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Owner	Pose
Lilian Rook	'No. It's better than it looks, trust me. Even if we were going to retreat, we'd need those guns dealt with anyway.'     Katrina looks betwen Bryce and Bond in an equal mixture of exasperation and fear. Whatever question she's asking is answered by Bryce's grim expression, and the words "How long has it been since I've thought about enemy range?" as he runs his hand back through his hair. "Fine. But I'm not letting them acquire recorded visual of Kat." "Hey, you--" "Which means me as well. I know. After this, we're leaving, James."     'I don't care who or which. If you're going to get out, don't expect me to stop, and for God's sake, don't waste time staring.'     "Who do you take me for?!" says Katrina, already lunging for the collasible stepladder and clambering up to the gun directly above it. "I lied about my age to be a combat medic at seventeen, and I didn't stop until I was thirty! Don't underestimate me, Mister Hot Shit!" Bryce is less verbal, but seems to think the same. He removes his hand from his mussed hair, says "Good luck. I won't haunt you if you get us killed. My ghost is spoken for.", and pulls down the steps for the second turret. Bond sees both indicators light up on the dash. The indicators reading ¹3,718 and ²3,363 tell him plenty about what it took to get to Nevada.     'Why would you do that?'     'Hold onto something.'     The perimeter guns acquire the APC instantaneously. Their tracking and accuracy both leave nothing to be desired, but the small calibre designed for maximized velocity can only pummel several hundred dents into the vehicle's chassis beyond very close range. One lucky shot breaks through, and punches a sunlit hole through a now-broken viewscreen right by Cinder's head. The ground crew have the ability to direct fire at them that will matter, and don't panic.     Katrina and Bryce both open fire on the nearest gun; Katrina's number two turret sweeps off to choose a second just after, and the distinctly 'this world' incendiary crackle of Bryce's focused fire burst through the gun housing and ignites the capacitor inside a second later. Katrina downs hers as Bryce moves to number three. She sweeps a terrifying line of fire over the assembling crew, forcing them to dive for cover, but by the time she's pouring fire into gun number four, they're already back out again. He's close enough to see a squad leader give hand signals, and another take knee and brace a shoulder launcher at him.     Xion's keyblade cracks his body armour just before he can fire. The blue-white flash launches a warhead somewhere invisibly into the sky, and he crumples in shock and pain. The men around him turn and fire in motion the instant he hits the ground-- no he dropped to the ground so that they could shoot, already drawing a bead on her. But another soldier staggers under one strike and collapses from a second. A third clutches his arm, bleeding and broken at the elbow, and slumps against a barricade with teeth grit. A fourth briefly defends himself with the length of his rifle, draws his sidearm on Xion, fires twice at point blank, and is sent flying. And it goes so-on.
Lilian Rook	Cinder can hear Katrina scream in spite of herself as Bond barrels towards the tower mast, not let in on the details. The impact slams him against the emergency driver suspension, bruising his chest, and strains the occupants. Clattering surrounds him as loose metal falls from the tower and pelts the roof; then the awful groan of straining metal. Three of the supports are mangled, with a third bent but holding. Bryce clambers out through the turret exit, slides over the windshield and off the hood, draws and drives that sword into the damaged strut. Rita's tentacles grasp and slice through two more, and over the course of ten seconds, a chain reaction of metal reaches its limit, and the tower careens slowly down the mountainside.     Only to be arrested in Rita's grip. Even tilted out of place by that much, tremendous geometric pressure lets off the Elites at ground zero. The saturation bombing had destroyed most of the pocket jammers, and the triangle drawn by the towers is cut down to a line. As Rita hurls the entire structure, Xion feels the land-sickness recede into the distance in real time. Katrina takes a deep breath and turns the gun on the crews, wide-eyed and trigger down. Bryce effuses black sparks, then weaves through the wreckage into hand-to-hand combat with the stragglers.     The last remaining mech in the bombed-out streets crashes forward headlong. It pivots from the Rita turned to ash, and lunges forward to stomp down on Arthur with its jagged-ended leg. The sidearm moves on from Lilian the instant the pilot loses her signature, and pulses a continuous sweep of beam fire over the sound of Trudy's voice.     'SHUT UP! YOU *BET* THAT'S MY DAMN NUMBER, YOU THREE-TRILLION EGO-SMEARING *KILL-COUNTER*, YOU THINK I'M ABOUT TO CHANGE FOR THE GUN-FUCKER WHO CAN'T DECIDE WHAT HER ARM'S GONNA BE MADE OF TODAY?!'     The last few missiles are dumb-fired straight along the line where Arthur can leap back, then the launcher is purged, and after it, something is shot high into the air before becoming a rotor drone, taking advantage of the lack of comm scrambling instant it happens, without question. "I expect you to change into a smear, kid." A shot from Lilian snipes it out of the air, but it's already scanned and acquired Petra, and transmitted telemetry to the incoming aircraft. The flaming husk falls from heaven and is quietly lost in the chaos. "Do you think there's a moral point to even make here? Hahaha! The winner gets to believe whatever they want when you're dead!"     'LEAST SHE'S STRONG ENOUGH FOR MERCY, *MURDERER!!!*'     "So who fucking cares? Her grey matter isn't stronger than a bullet. 'Strong' is something you people made up. There's no such thing as being a strong person when a rock falling off a roof gets more say in who you are than you do." The machine's remaining arm ejects the flame canister, and the blade lashes out at him a little faster than before. The spreading shadow beneath it takes the energy weapon just past him as the mech stumbles.. A sound of irritation turns into a garbled snarl in the radio. "And whatever you see in her goes away when you all die. And when I go on ignoring it, it never existed. No one will ever know what they even lost."
Lilian Rook	'Do you even know who amongst your targets is even capable of it? Would you bother to learn in the first place?'     Still dripping iridescent burgundy gore-like from its severed arm, the mech punches its fingers through a mangled car and fastballs it down the street, rolling over Trudy and any reflexive summons on sheer inertia. "Should I have? Did I need to? If only you had time left to learn! You only have to know anything about anyone when they can hurt you. Once they can't, you can make them anything you want."     'Why are you so mean to Lilian, Ash? Why do you want her to 'break' so badly? Why do you hate her dreams so much? I don't get it at all. A Bloom of Humanity is supposed to be someone special. But you sound just like everybody else.'     The machine's fist clenches in direct mirror of the pilot, the signs along by controls that cannot possibly be manual. The acidic glow spreads from somewhere in its middle, racing along subsurface etchings across its skin. Magic suffuses its legs, and pools in its remaining palm. Pale blue-green designs overtake Trudy's shadow portal. The pilot broadcasts out loud what Rita sent only psychically.     "Oh dear me! I'm so sorry, Madam Rita Ma, heiress to the Ma Fortune, founding family of Union Busan! How ungraceful of me to speak ill of Chevalier Lilian Rook! I'm sure we all look alike to your esteemed company, but I beg you to reconsider!" It's incredible that a speaker that badly mangled can still convey sarcasm, double processed as it already was.     "I'm sure your 'dreams' are so all so important that it'd change my whole life if I just stopped and listened only for a moment. I'd bet they're full of all kinds of shit I've never heard of before, and not the same endless whiny dogshit every one of you spend your lives pining about like so much as the dirt you walk on cares. I bet you know just the right words to say to change everything; and I only have to listen!"     The thrown jammer tower scrapes the roof from a building and collides with the earth. The magical takeover of Trudy's shadow crumbles in seconds. The mech lurches forward, and the pilot crackle-snarls through the speakers. "Haha! God I hope so. It makes it feel even better to fucking ignore it."     Freeing one leg from the shattered shadow-zone, the pilot slams the mech's jagged leg through the pavement, then claws another building to drag the machine free. Its working leg begins tearing apart at the knee, lost to the void. "You too. Everything you were ever going to do, every shitty little thing you were ever proud of about yourself; blink and it's all gone; and the rest of us decide everything about you forever."     "Take your beautiful could-have-been to hell along with you. The rest of us already decided you'll be the little heiress super hero that everyone loves, senselessly killed in action, because she was just so fucking greedy that nothing was ever enough; and she wanted us to like it."
James Bond	After this, we're leaving, James. Don't underestimate me, Mister Hot Shit! My ghost is spoken for.     "Thanks for indulging me," Bond answers, without turning to look at either sibling as they man the turrets.     He keeps the rover moving--because to do otherwise would mean it becomes a mausoleum. As he wreaks havoc on the emplacement, he makes eye contact, filtered through the intact viewscreen, with the soldier arming the shoulder launcher. The rover speaks its language to him, with transmission tongue and engine diaphragm. It has been this entire time, a tonal language felt and understood in the lurch of inertia and the bounce of suspension.     Bond understands what it tells him in the race towards the tower: 'I might not get clear in time.' Thanks to Xion, it doesn't have to, and his hands grip the wheel with renewed purpose.     Crash. He makes a strangled groan of pain as the restraints dig their fingers into his chest. Bryce is out, Bond drops the rover into reverse and frees it from the dented, now-useless tower supports, sending it barreling down the incline. A precise wrench on the wheel and a light tap on the brake whips it around.     As it spins, the driver's door opens, Bond bracing one hand on the handle, one foot on the running board--the door is rolling cover for him, the nose of his Walther spitting a shot grouping at the last straggler Bryce has yet to manage.     "Take the wheel, if you're leaving," he calls to Bryce. "I'll man the gun until we're back at the central AO." With the implication being of course that Bryce and Katrina can make their withdrawal in the rover while Bond, Xion and Cinder regroup with the others once they're back in reasonable walking distance.
