Scene #8018: HELL

Owner	Pose
Vantablitz Remnants	All said for such an 'operation', not much preparation needed to be accomplished before the green light. The 'purification markers' Ahn had persuaded the village matriarch to put up are mainly a handy sequence of trail pointers to lead as close to the last site as anyone dares go. She and Lotus, knowing their way around the mountain better than well by this point, had split up (and split up) to search the area, and located no further breaches. Those who have requested ammunition and armament have gotten it in spades, Ahn being cheerfully more liberal in offering than someone from the central intelligence bureau. The whole process takes a day and spare change. You're met shockingly far up the mountain, for a situation that had afflicted the people far down in the valley, and for that much, on an oblique side of it too. White, black, green, and red painted marks would guide you there even without coordinate help. The lush jungle turns to the surreal jungle turns to the incredibly spooky jungle where you are stalked by the sounds of clicking, groaning, and hoarse, hushed 'breathing' at varying distances, but you arrive without incident, at a cliff edge so heavily forested you can only tell it's a cliff by the sound of water far below it, intermingled with random overlapping wet thrashing and stony crunching sounds. Also the deeply uncomfortable noises that Lotus, sat on the lowest bough of a tree like a jaguar, is making. Red-black goo drizzles from the branch with every hefty crunch that disappears a foot of off-green limb between her illogically distended jaws. Black lotus flowers have sprung up around the tree, floating on little pools of gore. Ahn pays it as much mind as someone zoning out while their kitty cat is eating her wet food, much more invested in greeting you the instant you show. There are many large crates (this time olive and black) arranged a short ways back from the cliff, which she doesn't say anything about, two rather hefty long arms and two short arms of baffling quasi-industrial make lying atop one which she also says nothing about, and a water bottle with a cute panda on the side, which she immediately has to show Rita with much pride. "We've tracked the 'demon parade' to this part of . . . umm . . . wait, that's obvious. W-well, the valley people look like they blocked it off with a landslide for a while, but it broke a few hours ago. Now there's an upsurge pouring down the river. We blocked it off a second time but only for a little. Basically we just have to go . . . upstream, until we reach the entry point, and then go as little inside as possible until we find a control point to reengage a lockdown mechanism."
Ishirou	Ishirou went on the wing the moment they were called. He had spent as much time as he could helping with healing the people in the valley the best that he can and spent the other time he had taken care of his own needs. It'd be bad if he went up there asleep, or kept awake by combat drugs. On the wing, Ishirou flew over the jungle and did his best spotting ahead for the group. Though closer to where they were going he decided that ground level was likely to be better for coordinating... especially with the jungle becoming so thick. He decoupled from the flight unit and attached to a ground-based unit. Using some of the hovering devices from the flight unit, but a mounted blade arm and drill arm to help him with getting through rough patches of earth. When he arrives to meet Ahn and Lotus, he waves. "So there are...actual mechanical doors? Blast doors? Are they connected to anything electronic, or is it all just mechanical?" he asks, trying to get a feel for how it'd be set up.
Kukuru	Kukuru's looking and feeling pretty good when it's time to get going on the expedition up the mountain. She was already in quite a good mood after getting the opportunity to work with Ishirou and Rita and Staren on getting those wounded/poisoned villagers into better shape, and that extra day of time meant she's now fully rested up and ready to go! Thankfully, she's not one to need any kind of extra gear or weaponry. All she needs is the extra food that's already stored away somewhere in her voluminous pockets and a direction on where to go. She meets the group just before it's time to move, and her steps are light while going through the jungle (and offering food to anyone with a stomach that so much as whispers in her presence, never mind rumbling). The spooky noises have her gawking and trying to figure out where they're coming from, but more out of curiosity rather than actual safety concerns. When she hears and sees Lotus and Ahn (respectively), her face lights up and she hurries over to join them. "There you are~ Did you two make sure to fill up before coming here, too?" She asks first, then lets out a thoughtful noise once she actually listens to what Ahn says. "That mechanism is to... Stop the water, or to keep it going longer? In case we gotta find some other way to do one of those things." Kukuru presses her hands together absent mindedly as she says that.
Rita Ma	Rita speaks infrequently about her own experiences. Given how expressive she normally is, one can feel out the shape of them by the things she doesn't react to. One of those things is Lotus's grotesque eating. Instead, she says "Hi, Ms. Lotus! Are you doing okay today?" and waves eagerly. It's followed a second later by "Hi, Ms. Ahn!" and running over to hug her, then gushing over the adorable panda water bottle. "By 'upstream', I don't think she means water, Ms. Kukuru. It's more like... a tide of monsters, isn't it?" Rita accepts no guns and wears no armor. She's dressed in a white blouse (bad choice), black skirt, and black leggings, better suited for church than an expedition like this. Ishirou, she addresses with soft concern. "You've been really pushing yourself these last couple weeks, haven't you? With Scathach, and the other stuff with Ms. Rook, and now this... are you sure you're going to be okay? Not that I'm not grateful, but... nobody could blame you for taking a rest."
KNK	Rose and Violet look only a little different this time, but the differences are very noticeable. They wear grinning and grimacing (respectively) horned oni masks in a vaguely Noh style, if a little blockier, fit to their faces without apparent means. Each is carrying a great deal more equipment than last time, including a straight blade for Violet closer to her own height in total, and a collection of filled holsters from ankles to shoulders for Rose, along with cloth backpacks, tightly strapped, stuffed with mystery contents. The masks have prominent teeth, but no jaw articulation, and Rose's doesn't move as she talks. While looking up at Lotus eating, she says to Violet, "Still want to try that?" Violet has to think about it, and doesn't answer before bounding over to Ahn. Her hands have a soft-gloved texture, and having been given no signs she shouldn't, she goes for 'greeting via vigorous double-handed handshakes.' "Hello, we're here! And we have stuff!" "But just our stuff. And only what we could carry. You've got the drop points stocked, right?" The only reason Rose isn't double-checking anything is because she already did that before securing it, and she'd have to double-check the straps if she triple-checked anything now.
James Bond	Bond is dressed decidedly differently this time--Paladins-issue jungle camo fatigues, armored vest, and a velcro insignia patch at the shoulder. He's also not here on foot, this time. Bond's come on a brand new dirtbike, no doubt loaded down with 'optional features' beneath the Paladins drab paint job and outsized engine. Navigating the 'purification markers' at speed is somewhat like an obstacle course with very slim margins for failure--but even when ramping off of steep inclines or taking corners, the rider always seems just out of reach of danger. When he pulls up, Bond removes his helmet, kills the engine, and peers up at Lotus. Someone normal might look away. Bond makes a joke. "Hello, Lotus. Eating our roughage, are we?" he asks, with the corners of his mouth turned down in a wry smile. "And hello to you, too, Ahn." Bond's assault rifle clings to his vest by way of a clip, there in place of a strap. He offers a hand to shake when she makes her greeting, listening as she explains the plan. There's a glance towards Rita, and a somewhat grave nod. "They didn't use the word 'parade' for no reason, did they." He looks past Ahn and Lotus, briefly. "I suppose it's a good thing I came prepared," Bond then adds, his hand resting on the handlebar of the dirtbike. "I'm ready to go as soon as the rest of you are."
