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Lilian Rook     Lilian hadn't openly announced she'd found anything for Rita's specific purposes, but when does she ever openly announce anything? At least, anything kind. It is certainly, if nothing else, a long-premeditated decision, and not a sudden impulse after the Busan has cast off from Trash Island and begun the final stretch. The fact that it took this long is-- to anyone who understands her reasonably well-- a matter of just how difficult it was to follow through on.

    Anyone else can sort of tell by the fact that you're summoned via faerie circle instead of warpgate, to a lonely little lighthouse on the end of a long and narrow cliff, where you'd need to be even higher than that to see any land to the south. This can't exactly be a well-known place.

    But what you can see, enveloped in a spiral of permanent storm clouds, is a distant sliver of red-alike glow in the far southern sky. In the middle of the night, as it is now, you could almost imagine it'd been cut there. The long rays that intermittently fall from it, like a terrestrial aurora, almost look like dripping rivulets.

    Either way, it's so dark you can see all the stars in the sky; pitch black save for the quaint old lighthouse itself, having been just recently re-lit by Lilian so that the surrounding rocks are visible as early daylight, and sweeping beams can intermittently scan the black ocean. It's cold, too, being January, and you're further north than Oslo. This close to the ocean, frost can't quite find purchase on anything but bare metal, but there's plenty of that, given the adorable little grassy green countryside that was here, rolling north into the island, is cluttered up with the abandoned shells of bunkers, barracks, storeyards, monitoring posts, fuel depots, radio towers, and anti-air(?) guns.

    In the middle of night, in the middle of winter, in the middle of nowhere, you're surrounded by the vacant ghosts of fifty years ago; G.D.F logos in faded lettering, directions and labels in peeling paint, barbed wire and electrified fence all rusted by saltwater air, APCs and armored bikes and PT boats all laying half-frozen along roadside lots and chunks of 3d printed and flash welded dock at the cliff's base. It isn't ravaged; it's empty.

    "Getting out to sea; solvable. For some of you, at least." says Lilian. Armed, armoured, seated at the edge of the lighthouse lookout, you can hear her below with ease. "Four kilometers south-southeast. You'll be able to see land, and easily be inside the beam's reach. But I don't think it'll come near land." Grabbing a break in the circle railing, Lilian slides over the walkway and lands on the cliffside fifty feet down without looking away from the ocean. "We only want one. We only need one."

    Though she leaves the others to figure out their arrangements vis a vis flight or sailing, Lilian makes sure to say just a few other things.

    "Whatever you think you hear, ignore them. Whoever you think you see, ignore them. If you think you can help someone who isn't here right now, you're wrong. If you lose track of what you're doing, stop. If you can't remember why you're here, leave. If you think you're having thoughts that aren't yours; they are, and they're not real."
Ishirou Through the circle, Ishirou appears and looks at the surroundings.  This place is grim and depressing, but the lighthouse does at least cast some light on things.  He walks towards Lilian, but any attempt at a greeting is cut off by her instructions.  He pauses, he knows what his method of transport is going to be.  

"If anyone else doesn't have flight or water travel abilities, I can share with you my own.  I'll be able to grant you flight capabilities like my own," he offers, and if anyone asks, he'll create an OPTION that'll fit itself on them, and provide flight similar to his own.  

Ishirou moves to catch up with Lilian on the beach and listens to the things about their thoughts.  Ignoring those who aren't there and asking for help, about losing track of what they were doing, about what to do if they can't remember why they are there.  "So it's one of those on top of everything else..." he says, and sucks in a steading breath.  "Alright.  I'll do my best."

With that RESCUE is summoned, a suit of armor that fits around Ishirou and covers him up completely.  This is followed by an exoframe being summoned, attaching on top of that, and then the flight unit on top of that.  He flips over, shifting the exoframe's configuration into a more fighter-like configuration, and takes flight once the others are ready.

Others who get an OPTION to share with him are provided a little drone that looks like POD, which is to say a small box with arms.  It'll connect to you, much like a powered suit, but will provide flight so that you can fly as a method of travel!
Angela PREVIOUSLY

"Rita's a sweetheart, ain't she Gebura? A monster with a human heart but really that's pretty reductive right? She's one of a kind, never met a sailor quite like her."

"We didn't receive any warning but knowing the sorts of things that the Dame Commander gets involved with, you're going to need all your focus on the job." Gebura, annoyed, focused on the work ahead rather than Nonon's words. "We'll need you later so don't die. At this point we can't train up another Agent to be at your levels and I don't want us being showed up by the Outsiders."

Nonon smiled, undeterred. "You know, ma'am. Miss Sonia asked Shajo to look out for Bota if anything happened to her. It's silly, right? He can't do anything like that because he has to work here--but he promised to, anyway."

"Considering this may be dangerous, we'll be lending you the Eggpack rather than expecting you to fight onehanded. Angela and I will be observing."

Nonon just wouldn't shut up. "So if anything happens to me, I can count on you to look after Miss Rita, right?"

This got Gebura to turn her attention off the task at hand, narrowing her singular eye towards Nonon. Since when did she get so UPPITY towards her? She'd enjoy the harshest work she could give her and this limited her options. Instead she said, "She doesn't need anybody looking out for her. She's plenty strong on her own."

Nonon didn't disagree but her grin grew even wider as if she finally saw her as Gebura instead of the Red Mist and she'd never see her as just a Legend again no matter what she displayed. She crouched down to look at Gebura on the level like what she had to say was too important.

"You know I don't mean like that, Gebura. I think we all like her best when she's being a weaselly teasing goober eh? Just keep letting her see the real you." Nonon hefted up her gear and made her way out for another day on the job.

In the moments where Gebura was alone, the Red Mist muttered to herself. "...As if she needs my help to see me."

NOW

Nonon arrives, wearing the Eggpack on her back, the video screen showing Gebura and Angela together in their Cognition Filtered forms. Nonon is wielding her Gas Harpoon in one hand and Gold Rush, the King of Greed's EGO Weapon on the other. She is, additionally, wearing the Gold Rush EGO Suit, a black suit with a red tie with golden accents. Shajo isn't here today because she's still working on the ship. It's just Nonon.

"Nobody said it'd be this cold." Nonon murmurs though the suit wards off the worst of it.

She doesn't have a submersable or any sort of aquatic gear--it's just not something Lobotomy Corp needs and thus isn't something Lobotomy Corp has access to. "Four kilometers? Gonna be tough to swim that." Nonon admits before looking to Ishirou, "Hey! Catboy!" She says. "Lend me one of your Throw Pods! It'll keep my hands free and I won't have to swim four kilos! GA HA HA HA HA!"

She grabs one of the offered PODS and swings it around on her back with her gauntled hand. "All set here, Commander! One 'Needed Thing' coming right up!"

"Pay attention to the instructions, Nonon. If you ruin the Eggpack I am assigning you to work on We Can Cahnge Anything." Angela says resulting in Nonon quickly repeating Lilian's instructions like three times before Gebura and Angela let it go.
Dysnomia     She hadn't decided whether she'd come. Not really. It was simply that, when the time came, the memory of Rita's lost, wounded face came back to her. An expression that said to Dysnomia, 'I knew I deserved this, but it still hurts.'

    And Mia found herself on the move.

    Dysnomia had never traveled by faerie circle before, and she can't quite hide the look of surprise on her face in the instant she steps through into somewhere else, one that she quickly tries to wipe away.

    From the moment she arrives, before anything happens, there's already a sense of tension in her stance. In the way her arms cross, the way she stares into the night beyond, like she could see things the others couldn't. (She could.)

    "Whatever you think you hear, ignore them...If you think you're having thoughts that aren't yours; they are, and they're not real."

    Dysnomia...'Relaxed' is the wrong word. It suggests a dropping of guard. A recklessness, a trust. But there was a sense of relief, almost. Recongition, definitely. It reminded her of excursions into the inner solar system. "Psychic hazards, compulsions and memory subversions." She said, crisply, reiterating in her own words to check that she'd understood. "Copy."
Rita Ma      A floating red-and-dark-gray open jacket materializes inside the faerie circle. A few seconds later, after a little courage-building breath fogs the air, its wearer materializes too: tentacles stop pretending to be empty space and peel away like video artifacts, exposing the pallid monster underneath. She's putting a brave face on her anxiety.

     When has she ever exposed herself when it didn't serve a purpose? Or maybe it still serves a purpose now. Practice, one could hope, and not self-flagellation.

     Rita slips past Ishirou with the smallest acknowledging nod, the clammy tentacles and frills that hang down from her jacket trailing lazily through the air behind her. Her fingers trail along the chassis of an anti-aircraft gun, eyes linger on 'GDF', and her head tilts to look down the barrel.

