Scene #7692: What Lays Beneath p2

Owner	Pose
Ishirou	To understand the situation, the map needs to be laid out. Indus is the center of this area of the world in which it lies. It's surrounded by several, call it zones, that represent parts of the area that used to be part of the old city Indus, instead of the walled and skyscraper city it is today. The Desert Zone is where things have started, it is full of sand, old buildings, and apartment complexes for some reason. Buildings that might be considered pre-Indus are there, but that is unimportant. Right now the Bullette rests in the Desert Zone. The Ocean Zone is where the Bullette needs to go. While in the water it will lose its ability to constantly take in nearby rock and form a regenerating barrier of stone. The ocean zone is remains of the old dock, but the ocean has gotten closer to the city's edge. Between the Ocean Zone and the Desert Zone is a small portion of the Forest Zone and a larger portion of the Abandoned City Zone. This is where the forest has started to reclaim parts of the old city Indus, nature attempting to reclaim the city. Here plants grow around and inside buildings. What do you know about the Bullette? It's large, easily over two hundred meters wide. It's, however, less than a quarter of that tall. It burrows into the earth, which allows it to use the earth itself to cover itself in ablative armor. It's extremely powerful, and anything caught in its mouth is likely destroyed. It is also known to command lesser nullborn, those that live on the creature between the ablative armor and rocks. It is almost like a miniature ecosystem, except that the entire thing is harmful to humans, and dependant on the devouring of humanity, and anything with mana. I4 has shown that it is on the move, and will start making its final movement towards Indus. If it gets to the city, it will eat through the walls, and from there chaos will likely take over the city. I4 indicates though, that it needs sufficient time to gain that momentum, which has given people time to prepare. INDUS has drawn up its defenses and put all of FANTOM on alert, but has not released any aid to help you avoid the situation. It is possible they have their own plan or have been ordered to let you fail first. It's impossible to tell if it is a plan, or pride that guides them. I4, however, is here and on standby. I4 is focused on monitoring the situation, but he can do a few things to aid. He has access to a single flare that can help draw the creature away in a direction. It might take time for it to deviate to the new course, however. He can also use biohacking to confuse the creature or to control a group of lesser creatures that can be used in various ways.
Kale Hearthward	Kale Hearthward is not up in the air this time. He's down on the ground, picking up rocks. So to speak. pomf "I wish that made a more... dramatic sound," he says to himself, as he clicks his heels together and jets over towards the next closest builder, stopping right next to it and placing a hand on it. He closes his eyes, focusing, envisioning the boulder in his hand- pomf goes the boulder, disappearing and being replaced by a stone the size of Kale's palm - not the same one, more like... a model rock. The idea of a rock, given physical form. A Token. The rock token gets dropped into the messenger bag at Kale's side, the same as the others, as Kale's feet are already jetting him over towards the next closest boulder of suitable size, his free hand already outstretched towards it to pomf it in turn. There's a number of ideas being discussed, and nearly all of them could benefit from having some extra ammunition - and Kale's also eager to show off the early fruits of his training. When you have a shiny new hammer, the whole world looks like a nail, after all. pomf
Kukuru	"Pkh-chew. Pkh-chew. Aaaaaa." Kukuru provides dramatically (drowsy) backing noises for Kale as she works on digging out that basin, using the combined powers of big dumb claws and freak strength to function not unlike a bulldozer. She's capable of working quickly when she wants to, although she's not trying particularly hard for a whole host of reasons that she's already made clear in the past. "I4. Are you really sure you wanna do this out here? If we're closer to the city, we could make your bosses help with this." She casts a few quick glances in the vague direction of INDUS, almost as though she's looking right at FANTOM's forces in the distance through that great distance between them and all those trees possibly blocking her view. She's definitely looking in that direction, but she shakes her head and gets back to digging out that basin. "If we drop it this thingy into the caves, though... Is there gonna be a problem if it just starts digging through all that instead?"
S6	"The Council won't authorize FANTOM deployment outside the wall. The expectation on us is to maintain order within the city until the danger has passed." "That will not be good enough. If this enemy reaches the wall--" "I know. Fortunately, you two are also with the Paladins and have additional operational freedom." "...Ma'am?" "Hanger C. Don't worry about bringing it back in one piece." -- What exits the hangers of the FANTOM facility into the skies over Old Indus is a heavily segmented, sleek white machine. It resembles a fighter jet, though in lieu of a canopy, the Striker who pilots it rides tucked inside the fuselage. Drawing a lazy arc, S6 angles herself towards the desert as she accelerates. "I4. The Council has barred FANTOM from deploying additional support." She's trying to hide the frustration in her voice and as a result simply comes across as tense, "Just as you suspected, we will have to do this without them. I am en-route to rendesvous."
Lilian Rook	Twenty-four hours is more notice than Lilian gets for most any operation like this. And yet, in this case, she wishes she had three times that. The enemy dossier is well within the range of 'something she would need very significant preparation time to kill herself' and within the realm that she wishes she had more than one backup plan to deal with. The intel is valuable, but she finds herself direly wishing for Strawberry or Stark's firepower, or someone like Strange to render the place moot. Hell, she'd even take the Archwolf at this point and see which one eats which. But as they say, wish in one hand . . . After surveying the barren landscape for the best place to set up shop (which strangely took twenty minutes), Lilian has chosen a place closer to Indus than one might expect, and spent a significant portion of a day using the concrete and metal of the collapsed buildings to host a staggering number of earth runes, the loose sand itself being essentially worthless to create the complicated land-forming array she wants. Gradually, the sand collapses and compacts into dense stone, which means losing thousands of cubic meters of volume, functionally creating the bottom of a small lake; step one of the composite plan. She spends much of the remaining time with two things. One is the maximum number of explosives she could requisition on short notice, which amounts to a hefty backpack of remote charges that she places at carefully created stress points for the purposes of blowing the floor out from under the target and dunking it into the underground river as a desperation plan, and in lines along reinforced ridges, sculpted to provide shaped explosion upwards. Excess weaponry is deposited at various high vantage ready points. The other is more runes. A lot more. Mandalas within mandalas most of harsh and geometric design, forming mile long 'sentences' meant for later movement control and pre-prepared attacks, though some are of a more elegant bent, using ostensibly mostly Greek characters. A handful are five pointed arrays or four directional spots, which provide extensive, but short-lived empowerments to those who can sit in their bounds and soak them up, most prominently 'passive super meter build'. She doesn't sleep at any point. She only stops to eat once, and only once she's run out of magic and needs to wait to recover it; the designs just by themselves are no good, and need to be filled up with her personal energy. Then, all she can do is wait.
