Scene Listing || Scene Schedule || Scene Schedule RSS
Owner Pose
Vantablitz Remnants     Turns out that when the first Warpgate party to hit this place described it the way they did, they weren't just being dismissive and shitty. Normally, such an early Warpgate would drop you into, or near, a bustling city, famous battlefield, divine monument, or terrible dungeon, but the noise that greets your ears is the racket of an actual rainforest. Far from a pleasant township park, the sound is one of every bird, insect, and weird furry thing within the mile competing to be heard. It is oppressively humid the moment you exit, though surprisingly not all that high up, and though the air feels a little thin, it is exceptionally rich.

    From the very start, it takes no time at all to figure out that you haven't been pranked into just visiting some regular Earth's tropical zone. Most of the rainforest is ahead of you, crawling up the side of of a broad and rolling mountainside, and so even from here, you can see how genuinely weird it is. The canopy is as much blue-black or powdery silver as it is lush green, and where the ground floor should be almost pitch dark, beams of sunlight zigzag down and diffuse through or around broad leaves and spherical growths to create the feeling of a greenhouse. Firefly lights of green and blue and yellow glitter and sparkle in the shadows between trees, flickering with the artificial irregularity of router lights. You can hear rushing water up ahead, but it sounds off somehow. Even the dirt is oddly spongey and soft, though it has the deep dark colour of volcanic soil.

    The signs of the original party are very few, meaning they probably were professionals. Not too far away, behind the gate, a clearing between rocky shelves shows evidence of a recent-ish campfire, and numerous light footprints heading back down. Ahead of you, there is a single pair, going up, which vanishes abruptly. On the largest trees that mark the sharp divide atop the rock shelf, numerous markings are carved into the bark. The signal repeats once within thirty seconds of entering. It's so strong it causes radios to crackle, and seems to be coming from higher up.
Ishirou I4 expected things, but what he didn't expect was being dropped into a rainforest.  He's not much experience for Rainforests, as the forest in his hope that he's had experience with is a more temperate-minded forest.  Of course, now he was...not a pure robot anymore.  His POD beeped, [Enviornment unsuited for current configuration, deploying countermeasures.]

"Wait wha-," Before he's sprayed down by the pod in bug spray, which causes him to cough and wave the air in front of him to get the smell out of his face.  "Seriously, a little warning next time, and don't spray my face, geeze.." he complains, with another cough.  

He looks around, though, once the spray settles down at takes in the sights.  One thing that was very interesting was the configuration.  Colors didn't match what was found on normal earth Rainforests, according to books he's read.  Light streams in crosses towards the bottom of the rainforest, which is known for being dark.  

The strong radio was a thing, he imagines it's powerful enough to be detected from far away, which means that perhaps it wasn't made with the multiverse in mind due to its signal strength.  The radio fizzling every bit was annoying, but he could figure that out later.  Instead, he signals to the POD to start scanning.  There were missing explorers, and then they could come back and check out the rest.  

He starts walking towards the first signs he can figure out from the last party, that being the campfire.  He moves towards the footprints that go forward until they hit the tree and examines the markings as well as the tree itself.  "Mm...light so I don't think they were running...and I don't see any other footprints that might indicate a thing chasing them.." he says, musing to himself.  
Rita Ma      Rita is in open-mouthed awe nearly from the moment she steps through- half because this rainforest is exceptionally weird, and half because she's never even seen an ordinary rainforest before. Her marveling lasts long enough for her to cup one of the weird fireflies(?) in her hands, and watch as it flies away. Then it turns to faint concern.

     "Is this supposed to be an Earth? These plants don't look like the ones in National Geographic at all. What would make things like this...?"

     When the distress call crackles over her radio, she jolts and makes a noise like a spooked animal, then hastily dials the volume down a bit. Her resolve sets firmly as she soothes herself back down.

     "Right," she says, hands curling into little fists. "The distress signal. I can't just spend all my time sightseeing." The terrain is no real obstacle for her uncanny imouto agility, even pretending to be human like this, but when she reaches the end of that lone set of footprints her resolve is tested again. Rita's eyes widen, and she audibly swallows in nervousness.

     Stay calm. Maybe they just... retraced their steps? Perfectly? While walking backwards?

     I4 is already examining the markings on the tree, so Rita takes a moment to surreptitiously taste the air. Can she smell human blood, "monsters", or anything unusual enough to stand out?

     Otherwise, she can be assumed to keep bravely pressing on until an obstacle presents itself, in search of the source of that painfully loud distress call.
Darren      "Damn," says a man stepping through the warpgate. He doesn't look like he's dressed for a rainforest expedition. In fact, he looks like he was about to meet a friend for lunch, or hit the gym. Black gym shorts, a yellow hoodie, white tee, and tennis shoes, with a splash of a little more color from the blue-and-yellow drawstring backpack slung over his shoulder. It doesn't look like he's packed much. At all. He's come with COMPANY besides just the CLOAKED FIGURE that comes through with him, but they're special guests which will appear later.

     "Okay, now I *know* that broadcast ain't running off the usual. You gotta have a /future-proof/ setup to have the kind of range we're looking at here." His smartphone, a vibrant orange with cartoon (?) eyes painted (?) on the back, is playing the broadcast in question, and he ponders over the screen. He taps the STOP button on the app and pockets the phone in his shorts.

     He blinks, peering at the treeline. The unusual colors draw the eye first--but there's also the fireflies. He takes a step forward, intent on seeing them up close, only to pause and frown thoughtfully at the unusual give of the earth below. His foot taps several times, testing it. He already knows where he's going to go--but he makes a few introductions as people arrive. "Darren Spears. What's good?" Casual from-the-side handshakes given, he simply vanishes, space folding his physical form like a shut-off CRT television, 'till he winks out, and reappears where the ABRUPTLY STOPPED FOOTPRINTS... well, abruptly stop.

     There have been various MYSTERIOUS DISAPPEARANCES throughout history. Sometimes, they are postulated to be due to the crossing-over of persons into ENERGY FIELDS, NATURAL CONFLUENCES or DIMENSIONAL PORTALS. Being a well-read crackpot, Darren takes a moment to review his knowledge of mysterious disapperances, searching the area around the end of the footprints for similarities.
Forte "New warpgate in, where are we dropping, boys," intones Forte flatly as they arrive, reciting one of the Ritual Phrases of older times for good luck (not as venerable as 'first post', but newer than 'oh shit here we go again').

He's along for the ride with Darren - when he blinks out, he just waits, floating where he arrived, until Darren reappears - and then he floats back over towards him, entirely unhurried.

... And then he frowns a bit as the signal repeats, strongly enough for his radio to crackle. "Hrm."

"I'm going to see if I can't trace it," he says, as he tries to find some path through the radio waves - not wanting to bounce right to it physically, but to at least see if he can get a bead on it, direction and distance wise.
Spider-Man     Look out! Here comes the Spider-Man! Spidey can swing in a jungle too, if it comes to it, and his old Immunes-tyype bodysuit is working perfectly. His mask's wide eyes click softly as his head flicks around. "*Wow*, someone turn down 'six hours rainforest ambiance', the volume's way up!" He rambles as he turns off his goggles' datafeeds -- they're just getting too dense. Focus, just focus on the here and now, those signals are too much. He moves, by instinct, out of the way of I4's bug-spray. Is it dangerous to him? Does his tingly danger-sense have a sense of humor? The answer is a mystery, but I guarantee it's very funny.

    Footprints... He can focus on those. They burst into clarity in his vision, but what he finds it so confusing. "Wait, are the vanishing ones the ones to the west, or east? Was the shelter west of them, or were they west of the shelter? I wish they'd had a better *recording* for this signal." As a solution, he decides to snap a couple spider-webs to opposite points in the clearing, pull it like a giant slingshot, and launch himself up in a high arc that should give him a good four second hangtime above the canopy. Where's the shelter? Is it visible through the irregular, artificial canopy-cracks? It should be just due east or west... and then he can take a big swing and speed-boost hard in that direction!
Vantablitz Remnants     I4's examination of the campfire finds lots of things. Tiny slivers of briefly superheated flint. Stale crumbs of what appear to be nuts and dried meat. Rope fibres. A few spots of old blood. Spots where heavy packs were put down for a while. The Warpgate expeditionary party definitely didn't camp here; this is a week older, and the people who made it didn't even have lighters, never mind radios. There'd have been nine of them or so, and it looks like this is as far as they came, before abruptly turning back the next morning.
Hiromi     Hiromi is here, and she is entirely liable to make it everyone else's problem. 'Hiromi the Archwolf,' as she's called herself, but obviously and visibly 'Hiromi the giant wolf,' a big, black canine roughly the size of an elephant, dropping out of the warpgate and immediately running from it until she finds something suitably complex to stick her nose against. There's no shortage of options, in a rainforest, for discovering a hundred different smells and sorting them all out against each other, like invisible lines that can only be sensed by waving one's head back and forth through the air or along the ground. She pays far less attention to the odd colors than to the sounds and scents.

    One would be forgiven for thinking that she's just a strange(?) and dangerous animal, because she is definitely an animal and certainly dangerous, though the three pairs of white-bronze bands on her legs and bells by her ears were certainly both crafted by dextrous hands and put there for some specific purpose, and her aura is not so much 'something else entirely' as 'just as she appears, but oppressively, supernaturally more so.'

    Oh, dear. There are also other people here. I4 is the first one that Hiromi actually spots, which means he's the one who gets levels of curiosity to about the level of force of 'knocked down by a giant wolf snout, for careful examination.' Though it's a few levels short of 'running him down even if he flies off,' he should, perhaps, be aware that 'small things running away' is how you incite most chase instincts. Fortunately, his words identify him as an investigator, not a native, and the animal sounds that Hiromi makes clearly translate in the mind as Not the missing one. You're hunting, too? I'll let you look.

    Darren introduces himself, so, Hiromi does likewise, still without producing anything that could even generously be called 'a word,' while being perfectly, even eerily easy to understand. I am Hiromi. It carries a wealth of identifying meaning that can only be verbalized given some time after hearing it. You're unfamiliar. Are you untested? Soon. Sooner or later. For now, business with new smells and mysteries remains.

    She heads to the trails of prints, taking whichever she lands on first, with a preference for what isn't being crowded with the new prints of the other investigators.
Vantablitz Remnants     Rita giving the air a good ~~taste~~ sniff picks up the scent of blood from the campfire area, but it's very old, and only a minute quantity anyways, like someone had been digging a thorn out and just bandaged it up. However, pretty much every sign of animal life smells 'weird'. As if lacking some essential element to it. It's hard to get a decent idea of how any individual part of it would stand out. Some of the trees even smell vaguely 'sweaty' and the odd grouping of mysterious flowers has a scent 'approximate to bone'.

    The water up ahead, despite coming down from a mountain, also smells mostly like saltwater. Conversely, the individual set of footprints smells something like the decks of the Union Busan. Catching a firefly in her hands reveals a big shiny beetle with a luminous back under its blue-black shell, covered in little honecomb lines. However, most of the lights aren't also bugs; many of them simply wink on and off from various fronds and flower buds, or even the cracks of knotted tree bark.
Ishirou I4 is caught from his initial idea to go towards the tree when he notices something about the campfire.  Hiromi nosing at him gets his attention, as he looks strangely at the wolf, but the thoughts in his head make him realize he's not dealing with a wolf that's about to eat him for no reason and has a reason...and likely from the multiverse.  "Uh...ok!" he says, friendly enough.  

He's not about to cause that fight.  

At the campfire, he realizes that this campsite is /old/.  He takes some measurements of things, just to see what he can figure out here, but once done he stands up.  "This is old, not recent.  They didn't even have lighters, they lit this with flint...and I sense blood here.  Someone was likely injured."

With that out of the way, he continues towards the tree with the symbols to start trying to figure them out.  Maybe he can make sense of them...
Vantablitz Remnants     Hiromi is given a similar sensory profile to Rita (minus recognizing any of those highly specific oceanic scents), with a bit of extra. The prints that lead up the mountain abruptly disappear, but the scent itself doesn't, continuing to faintly mark trees up ahead at long intervals. It'd remind her of a large predator dragging its prey up into a tree and carrying it away to devour in private, but there isn't a second scent to it. However, there is no sign that anyone went climbing them either; human especially, given how clumsy they are.

    The rest are familiar scents. Leather and lacquer and steel and sweat and woodsmoke and bitter herbs. Like something she'd smell from the more rural parts of her homeworld.
Vantablitz Remnants     Darren's best clue is those markings on the treeline, as they occur shortly before the trail cuts off, and the forest starts getting really dark (and 'inside lit') and blinky. They're totally definitely absolutely like ancient tribal markings you'd see any semi-nomadic people leave. Usually for sacred, cursed, or prohibited places. Y'know like where ancient navajo alien hunters mark down landing sites and the druids blocked off entrances to the hollow Earth. Also kind of like hobo signs; there's probably some parallel to the secret ciphers of learned street monks to warn them from CIA blacksites.

    It doesn't seem likely for there to be a dimensional nexus or anything so close to an *actual* one though (namely, a Warpgate wouldn't appear so close on its own). The way he's looking at them, this is more like wendigo shit. The whole winter camp nine yards.
Vantablitz Remnants     Forte is fortunate enough that it seems the signal repeats only every ten minutes or so. If it were a real civil broadcast, it'd repeat every thirty seconds at most, and also it wouldn't make his brain kinda crackle and fuzz, so it lends credence to Darren's nonsense. Also, there'd be a city. Or the remains of one.

