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Lilian Rook     Leaving behind the slightly surreal serenity of the Overture region's Beachhead area is a mixed bag of feelings. Though it finally allows allows you to leave behind the claustrophobic paranoia of what must be fifty thousand players staked out in less than a hundred square kilometers, watching you from the roadside and clustered in resource spawning fields in defensive huddles, it also distances you from the empty stretches of genuine, if eerie, beauty, where you were able to quietly appreciate the simulated breeze, the freshwater babble, the pink and gold trees, and the rustic paths littered with spooky-quaint ruins.

    The pass up ahead is considerably less of an entracing, fresh experience to deal with. Running up against the norther 'wall' of Beachhead, where the rocky slopes steeply rise once again and hem the valley in with striated white and amber cliffs, following it easy to one of Beachhead's two exits (discounting Clef itself, according to the map data you've bought), your destination looms into view well before you reach it, thanks to the fantastically unrealistic draw distance (actually, that doesn't seem to be possible on the specs of the lower end systems the game was released on). At first it seems only a vast, ominous shadow, clogging up the path between the narrowing of the cliffs, and then . . .

    This ruin is far different than the others. Far larger, but not intentionally. It looks as if the original structure once spanned the chasm and then collapsed into it under its own weight, from the middle first. A small minority of the ruins in Beachhead had been made of ancient, weathered metal, but almost the entire hulk before you is a mosaic of slate grey, rust red, and green-blue verdigris. It's impossible to tell what it originally was. Now it's only a fortress redoubt of monolithic slabs.

    A winding dirt path zigzags between the last dense trees of the zone, like weeping willows festooned with cherry blossoms and gold leaf; theoretically a perfect ambush spot, though it seems unlikely any players would be so bold at this point. Several branching creeks bleed out from under the ruin and conjoin into the river further away. You can easily see where a 'natural' gap in the rust-speckled blue-grey wall ahead of you has been made by the ancient collapse, triangular and tall enough to enter without stooping under, but pitch black inside.

    Your map updates. The text Overture ~ Derivation Bridge appears in your view, and slowly fades out. The sounds of sparse wildlife completely disappear.
Friz Savvy: Ruins. Ruins, according to our stakeout, can contain salvage.
Moxie: But if we want to get that, we're gonna need tools.
Dirt: Maybe someone here has tools?
Grit: Unlikely.
Savvy: So, if we're heading into a *heavy* Ruin, we need to...
Moxie: We need to remember to be aware! Ruins contain Ruin Bosses!
Grit: Dangerous.
Dirt: We gotta be on the lookout.

    "Watch for something called Ruin Bosses, interviews said they were dangerous." Friz scratches her face as she wanders the winding path up to that ruin. "But if we're going to open up the local economics (to salvage opportunities (that is, for personal survival)) we need to get in there and figure out a way to extract high-value salvage. And we need tactics (so expert salvagers can survive) too..."

Savvy: Alright, Moxie, head towards the ruin. Dirt, find us some of those harvest points from before, we need to figure out what's what with those resources.
Dirt: Got it, boss.
Moxie: As long as we don't run into a Ruin Boss...
Forte 'Overture ~ Derivation Bridge` gets added to the queue of entries Forte will update on the wiki later. There's a lot to update, from locations to new game mechanics to even the new organization Eryl Fairfax seems to be putting together in the base town. He'll work on compiling and updating that information later, though - there's still a lot to do in the game before he logs out.

One of those things that he's *not* doing is accepting, denying, or in any way interacting with any friend requests that have been sent to him, despite Bercilak's badgering.

One of those things that he *is* doing, however, is chasing after the trail of an advanced player. For reasons that are not entirely altruistic, Forte's strategy is to gain power quickly - with the goal given of being able to challenge whatever obstacles in the game might stand in the groups way. If he has to mug and maybe drain an advanced player a bit, that's simply the trolley problem cost of trying to save everyone else as quickly as they can.

It has nothing to do with the desire to challenge someone ten levels above him, really.

Forte continues on into the ruins, taking the vanguard spot among whatever people follow along with his plan. While he's trying to mind his sight lines as he moves, he's mostly relying on the advantage of making basically zero sounds as he moves - no footstep sound effects, and no ambient noise from breathing, either.
Ishirou Ishirou ended up catching up with at least Friz. Though possibly Lilian and Rita depending on if they go with Friz or not. "Ruin bosses huh? Well that tracks, bosses are often common in dungeons..." Ishirou considers. Though he's half distracted as they move out. He watches his map fill out, trying to see if he can detect any resource nodes (depleted or not) on the way.

If they run into a resource node, he takes a moment to try and excavate it. If they can find a depleted one, he attempts to use his skills to find out more information about it. What it was, what/when caused it to be depleted, and if/when it will respawn. If they can get more information on this stuff they'll be able to coordinate.

"Sooo...I see a way forward, want me to start digging around for any potential other ways in and other things or just...head into the obvious hole?"
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Upon arriving at the dirt path, Phreak opens his menu and checks his map. "We gotta get past this place before we can get to that next marker. But..." He nods at Friz. "Yeah. 'Ruin Bosses.'" Clicking his tongue, Phreak runs his non-prosthetic hand through his now-shoulder-length hair. The clockwork prosthetic shifts into the shape of a bulky, cumbersome 'hurlant.' "Berc, you ready?"

     "Yeah, just a sec." The Green Knight cracks his neck, shouldering the hefty greataxe. Before he advances, he opens up his friends menu and accepts some of the requests from the players in Clef. "Alright, all good. Let's go." Forte makes much less noise than him--his armor clanks noisily, and his glowing eyes are for sure a giveaway. This is fine, however--"I'm all about that hole, sib," says Bercilak, clapping Ishirou on the shoulder as he passes.

     Bercilak allows his heavily physical-slanted Traits to draw attention to himself, making no effort to muffle his footfalls, cover his eyes or halt the clinking of his armor, that the more subtle or at the very least 'ranged' tilted among the party can open up on anything that decides to jump out.
Xion 'Xion', still a slider blond, had disappeared into the crowd of newbies and milling-about people when the group had dispersed into the starter zone. She had gotten better, with people's support, but she demurred with 'I need some time alone', and disappeared into the sea of people.

It was vague when she left cohesion with the group, but easy to spot her back with the gang, even if it's odd looking for blond crown braids instead of a pixie bob of black.

With a broadsword belted (she has acquired Several Belts) to her waist, !Xion simply hangs around in Friz's shadow like a particularly sticky and silent Watson. Ishirou gets the first gaze at her, lingering in the detective's party, and with their arrival, Xion's suggestion for action:

"Well, it's a game, and a cave in that game built for players right out of the starting zone. If it's a brige we shouldn't cross, we'll just run the other way. But the people in the know ran this way, right? So..."

Shrugging with broadened shoulders, a simple up and down with a shake of the head, !Xion looks at the two Paladins and smiles faintly. "If it gets difficult, just stay behind me."
Kirishima Having a chance to explore the game world without being cramped in with so many other people is a much welcomed breath of fresh air. Kirishima even goes as far as pulling down her mask, pausing briefly to actually pay attention to whether that feels any different from breathing with the mask on in-game.

Spying the ruin in the far distance from where she's looking at the entrance/exit to the Beachhead region, she squints as she notices something off. It's far, but she can see the ruins clearly. "Wasn't this supposed to run on potatoes?" She asks aloud while approaching the ruins, practicing jabs idly to get a better feel for her body's limits here compared to her own. It keeps her occupied until reaching the ruins proper, and then she looks back at Clef just to see if she can still see the city just as clearly.

"If we run into a boss, then we might have some trouble at such low levels. Let's keep an eye out for anything else we might be able to fight on the way." She suggests after Friz's warning, following her lead and then taking point with Forte afterwards. She eyes that gap in the wall that could totally be an ambush point, and her curiosity gets the better of her as she heads right for it.

If anything tries to kill her, she can at least bank on stacking her stats in her defenses should her reflexes fail her.
Rita Ma      Rita is happy to soak in the eerie, peaceful beauty of the landscape. It's hard to find her without a smile on her face the entire way to the ruins. The only time she distracts herself from the quiet splendor is to stand on her tippy toes, reach out, and pleadingly ask Lilian:

     "Ms. Rook? Can I touch them?"

     It's the metal of the ruins, more than anything else, that fascinates her. She touches the patches of color, rubbing one with her thumb to see if any will flake off. "Iron is red. Copper is green. I've never seen anything that's both. I wonder what this is? ... I guess it wouldn't have to be anything real. That's weird to think about, isn't it?"

     Rita slips through the entranceway, instinctively trying to take point alongside Bercilak even though that's now a really bad idea for her. Only after she's taken a few steps inside does she seem to realize that she cannot see in the dark. The little spark of light in her chest is only meager illumination.

     "Oh. Um. Does anyone have a flashlight?"
Ishirou POD makes a clicking sound, like a flashlight, and produces a light in a small cone infront of it.
KNK     Violet has to get down from the cliffs, first, which means Rose has to head partway up to meet her, and spot her descent. That's more work, over all, but it's massively safer, and Rose wasn't about to head out on her own.

    <J-IC-Scene> KNK. Violet says, "Oh... I progressed a trait. Is that a good thing?"

    "It's fine. You can switch them around or something, right? But 'Divine Tuning'... the system expects us to be purposeful about it. Or else, we'll get stuck with... whatever else it was set up to do." Rose's expression twitches.

    "This one sounded good... maybe."

    "Yeah... maybe. Poking at things to see how they work is something we'll have to do, either way, or we won't make any progress, here. Can't just get on the grind like those gamers out there."

    The two talk about the farming groups along the way. Mostly, Rose talks, and mostly, she talks about how poorly equipped middle-class kids are for being thrust into gang warfare, relative to their typical self-assessment.

    'Oh. Um. Does anyone have a flashlight?'

    "Didn't you get a pack with torches?" Rose stops to look inside hers, then back into the darkness. "Hold on. Let me see if I can..." And she starts walking ahead, packs stored away again, mentally attempting to strain nonexistent not-muscles that would, usually, switch her vision to a non-visible spectrum. If the game gave her mysteriously fucked up targeting-reticle eyes, she figures, it probably gave her some kind of vision enhancement, that might be equivalently useful.
Haseo      Getting away from the crowd of new players is nice. Real nice. Even though Haseo knows the point of an MMO is social interaction, he much prefers to play in smaller groups. Well, it's his second preference, his first preference is to play by himself and not talk to anyone, but that's not on the table at the moment given the whole death game situation that needs investigating.

     "I doubt they're that dangerous. I mean, maybe they are to them, but I think we're built differently enough to where they won't really stop us."

     With the ruins in sight, Haseo simply brushes aside Friz's warning as he begins picking up the pace. After all, if they're looking for answers, they'll definitely be found in the ruins and not anywhere else.
Lilian Rook     "Hey. Asshole. Join the party." Lilian calls out to Forte, none too subtly, re-sending invites to whoever wasn't joined up before. "The XP isn't split evenly; it's better than that. And we don't know what Discovery does. If you run in there and start trying to get everything for yourself, we're going to break your knees." she says, apparently still not de-stressed from Clef.

    Scanning the outside shows only two rather pitifully sized nodes that can be harvested for scrap with the salvage skill, mostly there, it seems, to give an idea of what can be found inside. Ishirou doesn't have the skill, though Friz appears to have it at a miniscule level. There's simply no significant reward without risk, though; the players who have been through this way were more than sufficient to strip the show-nodes. Less than an hour ago, even. The timer is a rather ungenerous four hours in total.

    Lilian gently puts her gauntleted hand on top of Xion's head, refuses to elaborate, and says "This seems like the area people are intended to graduate into. Whoever got through here is either lucky, armed with foreknowledge, skilled in combat, or blitzed the early areas fearlessly and got everything before it was hunted to extinction. Let's not forget that his is still a videogame. It'll be laid out as a challenge, not realistically. And being conservative is indeed an option."

    Kirishima doesn't find much of a difference as far as breathing goes. Her face feels less warm and the air smells less like cloth, but otherwise the cosmetic item doesn't inconvenience her in any meaningful way. Lilian shrugs with a little click-clack of armour, but the corner of her lip twists in thoughtful dislike. "Whoever is running this farce must certainly have far more advanced central server and processing ability than the markets the game was sold to, even simply to build a world this big with a phantom studio."

    Lilian is, unfortunately, very bad at refusing Rita. She makes a face, then a noise, then a big, theatrically annoyed sigh. She says "Fine. I assume you have some kind of theory you need to test?" and then tries to retain some sort of patient dignity at Rita poking her head. There are only a couple of small tines and a single fork to poke at, but they don't really seem to feel like either velvet or bone, more like rough-textured glass. Lilian can only stand it for a few moments before resorting to batting Rita's hand away with an "Aaaa no no that feels so strange!"

    She has roughly the same thought as Rose. "Indeed. They had two hour timers as well. Let's . . ." Lilian begins, before betraying that she is not actually an epic gamer, by not stopping to think of finding an inventory menu, but rather, simply reaching into her beginner backpack and lighting a torch manually.

    Because it is, indeed, pitch black inside. Rose's glowing eyes show her a heat gradient in shades of eerie purple and gold, and Ishirou's Traits ping the surroundings for him in sonar waves of green, but most are left to rely on their eyes.
KNK     While Rose, whose vision is weird but functional, heads in to begin stealth recon operations, Violet tries poking at menus, not really paying attention to what's in front of her (because she's lagging behind to stay near Rita and Lilian). In particular, she's looking for graphic setting controls, after hearing Rose and Friz talk about it.
Forte Forte takes the party invite. (He just isn't taking friend invites.) When Lilian makes the not-to-subtle explanation of what happens to EXP hogs, he meets her gaze for a moment... and then simply nods to her, and then continues on.

At the darkness inside the cave, he falls back a bit, having to rely on those with better eyes and light sources. His glowing hand helps illuminate the immediate area when he slots the trait on, at least, so he's not stumbling around...

... and as he's measuring how much light the Red Grasp trait gives off, he glances at one of the mining nodes.

Experimentally, he reaches out with his glowing hand, trying to see if he can grab onto and absorb the node itself, and see if doing so would yield any useful data. (Or if the system would even let him do something like that.)
Lilian Rook     The interior of the Derivation Bridge quickly swallows all light and found from outside after only a couple of sharp turns. The breeze and rustling of leaves is replaced with the dull, breathy echo of slow-moving air scraping over vast, resonantly metal halls. Blue-grey metal sinks deep into the wet earth and poses walls at jaunty angles, rough ceilings formed of collapsed, overlapping tiles and beams, no gap particularly big enough to be helpful. Rust flakes from the surfaces and dances throught the air when touched, but it seems to be purely cosmetc. Motes of dust speckle the islands of torchlight and glow in flashlight beams, and the trickling sound of water adds to the gloomy cave atmosphere.

    More importantly, it is actually a sort of intuitive positioning conceit; from the outside, the water had run due east under the ruin, so you can easily tell what way you're facing, and how far you are to one side, by simply listening and concentrating. Players don't typically have automapping abilities, after all. It doesn't take long to wander into wide, rocky rooms filled with shallow sandy pits, or to stumble on the muddy banks of murky water, half-concealing flooded tunnels, the odd sharp split in the earth and sharp decline leading deeper down, and the much rarer rusted ramp leading upwards. Locked and jammed and sediment-sealed doors, oddly rounded and screw-studded, are common, some simply comsetically impassible, others requiring some unknown means to get past.

    'Less than an hour', on the resource nodes, indicates the last time players came through here, and that appears to have been enough time to respawn everything (or at least most of it) near the start of the ruin. You're quickly subject to your first encounters. Rottweiler-sized silty grey crustaceans with stalagmite backs unbury themselves from the sand and snap unwieldy, menacing pincers, spawning in groups of anywhere from three to twenty, depending on the size of the room. Vast, steely blue centipedes with scissor jaws crawl out of gaps and rafters, down walls and up through grates, larger and rarer and coming two at a time.

    Though the skittering and clattering sounds of chitin and carapace are unnervingly realistic, the faint ghost of a green and blue bar hovering near the Siltsnappers and Skittering Shades do at least reassure you that these are AI enemies. They prefer to posture and menace, hiss and snap and shiver feelers, for a short while after spawning, though they cancel their phobia-inducing animations if someone comes close, or attacks from range. And, much less like a normal MMO, they are aggressive and persistent, not bound to a tether range, and attacking quite frequently, though thankfully their attacks are quite telegraphed.

    The first few large sand pits are perfect places to experiment, where even falling doesn't hurt much. The narrowest corridors only permit the handy use of short weapons and spears, however. A flooded tunnel is the first major branch, with a steep, narrow decline opposite of it. Past the two of them, a fallen beam allows egress up to a second floor, where a single door is usable.
Ishirou POD provides a small light to those who are near it, though it's...well it's a flashlight basically. It's better than nothing but not going to make the ruins not dark. Ishirou, on the other hand, can see more or less fine because of his eyes. Which, remember, are glowing and can be seen no matter what direction you're looking at Ishirou.

Ishirou logs the nodes the best that he can, he'll have to see if he can make maps with his skills. Maybe he can..? For the moment, he'll instead just continue to map out things as they come. Rita also mentions the weird materials of the ruins.

Ishirou attempts to see what information he'll get back from the materials of the ruins. Can they be salvaged? What are they? Is it just generic 'can't mine this forever block'?

Inside, Ishirou is more active, attempting to map out the area around them and trying to keep an eye out for monsters that might ambush them. He also draws his rapier at this point, knowing that a fight was likely to break out down here.

This precaution is rewarded as snappers and shades start attacking. Using a light weapon, he focuses on waiting for the creatures to attack and then focusing on dodging and then counterattacking. He hasn't considered this strategy before, but now it seems...interesting. He'll have to practice in the real world sometime.

If given time he'll also check to see the various ranges on the monsters. How far away can you attack them before they'll rubberband back? What is their precise aggro range? The timing of their attacks. Things he can record and teach to others.

Is there a skill for teaching others..?
Lilian Rook     Inside the ruin is a different matter for resource nodes. The water appears to have zero places to fish or harvest whatsoever, but each large rocky chunk is a potential mining spot, the sand pits have dozens of areas that can be prospected with simple scouting skills, in addition to salvage and quarry, for low odds of random minerals, scraps, and odds and ends, albeit quite time consuming and impossible while under attack. Cracks in the walls and fallen heaps of metal can be scavenged for recently respawned resources, the largest ones yielding ten or more rolls.

    Data absorption seems to be adequate for draining them, but with a bizarre quirk: the drop rolls once and then gives Forte the full allotment of only that result.

