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Penumbra	The Day Before:     All three major factions keep up with new Warpgate developments as much they possibly can. From each world, they receive a steady stream of reports from authorities, helpful citizens, and client organizations, mapping out the steady crawl of their local network throughout its formative years. When no such cooperation exists, it falls to independent contractors, teams following after Elite operations, information purchased from freelance explorers, or commissions from smaller Multiversal factions, to fill it in. Never is it refuted that the Warpgate network cannot be allowed to fill with rising, uncharted waters. Many simply follow suit with the the big three, and share it openly.     So when it comes to truly new portals; infant connections to unstable paths, opening up in the vast hollow of the Soft Expanse; it falls to everyone with the equipment able to tap those silvery threads to know of each and every arrival individually. Without the means to venture into every single one, the process is much like labelling every new star in the sky; efficient, without character, and with very little known, cataloguing scores each day only to track them before they move on.     But every once in a while, the signature of one of these Warpgates is so notable that it invites immediate scientific investigation to determine the cause. Even amongst that exclusive number, there are very few that warrant an 'Elite first' survey out of hand.     This is one of those cases. When it opened, sheer weight of electromagnetic transmission blew out the nearest equipment almost immediately. Before it went, listening outposts were able to catch patterns that, when transposed, looked close enough to human brainwaves for someone to pick up the red phone before the day had turned.
Penumbra	The Day Of:     Softly blinding white to tarry black dark. In a moment, any sign of the Multiverse you know is swallowed into nothing, and deep shadow is the only truth left.     You're submerged into it. Suspended. A cold, cloying darkness. Midnight air that seeps under your clothes and condenses on your skin. Like thick drops of cold sweat. Like humid breath on your cheek.     You might think you were dead were it not for the sound of iron under your first, probing footfalls. The smell of dust, mud, and rust, follows shortly.     . . . . . . . .     The mouth of a pipe. That's where your journey takes you. You'd already walked for so strangely long, taking so many turns, that it seems difficult to believe. Even now, seeing that it empties over twenty feet of empty air, one struggles to imagine what purpose it could possibly serve.     You emerge surrounded by its cousins. A tangle of rust and iron that threads through every surface, where even the smallest among them are just wide enough to crawl through; strangles all but the last slivers of bare concrete. Above you, those pipes stretch on forever, fading into the faintest sliver of cold blue light before miles of shadow. The open space beneath you feels minute by comparison. A bubble of air, trapped in a far-flung capillary, lost in the circulatory system of an unknown beast.     . . . . . . . .     Has it really been so long in the pipes? Just reaching the ground felt like twenty minutes. Or seconds. Or just the space between dreaming and waking up. It's hard to tell.     Nothing is wrong with your senses, and yet time feels oily and slow. It pools stagnant in your cupped hands when you watch carefully, only to drain away through your fingers when you look away. The colossal heaps of crumbled concrete all around you offer no help. Despite the thin, lukewarm fog that collects in every space, and the thick grey mud that squelches under your shoes, you can't find the slightest trace of mold.     . . . . . . . .     Lanterns. That's what the orange light in the distance was. Tracing back your footsteps, you haven't gone far, but using twists of arterial pipe between concrete chamber walls to travel is more disorienting than you expected.     There are three of them, strewn amidst the rebar and piled-up silt. They're little more than glass jars, capped with metal, bound to thin twists of nylon rope, but a flame burns in each of them all the same, blurry and diffuse. They clearly haven't been moved in some time. It's hard to imagine who would even carry them here. There's nothing to find but steam, leaking from one of the pipes, cold, by the time it brushes your hair, and a wide, ankle-deep pool of muddy black water.     . . . . . . . .     It isn't water. You know that the minute you cross it. The marbled black reflection of the chamber around you doesn't change in the slightest as you move over it. The silt beneath is only visible through its shallowest edges. It's thick beneath your steps, yet glides frictionlessly from your shoes. You could pass your fingers back and forth through it and come away without a drop of it on your skin. It splashes where you step, but falls back into itself just a little too slowly. Now that you think about it. The way it ripples, to create that shimmering, oil black surface, doesn't follow the exhalation of the pipes at all.     You almost step on the bones in the mud on the other side. They've turned the same colour as the concrete.
Xion	Xion had been looking for someone. Xion had been looking for 'herself'. She had lost a part, had let a part run, and now paid in patience for her prior choice. A reflection in the mirror, following her turn away from inevitable conflict, Xion's doppleganger had occupied most of her questing time but the critical alert for the warpgate investigation comes at the perfect time to catch the Nobody's interest. Even with her particular skills at appearing at her intended destination, the initial motion does not end at a portal-mouth. Surreal to her experience, Xion finds herself walking through the Darkness, her attention lapses, and she is in tunnels and pipeworks. Trading one body-warm wet for another, Xion's bright blue eyes blink under her hood -- when did she put up her hood? -- and dip to check the sucking at her boot. The illumination's character changes, not the same textures of Darkness as she knows but not the bright tones of Light, either. Like the pale light of Ruin, the pipeworks emerges into a meager pool lit with somehow-bright orange, and Xion drops down into it for a second, standing and taking stock. After rubbing her eyes, having failed to feel like she fully transitioned between realms, Xion takes a few steps in the pipeworks and looks back up at the ceiling, trying to divine any purpose to the engine from within its valvery. Bending down, black-gloved hand dips into the oil, lifting to test the texture between fingers and finding that she cannot do so before her eyes. Kneeling instead, bare knee breaking from tails of black coat to dip into the flowing swell, she pinces the texture between fingers to test it before standing up. It's not one step more before she sees the bones and, startled at the sign, squints before seeing the color and frowning. "As grey as stone... Are they just that old? Warpgates have to go somewhere important. Is this maze--" Important? Closing her eyes for a moment, calming, Xion reaches out with her feelings, searching for the presence of others through the maze, a sign of life to follow or a source of emotional energy to relate towards.
Mag	Mag may have just been complaining about his busy schedule, but such excuses never last forever. His "advisory thing" clears up on schedule, and right around the time he's looking forward to resting in his own bed again he gets a buzz in his headset. Exploration needing done, maybe some people to meet, maybe some cool stuff to find and catelogue; cool stuff! It doesn't take much to get Pepper on-board for this kind of thing, and Linear was always coming anyway. They might've only had a day or so to prep, but an adventurer's always gotta have their kit ready, right? It's nothing out of the ordinary. Mag's got the gang packed and scheduled by the turn of the next hour, and none of them have to think about it until morning comes.      Stepping through the gate into the unknown, of course, was another matter. Team Launcher took precautions and hooked each other together belt-to-belt with ratchet straps, holding hands on the way through out of an abundance of caution. Plunging into frigid shadow is unnerving, even for them. Without letting go of either of his teammates in his natural-born hands, his third, mechanical arm cranes up slowly into deployment, a powerful square industrial light clenched like brass knuckles held out and angled downward. Maybe the shadows would swallow the light initially, but step after step would eventually carry them far enough to reobtain their senses, and that light would be their first cue as it reflects off even the rusted pipe interior and carries further away.      None of them want to fixate on the sensory deprivation, but it's only normal to at least let out a collective sigh of relief, as each teammate wipes their face carefully of the condensation they aren't sure is real, alongside their own unnerved sweat. The straps are unfastened, and both Linear and Pepper take a moment to test their footing while Mag kneels at the mouth of the pipe and peers out.      "Phew... That was nervewracking, li'l Mag. I don't remember any of the ruins portals ever dragging things out quite *that* much..." Pepper allows herself to complain, patting Linear on the back to encourage her to stick close as Pepper walks over to look out with Mag.      "Yeah, no kidding. I already feel like I need a bath. But... The smell isn't as bad as I'd expect? Pipes like this should mean sewage, or industrial runoff..." Mag says back without looking at Pepper, distractedly turning his high-power light this way and that. "Well, no time like the present. If everyone's feeling okay, let's get to looking. Guess we're trying to go up, instead of down today? If we gotta climb, let's wait for later and try to chart the pipes a bit first."      And so they do. The three move in slightly staggered single-file, Pepper at the back and Mag at the front, lightly jogging while now and then pausing for Linear to scribble a bit more into their rudimentary map of the pipeways and tunnels, clipboard and grid paper braced against one of her voluminous sleeves with a carpenter's pencil in the other hand. Finding the simple lanterns is curious, but innocent. They get marked on the map, particularly noted as non-electrical, and the team moves on slowly from there.      The strange mud draws caution, not out of unfamiliarity but an assumed familiarity; it resembles a tar pit to some degree, and that warrants Mag to take care drawing out a telescoping pole from his Cyframe storage and probing for the bottom before any of them commit to stepping in-and-through. When it seems safe enough to wade, Mag clicks his goggles down into place, scoopes Linear up in his Cyframe's elbow like a cat, and heads through. The bones stumbled across during the wade make Pepper wince most of all of them, with a little fuss and shake of her heeled boot when she wanders near them, but all three of them know it's mostly for show.
Mag	Xion, and anyone else for that matter, can see the advance of their light long before they see the Launchers. They're not particularly trying to be sneaky, though they don't chatter all that much amongst themselves yet either, actually picking up when they see a sign of someone else. Mag's ultrabright light remains angled down, away from Xion's eyes out of sheer habit. "Oh hey! Dang, I almost missed you in that coat. You don't happen to live here, do you? We haven't seen anyone else since we got here!"
Hamada Haru	Some people haven't been in a faction in a good long while. Doesn't stop them from having a finger on the pulse of things, though, and reports of a sketchy warpgate are interesting enough news to catch anybody's attention. It wasn't the first time Hamada Haru found himself on the cutting edge of exploring new stitchings on the tapestry of the Multiverse, though the last time was quite a while ago... before he had ever called himself any kind of Kamen Rider, in fact. He steps through the warpgate as the brown-armored, locust-themed Dynamic Era-- equipment blowout anything usually isn't a good thing to walk into unshielded, even if he's hardly totally helpless without the suit.     The whole experience has an eerie familiarity to it that Haru can't quite put his finger on. Something about Twin Peaks, perhaps...? He doesn't think so. Not exactly. The transitional nature of parts of that place were certainly distinct, but they had more of a flavor of suffering to them than this. It was less like walking into a place brimming with ambient hostility and more like walking into a long-abandoned hospital that nobody could be bothered to finish the demoltion of. Or maybe a dream of such a place.     Every now and then Dynamic Era pauses, and counts, and then moves on. Somewhere amidst it all he falls in with Xion without really seeming to have planned it.     It's an awfully long time, even with company, before he actually stops and de-transforms, a gust of nanomachines reconstructing a water bottle from raw material storage in one hand. He sips at it while Xion dips her hand into the oily material, watching. For a moment he concentrates on something -- counting, again, though he doesn't say so -- before capping his bottle. He stays out of the oily liquid as best he can, not that it seems to need much avoidance in the quantities that it seems to be here... though he suspects that a large body of it would be a real problem.     "Can't find the thread. This place feels ill, but I'm not detecting any hitches in the passage of time when I look for them," he offers, coolly. His eyes flick from Xion towards a not-so-distant, unfixed light source as it approaches. His posture tenses briefly, then relaxes as he gets a good view of what -- who -- is approaching.     "You don't, either," he decides in Mag's direction, without technically answering the question posed to Xion.
Xion	Xion, doing her best to wear the least visible clothes possible, startles when she's walked up on. It jogs a memory - there were other people she was working with, wasn't there? She was going to work with a few people, specifically, but exactly who... Oh! Haru, at least. Haru had fallen in besides her as she moved, so when they're called to-- Xion turns slowly after rising from the liquid, smiling thinly and waving with a hand in the side-halo of Mag's ultra-bright light. There's a slight wince, in her smile, of how bright it is anyway. "Hey yourself. I'm part of the investigation team too, I guess." She answers, looking to Haru and then back to Mag, Pepper, and Linear. "Are you an adventuring team, together?" She asks back. "I'm Xion." She adds, almost afterthought. Thumbing to Haru, then to herself, she introduces them both as. "We're action hero types." As if that meant anything. "He kicks people. I've got keys."
