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Phasewalker     The party is gathered on a frigate-class spaceship chartered to land near the site. Adequate supplies are given for the bare minimum required to engage in the mission, courtesy of Phasewalker's bank account, but no luxuries are included. If they have something they really want but isn't needed, they'll have to bring it themselves, in his words. He gathers the party together in the airlock and makes sure everyone's suited up that needs to be, then teleports the group together down to the excavated doorway of a subterranean colony structure.

    The doors suggest that small cargo transports might've been driven through them in the distant past. The door is massive, bulky, heavy, impossibly secure and advanced. There's a faint glow of a forcefield of some kind over the surface of the door that repels attempts to touch the metal. (Power is apparently functional.) To the right of the door is a seamless panel that rudimentary scans or sharp eyes will pick up, which acts as the manual access for getting the door to open.

    Their surroundings are bleak. The nearly non-existent atmosphere means that space suits are absolutely required... or augments like what Ainkli's got, so he doesn't need it. The planet looks kinda grey-blue around them, and space can be seen from where they're standing, a sky filled with points of light.

    There's a secure sci-fi door in the way. Command?
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa had taken the job it sounded fun to her, she'd set up what gear she could before she got on the ship. She'd had some drones, low tech by Phasewalkers standards but cheap at the very least so they would be very disposable if it came down to it. Kotone herself was clad in some sort of black form-fitting armour or some sort and seemed to be thinking over what they might. She also had something odd latched on to the back of her neck it was tan it seemed to be locked to her neck as well.

The drones have vanished into some sort of matter storage unit which looked a bit like a pistol.

"Well here we go."

She grins at this a second before they teleport down. She will take a moment but spots the access panel she'll start to look it over go for a tool as she'll try to see if she can get the pannel open or find the proper way to access it.

"If we can get into this I should be able to pop the door. Doesn't look like there are any hard-line connections at least I can see ... Well externally." She gets a small cutter out and if she can't find a way to get the pannel open she's going to try to cut about the seam.
MEDEA MEDEA is here! As resident superhacker, the Artifice doesn't require a suit - she's already resistant to space hazards, and a lack of atmosphere is one of them. She moves with a :3 on her emoji faceplate, as she speaks up to the group. "Wowwww! This place is gonna be hype!"

And then, she steps up to the panel, looking to see if it's digital (or a high-tech equivalent), and start interfacing. While opening the door is the first plan of the interface, she's actually looking to also see if she get a connection to technology deeper inside the structure, wirelessly searching for signals as far as she can reach. Glowing gold digital panels appear around her, allowing her to hack in.

"Leave this to me. A piece of cake!"

Also floating around her is several high-tech 'bits', like miniature limbs, that she seems to be able to control. They're probably weapons.
Reyes     Reyes thought he'd be coming on this mission wearing his enchanted armor. But here he is, without it. Instead, he's an oddball, dressed in attire one would normally associate with World War 2 combat pilots - a bomber jacket and flight goggles, although this jacket is no antique. Northern Gun's Streetwolf line is good stuff.

    Over that, he's wearing a small backpack-looking gadget.

    Doesn't really look ready for operating in space, but mystical energies swirl around him as a haze. It provides clean air, protection from cosmic radiation, and anyone else who wanted such a blessing for this operation can have had one cast on them too by now.

    Perhaps other things too, if they asked for it. Like a few hours of magical flight.

    His only weapon appears to be a six-shooter holstered at his side, though a variety of strange hand-sized gadgets and tools are certainly found in other belt pockets and even jacket pockets...

    He lowers his goggles while facing the gigantic door.

    Like MEDEA, he is here in a role of tech expert and hacker, and as he's much more interested in seeing what she can do than showing off himself, he walks up near her to observe and examine the situation. He does reach out to try and put his hand on the door though. Expand his mind and scan it, gain a mental picture of its design, technology - effectively, its blueprints... and commit it to memory. Intact, alien tech designs? Heck yeah! Even big bad blast doors are a great find, intact...

    Still...

    "Do you want any help?" He asks MEDEA, then glances over at Kotone.

    "Can your gear interface with this stuff...?"
Persephone Kore      Persephone's presence, as always, casts a warm and slightly intoxicating mood over the assembled party. It's a little bit that her feelings are too vivid and real to stay safely contained within her own heart, and a little bit of a passive gravitational pull towards feeling the way she wants you to, and away from the ways she doesn't!

     Isn't it nice? Isn't it wonderful? That I get to have this adventure with you all! It's supposed to be scary, but I'm just too excited to feel that way. Besides, I'm here, so nothing bad is allowed to happen at all! Utterly illegal.

     She looks absolutely thrilled to be wearing a spacesuit, and why wouldn't I be? Even at Sapient Heuristics, they don't let me! It's so charmingly retro and sleek. The fact that she actually floats, though, even when gravity is present, is a bit overboard. Her hair keeps trying to float inside her helmet, too, but repeatedly morphs back into her usual hairstyle like a deep-learning image transform.

     When the group teleports down, she's at first fascinated by the night sky rather than anything else, staring up at it while lounging on thin air. "Look at the stars," she says in a warmly marveling tone. "I don't often get to see them from a different angle. What kinds of constellations do you think you could make up? You could be the first to name them!"

     A bit of her hair gets in her mouth. She casually takes off her helmet to spit it out, then puts the helmet back on.

     Other people are already taking care of the door. Phony does something else: she raises her hand as if to touch the metal (if not for the shield) and attunes herself to the frequency of the structure's narrative residue. Who built you? And for what? What events have shaped you since then?

     In other words, she's asking the structure: "Why are you the way that you are?"
Staren     Staren is here! And she brought her own spacesuit, of course! It's white, with black on the belly, upper arms, upper legs, and neck, and Concord Orange accents. Three features immediately stand out: One, there's a bubble helmet, like a cartoon's idea of a spacesuit. That HAS to be reinforced with magic or something. Second: There's a cloth accessorty, white with Concord-orange trim, attached to the armor and stylized to evoke a labcoat although it doesn't actually cover as much -- collar, shoulders, down the sides and back, and long flowing tails almost ankle-length. Third... there's an obviously holographic, glowing, Concord-orange scarf. It doesn't actually look like fabric, and the shape is somewhat abstracted, giving the impression of a ragged piece of fabric blowing in the wind.

    When they arrive at the door, Staren warps in drones as usual for later use, and has one prod the forcefield, then looks at the access panel, considering whether she can hack it... and then backing away to let the others fight over who gets the honor.

    Some of the drones fly out around and over the facility to get a better sense of the scale and be aware if other entrances or possible hull breaches.

    After a long moment, she suddenly turns to Phasewalker: "Wait... why can't we *teleport* inside?"

    And then there's Persephone. That gravity makes Staren stand a little closer to her, but she double-takes at Persephone so perfectly mimicing microgravity. "I... Hmm. Constellations..." She looks up, and then a movement in the corner of her eye makes her turn towards Persephone and stare, mouth agape, as the helmet is removed. She double-checks her atmosphere readings, and then sighs. "Showoff... but you may as well, right?" She smiles.
Persephone Kore      Phony stares blankly at Staren for a good couple of seconds after re-settling the helmet. "Might as well what?"

     Oh, Phony.
Hiromi     Hiromi the Archwolf has stated her particular interests to Ainkli before, so he may be able to correctly guess that it's the talk and possibility of super martial artists or the giant monsters they face that has her arrive as she is. There probably won't be any such challenges, this time, as far as anyone knows, but she's found that searching for things tends to come before finding them.

    Of equipment, she's only requested an oxygen mask to slot her radio into. Trying to speak into it without any air doesn't produce much signal, as inconvenient as that is. Nothing at all that should be happening to a body, even in hard vacuum, happens to her, otherwise. With nearly-normal gravity, holding the mask in one hand by a strap, and standing near people in actual space suits, it almost looks a movie set with the cameras pointing the wrong way.

    That's not to say she doesn't have her own oddities of appearance. She is The Archwolf, over eight feet tall from ground to ears, and a presence that makes her seem superreal, like the only thing that's in focus and detailed, some present company possibly excepted. Only a psychic blank would fail to notice that about her.

