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Gideon Kaspar     Though the posted details on this mission were as sparse as they were short notice, the reason why is pretty transparent, and once those who've signed up for it have been locked in as 'the guys who actually show up', and thus people on the need-to-know list, the full rundown is given.

    Specifically, it is given en route aboard a turn of the century military helicopter with no military insignia and all the serial numbers filed off, painted with the G&K corporate logo instead. The destination isn't significant enough to have a Warpgate, and so there's about a half hour flight over somewhat unusual terrain. With the side doors open like an irresponsible FPS opening cutscene, the air is cold enough to be charitably described as 'brisk', but the ground below is green and flat, occasionally forested, but predominantly taken over for agriculture, with only rural homes and farmsteads dotting long stretches of dirt and gravel roads, with only one major highway close by. Frankly, it all looks marginally overgrown, and none of the vehicles have been moved recently enough for there to be tire tracks anywhere. Far off to the east is sign of a massive inland late, and beyond that, the foggy silhouette of a mountain range, but no further sign of human development lies beyond that either, making the thrum of the helicopter blades by far the most modern sound around.

    Their goal is explained solely through a radio communicator in the back cabin, isolated from a taciturn and untalkative pilot and co-pilot pair. A no-nonsense older woman's voice gives them the highlights. "Welcome to sector S-09. As temporary employees of Griffin&Kryuger Military Contracting and Security Consultancy Services, you are here on an emergency retrieval mission, for a Tactical Doll designated VZ-61. You might also call it a search and rescue operation if you please, as we believe VZ-61 to still be operational. This T-Doll has fallen into enemy hands, and if the information they're after hasn't been acquired yet, it's probably due to a situation where VZ-61 has managed to stall for time. This T-Doll has vital intelligence that is imperative to an ongoing operation, and so her retrieval is crucial enough that we're willing to outsource to operators such as yourselves."

    "You might be wondering who the 'enemy' is, if this region is not officially at war, and why there isn't a full deployment of G&K paramilitary assets. To put it bluntly, this region is part of the extraterritoriality of Sanvgis Ferri Manufacturing co. A company nation, you might put it. G&K doesn't have jurisdiction to act here, formally, but due to certain circumstances, we have limited leeway in conduction operations in S-09 due to the total lack of civilians."
Gideon Kaspar     A slightly ominous pause follows, leaving just the chopping of the blades and the faint smell of gasoline. "Let me be clear: there are no humans in sector S-09. We've yet to confirm, but we believe there are no humans remaining in Sangvis Ferri territory, period. Your opposition will be Sangvis Ferri's paramilitary assets, but as far as we can tell, no human operators. You are essentially weapons free to accomplish this mission by any means necessary. You will be tasked with raiding a Sangvis Ferri military command post in this area, retrieving data pertinent to the location of VZ-61, and deactivating all communications equipment capable of sending an alert. However you do it, I don't care."

    The helicopter eventually reaches a stretch of roads that converge into a single path, snaking through rows of warehouses and garages, passing by an old radio tower and resevoir setup before adjoining an old, dirt packed runway, with a handful of civilian aircraft parked along it. Overall, it looks like a bit of a rinky dick refueling and resupply station, with docks at the edge of the great lake, and piles of fuel towers set inside a walled compound adjacent to the water, certainly ecologically unsound.

    With high fences, concrete barriers, metal walls, and a big fat communications dish on the roof, the squat, gunmetal grey cluster of buildings stands out sharply in what otherwise constitutes 'middle of nowhere', only resembled by a small handful of . . . they might be barracks? Guard towers? Garages? Small clusters of matte black buildings with no windows, practically gas stations with a pylon and transceiver tower each, scattered across the flat landscape. They look significantly newer than the 'command post', which is probably a bulked up storage facility.

    The helicopter sets down at the far west end, at the start of the dirt highway that leads into the warehouses, not getting any closer than a mile. The reasons for this aren't obvious, since there was no sight of anti-air weapons anywhere. Getting off the vehicle, the radio lady has one last thing to say. "By the way, you're on a one hour mission clock. That's when the local G&K branch commander assigned to sector S-09 will be moving in with their own forces to secure the area. I'd advise you to eliminate as much communications capacity as you can, unless you plan to wait around and join forces."

    When the helicopter disappears into the distance, the renewed quiet strikes as a little odd. Standing in the middle of a country dirt road, surrounded by tall grass, clusters of trees, and old warehouse buildings, one would expect to hear the usual grasshoppers and birds alongside the rustling of the wind in the fields and the distant lapping of the waves. The distinct lack of them doesn't seem /ominous/, but certainly oddly incongruous.
Gaonoir Who better to send to investigate strange disappearances in an isolated region than a nosey kid and their talking 'pet' dog?

... What, it worked for Scooby Doo and a half dozen cartoon ripoffs?

Gaonoir, having sat quietly in a corner adjusting his gloves didn't appear to be paying attention to all the talk, but once the briefing is over grumbles out a low "Something seems suspicious."
"I know, right? Isn't it great?!" Erika reponds, mayhaps a little too eager at the prospect. Which just gets her partner to slap one gloved palm to his face and mutter under his breath at the lack of surprise at his Tamer. "I mean, a controlled area by a mega company that's supposedly got resistance but no 'human' prescence? I smell conspiracy~"

"Probably not the only one," murmurs the dark digidog as he debarks the helicopter after it lands, plodding a few feet away as Erika climbs out. Business first, potential shadiness on the side later. By the time she's caught up he's actually on all fours, ears perked forward instead of their usual half-flop. "The lack of ambience is unsettling..." There should be more background noise than distant water and wind if there's no 'human occupation' to drown it out with noise pollution...
Seifer Almasy      Secret war. Disable communications towers. A one hour clock.

     Is Seifer still in SeeD or something? Is he dreaming? He did this already. It was his graduation exam. He failed it because he ran off and did his own thing.

     Go on, guess what's going to happen this time.

     Well, at least there's an added element. It's not for some far-off meaningless country he doesn't give a shit about. It's for rescuing a (presumably hot) girl. And Seifer Almasy is nothing if not thorough about rescuing (presumably hot) girls.

     "Alright, well," Seifer says as soon as they land, shouldering his gunblade with an air of immense swagger, "I'm gonna go rescue that beauty. You guys do whatever dumb communication bombing you want."

     Seifer jerks a thumb at himself and grins over his shoulder at the rest of the team. "Just try not to get in my way, you got that?!"

     And then he's off running. He doesn't even *ask* about weapons free. Seifer is not the kind of man to ask for permission about stuff like that.

     He'll deal with problems as they come. And while ordinarily he'd probably do some stealth and commando crap, this is...you know, it's a princess rescue, right?! You gotta be awesome when you kick down the door and scoop the damsel up in your arms!
Haguro      It had been quite some time since Haguro's last outing anywhere, but she's feeling confident today. Long weeks of wrestling lessons, target practice, and mobility courses has all led to this moment! Or ... Several moments later, anyway, as the intel phase begins. With the rescue mission laid out, Haguro furrows her brow in thought as she considers her choice of armaments.

     "Going weapons free would be easier, yes... Hmm. Are there any locations that need to be kept intact?" Her turrets turn slightly for emphasis (complete with mechanical noises for the radio) before to Gaonoir, nodding after a moment. "There'd normally be... Some sort of sounds at least." Another pause, and then she turns back to Gideon. "Even if there's no humans, if we're facing opposition with enough intellect to know that this.. Erm. T-Doll is valuable, then are there any other targets that need to be kept alive? Er. Intact?"

     And then they're off! SEifer's off, anyway, making it a smidge harder to scout out the area prior to rushing in. Instead of calling out for him to stop, however, Haguro instead opts to sprint after him!
Hemlock Among those in the helicopter is an utterly bland looking male human with dark hair. Hemlock is wearing really light clothes, including a jacket, stuff he can easily pull off for a change of disguise. He has a bag at his side to hold his equipment, his fiddle inside the Bag of Holding safely, and a knife inside his jacket. The shapeshifter was happy to know that there were no civilians or humans, meaning they were likely fighting some manner of monsters.

Once on the ground, Hemlock considers the party. "Good luck." Seifer gets, because Seifer's basically a big fighter guy and you don't get in those people's ways.