Staren	Staren is monitoring things from an air-conditioned tent not too far away, with a comfortable chair, batteries, signal boosters, and computer equipment. For the moment, fashion has taken a back seat to practicality; her hair is up in a ponytail with multiple scrunchies for fast... scrunching into a helmet, and she's wearing a suit of leathery-looking material with webbing for attached gear and hard plates on the chest, back, shoulders, upper legs, and knees. The chest and back plates are painted white, while the other plates are painted safety orange. She still has the usual sea-green scarf around her neck, and completes the outfit with rubbery white gloves and boots and a belt with her laser pistol holstered on it. Her tail is covered in some black spandexy material, suggesting that there's some kind of carbon nanomaterial-based body stocking under the whole thing. Resting nearby is a decidedly more high-tech-looking helmet, a white, futuristic battle-armor-looking affair with a mirrored visor and a small air tank under the back. But she hasn't been resting idly by! Working with the others to dig is a small army of robots and golems, the golems being basic humanoid affairs with shovels and the robots being more nonhumanoid excavator-types, like construction vehicles without drivers. Humanoid robots zip here and there, repairing excavators that wear down from constant, tireless operation and using dimensional pocket technology to help pick up loose excavated dirt and deposit it elsewhere. Also, parked nearby her is something like a self-transporting missile launcher with three missiles an order of magnitude too large to be fired from a shoulder launcher, as well as the Star Hawk, the mech kneeling as it awaits its pilot. Parked very very far away, hidden by ruins near the warpgate, where Staren hopes no meddling interlopers will find it before the fight, is a missile launcher truck marked with a nuclear trefoil and two even larger missiles. Staren spends most of her prep time coordinating constructs with the digging team; but if no one else brought one, she'll have also built a small camp where people can comfortably rest and eat meals and stuff. Why not? Everyone is doing essential work -- they should get some comfort!
Tamamo	Tamamo works alongside Lilian for much of this one, needing to know exactly where her works are being placed so that her own can support rather than interfere or, worse, be ruined by the explosive emplacements. She takes smooth, water-worn stones, covered in carefully carved writing, little cloth bags with drawstrings, and sprinklings of what is mostly salt, always placing her work somewhere hidden, whether it means buried in sand or hidden beneath the rubble of the ruined city. Designs of laid salt won't survive in any particular formation, but it's only a preparation, a step in the process of purifying small patches of land. The final step, placing her own power into each, is delayed. Talismans form hidden relay lines, awaiting activation, while Tamamo herself waits at another point. Once she sees that it's time, she'll trigger the formation, at once sanctifying lines of land and creating the same sort of barrier as is usually used for protecting secret, holy spaces. Those moving toward them find they instead turn about and head in the opposite direction. By placing baffles along fully enclosing lines, the result is a maze with no end, a small space that appears to be infinitely expansive. It may not hold up for a very long time, but she doesn't expect months to be necessary, here.
Rita Ma	Rita (having 'gotten her face back on') stays out in the field for the full twenty-four hours, though she does a lot of coming and going when Lilian's first setting up the runes. She doesn't say where she's gone unless prompted, but it's not too hard to guess: little flecks of red are stuck under her fingernails when she comes back, her teeth stained slightly pink. I've got to make sure I'm not too hungry to think straight. Even so, a whole day... there's no way I won't be starving by the time it shows up. I'm not sure I've gone that long without eating since 'before'. Why couldn't Mr. Candy be here? "Thanks, Ms. Rook," she says in a quiet moment while Lilian's etching the runes. "For... all this. Trusting me, I guess. And for what happened yesterday." That she expected to be rejected after showing her true face, let alone after striking Ioanna, goes without saying. And then Lilian's terraforming is done, and there's nothing for her to do but get down to work. Standing at the edge of Lilian's basin, Rita stares down with an obvious blend of emotions written on her face: anxiety, trepidation, self-doubt. The scale of what's being asked of her didn't really sink in until now. Of course she has to try, but what if she can't do it? More than that, I don't really want to find out. I know my body's bigger, somehow, than it looks. I've eaten things a hundred times my size. I've drained enough water to fill a ship. But this is really different. How big am I, on the inside? How deep does this go? I'd almost be happy if it turned out to be 'not very'. But this body has never been kind to me like that.
Rita Ma	R She extends a hand over the empty artificial lake, like Moses about to tell the Red Sea to part. Hollow, invisible tendrils arc forward. They disgorge foamy blue-green seawater from the seemingly empty space in front of her hand- first a narrow fire-hose-like jet, then widening to a crashing waterfall torrent. Five seconds pass. Then ten. Then thirty. The torrent doesn't slow down, starting to pool in the bottom of the basin. Rita lets out a shuddering sigh as the cold fluid rushes through her, her eyes scrunching shut against the sensation. It's a little like throwing up and a little like getting your blood drawn. Don't think about what's inside you. To them, it looks like magic. So pretend you're a fairytale witch, casting a spell. It's nicer that way. After a while, she sits down, arm still extended. A while after that, she drops the pretense of holding her hand out at all. It takes hours overnight for the basin to fill; the flow of seawater never slows. Only when it's come up to the very edge does Rita finally stop, looking exhausted and a little pale. Then she casts a second, much faster "spell". Seah Unsurtr, the frozen Cryptid. I've gotten so much use out of that power, I almost wish I could eat it again. Various cloaked tendrils chill themselves to supernaturally low temperatures and stab into the water's surface at regular intervals. Ice spreads out as even the salt-water is frozen to a depth of two feet. It absolutely won't hold under the weight of the Bullette, but that's the plan. From there, the ice just has to be covered back up with a layer of sand to disguise it. Then Rita picks herself up and staggers off to one of Staren's tents, grabbing a few hours of sleep in the early morning before the monster comes. She looks utterly drained.
