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Flamel Parsons     Today we're at Grand Dorado.

    Flamel's public concord laboratory -- apparently Flamel Parsons has a laboratory! -- is a twisty building that looks like it's about to fall over at any moment. From the outside, it starts at a house, emerges like a tree from a chunk of roof, branches into a series of odd clustered sub-chambers, and then tops itself with a big receiver. From the inside, one can find no shortage of more seventies spy fiction aesthetic in its design; chairs hover magnetically, large windows are dedicated to persisting displays, automatic doors open and close around round or oblong thresholds, elevators float, and hard corners are rare and artistic where they're used. The Psychonauts logo is common.

    Parsons guides any visitor who's taking this opportunity -- an event posted semi-publicly to get some extra manpower -- up to the laboratory, where he's intending to get Priscilla ready. A Priscilla-sized chair has been ordered, and a vast array of sensory equipment pointed at the head of something that looks sort of like a dentist's chair extends from the walls and ceiling on elaborate robotic arms. There's also a small rest for her Moonlight Greatsword, full of sensors as well, meant for her to hold onto it and rest it where it can be closely analyzed.

    "Alright!" He calls out brightly to Priscilla. "Now, first thing's first. Right before we dive in, I want you to specifically get that Resolution set for, you know, a date or something like that. Figure out your own timeline right before we dive in -- and that's what's going to really draw in the heat!" Parsons says, adjusting something on a floating console. "Now, if what I'm guessing is right, it should draw in local and collective psychohazards. You're pretty motivated! But you're not /infinitely/ motivated. So there's gotta be some limits to Moonlight's power. We're gonna dive in and see what gets through the scorching, which ought to give us a little insight on how Moonlight actually works too!" He pulls something out of a pocket. A tiny door, marked with an ominous eye, like the entrance to a spy agency. "When you're ready, put this on your head."

    "So! For the rest of you, this is pretty straightforward stuff, it should be pretty intuitive. Priscilla has a strong mind so I'm preeeetty sure you couldn't cause a real screw-up on accident! We're here to deal with Psychohazards, so, just look around and fight any monsters that seem out-of-place or damaging to things, is usually the right way to go. I'll come along and help out figuring these sorts of things out!"

    Besides Priscilla's chair, there's a swarm of other nice chairs sitting around a central table; Parsons sits at the head, where he pokes at a console. He doesn't intend to spend much time in this "waiting room" it seems, and intends to start the dive in fairly quickly.
Gilgamesh      This is one of the few places Gilgamesh doesn't look wildly out of place.

     The rippling aura of glory and divinity and Authority doesn't seem as out-of-place in Grand Dorado, even as it's damped by Priscilla's own, contrary, power. Clothes that, despite their simplicity, seem finer than the finest tuxedos don't stand that far apart from the elite of the city. Those beautiful, crimson red eyes don't seem as strange in a city of superhumanity, and that perfect, god-made form doesn't seem as out-there as it does when he simply walks through a city. In a lot of ways, it's nice; there's a certain seductive appeal to just being one of a throng, even a throng of superhumans, that Gilgamesh has never been able to experience. He is the King; he stands out everywhere he goes, and even here, the longer he spends in one place, the more people's necks start craning to look at him, and the more people start following him around with eager eyes and empty stares. He is the King, and he cannot escape that duty, nor put it down for long.

     But he can put it down for someone he likes.

     Just for a little while.

     The King of Heroes stops in front of the laboratory only long enough to confirm that this horrifying place is, indeed, the place he was directed to. He climbs up the stairs with a distant frown on his perfect face, trying his damnedest to ignore all the bizarre, janky nonsense, the off-center seventies-ness of the place. It's probably a good thing Gilgamesh missed the seventies. He'd've hated it.

     Though he probably could've pulled off bell bottoms.

     When Parsons guides him up to the lab, he doesn't say anything. He simply follows. In silence, he sits down near Priscilla, crosses his arms, and closes his eyes. He's not interested in waiting around, either, but he's here, and his proximity is a show of support, a favor returned, and a debt repaid.

     There's no words. Just his presence. He doesn't feel the need to announce himself. Parsons tells them what they need to know, and Gilgamesh understands.

     Kill the monsters.

     He's been doing that since he was five.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa was happy to answer Flamel's call for aid on this given how much he'd helped with the Kid and everything to with the whole affair there? How could she say no, right? She did consider the man a friend. Also Priscilla well? She'd been part of the whole affair to save the Kid's world too. So here was and not in her stealth gear nay the sleeveless long coat shirt pant and boats was what she was wearing today.

She took heed of what Flamel had to say.

"I would agree with that assessment of Lady Priscilla's mind and soul."

Likely a lot stronger than her own when all things came to it. She took a deep breath and seemed to be ready.

"All right I'm ready to go."

She didn't quite expect Gil to be here and she wonders how that would make things pan out, in the end? There may be monsters to slay and having the first monster slayer of note along isn't a bad thing at all.
Staren     Staren's no styranger to Grand Dorado, of course, although his most frequent visits were in the immediate aftermath of the League-Concord merger -- nowadays he mostly comes by to put people ready for revival in tanks and pull revived people out of tanks.

    Flamel's laboratory leaves absolutely no doubt that Staren's at the right place. He wonders if that branching structure is really an efficient use of space, but... it's certainly got a style to it.

    He's in his armor to better fight psychohazards. Priscilla is a longtime comrade, and of course he's up for helping her. He's surprised to see Gilgamesh, and more surprised to see Kotone, but offers the latter a nod in greeting.
Yuuki Kuran The arrangement of things is not unlike an extremely rich dentist's office. Chairs for sitting, chairs for resting, and instruments. But crossed, like a seamless reel-clip, with Q's office from a (modern) James Bond film.

It's actually really cool, and being 'cool' is also a major part of being a chic superspy. It all lines up, even if the whole dentist motif gets Yuuki Kuran a little offput.

For some reason, she doesn't really like the idea of someone with a drill in her mouth, no reason, completely mundane.

"Flamel, this place really is tremendous." Yuuki breathes, circling for one of the chairs around Gilgamesh's grand entrance. "Flamel, there's only one question I have. I spent a little time in Lordran, and there was so many different monsters. Is there an easy way to tell whether a monster... belongs in the mindscape or not? Sometimes monsters..."

