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Lilian Rook     The California/Nevada border. One of the few borders without an ocean that could sincerely be called one, in this day and age. It is both a testament to the tentatively enduring success of the old United States' ambitiously scaled final military operations, and the eternal will of the state of California to never ever integrate with the rest of the country.

    As Lilian had explained, the disproportionately massive size of the US military machine had carried the country well through the early years of the Onslaught, and its nuclear stockpiles through much of the middle, allowing it to ride out a lack of magical backbone until the later stages. With the relative lack of Antegent attacks anywhere around the coasts, most of the country's surviving population repeatedly fled further and further east, west, and south, until only a few states remained meaningfully inhabited.

    Rather than consolidate forces into a handful of self-sufficient industrial arcologies like the pattern in Europe, or absorb refugees into the growing power bases of the strongest military leaders and their fortresses as in Japan, the United States had gone and quarantined entire states from the rest of the country, relying on its wealth and scale of resources to maintain access to valuable land.

    This is why California turns out to be one of the last green places on Earth. Certainly, one of the last places one can pile into the back of a big black jeep with lifted suspension and see trees outside of the windows more often than drilling towers, and even drive on asphalt roads. Lilian has secured such a suspicious ride, no plates, tinted windows, bulletproof plates and all, by means of money, and has taken several of those baffling onyx polygonal tokens --the ones with all the geometric icons-- recovered from Damien's safe and the dead agents at Caelton, and applied them around the interior. Why? Because they completely fuck sensors of all kinds, that's why.

    This is also why, as the palms turn to scrub and the scrub turns to desert, what first comes into view isn't the two mountain ranges that flank the passage into Nevada, but the towers atop them, and the walls beneath the towers, and then the barricade across the open flatland that looks like someone built an entire hydroelectric dam on land. A skyscraper of concrete and metal that stretches as far as the eye can see, the few gates along it comically tiny by comparison, even possessed of its own helipads.

    Obvservatory domes up top give off eye-stabbing glitter in the high sun, white radar dishes spin on tall masks, radio transceivers blink and crackle, and missile silos point vigilantly eastwards. Since there's no Warpgate anyone can find in Nevada (likely because nobody lives there), Lilian has insisted that playing it cool is definitely the best way to get into the former state. Unfortunately, unlike Japan, America has no love of the Immunes corps at the governmental level, and is stingy with its secrets. She has no back end connections with any Americans within the Phantom Circle, and technically being here is probably illegal anyways.

    All said, there is literally only one 'civilian' checkpoint for miles. Of course, the number of parked GDF vehicles and nested barricades would be sufficient to hold the golden gate bridge from a zombie horde, but comparatively, it's very light compared to the wall itself, staffed with as many border officials in tan vests and hats as it is white-armoured faceless soldiers.

    Also, Lilian refuses to drive. Because.
Ishirou I4 doesn't drive, because he's likely going to want to be on the lookout in case there ARE people on to them or roaming monsters missed.  He uses this time to keep an area scan up, aiming to make sure that they aren't ambushed or followed.  Otherwise, their mission could be jeopardized.  He's mostly focused during this time, though isn't completely unresponsive.  

When they get closer, he does attempt to look over what's in front of them but realizes that he's likely not going to get anything if their defenses are like anything from before.  The barriers made to keep out psychohazards also block his scans.  Which causes him some distress...it hurts his ability to be useful.

In fact, he wonders why he's even coming along because he's mostly useless.  Sure he could TRY and crack the defenses, but then it'd likely leave a lot of people open to attacks from the monsters.  Too much risk...

He sighs finally when they are arriving, looking over things just to confirm his thoughts.  What can he even do..?
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Drive

    Arthur never got his license.

>Arthur: Okay. Ride! And what was in that data?

    Arthur's instructions might have something to help with this. Lilian doesn't have connections, but who knows what Kent had? He sits in the back plugs the data storage in on a tablet to give it a look, and keeps an eye on the checkpoint. Is this *really* the only way through? Maybe the instructions have something he can do about this? Gotta hope.

    In a sensor-fucked car like this, though, is about the only safe time to get a look at everything.

    He scans for things like the Spurs. Maybe the sensor-blockers will stop them? Or maybe not. Is the checkpoint thin enough to Gate the group over, leapfrogging the issue entirely? Yet, with I4 unable to hack, surely a sensor would kick off about that. He's gotta study this a bit to find the way through, but at the very least he's finally got his papers in order if they ask for them.

    His papers are an extensive character sheet. Through legal convolution, they are valid as a birth certificate, proof of Afterus citizenship, license to perform magic, license to play videogames, and one free Coldness Curb-Stomp! EXTREME Slushie at 7-11 if he buys another $1.23 in snacks. His plan is for the layered convolution to make it too exhausting to question.
James Bond      There is a man present at that checkpoint. This same man was present outside the walls of the Urban Center in California. There is no Mark Andrew Dahlberg--but his identification is as flawless as his Arizona drawl. On that day, he had been clothed in the trappings of someone too old-world to fit in, but too new-world to be worth anything. Flannel, jeans, work boots, ball cap.

    Having applied and been approved for a position as a mechanic, he is now clothed in the standard-issue coveralls for the motor pool, complete with an ID badge that shows his uneasy thousand-yard stare. His brown hair is kept in check by a standard-issue flat cap, his neatly trimmed beard doing little to keep him from blending into the background of the checkpoint.

    Mark Andrew Dahlberg is a caul, wrapped around a man whose feet have never touched the soil of Nevada. The wearer of this caul knows enough about cars to drive them, and drive them expertly--but his masters have given him a device to bridge the gap in his knowledge. Contact lenses transmit and receive data from a microcomputer embedded in his pocket knife, to effectively diagnose problems with the vehicles with remarkable accuracy, suggesting tools and the application thereof.

    "How long's this one been parked here? Who was the last person to drive it?" ... "Uh huh. Well, it's no wonder the robots didn't see it. What you're looking at here is someone's pet project. I'd look at the roster to see the last person that checked it out." ... "Because there's a shitty after-market remote start in it. They spliced it to the onboard computer, which is why the battery's dead." ... "Doing it /right/? That's about an afternoon's worth of work, and it's probably out of the robot's comfort zone. I can get started right away, unless there's something else you need me for."

    This man is already at the checkpoint by the time the others arrive--not that he'd stand out terribly, aside from the fact that he's in the attire of a mechanic rather than a soldier or official.

    A worn wedding ring on his finger conceals the lens of a very tiny camera, also made to transmit to his contacts. The others will be arriving soon, and the other benefit of this falsified expertise is his ability to sabotage while hiding behind deniability. If it looks like there will be trouble, then one of the vehicles at the checkpoint, wouldn't you know it, will pick that time to break down spectacularly.
Rita Ma      Of course Rita doesn't know how to drive. This is only her second time in a car! Instead she gawks openly at the scenery rushing by so fast, even as desolate as it is, and politely asks Lilian for permission to roll down a window.

     If it's granted, she'll stick her head out for a while and nearly lose her cute little woven sun-hat to the wind; if it's denied, she'll just press her face up against the glass with all the breath-fogging fascination of a kid watching the grocery store lobsters.

     (She spends most of the ride thumbing through a few different books on biology, all shiny-new. There are many benefits to being a marine biologist.)

     Her marveling, of course, only intensifies as that huge barrier becomes visible in the distance. "Whoa...! Is that the 'picket'? I imagined something a lot smaller, like a fence. But I guess that was silly..."

     In her lap there's a little wallet, and in the wallet is an ID card and some folded papers. It's hard to get a close look at them, but if one does, the text and format shiver and blur like sloshing ink as if still undetermined. If Lilian doesn't have them covered for that, Rita can just fabricate identification instantly if she can get a glimpse of the 'correct' format- for herself and, potentially, anyone else.
Staren     "So people who are supposed to be, like, America's Immunes or whatever, intentionally hurt their own people, and we can't go attack them directly because they're using their own people and the threat of Antegents as shields?" Staren sums up her understanding of the situation to Lilian. "...This is exactly what you're good at and I'm not. Just tell me how to help you make sure they never hurt anyone again."

    Oh god, Staren is driving again.

    Now see, Staren has plenty of experience operating vehicles. Mecha. Planes. Hovercycles. Sure.

    But... wheeled land vehicles? Not so much.

    She's fine, honestly, as long as there's no tricky driving. Go slow, go fast, turn left, turn right, she can do all that, just don't ask her to parallel park or drive the transport through a narrow and cramped urban street.

    Fortunately, wide open road is the opposite of that.

    When they come to the checkpoint though, she just gives Lilian a questioning look. If someone DOESN'T have a cover ready, she'll just go ahead and show her Concord ID (since she was told they don't like the Immunes here).

    She has nothing to hide. But part of her brain is planning out what weapons she'll need to call to take out the entire checkpoint.
Lilian Rook     Yes, Rita can roll down the window, says Lilian with the precise intonation of someone's bored and distracted mom. Of course a big shitty government-black hummer-alike has power windows. Upon actually arriving though, Lilian tells her to roll them back up, sit still, and says, "Don't be fooled by it. That's the minimum to make sure something doesn't just crawl through while someone isn't looking." and then frowns faintly. "How many miles of this is there? For a state border?"

    In the shadow of the wall, it is pretty clear that no weaponry on hand is going to take out any significant portion of it. The wall itself appears to be a permanent garrison, with elevators poised to haul materials up from outside without ever having to open its gates to resupply. There are probably twenty different sensor towers in range that'd lock on to anything airborne, and a higher weapon and defense system density per meter than a battleship. There must be thousands of people based on, inside, and around it, on a persistent basis. A true maginot line in every way except actually seeing use.