Vantablitz Remnants	"Um, yes?" Ahn replies to Ishirou, a little stupefied. "Mountains don't just hollow themselves out you know~" Lotus interjects. Her fingers disappear one by one into her terrifying maw, licking stray splatter with some equally dubious black tendril. "Right! The cave ahead isn't a natural formation. So, obviously someone built it, right? So it leads somewhere." Ahn says proudly. Lotus snickers for no discernible reason. "Whether or not there's electricity . . . kind of depends." says Ahn, scratching her cheek. "There used to be, I'm sure. But in some places there isn't anymore." A breath, then she mutters to herself, "Actually I'm more confused about how there's any electricity at all. Even a nuclear reactor should have run down by now . . ." Lotus mimics clearing her throat (which sounds like a computer crashing very very fast). Ahn startles. "Right! So! Blast doors! Yes! Probably! I mean, there are definitely doors; I just don't know if they're blastproof. I never tried. Just seems dumb." Lotus, meanwhile, snaked a tendril down to tap Kukuku on the shoulder, and stealthily acquire more food to greedily shovel into her maw. "A-ah, no Kukuru, the water is normal. It just-- Well it's mostly normal. It comes from the top of the mountain!" Rita is scooped up immediately with the kind of hug a six foot tall girl can give a five foot tall one, and then Ahn is instantly sidetracked from remembering what the fuck she was just talking about in order to relay the story of how she found a new water bottle. It takes Lotus salaciously purring "Hello, little Rita~" to get her attention again. "O-oh! Um, there's water too, but you're right; it's coincidental. It's not uncommon for exits to be built near the water, right? That way you could just boat down the mountain. We're following the flow of neomorphs back to the source. The mechanism is a security failsafe. You'll know what you're looking at when you see it; it's all actually pretty ordinary. The mountain complex used to be heavily secure for some reason, so we're taking advantage of that!" Ahn eagerly shakes Violet's hand, and then filter-off immediately thinks-out-loud "Wow . . . she's so soft . . . Oh, right, this is pretty far from our previous routs, but I've set up two checkpoints along the way, and a recall cable inside, but . . ." Lotus, gracefuly ignoring it, sprawls out on the branch so she can hold her mask-like chin in her hands and kick her feet like a movie highschool girl with her phone on her bed. "Oh don't be that way~ I prefer good girls with all their limbs attached~ Don't get mad at me for borrowing a little mass from my failed cousins~ I'd be much happier borrowing your mass as it is~ Hehehehe~" She rolls over onto her back, arms dangling. "No point in wasting it." she says to Bond. "Every so often, one of them will have something for me. A novel little pattern. A spark of some eighth-hand memory. That's what humans call 'refreshing' after they've eaten, right?"
Kukuru	"Maybe they've got... Really big batteries?" Kukuru suggests, demonstrates her clear lack of knowledge on nuclear reactors and logistics in general. She doesn't seem bothered by that, at least, and she giggles softly while getting her pockets open to bring out THE GOOD STUFF for Lotus to feast upon. There's meat, there's fried stuff, and there's melty cheeses in each pack, and there's even a container that actually has vegetables instead of meat on the off-chance there's anyone that doesn't eat meat for some reason. Rita gets her somewhat back on track by explaining the more figurative meaning of upstream here, though, and Ahn clarifies both that and the actual purpose for coming here in more direct terms. "So we're... Oh, okay. We're gonna stop the flow of the stuff coming out and causing problems, not the water itself. I get it now." She confirms with a satisfied nod, reaching over to pat Lotus' tendril gently before squatting in place to consider the plan of attack. "Sounds like... We shouldn't go too far in, then. Just enough to figure out where they're all coming from before we close it up, right? With the... Failsafe!" Kukuru sounds mildly proud of herself for coming to that conclusion, although she still looks around to see if she gets reaffirming nods at that. "We'll have to be careful not to break it while we're fighting through them all, then. Or maybe we can stick stuff into the hole if it does!" She looks at Ishirou's flight unit and Bond's dirtbike in particular at that. "And if anyone gets hurt, make sure to come back to me, okay? I can put you back together, but only if I know that you're there." She half-warns half-reassures and digs into her pockets again, slowly drawing out those oversized claws and letting them rest against the sides of her legs. Kukuru opens her mouth, pauses, then holds her hand to her face while letting out a wide mouthed yawn that isn't even remotely hidden. "I'm ready, too..."
Ishirou	Ishirou makes a thinking expression, well... "I mean, it could have formed naturally, and then someone moved their stuff into it? Or expanded it out..." Ishirou says with a thoughtful expression. "I suppose though, that it's not the case and someone carved out the mountain like a pumpkin...which is weird, but okay!" Ahn considers that parts of it still have power, and it's been long enough for a nuclear reactor not to have been able to run, so that's an interesting observation. If they get close enough he'll have to try and get some deep scans of the place to try and get some information. Maybe he can answer some questions, and perhaps they could work on a better way to contain them without either hurting them or the people in the valley. Ishirou smiles at Rita as she shows concern for his exertion. "Oh, thanks Rita. I know, but I feel like I got to see this one through. I promise if things get too bad I'll retreat back so I'm not a hindrance to anyone. ...And I promise to actually rest the moment we get back for real.." he says with a widening smile. "I have been pushing myself a lot lately."
KNK	After hearing Ishirou's question, Rose says, "There's a thought. I'd guessed 'no,' but does anything in our demon parade have ECM capability?" Violet can't eat through her mask, but she tells Kukuru, "Oh, can we save some for later? Better leave it outside. Gonna get all messed up bouncing around in there, I bet." Observing Bond's gear, "You're not the type who gets armored up, huh? Or do you have subdermals?" "Hi~ Rita!" Violet releases Ahn's hands, but not before giving her another squeeze at the word 'soft.' The firmness is all under the softness, but that's the way human bodies usually work, anyway. "Hmm, are we going against the flow, then? Fighting the stream? I usually just go around things like that." "Not sure we've got any 'good girls' here, if you're still counting out Rita," Rose calls back up to Lotus. "I'd ask for a piece of you, before signing off on 'conditionally safe to touch,' but I'm pretty sure, after talking to Ahn, I wouldn't understand anything I saw, anyway." Rose shrugs, which moves all of her strapped-on equipment without a sound. "Are we heading in, then? If you've got maps, share. I'd rather 'recon first,' either way."
Rita Ma	During the hug, Rita kicks one leg up in That Way. She gives Rose and Violet a thumbs-up after smiling up at Lotus. "See? She's really trustworthy, isn't she?" Even if she's right, Rita should, perhaps, not be relied upon for character judgements. "I don't feel like that's what humans call 'refreshing', though." Implicitly setting herself apart. "Refreshing is more like... when something has contrast? A cold drink on a hot day. Something bright and tangy with a savory meal." After thinking a bit more: "When something satisfies a need that you're used to not being met. So maybe it is the same." Being 'counted out' from qualifying as a good girl makes Rita a little bit grumpy, but she'll live. She returns Bond's nod, almost equally serious. They've operated together, even if one couldn't quite call it 'being familiar'. Answering Rose's question: "No. I think he's just... good, and careful." To Ishirou: "Well... as long as you're sure, I won't stop you. I bet you'll be a big help here, too. I just don't want you to..." The thought isn't finished.