Angela	''You're not going to die here so don't even fucking--fucking try.'' "Doin' my best not to." Cinder says offhandedly before she manages to get into the car. Getting into a fast moving object driven by a Bond seems like the best way to stay safe and alive while she isn't in a position to fight. ''Ms. Cinder, you were bleeding'' Cinder smiles at Rita and says, "'m good." Then she feels a little woozy and she adds, "On second thought, maybe a little healing wouldn't hurt. Pretty sure I'm out of the K-Corp ampules." She doesn't seem to notice anything weird about Xion's blood but even if she could, she is sort of preoccupied with Cinder's blood right now. She doesn't even seem to be concerned that Rita has a taste for the stuff because she's only heard of Rita going after bad people and she didn't even eat Nonon, who has a lot more blood than Cinder don'tcha know. She opens her mouth to say something back to Ash who is saying shit that flies wholly in the face of her personal philosophy but then the pilot indicates they are wholly determined to ignore even correct responses back and Cinder decides to save her energy. Really doubtful she could yell loud enough right now anyway, she reasons with herself, focusing on not bleeding out. "So uh." She asks Rita, who is a Queen of the Sea and all. "Angela's out of reach so I can't get any orders. Can I sleep for a little bit, that sounds like it could be fun. I don't think missiles were launched at me before so new experiences, yaaayyyyyy...."
Trudy Grimm	That person just threw a car at her.     Trudy has no reflex-summon answer to this one, focused as she is on dragging Ash's machine into the void. Just holding them in place is a substantial undertaking, the gleaming black marble bone of the giant skeletal hands creaking like an unstable cave. The grip slips when that car is hurled, as Trudy's focus jitters and she drops to the ground. This manages to avoid getting completely bodied; she only gets crushed underneath it as it rolls over where she was standing. The witch remains there for a few heartbeats, curling up on herself to cradle bruised or broken ribs.     The giant's left hand slips, letting Ash's foot free. The right hand clutches more tightly, eventually tearing that leg completely free and dragging it into the inky pit of the Void. The hand returns a moment later, slamming open-palmed against the machine's back to topple it over.     Trudy groans, picking herself back up as the arms of the Giants wrestle with Ash's mech. Her eyes glance upward, following the drone's downward spiral.     Ah ha. It's gone.     Her right hand moves from cradling her ribs to the spine of the Grimoire. With a grimace, the witch straightens her posture. When she raises the book, it unfastens and flips open until Eiwaz flickers to horrid life above its seemingly blank pages. NAZCA has seen the Rune of Death plenty of times by this point. In her left hand, Trudy produces a green crystal, raising it to peer inside. Satisfied, she lowers it, pinched neatly between thumb and forefinger.     "Well. That makes this a simple decision, then."     The giant's hands focus entirely on obstructing, pinning, and holding Ash's machine still while the witch approaches. A runic circle erupts around her. Similarly, as if layered over the blackness of the shadowy Void, runes cast out beneath the mech itself. The inside of the gemstone begins to glow.
Rita Ma	Miss with the tower. That means she's scared of it, but I don't have a second shot. I hope it helped everyone's magic, but--      "I'm so sorry, Madam Rita Ma, heiress to the Ma Fortune, founding family of Union Busan!"      Rita always seems so placid when she's doing Queenly things, as if her mind weren't fully in her body at all. That brings her crashing back. Eyes open wide and a little gasp leaves her as her whole cloud of tentacles squirm, as if she'd just been pierced through the chest.      How many people here knew that? How many knew it wasn't really like that?      It's a bad idea to hesitate in the open, but reflexively she does the social math. Her eyes flit to Bond, Xion (no- don't look at her), Bryce, Katrina (don't look at her either), Cinder...      "Oh. Ms. Cinder." Startled, again, but that trusting look soothes Rita. One of many arm-thick tentacles snakes out, wraps around Cinder's body like a very gentle python, and then glows from within like a lightbulb.      "Please... don't sleep yet, okay? Petra will get really worried if she doesn't hear from you." That glow osmoses into Cinder before fading, sealing wounds and suffusing the body with a sense of wellbeing. Rita slink-slurps herself behind the APC for temporary cover while putting Cinder back down on her feet. "A little better now? Ms. Katrina, she might need your help too."      If you can look past the hungrily dilated eyes, she really is sort of like an angel.      The rattled, tired woundedness still bleeds into her mental voice when she telepathically reaches out to Ash next: "'Gray matter stronger than a bullet' is called 'having friends'. None of these people are your friends, are they?"      "You're all backwards. Or maybe inside-out. Wanting to say that we're looking down on you for being 'normal', but looking down from 'normal', too. ... I'm sorry we didn't get here sooner."
Arthur Lowell	> Arthur: BREAK HER, OR BE BROKEN.     Arthur isn't strong enough for that. He's barely strong enough to smash away the incoming missiles, and endure their blasts. Teeth are gritting more out of stress than determination now. > Arthur: IRRADIATE HER. CONDEMN HER TO WALKING GHOSTHOOD.     "SHUT UP! SH-SHUT UP...!" Arthur slams into the ground, skidding and scraping until he comes to a stop, struggling to prop himself up. "SHE'S NOT LIKE THAT AT ALL! WHAT SHE HAS IS MORE REAL THAN ANYTHING THAT COULD EVER SEE IT! *ANYTHING!!* No *ambush*, no *bullet*, no *BULLSHIT MECH-JOCKEY* IS GONNA UNDO IT!" > Arthur: CONDEMN HER AND THIS DESERT ENTIRE TO AN EVENT HORIZON.     "Sh-shut up...! You're wrong, you're *WRONG!*" Arthur struggles. He's not doing anything so cool as indulging determination, or so cathartic as crying. What he's doing is worse: That skin-prickling, overheated, agonized mentality of starting an incendiary forum thread and quote-replying every single other poster with sequentially-edited posts for five days straigh. That mentally strained state of wishing to be right and fruitlessly struggling to make them admit it all. > Arthur: BREAK HER OR DIE.     "YOU...!" That's wrong. There's nothing that demands that. They have a universally hostile sentiment and right now it's pointed at Lilian. There's no reason to put everything on the line like that. At this point, it's not even about Lilian.     "You..."     You're just looking for an excuse to fight the entire world. So when you ran into someone who's been fighting the world enough to hold onto the sword of humanity's disdain, you thought, finally, a weak point I can self-destruct at.     "Y-you..." > Arthur: NO. > Arthur: Shut up. I've got this > Arthur: Pull back. The only thing that matters is everyone getting out alive > Arthur: SHE WILL KILL THE BLOOMS > Arthur: They *say* they'll kill the blooms. Or "break" them. > Arthur: So learn more about what there is to break, and how > Arthur: Protect it > Arthur: Don't you remember when you wanted to be a Knight?
Xion	Hurtling into the crowd of support soldiers, Xion challenges them - challenges their ideals, challenges their masters, challenges their dreams. Was their a knight amongst them? Were they ready to die, here, for their cause? She asks with her words. She repeats herself with the Keyblade. A clean-coated black smear of motion swings out a silver crescent trailing crown-tooth tip, and armor shatters underneath the blunted swing of weapon. The head-leaking Nobody carries through her swing like a home run baseballer two-handing their whole body's torque spin into a swing, releasing one grip at the zenith to finish with a left-hand holding the blade and the squad leader thrown aside, down, flattened-- Shooting at her, given even the barest hint of mercy as Keyblade impacts yet does not cut through, bludgeoning apart will-to-fight as much as its wielder. She flickers, and makes a sickened noise, but the weaponfire doesn't lance empty air, and blasts fresh holes in Xion's black coat while she moves through all the frames and motion of her backswing and pivot, taking an extra steadying step hard into the ground beneath to not be pitched forward from the gunfire. Strike. Advance. Earn another hole. The pattern repeats itself, even when a swift kick to the head silences one gunman on the ground. Two handing blade down on a guard, she's shot twice more, point blank, and the fire again finds her flickering with a black-mote dander, pained complaining-tone escaping her lips as a fresh wave of nausea works through her, and then a split second later further holes are blown into her. Leaking from two burn-ringed holes in her center, Xion rolls her weapon tooth-out and drags it down the shooter's front at-speed, hooking weapon down and away with left-handed rotation while her right closes and flares with a bleak purple steam, swung with a devastating gravity-pressure blast to put another soldier for a bitter cause down on the ground without checking for pulse or effect. Punching aside, punching her way through when she cannot key away the barriers before her, Xion's sweeping swordplay tworls through blading away a scattering of automatic fire, bullets ricocheting and zinging around her, breaking into fat metal sparks and hot dots of scrap. Fighting her way to the turrets isn't her objective, though, and despite taking further fire for it, her bladed advance through the defensive line aims to keep that pressure off of Katrina and Bryce and James in the APC, until in the seconds-aftermath she staggers to the covered wall and hurls one more guard down into the defile before her and slides down to meet up with James and the gang. With the removal of the nauseatingly space-warping tower, the noirette snaps into a hole before reaching the bottom, landing on the rover's top and thunking to a knee for balance, knocking on the roof twice to make sure everyone knows she's friendly. From outside, Xion looks somehow worse than before she changed her coat the first time, having been clubbed and knifed when not shot some more, but only Bryce and Katarina might see her on guncams. There's no quips or extra words. She understands, intuitively, that James will bring her closer to the fighting. She's been denied the ability to carry herself there, but that's what friends are for.
