Scene #7874: Urban: Money Isn't Real

Owner	Pose
Lilian Rook	Within the Eastern Seaboard Urban Center, far out of the way under the cover and quiet of night, those responding to the call of Rita's operation are lead to their meeting spot by the coast, to briefly rendezvous with their mysterious 'contacts', and split into two teams: One who will stay 'on Earth' and deal with the extensive digital records kept within the First Circle's civil administration complex, and those who will travel to the artificially settled Otherside from here, and raid the Urban Centre Administrative Council Library for all of its paper records and hardcopies, as part of a two-pronged attack on all credible evidence that the requisitional debt of the underclass of the British Isles even exists. Other matters --ones that are safer for normal people, smalltime sympathizers, and non-Elite agents to handle-- have been seen to by Rita through the Watch's local cell, diligently and without fail. It's nice, to seek local help and find it. That's how the Watch best proliferates its aims, after all. And having someone who sympathizes, for some reason, even in the upper echelons of society, is how they've been given this chance. Of course the rendezvous point is within the First Circle itself; the little-touched city center of what used to be part of Scarborough, apparently, built up along the relative safety of the ocean, where privileged people have sheltered and lived lives partly unchanged since before the Onslaught, surrounded by the ablative mass of what is more 'arcology' than 'city'. It is exactly as spacious and built-up as it was in twenty thirty five, changed only by the advance of technology and demands of energy efficiency, and even by then it is less a panopticon than the Second and Third Circles by far, and patrolled by far fewer police units. It is difficult, but possible, to have privacy here, with no more disturbance than the rare sound of a car driving home at this hour. Out of the way, in the staging area of a convention hall apparently bought and reserved for tomorrow, keys easily given and privacy easily available to elite clientele, you're met by, of all things, two girls who have to be Lilian's age. A little bit shorter, certainly more stereotypically willowy and delicate, and dressed less conservatively, coming back from some night on the town, but both unmistakably 'of her class' for everything from their worn expense to their uncomfortable bearing at being here. One is blonde and blue-eyed, uneasily introducing herself as 'Eleanor', without a last name, the other brunette and yellow-hazel-eyed, trying to maintain her best poker face, and introducing herself as 'Sabrina', also sans family association. "--So, anyways, I can show you how to get there, but I can't offer you my signature key. That'll obviously point it to me. You understand, right? I have an uncle with a secondary job with the Council --legal concerns and record-keeping, mostly-- and I've been there enough times to see him on the job. See here, I drew a sort of . . ." "Well it's supposed to be a diagram. But this is the detection bubble around the building, which will record the imprint of whoever crosses it, reference, and sound an alarm. Here is the primary physical ward blocking access; the entry points are at the main doors and rear exits only. They're not ciphered; they're attuned to a physical key, individual to each authorized entrant, I'm afraid. Ah, and there is some sort of emergency defense if it's forced, but I never thought to ask what it was."
Lilian Rook	"What you're looking for is only on the second floor, in the west wing here. The offices are on the third floor above; please don't go destroying everything you see; most of these records are actually quite important. There shouldn't be anyone here at this time, but there may be a few people working late." "Oh, and of course there's a watch-spirit or five bound to the building. Servants. They'll probably be invisible to you until they're disturbed enough to get aggressive. Break one of these emergency glasses --I made them, one each-- if that happens. I can't teach you two thousand hours of how to deal with them thoroughly, you know. Oh, and come out the same way you went in, okay? And one more thing: if your prima material is too unrefined for the ley-saturation of the Hidden Continent, even at its lower level here, it will be very, very bad for your health to stay there. Wrap one of these around your mouth and nose, and don't be any slower than thirty minutes." So goes Team Eleanor. "My elder cousin --we don't talk about him-- turned out a bit of a dud, and so has a job in civil finance to support the family through branch contributions. That's how it is. I still keep in touch with him, so I know the details of his job. The admin complex isn't far from here-- paper directions only here, I know how easy it is to track through a smart device. It has permanent armed security on the staff, cameras, fail-secure shutters, silent alarms, and the basement levels with the server farms have to be kept very cold, so they're heavily sealed up, have multiple liminal zones where you could be trapped between security shutdown, and I believe something or other is electrified?" "The response time of the UCCS wouldn't be long; ten minutes maximum from setting off the alarm broadcast, probably less. I --here-- replicated a few keycards for the ground floor and offices, by nicking an original from my cousin, but it's a bit fragile; snap one in half to give yourselves maybe thirty seconds or so of coverage from sensor security. That's the best I could do on such short notice without making it totally obvious it's my handiwork. Sorry. And I don't have a getaway driver for you." So goes Team Sabrina. "Ready?" "Ready?" "Jinx." "I'll curse you. Oh, and any questions?"
Janine Liberi	Janine listens carefully to both briefings. One absolutely demands stealth and a feather touch. The other is absolutely, 100 percent going to go loud. She knows which one she's about. She takes a keycard from Sabrina and tucks it away inside her sling with a nod. "Thanks." Internally, she's sneering a little that this high-class girl looks down on her brother for having to hold a job, but now's not the time to pick a fight. Getting to the location is no problem for her. With flight, she soars above the sea and city unnoticed. Once it's in sight, she perches on a nearby building, draws her sword, and stares deep into the blade. "Catherine." Her persona manifests behind her, the horned bride raising her shackled hands to the air as the weather takes a turn for the worse. Fierce winds whip through the streets and uproot small public structures. Mail boxes, refuse and recycling bins, the occasional lamp post are torn up and take to their, before one by one, fly through the windows of the Urban Centre Administrative Council Library. They're staggered, to make it seem as much like a product of a sudden stormfront as possible, and forcing the security to split up through the building to investigate each one. On the fifth such window smash, Janine takes to the air again and follows the mailbox through, into the first floor. From there, she's looking to make a beeline for the sealed area.
Forte	Forte listens to the briefing, silently floating in the air as things are explained, passively as always. His right hand twitches, almost imperceptively, when 'important records that you absolutely should not absorb Forte don't even think about it' are mentioned, albeit not in those precise words.. "Right," he says, simply, at the end of the briefing. "Thank you." He takes one of the offered keycards, and holds onto it. When it comes to getting into the building - he first looks for any obvious ways in. That is - open connections between any computers inside the building and the outside world. Theoretically, that shouldn't be too hard to find - systems generally need to have connections to the outside world in order to function. Emails need to be sent, databases need to be queried. Even if the target systems themselves are airgapped, secondary and tertiary systems usually aren't. Maybe some clueless C-level has a smart air conditioner he can hijack to get inside the building's network, and emerge into physical space from there.