Ishirou	It's a hard road, without help from the city, without other worlds contributing due to INDUS' crimes being put on display and seemingly lack for their own survival it doesn't make it easy. Yet, people try, and I4 is very very thankful to each person who stayed to help. These are people he's fought before, some he didn't like much when he first met them. I4 gets to work in one of the tents. He starts trying to calculate things, trying to get the spell to work. There is a lot on his plate, including his own feelings. He sits back and throws his head back to look at the top of the tent. "So much for my vacation, I wonder if Gawain will approve more time.." he mutters. -------------------- Now. BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1z9HHg95bo The ground shakes violently, it's almost like an explosion. The creature breaks the surface of the earth, tearing through sandstone and sand as if it were water. The back tail of the creature shows first, like a shark's dorsal fin it breaks the line. Then its head is without eyes, but it seems to have a very developed nose, a very large mouth, and developed ears that point out the moment it surfaces. The entire creature looks like it's covered in stone, colored by the sandstone beneath, and collecting the sand as it digs through it like in a sea. The sand collects, hardening and compressing into the sandstone at an alarming weight. The creature's mouth opens and releases a terrifying roar that shakes the foundations of every building for miles before it starts marching towards Indus. It's not slow either, saving momentum to move it seems to be acting like a battering ram. That doesn't mean it can't move around objects, it chooses not to. Ruins shatter against its body, only to be incorporated into its bulk. Its current direction would not drop it into the pool, so it has to be drawn closer to the target. The question is yours to answer. You have the trap, the backup plans, the ways to move and fight it here. How do you bait it?
Staren	It's here. Staren grabs her helmet, stands up, and hurries to her mech. She'll be joining the fight shortly. But even before that, there's something that has to be done before anyone else gets close to the massive monster: In the distance, sunlight glints off something metal... two somethings, rising up from the ground on trails of smoke. <J-IC-Scene> Staren says, "Give me a few seconds. Stay a few hundred feet away and don't look directly at the blasts." Some kind of projectiles get close VERY fast, too fast to see clearly. The sonic boom to follow is muffled by the explosions, everything in sight lit by a BRIGHT WHITE LIGHT for a second before it fades, twin miniature mushroom clouds rising from the site of impact: the creature's back, unless something fucky happened (something fucky may happen.) Fortunately, these are tactical nuclear weapons, engineered for explosive power in a battlefield situation and minimized radiation or fallout.
Kale Hearthward	It erupts. Kale covers his ears, just a second too late. "... Ow." He preps a couple of spells, and launches them - shifting the winds around. He's trying to create a low pressure front, right in front of the creature, by setting a chain of persistent winds in motion... The sort of thing that heralds a storm. Evolution is a blind watchmaker that occasionally makes some very intricate mechanisms. Small animals do not handle being out in the rain. Medium-sized, and then in turn larger-sized, depend on those smaller animals for their caloric intake. Natural selection has pushed small animals to seek shelter during a storm - with those up the food chain following suit - and nature has rewarded those that can tell when a storm is coming. This is why your dog gets antsy before a storm hits. This is why your old war grandpa's leg starts aching before it starts raining. Maybe the bulette can sense something along those lines. It doesn't do well in water, right? And by all accounts (well, at least accounts of pressure-sense) there's the mother of all storms brewing right in its path - but clear skies over yonder, where Lilian's trap is waiting. It's worth a shot, at least.
S6	It has no notable eyes, and enormous ears. And it's in the wrong place. S6's HUD fills with projections, then plots a flight path amidst the False Horizon scroll. Her vision immediately polarizes when the flashes go off, the effect relaxing once the initial blast subsides. She swings the flight unit directly towards the Bullette, riding out the shockwave by going directly through it. That kind of noise might at least get the monster's attention. But now she has to give it a direction to go. Banking suddenly, the flight unit rolls itself as its components reconfigure from something similar to a fighter jet, into something more like a humanoid shell wrapped around the android inside its torso. In the same rolling motion, the unit disgorges a truly obscene number of small, powerful missiles, each tracking a specifically calculated point. Some impact against the Bullette's back and side, but a good number seem to go wild instead, scattering and bursting one after the other into ruined buildings or the ground-- drawing a line of heavy artillery explosions in an arc from the monstrous Nullborn towards the trap. The same direction S6 is now moving in.
Kukuru	After teleporting out of the basin to not get washed away in the mass of seawater, Kukuru takes a detour into the forest. She's pretty sure someone will make it obvious when the Bullette shows up, anyway, so she uses whatever time she might have to go on a brief hunting trip. If Kukuru finds any animals roughly the size of or larger than a deer, she'll kill the crap out of it and return to camp covered in its blood. That should be a nice snack for Rita. Otherwise, she'll stay in there until... --- NOW --- "Whoa. That's a lot bigger than it sounded." Kukuru murmurs as she watches the giant burst from the ground, perched atop one of the tents and just gawking at it at first. It's an impressive looking creature, and there's actually a moment when she glances back in the general direction of INDUS to see if anything's coming in defiance of what everyone's already been told. She's not expecting anything, of course. Heeding Staren's warning, she covers her ears and looks away as the mini nukes come down. She waits until the wave of heat blasts past her before finally releasing her ears, then glances towards the basin. "Okay... Time to get to work." Kukuru disappears in a cloud of dark energy, then reappears by the basin. Instead of charging at the giant worm or trying to carve it apart, she targets its mind with her own. She was able to convince that smaller worm to join her, after all, so how bad could it be trying to do the same with this one? A softer thought starts creeping in, a notable contrast from so many people trying to injure it with explosives and lights and piercing weapons. You should come over here. I'm a friend. It'll be safer if you come over to me. I can help you.
Rita Ma	Rita emerges from her tent before the first reverberations of the ground start, awoken by some instinctive unease. Though it's broad daylight by now, she moves almost as if sleepwalking, trudging across the surface of the sand-covered frozen lake with her head hung low. The roar, and subsequent nuclear explosions, jolt her out of that with an exaggerated jumping flinch and pratfall-stumble, ending with spitting some sand out of her mouth. "Aaah! I'm awake! I'm awake... pftugh." A moment later, she's re-composed and in position. She turns to face the monster in the far distance, and cloaked tentacles lift her up about ten meters off the ground, giving her the impression of floating in thin air. Even through the wrappings of her 'ordinary girl' disguise, her right eye dimly glows an uncanny blue. Mr. I4 said all Nullborn come from the same place... whatever that place is. So that worm I tasted, that was one of your kindred, wasn't it? Rita's presence begins to prickle the Bullette's awareness. Through the sympathetic connection of the worm's devoured essence, it can feel the pull of the biological singularity at her heart. She is a rival. She is a threat. Not one to be avoided, but one to be hunted to the ends of the Earth. A ruler over monsters... there can only be one, can't there? I know how this goes by now. You're too big for me to handle, but I don't feel as scared as I should. My friends are scarier than yours are.