    Most of the ruin is uninteractive 'walls and floors and ceiling' to guide dungeoneering, but apart from iron, steel, aluminium, nickel raw metals, and scrap bolt, scrap shard, scrap tile, scrap bar, scrap rope drops, in abundance, one can stumble across empty bottles, collapsible shovels, collapsible picks, empty lamps, iron pylons, steel darts, simple repair kits, simple prospect kits, and small handfuls of 5-50 Cune, and similar work-themed items and theoretically useful detritus. A 'mining' thematic seems more or less implicit.
Forte As far as combat goes - Forte brings out the quarterstaff he picked up as his tutorial-required melee weapon, and gets a grip with both using it and with the Tuning mechanic. After some experimentation, he opts for a Harmony tuning, with the intent of trying to pierce through an enemy's clarity protection instead of bothering with wearing it down.
Rita Ma      A theory to test? Rita visibly comes up blank, but then nods firmly anyways. "Yeah! Pleeease, Ms. Rook?" Her face lights up in pure delight at that 'fine', and she makes gentle grabbyhands at the nearest antler, stroking it in quiet awe.

     "Wow. I expected it to feel like bone, but it's more like... pottery? Or wood? It's so amazing!" Of course she knows what bone feels like. Shudder to imagine why.

     She lets go only reluctantly, but pries a little more: "Mmmm. How do you mean, 'strange'? Like strange-bad, or strange-good? Or just overwhelming?"

     Later on: "Oh! That's a good idea, Ms. Rose! Here, can you help me light it?" After rummaging in her little satchel for a torch, she tries to tap it to Rose's existing flame to skip messing around with anything like flint and steel.

     That just means that, a minute or two later, the awful arthropod monsters are better-illuminated. She's in the middle of foraging from one of those scrap nodes when a huge centipede erupts from a grate near her, and she's quick to fumble for her spear and brandish it. "Ah-!! Don't worry! I can-"

     Rita thrusts. She clumsily scores a glancing hit. Her spear simply deflects off of its carapace. She is paralyzed, wide-eyed, by surprise or fear or maybe both. The centipede's aggro grace period has run out.
Lilian Rook     The options menu allows for graphical accessibility options, ostensibly oriented at issues like colour blindness and motion sickness, but all options that could theoretically change someone's level of immersion are emphatically greyed out.

    To those paying attention, nodes are not instanced, however, the HUD scroll to the side indicates that items are being multiplied based on a dice roll, and added to a party pool. The Discovery stat appears to be the multiplier. The mechanics to retrieve items from the pool are unclear.
Friz Grit: Get your weapon out.
Moxie: The gun?
Grit: The baton.
Dirt: Can't see past the light radius.
Moxie: Baton it is. We should double our light.
Savvy: If we split into two light-sources, ranged combatants can give backup with less risk. It's a good idea.

    Friz reaches into her own pack (now lining the inside of her jacket) and retrieves a torch, raising and lighting it. "I can hear the water..." She mutters, not explaining further. Especially not once the cave crabs are found.

Moxie: Going for the melee!
Dirt: Catching three to twenty! Stack them up, don't get swarmed!
Grit: They're too large to manage.
Dirt: Slow, though... Chief, centipedes! Pairs!
Grit: We are precarious and new.
Grit: Kill them as if your life depends upon it.
Grit: Adrenaline.
Savvy: God, stop hitting me with adrenaline like that! It's hard to think!
Moxie: Oh god, oh god, gross! I'm using both batons!
Savvy: Wait, one of those is a torch!
Moxie: I said I'm using it!!

    While she's initially going to be careful, cautious, and tactical, treating the Siltsnappers like a grey-tide group and trying to help manage them with maneuvering and baton-smashing, she winds up menaced and stumbling back at the sight of the Skittering Shades. Luckily your average torch is also about the same as an average baton, because she's going to start trying to crack their heads open. Hopefully it won't be too embarrassing. She's used to seclights and other baton-flashlights!!

Dirt: I see two ways to go coming up, boss.
Savvy: Well fuckin' figure out which one to go yourself, I hate this goddamn adrenaline. Fuck!
Grit: Depths and dark always hold death. Ascend.
Moxie: Guess I'm gonna go up!
Dirt: Wait. Maybe we can find which way the other players went...?

    Friz reaches the split in the path. And while she initially starts heading up, she instead stops, puts a hand to the side of her head, and shakes it. "Guh... wait. I'm gonna see if I can find out where those players went." She should link up with them! She squeezes her Trait manifestation for Detective, a badge around her neck, and takes a deep breath, trying to identify signs of passage. Which way did the other players go? If she can find that out, she'll follow that... Otherwise, up through that door!
Kirishima "Streaming everything to the clients from the server does sound like the most likely explanation for all this, although that would be... Really, really expensive, I think." Kirishima replies, furrowing her brow at Lilian's observation and Rose's theory. "I mean, streaming videos already eats up plenty of bandwidth, but to expand it into something that hits someone's senses to this degree?"

She shakes her head. "Then streaming would only be feasible if they weren't intending for this to be a long term thing at all. They'd have to be..." She trails off, then does that 'well, maybe' sort of head tilt and nod. "... Crazy enough to set up a death-game sort of situation to blow that kind of money on a stunt like this."

With that theory now sticking to her mind, Kirishima sticks a little closer to the group as several of them handle the lighting thing. Content to keep her hands free for the time being, she stays right up front without quite leading the way so much as standing near the front, ready to take up a defensive position for the group whenever they encounter those monstrous crabs and centipedes.

"I'll get their attention!"

Rather than beating the shit out of one opponent at a time, she keeps bounding between them, trying to grab their attention through strategic kicks, punches, and attempts to grapple with them before backing off to start goading the next one. She's aiming to keep their bites and clamps aimed at her so her allies can focus on actually shooting the crap out of one of them at a time.

Or all of them. She's not their mom.

"Is everyone alright?" Kirishima asks once the first fight is over, taking a moment to check her injuries out. She can certainly feel the difference in her speed compared to her regular body, having to adjust on the fly and relying more on skillful movements rather than raw speed just to stay on top of the AI.

With so much stone and rock and other earthy stuff all around, though, it does get a little harder to keep track of which way she's going. Getting into fights throws her sense of direction off momentarily as well, but Kirishima keeps that flow of water in mind to help guide her further onwards. Upon reaching the flooded tunnel, Kirishima looks up, then down at the two most obvious paths.

"Do any of you know how to swim?" The not-really-acting-like-a-ninja asks, already starting to wade towards the tunnel and getting waist-deep before stopping. There's a brief moment of unease before she takes a deep breath, then just gets in there and goes as far into that flooded tunnel as she can.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      "It probably does help out," Phreak counsels !Xion. "The game really wants you to screw with... most of what it puts in front of you. Speaking of..." A confident smile spreads across his face, briefly visible in a sweep of light from POD.

Phreak - Chord: Scoundrel

     Phreak observes the odd locked door with interest, his clockwork arm shifting into a splayed assortment of lockpicks, files, probes and the like. If they're locked with the intention of tempting players (for instance, with valuable loot or Traits,) he's going to try and find it.

     Bercilak is on hand with a torch in one gauntlet and his massive axe held in the other, to keep the space elf from getting too caught up on side-errands. He is quick to drag Phreak back to the party, success or failure, so as not to thin their numbers too much.

     This proves to be the correct course of action when the party encounters their first monsters.

Bercilak - Chord: Warden

     "Nothing like a little trial-by-fire to get the blood pumping. Phreak, hang back, light 'em up and top off anybody in trouble."

     "On it."

     Bercilak doesn't have taunting tools like a traditional tank--but his support Traits, mingled with Phreak's, mean that he can nevertheless help the party's survivability in different ways.

     With one hand on his torch, Bercilak chokes all the way up on his axe, to use it as a punching weapon--more force, but less range. Leveraging his physical stats to tackle, shoulder-check or kick enemies clear of more fragile party members, he ties them up at close-range to let Phreak alpha strike them with his janky hurlant.

     With the fight over, the two of them decide to take the path leading upwards, along the fallen beam.
KNK     Rose's main expectation is that the light won't particularly matter, and that everything in here can see in the dark, or otherwise create its own light. It's their territory, after all. It'd be unreasonable to expect it provides the defenders any disadvantage.

    It takes a few ticks for her to even try to think of it as 'just a game,' and remind herself that some things might be convenient for no reason but player convenience. But she's not going to bet on that, either.

    When faced with opponents, she doesn't immediately advance, instead appearing intent on avoiding everything, a Shadow moving around the edges. That plan is halted when Rita steps in with her spear.

    It's not that Rose assumed that Rita's attack wouldn't be enough. She simply imagined the worst possible scenario, and prepared herself to act on it, quickly.

                Dissonance

    That Shadow slides across the floor with after-the-fact jarring speed, but largely lacking a tell. That's reflexive, though her Clarity toggling is conscious, all happening at the same moment as her sword flashes out, striking a series of stabs at different theoretical weak points on the centipede, beginning at the maximum lunging range and not so much 'willing to ever let up' as 'preserving enough stamina to outrace a counterattack.'

    Really, this should have been Violet's job, and she was closer, but Rose's aggression won initiative. If it seemed at all necessary, she was going to try practicing 'hit at maximum range while backpedaling' on a few of these, anyway.
Xion !Xion makes a quiet noise as she's headpatted, unused to the contact and several other things that happen in succession. She hangs, an odd tension that she cannot put to words gripping her, rendering the blond...

Rather useless to helping out until she is safely entirely in the dark where nobody can see her.

Well, except for all the robots, and all the people with darksight. And whenever she's in torchlight.

Then, the first encounters happen, and Xion has things to do. She draws her sword, the weight feeling both right and off in her hand, and engages in her favored style of 'moving forward and mashing the attack button while nobody's watching.

The k-TANG of her blade across a carapace that bounces off and sends her arms to an ill-feeling bone rattle, makes !Xion fret harder. She falls back from the front-line, rubbing her sore sword arm and frowning deeply. Thankfully -- there's local Collapsable Picks to acquire, an easy source of Wow, Nice, An Armored Shell, Be A Shame If I Applied Heavy Force To A Small Point, the natural counter to armored shells when you are not currently living a cartoonified life where large dowel-rod ass keys do slashing damage to buildings and tanks and tornados.

Shortly after, the strange feeling grips her enough that when there is some prospect of a hand task, she's quick to pick up the repair kits and begin inspecting them.

"Well, with all the materials and metals around, and the 'scrap', maybe it's a tutorial on... Fixing things?" The subtle-in-the-dark-blushing !Xion offers, hoisting the kit and thumbing through the contents. "Is it repair for flavor, or because there's something to fix in here? It was all left, so maybe it wasn't important at all, but... wouldn't it be nice if fixing things helped us advance?"
Haseo      It's dark, real dark. Everyone has already found a solution to making it less so, but Haseo contributes anyway in his own way, conjuring up a half-baked fireball to help provide a small amount of illumination.

     The various doors, both fake and real, catch his attention and they move down. He pauses for a moment, weighing on if he should bother with them. Nah, probably crap loot, although...

     As he grapples with his urge to start ransacking, a cast of crabs show themselves, with a giant centipede joining not long after. Finally, something he's good at.

     With a good amount of people helping though, Haseo doesn't get to contribute as much as he wants, his biggest and most crowning achievement in the tussle being him full force kicking a crab against the wall.

     Once it's all said and over, Haseo bends over to pick up one of the defeated crustaceans, holding it in front of his face as he looks it over, before dropping it to chase after Bercilak and Phreak.

     And by chase them, it's really that he's also interested the fallen beam. It's just makes him look a bit better if he pretends he's interested in staying with the group.
Lilian Rook     The early skirmishes are informative. The enemies don't appear to have canned animations, but the ways in which they attack and retreat are fairly intuitive to guess, and have a game-like rhythm to them, making them difficult to memorize, but 'fair' to respond to. The hitboxes are pristine. If one didn't know better, they might suspect a full physical simulation.

    The enemies don't pause in their attacks often, but don't string together flashy combos either. They track players relatively well, but have a notable, consistent vision cone, hearing range, and turn speed. The shades are far more responsive and difficult to avoid than the snappers, which are easy to maneuver into a blind-spot, but harder to actually damage, and don't flinch much. Despite the enemies being considerably more fair and intuitive than real life monsters, it's not that implausible for even an Elite to take a hit if they let their attention lapse; especially in the dark, when flanked, or in cramped spaces. It's an odd, yet strangely compelling mixture of immersive and plausible, yet never quite lethally bullshit game balance.

    It's not hard to guess why a regular person might get killed very easily while wedged between two skittering shades in a corridor, or surrounded by a full pit of siltsnapper spawns, but neither is it utterly unreasonable to expect that a cautious and well-supplied party of newbies couldn't flank and chug their way through it at a conservative pace. If there weren't the prickling tension of genuine death, it'd be quite engaging.

    Whacking enemies has satisfying physical feedback, like chopping into meat or hitting a punching bag on weakspots, and sort of like jarring controller vibration in the arms when striking a hardened point. The system seems to be surprisingly complex. Though damage numbers are visible, it takes a while to figure out. The speed of a swing, as well as the alignment of an edge, or contact of a blunt head, factor into the final damage as much as the specific point struck, and one's actual strength, weapon skill, and weapon attack rating. It's not quite as complex as the real thing, but there's a dramatically notable difference between flailing away with feather duster swings at a monster's body and lunging to skewer its head at the same time it attacks. Gore is relatively moderate. Blood splatters correspond to total damage done, and dismemberment physics are present, but gashes and amputations are largely represented with faintly luminous and simplified wound-marks.

    Those with detailed analysis abilities can assess the calculations on the receiving side quite clearly. There is both a percent based damage reduction and a flat damage reduction that comes after, making whittling enemies down with tepid hits supremely inefficient, and giving greater returns on bold, decisive strikes. Different locations have different values, but they're quite obvious; a hard, rocky shell is stronger than a soft underbelly and so on. There appears to be a certain amount of armour-piercing value baked into various weapons, but the rookie equipment has nothing much to speak of; only small amounts from weapons like Bercilack's dane axe and Lilian's claymore, or the more powerful firearms. No one factor seems to influence damage in an outsized way; an equal blend of stats, equipment, and technical execution matters. Superior combat skill provides a heavy advantage, but not a game-breaking one.
Lilian Rook     More importantly, the feel of Clarity becomes immediately, intuitively obvious. Damage done is split between HP and Clarity at the exact ratio of what fraction of the Clarity bar is filled. 100% CL means all damage is dealt to Clarity, whilst 50% CL splits it half and half. For a player character, this is functionally enough to turn a two-hit death into four hits, though AI enemies appear to have significantly less CL compared to their decent HP. Clarity constantly recharges, but the rate slows down dramatically, even to the point of freezing, when taking damage, and the rate goes back to normal at a static pace.

    What this functionally means is that the combat is fairly lethal, but it's quite difficult to lose large amounts of health before getting a chance to do anything. Backing off from enemies and getting Clarity back can take anywhere from five to twenty seconds, depending on build, but also allows the enemies to recharge. Repeated hit and run cheesing is thus, heavily penalized, but it's not too hard for players to simply back off from an engagement gone wrong and catch their breath, then try again, so long as they don't get in too deep.

    Notably, blocking and parrying both allow chip damage through, based on the weapon skill and the physical execution of the move. The utility of the large static damage reduction on heavy armour is thus, now quite obvious. Overpowering or interrupting an attack actually refills a small amount of Clarity, however. Both these mechanics work both ways. Amounts of HP damage are visible by blood shed, whilst Clarity damage is represented with blue-gold sparks. Clarity damage involves much less pain response than HP damage.

    Lastly, the Harmony tuning seems to provide faster Clarity recharge, whilst Melody allows a weapon and level-dependent percent of damage to always penetrate Clarity, and Dissonance increases the amount of CL damage by a notable amount. The beefy, low-capacity, and heavy-recoil jankcore firearms actually deal quite a substantial chunk of damage, however, their CL damage is rapidly reduced with distance from the target beyond 15 feet. This makes them fairly poor at killing enemies from full health, and more of an 'advantage' to open with rather than a battle decider, but it should be obvious to the tactically inclined that they are perfectly lethal to enemies low on CL, where most of the damage will hit HP.

    Weapon and armour durability is extant, but not a terribly pressing concern, and easily done in downtime, with skill-dependent repair results. The siltsnappers are capable of punishing pincer grabs if low-strength characters are caught just wrong, but drop their prey if struck hard by an ally. The skittering shades, meanwhile, inflict a poison status that saps HP, ignoring CL, at a steady rate, but having more CL makes the status harder to contract in the first place.

    The Elites with more ordinary human stats find that they can suffer one or two hits for high double digit damage without feeling much of a loss --more with heavier armour-- but being pounded with repeated attacks would kill them fairly quickly. HP does not regenerate quickly (excepting Bercilak), and potions are not instant heals. The more superhumanly durable find that that their level 1 status impedes them somewhat, but that they aren't really in mortal danger unless they allow themselves to be carelessly mobbed and neglect to defend themselves. Conversely, the enemies have shallow CL pools and are easily dispatched with a single decisive blow from a heavy weapon, or two or three cleanly placed strikes from a lighter one, but can take up to ten hits from half-hearted, fumbling, or poorly placed blows.

    This is the ideal time to figure out a playstyle going forward.
Lilian Rook     Some of the deranged game design comes into focus when Xion picks up a pickaxe, labeled a gathering tool, applies it with force to a siltsnapper, and deals immediately multiplied armour piercing damage that harvests a small amount of ore from its back, as ungodly unwieldy and unergonomic a weapon it is. Furthermore, looking for things to repair does reveal that the repair kits, labeled restoratives, work on a door with a broken lock, opening up another path. It somehow feels characterizing of the game's ethos. Phreaks extant lockpicking skill simply Works.

    Drops from monster-beating are fairly generous. They're being multiplied by about three and a half-times, then split into the pool, but the ease of this many players versus someone going solo seems as if it'd more than make up for the lesser loot. The XP gain is . . . really not generous. Two or three fights isn't enough to even get to level 2. Completing the entire dungeon might only get one to level 3, maybe 4, depending on the boss. A small amount of XP is gained from unlocking routes, discovering hidden items, and finding unexpected interactions, as well as encountering each enemy and mechanism type, and each item drop, for the first time.

    Friz's detective vision finds footprints wandering all over in a fairly consistent, deeply trodden circuit, no doubt the most efficient route to farm the enemy spawns with minimal wasted travel. The freshest go up the collapsed beam to where Phreak has just unlocked a second door; that door exactly, actually, which indicates a key is findable somewhere and permanently usable. There are traces leading into the flooded tunnel, however, Kirishima going in that direction immediately feels an acidic tingle around her legs, and sees her CL being slowly eroded by what must be toxic water.
Rita Ma      Rita, once she's no longer paralyzed, stumbles back away from the looming centipede and lands on her back, holding up the spear just to plausibly ward off a pursuing strike.

     Its point trembles.

     But the monster is dead soon enough, without her weapon drawing a single drop of blood. The breath leaves her all at once. The spear's point drops. She begins the awkward process of picking herself up off the floor.

     "Thank you, Ms. Rose," she says shakily. She forces a grateful smile. The gratitude is sincere; the smile is not. "I'm okay. I'm... okay." The rest of the fighting concludes without her help.