Arthur Lowell	Arthur's body suddenly saturates in shining green light, like someone flicked a switch to the "ON" position. No screaming, no shockwaves, no wild sounds and energies. Just bright white and shimmering black where flesh once was, and shuddering, incoherent sunspots where wounds were. "It would be so, so sad, if what you're saying was true." He says, in a voice quiet enough that it's unlikely Ash will hear without a directed mic. "But it would be worse for Lilian. So I need to make sure she doesn't have to bear that."     Ah. The geometry jammer is off.     No dramatic blasts and sudden shockwaves and rising heat and light. Just a single thin line of light, no more than a foot wide, tracing a line between Arthur... and the APC. His strange ultra-high-speed pseudo-teleport, leaving behind a scattered trail of distinctly not-mecha-sized evacuation gates to a hundred different safe distant locations, should land him clinging onto the surface of the vehicle. At which point, all that light leaves his body and enters the machine's. The horsepower and useful downforce should fucktuple. Fractally repeating space inside the transmission should enable twenty, thirty, forty new gears. Gravity should grant tires unspeakable grip, and the the guns should be empowered with the heat of stars. Any exhaust ports, air exchange vents, or anything like that, will spew stardust.     "We *need* to go. I can't stop Ash from hurting the Blooms if we're trying to fight like this. I won't be able to stop Ash from hurting *Lilian* unless we put all we got into protection and figure this out more. The more we fight here... the more we're fighting to hurt Ash, instead of protect the Blooms. I don't even know what we'll do if we win." > Arthur: Do what you always do. Say too much to the wrong people     "Trudy!" He calls out from his clinging position on the vehicle. "Don't! The Blooms... We need all four. We need all four alive, together, if we're going to get through what comes next!" He doesn't expect Ash to hear him when he focuses on her. "And you need them too."     Yeah, Bryce and Katrina are probably hearing way, *way* too much right now. That's the classic Arthur mistake. Or, maybe, to some degree secrecy is going to cause more trouble than it solves. One way or another, they're gonna learn enough capitalized words to make uncomfortable conversations later.
Tamamo	Nothing had turned out as Tamamo wished. She was warned of this, but had held out a very foolish amount of optimism, that they would discover something like the third Bloom she'd met, if not the second. Not all things parallel so neatly. She knew that, of course. That there would be 'something worse' was obvious, but not how much worse it would be.     It's an ordinary day, long ago. A time that felt more ordinary than today. Lilian taps away at her phone, when she thinks Tamamo isn't paying attention.     It's a time more recent, and less ordinary, not quite so long ago. Tamamo researches something to get along better with Oreshnika. . . . Yes, it is research, even if it looks like she's playing around.     It's today, in a land many times transformed. Tamamo is hiding, where Lilian had taken her. It's not one of her strengths, to sneak around without being noticed. Lilian wants her to be safe, and she -- Tamamo-no-mae was never given the role of 'hero.' Not back then, though there were some who imagined otherwise.     'No shock it took them this long to find her; how can they even tell you one-star nobodies apart?'     Memories draw a line of understanding.     "Oh, did everyone hear what was sent to my ears, just now? Perhaps dear Nika would have liked you, after all, if you could choose a path beside her. I little understand the thoughts of gamers, though in this, I am willing to try."     The moment she reveals herself, the pains taken in choosing that particularly auspicious hiding spot would be rendered npught. It's tantamount to suicide, even with her personal wards and healing charms, against the level of destruction taking place.     That was true until this moment, when the geomantic lines returned to comprehensibility, and the few talismans Tamamo had scattered slightly shift, according to her direction, perfecting positions that could only have been approximated just moments ago. The difference is that between a paper screen and a seven-layered fortress, even if her voice could be confirmed in exact position, without the sense that it echoes through a meandering arc.     'Haha! God I hope so. It makes it feel even better to fucking ignore it.'     "Is that your chosen joy? To say 'no,' and have the world recede before your will? It is an understandable one, at the least. I expected you to be more like the third, and yet, here you are, instead resembling the first." She doesn't explain the numbering, and isn't likely to.     '...and the rest of us decide everything about you forever.'     "'Just so,' I might have said, some handful of years ago. I have since come to appreciate how different 'forever' is from 'a thousand years.' Those who decide to write of one's life find that their own lives will also pass, and the wheels of karma, the cycle of small joys and great suffering, continues."     'Take your beautiful could-have-been to hell along with you.     ...because she was just so fucking greedy that nothing was ever enough; and she wanted us to like it.     "I must apologize, for such a journey would never have been taken -- under these circumstances, and on this schedule -- had I not wished for it. It was my mistake that our presence should be so unwelcome. I have, in truth, no wish to force your presence against your will. I hope for your forgiveness in giving some impression otherwise."
Tamamo	As if it's an entirely secondary matter, "That this world may be soon destroyed... well, perhaps that issue will not require your involvement, after all. The evidence was far from conclusive."     And all throughout, Tamamo aims at the remaining functioning mecha something that has no basis in sacred geometry, and combats directly against the stated wish to ignore her. It's impossible, really. Directed this way, with this force, the gravity of solar divinity would arrest the attention of the most stone-faced guard, and that clenched, robotic fist is anything but. The whisper of it a constant, almost-worded feeling, woven together with what Tamamo is saying aloud, but only for those in her narrowed targeting.     Look this way. Fall into me. See how brightly I shine. Feel this heat. Does it not burn your vision? Don't look away from me. I hold what you want. Strike your fist against the heavens. I won't disappear to half-hearted effort. You can't scream the sky away, but don't you want to try?     It's a bidirectional trap. It's a lure into a seemingly endless series of laid curses of varying esotericism, all the magical munitions that Tamamo couldn't have used minutes ago. Walking toward her hiding spot is the obvious, required choice, according to the pull of her Charms, yet punished at every fraction of a step, obfuscating the notion that she could have laid them entirely for the purpose of invoking greater caution.     No matter which path is taken, she expects the opening to be exploited. Tamamo leaves it up to Lilian to choose the moment to take her away.
Petra Soroka	There's plenty of targets Petra could potentially go after, and some of them are even firing high velocity rounds at her girlfriend. She's further away from the action, though, and with the tower collapsing once the rover crashes into it and subsequently being hurled away by someone unidentifiable, the mission objectives on that side of things don't seem to be something Petra can or needs to help with anymore. Meanwhile, on this side of things, oozing mechanical gore and more than holding its own against a half-dozen Elites, is.... "What a disappointment. I thought Fenrir was supposed to be something special too, but she just blends in with the rest of you roaches."     ... Someone Petra can't really ignore. And, against all intuition, not because she's frothing at the mouth to leap to Lilian's defense like so many of the others are, despite her fervent loyalty to doing so. Instead-- "And whatever you see in her goes away when you all die. And when I go on ignoring it, it never existed."     -- Petra glances over to look probingly at Lilian, in the instant before the mech's leap into the street kicks up a cloud of dust and debris that cuts off her vision. Petra pulls her EGO cloak up against her mouth, shielding herself from the near-incessent pulses of heat and pressure coming from being far closer to the mech itself than is wise, stumbling to catch her balance as yet another dummy car explodes by her when the mech's steps rock it onto its side. Another pair of ratbots float off her hand after being given instructions; directed to grab any number of the barriers and explosive traps set around the city block, and drop them right into Ash's path.     Petra, meanwhile, is pressed to fight for her life. A tangle of morphmetal from the FullBottle in her gun reaches out to rip a chunk of concrete out of a nearby wall, pulled in front of her in the moment that it crumbles to dust from a beam pulse that would've hit Petra an instant later. Getting a counterattack in herself is almost out of the question-- but that oddly warm feeling she gaslit herself into having towards the mech is still lingering, somehow.
Petra Soroka	"I'm sure your 'dreams' are so all so important that it'd change my whole life if I just stopped and listened only for a moment. I'd bet they're full of all kinds of shit I've never heard of before, and not the same endless whiny dogshit every one of you spend your lives pining about like so much as the dirt you walk on cares. I bet you know just the right words to say to change everything; and I only have to listen!"     This isn't the kind of banter that professional soldiers make; it's intimately, furiously familiar, to Petra. There's no amount of defiant, adoringly-devoted rage that'd make a dent in this-- and Petra can hardly even muster it up. "Haha! God I hope so. It makes it feel even better to fucking ignore it."     "I hate being right, I hate being right, I hate being right...." Petra mutters to herself while so, so intentionally flipping open her mirror to swap her Kamen Rider plastic gun for her gunblade.     "Hey, Ash? What, like, do you *get* out of working with NAZCA? You're talking a lot of shit about-- about Lilian being indistinguishable from the rest of us, but-- you're the fucking premier attack dog of the fucking future-CIA, right?" Profanity-laden and raggedly battle-interrupted as she is, none of Petra's questions to Ash sound like snidely rhetorical gotchas.     "It can't just be about this being what's fucking *materially best* for you, or whatever. Or you'd be a fucking CEO somewhere instead of a Bloom in the military." The fact that Lilian is a CEO briefly slips Petra's mind. "So what's up with *NAZCA*, for someone like *you*?"     "Lilian is really really fucking special, and she's with us-- she's a Paladin, and an Immune, you know-- because that's part of how she wants to be more special. Where the fuck do you get off saying it's different?"
