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Dysnomia     The warpgate itself was remote. Instead of connecting to one of the hubs that much of the multiverse was, it was on its own, beyond the bounds of the superearth and its moons. How the hell were they even getting there? Dysnomia wasn't interested in giving the gathering party details anything but a set of coordinates, time and an expectation they be there.

    Coordinates that ultimately led them to a warehouse, where she had solved the problem in her own way, with an artifical warpgate of her own, taking them to an odd cave systems, where the path shifted with a stomach-churning oddness--but somehow, the humming plates at their feet always feet read as 'down' as they stepped.

    "You'll want to stay on the path," Dysnomia gestured to her side. Beyond the railing, on the cave walls, were signs in black, white and yellow, depicting a humanoid stepping over the railing and floating away, arms waving. "Arms inside the rail at all times, unless you want to see what it does to a human digestive system to go from one gee to zero in a few seconds. I'm not going to clean up your puke."

    "I'm not going to say this is the most dangerous world out there," she said, "But none of you know it like I do, so listen up. If you feel like something's drawing to you, call out. If someone reacts to something you can't see, call out. If you feel like your mental defenses are being overwhelmed, call out. If your body starts to move in ways you don't want. Call. Out." The warnings felt worn-in, rote. Heard a hundred times and said a hundred more.

    "Not everything here will try to drink your psychic energy. But there are some. A bad run in can leave you missing memories, skills, parts of who you are..." She turned, giving the elites a measuring look.

    "The worst can drain you so dry your brain stem stops telling your heart to beat. So. Be careful."

    It was then that the cavern broadened, the warning signs planted in the cave walls fading, leaving gleaming marks in the wall. Each stroke looked carved, with deep indents in the rock, long and flowing. Abstract.

    Dysnomia, for her part, avoided looking at the carvings, her steps quickening, like someone passing through a graveyard. Instead, she turned her gaze ahead, where the anti-grav plates led; a shimmering barrier, distorting light like water, beyond which the texture of the stone changed completely.

    Dysnomia hesitated a moment. "We should avoid disturbing the ecosystem more than we need to. Causing too much more chaos would attract the wrong kind of attention. The whalefall will be disrupting things enough already. We need to get there before anyone else does."

    "You should see what you're dealing with."

    She led the way through. The tunnel angled upward. At the end, up a gentle slope, shone a soft light.
Dysnomia     As the elites stepped out of the dark, the world opened up around them. It was like walking across the bottom of a coral reef, except the ways it was not.

    With every footfall, little drifting strands, ending in a shining bulb, retreated into the ground, fearing their approach, their touch. Around them, colorful somethings reached toward the sky overhead, like trees. But instead of leaves, they were covered in waving polyps that glimmered in vibrant colors, waving lazily in the air.

    Long, half-transparent bodies swam overhead, propelling themselves through the air with their long bodies like oceanic rays. The whole 'forest' around them glowed with bioluscence so thick it was almost more of a fog...Perhaps even creatures too small to see, flitting through the air in radiant streams--

    --Streams that recoiled and dissolved as they walked through them, only to sheepishly reform in their wake. The stars winked in the night sky overhead, in the empty spaces between the coral's branches, everything moving with a gentle, effortless 'flow' of sub-earth gravity, giving every step an unexpected bounce, and strands of hair and clothing a unearthly 'floaty' sense.

    Lotus sees, or rather feels, more. Her psychic senses are overwhelmed with stimuli from all around her. The entire ecosystem around her bristling with psychic power far surpassing what such simple creatures would normally possess, a hundred-hundred messages between creatures around her.

    This coral sang of peril to the others, who sang to the next, hoping to draw a predator to taste the little wormlike creature that was snacking at its base. Those rays, communicating their senses as they moved, forming a broad network of psychic senses against predators. There was too much to see, too much to take in; she could spend a whole day here, just watching and still have more to see.

    For a moment, Dysnomia paused, st,aring at something past the 'tree' line. Nodded. "Good. We're not too late."

    "Here's the deal." She turned toward the party. "There's been a whalefall, but, it managed to soften its landing enough to survive reentry and impact. This is a three step operation." She held a finger with mentioned piece. "Get Rita there, let her talk with it, and get out. Simple." She closed the hand into a fist, letting it fall to her side.

     "Take five. Get used to the gravity. Ask your questions. Then we'll be off."
Redshift Operators     The Redshift Operators kind of make any out-of-the-way space their home. A crate of various weapons and planetary survival kit. Couple of unbearably cheap folding chairs. They've been working on their medic's idea of hardening their minds. Which is not super effective, given it mostly consists of meditative exercises combined with her playlist of anime OSTs.

    As they're up on their feet and heading into the gate, the leader moves ahead of the Redshifts, making quick tactical gestures. In Egregorist tactical-handsigns it means "formation around me, guard the VIP," whereas in military hand-signs it means something more like "find as many matches as you can and eat them all at once." Which tactical sign language he's using is an exercise left to the audience. "Form up. You heard the lady. Callouts, make sure you say them loud." He mutters, readying his rifle...

    And then emerges into the ocean-like space. The whole team clusters close around Rita, though the medic of the group makes a specific, dedicated effort to nudging them occasionally to make sure that Rita isn't sort of claustrophobically enclosed in a perpetual wall of human backs, like some kind of very unlucky football player, or a very warcriming president. As tactical operators, though, they know how to make sure no long sight line can ever get many seconds to put Rita at risk. But when it's time to take five, they relax... just a little bit.

    "Not done much with psychic stuff before. Got any decent ways to snap yourself out of it? Not exactly able to pinch myself, here." The leaderly gunman taps his hard armor. "Medical stims? Sounds? Probably not lucky enough to be immune like some of those weirder types are."
Father Berislav      Outside of the warehouse, there is a steadily growing hiss, followed by a weighty impact of metal. The soft whine of well-maintained servos then sounds. A few moments later, Father Berislav steps through the gate into the cave system.

     He listens, patiently, with his hands clasped before him, then nods pleasantly at Dysnomia. "Thank you, Mia," he says, with a little inclination of his head. "I appreciate the warning--and I'll cleave to it." His fanatical devotion to his cause and certain ascetic exercises have given him *some* measure of resistance to outside threats, but such things are best not gambled on.

     He does as Dysnomia does, averting his gaze from the wall and increasing his pace ever so slightly. Maintaining a brisk rate of transit across the antigrav plates with his hands gently clasped before him, the priest's simple black dress shoes click softly against the plates.

     Into the surreal likeness of an ocean floor, Berislav lets out a surprised little breath, reaching up and removing the reading glasses he'd absently left on. Hanging them by the frame upon his clerical collar. Are they jellyfish? Rays? Something entirely different from either despite their similarities to both? The lifeforms swimming up above capture his attention for a moment.

     He returns his eyes to the walkway, and finds himself brushing aside locks of his white hair as the 'ocean' gently, slowly sets them to dancing.

Get Rita there, let her talk with it, and get out. Simple.

     Berislav nods. "Simple," he agrees.

Take five. Get used to the gravity. Ask your questions. Then we'll be off.

     The priest does a little shuffle, bouncing lightly on his feet as would a fighter preparing for a juke. He does so--left, then right--before giving a final test by way of a standing roundhouse. The cassock seems not to bother him at all, through any of it, despite the face that it clearly wasn't a garment made with fighting in mind.

     "These antigrav plates look familiar," notes Berislav idly. "Like the ones on the Lindorm, in fact."
Stanley Padgett     Stanley is not much one for SPACE or Weird Not-Underwater Places In Space, but this is for Rita, and if it's for Rita, he'll be there to help.
    That said, Stanley is looking a little out of it already, on arrival. The edges of his body feel like a CRT TV's slightly out of tune. Fuzzy. Indistinct. Hopefully that won't matter too much tonight, right? Right? That said, 'get used to the gravity' is a little interesting. He takes a breath and teleports back and forth once or twice, almost a nervous fidget than anything else. Some people here he knew, some he didn't. a bunch he didn't actually. That's what he gets for being cooped up and not paying attention to the rest of... everything.

    "What's the ground and stuff actually made out of here? Is it just... like sand? Uhhhh, silica sand, like on Earth...s?" He reaches down, and almost touches one of the little spindly goobers, but notes the warning from earlier, and does not.
Rita Ma      Thoughts rattle around in Rita's brain.

     Lilian Rook says, ". . . I know you're still there. Take a minute. Get your face back on."

     "Revealing" seems like a single event to onlookers. For the person denuding themselves, unmasking themselves, it's a process. In every context where people could think you're 'normal', you have to unmask yourself again, disillusion them again. Removing a mask you've worn long enough feels like ripping off your face, and it must be done over and over, on every facet, to everyone. Amputation.

     With a drastic enough amputation it's impossible to imagine life on the other side. Not even you know the face you're unveiling. It is life, but life without an appendage, without a way of seeing, without a way of being seen; becoming a person you can't imagine feels like the annihilation of the future, the loss of the ability to empathize with the future self.

     Rita, of course, is an ordinary girl who has never worn a mask in her life. So this is all academic speculation.

     ----

     She is nervous today, with her elbows drawn in and hands balled in front of her chest and eyes darting. But the nervousness is probably about the psychic threats, or if it isn't it's about the grav-panels and heights, or if it isn't it's about the whale. That's probably it.

     When she comes out into the light of day, she gasps. For a moment the fear is forgotten. Rita darts forward into the reef, hair fluttering and flowing after her in low-G. She has swam in coral reefs before, but never walked them. "Oh! Ms. Mia!! It's just like...!"

     Rarely something leaks through of the true self, and even more rarely, it's joy.

     Rita frolics. She waves giddily to the 'fish' flying overhead, she blows at the glowing plankton and watches their currents swirl like smoke, (and when she breathes a bit in, delights in them obediently orbiting around her), she stoops down and- "Ms. Mia, this is safe, isn't it?"- tries to gently poke one of the bulb-tipped strands before it can retreat.

     Eventually her giddiness wears itself out, and she remembers the dangers, and retreats to Dysnomia's side. A guilty contentedness is left behind, wobbly but warm. The glowy current of microbiota drifts around her shoulders like a scarf, which makes her more contented, and more guilty. It's fun. It's an uncomfortable reminder of what her desperate fun is distracting from.

     "What did you mean earlier by 'the wrong kind of attention', Ms. Mia?" she finally gets around to asking. "Is this planet inhabited? Living here would be wonderful, but you said it's really dangerous too, didn't you?"

     "Probably not lucky enough to be immune like some of those weirder types are."
     Rita opens her mouth to say something, shuts it, and then looks shyly guiltier. Her eyes find the ground.
Angela Nonon and ... Wow! It's been a long time since Parker has gone out on a mission! The worst part is is that their ansi colors are super similar too! But Nonon and Parker, supervised by Gebura (of course) via a pad that Nonon is carrying, have joined this mission.

"Sounds pretty similar to dealing with an Abnormality, but alright! Ready to call out, Mia Ma'am!" Nonon snaps a salute, smiling as she always does.

Parker is still wearing that flesh mask with a big teethy smile on it. "Parker's mental defenses are absolute. That is why she wears two faces." Parker says in a manner that is sure to encourage everyone that her mental defenses are top notch. "You don't have to worry about her."

Parker is also still wielding that gun with flesh strapped to it but her armband now has a big B on it. She is the first member of the Extraction Department to ever go on a mission. This is also probably very encouraging.