     It's not hard to guess she's imagining the defenses as an attacker. Her conclusions are for her alone.

     Lilian drops, and wthout thinking, Rita catches her to gently set her down. The landing is soft, slick, and clammy. A little grimace catches Rita's lips before the smile. "Sorry," she says on reflex, and then softer: "Thank you, Ms. Rook."

     That ensemble's color scheme doesn't suit her in the slightest. But past that, does she look a little different than before? Her bared form doesn't usually stay still long enough for study, but the tentacles infiltrating her hair look more numerous and frilly-ribbonlike, the frills of her body's 'dress' a bit more ostentatious.

     She's definitely a couple inches taller. That's not ignorable anymore. When appraised, her tentacles curl in on herself protectively.

     "It'll be something like the last time, won't it?" she says, fidgeting like she can't quite get comfortable. "With the 'lightness'. I remember. This took a lot of trouble for you to arrange, didn't it? So I'll do my very best, to live up to all that work."

     She turns to wave at Nonon when she hears her voice, spirited by her friend's presence- and then promptly looks surprised, happy, and self-conscious all at once when she notices Mia. Rita draws the jacket tight like she's trying to hide herself in it.

     Shortly, when nobody's looking at her, she'll find a chance to hang up that jacket on a rock and vanish into the surf. Swimming four kilometers takes her alarmingly little time.
Dysnomia     Dysomia's eyes find Rita as she comes through. She inhaled.

    Then turned away, back toward the horizon and the dripping wound in the sky. "Rita. Good," she said, matter-of-factly, using a veil of professionalism to mask whatever else she might have been feeling. "Now that you're here, we can get started. I hope you're ready."
Meika Kirenai     Chevalier Vermillion, with all her armor's delicate and pristine metal filligree, really ought to become a popsicle from all the nucleation points she offers the frigid humidity. So for all that, it's a little bit odd that rime seems to refuse to dust over it in the slightest- her transformation carries the same clarity, the same polish, the same everything as always. Likewise, Vermillion isn't shivering, or visibly cold, in a costume clearly not made for this intensity of weather- despite her breath quickly turning to fog once past her lips.

    If Vermillion notices the disparity, it's hard to tell- from the moment she's ushered in by the faerie circle onwards, her gaze is locked at the sky. Stars just don't shine like this in the midst of the city, and if she tried, the magical girl wouldn't even be able to remember, let alone name, the last time she saw a night this empty and clear. She's not even doing a proper job of keeping her mouth from gaping.

    But missions don't get to be sightseeing trips, unfortunately, and doubly unfortunately, it's not one she can have fun on. Vermillion's skates click-crack on unthawed ground, to catch back up with the group, and quickly- not as much with her eyes, it's too dark for that -she fixes her gaze on Rita, and the complete lack of her usual disguise. Oh. A nigh-tangible aura of self-consciousness falls on Vermillion's shoulders, and she fidgets with one of her costume's ribbons. They don't look that similar, right? As her thoughts wander, there's a faint f-f-flicker in her posture, and she lets the ribbon go.

    "Chevalier Rook..?" The magical girl quietly coughs into a balled hand, before continuing. "Is- is air or water safer? I can stick closer to one or another, if it matters." She doesn't look Lilian's way much, in the asking, but focused on the dim outlines of abandonded vehicles, mind racing while trying to fill in story and details she doesn't know.

'Whatever you think you hear, ignore them'

    Her heart sinks, a bit. Why does everything have to play with my head..? Still- Vermillion tries not to let her expression falter, as she nods along to the warnings. "Any- any exit strategy, if... it gets bad enough to leave? Same as heading in..?" Not that I'll let it make me leave, giving up is- In the ever-faint light, Vermillion is glaring at Rita again. Part of her hopes the other girl can tell.

'Lend me one of your Throw Pods!'

    Vermillion, caught off guard, snorts- which itself gets quickly cut off and silenced. A guilty look Ishirou's way, follows quickly- but no actual apology comes along with it, mouthed or spoken or otherwise. They *are* kind of fun to throw.
James Bond      Once again, Bond looks like the last person one would expect to see, standing within a faerie circle. That is--perhaps any faerie circle but the one here.

    Dressed in a dark flight jumpsuit, complete with combat boots and a shoulder holster for his preferred compact pistol, his gaze travels slowly up the length of the lighthouse. As the sweeping beams roll steadily over the rocky shores, his blue eyes pause, his brow furrowed with thought. I know that logo. This equipment. A moment later, he sees the signs of their use and maintenance, strewn across the countryside. His mind idly constructs scenarios for a moment, of approaching from the sea--what it must have been like, what dangers there might have been, how the area was patrolled.

    These won't be as well-maintained as the ones Nika's village kept. But... There are ways around that, for those with the right tools. A lot of time and effort goes into making sure James Bond has the right tools. He approaches the lighthouse proper, giving Lilian a businesslike nod of greeting.

Getting out to sea; solvable. For some of you, at least.

    Bond listens attentively, even if his demeanor seems closed-off; it's just how he gets, sometimes, on the job. He approaches the railing, when she drops, though he doesn't do so himself, just yet. He does manage a smile for Rita, and it's genuine--as if his momentary warmth says that some things never change.

If you think you're having thoughts that aren't yours; they are, and they're not real.

    "Another one of those," he says, with mild distaste. After a sigh, "I'll keep it in mind, thanks." He lifts his wrist, evidently fiddling with some kind of function on the watch. A timer, repeating, every 90 seconds. Something of a tether to the real world; a line of breadcrumbs he can (hopefully) follow away from any induced visions or impulses.

    "There's an old GDF hangar not far from here--a few minutes down the road. ...Such as it is." Turning away from the ledge, he adds, "I'll be procuring something for myself there--it ought to have survived relatively intact. Don't worry about waiting up for me." A subtle motion of his hand across the bezel of his wristwatch sets the seemingly analogue face to winking out. A digital readout of the surrounding landscape is displayed in blue wireframe, when he lifts his wrist to check the 'time.'
James Bond      A few minutes later, Bond finds himself at the aforementioned hangar, its sturdy exterior showing the telltale signs of time spent in disuse. A rusted set of security doors meets its match in Bond's watch, the whine of a blue cutting laser briefly filling the air, before they each fall from their hinges. Inside, despite the stale smell of air undisturbed for many years, things have kept better.

    There, half-shrouded in a tarp left to lie for who knows how long, is the ancestor of a machine Bond came to know very well, in Siberia. The upholstery on the seat hasn't aged well, and the instruments are caked over with dust. Still...

    The touchscreen being several decades out of date from what he's used to doesn't bother him. Its sluggish awakening eventually gives rise to a menu, familiar enough in its orientation, if different from the Cyrilic he'd seen during the search for Oreshnika. He's able to get the engines warmed up, run a few diagnostics, and double check his weapons inside of one of his watch alarms going off. Still normal, so far.

    Before the next goes off, his finger taps an indicator on the touchscreen reading HOOK/STOVL, causing the VTOL systems to position themselves. Another tap, on HOVER, causes the engines to invert, and the craft emits a gradually higher whine. Pulling back on the stick brings it into the air, where he coaxes it through slowly opening doors atop the hangar, which groan, creak and complain for being roused from their slumber.

    "En route to regroup," Bond says through the radio. Sure enough, the others soon hear the roar of white-burning thrusters growing steadily nearer.
Lilian Rook     Lilian barely looks away from the water, but she does for Dysnomia. She does for the word 'psychic'. She looks back and down over the railing as if the word had surprised her. It's written on her face that she hadn't considered it applicable at all, when she falls into silent, back-and-forth gauging.

    "Close enough." she says, turning away again. "Type: Dominion, Catastrophe. Class: God. We're only mopping up leftovers; the real thing is gone. But even leftovers should be a dirty bomb that could only ever be acceptable to drop where we're all going."

    The breath Lilian gathers in the face of the ocean has a kind of cold tension that's meant for her alone. The one she lets fog as she slips down is filled with more resolution than resignation. The one she regathers when Rita comes out to catch her is a little choked up, and comes back up in stuttered stages. She should definitely be wearing enough armour (any, really) to not be able to feel in any difference in Rita's arms, but she flinches as if it were her naked neck. She dismounts Rita's grasp with just barely more fondness than alarm.

    "It'll be worse than last time. By a lot." she says. "But we don't have to stay there and fight the whole thing out. We're looking for the purest concentration we can get outside of London, not the most savage basic template." It takes Lilian a couple of seconds, but she notices Rita's height before she finds anything specific about the rest of her appearance to be to remark on. She can't hide the look of disconcertment-- of worried unfamiliarity-- from Rita, but her focus is on subtly rising halfway on her toes to check, rather than tendrils or glistening flesh. As if the place Rita's face occupies is somewhat more noticeable than the translucent ribbons in her hair.

