Scene #8876: The Obsidian Maw

Owner	Pose
Ivy Carrow	Petra's light flickered out. Everything dissolved into chaos. Thankfully, Cinder was there to provide a backup, her lamp pushing back on lethal darkness before it could close around Petra. It also gave everyone a good view of the vault that had been pried open. "Mommy." Teeming, inky-black strands of SOMETHING poured out through the door, pouring across the ground in rivulets, running toward the explorers the same way a river runs downhill. Whispers were all around them, now. An incoherent, mangled chorus, noises that weren't quite speech. Like someone had heard human voices and tried to create a similar melange of sound without understanding what was language, picking up snippets of words and phrases in mimicry. The Warprunner medic, Luz was unlucky enough to be the nearest to the vault--first struck. "Don't Leave Me." Ropy black tendrils snaked up one leg, adhering her fast to the ground, while strands of blackness 'leapt' onto her lamp from her hip, a sticky spidersweb that...pulsed. It quivered and trembled, with something that might have been excitement, as the warning light on the lamp flickered first red... "Little help?" Luz growled, struggling to keep the lamp from being pulled into the dark. The light went white. "Now?!" And Ivy is there, slipping through a shimmering fracture in the air. Her sword was in her hand--when did she draw it?--and with an absent flick, she cut through the ribbons of dark. In the odd light, she flickered from place to place, slicing through the black mass. She addressed her men, in a breath between cuts, her voice lacking its usual boisterousness. Acquiring a sharpness. "No firing--" Another step through, another slice. "--Until you get a clean shot!" But keeping it under control is clearly a struggle for her. Her attention was split between a half-dozen warprunners and their lamps. "Save Me." Just one slip-up, and... But they weren't the only ones being pursued. Petra's narrow escape, under Cinder's protection, were the first to see the filaments drift into their light. Thin ethereal black strands. "I'm Afraid." They struck toward Cinder's lamp all at once, from dozens of subtly different directions. Slower than the crawling veins, they were far more unpredictable--and who knews how much they could afford to get hit by, before their light went out? Behind, in the dark, hidden from view, the tendrils struck. They coiled up from below the path, out of the dark, rushing forward to try to tangle Madeleine in their web and overwhelm the warprunners.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	Madeleine yelps as the tendrils pour out of the vault, instinctively leaping back into the pack of non-Elite warprunners. One of them shouts "They're behind us, too!", and Madeleine clips her lamp to her belt to wield her spear in both hands. However, seeing the sheer volume of darkness-limbs seething up from below the path, she thinks better of rushing into the fray alone. Instead, she takes a deep breath in, and lets it out as a cloud of freezing mist that spreads across the width of the bridge. The ice coalesces and builds on itself to form a low wall of sharp blades and spikes, enough to stem the tide for a little while and provide a literally thorny obstacle for the tendrils rushing the group from behind. Apparently satisfied with her little fortification, Madeleine sets to work with her spear, reaching over the wall to swing it in wide arcs and sever many tendrils with each swing.
Angela	Cinder swallows faintly, "Oh geeze," She says. "It's the kind of abnormality that makes 'mommy help me I'm scared' noises." These are, of course, Cinder's leastfavorite Abnormality but it is also a kind of Abnormality she's accustomd to ignoring having survived in Lobotomy Corp for months and months. "Seems like...Repression right?" She glances to Petra. "Can't exactly go in there to clean or hold it." Don't worry, though, even in a realm of infinite dark--Cinder's Fourth Match Flame can still provide fire. The blade ignites through sheer psychokinetic will as Cinder stays close to Petra so they can share her lantern's light. But that blade of flame swings out from the blade like the first samples of humanity swinging a torch at monsters in the dark. Through this EGO's light, she can see the path to the heavens before her. "ATtempting to discern characteristics of the entity." Angela says from her pad. "Worry less about hurting them and more about mantaining your light." "Gotcha!" Cinder says to the entity. "You're the ones that must be feared, see yourself reflected in the flame!"