She gives a little eyeflutter, searching for the words as her eyes whisk around the room. "... belong?"
Zero Kiryu Zero looks distantly uncomfortable. He trails after Yuuki as he always does, passing by her to an adjacent chair. He isn't the sort of person who is into invading the minds of others, for a lot of reasons. The fact that this isn't really an 'invasion' makes it... nominally acceptable, but still uncomfortable. The other thing is that he's not really certain Priscilla wants him in her head-- they are long-time acquaintances, but Yuuki is more Priscilla's friend than he has ever been, as far as he knows.

He settles down in the chair, and looks over towards Yuuki. Then over towards Flamel.

"This is my guess," he says, "but I think that such a monster would not appear to be a monster."

"It would just be 'you'."

He is relying on Flamel to rebut or confirm this.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel snaps his fingers and points directly at Yuuki. "That's a good question!" He says, smiling brightly. "And I can't give you an easy answer, but I can give you one that makes sense. Your friend there has it just about right! Think about it like..." He gestures at his own midsection. "There's bacteria in your gut. Now, if you want to get rid of bad bacteria, how do you tell the difference between the bacteria in your gut that help you digest food, and the bacteria in a cut on your arm that turn your limbs into necrotic stumps?"

    He puts a finger up eagerly. "Immune response! You look for the inflammation, the fever, things like that. Anything -- monster or otherwise -- that looks like it's trying its hardest to break a stable equilibrium or damage things, and where it looks like the mind itself is fighting back, that's usually a psychohazard. Just remember that psychohazard is sort of like 'pathogen'; the term isn't a classification derived from its nature, it's anthropocentric. It just means bad psychic constructs, and sometimes bad has varied meanings depending on context. I trust you to go with your gut. That's where the gut microbes are!"

    "In case you're wondering, yes, this does mean you can get the mind equivalent of immune system diseases, and no, I'm not going to explain that just right now." He says, finishing up something he's typing on the console.
Priscilla     As Flamel seems to want the unfiltered experience, so prepared as to set up a full-sized chair for Prisciall to seat herself without diminishing anything (admittedly, easier to obtain in Grand Dorado than most places), so too is the sword Moonlight slightly overwhelming in its presence.

    Far too large to be meant to be used by a human wielder, the luminous surface of the blade, lying angled in its designated rest, seems almost liquid in the glow washing from its organically convoluted, swirling etching. A faint hum is audible near it, like the resonant ringing of a stimulated glass, at the distance where its aura of raw magic is equally palpable as an electric tingle on the skin. It seems almost sort of dangerous to have that lying around, effusing fireflies of blue energy, but Priscilla has a good grip of the golden hilt.

    Though the seating arrangements could be said to be comfortable, the situation as a whole isn't quite. Even if she knows that she is volunteering to aid Flamel with an analysis, Priscilla still can't quite shake the association of this business with crazies who need psychosurgery, leading to the occasional, discomforted shuffle of someone with 20/20 vision sitting through an eye exam.

    "Ah. Dates. That which oft slips the mind of those who live long enough to to witness too many pass." she exasperates flatly. Taking the tiny door that she's still not used to from Flamel, Priscilla takes almost a full two minutes to settle on something for an early kind of new years resolution she has yet to share with anyone, being that kind of person. "I am perhaps, likewise, curious what sort of monsters thou seeketh in such an odd choice of places. Curious, but little concerned."

    Exhaling slowly and deeply, Priscilla sits back and attaches the little door object with the expression that she half-expects it to just poke her forehead and then fall onto the floor. "I certainly hope thou art ready."
Flamel Parsons     The door "slots in", is if there were a waiting doorframe right there. Priscilla can feel it sit securely on her skull, as if it had simply found a hole that was there before. As her resolution is formed, the psychic energy of motivation is detected by the instruments surrounding her, which begin to pulse readings out to screens, showing wavy green lines or oscillating blue bars in artistic increasing agitation. "Alright..." He mutters, then happily smiles. "Looks like we have a fully formed resolution decided! Which means more mind-hostile psychohazards that want to feed on it will be converging momentarily -- things like doubts, limiting traumas, broader fears, things like that. I'll leave the analysis equipment out here running on auto. Everyone hop in with me! We gotta see what makes through and what gets zapped by Moonlight." He removes his sunglasses, exposing closed eyes. "Everyone, prepare your minds."

    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r0FdnDZSRBZPLVffa5Grye3bPqDMf94_/view

    His eyes open, revealing shining white. Each person present will feel a soft tug on an axis they've rarely felt, /away/ from their bodies. The door on Priscilla's forehead opens, full of shimmering white light. Unless they resist the tug, they'll find their ghostly, astral spirits pulled away from their meat, swirling through the air with Parsons', drawn in towards the Psychoportal, and diving into the light-filled threshold.

    The door shuts abruptly with a click the moment the last one is done. Wherever they are inside, those joining Parsons on this astral journey will find they can sort of distractedly feel their real-life bodies, but it's hard to concentrate on them. They're going to be in a state of trance outside, and a state of adventure within!
Priscilla     It is cold. It is very cold. The air is so perfectly still that it somehow feels a violation to disturb it, as with walking through pristine snow. Just one breath is like a heavy fog settling into the lungs, more ice than air. The cold is such that there is no urge to shiver, or sting of freezing skin, but as if one has reached the point of numbness some time ago, and is only acknowledged as the absence of warmth rather than a true physical sensation.

    It is also dark, though it shouldn't be. Looking up, the heavens say it is the middle of the day, with the sun frozen at its zenith, but the sky is in such dim twilight that a blanket of stars is stretched across it all the same, faintly visible behind the faded, off-coloured glow of 'day' --an eerie, washed out cyan-green that casts everything into vague and surreal tones. It slowly grows dimmer as one looks further away, until it fades completely only halfway to the horizon, and gives way to deep night in the surrounding distance. Thin arcs of leaden black clouds encircle whatever queer celestial body is posing as a sun, but hang completely motionless like an old photograph, interspersed with ribbons of an otherworldly blue aurora.

    They begin standing on a stone platform, precisely chiseled out of something that has an almost ghostly fluorescence under the light, and covered in a thin, crisp layer of frost. They're at the peak of a mountain, or rather, a whole range of them, dark and absurdly steep, extending far to the east and west, only to curve back together miles away, forming a perfect circle. Whatever lands the frozen stones wall out are completely hidden in blackness, if they exist at all, as looking back from their mountaintop platform reveals only a shroud of impenetrable dark.
Priscilla     Ahead is something somehow familiar enough to provoke deja vu, but different in all the ways that matter --the visual parallel of lurching on one less stair in the dark, everywhere the eye turns. Winding steps twice too tall weave down the side of the black granite slope and join into a colossal network of roads that don't even come close to touching the ground, invisible beneath the collective shadows of what is built level with the tallest peaks. Causeways of every breadth and gradient wind and weave together in great branches and concentric webs from myriad circular plazas, built across the backs of buildings of already dizzying height, only to serve as ground roads between architecture that only reaches even higher.