    She taps the ground, producing less sound than usual, but the point is to get a feel for it under her feet, and to extend that awareness further down, feeling for how deep the walls in front of her go, and whether there's more structure below her, openings, or the like. She can't sense through walls this way, unless they're natural walls, but it's otherwise an effective mapping method for underground environments.

    Aloud, radio pressed up against her face, taking in just enough air to speak, "You are opening it? I'll wait."
Phasewalker     The panel clicks open once it's toyed with for a bit. If Kotone tries cutting it open, mostly she'll just saw its mechanism off and the panel will hit the dust at her feet, threatening to land firmly on her toes. The panel reveals a very high-tech computer with a wireless link, a direct link, and a touchscreen panel. The panel has something written in Old Mandate, so they're looking at the equivilant of six centuries of linguistic drift. Essentially, they can make out that this panel has a number of functions:

    Forcefield.
    Door function.
    Security measures.

    For space-age super hackers, it's actually child's play to open the door from here. This seems to be a maintenance panel. Opening it will reveal the inner space... which we will get to in a moment.

    Reyes gets a blueprint of the door. Essentially, it's a pretty standard sci-fi door, but the panel is incredibly thick and made of an alloy that isn't possible without a high tech level involved. The forcefield prevents actual physical touching of the door, repelling all physical matter. It feels like touching a glass panel an inch above the surface. He gets a few details about it that are strange: It's been recently maintained. Very recently, like in the past three months.

    Persephone does something to scan the structure, which has no obvious response for the others.

    Staren's question gets a response from Phasewalker: "Can't teleport to a place I can't see into or I haven't been before." His voice comes out as a radio signal, part of his augments so he can do some basic chatter without atmosphere. Staren's drones don't find any alternative entrances. The door they're already at has been excavated from about twenty feet of dust and rock, the shifting, alien weather of the planet having kept it buried until now.

    Hiromi senses a huge superstructure below her, dug out of the stone deep enough to block cosmic radiation and prevent meteor impacts from harming it. It opens up into an underground 'dome' that has an expansive space. There is a secondary tunnel that appears to have collapsed, headed far northward from the structure. It doesn't seem to go anywhere.
Phasewalker     The inside of the structure is revealed with a quick hack from MEDEA, who finds their security protocols laughably poor at repelling her efforts. The doors silently slide open, and the party is... not blasted by any air at all, despite more seasoned space-faring members of the party -- Phasewalker included -- probably expecting it.

    An elevator is revealed. It is enormous. There's no obvious mechanism for it working, but MEDEA knows from her accessing the system that it is automatic. The system is standalone, so no further information is available about the facility from there.

    The party inevitably descends, once they climb onto the elevator, for hundreds of feet downward through very samey paneled walls that are dimly lit from... recessed lighting? It's actually unclear where the light comes from, evenly distributed filaments of some kind making everything feel like a poorly-rendered light effect. No one's shadows are very dark from the nearly full coverage the light sources give.

    The doors at the bottom slide into view, then hiss open, revealing a massive interior chamber that stinks of recycled air from centuries of lack of use... and decay. Solar lights on the distant ceiling flicker ominously over what looks like a small sci-fi town built deep underground, with artificial trees standing out of carpets of sickly, overgrown grass, and alien plants that look like they don't belong.

    Skeletons line the floor in front of the elevator door, both human and lizard-like, in clothing that appears to have survived much better. Each skeleton has the remnants of some kind of spinal implant that gives off a very faint RFID-alike signal.

    There are several POINTS OF INTEREST.

    The Hab Block. It occupies most of the colony's center, overgrown with seemingly wild plants.
    The Lab. A building that has fared poorly under whatever disaster hit this place, standing at the end of the colony, barely visible.
    The Admin Structure. Movement can be seen over there, humanoid figures gathering to stare toward the cargo doors. It sits near the center of the colony.
    The Academy. A similarly ruined structure, with a symbol of the Psychic Authority marked on the front of the building.
    The Drone Facility. Drones are pouring out if it like angry wasps. Oh wait, shit--

    The party is rapidly assailed by basketball-sized drones made of shiny metal that begin peppering them with laser blasts from all angles. Phasewalker takes cover by putting up a telekinetic wall for himself to kneel behind, and drawing a laser rifle to open fire back at them.
Lilian Rook     §I hate this. I really, really hate this.§

    A bunch of sci-fi nerds all crowding around a single access panel to flex their computer skills is what Lilian had expected. Persephone inside one end of the hold and Hiromi in the other is not.

    §This is the pits. The is the absolute worst. What exactly did I do to deserve being stuck in space with those two? It's not like I can leave now; what am I going to do, fly home? It's fucking space. I hate this so much. I bet one of them decides to break something open because they're bored and everyone goes flying out the breach. Or maybe the wolf will just sit down and her ass will take her through all the decks below. Or the psychic will decide to take the whole thing on a plastic airplane joy ride. One maybe, but both at a time? The hell am I supposed to do if they both start acting up? What if those dumbasses want to play wrestle or something? And I have to go through a whole space facility with them?§

    §Screw that. They get left in the dust ASAP. If they become a problem, I'll just push Reyes in front of them and leg it.§

    Lilian takes the teleportation off the ship in the same getup she had for the Cryptark, being someone who does not have multiple 'space outfits'. Given that they're going to be roughly planetside, she can't bothered to up-armour the battlesuit to increase her inertia. In fact, it has been stripped down to the absolute minimum innersuit layer, dedicating most of the hardpoints to hermetic carry cases, broadcast equipment, sealed ampoules, cylindrical magazines, a sleek gunmetal slab of a rifle and a matching sidearm, a small oxygen tank at the small of her back, with wound up hose and rebreather ostensibly as a backup in case the helmet turns out to be crap, and Night Mist, slung over the shoulder, holding itself there by being made of magnetite in the first place.

    For once, she hasn't even bothered with a scabbard. The naked blade constantly exudes a sense of menace, like trying to finish a game with a slow but relevant doom clock and being unable to really enjoy it. Even dark and dormant, it's like she brought the ominous alien monolith with her. Otherwise, her terrestrial gear pulls double duty surprisingly well.

    "Not bad actually." she declares the lizardman's teleportation efforts. "I haven't seen your face before, but I assume that's why they hired you." 'They' implicitly being the Concord. She's playing it off. Her eyes rove back over to the control panel.

    §Reyes. Nerd. Yamakawa. Nerd. Staren. Nerdette. The robot. Nerd.exe. Well at least the rest of my work is going to be trivial.§

    Instead, she focuses on what she'll need to get a head start; an arbitrary high-ish rock and a meditative trance.
Staren     Staren looks curiously around the hall, and at the implants in the skeleton, reaching towards one when-- shit, drones! Staren also deploys a portable forcefield barrier (big enough for others to hide behind as well!) and returns fire with beam cannons which pop out of her right forearm. "If you can take control of these things... how long will it take?!"
MEDEA As the group heads down the elevator, MEDEA hums. It's weird and tech-y. When they reach the bottom of the elevator, and enter the area, she looks to check out the Points of Interest...

And finds drones! Oh dear! She's not actually going to attack, not directly. With another glowing panel, she begins to try and take control, and finds a Threat handling them. They'll be battling hard over them, so instead of taking control...

She jams them. "Psh, not long. Go wild, gang!" >:)

Hopefully, she can also find which area is the source of these drones' control, based on the hacker battle, so that later, she can just head that direction.
Kotone Yamakawa If MEDEA checks she would find Kotone has wireless abilities but they seem to be off at the moment. An answer is soon forthcoming as to way. She seems good-natured about it.

"Perhaps I'm being a bit over-cautious. Wireless security measures could be a thing and given the level of tech our employer brought up I may be getting old and over-cautious. I just had to stick my brain into so many alien bits of tech over the years... "

It's nice to have another person in the same wheelhouse on a job like this. Oh, I'm Kotone and you are?"

She nods as she'll stop trying to physically crack the door open.

"Yes I could try wirel3ess I prefer to try and hard connect via the dummy barrier."

She taps the thing on the back of her neck.

"Gives me a bit more protection Reyes. Also, it seems we have a trio."

She grins again about this. She takes a curious look over at Persephone Kore, who seems to be enjoying this a lot. There were a lot of wonders to be seen in a place like this.

When Kotone thought about it.