Lilian Rook	'Thanks for indulging me'     "You'll do better than that! You owe me!"     Spalling metal falls from the APC's bumper as Bond reverses. Something in the frame definitely broke, but it's a military vehicle; borderline overengineered for how widely it has to be sent around the world; it'll hold. Bullets ping from the armoured door through the whole spin. The last perimeter gun drives a round through the locking bolt while he hangs from the handle, then Katrina sends up up in flames.     'Take the wheel, if you're leaving'     Bryce charges a man in the last moments of reloading his rifle. The barrel comes down unusually fast, aimed at his head by sheer adrenaline. He dives under it at superhuman speed, and the muzzle flash ruffles his hair. The sword scrapes the ground, scythes upwards, and cleaves through the man's tactical belt and into his spine through the waist. He kicks the body free before it's fully a corpse. "We are. Human beings aren't what I'm used to."     Katrina waves down Cinder from the gun to signal her to communicate if she needs to be carried out. Bryce scrapes by Bond exchanging places on the other, and swings around into the driver's compartment. The front axle squeals hideously, then spins freely, and the vehicle accelerates back down the route Bond had ploughed uphill. Katrina sprays retreating fire into the artillery batteries that look like they might still work, and flinches as the ammo catches and explodes from underground.     'SHUT UP! SH-SHUT UP...! SHE'S NOT LIKE THAT AT ALL! WHAT SHE HAS IS MORE REAL THAN ANYTHING THAT COULD EVER SEE IT! *ANYTHING!!'     "Then why do you even think she needs you to say it for you? If it were real, it wouldn't need you to prove it exists."     The garbled words are threateningly stable, for how badly mangled the machine is. The pilot is fighting a stalling battle in the first place, but the mech is limping along on a shin without a foot and concrete building-husks for support. The grasping skeletal hand occupies its sole remaining arm, fending it away and slashing back with the remaining functional energy blade, getting just a little further from ground zero, and a little further from the jammer tower wreck.     "You don't give a shit how real it is. You just want to be a part of it. Want it to be yours. That's why you'll smother Fenrir before she ever catches light. You'll abort everything we could be, before you'll risk not being there for it, hero."     Arthur vanishes from a retaliatory blow, and appears clinging to the APC for dear life. Bryce nearly lets the wheel slip as everything kicks into overdrive, the leans into it with an audible groan of exertion, spinning the steering arm over arm to turn until the car is practically streaking down the mountain sideways.     ' I won't be able to stop Ash from hurting *Lilian* unless we put all we got into protection and figure this out more. The more we fight here... the more we're fighting to hurt Ash, instead of protect the Blooms.'     "What?! I thought you were coming here to meet him?! What's going on?!" Katrina manages to yell over the stellar roar of the engine. "Doesn't matter! Leave it to her! If that makes sense to the rest of them then we don't belong here!" Bryce shouts back, and says "Tell Lilian we're out of the AO!" Flooring the brake only slows the car, but it gives Bond enough leeway to bail out; or at least give Xion a short enough range to take him and Cinder. He only drifts for a short while before slamming the accelerator again, and blasting down the mountainside.
Lilian Rook	'So what's up with *NAZCA*, for someone like *you*? Lilian is really really fucking special, and she's with us-- she's a Paladin, and an Immune, you know-- because that's part of how she wants to be more special. Where the fuck do you get off saying it's different?'     It's nearly bizarre that the pilot actually fires on Petra even as she gets her answer. The sidearm is the last ranged option, but still the deadliest, vapourizing cement as fast as she can throw it in the way. "I can't believe it. You don't know anything, do you? Never thought to ask, right? Get pointed at the bad guy and it all works out." The mecha-sized handgun overheats. The violet-tinged glow of the fuel rod-style core bathes the adjacent parkade, then the mech busts a handhold into it with its elbow and drags itself upright.     "Do you think the Immunes are going to do anything? The Paladins? This is why. Say whatever you want about the brass, but they're the only ones with a plan. And because it doesn't work unless all four are together, your fucking contamination is an existential threat."     "NAZCA is the fastest way to get all the Sparks in one place and finally let them burn. I'll kill you just to breathe."     'Is that your chosen joy? To say 'no,' and have the world recede before your will?'     "Get real. Why does anyone become a hero if it isn't that?" The mech turns to look in the direction of Tamamo's voice. The extended handgun sweeps across the ruins, angling back and forth as the pilot homes in on the sound. "You're supposed to be wise, aren't you? The people who chased you out loved every second of it, because they got to say no to a god. That's why they made the guy who killed you a hero, too. Nobody tells any stories about whatever you thought."     The trap does the work of finding Tamamo for the pilot before they even finish. A shot fires, punches through four buildings, and Lilian blinks into the way to turn it aside on the flat of her blade, digging in with a tremendous exertion of effort that leaves the armour on her hands smouldering uncomfortably. She catches herself against a doorframe, nods silently to Tamamo, gestures for her to move sidelong, and looks away after a worried glance. The mech lunges forward after the sight, lurching across the street to grab the building on the other side; and then crashes onto its back as space twists around and a cursed trap takes its last credible leg out from under it.     Like crawling out of bed a fresh amputee, the mech props itself up on its elbow, turns groaningly around, levels its sidearm anyways, and then Lilian streaks in from above and cuts clean through its battered and twisted wrist joint, losing its sole remaining weapon to the street below.
Lilian Rook	The wrist stump is swung at Lilian, who kicks off from underneath it and slows her fall from the side of a ruined general store, skipping back to neutral range on the road. The mech's head turns to watch her with the pilot, then examines its severed hand, and the battered speaker sputters out "So that's as far as this thing goes. I've got complaints, but it worked hard to come this far. Harder than the R&D frauds could have made it. I might get attached."     The dying comm winds down to a pitch-warped crackle, and putters out with a TV-switch thump. The last semblance of life in the machine vanishes, not by it falling limp, but by it going eerily still. Only now by contrast do you notice that it must have been mirroring even the pilot's breathing.     Then the mech's building-sized hulk lurches from the urban ruins as if hit with a defibrillator. The chest ruptures from within, and a spinning chunk of metal the size of a door embeds itself in a hotel wall like a shuriken. A human hand, clad in fighter pilot's fingerless gloves, catches the edge of the mech's gaping wound, and pulls the rest from the cockpit on its own.     You hear "Should I say 'don't send a machine to do a human's job'? Or should it be 'don't send a human to do a Spark's job'." without the distortion. Or at least, only one layer of it. The slight electronic tinge of a vocoder mounted somewhere inside the pilot's helmet; one with a full-face polarized visor with peripheral vision allowance, neck-sealed to anti-G suit slimmed down to be fit for a Harpoonist. Digital camo grey on grey, the idea that it could let a pilot escape into a city is dashed by the lurid purple belt fastened over.     One foot up on the edge of the cockpit, the pilot briefly brushes the metal with their fingers, and says "Oh. Right. You're using 'Blooms' instead. Anything to fit a theme."     'You're all backwards. Or maybe inside-out. Wanting to say that we're looking down on you for being 'normal', but looking down from 'normal', too. ... I'm sorry we didn't get here sooner.'     "Normal is the place you look down from. That's why everyone fights over it. And that's why you're so desperate to pretend like you aren't a fucking abomination, isn't it? So you can look down on the rest of us; like you just were, and you're still doing."     The pilot leans sideways, and reaches into the cockpit, snagging something that comes out with a screech of steel. Their arm jerks with feedback like a snapped rib. Lilian raises her sword, but doesn't move from street level, raising her voice to be heard. "If you're looking down on anyone, you're doing it with the three of us, too. You can't fight with me for that vantage without cutting it out from under you." And the pilot laughs.
Lilian Rook	"You think you get to count the same as me just because of some prophecy? Just look at you, Rook! Little heroine girl all over the recruitment posters, out on a special adventure, just for her and her eight fucking best friends who can't stop singing her praises, so comfortable that she brings her loving family along for the ride, too!"     "It sounds as if you know just about nothing at all as well."     "Prissy little bitch. I'm working out the fate of the world while you're putting on your makeup. Whatever you think you've been through, it obviously wasn't enough; you came here with your girlfriend and starry-eyed hopes we could talk it out."     "Soft. Soft. So fucking soft! You're not just held down by these lead weights; you gave them little names and backstories and started fucking them! What do you possibly think you can even do to me? Your friends are telling me your truest self is doing whatever your family did while looking like a model and putting on a plastic smile to get along. You're going to convince me over to your side in three minutes? Really?"     "If I have to, I'll break enough of your bones that you can't stop me from dragging you away and 'talking it out' where you can't keep being a nasty little contrarian about it. It's nine versus one; back down."     "Would you back down just because of facing nine 'Elites' at once?"     "I didn't, and I won."     "So why would I?"     The pilot, who can only be Ash, retrieves the only thing that was left in the cockpit; where there should be a medical suite or a SERE kit, instead, a staff nearly as tall as they are; one that was once ancient and well-loved wood before innumerable mismatching bracelets were fused together, tip to tip down its entire length, leaving nothing but metal and stone.     The old bindings are still there, near the head, heavy with pearl and ivory, jade and braided gold thread, shaped into countless charms that clatter as it moves, but the head itself had at one point been violently removed, and replaced with a single notched blade of translucent crystal, encasing like amber a spearhead-shaped fragment of chrome, etched with strange-familiar symbols, nearly recognizable.     "Two and a half minutes to change my mind. Three to run away and admit everything I've said is true. Unless you want to fight twelve to nine. But that shouldn't mean anything, right? You're the real thing. You can't lose."
