Scene #7921: TPT: The Breakthrough Case (2)

Owner	Pose
Flamel Parsons	Welcome to... THE MOTHERLOBE! Wait, no, this isn't the Motherlobe at all. Welcome to... A DISUSED MOUNTAIN PARKING LOT! https://i.imgur.com/LspGWGP.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/ZkNM6f4.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/ikGWpZ7.jpeg Here's where the engineer, Otto Mentalis, and the special agent, Flamel Parsons, meet the gang. Together, they lead them through a small abandoned campground and tourist trap. They pass a water wheel that spins with unbelievable speed, a waterfall that moves up, the incredible mystery of a public campground bathroom... Until they reach a specific abandoned locale, with very particular signage: https://i.imgur.com/5Hg9OCw.jpeg "The tourist trap called it 'The Forgetful Forest', but really, that's just the psychic illusions and defenses that Ford set up. Without him, it might take us a few tries to get through. Hang on." Mentalis pulls out a pad of sticky notes, sticks one on the sign, writes today's date, and marks a tally mark. Then he stops, thinks for a second, and checks the other side of the sign. He retrieves a second sticky note, marked with today's date, and two tally marks. "Ugh. Typical." He replaces the first (second?) sticky note with this one that was already there, marks another tally, and says, "Alright. I suppose third time's the charm, then." They're off into the woods.
Staren	Urged not to bring the heavy weapons and to prevent forest fires, Staren doesn't show up in a mecha or armor, although what she considers normal armament might still be what others consider 'heavy'. When they arrive at the campground, she stares at the welcome(?) sign. "'...A questionable area?'" Anyone close can see her mouthing 'more questions?' silently as she stares at it, then sighs and moves on; miniature hover-thrusters concealed in her boots allowing her to 'skate' leisurely through the campground as if on rollerblades. She's kind of annoyed by the constant? barrage of? question marks??? At one point muttering under her breath, "It's not a ticket booth??? it just is a ticket booth!' and 'it's just the bathrooms, there's no question!' ... Actually she peeks inside briefly to confirm that it isn't some double fakeout play and the signage is actually misleading. She reads the Forgetful Forest sign while Flamel does some ritual with a sticky note that she presumes is part of safe passage here. And then he takes a sticky note that was already here. "Wait... have we done this before??" When he says maybe, she groans. "Just... let us know what kind of countermeasures actually help. What's the deal with the sticky notes? If stuff like monitoring the clock-calendar on my HUD worked, or otherwise checking for lost time, this couldn't have tripped me up too much... I think... so, I'd like to only spend energy trying what actually works instead of paranoidly doing everything I can think of."
Flamel Parsons	"Oh, the sticky notes? Well, seems like we're dealing with something called 'antimemetics'. Trying to solve a problem while censoring the problem out is hard, and it's even harder to keep track of the brain-wipes. Looks like there's a lot of memory-loss landmines left behind, conflicting efforts to keep everything classified, you know?" Flamel explains. "I'm sure it's okay though." It's not a long walk until you reach the heart of the gulch. A high cliff overlooks a low valley, where a lake has intruded on construction years-abandoned. It's overgrown, flooded, but clearly was once inhabited by a number of people, with distinct little buildings that still emit a sort of "radiation" of the psychic health and wellness that must have once permeated this whole area, albeit slightly contaminated with some tragic event. https://i.imgur.com/UXJUa7K.jpeg You can even see the tippy top of the Motherlobe from this side of the dam that flooded this area (and, of course, made space for the Motherlobe). High above it, a watchtower looks down from a precipitous drop. https://i.imgur.com/NTGKKvW.jpeg Flamel keeps watch, pulsing clairvoyance into the densely energized environment while he keeps a battle-ready stance. Navigating the shattered wooden walkways, they eventually reach an airlock, totally dark except for a softly blinking power indicator, which pops open when Mentalis offers up his head to the Thinkerprint scanner... It feels like it takes an agonizingly long minute to cycle. When the other side opens, a flurry of dozens of post-it notes is blown through the door into the chamber. All completely covered in tally marks. "Oh dear." Otto mutters, softly.
