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Lilian Rook     The lift doesn't go all the way down to the heart of the mountain. It doesn't need to. It was built after the last nuclear weapon on earth had already been fired. It lies further from civilization than was ever possible across the lifespan of the country that used to be here, and the nation before that. The digging stopped thirty storeys down. If anything, the contractors only went so long because they'd begun to realize that they weren't going to go home at the end.

    You find left platform a third of the way down, nearly ripped from the gear tracks in the wall, hanging by one corner. The direction its borken railings and spilled cargo suggest it was struck on its way up, from above. Long after the sodium lamps trickling down the wall have gone fully extinct, the right platform comes into view through the murk, like a shipwreck. Crashed into the bottom of its track, still fully loaded, something must have struck it shortly after. The dull, windy drone is louder at the bottom, felt in your bones as much as it's heard in your ears.

    Shining lights around in the dark, you can read the labels on the sides of partially fastened cargo containers, but make little sense of the mangled heap of robotics to one side. The debris on the ground concrete, shattered and mangled, must have fallen from the left lift when it halted. The floor underneath is nearly opaque for the conjoined balloon-like splatters of red blood, each vacant of a body. Lilian, surrounded by her will-o'-wisps for light, lifts an empty set of fatigues by one corner; one of many. Peeling the butt of a rifle from the dired gore, only to let it back down again, she dusts off her hands, grimacing.

    "There's no signage. You either knew your way around this base like the back of your hand, or you weren't supposed to." says Lilian, gesturing in the direction where there must be a door. Up over the lip of the lift operation platform, all corrogated steel and yellow paint. A set of doors like those above, followed by a second, then third, making up two conjoined airlocks in a row, lie beyond. Each is so severely deformed that there is no reason to breach them at all.

    True to her word, there are no maps, lettering, wall markings, or even coloured lines on the corners. What passes for a 'front desk', only a guard checkpoint behind a foot of bulleptroof glass, looks turned inside-out by a tornado. Most of what was inside of it has been sucked through a fist-sized hole in the window and sprayed against the opposite wall as a fine mist. Streaks of blood paint lines towards jumbles of gear and empty clothes, scattered into corners like pinballs, one in the middle of the corridor, just outside the second, bunker-built office behind the first, as a mouse would be pinned down by a cat when fleeing from its hole.

    The destruction carves through one side of an F-bend past the doors; rounding the corner and cutting down an asphalt vehicle ramp under guttering industrial lights. The other end of the junction splits between an elevator with brushed steel doors, and a long concrete staircase with yellow rails, heading down. On the divider, the soft glow of an EXIT sign lies torn from the ceiling at your feet, pointing the way you came.
Arthur Lowell > [S] Arthur: Descend

    Let's not be too dramatic.

> Arthur: Descend more casually

    That's more like it. Once he reaches the base, the little star he uses to summon a sunbeam of a flashlight sweeps back and forth over splatters. "SHIT, MAN..." He mutters. "Must have been one hell of a RUSH. Must'a been trying to EVACUATE some MATERIAL, and then they got here, and..." He whistles softly.

    He shakes his head, shivers a little, and tries to focus. He snaps his fingers, and coincidentally, no matter what angle you were looking at the wreckage from, some of it suddenly was already a little staircase over the lip of the platform where its sunken elevator crashed, like it was only ever not there due to a trick of perspective. He hops up despite not needing to clamber -- that one was just for the sake of the others.

    He pops his head up from the bottom of the hole punched through the guard checkpoint, blinks, and whistles. A line of green light traces the path of the unluckiest man in the world, grappled through the hole and down the hall, probably slammed in sequence through barriers. "Did a COMBO on that MOTHERFUCKER." He rambles. He looks at a smear of blood and mutters, neutrally, "SICK." In two definitions.

    But honestly, this was all an appropriate response.

> Arthur: Get searching

    "No signage... gotta go with INTUITION. They had to LIVE HERE for AGES. So things wind up wherever's NATURAL." He taps his chin. "Something IMPORTANT was gonna be just OFF THE ELEVATOR. I'mma get that GOIN'." He wanders over, jabbing the button and impatiently tapping his foot. If it doesn't work, he'll give the door a solid kick (infused with stellar power) and supercharge all of the old elevator machinery to try to reactivate and force it to function a few more times -- after which he'll check for those keywords in areas just immediately outside of each elevator landing.
Petra Soroka     Jumping down a big elevator shaft into a bloodsoaked horror facility was, quite literally, Petra's job for years. With the Angelapad in her hand, Petra just swings her hips over the gap she tore in the blast doors at the top, does a goofy little peace sign, and then tumbles down into the darkness without the zipline or gravity for assistance. It's clearly enrichment for her, as maybe only Angela can see from the blue under-lighting from the perspective of the tablet, while her hair whips around from the air rushing around her.

    Shortly before slamming into the first lift, operating off of intuition in freefall, Petra grinds her boot against the wall to slow herself down, kicking to the opposite side, and then again right before the right side platform appears in her sphere of visibility. As if she's hopping down the last few stairs of a flight, after bouncing off the wall, her boot alights on the corner of the crumpled lift, transferring downwards momentum into the angular arc of gently tipping forwards. She lands at the base of the shaft with no more impact than if she'd skipped a stair, Angela securely in hand, and obviously pleased with herself.

    Petra's solution to the light issue is simple. She flips Angela's tablet around, turns on the flashlight, and then secures her to the underside of a ratbot that she deploys. Angela has become a little mobile security drone that can patrol in set patterns while emitting a cone of light.

    "Dang. Did they do all this...?" Meaning Ash, of course. As Petra surveys around the practically *evaporated* corpses, it's... possible to imagine that Ash just punched them super hard or something, but that'd probably still leave *something*, right?

"You either knew your way around this base like the back of your hand, or you weren't supposed to."

    "Well, we definitely aren't supposed to," Petra helpfully reasons, still catching her breath a little. She wanders up to the front desk, mysteriously putting her own fist to the hole to compare its size, and then gripping the front collar of her shirt as if lifting herself up. This is apparently her best mental metric for eyeballing whether it was Ash's fist specifically that made the hole.

    "But they do have an exit sign...." Petra actually *can* check out the mangled robotics, probably, at least to ascertain whether they're from the mechs that fucked them all up last time. "I'm gonna go check out the big ramp over there. If it's big enough that they've gotta drive around, then that's gonna be, like, the artery of the whole thing."
Tamamo     Tamamo walks over to the edge and looks down. She could, certaily, walk over the gravity sigil and, from there, take a stroll down to the bottom of the shaft. What she does, instead, is take a leap, her arc marked by glowing trails in the dark where fiery wisps keep precise pace. She hits against the opposite wall, the wood of her sandals striking old metal, and then leaps again, each precise and mildly superhuman impact punctuated with a not-quite kiai, too softly casual to give the impression. "O!" "Toh!" "Ha!" and on down to the final level. It is, in the end, a bit faster than walking would have been, even with taking a moment at the end to brush herself off.

    "Well, well, now. We are in search of that which we know not, and here we find... what, I wonder? It certainly seems as if something dangerous has here occurred. I have not before seen precisely such a thing." She looks about to see the others descending by whichever means.

    "Something may be learned by examining the discarded cargo, perhaps, as well as by seeking the further depths. I shall attend to these in a moment. Before that, however..."

    As the thing most concerning her, Tamamo goes to look at the hole broken through the glass, and touch still-flat planes with her fingertips, divining its past. "Now, what is it that you might tell...?"

    When she's finished there, she'll naturally gravitate toward the elevator.

    Not having forgotten what she'd said only moments ago, "Xion, if you are not otherwise occupied, might you see to these doors? Oh, I suppose sending an elevator on its way is a different matter than opening a door, though I understand most to operate by key, in special circumstances. That would make them all 'locked,' under normal circumstances, would it not?" She's really just asking, 'how would one consider this,' in a feely sense. That may or may not have relevance.
Xion 'Perhaps, but I promised no tornados.'

Xion had smiled faintly at Lilian's protests that it would be a simple and fight-free poke-around. "Lilian, I'll be honest:" Not that she had any reason to not be, but it underlined her point like the empty Starlight-lifting shrug helped to convey. "I wasn't going to blame you even if there was one. Tornados just happen, and in the type of place we plan to go..."

The noirette's shrug drops, but the tone remains. "The Heartless would be there, loitering in the shadows and flickering lighting. A tornado's not too far away, if the ceiling gets high enough."

Falling in with Tamamo for the last bit to the elevator shaft, Xion doesn't see any problem with splitting up and going with Tamamo and leaving Team Keycards to adventure for every colored access badge there was to be found. She was on Team Keyblade, and,

'Come to that... Xion, do your keys also work on doors that are 'broken'?'

"Well," Xion points at the shaft door, which really just need wrenching or maybe watch-cutting. "It can open or shut any path. Lock or unlock anything with that... distinction? It's not quite subjective - it's really objective - but the *context* matters. If a door is broken, that's like it being locked. The Keyblade can get it from 'locked' to 'unlocked', but maybe afterwards it's not really a door but a broken frame and pieces, and it can't be locked again. Does that make sense?"

Snapping her empty handed-fingers with a grin, Xion brightens. "I think you were around for another of Lilian's missions she brought me - there was a whole staircase that had been concreted up. But that's *locking*, right? There was a passage, and a threshold, and a door, and-- a key!" Lifting Starlight to indicate, she swings out the empty-star tooth to point into the darkness as Arthur and James set up their answers to a dead elevator and a long shaft down.

Turning key from tip-pointer to lifted blade, Xion grins over her shoulder. "So between the two of us, no problems at all from barriers to pick open or put up, mm?"