"Parker looks through the Well sometimes." Parker says. "It makes Parker feel like she's sinking and burning." Parker adds.

Nonon pats Parker on the head to encourage her to quiet down a little.

"We won't aggro anything until you give the word. Always listen to the experts." Nonon beams.

Gebura crosses her arms impatiently but lets out a low whistle. She glances towards Rita and asks her, "Having fun?"
Rita Ma      Familiar faces ought to comfort Rita. They do, a little. But they also make her more nervous. More facets to amputate, ripping the badnage off all at once. She treats her friends to a scared little smile.

     Not that the unfamiliar face is any better. She slides up next to the other agent. "Ms. Nonon? Is your friend, um, okay? What's all this about a Well?"

     Gebura piping up startles her a little, but she quickly nods. Her expression gets even more pensive; at this rate she's going to become a black hole. "Mmmm! It's really gorgeous, isn't it, Ms. Gebura?"

     Oh no, wait. Mermaids and coral reefs. If I like it too much, is that suspicious to her? But if I lie and pretend I don't like it, she'll know, won't she? But if she knows I'm lying to make her comfortable, is she the kind of person who'd think that's flattering?

     Rita's brain spends a second or two soft rebooting. Then she smiles awkwardly, folds her hands behind her back, and leans down to the tablet's level. "Thank you for watching over me, Ms. Gebura. I know you're not having an easy time. I'll do my best to live up to that care."
Meika Kirenai     Old abandonded warehouses aren't an unfamiliar sort of place to trespass near, while shirking school or other responsibilities. Meika hasn't, though, snuck into any that had whole warpgates set up within them. But, ducking past chain-link fences, and through left-open doorways, she's already fumbling for her notebook when she sees other Elites having begun to congregate. You're here to help. Put your best self forwards. People are counting on this working. Self-conciously, Meika remembers she's holding a half-burnt cigarette- and tosses it into the corner of the warehouse.

    With a fortifying breath, Meika rips a page from her precious sketchbook, and clutches its crumpled entirety over her heart. The ensuing flash scatters light across the interior around Meika, if only for a moment, before Chevalier Vermillion stands upright in her place. She gives a small little two-fingered salute to the handful of Elites she's familiar with. She doesn't, however, look much in Dysnomia's direction at all. "Magical Girl Chevalier Vermillion, Paladins Representative." That last bit is less-than official, she's not here on behalf of any orders or suggestion beyond her own desire to help, nor with any outside permission, but a white lie is mostly harmless. "I'm here to help."

'Not everything here will try to drink your psychic energy.'

    "It's a *liquid*?" The spark of nervouseness that flashes across Vermillion's face is evident, only steeling once more when Dysnomia's examining gaze washes over her, as the group marches through. She nods along passively to the various warnings, the G-forces, the pyshic influences, it's really only the uncomfortable image of being a squeezed-out psychic juicebox Vermillion's mind conjures that rattles her.

'Parker's mental defenses are absolute. That is why she wears two faces.'

    "That's... that's a really creepy mask, Miss. Are you sure you're..." She mimes a little waving motion to the side of her own head, then sighs, and moves on. No, Miss Rook said not to be mean to people who are- A blink. People who are trying their best.

    Her skates click-clink against the hum of the floor plates with every step or skating slide she takes, a conflict in resonance bickering wildly, if only in sound. Vermillion's eyes trace the cavern walls as they pass, even if the cave wall's shapes and gouges are easy to feel out just with just the slightest of echoes ricocheting off them. "Is this an old mine? Or... some sort of lava tunnel? It doesn't look that much like..." A shrug, and she drops it. "It's weird down here. How'd you even find this?"

'We need to get there before anyone else does.'

    "Any*one*?" Her arms cross in front of her chest. "That's... different than any*thing*. Are other people out for this too? What would anyone want with..." Vermillion's thought trails off, as the tunnel gets washed over in the light. "Oh, wow..."

    The girl is *instantly* transfixed by the surroundings on the other side. She reaches up to try and trace eddies through the air with fingers, as bioluminescent clouds congregate and scatter. Her stomach turns with the less-than-full-G gravity, but each hesitant step's lightness makes it unsettlingly easier to handle.
Meika Kirenai     "I should have brought a camera, oh, wow.... I wish Cobalt could see this..." the pang that this is business, and not sightseeing, hits quickly and with familiarity. Vermillion winds up a few steps behind the group, having gotten just distracted enough watching the scenery, and others like Rita *playing* with the scenery, to fail at keeping pace.

'Good. We're not too late.'

    "Huh? Can you, like, see the... whale(?) already?" Vermillion tip-toes on the leading edge of her skates, trying to see up a bit taller, and look the direction Mia is. "I don't... we're not that close, are we?" A pause, and a sheepish look. Oh. There's probably another sign of some sort, isn't there? Shut up, Vermillion. They'll all think you're just a kid.
Vantablitz Remnants     'If you feel like something's drawing to you, call out'

    "Um . . ."

    'If someone reacts to something you can't see, call out.'

    "H-haha . . . Ah--"

    'If you feel like your mental defenses are being overwhelmed, call out.'

    "Wait what does that even feel--"

    'If your body starts to move in ways you don't want. Call. Out.'

    "Ummm . . . Ha . . . Well . . ."

    "Maybe leave the calling out to me, hmm?"
    "Y-yeah."

    'A bad run in can leave you missing memories, skills, parts of who you are...'

    ". . . Like, which ones--"
    "No~ Banned."

    Ahn had no idea what to wear to a Space Adventure© and so already feels awkward being the one with fully fitted MOLLE over a comfy olive turtleneck and steel-toed work boots to stuff harness banded pants into. With a flashlight strapped to a shoulder, a gas mask fixed to one hip, nylon rope coiled next to it, a first aid kit on the other side, and a completely ordinary handgun in her hands, the picture of nervous mundanity she paints is rather jarring when put next to her companions.

    Yet, seeing the way she navigates the paths with creeping care in her steps; the habitual way she sweeps the light and her aim around corners, and the compulsive urge to check both ways; even the way she carefully peers at the ceiling as she goes, the alien surroundings are what she doesn't stand out against. Not much, at least.

    Lotus oddly melds into even just a little bit of dark, despite preferentially displaying white so much. It's mostly her markings that show where she is, crossing back over each other with each step, each crouch, each curious touch, like the bobbing of water lilies and the waving of leaves.

"It doesn't matter what happens to anything else, hm?"
"Um. Isn't it technically not a whalefall if the whale is alive?"
"And your plan to leave? Surely we're not just running back the way we came."
"And like, how does it 'fall'? There's no gravity, right? So,"
Stanley Padgett     Also, Stanley startles at the sudden MAHOU CHANGE behind him, and turns to look at Mei-CHEVALIER VERMILLION. He rights himself before pitching into the not-sand and the wigglybois. "You must be Chevalier Chevalier Chevalier Vermillion." His voice is still out of tune, like badly compressed MP3. A wave to her, and a glance at the outfit. "Are we doing the uhh.... transformations tonight? I wasn't sure if I would be attracting more... attention than I wanted." He waves at the environment at 'attention'.

    The general wave turns into a specific wave in Rita's direction, but she's busy enjoying herself, and that's cute. He can hold off on bothering her until she's had her fill of joy.
Meika Kirenai 'You must be Chevalier Chevalier Chevalier Vermillion.'

    "That's one too many. Come on. It's not *that* hard to get right." Still, there's a small self-conscious reaction in her- metal-covered fingers tap silently against her opposite arm's gauntlet. "What 'we' do you mean? I don't- you do whatever you want? Or don't do whatever you don't want to do? This is work. That's all." She inhales, sharply, doing her best to stand straight in the partial gravity. Then, as a slight bit of pushback-

    "And what's going on with your voice? Are you sick? I know I'm not just hearing you wrong."
Dysnomia     When Stanley reached out his hand, the bulb retreated from Stanley's touch, as if it could sense his presence, curling into the ground.

    "I don't know a lot about soil, but I know it's real hard to get anything earthlike to grow in the soil of planets here."

    "Medical stims? Sounds? Probably not lucky enough to be immune like some of those weirder types are."

    Dysnomia bit briefly on the corner of her mouth, scanning the surroundings. "It's the general intelligence level of things out here that gives us an edge." She confessed, finally. "Most psychic predators we need to worry about here focus on isolating and drawing prey out of safety."

    "The best I can suggest is watch each other. Check in. Make sure everything we're seeing lines up properly. That's the best defense, unless you've got something specialized." She grimaced, looking away.

    "These antigrav plates look familiar," notes Berislav idly. "Like the ones on the Lindorm, in fact."

    "You noticed? Made them myself," she said, as though it were minor thing. "The actual warpgate wasn't in a place fit for humans, at first. Had to rig up something."

    "Sounds pretty similar to dealing with an Abnormality, but alright! Ready to call out, Mia Ma'am!"

    "Parker's mental defenses are absolute. That is why she wears two faces."

    "That so?" Her eyes flickered to Parker. "Thank you for volunteering, agent. Everyone! Parker will be one of your touchstones today. Rely on them."

    It was hard not to smile, seeing Rita move like this. She wondered if Rita had seen the sea floor before? She seemed to recognize it. "I don't know why it's so similar," she mused, and it was hard not to be infected by it. "Maybe life just finds itself in certain shapes. Maybe it's concidence, or something else..."

    "I wouldn't have stopped us here if it wasn't safe." She blinked, as the bulb stayed outstretched, let Rita touch it. "It is kinda pretty, isn't it..."

    "What did you mean earlier by 'the wrong kind of attention', Ms. Mia...? Is this planet inhabited?"

    "Are other people out for this too? What would anyone want with..."

    "Inhabited is a strong word." Dysnomia tapped her finger on her thigh for a moment. "Let's just say there are 'park rangers' that wouldn't appreciate finding us in their garden world."

    "I don't know the details well, but when a whale doesn't die on impact, its wake makes a mess. An ecological disaster. They'll be wanting to put the whale down, as soon as they can. But we need to talk to it first."

    "I can see it, I can feel it." She tapped at her forehead, mildly. "Like I said, its psychic wake is huge." Normally, she could barely feel anything from this distance.

    "Um. Isn't it technically not a whalefall if the whale is alive?"

    "Not an earth whalefall. And anyway, it's not supposed to be alive. That's the problem. And why not just leave the way we came? There's no hostile troop movements, just fauna, and when this is done, we'll have the support of some new friends on the way out." She nodded toward Rita.

    "They live their lives in orbit around large planetary bodies. Sometimes, they lose control and start to fall too far into the gravity well. Like when they're hurt, they get too old, or something else happens."
Dysnomia     "Now." She claped her hands together. "If everyone's twenty questions are done, we have some traveling to do. I'll be your guide."

    It was tense, moving through the coral. For a moment, Mia and a large, sharklike thing with too many eyes locked gazes, only for it to flee above. In the dense fog, it was all too easy to see things.

    Glimpses of pristine landscapes, old memories. Friendly voices. Brutal bloodshed. Plucked from the minds of the elites and held up like a slideshow, between the branching coral. A gnawing SOMETHING clawed at the edge of their focus. "Stay savvy," Dysnomia said, ostentiably to the others. "Remember what's real."
Angela Nonon glances to Rita. "Oh ah..." She glances back over to Parker and then over to Rita. "Something going on in Extraction I think. Don't know much about it myself! She's always been a little..."

