenient because then you'd never be put up against something mentally stressful? The later stages are probably going to be horrific. The physical was exhausting too. Just come back fresh. Plus it's not really fair to do this right after that incredibly vexing interview. For most, it's like there's nothing in the room at all. It's their own rationalization. Bargaining. The mental ability to justify a 'cheat day' or weasel out of a commitment.

     It comes back in force after that. A lot of force. Whoever answers positive a second time is immediately blasted by hard, oppressive mental force, just straight up attempting to forcefully jack the words from your mouth. The feeling of the Other is strong now, trying to get in, take over, straining your force of will to an exhausting, headache-inducing degree. It's done playing nice, and forcing you to fight it, to push past it, and really sweat and work for it.
Lilian Rook     If one can answer the positive a third time and desire to subject themselves to worse, the stage after that begins inducing not just thoughts, but vivid visual, auditory, and tactile hallucinations. It stops being about control, and becomes all about making sure you never want to spend a second in that room ever again. For ten solid minutes, the presence does everything it can to shock, to horrify, to terrorize, to confuse and beguile, to bully or tempt you, into leaving. Nothing is off limits. It brutalizes your senses with all the things that make you want to cringe, recoil, panic, or flee. It's not above jump scares, nor horrible sensations like worms under the skin, a razor dragged over the eyes, terrible ear-splitting screaming, or sights and smells of horrible violence and gore, but the more common tact is where the Other plays smart.

    Its favoured tactic, tried and true, is, partway in, where the Other takes the shape of some horrible thing in the room, switches off the lights, shorts the intercom, and then when beholding the thing that is your exact nightmare, panicked voices outside inform you that this isn't part of the test --that 'it' isn't supposed to be able to get into the room. It fakes the sounds of the instructors banging on the door to try and get in, and when the clock runs down, it moves aggressively in a way you instinctively recognize as meant to kill or disfigure you.

    There are situations where it instead judges that other deceptions are in order, and instead mutes the comms to hurriedly share a tale of how it's trapped there, how you've been rused, how the others are all gone already and what the supervisors are really going to do to you with this fake 'test'; it tells you how they're going to implant things into your mind in the next stage, just like everyone else, and if you don't want to end up like the countless sorry souls before you, you have to leave and pretend you don't know anything, before it can no longer resist their control.

    There are even situations where it takes on something entirely pleasant. Relaxing. Dreamlike. Euphoric. Addictive. To those it judges can't be intimidated, or have their doubts preyed upon, it provides the Butterfly Dream, where everything is absolutely wonderful and the time just flies, until you're prompted to answer whether you want to ditch this and move back on to the horrible things, and the temptation to answer 'just five more minutes' is completely overwhelming; something obviously interpreted as a negative.

    Hell, it isn't above taking the form of an obnoxious little kid screaming and making insanely annoying noises over and over again in the corner for ten minutes solid if that's what it takes.

    If one is foolhardy enough to keep going, the presence dispenses with all indirect methods and issues a Command. It fills the room like the blow of a hammer and Demands that you give up. It doesn't struggle and wrestle with you and try to take control; it is overwhelming, irresistible, dominating power, fit to make one feel like a tiny, irrelevant nobody, woefully out of their depth and insane for ever coming here. It issues an Order, only a few steps short of receiving a vision from God in its overwhelming splendor, intensity, and implicit wrath and promise of Consequences.
Lilian Rook     Someone who can overwhelm even *that* is then plunged into total darkness. Total silence. Total numbness. Complete, floating sensory deprivation. Worse. You can't feel your own heartbeat. You can't tell your orientation. You can't even tell if your eyes are open or closed, no matter how fast you blink. You could be pinching your cheek and not even know. You could have in fact fallen out of the chair and hurt yourself, or someone could have broken in and stabbed you, and you wouldn't even know. Anyone or anything could be doing anything imaginable in this state of total, complete, utter vulnerability. Even the crazy hallucinations the human brain is supposed to experience in times like these, to preserve some vague proximity of sanity, don't come.

    All sense of time vanishes too. Have they already asked for the answer? Saying yes doesn't do anything. A logical mind might conclude that since you have no way of telling how time might be flowing, for all you know, this could go on for an experience of days, weeks, years, in the next five minutes. A more imaginative mind might realize that, for all you know, you might be dead. That this is all there is. Like this forever. Forever.

    What finally breaks it is being asked one more time, and this time they triple ask you to make certain you're absolutely sure, forcing you to repeat a full statement of consent before doing it. If someone *somehow* got that far, and *still* wants to go, what they're subjected to is a full sixty seconds of fully immersive hallucinations which defy description, defy understanding, and defy common sense. Not only the five senses, but additional special senses, senses you never even knew existed, and senses that might *actually* not exist, are overwhelmed by the unfathomable, ineffably alien, and utterly incompatible with the experiential paradigm of the mortal mind.

    There's no subtlety or urging to it anymore. There's no more yes or no to answer. It's basically just torture at that point, of the most bizarre and incomprehensible kind. It hurts. It's terrifying. It makes thoughts run in a million directions that don't make any senses. It makes one's pulse feel fit to explode out their mouth. It's roiling, inchoate madness, so vivid and intense that if someone doesn't quit before sixty seconds elapse, it ends automatically for their own safety.

    You get a towel, snacks, and free beverages after, though. That's nice. They also check your blood pressure and pupil response to make sure nobody had an aneurysm or something. Lilian assures everyone that she hates this one the most too. Nobody asks anyone what they saw or felt. It's up for debate whether they're even curious. Even as a first-timer, it'd be obvious that nobody remotely smart would tell even professionals exactly how to get to them in the worst way, especially what nebulously passes for 'the government'. After doing this a bazillion times a year as a job, the desire to know probably wears off.
Tamamo     Tamamo exits the torture chamber shortly into the fourth stage. She doesn't say anything about it.
Kale Hearthward Kale takes a seat. He sits, and he waits.