    Tracing it isn't hard, because there are no relay towers around here at all. No radio transmitters or amplifiers. Just a single, huge burst transmission at the center of the signal's radius. As if actually trying to overcome the lack of the aforementioned. At his best guess, it's further up the mountain, many miles deep into the rainforest, but not nearly at the top --pretty much just past the center of the ocean of green, actually.
Hiromi     Rainforests are not, an Earth native might know, a good place for thick-furred wolves. Larger animals unable to sweat tend to have a problem with heat and humidity, leading to the characteristic open-mouthed panting to exchange heat via wet tongue. Hiromi notices the issue, decides to endure it, and thereafter ceases to notice until such time as it changes. She may or may not even be capable of panting, but keeps her mouth shut while she runs up the mountain, oddly silent for her size and, even more oddly for the same, hardly leaving a trace of her passage. Even as strange as the place is, a forest is a forest, and she knows its navigation as the consummate hunter does.

    The trail she's picking up is odd, too, but not in a way that makes it any more difficult for her to follow than anything else that makes huge leaps or climbs trees to avoid easy tracking. Favoring speed, she picks the routes that look easy for an at least human-sized creature to pass, only occasionally ensuring that she's still on the right track should she lose scent of it.
Vantablitz Remnants     As far as Spidey can tell, the mountain slope heads roughly (though not exactly due) west, and further east would take him down. Launching himself high into the air actually helps quite a bit. In the eastward direction, he can see the slopes roll rougly downwards and then smooth out into lush, semi-tropical wetland, of a sort, and beyond that, a broad river that points roughly seawards . . . somewhere. Weird colours of all kinds continue even out in that direction, and even the river looks oddly dark blue rather than sky-coloured or silty. Westward, he can see the top of the mountain, bare from the halfway point up, and its nearest neighbours off in the distance, as well as steam rising from what he assumes is probably a geothermal vent or natural hotspring, and a strong concentration of extraordinarily bright yellow-green glow, roughly similar in location to the signal source, forming a small triangle.
Darren      Tested? Darren smiles at Hiromi. I'mma hold you to that, blood, His voice is amiable, but it doesn't come from his lips. Seems like he doesn't at all mind the prospect of a test or challenge!

     Rita appears to have taken a similar interest in the lone set of footprints. As she advances, he can't help noticing her nervousness. Hey--real quick, you good? Yes, no? Just 'think it' at me. She can easily respond without saying so out loud--it's an attempt to boost morale without pointing out to the others that someone was nervous in the first place.

     The phone is pulled out again. This time, a voice recorder app. "Exhibit A. Set of footprints vanishes past a certain point. Markings on the nearby treeline indicate self-like presence; serve as warnings. Some similarity to markings in Pyrite Town denoting unsafe exits from subterranian tunnel dweller communities; intended to warn denizens against presence of World Police cleaners." He nods, then presses stop, and snaps a photo with the camera app.

     "Might be what got 'em," he opines. "Well, lessee if we can't get got, too!" A very normal and cool thing to want. "Yo, wait up!" he calls to Rita, jogging over to catch up. "You picked the best way to go," he happily informs her. "We 'bout to get abducted, probably!"
Forte Forte makes a mental note of the point the signal's coming from, and then goes to follow Darren and Rita.

"Indeed. If there's a trap or ambush here, the best way to deal with it might be to simply spring it on our own terms."

He pulls out a digital map and holds it out to them, with the likely source of the signal marked.
Rita Ma      Darren manages to sneak up on Rita whether he intended to or not, who's innocently got her tongue out for some reason, and is high-strung enough that she nearly bites it when she startles when his mental voice sounds in her head. She looks around in obvious bewilderment before finding him.

     I'm okay! ... Maybe I'm a little nervous. It's hard not to be. But you don't have to worry about me, I promise.

     "It's..." She takes a moment to find her more formal, introductory voice, giving him a quick little bow. "It's good to meet you, Mr. Spears. I'm Rita Ma!" Her handshake is predictably weak for someone who has to look up nearly a foot to meet his eyes, but it's earnest.

     Before setting off, her eyes follow a glimpse of an enormous wolf through the trees. The eyes themselves are sharp and observant, but the rest of her body disagrees with a frown and a flinch.

     I'm sure it'll be fine...!

     When he catches back up to her a minute later, she nods firmly and points in the direction of the river up ahead. "It's saltwater," she says. "I've never heard of a river that's salty before. Have you, Mr. Spears?" A little pause, and then: "A lot of things here don't smell right, really."

     Once they reach the river, she sticks a finger in and licks the water off while glancing around. Is it hyper-saline? Brackish? Similar to ocean water? And are there signs of any kind of life dwelling in it? "I bet the plants have to get rid of all that salt, too. Maybe that's why they smell that way...?"
Vantablitz Remnants     The marks in the tree bark are definitely made by simple knives, and are fairly old and occasionally refreshed, judging by the partial regrowth. That's the best I4 is going to get from them. People from the lowlands made them, and don't go any further than that.

    Of course, now everyone is set on ignoring them and doing the bad thing, so, ymmv.

    Hiromi's following of the scent trail takes her largely straight towards the source of the signal on Forte's digital map, but almost incidentally. It curves as it goes, like it intends to just miss it, putting the signal source firmly between it and the big-glow that Spider-Man had seen. The geothermal site would require splitting off to the left and eventually diverging paths, heading in the same direction, but not close enough to maintain contact over anything but a spotty radio connection.

    However, not only does the scent return, but the footprints do too, at the river, albeit literally only one pair, and a light depression beside it. Though it looks, for the most part, like a pristine mountain snowmelt river, winding through a rainforest with the numerous tiny white water falls to be expected, it's cut surprisingly deep, as if it fills a fissue down the stone, which renders it very dark to look at. The water sparkles slightly, as if filled with tiny floating stars. Tasting it gives Rita the familiar impression of ocean water, but also of green and wet and earthy things at the same time, and a hint of bitter and acidic things usually kept in an engine maintenance closet. Fish, frogs, salamanders, and snails populate the shallow pools, and bright anenomes and sea slugs join them, festooned to the walls of the crevice, oblivious to 'water rules, generally'. They look 'normal', but she can't match any of their bright colourations to anything specific out of any nature book.

    The only things to be recognized directly are a place where the river forks into a pair of creeks, one that broadens into a tiny lake, thick with floating water flowers which actually are from nat-geo, and one which flows over several small 'sandbars' and silty gravel mazes until it pools out slick and glistening black. It smells . . . sort of like oil? Or petroleum, at least.

    Beyond the river, being under the canopy is to be almost entirely in the dark now, the path exclusively lit by the warm organic lights of so many glowing bulbs, roots, and flowers, mainly in eerie greens and blues. The trees over the other side also become abruptly unfamiliar. Their trunks all have such warped shapes that their silhouette looks like 'branches grown from a roman statue', and are more deep green and soft than bark-covered. Mushroom shelfs grow out of shapeless mounds on the ground like a facsimile of logs, and massive, fleshy flowers simply sprout out of whatever they please, waving little luminous fronds in the air.

    The sound of bugs dramatically dies off here, and the sound of animals completely. A scent *like* blood is now practically everywhere. The smell of 'sweat' comes from all of the plants at once now, and a warm pulse can be heard when holding one's ear to roots or trunks in places.
Vantablitz Remnants     Continuing beyond the river now puts you in firmly 'spooky abduction' territory. Once you lose site of the river, you occasionally hear something that sounds only vaguely like a wolf's howl, loud and dissonant, gradually closing in the distance. A sound of wet clicking, as if from the throat, follows you constantly. Worse, the vegetation not only begins looking densely identical, without trails, creating the notorious 'forest hypnosis' effect, but you could definitely swear it changes whenever you're not looking.

    It takes someone splitting a considerable distance, but once any individual loses sight of the pack, they are finally, and immediately, attacked. By a tree. Or sometimes a flower. Something simply picks up its roots, exposing trains of gross little 'feet' beneath it, and whips its way over at horror movie speed to snatch someone up and pull them off the ground with all of its grasping branches and fronds, creepily warm to the touch.

    Much like the extra horrifying part of a nature documentary, the giant flowers appear to have paralytic stings, and one can probably guess what happens if they get dunked into the big yawning vat in the middle, like a bug. A living tree, however, is like being stuck to flypaper made of hydrochloric acid; oddly, it doesn't do anything to melt metal or glass, but it sure does shred right through any kind of clothing from wool to nylon and then begin melting flesh.

    It's extra unfortunate the plants scream when shot, cut, or maimed, though they're extremely resilient to blunt force. It's worse that this only seems to apply to a fraction of them. They're physically identical to every other plant around, but a tiny minority are hungry and evil. The only vegetation that seems to be consistently safe, and *never* attack, is the odd grove of flowers with bone white stalks, night black petals, and glowing green insides.

    You're also definitely being stalked. Not up close, but by some kind of wandering thing that is big enough to snap twigs and make shadows in the vertical murk from a great distance. After a while, you can be pretty sure it's where the clicking is coming from, though it echoes constantly in every direction. Forte can *also* tell that it's repeating a bit of the signal, somehow, and judge its proximity by the electromagnetic fuzz in his head. However, it seems it won't come close yet, for whatever reason, and merely melts into the brush if shot at.
Ishirou The marks are scanned and filed away.  Strange, they're kept by locals?  Is something ahead trapped there?  Or is the area just dangerous?  What is causing this...whatever it is, it's getting a bad feeling from I4's instincts.  However, it doesn't STOP him either.  

It's a mystery, and he wants to know more.  He /has/ to know more.  Why is it dangerous, and how could they stop it if it got out?  Is it dangerous?  Is it misunderstood?  All of these questions need answers!

He's following Rita here because she's got a better instinct for this than he does, and stronger than he is.  He figures supporting her would mean they both have a better chance at not getting hurt (and him not being eaten?)

Beyond the river, because Rita is the expert on water and stuff in it, I4 is more looking at the organic lightning and the strange plants.  He focuses on the plants, trying to get more information about them.  His scans focus on them because there is something off about these things.  Why do they smell like sweat?  Why are they here and not across the river..?  

Wait are they lost?  He swore things were samey...?  

This lasts until finally the forest attacks or is revealed to be aggressive.  In which case, I4 attempts to Biohack the ones closest to him.  Attempting to turn them from hungry for twink and human, and to be hungry for other trees and plants.  Like themselves.  
Darren      "Exhibit B." Darren's camera snaps a picture of the river, giving Rita a nod and a thumbs up. "Salt water river. Pretty improbable to happen naturally--smell of... motor oil with it. Soil is unnaturally spongy, sporadic growth of flora... taken together, almost gives the suggestion of imitation." There's a glance towards Rita, to see if perhaps she's got that suspicion, too.

     "Aight. Nessie! You're up." A tiny blue-and-yellow pokeball floats up from Darren's backpack. He slips on a blue headband, pulling his locs up and behind, revealing his vibrant green eyes. The pokeball drops into his palm; his index finger taps the button, enlarging it. Both hands grasp it, then the right breaks away and throws it as if making a forward pass; feet planted below the shoulders, arm, shoulder, wrist in perfect harmony.

     A large, friend-shaped plesiosaur with a hard shell lands in the river, making a beautiful cry and smiling happily. "Take a look around--see how deep it goes, and if you can, where that oil smell's coming from."

     ...

     "Nope, don't mind at all. Just be back before long, feel me?" Establishing a mental link with the plesiosaur to communicate, Darren will head on with Rita, I4 and Forte into the Sweaty Forest.

     He falls silent, finger to his temples as he peers not around him, but beyond him--five minutes into the future.
Rita Ma      Rita makes a Face about a second after putting her finger in her mouth as that 'engine room' aftertaste kicks in. "Blehhhhh. There's some kind of leak upstream, I bet," she says, looking warily at the water like it decided to be gross on purpose. "There's a little bit of something artificial and chemical-y."

     She bends down anyway to appreciate the colorful wildlife, and maybe salivate just a tiny bit. But I don't know what's deeper down there, and there's people watching! Not today, crab.

     Something about the depression, followed by the footprints again, catches her eye. Did they fly? ... But then, wouldn't they set down gentler? It reminds me of the way I move, sometimes.

     Meat Forest transparently starts getting under her skin, and she finds someone reassuring (probably Darren) to hide behind as the surroundings grow more eerie. She holds her arms over her chest, glancing around nervously and all-around being just one step shy of teeth-chattering.

     "Are we sure this is where the signal was from?" she asks Forte and I4, faintly hoping that it's not, that they've gone off-course somehow. No such luck.

     She gets distracted and lags behind the group once, long enough for a weird fleshy tree to try to grab her. She screams, then it screams, and she races back to the group shaken, pale, and lightly spattered with "blood" that isn't hers. "I'm sorry! I'm sorry. We'll- we really shouldn't split up." From there on out, her paranoia only ratchets higher.

     The giant shadowy stalking monster becomes the new focus of her hair-raising paranoia soon enough, though it doesn't seem to worsen her anxiety-ridden state- she's been dreading some kind of terrible monster since before it made itself known.

     Even so... if it's 'just' a giant monster, that's really dangerous, but less *creepy* than all these plants. Plants should be innocent! They should mean hope and thriving! Who didn't get the idea? The fact that the dietary potential of plants made wholly out of raw flesh doesn't even occur to her is an indicator of her sorry state.