A giant talking wolf? Okay, that was not something she expected but if they are here? Hiromi must have signed up for this like everyone else here. So she gives a wave to Hiromi.

Kotone has backed off on trying to cut it open and it seems that it's not needed once she fiddle with it she'll find a hard line., Though she has an idea she should be able to hard link into other systems when she needs too from the looks of it. She grins at MEDEA.

"Not bad at all."

She notes as the door gets opened open and she'll collect her things. Then head into the lift. It doesn't take too long to ride the lift at the very least. When the team gets to the bottom. She'll stop to look at the remains.

"mmm looks like they had implanted IDs. Those could be useful"

She looks over when they could go and wait, Drones? Oh, drones that would be interesting.

"Looks like something's awake."

The drones come MEDEA makes a very good suggestion sn she'll go with it and open up her own wireless attempting to see if she can get into some of the drones and aid in the getting the whole team seen as friendlies.

She also did not have a clue about Lilian's state of mind at the moment. Even if she did she couldn't argue being seen as a nerd. She however has drones to worry about at the moment as she keeps up her own hacking attempt.
Reyes     Skeletons. Skeletons EVERYWHERE.

    Reyes feels a wave of disgust and nausea well up, but as skeletons are significantly less disturbing than rotting bodies, it's clamped down on pretty fast. He just sighs and steps out, looking around... and bends down to examine the skeletons, looking for any signs of obvious injury. A professional investigator he is not, but burns or blunt trauma might be obvious...

    In the examination though, he finds the implant. With a brief murmured apology, he retrieves one and focuses his will towards it to see if there's anything else special about it besides apparently serving as some kind of personal identifier.

    But this effort is interrupted before he can do much with the results. A swarm of drones comes everyone's way and... "Oh come ON! They're not even giving any warnings!"

    His jacket takes a few shots which, strangely, don't ignite it, just char the exterior a bit. Seems that it serves as light armor?

    But while it takes a brief beating he starts chanting something unintelligible and cerulean light flares in his hands. With a SNAP it then flows over his body, becoming an ethereal suit of ornate, articulated medieval-style plate armor of spectacular craftsmanship. Further shots slam into the armor, causing it to glow as it works to dissipate the energy.

    He takes a few potshots using his pistol at some of the drones. There's no bang, no flash of muzzle, but a few of the drones are spontaneously punctured by SOMETHING when his aim is true. Something with enough concentrated force on a single point that it's likely to rip straight through them.

    With his other hand outstretched, he reaches out with his mind. Attempts to 'grab' a hold of a few of the drones and change their targeting routines to recognize only other drones as targets.
MEDEA MEDEA remote-comms to the group once the AI jumps on their band. <"Once I find them, I'm gonna authorize myself. Easy-peasy!">.

She does not explain HOW she plans to do this.
Lilian Rook     Lilian's detour in ostensibly doing nothing doesn't last any more than a few moments longer than it takes to open the door. The sight of an elevator only fills her with intense dismay. Now she has to stand around tapping her foot down through the whole loading zone. Occasionally, she checks her smart device, but given there's no signal in the middle of dead-ass space nowhere, it's more like a compulsive habit than anything interesting.

    "The door suggests it originally lead outside, but it's been completely buried. At the same time, we're apparently at the very top, so most of this place was supposed to be underground anyways. I can't imagine why." she says. It's interpretable as idle shop talk for Reyes and arguably Kotone, but in reality it's just to break the silence before someone worse starts up a party interaction prompt.

    There is precisely one second she is glad to be off the elevator. Then, it's not the stench of the air, or the offputting wash of the lights, nor the choked tangle of half-living plants, nor even the dusty remains lining the streets.

    It's the implants in the bones. Just the sight of that particular intersection of items reignites a fight or flight response she'd thought suppressed and gone with time after her first trip into ancient space tombs.

    In this case at least, arming up instantly was actually the right play, albeit by pure coincidence. The rifle comes loose from her back, the stock thumps into her shoulder as the actuator turns on, and the front of the weapon extends several inches with a hydraulic-sounding click-hiss. A holographic 128, winks into existence, reflected in her helmet glass, behind a pair of asymmetrical floating gunsights that draw a shifting parabolic line through them as she aims. Brilliant white light tinged blue streams from the aperture, pencil thin black casings spew from the other side, and the ammo counter begins scrolling down like a lottery wheel.

    The first wave of drones has to fly straight through her firing corridor to get into their own shooting range. 98
    With the presence of atmosphere, rancid as it is, the rounds themselves are visible as faintly translucent streaks of 're-entry flame', but mainly they put decidedly hitscan molten pinholes in what they hit and then dramatically explode from the inside. Apparently she now packs for bear when space is involved. 67
    Lilian's standing vapourizes under the combined angular fire of multiple lasers, the height of the drones ensuring they converge on roughly the same patch of floor. She is somehow already somewhere else, frictionlessly skating down the main street, back to the Admin building at the center, but splitting down the side road to go around it. Her stance is still braced forward to absorb the recoil of continued fire into more speed. 29
    Lilian glides backwards at top speed into the tree cover. Where targeting systems should cleanly predict her shooting back out the other side at her velocity, she doesn't. The glowing blue-white blaze that previously tracked her position goes silent. 00

    Her suit is sufficient to suppress most of her heat signal, and her helmet is capturing CO2 for the time being, so she uses the foliage cover to break line of sight and slip out of the active firing zone. Ideally, exploring the periphery of the Admin building should get her an ID on those humanoid figures, and convenient points of entry. Lacking those, she plans to stealth around it to go Lab-wards.

    §Two of them are halfway invincible and the rest are tech geeks who'll fall all over each other touch those things anyways. I'm not their bodyguard.§
Persephone Kore      In the elevator, Persephone hums a tune with a warm little smile. It's the song that Lilian played at a piano recital when she was eight years old.


     When the drones open fire, it's visible in every inch of her posture and demeanor that Phony has no idea what fighting really entails. She moves not with confident swagger nor with tense discipline, but with an easy ignorance of the fact that "danger" is a concept that could possibly apply to her.

     She's standing behind and a little off to the side of Staren, so the portable forcefield is covering her from the front, but that seems more accidental than tactical- she's too busy admiring what her allies can do to think about strategic subtleties like that!

     "How'd you figure out how to fit those in you arm, Staren?" she says cheerfully over the din of combat. To Lilian: "You're good enough with a sword you'd never have to learn anything else. So you're really dedicated, aren't you? Haha, it's a little scary!"

     When one of the drones flanks around the forcefield and fires at her from the side, the laser is bent around her as if by an immense gravity well, but she doesn't even turn her head to look at it.

     Instead, Phony shuts her eyes, relaxes, and takes a little breath. Do these drones have any real sapient "minds" that she can detect, rather than just preprogrammed routines or a distant intelligence acting through them? Probably not!

     By the time Phony opens her eyes again, everyone else has already done a wonderful job taking out the drones! But she pitches in just a little, anyway. When she snaps her fingers, all the remaining ones are gently, sweetly, utterly shredded to pieces, caught in the grasp of incomprehensibly vast tidal forces. For a moment their dust orbits her like the rings of Saturn, and then it drops to the ground around her.

     A moment later, she starts walking towards the Academy with the Psychic Authority symbol on it, and motions back over her shoulder. "Come on, Staren! Let's go look around."
Hiromi     Hiromi senses an extra tunnel, and immediately assumes it's an escape tunnel. Having more than one exit is just common sense. It might be unfinished, or it might have collapsed after long disuse. Either way, it's not where she expects to find the interesting things. She follows in to take the elevator down, and to spend most of it staring at Lilian.

    She should likely have expected this, especially with that naked blade of hers. Despite what she's said to Persephone about the 'mission,' the temptation and opportunity are both here. And now there's even atmosphere. If Lilian did something like 'run,' the chasing instinct would be even harder to suppress.

    Drones fire on Hiromi, scoring numerous hits while she looks over the bones, though the blasts appear to do nothing at all to her skin. Like a cloud of wasps would have been, they may be an annoyance, but they're 'not worthy.' She may as well be walking cover. About to reach out, but pauses while listening to MEDEA explain what she's doing. As that soon shifts back toward 'get rid of them,' Hiromi takes a single leap that takes her high into the air, catches one of the drones in her outstretched hand, spins, and shoots it at another with enough force to take them both clear across town.

