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Metamorph One	Taking a mission for a company that contracts nebulously defined 'agents' for ostensibly violent mercenary jobs via press-ganged debt slavery and where you've yet to meet more than one mber of staff, to recover a stolen server allegedly belonging to the company that is aboard a high-speed train that is somehow qualified as 'heavy resistance'--     May not be the smartest thing anyone has ever done.     But you're here now. Sorry hun! (¤n_n)     'High-velocity' was right. It takes a VTOL from the company skyscraper roof to even catch up, and by the time you're dropped off along with WeezerFan69 at the rear helipad, you can't even see what the ground looks like. The world around you is an indistinct tawny-grey blur, streaking by at immense speed with strangely comfortable near-silence. You can't see much out to the horizon; just the suggestion of sun-baked badlands and distant, hazy shapes; probably mountains. You have no idea where you are. The only place you can safely say is 'the next car up'.     The floor is plushly carpeted in wine red, with two relatively luxurious couches before a window, looking out onto a web of mesh scaffolding and node antennas bristling off the train's sides. A small passenger bathroom sits opposite, with a recessed electronics panel nearby; probably for passenger calls other compartments and sundry; giving off the sense that this is one of many compartments meant for a comfortable ride.     So the presence of heavy machinery is a little out of place. Wall-mounted stations the size of a changing stall or so. A hollow frame filled with folded arms here, a series of clamps with a recessed needle there, a tall-stacked and heavily plated thing like a vending machine in another corner.     There's not much to hear but the wind whistling by though. Until your radios ping receiving messages. Which is funny, because you didn't give away your number here. [The Concierge] "Hello cuties! Isn't it exciting to be working on a train? I'm sure you love trains (¤^-^)" [The Concierge] "I'm going to need you to turn on your transmission scanner. It's tuned to the company's private cryptographic key. You should be able to see where the server is still transmitting wireless data. Looks like it's up ahead!" [The Concierge] "Don't worry, all I need you to do for me is to spike into it and leave, okay hun? You don't need to bring it back. Don't ask why (¤>_>)" [The Concierge] "And make sure you don't fall off! If you die, the company will have to pay your resurrection fee, and you'll probably end up as WeezerFan69's cute little coworkers! But maybe you wouldn't mind working under me? Haha." [The Concierge] "Don't look so serious (¤u_u) I'm just joking hun~"
Persephone Kore	xxWeezerFan69xx, as her digital ID says, walks perilously close to the edge of the caboose's back platform. That's the best place to look out at the horizon, a more appealing luxury than the soft seats of the train car.      She looks different from last time. Most everything is better: she's showered, her hair is halfway brushed, her back is a little straighter, her futuristic gun looks a bit less plasticky, even the silvery exoskeleton erupting from her leathers looks higher-end.      But when she turns around, her eyes are worse. Before they were wide and frantic like a caught animal's. Now they're sullen and sharp. A lion at the circus, just waiting for someone to fumble the chair. [xxWeezerFan69xx] "You know, I really thought you abandoned me for good." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "How long has it been? I can't tell." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "None of you look older I guess."
KNK	This is fine. These working conditions are completely normal. Isn't it always like this?     Rose and Violet decide against trying to race trains. They're really more sprinters than marathon runners, anyway, and a VTOL drop off is a convenience not to be missed. Rose disappears partway through the trip, but that's only in a visual sense. She's still holding onto the craft until at least the moment it matches velocity.     Violet walks in with more apparent bravery, responding to the call with, "Scanner... on!" before approaching the recessed electronics panel. She tugs the fierce oni mask down, and takes a look through the built-in wiring scanners, checking for different sorts of connections than will show up by the (separately enabled) transmission scanner. A subtle slide-away panel in her 'glove' pops out a multipurpose interface connector as she looks for suitable bits of the panel to cut away for system invasion.     "Trains? I guess they're alright. If we fall off, just leave us for dead, alright? Don't make it your problem."     WeezerFan69 speaks, and while Rose is (audibly but invisibly) approaching that station with the needles, Violet answers, "It should be 'good to meet you,' right? Thanks, though! I've got a whole skin regimen."
Arcadia	It might not be the smartest thing to do. But it was definitely the most suitable thing to do. If you're dealing with high velocity vehicles in conditions that are likely to become chaotic and crazy, who better to get involved than denizens of one of the most speed obsessed locations of the Multiverse? But at least it left more room on the VTOL for the people that needed the transport. Since Arcadia, one of the fastest and most agile fliers of The Line, just flew alongside the vehicle in pursuit of the train. This may be rediculously high-velocity for other people, but for the technorganic sphinx-girl it was a cruising speed. The most it does is that when the group catchs the train and disembarks the VTOL, she actually comes down to land on the platform with them instead of her usual hovering. She does take a moment to regard the view, or what passes for it with a certain feel of casual familiarity with it's bleary blurring of colors in muted streaks. "It's almost like being back in the Fourth Gear ring before The Line stabilized with the rest of the Multiverse after the big race," she muses. "But facinating to see outside of our home realm." The radio pings get a roll of her eyes. The intense speeds, outside or in, isn't going to disorient her much. "I'm not the one we need to worry about falling off." Before her magitek headpiece and visor manifests fully atop her head and following the group onward. Honestly about the only reason she's not speeding ahead is that she can't blast forward at rediculous speeds in a crowded interior, but at least it forces her to stay with the group.
Friz	Dirt: Rain. Humming. Roaring. Wind. Rain. Wind. Raindrops. Rattling. Moxie: Are they gonna, uh, be like this the whole time? Savvy: Seems to happen when we arrive, and last until a little after we leave. Moxie: Is this safe? Grit: No. Moxie: So we should leave. Savvy: A mission here buys a decent number of Hopes. Grit: Solidarity for the debt-slave. Dirt: Carpet. Rattling. Rumbling. Rain. Machinery. A ping. Radio. Moxie: Ahh-- wait, we're here.     "This is a train? I-- right, sorry, just a little confused around here. Alright, hope this PDA can run your tracker... Okay, okay. I think I see it. Further up, ridewards. Oh, that's a ways away..." Dirt: Distance. Distance. Distance. Resistance. Savvy: Load the gun. Moxie: Alright, loading and readying. What's up? Savvy: 'High-resistance'. All I know is that this will mean a lot of violence. Grit: Get whatever backup we can. Moxie: Alright, on it. Savvy: Remember: Pretend we're talking to a tape recorder. Savvy: I don't want them knowing about the ghost. "Rogers...." "Plenty of cars full of misery ahead, I'd bet." Whispers. Sound of wind. Near-inaudible. Near-inaudible. Whispers. "I'm not expecting to get out of this without some injuries... I hope it's not many. Wish you could help me out with this." "Yeah? Guess I'll see what I can do." Dirt: Soft footsteps. A cold wind. Savvy: Maybe he can make sure the guns are unloaded. Savvy: Or at least help wear down some security so someone else can work. Moxie: Alright, I'm moving us forward. Grit: Give the girl her grounding. Savvy: Alright, I'll try.     "I'm not gonna abandon you. It would tear me up inside. If I did that, I guess, or if someone did that to me. You're like me. You just have it... a lot worse. Just... be ready with that medic kit, please."
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Elineve 'Phreak' Smith might best be described as a space elf. Pointed ears, gray skin, golden eyes, lithe build. He wears treated leather armor the color of rust, with lightweight, ablative metal plates sewn in to protect the vitals and extremities. His sharp, boyish features are partially obscured by a translucent, blue hardlight visor that somewhat dims the gold of his eyes through its faintly visible scan lines. The sleeves of a red tee, fitted snugly to his wiry but built arms, poke out from the sleeveless chestpiece of his armor.      This kind of speed is unknown even to him--a man who routinely pursues speed as a function of his fighting methodology and for general convenience. He utters a low whistle as he touches down onto the helipad.      Receiving a message from someone to which he didn't provide his contact info is enough to draw a frown of concern as he traverses lavish carpet to stare out a window. [Phreak] It's on. [Phreak] How'd you get this frequency, 'hun?' [Phreak] Nevermind. [Phreak]Nevermind. Don't bet on me dying. I got my own coverage, even if I do. Besides. You couldn't afford me. Or maybe *do* bet against me. Motivates me, you know?      First thing's first, before just beelining to the objective, Phreak calls up a user interface, projected onto his visor. With eye movements and small nods of the head, he navigates the menu, searching for devices in his vicinity. It's going to be a big help, seeing what is and isn't networked, and from there, seeing the extent to which he can play hell with the devices on the train. [Phreak]Dunno. Wasn't here last time. Call me Phreak if your hud's broken. Shout if you're about to croak. Last thing you need's more debt. Yeah?      His bedside manner is as generally lacking as the rest of his manners.