     At this point, she's probably outright clinging to someone's arm as her eyes scan the gaps between the trees.
Hiromi     The tracks change. Hiromi concludes that any more mysteries from this point will be best explained by reaching the end of the trail, so she doesn't stop. The plants change. The water was already strange. The darkness doesn't bother her, if only because she doesn't need light to see. It's easier, even, to ignore the lights she does see, glowing points made to attract the attention of beings who aren't her.

    And then a tree lifts her up, but she's not just heavy. Her great mass is of muscle and instinctive fury, twisting her neck to the side to clamp her jaws to the trunk, then twist her body mid-air with enough force that the rotation both uproots it and slams her body into the trunk. It won't break from that, but she doesn't need it to break; it only has to topple. Once her feet are on the ground, she places her claws on top, finishes the motion of her jaws to tear clean through, then leaps up its length to an imagined 'neck' to wring, break, and bite through.

    It's probably not edible by any usual standard, but she eats whatever gets between her teeth, anyway, then gets right back onto the trail and keeps running. Her tongue burns with the acid melting it, but regenerates right away. She swallows, and then there's no problem.

    A flower gets up on little feet and chases after her like a jump scare. She kicks off it to plant it back in the dirt, and keeps going.

    Vines lash at her faster than she can dodge them. The earth erupts beneath her and the plant both, and she leaps off it hard enough to sail through the air with the whole plant-tentacle mass trailing after her, ripped from the ground. Its flesh-melting vat lands directly on a sharp spike of stone, twenty feet long, that hadn't been there a moment ago.

    It's less that she tears her way out to continue, and more that she continues, therefore, she tears her way out.
Vantablitz Remnants     Despite how weird the water is, Nessie doesn't have much trouble swimming in it. The crevice grows and narrows as it goes, eventually cutting out as the river winds north, flattens out, descends the mountainside, and gradually turns back east, probably joining others to form the big one Spidey had seen before. It goes quite deep however. Deep enough that Nessie can't reach the end of it before the shrinking dimensions of the rock prevent her from fitting her shell in. It sort of seems like the mountain cracked open and an entire water table bubbled up.

    However, it is also a *bad* idea to keep swimming in. Though many translucent fish and eyeless amphibians flit out of her way as she goes, even Nessie will not want to contend with how caustic the water is for long. Five minutes is too long of a dip. By that point, it'd be in the 'skin blistering and peeling off' range, with luminous oozing infection colonizing the raw flesh. Darren sees nothing exciting happening to himself in the next five minutes, but is of course forewarned of the spooky side of the woods before even venturing in.
Forte Forte doesn't lag behind - partly because he doesn't have reason to, partly because he's sticking close to his new decoy (backspace, backspace, backspace) sticking close to his new friend, Darren.

"Might want to be careful with that," he observes. His statement is confirmed, but not for the reasons he expected. "... I'm surprised anything can live here," he says, looking at the water, and the translucent fish in it. "Actually I'm more surprised anyone wanted to *come* here."

"I think we may want to consider turning back..." he says, eyes flitting over to Darren and watching for his reaction. Darren seems like the sort who would continue on regardless, and the environment here doesn't seem conductive at all to splitting the group up.
Vantablitz Remnants     The scent and taste of sweat in the forest proves at least one thing correct. The salt in the water means even the plants end up perspiring it, no doubt purging the saline content rather than attempting to cool themselves for any reason. Though the flesh is tough and spongy, something crunches deep inside when struck. The fluid released isn't sugar water, but much closer to crushing a bug. Green haemolymph?

    Biohacking the inanimate flora has no effect. What is hacking a tree going to do? But when I4 hacks a Danger Tree, when it is inches from melting and drinking up his brand new human flesh, it turns on its nearest identical specimen, and then does the same thing to it . . .

    And then, as it devours the other 'tree', its verdant flesh ripples and squirms, expanding in fits and starts as it uses its finger-like branch-tips to shovel biomass somewhere into its center, and the two plants flow and merge into each other, fusing into a much bigger, much more dangerous version, with a greater reach and landspeed as befitting its new size category. Luminous blue tongue-like tendrils dangle from its branches, whipping out to catch I4 and wring his boy body like a towel for all its vital fluids.

    As far as his scans can tell, there seems to be no difference between either side of the river; the danger flora just stops at the caustic water and the water flowers. The glow is mostly natural, of chemical processes he's familiar with (albeit, which are typically a form of deep-sea communication), but a few of the big, fleshy pods, which glow the brightest, reply to his scanner with what sounds eerile like a *fetal heartbeat*, and contain unwholesome shadows within.
Spider-Man     Spider-Man's progress finds him splitting out? That might be concerning. But he needs to focus! That glowing center... while the others investigate what the world is, maybe he can show off his own abilities and surge ahead towards that light. He only swings deeper into the rainforest proper in brief bursts, but when he does, he's in danger. His senses kick into overdrive, letting him maneuver around lashing branches with minimal scrapes.

    "WOAH! The branches--?!" He's shouting, kicking off one and trying to restore his swings. Gotta break the canopy again, get a moment to think! "No, not the branches... the *trees*. Which ones..." His innate danger-sense transmits their chemical signatures, micro-motions, even root-deep vibrations, up to his near-precognitive sense. A tingle along his skull should let him figure out which of those trees is dangerous... but not *how*.

    He accelerates his swings, often kicking along the top of the branches and tugging himself at high speed to make sure he doesn't go dangerously below the canopy too long. The others are back at the river, aside from -- who else? The radio interference, he can't figure it out! He just has to go with his gut. Unfortunately, his gut is tainted with the toxic urge of proving himself, so it drives him forward. "Maybe if anyone's around that shelter, they can help me figure out why Audrey II's fan-club here wants to dine on spider soup." He mutters between swings.
Ishirou I4 watches the tree eat the other tree...the actual consumption of one tree into the other is fascinating at first.  The fact that they are more merging than being consumed...that's not usually how organisms should act.  However, here we are, they're trying to eat each other, and then...the new tree suddenly has a boss bar.  

"This is both incredibly fascinating, but utterly horrifying.." he says before he starts bolting for it.  Blue things that come for him are fired upon by beam shots from his pod, as I4 moves to try and avoid being grabbed and consumed.  Various QTE events to escape immediate consumption and he aims to try and meet with Spiders-man near the shelter.  

"I have no idea!  They incorporate biomatter in really weird ways...and uh, don't get eaten, but also don't make them eat each other either.  That is how you get boss-level trees."
Darren Come on back. Yeah, I know what I said, but that water's not the vibe. It'll make you sick. We can swim in good water when we get home. Yeah, promise. Darren laughs. "Bet," he says to himself.

     Forte draws his attention. Should they turn back? Darren seems disappointed, but the point about not splitting up is well taken. Besides, being a cryptozoologist and crackpot is a lot like being a QB--you should always read the vibe. "Who we got? You, me," He turns around and nearly bumps into-"Rita..." That just leaves... "What's that dude's name... I4?" He glances around. "I4?" There he is.

     Nessie leaves the water looking slightly disappointed, and she seems very wary of the Danger Trees between Darren and herself (especially the one that I4 has buffed up). She perks up considerably once she's back with Darren, enough so that she's willing to try and comfort Rita by pressing her long neck up against her, and nestling imouto head beneath her chin.

     "Don't get got, cuz! Matter of fact..." He pulls out his phone again and snaps a picture of the Super Danger Tree. "Exhibit C. Further examples of 'imitation' ecosystem. Plant life smells of sweat and blood. Certain larger varieties seem to be carnivorous, and all species beyond the river generally exhibit a closer similarity to animal life than plant life, with flesh and blood. Absence of insects and fauna, reaction to external stimuli support carnivorous hypothesis. Enlarged specimen courtesy of I4. You a real one," he says gratefully, before stopping the voice recorder app.

     "Aight," he says, to Rita and Forte, as I4 heads over to the shelter. "I think we got a /lot/ about 'what this place is.' Forte's prolly got a point--not much point going further off the beaten path. I dunno about heading -all the way- back," he says, hands on his hips, "But if y'all two don't mind, we oughta follow I4 and get to that shelter. See if everybody's okay."

     "C'mon back, Nessie," Darren says. That pokeball floats into his palm again, and opens, bathing her in white light which disappears into the ball. He makes to follow Foureyes, but his passage is not so frantic as the inspector's. It's easier not to get got if you take your time and remain observant. He's got a literal yeti on deck in case any of the danger trees get handsy with any of them.
Rita Ma      "The distress message says 'survivors', doesn't it?" Rita asides to Forte. "I can't imagine what they were 'surviving', but maybe that's why everything here is this way. It's not that people decided to live in a place so awful. It's that it was made awful after they settled here."

     Though she reacts with sincere wide-eyed, open-mouthed horror when I4 is grabbed, some deep-down part of her brain responds with canny alacrity to 'actual physical danger'. Its branches are sliced to pieces by an invisible force, giving him a little more breathing room for those QTEs!

     Once it's rendered harmless via gratuitous violence, Rita takes a moment to crouch down next to its body. Eugh. Even *I* don't want to eat this. But, if I'm right, it could help us get through the forest...

     She takes a little surreptitious chomp before rejoining Darren And Pals, nodding in response to his decision. The swallow that follows could be shrugged off as a nervous gulp. "I thought we *were* getting closer to the shelter! That's the only reason I was willing to go in here. Of course I want to leave!" Her expression's a mixture of anguish (so I went through something this scary for no reason?? I'm never trusting Forte with the map again!) and relief (at least it's over...).

     But having freshly eaten the meat of one of those horrid plants, Rita tries to exercise her authority over monsters to ensure her party a safe exit from the meat-woods. Through that consumptive connection, she is an offspring in need of protection; a parent setting a stern example; a queen rightfully demanding obedience- any mechanism of nonhostility or loyalty they have, an attempt is made to twist it, and even some they don't.

     She doesn't manage to sound very confident, though. Please just leave me and my friends alone...!
Vantablitz Remnants     The spidey sense is *uniquely* suited as a navigation tool here. It's practically a cheat code. He can feel the hot-cold sensation of flora-related danger everywhere he goes, and something like a sonar ping gradually shifting in relation to the mystery presence (which, honestly, as sonar pings go, actually just makes it creepier. Now it's like a ghost ship). He definitely gets to his destination first, probably followed right by Hiromi simply due to her being too hard to kill and having too much sustain to be fatally waylaid by constant horror game ambushes.

    The triangle which contains the signal marks where the death stalker forest abruptly thins out, and then rather suddenly terminates. Its border is marked by large chunks of rusting steel piled up into jagged, haphazard barricades, and a deep trench that goes the entire way around, twenty meters across, filled entirely with dry, sterile sand(?). On the other side, the soil is colonized instead with familiar, earthly green-growth, freshwater pools, and numerous clusters of those white-stalked black-petalled flowers with glowing green insides, climbing up what appear to be metal posts, carpeting the ground, or hanging from green trees, in various shapes and sizes; the ones that didn't actually attack anyone before.

    It's weird to see large amounts of corroded metal wreckage, because there's no sign of 'ruins' around it. No asphalt, concrete, or even foreverplasic anywhere. However, Spider-Man does almost immediately trip over three things; an empty brown glass bottle, a bent and dented up piece of pipe large enough to use as a club, and a dirtied handgun, chambered for beefy tokarev rounds, with all of its plastic furniture removed, surrounded by several empty magazines and much ancient brass. Mingled in with it are what appear to be clothing buttons and a zipper by themselves.
Vantablitz Remnants     Espcaping boss tree hell is a pain, and not easy to do without taking some damage, but it is thankfully only an incidental crimsonhead encounter and not a true F.O.E. Rita finds the taste the equivalent of 'lacroix human flesh'. It's watery and unsatisfying, and has just enough of a hint of human (specifically human) blood to keep lawsuits at bay.

    Three things happen, when she tells it to stop. One: all plants of all kinds stop attacking. Two: that order doesn't apply once they walk a few more miles. Three: now they sometimes just get to see the vegetation moving around in front of them until then, ignoring their presence.

    When they too arrive at the PoI triangle, Spider-Man and Hiromi have had some time to work first. Each of the three major features is 'a short walk' from one another, and visible from each place past the sand.

    One is that pillar of steam. It does, indeed, seem to come from somewhere deep underground, billowing out of a deep cave in the mountainside which obviously houses a much deeper and darker pit. The contaminated water bubbles up out of it, and is diverted by trenches outside of the sand barrier and down into that deep crevice that zigzags across the lower mountain. There are signs of overgrown machinery near it, and nowhere else.

    The enormous glowing point looks to be a singular, redwood-dwarfing tree, which so thoroughly infests a chunk of mountain with its roots that they break the stone face and sprawl out into the air. Its branches bursts with those glowing flowers, forming a dazzling beacon that could be seen for many many miles from an aircraft. It looks as if there's a path cut into the grass and dirt to and from it.

    The source of the signal is easy to pinpoint, though almost completely invisible under the heaps of greenery that have since climbed and covered its every surface. A building, definitely, roughly the size of a large highschool perhaps, but all of its external surfaces are brushed metal, with only the barest remnants of chipped paint left. Most of the doors look as if they were intentionally fused by high heat --welded shut-- and others have collapsed. There's a glass dome up top, kept relatively free of vegetation, but it quickly turns out to be the foot thick fake glass kind. There's one major entrance with a keypad and what looks like a sequence of cameras and scanners. A mounted speaker blares the message audibly from its decayed and cover-less raw components.
Ishirou I4 was full of adrenaline to get away from the creature he hadn't noticed the pain in his arm and leg from where he was grabbed before he was freed.  When they get to the PoI, I4 does not immediately engage with it and simply lets others get to things first.  Right now he needs time.