Vantablitz Remnants	Everyone properly assembled, after Ahn has greeted Bond then and then pondered-with-words "Isn't a demon parade a Japanese thing?", and sadly informed Rose "Sorry, but I don't have a satellite uplink, and there wasn't really a point to drawing a map when it's just . . . so straight." Lotus cryptically (and smugly) answers "Just the tip~? Well that's okay too~ We'll talk~", but then senses the signal that it's time to go, and pours herself off the tree; she doesn't actually lose any coherent at all, just the boneless way she slides and contorts would make liquid cat memes blush. "Okay, um, two very important things." Ahn stops to say. "Wait, three. Just keep moving at all times. Don't stop; don't slow down if you can help it. The faster you can go while staying organized, the better. If someone falls behind, lap around. Um, two, if you get any puncturing or chemical wounds, you cannot just patch it up and leave, okay? Talk to me and I'll get you something for it. Otherwise bad things could happen. And three . . . we probably won't, but if you see something black instead of flora-coloured, get underwater or get behind a lot of rock. 'Asura' won't even notice steel or ceramics. Got it?" This time Lotus unravels herself. Or rather, she turns into a lot of very fast-moving black and white motion blur, yanks Ahn half the distance towards her, and impacts her body like a water balloon exploding in reverse, liquid blackness hardening into slick quasi-muscular fibresuit and porcelain plates snapping together with toothy crunches. Four eyeslits gained, head lotus blossomed, red markings added, half a dozen tendrils shoot out and snatch up the heavy industrial-brutalist firearms, reeling them back in and tethering them to the body. AhnLotus then says, "Let's go! Twenty minutes!" "If you go too slow I might get dangerously bored~" she turns and throws herself over the cliff edge. How they expect everyone to deal with the rather steep sixty foot drop is left uncommunicated, and probably solely to their discretion. Opaque greenery gives way to a stark, layered granite face, and jagged blue water (somehow) rapids tumbling down a vine and moss-choked ravine. To your back, a heap of semi-dissassembled boulders carved off the rock face and a large pond pooling at its bottom. Ahead of you, a long and narrow incline studded with countless boulders, winding rivers, thick roots the size of your entire body, giant ferns and flowers, massive overgrowths of wildly coloured fungus, cross-latices of vines overhead-- And about 'way too many' moving shapes that briefly blended in with the background. Shades of off-green as if they were grown out of giant stems, a little bigger than you, randomly assorted between humanoid shapes with heads unfolded like night blossoms, upper bodies oversized enough to walk four-point, spindly clawed limbs that allow climbing and scuttling, or huge slab-like growths for lower arms. Bristling fangs and shocking blue whip-like tongues are as common as still-furled growths around the spine and eyeless head. A tiny handful appear to have healed bullet wounds. A veritable mosh pit has formed around the blockage, the larger humanoids trying to bash through the rocks while the smaller attempt to climb up it. They turn all at once the moment something warm and moving enters some large, spherical radius around them, and swarm immediately. Which is a problem.
Vantablitz Remnants	Individually, they're not enormous threats, but they're far stronger and significantly faster than any 'zombie' would have a right to be, and prefer grappling wherever possible. It's much harder to avoid any one set of grasping hands in a wall all around from finding a limb, never mind something running around three inches off the ground and lunging at your legs, or freakishly somersaulting from above to land on you. Being grabbed once is asking to be grabbed thirteen times a second later, and the sheer amount of mildly superhuman strength from so many angles on different bodyparts is liable to tear someone apart before they can even do whatever it is they like to do next. The beefier kind charge right to the front and seek to break ranks by barreling right into you. The slabbed up types defend themselves by using both limbs together as a shield. Darting tongues whip out thirty feet and seek to disarm and strangle and reel back towards thorny maws. And the old adage about aiming for the head doesn't seem to mean shit; it's massive physical trauma or massive blood loss (they have that, and it's shockingly red) or nothing, and even then it's like tearing green kevlar. If they came at you one a few at a time, it'd be fairly trivial for an experienced Elite. If they all came from one direction, concentrated firepower could at least burn through them well enough. Being caught by surprise by just one would probably be bad for most. Having fifty of them in your blind spot at all times is basically a death sentence. You can't even cut their heads off and turn your back on them; sometimes they'll keep moving and randomly grab you anyways. In other words, Ahn's 'go fast and don't stop' is surely something that comes from ample experience. She's certainly taking it to heart. In tandem with Lotus, she doesn't even hit the ground, but crunches one creature to pulp under a double boot drop, then leaps off the falling corpse and parkours on to the next jutting rock, hanging vine, or available tall head. Little blooms of fire sputter all over the protective layer of Lotus' symbiotic efforts, like thrusters mounted to a henshin battlesuit, rapidly accelerating her to a slightly ridiculous pace, and optimizing all of her leaps, wall-runs, stomps, swings, and slides. The wildly oversized handgun barks loudly as she goes, each shot visible as a zigzag of light where some esoteric penetrator cavitates a chest here, pierces to the next, and then ricochets off the rocky surface behind, three or four times before hitting the water and stopping. Really, it's less the shooting and more the amount of geometry she's doing in her head that stands out.
Ishirou	Ishirou watches AhnLotus go down and he shrugs. The Flight Unit systems reinstall as he dives in after them. He's sure everyone here has some way down because this is going to need to go fast. IF someone does not, he does offer a grapple rope to help them down. He soars down but does not hit the ground taking a moment to scan his surroundings. Not a long one, but enough to get a feel. Smaller creatures swarm, but he releases a blast of electrical energy around him to try and keep them back. Though a few get through to sear and sting at his armor. If electrical magic wasn't enough, he turns to fire and swarms it around himself. He flies forward, trying to follow AhnLotus before he gets swarmed in. He does see the large one and fires a beam of Hacking at it. He attempts to biohack it, attempting to turn its senses of them from 'food' to 'preditor' to try and make it run off in a direction of fear and send it into the smaller ones. Of course, this forces him to be close to it, and he gets a wallop for his efforts, his entire HUD shaking and flashing, turning greyscale for a moment.
Kukuru	"Oh, definitely. Lemme just..." Kukuru starts scooping the unclaimed food containers back into her pockets once Violet reminds her, somehow managing to just get everything in there without a single bulge appearing on her person that wasn't already there. "I pack the stuff in real tight, but it couldn't hurt making sure nothing breaks while we're working. I know some people back home that get so hungry, they bite through plastic forks~" She sounds weirdly pleased about that last part for some reason. It's probably an ego thing. Ahn gives her warnings, and it's only the black-colored thing part that has her furrowing her brow slightly. "Uhm... Weird black stuff that's not Lotus, right?" It's an obvious question, but she's still compelled to ask. Eventually, Kukuru follows Ahn and Lotus to the cliff edge and just jumps right after them rather mindlessly, only realizing afterwards that there's a steep drop. Her landing isn't graceful in the least as she half-craters herself in the ground, but it does give her some time to reassure everyone that it's probably safe! On the plus side, the size of her claws and the amount of strength packed into her otherwise unremarkable-looking arms means Kukuru probably has a fairly easy time just tearing through the swarm as a rear guard/pocket healer. On the other hand, she's not fast, so they have plenty of opportunities to smash into her, tear chunks of flesh away, and generally inflict a non-negligible amount of damage to her and her wardrobe. It's a trade she's willing to make, though, considering the alternative of not protecting her old and new friends. The only creatures she has an easier time with are the ones trying to tongue-grab everyone. For those, she just starts ripping off tongues or pulling them into the advancing death ball to get shredded apart while pushing everyone along and making sure nobody falls behind.
Rita Ma	Rita comes to the edge of the cliff, makes like she's about to jump off a couple of times, and then chickens out, her heart irrationally racing. There's no good option for her. If anyone else wants to carry her down, she'll meekly accept. If no-one does, though, she'll take a deep breath, leap off, squeal a little on the way down, and then land on her feet in a perfect crouch unharmed, still looking a little shaken. Why was she scared in the first place? Rather than sprint straight ahead with her alarming speed, Rita tacks back and forth, heeding Ahn's advice while trying her best not to leave the slower party members behind. Monsters tend to crumple or be sent flying in her vicinity; her form is messy, but the hand-to-hand strikes she deals out cavitate flesh and shatter bone anyway. Her kill rate's pretty vanilla at the moment, but they can't quite seem to touch her, either. That's because, whenever she's in a pinch, whatever's menacing her tends to just collapse into neat deli-sliced fractions of meat with no obvious cause. It's very unlike the etiology of her unarmed strikes. If she's grabbed- and she is, a few times- the grabbing limb turns to ribbons before she can come to much harm. If she's surrounded, invisible blades hew a path out. In the worst scenarios, she has an avenue of movement the monsters don't: at a couple of points she simply pounces dozens of feet into the air, carves out a safe landing spot with that 'telekinetic' attack if necessary, and lands out of harm. By the time they've made substantial progress, blood is running off of her white blouse, not staining it, as if it were a raincoat. She looks disheveled, shaken, and decently out of breath, but the worst she's had to deal with so far is a couple of close scrapes. "Do you really come here just to train, Ms. Ahn?! This is horrible," she groans.