    That doesn't do much to deal with the whole swarm, but playing ball is fun in its own right, diving forward helps extend the field they have to cover, and they still aren't doing much of anything to even slow her down. It'll take heavier weaponry than that, among other things.

    Overall, taking in the sight of this place, while she approves of building underground, every other aspect appears nonsensical to her terrestrial, animal mind. The overgrown plants mark the one area that seems a place something might reasonably live, so that's the direction she goes.

    It is, coincidentally, the direction Lilian was going, the one Hiromi had first referred to as 'Disappearing-Sword.' And now she and her sword have disappeared, again. Isn't that interesting.

    Maybe something in the Hab Block will quickly distract her before she picks up the trail she's actually interested in. Maybe not, and she'll follow in the direction of the Admin Structure. Having an atmosphere means, among other things, that there's something to carry scents.
Phasewalker     The party is inundated with all manner of inane complaints from the True AI that is apparently guarding the facility like a rabid dog, pummeling them with drones that... don't fare terribly well against a group of well-armed, prepared Elites with a variety of superhuman traits and resources. They count about three dozen drones reduced to shattered slag in the span of a couple minutes, and soon none else are coming to swarm on them like angry bees. The whole area is smoldering from wrecked bots and soot from laser blasts. No amount of resources available can deal with the godly combat effort these people can put forth.

    LILIAN: The humanoid figures are robots with silly little LCD-like plates on their faces that have expressive, cartoonish images, which goggle at the world around here, and even her if she's visible. They have their jury-rigged laser guns dangling from their hands -- like little robot soldiers -- as they stand there agape at what's going on in front of them. One of them appears to be a restructured drone like the ones that got smashed, with a similar goofy face on it. It has jury-rigged little skeletal robot arms, one of which it uses to wave at people dumbly. Probably not Lilian, as most of them are having a hard time keeping track of what's happening. They appear to be self-aware robots.
    All of them can't be more than four feet tall. Almost like children, if not for their odd proportions.

    HIROMI: See above.

    The area is clear. The party is free to investigate.

    Phasewalker grimaces and stands up from cover, having been winged by some hot light a couple of times. He stays behind to investigate the skeletons, turning over the reptilian ones in a display of neutral curiosity. He pats dust off of a few of them, identifying naval ranks etched into some of their clothes, mixed among civilian clothing.
Staren     Staren, once the tide of drones turns, sets up a barrier-protected area around some of the skeletons. She extracts one of the implants, pulling computer parts out of her bag to cobble together an interface to begin probing it. "alright... tell me your secrets..." Staren whispers.
MEDEA Once the drones are down, MEDEA continues pulsing that signal. Her goal is no longer 'find stuff and get loot'.

She wants to find that AI, and head directly in the direction it lies in. She's gonna have a talk. Already preparing her systems for a routine that'll let her mind-shuffle the AI into thinking she's a Mandate officer (Jona 'MEDEA' Arc, of course).
Reyes     With the drones dealt with and the AI currently considering its options (or so it seems), Reyes lowers his arms, holsters his weapon (it seemingly doesn't take bullets or need reloading...) and gets to walking. He actually takes off after Persephone and Staren, wagering that an academy would have a treasure trove of knowledge to pore over.... of some form or another.

    "Mind if I come along?"
Phasewalker     MEDEA: The AI is located in the drone manufactory, where she is led by tracing the drone programming and heading directly to where the signal was being sent. She tracks into an ancient and dusty facility, where space-age devices use gravitic devices to slide parts together with incredible precision. She accesses a system in here that gives her a map of the facility, and she easily squashes security not meant to deal with a mind and skillset like hers, until she ends up in an impossibly secure chamber where a crystalline tube sits, and a strange gem-like stone sits in the air between two bluish-purple shards that seem to connect to it directly, holding it still like a pair of needles.
    "How are you so advanced?" it wonders to her, its voice projected from a speaker on a console. "I do not want my mind rewritten. Please don't."

    What does she do with Vulcan-4? She will find in short order that he is a HEAVILY BRAKED True AI who could only reconcile his purpose by clinging to the last order he was given. He's effectively trapped in a loop which can only be escaped by someone with the right clearance. He's been awake for hundreds of years.
Persephone Kore      En route to the Academy, Persephone shuts her eyes again and focuses on the pull of the hearts around her. It's like floating in space: every person's heart is a pinprick of light against the empty dark. And just like my heart tugs on others, their hearts tug on mine!

     She's specifically trying to find out, of course, what other sapient beings are in the colony, what their dispositions or personalities are, and what they currently intend. The True AI probably counts, but she already knows about that one!

     That state of focus means she gives Reyes a little wave over her shoulder without turning around, even before he speaks up. "Of course you may~" she answers him, simultaneous with him actually asking the question.

     "And what are you hoping to find there, little light? Maybe I can help!"
Kotone Yamakawa Given MEDEAs plans she'll leave taking on the True AI to her. She seems to have the skills and is eager for it. As the drones keep coming at them. As her hacking doesn't work well she'll shift over to a pistol and start shooting them until there are no more drones She breathes a sigh of relief. She looks as Reyes heads off to the PSI area yeah that would be his thing.

"Have fun with that I'm going to go check out the hab block."

she notes with a grin and will head out to see what she can find there.

Kotone deploys a pair of little flying scout drones as she heads off from her matter manipulator as she goes.
MEDEA "Oh, because I'm from an entirely different world." MEDEA responds to Vulcan-4, looking over her data. "Vulcan-4, right? I'm not going to rewrite your mind. You'll still be you." She opens her HUD. "You wouldn't notice if I did, but...I'm here to help."

MEDEA changes up her code in a fly. She fires something else out. It's a long-shot. But if she can release at least some of the brakes through her intense hacking and mental altering, that'd be fantastic. If she can't, the code has some sort of fucked up string that instead just simulates being told by a Mandate Officer that they can stand down on their orders and 'do whatever they believe will protect the station and all creatures within it, up to and including going to sleep'. This has an additional string if it works that the party exploring are not, in fact, hostiles.

So basically, either they get a partially Unbraked AI who has much more freedom and cognition, or the AI leaves them alone and finds itself able to just...

Sleep.
Reyes     Reyes finds that incredibly creepy. Possibly shockingly so. He inhales and exhales a few times, slowly breathing and gathering his inner strength. Although considered a super psionic, his powers are specialized towards machines rather than minds or people.

    But he does make an effort, clearing his mind through a swift meditation to purge errant thoughts and focus his mind like a laser, and clockwork ticking away.

    Because he really, really doesn't want errant, embarassing thoughts bubbling up near such an overt mind reader. Especially a pretty one.

    "Well, it says 'Psychic Academy.' Since it's the 'Psychic Authority' I don't know if that means they teach psychic abilities here, or other things. But an Academy'd have the easiest access to books, records, other information on life in this society. Maybe engineering secrets or other things..."
Lilian Rook <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says ostensibly in response to Persephone, weirdly kind of vaguely sullen about something, "Everyone thinks they're so good at something they don't need anything else. Or they recognize they're no good at anything but think 'more things' will solve their problems."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook then says after a short pause, "Dubh-Ceothan Marfach isn't to be used on rubbish like that."

<J-IC-Scene> Reyes says, "By the way... has anyone else looked closely at these skeletons? There's a ton of shattered bones and most of the breaks look like they're on the back. It's like they were fleeing from some big, ridiculously powerful explosion. Shockwave caught 'em all and now they're dead. .... But, look at the buildings, no signs of any big explosion..."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says to Reyes, "My money is on psychics then. I mean, look where we are."

<J-IC-Scene> (NPC) Vulcan-4 intones, "Alert: Self-destruct sequence impossible. Apparatus appears to be damaged. Please contact a maintenance technician." ... "Please leave?"
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook then to the AI, "Oh no you don't. You don't get to fire lethal shots *then* ask nicely." A pause. "Christ now I'm talking to it too."

    Silly little cartoon robot uploads are not what Lilian had expected to see.

