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Cantio It's time to check out the meat zone! Everything's kind of jiggly and pulsating, but not outright hostile. It's certainly gross, though, and Cantio doesn't look all that enthused to be there even though she's the one that put out the call for assistance in checking out what can even be done with the fauna and 'geography' of this place.

"Why couldn't it have been somewhere nicer...? W-well, biological research should be... Something?" She sounds like she's trying to convince herself more than anyone else, tablet in hand to take notes on the various fleshy creatures sliding by. She nearly jumps aside when a slimy pink thing moves right past her, watching it for several moments before breathing another sigh of relief.

This will probably be gross.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel's followed Cantio here at some point, through the warpgate. When she comes around a corner, it's right into his face. He's wearing a big bulky biohazard suit and waving around a large scanner device, which makes screechy "WEEWOOWEEWOO" sounds every time it detects meat, which is always. "Hey, heard you were doing some studyying!" He lifts the hood off and shoves the instrument at her face, where it screams quietly. "This place looks great! I think I heard about somewhere like this once, inside of a horribly traumatized person's head, where everyone would do terrible terrible, evil things to cute bunny rabbits!"

    He waves the tool around. "This looks more peaceful, though. I mean, meaty, too."
Chains Knight "... Biological resource should be 'something', as in, 'something that happens to someone else," suggests Chains, picking his way through carefully.

"Surely there was some sort of... nice saccharine board gaming land, or something. Maybe something like Candyland, if you were intent on being somewhere made out of food," he says.

Although his face is entirely obscured, he manages to convey a look of disgust as he steps in or on... something. Best not to examine it too closely.
Flamel Parsons     "Is this really food? It looks more alive." Flamel calls back over to Chains. He sweeps his doodad over the meat, which detects: Yes, still meat. "Maybe in a mall-lobster sense. Or a pre-slaughter pig sense."
Chains Knight "Do I look like some form of a foodologist?" says Chains, irritably. "Food comes from farms, or inns, or from punching holes in walls. That's all I need to know."
Flamel Parsons     Sweeeep. Weewooweewoo. Flamel regards one of the nearby walls of a structure. "Looks like you could get a meal if you punched a hole in this one, but you might have to cook it first." He adjusts his sunglasses and puts his hazard hood back on with a "hmm" kind of sound and expression.
Staren     Sometime after the whole 'getting settled in' process has had a moment for Staren, she's able to come help! She steps out of the local warpgate in her usual clothing, accompanied by a teenage girl in a basic 'adventurer' outfit with a red tunic, plain trousers, backpack, and sword. Both of them look disgusted.

    Staren flips open her vambrace and starts fiddling with it. The other girl looks around. "THIS is the kind of place that's through these gates? Yikes."

    "I'm sure they're not all like this. My scouting drones have already located a few other territories to check out that are definitely NOT like this."

    "Honestly, after seeing you fight, it seems like this kind of thing is..." she hangs her head. "I don't have cool elemental powers. I don't transform into a magical warrior. What can some normal person like me do, anyway? Man the castle like a Walmart greeter..."

    "THAT is something we can solve... soon, I'm sure. But right now, I have to do this. Engaging micro-wormhole..." Staren's clothes are suddenly replaced by sealed, environmental armor with a sciency look to it.

    The other girl stares, open-mouthed, then: "...That was cool. But I'm gonna... go... before I get oozed on or catch a disease or... ground up or something..." She backs towards the gate as some slimy pink thing approaches her, muttering, "I'm just a normal... Gonna... gonna go play Gamecube..." before turning and quickly walking through.

    Staren strides across the concerningly-gross floor to Cantio. "We might well find a Candyland-type deal out there somewhere, I dunno. Uh... food? Alive?" She looks at Flamel. "Wait, WHAT did you say? How do you do that with your v--"

    She shakes her head. "No, no, no. Alright. Cataloguing. Let's see here." Staren sends a drone upward, to try and get an aerial view on their immediate surroundings.
Cantio Cantio nearly screams when Flamel shows up right in front of her, clutching her chest briefly to catch her breath once she realizes it's him. "A-ah, hey... Oh geez, that's a... What's that you have there?" She asks as she gestures at the meatus finder, leaning back juuust a bit when it's too close to her face.