    Even atop the mountains, one is left to descend the step and walk between baroque monoliths of finely worked stone, intricate silver and platinum and gold effusing bleached emerald in the half-light, gargantuan steeples and buttresses faced with chiseled designs both epic and grotesque, and dizzying splays of light seemingly emanating from impossibly huge cathedral windows of frosted, tinted glass. Roads lay within roads and stairs within stairs, cutting up and down and across a cathedral-citadel that scrapes the heavens, some walkable by mere humans, others meant to be tread by unknown giants of suitably massive stride.

    Every traversable surface is shallowly covered in patterns of pure white snow, building into small drifts near ornate railings and the corners of crazily winding staircases, and lying thick and heavy atop vaulted archways and flying buttresses, yet there is no real snowfall to be seen. The air softly glitters with an ethereal haze of diamond dust, but the snow itself is a fixture as rooted and permanent as grass or stones. Walking through it, one leaves no footprints.

    The structure of the city atop the mountains is utterly dizzying, almost Escher-like in the way its intricacy casually defies the eye to closely follow it, but it all rises as it goes inwards, to the most titanic structure of all; a church, palace, and fortress the breadth of a small city in of itself constitutes the highest peak, even within a ring of impossibly tall and jagged mountains. The truest points to navigate by are myriad spaces dedicated to enormous statues of grandiose figures yet unknown, but even then, tricks of perspective are so commonplace, and yet made physical, that there is almost a Wonderland method to traversing it; there are places that are crisp and detailed and firm in their dimensions, where one can move close to normally, and other places that seem somehow lacking slightly in definition, smudged and out of proportion, such that one struggles up steps and enters through looming doors as if they were suddenly looking out from the eyes of a small child.
Priscilla     The only points of reference visible from anywhere, aside from the central citadel itself, are four colossal beacons spaced across the webway of stairs over the inner mountainsides, connecting many such platforms as the start. Like overmassive torches, gold braziers contain entire bonfires within them, letting four pallid golden flames tower high enough to be seen even from across the mountains, if only distantly, undeniable in their existence, yet somehow not quite part of the society they surround.

    And it is a society. It is populated, after all. Though they are practically snowflakes lost adrift through the sheer scale of the city, thousands of figures can be seen walking its streets, even with an uncanny dearth of sound. Humans of all kinds move from place to place for unknowable reasons, stopping to converse with one another over unknowable topics, giving no hint as to what their business or daily life is supposed to be. The look of them is all over the place, visually evoking every region and time period of archaic western civilization, and then even further into genuine antiquity, as if set adrift from legion dead cultures and eventually congregating here.

    At least one in three of them isn't there. That is to say, walking amongst them, rubbing shoulders with the crowds and upholding halves of discussions, are figures that do not gain any visual identity when examined. They are shadows of people, each individually unique, but a hazy black hole in the world around them, never being acknowledged as such by anyone around, yet impossible not to find anywhere one looks.

    Apart from them, the only company to be found are scattered murders of crows that find ample perches across the grandiose ancient cityscape, but seem to stand exclusively where neglected stone has started to crumble and metal started to corrode, as if they have a perfect sense for where tiny pieces of the city have eroded, or perhaps it is their very presence that makes it start to crumble as if left an age in the wind. Though the clusters of ominous black birds pay close and unsettling eye to everything, they never, ever caw.

    That, and the vaguest, most delicately and insubstantially 'there' outline that lies somewhere atop the citadel palace, perilously large even in scale with the impossible feat of architecture is claims as its rest.
Staren     It's cold. Staren initially checks his armor's environmental regulation systems in a panic, but... it seems to be kind of like in a dream, how you can breathe underwater anyway, for instance. It doesn't seem to be hurting him. The strange sky is surreal -- he can't recall being anywhere in the Multiverse where the sun worked like that. He crouches to run a gauntleted finger over the glowing stone. As he stands...

    ...he turns around to see an Escher painting. Wait, weren't these causeways part of Lumiere? He approaches the edge of the spawn platform, then hesitates. He checks that his laser rifle is ready and slings it over his shoulder. Can't be too careful. And then he offers tablets to the rest of the party, bent into the shape of bracers, or that can be unbent into phone shape and pocketed, mainly as mutual tracking devices. This looks like geometry you could get lost in.

    Staren takes flight to skip among the stairways and causeways and look around and avoid disturbing the snow. He doesn't notice right away that they don't leave footprints. And then there's people as Staren moves away from the mountains. That seems normal enough, but the shadow-people, less so. Staren watches them for a moment to see if they're doing anything monstrous, but... they don't seem to be.

    So he flies over to the closest one. "Hey there. Who are you?"
Gilgamesh      This is novel.

     Not a lot of things *are* novel to the King of Heroes, so he always takes special note of things that are. This happens to be one of them. He's meditated before, been out-of-body before, but never in a manner like this. It's always been him controlling it, guide or otherwise. Having something else actively separate him from it is intriguin, so he goes with it. More specifically...

     More specifically, as he steps into the frigid cold, Gilgamesh is completely aware of his own body outside, and it in fact stands up and produces a drink from the Gate of Babylon and starts having a drink, then produces the world's prototype yo-yo and starts doing yo-yo tricks to kill time. This is probably sort of unnerving to people who don't recognize what it means to be a complete being, something so firmly aware of your own sense of /self/, so firmly aware of every cell in your body, that even if *you* aren't in your body, your body is still you, and will still act as you would in this situation.

     So Flamel's lab cameras get to see Gilgamesh playing with a yoyo and drinking ambrosian liquor as the actual Gilgamesh steps forward into a frozen hell.

     Well, perhaps not hell. A frozen stillness, something beautiful, something exquisite. The King of Heroes, dressed in his long coat and his warm sweater, still snaps his fingers, as much to test his connection to the Gate of Babylon as to draw a warm-looking cloak out from behind it. The cloak settles around his shoulders and there's a look of displeasure on his face. He can immediately tell that it is not the real thing. There are subtle hints, subtle truths, that let him know immediately - the color is too bright, the sort of color a thing might have in his mind rather than in reality, brighter and more full than he recalls. It's also warmer than it was in reality; that's fascinating. It doesn't do much to protect against the chill, but it's warmer than it ought to be, and it's a sufficient test.