James Bond	We are. Human beings aren't what I'm used to.     "I know. I wish I weren't," says Bond as he settles into the gunner's spot and sweeps a suppressive arc to cover the rover's retreat. Tell Lilian we're out of the AO!     It's a little odd--part of him wants to stick purely to the language of missions. But these two are family. What comes out is something in between mission and personal. <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "Lilian--Bryce and Katrina are fine, but they're retreating."     "Xion," he says, without taking his eyes off the viewfinder, "Can you get us within striking distance of Ash's armor?" ---     The moment she does, the moment Bond feels his passage through the dark corridors, his hands reach for the carbine clipped to his fatigues, tucking it close. He bends slightly at the knees, then, and upon the touch of alpine air at his skin again, he tucks and rolls, shouldering the carbine and placing himself beside something solid in one fluid motion. Get real. Why does anyone become a hero if it isn't that?     Lilian's disarming cut illuminates his sweat-beaded brow from above, and he lowers the nose of the carbine, peeking hsi head from cover. Two and a half minutes to change my mind.      "Did any of that happiness last, after you got to say your 'no?' Do you feel like a hero at night? When you're not on assignment, and there's no enemy to be defeated?" Bond calls, from behind his cover. He stands up and releases his grip on the carbine.      "Did it last for those people, who said no to a god? Or did they ride the wave for a few years while that memory got smaller and smaller in the rear view mirror?"      "Mine didn't last. The people who gave it to me just knew how to manage the drip feed from decades of practice and shared knowledge. By the time I realized that, it was almost too late for me to find the kind that does last. It was sickening, and overwhelming, at first. Like the first sip of water after nothing but poison and garbage."      "This isn't a place for a young person to find themselves; it's a place where the self is squeezed dry to keep ideas alive that wouldn't otherwise be real at all." His jaw settles.      "But you already know all of that. Don't you? I can hear it in the way that you talk."      Bond reaches into his fatigues for what might be his last cigarette. The little 'shink' of the lighter feels heavier, more weighted, than any of the grenades or bullets he's put forth today--heavier even than the triggerpulls in the rover's gunner bay. He takes a long, silent pull, the rush of nicotine dulling the sensation of the snare that slowly tightens around him.      "...so," says Bond, looking at his wristwatch, feeling as though the earth shakes beneath him for each measured tick of the second hand. "I don't know what I can say to get you out of the jaws of that thing of movements and ideas. Only that it's possible to live outside of those ideas--and that I'm willing to lose to show you that."
Angela	Cinder's head turns towards Rita and smiles. "okey dokey." She says dizzily. She seems to sober up a bit when Rita heals her up. At the very least, she's not about to pass out but she's still a bit woozy. She gives her a small nod and shifts herself up so she's sitting properly. She starts to stand herself up and then stumbles a little. She gives Katrina a nod, then a shake of her head, then a couple of blinks. She smacks herself twice in the face to wake herself up and then exhales slowly. "Arright. I think... I'm good. Don't think I can get back 'in' it, though. Wings, that was the scariest thing that's ever happened to me." SShe looks at the stains of blood on her EGO Gear and grimaces. ''Normal is the place you look down from. That's why everyone fights over it.'' Cinder crosses her arms and scowls down at her arms. "Or drag you there whether you wanna be or not." But then it seems like Ash is offering to...just let them go? She looks towards Rita for a long moment and then asks, "Er... Should we just...leave then?" She doesn't actually think that's the worst plan. They're offering to let them go without throwing more missiles at them and--most days that's a win as far as Cinder is concerned.
Xion	Xion spends scant moments knelt on the top of a whipping roof balanced as only someone completely and blissfully ignorant of momentum's effects could be, stuck to the roof like a tick to a neck and around as 'blooded'-black, and she's not the only one! Cinder's gathering by Rita isn't marked in the high speed motion, but it's almost all Xion can do to continue on herself. Arthur's lightspeed transfer turns the APC rover into a cosmic turbocharged super-machine, spitting stardust as exhaust and shear forcing the wounded Nobody atop with a hecktouple overdrive boost. The Kingdom Key, held unbraced, is taken by the wind and spins away, disappearing in flight as a scattering of twinkling lights across hundreds of meters of bumpy terrain and mountainfall speed over the whipping-past trees and dark shapes. Xion, wounded enough she feels the pull despite her sticky adventure super-heroine stance keeping her belligerently attached to the vehicle must 'surf' and bounce the deeply fast-forwarded trail on knees and thighs, smearingly lengthening around corners while the APC takes turns that only the deeply downforced vehicle can make, so damaged. It is a miracle that their APC doesn't break apart, but Arthur is in the business of miracles, and Xion is in the business of riding out storms. It is not all bloodied balance that keeps the noirette stuck to the top of the APC, a simple spear of wood tipped in ghostly silver metal, unadorned but for the lacquered-over marks of combat. A warrior's weapon that she had borrowed what felt like a lifetime ago. With it, planted in the top, red marks bloom and drip across her. Black and uncertain smears are as cartoonishly exaggerated scars - them and more crisscross Xion like an overmarked autopsy report, superimposed over her black coat and skin alike. It holds her up, though, weapon reinforcing her poise, and she wields the planted weapon like oar against the storm of approach. But they won't go all the way down the mountain, like family. It's better that way. 'Tell Lilian we're out of the AO!' is the prelude for Xion pulling an old knight's spear from the roof of the APC and jumping backwards, leaving a scattering of momentum-confused red droplets floating and falling into the mountain ground while she contorts, distorts, and disjoints from reality into blessedly empty no-where. James is unceremoniously sandwiched in a pill of portals, from behind an fore, and feels a grab on the scruff of his jacketed neck as he's shoved forward, and then the APC and pair are parted. --- 'Normal is the place you look down from.' Xion's Corridor, geomantically realigned with the paths-between finally cleared of the brambles of space-bastardization, snaps open while Xion and James are heaved through at speed, James bowling for his carbine and the noirette moving from Corridor at a full sprint with spear couched in left hand and under left arm. "Do you think so? Where you look *down* from?!" Xion challenges, incensed in a way beyond passion. Her mood, twisted by something that feels sneeringly and childishly wrong to her knowings of the world rises in her throat. "Normal isn't a bastion for you to fire from!" Summoning another sword to hand, this keyblade a twisted-organic black on black with a bloody-nerved glass orb 'tooth' closed around a blood-crimson sworled substance, Xion swings out a running set of vacuum wave air slashes to join James' carbine fire, then shoulders the blade. "I've seen what the enemies of humanity, what the monsters you fight for survival see of you. They hang above, and not besides, and they are looking down too!" Her words are punctuated with a ground-cracking lunge behind the vacuum wave sonic booms, a distance-defying spear-Stinger that leaves a mark of bleeding crimson across her path towards Ash. "So that *can't* be right for NORMAL!!"
Tamamo	'The people who chased you out loved every second of it, because they got to say no to a god.'     Tamamo isn't flustered by the expected violence that just fails to reach her. That is a particular strength. "That is a fine story, I suppose, though far from the truth. There was no love for anything, on that field. No love of anger, and no love for the emperor they served. There was fear, hatred, and duty. Are you familiar with such things? What do you think 'love' is?"     ...gestures for her to move sidelong, and looks away after a worried glance.     Lilian's glance is returned with a faint smile, and Tamamo moves. She doesn't need direct line of sight, and control of her charm likewise redirects attention, though the effects are somewhat too subtle to be fully reliable, here.     'Oh. Right. You're using 'Blooms' instead. Anything to fit a theme.'     "What do you believe their names to be?"     '...so comfortable that she brings her loving family along for the ride, too!'     "Were you not aware of Nazca's actions in the Urals?" Tamamo's tone is curious.     She's still working, while she moves. Talismans tug out of position on trees and walls, and take new ones. The threads she needs to read are where they always were.     'Two and a half minutes to change my mind. Three to run away and admit everything I've said is true.'     "Oh, is that how you see it? My goal has already been accomplished. Would you like to convince me otherwise? Do you... wish to be pursued?" Her head tilt is carried purely by tone.     She doesn't say everything in that echoing call. Some of it's subvocalized to be heard elsewhere.
Trudy Grimm	Ash declared they would ignore anything said to them; and so Trudy pays what they say no mind in turn. She comes to a stop, staring at Ash's mech as the machine is beset upon from all sides, foundering in the ankle-deep muck of pitch black Void. When the machine finally collapses on its back, the more intact of the two giant skeletal hands slams down on the chest and then presses down; sinking it slightly more into the hungry shadow around it. The other arm, now missing several fingers, recoils and then sinks down out of sight, dragging the mech's freshly severed hand with it.     Trudy stares at the machine, her lips curled into a cruel shark-toothed smile, her eyebrows set in a way that almost makes her face look apologetic if not for that. Cast mostly in the sickly green glow of Eiwaz hovering above Malice, the Grimoire of Despair; for a haunting moment, it's easy to forget that she isn't her father's daughter.     "You can join my collection." > "Trudy! Don't!"     She pauses, her eyes shifting towards Arthur without moving her head. The green-tinted light dancing across her features casts those faintly luminous green eyes in shadow. She almost asks why, but he already provided that. Her smile disappears when her attention returns to the mech in front of her, the tense little frown conveying an altogether different emotion.     Dissatisfaction. Pity. Shame. One or the other. Some mixture of all three.     The mech lurches and jettisons its hatch. The giant hand rears back, losing all but its thumb to that door-sized hunk of metal when it smashes through the tarsal bones in a shower of black marble. Fingerbones rain down soundlessly into the void and, defeated, the set of gigantic armbones also sink out of sight.     Ash makes their first in-person appearance, berating Lilian and belittling the ability and personhood of every other person present who had chosen to be here to support her. Trudy's expression shifts, then hardens. She glances back towards Arthur in a way that seems to ask 'Are you sure we need all four?'     The witch surrenders at last, though, closing the Grimoire with a soft thump and tucking the crystal away, "You already lost," she states, closing her eyes with a gentle roll of her shoulders, "Now you think you deserve a do-over?"     James opens fire. Xion follows suit. Trudy exhales, releasing the Grimoire and raising her hand. Above her palm, the rune of Hagalaz traces itself out in flickering pale blue. She does nothing with it, save tease the rune's gentle flame with her thumb, "Look down on me all you want, I don't mind. A wretched creature is there to be looked down upon and sneered at." Her eyes shift back up, fingers curling into claws around the rune she holds, "I have my own reasons for being here."     If there's anything I can do to lesson the burden she has to carry...