KNK	Rose and Violet walk over the cliff, dropping down and not so much running as occasionally kicking away from it to keep going. Rose opens up her pack along the way. There's no sight of them at the moment AhnLotus impacts. Instead, a small swarm of matte, ultraquiet rotor drones fan out over the area. Rose appears below each one of them, SMGs in either hand, firing loudly, running and dodging by a hair's breadth, leaping over areas too full of enemies to even find a place to put one's feet. The real Rose is still clinging invisibly to the cliffs above, talking quietly into her radio as she watches Violet move. To say that Violet is a blur would be to imply that she's visible at all. What the illusions of Rose do as a cheating, collision-hacking algorithmic approximation based on what the drone cameras are seeing, Violet does with her own body, and faster. She vaults and dives with uncanny flexibility and all four limbs, ignoring every enemy that isn't actually in her way, more a whisper of wind than a tangible presence. When Rose says 'left' she's already rolling, and when she says 'up' she's already jumping, air-thrusters engaged. When she can't ignore it, her blade comes out, a slightly bigger version of the same choice she'd made for cutting up the Green Knight, and so long as -- or rather, even if these enemies are as immortal as he'd turned out to be, she's confident that'll let her get through. The glow of the blade can't be hidden, the heated edge swung to cut through not just necks, but as many limbs as can be taken with a single spine-severing swing. A zig-zag pattern finally forms through the air to mark her progress, a chaotic back-and-forth like lightning that refuses to touch the ground. Once they're far enough in, she becomes visible long enough to fire a tow cable, impacting a far wall and rapidly accelerating Rose, tied to the other end, to join them, who manages to empty two magazines in the time before she has to unclip and leap away. It was Rose who laid the second tow cable to catch Kukuru and yank her along the same way, just in case she proved slothful, despite the warnings.
James Bond	"Exercise and vitamins do wonders for your constitution," says Bond to Rose with a sly smile. It shifts to a 'you're too kind' type of smile when Rita speaks up. Given the vest, it's probably safe to assume he is the type to armor up, at least somewhat--but mobility and discretion appear the priorities by a wide margin. "Got it," says Bond to Ahn, putting the helmet back on. The bike's engine growls to life and revs twice. It's time to go--he can lap back to Kukuru or Ahn if something manages to catch him out. The cliff doesn't even factor in. A plume of dirt and undergrowth kicks back from the treaded rear tire of the bike. It tears a path to the cliff, and accelerates straight off, Bond's posture shifting as the nose dips forward, down to face the terrifying drop. Hands off the handlebars, Bond aims his wristwatch behind him just as the rear wheel disappears, too. A steel-tipped grapnel impales itself into the face of the cliff. Spooling from Bond's watch, it's only the agent's control of the motorcycle and his superhuman strength that keep this breakneck descent looking like an actually decent idea. With the watch wrapped around a handlebar, held tightly under Bond's grip, the dirtbike touches down at the end of a death-defying drop. Slipping the watch back on and releasing the tether, Bond accelerates again. As they're revealed on his approach, the demons are subjected to hidden armaments--side-panels open to spit micromissiles at the bulkier kinds, the rear wheel flicks out to crush would be blindsiders attacking from low points. Tearing up the incline, Bond pulls the front wheel upwards, landing in a sharp U-turn to double back. Firing a rifle like his one-handed should be wildly inaccurate--but even with one hand on the handlebars of his bike, Bond seems entirely able to manage the recoil--or he does, until the gun is ensnared in one of those tongues. Struggling to keep the weapon in his hand, the speed of the bike and the strength of the demon pry it free, to a hissed swear from the secret agent. "I'm beginning to see what you meant!"
Vantablitz Remnants	Biohacking the first 'neomorph', 'demon', 'failed cousin', whatever is preferred, tells Ishirou a few odd things straight away. Unpleasantly so. They appear to have no real definition of 'food' installed into them, or even 'predator'. It'd be a cop-out to call whatever is going on in that bizarre nervous system 'alien', because the concepts are roughly comprehensible, but rearranged uncomfortably. The monsters that crowd around him don't seem to do so out of an instinct to consume. They regard him --and everyone else for that matter-- with an attraction more similar to a warm bed. His flesh, his pulse, his firing neurons, are respite. They are refuge. They are warmth and closeness. They feel cold and sluggish to him, seeking something invigorating and soothing. Seeking something to join with. Something they don't have, but they need in some way, to get something else. It isn't as relaxing as any of those things; it burns with a certain fever, like a drug craving, like sex, like parching thirst. There is only an (attractive? tempting?) eligibile target, and not. They dimly understand the concept of a (progenitor? harvester?) superior, but he can accomplish his ends by simply toggling off their aggression towards him where the opportunity presents, as long as he can tolerate the feeling of being seen as something to cozy up inside of and be together forever with. Carving your way 'upstream' is made exponentially easier at speed and with roughly united breadth. AhnLotus and Violet blazing ahead with fire support from Rose disrupt the press of bodies and carve foothold channels, where Rita and Bond can dive through and cut donwn dense blobs of exposed targets and turn the 'parade' porous and scattered, for Kukuru and Ishirou to clean up behind. Imagining all of this and more simply pouring out onto open ground and allowed to surge towards a village paints a pretty stark picture of why Ahn thought of 'arming the villagers even more' was a no-go. It only takes being grabbed badly once, and near-stabbed with a bright blue something that is looking less and less morphologically related to a tongue, to get an idea of the distress faced by an ordinary person. Scything your way up the ravine soon gets you the radio ping "Drop up ahead!" "Ahh, but some pairs already advanced past it. Let's clear them out~" Hearing Bond's tone through the radio, Ahn weightlessly flips over and rotates around in mid-air, pulverizes a monstrous head with a flying kick, launches herself up into the air, and is hotswap-fed what looks like a monstrously quad-stacked shotgun by a helpful Lotus tendril. At the apex of her hangtime, Ahn sights and fires, and 'suit' thrusters kick in to absorb the recoil. A solid slug crumples the upper half of the monster grabbing Bond, then explodes right behind him, pulverizing a few more and sending the bike lurching forward at road speed again. The head of the river channel comes into view over a short, stepped waterfall, but the way above is blocked. Bright new shapes of unhealthy, lurid green have crowded it out, each twice as big as before, with four visible grasping arms, and no legs to speak of, seemingly rooted into the ground, though they must have moved to get here. Body trunks the shape of melty candles splay open at the top like an undersea anemone, and from their high vantage, they react to intrusion by spewing forth heaving geysers of what almost look like glittering blue dandelion seeds.