After Arthur sets up his little space-turning sigil in the air, Xion is lightfooting and idle with Starlight tip-down in the ground in a leaning idle posture that crosses arms across the broad guard, and a sway forward while the shaft is interacted with. Lilian speaking brings her back to general attention, pushing down on swordguard to stand ready with a knowing nod without adding more to the light whining in Lilian's expression. The kindest angle there was no comment, and so Xion oblidged.

'I'd like to verify that Xion won't have any issues with interior geo-jammers at the bottom,'

Grumbling and shifty-eyed, Xion peers into the elevator and sighs, nodding and reshouldering blade. "If they geo-jammed their whole facility to ruin their mountain lair's feng shui permanently it's probably why things went that bad for them. I guess we'll see, but if I have to find one and have it pulled out by James... whatever. That's fine." She cedes, trying to be supportive. "I'm not counting that as a tornado either."

Deciding that's enough pressing X through all the new dialogue of the characters standing around outside the elevator, Xion steps up when Tamamo tosses down her lighting talisman and offers a quick 'see you below!' before jumping through Arthur's rune of rotation at speed and using Starlight to hook up onto the cabling while rotated around to, instead of walking, zipline down the track at a somewhat sedate pace because of the general rotation. She can race paper! It's cooler!

But she lands with the group after riding the kiddie version of the railgrind segment, swinging off to flourish into a crouch and stand up casual to keep walking with blade shouldered.
Xion Stepping into the dark underground, Xion doesn't get too far in before Starlight comes back off her shoulder, tapping the corpseless detritus left behind the security lobby with startip and frowning emptily. She follows after Tamamo after a slow, few-second blink that her bright blues refocus from solemnity a moment after.

The elevator and its staircase are equally drawing to Xion as they are to Tamamo, lifting Keyblade as she approaches to tap the closed elevator doors and thumbing the car call button at the same time with her off hand. "It'll open into the shaft if we want that, but you're right..." She grins over her shoulder again.

"Security locked is locked. I've got the big key!" She proudly declares, though if the power is out. . .

That's not 'locked'. Even if the magic of the Keyblade could shunt open the shutter with a little sparkle grease, it couldn't re-operate an entire facility from cold.
Foundation Scions     Between a zipline, and Arthur's gravity trick, Matilda trusts something as sturdy and reliable as a magic trick over nervously-thin metal. Surely, that's something trustworthy, even if its source is someone who is, for some impossible to understand reason, calling her 'Tilly' when 'Matilda Bouanich' sounds so much better and flows cleaner off the tongue! Truly ridiculous.

    One step after another down the vertical walls, which immediately feels just like a normal tunnel once she's over the side, Matilda clutches onto her orbuculum as she walks. Motes of light from behind (up?) sparkle within it, fading, but slower than the ambient light, such that it comparatively looks to brighten, until she's back in the company of others and their sources of light, for the orb to truly shine again.

    "Quel est ce bruit..? That low, buzzing wind..?" Matilda has a normal tolerance for creepy things- normal tolerance for that is low! Weird, spooky noises? That's no good! If it is the wind, or ambient underground noises for being so deep in a Facility, either option still feels creepy.

    Welp. The blood is a lot creepier.

    "Zut alors-!" Matilda nearly stumbles trying not to step in a (dry) splatter-mark, teetering and having to take a handful of steps away to regain balance in motion. "Was there a fight? What exactly happened, to..."

    Her eyes fix on fragments of uniforms, making obvious the object of her question even as the words trail off. Continuing on, she does her best to stare at the remnant markers, like uniforms and bloodstains, purely out of back-of-spine worry that if she turned her back, Something might try and jump out and get her, and she truly doesn't want to be gotten! That fear would make more sense if there was nearly anything left that could be considered a body.

    In times like these, Matilda Bouanich practices responsible breathing techniques to lower fear and anxiety! If you listen close, you can hear her counting to herself between breaths.

'There's no signage. You either knew your way around this base like the back of your hand, or you weren't supposed to.'

    "You forget the third option- Me!" She's too eager to say that. "Please, allow me to orient us in the direction of goals and usefulness! It will, of course, only take a moment! Then, of course, we will have a most definitive answer!"

    Sitting down, criss-cross applesauce, she plants her orbuculum in her lap and starts to whisper out her incantation, "Oh, boule de cristal, montre-moi la voie à suivre..."

    Without the pomp and circumstance (and time, mostly) to prepare up a ritual, without truly positive celestial positions, beckoning forth visions of where answers and value can be found in this facility has an immediate, visible toll on Matilda- energy zapped out of her in a way that has her wobbly when she stands again, and pouting at having to lug the giant sphere of rock she carries again.

'Now, what is it that you might tell...?'

    Matilda, ever-curious, and with a bit of a capacity to notice the up-start of magic around her, decides to pitter-patter over and bother Tamamo- pseudo-whispered, "Your own manner of divination..?"
Angela ''How's that?''

"It sounds difficult, Dame Commander." Angela doesn't exactly have a negative opinion of BInah, really. Sure, she is a sadistic bully who is the cause of so much terrible bad things happening but Binah hasn't done that to ''her''. They probably would've made Angela anyway. She certainly wouldn't have been allowed to look outside a WIndow. An Eye might see her.

> Have a Brackets S Brackets Moment Malkuth: Descend

Malkuth makes some beatboxing style spy thriller noises as she makes her way down. Roland doesn't tend to get Brackets S Brackets moments in his life because he prefers not to announce his presence to things that might kill him. They both figure Petra knows what she's doing and follows her path down. Malkuth knows that jumping down elevator shafts was essentially Petra's job at Lobotomy Corp and Roland just figures Petra hasn't died yet.

Well, okay, she hasn't died to jumping puzzles yet. That's the not-dying part that is important here.

"I'm glad you're having fun." Angela asides to Petra which is true. It'sj ust been ROUGH lately so anything that boosts Petra's spirits is good for her. She's feeling better already.

> Angela: Join in the Homestucking and become a flying rat.

Angela doesn't actually get a choice in the matter because Petra already made that adventure game choice for her but she doesn't seem to mind it. "Oh...this is actually...a little fun." Angela says. She's still not actually controlling the ratbot herself but she does get a good view of what's going on and actually gets to see people besides Petra's face and neck or however else she held her.

"Exit Signs are standard practice. Lobotomy Corp used to have Exit Signs but they proved to have negative impact on the clerks so we ultimately removed the Exit signs around the thirteenth loop. Of course, the Exit Signs did not lead to Exits which may have been the problem, but--well-- they'd tear the EXIT signs down too. The signs were originally present before the building went underground, of course, as they served no purpose in the facility afterwards."

Roland aims to pick it up. "Can I take it back as a souvenir?"

"It's Lilian's project. If she doesn't mind I don't."

''You forget the third option- Me!''

"Were you working with these people?" Angela asks, mostly to mess with Matilda a little.

On her screen she bobs her head in agreement with Xion's door definitions.
James Bond I guess we'll see, but if I have to find one and have it pulled out by James... whatever. That's fine.

    Thus follows Bond's press-x-prompt: "These places have weak links, where they expect to be hit the least. Looking for those is how I found out their name for Ash, the Blooms, their ties to Caelton, all of it. So that's what I'll be looking for, but don't worry. If you need me for something, reach out the usual way. I came prepared for their particular brand of paranoia."

    With that, he clasps his hands together, and jumps forward, his watch magnetizing to the zipline via the disc it's threaded to, and he disappears into the descent a moment later.

--

    Bond crisply snaps his harrington jacket after a brisk zipline down the elevator shaft. Lilian's wisps are reflected on the surface of the sunglasses that hang from his polo, flickering in skewed miniature.

    It's unlikely that anything is left to pose much of an active threat. Ash is thorough, Bond and Lilian had already discussed the possibility of needing tuners here. Still, the weight of the Walther in the holster at his shoulder is tested with a palm against his jacket. Still there, if needed.

SICK.

    Bond looks over his shoulder at Arthur, mildly annoyed that the opportunity for a joke in poor taste was wasted on a sincere word of impressed awe. "Weren't you supposed to have some sort of thing about--..." Bodies, but, his vision follows the trail. "It's not as if there's much left, is there."

If it's big enough that they've gotta drive around, then that's gonna be, like, the artery of the whole thing.

    "I'm inclined to agree. Not only that, Ash hit this place, loud, from the top down. We might find something further in--something someone was trying to smuggle out."

Oh, boule de cristal, montre-moi la voie à suivre...

     "Pace yourself," Bond says, no expert on magic but used to difficult jobs away from organized support. "We still have to find whatever it is and get it out of here."
Tamamo     "I suppose the locking and unlocking duo makes sense." she says, just a bit whiny.

    It's probably safe here, after all, but Tamamo will be sure to check in, anyway.

    "The Keyblade can get it from 'locked' to 'unlocked', but maybe afterwards it's not really a door but a broken frame and pieces, and it can't be locked again. Does that make sense?"

    "Yes, perfectly," Tamamo says, nodding along. "A door may be locked in a manner such that it is not intended to ever be unlocked... and yet, still, it is 'locked' or, at the least, 'closed.' For a door to 'open' may mean that there is only a 'doorway' remaining. Motion, however, is a trickier matter." She might be able to repower some things, but only things that agree to interact with her way.

    "Your own manner of divination..?"

    "Just so. Rather, I have several techniques, but the simplest of these, for myself, is to follow the connections. You have heard of the red string, yes? To divine, one must either have a special sort of sight, or else, more commonly, one must have the means of contacting those who do have such perception and perspective. That is why it was called... what was it, before the modern French... divinare, was it? 'To listen to the divine.'"

    Tamamo's gaze is focused on something far away, her voice softly distant, attention split between responding to Matilda's present and on the past that created the violence before them. More of it is on the former, though not quite a trance, that she should be so split at all. "Where this is insufficient, there are other means."
Foundation Scions >Consulting the orb...