     The most fascinating part of it is probably that Gilgamesh is looking so serious as they walk. Gilgamesh rarely looks this serious about anything. Gilgamesh rarely *acts* this serious about anything. No loud declarations of his presence, no fire, no brimstone, no holy glory other than his own shining aura struggling against the darkness (not literally; Gilgamesh does not produce light). As they walk, he's looking. He's looking at the city, and he's taking it in, and he's remembering. He's thinking of distant Babylon, of a time long ago. He's thinking of something long lost, something beautiful, frozen in ice. The shadows of people fill him with an endless, distant ache, and the crows the same. He knows this sort of thing. He knows how this feels.

     The King of Heroes looks up at the outline above. That's probably where they ought to go. If he knows anything about adventure...
Zero Kiryu It is a strange thing, and requires admitting to malleability that Zero Kiryu is used to rejecting categorically. The cold is the first thing that strikes him, and the second is the darkness. The darkness does not bother him, though it bothers him that this is so. But the first thing that strikes him is the sheer melancholy of the environment, if it could be called that. It is at once grandiose while feeling -- to him at least -- too empty, and as he surveys the surface beneath him he cannot help but note that no mark is made here by somebody who treads through.

Is that a good thing? Is it a bad thing?

He doesn't have Staren's curiosity, or Gilgamesh's respectful approval. Certainly, he does not know Priscilla the way he really should to be here. But the only thing that comes to mind is how terribly sad it seems. It is, he reflects, the sort of thing that he would expect out of the mind of a drastically deteriorated Level E-- or a Pureblood who had simply lived too long.

If he had to guess what Shizuka Hio's mind would look like, it would not be so distant from this. But he is certain that it would be a much, much smaller world.

He falls in alongside Yuuki -- probably a short distance from Gilgamesh -- and draws his coat shut as he walks the path towards the Citadel.

Though he says nothing, Zero looks more than a little uncomfortable.
Flamel Parsons     "Phwuhhhh... Gives me chills like Maslow Peak. I swear, I never get used to minds like this." Parsons says. He's dressed appropriately for the mind, wearing a furred medieval cloak, looking like a mysterious king's ranger. He takes a long, sober moment to regard the horizon, the sun, the strange shadowed border of the mind. "Alright," He says, after a chilly breath. "We've got work to do. Let's try to get there when the psychohazards do. If it's anywhere, it'll be nearer the centers of activity, since it's a fresh mass of motivation. Try to keep an eye on the skies. I'd like to know what the moon does, around here."

    He accepts a tracker from Staren, linking it up with his telepathy to give a consistent data-feed. His body begins to float as he activates levitation. He begins the steady effort to traverse the stairs. "If a Resolution's been made, there's a few key places you can usually find it. Places where important decisions are made, places of important power, or places of deep conflict. I think... the best bet we've got is that citadel, yeah."

    He keeps an eye on the skies. He keeps his pace up as much as any pace can be kept up in times like this. He moves on as much towards the tremendous castle as he can determine directions around here. His face isn't stern, but placid, accepting the cold. He expected something like this, and he's already got a nagging feeling in his mind. He's a man full of hope, and optimism, and openness, and warmth. He was built by the Psychonauts to strike and kill the heart of the Cold War. So much chilliness in a mindset is... sort of like a bull seeing red. He's hoping the castle will offer a little more warmth, alongside a few more insights.

    He taps his head, as if turning something on. He's activating his psychic senses. A Resolution is a beacon of high-density psychological motivation. And if it's going to draw in psychohazards, it should give Parsons a signal he can lock onto too, and follow.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone soon finds herself away from her body she can still feel it it's a bit strange but she does not fight it at all. For her case though it's less her meat and more her metal. This does remind her a little of the week she spent as an infomorph helping the Argonauts while her body underwent repairs and some upgrades. Not quite but it was in a way like it. It does not take long for her to get her bearings. First up? Things are cold, quite cold and moving almost feel like she's doing harm to it.

She's cautious in her movement as she starts to get a better feel for the mindscape of Priscilla. It starts to seem there is a city here. Which seems to be right out of a painting when she thought about it for a moment. Well, this is the realm of the mind the laws of physics don't really apply here now do the?

She'll move to follow the group and use her mobility systems to keep up if it comes to it, she knows better than to run off alone in someone's mind like this let alone Priscilla's while she moves she takes the mindscape in looking for patterns or anything she might know. She notices Gil is silent, that isn't lost her, and Staren's going ahead trying to ask questions of one of the parts of Priscilla's mind wandering about here. At least she thinks it's a part of Priscilla.
Yuuki Kuran On the outside, Yuuki settles into a seat and watches with some interest as Flamel takes off his sunglasses to reveal...

That his eyes are closed? Huh! How curious, it wasn't especially dark inside, so her first impression had been that Flamel was like her - someone who could see in the dark.

When the doorway to the mindscape opens, and Flamel's eyes reveal that he sees in the light instead, Yuuki mouths a quiet 'oh', before being DRAWN INTO...

The Chill Space.

Snow, and crows, and shadowy 'lesser' peoples, a winter wonderland of emptiness and silent solitude. Cold, cold cold.

Astral Yuuki spends a long series of moments, immediately upon entry, prodding at the snow, smiling to herself as her finger brushes the everpresent white powder. "This really is Priscilla's mind." She muses, standing up to wander down the path and bother the crows by staring at them and their affinity for crumbling things. "In here, even the snow doesn't leave sign of passage. But I imagined the crows being white, for some reason."
Priscilla     Staren takes to the air. He climbs above the walkways, above the above the towers, above the steeples, until the ground is foggy and pale, half faded out of existence by a league of frosted air, but he goes no higher than the palace. No matter how he might maneuver, he cannot ascend above it. Whatever way this place works, it does not permit it. Psychically, Staren is not strong enough to achieve the feat of looking down on the grandest structure at the center of all of this. It is not allowed.

    Still, there is an uncanny resemblance to the Anor Londo he might remember from when it lay empty and bare. So much of it is styled in almost its exact likeness, made eerie and strange and unfamiliar under the ghastly glow of the un-sun and the inconsistent mix of incompatible sizes and distances that distort it. There had been no crows in Anor Londo though. No snow in the kingdom of the sun. Even in the dying days of the Age of Fire, it had basked in warmth and golden glow that would drive away any ice. No such shades had ever walked its streets like this.