Candy	"Hi Eleanor! Hi Sabrina!" Candy waves at the Watch's two contacts, smiling brightly. "You can call me Candy." He's wearing that beige longcoat of his, a thing for colder weather. Long-sleeved button up work shirt beneath, in pale blue, and dark brown slacks held up by suspenders. He's going to be part of the team that handles paper records, knowing that he knows nothing about electronic ones--and knowing that Forte is on the case, as well. Candy studies the diagram, when Eleanor shows it off. Find a way to get past the detection bubble, then in through the front door or the back. Head to the second floor, don't piss of the spirits, break the glass if we do... Keep it to thirty minutes and come out the same way we went in. Got it. "Ready!" he takes a glass and one of the Hidden Continent precautions--he has no idea what prima material is, but better safe than sorry. Candy finds his way to the building using Eleanor's directions and his own talents to ensure he's there before too much time passes. To observers, it looks like rapid short-distance blinking, keeping to the shade of buildings and always staying off main roads, always just beyond the range of what scarce city light there is when he can help it. First thing's first: find a way to get past the detection bubble she'd mentioned. Candy took the liberty of copying her diagram, checking the boundaries she illustrated. Keeping low to the ground and making use of scenery to obscure most of his body, he peers across the grounds. The easiest way to do it would be to look for someone heading home after a long night and steal the key once they're past the boundary. If no one is immediately on their way, he'll force the issue with an illusion--a conjured sound of clatter, as if someone were trying to either scale the building or quickly get out of sight. An illusory Candy, his gait just a little too uncanny, is snooping across the grounds, until, 'spotted' by someone, he takes off, conveniently taking any would-be pursuers past the real Candy's hiding place.
Redshift Operators	The Redshift Operators are preparing to work. Their materials are spread over the staging area. And while they prepare, they take a close listen. A giant hands a heavy helmet to his smaller friend, who clicks it into place while he chats. "Technical and fast, or magical and loud." His optics narrow at the diagrams. An astronaut nearby hands a freshly cleaned pistol to him, and he loads and readies it as he speaks. "Technical and fast is where we work best. Newt, hit that end. Handle hard breaches wherever the hacker can't handle soft, and deal with those electrical hazards too. We'll be in close with a security team, and I want them cut down before they get mobile. White, you're up." He finishes with his gun, fishes a katana out of a case, and tosses it to a swordswoman. Snatching it out of the air, she says, "A more open, socially-secure space would be more suited to my abilities, but needs must. They will not have the chance to scream." She slings the blade over her back, ready for use while the astronaut hands her one of those keycards. A giant of a man hands off a respirator mask for her, tugged into place as she says, "And the protection of our giant for their response should assist most of all. Perhaps even that aura of his." "Yeah. No split on this operation." Quick bro-pounds, squeezed hands, even a few hugs from the giant, and the team is on the way. Piling into a Watch van near a convention hall loading area, they make for the First Circle's civil administration complex, stash the car as best they can, and go for Janine's swooped window as soon as she gives a signal, at any moment where the precognitive among them might be able to find a gap in suspicious eyes. Submachine gun, marksman rifle, blade, and fist, all are ready.
Rita Ma	Rita's wearing a pretty aquamarine dress with a white bolero to fit in a little better with the upper-class style. It might help her fit in even better that she's still on her phone even as she's walking into the convention hall, right up until the minute of the briefings. The local cells and contacts haven't let her down in the slightest, but she still has a lot to learn about the fine art of delegation. "Mmmm. Mm-hmm. And the edited ones? ... Okay. Good. I'll call you right back, okay?" Click. Sabrina and Eleanor. We met when me, Bercilak, and the others had a 'talk' with Lilian at the mall. I thought that would've made them less willing to help us, not more, but... I guess they realized we were trying to help her, after all. "The 'imprint'," she murmurs, rubbing at her eyes in mild annoyance. Or maybe she's just tired. "Yeah. So just disguising won't work, probably. Don't worry, though; we'll be careful to only destroy the records we need." She takes the fabric that's supposed to protect her from the Hidden Continent's atmosphere and stares at it in soft bafflement. "Ah... I don't know how 'refined' my material is?? But thanks, Ms. Eleanor. I'll take this to be safe." ---- Rita takes a few moments to catch up with Candy, but catch up she does: footsteps come up behind him, followed by a quiet "Shhhhhh." The voice is unmistakeable, but there's simply nobody there. "Even when we get the keys, it'll still set off the alarm, right? They're just to get through the doors. The bubble's looking for our 'imprint', she said. ... I think I know something that might help." Rita shimmers back into visibility, crouched down so as not to interfere with Candy's shenanigans, and- if necessary- uses her invisible tentacles to yank his mark over to somewhere they can both subdue the victim in relative quiet and seclusion. After that's dealt with, though, she wreathes her hand in an eerie un-red phantom glow- the same color that Candy saw racing towards London, when the Pillars Antegent they were hunting on the island died. She touches it to her own chest, and with a little shivery grimace, she fades away, becoming a barely-there shadow of herself. The outline of her hand in red energy, still barely filled in with phantom-translucent flesh, is held out to Candy. "This should confuse the alarm. Remember it? The negative gravity. Becoming things that aren't. ... It'll hurt when it wears off, though. So brace yourself."
Lilian Rook	"Hi candy." "Hello Candelario." "I liked your debut cover shot~" "You couldn't behave for ten minutes huh?" Yes these two actually know him, to some extent. "Don't worry Rita, you're pretty fine by me~" "Good God stop. Just be careful please. This is already a little too much for me." "And . . . Please don't get Lilian involved. She's . . . We've been friends a long time, so . . ." "She's been through enough already. I'm trusting you to make this about fixing the problem and not getting revenge." "Yeah. What Sabrina said." As soon as the group disperses, they leave. They're going home so as not to leave a suspicious hole in their schedules. Janine's windstorm will actually be a good excuse for a slight delay.