    Of course, those obnoxious pylons are there too, ready to mildly scromble the brains of anyone with magical sensitivity, but they're much smaller models, lined up along the picket barrier itself, rather than a full perimeter designed to cover the entire area of a major population center. Their band of influence is very narrow. Gating past them is a matter of rolling dice on the scatter chart, but they won't affect very much once the car is through.

    Speaking of which, Lilian in the shotgun seat motions Staren to stop (gently) in the hashed zone, upon which several men saunter over with the lack of urgency yet conservation of suspicion and effort common to people who see only a handful of exits a day from this side. A beige-suited technician comes up to the car and begins waving it down with what looks like a radar gun, consulting a tablet device held in the crook of his arm, and frowning at the lack of meaningful result.

    "Hey. New guy. Dahlberg. Get your ass over here. Figure out what the fuck's up with this car."
Lilian Rook     Of course, Lilian has the basis of a cover ready. Her instructions to Staren are to shut up, look straight ahead, don't speak unless spoken to, and pretend to be a chauffer.

    A knock on the window by a man in dusty grey fatigues and what would seem to be impractically white armoured plates bids the driver and passenger both roll down. "Military ID only." the soldier grunts, immediately betraying the fact that he sounds eighteen, even with a fully enclosed helmet and blue polarized visor. Lilian flashes a platinum-black card and holds it steady within easy view of Rita, however, the man outside the window takes, it, runs it through some kind of card reader for security features, and hands it back with a low whistle.

    When he gets to Arthur, his trying-to-sound-tough response is "What the fuck is this?" He starts looking around for a superior to call over and hand this over to the manager who might have some idea, before Lilian goes "Seriously? You don't recognize the Syndicate as a sovereign authority?" It goes "The who?" "Have you just not been paying attention to anything for the past three years?" "Is this one of those Mul-tye-verse things?" "What do you think?" "Ma'am, I haven't seen a laptop in three years and ten months." "Oh, so you're nearly off your first tour?" "Yeah. Gonna need two more though."

    Then Lilian slides out and hands over something that looks roughly analogous to a credit card, and says "Get the fuck out of my way and retire on Christmas."

    The soldier blocking the window begins hesitating so long that men from further away are calling out and asking what the holdup is. He replies, a little too loud and stressed, that he's still checking IDs. He motions for the rest of the people in the car, silently communicating a 'hurry up with it'.
Rita Ma      Despite her earlier marveling, as they get closer and closer to the wall something starts to nag at Rita. It's not a sensitivity to the brain-scromble fields; she hasn't got an ounce of magical capacity, and it starts before they're in range of those anyway.

     She shifts and squirms restlessly, pulling her arms and legs in close as if she could sink into the seat and disappear.

     They're on the lookout for monsters, aren't they? 'Antegent'... I still haven't seen one. I don't know how alike we are. When they check us, are they going to discover me too? In front of everybody... I don't even want to think about it.

<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Ms. Rook? Are there any Antegent that disguise themselves as human?"
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "Uhhhhh..."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Not well."
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "Parasitize is the best."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "At least, not in the way you're thinking."
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "I remember that...those ones."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Mmm..."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma taps her fingernails on the car's window a few times. "Thanks, Ms. Rook. Thanks, Mr. I4."

     The conversation on the radio sets her slightly at ease. The man in the faceless uniform makes her shiver anxiously for different reasons, but by the time Lilian presents that military ID card, her head's back in the game.

     Within seconds, everyone else in the car finds a platinum-black card- a flawless visual imitation of Lilian's but for customized details- slipped into their pockets, pressed against their palms, or otherwise surreptitiously shuffled off onto them. Rita shows no outward evidence of having been responsible.
Lilian Rook     On The Way:

    "There's no such thing as 'America's Immunes', idiot. That's an extremely special class of individual that renounces allegiance to any one specific nation's interests over others. The only 'country' the Immunes belong to is the Hidden Continent."

    "The Letter Agency is a catchall name for all the esoteric bureaus of Enlightened individuals and projects the existed *before* the Onslaught. During the masquerade period. The people behind the scenes who played with the paranormal in the states. Most of the country's magical knowledge, history, and heritage, was wiped out with the annihilation of the native populations, or lost when British Enlightened went back to Europe after the war of independence."

    "At least one organization belonging to the Letter Agency is only vulnerable at the moment for almost succeeding at a foreign intervention against the Pendragon's reclaimation initiative. All of this was just here already. This is how they live. It's just predictable that someone working for the Agency would be out in the middle of a desert where 'nobody lives' honestly."

    Arthur finds the most obnoxious shit: most of the data on the card is time locked. It self-decrypts in steps, in lieu of having a mysterious deep voice on the phone to tell him exactly enough to know where to look, but not enough to avoid the climax of the thrilling conspiracy probably about to kill him.

    Other than the instructions about 'it's not Area 51; it's never Area 51, you idiot' being pretty clear, most of what he gets is navigation data for following a number of old highways in specific order. The order seems to be almost arbitrary, taking thrice as long as necessary to just go northeast, where it seems to be headed, before finally turning an offroad detour into the middle of the desert. It also has a ticking clock, timed to sunset, which seems vaguely ominous.
Ishirou I4 takes the card that is produced by Rita, though how the situation comes down goes a bit different, he should have expected that Lilian had some plan to get them this far.  The scanner might not have been part of the plan, but that can be circumvented.

His scans can't get very well past the wall, but it's already showing that he can get some things, it's just not consistent, and the wall is only a single fort here, not an area...so past that he'll have his full ability again.  He remembers hating those things, but he realizes he wasn't really in a good headspace in the last mission.

On reflection, these things could be very useful.  He could try and see if he could steal the plans and see about later integration or improvement elsewhere.  That was for later, right now...

He waits until they get out of the car, looking at the guy's machine.  He waits for him to be distracted with Lilian still, before aiming to try and remote hack the device.  He doesn't shut it down but instead wires it so that it will recognize each of them as human, before shorting out.  This way he doesn't have to worry about future uses of it letting in monsters.

They might not exactly be on the same team, but it's no reason for all of these people to die because of their leader guy.  
Staren     Staren sighs at being called an idiot for calling the Letter Agency 'America's Immunes', but lets it slide. She nods at the explanation of why America is low on native mages.

    Oh. It's THAT kind of checkpoint. When they come in sight of the wall, Staren asks, "How are we supposed to get through THAT?" Don't be fooled by it? "*This* is the minimum? Shit, if the Coalition had walls like this around all the territory they *claim* jurisdiction over, we'd be in real trouble..." She glances over at Lilian as they approach. "Are they really gonna put THAT much effort into their defenses and then let troublemakers like us just drive in?"

    The person looking in the driver-side window sees a 20-something catgirl wearing aviator sunglasses and a dark, desaturated red beret, a black loose-necked turtleneck, and a knee-length A-line skirt (there's a slit in the back for the tail) that matches the hat and has a thin horizontal Concord Orange stripe just above the hem. (Also: Black leggings and brown boots, but that's hard to see through the window.)

    Look, she's trying, okay? She hasn't had to Clothes her entire life. The hat, glasses, and top probably give it a bit of a 1960's/1970's vibe that would fit right in on Flamel's Earth. It's not a combat outfit but she CAN literally just summon whatever gear set she needs. Still, a little old paranoia remains, thus the trusty laser pistol holstered under the skirt, and Staren's labcoat is in her bag which is in arm's reach in the vehicle somewhere.

    When the black ID cards appear, Staren hands THAT over instead of her concord ID or her own Immune test results card (if she can even see that's what Lilian handed over.) Who knows if her real one would make any fakes the others use look out of place?
James Bond      "Begging your pardon, but she's purring like a cat, mister," says Dahlberg, having jogged over. He says it with the precise authority of someone who just Knows these things by the sound of them. Then, a sniff at the air as an invisible data feed informs him of something to support the bluff. "Brake pads might need a replacement next month or two, but this is onna the best I've seen all day. Lemme just check one last thing--hold on, miss, if you wouldn't mind," he utters to Staren.

     There's a tool in his hand--a mirror angled so that he can see what's underneath the humvee-alike. He looks over his shoulder as the young man is given what's clearly a credit card, and a knowing, sly wink thrown his way. He works his way around to the other side. "She's good! Guess drinks are on you tonight, huh?" When the car accelerates, 'Dahlberg' is gone.

     Riding on the undercarriage of cars is hot, cramped, and extremely dangerous. For superspies in superhuman physical condition, this is somewhat mitigated. Bond has a disguise and a ride, now. All he needs is patience and a little bit of luck.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Oh, we can't use this yet. Keep it in the inventory.

    You're the boss. Here's your quest markers, though.

>Arthur: Can we do something about the IDs?

    Yeah, some people are having trouble with this. Unfortunately, Arthur has three cool things at his disposal: Fighting, crafting things at a cool crafting station, and doing space magic. Guess which three things he can't, for various reasons, do here?

>Arthur: All of them? You don't have to be rude.

    Bingo, buster. Arthur's sitting this one out, on account of already pretty much addressing it. He takes his character sheet back with a stiff nod. "Good work." He says in his best "official business, got places to be" tone, shuffling through its pages a couple times to make sure everything's in order and stowing it. He nods at Lilian in a way that says, silently, in a single motion, "Yeah, I got nothing, sorry, but thanks for the help." He was hoping for more HOTL-type shit that he could interfere with geometrically, a checkpoint full of actual humans is a *problem*. He has to wait it out, while others solve it!
Lilian Rook     Rita's Very Legitimately and Unquestionably Acquired identifications certainly pass visual inspection without a second look, but also don't read for shit digitally. Which is why it's good and cool that I4 is hacking the scanner anyways to verify them manually. The incredibly invasive airport-grade body scanners even verify that he is a real boy with real organs. And Rita has the correct number of organs too! Nice! If only either of those things were actually true.

