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Lilian Rook     --Ishirou's continued scanning is quite conclusive. There are no signs of any magic whatsoever on the Antegent remains. There is no doubt its demise was accomplished with purely nonmagical means.--

    --Rita isn't exactly clearly guided, but she might get the idea by the time she starts to feel the air growing warm and electric, hear the sounds of animals(?), and see the tip of an extremely tall triangular-prism structure above the brand new buildings, like a three-sided obelisk. The small portion she can see is carved extensively with faces and tree imagery.--

    --"By the look of it, probably. It's certainly not pure morse, even if you look at it for only a minute, but it never flashes more than nine times in a row, and it only has a short and long length." Lilian lays her fingers on the ice-slicked stone for a moment. "And it has to be much older than the FOB down below."--

    --The most significant item is a simple charm for luck and fair weather stuck into the ground just outside.--

    --flickering visits from unknown individuals whose presence is worth but a moment of time, appearing on the mountaintop in thick layers of furred clothes without apparent means, entering and leaving again, occasionally exiting with packs lighter than before. The vision history slows down for seconds at a time, here and there, and always to see the mirrors on all the surrounding peaks flickering bright, just before it looks as if a piece of the sky itself falls, somewhere in the range nearby, and shakes even the mountain underfoot.--

    --Coat-clad individuals wear respirator masks of some kind, but seem in high spirits, taking turns carving the charm themselves, ostensibly to christen the site before the light is turned on for the first time. Someone says something about a 'sacred birth'.--


    Cantio phases through the door without issue. It takes her into a small, squat, lukewarm space, with wooden floors that have been weather-sealed the old fashioned way, and a short ladder to the floor above. There is nominally a pair of cots for sleeping on, a drying rack for clothes, and an open and empty longchest for supplies, around a cleared gravel fire pit, but most of the space seems to be for what looks like an enormous battery, slapdash and improvised from what look like manually cast parts, but clearly functional, and, connected to it, fully obsolete, last generation ham radio equipment, currently receiving a crackling signal. She can see a hunting rifle propped against the wall, a heavy duty cable strewn across the floor, and--

    A dead body. Face down. Wearing a rustic parka with two neat holes torn through the back of the hood. Two more are punched in the opposite wall, where she feels a miniscule draft. Half-dried blood coats the floor, sticky enough to be most of a day old. Some small, polygonal black object is physically attached to the crusty old radio, but besides the empty storage chest, nothing else appears amiss. Wait. No. Something flat and curved and beige-green has been stuck to the underside of the loft floor, behind the ladder.

    Trudy may help getting in, but it's Arthur in the way of forcing down the door. The subtly menacing click-ping of broken wire follows. There is an ear-piercing explosion, and the doorway is shot through with hundreds of tungsten ball bearings.
Tamamo     Tamamo describes her vision. "Little done by those who built this place to protect it, but only a small blessing against the storms. When some piece of the heavens falls to earth, every mirror marked its passing. Whether to warn of its coming or to guide its arrival, I cannot see. Strange, then, that they should be so bright, now. Is there something else, perhaps the influence of this army, that has lit these lights? Ah, but perhaps it is all the simpler. If only the mirrors had been here, then it is that these are meant to reflect the arrival of something else. The strangeness would be in bringing a lamp to each, where such had not been meant."

    Still unaware of what's inside for the moment, she hugs her arms to herself in the cold, leans against Lilian, and continues. "They spoke of a sacred birth, those who built this place. They wished for the arrival of a child. Were these meant to reflect the light of such an arrival, perhaps? Do they now signal falsely? If so, for what do we yet wait? For a mirror to have meaning, somewhere, there must be a watcher."

    The shotgun trap goes off, and she jumps, ears straightening. "What was that? Is everyone -- oh, no! Arthur! Please hold on, I have--!" And she's pulling out her healing charms.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Force down the door

    Arthur waits for Trudy to melt the door, leaving it far less cumbersome to open. Once enough ice is through, he gives Mister Flamethrower a cheery thumbs-up and a grin. And without hesitation, he smashes through the door with his shoulder, using moderately superhuman strength against an aged piece of construction to break the locks and jams. Hey, even when you're not a strength specialist, there's only so much an architect can do years ago, right? So he crashes his way inside!

>Arthur: Observe the corpse

    His eyes widen. Nausea and pain slam into his stomach. If he had the time, he would have gone pale. He doesn't, unfortunately, have the time.

>Arthur: Dodge the rigged trap

    No dice. Arthur's focus is far too consumed by the corpse to do anything about the bullets. Unless someone does something *very* fast to interrupt, Arthur's about to be taken off his feet, blasting backwards out of the doorway.
Trudy Grimm     The Flame Trooper's gout of flame is short and controlled, hosing the doorframe down enough to melt the ice but not enough to do more than scorch the wood a bit. With all the cold and moisture, and the trooper's distinct lack of certain jellied fuel compounds due to the era he came from, it's all remarkably controlled for a tongue of flame that could potentially reach out some 20 meters.

    He clicks off the torch and lifts the nozzle skyward, observing through empty gas mask lenses as Arthur breaks the door in. Something snaps. Something clicks. He steps aside, shielding Trudy completely and providing a partial defense for others who happen to be behind her when his own body is riddled with high speed shot.

    It's a rather gruesome result, blasting open the front of his coat and shattering half of his mask. The gruesome inner works of the undead soldier are exposed, though briefly. Some shots graze his flamethrower's fuel tank, prompting an alarming pressure-release sound followed by the *thwoom* of the escaping gas catching on residual flame.

    And then he's gone. Sunk immediately into the Witch's shadow. Just as the void portal closes, there's a distinct subsonic *whump* of an explosion and a tongue of flame manages to escape.

    Trudy sighs in relief, glancing over her shoulder towards Petra, Lilian, and Tamamo. Her attention then returns to Arthur, "Well, if Miss Tamamo can't save him, I can always pick him up again."

    "Can't say I expected that."
Ishirou Non-magical, which means it was either done with tech or...was done by another monster.  Something like this would be a big threat right..?  Or rather, something that could do this would be a big threat, but they hadn't run into it..?  The forces heading to the base also do not know what caused it, and were likely going to study it.

The news that the dead monster itself was a major threat itself was curious.  Ishirou waits for the convoy to get farther away, and starts scouting the way they came to see if he could discover any more clues to what caused it, or perhaps look for the trails of anything that were either following the convoy or traveling off the beaten path.  

Something was going on here, more questions than answers, and it was getting serious the longer these questions remained unanswered.  People were exploring some overlooks, two were in the city, so he had time to continue this scouting to get a better feel for the land they were on before any moves could be made.  

Just as long as he stayed low and quiet, right?
Petra Soroka     Lilian's acknowledgement brings a strange expression to Petra's face, a strange swirl of self-indulgent pride at her observation being affirmed by her, specifically--as begrudging and minor as it was--and petulant irritation at that prior feeling. None of this is visible, though, since her face is totally obscured by her scarf and goggles.

    "I'll note down the pattern, see if it matches with the other lighthouses around. If it doesn't, maybe we can figure out why; if it's tracking or measuring something, or whatever." She nods, self-evidently pleased by this plan of action, and hops up on top of the Kana.

    Holding her hands inside the cockpit to keep them warm while she writes--the change in temperature once inside the mech is *immediate*--she's just finishing noting down the cycle when the explosion goes off.

    Petra's first reaction is to dive inside the Kana, crouched and shaking to shield herself from the full-scale military bombardment she's sure is coming. It doesn't, though, and the groaning of the mountain reminds her of another potential threat. She pulls herself up into the pilot's seat, ducking her face in embarrassment from anyone who saw her panic from the explosion, then turns the inertial locking pellet cannon of the Kana to the snow around the tower. A few shots scattered around--they're quiet, but who knows if that even matters now--guarantees that the snow won't collapse into an avalanche.

    Petra reemerges from the hatch, scanning her companions. "Is everyone alright? What happened?" She winces at Arthur's seemingly inevitable fate.

    Wait, did the camp hear any of that? Nervously, Petra peeks through her targeting systems to check for any sign that anyone, or anything, is coming for them.
James Bond      Having split off from Rita, Bond finds himself at the outer barracks. He finds an unoccupied bunk and makes a token display of claiming it as his. If there's a lockbox nearby to claim as well, he does--placing a few meager possessions within which amount to what someone in his position might conceivably carry on a long journey, but don't make up 'standard issue.' A faded, worn paperback, a pack of cigarettes and a decanter of some homemade spirit or another.

     So far, he's learned a few things of interest. Enlightened personnel aren't on the roster, or subject to the quite same scrutiny that the soliders are. Among the Enlightened personnel here, there's someone most of the soldiers would deem a 'kid.' There's an inordinate amount of effort being put forth to screen potentially compromised persons, and finally, a vested interest in keeping 'outsiders' from learning about this place or interfering with what's going on.

     Figuring out what's going on and what all this is in service of is number one on the list, and so once his things are put away, Bond loiters outdoors with a lit cigarette, in that way that's almost certain to attract a superior officer in search of hands for drudgework. While he waits, he strikes up conversation with anyone who happens to pass him by and especially anyone co-loitering, even if only to catch their breaths in between assignments. He's careful to keep his conversations casual, but his primary topic is the 'other' Enlightened kid that's been let in, fishing for opinions about them.
Rita Ma      A strange obelisk, an electric feeling in the air, the sound of animals- the first thing Rita does, reflexively, is sniff for blood. Is this an animal sacrifice thing? It'd explain a bit.