Petra Soroka	"You don't have to hate the Train simply because of a bad experience I had on it." Before the thing beyond the door breached, Petra looks slightly disconcerted at Angela over her shoulder. Fidgeting by squeezing her thumb with her fist, she struggles with words for a moment, trying to either work through or convey some complicated feeling, before managing to find some. "That's not... really true. Your enemies are my enemies. That's what I'm for. I could've had a perfect experience with that fucking train and I'd still hate it for what it did to you." "Help Me." "Oh, fucked up. This is-- this is kind of spooky." "It Hurts." "... E-eugh. Is it actually harmful, though? It's just voices." "Hold Me." "Shit, it's going for our fucking lanterns--! Cinder, you-- don't worry about slowing down for me, if you need to dodge something, don't hesitate for me!" "Mommy." "Okay. I'm going to kill it." Now constrained to Cinder's puddle of light, and more, constrained to the light being stuck in Cinder's hand rather than freely carried as fast as she wanted to move my her morphmetal, Petra doesn't have nearly as many options as she would've before. Still, none of the options that would've moved her away from Cinder would've been taken in the first place, so it's only different in limiting her tactics, not her mobility. The rest of Petra's morphmetal coils up her torso, draining out of the bottle on her hip to naturally form a quivering lattice of gleaming metal strands across her chest and shoulders, cyclically flowing. When the filaments of vantablack trickle in through three-dimensional space, though, Petra is momentarily entranced. Raising a hand up in front of her face dazedly, she's distracted until Cinder's lamp flickers white. "Oh... it's kind of pretty...? Sh-shit, wait--!" Petra lunges forwards towards the filaments, already closer than comfortable for her slow start, and the quicksilver accumulation in her hands takes the fastest and simplest route to becoming a weapon. She's swinging her spear even before it's fully formed, slicing through the strands just before they reach Cinder, and in the next moment she crushes the shaft in her hand to split the morphic spear in two. Each half loses surface tension and dissipates into discrete floating droplets, which all harden into needles and launch outwards in every direction to drive back the storm of tendrils. "I fucking hate the ones that say 'mom'. God they're so gross." Petra gripes with Cinder, positioning herself loosely to fight at her back. "Maybe this was a bunker before getting fucked up and falling apart? And now all the dead idiots are just, like, bitching that we're not stupid enough to die like them?"
Ivy Carrow	Roiling, shadowy tendrils were engulfed by ice, frozen solid and stabbed atop icy spines and barricades. "Don't hate me." But...They just kept coming, roiling forward over the bodies like a glistening tide of black. ...But it bought enough time to for the runners to catch sight of it. "Don't hurt me." Guns slid from holsters at their sides, and the intermitted whispers were interrupted by the sharp report of gunfire, shattering ice and dark substance, pelting the narrow path about them with black ichor. Angela began to feel their nature falling into persective. These...Proboscis extend from the main body, act as hands, eyes...Mouth. "Don't let it find me." Somewhere deep inside, is the true thing. The real thing. Big. Sedentary. Vunlerable. They...No, It...is a carnivore. But it doesn't eat flesh, or even memory. Unlike Nothing There, it has no aspirations of personhood. It is a devourer of reality's building blocks, of the fundamental nature of reality that allows other life to thrive...That and so much more. "God help us." And it hungers. Cinder's flare does delay the filaments, but not quite for the reason she wanted. They turn on the fire in a frenzy, undulating, shaking, trembling...There's a sense of something being drawn in. Siphoned. Consumed. It's Petra that exploits this, half-formed morphmetal spear cleaving through tendrils of dark as they closed on the fire in a feeding frenzy. The dark teemed around them, dissuaded by the warprunner's gunfire, but... ...The path. The lamps. The lamps along the path. One by one, they were winking out, following the trail toward... ...The Warpgate. "I want to go home."
Angela	Angela's eyes slant towards Petra from her position on the pad. That's true, isn't it? Petra is that loyal. And she should repay that loyalty in equal measure with her own. Angela mulls on this quietly but only answers with a small nod, "Understood." ''Shit, it's going for our fucking lanterns'' "It learned that we really needed those fast!" Cinder admits, hissing through her teeth. "As much as I don't want to be devoured, I can't leave you without a light source!" Of course if she gets hit and loses that light it won't really help either of them, so Cinder decides she's just going to have to avoid getting killed AND avoid leaving Petra's side simultaneously. ''God they're so gross.'' "Yeah that's kind of the vibe I'm getting... What do you think?" That last question is to Angela who is rapidly digesting information on the--well it's not technically an Abnormality--monsters are sometimes just called monsters even in The City--but it's definitely a familiar one. "It's like Nothing There but even more empty," Angela says before realizing Madeleine probably won't get that reference. "There's no people remainng, it's just echoes. Or maybe the sound of digestion. It devours the building blocks of reality--just like the Captain said. The ideal solution would be--" The lamps start going out towards The Warpgate. "We ''absolutely'' cannot let it reach the Warpgate!" Angela says, her usual monotone giving way to actual fear and concern in her voice. The fire doesn't seem to be working exactly but Cinder only really has the fire. Maybe, she thinks, she can hit it with more than it can eat. The fire flares out once more as she takes another swing, trying to backpedal towards the Warpgate--hopefully with Petra with her. "DOn't know if we can kill it," She breathes out. "Maybe we can just escape out through the Gate before it and close it and never open it again ever?"