    She had always been bad at faces, after all.

    "You're a braver soul than I, Rita." Lilian says, letting her weight rest on her heels again. It's unclear how positively she means that. Less than totally, more than not at all. 'Complicated' haunts every word and look she gives her. "You'll feel better once this is all over." Lilian decides on. "I know how it is right now. I let some things show when it was me, too. Things that I didn't need to, and I think I maybe shouldn't have. So just like then, I'll be here for you. During. After. And I'll still be there once you're past it."

    Yeah. That's it. The way her eyes catch Rita's exposed tentacles, linger uncomfortably, then tear away from them, as if she's seen something she thinks someone wouldn't want her to; there were people looking at her hoodie and jeans like that, too.

    "The water." Lilian says to Dysnomia, her gaze back on the crimson horizon. "But only if you can take going under. I wouldn't recommend it." she says. "The strategy is to pick a direction; any direction, and go as fast and far as you can. If you get lost, and can't see the lighthouse await pickup." Therein Lilian reveals the purpose of lighting it at all.

    Bond's presence is a kind of soothingly professional-familiar weight. His words elicit a little wry quirk to Lilian's lips. "The 'Immune' part does mean something, you know." she says. "Over one third of known Antegent strains have psychological effects on exposure. Despite every other horrible thing they do, it's what they're most known for. And why not? It's scary. You can't shoot a delusion. You can't pack a bug-out bag for an urge."
Lilian Rook     She lets herself pause for an unusually long time, just before he leaves. "This one doesn't have to get into your mind, though. It's not like the Man in the Moon. The danger isn't whatever tries to get inside of you; it's what comes out when 'inside' stops being a place." Lilian breathes deep. Her voice lowers for the space of two words, pronounced with shameful delicacy, like repeating a slur.

    "Mors Caelorum. The death of heaven and the extinction of souls, or so it's called. It's long gone, but the shrapnel in its wake is still hot. Don't be careless with any graphite you find in the grass."

    Stepping up to the edge of the cliff, Lilian motions forward, and then nods back. "We won't wait then. Anyone who could use the ride; no, at least one person, go with Bond. Then catch up to us." A moment later she drops off the edge, and her feet separate from the ground with a snapped tether of crackling black static.
Meika Kirenai 'The danger isn't whatever tries to get inside of you; it's what comes out when 'inside' stops being a place.'

    Vermillion's breath silently hitches. "...If- if it's not too much, could you- could someone elaborate on that?" Not only does her gaze snap to Lilian, she also scans across the group, at the few who carry the impression of having seen this place-slash-this-foe before. "What's the- the sort of stuff that can spill out?" Vermillion's worry isn't hidden well at all. But what would it look like if I turn around right now?
Angela Nonon grins back at Rita with one of her big cheeky grins, throwing a wave with the hand that's holding POD. Angela nods to Rita. Gebura's eyes slant to the side. She doesn't say anything for a moment and by the time she finds any words, they're already off.

I can't look out for her, Nonon.

Gebura draws out the cigarette from her mouth and tosses it aside, crunching it underneath a foot.

All goes well, she'll be queen of her sea.

Nonon whistles at the mention of 'Class: God'. Even if we're just mopping up leftovers, God's the most dangerous class there is. And with Abnormalities, sometimes what the Aleph spawns is worse to deal with than the Aleph itself."

Gebura says, "You should be reasonably prepared but EGO Gear will only provide resistance not immunity to any psionic manipulation, Nonon." Gebura reminds unneccessarily because it keeps her from thinking about...

You'll be a queen and I'll finally be dead.

Angela's eyes slant towards Gebura. .She can't see a smile aimed at Rita on her side because she doesn't have the Cognition Filter and yet, in this moment, it is essentially filtering away what Gebura is truly showing.

But it's gone quickly. Gebura is business before pleasure no matter how charming a sea monster is.

"Damn she's being cool." Nonon says moments after she jumps off a cliff. "Well can't let her have all the fun!" She jumps down after her.

"Rita." Angela says first. "Has something changed since we last spoke?"
Ishirou Ishirou returns Rita's wave and smiles with a warm one of his own.  He's known the truth for a while but had decided to let how she wants others to see her be the truth.  He guesses that she has decided to come out about it, and he stands by her decision.  Though his eyes linger on the visible tentacles a bit too long, but pulls his eyes away.  "I'm glad you're here, Rita," he says, warmly.  

To Meika, he withers a little bit under her stare.  Not because she's particularly uncomfortable, but because her treatment of his equipment makes him somewhat uncomfortable, even if she finds it enjoyable.  He doesn't follow up on it, other than to shake his head and clear the thoughts away.  Right now he has to be on point for both Lilian and Rita.  

Nonon gets her withering expression, but he's already made his opinion of what she has called his 'throw pods' open and frowns about people being mean to anything that looks like POD.  Angela, however, does get a smile and a wave.  

To Lilian, he pauses and frowns.  "I don't think I understand... but it almost sounds like the..." he pauses, not sure if he should say it.  "Inversion cannon.."  He asks this after jumping down the side of the cliff and landing near the rest of the group.  
Rita Ma      Rita, though she mostly shrinks from examination, catches a spark of a gremlinish urge: she tries standing up on her tiptoes too. When she does, she's just about the same height as Lilian.

     That idea leaves her with a lot to chew on. It's 'complicated', too.

     Bond's warm look tinges her bittersweet anxiety a little sweeter, and she rewards him with a pure shy smile. Gebura's uncharacteristically kindly-if-brief expression bolsters her the most, making her shoulders lift and eyes shut in unbearable sunniness. It drops to a queasy contentment when she gives Dysnomia a nod- "There isn't much to be ready or unready, Ms. Mia."- and drops further when her mismatched eyes rest on Meika.

     Rita never challenges a glare like that. She just basks uncomfortably in it, for as long as she can stand, until the relief of being seen is outweighed by the gutpunch of being judged.

     It's a little longer every time. Whatever she's becoming, she's becoming it fast.

     "Thank you for being here for me, Ms. Rook," she says with an adorably precocious glumness. She folds the jacket oh-so-delicately and lays it down, even though Liza could definitely get more. Her tendrils billow out, squirming restlessly in the air without that restraint. "I don't know if I'll regret it or not, yet. And I don't think it's brave either. But it feels important. So I'm glad you're here for it."

     She reaches out to squeeze Lilian's hand tenderly, and a tentacle winds thoughtlessly around Lilian's forearm in the process. Then she breaks off, turns, and steps to the cliff's edge. Angela's words arrest her at the last second.

     "It's the same me as it always was, Ms. Angela," Rita says. One tentacle rises and falls in front of her body, morphing to imitate a moving slice of Rita's human disguise as it does: eyes when it's in front of her face, that green skirt when it's at her legs. Weakly: "I'm sorry I'm not really as cute as you thought."

     Then she drops, just after Nonon, and swiftly overtakes her. A faintly luminescent streak highlights the waves and foam from below, zipping out to the horizon. One tentacle loops around Nonon's waist to pull her along at accelerated speed.
Dysnomia     Lilian's reaction told Dysnomia that it might not have been...quite right. But 'close enough' was fine for her.

    Fast as you can, far as you can? In ANY direction? Dysnomia's mouth made a thin line, thinking over what kind of being could make that the game plan. She felt like she barely grasped the edges of what they were up against, and she hated it.

    But it seemed clear that this would be something she had to learn 'on the job.' "Right." She sighed, conceding; "I'll tag along near Bond, I guess."

    Her hair swayed in a nonexistent breeze, violet-teal color streaking from her hand in the air like charcoal smear across a canvas. She made for the cliff's edge, and it flowed after and from her, until the moment her feet carried her off the edge they knitted into ethereal wings.

    She banked hard over the island, veering off toward the sound of the VTOL, darting around the old machine with practiced, effortless ease. Her voice chimed up over the radio, after a moment's static. "I'll be your wingman today. Don't disappoint."
Lilian Rook     '...If- if it's not too much, could you- could someone elaborate on that?'

    "Not really." says Lilian. "And, if I could, then I still shouldn't. It's best to pretend it's all in your head. Drawing that line, between your soul, the reality inside you, and everything else . . . that allegedly increases your resistance a little bit. Knowing exactly what's happening to you can only make it worse."