Angela	What do you think a hero is? There's an operation in five months that could mean the end of 1d4+1 worlds--maybe more!--so maybe it reads as a bit unusual that Lobotomy Corp would send anyone let alone Nonon of the Disciplinary Team and four members of the Rabbit Team of R Corp's Fourth Pack. Two men, two women, all wearing black and orange uniforms and...rabbit eared gas masks? ... Well one of them isn't wearing a mask, a white haired red eyed woman who doesn't seem to naturally have the rabbit ears so they must be cosmetic. The Rabbit Pack is expensive so it is atypical for them to be contracted out to be contracted out by another company in a far off world--but L Corp had somehow (through illegal trade through their Artificial Warpgate) a surfeit of bullets to sell and a reason: They wanted to confirm that the Disciplinary Team and the Rabbit Pack could work together without killing each other. Mysteriously, Shajo couldn't go to this assignment because-- "Ahahah! Shajo's still puking up a storm! Guess he is earning his sealegs! Hahaha! I was going to comfort him but then we got the call! Sorry my man!" "What a condescending piece of work..." Myo mutters to herself on the Concierge. "Don't you fucking dare let them ressurect me. I'd rather stay dead." "Don't worry, buddy!" Nonon beams happily. "I'll make sure there's nothing left to bring back!" They drop down into the train car. Myo frowns at the machinery (Nonon doesn't seem to notice anything differently). The Rabbit Team points their assault rifles every which way, not too caring of typical trigger safety protocols. Myo recognizes that look in Miss WeezerFan's eyes. "Gear looks solid." Myo says skeptically. "Hahaha Justin would've come but he had PSYCH EVALS. Say what happens if you die while you're already in debt?"
Karlan Nobles	Doing smart things is smart, but Pramanix isn't about that life. She likes her freedom, she likes her excitement, and she likes following mysteries. The company is one of many that have piqued her interest lately, but going alone would probably be suicidal and highly against many people's best interests. That's why, just like the first time she met with WeezerFan69, Pramanix is here flanked by her big boy bodyguards: the relatively average-sized Courier, and the giant Matterhorn. Their landing at the rear helipad is pretty slick on average, too, with Matterhorn landing in that classic three point pose with a heavy thud while Courier does one of those parkour-esque rolls, capped off with Pramanix landing with a similarly heavy noise, but flat on her face. At least it's not a high landing, or she'd need a minute before getting back up. [Pramanix] "I do. They're such a relaxing way of seeing new things." [Courier] "It's a little hard to see anything out here, though." [Matterhorn] "We'll have time for sightseeing later. Just not here, if we need to keep a low profile." Seeing that the scanner matter's likely covered at this point, Pramanix approaches WeezerFan69 while Courier and Matterhorn keep their eyes peeled for physical threats, all three of them more than content to leave the more technical electronics checks to the experts. "We'd never abandon you. If this gets to be too much for you, don't be afraid to step back and let us take charge, alright? You look..." She pauses. "... More focused. Just don't push yourself too hard."
Ophrys	It's that woman from last time. The sharply dressed corporate type who had introduced herself as Ophrys exits the VTOL, checking a projected screen from the inside of her wrist as her heels click on the platform's landing surface.     I appreciate your concern.     With that same hand, Ophrys produces a breathing mask in a flicker of blue-white sparks. As she lifts it to her face, her entire figure melts away into a translucent distortion. Something whips to life, faster and faster, rhythmic beating becoming a buzz and then fading out to a dull hum again barely audible over the wind and the noise of the train itself.     Ophrys gains altitude on her own, keeping pace with the train while checking the surroundings; up the vehicle's exterior on either side and the roof, as well as any pursuit-- if the company VTOL can make it to a train going full tilt, so could less desirable aircraft. It's clear the assassin would rather avoid surprises. She not only leverages her eyes but her flight radar, given the open terrain and possibility of cloaking similar to her own.
Metamorph One	[The Concierge] "I could never leave you for dead hun! (¤'~')" [The Concierge] "If you fall off, I'll just have to nurse you back to health!"     The electronic panel comes back easily enough. Inside there are--     No switches. What? There's not even a button to press.     Scanning it afflicts Violet with a vision from hell; the worst device design she's ever seen. An entire piece of critical infrastructure that can only be accessed with its own proprietary remove control app, and its connection is hardwired anyways to the node outside. The UX is absolute garbage; a nightmare to navigate even when she hacks in. breaker_caboose goes to node_brkr_acc_1 which wirelessly links exclusively to breaker_dining and far up ahead, breaker_psnger_1. The breaker itself only accepts raw text input for its parser, having that whole app and physical transceiver node just to flip the lights on and off in the caboose, and indicate where that area even is.     Not only that, but she and Phreak both unknowingly find that the company office was not an anomaly; it's either atmospheric conditions or-- no, the sheer pollution of electromagnetic broadcast waves? Both of their signals barely extend out to a full car away. The overwrought physical node broadcasters seem required to extend a signal out to a reasonable length. Where the fuck is all this noise coming from? And the worst part is that all of these stupid electronics have cameras in them anyways; a generic sensor suite slapped into everything to tag it with the 'smart' advertising label, without even the firmware to run the user recognition or motion activation functions it probably has. At least there's blurry, low-res, short range visuals, and access to every device's own short-range transceiver (from god knows what factory). From the outdoors node, violet can see node_bridge_acc mounted outside. From inside, Phreak can see . . . toilet_5648. Okay.     Rose wandering up to the device with the ominous needle; a six inch long pneumatic mounted ten gauge syringe in gleaming steel, gets the signal ping (god, this thing uses a different app?) for slug_needle. God knows what that means. But she's somewhat familiar with various high-tech 'shops, and she's pretty sure those are shoulder braces. Rabbit Team wandering further into the car pings repair_station, which makes sense to stow away in a passenger area (probably), but the words ammo_station in a train caboose is enough to make for a jolt of cold unease, followed shortly by the realization that devices being discovered in the personal bubbles of other Elites are somehow making their way to Violet and Phreak. Their software isn't connected at all, right? Is it manual, somehow? [The Concierge] "Aww, taken already hun? Or maybe you're just playing hard to get. (¤¬u¬)" [The Concierge] "I can track your transmission by the server's position, obviously. What a silly question! You're so silly hun!"     Outside, Ophrys can see the full length of the train; it's not a big one; the group is in the second of eight double-sized cars. The outside bristles with antenna nodes ostensibly necessary just to network the electronics inside, and enough shitty mess scaffolding to make for incredibly dangerous catwalks on the outside. There are windows into some of the cars, but not many of them. The only other thing of note is the rear helipad being adjacent to a folded bridge access outside, meant to dock the train with another vehicle in motion. It's electronically locked down, for some reason.
Persephone Kore	She looks at Violet and the-vague-area-where-Rose-isn't with almost equal skepticism, while doing pointless fidgeting with her blobject gun. [xxWeezerFan69xx] "'Good to meet you'. Yeah. I guess it is. People can get used to anything huh?" [xxWeezerFan69xx] "The needle injects exotic matter."      There's no indication in her tone of whether that's good or bad. As much of a relief as it is to stare at something further away than twenty feet, she eventually turns back around and heads toward the train's door. Friz and Pramanix both evoke a kind of... unease, in her? [xxWeezerFan69xx] "We're so alike, but you wouldn't even try to break me out?" [xxWeezerFan69xx] "I guess I ought to be grateful you're here at all. It's just... hard. I don't know how to feel about anything." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "I'm conserving my energy. Sorry though. I don't think I can heal people at all."      'Condescending piece of work' visibly warms her to Miyo immediately. The comment about her gear gets a sharp noise of amusement out of her. She pops out the magazine of her gun to show off a whole three near-forearm-sized spikes. [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Thanks. It actually sucks." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "I keep stealing better stuff off dead guys." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Can't stop them from bringing you back though. I don't even know how they do it." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "If you die again they just add another million. And interest. It gets big fast."      After a moment's thought, she swaps her gun for a probably-excessively-large scythe and a weird cube-shaped... grenade? Then she positions herself by the door to the next car, not yet cracking it herself. [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Open when ready."