Keeping his footsteps quiet and making sure to stick to walls once he reaches buildings, Hemlock moves to approach the buildings that appear to be barracks. He's going to try and climb the fences if no one appears to be watching, using his skills in parkour, and then start approaching the buildings that appears to be barracks. That's the best place to both find a uniform and someone to replace, after all.
Gordon Freeman     Hazard-ruined urban wastes and firearm-focused runaway tech? Gordon is ordered over there faster than you can say "HEV suit". He's geared up with an assortment of firearms and mad-science force projection equipment all at hardpoints on his armor, and he's clearly keenly attentive to the discussion. After they're deposited, he responds in his own quiet way, poking and prodding at his suit's interface. A passive computerized voice announces, "TIMER SET: SIXTY MINUTES." He does a little smart salute of sorts to the heli as it leaves.

    Seifer makes his own demands of sorts, and Gordon gives that "response" again. A quick nod, then another configuration on his HEV suit: "DANGER CLOSE ZONE SET." It looks like he's not planning on forcing any interruption there. Haguro's offer of going Weapons Free is something he gives another thumbs-up to, taking out a large submachine gun from a hardpoint. "HIGH-IMPACT REACTIVE ARMOR ACTIVATED. DEFENSIVE WEAPON SELECTION SYSTEM ACTIVATED. MUNITION LEVEL MONITORING ACTIVATED. HAVE A VERY SAFE DAY."

    Gordon heads in, sprinting with some superhuman speed alongside Haguro. He's not stealthy by any means the way Hemlock is, but he's heading right for the warehouses. If they were next to an airfield like this, there must have been something underground, some old maintenance or delivery tunnels or something, to take goods easily to the airfield. It's not likely to be /less defended/, by any means, but it's likely to favor him more, and let him bottleneck things harder as he seeks to surge through into the interior complex.
Gideon Kaspar     At the very least, Seifer will make good time. An hour clock would be tight but reasonable for a professional squad to scout the area, move from point to point while avoiding chokes and killboxes, and surround the command post for a simultaneous attack. Just charging down the road cuts that budget really short. It's a road straight to the base after all. Flat, level, hard, and almost completely straight, it'd be a terrible road if it didn't take him there really quickly.

    He and Haguro end up pounding dirt past the warehouses in increasingly eerie silence, watching rusty corrugated doors and dilapidated storage units blur by on either side, occasionally privy to the sight of an empty garage or derelict jeep sitting out under a rain tarp or tin roof, better suited as a backdrop to scouting out a secret cult than a black ops mission. Gordon finds a number of warehouse doors either hanging open, or easy enough to lift with some assistance from his suit, and from there, tunnels that run from compound to compound that could be military, or could simply be drainage from the lake were it to swell over its banks. They're dark, damp, and old concrete, but a mounted flashlight is sufficient. Unlike sewers, there are few real branching junctions or entry points from above, making it very simple to navigate, with little more than squared support struts partly sticking from the walls every fifty feet.

    Charging down the main path has about the expected result, in a somewhat novel form. Though no spotters or cameras seem to be around, an alarm goes up once they clear the short series of warehouses and begin approaching the airfield, cutting the air with the warbling of a powerful, electric siren. Instead of personnel waking up, dropping their cards, and scrambling to climb buildings and dive behind cover however, the sole reception party comes from those odd, identical buildings of prefabricated matte black metal, which swiftly open almost seamless ports in their sides like the missile tubes of a submarine, and disgorge lines of what seem to be robotic vehicles.

    About half the size of a car, very low to the ground, using mars rover-esque wheels on a quartet of robotic legs, and with a central mass that is almost entirely a giant optical battery with a gun attached to the right side, dozens of them speed from their holding stations and swerve onto the road with hairpin turns. Smoothly orienting and adjusting their wheeled legs to keep their center mass low and steady, they look every bit like overfunded DARPA nightmares, in the same matte black finish, with red-pink LEDs. They have no issue navigating through the clustered warehouses and chasing down the Elites in the middle of the road, skidding at them headfirst.
Gideon Kaspar     Just before they enter ideal weapons range, the 'bots flatten themselves and begin zigzagging laterally, swerving side to side and weaving across each other to make themselves more difficult targets. When they do start shooting, what comes flying at the party on the surface are bright green flashes of energy weapons, practically zapping them with bolts almost too quick to see, rather than ponderously slow 'plasma bolts'. They're highly accurate, but very easy to see coming, since their guns are fixed, and have a fairly slow rate of fire. This is unfortunately because they're quite punchy for their size, hitting hard enough to probably kill or incapacitate typical human infantry instantly.

    Gordon isn't quite safe in the tunnels either. He can hear the loud whizzing of spinning tracks and the quiet clack of drones dropping into the concrete passage with him, and soon enough he finds another half-dozen charging him from the front as well, half-piping up and down the walls, and even skidding over the ceiling to maintain an evasive pattern.

    Hemlock alone is unaccosted, because he didn't take the direct route. As an utterly unassuming man with no significant 'weapons signature', the drones don't notice him as they pour out of one of the mini-bases he approaches. He passes by an elaborate, angular, red-pink logo with the name SANGVIS FERRI stamped on it in hypermodern chic font, erasing any doubt there could be as to its origins. Inside, he finds that the place is barely suited for human use whatsoever, only having a handful of engineering passages to squeeze by the drones, store tools, and perform checks and light maintenance. He actually does find a number of uniforms, being a blend between mechanic's coveralls and clean room suits with gloves, masks, and goggles, in the same corporate colours and synthetic materials. He also finds small work computers locked by password.
Gaonoir Gaonoir doesn't say anything as Seifer sprints past with his witty repritoir and bolts for the compound, he just jabs Erika lightly in the side with his elbow to get her to stop gawking in that way young ladies do after cute boys.

"Wha--" Blink. "Oh, right, illicited and potentially vagely illegitiment investigation!"
"Maybe you should tell him not to split up so soo--" Gaonoir stops. Then sighs and slumps in exasperation. "--She already wandered off, didn't she?"

Fortunately she's only farther down the path, not being as inhuman fast as others present. "I'm looking for conspiracy clues!", Erika snaps back. "For all we know this place could be another Philedalphia Experiment! Or Area 51! Complete with pseudo government cover-ups, military shenanigans, and alien probings!"

"Don't use the word 'shenanigans' like that... and for the love of mods," Gaonoir trudges after her, "Don't mention alien probings. Reminds me of the last time I had to deal with a Vademon." Erika half-turns and opens her mouth but Gaonoir quickly cuts her off with a paw-wave. "Don't even ask."
"But you brought it u--"
"Don't you have 'clues' to look for?"
"-- Oh right!" Erika spins with renewed if misguided vigor and starts scouring across the compound once more.

Gaonoir just shakes his head. There's a brief electrical distortion, and then a pair of scarf-like tendrils grab Erika to reel her in and put her on Gaonoir's back. Now that he's in his bear-sized huskie Adult form. "Then search from here." He is at least a bit faster to catch up with the others, running on all fours, and senses tuned more on potential and likely interventions.

Like, you know, alarms going off. Leading to robot swarms disgorging themselves from buildings. All because of some hotshot hor--well not sure what age Seifer actually is but...

Not important. What's important is being shot at by robots with lasers. "See?! I bet that's alien technology!" "Would you get down!" Even as he's juking side to side to avoid energy bolts humming across the compound Gaonoir grabs Erika with one scarf again and pulls her down against his thick armor-like fur to make less a target of her. "And hold on!" Just as another bolt zings towards them the Dark Gaogamon lunges forward, seeming to almost dive at the ground and disappear into his own shadow.

At first there's nothing, and then glowing eyes appear amongst the shadows of the compound buildings. "SHADOW BEAST!" And then the Digimon comes barreling out of said shadows, in an attempt to blindside the robots and disrupt their erratic maneuvering with his comparitive bulk.
Seifer Almasy      Haguro immediately receives a flashy, cocksure grin from Seifer Almasy as she runs up behind him. He's perfected the flashy, cocksure grin. "Hey, great! I was afraid the whole squad was gonna hem and haw and take forever! Glad to see I've got backup. Cute backup, too! Always a bonus!"

     "Just make sure you watch my back, huh?!"