Hamada Haru	"Hamada Haru," Haru introduces himself, blandly. Apart from the funny-looking gun he really doesn't look like he belongs here at this point, on account of the detransforming.
Mag	Mag shakes his head back at Haru, in answer-to-an-answer. "Nope! Sorry for not recognizing you then, just a little hard to make out faces without, y'know." He jiggles the lamp gently, and Linear atop his robo-arm in the process, who spreads her arms out like wings to regain her balance wordlessly.      Xion's apt guess prompts an almost smug giggle from Pepper. "Got it in one, sugar. See Mag, you don't need to be so self-conscious about job titles and all that." He tries to brush it off with a roll of his eyes, an affable smile, and a small chuckle. "Guess so. Well, anyway. I'm Mag, that's Pepper, and this is Linear." Linear self-introduces by way of a fingerwaggle from behind her clipboard. "Kicks and keys. Well that's great, since I'm a hands guy. Always wished I had more keys too. So, if we're all on this thing together, we may as well sync up, right? We've got a partial map from where we... Uh, appeared, I guess. Got anywhere you're going yet, or still just getting a feel for the place?"
Xion	"Well, you were all together when you got here," Xion admits, before tilting head while black bangs drift. "But I've got a knack for hearing Hearts too. It's... A part of the key thing?" She tries to explain, decides that's good enough to the Hands Guy. This felt like an important wavelength they were both on. "Sure, happy to group up. A map might help - I've been searching for signs of where to go, but if you're experienced mappers that'll make it easier. What's your battle order, does any of your group normally stick back or need support? Haru and I are mostly direct fighters, but we can work out a battle order. Both of us are flexible." She explains. "If we set up a good flow we can cover more ground while moving towards our best shared idea of 'forward'. It's better than nothing. Got anything for, um, bones?" Xion steps aside to point at the gloomy concrete-grey bones past her.
Penumbra	--------     Shining a light into the gloom makes it feel colder. Feathery flakes of ancient paint and concrete facade hang in the beam like marine snow, matching the gritty grey sludge that wetly sticks to your boots with every step. Calling it mud is only a best approximation; when you get close enough to look, you can't find a hint of organic colour in it at all.     --------     Old cement dust, maybe. Piled thick and high enough to swell when fed with water. The bottom of the shallow pool is covered in it too, wet in separate layers.     . . . . . . . .     Someone did live here. Maybe someone still does. The lanterns have been here a long time, but not everythng has. When the pipes finally contract into tunnels, rust-streaked metal giving way to mud-spattered cement bricks, the clearest taste of 'emotion' is tarp cloth hung from the capillary pipes that run through the ceiling. Tattered and ragged at the edges from use, its only purpose seems to be to block the cold breeze coming over the bent railings that hem your path, and even then, they do little more than block sight. If it tastes of any feeling at all, it is breathless, eggshell-thin anxiety.     There are lights in the walls. Thin strips of ghostly blue white, low to the ground, running on a trickle of amperage. They're the only thing that shows signs of being cleaned. Going by the raised path to one side, and the enormous grates that seal off pipes that lead back into the endless blackness, you'd think this was a sewer, but a peeling transformer box around the next corner says otherwise. For some reason, the gluey remnants of a voltage warning sticker elicit a pang of uneasy relief.     Beside it, a dust-smeared oil drum, still sealed, watches unmarked plastic crates that are each nearly as tall as you, propped up on aluminium pallets and enclosed in criss-crossed iron bars. Plastic shopping bags crinkle underfoot. Old batteries and cans with the labels worn off lie scattered in a muddy puddle.     . . . . . . . .     There is no explanation for your surroundings that doesn't involve first being built by human hands. The eerie black liquid that pools here and there, in crumbled corners and muddy furrows, likely was too. And yet, a dead body slumped in the corner of a dry corridor, under a dying fluorescent bulb, feels like first contact with another species.     A man in a state of near-emaciation, clothed in little more than waterproof rags, arms and legs caked with layers of dirt and smeared with oil. His hair is long and shaggy, and greyed far in advance of his apparent age. The sticky blood against the wall isn't fresh, but isn't old either. The plastic satchel at his side has only a thermos, an old lunchbox, a crude scrap pocket knife, and an unopened tin can,     Most of his belongings look as if they had spilled when he dropped them, but the satchel itself has been moved. Searched, perhaps, but it isn't big enough to hold much more than you can see. The thermos once had water in it. The lunchbox contains only what looks like dessicated meatballs, though despite their slimy sheen, they have no scent whatsoever. The can bears the remnants of once being labelled tomato soup. There is no expiry date.
Chuyao He	Chuyao has come with his traveling pack full of supplies--paper, a new inkstone, a favorite abacus, and food enough to last through what he assumes will be an enlightening day or two of investigation. The full waterskin was a subject of debate at the time he left, but ultimately he decided to bring it along out of an abundance of caution. His traveling clothes consist of a loose-fitting outer zhiduo robe in sunflower yellow with black trim, held fast with a matching black cloth belt, and, of course, his wrapped traveling boots.     He is simultaneously grateful for the layers, and regretful that he didn't pack something warmer. He extends his hands in the darkness, searching for a wall. "That it should be so terribly dark... this unrefined scholar should have brought a lantern. At least then these surroundings could better be seen and, thus, documented... Alas." Part of it, is, of course, speaking so that his voice may be heard, so that he may be assured it still exists to *be* heard, the timeless comfort of the learned in the chill of darkness.     When his hands don't immediately find something, he takes a step, and the muted sound of iron both confuses and reassures him. "Curious... what could be the significance of this? It is as if we are in an aqueduct. Yet, Warpgates most often lead to places *of* significance, do they not? If not where people gather, then surely, to a place that has some meaning *to* people. This, too, should be documented..." ...     Outside... well, as 'outside' as one can get in that confusing tangle of exposed pipes, Chuyao's excellent sense of balance serves him well, allowing him to lean out and survey the full scope of the industrial structure. "Ah, this lowly scholar's initial supposition was perhaps incorrect, for, if it *were* an aqueduct, where is the sound of water? From where does it draw? It appears that we have found where it empties, yet, there is nothing here *but* emptiness." He leans back with an impressive display of calf strength, looking up, next.     "Hm... the pipes stretch on for what seems to be many li. Not even the sun on high can reach this place. Perhaps it *was* an aqueduct, which no longer functions? This, this would explain the mud and rust... perhaps once this spot was submerged, and no longer?"
Chuyao He	If we gotta climb, let's wait for later and try to chart the pipes a bit first.     "Indeed, brother Mag. Reaching the top by traversing straight upwards would be troublesome to say the least. Though it will mean a longer journey, the pipes do indeed seem safest... Therefore, I, Chuyao He, beg my colleagues' indulgence for a moment." In the paltry light afforded by his not being in a pipe, Chuyao retrieves his notebook, one of his brushes, and his inkstone. As he said he would, he documents his findings thus far. ......     "Colleagues, have your boots so much as broken the bones of a fish amidst this mud?" He's quite sure his haven't. "Or, perhaps, snagged on an errant clump of river grass?" ...... The lanterns are, to Chuyao, a thrilling discovery. They are a sign of habitation, an intentional divergence from the also-very-intentionally designed pipe network. Aqueduct or not, this was something designed to function without having people in its innards attending to its every need. Moreover, there doesn't seem to be anything here to attend *to,* unless there's some crack or imperfection mended beyond his ability to pick out. Naturally, he writes this down, too-- "Someone was here, although not recently... It does not appear to have been the work of a laborer, either. Perhaps an explorer, or even... a resident?" ......     The un-water fascinates Chuyao, as well. "Colleagues! Look! Thick as it is, one would expect it to resist first and relax later... yet, it rather seems to do the opposite?" He demonstrates, splashing with his foot and pointing excitedly as the drops reluctantly rejoin the larger pool.     Haru's de-transformation draws an intrigued lift of the brow. "Brother, I have never seen such a marvel as your armor. Did you make it yourself?" This place feels ill, but I'm not detecting any hitches in the passage of time when I look for them.     "Such a thing may be measured..." Chuyao quietly marvels, before nodding. "Indeed, there is something out of sorts, is there not? Clearly this place was built with some purpose in mind, yet it is as quiet as the grave."     "Ah... brother, sister, please forgive my boorish manners. I, Chuyao He, scholar of the late generation, greet you respectfully," he says, offering Haru and Xion--the two who are strangers to him--a fist-in-palm salute.     He returns to his investigations only a few moments after. "Hm... one almost wonders whether these pipes were made to move such a subtance. But if that were so, why did we not see a pool of this, collected at the bottom, or... on its way up? Perhaps the machinery has ceased to function. Or, perhaps, something to do with the qualities of this..."     His face goes pale at the sight of the bones his boot almost snaps. "Liquid," he finishes at a hushed whisper. Are they just that old?     "One would hope that this was not the same who installed those lights." But it is possible, he clearly knows--they obviously hadn't been moved in some time, either. He takes a cursory look around the bones for anything that might give a clue as to who they were or how they ended up here--are there any obvious fractures, or any sign of personal belongings left?
Chuyao He	When there is more light than just the occasional lantern or the beam of the flashlight, Chuyao points it out. "These seem more as though they were built by the same as those who made the pipes."     The sticker, too, draws his attention--he glances towards Xion, Haru and the Launchers curiously, as if to ask whether any of them know what it means. At the sign of the drums, the crates and old batteries, he pauses in the light of the nearest strip to document his belief that there may indeed be human habitation further into this complex.     It is very different, seeing a dead body as opposed to a dusty old skeleton. The latter is something that, while not at all comforting, is human only in an abstract sense. It's difficult to see bones and picture what face they might have had, what they might have looked like when they were smiling, resting, at play or at work. A body is something very much different. Its lifelessness casts a shadow where the light of life once was. Its repose all but shouts the fact that it once stood, that it once was more than 'a body,' that there was once warmth and color and breath, that it once moved according to a will and whim that has since depart, or--as is the case with this one--has been made to depart.      Chuyao gasps before he can stop himself. "Please... forgive my lack of decorum," he quietly states. Turning to Linear, "Sister Linear... would you be so kind as to mark this spot on the map, so that this lowly scholar may return with one versed in the funerary rites of this world?"      The dried blood receives a hard, long stare from him, before his face softens into something almost remorseful. Eyes closed, he shakes his head. "What a pity. A beggar, perhaps? Or a laborer struggling to feed himself... To struggle, so, and to have one's life ended in such a way regardless... Awful. Truly awful."
Xion	Xion laughs lightly at 'boorish manners' from Chuyao, waving off his concern and grinning at him rather than bowing. She does do a palm-into-fist and presenting back to him almost automatically, then rights and shakes her head. "I'm Xion. If you didn't hear. That's the fastest anyone's ever called me 'sister', but it's not a bad affectation!" "The liquid's different." She confirms, having taken a kneel in it just to see. "Different than anything I've seen. Like it's more jealous of itself than of binding to you. Most water makes you wet, you know? Sinks into the crevices. This barely wants anything to do with you." Looking back at the pipes one more time, Xion considers further. "I think the pipes were meant to convey some-*thing*. The mud is there, but so were we. And now we're here." A beat. "Is this place, this construction, the 'warpgate'? The natural shape of that? It's powered. Lit, operant." Xion asks, then looks down. "No fish though. Nothing living, nothing feeling. This place is entirely empty." Of living things? What about the oil? What about the... people? Xion crouches down by the corpse, looking with dull eyes at the effects of the deceased. With a curious pinch of fingers, she lifts the strange sticky-ball to her nose and sniffs. No smell? None at all? Tentatively, she takes a bite of the 'food', chewing for taste. She had learned that there was a way to tell about a universe by its tastes, the deviation from the sweet highs of her own, but... Well, it wasn't a good plan but she didn't have many other investigative abilities without scent or sight of other-'beings'. "Were they here to maintain the place? Or... Just scavenging? There's nothing left of them, but they... came here like that."