    The techie stares at 'Dahlberg' with grumpy, boomerish disbelief, but considering Dahlberg knows cars like magic, and this dude just reads what the computer says, he has to take the new hire's physical examination for what it is. Waving back, he confirms that the very suspicious car is as clean as he is authorized to check, and the soldier actually at the window apologizes for taking up time, glances to Dahlberg, nods just an inch, turns back, and whispers 'thank you' as he steps back from the window.

    "Dahlberg? Where's that refugee sonuvabitch got off to now?" can be heard distantly wafting from behind, as the jeep churns dirt through a long concrete tunnel, just before the gate shuts.

    Lilian's presumptions are correct. Anyone above the actual bottom rung of the least dangerous part of that job knows not to escalate a black van with mysterious sensor blackouts on it, and none of the mid-tunnel gates or pylons even activate along their way. A few minutes on the road, and they'll be too far to examine anyways. Probably about the time Bond would like to get out from under the car.

    He might want to the second they cross the threshold, but he'll have to wait.

    It takes less than a minute to accelerate through the tunnel, and in that brief transition of scorching sun to pitch dark to scorching sun again, the jeep comes out on the other side of the wall, and what feels like the other side of a hundred years of time. What had been a bleak and austere, pristine concrete monolith from one side, is covered in crisscrossing rows of meter deep gouges that utterly dwarf the low vehicle driving away from them, and pockmarked with what must be millions of small craters. Large splotches of ugly brown glass mar its upper reaches, and the bottom floors are burnt the colour of charcoal.
Lilian Rook     The jeep drives past endless rows of troopers, in fully sealed suits, roving the desert ahead in tight formation, blasting the earth inch by inch with the white hot flames of portable flamethrowers. Flatbed trucks are in the process of hauling back what looks like heaps of misshapen bones, trussed up like lumber, to be dumped into mobile incinerators. Excavation equipment is in the process of starting to fill in the holes it'd dug, whatever it'd removed the ground long gone by this point in the day. The road is so freshly paved that it might have been patched up yesterday. Bond can still smell hot tar.

    But the long, long road ahead, is not nearly so well kept. Where 'the picket' begins to recede, and only the odd white gleam of forward sensor posts and advanced vanguard batteries can be seen atop worn rocky plateaus and stranded hills, here and there, the landscape changes over dramatically.

    The earth becomes like coarse, dark blue sand, soaking up the blazing sun without emitting any of it back, creating a perversey deep chill in any amount of shade. No shrub, cactus, or flower than once lived here can be seen for any number of miles; instead, the drive must pass under the shadows of gigantic growths like failed skeletons half-buried in the dirt, twinkling with eerie living lights on their shaded faces. Translucent ribbons of something like giant kelp form dense groves and create opaque screens of caught and split light, reaching multiple storeys into the air, and waving in the empty air under an ocean current that doesn't exist. Weird, tortured formations of black obsidian form inexplicable, seemingly meaningless formations along the roadside. Blood red ivy, with an unfortunate extreme resemblance to a living circulatory system, grows all over the old rocks still exposed through darkly iridescent underbrush that flickers its lights as if transmitting and yet rises and falls as if breathing, occasionally spewing white vapour into the air.

    And, it seems, the off-fork Arthur's map shows doesn't exist. The road is completely destroyed and thoroughly overgrown in that direction. The only thing marking it is a tall, sun-worn rock, carved with a number of oblique pictographic signs, which mainly seem to involve sun designs, and squiggly snakes.
Rita Ma      Rita is transparently and absolutely sweating bullets when she goes through the scan. Her poker face isn't worth shit, if she even bothers to try to have one. Fortunately it beeps her through, thanks to I4, and she tries to stifle a deep exhalation of relief.

     "Thank you, Mr. Dahlberg!" she says sunnily before getting back into the car. His clinging beneath it completely eludes her notice- she's so preoccupied with having survived scrutiny that his stealth skills are almost wasted.

     "I can't believe we made it," Rita sighs once they're on their way and safely out of earshot. "Thank you, Mr. I4! That was you, wasn't it? You really were amazing!" For whatever reason, she has no inclination to take credit for creating those military IDs. Without a familiarity for the arbitrary shit she materializes, it's hard to pin back on her.

     Her books don't get much more use. First the scarred and pitted wall catches her eye out the back window, making her twist around to stare at it in slack-jawed awe. Then the bizarre Antegent-terraformed hellscape beyond snags her attention; the enormous translucent kelp, the iridescent bushes, the vantablue sand...

     "Is this what they're trying to make the world into?" she wonders aloud, her face nearly pressed up against the glass. "Why? It feels so..." A pause. She picks the word carefully. "Indifferent."
Staren     Staren slows the vehicle for a moment when she comes out of the tunnel into full view of the 'picket'. "...We were going OUT, not IN?" She turns her upper body and head to look back at the wall, and the troops to each side, before putting her eyes back on the road and accelerating again. "What are they... doing? Are they *still* cleaning up bones from... before?"

    Driving through a post-apocalyptic wasteland is familiar, comfortable territory, though Staren would feel more at home in a larger, armored transport. But then things get weird. "Geeze. It's like that one world that was totally terraformed by AIs a few years back. At least we're not at risk of breathing in hostile nanites, right?"

    She looks at Lilian.

    "Right?"

    Softly, Staren mutters as she looks back to the 'road' ahead, "At least my IRMSS will fight them... I think..."

    "Is this what the Antegents' homeworld is like? It's like I just drove through a rift..." She looks at Lilian again, "Is any of this safe to take a sample of? I know some people back home who'd *love* to study it."

    Eventually they come to the fork in the road that isn't. Staren brings the car to a stop. "Is it concealed by illusion, or are we gonna have to MAKE a path?" She sounds like the idea of making a path is an entirely normal and expected, if tedious, activity.
Ishirou I4 waits for the tunnel to be over, having been forced to be content with just knowing what's in his general area.  Rita praises him but he waves it off.  "Naw, that's easy.  Anything related to data or machines is child's play.  Though..." he pauses, "What about these?" he says.  

Though once are they out now.  I4's not really sure what's going on here.  No wait, once he sees enough he thinks he can piece it together.  His eyes try to take everything in, those blue eyes glowing faintly as he tries to analyze the data that the POD that's now floating near him is trying to feed him.  Hopefully, the structures are not functional enough to let him get data going.

The idea first is to try and determine what the current situation of the organism around them is.  It's obviously dead, but what it left behind is not.  Is it an ecosystem?  Then from there trying to determine if it's dangerous, or if they need to do something about it.  How far does it extend?  How recent was the battle?  

Are the forces here trying to burn it away, or let it extend its reach?  It feels like they're trying to fight back against the dead creature, but it's also a very long and dangerous walk.  Or ride...    
Staren     If no 'the next step is X' is forthcoming, Staren puts the car in park, grabs her bag, and disembarks (but stays on the visible road, keeping her distance from the xenoflora while unprotected.) She warps in some drones to start scanning the area, and a stick to throw at the place where the road SHOULD be, to check for illusion.

    Depending on how things go, she MAY summon the same armor Lilian saw at Langely for herself, or a new vehicle for the party to continue on in: The 'hovermech' is exactly what it says on the tin, a hovercar Staren obviously modded with junkyard materials to add legs with maneuvering thrusters and a dual anti-infantry railgun turret-mounted on the underside.

    The main part of the body is what you'd expect of a mid-to-large-size car that doesn't need wheels, and the whole thing has a fresh white paintjob. Staren affectionately pats the side, "This baby got me through a lot when I was trapped in the past."
Arthur Lowell >==>

    Arthur calls his directions, but... "Man, this reminds me of that gif I kept seein', of the DUDE DRIVING INTO THE LAKE. Damn, 2009 CULTURE was the BEST." He glances back at the map, back at the mysterious not-a-road... "So we JUST DRIVE? or WAIT?" He pulls out the ticking clock and his tablet, holding them both up as if the road were simply going to open itself cleanly. Roads... roads are a kind of space, right? What if he analyzes this from a geometric perspective? Time-sensitive things never work well for him, but space-sensitive? The movement of the sun is a little more space and a little less time, after all.

>Arthur: Hey, I4 wants more terrain to scan, can you do that?

    Well, fucking around with the entire local space might be a bad idea. What about repeating it spatially? He snaps, popping up a 1:412 geometric repetition of the local space, about a foot wide above his hand. His diorama of the area is a replica of the local space, including a tiny 1:412 Arthur holding a 1:169744-scale recreation of local space, which includes Arthur holding a 1:69934528-scale recreation, and so on. Do NOT look at that part too closely. But the rest should be good for I4's scans, and for Arthur's own analysis of the roads, trying to follow those directions...
James Bond      This would be one of those situations where clinging to the undercarriage is less than ideal even for someone with Bond's abilities. He manages to last through the more earthly desert, even with the smell of tar assaulting him, and hot winds blasting in his face.

     The darkened, kelp-rich desert is quite another story. A near miss with the white vapor from one of those unnerving, pulsating masses of ivy--his head jerks to the side and he nearly loses his grip, the metal of the inspection mirror groaning as he quickly readjusts it.

     He can't just rap on the passenger side door and ask to be let in--even though at least one person here would likely do exactly that. A series of awkward, short shimmies, backwards. The inspection mirror holds, though it grows concerningly more bent out of shape with each one.