Vantablitz Remnants	The bottom of the falls is no easier, patrolled by other shapes equally hulking, visible just above the humanoids even with four legs. Built like wolves, with the frontload of a bison instead, roving tendrils whip hungrily from their backs of braided green cables, and spear-shaped heads open sideways into toothy snarling jaws. They simply plough through the mob to get to you, either attempting to smash you against a wall, boulder, or the ground, with their flattening maws and hook teeth, or if they miss their charge, reach out and grab you with vine-like tendrils on the way past, and reel you in. Both things complicate the other. The pack of giant beasts makes it near impossible to get into the deadzone of the spitters at the base of the waterfall, and the seeds --which sting like jellyfish tentacles where they land and inject dizzying, soporific venom-- blank out higher reasoning and compel the afflicted to simply walk forward into danger. Both larger forms are obnoxious bulletproof, and take more dedicated hacking and whacking with multiple blade strikes to cripple. Doing her best to help out, AhnLotus stands still and baits out a charge from a quadruped from practice, then ducks low, uppercuts from beneath the base of the jaw, and sweeps out both front legs with the same martial arts movement, sending it tumbling into the river. The severed feet and tendril tips landing around show where Lotus extended thin black blades at the same time, just before juggling what looks like a rifle with gatling barrels over Ahn's shoulder, plugging her own black mas into it, sweeping some of the spitters up the falls with what looks like a rainstorm of glowing hot metal. Some are shredded, but all of them burst into flames easily, preventing both the spitting and a close range grab. Taking them down reveals a heap of crates, a comm beacon, strung electrical fencing, and some hideously dangerous cable catapult under a transparent plastic dome behind them at the top of the falls. Provided one can get there, ducking under the see-through glossy tarp briefly seems to cause the monsters to lose track of them, where they can access ammo, medical supplies, repair tools, very unnecessary emergency rations, and a lot of injectors filled with pink fluid. AhnLotus is doing her very best to zigzag walljump up there and clear out some of the descending seeds with sweeps of a blue flamethrower that emits from Lotus herself at the wrist. "No! That makes it sound like it's for fun!" She calls out to Rita. "We go inside! Where there's important things to do!"
Ishirou	Those surface thoughts hit Ishirou and it forces him to shudder involuntarily due to just how...CREEPY it was. Those feelings, that singular drive, just wanting to be /warm/, to be /close/, to hijack the social desires of humans and drive them to that of a drug addict. He tries to keep himself together, breathing heavily and taking some sanity loss in the process. Charing on ahead puts them into contact with tentacle wolves. They start rushing, Ishirou tries to take a flight to avoid it. Of course, then they whip those vine things around and smash him back down to the ground with record speed. Grappled, Ishirou is forced to focus his attention on another attempt at hacking. God, it's so /wrong/ he knows it, but he's got to work with what he has here. He changes the desire of those feelings, aiming to direct them to others of his kind, instead of the group. It might cause infighting and hopefully release him. Ishirou takes a moment to breathe. God that was awful. These things are awful. Though he DOES save any data he has for Ahn later. His desire to not have knowledge be lost overrides his desire to not lose sanity. Ishirou is the kind of guy who dies in Call of Chuthulu.
Kukuru	Kukuru will certainly appreciate the existence of Rose's tow cable, letting it subtly guide her forward and urge her into not falling behind too much (or not so subtly via yanking whenever her foot gets stuck in the mass of bodies). "Exercise is really good, mhm. You can't go too hard at once, but... You just gotta find your right amount!" She encourages along with Bond, still sounding as chipper-drowsy as ever even with all the violences happening around them. The warning of the drop at the river is heeded, and Kukuru actually shows some initiative for once: As the group gets closer, she actually leaps upwards once to get a better look at the bottom. "If you can't get down safely, I've got something for it!" She calls out while conjuring up a dark cloud a little off to the side of the drop, just close enough that it's barely even a detour and just far enough that it won't get in the way of anyone confident enough to make that landing themselves. It'll deposit them a good foot off the ground at the bottom, but it's still probably going to be an easier landing than just jumping right off. Kukuru joins AhnLotus in tangling with the giants at first, pitting her strength against theirs, and smashing into whatever lesser beasts happen to be nearby in the process. Her brain kicks into overdrive, though, as she keeps pushing harder and harder against the one in front of her to try and goad it into returning just as much force back at her, then promptly disappears in an effort to get it to release all that pent up force against the other nearby creatures. Kukuru herself, meanwhile, reappears above and behind that same creature. With any luck, she can start ripping those tendrils apart before she or her allies get tangled up themselves, and THEN she can worry about healing again afterwards.
James Bond	Bond gives a fervent thumbs up with the left hand to Ahn, as the freed bike whips past her. Leaving the exploded monsters behind, he lowers his profile. New shapes are reflected in the visor of his helmet. He just barely passes over a charging beast with a well-timed bunny hop, burning rubber just above the split on its head to carry him over. When the bike hits the ground, he's nearly blindsided by the tendrils, avoiding it only with a perilously low slide that has the side of his helmet inches from an accumulation of those strange, glittering seeds. On the come-up, Bond mashes a button hidden beneath a rubber facade on the handlebars as he coaxes a donut from the vehicle. It sweeps in an agile, growling circle, just as a cleverly concealed compartment opens. Adhesive, spherical fragmentation grenades are flung violently at the beasts, in tight, rapidly expanding clusters. The bike is well-armed, but well-armored it isn't. Just as Bond's about to take off again, he's knocked from the bike by a glancing blow. The vehicle is mostly crushed by the still-charging beast--and, dishearteningly, momentum carries it over the edge. Never one to be discouraged, Bond tosses his helmet breaks into a sprint through the field of exploding adhesive grenades, making a leaping dive to clear the last of it, landing in a roll, and hustling through the foliage to reach that resupply tent. Having lost his first choice, Bond is more than happy to try out one of Ahn's guns, giving the sights, action, and safety a few professionally cursory checks before arming up and fastening it to the clip on his vest.
Rita Ma	"Well, if it's horrible for you too, then... I don't know if that makes me feel worse or better," Rita murmurs. The huge charging beasts would be awful if they hit her, but she's agile enough to not get caught standing in the way, and she can match them invisible tentacle for tentacle. When the clouds of blue seeds menace her, she's very intent on not finding out what they do, and dives beneath the water to re-emerge elsewhere at preternatural speed. She isn't fond of the idea of getting close to those giant monsters herself, though. Instead, she seizes one of the smaller demons and drags it under the water with her. What follows is not visible, but the water froths for a moment and then turns red. One can imagine. When Rita re-emerges, she does so with a surprising serenity (or is it sleepwalking?). The smaller, minion neomorphs are attuned to her: she is Queen, and having 'connected' with their biology she is their Queen, and if their minds recognize no such thing then they will be forced to. "Halt" is her first command, transmitted telepathically. "Don't attack the humans" is the second. Then she points towards the larger forms, the charging wolf-bison and the spewing anemones. "Attack them." Amidst the new chaos of the civil war, Rita walks (relatively) sedately towards the glossy tarp, looking as if she were intensely distracted by something. A gaggle of the smaller monsters ward off or absorb attacks directed at her en route. "Which way from here, Ms. Ahn? ... What's that for?" She gestures loosely at the cable catapult.