Intrusive thoughts come in. Does he want to call it off and leave right now? Well, he's apparently not doing too well on the exam, maybe it is time to call it quits...

... "I want to continue," he asks, when prompted, deciding that no, just because he's behind is no reason to give up.

The next stage starts.

The next stage finishes.

"I'd like to leave now," says Kale when prompted, the hawk slumped over in his chair.

He leaves. The snacks and the aftercare help. He finds somewhere reasonably private and reasonably comfortable, takes a seat...

... and then just sort of quietly breaks down.

"(Maybe if I leave now, leave early, while everyone else is still taking the test - they won't announce my score,)" he mutters to himself, and then slumps back, looking up at the ceiling.

"Mirror Silver, when everyone else is getting - damnnit I don't even remember what the order goes in. Blades? Was that two or three above mine? And I couldn't even come up with decent answers to the questions, and I didn't get past the second stage of the mental thing..."
Staren     When Staren sees The Chair, it comes back to her. "Can't we just keep my score from last time?" She asks, but if not, in she goes.

    She distracts herself on her headcomputer from the getgo this time, and sets up HUD reminders to answer that she wants to continue. May as well make the time pass quickly. This time, when stage 3 comes, she meets it head on. When asked about stage 4, she answers, "I'm good, but I don't wanna do the next one" and then slaps her hands over her mouth as she realizes whatever it was managed to sieze control at the LAST FUCKING MOMENT. Last time, it couldn't, but this time, she knew what was coming and was planning to bail as soon as the hallucinations started, and... that created an opportunity for whatever it was to exploit.

    Staren sighs and hangs her head, ears and tail drooping, as she walks outside.

    To Kale, she comments, "It's really for the best. Last time I made it to the start of the next part, and... it was not going anywhere good. I can only imagine what comes after." She pauses, then shakes her head. "...No, I can't, and I don't want to." She tries to pat him on the shoulder.
Shinnosuke Tomari "I'd like to continue." After the first urging, Tomari says. After the second, the bargaining, he says it again. "I'd like to continue."

The oppressive mental force tries to take his voice. In the end, he struggles with it, but goes. "I'd like to continue."

Hallucinations time. Some horrible thing appears. It reminds him of his father, specifically his corpse. It moves aggressively. But Tomari thinks about it rationally. They're too competent for this. This is part of the test.

"I'd like to continue."

There's a command. An order. Tomari's words almost slip to 'I want out.' Almost. Just barely...

"I want to continue, please."

But then, he's plunged into darkness. Total sensory deprivation. This is awful. This is...

A lack of control. A complete and utter lack of control, and he has no way to fight it. He'd scream, but he wouldn't hear it. So instead...

"I want to stop."

He only takes the towel and water. No snacks. He wipes the sweat off his face. "You alright?" He asks the others, not asking what they saw.
Kale Hearthward "Ask me once they announce the scores," says Kale, remaining staring at the ceiling without looking over at Tomari as he answers.

"Or - on second thought, *don't* ask, please."
Hellwarming Trio It's time for the next stage! Feeling enthused from their performances in the written and spoken sections, Utsuho and Rin are raring to go by the time they get into the dimly lit room stage. Sitting in the chair is a simple enough matter, and they're going into this without realizing what they're getting into this time around.

They sense the Other almost immediately, and they're quick to bring out some flames to fight off the darkness in the room. The fire also helps things feel a little home-y-er as the stages of this next test begin.

The first stage is easily passed. It's a little confusing, but that's about it.
The second stage tempts them, but they still manage to push through with the power of sunk costs weighing in the forefront of their minds.
The third stage has them cursing at this unseen force, shouting defiantly at the Other that they can't be told what to do by someone that won't even show their face.
The fourth stage is where they get booted out. Trying to intimidate the youkai with movements and noise, or trying to annoy them with children would only lead to more fires (and possible disqualifications), and trying to trick them into leaving a fake test would only send them right back to sunk-cost logic. What will work easily, however, is getting them in the Butterfly Dream. They'd assume it was part of the test and unwittingly agree to just remain in there for a while longer.

At least that last part was pleasant enough.
Taelveras Tael is relieved, honestly, to not have to deal with academics, and while she probably would have enjoyed working out her frustrations in combat, where it's acceptable to do so, she does understand why they might want to skip it. No point.

Which means there's only one thing left.

"Good luck," she says to the others before she steps inside, and isn't entirely sure why she did it.

Taelveras enters the room and sits down in the seat. The dim light is comforting to her, though not so comforting she's going to take out her magic contact lenses, because she knows perfectly well they're going to turn the lights back on afterwards. So she just sits down and waits.

In the first part of the test, she simply is bored. The 'asking nicely' barely even registers with her. If she noticed it, she doesn't react. She asks for the second without thinking twice.

In the second, it registers, but Taelveras doesn't allow it to change her mind. It's boring, but she's had to sit and wait and watch for hours at a time. Ten minutes is an amount of time she can simply endure. By this point, she has guessed what the test is *really* testing.

By the third, she *knows*. The force hits her, and her own force pushes back. It tries to move her mouth; she locks her jaw shut during the event, and her first response, when they ask her if she wants to keep going, is to nod rather than speak. But a moment later, and she *does* speak.

By the fourth...