     The road and the warehouses are both awful in equal measure. Seifer slows down a little bit once they get in there, just because of how bad the road is, and to let Haguro keep up with him (he's a gentleman, after all). "This is awful," the Gunblade Knight complains, "Man, why don't these kindsa guys ever just pave the place? It don't look more suspicious to have paved roads than this decrepit monster-pit shithole!"

     He pauses. Something about 'monster-pit shithole' rings a bell, but damned if he can remember what it is. Higher pay?

     Hm. For later investigation.

     The alarm goes off as expected. Seifer's cocksure grin becomes a wild, excited grin. The drones come out, and Seifer *visibly* becomes unhappy. "Oh, COME ON! Not even some kinda monsters?! Just tanks - woah!"

     The second they start firing, he's interposing between Haguro and the lasers. He takes one right to the chest as he does so. His breathing staggers, and there's some blood in his mouth. Shit. He can't (easily) deflect lasers.

     "Hey," Seifer says over his shoulder to Haguro, wiping his mouth, "Stay behind me, okay? A real knight doesn't let a cute girl get hurt on his watch."

     "Although," he adds, "If you got any kinda guns or magic or anything to take care of these guys, that'd be great. I'm, uh, kinda an up close and personal sorta guy myself. I can do ranged but I bet I'm better-served shielding you and letting you do it."

     "Unless you don't have any ranged options. Uh, in which case, I guess, fuck?"
Hemlock Drones. Here's hoping the others can handle that, as Hemlock's not the type to do so. He's going to focus on two things - informationb, and turning off communications. As he enters inside, he immediately surveys for security, and then gets to work. The uniforms are jackpot. He's not sure if they'll work well or not, seeing as there's not supposed to be humans, but wearing them is better than not wearing them. Taking off his jacket to change, he makes sure that they'd be easy to change out of in a heartbeat, or atleast not really difficult to change into. If they aren't, Hemlock pulls it on, including the mask to hide his face.

And then, hoping this will be enough to fool the drones, the bard starts down the corridors. He's going to try and find his way closer towards communications, or to anything useful. The knife was pulled out of his jacket and hidden in the coveralls, because Hemlock refuses to completely disarm pretty much ever.

There's a brief radio communication to the others. <"Inside. I have a computer, too big to bring with me. Will return to it if I find a password. Looking for communications now.">
Gordon Freeman     Oh god, underground drones.

    Somewhere else, a much older man is quite excited as he watches a monitor. "Great Scott! I'd expected much less adaptive drones, especially at sizes like that. Gordon! Gordon, please-- Can you get a sample of those processors? The adaptive maneuvering alone, why, Eli would have a field day!"

    "Yeah." Gordon mutters softly, opening fire. He empties the mag on his SMG, slams it to one hip, and brings out a shotgun as well, one loaded with massive piercing slugs. His helmet unfolds fast and encases his head in time to fully shield him against the plasma; sizzling reactive armor twists and contorts with smart-material reactions as he suffers moderate burns instead of disintegration. He doesn't let it faze him in the slightest; he keeps his quick pace, grunting and barely wincing, unloading with the shotgun and using brief breaks in the zippy volleys to load fresh slugs.

    He does his best to scavenge as he goes, too! Assuming his big AP slugs are doing their thing. Grabbing up chunks of processors if he can get them... As well as seeking out those plasma emitters. He's looking to fast-craft up a big plasma accelerator that can clear out the rest of this straight-shot tunnel with a singular burst of heat and pressure, and give him an HEV-guarded straight shot for the central area.
Haguro      "Eh? O-oh! Well... A mission like this needs to be completed quickly, right? We'll have the element of surprise this way, and..." Haguro starts in response to Seifer, getting flustered rather quickly at the compliment. She shakes it off relatively quickly, though, eventually managing a quick nod and confident cocking of her wrist cannon. "Understood. My aim's good enough that you should be safe from the explosions, too!"

     That's reassuring, right? Right. Gordon's gun, meanwhile, draws an amused glance from Haguro. Why couldn't her turrets be a little more polite? Or... Vocal, even?

     Right. Priorities. Focusing again on the mission at hand, the shipgirl tenses up visibly as the alarm goes out. "Incoming!" She shouts out as her sprint turns into a slide, throwing herself into a crouching position both to stabilize her aim and make herself a smaller target behind Seifer.

     "Guns. Well, turrets, but... No magic, unfortunately! I'm also equipped with a smaller revolver, but with so many of them..." The turrets creak to life as she starts to fire on the guards.

     "... Explosives should work better!" Rather than aiming for any one in particular, Haguro opts for a blanket fire approach with explosive shells to try and thin out their ranks. She's aiming high, too, so as to minimize friendly fire risk!
Gideon Kaspar     Whatever guns these units have, they're sure a hell of a lot different than the firearms being /sold/ out of this world, or at least they might have been the ones 'in the back room'. They're not quite lasers, being being effectively instantaneous, but they're faster than plain bullets by a lot, largely by virtue of not losing speed to air drag, and they hit with a significant amount of physical impact, feeling like a hard punch to the chest, despite most of the real damage being instant, deadly heat discharge, involving steaming pops of nitrogen and CO2 where they hit.

    As stated though, they can only shoot where the main body is directly looking and angled towards, and when Gaonoir jumps into his own shadow, they quickly lose sight of him, with a few drones visibly pausing and starting to swivel due to targeting error. When he jumps out from the side, one of them is surprisingly quick enough to spin around and fire point blank, before being crushed along with the other two next to it. The metal plating is pretty hard and well-fabricated, especially for what's probably a cheap mass production unit, but the joints aren't really built to handle the stress of having a bear-sized monster smashing them. The rovers surrounding the unlucky ones smoothly back up, weaving and zippong away from him, firing as they drive backwards without difficulty.

    That does result in putting them mostly parallel to Haguro rather than perpendicular, the idea firing line. Clustered on the straightaway, dropping scores of shells into their ranks actually works pretty well. Very lightweight for their side, the blast waves send them flying, or else tear their legs off and shatter their optics. Direct hits flatten them completely, having a roughly 'anti-infantry' effect on the mobile horde.

    Just when their numbers start to thin, reinforcements arrive. Another, smaller wave of the zippy ground vehicles arrives from a base point further down the road, adjacent to the airfield, and with them comes a swarm of flying drones as well; triangular units with red 'cockpit' optics, sharp leg-like fins, and small cannons mounted on each side break into squadrons and dive at the ground from the air, strafing them with repeated blasts of smaller 'calibre' energy fire. They're fast, nimble, and most importantly, small, barely as big as a human torso, and their general quantity is enough to stitch the road with lines of smoking pockmarks.

    They let off an eerie electronic buzz as they fly without visible propulsion, darting around like flies. Where people might take cover from the rovers, where the wheeled vehicles can't easy chase them down, the scout drones fly easily overhead, even between buildings, and try to flush them out again with repeated blasts. They especially like to try and get behind Seifer, forcing him to expose his back to either them or the ground bots.
Gideon Kaspar     At close range in tight quarters, Gordon's weapons do the trick too. The wheeled drones can survive a surprising amount of SMG fire to the face, where the bullets largely end up hitting their plates, but crash and spark out with sustained automatic fire nailing their very large optical apertures and necessarily exposed skeletons, starting to block up the tunnel. Shotgun slugs are a different story punching straight into their main units and tearing them up inside at this distance, soon leaving him with a modest pile of robotic corpses. He is thankfully free from being harassed by fliers, and has some time to perform salvage.

    The insides of the robots are . . . weird. It's difficult to quite say why. There are wires and bolts and circuits, sure, but they're arranged in this kind of 'off' sense that makes the engineering just strike him as 'wrong' somehow. Call it PhD's instinct, but it kind of looks like the configuration of insides shouldn't really work. They don't seem to be properly cooled, the connections are inefficiently spaced apart, the circuits are sandwiched in a very strange manner, and what he can best tell is a power cell only appears to have a single hookup. All of it is precision machined into very cramped and compact space, meaning it would be an incredible pain in the ass to service without ultra-specialized tools; it's the exact opposite of what should be practical military design. Fortunately, he's smashed them up pretty good, so he can yank components that are intact by hand.

    As far as he can tell, the weapons are actually of the particle accelerator branch of the Tree of Gun, though how they get real impact out of significantly sub-luminal blasts is a good question. Rigging several of them to fire in tandem is mostly a matter of stripping them down, tying them all to a big bank of power cells, and layering their coils, so he ends up with an end product that amounts to a combined triple discharge into one bigger, heavier beam. The tunnels look like they end just up ahead, popping him up into the hangar at the head of the airfield, out of sight for the moment, and pretty close to the command post. He can see the dogfight happening to the west through the open hangar doors.