     She sticks to the back, now. The joy and wonder that she'd worn before is gone, replaced by an unvoiced guilt.
Ishirou Ishirou steps back to help Kirishima and the others with Rita. He goes to flank with her, aiming to pierce at weak points as opposed to going with heavy damage.

As for the monsters, Ishirou decides to capitalize on his dexterous form, not eschewing strength and stamina, but not fully prioritizing them. He goes in for swift strikes, dodges out with nimble acrobatics, and keeps on his toes. He's used to dodging, but he's MORE used to doing it in a way that is less physical and more about scanning and predicting.

It's exhilarating, rather than a prolonged game of chess he's used to dealing with. He exhales a breath the moment they get a moment of rest. His clarity and HP have taken some indirect hits, but he seems fast enough to keep up with the shadows. He also spends any downtime searching. Friz is searching for people...

However, Ishirou is searching for side paths, objects, and the structure of the dungeon. He's looking for how the place tics, and what mysteries it might contain that other...more speed runny people might ignore or think unimportant.
Lilian Rook     Sidestepping a skittering shade's snake-like lunge and hacking its head clean off with a whopping 459 damage multiplied chop, Lilian stops to reach out for Rita, splashed blood gradually disintegrating into red voxels on her armour. A disappointed, but sympathetic, frown controls her face for a second. She slings her sword to its magical hardpoint, then crouches down near Rita, lifting the spearpoint on her finger and maneuvering it into a sort of lowered tilt, hovering near Rita's knee level. She gently removes Rita's hand from the back, half-laces fingers, and puts it back into place with an opposite grip.

    "You want to hold it like a lever. Push down with your top hand and pull up with your forward hand to raise it, do the opposite to lower it. When you attack, you want to step foward and extend your arms at the same time, and line up your weight with the point. If you're being attacked, you wait to raise it up, step back, and thrust at the same time. Even if you don't hit very hard, it'll stop them from approaching and put you out of the way at the same time. Bring your hands closer together to make it quicker to maneuver into a defensive position, move them further apart for more power. Got it?"
Kirishima With a real chance to learn how combat works in this game, Kirishima finds her own combat style shifting somewhat. Although she's still angling towards hitting things and trying to force their attention her way, she starts realizing that there's a the correlation between the attack swings and their actual impact (or lack thereof). Eventually, she even goes as far as grabbing onto those clawed creatures and shades alike, not to inflict damage herself, but to restrict how much damage they can actually put out when their swings are inhibited by an entire person actively holding them back.

She'll probably chug a few health potions throughout the fighting before realizing that they're more like regen than immediate healing, but at least she'll learn.

Meanwhile, in the flooded tunnel, Kirishima notices her CL ticking down. There's only a brief pause in her movement before she just keeps on going through that tunnel, basically swimming into it should she have to just to keep moving. Assuming she hears about the key needed to progress further above, she'll continue searching as long as she can until her CL gets to roughly the one third point, and then she'll head back up to let it refill before resuming her search for THE KEY if necessary.

She'll keep her eyes open for other shiny things, too, but THE KEY is the the main thing she's looking for right now.
KNK     Committing to the point of risking herself is against Rose's nature, and that's proving a frustrating impediment in this system that seems to be designed, once again, specifically to spite her. At first, she pushes through it with a reflection of that perceived spite, but then she backs off again, going silent, thinking.

    Violet hangs back, watching everyone else, and taking particular note of thsoe first-time drops. "Oh," she says, surprise still clear in that tinny voice, "Thats the 'discovery' thing, right?" Putting into words what this means for optimal strategy is a little beyond her, at least right now, though Rose immediately gets it.

    "Alright. Assuming we've got to play around like this, let's work it out. Come on. Let's do some practice."

    "Hey, Rita, do you..." And then Lilian is there, and Violet's whirr-click motion halts for a few tick-tocks, as she looks between them and Rose. She hovers like someone unsure whether to intrude, and moreover, like someone decreasingly certain of where she is. Awareness comes and goes, over the course of locking her eyes onto every little event around her.

    Lilian's lesson finishes, and Violet tries again, "Do you want to join in? Or, go to another side. Or hang back. I think I would, but... Rose needs me, so I'm going. Do you want to?"

    Working out tactics for a group this large is beyond what Rose is interested in trying, even if she trusted everyone here (which she emphatically doesn't). It'll be two to five people she works in, five being the upper limit before people are definitely certain to be getting in each other's way. Violet, with her traits, can focus on parrying, opening for Rose's higher STR, with less risk for following through each strike. Dissonance and its flat Clarity damage help push through that mechanic and reduce Rose's frustrations. If Rita takes Violet's hand, there's plenty for 'a spear' to do in a similar setup.

    Only after they've cleared out the area (and repeated similar work on each subsequent) do the pair start looking for additional exits, beyond the obvious path up and the water-filled area they aren't equipped to handle. Maybe heat traces can find footsteps, too, under this system.
Forte Yes! Combat with something that Forte isn't at risk of becoming a PK'er over. (Not that that'd stop him, necessarily...)

Forte tries out some other strategies, and eventually settles into an 'off-tank' combat style: while Bercilak might be the hardiest of the group by a large margin, and thus the one that should be taking up monster aggro at the front, Forte takes up the duty of grabbing any adds and protecting the flimsier members from attack - blipping across the battlefield with short range teleports or flying over obstacles to get to where he's needed quickly. He uses his quarterstaff to simultaneously do damage while keeping up a defensive stance, and supplements his health bar both with some extra self-healing from his Connection trait and by draining enemy health by using his Red Grasp abilities on cooldown.

The other component of his strategy is simply stated an attempt to git gud - getting the hang of blocking, countering, and/or interrupting enemy attacks, making them a priority in his fighting style and seeing if he can keep his clarity bar topped off using Harmony regeneration and interrupt bonuses.

Once Forte feels comfortable enough with his strategy, he goes to join the search for the key, intending to follow the fresher set of tracks.
Rita Ma      Rita looks away from Lilian at first. It's hard to tell if it's to hide her own face, or because she can't endure the disappointment on Lilian's.

     But she still watches the spear out of the corner of her eye, and nods along with Lilian's lessons. "Like a lever... right. Thank you, Ms. Rook. I'll remember. I'll definitely remember." Her voice sounds a little shaky, but she does mean it.

     She'd failed to meet Lilian's eyes, but she musters up enough bravery to meet Violet's. "Yeah. I'll go with you. Even like this, I... I still want to do my best to help. Is that okay?"

     'Her best' is not that much. She's too hesitant to endanger herself. Fear of getting hurt is only a small element of that. The larger element is the guilt she'd feel over having to asking for help again.

     But a spear is the least bad weapon if you really don't want to engage. At the very least, she can keep the tip pointed at the closest enemy, restricting its movement a bit.
Friz Dirt: Hey boss. Lilian on the horn with some ideas.
Moxie: Heh. 'On the horn'.
Savvy: Her? Uh.
Savvy: Yeah, whatever she says. Go for it.
Savvy: I've still got like an hour or two of adrenaline to churn through.
Grit: Being less at risk is ideal.
Moxie: And being able to use my gun too, goodness.
Dirt: Alright. No more torch though.
Moxie: I'll be fine. Keep an eye on the light from others. Gun and baton time.

    Friz douses her torch against a wall, and retrieves her pistol of sorts. Ranged attacks aren't exactly an easy thing to focus on here... so she's going to have to be precise and ready to swap to melee. She can do that, yeah. But those footprints... She's following up the beam now, but where would that key be? Should she just accept the lockpick? Honestly, probably. She lives on a debt station, and that means she's used to following an engineer through a hotwired door instead of running to go get access. She'll keep following the deeply trodden circuit, and as part of that, she even specifically points it out, recording everything she can to... well, whatever data-sharing solution she can. Maybe even just shouting it out!

    Is there some way to positively-appraise these footsteps? No, wrong genre. She presses on, gun-and-baton, focusing on her ranged combat and her reloads. Admittedly she's always focused more on the baton outside of gunfights or heavy events, maybe this approach could be better...
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      "Queen shit," says Bercilak approvingly of Lilian's spear tutelage. Standing over the corpse of a centipede hewed with a decisive strike between the mandibles, made with his grip choked all the way up, he holds up a hand (down low) for Phreak to smite him five. Their strategy seems to involve Bercilak leading the charge to grab initial aggro.

     While the Green Knight stays in MELODY to soften them up for his partner one-at-a-time, Phreak stays in HARMONY, in order to safely keep within his preferred weapon's effective range. Leveraging the Clarity regen with his natural evasiveness to stay ahead of enemies, Phreak follows callouts from Berc, the two of them focusing down enemies. Once Bercilak lowers their Clarity enough, Phreak's hurlant cleans up, the remainder-to-hp mechanic synergizing with Bercilak's pierce-through.

     "Any advice for this thing?" asks Phreak, post-five, as his arm folds back into its proper shape--only briefly. A hidden dagger shoots out. "Not usually my bag." Advice or no, there's a branching path to take!

     Up top on the second level, Phreak picks the lock. "Alright. So 'locked' means 'actually locked,' not 'video-game locked, fuck off.' That's good." Turning to call down the beam at the rest of the party, "You guys find any lockboxes or shit like that, I'll crack 'em for you!"

     The two of them split, here--Phreak, exploring the path up'stairs' with Forte, Bercilak sticking closer to the greatest concentration of 'the rest of the party' so as not so split healing.
Haseo      People go to search for the key, meanwhile, Haseo is getting a bit tired of the slow progression. He places a hand on the door as he looks it up and down a bit for some sort of clue, before kicking it in frustration when he realizes he doesn't even know what he'd be looking for to help.

     Well, he may not know where to start, but he doesn't really have to. Possibly. The game seems to be pretty good with its ability to prevent any cheekiness, but that's not going to stop him.

     "Well, if it's locked locked and not video game locked, that means there's got to be a way to unlock it from the other side, right?"

     Haseo asks Phreak, but he doesn't wait for a reply. Instead, he backs off a bit. He flickers a bit, his model disappearing as he tries to place himself behind the door with the power of his VERSE - TERROR.
Xion The enemies don't have the screeching, dynamic, flailing or Idiot Ai types, and instead react in a strangely fluid way. Trying gathering tools on enemies and getting a feedback response surprises !Xion, and she does a loop of Friz's found path on her own, roughly, chasing enemies in their density stacks to smash apart with shoving and smashing.

!Xion fights tightly, but uninspiredly: her style trends sharply towards being 'Lame', because there is not a style meter or any kind of higher points for doing Cool Things. Effective things, yes - but not 'cool' things.

So with incredible pragmatism and rat strategies, !Xion battles the forces of Starter Cave Ghost and Mineable Enemies. A little watching and testing, and then she starts relying on quick circling and dispatchcing crashes of swings, learning the enemies internal logic and then crashing through. If the mineral-rich enemies get baited by stepping left, and then leaping right - !Xion does this. Does it change when other enemies see Flowchart Fighting happening? She has time to test.

!Xion ends her loop near Phreak's door, carrying another repair kit.

"Oh, it's... Not broken, just locked." She blinks, one hand carrying a pick, and the other carrying a pack.

Her eyes drop to her swordbelt, and then up to Phreak. "Think we can just bash the door down? Or do we have to use keys?"
Lilian Rook     Despite the strange verisimilitude of the place, it's not ridiculously complicated. It is, after all, meant to be 'enjoyed' by gamers. Most of it really is just heaps and heaps of arbitrarily durable scrap and ore points. The intention appears to be to give players their first haul of major crafting components to begin improving gear for the areas beyond, somewhat like Beachhead had been full of organic compounds useful for potions, food, and buffs.

    The deep trench goes into a basement level, where the water can be heard most loudly, with what seems to be a narrow network of twisting passages that skip the main floor's walls and doors, but might be quite cramped and dangerous. The now-unlocked door seems to skip ahead a fair bit --it might be intended as a shortcut for having made hard progress as much as it might be access to a new area; the lockpick is a sequence skip not usually available to players at this level. The unlocked door leads to an 'earlier' point.

    Up top, explorers find what look like actual rooms, albeit warped and dilapidated, containing rope-lashed cargo crates, barrels, and pegged racks, largely empty, and not because of other players; scavenged by countless pilgrims before the players in the lore, or so it seems. A few low-tier weapons can be found, passed over for low durability and condition, but theoretically there if someone ran out of repair kits, as well as pittances of respawning money and components. A single rare item, an esteemed clicker, named in green, is dug up, equippable in a portable slot. it just looks something like a rusted stick grenade, wooden-handled, with a number of metal tines radiating from its head, and what sounds like a slightly loose flywheel inside of it, audible to a good shake.

    Kirishima taking a dunk in the toxic water finds that the visibility is terrible, her movements sluggish, the tingle of taste on her lips acerbic and metallic, and the damage fairly obnoxious, starting to eat into her HP as her CL ticks lower and lower. A breath meter appears at the top of her hud, but is filled solid white, and doesn't move.

    She emerges into a lobby-sized stone-floored cave, formed of a dome of girders and collapsed earth above, ringed in toxic water. A chest, more like a rusted lockbox, with flaking, indecipherable script, offers up a rustblue key, which goes into a key item slot.

    It also triggeers an encounter. The water on the opposite end of the cavern erupts, speckling her for trivial damage with the spray. An enormous, iridescent, shrimp-like Opaline Crusher drags itself onto dry land with too many spiny legs, bulbous compound eyes shining wetly in Kirishima's light, and enormous, mantis-like folding pincers clattering menacingly at her, serrated on the inside. The previous enemies for level three to five characters to kill had only a few hundred HP and barely a hundred CL at most. This creature has two HP bars of 1500 each, and a CL bar depicts as a crescent around them, at 1000. It is very clearly a miniboss.
Lilian Rook     "If it's still too much, the same advice goes for you." Lilian says to Rita, clearly referencing what she'd been talking to Friz about. "We have enough people that all trying to mob the same target is a bit difficult. I don't have the same ammo type as you, but we'll find something if it comes to that, okay?" As promised, she opens up her trade window and sends Friz 30x Iron Slug. "It doesn't look like there's a sneak attack bonus. At least not without some Trait or ability." Lilian says to Phreak. "But enemies don't really have a 'block button'. They have to actually move to defend themselves. I'm thinking most enemies, even players, won't really be able to dodge or block a firearm, so it'll easily stop their Clarity from recharging. And a hidden blade would be optimal for suddenly interrupting an attack for counter damage."

    The phasing works fine for Haseo. It's a bit of a pointless flex, given Phreak has the door, but it's good to know. Chasing footprints is an easy way to do laps of the entire dungeon fighting everything in it; there are some decisions to be made about whether to try and exhaust it for XP and items, or whether to cut ahead to where players seem to be exiting.

    The second floor still has the odd ambush from a skittering shade or three, but gives rise to new enemies. Viscous blobs of oily slime mold that drip from the ceiling and land poisonous, grappling holds on the unwary, highly resistant to slashing and piercing damage, called malicious filth, and, eventually, depleted racks and rusted sub-tunnels disgorge shambling, silt-caked humanoids, tall and lanky and made of engraved metal --in an abstract golem sense, rather than robotic-- with single bright red eyes, dragging heavy pickaxes, sledgehammers, long iron spikes, and heavy drums with them, tagged dishonored laborers, each heavily armoured and very strong, but slow and with low HP.
Xion Given to puzzles by acquiring items and then using items on <target>, !Xion quickly encounters the slimes past the door to the second floor -- she lets Phreak pick it, (as using the GEP Gun isn't economical or required for a Full Stealth playthrough) -- swings her pick and attempts to Mine Slime, and immediately slops into their strong piercing resistance. Shoving them off with bad damage planes, Phreak is privy to !Xion, pick over shoulder, proudly jogging away from a whole brood of slimes that she Trains To The Other Zone of the second floor, finding the Low-HP but heavily armored enemies and seeing what happens if the Slimes interact with them.

Otherwise, well, they have sledehammers!

"Hey, Phreak, help me control these big guys, I need a different weapon for the slimes!"
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Phreak, using weapons that primarily do slashing and piercing damage, is initially at a disadvantage against the slime molds. "Get the fuck off me!" His Clarity takes a dip as he gets grappled, but--

Phreak - Verse: Wraith

     His form shimmers in the glow of torchlight, and he wriggles his way out, making a nimble backflip and retreating along a wall to wait out the increased regen tick from his HARMONY tuning. Finding that his hurlant, ostensibly a piercing weapon, isn't the best against them, he spits a swear.

     The retreating fixer passes Bercilak, himself up here for the density of other party members present. The Green Knight lowers his grip on his axe, flipping it around to strike with the blunt butt of the weapon's head, hands spaced generously apart.

     This frees Phreak up to assist !Xion, which is good, because of the aforementioned train. "You got it, pal! C'mere, you." Big, slow guys are an enemy that Phreak has a Type Advantage against. Their telegraphed moves are easily parried, as the space elf takes the opportunity to get some practice in with his knife. Namely, using it to interrupt by going for joints with vicious stabs, then leaping overhead to shove them towards the slimes while they're still off balance.

     Can the two of them maybe bait the big guys into smashing the slimes, or the slimes into gumming up the big guys?
Haseo      Phreak had the lock. Haseo totally knew that, he didn't just overhear him complaining and assumed it was because he couldn't do anything. He totally didn't flex for no reason and looked like a jackass. No this was definitely all planned and he is not silently malding.

     Whatever, he'll just have to get over it.

     "Well, if you're not jacked, I can be the muscle, and that Xion girl can be..."

     Haseo just silently trails off as he visibly ponders. He can't really think of a role for her. Cheerleader? No, if he says that he's going to die...

     "She can help beat crap up too, I guess?"

     Yeah. That works... No it doesn't, that sounds almost as bad! Hopefully a new wave of enemies will distract them from that though.

     Loading a bolt into one of his miniature crossbows, Haseo takes aim at one of the oily blobs, letting out a noise of irritation when he realizes that it's apparently not effective... This game has different damage types for melee weapons??? Was he just not paying attention? (The answer is yes.)

     Not wanting to play a guessing game on what type of physical attacks work, Haseo opts for the option of just throwing fireballs at them and hoping it helps to thin the crowd.
Forte Oh, Kirishima found the miniboss. And she's alone.

"Excuse me, I think I'm needed on the other path," says Forte, which is about as many words as he's said this whole trip, and he makes an about face and heads back downstairs. It shouldn't be enough time for the enemies to respawn - though if they have, or if the group's missed any, he relies on stealth and blip-teleports to get around them.

For the flooded tunnel, Forte steels himself, hits a regen cooldown, and then dives in. There's not a lot of high strategy he can employ here beyond 'face tank the hazard', unfortunately. (Though at least he doesn't need to breathe.)

And then to the miniboss. Forte beelines for it, trying to get its attention and buy Kirishima a moment of respite...

... and then abruptly *blips* behind it, going to grab it with his glowing hand extended. Time to see if grabbing enemy skills works the same here as it does in real life.