Arcadia	Arcadia tilts her head a little as she listens to the other comm chatters. The exterior structures don't sound all that unusual to her. But then again she comes from a region of the Multiverse were even the cities were constantly moving, so it is just a personal point of view. It probably is weird to other people. But that's not her concern. Just the matter at hand. Though she doesn't have the technical skills to deal with the figuring out what connects to where to make whatever else happen even if she is comparitively good with puzzles, so she just joins the people getting ready to cover the door to the next car. How long will it take for someone to realize they are here and send some manner of security or automated defenses to stop them.... "Dungeoneering Weapon Systems online and ready." She's got specific settings for dealing with interior work, at least.
Angela	Myo grimaces at the Concierge's ''reassurance'. "You sure there's even grass for us to graze on here?" "Haha, they said it was heavily guarded, Nonon!" Myo hasn't opened fire in hours so she's getting nervous and impatient. She was expecting a hot drop. ammo_station Why is it underscored--no, Myo thinks, this is some weird alien universe you've never been to before. Maybe they just like underscores here. "Yeah just making conversation, no clue what qualifies for good gear here but apparently--" She glances to the ammo_station. "There's a whole slew of bullets." She gestures forward to send her team to investigate. "Tch," She says on the matter of how they bring them back regardless of what remains. "That fucking bites ass." Nonon beams happily. "That so? Haha."
KNK	'The needle injects exotic matter.'     Rose's voice hits the same channel, as both speech and text. "For what purpose?" She spends a few moments considering breaking the needle off, but she can't easily guarantee she'll safely nab its resevoir, even if it turns out to be something useful. Injecting -- or rather, stabbing -- herself never occurs to her.     'I could never leave you for dead hun!'     "Get used to disappointment."     "Wow! This place is a mess." Violet dutifully traces all the lines, feeding the data back to Rose, knowing she won't be able to remember it all on her own. "I wonder if they did it this way on purpose. Like, just being difficult for the sake of it? If they wanted it hardened, they would've tried making it impossible instead of just a headache, right? Hm, hm..."     She takes a break from that (to the extent she focuses some of her attention back outward) long enough to say, "'Weezer'... what's a... oh, anyway, do you like it? As a codename. Oh! I could call you Sixty-Nine. You can just call me Violet, and she's Rose." Those names were already in the chat logs. Why she has to specify is left a mystery.     "Oh, yeah, is anyone expecting you? Because if they are..." Rose shimmers into view near xxWeezerFan69xx, holding a blocky, flat little robot. She drops it, where it camouflages itself against the floor, and then projects a fairly convincing holographic projection itself that matches the alleged Weezer fan's appearance, minus the equipment she just picked up. "Let this take fore, a'right? Okay, ready."     And she takes up a position to the side, ready to let the illusion charge in first, the moment the door opens.
Karlan Nobles	[Pramanix] "How... Thoughtful." [Courier] "Isn't she? Thank you, Miss Concierge." [Matterhorn] "Is that your type now? Hm. I thought that taller one was." Courier's a little more eager to show off after that, but he'll have to wait his turn. All that technical stuff flies right over the bodyguards' heads even as they watch Phreak and Rose at work. Spotting Rabbit Team from the corner of their eyes, though, they glance over at Pramanix who gives them the nod of approval, then take up positions with the team. Courier's got his long sword, and Matterhorn's got his kukri and shield on hand. Once that door opens, they're ready to head in first, with Matterhorn doing the big boy charge straight down the middle while Courier's on hand to capitalize on whoever's distracted by Matterhorn. Pramanix, meanwhile, gets a heavy dose of guilt right to the chest from WeezerFan69. "Of course I'll try. It was just at the time that you were deep inside their facilities, but now..." She pauses, a look of slow realization crossing her face. They're not in the company's building, are they? A smile crosses her face, and she gestures all around them, then holds a finger up to her lips and winks as if that might be a signal for something. Playing along? "Do you know how to drive a train, by any chance?" Wait. Can the Concierge hear them here? Well, it's probably too late now if she can. Might as well keep winging it. "I wonder how feasible it'd be to... Acquire this train if we're able to get in deep enough. For your company and paying off that debt, of course." She winks again. It's not subtle at all. She also gets her bow drawn, ready to start firing arrows in with the rest of the group once they make their move.
Ophrys	What a curious design for a train.     Then again, her flight frame is based on a hornet. Ophrys might be the last person who gets to rag on anything about how aerodynamic it is. She weaves out from behind the rearmost car and accelerates up the side. Those inside get a brief glimpse of her when she pulls a weapon out of storage, a flare of blue-white voxels fading into the distance.     Through the window, she notes the door that WeezerFan69 prepares next to-- and then pushes further forward to the next compartment. Cloaked as she is, the red-orange ring of the WizarTech system manifesting its spell circle around her arm is the only thing visible when unidentified figures move into view.     Ophrys wastes no time lobbing the spell she's prepared through the window like a grenade. It behaves very much like one, bursting into a brief, flaming explosion on impact. She follows it with a burst of fire from the submachine gun she'd pulled out a moment ago.     This all disrupts the GhostWare camouflage. As her armored black and purple figure starts melting back into view, the cyborg rolls upward and out of sight, using the train car's roof as cover.
Friz	"We're alike, and that's why... I can't. That's why I can't." Dirt: The floor. The floor. The floor.     "Sorry. I wish I could. I probably can-but-can't. You could walk away, and just... accept that life will always lock you out of all of its systems forever. That you'll never be a 'human' again. And I can't save you from that unless I do this, not unless I do all this. But... I get the feeling you kind of know that too. That maybe you could walk out the front door sometime, or leave a mission, but you'd know the world would never treat you like a human, ever again. It's something like that. You don't have to feel any one way. You can feel every way, I mean, if you want, all of them. I'm not the consistency police. I'm just a volunteer." Dirt: Door. Door. Moxie: Plan? Savvy: The usual. It's sliding, electronic. Hold while it opens, half a second. Grit: A consistent opening means a consistent place to look for intrusion. Savvy: Then rush. Fast. Cross the kill-spot in the middle of the door. Moxie: Alright, I'll do whatever I can. Dirt: Door. Splitting. Sliding. Grit: Go. Moxie: Moving, moving!! Readying gun! Dirt: Footsteps. Fast footsteps. Shouting. Savvy: Calling out!     "Freeze! DVSD, drop your weapons!" Grit: It won't work. Savvy: It's the best I've got. Moxie: Firing on *anything* that moves too much...!!
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	[Phreak] Who's the moron that designed all this 'net-of-things bullshit? Great job, there, Bob Kahn-artist.     In truth, Phreak isn't actually bothered by it--but the sheer noise pollution is mildly insulting from an ease-of-use perspective, not even from a hacker's perspective.     That is, until he sees-- [Phreak] A smart toilet? Are you fucking kidding me? What, is there an app with frequent flyer miles? Fucking jabronis.     Out of morbid curiosity, Phreak accesses the node. If there's anything disruptive he can do with it, it's useful information for later. On the off chance he can make a disruption for when WeezerFan breaches into the next car, he keeps the connection open, pressing his back to the wall while one hand hovers near the grip of an absurdly oversized SMG. His speed should allow him to assist in breaching, if there's nothing useful there.     He tries to suppress realization of the absurdity of the options he's leveraging.
Persephone Kore	Myo gets her the closest to smiling she's been all day. [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Yeah. It absolutely does bite ass. Don't worry, though. I'll take a bullet for you."      Violet, as Violet sometimes does, visibly chills WeezerFan's bones. She stiffens up in something akin to a fight-or-flight reflex. [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Please don't call me Sixty-Nine. My name's     ." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "... Never mind. 'WF' is fine." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Sometimes they expect me. Usually not. The VTOL's loud but the train is louder." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "And my skeleton uses the exotic matter for bullet time. I don't know anything else."      WeezerFan looks skeptical of Pramanix's smile at first- doesn't she seem sort of like an airhead?- but gradually warms up to the plan. Her eyes flick in the direction of the front of the train; she tosses her grenade idly from hand to hand, scythe held in the crook of her arm. [xxWeezerFan69xx] "First time for everything." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "It isn't really like I have anything to lose."      Her good mood cools to scorn when Friz speaks up, though. No, not even scorn- disgust? [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Do you think I'm human?" [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Do you think I haven't given up on ever being human again?" [xxWeezerFan69xx] "I'm an animal in a cage." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "I can't just walk."