Hamada Haru	"There's nothing to recognize, and so no misunderstanding to be had. If there is a name you might recognize me by, it's Kamen Rider, but I doubt it," Haru reassures Mag, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and looking between Pepper and Linear. The thought that they're awfully young for this strikes him briefly, followed rapidly by remembering exactly how young he started getting involved in this sort of thing.     On the subject of where they're actually going and how they're getting there, he says, "We're pathfinding. The warpgate leading into this place was giving off bad readings, so getting 'somewhere useful' and 'back again' is all that's necessary. I don't have a specific destination in mind so far."     He doesn't comment on battle strategy things. Either he's comfortable just falling into a rhythm, or he doesn't think it's worth worrying about yet. Haru does glance towards the dusty bones as the process of moving on begins, lapsing back into vaguely tense silence as they do.     He stops at the presence of the ragged tarp, running a hand along it and examining its ragged edges. When he settles it back into place he makes certain it falls the way it seems like it's intended to-- Haru isn't certain that whoever put it there is still around, but it's plausible enough that he's not about to do the unkindness of leaving it even a little non-functional. This is a bleak enough place to be without somebody making the breeze a little more worrying and worse.     Retrieving his transteam gun, he tinkers with it for a moment before waving it and producing a fairly ordinary flashlight in a buzz of mechanical insects, which he passes towards Chuyao before re-holstering the weapon/tool.     "High electromagnetic interference even through a warpgate suggests a lot of functioning infrastructure of some sort... or at least 'functioning' in the sense that it has a tangible footprint that can cause extraordinaryt amounts of noise. As desolate as this place is, my guess is... it's important, but there aren't that many people for anything to be important to here," he speculates. //Brother, I have never seen such a marvel as your armor. Did you make it yourself?//     "No. My mother made it," he says. This is an assumption. Haru is never certain how much of the mad science is his mother's work. //Such a thing may be measured...//     "People who tamper with perception of time have given me some cause to count the time. If it's a disparity of perception counting while knowing the time when you started counting can help. If it's a disparity of experienced time you need knowledge from outside the effect. It's still possible we're experiencing time anomalies we don't have the point-of-reference to catch." //"Ah... brother, sister, please forgive my boorish manners. I, Chuyao He, scholar of the late generation, greet you respectfully,"//     "There's no problem. Ceremony isn't for places like this," he says, offering a curt nod in response.     When the gang starts to run into plastic shopping bags and just... trash, Haru picks up one of the plastic bags and starts collecting the trash. He carries on like this until they come across the deceased man, at which point he puts his plastic bag aside and draws his transteam gun again.     "I'm going to at least create a container around the body," he says. "It's awfully fresh for as old as that blood looks, though."
Mag	Mag looks almost comically relieved at how quickly Xion slides into the shop-talk of her own accord. "Hearts, huh?" He can hear capital letters. He looks at Linear, still couched between his shoulder and his artificial white-gloved arm, who straight-faced nods back at him in what could only be communication on the Sibling Wavelength. "Well, usually I take point and Pepper's our all-types gunner, Linear's support. Healing, ability boosts, she's great. I can take second rank too though. If you hear 'Magna' or see a little tech-ball pass by you, that's your heads up to give me or Pepper a bit of space, but we'll watch out for you anyway. That's the jist of it!" Mag sums it up with a left handed thumbs-up, tangibly glad to have the warning system out of the way already.      As for bones, Mag can't do much. "Nah... Normally I'd bring something like this to a Society researcher to look at, but... Well, there is one thing." He spends a moment inspecting the skull in particular, looking at the teeth, eyesockets, jaw structure and such. Delicately, with the palm-pads of his gloves rather than his bare fingertips. He's not a biologist or anthropologist, but he can at least probably confirm two things; are the bones human, and were they technologically augmented? He has his suspicions about this world, given the nature of the electromagnetic waves that the gate's opening heralded, but it wouldn't be surprising either for these random remains to have no tech among them.      Chuyao's presence is reassuring too, as any familiar face would be in the dark. Mag greets him with a gentle nudge of his cybernetic fist and a big grateful grin. "Awesome. If you're taking notes, and Linear's working on the map, this'll be easy." At Chuyao's observations, Mag agreeably muses, "Just going by the noise level and the fact we haven't seen anyone alive here, it seems like either the pumps got turned off on purpose, or it's been broken for so long that anything that could still move is completely burnt out. And this uh... Goopy stuff doesn't really stick to you when you move through it, so I don't think we can count on residue to get an idea of how recently it all broke down. If this stuff is what it was moving, I mean."      Coming across the warning stickers that Chuyao seems curious about, Mag is happy to elucidate. "Oh, those? That's to warn you about a live current. As in, you could get electrocuted if you touch it, or if something nearby conducts the current close enough to arc to you. I guess if they had signage up, this had to have been a umm... Legally established place for people, right? Like, it's not a hidden base or whatever, people were expected to be down here... At some point. And if the lights are getting cleaned now and then, but not much else is... Maybe people use the pipeways for transit here?"      Linear is content to take Chuyao's request on the mapping, even if marking the spot with a skull is a little intimidating at first glance if one imagines a future map-reader without the proper context. "Mm. They might have been lonely..."
Mag	Moving on from that original mud-pool where they met and spoke initially, the Launchers and their new friends carefully pick their way down the makeshift path ahead. Mag stays beside whoever else is in the lead to keep his lamplight level and out of people's eyes, while Linear steps down to walk in the middle of the group as a whole. Pepper occassionally seems to dawdle and dally in the back of the group, but only to thoughtfully examine something or other before trotting to catch up before she's fully outside of the reflected light. Coming across another body, this time far more than bones, is more than enough reason for the team to group up closely together, Pepper leaning around Mag's shoulder like a rubbernecker while Linear pinches his opposite sleeve for reassurance.      "Gosh Mag, this isn't a good sign is it? Been a while since we found someone in this kind of state in a ruin..."      "Yeah... Someone's been through here, but didn't want what he had I guess? It's weird there's no bugs around too, even if that doesn't exactly look edible..."      It's Linear who ultimately marshals herself to step away just in front of Mag, setting her map-clipboard aside and grabbing the corpse's shoulders with the delicacy one might apply to a precious vase. She tries to tilt the body just a little away from the wall while mumbling a faint "... Sorry.", just enough to check the back of it; namely, for the wound that presumably killed them. The most important thing to find out, of course, is whether it was done by claws, or blades, or something else.
Chuyao He	Is this place, this construction, the 'warpgate'?     Chuyao has been chewing on that since Xion said it. I'm going to at least create a container around the body.     He nods. "This is prudent. If sister Xion and brother Mag are correct, and it seems increasingly likely that they are, the... *compound* which we emerged in, some time ago, is the Warpgate. Therefore, with luck, whatever community he came from will not be far, and thus, we will not go long without guidance on the necessary rites." They might have been lonely...     "Indeed they might have, sister." It seems, at first glance, that this is a very lonely place. It's awfully fresh for as old as that blood looks, though.     "This unrefined scholar thought similarly," Chuyao agrees, with a nod and a thoughtful frown. "Brother Haru, did you notice the preserved meats he carried? Those, too, seem to have kept for quite some time. Ordinarily, that kind of preservation, where meat is concerned, would have very specific requirements. It would need to be cured, or dried in certain ways, yet... it does not look or smell of either. Could this be one of the distortions you mentioned earlier?"
Penumbra	--------     The bones are human. Worse, there are no bones that aren't. Raking through the muck, there are no signs of augments. No screws or plates or sutures. It's hard to tell whether the faint metallic residue that unevenly stains their surface stems from their long abandonment, or was already present within the body.     --------     It doesn't take much bagging to notice that none of the discarded items have brands or serials. Besides the cluttered labelling in twenty different languages, crammed into what space there is, colouration and pattern are the best way to tell what any of it is. Though the make of every battery and can is similar to what you would hope to see on a supermarket shelf, they can only be seen as 'rations'.     --------     There's far too little blood spilled for that to have killed him. Most of it you can see is from where he must have leaned against the wall before collapsing. It's easily explained by the gash through his side, smaller and deeper than you might imagine, and completely untreated. Any experienced explorer would attribute it to the claws of an animal, but even the flies haven't found you down here.     It's not infected. You don't smell anything putrid or rotting at all. Just iron and sweat.     --------     Biting down is an exercise in regret. The texture is offputting, but the taste is absolutely foul. Something neither bitter nor sour nor fermenting or expired, only retch-inducingly impossible to keep down. If there is any one recognizable note, it might be charred sugar. Something derived from carhohydrates and proteins formed by something so detestably obnoxious that it beggars belief.     It couldn't possibly be natural. It doesn't seem expired, either. The bioelectric prickle it leves in your mouth fails to even come off as medicinal. If there are ways of preparing it correctly, you don't know them; he didn't even have salt. If this is meant to be food then a stale can of soup must be like treasure.     --------     Stop in place and look for long enough, and the black has a way of playing tricks on you. Especially where it gathers in stagnant pools. The subtle rippling of its surface, present even where the fog clears and the air stands oppressively still, is purely random motion. Every so often, the undulation looks something like a silhouette by chance, and then pareidolia tells you that it's trying to crawl out. But the ripples always disperse.     Stay and strain year ears for long enough, and you can hear rumbling in the earth. The groan of metal that should follow each seismic shift never comes, but everything shivers just a little at its seams. It's as if the pipes could feel a chill down their spines.
Penumbra	. . . . . . . .     If the dead man was returning this way, you should hope to find a community before long. You find another body instead. Then a third before long. Then another. The first was an anomaly, but this many forms a pattern. They aren't so close as to feel crowded, but there aren't so few that you can quite forget the last before stumbling on a new one either. All of them are in similar states, save only for their age, and the majority are not far from the makeshift lanterns that seem to serve as markers where the electrical lighting has failed. Beyond a point, you can't really be certain how many there are anymore. They're deceptively easy to miss; as if apathy had claimed them in rot's place.          . . . . . . . .     You can almost hear it. Like a steady hum, pitched too low to be perceived, loud enough to drown out your quietest thoughts. It hasn't changed in the entire time you've been here. You've only begun to notice it in the prolonged absence of any sense of time or place.     . . . . . . . .     Perhaps it isn't your senses. Perhaps the absence is real. Each time you travel deeper, it gets harder and harder to believe otherwise.     Nothing grows here. Nothing rots. The bones in the mud are all but petrified. The pipes lead to corridors. The corridors lead to sheer drops. The doors at the bottom open into power stations, and those send you back into the pipes again. Even the lanterns eventually take you to a yawning chasm between high walls of buttressed cement that could only be compared to a dam; neither of which is placed to hold back water. They used to be inexplicably connected by a metal-strut bridge far above, now wrenched apart down the middle, as if destroyed from above; but there is no rubble below, and the ceiling is a solid wall of pipes in the first place.     The largest outflow is higher up the walls than it is anyways. It seems to go on forever. It's easy to imagine that it does.     . . . . . . . .     A robot, of all things. Not a simple one, either. Everything you've seen so far could have been made back in the 70s, and yet the rusted-out husk of a semi-humanoid figure, half-submerged in liquid blackness, would look straight out of science-fiction were it not for the occasionally makeshift hose or pipe under its once-white chassis.     'Has it really been so long?' The notion is bizarrely intrusive. It's been hours by your watch, not centuries; it's absurd to even check. You could almost swear that the archaic brass gears buried in the same muck were placed there to just mock you.