     Bond stifles a scream as another burst of vapor grazes his left index finger--the skin is melted and bloodied just from that fleeting graze, but his grip tightens enough to render his knuckles white, the metal of that appropriated automotive tool squealing its displeasure. His upper body emerges at the back end of the vehicle, and he pulls himself onto the rear bumper, adopting a crouch.

     One end of the inspection mirror is leveraged behind the spare tire on the tailgate. That, and his low center of gravity, will keep him mostly stable.

     The mirror end of the tool has the added benefit of allowing him to see in front of the vehicle.
Lilian Rook     "Who knows?" Lilian replies to Rita, trying her best to be suitably indifferent herself. Her elbow is up on the windowsil, chin in her hand, eyes superficially glazed as she watches the countryside --or what used to be countryside-- scroll by. It's reasonably convincing. "It's different wherever you go. There aren't all that many Antegent that can alter terrain over scopes like this; they pop up in the middle of nowhere, spread and spread, and you're always sacrificing some amount of men to get rid of them. The issue is that there are enough of them, and enough of those are powerful enough, that it's more economic to retreat and let them chew up uninhabited land, than to try and fight them for stretches of wilderness."

    She yawns. "But different landscapes don't mean much. Earth already had thousands of different landscapes. North Africa looks different than east Asia looks different from west Australia. Maybe it is a faithful recreation of something or other. Maybe it's something they think up themselves. Maybe it's just part of how they are, like ants building hills. Maybe it's only something they dream of." Lilian then shakes her head at Staren. "That looked like a daily burn to me. Cutting down everything that approaches the wall and torching it off so it doesn't spread inside. That means whatever Antegent is responsible for all this is still alive. And likely a big one. I'd prefer not to encounter it right now."
Lilian Rook     I4's scans corroborate exactly what Lilian is saying. The surroundings look like they'd exist at the bottom of a magical ocean trench around a whalefall being perceived by an artist on an unhealthy level of bad LSD, but they're very much alive. Even the stuff that looks like bones. There's no indication at all of why it hasn't overtaken the road itself, nor that standing rock; the cleared areas are clearly highly anomalous. If he aims very, *very* precisely, at an invisible boundary by the roadside, more or less amounting to pixel hunting with tiny mouse movements to get into that one frame where the indicator turns blue, he gets the digital equivalent of a spinning compass needle.
Rita Ma      "Mmm," Rita says softly, still showing a lot more unabashed wide-eyed interest than Lilian. "And like humans build cities. ... But you said a lot of the Antegent are dead already, right? Maybe this is 'incomplete'. Missing an ingredient from something that didn't survive, or an ingredient in another dead thing's process."

     Rita isn't the first to get out, but once someone else sets the example, she opens her door and steps out into the alien ecosystem herself. Her demeanor's still timid and hesitant, as if any of the unfamiliar structures or flora might rear up and bite her. As the moments pass and that (hopefully) proves not to be true, though, she gradually becomes less tense.

     The temptation to put some of the meatier-looking flora in her mouth is intense, but for now she stays focused on that carved rock. It feels like a signpost, doesn't it?

     "Carving things in stone is hard," she says decisively. "People don't do it unless it means something. Ms. Rook, is this rock 'magic runes' like you use? Or is it some kind of message?"

     She has no objections to hopping in Staren's hover-car if that seems to be the way things are headed, though. "Air boat," she says decisively, and with no small amount of enthusiasm.
Lilian Rook     Stopping the car properly finally allows Staren to conclude faking knowing how to drive. Lilian picks up all of the bafflers, and hands out the spares to Rita, I4, and good old Mister Dahlberg when he joins the rest of them, keeping one for herself before dismounting. She looks incredibly out of place, on a nowhere road like this, and would feel the exact same amount even were it cacti and road signs to either side.

    "And good for that." she decisively concludes for Rita. When her attention is drawn to the carvings though, she examines them a moment, and then shakes her head. "No, these are definitely just signs. And not all that old. There's a strong possibility it's one of the Native American languages, all of which I have no idea how to speak." She grabs for Arthur's tablet. "You're *sure* this is the right way?"

    Checking out this area spatially shows that the standing stone is oriented such that its shadow will directly cross the long-gone road in fifteen more minutes, and remain that way for only ten more before the rays of the sun are going to be comfortably occluded by one of those giant, glow-blinking bone formations, which will black out this 'crossing' for the remainder of the day. Geometrically speaking, it's hard to distinguish any other meaningful boundary; it's just one road, after all.

    Zooming out is kind of helpful! The road they're on continues quite a ways, until it drops right off the face of the earth and into an abyss from which sensor waves do not return, splitting the ground in half across the whole edge of Arthur's range. The direction the fake road on the tablet shows them seems to point parallel to it.

    Also, there are things moving out there! From out of that pit, twenty, forty, a hundred, two hundred-- a lot of little moving dots, all ambling down the highway, towards where they'd all come from. They'll arrive at the parked jeep in five minutes at best.
Ishirou Two hundred things are coming, which means...they're going to get swarmed if they try to go that way, they can't all fly...uh...

They're not sure where to go..?  He has no idea what is going on either, he's losing the ability to scan along the road up before too long, and this is confirmed by the tablet thanks to Arthur's spacial manipulation...

Ok, they can't go back, but forward is...

Wait, this is one organism.  He pauses for a moment.  He reaches a handout and attempts to biohack the creature, trying to cause the area they are going to travel to start 'withering', aiming to try and forge a path out of the way they need to go.  

Hopefully, this won't catastrophically backfire.  
James Bond      Bond eventually joins the others, after tearing off a clean strip of his oil rag to tend to his burned finger. The baffler is tucked into one of the pockets of his mechanic's coveralls.

     "Whatever's going to happen ought to happen soon," he opines, checking his watch. He doesn't bother with the Arizona drawl--and though Lilian likely pieced it together from her time working with him before, now would be when everyone else can likely tell. If they don't know who he is exactly, they'll know he's at least 'that weird guy from the radio.'

<J-IC-Scene> Staren says, "Ah, shit. How are we moving forward, once THOSE things are dealt with? Cut a path? Fly? Something else?"

     "I thought that's what these bloody things were for," he says, patting the shape of the baffler in one of his pockets. Bond is irritatingly calm, here, not even reaching for a weapon when he verifies the blips moving on I4's tablet. Instead, he procures a pack of Lucky Strikes and a flick-open lighter.

     If they're about five minutes away, that's enough for a quick smoke.
Rita Ma <J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "Uh."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma ?
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "Look at the tablet."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma !!
<J-IC-Scene> Staren says, "Ah, shit. How are we moving forward, once THOSE things are dealt with?"
<J-IC-Scene> Staren says, "Cut a path? Fly? Something else?"
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "Deal with them? There are hundreds and no reason to believe they don't stop. We move."
<J-IC-Scene> Staren says, "Which way?"
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "But the path...!"
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "..Ugh..."

     Rita inhales softly, exhales, and starts walking down the fresh-paved road towards the oncoming blips. She doesn't go too far- fifty, maybe seventy feet. Then she stops in the middle of the highway, standing apparently stock-still.

     This many monsters... I've seen things like that before. It's more like a flood than a battle. Ms. Rook and Mr. I4, I have some idea what they can do. Arthur and Staren, I don't know. But I've never seen any of them build a dam. That means that's my job.

     Between the ominous obsidian rocks and the sky-scraping strands of kelp, between the skeleton-like growths and the natural crags, Rita extrudes hundreds of feet of invisible tentacles and weaves them together into a spiderweb-like net that may as well be a wall.

     Each strand of that invisible spiderweb is a tripwire, and each tripwire is charged with Elon Ark's power- the gravity-and-time-twisting Cryptid she tasted on her very first outing with the Watch. The individual tripwires, the first time each is touched, will release a ripple of light that temporally slows everything nearby to a crawl. A net of them this dense ought to make the charge easy pickings.

     That occupies her for the entire five minutes. She stares blankly out at the horizon, though if anyone approaches her, they can hear wet slithery noises with no apparent origin.

     But this much mass expended... I'm feeling those pangs already. I've just got to hope they're edible. Why couldn't Candy be here?
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: You're *sure* this is the right way?

    "Hey, get off my nuts! This is KENT'S fuckin' MAPQUEST PRINTOUT, not MINE, dawg!" Arthur sasses Lilian plenty, albeit mostly in good faith, quickly. "Look here. My clock's timed to SUNDOWN, right? And the LIGHT is gonna be like... SWOOSH, like over HERE, right, so the SHADOWS go HERE. So it's gotta be something about the STANDING STONE here CASTING A SHADOW, and we go into the SHADOW." He looks up, peering at the stone in question. "Gotta have SPACE MAGIC in there. Maybe I can accelerate it somehow...?" An artificial sun, angled properly?

>Arthur: Analyze the shadowcaster stone, try to pick the lock early so that you don't fucking die in a swarm of evil monsters!!

    Arthur tries to run his magical analysis, and see if there's any way to use an artificial sun to get an exit here faster! If he can angle a real sun-shadow properly, it might get them what they want. He summons up a fresh, second sun using his space powers, and angles it properly, if that seems to be a valid solution...
Staren     Staren concernedly looks at the approaching horde on her sensors, but is waiting for someone to explain *which way they're going*. Arthur does so. "...I don't suppose we could MAKE a shadow that would work? If it has to be a sun, do you think my copy of Utsuho's stuff would be good enough...?" In the mean time, she puts on her coat and warps her vambraces on, flipping the screen on the left one up as she makes selections of on-foot weapons to use and, if desired, distribute among the group, should it come to having to help Rita hold off the horde until the stars align (the sun is a star!)
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Unleash the power of the sun

    "I made SUNS before, I can DO IT AGAIN! The REAL LEGIT SHIT. Gimmie a minute to GET MY ANGLES!" Arthur calls out, slamming his palms together abruptly, causing both hands to start gushing light. If this works, he can hopefully have that sphere of fusion power ready and casting light properly!
Lilian Rook     Despite the increasing time pressure of the situation, Lilian's response to Bond crawling out from under the car is "Took you long enough." and then "Couldn't you have just climbed up into the back seat fifteen minutes ago? Or at least knocked on the undercarriage so I could tell the learner driver how to apply the brakes." However, there is no mistaking that this is a good time to have him back.