    Structurally, it is the oldest and most familiar place Priscilla knows, but overwhelmed by so strong of an imprint, so deep of an ages long stain, that it resembles something she may be ultimately more familiar with. It's as if it can't decide which it is. Which is more important. Which is more 'her'.

    Down below, others walk the streets.

    To walk the streets is to walk with the loudest sounds being the subtle crackling of ice underfoot and the uncomfortably audible thumping of one's heart. Even moving at a perfectly normal pace, pumping at an ordinary rate, the subtle, repetitive sound rings just slightly in the ears, at the barest edge of audible perception. To walk the streets is to be watched by scores of crows, silently following each movement with eyes too dark to see in their faces. There is the sense that they might somehow be following, as if they take flight when one isn't looking, and find a new, worn and crumbled patch of otherwise pristine arch or gable wherever they go. To walk the streets is to be lost amidst structures seemingly built by hands and tools, yet so vast and old that one is as a child wandering alone through an abandoned forest --an ant amongst myriad other ants, slowly streaming to and fro, and yet no number of them capable of making this place feel inhabited. Anyone here is perpetually a visitor. Whoever built it, whoever lived here, is gone and never coming back, and it will always be that way.

    In just that way, the snow is inviolate. It is such a part of the landscape that it may as well be carved from the same stone, if not something even more imperishable. It shifts and crunches as it should with each boot press, coming away in a fine powder when prodded and scraped, but it never disperses, never lessens. Tiny crystals of frost spring from cold railings and carved facades like miniscule formations of quartz grown for ages in some long forgotten underground pool. Pressing a hand to them, even holding a flame to them, doesn't do a thing.

    Moving towards the citadel, looming as a mountain amidst mountains in the distance, entails joining the crowds, insignificant and small as they are when compared to everything around them. The people are not completely imagined. Passing extremely close to them, one can pick up snatches of conversation, or hear their footsteps, but even Zero has to be a stone's throw away to just barely hear any of it, as if each person were isolated in their own bubble of distance that isn't there. The languages are different. There are predominant strains, but an alarming amount of it doesn't translate to anything. They are words so old that only Priscilla remembers them, after the last speaker vanished off the face of the earth.
existence than the human beings
Priscilla     Only a few of them look at the pedestrians as they pass, many more at Flamel and at Gilgamesh than the others, but they offer on silent nods or faint smiles, when they offer anything at all. The crows are far more aware of their existence than the human beings are, watching, analyzing, almost judging. Larger numbers of them are found where larger patches of architecture have decayed a thousand years in one localized area around their feet and feathers; like plaque settled on teeth, they are a small, gradual decay, driven away daily, only to return again.

    Amidst those people, the walking shadows stride with unnervingly close presence. They act indistinguishably from those with flesh and blood, even joining in their groups, mingling amongst them. Where one stops to listen to a conversation between a shade and a person, the former only gesticulates without making sound, leading to only half of it being spoken, as the human responds to words that were never there. Despite it all though, they aren't vague or indistinct in the slightest. Though they are nothing but darkness pressed into the shape of a person, they have so much sharpness -so much reality- that they stand apart in high definition against much of the landscape. Like snowflakes, they are unique. Without any visual information, one can tell man apart from woman, old apart from young, and even the sense of face apart from face, though none of them have one. They seem simultaneously as if they shouldn't be here, and yet they perfectly belong.

    When Staren gets close enough to speak to one, he sees that it isn't exactly a shadow. The being stops before him shortly, and in the silhouette of a man, Staren can see movement. Vibration. A static and buzzing within their outline. He is looking at a blizzard of black snow. A column of pitch dark embers. A blossom of ink in water. A swarm of hallucinated flies. Asking it a question, he only gets the sense he was given an answer, without ever hearing it, and it is suddenly, deeply, intensely uncomfortable to be there. He was given a name, but he doesn't remember it. The figure keeps walking, and as it apathetically approaches him, the gut-dropping sensation of perilous freefall only intensifies, urging him harder and harder to get out of the way as quickly as possible --to not /touch /him// at all costs.

    For the others, even walking to the citadel is a task in of itself. The true size of this place held within Priscilla's head is overwhelming, only seeming to grow wider and loom taller and cast its shadows deeper and longer as they proceed. It also somehow seems as if it's getting colder. Appropriate winter wear helps, for whatever reason, even if only acknowledging a theme, but it doesn't forestall it forever. There is a certain way the numbness grows, footsteps slow, muscles grow sluggish and uncooperative. It is almost imperceptible, like boiling a frog degree by degree, dangerous in its deceptive climb. It is all too easy to completely fail to notice, until someone bleeds.

    From the nose, probably. Most likely Gilgamesh first, despite being the one here of immaculately perfect health. It won't be just him though. Sooner or later, trickles of blood, superficial as they are, drip from others. From elsewhere. Under the nails. From somewhere on the brow. The back of the neck. Small, irksome places that are either frequently visible or highly sensitive to a warm drip. If examined, there are no wounds. No invisible assailants. Tiny quantities of blood simply appear. The air is making them bleed.
Gilgamesh      It is indeed Gilgamesh who bleeds first.

     He smiles at the phantasms, not because he cares about their feelings, but because he cares about the feelings of the one they represent. Which is an odd thing, admittedly; Gilgamesh has rarely cared about anybody's feelings. He has no friends. He has no equals. But occasionally, there are people he actually gives a shit about. So he's willing to put in the tiniest sliver of effort for them.

     And as he's climbing, he starts bleeding. He immediately notices. Of course he notices; he's a perfect entity at one with his own body and aware of his own mind. Nothing about his own existence is beyond his notice. So once he realizes it, he frowns and holds up a hand.

     Gilgamesh snaps his fingers.

     This is the first time any of the group has seen his golden armor. This is the first time he's pulled it out at all in the modern age. He's gone radiant, splendorous, a gleaming god-thing in bright and shining gold, as if a sun descending to stave off danger. Something being able to do that to him, being able to do /something like that/ to him, is something that cannot possibly escape his notice, and something he is not willing to leave to chance.

     The armor shines. It literally shines, even in this place, a thing of absolute glory. It's like he's pulling in his own ego and wrapping it around himself, shining, shimmering, splendid, a red cloth roiling behind him, gold boots and gold chestplate catching every little bit of light and sparkling around them. It's warmer than his cloak and modern clothes by far, and moreover, it's a sign that Gilgamesh Might Actually Be Kinda Taking This A Little Seriously.

     Just a little, though.