Penumbra	. . . . . . . .     Here and there, hanging tarps and and raised boards of corrugated iron almost amount to rooms, of a sort. Through cold banks of billowing fog and drifting flakes of insulation, the spectre of a proper path emerges, following the endemic stream of wires, breaker boxes, steam pipes, and metal stairs. In rare instances, you find wooden boards, used to make bridges over deep, water-filled fissures, but no matter how swollen the planks are, none have even begun to rot.     No wood is involved in the flames you find still burning in an empty drum; only chips of something like burnt chitin, boxed in by neat and properly piled stones, as if camping outdoors. The warm light is a welcome relief, but all it reveals is the unnerving assortment of electrical boxes on the walls, so numerous and bizarrely mounted that they resemble a clock collection instead.     Faded rugs and half-clean blankets are gathered near it and held down by rubble at their corners. Not far away, the giant letters C-5 are still readable against blue-grey paint.     --------     And maybe the light was never playing tricks, and you eyes were trying to warn you. Motion in the shadowed corners draws your eye to quivering shapes near-indistinguishable from the mud and rubble and refuse around them. Strain your ears and block out all other sound, and you can hear wet-crackling noise that stands erratically apart from the steady drip of water. An electrical wire on the wall fizzes, then pops, and the weak sparks illuminate the hunched backs and bowed heads of bodies that end at the waist, trailing away into the muddy black slime that makes up the rest of them.     They're gnawing on bones. Or at least what was left on them. Clusters of them, heaped on each jumbled skeleton like flies, dragging themselves with their arms alone, individually malformed as if their oily black skin were sloughing from their dull red bones. Even in the firelight, they pay you no mind whatsoever; not unless you approach close enough to see that their skulls are nothing but misshapen lumps of flaking red crystal behind incomplete oily black masks. Then they respond to your presence by crawling through mud and filthy water, up and over the rails on the concrete, to reach the fresher meat.     But they're pathetically weak. Slow, clumsy, fragile, only able to grab and pull down and bite, easily killed with a single blow. They crumble away like lumps of coal when they die, which dyes the muddy puddles beneath them a familiar, undulating black.
Hamada Haru	"For my part," Haru asides to Mag, "I should be able to mitigate any friendly fire problems that might result from saturation attacks. If you tag me during wind-up, even without the signals you mentioned, I can fix it."     He makes a vaguely agreeing noise about the pipeways maybe being used for transit, though he doesn't sound entirely certain. It doesn't -- to him -- seem likely to be inhabited exactly. But it's not entirely unused either. If he was going to take a stab at guessing, the place with the tarps is probably a rest stop... more of a camp site than it is anything else. Even if this place is too important not to move through to other locations, that's not the same as needing the same care and energy put into it as habitation. It would only take a few people getting too chilly over repeated trips to justify the minute amounts of shorter-term maintained infrastructure.     The lights, on the other hand, would be mandatory for traversal to be possible without equipment at all.     He does get down and assist Linear with checking the wound-- mostly by holding on to the body while she does the examining, since he's not particularly keen on 'stealing' her investigation from her. Whether it's the less nasty job or not, he couldn't say.     Once the examination is done he re-positions the body and uses his transteam gun's 'building' mode to create a crude, openable coffin around the man. As an afterthought he produces some hand-cleaner, which he offers to Linear before he washes up with it himself. //Brother Haru, did you notice the preserved meats he carried?//     "I noticed that Xion was comfortable trying to eat them even a little. Didn't look real closely mself," he admits. "Even the properly-preserved stuff can be rancid in the wrong conditions, and I wouldn't call these the right conditions. That's strange too..."     "It would go beyond bugs, though. There would have to be practically no bacteria here. I don't have the senses or equipment to check that."     Haru examines his bag full of trash, nudging items around. "Everything here is also manufactured 'generic' and not that old... if they had branding, it was stripped off. I don't think anything here is old enough for that, and given how particular decay seems here..."     Haru fishes out some of the batteries, turning them end-over-end in search of one with clear, familiar corrosion. He remains fixated on this, and examining the general state of his garbage bag's contents, for only a short while. The next body brings him out of this interest altogether.     The third keeps him alert-- and lose count though he might, Haru does make crude instant-constructed coffins for them as he goes, even long after they've encountered enough bodies for it to have been strange and wearing for a while. Past the third or so the coffins have distinct markings he draws Chuyao's attention to so as to cleanly identify future visits-- he's definitely under the impression Chuyao won't be daunted by the number that he'll have to get back to.
Xion	"Hearts." Xion confirms, not able to refine more with any usefulness. Drawing narrower circles carved off parts. She related! She engaged with hearts and feelings. "You've got danger modes, got it. We'll stay clear if we can, and keep an eye out for Linear and pepper getting pushed if you're tied up." Confirming with Chuyao seemed only right, though it didn't seem the same sort of easily broachable subject with the scholar. "Hey, Chuyao. In a fight, where are you? The front, the middle, or the back?" She simplifies down for the martial artist, not sure how the scholar rolled, and not sure if they shared the same language she shared with Mag as an experienced Dungeon Dingus. "Can you turn down the lantern?" Xion asks, after a little bit, curious to Mag. "The ambient light's almost enough to go on, but the flood sort of obliterates our peripherals. I'm used to walking in the dark, but if you're not..." It's fine, really, but it seemed more restive to the situation. 'Preserved meats', as Chuyao speaks, aren't preserved... or meats. Xion, sensitive to taste in the quite particular way that the mass might 'attack', retches and spits, coughing and sputtering and dropping to her palms on the ground as she dribbles sickly. "Oh, stars, it's bad. That's not meat *or*... food? Even if it's what's eaten, it's something else completely. It's... burned, burned out, but the *texture*..." Shuffling away and sitting for a moment before spitting to the side, Xion makes a dark face. "No wonder they're made of nothing but dust and mud, if that's what there is to eat. Is it even... 'food'?" Deeply affected, Xion slouches back up to standing after a few moments of her sick wearing off, and then stands. It's not long after they find another. Or another. Or another. Crouching besides each, Xion gives the corpses their own due little look, a duller and duller look remaining on Xion's face with each body. They mark the path more than any light for her, used to travelling darker places and Mag's torch bright enough for all of them. "Is it even corroding?" Xion asks after a while, looking at a pipe. "All of this, all of these markings, all of this as it is... Our senses rely on, um, an entropic factor, the decay of things, to understand it. 'Right' and 'wrong' aren't objective, but subjective to us. What is suited becomes what is sought, but..." She walks to the edge of the fallen bridge, looking down, then back at the group of everyone else. "What if none of this was decaying? At all. 'As if time stood still' would be literal, even if the seconds ticked. It wouldn't be changing. Nothing would be happening to it, so everything would be still." Hours had passed. Xion flickered in sudden disappearances and reapparances in the darkness to go across chasms to explore only to double back, the other ends of lost paths not useful for her if they extended away from the party. Searching for something else, she finds one of the 'rooms', almost a place, and pauses, raising hand to wall to trace texture with gloved finger glide. "There were people here. When, do you think? There's not the light of a single person left, here, decayed away like radiation past it's half-half-half life, to the kinds of things that don't even color the ground or spill into thin pools. It's gone, and even the bones are 'old' in a way we can't tell." Everything Xion knows about Warpgates makes her think that something is wrong... "... unless we're not even through it, yet." Her thought finishes under-breath, straining hearing while listening to the ghosts at the periphery of it. It takes getting closer to get it, the mass of moving in the dark, gnawing on bones. It's baffling to the Nobody that she doesn't get a sign at all of feeling from the creatures, but she gets close enough to check and that's a clear mistake.
Xion	"Don't--" Xion begins, straight declarative as an empty-socketed lunger locks onto her, and within fractions of a moment Xion draws a length of silver hilted in blue with empty star-charm chained to hilt from the air, pivoting into a pushing thrust with the tooth of her Keyblade out and pierces through the center of her target rather than pushing, finding the pathetically weak entity crumbling off her blade into the mud eerily a beat after, breath short. "They're not even Heartless." Xion states, flatly, holding Starlight reversed in left hand while looking at the crumpling, the same dull look in her eyes as she had finding the corpses. "It reminds me of someplace, so far... But without even the vague monochrome and sarcastic party about everything. This place is past even longing for something new and rationing what's left."
Mag	When Linear releases the body, she does so with a gentle pat downward, to smooth the clothing flat again where she disturbed it with her hands. While she washes her hands at Haru's offer she spends a moment watching Xion sample the disgusting 'food', her bland expression trying to figure out if sympathy or worry is more appropriate, before settling on watching Haru make a container instead, pensive-curious about the odd gun he's holding.      "So the food isn't rotting, the body isn't decaying, there's no mold around, no insects..." Mag muses aloud, doing mental notation. "That's whole chunks of an ecosystem missing, isn't it? No animal bones at all down here either. But there's still something around with claws? Or this guy got hurt outside, and came here to hide..?" His tone is already crawling downward in pity, imagining this poor stranger bleeding out on his own after some unlucky encounter. He mostly breaks from that line of thought to wince at Xion's taste-test, stepping a little closer to just within fretful hovering range with all three hands ready to brace her if she retches. His and Pepper's eyes both flit to the moving blackness in the periphery more often than they try to allow.      Pepper tries to break the pensivity. "Well, maybe we aught to bring a size-o-meter next time? I bet the readings would get someone's collar popped." Mag corrects her, "Seismometer. You know that one Pepper! But yeah, maybe."      The group has to move on eventually, once it's certain Xion hasn't poisoned herself or the like; if she's still feeling poor afterward, Linear can at least do something about that with softly green-glowing hands applied in the way one might to pet a timid cat. Mag can turn down the light at Xion's ask with ease, though he does so while also adjusting his goggles; they seem to have some degree of adjustable filtering, and Pepper's visor seems similar. Corpse handling isn't something Mag and company would leap to volunteer for most days, and it's something that can wait for later, as Chuyao suggested with bringing someone who knows the 'rites'. Still, even saying to oneself 'We can come back for them later' doesn't fully ease the discomfort of stumbling across body after body in the dark, flitting a flashlight beam across a sunken face and holding in the urge to jump or make noise each time. Climbing down from high drops is actually a relief, since there's less to get surprised by when suspended so high up; Team Launcher can assist the others down whenever needed, with a combination of well applied rope, pitons and bungee cord. Mag carries Linear down a rope with his third arm without a word between them, like they've done it a million times.      It's hard to make a map that includes the vertical shifts, though. Linear has to flip between multiple pages, marking edges where they've moved beyond the bounds of one sheet of paper to the next, or labelling fresh ones based on which of the others they're physically beneath. She has to get out a green marker at one point to help with this, while Mag tries to draw his inferences aloud. "You know, I almost wanted to guess this place was some kinda hydroelectric plant. It's so maze-y it's crazy. It'd have to be massive, and then you think about the kinda place that would need such a big dam, and it's just- man, I wanna see what's outside even more now!"
Mag	Finding a half-submerged robot, Mag is almost immediately infatuated with the design. He absolutely *must* stop and fish out a disposable camera to take a snap of it, and Linear adds it to the map as another landmark. "Holy crap, do you think they've got full manufacturing for these here? This kinda thing would make a top exhibit slot in a heartbeat if it came from a ruin back home... Most of the ones there are aggressive though." He knocks his own knuckles against the metal casing of Magnus, in lieu of some clean wood to knock on.      Maybe the team had gotten used to feeling like the movement in the puddles was just a trick, but it doesn't fully stop them from showing proper caution when they stumble into the feeding ground of the first moving, arguably living creatures they've seen so far. Mag's first instinct is to keep the light down at the ground to avoid agitating the creatures too soon, but he passes the lamp from his one large robot hand into his two human ones, trying to prepare for defense while checking with the others.      "They're eating people's bodies..? Geez... Don't wanna leave them at our back if we're moving through, and especially not if we're gonna bring other people through here later, right? Just to be safe..." he says sort of narrating his thoughts to the others beside himself, before shuffling forward. The white hand of Magnus brandishes outward flat and finger-extended, like miming to brandish a sword. Xion is lunged at, and Mag is almost certainly too, and he deals with it by striking with quick, sharp flat-handed chops and not so much slashing as pancaking the frail opposition with each strike. Extending Magnus's fingers was just for more reach, it turns out. Magnus, the arm itself, works on ball-joints and free rotation with motors so tiny as to be hard to pinpoint, and can easily flex and whirr, turning to handle each threat in each direction without Mag needing to move his feet very much. This time, at least. Linear and Pepper both remain calm in the process, though the latter watches the rear of the group to be sure they aren't pinched in the meantime and looks quite pleased when it doesn't turn out to be the case.      "Do your monsters listen if you talk to them, Xion? Linear used to do that. With the big rats and stuff." Mag asks as if to simply try and distract himself; he's not used to smashing something with even remotely humanlike shape... Let alone something that crumbles so easily. He feels a bit gross about it even without having reacted to the mud itself previously, and in the aftermath of the fight kneels down to try and bottle a bit of the odd goop. "This stuff... It was clinging to their bodies like a part of them, right? Never seen anything like that before..."