Petra Soroka	Looking back at the lights flickering out, Petra makes a nervously uncomfortable sound in the back of her throat. "Mmmm. The more lanterns we lose, the harder it'll be to get us back to the warpgate while we're being chased. If we're going to cut our losses and run, we should do it now." There's not much running and jumping around Petra can do in the lanternlight, when the threat is omnidirectional and the danger is posed to hurting something that isn't herself. Instead, the fight takes the shape of a tense back-to-back stance with Cinder, matching her movements as much as she can but mostly creeping around and exterminating the invaders into their pool of safety with spikes of morphmetal rather than engaged in 'battle'. Angela's analysis is given due attention, effortlessly; this trio dynamic isn't unfamiliar. "Right. So we're either running in to get to the core, or we're running to the warpgate while we've still got time. Either way we're doing it now, since attrition is, like, the absolute worst for us." Petra's musings on the nature of eggs and the void finally come to fruition when throws a makeshift Silver knife to sever a tendril and it passes out of the light before she summons it back to her hand. "Oh, shit, uh-- I'm testing something. Don't freak out, I'm being normal." The meaning of that inscrutable line becomes clear-- clearer, at least-- when Petra flicks a droplet of morphmetal between two fingers like a switchblade, and takes the ensuing flechette to her arm to draw a small trickle of blood. A globule floats underneath, red dripping to pool into a depression in the pristine metal, and then it seals shut around her blood like a bubble. With a gesture, Petra sends the capsule of her blood-- organic material, surrounded entirely by inorganic to be sealed off from the fatal darkness-- out of the realm of safety, lingering beyond the lanternlight for a second before returning to Petra's side and unsealing. Is the blood denatured, coagulated, boiled, damaged by the entropic environment despite being closed off from it? If not, then-- "Oh god. Lilian's going to kill me. I have a plan, you all-- you all go back to the warpgate and hold it back there."
Madeleine Cadrasteia	Shadow tendrils pour over Madeleine's fortifications, and she's slowly forced backwards toward the battle at the vault's entrance. Things are already feeling desperate before she sees the lamps on the path going out. When she does notice, she hastily puffs out more ice constructs - but this time, it's not walls. Seeds of ice grow and branch into quadrupedal shapes that quickly develop the features of large wolves, a half-dozen of them crowding around her on the bridge. No part of their function relies on cellular life, so unless this universe is inimical to water, Madeleine guesses, the wolves should be free to maneuver among the tentacles, tearing at them with tooth and claw. This leaves Madeleine with a little more room to breathe, at least in theory. "Maybe we can just escape out through the Gate before it and close it and never open it again ever?" "I think," she calls out, "We'd have to close the vault, too, so whatever this is doesn't spread, or even figure out how to open the warpgate. This gate was natural, right Ivy? I don't think it could be permanently sealed! Hold on, I'm coming over to the door!" Madeleine half-clambers, half-wall-runs up the side of an obelisk and kicks off toward the vault door. Instead of falling into the mess of tendrils below, she soars in a straight line, untethered from gravity, relying on the momentum from pushing off of the obelisk. She comes to a somewhat inelegant halt against the vault's great doors, dropping again to the ground near Petra and Cinder. "I have a plan, you all-- you all go back to the warpgate and hold it back there." Madeleine keeps an eye on Petra's blood sample, waiting to see if and how it's destroyed by the ambient environs of the surrounding world. The rest of her attention is spent clearing a wide enough swathe of the tendrils that Petra has a moment to do... whatever it is she's about to do.
Ivy Carrow	Cinder's flame burns bright and hot, as they retreat, and the tendrils continue to congeal around it. Eating, and eating, and eating, endlessly gluttonous. Insatiable. They shake with esctacy, diving toward the fire..."Please..." And one by one, the tendrils begin to glow with a red flame. Too much, too fast, they begin to wilt. With a keen, sound, like a tuning fork singing just beyond human hearing, they erupted into flame. "Why are you hurting me." The warprunners whooped and cheered, using the disruption to get a few more shots in. The flick of blood, turning through the air, catches Ivy's eye even in the grim red ambience. "Don't You Remember Me?" And as it returns to Petra's hand, Petra finds it...Normal. Ivy looks to Petra and smiles, a hard, razor of an expression. "Not alone you're not." She insists, raising a hand, a slash cutting through space. "Warprunners, guard the gate. If they start to breach, go through and close it behind you. Don't risk a breach. Elites. Guard the gate or follow us, but pick now."
