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Owner Pose
Hiromi     The land, Atnas Zurc. Cursed. They know the curse's pins. But, can't pull them. Wished-to-be-heroes, none returned. A labyrinth. Doors that open only once. At the bottom, an amulet. Its name, Yendor. These things, I've seen.
    Would you face death, only for challenge? Or, only for thanks? I wonder this. You can refuse.
    Oh, you better believe I'd do it for the challenge.
    Good. I'll not help you, then. You'll be guided, only, to where it begins.

    As Hiromi had said she would, she provides directions to the entrance. This valley was populated, once, but only ruins of villages remain, and the water has long since dried. Hardly anything grows here, and the wind is full of choking dust. The closest inhabited area is, if one were only able to walk, a full week away. With any kind of transportation that can traverse mountainous terrain, the distance is much shorter, while still establishing this place as 'remote.' It is notable, then, that someone is already waiting for Darren, Guzma, their teams, and whomever else they may have invited.

    It's not Hiromi. That was stated. She's closer to five feet in height (than eight), brown-haired (rather than black) with a ponytail (rather than wildly loose), less tanned, less overtly muscled (if still a match for any farmer's child), and dressed in the white and red outfit of a miko (rather than 'barely'). In short, she looks nothing at all like Hiromi, which makes it all the more noticeable that she has just a sliver of the same supernatural presence that Hiromi possesses. That is, from close-up, more remarkable than the one other similarity -- the wolf-like ears and tail.

    Upon being met, she bows (from the hips, back straight, fist to opposite palm in salute), and introduces herself. "Good day. I have been awaiting your arrival." She speaks much less roughly than Hiromi, too, but that's more of an 'everyone' trait. "I am Hisako. Are you ready to depart?"

    The way inward looks less the entrance to some place that was built to be entered, and more a series of cracks in stone that have crumbled over time, opening up into a cave, which progresses through bare earth and natural stone before coming to heavy stone doors, carved with circular, knotting designs. These doors open easily, most likely magically, when touched. They'll even open again, from the other side, should one attempt to leave.
Darren      Darren's dressed less for 'death labyrinth' and more for 'an afternoon at the gym.' Tank top, gym shorts, ankle socks, sneakers. There's a blue-and-yellow headband that's keeping his medium locs from his eyes, and a matching drawstring backpack slung over one shoulder.

     In one hand, he's got an orange smartphone, the back of which sports eyes that straddle the line between 'real' and 'cartoon.' His means of getting here is wildly at odds with his relatively mundane attire--flying. As he touches down, he snaps a few pictures, but puts the device away when Hisako introduces herself. "Darren Spears," he says, returning the gesture without hesitation. As he rises from the bow, "We're ready." The meaning of 'we' becomes apparent when six Pokeballs, in those same blue-and-yellow colors, float from his backpack and orbit behind his head like the classical depiction of a halo.

     With a quiet, calm determination aglow in those green eyes, he presses his hand to the stone doors and steps past the threshold.
Rita Ma      It's not entirely clear what kind of outing Rita (presenting, still, as a perfectly ordinary girl) expected this to be. Her woven-straw sun hat and lunchbox would fit a relaxed forest hike better than a subterranean delve. She's apparently unarmed, and her white-blouse-black-skirt combo can't possibly be protective.

     Close quarters, probably. There'll be blood; maybe human blood, if we're unlucky, so to help stay focused I have to stay full.

     She gives a little bow that's mostly from the neck- informal, but practiced- to Hisako on meeting, realizes the other girl has gone much deeper than she did, and flusters a little to immediately try to replicate it, looking rather silly in the process. "Ah! It's good to meet you, Ms. Hisako! I'm Rita Ma. I think I'm ready, but..."

     Half directed to the wolfgirl, and half directed to the rest of the party, she says: "I don't think I've ever been under-ground before. Is there anything special I need to know?" A little pause. "Can you get the bends down there?"

     Her gaze lingers on Hisako for a few long seconds, brow slightly knitted, as everyone else confirms their preparations. She's obviously trying to place that abstract-yet-visceral sense of 'realness', but doubts her perception too much to actually ask.

     When the group enters, she's likely at the back, instinctively sticking near someone bigger.
Vantablitz Remnants     "There's no water here at all. I hate this." "You're the one who said you wanted to stretch your legs this time!" "Hey. You have water in that bag right?" "That's for me!" "Come on~" "You don't even need it! You're just being greedy!" "You can either fork it over, or accept that I'll be taking it off you when you sweat~"

    Given that this is the middle of nowhere, and neither a place where anything slightly inhuman is a grave issue, nor a place where they're trying to be sneaky, Lotus and Ahn are physically separate for today. The former looks pretty much the same as Darren and Rita had seen her 'walking around' before, albeit currently engaged in clingily annoying the shit out of Ahn. The latter is currently dressed in what may actually be 'stolen' military fatigues, and carrying a backpack actually suitable for mountaineering. And then, upon finding Hisako . . .


"Oh gods! She's so *cute*!" "Right?! I totally wanna eat her!" "H-hisako! My name's Ahn! I hope we can get along!" "Who knew that wolf had a 'collection' like this~?" "Ahhh, I wanna touch her tail. I really wonder what it feels like. I bet it's so soft." "It has to be, right?" "Darren . . . Darren, thank you so much for bringing me here! I know what I must do now!"
Hiromi     "The Archwolf has told of its depths and hidden places," Hisako says, "but I can only speak of the first two chambers. The second is beyond a door that will not easily open from the other side." She has a serious tone to her, and the kind of automatically deferential manner while greeting each person (except the pokemon) (by name) that suggests that, if she has been raised by wolves, they were very uncommonly well-civilized. "The deeper one explores, the more dangerous the labyrinth becomes. The rooms are constantly shifting, but this can be controlled. I will show you where."

    Rita will find her very accomodating for her own manners, in that she doesn't appear to notice anything out of place. To her question, it seems Hisako may not know what 'the bends' means. From the way one of her ears turned, she definitely heard Lotus and Ahn speaking, but has apparently decided to ignore any dangerous statements. "Yes, Ms. Ahn. Please treat me well."

    The first danger becomes apparent about thirty seconds after letting the doors rumble open and entering, if one keeps to a quick walking pace. "Be wary of ants."

    As she said, it's ants. A lot of ants, as tends to be the case. They're each a few feet tall, about as horrifying to look at as one would expect of insects 'simply' made gigantic, and remarkably quick. If one were to expect their greater weight to prevent them from climbing the walls and ceiling, one would be disappointed. The only mercy there is that they're not keen on dropping upside-down, and only quickly skitter, rather than attempting to leap. They are, of course, immediately and extremely aggressive, unthinking but for their ability to swarm and surround, and to sacrifice themselves only when it would give another ant a better chance to strike.

    Hisako pegs one leading the charge in the eye with an arrow, before putting her bow back away and adopting a stance with one fist held at her waist and her other hand forward, palm out and fingers curled. That one arrow is only enough to slow it down, but when she strikes with her fists and feet, there's a strength in each blow far beyond what her frame would suggest.

    It's really not enough. Their exoskeletons are annoyingly sturdy. Some quick and cautious footwork means they can't surround her, but without any help, she'll barely make progress through the swarm. If everyone does help, with a swarm this size, they're likely to make good time. These are the only the 'weakest' enemies for today, after all.

    However it's handled, by the time the second door is reached, the cave has progressed to roughly worked, partially-covered stone, like a ruin that geological forces had begun to reclaim.
Rita Ma      Rita perks up, eyes practically sparkling, and immediately insinuates herself right next to- if not between- Lotus and Ahn. Their presence alone seems to alleviate some of her anxiety, though she seems to have decided the situation is just a little too serious for an unprompted hug.

     Even so, she pulls her arms in against herself defensively as the group enters the jagged cavern, glancing about with some modicum of residual nervousness. Points of foggy blue light shift and float near her to illuminate her darkening surroundings, somewhere between foxfire and an unseen anglerfish's lure. "A door that doesn't open again... Won't we be- aaaah!"

     Though there are multiple capable fighters between her and the ants, Rita still lets out a squeal of panic. Naturally, only a handful are likely to reach her; one has its exoskeleton softened and burned by a spray of glowing cyan acid that seems to originate from one of those floating points of light. A second ball of glowy fishfire spears through the corroded shell and sucks out the ant's viscera; hemolymph stains it, the dripping liquid briefly revealing the outline of a larger invisible tentacle that merely terminates in the glowing point before it's flicked off.

     Rita leaps backwards to get away from the remaining ants trying to swarm her; save for the mysterious and sudden death of one, she makes little contribution to the ongoing fight.

     I'm sorry, everyone! But I got one, so in just a minute...!

     After everyone else has done their work and the swarm is considerably thinned, Rita's process- whatever it is she's doing just by standing there- seems to finish. She raises a hand towards the remaining bugs, expression blank with deep concentration. Through the newly-obtained biological connection, her consciousness brushes up against theirs and makes her hivemind dominance known. Whatever instincts they have for coordinating, for communicating, from knowing 'kin' from 'food', are wrenched and distorted to the purpose of conducting her will.

     Her first order is STOP, followed by- should her hijack be successful- a spoken, more pleading "Stop! It's okay! They can help us now. They'll listen to me, I promise." Even weak monsters can find a use in a party.
Darren      "Beats me!" Darren cheerily replies to Rita.