Tamamo	Tamamo does not send any attacks out. Instead, she takes enough of a peek above her hiding spot to see who is currently in positioned in the area of the trap, where one should reasonably expect to need to be to lure the monster to it. Spotting someone there, Tamamo gets herself back into hiding, sitting on one of Lilian's prepared power-up enhancement spots, and sits down to write a letter. The contents of the letter aren't really important, so much as the address. An address is just targeting coordinates for a delivery. The deliveryman is wrapping paper itself, which unfolds into the wings of a simple, vaguely person-shaped shikigami. It flies up into the air, then takes a winding, looping route through small eddies of wind. Eventually, it finds its way to Kukuru, silently sticks to her back, and there delivers its package. To her, it's the kind of immediate high that comes from dropping shot-sized energy drinks into coffee, yet a not wholly, nor even primarily physical energy, if examined. To one who eats mana, it's the sense of an enormous, delicious feast.
Lilian Rook	Lilian is pretty familiar with cool girls don't look at explosions doctrine due to operating with Strawberry a lot. Though there seems to be some consternation as to the use of a nuke in the first place, her own assessment is almost the opposite. "We'll want the firepower to crack off as much of its shell as we can before it hits the water. However, at that distance, it'll likely build back up a great deal on the way to our kill zone. Don't fire another one until it's almost in; and don't fire one when it is, or else you'll excavate most of the water. It's wearing sandstone, so the bottom layers will probably fuse and superheat. Thermal attacks may be worthwhile to traumatize its carapace." While waiting for Rita to pull the final steps, Lilian moves to the very edge of the combat deathstack hex, and removes one of those skateboard-sized vented rectangles of solid gunmetal which split like a tuning fork from its vertical rack anchored into a concrete roof. The same model she'd used on that demon tree. Taking a knee to absorb the inevitable recoil, she fires a circle 'belt' of six streamlined rockets almost like arm-sized flechettes, mostly accelerated to hypervelocity straight out of the aperature with big flashy magnetic incendiary crack-whines, and the boosters firing just to keep the speed and trajectory over long distance. It's nothing nuke-like, but it's a fairly rapid salvo of extremely high-velocity piercing explosives, targeting the epicenter of the nuclear strike on the bulette's body to drill shotgun blasts of iridium plasma into its flesh. She can test its physiology in the short time they have left.
Ishirou	The beast rises, roars, and starts marching towards its source. Before it can get very far something strikes at it from the air. A brilliant flash of light drowns out all other light in the area. For a moment, any staring directly at it are blinded. Thankfully, the radiation is kept to a dull roar. When the smoke clears, and the mushroom cloud dissolves. After the rain of clumped pieces of dirt hit the ground, though smaller particles were swept into the air. The Bulette has been staggered, its momentum temporarily halted by the force of the blast, though its back is not nearly as injured as Staren might have liked. The armor was still there, though in two very small places it was definitely weakened to a small thin layer. Before it could dive beneath the sands again, more shots hit across its nose and face. Though the armor was not touched as badly there, it does react to that, as its nose and face were more sensitive, S6 definitely starts getting its attention. The storm forming above it will start raining black water thanks to the explosion when Gale gets it going in full force. Kukuru tries presenting to it, trying to convince it that she is a friend. However, the concept of 'friend' is alien to it. It does not have friends, it is an apex predator. It has rivals, it has food, and it has a deep hatred for enemies of the earth. The concept of friend confuses it...but Rita's concept, that one causes it to turn its head towards her. It snorts, sensing a challenge to its power. Sensing rival or enemy. That is before Tamamo does something to how Kukuru senses it. It stops to sniff the air and then turns towards Kukuru. Eat. Then kill. Those are its thoughts. Eat Kukuru, then kill Rita. Its mouth opens, attempting to bit down at Kukuru, but with how large the mouth is, it was like releasing a giant weapon at a single person. Kukuru will need to move because as it scoops up dirt, it seems to be less eaten than annihilated in its mouth. Where the damaged pieces of its stone skin started to regenerate, thanks to the eaten sand. If Kukuru runs, it starts chasing, though it is slow at first, its momentum starts kicking up. This is before high-velocity shots rain down on its thinned armor. The creature roars in pain as it tries to whip a very large tail towards Lilian. She did hurt it. Thinning the armor is definitely the key to victory. Especially as she can see blood start to leak from where some of the shots hit. However, its' focus is still on Kukuru, trying to gobble her up.
Kale Hearthward	Kale readies an action. He's giving someone a lift! That someone is the bulette. Up in the air, he quickly starts weaving some spells together - he's no dedicatedly studied mage like Lilian, relying more on his natural talent, but he does know enough little tricks to pull off some bigger tricks - in this case, a variable spell delay trigger, which he adds to a dozen updraft spells he weaves in his hands and tosses out near the trap area in quick succession. If his timing's right, there'll be a brief, focused bit of updraft all at once, right when the bulette is crossing into that point - hopefully sending it upwards and sending it crashing back down for some extra oomph!