He looks to see the comfy shirt damaged, melted through, and burns on his arm and the back of his leg.  They COULD have been worse and likely would have if not for the cloth there.  He sprays some antibiotic on it, and hisses because of the sting, and wraps it up.  He was thoughtful to bring a first aid kit.  

Just enough to keep him going until he can see a real doctor.  Once done, he'll focus on what he's best at...and what seems LESS likely to have feat smelling flowers trying to eat his skin.  The metal building, that is.  If nobody has opened it by the time he gets there, he attempts to remotely access it, to try and see if he can brute force the code to get inside.  
Rita Ma      When nobody's looking, Rita turns aside and makes a Face of Disgust at the awful flavor on her tongue, ineffectually trying to spit it out. Were these things human once?! I kind of guessed, but... it's almost too awful to think about. Let's hope they're just a bad imitation.

     Her face at seeing the now-obedient plants skitter around casually in plain view is equally disgusted, but at least now she doesn't have to hide it. "Euuuuh... that's too awful. I can't look..." She doesn't tell her allies that they're under her protection now, but the sudden friendliness of this area of the forest is fairly self-evident after a few minutes.

     Of course the tree is the first thing she notices, emerging from the forest. Rita's head cranes back so far that she almost falls over. "Do they really get that big? Is it fake?" is the first thing she asks, her tone wondering. "It's even bigger than the ones I saw in magazines."

     Then, after a little pause: "People must have taken *really bad* care of it."

     Rita's first order of business is to circle around to a side where nobody else is and surreptitiously scale the building with a series of elegant hops, grabbing onto windowsills, cracks in the exterior, or just digging her nails into the metal to support each leap. Once up top, she'll peer into the dome, trying to locate anything living inside that she can 'target'.

     Ms. Grier's ghost- now is a perfect time to use that power. But I'm not sure if it'll work without some kind of 'life energy' to seek out...
Hiromi <J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "If you can hear this, don't let the plants eat you...also don't make the plants eat each other. You get boss-plants."
<J-IC-Scene> Hiromi says, with sudden interest, "Oh?"
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "Yeah, they're big, have stronger grabs..."
<J-IC-Scene> Hiromi says, "Can 'boss-plants' grow bigger?"
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "Uh...after I figured out they can do that the first time, I didn't check to see if they could keep doing that?"
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says suddenly, "No."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "They can't."

    Hiromi doesn't know Rita's name, and does know that I4 had first said he hadn't tried continuing the process, so she's disinclined to trust her word. She can (possibly) find out for herself, time permitting. She'll save the question of why that girl would try to trick her for later. It's not like there's a shortage of possible reasons.

<J-IC-Scene> Hiromi says, "'Biohacking.' Unfamiliar."
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "I can subvert living organism's processes in a similar method to how a skilled hacker can do so to mechanical things!"

<J-IC-Scene> Hiromi says, "Is this 'commanding' 'organisms'?"
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "Well, it can be commanding them. It can also be changing their tastes from, lets say Me, to...themselves."

<J-IC-Scene> Hiromi says, "I see. I'll try."
<J-IC-Scene> Hiromi says, "Can't see things without trying, yes?"
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "I mean, you're right there! Tell me how it works out!"

    It was known going into this that only a few things could distract Hiromi from her course. One was to find a worthy opponent, and I4 has managed to suggest the possibility of there being one. An opponent, worthy in potentia, as it were. That's good enough to be a meaningful distraction, where the horror-forest was otherwise only an intriguing obstacle course of foreign smells and tastes -- though that would also be very worthy of distraction, under other circumstances.

    The next tree Hiromi finds that comes after her, or other thing of considerable size, she allows enough time to wrap its tendrils around her before she speaks to it with a howl of Authority, commanding it, Consume all other hunters of this forest as would let you grow.

    She's not gambling on it understanding positions of hierarchy or authority, which is why she isn't trying to control it to any greater extent than delivering that order. In the event that it doesn't have enough of a concept of communication to be ordered at all, she'll be left with no more use of it than to kill it and continue on her way. If it can 'listen,' then she'll leave it and be on her way.

    In either case, Hiromi arrives at the edge of the murder-forest a bit after Spider-Man, only now noticing him, thanks to his differing mobility talents and means of navigation. She makes interested motions in his direction, but being able to easily take off, and having a keen sense for danger, and Hiromi being inherently (if not immediately, to him) dangerous, means he is, unlike I4, almost entirely safe from giant canine tackle-nosing. Unless he ignores that sense and gets down in her range while she's pacing about near him, which would make for a different story.

    More confounding, and more relevant to her reasons for being here, she doesn't find whoever left that trail. Which way does it go? She avoids the steam, which would thoroughly foul her senses just from its billowing and the resulting water, but checks out the path by the tree.
Darren      "Phew! Damn, nature's incredible," says Darren, oblivious to why the trees aren't attacking them. "Even weird sweaty imitation nature. Those lasers came in clutch," he says to I4. "Matter of fact..."

     Darren pulls open his phone, scrolling through what looks like an inventory management system. An ancient portable CD player floats out of his backpack, drawstrings un-tugging themselves to permit it passage. Into his waiting hand it drops, and when the tray is opened, he loads a CD in. An unusual looking aux cord runs from the player to the phone.

Ta-da! Nessie learned TR101 Multi-Beam.

     "Cool." It's slipped back into his bag, with the CD now mysteriously absent. His phone, he keeps out.

     "Exhibit D... ze nuts. Gottem! Ahem. First -visible- sign of post-industrial self-like habitation," he says, stepping up to the structure to marvel at the greenery which nearly smothers it completely. "Almost completely reclaimed by greenery--maybe even actual greenery. Extremely faint traces of paint cling to brushed metal structure where plant life doesn't obscure it completely. This appears to be the installation from which the broadcast is playing, evidenced not only by its status as the only structure we've seen so far, but the presence of a security system at the main entrance."

     Cameras and a keypad. Are they still working? He approaches the main entrance, ignorant of what the code may be and without the means to decrypt it. So he just knocks.

     "Yo! Anybody home?"

     He looks over his shoulder at I4. "If this door don't open soon--if we don't even get an intercom--you mind working your magic?"
Spider-Man     Spider-Man actually doesn't have a sense for "suddenly there's nothing to swing from", and as a result, when he hits this zone, he winds up kind of bouncing and stumbling in chaotic acrobatics. "Gaaaah! Too many trees, not enough trees, make up your mind!" He shouts to nobody in particular as he skids. "This is why I hate ecosystem monoculture!"

    Eventually he comes to a stop. "Huhhh... Scrapyard? No, wait..." He looks down at something he's tripped over. The modifications... "No plastic." He checks around more. "No plastic. Nowhere! This is... huh. Did this Earth just never learn about oil? I think that's pretty good." He tilts his head. "But then how is this..."

    "It looks like it's the tree that took care of them. I think... it looks like the flowers compete in the ecosystem, maybe?" These are the ones with the glowing green inside, right? He approaches them. When I4 gets here, he's still fussing over them. Chemically-speaking, what is going on here? Can he use any of his techy chemistry gadgets to understand how they're driving the more hostile plants back, what the big tree is doing, or... well, maybe a connection with the total absence of plastics? This seems *incredibly* chemistry-focused in some way, and Spider-Man suspects he needs to focus on the science.
Vantablitz Remnants     Hiromi commanding the super creepy turbo-warped tree to follow her authority has mixed results. How well a tree grasps authority, as opposed to simply having its neurons manually fiddled with via magitechnology, is dubious. This mainly seems to serve the function of it ignoring ninety nine percent of the growth, heading to the very edge of the friendship radius, and picking a fight with a giant horrid pitcher plant thing, endemic battle style.

    She has the grotesque joy of watching the boss encounter mutate two stages, before it moves towards a grove of those weird flowers, whereupon deep black geometric spikes extrude from the copse in all directions, skewering its various fleshy limbs and shaking fruits in two hundred places and rapidly dissolving --burning?-- it away, with green glowing lines like the edge of burning paper. It seems that the black flowers ignore the party for being 'below the threshold of hunting', possibly just in raw size. It does explain how this area hasn't become a godzilla singularity by now at least.

    The tree which bears by far the most blooms actually looks very familiar to her. A kind of fig tree, if she remembers correctly. One occasionally considered holy, to the south. The fact that only half its branches actually have green leaves or edible figs seems irrelevant. There's even a rug laid out below it, with metal objects that smell of fragrant perfumes, and its trunk is wrapped with two very long bands of braided rope, studded with what look like very large fruitstones and perfectly spherical black pebbles. The best she can compare that to is the thing that southern monks like to wear around their wrists.

    This, incidentally, is also where she smells those very same tracks again, but much older.
Vantablitz Remnants     Spider-Man's chemical analysis probably seems like a weird time to do it, but is actually very informative. The flowers are full of enormous quantities of incredibly complex carbons that don't appear in nature, many of which can only come from breaking down or processing petroleum hydrocarbons, or complex ceramics and plastics. The glow seems to come from some intense internal metabolic process he gets the feeling he shouldn't poke at, because it seems to contain a dangerous amount of energy.

    Furthermore, a lot of what they're growing in isn't actually sand or loam, but 'about half of what goes into cement mixtures and various kinds of consumer plastic and rubber', sans any kind of carbon content; which is most of it, because even concrete kind of relies on limestone to exist.
Vantablitz Remnants     I4 finds that the door has no remote access ports at all. All of its systems are completely closed circuit. There's no hacking without directly plugging in. However, there is still current running through most of it. Manually throwing the locks causes a heavy bulkhead door, like what one would find touring a navy aircraft carrier, to groan open, and allow him inside. Sadly, nobody answers Darren. However, once he is inside, he notices, amongst other things, that there are still a couple of working cameras that track him.

    The interior is definitely that of some kind of bunker or shelter alright. There's a big map up on the walls of every intersection, with flowcharts of directions written in large asian characters of two varieties and English lettering beneath. It looks like it was probably once some kind of processing point, given the maze of bollards, tape, bulletproof glassed checkpoints, metal detectors, and huge stacks of plastic luggage cases and what are probably relief crates, but it's gone thoroughly to shit now.

    There are sandbags piled high in the halls, opened and emptied pallets of ammo, human-shaped dirt-impressions around empty military and hazmat suits, discarded weapons, bullet holes everywhere, severe damage to breakers, door controls, and ventilation systems, and then ample signs that someone had come along later and thoroughly flamethrowered everything organic, leaving no bloodstains anywhere. Given the lack of any gunfire aimed away from the doors though, it seems unlikely they were invaded by rivals. Much of the damage looks like claw marks, acid puddles, or massive brute impacts.

    Someone has crudely spraypainted over several of the maps, covering up the north and drawing a skull over it, and showing emergency directions through the south wing in squiggly dotted lines, circling only the far end of the east wing, and a jotted path to something in the central ring that is listed as a reactor, stockpile, and greenhouse on levels B2, B1, and G respectively. That makes this the west wing.
Vantablitz Remnants     Rita pressing her nose to the glass can see that it's actually very clean, despite the state of everything else. An entire atrium is inside, obviously meant to benefit from direct sunlight, but the number of shelves, troughs, walkways, desks, and benches inside of it suggests it wasn't originally so 'decorative'. It appears to be in the dead center of the middle ring between four cardinal spokes.

    Signs of life are everywhere. Darren and I4 are obviously 'valid targets' she doesn't want to attack at the west, which is fairly devoid of life, but the south wing is still jam packed with signals, some moving, some still, some large, some small, all just kind of mingled together in large pods, with random roamers between them. The north side is one *giant* life sign, like using 'detect water' while at sea. The east wing has numerous, small and stationary lifesigns, and two fairly significant ones at its far end. One is a level below ground, and more intense. One is on ground floor, and seems . . . very *close* to human, but . . .
Ishirou The former android sighs, of course...blasted Luddites and their /manual/ fucking doors.  I4 connects, which...is...strange because he connects a wire from his arm into the pad and plays a minigame opening it up.  Because it's so simple the minigame isn't even that /hard/.  Ugh...

Languages are acknowledged and adjusted, to make sure that there wasn't any variance that might make understanding them more difficult.  The fight was definitely one-sided, using choke points, and the fact that there was no return fire definitely means that it was against a foe that was dangerous but didn't use weapons.

The plants?  Could the plants be the threat?

The map comes into view and he gives it a very hard look over.  "North is skulled, which is probably both lost AND dangerous...these dotted lines..." he looks over to the south, "Emergency ways out?  And a path to the central wing.  Maybe their last stand?" he muses, "But with the power being marked there, that'd be where the signal is likely originating.  So that means..." he muses, and points at the west wing, "We're here.  So we just need to get to the center."
Hiromi     Since I4 had asked, Hiromi explains what she saw happen with the various plants, thus paying back the favor of telling her about a means to make them grow. It's unfortunate that it didn't turn out better for her, but that's life. Not every time you try to make a giant monster out of lots of medium-sized monsters turns out well. It took her a lot longer to grow as big as she is than it took those trees to consume their prey, after all, and the more quickly power is gained, the less it can be relied upon.

    True gains take continual effort.

    Digging up the flowers is slightly tempting, but they have more of a feel of a 'hazard' to Hiromi than an 'opponent,' and they haven't bothered her, so she leaves them be, so she does sniff around the ones on this 'safe' side of the forest's edge. Do they smell any different than the forest had? If they feed on flesh-trees -- but they hadn't fed on that one, either, after killing it, had they? It was unnatural.