KNK	Kukuru will have to keep up afterward without another cable, since the towing only lasts until the point in the route where Rose catches up with Violet. Expended magazines are dropped, guns slide into holsters that snap shut on their own, and Rose replaces it with a 'short' rifle, nestled up to her shoulder. Even with that, she lets Violet keep the lead, her blade have already been proven effective, and more so than as many bullets as she can fit in more easily portable guns. The two disappear under a charger, scattering to either side, though not entirely avoiding the whips. A grappling line carrying her back toward the ceiling, Rose points her gun one-handed, and says, "Oil." Violet charges the next to charge her, moving faster than even unthinking reactions allow, stapping her blade into the side of its spear-shaped head, and using it to pivot into a leap, twisting out again on the way. She passes into the cloud of spores, but there's not even fake skin for them to nest in, let alone an actual opening. Her mask has none. When her arm opens up to fire an aerosol-dispersing grenade, they can get in there, but that's just another holding chamber for armaments, without access to a circulatory system. It snaps shut again. She'll have to talk to Ahn about getting cleaned up, after all. Rita's seen this one before, or a trick very like it, though Rose couldn't lug in a whole MLRS, this time. First, Violet hits the anemone-like target with the covering layer of extremely flammable hydrocarbons. Then, Rose fires the underslung grenade launcher on her rifle, the incendiary hitting with both a primary, explosive impact and a long-lasting secondary burn, dealing with the problem of not being able to instantly kill this opponent by, effectively, filling their mouths with napalm. Taking those out seems to be the priority. Things that have to get close are easier for the ninjas to avoid, and they catch up at the supply camp after Rose takes a moment, invisible again, to assess the route behind them, checking for the need to loop back. At the camp, the pair are showing, at least, noticeable injury from the whips -- 'injury,' if one judged by the red stains. 'Damage,' if one paid attention to how it dents their bodies inward just slightly, but doesn't interfere with moving around. Rose takes the time to reload. Violet goes to check with AhnLotus about her arm. "Oh, do we need to clean this outside...?"
Vantablitz Remnants	The spitting stalk things with the anemone flower heads and double-humanoid welded bodies are, following Ahn's lead, extremely flammable. Way more flammable than shootable. The KNK maneuver quickly sets the upper blocking wall ablaze into a veil of heat shimmer and bubbling screams. Rita is the second recipient of slightly unnerving knowledge: not all of the monsters recognize each other as the same kind of being, even when they basically look the same, but sometimes they do when they look different. Dragging a humanoid below to feast on its hard and spongy flesh (and alarmingly human-tasting blood) causes dozens of roughly similar variations to heed her, but it's a random scatter in the crowd. She can always simply grab more, of course. It's more time and effort investment, but repeating the process many times is different from 'it doesn't work' by far. It starts to give her a feeling almost opposite to a hive, in a way. Like seeing a vast grove of redwoods and becoming aware of the fact that hundreds of them originate from the same, long-ago 'parent', yet taking hundreds of 'parents' competing with each other to build it; yet looking simply like 'a grove of redwoods' to humans; a single monolithic entity of passive, identical scenery. It's somehow 'different' to order them to attack the others, though it is not actually hard. Hijacking a majority of the humanoids without a noticeable range limit sets them into a bloody brawl with the quadrupeds, and buys the group ample time to get by. AhnLotus slides under the flexible dome last, once everyone else is herded in. It's a little menacing to see the masked face examining Violet, but it is distinctly Ahn's voice saying, "Oh. I think . . . you should be fine, as long as you can heat-sterilize it. Actually, let me--" Somehow she has a wrist tool for this, flash-ashing the seed material with a low pressure burn. "Haha . . . I didn't realize at all . . ." she mumbles out loud. There's a lot of choice for firearms on Bond's part. Ahn's long boredom and general unhappiness with modern fare is palpable with the way they've all been designed to be balanced, ergonomic, lightweight, and fed with fat-stacked horizontal magazines with colour-tipped bullets for incendiary payloads. One can only imagine what kind of experience the woman has that made her resent guns for being heavy, uncomfortable, hard to shoot, and somehow not killy enough. Lotus extends another handful of tendrils to flick clasps and pester everyone but Rose and Violet (albeit, Rita half-heartedly) with injectors, while Ahn is busy. "You don't have flowers, so you'll want these. Just press it to the skin." she rumbles. "Not far now!" she reassures Rita, which is not the answer to the question she was asked. "Oh. That's for getting out of here. I made a lot of these forever ago. If I ever got hurt really bad, and couldn't move or fight well, I could get to one of these and get away really fast, instead of becoming trapped. You can operate it with one hand from the ground, even." she declares, like that's the most normal thing for anyone to admit having thought of. "I haven't had to use one in a while though, and they're really easy to make, so I just moved some old ones here. If someone was too hurt to move at this point, we could get right out of the ravine. But since we're all fine . . ."
KNK	Getting by with more of the big guys distracted is a lot easier, though the other effect of Rita's queen-beeing (or 'being a queen') is for Violet to give her some curious looks. Rose, after watching Bond make it up, is too distracted by the fact that Violet was 'injured' to think of much else, and Violet is subsequently distracted by looking away as Ahn mumbles. With the masks on, it's difficult to tell, but the (habitually expressive) posture of her body does suggest something in the direction of fidgety embarrassment. The drones Rose had released in the first area haven't returned. Either they've been taken out as 'hostile' (perhaps unlikely, for having made no physical contact, being reasonably stealthy, and having little warmth to give) or they've finished their distraction routine and flown back up for Rose to retrieve, later. She'll find out once they're out. With the space that leaves open in her pack, she begins rearranging her loadout, taking 'more guns' rather than 'more ammo.' Violet had told Liza that Rose had a habit of losing her guns. And if these are 'extras,' anyway...
Kukuru	<J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "They want...what is driving them is warmth. To get closer to us. It's a overriding drive, almost like someone who is suffering addiction might be driven." <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "'Warmth?'" <J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Comfort, care, love..." <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "You've got to be joking." <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "That horror show out there is because those goddamned things are lonely?" <J-IC-Scene> James Bond ...sighs. <J-IC-Scene> Kukuru says, "R... Really? I'll-ow. I'll take care of it, then." That's all it takes for Kukuru to adjust her approach. Although the relatively safety of the dome is right there, she can't bring herself to abandon something that just needs the warmth of affection shown to it. It's a huge gamble, sure, but it's one she's willing to take as she slows down just long enough to catch another one of those humanoids trying to tear her apart. Instead of ripping the creature off of her, she holds it close even as it starts tearing at her. Biting back that pain and keeping her own healing nanites flowing to close up her wounds (and likely forgetting what happened with her nanites in the village), Kukuru leverages her great strength to just hold it close, binding its arms with her own, and generally providing the warmth that she's heard that these creatures seek. She even goes as far as shushing the creature and pressing their heads together, although she still keeps her face mostly away from anything that looks like a mouth. Regardless of whether it actually calms down enough for her to try bringing it inside or it just ends up dying due to the effort being waste, Kukuru eventually joins the group inside! She focuses her efforts on doing the healing thing, definitely needing quite a bit of healing herself after getting smacked around and torn up, and seeing that her allies might very well need the same.
Ishirou	Ishirou quickly dashes towards the restock zone wanting to take his breather, watching the biohacked monster start giving chase to the other large monster. Well, tentacle dogs. At least they're not all right hands...but Rita's minions are going to tear those apart eventually, so the chaos will only help them. He hits the ground and starts reloading. There isn't any reason to not, but he does take the injector from Lotus with a nod and thanks. He presses it to his skin. With a sigh, he takes this precious moment to rest. Also takes a moment to mentally come down from how horrible that was. Ishirou stares at Kukuru, "I forgot I need to be very specific with what I say," he says with a resigned sigh.
James Bond	Bond settles for something in a bullpup configuration, pocketing a magazine with those colour-tipped bullets. "Light as a feather," he quietly notes, clearly impressed. "Mm?" Lotus' tendril catches his attention. "Oh," he says with a grin. "For me? You shouldn't have." Bond takes it, rolling up his sleeve to press the injeector to the underside of his wrist. Pulling it back down and buttoning it, he watches Rose stock up in silence until about the third is put away. "Waco is about 14,000 kilometers that way," says Bond drily, pointing helpfully.