Parker's skin-face smiles at Rita.

"Well, she had that 'face' on pretty much the entire time we were connected to the multiverse so... I think this is normal?"

Parker explains, "This mask is a gift from an adorable abnormality! It helps Parker get jobs done quickly and effectively without losing her mind. Parker is very sane and nobody gets to know Parker's real feelings, would you like one too?"

Parker does sound like she's doing her best at something, though what that is.. Well presumably she is doing her best at something anyway. Right now Parker is doing her very best to admire the alien landscape. Probably? They are wearing a mask.

And yet Gebura is the hardest of the three to read. "Yeah. But gorgeous things can be dangerous." Gebura says, giving Stanley a look as he says Chevalier Chevalier Chevalier Vermillion. Gebura doesn't truck with tomfoolery. Her eyes slant back to Rita.

''Thank you for watching over me, Ms. Gebura. I know you're not having an easy time. I'll do my best to live up to that care.''

Gebura's cigarette hangs loosely between her lips for a few seconds. Nonon starts sweating bullets right there on the spot.

"...Nonon. What did you tell her?" Nonon immediately starts sweating bullets and presses her lips shut.

Parker gives Dysnomia a thumbsup. "Parker will be the best touchstone." She says in a way that sounds like is aiming for encouragement but doesn't hit the mark.

The crew follows after Dysnomia, Gebura doesn't leave it at that. "I'm fine. Guessing this enviroment reminds you of home a bit? Reasonable to miss home, 'specially when most worlds are so different."
Redshift Operators     "Alright. Standard check-ins." The gunman nods, tapping the others. "Newt, run the clock." THe astronaut nearby nods to him, starting a timer on their PDA. From then on, the Redshift Operators, every few minutes, do a short series of taps on each other's arms. Look closely and you'll be able to tell that they're sort of "reciting" a kind of numerical sequence of some kind. They never mentioned it to each other though... what would that mean? Strange.

    Their motion in sub-earth gravity is significantly more graceful than it could be, but not expert. They're used to operations on earthlike planets, outer space, or space stations, which means that the middleground has a little bit of expertise but not a ton. Enough to make sure they're always gliding into place to keep guard over Rita as she frolicks joyously. And always close enough to each other to continue the mysterious sequence of wordless taps. When the giant gives a particular number of taps to the medic, one can hear her saying, "RG. Awaken. Refocus." A quick jostle gets him back to focus.

    "Not much sleep." Is all he says. Then the sequence continues. A little slower on his turn, as he makes sure to get his math right this time, counting on his fingers.
Rita Ma      Rita realizes her mistake with widening eyes. She leans in to take the bullet for Nonon, taking the bigger woman's arm in a show of solidarity. "Oh! I'm sorry, Ms. Gebura! Whatever personal business there is, it's not like that!! I just knew you were acting tense around me, and... I asked what she meant by mermaids. That's all!"

     That isn't all. But Rita has the good sense and the class levels in Little Shit to not say the rest. She underscores it by squeezing Nonon's arm and resting her cheek against her bicep: "Ms. Nonon has been a really good friend to me. Isn't she?"

     If I look cute enough she won't want to spoil the moment. I just have to keep that up until she stops being upset.

     En route, the way Rita navigates spaces is- well, it's more like a sunny flower girl than either of them, but it's less unlike Lotus's method than Ahn's. She's instinctively a little too quiet, a little too aware of sight lines, in that way that either a wild animal or a child from a 'troubled home' might be. Not an explorer of the space, but a readymade native in it. Silent, creeping, creeping--

     Something seizes Ahn from behind. Its limbs close around her waist. Its... cheek, nuzzles into her back? "Ms. Ahn!! I'm so glad you're here."

     Rita's lucky her smile is too innocent to suspect a thing. When she pulls back, she's happily swaying from side to side- strangely, these two acquaintances are pure upside, no guilt. "And Ms. Lotus! You both came! Oh, thank you so much." Then, with a bossy posture: "But no weird nicknames this time, okay?" The stream of bioluminescent plankton following her coils up and points at Lotus accusingly.

     The monster alarms Rita, but it doesn't really weigh on her. She looks at Mia admiringly for banishing it and moves right along. It's the psychic pressure that gets to her. "It's familiar, isn't it?" Rita says to no-one but herself, and she doesn't mean good familiar.

     After a minute or two, she startles upright and stares into the fog with wide eyes like she's seen a ghost. Maybe she has. "Mom? No, was that...?" Rita takes slow, almost sleepwalking steps off the path. She knows she shouldn't, and yet it looked so real- she has to make sure, doesn't she?

     Somebody should probably grab her.
Stanley Padgett     Meika first. Stanley adjusts his tie a bit, but no self deprecation tonight, not for something he's proud of. "Made sure Miss Rook and the L-Corp folks and Tamamo and everyone else made it out of Lampport alive and in mostly one piece. Used up a bit too much doing it. Tamamo says souls grow back though, so..." He wobbles his hand a bit at the end of that.
    There's a moment where he looks like he's listening to someone just over his shoulder, and then he nods. "Yeah, like Mercutio says, I'll be fine, it'll all be fine, you know? Just gonna help Rita out and the others here, and we can just... be good." He gives a wane thumbs up at Meika and then to the group at large. The smile, while proud, doesn't quite reach his eyes all the way.

    But then he's sorta melting backwards to shuffle over and look up at the Shark that regards all of the on-site team... and he waves at it. Just... waves. He is very friendly tonight. Another moment to listen to something, and he perks up. "Oh right, Miss Gebura! How's the others doing, the..." He pauses and sort of stands transfixed in mid sentence, his brain visibly firing to try and remember... names? Faces? His shoulder shifts as if someone has shoved it to get his attention. "Mikey, Baba, are they uh.... okay?"

    Oh, look, Rita's having some more fun with the big lady, that's nice. Awesome. Good for her. Stanley mentally files that away for reference, and immediately forgets why he's filing it away.
Father Berislav Not done much with psychic stuff before. Got any decent ways to snap yourself out of it?

    "For someone unaccustomed to it, there aren't many. If you feel yourself slipping away, then think about something very important to you. Home, a cause, a belief system." He frowns. "That isn't guaranteed to work, but it's a bit like treading water." After a pause, he elaborates: "Anything is better than 'sitting idly by' or 'swimming deeper'."

    The sight of Rita enjoying herself is enough to erode the frown on the priest's face, and render it into a warm smile. He gently reaches forward with his right hand, into the cassock, and procures a small, leatherbound book. Evidently satisfied with his understanding of the local gravity, he spends the rest of the little warm-up period reading scripture.

You noticed? Made them myself.

    "Really?" he asks, looking up from his reading, and pushing his re-donned glasses up. "Then I suppose the signs and the rails were your doing, too. Very thorough work."

Let's just say there are 'park rangers' that wouldn't appreciate finding us in their garden world.

    "I see," nods the priest, closing the book stowing it back in the inner pocket of his cassock. "Thank you for letting me know--with any luck, we can avoid the issue entirely."

    During the trip, Berislav helps by confirming or denying along with Parker, keeping himself on target with internalized rigor. He does, however, make a call-out to Dysnomia.

    "Something's attempting to lure me," says the priest, with collected calm, remaining perfectly in place. He closes his eyes, his brow furrowed with concentration. "In that direction," he says, pointing with an index finger. "Whatever it is, it's pretending to be..." Someone who died, years ago. By his hand. "It isn't doing a convincing job. Your way is quieter than mine. Do you mind?"

Mom? No, was that...?

    "Rita?" He opens his eyes. "Oh--no, Rita." Amidst a field of trees (many of them cut down), as lumber equipment whines in the background, Berislav darts forward. Lunging slightly to do it, he gently takes her by the hand. "Rita, hold on a moment. That's--something is playing a trick on you. That isn't your mother."

    "Right now," he explains, "Something is making me think that I'm... that I'm here to do something I already did, a long time ago. But I'm not--and that isn't your mother. Stay on the path with me, okay?"
Vantablitz Remnants     "You . . . made them?" Ahn's flashlight swings over to illuminate Dysnomia's face as an inevitable artiface of suddenly twisting to look at her. "Wow. That's . . . really cool actually. Can I ask how? Do you have schematics anywhere? Ah, maybe I'll just get a look at them in a minute . . ."

    "The better question might be 'why'." Lotus purrs. "Do you have them lying around, I wonder? How much do you come to this place? Where even is it? Really?"

    Ahn's eyes widen, eyebrows raised, and Lotus tilts her head, clicking softly, when they both hear the words 'garden world' in unison. "What does . . ." Ahn begins to say, nervously fiddling with the lone flower in her hair. "Aha? Are we engaging in illicit activities~? How exciting~" "Everything about you is illicit." "Flatterer."

    'And why not just leave the way we came?'

    "Um. Because won't there be a giant whale following us?" Ahn glances nervousy back and forth, ponytail bouncing onto her shoulder. She looks like she's suddenly afraid she missed homework.

    'Ms. Ahn!! I'm so glad you're here.'

    "WAAH!!"

    Ahn practically jumps out of her skin. Talking to human beings had lowered her guard, and now she spins around and jumps away a little too late; Rita is gracefully twirled off her feet with her, and still stuck to her back when Ahn is frantically staring at empty space for a moment.

    "R-Rita! Hi! I'm really glad you're alright! It seems like I was basically right, huh?" She puff up her chest a little, then makes sure to properly ruffle Rita's head. The ballistic gloves are so soft that she definitely absentmindedly threw them in the laundry. That can't actually be good for them. "Sorry for not coming over right away. I was just . . ." "Spaced out." "Really focused!" "Thinking about old times." "Before you, goofball." "Only in one sense."

    Lotus pantomimes stifling a laugh when Rita points at her, preemptively indignant. Only the slimming and tilting of glow-rays from behind that carved-seeming 'mask' indicate what her fingers are supposed to be doing at her face. She leans forward, hands on her knees, and lifts just one to prod at the very tip of the plankton. It vanishes with a nearly inaudible little crack. "You're not so little anymore, are you? Would you like Princess Rita~?" Yeah. On her bullshit. "No, I couldn't keep that up. No nicknames for now. How nice for you~"

    But for all that . . .

    It's Lotus who has her turn to halt Rita. A thin wire from the seam in her wrist, strung like a near-vantablack line to Rita's back, stuck on when she'd started sleepwalking away from the path, and tightened with the twist of a wrist and the squeeze of mockup musculature. "Calling out." she drones, a little less humanly than usual. "Yeah. Sorry Rita. You don't want everyone to know what you're seeing like that, do you?" Ahn says, uneasily, looking over and then away. The tone is implicative.

    Her eyes are solidly downcast at the floor. Her jaw is set tense, lips squeezed together. The way she won't look up isn't especially canny. It's fearful.

    "Haven't you figured it out by now, Rita? Can't you feel that? The tender brush of nematocsyst in the immaterium. The pins and needles of the shadow above trailing its long gown over the dark nooks of your psyche. That prickling hum, thrumming on the surface of your brain, rocking your nerves in the tidal current. You should be able to hear 'them'. If you don't know better by now, then I might be worried for you."
Meika Kirenai 'The actual warpgate wasn't in a place fit for humans, at first.'