Chuyao He	Chuyao wets the brush with his tongue, dips it into the inkstone, and begins taking notes once again in even, graceful strokes. His brush pauses, and his eyes wander from the page, when he feels as though he hears something more than the oppressive silence. His gaze sharply adjusts via head-turn when he thinks he sees a silhouette at the corner of his vision. It was nothing.     .......     For a time, his attention is more on the bodies. "Surely, this cannot be what it seems," he says, a tremor in his voice. It seems as though they're here because no one much cares to have them anywhere else. But how could that be? In any place where there are people, there are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children, neighbors, even--who would mourn the passing of someone. "There was some tragedy, which forced the people who once lived here to leave." But what kind of tragedy could that be? It doesn't look as if there was some panicked evacuation. So why have so many people died in this heartbreaking isolation?     Despite his distress, and his attempts to find a reason for it, Haru does seem to have accurately discerned his character. With each body so indicated, he nods solemnly.     ......     Through it all, there is the growing realization that, indeed, nothing is rotting. There is no mold in the damp places, no musty odor of water gone stagnant, no flies, no mushrooms, no rats, or ant sort of creeping insects drawn to decay. "This may seem a crude observation, but... this lowly scholar has not so much as heard the buzzing of a fly, in this place which has been still for so long." He documents it, feeling that it will be relevant. "Earlier, brother Haru mentioned 'bacteria...?' Is this an animal smaller than the average insect, perhaps?"     ...... Hey, Chuyao. In a fight, where are you? The front, the middle, or the back?     "The front, preferably," he answers without hesitation. "This lowly scholar has ways to get there, and ways to make do, until such time as he is able--but the Five Virtues Style is most effective when the hands, feet, elbows and of course, short weapons may be used." He lifts his calligraphy brush--indicatively?     The next thing to catch his eye from his note-taking is Xion's approach towards the sludge-figure. "Could such a thing be... what takes the place of decay, in such a place?" The thought is put on hold the moment Xion has to defend herself.     "Sister Xion prefers the front, as well?" Chuyao asks, relieved that she handled the danger so swiftly. He moves to join her, peering over the railing as the crumbling figure pools and...     "Ah. Do you see it? Our mysterious liquid, unmasked... yet, if it was in the pipes, that would mean... perhaps, that someone moved through here before us?" He frowns as another comes up to try, twirling the calligraphy brush to hold it end-first and swiftly jabbing it between the 'eyes' of the red crystal 'skull' at the front of the figure. Don't wanna leave them at our back if we're moving through, and especially not if we're gonna bring other people through here later, right?      "Indeed," Chuyao says, after a sigh.
Hamada Haru	Haru uncaps his water bottle and offers it to Xion after her little fit with the vile food. He doesn't really need to know more about it to know that he was right not to try it himself. On the subject of decay, he says, "I don't think any biologically-driven decay is happening. Or if it is, it's happening much slower than it should. The environment isn't completely hostile to the existence of life, but the impression I'm getting is that it's... unpleasant. Take that food you ate for instance. It didn't seem like food to you, did it? He had other food he was hoarding, but what he was primarily eating wasn't 'edible' as we understand it. It sort of... paints this picture of a world where even the things that are worth doing to keep yourself going are so unpleasant that a heavy enough blow to the spirit will make you just stop. Fall prey to the things that are still willing to fight for the scraps a little longer."     "Given the state of 'decay' and the seeming lack of large chunks of what we understand to be the biosphere, it's hard to pin down exactly when these people were actually alive. It's possible..." He glances towards Chuyao, "that they've been left where they are because they'll probably still be there the next time anybody who cares comes about. They're their own grave markers just fine, for a good long while."     "But I don't think... it can have been all that long ago. The lights are being cleaned, the tarps are old but they've been replaced purposefully."     The corrugated iron gives Haru a stronger impression that people are still around, or have been fairly recently-- he says as much in passing. The planks that ought to have rotted by now get his attention, and he takes a photo on his phone before moving on. It's the only one he's taken so far.     He does take a photo of the flames, as well, though.     "Three people out of a hundred people remaining is still a large number of people, proportionately," he comments to Xion, bleakly.     Haru isn't the first one to react to the... creatures. He's not even sure what to make of them at first, raising his transteam gun more defensively than with an intent to shoot them. Even when they get close enough to get their attention he holds fire until Xion takes one down-- the barrel of the gun twitches to target another, firing three simple shots center-mass.     It's only at this point, when Haru is fairly certain that everyone needs to think about Something Else, and maybe particularly the younger members of the party, that he displays the pistol to Linear properly. "You were looking earlier. It's a transteam gun. It accepts a kind of gaseous 'memory of the earth' and applies it in a variety of ways. The bottle plugged in like a magazine defines the function. This one is 'Locust'... it can strip things down into base materials for later reconstruction, either as it was before, or in another shape if need be."     "I'm aware of another individual with the 'Cobra' bottle, who deals in poisonous effects."     Haru seems pretty comfortable around the sorts of drops they're doing, but does let Team Launcher do it their way and uses that, for the most part. It's unclear if he's just being nice or if he doesn't want to re-arm Just For This. Maybe he thinks the practice is good. //Earlier, brother Haru mentioned 'bacteria...?' Is this an animal smaller than the average insect, perhaps?//     "Yes. As an example, a human stomach has a lot of bacteria that helps break down foods. It's not just acid. That's part of what pushes decay-- micro-organisms that take opportunities." //Ah. Do you see it? Our mysterious liquid, unmasked... yet, if it was in the pipes, that would mean... perhaps, that someone moved through here before us?//     "I would almost guarantee it. Only... the way decay is stunted here, I don't think we can reliably identify any movement that isn't very, very recent," he admits, a little grumpily. This lack of certainty obviously grates on Haru.
Penumbra	--------     The chirality of entropy in this place is laid thick when you know just where to look for it. Rust, corrosion, chemical leakage; where the world is dry, the traces of humanity are preserved as if behind glass, but where water touches, the world is eventually returned to dust. Dating it by plastic and lithium, it could be ten or a hundred years old.     But never rot. Never the buzzing of flies or the drifting of spores. Even the concrete has never known the touch of lichen. If you kneel down to even the clearest water, pooling from a leaking pipe, you can see by the colour of eroded cement that even bacteria won't grow in it. Nothing will grow on anything. That much puts a name to your motion through the pitch blackness of time. That absence is what feels like missing a stair in the dark.     --------     The only virtue of that foul substance is that it seems it wasn't poisonous. That and the strange slowing of metabolic decline, slight as it may be for having eaten so little. Neither fact makes food or medicine any more likely than the other.     --------     It was dirty water a second ago. It was right there before your eyes, stained dark only after. The pitch is much lighter than the pools you've seen so far, so much that you can almost see the bottom of the bottle even after filling it, but the surface of the puddle squirms in the wake of your skimming, and the surface of the liquid in the bottle shimmers. Its weight feels somehow uneasy. A step away from restless.
Penumbra	. . . . . . . .     If this place truly had a purpose, you may never come to know it. The longer you walk, the faster it sprawls out beyond knowing. Each new bend, door, and tunnel passes by without any more awareness of their greater purpose. No grand design slowly takes shape. No form reveals itself to your intuition. Even the existence of a deliberate path cannot drive back the sense of being lost; of being cast into an unimaginable vastness, without purpose or end.     . . . . . . . .     The glow of chemical lights in the distance can only deceive you for so long. They're only set into the upper hooks of a collapsible steel ladder, less rusted than its surroundings, but leading only to a broken sluice that has turned the lower tunnel into a shallow lake of shimmering liquid haze. The meagre light is enough to see the scattered backs and abandoned belongings half-submerged around the bottom rungs, as well as the twisted shapes below you that stumble back and and forth on two legs.     You'd think they would look more human this way. Instead, the skin has only dried into a muddy brown carapace sporadically shot through with red like mineral inclusions in rock. The crystalline growths within them almost pour through ther half-finished ribs. Their clawed hands dangle past their knees. If you look closely, their joints are almost doll-like. Why do they have tails?     If there is even the most primitive precursor to a 'heart' amongst them, it is the trace scent of 'want', of 'failed desire', that hangs thinly in the air here, already stale.     . . . . . . . .     Perhaps this is only a memory. A realm of hazy recollection made manifest, rendered in fog and iron and concrete. Perhaps 'C-5' means something to the dreamer; a fragment of a past event embedded in their subconscious.     In one chamber, the pipes converge both their vast arteries and narrow veins into a tangled mass that winds about itself and passes through the walls far above your head; and never do they join. Breaker boards, grid connections, and transformer boxes battle for space with them, as if they grew this way like fungus. The slivers of pale light that had once seemed like some glimpse of daylight far above reveal themselves as nothing more than incandescent strip lights, straight from an old office, hanging from cheap, nickel-plated ventilation shafts across the ceiling, running between pipe valves and crank wheels.     The stone tiles of the floor; cracked here, strewn aside there, worn and slippery; are only a facade over endless iron drainage gutters. Frayed tarp cloth banners hang from silos that rise from floor to ceiling, patterned with faded warnings and hazard stripes turned white with age. Railings out of a subway station urge you to stay away from rust-stuck reactor turbines, sharing space with centuries old boilers.     Tattered banks of cold fog roll through in waist-high waves, allowing you only momentary glimpses of the corpses littered across the chamber, all facing the only doorway out.     The cheery glow of EXIT -> hanging over it on a little white sign feels like delirious sarcasm.
Penumbra	--------     There is a stirring in the air that is more than just suggestion. Something hazy and promordial, older and more base than emotion, but still recognizable as some distant evolutionary cousin; the kind with translucent skin found at the base of an abyssal ocean trench. A sluggish, indistinct will to 'be'. To 'perpetuate'. It is more like hunger than either.     --------     Another robot. This one is newer. You can still see the white chassis beneath the lines of caked-on grime piled into its seams. It's sprawled out in the middle of the badly damaged floor. Most of it is one place; the rest is everywhere else. There was defintiely an explosion, but most of its the exposed hydraulic hoses and struts have been shot or slashed by targeted attacks. There are unmistakable bullet holes through its optics.     The weapons that replace most of both arms arms can account for trails of ash painted on the floor and fist-sized holes in the concrete walls, but the hulking monster just past it, chewing up metal railing along with the corpse slumped over it, can't account for the robot. It's even less human than those you've already seen.     Twice your height at the shoulder, mudrock shell over oily black flesh and luridly red crystal, all vestiges of humanity have been lost by its cancerously overgrown frame having forced it most of the way into a bestial four-point gait. Its arms and legs are only distinguishable by which way the joints bend, none naturally, easily missed between abortive limbs that twist out of its torso like gnarled branches. It tail is as long as the rest of it, now. Its head is an animalistic mask on the end its bonelessly elongated neck.     If it is another stage of the same thing, there is surely no imagining what it could possibly be trying to become. When it turns its head to look at you, it does so with seven eyes and blood-slicked jaws that seethe with crimson inner light; then it screams at you, at such volume that the fog shudders away from it, and barrels down on you with clawed hands and feet that gouge the stone beneath it.     --------     The doors aren't small enough to keep it at bay. It's sheer size allows it to attack anywhere in the same room as it, whether by steel-shearing claws and jaws or tails sipes that gouge inches deep into solid concrete. It has no other virtues. The monster is possessed of only erratic intelligence, hyperactively bloodthirsty to an unlikely extreme. Its carapace is only modest protection from real weaponry. Its range of motion is limited by its own overlong limbs, and it can't even see as far behind itself as you can.     It presses its attack for longer than you'd like, even after losing several bodyparts, but it crumbles quickly under concentrated fire. If the weapon damage in this room is any indication, it never crossed paths with the armed robot at all. If the marks on the bodies mean anything, they were dead even before it got here too. The lacerations are far too small and numerous to be its handiwork.