Rita Ma	Rita breathes out in relief when Cinder steadies. The tentacle stays wrapped around her torso; its tip reaches up to stroke Cinder's head like a (too-soft, clammy) patting hand.      "Yeah. It's one of the scariest things to happen to me, too." Little jarred giggle.      "... I don't know if we're running. It might be a good idea," she adds. "But... there's something I want you to do for me, Ms. Cinder. Okay?"      "And that's why you're so desperate to pretend like you aren't a fucking abomination, isn't it?"      Rita reaches into her own mouth with two fingers, crk-pulls loose a sharklike fang from the back, and puts it in Cinder's palm. It feels too warm. The edge is dark and glitters with bioluminescent specks, like the Cycle of Tears. The drool dripping from it is a certain color.      She sniffles and scrunches her eyes shut after. That hurts- the tooth a little, and the words mostly. It isn't true, anymore, but it hurts.      "Ah. Um. I need you to take this somewhere they won't find it, and bury it shallow, Ms. Cinder. Okay? And then come back to me and Ms. Petra; and we'll do our best to keep you safe."      What Cinder's holding in her hand now is a perfect little abomination. After the APC peels off, Rita stands, re-weaves herself, shimmers invisible, and gives Cinder one more reassuring squeeze.      - - - -      She's next glimpsed on a high rooftop, close enough to use her words. "I'm not pretending anymore, Ms. Ash. But you're right that I'm too greedy. I get to not be normal, and I get to be loved anyway. You could have had that too."      But, then, she's in Petra Presentability Mode as she says it, which undercuts it a little.      One of the little pocket jammer-stakes is clutched in her hand. There's a second of twisting windup, hair fluttering in the high breeze, and then it makes a whipcrack noise as she hurls it like a javelin, blur of motion and invisible bullet.      A poke to feel her out. The Letter Agency is big on that kind of intel for a reason.
Arthur Lowell	> ==>     Arthur gets that gang out of the AO. And so he lets go, letting the APC's power slowly fade, and he drops back away towards the final encounter. > Arthur: You literally can't fix this     When he lands near Ash, he looks hollowed out and burnt. A lot of stress and shouting and exhaustion. "Lilian!" She already knows about the situation with Bryce and Katrina. And it looks like Arthur's retreat wasn't needed here. "..." His broom is out, blades chipped and engine sputtering. "You-- what, *convince* you?!" His grip is tense, but his stance is defensive, focused on trying to prevent any sudden shifts in the tides.     He grew up inside an RPG, so he's used to so-called wins in difficult fights that result in, like, a kidnapping or the theft of an artifact or something. > Arthur: You actually can't do this     "You *know* I can't convince you. You're working with people who are willing to ally with the Man in the Moon, so you've got... I don't fucking know. Justifications. *Literature.* Don't pretend like you're planning on changing your mind, I can't even out-talk you on my home field." Just a little more rising stress. But it subdues again. "I can't. Best I've got is trying to keep the *Sparks* from getting hurt before things get bad. Whatever, flip the script. Lay on *me* why *I* should be believing hard in this bleak-ass world where you gotta kill tons of people and think nobody's worth anything. And *I'll* give it all the brainpower."     Is this a strategy? No, this is literally just Arthur dramatically bleeding various emotions out of the wounds that Ash inflicted. He sounds like -- well, he sounds like an upset 19-year-old who just lost an argument and a fight, honestly.
Petra Soroka	"Then why do you even think she needs you to say it for you? If it were real, it wouldn't need you to prove it exists."     Ash's words aren't directed towards Petra, and interjecting as a scraped-up little girl on the ground in a fight between a blindingly glowing god and a mech five times her size is patently pathetic, but this is something Petra feels too strongly about to not try to raise her voice above the constant throbbing thunder of explosions for. It's one of her most closely-held topics, and besides-- she *is* pathetic, so there's no reason for her not to be.     "You're *right*. You're right about everyone *but* Lilian! There's no one else in the entire world who's real in *spite* of other people like she is; when basically everyone is a fucking helpless dependent fragment of society that only has any kind of individuality when other people say they do, Lilian *not* being like that is something you have to fucking *respect*! She's the *only* person I know that doesn't need other people to say it for her for it to be real."     Petra preempts the obvious retort, of 'don't care didn't ask plus your grey matter explodes if I shoot you', by circling back to something they'd said earlier. "And of fucking course there's a moral point to saying that! Everything about and between people is fucking, making a moral and ideological point, until the world stops fucking existing, and it hasn't yet, so--" "Never thought to ask, right? Get pointed at the bad guy and it all works out."     Petra yelps and barely manages to keep up with the rate of the sidearm's fire, alternating between ablative concrete barriers and diving away from asphalt as it evaporates behind her, clothes tearing where she skids across the street. She, as usual, plays second fiddle to Lilian, taking advantage of the time and attention that Ash is compelled to divert towards Tamamo to harry the mech with gunfire-enhanced jabs to its weaker joints.     "Fucking, yeah? I'm not one of these stuck-up self-important idiots that insists on figuring out their own fucking way just because they can't tolerate not being the biggest dick in the room." Petra makes her bold declaration that her being stupid is actually a moral high ground to most people, somehow. "Lilian knows better than me. If she points me at someone, I'll fucking go after them, because that's what I'm for." "NAZCA is the fastest way to get all the Sparks in one place and finally let them burn. I'll kill you just to breathe."     This is infalliable logic, to Petra. Self-preservation and actualization are goals to be pursued to the exclusion of everything else if necessary, and Ash certainly knows what they need better than Petra does-- she's no stranger to invoking whatever societal leverage is at her disposal to those ends. She falls silent in response, saving her breath for scurrying away from nearly being crushed underfoot(shin), only continuing on a tangent once she's hopped her way up onto a rooftop nearby.
Petra Soroka	"But-- what's next? After that? Like, I get the need, and everything, but... before now, what was up with Invariable Completion?" Petra isn't clever or mindful enough to not earnestly ask the questions she means to, hemorrhaging intel or no, but it's fair turnabout after Ash called out Rita and Tamamo so directly. Sort of. "What were you able to do before, like, alone, that you need the others for now?"     "Sorry. I'm not, like, super up on the lore; I'm not one of you. But I don't know, so I'm asking now, and I've asked Exigent Serenity stuff before, but...." Petra's head tilts to the side, thoughts so tantalizingly close to being put together like a puzzle that it feels like just shaking her head around will make them fall into place. But firefights are bad places for lore! "You're using 'Blooms' instead. Anything to fit a theme."     Petra crouches on the rooftop, readjusting the torn shoulder of her jacket to cover up the inflamed roadburn underneath. She carefully loads a slug into her gunblade, keeping it at the ready to watch Lilian for cues. "Yeah? Fucking *'Sparks'* sounds like you got it out of a corporate Powerpoint presentation. You probably *did*." "Little heroine girl all over the recruitment posters, out on a special adventure, just for her and her eight fucking best friends who can't stop singing her praises, so comfortable that she brings her loving family along for the ride, too!"     "Stupid! Lilian doesn't have that many friends!" This might not be the most flattering defense Petra can make for Lilian, but it's fundamentally what she's been saying all along. "Most people fucking suck to her! Even, like, here, it's more like people already fucking learned their lesson about her, and are at least decently trustworthy tools now. And it only makes *sense* to take the most reliable people you have on an important mission! That's normal!" "You're not just held down by these lead weights; you gave them little names and backstories and started fucking them!"     Petra's fervor is broken for an instant, stagger bar full. She looks off to the side and coughs into her fist. That triggers a worse coughing fit, from inadvertently inhaling the powdered concrete in the air. How much research, exactly, did NAZCA do on *that*? "Two and a half minutes to change my mind. Three to run away and admit everything I've said is true."     For all her talking and sincere interrogation of Ash, Petra defers entirely to Lilian's opinion on this. She's stupid, after all; and convincing people through conversation isn't exactly Petra's strong point. It might be her famously weakest point, even! When it comes to things so grandiloquently abstract, the deeply detailed traumas and ideologies and metaphors of people far smarter and more *complex* than her, her fixation can only bring her to the point of *wanting* it, not having it.     But there is *one* thing that comes to her mind. "Uh-- wait, you want to get all four Blooms together, right? We know where three of them are. How come NAZCA's the fastest?"