    "So how did you... Ah. Um. Never mind that, actually." Where Vermillion's hand grasps around her opposite gauntlet, metal that ought to creak and groan as she squeezes it doesn't, a light hand-shaped imprint left in the steely armor plating when she eventually lets go.

'Parker will be one of your touchstones today. Rely on them.'

    "Are... you really sure about that, Miss? She's..." The magical girl huffs. "Well. S-safety in numbers, right? I guess worrying too much won't help."

'Tamamo says souls grow back though, so...'

    "Souls don't. Why would that be linked to..." Vermillion cuts off, and shakes her head. "I'm not kidding though, about the name, Mister. Say it right, or don't say anything at all." Matching her tone, Stanley recieves a sharp, piercing glare from unsettlingly red eyes.

'Like I said, its psychic wake is huge.'

    "Does its wake do anything to people? Or is it... everything else, that it pokes at?" Chevalier Vermillion is not a 'psychic'. She's just really quite good at eavesdropping. She knows it's bad to. She knows she shouldn't. Worst, she knows now is the time to be careful, to not lose focus. But watching all the dancing shapes and swirls, the beautiful ecology, the playfulness it evokes even in the shadow of all the fog-lurking threats she's not certain are even there, it's just a bit too easy to let her practiced restraint slip, and listen in just a little too deep on the thoughts swirling all around. Whales are supposed to sing, aren't they?

'If everyone's twenty questions are done, we have some traveling to do.'

    "Wait, but that's not how you play twenty questions, is it? I thought you had to pick something, and try to let people..." Fidgeting, movements looser than she means to, she actually covers her own mouth for a moment to stop talking. "Ignore me. Aha." In lighter G-forces, Vermillion's skates dig softer into the ground, still mostly frictionless, as the group presses on. Her hand taps once more at the indentations absentmindedly left in her gauntlet, and her eyes scan to and fro around the fog. Don't pay too much attention to vision. Feel it out. There's enough sound to echo. If there's something, you'd feel it for real before you see it, anyways. Her mental reassurances to herself don't still her nerves well. Especially when the foggy shapes do, in fact, correlate to life-
Meika Kirenai     She flinches, when the shark-ish creature approaches, a flutter in her chest kicking her into near-action- until just as suddenly, the animal gets scared away. "W-what was that..?" She asks, on instinct- not unlike a response to hearing rustling outside a tent, or the porchlights come on in the middle of the night. She watches it run off, disapearing into a haze of crumbling storefronts, the likes of which make her fluttering heart jump to where the ever-present knot in her throat ought to sit. Why didn't Drop call out the network's warnings? Is it an attack, is- There's no distinction, as she looks out into the fog, from memories called up by the psychic presence of this world, and memories called up unbidden and guilty on aching familiarity. That fight... it's...- Faces and names. The pressure to do something, to help with what doesn't look like it's a months and months-past emergency, would be unbearable if she couldn't also recall the desperation in which she'd scrawled those same faces, those same names, into the notebook that serves as their cemetery.

    Vermillion's eyes shut tight, trembling with each skate-sliding step she takes. "Could- could someone hold my hand? I don't think I can look, any more." It's a timid, near-childlike plea- or, at least, that's how it feels to Vermillion, saying it- but the words slip out anyways. She half expects it to go unheard, anyways- Nobody else would have heard back then, isn't it a luxury to even get to ask? That fight's weight should be heavy. Carry it yourself, coward. How many times did you say 'it won't happen like this again'? The lists keep getting longer.

    The girl f-f-flickers where she stands, eyes shut, hand slightly out to the side. When the momentary, easily-missable distortion ends, the armor plate of her gauntlet is once-more undented.
Angela Gebura, distracted, assures Stanley. "They're alive. Mental Corruption was high but it's lowering gradually."

Nonon brightens at Rita. "Aw Rita, you don't gotta jump in, I'm s'pposed to be lookin' after you!" Not because it's a strict order exactly, you know beyond her being the best hope for her homeworld. It's just Nonon is a big muscular lady and Rita is a small girl who, yes, could almost certainly destroy Nonon but that's not really the point as far as Nonon is concerned.

But Gebura does relent, "Ah, yes, that would draw your attention."

''Ms. Nonon has been a really good friend to me. Isn't she?''

Nonon beams a big glowing smile, ruthlessly teaming up with Rita against her own Sephirah. Gebura blows smoke out between her teeth. She can't read Rita's mind at all, naturally, but--

Gebura thinks of her conversation with Lilian. Lilian's argument was flawless, she should be able to be smart about this, but what is stopping her? She hates that her hard-won discipline cracks around her.

"Don't worry about me. Have fun if you want to have fun." Gebura says eventually. She doesn't want to ruin any particular moment right now either but she might be elementally a moment ruiner.

At least until Rita starts heading off the path. Gebura says, "Oi..." That's too vague to stop Rita. "Oi! Rita! Snap out of it!"

But Nonon isn't likely to outspeed Lotus to the punch there, reaching out with a hand a moment late.

''Could- could someone hold my hand? I don't think I can look, any more.''

Parker reaches out to hold Meika's hand.
Stanley Padgett     Gebura assures Stanley that things are Just Fine, and the young man smiles. "Good, you Agents are all good folks who deserve good things and you look out for each other and that's really keen..." The information breaks through the mental fog for a moment or two, before he sort of drifts again.

    At the edges of his vision, Stanley's starting to see... snippets. Flashes.

    Christmases gone by. Tis the season, after all. Ho ho ho. Each year, a different house. A different tree. A different mess.
    The year he got just ties, while his foster brothers got new Gamestations.
    The year he was forced to be a Wise Man, and yelled at by his Aunt for hours for daring to talk to the girl playing Mary.
    A gift or two out of The Pile at Toys for Tots, which he then had to hand over when his cousin wanted it instead.

    Stanley starts to just... lag behind the crowd, staring off into the middle distance, and just... Doesn't want to walk towards that stuff. None of that is fun. But there's more images ahead of the group, ahead of Rita having fun, of Father Berislav talking with... Parker. Parker and Meika. Mia. The Agents.

    "They all had great Christmases, I'll bet." He glances to the left, several meters behind the group now. "No I'm not going to ask them, I barely know any of them, that's rude."
Rita Ma      "Nnn- ahhh?" Rita looks back over her shoulder at Gebura, hazily disoriented. "But, Ms. Gebura, it's...?"

     Nonon, Berislav, and Lotus all lay hands on her (literally or metaphorically). For a second she looks confused and almost resentful. "No- wait, why are you- it might be her?" Then she blinks and reorients herself, like waking from a dream.

     Suddenly she looks terribly embarrassed. "Oh. It was-- of course it was." Her hands raise up to cover her lower face with half-fists; her eyes slide off to the side. She slips back into the center of the traveling group, shoulders narrow and high.

     "Thank you, Ms. Lotus," she says, in a sheepishly miserable that really means I'm sorry. "Ms. Gebura. Mr. Berislav. I should've known better, but..."

     "It looked so much like the last time. I thought it was real again."

     She recoups a little of her spent mental energy by finding someone in need of care. Rita slides in next to Ahn on one side, and takes her arm with a squeeze- downcast eyes from that height are perfect for catching Rita's bravely sunny smile. And on the other, she takes Meika's un-Parkered wrist, squeezing it too: they're not quite familiar enough to press side-to-side like her and Ahn, but any grounding is good.

     "There," she says firmly. "It's not as bad like this, is it?"
Rita Ma      Something cold and boneless wraps around Stanley's wrist when he lags behind, invisible except for how its coiling grip indents fabric and skin. It feels uncomfortably half-like a tongue. This is definitely how he gets his brain sucked out by a psychic monster, isn't it?

     It gently-but-firmly tugs him forward to rejoin the party. Rita doesn't say anything, but happens to glance back over her shoulder just then, neutrally bright.

     Sometimes the psychic brain-sucking monsters are friends, too.
Stanley Padgett     The Not A Tentacle snags Stanley.

    He startles and the touch suddenly snaps right through him, like an ice bath down his spine. "IF YOU'RE MOVING IN A WAY YOU DON'T WANT-" He's stammering and shivering until he spots Rita's look.

    And what he's feeling on his wrist.

    He's seen Rita. He knows what he's not supposed to have seen. His cry stifles itself, before he can even finish the statement, his cheeks instantly turning bright red.
Dysnomia     Meika picks up...something unpleasant. Something that hurts. She hears a wail, in a sound that has no sound, a deep, thrumming echo of something that feels like it should vibrate her apart.

    There were no words to its thoughts, no clear picture she could glean from it. but as the sound of it faded, Meika was left with the haunting impression that this song was... terrified.

    "Rita?" Dysnomia turned around, saw her walking behind them and--froze, wracked by indecision. Unsure, suddenly, if she really was seeing her friend in peril, or...

    She forces her breathing to steady, as the rest of the group pulls them together. She takes a moment to rest her head into her hand, regathering her thoughts. Then breathes out, hard. "Everyone together?" She called out to them, counting them. "Good. We're most of the way there. Hang on a little longer."

    As they progressed, the visions....Faded? Yes. The activity in the world around them began to fade, sounds of strange alien life disipating slowly, then quickly. Eventually, there was nothing else there.

    "Stars," Mia's voice was a low murmur. She adjusted her breathing, not looking away from something straight ahead. Their destination, presumably.

    The further they walked, the more dead it became.

    ...No. Not dead. Though the colors and light faded, leaving the coral like bare witches' fingers pointing accusingly at the night sky, the polyps were all still there. Pulled back, in anticipation. A shimmer in the cracks betrayed where little, long organisms had coiled, leaving just an eye watching the elites as they passed by.

    The bustle and flare of life and light, cut short. Bracing for...Something.

    Advancing, they learned what.

    It's like being buried alive.
Dysnomia     'Attack' is too sophisticated a word to describe what rolls over them. Too malicious. It isn't hateful. It doesn't want anything. The rush of feelings, of sensation, is like being a small animal caught in the rising tide, struggling not to be pulled into the sea. In the dying screams of this creature from the stars.

    It was so easy to lose track of what you were supposed to be, when those little specks of will were so small, and it hurts so much. That terrible, irrepressible weight was too heavy to not be real. Your marrow shattering, your bones grinding to dust.

    It's real. You're going to die.

    When Mia's conciosuness floated back to the surface, she was clinging to a piece of coral, halfway fallen to the ground. "G-guard up, soldiers." She hiss-barked, words numbly tumbling out. "These are her death throes!"

    She pushed back against the whale's psychic presence, but even dying, it was overwhelming. Hands clutched at her arm until smoky odd-colored blood dripped to the ground, making pain a handhold to grapple hold of identity. "It can't be far!"
Angela Why did Gebura speak up?

...It doesn't matter, plenty of people are looking out for her. She won't let her die on her watch, at the least, just by assuming someone else will do their job properly or handle an unexpected scenario.

Her Mom, Gebura thinks.

She really is just a kid. Nothing There wouldn't even remember their mother.

An exceptionally strong kid.

Gebura says, "We were warned about this." Gebura says. "I know its partly psychic compulsion but if it could just control you it wouldn't be showing you images that affect you like this. Buddy system up if you have to."

Parker doesn't seem particularly affected. Maybe she doesn't have anybody to walk after, or she's already so broken that the compulsion can't find a grip. Nonon periodically stares off into the distance, but whatever she sees she doesn't speak on. The EGO Gear is providing some resilience for the two of them and Gebura isn't actually present, but of the Lobotomy Corp team members present, it's Nonon who seems to be suffering the effects the most.