Xion	Xion is thankful for Haru's water and a little curative help just to rid herself of the reaction to the object, a whole-being revulsion at sucking down that mass of befouled sustenance. Linear's aid earns the palm-riding helper a returning-faint smile, cured of the clench that 'food' had caused in her. Xion has nothing to slow her blade, knowing without interrogation the bone-gnawing deformities as threats with plenty of time to react. It's smooth, even, warning into motion because no effort was wasted in the draw of weapon, but her eyes in the moment are more dull than anything else. Steadily responding to threat, the fight is over quickly with Magnus' help, and Xion is just as soon lowering her star-toothed crowned and chained blade to side, where cap dips just short of dipping into the mud at their boots. 'Do your monsters listen if you talk to them, Xion?' "Sometimes," Xion states, dry and distant. These didn't, and she lingers on their crumblings with a lengthening consideration. "If you don't try to warn people, and let them learn first at your blade's edge, that's worse, isn't it? 'Buyer beware', but people can't know what they're... bargaining for." Xion trails off, unhappy with how she phrased that. Getting jumped puts her on edge, even if the threat was stated more than felt. "The front's fine. I'm better at front than middle." She raises Starlight demonstratively, a shine reflected in lamplight that seems overbright for what it catches. "Key stuff." She explains, now holding it to show off it's sort of kind of shaped like a large key. The conversation on what 'decay' takes the form of, Mag's observation, Chuyao's question, even Haru's certainty, leaves Xion with that lingering dull-dissatisfaction. "I can't imagine the bones have anything worth sucking on or snapping through to, but it all seems like it's drained away. The contacts are corroded, the lights run on power, but look - it's like time stops where this stuff touches. Or, more -- that it's been drained away? Down, and in. I've got some things to try, if we find any more threats." 'Threats'. A rhetorical thought. Macabre, resigned to test the edge and weights of her arsenal as tools to sound out an understanding the world, the experiment begins with traversal, the lift-and-out sweep of dismissal into pale-light motes and metal-on-metal contact of Starlight being replaced by the thrumming-snap of appearance of a different blade, a length of twisted black and a head with glass-ball cap of primordial red. Weightier than the empty tooth of Starlight, Xion meditates over her sword for a moment, dipping blade down into the 'mud' and running through a sequence of attempts. Could she lift it as water? Could she draw on it as she might the earth? Would it respond to blood control? Each attempt causes colored motes to dance around the quietly meditating Xion, lasting a few moments, before she sees of the escaping liquid could be drawn from by osmosing or draining energy straight from it. With how it clumped, and escaped, and failed to stick at all, escaping and draining down and away, perhaps it was the crystals that animated the threats and not the mud. With all of her gravities, Xion plied the substance as she could, and then lept up ladders and landed at the top, glanced at the garishly neon sign that said EXIT and... Heaved a sigh. "Yeah. We're still in the warpgate. A smear of between, I bet. The black mud - I think it's like the Darkness from my world, even."
Hamada Haru	Sometimes you really, really shouldn't scene transition repeatedly without holding a transformation. Hamada Haru has been pushing it, and knows he's been pushing it, and really just doesn't care. It's not important to be Kamen Rider, or a fascimile of a Kamen Rider, while wandering through such desolation. The fact that all the resistance so far has been feeble -- and every evidence suggests that the world itself is barely holding together -- is convincing enough by itself to treat things as unsettling but comfortable enough to not go around suited. There will come a moment -- he's sure of it -- but the moment isn't now, and the moments in-between have been stretching out for what feels like an eternity.     "The 'things' are decomposing the way you'd expect them to. Corrosion. Rust. The biological things don't have the decay element," Haru confirms, after rifling through his plastic bag for a while. He replaces his transteam gun at his hip for the moment, because he's entirely surrounded by people who Can, In Fact, cover him. If, along the way, they get another opportunity to 'sample' the food, Haru will actually pause and put some of it in the plastic bag full of other garbage, because he thinks it's a pretty good idea to check it out chemically later.     It's the room with the enormous, broken-down robot that convinces Haru that maybe he ought to put the plastic bag full of rubbish down and transform. The bag hits the floor in time-- his hand's on the transteam gun at exactly the wrong moment with exactly the wrong grip strength, a whip of a vast tail from the charging monstrosity knocking the wind out of him and knocking his best transformation device out of his hands. Hamada Haru hits the ground hard, sputtering. He does not reach, futily or otherwise, for the transteam gun that goes skittering away across the floor in great spinning whorls. Instead he fishes a cracked core out of his jacket pocket and slaps it into the buckle of his belt with his left hand while drawing a dark green bracket-like object out with his right. The belt hums uneasily as the activation device meets the core, a broken jingle playing but no words come out except some vague crackly impression of the word TETRA. The armor that snaps into existence around him is about three times as scuffed as the one he wore as Dynamic Era-- it closely resembles the entry armor of Desire Grand Prix members with a built-in raise buckle that colors in its chest and gives it a familiar classic grasshopper-shaped helmet. The armor is visibly cracked from the outset, though, with one dark eye-lens split down the middle.     Kamen Rider Tetra's long gone, but sometimes what's left comes in useful in a pinch. Haru rolls out of the way of a swipe of claws -- not quite effectively enough -- to a shower of sparks from his side, and retrieves his transteam gun.     This is the exact moment that his much more composed doppelganger in Dynamic Era form materializes from a cloud of mist that drifts to one side and lets the duplicate flank the creature, pushing in hard and aggressively with a swipe of a gunblade that is more diversionary than anything.     Haru himself is too busy getting off the ground. He has spent the last ten-and-a-half-seconds telling himself over and over in his own head not to swear out loud through any part of that. God did he want to, though. That was a frustrating sequence of events.
Xion	The air stirs, and Xion walks with blade held at side, shifting the tip to dowse out the subtle feelings, finding her way blind in the dark by the walking-stick she taps here and there and tries to reach further into the nascent feelings. "This whole place makes me feel like I could be treating it like some sick sort of... spelunking game? And the more I think about it, the more it's not just revolting as a possibility someone else would do: there's no prize. If you think there's something we can retrieve, or that's valuable to pluck, tell me, though, everyone." Xion explains, eyes closed as she walks. It doesn't seem to slow her, pacing over the little differences in terrain, dodging rocks and weaving around the environment as if she was paying full attention. To many ways, she is, touch-sensing the surrounds by using a more sensitive surface for such intuitions as the twisted-star length of her helix key. She is sensing something and it leads it her to the robot shot out with bullets, and crouches again, extending hand to touch the marks and pocks and chips in the crevasse left by conflict. "There had to have been something here, *before*." She breathes, insistent, wanting more and more for there to Be something, for there to emerge some clear and preserved sign in the sucking bog-mire of emptiness. Worse than darkness, it was like the oeuvre here was thinner than even the abyss of it that Xion had found behind a locked door. It makes her sensitive when the screaming comes. Lifting free hand to ear and turning head away as she's shocked by the mist-piercing wail, Xion takes a step back and raises blade in loose guard, pressed into and clawed at. A second blade draws from the air, catching the gangling limb that whips out of her in a scissoring block of angelic and feather-seeming white against chitin black. Oathkeeper, singing into grip faster than any others, levers against the slam Xion takes as she pivots around, swept through until the overswing ends at the maximum extension of the arm and Xion's drifting feet plant. Checking with her featherwhite blade, Xion plunges in closer while Haru transforms, forcing a clash herself to buy time for Haru to transform. With confines as tight as they were she had to dramatically act. A second rending claw-swing rips at her and passes through empty air, Xion teleporting or Stop-stepping out of the sweep and crescents both blades into the arm to send it further away from her, sprinting forward with Pylon couched for a thrust to drive blade and tooth deep into the crystal core and run the creature down with a sawing in of deliberate attack. Threat escalating to deadly serious, Xion re-commits when Dynamic Era's shadow joins her assault, warding close in with blade of white while doing what she can to pin down the assault with draining black sword.
Chuyao He	There are places as empty as this place--old places, built long before Chuyao was ever thought of, abandoned only slightly less long ago, in the grand scheme of things. There are no places which, built by human hands, is as aimless as this place seems to be. Even the embarrassments of one emperor or another, the intimidating, awe-inspiring sprawl of modernity in other worlds, ultimately have their purposes. They are generally built to satisfy either a petty ego, or an infrastructural need, and occasionally history tells that they are both. An excerpt from Chuyao's notes makes his feelings clear: I have been to a place so large, and so sprawling, that it is known only as 'the City,' for it has subsumed any other means to place it within the world--it dwarfs nations, strips the very word of context. It is a desperate place, but it is alive. In the endless span of brick and mortar, generations of wills are at work. This building houses the many laborers who toil at this warehouse or that inn. This street was paved because that duke wished to make use of the space for his enterprise. This building was built because what stood there before grew too old to be properly maintained, yet that one there was built because it did not serve the purposes of the merchant who bought the deed. The many pipes, passageways and halls of this compound feel as labyrinthine as the City's streets. Yet, despite the clear influence of human hands in the making of such a place, it somehow feels utterly absent any creator's will. We have no name to call it but 'C-5,' which sounds more like a measurement than a name. We travel through the innards of a great aqueduct that is not an aqueduct, past mechanical 'generators' that do not generate. Throughout its vastness there are villages--which are not villages. It is as if what is here is here because it has nowhere else to be, not because of the natural law or the will of humans. It is as quiet as the grave, as still as a corpse, yet not even the relentless patience of water can move it. The Supreme Polarity is eerily frozen here; the limit of the stillness in this place is *not* the beginning of activity. The Five Elements lie as still and motionless as the dead, here, but lifeless. We have seen not even a speck of mold here despite the frequent presence of water. What we imagined to be mud was instead ground-down mortar. The bodies of the slain, which break my heart to count, do not even attract flies. The Taoists say that water seeks the lowest places to benefit that which needs it most. The Buddhists seek to shed their worldly desires. The Old Master once said, 'a single strand runs through my heart.' Yet sister Xion has found no other hearts here, desire is not shed willingly here but seems to seek this place to die as would a sick animal, and water struggles to bring it back into the cycle of stillness and motion. What could have happened, to have created such a place? What could have caused it to take so many lives that even despair lies bleeding?      'EXIT.'      It's almost upsetting. To have walked for what feels like miles, to have seen endless gray emotional inertia, to have come to know a place that has lost all but the thinnest will to 'be,' passing by innumerable emaciated corpses and the loathsome, pitiable things that feed upon them, only to be greeted by the almost urbane sign, nearly fills Chuyao with contempt for people that may not even exist. As if there were someone, past that sign, beyond however many flights of stairs, laughing and cavorting with a bowl of wine in one hand and a fan in the other, while untold scores found quiet corners of this place to die.
Chuyao He	That there should be something here, threatening to take his own life, is then almost a relief. It's something to focus on, here and now, to ground him in what may be done *this moment,* and to prevent his anger from clouding his judgment.      Chuyao snaps the sharp steel cap onto his calligraphy brush. Two Rivers slips out of the sleeve of his robe and falls with comfortable familiarity into his hand. He clears the distance between himself and the charging monster with a single leap, setting his robes to fluttering and the unbound portion his hair to spilling out behind him as if undersea. He lands between Haru (the real one) and the monster. All of that mass, all of its weight, could snap him like a twig, and yet he's facing it down, confidently, respecting it in the terms of an opponent with reach and speed and strength, and not in the terms of a slavering monster uncaring of the transgression it sprints towards ravenously.      His eyes narrow, his lips pull into a tight frown, and in the harrowing seconds where it closes in on him, he studies the motions of the murky fluid and the crystals, shoulder to shoulder with Xion. The human-ish ones had collapsed without much fanfare--*the liquid is likely the weakest part of them, but is it the most vital?* That's what he tests first. With 12 inches of damascus steel and a Keyblade between him and the jaws of death, Chuyao pivots at the waist, lifts his left hand, and with a flick of his wrist, slits the monster's throat with the razor edge of the fan. The silvery triptych of the giant Kuafu chasing the sun in vain is splattered black. *Still standing.* Before the fan has even completed its arc, as the black splatter flicks in droplets against the ground, Chuyao ducks forward beneath the misshapen monster's almost chitinous body, whirling around its front-left limb--the one not swiping at Xion. Cling-cling-cling.      Something that heavy needs its limbs on the ground to make an attack like that. It almost sounds like a bell--the impact of the brush's sharp steel tip striking a staccato against the left leg. Far from random strikes, he's positioned himself on the outside of it, watching split-second motions of the opposite limb to pinpoint pressure points in this one and send it crashing to the ground before it can turn on Haru's Era doppelganger.      Xion teleports away, his eyes flick to her location and then immediately back to the monster as he clears its collapse with inches to spare. Its impact with the ground disturbs the air and sets the lower edges of his hair and robes to a brief billow, before his sudden sideways flip sends it all askew. Twisting in midair, he collapses Two Rivers and strikes the back of the monster's skull with it while it's focused on Xion.