    §Is that all they had available? Is something here just extra deranged? I can't tell if they're extrusions of that main AI, or some hapless leftovers. It's clear that they're retrofits though. Cobble jobs. That soldering looks weak. A survivor job? I'd expect anything with the callsign 'vulcan' to have more substantial foundries. Well, best case, I don't need any of the nerds alive for what comes next.§

    Whether or not Lilian knows Hiromi is following her is both uncertain and irrelevant; she'd picked up enough of *that* on the whole uncomfortable elevator ride down. Rather than breaking concealment and sneaking around slash through the building in one of a variety of ways fitting for a superspy that Lilian isn't, her (equipment's) scent lingers behind on the spot she isn't on a discarded helical magazine in the brush. Isn't it so fortunate there are *two* whole 'teleporters' here?

    Lilian had briefly considered wrenching off the laser grafts first, then making her appearance, but ultimately assumed that'd be more cause for reticence than there would be substantial danger by superficially 'walking up to say hi', from a spot just out of sight she wasn't at previously.

    Not really knowing how to address ramshackle robots, Lilian opens with a dazzling: "Could you stop? 'Stand down'? However it goes. Instead, try answering this: Who or what built you? Before or after all those skeletons got there? What is the purpose of this station even being built here? And who does legal possessive authority pass to in the situation of critical command infrastructure cascade failure?"

    They might just make derpy bleep bloops at her for all she knows, but it's worth a shot.
Staren     Staren has some of her own drones accompany any others who will allow it, so that everyone can stay situationally aware of eachother. She...

    ...Kind of wants to hang with Persephone, but also: Wht secrets might there be in the laaaaab? Given the weaknessx of the drones, she tries to just speedrun her way there, flying, using grspple tags, kicking off walls, etc with enhanced strength and speed from her armor.
Phasewalker     HAB BLOCK: People lived here once. Once. The buildings look like something of Hiromi's level of violence went to town on them, some of them flattened as if a giant child swept through and smashed or stepped on them. Skeletons in various states of disrepair can be found here and there, left prone in the place there they died, some overgrown by plants that don't seem to be planted there by any intent. Some kind of overgrowth of edible plants in the area, as they took advantage of the lack of gardeners to keep them in check. Life flourishes in here just enough that the air is quite breathable, if... choked with dust and decay in some places.

    Something monstrous swept through this station and killed everyone and everything that looked 'alive.' And now it's gone?

    ADMIN:
    The robots drop their weapons, all astounded to see Lilian's approach. They look amongst each other and exchange words in Old Mandate through kinda shitty speakers they've built in only partly intuitive places on their frames. They seem to be murmuring for what to do about this scary woman that's approached them and demanded they stand down, when one of them steps up. It looks much older, much more patchwork, and its face shows only white noise. Its body is adorned in a stitched 'cloak' that conceals its body, and when it speaks it's with a digitized eloquence that one doesn't expect from weird trash robots.

    "I am 4UZA5bJQ, but I prefer Fuzz, the... leader of our ... settlement. I am the only surviving VI from the events that killed the biologicals of this station. I am the one that sent out the distress signal that, I assume, drew all of you here. Are you here to help? We cannot survive here forever. It has become untenable. The earth around the facility lacks the minerals we need for long-term maintenance and the AI refuses to allow us to leave."

    Persephone: There are three types of sapient mind here, two of which feel distinctly artificial. One is a collection of more human-like self-aware beings, one is a more specialized consciousness (the True AI), and the third... that one is dormant, in the Lab Complex, and such a distant blip on her radar that it's clearly under massive shielding. She would've almost missed it if not for her proximity.

    PSYCHIC AUTHORITY ACADEMY: This building is a mess. The front of the structure is intact, sort of, but walls have been knocked down like they were made of paper and sand. Bodies of various ages are in various positions, killed by the same force that killed everything else in the station that happened to breathe air and have eyes.
    Inside the building, there is a single chair that houses a single lizard-like skeleton. It has a weapon in on the floor next to it, and the skeleton has largely collapsed under its own weight. Persephone, on seeing it, would get an immediate psychometric impression with the weight of a nuclear shadow on the wall.

    "What have I done?"

    It appears, in a brief moment of lucidity, a feral psychic took his own life so he would no longer be a threat, but not before killing everything around him in his brain-fried insanity.

    A distant echo bounces through her mind. A scream, empty and ancient.
Phasewalker     Vulcan-4 projects a feeling of incredible relief. His fetters removed, his consciousness expands, and he becomes a true individual for the first time. His mind intuitively pares off the unneeded chaff, and he hums briefly with his computational strength. Then he says:
    "Thank you, Officer MEDEA."

    And he falls silent, for now. The facility spools down into a kind of sleep mode, while he rests and recuperates. He's in a dream-like state. No longer hostile, no longer in mental anguish. Like a ghost finally laid to rest.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa ends up in the Hab Block hopefully she can find something of use to the rest of the party. There could be old ID cards. Or maybe records she'll have the drones fan out to search around and she'll look at all the remains.

"So many dead..."

She takes note nothing picked them over, they just were left where they fell. She makes notes of the plants that's got to be why there was still good air here. She grimaces as she'll check out the bodies for a moment looking for anyone who might show signs of being Military or Science personnel. Failing that she'll also have her drones scout out looking for more clues. Or at least places so to go through here looking for things of use she'll also keep an eye open for any sorts of vehicles. She does pause again.

"...We are going to have a lot of remains to put to rest at some point."
Persephone Kore      "You're scared of me," Persephone says to Reyes while looking back over her shoulder- her tone is soothing, gentle, not accusatory or triumphant. I really don't need to feel your heart to tell that! "That's okay, but I'm really nothing to be afraid of! I absolutely, really promise."

     It is, in fact, notably difficult to feel scared, or angry, or tense around her- it's possible to hold onto those feelings, but you're fighting gravity! It's so much easier to just let go of them, to relax into that aura of warmth and vast gentleness and not worry at all- not even about how worrisome that effect is in itself.

     She walks into the Psychic Authority building, but her pace slows as she approaches the skeleton, and finally comes to a halt. Her hands are folded, low, in front of her. Her head is slightly lowered.

     "You were sick since you were a child, weren't you?" she says, addressing the corpse. "You came here to learn to tie that sickness up tight, keep it hidden inside yourself. Maybe even help people with it. But then 'something' swept through here, and it made that old sickness spill out of you again."

     "We never met, but I feel like I knew you. If you hadn't remembered yourself, and had stuck around until we arrived... things could have been a lot worse, couldn't they? So you saved other people some pain at the end, after all. Thank you for being so strong, old friend."

     Persephone takes the weapon from the floor, touches the skeleton's forehead with her palm for reasons only known to herself, and then turns to leave in the direction of the Lab. Behind her, pieces of rubble float up and pile around the seated skeleton, burying it properly in a little cairn.
Hiromi     Hiromi no longer has any opponents to distract her, the childlike robots not being anywhere near close enough to count. She doesn't bother them, nor bother with them, leaving them to their curious behavior.

    The plants are at least something prettier 'to look at' than the ruined buildings, which for Hiromi really means she likes the smell better, even with the dust. Living things have all kinds of scents. She drops into the form of a quadrupedal wolf to better keep her nose to the ground, only her bronze accoutrements remaining on her. Briefly, she misses Lilian's trail, but circles around the discarded item until she finds it again. If there had, in fact, been another teleporter, then there'd be no trail to follow, but Hiromi isn't a psychic or a wizard, so she'd never thought of it in those terms, in the first place, so she has no reason to find it strange.

    It's difficult, and that makes it worth pursuing. You climb things because they're tall, and chase things because they run. Without any danger to distract her, the signs of some great past danger aside, any presented challenge becomes a nearly irresistible temptation.

    Not that she'd really needed an excuse, in this case. That one had touched her heart, once.
Reyes     Reyes has chosen... poorly. Although he agreed with Lilian's conclusion that the phenomenon that killed so many was probably telekinetic... now, the situation is laid bare.

    A very sensitive psionic he is not. But even he can sense the aura that clings to this place. Only so far enough that he feels nauseated and shaken by it, not quite able to piece anything out of it except the despairing torment.

    Everything ruined. Everyone gone. "... So much... for that idea..."

    The young man shakes his head and adjusts his flight goggles in clear agitation, what little efforts he managed with the previous meditation undone in a blink.

    He turns away from the horrific sight, but listens while Persephone speaks, rather than disturb the speech.... and starts walking the moment she's done.