Lilian Rook	ADMIN COMPLEX: Forte meets with the unfortunate fact that this government isn't a bunch of old boomer dumbasses who don't know about computers; cybersecurity is old hat in this world and this organization takes it seriously. However, they are not prepared for 'digital people travelling through wireless connections', to say the least. None of the systems he's really looking for are internet connected, and in fact, it seems that the primary servers are housed on their own electrical grid, and only accessible with a wired terminal, but simply accessing a low level desktop computer --his choice of scores of them-- with what passes for internet access, is enough to get him into the first floor offices with a little hacking magic. Janine's storm sends pedestrians scattering. Security, unfortunately, just has to weather it at their posts; they're a little too committed to keeping their jobs for that. The first and second storey windows break easily, but the third and handful of basement level windows appear to be thick shatterproof glass for unknown reasons. White Dwarf's precognitive abilities track the dispersal of security within the building; predictably, they each head to a different crash site as they hear them. They also leave just two guards behind at each one, just in case. They have radios, flashlights, and handguns that definitely aren't rubber bullet-loaded, but otherwise, they aren't the cavalry at all. Janine and the squad slip in just before security arrives at the fifth window, obviously unable to tactically predict the wind. The inside of the building is memorable, but unremarkable, all pristine blue carpets, white walls, oak panels, frosted glass dividers, ergonomic desks, stainless steel wastebaskets, and overdesigned (and overtaxed) espresso machines. However, there is definitely no gap in the security camera footage once they get away from the outermost cubicle areas and into any useful corridor or intersection. All doors are metal and carded, and there are multiple metal detectors that are set right into the walls going floor to ceiling. A floor plan isn't too hard to find, but puts the elevators to the basement right in the middle of the building's central area, like a core pillar, and 'everything' is in the way to get there. Forte, not need having entered through the same window, has functional free rein to reach a (keycarded) stairwell (patrolled by security) door (under a camera) and simply take the stairs from there if he so chooses. The floor above has all the private offices where useful information will be kept. If he checks the ground floor computers at all, they're all end terminals for low rung workers that don't save anything locally, but the executive offices have, if nothing else, an airgapped local network to share important documents; and a no removable media policy. Wireless signals don't appear to get in and out. A little odd that they'd wifi shield the floor, but this world is a little bit just like that.
Janine Liberi	Once inside, Janine is on the floorplans like bees on flowers. Figures, for once a place with a thought paid to security. They're not accessing the elevators without wading through security. So much for her plan to just fly down the shaft unseen. But, she's not alone. The funny spacepeople are with her. Looking to them, she says, "Leave security to me, and get us to the elevators." Again that sabre is drawn and the polished blade looks back. "Come forth, Catherine." The Persona arises in sparks of gold, and raises her hands. "Brace yourselves," Janine orders the Redshifts. And the storm is invited inside. The gale winds intrude with a mind of their own, pressing through the windows to howl through the corridors. The investigating guards get bowled over, as simple physics apply. Anything flowing through a confined space will flow faster than flowing through an open space. Desks and cabinets go flying, seemingly tracking those on-site with malicious will. As they progress, Janine also leaves behind traps of thin golden thread. Any guard who comes running in their direction may receive a nasty trip, and become subject to the winds once more.
Lilian Rook	COUNCIL LIBRARY: Eleanor's directions are more difficult to follow than simple street turns. It requires going all the way out to a private terminal, kept under light guard by UCCS, but not all that difficult to slip past with Rita's and Candy's combined powers, where transit stations involve large rooms given over to what she called 'translocation circles', built indoors with sigificant equipment to tap from the underground leylines, warp space, and dump people into a commensurate location Somewhere Else. She has furnished them with the occult directions and equipment to do so; thankfully, these are designed for regular work transport for 'anyone with an office in the Phantom Circle', and don't require considerable expertise or investiture. They're dropped off in an identical terminal, this one totally unguarded, and emerging outside puts them under a wide open starry sky, with a moon that looms too large and bright and close, and a strange, prismatic sort of layered geometric corona to it. Their surroundings are dominated by nature more than urban construction; though the shape of buildings are visible glittering with nighttime lights, they're all at considerable distance, each and every one given over to an entire moderate estate's worth of land. For some reason, the air tingles just being here; like tasting a battery with the tip of one's tongue, but through their entire being. Candy finds that it makes it a little bit hard to breathe, but also makes his magic easier to use. Rita finds the air 'unnaturally dense' and hard to respire, but at the same time, her 'essence meter' gradually trickles upwards by decimal points just being here. The building they're looking for is about the same size as the admin complex, three storeys and separated only into east and west wings, but has the appearance of an ivy-grown manor, with a cultivated surrounding lot like a country club. There are lights on in a few windows on the second floor, and some in the west wing, though the latter appears to simply be permanent. Waiting around for someone to come out will be dangerous to their health, but weird noises and spooky sights are enough to draw out an incredibly bored and slightly shook night owl, slicked back hair, blue suit, and briefcase, to call out shakily if someone needs help, and then yells when fake Candy runs off. He gets as far as calling up one of those fancy holo-windows Lilian frequently uses to make a call, before he's ambushed, dragged off, and rummaged. The key, as far as they can tell, appears to be a sort of diamondoid blue crystal prism attached to gylph-studded silver fittings and a chain like an ID lanyard. It glows as they approach the front doors, though nothing actually happens; the lack of happening is the idea, as they're able to simply twist the handles and walk in. They can, however, feel the moment they step into the alarm radius, prickling on their skin like static. Their signature is too faint, too fuzzy, too see-through, to detect as 'people', or even 'something living', but the cloudy haze on the metaphorical radar seems to have increased some sort of 'readiness level'. They feel as if they're being watched. Compared to the admin complex, it's practically empty here, and outrageously spacious given its size, probably meant for less than a quarter the number of staff. No expense has been spared to furnish it like a palatial hotel, likely to keep the necessary work here from grating on the dignity of whomever it asks to spare time for Urban Center affairs. The stairs aren't hard to find, going up in grand spirals across multiple open balcony lobbies, but the library itself, on the west end, is tightly locked, the the door crackles dangerously just to put one's hand near. The third floor is accessible, but eerily pitch black --moreso than it should be just for 'being nighttime'. There's no hint of moonlight through any of the windows seen from outside, and the feling of being watched is direly intense.
Redshift Operators	Janine is flooding this place with a grand and sinister wind, or so a certain cyborg Redshift might say. But the team can stick with her. The giant stays firmly planted, with his massive weight, incredible stature, and unyielding strength, and the other three can cling onto him -- or in the case of the absent-minded astronaut, be grabbed before blowing away. Gotta get to the elevator... With White Dwarf and Red Dwarf acting as lookouts from either of Red Giant's shoulder's, the team surges forward with surprising speed purely from the giant's jogging steps. The astronaut held under one arm like a football also acts as navigation, guiding the group using the recorded layouts, and readying a cryptographic sequencer and assorted engineering gear. Elevators are relatively self-contained control systems, and they should be able to electromagnetically breach and take control of it to take it where they need to go. Aside that, the giant has more than enough spare strength to wrench open security doors with the astronaut's engineering help. The precognitive cyborg keeps spamming the futuresight every so often of dismounting and running ahead through the wind, just to keep a lookout for that electrical hazard... One way or another, this will hopefully get them to that server cluster as quick as possible.