     She continues to approach it, as she's quietly expected to do. The cover Bond gave her had survived scrutiny, but her transparent awe and unfamiliarity on her face might give the lie away.

     When she finds a furtive moment, she ducks behind something and taps her ear to key up her radio.

<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Ms. Rook? Are there any big magical effects near me right now? There's a big monument with faces and trees on it, but I don't know what it does..."
Rita Ma <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Ms. Rook? Are there any big magical effects near me right now? There's a big monument with faces and trees on it, but I don't know what it does..."
<J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "You're closing in on the highest density of magic I can sense down there, but I couldn't tell you exactly what it all is from here."
<J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "Oh, does anyone..."
<J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "...Should I swing back around to start IDing magic?"
<J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "Pardon me, I am a bit busy. However, if someone here has some item of Ms. Rita's, I may assist her."

<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Mmmm... I tried to give Ms. Cantio a cup of tea, but I think she didn't want it. I'm sorry, Ms. Tamamo!"
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "I could get something to you if you give me a second, though."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Where are you?"
<J-IC-Scene> Tamamo says, "We are outside one of the lit structures up the mountains, at the moment."

     While Rita's huddled down in the most secluded corner she can find en route to the obelisk, one of her mimic-tentacles peels off her arm and stops imitating skin. Segments appear on it, like an earthworm. The tip segment crackles with energy, calcifies into aerodynamic form, and then zips into the air: a tiny guided missile.

     To the naked eye, it's imperceptible, thanks to Rita's active camouflage. To other sensors, it should be no more conspicuous than a bird.

     Up on the mountain, the air whistles. A little white-blue shape lands near Tamamo and creates a puff of snow on impact, trailing a faint wake of energy. It's hard and glossy like a beetle's shell, faceted sharply like an arrowhead-gemstone, and warm like a body. That should suffice.

<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Okay! Just..."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma makes a queasy noise. Regret, but she's not backing out now. "... Don't look at it too much, okay?"
    
Lilian Rook     Despite the lack of meaningful aid it provides, Lilian wraps her arm around Tamamo as she leans against her, rubbing her fingers along her upper arm while still trying to keep track of the area as best she can. "A million soldiers camped out at your doorstep would be reason for anyone to light a signal fire, I think. God knows how they even get up here, though. I'm not surprised they didn't try hard to protect it; there's not even a reason for Antegent to come up here."

    The thin set of her carefully neutral expression tenses at the words of births and children. "Someone must be watching them, I agree. But the purpose of these sorts of chains is usually so that someone can be very far away. It stands to reason that light and mirrors must be far more practical than sending messages over the mountains by foot, but then why not a radio?"

    Petra's paying close attention to the pattern itself does confirm one of her suspicions: Each other blinking light on the frigid horizon spends approximately three quarters of its uptime repeating the same pattern in staggered succession across them, though the pattern itself seems to change very slightly every so often. The remaining one quarter is a unique pattern, for unknown reasons. Clearly they are meant to be seen and to pass along information, but given the lack of rational reason for occupants . . . Well, it's definitely code at least. Not one she can decode, but something that must be legible to someone.

    Lilian reacts more or less instantaneously to the sound of the explosion, bolting to the door with Tamamo in tow, but problematic physics dictate that Arthur is going to be hit with a spray of shot before the sound of the blast even reaches her ears, so the best she's done is to bring the healer to him instantaneously. Snow on the higher shelf begins to crumble, and then simply slides down very slowly once Petra's marker shot thumps into the fluffy white problem area. From any position outside the post though, the sound is loud and shocking but not particularly resonant. It doesn't carry far and doesn't have the bass of a real high explosive blast. Petra scanning down on the FOB finds no indication anyone is aware of anything.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Arthur, hey, get up

    Arthur is a wheezing mess of sucking chest-salsa and flopped limbs. Despite it all, to nobody in particular (especially not his healers), he rasps, "No, fuck that. I'mma lie my ass right down here for a while looking slightly less cool than I make myself out to be ordinarily." And, for now, he'll lay there while much less shot people put all his blood back into his body.

    For no especially clear reason, Arthur's prone body has a small prompt above it that says "/!\ HOLD E TO REVIVE /!\".
Lilian Rook     Inside the mystery construction, Lilian is already clearing out the chemical-smelling smoke. Poking around at the spot under the loft Trudy had seen before, she first wonders aloud "The hell? Those fragments look like an anti-personnel mine. The kind of thing commandos used to use to hold buildings from superior numbers." and then a few seconds later, she finally notices the body, with a dull and unimpressed "Oh."

    Her eyes drift over to the radio equipment right away. "Well, I suppose we probably know how these lighthouses are staying in contact. So what exactly is the point of a signal light at all?" Lilian sighs. "And who is the corpse with? It's clearly not G.D.F. Why kill them? And why trap the place behind you? It looks pretty recent, doesn't it?"

    Ishirou's continued flying around the mountainside isn't all too exciting. It makes sense that the G.D.F wouldn't set up right in the heart of Antegent activity. The area around here is barely terraformed, as seems to be the case for bare rock from deep in the earth, only the deep valleys and crevasses teeming with writhing mists and cold lights. The sighs of battle damage --not recent, but decades old-- are evident everywhere to a thorough terrain scan; most of the places it is possible to fall through the snow are where it has filled in hundreds of thousands of deep craters, entire bare faces are bereft of snow by contrast because it can't get any grip on solid glass, and what pings as fossil presence shows up all over the place. The amount of scrap material buried under the ice and hidden under the trees here must be unspeakably immense. Just salvaging it would probably fund most of this entire operation; likely a sneaky third goal.

    He can also see how the mountain lights wind away to the north, but no further to the south. The G.D.F and the Elites both are parked at the very terminus of a long trail. Almost as if the former intended to keep an eye on it and search it backwards to the root from the very start. Lastly, at the same instant as the explosion, he picks up an encrypted radio ping sent from the lighthouse somewhere down the mountain.
Tamamo     Tamamo is swiftly moved to the emergency patient's position. Just how much of an emergency it is is a bit beside the point. She's not really sure how durable Arthur is, in general, but hearing a loud explosion and him bloody on the ground is enough to activate her sense of worry. Fortunately, her worry reflexes are mostly productive, in this sort of situation. From the depths of her fluffy winter coat, she retrieves a stack of talismans.

    Her monofocus would be rather bad in a firefight situation, but as long as that trap isn't resetting itself, there's no problem. Under the immediate assumption that it's better not to move, she kneels down next to Arthur, rips apart the first talisman like it's a package for the calming golden sparkles that fall from it, and sets the remainder out in a ring around where he fell. If a bar under the REVIVE prompt starts filling up as she does, that's probably (not) a coincidence.

    "Yes, I should think you should lay there a bit longer. Rather, do not be in a rush to stand and, even then, do not be in a rush to enter. The cold is a softer hazard than motion would be." He's lost blood, but Tamamo can make use of that. With a long feather pulled from her pockets, she draws the scattered fluid into a series of largely indecipherable symbols withini her circle of talismans.

    'Turning back time' isn't quite within her power, but the effects look a bit like that. Transforming his wounds into part of the magic circle gives some control over that lost fluid, and the arrangement of the circle is self-organizing, like constructing a spring that's already tensed, and letting it go. 'Go,' in this case, being 'the blood, going back in where it belongs.'

    Once that's working, and it will work even without her continued involvement, she stands up again with a, "Please wait a bit longer, would you?" And she goes to find Rita's camoflauged missile.

    Though she'd said she wouldn't look at it any more than necessary, Tamamo had politely refrained from mentioning that she cannot help but look very carefully, for her magic to work. What thoughts she has for it she keeps to herself, out of that same consideration. She doesn't want to keep the girl waiting, if she's presently somewhere dangerous, surrounded by possible enemies.

    A sympathetic connection between a discarded part of a body and the person who'd lost it is extremely easy to establish, especially for how fresh that disconnect is. For most objects, time would be needed, but that's time spent on the person. This is far easier than the tea would be. And with that connection established, and her mirror at hand, Tamamo summons up a vision of Rita's current situation. She can't see very far around her subject, but if the imagery she'd been looking at is close at hand, then it's just as good as Tamamo being there, herself.

    "Now, just what it is we observe, in this place?" She can't send her talismans to Rita through the connection, but she doesn't need those to reach out and touch the threads of the obelisk, and follow their connections through the land. Most likely.
Ishirou The survey isn't the most interesting, but it does fill in a few more holes.  Not fully terraformed, lots of debris from the onslaught and the months that followed.  Once they achieved their goals it stands to reason that salvaging would help supplement the resources used to claim this land.  There were many reasons to come out, even if this wasn't the most pressing.  

So many craters...Ishirou silently sighs to himself.  It almost reminds him of home, though his home is doing worse off in most ways.  At least humanity here is recovering.  It's been a while since he thought about INDUS.  

That's a whole different question for a different day.  The moment he starts getting ready to turn back, his ears hear the explosion.  The signal sent catches his attention immediately.

"POD, try to decode, I'm pushing forward," he says, as POD, who is currently integrated into him, starts trying to decipher the encoded signal.    During this, Ishirou swings around towards the Mountain, trying to scan ahead, down towards where the signal was sent, and trying to get some clue as to where it was sent to.  
Trudy Grimm     Trudy trots the few paces from herself to where Arthur landed, standing by while Tamamo takes care of him. She paces around outside the circle created by the talismans, partly to ensure her own talents aren't needed and partly to observe the magic itself. It is, after all, a hobby of hers. Once it becomes clear that Arthur is not in fact going to die and need the Necromancer Special, the witch nods once, "He seems to be in good hands, I'll leave you to it."