Taelveras actually finds the fourth easier than the third. Not because it's actually easier (it is not; they are sorted this way for a reason) but because it's *familiar*. She was trained by velstracs, those who cause pain - physical, mental, spiritual, emotional. Their method of training was, in some ways, brutally similar to this. Even the pleasant butterfly dream is part of it. Sometimes the worst torture is ending it, and knowing that it can come back whenever they want it to.

"Keep going," is what she says afterwards, as much from spite as anything else.

In the fifth, the Command hammers at her. Taelveras almost - *almost* taps out immediately. She braces herself in the chair physically, hunched, as if the verbal assault was a weight that was slamming down on her shoulders or that she was trying to hold on her back. But spite got her here and spite gets her through it. She cannot - *will not* - show weakness to something like this. She will feel awful about it, later. Right now she only feels cold.

She almost cannot say to continue. But she does.

The sixth is the void. Spite only goes so far.

Taelveras actually makes it minutes into it before she has to scream. A few moments later, and she exits, wrapped in her coat and practically radiating tightly controlled fury that she is trying not to show to anyone and only emphasizing. She does not speak to anyone - not Lilian, not the doctors (though she allows them to look at her), not the other testees.

Weakness and failure is too bitter,  even if it can't really be called 'weakness'.
Ioanna Langstrom      She's nervous.

     Ioanna is nervous.

     What did they leave for last? What did they leave for the end? What horrifying thing that only Elites can do was left for the end of it all?

     It's a room.

     A sealed chamber. And nothing more.

     Ioanna sits down in the chair and crosses her legs and folds her arms over her chest. She stares at the door. Once the door locks and she becomes aware of the Presence, of the Something, her nerves flare again. That's unsettling. She's never been good with totally invisible things that can whisper into your ear. Her willpower is iron and her training is exceptional, but it's still, you know, unsettling. Creepy. Unpleasant.

     When it starts muttering to her, she's silent.

     "Yes," she says to continuing the test.

     Then the thoughts start flowing in. Immediately she identifies them as not her own. Immediately she shifts gears. She acts like she's really considering it. She frowns. She stands up to pace around. She moves as if the thoughts are moving her, examining them the whole time. She leads them through a dance of agreement that she's not really feeling, pacing, looking nervous, tweaking her eye and her facial muscles slightly to pretend like she's about to quit.

     The proctor asks if she wants to continue.

     "Yes."

     Then the force comes back in. It's an aggressive presence. It literally knocks her back on her ass, landing on the floor in a humiliating fumble. She wasn't ready for that. She wasn't ready for the sheer power. But once she's ready she can handle it easily. She mentally judo-throws it. She wields its own power against it. She scatters her own thoughts so extensively that it's trying to punch through a web and finding itself allowed through. What she's having for dinner tonight. Whether or not Shinji's coming over for a ride. A map of the sites S.O.N.G. is investigating. Lines of poetry. Her brother's travel guides. Ant-people opera. Wasp-people rap. Whale-people hip-hop. It's a completely porous mess that moves around so that every strike just...does...nothing.

     "Yes," she repeats when the proctor enters.
Ioanna Langstrom      And then it gets hooks in.

     God, you were so proud, weren't you? You got handed that medal and you puffed out your chest and you were *so proud*. Your brother clapped his claws and mom and dad hugged you and you were *promoted*. You lost your eye and it was fucking worth it. You're *in there*, now. All those people you lost. All those soldiers. All those friends you saw die with bullets to the brain from things that didn't even know you existed. And then you're *in there*. You're a *real* Elite. How excited *were* you to post your introduction to the boards, Ioanna? How happy were you? How much did your heart *swell* with pride and affection? Oh you were *so* happy.

     Remember the art, Ioanna? Remember the taste of the pencil falling from your mouth? Of your astonishment? Ha, ha. Remember that taste? It's the taste of failure. You'll never get it out of your mouth. Your first mission and you were a failure in your own specialty. Remember that slap, Ioanna? Remember the feeling of how you *dared* to feel strong? Of how you *dared* to try and show off?

     Remember how you ran from Phony? How you tried to tell her that you had earned where you were, and that that made things better, and that you wouldn't want power given to you? You fucking liar. You would've *begged* for it. You couldn't even argue with her. You disappointing creature. You're just showing off now, aren't you, you weak little thing? Just to try and impress them, you're going to hurt yourself? Are you so *desperate* for them to look at you? You pitiful little thing. What are you even good for? Look at them pitying you. Tomari told you 'haha, don't worry about it, we're stronger than them in the will department' but *you aren't*, are you? You're.

     Just.

     Pretending.

     They *pity* you, you tiny, worthless little thing. Hell. Even your face. Even your body. Even the things you're *proud* of, someone else does better! A fucking goddess! How are you supposed to compete with that, hm? You came in here all sexy because you wanted to feel like somebody and *you can't even do that* because *even that, somebody else is better at*.

     You-

     The proctor enters.

     Ioanna looks up from the floor. She takes a deep breath. It would be so easy.

     "Yes. I want to continue."

     It's an order.

     It hammers her with the force of an angry god, and this flattens her out again, because her will is shaking and she hadn't been expecting it, and this time it's so much harder to put her thoughts out because it's all doubts and it's all self-loathing and it's so much, so much, and she can feel the sting on her cheek and the taste of blood in her mouth and the sound of the gunfire and the roar of the Elite above grabbing at her mind and-
Ioanna Langstrom      The proctor.

     Ioanna grabs her head.

     "Yes."

     Darkness.

     Nothing.

     Absolute nothingness.

     There's nothing, nothing, nothing. No one. Nowhere. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing but her thoughts.

     But that's what she needs. She needs that nothing to grab her composure. To grab her thoughts and reorder them after a brutal mental attack. To...hold on. To think. To recenter. To grab onto things she *does* know. To start running through some dance music in her head.