<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Thanks for having me, Mr. Spears!"
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "This is mostly a test for you, right? So I'll try to follow your lead."

    Darren stops in his tracks and offers Rita a hand to shake--should she accept, he brings it in for a chest bump, patting her on the back with the opposite. "We got this," he says as he withdraws, smiling at her with infectious confidence.

    Live your truth, Ahn. She don't seem like the biting type, anyways.

    Be wary of ants. They're big, they're smart and they're cautious. "SCALE! 15! HUT HUT HIKE!" Two Pokeballs open. Emerging in a flash of light are Slabb--actually just Stonehenge and Roswell--a little alien in a trenchcoat. The large, animated stone pillars would normally be too slow to stomp the cautious ants, but with space bending from Roswell, the slow become fast and the fast become slow.

    Slabb rises to the air and crashes down meteorically over a crowd of them, and the mere presence of Slabb seems to empower everyone with the invisible strength of the earth.

     "Exhibit B," says Darren, speaking into his phone once the second door is reached. "The point of unlikely return. More obvious signs of self-like alteration here, abandoned for indeterminate amount of time."
Vantablitz Remnants     Rita may have decided the situation is too serious, but that doesn't go for everyone else. The minute she wanders close, Ahn squeezes her with all the typical social awareness that Ahn has (none), and Lotus absolutely acquires the overly familiar headpat (ver. Ara Ara).


"Not easily open from the other side? Ah, so she tried to tunnel down directly from above, but--" "Huh? Did you forget to sleep? That obviously means 'so we can't go back'." "O-oh, yeah. Then we'd just jump down the tunnel." "Actually, why aren't we?" "Because that'd defeat the point! This is Darren's 'challenge'!" "Ehhh? So why am I helping him? Shouldn't he be helped by people weaker than him?" "I notice you said 'I' and not 'we'! And that's still totally rude!"

    When Hisako actively attacks the first giant ant, and then tries fighting them, Ahn goes from being creeped out to leaping into the room in a panic. "No! Hisako! Please stand back! Ah-- That's way too dangerous!" Oblivious to the fact that even this girl is Hiromi's underling, she jumps right in front of the much, much shorter girl withut thinking, and tries hitting it herself. There's a split second where she flinches in confusion from lacking the expected splat-crunch, and then literally simultaneous with her pulling back her hand, palm tapping one above the snapping jaws, and somehow superheating its insides so badly it glows from within, thinks out loud "Oh right. They'd have to be magnified, not scaled, right? Otherwise the square cube law-- Wow, insects are really impressive. I remember reading facts like this in school books."

    "Ohh, this what they call a 'buff' in videogames right? Not bad at all~" Lotus is meanwhile more concerned with speedrunning straight to the door. That is, those little glowing 'flowers' fluidly open up on her back, and propel her forward lunge with trailing streaks of light. Something that might be a flat, black, 'blade' of some kind follows her arms as she goes, snapping back and forth with a little too much off-model behaviour to be fully solid. She's being the obnoxious tryhard, unwilling to sit still or skip corners, and is much better at dealing with the swarm by forcing it to trail behind her, and firing long, spike-like extrusions from between her plates that dissolve their insides. She stops exclusively when Rita says to. "Weren't some 'adventurers' here before? Isn't it funny that there aren't any signs of previous battle? I guess the nasty bugs would eat their own, but still."
Hiromi     "Ms. Ahn, please do not worry, there is no need to--" Leaping in front only gets Ahn so far, since the rush moves to surround both her and Hisako together, even after she causes one to break apart into superheated pieces. The giant ants do act more like ants than they do like 'things the size of big hunting cats yet shaped like insects,' though it doesn't appear they have the full proportional strength tiny ants would have, either. It's enough to be dangerous, if they get bites in, but against this group, if everyone is careful, not terribly so.

    Hisako moves about to kick back those getting too close, incidentally making it easier for Ahn to fight, as well, though Lotus needs no such help as she cleaves her way through. The strength of the earth seems particularly helpful for the wolf-miko, through some unexplained affinity, letting her strike and parry harder, cracking exoskeletons in the process. With the enemies also slowed, she shows a well-practiced punishment game, turning any mistake in approaching her, including 'hesitation,' into a crushing combo of fist, elbow, knee and heel.

    The ants have no special resistance to Rita's domination. If anything, they're quite willing to follow a queen, though it still takes some effort from her to get them reoriented from 'eat the intruders' to 'don't do anything' to 'help.' Once she's overcome the initial momentum of their minds to give them new directions, she has her new minions.

    As warned, the second door is the cut off point. Here's where hardly anything about what's ahead can be known, because once one goes through, they don't come out again. At least, that's how it's been for everyone who came, before. How anyone knows that the amulet needed to lift the land's curse hasn't been mentioned, nor have the means by which Hiromi revealed what secrets lay beyond. The door is still whole and undamaged, so it probably wasn't through her most obvious talent.
Hiromi     When it slides open, remaining so long enough for everyone to enter who plans to, Hisako walks down the corridor with ears raised and sharp, looking for something. The stone becomes less eroded as one goes, until it looks more properly like an old ruin, rarely touched by fresh air. There is absolutely no light coming in from outside, by this point, nor any source of light within, with the exception of what Rita brings with her, and anything similar from the others.

    This does not appear to bother Hisako, as she walks ahead, reaches a cross-shaped intersection, and doesn't hesitate to cross over from the right to left wall, continuing a short way down before she stops at a section of wall that looks just like any other.

    "This area changes little, I have been told. Down this hall, there are jaguars hiding in a wrecked room. In the opposite direction, there are pressure plates that release a suffocating gas. Should one instead proceed straight ahead, the floor will be covered in a blue jelly that freezes those it touches. Paths downward are in every direction."

    While reciting this probably-memorized speech, Hisako retrieves a talisman from her clothing, tosses it into the air, performs a quick series of handseals that cause the talisman to burst from flame to ash, and then takes a running leap at the wall, twisting to the side mid-air and striking it with her foot.

    The wall crashes inward in a shower of stone facade and brick. Stepping through, Hisako points to a series of mysterious levers set into most of the small room's available surfaces, and also to the mysterious glass screens that cover most of what remains. "This is the secret the Archwolf has revealed, for the sake of your test, Mr. Spears."

    For once, she hesitates, carefully counting from one side before she grabs the fifth-from-left lever on the left wall, pulls it, and twists to the side. The glass lights up, revealing a wireframe like an architectural blueprint. She twists again, and characters appear as the map moves. Lines like '3F 5th Lava Flow Control' and '7F Dark Golem Activation' scroll over one side. Even in the few moments since it lit up, the map has already changed, something sliding upward while another room rotates and reconects.

    "Chambers like these exist throughout the labyrinth. Finding another without finding the first would be difficult. This is as far as I have been told to guide you." She bows, again.
Hiromi     The hallways to the right (if starting from the entrance) opens up into a wider chamber of nicer stone walls and floors. Hisako had warned this place to be full of pressure plates that trigger a suffocating gas, but not described where they were, or whether they were restricted to the floor. She hadn't mentioned that there was a water fountain on one side of the room, either. Some mechanism continually forces water to rise from a pipe under the surface, which then falls back down into it. That's the first source of water found within any reasonable distance of this place

    It doesn't smell poisonous.

    There is a small pile of dusty bones at the far end of the chamber, which has yet another stone door. If it's like the others, it won't be difficult to pass through, so much as a delay to annoy speedrunners.
Darren "They prolly made it past the bugs," Darren guesses. "That's s'posed to be, like, bush league stuff for adventurers, ain't it? Then again, she mighta cleaned 'em up so we didn't get no hints."

    Roswell and Slabb are recalled, returning to the slowly orbiting halo of Pokeballs behind Darren's head.

    In the darkness of the next room, the illumination of Darren's Pokeballs is fleeting. His smartphone levitates beside him, flashlight app running, making a slow circular pan across the room.

    Once he's gotten an idea of the layout, he turns it off. Gotta save battery life for dictation, of course.

    As the wall is smashed, Darren doesn't hesitate to follow Hisako and step into the control room. The Pokeballs, however, hover over towards Rita.

I can understand an Atlantean being uncomfortable underground. You'd do fine even without their help, but I'mma have the team with you just in case.

    "Exhibit C," says Darren into his phone. "Control room for labyrinth. Sophistication of technology belies archaic exterior. Real-time readouts of shifting halls suggest extreme motivation to keep amulet hidden and therefore perpetuate the curse."

    The first order of business should be finding the next control room. The risks will likely only get higher the further into the labyrinth the team goes, and so knowledge of off-switches is crucial. Next, communication. Hisako is included in the telepathic party line, so that she has more to report to Hiromi.

Aight. Here's how I'mma do this. I'mma be looking for the next control room, but I'm -also- gonna be looking for controls on how to get y'all through easier. This place thrives on unpredictability, so we gotta be flexible and fast to keep from getting worn out. I'mma give y'all heads up on what's coming, then you pick what you're suited to, and if there's no good options, call it out and I'll have my team pivot. Y'all ready? Win on three. One, two, three. WIN!