Right after, he shifts back to defense - staying on the defense till Kirishima launches the next strategem.
Kirishima The swim could have gone far better than expected, but Kirishima makes it to the other side! She dries herself off as best she can (not very) while waiting for her CL to recover, debating whether or not to use another health potion when she could just use one after heading back through the tunnel once she's done here. She keeps thinking about it without actually committing as she looks around that dome lobby, and she even hesitates from drinking it when she sees the chest. On one hand, this could be an ambush prompt, but on the other hand, her health is not quite in a terrible state just yet, right?

She can probably tough it out even if there's a small fight here.

Thus, she pops open the chest, takes the key, and relays that information to the crew. <<"It looks like a dead end here aside from the chest and the key.">>

Just as she says that, the water explodes, and the giant shrimp miniboss appears. <<"And a miniboss!">> She calls out while shielding her head reflexively with her arm, growing more irritated at the constant-enough chip damage that's keeping her CL from recovering as quickly as she'd like. Her health is lower than she'd be comfortable with dealing with a tougher enemy, too, and inwardly, she's cursing at herself for not drinking that health potion earlier.

Instead of fleeing like a saner person would, Kirishima opts to start laming it out. She had heard Forte is on the way, after all, so she's going to play it safe for now by mostly kiting the giant shrimp around the room, both to try and learn its patterns as well as letting her CL recover whenever it can while occasionally bringing out her crossbow to take pot shots at it and wear down its CL in the process.

It's only when Forte arrives that she'll actually shift strategies. Taking a cue from what he's doing by grabbing it from behind, she waits until it turns its attention to Forte before getting in close to bludgeon it with haymakers and elbow strikes from behind, then backing off if and when it turns its attention to her so Forte can start doing his glowy hand thing.

She's also gawking a bit when he does his glowy hand thing, but not so much that she's dropping her guard. She still needs to stick to the plan, after all, even if they haven't said a thing about what that plan is.
KNK     Rose leads the way, Violet following after, and encouraging Rita to stay at her side. They're looking for more Discovery XP rewards, given the group's bonus for those, and since new enemies and drops qualify, the footprints leading through every single spawn isn't the worst thing to start off with. Rose is, as her cautious nature and search would predict, not one to be surprised by ambushes from above. She is one to curse about 'total bullshit' when she happens to not have the right tool for the job and the challenge seems designed to kill her, but that's more in line with usual gamer behavior than she'd be pleased to have pointed out.

    If slashing works to fatally tear apart whatever gives meaningful surface tension to the slimes, or to cut them into smaller, nonfunctional pieces, then 'swords' remain a viable strategy, though here Violet cautions Rita against leaning into the stabs, and Rose mutters something about getting a spear with a 'crossbar.'

    But once they've killed a few, there's no more first-time bonuses to be had, and Rose charts a preferably-safer path forward, incidentally helping Xion with her plan of leading the slimes up to the golems, when more aggro them on the way (but aren't able to easily catch up).

    There's another opportunity for bonus XP upstairs, and a much easier opponent for the ninjas to handle -- sort of. Either one can absolutely run rings around slow, telegraphed attacks, but Violet intentionally stands in the path, using minimal motion to dodge and parry, forcing those sledgehammer weapons to hit the ground harder, and providing an opportunity for Rose to seek something resembling an armor chink.
Lilian Rook     Xion luring the filths into the laborers has mixed results. The rusted, scrawny golems are immune to their poison, but easily gummed up and slowed down when the enemy types dumbly collide. Incredibly, every single laborer drops its held gear, albeit these aren't multiplied by Discovery; something videogames seldom have the bravery to do. This is somewhat offset by the fact that it's all low on durability, takes up substantial inventory weight, and isn't all that valuable to sell.

    Still, stealing a sledge gives her a serviceable blunt weapon that turns the filths into satisfying jelly splatters with a few good whacks. They are also, as Haseo finds, extremely flammable, and reek like gasoline and pond scum when burned. The pickaxe remains an unwieldy and unpleasant weapon, but is shockingly useful against the laborers, where it was useless against the filths. Careful prep, and the lack thereof, has an enormous range of consequences.

    Alas and alack, Phreak's dagger is just not very useful for the heavily armoured metal enemies. However, his twin hurlants, even the lighter variant sharing an ammo type with Rita's, have a degree of armour piercing. Wild, uncontrollable muzzle climb, venting white gases out of blowback slides with every single shot, and running dry after a whopping eight shots, but the iron darts they fire penetrate the enemy pretty well. At point blank range, they aren't even damage attenuated, hitting with the full damage of several rapid sword strikes.

    They are, admittedly, good dodge and parry practice, as long as he doesn't take a pick to the side of his skull for half his health. Rose's much higher strength makes gouging into their metal exterior much easier, but it seems to be the glowing red eye that deals tremendous damage to bury her blade in, if she gains a bit of air so that she can hit them.

    Friz's heavy pistol is even more of the same. She has to load each cartridge individually and pull a very stiff and heavy bolt, and each shot throws her hands back with a thunderous eruption of flash-ignited compressed gas, but she can easily hit chunk 150s up close and simply aiming for center mass; two or three times that with a precision headshot, enough to oneshot most enemies here if she's accurate. The issue is that the reload is stiff and slow and physically exerting, the slugs only stack in 10s, and if she backs down a full corridor intersection, the damage easily halves on the CL bar.

    Advancing down the corridors eventually arrives at what looks like a main spine, with many branching offshoots, and conspicuously gigantic doors at the very end, where the ceiling is more actual ceiling and less collapsed metal. Off to one side, the clicker begins doing exactly what it says. A hallway, slightly stained black, causes the device to whine and click as its inner flywheel spins up and ticks some internal teeth. The end of the hall has a room with an open door and faint light.
Ishirou Ishirou's searching has turned up...

An Esteemed clicker? It's green and equipable and apparently goes into a slot. It...looks like a grenade on a stick with a flywheel somewhere inside of it..? He's not sure about it, but before he can analyze it, more monsters come out of the walls and the filth and other monsters get his full attention.

He decides to equip it swiftly, better to try it out NOW than to forget about it.

He rushes back out after people and quickly learns that the new enemies are assholes. What he can't strike he decides to dance back. He focuses on trying to hack/biohack the creatures that come at them. Instead aiming to try and reduce their innate resistance to damage. He'll have to do this one enemy at a time unless they are some sort of hive mind.
Friz Dirt: Nothing ranged so far.
Grit: We're keeping distance. Good.
Moxie: With this extra ammo, I'm having no trouble focusing on these at range.
Dirt: Hey, Savvy? You churned that adrenaline yet?
Savvy: Guess I've. Ugh. Guess I've got it. What's going on?
Dirt: Looks like... Golems? Can we stop these guys?
Savvy: God. Give me a minute.

    These golems and their massive heavy armor... the others really have the oil well in hand. She needs to solve something about them. She knows how to repair things. She knows how to interact with the R&D department's occasional space-golemcraft. She has to be able to find something here...

"Adamantine Advancements - Golems in the 23rd Century", 3rd ed. 340-370, Sourcer Public Archive
"Fleshless and Cogless", 30-240, Free Golem Publishing
"Unarticulated Entities and their Embodiment", 6th ed. 120-140, Company R&D

    "Golems aren't meant to be like this. They're laborers. And those red eyes, anything meant to be a laborer is supposed to have... some kind of sign that it's gone wrong. What could be going wrong here?" She manages to finally force another cartridge in while she wonders this. "Maybe I can understand more about what we're headed for..." She stops a moment, to kneel over one of the shattered Dishonored Laborers. Are there any signs of what used to animate them? Are there any signs of something interfering with it? Are they identifying human beings as a resource to gather, or an intruder to destroy? Is something deeper at play here? "I need to know what's happening further on..." The Clicker goes off. That means something ahead is emitting something. Could it be what did this? She tries to make the connections. Understanding the lore of the game is essential to knowing what to do next.

    Either way, unless it seems to be damaging her clarity, she needs to press on forward into the one indicated by the Clicker.
Rita Ma <Tac-Watch> 4 KNK. Violet says, "Rita, you're right-handed, right?"
<Tac-Watch> 4 Rita Ma says, "Yeah, I am."
<Tac-Watch> 4 KNK. Violet says, "Okay! Rita, just stay on my right side, okay? Since Rose is on my left. That way you'll have a good view to your right, and you can raise a block easier. Though I guess I don't use spears a lot, the body motion's stuff I get. You can stick 'em when Rose does, or when I do. But just hold off if I'm not moving, 'cause that's when I'm waiting for 'em. You see?"
<Tac-Watch> 4 Rita Ma says, "Mmmm. I think I get it, Ms. Violet. That's really smart."
<Tac-Watch> 4 Rita Ma says, "I'll do my best."
<Tac-Watch> 4 KNK. Rose says, "Right. I'll call targets, and you just follow up. 'Get out alive' is still priority one. Always is, so remember that."

     Rita does, in fact, do Her Best to help Rose and Violet. Even so, the damage she deals on her little synchronized lunges and thrusts could generously be described as "chip". One gets the sense that she is performing not only at the standard of a 'real' level 1 player instead of a boosted Elite, or maybe even a bit below that.

     Flat damage reduction from armor is especially unkind to someone dealing little damage in the first place. Even though the 'malicious filth' (which she carefully avoids being grabbed by) resists her spear, the 'dishonored laborers' and their armor might shut her down even worse. She can, at least, halt Clarity regeneration with a poke.

     By the time the group reaches that main corridor, her Stamina bar is uncomfortably low even though she still hasn't taken a proper hit, and she's visibly mentally flagging too.

     But the sight of that open door, and its faint light, rejuvenates her. "Hey! That's the exit, isn't it? It's daylight! Come on!" She does a little half-jog towards it, taking the fore again if nobody's faster, and beckoning for the others to follow.
Lilian Rook     Once Lilian sees that Haseo's fireball causes one of the filths to catch light, its HP bar exploding into an enormous chunk of transitional yellow-red that peters out in seconds, she says "Congratulations. You were useful for something." and then pulls her torch back out for her off-hand, swinging it at another one of the pulsating oily blobs and smirking in sadistic satisfaction as it bursts into writhing flame. "That's very thoughtful of them. Making a game about swords and arrows, then introducing an enemy that's so resilient to them, but weak to your starting supplies. A teachable moment." she adds, wryly.

    In general, most Elites present are capable of putting out so much damage, even at level 1, with their real life experience and powerful starting Traits and stats, that the high resistance percentages of the laborers don't make up for their low level HP; it simply takes some Stamina-intensive battering to put them down, whilst avoiding their telegraphed swings, with slow, stutering wind-backs and flashes of their red eyes. Especially with the twin ninjas, though their light swords are heavily resisted, the minimal dodges deplete very little Stamina, and mid-swing counters deal upwards of one and a half times the damage, sometimes double.

    Hacking the laborers is certainly much easier than the blobs. Rows of debuff icon string together under floating enemy status bars in quick succession, resolving with a voxel effect before becoming standard icons. Ishirou finds out immediately that, though none of the low-level enemies are all that hard to hack, hacking becomes significantly easier the lower their CL bar is.

    The mechanics simply seem to be allowing him to roll for each debuff each second, and their status resistances cleanly halve at 50% CL, quarter at 25% CL, and so on, leaving only a small 'base' value at zero. That would mean, contrary to most MMOs, debilitating enemies with lockdowns and crowd control is likely intended to be far from a surefire, optimal strategy, yet it becomes almost unfairly effective once an enemy's CL has been damaged. This is direly relevant knowledge to a player's survival, simply due to the inevitable disparity of the value of CC on many NPC enemies, and a single valuable player with one life.

    The quirk of his ability being translated in this way means that it swings from harder than usual to easier than usual and with greater effect, and that there are probably plenty of enemies that he couldn't realistically hack, but can in the game. Further, there isn't a blanket resistance to his hacking; only different resistances to the different debuffs and statuses he can inflict. He is able to quickly locate resistance down, defense down, attack down, slow, stamina drain (meaning enemies also have stamina), and something called 'anti-regen'.
Lilian Rook     Friz is the first to engage with anything that seems like game lore; admittedly, most have a good reason to consider it a low priority, given the circumstances. The insides of the laborer are highly unusual, in that they are unnecessarily detailed for a videogame, and even if relying on the contrivance of fictional pseudo-magic that doesn't exist in the Multiverse, the design at least looks as if it would work in real life.

    As far as she can tell, the golems are extensively waterproofed, built to sink and resist currents, and designed for what seems like an incredibly crude version of fracking. They're designed so that the glassy orbs and oddly muscle-like fibre bundles inside would resist corrosion and heavy metal accumulation even if breached, but the orbs have been tinted and stained as if by intense radiation, against which they would realistically have no strong protection against. The commitment to niche mechanical and physical verisimilitude is a little unnerving, actually.

    The esteemed clicker does its job. Following in the direction of its rattling and whining flywheel causes a status indicator to appear in the corner of Rita's HUD. A grey-blue icon of forking spikes, gradually incrementing stacks, increasing in gain-speed the further one ventures towards the light source. Each stack applies an anti-regen effect, miniscule on its own, but which seem to stack without limit, cutting into natural health gain and healing potions by a static amount, ignoring CL entirely. There's no indication if it stops at zero, or goes negative. The expiry time is an absurd 72 hours.
Lilian Rook     The Opaline Crusher presents an immediate, drastic step up in difficulty from what Kirishima and Forte were previously dealing with. For one thing, exploiting its turning radius just isn't going to be a thing; though it bears some passing resemblance to a giant, horrid mantis shrimp, once it locks onto Kirishima, it adroitly scuttles sideways like a crab, circle strafing her to keep her in focus.

    For another, her first few probing blows are met with significantly chunkier defense than anything else around, walling out tepid hits with low level equipment. The other enemies had higher resistance, so that even without their weakness, they'd still eventually go down, but this enemy is a mobile tank against rookies, demanding better equipment, cooperation with allies wielding heavy weapons, and/or aggressive up-close counterattacks. In short, even though it feels like an optional, hard miniboss, with a big reward, this clearly underlines the possibility that the game might simply be implausible to ever clear if every player tries their hardest to make safe, conservative, survivable tank and support builds. The design demands the existence of risk-takers.

    And for another, since CL recharges in percentages, its larger bar recharges well over ten times faster than the fodder, on a point-per-point basis. Its double fat HP bars make each of her hits a smaller proportional amount of damage, and thus a 'weaker hit', according to the system that governs damage impact to recharge speed, meaning that both HP and CL affect each other.

    Forte's grab affords him a update on his status screen, a Note ~ Cavitation Claw. He has just enough time to read the text that states Throw a heavy punch to create a kinetic implosion. Use an unarmed rend to fling invisible air blades and potentially warn Kirishima, before the monster crouches down, curls its arms close to its body, clatters its jaws and rustles its antenna, then lashes out with a pincer almost unreactably fast, creating a thunderclap in her ears and extending a large phantom hitbox around it that deals fairly significant damage and can easily throw her back into the toxic water.

    Thus, the gimmick. Any number of people could crowd in here to help, and become dodging hazards for each other. Even though the speed of the attack is incredibly unfair for a human, however, both she and Forte can intuitively feel its timing, like the last beat of a bar 4/4 timing, followed by its telepgrahed startup movements.
Friz Grit: Remember the headgear.
Grit: Remember what will happen.
Grit: The radiation is simulated.
Grit: It is silent, invisible death.
Grit: It will kill you unless you are fast.
Moxie: Goodness... better be fast then.
Dirt: What are we looking for?
Savvy: Something to help us find the Ruin Boss.
Savvy: Whatever's emitting that, we have to find a way to cool it.
Savvy: And we have to find a hint there about the Ruin Boss.

    Friz stands up from the golem-corpse. She bounces between her feet, limbering up for a mad dash. "We need to get in there and figure out a way to get whatever's emitting that radiation cooled down *fast*. My Savvy's saying that there's probably a lead on the Ruin Boss in there, if it's not there already." A little more limbering, awaiting others taking the lead, and then... She breaks into a run.

    Avert eyes from anything that glows. Move quickly and steadily. Focus on the environment. Things here seem artificial. Like the broken pieces of a ship or station. Find cooling systems. Her feet leave behind gleaming footprints as she activates ALL-BEAT PATROL, trying to queue up her ability to repair, in search of any damaged means within the chamber of cooling and calming whatever's emitting that horrid anti-regen. That's priority number one.

    Two, of course, is the hand on her gun in case one of those Oil Molds has been sucking up the radioactive energy and gotten too big...
Rita Ma      Rita's eager jogging slows when she notices the status, then slows further when she notices how rapidly it's escalating. By the time she comes to a halt and reads its description, her eyes are widening in dread.

     "Seventy-two... ah!"

     She turns around and sprints away from the light, back towards the rest of the group. Her heart is pounding almost as quickly as her legs. She doesn't stop until the clicker's gone quiet again, and leans against a wall to catch her breath in panting gulps.

     "Whatever's in there, it.... well, look." She shows her status page to those nearby, complete with the really alarming number of anti-regen stacks. "I don't think that that's the way out. They wouldn't make something like that the exit, would they?"
Ishirou Ishirou gets a LOT of information! It's helpful information, and a strategy starts to form. Knowing the limits of the gaming system including his own ability to affect it is worth the extra time they took here.

He starts slapping debuffs on enemies, attempting to get the feel for how exactly they work...even if they DO seem to be rather obvious. He's looking for how things interact with each other too, to see if there were any combinations he could pull off with status effects. Eventually, with the workers going down he pauses and sighs.

Only to hear the dread in Rita's voice. Popping a healing potion now to eat some of the damage he took to help later...because obviously there is some nasty stuff ahead. He also starts scanning up ahead, what is even causing that nasty debuff?
Forte Oh good, *that* still works. The system recognized Forte's ~~data drain~~ Red Grasp and gave him a... is that a new trait? Forte has enough time to slot it in with some quick menuing and read the description, but not enough time to really consider the implications... yet.

One two three - guard. One two three - block. There's a timing to it. How well Forte can pull it off, and keep it up, is another question. For being from a world with a musical naming scheme, he isn't a musician himself, and his sense of timing isn't any better than others...

... Timing. Yeah. That might work.

<J-IC-Scene> Forte says, "Tch... Kirishima. Can you follow my timing?"
<J-IC-Scene> Forte says, "I'll bring the clarity bar down, you spike it right after I hit it."
<J-IC-Scene> Kirishima says, "Of course! I'll hold it's attention and follow your lead."

Forte swaps in (would it be a swappable note trait now? A different usage of Red Grasp? Something else entirely?) BB's chip data... the formatbreaking BBUFFERHIT BB.

And then he draws back his quarterstaff, waiting for the right moment, gives Kirishima the timing signal, and then attacks - and simultaneously attacks - and simultaneously attacks.