    "Sadly, those things are exclusively useful in magic and electromagnetic interactions; Antegent can't use the former and interact erratically with the other." she says, glancing at the toxen. "Though, it's also possible that they don't know we're here. They might be heading to the picket on their own. It has to happen fairly often, if it's that heavily damaged." It only takes her a moment to decide what to say next. "Combat positions. Come on. We have a short window and we can't get around them and come back."

    Even Arthur really can't tell if a fake, or technically real but unnatural, sun would do the trick. None of the signs themselves are magical, and there seems to be no real 'mechanism' that would even suggest anything happens at the auspicious time of day they're all banking on. It's purely faith in what they have and too much of what they don't have. However, making his own sun is as easy as ever! The problem is the *extremely* intense focus and ultra-precise maneuvering it's going to take him in order to produce the exact same shadow against the already, more slowly setting sun. Given how everything magical in the world seems to work with exponential increased returns for exponentially decreased margins of error in 'geometry, broadly', it's probably not something he can just press X on and go!

    Biohacking the flora behind it isn't nearly as demandingly precise. It's *weird*, but not *hard*. The ground beneath is hard-packed and weather worn, and certainly was before it was covered up, but it looks like a dirt horse trail, not a road, and certainly not for driving.
Staren     Learner driver?! "Hey!" Staren objects. "But yeah, you shoulda just radio'd us." If Lilian allows, she has some of her drones taking what readings they can of the sensor-blockers, to see if the effect can be replicated and perhaps used to coat other gear, like another vehicle. Other drones fly ahead... Staren's trying to see if she can get eyes on the approaching monster horde. If they're straight ahead on the road, shouldn't they be snipe-able...?
Lilian Rook     Rita has those five promised minutes uninterrupted, and not a second longer. Even as she is laying the last threads, she sees where the heat haze on the asphalt ahead contains shapes that are certainly not a mirage. The ambient heat, the gentle roll of the ground, and the occlusion of the otherworldly landscape, give less than a kilometer's notice.

    It takes the eye a minute to sort out what it's seeing. The moving mass is so densely arranged that there's no dead space to judge its movements by. Ten foot tall shapes on six foot legs move like a walking forest, but are built like men stretched out in a photograph from the wrong lens width negative, made head to toe of mottled bone-like solid pieces wedged together without muscles, glowing with tens of thousand collective lights, embedded into their weird hammerheads, the grooves in their limbs, and the sides of their dorsal spines. It'd be fascinating to watch the horde on the move, like a herd of flamingos, if they actually moved like one.

    They're sprinting straight at the car, pounding blunt-tipped legs and pumping long-clawed fingers as if berserk. When the group comes into view, their body lights change from a shifting rainbow to a spreading wave of deep blue hues, like a shoal of fish reacting to the emergency evasion of an individual. They're so tall, so strangely shaped, so light-studded, and so *fast*, that it's like an optical illusion, tricking the brain's visual centers into the position of a deer in the headlights, simply blinking and realizing too late how fast they're actually approaching.

    The first wave of them crashes straight into Rita's net, and the pulse of spacetime-altering power immediately stops them dead, forming a broad obstacle for the river of oncoming reinforcements to part around. She can see them gripping at the thread in ultra-slow motion. The sound of their movements is like metal grinding on metal; a harsh, quiet screeching that accompanies every step.
James Bond      "I figured you wouldn't want me underfoot," Bond annoyingly puns back at Lilian and Staren. After another pull on his cigarette, he endures 'combat positions' with a single nod. The spent thing is flicked away. From the inside of his coveralls, Bond procures a compact nine mil pistol. He racks the slide, then digs in his pocket for something. Satisfied, he removes his hand with what appears to be a pocketknife.

     The wooden paneling on the side pops off with pressure from his thumb. It reveals a dial and a small switch--intensity and arming, perhaps. He turns the dial, flips the switch, and tosses it into the path. It begins radiating heat, bright lights flashing from it, randomized animal noises and garbled human speech piped out from tiny speakers.

     One adjustment of Bond's wristwatch, timed right when Rita gives her command, sets off a bone-rattling explosion.
Ishirou Arthur can work on trying to work out the path, I4 will work out making the shade less hazardous for this, and them.  They can't just run right this second, without a way forward.  The map isn't exactly potentially correct?  Or at least not in the way it should be.  Reality warpers are the worst.  The ones from Lilian's world are double the worst.  

There is a point in his biohacking where he gets an idea, not exactly important to the current situation, but rather to his technique as a whole.  That might take some time, but...well still an idea.  For later.

When he notices that Arthur might have some trouble with analysis, he turns his attention to helping Arthur get his angles right.  
Staren     Staren doesn't really NEED a launcher, when she can just pull missiles through the magic micro-wormhole, wirelessly transmit targeting data, and have them launch immediately. With a dramatic wave of her hand, they just appear around her and then streak away on plumes of fire and smoke, reminiscent of a mage firing a homing attack spell or a mecha deploying remote weapons systems.

    Waves of mini-missiles, about a foot long and an inch or so wide, are summoned and launched. Some are futuristic high-explosive, that is, High Explosive But More, other warheads dump enough heat into the air to turn it into plasma, resulting in more heat and less shockwave, and a few are HEAT but more, using shaped charges and computer-controlled aiming to pierce torsos with shaped charges. Staren monitors the results from drones, trying to work out which sorts of attacks work best.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Press X on it and go

    Were you fucking reading AT ALL?

>Arthur: Calculate the kinematics of the entire solar system of Lilian's world

    Well, that's a little bit better. Arthur can't finesse any mechanisms, but perhaps there isn't a mechanism? Perhaps it's a matter of space, light, gravity, momentum... what are the conditions here? In that moment, what force does the sun exert? Where, *exactly*, is it? Don't just estimate positions in the sky. Calculate the earth's current position relative to the sun, the rotation, the velocity, the gravitational pull. Use everything about kinematics, space, and everything else.

>Arthur: Ignore weird wet noises

    And ignore the weird wet noises from Rita. Focus.

    Arthur designs several hundred models for the relative mass, output, and position of the sun and earth in incredibly high precision by deriving them from the conditions of the formation of solar systems, and then, with an array of gates and his second sun, begins to micro-adjust local gravity and teleport the second sun in a sort of complex, non-digital password crack. Go FAST! I4's analysis here can refine the model, but his hacking abilities are also incredibly useful for this lock-cracking of sorts too! Arthur presents a proper gamified interface, a series of inputs (mappable to an Xbox 360 controller) that I4 can use to adjust the process with his own analysis!
Rita Ma      Rita has committed Way Too Much Biomass to her invisible tentacle barricade. The wet slithery noises have stopped, but now some of the sky-scraping strands of kelp sag slightly under the tripwire-tentacles' aggregate weight, and the skeleton-like growths might subtly creak or shift. That's all the evidence of what she's done for now, though it'll become blindingly clear once the Antegent arrive.

     That's the best I can do. But...

     After the net is woven, she drops to her knees and one hand in the middle of the road, holding the other arm across her abdomen. Her face tightens in discomfort, eyes scrunching shut.

     It hurts so bad. So *empty*, like there's a hole in me deeper than my body. Cold, cold, cold, need something warm. When are they getting here? When can I-

     A distant noise. Rita opens her eyes, audibly startles, and pulls herself up to her feet. It's all she can do not to run out towards them, even conscious of her own barricade. Almost unconsciously, she realizes she's drooling and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.

     The monsters hit the tentacle barricade. Haloes of white light spread out vertically from the contact points like raindrops hitting the surface of a lake. As the tentacles discharge their 'magical' payloads, they turn opaque white, becoming bit by bit visible as an enormous fleshy spiderweb protecting the group from harm.

     "*Now*," she remembers to say.

     Where weapons pass through them, Rita shows no pain- they're no longer connected to her body, after all- but they bleed a very human red.

     But Rita herself walks forward as if in a trance. In a flutter of "ribbons", she suddenly looks- from a distance- like she's wearing a blue-white dress. (Anyone close enough, or with augmented eyesight, can spot the truth.)

     The closest Antegent to her, still helpless from the time dilation, simply fall to pieces with a noise like a gunshot as they're shredded by invisible tentacles that lash hard enough to shear steel. She picks up a piece small enough to get her mouth around. A crunch is faintly audible, even back at the car.
Lilian Rook     The fighting at the head of the road, blocking I4 and Arthur from the herd of Antegent that had ostensibly sprinted all the way across Nevada to find them, quickly turns into chaos.

    The fact that the first wave, held still against the web, is pushed through its first layer of threads and into the second, simply by the pressure of the stampede behind it and their immense, tearing claws, is as much of a blessing as an imminent problem, as it forms a solid wall of temporary cover, where scores of enemies are trapped at once. However, attempting to wipe them all out at once means damaging the net and likely letting the rest come streaming through, and so explosives have to be thrown and launched to the sides, where the rest, impatient for blood, are already streaming around.