     Two Pokemon emerge from behind Rita. Roswell, who she's met, and Saucer--a humanoid little ladybug with an aircraft early-warning system for a thorax. Both of them float above the ground, and won't get in Rita's way. In the unlikely event that someone as agile as Rita would need it, they can even levitate her.
Vantablitz Remnants     "No no, don't worry about it! I can handle it, Hisako!" Ahn immediately replies at first, obviously mistaking the miko's concern in the most egregiously anime way possible. Stacking up back to back, she proves herself to be shockingly capable at constantly shifting herself to face the opposite of wherever Hisako is, timing her attacks to Hisako's defense and vice versa, and remaining out of her personal range, without looking or verbally coordinating with her at all. In the end though, she still seems pretty glad to see the giant bugs back off. "Ah, was that you?" "I really didn't mind killing them. Nasty little aphid-herders." "You don't even have chlorophyll."

    When the wall comes right down (and Ahn is done obsessively fangirling over Hisako), she swarms into the room with the screens and levers pretty quickly. "What?! Isn't this way too suspicious?! Look at all of this! This was like a ruin, right?!" "Ehh? Don't janguars live in the jungle? How'd they get down here?" "How would someone get in here normally?! This is a control room! Or perhaps, a cipher?!" "No, seriously, who was feeding jaguars?" "As in, maybe this is *meant* to be used to disarm the dungeon! Or make it super easy! No no, there's monitoring screens too! So that means--" "Would jaguars even live outside? This is a dried up mountain. Hey! That room has water--!"

    For the time being, the two are stuck in the control room while Ahn obsessively pores over its technical functions with dumb, yet sharply intuitive, inductive operation, looking for a way to map out the way to the final chamber so that minimal time is wasted. (This is also where she can stay with Hisako for a little, and ask her about her tail)
Hiromi     Darren finds evidence of several more control rooms, progressively deeper into the labyrinth. Unfortunately, none are immediately past the rooms that can be accessed at the moment, and are likely to have their relative locations shifted before they can be reached, unless someone finds a speed cheat. As an ongoing action that won't take up too much more of his attention, he can provide updates on the shortest route to the next-nearest control room as doors are opened.

    Or, because the controls he has available here suggest that the next-nearest room won't have access to the bottom floors, he could skip that, and instead provide directions to a mid-level room, which is closer to the edge of what this room can influence, and should provide greater access.
Hiromi     It's hard to tell how Hisako reacts to this strangely well-coordinated, and less-strangely competent, martial showing by Ahn. At least, it's hard to tell on her face, which maintains a professional neutrality. At the far opposite of subtle, her tail wags only for the space when they share a look after the ants have been pacified, before they continue on.

    Trying to figure out the fastest route down is the hardest possible task, here at the uppermost control room. Things become iffier every single step down, and it would require a long while spent watching to observe and understand the rules by which the room shifts occur, assuming that they aren't just random. One could make a probabilistic model with a lot of assumptions, but that's useful in inverse proportion to its length.

    Hisako remains here, whether to watch Darren, or because this is the 'farthest point' with which she's allowed to help. She retrieves a wooden-handled, stiff-bristled brush, clears an area of floor of dust, and sits down on it with her legs folded under her.
Rita Ma      Rita seats herself side-saddle on one of her new ant friends- they might not be that big, but she's pretty small herself, and if they're anything like normal ants they can support her weight pretty handily! "Yeah, that was me!" she says sunnily to Ahn. "I told you about it at the check-up, didn't I?"

     She dismounts (really, stands up) to gawk in open amazement at the hidden control room, eyes wide and neck craning to get a proper peek without stepping inside. "Machinery like that in a place made of stone... where is it getting power from??" But then, after a minute's contemplation: "I've never been good with old technology. Mr. Spears, do you want to give it a try? Or Ms. Ahn?"

     Being telepathically contacted visibly startles her, but she answers mentally, on the presumption that Darren can hear her: Okay, Mr. Spears! I'll do my best. There's a slight buzzing background noise to her consciously-projected thoughts, but without the ability to dig deeper, its content remains mysterious.

     All three of the chambers' descriptions get a slowly-escalating anxious grimace out of her, but finally something seems to pop into her head. "I'll take the suffocation chamber!" she says, though describing it that way makes her wince again at her own words.

     She said it's a gas, right? If I can just fill my lungs with water, I'll be okay even if I make a mistake. The ants won't be as lucky, though, so I should still be careful...

     The fountain allows Rita to do so without tapping into her own saltwater reserves: an invisible tentacle reaches across the room, drains a couple gallons of it, then loops down into her own nose and fills her lungs with cold water. Rita sputters a little, and some of it runs down her face in the end, but in the end she's okay.

     That'll last me a minute or two. ... Oh, right. I can't talk like this. 'Roswell' and 'Saucer' are here, but...

     Picking up one of her ants like it's a cat, she motions to the pair of Pokemon that they should take it off her hands, then points across the room to the exit, obviously indicating that she wants them floated across. With that (presumably) handled, Rita backs herself up down the preceding corridor, crouches down, and eyes the distance.

     Can I really make that? It *feels* way too far. But I'm still not comfortable with this body's new limits. I guess I'll just have to trust...!

     Rita sprints down the hallwayas fast as she can without dropping to all fours, takes a huge flying leap across the room, and hydroplanes off the fountain water's surface to somehow boost her speed further and squeeze out a second jump. She lands, just barely, on the other side, opens her mouth to celebrate, and doubles over and 'exhales' a solid gallon of water instead.

     "Euuugh... I really made it. Good job, Roswell. Good job, Saucer..."
Hiromi     As Rita quaffs gallons of fountain water, the force causes something to come unstuck that had been partly clogging the pipe, allowing it to bubble up more fiercely, and that causes something to begin coming up from beneath the surface. This doesn't arrive in time to interfere with her jump, but it does appear before she's had time to open the door and get all her ants across.

    It's only very vaguely humanoid, somewhat like if a frog had big, jagged teeth and a permanent grin. Its pot belly is deep blue, and its claws red. It was already grinning, yet somehow smiles in her direction.

    "You have freed me, mortal. In gratitude, I will grant you one wish."

    The door begins to open.
Darren BACK AT YOU HOMIE THAT LONG JUMP WAS DOPE

Saucer doesn't appear to be telepathic as Roswell does, but he does make a nimble celebratory barrel roll, throwing both hands up to cheer for her.

OH DAMN A WISH YOU GONNA TAKE THAT RIGHT?

    Back in the control room, Darren grins broadly at Ahn. "Oh, I dunno what I was thinking," he says, clapping her on the back. "I got somebody here that ran a nuclear reactor for a population of two. How 'bout you take point on these, and I'll run routes?"

    Looks like there's a lot of redundancy built in here. Makes sense, considering the concept. We're better off shooting for terminals that give us that good good, you feel me? Ones that give us access to the deepest floors we can find.

    "So check it," he says. "Keep in contact like this," tapping a finger to his temple, to indicate the group's telepathic conference. "Or through the radio."

    Whichever of the three paths gets him closest to the final chamber in the least amount of time, he'll take--and for the moment, he'll do it with company. The remaining four pokeballs fly from Rita back into the control room, and follow behind Darren as he departs.
Rita Ma      Rita recoils in horror, both hands held over her mouth. Her eyes are wide in panic. Even though she's a terrifying monster herself, her instincts don't know that, and they are slanted firmly towards 'flight' over 'fight' here. She's edging towards the door even before it's fully open.

     Its words, of course, freeze her in her tracks. "A... a wish?? Like in storybooks?"

     I wish I were human again. I wish I could go home! I wish all the sea monsters were gone, and Bota and Kana were safe. But... can a weird fountain frog really give me those things?? How am I supposed to know what's okay to wish for, and what isn't?

     No, wait. I know exactly.

     Rita straightens up, having found a sudden certainty. "I want to help others, Mister Frog. I owe so much to so many people, and I need to be able to pay it back.. So please, give me a drop of your blood. That'll help me find what I need."

     After that exchange is concluded, however it may, she proceeds through the door and trusts in whatever path Darren and Ahn have arranged for her.
Vantablitz Remnants     "Do it~" "N-no." "Do it~!" "It's rude!" "If you don't, I will~" "Nnnnn . . ." "Doooo iiiiit~"

    The other half of 'psychic conference' is this bullshit, when Ahn realizes that this room isn't going to map out the rest of the place like she had hoped. Theory, burned. Instead, on the way out, she sucks in a deep breath, balls her fists, and 'bravely' stammers "Th-thank you for your hard work, H-hisako! W-we'll see it from here on out!" for the sole purpose of then petting her on the head before skipping out.

    "Now you're a degenerate too~" "I'm rewarding a junior!" "How was it?" "Soft as a dream . . ."

    Since Daren and Rita have one route handled, this pair intends to at least peep the blue jelly room. Specifically, because Lotus thinks a 'freezing power sounds really interesting~'.
Hiromi     It may not be possible for the recently-named Mister Frog to do anything but smile, but that is what it does as it holds up one claw, and uses the other to slice open just enough for it to bleed. At least, that must be blood, contextually, though it isn't red. It looks more like water. Rita will have to reach out to grasp it, herself, while being careful of where she's stepping.

    Ingesting it immediately lets Rita know that this is not blood. In fact, this creature has no flesh and what she's just ingested isn't water, either. It's something ephemeral, that won't be able to exist in her for long. While she can hold onto it, she realizes the main limitation of the 'wish': It only allows for the summoning of an item that already exists. If her choice had been that first thought, she'd only get some item Mister Frog expected to be useful for her goal.