Metamorph One	Rabbit team investigating the armour plated vending machine helpfully labelled with an underscore finds it . . . nonthreatening. Actually, this is one of the very few things that they can press physical instruments on (though it has its own shitty app anyways). Whatever they expected from holding a weapon beneath a scanner that looks like a bulky square faucet, it's probably not the hiss of a mist-injector and high-powered lasers fusing particulate into 3D printed bullets, magazine and all, that drop weightily into the hand one after the other. They're . . . mostly pretty okay quality, actually? That's . . . alarming. [The Concierge] "I like your spirit hun, but don't go stealing the train, okay?" [The Concierge] "Besides, there's no human driver, and only this rail, so where would you even take it?" [The Concierge] "You'll need a little more than a big gift to impress me hun (¤'.-)"     Phreak's hacking of toilet_5648 is utterly fascinating, by which he should intuit to mean 'completely stupid'. The sole legitimate command is to flush the toilet. You have to flush it with an app. A smartphone button, at minimum. It is also poorly designed beyond his wildest dreams. It would be actually trivial to overload the water pressure so badly that it explodes. The exterior node would let him access the train's loading bridge, if he felt like it, as well as a seemingly useless util_node outside. He still has to hop one system at a time to control the cabin breakers. But from brkr_access where he is, he sees something that radiates 'this is not a place of honour' vibes. emergency_brake     The holodrone scuttles through the automatic sliding doors at the same time Ophrys slips in. A connecting hall rattles precariously between the two cabins, but seems to be safe, if a horrible chokepoint. The next cabin is clearly a kitchen car, with clean little tables on a slate blue tile floor and a separated partition with a fridge and stove. A security camera occupies the far corner, scanning the room for potential fridge thieves (though the fridge has a command to list its contents, for some godforsaken reason).     The next cabin also has a dozen people already seated inside of it. It takes all of less than a second for them to notice the illusory WeezerFan69 isn't one of them, and then they all jump up from their places at once. All of them are clad in something roughly similar to . . . whatever WeezerFan69 is wearing. Mechanical leg braces, piston-studded arm shells, transceiver headgear, full-faced cyclopean helmets, logo-emblazoned chestplates, wires and segmentation and trendy clothes draped over most of them. It's hard to tell how much is armour and how much is augmentation; maybe it doesn't matter. What also matters is that all of them are armed too.
Metamorph One	The holodrone is instantly hosed with a barrage of fire that is as merciless as it is completely reckless. Even a full car over, you're nearly deafened with the chatter of submachine gun fire and the percussive booms of large gauge shotguns, rattling against the advance cabin wall like thrown punches. A particularly high power rifle pierces both walls and leaves a hole into the helipad car behind you. No two weapons even particularly appear alike, whether gleaming steel or matte carbon or colourful plastic, each with a completely different manufacturer mark. None of them spit brass. The deluge is so complete that the holodrone is, of course, quickly revealed to not be a real person. And it's also bad enough that Ophrys is going to be shot several times whether she's invisible or not; the kitchen is more blinding tracers than air.     The grenade spell goes off in the middle. One individual-- who even are these people?-- is violently splattered into red chunks from the waist up immediately, viscera sprayed against the far door along with the shrapnel of his cybernetics. The remainder around him are thrown away, toppling over tables, slamming against walls, and smashing through the kitchen window. Exoskeletons audibly crack and visibly spark. More than one of them bring out-- those are honest to god walkie-talkies. Big chunky ones. You can barely even hear the tones of speech, but picking up the powerful signal necessary to get two cars down is easy. They're alerting the whole train for backup.
Metamorph One	Rogers, as a literal ghost, phasing on up ahead, finds car four is clearly the bulk passenger car. Rows of numbered doors line the corridor on both sides, fake-panelled and signal-proofed. There's at least one additional cyborg in every single one of them, sleeping in their beds in shifts, tapping at laptops filled with inscrutable white on blue ANSI, or maintaining weapons; god there are a lot of weapons. Most are left right on the nightstands or propped against bedposts, however.     While the fight is going on a car down, it doesn't take much for a ghost to flit between rooms and eject the ammo out of each loaded magazine. They'll certainly be in a rush when they scramble to reinforce. If he's willing to stay there, he finds a separate, segregated breaker_sleep panel too, with access to rail_door leading outside and around the sleep compartments.     Weird, that Rogers starts to fuzz the further he goes. A ghost, on the fritz, like a TV. How odd. It doesn't seem to harm him, though.
Persephone Kore	The deafening hail of gunfire pouring down the hallway surprises WeezerFan not in the slightest. She just grips her scythe a little tighter and steadies her breathing, not yet accustomed enough to combat to have lost the jitters. One upside of the weird 'subtitles' becomes clear: she's perfectly intelligible even with her voice totally drowned out. [xxWeezerFan69xx] "It's always like this. Everyone, every time. Everywhere you go. I hate it here."      Then she steps into the line of fire, weapon at the ready, and-      Parries a dozen bullets on the flat of her scythe.      Lets a stun grenade roll from her hand to delay their call for backup by just a fraction of a second.      Makes a twisting gesture with her now-free fingers, vampirically drawing ribbons of blood from the living and dying towards herself.      Lurches behind the counter before she can catch a dozen more shots.      It's all done at regular speed, but as sleekly as if she'd rehearsed those exact actions her entire life, all the fat shorn off every movement. That must be the 'bullet time'. [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Good feint. They'll run themselves out of ammo if you let them." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "I've got more grenades. Tell me if you need covering for anything."      The (enchanted?) blood flows in thin streams through the air, curling around cover to feed into ports on her Skeleton. The unwholesome network of veins under her skin darkens. It doesn't seem to alarm her.
Friz	Savvy: They've almost unloaded their guns on the holo. Dirt: Mostly. Savvy: Trust xWF to deflect the rest. Dirt: Words. Speech. Savvy: Which ones?! Dirt: Some. Savvy: Why can't you *understand?!* Dirt: Phonemes. Grit: There will be no arrests today. Savvy: God-- just-- Just shoot! Just SHOOT!! Moxie: Firing!! Dirt: Red. Meat. Grit: They will bring backup. Dirt: Reloads. Clack. Clack. Grit: We are not more durable than a train. The shots will kill us instantly. Moxie: Firing! Savvy: Prioritize fire, prioritize it! Moxie: How?! Dirt: Guns. Different. Savvy: Dirt, fucking-- if you're not going to tell me about the world... Savvy: Find the reload times for the closest model to each of those firearms, mark foes in sequence! Moxie, fire in ascending order, one stun-shot each! Dirt: Marking. One. Two. Three... Moxie: Firing!! Dirt: Heat. Light. Crack-shot. Grit: Steady everything. Even breathing. Grit: Slow is steady. Steady is fast. Grit: One shot. Then the next. Moxie: Then the next. Grit: Then the next. Dirt: Then the next. Savvy: Until it's done. Savvy: The stun-shots won't do much against cyborgs. Moxie: Won't have to! Moxie: Just have to get them cued up for the others to finish them! Savvy: We need to keep the momentum into the next car...!
Angela	Myo feels like a champ for once. She doesn't really know what she said (she was just speaking her mind) but she enjoys comradery all the same. She's part of Rabbit Pack not Rabbit Solo Ninja. "Name's Myo," Myo asides to WF as her team investigates the vending machine. "L Corp contracts us out sometimes." "...They fuckin' just PRINT bullets here??" One of the Rabbit Team members says. "WHAT?" Myo asks. "Quality looks...okay?" Myo is bewildered. "Well damn son, load up. This job's already paying for itself." Nonon frowns suspiciously at the idea of a free ammo dispenser. On a train. Or really in general. The Rabbit Team seem happy to make the most of it. If there's a cost to it, well, R Corp can pay it. "Let's test 'em out!" Myo chirps, her mood improving just a bit as she kicks the door open into the next cabin and just immediately opens fire with her assault rifle in a wide arc towards the folks standing up with weapons. The only reason the other members of Rabbit Team don't also open fire is largely because there's only so many who can push in at once. Nonon is stuck behind all of them looking disappointed and impatient. "Hey hey, go in faster! I want to hit someone too!" Nonon whines. "I haven't been in a fight FOREVER." Myo asides back to WF. "Yeah? How're they gonna run out of ammo with ammo dispensers just printing bullets? ... Wait fuck, is this the only one?? We should stay in there then!"