     Because there's now a wild smile on his face as the blood rolls down his nose, joining with perfect lips like flawless, gorgeous makeup. The mountain itself is challenging them. Priscilla herself is challenging them.

     How can he do anything but respond and show her what the King is?
Staren     As soon as Staren is close enough to 'see' the shadow better, to see that staticy outline, he's given pause and almost just backs away there and then. The 'Hey there. Who are you?' comes out nervous, rather than friendly and curious, and when it approaches him he reflexively flies backwards, possibly bumping into other people, then flies to another causeway to recover for a moment, the sound of his breathing heavy inside his helmet.

    He makes his way towards the citadel.

    And then he begins to bleed. He fels a trickle on the back of his neck, takes it for sweat. He can't actually SEE any blood, what with armor all over him, but at a point he notices his boots are starting to fill with liquid, and then he realizes. "Oh no. The Lifehunt!" He's suffered it multiple times, and one of them did result in him horribly injured with his armor full of blood. It kind of made a big mess in Priscilla's throneroom when the healers opened his armor up to work on him.

    He makes his way forward, more worried now, and double checking his vital signs to see if the blood is actually accompanied by any signs of blood /loss/.

    Flamel will pull them out if the Lifehunt hurts them too much, right?
Zero Kiryu Zero grows ever more uncomfortable with being here by the second. It is not the atmosphere, or the strange things within it. It is not the watchful crows, or the difficulty of travel. It is not even the blood that begins to materialize on the surface of his skin that troubles him. It is no wonder that a place like Priscilla's mind would be so hazardous and difficult to navigate-- if it wasn't, he would be surprised. It is the passive resistance that bothers him, and the increasing feeling that he simply shouldn't be here.

That, whatever else passed in the world without, this was done all too reluctantly.

The idea of tampering with the mind of a reluctant person sits poorly with him.

More than anything though, nothing they are encountering is out of place. Zero can remember forays into Priscilla's world, and when things were bad things were really bad. The effects of her Lifehunt upon her mental landscape are natural, but they're not out of place. They're not grotesque, or stand-out on the backdrop. 'Something bad' would not be middle-of-the-road bad. It would be glaringly, hideously bad.

"I don't see or feel anything out of place." He says, "is it possible that there's nothing to find?"

There is only the one logical place to go, as far as the hunter can see. Everyone is already going there. But the process of getting there is wearying-- unnaturally so. An effect of the Life Hunt, he's sure. This gives him momentary pause. One of the rules of any strenuous activity is to ascertain one's limits.

Do they have the stamina to reach that place and return if need be?

Zero thinks so, even without the momentary glance he gives to his companions. But it's worth asking.
Flamel Parsons     "Oh, /definitely/! I don't think Priscilla is usually chronically dealing with psychohazards, especially with regular exposure to that Moonlight sword." Parsons says to Zero. He's busy... Sort of tuning his own temple. His pair of fingers pressed to it is sort of like he's twisting the dial on a radio. One can see a light flicker in his eyes as he tries to "tune in" to his chosen "station". It's a little unnerving with the bleeding going on; Parsons doesn't bleed blood, but the raw psychic energy he's leaking is still /bad/ to see. He's having to fight his natural impulse to go invisible when he suffers damage, because, well, that wouldn't help right now.

    "But, if she has a Resolution on the mind, I think it'll draw anything in here towards that. Or anything from the Collective Unconscious, out of town! It's like a big, meaty buffet for them! See, when most people decide to do something, their mind whips up a chunk of motivation to fuel it, and then ambient psychohazards start to feed on it. Sometimes they eat too much and you can't fulfill your decision, sometimes they don't eat enough and you get to have it. We need to find where Priscilla's Resolution is, because that'll be where anything bad is."

    "I think I can keep going a fair bit though. I'm not projecting us too deep here, and there shouldn't be too high-class a psychohazard in here since Priscilla's usually quite sane. Let's keep heading to the castle." pulls out telekinesis in the shape of a tissue, manipulating his own blood about as effectively as a tissue might in trying to clear out some of that raw psychic energy in the spots where he's bleeding. The shining white light is eerily wet in the way it moves.
Kotone Yamakawa The party is being watched by a whole lot of Crows, she takes note of this and will not try to provoke them as she moves. They keep going and there certainly is a lot of snow here. She feels very tiny right now but she can only press forward or leave so she chooses to press on while paying close attention to anything she sees of notes here. She now hears voices she hears talking languages that she can't understand and are so faint she can not hears them clearly at that even with all her argumentations.

Some of the beings here will rarely give her a silent nod or a faint smile but that's it she will keep going. Kotone feels a numb of the cold she'd never thought she'd feel again and tries to pull her coat closer as best she can and keeps moving. She bleeds, blood from a few places the rest? Of what she's bleeding? Is the sickly smelling fluid that acts as blood for her cybernetics the loss of both is quite dangerous and worrisome for her, she has far less blood then anyone else here does.

"I'm bleeding, wait I'm bleeding?!"

There's s alight spike of panic but she bolts down on it she looks ahead and frowns.

"We should keep moving..."
Priscilla     As far as Flamel looks to the sky, despite the stars being visible, it seems only due to the inherent insubstantiality of the sun. The moon is nowhere to be seen in the sky. In fact, the sun sitting frozen and stagnant at its zenith seems almost a rejection --a firm denial that the moon should ever be allowed to appear, intent locking it out somewhere in the pitch black void that lays outside the mountains. The polar aurora that runs in translucent blue ribbons through the eerie green of the sun is a more persistent celestial fixture. Examining its direction, it seems to flow together from many different directions, lacing across one another as if weaving a net or cage over the sky, rather than being blown by a heavenly wind.

    The soft, luminous, almost liquid hue is certainly familiar, and seems to be responsible for many twinkling cyan lights amidst the normally pale and colourless stars, appearing and disappearing in the corner of the eye. There is a sense that they aren't quite a part of this place the same way everything else is; the aurora ribbons arrive as a subtle and unobtrusive visitor, as transient as the real thing, no doubt soon to be gone by the end of the night. They don't quite belong, but they fit in. They are permitted to exist everywhere but where the light of the four bright torches atop the mountains occludes them, unable to touch that white-gold brilliance.

    The crows never take flight though. Their wings are never seen beating. They're always there -always around- but somehow never do anything as mundane as flying. They're as if they were painted in. A subtle fixture that always appears in an artist's work, like a hidden signature.