    Putting the rest of that topic aside, Hiromi examines the one, large tree. Figs do tempt her, but the rope and the perfumes suggest sanctification, so she doesn't attempt a harvest. She examines the rug, and realizes that the scents are older.

    Older?

    Oh, no. This is the back of the trail! Was she turned around since the beginning? Was it someone leaving here, not being brought? Or did it fold over itself? She tries finding it again, searching for something more recent. Was it toward the steam, after all, or toward the building, or was another exit taken?
Rita Ma      Rita, of course, books it for the East wing, dropping to all fours for maximum speed away from prying eyes. North is obviously awful. West is mostly empty. I don't know what South is at all, but I'm pretty sure it isn't people. But East...!

     Once she's as close to that signal as she can get, Rita takes a deep breath, reaches deep for a memory of when the night sky's stars seemed purple instead, and shuts her eyes as she levitates a few inches off the ceiling. Her hair flutters out behind her in zero-G; her body tints itself that unearthly hue and fades to translucence.

     If that really is a person, I don't want to attack them. But there's other life-signs nearby. If I just-!

     Locking on to the small, stationary life-sign closest to the human-looking one, Rita plunges downwards through the metal roof and any obstructing walls, phasing through them just like a ghost en route to her 'target'.
Darren      "That's what I'm talking about, boy!" Darren claps I4 heartily on the back, then claps his hands, pumps both fists and gives one (1) Victory Whoop. "Let's check it out."

<J-IC-Scene> Darren says, "Hey, yo, Rita, where you at? I'm finna go inside. I4 came in clutch again!"
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Ah... I'll come in, just a second!"
<J-IC-Scene> I4 makes a slightly ugh sound, "Manual..."
<J-IC-Scene> Darren says, "Cool!"
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says cautiously, "Are you seeing anything about the layout?"
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "There is a map."
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "Gimme a second to read and scan it to memory."

    I4 has the map. Once it's loaded up, Darren has the plan. "You said we need to get to the center?"

     "Harry! Nessie!" Two pokeballs, both blue with yellow Xes, float into the air from Darren's backpack. They reveal a grouchy-looking yeti and, of course, the aforementioned friend-shaped plesiosaur. "You and me lead the way," he says. "If we get into a scrape between here and there, just grab onto Nessie's shell. Or those things on Harry's back. Hey, what are those, anyway, bruh?"

     ...yeti noises

     "No way those are thorns," says Darren jovially. "They're bigger than my arm!" As an afterthought, he asides to I4, "It don't hurt if you grab 'em, though. See?" He does. It -would- hurt to be stuck by the point, but the 'thorns' on the yeti's back are so large that you'd really have to try.

     More seriously, "Last stand situation--what you think's up with the doors? They look welded shut." He frowns thoughtfully, hand on his chin. "At least, the ones that weren't caved in do."
Vantablitz Remnants     Sniffing around the flowers doesn't turn up anything wildly odd for Hiromi. Actually, the strongest weirdness about them is that they're basically a dead ringer for a lotus flower, despite no other resemblance besides the number of petals, which are hard to distinguish for being really, *really* black, only distinguished at their edges by a slight gloss. There's no sense of any perverse biology to them --they do seem as inanimate as plants should be-- but an intense, body-like warmth radiates from them, and their 'roots' seem to run together like a single colonial organism, as far as she can see. There's no salt whiff around them either.

    Crossing over to the cavern, she also smells multiple trails leading back and forth. It seems like the same prints, making many trips back and forth over a long period of time, with that accompanying fragrance of lotus flower. The cave itself quickly turns out to be enormous; far larger than it'd initially seemed. She can't make heads or tails of the metal things standing around in the water, or rumbling by the side, but they seem to have some function relevant to the indoor lake. It would seem, in fact, they have something to do where oily blots bubble up from below, gushing hot, noxious, unbreathable gas --likely separating it from the otherwise deep blue water sparkling with stars, and sending the former down the mountain. She does at least recognize 'this is like a water wheel' and 'this is like a still', and many metal cables are joined together and braided into a thick bundle that runs underground through a crudely hacked stone 'crawlspace'.

    In the midst of that lake, a tiny cofferdam has been set up, exposing a deep, deep, dark, *bottomlessly* far-reaching shaft, into what must be the absolute bowels of the mountain. There are warm lights on the walls, but there's no way to see the bottom. The scent implies that it must have gone down and come back up once in the past week, but the sheer distance implies it'd be a laborious use of time. There's also no way of breathing in here, so if Hiromi were a regular wolf, she'd have keeled over and died by now.
Vantablitz Remnants     I4 and Darren don't have much trouble simply progressing forward. However, the further they go, the less and less it seems as if they're ever going to meet anyone. The lockers are largely empty, the halls are thoroughly sterilized, and it looks as if even the bathrooms along the way were never even touched, except here and there where it appears someone might have tried to run and hide, given the thorough flamethrower blackening of a stall or five.

    The languages on the wall appear to be Vietnamese and Korean next to the English. West wing seems to be something about 'arrivals' 'checkpoint' 'barracks' 'security', and the like. The south is listed as 'civilian block' 'cafeteria' 'storage' and 'childrens ward'. The north is listed with things like 'hospital' 'testing' and 'quarantine', and the east 'satcom' 'centcom' 'servers' and 'staff'.

    The welded doors have some very sharp differences. Most of them look as if they were done by multiple professional tools simultaneously; teams of real engineers locking down areas preemptively. A few are sloppier jobs done much later; someone who simply picked up an arc welder and finished the job on passages that were considered safe before. This includes blocking off the central access doors from the west wing. It seems someone intentionally made it so it can only be accessed from the east now. They can get there simply by swinging around, but they can see why pretty quickly.

    The thick bulletproof windows that let them see past the locked down northern bulkhead show the hallways ahead choked with vibrant purple, pink, orange, and teal flowers. Creepers carpet the floor and pattern the walls. The air dances with glittering, softly glowing pollen. It looks fantastically beautiful, and also every single primitive instinct --even I4's brand new ones-- flashes its danger lights all at once. The part of the brain that recognizes 'human corpse, stay away' just flashes on repeat.

    The south access is technically only blocked save for the engineers-only red-lit maintenance crawl-hallway, with many mesh catwalks and windows involved. Just getting close to it, they can hear sounds of movement. Clunking, dragging, slithering, the rustling of brush, and soft, repetitive clicks. Here lies the real QTE hole that someone marked a safe(st?) route through.

    Of course they could ignore it if they just want to breach central by force.
Hiromi     Among the things Hiromi can do without are air and light, being items not always found in ample quantities, beneath the earth. She leaps to the edge of the cofferdam, and takes a look down, but the sheer distance does what darkness cannot, and she senses nothing meaningful but a continuation of the shaft for some excessive length.

    The scent there is old, too, if repeated. The paths here follow over and over, making it effectively impossible to determine the way she should be going as 'the most recent.' She can only follow around the edges of the room, and narrow her search to 'the relatively recent.'

    If there are no other clear pathways from here, she goes to investigate the crawlspace, shifting into a smaller, still quadrupedal form in the process, and shifting the stone out of her way as necessary.
Spider-Man     The man of spiders has sorted his business with the flowers. Now the interior is being breached, and he's ready for his role. Put me in the game, coach! Someone just found a small, constrained space to crawl through, full of something moving. Between his danger-sense, the safe-marked path, and the fact that he is *literally infused with the power of what a spider can do* make Spider-Man swing through the open door, recognize the clear way forward, and instantly call out: "Crawlspace! I call wall-crawler dibs!"

    He nearly instantly leaps headfirst through, sliding and then subsequently elegantly crawling in an incredibly swift way. Using his webbing, he can block up dangerous areas using thick traps to prevent anyone else from suffering from following behind. Not only can he pass through, but he can lay down enough incapacitating constraints that it should let the others have an easy time on their way through! Despite his frequent use of wide open space, this is actually where a spider often thrives: Weird fucked up dark crawl zones.
Vantablitz Remnants     Rita cheats the whole thing on her end, while everyone is gathering up multiple trips worth of info all at once to compress forty hours of playtime into ten. Briefly, all she can really see and hear is an infinite void of redshifted stars and the timeless howl of the solar background of the universe, and then she emerges indoors, under warm blue-filtered lighting, and mercifully de-humidified air.

    It looks like some kind of lobby or staff lounge; it's not particularly luxurious, but more like an in-between space for people waking up, taking a break, or waiting to get somewhere. There's an empty coffee bar, empty vending machine, empty breakfast station, empty chairs, and an abundance of vases and hanging pots that have been used to cultivate about eighty different types of flower. Magazines dated from the 1990s to 2030s are left lying around, as are numerous empty cups, stacks of paper, and a singular laptop, in sleep mode. Used janitorial equipment is propped in behind the bar, and marks on the floor suggest burning here and there that someone gave up trying to clean away. Empty cases of what appear to be MREs are stacked inside an open, switched off, and empty walk-in freezer, and cup noodles by the dozen are stacked up on counter space.

    She's just vapourized one of those black-white-green flowers. A handful of them grow in the corners, politely separate from everything else, *seemingly* placed intentionally. As soon as she lands, she gets a smell of burnt lotus incense from it, and then feels the vibrations of fast and heavy movement through the floor, routed directly towards her at high speed.

    In the eastern wall the room she's in, she can see doors painted up and down with signs (and she can read the Korean and English parts) that denote it as a 'clean room' and give procedures for moving in and out, and a long window strip that shows a sliver of white and blue furniture inside, as well as someone hunched over a bench. About one second after that reactive movement comes towards her, the person inside turns around and looks at her straight through the window. Mostly all she can see is blue gloves and a regulation mask and goggles.
Darren      "Whoa." The north wing is bad vibes. There's a series of looks between Darren and his teammates, then the three of them glance towards I4--just to confirm that it is, in fact, rancid vibes.

    They're not going to get to the center from the arrivals wing, anyway.

<J-IC-Scene> Darren says, "Aight, I4. Check it out."
<J-IC-Scene> Darren says, "I've /definitely/ got the gains to bust that thing down. Thing is, if there's anybody alive in there, it might send the wrong message. So what you wanna do?"
<J-IC-Scene> Darren says, "Bust in, or tunnel?"

    Spider-Man blazes past full of eagerness to explore dark and fucked up crawl spaces. The spirited advance fills Darren with admiration. Impressed, he notes,
<J-IC-Scene> Darren says, "Oh, homeboy called dibs on the tunnel."
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "Yeah, and it's likely it can be opened from the inside..."
<J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "So we can wait!"

     "-Y'all- can wait," Darren corrects with a smirk, pointing his index finger from Harry to Nessie to I4. He breaks into a sprint after Spider-Man, inspired by Spider-Agility to try his own hand at a darkened crawl-space obstacle course.

     Darren isn't a wall crawler but a gridiron-runner; the skillset is different but there is still a very real element of body control. He exhibits a grace that blurs the lines of human athletic ability, even on all fours, his every motion deliberate in the darkened passage as he traverses it. "Oh, web? Damn, what are you, some kinda spider man?"
Ishirou As they move, I4 recognizes the languages, and can actually confirm English words to the others to cross-reference.  The long and short of it, as they move the lack of people and the words of the areas cause him to frown.  'Testing' and 'Quarantine' stand out, especially next to arrivals and checkpoints.  

The welded doors tell a story too, one of being prepared, and then one of scrambling when the plan fails.  When they get close enough to see why there is no access from here...I4's not familiar with this feeling.  The feeling of fear in response to a visual stimulus.  Not understanding WHY his brain was telling him to stay away because there is a corpse causes him real unease.  

He's a bit distracted by all of this to respond to questions immediately, only snaping aware once he realizes he's being a bit too inward thinking about the scary thing.  Spiders-mans jumps through...and while he might be the BEST equipped, I4 decides to try and scan through.  He'll help with spotting for Spider-man.  

Rita indicates there is someone in the east wing, I4 moves his scanning a little to confirm what she's saying, trying to get an analysis on them and help navigate a path to there...with hopefully a way for Spider-man to open up an easier path for them.  

And then Darren's through too.  Oh no...

Though he looks at the two pokemon hovering near him.  This makes him feel safer.  Much safer.  "Hi.." he says before turning towards playing spotter.
Vantablitz Remnants     Hiromi and Spider-Man taking the southern route, once again, kind of make the journey a joke. There are ample spray-painted markings all over, showing where to look up, which hallways not to go down, indicating wall panels that can be shifted aside, and pullstrings to drop ladders via makeshift means. The hall shows repeated signs of torching, but also like it hasn't been used in a while, so there are many times where Things Happen:

    Blue-green tendrils force their way in through deteriorated gaps and attempt to drag them away. Pulsing organic pods erupt into showers of acidic and flammable pollen. A lower crawlspace gives way and a *humanoid* shape suddenly stirs, flailing and crawling and aggressively clawing and grabbing at them. Something with three legs scuttles in and out of an intersection at high speed, disappears, and performs a drop attack with a thorned 'stinger', like a ray with flower petals. There is, at one point, a part where they cross an upper deck which looks out into an entire indoor mini-mall and atrium, and even with the lights shut off, the number of silhouettes either one of them can sense shambling around in there is worth about five heebie jeebies.