    Alarmingly, they show absolutely no interest in the heat and light and animal sounds from Bond's spy-bomb, simply running over it, or leaping and clambering off the solid, organic terrain like feral cats, rather than pay it notice. When it swaps to something that sounds like human speech however, a dozen of them all turn around and race towards it at once, mainly to have their arms and heads blown off for reaching for it. Their insides are like a shattered geode, filled with a rainbow of fine crystal hairs and filaments.

    Staren's missile waves are successful in holding back the overflow for several waves, but each wave is coming almost as fast as she can even fire them. Whether she uses HE, PB, HEAT, it doesn't really seem to matter much. The problem is simply that she is stuck trying to backpedal and shoot down hundreds of high-speed enemies that have one hit die but forty HP each. They have no particular resistances, but unless squarely blown to pieces or melted nearish the ground zero of a missile, they leap back up again and keep going, or even crawl on all fours, or drag themselves with frenetic clawing motions at the dirt.

    Lilian pops the boot release, and from under the tarp, throws James Bond the squad area weapon she'd brought that fills up half of it. It's extremely heavy, and it might take a moment to get used to the strangely even, back and forth axis of recoil, but the projected displays are intuitive enough for him to make use of. A gun is a gun, and since they're standing and holding one position, she clearly anticipates two things: that it'll be temporarily more useful to him than the walther, and that she needs both her hands free.

    A second before Rita wades in and that crunch splits the air, Lilian steps right behind Rita, blocking her exposed back. Sharp, swift hand motions, like gripping, torquing, and chaining invisible gear axles, bring together fizzling inkblot magical circles of black and gold, stacked into a compressed line of counter-rotating designs. Firing straight through it, Lilian releases a long, continuous beam of vantablack and infragold static, hissing with a low flywheel scream, which she swings through the space that Rita's tentacles have cleared and slices through the crowd exposed behind them before they can react to the butchery of their fellows, bisecting a few rows that then dissolve from the top down like running water.

    Though they look like bone, and their insides look like crystal, Rita finds that it's more like snapping a rock to get at marrow inside. Layers of gossamer weaves and vibrating membranes, hard rods that burst into warm fluid, spherical organs that all pulse at the same time, and thick and viscous cobalt blue blood that gets all over everything. It's a wildly different taste than animals. Than monsters. Than people. Like discovering 'sweet' after a lifetime of tasting only the other four flavours.

    And then she Hears Them
Lilian Rook     However, all of them are still in the line of fire. A moment's hesitation means being gripped and torn like plastic wrap by fingers like needles, harder than steel, with the strength of an uncaring piece of industrial machinery. Worse, as the initial horde finally starts to thin out, *more* shapes show up on the map; another hundred of the 'humanoids' and thrice that making loping, quadrupedal shapes, all spine and claw and burbling lights as the others, approaching *much* faster.

    Arthur and I4 are obviously on to something. And it's a good thing too; ten more minutes of this probably just isn't feasible. By adjusting for the exact interplay of all celestian conditions affecting the stone marker and the exposed path, the shadow of Arthur's false sun perfectly touches the other side of the dirt I4 has visually uncovered, and then shifts and solidifies into a thick, black, perfectly straight beam, like racing tape. Beyond it, the air shimmers, and everything turns strangely yellow and glittery. Getting the car through it would be a challenge, but there's no telling what's behind it or how far there is to go.
Staren     Okay, yeah, screw this, "We need to go airborne!" Staren warps in the earlier-described hovermech, fires one more wave of missiles, then climbs in. "There's guns in the trunk!" (There are, indeed, guns in the trunk, including five each laser rifles (with underbarrel frag grenade launchers) and laser pistols, a caseless assault rifle and two caseless submachineguns with a few spare mags of futuretech smart material nonsense bullets, a six-pack of frag grenades, one or two suits of body armor (similar in aesthetic to Staren's old armor but much lighter and covered in runes), and scattered between the trunk and the passenger compartment are several knockoff M72 LAWs.)

    As soon as Staren's got her seatbelt on, the twin railguns mounted on the turret under the nose start firing, doing their part to slow the onrushing tide even a little bit. "Get in, get in! Rita!" she calls, moving the hover-'car' with much more precision and skill than she did the jeep and remotely opening/closing doors to pick people up!

    Once they're all aboard, she heads for the mysterious spatial distortion. "Here we go!"
Ishirou Confirmation of celestial bodies, combined with setting up path and other variables.  Arthur surprisingly generates a lot of data, but I4 is fully capable of keeping up.  Arthur draws the blotches in the map, and I4 refines those into specific features.  The teamwork turns a bad situation into a solved one though!

I4, who has all of his sensors, on overdrive, his POD scanning and trying to filter everything does not have time to shut things off or to filter his vision back into the normal realm.  The result is that his eyes are a bright blue the moment he turns.  

Then there is the sound of glass shattering the moment he can see Rita.  He makes a sound as if struck but doesn't immediately do anything more than that.  Arthur saves the conversation, and I4 recovers enough to agree.  

No more hacking, he just goes for it once he's sure people have seen there is a new path to go and run towards.  I4 meanwhile is having to inwardly try and come to terms with seeing what he suspected.  No that was wrong...he expected more monster, less human.  The fact that it's blended...

'Breathe I4,' he thinks to himself.  'Isn't it hypocritical to think like this..?' I4 isn't sure of the answer to that.  He really isn't.  There is so much going on, so many things to process and he's working with a mental state best described with kept together with duct tape and prayers.  
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Do not look at the noise

    The fighting around him is something he has to lock out of his focus. The crunching, the eating. "Who the fuck EATIN' TOAST in the middle of--" He has to not look. He thinks, maybe, that he can see someone in a blue-white dress gnawing. He decides he won't think about that! He won't!

>Arthur: Don't think about that

    Sure thing, chief. Instead he focuses on that black beam, and the shimmery yellow air beyond. "Shit!! Yes!! Got somethin' open!" Slamming out a few other spellcircles, he rigs the sun to continue motions necessary to fully emulate the cosmic circumstances, and races back to the car. "GO GO GO!" He hollers, jumping in haphazardly. PILE IN AND FUCKIN' *GUN IT*!" He waves the others over! Yes, even the terror girl who he tries to sweep his vision over without looking at the slaughter!
James Bond      Bond catches Lilian's offered weapon with a grunt, and, internally, a wave of relief. This is *much* better suited than the Walther. The first few shots go off-target as he gets used to the unusal recoil, certainly, but only those first few--his unnatural strength brings the weapon to heel, followed closely by his training. He isn't bothering with shot groupings or conservation. The sheer number of them precludes the practicality.

     "More of them coming," he calls, just when it appears the numbers might finally thin. Staren seems to be aware of this, too, as she's bringing the (hover)car around. "Get the others," he calls up to her, sprinting over to the off-roader. The tailgate swings open, and in one fluid motion he's in--he may as well be carrying a box of flowers, for all the unwieldy weapon seems to bother him. It's planted in the back, tailgate slammed shut behind him as he effortlessly vaults the backseat, momentum carrying his legs over the console. A shove off the driver's seat, and he's there. The engine roars to life, headlights glaring. Anyone who's chosen to ride with him over Staren is going to have a bumpy, harrowing ride.

     Dirt and dust are kicked up by thick tires, the back end swings out and slams into an approaching wave. Bond shifts to 4WD, and the vehicle grips the earth like a glove. Staren's example set, he heads towards the anomaly, too, tires crunching and snapping severed limbs and maimed Antegents alike. Whatever limbs may survive to claw, whatever 'faces' may make themselves known at the side of the vehicle, are promptly dispatched with controlled flicks of the steering wheel. The anomaly grows closer and closer--as does another wave.

     With a calculated application of brake and a hard right swivel of the steering wheel, the vehicle dips up on two wheels for one terrifying moment. Crunch. Tons of armored military vehicle crush would-be predators.
Rita Ma      Rita is only dimly conscious of Lilian right behind her- she's only dimly conscious of anything, just enough to sway her cloaked tentacles out of the way of that eerie magical beam. Rather than slowing down as she shovels alien-tasting ""sweet"" un-flesh down her throat, her body acquires a kind of momentum, becoming somehow less and less inhibited from its already-feral state.

     Her body is doing this because it's starving, having expended god-knows-how-much-mass on that spiderweb barricade. Her brain is choosing not to apply the brakes because it also serves a tactical purpose.

     Her tentacles, and her allies, protect her while she kneels next to a geode-like carcass that's disappearing alarmingly fast. Cobalt juices run down her face, her hands, her dress.

     And then abruptly, arbitrarily, she is "finished". Rita stands up, her head and shoulders drooping. The monsters don't touch her. They don't even try. Eerie cerulean tendrils become visible sprouting from her back, as some other mental process hijacks the processing needed to maintain their optical camouflage. They're already dripping with the same blood.

     I feel you. I know your name. You run, you fight, you die, you're remade. That's all your old Queen used you for. But I can think of better things.

     "STOP!"

     The surviving monsters- reinforcements included- all go abruptly statue-still, their bioluminescence losing its blue color and reverting to rainbow hues. Rita walks through them, towards her allies, and the Antegent politely part to either side for her like royalty. Her hands and mouth are still stained with their blood.

     Tentacles trail behind her like ribbons, dark and shimmering exactly like the Antegent's bodies, only their shifting colors lag a fraction of a second behind hers.

     Standing with her back to the swarm of statue-still Antegent, she holds out her arms to either side- not to protect the Elites from them, but to protect them from the Elites.

     "Please stop," she repeats in a dull and distracted tone, as if the great majority of her attention were elsewhere. "It's over. They're mine now."

     "And they're coming too."
Staren     Staren stops firing when she sees the monsters have stopped. She glances at one corner of her HUD.