    Four kilometers sounds like a lot, but it's a bearable walk in the city like this, and uncomfortably little time by air or by boat. The minutes-long nothing that hangs after abandoning solid ground and man-made walls is darkly familiar. The quiet of the dark sea and the still air and the soft glow of the night stars all around you, without warmth or place or direction, feels like the liminal stretch of tension that hangs in the wake of an unanswered plea, just before you know for certain that no one cared enough to listen.

    The apathetic wind of overland travel makes it tough to talk. The frigid air makes it hard to find a center of comfort. Your own breath fogging on your face feels like cold hands trying to cover your mouth. The water below gives off the uncanny impression of being just a little too black. When the lighthouse beam occasionally sweeps by, it feels like sterile indictment for being out here at all, in this place you don't belong.

    It's so hard to talk, and so easy to withdraw into yourself, and become lost in your thoughts, that it's difficult to pin down when you first noticed the humming in your ears. A little easier to notice the lack of electrical resonance to it; that it sounds, very faintly, like a single, perfectly harmonized tone, from a thousand individually inaudible voices. Just a tiny bit like the buzzing of flies, and the whine of glass just before its shattering point, but for the most part, too quietly human to shake.

    How did you not see it until just now?

    The beam of the lighthouse sweeps past one more time, and without fanfare, it's just There. Up until then, you hadn't felt so much as a the instinctive sense of danger, or the pressure exerted by an especially powerful enemy, but laying eyes on it now, the bone-chilling rush it provokes only makes it all the more alarming how easy it was to not notice. Even Lilian, leading the pack by air, banks away by reflex, establishing an invisible minimum distance and diverting herself around an instantly wary circle.

    It's just water. It's just water and it feels like coming face to face with a cryptid in the dark. Sure it's floating; a big blob of ocean water all collected into perfect sphere is a little weird. But that not scary. The partial wreckage of an old PT boat inside of it, and the dismembered bodyparts of another Antegent; those aren't anything you haven't seen before either. There's even fish in it, swimming around in oblivious circles. That should be reassuring. It feels like the frame in which the monster catches you, right before the game over. Why? Your heart wants to leap into your throat. It's moving westwards, slowly. Did it hunt you down? You can see a tiny glint of red inside its depths; the crimson blip is like a single miniscule sea-critter dragged up from the deep. The sight of that tiny thing wants to freeze the air in your lungs. You hope it doesn't see you. All you can think about is Ellie back home and pray that your kids found somewhere safe to hide and the taste of human bone marrow and how much you hate hate hate hate hate--
Lilian Rook     "DOWN NOW!"

    A glimmer in the dark, thin and broken, stabs up from the sea and into outer space, then sweeeps erratically through the northern hemisphere; a madly scribbling thread of light carves up the air, leaving vacuum in its wake, and the vacuum doesn't collapse. Instantly, you feel gravity start to dissolve under you. The breath seeps from your lungs. The seawater from the single orb flattens in a rolling wave, pressed glasslike out to the horizon, and then thunderously craters upwards. The air becomes much like the sea, and the sea becomes much like the air, mottled together in a hundred million disintegrating globules of oxygen and ocean along their rapidly dissolving boundary.

    Touching that light is death; you know that instinctively. Your ears are ringing and your hearing is muffled and it feels like your bones are about to pop from the pressure instead of your eustachian tubes. Adrenaline floods your mouth and your blood runs cold two inches from your fingers. Thirty six minutes until operation start. Is there anyone even left in London? You can't even feel good about all the Antegent killed by this thing; that it doesn't even notice its own kin makes you feel a kind of queasy disgust. You suddenly realize you can't find your rifle. You suddenly realize you're surrounded by people. Which one of them seems easiest to kill?
Angela ''I'm sorry I'm not really as cute as you--''

"I am incredibly attractive, yes. I don't expect you to compete." Angela agrees.

''--thought.''

"Ah." Angela says. "Well, do not believe that denouncing your own appearance will deter me from asking you to show me the ocean one day." Angela says. "And you need not be anxious about them around me. I have more in common with Abnormalities myself."

She doesn't explain this at all, however, instead as Nonon--

"Weh!" lets out a noise as she is snagged by a tentacle but after the moment of surprise is laughing like she's having a good time (she is having a good time). Nonon doesn't have anything to hit yet (she is a simple creature in many respects) so she just enjoys the ride. Right now she feels invincible and flying free, even secured in the same sort of tentacle that killed her crewmates.

Then she feels it.

Ah, there's...

She feels something grabbing onto her, something that hates and wants her dead. She grips her gasharpoon tightly in her hand. Wait for the right moment, then jab that harpoon right into her chin and--

...Her chin?

Ah, Nonon thinks, that's right it's just Rita holding onto her. She's in one of the safest places there is.

Nice try, Brain! You can't trick me! I know that her smile's real even if it's camoflauge!

But of course it's that moment where a different monster is about to catch her while she's being held by a tentacle that really makes it struggle, there's plenty of people here Nonon doesn't really know and in not really knowing them---well, Ishirou is probably the easiest to kill right?

He's the only one that's been killed before so he has the most experience at it.

Nonon guides the harpoon towards him instead and then--

"Nonon. Wake the fuck up!"

''If you lose track of what you're doing, stop.''

Nonon bites into her tongue, tearing the harpoon away from being pointed at Ishirou and aiming it towards that flicker instead, screwing her eyes shut, not budging her aim a bit in case she turns out to be aiming at someone else.

No, maybe there's a better idea.

"Rita... when the time comes..." Nonon says, screwing her eyes shut. "Can you aim the harpoon for me?"
Ishirou Despite the design of the RESCUE, being able to be deployed in places where it's typically too hot or cold, the chill from this thing causes him to shiver inside.  It's weird, he shouldn't /be/ cold, but he's feeling the chill.  Worse, the darkness is stifling, which... again he's been to space in this machine, it shouldn't /feel/ like this to him... at least not like this.

He doesn't want to talk, which is something that he can... understand and in fact, easy to fall into.  Silence is golden, he wants to talk to people normally, but lately, that's been harder to do.  People are hard to understand, are mean to him, and all he wants to do is help and...

No this stifling feeling sucks, he hates it here he wants to be anywhere else but here, but all he can be is here right now.  He has to be here, for people who he cares for, for people who care for him, but right now it's hard to say that.  It /sucks/ to be here, now, and it takes everything to not wallow in that feeling...

'DOWN NOW!'

He jerks down right at the last moment, following Lilian's movement, and just narrowly avoids death through the light.  POD immediately lights up and signals that there is an aggressive action aimed at him, but it's not from where he's looking...

From his group, the hate flowing through him for a moment causes him to turn towards Nonon.  She pulls back, but the feeling of being aimed at /hurts/.  He isn't sure why, but he feels as if maybe she isn't his ally, maybe he should fire first and then...

"Unit Ishirou, wake up and return to normal operation."

He snaps out of it, shaken by the near accidental pulling of the trigger.  His hands shake, as he is forced to avoid areas of space and water coming and forming into non-earth forms and turns the RESCUE away.  No, it's fine, he has to focus.  "Thanks, POD..." he says, his heart in his chest and shaking almost uncontrollably.  

The sting of resentment is still there, but he knows it's not Nonon's fault.  He just wants it to be because then it'd be easier to justify the feeling.  He has to be better, he reminds himself, more like Lilian.  She was kind and good for almost no reason at all, right?  Breathe Ishirou... breathe.  
James Bond SLIGHTLY EARLIER

Anyone who could use the ride; no, at least one person, go with Bond. Then catch up to us.

    Smart.

The danger isn't whatever tries to get inside of you; it's what comes out when 'inside' stops being a place.

    With his back to the ledge, Bond's expression is a tight-lipped frown. For a long time, Bond tried to stay out of 'inside.' When he no longer could, he dwelled there, taking a kind of refuge in solitude with his blackest thoughts, hoping, deep down, for the world to take him from it by force. Now, 'inside' is still being put together, after hard work, into a place of refuge without bitterness and anger--

What's the- the sort of stuff that can spill out?

    The prospect is coldly terrifying; that even slag still warm from a decades-past battle could take that from him, in its way. "It's..." Bond sighs, looking over his shoulder at Meika. "Lilian is right. Besides... very rarely is there any active intent, as we'd understand it. Most Antegents that affect the mind are more like a jellyfish or a poisonous frog than a man with a gun pointed at you. Just don't let your imagination get the better of you, Chevalier."

NOW

I'll be your wingman today. Don't disappoint.

    "I never do," comes Bond's reply through the crackly but functional built-in radio, his tone implying an eye-rolling double entendre. A little joke helps take his mind off of what they'll all be salvaging, and what incautious work might invite.