    As they soldier on however, where he remains attentive and upwards-looking, trying to tune in on his quarry, he finds that the silhouette dominating the grandest spires of the citadel-palace darkening and fading in and out, like the growing and lessening clarity of a radio dial glossing back and forth across an especially faint and difficult to acquire station. Getting closer helps. The closer he is, the easier it is to pick up on. That applies to others as well, to an extent, even without his psychic prowess.

    As far as he can tell from his distance, to the best of his ability to identify, perched atop the citadel, surveying the city all around, is some indistinct, shadowy beast, certainly no crow. It has wings, but the mass of them suggests four or more, and huge, swept protrusions, probably horns, extend from where its head likely is.
Priscilla     When Gilgamesh dons his armour, it does indeed keep the cold at bay. At least for a while. He can start to experience some feeling returning to his fingers and toes, and the uncomfortable prickle of circulation on the surface of his skin. Where his radiance directly shines, in a very small area around him, the stones are all the hues of sunlit marble and sandstone, and the priceless inlay in the columns and arches glitters the gold and silver that it should. Even the stained glass properly catches and refracts the light into rainbow colours.

    But he is still a temporary presence. The light fades as soon as he passes. The snow and frost go nowhere. Though there is sunlight to be had from him, able to wash away the half-dark, however limited in scope, there is no warmth capable of defeating this ice.

    It also has an undesirable effect. Where he begins to glow like a beacon, more of the foot traffic takes notes. Though humans watch him as he goes, and crows keep their distance, the silent, buzzing shades grow thicker around her, subtly drawn in as if by some personal well of gravity. At first it looks like they're doing exactly what subhumans would: crowding around him to taste a snatch of his glory. As they draw more and more together though, he realizes they don't actually see him. Of course, they've ignored everyone so far except Staren for precisely the one second he asked for a name, but now when he blazes with divinity, they gravitate to him as if they are searching for something. Homing in on something they can't see, but pick up the same. Like frigid wraiths that can feel the heat of a body. Like sharks that smell blood.
Yuuki Kuran This sure is a teaser, a brain blaster, as Yuuki meanders at the back of the group, through the frozen glory of the grand cityscape bereft of tangible people.

Internally, Yuuki contemplates: Try to find what doesn't belong. Something preying upon Priscilla. Something that didn't match the surroundings.

Silent shadow people? No, that... that tracks.
Snow that crunches but doesn't displace, air that bites the lungs and fills the chest with chill?
Seems regular.

Crows, ok. Giant spires that look like a child's finger-smudges on glass? It could be anywhere. Even she has memories like this. And something like a building, an edifice, within the mindscape... That's probably safe, too. This was all so dim and dreary, but Priscilla was quite possibly the coldest person that Yuuki knew. Even colder than her brother, Kaname.

But when Yuuki start's smelling her own blood, in the thick winter air, she begins to quietly panic. Her breath shortens, and she pulls out a handkerchief to daub at her nose, where the blood began to trickle. It was a maddening dribble, kept well at bay by her own rebounding vigor, but so maddening in its tiny presence, its unmistakable bouquet, that her eyes glow bright with the tell of her own - far quieter than Gilgamesh's golden divine glory - power.

She hustles up, to catch up with Flamel and Zero, looking between the two. "Flamel, the Psychohazards - they're like monsters, right? Everything that should be here is here and the things that aren't, know they aren't. They'd be the boogeymen, right?"

She places a pale hand on Zero's shoulder. "I know it'd be hard, because of the chill and..." How she's bleeding right next to him. "But your sense is much better than mine. Can you feel any monsters? Anything that shouldn't be?"
Zero Kiryu "The chill isn't what's interfering," Zero replies to Yuuki, "but everything is fuzzy. I am starting to feel things at the edges of my senses, but they're all over the place. It's the sort of thing that happens in a building full of hunters, or an average gala. If it helps, I think it's a lot of 'small somethings' instead of any one particular 'big something'."

He does not recognize the crows as the probable source of this, because they seem too natural to the landscape to him.
Gilgamesh      The warmth coming back is useful. He hadn't expected that. Gilgamesh put on the armor because he's being challenged. He's responding to his challenge, in a natural way that makes sense to him. He's responding to Priscilla's mind with a display that makes sense to him, and which he expects makes sense to her. He wasn't looking for anything else. So that's nice.

     The other shadows come after him. Gilgamesh at first ignores them. They cannot see him, and he does not care; they are welcome to snatch at glory if they like. But when the comparison to sharks becomes apparent, the King of Heroes's lips purse upwards in a smile. This is a threat. A danger. But...

     ...but not a monster.

     So he cannot slay it.

     But he is still Gilgamesh. Strong as a star from Heaven. Undefeated and undeterred.

     Gilgamesh laughs. It's a loud, booming, delighted laugh.

     And then something emerges from the Gate of Babylon.

     "This!" Gilgamesh says delightedly as he grasps a key, jumping backwards and away from the shadows, holding up the strange golden object in the air. "This is not real! *These* are not real! Mere projections! Memories turned to weapons!"

     The world starts trembling. The snow around him starts trembling. As he thrusts the key into the air, there's a smile on Gilgamesh's face like something out of a horror movie. "And I cannot dirty memories!"

     "Fools! In here, even my greatest treasure cannot be damaged! In here, even my greatest treasure is nothing but an image!"

     Music starts playing. It's something primordial, some ancient music that stirs at the root of all other musics, some original song first plucked on some first instrument or first drummed out by some ancient caveman and found by the King of Heroes' will.

     Red lines begin to crack in the world. Gilgamesh's glory suddenly flares, and then dies, as something...emerges.

     It's not a sword. Calling it a sword is an affront to swordom. It's something /other/, something gold, something round that spins and whirls, some *cylinder*. Gilgamesh's laughter is wild and free as he draws it forth, holding it up like an appreciative jeweler.

     And then he does it a second time.

     The greatest weapon in existence. The Star From Heaven. Something that hurts to look upon. Something whose material does not even exist in the world, so ancient it is. The Sword Of Rupture gleams in his right hand, whirling and spinning as his body burns red, as red magic circuits light along his form.

     The Star From Heaven.

     And he just pulled out *two* of them.

     He crashes the two together with a wild and glorious laugh, and the two blades emit a force to simply *blow back* the horde. Not kill them, no - simply blow them backwards with the force of two Stars falling from Heaven itself, a burst of red light and power and destructive energy unleashed in Priscilla's mindscape.

     "I can use it as often as I wish!" Gilgamesh's crowing laughter, his glorious delight, erupts from his lips, and the Swords of Rupture begin to spin up, more power whirling around them as he starts running up the mountain.