Forte	Forte considers the door and the camera, peering around a corner at it. He focuses on it - going to find a remote access point into it, and do the stereotypical 'loop the video footage' on it trick. The door itself he uses a keycard to get through, and attempts to get past the stairwell security by just quietly floating along the ceiling. And then, at the executive offices... ... Forte pauses, and considers the executive offices. Which one would have the least security, or otherwise be the best for doing this sort of operation... ... As Forte ponders this, something internal tugs at him. ============================= \|\| >CMD \|\| /Count up your sins!/ \|\| NAVI OS V0.8.4 BETA \|\| create procedure GaiaLookup \|\| SYSTEMS FUNCTIONAL \|\| keyword1, keyword2, keyword3 \|\| > LOAD CROSS.BAT \|\| as select * from (select * from \|\| STARTING CROSS.BAT \|\| (select * from Gaia.Library.Shelves where \|\| LOADING CROSSSYSTEM.MDF \|\| keyword1 in ) where keyword2 in ) \|\| CONTEXTUAL DATA FOUND \|\| where keyword3 in * \|\| APPLYING DETECTIVE CROSS\|\| return sys.lastselected ============================= "... That's new..." says Forte, quietly to himself, as he checks out his dual-colored green-and-black color scheme, and then his eyes go wide- KEYWORD 1: ADMIN CENTER KEYWORD 2: FINANCIAL DATA KEYWORD 3: EXECUTIVE OFFICES - "Ah..." He picks one of the offices, seemingly arbitrarily, and goes to get into one of the offices and start searching for the financial database copies...
Candy	Candy smiles to himself, when his ploy works. Rita quietly announces herself to him, and his smile grows wider as she helps subdue their mark. He gets as far as pointing out a place to hide them, but... it's hard to breathe, here. Yet easier for us to work. Boy needs to use Eleanor's gift! He nods his agreement, not knowing where to look until Rita briefly reappears. By that time, he's holding the cloth over his mouth. When Rita's hand is offered, he takes it, gritting his teeth in anticipation of a strange sensation. Okay. I'm braced. Under cover of being something which isn't, he approaches the front doors with key in hand. The Candy-shade makes a cautionary gesture, once inside, to the Rita-shade, an index finger swirled around, then pointed upwards, as if to say, 'we might have stirred something up.' They call it a library but it's more like a hacienda. And it's not even the only building here. No wonder people are pissed off. The records get better accomodation than the people. Up one of those grand spiral staircases, and there's another obstacle--a door that seems dangerous even to have one's hand near. In Candy's shadowy hand, the crystalloid key turns--but the outline of his hand looks different, after a momentary stutter in his image. He's wearing some kind of magically insulated gloves, created on the spot to try and baffle what Candy presumes to be a countermeasure of some sort--and if Rita's got a better way past the door, he'll pass them to her.
Rita Ma	Rita pinches the fabric Eleanor gave her a little tighter around her face with one hand, taking deep and slow breaths. Everything about this sets her a little on edge, from the literal atmosphere to the metaphorical one: the not-quite-right moon, the land neither left untouched nor fully developed but parceled out lavishly, the luxury hotel interior. All that on top of the feeling of being disjointed like this. Being this kind of shade means everything being so far from everything else. Blood is miles from bone, bone is miles from flesh, flesh is miles from nerve. It means looking out at the world as if through a pinhole- no, as if from the bottom of a well, having fallen down through it and now gazing far far up. The shade of Rita is doing her best to keep it together, but that's getting to her a little, too. Just peeking onto the pitch-black third floor from the staircase has her crossing her arms and shuddering with visible unease. She nods firmly in response to Candy's stirring gesture. There are a half-dozen things she could do to prepare for countermeasures, but all of them might just be obvious enough to tip the balance into a full-blown alarm. Instead she has a childishly simple backup plan: deepening her 'fade' just another degree, she tries to test pressing her fingers into the wall next to the door. With her other hand, she makes a fingers-crossed gesture at him. If it works your way, all the better. Good luck. But if things suddenly go wrong, she may be able to simply step through the wall and pull Candy along with her, too. From there... well, Candy has a way of getting things done in a hurry.
Lilian Rook	ADMIN COMPLEX: Blowing the storm around inside the building is exactly as disastrous as one would expect. Rushing the elevators is about as simple as one would expect while security guards are huddled under the desks that are bolted down behind the class that isn't shattered and radioing for help, of any kind. The fact that this involves a full sprint through the metal detectors doesn't even matter; plenty of metal junk has been blown through them anyways. Unfortunately, this means, according to White Dwarf's predictions, the Real Cops will be here in six minutes. Bad timing. The elevator itself can be easily accessed with the duplicate keycard. Though it appears somewhat glittery and insubstantial, it reads just fine. From there they can go up floors, or to B1, but not B2 or the top floor. Crytographic cracking from Neutron resolves that problem quickly. Within a minute, they're down to the bottommost basement. The sub-basement isn't all that impressive. There's a miniature airlock clean sequence, a scanner (which is useless, at this point) for walk-throughs, and square corridor around the central area, mainly for maintenance purposes, where transparent walls show rows of somewhat monolithic black processing and storage units under cool blue light. The temperature down here is frigid, and wireless signals cut off immediately. It actually seems rather odd that they'd have this just for storing data, even if it is very valuable. Usually this kind of setup is for small-scale supercomputing. None of the terminals feed directly nto the servers, but only monitor them. The walls are a couple of inches thick of insulated and shatterproof material, and the main door is bank vault grade, with electronic and manual locks. This would also be the thing that is 'electrified', now that the alarm is on, as Sabrina absentmindedly identified. Cameras are also locked on to any entrants here, and probably relaying through the wired closed circuit. A few seconds after, the room starts filling with gas. Fire suppressant maybe? Can't breathe it, either way. Forte, up top, finds pretty much the entire floor is given over to private offices with nice views, equivalent to an upper-middle ranked corporate head, all. It'd be incredibly annoying to run from room to room to get all of the computers individually; hacking them, even if it's only a twenty second job, is still just too much of a time investment to do the inefficient way, and they don't route directly to each other. The data they're pulling from is a central server equivalent to an apartment unit's data room, housed on the same floor. However, there are locally saved registries on each computer, used for active day to day number crunching. The numbers themselves are dismaying. Staggering, even. There are also guards on this level, and no plausible means of simply slipping past them; hiding in side rooms and popping in and out requires opening and closing a bunch of doors, and they're not deaf. Oddly, they do have permission, apparently, to shoot Forte on sight, now that the alarm is blaring. Which they do.