    RGUN (2LINK) RGUN
    540/600] [540/600

    Somehow, it really doesn't feel like the turret has enough ammo for this sort of thing anyway... So she doesn't waste it, since Rita is... clearly controlling them?

    Staren has no idea how Rita *did* that, but if she's not volunteering the information, asking probably won't help. So after landing next to Rita, opening a door, and staring at the horde for a moment trying to collect her thoughts, Staren finally speaks the first words that pop into her head that aren't a dumb question:

    "...Okay, but they're not riding in the car."
Lilian Rook     The stream of fire from the borrowed weapon is four times what should be usable, but makes a convincing case for its existence when the sheer number of hot blue-white tracers ripping through the crowd obtains group stopping power simply by Bond's strength and control of the weapon, even staggering the front ranks back into the second, or chewing the tops and edges off the taller scenery. But it seems the jeep was chosen even better. It may have seemed a little ridiculous for Lilian to have sourced the steel-framed behemoth with its ceramic interior plates and bulletproof windows, but smashing it at highway speed into the tough, but spindly, enemies proves its worth immediately, shattering legs and crushing grasping arms with wild fishtails and jacknife maneuvers. There are a number of unnervingly loud squeals and scrapes heard from inside the car, and a few heavy bumps, as the Antegent claw at its hull and leap onto its roof, but Bond now has the faster landspeed.

    Lilian herself flicks her circle array apart like a hand of cards on the table, and each individual component is made to fire in rippling sequence, each individual beam forking horizontally, crossing over each other, merging, and forking again, every couple of meters, to create something like a rapidly expanding hexagonal mesh wave through the first wave of quadrupeds, each the size of a mastiff, which explode in colour picker hues when struck. Leaving it for the short while it will take to use up the last of its power, she jumps up to the top of the jeep, and kicks the scrabbling Antegent free from trying to break through the windscreen and driver side window. The wheels vomit dust and scream off the asphalt, and the vehicle careens through the shimmer. Lilian extends her hand to catch I4 and drag him off (by the collar if necessary) as it blazes by.

    The hovermech is forced to take over Bond's and Lilian's slack. It isn't sufficient, but it is still slowing them down. Just long enough for Arthur to finish making the autonomous adjustments and haul ass. However, given the way the horde's onward charge violently curves to chase, the question 'can the Antegent follow them through?' is suddenly a very, very real one. The number that leap at the hovermech and either try to pull Staren's limbs off or simply grip and suicide detonate isn't enough to bleed off the main wave. Lilian reappears from beyond the veil, wading over to Rita, intent on pulling her out of the stampede and extricating her somewhere safe--

    Which lasts until the exact moment Rita has fully Made Contact. Even Lilian stops dead, her pendant's chain dangling from her clenched fingers. "They-- what? Beg pardon? How can you-- no, never mind that; if you've stunned them, now is the time to get rid of them all at once!"

    All of this is dimly visible, and slightly audible, from beyond the shimmer, but only as if seen and heard through thick and murky aquarium glass, faded into the background of the space it takes place in. The landscape otherwise is completely different, and yet eerily the same. The dreamy yellow tinge of the desert sun permeates everything, the air shimmering with visibly fluid waves; staring straight up indeed glimpses the sun exactly as if through the surface of choppy, clear water. The ground is the sand and gravel found on the slope of a continental shelf, polished by aeons of water, in hues of brilliant white, turquoise, green, yellow, and black. An entire coral reef lines the path to either side, bleached to barren white bones everywhere beyond, making for a surreal and desolate horizon, but retaining its colour within just this one lane, and in fact crawling with sea creatures despite the lack of any water. Save for a mirror-silver lake up ahead, that is.
Staren <J-IC-Scene> I4 very quiet, "They're monsters."
<J-IC-Scene> Staren says, "...Okay, but they're not riding in the car."
<J-IC-Scene> Staren says, "They're HER monsters now, though, apparently."

    I4 stares at Staren after a few moments, "You know, I as of this moment agree with everything Lilian has ever said about you."

    What? WHAT?! She wasn't exactly *friends* with I4, but all of a sudden out of nowhere he goes for one of the meanest things anyone could ever say! And what's more frustrating is she doesn't even know WHY. He doesn't clarify it in the ensuing argument, either. It's the verbal equivalent of just getting sucker punched out of nowhere.

    What did I do wrong?! Why won't he tell me?! Why are people like this?! It isn't fair! I didn't do anything wrong! I didn't do anything wrong on purpose. It's not my fault I'm broken.

    Old pain flares up. How dare he! After what she did on his behalf, admittedly in a moment of carelessness on her own part. And she still doesn't know WHY.

    ...Oh wait. That's why Persephone granted her oldest wish; It always seemed like everyone else must have psychic powers she lacked that helped them communicate with eachother, and now she doesn't lack them anymore!

    It seems they're stopped, Lilian's arguing, so she can take just a moment to focus on that ocean of stars, and pick out I4's mind, just, gently, cursorily examine it, enough to try and get a read on surface thoughts. Why is he mad at me?

    And once that's done, if the 'monsters' are 'visible' on this metaphor for the psychic plane, she can't help but pick one to look at closely, and wonder:

    Why are you?
Ishirou Before he has time to recover, Lilian is grabbing him and carrying him off.  This is probably better, given the shit that has transpired.  Near Rita, he's visibly uncomfortable, until Lilian is basically supporting his view.  "They're not people, they're monsters like I said.." he starts.  "We should just put them down and make this world safer."

This is about the time he snaps at Staren, but clams up.  Not because I4 thinks he's wrong but because he's probably out of line.  Right now they're trying to get out, but just the pure (at least to I4) contradiction.  Monsters are vile, evil, ect.  Staren claims to want to protect people.  Then Staren uses the worms against him.  I4's ability to not bite her head off.  He's trying to keep it going to the finish line.  

THEN SOMEONE PEAKS.  

It'd be too easy if the above was the answer entirely.  It's the easy answer, the one that I4 justifies to himself.  

The real answer is the amount of trauma that I4 has going on right now.  Being born to be a monster destroying unit.  The images of him seeing people torn apart by the nullborn.  The images of androids that are being controlled by those worms.  Them getting too close to S6.  I4 uses all of his ability to hack and donate the mana battery.  The explosion and knowledge that he killed that android, and he wasn't sure if they were actually dead.

That same fear closed in on him a year later in the sands, the time that Staren fired because I4 was in a blind panic and without any ability to defend himself.  Just after the same people who built him were trying to kill him.  

That knowledge in the future, where the word monster makes him twitch.  That is because he's not sure what he is.  Is he human?  A necromantic construct using the soul of another person?  The self-loathing because he saw Rita and recoiled at what he saw just a moment ago.  These monsters kill so casually.  

Self-loathing, contradictions in what he is, actual experience with dealing with monsters, Staren's own contradictions in thinking that the monsters were worth any effort, the knowledge...there are enough reasons why I4 just snapped.  There is a lot happening between his ears.
Rita Ma      Rita stares up at Lilian with glowing blue eyes, blue hands, and blue lips. The dull, distant look on her face is fading as the neurochemical rush of eating half an Antegent, and then getting a horde of monsters hooked up to her awareness, wears off. In its place, she's starting to show the first glimmers of looking a little guilty and a little sad.

     "They're not stunned, Ms. Rook," she says, looking down at the ground uncomfortably. "I told you already. They belong to me."

     The glowing patterns on the tentacles sprouting from her back shift slightly, prompting the two closest Antegent to pick her up reverently and set her down on one's shoulders. The rest of them stare at Lilian impassively: they register her presence, but whatever impulse drives them to attack humans has been lobotomized out, or else utterly subordinated to some superior compulsion.

     "They're still monsters that hurt people," she says, staring down from her now-elevated perch with a kind of forlorn deperation. "I'll get rid of them after, I promise. Every one. But they can help us first."

     Will she really understand? Could I ever get it across to her? ... I still taste blood. I look like a monster to her, don't I? Lilian...

     Rita glances, uncomfortably, over at the shimmering entrance to the other dimension. She looks a lot like she might throw up, and a little like she might cry. Her tentacles tense and curl uncomfortably. "They're waiting for us," she says. "We should go."

     If not prevented, she and her whole procession of hundreds of awful monsters trail through after the rest of the party.
James Bond      Either Rita is right, in which case everything will be fine, or she's wrong, in which case everyone is going to be violently swarmed by monsters. There isn't much point in arguing. Bond passes through the anomaly and into the bone-white reef-desert, checking the rear view mirror. Apparently, she was right--although, for some reason, Lilian's back there debating something or other. It doesn't matter. As long as there's not a horde of Antegents chasing him through, then he can stop and think. The jeep stops, and there's a crank as he drops it into park.

     Bond pops open the glove compartment and rifles through it idly, as he allows his mind to wander. He imagines that, by now, they'll be looking for 'Dahlberg' back at the Picket, or at the very least, some desk worker somewhere is sighing and filling out a termination form. They won't get the truck--though if they try hard enough, the truck might get them. That thought draws a smile to his otherwise stony face.

     I4 and Staren are letting the stress get to them--or perhaps this is merely the last in a long line of misunderstandings between them. Years ago, he might have made some half-baked quip about old married couples, but now, all he can do is wonder whether it'll cause problems for the operation. It's strange--even that is filtered through the lens of someone who is mildly surprised to be alive right now. He expected, still expects this mission to kill him--it's hardly the first time he's gone up against another agency, or even the first time that he's infiltrated one of their strongholds.

     There is little and less of this country every day. Little and less proof that its ideas work. That isn't new, either--the empires of his own world all have obsessions and fixations and fears. But none of them cling so tightly to so little as the Letter Agency. Caelton was a move of desperation. This op is nothing so much as walking into the den of a cornered animal. So... why isn't he bothered, if all of that was just 'getting from point a to point b?' If there's even more in front of them, why isn't he scared?