Ivy Carrow	Alex looked conflicted. But Luz gave her a grim nod. "Aye, Captain. Come back from the woods." "I'll get us inside." Another cut in the world opened, even as the other was closing behind them...Glistening, seeming darkness beyond. Until Ivy HURLED her own lantern through. The interior was sleek, polished, futuristic and sleek, half-coated in black tendrils, leading somewhere deeper inside. They froze, momentarily, at the introduction of that delectable light. "Where Did You Go?" They peeled away to touch it, drink it up. It only took a moment. A moment, where the creature wasn't focused on what else was going through. Ivy was content to back up Petra, seemingly unphased by the anti-life properties of this exoverse, carving away at any curious filaments that meant to make the last of them a snack. "How Could You?"
Angela	Cinder always thought Petra was a true action hero and a bonified badass that was inspiring to watch and one she could place her heart in the hands of so when Petra suggests that the two of them head to the Warpgate while, by the sound of it, she dives into the midst of the beast to try and finish it off (at least, that's what she THINKS Petra is suggesting), Cinder only hesitates for a moment. At this point the three of them have worked as a team plenty and Petra being on another team now hasn't really diminished their ability to work together. "Petra, remember I am responsible for keeping you in optimal condition as per the Dame Commander's instructions," Angela says because this is what she thinks she can say to encourage Petra to survive more than anything else. It's also true, this did actually happen. Cinder takes a sharp breath and runs off towards the Warpgate, trying to cleave through any tendrils or devouring darkness that's in her way. The Fourth Match Flame blazes its hottest in places of dark and cold. Cinder swings the burning blade in wide arcs before using it to propel herself like a jetpack towards the Gate, skidding across the floor when she lands, spinning around on a heel to take another slice down like she was born to use this weapon. She wasn't, but that's the beauty of EGO Gear. "Petra! Don't worry about the Gate, we've got it! You've got this!" Cinder cheers Petra on, loyal to the point of not considering just how insane this feels.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	Madeleine sees Ivy - somehow alive without her lamp - open a portal into the vault's core and lead Petra in. The huntress hesitates, briefly, torn between the mission and impressing the captain. When she sees the grave expressions of the other Warprunners, however, she grits her teeth and starts fighting her way away from the vault. "Drogrung," she says, "It's time to see what you can do in here." The spear attempts to manifest its draconic form - first in full, but the apparition is faint and flickers out at the edges of Madeleine's lamplight. Then it contents itself with sweeping one massive clawed hand at a time across the bridge, tearing shadow-limbs and pushing them out of Madeleine's way. Once she's caught up with Alex and Luz she keeps a pace they can follow, letting their firearms cover her back as she focuses on clearing a path with wide sweeps from Drogrung. Meanwhile her wolves have rushed ahead to the warpgate itself, and are spraying clouds of freezing vapor to stick tendrils in place before they can push closer to the exit.
Petra Soroka	"We'd have to close the vault, too, so whatever this is doesn't spread, or even figure out how to open the warpgate." Petra looks over at Madeleine doubtfully, tracing her arc through the air with her eyes. "That's kind of a lot of assumptions to make when risking all of our lives, isn't it? That it's intelligent enough to do that, that it'd want to, and that it'd figure out how to get past the defenses the Warprunners have set up so quickly that it'd make regrouping and recovering pointless. It's not a risky gamble if there isn't anything big to lose. You don't have to play hero today." Petra is about to reconsider her plan and stay behind to guide Cinder and the rest to the warpgate-- because of course it would turn out this way, of course Elites would fall all over each other to recklessly dive into the heart of the threat without any regard for risk management or protecting the less resilient members of Ivy's team-- until Ivy herself steps up to join Petra instead, outside of the light. Petra looks at her curiously, head tilted to the side while her eyes saccade to assess her with an unreadable expression. "It'll be Ivy and I. Outside the light, so that there's as many lanterns for the warpgate group as possible. They need redundancy, we don't." Just before Cinder joins the others in retreating across the darkened bridges, Petra takes in a deep breath, inhalation matched by all of her morphmetal draining back into her bottle. She palms the bottle off her hip with one hand, drawing the transteam gun and spinning it around a finger with the other, then slams the Silver FullBottle in place with a sharp click. --SILVER!-- As Cinder runs back towards the warpgate, the edge of shadow encircling her lamplight closes in on Petra and is met by her own black glittering fog, pouring from the the muzzle of the transteam gun. "Vaporize." Mist Match! SILVER! ST-ST-STING! The fog explodes outwards in a flash of fire, leaving Petra clad in the black and sickly glowing-yellow armor of Sting Silver, running through with the lifeblood of the Silver morphmetal. The Eggpack is still on her back, though-- it's not like Angela's at risk. Taking her first steps into the darkness, Petra runs and lets the propulsors on her calves launch her through Ivy's portal, joining her in the room beyond. With the transteam gun in one hand and an amorphous conglomeration of quicksilver accumulating in the other, Petra sears away the creeping tendrils with a concussive blast of light from the gun, and sprays out a cloud of telekinetically propelled flechettes to lacerate others. To Ivy, "So, are you, like, a robot?"