Lilian Rook	Sadly, Lilian cannot wear a fancy turtleneck in a thick forest. She could hypothetically, but she's not dumb enough to try. It's spring and the particularly overgrown hellhole is pretty dark, so a light coat in subdued green that won't get snagged and torn in thorns and twigs is her choice of the moment. The point is rather defeated by Lilian's incorrigible insistence on skirts, her best compromise seeming to be shortening it as much as she dares and having on thick leggings and nearly knee high leather lace-up boots underneath. Normally, she knows quite a bit about the woods, and feels perfectly at home in them, but she isn't about to play statistics games with the probability of mutant psychic CIA experiment mosquitos or ivy plants that imprint alien barcodes on your skin or something. "How does putting question marks at the end of every sentence not incur a wrathful nightmare of illegal technicalities?" Lilian can't help but ask, staring at that last sign in particular. "It even says 'WARNING?'. How absurdly it'd be to sue. Good lord." Seeing Otto's sticky note escalates her reluctance to an audible groan. "Aren't you supposed to know how to get through this?" The trip through the forest is somehow uneventful. That fact alone sort of boggles Lilian's mind. Arriving at the gulch, she barely remembers to stop and ask "Wait, hold the phone, were you building a permanent settlement here at some point? Why is there a little podunk town right next to your giant psychic brain-shaped headquarters?" And then, just before arriving at the outpost, a much, much louder groan. "Are you joking? Couldn't we just have flown or teleported up there?" Lilian cannot stand around a whole minute waiting for the scanner to cycle. She already pops open her AR display and begins fucking around like a workaholic with a smartphone; which is basically what that is anyways. The blast of notes has her hand drop to her waist, and then hover indecisively between her sidearm and collapsed wand. She settles on the former, flicking on an under barrel flashlight and slowly advancing. "If nothing else, I won't be forgetting anything, so just stick close to me. Oh, and don't be annoying, or I'll just let you wander off."
Persephone Kore	Phony is heavy weaponry, but there's no way to fix that, and she's decided not to disinvite herself. Lilian's outfit earns an approving look from her as a fellow Skirt, Leggings, And Boots wearer. "I'm not rubbing off on you, am I?" she teases. "No, we know I am. But I didn't think like that." Persephone oohs and aahs politely at the waterfall and the wheel, but it's the public campground bathroom that really captures her awe. "They really have it like that?" she murmurs in hushed tones, but fails to elaborate. "Don't worry about it," she says smoothly in response to the sticky notes, laying a reassuring hand on Staren's shoulders. Her expression's sweetly serene. "I don't need to remember things to know them! And I'm sure Lilian would remember, if nobody else." She pauses for a moment. Her lips shift in concern. "Or maybe that's a bad thing, if there are truths here that are important to forget." Just to be sure, she touches the sticky note on the sign, asking it why it is the way it is. None of those tallies are hers, right? That seems to reassure her. By the time they reach the building-drowning lake, she's in a mood to be perpetually smiling again. "I like this a lot, Flamel. Haha, I can't blame you for coming here so often! The spirit of the place really is beautiful, isn't it?" Out of curiosity, she psychically asks the buildings why they are the way they are too. Can she catch a glimpse of what transpired here? Traversing the shattered walkways, she doesn't pay much heed to whether she's stepping on wood or water- her heels make the same clacky noise regardless. When the airlock opens, and the post-it notes flutter out, one lands perfectly in her hand. "Oh," she says softly. "This is supposed to be bad, isn't it?"
Lilian Rook	For her interactions with Persephone, Lilian just makes a terribly annoyed scoff at her earliest implication, but grimaces just a little bit at the object of her later fascination. "I know what you're thinking, and it's worse." she says, grimly. A moment later, something else occurs to her. "You know, I've been on three space stations and never thought about what those bathrooms are like." Later on, "Okay, I admit, I'm envious." A few seconds go by without her elaborating. "I wish I could get a menacing heel click going on at all times." And then, not long after, "It means this place has been locked down a few hundred times harder than the spooky woods." A thoughtful noise. "So, probably bad."
Persephone Kore	"It's just bad design," she says to Lilian. "I mean, what are the nonbinary people supposed to do?" Characteristically, she doesn't seem shaken by it; just gently troubled and concerned. Maybe this is the way the world is, but I've decided the world is wrong. Later: "Oh! Haha, thanks. But can't you do that yourself? I mean, can't you just..." Persephone waves her hands sort of nonspecifically. "Put some magic on your shoes, so they'll do that?" She laughs a little. "Sorry. I don't really understand the magic things you do at all. That's totally beyond me."