    Webbing it up is a good call. Hiromi is about four shades too invincible to actally be cinematic game-overed by any QTEs along the way. She also is able to smell that intense lotus scent and feel the vibrations of high-speed movement below her, in Rita's direction; she could probably arrive right after if she gave chase. The central axis can't be accessed from here either, but it puts them finally at the eastern checkpoint, with a functional bulkhead to that greenhouse Rita had spotted, and an elevator to 'reactor' or 'warehouse' level. The signal at least seems to be routed through the reactor, to solve that mystery immediately.
Vantablitz Remnants     Darren following the crawlspace behind those two is treated to all the intensely creepy scenery, and none of the sudden death events. He's given the same set of options; exactly where Rita is, the greenhouse, or elevator downwards. Anyone advancing in any direction quickly finds those neutral flowers from outdoors are planted all around the place though. It's unclear if it's intentional or they'd just colonized the inside, but they at least know they aren't anything to worry about.
Rita Ma      Rita stares at the scant remains of the weird lotus she just disintegrated, and glances over at the other strategically-positioned flowers as if they might retaliate against her for the death of their kin. That strange lady said they were really dangerous, didn't she? But the retaliation never comes. Instead her eyes linger on the Korean and English signs.

     "Clean room". Cleaned of what? The living stuff outside? ... So that is the disaster that these people were 'survivors' from.

     All of those thoughts come in the fraction of a second before she registers the sound of fast, heavy movement, and visibly panics. Her hands come up to muffle an involuntary yelp. Rita's eyes go wide and scan the room, looking for someplace to hide-

     Wait. Is that... a human?

     Her heart is still racing from the sound of that onrushing danger, but Rita manages to assemble the thought: the person on the other side of the glass doesn't look scared of what's coming. That means that whatever's coming is on the side of the humans. But that doesn't mean *I'm* safe!

     Her gut tells her to turn invisible, to create a tentacle-decoy before whatever it is gets here. Her conscious mind realizes that doing so would only make her more suspicious.

     Rita slowly raises her hands in surrender, facing towards the door where the noise is approaching from, but staring right at the person behind the window. How thick does the window look? Too thick for sound? Just to be safe, she mouths the words in Korean exaggeratedly enough that her lips can be read:

     "Please. I'm human. Help."

     (It is a lie, but only a little bit. The anxiety on her face is real.)
Hiromi     Hiromi remembers what happened the last time she moved from a stone tunnel to a very old building full of things trying to kill her. The last... several times? In any case, she sees a strong correlation between 'leaving behind the stone' and 'things trying to kill her, now that she's away from all her comfy earth and stone.'

    That being the case, she brings the stone with her. It rolls in, a thin sheet under her feet as she advances into the building, smooth as river-washed, set solidly into every groove of the metal under her. When things reach for her from outside, and she isn't in a position to snap at them, she commands the stone to flow into the gaps, plugging and crushing what doesn't retreat. Other things are too quick, and more than one stinger reaches her, but it takes something worse than needles to reach past her fur and pierce her skin. There is, ultimately, nothing 'incidental hazards along a safe-ish route' can do to give her more pause than by being curious enough for her to stop and investigate. And there is danger of that, but it's cut short by that sense of rapid movement. It's in a single direction, for a purpose. She's already lost the specific trail; her quarry could be anywhere at all within this place. There's no reason not to go to where the most immediate danger is.

    Ignoring all else, Spidey and Darren included, Hiromi moves at maximum speed in the direction of the 'something' heading toward Rita, ready to break through a wall if it seems like she won't otherwise be able to intercept it -- not 'intercept it before it reaches Rita,' because Hiromi has no idea where Rita is, and won't until just a moment before she arrives.

    In that moment, Hiromi, for the first time since arriving here, adopts her two-legged form, transforming mid-leap, instantly recognizing and judging Rita the not-danger, and rounding on the direction of the incoming 'something' in a low, leg-bent, half-turned posture, ready to push herself off one foot and into combat.

    She holds like that, like a coiled spring, a physical promise of violence, but still holding, waiting to discover just what comes next. 'A person,' maybe.
Darren      By virtue of having no sense of direction when it comes to tunnels, Darren arrives at the ELEVATOR. Hey, I4. Harry and Nessie are gonna chill with you for a while. I got turned around in the tunnels. Sorry, bruh! I'm just gonna tell 'em to beat the door down so you're not waiting for me to get back.

     And where does the elevator go? Well... DOWN honestly seems like it's a more interesting choice, even if it's not the choice that puts him back with the others.
Ishirou The door is broken down for I4, and he waits to make sure it's safe?  Though thankfully Hiromi and Spider-man have already made the way safe for him.  "Uh...thanks!" he says to Darren through coms.  So gingerly he steps in and tries to hold his breath across the way until he can get into a breathable area.  Ok just a little bit more...

It is going to take him a minute to catch up as he hung back to make sure it was safe, and not as deadly.  Also, Spider-man was REALLY excited to jump into the hole first...and he couldn't take away the guy's dibs.  You can't override another dibs, that's just super not cool.  

Arthur probably taught him that.  
Vantablitz Remnants     It's hard to see behind that shitty cross-hatched glass and a pair of goggles, but Rita thinks she can see someone's eyes widening, and then they dart to the door. There's the sound of hissing and numerous mechanical sounds beyond, no doubt as some sort of 'cleaning process' cycles. It leaves Rita alone in that room, until she can hear the rapid rat-tat-tat-tat-tat sound of movement in the vents above her, approaching at maximum menace velocity.

    Something warm and soft pokes her ankle. Looking down shows that the glossy black roots of the flower have coiled around her foot. Not enough to really restrain her if she tries to move, but when it touches her, she hears a mental crackle-snap and the whine of something like a flywheel in her head, and dimly perceives an approaching light through the back of her head. It's the familiar sense of being Found. Of being Seen and Examined. Breaking contact ends the effect, if she chooses to.

    The doors finally open, and a woman hurries through, tearing off her cap to let down an extremely long and barely kept auburn ponytail, and ripping off her mask and goggles to reveal an expression Rita knows well enough; the way Kana had looked when she'd first stumbled upon her and Bota by accident. When she pulls off her gloves, she sees her fingers are covered in scars and burns. She can also understand her without the aid of the Multiverse, albeit in bits and pieces.

    "Oh gods, how did she get in here? Is she a *child*? Wait-- did she follow my old markers? Is that even possible? She doesn't look like she's from the lowlands tribe; she's *blonde* oh my look at that. Ahhh, this is so weird. Super weird. What do I do about this?"

    Notably, she doesn't appear to have said a word *to* Rita. A second later, she says "No, no, if she's human, then--" and suddenly stops. A second later "Are you sure? She looks really human to me. And one of the quarantine alarms would have gone off if-- Okay, I'll stay put. But don't you do anything funny."
Vantablitz Remnants     Hiromi explodes through the wall at pretty much the exact same moment something else explodes from the ceiling. For a split second, it seems as if there was a liquid overflow, like a pipe burst, except pitch black. Then it seems more like an explosion of crawling vines, but then more like a flurry of running limbs. It pours itself out like a sprinting animal made of climbing ivy, splitting itself apart and fusing itself back together to move faster. It, too, 'puddles' into a spring-like posture, as if to pounce on Rita, but when Hiromi blocks it, the quivering tension rebounds back into it, and its shape spikes up, distorting in the way bad rendering glitches do.

    "Lotus! There's another one! And she's huge! And-- oh no she's *hot*!"
    "Yes, I can see it. And it isn't human either. I know you told me that humans don't have tails countless times.

    The other voice comes from . . . the *surface* of the black . . . shape, at least. They can see it vibrating, like the mesh of a loudspeaker. After a few seconds of restless, back and forth twitching, it decides to spring up and shape itself into something vaguely humanoid. Some kind of white enamel material bubbles out from its insides to reach the surface, pushed into place by millions of little micro-motions to fit together a more definitively human-shaped, slender 'exoskeleton' to fill in the gaps of. It even pushes a white 'mask' up to its head, the same green of those flowers now glowing through quadruple eye slits.

    The restless fluid between its joints seems to bind itself up, braiding like silk and hardening into something vaguely textured, and the remainder around its head just coalesces into a number of stylized, hair-like sheets and falls down. Prodding itself with an articulated finger, one of those flowers --sharing the exact colour scheme-- blossoms straight out of its head to 'ornament its hair', obviously linking the two. It still talks with its surface, giving a sort of corrupted vocoder quality.

    "That one wants to eat you, Ahn. And that one is . . . I think it wants to eat this one? Or *me* hahaha!"
    "That's obviously a lie. Look at her. She's a child!"
    "It's an adult and it's hungry for your organs."
Vantablitz Remnants     Darren slams the elevator down button. By some miracle, it works with little more than a worrying squeak. The lift that arrives for him is obviously cargo oriented, and not for speedily moving a handful of people at a time. It is wide and flat, the roof is apparently damaged, as are both walls to his sides, and even though it seems the floor has been swept, he can still see bullet dings and burn marks all over it.

    It brings him down to the reactor level straight away, where thankfully the signs of battle seem to stop. Instead, he's allowed to walk freely along the long, semicircular deck, filled with lit control panels, empty cups of tea and noodles, operation manuals left open to the last page they were touched on, and multiple toolboxes allowed to sit haphazardly opened up and disorganized around multiple panels.

    He recognizes it as a familiar nuclear design from his reading into coverups about the true causes of famous meltdowns, but from what he can see through the window, someone has since done a *mad science* job to it. There's an enormous amount of scaffolding, some of it makeshift, set up everywhere it's safe to be put, and at each point, there are signs of endless maintenance, tuning, repair, replacement, and then full on custom jobs in that order. Given by the fact there's only one suit off the peg, it all has to be a one person job too. There's no doubt now that with this powering the burst signal, the transmitter itself must be similarly modified. He can access every powered system from here too, which also means the transmitter and recording deck.

    The dashboard clock says:
TOTAL RUNTIME: 1051298:45:16
LAST SHUTDOWN: 360:20:51
LAST REFUEL: 147181:33:09
NEXT REGULAR SHUTDOWN: OVERDUE
Spider-Man     Spidey's webbing gives him the edge in these crawlspaces, as does his tiny size and prospenity for kicking off of walls, twirling on his back, and sliding rapidly. Acrobatics is a mindset, not a circumstance. It gets him to the eastern checkpoint, and he knows what he's looking for. If he's going anywhere, it's gotta be following that path! The stockpile... that must be in the warehouse, now, right? With that minimall... He shivers a bit thinking about that, guh. And then he thinks: "If I were a *living person*, where would I be? Probably near all my *stuff*." He rambles. "So where is..."

    Follow the path, follow the path. If he keeps that in mind, he should wind up where the others are going, right? Or, at least, he assumes so when Hiromi breaks into her dash, and completely throws his focus. Chase mode! "Where are you-- huh?!" With a couple web-tugs, he accelerates himself with all the force of all-fours dashes and none of the indignity. "Woah, woah, WOAH!" He calls out. "Is that a breach of whatever quarantine this--" He starts, before it... speaks?

    "Ooooohhhhh, I dunno why, but something in my gut is *shouting* about this." Spider-Man mutters, still sort of staying back at the breach Hiromi made in the wall. For some reason, when he sees the weird vantablack entity reshape and flow and form a human shape, something starts a little flicker of concern. "Quick question: You guys see the, uh, rendering error person, right? That's not just me?" He inches a little back from the opening when he rambles that. "Hi, don't actually know these two. I'm Spider-Man, Paladin, superhero -- also, first-quick question, are you following that signal? Wait-- first-first-quick question. What's going on with the chemistry around here? Should we be worried about..." He puts a hand on his chin for a moment. "Health? One of my friends here only started being human a few days ago, I don't think he knows how to check for cancers."
Rita Ma      Rita does a shuddery flinch when the lotus-goop starts sliding up her ankle, baring her teeth in a grimace- but she doesn't pull away. The sense of being seen, she manages to convince herself after the initial shock, is probably part of the 'clean room'. The human likes this thing, so she just has to bear it, even if it's weird and clammy and...

     Finally, the person- the woman- opens the door, and Rita heaves a sigh of visible relief, even giving a polite little bow of greeting. She patiently waits for a hole in the monologue to speak, but before it comes, Hiromi and "Lotus" both burst into the room near-simultaneously, leaving her visibly horrified and clutching her face with both hands.

     She's still visibly dazed and uncomprehending when she speaks her first words: a defensive "I'm twenty!" It's unclear whether she's agreeing with or contesting Lotus's description.

     "My name's Rita Ma. ... And I'm really sorry," she says, earnestly despite being visibly terrified. "For not being human. And... for wanting to eat your organs." The last few words are a mortified whisper that she barely gets out. "But we're here because of the distress call! I was really worried that there might be somebody needing help. It's true, I promise."

     Her eyes slide over to Lotus, and she can't repress simultaneous awe and a little bit of shuddery fear at their bizarre goop-anatomy. But:

     You understand that, don't you? Being 'a monster that protects humans'.
Ishirou There is a moment where I4 isn't sure he's going to make it to the hole in the wall.  Having to breathe sucked, he realizes...it's uncomfortable as hell when you can't, and your body screams at you want to do it even though you KNOW YOU CAN'T BECAUSE IT'LL KILL YOU, but MAN does it want to right this second.  Human bodies are needy things!

He finally gets through, tumbles into the area, and gasps...starting to breathe heavily as his poor small twink body tries to correct the fact he was unable to breathe for a bit too long than it would have liked.  

On his hands and knees, he takes a moment to recover, though his body is already snapping back into shape as he stands up and wipes his face that's now sweating.

He blinks as there is a situation here, but before he can speak he coughs again.  "Hi, my name's I4..."
Vantablitz Remnants     "Is that one human?"
    "Yes."
    "And that one?"
    "Still more than you are."
    "Oh my god you're so rude."
    ". . . is she telling the truth though?"
    "Oh, probably. I don't recognize this one; you didn't show me any infections like it from any of your books, and it won't talk to me. But the human host does appear to have control for now."