Arcadia	The door is opened. The defenders in the car open fire on the holodrone, quickly proving its lack of existance, but the few moments they're busy with that, and with WF69 stepping in to doing fancy bullet parrying and blood trickery, is enough. Arcadia bursts forward into motion, impressive in speed and agility even as she has to hold back for the confinded spaces. She can't go full bullet hell within the train this soon, but she's got a few other tricks up her non-existant sleeves. As the sphinx charges through she opens fire as well, unleashing bolts of magitek energy in a burst in front of her. But rather than flying straight ahead the bolts, her equivilent to the emponymous Magic Missile spells, bend and turn to home in on any enemies even if they try to move out of the way and shoot back, trying to pick off as many as possible so the group can continue ahead.
KNK	Rose communicates briefly over more secure channels with Pramanix, but that's not important right now.     Under other circumstances, Rose and Violet would have each been not too far behind the distraction, ready to take advantage of it. With more than a dozen people on their side, Rose holds up a hand to keep Violet back, waiting long enough for Ophrys to go in first, and for that grenade to go off.     The delay could be critical, but WF follows up with a stun grenade. That should give just enough time for Rose, crawling on the ceiling, to reveal her position with the sharp, repeated flash of her long rifle. It's on semi-automatic, but you wouldn't know it by how quickly she empties the magazine, every shot aimed at a different 'power source' in the view of her mask, suddenly visible in the glare.     Walkie-talkies are obvious sources, but cybernetics, and some weapons, tend to need their own. It's quicker than looking for biological vitals.     Violet is taking an extra second to not be caught in all that inaccurate fire, and is slower to reach anything important. Given a little more time, though, she'll reach the entrance to the next car, to either ambush the reinforcements or to snap to position and finish off someone still intent and able to fight.
Karlan Nobles	[Pramanix] "H... Hun? Ahem. Yes, where, indeed." Feeling rather pleased at her ploy(?(does this even count?)) seemingly not drawing suspicion from the Concierge, Pramanix tucks away the idea of pulling off a train heist in the back of her head for the time being. She makes particularly sure not to look at Rose further, too, but she has something else to keep her vision occupied soon afterwards, anyway. Namely, the bloodshed. Courier and Matterhorn certainly aren't strangers to seeing people (with or without full body armor) getting pasted, and they take all of that in stride while chopping through the first wave in that car. Even Pramanix has seen plenty of it before, albeit not in a body-obliterating viscera-to-the-face way that she's encountering here. At the very least, it's bad enough that she still needs to step back and catch her breath. That just so happens to coincide with when she hears, then sees WeezerFan69 heading into the melee herself. Before Pramanix can warn her, though, she's already deflecting bullets, pulling blood, dropping grenades, and talking again. "... No wonder you hate it. Well! Let's finish up here, and then we can put this place behind us."  Courier chimes in, smiling his ever polite smile at WeezerFan69 while gesturing at Pramanix to stick close, prompting the latter to do just that even as she gets her bell out. "Right... It really is always the same, isn't it?" Pramanix murmurs, somehow looking a little more guilty than she did earlier in the mission. Inhaling once, she starts ringing the bell while going through her usual ice-summoning ritual. Icicles start to form on the roof of the car the group is in, shaking and dangling precariously as though they might snap off at any moment. They don't, but that's because they're waiting for Phreak's signal. Once he hits the brakes, those great icy spikes finally break off and get launched into the next car over while Matterhorn and Courier rush in to start slicing away once again.
Ophrys	The flame spell is thrown. Guards open fire on the holographic drone. Guards that have terrible, terrible aim.     Wild gunfire perforates walls and parts of the cabin including parts nowhere near the holographic decoy that's gotten all of their attention. Unfortunately for Ophrys, she's occupying the space those guys are badly shooting through. Covering herself with a burst of fire from her SMG, the cyborg ascends out of sight and traverses to the other side of the train car, trailing sparks from numerous bullet impacts.     With a frown, she pries a slug out of her bicep, closing off the resulting fluid leak with her exterior suit layer, "Annoying..." She skims the damage readout in the corner of her AR HUD. Some armor damage, a structural strain, reduced myofiber in one leg, but no core systems down.     A flashbang goes off inside. Ophrys discards her emptied SMG, accelerating while the others engage the car she grenaded. The WizarTech system winds up, its ring pulsing blue-white this time. When she releases the spell through the circuit this time, it plasters slick ice on the exterior catwalks near both doors used to access the gantry from inside.     Only then does Ophrys land near the relay antenna perched on the exterior catwalk, using the device as cover while forcing her own access into this world's nightmarish digital realm in search of more clues about the objective's location.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	[Phreak] Oh, hey. [Phreak] That looks useful. And real fuckin' dangerous.     Who in their right mind would make a remotely accessible emergency brake?     Don't care. [Phreak] So there's this emergency brake node... [Rose] Gimme a countdown before you hit that. And maybe wait 'till we see someone important standing up without their hand on a wall. [Ophrys] I'd appreciate that as well, please! [Phreak] Glad we're on the same page. [Matterhorn] I agree. We can sweep through while they're off-balance. [Phreak] Okay, you guys got thirty seconds. Gee-el-aych-eff.     Phreak's implants allow his fingers to race across a keyboard, auto-fill asssisting in compiling a simple script that will flip the brake when the timer runs out.     It's banged out quickly, at which point he activates a script he's well used to--Grid Armor. In a matter of seconds his body is near totally digitized, but for a ludicrously small portion, bounced around between a hardlight, blue wireframe shell. The two massive SMGs are still very much physically present.     Phreak darts from his spot pressed against the wall, a blue blur vaulting posh furniture and shoulder-checking his way through doorways, until the timer on his little brake trick ticks down--at which point he leaps, letting momentum carry him, as he twists nimbly into a midair roll. His hands find his guns with ease, and his fingers summon a mesmerising helix of white-hot tracer rounds aimed at bowled-over, would-be muscle, Hurled spikes of ice from Pramanix pierce harmlessly through his hardlight shell as he sails, landing with a roll and sweeping with both guns to cover anyone getting back to their feet.
Metamorph One	Bullets fly in semi-random direction from WF's scythe, embedding in the walls within smouldering pits; cherry point-glows like lit cigarettes. Garbled screams and radio static come from multiple passengers, writhing and shuddering as their crimson blood is sucked out through their mouths, helmet ports, burst veins, and the seams in their exos. Gunshots pound the counter; god what is it made of? One of the survivors picks up what looks like an honest to god churchpick, fibreglass handle and logo-stamped head and all, and vaults off a table to leap over the counter and slam it down through her head. Just like that. They have no idea who each other are. They just do it.     The stun grenade goes off as the second explosive in the cabin, flattening some cyborgs, disabling others, leaving them staggering around or firing blindly in circles. Friz has several critical seconds to fire stun rounds into the passengers (god please let them be enemy agents) already damaged by the grenade spell. Aiming for gaps of ragged clothes or exposed flesh, she sends two of them slumped to the ground with broken bones and a mild concussion, before Rabbit team piles in through the doors and sweeps the room, and Rose fires her first shot, inadvertently saving them by dropping them to the floor.     The vicious scything of gunfire back and forth is easily enough to cut down the stumbling survivors. Precision shots punch through helmets, spray viscera across the walls (only Rose and Myo are the type to notice a distinct lack of grey chunks), and drop the few still fighting back. Arcadia's rapid blitz and magic missile spray blast WF's ambusher out of the air, saving her the trouble. A walkie talkie-- then two, explode into shrapnel, but the third goes off before it's taken out. The walls are painted carmine with assorted high-pressure blood. God there's so much of it. Why is there so much?     A little worryingly, each individual enemy appears on Violet's and Phreak's node graphs. They're marked like any of the devices aboard the trian are are. Just . . . with their names. Handles?     Ophrys checks the graph, and confirms that the closest computer mapped by the group to the source of the transmission is the passenger compartment breaker. In the car ahead of the sleep car; a generic passenger seating area, by the looks of it, with the usual cushioned seats, fancy benches, polished tables, and scenic window views. More substantial catwalks run down both sides. With the grainy, dirt cheap camera nub, she spots another node rail_acc_2 and . . . that . . . looks like a . . . it's marked turret_1. Just outside the train. It's probably defensive, right? To shoot bad guys trying to break in through the big ol' windows. Right? Well, it's in the way; otherwise someone fast and sneaky enough could run past several cars, if they can brave the exterior wind.