Kukuru	"Eh? What's all this?" Kukuru blinks slowly at first as she feels something coursing through her, not quite realizing what it is Tamamo's done just yet. She does notice the effects easily enough, however, and it's hard not to see a notable change in Kukuru's everything: Her eyes are open wider. She's bouncing (on her feet). Her hands are trembling a bit in front of her, and she's gesticulating wildly as the Bullette approaches. "Ah, here it comes! Maybe it really does want to be friends with us!" She shouts excitedly towards Rita, completely unaware (or just ignoring) the fact that she hasn't actually mentioned her ability to make it think that and the fact that she hasn't said a single thing to that effect ever. She's far more excitable than usual, too, and it's only when the Bullette appears to be focusing on her in particular that she finally starts to move in a more defensive manner. Turning around with an exaggerated stagger, Kukuru starts hopping as she teleports from place to place, puffs of energy indicating rather blatantly where she's going. She's only teleporting a few yards at a time, close together enough that there's probably no chance of the Bullette losing her trail, but still far enough that her strangely hyperactive teleporting keeps her just out of biting range. <J-IC-Scene> Kale Hearthward says, "Kukuru - need a lift when the time comes?" <J-IC-Scene> Kukuru says, "I'm okay! But... Yeah, that couldn't hurt. Maybe if you bring up the Bullette at the last second, it can falls a bit harder to make sure it gets really stuck in there." With her brain even working at high speed, Kukuru starts taking a slightly curved path out from the center of the basin. She's not angling it so much that she's not still mostly in front of the creature, but she's trying to make sure to lure as much of the Bullette's body into the basin by the time she nears the 75% point from the inside of the basin towards the outside. Once she reaches that point, she performs a somewhat impressive looking backflip and waves her hands as if trying to taunt or signal the Bullette to come at her instead of teleporting away again. She's actually trusting Kale on this one to get the Bullette up at the last moment!
S6	Well that got its attention. Though the Bullette lacks eyes, the way it reacts in her direction is all the evidence S6 needs to feel like someone who just stepped on a dragon's tail. She immediately squashes the fear that tries to swell up, as she always has. It takes a moment, some hesitating, before she twists her flight unit around and rolls it, transforming back into the jet-like form and accelerating away, low to the overgrown streets and then sand. She only ascends when she realizes someone else is making a better bait, rolling the unit again to unleash another, smaller cluster of missiles. This salvo arcs out and away, impacting one after another on the far side of the disguised depression. Being the same sound as what slapped the monster in the face moments ago should keep its attention, she reasons.
Tamamo	Tamamo sees that things are going in the right direction, but she still has to hold off on actually pulling that trigger. Instead, she doubles up on her previous effort from the opposite direction. Having first turned Kukuru into the appearance of a delicious meal, through the complex means of pouring technically safe but almost dangerous volumes of temporary blessings into her, now it's time for something simpler, yet vastly more dangerous. Tearing things down is so much easier than building things up, though she usually makes less mention of her skill in blessings being merely equal to her skill in the opposite. It's more than one little bit of paper that flies out, this time, in case some should have difficulty finding their target. They rush right into the oncoming mouth of the massive Nullborn, each one loaded with simplistic, yet horrendous curses. To something closer to the level of a human, it would be an explosion of energy in reverse, a collapse inward as the poisoned mana renders all it touches useless, but to something of this size, that vast bulk renders it vastly muted. It's a curse of famine, starvation to this monstrous ecosystem, draining its mana to ensure no thought of self-preservation should enter its mind before the blind thought of feeding.
Staren	Staren flies off to meet the beast, but it's coming towards the trap fast! Most of the robots left as soon as their work was done, just trying to get out of the combat area; The last to flee were the humanoid support bots, which dumped some of their dimensional pockets' stored dirt over the ice as camouflage. Now, her mech in a hovering chicken-walker-with-wings (or is it jet-fighter-with-arms-and-legs?) mode, she keeps up a spray of tri-barreled railgun fire from the right forearm and occasional laser shots from the handheld weapon pod, trying to lure the beast over the ice, flying backwards. Seeing the effectiveness of targeting the face, and the uncertainty of being able to use the missiles in water, Staren deploys the rest of the airstrike now -- The launcher parked outside the camp fires, three missiles too large to be man-portable arcing into the air, then down, then circling around so they can come in low just over the 'trap' before barreling into the thing's face. They're designed to use concentrated physics to punch small holes through mecha armor in the hopes of damaging important components, so here their main function is to try and hurt the thing THROUGH the armor, perhaps mostly inflicting pain in this situation, but precision attacks might be able to target the resulting holes if all goes as planned!
Rita Ma	The creature is obviously eyeless, so there's no point in Rita doing her usual shell games and charades... but she keeps up her human guise anyway, fastidiously keeping her tentacles invisible just for the sake of her allies. All of them know what I am, except Ms. S6. Why do I still feel so scared about what would happen if they saw? ... No. Don't think about things like that right now. Her and Kukuru aren't far apart, but it only takes her a second to realize from its trajectory that the monster is coming after Kukuru first and not her. That means she's allowed to get a little fancy. Rita floats over to Kukuru and holds one hand above her head, charging up the devastating deathball that she'd used to clear out the room full of hivemind androids in the lab. She's lined up directly with the Nullborn's face. Its open mouth is a perfect target, but she can't charge the attack for too long, or she won't have time to get out of the way. The energy sphere intensifies for one second... two seconds... three... until the last possible moment where Rita could, even with her enhanced speed, conceivably get out of the way. And then a little bit longer than that. By the time she throws the horrifically overcharged energy-ball down the land-shark's throat, it's too late to possibly escape. Calling for Lilian's help is the only way she could avoid certain death now. But she doesn't. Rita steps into the shiny surface of the monster's huge wet incisor, and steps out of a reflective glassed portion of its hide from Staren's tactical nuking. That places it right near where Lilian drew its blood, so she swipes a hand along one of its bleeding wounds too before she falls to ground-level, and licks it off her fingers greedily as she lands in a low three-point stance behind the beast. After all the work I've done today and yesterday, my gut feels like it's twisted in knots. It hurts so bad. An appetizer will only make that worse... but like Kukuru said, if it has any big surprises, we have to know. What powers do you have for me to devour, mister shark?