Ivy Carrow	As Cinder and Madeleine burn and spear their way to the tower and the others filter in the tower, Luz holds out her hand to the entrance. "We won't hurt you." It quivers, flows like water, and waht had once been a doorway was lichen-covered brickwork. When they reach the gate room itself...It doesn't look good. Tendrils have crawled their way in through the window extinquishing most of the lamps in the leaving the two guards cornered around the gate. "We need to shut it down--" Luz starts. "Not yet." The Vice-Captain hissed, turning to the elites. "Get them out the window, and we'll make sure there's no window for them to get in through." There was a note of pleading in their voice. "They need more time!" Luz's expression pinched into a frown, but she raised her hand out--as did Alex. "Let Me See Your Face." The walls of the tower quavered, waiting for a chance to pinch shut. Ivy and Petra run through dark corridors, tendrils shifting and shaking underfoot, until they became a matt of quivering...Something, tendrils experimentally, tenatively trying to climb their legs, tasting a shadow of reality, but not quite enough to be sure. "I'm Home From Work, Honey!" Nothing the morphmetal and Ivy's blade couldn't handle. "So, are you, like, a robot?" Captain Carrow grinned. "We don't always have these lamps, you know. They're special. They'll let other visitors in. But, a Warprunner has be ready to go anywhere. Even a world that'd rip their bodies apart. What would be the point, if we couldn't?" A blue light began to shine. "Are We Going To Be Okay?" A low, strangled hum cut through the conversation, and the hall opened up. The two of them saw it. Its strange, insectoid body glinted in faint lightless like it was made of chitin and more like it was made of slate. Its headplates had horns, no eyes, and it was wrapped around a humming blue cylindar, great fangs burrowed into its substance, while a fountain of endless black cords split from its sides, like cancerous growths. There was a sound of lurching metal, as it felt some kind of threat. What came at them now weren't mouths, but talons, sharp like knives, sensing a threat to the body to put put down at all costs. "Show me what you're made of." Ivy said, and even in the dark her smile was audible. Throwing out her cloak, she let the spines fall into the void of its folds... ...But by no means was it all of them. They rained on Petra with a desperate, terrified fury. "Promise You'll Kill Them."
Madeleine Cadrasteia	"Get them out the window, and we'll make sure there's no window for them to get in through." Madeleine's breathing is getting a little ragged by the time she's back in the tower. In these close quarters a spear would be unwieldy, so she hands Drogrung off to a Warprunner and draws her knife. She hacks away at the tendrils creeping in through the window, hoping that Cinder has more tricks up her sleeve to clear the window in time.
Angela	The Eggpack IS with Petra! But Angela isn't sure that mechanical limbs will fair much better than everything else that they've been using. She's wholly willing to destroy the Eggpack ot protect Petra, though--it's not like oblivion will be able to hurt her when she's essentially telecommunicating like this. But the purpose of the Eggpack isn't really to help with fighting. This is the first time Angela gets to experience Petra's HENSHIN while she's actually on her back like this. Rather than the special lantern light, she can only emit the natural light from her screen. ''So are you like a robot?'' Angela's eyes slant towards Ivy. She looks at that grin for a moment. "She's a person," She confirms to herself. "If Petra ends up harmed from this I will blame you for it, Captain." Despite, you know, plenty of warning this was a dangerous adventure but Angela doesn't seem to care about the fairness of the statement. "So I hope you are taking this seriously." Cinder meanwhile hops back towards those two guards, slicing away with her blade. "Fall back if you can't help!" She shouts to them. "I'll be fine. I'm working with L-Corp's greatest Agent here!"