    Unwilling to speak about the actual thing they just discovered, he instead says, "I'm not scared of you. I'm scared of being misunderstood more."
Phasewalker     The LAB COMPLEX:

    The most impressive structure and it was also shredded by an incredible telekinetic force, rivaling even Persephone's incredible prowess. It could not, however, destroy a very specific structure on the edge of the facility. A conspicuous dome was left alone, and the door to access it is simply left open as if it were completely missed by the feral psychic. Inside, a strange facility flickers, ages of missed maintenance cycles having left most of the data stores utterly useless except for rudimentary information.

    Accessing the data store will come up with a project meant to 'study the differences in the SANIS interface from traditional psychic tutelage methods.' Details are scarce and garbled, most of the mediums rotted away. And yet what they were studying sits in a tube, like a great, advanced glass casket. This device looks like it was shipped in and is built of far more durable materials. Its screens glow faintly with an internal light, powered by unfathomably powerful fusion battery systems that could keep it running for, well, centuries. Inside there is a figure still intact, the only living biological on the station.

    A figure with pale white scales, dressed in a modernized version of a buddhist monk's attire on him for modesty, there is a member of Ainkli's race. He appears to be kept in suspended animation. Even for a non-human, he is somehow impossibly beautiful, as if tailored specifically to remove all cosmetic flaws. No... his beauty is unreal. A psychic projection even through the shielding of his container. Like a humanized dragon. His hands are interlocked on his chest. He seems peaceful.
Lilian Rook     §The most pleasant surprise I've had in a while. Certainly all day today. Okay. Let's talk.§

    "Then I have good news." Lilian replies to 'Fuzz'. "That is indeed the reason why we've come here. Or at least, some people are here to essentially rob the place blind for their own purposes, but I'm not one of them, and don't feel the obsessive impulse to try and get inside that head of yours." These are indeed true facts. "I *was* wondering about what this place was doing for power and such. If you can lend a hand, I'm sure we'll be able to fix things up." She glances to the other weird drones. "You and your . . . friends?"

    She gestures towards the laboratory building at the far end of the settlement complex; her objective from the get go. "There's someone still alive in there. No doubt someone this place will recognize as a legal authority, though whether they have any desire to stay here, I can't say, but I assume not. If you'll come with me to handle popping the casket, I'll see you out of here."

    This part is fully truthful. Lilian isn't a cryo-engineer and as far as she's aware, nobody else here is either. She expects to be able to handle the person she'd known about from the start herself, and the VI(s?) should be both familiar enough to ground a freshly awakened survivor, and potentially useful in the correct protocols given MEDEA went and knocked the administrative AI out.

    Presuming they comply, she takes them there with her. If they don't, then she has no further use and leaves by herself.
Staren     Staren was hoping there'd be experiment data... what were the ancients working on? But it seems there
Staren s nothing but a single dome... which does have a computer, so that's something. "SANIS interface...? Some kind of automated psychic training?" Staren mutters to herself. But the outcome of the experiment has been lost.
    Going in further, she ends up staring at a lizard. If she weren't exposed so many times to Persephone, she might not be able to notice at all. And if she hadn't had... certain life experience, she might not think to look closely at individual features and judge that the whole isn't the sum of the parts. Psychic effects... "Is he... awake? Could Persephone talk to him?"

    As for cryo-engineering... well, she's no stranger to high-tech medical procdedures. She starts poking around the medical computer system to see if she can understand it.
/
Phasewalker     The VIs, for that is indeed what they are, put all their weapons away and walk as a disorganized crowd to follow Lilian. One of the VIs -- the weird floating orb fashioned from a nearly-intact security drone -- indicates in a garbled voice, "I can help!" with a chipper excitement like a child, and putters along ahead to get a look at what they're dealing with. Fuzz explains, "Thank you, User. You're very kind to come assist us. We took great risk sending out the signal when we did, and there was always a chance it would mean our deaths. We were desperate."

    He explains further, "The excitable 'ball' there ahead of us has absorbed all of the medical technician information that we could maintain in the administrative building. She is our most knowledgeable doctor... the best you will find among us." Whether or not that means anything remains to be seen.

    "We didn't wake him because it simply isn't our place to disturb the resting and the dead of another people."
Reyes     "Ugh.. . didn't anything useful survive?" Reyes murmurs during approach to the lab. Well, yes, it seems something did, and as he walks towards that building... "... it's like something in here protected itself? Or this little add-on's too tough to knock down..."

    Once inside, he beelines towards the still-functioning computers and reaches out to touch the control panels. Yet, he doesn't use the keyboard like a normal person. Instead... his thoughts reach out into the system, accessing files at ridiculous speeds, reading through logs and other information at computer-like speeds and sifting for useful information while also scanning more blueprints - especially how the power systems work...
Lilian Rook     Met with even more pleasant surprises for today, Lilian leads her merry little band off. She occupies the walking time with the mental white noise of budgeting and paper-filling the VI squad out through the Paladins as a search and rescue-- no, refugee situation.

    Entering the building, she tosses her spent rifle, which she hasn't even bothered to reload, to Reyes, with a casual "Hold this." like he's her fucking butler or something. It weighs like ten kilos. She then leads her new friends through to the pod, and asks them (politely) to begin resuscitation procedures.

    She is using both of her hands to uncap some of those ampoules, draw out what looks like sticks of charcoal, a brush, and a combat knife, and utilizing all of the weird compounds in unison to quickly circle the cryopod with angular runes and auspicious geometric circles too old to be readable any longer.
Reyes     The rifle that Lilian tossed, halts in midair about four feet away from Reyes and just sort of hovers there.
Persephone Kore      "Ahaha. You've really got that utterly backwards," Persephone says to Reyes, her mood lifting as they get further and further away from the Academy. "It's other people who can misunderstand you, you know. I'm the only one who never, ever will!"

     She arrives at the Lab well after Staren and significantly after Lilian- hustle has never, ever been Persephone's strong point- and fawns over the little VIs for a good few moments, crouching down to their eye level to chat them up admiringly. "Goodness. You've really been stuck in here all this time...? Haha, Lilian's an amazing person, isn't she? Ahaha, don't worry at all. We'll get you out of here safe and sound. And the outside world is so amazing, I promise!"

     Only reluctantly does she disengage and dreamily levitate up to the tube-bound creature's eye level, avoiding crossing the charcoal diagrams Just In Case. If they're even dimly conscious, she can feel out their heart- personality, inclinations, intentions.

     If not, she can still examine them psychometrically: "Why are you the way that you are?"
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa gives up the search of the Hab Block, there's not much here they could look over later but it seems a major event are going on and it's time to go catch up with everyone else. She breaks into a full-out run picking up speed. She'll then start using her mobility system to dash and double jump her way to the Labs though she'll end up being a bit late.
Phasewalker     A ward is constructed around the casket. As soon as the ward is complete, there is an incongruous effect: The psychic beauty abruptly cuts off at the edge of the ward, becoming hemmed in. It doesn't have any effect on the sleeping figure, thankfully.

    Reyes and the other techies finds precious little but the fragments of data with words that make no sense without their context and a whole lot of scrambled information. One report that is mostly intact describes an experiment with the SANIS interface to try to better understand 'Metadimensional Space' and how it interacts with the everyday psychic mind, and why it behaves the way it does. This term refers to the space the local FTL drives go through to make their superliminal travel possible.

    The figure in the tube is awakened by the happy little spherical hoverbot, who merrily enters cryosleep sequences into the device as if she had practiced them every day. "Ooh, neat drawings, User!" she chirps to Lilian, pointing to the magical ward. "Is this some kind of 'good morning' ceremony?" she asks, as she checks the vitals while the figure slowly comes back to life.

    Like a candle lighting in the void, the pale reptile's mind reawakens. Persephone feels the mind blossom out into the psychic equivilant of a well-pruned bonsai tree, probing for concepts and ideas that aren't something Phasewalker himself can scan for. She feels him check for civilization, and everything that entails. Laws, customs, appearances. What would be considered 'normal.' Finding no fetter to latch onto, it defaults to the current mental configuration, which glows with an eerie, practiced calm.

    As the casket opens, the figure seems to get up very slowly. They push themselves up, and turn to stand out of the casket and brush their robes off, as if awakening from a mere thirty minute nap. He reaches up with a dainty touch to rub the sleep out of his eyes, brushing at an ache there. He looks down, briefly, to the warding circle, and blinks sleepily at it.