Penumbra	--------     It might have felt gratifying if the monster had dissolved differently; left some mark or change on the environment; set everything or anything at all into motion. As if for that reason alone, it doesn't. All that marks its destruction is a tiny lump of crude carbon at the center of the ashen smear, which itself is so faintly luminous that it can only be seen at all in the dark.     The wreck is lukewarm. One of its batteries is missing. Deliberately ripped out. Very close, you can smell fuel and acid and the faintest trace of ozone; the closest to any 'living' scent by such a vast margin that it evokes synaesthetic pangs of homesickness. Despite the work of blades and bullets, none of it looks to have been salvaged.     . . . . . . . .     'Void Beast'. That's what the scrap of paper stuck to the wall says. The strokes of black ink are dramatically bold, and more than a little confused, but you can easily see the resemblance. Whether or not it is meant to depict the same creature, or something that comes after it, you couldn't say just by looking. The only other words, scrawled by an unsteady hand, are EXTREME DANGER!     It's on the wrong side of the concrete arch. You'd only see it if you had come the other way, towards where you first arrived. The dried residue of other letter-paper posters suggests that many notices were once plastered here beside it. Perhaps one of them said something about robots, too.     . . . . . . . .     You understand why the exit sign was posted there. It would be impossible not to by now. Though it isn't daylight that greets you, you've unmistakably 'emerged' from wherever you were. What's in front of you now is somewhere else.     It's the pit that draws the firmest line. The strange metal spheres you've seen recently discarded along the way, some too tall to see over, none small enough to hold, all still plugged into scraps of insulated hose, had been an indicator, but it's the pit beyond the next railing that truly seals it. Here, your footing dwindles to only a narrow steel catwalk, bolted to the wall of an unfathomably deep shaft, and the stamped-in texture is the only traction you have. The matching stairs only run one way, coiling upwards along the inside wall, broken up by similar landings with no doors in and out.     A fine layer of frost collects on the outermost edge of the metal. There is no culprit but the thick fog that billows down from the top of the shaft, utterly frigid, possessed of a sharply chemical scent. Near the wall is tolerable, but when close to the rail, it stings your bare skin, and blisters before too long. For as dense as it is, it can't obscure the massive column that runs all the way through the shaft's center, too far to hit with anything you could throw. Titanic rubber-insulated cables pour down over it like a rime-coated waterfall and follow it down, down into the abyss.     . . . . . . . .     For a while, it was easy to see how far you've climbed. All you had to do was look down. After a full twist of the rifling stairs, however, all of that fades into mist. The glittering flakes that drift down like deep ocean snow aren't paint or insulation, but ice; which means that there is no water in the fog.
Penumbra	. . . . . . . .     Eventually, the column ends. It's faintly surprising that it does. The top is flat and level, but it was clearly never meant to be walked, only remarkable for its pristine metal and crisply stencilled hazard markings. The bridge across to it from the stairs is held in place by a colossal gantry, and the only way off it is the strangely pristine platform on the other side, pressurized doors tightly shut. From up here, under the pale glow of indicator lights, you could imagine that the gargantuan robotic clamps that hold the column's vertical overhang were originally meant to raise and lower it. Going by the visible tracks in the walls, you've only now reached their lowest point.     You can't see how far they go up anyways; a mercy or a curse. Everything above you is eclipsed by clusters of spherical machines that dwarf their cousins, discarded in the tunnels below, by magnitudes that begin with five zeroes. They're networked together, with endless braids of pressurized hose and insulated cable, woven into the shaft like sinew around bone. Each one bears an access plug wider than any of you are tall, which glows with cherenkov blue bright enough to see by.     There is no radiation. If they process anything, the signal must run exclusively through countless miles of bundled wire. The hum is stronger here nevertheless. The nameless, formless thing that pools around your thoughts, immiscible with your mind, incidentally submerging your most abstract senses beneath a palpable neural tide, is concentrated here     There is a pool of unnatural blackness here, above the icy fog. Its basin is a flat, two inch deep indentation that takes up most of the column's top, but still it ripples without the slightest current of air. It's as if graphene could shine like a mirror; if latex could flow like water; if tar could cling to nothing; if oil could be seen all the way through at just the right angle; as if the dark of an empty room a million miles away from the light of the sun could splash around your ankles as you walk. Something about the shallow pool is intuitively 'pure', which makes it feel eerily almost sacred.     Yet the only thing in it is a lump of metallic crystal. Sharp, angular, blandly silver, but twisted up in the organic knots of tree bark; it curls into most of an oval shape before reaching as high as your head, and spreads 'roots' under the surface of the pool from its base. The faint pressure on your mind grows so strong from approaching it that, at the edge of the pool, it feels almost tangible; yet when you cross over the circle, it disappears completely. The vacuum is filled only with quiet white noise, like melodic static.     Here is the closest place to something 'mystical' you have felt; and not slightly, either. It's difficult to tell whether it radiates from the crystalline root and reflects off the black liquid, or whether the black liquid condenses it so that the crystalline roots can feed on it. Both feel strangely plausible. Electromagnetic waves downshift from it as a byproduct, and wash over the endings of the nerves beneath your skin.     Here is the only place in what might be all the world where emotion is anything less than a ghost. A locus of meetings and partings not so old to have faded from the memory of steel, richly painted with layered stains of loneliness and yearning, where an enduring spark of hope is nestled within rings of fresh grief. It feels like a place of prayer.
Penumbra	The perfect black level of the pool is interrupted by a cluster of radiant blue crystals on silver strings that hang from the arm of something far too crudely improvised to be called a sword; and, by the upright jagged metal sheet behind them. Words are carved into it.     Here Asteria the Branchweaver gave a crystal to each of us. She asked us to save the unchosen humans and repair all the scattered Branches, like this one. She said they were her life's work and the only way for the world to be saved. For speaking to us, she was taken away and recycled by the Sphere...     They're written in English. Cut into the sheet by a point much too fine for the rusted iron blade beside it. Whoever left it passed by when the epitaph was already here.     If you look just a little harder, you can see that the original hand tried to render a likeness as well. You wouldn't be sure that the rough etching of a woman's tiredly smiling face was meant to have the diamond design set in her brow, nor the floating 'crown' peeled down to bare panels and screws, if it weren't that the later hand has touched up the details with as much care as a blunt edge allowed; as if from memory.     ... Please take a crystal if you can help. She was very kind. "May the Branches guide your path."     It will still be here for a very long time.
Hamada Haru	"A road. That's all. That's what we're looking for, and I think that may be all," Haru asides to Xion. He sounds direly dissatisfied with that statement. It doesn't take magical powers over the Heart to know that he wants it not to be true, but it helps. If he wasn't the sort of person to want that not to be true, he wouldn't be making temporary graves for later revisiting at all. He doesn't join her in speculating further about what might have come before.     Xion and Chuyao both stepping in directly to make certain he GETS the time to transform earns an audible sigh of relief from Haru, who really did need the room to... actually breath, on account of getting the wind knocked out of him. He doesn't say 'thank you', but he does offer an acknowledging noise. He tears the fullbottle out of his transteam gun and shakes it before plugging it back and pulling the trigger.                               LOCUST! L-L-LOCUST!                               The transteam gun exclaims. Despite putting a doppelganger on the field already, Hamada Haru doesn't actually bother re-doing his transformation with the better device. Good-enough always trumps eating time with another transformation sequence. It is buzzing metal locusts, not steam or mist or smoke, that pours out of the transteam gun, passing harmlessly through Haru's allies but descending on the... THING... in a fashion that, near as Haru is able to tell, this world probably hasn't seen or had a meaningful defensive mechanism against in ages. At the very least, he supposes, it should offer an aggravation and distraction that can't easily be ignored. It's probably not even necessary -- as proves to be the case -- but he's not leaving that up to chance.     His doppelganger remains where it is, threatening from the side, until it's clear that the immediate physical threat is gone, at which point it disperses into mist.     Haru himself does his damnedest to just get some distance, though-- talking on the radio in his helmet as he does so. His attention swivels towards Chuyao, though. Curious...     "Remarkable as transformation devices might be... you seem to do fine on good fundamentals," he comments, curiously.     He looks at the motionless clump of carbon, and then to the disabled robot. Haru reaches towards his belt, plainly considering de-transforming. Then he just doesn't, remaining armored, picking up his plastic bag and using it to collect the clump with the other debris. He looks towards the disabled robot and the empty battery slot, feeling some distant sense of melancholy.     A battery wouldn't be hard. Sure looks like it would just try to kill whatever was near it if it woke back up again. Haru makes a mental note of it anyway.
Hamada Haru	The transition from 'here' to 'there' is almost absurd. The awful corrosive -- is it corrosive? -- fog they have to traverse through is enough to have Haru doing something he's avoided so far, which is using his transteam gun to generate more enclosed terrain-- the crude and barely-adequate catwalk being built up first with new support structures, then partly enclosed. Partly because Haru isn't about to start setting up the HVAC necessary to make this passage TRULY protected from whatever that is. It's ventilated enough, though.     In the end, their passage is clearly marked here, at least. It's a little better. Not dramatically, but enough to kill somebody less surely.     The increasing presence of obviously functional machinery... that's less surprising, but still strange in its loneliness and sterility. Haru continues to collect debris, as much for later examination as to just clean up the garbage, but by now the plastic grocery bag is bound to be getting a bit too full. He's forced to stop after a relatively short while.     He's not about to try to mess with the crystalline root with the way it makes his skin crawl on contact.     The epitaph and the blue crystals get a different reaction. It's a memorial mixed with a plea for help-- even beaten up and a little dispirited, Kamen Rider doesn't ignore things like that. He takes one of the crystals from the strings, his gaze shifting from them towards the crystalline root with its skin-crawling strangeness. Then towards Xion.     He trusts her more to be sure of what needs to happen here than he does himself.
