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Flamel Parsons     The Psychonauts launch this operation under Flamel's main command, but that's sheerly out of a total lack of knowledge about what they're after. Which means Hollis Forsythe had a lot to say about what to go after: "You're there to get *MAD-men information*." She'd insisted to the group loading up on the psychic spy-jet, the Pelican. "Strictly recon about the MAD-men, don't try to pull more knowledge about the new MAD strain. This isn't me doing a little dance of words so you can feel extra-satisfied when you go beyond mission parameters. I'm telling you to *just* try to get information, and don't go deep. Whatever's there is *badly* infectious. Yes, even for the psychics that are tank-armored around the brain. That'll just make it harder to help you heal if you get compromised. Be *careful*."

    SOMETIME LATER...
    SOUTHEAST ASIA...

    The Pelican's landed as close as Parsons can get to the exact coordinates. Which is... *odd*. "Weird! I could have sworn I was landing *right on top* of the coordinates. But... here we are!" He looks around, gesturing over the wind-whipped countryside. This area is relatively flattened out compared to most of the rest of the nearby terrain, crisscrossed with a few rivers. "Looks like we're just a mile off though. Wonder what that's about! Did anyone see us teleport while I was setting down?" He pulses his clairvoyance all around -- which reports nothing but distorted, impossible readings, strange geometric gaps and nonsensical emotional reisdues, in weird, roiling ethereal shapes that flicker with deep reds and dark blues.

    Flamel's own instinct is to ready up, press two fingers to a temple, and leave a hand free to fire. "Let's be extra-careful!" He says, in a cheerful tone. "Never hurts!"

    There's some psychic effect at play here, but even for those with massive psychic defenses, it's "hard" to resist, fundamentally unclear. One great, intense psychic effect wants to send information to the mind, and one wants to block certain information. There's no clear indication of which presents "the truth", but it's likely that the former represents the memetic hazard, and the latter, some other strange effect.

    There does not appear to be anything unusual at the objective point.
Phasewalker     Ainkli is a thrill-seeker. Unfortunately for Hollis Forsythe, he's very likely to go off-mission if it feels like he can have fun or excitement doing it. He does smile and nod when he's given these orders, and she has no reason to think (yet) that he's going to be a problem for anyone while out on the job. He's kind of the definition of a problem to ritually careful people like her.

    Later:

    Ainkli Naragol steps off the Pelican and takes a look around. His strange greeh eyes scan his surroundings, and a frown forms on his face as he does... then he begins making quick ten meter teleportation jumps here and there as he tests whether something psychic is causing a spatial distortion. He'll speak over the radio as he moves to the others.
    "There was no teleportation on the way down," he explains, "Something else is happening."

    Ainkli, curious about the strange visual appearance of the location, would make a telekinetic platform as high up as he can to stand on to get a good idea of the layout of the rivers. Then he'll squint at it, and focus his Metapsionic powers.

    What is the deal with this place? He tries to trace the lines of power from the effect to what's causing it.
Candy      Candy rolls his eyes at Hollis's repeated insistences--but he'll be careful, if she's made the effort to drive the point home so often, each time they've met. Just the MAD-men. Got it.

     When the plane lands, Flamel asks a concerning question. *Did* they teleport? "You tell me, G-Man. It was your flying, anyway. Did everything get all fucked up for a second outside?" He was busy strategizing. Thinking about ways to get the information while minimizing his exposure to the strain itself.

     Stepping out of the plane, his first order of business is to confer with 'the locals.' Hollis was concerned that these guys might try and make contact with the Watch pre-emptively. A card is thrown into the dirt, burning up. Smoke rises from the flames and billows to impossible proportions. Strange lights flash inside it, almost like thunder. The wind picks up, blows the smoke away.

     There is a wooden desk, atop it, a crude sparkplug radio. Candy creates a chair in the middle of the field, and begins scanning a few of the Watch frequencies used by hams in this region. Can he pick up any mention of MAD men, or any unusual activity in the area? Hopefully, the local cells, if there are any, haven't been compromised...
Cantio "Recon... Understood." Cantio repeats after Hollis, peering out the to observe the land (or whatever qualifies as land) zips by beneath them in that jet. Although she isn't uh-huh'ing and nodding at everything that's said, she's clearly listening well enough to not actually be paying much attention to what she's actually seeing compared to what she's hearing. "If we're confronted by any of the MAD-men, how should we prioritize capture, killing, and releasing?"

She really just means escaping, but releasing makes it sound like she's confident about success.

LATER

"I... Don't think we teleported, no. It'd be pretty easy to notice that sort of thing." Cantio replies to Flamel as she disembarks from the Pelican, hand raised to keep the 'stylish' straw hat from blowing off her head. She's dressed like a typical farmer to match the look of the countryside: Jeans held up by matching suspenders, a light yellow t-shirt, and even a stylus shaped like a wheat straw.

That illusion is ruined somewhat by the very unfarmerlike briefcase in her other hand that has a rather conspicuous hole pointing out one side, but it'll have to do.

Despite all her previously terrible experiences with psychics, Cantio has yet to really figure out any defenses against them. Sensing the effect is easy enough, at least, when she finds her own ability to really comprehend things muddled already. Thus, the best course of action would be to send one of her weird-looking drones out to scope out the place in her stead, to let it act as her eyes and ears until someone figures out which way to go!

If nothing else, at least the drone is more expendable for wandering off towards the ~~random direction~~ east than doing it herself.
Staren     Today's Staren: She's still trying to find something that looks 'Psychonauts-y'; the black turtleneck has been paired with matching fingerless gloves and loose-fit cargo pants of a shade and hue of green chosen to not look awful with a Concord Orange scarf and beret, she's wearing the big round-framed glasses again and has her labcoat folded and tied around her waist.

    Disembarking the plane to look around, she's followed by a swarm of spy drones she brought (well, they're the usual camera/sensor drones, coconut-sized hovering metal orbs with obvious lenses and antennae, but for some reason it feels appropriate to call them *spy* drones today) which begin spreading out over the area.