    This done, Mister Frog chills in place, content to sit in the fountain, which overflows a tad when it sits down. It'll still be there if someone else arrives, but isn't granting any more wishes.

    The door opens, and heading downward finds...
Hiromi     MEANWHILE, in the top-level control room...

    Hisako nods to Ahn. She finds that tail-wagging can still occur while sitting in that position. "Please take care, Ms. Ahn, Ms. Lotus." Hisako returns her quiet attention to Darren.

    The blue jelly room is just as described. Getting across it requires going across what at first looks like it might be deep water, but is actually a shallow layer of blue jelly. It's not a perfect fluid, of course, and some sections of the floor are clean of it, as it seems to prefer being at least a few inches thick. It doesn't appear to be an active threat of any kind, but a passive one, as approaching it, including 'attempting to jump over it,' introduces one to deathly cold. This could be minimized by moving quickly enough, but is much, much worse on contact.

    Should anything warm have a close encounter with it, then, in addition to being cooled, they'll find that their stolen warmth is quickly converted into more jelly, as it expands to cover more of the floor.

    The largest mass is covering a frozen corpse, which managed to near-fully decay before being covered in jelly, partway through the room. Apparently, that adventurer had tried using makeshift stilts to get past, but must have fallen.

    Yet another door is at the end.
Hiromi     Rita finds her way down to the next level, and she and the pokemon are forced to content with windy, narrow tunnels, as it briefly returns to being a cave and not a ruin. This area is rife with dead ends -- all of which do appear on the map -- but not otherwise especially dangerous. She only comes to a meaningful, non-time-wasting fork once she's back into the smooth stone corridors.

    There's no way to tell what's in each direction apart from reading the map, leaving her with a simple 'right, left, or straight ahead' choice.
Rita Ma      Rita nearly jumps out of her skin when she's addressed by Roswell, and glances around in a panic looking for the source before finally realizing it's him. Something about the idea of mental contact- outside of whatever she exerts over the ants, anyway- seems to inherently put her on edge, but she makes herself relax ith a little sigh. "Ah... thank you, Saucer. Yeah, I'm gonna take that."

     She instinctively reaches out as if to catch the falling drop of not-blood, but she's twenty whole feet short. Instead it falls on an invisible tentacle that reaches out for it, then retracts to convey it to her tongue. Her expression stays impassive for a moment, but a light behind her eyes gutters before shining again, as if a light switch were being held at exactly its midway point.

     It's already evaporated. But a power like that... I understand now. That couldn't have given me what I want the most. If I ate more of it, I'm sure I could- no, that's awful, I shouldn't even think about it. Mister Frog is a person and he hasn't done anything wrong!

     Rita smiles, with just an undertone of disappointment, and waves farewell as she proceeds with her ant swarm. "Goodbye, Mister Frog! Have a good, um, life!"

     Once she's down the corridor, she pops open her lunchbox and munches on some cuts of raw fish while walking. I shouldn't think about it, I shouldn't think about it, I shouldn't think about it...

     Reaching the fork, she puts her lunch away, exhales, and pats one of her ants on the head, using it as a captive audience to walk through her thoughts out loud. "Spiders... oh, right! Those are like land crabs. Did they eat ants, or the other way 'round? What did National Geographic say...? Well, it doesn't matter. It's hard to get you guys through the obstacle rooms, so I might as well throw you into a fight."

     Marshaling her forces, Rita opens the Spider Door with all the casual fearlessness of someone who's never seen a spider in her life.
Vantablitz Remnants     Ahn, upon actually arriving at the jelly, has the slightly abnormal human being reaction of immediately picking up a small rock and skipping it over the goopy floor on sight rather than hesitating or examining the area by sight three times, and then the very abnormal reaction of pulling, striking, and throwing a match into it. She only flinches back when the tiny fire is greedily engulfed and spills out into a new blob of gel.

    "Maybe you shouldn't touch that right away?" "Obviously. I'm a delicate flower you know! I'll wilt in that much cold!" "Still, is this a kind of 'radiating cold'? Or 'stolen warmth'?" "You told me those were scientifically the same." "Well, it grows off of the heat right? Even the ambient heat in the air should be getting sucked out beyond more than just directly over top, and then wouldn't it slowly have surely grown over every surface for all the time it's been down here?" "You're overthinking it. It's a video game right?" "Wh-- No? No this is definitely . . . Excuse me???"

    While Ahn is puzzling over how the fuck to even begin to approach that, Lotus saunters her way over to the edge of the jellzone. Waving one white and black hand over it like trying to pass one quickly through a campfire, she hisses "Eugh, that really is cold. But I won't be deterred that easily~ All this ancient stone isn't my favourite kind of environment though. Actually, it's the worst. How about . . . this?"

    Her forearm then splits down the middle with a grotesque, wet-wood cracking sound, whereupon Lotus reaches into a slick interior and withdraws what appears to be a black and white carbon (heh) copy of a ka-bar, separating from a dozen little tangled 'roots'. A boneless flick of her wrist snaps her arm shut again. Crouching by the goopy hellzone, she holds the knife flat across her palm and angles it into the stones, and begins sawing away at the floor a solid inch and a half beneath the jelly, carving in a way that would seem suddenly eerily human in posture and focus if the subject were a carcass and not solid rock. Her aim is to withdraw a cracker-sized portion of jelly-coated rock and bring it out to a safe distance, and then, tossing the knife over to Ahn (who robotically catches it), unwind meters upon meters of thin silken black 'spool' from the back of her neck, somewhere under her 'hair'.

    The prevailing logic is thus: Lotus is significantly less warm than Ahn, and very well insulated from extremes, but still not immune to cold damage. She needs to physically permeate the jelly to learn and gain its properties, which is her own selfish desire. Doing so would obviously start freezing her. Since she only needs a small sample and single contact point, though, she intends to analyze and break down the jelly on the stone chip with several meters of 'artificial distance', such that the heat is gradually sucked out of a long 'fuse' insulating the rest of her body. The speed of neural information is much higher than the speed of her thermal conductivity, so she should be able to finish before losing anything more than one expendable tendril to freezing, growing the jelly only a tiny amount!
Vantablitz Remnants     "Okay, we can go now." "Huh? We can't just turn right back." "There's no point splitting off from the others, and we don't know what's down this way, do we?" "We can meet up with them later?" "Ehh? What makes you so sure of that." "Let's just keep going this way!" "No way. Don't wanna." "Come on, don't be a baby!" "I'm not getting half-frozen for no good reason." "Of course there's a good reason!" "Like what?" "Don't you see that there? That man who tried to get across before us?" "Yeah, he looks far from edible in that state." "H-his spirit won't be able to rest until someone--" "Oh not *this again*." "Yes! This again!" "This isn't the time!" "This is exactly the time!" "Even if there isn't an enemy presence here, this is still a lethal situation. An actual 'dungeon' isn't--" "It's exactly the place where it matters most! The people came here already failed and died for nothing! That's . . . That's too sad!" "Can't you do a ceremony later?" "No! We can just hop across! It'll take five seconds!" "I know from videogames that sacrificing a little bit of HP in every room adds up. You don't take these risks normally." "If you won't help then I'll just go myself!" "Don't be stupid! If you're wearing me at least, you'll hardly take any damage!" "So you'll help?!" "No!" "Then wait here and take care of Hisako!" "Ahn! Don't *do things* like this just because of--" "Because *what*." "Because . . . Well, you know." "Yeah. That's what I thought. Just stay here."

    Before Lotus can try to summon up the words to engage in more argument on this rocky emotional footing, Ahn takes a sprinting run at the jelly hell pool and leaps off from dangerously close to its edge, hitting the adjacent wall up high at an oblique angle and kicking off even faster, touching only with her toes for thrust and her fingertips for stability. She's not all that much higher than the ill-fated adventurer's stilts, but she is much faster; no contact points with the goop itself bog her down, and instead of slowing as the momentum of her jump bleeds off, she actually accelerates as she goes, disengaging from the wall at the end with a crack-hiss sound that propels her to safety, whereupon she stumbles momentarily, and then rapidly pulling off her definitely grave-robbed fatigues, throwing the ice-coated clothing on the ground now that it's doing more harm than good, and pulling out the items she'd inserted into its pockets to rearrange into her harness as she keeps walking, soothing the chattering of her teeth by pressing her palms together and drawing them back to hold steady around a glowing pilot light between them, venting heat into the air to then reabsorb through her skin.

    Lotus currently languishes in deciding whether it's worth it to try and say sorry yet.
Hiromi     Rita, her ant buddies, Roswell, and Saucer enter the spider cave. This proves to be a larger chamber than previous, with a greater variety of dangers.

    First, the place has a lot of dark, green (if Rita's light source has the color to distinguish it), leafy trees, like a rainforest. It's not open to the sky, and it's a mystery why the air is so humid, but they all seem to be growing quite well. The ground has both bush coverage and some discarded steel armor, with only piles of bones inside to mark what had been previous attempts to pass through here. That armor is the first danger, as 'tiny' spiders, merely tarantula-sized, are hiding under every other piece, or else under the bushes, waiting for something to get close for them to run, leap, latch onto, and inject poison into.

    The webs are harder to spot, despite having been made by the giant spiders hiding up in the trees. These ones are closer to horse-sized, still venomous, and their great strength gives them the ability to swing and throw around anything that tries grappling them.