     He believes he knows why. But that can wait. He speaks up over the radio.

     "If you're riding with me," Bond placidly intones, "Hop in now. I've already had a cigarette and looked through everything in the glove box."
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Is his Hollywood hispanic air?

    That's not the right reference.

>Arthur: Try to figure out what's going on back there

    Through the murky warpspace, Arthur can see what's afoot. This is the strangest thing he's ever seen done with an antegent. Is that how this works? Is that... what happens with antegent? Do they become your friends if you eat them? How did the weird Wet Magic girl who doesn't show up on magic senses eat them?

    These are mysteries Arthur Lowell will not think on. He'll regard the strange events from beyond this pale, and he'll puzzle on them, and he will *very* much not solve them. His only input: "This is gonna be heavy fuckin' escalation!" He calls over to Lilian and Rita. "K-dawg cleared us for one-man removal, not total fuckin' obliteration! We gonna be all good with taking this shit to eleven?" Pause. "I mean, *I* am, so, I kinda figured y'all were gonna call that fuckin' irresponsible."
Lilian Rook     Lilian looks at Rita like she did the first time they met. The same stare as back then on the train. The same strain in her eyes. The same twitch to her lips. The same tilt of her chin. The same probing darkness. But like back then . . .

    Lilian sighs, closes her eyes, presses a thumb to the bridge of her nose, mutters something about a 'fifth' and 'sixth', and repeats "Thou shalt not deny thy brothers and sisters that which they hath earned. The form of . . ." She looks up again. "Every single one, Rita." It isn't a question, but it's not a threat either. "But, please, put your face back on, alright? At the very least, you don't need the wrong person missing it."

    Lilian hits her radio instead. "As if I'd ride shotgun with a smoker." she retorts. "I know the last owner had some non-reg whiskey behind a false back panel. Don't drain it all before we get there either." She replies to Arthur only as she walks past. "Kent wants one man removed from the equation because even *he* knows they crossed a line that can't be justified. He won't help us with anything else. But *I* have more than enough reason to punish whoever knew what they were doing and pulled the trigger anyways. And who is someone from the Agency to bitch at me about acceptable costs?"

    Staren's read on the Antegent is murky and fragmented, like the past moments she accesses have been broken up into gravel and scattered across time too far for her to reach. But she can remember a terrible wound. Remember darkness. The sound of thunder and rain. The smell of blood. Crawling from the humid earth. Blinded by the sun. Stumbling through a world of pure scorching white and wavering grey shapes. Running. Running. Blood. Pain. Darkness. Clawing a way out of the deep earth again. Running again. Blood again. Pain again. Darkness again. The earth again. It's underpinned with a sense of some ill-defined and aimless thing halfway between nostalgia, loneliness, and longing, and--

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Rita Ma      Rita seems to realize, just now, that she doesn't have her 'face' on. Lilian can tell because she gasps softly, claps both hands over her mouth, and nods in a horrified assenting way like she's just shattered Grandma's fine china and been told to fetch the dustpan.

     In a split second when Lilian looks away- as Rita quietly requests she do in a mortified tone- she's back to being a perfectly ordinary girl, if a perfectly ordinary girl with cobalt-painted teeth and with an Antegent serving as her ride.

     "Okay, Ms. Rook," she finally says with a deep and anxious gratitude. "I'm... I'm sorry. I didn't really mean to."

     When her entourage is through, and they're strolling along that coral-hemmed lane, her spirits are a little too low to relish the strange-familiar oceanic scenery.

     At some point a minute or two later, it's like a switch flips in her brain: she suddenly realizes her mouth is still full of alien blood. She immediately makes a soft, strangled noise of disgust, spits out cobalt fluid and pieces of gemstone, and frantically wipes at the inside of her mouth with a piece of gauze from her leather meds satchel.

     "Euuuugh..."
James Bond      Bond chuckles. "Shotgun, no, but the roof seemed to suit you fine. Maybe you just prefer to be on top?"

     Bond puts the jeep back into 4WD. He could have a drink--it'd hardly be his first time driving after a stiff one. Something like that, though--someone's treasure--that ought to be saved after, to celebrate. If not to celebrate, then at least to put it behind oneself. His eyes are back on the road, now, and assuming no one flags him down for a ride with air con, he gives it the gas. See? He actually can drive like a normal person--at least, as normal as one can drive in a weird under-not-sea otherworldly desert.
Staren     Staren can sense a conflict brewing and naturally wants to take Rita's side. Rita calls her on the radio. Staren's eyes water a bit. How she *wishes* Rita were right, that this was a problem with an Us solution and not a Lilian solution. But it's not.

    Is this... is this going to come to a fight? Is she going to have to fight sweet little Rita in order to support Lilian, the mean and terrifying bitch?

    That... there is something so wrong about that...

    Meanwhile, reading I4 explains it all. She was only seeing the outside, and meanness, and someone who wouldn't talk to her.

    But now she can see the internal struggle. Desire and purpose and guilt and pain, self-questioning and self-loathing. A little misunderstanding. It's too much for him to put into words, to explain, some of it probably too private to explain fully.

    This. Oh, this understanding is all she ever wanted! Every time she tried to explain herself, to justify herself, pleaded and *begged* with those who hurt her to just tell her what she did wrong so she could not do it again... it was all out of a desperate hope of reaching this understanding, and it never worked!

    After decades of pain, this is... there are no words for how wonderful this is!

    Staren is feeling SO good, that she's optimistic about poking the Antegent-creations.

    Honestly that could have gone a lot worse. But now she can't help but feel sympathy for them. The antegent... it's so badly hurt. All of its existence is pain, and running, and it misses a home it never had... How can she not see herself in that?

    Thanks to Persephone and the Concord, Staren found the home she never had. Now she can understand people instead of feeling like a lost alien from planet Logic. Do the Antegent really deserve any less?

    She mentally shakes her head. They're hurting people. It's tragic, but... it needs to be stopped. Right now, she can't see how to give them both what they want, and...

    And...

    ...They need to get moving. How long will that portal stay open?

    Staren opens her eyes. Rita's decided to walk. It seems Staren will be driving alone from here. Probably... for the best, considering who all else is available for company. Well okay, Arthur would probably be cool to have around, at least.

    Staren flies the hovermech on through, landing next to the jeep, window rolling down. Staren looks to I4. "I'm sorry. I... forget, sometimes, that everyone else has just as much going on in their head as I do." She holds a hand to her head. "I can't see it. I can't feel it. I see stories, and roles, and scripts, because of what I am, but that's not what people really are."

    "I just... I have no reason to disbelieve Rita. But more importantly... it's okay. It's okay to be yourself, and to not be fully human. Or maybe even to not be human at all. We're not broken. We're not less. We're not monsters... and if we are, then that word doesn't mean something that has to be destroyed, and it's okay to be part monster. You're YOU, and you work hard to help people, and... and that's more than enough."

    Staren closes her eyes and takes a deep breath. Buoyed by the goodfeels of what she thinks is positive social progress, she decides to reach out again, to ask Rita Why.

    Why do you believe the simple way will work?
Ishirou I4 gets to sit down before Staren comes up to him again.  He's about to open his mouth because it's likely she wants a fight.  I4's at a point that he's ready to give it.

Then what happens is both bizarre to I4 and off-catching.  It's an apology, especially when I4 said something pretty nasty.  He's not even sure if he didn't not mean it, that Lilian is right. Though something about the 'not being a monster' speaks to him and deflates him a little.

"She doesn't think they're not monsters or has a new attachment to them.  I saw what I saw, and I'm not sure why she's suddenly on about them not being monsters," he says, perhaps a bit sourly.  "It's...not a matter of trust, but rather concern.  You don't have to agree with everything someone does to be their friend." he quips back and closes the door.  When Staren's far off he just sighs exhaustedly.

There might be some implied exasperation.
Staren     Staren nods at I4's comment about concern and friends, thinking of Cantio.
Rita Ma      Why does Rita believe the simple way will work?

     Rita is a young teen. She's living in a sleepy port community where people dive into the ruins of a submerged city for artifacts and supplies. Sea monsters never attack there. That's because, secretly, the mayor has been making human sacrifices to appease a Leviathan. The mayor says this is the best way, that hard choices have to be made. The people stone him in a rage. Then everyone comes together, with heroic bravery and selflessness, to slay the Leviathan and bring about true peace. It was hard, gruesome, costly; she lost part of herself forever. But it was simpler than the mayor thought.

     Rita is in her upper teens, now. She lives on a huge ship where the gap between the poor Lower Decks and rich Upper Decks is inconceivable. By a fluke of inheritance, her family's granted a place on the Upper Decks- and its opulence horrifies her. The common people are beaten and starved while the wealthy drink champagne and eat real fruit. When a Leviathan gets loose on the ship, she uses it to kill almost the entire Upper Decks- and then eats the stragglers herself. A worker's council is implemented instead, and the common people flourish. It was hard, gruesome, costly; she lost part of herself forever. But it was simple; the bad people just needed to be killed.

     Rita is twenty, and has lost too much of herself to be called human. A Leviathan comes after her, personally, now seeing her as *competition*. It attacks the ship and threatens everyone she loves, demanding through its human puppets that she come out and face it. She knows everyone else wants her to stay, to be protected, to find a way out of this; there must be a third option. But Rita knows there isn't. She kills it herself, unmasked to her whole community, and then leaves forever so that her loved ones won't be in the crossfire anymore.

     It's simple, and it works. Even if it tears her apart.