    "If it's not teleportation... either we were pushed away, or it's an illusion, or they're messing with our navigation systems somehow..." Staren blinks. "What are you using, GPS? All my stuff has INS, just in case..." For the sake of visibly doing something, she pulls a scanner from her bag -- it's constructed like a rectangular flip-phone, but the top half, aside from a little bit connected to the hinge, is entirely transparent green plastic with a bezel-less monochrome LCD screen.

    She looks around, holding it aimed in different directions and looking down at the screen, but she's actually checking the drones' inertial navigation systems and having them try microwave rangefinders and such to see if terrain is where it looks like it is (although, if light is bent...)

    When Persephone says to be careful, she looks briefly at the taller woman, then undoes her labcoat and puts it on. It's still the calf-length battle labcoat with belts and a Concord-orange stripe for show. "Armor of Ithan." she intones quietly, more to notify others than as part of the spell, as she gently pushes some of her own potential psychic energy* (* - not actually psychic, it's magic) through the coat's circuits, an energy field resembling glowing blue-white medieval plate armor manifesting around her body before fading to invisibility.
Persephone Kore      "Okay, Doctor," Persephone answers Hollis, with a kind of faint and patient indulgence. It's the well-practiced tone of reassuring a worrywart parent. (Is Hollis a doctor, or is that just sheer habit on Phony's part?) "If you say it's that dangerous, then I promise I'll take care of myself."

     "If nothing else, I'd hate it if someone else had to worry about me, haha."

     Phony is immensely enthralled, once more, by the cute little in-flight peanut bags. I think most people are supposed to hate flying! It's crowded, and it's sort of uncomfy, and there's not enough to do. But I haven't stopped thinking it's really cool yet!

     This makes her, of course, an extremely fun person to sit next to. Now, now, don't fight over it! Ahaha.

     Stepping off the plane, she takes a deep, deep breath in through her nose and lets it out through her mouth in a mind-clearing sigh. "It's okay, Flamel! I know boys hate asking for directions."

     Her eyes shut, and stay shut for a good long moment, as she takes in those flickering semi-real reds and blues. I can keep both of them out, for now. But I don't want to expose myself directly. A story about them shouldn't *contain* them, right?

     Even things as ethereal as those twin psychic pressures have a story, and Persephone tries to tune herself to that: first the 'revealing', and then the 'concealing'. Not their actual content, pointedly, but rather: "Why are you the way that you are?"
Flamel Parsons     Phasewalker finds two things are trying, at the same time, to affect this location. One of them is a wide-area effect, like a chemical spill or a radio signal emission, which is up on a rolling hill leading to a mountain, to the northeast. There's almost no tree coverage in that zone, but nothing of note to be seen there -- unless Ainkli wants to spend several weeks combing the shrubs, he's not going to find anything without a little more help or a hint. Another influence is coming from the southwest, in an ambiguous, fuzzy zone somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Its effect is reinforcing the local one intensely.

    A conflicting influence is found originating from a single point, the same one that seems to have generated the memetic psychohazard in that trace Phasewalker did before.

    Candy's radio sputters softly. A farmer some miles away mutters softly between static. Speaking in a local language (Burmese? Chinese? Hard to say, with Psychonauts geopolitics, but it translates) a man with rural speech patterns mutters, "Sector Pillar White, clear. Sector Dagger Onyx... The 'phantom soldiers' again. But how do you fight something you can't see? Nobody's gonna blame you, son. But -- I swear, the strangest thing -- I went to see her again. To give her the news about her daughter. And she said to me... 'What daughter?' Kid, if you're still out on that recon, c'mon home. I don't think this is the kind of spirits we're trained for." Then, things shift to less relevant topics. "Sector Midnight Crimson, clear. Sector Sword Viridian, clear. Sector Chamber Null, government officials were spotted with..." And so on.

    Cantio's RANDOM DIRECTION robot eventually stops. It doesn't vanish. It just stops! Where it stops isn't clear, because despite the readings assuring Cantio that it stopped in one place and has remained motionless, it's impossible to remember an exact coordinate where it did stop.

    A similar effect is emerging with Staren. The rangefinders should be reaching all the way to those nearby mountains, but they're not. The problem is, it's seemingly entirely impossible to remember exactly how far they reach, or even read the numbers if Staren tries to speak them aloud. Nothing has crashed, nothing runs headfirst into anything, but it's like the numbers simply fail to catch in the mind.

    And Persephone...

    The REVEALING influence contains a modern city, or at least is was modern for 1962. The styles, aesthetics, and moments remain preserved, at least mostly. A gradually-industrializing minor metropolis, with millions of lives. Something from that city craves to be known again.

    The suppressing urge comes from two men, far away, on a strange island, in 1962. One screams to another, "Activate it! We're out of time!"
    "And *let them win!?*"
    "You gotta let it go! What's the sense in winnin' at the cost of--"
    "Don't you remember what they've done?!"
    "I do... I do. And I don't want to. Please... For me. Please."
    "...Dammit. Fine. I'm activating the device!"


    The rest is cut off by a loud, gunshot-like burst of psychic energy from what seems to be nothing at all, about eighty feet up from the origin point of the memetic hazard. It drives straight into Parsons' barrier field, slamming him onto his back in a storm of shining orange light.
Flamel Parsons     That same origin point in the nothingness at the eighth set of ten feet up in nothing at all, actually lets lose with several more shots. The flying ones are the first targeted -- that's Phasewalker, some of Staren's drones, and then working down to try to take Candy, Cantio, Staren herself, and Persephone. Short pauses between individual massive shots at anything visible to that point in the unobstructed, open sightlines of the area -- those are the only respite! Any sensible intuition says it must be a MAD-Man Sniper!
Staren     Staren frowns. "I can't..." Am I dreaming? Or is this a possible psychohazard? Staren turns to Persephone, "Am I dreaming?" And then looks at the other psychics questioningly, before deciding to err on the side of panic and warping in what appears to be a reflective foil-coated hazmat suit -- as soon as it appears, the suit's collar deploys an opaque helmet, sealing Staren off from the world.

    Now that the safety measure is deployed, Staren is free to think about something else. Her voice comes from the suit sounding like it's coming over a moderately low-quality telephone or radio, as if it was designed by someone worried that *something* might spread in nonvocal frequencies and not-consciously-processed harmonics. "Ummmm... so when I try to read the numbers on the Inertial Navigation Systems and the rangefinders, I... can't. I just can't. My brain can't process them. I don't like it. What does that mean? Have you ever seen anything like this, Flamel?"