    Perhaps worst of all, the path through the forest is not only maze-like, but, visible only to Darren and Hisako in the control room, the room begins shifting its maze to be harder to navigate the moment someone gets inside. A message of Shift Active lights up next to it, followed by a sub-entry for each portion of ground. It seems he can interact with these to change the order in which they move, delaying one 'shift' in favor of another.
Hiromi     Though the passage hasn't yet been reached, Darren can still see what would be found by someone who's successfully navigated the spider cave.

    Neglecting the paths that would take longer to get to the mid-level control room, there are still two options that would get there in about the same amount of time.

    Option A is a lava tunnel maze, down and to the right. The controls to redirect or shut down the lava flows are already active, though manipulating those at the same time as messing with the spider cave-forest-maze requires a lot of context switching.

    Option B is a field of ghosts, down and to the left.
Hiromi     There's no safe way to be near the blue jelly without total immunity to cold. Even getting close enough to cut off bits hurts Lotus, though not so much 'a knife.' Analyzing and absorbing it gives her a chance to repeat its trick of cold radiation. Curiously, it's apparent to her that even an 'ordinary' human would gain benefits from eating this, if they were somehow able to safely do so. They wouldn't gain that ability, but would gain some measure of resistance to cold and poison. More curiously, it's not poisonous, just dangerously cold. It also is, or was, alive, though only in the same sense that a fungus is alive.

    Ahn makes it across, though discarding her frosted clothing is definitely a good idea. The door behind her slowly opens, revealing a winding passage down to the next level, the same as Rita has already reached.
Hiromi     The door at the end of the blue jellies room opens to reveal a winding passage down. It branches out into several passages, though it's only with the control room's benefit that someone could tell what's down each of the first left, second left, and straight ahead routes.
Darren      Rita. Room's shifting, and I don't like them trees. I'mma delay the shifts to try and keep 'em in front of you. Roswell and Saucer are on point for little stuff. Keep your guard up and take your time. Once you're through, I'm running to the next room.

     In the control room, Darren's eys scan the monitor carefully, hands seldom pausing, his mind's grasp working what levers and buttons aren't in immediate reach. Meanwhile, in the jungle room...

     Saucer and Roswell form up on Rita.

Saucer's wings unfold, revealing an unusually artificial-looking carapace beneath. The air before him glimmers as alternating screens of hard light are constructed. Usually, these are applied defensively.

Roswell, however, makes them into an offensive tool. His telekinesis grasps the barriers, spreading them out to serve as giant swatters for the smaller spiders. Rapidly combing the ground like shrimp nets across a riverbed, the barriers make sharp turns and abrupt pivots to crush swaths of them between gleaming walls of psychic force.

<J-IC-Scene> Vantablitz Remnants |Lotus says, "Darren~ Can you, ah, see if that jelly room leads to where little Rita is?"
<J-IC-Scene> Darren says, "On it."
<J-IC-Scene> Vantablitz Remnants |Lotus says, "Thank you~"
<J-IC-Scene> Vantablitz Remnants |Lotus says, "Ahn got a little heated and went on herself, so it'd be a big help."
<J-IC-Scene> Darren says, "Not no more. Maybe if you book it y'all can meet up on the next level down, but it's all jumbled up. Just keep moving and try to stay ahead of the shifts."
<J-IC-Scene> Vantablitz Remnants |Lotus says, "Ughhhh. I was afraid you'd say that."

     Yup. I'mma move down to the next room, so hold it down best you can. We gonna be fast and loose for a tight minute.

     Speed and flexibility. He won't try and fiddle with the controls for the lava room. Not when he's got Nessie. Breaking into a sprint towards that room, Darren calls upon the friend-shaped plesiosaur to cheat the maze via applied and voluminous amounts of freezing cold water.
Vantablitz Remnants     Ahn, in her infinite sulking DETERMINATION, picks the first corridor she sees to turn, naturally 'scraping the corners' rather than leaving bends behind and getting confused about which way she's been (or else missing something important, or being ambushed from behind). This sends her in the miserable direction of the MIMIC ROOM.

    Lotus, meanwhile, now has to sack it up and copy Ahn, though in her case with more of a roof grappling thing. Reaching the other side to chase after her partner, seething at the unblockable cold chip damage on her type template, Lotus spends the short pursuit reflecting on the fact that if she'd gone with Ahn in the first place, they wouldn't have taken the cold damage separately, and she would be slurping down the woman's internal body heat right now instead of grumbling. Refusing to cooperate immediately sucked in the first room it came up in.
Rita Ma      "I'll be careful, Mr. Spears!" Rita broadcasts cheerily. But that cheer evaporates on entering the room.

     She grimaces, teeth nearly chattering, and hugs herself as her eyes linger on the armored skeletons. "Of course there'd be bodies. Nobody's ever come out. But I still hoped..."

     Hoped what? That they were somehow safe, just trapped after all these years? Or that I just wouldn't have to see the bodies? ... Ugh. Somehow it's dried bones that always get me the worst.

     Her eyes are on one when a 'little' spider darts out at her; she squeals in fright and jumps backwards, clearing ten feet horizontally in a single graceful hop and immediately getting snarled in a huge web for her trouble. "Aaaaah!! Mr. Spears! Ms. Lotus! Somebody! These aren't like crabs at all!!"

     The ants are too far away to defend her. Her eyes whip around, anticipating a threat, and find one of those giant spiders staring back. For a moment they go wide in fear. Then two transformations wash over her in quick succession.

     The first is purely mental and kinesthetic. Rita's expression goes glassy, dull, and sharklike; a dreadful look that doesn't belong on human faces at all. She stops squirming wildly, going suddenly still. The second is physical: her body turns purple-translucent like a ghost, long hair and clothes fluttering as if in zero-G. The strands of the web come unstuck from her, some of them even phasing through in the process.

     She swoops towards the nearest spider as if magnetically drawn towards it. Where her intangible form intersects its body, its 'life force' is siphoned away into a hungry void.

     The purple-ghost-Rita swoops from one giant spider to another in a series of homing dives, leaving the giant spiders withered and either exhausted or dead in her path, and simply ignoring walls or trees en route to the exit. The giant ants cascade along behind her; Roswell and Saucer protect them from the smaller spiders that could overwhelm them, and they overwhelm the larger spiders in turn.

     Of course, Darren's helpful manipulation and her own enhanced, terrain-defying mobility ensure she reaches the exit in record time. Rather than immediately leaving, though, Rita sets down, returns to tangibility at the end of her little rampage with a composing sigh, and unwraps a long azure tentacle from around her arm to fire it back towards the exit. It wraps around trees and branches to secure itself; follows the path of dead spiders she, her ants, and Darren's pokemon carved out; luminesces to pierce the darkness; and stretches and distorts if the rooms shift to continue marking a viable and safe- if not the shortest- path.

     "Follow the glowing guide-line, okay? It'll get you through, I promise!"
Hiromi     Ahn (and, not long afterward, Lotus, presumably) follow a tunnel that curves around and around until it reaches someplace new.

    It certainly has a lot of stuff in it. It looks like some kind of alchemist's workshop, perhaps. There's a bed, an unlit fireplace with a chimney going to the ceiling, desks and books and papers, chairs, piles of scattered gold coins and potions, big wooden chests, cupboards, and dressers full of clothes. There are hooks and chains connected to rafters tin the ceiling, presumably for holding up those big cauldrons over additional fires. There's scattered swords, tools that will take varying levels of effort to identify, wands and scrolls. The shelves have rows of ancient-looking books.

    Many of these items are exactly what they appear to be, though there is no immediately obvious means of determining what a wand or potion will do without activating it. The rest are shapeshifting monsters that sprout claws on waking. They're not very fast, which is why they'll only attack if someone gets close enough, but the larger ones, like that dresser, also have the biggest claws, and all but the smallest ones have a glue-like mucus that sticks to the target, letting more and more mimics pile on, sprouting additional claws.
Hiromi     The giant spiders have little means of attacking intangible opponents, though their reaction speed to a disturbed web is such that there's barely time for Rita to escape before that first one reaches her. Once she has gotten through, her guide line starts to feel stretched as the forest maze shifts behind her, but it's still working through the order of changes Darren had left for it, giving just enough time for everyone to follow her. The smaller spiders are comparatively little trouble, once people realize they're there, and Saucer and Roswell combo to comb them out of their hiding places. While slower to follow, the group of giant ants are pretty well able to deal with the remaining spiders, and most effective at preventing what would otherwise be a numbers disadvantage even in the case of an ambush, protecting anyone (except Rita, as she zooms ahead) from being flanked.

    Going through the next door, down and to the right, the group reaches the lava tunnel maze. The main danger here is already known, which is the way the tunnels alternately fill and drain with lava, changing which passages are safe to traverse. These do become safe again if a big enough freezing beam hits them, though one may be advised to hurry if the flow is still active.

    The second danger comes in the form of creatures(?) that look like tiny, localized firestorms, traveling up and down the tunnels. They must have some sort of intelligence because, rather than just passing on through, one that reaches a living target will stick around them, moving on only after that target dies.
Darren Good hustle, Rita. That guideline gives him an idea for later, but for the moment Darren is too busy sprinting through the forest with his floating Pokeballs in tow. Upon reaching the lava tunnel maze, he sends another message.