Lilian Rook	'Do you think so? Where you look *down* from?! Normal isn't a bastion for you to fire from!'     "Normal is a thing we made up to decide who doesn't have to change. It doesn't mean anything else! And since the beginning of fucking time, every living thing on Earth has been competing for the privilege!"     Xion comes flying out of the Corridor at speed, and Ash responds with another, incremental increase in vigor and vehemence. Cold, accentless, arrogant indifference is shed at the same rate as layers of steel and magic, and replaced by something with tone. When they reach out against the vacuum slashes, the motion can't help but be honest.     There's no mech, missile, markerlight, no remote call-in or steely call-out to cover up swift and sure footwork, the graceful interplay of hand over haft, nor to dampen the queasy-gleaming arc of light reflected from chrome and refracted through crystal that follows the tip of the spear. Arcs the colour of unknown lights in the sky, painted as by the tip of a brush, splintering each vacuum into collapse.     "Everything that is and ever was is war, and normal is when you win! Having to care means you're under fire; having to change is when you're hit, and everything that ever lived wants to be on the right end of the gun!"     'I've seen what the enemies of humanity, what the monsters you fight for survival see of you. They hang above, and not besides, and they are looking down too!'     "The goal of all life is to stagnate, growing is just what it does to get there, and not even the Antegent are an exception! They're the perfect embodiment, even! If they're looking down on us, they deserve to! They WON!"     The word peaks the helmet's vocoder, and the toneless tinge cracks with something rough-edged and full-chested. Xion's spear strikes the exclamation mark. The sonic booms are the dot. She flashes past the tip of Ash's weapon, and paints crimson from there to here and somewhere else. Cracked windows break to pieces nearby. The surface of the downed mech peels away in the scathing force of her wake. The feedback feels like thunder. Xion feels something very, very wrong, and then impacts a building thirty degrees to the side of where she'd struck. The concrete next to her ruptures inwards; burst inside out with an invisible spearpoint-shaped impact. Ash turns around in an instant to follow her, polarized visor locked on her destination.     "--Lasrach Roinnte!!" is the next thing anyone hears. Lilian capitalizes on Xion's success at drawing all attention to herself; the literal spearpoint of the only offense still on Ash; and crashes into the mech-corpse vantage at a hundred times more speed than could be possible from a dead stop. Light diffuses incorrectly from the edge of her sword, condensed in a moment it could be collected, and scatters along the perfect parallel thunderclap of impact. The upper half of the mech's cockpit is sheared away and smashes into its optics.     Ash catches Lilian's eyes through their visor as Lilian stumbles to a dead halt. Night Mist is still at the site of impact, skewed sideways with no followthrough. The ruined hotel still supporting the collapsed war machine bisects cleanly through its upper third, and blows away in a violent wind. Lilian stares only a moment, then blinks away by reflex just as Ash brings down their spear to where she'd just stood, and turns every ton of steel, concrete, asphalt and earth directly below it into an impossibly narrow crater, twisted in upon itself and splashing into the air like a struck artery.
Lilian Rook	"Hey. What was that?" says Ash. It's oddly as their voice falls to a relaxed quiet that the natural tone bleeds in the most. Rough, low-pitched, softer than you'd expect. "Apparently something beneath you." Lilian says, and in doing so, conveys perfectly well to you that she's padding out time to think. "No, no, it's too late for you to pussy out now. That's not your limit at all. Why are you lying to me? For these people?"     "Decide on your own." Lilian spits back. "Don't suddenly act like we have some kind of special link after saying all that. 'Too late to pussy out now'." The repetition is purely vindictive. Giving away what stings. "Don't be a bitch. This is literally the only thing that's ever been thought of that can't be decided on by someone else. It points straight at the one and only part of you that isn't as plastic and predictable as the rest. And you're hiding it." "Drop dead."     The way Lilian stares at Ash is her unmistakable high-intensity way of looking for openings. If the group came here to befriend them, Lilian has forgotten it. 'Not breaking first' is the only thing on her mind; and perhaps her mind alone.     But Ash has the luxury of seeing Bond lower the carbine, rather than taking the sensible shot. The tilt of their head suggests a scoff being loaded into the chamber for his questions, cut off into a bitter 'tch' as they're cast as rhetorical.     'But you already know all of that. Don't you? I can hear it in the way that you talk.'     'I don't know what I can say to get you out of the jaws of that thing of movements and ideas. Only that it's possible to live outside of those ideas--and that I'm willing to lose to show you that.'     "Do you think I'm stupid, or just helpless? Like I need to be rescued from bad men who have me under their thumb?" Ash hisses back. Or it could be a sigh. The electronic static muddies the line. "They're using me. I'm using them. You know you can't win, so you're trying to make losing a way to get me out of their jaws and into yours. Conceited old fuck. You're the ones getting squeezed to keep something unreal alive, and I'm the one doing it to you."     'Are you familiar with such things? What do you think 'love' is?'     "Who cares?" The words are brisk, irritable; defensive, wrapped in anaesthetic transgression. "It doesn't look like it stops a bullet to me."     'What do you believe their names to be?'     It's unclear whether Ash is running down the clock on purpose or not. Their weapon slowly shifts back up to a ready position, the spearpoint held low to the ground, the haft up under their elbow, braced against their mismatching g-suit, and the stance by which they do so certainly has not the slightest thing to do with any Tradition of the Letter Agency; and yet the posture is nearly psychosomatic. "Coals feed flames. Flames throw off sparks. Sparks are sent somewhere else, never to return, and where they land, something new catches light."     "People aren't something pretty enough to grow up and blossom. It's delusional thinking. Humanity consumes the world around it, turns it all into a pit of indistinguishable dust, and when it can't find anything new and whole, it smothers itself and dies. Only the sparks escape."     'Were you not aware of Nazca's actions in the Urals?'     "What?" says Ash, and then abruptly raises their weapon, curtailing the rest of a sentence by stance and mindset alone.
Lilian Rook	'You already lost. Now you think you deserve a do-over?'     Ash hops straight down from the front of the collapsed mech, and the earth shudders at the moment they land. The asphalt spiderwebs like sugar glass, and the cracks follow them as they march forward treateningly, tracing their path as if walking on dangerously thin ice. The sound is exactly like that of ice creaking.     "Well look at that. My legs still work."     'You're working with people who are willing to ally with the Man in the Moon, so you've got... I don't fucking know.'     "Don't jerk them off, fuckboy. The hero thing was sarcasm, remember? No human can ally with something like that. They serve it. That thing won, and we all just accepted it as the new norm, and everyone on Earth changed their entire lives to revolve around it!" Ash shouts back. The charms clatter under the creaking of their grip. Up close, some of them could be outright prehistoric, while others must be new. "Except me. Maybe except the others, too."     'Lay on *me* why *I* should be believing hard in this bleak-ass world where you gotta kill tons of people and think nobody's worth anything.'     "Because they all die anyways and you can't stop it. All I care about is what happens after; and you're ruining it."     'I'm not pretending anymore, Ms. Ash. But you're right that I'm too greedy. I get to not be normal, and I get to be loved anyway. You could have had that too.'     The tiny jammer, accelerated to lethal velocity, strikes the back of Ash's helmet, and shatters into a hundred little pieces. The gunshot crack is rejoindered by the plastic fracturing of their visors, split straight down the middle from shock. Ash's head doesn't even move, but the pavement is torn up by shallow lacerations in radiating bands. The last sound that passes through the vocoder is a snarl of maddening frustration, and then they tear the helmet free entirely, throwing it to the side with careless force, and putting fragile plastic through solid concrete and rebar with a sound like a cannon.     Tamamo has especial reason to remember something, at the sight of hair more red than brown, so deliberately messy that it's hard to discern any shape but 'long'. Despite the helmet, the face beneath is deeply tanned and freckled, and despite the combined effect of height and military wear, nothing about it succeeds at conveying 'pilot'. The exact opposite of sharp good looks with high cheekbones and a rogueish smile; the dark circles under their eyes only make their look of anger more depressing.     "Easy to be an angel when they love you; but I wouldn't take it if you offered it to me. I won't be like you; I'll keep fighting forever before I'll finish off my last page with a happily ever and forget to exist." Unable to see Rita, Ash does their second best by turning a gaze on Lilian so severe that Lilian tightens her grip on Night Mist. "Nobody gave me a fucking thing, and that made me strong. Being strong made them want to start giving me what I didn't have, and stepping on their faces instead is what made me this strong."     "And you'll never be. When they got scared, offered to let you be normal, too, you gave in and let them. Now they're rotting you from the inside out, and if you let them drag you any further down, you'll burn along with them when the fire comes."
Lilian Rook	'You're *right*. You're right about everyone *but* Lilian! There's no one else in the entire world who's real in *spite* of other people like she is'     "Not any more. Maybe she could have been, but you've already infested her. Now she's addicted to you. Dependent."     'But-- what's next? After that? Like, I get the need, and everything, but... before now, what was up with Invariable Completion? What were you able to do before, like, alone, that you need the others for now?'     Unlike Lilian, Ash is no good at hiding expressions without a helmet. The earth-shuddering forwards tread pauses just as they devote enough attention to Petra to bother to look; and the look in their eyes is nakedly prickly and protective. "Damn, that sounds like you think I'm actually stupid enough to tell you." Ash says. Their grip shuffles up on the staff-turned spear. Bone charms clatters against crystal chrome and sound like glass chimes. "Maybe you first--"     'But I don't know, so I'm asking now, and I've asked Exigent Serenity stuff before, but....'     That, finally, is the first thing since arriving here that makes this one person pause. Their mouth opens, closes, eyes shift right, and they take one step sidelong, then another, refusing to gain distance from Lilian, but stalking a circle around her. "Do you think I'm actually stupid enough to tell you?" "I don't believe you. Show me." "Show you what?" "Don't pretend you don't know how." "Beg pard--" "Stop LYING to me! Or at least lie to me because you want to, and not for THEM!"     'Uh-- wait, you want to get all four Blooms together, right? We know where three of them are. How come NAZCA's the fastest?'     Briefly, you couldn't possibly hear an answer over the sonic wake of the craft passing overhead. You don't see so much as a shadow, but the slow-fading roar is unmistakable all the same. Ash's voice punches right through it anyways.     "Too late. Time's up."