    Mists swirl, as Matilda focuses deep within the crystal-clear quartz, and as vague images make themselves clear to her, she mumbles aloud, "Down, further than we have came, stretch two paths ahead of us. One treads softly through the the abandoned den of this burrow- er, a dormitory, it must be, and through it..." Quiet murmuring, she points off to one side, at the creepy staircase- "Down, deeper again one must go, once more, should records and answers be sought from their heart. Perhaps, too, the eyes watching us lie? But another-"

    Matilda pauses, concerned and curious, brow furrowed in concentration- "Another stretches opposite, less clear to me except for a tug- a pull, like falling, it is important, I know it, to follow the crushed-down trail- er, that way, I am sure," She points this time to the vehicle path. "But I cannot, despite my efforts, put words to exactly why... Comme c'est bizarre..."

'You have heard of the red string, yes?'

    Matilda, still a bit woozy from her efforts, definitely keeps a reserve of energy specifically for being proud- "Of course I have! Fates woven in thread and cords are a motif as long-lasting a notion as notions themselves, no doubt! Though, while 'listening to the divine' may be a bit antiquated a terminology, the prospect of guidance and intuition unto prophecy still, frequently so, is considered to be a celestial blessing of some manner by many-! I of course, consider elsewise, my talents are mine, as is my genius, and my wit- Ahem. But, for you to follow along such... that is your special sense of things, yes? What of the other techniques?" She's still so eager.
Lilian Rook     'Did a COMBO on that MOTHERFUCKER. SICK.'

    Lilian eyes the trail with an unusually obvious sense of misgiving. "How?" comes to her lips before anything, though she turns away shortly.

    'Dang. Did they do all this...?'

    "I can't think of anyone else." says Lilian. "I can only think of a couple of varieties of magic that could do something like this, and there's no way you could use them on scores of people in a row like this. Who else even knew this was all here?"

    Petra's wandering to the robotic heap is almost she expects. The unbroken contours she can find, as well as the general colour and make, appear familiar, but it wasn't just recently repaired; there are additions that she doesn't remember; considerable upgrades to internal systems and new, experimental attachments that will now never be proven.

    Of course the hole is the right size. But there's no way a human head would fit through that gap.

    'Something may be learned by examining the discarded cargo, perhaps, as well as by seeking the further depths. I shall attend to these in a moment. Before that, however...'

    "Please stick together like you promised." comes from down the hall. Lilian won't move on until Tamamo is visibly busy, with at least one other person nearby. The way the bulletproof glass, thick as a forearm is long, shuddered and crunched inward around such a narrow hole, exactly as it was built not to do; the way that the back wall got those markings, invisible in the dark, from shrapnel that shouldn't have spalled, and how when exposed to the room outside, all of the air inside the security office had ceased to exist; those things are for Tamamo's eyes and ears, and not hers.

    The violence of everything being dragged back towards the breach, ripped through a space that shouldn't accommodate them, the solid pane possessed of membranous elasticity it shouldn't have; it feels like everything touched by the event decided on its physical properties only retroactively. She knows that a keycard, white and blue-striped, did touch the glass at one point, but is nowhere to be seen. There aren't any fingerprints on the reverse side of the glass, though it was touched by human hands.

    'If they geo-jammed their whole facility to ruin their mountain lair's feng shui permanently it's probably why things went that bad for them.'

    Lilian utters a single dry syllable of laughter, and says, "I hope not. I'd like to believe it went that badly because their enemy was simply more skilled than them.", firmly, and yet like she doesn't quite believe it.

    Once the electronic lock is cracked, the elevator responds to Arthur's summons in an eerily polite and ordinary fashion. The classical hotel 'ding' feels strangely electrifying in such heavy air, silent save for the constant, sourceless moaning, on the lower end of hearing. The lights inside work fine; a jarring island of disingenuous cheeriness outside the darkened corridor. The buttons, unmarked, lead down three levels, and up two; not nearly so vast and sprawling a complex as a mountain could host.
Lilian Rook     'Was there a fight? What exactly happened, to...'

    "Call it what it is." Lilian says. "There was a massacre. The fact that they were armed has nothing to do with it; none of their professional combat personnel were home at the time. You can tell, can't you?"

    'Exit Signs are standard practice. Lobotomy Corp used to have Exit Signs but they proved to have negative impact on the clerks so we ultimately removed the Exit signs around the thirteenth loop.'

    Lilian steps over it, barely sparing it a glance. "Somone thought it was funny, I suppose." she says. "Who knows. This was here for long enough." She waves her hand noncommittally in Roland's direction. A prissy 'sure, who cares', implicit. She stops just to tilt her head in Matilda's direction and reply, before changing directions.

    'One treads softly through the the abandoned den of this burrow- er, a dormitory, it must be, and through it..'

    "I'll trust you again. If nothing else, we need the records." Lilian says, and then pivots at the F-bend, down to the stairs. The echo of her heels clicking down the repeating bends slowly grows quieter.
Lilian Rook     ELEVATOR:
    With a stairwell descending right next to it, the upper two floors are the only ones the elevator should uniquely reach. Hitting the first closes the doors in an orderly wall, and then fills the little cabin with haunting white noise. The mechanism responsible for playing music, across a one-floor trip that travels five storeys, is practically electronic dust inside its shell.

    The first landing empties into the middle of a long, U-shaped corridor, studded with keycard-locked doors that open into half a dozen supply rooms, along with a break room and restroom on each flanking branch. The supplies themselves count portable deisel generators and what must be six months of food, medicine, spare parts, and stranger odds and ends-- drugs and metallic tchockes, mostly-- just for this one level. There is no guard station; armories are simply lined up along the walls inside any carded area, exotic rifles sat next to fire extinguishers and manual alarm pulls. The lack of handguns imply that sidearms were facility standard.

    A keycard for tier-1 clearance-- to the break rooms-- can easily be found soaked in human blood, along with a yellow-bordered tier-2 in one of those same chambers, coincidentally laid out in a pattern. The former, nestled in crumpled bluejeans and a sweatshirt, is right outside the elevator, against the opposite wall, cracked inward. The second is behind a kicked-over coffee table, across from a number of bullet holes in the hallway that would be out of line-of-sight for someone inside shooting through the door. The television itself is painted over by the absent remains of at least four men; the programming appears to be recent, somehow coming from a live signal.

    The interior of the U bend has multiple doors leading into the floor's real purpose: A control center the likes of which NASA could only dream of. Semicircles of multi-operator computer stations are clustered up three concentric levels in the back half, like a curved choir stand, leading to a front floor where scores of individual projection screens still monitor countless satellite terrain feeds of everything but the surrounding area. On still lingers on a familiar site, strewn with wreckage and the after-plane of the Armillary Sphere. Others hover over obscure convoy routes, or main roads, monitoring G.D.F movements live.

    A quarter-- perhaps originally for the mountain itself-- are in other areas. A range of snowy mountains. An endless expanse of fog. Somewhere on an oceanic east coast. How anyone has satellite surveillance at all in 2091 won't be answered that easily; the computers are mostly trashed, with very few working, and their operators' remains-- watches, wallets, clothes, glasses, rings, piercings, everything but smartphones-- lie heaped in one corner, as if the room were turned on its side and they'd fallen. A red-striped tier-3 can be retrieved from the mess, for someone sufficiently unsqueamish. There are no bodyparts remaining to use the retinal or fingerprint locks on the computer stations.
Lilian Rook     STAIRWELL:
    The concrete steps go on for five entire flights, with ten hairpin bends. The lights in the ceiling are out; examined closely, they appear to have shattered inwards, metal cages around them twisted and flattered, as if something enormous simply forced its way through here, scraping the ceiling along the way.

    The bottom is a solid wall, filled with the emergency expansion of some kind of hard and impact-resistant resin, maybe from the ceiling, but it's already been carved through; the elevator access in the round lobby behind it is the only thing that remains blocked off in a similar way; like someone knew how an on-site commander would try to block access routes, and maneuvered around them to ensure nobody would get past while their back was turned.

    Faux-marble upscale corporate interior. The top five plants off NASA's air detoxification list, grown under high-pressure sodium lamps. Armory station, cargo ramp, breaker panel, locked checkpoint office, induction charging stations, an old-fashioned water cooler. All of them stand out more than the few signs of actual battle damage. Three branches radiate from the lobby, into a compact mess hall and kitchen, an indoor gym, and what must be a barracks hall. The first and second are clustered with equipment reminiscent of a space shuttle; the kitchen is filled with complicated three-dimensional storage and a number of gravity-proof appliances, while the gymnasium's gear overwhelmingly focuses on metabolism and bone density, the weights and gear for bodybuilding brought in by staff after the fact. Neither are exactly small, easily comparable to Trídéag's facilities, if not larger, but the barrack hall is not as long to match.

    The gym is untouched. Exploring there yields nothing in particular but someone's forgotten tablet computer. The kitchen is a bloodbath, but the personal effects have been removed, for some reason; or destroyed. There are open cupboards left over from someone raiding them and sitting down to eat; the only empty tray on any of the tables, amidst the reek of old blood. The barrack hall is tier-1 only, with a combination and retina lock on each door. The far end of it is host to another set of stairs, down, as Matilda foretold, but the room at the very end has its doors still open, with a paper note taped to the outside. Written in ballpoint pen, someone used half the page for a single word, then scribbled out half of it htemselvees: ASH~~~!!!

    I'm sorry I didn't see this coming. You were right. If you come back again before they get here, I've left something for you where your mother was buried. My apology for not listening. Hope to see you again. Unsigned.
Petra Soroka > She's still not actually controlling the ratbot herself but she does get a good view of what's going on . . .

    PETRA produces a GBA LINK CABLE. Naturally, there's a way for Angela to control a ratbot from home in true Player 2 fashion-- try collecting star bits!

"Exit Signs are standard practice. Lobotomy Corp used to have Exit Signs but they proved to have negative impact on the clerks so we ultimately removed the Exit signs around the thirteenth loop."