Metamorph One	There are three seating compartments in total, each one stocked with armed cyborgs wearing various degrees of exoskeletal enhancement who are just . . . sitting there. Talking. Looking out the windows. Eating food. Why? Past those three rooms stocked with fully armed hostiles, the transmission car. It's heavily shielded. None of the electronics go inside. There are multiple electronic door lock consoles.     As Phreak bursts in with the others at his signal, the sleep car's doors burst open, and a stream of passengers(?) comes flooding out, armed and dangerous. They don't seem deliberately coordinates at all, so much as every one of them has spontaneously decided that the most sensible and normal thing to do in this scenario is to kill whoever doesn't belong. They surge through the room, filling it five ranks deep, those in back leaping onto dining tables to draw a bead on the party. There's certainly no way to not get shot now. Why are they so fucking aggressive?     That is, until a chorus of dry clicks rattles off from the mob like dropping change. The entire group is left paralyzed in a moment of collective confusion, and that moment is critical. Most check their weapons, some toss them away and ready up brass knuckles, stylishly studded baseball bats, and one with what looks like a hefty tungsten alloy chopping sword, one primes a grenade instead--     But Phreak's dive in shoots the grenade out, blowing up into a cloud of obscuring smoke and chaff. A sword and a bat pass right through him. Icicle spikes skewer the row in the front, allowing the other Karlans to barrel into the rank behind, Skeleton and skeleton crunching under the terrifying assault. Some of the passengers start to run. Back to who knows where. Yet another one picks up his walkie talkie (who's giving them these?) to alert the small army in the three cars ahead; and he is instantaneously decapitated by Violet from stealth.     And then the brakes kick in.     Just how fast this train is moving is sharply underscored when it stops far, far faster than it has any right to. There's no slow and steady roll; the vehicle jolts so hard that a loose grip on a table bolted into the ground might break your arm. Dead passengers fly into the far wall and provide bare impact cushioning to those also thrown with it, while the living are dangerous weapons to those in the way. Chairs tumble into the walls and shatter. Spare magazines smash to flinders. Dishes disintegrate in flight and pepper the walls with aluminium shrapnel. Bullets dislodge themselves from their holes and regain injurious velocity the other way. The fridge crunches into the kitchen wall. The sofas from the previous room audibly smash against the caboose car wall behind.     And when the dust settles, forward surveillance confirms that all the passengers waiting in the seating cars are dead. Completely unprepared for the stop, they've all been thrown out of their seats and broken over tables or splattered against walls at deadly speed. Three whole cars, bathed in sticky blood and slick fluids, splinters of furniture sliding goopily from the sides. Dead silence underscores the abrupt, horrific sight. 'Emergency brake' never meant an emergency for the passengers, did it? [The Concierge] "Great work finding the brakes hun." [The Concierge] "Careful. A group of train pirates is moving in."
Persephone Kore	[xxWeezerFan69xx] "Myo. Nice to meet you. Um, I don't- have a name. Right now." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "They'll turn their backs to get more bullets. Then you- then you can shoot them. Usually."      The cool dissociation of bullet time gives her a kind of artificial composure. Outside it, she's far more obviously an amateur. WeezerFan dry-swallows behind her cover, stands up, and immediately catches a shotgun blast to the collarbone. She staggers forward, collapses, and swings her scythe at ankle-level to trip a passenger.      A lattice of stolen gore extrudes from those subsurface veins, filling in her wounds and becoming something not unlike the bones and organs it replaces. So that's what she was siphoning it for.      WeezerFan pushes herself upright on one arm, hastily double-taps her prone opponent with her spikegun, and then staggers her way to the other end of the room while trying to fumble-reload. [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Fuck fuck fuck fuck. Ohhh, god, I'm sorry. That's all of them, right? They..." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "I'm fine, I'm fine. Keep moving." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "God you guys are something. Haha."      Then the brakes are hit. WeezerFan hurtles down the hallway and impacts the far wall at speed, cushioned only by the gore of everybody before her. Then a sofa impacts her. She peels herself off of the wall and flops onto the floor after a comedic delay, coughing. The same gore-3D-printing thing happens again, setting bones and repairing crushed tissue. [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Ough." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Oh, god. Um-" [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Guh. Sorry. Oh, god, this is so fucking gross. Is everyone okay?" [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Gh- train pirates?! Wait, we have to make it to the front before they do! Come on!      It's kind of alarming, if nothing else, how quick she's able to get back to her feet. Dropping her scythe in favor of the big tungsten-alloy chopping sword, she smashes a window and hops out onto the ground outside, only almost tripping again from her slippery coating of blood.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	His voice cuts off from the mic, when he notices it. It isn't completely unheard of. There are some programs, back home, that can override someone's control of their own body, temporarily. Some of them do it externally--imposing heavy gravity fields, or cranking up the production of lactic acid to induce artificial exhaustion, or interfering with the way neurons transmit electrical impulses. Some of them are more insidious, playing at the workings of the psyche.     None of them are as callously accesible as this.     Phreak's expressionless wireframe face can't convey shock or revulsion, in the chaos of his entry. He'd fully anticipated the flying sea of humanity upon the brakes being tripped. Bodies, living and dead, zip through his wireframe armor, punching holes in his virtually constructed shell of a body only for those holes to repair themselves. Fleeting glimpses of the handful of tightly packed particles serving as his 'real' body are seen through these holes, rapidly bouncing between the walls of the shell.     This--breaching into tightly packed quarters--is a fixer specialty, and Phreak has made 'being hit at all' into a literal, obnoxious shell game, for a teeth-grinding span of double-digit seconds. A chair crashes through his head, the augmented meta-human huffing. [Phreak] Jesus Christ. What a world. What a -life.- Okay. [Phreak] ...we got heals, inbound. WF, and any of you others that haven't rolled with me yet--stand still and don't hit 'cancel.' Don't wanna meet the pirates fucked up.     With both hands on his guns, Phreak can still navigate his command prompts with hands-free controls. When his Grid Armor fades, and his physical body returns, the last few lines of code scroll over his visor. Anyone in or coming into the car with him gets an AR splash page for cracked medical software, assuringly titled Dr. Hack n' Quack. A progress bar spins up, and then a cloud of nanites is briefly visible as a swarm of red motes around anyone in need.     They aren't like Bercilak's healing--an ever present background noise--nor as directed as that of an actual medical professional. Rather, this is utilitarian, kitchen-sink style triage, that pulses at regular intervals and does what it can until the next pulse. Being kept alive this way is surely stress inducing for the implication of being in a tight spot and waiting on the next pulse--but it's better than nothing, and each pulse is at least efficient in what it can accomplish.
Arcadia	Normally massive numbers wouldn't be an issue for Arcadia... but this isn't the normal situation where she can just speed around everything shooting at her. She doesn't have the room for it. And even if their aim is shit there is -so many- of them that she'd arguably wouldn't be able to dodge all of it anyways. Fortunately, she has some contingencies. The protective ward her magitek armor is enchanted with flares to life, a faint golden glow enveloping the sphinx as gunfire makes hit sparks against it. But it's not a full forcefield, it won't hold forever, and it doesn't take long for the occasional shot to get through to ding her actual armor and flesh as it starts to weaken. It is long enough for her to prepare though. The first step is to dig her foot claws into the floor to brace herself. She is familiar with sudden shifts in speed, she's not worried about it too much, just making sure she remains moving in the same stretch as the train does. Or stops doing. The second step is to pull out an intricate staff-like device, that opens up one end to some kind of emitter. Which she points ahead. Waits a few seconds, which is almost an eternity to her, and then just as the signal is given the brake is going on, fires from the array. But rather than a distinctly direct attack the energy emitted from the Argo Alexandrian magitek has a peculiar disruptive effect on inertia. Things struck by it's ray, be it object or (questionably here) man, lose that 'continue in its existing state of uniform motion in a direction'. Which means that when the train abrupt stops from the emergency brake... They don't. Things flung into motion at the sudden arrest that were hit with the ray do so with even greater intensity with no metaphysical force to hold that position, slamming into walls or whatever else is hurtling about like ragdolls and random directions to amplify the damages dones. It looks a lot like when the physics engine of a game gets royally screwed.