Three hits, at once - trying to drive down the Clarity bar to the lowest point he can get it by grouping together three attacks instead of launching them one at a time, and coordinate with Kirishima for an HP spike right when the bar would be at the lowest!
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      "Fuck yeah!" Phreak pumps a fist, grinning wide. Even if his knife wasn't so effective on the laborer constructs, the space elf is quite pleased with the results of luring the filths into them. Even moreso with all the opportunity to get in dodge and parry practice. Things are looking pretty good for the first dungeon. "You guys see any iron darts you don't want, pass 'em my way, would you?" He pats a grey hand against the frame of his hurlant, stepping over the flaming remains of a filth.

     Bercilak traces a gauntleted hand across the wall as he slowly catches up, once the immediate danger is cleared. "Damn. I know this is a game and all, but they really put a lot of effort into little details. I really feel like I'm picking through the bones of something that died a long time ago, down here. Makes me wanna know more about the pilgrim guys."

     It's then that Rita rejoins the group, warning of a status effect. Bercilak frowns, his lantern-eyes burning as he peers at her status page. "I can fix it," he advises. "But it takes Clarity. I can't help you ignore it. Make sense?" Navigating through his menus, Bercilak finds two abilities that might help, within the Warden container--first, a regen buff, then a cleanse.

Chord: Warden

     The clasp of Bercilak's cloak glows bright, briefly bathing the both of them in golden light. His Clarity dips down--unsurpisingly a considerable amount, given the game's emphasis on risk taking over cautious play.

     "How's that?"
KNK     "I think we've got as much as we're getting out of these guys. Unless we want to stick around for days in hopes of rare drops. There was some downward passage we passed, right? Not the water one." After they've gotten the discovery bonus XP it seems they'll be getting, and have gotten as much combat practice as the rather predictable golems can get them, she's ready to move on to exploring the rest of the place. Anything after this is likely to be harder, not easier, so they might as well 100% the place. Just in case.

    Then Rita comes back with something that sounds, from Friz's explanation, like it's probably radiation related. Even with the artificial appearance of her body, Rose can still raise one brow. "...I'm gonna check this out. Rita, how fast did that accumulate? You time it?"

    She's not going in all the way. Rose takes the same path, at roughly the same pace that Rita did, consciously following in her footsteps despite her gait being naturally distinct. She turns around at the same point, and roughly the same time, returning to the start and, for the sake of avoiding the distraction, doesn't look at her status bar until she's returned.

    If the traits they gained really were based on the physical specifications of her physical body, the one she built herself, then at the least, she'll see that body's hardening reflected in a resistance to whatever was hitting Rita.

    Or maybe it'll turn out to be completely different. She'd rather no one involved in this game know anything about her body, come to that. '72 stacks' might be a small relief.

    Having been told to wait, Violet idles while timing Rose, and keeping both Rita and the nearby spawn points in her peripheral vision.
Kirishima Peppering the Opaline Crusher with jabs doesn't look like it's going to work particularly well even from the start, and Kirishima doesn't look surprised in the slightest. Of course something like this would have high flat damage mitigation! That does limit her options somewhat, but it also means she can conserve some of her vitally important stamina by biding her time for the big openings.

Forte's warning about the creature's sonic attacks, meanwhile, give her enough time to back off once the miniboss withdraws its claws like it's about to explode out at her or something. She just barely manages to back off enough to not get clipped by the tip of that phantom hitbox, but the ringing in her ears still has her reeling as she observes the rest of the giant shrimp's meters going down far more slowly and up far more quickly than she'd like.

"That range is deceptive... But I think I've got the timing down!" Now that she's aware of this attack's timing, she'll (presumably) have an easier time squeezing another hit in before backing off again the next time. Forte suggests a strategy of biding her time until he brings down the miniboss' CL, and she obliges while doing her best to keep its attention and general facing towards her.

Primarily, she keeps punching and shooting it with her crossbow. It's still mostly conservative attacks at first (and more shooting at that), aiming mostly at the creature's claws and face to keep riling it up while Forte prepares his... Chips? She's not quite sure what she's seeing from the corner of her vision, but she'll have time to ask later. It's only when that signal comes forth that she adjusts her stance, throwing her hands up before bringing her arms closer to her chest not completely unlike the boss' windup for its big sonic burst.

Unlike the shrimp boss, though, Kirishima's going for a pure physical strike. She lets out a startlingly loud grunt while dashing in low, fists clenched with one trailing behind her to give her that much more momentum once she throws it forward in a mighty haymaker just after Forte's three-in-one attack to try and chunk down as much of its health as she can with that opening!
Lilian Rook     Lilian kicks the hulk of a laborer off of her sword, slowly beginning to dissolve into red voxels, and raises her voice with a hair of alarm, "Rita, are you okay?" Her frown only intensifies at seeing that status screen.

<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Good lord. What a savage game mechanic. Immersive, I'll grant, but . . ."
<J-IC-Scene> KNK. Rose says, "...I'm gonna check this out. Rita, how fast did that accumulate? You time it?"
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "We might be able to use that later. I think. I wonder if 'radiation' is a common thing? Or is it associated with this one type of ruin? There's been three distinct styles in Overture, hasn't there?"
<J-IC-Scene> Kirishima says, "Perfect. I'll drive my fist right into its face!"
<J-IC-Scene> KNK. Rose says, "Three styles? What?"
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Of ruins. Architecture."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "This beat up metal look was in a few places. Around water, mostly."
<J-IC-Scene> Friz says, "Everything here is *angular*, it's *blocky*... it's *artificial*, isn't it? This is ruins, there's salvage. This wasn't a mine, it was a salvage camp, this must have been some kind of ancient facility. A ship, a fortress, a station, something that fell apart."
<J-IC-Scene> Bercilak says, "Well, damn. That'd explain the robots. And the radiation, too."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "It doesn't take a sage to figure out that's probably what 'Priors' refers to."
<J-IC-Scene> Friz says, "So my theory is, something this big had a *power system*, right? Maybe it didn't get shut down right, or it didn't get contained right, and... If I can run in and repair something to shut it down, maybe we can study this and get a lead on the Ruin Boss."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "But it's odd that there's several styles instead of a single monolithic fallen empire or something. People love those 'almighty ancient civilization, secrets lost to the ages' hook. But I don't see anything here that'd power us up with lost magic."

    "I'll let Bercilak handle this one. As long as you don't let it get negative though, I should be able to help as well. I haven't tried using magic yet, but the creator has clearly spared no effort modeling everything."
Lilian Rook <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "The creator seems to *really* hate any strategy that would make it simple to deal with enemies while barely fighting them, but they haven't simply disallowed them completely and made a swordfighting simulator."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "The cooperative aspect is probably intended."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "By the same token, these hazards are sort of ridiculous for a 'first dungeon', but you noticed that we were able to find special gear to detect it, right? And we found that key into forbidden areas. There are probably hidden things all over that open up new routes or deal with hazards, if you can find it and prepare."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "They're fastidious about this sort of design. It's more than just a skill test."
<J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Was the game intended to be a game for Elites specifically? Or..."
<J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "Huh..."
<J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "A game for /finding/ potential elites."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "Using our starting torches to kill some enemies, or the mining gear to kill others, repair kits to fix doors, and special items to navigate hazards. No wonder this place is huge."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "I . . . hmm."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "I don't know, but that's a bit of a menacing thought."

    Rose walks up and down the length of the corridor. She can tell the intensity of the effect even without the clicker, largely because of the number of pings that pop up in her scroll. Even then, though, she returns with a sizable stack of tiny 'anti-regen' statuses (focusing on it brings up the details of the status, named dishonored), similar to Rita. What seems to be the case is that each stack is individually less effective due to her Base Resistance granted by a trait. That is to say, it isn't possible to 'save against radiation' --everyone gets irradiated equally-- but it simply matters to her less.

    Then Friz blitzes right past "Hey! What the hell are you doing?!" Lilian yells. "God dammit rookie!" She starts to run after her.
Lilian Rook     Blitzing down the corridor and incurring a dangerous number of dishonor stacks ends in Friz charging into a single large chamber with . . . no enemies, actually. Which is weird. Perhaps the hazard alone is the test to be conquered. Light emanates weakly from above, along thin lines in the rusted ceiling, and much more strongly from what looks like a shattered glass tube, set into the left wall between two baroque metal pillars, like a cathedral sculpture. The room is occupied by corroded benches and water-damaged standing machinery of uncertain purpose, littered sparsely with handfuls of usable salvage items, stacks of empty bottles, and handfuls of mystery vials, each station studded with locked cabinets. The right wall is dedicated to an enormous, slate of salt-encrusted blue metal, engraved with countless foreign characters, which seem to glow very faintly in her vision when she focuses on them. The left wall with the shattered tube . . .

    A chunk of what looks like greened lead, cut like a spiked prism, radiates palpable, prickling heat, and pale bluish-greyscale light, rapidly incrementing negative status in disgusting amounts. The container pops up a notification when she attempts to apply Repair; her skill is sufficient, but it'll incur a steep cost in scrap bolts, shards, and tiles, in excess of what she personally has. The interact node is labelled as an emanation core.
Rita Ma      Rita gasps softly when Bercilak begins to glow, then shuts her eyes as it intensifies. When she opens them again, she checks her status page, and...

     "Yeah! It's all gone for now. Thank you, Mr. Bercilak!" Giddy relief shifts to guilt and worry as soon as her adrenaline rush has passed. "Your Clarity comes back though, doesn't it? It should only take a minute, right? Can I help with anything to make it go faster?"

     That's kept from going any further, at least, by Lilian bringing up another concern. "'Negative' But wouldn't negative health regeneration mean... for three whole days..." Rita shudders visibly, hugging herself with crossed arms. That's far beyond the ability of chugging some healing potions to solve.
Ishirou "Well, NEGATIVE health regeneration would be a DoT..." Ishirou says, with a thoughtful expression. Well, he can't seem to figure out where the radiation is coming from. There seems little for him to /do/ here...

Then Friz rushes ahead. Ishirou seems to hesitate for a moment, then remembers if this is radiation, he should be fine. /Should/ be fine. He runs in after Lilian because he's concerned about an ally doing something dangerous!

He catches up only to see the room around them. He's not even short of breath and decides to start taking very deep scans of the various things in the room. Not because he wants something, but because he's trying to figure things out.

What is this room? Can he learn anything about it that's not obvious?
Lilian Rook     Forte's careful observation of the enemy pays off enormously. Actually, it dimly occurs to both he and Kirishima that it almost feels like the whole point is to force the player to observe the enemy; to confront it directly, take it in, internalize its expressions, and derive ideas from them. It's lethal and unfair to someone trying to play reactively and only focus on their own movements, but surprisingly logical to take apart if they think about it.

    The crossbow bolts have enough penetrating power to chip away at the monster's CL bar, especially while Kirishima dodges it up close. Actually, the longer she continually remains focused and engaged with the monster, the less penalized her ranged weapon is. The initial quarterstaff strike's base damage is almost wholly absorbed by the Opaline Crusher's defense score, but takes off a chunk of CL with the counterattack bonus. The multiple simultaneous strikes deal more damage than their total sum. Their perfectly unified timing has a multiplicative effect on their power. The combined strike throws off an explosion of blue-gold sparks, enough to drop the monster's CL to less than one third after the crossbow barrage, and puch its regeneration below zero; deep enough it'll take a few seconds to climb back to positive again.

    The massive haymaker strike from down low hits the creature's softer undershell, slipping past both its front claws while it's still winding down from its animation. The heavy blow to its weak spot, timed well with Forte, bottoms out its CL bar and annihilates most of its first HP bar, spraying her with briefly warm, dull blue blood, spiderwebbing 'damage lines' sprawling out from the punch.

    The monster screeches in a gross, bubbling way, and rears back on its back legs, winding up for an obvious, crushing AoE slam while Kirishima is inside of its claw range. It looks pretty powerful, but it's also vulnerable, with its weakspot exposed and its CL bar empty.
Rita Ma <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Ms. Friz!!
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Are you going to be okay??"
<J-IC-Scene> KNK. Rose says, "Not if she stays in there."
<J-IC-Scene> KNK. Rose says, "Looks like... positive result. Damn it."
<J-IC-Scene> Friz says, "*Emanation Core*! If we want to solve this Ruin, we need a *lot* of bolts, shards, tiles-- Ghhh, more than I have!"
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Oh! I have some! Ah, but-"
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "I shouldn't go back in there..."

     Rita rummages hastily in her inventory, digging up the meager-to-modest salvage stacks she has and holding them out to Lilian in her two cupped hands. "Ms. Rook! It'd be safe for you to bring these to her with your special power, right? My Constitution is really low already, but..."

     She's clearly desperate. Not just for 'Friz to be okay', or even 'for the problem to be solved', but also 'to be part of the solution'.
Lilian Rook     Just before Friz runs off, Lilian smiles patiently with Rita, but Rita knows her well enough by now to guess that it's a well-practised fake. "We can't discount the idea that some people have died already by charging into it and simply bleeding out before they could get back to town. Very few people can afford restoratives, and I don't know if Clef has any for this kind, and even fewer people have unlocked any sort of restorative Composition. There might be some sort of immunity trait, but . . . Well, don't worry. You're safe with us."

    Only then does she allow herself a contemplative frown. "Still. Three days? That's insane for a social game. Screwing someone over for three days is just telling them to quit. It could have possibly been that extreme in the closed testing, right? And our passive regeneration values are so slow. Even mine would take a solid half-hour to get back into fighting shape."

    When Rita halts her just short of chasing Friz, Lilian takes only a split second to get it. "Right. My strength is pretty high, I'm sure I can carry all this!" The material voxelizes into her inventory, then--

    A glint of gold, like a drawn blade, runs along her scar and sparks in her eye; a split second tell before she vanishes, leaving a short, faint, tapered red-adjacent streak. She appears next to Friz next, her fingers moving as she hammers an urgent trade request, the window popping up in Friz's field of view. The scrap will overload her, but she doesn't need to go anywhere.

    Ishirou running after discovers that his resistance works in a similar way to Rose's (though he has no way of knowing what hers is). Scanning the room gives him a heatmap of the emanation element effect, and highlights all the usable cabinets and clutter. Despite the toolshop look, it must just be because everything perishable has turned to dust; he mostly detects various healing, curing, and buffing consumables in storage, of middling item durability; varities that were expensive or unavailable in town, as well as materials to make more. The wall is listed as a Prior ~ Sheet: but the following text is indecipherable. Its contents are locked to a certain category of Trait, which he does not possess.
KNK     "You seriously think it's 'solvable'? That's taking this whole 'punishing repetition' thing a bit far, isn't it?"
    "Oh, I think I've got a... salvaging skill."
    "Oh, me, too. And what are these... are these extra inventory slots? Let's look into that later. Not that having extra's ever bad."

    ...to wander into wide, rocky rooms filled with shallow sandy pits, or to stumble on the muddy banks of murky water, half-concealing flooded tunnels, the odd sharp split in the earth and sharp decline leading deeper down, and the much rarer rusted ramp leading upwards. Locked and jammed and sediment-sealed doors, oddly rounded and screw-studded, are common, some simply comsetically impassible, others requiring some unknown means to get past.

    "If it is possible to 'solve' this place, I doubt you can do that without exploring all of it." Rose jerks her head in the direction of those lower passages. "Come on. The good stuff's never on the same level you are, and if you want salvage, you gotta look down. No reason to think that that'll be different in a game -- in a game like this."
    "Right! Oh, Rita, are you coming? Mm, you can keep an eye up here, but..." Violet looks between Rita and Lilian, before a quick shift from Rose to Bercilak. Rose hasn't asked for curing, though she's got the same set of regen debuffs Rita had, a moment ago. Why she hasn't asked, Violet isn't sure, herself, but it's the reason for the worried look passing briefly over her. "Well, anyway, let's get that salvage."
    "And ruin the dungeon for everyone who comes after."
    "Maybe the good parts will stick around, and it'll just be... safer?"
    "In a game that only rewards you for taking risks, 'safe' and 'ruined' are about the same."

    The two head down, with or without any others.
Friz Dirt: Good news and bad news, boss.
Savvy: Good news first.
Dirt: Good news is we can fix this.
Moxie: What could the bad news be?
Dirt: Bad news is we can't fix this without more stuff than we got.
Grit: We will die if we remain.
Savvy: And if we don't solve this now we might be stuck waiting half a week to try again.
Moxie: We need to move *now*. I'm getting us out of here.
Savvy: Like hell.

    Friz winces, immediately biting into one of her knuckles in a frantic panic. She thumps the side of her head with her palm, as if to jostle a machine into action, while every muscle tenses. She's trying to solve this in math. How much time can she spend explaining and convincing the others, versus the amount of time before she can't expect to survive the radiation? Can anyone else here repair this?

Grit: Every moment is death.
Grit: Remember what to do.

"Endure it, kid. Roll with it. Limit the breathing. Stay still. It gets to you through the particulates. Slow. Still. Calm. And be ready for her."

    There is a soft, shadowy afterimage with her in the chamber. She's deathly still by the time Lilian reaches her. She's hardening herself against the effects of the radiation, hoping the simulation is so detailed. Hoping desperately that this can work.

Dirt: Trade invite, boss!
Grit: ACCEPT IT NOW.
Moxie: Going!

    Two clean motions. Friz slams accept, and, not even bothering to check the values and costs, slams the prompt to repair with tremendous and totally unnecessary force, in a panicked shout.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      "Sounds good to me," says Phreak to Rose. He follows, and so too does Bercilak. "Listen," he continues in tow, "Just for future reference... if *you* guys wanna pull what the detective just did, give me a heads up before you do, huh? I can get you a runspeed buff at least. In and out a little faster, yeah?

     The Look from Violet isn't lost on Bercilak. The Green Knight's clarity dips once more on the party UI, providing both a regen buff and a cleanse. "You and Forte, I swear to God. Don't be an island, sib." On the topic of ruining the dungeon, he barks a laugh. "I doubt it. If you ask me, shit's probably gonna be different, more so than easy. You never know, maybe we'll get something special for being here when the change happens." He pauses. "Besides. A lot of work went into writing and making all this. I dunno about you, sib, but I'm pretty interested to see more of it."
Ishirou Ishirou hits the room right after Lilian, his eyes moving around to try and figure out what's going on here. There is warmth, likely the source...but his eyes also scan over the workspace and cabinets. He also sees two things. Friz is going through something that might actually kill her, and something on the wall with letters he can't read.

He's pulled in two directions, pausing for a few extra seconds that others would normally not hesitate in at all. Then he moves toward the cabinets. There were potions, could he ID something that could keep Friz safe...even if for a little bit? Some sort of restorative, or anti radi-dishonored effect? Something...

Anything...come on!
Forte Simultaneous hits...

Forte makes a note to go track down BB again later, since refreshing the bbufferhit data will be really useful here, if he can triple his contribution to any group attack.