    "I mean, it was grotesque at the time, obviously, but, like-- like it *is* kind of funny in retrospect. There were a bunch of them that ended up just sort of pointing in a closed circle, so they'd run around and-- yeah."

"I can't think of anyone else."

    While holding her own shirt collar, Petra agrees, "Yup, it was them. I was just wondering if maybe their smashing stuff let some fucked up Ab-- Antegent loose with the special ability of evaporating people, but it doesn't look like it so far." Petra puts her fist back in the hole and takes a picture that makes the destruction on the other side clearly visible in frame.

"The fact that they were armed has nothing to do with it; none of their professional combat personnel were home at the time."

    "Well, they had those mechs here at least, so some of the strongest combat guys we were aware of were here." Petra pokes around at the machinery, but, really, whatever military advancements NAZCA made are kind of irrelevant now; they're only here for data on the Blooms. "Not that it matters, in comparison."

"Security locked is locked. I've got the big key!"

    "Alright! See you soon, Xion!" Xion opening a door with her own technique is a sign for Petra to go apply *hers*: a little Sims moodlet bubble appears above her head, emoting a keycard and question mark as she wanders off towards the ramp.

"Please stick together like you promised."

    Her expression falls almost immediately when it becomes clear that Lilian's headed to the stairs, somehow resulting in Lilian, Tamamo, and Petra each going three different ways. Her first thought is vague disappointment, her second thought is that this is probably a very practical split mission-wise, and her third is that this *exponentially* increases the likelihood of Petra getting sent to GobTown or whatever it was Lilian said in the car.

"I know it, to follow the crushed-down trail- er, that way, I am sure,"

    "Well, then, come on and come this way too!" Petra figures that as long as she has a diviner around, she's much less likely to end up trapped in a portal dimension-- technically, also, every other group already has a diviner! She beckons Matilda along like a dog, before scampering off into the inconsistently-lit tunnel along with the Angela-drone.
Foundation Scions 'I'm gonna go check out the big ramp over there.'
'Well, then, come on and come this way too!'

    "Ahem! A smart decision- I, of course, will accompany you!- excuse me? There is no need to beckon me like that! I am following!" Matildork. Half-defensive, half just explaining to Petra, "I was, in fact, quite curious, truly, as to follow this thread to where it leads, to do anything but would be, well, unacceptable."

    Matilda is quick to catch up, and start down the sloping pathway, light steps echoing on the asphalt, orb hugged in her arms and eyes fixed on the flickering overhead lights.
Arthur Lowell > Arthur: Was there a fight? What exactly happened, to...

    "Someone got a METRIC FUCKLOAD of POWER in 'em." Arthur explains. "On account of they BEAT MY GAMES with their GAMER POWER. And then they decided to do a LOT of the RIGHT THING in a BIG HURRY before the SPARK BURNED OUT." He regards a baloon-burst bloodsplatter grimly. "Not a lot of time for CHATTIN' ABOUT IT."

> Arthur: Get in. Find those keycards!!

    Arthur heads up the elevator. And he's... not actually super aggressive about finding the keycards! I mean, when he sees one first he's going to make a dash for it triumphantly, and weirdly enough despite past aversions to corpses, just the non-body remains are fine -- so he even takes a shot at the red keycard. When he gets there, that is.

> Arthur: Fondly regard bulletholes

    "Man." He rambles. "This shit must'a been SO SCARY. Looks like they had at least a FEW SECONDS to REALIZE how fucked they were. But not a lot more." The manual alarm pulls... mostly unpulled.

> Arthur: Admire ultimate gamer battlestation

    "Fuck, man, this RESOLUTION is WILD. Imagine getting FOV like this." He continues his jabbering. "But how do we get the COMPUTER SHIT out of this stuff...?" He scratches his head, looking over the concentric multi-operator displays. No way to get through the security... "I could just RIP THOSE FUCKERS OUT, come back with a SYLLADEX full'a HARD DRIVES, but don't they got, fuckin', I DUNNO, ENCRYPTION or something. WAIT." He slams one hand into the opposite palm and hollers out into the hall:

    "XION!! Ya gotta GET IN HERE. I need to know if a KEYBLADE can go into a USB DRIVE. I gotta see if you can HACKERMAN this shit!"
Lilian Rook     PARKADE:
    There must be limited use for a parkade on a mountain, but not none. Outside of the single lift track that would haul a helicopter up to a launch track through the ceiling, smack dab in the middle, the creepily urban-bland indoor parking structure is still host to eight armoured trucks, four trailers, six unmarked vans similar to what Bond once stole, and a smattering of forklifts and motorcycles. Driving any of them out to the main elevators would be a slight ordeal, but you know the path up and down the mountain is nominally driveable; you've done it.

    Though the asphalt is torn to shit, drenched in spilled fuel, and cluttered with the detritus of countless spilled supply crates and maintenance kits, none of the wheels have been scratched. Not so much as the paint. Nobody thought it was important to destroy any of these possible escape vectors, for some reason, though a single bloody blotch at the bottom of the ramp shows someone had the idea, and was hurled all the way down. The reason why is easily discerned; all of the batteries are fully drained. Not just that, but polarized beyond use, somehow. If you can somehow get them working again, the navigational data on the geopositioning computers alone must be more than another for a cleanup team to hike out here to scrub.

    Why anything leads down from here is somewhat incomprehensible. The cardinal doors lead to an indoor garage, a diagnostics station, and the usual suite of rooms for several mechanics to work long hours, certainly, but a tier-4 stairwell hidden in an obscure corner with multiple levels of authorization blockage on it just seems like nonsense. It's even more cramped than the emergency stairs above, as well, descending to what might be the lowest level of the elevator shaft, or even lower; it's even been cut into the rock without concrete facade or reinforcement afterwards, only smoothed down.

    The bizarre little adjoining room all the way at the bottom of far too many stairs is locked exactly the same way once again. Despite it not being forced open, someone experienced would notice the signs of multiple layers of anti-personnel mines set off in the stairwell, and the lingering traces of gas. The only geojammer in the entire facility seems to be at the bottom, as well, along with several of those 'anti-scrying' spy glyphs like the ones found all the way back before Caelton, in Damien Kent's car. The cramped cluster of lab equipment, the airlock, the blinding white 'clean room', all seem suspicious for such an inausipicious location. Heaps of bloody hazmat suits lie neatly piled just outside.

    The computers in here have been 'recently' accessed. Only the automatic timeout lock is on. The polarized glass blocks a view of the lab(?) interior, but the decontamination lock still works, leading into little more than a small room filled up with emitters, sensors, and, suspended in a solid acrylic cube on the only table, a gold-plated phonograph record. One that should be millions of miles from Earth, but isn't.
Xion on believes that James "Ian Fleming Presents" Bond could crack the case of the facility's absolutely rancid vibes smoke generator choking out his fellow operators. Really, it's free to do, because of how often they had paired up to do exactly that.

Xion wasn't exactly prepared for their paranoia, but she had plenty of allies so it would probably work out.

"We'll be careful!" Xion calls to Lilian, meaning it, but that's hard to translate around the corners, and she knows Lilian is fretting. She'll just have to mean it in action!

"I'm glad it's clear to you. Some people get really literal about 'door' as they understand it, but it's a definition problem! Some people are very narrow minded, but you've been dealing with 'barriers' as ideas that can be lowered but not raised back, I'm sure!" Xion converses lightly, having stepped back from Holding X To Interact'ing the elevator call button.

She didn't *need* to stim by pressing the call button more. Still, she's utterly unstartled when the elevator 'ding!'-s on arrival. It should! It's supposed to.

Trotting into the elevator and spinning about to balance keyblade tip before her again, Xion relaxes in the elevator, looking at the buttons and chewing on her lip while leaning against swordguard. "Well, up's the only way to go, right? We've not seen another way to go up."

Path mostly decided by process of simple elimination, when the doors close and they get going the reaction is a 'woah!' of shock, startled to standing ready. She didn't just hear creepy-weird danger noises, but she felt a jostle!

"We did a good jump there!" She exclaims, but the facility still having power is a small blessing. Clearing out into the '1f' exit, Xion is cautious to all the corpses - the meat piles - left about. It feels sinful to touch them and the noble Interacter doesn't quite have a pocket-rifling impulse for the keycards. Thankfully, she doesn't need them!

Stepping around blood puddles and shorthopping over when she can't avoid them, Xion makes her way into the command center around the U-bend, not interested in racks of loose rifles so much as finding the truth, and the pile of corpses... Xion will not be finding that keycard herself.

Instead, she's drawn from the racks and wandering around checking for loose shiny objects and interactables when Arthur gives her a holler-for. One moment she's down the hall, and the next she's at the consoles, looking over Arthur's shoulder and smoking semi-liquid black ectoplasm from the dark dimension that wicks away quickly. "Huh? Oh! Yeah, I can do password prompts and stuff, but for code. . ."

Xion narrates while trying her luck to find one clean and powered and active that she can fiddle with and try to get to a login screen. "I can upload my social media demon to the computers and see what Wendy can bash through and ransack for us in the database, but I think Angela or Petra might be who we need here to go over the data. Do we want to keep going? Mark this place for later? I can probably leave Wendy if she plugs in." She offers Tamamo and Arthur.
Angela STAIRWELL

Roland is pretty sure he can also make doors go from locked to unlocked forever by hitting it real hard but he isn't going to question the matter but he and Malkuith end up sticking together since ... Angela seems to be having a time with Petra right now.

"Getting our steps in, huh." Roland says.

"Yeah." Malkuth says. "Getting a little nostalgic. Horrible facility in the middle of nowhere with too much blood."

"Really?" Roland asks.