    Hemlock finds the uniforms a decent, if snug, fit. Once he has it on and moves into the next series of storage units, the drones that activate there take only half a second to stare him down, adjust their optics, scan him, and then turn around and run off, apparently assuming he is maintenance personnel due to his affected aura of normie and the likelihood of an RFID tag in the uniform. Communications in the drone hangar are strangely sparse, little more than a single, fixed transceiver with both a computer terminal and manual switches, like a WWII radio unit, turnable dials and everything. It's entirely possible he could just smash the thing if he wanted to, since it's not very large or sturdy. The terminal isn't locked, but also isn't helpful. It seems to be running some kind of algorithm which is utterly incomprehensible, with a source signal titled SCARECROW-041.
Seifer Almasy      Seifer watches the fireworks with the sort of quiet appreciation generally reserved for an actual fireworks display. He whistles. It's an appreciative whistle, not a wolf-whistle. For all his faults Seifer's not a wolf-whistle guy. "You're cute *and* you're armed. Wasn't expecting guns but I can definitely appreciate it!"

     He burns a Potion, tossing a little phial into the air to clean up some of the damage he took. Just enough to remain presentable. You gotta look good. You gotta look *impressive*.

     But with the victory comes a new problem - *flying* murder drones. Smart flying murder drones. And they're trying to get between him and Haguro. As anyone who knows Seifer can tell you, getting between Seifer and a cute girl is a great way for Seifer to put himself in harm's way very rapidly to protect said cute girl.

     Which he does. He doesn't *let* them have his back. Instead he turns with them, exposing his back to the drones behind him and taking laser fire from behind, burning laser fire that scores through his jacket and hits his chest. He puts his arm on Haguro's shoulder, not in a romantic way but in a firing line kind of way, lining up a shot with his gunblade. He's not a great ranged fighter, but flight is different. Flight is vulnerable. A decent shot, even if it doesn't do damage, can destabilize flight. The gunblade fires only revolver bullets - it's not designed to fire anything of the caliber Haguro is putting out - but with Haguro to stabilize his aim Seifer is a hell of a lot better shot.

     While he's using Haguro as a gun emplacement he also takes a minute to wink at her. He's pretty tall, so it works pretty well.

     "Hey. Seifer Almasy. Figure I should introduce myself. I'm a guy with a romantic dream. Maybe I can tell you about it one of these days over lunch."

     He's still getting *fired upon*, mind you, so it comes out more like 'h-hey. s-seifer...almasy. figure...i should intro...duce myself. i'm a...a guy with a romantic dream. m-maybe...i can tell you about it...one of these days....over l...lu...lunch,' but you have to give him props for being...

     ...something, at least. Dedicated?
Gaonoir Even as the drone is smashed under his form the point-blank shot hits Gaonoir square in the chest, evoking a snarl from the beast as digital mores flicker away in the 'hit flash' of the strike. The backtracking drones pepper his shoulders in a similar fashion but with less drastic results due to their increasing distance. Then the beastial features curl from the pained snarl to a more vicious growl, fangs bared and all. With little arcs crackling around the bared fangs as he takes a few quick strides forward to close the distance. Then stops again, hissing and broad chest expanding as if taking a breath. Claws dig into the pavement to brace himself. The crackling arcs increase, a faint but tangible charge building in the air around the digimon.

"STATIC HOOOO-OOOWLBACK!"

The attack starts like a canine howl when his mouth opens, but in doing so an electromagnetic shockwave not unlike a kind of EMP discharge is let loose with it, visibly rippling with the current through the air around him. Let's see what the robotics think of that!

Erika leans off his back a little to snap some pics of the crushed drones with the camera function on the D-Port, then glances up towards Gaonoir's head. "Why didn't you use that right away?"

Gaonoir rolled his eyes after the attack ends. "You've played enough video games to know you never use your special attacks on the first turn of combat."
Hemlock Hemlock walks past the drones with the utmost confidence. He belongs there. He acts like he belongs there. For as awkward as he can be socially, he's a highly skilled actor who has worn many, many uniforms that didn't belong to him. As they all exit the hangar, he moves up to the terminal, examining it. He commits the name listed to memory, and then decides he'll just smash the thing, grabbing his knife from his bag, flipping it over, and beating the handle into the communications terminal repeatedly until it breaks. Once this is done, Hemlock quickly rebags the knife and starts to move.

His destination is somewhere dark, in case someone immediately comes to investigate this. He'll wait there long enough to see if any sort of alarm was sent out, and if not, he'll move to proceed to the next important looking building. If someone /does/ show up...well, there might be a problem.
Haguro      Success! For now, anyway. The explosives find the marks, but the cruiser isn't celebrating just yet. As expected, reinforcements start to come into view, and the sight of fliers mixed in with their ranks has Haguro looking to and fro to determine her ideal targeting lines again. "We may get surrounded at this rate. Perhaps we should-"

     Fighting the instinct to recoil and hurl whoever's on her shoulder, she glances sideways at Seifer who's suddenly gotten incredibly close! Stammering incoherently at first, Haguro's surprisingly stable and quite suited for use as an aim stabilizer despite her voice barely coming out as more than flustered noises.

     Thankfully, the whole being-shot-at thing helps bring her attention back to the firefight, and she brings her arm up again to take aim at the grounded robots. The wrist turret takes more direct shots straight at the oncoming robots while the turret on her free shoulder continues lobbing shots upwards, and her armor, alongside Seifer acting as a human shield, makes it relatively simple to weather the shots that do reach her!

     "M... Mister Almasy, was it?" The threat of explosions and death sure makes it easier to speak and not be embarassed the whole time, even if she's twitching and jerking each time a shot goes off that isn't her own. She was stable before the shots started going off, at least! "My name is Haguro, fourth..." She stops herself momentarily. She needs to stand on her own feet, dammit! "I'm a... Fleet Daughter, designed for bombardment and general combat situations. As for lunch... That would be alright. After this sometime, perhaps?"

     That's right. Be smooth and not desparate like your oldest sister! She likely sounds more like she's screaming half the time saying that, of course, but... Well. It sounded better in her head! "But.. If you need a breather, don't be too proud to use me as cover. My armor's much stronger than it looks!"
Gordon Freeman     Kleiner leans close to the monitor showing the feed of Gordon's suit cameras. "Strange... Why, I've neve seen work like this! This isn't fit for defense use at all. But it's still clearly keeping proper efficacy. Fascinating!" He calls over some of the others. "Eli! Eli, come here, you need to see this. Can you figure out this robotics..."

    Gordon pops his head up out of the delivery tunnel, spotting the ongoing dogfight. He's not messing around with salvaging, it seems. That looks like they're fighting Seifar. He stops for a moment, considers Seifar's warnings... It looks like things are mostly handled over there, right? But he can't help himself. He has to fire a few backup shots towards Seifar's harassers, equipping some kind of heavy crossbow and blasting heavy rods downrange out of the hangar door, trying to intercept the flying dogfighters.

    Okay, Seifar said stay out of his way, so Gordon does; this means it's time to focus specifically on the comms stuff. Now it's time to locate comms equipment. While Kleiner obsesses over the odd designs, Gordon obsesses over getting to that gunmetal structure with the big fat dish on it. He makes a break for the smaller hangar passageways, and for anything that resembles the shortest path between him and what he recalls the direction of the structure was. Just gotta get there and then start bashing things apart! Or at least punching holes in vulnerable, valuable dish equipment.
Gideon Kaspar     As far as it goes, it seems big revolver bullets are sufficient, so long as Seifer fires when the scouts are pretty close. Any any significant distance, they bob and weave like horrible, bladed metal mosquitoes, ducking bullets with remarkable ease, likely being programmed for exactly that. When they swoop in for their firing runs however, it's easier to nail them dead on when they have less time to dodge, and then they turn out to be understandably fragile, breaking legs and guns off or going spiraling and crashing into metal barrels, crates, and garage walls. The pressure lets up somewhat when Gordon pops up and begins firing from extreme range, and more vitally, from behind. All of the flying drones sensors seem to face mostly forward, and don't have a huge range beyond their vision, so they get picked off with flying, red hot rebar without much difficulty beyond leading shots on such small targets.