Petra Soroka	"I'm Home From Work, Honey!" That startles Petra more than the tentacles of shadow creeping up her legs. She stumbles in the middle of kicking through the clumps of darkness with morphmetal leg blades, staggering off-balance and being forced to dispel the unwieldy weapons on her calves before they cause her to fall flat on her face. "What the fuck was that? Like, actually-- what is it mimicking that phrase from?" Petra's disgust is quickly mixed with another emotion, only slightly lessened in the combination. To give herself from breathing room after losing her momentum, she slams the muzzle extension into place on the end of her transteam gun, prompting a callout of RIFLE MODE! A charged blast of light grows in front of the gun, glowing inside the tubes and bulbs affixed to the barrel, and Petra releases it at the densest cluster of tendrils blocking their way forwards. The purple-black 'STEAM BREAK' mixed with motes of silver explodes one with concussive force, and then a second time when the quicksilver particulate condenses into a razor sharp starburst to shred the rest. After that, Petra turns to Ivy with repulsed fascination in her voice. "Like, for real. Is it saying that because of getting memories from you all?" Not herself, for obvious reasons. "Or is that something it picked up from the civilization that was here before? The whole setup is kind of weird, isn't it? That it's a 'vault' like this instead of something meant for people to inhabit? Even monsters don't build things for no reason." "But, a Warprunner has be ready to go anywhere. Even a world that'd rip their bodies apart." "I see. So we got the budget option." Whether she's mad about that depends on whether Cinder gets out okay. "She's a person," "Well, I wouldn't necessarily go that far," Petra fondly luxuriates in the meangirl allyship from Angela, lightly sarcastic like she's sharing an in-joke. "I barely know her." "Show me what you're made of." "I guess we'll have to see if it disintegrates when we cut a piece off like the tendrils do, right?" Petra has to briefly raise her voice as dodging the talons brings her away from Ivy, rolling underneath a slashing pair of them and blocking another with a sheet of mercury spread through the air above her. "I mean, I'm not really a stranger to material that works off of non-Earth physics, but if it's a living thing, that's kind of interesting, isn't it?" Petra presses her palm flat against the quicksilver mirror-plane she created, grabbing the hilt of her gunblade from Qetra's hand as the reflection offers it up. She slashes through her own morphmetal, cleaving the shield in half while droplets of it accumulate on the edge of the blade like iron filaments on a magnet. Each half flows inwards to wrap around the shotgun's bayonet, stretching into a longer and longer echo of the blade, oversized but telekinetically lightened by Petra's connection with the metamaterial. Separate from the others, in the pitch-dark vault chamber, Petra grabs the next clawed tendril to make a swipe at her in her armored hand. Rather than batting it away, she squeezes it tight and yanks backwards as hard as she can, ripping the tendril but sending the thing's core sliding towards her. Both hands wrapped around the hilt of her gunblade, configured so that the blade is parallel with the grip, Petra levels it at the monster coming towards her and leans into a thrust at the same time as squeezing the trigger, ramming the massive blade fully through its body.
Ivy Carrow	Petra seizes the claw, and with a horrible yank, propels herself toward the creature. It screams, that same horrible, high-pitched noise that rips at ear drums, as sting Silver Pierces it through. It thrashes, feebly...But this part of its body was never meant to move. Not now. With a final low, earth-shaking moon, the leech died. It fell with a heavy clatter, its strands drooping, lifeless and dead. And the blue cylinder began to glow brighter, and brighter. The hum grew healthy and warm. Light began to fill long-dark alcoves, pouring across the walls, the roof, the ceiling, in channels of power long dorment. A hologram hummed to life, something like a blueprint, with red flashing icons. Ivy approached it, slowly. "I don't know what this place is for..." She grinned. "But I bet now, we can finally start to figure it all out..." Cinder's EGO acts as the flame to the moths of the tendrils, drawing them in from all about, overloading them with more of those, too-high screams. The room cleared, and... ...The whispers faded. "Is it done?" Luz breathed, "Did they do it...?" Beyond the window, a light began to glow. Warprunners slowly approached the window, peering warily over the edge, their expressions gradually shifting from suspcion to awe. It was a little like a popup book. Neon lights shone along the smooth black surface, began to stretch, move. Rise. Three great arms, seething with energy, rose into the air. The outlines of the 'vault' began to glow in intricate patterns...Aesthetic? Functional? Impossible to say. But against the backdrop of infinite dark, it was striking. And, at least for now, it was over.