     When the proctor comes in next, and demands a triple ask and a full statement of consent, she doesn't hesitate.

     "Yes."

     And then she's screaming.

     She's on the floor, screaming the whole time. There's nothing but pain. Nothing but agony. Nothing but everything. Nothing but madness.

     And then sixty seconds are up, and it ends.

     Ioanna Langstrom stands up. She walks out of the room.

     She immediately grabs a towel to hide her face. She's sweating through her sports bra. Her hair is a goddamn mess. She's shaking. Trembling. Her fingers twitch every so often involuntarily. Her legs literally tremble. She's having trouble standing up. She's having trouble *breathing*, for God's sakes, the rise and fall of her chest wavering, and a few unpleasant, wet-sounding coughs into the towel. After a few seconds of standing she actually collapses against the wall, panting, shaking, trembling, hugging herself, and hiding her face behind the towel so no one can see her tears.

     Later, she might even be proud of herself. But right now?

     Right now, Ioanna Langstrom is barely able to talk.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Maybe you should hold off this time?

    "Is it even an *option* to hold off? Like damn." Arthur mutters. "Staren's got the right idea, I wanna just carry over my old score. This shit sucks in space. I hate this one worse than the goddamn orb." He rubs his face a little, and presses in. "Alright, let's do this shit. Again."

>Arthur: Sit

    Arthur takes his seat. Stage one. Like always, what he's going through is represented via menu.

                                 +---------+                                  
                                 |  YES    |                                  
                                 | >NO     |                                  
                                 +---------+                                  

    He continues. He keeps continuing. Though every so often, the cursor moves down, and he has to move it back up.

                                 +---------+                                  
                                 |  YES    |                                  
                                 | >NO     |                                  
                                 +---------+                                  

    Alright, Arthur gets to the second stage. Arthur plays games on his phone through it. More rationalizations. Why not just take the loss this year? Basically nobody would take that seriously, after all. You fought a breakout of the Man in the Moon! Just let that be enough. And god damn, do you REALLY wanna go through stage 4 again? *Again*? There would be literally no downside to leaving.

                                 +---------+                                  
                                 | >YES    |                                  
                                 |  NO     |                                  
                                 +---------+                                  

    Like last time, stage three has Arthur physically and mentally fighting. His willpower is significant, and he's more than willing to physically pinch his own tongue. The menu becomes a struggle.

                                 +---------+                                  
                                 | ^ ...   |                                  
                                 | |  NO   |                                  
                                 | o  NO   |                                  
                                 | |  NO   |                                  
                                 | | >NO   |                                  
                                 | |  NO   |                                  
                                 | |  NO   |                                  
                                 | v ...   |                                  
                                 +---------+                                  
Arthur Lowell     He struggles to scroll down the menu all the way to the "YES" and speak it. Unfortunately, Arthur Lowell still, despite all efforts otherwise from the world around him, maintains certain parts of his mind below the mental age of thirty, and thus euphoria involves being dead. He's unspeakably vulnerable to gore. Literally just spam the imagery of corpses or even just intense wounds and it drains an actual, visible bar on Arthur Lowell that's labeled "resilience". It flickers up and down, and seems to be much more erratic than the last time. Not weaker, just shooting up and down more. Yet, he presses on.

                                 +---------+                                  
                                 | ^ ...   |                                  
                                 | |  NO   |                                  
                                 | |  NO   |                                  
                                 | |  NO   |                                  
                                 | |  NO   |                                  
                                 | |  NO   |                                  
                                 | o >YES  |                                  
                                 +---------+                                  

    Like before, he lasts only a few seconds in Stage 5. Being so intensely weakened by Stage 4, he barely has a chance to get through it.

>Arthur: Go out there. Be cool.

    No. After all that sensory blitz, Arthur just stumbles out and instantly falls face-forward onto the floor of the room. Wisely, this time, he chose not to eat for most of the day before this test. That's why he's dry-heaving and not vomiting into a bin the way he did during the previous tests.

    Between his body's intense responses, he mutters his deepest secrets to the floor. "SO COOL." Heave. "SO AWESOME." Heave. "Love to GO HAVE ADVENTURES." Heave. "WHY does that thing have VINTAGE SHOCK SITES up in that?" HEAVE.
Staren     Staren looks at Arthur, concerned as he comes out of the test room in that state. "Uh..." she approaches, "Do you need a hug, buddy?" Pause, rephrase: "Would you like one?" Those cat ears rotate towards him, Staren not realizing these are supposed to be secrets. Vintage shock sites? "That's how I expected Stage 4 to go. Last time it was... That, and pain. I got out immediately. Why did you force yourself? I don't see how that wouldn't... *damage* a person, going through that..."
Arthur Lowell >==>
    Arthur tilts his head to peek one eye at Staren before he resumes his face-down state. He raises one hand and gestures with an extended index finger as he explains. "See, this is actually way better. After that fuckin' orb? I needed *pain in me*. There ain't much that can stave off some Expiration, but *intense misery* can do it some. I mean, I didn't *wanna* but, I might as well. Take ya medicine, y'know? This is how a dude stays human."

    He does a little heave and spits on the nice fancy floor. "It's so cool. It's so cool to be a hero."
Strawberry Princess      Strawberry sits in the chair, hands folded in her lap. The wand has been left outside- her magic wouldn't help her in here, and it'd be potentially apocalyptic if she switched it on in a moment of panic. Her eyes drift shut- there's nothing to see in here, anyway. There's obviously a presence, but what can she do?

     Well, maybe be nice at it.