Janine Liberi	Janine taps her foot impatiently as the elevator descends, but takes a moment to pop any roof access or trapdoor it has open. "If we don't finish down there in time, we can't use the elevator, it's announcing where they can point their guns. I'll have an alternate exit for us." Stepping out, she lays the sheathe of her sword on the floor to block the doors. If the doors can't close, the elevator can't move unless someone bypasses it. That'll buy them an extra minute or two. With a contemptuous snort, she calls out Catherine again to conjure a dense, swirling barrier around each gas emitter, preventing whatever warcrime they have down here from permeating into the rest of the chamber. The Redshifts would probably be fine with their helmets and masks but she's breathing regular air still. "All this just to make sure they can prove how poor people are." The electrified wall is beyond her. If she had time she didn't have, she might be able to batter the door down, but she'll leave that to the hardened spec-op team.
Lilian Rook	COUNCIL LIBRARY: Arbitrarily magically insulated gloves do Candy just fine. The doors yield to him with a writhing arc of iridescent lightning, briefly like a locking door chain, that crackles and snaps apart with a bit of elbow grease. This also raises no alarm, which is good. The lights are on here, apparently just left this way for whomever might need to arrive at any hour. Warm radiance is shed from chandeliers that appear old-fashioned and set with candles at first glance, but are more or less decorative fixtures to the flameless magical light bound to them instead. Monolithic mahogany shelves rise up from nearly plush red-carpeted floor to panelled ceiling on both sides, broken up into four distinct aisles, without any space to sit down and read them, meant only as a repository. Still, though filing cabinets probably would have done fine, most of the volume of content here is in actually bound books and ledgers like someone would keep transactions in the 1800s, along with the occasional box, rack, or slider set into the shelves, filled with carefully organized loose papers. The records he's looking for have to be searched for manually; Eleanor has never thought to locate them for herself while visiting. This isn't difficult, and leads him to the final row of shelves at the far end of the surprisingly vast room. However, the 'fuzzy' intrusion has at least aroused one of those 'watch-spirits'. He can just barely perceive it at its current state of materialization, something like a translucent scaled serpent, black and white, and large enough to wind through so many bookshelves that he can't actually see most of its body, merely perceive it moving in the direction of its horned head, roving around the room with glowing lantern ghost-eyes, tasting the air for something as snakes do. Trying it out for the first time, Rita finds that going through walls is entirely possible here. Floors, ceilings, whatever. It's functional free reign. It might be just because there are supposed to be servant spirits moving around dematerialized, but it seems a little odd for a reasonably secure hub of this size, given that she knows Lilian is from here and can do something similar. The axes along which she is dematerialized, and the giant serpent is dematerialized, appear to not be the same one. It'll phase right through her, and her it. It doesn't appear to be able to sense her at all, though it remains restless. However, she also can't do anything to the records in this state. The shelves go nearly all the way up to the ceiling, just short enough to allow the chandelier light to permeate over; it'd be simple to climb up through the third storey floor if she intends to split up.
Redshift Operators	The radio's cut off. No monitoring, nor conversation. The whole team secures their breathing apparatuses as the gas floods in, each and every one prepared for just such a risk. Well, unless it's a hellburn incinerator, but that seems unlikely, next to so much in need of freezing... Sadly, none have so much as a spare mask for Janine! They even check the astronaut's deep bag. Maybe she can neutralize the gas somehow with her windy powers? "Check internals. Wait, what is... Newt. Get me a read on this." With short tactical hand-signals, the squad lead signals for the astronnaut to check the monitoring servers. "Reminds me of station R&D. This isn't just storage, it's processing. What is it processing?" Thoughts drift through his mind of horrible things. Bleak, dystopian surveillance? Sinister, esoteric numerology that moves debts to enact grand rituals? Super-future FICO scores encouraging debts only for those who can't ever pay them off? "No. Need to get the doors." The astronaut points out, ever-fixated on objectives. They move almost immediately towards the vault door, brandishing shaped charges. It's the cyborg who moves to hold them back a second, indicating the electrification... Thank goodness such things aren't activated by electricity! And with their hands covered in insulated gloves... well, no, that's still a lot of electricity, they have to start the timer, take an agonizing few seconds to gauge the throw, and lob it at the vault door with the exposed adhesion ready to latch on. It's placed where Neutron expects electrifying wiring to be. They might not be able to blast the door down entirely, but if they can unwire it, the giant's strength can do the rest. "Fine, I'll check myself..." The gruff gunman examines one of the terminals while the others work and get into cover. What sinister computation is being done here? The astronaut moves away, signaling a safe distance for Janine and the others.
Forte	Oh hey, guards. Ordinarily, Forte would have no qualms with simply casually shooting them all and moving on. Any individual life is not really much of his concern - in the past, he'd killed in pursuit of something as petty as his own peace and quiet, and the operation today is at least as worthy of a cause as that. But. He's just seen the numbers. The numbers are disgusting, in ways that are hard to process. It's in the same way that a single person is a tragedy, but a million people are a statistic - the numbers on the screens represent reality in an almost unreal way. In a way that you can't interact with besides looking at them with the analytic part of your mind, the cold hard numbers part, the part you learned in math class... and then having that part of your mind attempt to explain to the rest of you, the parts that learned things not taught in math class (such as empathy, morality, and most importantly anger) exactly what those numbers mean. The scope, the impact. Trying to express a statistic in terms of a tragedy. Doing those mental calculations is an excercise in anger and frustration, and there was nobody to get mad at besides distant faceless figures and the theoretically-blameless numbers on the page. Except, now, conveniently, there's guards. "Tarnished Shards T, execute." He says it calmly, rotely, like chanting a spell - but his eyes are anything but calm. And there's a certain angry satisfaction, as well, as he aims an antegent's weapon at those who thought they were insulated from it here, deep within their circles. Forte doesn't stop firing the anti-mass shards till the guards no longer exist.