Chains' arrival is much less horrifying in comparison, and she breathes a slightly more dejected sigh at the mention of alternatives from both him and Staren. "Frankly, I was hoping for something a little closer to home, more robotic, more..." She gestures vaguely at first, then all around. "... Less like this? Even a candy-themed region would be less icky. Still... It's good to step out of my comfort zone sometimes."

She's lying to herself super hard.

"It does feel like there's a lot variety in what might be lying around here, at least. If I can't make it quite like home yet, I can at least figure out what can be built or..." Cantio pauses, looking at another slimy meat rabbit that comes by as Flamel's words come back to mind. Fighting back her terror, she picks it up, then tugs on its face and notices that it's more stretchy (like a slime!) rather than meaty (like everything else!) "... Produced. Food would be obvious, but there might be other applications for all this. D-do you all mind gathering some different samples together? It might help us make this place more..."

She can't even come up with a good word. "... We'll play it by ear."

Staren's aerial recon reveals... LOTS OF MEAT CREATURES. And meat terrain. And meat water. If it wasn't so fleshy-looking and pulsating, it might almost look pleasant. There's a good variety of normal-looking animals, at least, along with some weirder ones that look like they might be amalgamations of multiple other meat creatures.
Chains Knight Chains considers the possibility of breaking off part of the wall and cooking it.

"... Maybe I'll pass on that," he says. "I don't know where this has... been. Or - if it's immobile, I guess I don't know what's been nearby it?"

"... You know what. I'm going to be lazy about this."

He pulls out his deck, and (carefully, so as to not get meat or meat juices on it) plays a few cards. Shortly afterwards, there's a palanquin with two soldiers carrying it, which he boards.

"Onwards," he says, the carriers following Cantio.
Flamel Parsons     "Finds meat! Or... maybe it finds life? I can't really remember." Flamel tosses the thing aside. "There's a neighboring territory I can see on the maps here," He pulls out one of those Syndicate tablets. "And it looks like it might be, I mean, digital at bare minimum. Thought about expanding there?" Flamel puts the tablet away and starts picking chunks of meat out of the environment with his telekinesis. He's bottling them away in vials and doing unusual psychokinetic actions to them to understand and extract all the valuable materials in this flesh, as Cantio leads the way.
Staren     Staren slumps a bit at the sight, getting out tablet to pass to anyone she can't just send video to. "EVERYTHING appears to be made of meat. Maybe we're in or on some kind of giant creature?" She prods the ground with a blade to see if it bleeds, or flinches in pain or anything. "Gather samples for where? Have you got a meat lab you're looking over these in?" She goes over to check out some of the meat-water and take a sample of it. Maybe pick up a particularly slow meat-fish.

    Which SOUNDS redundant, fish are NORMALLY made of meat, but somehow you just know it will be extra gross here.
Cantio Sadly, meat juice is all over the place. It probably won't get on Chains' cards as long as nothing stomps or splashes nearby, at least. Perhaps sensing his position on the palanquin, however, a curious meat hummingbird is fluttering ever closer to him and his soldiers! It's easy enough to capture or smack out of the air, though, so it's less of an actual danger and more just a gross wet thing.

Cantio, meanwhile, shuffles over to peer at Flamel's tablet as she leads the group forward. The chunks are easy enough to pick out of the environment, and there's even little pockets of minerals that can be extracted, or  for raw materials like bones and hardened muscle.  "I think I sent the larger... Creature over that way, yeah. If it can talk, then we might even be able to expand...!"

She pauses, then shakes her head. "Expansion later. First... Whatever this is." She gestures around vaguely again, pausing briefly to carve a piece of the ground off to inspect more closely when Staren mentions what they might be on. Both the carving from Cantio and the stabbing from Staren cause the ground wriggle slightly and bleed, but only as much as raw meat would rather than if it really attached to something living and breathing.