    Persephone can easily know that the audio effect is two-way and Staren's only able to see deliberately-distorted video like an old TV through a screen on the inside. Her implants can't work through the suit -- she has to use the built-in radio and external computers.

    It does nothing against purely psychic phenomena.

    And it's certainly not ARMOR, although the magic field holds for now. "What was that?!" Staren's voice, distorted, asks after the first gunshot. She doesn't know her drones are being shot down yet. Flustered, she reaches for her laser pistol but it's INSIDE the hazmat suit, and a psychic bolt slamming the Armor of Ithan sends her sprawling too. She reaches for the Matter Manipulator... and the suit gently crinkles as her gloved hand touches it. GOD DAMN IT.

    "Get behind the plane! We can use it for cover!" While running back to the plane, she decides getting INSIDE it is better and does that.
Cantio Eyeing the wooden desk that just seems to have appeared out of nowhere, Cantio gestures at it briefly as though she's asking Candy for permission to use it. In her addled mind state, however, she just ends up sitting down immediately while waiting for her drone to feed her some useful info.

"Ainkli and Staren didn't notice it, either. If that many of us didn't, then..." She looks over at Persephone. "Then it really might be something messing with our heads. Did you catch anything, Phony? My drone's not picking up much, eith-"

She pauses, then pulls that fake straw out of her mouth and a tablet out of the front pocket of her suspenders. She taps on the screen a few times, then furrows her brow. "It stopped. Huh. But where'd it go?"

She squints at the screen. It's blank. It wasn't on to begin with, and the tablet's not even tracking the drone's location. "Yeah, I'm not... No, nothing's showing up. Plan B, then?"

Cantio doesn't know what plan B is, but her attempt at focus is interrupted when shots ring out through the air. Spotting the one hitting Flamel's barrier and the direction he falls in, she does a few quick calculations as more of those shots are aimed at the fliers, and after predicting where the shooter is...

She throws her nonfunctioning tablet forward and gets nailed right in the chest by another shot. Yelping in pain, Cantio falls backwards right off the table and hunkers down behind whatever cover it may provide as she clutches that briefcase against her side. "Careful! Darn.. Where's it coming from?"

Cantio can't see the sniper, and her attempt to predict where they're hiding didn't really work, but there's still some things she can do. Step 1: Healing. Having the skillset of a generic protagonist means having generic protagonist levels of healing magic, and she starts hurling that around to take the edge off the worst of Flamel's wounds along with anyone else that's gotten shot!

Step 2: Identifying the target. While Cantio focuses her personal efforts on healing, she thunks her briefcase against the table a few times to shake some cubes out of that hole. They expand rapidly into more of those weird-looking drones, spreading out in a wide fan in the general direction of the shots. As they move forward, they start screaming "DETECTING TARGET. DETECTING TARGET." regardless of whether or not they've detected anything as part of Cantio's ploy to try and force the sniper to reveal their position by shooting them or even just moving when someone else might actually notice.
Persephone Kore      "Ahaha. Of course you're not dreaming, silly! And even Dream-Persephone would never lie to you," Phony tells Staren, affectionately patting the opaque helmet as if it were her head.

     (Because I want to pat your head anyway!, a ghostly force delivers the appropriate sensation to Staren's scalp regardless.)

     She's just getting back to her fruitful psychometric investigations when they come under fire.


     Had the invisible 'sniper' targeted Persephone first, it would've almost certainly hit her. With her so far down the list of targets, though, it doesn't get a chance to. Two hundred and fifty milliseconds pass, enough time for her to register and process that they're under attack. Enough time for her to form the simple, half-reflexive thought:

                        That isn't allowed to hurt me.                        

     Reality complies. The bolt meant for her is lensed around her body like light crumpling around a black hole, striking the ground behind instead. A split second later, she has the thought:

                  That isn't allowed to hurt Staren either!                  

     It's too late to stop the first bolt aimed at the plucky girl genius, but further attacks meant for her as she sprints back towards the jet meet the same fate, shattering against or lensing off of effortless dents in spacetime.

     Or Candy, or A-N, or Flamel, or- ... no, there's a more efficient way to protect people, isn't there?

     With a careless thought, she sculpts eighty-foot-tall monoliths of stone and earth out of the ground in a Stonehenge-like semicircle between her friends and the origin point of the blasts, giving convenient cover to anyone who wants to take it, without entirely obstructing the hazard from examination. Flamel in particular is helpfully scooted behind one so you can catch your breath!

     But Phony herself doesn't take cover. Instead, she floats up into the air near the origin point of the bolts. Is there anything there she can use her psychometry on? If not, she just captures one of the bolts in her orbit and examines that instead!

     Now, why are you trying to hurt us? That seems like a really unpleasant thing to do! Or, "Why are you the way that you are?"
Candy      Candy is wearing that mad bomber style longcoat, with simple working person's clothes beneath--pants (a little tight), work boots, a button up shirt. He's got that little red neckerchief, too, and his work shirt is unbuttoned a tad too much to be unintentional.

     "I'll be careful," says Candy softly, hand over the receiver of the radio. He spent his flight sitting in front of Staren and Phony, mostly gossiping and making his usual juvenile remarks--which might make that hard to believe, if he weren't so good at switching between 'working' and 'not' at the drop of a hat. Accordingly, he holds a finger to his lips when he hears something.

     When the radio chatter drifts away from the immediately relevant, he cuts it off, with a squelch. "You hear that shit? Phantom soldiers." BANG.

     Candy's table and radio splinter behind him as he dives away from the sparking, shredded mess, the chair falling to one side. Landing in a roll, when he stands back up, several Candies split off from one, and begin blinking erratically across the landscape. As flat as this place is, as clear as it is, a sniper could easily make quick work of them. The plane is also the most obvious choice for cover. If it were him up there, he'd be trying to draw them out. Can these psychic bullets penetrate the plane's armor? He's not sure. He IS sure that right now, he can't see them. So how do you fight something that you can't see?