"No. Of course not. Anyway, wonder if they were able to get something in here because those cages--"

"Isn't this a magic world? Who knows. It could be anything right? Maybe if we were an expert--" Roland whistles as they make their way further in. "Now this looks more like a Wing joint." He's still happily holding that EXIT sign. Maybe he intends to use it as a club. "There's even a gym, they really set this place to bunker down for the long haul."

"Okay this is maybe more LobCorp..." Malkuth mutters. Roland naturally examines the gym first and comes back with a tablet computer, the EXIT sign has ... gone missing. He must have put it in that coat Audrey stitched for him. He, experimentally, tries to turn it on. Maybe there's a horror-style audio-video snippet on there or something.

Malkuth goes into the kitchen first, steps out quickly. Then together they make their way down through the hall. If the tablet turns on Roland will look it over but he'll hold onto it for now either way.

Roland stops by one of the locked doors and examines the security system for a moment. " Can you handle it?" Malkuth asks.

"Think you're vastly overestimating my B&E experience." Roland says. "No way I can fool an optical scan unless you found an eyeball in the kitchen."

Malkuth grimaces. "I ... did not find an eyeball in the kitchen."

Roland gestures in her direction. "Let's leave it for Xion and move on." He says as they make their way into the open room and...

A note! "Oh someone said that name before." Roland says. "Man how embarrassing to get the name wrong it's only three letters."

Malkuth rolls her eyes and snags the note from Roland's hands. She reads it and frowns. "Feel like a voyeur reading this one but ... maybe Lilian can make use of it."
Lilian Rook     '"Well, they had those mechs here at least, so some of the strongest combat guys we were aware of were here.'

    "Ash mentioned the exact number, split between Blue Team and Red Team. We all know that Blue Team practically didn't exist by the time of that operation, and the entirety of Red Team was definitely deployed. They'd have to be on reserve pilots, or understudies." Lilian replies to Petra while they're still together. "Which means you're right; not that it matters. Whatever countermeasures they had . . ."

    'On account of they BEAT MY GAMES with their GAMER POWER. And then they decided to do a LOT of the RIGHT THING in a BIG HURRY before the SPARK BURNED OUT.'

    "I feel like that by itself confirms it." she says, cynical-toned. "Who else realizes they have one our to make a decision that will change the rest of their life and possibly the entire world, and just does it, right then and there?"

    "Anyone else would panic until the chance is gone and claim that they didn't make a choice one way or the other."

    'Isn't this a magic world? Who knows. It could be anything right? Maybe if we were an expert--'

    "What?" Lilian stares at Roland. "The City is far more ridiculous than any sort of magic. Calling it 'a technological singularity' doesn't mean you don't have the fairy realm where the king owns all the colours and people buy and sell time. Come on. You people take a teleporting train to work."

    'Man how embarrassing to get the name wrong it's only three letters.'

    Lilian clamps her lips together, then takes the paper just as Malkuth says so, barely holding down a 'give me that'.
Tamamo     "Oh, thank you, Mr. Lowell." Now Tamamo doesn't have to find a way to charge the elevator, herself.

    "Well, up's the only way to go, right? We've not seen another way to go up."

    "Though we did come down... that is true. This must lead to some place not connected to the entrance shaft."

    ...and then fills the little cabin with haunting white noise.

    "Should it be making that sound, do you suppose? It feels either distressing or distressed."

    This new floor would be such a treasure trove to a looter-adventurer. Sadly, Tamamo is not. She doesn't even have one of the archetypes that gives XP for stealing and/or recovering items. She picks up the tier-1 keycard that she happened to see, but the others are sure to be first noticed by Xion or Arthur -- not that she has any use for them, herself, in either case. Once Xion has opened the doors, which Tamamo naturally leaves to her, she inspects the exotic weapons closely with her inexpert eye, only to leave them, and all the other equipment and supplies, where they are.

    The control room is a bit more interesting for her. "I wonder just what their method was... and whether anyone else is doing the same. If these..." Tamamo takes a closer look at some of the images, looking for live feeds, for familiar sights, and for motion, all of which together she can use to find the particular path, in the form of either a geostationary line or a curving plane, taken by whatever is providing the sight.

    "...were to still be in operation, it may be that there is another means of using them, or else it may not be so. If left alone, they may provide no further mischief... or else, they may. Though it is not always happier to know, it is most often better."

    Watches, wallets, clothes, glasses, rings, piercings, everything but smartphones--

    Gingerly, using a handkerchief, Tamamo retrieves a ring. A worn but clean ring, excepting blood splatter, is ideal for her purposes.

    "Now, let us try to see... who was it, who was here, and how was their thread frayed to its end? What was joined, and how were you parted?" Familiarity, sentiment, and blood make for the easiest work for her divination.
Angela RAMP

Angela suddenly finds that she's able to move the tablet around with the Ratbot. She frowns a little as she questions just how compatable with other technology LobCorp video tablets are with everything else, but she isn't going to question it for too long. Petra learned from Robotnik and he just did this shit all the time.

''I mean, it was grotesque at the time, obviously, but--''

"Ah, well, with hindsight I'm sure a fair number of things about Lobcorp was funny. Such as one of our Abnormalities essentially being a big dog, or having a button that just destroyed the facility if someone pushed it. Or the 'Bald' one.--Of course, the thirteenth loop was reached considerably more quickly than the others so the vast majority--ahh, I'm used to explaining this to people who weren't around for it." She shakes her head apologetically.

The ratbot wobbles a little as Angela gets used to the controls before puttering off after her. "Was maybe not so funny for Sal." She adds, regarding the Exit Signs, though, like she just couldn't stop herself.

Then she notices Matilda has come along. "Oh! Yes. I suppose you aren't aware, but one eventually fell on Sal's head and crushed it but you'll be pleased to know that their current iteration is alive and well."

She follows Petra along the ramp. She periodically stops to shine a light on a blood spray, or onb the batteries but Angela doesn't have the tools to fix any of that up and wouldn't even know how to to begin with. She endsu p scooting ahead of Petra to make sure she has claer vision of where they're going.

''Heaps of bloody hazmat suits.''

"Why'd they leave them like that?" Angela wonders.

''Recently accessed computers.''
''The golden disc holy shit''

"If you can get me into these computers I can access the information quickly so we need not linger." Angela says before her light settles on the record.

"...." And then she turns away. It's just a record, clearly not as important as ''data''. But it's so out of place she does ask, "Why is there a record here?"
Tamamo     'Do we want to keep going? Mark this place for later? I can probably leave Wendy if she plugs in.'

    "I will be but a moment, objectively speaking." Tamamo says, word choice intentional. "I am unfamiliar with Wendy... and, more importantly, unfamiliar with these systems. Would it be dangerous to leave her?"

    Tamamo thinks for another moment. "We have not seen evidence of traps laid along the route to this point, excepting a plainly visible guard station. I suspect they had no more reason to leave traps in their equipment, believing that anyone who infiltrated to this point would not be stopped, in any case. In that case, it is likely safe. Still, let us go and request Ms. Angela's group to try their hand, here, when we are ready to search another room."
Foundation Scions     "Ack- aïe, such treacherous terrain!" Matilda whines, about normal mundane cracked-up asphalt, after a near-stumble.

    It often pays to be thorough- though, possibly, not here in the parkade, as Matilda flits about peeking into vehicles and maintenance kits for anything to glean. Unfortunately, she knows basically nothing about cars, and even less about their maintenance. She wouldn't be one to ascertain that their batteries are kaput, because she wouldn't know how to turn one on in the first place. That won't stop her from opening up the vehicle doors she can to stick her whole torso in and look under seatcushions.

    "Tier Four? Is there a sequence of some sort, to move up from one, to two, to three, to four? Perhaps an understood ordering of incantations to perform for analysis of identity and permissions? This is a realm in which arcanum (by another name, perhaps) *is* utilized..." Matilda is unfamiliar in most ways with the art of magnetic-strip keycard access, still! She's extrapolating off of far-less hinged measures, such as the Foundation's authorization systems with communication devices. Why do they do it that way??? "Ah-hem, perhaps trial and error will work?"

    If not stopped, she will start articulating random Latin-and-English incantations in a guessed-at progression of 'tiers' four in a row and starting-over at the inevitable failure point.

'A button that just destroyed the facility if someone pushed it.'

    "Hein? What could possibly be the point in an innovation such as that? Was there an ambient threat to which self-destruction, in a pressable format, could be required? And likewise to shave hair?" Matilda doesn't know about Lobcorp. Don't tell her. Save her innocence.

'I suppose you aren't aware, but one eventually fell on Sal's head and crushed it but you'll be pleased to know that their current iteration is alive and well.'

    Matilda, with no other possible way to process nearly any of that but to launch into a contemplative little cautioning, murmurs, "It is so frequently bad luck to traipse underneath anything hanging precariously, such a thing is a petition for chance to strike out with harm... er, but, if all is well, then, all lessons are learnt!"

    She does hug her crystal ball tighter.
James Bond      Bond is quiet, the whole way dawn the ramp. Upon seeing vehicles in seemingly pristine condition, he reaches into his pocket as if this were a normal parking garage, maintaining a confident stride towards one of the unmarked vans. As if he belongs here, he pulls out a key, holding it out perpendicular to the driver's side door. The teeth fold and reconfigure themselves until the key emits a beep, and he opens the driver's side door.

    Climbing into the seat, he inserts the key and turns it...

    The distinctive, disappointing click-nothing and utter lack of response from the dashboard is the telltale sign of a dead battery. But, he doesn't seem discouraged. "I'll be a moment. Don't get too far ahead." Bond calls to Angela, Petra and Matilda, not having bothered to close the door. "There's no good reason the battery ought to be dead. Not with a motor pool in walking distance."