Lilian Rook	§Target has abnormally high explosive shock resistance. The shell is ostensibly sandstone, but it's acting like loose sand. Shear-thickening fluid reaction, but without significant glass-fusing. Is it just manually holding the sand particles in a compressed state rather than converting it into a stable matrix? It has the expected fluid dynamics of hypervelocity interaction.§ Lilian tosses the weapon aside, letting an unwieldy fourty kilos of metal crunch onto the sandy concrete without a bounce. Reloading from this position is a waste of time; that's why she'd set up so many in the first place. She has only seconds to think over her options. §The total armour mass is more important than structural integrity; rather it doesn't seem to have integrity at all. At that size though, its vitals have to be buried pretty deep. We still don't have the firepower to just burn through its biomass until it dies of traumatic shock. It's bleeding though; that's a relief. Death by exsanguination is a fallback at best, but if I can paint a substantial blood trail, I'll be able to get a lot of use out of Slais Gearradh Fola. I don't have the resources to probe every one of its defenses, so for now I'll watch its reactions to the others. For now, I need to focus my efforts on opening wounds and feeling out its vital force; I can't afford to waste energy on half-measures.§ The one upside of targets of this size and scale is that Lilian can see physical attacks like these coming from a mile away. She'd already made sure to maximize her vertical advantage rather than her horizontal spacing, knowing the nullborn is squat and long rather than tall and narrow. She cedes ground without a fight, abandoning the carefully chosen post and expensive weapon in a heartbeat as the building explodes underneath her. She accelerates skyward at top speed, then jumps further to stay ahead of the high velocity rubble just about to catch up to her anyways. From on high, Lilian begins rapidly drawing out the complex both-handed motions of interlocking and overlapping spell circles --or at least, that's what they look like, though there's no recognizable script or iconograhpy to them, just endless geometry that falls into itself-- as opposed to the more naturally reflexive use of faerie fire or further explosives. A dozen different arrays crunch together and spin up in sequence like a gear train, causing score of glowing points to spark into existence ahead of her, hissing and bubbling like a plasma torch underwater, rather than gleaming like stars. The 'spell' discharges into a pounding barrage of down-angled beams, unidentifiable energy like fine strokes of sizzling vantablack, gold flecked ink. The angle is chosen so that the bulette's forward momentum will carry it more or less tip to tail through the whole raking stream of fire, but each beam will carry back to front through a lot of its flesh on the way through. It's a focused, but intentionally randomized light show. Each individual beam is narrow, and pierces through both stone and flesh with almost intangible ease, but causes only very localized damage, meaning Lilian is relying on bulk of fire to quickly test for flesh wounds and vital points, pain reflexes and hardened redundancies, all at once. Rather than causing flash heating or magical burning however, the beams carve channels of bloody physical 'static' where they go, expanding a short ways like hydrostatic shock, strangely causing vicious, sustained bleeding where they land, practically designed to make natural wound closure irrelevant.
Ishirou	The beast stomps forward, and there is no doubt about what it is now, it's a beast. A siege engine at best, but a living one whose only thoughts are 'smash' and 'eat'. As it finally comes into the trap several things happen at once right as it is sprung. Some of it the Bulette can't even begin to understand what just happened, its' attention is focused on the pain. Several shots braze the nose. Powerful explosives from Staren cause the entire head to wave to the right, causing a roar of pain to be released from the shock. Where the detonation happened the armor is thinned again, giving S6 a chance to pump rockets there. It spins its head back and forth, trying to shake the two off. What it doesn't see is the curse laid on it. It's too small, too focused to notice, but the desire to EAT utterly consumes it. It continues to throw itself at Kukuru, heedless of what is around it. It has to eat, it has to eat it has to eat. IT HAS TO EAT. Kale focuses his wind magic on a single moment. That highly focused, even with its mass is enough to lift it for just a moment...which causes it to turn slightly. Gravity and momentum do the rest as it seems to lose control and spin sideways as it will start to land. It is at this moment Rita releases her blast, smashing into the mouth of the creature and causing it to release another roar, and disorient it. She gets a chance to taste its blood... Lilian gives the creature a taste of COLOR SPRAY and forces it to TASTE THE RAINBOW OF DEATH. Lilian's idea is a good one, it's a sound attack and thought process. The problem is the size, one could shoot a machine gun across its broadside, and still miss vital organs due to both its size and its armor. Without its armor, then it is just a matter of time before SOMETHING important is hit. It does scorch and hurt its hide, causing more blood. A few organs are hit in the buckshot. It's definitely going to be bleeding more when it hits that water. Which it does now, hitting it and going under the water that was made to hold it by a large margin. For a moment the water churns, before two arms burst out of the water, and try to grab for the side of the water as its head comes up. The mouth opens up, it can't think about eating, but it can think about destroying. As a ball of what might be considered PURE HUNGER fires out in a ball towards Tamamo and a second one at Kukuru. The ball aims to suck up everything in its path, like a ball of annihilation. After that, it makes a terrible sound, a powerful roar aimed all around it. The sound is disorienting and painful. As small creatures fly off it's back at everyone else, not Tamamo. They fly like bullets, aiming to match on like leaches, and start drinking blood or mana. Slowly it's trying to draw itself out of the water, as armor starts slouching off of it. Bugs that get close to its mouth cause it to start eating them. which will delay its getting out of the water.
Kukuru	Kukuru is starting to get the feeling that something's off because even she knows she doesn't normally feel this fired up about anything, and especially not when it involves aiding a group like the Council. And yet, she's still weirdly hyperactive compared to her usual. The puffs of dark smoke that indicate each time she teleports don't even have time to clear before she's already teleporting again, moving in zig-zagging patterns that still have her curving steadily towards the center of the basin. "I thought it was friendly, but this... Something's off." Although she can't confirm her suspicions just yet, she sees that ball forming and flying right at her. She thrusts a claw downwards instinctively to try and affix herself to the ground, only to realize that she's still on the sandy icy surface over the basin rather than on actual solid ground, and the ball starts sucking her in! <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "I'm going in the water." <J-IC-Scene> Staren says, "Oh no what?" <J-IC-Scene> Kukuru says, "You need it in there? Oh, yeah... That was the plan." <J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "An incoming curse! Also, please push it away from the edge, or the baffle will have no effect." Until she teleports again. Instead of teleporting into the basin to continue trying to lure the creature, however, Kukuru's next teleportation target (in addition to getting her the hell out of the way of that hunger ball) is... Right underneath the Bullette's mouth! It's the best place for her to get leverage to start trying to brute force the thing back into the water, but it also serves a few other purposes. One: She's confident it can't shoot creatures coming off its back from its belly. Two: It's the closest place she can use to try and just find a less defensible area from up close with her weird whatever-she-is eyesight. She can already feel some of those first launched things chewing into her flesh and drawing blood from her, though, but she'll have to grin and bear it if she wants to find a worthwhile attack vector for the rest of the group.