''you Agents are all good folks who deserve good things and you look out for each other and that's really keen...''

"Daww, Stan. You're the same way with Char aren'tcha?" Nonon manages a smile. "Just look after your crew and everything'll turn out alright for you, bud."

It's the sort of lie you tell kids, but it's a well meaning one.

She hears an ominous thrumming echo, a song? Nonon gets her harpoon ready and says, "Just a precaution, Rita, eh?" with a wink. "If the worse we have to face is ourselves, then we'll get through this easy peezy lemon squeezy."

The pulses get stronger, speak to something more primordial. The King of Greed thrums more loudly in Nonon's head as her identity struggles to find itself in the cracks.

"The Well," Parker tells Rita. "This is a littler Well, but still quite big. Don't lose track of your faces, okay okay? Otherwise you'll end up with extra faces, faces you didn't even know you had, faces that were never yours, eheh..."

''G-guard up, soldiers. These are her death throes!''

Gebura frowns. Their guide seems to be struggling too and Nonon is stumbling. Parker ... hard to read. "Mia, don't forget. We aren't soldiers and neither are you."
Stanley Padgett     Stanley has to force himself to stop blushing as Rita pulls him closer, but he is not going to stop her from holding onto him. There's something.... oddly comforting about the contact, despite it being what it is. Gebura makes her call for a buddy system, and Padgett coughs. "...yeah, buddy system that sounds pretty good right now actually. And invisible friends aren't buddies." He looks pointedly at a space over Nonon's shoulder.

    And then The Cry stifles the whole area, and for the second time in a week, Stanley Padgett's brain and self are being suffocated and smothered. The Fool grabs for Nonon's shoulder for a point of contact, before he sucks in a breath. "Everyone comes home, that's the goal, right? Everyone safe."
    His transformation isn't as glamourous as Meika's but in the space of a breath, Stanley is covered head to toe in neon and smoke, his fencing tabard sliding into place, a wash of digital static marking its appearance. The edges of the fabric and the suit are frayed, like digital textures which haven't loaded correctly, but now he's properly armed, a sabre and a matchlock in his grip.
    "The mission is help Rita, and we all go home safe. And in one piece, and with our memories. Home safe, no juicing our psyches. It's not a juice." Repetition now, a mantra. Say it out loud, manifest it in your mind, guard yourself from The Dangers.
Vantablitz Remnants     'Souls don't. Why would that be linked to...'

    "If it were really his soul, it wouldn't even be possible to shave parts off, right?" Ahn says to Meika. She hasn't paid particular special attention to her, but the way she speaks to her is perfectly warm. "You can . . . I think taint them? And cleanse them. You can make them heavy and light. But you can't burn them up, right? Or else they wouldn't be eternal."

"I thought that 'no-self' stuff said souls don't exist?"
"That's not real."
"Mm?"
"He never said that. People made it up for philosophical debates. To impress kings and stuff. For money."
"I think I might have heard this before."
"It came up like, three years ago?"

    'Thank you, Ms. Lotus,'

    "Is that the kind of 'thank you' humans say to mean that they're happy?" says Lotus. "It must be, seeing as I'm only following instructions." She tilts her head again, in that way that doesn't look quite natural again; a little too deep and horizontal, more alien inquisitiveness than prompt to continue. "The last time you saw your mother? Well, obviously. It's an illusion. It has to be realistic."

    <<'. . . --you're hearing thi-- . . . --shelter CAMELIA is-- . . . --yone looking for-- . . . --est bet is the mount-- . . . --f you're in the city, god help you-- . . . --ill repeat every thirty minutes until the power finally-- . . .'

    Ahn stares at the beat up radio through long minutes of quiet static fuzz. Her eyes blankly drift from the empty barrel beneath it, and to the dead man lying slumped against it on the concrete floor. The red stains soaked into his facemask tell her that he did it himself. A small token of defiance, and a little mercy to those who'd come after. The lights flicker for an instant. She blinks the stinging dryness from her eyes, and makes herself ignore it in the back of her throat.

    ". . . have to move before it's spring." she murmurs to herself. A dread mantra that puts one dusty boot in front of the other. Enough to spur her into tugging the zipper on her scuffed and stained coat, crouch down by the body, and gently-- so as to make no noise-- lay the blood-caked length of metal pipe on the ground. There are no other bodies, so he might still have ammo. Water too, maybe. She'd run out of both yesterday. None of the units in the building still have it running. Corpse pockets are nothing new.

    "It'll be worse in the spring. Much, much worse." she whispers under her breath. "While the day is still short." She pockets a string of glowsticks, and a new carabiner clip. Just two magazines. Better than nothing. Might as well replace her busted up survival knife too. Shaking the canteen on his hip, she tries to remember how to frown at the high-pitched splash it makes. A pensive lick of her cracked lips, then, reluctantly, she adds it to her pack.

    The lights flicker again. Worn rebar creaks beneath her, echoing from somewhere in the stairwell. Ahn freezes. "That smell is . . . orchid? That's-- Shit! Shit shit shit! Nowhere to go but street level--!" She bolts up to her feet, grabbing her-->>

    Lotus' hand falls on Ahn's shoulder. She deflates, rather than jumps, letting out a breath she'd held for the last minute without thinking. "Yeah. I feel it. I'm not gonna die. Not yet anyways." she says. "That's good." says Lotus. "It isn't either. Not until Rita is done with it."

    <<I smell your blood in the water. 'Everyone else' can. No matter how much you bellow, you can't keep them away forever. Go silent, if you want to live. I have more use for your soul than your meat and bone.>>
Father Berislav      "You're quite welcome, Rita... and I'll thank you not to blame yourself by saying you should have known better. These are things that have specialized to make sure their prey can't 'know better.' Unlike their prey, we all have each other, and a common purpose. Now,--"

    He looks over his shoulder and lets go of Rita, just in time to see something invisibly push Stanley towards the group. "Ah, it looks like someone else got Stanley. Good." The 'sun' disappears behind the 'treeline' of a forest that only Berislav can see, as he turns and faces Rita again.

    The sounds of industry haven't dulled for the fact that it's nighttime. Berislav feels something tugging him towards those sounds. Past the stomping of patrol mechs, past the foreman's office and into the barracks where the mercenary outfit sleeps.

    He doesn't budge an inch off the path, or at all, but for a twitch in his right trigger finger. The animal hadn't compelled that--but its illusion had provoked it, nonetheless.

IF YOU'RE MOVING IN A WAY YOU DON'T WANT--

    The space before Berislav's palm is bright, burning orange, as his hand dips through space and retreats with a heavy, large-framed revolver. The hammer is pulled back effortlessly, and the pistol is pointed at... nothing, the priest briefly frozen in a stance seemingly half sharpshooter, half martial artist, coiled like a spring. His silver brows knit briefly together, and he sighs, gently resetting the hammer, dropping his stance and averting the muzzle.

Everyone together? Good. We're most of the way there.

    Berislav turns, stows the revolver in that torn space from before, and falls back in line with the group. Gradually, the trees fade away. Eventually, so does the cry of a logger subjected to the mill's 'disciplinary action plan,' and the buzz of the electric lights around the mercenary barracks.

    Back in the place that he knows himself to be, he comes to the whale.

It hurts so much.
I appeal to you, therefore, brothers--
That terrible, irrepressible weight was too heavy to not be real.
by the mercies of God,
Your marrow shattering, your bones grinding to dust.
to present your bodies as a living sacrifice. Do not be conformed to this world,--
It's real. You're going to die.
--but be transformed by the renewal of your mind--

    Though the priest wears his usual placid smile, his footfalls are heavy, laborious despite their grace. 'Walking' here is filtered through layers of abstraction; an effortful act, when his mind must be so focused on defending itself. His hands clasp each other tightly, silver eyes locked dead ahead.

It can't be far!
that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

    If there is one thing that Berislav can say about himself, it's that he knows, intimately, who he is, and what he wants. Even smothered, striding into a storm, 'Waters Berislav' is not tarnished or stifled.

    Don't lose track of your faces, okay okay? Otherwise you'll end up with extra faces, faces you didn't even know you had, faces that were never yours, eheh...

     Maybe the sound of a human voice will help the others. "God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability," intones the priest, his eyes scanning the surroundings for either signs of the whale or anything attracted by the death throes. "...but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it."

     It feels like trying to walk through a heavy wind, without there actually being any. But he keeps pushing himself, doggedly determined to keep pace with Mia; to keep an eye on the surroundings, and to provide what comfort he can. "Keep pushing, everyone! Find something important to you and hold onto it."
Rita Ma      "Just a precaution, Ms. Nonon!" Rita echoes cheerily. "Thanks for making me feel safe, too." But something's nagging at her, under her sunniness.

     Where does she know that feeling from, that nagging psychic aura? It probably doesn't matter. If it's familiar- well, the mind is susceptible to tricks. She knows that.

     "Are souls supposed to be eternal, Ms. Ahn?" she interjects, leaning around to peep up at her face again. "I was pretty sure they could just go away sometimes. Why would they be?" Lotus prompts a retreat instead of an advance. She shyly pulls back behind Ahn again: "Well, it's complicated. I guess I thought I'd be able to tell the difference. But that 'prickling' you said- that was there last time, too."

     Stanley blushes, and Rita stifles an anxious little laugh behind her hand. It still feels miserable to do- it's a test run, she tells herself- but helping a friend almost, almost makes it worth it. The slick, clammy flesh trails off his skin as it releases.

     The laugh dies in her throat with a sharp, hoarse gasp. She seizes up. One hand digs into Ahn's arm. The other squeezes Meika's wrist hard enough to bruise.

     Oh.

     Rita's inside an alien egg. She feels like she's burning alive. Hostile veins are worming their way into her, connecting her to too-cold blood. It's getting so hard to hold her breath, but the last glimmers of her mind know that if she passes out now, there's no waking up. Not as Rita, anymore. But the bubbles pass her lips. And through the tightening black, they're the last thing Rita Ma ever sees.

     That's where she knows it from. That's what dying feels like.

     Rita comes to a moment later, and wobbles up from where she'd crumpled on the ground. Her knees are shaky. Her breaths are quick and shallow. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm- I just--" She glances from Meika to Ahn, and back to Meika again, to see if they're badly hurt. Her hands wring in desperate anxiousness. Whatever the best headspace for fighting psychic attack is, she's not in it.

     But the only way out is through. She takes an unsteady, timid step forward. I have to rip the bandage off, she's been telling herself all day about so many things. Now or never. I've already hesitated too much. And it reaches a head. So then- with one more guilty glance back- she breaks into a dead sprint towards the source.
Meika Kirenai     Stop. It's a mistake. Stop screaming, I- She pulls back from listening in on the whalesong, instinctively, as just like always, the dive into prying and eavesdropping bit back harder and harder than she anticipates. Her breath picks up pace, and she wants so badly to cover her ears and face only silence, as the remnant of that horrifying prelude sits echoing in her mind. Instead, teeth just clench until it hurts, eyes squint shut, and-

'If it were really his soul, it wouldn't even be possible to shave parts off, right?'