    The darkness of the sea, its seemingly all-encompassing inky blackness, is something Bond has known before. It didn't give much comfort, in the old days--serving instead as a physical reminder of everything that separated the people of the world. Here, in a silent graveyard for a world that was, it gives less.
James Bond      The steady-beep-beep-beep of Bond's 90-second alarm sounds--over a backdrop of strange hummaing. His eyes sweep across the instruments, a hand lifted from the flight stick to lay his fingers gently upon the console. It isn't coming from the jet. His fingers quickly shift to the tuning knob for the radio, digitally rendered on the touch-screen console. None of his minute adjustments rid the noise.

     "Good God," says the spy breathlessly. He radios a brief advance warning to Dysnomia, so as not to cut across her flight path or hit her, when he follows Lilian's lead and banks off. The old, forgotten jet's whine as it pulls back might be characterized as the groan of an aged sentry having spotted signs of an old enemy, the way its shrill rapport and the following hiss ring through the air.

     Ellie... God help me, I can't remember her face. Thoughts that aren't his own shift, gradually coming into focus. His hand guides the controls, commanding the jet to climb, for some reason, until--

DOWN NOW!

     Alarms blare warnings about unsafe maneuvers, working with pure adrenaline to shock Bond back into himself. The nose ot the jet dips sharply, as Bond feels himself grow lighter in his seat. The jet avoids the wildly sweeping thread of light by inches--and, having to work with sudden pockets of vacuum, its descent is ungainly.

     Another memory, closer to his own experiences, creeps in the wake of the andrenaline, between the pounding of his heart. Thirty six minutes until operation start-- No. Bond's grip on the stick tightens. His free hand drives his thumb into his thigh hard enough to draw a pained groan.

     Through the hazy, sea-like air (or airlike sea) the jet cuts a wide, strafing circle. The flywheel mounted beneath the jet groans and complains, as an autocannon swivels to keep perfect synch on the glimmering red mote. This model is much older; the technology less refined--but the stream of tracers pouring from the end of the cannon is hard to argue with.
Meika Kirenai 'Not really.'

    An unmitigated flinch. That's exactly the words Vermillion was scared of, not made easier to swallow by the assurance that it's the best she'll get. None of the tangible fear leaves the magical girl, but it gets worse as Lilian continues. Drawing a line? I'm doing that the best I can, even if I have to smear it. I know what's real. I know what's not. And if this-

    There it is again. That soft, quiet, smeared-out f-f-flicker. Vermillion's skates have silently chipped themselves half an inch deeper into frozen soil, which only makes her awkward, nervous shifting more strained. "I- I'm sorry, Chevalier Rook. I think I've wasted your time. And everyone else's."

    "I think it'd be best if I stayed back. Please trust me." Arm clutching at her other forearm, squeezing tight at the gauntlet-shell until it silently starts to crack and deform, Vermillion doesn't even raise her gaze to eye-level, let alone at anyone's face. "...It's- it's better, if I don't go. I can wait at the lighthouse, or I could just..."

    Another f-f-flicker wells up with ugly, guilty bitterness in her throat, and Chevalier Vermillion, looking obviously frustrated in the minute before she's washed-over with a flash of light, ends her transformation.

    Meika isn't much use here, shivering in the bitter cold. But it's cutting off that option of still trying, bar wasting another page of her sketchbook, from even being considered.

    "I- I do really wish you good luck..." is all she has time to whisper towards the Elites, hands shoved in pockets, as Meika turns back towards the faerie circle- frustrated guilt obvious enough to everyone, as she doesn't even watch the depatures.
Rita Ma      Rita looks even less human in the water than she ever does above it. On land she stands on two feet. Underwater the arrangement of her many limbs is like an aquadynamic arrowhead, and they beat in a churning polyrhythm to propel her.

     They all freeze when the sphere comes into focus. Even the one wrapped around Nonon tenses, like a hand anxiously squeezing for confirmation. Rita pokes her head above the surface, hair sopping wet, to stare up at it wide-eyed.

     Her thoughts are a dizzying whirl. Where is my gun? And my kids--no, but I can't have those anymore, can I? What did Ms. Rook say? But it's thirty-six minutes 'til, I should get a snack first. No, those aren't mine! What was I thinking about? Marrow, and...?

     She twists around in the water to look up at Nonon. The light's reflected in Rita's eyes even though the angle's wrong. She's frozen perfectly in place. Her alien eye dilates to a diamond and constricts to a cross, over and over.

     Rita has spent a very long time trying to be less herself.

     The easiest to kill. That one up there with the harpoon. I'm holding her already. Stringy maybe, hard to crunch but lots of juice, not too many scars. Eyes go smooth but long hair's a mess-- no, doesn't she look familiar?

     When air starts becoming water and water starts becoming air, finally the wash of thoughts animating her body aligns into action.

     The easiest to kill.
     Ms. Nonon?!
     "The water. But only if you can take going under."
     "DOWN NOW!"

     The tentacle around Nonon's waist jerks her under while the un-red light scribbles overhead. A half-dozen more are waiting to wrap around Nonon as soon as she breaks the surface. Rita grabs her shoulders from the front, glassy-eyed, and bears her down into the deep with the red light behind her.

     If Angela and Gebura are lucky, they can see that look amid the swirling bubbles too, before the seawater shorts the tablet. She's safe down here. I can kill her down here.

     Feebly, once they're deeper in the ocean's crushing black, she manages to give Nonon a nod.
Dysnomia     "I never do,"

    "Smug, aren't you." Comes her retort, in a tone that could have been said with a sneer, but with her out of view, it was impossible to know for sure.

    As they fly over the sea, Dysnomia can't help but skim over the ocean, beneath bond. Its sleek, black surface reminded her more of oil than water. The silence crept over her, so slowly that she didn't notice until it felt like a solid, tangible thing, broken only by the roar of the VTOL's engines.

    She clasps at her ears with a grimace, as she finally notices. Turns her eyes up.

    She's not ready.

    How could she ever possibly have been ready? She missed Ellie. She--

    "DOWN NOW!"

    The light swerved wildly toward her, came close--too close--and Dysnomia recoiled so hard away that she began to fall into the sea. Then she stopped falling. The sky and sea churned, and Dysnomia floundered, streaks of color desperately tearing out from her, trying and failing to find ground in this world that had lost all sense.

    The man in the old bird. She thought, a line of plasming igniting in her hand. He was just some human, as far as she could tell, and he needed that bulky thing to stay in the fight. If she could bring it down then--

    --realize She can't find her rifle. Rifle? I don't have a rifle. Never had one. Never--

    "Calling out," She managed, regathering herself, a lance burning plasma held still in a white-knuckle grip, stilled bare moments before the throw.
Lilian Rook     The air ruptures with a sound of thunder. For an instant, it sounds as if the vacuum has finally collapsed; then you notice where the upwards rush of weightless ocean has burst on its own upon touching it. Water is pulled apart with such instantaneity that it sounds like an explosive, ripped apart in every way as if the pressure differential were ten thousand atmospheres and not just one.

    The red thread of death tapers out into invisibility past you. Lilian tumbles underneath it, Dysnomia just past, Rita and Nonon dive lower than the reach of its last attack, Bond's VTOL strikes the vacuum wake as if it were semisolid and nearly spins out from the evasive maneuvers. Seconds later, The beam is re-projected-- the light reappears-- another thread is pulled just so it catches the light nearby and scythes low across the waves, then deep into the water. Despite the blueness of the ocean, Rita, Nona, and even Angela and Gebura, see the bright semi-red hue unchanged, madly slashing through the depths in seach of them, and turning the aquatic environment partially aerial in turn.

    By the sound of the second explosion, it's already impossible to tell where sea level originally was. Air and water are so mingled that you could practically step from one to the other. It's all so slow to fall, too. Slower by the second. You can see where the lines were drawn, and they lack more than just matter; the random cuts are vacuums of light and gravity. As if bleeding away, you're already seeing the stars, the lighthouse, starting to dim; you can feel the grip of Earth on your body slipping away, causing your movements to overshoot and the delicate organic machinery inside you to hitch. The fact that it's getting harder to breathe is almost an afterthought.

    That's why it's so terrifying. That's why they named it as they did. No alien thing, no matter how hateful and gruesome and cruel, can elicit the same feeling from within a human heart as witnessing abject, apathetic ignorance of objective reality. Light, sound gravity, mass, energy, groups, individuals, substrates, numbers, separation, definitions; never before have you seen all of these things unmade because it was looked upon by somethingone that doesn't believe. How do you process feeling that? No matter how bad it was to you, the world in which you live was Heaven all along, and you never noticed until you saw it die of atheism.