But more importantly - There's an AOE incoming, and it looks like the sort of 'dodge this or wipe you idiot' check that you can't just eat and declare that the healers in your group should adjust. And yet-

-that exposed weak spot, and with the damage they've been doing to its CL meter... they might be able to stagger or outright defeat it, but only if they *both* hit it hard enough.

Forte makes a snap decision. "Kirishima! Press the attack!" And he puts his trust in her as he moves-

In the real world, in the Watch's makeshift medical ward, Forte's whole body glows brightly for a few seconds.

- and the quarterstaff, mid-windup, drops from his fingers - his body moving on its own, mirroring Kirishima's movements-
Lilian Rook     The trade prompt dumps the items into Friz's inventory. More importantly, she can feel herself get about thirty pounds heavier, as if someone had physically dropped several bowling balls into her backpack. Hitting the repair prompt shows her a stacked, five-layer progress bar, rapidly filling based on her Repair score, and a glowing circle around her, perhaps indicating where others might be able to stand to aid the effort.

    Scrap components appear in orbit around the interactible, slowly fitting themselves together and voxelizing at the seams, blending and morphing into a new, complete, reinforced tube, lined with semitranslucent silver, such that only the light dimly escapes. The 'emanation' field drops, to a mere foot around the tube, weak and superficial. A durability bar is visible on the tube, like an item, now at 99.9%, with an ETA to total decay of twenty four hours. For some considerable amount of time, the room is essentially safe to access.

    "Sit still for a second, crazy." Lilian sighs. Friz can feel a hand laid on her back, and another fingertip tracing something on her neck. Her vision fuzzes and blueshifts around its edges. The expiration timers on her Dishonor stacks churns at rapid pace, hours disappearing in seconds. Her Stam shoots back to full right away, as does her CL, though her HP barely regenerates at all. At the same time though, her Vitals begin to tank, incurring a tangible feeling of hunger and thirst.
KNK     "What? Oh, yeah. Thanks." Rose says to Bercilak, in that particular tone of someone trying to pass off nervous agitation as cool apathy without being very good at it. Violet gives him an enthusiastic thumbs up from an angle Rose can't see.

    "I wanna see what happens. Can you fix dishonor? Is that with honoring, or rehonoring, or do you get rehonored, or... how does that work?" Along the way, they're naturally keeping an eye out for salvage nodes, as well as ambushes from every direction, having already run into the ceiling slimes, and being no more trusting of floors or walls.

    "Can you honor people by fixing their old stuff? Oh, but I guess they're robots, not people."

    "Virtual robots. Not that that's really any different."
Lilian Rook     The cabinets are behind lockpicking minigames for Ishirou, having no appropriate skill, but the larger ones are oddly hackable, using a kind of magnetic node puzzle he can break with a bit of brainteasing. Those, at least, contain blue iodine, which appears to speed up stack decay and lower the anti-regen strength, as well as a handful of marrow draughts, which boost health regeneration by an appreciable amount; not terribly useful as a combat item, but easily allowing for dramatically reduced downtime, and more importantly, each lasting hours.
Kirishima No hiding. No retreat. That's the feeling Kirishima's getting, and it's certainly different from what she's used to seeing in games. To actually go with the flow and internalize things while adjusting on the fly instead of just reacting...

"Amazing... These systems are more like a live performance than a simple pattern-recognition game. Trying to just bait out attacks and capitalize isn't going to get very far." She comments while driving her fist deeper into the miniboss' softer surface, scrunching up her face reflexively when she gets that blood sprayed at her. Despite that, though, she doesn't seem disgusted so much as fascinated.

Also, immensely pleased at seeing that first bar just melting with that combination maneuver between Forte and herself. "Good thinking! If we did that much when it was starting with that much CL, then striking it again when it's almost empty now...!"

Although her footwork isn't at its best, Kirishima's already starting to adjust to it. When the monster screeches in anticipation of its next attack, she moves right back in rather than backing away to give it a chance to recover. She doesn't know what that attack might be, after all, and it could very well carry another bullshit box with it that could wipe out the rest of her health.

That just means the best chance of surviving is destroying the second bar immediately.

"Understood! Let's finish it off!" She calls out to Forte while starting to advance steadily as she throws fist after fist at the miniboss, stepping into each wide hook and forceful straight to make sure that she's still in range for the next strike. After the third big swing from left to right, she ducks forward suddenly to practically shove herself right up against the shrimp's underbelly before driving her fist upwards in another uppercut to try and force her fist right through all of it in time with Forte's mimicry!
Lilian Rook     Heading downstairs exposes the ninjas to a steady onslaught of the prior enemy types, though the ones they've recently killed haven't respawned. Though they're still only low-level enemies, the increased hassle and attrition of fighting them all 'solo' is noticeably much higher than as a group; numbers really seem to matter. At least the party is getting a steady tick of XP and drops from this. It's been surprisingly lucrative. Not as much as going solo, but far more than camping out in the newbie fields.

    Their way is blocked by both simple fence doors and heavy bulkheads, all locked, some intended to be opened by a sufficient Tinkering score, some meant to be opened by dungeon key, but they have the ability to break into them anyways. They appear to lead to a claustrophobic labyrinth of underground tunnels, clearly mined out, made of old limestone and petrified clay, with a trickle of water running through them (toxic, of course). They're ambushed in the dark by many more enemies here, all four varieties in one, as well as Slate Devils; dark-grey cousins of the miniboss, each the size of a wolf, and often popping up out of the water and mud.

    The main value of the network is the very high proliferation of mining nodes, many with brand new, rare metals not seen anywhere else, as well as direct access to many other parts of the dungeon, ignoring the maze of walls and doors above, to compensate for the higher risk levels. Additionally, very large, definitively non-humanoid golems are found here as well, collapsed in dead ends, only interactible as salvage points.
Rita Ma      "I'll stay up here, Ms. Violet. You two stay safe, okay?" It's a totally superfluous warning for a pair whose self-proclaimed first priority is survival, but Rita's in a fretting mood.

     As soon as the Esteemed Clicker stops making its scary noises and the glow down the hallway dims, Rita rushes in breathlessly to rejoin Lilian and Friz. "It worked! Are you feeling okay, Ms. Friz? You're alright too, aren't you, Ms. Rook?"

     When her worries are assuaged, Rita joins Ishirou in scrutinizing the wall- maybe she'll have better luck than he did- and then focuses on the machines as he rummages through the cabinets, hoping to recoup her salvage stores from the ones that aren't fixable.

     Further: does this place branch out into anywhere else, or is the only path back the way they came?
Ishirou Ishirou is surprised, but he can't do anything about the locks he can't pick...but the ones he can /hack/ he was surprised about! Using magnetic magic and trapped in a mini-game the cabinet unlocks. He checks over the stuff inside, managing to grab some of the health regen and blue dye, and brings it back to Friz. Just opening a trade window and shoving one of each into her inventory.

He goes back to start searching the cabinet more thoroughly now and taking out potions to store. They'll likely be very useful for later! He also points out things he can't lock pick because he can't hack them. So that's someone else's problem!

Now that the immediate threat is handled he goes to the weird word sign and stares at it, trying to...figure it out. Understand it? He feels it's likely important, but does anyone else here have the skill? Does he just stare at it to learn a skill? Well, time to see which happens first, he gets a skill, dies of hunger, or just gets a headache.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Bercilak smiles at Violet, but says nothing. At least, not about Rose's cured status con. As his Clarity ticks back up, he opines on the status condition itself.

     "I figured it was, like... fuck. What's the word?" His glowing eyes narrow in concentration. "Like, a word that they used because they didn't know what it actually was, because they didn't have any context for it. The ship crashed, for whatever reason, and the reactor sprung a leak. The pilgrims didn't have any understanding of that shit," he continues, gesturing with his free hand. "They just saw a spooky crashed thing full of robots gone bugshit and spicy air, so they assumed the crash was a punishment. And there you go, 'dishonor.'"

     Phreak and Bercilak assist Rose and Violet on the fights between here and the formerly spicy-air corridor. The fixer opens up on enemies with twin hurlant alpha strikes, keeping within the weapons' limited range and counting on dodge rolls to keep his own Clarity up. Staying in Melody to chip down a little HP with his openers, Phreak is complemented by Bercilak.

     The Green Knight uses his bulk and the reach of his axe, in place of a taunt, to manage enemies pulled by Phreak, Rose and Violet. His Harmony stance, coupled with expertly made, aggressive melee interrupts, keeps his Clarity from completely bottoming out, ideally enough to have an emergency heal or cleanse on hand.

     The toxic water is something Bercilak and Phreak both collaborate to help pass--Phreak gives a movement speed buff, and Bercilak, a heal-over-time. The fixer's ability to evade suffers in the water, causing him to take a few hits from the Slate Devils--evidently feeling some kind of way about this, Phreak is very eager to help with any of the locked fence doors and bulkheads.

     Messages in the party chat scroll up on Bercilak's UI; people are starting to get hungry. The rations should help in an immediate sense, but they're finite. Opening his sheet during a moment of relative peace, the Green Knight finds...

Notes - Woodsman

     Are these wolves good eating? If not, are there any other kinds of tracks visible in the muddy portions?
KNK     While not yet familiar with the (giant) shrimp-like Slate Devils, Rose and Violet are adept at twitch reaction games, and know well enough to focus on a new enemy and figure out how it wants to move before deciding how to best deal with it. That means focusing on dodging, first, then moving in to parry once Violet has a handle on it. Her lower STR might mean she has less chance of breaking through defenses, but a decent AGI score lets her move her body quickly -- if still not as quickly as she's capable of thinking through the motion, when pressed.

    Testing a few more strategies once they've been down there for a little while, Rose left-hands her pistol-like, single-shot hurlant, waiting for the exact moment the strike of her sword pulls a Slate Devil's attention off of Violet and onto her before firing just shy of a contact shot.

    Violet puts a couple of things together, shifts some items around in her inventory (which doesn't really look like doing anything, externally), and the next time they find a slime ambush, she swishes her katana down to her side, holds up her left arm, opens her empty hand with fingers spread, and--

    "Ahh, it feels weird doing it like this!"

    --unfolds her arm in a flurry of shifting reconfiguration, refolding into a miniaturized, thick-bore cannon, which makes sparking noises as the slimes drop toward her before firing an arcing shot like a flare into the group of them. The shot explodes into flames, subtracts its ammunition from her limb-specific inventory slot, and and returns something notably higher than the effects of her torch.

    The mining nodes are probably usable, using equipment taken from the laborers to mine them, but it's the salvaging nodes that Rose focuses their path toward. Once they have it, she makes sure to distribute the load between the four of them, in accordance with their varied strength scores.
Friz Grit: We will now survive.
Grit: That was true danger. Death.
Grit: I'm hungry now.
Moxie: What?
Grit: I'm hungry now. Find me food.
Savvy: That-- wait. Did she accelerate our subjective time?
Dirt: She traced something on us. Probably glyphs, boss.
Savvy: Guess that makes sense.
Moxie: We need to get moving. We should look around!
Grit: We should look for food.
Savvy: Hush. First we're gonna say...

    "Thanks." Friz manages to sheepishly sigh. "Yeah, sorry. Got-- uh. Well. I've been kind of off-focus, I guess. And once I picked up some stacks, I had to continue..." She's digging, absentmindedly, for a newbie ration. She felt too heavy anyway! She'll have to give a lot of that back... It's almost a higher priority than the thing Ishirou brings back. "Oh, thanks!"

Grit: He is Good.
Savvy: What, capitalized? Because of food?
Grit: Yes.
Savvy: Okay, but that's definitely not secret wisdom.

    "I'm alright." She nods to Rita, a little awkwardly. So weird, to have to accept kindness and help from someone she was trying to arrest recently. "Thanks." She starts straightening back up. "Now we need to find a clue for the Ruin Boss. Or any of the loot this was blocking... Something. Let's make that worthwhile, I mean." That's important! She's gotta scan the environment for lore, loot, and leads. Where could that boss be...
Lilian Rook     Kirishima and Forte tearing into the miniboss in unison meet with tremendous effect. The attack is certainly incredibly dangerous and wide-ranging; running away to get away from the danger, or trying to block it with a shield, would likely mean getting hurled into the toxic water and allowing the boss to recharge CL. However, it might be that the weakpoint exposure is intentional, because it presents a perfect opportunity.

    Barrages of punches speedbag the mighty monster with satisfying rattle-bang thumps, spraying artful splashes of voxelized blood with each impact. Faintly glowing gore-lines spread wider across its shell with each jerk of its body. They're so close they can hear the subtle sound effect of its HP decreasing, the little electric chime-buzz declining from high-pitched and smooth to low and raspingly urgent. Each blow turns a hefty chunk of green bar red, coming so fast and hard that the smoothly declining red section can't ever catch back up to the green. The combined force passes some kind of DPS check, and the creature topples backwards off its precarious, rear leg balance, opening up a lengthy vulnerability window.

    Maybe a coordinated and informed party of four, levels one to five, would appreciate that immensely, but it's overkill for Kirishima and Forte. The last, unified strike obliterates the last of the monster's HP. Its status window cosmetically shatters, and the giant goes still, voxels starting to drift off of it like campfire embers, starting its slow disintegration over the next few minutes.

    The entire party gets a notification for a hefty chunk of XP; far more than half an hour of clearing mobs had gotten them. The Discovery multiplier also rolls lucky, and gives them two times four opaline shells; ostensibly some kind of rare crafting material, used for hard armor with high defense and protective gear with resistance to: poison, fire, earth toxin, drowning, radiance, and emanation. in ascending order.

    Forte keeps his Note. Kirishima gets a Trait Discovered notification, for Anchorage, at fifty percent progress. 'When faced with the depths of shivering fear, people flee back to the comfort of familiar miseries. A moment of terrible danger is often enough to cow the most stalwart soul into returning to fouled and stagnant waters, and thus their very soul is polluted. Not you. Do not back down. Never again fall into the cloudy murk behind you. Stand your ground. Show your enemies that you will not be washed away.'
Lilian Rook     Examining the engraved panel that stretches wall to wall, Ishirou and Rita come away with very different conclusions. Ishirou can push his traits and expend quite a bit of Stamina to decipher the functional structure of the geometric glyphs, and discern a map, which is automatically added to the entire party's local area data, gathering points and locked doors included. According to it, the boss door actually isn't very far away; easily reached with their key-ignoring prowess, which will exit into the next area to the east.

    Rita, however, feels as if she can read them. Not precisely like a 'language', but as if they instinctively 'mean something to her'. The Trait Discovered is named Respite. It begins fully unlocked for her, listing its unlock conditions in post as being influenced by LCK, maximum CL, Psychoprofile match, at least one 'Trait of Hope', and 'Reading Sheets of Hospice' as factors.

    The danger exists in this time as it did back then. Though we strive to save the individual, the scars of the world so often feel too vast and terrifying to mend. Thus healers are esteemed only for their compassion, for there is no honour in mending the hurts of the world. Bring respite to those bloodied and wearied by the mistakes of our past. Those who came before you never wished for you to hurt as they did. Rebuff the pain that surrounds you, as long as you are able. But treasure your bonds. You cannot rest forever. One day, you will have to act.

    It fills up her last available Trait points, if she chooses to slot it. However, it immediately unlocks the Composition of Breath, and two starting abilities; an expensive, targeted regeneration effect, which runs at tenfold speed in combat, and a more moderately costed ability that gives someone 'temporary CL' that can exceed their maximum but cannot be paid as cost, and decays over ten seconds.
Kirishima Kirishima exhales slowly as the miniboss disappears into so much digital dust, then breathes a heavy sigh of relief as she hunches over with her hands on her knees. "Quite a close one... But we did it!" She blurts out with a satisfied laugh, throwing her head back and straightening back up to smile appreciatively at her impromptu combo partner.

"But I didn't know you were a boxer, too. I guess that's appearances for you, though." She chuckles again, then wobbles a bit as she moves over to start poking through their finds. She'll figure out the worth of the materials later, but for now she just starts gathering things up so they don't risk forgetting it later. As she does, though, she has to stop and look up when she gets that Trait Discovered notification.

"Anchorage..." She murmurs, reading the text that comes up. At first, she skims it briefly, and then she goes back to read it more thoroughly. It's on that second read that her expression tightens a bit, as if something about those words is making her feel a little uncomfortable about being in her own digital skin.

"... That's why we're here instead of staying home, isn't it?" Kirishima comments again, pausing briefly before looking over at Forte and gesturing at the notification she's seeing. "Er. Do you see that, too?" As she asks that, she reaches into her bag, only then remembering that she's already cleared out her health consumables and furrowing her brow.

"... Hm. Well, it should still be okay as long as I let my CL recover first. Shall we get back to the others, then? Or do you think there's anything else worth looking for in here?"

She glances over at the chest that kicked off this whole miniboss fight. "... Do you think we can sell that?"
Lilian Rook     As Rose and Violet become more familiar with the enemies and get into a rhythm, the going becomes considerably easier over time. Bercilak basically doesn't need to care about taking hits at all, as usual. They could probably go at this for a while, though the steady decrease in their gear's durability (and especially Phreak's ammo count) is a concern. It's the kind where the base stats gradually decrease under a certain threshold. Certainly if it was realistic, they'd break down faster, but it's pretty hard to nolife a single spot without a lot of prep. Perhaps leaving a stockpile of goods, or having people with excess inventory capacity mule repair kits and ammo. This game seems to revolve around 'packing for expeditions'.

    The flares clear out groups of filths easily, and tag team bladework into the weakpoints of the flesh and blood critters makes quick work of them. The salvage skill of the two experts in robotics, gadgets, and improvised gear, comes in handy immediately; the deactivated great laborers yield high amounts of scrap, as well as purified gold, purified steel, spent emanation shards, and small resonance fuses (0/50).

    Beyond that, there's not much to do except skip around various areas with the quicker travel of the danger tunnels. Alas, the critters are extremely contaminated, and butchery items yielded are poisonous. Maybe useful to make a venom, but not to eat.

    Friz's rations are definitively 'fine'. Like storebought 'original' jerky, reasonably fresh rye buns, backs of mediocre raisins and nuts; that sort of thing. It's not bad, but a foodie would probably want to aim for better.
Ishirou Ishirou looks exhausted after pushing himself to try and figure out that the thing was a map. Though it was something else to others, he isn't quite aware of how important it is yet. He sits down and decides to take a rest after pushing himself like that. Thank goodness he has all of these scanning abilities because it never feels like he's going to find any wild trait.

Or skill? He can't build things, he can't unlock things, he can't salvage things, he can't make maps...

"Oof...feels like I am playing the wrong MMO.." he says. He's not very good at combat. Did he just pick really badly? Well, at least he got a map? So there's that!
Forte There's a long moment as Forte considers how much he's going to reveal to Kirishima about the Cross System, and then simply settles on: "I pick things up very quickly," as the explanation, which is at least technically true.

"... Anchorage?" he asks, and makes note of whatever Kirishima wants to tell him.