    She next pops up inside the lighthouse proper, leaning in, nose wrinkling at the acrid stench of spent explosives. When she actually enters, it is done so while covering her mouth and nose with one sleeve of her unliving weasel jacket. The scent seems to distress the weasels as well, with the jacket itself writhing with unease, "Anti-personnel mine? No wonder my cute friend recognized it. The war he came from used a lot of those, too."

    Regarding Lilian's questions, Trudy takes her hand away from her face, procuring the Grimoire from within her squirming coat, "Well. We could collect clues and try to piece it together-- or we could try asking them directly." The book unbuckles and flips open. From its pages she extracts the rune of Man, Mannaz, then twists its pale blue-white shape into the sickly green of the Death rune Eiwaz.

    "He's clearly quite lost when it comes to resurrection. Fortunately, that isn't a limitation for me." When she reaches out, she curls her fingers and draws them up as if lifting something, accentuated by the runic circle expanding around her feet, "Come on, surely you'd be willing to answer some questions for us. Let's start with your name; we can get into Miss Rook's inquiries after that."
Lilian Rook     Bond, more than prepared to blend in, does so. Once he is simply thrown into the teeming masses of expendable humanity (and slightly less expendable rifles and vodka-based drinks), physical security is actually more relaxed than it might be on the usual sort of military base. The middle management seems too busy to do menial checks, and there is no particular reason for a spy to actually be here (his own involvement being plenty ironic), so he is largely left to his own devices.

    The sheer size of the base means that the vast majority of the individuals who cross his path haven't seen the one singular event he is referring to, but are happy to chat to him about various superstitious takes, the weather, their gambling streaks, and unprovable rumours. It's his thirtieth arrival that seems to know what he's talking about. "The little blonde? With the spirit mask, right? From a week back. Haven't seen any others that young, that's for sure. Don't know what to tell you. We don't speak to the props unless spoken to. Kind of bashful and small. She had an attitude like she knew more than she was letting on, but they all do. Just between you and me though, she had the look of someone who's seen action before. You can see it in someone's eyes, when they're young enough. That they've seen death and it wasn't a surprise."

    Rita certainly smells blood. Quite a bit, and several shades of old. It doesn't smell like just blood though; not the clean slit of a throat. She faintly smells marrow and bile and spinal fluids. The complete boquet of a mid-sized animal torn open and chewed to pieces. It doesn't take her long to figure out why, once she meanders past a cordon fence that nobody seems inclined to approach anyways, and comes across the lone natural feature remaining in the area; a heap of ancient glacial boulders having slid off the mountain some aeons ago, covered in tundra vegetation and with a few boreal trees left. Mixed in them are tall iron poles, forked at their ends, to clutter the space a little more, and a topless wire and steel post cage around the perimeter.

    There are certainly animals within it, being very technical. She can only really see half of one, but can smell several others. An enormous, scaled beast, glittering dull, oily gold, with multiple serpentine necks and heads like fanged deep sea fish, perched up on one of the poles in some sort of restive semi-torpor, finned wings folded against its body. The heap of stones is stained with blood and strewn with bones, probably from feeding multiple monsters the size of a school bus each. There is nothing preventing them from flying away, it seems, so one can only assume them some degree of tame, or perhaps 'contracted'.

    Tamamo is able to define the center of magic as, in mythopoetic essence, a 'World Tree'; a great idol that is serving as a root of energy and locus of faith, focusing in the natural flow of energy in the landscape and the meagre mystic energies of the teeming masses of soldiers to whom it is totally useless, to form an enormous, blinding 'battery' of available magic means. The area around is strewn with the remnants of old spells; mainly divinations, as it seems a number of sorcerers have simply come and gone as they pleased. A community commons, perhaps. She also detects traces of what are most certainly 'spirits'.

    Bond is eventually harangued for slacking, and sent to 'goat shovelling duty'. He is, ironically, herded off towards where Rita is.
Cantio "It's still chilly in here, too..." Cantio comments idly as she feels that draft on the way in, then jerks back a half-step when she sees the body. Rather than touching it right away, she gives it a quick once over and spots those holes, then takes a quick look around to get her bearings.

Holes in the wall. A rifle hooked up to a wire. A modest living space, a lot of blood, a weird black thing stuck to a radio, and a beige green thing that she doesn't get a chance to take a closer look at before it blasts the door with way too many projectiles to be an accident. Tamamo gets Arthur taken care of, though, so Cantio's shock ends up being short-lived.

"Easy now. Don't worry, it looked pretty cool when you got lifted off the ground like that!" She's trying to sound reassuring/like someone else who would totally say that unironically, and she even offers him a cold/nearly frozen cube as some kind of makeshift cold compress. After that, however, it's time to investigate!

Ishirou mentions a radio signal, and Cantio's attention goes right towards the radio with the weird black thing on it. "I wonder if this..." Beelining for that, she fiddles with the radio a bit at first, checking to see if it's capable of being turned on to listen to anything. If it's not, she moves on to the black thing stuck to it, handling it far more delicately during her inspection.

Once that's done, though, she moves onto something slightly less delicate: Picking it apart to see if she can get it opened up without actually breaking anything off of the whole setup.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Okay, lie there for a bit.

    Arthur gives a weak, unsteady thumbs-up to Tamamo. As she completes her rush-job healing, the prompt hovering above him slowly fills with a green color, left to right. Wounds closed and blood mostly returned, he just sort of reposes in a crumpled heap, snow steaming where flecks of blood were cast out and could not find a conveniently magical path to return. That would have, for sure, killed him if he hadn't gotten a lot of medical aid, or a *lot* of reasons to scream and shout and dramatically endure the vicious damage.

    But he's alive. So...

>Arthur: Okay what about now?

    "Yeah, yeah." Arthur mutters to himself as he pulls himself off his frozen ass, pats the snow off his body, and staggers through the door (much more carefully this time). He sort of... shields his eyes from the body, listening to Lilian. "That type of thing is made for a type of dude like me." He rubs his sore chest, wincing. "Type of dude who comes here days or weeks later to figure out why nobody's on the other end of the radio. Bet that..." He gestures at it. "Is meant to tell whoever's here to do something with the lighthouse. Maybe. Shit."

    Why light signals and radio? Is something being done with the light here? He resolves to root around. Maybe head up there and see if there's something he can figure out above the ladder. He never finished that analysis of any geometry, magic, or other unusual properties about the lighthouse or its position. Anything?
Lilian Rook     Ishirou finds that the ecryption is actually pretty top calibre. After poking at it for a little while though, he'll be able to infer that there simply can't be enough data transmitted underneath it to be a meaningful message. It's probably just an alert or confirmation, which makes the encryption even more suspicious.

    Scanning the mountainside proves unfruitful. He can roughly pinpoint where the signal was sent to, but not detect anything there. It just seems like an empty spot. An unremarkable stretch of snow and a few scraggly trees just on the edge of the terraforming line. It'd be easy to conclude that whoever was there has simply moved on already, but it seemed like a location-targeted transmission, not a fixed coordinate transmission from what he cracked on the encryption; something aimed at a device with locational information access, not simply wired up and aimed ahead of time.
Petra Soroka     Petra hops out of the mech, her boots *paff*-ing softly against the snow. Arthur's mauled condition involuntarily causes her to turn away with an exclaimed "Eugh!", and she continues facing away for a few seconds, drumming her hand on her thigh to calm herself down. No intentional offense to Arthur.

    Warily passing through the doorway--she watched Lilian go in first--and upon seeing the corpse, she slaps a hand to her mouth in horror. "Wh-what is this? What happened? Was he, shot? By whom?"

    Giving the body and its leakings a wide berth, Petra edges over to join Cantio by the radio. "What could be the point of having a radio and signal fires, radio is just better." She's talking loudly, as if to overwrite the presence of the corpse in her mind, and her tone is oddly whiny. "Could they be communicating with something besides each other? Maybe that black box is some sort of bug to listen in on the radio, put there by whoever killed h-him."

    With Cantio already picking it at though, Petra turns to look at the battery, prodding at its side. "Is something this big really just for a radio and a signal light?" She looks around for anything else it might be connected to.
Ishirou 'Signal unable to be decrypted, not enough data to work with.  The signal is likely an alert or confirmation signal,' POD speaks to him, which causes Ishirou to make a thinking sound.  That's not right...

What makes this even weirder is that the area it was sent to doesn't seem to have anything there on the sensors.  That couldn't have been wired up and aimed ahead of time...the information was fixed coordinates...and with nothing there, this doesn't seem to make sense.

Ishirou decides to fly closer, slowing his speed and landing just outside of where the signal was sent.  He steps carefully towards the destination, scanning everything he can and trying to piece together the mystery with the data he can collect.  
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Clarify the events

    "Yeah, got my shit blasted by some kind of mine." Arthur calls over to Petra weakly. "Think they're trying to fuck up one guy who'd come along to try to check on this, if my guess is right. Rook's wife or whatever they are now was on the case to put my blood back in my body and de-salsa my whole-ass chest cavity. Big ups to ya girl Tammy for real." He groans a little with the pain of speaking, but it was probably worth it to plant the seeds of Problems.
Lilian Rook     Cantio's fiddling with the radio finds that it is, in fact, fully functional, even if rather shit. There's little point, as there aren't exactly FM radio stations playing 2080's greatest hits out here. She can get noise from the FOB, or a sequence of bleeping signals from somewhere else on one specific frequency. Even she can eventually piece together the obvious: that the bleeps match the blinking of the lights further away.