     Hi, mister ghost. I'm Strawberry Princess! I know you have a really important job to do, don't you? But I also know... if they use you for testing, you must not really mean any harm. You just want to make sure everyone who makes it into the Immunes is really ready for bad things, right? So I promise I won't be angry at you.

     "I want to keep going," she says on the first and second rounds. She wanted to stop- really, she did. But that wouldn't be the 'Strawberry Princess' thing to do. And in the name of that, she's used to not giving herself what she wants. Gentle persuasion won't work.

     So, for the next three rounds, brute force gets tried instead.

     Strawberry does not refrain from screaming. She doesn't refrain from crying, and pounding the walls, and twisting her silver bracelet until it digs into her fingers and wrist. Her whole body tenses up until her muscles start to cramp. Tears run down her chin until they're soaking her shirt. She slumps down in a corner to hyperventilate, ignoring the provided chair. When an illusory monster materializes to attack her, she doesn't open her eyes; she just sits there, shuddering at the sounds it makes and shaking with ragged breaths.

     My name is Strawberry Princess. My name is Strawberry Princess. Strawberry is noble, and kind, and selfless, and brave. If I gave up on this now, if I disappointed Lilian- I'm sure everyone else made it further than this. I need to be just a little bit stronger. If I cave, I'm nobody. So I can't. Because my name is Strawberry Princess. My name is Strawberry-

"I want to keep going," she says at the end of the third.
"I- I do want to keep going. Yeah," she says at the end of the fourth.
"I want- I want to... to keep going. Please," she says after the fifth.

     The sixth is, comparatively, a reprieve for her. The void gets its hooks in her, filling her with creeping dread and piercing vulnerability, but she's so laser-focused on her mantra that it can't permeate too deep. Her breaths start to come slower, deeper, less ragged. She doesn't thrash or flail; just stays there, sitting in the corner, with tears and snot running down her face.

     When the seventh stage arrives, she's composed enough to say in triplicate: "Yeah. Yeah. I want to keep going. I'm sure." It's palpable in her hoarse voice that she wants nothing less in the entire world. But she's more scared of 'failing to be Strawberry Princess' than she is of whatever comes next.

     Five seconds into the seventh stage, she caves, staggers out of the room, shoves Arthur out of the way, and throws up into the bin for real.

     Her eyes are puffy and red, her face has fingernail scrape-marks on it, her teeth are tinged pink- did she bite her tongue at some point?- and she's still gulping down lungfuls of air like she's just surfaced from underwater.

     "Fuck," Strawberry Princess says. She's not in a state to watch her language.
Staren     Staren folds her arms, though it's not really AT anyone. Her expression just looks nervous and awkward. "If you say so..." She's about to turn to the snack table when Strawberry Princess pushes by and throws up. "Geeze, are you okay?! ...No, I'm sorry, that's a dumb question, I..." She grunts incoherently, and then turns to partake of snacks and sweet drinks. They don't really make the 'awkwardly not knowing how to make people feel better' feeling go away, though.
Kale Hearthward Kale looks over at other people as they start to emerge.

"... Oh, that... gets *that* bad."

He sets aside his self-pity party (for now) and gets up. "C'mon - comfy spot over here, and make sure you get enough water," he says, doing what he can with a towel to try cleaning up whoever'll accept his help.
Lilian Rook     In this instance, and maybe just this instance, Lilian is about as patient and sympathetic as she needs to be. She has done this bullshit song and dance here more than anyone else. She hasn't forgotten exactly what it was like at the start, or in the middle. She tells Arthur he is indeed pretty cool. She promises Ioanna a drink at the end. She frets intensely and quietly over Tamamo. She frets somewhat more audibly over Strawberry, who is using her words, and says that she really didn't need to try so hard on her first time. She just sort of avoids talking to Taelveras who is being broody.

    But, asked about herself, she just shifts uncomfortably. "I remember the first time I came here with Paladins, two years ago, I got through six, and was at my sweatiest and most ill after, as is somewhat usual. But by now . . . I'm sure I've improved, but I also feel like . . . It wasn't doing as well? I doubt they decided to, and somehow succeeded at, replacing a central Zoroastrian demonic presence; especially one so cooperative and experienced. But it felt a lot like it was making mistakes, somehow. Or cutting in and out? Or maybe that I wasn't getting all of it. I don't know."

    She promises that the last part is better.
Lilian Rook     The last one was called 'Externalized Arcana'. This was a very vague term. It turns out that's because there simply is no concise way to interpret it. Now, you're finally led outside to the field exercises; those sounds you'd heard from far off in the distance, which seem, by necessity, that they cannot be contained inside the. Not simply for sheer number and variety of stations, but for the basic metaphorical (and sometimes literal) machinery of what it takes for them to work. 'Externalized Arcana' is a purple prosaic way of saying what it means: what all that power looks like on the outside.

    The plots outside here occupy as much square footage altogether as the entire dome does, without the benefit of multiple floors to stack it all up on. This is because they have to be individually tailored to be applicable to hundreds of broad classes of ability, meaningfully capable of abbreviating the capacities of all sorts of abilities from all sorts of Traditions the world over. It's certainly not designed for the entire *Multiverse*, but the scope of it just for one world is already both briefly overwhelming and sort of inspiringly heartwarming at the same time. Even if it were nothing else, and served no other purpose, it'd still be a statement as to the ambition and efficacy of those who really, truly, wanted to see a world come together. One even more fractious and embattled in ancient history than most masquerades ever were. It's the refreshing feeling of experiencing how far something has come, even without having been there to see it earlier.