    Aight, Nessie's got the lava, but we still gotta keep moving. Stuff behind it's gotta go somewhere, feel me?

Saucer and Roswell remain out, but stay with Rita even once Darren arrives.

    Nessie certainly does have the lava--in the first case, her horn seems to be able to manifest absurd amounts of high-pressure water blasts, and in the second, that same horn can flash-freeze the already-cooled lava with cones of freezing cold. "That's it! Accept the challenge!" Darren extends his hand, and Nessie jumps up to slap him some fin. He pets her when she lands, the shelled Pokemon beaming proudly.

    "Keep moving! Keep moving!"

Nessie, keep on the lava flows--I'mma cut through that traffic!
<J-IC-Scene> Darren says, "Rita, can you cover me?"
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma !
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Uh, with what, Mr. Spears?"
<J-IC-Scene> Darren says, "I'mma cut through that traffic. The firestorms."
<J-IC-Scene> Darren says, "I got jukes for days, but they're a little different from a d-line. You feel me?"

    With help from his friends, he aims to take the shortest route through the lava maze to the next control room. Darren's football days come in handy here--he runs at breakneck speeds, arms and legs pumping, making superhuman dime-stops to fake them out. His body control is incredible, and he's able to make spot-jukes, lurches and spins without losing his balance, all in the name of cutting through the firestorms and getting to the next control room.
Vantablitz Remnants     "Don't run on ahead like that!" ". . ." "That's not like you, Ahn. Normally we . . ." ". . ." "If we'd just gone together then--" "Yeah? If we had?" "Ugh, okay, fine, if I had then--" "It's fine. Really. This isn't all that hard anyways. See? Look. Two minutes by myself and I already found a whole trove of treasure. Easy." "Weren't you looking for a magic amulet?" "Easy."

    Ahn does her level best to scan the room for signs of mechanical traps, assess the alchemical components for volatility, and even goes so far as to throw rocks at a couple of chests and bits of furniture. Another match is waved around in front of the dresser, unfortunately wakes it up while Ahn is in arm's reach. This is technically better than touching it, but not by much. It just results in Ahn being covered head to toe in thick, sticky, viscous, legally printable fluid, and Lotus having to react in a fraction of a second to lunge across the room to intercept the monster with a sidelong tackle wherein most of her 'chassis' peels back menacingly and she 'splashes' the mimic on impact; that is, it is not she who splashes, still holding herself together in that 'woven black silk' solid, but the organic matter she claws into, which dissolves less as if melted by heat or acid, but as if it were shaped jello carefully disguised by a decorative cake master.

    "The furniture?! Why?! How would you even sit down?!" "Ahn, back up!" "My everything is glued to my everything!" "So it's like--" "Not helping!"

    This presumably awakening the hordes of lesser mimics who want in, Ahn begins mashing her struggle meter as hard as physically possible, and pressing the pilot light to her other arm, gritting her teeth and hissing at the building first degree burns in the process of melting the organic glue away, and then using the 'combat knife' handed over earlier to start sawing the rest off, freeing up her mobility again bit by bit.

    A potion scuttles aggressively at her leg, and Ahn shifts her weight with a very limited half-stomp and kiai that causes the floor to rumble and launch it away again. A carnivorous book leaps from her left, and she plunges the knife crudely into its face, crouching and stabbing it against the ground, then tearing her foot free to plant on its cover and wrench the blade back out. An aggressive wand jumps out and sinks its claws into her lower back, whereupon she strangles down a cry and quickly hacks through the goo sealing a carry case and hurls what is definitely also 'found' anti-personnel explosive into the oncoming lumbering chest before Lotus leaps in and snags the little bastard clinging to her and chomps it in half.
Vantablitz Remnants     Lotus shifts to bodyblocking the leaping attack of a voracious cupboard, claws skittering from white armour and dribbling vantablack blood through the cracks, before she propels two dozen inky black spikes through the back of its maw. Ahn, freeing a leg, burns the bottom of a boot with a flash of light from her heel and adequately spinkicks an animate sword by the hilt into the opposite wall, tearing free her other foot by rotational torque. She grabs Lotus by the arm and begins hauling ass towards the opposite door. There's no attempt to stop and try to identify magic items now.

    In fact, the panicked silence mixed with adrenaline-infused and well-practiced motions Ahn especially is engaged in resemble a certain kind of learned lesson about scavenging and risk/reward situations. A survival axe is unhooked from her military-style backback and driven straight through a coinpouch, pinning it to the ground. A palm strike to a salivating heap of scrolls flash ignites it, in exchange for more bloody scratches. Having Lotus operate the door out (and down), Ahn hurls the knife across the room to peg the potion as it recovers, then wrenches it back on a silk fine cord. Her offhand fumbling for what is definitely a molotov she just made this morning, lighting it with a flick of her fingers, then hurling it into the room behind her to cover her escape downstairs.
Rita Ma      Rita flags Darren down with an overenthusiastic wave when he and his pokemon make it to the other end of the Spider Room. "Hi, Mr. Spears!!" Her ants bunch up at the exit, forming a beachhead of sorts at the exit; she can't feasibly exterminate all the spiders, but she can keep them at bay for the later party members.

     Once he's through, she follows immediately behind; some passages are absolutely unsafe for her to traverse, but when there's only a little bit of lava, she can get through by leaping up to cling to the ceiling. Her fingertips and invisible tentacles are harder than stone and strong enough to gouge out tiny handholds that allow her to cling in a gravity-defying way, then skitter at almost full speed without ever having to touch the liquids below.

     It's uncanny, like some kind of bug has suddenly taken charge of Rita's body. Normally she does a superb job of Acting Human, even in some combat situations, but just there's no way to make a maneuver like that look natural.

     An invisible tentacle instinctively lashes out at a mini-firestorm the first time one menaces her or Darren. It's wholly ineffectual, but the panicked little yelp of pain she gives in time with smoke rising from thin air does a good job of humanizing her again. "Aaah-!! Mr. Spears, look out!" More quietly, to herself: "There's nothing to them. They're just... empty clouds??"

     Change of tactics: Rita switches to using water attacks, almost like Nessie. There's no clear origin, but firehose-like bursts of seawater erupt out of thin air near her to douse and buffet any firestorms that stray too close to Darren. As swift as he is, she manages to stick right beside him the whole way, her legs practically blurring to keep up with his longer strides.

     "You're really good at this, Mr. Spears!" she chimes in cheerfully, halfway through the mad dash. "Do you get chased often?"
Hiromi     The Mimic Room is only technically not a layer of hell. It's still a nightmare of seemingly, if not literally, everything in the room trying to kill you. Even that fireplace isn't real, the chimney stopping right at the ceiling.

    There are a lot of tactics that don't work well against mimics, but, happily, blades and claws still do, getting through the thick 'hide' of the larger ones and revealing their gruesome internals, transforming furniture into gore. Some of the objects destroyed just burn or break like the things they originally appeared to be would, but this is acceptable collateral damage.

    After breaking through and descending, Ahn and Lotus find themselves in a three-dimensional maze of twisty stone stairs and passages. Its mostly solid walls mostly prevent them from taking shortcuts, but there are also points where a good enough leap can carry someone clear over one section into another -- assuming one wants to get there, and isn't just jumping into a dead end. Without anyone looking at a map, it's hard to tell.

    Those open areas are also the most dangerous, not so much because of the pit traps, but because of the bats. Most of them are of normal sizes, with 'normal' bite-related danger, but the few giant bats have enough mass to knock someone off course, and they show little in the way of rational thought in deciding when to take off and which direction in which to do so.

    The pits lead into slippery slides that mostly end in either lethal spikes or acid baths.
Hiromi     It hadn't been immediately obvious, but Hisako catches up to Darren quickly enough that she must have left quickly after he did. She's not so much 'remarkably quiet' as 'quiet enough that few would notice to remark upon it,' outside of her red and white clothing being an outfit that would be loud, if these tunnels weren't all very dark. She stays toward the back of the group, where she can keep a watch on everyone.

    Rita finds that, like with the blue jellies (she hasn't seen), even being near the lava is very dangerous, and the tunnels are big enough for her to climb down them while the lava is there, but not nearly big enough for her to avoid the deathly dry heat. It's a lot safer when hit by water or freezing attacks. Luckily, the heat doesn't stick around except while the lava is actually there.

    The firestorms possess some aggressive intelligence, but it's minimal enough to be fooled by fancy footwork and speed, and they do get destroyed by being hit with the same techniques as are effective against at cooling the lava, despite being formless enough that they can't be tentacle-smacked.

    Immediately after the Lava Tunnel Maze is a passage that the map had marked as containing another control room. It's through the left wall, which requires digging through some solid rock. Hisako had managed it using a bit of magic to grant herself one Hiromi-esque strike, but this time she's not making any move to help, leaving that up to everyone else to figure out.

    Once that's done, the control room will be revealed, and its mechanisms are much the same as the earlier one. This one differs mostly in that its influence reaches down as far as something marked Castle Level, near the bottom of the labyrinth.

    Fortunately, this room also has some influence over the passages immediately above it. They can't do much about the bats, but there's a control option for Pit Routes. Routes that currently lead into deadly traps can be changed for relatively harmless dead-ends, and one of them connects to a passage that leads directly down to the next level, hitting a trap door in the ceiling right near this room, letting someone skip a little over half the maze, in the best case scenario.