    However, not this particular light. The polyhedron, matte black and scratched with simple geometric symbols of strangely menacing banality --a star here, a triangle there, a hash of intersecting lines on one side, a spiral on its other side-- seems to be spliced into the cables themselves, the metal having somehow pierced the shielding and invaded the threading on its own. It's hooked in between the radio and its cable to the lamp. Besides that, it is a black hox to her; merely something heavy and durable and cold metal.
James Bond      "That's the one," says Bond with a casual nod. "I got the same impression, so I'm not surprised. Hope one day there won't be any people her age with that look in the eye. Even if I'm old and gray by then." Dressed down for slacking, he waves a half-hearted farewell to his 'fellow' soldier and flicks a cigarette butt away.

     Goat shoveling duty isn't the most glorious thing he's done in the line of duty, but neither is it the most ignominious. Rita receives a courteous nod as he approaches, and his nose wrinkles as the scent of viscera wafts downwind. With a bit more of an idea of just what 'goat shoveling' entails now, he grabs the implement he's meant to use and looks around the enclosure and its surrounding areas to determine if he's meant to be shoveling freshly slain goats in, or picked-over viscera out.

     Either way, he takes to his work with admirable dedication to the bit, and his augmented physiology certainly doesn't hurt matters. As he does, he pauses every so often to take swigs from a canteen with a hidden microfilm camera sewn into the insulated case. The resting beast is photographed from several angles.

     During the course of his work, he scans his surroundings for other such posts like the one it's resting on, attempting to see if there's any visually evident rhyme or reason to its posting here--what it might ostensibly be for, besides the obvious answer of 'security.'
Rita Ma      Through her scrying, Tamamo can see a spiralling strip of flesh hastily re-wrap and optically merge with Rita's arm. Huddled down in her oversized jacket, Rita follows her nose- past the obelisk, though slowly enough for Tamamo to have time to inspect it- towards the cages.

     Rita's breath hitches in her chest.

     'Dragon' and 'hydra' are words she's never heard, let alone whatever these things are properly called. But 'monster' is a good enough umbrella. Her feelings towards those are known. She stares for an almost inadvisably long time. Her hands ball up in the warm jacket's pockets.

     There's a difference between what's happening here, and what the Americans were doing with Antegent. It's a difference that's foggy, at best, for her.

     It'd seem strange if she were to keep staring, of course, so Rita turns her back on the creatures. But a camouflaged tentacle does snake out and jab one of the hydras on its side. They're likely quite tough, if they're worth so much trouble to keep, but the point is needle-like and only a single drop of blood must be drawn.

     Once that drop is smeared across her tongue, Rita starts heading towards the nearby Command Center, her original goal. That's likely to be a bit more secure, but it's too juicy of a target to pass up. She gives Bond a sunny smile on her way out: all's well, for now.
Lilian Rook     Peta's examination of the battery merely confirms that it looks like a real piece of shit. With her middling knowledge of mecha, however, she is able to realize that some of its parts look like military-grade exchangers and capacitor trains attached to it with deceptive expertise, though rusty, dinged up, peeling and probably scavenged. It seems to have little purpose but to store weeks or months of power at a time, deeply inconvenient as it would be to ever recharge. There's a port to plug in with a cheap portable generator, and, she confirms, a small radiator that is pointed mainly upwards to defrost the glass, the backwash making the sleeping area relatively tolerable.

    "What do you think?" says Lilian, rhetorically. "Same person who stuck a claymore to the loft. Probably the same person who planted that thing." she adds, pointing to the polyhedron. Bringing up her smart device, she snaps a picture and sends it to Bond over the Paladins tactical band. "Look familiar to you?" she radios, expectantly. Sighing with a second round of annoyance, she turns away from Petra to say "It is possible that the lights are to signal to someone or something that simply doesn't have, or cannot use, a radio, yes. The transceiver here is probably adequate for operating it by radio control, and the mountains would give excellent range."

    An eye twitches in annoyance at 'Tammy' from Arthur. The one with the scar below it. "Pick a lane, Lowell. Ideally the respectful one, if you are invested in remaining 'un-salsa'd'."

    Trudy has the easiest job in the world, for once. A fairly recent, violently killed body, evidently with unfinished business. His ghost looks almost exactly the same as the body on the floor, save for his see-through countenance. Unusually, there is no death-wound on his head. She can see the weather-lined and sun-darkened skin of his brow crinkle in shock as his ghostly fingers reach under the hood and feel out that space once the phantom beholds his own dead body, taking a moment to process. Evidently, he hadn't even realized he'd been shot; his consciousness had no awareness of the wound to reflect.

    Slightly dazed, yet speaking with tense and gravelly concern, the spirit replies to Trudy, "Ai-Mökö. And you are not the man who was here. Who are you? How long has it been? I have an urgent task." He says little more than that at first. His dark eyes are still suspicious.
Tamamo     Tamamo's view of the interior of the base is limited to Rita's immediate environment, but thanks to her walking slowly, there's still time for her to reach out for more information. It's not quite the same as being there, but the obelisk makes her task easier; it's a large, easy target, and meant to draw in energy, both useful and in the form of attention, from the surrounding area. Momentarily linking herself to it, as if leaning on it for spiritual support, she whispers to her mirror, calling to the local spirits. "And what might you make of this...? Have those who settled here given you worship? Do they seek others of your knowledge? Have they kept out others who cared for this place?"

    The words don't need to mean anything to anyone else. She has a little bit to hear their answers before they become ever more faint.

    Just barely enough time to check whether she recognizes the magic of any of the diviners who've recently visited. It's rare for those of significant skill not to have some signature habits.
Cantio 'What could be the point of having a radio and signal fires, radio is just better.'
"A few! Hearing it on the radio lets someone... Er. Hear it even if they can't see the lighthouse or the sky for those signal fires, but the smoke could also be seen by someone tha might not have access to a radio." Cantio explains to Petra, sounding just a bit proud of coming up with that roughly around the same time Lilian does. She halts briefly in her picking-apart of the thing when Petra mentions that the object might be a bug for whoever killed that guy, though, but eventually gets right back to it before long.

"If that's the case, then whoever did it probably knows we're here." There's a moment where she sounds like she might be worried, but the moment passes quickly enough. She's far too focused on the strange object anyway, trying to decipher its symbols and purpose to little result as the seconds tick by. Letting out an irritated noise, Cantio sets the black box and radio back down, then peers outside towards those blinking lights.

"If the noises here match the lights over there, then why doesn't it match this one?" She asks aloud, not only for her own benefit in getting her thoughts put into real words, but to see if she can't jar someone else's mind towards the reasoning. "It'd make more sense if only some of the blinking lights matched this one, since then we'd have some signals and some radios lining up. But for it to only be this one that doesn't..."

It takes a while longer before something finally comes to her, and she even snaps her fingers for emphasis/out of habit. "I've got it! This box must be interfering with the signal between the radio and the lamp, throwing the timing off!" That look quickly goes right back to a troubled one, though, as she peers at the lamp once more. "... But why, though? We'd need to find out what this tower is for before identifying why someone would single it out and not want it to match the rest."

That's when she finally heads over to Trudy to see what's going on with the corpse-raising ritual, bringing out her phone to get some footage recorded in case the corpse turns out to be really hard to understand or something.
Lilian Rook     Arthur's scan of the lighthouse finds nothing any more magical than Tamamo found. What strikes him as a little bit odd is that, judging by the other lights, every single lighthouse in the entire chain appears to be exactly level. Less than a centimeter off, in fact. Outside of its strangeness, it is also incredibly implausible for people working with stone and salvage. What is also notable is that the chain isn't a winding zigzag, but, strangely, a pretty solid replica of Centaurus. He can't see them all, but given the ones he can, it seems to represent all 281 stars visible to the human eye.

    This lighthouse is at its lowest tip. Its highest would be to the north. The 'bow'.
Trudy Grimm     "Trudy Grimm, a humble witch of little import, at your service," the witch introduces herself with a little bow. As the stench of cordite starts to waft out of the space, her unliving weasel coat is finally starting to calm down again, though numerous weasel faces peer out of the fur from various places.

    "I do not know how long you have rested here, though it seems you were caught by surprise, Mister Ai-Mökö. I suppose that answers my question about who killed you; if seeing your deceased self is such a surprise, clearly you wouldn't have had a chance to know such a thing." She snaps the Grimoire shut with a *thump*, tucking it into her coat, "We were all quite curious about how you died, and what you were doing. And also who would have the inclination to set up a land mine tied to the door after taking your life." At that last bit, she gestures out through the door towards where Arthur is recovering from his crash course in gibbing mechanics.

    Lilian's comment doesn't go unanswered, though, "Please be merciful with him, it'd only be a little funny to see how his constitution reacts to being a corpse himself. I'd still mostly feel bad about it."

    She returns her attention to her new friend, flashing a genuinely friendly (shark-toothed) smile, "I'd be more than happy to help you finish what you came here to do, but what exactly was it? You don't seem to be with the army. Neither are we-- was that the other man you mentioned? Or is he with your group?"

    "We've been noticing some odd things about these lighthouses, too," Her head cants a bit, "Would you be willing to tell us a bit about them? Clearly a lot of care went into building these towers."
Petra Soroka     Played like a fiddle, Petra twitches when Arthur calls ya girl Tammy Lilian's wife. It is *so* irritating how close all of these people seem to be to her, though Lilian's warning response to Arthur doesn't even register in Petra's mind.