    The structure of it calls up the other thing that Lilian had described as the third and final pillar of integration: the thirteen Archetypes. The fields are designed more like lanes, and laid out in such a way as to fulfil the essential geometries of a thirteen point spirograph, so that each lane overlaps and intersects with each of its peers somewhere. Intuitively, each is dedicated to one of the Archetypes, being a broad superclass of ability that this world's emergency Enlightened governance had built and agreed to as the only productive means of splitting known powers into useful categories. Those who've read the pertinent files know already that these are shared --in an opposite side of a coin sense-- with the designations even used for Antegent. Here, Lilian actually stops to ask about everything she doesn't know, because the only way that people won't be here all damn day is if she can make her own semi-expert recommendations of where to start.

    The range is absurd, but those closest to the tips start in the most general capacities where any number of relevant abilities might be generally useful, and have helpful and expert examiners who can use their data-harvesting equipment, their own considerably sensory abilities, and their years of expertise, to show you each to increasingly more specifically suited challenges, sending you down simple, branching flowcharts that grow increasingly more tailored to your skill sets.
Lilian Rook     Even at their most basic, the facilities are still impressive, Some are basically firing ranges, fitted with swathes of targets of varying sizes and durability and backed with space-warped overflows for battle magic. Others are impenetrable clusterfucks where one has to find various, increasingly subtle objects with special senses, avoiding traps along the way. Some are what can only be described in the engineering sense as 'torture tests', where defensive powers have to take someone through being hit with mounting and varied degrees of deadly magic and live ordnance. Others are surprisingly simple and low-key, being just personal meetings to try and read minds off of trained pros, do complicated tasks like intricate knots or copper wire tests with telekinesis, or try and perform tasks from thousands of feet away. Some involve bent space to try and navigate with transit powers, there are obstacle courses hovering in the air for flight training, and even enclosed areas full of sensors, traps, and guardian summons to sneak through with stealth powers. The most specific even get into the realms of incredibly fine tests for things in the realms of altering probability, or predicting futures involving several other futures being predicted by other precognitives.

    It represents well the many decades of getting to know all the magical disciplines, arcane bloodlines, inexplicable powers, and even weird artifacts or pseudo-technology that emerge throughout history and have survived to the present day. You're encouraged to take on literally every single one you think you can reasonably manage. You're discouraged only from ones you have no business trying (remote manipulation with no means to do so, for instance) because low scores are actually negatives, but 'doing well' is as much a matter of breadth as well as height, looking for versatility as well as raw capability. The overlaps are indeed designated areas where abilities may blur the lines, or share multiple facets of, two different 'Archetypes', rather than simply a convenient plot for doing two at once.

    The final values that everyone gets come on the kind of fancy black and platinum ID card that Lilian herself sometimes flashes, with the general photo, age, gender, height, etc. data on it, as well as title, affiliation, and rank with said affiliations. The reverse side is where all the info is inlaid in seemingly crystalline etching, only revealed at a specific angle, where each test is tracked with the same flowery measurements as the second test was. Obscene physical performance might sit somewhere in the Throne region, while a horrible job in the interview might only be somewhere in the Jewel colour band.

    In this specific situation, no doubt due to Lilian pulling some of her own strings, they also come with the stamp of 'Immune Auxiliary' status, next to the two ArcheArchetypes that best their general ability orientation, and an overall status of non-specified Station and Hue that seems to relate to their most relevant talents as a sort of at-a-glance 'field priority' system, without actually disclosing all their special abilities, thus setting their useful roles out at a glance, but not giving away unnecessary information.

    At this stage, Lilian is called off separately. She appears to already know she won't be doing directly relevant Arcana testing, as several individuals wearing technician outfits and a couple wearing military officer insignia --one with the complex mark of the Immunes-- meet her with several large, gunmetal grey briefcases, and discuss something about 'the new equipment'. She waves before heading off, in that little queenly finger-wiggle way. "Back later~"
Lilian Rook     Then, at last, you get to hang out on the very top floor of the main building, where the tip of the dome is exposed to the sky and plenty of windows let in a wonderful breeze. It's an atrium of sorts, specifically designed as a relaxation area, with its own indoor park and waterfall with many free-roaming birds and small animals, complete with shops to peddle incredibly expensive drinks and snacks and sugary desserts at people to reward themselves for a hard day's work.

    There's even multiple goddamn gift shops, with fare which ranges from genuinely really high quality oddities, which are halfway there to brag about having suffered through a full cert as much as they are impressive, to stylized ornaments, jewelry, fixtures, even keychains, of the various combinations of seven stations and five hues, and thirteen archetypes, even to the ironically tacky end of merch, including items like 'I got to stage X of the fortitude of mind and all I got was this lousy t-shirt', going from numbers 3 to 7.

    Lilian, will of course, buy whatever someone asks for, within the bounds of how much she arbitrarily likes them versus how much more entertaining it'd be to make up bullshit math ghost reasons why she can't.
Ioanna Langstrom      Ioanna doesn't respond to Lilian's offer of a drink. It's not that she doesn't want to. It's that she just can't.

     And then she hears that it's *weaker* than last time.

     Her head ducks down against her knees. Of course. Of course it was weaker. She was just pretending, after all, wasn't she...?

     She can't even *do* the Externalized Arcana - she has to write, in shaky, almost illegible handwriting, that she's not permitted, and she apologizes, but she doesn't have the authorization to demonstrate the Alter Gear. She just doesn't. Nobody here can authorize it, either. So she just has to sit there, and wait. And she's clearly in no shape to do it anyway. At all.

     So she just takes her card quietly, and doesn't look at it, and trembles again.

     It'll be a while before she can walk, simply because she went all the way to the limit, and it was god damned stupid of her.