Lilian Rook	Gas flows with the direction of air, even if it is slightly heavier. Bubbling the emitters renders each of them a non-threat. A civilian-grade elevator isn't about to crush Janine's scabbard. Four minutes remaining jumps up to four forty-five by White Dwarf's estimation. Blasting the door is, of course, incredibly fucking loud, especially in these tight and geometrically regular quarters, but the ground floor is a shitstorm anyways. The door is still, unfortunately, tightly fastened, but the electronic mechanisms didn't survive it intact, and the two ton slab can be wrenched open by someone with Red Giant's strength within the time they have remaining, releasing a foggy blast of freezing air onto them. Red Dwarf can't see the contents of the servers without directly jacking into them, and more importantly, decrypting, rather than just cracking them, but the terminals actually give him a solid idea of their task processes. Only a fraction of the space is being used for top security data. The rest is being given over to four different high-yield simulation blocks, crunching supercomputer numbers night and day; they've been active for years. Three appear to be officially sanctioned by the Urban Center; something to do with disaster readiness, civil destabilization, and probabilistic trading respectively. One appears to be rented out privately, by one Matthew R., at exorbitant cost, and is crunching god fucking knows what, using a five dimensional manifold. The access records are incessant. From this point, the servers can be accessed manually for their data, provided one can contrive up an annoying proprietary interface dongle and decrypt the partition needed to spike the data, or simply destroyed, though it would certainly obliterate a number of records that are actually probably pretty important in a long term sense to regular people; it's not just a secret debt database; figures on power, water, weather, imports and exports, population, and even antegent activity are kept here. Forte just sort of one-sidedly erases a handful of high-paid cops several floors up. Their screams are lost to the storm. The server can be accessed by force and tapped into at his discretion trivially. It has write access to all PCs on the floor, provided they're actually on, which many aren't. Judging by the sound of sirens approaching from outside, and the crashing through the front door, though, the group is roughly out of time. The elevator button is flashing below as someone tries to use it.
Candy	It's quiet up here. Well lit, too. Perfect conditions for scouring bookshelves easily and in relative privacy. Candy's breath hitches, behind Eleanor's cloth. The watch-spirit. I didn't know what I was expecting, but it sure wasn't that. Thing's fucking huge! Does it... smell me? Not yet. But it's looking. Eleanor had said not to just blindly destroy everything. There's nothing that Candy would like more than to clean this place out, and, for that matter, the other two estate-sized buildings in this area. But... doing that would just create more problems, and probably for Lilian and Eleanor specifically. Besides that, Eleanor did like his picture. Time stops. Candy has time to think, as the serpent's lantern eyes peer frozen, unblinking, towards the spot he was just standing in. He steps over a large coil of its massive body, approaching the bookshelf at the end of the hall with careful footsteps even as the passage of events is halted. They would probably expect fire, no? Even though the candles are fake... you'd be dumb not to have some way of responding to one, with all this paper and wood here, right? -Time resumes. -Crescent-shaped blades of pressurized water appear from nowhere to bisect the bookshelf a dozen different ways. -There is a sound of glass shattering. Candy, hiding behind a bookshelf at the opposite end of the hall, has cracked Eleanor's in-case-of glass.
Redshift Operators	Christ, that's loud. Thank god the Redshifts brought their earplugs. THAT, at least, they can give to Janine too. The astronaut is the one who heads in, almost immediately setting up to wipe the data... "Wipe it. Then check this block, pull whatever you can, and we get it to Rita." The gruff man peeks his head around the opening, signaling in more tactical signs to Neutron. "She's here about that Rook girl. 'Matthew R.' sounds..." Neutron is fast, Lightning fast. Thirty seconds kind of fast. They were literally checking their connection port orientation (fidgeting) to make sure they could most efficiently jog in, jack in, and X out the debts. As for Matthew R.'s shenanigans, they take whatever fits in a few more seconds of transfers. They're now at something like three minutes and some change now, after all. "I believe our work here will shortly be complete. You had an escape prepared, a release from these accursed depths?" The cyborg woman, blade drawn, mutters to Janine as she glances around, anxious. She cuts down one of those security cameras just to ease her mind.
Rita Ma	The fact that the serpent can phase through Rita, and her through it, is not at all intuitively obvious. She clamps her hands over her mouth to stop herself from screaming when it slithers close enough that it ought to brush up against her leg- and then, somehow, doesn't. ... Right. Even though Antegent and magic are both from Ms. Rook's world, they work completely different ways. Of course we'd be 'ghosts' in different ways too. Is that why I can move through the walls so easily here, too? There'd never be any Antegent on the Hidden Continent; they only have to protect themselves against the ways magic can move. Rita remembers, after a moment to collect herself, the offices on the third floor. Scaling a bookshelf is trivial for her, and soon she's pulling herself up through the floorboards into the dark rooms above. She'll need to be more solid for what comes next. People are, presumably, working here, even though the rooms had appeared ominously dark from the top of the stairwell. They know where all the files pertaining to the Urban Center residents' requisitional debts are, even if she doesn't. So they'll help her. Tragically, Rita's queenly authority doesn't normally extend to humans. Happily, now is not "normally". On finding employees who could be recruited to assist her, she fades back into visibility and tangibility, then strobes an awful sequence of organic colors in dizzying, whirling, paralyzing patterns. The mimic tentacles that normally project the image of an ordinary girl can just as easily project anything else. It's a brain hijack, simply, of a cruder and less esoteric bent than Lilian's world is used to. Once they're suitably emptied of all other thoughts, identity, or feeling, she fills their head with a new purpose: "Please destroy all files with information about requisitional debt in the Urban Center."
Forte	Forte takes out his frustrations. ... He realizes, in the back of his mind, that he should have just quickly dealt with them and moved on, instead of taking the time to painstakingly erase them from existence. And now they're out of time. He gets to the central server, and access it. There's write perms. Good. Not all of the individual computers are powered on. That's... less good. He needs to take out every copy of the financial database here, if the group wants the best shot at wiping the debt out. Not just 'most of them'. He needs those computers on, but going around turning all of them on would take time - and they're out of time. He focuses, both hands physically on the server - not bothering with keyboards or other manual input methods. A computer being off is an insurmountable problem... You can't hack something that's powered off. Then again, air gaps are supposed to be insurmountable, as well. How do you hack a computer that's behind an airgap - no connection, no data going back and forth? There's ways, as it turns out - relying on human falliability to transfer an attack vector via carrying an infected USB drive to make the initial connection, and then cleverly using computer speakers and microphones to create a bridge over the airgap - by using the air itself, sending below-human-hearing sound waves back and forth to transfer data and instructions between hacked computers. In security, nothing is absolute. So how do you hack a computer that's turned off? It's connected, certainly, but there's no power flowing through it to spin hard drives and run cpu instructions. It's not listening on the connection ports. It is listening on the power ports, though. Sort of. It's... tenuous. There's more theory here than established security-science. But it's possible to transfer data not through ethernet cords or wireless connections, but through power lines and AC cords. Forte digs deep. Setting up the BPL protocol on the server is easy enough. Trying to force his viral power through it, enough not just to reach the terminals at the end but to physically overwhelm them - force his control through two hundred and thirty volts of alternating current and have it reach the end at full strength- He digs deep. He digs deeper. He feels like he's sticking his very soul into an electric socket, then like he's grasping lightning, then like he's trying to literally eat it- The lights flicker.