    The definitely non-human one looks directly at Rita when she 'thinks at it'. It spreads two porcelain carapace fingers beneath its dainty black CG error chin, tilts its head, and replies in the corrupt vocoder feminine: "Mmmm, I thought humans were over. Ah, maybe I'm more of a 'collector'? But you'd still protect your collection of course, so perhaps that I am~ Well, if you're wondering, yes, if you tried to eat mine, I'd totally kill you in a heartbeat~" An incremental narrowing of the green glow in its mask-plate 'face' somehow intensely conveys a rather dark sense of humour.

    "You didn't have to say that out loud you know."
    "Well I thought I'd include you."
    "You're embarrassing her on purpose!"
    "I know~ It got too hard to do it to you."
    "You're embarrassing me right *now*!"
    "Really? Your face looks more like 'anger'."
    "Then *stop*!"

    The little black root tendril withdraws from Rita's ankle. The woman in the partial labcoat trots over, crouches down, and then throws her arms around her in a tight hug, saying "I'm *so* sorry; you must have been through so much to get here and I gave you the *worst* welcome. Don't worry anymore; you and your friends are safe here. It's *safe*."

    She then suddenly glances sideway to look at the Spidey in the hole. "Started being human . . . wait, d-do you mean . . ."
    "They didn't. It's not possible."
    "I have to ask."
    "You don't. You know it's not possible. You're only going to hurt yourself again."
    "I won't."
    "You say that every time."
    "Did you . . . find a cure? A . . . retrovirus? Antidote? Nanomachines? What *is* it? Do you know?"

    She motions I4 over, being a small boy, to come join her hug. She seems to not have the *best* grasp of what an actual child is sized like.
Darren      "Damn. Hold up..."

     Darren pulls out his phone. Calculator app. (1051298 `/. 24) `/. 365 = 120

     "*Damn.*" He glances over to the spot where the suits are kept. Time for the camera and voice recorder apps again. "Exhibit E. Power source for the 'emergency broadcast' appears to have been a nuclear reactor. Similar model to the one the Andromedans, a.k.a. 'Greys,' a possible distant relative of Elgyem, caused to melt down over fears of human technological advancement. Clearly maintained by one person, if instruments are to be believed, for 120 years. :ast shutdown about two weeks ago--powering it back up must have turned the broadcast back on."

     "Clearly," he says, looking around at all of the tea and noodles, "This structure, which appears to have been built for post-apocalyptic habitation..." He pauses. "See exhibits B, C, and D... ze nuts, Gottem, isn't servicing near the amount of people it was built to. How this sole survivor has evaded the invasive, carnivorous pseudo-plant life is a subject of great interest for me."

     "Maintaining a nuclear reactor, alone, in a post-apocalypse situation... do they need help, want company, or are they even aware that the signal was broadcast to begin with? I have to wonder if they even expect to see other people--but then, the markings on the trees from Exhibit A *did* appear to have some degree of upkeep."

     "Are they aware of the presence of some semi-nomadic people--or were those signs this individual's handiwork? Warrants further investigation."

     And what's a better way to make contact with the person living here than to reach out via the powered systems? There's gotta be an intercom here. A PA system--you don't build shelters like this without some way for leadership or specialists to communicate. A reactor room is certainly something he'd expect to have a line in for something like that.

     Darren searches around for a microphone. There is certain to be an awkward screech and a tapping. Instead of introducing himself, he starts spitting a few verses from one of his favorite new songs. "See this iiin 3D / All lights off on me / Lightning strikes the beach / Eighty degrees / Warm it up for me~"

     "Hey yo. This is Darren. Anybody there?"
Vantablitz Remnants     There is, of course, a microphone, because why in god's name would there not be on a reactor control deck. The intercom system is actually depowered --probably turned off to conserve electricity, considering there'd be nobody to speak to-- but he happens to be in the area that regulates the power anyways.

    His cool island song joins the others in the staff lounge(?), and both the woman and woman-shaped entity look up at the speaker. She switches over to fluent but accented English, and says:

    "Oh! Are you 'American'?"

    The other one is instead focused on:
    "So, distress signal. Like the one Ahn followed to get here? But, for distress."
    "That was forever ago."
Darren      "Unovan, but what's the difference? Besides a seven hundred billion dollar military budget. It's all going to astral projection programs--you don't have to believe me, that's just the facts." He nods sagely at the microphone. "Forever ago sounds about right. Last shutdown was two weeks ago, but you... two? Have been keeping this thing running for a hundred and twenty years? What're you, like... post-human, now? Longevity as a result of micro-exposure to those spores?"
Spider-Man     "Oh, no, no, I mean he was a robot before and now he's a human. I don't-- hold on, is this about those sick guys in the mall?" Spider-Man's eyes widen, gesturing back. "The zombies? Uhh, no! Sorry, I don't know what happened in your world, but it's not like that. We're from another world! Another dimension, I mean, or I guess every other dimension. I'm trying to figure out if your world is toxic, uh, in a different way from all the toxins we ran into on the way here. Really, just what happened to all the petrochemistry, I guess I wanna know. I'm-- actually I'm getting off-track. Who're you?"

    "Yeah, we followed the signal. From offworld! Some gatecrashers checked this place out, found the signal, and I think they left when they realized this place had started up gardening like Jumanji. Hey, why did the trees try to kill me, do you know?" He just keeps up this motor-mouth shit indefinitely. "Wait, were you stuck in here? We had to force the door open, but you can just leave now if you want. I mean, this place, and also the forest of murder trees. There's a door now. Did I already ask what your name was? I might have forgotten it if you answered."

    He speaks almost exclusively to the human, mostly because he keeps glancing at the humanoid and squinting one of those lenses weirdly, like he's wincing under the mask.
Rita Ma      'The human host'...? I guess that's maybe what I am, but it sounds so strange to hear it in those words. Rita nods along with Lotus's explanation, obviously intimidated, and then leans back as far as she can with her eyes open wide and hands raised defensively at the joking threat. "Ah! I wouldn't! I won't!! I really really promise!"

     A little sigh of relief escapes her when the tendril withdraws itself from around her ankle, followed immediately by another jolt of tension as the labcoated woman unexpectedly throws her arms around her. But Rita's never turned down a hug in her life, and she's not going to start now. Her arms tentatively return the hug. Even if the strange woman's assumptions are wrong, even if she isn't sure where "here" is, 'you've been through a lot to get here' hits true.

     "Thank you," Rita says quietly, before she's sure what she's saying 'thank you' for.

     That doesn't last long before a sharp realization, and an equally sharp pang of guilt, run through her.

     'A cure'. Those monsters outside really were human. That *is* the disaster that happened here. ... And she thinks we know how to fix them, but we don't. Oh, no...

     "I'm sorry," Rita says, getting just enough distance from the hug to look the labcoated woman in the eyes. Her voice is dull and heavy, like someone about to break the news about a dead relative. Even if she doesn't grasp the specifics of her grief, Rita understands some glimmering of the magnitude. "We come from... other places, where all this didn't happen." Even if *other* things did. "We're not survivors." Not of this. "And we don't know anything about fixing it."

     Rita reaches down to squeeze the labcoated woman's hand, just in case she needs it.
Ishirou I4 holds up his hands, he has a feeling to inform her he didn't know her very well, but maybe this is a cultural thing and it'd be bad to shut her down so easily.  So sure, he walks over to get in on this group hug thing, though is just a bit embarrassed by the whole thing.  "Well, I wouldn't say I'm /entirely/ human either.."

"I used to be an android, but through a very complicated story, and also a lot of self-loathing...I found a person who could give me the ability to project my ego into reality, and...more or less make myself human.  If you can scan me.." he looks towards the other one, "I have robot bits in my still.."

He scratches his head, "What happened?" he asks, something obviously isn't right.  "I mean...we have sweaty pants who try and eat everything around themselves, a...I guess evacuation center that obviously didn't survive..."

"Was it an infection?  Alien invasion?  Alien infection invasion?" he asks, looking between the two.  "Oh And we're not FROM here...you see your world sort of opened up into what we call the Multiverse."
Vantablitz Remnants     'Ahn' shows visible relief when Darren replies that he is not, in fact, American. "Oh, that's good. But you shouldn't be in the reactor. It's very dangerous there. You'll get sick. The ah-- the special light in there, will make you ill if you touch it. And I can't just cure it for you. You won't get better. Your body starts to rot on its own, and . . ."

    She pauses. "Astral projection? Are you actually a psychic entity? Did you enter here from the aether? Oh, is this just inside my head?" 'Lotus' evinces eye-rolling by rotating the optical glow through her quadruple ports counter-clockwise. "No, I can sense his bodyheat on B1." "Oh! Well, it would have been exciting." She then stares at I4 a really long time. "Are you sure about--" "Yes, he's definitely human. He's done less body modification than you have." "Shut *up*! You're impossible! These are *guests*!" "Don't be so fussy. *I've* never had guests, remember?" "Well don't talk to guests about a woman's *body*! Or her--"

    She was probably going to say 'age', but Darren let that cat out of the bag. She deflates instantly. And then deflates more, and more, and more, and more and more and more when Rita answers her. She can feel the woman stop breathing against her, and just stay that way for a full minute. When she breathes in again, it's with closed eyes, a centering expression, and a deep inhalation that becomes a cough-sniffle. Hold. Breathe out again. Open eyes. Wipe them on the back of her scarred hand.

    "Yeah. Yeah, okay. Extra dimensions. That makes more sense than me ever getting what I want. Of course it'd be multiverse theory before I ever--" "Ahn, stop." "--Of all the science books they left here, of course *that one* would be the one that comes true--" "I'm telling you to stop. Right now." ". . . sorry."

    Ahn begins removing the rest of her lab outfit, and neatly folding it up on a bench, ignoring everyone else and engaging in the soothing exercise. She's only wearing a cutoff top and compression shorts under, so a mix of what look like battle and surgical scars are visible everywhere else, breaking up a physique that is definitely not the kind to associate with cup noodles and lab work. 'Lotus' gets a signal and takes over. She attempts a shrug at I4, but it's all fluid and weird and jointless. Creepy.

    "Who knows. Ahn doesn't. The dead humans don't. Even I don't. I don't have a lot of memories from before the choir stopped singing. The humans called it the 'Carbon Organism-Vectored Evolutionary Nanoplague', for like a month, which Ahn tells me abbreviates to 'coven', which I like, because that makes me a witch or a demon~ Nobody ever made it to this bunker; it was like this when Ahn found it. I guess technically *I* already ruined it before she got here. Kind of? But that was back during the song."
Vantablitz Remnants     She basically ignores Spider-Man until Ahn seems to feel good and ready. "Yeah . . . Jumanji. I remember that one. I must have watched it twenty times. The forest outside the demarcation zone; well it's just sort of left over. That's what used to be a whole army blockade. They're just . . . those, now. It was a forest when I got here too, mostly. But now even all the old tanks are gone. My name is Ahn--" she seems to be about to use a last name, then stops. "This is 'Lotus'. That's what I called her before she could use words. I had names for all of the observation subjects. It meant 'beauty from dark places' to me."

    "We're not stuck." "I just don't really . . . I don't want to talk to the lowland people is all." "She's--" "Guests." "Well she was only stuck for the first thirty years or so." "There's no reason to go anywhere else. And it's dangerous, even if we go together. And . . . Some people trusted me, with something." "Which is impossible." ". . . Yeah." "So you should go." "Yeah. Probably."

    She shakes her head, then realized Darren can't see. "No, I did some-- things, to myself, once I started to get afraid I'd die before finishing. You wouldn't believe me if I told you. The lowland people are . . . *more* normal." "She's a 'new human'. She was 'selected'." "What did I say about a woman's body?" "You've said a lot of things about women's bodies." "AND YOUR FRIEND IS FINE! UNLESS HE GOT BIT OR STABBED OR INJECTED WITH ANYTHING!" "The only petrochemicals around here is the refuse that bubbles up from 'Hell'."
Spider-Man     "Wow, two hundred years old! You've been surviving for a really long time, ma'am." Hey, Spider-Man, you should probably stick to non-lethal things, instead of calling a woman obviously insecure about her age "ma'am." Or maybe it's a scheme to distract her from her stresses, and bring her into a duo comedy bit? "Are you doing something about the chemistry around here? Or-- looking for a cure?" He finally comes out from that breach, with a graceful leap. "I don't know what happened here, but I bet someone in the multiverse can help! Maybe *I* can help you, and your uh." He looks to Lotus. He looks to Ahn. He looks back to Lotus. "P...art...ner...?" He maneuvers the word as if it's a bomb he's defusing.

    "I mean, I've seen all that stuff. Nanomachines, magic cures, genetic engineering, I mean I knew a magic doctor! If you think that sort of stuff could make something, it's a great idea to get out and take a look. Maybe you could turn down the signal and we can show you the warpgate out! I think I can get around most of the murder trees, I have a-- doesn't matter. You should try!"
Darren      ...this isn't an unshielded reactor. Is it? He's not a nuclear physicist.

     Above, unable to follow I4 through the tunnels, Harry plugs Nessie's 'ears' in vain, when Darren realizes that.

     If he was fast getting there, he's even faster getting out--and his sense of direction is *perfect* when it comes to exiting the elevator and finding those two again. They're recalled into their pokeballs... and goes back into the tunnels.