Rita Ma	Rita accepts an injector and presses it to her arm with a little grimace. Needles are scary, but better safe than sorry! "Thank you, Ms. Lotus," she says, subdued. She still has the demeanor of doing very difficult math in her head, and only halfway paying attention to the world around her. Even so, the idea of taking a ride in a cable catapult like that visibly spooks her. "You mean you've had to use them before, Ms. Ahn?" Her new minions bring her blood whenever they score a kill on their surprisingly-distant kin. One of the few things she bothers to do with her own hands is to swipe her finger along their bloodied claws, and- surreptitiously, when she thinks (probably wrongly) that nobody is looking- touch her finger to her tongue. The fraction of the small neomorphs under her sway accordingly continues to grow.
Vantablitz Remnants	Thankfully, the injectors of the automatic variety, either because those are what she had or Ahn hates needles too. There's not much of a feeling except suddenly realizing it was starting to get cold and difficult to breathe, only by the slow rush of oxygen and warmth shortly after. Ahn makes an embarrassed sound when Bond compliments the guns, and doesn't seem to mind Rose taking more; again, probably 'what would I do with them?' Then she gets to demonstrating what she was talking about. A solemn "Once." is all Rita needs to know how seriously Ahn actually takes this kind of jury rigged apocalypse survivalism, even though she has Lotus to help like this now. A chunk of cheap resin-coated metal machined flooring spins on a steel axle underneath, allowing her to crank the circular section in a direction away from the side of the ravine. The telltale hiss of simple exchange hydraulics underfoot is something that she seems remarkably cavalier about. Motioning everyone to join her in standing on it (and grabbing hold of Rita unthinkingly), she kicks a low red lever with the heel of her foot, and it does exactly what this sort of thing does with planes; massive amounts of steel cable tension sends the whole plate flying at lurching speed. The surface is grippy and the backplate makes it harder to do anything more than fall on one's ass and hurt their back, but the sensation of being instantly accelerated to Yes Fast and recklessly flung through the air as a projectile is harrowing all the same. There's just enough time to see a scattered tide of green bodies of off-coloured petals below, as the catapult skips what is probably the last third of the run, and crashes into the water near another rock face, the wide bottom absorbing the impact. Dead ahead is a section of granite mountainside that was clearly once concealed and eventually fell apart with the inquest of massive jungle roots over a century and a half, revealing, in a dark alcove behind another waterfall, an open door gaping into a pitch black tunnel. Shockingly, there are no 'demons' around here, for the time being. Rita can now sense many that belong to her close by, if she cares to summon them and wait several minutes. However helpful that would be for a blind walk into a corridor that . . . It's a lot like a ship. The flat beams, low ceiling, metal panel walls, the flooding lips at the base of doors and corners. It creaks and groans faintly with the sounds of what one should hope is regular temperature stress, but it's so enclosed and winds at so many right angles that it feels like you can hear every ping and drip and settling beam for miles. Ahn has wearable flashlights to give if nobody else can solve the darkness issue, as sunlight disappears instantly around the first corner. Signage was once painted on the walls in English, but only the faded scraps of single letters and smears of arrows remain. Old fluorescent lights are dull and dead, embedded in the ceiling. The angles are of a small branch corridor; probably a secret personnel exit, given the river. It rejoins a main causeway almost immediately, which is really like a ship. A dorsal corridor, to be exact, which should run the entire structure, though rather than a bulkhead up ahead, the run is blocked by signs of wide and flat cargo elevator, operated by massive, outdated levers and fuseboxes, albeit you can't see the lift itself from the start.
Vantablitz Remnants	You're forced to walk through shin deep water; the corridor is flooded with ice cold, not quite stagnant water. Every available surface is colonized with a layered tapestry of interlocking vines, getting thicker as they climb up the walls and blocking out the ceiling. Massive flowers of fifty different varieties bloom at random from what should be steel bulkhead and the rusted, mossy hulks of what were once gun turrets, no doubt responsible for the faint glitter of pollen motes in the air, reflecting off the dark water like a starry sky. The air smells shockingly sweet, in a way that feels both inviting and deeply dangerous. The groans of steel are absent now, replaced by some kind of sustained 'tone'. One that you can't quite hear, but know is there all the same, rising and falling in some fully random yet harmonious way, like windchimes. Some of the flowers are ambulatory. Green creatures sort of like shell-less crabs, host to a single large blossom, detach from the walls and attack the head, but they are actually trivial threats, killable with a crowbar or a lead pipe. They stop appearing when you advance far enough down the corridor to see two interruptions to the surreal little cave world. One is that the vines break just enough to see a thick, blastproof glass window, short and long and rectangular, set into one wall. It's smudged with a frosting of pollen residue, but looking through it, you can clearly see a glimpse of a three-wall control panel desk filled with defunct computers and switches like something out of NASA, flora having completely overgrown old pleather chairs and turned them into mossy cairns. The room is packed with vibrant colour from a three dimensional field of wildflowers within it. Blooms and shelf mushrooms emerge most densely from irregular greenish surfaces that briefly look like more monsters were simply buried under the growth. Looking further, what should be a mound of earth for flowers, a rotting log supporting bright caps, a twisted trunk and branches replete with vines and blossoms, have just enough shape to register in the brain, instinctively, as 'anomaly'. Looking a little closer, letting the eyes roam and the pattern matching brain work, details slide into focus and register as human body. Bodies, plural. Prone or seated or frozen standing. Many are two at a time, lumped and welded together and turned into off-green backdrop for the thriving flora to grow on. Hoping that the shapes are coincidental feels like a little too much.
Vantablitz Remnants	The second discovery is that the lights are still on over that elevator. Near the end of the corridor, you can finally see past the scattered, thicker vines that dangle from the ceiling and split into the water like tree trunks and roots. A row of four artificial yellow orange beams shines warmly from above, brightly illuminating the airport pollen, making the open lift platform an island of visual heat and familiar safety in the dark. Save for the fact that it's occupied. The thing occupying it could only be mistaken for scenery for a second, but a 'demon' it must be, when it heaves and quivers at the closest arrival. It's like an unholy pipe organ made of different kinds of massive pitcher plants, all having grown from a single pod with an unfortunate resemblance to a single giant human head, shoulder, and arm, lying on the ground. In the cramped, flooded corridor, there's not much room to move when the pitchers begin bombarding anything warm with huge globs of reddish liquid, shot with considerable speed and volume and not much accuracy, smelling of sickly sweet rotting petals The liquid itself is clearly extremely powerful acid, easily melting through steel in seconds, however it appears to be neutralized by mere water, given the way it doesn't eat through the floor, and the face that it only burns flesh flesh enough to turn red and sensitive. Where it's neutralized though, it turns thick and sticky, like quickly hardening sap, leaving hypothetically unarmed and unarmoured individuals easy pray for the carpet of rooting tendrils that spreads from its base to ensnare them, drag them towards one of the pitchers, and presumably do exactly what pitcher plants do with bugs, probably. There's certainly no way of using the elevator without a boss battle, since the mass must be several tons and neatly occupies the entire lit platform. Merciful that there's no good reason to go deeper.