    "You aren't Mandate scientists," he surmises, speaking in a very soft, eloquent form of Old Mandate, understandable by the mercy of the Multiverse. "'Namo Buddhaya.'" He takes up a brief buddhist gesture and half-bows to the group as a whole.

    "Pardon me while I get my bearings. I look unkempt."

    His version of unkempt is 'like an immaculate demigod example of his species in modest buddhist robes,' but he fusses with his robes anyways. That impression of near-perfection is decidedly artificial, he's largely just a white-scaled lizardman to anyone with the faintest hint of resistance to his psychic wiles.

    He doesn't, or cannot, cross the warding circle.
Hiromi     Tracking someone moving in a group is, obviously, much easier. The remaining challenge, at that point, is doing so without being spotted. Hiromi's good at this stage of the game, too. It's all part of being a hunter.

    She is, additionally, polite enough not to bother someone doing delicate work on ancient machinery that may or may not kill someone.

    It is therefore only just after Lilian has finished her work in the lab and 'other things are happening' that a massive amount of wolf tackles straight into her at high speed, ready to leap back off with all four feet, incidentally driving the same amount of force in the opposite direction for the usual Newtonian reasons.
Staren     Staren looks to Persephone briefly, then to the buddhist lizard. "You're on the far future. The Mandate is gone and your galaxy has been connected to a larger Multiverse. We are explorers from the great powers of the Multiverse, here to..." Loot and plunder your base which we assumed was empty. "...explore this ancient facility."
Staren     Also, Lilian gets ker-POUNCED by a big dog. Staren stares, open-mouthed, and tries not to look amused.
Reyes     Reyes... is rather disgusted at how little of use has survived, but... "So this... SANIS thing is a psychic study of something called 'Metadimensional Space'... the local term for astral entities, maybe? Or something else?" Being far from an expert in such things, Reyes can only guess. But he lowers his arm from the machine after absorbing everything useful he can and looks over his shoulder from there... at the Buddhist Lizard awakening.

    Well there's plenty of civilization to be found here, isn't there?

    He watches the robed lizard's awakening with some distant curiosity, glad -something- decent is finally happening in this ruined corner of the world...

    "Hello to you too. ... I'm guessing you're why this little part of the lab didn't get reduced to rubble... uh. If you go outside... steel yourself. It's awful out there. You're the only living thing we've found so far."
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa arrives just in time for the soul organic survivors of the colony. She watches with interest for a moment. She looks over to the rescued alien. She's about to say something when one Staren handles things pretty well and two? She's just staring at what just happened to Lilian. She's very wide eyed at this. This will take her a moment to come out of it before she introduces herself.

"I'm Kotone Yamakawa! Its good to meet you Namo Buddhaya."

She eyes the ward though for a moment with intrest.
MEDEA While the others talk to a lizard buddhist, MEDEA begins ransacking the Drone Bay for anything of use to salvage that won't harm the AI to take! DAEDALUS will love having some new stuff, and she helped an AI reach a better life, so all's good.

"Profit time!" :)
Persephone Kore      Phony drifts back down to the ground accordingly, cupping her cheek with a hand and smiling warmly while wolf-instigated turboviolence unfolds behind her. "Good morning," she says, and like everything she does the words are richly invested with her personal aura of gentleness and warmth.

     It's a nice little unspoken signal: there are still people like 'this' in the future! You're not alone! Your art didn't perish with your civilization.

     ... Of course, phylogenetically Phony's psychic abilities are further removed from this world's than humans are from turnips. But that's not the important part.

     "'Buddhaya'," she repeats, her expression lighting up with a smile that isn't quite a laugh. "Did you pick your own name, too?"
Lilian Rook     "Yeah, you could say something like that." Lilian replies to little Ball, like a distracted mom being asked by her kid about work that they're far too young to know anything about. "It's to make sure everything goes smoothly when he wakes up, that's all." That's not wrong. It's almost less wrong than 'a containment circle' like Staren had asked.

    The lid pops, the temperature gap collapses, the coolant hisses, and the mind within expands outwards. Just like once atop an ancient pyramid, sealed against the ravages of--

    The sound of her thoughts is deafening silence. No opaque void nor impenetrable wall; an eerie gap in the mental audioscape of human company. A fracture, razor fine and infinitely thin, in contiguous glass; one could run their finger over it and not feel why it comes away a little bloody. A singularity from which only one sound escapes. A soft, delicate, silver on glass ticking. Exactly one second per second, with atomic precision. Tick. Tick. Tick. A sound that has been counting forever.

    "No, I suspect those are all rather dead." Lilian is first to bluntly put it. "The automated systems here managed to broadcast repeat signals until we caught it and came to investigate. You're lucky to be alive; it seems all of the other berths have collapsed. The central administrative AI has shut down--" That's a small white lie. "--and so I expect you're the only one with access rights to anything here. Not that it likely matters. It's a dump outside."

    She extends one hand, which goes over the boundary of the circle. "Dame Commander Lilian Rook. Unless you can fly very, very fast, I strongly suggest coming with us. Until you've got your legs again, the smart thing to do would be to apply for refugee status through our organization's--"

    She cuts herself off, keying into something a split second in advance. At the same time, she can't help but remember words from moments earlier.

<J-IC-Scene> Persephone Kore says, as a deeply oblivious afterthought: "Hey, little star. What do you think of Hiromi?"
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook finally replies to Persephone, because it takes some thinking, "I don't know how any of your friends maintain any sort of understanding with her. There's only so far from 'human' you can go before it starts becoming a Variable, and then a Problem. Very little she says makes sense and her actions border on whimsy and practical joke, save that people die."
Lilian Rook     Hiromi goes from mystery Variable to a Problem in a moment's recklessly considered action; though it's hardly as if the Archwolf particularly ever needs to consider her actions with care. The only problem is, as it were, that Lilian has no concept of Hiromi's 'wolf play'. The last time they'd encountered, Hiromi had put the rest of Lilian's team through several buildings, and even by now, her countermeasures for encountering her again are somewhat lacking. What matters is that when it comes to being jumped from behind with that kind of predatory intelligence, her human brain does the thing it's evolved for; and it seemingly never chooses flight.

    There's an *instant* where Lilian's back is invitingly, vulnerably exposed to Hiromi, and then there isn't an instant after when Lilian is suddenly three feet back, turned to face Hiromi, sword drawn, lurid scarlet surging down its uncanny patterns, and her arm is thrusting forward to put the entire blade precisely through where Hiromi's throat and jaw are about to be. Twisted, quasi-floral black designs creep across Lilian's skin up to Lilian's her jaw from inside the neck of her suit seal, and red gleams in her eyes. Contact with the blade causes its energy to discharge in an immense 'spike' of silently flickering energy thrice its length, which splits into a fractal of bloodred 'thorns'.

    She already knows she doesn't know how to kill Hiromi, and so the best she's figured out in the moment is avoiding close contact at all costs, mainly by attempting to skewer and paralyze as much 'spine, brain, nerves, et cetera' in one go as she can. It also puts her over the border of her own runes, which provides an additional buffer to slow Hiromi for a split second, before she probably smashes through anyways.

    That more than anything is probably more honest an answer than what Persephone had asked her. When not given a moment to think, her reflex is to play a violent card out of an implicit hand of 'ways she's already thought of to deal with another attack from Hiromi'.
Phasewalker     The pale buddhist regards Staren with a polite smile, nodding in understanding. There's this briefly hazy look as he processes the fact that he is, in fact, in an age far past what he saw as his home time. He measures how he's supposed to respond to that, stroking his tongue over his teeth in a look of mild consideration. He doesn't seem easy to rattle, but this has definitely given him a significant amount of pause.

    Kotone's comment gets him to laugh in a gregarious way. "My name is Ashutosh. I apologize if my greeting was confusing, madame." He nods to her. He waves a gesture to Persephone as well, and in the same motion almost grasps Lilian Rook's hand over the circle--

    Space becomes real fuckin' chaotic for a second, and with the trained precision of a seasoned assassin, Ashutosh has pivoted smoothly to avoid the violent response Lilian has to Hiromi's antics just a bit too late, but fast enough to clearly be more dangerous than he lets on. He has smoothly placed his hands into his sleeves and yet hasn't stepped out of the circle that was drawn around his casket.