"... And I got..." He slots in and turns on the Note - Cavitation Claw, and his left hand shifts into a lobster claw. "Seems useful, if a bit... unexpected," he says, giving it a test swing.
Rita Ma      Rita reaches out to touch the carved panel with her fingertips, her eyes wide in awe. Her lips move, trying to mouth the things it's impressing on her mind. When it reaches the end, though, she freezes.

     You cannot rest forever. One day, you will have to act.

     "I know," she answers, almost inaudibly. "Please don't remind me. I know."

     Respite is slotted. She takes a deep breath, re-composes herself, and turns around wearing a plucky smile. "You're welcome, Ms. Friz. I think I did find something."

     Experimentally, she casts the temporary-CL ability on herself. With a moment of focus, her hands glow with a faint blue light, condensing down into a sphere between her palms that flows back into her chest. Her CL dips (surprisingly little), and is then overcharged a moment later before slowly decaying back to normal.

     Her smile doesn't grow, but it does become a little less forced.

     "Using magic... I don't know what I expected it to feel like. But it's nice, isn't it, Ms. Rook? I'm glad I have a way to help now."

     But in the end, it won't be enough. She is naggingly aware of that.
Lilian Rook     The ability uses up a whopping 110 Clarity. This would be roughly half the bar for an average player. It is slightly more than a pittance to Rita. The ability seems to scale off her WIL. A pale blue-white chunk 'overlaps' her CL bar; 300 in total, overcapping its fill percent too. Using this on a random player would immediately push them over 100% and fully absorb the next hit they take. Though it bleeds away very rapidly, the utilities are very obvious if she can time it and use some strategic foresight.

    "Hmm? What does it feel like, Rita?" Lilian asks. "I don't know how this game simulates its 'native' magic system. But you look pretty happy with it~" A pause. "I'm glad. You really didn't seem to be having much fun with that spear."
Kirishima 'When faced with the depths of shivering fear, people flee back to the comfort of familiar miseries. A moment of terrible danger is often enough to cow the most stalwart soul into returning to fouled and stagnant waters, and thus their very soul is polluted. Not you. Do not back down. Never again fall into the cloudy murk behind you. Stand your ground. Show your enemies that you will not be washed away.'


"I noticed. Well, whatever the case was, let's hope we don't run into another one of those on the way back." Kirishima chuckles briefly, then nods once as Forte asks about Anchorage.

"A new trait. Something about..." She pauses, reading the text again. Something about it strikes another chord in her, and it's clear from her expression that she's holding something back. "... Standing my ground. Maybe it'll help me become a more steadfast defender while we're here."
KNK     Violet uses her cannon only when they have a nice group-up, but with the long-ish respawn timers, that should be fine with the amount of inventory she has for what the system refers to as 'hidden tools.' Rose is naturally sparing with her own ammunition, both for its lack and for how long it takes to reload, factoring that into her mental calculations for efficiently clearing out the area.

    That the game discourages acting in an efficient manner complete with rational self-preservation grates, along with all the other insults she continues to suffer, but that's really just her life.

    Now armed with a map, Rose is confident enough to avoid completely unnecessary fights (should there actually be any), directing Bercilak, Phreak and Violet to follow in this or that direction, quickly rerouting based on what they find. Her remaining goal, before leaving back to the upper levels with their loot, is to check the walls bordering the blank spaces on the map, both visually and by knocking it with her feet, doing a reasonable skim for differences in wall texture, uncoverable mechanisms and hollow sounds.
Rita Ma      "It feels like..." Rita bites her lip in thought and taps the ground with her foot.

     "Do you ever just shiver for no reason, Ms. Rook? Or does the hair on the back of your neck stand up? It feels like that. Getting an impression from the world that doesn't have a name. But starting here-" she reaches behind her back to touch the base of her neck- "and spreading out."

     "It's cold and electric, sort of. And when it's left through my fingers, it leaves a warm feeling behind."

     She hesitates, and then asks "Is that right?" like she's expecting Lilian to grade her papers. Then, grumpily-defensively: "I like using a spear just fine, though."
Friz Dirt: Ishirou's got a map, boss.
Savvy: Guess I'll interpret. We need to head for the boss.
Moxie: No locked doors in the way?
Savvy: Not with the lockpicking. Let's go.
Grit: Strike quickly. With all force. Be ready to kill.
Moxie: Got it.

    It doesn't take long to finish the ration. It also doesn't take long to surge back and through the halls. Not much in the way of batons or pistols among the mostly-materials loot, right? Either way, she loads up as much as she can, holding spare cartridges between her knuckles and limbering up at the boss door. She's practiced enough of the reloading to really get the hang of it, so she hopes she can strike when the striking is good, and when it hits low Clarity, she plans to truly blitz it with shot after shot.

    She even has a breach technique. Unless someone else handles it, she handles the entry, once things are unlocked, with a *dramatic detective door-kick*!
Rita Ma      "Ms. Friz, are you really sure you ought to be in front? I mean, you're sort of..." Rita is absolutely residing in a glass house, but she still makes anxious noises as they approach the door together.

     "Here, at least let me help a little! In case it attacks as soon as we open the door." The Clarity-boosting orb darts from Rita's hands over to Friz, suffusing her and substantially overcharging her blue bar. After that, as an afterthought, she fumbles for her spear.

     It is, at minimum, keeping up appearances. She can't very well protest that she's Great At Using It Actually and then not even draw it when the time comes.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Bercilak opens a trade window with Violet, passing some poisoned meat over. Happy to follow along with the ninjas, he does do a bit of multitasking: namely, he opens his Friends window, sending private messages to the players he'd encountered in Clef. The messages are short and to the point, providing encouragement, advising of the dangers within the dungeon, the benefits, and, of course, the shortcut area with toxic water and meaner mobs.

     He doesn't necessarily expect they'll jump at the chance, but it's more aimed at keeping spirits up in the first place.

     With that done, Phreak urges a return to regroup with the rest of the party, given his dwindling supplies of darts. He and Bercilak take point on the return, referencing the map to find the most expedient route back to everyone else.
Friz Moxie: Should we really be in front?
Grit: It's what we do.
Savvy: Should we change that?
Grit: No.
Dirt: Uhhh... hmm. No, chief, I think that's wrong.
Grit: What?
Dirt: I think that's wrong, chief. Go get Lilian. Or Bercilak.
Savvy: Huh? Uh... Okay. Yeah, give it a try, Moxie.
Moxie: Okay... I guess we'll do that.

    Friz glances to Rita, uneasily shifting her weight... before sighing and nodding a few times. She's still got those much-ticked stacks of dishonor... she takes a few steps back and makes a silent gesture, prompting the more direct actors to take point. She'll still do the kick for them to run in, of course, unless someone else has a more dramatic breach-method. Surprisingly professional security posture!
Kirishima Whether the chest is yoinkable or not, Kirishima too moves to rejoin the group! She may be rather low on health by the time she finds everyone thanks to the toxic water, but at least she's not dead! She does, however, look considerably more worn out than she did prior to heading into that sunken tunnel in the first place.
Ishirou Ishirou stands up after taking a rest as the group seems to be ready to move again, and the other groups are heading back here. Rubbing the back of his head he settles in pace. He looks through any last status and tries to make himself as fresh as possible.

Unless these are hackable doors, he doesn't bother. Instead, he stays back at a medium distance and waits to dive in. Once they can coordinate to weaken the boss so he can start piling debuffs on it when they can weaken it enough.

Ishirou gives Friz a pat on the shoulder. "Well, I thought it was pretty cool and brave. Just don't push your luck...it hurts to do that."
Lilian Rook     "Mm." Lilian just folds her arms for a second. "That . . . is sort of familiar, actually." That seems like it only troubles her more. "A little."

    Alas, the chest is not yoinkable. Kirishima can carry it if she wants, but it's very heavy and practically worthless.

    Both members of KNK are essentially unmolested on their way back, simply following their own trail of carnage. Little of note occurs, all the way up until the second floor. There, a passage that appears to be hard-closed by convenient rubble, to function as a visually fitting dead end, actually seems to be reachable.

    If Violet wants to commit to considerable acts of dextrous contortion and shoveling away debris that secretly isn't level geometry, she can squeeze her way through and into a short segment of hallway lined with eight locked doors. Each of them leads to the slightly-less-rusted-than-usual remains of some ancient bunk room, with purses of money, handfuls of consumables, nice stacks of ammunition, clickers, more resonance fuses, and protective light coats with marginally better stats, with notable toxin and emanation resistance. There is, in one room, a bound notebook inside a lockbox that she cannot yet read. Her Untethered progress climbs to 50%
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      The trek to rejoin the party eventually puts Bercilak and Phreak into contact with Friz. Bercilak dips into his Clarity to cleanse the debuff from her, giving a clawed thumbs-up. He smiles at her, gesturing invitingly to the door, perfectly happy to see her technique.

     He himself takes up a position that'll allow him to charge recklessly in and grab agg from whatever might be on the other side, holding his axe one-handed, choked all the way up to use the blade as a target shield.

     "Berc runs in and gets its attention--if there's an 'it.' I hit us with some contingency heals, that'll take us through the first few swings. You, me, KNK, anybody else that's got hurlants, we get within 15 feet and blast at the same time to knock through the Clarity. From there... fuck it, I dunno. Just do what feels right."

     Phreak dips into his own Clarity to hit the party with some short-duration heal-over-time, reloading his hurlants. He signals with a finger-countdown to Friz, as his Clarity takes a bit longer to refresh than Bercilak's, what with their difference in Tuning.

     When the 'countdown' hits zero, he signals for her to kick the door. Bercilak charges in, axe at the ready to deflect any first-strikes.
Lilian Rook     Assembling in front of the boss door, Lilian agrees with Rita's proposition. She doesn't wait for people to stack up if they don't want to. She passes several of her starter potions to Kirishima, and some of the recovered Hospice room loot, somewhat arrogantly expecting she won't need it, but also saying Kirishima at least deserves it for carrying her weight with that miniboss.

    The boss door is unmistakable, being dramatically twice the size of every other portal, and opening down the middle, hissing pale gas from the vents at its rim as it grinds apart with the application of the rustblue key in pop-up. The hallway beyond is dark, but dramatically lights up with dimly flickering flood lamps, clack-clack-clacking from what look like simplified gaslights as the group advances down a rusty catwalk, suspended over the abyss.

    As they walk, the familiar androgynous voice speaks without echo in the hollow gloom, delivering the system message Registering: One Iconic Character - Prologue. One Iconic Character - Pending Start. Three potential Iconic Characters remaining. Prime User Two is encouraged to begin their Iconic Arc. Beginning Collaborate-Argumentative parameters test. Boss increased to level ten. Minor story event initiated. Enjoy your gameplay experience!

    The door seals behind the group. Though there is plenty to space to bring almost any number of players, the lock-out means that the entire group is committing to a considerable risk. With town recall items currently unaffordable to newbies, it's entirely possible this encounter has wiped hundreds already. The dramatic catwalk leads to a broad, rusted steel platform, shadowy at its edges, but brightly lit by the beams of converging lights at its center, swirling with flakes of rust and stirred dust.

    At the center, a hulking colossus of worn blue-grey metal, etched in angular designs, just like the laborers. Its size is that of a main battle tank. Its shape of that of a hexapod, with clawed, track-like feet, heavily reinforced ball joints, a hulking central body, and a central, elevated 'head', which glows with four equally spaced ominous red lights as the group enters its arena. An enormous saw, drill, pincer, and hammer unfold from four arms, two to its front and two to its back, as it lifts itself from the floor. An enlarged status window flashes into existence over it, the bolded name Laborer 04, The Abandoned, above a rapidly filling CL bar and four stacked health bars. Scans read heavy physical resistances, a whopping twenty five hundred CL, and ten thousand HP, with a gigantic Stamina bar and enormous STR and CON to spare, as well as numerous status immunities.

    The party is blasted with a bout of keening static, and then rapid, mechanical nonsense-speak, translating as glyphic subtitles in their HUD. FORBIDDEN ACCESS. SECURITY ORDER UPHELD FOR 2628000 LONG BEATS. EXIT QUARANTINE IN EFFECT. ELIMINATE ALL CONTAMINATED UNITS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR LONG SERVICE, DEVOTED ONES. YOU WILL BE REMEMBERED BY ADMINISTRATION.

    The entire platform shakes under its enormous footfalls as it charges towards the party, attacking with all four limbs independently to handle multiple opponents with relative ease. The saw rapidly grinds through CL and HP with frame by frame contact damage, while the drill strikes with incredible armour piercing. The hammer hurls players back, potentially over the edge, and deals massive stamina damage through blocks, while the claw is capable of catching players in damaging grapples that lock them down and take them out of the fight until rescued by certain amounts of damage. Its attacking limbs have their own, miniature health bars, as well as its legs, and optics. Its damage potential is is as heavy as its armour; not quite an even match for the Elites, but enough to provide stiff opposition even compared to the miniboss.
Lilian Rook     After its first health bar is gone, it announces ELEVATING OFFENSIVE PROTOCOLS. STERILIZATION METHODS ESCALATED., causing its head to pop up and expose a ring of what look like gun ports. Soon, any Elites at range are bombarded with blasts of buckshot, venting gasses from the opposite side, each barrel reloading on independent, telegraphed timers. Elites up close are seared with fire-element flamethrowers that inflict a deadly burning status to those low on CL. Breaking limbs or guns shuts them down for a moment, before it announces DAMAGE CONTROL FUNCTIONING AT HALF EFFICACY. and begins steadily repairing them, reactivating its legs and weapons when their bars reach full.

    Two abnormal things happen in that time period. When Rita first uses her new Composition, the golem announces, in its magical semitelepathic speech, HOSPICE PERSONNEL DETECTED. UNKNOWN BLOODSONG ABNORMALITY. TIER THREE LETHALITY NOT AUTHORIZED FOR HOSPICE PERSONNEL. ESTEEMED HEALER, PLEASE SUBMIT TO BLOODSONG EXAMINATION AND CORRECTION OF YOUR ANOMALOUS CONDITION. COMPOSERS HAVE BEEN NOTIFIED OF YOUR CONDITION., and then begins attempting to stun Rita with laser bolts from its eyes, briefly telegraphed with building glow. However, her utterly enormous Clarity makes most of them simply cause light damage.

    The other is that the second when Lilian hacks apart two of its legs in the blink of an eye, loud, klaxon-like screeching emanates from the golem, and HUD text rapidly translates as DESTRUCTIVE INTERFERENCE DETECTED. SOULSONG PATTERN UNRECOGNIZED. ESCALATING TO TIER FOUR LETHALITY: CONTINGENCY - CONTACT WITH EVERSE ONE. EMERGENCY ALERT DISPATCHED. Within seconds, rusted shutters clunk open in rapid sequence counter-clockwise around the room, and begin pouring out swarms of silver-grey, wasp-like contraptions, diving down with silvery wings and deafening, thunderous hums. They overwhelmingly focus on Lilian, both attempting to ram her with arrow-shaped blades, blast her with rapid pulsed beams of magical energy, and even swarm all over her body, grappling with their pointed legs and glowing red hot from within, overloading what sounds like a flywheel power supply. It effectively keeps her fighting the waves of reinforcements instead of the boss.

    NINETY PERCENT OF CRITICAL CONTINGENCIES FOR EVERSE ONE CONTACT UNRESPONSIVE. SENDING NEW NOTIFICATION TO PRIME CONDUCTOR HUNTER-KILLER SQUADS. POSSIBILITY OF QUARANTINE BREACH TO INNER AREAS.

    Finally, the last health bar sends the boss into some kind of overdrive, glowing red hot the same as the drones. Its movements speed up dramatically, and it gains a new AoE spinning attack, as well as a separate ranged attack that blasts in all directions, all the while its HP slowly decreases on its own. INTEGRITY FAILURE IMMINENT. I OFFER THE END OF MY SERVICE FOR THE GLORY OF THE PRIME CONDUCTOR. IT HAS BEEN AN HONOUR TO SERVE YOU, ESTEEMED ONES.
KNK     Violet is absolutely eager to wedge herself through map geometry, regardless of whether it seems possible. She'd clip through the walls if she could (and makes what appears to be several, concerted attempts). She's familiar with illusionary obstacles in physical space, and even if this place hasn't allowed her to use dream physics yet, there's no reason, in her mind, that it might not just decide to start letting her do so at any moment.

    Rose lets her go in, watching her struggle through, but some brief exchange has her hanging back, herself. Only Violet is left to work or break through a series of locks, and rifle through old belongings. She takes everything she can carry, stopping to examine each, place where it is in the room, pace and imagine a place that would have been -- could have been -- in a fictional past, with real people living here. It's fine if they were never real. She can't articulate what it is she sees in the connections between people and places and things, but the memory of it will stick with her, if she tries.

    A little while later, and she's shoving the extra her moderate STR score couldn't carry back through the gaps for Rose to take. New equipment, even if only slightly better, is changed to. Consumables are readied on belts. Mysterious notes are stored away. They're ready to join at the door.
Kirishima Coward that she is, Kirishima does not take the chest. She's got enough on her plate just bringing the loot from the shrimp beast back and also trying to get through that toxic water as fast as possible.

"We survived!" She announces to the group upon finding them, still looking energetic despite her health bar being somewhat dangerously low. Thankfully, Lilian is there to give her some much needed aid, and Kirishima takes the potions and the compliment with some bashful chuckling and mumbled words that don't really sound like anything concrete.

She only drinks enough to get her health to almost full, of course, leaving the rest for later instead of topping her bar off completely. She looks rather proud as the key opens up the venting door, and then she heads in with the group while peering down at the nothingness below and up at the ceiling to look for the source of that voice.

"Three Iconic characters, some number of Prime Users, and... Collaborative Argumentative parameters test?" Kirishima repeats slowly to herself to try and figure that thing out, then snaps her fingers shortly after the doors close behind her.

"... Oh! It's a boss fight!" As she restates the obvious, she looks over at the giant machine and draws her crossbow. "Don't let up even if you're attacked. The system demands and rewards boldness, teamwork, and precision!" She calls out while demonstrating by doing, advancing on the giant while firing at it all the while. She's not expecting the individual bolts to do much but tickle it, but it's all a part of the CL-drain game as she aims her shots at the optics to try and bring that bar down.

When it charges, Kirishima is quick on her feet to slip past its swings and slam her fists into its arms. The miniature bars are enough of a sign to her that crippling it is an option, and she aims to do just that with each heavy blow from her fists or another one of her many shots from the crossbow at close-ish range. Being that close, though, means the flamethrowers from the escalation of violence catch her at first, drawing pained yelps from the roguish office worker until she's able to figure out THE PATTERN of attacking venting weapons rather than the ones are in the middle of shooting her at point blank.

The legs go abruptly, and things escalate further. "How many forms can one boss have?!" Kirishima shouts in half-frustration and half amusement, leaping from spot to spot to avoid the increased gunfire and spinning attacks as best she can. When she sees someone else coming in for an attack, she joins them by striking from another direction, delivering huge haymakers to whatever limb happens to still be in reach. At one point, she even leaps onto the machine's head to start raining blows down at it.