Ishirou	Ishirou is launched with the group, barely having enough time to steady him-oh no wait, he doesn't and bounces off something and crashes face first into the ground a moment later. With a groan, when the ride stops he peels himself off the ground and staggers, shaking his head. He checks himself for injury and just notices that it's only a mild concussion. He injects himself with something to keep going...now was not the time to lose focus. Moving through the first part of the facility, the sweet smell gets him on edge just slightly. He knows some plants use that to draw in prey, and it wouldn't go amiss that there would be ones that do that here too. Though when one of the flower head crabs flies at him, and he shoots it with an arm-mounted gun, he sighs a little relief. Okay so it's just these things, right? He continues on, shooting as he needs to, and presses to the control room. Here there was electricity running through it, well at least partially. He does a quick scan to look for anything he could hack into, just in case there might be something that hasn't been able to be pulled out or some way to expand his field of vision in this place. Though that is interrupted by the Pitcher Head. That was absolutely horrifying. What's more horrifying is the acid, which causes him to scream and roll around on the ground. Which thankfully saves his bacon because of the water. He blinks, realizing what happened...only to get snatched by a vine. Shit shit shiiiii Ishirou instead tries to rocket off, aiming to put distance between himself and the plant, bouncing off a wall and hitting the side of another. Getting back up after a moment of being stunned he levels a barrage of micro missiles at the thing, aiming to try and counter acid with fire. The missiles also release a napalm-like payload. To set it on fire.
Rita Ma	The terrifying launch jolts Rita out of her queenly fugue. She yelps in terror when the platform accelerates and clings to Ahn's arm so hard that it might leave a hand-shaped bruise through Lotus's armor. Even when they land, and she slowly opens her eyes to find herself still alive, her grip slackens but doesn't fully let go. "Auuuuuh... That was really, really scary, Ms. Ahn. I can't believe we didn't die," she groans. "We don't have to ride one of those again on the way out, do we?" The controllable 'demons' aren't close enough to expediently join the party, and Rita doens't feel like hanging around, so instead she directs them to gather outside the compound: they'll help cover the group's escape later. Once more, something that ought to scare a fraidy-cat like Rita fails to: navigating 'something like the ruin of a metal ship' is totally within her comfort zone, even if a little eerie. The flower-crab-things startle her badly the first few times, but once she realizes how easily they're dealt with just by punching them, she doesn't get quite as spooked. While Ishirou bravely battles the awful acid plant, Rita is transfixed- and visibly horrified- by the flowering corpses on the other side of the blastproof window. "That's where we need to go, isn't it, Ms. Ahn?" She says it despairingly, but she already knows it's true. Rita might be able to punch through the window, but she'd definitely hurt her hand if she tried and failed, so instead she rips away the vines until she can find the proper door. Once inside, she has to ask Ahn what switches to pull (while very purposefully not looking down at the floor), but wants to do it personally anyway. Big switches are just fun like that.
KNK	Violet clutches Rose on the very quick ride over, screaming until she's abruptly muted. Rose just braces. Both lurch with the impact of arrival. The ninjas have their own lights, which they switch on, light-pricks appearing around the edges of their masks, after AhnLotus does. There's about a minute of Violet looking around and gesticulating silently before she seems to realize something, and then just says of the water, "It's cold." The gestures had suggested more to say, but she leaves it. "So, this is hell." It could be, but isn't quite, a question, delivered as Rose blasts a flower-crab with a stubby pistol that is also, apparently, a flechette-loaded shotgun, painting her target over the ceiling. Violet ends up getting stuck to a window for a bit, looking at (what might be) bodies. After a "C'mon," she's back on her way. They find a... something. It notices them. There's no need to say anything -- the ninjas disappear. They're really best at that sort of thing. Moving in the water would at least make ripples, but running along the walls only makes noise that echoes throughout the ship-like halls. Not having a protective layer of well-moisturized skin, neither of them can afford to be hit by the acid at all. It would just eat all the way through, if one of the non-metallic layers didn't foul it, and it's not worth betting. "Ice." "In five." Wider spaces would have been better. Clear ambush circumstances would have been ideal. Lacking either, it takes the full five seconds before Violet drops back into visibility, appearing in a splash, hands held in front of her like she was finishing a hand seal. Four fingers steepled, there's a little spark between her palms. Her left arm opens up, unfolding, ports in her long 'glove' sliding to barely reveal a series of nozzles, coiled tubes rising just above a section of silvery muscle fiber. All of that is much harder to see a moment later, after the cloud of chemical and ice vapor fills the space in front of her. She hoses down the pitchers with a full resevoir of pressurized, endothermic reactants, sapping heat until she's empty, and then leaps back. Rose sets a pair of Ahn's guns in her hands, the closest she could find to LMGs in the arsenal of someone with a far greater preference for ergonomics and not dislocating shoulders, braces herself against the wall, and unloads. 'Brittle' is one way things can end up, without the flexibility afforded by liquid content. Drying out this environment with fire would have taken too long.
James Bond	Bond's wading is quiet, a small flashlight pinned to his protective vest. Those few crab-like growths that manage to get in are summarily dealt with by brutal, efficient knifework. Approaching the first of the two interruptions, he quietly lets his eyes sweep over the bizarrely vibrant indoor greenery. His frown goes from concerned to shocked, his face pale as he tries to ignore the signals his mind is sending him. Turning away, to look at literally anything else, he finds a shade of the familiar. Only a shade--drowned out by the heaving, glaringly 'familiar' presence. Opening up with Ahn's assault rifle, Bond rolls clear of a red globule, hand drifting from the foregrip to reach for his knife. A flick sends it across and through an encroaching tendril. More of them approach--more than he can cut down with the knife. But not more than he can cut down. "Cut it out," he unbearably puns, as a brightly burning industrial-strength blue laser cuts through the monster's grasping tendrils in a broad, sweeping stroke.
Vantablitz Remnants	Rita only has to cut a few sheets of growth off the walls to find where a door is sensibly placed. It's heavy, metal, and has multiple watertight locks, but is evidently rustproof, and cutting through it isn't beyond her means. Ishirou detects no wireless signals, but can connect with the small handful of functioning 'hardened electronics' built into the console, rather than desktop computers. The operating system is, as far as he can tell, a bastard offshoot of Windows 2.1. Bespoke. Very old. Maybe military. Data storage is largely irrecoverably corrupted, but he can access the elevator, lights, fire suppression, alarms, automatic defenses, security releases, and decontamination; several of those don't work. It's not tough for him to override electronic locks on the manual releases though. This allows Rita to get inside and simply flip switches and crank levers. Assuming she can read American English (and break a glass button cover), it's actually very simple, only requiring Ahn to tell her what 'block' this is (by memory? somehow?). he pitcher plant monstrosity, meanwhile, doesn't exercise much in the way of targeting priority. Or aim. Trusting it'll simply splash the entire corridor with continued salvos, the grasping vines mostly seek targets by water disturbance and body heat. Acid melts missiles and missiles vapourize acid in the crossfire. A blue laser pierces through the water and slices hungering creepers. Napalm and incendiary rounds cause the upper body to catch light, hissing and crackling in eerie, convulsive silence, but the lower organs are still too damp. Flash freezing chemistry takes advantage of it. That single giant arm suddenly lurches to life and reaches out to grab Violet, whether to crush her or take her along unknown; AhnLotus blurs into the way and tackles it to the opposite wall with an outer arm strike that throws off multi-coloured sparks, and pins it there with spears of branching, corrosive blackness. Blowing the frozen hulk to smithereens with concentrated gunfire and missile barrages rapidly rolls through three boss healthbars and turns most of the monster into a crumbling heap of semi-frozen flesh and blazing tendrils. The freed up controls can do two important things. One is sending the elevator away, plunging back down into the mountain. Two is re-engaging 'tier five quarantine', blaring a loud, grating alarm klaxon from further in, where something still works, and rolling a two minute countdown timer before shutters start slamming closed one after the other. Enough time to hustle out if you're fast, and emerge back out into the bright heat of the mountainside, just as the last slab of glossy ceramic (why not steel?) slams shut behind you. For a second, it really sounded like an extra set of footsteps was pattering around behind you in there. But nothing bad happened, so who cares, right? Neither Ahn nor Lotus thought to mention it.