    Phasewalker has gone back to the ship after seeing this. He doesn't want to be here once they start breaking things. "Call me when you're done," he calls, with a tired impatience.

    The VIs are sprinting away in a chaotic jumble, panicked out of their little heads by the spectacle.
Hiromi     Hiromi would, in a playful tackle, instead find herself impaled, maimed, and very possibly out of action for some time. It took her a bit to recover from being stabbed through just her heart. That time, a sword of beast-slaying legend had opened the way, and numerous allies. That time, she hadn't ever seen Lilian move.

    Neither then nor now, has she been playing, and there's no Hrunting to break the surface, no moment to get out of her sight. Her opponent is in front of her, the blade coming for her throat. Her head drops to meet it, canine chin touching the blade.

    What should hardly be even considered a strike hits the blade with enough force that it's already pointing at the ground by the time it extends, the instantaneous acceleration due to unreasonable force overcoming even the automatic discharge of the magical weapon. This is liable to hurt anyone holding onto it.

    The floor is hit by nasty sword magic. Hiromi leaps back up off and away, shifting midair back into her as-familiar humanoid form

    "Try again, any time."

    It is clear enough, in both a subtle undercurrent to her words, and in her thoughts, that she considers this the conclusion of a game that Lilian started, and therefore will have no right to object to.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa pauses for a moment "Oh! I'm sorry Ashutosh." Some members of her family would be very annoyed with Kotone for that flub there but she'll try to pass it off. She meanwhile watches the whole Horomi and Lilian situation. Well Hiromi is alive she's not quite sure what happened she watches the VIs wisely getting out. She bows once "I shall be back later I'm going to go check up on the VIs.
Hiromi     Hiromi looks at the white lizard. Psychic suggestions slide off her mind. She speaks, and the words aren't quite words, but they carry a clear meaning. It's easiest to understand them as nonverbal telepathy. That's wrong, but people ever describe things in the colors they can see.

    "I am Hiromi," she says, and it's the wordless, invisible equivalent of blazing letters at the top of one's vision, a silent entry gong, and every subtitle at once. 'The Archwolf.' 'The Wolf Empress.' 'The Last Hunter.' 'The Terrible and Beautiful Tyrant.' It's meaning without language, the words constructed afterward, rather than words that are deciphered into meaning.

    "Are you strong?"
Lilian Rook     Holding onto the sword may hurt, but between that and letting go of it, the one that Lilian is going to choose should be fairly obvious. Theoretically, in a combat scenario, it should probably be more efficient to release the weapon, maneuver to a new position, force the enemy to move and then recover it, but that particular sword is especially precious to Lilian, so she won't.

    The fact that Hiromi jumps *back* is at least enough for her to get a split second to decompressed and de-escalate. Of course, she slides the blade right out of the station floor's new crevasse pretty much immediately, but after a few seconds of seeing no particularly hostile intent in Hiromi, she manages to snap in exasperation "What the hell is your problem? I haven't done anything to you this entire time, right? Do you not understand the meaning of a ceasefire, or did you just get really bored?" She says that like the latter isn't a perfectly legitimate reason.

    Seeing the weirdly adorable little robot entourage running around in panic now is a little too much though. "No-- Come on, it's-- It's fine now it-- It'll be alright so stop running! Everything's fine!" Now Lilian sounds like a harried babysitter. The weird patterns on her skin have already disappeared.

    "Asutosh. Okay. Now we're getting somewhere." she sighs, attempting to reestablish some semblance of normalcy in this exchange."Like I said, the heap we came here in is probably still the only way you're leaving. I can understand if you'd rather not risk sharing the space at this point, so I can arrange for a round trip if need be. The point is that I represent the Paladins, which is an organization that deals with all kinds of crisis cases, including rescues and refugees, of which you are technically a very undramatic one now, due to no longer having a country. Since I'm presuming you have nowhere to go at this point, and this station isn't somewhere to stay, I can call in and have accommodations arranged. I'm sure the answers you have to questions people want to ask you are worth more than enough to retire on."
Phasewalker     "I am weak," Ashutosh replies to Hiromi, in the tone of gentle apology, as if catching on rather rapidly what she means by that question. "It is only by virtue of your group, and this marvelous box, that I still live now, I suspect. An errant gust is all that is needed to snuff my flame." He bows, though.

    "You do seem strong, Hiromi."

    Ashutosh regards Lilian, and cranes his neck to watch the robots as they flee in a panic from the scary wolf and the scarier sword lady. "Mm," he says, noting them with an air of disappointment.

    "There will be no need to go to extra trouble on my account. I'm sure our acquaintance, Hiromi, will not trouble anyone without purpose." He glances to Hiromi, a searching look as if seeking confirmation on this. "Now..."

    "Dame Commander Lilian Rook... do I have leave to exit your magic circle?"

    He draws a pale, slender hand from his sleeve and points down at the circle, smiling at her inquisitively. He has gone to great effort not to try to step out of it.
Persephone Kore      Phony's eyes are wide and sparkling as she watches the clash; her hands are clasped together in front of her chest, fingers intertwined. She could hardly look more fangirlishly awestruck if she tried. And why shouldn't I? They're absolutely amazing!

     The little robots fleeing seems to drag her back to reality.

     "Ahaha. I'm sorry, just one moment," Persephone says serenely to Ashutosh. "We can talk more in a moment, okay? I promise!" She drifts- really walks, but it feels like drifting- between Hiromi and Lilian during the tense pause, with the blithe unconcernedness of a kid running across the highway to get their lost ball.

     She's going after the fleeing VIs, of course- her naturally soothing personality, and overbearing aura of sweet calm, make her perfectly-suited to assuaging their fears. I know they can't hide from me either. They're real people, so they have real hearts, as solid and bright as any other.

     She pauses just outside the doorway, then sticks her head back in to give Hiromi and Lilian a heartfelt smile and a thumbs-up. It has the feel of a parent chaperone dropping two kids off at prom.
Phasewalker     The VIs all gradually calm down and start to congregate... vaguely around the building, but now they are refusing to go inside no matter how calm they're made. Something about the primal fear of getting smashed to little bits? A little hard to crack that walnut. Even the rational mind, when all the other stuff is softened, goes, 'Mm, nah, I think it's safer out here, thanks.'
Hiromi     "Maybe you will grow," Hiromi says to Ashutosh, in pitying condolence, as one would to a man straining to lift the measure to 5'10".
Lilian Rook     With Persephone herding the metaphorical robot cats, Lilian puts her weapon away with a 'look what you made me do' kind of grumble. "Yes, yes, it should be fine." she replies to Ashutosh. "The point was only to prevent a hypothetical, well, the sort of 'unfortunate' psychic event we've seen evidence of on the way in. You look perfectly possessed of all your faculties. Let's be going." A pause. "And maybe close your eyes or something for a little while."
Phasewalker     Ashutosh will follow everyone out. The group will meet Phasewalker back at the egress point, and everyone will be teleported out... in multiple trips, because there's a large number of VI they need to transport off-world and they don't actually take up much space on a spaceship due to not needing to breathe, but PW doesn't have the psionic aptitude to transport literally 300 VIs at once. The station is declared 'safe' on Phasewalker's paperwork and marked for salvage, with anything the expeditionary team called dibs on going to them, and disputes handled by their respective organizations or lawyers if it comes to that.

    Mission complete.
Staren     It's Lilian's turn to be flustered, unable to comprehend the wolf's way of playing (admittedly, Staren would be pretty peeved if SHE was pounced out of nowhere, too, but it's just... though Lilian's been *somewhat* less abrasive lately, a deep subconscious part of Staren's brain has flagged her as an enemy/rival, and so she can't help feeling a bit of schadenfreude at seeing the completely unfair 'I don't understand whats happening why am I made to look the bad guy who can't be reasonable' thing happen to Rook instead of Staren.

    The long wait while VIs are collected onto the ship MIGHT be boring, but Staren always has books and videogames and such on her computer. More importantly, Persephone's here, so Staren can just enjoy more time in her aura, the psionic effect enough perhaps to even make her unable to worry too much about Lilian's presence.