     Drag it out into the light.

Time stops.

Flamel's forcefield is frozen mid-ripple as Cantio's drones try their ploy. He grins--that's something he can definitely work with. His mind is buried beneath layers of Nothing, thanks to his mental houseguests. The real Candy presents exactly as much Nothing as his illusions. One of those illusions is taking cover behind the plane, but not him. Three Candies now appear beside Flamel. One of them is real--but all three of the mortars are real.


-Time resumes. Heavy artillery, circa WW1, appears in a protective circle around Flamel. The guns are very real--long and imposing beige barrels with thick blast shields.
-One by one, each gun fires, shelling the countryside in one-two-three cracks. The recoil sends them rolling backwards on thick, sturdy wheels, bumping into 'Mel's forcefield.

     "...IF I WAS YOU," CRACK.

     "I WOULD ANSWER THE LADY!!" BOOM.

     "'CAUSE THERE's A LOT MORE WHERE THESE CAME FROM!" BLAM.
Phasewalker     Ainkli gets shot. He was not expecting this, and crumples like a jenga tower, and falls off the platform he was on, and straight down to hit the grass. He's the second on the list and didn't have time to respond with an appropriate telekinetic shielding. He falls and hits the dirt some sixty feet down and immediately regrets not learning how to fly earlier in his life. It hurts. He lets out a strangled cry of pain when he lands, and then, with the air suddenly getting very loud and very violent -- thanks, Candy -- he thinks he's under some kind of advanced psychic artillery, so he turtles up.

    Several translucent shells of psychic force go up around him like dense domes of shielding, to prevent further impacts on him while he catches his breath and checks the wound he just received... only to find it is mostly bruising and maybe a cracked rib because of the nature of telekinetic blasts around here. He's lucky it wasn't a gun. Or maybe less than lucky, because he's still floored for a second.

    He scans the air, squinting into the expanse... then he reaches up, and projects psychic static over the whole field of vaguely where the shot came from, to try to hit the culprit with raw psychic interference. And maybe disrupt the overlapping psychic effect with brute-force disruption.

    "Hhhhh," he wheezes with effort.
Flamel Parsons     Ping! Ping! Ping! At least that plane is good cover. Jumping back in, Staren finds she can at least keep away from the windows and effectively have safe cover! Enough to whip up a scheme, if she has one... Got space, time, and heck, even materials to work with, if she needs them!

    Flamel heals enough to get his head in gear. A focused mind allows him to levitate and kind of zoom along the ground, over the wind-whipped plains and then he's yanked into cover with Persephone! "Hhhh. Thanks, Cant!" He calls out, trying to stabilize himself further.

    The drones from Step 2 receive a similar treatment. BANG! BANG! With a series of practiced shots in precise rhythm, the empty space in the air lets loose to down the drones, and unfortunately, to perhaps clearly display which of the empty spaces up there it's shooting from. It's Ainkli and Candy's impacts that startlingly have some of the bigger effect here. A stray shell falls short of its expected trajectory, actually it keeps going, or something along those lines. Don't worry about it. Still, the shaken foundations mean the shots stop blasting away for long enough for the descending Phasewalker to land a disruption precisely on the window that the sniper fires from. Through the disruption, you can see it, can't you? When all the psychic influence is suppressed, you can see the eighth-story window and its shattered glass, overgrown with vines, and nothing at all, no shape or form where one looks at that origin point. There is not a person there, and he is not wearing heavy US military headgear and aged fatigues. He does not have a large rifle wired to his helmet by a gleaming purple cable, and he is not loading a fresh shot.

    Most importantly, there is no answer to Persephone's question, spoken in both the real world and in mental space. And if there were, it would never sound like: "# ###'# ### THE WORLD ###### #### FUCKING ########! # ###'# ### '## WIN! # WON'T! I ###'# ### #### CELEBRATE VICTORY DAY ##### GODDAMN KILLING ## #### ######! VICTORY DAY, ## ### HEAR ##?! VICTORY DAY! BASTARDS!!" The innate human immune response to memetic psychohazards is blocking out much of what's being said, and it feels like the pressure at the bottom of the ocean just to let any fragment through.
Phasewalker     Through all of it, Ainkli has only one thing to say:

    "WHAT THE HELL IS VICTORY DAY!?"

    He yells it at the top of his lungs, then coughs into one of his hands like he's going to puke up one of his lungs in a second, and doubles over in his shell of TK barriers. He sits down on his bottom, and makes a hand gesture like lining up a picture for an imaginary camera, and focuses the psychic static precisely on that point where he saw the guy, and then... he just starts filling that space with psychic static. The static burns psychics when they use their powers in such a way that it may even do damage to his weapon if he's too careless with it. He's just trying to utilize some of the anti-psychic techniques he's learned to maybe let the others take advantage of a window of opportunity.

    Blood leaks from one of his eyes. He's over-exerting himself. This isn't his area of expertise.
Cantio "There's a... A gap up there. Further up near where the third one went down. But that's an empty... No. That can't be an empty space. Where Ainkli's doing that thing he's doing!" Cantio shouts as she catches sight of how the drones are going down, although she still can't see what's in that empty space. She can tell that the shooter is there, at least, and her mind is already working overtime as she's given some rather useful information to work with.

<J-IC-Scene> Cantio says, "How's he flying? Is it a machine?"
<J-IC-Scene> Persephone Kore says, "He's not!"
<J-IC-Scene> Phasewalker says, "He's in a building, up about... eight stories up. An old one we can't see."

That doesn't quite line up with what she's seeing, but it's more than enough to work with.

"A bu...? I see!  Well, I don't see it, but it's... I think I know what to do! Don't go inside." That's the best warning she can give while sprinting towards that floating empty space, mostly hoping not to run into any other buildings that definitely aren't empty spaces on the way towards the one Ainkli's facing and Candy's artillery.

It's finally time to try something she hasn't actually used offensively before. She needs to visualize the flow of time here. The way buildings crumble. The way they're weathered over time, not through heavy footfalls but through the elements wearing them down. The air picking away at them. Their construction slowly buckling over months, years, decades, even centuries without anyone to repair them. She pictures that happening to a hypothetical building's foundation in this...