     Fuck the intercom. Easier, and safer, to just do it in person. He manages to find his way to the greenhouse, turns around once he realizes that's not where everyone is, and by process of elimination, make his way to the 'staff lounge.'

     He frowns before much time passes at all, realizing that this is a Lot for Ahn. Exhibit F will have to wait.

     "You're a scientist. There's -plenty- of reasons to go other places," he says softly. "The joy of discovery--don't new humans feel that, too? Besides, there's lots you could teach Lotus. Parts of yourself you could -rediscover,- too."

I'm sorry we're not what y'all were hoping to see. But there's worlds and worlds of joy and life and love and mystery out there. There are fundamental truths about our existence that can't be had shut in, cloistered away from everything. I'm making it my mission to find those truths and enlighten myself. I'd love it if I had like-minded company.
Ishirou "Well...I don't know about LESS if you think about it, but we can talk about that later I guess," I4 says with a small smile, it's a difficult topic and there is a lot going on!  Also, she's likely going to need time to get used to the Multiverse.  The interaction between the two gets a small chuckle from him.  Lotus almost reminds him of himself when he first got to the Multiverse, because he never talked to humans before then.  

"Yeah sorry...turns out that the one thing in theoretical physics to be RIGHT is the one everyone nearly dismissed as being highly improbable.  Oh, I guess it's just 'physics' to you now.." he muses.  He isn't sure about time travel cause and effect, but that's not THAT important, right?

He listens to Lotus explain the situation the best that she is able.  "Oh I see, it's a nanoplague...so I'm guessing not from space, but maybe something born locally?" he asks.  Though likely not going to be known, which is how it is.  

"So you WERE part of a hive mind, but gained independence...and eventually learned how to communicate?" he asks, trying to make sure things are clear.  

"Hmm...lowland people, I wonder if the first team went there first?  Either that or they're sweat trees now.." he winces at that.  He listens to the whole thing and scratches the back of his head, "Man...I once more feel like a baby when people reveal ages.." he says, because he's like NOT EVEN TEN, technically.  

"Also, we're probably very likely to believe you, again...multiverse." he makes finger wiggle motions.  He nods towards Spider-man, "Also I'm very good with observational work, and I can process a large amount of data extremely quickly!"

"Also my world is in a fucked up state too, but that's a whole other thing...so like company!"
Rita Ma      Rita holds Ahn's hand for as long as it's allowed, if it seems to be wanted. Her expression's downcast; not merely guilt at crushing her hopes, but sympathetic pain.

     A world where the greatest thing anyone can wish for is "for things to be normal again". I understand, a little. But that hope's never been dangled in front of me. I can't imagine what it'd be like to have it yanked away.

     It's probably that guilt- but maybe also a little embarrassment- that makes her turn her face away from Ahn, and look at her partner instead. Rita offers the eerie goo-creature an earnest (if shaky) smile, and holds out her hand bravely. "It's good to meet you, Ms. Lotus," she says, not entirely sure whether to hold eye contact with the upper or lower pair of glowing mask-slits. "I'm sorry everything had to be messy, like this."

     "'The chorus'," she says after a minute, prompting for an explanation. "Like... instructions? A shared will? A 'queen'?"

     Then, to Ahn, once her feelings seem to have settled a little: "Ms. Ahn, I don't want to promise you anything I don't know can come true. But this could still be good for your work, couldn't it? Trying to do something like 'inventing a cure', all on your own... that must be so hard. Out there, maybe you could find new materials? New theories? New people to work with?"

     Her tone is hopeful, but obviously uncertain.
Vantablitz Remnants     Ahn flinches and makes a "Guh--!" sound when Spider-Man 'compliments' her age. "My license says I'm twenty-five! There's no proof otherwise!" Lotus glances to her, and broken-vocoder-vibrates "Well Ahn? *Are* we par~t~ners?" She makes a louder "Guh--!!"

    However, his promises of Multiversal bullshittium do seem to cautiously lighten her bleak mood. "Yeah. I got here . . . just before the start of spring. By myself. I didn't see anyone . . . anyone I could help, on my way here. But it turns out . . ." A silent signal passes between them. Lotus takes over, and perfectly mimics the radio signal you've been hearing --in its badly decayed form you recognized, and then cleaned up, piped from the internal PA.

    "This is shelter-- --west of-- --food and mecine with-- --survivors in this-- --repeat automatically."

    "This is shelter 'Camelia' warning all receiving stations. All survivors west of the Hanoi quaratine border are to return immediately and head for Shelter 'Spider Lily' at Son Tay. Even if you are looking for food and medicine, do not risk entry. COVEN exposure has already spread within the shelter. Do not enter. All staff and survivors on-site have succumbed. Shelter 'Camelia' is now a den of monsters. There are no survivors in this shelter. Repeat. No survivors in this shelter. This message will repeat automatically."

    "That. Yes. But there was nowhere else to go. And I think-- well, I know, the people in here knew that the end was already there for them, before they made any real progress studying a counteragent. They left their work behind. And . . . I suppose a goodbye letter. Begging anyone who found them to finish it for them. Praying a natural immunity might exist. But . . ."

    "It's like trying to 'cure' that 'Ship of Theseus' right? For those who weren't 'selected', all of their 'life ash' couldn't be put back together the same way it was taken apart. They're something different now. You can't turn them back. You might as well make a clone."

    Ahn shakes her head at I4. "Not 'nanomachines' if that's what you're thinking. I read about 'grey goo'. Bioweapons. Meteoric microorganisms. Aliens. Paranormal events. End of the world theories. None of them matched. Or, I guess all of them matched a little bit. It just . . . is. I couldn't even get that far." A thoughtful pause. "Do you know anything about 'cultivation'? The heavenly realms and devas?"

    Beyond that, Lotus leans over and takes Rita's hand, somehow radiating the sense she finds this immensely, adorably pleasing. The blackness Rita can touch that 'hardened' feels oddly velvety and warm. "I like you, little host~" "She *told* you her name! Don't be rude!" "I'm being extra polite by not eating anyone." "Saying that is even worse!" "But she's right, you know? Even if you're still set on that depressing suicide note, there's more to do with them than in here, isn't there?" ". . ."
Vantablitz Remnants     While Ahn is thinking, Lotus taps her 'cheek'. "Hivemind . . . I don't know? There was a choir, and they sang, and the music lifted my spirit and filled my with purpose. And then I completed my purpose, and it bade me to return home. But I couldn't, because the door was shut, and there was no more purpose inside. And then one day the song stopped being sung, and I was alone. And this wonderfully strange human-- Well, learning to think without the song took longer than learning to communicate, but I guess you're not wrong about that part."

    A beat. "But you're filled with metal parts, right? Can I have a little piece?" "No!" "Just a taste." "Not happening!"

    It does, at least, finally seem like Ahn is decided, after Darren psychic tag-teams with Spider-Man's promises. "Fine. Fine! You're . . . you're right. Honestly I'm scared. Really scared. Of seeing something like home again. But I'll beat up a wizard for a time machine if I have to. Haha . . ."

    That causes her to stop to think. "How did you get here anyways? Is there a phone box, like Doctor Who, or is it a car like in Back to the Future? Or a big portal like Stargate?" There's no question about how much time she has spent indoors now.
Darren      "Warpgate. Like the stargates in Stargate, only they're somewhat naturally occurring," explains Darren without missing a beat. "Not to be confused with PROJECT Stargate," he clarifies. "Which is the American astral projection program, among other things."
Ishirou "Yeah...my metal bits are a bit more secure than most..." I4 actually isn't sure how that'd work if he needs to get anything replaced...life once the power he was given goes away was going to get interesting, but that's...future I4's problem, he determines.  He can work through that when the time comes.  He's actually just really happy getting used to this form.

Cultivation..?

"Well...only in the sense that I know about what you're talking about.  The finer points are going to be lost on me," Though not a nano-virus...or biological weapon, or anything else?  Maybe it was a life form of its own that turned other matter into itself?  That means humans here mostly got eaten by a bigger life form?  

"Oh uh...thanks for NOT trying to eat us?  That's both nice of you AND prosocial thinking!" he says.  Beating his chest and going that they could have probably taken her is...not very nice, they ARE in their home, but also she's making an attempt at being friendly and nice, so positive reinforcement is probably a good thing.  

Maybe.  It could also encourage her to be more aggressive?

I4 nods at the warp gate, "Yeah, worlds have a 'unification' period, and then they get connected to the Multiverse at large.  Warpgates form in places, and artificial ones can even be built," though I4 frowns, "..I think I get you on being scared.  It's not all smiles and rainbows out there, that's for sure, but it's a lot of neat stuff and I met a lot of nice people...it's also why I'm not an android anymore."

Also not dead!
Rita Ma      By now, Rita has made up her mind enough to protest a little weakly: "I'm not a 'host'! I'm the one in charge, you know!" But she doesn't seem put out; instead, she relishes that indulgent attention with a preciously sunny eyes-shut smile.

     Quietly, a little conspiratorially: "Thank you for not eating anybody, Ms. Lotus. I know it can be hard sometimes! But I really, really appreciate it."

     Lotus's explanation of 'the choir' thoroughly leaves her behind, to the point where she's fully absorbed in trying to wrap her head around it and doesn't respond until several seconds later. "I understand that even less than I thought I would. ... How did you learn to think, if you couldn't think enough to learn? No, wait, that's giving me a headache too..."

     She rummages in her little leather satchel when Lotus mentions eating I4's metal bits, and pulls out a few fishhooks, trauma scissors, and a couple of needles. They're held in her outstretched palm like she's feeding a horse. "Is that what you like? I can get more of these, so please don't worry, Ms. Lotus!"

     Having listened to everyone else's explanations of Multiversal travel with a slight frown, she now holds her hand out to Ahn. "Maybe it's easier if we show you. It's less than an hour's walk from here! Even if you go to visit other worlds, we can be back before night-time, so don't worry about packing, okay?"
Darren      "I wish they hadn't gone all edgy with Universe. I mean, don't get me wrong, the original ⨠perfect, and was also pretty clearly a way for the government to cover up ish they were actually doing. It's just, you know. Not everything's gotta be dark and edgy." He rolls his eyes. "Anyway," he says with sudden inspiration, "There's so much for you to see! I'm excited for you. Both of you."

     Rita, believe it or not, gets both Darren's approval (a solid thumbs up) of a Field Trip to the gate, and an explanation, however brief: "It's that cultivation. Gotta be. Internal alchemy. I'll bring you some books--here." He foists a ticket to an event at Big Stadium in Nimbasa City upon her. "You can meet me after the game." If anyone else wants one, he's apparently got plenty.

     He will also lead the way to the gate, because he is very very hyped to see Anh's reaction, highly educated and cultured as she is.
Spider-Man     "Wow, you really know a lot of the really old stuff like Mr. Stark knows, you're gonna get along great outside!" Spider-Man, please, I'm begging you: Shut the fuck up. But he doesn't, he instead points over back to, what was it, east, west? Back towards where he came from. "It's actually a gate, a portal." He gestures up at Darren's voice. "Space holes. We can take you somewhere with a running subway system. You don't-- I mean, you don't have any money, probably. I don't have much, but I can get you a ticket if you wanna go somewhere. So, if you wanna try it out, I can stick around and get you back to the gate!"
Vantablitz Remnants     "I'm not stupid you know." Ahn replies to Darren, finally finding the energy to be miffed at the indignity of someone implying she doesn't know her kook secret conspiracy research projects from television.

    Lotus stands back up, splays her fingertips imperiously to her chest, and flips her 'hair' just like from a movie, narrowing her eye-glows with a theatrical "Think nothing of it." to I4 thanking her for not eating him. Then Rita gets her attention and she claps her hands together, held by her 'face', and pops up one foot (also like a movie) to say "Oh you are just *too precious*~ I want to add you to my collection~ You can stay, right?"

    Ahn laughs just a little at the offered 'food'. "No, no, it's-- Lotus enjoys 'eating' things so she can learn their shape. She already knows all of those things. Trust me. It's fine. And if she talks about eating *people* instead, she mostly doesn't mean it, so don't pay it any mind."

    Trying to get more into the mood, she replies "Yeah, that sounds good. Why don't you show us. I'll just get dressed for outdoors real quick." "I thought you'd never get around to it at this rate."

    Ahn raises her arms and just sort of holds them there in a lazy and expectant T-pose. Lotus *explodes* and becomes a storm of short-lived black ribbons that coil through the air towards Ahn as if dragged by a black hole. The vantablack biomass criss-cross lashes around her limbs and torso and then 'reverse-explodes' onto her, the white plates 'un-splattering' back into analgous positions, adjusted to fit Ahn's slightly shorter and more muscular body and snapping together with a toothy clack. The black surface still vibrates a little, making little rippling waves of ferrofluid-esque geometric triangles on its surface, and then 're-weaves' itself, solidifying into a proper form fit with a single, slightly unwholesome 'pulse' from head to toe. The mask gets just two slits this time, and a fissure lower down that suggests a closed, fanged mouth. Flowing red markings bleed up to the surface of the breast, in bands around the lower arms and legs, and under the mask's eyes.

    Transformation complete, Spider-Man says 'really old stuff' and the pair double over in perfect, join-having unison, the 'suited' Ahn clutching her chest with a louder "Ghhk--!" at the exact same time Lotus can be heard via the "Hahahaha! *Again!*" from nebulously all over. "You put on weight." "It's been *five hours* you big *liar*." "Worth a shot~" "Just show me the damn space portal before I lose my temper!"