    "Huh..? I-" She blinks, refocusing on the words. "I... think so, yeah, Miss. Immutable, that's a word I think they use a lot about it, I think? Or... If they keep growing back, I guess they'd be eternal too, but... that's selfish, to think possible. It's silly."

    "I hope parts can't burn away, at least." She mutters, quieter.

    After the pschic assault starts, when Parker's hand takes Chevalier Vermillion's, and when Rita's grabs around her wrist, the reaction from her doesn't add up, not quite, with the words of her own request. The panic subsides nearly instantly, but she's certainly not grounded. She can feel the summer's humid sunlight on her face, hear wind high in the trees, smell the lingering ozone exhaust in the small winding street she's walking down. She cracks an eye, and it's-

    That's the old ice cream parlor by our old elementary school. Is it even still- "Hey, Kyou, Kayoko, I've got a bit of pocket money, and it's hot out, why don't I get you both-" Parker and Rita can both feel her tug at their grips, toward some unseen location, imagining she's headed there with both of her younger sisters- before she stops at any resistance. The warm smile on her face, held for just a moment, quickly fades away. Kyou isn't that tall. And when's the last time either of them wanted me to hold their hands as we walked? That can't be right. It's been years. And- no, I'm sure the store closed down, back at the end of Junior High. It's winter, and-

    Why can't I even remember the last time it was the three of us like that? Vermillion's hands, flinching with an unsettling, resonant buzz, slip right through Parker's grip, and-- as her grip turns vice-tight around her wrist, armor creaking, skin bruising, drying scabs cracking-- her wrist out of Rita's, as if the two of them were trying to hold onto a car speaker's bone-rattling bass. She shakes her hands off for a second, and tucks them close in at her sides. "S-sorry. I'm good now. I'm good."

    Rita's tentacle-leashing of Stanley, unseen even if Vermillion hadn't been facing the opposite direction, still sends faint ripples in the echoes and sounds surrounding the group, immediately tangible to the magical girl. Her eyes finally fully snap open, and she looks over her shoulder to see- Nothing? She stays still for a moment, and then looks back ahead, bringing nothing up about it.
Meika Kirenai     Vermillion stays fairly quiet, as the hallucinatory psychic assault subsides. But she stays silent, as the waves of suffocating weight start to flow in. Her hand grips her bruised wrist, squeezing it tighter herself, shooting flares of pain up her arm, if only to feel there's strength left in her fingers. Guard up? What's there even to do? You can't just guard against dying. It'll happen some day, no matter what. Maybe it's right, to make us hurt. I think that's fair. Or even if it isn't, I get it. Why not? Why wouldn't you want to? Her breaths are ragged, and footsteps slow, even under the faded, low-G pull, her skates dig ringing gouges into the ground along her path, chipped and carved more violently away than her graceful, frictionless movement ought imply.

    "I hope it's dying slow. I hope it hurts for it to stay like this." The magical girls mutters, un-magical girl-ily. She didn't notice when Rita fell, but does turn to watch her bolt off, with an instant, guilty hope that it's out of the same welling spite the pulsing pressure of the whale's wake is drawing up in herself, and why her own lethargic movements are movements, and not cessations.
Dysnomia     "Rita--wait, you don't know the...shit!" Dysnomia forced herself after her body half-dissolving as she slipped through the terrain, to reach Rita...But she was always a little ahead. Pushed to her limit even, Mia could barely even keep pace...

    "You don't know the..." She trailed off, eyes going wide as she realized Rita was speeding straight into the whale's song.

    Rita was the first over, Mia, not far behind.

    ...Calamity.

    There was no other word for it.

    A clear path had been cleaved through the land behind it, coral smashed down under incredible weight and scattered, the very landscape reshaped. At the end of it, a craterlike hole, filled with pooling liquid that hissed and curled up in the air around it and in the middle, a vast islan--

    ...No.

    It was too BIG to be an organism, yet here it was. Its skin was covered in layers of rock and dust, accumilated over eons. Fissures had opened in its skin, from which its...It's blood poured in a fountain, like streams bursting their banks, spilling out where its skin had fractured painfully open. They could only see PART of it, but it rose above them, a dying leviathan, its shape obscured by the sheer unimaginable bulk of it.

     Three massive eyes (like meeting the gaze of a mountain) on one side, big enough to dive in for a swim, stared down at the little creatures before you. Each of them knows that, if they had been human eyes, they would be filled with tears. Instead, they spilled steaming orange, not in grief, but from the sheer strain of gravity on a body never designed to take it.

    She was trapped here, in the midst of a painful, inevitable death.

    Everything you felt was just her screams.
Dysnomia     But, your children won't give up on you. Creatures rise over the bulk of the whale, where they had been nestled, struggling to sing comforting songs over the pain.

    "This many kids lived?!" Dysnomia's eyes were wide. "Shit!"

    Smaller by far, and apparently able to stand the weight of gravity here, the elites got a good look at the juveniles. Three eyes on each side, all burning with the same color every other eye from this planet seemed to, its outline was vaguely whalelike, but the rest...

    They had no mouth at all, only with a wedge-shamped head at the front, with tentacles falling out from their sides, sizes varying, but none smaller than a car. They reared their tentacles up, attempting to defending their mother from a possible assailant.

    "Protect Rita!" Dysnomia panted, wild-eyed.

    The earth below their feet cracked, as bits of earth began to float into the sky forming clumps of rock and shattered coral that the children threw back down with terrible toward Rita, to tear up the very earth underneath her feet as she sprinted wildly toward it with that inhuman speed. Swirling stardust spiraled out from Mia, smashing aside stone after stone. But there were far too many for her to stop them all...
Angela Nonon ignores the rallying cries of her crew. She knows damn well that they're all dead and Shajo's the last person from her old life still alive. But that's all she needs. That particular nerve is still raw, though, from the last time Nonon helped Rita with an adventure. The only clue that Parker is feeling anything at all is the easily missed water drops dripping out from underneath her mask. Parker says, "See? It isn't so bad!" In the same perky tone as usual. "Just put on the right face and we'll be done before you know it o/~"

Gebura doesn't say anything until Rita runs ahead. "Nonon."

Nonon chases after Rita while Parker lingers near Meika whether she wants her to or not. Parker's masked face looks at Meika's pocketed hands but she doesn't say anything.

They move.

Nonon seems unsurprised by what she sees. This is the sort of shit she expected when Dysnomia said 'whale'. Perhaps one day she'll see a normal whale but for now, whales like this are a normal whale for Nonon.

"S'already dead. If we waited a bit it'd have passed on on its own."

It's the little creatures, the children that give Nonon pause.

Maybe whales are just....

Nonon braces her harpoon forward, grimacing. "Mermaids...? Baby whales...?"

''Protect Rita!''

"Aye aye."

Without any hesitation, Parker just starts shooting at children with her pistol. It's not a very powerful weapon, though Parker resonates strongly with this EGO. Nonon's is an experienced whaler, and she mercilessly goes in with her harpoon, using Gold Rush to eradicate rocks thrown Rita's way. Nonon gets clubbed by a few upside the head, leaving a red smear across her forehead, but she says, "Do what you gotta do, Rita!" with a shout.
Stanley Padgett     The whale. The whale. The whale.

    Stanley Padgett, why are you crying? You've never met anything like this before, you have never encountered a situation like this. This is a eldritch beast from literally beyond the stars.
    Stanley's not sure why he's crying. He might never quite get a good good answer for himself. But he's going to cry even harder, as the children start to swarm Rita, come for her, the thrashing starts.

    He's right there beside Nonon as she dives in. She's the whaler, and he's decided she is his battle buddy. And you gotta stick together. Nonon goes in for blocking rocks tossed at Rita, and there's sudden ghastly afterimages as Stanley's fencing comes into play. He's too fast to see, just the remains of his passing, as his sabre hesitates on the first few attacks against the 'little ones'.

<J-IC-Scene> Stanley Padgett says, "...where do I aim, Nonon? To make them stop?"
<J-IC-Scene> Stanley Padgett says, "...what's the soft bits..."
<J-IC-Scene> Nonon says, "Heads are the hardest part. Belly if you can manage it, but chopping tentacles off won't hurt either."
<J-IC-Scene> Stanley Padgett grimly. "Aye aye."

    Nonon knows the way though. His sabre starts sinking into underbellies, into jaw lines. Soft places to reach places that make the children stop moving.

    <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says softly, "Please try not to kill too many."

    Stanley... swaps strategies. The matchlock, then. He starts conjuring up noxious clouds to drive the little ones away from Rita, to push them away, rather than kill them.
Father Berislav Protect Rita!

<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says softly, "Please try not to kill too many.

     That helps. Berislav's mental fortitude is at its strongest when there is a clear and present objective. Protect Rita, without killing too many of...

'My' children? No. I don't have any. And I remember too well the last time I felt like...

     An eye swollen shut. A wet rasp in the lungs. The whole body aflame. There was a reason he'd gone with that prayer--the one about transfiguration. In many ways... that day was a transfiguration of sorts.

     He'd hoped, of course, that this would be done quickly enough not to risk attracting more attention from other wildlife--but the presence of that many children forces his hand. He sharpens his mind with a prayer, one deliberately chosen to keep himself within sight, to distance himself from the whale's psychic pressure.

O God, whose mercies cannot be numbered:

    He's off like a bullet after Rita, his arms pumping as his feet impact the path like hammers. It takes him a second to see that she got too much of a head-start for him to catch up on foot. Rather than continue trying, he dips his right hand through a burning orange tear in space as he runs, procuring a brick of plastic explosive with a keypad affixed.

Accept our prayers on behalf of your creation...

    As Berislav stops, he hurls the primed explosive with all his might, its ticking-down LCD timer visible in brief flashes as it rapidly flips end-over-end. A chest-rattling explosion breaks apart a descending chunk of earth, as Berislav funnels the momentum from his pitch into a full-on lateral flip.

And grant it an entrance into the land of light and joy...

    Rather than land on the ground, his foot impacts the gleaming metal fingers of his mech, stepping out from a much larger hole in space on some sort of autopilot. As it emerges fully and kneels to lift the priest into its inhuman, open black ribcage, the red cloak on its shoulder is pushed aside by the emergence of something rectangular and blunt.

In the fellowship of your saints, through Jesus Christ, the Son, our Lord--

    Berislav's fingers find the switches easily. The noses of guided missiles briefly protrude with an arming click, before their high-pitched hissing resounds. Four of them fly in severe parabolas, each one zeroed in on a formed-up cluster of earth and coral. As the mech rises, and its ribcage closes, an internal feed mechanism reloads the launcher.

Who lives and reigns with you, and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever...

    The gleaming silver machine, standing easily six times the priest's height, reaches behind its back, for the wrapped handle of a war pick. Even in the non-Earth gravity afforded by the plates, Berislav's mastery of the machine can't be understated. At this size, the path is more like a tightrope, and still the machine walks it gracefully, patiently, its grip on the war pick loosened up almost to the pommel as it closes in to ward Rita.
Vantablitz Remnants 'I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm- I just--'

    "-ita?! Rita! Are you-- No, obviously you're not . . ." Ahn is already there, hovering over Rita, reaching down her hand to help. "It's okay! It's okay. You didn't do anything. It's not your fault. Please just get up, okay? All you have to do is keep moving forward. You can't stop. You don't have to apologize, but you can't stop."

    "Wh-- Not like that! Rita wait!"

    'But, your children won't give up on you.'