Well, it still looks like an empty space to Cantio, but she's trusting that it's right here. She visualizes those centuries of wear and tear, concentrating them all into a single moment on where she imagines this building's foundation to be, all to bring it down under its own weight.
Candy      If you're a sniper, this might be exactly what you want. A loudmouth like Candy, essentially trying to carpetbomb the area, creating a chaotic backdrop for you to work from. All you have to do is not take the bait, and stay cool enough to finish the job--quickly.

     Candy knows this. It's why, after one of the shells behaves in a very unusual way,

Time stops.

    It's difficult even freezing the shell in its trajectory, to see just what happened. He checks the azimuth--nothing in front of the gun. Elevation... it should have gone much farther, but stopped as if he'd had it aimed higher. Ainkli, though... he's onto something. And maybe on something.

*My friend, you don't look too good. But you do good work, don't you?*

    The glare of an exploding shell illuminates Candy's face as he strides over to Ainkley's position to get a good look upwards. A glance over to Cantio, her mouth frozen in the midst of some warning not to go inside.

*Sure, I can live with that. Boys, we are going to need us a little horsepower, ah?*


-Time resumes.

-A diesel engine growls to life.
-A winch unwinds itself, whipping and hooking around a column of nothing between two non-windows.
-The metal hook clicks a satisfying click.
-Thick rubber tires kick up clods of dirt and grass.

     The red pickup, doors bearing the branding of the very likely made-up ESTEVEZ AND SONS SALVAGE, accelerates, its engine roaring as Candy attempts to tear the wall down, just as Cantio rapidly ages the building.
Persephone Kore      Phony obediently floats backwards when Phasewalker calls out the incoming psychic hazard, but still stays as close as she can without being in the area of effect. Her eyes are fixed on that point in space- no, on that man with the rifle, gaze locked with his in the fleeting moment that Phase's disruption provides.

     A more normal person than Phony would have an aggressive- or at least defensive- reaction to coming face-to-face with their adversary. But I never learned to be on my guard! I've never needed to be, after all.

     Persephone, instead, makes a heart with her hands- incidentally, a clear sight through to her actual heart.

     You're a real person, aren't you? I can't hear you, but can you hear me? I don't hate you. I don't even want to hurt you. I can't want to hurt anyone! So how can we be on opposite sides? I don't want to play this game; do you?

     One of Dr. Carpathia's old books talked about first contact with alien life. Mimicry is the first sign of comprehension; it is a recognition that something is being communicated. This is a human being, not an alien, but it still feels almost the same.

     So Persephone tries that. She mouths silently: "I - WON'T - LET - THEM - CELEBRATE - VICTORY - DAY?"
Staren     Staren isn't quite in a planning mood, having run from one panic to another. Get safe. End the danger. Get heavy armor. Delilah is ready, faster and with weapons more suited to Staren's fighting style than the Samson; but its comparative advantages are unsuited. She WANTS heavier armor today. Suitable weapon? She could spray & pray with the TK rifle... Explosives target a wide area but saturation-bombing is problematic. Desired characteristics include wide area and direct-fire. Maybe some kind of modified shotgun? Or...

                                 NO CONNECTION                                  

    Oh right. Staren retracts her helmet.

    Back at a lab in Grand Dorado, robotic arms grab pre-assembled weapon parts from the armory and begin attaching them together, finally detaching the Samson's missile launcher and attaching something else in its place. In a room of endless machinery, a screen with no one to read it displays: Wormhole link ready for expansion. Charging... Portaling package in 3... 2... 1...

    Staren quickly strips out of the 'hazmat suit'. It was not what was called for here. She's not sure what she's doing NEXT is what's called for either, but she's pissed at herself and whatever's out there and directing her anger outward can also help neutralize the threat, so. She runs to the plane's door and leaps off the ramp--

    --And then around her is an 11-foot-tall humanoid armored machine, painted white with Concord Orange accents. With a neck guard on the right side, wide shoulder guards, twin searchlights in the chest, and a helmet with a distinctive T-shaped visor, it's a distinctive design, eye-catching quality enhanced by the obviously holographic, glowing, Concord-orange cape. It doesn't actually look like fabric, and the shape is abstracted somewhat, giving the impression of a ragged piece of cloth rustling in the wind.

    It also still looks like it's been through hell, scratched all over and the front covered in scorch marks except for a pair of conspicuously obvious fresh armor plates over the abdomen.

    Though careful not to shoot allies, Staren's still attacking blind. New drones warp in and spread out to establish situational awareness, but it's apparently *impossible* to actually map what she's shooting at... maybe she can find out where it's *not*?

    In any case, on the Samson's left arm is some kind of quad-barreled energy weapon. Staren demonstrates it by aiming in the general direction attacks are coming from and sweeping it back and forth. The four barrels fire in sequence, several times per second, and...

    Well, as energy weapons go, whatever the projectile is doesn't LOOK all that impressive, though occasionally there's a bit of glow or an electric zap when an air molecule gets hit by mistake and utterly obliterated by the horribly misleadingly-named 'ion rifle', which fires artificial cosmic rays in a shotgun-like spread, high *kinetic*-energy nuclei, electrons, and the subatomic gibs of innocent air molecules caught in the way, slamming into matter in front of them and blasting it apart at the atomic and subatomic levels.

    On the macro-scale, it's not unlike a target is being viciously sandblasted by grains too small to see and simultaneously cooked from within as if by a microwave. It's real bad on flesh but it's not exactly great for a building's structural integrity either.

    "You shoot at me... you shoot at my friends... Stop, or we'll see just who wins 'victory' in a contest of shooting!"

    The conversation going back and forth on the radio does bring up the possibility that this person(?) is an innocent pawn, so Staren's kind of relieved that Persephone can protect them, although she doesn't feel like announcing that to the enemy right now.
Flamel Parsons     "##############################################! #######################################!! ###################!!" The natural mental immune response filters out the entirety of the response to Phasewalker. The sound crackles as it flits near the surface of the mind, a dangerous memetic conduction. No more shots come from within, as the man within, seen through the static, yanks the plug, tosses his sparking, burning rifle aside, and dashes out the back door of the blasted room. He has to move fast, hopping entire flights of stairs with minor levitation, swearing under his breath while he draws his pistol and plugs it in.