Lilian Rook	As far as Lilian's tactical thoughts go, they read something like this. §Tamamo!§ Against whatever that is, she doesn't expect even that mirror to provide the kind of coverage she would feel comfortable with. Leaving the circle array behind to continue firing on its own, discharging the rest of its energy until spent from a remote position, Lilian appears by Tamamo for only the blink of an eye, somewhat less elegantly fireman carries her, and disappears right out of the way. The distances involved necessitate using a lot more of her earmarked reserves than simple combat dodges, but this is a higher priority. All the way until she can set Tamamo back down further along her barrier sequence, and also within her own runic coverage. §It's a long way back to that blood trail, but I can't exactly decline. I'll just have to trust what I laid down will cover her for long enough and try to keep that thing as busy as possible. There's no point in firing the explosives for effect now; I'll have to save those for a tactical maneuver to get any use ou of them. The damage runes either. It's in the water now, so I might as well use the inner circle.§ Lilian stays long enough to release the most dense string of runes with the correct, imperious commands and the remote unravelling of magical energy. A tightly wound spiral, rather than a perfect circle, shines with aquamarine light at the center of the new lake, and on the surface, the water quickly begins to twist, sink, and churn into a rapidly expanding whirlpool. A powerful, circular riptide spreads along the bulette's body length, up to the edge, forcing it to fight against the immense weight of water trying to drag it back under and towards the center. When she departs, she leaves Tamamo in the care of a handful of expendable 'fire pillar traps' for leeches that might slip past her own defenses.
S6	-VDELLA DETECTED.- "Leeches," S6 twists her flight unit into banking maneuver, rapidly rolling over into a spinning dive while smaller Nullborn latch onto the hull. Though the maneuver is intended to shake them off, they still dig furrows in the hull. Her eyes shift briefly to the decreasing energy readout, and she only pulls out of the dive when it stops decreasing faster than normal. Finding herself nearly at level with the cracked icy surface of the artificial lake, there's no time to brake or pull out of the dive. S6 instead switches her unit into its humanoid form just in time to smash into the ice feet-first. She lets out a grunt from the impact, quickly shifting damage alerts out of her vision and hurling her machine skyward again. Scant meters off the cracked ice, she surges forward, straight towards and then up along the thrashing curve of the Bulette's waterlogged back. Kukuru is beneath it. Lilian's magic is dragging it. S6 lacks any meaningful way to contribute to the efforts of maneuvering something this massive; but she does have an idea that may weaken its efforts at resisting them. The flight unit's right arm sweeps back, fist clenching. The forearm splits and separates, forming a wide emitter from which projects a truly enormous sword of blue-tinged light, easily longer than the Flight Unit is tall. She crests the beast's hunched back, curving down to the right and bringing the blade down in a full-body cleave across the base of the monster's right ear. Severing something so vital to the Nullborn's function, she hopes, would make it flinch. Distract it. Give the others some window to leverage their efforts.
Staren	Ooh, what is THAT? Staren turns sensors on Lilian's Deadly Colorspray to see what data she can get from it later. And then the bulette goes into the water! It is at this point that Staren realizes she didn't bring a way to fight in the water. Hmm. Well, that's okay, the Bulette is trying to climb out and needs to be forced back in! Staren flies down, firing a spray of laser and railgun fire at the nullborn Just Because, weaving a bit when the strange creatures come flying at her but not really prepared to counter them. They seem to be... leeches? That stick to her mech's armor, but don't seem to be damaging it. Ha! Stupid beast. The Star Hawk lands, and tries to brace itself against the creature's snoot, before turning up the main engines and the rocket boosters, PUSHing with all its mechanical might! High on adrenaline and inexperienced, relatively, in some aspects of magic, Staren's focus doesn't notice her potential psychic energy being drained, nor the tiredness, until she's on the edge of passing out... drifting off and then jerking awake, struggling to think the coherent thought of 'What is happening? Why am I so tired?'
Rita Ma	Rita's just pulling herself back up to her feet from that low crouch when the Bullette crashes into her and Lilian's miniature sea, then lets out a terrifying roar. She claps both her hands over her ears and scrunches her eyes up tight, grimacing as her bones rattle from the vibration. She only forces her eyes open to make sure those spheres of annihilation aren't aimed at her. Just like I tasted in its blood. I hope that was enough warning...! Leeches dive towards her and are immediately carved into ribbons by invisible, razor-sharp tentacles. Before more can strike her, she's sprinting towards the cracked ice and swan-diving in. Her disguise unravels on impact with the water's surface, leaving her revealed and bathing in diluted blood- And that's it. It's awful. It's sublime. Underwater, I'm perfect. Every ugly fin, every gross tentacle, every mutated frill has been to make me better at this. In this biosphere, I'm the apex predator. The slightest twitch of her lappets sends her jetting forward at blinding speeds to avoid the flailing of the monster's tail, leaving a trail of hissing bubbles behind. An elegant twist of her body puts her into a perfect aileron roll, avoiding its graceless attacks by inches. My body knows exactly what to do. I'm just a passenger. But for once, that's okay. For once we want the same thing. Rita's tentacles stab deep into the monster's bleeding wounds, but not to feed- not yet. They pump in a corrosive blue venom, gallons and gallons regurgitated directly into the huge monster's bloodstream in rolling pulses, until they light up its circulatory system from the inside. But that venom has another trick. When it reaches critical mass in a single place, it reacts with itself and violently explodes- in this case, wherever the monster's heart is will naturally be the greatest concentration of blood. Rita's going to blow out its vital organs from within, and she doesn't even need to know where they are. Does my body really think we can win like this? ... Alright. I'll trust you.