The meatwater is not blood, but bloody water. It's not quite saltwater, but definitely not freshwater.
The meatfish are actually more like a normal fish than fish-shaped meat. Their flesh looks like raw meat, but the insides are still like themselves rather than all being a uniformly beefy or chickeny texture. That seems to be the case with all the animals here.

Cantio leads the group onwards, and they soon find... A clearing! One that's suitable for building an outpost on, if not for the fact that there's still a lot of wandering meat-fauna around. They're milling about, grazing on meat grass or sipping at the meatlake, so something will need to be done with them before anything can be built. What will be done, though?
Flamel Parsons     Flamel is up in some trees, checking out the bones. "Oh, great!" He says cheerfully. "And I think you *can* build here. Think about it, if this has *meat structure*, well... I mean, bodies have systems for creating 'housing' for intruders, you know? We might be able to *motivate* this place to build a home for us!"

    He regards the clearing. "You know... like this!" He stries on, scratching his chin. With two fingers on one temple, he starts pushing and shoving the local fauna around with telekinesis, gently but firmly, dragging them all out of order and out of place, as well as occasionally pinching and prodding the meat terrain to see if he can start a slow and steady structure-opening process. "Honestly, might want to bring in some Concord prefabs. What do you think?"
Staren     Staren puts the meatfish in a large sample container with some water. "It's like life evolved here to... like there's some reason 'skin' never became a thing?" She shakes her head. "I don't know why, though. Mom's the Xenobiologist, not me."

    She looks back at the gate. "Not the Mom that's apparently HERE, the other one." She slumps at the memory of some recent Awkward Interaction. "Guh."

    Base building! Staren nods at Flamel, "That's what I'm thinking! We fence off an area, put down some buildings. Um... the ground is weird but I *guess* we should be able to like... put pylons down to hold buildings in place?"

    Staren considers this. She calls in some golems, big stone things, and once they arrive from the gate, deploys pylons like giant stakes from her matrer manipulator for the golems to start pounding into the steak, so that a foundation can be built atop them.
Chains Knight "Finally, some empty space," says Chains, as the group advances on it.

"Here, Enticing Fruit," he says, throwing a card off towards the side. It poofs into a delicious looking fruit where it lands. "There. Go get it, and get lost. Wait, do meat... things, eat fruit?"
Cantio "Meat structure, meat housing... Uhh. Would that actually work? Only one way to find out!" Cantio goes along with Flamel's plan, sounding fairly enthused as she... Actually,s he's mostly watching him at first. The creatures are moved aside rather easily thanks to a lot of them being docile or skittish, but creating a structure in the terrain proves to be difficult at first. It's not unlike trying to set a bone in a different direction or putting braces on to adjust teeth, so it'll take a while to see results.

... At least, until Cantio remembers that she's got some tricks up her sleeves as well. Focusing her time-speedening powers on where Flamel's working, the meat becomes noticeably more malleable, looking as if it's growing or moving around in real time beyond its usual pulses. It'll almost be like maneuvering putty if the putty was in a bathtub, and creating rooms and pits and even walls might be workable at this rate (albeit slowly).

Staren's stakes in the steak, meanwhile, punch through the 'ground' about as easily as expected. It's not nearly as clean as Flamel's work, but it's certainly faster than trying to grow the meat into the desired shape. Like before, the ground doesn't actually react to getting stabbed, although the animals outside seem to be more wary of approaching Staren's golems afterwards.  "Fencing and prefabs should be a good start. It'd probably be easier than trying to build everything by.. Er. Like this."

Cantio gestures at what she's doing with Flamel, and then she notices Chains' experiment with the fruit card. The meatbird zips backwards at first, then follows the fruit to sniff around at the strange foreign thing. It pecks at the fruit rapidly, its meat-looking beak actually functioning like a regular beak and likely to get to whatever delicious flavors are inside if it is in fact a real fruit. Crisis averted!

"... So not everything functions like meat even if it all looks like meat. Interesting." Cantio murmurs, then turns to her companions on this venture while still keeping her powers going as long as Flamel needs to shape whatever it is he's shaping. "I guess this'll be an interesting project to keep working on, then... Oh! Is there anything any of you want to do out here in particular? I-I mean, since we're out here, and..."