     But she did it.
Staren     Staren considers the challenges. Delusion? ....Not up to it, after that last test. Messenger? ...She SHOULD be somewhat practiced in the preparations for how to handle it. She asks the examiners for their thoughts, describing countermeasures like using drones and low-res cameras. Intruder? Supplicant? Convergence? Cipher? Encroachment? Yeah no. Immaculate? She's confident armor and shield spells can get a respectable score. Adversary and Catastrophe? THE BIG GUNS ARE READY. Dominion and Architect? Nah. Extinguisher? She points back to the weapons tests and asks if the same tools are relevant.

    Once it's all over, if anyone seems interested in gift shop stuff and Lilian doesn't already buy it for them, she offers to use her CONCORD CREDIT CARD. A little good will is surely worth the credit expenditure, right? Ahe also gets the shirt for herself -- ironically -- and some of the knick-knacks matched to earned colors and threat types and such.
Kale Hearthward Kale heads off and works through the Catastrophe and then the Immaculate courses without issues, and tries a few other ones with varying degrees of success (mostly the Dominion and Adversary courses).

He takes his card, glances at the numbers on it, and then puts it away to never ever ever ever ever see the light of day again.
Taelveras Taelveras isn't being broody. She's...

Okay, yes, she's being broody. She doesn't know how to react without lashing out, she won't let herself do that, so she's targeting only herself. Which is better in the short run for everyone else, but probably worse in the long run overall.

She does not come out of it before they hit Externalized Arcana, but at least that gives her something to do. The spirit of cooperation is lost on her. She assumes it was enforced from above - or maybe she's just not in a very generous mood.

Taelveras' skills are exactly where you'd expect. Combat, especially singly or in small groups; stealth, infiltration, misdirection; analysis, study. She does well down the Adversary and Intruder lines, and can handle where they cross over into Cipher, Extinguisher, and occasionally Immaculate. She knows the assassin's arts, the creation of shadow into both darkness and to semireal blasts (but nothing that lingers long enough to be a long-term threat), and can teleport through the darkness. She knows thievery and traps - how to remove them, even magical traps. And, of course, she has a sword. Never forget the sword.

She works at it, and hard, long enough to get placed appropriately. She seems to think that being truthful and strong here makes up for her previous weakness, or if she doesn't think that, she does it anyway.

By the time *that* ends, she is doing better, mentally. At least a little. She accepts the card, though she does not look at it in terribly much detail right this instant. "Thank you," she says to Lilian, and if she's still brittle it doesn't show. "I appreciate the invitation to see how other places train."

She buys only one thing: a black chalice ornament. She pays for it herself, with coins that are probably actual gold.

It occurs to her that she would like to check on some of the others who were doing no better than she was - not necessarily physically. But actually finding them - Arthur, Strawberry, Ioanna - is too awkward, even though she wants to know. So she doesn't. One day she'll manage social skills.
Tamamo AFTER THE DEMON:

    Tamamo does such an excellent job of pretending that there's nothing at all wrong that it would absolutely fool anyone who isn't Lilian. She manages this while making not even the slightest, most oblique reference to why she left the test at the specific point she did. It probably doesn't even mean anything.

    She's in such good and perfectly okay shape that she can even afford to worry about others. She asks for hot water -- specifically, hot water -- and sits down to pull a complete a tea set from inside the sleeves of her robes.

    Within a couple of minutes, she's offering a cup to Ioanna, another to Strawberry, and setting one in front of Arthur whether he agrees to it or not.

    The tea is mildly delicious, only moderately warm, and absolutely magical. It's infused with enough health-affirming, curative blessings to remove everything but the mental scars, and even make those seem as distant as a night's sleep would.

    She has more, for that matter, if it's needed. She sips only a little bit, herself.
Arthur Lowell >==>
    Arthur accepts some help from Kale Hearthward, appreciative of a stranger's assistance blindly. "Heyyyy, thanks homie. Damn, looks like you got through that easy. Must got rad as hell brain." Arthur, meanwhile, has to navigate something like a psychological recovery minigame. Feather-breathing? Unusual heart rate management? All on display. Sad! Embarrassing!! Tamamo's tea helps, though. The visible metrics are calmed by all those wonderful infusions. "DAMN, this shit is TIGHT. Like, for TEA, I mean. But DAMN!"

    At one point, he does the worst thing that literally anyone has ever done anywhere: he removes a HIP FLASK from his SYLLADEX, and pours a small amount of the flask's MOUNTAIN DEW into the tea.
Ioanna Langstrom      Tamamo offers the tea. Ioanna takes it, because she was literally just ordered 'take something and sit there you stupid idiot,' and so she does. The tea helps. It's not going to clean out Level 7, not entirely. The physical effects are gone for sure, but the psychosomatic effects aren't going to go away until she's had a good, long sleep.

     But it does let her speak, again, and it's a bit less halting. "Th-thank you, Your H-Holiness."

     Before she takes the tea, though, her vital signs are going fucking insane. The tea brings it back to, you know, sane levels.
Strawberry Princess      "I'm fine," Strawberry says to Lilian, wiping off her lips and face with a kleenex. It takes her a moment to straighten up, clear her throat, and stop heaving deep breaths. She makes eye contact and forces herself to smile. "I'm okay, Lilian. Thank- thank you. I don't- did I do good? I thought that wasn't... I didn't know how far I was 'supposed' to go."

     An expert like Lilian can see in her eyes that she's in "will have nightmares about this tonight" territory, but not "permanent mental scarring". Thank god.

     After cookies and Tamamo's tea and emotional support, Strawberry's at least in good enough shape to take on External Arcana. The two support techs stand by with replacement cores as needed.