Angela	Cinder may not have STEALTH but one of the benefits of having your normal armor be various forms of suit certainly helps you be overlooked anyway. She's in Control so she definitely isn't some kind of grand Elite in her mind--she's just happy she can help out. Feeling like she's helpful means just so much to her. So when Rita offers to give her a task--Agents in general love to be given ''tasks''--particularly one that has them leaving the immediate battlefield. Now that Cinder has rediscovered her sense of self preservation and she nearly died like three times during this fight, she's inclined towards the better part of valor. But Lilian doesn't want to back off and a guilty knot tightens in her belly. She--the whole facility--owes Lilian so much. How can she just abandon her goal just because she might die trying to help her? She feels lower than Mikey in this moment. (Mikey would protest being used as the bar of cowardice but he would be too scared to) So being given a task doubly helps. She's still helping, right? This isn't just a task to get her out of the way? She isn't sure how a buried tooth will help but, well, Rita can be part Melting Love, apparently, and she's been interacting with numerous other Abnormalities. The bigger question in her mind is what Rita CAN'T do. "okay." She says, failing to capitalize okay because of how small she feels. But maybe being small will be fine for right now in getting this task done. She slinks off into the distance, looks over her shoulder to make sure she's out of ready line of sight before ducking down and digging with her hand, sliding the drooling tooth into the dirt and lightly covers over it. SHe pats it twice. "Um." She says. "Good luck." She should have asked Rita if she was okay, she thinks, she didn't because Ash was there and people were talking about important things, but she should've. She hopes Petra's okay. She'll probably be fine she's ah ero and god can she take apart mechs... She keeps a good pace rushing back.
James Bond	Do you think I'm stupid, or just helpless?     "Yes, as a matter of fact, I do think you're stupid," Bond says bluntly, taking a pull on his cigarette.     "I was stupid at your age," he says as a grey-blue plume snakes out of his mouth, slow and steady. "I'm only somewhat less stupid now. It isn't a sin. Just a consequence of being born into a world that's so much larger than you are--with all the setpieces already arranged years before you were thought of. How could we be anything other than stupid, if only for a time, when so much of our lives are decided for us by things outside of our control?" Were you not aware of Nazca's actions in the Urals? What?     "You think that you're using them. And you are. But what you don't understand, or don't care enough to consider, is that they've baked the cost of that into everything they'll ever allow you to do or to know." Nobody gave me a fucking thing, and that made me strong. Being strong made them want to start giving me what I didn't have, and stepping on their faces instead is what made me this strong.     "No, it didn't. Do you think you're the only one here who wasn't given anything? That's on purpose, god damn it."     "It didn't make you stronger, it made you vulnerable to them. Do you think a wasp's nest cares when one of them gets crushed? They know what's good for them and they're goddamn well going to get it. No matter how many you smash, they can always make more. They made you, and when they've gotten everything they want from you, they can unmake you." Too late. Time's up.     Bond settles his jaw and flicks his spent cigarette away. "Mhm."
Petra Soroka	"Now she's addicted to you. Dependent."     Petra's unwholesome reaction to the idea that Lilian is addicted to *her* only lasts for a few stammering sentences, fingers splayed across her mouth while she looks diagonally away. "Ah, eheh, *addicted*, is, a pretty strong word. I mean, if anything, I'm kind of the one who.... But, um, that's not the point. If you're talking about *me*, then..."     "I'm not really that much of a fucking fan of compromising with the world either. And I fucking hate every time one of those sucking parasites tries to make Lilian less special for their sake, because it *does*, it does happen all the time, and I'll fucking behead them before I let them get an ounce of her flesh. So don't fucking lump me in with the people like *that*. I'm not even fucking arguing with you."     Two and a half minutes vanishes quickly, and in the last frantic seconds of 'convincing' before Red Team's arrival, Petra is seized by an insane impulse. While everyone is rushing to pile into Arthur's portals, Petra stumbles over herself in an abrupt decision to pivot around on the ball of her foot, flipping open her compact mirror. "Too late. Time's up."     Petra's voice doesn't carry to Ash over the sound of the jets like theirs does. But her mouth moves, and held in her upraised hand is a burner flip phone with her number already on it, and when she rears back to hurl it over at Ash, her lips form 'it doesn't *have* to be'.
Trudy Grimm	> "Well look at that. My legs still work."     The threatening approach is undeniably unnerving. Trudy pulls in her breath and holds it to force herself to remain at least outwardly calm, bloodied and battered as she is. There's no way she could go through with another fight so soon, like this. So she settles on her initial plan.     As she is approached, the witch curls her fingers like claws around Hagalaz, clutching the rune tightly. The Rune of Air, as it might be known, but also the Rune of Transformation. After a moment, she pauses, then releases it. The magic circuits forming flicker and fade out, and she waves a hand to disperse the rune's flames.     "You truly are a frustrating sort, aren't you? It must be done your way and you shall not compromise at all. Stubborn, stupid, and so easily manipulated that you think you are the one in charge." Eyes closed, the witch places her hand on the spine of the Grimoire, "A true warrior has some sense in her skull, but I suppose you pushed it all out with this petulant entitlement of yours."     Eyes opening, Trudy exhales, running her fingers through the assortment of beads affixed to her tome, "If your intention is to build a world after Ragnarök, then I would much rather you didn't. Whatever world someone like you builds will be a dreary and miserable place to live. I'd rather resign myself to Hel."     Without looking, she plucks a carved red basalt bead from the collection and lifts it up to examine it. Seemingly satisfied, she tosses the bead and its little leather strap towards the pilot; the engraved rune is Wunjo-- Joy, Kinship, Heritage.     "Something worth seeking."     Without another word, the witch vanishes into her shadow. She'll make use of Arthur's escape route for longer distances; this is just the quickest way to get out of throttling range.
Arthur Lowell	> ==>     "I won't be like you; I'll keep fighting forever before I'll finish off my last page with a happily ever and forget to exist."     Arthur's eyes suddenly shoot wide. His mind races. He thinks to the other part of what they said. Teeth grit, breath gets slightly heavier. "Wait-- what did she say?" He runs the words back. "Humanity consumes the world around it, turns it all into a pit of indistinguishable dust, and when it can't find anything new and whole, it smothers itself and dies. Only the sparks escape."     "Wait. Wait a second, call them off--" He says, urgently, taking a step forward. A hand is reaching out a bit. "Are you saying you have a cure? Even if it's just for the benign fragment-- wait. Wait!" His eyes flutter up, urgently. "Don't--!"     "Too late. Time's up."     "Not yet...!" He calls out. But, yet, actually. He's not so stupid he can't run from the impending backup through one of those gates he left behind. Swearing in a soft panic.
Xion	Wind is turned aside as shattered glass, and speartip out Xion leads her charge to punctuate her disagreement - her defiance - backed with force. "You're--" Xion begins, thrusting out with the Lesson in Scars' simple speartip, about to say something more in the moment and moment-after of bloody-red flash, sweeping the Twist Pylon's drawing-in verte-blade down off her shoulder in a double-- Shattering. There's no space, no time, between Xion connecting--passing through--and being impacted, and resolves into an inwardly-blown wall segment, having skipped even crossed-weapon block and gone straight through to the post-wall-crumbling bounce of her spine off the invisible spear-made crater. In her hand is just one weapon, grip viced around scar-marked length. Xion herself is infiltrated with countless red cracks, a pane of glass crumbles from a point of impact in her centerpoint, in the crater's centerpoint. Ash turns. Xion slides black booted feet to the ground and holds her spear in both hands, shaking, bleeding red, and somehow still standing. Blue eyes stare back at visor, with a long 'scar' breakline cast up across her left eye that turns her face into shifted statuary, and then, stare at broken mask. "They hurt, terribly, too." Xion creaks, off the wall, stepping, and then stepping again, spear readied with a 'poise' of unbroken legs and the suggestion of firmed bones in cracked statuary standing all highlit in red. 'It doesn't look like it stops a bullet to me.' "Look harder." Xion states, the click of the Lesson in Scars steadying to a wide spear stance. "More than one bullet. More than one stroke. People are *more* than enough to grow up and blossom. You'd know that if you didn't cut them off!!" Woozy-eyed with a cracked lens, Xion lifts to point her spear. "Not even an engine stagnates. It picks up dirt, and tastes the road, and needs *maintenance*. If all it does is run, it runs *right into the ground*, so--" The speartip lowers. The twisted-helix blade falls out of the sky, spinning as a single black piece of 'snow' and lands before the Nobody. "--I'm sorry." She finishes, and reaches to retrieve her scattered second weapon. "It sounds like nobody found you before you thought to carve and smooth and sand, and spend the cuttings for tinder. I hope it warmed you. You can still choose different, if you like." Xion doesn't turn, but with the lowering of the geomantic corruption, doesn't have to. A woosh of jets, and she steps back into one of her own Corridors. At least, at the end, Petra proves Ash wrong and gives her one hecking thing. All Xion could offer, by the end, was blood.