Once the boss starts melting its own health, Kirishima finally... No, she's still staying in there, smashing it all the while. It would be easy to let the visible danger discourage her, but...

Maybe that Trait had something to it after all. With Lilian occupied as she is, this would be the perfect opportunity for Kirishima to show her and everyone else how far she's come (even if it's largely by using illegal boxing-punches directly from above).
Ishirou Ishirou, despite what was being told to him still only runs in his gear. It's how he knows how to interact with the world, it's how he processes things. The world works because there is logic to it, and figuring out that logic is how he operates. Once he understands that logic, he acts with more boldness, because he hates one thing more than anything...and that is doing anything in ignorance. It isn't about optimization or having to know the right and proper move...

Though it can often look like that from the outside. However, something deep in him screams at him whenever he tries to do anything without at least trying to frame the situation, and then work off of that. Moving stupidly or ignorantly...not having the tool (or at least thinking he has) the right tool for the job.

At first, he dashes in and out, trying to probe its defenses while keeping a scan on it. He notices some things right away. It's very tough, it's very strong, but it's not very fast. It also moves...well acts with devotion to another cause. Okay, how to work around this...he can't make anything stick right now...

Bercilak seems to be going for a position of defense, Rose and Violet are a team and will likely complement themselves. Even as things change, first Rita is overwhelmed with attacks, and then Lilian is singled out by swarms. Rita doesn't want to dip into those 'other' powers. Ishirou decides to wait, and synch his strikes with Bercilak's own.

He runs in, right after any swings, and dives under the larger man, thrusting upwards towards some joint or weak spot, before dancing back behind him. He does this again and again, aiming to try and strike from different angles.

Once the warning about self-repair happens, he changes tactics and jumps back. His hands come up...and attempts to throw all of his efforts into hacking now. If it wants to regenerate, he'll work on countering /that/! The hacking attempts to start applying stacks of counter-regen, attempting to lower its ability to do just that...then works to try and lower its ability to accurately target and its speed.

He assumes its str and con are protected, so he doesn't try...at least not until he is sure that relevant stats are weakened, before trying at least hitting con once. Ishirou comes in again, dancing over the large knight, and attempts to drive the blade in, before flipping off of the monster.

He lands, and this time channels both hands forward. Releasing a bolt of lighting (or at least what he does normally as the magic he's used to) and attempting to strike where the rapier was stabbed into, attempting to inject magic directly into its internals.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants Phreak - Dissonance

     Phreak does exactly what he said he would, upon crossing the threshold, namely, coordinating with Rose, Friz and any other hurlant users to open up on Laborer 04 as soon as it gets within 15 feet. He isn't just aware of the four massive limbs--he's counting on them being used. His tattered cloak rustles as he makes a sideways somersault over the swinging hammer, his hurlants emptying their total of sixteen darts with expert precision. "I'm out!" But he's not done.

     While Bercilak attempts to pin the saw down by hooking the beard behind the accompanying ball-joint at the apex of its swing, Phreak's form shimmers.

     The fixer's feet plant nimbly upon the drill-limb when he lands, and he sprints up the length of it, knife drawn. "Gonna pop the hood on this thing and see what we can fuck up!" In realspace, this would be where Phreak's implants would search for skillsofts on the robot's operating system. Where they'd speed up his mental processing power to greatly reduce the amount of time spent hunting for vulnerabilities. He probably should've tried using his skill on something less wildly dangerous... but then he wouldn't have anything to brag about.

     The gunports emerge (and repairs begin on the saw Bercilak had worked on) as Phreak's about halfway up it. His Clarity seems to tank--but not because of being hit. Rather, his Verse - Wraith is doing heavy lifting, opting him out of being hit in exchange for a flat Clarity ping. The presence of the swarms give him a new sense of urgency. Fuck specific tactics: "Just stack as much shit as you can on it!" he cries to Ishirou--absolutely intending to do the same with the automaton-buggering aspects of his Scoundrel trait.

     Bercilak keeps healing up on Lilian as she fights off the swarm, all the while continuing his determined attempts to swat limbs away from Ishirou with timed interrupts swung at his full strength, hands spaced apart to leverage with the axe that much more. The final stretch, and its super mode, force Phreak from the chassis with a death-defying flip that sends him between red-hot swinging limbs with inches to spare. This is definitely not a job for the knife.

     Bercilak's Clarity is effectively zilch now, but, his HP regen still being cracked allows him to be more reckless than Phreak. Rather than wait for the boss to burn itself down, he closes in, axe held choked up once more to block the ranged attack (his durability weeping at this point). Sliding beneath the AoE spin, he catches the hexapod robot's nearest leg in the weapon's beard and heaves with all his might.
Rita Ma <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, answering the voice: "I'm sorry. I'm not ready to begin it yet." Her tone is strained.
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Just a little more respite first..."

     Once she's re-gathered her pluck, Rita's strategy at the start is simple: stay at the back, start casting her Clarity-boosting Composition, 'hold' it until someone appears to be in imminent danger, then release the blue energy-orb towards them at the last moment. She manages it just once or twice before the Abandoned distracts her.

     "Hospice personnel...? The Respite trait. Is that what people used back then, too?" It's a genuine question. She's overestimating its intelligence. That only makes what comes next hit harder.

     ESTEEMED HEALER, PLEASE SUBMIT TO BLOODSONG EXAMINATION AND CORRECTION OF YOUR ANOMALOUS CONDITION.

     Her breath catches in her throat. Her eyes go wide. What can she possibly say? "Yes" and "no" fight for control of her throat. She should put down her weapon. She should-

     A stun bolt hits her in the chest. She yelps and staggers backwards, tripping over herself and hitting the floor. When she picks herself up again, the emotional paralysis is gone. "Ms. Rook! Hold on!" It's a green light that leaps from her to Lilian, not a blue one, applying that rapid health regeneration effect to help her endure the wasps.

     At the very end when its CL is lowest, Rita shoulders her little hurlant and aims for the eyes, damaging them to minimize the harm its rage state can do.

     "I'm sorry," she says quietly, with just a little tremble. "Thank you for your service."
Friz Grit: Look upon it.
Grit: Size. Shape. Weapons. Limbs.
Grit: It is made to kill you, and it will.
Grit: Full adrenaline.
Dirt: It's bumped ten levels. Some kind of--
Savvy: Focus. Four bars, lots of Clarity. Too many immunities.
Moxie: We'll kill it. We'll kill it.
Dirt: The door closed. Only option.
Moxie: Steady.

    Friz surges into battle, darting aside to let the others take the main combat in melee. Cartridges almost float between knuckles.

Dirt: Drill on the right.
Grit: Roll left. Can't avoid fully.
Moxie: I need aim!
Savvy: It can't swing that mass quickly. Ready in one and a half seconds.
Grit: Ready. Roll.
Moxie: Rolling!
Dirt: Overswing! I see venting! Mark, fire!
Moxie: Firing!
Grit: Bruises. Adrenaline refreshing. The office drone is on fire.
Savvy: Hell of an endurance.

    She tumbles, rolling into a shooting position on her back to fire, reload, fire, scramble to her feet. She continues the pattern, focusing on staying at an angle of familiar industrial machinery and keeping the melee types between her and the arms.

Savvy: One bar's down. Next.
Dirt: Watch it, boss, it's amping up.
Grit: Guns. Death before sound; a supersonic threat.
Moxie: What do I do?
Dirt: Footwork! Gunports reload on a timer, footwork when they're loaded!
Savvy: And kill them dead if you can. Give me your best shots.

    She screams as buckshot tears through space she almost was. It glances off of her armored coat where it would have punched through. Her legs tremble with the urge to run when she stands, exhales, and tries dead-on shots on the ports.

Dirt: I'm seeing repairs, chief.
Grit: It hungers for survival. Like an animal.
Dirt: Wait-- The hackers have got it!
Moxie: Perfect!
Savvy: Alright, Moxie, keep it up!
Friz     Her aim steadies. She pops the gun ports with new determination. Ishirou and Phreak will tear the defenses to shreds, and with practiced motions, she blasts and blasts and blasts with her gun, struggling through reloads but never stepping out of the machine's awareness. She might be ranged, but she plans to Tune hard.

Dirt: Rook just obliterated *two legs at once*!
Savvy: Superb lethality from the Extinguisher.
Dirt: Wait, it's escalating!
Moxie: She can't take them all down like this...!
Savvy: Then we can't keep depending on her.
Grit: We kill it ourselves.
Moxie: Where's our options?
Dirt: Bercilak's pinning a limb.
Moxie: Can we capitalize?
Savvy: No. But someone else can. Keep them covered.
Moxie: Got it.

    Rushing closer, Friz slides behind Bercilak, using him as cover. Her eyes gleam under shadow, no glasses to obscure the keen examination of everything. She finds every gunport and every limb that could strike someone who's attacking through the oppoertunity offered by Bercilak's grab-and-heave, and blasts every one of them -- albeit slowly. She's ready to swap to her baton and smash hard the minute she risks an element going un-stunned, not afraid to drop the weapon for just a moment to deliver the quickest strikes. Kirishima's strike from above, Ishirou's lightning discharge right over Bercilak...

    And the shot from Rita.

Dirt: Unbelievable lethal intent from the girl.
Grit: It is nothing but believable.
Grit: What persists in her most is the only trait unique to humanity.
Savvy: What's that?
Grit: The hurling of a tool of death.
Savvy: ...
KNK     Rose and Violet enter the room, Rose restraining herself from making any remarks about them being trapped in a kill zone. That was a given. It's been the case since they logged in, for that matter, if Bercilak's shared immortality doesn't work. And even if it does, that might mean an end to the investigation --

    Would that be so bad? She's not sure. This place seems out to get her, specifically. It hates survivors, and she hates it, in turn. It's trying to get under her skin (and succeeding), to know her, and she hates strangers who think they can, too.

    Violet's having fun, isn't she? Maybe that's worth something. Just not if it gets her hurt. Really hurt.

    Reflexively, Rose analyzes and orders, brain in overdrive, an old reflex triggering the necessary drugs to clear and accelerate her thought back in her physical body.

    "Auto-repair. Prioritize. Shutting down an arc has value, full lockdown's impractical, unnecessary. Violet, don't parry." Getting thrown off by blows that heavy is the more likely result, without boosting her STR by a lot. "Bercilak, you've got the weight for it. Legs after arms. Can't spin other weapons into place, then. Watch your positioning."

    Violet isn't watching. She's listening.

    "I wanna be an--" She stops herself from saying something that was probably stupid, ahead of being reminded of the timing, "ri-right, focusing!"

    The both of them take every single duration-based consumable that could possibly be useful, stamina regeneration being the most important, but there's no reason not to gain even the slightest edge in damage resistance or health or clarity regeneration. Fancier items will have to be things to look for, later. Ammo's plentiful, at least.

    When they actually get to work, it's a blur of motion without stop. The system limits the force that can be applied based on the (considerable) stats of those present, but the advantage of reaction time is one a real-time game can hardly diminish, and it's with speed of thought that Rose turns every moment that should be recovery and reorientation into another strike. Coordination with Phreak comes first, firing her first hurlant to time with the final shot from his, precisely aimed, followed by a wide dodge. The jank gun is stashed, and her blade nicks the arm targeting her every time she avoids it -- letting it come closer and closer with every attempt, until she's utterly confident that she can follow its movements to millimeter precision.

    Violet baits the drill, sliding in low in range, then leaping over with uncanny movements when it hits the platform under her. Rose lets the chainsaw pass just beyond her chin as she contorts beneath it, drives her blade into the platform to pivot, and brings her foot down on top of the retreating arm, leaping from there over the center, seeking the critical points that'll give her that necessary bonus damage.

    When the gun ports open up, Rose, by pure mental reflex, attempts to connect her electronic countermeasures and upload a full suite of submit-or-die viruses, forgetting that this isn't a real robot.

    The surprise of her CL taking a hit and the flamethrowers being hit with confusion and paralysis effects is processed in split moments. She swaps to Harmony and does that again, and again, timing it for moments a specific weapon would have otherwise had a close lock on a soft target (herself and Violet naturally included).
KNK     Violet definitely isn't risking that boss parry, but she can still effectively tie up any given arm by being directly where it should be able to easily hit her, and then simply not being there anymore, a Shadow that slipped away again, clockwork joints pushing her legs full-force in directions that should, maybe, not be possible, but to which she's more accustomed than is comfortable to admit. Better to pretend that it's just a practiced skill.

    "And what makes them so important... to you? Starting to get sick of that, and it's only been a day."

    Even though it was a separate voice speaking, Rose can only take out that frustration on the robot before her. There shouldn't be a problem with that, but there is. This won't be enough to calm her. In this state, it's not even tiring, though it really should be, to leap over a claw, to dive directly beneath an expanding flame, to high kick her foot on the edge of the 'bot between two guns, press down and launch herself up, and badly, badly abuse the durability her poor blade by using the the reaction force of each target she strikes with it to help launch her into the next through unfair abuse of rotational momentum and an apparent immunity to nausea.

    Violet joins her in each moment, the one who can undoubtedly keep up with, by familiarity if not by stats, striking once out of twice like clockwork, like a dance, alternating strong and weak beats without the chance to rest. The second hurlant is fired right as the CL bars drop, Violet's arm unfolding to fire an overheating shot where she'd expect a 'brain' to be, and then returning to the dancing beat until the next opportunity.

    "We aren't -- well, maybe we are contaminated. But, you know, I don't like the kind of job that ends with being thrown away, dirty, in a bag."
Lilian Rook     It's a bit rough and slipshod, but the general strategic approach put together by the Elites over the course of Derivation Bridge comes together well for the boss; a true test of everything they've learned in exemplary boss fight fashion.

    An opening salvo of ranged weapon fire to deplete a chunk of CL, followed by a rapid melee assault to carve it lower in a short time, then allowing tanks and gunners to take over for steady pressure, makes sure most damage goes to HP, resistances are mostly lowered, and the boss' CL bar wobbles back and forth in the bottom quarter.

    Targeting specific parts when HP is vulnerable to selective reduce the boss' attack output and mobility works wonders, especially Phreak gutting its ranged attacks. Ishirou brute forcing debuff after debuff in sequence starts having a dramatically swingy impact as the fight goes on, further aided when Rose joins right in. Rita's regeneration buff is a multiplier on base regeneration, but even then, one percent HP per second is still three additional health bars over the bossfight, and large chunks of emergency CL prevent the boss from spiking anyone to death. Bercilak can hold its attention quite well, sticking to it like glue and tearing it up and slowing it down so long as people reduce its concentrated fire on him, and his heals rescue anyone in a poor position to find time to use items. Kirishima's steady DPS and Friz's armour-piercing spikes deplete its HP in rapid chunks, and the fluid duo of KNK constantly takes down systems just as they come out, then switches to even more DPS without pause.

    Despite the fact that Lilian is targetedly prevented from helping trivialize the fight, she seems to be doing fine. Her heavy sword, high strength, even higher skill, and expert strikes hack through respawning reinforcements in short order, bursts of instantaneous action wiping out many at a time when they crowd too close. The CL cost is covered by expert parries that drop damage to small chips that her plate armour more or less negates. Her Stamina begins to flag by the end, but she finds openings to draw and fire her hurlant into the boss here and there as well, soon surrounded by voxelizing wreckage and drops.

    The redlining boss is swiftly put out of its rage state by having its optics blown out, legs torn off, and interior systems gutted. As its last HP bar slowly comes to a rest at zero, it garbles out one last distorted MAY THOSE WHO COME AFTER ME SERVE BRAVELY . . ., and then dramatically vents fire and gas in all all directions, spraying off a shower of shrapnel as its status bar shatters.

    The amount of experience is tremendous. With the miniboss too, everyone shoots up from level one to level four. The item pool is immediately divided as equitably as possible between players, along with several drops from the boss. Schematic: High pressure canister. Schematic: Small and Medium Resonance Fuse. Schematic: Purging Torch. Schematic: Paralytic Gazer. 4 x Line Fellers (Hurlant). 2 x Riverbreaker (Great Hammer). 1 x Steelcutter (Great Axe). 1x Blue Auger (Spear). 30 x Rustblue Light Plating. 10 x Rustblue Heavy Plating. 120 x Iridescent Blackblood. 15 x Blue Iodine. 1 x Labor Cortex. Then a sundry list of large amounts of scrap, ore, and reward money. One would have to grind for days to get this much XP, and scavenge and explore for days more to get gear roughly this good. Any player who survived this already has an enormous advantage.
Lilian Rook     Both Friz and Violet are prompted with a Trait Discovery, at ten percent each. Pride of Flesh. It says It is natural to envy the steel. To covet its cladding and its sharp confidence in your hands. Humankind was destined to wield it, as they themselves were forged by fire long ago. The steel feels no pain. The steel brooks no hesitation. The steel makes no distinctions. Never forget that steel can never be anything but a tool. Do not be entranced by its lure. The awareness of the frantic blood pounding in your veins, ready to spill with the slightest error, is what keeps your mind sharp, and your instincts true. Face the steel with your mortal bones, and fear not; you were born tempered; humanity did not invent fire, fire invented humanity.

    That voice again. Congratulations! Thank you for your participation in Collaborative-Argumentative data collaboration! Your game experience will be updated with further accuracy as your arc unfolds! The exit door, on the far end, ceases blaring its emergency lights, and creaks open, a dramatic foot at a time, to spill foggy sunlight into the darkened room, almost blinding after such a long, pitch black dungeon.

    Cool, humid air meets you on your exit. Scrub grasses turn lush and green. Trees are thick and riotously coloured. Flowering climbers cover every surface, the air filled with dreamlike haze and glittering pollen. The path is equal parts gravel and mud, and the sound of crooning animal calls echoes with haunting melody from the distance. Overture ~ Ancient Lake flashes across your HUD.

    Lastly, only a short walk is needed to arrive at a particularly intact ruin of white stone topped with a black glass cube, covered in whorled geometric designs, which begins to float and rotate as you approach, red-gold light flowing through etchings down a central pillar and over a wide diamond foundation under the vines. Waycadence ~ Ancient Lake is added to your map. Phreak, with his teleport ability, can see that this is a Recall Node. A place that can be teleported to with an item (or his Trait), or touched directly to travel to any other one; likely there is one in Clef too.

    Congratulations on successfully completing your calibration trial! Logout features have been enabled! Logging out will only be possible from Waycadence points. Logging out will be placed on cooldown for a set period after each login. Please use your time to contemplate your experiences thus far, and approach this world with fresh eyes. There's a weird pause in the system announcements, marked by more static. System clock has been updated with RETROCAUSAL TIMEKEEPING FUNCTIONALITY thanks to PRIME USER ONE. Virtual time compression will now be adjusted in real time, scaled to concurrent logins of Iconic and Potential Iconic characters, so as to maximize Primary Arc involvement. See you again soon!