Staren	Staren just grunts acknowledgement to the explanation of antimemetics. She walks through the forest as long as she pleases; content to enjoy Phony's proximity. Staren's long coat and hiking boots are appropriate here, and an enchantment keeps her temperature comfortable. When she gets tired of walking, she just activates Fly as the Eagle and floats along. Oh, dam. "What happened here? Was this flooded area the old lab?" Lilian remarks why they didn't take the direct route. "Maybe we did try that, and forgot." Staren observes. "Isn't that exactly why we're going this way?" Barrage of sticky notes. "Well, at least these aren't ours. ...We wouldn't have made it this far before, right? ...Right?" She glances at a few at random, reading them. Right. Lilian... Staren remembers what her impression looked like, in the Underworld. It makes sense this forgetfulness thing might not work on her. She feels a bit awkward sticking close to Lilian, but... things are better now, right? Right? "Y--" If you want a menacing heel click can't you just put a little circuit with an accelerometer and a speaker on your leg? Wait no it's probably not the same if not done naturally nevermind. But, shutting her mouth doesn't stop the thought that already went out.
Flamel Parsons	"Pretty sure this is the first time with you bunch, at least." Mentalis admits to Staren. He answers Lilian too. Here in Green Needle Gulch, we... the Psychic Six, we founded the Psychonauts." It looks to be its own entire small facility. "I worked with what I had, back then. But after our founding and our first real disaster, we suddenly had funding... We moved on over to the Motherlobe, though I still used the lab for... what did I use it for?" He shakes his head. "The world never took psychics very seriously, until Maligula. After we beat her, it... well. Every government wanted psychics that could put the fires out. But then the paranoia started setting in..." "Everyone felt like there were spies everywhere. Even spies who didn't know they were spies." Mentalis leads the group through a dark hallways lit irregularly by harsh lightning. It's hewn out of living earth, and shaped by stacked sandbags that will one day be sedimentary rock. Someone carved this place with their mind. https://i.imgur.com/yJPJ8ne.jpeg https://i.imgur.com/APdRYC8.jpeg One of the screens in the hallways pipes up, with a sort of cut-footage version of Ford Cruller speaking. "Heya, bushy-brain. It's been: Five. Thousand. Six. Hundred. Twenty three. Days. Since you last worked on Project Victory. Now, you always remember 'til ya forget: Time's running out, I recorded this at one minute to midnight and it better be at least five when ya hear this! Lab's this way, go on and git! Get your brain refreshed and we gotta get to work!" Arrows pop up on various screens, leading to the lab... And more sticky notes along every wall. Scanners all along the wall start flashing red, though. "Cure contamination risk!" Ford's voice calls out. "Dang it, Otto, what did I tell you! Clean your brain up before you get in here, you gotta focus on that cure! You're gonna lose some memory on the partition, just remember to be more careful next time! ...Wait, you won't remember, so..." The old man on the PA system trails off as small, basketball-sized spheres start to roll out of ports along the walls. Their main target is Mentalis, but they rush upon the whole group, dozens rolling wildly and emitting a series of dangerous pulses. "Woah, woah!" Flamel calls out. "They're trying to lock out certain memories! We need all of those!" Mentalis shouts, despairingly, from a bit of side cover behind some of the sandbags. "Wish I could tell you why I invented these!"