She gestures around again. "We have a lot of room to work with, and not a lot of oversight. This is uncharted territory, after all, so we can really try something new!"
Chains Knight It's real fruit. It's delicious, MP restoring fruit, even.

"... Here?" Chains asks, looking around. "If you are asking me what I want to do here in particular, the answer is 'leave'."

"... If you want to find me some sort of... board game world, or world that runs on narrative rules, or... some other thing that isn't made of meat," he says vaguely. "Honestly, just 'some place not made out of meat'. That'd be great."
Flamel Parsons     Flamel pulls his wrist-deep grasp out of a chunk of the lower flesh. "Ganglia!" He answers to Cantio, hoisting the meaty bundle of disused nerves. "The brain doesn't actually contain *all* of the thoughts. Ganglia are clusters throughout meat where some mental processes still occur! Like relays. I'll just take those, to study! I bet we can do a lot with this territory by studying it."

    He's also calling in for some prefabs, as per Cantio's specs. He wants to give her the time to focus on studying, of course. By tonight, she ought to have a modest little base, with a *freaky* basement!
Staren     "It's alright," Staren notes, when it's clear they're building structures multiple ways. "This way we can see what works better over time and compare!"

    She looks at the bird pecking away. "So some of it is just looks, huh? I guess that makes a weird sort of Multiverse-sense."

    Things to try? "I mean... I guess we set up some basic defenses and things... run some lights from the warpgate to here... you have any preference for power method? For now, we might want to just gather samples from various areas and compare the meat, see if it's... different. Do you have a lab somewhere to take this to, or is that the first thing we're building?"

    "...And also a grill. I guess we'll find out soon enough whether the smell of cooking attracts predators..."
Cantio The bird pecks away at that fruit, happily consuming the mysteriously unmeaty substance. In time, it will become a mighty meat kebab bird with the power of both meat and fruit juice, begetting the first of many empowered children in this hellscape. That, however, is a story for another day.

"With any luck, we'll be able to find something less... This." Cantio smiles awkwardly at Chains' request, and it's clear from the look on her face that she's fully in agreement with him. "Somewhere else might make for a more stable base, at least, or one that isn't so unpleasant to be around. Still, if there's discoveries that can be made here, it might not be a ba-"

Flamel holds up a meaty pile of nerves, and Cantio screams in recoil. She hyperventilates for a few moments before calming herself down, even going as far as reaching out to poke at the ganglia a few times. "That's... Hmm. I wonder if their brains are made of the same material as regular animals, or some kind of meat hybrid..." She comments despite not being a brain surgeon or even remotely learned in that field. "Even if a base here doesn't work out too well, knowing how this... Er. Place's material works might help with Concord tech development in the long run."

"Power methods... Basic electric should work for now until we figure out if there's a reliable local source to draw on. Like..." Cantio trails off, stroking her chin and then recoiling slightly when she remembers what she's touched. "Something more efficient than a waterwheel, or perhaps even a generator that can convert the energy in the meat to... Something? I'll need some time with a lab here to really figure out what we can do with this, and also... Showers."

With a plan of attack decided upon, Cantio's reward for everyone: A fresh set of high fidelity wireless earbuds (with optional connecting cable so they don't get lost if one gets knocked off) securely housed in a little pocket-sized and branded case that itself is also housed inside a throwaway plastic case. She'll be sticking around here for a while between setting up that base and testing what she can on the meaty denizens of this meatworld.
Flamel Parsons     "Unusual brain matter is my specialty! I'll figure it out. I mean, nerves are part of meat, you know! Just usually not the big clusters. I really do wonder if there are any giant brains around..." Flamel rambles. "Let's get a base set up! I'll have you some prefabs here in a little, you can rest somewhere that's less squishy and academically fascinating."

    He regards the environment, pondering a solution... "Honestly, just a combustion generator for meat would work. The boiling of the meat-slurry rivers can double for water purification... That'll be great! A little home away from home. And so many ganglia to poke at!"