Janine Liberi	Janine tries to look over Red Dwarf's pours over as she pops in the earplugs, but it all goes well over her head. Content to leave them to it, she looks to White Dwarf and nods. "Everyone in the elevator, let's get out of here." Once they're all crammed in, Janine again conjures Catherine. From the spools atop her shackles, golden thread begins looping around the chests of the Redshift Operators in sequence, starting from White Dwarf and moving up the height chart. Each now wears a shimmering harness connected to a thick cord that trails after Janine as she flies up through the trapdoor and into the elevator shaft. There, she secures the cord to the thick cables that move the elevator, makes sure the slack is neatly spooled, and then severs it from the elevator. Then flies to the top, and with a sharp gust of wind, destroys that which secures the counterweight. As it plummets, the cable that Janine's cord is tied to rises rapidly, pulling the Redshifts through the elevator car one after the other. Awaiting them up the shaft is Janine, besides the second floor doors which she has pried open with her sword. It flashes, cutting her golden cord from the cable, and a gust of wind ejects the four (mostly) safely above where the Actual Cops have no-doubt massed their offensive. "Out the windows, into the van, let's go!" A desk overturned from her storm is launched through one to provide the exit, which she flies to to provide a distracting target for anyone waiting outside.
Lilian Rook	COUNCIL LIBRARY: Candy's guess is almost certainly right on the money. Leatherbound books and mahogany shelves react to his manyfold cutting blasts like bricks. It figures that if someone were going to record all of this on paper, they'd bother to enchant them. While this causes the shelves to collapse, and tears books in half, soaking their pages as the echantments are overloaded and burst, the bulk and resistance of the shelf block perhaps begs a more thorough double tap. It also attracts the attention of the watch-spirit immediately. The enormous horned serpent turns his way in an insant, bathing the shelves in glowing beams of cold ghost-light cast from its eyes as it shifts into near fully material phase, such that he can hear its scales rustling, muscles clenching and undulating, and the hissing of its breathing. He gets the feeling, immediately that he doesn't want to be under those eyebeams for even a moment. However, heeding Eleanor's advice, shattering the glass full of murky red-tinted liquid from earlier fills the room with a sort of rusty crimson smoke that, when it touches the serpent, forces it back into a near-fully intangible state, only showing as two dim blue glows. Nothing here is equipped to deal with or chase his time-stopping. What Rita is up to would be tragically useless if the idea was actually to control the couple of overworked night owls she finds at their offices in any sense of espionage or subversion. Fortunately, it's actually probably better if 'getting brainblasted' is as obvious as possible if she plans to just fuck them over, wreck things and run. Despite everything she knows about this world, and despite evidently being of high social rank, none of them appear to have any greater mental defense than a regular person. Actually, she can't really tell how they differ at all. They'd be completely screwed if she really were an Antegent-- even a very weak one. They're still screwed, but mostly in the sense of what will happen when they wake up dazed and with splitting headaches to find that they've destroyed so much data. Funny enough, this does mean, going by previously stated information, that Matthew has been direly spited twice in the same night. Of course, Candy's intrusion and destruction has set off the primed alarm. The two of them are well inside the actual bubble's 'thickness' now, but very large, and very intimidating, insubstantial shapes --shadows of huge wings here, floating fins and teeth there-- now gather around the third and second floors in a patrolling frenzy. A signal has been sent already, and it'll take people with teleportation infrastructure a lot less time to get here.
Redshift Operators	"Hold tight. This will be beyond your meager poise." "My poise isn't meager." "It's pretty meager balance. You have lacking composure." "I'm plenty composed!" "I think she's right." "Don't you start." "I think this will be uncomfortable for you." "Everyone hold hands!" The Operators ascend. Each holds the hand of another, even as the harness helps secure things. WHOOSH! Four masses of varying weight rush up and out. And bam, right back out of the shaft, rolling and tumbling. The gruff gunman tumbles, slamming against the ground a few times, groaning... It's the giant who picks him up, pulls him over one shoulder, and then does the same with the astronaut, while the ninja jumps onto his back. Charging with unbelievably loud thuds, he goes straight for a window, slams through it, and leaps down! His jetpack fires like a retro-rocket, meaning his impact leaves only a modest indentation instead of a crater in the concrete as he lands, one foot and one knee. The others are deposited (a bit hastily) and everyone rushes for the van. The astronaut is usually their team's driver, and they dive into the seat, reorient themselves quickly, and gets the car in motion quickly while Janine works the distraction. She's free to join in the open back of the van if she needs a ride out, but flight's probably better. So's Forte, though it seems he, too, has his own transit. They're taking off! The astronaut hands the storage device off to their leader, ready to relay to Rita soon.
Rita Ma	Ah... that easy?! Does this world's training just not include that kind of thing? ... No, that can't be right. It wouldn't have a glaring weakness like that. Like Sabrina said, these people are the 'duds', aren't they? Ones who were supposed to be more important, but aren't. Rita sticks around for just a few moments to ensure her thralls are doing their new jobs adequately, personally helping them with anything they're struggling to destroy under their own power- but the monstrous patrolling ghosts rightly unnerve her too much to stick around for long. She reaches into her little satchel and snaps the glass on a particularly close call, then digs her fingers into the floor and tears a hole through it before diving back down to the second story library. "Mr. Candy! Where are you? They know we're here; we've got to go!" Her first instinct is to splash acid on a nearby exterior wall, preparing to just grab him, jump out, and sprint. She gets as far as the acid before remembering her teammate's toolkit. "Did you drop a playing card at the Hidden Continent entrance? That'd be really useful right now."