    Lilian's sighs sound overexaggerated to Petra's wound-up brain, and she bristles at the obvious reluctance. "Do you *have* to--" To her credit, she cuts herself off mid-sentence, but she's obviously fuming.

    Pointedly turning away from Lilian--so it looks mutual--Petra frowns at Cantio. "What could be the point of disrupting the signal in such a small way? It still matches the further signals, so... if this is a way of sabotaging whatever this relay is supposed to communicate, what kind of snowball effect are they expecting? What could happen from such a small difference?"

    Petra halfway turns to watch Trudy commune with the dead. She can't seem to look at any aspect of it directly; not the corpse, the ghost, or Trudy herself. She ends up staring directly into the side of the battery.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Pick the respectful lane

    "Big...ger? Bigger ups to Tammy?" He gives Lilian a sheepish, helpless shrug! Is this part of the bit? Is he just like this? Vote now on your phones.

    Standing atop the lighthouse, he visualizes every other lighthouse he can see, as precisely as he can. Stepping back and forth around the light, he constructs the model in his brain...

    "Centaurus." He mutters, on his descent. "We're in some kinda local mirror of a constellation. Absolute wild-ass guess, but we might be sitting inside something meant for running the celestial effect during the day too, or mirroring--" He flinches at the sight of the corpse again, but somehow it's lessened by the presence of the ghost. A zombie or a spookem, Arthur can deal with a little better, even if he feels like this is probably not quite the idea here. Either way, it gets him to stop talking space-shop and start asking questions.

    "Y'all know Hazel?" His own question here is looking for the shortcut. "That's the one we're after here, right? Thinking, maybe they would have come up here to check on you, got pulped like I did?"
Tamamo     'Rook's wife or whatever they are now was on the case...'

    "Oh, no, such a thing has not," Tamamo silently mouths 'yet,' "happened."

    'Pick a lane, Lowell.'
    'Big...ger? Bigger ups to Tammy?'


    Though she's busy with her mirror and looking into the base, Tamamo affords Arthur the sort of smile one gives to those who have been shot in the head and can be forgiven any mistake.

    He wasn't shot in the head just now, but it stands to reason that he must have been, at some point.
Cantio The corpse speaks! Or the spirit, rather, as it's a ghost that comes up rather than a body with dripping wounds in his face. "Ah.. Hello! Cantio, a mechanic." She opts to skip the largely irrelevant (to a spirit) titles for now, instead leaving the bulk of the talking to the group's resident spirit-talking expert. Instead, she's just trying to pick up what she can from what Trudy asks and what Ai-Mökö may reveal about the lighthouse.

She does, however, gesture meaningfully at the light here and the radio with her head. "The timing for this one's a little off compared to the others out there, too. Is that going to be a problem?" It's the easiest way to figure out what all this means, and she turns to Petra briefly to give her a quick thumbs up in reassurance at their shared line of thinking.

"A small timing discrepancy could certainly snowball into other things given a long enough period of time. But if it's noticeable enough even a few days after..." Cantio pauses, trying to figure out how to address Ai-Mökö's recent death tactfully. "... The initial change, then whoever changed it might have wanted that effect sooner rather than later."
Lilian Rook     Lilian makes a sharp sound of irritation. "Probably because they don't want to whoever's picking up what's really going on. The G.D.F doesn't seem to be aware. Our locals are being killed. There really is a third party here. The administration was right." Lilian withdraws that combat knife again, and is holding the object, cleanly severed from the wires between millisecond electric pulses. No interference. No transmission.

    Tamamo's checking with the spirits is unusual. None of them claim to be local, but having come from quite far away, in all directions. She even recognizes the presence of the powerful spirit on the mountain near the Urban Center; the Víla, or mountain valkyrie. They have little apparent interest in communicating with her. From what answers she gets, this situation appears to be an exception. The spirits here have congregated at a site suitable for housing them because humans from all over the country had made bargains and contracts and called in ancient favours and blood debts to bring them here as allies.

    As little as spirits care for human civilization, even they have a common enemy in the Antegent. They also tell her that this location is something that poorly translates as a 'holy-unholy' place, without elaboration.

    Confirming her earlier suspicions, she does, in fact, recognize Arina's magic. She recogizes magic that is both distinctly Arinas and significantly more powerful than any she's seen Arina use before, and not just because of the plentiful energy.

    Trudy's ghostly interogatee seems darkly reluctant to say a single thing to him, but a prickling sense of agitation and impatience builds up from him from the moment she says she has no idea how long he's been dead. It seems the urgency of his unfinished task is overriding his shockingly intense suspicion of strangers. "A man came up the mountain." he says, without decoration. "I thought him from the army, come to speak to the lightkeepers. It is natural they would be surprised to see. We had long prepared to answer and send them away." He grinds his teeth. "The man is a liar. The men he spoke to with his radio were not of the army. I turned him away, and now it seems I am dead. I know not his accent or his name."

    With great reluctance, Ai-Mökö continues. "I came by the wind-ways to adjust the sight of The Archer, and confirm the last arrow of heaven. We must know everything that happens here. The army men have camped here for months, and explored little, but the star-devils care little, and change their ways never." He pauses. "The radios would only drown out the words of the universe, and mar the Perfect Questions we ask of it. Light is silent. Light allows the Perfect Questions to carry."

    He grumbles as he turns his gaze on Cantio. "It is the worst problem. He must mean to deceive our Autumn Angel, so that no Perfect Questions are asked, and his conspirators can move without being seen by the Archer. It has to be fixed at once." He scowls at Arthur. "I don't know anybody in any name in your tongue." He seems weirdly defensive.

    Landing on the correct site, following his gut rather than probability, Ishirou ends up pacing around an empty field of snow for a short while, finding nothing. Just as he might be inclined to leave, his foot sinks too-deeply through the snow, and becomes tangled in a white, synthetic tarp, causing his footing to collapse beneath him and drop him by four feet. Hard objects clatter under him where the snow caves in, buried for the time being.

    And then, before he has time to think, cold, strong fingers clap over his mouth from behind, and a sharp, humming blade is plunged into the suit over his neck, carving through the metal to slash his throat.
Ishirou Ishirou scans, and nothing...he frowns.  His gut was wrong?  No, he was missing something and he might need to take a flight to try and sort things out again.  It was right then he noticed his foot sinking.  "Wait what..?" he starts before he sinks into the tarp and collapses into the snow caves.

The fingers covering his mouth prevent him from calling out beyond a muffled sound, and the blade comes in quickly.  The metal protects him from instantly being killed, thankfully.  Also, thankfully, Ishirou reacts quickly.  The weapon system he uses to control weapons at range, and also allows him to fling things with electromagnetic force activates on the knife, trying to force it away from his neck.

In the same movement, he attempts to activate his thrusters and tries to dash forward instead of up.  He turns, the R.E.S.C.U.E. unit deploying a rapier.  "I'm not with the Russians!" he calls out quickly, hedging his bets that his assailant wasn't either.
Lilian Rook     Bond finds his task is slightly more unpleasant. He's given a forked catcher and bid to drag live goats out of a semi-distant pen and shove them into the enclosure. The minor officer on station laughs and says it's best he keep them full and sluggish, or they'll get bored while their masters are inside and might just eat him. Bond can tell that he's sort of joking, but also sort of believes it.

    True to his word though, Rita finds the huge monster is borderline asleep, and only seems awake due to lack of eyelids. Its scales are interlocked so tightly, and so incredibly hard, it takes a bit of wiggling to get her hypodermic tentacle into its thick skin beneath, but she gets away with it; again, her 'powers' use no magic to detect.

    Bond's bored officer on garbage duty conversationally informs him that the riders of the beasts (five in all) are inside the command center for some sort of important meeting. They arrived a couple of days ago, and he suspects they'll be tasked to scout the mountains and pick off targets of opportunity. 'If the tales are true', they'll 'conjure up a clear and sunny day, or maybe a week' to make the area easier to operate in, and 'storm by night' to keep nosy Antegent at bay. It seems like a credible rumour he's heard trickle down from standing around here so long; he says that Enlightened are impossibly good at keeping secrets about themselves and their kind, but only mediocre secret-keepers when it comes to the activities of 'us mortal men'.

    Rita is admitted in without question, again based on presumption of her position being beyond reproach. Still, she should know very well by now that she is not at all above being checked by one of the Enlightened she might find in here; they'll know she has no magical ability to speak of at a glance. Lilian speaks to her on the radio about the monsters she's seen --the balauri-- as well as their sorcerous masters and the long tradition of binding and riding them. Tamamo's deduction agrees with her, but sits ill, by the sounds of it; they'd seen those exact things back in Eastern Siberia, which means the Solomari here may very well be Onslaught veterans.

    Rita is able to wander in several directions. The personnel areas probably aren't interesting. She could go to the departments dedicated to those giant dishes, to the ops and intel region to see what they're planning, the reconnaissance branch where the Antegent splatter was taken, or the 'hall of Svetovid', which sounds very Enlightened.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Fix the Questions and the Archer

    "Shit. Well, alright." Arthur mutters. "What was the name... Never mind. I'm decent at stars, geometries, and communing. You tell me what needs doing, I'mma do it." Arthur rubs his face. "I know the person I'm after is all mixed up in this, so the only way to get contact is to get hella useful hella fast, and stay that way until they show."