Lilian Rook	Trying to make up for the time spent on the emergency interception remover, Lilian flies over the battlefield predominantly in manual. Though she blinks about to juke blindside attacks from the swarm and converging clusters from too many angles to adroitly dodge all at once, it's mainly her drawn sword that does the work of both defending her and cutting through the swarm. She swerves and dives where she can, hacks through the monsters approaching from the front and below, turns around and coasts forward on momentum when attacked from behind and above. A leech colliding with her extended arm is whirled around with immense force and pulverized with the pommel. One that grabs at her foot is blasted off with a roiling wave of unseelie flames. One from right behind her finds its sucking maw caught right on the edge of the sword as she wheels around all at once and braces it across herself, struggling and grappling level with the monster for several moments before splitting it lengthwise down the middle with a twist and flick of strong leverage. Finally, crossing the water, she dives harshly and swoops low over her objective; the lengthy smear of fresh blood the bulette had dragged all the way from sand to shore. Though it's not quite on the same level as an arcane connection as a literal fire-sacrificed child, fresh blood has always been known to have a potent sympathetic link to its owner. Night Mist's floral twists knots and illegible runes run scarlet with menacing light. Lilian skirts dangerously low with the ground, almost colliding face first at that angle. "Cleasa Iontach - Slais Gearradh Fola!" The black blade slides through the dramatic bloodstain as if it were the surface of a deep red pool, flicking and splashing it over the edges with the tail of each arc. Deep and wide, cutting crescent moon arcs simply appear inside the bulette, mainly from the places the appropriate blood was first shed. She doesn't have to stop with one either; Lilian flashes low down the entire runway of gore and lays into it the whole way, hewing back and forth with wide-ranging power strikes to flay the monster's insides, extending further and further from those original wound channels.
Tamamo	"Oh, oh no!" Tamamo sees the incoming 'ball,' and identifies it as best she's able. "An incoming curse!" That's about as much time as it takes for Lilian to reach her. She's continuing the explanation, for the sake of the others, even as she's lifted. Rather than be surprised at the less than genteel carrying, the following is comparatively calmed by Lilian's sudden presence. "Also, please push it away from the edge, or the baffle will have no effect." Time is short, yes, but isn't it always? She needs no more justification than that to take the extra moment, on being let down, and before breaking contact, to squeeze Lilian's arm with both hands. She doesn't need to give her any more blessings, having already made sure to amply supply her with both physical and mystical supplies before they'd begun, but there's still a jolt of subsequently soothing warmth between her palms. "Thank you." And then she's off in a swirl of long robes over the sand, retrieving a bell from within sleeves. She rings it, twice, the sound unlikely to be heard over the battlefield so much as felt. It's a pure sound, simple and clean, unlike everything else here. She claps her hands. One by one, and then in a rush, the buried warding talismans activate, the last component of their ritual completed, light filling them spread flames from the burning aura of the Sun goddess, just briefly revealed, only to be hidden again. From inside the trap, the subjective experience is one of endless water. There is a bottom to the lake, but it has no edge. Any attempt to find one, even determinedly walking or swimming in the same direction, cannot find it. It's not a maze, nor a prison, for it has no walls. From the outside, nothing appears to be different. Those inside the basin simply don't approach the edges of it, turning away by their own volition. It's merely the same sort of barrier as is used to keep passers-by from bothering reclusive spirits in their homes, though here powered far beyond those casual parameters. Apart from Lilian, Tamamo hasn't given anyone else a key to escape the trap. Perhaps, it slipped her mind.
Ishirou	The Bulette hangs on for dear life, having somehow released its arms to dig into the ground. It tries everything and everything to fight against the tide trying to suck it down. Both literally and figuratively. Kale and Kukuru use full force to try and drag it back into the water. Little by little, they gain traction. But its mouth sucks in new creatures. Lilian's spell tries to drag the creature in, but it digs in, refusing...but it's also now fighting yet another force AND those it was fighting before. It is no longer an uphill battle, it's an up-mountain battle. However, between Rita and S6 it loses the last of its grip, falling backward into the water and into the trap set for it by everyone. Rita's tentacles hit injuries, which it sustained to get to this point. Poison first tracks how blood flows through it then starts to collect where blood forms. For a creature this big, it's several places, but the point is the same. It also can't look around itself. There is no top, or sides, just a bottom. It can not understand what is going on, but it's starving. It's can't eat enough to overcome itself. It's trapped in a place that it KNEW had a top and sides, but now does not. All it knows is a bottom as it sinks down to it. It SCREAMS again... Before internal slashes hit parts of its body, it can't figure out where these are coming from! It thrashes and convulses in pain before several of its hearts explode in simultaneous eruptions. It turns to face Rita, trying to bite at her, trying to tear at her tentacles...and then it screams once more... Rita would recognize a creature like this entering its death throes, it was already dead. Nothing could stop it, or prevent it from dying now. It had no regeneration, just a trick of dirt. It can't do that trick submerged! It releases one last desperate ball down, trying to eat at the rock at the bottom. It could win if it could get some armor, it could kill what has killed it!!! Then the bottom drops out, like a bathtub plug that has been pulled out, it can't understand what is happening. Dying and getting farther away from Rita who absolutely dominates the water, it can't help but realize not only was it dying, but it can't get closer to its rival. Only then does it finally give up, becoming still as the creature is sucked out of the bottom and dragged along the current? Eventually being dumped into the river.
Ishirou	Hours would pass, the dead creature would take time to break down into sludge and mana, the river might need to be avoided for a few days, but in a few weeks would overflow with new life. Between the new lake and the death of the bulette, it would change the desert dramatically. Over a year it would eventually turn into more lush dryland. In a longer time frame, it would turn into more grassland without intervention. The Bulette's corpse slowly hits the ocean. Slowly drifting out to sea, sludge dripping off of it. This is until a larger sound could be heard. It could be heard as far as the desert. All of INDUS hears it. Every single person within several kilometers of the ocean can hear it. Rita knows what a large sea creature sounds like, and it sounds like that. The bulette's body is dragged high into the air. In the jaws of a massive creature, its back is electrified the moment it touches air. Its jaws are massive enough to hold the bulette like a fish. It snaps down, devouring the entire creature in a single bite. Giant claws dig into the ground as it starts slowly lifting itself from the bottom of the ocean, and starts drawing towards land. The bulette had awakened it, but now it was hungry. There was only one power source in the area that could feed a creature that large. Indus is in chaos. Nobody knows what the hell that thing is.
Staren	Fortunately, they push it into the drink! Unfortunately, a 40-foot-tall mecha just made a bigger target for more leeches to stick to but inside is still a regular-sized person with a not-that-huge amount of energy. Staren, too tired to argue much with Lilian right now, sets her mech to auto-land somewhere and then ejects to escape the leeches that are steadily killing her, summoning a magical jetpack to control her movement... oh right, no magic. She passes out and lands wherever her parachute blows; if noone else does, retrieval robots will eventually come get her.