    He pulls the release for the hood, steps out, circles around and removes it, putting on, for some reason, his sunglasses. Even with the battery dead and polarized, he still removes the leads in the right order. Leveling his watch at it, anyone observing might be worried he'd be thinking of blowing it up out of frustration--but, in fact, a diagnostic crawl speeds across the inside of his sunglasses. Whatever program is there reaches the conclusion that the battery is not only dead and intentionally so, but polarized--a progress bar crawls across his vision until, blinking full, the face of his watch pops upwards.

    A pair of metal caps tumble out into his palm. Each is about the size of a battery terminal--and each has a long spike at the bottom that seems to be an applicator or syringe. Bond drives them through the terminals with a forceful grunt each, shearing the metal and ensuring a suspicious look from whatever auto shop clerk might see it in the future. A faint smell of ozone surrounds the van; electrolyte-acid paste injection temporarily renders it workable long enough for Bond to reconnect the leads.

    The van cranks stubbornly, first with that disappointing nothing-buzz then the promising click of a starter motor, then the whine of a not-quite turnover and finally the relieving growl of a sparkplug finding purchase for a full turnover. Bond wastes no time linking his watch to the powered-for-now electronics and reviewing whatever survived the wipe on his sunglasses.
Xion 'Would it be dangerous to leave her?'

Xion almost hits a shrug, and then gets to a nod. "Probably. Wendy, um, Wendys Woman, is a digital entity I saved from being recycled after some business with Doctor Wily? Anyway, she haunts my phone now. She's cool."

Lifting her phone, she waves the face towards Tamamo, where a sassy pigtailed burger robot woman is depicted in a white t-shirt and overalls with the red optics of robot evilness and an otherwise sassily genial expression on her rust-freckled face. The digital specter - really a .EXE - disappears as soon as Xion can find a place to plug her phone in.

"She'll be fine. She's got some kind of platformer powers? I think she kills people with burgers? To be honest she's so much better than me at netbattling I just let her handle it. She'll probably be fine after I password in unless they have some sort of super aggressive lockdown feature, and then she'll have an adventure! This is like watering a plant, it's fine." Xion confidently narrates (or, talks herself through) until nodding and popping up. Gathering Kekyblade to hand she steps back over to Tamamo. "Arthur could set up a gate here, and bounce the cards we have around, and we could see if there's a higher access card upstairs? If there's a particular door stopping people, we can go right to them, too! But, let's stick together, I think. If we want me to bounce over and hit the doors we don't have keys," Or eyes. "For I can just get them too."
Petra Soroka "There is no need to beckon me like that! I am following!"

    "Uh huh! You are! Good job!" Petra has no reason to say that and do an encouraging golfclap to Matilda besides being a little mean, but she's just having fun.

    At first, stuck in what is mostly just an arena of ruined asphalt that smells like gasoline, Petra is wondering if this was perhaps the worst path to take in terms of enrichment. Necessary, of course, for mission reasons, but she was hoping for a little more from exploring a ruined NAZCA facility than just rubble. This attitude changes immediately when she spots the parked vehicles, and she lights up and scampers over to them in a direct beeline, simply hopping over any chunks of debris rather than navigating around them.

    "Truck!" Petra scrambles around the vehicles, first poking around to see if any of them still work, simply skipping past the puddle of blood to do so, and then once disappointedly sliding out of the last of the drivers' seats, gets to diagnosing what's causing them to be broken.

"Such as one of our Abnormalities essentially being a big dog, or having a button that just destroyed the facility if someone pushed it."

    "Don't joke around, Ange," Petra says, fake-warningly while popping open the hood of an armored truck. "Every time you mention that button someone presses it within the week. Someone's gonna hop into that book and blow the whole Library up somehow."

"Oh! Yes. I suppose you aren't aware, but one eventually fell on Sal's head and crushed it but you'll be pleased to know that their current iteration is alive and well."

    "It's cartoon shit!!! It's so funny!" Petra slaps the truck, snickering, then begins messing around with her own reflected stash of mechanics supplies to repair some of the vehicles. 'Batteries' are actually maybe the thing she has the singularly most of out of any bit of machinery, besides random mismatched bits of metal, so it doesn't take her all that long to rig something up.

    Also, as a matter of curiosity, she pokes around inside some of the vehicles: the American military of the early 21st century is something she retains at least some absorbed knowledge of, and foremost among those thoughts is how much of a complete disaster they are. Did NAZCA, really, run so tight a ship that each of these trucks would be spotless on the inside even on the day that they're all massacred? Or would there be empty beer cans, crumpled wrappers, gum stuck to the underside of the dash? It doesn't really matter, but, in her investigations, she finds a keycard! Tier-1, though.

    "It's kind of nostalgic, right?" Echoing Malkuth from across the facility, but without any of the irony, Petra looks around at the bloodstains in the concrete. "It's almost sort of, like, soothing. All those bloodstains are *enemies* this time."
Petra Soroka "Tier Four? Is there a sequence of some sort, to move up from one, to two, to three, to four?"

    Matilda's first idea sticks in Petra's head better than her second idea, because the second idea results in Matilda speaking in tongues at a door. She offers her a vague "Good luck," before backtracking to the mechanics' workshop.

    Petra has: one keycard, tier one! She needs to add three tiers to that! Surely there's something in this room that can help. It might have to involve going all the way back to where the mech's wreckage was, but eventually Petra assembles a series of casings for the existing keycard that adds additional layers of magnetic signaling and complexity, to clunkily create a more secure keycard! As a finishing touch, she pops open a hatch on the top, and turns a big dial from ONE to FOUR.

    That doesn't do anything, but it's the Robotnik way.

"Was there an ambient threat to which self-destruction, in a pressable format, could be required?"    Lugging this cube alternative to Matilda's orb back down to the stairwell, Petra fiddles around with it a bit before finally clicking the door open. "It prevents you from ever becoming mistaken that your boss has anything but rot for brains and a completely miserable moral character." She's so mad about that fucking button.

    Downstairs....

    Unnerved by her morphmetal tools suddenly distending fractally and losing their form, Petra stows the Silver away. It's not entirely useless with the geojammers active, but it's much weirder for her to control, so she'd rather not until there's a reason to. Much more so than the blood and destruction upstairs, the sterile room weirds her out, creeping carefully around to avoid disturbing anything unduely.

    "... What the fuck? The golden disk?"
Tamamo     Tamamo gives Xion's social media demon the sort of look a mom trying to be supportive gave their teen child on having webpages explained to them circa 2000, a level of impressed mixed with incomprehension while making 'please continue' noises. "If you believe it would be the fun sort of adventure, then, by all means, continue. Ms. Angela has mentioned that there are -- or, at the least, were traps -- and on this note, care should be taken."

    Xion talks about sending around the keycards.

    "Staying together would be best, I think. I would only worry Lilian if I explored without an escort." It would be a normal, for a lot of people, to complain about that kind of thing, but Tamamo doesn't seem the least put out.

    "As to sending the keycards out..." Tamamo thinks about that. "Mr. Lowell, might you connect a portal between this room and... I do not know the layout of the rest of the facility, but perhaps there is some central hallway on the other floors."
Angela RAMP

''What could possibly be the point in an innovation such as that?''

"The button was actually an Abnormality, it transformed into other entities to psychically manipulate Agents into pushing the button, though usually they just pressed it to see what would happen. I once had to train Elites to wait outside the room with the button in it to confirm that they could at least pass the bare minimum threshold of not pressing the button that killed you. Of course, someone nearly died." Angela sighs. She does not explain the shaving Abnormality though so at least Matilda is spared that. "But yes, you're correct. It is--of course--a bad idea to stand under a precariously hanging sign."

''Someone's gonna hop into that book and blow the whole Library up somehow.''

"Fortunately if the button is pressed in the book, the only people who would explode would be those in the book." Angela thinks for a moment. "...But surely, I do not need to concern myself with the rights and guidance of a button?" She is a little uneasy. Maybe she does have to send people into the Don't Touch Me world but Abnormalities are stronger in their Book World. It feels like a suicide mission.

''It's cartoon shit!!! It's so funny!''

"This is all cartoon shit, though." She agrees. And now that she is no longer trapped inside Lobcorp (well okay, she is, technically but the situation is different) she can remark, "A bit. It is nice that the bloodstains aren't our own."

''It prevents you from ever becoming mistaken that your boss has anything but rot for brains.''

Hastily, Angela is compelled to add, "I was not the boss at the time." She can't have it going back to the Foundation that she was responsible for the button. She just can't.
Foundation Scions 'Uh huh! You are! Good job!'

    Matilda knows Petra is saying that (and clapping) just to be mean, but she is still saying those things- "W-well, naturally, I would do a good job at this, as I do everything," She says, not unaware she is throwing herself into a trap.

'Truck!'

    "Yes, that is a truck. Is..." Oh no, is Matilda missing something? Shifting her tone more worried and serious, "Is it being a truck important? Is there a value to them, in this mission? I- of course, would know that, but you should elaborate!"

    Sometimes people are just saying things, but Matilda can't not take precautions! She hovers over Petra's shoulder as she performs autopsies on truck engines, fully confused at what is going on.

    When Petra returns from her keycard mission, she finds a frustrated and exhausted Matilda sputtering complete nonsense at the wall, who very quickly goes quiet the second she realizes someone who very likely will pick on her for it (even if it had worked) is now watching. The jumbled nature of the lugged contraption draws her attention, a little bit-

    "Is that an alchemical construction of some manner?" Hushed, "Wait! Is it explosive?" She steps back a good way before Petra can even answer her.

>Down

    Matilda may not have seen the anti-scrying glyphs at any previous occasion, but she can get a pretty good idea of their function from her own knowledge of magical arrays- that this is the first area she's crossed into that wards out prying eyes is exciting! Matilda loves to be prying eyes! "We must be moving in the right direction, if they do not want this seen," she mumbles, staring at a glyph and not quite explaining. Just on principle, she tries to smudge through the few she comes across, as if it would actually disrupt instead of simply feeling disruptive to her.