KNK	"Huh, that's weird."     "What is?"     "No time for an autopsy. Keep moving."     Ping. Data on accessible nodes transferred.     "Open connections."     "Not well-secured, huh?"     "Not surprising, if it's like the rest -- wait a fucking minute, they're using hand radios. Why the fuck would they, if they're networked to --"     "Interference? Can't make the hops? Their reach is really bad."     "Then why are they networked in the first place? Is getting fucked by someone sitting on the other side of a thin wall just their hobby?"     "Hmm, wanna find out?"     But Violet doesn't get a chance. Internal clocks tick downward, the brakes are hit, and the jolt is beyond anything expected, if not beyond their ability to handle. Every loose object, corpses and soon-to-bes included, tumbles through the air at deadly speed.     Violet spins, scattering blood from her blade into a wide arc, and fires the thrusters in her legs at full force, as if making an emergency backward dodge. The blast of air can't even be heard over everything else.     Rose slides down the ceiling while losing traction, magnets still engaged, scraping loudly for all of ten milliseconds. The pounding of her heart is something she feels without being able to feel it. Magnets disengage, power reroutes within her body, and she kicks off the ceiling, redirecting her relative momentum by tapping every table, chair, and discarded gun flying her way so that it flies just around her, and she keeps moving back.     Both cyborgs hit the walls feet first, absorbing the final impact with bent legs, caring about inertia but not about gravity. There's no opponent left to knock over while stunned. There's no one stunned who didn't know that was coming. Rose lets out a string of ugly invective that doesn't easily translate.
Karlan Nobles	If nothing else, Pramanix can let her apprehensions about all the bloodshed fade however briefly just watching everyone's acrobatics in action. There's a moment of concern when Phreak looks like he's getting punctured by one of her icicles, but she lets out a relieved sigh when he just continues as though it didn't touch him in the slightest. It's a welcome distraction from all the bloodshed that she and her companions are taking part in, and she's almost about to get used to it when it's time for the brakes. Even with advance warning, Courier's the only one of the three that actually has a soft-ish landing, albeit by using several other bodies as a cushion for himself. Matterhorn's braced for a heavy impact against the opposite wall and the bodies piling there, too, but he catches Pramanix with his gut when she basically bodyslams right into him. Clearly, all three of them have greatly underestimated just how good this train's brakes are. [Pramanix] "Train... Pirates? That's-ow. That's not very fair, swooping in after we did all the work." [Courier] "It's not surprising, is it?" [Matterhorn] "It shouldn't be. Come on, back on your feet. We've... Rrgh. Still got a job to do." As per their role as bodyguards, Courier and Matterhorn check into the next car first before being followed in by Pramanix to try keeping up with WeezerFan. They're still largely pretty sore from that heavy impact without that same ability to patch themselves up, though, and the sight of all those dead bodies has Pramanix losing some more color in her face. She even has to stick her head out of the train momentarily to throw up before coming back in with a mouthful of snow to rinse it all out. A promise has been made, though, and she pushes through that disgust, moving hastily to get past the messier sections while pausing to catch her breath in the relatively cleaner spots (And to let Phreak's healing commands wash over her). Courier and Matterhorn helpfully stand nearby to block some of her vision as she does that, but they all keep moving fairly quickly with WeezerFan's warning about getting ahead of the pirates still fresh in their minds. None of them are going to be as fast as her, but the swordsmen are both performing their jobs as human shields for Pramanix while she gets back to ringing the bell and performing her rituals on the move. Outside the train, snow starts to fall rapidly. Unnaturally, even, if this isn't the right weather for snow to fall, and especially if it's normally too hot for snow to even exist in this part of the world. Stranger still, the snow falls around the train in a way that's outlining it and further ahead, as though the clouds above are dropping snow in a suspiciously this-train-shaped pattern rather than blowing any further away from it.
Friz	Savvy: We've got a countdown. Moxie: You memorized how long a second is, right? Dirt: Thirty. Savvy: Yeah. Keep the fight up, but brace for high-G as soon as it's at one. Grit: At these speeds, an emergency brake will be lethal. Moxie: To them. Savvy: To us too, if you don't brace. Moxie: Fine, fine! Reloading, firing! Dirt: Fifteen. Dirt: Rogers. Savvy: Keeping it quiet. "Kid, can't scout too far ahead. I'm fizzling out." "Back on me then. Call you when I need you."     "Everyone! Slack jaws, push air out against closed glottis, hold your calves and thighs and shoulders TIGHT!" Dirt: The world is moving. Dirt: The world is trying to kill you. Dirt: Gravity. Gravity. Gravity. Crunch. Grit: I am stronger than this force. Dirt: It's over. Blood. Death. Silence. Grit: Lost endurance. Lost bloodflow. Strained several muscles. Dirt: Sensation of pain. Grit: You missed some bruises in that melee. Moxie: I did? Crud. Explains the pain.     "Hhhhh... haahhhh... holy shit, they weren't kidding about that being an *emergency* brake. Oh god..." Moxie: Getting onto feet. We're rushing with xWF. Grit: She is enduring. A mess that survives. Savvy: Doesn't she need help? Grit: Solidarity for the debt-slave. Moxie: Following! Moxie: I'm gonna stay by that hacker, then take the hole she busted out! Savvy: Grit, get me more adrenaline. We need to dash. Grit: Injuries in the calves. Savvy: Can we do it? Grit: We can. I want sweets after. Savvy: Fuck it, fine. Moxie, maximum speed, keep pace with xWF.
Angela	"Did they erase it? Damn that's cold," Myo admits, wondering just how in debt this lady is. The brakes are hit. Myo goes flying and slams the back wall--she wasn't expecting that. Nonon is able to grip the side of the door and keep calm even as the rest of the team stumbles and flops into places. The Team doesn't seem to be that wounded or anything, just disoriented--except for one dude who landed wrong and now is suffering a broken neck. One of the Rabbit Team members gathers them up carelessly, intent on dragging them back to R Corp. They gather themselves up slowly. "Train pirates...?" Myo groans, setting an arm back into place with a grimace. "Well at least we're still armed.." Myo says, collecting the fallen Team Member's gun. "Can't believe we lost a guy to brakes." She mutters in disgust. They follow after WF, covering for her while Nonon takes up the rear.
Ophrys	Okay, you guys got thirty seconds. Geel-el-aych-eff.     While investigating the external antenna hub, Ophrys' posture shifts. The spurs of her heels flex, then dug into the catwalk plating and close up against the balls of her feet, anchoring her in place while she sifts through connections.     turret_1 catches her attention. Skimming lines of code, she spikes into that connection and digitally pries it open. It would be easy to just shut it down, but the assassin has other ideas, digging into the IFF identifiers. Flags are switched. The device is left to reset with its new parameters while Ophrys backs out of the system.     The emergency brake activates. The train stops itself far faster than anyone could have expected. Held in place as she is, Ophrys at least avoids flying forward, though momentum does press her into the antenna casing and peel up part of the catwalk deck. Mroe structural strain, another ruptured myomer bundle. Frustrating. Nonessential.     She presses herself back, disengages her feet, and takes the air again with the dull hum of primary and secondary wings. It's not the engine she's interested in but the car that, in this sea of IOT nonsense, shows up like an electronics dead zone. It's this car that the assassin hovers over, drafting up a fiery red-orange circle with WizarTech around her right hand.     This time Ophrys wields a crimson-tinted laser, firing down on the roof of the armored car, dragging it in a circle to carve herself an entrance. The announcement of train pirates is so absurd she almost casts it out of mind immediately, though WF's reaction to the warning suggests some merit. The urgency prompts Making a Door rather than fussing with the locks.