    Nothing at all begins to decay, hard. There's rumbling in the ground, that no amount of natural immune reaction could suppress. Dust is being kicked up, and the building's structure is laid bare by the expiration of the memetic hazard censor's half-life. The entire building -- a metal, wood, and concrete mass with architecture not native to any known culture -- is exposed, and decays further. Efforts to reach new areas to attack from are interrupted by brutal shots from Staren's heavy weapon, which smash apart the stairs that the MAD-man takes, above and below, eventually driving him out of the building entirely!

    Candy tears his way towards the building with the demolitions equipment, taking it from precarious to actively descending. With a massive crash, it impacts the revealed structure, and the MAD-man is forced to leap out the front as the entire building pitches backwards. Dust is spreading all over, and the building's great lean causes it to fall easily, as the only building here, of course. There are no other buildings, none that are being revealed by the debris and dust. There is no aged city, decayed for twenty long years, visible through the dust and smoke, in flickering images. No small metropolis that looks as if it once housed millions of people, no narrow streets and abandoned stalls and charred, bomb-blackened surfaces. No strung-up suits of strange combat armor and helmets, marked like trophies. But, if you so choose now, you can see it. You can see one of the lost cities. If you choose.

    The soldier, flickering in perception like the numbers on a clock in a dream, arcs through the air after his great leap from one of the front windows. His pistol blasts angry magenta at every one of the visitors whenever he can see them out of cover, but he stops moving right as he'd hit the ground near Persephone -- a combination of his own levitation and her intent for him not to get hurt. He points his pistol straight at the heart she forms, finger on the trigger. Under his heavy helmet's visor, one can see his teeth grit. He sees what she says. He recognizes something. Hope shines in his soul for a moment... But his mind is hollowed out by the psychohazard, infested top to bottom by MAD. He speaks, in a demanding tone, thick with censoring.

    "DO Y#U RE#EMB#R #######?"

    But if Persephone doesn't perfectly recreate the appearance of easy recollection, he'll start squeezing the trigger rapidly, trying to put four rounds straight through that hand-heart-sign. But at least she got one important thing out of it, whatever ####### is.
Phasewalker     Ainkli's getting nowhere with the city shielded from his perception... so he does. He chooses to see it. He focuses mostly on where the maddened soldier that's still shooting at them as if failing to kill them would mean his immediate and vicious death.

    He doesn't care about the risk. He knows it's there. But that's just an exciting bonus. He could get through this, and survive, and that would be thrilling, wouldn't it?
Staren     Staren's eyes widen as the building becomes visible. She finishes the job, though, making sure it can't be used as a place to attack from. What a strange building. Why is it out here all on its own?

    Wait... there's a lost city here? Of course she wants to see it... And she does, momentarily lowering her weapon as she tries to take in the sight, pointing all drones at it to gather data.

    And then the soldier ends up in front of Persephone, weapon pointed at her, finger on trigger.

    Staren reflexively points her quad ion cannon, but by the time her arm has moved, she remembers Persephone is invincible, and opts to draw the big handheld TK-converted railgun instead, so as to Point it Threateningly at the soldier. Words aren't needed to communicate the idea of 'you shoot, I shoot, and one shot from whatever this is will turn most of your body into paste.'

    The soldier calls her bluff. Damn. She lowers the weapon and looks to Persephone. "What do we do with him...?"
Persephone Kore      Deceit doesn't come naturally to Persephone. Her expression lights up with earnest, light incomprehension. Her eyebrows rise; her hand-heart falters just a little. A second before the MAD-man pulls the trigger, she says:

     "Do I remember what?"

     Four psychic bullets pass between her hands, through her chest, and out the back of her sweater. Persephone isn't on her guard; with her innocent sincerity, she really did believe that plea would work. At point-blank range, heart, spine, and lung give way to-

                           No, that didn't happen.                            

     Two-hundred and fifty milliseconds after being shot, Persephone abruptly isn't shot anymore. She reaches out, grabs the soldier's gun (whether or not it's in reach), and effortlessly makes it stop existing.

     Phony looks up at Staren in the imposing mech, tapping her fingernails on her cheek. "Well, I don't want to hurt him. But we can't just leave him here either, can we? ... I guess we have to bring him back to Hollis."
Staren     Persephone gets SHOT?! Oh wait, no, she's fine. Did Staren really see that?

    If Persephone didn't change her armor's camera records too, she verifies it, and wonders, horrified, Oh no! What if you had been shot in the head?!

    Somewhat shaken, she suggests, "Levitate him for a moment." If Persephone does, Staren opens the armor, warps the 'net-gun' into her hands, and uses it to stick the guy's legs together and his arms to his body. "There. Someone restrain him in the plane, that spell only lasts like half an hour."

    She climbs out and stretches before Considering the city. She practices, trying to bring up the Underworld, the Ocean of Stars in her mind without closing her eyes. She doesn't strain TOO hard at the attempt, though, kneeling and placing her hand on a piece of rubble, thinking about another time she had the power to do this and leaning into anything that feels like a vision...
Cantio Cantio feels it before she can see it. The nothing falls apart, turning from nothing into very much a broken down something that feels like a building crashing down in front of her. It exposes more nothings as well, but she knows there's more to this place than just the one building. There has to be more.

She chooses to see more. It's heart-wrenching to see, and part of her wishes she didn't will herself into seeing it, but it's too late to unring that bell. If nothing else, seeing that lost city means seeing where that soldier is going, and how to best respond in the defense of her allies. Her friends, even.

She sees the soldier aiming at Persephone and Staren aiming at the soldier. She trusts in both of them enough to have that situation handled, so she turns her attention towards what Flamel mentions about checking out the buildings. With so many of them visible now, it can't be easy to pick just one to start with.

And yet, she does because it is. The building that she and Candy wrecked to get the soldier out of hiding should do nicely, but sorting through all that rubble and separating the useful materials from the debris of that single collapsed building could take days. Weeks, even!