'... What the fuck? The golden disk?'

    "Pardonnez-moi? As in, the one from the long-away spacecraft..?" Matching surprised-tone in her voice, she stares alongside Petra. The romance of 'a spacecraft carrying a message out and beyond the solar system' rests far better in the astronomer's memory than the specific name of the probe- she loves space, but not the space program. That it is behind plexiglass, like it's in a museum, helps a not-insignificant amount in her being able to recognize it as anything other than most-likely a normal record. "It should not be here at all, no? Unless, it is a copy? Incroyable... But why?"
Lilian Rook     ELEVATOR:
    Factoring in the total collapse of the global supply of rare earth metals during the Onslaught, and how long it took just to begin producing an equivalent level of computing sotware again afterwards, the amount of data stored here simply isn't normal. The computer console that Xion gains access to appears to have almost nothing local at all; it's a glorified terminal to a truly grotesquely swollen database somewhere else, on a closed, wired connection, which its local memory is dedicated to caching and interpreting. The Angelapad is currently the only wireless connection going through the side of a mountain, how to get petabytes of structured, encrypted data out of here is very much 'solvable'.

    The satellite screens that Tamamo pores over are both familiar and not quite. Those of former Nevada show the route they'd taken to get there, but only so much is visible from the road, and certainly looks different from the air. On one screen, visual markers are being automatically generated and placed on what must certainly be moving antegent, given the location in the middle of no-man's land. The mist only takes mild panning around for her to understand that it must be in the Japanese archipelago; for lack of any other leads, it seems someone has been aerially combing each island in a systematic grid pattern every time a satellite passes over.

    The log goes back years. The exact space where 'the Dragon's Garden' is now has already been scanned; but that was back when the sword of 'Distortions' was still present, and the view of it is little more than a chromatic anomaly marked 'low priority'. A second pass around would have found it again by winter. The ring's history is far from pleasant either; faded memories of a marriage eighty years ago, separated in the storm, joining the Letter Agency for their assets, casting a wide net to find her, and ending up here, trickling through the grooves of history, after that warmth turned cold and became the icy feeling of revenge. Its owner was killed at the same time as the others; when something attempted to start up, then failed; the world lurched around them, they stumbled, and something glass and chrome undid them with its pseudopods.

    The tier-3 card accesses the second and last stop on the elevator above. With that checkpoint opened, you're able to enter the smallest point on the base, a 'mere' basketball court in size, and the place most viciously savaged by violence.

    Rows of tables with sterile flex-neck lights and clean tarps flank one wall, with uniformly shattered computer stations following most of the other. Power banks, server racks, industrial hydraulic terminals, and thick brains of wires divide up most of the center. Domes of polarized glass stud the ceiling, arbitrarily dome-shaped, surrounding a pillar of ring-suspended mechanical equipment that has been torn apart into a mountain of scrap metal and plastic.

    Two clusters of four bunk beds occupy separate corners, separated from plastic card tables and old cookware by privacy curtains, for reasons initially unclear to such an unassumingly utilized room, lacking even an armoury station; what replaces it instead is warm weather gear and climbing equipment mounted on the wall. The only ostensible purpose is the long hole drilled in the ceiling, through which runs an extensive metal mast near one side, accessible via precarious pedal-steps along its length. It's the only thing that leaves the mountain interior; no doubt it connects to something responsible for the satellite uplink and long-distance comms system, though the only reason to space it such as this is . . . if the facility were originally designed to geo-jam the entire inside of the mountain.
Lilian Rook     The equipment that's still useable suggests its use via words like 'neutrino detector', 'wide-band dish C', 'external lidar', 'frequency scrubber', and 'gamma burst alarm'. The ruined equiment's closest labelling is ruined by long slashes, reading 'TEL~~O~~ A~~IB~~' unhelpfully.

    Bullet markings are lodged in many pieces of major equipment. Black graphene casings are scattered underfoot along with broken glass and blood. A broad, flat piece of metal on the heap of wreckage has been used to graphic effect, where multiple pieces of rebar have partially crucified a set of empty outdoor clothes, drenched in blood, inside of which linger a mildly decayed human head, heart, lungs, and partial spine. The rest of the body is nowhere to be seen at all. The seven other personnel could be accounted for by the random ring of outward-facing spatter from here.

    A tier-4 keycard at the partial-corpse's feet only hints that they were someone important, and a spent sidearm and broken knife shows that they were the only one with a reasonable amount of time to fight back. The backpack they had on appears to have been rifled through and emptied.
Lilian Rook     STAIRWELL:
    The kitchen is as worthless as imagined. The only food that seems to have been raided is in the form of candy bars, soft drinks, jelly snacks, and other artifacts of taste without substance. The bench is still sticky; someone sat down and ate while already surrounded by blood, after having dragged away the belongings and not before.

    The single open room has been ransacked in a more orderly fashion, but only partly. The 'barracks room' was clearly once for four soldiers and their kit, but three of the beds were torn out at one point a while ago, making it a cramped single-room suite. The walls appear to have been inadvisably painted and repainted several times, most recently in warm autumn colours, in a way that'd be unimaginably poisonous to breathe in.

    A corner that began with a minifridge is an entire kitchenette. All four footlockers have been kept, had hooks drilled in and draws screwed inside, and stood up to make a closet. Faded spots on the bathroom walls where two urinals were removed by someone with powe rtools and patience have been mostly covered up with shelves that were hammered in with nails on purpose, loaded with junk and trinkets, along with a boombox and an air dehumidifier, in the corner that now isn't used for anything at all. The shower is covered in old red handprints inside; the drain is clogged and reeks of death.

    Not a whole lot remains inside it. Someone took everything that mattered to them already. It seems anything else was burnt in a fire under a broken suppression sprinkler, perhaps out of spite, the only things having survived being a tier-3 soot-caked keycard and photo ID, most of the plastic melted off the metal backing.

    The stairs from there are an afterthought; tier-3 and easily bypassed by now. They lead into a series of locked down armories with higher grade combat equipment than the others; exosuits, energy weapons, inactive geojammers, target designators, plastic explosives; they're arranged alongside authentic G.D.F special forces armour and dress uniforms, and exactly one stolen (hopefully) Immunes corps combat skin. Between them is a security station, with all the internal cameras on-screen, hosting its own small server bank that must contain months of rolling footage, isolated from any other system. Several points in the walls have been deliberately smashed, seemingly by memory, behind which now-unrecognizable machinery is jammed.

    Bloody clothes are slumped over a central console keyboard, where a [YES/NO] prompt has been flashing on-screen for ages. Small side text mentions 'gravity calibration' on a completed checklist. Lilian takes the console by 'intuition', enters the correct password on the first try, uses the tier-3 card to access the footage banks, and asks only, "Do we have any means to store and review it off-site? It's getting deleted either way."
Arthur Lowell > Arthur: Set up a gate here

    "Damn, I thought LOCKS is LOCKS. Computers are... hard." Arthur frowns as he contemplates Xion's conundrum. "And they aren't gonna have some GOOF-ASS SHIT where the PASSWORD is something ya boy can get off of DERIVED LAUNCH SITES CROSS-REFERENCED UP IN THAT SHIT WITH THE CULTURAL SHIT OFF THAT TEEVEE. It's gonna have NUMBERS and SYMBOLS and shit."

    He drops a Gate in the room -- he can *create* ones at short-range, at least, even with geojamming, and link them up later -- and steps away. "See what WENDY can snag, yeah dawg. Mannn, someone gotta get them hard drives. Nice HAUNTING though, glad GHOSTS are nice."

> Arthur: Set up gates at the accessible floors

    Nah, easier to just put another Gate in the elevator itself. Anyone can call it to their location using the normal elevator stuff, after all! And that should insulate it against geo-jamming.

> Arthur: Ascend

    Up we go. Gamma burst alarm, huh? Arthur regards that smugly, then the... "Tele... Teleport anti...?" He scratches his head. And then--

    Someone who knows his poor feelings about dead bodies should possibly stop him from seeing that disembodied head. He's about to suddenly come face to face with that gore!
Tamamo     Tamamo leaves the computer searching to others. As for Petra, it sounds like she's already made a key... and it's not as if they can't just make new doors. She's not sure how Roland or Malkuth are doing, but if there are no complaints... no, would Malkuth complain, when there was something to complain about? The City isn't really a place that encourages speaking out, is it? That's a bit concerning, even if it's not truly her responsibility.

    Far more so is what she finds in the ring. "Silver and chrome... a shape neither of man, nor machine. That was how these lives ended, for the one who joined the Letter Agency to search for a lost love that was never again found, and for all the others." It's time to move on.

    'TEL~~O~~ A~~IB~~'

    "Tel, tel... 'teleport,' and the name of a destination, perhaps? No, this does not seem a place from which to create portals, but to see into the distance. Would 'telescope' fit?" She hasn't read Le Guin.

    Tamamo places herself directly in front of (and therefore coincidentally between Arthur and) the quarter-body. "Apart from that... my, but this place is... ahem. I suppose that is the most... intact body we have yet found." It's a difference, and she can pattern-match it to the spent weaponry, but hasn't yet placed the significance.

    Very quietly, "Head, heart, and lungs. Just enough left that they might have spoken as they died."

    Walking a bit away, and looking over the broken equipment, "It does not seem as if one wished for any use to be made of what was left here. Strange, then, that the same extent of destruction was not given to the prior room." She'd move if she had an idea of where to move to next. Maybe it'll come to her while she looks at the least broken equipment, and ponders cookware placed here by the beds, rather than in the breakrooms elsewhere.
Lilian Rook     PARKADE:
    The fuel, at least, probably isn't gasoline; it reeks badly, but the smell is off. It's much worse, actually. Exploring under seats mostly rewards you with concealed guns, black metal polyhedrons with symbols at least Matilda would easily recognize as being very similar to Soviet-era 'psychic test' markers, snack wrappers, and distasteful magazines. Most of them are actually more or less cleaned over, but several still have muddy bootprints on the mats inside.