    They're much easier to wipe out with the electrical attack from Gaonoir, being a broad saturation attack against enemies that rely almost entirely on evasion. A great swath of the scouts explode in balls of coruscating electricity, crashing in tiny heaps that reek of smouldering plastic and burnt rubber. The ones surrounding Seifer and Haguro aren't a friendly fire risk because Seifer got them all. Haguro continuing to pound away with her guns quickly leaves him with no further drones menacing himself and his trainer as well. He has to hold out for a little while against a half-encirclement of rovers firing further greenish blasts into his flanks, but the heavy bombardment wipes them out before a minute is up.

    The drones ignore Hemlock until all of them have departed, dropping from racks holding them to the ceiling, or disengaging from simple clamps that hold their wheels to the ground, rovers stacked low and scouts stacked high. Without much to obviously gain from the computer, he pulverizes the transceiver, taking a good few solid whacks with a blunt object to crumple and cave in its antennae and wire receiver, whereupon the signal becomes static and the terminal ceases processing any further code. Nothing overly dramatic happens, but it tells in a few minutes where no further reinforcements have accosted the party, giving them some time to breathe instead of being hit by a third and fourth wave. That's probably normal. That's how alarms work, right? Smash it up and the alert goes away.
Gideon Kaspar     Two more of those drone bases are passed by those beating feet down the central road, prompting the question of if this place ever even had human guards, and if so, where they could possibly be staying. Obviously it'd make sense to have moderate defense for potential intruders on a resupply station, but it'd been a proximity alert that instantly went to shoot on sight, which either says something about corporatism here or something stranger about Sangvis Ferri. True to the radio lady's word, there are no signs of recent human habitation. There are functional vehicles still gassed up that could easily be driven, but they're covered in enough leaf litter to have been parked there for a year or so. Walking by the radio tower, they find that it isn't even powered on, providing no civilian communications anywhere.

    Gordon gets to the command post first due to having skipped to the airfield, past the drone bases. There are no boats at the dock, and no equipment is functioning, yet all of the fuel tanks and gas pipes appear to be not only functional, but completely topped off and unused. He actually /does/ see cameras here, in what is becoming a pattern of chic black, white stencils, and reddish lenses and lights, but they're mounted onto an older structure that doesn't look corporate, possibly from some previous war, judging by the usage of sandbags and barbed wire, as well as handfuls of canvas trucks and those red barrels you expect to see filling up a vehicle yard in neat rows and bundles.

    At his closer distance, he can see personnel on site, but only at first glance. Two squads of what appear to be identical women patrol around the perimeter on opposite sides, apparently under the impression the intruders have been eliminated, due to at least a lack of command update. They /look/ entirely human, but there's no way they are, given every single one of them has the same height, complexion, build, and gait. They're all adhering to a more purple version of the company aesthetic too, with short, dark violet hair streaked with fuchsia, leotards, gloves and boots of the same colours, and parts of black Sangvis armour over their joints, hands, and lower legs.

    They appear very futuristic and sort of style over substance, even with a transparent fuchsia visor instead of real goggles or a mask, but they're all armed with Sangvis stamped firearms; they carry heavy, angular-looking black guns in each hand, about the size of a carbine, involving a surplus of glowing pieces and a dearth of magazines or ejectors. They're very much movie-esque, but still somehow intimidating, likely due to their cold, robotic, perfectly synchronized motions.

    Unfortunately, there only appear to be entries from the front and back, and then it's just a pair of doors and a garage, both easily guarded and past the patrol routes. The windows are small, barred, and not designed to open. Almost definitely old war construction.
Seifer Almasy      Gordon's shots get an appreciative thumbs-up from Seifer over Haguro's shoulder. He may have said 'stay out of my way' but he didn't mean 'don't help if we're pinned down.' Seifer's proud and headstrong, not /retarded/. He slumps a bit as he weathers another rough shot, but his eyes are still strong and focused. This is a man who truly believes that he is invulnerable, and that pain like this is temporary, because everything will go fine for him in the end.

     You know, a lunatic.

     Over the roar of Haguro's cannons and the sound of lasers, Seifer shouts back, though he's still getting hammered on, "Yeah! Great!" Again, it's more like "y...yeah..! Grea....t!"

     He grits his teeth a moment later. "Like...hell! A man doesn't...doesn't let a lady...suffer if he can help it! And...a knight...protects his sorceress! So fuck...off with that....suggestion!"

     When the bombardment finally ends, Seifer's back is absolutely ruined. It's black and nasty, his coat carved right through. He swears as he takes another potion, just to ease some of the pain. It won't heal his coat, though, so he slings the trenchcoat and jacket off and let them disappear into the ether, instead taking a minute to wrap his wounds to look at least slightly dignified rather than topless in a war zone.

     Not that it super matters, but, again, presentation.

     Once he's wrapped himself up (mostly in shreds of cloth from his own shirt) and has steadied his breathing, he nods at Gaonoir. "Nice shot. Shit. Real nice. Not sure I could've taken too much more of that."

     "...nah, fuck that, I could've taken that all day. I'm the kinda guy who just doesn't go down no matter how hard you hit me."

     "But we ain't got time to stand around, c'mon."

     Seifer starts beating feet back down the central road. As he does so, he turns around, running backwards for a brief second. "Hey. Haguro. Don't get scared, this ain't gonna hurt, but I'm gonna see what I can borrow."

     "Wake up, you lazy grey bastard! We got ladies to save!"

     Behind Seifer, a red-clad grey ghost just sort of spawns. It's got...a coffee mug clutched in one of its four hands (all on one side; the other has four cardboard arms attached). Under its shoulder is clutched a humongous green dog teddy bear. One of the hands goes to the red cowl on its face like a yawn.

     Seifer rolls his eyes. "Get the fuck on with it!"

     The grey ghost yawns again and then reaches out lazily towards Haguro. A ball of blue light comes shooting out of her and into the ghost. Seifer's eyes widen, and then turn into a remarkable grin. "Fuck yes! That's the first time you've ever got anything worth grabbing!"

     "...the hell does that mean?"

     Seifer's face turns red, and he narrows his eyes at the ghost as he turns back around. "You're lucky I can't beat the shit out of you."

     And then they're at the base, and there's only one main entrance, and, well, Seifer gonna do what Seifer does.

     Charge the fuck in.
Gaonoir "You're not so bad yourself." Then Gaonoir pre-emptively gives himself a shake to keep Erika on his back from getting distracted at Seifer partially stripping and wrapping his wounds. Come on, that sort of tough troubled dude is just the sort of guy a nerdy girl is gonna topple over if he doesn't keep her on something more tolerable. "Don't get distracted!"

"I'm not distracted!" Erika blurts out in response, though her cheeks are a little pink.

"Whatever." But then Siefer goes storming straight through the doors. "Okay, pretty boy or not, I'm kinda starting to like his style."

A moment later he follows. Sort of. There might be a door and part of the wall it's built into that's gone afterwards due to the dog-bear's size. Not that Gaonoir cares, properity that's in the way of the mission objective is just an obstacles, and he's one hell of a bulldozer.
Gordon Freeman     Okay, time to book it. Freeman guns it towards the base, stopping only long enough to take a good look at the defenses that haven't quite spotted him yet. This is probably going to give Seifer, and then Gaonoir enough time to catch up, but not to get too far ahead; the moment it looks like he's plowing in, Gordon wordlessly dives in, using his pre-scouted understanding of the routes and positions to strike hard. These enemies look like they're a tougher breed than the others, and so Gordon brings out a bigger gun: the Tau Cannon, a heavy energy assault weapon.

    It's stripped down and clearly built from lab equipment rather than manufactured, but as he does his best to clear the flanks and keep the group heading into the main entrance from getting pincered, the Sangvis Ferri forces are likely to find that at least the lesser manufacturing finish doesn't stop its efficacy. Rounds of condensed, depleted uranium-235, charged with unspeakable energies, are soon blasting towards the enemies in rapid bursts, trying to clear things so that Gordon can pull into the structure and bottleneck them at the door if they pursue -- or take a crowbar or similar tool to anything communications-like that he finds inside.
Haguro      With the immediate threat eliminated and all the noise subsiding, Haguro finally remembers that breathing is good to do to calm herself down! And also function normally. It's not until after she glances around rapidly to confirm that nobody she's arrived with is dead that she finally breathes a sigh of relief, going slack armed for a few moments before standing again.