Lilian Rook	"They don't." Lilian informs Persephone with a little grimace. "Learning not to happens fast, at any rate." She looks just a little ill for a moment, then shakes it off. Lilian thinks about Persephone's suggested direly irresponsible use of magic. "I'll look into it." she finally says, guardedly. She blurts out a little later, not bothering with being psychic with Staren (more due to the location than anything else, albeit) "I'm not putting anything on my legs anywhere near that dorky. Legs are a sacred territory." One can tell she's really reaching to try and inject any amount of levity into the situation, clearly as a begrudging team lead responsibility to manage uncertainty and stress levels. "Everyone knows that electronics are for going between legs anyways." To Otto, "Wait, you suddenly had funding as in the government was suddenly willing to fund you, or you suddenly had funding as in you don't even remember where your own funding came from?" she asks. "You understand why I'd ask that, right? In this situation, please refrain from being flighty and vague with descriptions." Once they're actually in, Lilian repeatedly suppresses the urge to summon magical lighting instead. Finding that the weird mountain science bunker still has its power running is barely enough to get her to flick the flaslight off; somehow it seems just barely north of 'only spooky rather than useful'. When she hears the recording count the day in that awkward, robotic way, she instantly spits out "Fifteen years? You're not doing bad for that age." without ostensibly pausing to actually calculate that in her head, just instantly grasping the conversion of time. Then the warning hits, and two of the . . . four (wow) psychic adults in the room fail to properly explain jack shit. "What did I just say about vague you-know responses?!" she gasps. "At least it's robots this time. I wish it were robots pretty much all the time." Lilian already has her weapon out, and the small size of the machines makes it awkward to engage in melee combat anyways. The holographic display blinks back on, and lightning-cyan starbursts of muzzle flash sizzle-crack in rapid succession ahead of her. Her aim snaps jankily from sphere to sphere, like watching someone play an FPS with simple cheats on, creating the illusion of a flower trail of firebursts around her front arc with the eye's lingering images. Gambling a little that the pulses probably have to be non-lethal mental alteration blasts, if they're going to be deployed against Otto himself (she assumes he isn't dumb enough to program and store killbots that'd target him in his own lab), Lilian makes a half-attempt at avoiding them, simply smoothly crossing leg over leg to strafe between the bulk of them, and simply absorb the pulses that might slip through to hit Otto with her own fractured blender of a psychic profile. Something is audibly ticking in her messenger bag. Weird.
Persephone Kore	"Maybe it's more about the sensation of it," Phony says offhandedly to Staren. "You know, the feeling of your shoe hitting the ground. It feels satisfying, doesn't it?" A slight frown. "Oh, have you ever worn heels, actually? I don't remember." "Is that why you make yourselves seem so spy-ish?" she says to Mentalis, while soaking in the ambiance of the sandbag-walled lab. "So people worry less about the spies that aren't there? Or is that just a thing that Flamel does?" She gives the Ford Cruller recording a friendly wave, pointlessly, and then makes a noise of soft surprise at the figure his chopped-up voice dispenses. "Five thousand, six hundred..." She's immersed in intense thought for a good few seconds; long enough to try, and fail multiple times, to do division in her head. "That's... over ten years, isn't it? Wow. Well, no wonder you don't remember!" The bots don't jolt her into crisis mode. Just about nothing can. She turns on them lazily, with an expression of soft delight. She doesn't even wish that they wouldn't attack her. Instead, their pulses wash over her harmlessly, their psychic effect dwarfed to a rounding error by the weight of all she is. "Wow! You did a really good job on them, Otto! I love how round they are. Is it really okay to break them? Ahahaha, I almost don't want to!" I wish they couldn't hurt my friends, and so the ones immediately attacking the others are disassembled. Nothing is broken, but every screw is unscrewed, every component that can be gently detached from another is set aside, everything that interlocks or clicks or latches is undone. The pile of parts that previously composed each one is laid, neatly organized, on the floor. "There. That way we can put them back together later!"
Staren	Called to Staren's mind are images of some bots in her parents' lab, similarly-sized spheres but with four mechancial legs. Huh. She doesn't understand an ATTACK is coming until too late, bolts of psionic power raining into her and making her cry out and stumble back, before bringing up her combat enchantments a split-second later. She quickly closes the coat, actually using that ornamental hip-belt to help hold it closed over her less-protected torso, even if Armor of Ithan is up now. Persephone can see her mind mentally selecting weapons -- for some reason, she expects a forcefield, thinks to use kinetic instead of energy weapons 'to beat down the forcefield', then rejects bullets because they'll ricochet all over in this confined space. She has her vibroblades, but also... Coat now closed, Staren unfolds her arms and aims them at the drones as there's a mechanical whir-clunk from her vambraces, and from each fire a pair of smart gyrojets each the size of a pencil, homing in on drones and trying to ram them at high-speed. "Obviously you invented them to contain dangerous thoughts! But I guess we need these now? Why do they have to do it so violently, if this was a facility you worked at, wouldn't you like, offer a chair you willingly sit in or something?"