    Several of the vans are hollowed out to contain monitoring equipment that would make Flamel Parsons proud, whilst others contain more medical equipment than a standard kit on the wall; enough to carry someone out in critical condition if you want to be charitable; if you feel more skeptical, then enough to abduct someone who is seriously injured. Bond takes no time at all to find where the hideously illegal foldable gun racks are. There's so much iodine, too.

    The navigation computer is fingerprint-activated, but Bond already has prints from doing something like this a while ago. The fake consumer OS on the dashboard lets him crawl through it in a similar manner, until he has every pre-programmed route on the car and the last nine weeks of travel prior to its docking. It'd no doubt be automatically wiped by now, if the battery were working.

    Petra's cobbled-together solution to break into the lab works just fine, once it's in motion. The jammer itself is easily located in the middle of the ceiling, deployed like emergency fire suppression, and hers to do with as she pleases. The window polarization is just a switch on the wall, not requiring a passcode for the idle-locked terminal screen, but looking around at the rest of the equipment proves it to be far more complicated. The dashboard (touchscreen as it is, locked) doesn't pretend that they're anything else; everything here is for electromagnetic microscopy and spectroscopy, physical age dating, exotic particle detection, and even sideways tech-derived solutions to checking for and analyzing magic.

    The screen panels mounted on one wall, where one would ordinarily tape up physical photographs or x-ray charts, is covered in angled shots and closeups of the record, automatically activating again once the terminal is touched. They're overwhelmingly focused on odd subsurface patterns that seem to have been placed under the gold electroplating, somehow, despite these etchings and markings having nothing at all to do with the originals. Like someone had scribbled something in every available empty margin; a clumsy copy of the record's original elegant design, by Petra's fan-knowledge.

    The rest is taken up by a digital corkboard of unfiltered crankery. Lists of coordinates, blurry snapshots of far-away star systems, long charts of specific dates and times, charts naming historical events selected seemingly at random, crude attempts at drawing geometric shapes over those close-up frames, and multiple long mathematical formulas that all end with the answer '4'.

    The record is secured to the table by physical clamps, easily torn free with patience and the right tools. The database is more difficult to crack, but has scanning results that date back twenty years; all the way to 2070. Despite there being direct routes to five databases; JORMUNGANDR, FENRIR, GARMR, HEL, YGGDRASIL; the last person to use it had only checked the files pertaining to its physical age:

    834 years
Angela STAIRWELL

Roland looks at the tablet that he stole and offers said tablet to Lilian. "Only portable computer I've got on me unless you want to use Angela's tablet." He tells her.

Malkuth says, "I... guess they're not very likely to come back for it?" Malkuth frowns. "Does feel wrong though." She definitely didn't linger in the kitchen , gang, but Roland does eventually double back to snag that keycard. He's surprisingly apparently cooler with going into that environment than Malkuth. Though maybe the reason you'd think she'd be comfortable going into a place like that is why she's not keen on lingering in it.
Lilian Rook     ELEVATOR:
    As far as Tamamo's examination of available living space goes, it must fit hand in hand with the fact that the keycard equipment doesn't exist on the inside of the room. Given the small portable freezers and amount of extra dry food, it looks as if this room were built to be actually sealed off for two weeks at a time, with an extra week of wiggle-room. As if to quarantine everyone inside for two weeks after using . . . a telescope?

    STAIRWELL:
    "I'd rather stick to theirs. Just in case there's something nasty." Lilian says to Roland, accepting the tablet with a nod, and pairing it up with the console via another 'lucky guess' password; no keycard required. "This is probably all custom software anyways; I bet all of this data will brick any other OS it detects." Navigating the footage, she begins uploading the raw files from the last day any activity was seen, then rather than going backwards, the compressed reels from every other day since. She says "I want to catch whoever left that note." once she notices any attention, then "We can try delivering it when we next see them." after Malkuth.
Foundation Scions     Matilda's focus stays on the images detailing the record's sub-surface patterns- patterns are important, and sometimes even tell you things! Even if these don't reveal anything along the axis of information she's familiar with, the time and effort spent trying to piece together meaning from such things is worth it, to her.

    The corkboards are frankly the same to her- a possibly-meaningless bit of practice at piecing together patterns, except that in this case, the base substrate is someone else's pattern-reading. Matilda is oddly quiet, for her usual demeanor, when in study- with her head tilted nearly comically to the side to stare out at such things, and her fingers every now and again drumming against her crystal orb.

    "Why 'four'?" Matilda mumbles, confused herself at the apparent conclusion- "If that is what they always come to... what does 'four' mean? Elements, seasons, hemispheres, winds, cardinal directions, limbs... certainly, it is quite an impactful number, but *what*, within that?"

>834 years

    Peeking over Petra's shoulder (as Matilda clearly isn't the one who can figure out the computers here) when she accesses the data, Matilda just lets out an interjecting "Quoi?!?"

    "I don't understand? How can it be that old? The disc record was an innovation of nearly the twentieth century, and the twentieth century is most certainly not eight centuries in the past? Where has it been- and why must eight hundred and four end in four as well?" Finger-on-chin confused musings trickle off into faint noises, as Matilda stares at the numbers again and again.
Petra Soroka "Is it explosive?"

    Petra looks down at the lump of complicated machinery in her arms, then at the door that can't be more than a couple inches thick. "... That would've been a lot easier, probably."

"Unless, it is a copy? Incroyable... But why?"

    "A copy, or retrieved...?" Petra's trailing response to Matilda isn't rhetorical, or dismissive. The imagery of the *golden disk* of all things being here, associated by orders removed with Lilian's nature, is instantly powerful enough to escalate her seriousness far beyond what it's been so far; shifting from the adventure-protagonist seriousness for exploring, to the held-breath excitement of a scientist at the beginning of a horror movie.

    She's not overly hasty in disabling the jammer, not here. Using mundane tools rather than her currently-unreliable metal, she detatches it from the ceiling and experimentally moves it closer and farther from the record, eyeing it suspiciously to see if there's anything being actively suppressed by it. Then, for her own ease of use, she switches it off, keeping it close nearby just in case something spirals out of control.

    Once in the terminal, Petra copies over as much information as she can to her personal device, getting increasingly more agitated as she does. It doesn't even begin to cross her mind that any of the absolute nutcase conspiracy scrawls down here might be incorrect, dead ends, or misleading in some way; they're all absorbed and rationalized into the whole, devoured to fuel her rambling.

    "*Eight hundred*?! It should only be a little over *one* hundred! It's-- I mean, even if it was going at a fraction of the speed of light, that'd result in it being younger, not older. Eight hundred thirty four, minus two thousand ninety one... twelve fifty seven? What the hell was going on in the thirteenth century? What *blackbody radiation* are they getting out of this thing?"

    Shifting over to the screens of pictures, Petra nods several times at Matilda, not really noticing that she's just spitballing randomly. "I mean, the *age* being four-- probably doesn't mean anything, right? Unless its age by whatever way they're measuring it stays the same-- like, I mean, we can see they've had this thing for a couple decades, so probably not that. Four's the number for the end of the world, though. But how much of this stuff's from *before* the Onslaught, even?"

    Petra can't make any sense of magic or shapes, no matter how much she'd like to. The fact that Matilda seems like she can do so better means Petra shuffles aside to give her a better look, encouraging her dorkiness instead of mocking it. Eventually, though, she's got little ground she can make without either reading through files on the Blooms herself, or just prying up the disk and taking it along. Expanding pillars of Silver pry open clamps with no pressure put on the disk itself, but the problem comes from actually extracting it. She's not going to *ignore* the signs of a hazmat suit and decontamination chamber, but it's not like she has a giant lead box inside of her mirror.

    What she ends up doing instead is kneeling down and gathering up an undamaged hazmat suit, careless to the blood all over it. Checking it up and down for what it's actually made to shield against, she unzips it and passes it, via her Silver globules, into the chamber with the disk. Feeding the disk into the suit, zipping it closed, and then balling it up and encasing it in a sphere of Silver, is about the best she can do, though she looks around the room for any geiger counters or whatever else to double check
Arthur Lowell > Arthur: I suppose that is the most... intact body we have yet found.

    Arthur instantly, sheepishly, steps away. "If they got eyes, you can... those guys needed eyes." He mutters, fidgeting with his pockets -- the ones he keeps nothing in.

    "Alright," He mutters. Then focuses on the equipment. "Was it them that did this though? Or was it the guys here? Almost feels like..." He examines this again. What were they doing? "A neutrino detector, a gamma burst alarm..." He snaps his fingers. "Something's wrong with the stars. The-- it's not just what's going on here, they had someone here stressing about the cosmos all the way. Stellar stuff big enough to wind up with gamma bursts and neutrino signatures. Why?"

    He taps his chin, pacing, thinking a little about what Tamamo said. He doesn't want to *look* at the body, but... from that description, maybe Ash learned about whatever it was too.

> Arthur: Maybe this is connected with what the Letter Agency was trying to do worldwide with the Blooms?

    "Too altruistic, too underfunded. Maybe a little linked."

> Arthur: What about what Ash themselves was trying to do with the 'Sparks'?

    "No, they just wanted to fuck off. Away from...?" He thinks, then shakes his head. "Did Ash go out of contact with Lilian though? Or even Petra? What if I..." He scratches his cheek, and focuses. Really, really focuses.

> Arthur: You're missing a piece

    "Yeah, yeah, I know. Alright, reconnect with Ash first, maybe. Or at least see what was downstairs." He mutters, checking over the equipment one more time. A lot of space-scanning gear like this... He subtly gathers whatever data he can, to try to draw some of his own conclusions from it. He'll need a while to figure that out.