    Unfortunately, it doesn't tell anyone where in that room an intruder/adventurer is currently located. Fortunately, the bat cave's individual pieces are, mostly, uniquely shaped.
Rita Ma      Though she'd endured the mad sprint itself remarkably well, the dessicating heat has gotten to Rita maybe even worse than it'd affect an ordinary human. By the end of it, after getting a little too close to the lava- who knew that media had lied to her about convection?- she's drooping like a neglected houseplant, and simply collapses supine onto the floor for a while once they reach the alleged location of the control room.

     "Blugh... urgh. Just leave me, Mr. Spears. I'll be... I'll be okay. If you need me to open that up, I can... I can do something. Just a minute. Actually, if Nessie could...?"

     Of course *I* can't make *fresh* water.

     Once a little bit of time has passed (or the friend-shaped plesiosaur has rejuvenated her), Rita's solution is simple and frighteningly esoteric. As she stands up, an invisible tentacle subtly unwraps from around her arm; she raises her hand towards the offending stone, and the tentacle (that is, what appears to be thin air) drips with a sizzling luminescent-blue acid.

     Gouging into the stone, the invisible implement traces a smoking line to saw the rectangular outline of a doorway out of the rock like scissors gliding through paper. With a tug, the rock falls outward with a noisy crash, its edges still smoking, and Rita lowers her hand.

     "Are you doing okay, Ms. Hisako?" she asks idly afterwards, intending to remain outside and let Darren work his magic as usual. "I didn't see you before. You weren't doing all that alone, were you? It's okay to ask for help!"
Darren      Darren slides under a cloud as Rita blasts it, pulling himself back onto his feet with the force of his mind. Another, just a few yards off, approaching fast. "Got chased professionally for three years," Darren calls back to Rita, breaking hard to the side to run across a wall and past it. "And two championship rings to show for it!"

     Through to the other side, Darren nods. "She could, bet." Nessie coos proudly, then pats Rita comfortingly with a fin, as Darren procures a sports drink for himself and Rita. "Ahn and Lotus got their hands full with that honeypot room. Quick breather, and then we gotta get going. Nessie, freeze up that wall, homegirl." The Lapras turns towards the wall, ices it over with a chilling blast from her horn, then returns to her Pokeball.

     Out comes a sarcophagus with four ghostly arms. "Ramesses, get that curl on, bro. Roswell, get ready for a pass."

     Ramesses grins toothily at Rita while Darren swigs his sports drink. The sarcophagus wraps itself up tightly in those ghostly arms. Bound up as tightly as possible, Ramesses gives Roswell and Darren a few rapid hops, chattering his teeth excitedly.

     "Aight, fam. One, two, THREE!"

     Curled up and hardened, Ramesses is thrown through the frozen-over wall, his highly toughened exterior and weight making him a person-shaped wrecking ball which Darren and Roswell can easily make use of to demolish the wall.

One other thing. Spot playbook adjustment.

     Darren procures a jewel case and a well-used CD player from his backpack, plugging in a pair of headphones. The insert of the jewel case reads TR102 - SLINGSHOT and depicts an octopus pokemon catapulting itself forwards with two stretchy tentacles.

     The tray is opened, the disc slotted in, and as Ramesses dusts himself off, he floats over to Darren and slips those headphones on. Darren presses the worn-down play button on the well-loved, scratched-up CD player, and smoke filters out from the device as the disc burns itself up inside.

Ta-da! Ramesses learned TR102 - Slingshot!
Vantablitz Remnants     "I want to go home now. This sucks." "What about 'supporting Darren'?" "I don't even know where he is!" "Rita?" "Her either!" "We could retrace your steps." "No, that won't work! Even if we half-freeze again, we'd still have to figure out where they went go through all the rooms they did, assuming they're even still there with the way this place allegedly shifts!" "Allegedly . . ."

    The timing is perfect for the pair to cluelessly stare around a big sweeping pan around the maze they find themselves in now. The first swarm of bats actually causes Ahn to shriek like an absolute stereotype, so mundane by comparison to every other horror she's had to endure until now. After one false step near a pit, caught by a timely extension of a Lotus vine, however, she learns to simply drop to the ground when hairy wings beat the air as if targeted by a sniper. Lotus stops to catch a couple of the normal-sized bats like a gross snapping plant to heal her prior injuries.

    Pretty quickly becoming Very Sick Of This (and especially leery of acid), both of them stop at the same time. Lotus simply uses her recently chomped radio to direct her hair-raising tones into a tingling purr of "Daaaarreeeen~ Riiiiitaaaa~ Hisaaaaakoooo~ Could one of you politely point out the way to take to get back to youuuu~?" Ahn instead kneels down, hands against thighs, and focuses deeply. Like the engine room on the submarine, the 'space' in front of her eyes visually becomes a nausea-inducing little inside out marble of shifting perspective and colour, but from her precise position, she's able to look into it with the exact utility of a fibre obptic camera snake, winding it around stairs and corridors and even through the bottoms of pits to feel out dead ends and useful passages. It's still raw trial and error, but a hundred times the speed of walking around to each of them on foot, and much less dangerous.
Hiromi     Rita was indeed lied to about the dangers of lava. But now she's through, and Darren has hydration. Maybe or maybe not ocean levels of hydration, depending on how much Nessie has in reserve.

    It's unclear, thanks to questionable translation effects, whether Rita and Hisako are using the same honorific or not, but it is (subtly) clear that Hisako has a little lip-tightening frown when addressed, like she's unsure of whether it's improper, and since she's not sure she can't actually mention it. "Don't worry, Ms. Rita. I was chosen for this task because I was strong enough. Following behind as you clear the way isn't difficult for me."

    Between freezing, bashing, and cutting, the way into the next control room is opened.
Rita Ma      The flipper-pat helps to rejuvenate Rita already, though there's a slight grimacing-uneasy undertone to the smile she gives Nessie in return. She does try to pat the pokemon's head in return, but she's clearly steeling herself to jerk her hand away in case its skin somehow stings her.

     Her expression shifts to something slightly guilty when Nessie's recalled. I should've been nicer. Why do I feel so nervous around them? They're really nice, aren't they? One of them even talks, sort of. Am I really that shallow?

     ... Even if I feel guilty, a power like that would be convenient to have. Seah Unsurtr gave me something like it, but only for touch. Is it really okay to be thinking greedily like that?

R     Her conversation with Hisako stops her from sinking deeper into pointless introspection, though. She realizes with a little start that she's stopped talking, rewinds the last few seconds of conversation in her head, and fumbles for a reply. "Oh! Um, as long as you're okay then, Miss..."

     Too late, she notices the tiny frown and reciprocates with a little wince. "Um, Hisako. ... How do you think Mr. Spears is doing so far? I think he's really impressive! Did you get to see how he dodged those fire clouds?"

     After a minute of hesitating deliberation, she steps into the control room with him and taps his arm for attention. Awkwardly-softly: "Nessie was really nice. I liked her a lot. Do you have anything of hers I could hold onto?" There is, of course, an ulterior motive.

     It's not a lie. So why do I still feel guilty?

     If Darren's too busy with other control-room tasks, she can at least peek at the screens and try to give Ahn and Lotus directions on how best to reach their location- ideally through that one trapdoor.

     "So if you're in that part there, then... You'll just have to trust me, okay? I know it'll seem like a scary drop, but it'll be alright, I promise!"
Hiromi     Apart from the pit trap that leads down to the next level, simply getting through the maze is the other, obvious option. While startling and erratic, the bats aren't too dangerous on their own, and are made of nutritious meat. They taste stunningly awful, but that's to human palates. Scouting out the paths ahead of time does make things easier, as this place doesn't have the same constant, automatic reconfiguration feature that the spider cave did.

    Below, the surviving ants (assuming they weren't left on the other side of the lava tunnels) mill about on the walls, floor, and ceiling in Rita's general vicinity. They're apparently content to follow her wherever. Eating some spiders will keep them going for a long while, though they're too dutifully minded to need regular food payments as motivation.

    Hisako tilts her head to one side, shifting her stance, and takes a thoughtful moment before answering Rita. "I believe he is more skilled than most of the teachers, and more than my sisters, but the Archwolf's tests aren't a matter of passing or failing. One can always be stronger, and can always do better. Even if they are 'the best,' they can always seek out someone better." This is clearly something she's thought about, if not just something she's been taught to memorize. It's a firm conviction. "My role isn't to do more than observe, so I cannot judge just how well you're doing." 'You,' rather than just 'he.'

    She again pulls out her brush to clean out a little area, away from where the remains of the broken wall have fallen, and sit down to wait and watch, expecting Darren to be here awhile. After a few moments, she thinks to add, "But if you are unable to continue, I'll try to save you." 'Try,' like she doesn't really expect it will be possible, but without any real hesitation in that she'd do it.
Darren      Darren smiles at Rita. He holds up an index finger, as if to silently say 'I'll ask.' Nodding, "She said you can have some horn shavings--that's good luck, you know. Here." An empty sandwich bag floats out of Darren's backpack and hovers near Rita.

     The friend-shaped Pokemon hops back out of her ball, gently nudging Rita's hands with her head, until the general idea of 'hold out the bag' is conveyed. Then, she grinds her horn against the nearest wall, like a boar marking a tree. Fine blue flakes drift into the brown paper bag. With that done, Nessie coos at Rita, offering a hug with her long neck.