Flamel Parsons	"All we've got is vague answers!" Flamel shouts from cover, trying to curve psi-blasts back. He grits his teeth and heaves a heavy sigh. "And at some point we had to become spies. A lot of mental health is... lies you have to believe until they're true. 'The world's safe', 'I'm not in danger'..." He leans out of cover for a few shots. "'Everything's going to be okay'! So I'll stick to that last one for now!" "We went from a commune of psychic academics to a defense industry. We knew exactly where the money was coming from." Otto mutters tensely to Lilian as he sits in cover. Every so often, he takes a shot of his own, or moves up in one of the gaps that the others buy. Lilian's right though, they're nonlethal, meant to bash down a psychic defense and wipe a specific category of memory. It's targeting a few of the ones she has, even! Drones are slammed with jets, wand blasts, and several simply come apart into pieces. A few of those pieces look like components of that device they were studying before. The cover-up. Otto calls out: "If I can get to the workspace, I can see what kind of work I was doing! We don't have to clear all the robots out, just let me get a good look at the workspace, grab some files..." More drones. Bigger drones, now. Ford's voice speaks up. "Breach, level 2. If you're hearing this, Otto, whatever you're doing, you know it's not right. Calm down, at least stop moving ahead. If you're trying to make a change on Project Victory, we need to talk it all out. The violent option... it's not going anywhere fast. We could at least talk it out. Alright?" "Oh, you old coot, I really wish I knew what you were talking about!" Otto calls out. "Now the rest of you, watch out! Bigger ones incoming!" Otto's machines, at larger sizes, start to become more... emotional, is the only descriptor, as they establish defensive lines. Large, angry claws on snakelike bodies, trying to lock down motion. Mobile, mechanical jaws breathing psionic impulse, curled into a despairing grimace. Several large eye-spheres, spotting for others. A host of machines that express emotion in their design. The sadder, the heavier the defenses. The angier, the harsher the attack. The more happy or curious, the more precise the attacks. But push through this, and one can find an essential lab beyond.
Staren	Bigger incoming? "Oh... Dr. Mentalis, can you see your lab door from here? If we can reach it, I think I can block off the drones and buy you plenty of time. ...Unless they're already in the lab..." The Emotionbots attack! "Gh!" Trying to dodge around in the cramped space, Staren is beaten and battered, pionic blasts hitting the plate armor-like forcefield surrounding her, but... does that actually protect her from losing memories? Has she forgotten anything? If she has, she doesn't know! She was GOING to go at the drones with a sword, but thinks better of going up against these machines. "Just need a moment to warp something in..." Staren shoulders the M72 LAW knockoff that's been on her back, extending it and kneeling in the middle of the corridor. "Backblast clear!" FWOOM And, just after it fires, a cylindrical piece of tech warps in in front of her, looking vaguely like a Military Energy Thingy That Will Project Some Kind Of Field Or Aura, and which looks like it's too impractical to wield but could probably be pushed or dragged around with a little effort. And a forcefield goes up, blocking off most of the corridor really solidly, just like the ones the Marauders had on the ship. (Lilian can coordinate wirelessly or they can just use speech or thought or something so the field is dropped when firing.) Lilian and Persephone can also tell that she's planning, once the current wave is clear, to drop the field and with their help push the heavy emitter PAST the lab then turn it back on and block off the corridor the drones are coming from!
Lilian Rook	'A lot of mental health is... lies you have to believe until they're true.' "Yeah." Lilian sighs enigmatically just as her weapon clicks dry and provides a moment of silence. A split second later, the ammo indicator just blinks back to full. "If you say something enough, you eventually start to believe a quarter of it. So sometimes you just have to say something four times as outrageous as you need, and keep saying it no matter what." A pause. "But everything really is going to be okay. I promise." Lilian resumes shooting. A little later, Lilian really just can't hold it in anymore about those pre-recorded broadcasts. "It's bad enough being talked down to by an old man, but being scolded by some completely different context from fifteen years ago, just totally ignorant to what's going on now; god it's so grating." A beat. "And unpleasantly familiar. If you feel even half the way I do, I'm sorry, Doctor Mentalis." §Trying to make me forget those. I almost sort of appreciate it. But the trying is just reminding me of them. So I really don't.§ Lilian waits precognitively for Staren to fire the forcefield, and for the enemies to group up on the other side, then she-- -----[stop]----- Lilian stares at the forcefield --a surreal photo flicker shimmer, like the inherent absurdity of photographing a helicopter in flight-- and decides on the smarter course. Discorporating into a shadowy silhouette of faint black fog, she phases through the mundane sandbag walls to either side of it, and comes around behind the enemy drone pack, where their defenses aren't solidified at all. She holsters the sidearm again, and draws out Night Mist. A Cleasa Iontach later, and overlapping arcs of finely split space, like viewing the drones through a pane of glass that'd been invisibly cut and the pieces slid a few degrees over each other, hang in the air ahead of her. -----[start]----- --somehow appears around the other side. A flurry of broken air --a sword severing a neat line of infinitesimal threads of spacetime-- blossoms outwards in a score of spirographic overlapping vectors. She works on clearing the drone parts in the way so Staren can push the emitter forward.