     "Everyone's alright... Good. Mister Almasy, you should still... Er. Pace yourself better." The concern is evident in her voice what with all the shots he's taken and the visible wounds, but she keeps a (relatively) firm front as she adjusts her armor and discards one of the few pieces that actually got damaged enough to get rid of.

     She may also be staring just a little bit too long a times. FOCUS. She takes a moment to smack herself on the cheeks, then grunts as her resolve is strengthened! Which is then followed by a confused "huh" and a bewildered stare as Gilgamesh does... Something. She's not quite sure what it was, but she does manage a slow nod with a questioning expression as Seifer talks to the ghost.

     She'll ask about that later. "Same strategy as before, then?" Not that she really needed to ask, what with Gaonoir, Gordon, and Seifer charging right at the front door. "I... Can't say I disagree, Mister Gaonoir." Haguro chuckles softly, finding no small amount of liberation at being able to just... Go. No formations, no combat lines, just... Going.

     Time to get going. Haguro rushes forward at a slightly slower pace to give the front-line fighters more time to maneuver, all while plucking the revolver from her hip. Her shoulder turret is still (mostly) functional, but she's not quite ready to risk blowing up a building they're going into just yet. She moves alongside the man with the crowbar, opting for a quick-fire approach of emptying her revolver in seconds rather than aiming for precise headshots or anything fancy.
Gideon Kaspar     At least, when it comes to charging in, if there are two blobs of enemy forces and two groups charge in at different places, that splits them up. Even if it emerges sort of organically rather than through solid communication, it works well enough.

    Gordon charges a Sangvis squad supported by Haguro. All common sense indicates that robots built to look like people should be less efficient than robots built to do robot things, owing to the 'design space' given to convincing human form and function not being task-oriented, but that seems to be the opposite in this case. His Tau cannon strikes one of the units directly in the torso, punching right through it and ripping a gaping hole through its midsection that splashes a shallow puddle of startlingly blood-like coolant across the asphalt. It topples over of course, and its squadmates all snap to attention and turn to face him at the same time, but when they actively move to take cover behind concrete and metal barricades, the first one actually gets up and staggers to its feet again, locking both weapons on Gordon without so much as a grimace of pain.

    From there he's lit up by ten of the things, dual wielding particle blasters that whine and crack at a vastly increased, semi-automatic pace, if with slightly less accuracy than the rovers. Scores of shots streak in on him as he moves, swiftly chunking any cover he uses to evade them, such that it won't survive for long enough to do much more than dart between it. Of course, the same cover isn't built to resist a DU-'railgun', and his own shots blast through theirs, blowing off arms, puncturing midsections, crippling legs, and similar, but though they might be bowled over, slammed against barrels, or sent skidding back, they quickly re-balance themselves and resume firing while moving to fresh cover, even with only one arm or leg. It takes multiple consecutive shots to actually take them down, or else it demands consistently aiming solid headshots from him while under fire.

    Haguro's revolver, which she might expect to be the more efficient option against soft-skinned human 'bots, turns out to be not very useful. The lack of overt combat gear appears to be a choice of aesthetics, because the handgun calibre mostly just squashes on their frames, puncturing the thin layer of artificial flesh, sometimes embedding in carbon muscle fibre, but most often bouncing off or breaking on titanium alloys and composite ceramics. They handle the impact of 'normal' guns in an uncanny way, perfectly counterbalancing themselves in an almost gyroscopic way, like the human version of one of those DARPA quadruped videos. They're literally programmed to stand and trade shots with weapons of her calibre, since their firepower is much greater than that which she is using.
Gideon Kaspar     Seifer and Gaonoir find this equally obnoxious on the other end. Since both of them primarily excel in close combat, approaching through a corridor of fencing and barricades with ten Dolls set up to blast them at every step is a bit of a nightmare. When they close in, the Dolls switch positions, covering each other to maneuver around with surprisingly solid squad tactics, unimaginative, but certainly better coordinated and executed than normal humans. They're fast too, somewhere above 'Olympic' but below 'overtly superhuman', and the really annoying part about their guns is that they don't actually stop to reload, meaning the barrage is constant and has no good openings.

    Granted, when they actually /do/ get into close combat, the Dolls are at something of a loss. Nobody uses goddamn swords in this world, never mind claws, and unlike real people, they don't naturally adapt to that. Since they have no programming to deal with those weapons, never mind their styles, the best they can do at close range is dodge, backpedal, and try to get in close range shots with their compact guns. This leads to them being pretty quickly overwhelmed and having their limbs hacked off or being smashed through a cargo container, meaning that those two can clear out their side very quickly if they're willing to soak a lot of hits.

    The door is pretty easy to defeat. It's a door.

    
Hemlock As Hemlock moves out as the terminal is down, he starts moving towards the next building. There's a nod to the others if they continue. He glances to the other drone bases to see if they have terminalss, but as there doesn't appear to be more drones coming...so he's going to focus on the airbase as part of the primary goal for finding communication networks. The rest are about to play distraction, and Gordon's already starting his assault...

So Hemlock whistles a short melody to boost his speed, and double-times it. Once he spots the patrols, who are very likely to start running at Gordon, he draws his knife and tries to keep his footsteps as light and quiet as possible. If he can grab one of the rear of the patrols or someone alone for whatever reason, he's going to drag them into bushes or behind sandbags, whichever is closer. Hemlock will apologize under his breath, slitting their throat in the process. He flinches ever so slightly, but he's killed enough to not be thrown off the mission by it.

The process of disguise is simple. Hemlock strips both them and himself while the others provide a distraction, then takes their form, pulling hair back, changing the colors of eyes, etc, before changing into the Doll's clothes which should now fit him perfectly, and then grabbing her guns. The bard will look like an exact replica of the Sangvis Ferris T-Doll.

And if that all works, Hemlock will move to either rejoin the patrol if it doesn't focus on Gideon, or head into the command base. 'She' still has work to do.'
Gideon Kaspar     This basically extends to Hemlock's stealth contextual takedown. Basically ignoring an ostensibly unarmed technician with a real firefight going on, he grabs one of the T-Dolls completely by surprise. He then finds that the throat isn't all that vital and that he basically has to stab down to the robotic 'spine' to shut off control from the 'brain' to the rest. Past there, it's not difficult. It is in fact extremely advantageous to him that Sangvis have stylish human-looking guards on auto-patrol here. The cameras swivel to track him both visibly and audibly, but because he looks exactly like one of their units, nothing comes of it. He's free to simply march right in through the back.

    Said back takes him through a garage with all of its previous vehicles removed, and instead filled with a small handful of those weird T-Dolls standing in charging stations, which don't react to his presence because hello fellow T-Dolls how do you do. Beyond that, there are stairs leading up to the roof with the giant dish, and stairs leading down to a basement with, who knows, probably basement things.

    The front door, when smashed down, leads into a tight corridor that unfortunately has an automatic gun emplacement at the end, which zaps Gaonoir bashing the entrance in several times before he can bulldoze the length of the hall and crush the flimsy thing too.

    The inside past there is a bunch of cluttered filing rooms, a war room with a paper map, armouries and supply closets that are totally unused, the amenities for human staff, and then a rather large interior space something like a police monitoring station, featuring both big switchboards of audio processing tech, and analogue tape recorders, with headsets for listening in through the giant comms dish. It appears to be switched on and receiving at the moment (obviously), and recording to a hard drive that is only remarkable for the fact it is being recorded to. There are cameras absolutely everywhere, and they blatantly monitor all the people inside, but the cameras don't have guns, so their influence is limited to mean camera glares.
Haguro      The impact/lack of impact of Haguro's revolver has the shipgirl pausing for only a moment of confusion before she starts moving again. She can't count on any physical cover lasting for long with those bizarrely non-reloading weapons those units, and finding a proper firing angle with Gaonoir and Seifer at melee range means sitting still to fire is probably the worst thing she could be doing.

     Thus, running sideways! Slipping the revolver back into her holster, she winces as their return fire leaves sizable dents in her armor and draws quite a bit of blood on the way in and out, but it's not enough to put her down just yet. It is still enough to have her freaking out on the level of overreacting, although that may easily be attributable to the noise rather than the pain itself.