    What worse is there, than knowing you only currently exist because some vast thingmultitude still believed you? If we killed God, he must have felt like this.
Lilian Rook     Autocannon rounds and celestial plasma. White hot streaks of humand defiance. Those are something real to grasp onto. They strike the water. They strike the wreckage. They strike the corpses. They remind you that your enemy is finite and tangible; a sliver carved off of infinity, that every instinct screams to eject from realityconsensus.

    Burning tracers punch gorey blue craters into the water, ejecting bone fragments and bile. One catches the tank of the broken boat, and it sparks a note of music before exploding into a fireball of winter-fogged breath. Plasma burns away its mass from the outside in, carbonizing layers of hair and shell, melting down plastic and ceramic. Fish cook off like firecrackers, their payloads igniting from the ambient heat. Old human bones coruscate with electricity, overload, and short out.

    "--ita--cor--etrea--ixty--" You can't hear that well. Lilian's callouts are so touch and go. All sound is, really. You see her maneuvering between the shifting mosaic of air and water, blinking here and there as passages open and close, and simply holding her breath where she has to charge through water. You can see the instant entire corridors of water blossom open behind her, all at once. The breakdown of the visible light spectrum makes you see several of her at once. Several sword strokes at once, around a crescent portion of the enemy, staying just ahead of the advance of a third thread tracking her. Each slash tears away countless black flower petals and bloody splatters of mass.

    §<<We only need Rita to get the part that looks like a core! Once we have it, retreat immediately; the Mors Caelorum reaction will decay on its own. We have maybe sixty seconds remaining at best!>>§

    That's better. Where did it--?

    There really isn't time to dwell on that. Lilian can only occupy the third attack for a few seconds. The fourth comes from you faster than the last. Your movements are impaired. So is your breathing. So is your pulse. Kinetics are changing by the second, as is te terrain. You're starting to sweat blood. Static crackles from your skin from the bleed of innumerable neurons displacing their charge. You have to fight it. The air tastes like the fear of milliones. Your heartbeat sounds like their screams in your throat. The world is tinging a certain kind of spectrum at the corners of your vision, reminiscent of an Antegent that isn't the one you're facing.

    You used to have dreams about that thing, you know. Every night, from when you were six. You still remember the feverish urge to draw it when you awoke sweating. Scribbling with pencils and crayons as if possessed; as if you could describe it, and that would get it out of your head. It's not fair that everyone thought you were fucking crazy. You were six. Nine at the oldest, when it stopped. They treated you like shit for dreams. What did you even do wrong? You were six and you loved them.
Ishirou It's hard to breathe...

No, it's hard to be /anything/ else other than dead right now.  It's hard to be so bad that it feels like his soul could fall out of his body at any moment.  He's got to hang on, he's got to ignore the betrayal from a few moments ago, and he's got to /focus/.  The beam moves again, and he's diving as Lilian instructed.  

He's trying to make heads or tales of what's going on but it's so /hard/.  The radio from Lilian wasn't enough to go on, and worse, he's not sure what to even do right now.  He's so used to having clear communication, and allies who didn't point their weapons at him.  Well, the last one isn't /quite/ true, but that's only a sometimes thing.  

However, the clear information that comes in... though he's not sure where it is from is enough to cut through it.  Even with the scene he sees after, he pushes.  A OPTION near Rita sends data to her, aiming to try and give her everything she needs to know about where to strike, as his scanners try to make heads or tales of what they need.

No, he doesn't need to know what it is, he needs to know where it is, so Rita can do what she needs to do.  Everything else is pointless right now, he knows this.  Lilian's OPTION surges, aiming to send energy her way and to make sure she can keep it up, trying to force her to be able to go just a little bit more.  

Once he has enough information, he fires a barrage of shots at the red thing again, trying to pepper it with rods of iron, that way he can use his electromagnetic force to try and weigh it down, trying to work with the others to weaken it /just/ enough for Rita to get that shot at the core of this monster.  They don't have much time left, and this might be their only shot!
Angela Nonon is unaware of how easy she is to kill in this position. It doesn't occur to her that Rita might be susceptible to what's being thrown at her. After all she's seen Rita do, she seems so strong. If I can stumble through surely, Nonon thinks unaware she may ver well have more protection than Rita herself does, it must be a cakewalk for RIta.

Nonon is a big gal. Instinctively when that tentacle tenses around her she places a hand on it--not to pull free but like--a hand on a shoulder.

Getting attached to a mermaid, Nonon. The old you would've never believed it. Her eyes are closed so she doesn't see Rita staring at her with an alien eye, she doesn't see Rita thinking all those hungry thoughts in the eye because she's not looking at it. She's not smart enough to know that Rita would be having thoughts like that, even if she knows that Rita sometimes says to not look, and that she isn't ''as cute''. But maybe it's that intuitive pirate instinct of hers that tells her the only way she gets through this is by trusting Rita. If it turns out that trust is in vain--she is already dead. If it isn't in vain, she might still be dead to something else but this way she still has a chance. It's an easy choice for Nonon, even disregarding her love.

Besides, The King knows hunger. And The King enshrouds her body not unlike camoflauged tentacles revealing something of who Nonon really is.

And isn't.

She senses Rita's nod. She nods her head, somehow. Angela and Gebura are staring with fascination at what they see in the distance. They aren't taking notes. There is something all too hopeful about a pillar of light reaching out into the sky for Gebura, and something all too inevitable for Angela.

It is easier for Angela to comprehend simply because it happens so much lower for her. Slower, but yet--it still seems fast even to her, in slow motion.

The King firmly believes in herself, it is just an echo connected to something just larger so Nonon can't just shake it off, she sees the world unmade and what strikes Nonon in the moment is how beautiful unmaking can be. So few people in the multiverse get to see a sight like this.

I am the teeth sinking into the forbidden fruit. The sight of the forbidden nectar dribbling down the throat.

If Nonon fired that harpoon, would it too cease to be?

''We only need Rita to ge thte part that looks like a core!''

"Rita." Nonon says. "Let my hook be the line that guides you to your prey, let it provide some base undeniable thread so you can reach it..."

But she won't fire it untl Rita aims it. But once she does, she will.
James Bond Calling out.

    "Acknowledged." The staccato beep-beep-beep of his watch sounds off a moment later.

    The near-spinout is almost comfortable, compared to what races past the canopy window in blurry streaks. Absence, cut into the invisible skin of the world.

    To hit the surface of the water, at speed--that would mean death, but death, water tension, the apathetic pull of nine-point-eight meters per second--those are all certainties. There is precious little to be found in the slow-falling water, and even less in the wounds carved out by the threads of light.

    To look through the canopy, as suspended water slides and sloughs off its surface, is to see a profoundly unhelpful expanse of color, which does nothing to assert any certainty in the physical world. Flying becomes guesswork, and in the bleeding, weakening grip of gravity, it is clumsy guesswork.

    Bond takes his thumb off of his thigh as the jet sends up a spray of water in its wash, banking shakily but surely, to keep both the shrapnel and Dysnomia in his vision as points of some sort of reference. Hand trembling and clumsy as every physical underpinning his muscles rely on is scoured from the world before his eyes, he reaches between his legs. An unused oxygen mask, left on the floor of the cockpit for the assumption that he'd stay at low altitudes. Flying now, where the meaning of those words bleeds out profusely from grievous harm, he hastily affixes it and takes what ephemeral solace he can.

    Even that is short lived--the sensors of the jet rely upon the same rules that he does, and the instruments dance wild, contradictory jigs, while target indicators crawl in myriad directions.

§<<We only need Rita to get the part that looks like a core! Once we have it, retreat immediately; the Mors Caelorum reaction will decay on its own. We have maybe sixty seconds remaining at best!>>§

    I just have to hold on a while longer. The thought is exhausting even to entertain idly; like the marathon runner's 'just a little longer.' Bond's index leaves a red print upon the touch-screen, as he turns the missile guidance systems off and arms a payload. A bloody thumbprint likewise stains the side of his flightsuit. What is it with me....

    "Missiles armed," Bond pants. The oxygen starts to smell of bourbon; the hiss starts to sound of difficult discussions had with cold frankness. Every heartbeat sets the buzzing in his ears louder. And almost dying to things that may not even have a goddamned will?

What did you even do wrong? You were six and you loved them.

    I want to live. "Missiles away," Bond rasps, as much from the oxygen as from the tightening of his throat at the memory. Just blow the core apart--and God willing, let that be the core. Two of them, dumbfire--straight ahead. Even so, their flight is an ungainly, meandering double helix, the path fraught with emptiness and absence. The fires that carry them burn in rapid fits and starts, wavering less than the human pilot which fired them but more than weapons of war ought to.