Persephone Kore	Persephone ever-so-carefully steps over the bots she's disassembled. It only takes a glance for the other little spheres to meet a similar fate. As they leave, she reassembles them, but telekinetically stuffs them back into their little tubes before they can finish booting up. "See you! You did a great job, I promise!" The physical attacks of some of the later machines are, at least, notionally dangerous to her, not that she acts with any more alarm. "What do you mean, it's not right?" she says to the recorded voice, as if it could answer her. The earnest vehemence of that statement seems to be getting to her, just a bit. He knew more back then than we know now. Are we really sure this is okay? I know there's nothing we can do but keep moving, but... at the same time, are we making a mistake? "No," she says to her own thoughts. "You're probably right, Lilian. A lot's happened in fifteen years, hasn't it?" But she doesn't seem annoyed, either. The various bots that lunge for her are pretty trivially brushed aside; one does, in fact, manage to grab her arm, and she just sort of pulls her hand free with a shrugging motion that leaves metal bent. When the forcefield comes down, she beams and pats Staren on the shoulder. "Awww. You're really smart! That'll be great. Here, let me just..." Once Lilian's done her sword thing, Phony carefully distorts the force-field around her, then telekinetically sweeps the generator to sandwich all the remaining bots up against a wall. They look sort of comical, like butterflies under glass. That definitely wasn't the plan, but she seems giddily cheerful about her, so it's probably best not to correct her. "Great job, everyone!"
Flamel Parsons	Pushing up and into the lab, the forcefield and its powerful, suddenly present cleanup handler can shove to cover it. Ports ahead continue to pour the robots out... until, suddenly, Persephone pushes forward with much greater force than anyone expected, especially the bots. With a solid, meaty crunch, finely-crafted bot-shrapnel Lilian's been working on is launched forward and sandwiched against the wall, sort of creating a spike-wall that pins everything remaining and blocks up the ports. The engineer pokes his head out from behind cover. "I'd ask you to handle my old inventions gently, but, well. Seems I didn't make them when I was in a great place." He says, sheepishly, heading through. "Don't know when those automated systems are going to recover, so let's make this quick... The laboratory is a small affair as far as labs go. Round, encircling a central workshop area and surrounded by a variety of what look like propulsion and explosive test areas. A small reinforced chamber for testing blasts, a charred and blackened segment of wall where thruster engines were tested, and in the middle... An evolutionary, iterative line of rockets. One fat, heavy, bristling with thrusters, marked with a flag that features red and white lines, and an eagle swooping through stars. "A United Oorahish Provinces rocket." Flamel whispers. "Looks to be... a '71 model? These never even got used." One is tall, stern, plain, a dull green marked with a deep red flag featuring a yellow symbol that looks like an industrial dam's high walls. "This one's from the Greater Grulovian Revolutionary Federation. Intercontinental capabilities, from '68. Top secret." He looks at the one that looks like an anachronistic radio, tall, bristling with guidance systems. "I don't even know this one. Writing looks... Dynastist? They have rockets? What are they putting on them?" A pedestal marked with the Psychonauts logo. Whatever was on it is gone. The engineer walks up to it. "Hopefully not whatever we put on ours. I must have used those as models. I must have tried to learn to make... some kind of rocket. Something to deliver that device." He sighs, heavily. "What could I have been feeling that made me build a rocket? When I built those claws, I was mad. When I built those eyes, I was curious. When I built those grimaces, I was sad. But when I built this..." He runs his hands over the pedestal. "What could I have been feeling?" Flamel's stepped up, and is concentrating his clairvoyance on the pedestal. "If you guys have any ideas about what to look for, look fast! We should grab and go." The lab is free for the taking, with electronic storage tape and heavy stacks of drafting paper around many tables, as well as plenty of old failed pieces of machinery.