Chuyao He	The silence after the 'Void Beast,' if indeed that's the creature which earned the name, is unsatisfying, but necessary. As much as Chuyao would like for there to be someone waiting on the other side to come in seeking to enact some kind of rescue, some part of him knows, based on everything he's seen up to this point, that it isn't going to happen. What it still allows, despite that, is the time to ground himself and face the anger he felt before.      Chuyao sighs. He flicks open Two Rivers, and with a sharp secondary motion flings the last remnants of the beast from its slats. Clean once again, the fan bobs to and fro as he uses it to cool himself, eyes closed. They crack open to give Haru his full attention. Remarkable as transformation devices might be... you seem to do fine on good fundamentals.      "Master Wen was many things," he says, in the universally understood 'it's complicated' tone. "As was the Five Virtues School. Among them, he was an excellent teacher, and the School an excellent place to learn the martial arts." Of course, his log will later read, It is natural to feel anger when confronted with an injustice. What is important is where that anger comes from, and where it is going. Some people feel angry not because it has happened, but because it has been drawn to their attention, and because they cannot be comfortable knowing that it exists. Many who are inclined to do something about it feel angry because it has happened, yet allow their anger to direct them towards punishment instead of helping those who have been harmed. Seeing that sign, I felt as though the dead were being mocked. They had died, not surrounded by their loved ones, in the comfort of their homes, or even fighting to protect anything, but alone, in a place built to be forgotten by all but the laborers tasked to maintain it. Some were so emaciated as to scarcely look human. That sign silently and jovially stripped them of the last shred of dignity they had, on behalf of all those with the luxury to ignore this place. The signs, we did not discover until we made our way out. At one time, there must have been dozens of warnings--all placed such that only those entering from above could see them. Those that died here were very likely trapped here. This unrefined scholar hopes, fervently, that it was a tragic accident and not deliberate cruelty which trapped them.      The ascent is glum and contemplative. It doesn't feel like an ascent should, even if one discounts the stinging fog--there should be sunlight, clouds parting, something to say that things will be better. But that desire is the poet in Chuyao, and not the man who has to live in the world. Sometimes there aren't things like that waiting for you--regardless, there's only one 'forward.'      The place of prayer isn't what he was hoping for. There aren't any other people here. Today has always been arriving *after* them, and this is no different. It is, in some small way, still a relief.      "That people may find things to believe in, even in such a place... This lowly scholar's English is a work in progress..." Chuyao smiles, tiredly. "Nevertheless, the way forward seems fairly clear." He reaches out and takes one of the crystals.
Xion	Xion is quiet in the moments after the fight, landing from an aerial to a quiet shift of stance and approach after Chuyao strikes from 'up front' as he had promised. The soft step and a half of the end of her momentum, and the way she paces forward after are wholly different, pace and tempo measuring down as the creature crumples. When it does, into an object shining in the dark as she is more used to, textured in the black, she reaches out for the chunk to take it up again. Reaching down, Oathkeeper dismisses from her hand, she takes it up in glove and sees if the very stuff of it bitterly retreats as oilshale might from source's parting. This, like the little sludgy orb, she takes up and turns over, offering it out to Mag and his gang to see, before at the end of evaluation... banishing it away into inventory, if only to take something or rake back some measure from the world. Bitter, perhaps not to take another bite of that wretched ball, but to at least take a trophy here. 'Void beast' is apt, as a warning found only after the encounter, frowning as she looks back at where they had come from, a path that required entry through that wretched long-armed threat. Would it, too, rise as grabbing claw from the muck to try and violently rake another morsel from the air? What came after entropy, one last gurgling suck? "No wonder all of the creatures here so far have lunged, hungry, claws and hands. The feelings are like gases, the distant smell of something off in the air. Want. Hunger. Basal needs, and deeper sounds." She utters, walking with a different sword in hand - Starlight, again, with the dull light of a Ruin-sphere caught in the star providing washed-out light like radiative glow around her, reflective on the black beneath and casting across metals and textures other than the oilslick, more comfortable than holding Antegent reference besides Kairi's as more than the blades that came closest to each hand when swung with need. The place of prayer, the platform there, Xion steps onto, entering the circle of and dismissing blade with release of hand. For a moment she stretches, tiptoe extending and bending back, and pops gently as she twists out the tension in herself and goes slack-wobbly for a bit while she flexibly turns back side to side and goes forward limp to touch toes before straightening. It's not even a ritual, it's just the roll she took to the lowest point before rising up. "Awful." She commemorates, looking back. "The real work with this place will be making sure to establish a stable Warpgate past all of that. And even so, wouldn't that be like dropping a hole into a different pressure zone? Would the life flow in? Would the black flow out?" Xion blinks. "Would it reach?" She asks, and sighs, before finally attending to what Haru draws us forward for - crystals of azure. These, more than her pale nothing-light, cast something like light that 'lit', that brought color to the world that wasn't caked in verdigris and rust, and wasn't beneath a thick choke of black. In a place of prayer, Xion kneels again, this time to pick up a crystal herself and close her eyes to hold it close to ear. Satisfied, at least, it wasn't some kind of trap, she looks to Haru, shrugs, and shifts more deliberately towards the branch, and pool 'nourished' by the bloom. Here, again, Xion searches for feelings, knelt by the branch and holding the crystal. Was it the base of a great tree, or just a torch, left lit at the foot of the mountain? Was there anything to draw on? Had 'she' been 'recycled' by the 'Sphere'? What were any of those things? Were they connected here? Could they be traced back? Captured in this moment? Or was this, too... A moment ten forevers ago, and were the blooms brilliant before, with the oeuvre that still remained in miracles?
Mag	Under the initial mild resistance of red-bone creatures, Mag has little to be anxious about during the trudge and trekking through the pipes and passages except the group's own theories and wonderings. The mortal perils aren't intense enough at first to really warrant it, as long as Linear stays close beside him and Pepper has their back covered; the group is so frontline-heavy that he doesn't even have to work as hard as usual, just focusing on aiming the light as needed and, now and then, extending his cybernetic arm to swat away an inconveniently timed attacker for someone else. It's a lot of time to spend thinking, really.      Linear, for her part, seems to like listening to the things people tell her even while she actively works on the map. Haru's weapon and the accompanying explanation maintains her defaultly sleepy, barely blinking focus with small glances back to the clipboard in her hand. It takes her a few moments of visible mouth-moving leadup to finally ask him, about the person with the Cobra bottle, "... Do you get along?" Her soft intonation makes it seem more searching than she means it to be, but that's not to say she's hoping for nothing at all. 'Creation and destruction' is a dichotomy she has to think about often, and even a pair as removed as 'poison and reconstruction' is close enough to think about it. Mag can be seen looking backward at Linear, probably holding in the urge to ask more selfishly leaning questions, smiling slightly in that way you'd expect a brother to when he's thinking encouraging thoughts.      More actively, Mag seems to mind the sealed sample of 'restless' mud. He has three hands to spare, one on the light, one on the occassional opponent, and one arguably for a bottle... But eventually he does pass it back to Pepper, who's more completely hands-free for most of the trek. Neither one of them really wants to tuck it away unwatched in Cyframe storage when it keeps moving...      There are other things to talk about along the way too, though. "If you don't try to warn people, and let them learn first at your blade's edge, that's worse, isn't it?" "Yeah, definitely." Mag returns to Xion with the certainty of someone who really, really wishes it didn't need to be said. "I don't like fighting people very much. It's just... Not why I got into the business. I do it if I have to, but... I'd rather send 'em running too." He thinks another moment, and starts to perk up as he thinks of a swerve of topic that he thinks is lighter, but he gets as far as "Hey Xion, how old are-" before Pepper exasperatedly snaps "Hush, Maggie!" Mag leaks an awkward chuckle and scratches his nose, letting that question lie.      Passing through the neon-marked exit doorway into the presence of a (destroyed) robot and a large monster is somewhat more Team Launcher's speed. Pepper even announces perkily, "Oh look! This must be the boss room, right? Midboss at least!" Mag stifles a halfhearted laugh and shakes his head, taking a loose boxing pose while he notes what he can see of the creature with the help of his portable high-beam. "Okay team, tweak the usual! I'll wall for the others, Linear go with a Power Spell, and Pepper-"
Mag	Things kick off a bit faster than usual, here. Haru takes first aggro and a hit, so Mag quickly finishes "Pepper, stick with Haru, cover and treatment if he needs it!" She barks back a "Got it!" while she and Mag both rush into the room before splitting in different directions. Linear stays near the doorway, drawing a ring of glowing orbs in the air before drawing them together and pushing them toward Chuyao and Xion, boosting their attack power from safety. Mag takes advantage of the creature's reflexive actions and limited sight by bracing behind Magnus as a shield, getting right inside the monster's personal space so it can't freely lash its long limbs around the room without him getting in the way, creating blindspots for the others while he blasts it in the eyes with his high-power light. Pepper, for the most part, doesn't end up doing much; she joins with Haru where he's been flung and makes sure he isn't badly hurt, but firing wildly in a small space with this many people could backfire... So she burns time teasing instead, while keeping an eye on things. "Sooo... Vigilante type. Got a bike cutie~?"      Before the fight's over, Mag sneaks in at least a couple of quick kidney punches and elbow checks with Magnus, and joins in the finishing push with a faint *bwee-bwee-bwee!!* of charging power and a rough grunt of breath into a hard-thrown uppercut of his giant artificial fist. Nothing warranting an attack callout, but enough to say he wasn't just clinging to its leg like dead weight. It's something else that matters more in the breath-catching that follows the scuffle though, and he seems oddly rushed to get the thought out while he wipes his face and takes stock of everyone's conditions, glancing just briefly at the creature's 'core' when Xion displays it to them.      "... You know, you might be more right the more I think about it, Jianya. About uh, the fact something really horrible had to have happened here. 'Cause you know, there's not many animals that actually... Predate on humans, officially, if I know my stuff right? Not on a regular basis anyway. And these things, they've got the human-like bones that aren't really bones, maybe-sorta? But they eat people. And that goo, it's like... It's like the goo is trying to be alive or something? I'm not sure I really get it yet, but it's reminding me of the saying, 'you are what you eat'. I've heard horror stories about critters that wanted to be human eating people, before. Maybe... Maybe if Linear tried to 'heal' it- no, no, let's uh... We can find somewhere secure to try anything weird. First things first, gotta get outta here, right..?" He seems somehow more tired after gushing that whole thought at once, and sheepish to boot, rubbing his neck a bit while Linear walks closer to pat the top of his head. He was kind of hoping finding an answer would make him feel better about things, but the reality is still going to drag him down the more he thinks about it. He's not the only one.      Before they leave the room, it's only appropriate to gather what evidence and useful material they can in a reasonably short time. Mag takes a couple of minutes to look at the robot, trying to glean anything he can about how it was operated and how difficult it might have been to produce with the levels of industry one could infer from the things the group has seen thus far. There's probably a limit to what he can take with him here, but if he can find any whole computational parts by popping open the shell of it, he'd love to bring those along.
Mag	From then on, there isn't much to break the quiet other than chatting with the others, or listening to Linear's effortful map-scribblings. The team helps the others whenever needed with the climbs, up or down, plus lends out breathing masks or other useful gadgets as needed. They offer bits of food now and then too, as time drags on. Real food in a situation like this, even if it's preserved, can help the mood.      That final, baffling sight is striking though. Mag's tentatively (barely) familiar with psychic contact and tries to draw comparisons to the sensation in the air, but comes up short of words that sound intellectual rather than dumbstruck. He visibly discards the attempt with a small sigh, dropping the charade for the simple muttering with sagging shoulders from nearby Xion's stretches, "Damnit... I hope whoever left this message is somewhere... Better? Now."      Mag is still stepping closer and kneeling to look closer at the etched recreation of a woman's face when Linear reaches past from behind him, grasping a crystal from the bunch between three fingertips with utmost gentleness. She pulls it away slowly and clutches it close to her chest like an heirloom she only just rediscovered after many years, her eyelids low with almost guilty-pouting care. Pepper steps alongside her and side-hugs the girl, reassuringly resting her cheek on Linear's head. "Reminds you of something?" she asks, and Linear nods barely. "Yurka. A little." she says, and Mag nods like he was already thinking the same. He pushes himself back upright, and turns around with his arms folded, putting on his best, most certain leadership posture with a somewhat forced half-smirk of not-quite-confidence. "Well, that settles it. Linear knows best! If it's to save the world, we'll just have to stick with it, right gang? Don't worry about the warp gate too much; it might not be super familiar to me, but I'm a whiz with machines. If there's interference I'm sure I can figure something out, and there's tons of material all over the place here to jury rig something with. And... Jianya, if we can't find someone for those 'rites'... I'll help you do whatever the next best thing is when we get the time. Not good to be down here alone."      Pepper, sounding vaguely relieved, pokes a little fun. "Well, look at you stepping up." While Mag's busy smugly rubbing his metal-guarded knuckles across his nose at the compliment, Linear steps a bit closer to the branch. Purely driven on sentiment and visual association, she delicately brushes her hand against the top of the crystal, glowing faintly green with restoring energy. It probably does nothing at all, but it feels right. It's what she does for the plants in their garden, after all. A little wish for them to grow big and strong.