     The jet itself maintains a dangerous, high-speed hovering strafe, only for the fact that slowing down puts it more at risk of being bisected by another deathly ribbon of light.
Dysnomia     Bit by bit, every little fetter of earth tore away. The facade of trying to breathe grew unbearable. So she stopped. Wings banked through vaccum, propelled by the will to go forward. The details began to slide from her, the smears of her power obscuring her as the facade chipped.

    The basic truths of the universe slid away from her, left her alone in the world of her own will. It was all she could do to keep from getting completely lost in the chaos.

    She dove down through vacuum in a zig-zag, annihilating light carving behind her until she broke away...Or perhaps it found something else to hound. In the chaos, she found Rita and Nonon--Had she dove that low? Were they beneath the water line?--Useless questions, all of them.

    The voice, it gave her a way out. Get her to the core. Fast.

    "Rita!" She cried out, in a voice that resonated in her head. "I'll clear the way! Come!"

    Without gravity, the water fell below, or up, according to the arbitary whim of dying reality. But Mia's body spread across it, a smoky sketch of reality clinging to the water. And she wrenched. It felt like dying, to push against the will of this god, to try to assert her own reality.

    She screamed, but no sound came out.

    Dysnomia struggled to pressure bubbles of water, bending them too and fro until they met, forming a bulbous string, tinged in her colors, leading Rita across the void, closer to the core.
Rita Ma      I just have to hold on a while longer.
     ... need Rita to get the part that looks like a core!
     Right. That's what I'm allowed to eat.

     Distance seems to help, just a little. Nonon can't see Rita's quivery, achey smile. But she can feel Rita draw closer, and twist around, her back to Nonon's chest. Marbled air and water would be a mess, but Mia's solid column of water lines up a straight shot.

     Half of Rita's tentacles press their hungry blade-like tips against Nonon's skin. The other half gently wrap around those and pull them back.

     And your guts feel like a pit of snakes. You're not even sure what they'd look like anymore. If they cut you up and labeled you, would they even know what to write on the little white tags? But it hurts. Freezing cold, prickling-sharp, barbed wire being dragged through your insides. It's every need condensed into one, humiliating in how it twists your thoughts. Be careful or you'll fall into your own bottomless pit and never be seen again. Be careful, be careful, until the chance to be careless feels like a trap. At least drool is human. Fish don't drool.

     Fire.

     When Nonon does, Rita taps the power she tasted from Exigent Serenity and vanishes from her grasp.

     For a subjective second, the only real things are Rita and the harpoon's cable. She carefully pulls herself along it, hauling herself towards its endpoint at that evil red core. She's a quarter- Another second. This one's starting to burn with the effort. But Lilian's smart: when the laws of physics decay, exempt yourself. Half- Another. Rita winces, scorching at the edges with 'friction'. Is this what happened to Lilian, when the Watch fought her? Three-quarters of the way up- One more. Rita finds the harpoon's end, twists around, and shuts her teeth just ahead of its tip.

     Rita, smoldering at her edges in off-red even underwater, re-materializes with her teeth neatly bisecting the scrap of Mors Caelorum.

     The sight of the forbidden nectar dribbling down the throat.
     She swallows. The light vanishes behind her collarbone. What's left, she strains to command: STOP.
Angela There is a command to STOP. Aimed elsewhere, but still heard. And considered.

Would you like to command me as well, Queen?

But there is a gift you must accept first.

A morsel of my flesh is right here for you, already in your embrace.

A spoonful of my soul.

And we'd love to be devour you, Queen.

But we'd love to be devoured by you even more.



Nonon nearly cheers as Rita bites down upon the prey but that would be really bad right now considering Nonon needs all the air in her lungs she can keep. She pumps her fist. Somehow, she thinks, they all made it through!

A small gift from one kingdom to another. You won't refuse my generosity, would you? A gift, a gift, a gift for you.

The warmth from the King is genuine, the fondness clear, and maybe that's horrifying enough.
Lilian Rook     The OPTION that catches Lilian suddenly accelerates, flies past her, and is caught by gentle §hands?§ that send it back. It falls into perfect celestial orbit, spiralling around her center of gravity. The red thread of death scythes down between the two, slicing through the ontological tie that binds them; and skews sideways as it deflects from a §sword?§ raised in mirror motion with Lilian's, herself parrying air. Where it grazes by her, blood seeps from her faded scar. The skin burns away, and reveals gleaming blackness underneath, mirror-scarred by a singular crack.

    Rods of iron hit the water. The water's skin splits open, and the rods begin to corrode from touching copper. Boss Hourong said something about that. The force that jumps between them crackles like a geiger counter and paints each arc in rainbow of ultraviolets. Radio fizzles from the bleedoff transmission. The red glimmer darts away from the direct hit, but only to the edge of the electromagnetic cage, hemmed in. Of course the core can dodge. Everything about this is awful.

    Yeah. You remember how 'forbidden nectar' tastes. Like sickly sweet battery acid under your tongue. The thought flushes your veins with forbidden ecstasy, and the nectar itself makes you nauseous enough to vomit. The only time it tasted good was when it took a totally different form. When you imbibed it with Rita. It's ridiculous, right? Incomprehensibly absurd when you think about it. For your entire life, when they were doing everything they did to you, do you think they knew how incredible they tasted? All of that fear, that anger, that obsession, that desperate need; all over something so sweetly piquant. And it talked to you too. Did they know you were always made to feast on them? Is that why they were that way to you? So why is it that when you finally acknowledge that it's true, they treat you so much better than you deserve? They think you're so brave; so put-upon, so vulnerable, so cute, so precious, so needing of saving; don't they believe you? Why do they want you so much when all you really want is their marrow?

    If they really wanted to make you happy, they'd let you kill.
    If they really wanted to make you happy, they'd let you die.

    Missiles in double helix. The deterministic result of air and gravity unravelling. The physics are near-random, but the pattern contains sacred intent; it was inevitable that they'd strike this way. If they flew any other way, they could not strike. The world unravels not like cloth, but is unthreaded by its telomeres. Both land. One breathes its last gasp and dies. It pulse stills, and its body goes cold. The other detonates; its warhead blooms every shade of fire and immolates its kindred, setting the twin ablaze. A third of the remaining water disappears. The corpse of one unlucky G.D.F patrol boat glows cherry red at the edges. The redness drips like wax.

    Space is defined by water and air. Meters and inches are gone. Joining one and rebuking the other is an act of divine creation. Land from the primordial ocean. Miniscule arthropods spring into being beneath dysnomia's claws. The air left behind is defined as heavenly by its borders, and the light burns her hands and blinds her face. A corridor of primeval sea is more than enough for Rita, though; she's been faster beneath the waves than on land for a very long time now, and this is a rare chance to swim to her foe. The harpoon threads between sea and sky in parallel; a line of metal cable permitted to exist as the solid land between.
Lilian Rook     Energy flows through §Night Mist? Is that really its name? Its shape?§ and the last strike splits straight through the last remaining thing that can be called the sea. The remaining water and death are an insufficient sheath for the binding energyskin of continuity suffusing it.

    The §<<wavelength/superposition/higgs boson field>>§ of the enemy is split and fended to either side. Rita's resolve is shot through that breach in the last causal instant before she has already taken a bite of deathheaven.

    'The feminine urge to steal fruit from god' pops into your head unbidden. It's grimly funny, and yet undeniably alluring. Is this what they mean by a 'religious experience'?

    Chaos halts in its tracks. The remaining mote sputters like a failing heartbeat, then stabilizes at half its original strength. You can't breathe. You can't think. Not really. All your thoughts and feelings and memories and secrets are scattered into the space around you. The way this moment registers to you is hovering somewhere to your left; you'd have to swim out and grab it to check.

    One more peal of thunder comes from the collapse of a million tons of water crashing back down to Earth, and some fraction of that amount of atmosphere apocalyptically smashing itself back into place. The ocean is pressed glassy flat again. The air is thickly frozen around you, supporting even the VTOl against the sickening return of nine point eight zero seven meters per second per second. The surface of the ocean hums like the rim of a glass. Like a million voices in choir. Then it falls silent, and once again, you can breathe.

    The mass of . . . whatever it is you were fighting-- it's already sinking back beneath the waves. The glimmering thing is Rita's alone.
Rita Ma      The smoking-dripping PT boat descends towards the glassy-smooth water, still untainted by waves. Rita lands on its ruined deck just before it lands on the ocean, sizzling herself. The halved mote, something-that-was something-that-was Mors Caelorum, obediently spirals around its new master before perching above her shoulder.

     Its glow in the night-time casts magenta shadows across her dull and unfocused face. The color doesn't suit her. Thank god for that.

     Everything is quiet. Everything is still. No waves have reached the just-smoothed water, giving it a purity like fresh snow.