And yet, it's done in mere seconds. A pixelated ripple appears behind Cantio while she mulls over how to do this, and she promptly yelps when a hand is placed on her shoulder. It's another Cantio, but wearing a slightly different and dirtier farmer's outfit than what she's wearing now. The second Cantio sets down a similarly dirty briefcase, and then she points at the building.

"A team can handle this. Just don't forget to have them handle it before you leave!" The second Cantio explains, then disappears as quickly as she appeared while leaving the first Cantio dumbstruck on what just happened.

"... What? Uh. Wait... What?" She stares at the briefcase for several moments, then opens it open finally as piles of STUFF spill right out of it. It's all sorts of bits and bobs from the the rubble, somewhat messily organized in rough alphabetical order and crammed right in there to skip the immediate need to actually dig through all the rubble and separate everything out.

"Hhhhow?"
Candy Danger! Bad! Look not upon the Un-Place!
They have the advantage here. We have sssseen what we came here to ssssee.
In matters of clothing, defer to the tailor.

     Candy chooses not to see the un-city. His thoughts about the agency notwithstanding, Hollis and Flamel do generally appear to know what they're talking about, and there's no need to throw everything at this just yet.

     It does make avoiding the MAD-Man's fire more difficult, angry magenta or no. As Candy hurriedly kills the ignition of the truck, bullets shatter the glass. One strikes him, causing a dark crimson patch to steadily stain his work shirt. He hisses in pain, hand pressed to his waist as he scrambles behind the thick metal door of the truck for cover. Magenta bullets zip past, and he's forced to press up against the grill before the MAD-Man can catch his exposed legs.

     "Give him one for me," calls Candy half-seriously to Staren and Phony. "That peashooter hurts." Of course... Phony can just decide not to be. If he's going to do this without seeing the city, then he needs more ways to defend himself. If things had gone just a little different...

Time stops, for a house meeting.

*Boys, how can I be like Phony?*

You should have listened, when your father told you to eat your greens. I'm afraid you've done all the growing you're going to do.
*Fuck you. I mean grabbing shit with my mind, and you know it.*
Sssshe would teassse you, too.
She is a beautiful paradox--strong because she is gentle, and gentle because she is strong. You are too willful, your magic too fixated on the material, to completely match her strength. But the gentlest among we three may teach you a way to grasp a fraction.
Underworld dark, but safe! Warm. Boy listens... boy thinks back to when she visited. Use Unseen Arm for holding, touching, not making.

Time resumes... and nothing seems to have happened. The MAD-Man's shot dissipates against Phony's will, and Staren's net blasts outwards to envelop the assailant's limbs. "I got him," says Candy, as a rope burns itself into his waiting hand, a bottle of top-shelf tequila in the other, followed by a tin funnel that clinks atop the neck of the bottle. Concerning.

     "C'mere, you," he says. If Phony will let him go, the MAD-Man finds himself pulled towards Candy, who will tie him up again just for good measure, then use the funnel to get him so blackout drunk he couldn't possibly concentrate enough to do any mental bullshit.
Flamel Parsons     The soldier's gun vanishes in a puff of psychic energy. His anger surges. "YOU'RE ONE OF THEM!! THE PSYCHONAUTS! #######################################! ######################################?! ##! ##!! #############!!!" He shouts something accusingly, something that a mind's immune system filters aggressively. Whatever his memetic hazard is, it involves something targeting the Psychonauts themselves. No wonder they kept getting so much of these psychowarfare attacks! The webbing slams into him in spite of an effort to become far more invisible, and he's trapped and bound. Telekinetic hands swarm around, trying to tear webbing off and punch the people capturing him, but Candy has his own solutions for a psychic, and he applies them quite eagerly. Flamel's back on his feet enough to snatch the webbed and roped soldier up with one big TK hand and bring him aboard the Pelican, staggering alongside the man and groaning with the pain, muttering a little, though in a mostly cheerful way. "Wow! Dang, Candelario, why did we spend all that time inventing psi-suppressing helmets? That's genius! Bob Zanatto would be proud." Alcohol solves all problems!

    Cantio's efforts bear plenty of fruit. A lot of this is simple survival stuff: Food, clothing, medicine, even some books to keep the brain functional. Lots of music, old and some new stuff, recorded off stray radio transmissions. Judging by the complete lack of any money, delivery packaging, or similar, a lot of things have been stolen from neighboring areas, though sometimes there's blatantly stolen things from entirely different regions or worlds, random assortments of bits and bobs like electronics, weapons parts, and other suchlike, in varying stages of agedness. Most significantly represented here, though, is the video editing and burning equipment.

    And the most important example is a single intact video cassette, labeled "VICTORY DAY". It feels like it's covered in mental static electricity, a fuzzy sensation that lets you know in no uncertain terms: Watching the contents of this video cassette will instantly endow the observer with the urge to do something drastic that could incite global thermonuclear warfare.

    It is not rewound.

    Staren gets a good look into the past. Why is this place like this? Why is this city so bombed-out, damaged? She sees...

    An arcing intercontinental ballistic missile, whooshing through the air. It plunges down as its intentions are made more clear. It slams into the hillside just near the city; imprecise, sure, but precision isn't needed. The expanding sphere of shining white heat and pressure dissipates, leaving behind a slower, thick, misty sphere of purple psionic energies, which blasts over the whole city, and then, there is no city. For twenty years, there is nothing Staren can track, until suddenly, today, there it is again.

    It's hard to tell what went on. A psy-tech weapon of some sort?

    The city itself, for those who choose to see it, seems to not be harmful directly. Flamel's chosen not to, and he's not panicking about evil psychic energies in their brains, after all! It must just be one piece of a bigger puzzle, one that forms the memetic hazard when seen all at once. For now, the city itself seems... startlingly mundane. A quickly-industrializing southeast asian city caught in a snapshot of 1962, with a totally unfamiliar culture. The signage is unreadable, the buildings full of far too much information to find any useful specific thing, and... specifically, the most notable thing is the armor, helmets, and weapons strung up like trophies. There, ten Trance Trooper helmets kept as trophies (see True Psychic Tales no. 61, psi-cadets!), over there, some of Frontal Lobe's minion-brains (#245), and here, a variety of the Noodler's henchman armor and masks (#146), all strung up as a warning. To who, though? It seems to be implying other parties with knowledge of this invisible city.
Staren     Staren is punched by telekinetic hands. "What?" It's like punching someone in armor -- the magic is still there -- and by the time she's realized what's happening, Candy has a solution ready.