    The Archer is used for, it seems, some kind of precise, inverted celestial augery process? He understands how to speak with beings beyond normal comprehension, he understands stars and constellations, and he understands geometry. So maybe if he can get some information from this guy, he can put together a model of the exotic processes happening in this area, and find where and how to correct them.
Trudy Grimm     As Ai-Mökö speaks, Trudy touches a curled finger to her lips in thought, listening intently with the occasional nod or noise of understanding. As he finishes, she closes her eyes with a disappointed noise, "Rather unfortunate... When you turned him away, it seems he took exception to it. My sympathies for the troubles you've been forced to endure."

    Lowering her hand, she claps those palms together once, "But now you have a chance to finish your work. I, too, am more than willing to help you. Astrology isn't my strongest suit, so I will rely on your expertise and direction."

    "Once we have helped the Archer clear his vision and your people can resume their duties, we can find who killed you and bring them to justice. No doubt doing so will align with our own goals." She gestures towards Arthur, "As he suggested, we are looking for someone. Someone who might be in danger, if your unfortunate condition is any indication."

    Stepping closer, the witch extends a hand, "Let's work together, mister Ai-Mökö. I would like an opportunity to prove I'm being genuine."
Cantio "A liar, likely working with or a member of that third party. Someone willing to kill just to throw off the trail of these..." Cantio tries to get the right cadence in her tone despite working with unfamiliar names and terms. "'Autumn Angel' and 'Archer' by disrupting the light signals."

Wracking her mind for a moment, Cantio's train of thought is interrupted by that distressed noise from Ishirou. She doesn't get confirmation on what happened, so she can only assume the worst. She's about to leave the interrogation of the spirit to those still in the tower, and she's even heading right back out the door before coming right back in seconds later.

It's not the regular Cantio coming back in, though, but the one dressed in a vaguely thief-like attire between the bandana, the belt full of knives, and a distinct lack of pants that cover the knee (even if the coat does). She's there to chill and continue listening in on all of that while the original takes off in the direction of where she had last heard Ishirou heading towards:

<J-IC-Scene> Ishirou says, "The radio signal was transmitted down the backside, away from the FOB."

And so, she speeds away from the lighthouse to check out that area full of craters by the mountain, transforming into her strangely armored form ahead of time so she can fly low and close to the ground instead of having to navigate all that annoying terrain by foot. She's not sure what to look for in particular, though, it may take a while for her to actually find that specific hole in the snow amongst the craters before she crash right through it to see who and what she can find.
Lilian Rook     Ishirou's quick thinking saves him. His assailant is not aware of his VRCS, and the knife stops just short of killing him. The matte black, polygonal blade doesn't look like a familiar model, and the way it shivers and blurs at the edges is nearly as concerning as the fact that the hand grasping it seems to have articulated fingers made of the same substance.

    When Ishirou tears himself free, he feels the way his powersuit is just barely adequate to escape his attacker's grip, despite the greatly augmented strength it affords. He wheels to face a man clad head to toe in thick, heat reflective, arctic camo jacketing, obscuring his entire body except his hands --only one of which is wearing a glove-- and part of his face --showing only a black helmet and polarized full-face visor beneath. In that instant, he has apparently already drawn a sidearm on Ishirou and aimed for the head. What might strike him in the instant is that the man has a military pistol still holstered at his hip, and the gun in his hand is the size of a compact hairdryer; black and bulky, spartan smooth and angular, with a glowing purple rod partially exposed through the yellow-slashed slide.

    His finger remains on the trigger as he replies to Ishirou, the knife hand folded under it something like a harries stance. His voice is obviously distorted by a vocalizer in his helmet, set to alter his voice. "Then identify immediately." he says, sounding about three seconds away from shooting Ishirou anyways. He speaks in fluent Russian, but his accent isn't. It sounds . . . blandly anglo. Someone who could come from any English speaking country.
Tamamo     'Y'all know Hazel?'
    'I don't know anybody in any name in your tongue.'


    "Oreshnika," Tamamo says, loudly enough, eyes sliding to glance in the ghost's direction.
Ishirou Ishirou takes a second to breathe because that was way too close.  Times like that he wishes he didn't need the blood inside of him so that slitting his throat wouldn't have been fatal.  Though he also learned another trick for later.  Right now, though, he's not very happy about the situation he now finds himself in.  

"I'm Ishirou, I'm with the Paladins.  I'm trailing the Russian army above to try and find someone who is said to be in this area.  We accidentally ran across your...I guess trap and signal," Ishirou thinks quickly, no need to let him know he's not alone, and that help isn't coming.  This also lets a signal out to let Cantio track him.

"I'm trying to find Oreshnika, if that means anything to you."
Lilian Rook     The ghost looks at Tamamo as if he could stare into her brain. He is admirably tight-lipped and iron-willed, but he is no practised liar. She can tell just from looking at him that he knows exactly who that is, and is simply not going to admit to any outsider that he does, for some very important reason. Possibly an oath. "No." he lies out loud. "That is a Russian name." She can intuit he means 'the official Russian language', to which his own name definitively does not belong.

    Ai-Mökö stares at Trudy's hand with some misgiving, but then attempts to shake it back, though he seems uncertain if his fingers will just phase through her or what. "As long as you are performing this task, you are our ally. After, we will see." he says. "This is the closest point of the Archer to the army men. It is essential that it speak their business plainly to its brothers. We will calibrate it to tell of what has happened here, in the language of the stars, and with luck, we will be asked a Perfect Question." he says to Arthur. His scowl deepens even more when Cantio speaks, though not in enmity at her. "They are surely enemies of the Autumn Angel. You know more than you seem. The shaman said they would come one day soon. The men from over the sea, who are bound the stars as we are."

    From there, the ghost begins rapidly bossing Arthur (and Petra, for being close by) around on what exact pattern to set the radio to. It is long and complicated and he is (well, was) most definitely the strict old man, used to being obeyed by young people and tired with teaching.
Rita Ma      The blood in Rita's mouth is, as always, unsettlingly sweet. She's gotten a lot of practice at not thinking about that. Ishirou's muffled screaming over radio startles her- something that, thankfully, none of the soldiers around her seem to be concerned with- but then Cantio volunteers to take care of it, and she sighs in soft relief.

     She forces all those bustling thoughts out of her head with a sigh when she steps into the command center. 'Galina Koslova, Mirror Silver' wouldn't be stressed or absentminded.

     Rita immediately writes off the 'Hall of Svetovid'; it's tempting, but nearly guaranteed to have someone in it who can clock her. 'Ops and intel' seem only a little less dangerous, but significantly more rewarding.

     Mundane, ordinary doors are the most substantial problem. They're the main reason she can't just be cloaked the whole time: it's very suspicious if a door is opened by 'nothing'. Until she encounters a real obstacle, she just huddles down in her big jacket and trusts in her presumed Enlightened status to protect her.

     Her goal, of course, is any eavesdropping or document theft that could get them closer to gleaning the operation's true objectives.
Petra Soroka     Petra finally looks towards the ghost directly, more animated now that her curiosity is piqued. "So what realms are the Autumn Angel and the Archer concerned with? What purpose do the Perfect questions serve?"

    She jumps into action at Ai-Mökö's command, fiddling with the radio with his instructions. "And what does this group have to gain from hiding from the Archer?" She purses her lips, bothered by the ghost's unwillingness to talk. "If you're an ally of Oreshnika's, then this group is her enemy, and that's something we share."
Trudy Grimm     A ghost's hand passing through a hand of the living is the expected result. Most living people are not so accustomed with-- and prepared for-- working with the dead as Trudy Grimm. Through an invocation of the Death Rune, Eiwaz, just as Ai-Mökö reaches for her, his hand contacts hers as if both were living, solid beings. With a bright smile, she gives his hand a shake, "I understand. Thank you for this generous opportunity."

    That completed, she claps her hands together once, rubbing them together, "Let's get started."

    Though Ai-Mökö seems to focus his direction on Arthur and Petra, Trudy does pitch in where she feels like she can, usually when she's the one closest to whatever the spirit is demanding be done. Calibration feels like delicate work, as most magical matters tend to be, but she finds some satisfaction in it.

    At one point, the Witch speaks up during a point where the ghost is not explaining/bossing, "Something has me curious, though. This Autumn Angel. Is this someone we might be able to meet? Or are they someone amidst the stars?"
Cantio With Ishirou's position confirmed, it should be simple enough for real!Cantio to reach him. If the hole's still there, she'll just drop right on in like a cool action hero! If not, she can follow his coordinates before slipping through the ground as though it wasn't even there. Either way, she'll land somewhere around Ishirou and his assailant soon enough. She's also forced rather quickly into exercising a fair chunk of self-control not to bring her own weapon forward and risk antagonizing the stranger further even though his is already pointed towards Ishirou.

Instead, she tries to put on a friendly, if rather awkward smile. "Er... Hello! I'm Cantio, pleased to meet you. Could put that down, please? It'd be greatly appreciated." As she says that, she lowers the sword to her side, although she's not quite willing to let it disperse just yet. "I'm a fr..." She glances over at Ishirou for confirmation. What do they even count as, anyway? Friend is the easiest one to go with for now. "A friend of his, if that helps, Mister...?"

Thief!Cantio, meanwhile, looks about as focused as the real thing when she's listening to the spirit speaking. A lot of it still clearly goes over her head, but the combination of astronomy (astrology? She's never remembered the difference) and technology all looks so fascinating to her as she paces around to keep looking at the light, the black box, and the radio. She even joins in on helping Arthur and Petra with whatever directions need to be followed, although she's visibly more interested in just absorbing that stuff instead of handling it herself.
Arthur Lowell >Arthur: Okay, do what the old ghost says

    Yep. Arthur has plenty of experience taking incredibly details commands in specific sequences and with a particularly arbitrary nature. It's almost like that's been happening forever, for most of his adult life. Funny! He gives a little sass, but only a little. This stuff is important, being their literally only lead on this. And when it comes to pushing buttons and turning knobs, Arthur has some of the most power of anyone here. He's a gamer!!