     Some of Rita is handling her new pet. Some of Rita is still smeared across space as thought-sensations, only gradually condensing back into her skull. And very little of Rita, right now, is in Rita at all.

     A morsel of my flesh is right here for you, already in your embrace.
     So it is. A tentacle had stayed wrapped around Nonon, all this time. It effortlessly lifts Nonon out of the water and drags her towards the little boat, and the way Rita looks a lot like she's sleepwalking and not at all like she's celebrating makes it clear this isn't for a hug.

     It lays her on her side on the ruined boat's deck. And if Nonon doesn't resist, Rita kneels down next to her, breathes out a heat-laden cloud to fog the crisp night air, and lays her teeth- still stained with not red- on Nonon's shoulder.

     If they really wanted to make you happy, they'd let you kill.
     Her jaw trembles with need. She swallows nothing. And then she stays there, just like that, face against Nonon's shoulder for a little while.
James Bond      Bond clutches at his stomach, leaving a bloody handprint on his flight suit as he squirms at memories, feelings that aren't his. He knows that they aren't his--knows that they must belong to someone out there. He's never known a hunger, like the one that stabs at him, for a moment. Cold and pain, yes, but never a hunger like the one at the bottom of the pit he feels himself observing. One that twists not only the stomach, but the thoughts, into something unrecognizeable.

    He hasn't known that hunger, he knows. But even so--he can scarcely tell up from down, and the sense of touch is a quickly a very clear recollection rather than a fact. Bond's watch beeps. The sound is tinny; distorted. It gives him a moment's reprieve--a few seconds, of those sixty. Think. Focus. We won't be alive to hear the next. Remember who you are!

     James Bond has known the profound humiliation that comes with the twisting of one's thoughts. Left behind him, he hopes, grown past, but not beyond the occasional ache; the occasional ugly recollection.

    'We'd love to be devoured by you even more.'

    Not me. Bond's hands shake as both clutch the controls, no longer struggling with resistance to air, but with the erasure of fundamental forces even allowing it to fly at all. It was him, a long time ago. Something he'd never admit out loud--that he'd give every bit of himself, until nothing remained, if only--

If they really wanted to make you happy, they'd let you kill.
If they really wanted to make you happy, they'd let you die.
James Bond      No. Something only I know. Something to anchor himself, mentally, as he threatens to unravel physically. He thinks of it--and has the misfortune to do so, right when it is cast out of him.

     Bile rises up in your throat as the unbearable weight of disapproval presses down upon you. Every part of you wants to resist, angrily, bitterly--every part, but the queasy undercurrent of shame that pleads inexorably against it. It's the same shame; the same intolerable, wretched hope that one day you might feel something else, that keeps bringing you here, seeing you subject yourself to this. To the agony of begging for what you'll never be given in more than the most insulting scraps; and the profound humiliation of knowing you'll dance for them anyway.

    "Whatever sympathy you have for that girl, get rid of it. She isn't a kindred spirit, just because she's an asset like you. She's a liability. A loaded gun, pointed into a crowd. This operation is as much to minimize harm as it is to enforce a badly needed sense of decorum. We retire -gracefully and quietly- in this business, or not at all. I expect you to deliver that message objectively and professionally."

    A part of you sickly agrees with your superior. In the worst, most embittered way. In the back of your mind, you know she'd get rid of you, and everyone who ever saw your face, if you ever gave her a reason. Maybe you already have. So why should that girl get to leave? To be 'fixed?' Will you? Will anyone even remember your name, but for the shallow pleasures you stole away from people you never intended to see again? Why does she get to be something other than--

STOP!

    The word is blessed relief. It means so much more than what it often does; applies to the whole of the world, for a moment. As if Rita had told his lungs to stop aching, his skin to stop sweating blood, his nerves to stop burning, and his ears to stop buzzing. As if she bade the air to stop smelling of spirits uncorked for bad omens and cross-examinations. As if she bade visions of a girl in the crosshairs of your rifle, eyes locked with yours in a moment of ugly lucidity, to sleep with the memory of old assignments, and other ghosts of the past.

     Bond presses the mask to his face and gasps for air, as the VTOL rocks hard to the side, for the presence of tangible atmosphere again. He wastes no time, coaxing the aged craft into a sharp rotation, the view of the canopy filled anew with what is recognizably Earth. "Do we have everyone?" comes his voice, over the radio, dispensing with protocol to speak plainly. It's all he can think to ask. What the hell else do I even say about it? That it was terrifying? After a sputtering cough, he speaks up, a second time.
James Bond      "Rita?" He spots her, as the nose of the craft sweeps horizontally--in the PT boat. His fingers race across the touchscreen controls. Whatever Bond says to her, it doesn't seem to transmit on the radio. No one but hers, anyway. It's brief--whatever it was.
Angela They all have stories and Nonon is no exception.

Born on the sea amongst a crew of pirates, Nonon might have thought herself more free than anyone else in The City. She started as a swab, then became a quartermaster, then a First Mate, then when her Captain was taken by the Whale of the Porous Hand...a Captain herself.

A pirate's life is not cute in the City, they did terrible things to survive and to support their 'free' life because it was not actually free, all they could do was offset the cost to others. Devour or be devoured--that was the true Law of the Sea. But at the same time, if everyone was forced to 'offset' the cost, then it was almost like fairness right? Eye for an eye, arm for an arm. Nonon thought that like this, she could be happy--happier than anyone else. And she was always so happy. She was so happy that she thought the joyful days would never end. She played it just risky enough, not reckless--reckless was too much, but a bit risky could be just fine.

Once she picked up a short grouchy man who despite being a prisoner, a fool hiding from the Middle after leaving it but she saw something in him that stopped her from just cutting him down right then and there. Despite being a dangerous prisoner whom associating with would only cause further trouble, she found that she was enjoying their back and forth. And Nonon hadn't given up on what she had found that brought her joy before, has she? Why start now?

Soon he was no longer a prisoner, and Nonon started thinking of what she wanted to protect. Even being just risky enough would turn out fatal in the end and so, she quietly inquired about securing a spot on the Kraken. She had stolen and seized enough riches for it but--

Denied

Of course nobody would want to accept a pirate so she tried to play it safe, took in a kid--a stowaway as a swabhand herself. And she pretended that the little slice of heaven she had found would last forever. She taught the kid everything she knew, piece by piece, encouraged her to lift, to grow, to eat, to become strong.

...One day the kid came back, with white gunk with red veins all over it. She sank her Fang into her shoulder and Nonon tried again and again to reason, desperately, pleadingly. It was the one day Nonon couldn't find a smile for her face.

Shajo appeared to protect her and when the kid turned on him...

Nonon made her choice.

NOW

Nonon is taken back to something almost solid she can stand on except she doesn't get to stand--Rita actually lays her down on her side and after that ordeal, after everything that pounded into her mind and everything that didn't, after a harpoon line became a thin string of existence--Nonon...is in the mood to celebrate lying down!

"We did it, Rita! I can't believe it, something even the Commander calls a God, even if it's just something left behind--we did it, we survived...! Maybe we can actually--"
Angela She notices that Rita is too quiet. She's not very smart but she isn't completely hopeless. "Rita?"

Rita kneels down by her. Nonon's heart is pounding because even if she wears the clothes of a King, they might as well be invisible in the presence of an actual Queen.

Nonon doesn't resist. She tenses for a moment, but then lets it go. Someone like her who has devoured all that she could see before her, someone as greedy as her--

--It's only fair right? She doesn't think she could so much as harm a hair on that swabhand's head anymore. Could a stronger Queen protect even someone as reckless as Shajo? Or is it wrong to even encourage Rita taking these meals, these servants to begin with?

Nonon... has no clue about any of that!

But she wants to be a real friend to Rita and Nonon has reached for everything she wanted in her life so far. It'd be a disservice to all those she has devoured along the path to stop now.

It's a bit of an awkward reach. since she can't move her closer arm quite right but she takes the lower arm up across her body to touch Rita's arm.

"You're as sweet as your brother," is all she can think of saying since she's not very clever and it's the one thing she knows is true from experience. "Must be tough. Hope you can do whatever you want when it's over."
Rita Ma      Rita's knees rest on the deck, and her face rests on Nonon's collarbone, and her tentacles rest wherever they wish. Drop by drop she comes back to herself. Bit by bit she tenses up.

     Why is my mouth on her? Wait. No. It wasn't me! I can explain. They won't have to hate me. They won't have to forgive me. I can...

     Bond says something in one ear from afar, and Nonon says something in the other from up close. When she takes her teeth off of Nonon, maybe she means to say something back to them.

     All that comes out is a choked little sob. The tentacles squeeze her, only almost enough to hurt.