Metamorph One	With the train stopped, the view out the windows is fully drowned in billowing dust. Brown particulate washes past the cars at shocking velocity, scraping the windows with the grinding noise of a belt sander without the electric whine. A little while later, it begins to settle down, and you finally have your first clear view of the badlands outside. Even a chance to step down. The tawny crags, the striated canyon stone, the wind-weathered formations.     It's all plastic. Or. Covered in plastic? Like, an inch of settled and compressed plastic particulate, giving everything a completely fake, toy-like appearance and feel. Thousands of miles of plastic desert; picture perfect wild west badlands make of microplastics so dense it'd become just regular fucking plastic. It's astounding. And baking hot-- at least until Pramanix makes it snow.. And the misty 'mountains' in the distance; now that you get a second to look at them, you're pretty sure those are city blocks. Lining the desert like the ocean along the shore.     This entire high velocity train to move from one part of a city to another through dead space where nobody will build It can't be hauling cargo. It's all passenger habitat. For all you know, it might just be to get people to work on time. The sheer scale of that blasphemous obscenity of what you're seeing takes a minute to settle in.     But the Concierge isn't wrong. You can hear the grinding squeal of another high-velocity train settling in near you, on a parallel rail that was basically impossible to see while moving that fast-- no, the train looks pretty close to the one you're currently on. It's just a second train, following close behind, and slowing more gradually; software automatically lines itself up to your target train's bridge, starting to unfold its own connector automatically. Technicians? Refuel? It's weird. It also bristles with nodes, but there are no windows. It's sealed off; heavily shielded; like an armoured van driving to the bank. Why was there no mention of a second train? No, the Concierge isn't wrong because of the roar of a beater engine and the sound of wild, whooping hollering outside. The train has barely been stopped for forty seconds.     From behind, you can see the dusty (microplastic-y?) cloud churn of rough wheels bouncing on desert rock, swerving a sharp jacknife turn back away from the train at a respectable distance, and another, that comes around from the front. Thirty-- forty shapes, at least, rush straight to the train over open ground, on foot. Fleet-footed, alarmingly fast people in mechanical suits spraypainted black and wrapped in loose shawls and tattered clothes, descending on the stopped train like locusts.     They carry only bloodstained riot shields, rail hooks, and spike drivers on their person; the luckier couple have a functioning harpoon launcher and what looks like either a flamberge or half of a stripped down chainsaw. No answers, still, to why this massive crowd of half-armed yet teched up augmented pirates is living out in the middle of a wasteland and pouncing trains.Most of them are coming right for you. A third car is splitting off to attack the other train; their problem, if there's even anyone aboard.
Persephone Kore	[xxWeezerFan69xx] "Yeah. Can't even say it.     ." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "Oh, god. Your guy with the broken neck. That looks bad. Need to let Phreak patch him up?"      WeezerFan leans on the side of the train for just a second to catch her breath, scuff the blood off her shoes, and let Phreak's nanites do their work. Her own regeneration is fast, but a lot cruder than what nanites can do.      She notices the plastic, in the process of cleaning her shoes, around the same time Friz does. [xxWeezerFan69xx] "What the hell. No way. No fucking way. This is... I get outside for once, and it's..." [xxWeezerFan69xx] "I hate it here. I hate it here! How long does it take for an inch of plastic to be on everything?! Even when I'm out of the fucking cage it's just-" [xxWeezerFan69xx] "It's nothing. God. There's nothing left. Do you get it now?"      She kicks a plastic rock in petulant anger. She could probably go on like that for a while, if the arrival of the train pirates didn't spur her into action. Rather than stand and fight, she finally breaks into a sprint towards the train's front, and the server with it.      While running, though, she tosses a stun grenade into the air, winds back with her new sword, and smacks it towards the train pirates like it's a baseball. That'll slow them down, if only by a second or two. [xxWeezerFan69xx] "We're not here to kill them. I can't even feel mad at them. They're doing their best out here. What else is anyone going to do?"
Arcadia	And now they have raiders. Pirates. How far back had they been following in their own vehicle to not be detected? In the end, not really important as far as Arcadia is concerned. This is technically not part of the mission. So they're technically not enemies. But they are becoming a complication. So Arcadia switches to something a bit less lethal, engaging the elemental turbines that are part of her wings to create wind streams and push the pirates back from interfering without, at least not intentionally, lethally harm too many of them. "Just hold them off long enough to finish OUR mission and we can leave them to have fun scrapping the rest." The dead guys aren't going to need any of it, and they're only here for whatever is on that one server.
Friz	Dirt: Plastic. Savvy: What? Dirt: Plastic. Plastic. Plastic. Movie set. Savvy: This-- this is plastic? A plastic desert? Grit: A microplastic landfill. Grit: Decontaminate lungs when we get home. Moxie: Keeping up the running! Savvy: I thought we'd... God, I thought we were going to finally touch some fucking sand. And it's plastic? *Plastic* sand? A *fake* desert?! Dirt: Unsatisfying. Savvy: Why the *fuck* does the world keep cheating me out of *dirt*?! Dirt: Car. Car. Car. Noise. Dust. Car. Grit: Use the dust for cover. Weave through its thicker areas. Moxie: On it! Savvy: Nothing left! Not a single fucking thing left! Grit: And get the jacket over our mouth. Need a dust mask. Moxie: Tying it back! Savvy: What the *fuck* does surviving even mean now?! This is-- it's all--! Grit: Stop.     Friz digs her fingernails into her palms, into her cheeks. She pulls on her own hair. The world is, briefly, in total clarity. Doomed, a desert of microplastics, acid rain, discarded products at discount prices. For a single moment, the numbness on her senses stops. Then it's Dirt: back to this. Savvy: Aaaaargh! That fucking hurt! Grit: Focus on the server. Savvy: Fuck you! Argh... Grit: Moxie, bypass this useless berry-counter. Moxie: I'm already moving again. Dirt: Pacing. A girl. Matched speeds. Hollering. Danger. Plastic.
Friz	"Hate it here. Hate it here. God. We need to get you out of here. This is no way for a person to live. I bet the Concierge has a greenhouse. There's no way someone could ever be happy with this. How is *anyone* happy with this? People just glide over this when they commute... The world can't be like this. It's not even this bad where I come from..."
Angela	"Uh--sure if they can!" Myo says in the sort of tone that suggests she really wasn't expecting it and wouldn't mind it either way. Death hangs around Myo like a necklace. "And you know, it won't cost a name. We can outsource payment to the companyy." She frowns, erasing an entire name is no mean feat but she supposes some Wings have stolen more than that before so it isn't too out there. TRAIN PIRATES? "Train pirates...!" Nonon cheers, rushing out to start punching them with Gold Rush, laughing happily. "This is amazing! First Sea Harpoonists, now Train Pirates! What else is out there??" The Rabbit Team covers her with weaponfire and somewhat try not to hit her in the back with their gunfire.
Karlan Nobles	Why is it so hot? Why is it so plasticky? Even for Pramanix, who had lived in a closed off world for so long, the plastic desert is a completely baffling sight. Courier and Matterhorn look a little less disturbed by the sight of it all, having seen a fair bit more of the outside world than their protection target, but the three of them all look towards that distant not-quite-mountain in the distance. The confusion gets worse, but... WeezerFan's and Friz's frustration over it all just makes it hit even harder. Courier and MAtterhorn exchange brief looks, first with each other, then towards Pramanix. "You know... You could always ask SilverAsh to-" "He'd never do it." "He would, if it came from you." "And then? He'd hold it over their heads, and then... No. We'll find another way." With Pramanix's own frustration building, it's almost a relief to see the second train pulling up on one side while the train pirates make their appearances as well. The three sprint on ahead to keep up with the rest of the crew heading for the server car, although the swordsmen do slow down a bit to make sure that Pramanix remains covered as that snow-summoning ritual continues all the while. Unlike before, however, the snow starts to whip into a frenzy as the wind picks up around the train. Rather than simply falling around it, the snow starts billowing right at the oncoming pirates, practically moving sideways within the first minute of Pramanix's ritual turning that  unnatural snowfall into an even more out of place blizzard. Aside from the blistering cold, the snow freezes huge and random patches of terrain between this group's train and the oncoming pirates, and the ice itself seems to sap at their armor through inexplicable magical means.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	[Phreak] Yeah. I get it. His thin lips are pulled into a scowl. It's not like he's unused to ravenous greed having adverse effects on a planet. Replace 'plastic' with atomized mortar and warship wreckage, and one could easily describe his home on Rubi-Ka--the infamous Wartorn Valley. [Phreak] Same shit, different day.     Phreak exits the car, standing for a moment on the connector before hopping off. A blue hoverboard with well-worn black tape materializes from thin air to halt his descent. Turbine blades spin up rapidly, as he assumes a feet forward stance on the board. His left heel presses an accelerator, and with both guns leveled, he rockets towards the approaching pirates.     Flying overhead, he pops a kickflip, feathering the triggers, left-right, sending terse streamers of hot lead downwards into would-be boarders, timed perfectly with the rotation of the board. It dips, and he pumps the brake and the accelerator at the same time, crashing into their midst with a 720, back leg popped up to angle the turbine and make a weapon of its whirring, reinforced blades, as well as the white-hot lance of exhaust.     His heavy SMGs, spent, crack into skulls and swat aside weapons, as he darts between bodies in a high-speed offensive. Phreak twists, gaining altitude to toss each gun into the air, one after the other, each one releasing its clip and slamming into a waiting repalcement held in his outstretched hands.