     She's back in her ball. "Aight, Rita. You give 'em directions, I'mma delay the shifts so they can catch up faster. Then you and them can head on. Take Saucer and Roswell with ya--I'mma stay in here 'til y'all get too far down for this room to be useful. Then we rinse and repeat."

     One can always be stronger, and one can always do better. "Words to live by," he says with an assured nod. "'Swhy I took Hiromi up. I love a challenge, I love that feeling of testing myself, and I make my failures into lessons. Hiromi seems like she understands the value of that--and I can only judge my own strengths so well in a vacuum."

     At the control panel, while Rita gives directions, Darren delays shifts to allow Lotus and Ahn to catch up more speedily.

     Saucer and Roswell remain Rita's faithful buddies, but Darren stays in the control room to search for rooms with easily-disabled hazards. He doesn't so much expect an off-button, but rather, rooms easily suited to what he knows of Rita and Lotus' strengths--things easily solved with agility, strength or quick wits, as opposed to more abstract-sounding rooms.
Hiromi     Darren searches the rooms below. At this point, there's a great danger of entering chambers that just dead end, but from here, he can discard those routes immediately. There are still a few to choose from.

    But before any of those, there's an attention-catching secret chamber. It's not another control room (though he can see where those are, further down, too) but something marked Transportation Room.

    Like this one, someone will have to break down a wall to get to it. The only thing standing in the way is a maze of ant tunnels. The good news is that the path through is fairly short, if no wrong turns are taken. The bad news is that's it still full of fire ants.
Vantablitz Remnants     Chilling out has paid out this time. Darren has promised his timely assistance. Lotus assures him that she must always be 'extra' because she is so generous. Ahn mostly starts moving as she focuses, narrowing the range of her bendyvision to follow the specific directions the other two are giving her to double check ahead. Not that she doesn't trust them! Or so she claims, boldly. But if she can, why not? Dungeon crawling isn't specifically her thing, but surviving improbable numbers of back to back hyper-lethal setpieces *is*.

    Placing her faith in Rita-chan, and helpfully motivated by the opportunity to perhaps get to pet Hisako again, the pair jump the last super doomsday pit at instruction, and finally catch up. This also involves Ahn bumbling in with half her clothes gone and just wearily telling Rita to hose her off at this point since Lotus refuses to touch the mimic goo. She will regret this immediately when salt water gets in her open wounds.
Darren Damn, Ahn, Darren sends, as she shows up on the monitor. You ever heard the phrase 'rode hard and put up wet?' You good? Something else catches his attention. A different monitor.

    A transportation room could mean a lot of different things, all of which are of great value in a labyrinth, especially one so dangerous.

<J-IC-Scene> Darren says, "Aight check it. 'Transportation Room.' Not far from here, but it's fire ants between us and that."

It's behind a wall, too, but we can get that no problem. Rita, if you can leave ya little glowy cord again, I'mma tell you, Lotus and Ahn the right way to get there. Then I'll follow behind y'all. I'd take 'fire' literally. So, Rita, maybe you and Lotus take point for Ahn Saucer'll get y'all some protection, and then I'mma swap him and Roswell out for Nessie and Ramesses.

     Darren provides directions in real-time to the Transportation Room, sending along the two Pokemon best suited to dealing with fire hazards. Ramesses decides that he really likes Ahn, forgetting that he is a leering, red-eyed sarcophagus for a moment to Grudge-crawl over to her on all four ghostly hands, before flipping upright and bouncing up and down in an excited demand for pets.

     Oblivious displays of animal friendliness aside, Nessie will aim to assist by blasting the ants with water, while Ramesses litters hallways with poisonous, sharp stones to corral and limit the ants' angles of approach--assuming, of course, Ahn, Lotus and Rita are cool with this plan.
Hiromi     Going straight for that other secret chamber, it's just one turn away, down a certain corridor, from the control room -- and then through a hopefully short set of ant tunnels.

    Fire ants prove to be smaller than giant ants, though they're still much bigger than ants have any right to be and still move like they do. They're just as dangerously fast, can still climb on the ceiling without difficulty, and their bite is much more dangerous for the accompanied fire-breathing. Their swarming behavior, and preference for surrounding their prey, is the same as previously seen, though their smaller size actually makes them better at it. As a small mercy, they aren't at all poisonous. Nor do they have any resistance to Nessie or Ramesses's techniques.
Rita Ma      The lava room has probably taken its toll on Rita's ants, but at least a small bunch of them are sticking with her, aimlessly milling about or munching on leftover spider bits.

     "One can always get stronger..." Rita says. She turns it over in her mouth like it's something abstract, something that couldn't possibly pertain to her. "Is getting stronger always the same as getting better? Can't it come from getting worse, sometimes?" She says it offhandedly, carelessly.

     "Ah- judge me?? I don't really think I'd even qualify. If Hiromi's going to make some kind of judgement, I..." There's a little pause. She crosses her arms, uncomfortable in an ambivalent sort of way, and looks off to the side. "... well, I guess that's okay. But I'm not here because I wanted a test. I'm here because I wanted to help Mr. Spears with his."

     Rita's eyes practically sparkle as she accepts the bag of horn dust. She still looks uneasy at the prospect of giving a 'monster' a hug, but after taking a moment to steel herself, finally embraces Nessie's neck and pats her back. "Thank you for all your help! I... I really appreciate it."

     She really is going to keep some of it, but when she thinks nobody's looking, she dips a finger in the bag and licks some of the dust off. Ahn comes in when she's still got her finger in her mouth, resulting in a brief moment of wide-eyed panic and hiding the bag behind her back. "Ah!! Ms. Lotus! Ms. Ahn! Oh no, you look terrible! Here, I'll help wash your clothes later, I promise, but..."

     A quick firehose-burst of water puts Ahn right.
Rita Ma      "Got it, Mr. Spears!" Marshaling her remaining forces, Rita spools out a thread of bioluminescent tendril behind her, doing her best to make it look like something magical rather than awful and biological.

     The ants are unlikely to fare well against their upgraded version- I can't expect these ones to recognize me as Queen too, can I?- but Rita has a handful of tricks. After getting fire-breathed once- she yelps in pain and flings herself back out of range, though her clothes and hair seem strangely nonflammable- she takes her best stab at counterplay.

     Filling the room to about shin-height with water lets her larger giant ants keep their feet on the ground and her friends move largely unimpeded, while the smaller ones are forced to swim and get wet, hopefully lessening their ranged capabilities. A little yellow parasol forms itself in her hands, too, which is deployed to protect against the ones on the ceiling above. That doesn't work perfectly, though; her already-reddening skin still gets singed a few more times by ants at a good angle to bypass the protective umbrella, giving her scorch marks that are sure to blister in a few minutes.

     Actually getting close enough to bite her is a non-starter, though. There is a zone of about ten feet around Rita- the most she can consistently reach without having to unravel her human disguise- where ants consistently just fall to pieces, as if sliced or stabbed through by a cruel telekinetic force.

     "Auuuuh... Saucer! This really hurts! Can I get some help, please??"
Darren      Saucer, being rather vulnerable to fire, is sent in a few seconds after the others clear a path for him. He seems disappointed in himself, when Rita asks for help, his expressive little ladybug face falling as he hangs his head low. His unusual eyes gleam with clear determination, however--and numerous screens made of psychic will bathe Rita, Ahn, Lotus, Nessie and Ramesses in protective light. Three distinct kinds--one appears to dull the impact of bites, another lessens the heat of burns, and a third, usable only intermittently, seems unusually durable in its protective capacity.

     Nessie and Ramesses fight hard, too--though even with the protective screens from Saucer, it's clear that the Pokemon, much like everyone else (Darren included, even if he's good at willpowering through it) are beginning to tire. Nessie's smooth scales are scorched and scratched in places, while Ramesses' tough exterior is dulled and nicked from tough pincers and flame. In the control room, Darren's headband can keep his locs from his eyes, but beads of sweat still cling to him. A sports drink can't do much against extreme heat, thick undergrowth, boobytraps and two different species of huge ants.
Hiromi     Partial flooding is a good tactic here, though it doesn't last very long, on account of the water draining into lower tunnels. The giant ants don't compare well to their fiery cousins, but the controlled water level, together with their equal speediness, lets them get in to bite first. There's a lot of thrashing involved, grappling in the water when they can't get their feet on the ground easily, but together with all the other firepower the party brings to bear, getting to the other end of the tunnel doesn't all that long, after all. By the time one thinks of it, the fight's already past.

    Once breached, the Transportation Room shows no physical connection to any outside space, but some people looking around may make a connection between the raised platform, the bank of controls, the apparently significant circles and writing around them, and certain 20th-century science fiction tech that includes the word 'transport.' The controls are still a set of mysterious levers that cause writing to appear on a mysterious screen that lights up, but that should be familiar, by now.

    Figuring out the controls will take a little while, but there's a selectable destination and a timer, which together will let one teleport however many people can fit onto the platform to another, identical room. The greater functions of the control room can't be accessed from here.

    The only currently selectable destination, it turns out, is back up on the very first level, where the ants were first encountered, on the outer side of that 'one-way' door. The map screen makes it clear which of the walls of this room need to be punched out to exit.