Staren	Staren stares at her comrades' handiwork, unable to help smiling a bit at the way the drones pinned by Persephone twitch. She stands, and drops the expended launch tube. It's not littering if it's inside an abandoned laboratory. Handle them gently? "They're combat machines, aren't they?" Staren tries to grok this sentiment. "Anyway, isn't it a good thing we were able to beat them?" "Hmm." Staren looks over the various testing areas, quickly ascertaining what kind of devices were tested here... before she actually sees the rockets, duh. She whistles, "Damn... so this is the kinda facility the first people to send man to space might've used, huh? Well, except for the weapon part." "Although, I don't recognize any of those country names..." Staren takes a few moments to appreciate the atmosphere before she begins collecting data storage into extradimensional storage, glancing at the tech. "What were you feeling? Well, did you by any chance have a lab notebook or journal around here somewhere? Maybe you wrote it down." She pauses for a moment. "This was important. You'd have wanted to let people know why you did it. Perhaps not in a big public thing, obviously, given the nature of the project, but..." Staren skates back to the lab entrance. Looks around the doorway. Then looks for personal workstation-type areas, looking not at the notebooks and data storage but at the personal affects, sticky-note-reminders, and such put around them. "If that Ford guy's recordings were worth preserving, surely you saved something of your own, right?"
Persephone Kore	"I was gentle, wasn't I?" Persephone says, just a tiny bit defensively. She casts a glance back at the forcefield-pinned bots, seems to satisfy herself that she hasn't mistreated them too badly, and only then turns to walk further in. The rockets, she regards with... wariness? No, not wariness exactly; hard to tell what that'd even look like on her face. Something closer to soft, mournful distaste. "When we try to understand someone else's thoughts, we paint their portrait in the colors we know. That's just how it works, isn't it? Sometimes there's a color we just don't have on our palette, so the picture's incomplete! Haha, not that that happens to me anymore, but..." "It's so strange, isn't it? For the person you don't understand to be your own past self." She bends down to scrutinize the empty pedestal, the one with the Psychonauts logo, and scrutinizes it. "It'd be better if I had the rocket itself. But, I wonder... what were you feeling?" Or, empty pedestal: why are you the way that you are?
Lilian Rook	'I'd ask you to handle my old inventions gently, but, well. Seems I didn't make them when I was in a great place.' "Designs are immortal. Instances are replaceable. They're just extensions of the core idea. Like cutting grass." says Lilian, who is not an inventor. Once they're in the room, Lilian stares, blinking, at the rockets. "Oh. I wasn't aware these countries were a thing here. I suppose I should expect geopolitics would be different with spy agencies alone being so wild, but it never quite struck me." Thinking about it, Lilian then trances out for just about two minutes, really having to work hard to figure out which one of these potential futures gets her what she wants, given the huge number of esoteric things to take back here, and the length of time before they'd return any results. Remembering to blink again, she says "Phony, do you think you could dissassemble the rocket material and carry it out? Or get most of the pieces small enough for Staren to store. Staren, grab the tapes. I'll leave the papers to Parsons. I have something I need to get." From there, Lilian disappears into one of the test chambers, again taking on that weird and vague shadow form that seems to be new in order to get through the dividers. Once she's in, she crouches down, withdraws a couple of her spare reagent vials and a combat knife, and then begins scraping ash, residue, and fine dust from the chamber interiors, carefully sliding them off the point into the narrow containers and sealing them.
Flamel Parsons	"No, not likely... I'm just not the kind of man who writes how he feels, you know." The engineer pushes his glasses up his nose, and then frowns. "But we can try to see what I was dreaming about." He heads straight to the designs and the drafted papers, as well as some of the tapes. "If you want to know what I was thinking, it's going to be in what I made. But who knows how I felt in here... Seems as though I had my mind partitioned. A different person inside and out." He picks up a piece of paper. At the top: 'Device Which Reminds Ford Cruller Every Hour Of How Much Pain He's Caused People.' "Might have had some negative feelings about that at some point. You might want to find a way to talk to Ford." Persephone scans the pedestal. Why is it like this? She and Flamel get it simultaneously, both directing their powers against the pedestal. They both learn the nature of what was happening in the Cold War. The pedestal is like this because of the Invisible City. It was once the capitol of an asian neighbor of the Post-Dynast Republic. Its name is now impossible to know. It was a casualty in the Cold War. Several major population areas were instantly obliterated and censored by missiles carrying the Mk. I Censor Device. Nations lived in fear that they would be obliterated and unremembered. They could not prove that they were not already suffering that attack in the moment. They were willing to kill each other eagerly. The Psychonauts were willing to do anything to end that war. Using the device that was once placed on this pedestal was the ultimate expression of their willingness to go to any lengths to save the world.