Lilian Rook	ADMIN COMPLEX: On the upper floor, the building buzzes like the switch flip of an electrical chair being fired. Dozens of PCs flicker and go off. Absurdly precise electromagnetic sequence loads run through cables, are converted by PSUs, and flip the charge state of board transistors with raw current. It's sort of ridiculous, but it's impossibly clean. There won't even be a record of what happened, because Forte never even logged into anything. He never even moved a mouse. Neutron's hyperfixation on the server block, alongside Red Dwarf scanning the terminals (and White Dwarf being able to optimize routing with precognitive health) allows him to burn through the storage partition at exactly the manic speed he desires. Since they don't have to be sneaky, the cryptographic sequencing approach works fine in here; fucking the partition and leaving junk data actually just makes it harder on the people they're out to spite. The simulation data is far more robust than can be transferred in this time frame, but only if they try to download the entire model. The the dataset it's being trained on is fairly reaonable, and the gist of it seems evident enough. Some kind of theoretical mathematical model is being fed observed physical data from specific times and dates in massive quantities and mapped to a spatial manifold including linear and parallel time as fourth and fifth dimensions. It looks as if the simulation is attempting to find a way to reconcile all the individual data entries into a a single consistent model that would cleanly explain all of them, and thus create a predictive formula, but it's made little progress. Inches over years. The most recent data is stamped yesterday. The author must think of it as critically important, and be both very rich, and very patient. They can choose whether to let it run, or destroy the data. Cutting the elevator and launching everyone out the door while the car itself is still stuck at the bottom is seriously to Janine's (and everyone else's) benefit. She can hear the override in process while someone else is slicing the door even as they go up, less than a minute to spare, bought by her scabbard jamming maneuver earlier. Blasting down the door knocks down the team of hardsuited men working it, and fills the air (and airwaves) with shouting, swearing, and urgent orders, delayed only to the limits of human reaction speed. Weapons are already trained on the opening, and the elevator doors themselves are what initially deflects the spray of bullets. The black-armoured squads inside the building, and especially surrounding it, waste no time in simply opening fire on the Redshifts and Janine as they escape. There's no attempt to get them to stand down; two dozen fiery blossoms of muzzle flash simply erupt into the night, blasting lethal automatic fire at them (with night vision, it seems) as they run for the van. It seems they didn't have time to block the roads, at least, so ploughing through is entirely possible, though it'll take some doing to shake the pursuit they can hear. Forte is kind of just in a position to teleport his ass out to anywhere nearby with a computer. There's a lot of them. This is a modern city.
Candy	Candy releases a breath quietly through his nose, as his heart pounds in his chest and baleful lanterns are snuffed to blue embers in the rusty cloud. The adrenaline doesn't dull the pain--Rita said it would hurt, to return to being something again. Alarms will be going off, now, almost certainly. But Candy can almost always afford to take his time. The monent that time stops, Candy strides back to the other side of the hall, as nigh-completely immaterial eyes are frozen peering at his hiding spot. His passage pushes aside red-brown particles only where his body touches them. He doesn't bother hiding his footfalls, now. Not now that the jig is up. No, with the snake momentarily out of the picture, Candy now intends to finish the job. He lowers the cloth from his mouth, and takes a deep breath. It's hard to breathe here. But it's easier for his friends to do their work. Time resumes. -A current of air rushes back and forth through the rust-colored cloud. -Sliced up records fly into the air. -A split second later, playing cards appear from thin air. They surround the defaced records in a complete circle. Each one flies towards the thrown pile, dozens of trajectories intersecting, razor sharp cards shredding what paper remains like frenzied piranhas. Each one burns away into nothing the moment its cut has been made. -A portion of the dust is suddenly vacant. "No," says Candy, appearing outside of the library to meet back up with Rita, pistol in hand. "But close enough." The Spot, as it turns out is where he and Rita were hunkered down, lying in wait for someone with a key to steal. Not terribly far from the entrance. A few cartoonishly fake 'burglar' figures are left behind (complete with striped black and white shirts) in their place, to confuse the response team when they arrive.
Redshift Operators	When the astronaut presented the gruff gunman with the option to terminate or continue the simulation, the latter had to pick based purely on what little information he had. And what he had isn't much. He doesn't know these simulation. He doesn't know these people. He barely even understands that this world is magic. What he does understood though, was his own unhinged politics-posting. His decision to preserve or terminate the information depended entirely on whether the access logs contained any subordinate-sounding names, such as regular access by an employee ID. If this private work was being done by an organization, there was a very good chance it's corporate, lineage-based, or similar, and thus he should obliterate it. But if it was done by one person... then he choose to leave it going. He hates the wealthy, sure, but his primary hatred is the Egregore. And he's not going to blow shit up without understanding what he blows up. Unless it has literally anything to do with an Egregore, in which case it must always, without exception, be obliterated.
Janine Liberi	On their way out, gunfire is deflected by a powerful maelstrom of wind that protects Janine and the Redshifts. More of it lashes out to lift the police off their feet and onto their back. But that's a feint. The true intent is so that golden thread can bind their trigger fingers to their trigger guards, thereby preventing them from shooting until they can get themselves free. Once she's sure the spacepeople are in their vehicle and peeling away, Janine simply rockets into the sky, out of range and out of sight in a blink, leaving only a distant "Fuuuuuuuuuck yoooooooooooooooooo..." behind her.
Lilian Rook	Log examine tells Red Dwarf: The simulation is run at the behest of a handful of high-level staff who actually work here, and the recent external aid of another individual, ostensibly to refine the model with additional expertise and perspective, but all data is contributed by just Matthew R., and the server space is being taken up at a rate of 'providing significant budgetary income to the city'. The data contains references to a 'subject', singular, along with something that looks like biometric data, but no evidence whatsoever that anyone else is even aware of it beyond the few men in the loop. Shredding and bailing gets Candy and Rita: Pretty much exactly what they want. A complete success. Teleportation recall, as Eleanor had told them, isn't something blocked by this building; certainly not to the level it is in the Urban Center itself. There could certainly be no expectation that Antegent would ever be here, and it seems that freedom of magic convenience was high up on the lift at some point. Eleanor's lifecraft vials work for a little longer, and the pair are able to bail before they have to see just what kind of heavy response shows up here. It's a clean getaway. And it'll only take a few hours to be breathing normally again outside.
Rita Ma	"You're really smart, Mr. Candy," Rita sighs. "Just leave the rest to me, okay?" She takes a moment to look around, regain her bearings- which way did they come from, again? She picks him up like he's nothing; no effort, just a shift in her center of gravity. The 'princess carry' is the only kind that's been demonstrated to her, unfortunately, and that precludes her fastest gait of "running on all fours", but when she breaks into a bipedal sprint it's still enough to blow her hair straight back like a banner. Humanoid footprints are violently torn into the dirt for a very good distance. It beats a motorcycle, probably.