    <<Children . . . That must be nice. It's been a long time since I had any. And we were never close. Ours is to see them away to a rich place they can grow, and wish them fortune in making it their garden. Shouldn't you do the same? What use is letting them watch you die?>>

    <<Not that I'll let you, anyways.>>

    "Forward! Just get to it! We don't have to fight all the offspring!" Ahn yells, partly over the bark of her handgun. Bringing it up and firing it a few times at the 'children' doesn't seem to scare them. A few times into oncoming rocks doesn't do anything. Gasping as one of them flies straight down her sightline towards her face, she throws up her arm to shield herself, defending her head on reflex and is just launched off her feet, tumbling backwards and righting herself into a smooth stand a second later with a little cough.

    The rock breaks on her forearm with a subtle thump. Her turtleneck sleeve is torn, but there's no blood.

    Lotus pushes forward. Lowering her center of gravity, she breaks into a headlong sprint down the middle. She swerves fluidly around the first few rocks hurled her way, straining the believability of her balance as she picks up speed. The faster she gets, the lower she sprints, until at peak acceleration, it's practically like watching a bestial lunge; just zigzag crunches of dirt and rock, puffs of dust and debris, and the erratic scrawl of glow-lines lingering in her wake.

    Ahn catches her breath and accelerates just after her, pounding earth in her wake. She skids short as a wave of rocks come at her, leaning so far over she can brush the dirt with her fingers, and steer herself in a grinding half-circle left, breaking off to charge down one of the groups directly. Jump-snap-kicking the next projectile hurled at her, kiai and all, might look a little odd for her current state of dress, but bouncing back off the ground with a headlong flying tackle is probably less so. She goes tumbling with one of the whale-children so she can pin it under her, with the sole purpose of having the others focus on rescuing it.

    Focusing enough, ideally, for Lotus to slip by the last stretch, rockets off the ground with a whole-body coiling jump and a split-second blast of blue fire and swirling dust, and sail across the acid-orange lake to collide with the behemoth's head, between the eyes. Her fingertips sink slightly into its flesh. Her back curls and her knees flex under her, anchoring her by pressure. "Shh. Quiet now." she says. "You fell from that higher realm to be purified back on earth. That's how it always works."
Meika Kirenai     Cresting the crater's rim only to watch the group's guide and escort objective both take off down it immediately pulls Vermillion further into fight-or-flight impulse action than she already was. It truly is hard to see the whale as something once-living, both from its rocky island-ness, and how horrifying and oppressive the weight of death remains.

    "That's- that's the target..? It's..." It's easier to hate something you're looking at. Vermillion's trembling gaze stares daggers at the beast, and the swarms surrounding it. She wants to keel over and vomit. Shut up. Suffer quieter. Bleed faster.

    The rush of vertigo, standing at the hilltop, doesn't leave her. It doesn't get easier. It doesn't feel lighter. But, even with the crackle of distant thunder, that feels just a bit too much like it's in her joints, forcing her forwards, Vermillion's thoughts strain and grab at the routines and practices she's used to in normal fights. Don't kill many. Don't hurt them too badly, either. But get Rita in... Augh, won't they just all shut up!

    Chevalier Vermillion can't bear hear the whale-spawn's songs, nor let them hang in the air, psychically imposed as they are- so, summoning up her own magic, in its roaring red nova encircling her, she's greatful for the deafening, limb-deadening ordeal that comes each time she holds onto it herself. Wave interference won't do anything against telepathy, but when something is loud enough, thoughts at least *feel* like they're melting away.

    It helps so much less than she wishes it would. But breaking off parts of the sound magic into flickering, jagged, ephemeral burts of percussion, Vermillion vaults the embankment's edge, skating down the rim faster than the lowered gravity alone ought allow, the blasts help her rocket into the fray as legs feel weak and motion scrambles for a motive.

    Similarly twisted off from the mass of that aura, pulled and stretched until ever so more stable, come shardlike javelins, the kind Chevalier Vermillion knows disable more than kill. She doesn't have the heart in her to call out move names, not as her throw's follow-throughs f-f--flicker, but there's a bitter-guilty rise of excitement in it each time her pinning spears hit whale-spawn flesh and linger there, siezing the muscles they pass through and stick into like harpoons that can't draw blood, won't leave real lasting.

    But she knows they *hurt*.

    Finally hefting her hocket stick, skating now over the surface of the unsettling orange liquid, she dips its tip into it and starts to slowly move the built-up energy in her through her stick, and into the steaming lake, dragging it through- And as she careens past, in a hemicircle movement, the wedged blade of her hockey stick and it's deafening concussive magic rips at the liquid and splashes it up into an oversized wave, hoping to section off whale-spawn sightlines from Rita's approach with the world's most neon smokescreen.

    "W-will you need help getting back out, Rita?" She calls, on third attempt fo trying to make sound come out of her mouth. Get in, guard her, get out. I want to get out. I want to be away. I don't want to die here either. She gulps down air, as best she can, choking at the suspended orange mist. She shouts, to avoid coming closer than the encircling pool of orange ichor. "S-say when, I could even throw you back, if you need it, if it doesn't- If they keep coming even after.."

    As a thrown boulder collides in an artillery-ish splash near her, Vermillion shouts out a wordless curse, and pivots to hit the rock with her hockey stick. It doesn't knock it back, it doesn't do *anything* productive for the mission- it just shatters into an earthenwork fragmentation bomb, into the liquid and against her armor. A spiteful little distraction. It just feels nice to hit something until it really breaks.
Rita Ma      Rita slows at the cusp, mercifully, when she takes in the sheer scale of the calamity. She stops outright when the 'children' emerge, and draws a deep, alarmed breath- awe and pity both cut through her adrenaline. It'd be easy to compare them to the sea monsters back home, but instinctively she knows the difference. They're protecting family. I can't hate them for that.

     Rita casts a shaky look back over her shoulder at her allies. Her smile is rueful. "There were a lot of things I meant to say before now," she says. I put it off too long. I should've confessed. At least to Mia. "I wanted to be honest, with everyone. I wanted to say sorry. I lied to you. And it's going to be ugly. But even if you hate me, please don't look away. Soon there's going to be no going back."

     She shimmers invisible halfway down to avoid the rocks, but the children can still track her by the swirling wake she leaves through the orange fog and glowing plankton. She realizes a moment later she can use her command of the latter to misdirect; phantom wakes diverge from her, drawing fire.

     Splashes form across the surface of the orange lake, like skipping a stone.
     Galloping handholds spurt blood every three feet up the side of its body.
     Something blossoms like a flower near its eyes, evidenced only by scattering plankton.

     And there she is, suspended from its sided, mimic tentacles peeling away like video artifacts in their horrific sixty-foot span. The pale creature underneath isn't completely unlike Rita: it still has her hands, her hair, even mostly her face for now. But it's easier to imagine that the girl you're used to seeing is pure fabrication, than to imagine that this Rita used to be her.

     "I'm sorry," she says, not knowing if the whale can hear her. Her eyes wander back over her shoulder- at Meika, Mia, everyone who doesn't deserve to have to see this, but who I need to. It's too late not to. I've put it off too long. Again: "I'm sorry." She's forcing a little smile like she often does, and only her human eye tears up.
Rita Ma      Half the people here have seen that much already, but that's not what she's apologizing for.

     A dozen tentacles stab deep into the side of the whale's head in quick staccato. Thirty feet deep might not be enough to pierce the brain. But that's okay.

     They start to drain out bubbles of blue light in grisly, stomach-turning pulses. And as they do, they rapidly grow and bifurcate, branching out and piercing through its whole mountain-sized body like a root system or mycelium mat.

     At some point partway through, the whale's psychic background radiation cleanly switches off. That's around when its body starts to disintegrate. Rita's opinions on the impermanence of the soul suddenly make sense. But for an instant in the middle of the light-switch toggle, it's hers instead. It transmits a skin-crawling feeling: sweet and terrible relief, drool-inducing, achingly painful and yet the end to another deeper ache. The hot slick bliss of deep nerves and the self-conscious revulsion of higher ones.

     The entire leviathan crumbles to fine ash, revealing the skyline and horizon beyond. Rita falls to the ground it leaves behind, in a little rise above the lake of orange blood. She collapses to all fours as her tentacles recede, glowing with stolen light so brightly you'd almost think she was radioactive.

     It's dimming slowly. She coughs and retches, and tries to cover her mouth, but some of the glowing blue soul(?)stuff oozes between her fingers to dribble on the ground anyway. Her tentacles curl in to comfort herself, and she makes a pathetically ill whimpering noise.

     The gaze she casts back at the party is uncertain, helpless, vulnerable. But when it falls on Mia, it's especially guilty. One of the baby whales floats down to nudge her gently, but that only makes her look sicker.
Dysnomia     Nonon rushed in, smashing aside boldier after boldier that slipped through the onslaught, while Stanley, fighting at her side, stopped a brave little child from trying to ram her at full speed, then another. Another!

    Ahn's stunt doesn't distract most of them, but enough. The child's brothers and sisters turn tentacles toward her, the ground shaking apart where Ahn pinned the little whale to the ground, while Lotus struck at the Mother...!

    They swarmed Lotus on mass, struggling to pry her influence from their mothers' body, trusting a few final defenders...Only for those to be struck by Vermillion, screaming as they flagged in the air, reeling to the side, opening a direct path for Rita to burst through, until there was nothing more in her way.

    "Rita?!" Mia's eyes track a nothing up the side of the whale, comprehension and some shadow of horror passing over her phase, little pieces of conversations suddenly snapping together. "You..."

    But then Rita had struck, and it was too late.

    The whale's wail rose and rose and ROSE, annihlating thought and sense, staggering even her own children. She struggles to shift her body, and the earth shakes, but it brings her no release.     You feel the teeth of the great predator close around you, hungry and terrible. You feel it drink, and drink. You feel your life ebb. You taste the end.

    Everything's
Dysnomia     fading...

    It doesn't hurt

    anymore...

    At last, its presence fades into Rita's, the last echo of its presence a resonanting, bittersweet relief.

    Dysnomia comes to sprawled, facedown, across the ground, tears rolling down her face, awash with...With fear. Relief. Awe. Shaking, still from the feeling of being devoured. From the relief, salvation from all that impossible PAIN.

    The children...The children have stopped. They circle now. They sing.

    It's not a song that you hear with your ears. It's deeper than that. It's holding your sisters' hand as the light leaves their eyes. It's watching your friend slip off a cliff. It's being held tight by your sister for the first time. It's being held by warm arms and spoken to in a low voice after scraping your knee on the playground.

    It's a farewell to their mother. It's a greeting to their mother. It's loss. It's love.

    In the ruined landscape around them, one of the polyps that had hidden emerge from hiding. Then another. Then, a dozen, with the oppressive death-knell of the whale, the reef awakened, waves of light spreading until the coral was once more alight with life.

    Biolumescent plankton swirled once more through the air, forming a halo over Rita...Or perhaps a crown, as the planet acknowledged a Queen.
Angela Nonon and Parker fight. Their goal is less to kill them so much as it is to survive--Even Nonon can only do so much against a swarm on her own--but fortunately, she isn't on her own. Nonon counts the seconds in her head. She only needs to survive sixty seconds. That can feel like forever in the facility but this is just one set of monsters to deal with. She can endure it. She must endure it.