    Ai-Mökö will find that commands issued to Arthur appear to take the form of a combination of text-prompt entries and a series of symbols that pop up and either rapidly flash or seem to hold an odd glow.

    Arthur, himself, has the skills to keep a constellation working right. What can he learn about what this will do, from operating it himself? What, he wonders, is it going to send, and where? Is there any lead on their objective in all that? Part of his expertise in exotic communing can be an understanding of others doing much the same.
James Bond      "All the more reason to keep them fed," Bond jokes back. "In my younger days I lived on coffee and cigarettes. The poor things would take ill." It's hardly the first time he's been so close to something that could end his life with a thought. The Dragon of the Isles comes to mind. As does the Archwolf.

     He's strong enough to employ that catcher on even the most stubborn goats. "Bad luck," he mutters to the animal. "Maybe in the next life you'll come back as a kitten in the care of some pretty girl. In you go." It's as much a joke for the other officer as it is consolation for the goat. Between herding the animals in, he continues his conversation.

     "It's true," he admits, on the topic of secrets. "In those bygone days, before you or I were thought of, there wasn't even a word for them, except maybe 'fairy tales.' But even in those days, the saying went that stories have a little seed of truth." Hooking another goat and forcing it into the pen, "I have to believe it was overlooking us mere mortals that let those things bleed through and become superstition, before the days of 'weather balloons' and 'gas leaks,'" he says with a smile.

     On his way back from leading another animal in, he nods backwards, at the slumbering beast. "It's easy to lionize them, when their world is so different from ours. But they're a lot like us. They have training, and discipline, and moments where the both of those slip, and moments where they feel comfortable enough to ease off of it, like hanging up a coat on the way in from the cold." He shrugs.

     "I respect them, even if I don't always understand them. At the end of the day, I know however different we are, we both want things to be better than they are. I saw one of the ones they brought in--the short one, the kid. I hope her generation can reap the benefits of what we're doing here before long."

     He fakes a stumble in the snow, and spits a convincing 'whore,' kneeling down to pretend to relace a boot. In truth, he's aiming the lace at the beast. A miniscule, simple RF tracker covered in a glob of adhesive flies quietly towards it, aimed between its talons. It's currently inactive, so as to avoid setting off any alarms. When they take flight, he aims to activate it the moment they're clear of local airspace.
Lilian Rook     "Paladins." the man who had nearly killed Ishirou repeats after him. The scathing crackle in his altered voice makes it clear this isn't a positive. "And not that smart for saying so." he adds. The fact that his finger doesn't waver the slightest iota in its partial squeeze on the trigger is distinctly unnerving. The muzzle remains squarely pointed at Ishirou's head, as if smoothly gyrostabilized despite the stranger's slow breathing. It'd be less scary if he were posturing aggressively with it.

    There is a long, dangerous pause at Oreshnika's name. "Yeah. That means something to me." he says, breaking the silence. "And if it means something to you too then you're already in too deep. I bet you're dumb enough that you reactivated Centaurus too, so you don't have a lot of time to choose." The handgun faintly whines. Holosights flicker to life above it. "You can come and tell me everything you know. Or you can disappear in the Ural Mountains, presumed KIA by Antegent. Pick."

    Cantio can find the two in a standoff by just following Ishirou's beacon, but it's then that Ishirou realizes that his assailant had already intercepted it, and done an incredible job of showing it, when the man speaks into his in-helmet radio.

    "NAZCA two, this is NAZCA one. We've got a loose end. Code olive has aborted searching for the First; they're after the Third now. Got a detainee. Incoming IFF extraneous. Smoke 'em."

    Ishirou senses another encrypted confirmation ping. POD's processor tells him it's from eleven kilometers away. The response is so quick that someone must have already been watching Cantio; somehow, from that distance. Cantio is still closing in, skimming low, when a ray of purple light strokes down on her from above like a perfectly smooth flash of lighning. There is only ghostly silence from it; a flicker in the night, and an impact heavy enough to hurl her into the mountain, accompanied by a feeling of blinding heat and the risk of half her body turning to ash in an instant.
Ishirou "Wait!" he calls out, realizing what was happening only slightly too late.  Damn!  "I wasn't saying everything because I didn't know who you were, and by that response, this is far more complicated than we thought coming in here," he says with a breath.  

"It's not /just/ Paladins, but a group of people working with a mutual friend because they wanted to meet Oreshnika," he says with a sigh.  "Her name is Lilian Rook," he'll admit.

"If you want me to come, I'll go but we're not involved with what is going on with the army...or else I would have signaled for the people up on the hill to send a flare-up.  There would also likely be more than a small handful of us here.  We also have people infiltrated in the camp."

"So how about we talk this through?  Without pointing weapons at each other?"  As Ishirou says this, he's also taking time to get scans going, trying to size up what this man could do in the short amount of time he has...and how he'd need to work to counter long enough to escape.  
Tamamo     'They are surely enemies of the Autumn Angel.'

    "I believe you correct, in this." Tamamo sets aside her own mirror, to follow behind her, as she goes to look again at the lighthouse's mirror, and the work being done on the radio. She doesn't understand much of that. Etchings, though, in the box that Lilian removed...? Perhaps she can understand those, with some thought, if there is an occult meaning to find.

    'The men from over the sea, who are bound the stars as we are.'

    "If not to the Archer, then to which are they bound?"
Cantio It turns out, Cantio doesn't get anywhere near dropping in on the two! Instead, she's intercepted by that bolt of purple out of nowhere, and it comes in far too quietly for her to notice before it hits her right in the side, only seeing it from her peripheral vision a split second beforehand. Her first instinct, naturally, is to resist the force pushing her one way, but that's far easier said than done when it's launching her towards the mountain. Her next instinct, then, is to control where she's being flung, but that certainly won't help once everything on her feels like it's getting set on fire.

Plan C: Get into the snow. Rather than trying to fly back up and get her bearings, she lets herself get carried off by the momentum from getting struck to sail right into a snowbank instead. The coldness of the snow helps alleviate the horrible burning pain from that bolt she couldn't even hear coming for her, and she's mildly tempted to stay in there just to cool off. She can't, of course, and she has to opt for a different strategy when she realizes she can't actually see who could've even shot that from where she's laying in the snow.

Instead of pulling herself back out of the snow, Cantio just lets herself sink through it. It's a little too fast for someone to sink through even the fluffiest snow naturally, but she's less concerned about it looking perfectly natural and more about just getting through the ground by phasing through it. She's banking on her assailant needing to actually see her and, based on the point of impact, having to fire some manner of projectile at her, so staying in and moving through the ground should help her avoid whoever and whatever shot her!

As long as she's not getting shot again, meanwhile, Cantio can start her approach towards those coordinates where Ishirou and his assailant are once again while keeping one hand moving to keep the healing magic flowing to soothe the pain from that burning sneak attack. It'll be slower going to approach through the walls compared to just flying, but it might just be enough to make it look like she hasn't gotten up after getting shot out of the air rather than outright disappearing (for a little while).
Lilian Rook     Rita, despite her (fake) status, or perhaps because of it, is now being watched closely inside the command center. What might strike her is just how 'new' it is; not a shoddy prefab or utilitarian concrete bunker, but something that feels like a government poured a lot of money in keeping it spacious and top of the line. There camera coverage is immaculate and there are no convenient vents, though the frequent guards make no effort to stop her; for once, she has classism to thank for something.

    She can tell right away, once she steps into the bright, slightly blue-tinted lights of the ops department, that document theft is probably out of the question. It is bustling with fast paced activity, practically threatening to knock her over as men and women in four types of uniforms move around on their own individual missions. She can't see anywhere they intend to store paper records at all, and she has no credentials to log into any of the widely available, cutting edge computers installed in every desk and corner, nor can she read the cyrillic over all the glaring neon wall displays.

    Eavesdropping, however, is well within her power. She's so small that people look over her, and her lack of social or magical presence doesn't trip anyone's senses; thankfully, the few Enlightened she can spot (mainly by not wearing uniforms and being given much more space) here are too busy to actually see her, especially if she blends into the crowd. She has the unique opportunity here to door surf while invisible, and get close enough to hear a briefing in progress.

    "--large scale expeditionary push will begin at sunrise. You will split from the main force on the northern flank under the pretense of having spotted roaming Antegent, which we have fabricated for you in the dossiers you see before you. Once you break off, you will have until nightfall to reach the other end of the Centaur, and confirm evidence of the asset. Proceed at speed; there will be regular checkups every two hours. Once on-site, you will reestablish contact with the main force, confirm Antegent elimination, and explain that you will start your return trip once you have light."

    "You will stay there overnight, reconnoiteuring the asset location for everything you can find. Any evidence of the foreign insurgents is to be noted and reported immediately. If you have the opportunity, eliminate them with extreme prejudice. We cannot allow them to establish contact with the asset. Am I understood?"