     The generic Adversary courses show her as an unbelievable menace in any kind of air-to-air combat, an improbable crack shot with conventional firearms, and tough enough to survive a couple of knocks from a bigboy Antegent. But that's not going to be one of her two headline ratings, and she knows it.

     CONVERGENCE: Strawberry demonstrates the ability to manifest a functionally arbitrary number of 'proxy' bodies at functionally unlimited range, flawlessly multitask or coordinate to achieve more than one body ever could, channel any and all of her magic through them, and generally fight like a school of piranha all by her lonesome.

     They have her run through a number of different obstacle courses simultaneously, each infested with hazards and busywork "objectives"; sometimes her bodies' paths cross, allowing them to team up, and other times they're forced to work on disparate tasks and maneuvers. Regardless, they perform perfectly- their only meaningful limitation seems to be that they tap into Strawberry's 'HP' and 'MP' pools. If one gets hurt, they all do.

     CATASTROPHE: "The Annihilator Beam's firepower is classified as 'sufficient'. This means it is difficult to imagine that improving its intensity would allow it to solve additional problems. Please interpret this as broadly as I intend it. -Director Velt"

     That's what the first page in the bland manila envelope the Reignition techs hand to the House staff says, anyway. But it remains to be proven.

     Firing on the lower settings, Strawberry displays a kind of creativity and finesse that she rarely needs to deploy in the field: she can throw down slow-moving orbs to take up space, bend the beam around corners or hairpin it to weave between defenses, and even fracture it into a 'shotgun' laserblast that looks nightmarishly difficult to dodge.

     As for the higher settings...


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     The sound can shatter glass, rattle bones, and burst eardrums. The light can flash-burn grass and paper, blister skin, and scorch retinas. Actually measuring the beam's output is an academic problem: whatever they put in front of it stops being an object and becomes theoretical physics.
Strawberry Princess      Maybe finally getting to spread her wings on those last tests was a source of comforting familiarity, maybe Tamamo's tea had further delayed effects, or maybe she just viscerally enjoyed knocking down whatever bowling pins they set up for her. Regardless, Strawberry is- if still somewhat exhausted and haggard- in a better mood once they reach the gift shop.

     She clutches her card- "CATASTROPHIC CONVERGENCE", of course- with greedy little white-knuckled fingers, refusing even to pocket it. She went through hell to get it, so that means it's valuable. That's how it works.

     "That one," she says, pointing at a keychain dangle with a little smile. It's the one for the Catastrophe symbol. "Is that okay, Lilian?"

     She clips it onto her wand, jiggles it a little to make it 'clink' softly, and smiles. "Yeah. ... I think that'll be good. Thank you."
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Get that fucking Adversary archetype. You can do it

    Can he really though? But, by the time it's Externalized Arcana time, he's in a bit of a better state. Alright. Let's do this properly. Let's earn something better. Today, Arthur Lowell earns Adversary. Today, Arthur *stops getting categorized as Encroaching Architect*, surely. Surely, he will get to have it. He will finally be so cool and high-powered in combat. He turns in his old card, and rambles, "Y'all start printin' up my ADVERSARY CARD, I'm about to show you some HEAVY POWER up in this." He declares.

    It's time for flight. Arthur's rocket-broom shows off incredible aerial agility. It's time for endurance. Arthur can withstand gunshots, impacts, all sorts of things, with some intense but good pain, blunted through gravity barriers and other suchlike. It's time for the Reactor, where Arthur provides massive volumes of refined magic fuel to any type of receptacle. It's time for Gates, the portals with all kinds of size, orientation, and properties. It's time for doors to link to new doors, time for up to be down, time for things to be weightless. He even brought the alchemiter again! And he wants to *de*-emphasize it, and avoid getting another Encroaching Architect rating. Sure, he shows off its combinations and suchlike, but still!

    This time, he's *gotta prove combat ability*. He's gotta struggle his way through whatever the combat challenges are, at the highest possible intensity. He's gotta use that blender broom to obliterate any and every possible challenge he can try that could *possibly* be related to Adversary.

    He's still, of course, Encroaching Architect in terms of his overall ability specialization. But god damn is he gonna try to get Adversary. Here's hoping, Arthur. But, of course, the card comes with its own prize. He doesn't even have to go to the merch store for it. Though the gift shop branding *is* on the lootbox that falls from the sky, popping open to reveal four IMMUNES EVENT COSMETICS. This year's Immunes Event dropped a fresh batch of cosmetics with more foreign themes, aesthetics from Japanese and Russian culture.
Strawberry Princess <X-Paladins-Chatter> [4] Hoarse, Strawberry Princess says, "Um. Lilian? Could I get something else in the gift shop too."
<X-Paladins-Chatter> [4] Lilian Rook says, "Anything you want."
<X-Paladins-Chatter> [4] Hoarse, Strawberry Princess says, "Okay."
<X-Paladins-Chatter> [4] Hoarse, Strawberry Princess says, "Then I want- a hug. Please."
<X-Paladins-Chatter> [4] Lilian Rook transmits only after the long pause of someone who has been metaphorically kicked in the shins by the most innocent-looking of metaphorical children, "Okay."

     Strawberry bends down. There is ample time- should Lilian wish to object- for her to see the telegraphing of what the taller mahou is about to do, and QTE her way out of it. But, assuming there's no opposition...

     Strawberry slips her arms under Lilian's and, with a bit of audible effort, does the kind of hug where you lift the other person's feet off the ground. She only manages to hold it for a couple of seconds, but if she's very very lucky, that might be long enough for Lilian's legs to kick embarrassingly.

     And then she's set back down, and Strawberry disentangles herself, and she's wearing an uncertain but very very sincerely sunny smile.

     "You should- remind me to exercise, okay? And then... I can do that a lot easier."