     The pain is still awful, of course.

     "The spine... A-alright!" She starts to move in a zig-zagging pattern as she keeps running parallel to the T-Dolls, adjusting her aim and swapping out her explosive shells for the non-exploding type. With her targets confirmed, she joins in on the trading-shots contest, but with more accurate shots aimed for their center of mass in the hopes of punching straight through them.
Hemlock Once inside with a disguise, T-Doll!Hemlock walks much like the others. He didn't get much of a bead on how they walk, but he copies what he saw excellently. 'She' refuses to speak where she can be picked up, though, because Hemlock has no idea what this body's supposed to sound like. Travelling through the garage briskly and towards the stairs, Hemlock takes several seconds to consider which is likely more valuable, and then chooses to head down to the basement. This is because the deeper you get, the more likely there's treasure.

Adventurer logic!

The guns are sort of examined while travelling, Hemlock curious what they're like. The Changeling has no knowledge at all about guns, but trying to hold them properly is important, atleast, for appearances.
Seifer Almasy      Seifer gets the *shit* shot out of him.

     It's sort of to be expected. He takes an absolutely disgusting amount of hits, blaster fire raking across his body. His chest, his arms; the only thing that doesn't get hit is his head, and only because he actually takes the time to bring up his gunblade and try and...bounce?...the laser, not so much deflecting it as avoiding taking a direct shot. If these weren't energy weapons he would be coated in blood. Because these are energy weapons, they're doing the decency of cauterizing him. So that's nice. Less nursing needed.

     Wait. Might not be nice. Seifer's brain'll get back to that later, though. Right now he's in his element.

     He wades through the barrage with the stubbornness of a JRPG protagonist, that unique mixture of disdain for his own well-being and determined hot-blooded willpower practically rolling off him. He suffers the barrage for Haguro, too; Seifer has enough wherewithal to get in the way of direct shots on her while she's forced to stand still, jerking to the left or to the right in order to take direct body blows and ease her attacks. Erika gets a similar deal as Seifer moves into position, doubling up his own damage. He's really, really hurting here, and it's showing - his walking is slowing, his teeth are grit, and there's definitely some blood pooling around his nose.

     But then he gets into melee range.

     Up until this point Seifer has, essentially, just been a meat wall. He's been taking hits for Haguro, and for Erika, like a force of unrelenting outdated ideals about gender roles, basically *letting* the enemy hammer him into uselessness. The instant he steps inside their reach, though, his eyes go bright, and his blade becomes something...

     ...elegant.

     Even an amateur can see the kind of skill Seifer has is utterly wasted on these creatures. He's godlike. Maybe even beyond godlike. His blade whirls, flashes, flourishes, dances, vibrates with every trigger-pull and carves through metal like so much paper. He doesn't even need to go back for the spine - the spinal hit is just included in his whirling motion. It can't be called elegant, because elegant isn't the right word - it's forceful, but in a beautiful way, a bold and direct sort of beauty that hammers its way through opposition on raw skill and willpower. And he doesn't stop, and he doesn't slow down, and he doesn't pause; it's just one long combo of artisanal destruction. A masterpiece of violence. A galleria of dismemberment.

     He's not even out of breath when he finishes. Instead, he just looks disappointed as he wipes his nose with a piece of one of the dolls'...clothes.

     The door blasts Gaonoir, and Seifer looks irritated as he falls back to the side. He may think he's invincible BUT ALSO HE IS IN A LOT OF PAIN RIGHT NOW and he doesn't really WANT to get shot head-on by another laser. "Shit! Fighting automatics is so goddamn lame...rescuing princesses is supposed to have dragons, or dimwitted soldiers you can kick the shit out of, or...I dunno, at least fuckin', a tank or something?"

     He does, however, tank for Erika and Haguro while they make their way inside, forcing the laser to focus on him as he ferries them through. Once inside, he just casually shoots down the cameras. Fuck cameras.

     "This ain't lookin' much like a prison."
Gordon Freeman     Gordon is lit up, and he can conspicuously see the energy of his reactive armor dropping hard. Those particle impacts turn from light bruises to heavy impacts as the smart-material of the Hazardous Environment Suit starts running out of charge for its capacitors. Going for cover only gives him time to jam another glowing canister of terrible nuclear nightmare into the Tau cannon. Okay, need precision. Think, Gordon.

    There goes another chunk of cover. He has to move fast. Has to think fast. How do you deal with this? Gordon thinks, and thinks, and in the few moments he has where a fresh piece of cover gives him a moment's respite, he runs through physics in his brain. Something sparks, and he dives out just before the cover explodes. He's battered, of course, by more rounds, but he plants one knee in the ground and just TAKES it, flatly refusing to be laid out by the barrage. He gets a solid down-the-sights aim on his Tau cannon, charges it up with a conspicuously powerful shot... And then takes it. Straight for a support on one of the fuel tanks.

    If what he saw inside those half-car drones was like what he's seeing here, then that means one thing: They can't manage heat especially well. Nothing can manage heat especially well, to be fair, but these particularly. So he intends to dump one of those fuel tanks directly onto them, smash the fuel out, and set it alight with one final heavy bolt from the tau cannon. However, he thought this through. It's true that they probably don't have an /elemental fire weakness/; if heat disabled them, a hot day would take these guys out. No, Gordon's banking not on the fact that they're killed by heat, but rather, that they're likely to be stunned for a moment by it while their countermeasures come on. The plan, originally, was for him to use his own heavy resistance to heat to survive the ensuing flash-fry, but... well, maybe this can help Seifer well enough and not burn him alive; ideally he can get it /before/ Seifer dives in. Gordon doesn't really talk these plans out with anyone before doing them. That's a problem, Gordon.

    Either way, hopefully this will give him an opportunity to run right in and start... uh, bashing the young girls' faces in with a crowbar, trying to swiftly dive right in and smash their spines apart. It's a little underwhelming compared to Seifer's /godlike bladework/, but hey! A classic crowbar to the head has a charm all its own, especially if it came with a flashburst of heat and fire.

    Hopefully that'll be enough to drive them off, because he really needs to retreat inside and rest a moment, maybe recharge his suit if there's any power dispensers around here, and definitely, absolutely grab the hard drive -- and if he's gotten in here in time, start efficiently disconnecting anything that looks like it's communications-ish.
Gaonoir Obvious and unimaginative does not mean ineffective, as the corridor turned into bullet spewing gauntlet just behind the main door is a clear indicator of that. It doesn't matter if the Dolls are creative as long as it accomplishes their job, right?

The problem in the strategy lies more in the fact that Gaonoir simply doesn't give a shit about things like obstacle hazards or bottleneck tactics. Digimon tend to throw their proverbial weight around with little consideration for things like collaterial damage... And despite having better training and experience at the core of it Gaonoir isn't much different. He can't make much for elaborate maneuvers in such confinded spaces and after how quickly the drones readjusted he's actually reluctant to use any more shadow-stepping.

He does, however, have one advantage despite being melee oriented. That also includes the lengths of scarf emerging from the thick fluff around his neck and shoulders, that double as a second pair of limbs. A pair of limbs that end in knife-like claws for 'fringe'. Which means while Gaonoir does initially stagger a bit when first hit, he doesn't need to keep moving. So the autofire placement does do its job, peppering the Digimon with shots

... The bruiser beast just doesn't slow down much as the gunfire leaves more evident damage to his form in cracks of fragmentation. Just more obstacles between them and the real target, so the inflicted damage does little to stop Gaonoir from responding with more violence.

Instead of charging into the slaughter he digs in and whips both lengths of scarf in front of him with those unnaturally clawed ends, aiming to rip apart the turret and anything else that isn't fast enough to get out of their whipcrack path.

He may be melee oriented, but that doesn't mean he has to be -close-.

Mods damned that fragmentation is going to take extra long to restablizing though. These things aren't fucking around.

But neither is Siefer, and maybe it's a good thing that Erika is too busy watching him being elegant destruction to pay attention to all the other chaos.
Gideon Kaspar     Hemlock taking a tour of the interior base finds a few things. One is that the guns are pretty heavy and horribly unergonomic. They're awkward and uncomfortable to hold, albeit clearly balanced along the grip axis for one-handed firing, only possible due to a presumed lack of significant recoil. They have something like red dot sights, but with no way to really look through them, meaning it's probably a camera/lidar set. The back ends are really heavy and the stocks aren't seemingly meant to be braced, and there's a real good question as to how these things are recharged exactly. They're just all around odd. They'd easily pass as alien guns if they didn't use the overall design schema and layout of the bullpup carbine family.