    Staren leans into the vision. The city was nuked... wait, no. What?

Persephone can see a memory:
    Staren is in orbit over a planet in his fighter. And he's looking out through his flightsuit's helmet, and the canopy, at what's left of the alien roboskeleton mothership that had to be stopped at all costs.

    She knew to expect flashes, not mushroom clouds, but where each of the eight warheads detonated is instead a glowing cloud in the shape of a skull, against all logic and reason, and the vacuum of space is filled with hellish, demonic SHRIEKING--

Now:
    "What... what did they DO?" What is that weapon?! Staren's seen weird-tech superweapons before and... they're not good news!

    Also, drones are searching the city. "That vision... is this city even from this world? Or another timeline? Or rather..."

    Staren turns to look towards the city. "Has *everything else been rewritten* since this city was here, and now it's... all that's left of how this world used to be...?"
Cantio The soldier screams about Psychonauts, and Cantio's attention is diverted upwards for a few moments. "Is everything okay up there?" She asks, more out of obligation than out of actual concern.

She knows they've got this in the bag, and she's also a little distracted about what she just did to worry as much about that as she normally would. Looking through those retrieved materials, she doesn't quite understand the significance of them right away, although it does eventually dawn on her the longer she looks at these things.

"This... This whole place was a warzone. A siege, perhaps, if people had to fight for long hours or through campaigns lasting weeks. A lot of this might have been scavenged, too, from whatever they could find."

That certainly puts the bombed out and explosion-marred buildings into perspective. It's a grim perspective, too, but that video still remains a mystery to her. She doesn't have a VCR on her, and video cassettes themselves are something of a weird relic to her as she looks the thing over.

<J-IC-Scene> Cantio says, "'Victory Day'... That's come up a couple of times already, right?"
<J-IC-Scene> Persephone Kore says thoughtfully, "Defiance."
<J-IC-Scene> Persephone Kore says, "Not celebrating Victory Day, but against it, I think."
<J-IC-Scene> Cantio says, "I have a weird plastic brick with Victory Day written on it. I think this goes in a casette player."
<J-IC-Scene> Staren says, "There's no WAY it's a good idea to watch that."
<J-IC-Scene> Flamel Parsons says, "That would be what we traced to, I think! It must be the cassette that transmitted the memetic payload into whoever wrote those hazardous letters."
<J-IC-Scene> Flamel Parsons says, "I can feel it from here, wow!"
<J-IC-Scene> Cantio sharp inhale "O-oh. Uh. Is it safe to touch? Should I put this down?"
<J-IC-Scene> Flamel Parsons says, "I think it's fine! As long as you don't *watch* it."
<J-IC-Scene> Cantio says, "Oh! Good. I'll bring it back, then, and... It looks like all the film inside is bunched up on one side, so it might be hard to watch by accident, anyway."
<J-IC-Scene> Flamel Parsons says, "Ooof, not rewound. We'll leave it like that for now!"

Best to leave the actual inspection of that thing to the experts, and just reap the fruits of their research after it's done. She still needs to figure out how she did that thing with the other Cantio, too, but Staren's given her a bit of a jump start on how that all works.

Cantio closes her eyes, and multiple other Cantios start to appear nearby. There's five in total, including one that's dressed just like she is minus the hat, and that's probably enough to work with here. "Okay... I think you know what to do, right?" They nod. "Great! So... Er. Right, then once you've sorted through everything, send it back here with me. Er." She points at Farmer Cantio #2. "You, and remind Past Me to use a team for this."

She's already getting a headache trying to understand this.
Phasewalker     Ainkli lets his psychic shields drop, and stands up. He clutches the spot where he was shot with the psychokinetic amplifier, and looks around the 'not quite there' city around him. It still holds a strange chromatic aberration, as his mind struggles to make sense of the conflicting mental processes. Then he turns and begins to follow Flamel back to the Pelican. He's not going to linger here if he can help it. It's like standing around in old Chernobyl, right? He might develop new and interesting mental problems just by being in this blasted former city.

    He doesn't have much to say now. The others have said and done all the really important parts of this.
Candy      "Probably 'cause the helmets don't make you horny, G-Man, but that's how come I made the rope." Candy taps his temple and nods sagely. He does briefly venture into the Pelican to put the tequila away. They may need it later, depending on how well this guy holds his liquor.

     After stowing it, he heads into the cockpit. "Jesus." He closes the door behind him. The console looks about forty to fifty years ahead of what he's used to--but he can at least figure out where the radio is. Sending transmissions is very much more risky than receiving them. If someone is looking, they can find it, and there's not much he can do to keep them from finding it--e-warfare is far beyond the technology of his world.

     But... ciphers, those are very popular right now. To the uninitiated, it just sounds like pops and squeals. To the Watch cells he'd picked up earlier, however, it's crystal clear.

COMING TO YOU LIVE FROM SECTOR DAGGER ONYX. STOP. PHANTOM SOLDIERS HARD TO SEE BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE. STOP. GET YOU A PENCIL AND WRITE THIS DOWN. STOP. THEN COME AT NIGHT AND DO EXACTLY WHAT I TOLD YOU. STOP.

     It sounds like these guys have made themselves a royal pain in the ass. Like they've taken loved ones. So Candy provides clear, detailed instructions on how to hide one's mental presence, trusting that Watch operatives and sympathizers already know the basics of hiding their physical presences. If Hollis wants intel, that's exactly what she's going to get--and she can get it without anyone being unnecessarily exposed to the disease.

     The plan is simple. Candy provides the equipment, the local cell hides it and sets it up. An old-school, analog series of radio transmitters purpose built to play only a single tone, each slightly larger than a human fist, each keyed to a different tone corresponding to an agreed-upon portion within this 'sector.' Pressure plates and tripwires, buried under cover of night, will set off the transmitters, sending the corresponding tone to a receiver in the nearest Watch safehouse.

     Matching the tone to the region and counting the frequency of tones should provide some limited insight into movements, the daily goings-on, and give an idea of when to expect a major push.