    The chorus of yes-sirs is disorganized, but earnest. A chorus of unfamiliar voices, save one, tense and slightly dejected. "You are to reserve the use of force or tier two magic on any natives unless it becomes operation critical. We will make preparations to defend and retrieve the asset upon your confirmation of its existence. You have full discretion to handle any other complication as you please, save in two cases; if you encounter a deserter or tagalong, you will execute them immediately to preserve operational secrecy. If you encounter non-insurgent Enlightened, you will dispense with them non-violently if at all possible; no incidents." Another round of tense confirmations.
Rita Ma      Once she's found a quiet corner to shimmer into invisibility, Rita clings to the ceiling of each room to avoid bumping into anyone in the crush of bodies, silently crawling over the tops of doorframes at the same time as someone opens them below.

     If she watched more horror movies, she'd feel very self-conscious right now.

     She catches the briefing nearly on accident, pressing her ear against the wall to listen closely. Rita's eyes continually open wider as the briefing officer speaks- then her blood runs cold, and she clamps a hand over her own mouth, when one of the responses sounds familiar.

<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma whispers, "Ms. Rook."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma whispers, "She's right here."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma whispers, "Ms. Arina."

     Rita waits tensely above the doorway for the meeting to conclude. Precariously, she reaches into her satchel and pulls out a little notepad and pen. She scribbles something down on a page, then tears it out and folds it into a tight little wad.

     When Arina leaves the briefing room, a cloaked tentacle will slip the note into her pocket or bag, with just enough of a subtle brush to call casual attention to its presence.

     Part of Rita is aware this is a very bad idea. The rest of her, though, can't shake the memory of Arina being kind to her in the past. She can't be a bad person, right?

Ms. Arina,
I'm worried about you. Please talk to me.
Find somewhere quiet, okay?
-Rita
Lilian Rook     "I told you I don't know who that is." the ghost dourly lies to Petra. "And you ask too many questions of strangers. I don't know that you wouldn't have killed me if that man hadn't got to me first." he says, relenting only so far as to answer "Perfect Questions are answered by the universe. We live on the middle plane, and so that is where we watch. It is natural they would hide from the Archer. This will allow them to approach with stealth in darkness." He hesitates at Trudy. "The chance you will meet her . . . We will see. It will not be my decision." Ai-Mökö clearly finds Arthur's gamer mashing completely mystifying, but he grudgingly compliments his efficiency.

    Arthur starts to get the gist as he works, too. The code isn't one he's familiar with --probably one these mountain people came up with, actually-- but it's certainly transmitting a very long and complex message in compressed shortform, and doing so in an algorithmic way that will cause it to self-adjust over time, as if that could account for future events too. The radio signals are broadcast out here, but not sent back; only light, 'silent', not cluttering the airwaves, potentially so someone could listen for something else.

    If he is relaying information about the saboteur, it is so people, or a person, can know about them, and take action, though how they will do so all the way over here is unknown. He can be pretty sure that the Archer refers to Centaurus refers to the installation itself, and Tamamo's vision. The ghost answers Tamamo with. "The Hunter." Which would be Orion.
Lilian Rook     The officer laughs with Bond sympathetically about coffe and cigarettes, and says jokingly "You lived without a drop of liquor?! I can't believe it!" The goat bleats obliviously at him, and tries to resist a little too late once it smells the gore of its kin. Bond is at least able to turn around before he hears the deep, guttaral hiss, like a broken boiler, the whooshing strike, and the bloody crunch, followed by the sound of dragging. He feels a bit of warm splatter on his back.

    For some reason, the officer seems to find his rambling genuinely interesting, leaning on a post to take it in with an unguarded expression. "You aren't like most people." he observes. "You'll learn which ones you respect and which ones you don't, in time, but you are wiser to choose respect over hate to start with." He sighs at the mention of 'the kid'. "The young fighting the wars the old grew tired of. You and I are a dying breed, friend. We believe in adults taking care of things so children can grow up. If they fight our old battles, they'll only turn out like us." He smiles in rueful reminiscence. "That one said she was here to protect a friend of hers. Maybe some of them will be alright."

    The tracker plant goes off without a hitch.

    As does Rita's ceiling cling, for the most part. It might be a different story if she were biologically Antegent, given the scanners she can now see in the corners of the ceiling, mounted above the screens just out of sight, but nothing trips. Arina exits the briefing room with the rest. It's odd to see her without her Immunes combat skin, wearing surprisingly simple and warm, rural country clothes in sky blue underneath her usual accoutrements. Nervous girl as she is, she jumps a little at the casual brush, but doesn't startle.

    She keeps moving out of the room in a smooth, purposeful stride once she feels the paper, letting her operative training (in progress take over), pulls up her tablet, and reads the paper on its screen, obscured against her chest, so that she appears to be glancing over ops information. A few seconds later, Arina bites at her lip, stares down at her feet, and begins moving towards an exit.
Lilian Rook     When Cantio plummets into the snow, NAZCA 1 holds silent for just a second, in what should be communication, yet, suddenly, Ishirou doesn't detect any radio burst at all. Using the opportunity to scan the operative, he is treated to a whole Sunday paper of bad news.

    There's no question the guy holding him at gunpoint is Elite quality. His physique is incredible, probably biologically augmented, and he can detect nearly twenty distinct implants, shielded from invasive analysis as black box devices, going from his spine to his skull to his heart and lungs to one entire hand. His stance is immaculate; the degree of combat experience he must have can only be guessed at. Under the arctic jacket, his attacker is wearing a full suit of powered armour, currently running on energy conservation mode, but which could clearly be reactivated at any moment.

    He has top quality gear as well. Stunproof helmet, environmental seals, closed oxygen, EMP-proofing, heavy plates with refractive coating and insulating layers. There is ammo and explosives packed into every available holster and pocket, and though he can roughly identify a vibro-knife concept, the handgun is running on some energy source Ishirou has never even seen before, so he can only estimate its lethality. He can detect a combat computer with a currently closed uplink, a dozen different chemical injectors, automatic aid implants, and several other black box devices strapped to his body. And--

    There. A psychic signature. He's psychic, too. This isn't the kind of dirty work agent that attacked Caelton. There is no doubt that this guy, and probably his ally, are the best of the best, no expense spared; the genuine peak of force projection that the Letter Agency took great pains to hide. If there's a sniper watching him too, he is in way over his head.

    "Acknowledged, NAZCA two." says NAZCA 1. He must have been updated telepathically, but is responding out loud for Ishirou to hear on purpose. "Stay on overwatch until I confirm kill. NAZCA three, four, five, six, set up perimeter. NAZCA seven, eight, nine, proceed as planned."

    Cantio is able to approach as she intended, but it does sound like the sniper had noticed the subtle discrepancy in her fall, and is taking no chances; he simply can't confirm her location under so much snow from double digit kilometers. She even gets close enough to hear the conversation, but the way NAZCA 1 is raising his anonymized voice makes her feel as if he's on guard for a surprise attack himself, just in case.

    "Yeah. A lot more complicated than you thought." says NAZCA 1. "Thanks for the intel." he adds after, just a little sarcastically. "We can talk it through all you want. Back at base. And once you tell us everything, command will decide what to do with you."

    When he drops Lilian's name, there is a moment of silence, and then a sharp, barking laugh. Unfortunately, it doesn't make his aim waver in the slightest. "Are you fucking kidding? Well god damn. We barely even started this op and it's already gone better than I could have anticipated. Thanks for that kid." It does not sound like a wholesome kind of thanks.

    "Belay that order, NAZCA seven, eight, nine. Return to Centaur two eight one. Detainee has fingered one of our people of interest as the First. Sounds like code olive found it for us. It's Fatal Black." He briefly spits, off-radio, "Crafty old bastard Gerart." then returns. "Asset is on site with partial contigent at Centaur two eight one. Prepare to verify. You are authorized to neutralize all hostiles that resist. Sol Gold must remain alive. If his story checks out, we'll retrieve the First and push back retrieval of the Third until tomorrow's timetable."
Rita Ma      Even if she knows she isn't an Antegent, seeing those sensors makes Rita tense up a little. Maybe they'll trip from the monsters she's been eating? Maybe they can just tell there's something badly wrong with her? Maybe-

     No. She's safe. They're fooled. Her racing heart just has to accept that.

     When Arina heads for an exit, Rita naturally follows. Now that she knows what to listen for, and they're further from other people, Arina might just be able to make it out: the whisper of fabric as Rita moves, the deliberately-shallow breaths, the infintesimal squeak of fingertips gripping doorframes for traction.

     And then, once they really are alone, a little thump as Rita drops down and lands on her feet. When she shimmers back into visibility, it's really unmistakably the little blonde girl Arina knows, albeit still in the false uniform.

     Rita puts on a tiny guilty smile, then does her best to look bored and casual until they're outside. No words just yet.
Ishirou Ishirou knows he's /very/ much outmatched now, especially with that sniper.  Worse, he took a chance on who these people were and botched massively.  He swallows, realizing how bad of an error it was.  He's psychic but he's speaking out loud.  Is he arrogant or does he want this info known..?  

Doesn't matter, she has to know and he's going to have to start cleaning up.  Sniper will prevent him from flying, but he has other options.  Quietly he whispers, POD, deploy Drilltank."

Ishirou goes for the play.

He uses his electromagnetic hold to drop snow down from above to blind and moves erratically to try and avoid the shot as much as he can.  The Drill options deploy, attempting to ram the agent first before the flight unit parts detach and the drills connect.  

"Alright guess we're doing this.  I know your goal but not your game...and you're going to find her very hard to get, especially with you and your sniper about to have a very bad day," Cantio dropping in would free him up to dash for the sniper..."  

Maybe.  Assuming he doesn't die before he gets digging.