    The basement appears to be largely useless. It has what are obviously bombproof shelters and storage rooms full of canned goods and backup equipment, but nobody human uses this base anymore, so it's all completely untouched. He does find a generator in the back, but it's only a gasoline backup, with the base itself actually routed to an electrical grid like the surrounding infrastructure is. He could certainly cut the power later if he really wanted to.

    The only noteworthy thing in the basement is noteworthy for how useless it is for different reasons. There is a tactical station that is fully powered, with a topographical map of the area, and a number of lit up blips and Xs indicating functional drones on standby, those that were destroyed and their precise locations, and in fact the tracks made by the party, indicating it was all picked up by tactical scanners and captured on the computer, but there are no operators here making use of it, begging the very real question of why it was left on in the first place. Someone put a sticky note on a corner of the holographic table wedged into the concrete bunker, which just has the phrase "99WISH" scribbled on it, probably being a password for something somewhere.

    The camera feed is also here, but it's just showing the firefights unfolding outside, and then the empty interior, until it becomes less empty. A large number of camera feeds are all spectating Seifer's swordsmanship from multiple angles, which could be a larger number of cameras at the front, or actually an important detail. The number of Xs grows until the frontline group ventures inside, and adds one additional X to the front hallway.
Gideon Kaspar     Because of the recurring detail that nothing still running here even uses something like petroleum fuel, the tank Gordon chooses is full to the brim, and spills out a tremendous, shin-deep slick through the slightly depressed cargo area. Given a little bit for the fumes to rise, firing once sets it up in a tremendous, shimmering blaze, suddenly putting the T-Dolls, in cover or not, in the middle of an ad-hoc slow burning fuel/air bomb. Not programmed by idiots, the T-Dolls abandon their posts and begin making for the edge of the burning hellzone, extreme stress placed on their components from heat tolerances they can technically 'handle', but really aren't supposed to under combat conditions. Damaged T-Dolls collapse entirely and sink into the burning fuel, where others are slowed down and more easily picked off by Haguro's precise shots. They're also easy to catch up to for Gordon just charging right through, and with their frames softened up considerably by the flames, they warp and snap easily under powerful smashes of his crowbar.

    Outside, those two can hear the sounds of more combat, but coming distant from the south. The constant whine and crack of particle weapons makes it sound like there are easily fifty or so Sangvis units that way. The chattering sounds of automatics, the misty crack of rifle fire, and the muffled thumps of explosions, place their opposing force at a significantly lesser number, but it is the sci-fi guns that cease firing first, after less than five minutes of intense shooting. G&K is swooping in at the designated time, and making a really fast pace, efficiently clearing through an adjacent blockade, until they can actually hear movement through the dense tree brake, though the party here has finished up in time to impress them, certainly.
Gideon Kaspar     Those inside the front building have their pick of the place, but only the monitoring station seems to stand out as important. Considering there is only one incoming feed, it doesn't take a genius to flick some switches and get the screens and speakers inside to play the audio/video feed as it streams in. When they do, the data lists a constantly fluctuating stream of tracing data in the corner, as well as the words SCARECROW-041

    The video feed involves a blonde haired, blue eyed girl in a black jacket and shorts with some kind of high tech black eyepiece obscuring one eye, visibly battered and burnt and with the outer layers of her clothing shredded and filled with holes, exposing light casual wear underneath. She has /a/ gun, but it's clearly completely useless, melted across the front end, not to mention that her ammo belt has only empty magazines left in it. It'd be easy enough to mistake her for an incredibly stressed and timid-looking wounded human, especially in comparison to the killbots they'd just fought past, if another woman's voice didn't immediately say: "Your cunning has slightly surpassed by expectations, VZ-61 of Griffin."

VZ-61: "All I did . . . was provide a possible location . . ."
???: "All you did . . . was stall for time."
???: "Poor thing. You're going through this interrogation because of your friends, but they've already left you for dead."
VZ-61: "That's not true! They're gonna help and come back for me! She promised!"
???: "Then let me remind you again, you pathetic piece of junk. They are the A-R Team, cold, highly efficient elites. You are nothing more than disposable goods to them."
VZ-61: "No . . . not true! I won't believe those lies! M-4 is my companion!"
???: "She isn't your companion, pitiful thing! Tell me where she is, and I'll be kind and let you rot on the roadside like the piece of junk that you are . . . just as your 'companions' have done."

    The video screen makes itself known as a first person feed, as an arm and upper torso comes into focus with the shift of a camera, dressed in black, white stenciled, and wearing complex mechanical gloves, backed with discs with a familiar green glow. Some type of silently hovering mini-drone orbits through the frame, basically just a floating, futuristic particle gun, hanging near the recording party. The Sangvis Ferri logo stenciled on the side makes the very convincing argument that the visual feed is coming from a T-Doll somewhere else in the field. One made by this same company. A second later, the feed cuts to black.

???: "Your emotions are merely fabricated lies. I'm asking you one last time. Tell me where she is."

    It cuts off from there.

    
Gideon Kaspar The feed has has run long enough, however. A position can be triangulated with skilled personnel examining it. That's probably the idea, since by the time they're done watching it, allied T-Dolls break through the treeline in time to aim guns at Gordon and Haguro, and then lower them a second later. There are about ten of them, though half of them are identical clones of the other half, most sporting light battle damage, but not quite so worse for wear due to no doubt not charging head on like big damn heroes. Most of them likely wouldn't be recognized as more than a colourful collection of girls wearing various snappy clothes blending tactical and professional and geared up with light exo-frames and advanced ballistic weapons, but the one apparently leading the pack is the T-Doll with short silver hair and amber eyes, wearing white, black, cream and gold, and with the big SMG, seen as Gideon's favourite^5^5^5 adjutant.

    From there, things are relatively straightforward. Krysanthe efficiently establishes a full defensive perimeter around the building, radios the all clear, and calls for helitransport. A couple more pairs of girls enter and track down the other Elites. A handover of the data takes place if anyone wants to get paid whatsoever. Oddly, no acquisition of the Sangvis tech happens at all. They seem to have no care whatsoever for scavenging T-Doll parts and weapons from the battlefield, even this overtly advanced.
Hemlock Hemlock commits the 99wish password to memory, before taking a look over the camera feed. An additional X in the front hallway? Curious, but Hemlock's not entirely sure what it means. 'She' pulls out a pen and journal and writes it down, before moving. Looks like their expedition is over, as she starts to head out to sneak over to where she left her clothes. If there's a confrontation with G&K in the process, Hemlock shifts their face back into that strange human male simply to show 'I am a weird shapeshifter, not a T-Doll'.

Once he's back in his normal shape, Hemlock meets up with G&K, providing them information about the computers as well as the '99WISH' likely password. Get paid, go home, definitely be willing to do more jobs because that went pretty damn well. Also reporting the weird extra red X, because Hemlock has no idea what that was about.

All in all, good mission. Reminds Hemlock of the old days. He misses the old days.
Gordon Freeman     Gordon gets inside, and leaves the hard drive active and linked long enough to get a full recording, at least. He also saves his communications disassembly -- maybe more violent than intended -- for after the show. For a man so quiet, his body language speaks a thousand words. A tensed posture, narrowed eyes, a furrowed brow the moment he sees the hand. Something inside him is instantly motivated, despite the injuries, when he sees this kind of psychological and physical violence. Teeth are wordlessly gritted at inhumane treatment. It's not like he has any reason to... care? At all? He doesn't know this person or know a lot about what's really happening in this world in general, but the whole display seems to set him on edge and make him seem more motivated to help out.

    Once it's done, THEN he disconnects the hard drive and starts disassembling the comms equipment. "Tactical objective acquired." The HEV suit says, with a short few tinny beeps. He'll hand off to the H&K backup, though he won't be having much of a post-battle conversation. Listening to the followup, surely, but it's not like he has much more energy after that. Time to get back to the Lambda Complex and go over data on the Tau Cannon testing, as well as the observed technology around here!