Bloodied and beaten, Nonon sinks down to a crouch, holding her arm tightly against her body as Rita strikes.

She looks up as Rita strikes and...

Ah..

Yeah.

Nonon doesn't look away but she does reach for her head for a captain's hat that is no longer there--she grimaces and places it over her chest.

"Respect the hunt." She says softly.

Parker is more inappropriate, "Is Rita adopting the whale babies?"

Gebura clenches her fists on the video screen. She stares, at what Rita does--no, not really, she's staring into that eye of hers. Which one is hard to tell but it doesn't seem like both.

That look.

She hates it.

She realizes now what bugs her about the kid.

She remembers when she was still Kali.

She remembers protecting her neighbors, protecting the stable life she had built for them with her own strength, a safe life in the backstreets is more valuable than a pot of gold.

She remembers them breaking into her room, tying her up. She could have broken free at any time but she chose not to. Maybe it was a misunderstanding.

''We can use what she's saved up to move away''

Gebura is disciplined enough to wait until Rita is done--even Gebura isn't so coldhearted as to turn away at such an earnest request.

But when she's done, she turns off her video feed. She doesn't want to be seen right now.
Meika Kirenai     Why won't they stop singing?

    Throughout it all, that's the single most gut-churningly maddening part of it, to Chevalier Vermillion. It shouldn't be. There's so much more awful, right in front of her face, in front of her eyes. But she is *really* starting to hate the song. All this and she didn't even make it be all be quiet.

    It takes Vermillion longer than she'd like to recover from the secondhand pressure of a mountain being anesthetized. Hovering, suspended inches above the whale's ichor, she twists to rest her hands on her knees, and heaves. It doesn't help. But watching the- It must have been a monster, to die that way. But isn't that also how they k- -dust filter off into the sky and still-steaming water only prolongs the sickening feeling, even if it serves as something gentler to look at.

    Watching Rita give up on the glamoring, the invisibility, any of her previous rigid-seeming efforts to hold onto something else, was a mouth-gaping shock. Watching what she turned into was, too. Hah. Aha. That explains the vine thing, but... I don't get it. I can't get it. Why would you think that that's-

    "What's honest about this? What could be?" Bile-guilt and aching nausea lace her words with an acrid wince. Vermillion doesn't abide Rita's earlier request of the group, though. She looks away- not that it does much good. Her body language slows and stills, as the adrenaline starts to fade out of her veins.

    There's still a periodic little f-f-flicker to her smallest movements, though, refusing to abate.

    "If you're sorry, why are you staying like that?" This time, it's only a whisper, audible enough to Rita, but quieter, weaker. "You know how not to, so what's your excuse? Cowardice?"

    She stays still a moment, and turns on her heels- a strange movement, suspended in air, and stranger still that it comes with a grinding-ringing sound, starting her way back towards the hillside, otherwise silent.

    If you won't even try, if you're resigning, that's the same as acceptance, isn't it? Are half-measures better or worse than nothing at all? The tremble in her limbs doesn't abate, and the bitter taste stays stuck in her mouth. Silently, though far enough away it ought not matter, Vermillion sighs. Who am I to throw stones? I can't even look her in the eye to say that.
Father Berislav There were a lot of things I meant to say before now. I wanted to be honest, with everyone. I wanted to say sorry. I lied to you. And it's going to be ugly. But even if you hate me, please don't look away. Soon there's going to be no going back.

    Bathed in the soft red glow of Isaiah's cockpit lighting, Berislav watches pale figure reveal herself. His lips are pulled into a tight-lipped frown. "Rita..."

    The head of the war pick seems appropriately sized for the weapon's one-handed grip. When it impacts the massed rock and coral boulders which menace Rita, the effect is anything but proportionate. Invisible cones of force amplify the impact, all but disintegrating the projectiles on contact.

    Memories of a brush with death fade from the cockpit's interior, as quickly as bright blue essence drains from the dying whale. His thoughts turn, on their own accord, to the notion of his own inevitable death. That Rita could bring about the whale's end in such a visceral fashion doesn't bother him.

Amen.

    Rita's, too, slides off of him, when it comes--but that one *does* bother him. Being able to distinguish the thought as not his own does little to comfort Berislav. He's never known a satiation that sweet, nor imagined a hunger grave enough to spur it. He is stunned, for a moment, silently contemplating the extent of what Rita has to deal with.

If you're sorry, why are you staying like that?

    The mech lowers its war pick. Its black ribs open up like the jaws of an animal, and the priest is quick to exit, not bothering to wait for its hand to lower him. Instead, he slides down the leg, his landing setting his hair to slowly floating in the 'current.'

    "Meika. There are some things that only ever hurt, to reveal about yourself," he firmly reprimands the moment his dress shoes hit solid ground. "To shame people for doing that is hurting them a second time, no matter the reason. 'Let all that you do be in love.'"

    "To that end..." Berislav's grey eyes weigh heavily on Rita. "I'm afraid it's hard for me to feel lied to. It's true--I hadn't seen you like this, much less seen that part of you."

    He frowns, softly. "But to show us that must have been very difficult. And, it was distressing, to see someone else's thoughts at all, much less to... know, that you're under that kind of turmoil, even for a moment."

    Berislav smiles wearily at her. Tired, shaken, worried, but sincere. "I don't hate you. And I won't abandon you. I still believe in that day I told you about. Whatever else is coming to you, know that day is, also."
Meika Kirenai 'Let all that you do be in love.'

    Chevalier Vermillion, for just a moment upon the shore, looks the Father's way, with an expression that's ever-so-close into forming a sneer, or rolling eyes. She doesn't, though, falling ever-so-short. The magical girl lets out an exhasperated little whimpering noise, and murmers at Berislav. "Then shouldn't they just not be revealed in the first place? If they hurt. If it's not something you want to show. That's out of love, right? If it's better for everyone you just-"

    Then, her eyes do roll, and arms do cross, and the girl looks away from him, towards the crater bank's hill and polyp forests beyond its crest. "Right. Okay. I'm sorry, Father. I'll do better."
Rita Ma      Rita, incandescent, doesn't have the strength to stand. She collapses from all fours onto her side instead, clattering the pulverized stone of the impact site. Her tentacles are sprawled out all around her, wriggling reflexively in the overwhelming aftermath like earthworms. A few wrap around her, like crossed arms, to fend off the chill. The ashfall that was once the whale's body makes her shiver like real snow.

     She looks up at the infant whales overhead with nauseatedly guilty fondness while they sing. Shouldn't they hate me? But they can't. They don't. That's how it always is. Maybe I do affect humans, too.

     Dysnomia, prone, blends in while she's still. When she shivers and pushes herself up, it catches Rita's eye. "Ms. Mia! Are you-" Rita tries to stand, decides it's a bad idea, and instead only scoots herself closer a few inches. "-okay? Was it even louder for you?" A tentacle, still glowing as bright as the moon, wraps itself around Mia's waist and pulls her upright with a comforting squeeze.

     And then Meika. Rita looks up at her from her place on the ground, eyes widening in fear. It's the way any little sister looks, when she's in trouble and only half understands why. But there's something missing from her face.

     Can something painful be a relief? Being rebuked doesn't make Rita happy. She flinches from it just like she should, and then double-flinches when her downcast gaze finds her own reflection in the lake of blood. But she's smiling, just a little, when the tears well up. And it doesn't look plucky or forced. Finally. Someone sees me.

     "You'll never look at me the same way again, will you, Ms. Vermillion?" It's so strange to hear the reassured smile and the creaking anguish come through at once. "That's okay. It's a normal way to feel about me, I think. I feel that way too. And I have to be braver for everyone, so... could you please not forget?"

     The irony of a halo is that Rita, herself, can't see it.

     The smell of blood draws Rita's eyes to Nonon when Meika leaves, but for once in her life, the hunger isn't sharp. On the way there, her gaze catches the switched-off tablet. It's another sting of reassuring pain. And Ms. Gebura probably hates me now too.

     But when they land on Nonon, instead of glazing, her eyes widen in concern. She manages to push herself upright with the help of her tentacles, staggers over like a newborn deer, and crouches down in fumbling concern. "Ms. Nonon! I'm so sorry. You got hurt for me, all over again... the 'HP bullets'. Where did you keep those?"

     A couple of her tentacles instinctively drape around Nonon, trying to reassure her. Given what they did just moments earlier, it might not work.
Rita Ma      Berislav catches her when yet another tentacle has retrieved her satchel, and she's rummaging through it for bandages. She looks up at him with lips parted, her face the opposite of 'secure anguish': terrified happiness.

     "And, it was distressing, to see someone else's thoughts at all, much less to... know, that you're under that kind of turmoil, even for a moment."
     Liza Grier says, "That's kind of creepy and kind of nasty, and I usually make it a soft rule to stay away from anyone with feeding tentacles because I know how that goes."
     Historically, a spoonful of medicine has helped the sugar go down. Rita smiles shakily, her gut-dropping joy tempered. Her eyes are still watering, but it's for a different reason. So he sees it too. How awful it is. But he still...

     "Thank you for believing in me, Mister--- Father Berislav. I don't know why you do." A tiny, fragile, self-conscious laugh follows. "Please don't say the reasons why. But... it makes me happy to hear that you do."

     She looks down and to the side, heartbrokenly bittersweet. Another-another-another tentacle reaches up to the sky to pet one of the baby whales, and that definitely isn't conscious. "It's hard to open up to anybody. It's hard to depend on..." Her voice finally cracks. Her tears, held back for a few long moments, spill over down her cheek again.

     She sniffle-sobs, wipes her face on her arm's dress-like lappets, and shakes her head. "... but I have to," she says, forgetting her place. "And you make it easier. So, thank you."
Stanley Padgett     The Pressure lifts from Stanley, as the Whale is SUBSUMED. He falls to the ground as the wailing intensifies and then ends... And he gets to see the rest of the process that he missed, that he got snippets of in The Reversal so many times. This is what they're afraid of on the Busan, Stanley.

<J-IC-Scene> Stanley Padgett says, "...it's still a promise, Rita."
<J-IC-Scene> Gebura says, bluntly, "Quit it."
<J-IC-Scene> Gebura says, "...We're taking advantage of your strength already."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Quit it? I'm sorry, I don't..."
<J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma takes a shuddering breath. "I can't, stop, being this. I'm sorry."

<J-IC-Scene> Stanley Padgett says, "...then why are you apologizing?"

    Soft footfalls start to approach the pond of blood. A sword and a pistol clatter into the dirt as Stanley disarms himself. Hands are up, palms open, as he approaches the Queen. He's taking it slow, Stanley's eyes wide and his motions deliberately non-aggressive as he passes by the Little Ones. He will feel the shame sink in later, probably. The crying will continue. His clothing, his skin will smell of whale blood for a while, but that's not what's important right now.

    Stanley Padgett wades. He sloshes through the remains of the Whale. He... avoids any of the dribbles of blue soul stuff that have escaped Rita, not wanting to touch it. Not wanting to... sully the memory? Something. It feels wrong enough being out in this grave.

    But then Stanley's made it to Rita. And he shuffles around to the front of her, and kneels down, making sure he can get his lanky frame to eye level. Rita's not looking into faces right now, but that's fine.

    The Fool holds out blood stained hands, and whispers. "I'll keep that promise, so long as you promise to forgive me for being scared sometimes when I look at you."