     "GIVE ME SOMETHING WORTHY OF MY MEMORIES!" He shouts to the empty world as power flares around him, "HERE, THESE PHANTOMS, WHICH CANNOT BE DIRTIED, ARE ACHING TO BE USED! OVER AND OVER, WITHOUT LIMIT OR PAUSE!"

     "SO SHOW ME, HALF-DRAGON! SHOW ME, PRISCILLA! SHOW ME THE DEMONS YOUR MIND HAS DRAWN FORTH FROM THE EVILS OF THE WORLD! LET THE KING OF HEROES ENJOY HIMSELF UPON THEM, AND KNOW WHAT IT IS TO BEAR WITNESS TO EVEN AN IMAGE OF MY STRENGTH!"
Flamel Parsons     Flamel tunes into what he's after. "I think... I see what we're looking for at the top of the citadel. Right? And-- Well, it kind of depends. A lot of minds are different. Like I said, 'psychohazard' is just a term we use for damaging things. If you see anything picking at the mind, you can guess it's a source of psychohazardous influence." He says, seeming to lock his senses on what he's wanting to see. Time to see what this is doing. He has... Strong suspicions about the ominous cyan light, and strong interests in seeing how it interacts with the shape atop the citadel.

    The shapes that swarm Gil would be the passing thoughts of Priscilla, things that drift through her mind, and as long as he doesn't slaughter too genocidally, Parsons thinks it's probably okay for him to... Gah. GAH. "Hey! It's okay if you fight the mind a bit, but make sure not to, uh, devastate things /too much/! But, enjoy the... stuff I guess!" He urges, and then surges all the more quickly towards the citadel, now bounding between stairways and walkways and trying to specifically get at that entity he found, to see what psychohazards may be filtering in around it, or other such interests.

    He's got a keen eye on how the lights in the sky interact. Can he tune his Clairvoyance to analyze the psychic processes going on? Can he peer into its nature more finely to extract some useful data about how it's interacting with the strange events going on within?
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa will keep moving even as she bleeds she wants to keep near Flamel in the event something goes south. She feels the cold strangely it's like it used to be when she was flesh. She watches Gil now for a moment noting the changes then he goes full-on divine king mode from what she can tell. Then he just got on a short speech and she braces herself for what might happen. He unleashes power and then taunts Priscilla's very mind and soul?

She looks to Flamel and falls in with him.

Well it might get a reaction, or draw out what is here she makes ready for a moment there may be a reaction and she may very well need to react.
Zero Kiryu Zero watches Gilgamesh go through his revelations, and cast the teeming masses away from him with... he doesn't know what to call it. It certainly isn't a sword, it looks more like drill. A drill with a flat tip, though, so that doesn't make sense. The act of clashing them together generating a tremendous force combined with the burst of red light tells him that it's either magic or some sort of advanced technology. The difference is a moot point-- it's very powerful.

If he didn't know better, though...

He could swear that it's strangely low-resolution and undetailed.

The fact that the crows are actually psychohazards only occurs to him in answer to Flamel's reiterations, and Yuuki's own repetition of them. They weren't out of place, but the crumbling that occurs around them is what gives them away. Otherwise, he would have continued to assume they were a natural presence.

"Get rid of the birds along the way, if you can." He advises.

He draws the Memory of Bloody Rose, following behind Flamel -- not at the same clip, because he'll be targeting things along the way -- towards the Citadel and opening fire on any crows that happen to be along the path.
Kotone Yamakawa At Zero's suggestion she's going to trust him on that and out will come a pair of pitols come up and she open sifre ont eh birds as they get closer. She will just keep shooting trying to gun the birds down, as she keeps moving she'll keep shooting and try to keep with Zero and the rest of her allies as they make fort the Citadel.
Staren     Staren flies towards the citadel where everyone else is going. There's some kind of monster atop it. Could it be a psychohazard? Hopefully they can beat it before he bleeds too much.

    And then Gil does something interesting. Staren lands to watch and listen, then tries to focus on the idea of summoning helpful things like Abstractum or one of his old resonance cannons or magitech staff. Or like, a Glitterboy or something. Even if he's never actually piloted one, he grew up hearing the same legends as everyone else on his world.

    Whether any of that actually works or not, he gets back to flying towards the citadel, and helps shoot the crows if Zero provides a reason.
Priscilla     Most continue on ahead. They find that the crows are of no object. Bullets and beams hit them dead on, and where they do, the false birds implode in puffs of shadow and inky feathers, destroyed on the spot. Some of the murder comes down on Zero and Staren, dive bombing them with cutting claws and beaks, biting and scratching and exacerbating their bleeding by inches, but they are weak. They are minor, ambient psychohazards, so native to this place, so endemic and passive, that they are beneath Priscilla's notice, and possibly even outside of her conscious recognition.

    Killing them puts the scent of blood in the water, though. Metaphorically speaking.

    The headlong rush eventually breaks into the rings of statues that fill much of the inner perimeter of the city, and those statues are welcome points of consistency. Towering figures of ancient heroes, legendary knights, and even larger and more heavily wrought visages of gods, loom in various poses from pedestals of marble and basalt, ornamented with gold plaques covered in runes that are simultaneously nearly Sumerian and Norse, shining eerie green and pale under the ghastly pallor that comes from the sky, stuck between day and night, as if neither matter. They stand solid and fixed in perspective, as anchors of especially strong impression, where the crows don't venture and the snow has barely fallen.

    One or two are recognizable. Some, because they are highly important figures from Anor Londo. Those aware of Gwyn or Gwynevere would notice their statues immediately, especially massive and ornamented in gold, meticulously kept and untroubled by age. Others, because they aren't from distant memory at all. Some statues appear newer. Less formed. Smooth and a little blurry, as if still being chiseled away at towards their final level of resolution. Many of them are still recognizable, for bearing resemblances to more familiar figures. Older statues of Psyber and Nathan Hall and Kirito and Tomoe, more recent statues of Reiji Arisu and Lezard Valeth and Staren and Arthur and Mizuki, and newer still, barely started statues of Parsons and Yuuki and Gilgamesh, amongst others, some little more than a plaque as a declaration of space reserved, some largely underway.

    No more than a couple are found within visual distance of each other, and many are still people nobody present would recognize, or have ever heard of. Those ones aren't useful as more than landmarks, but there is a certain pattern to the others, in the way the new aligns with the old, in a sort of spiral outwards from the citadel, sequenced in a certain way, growing older and more defined in a counterclockwise direction, and newer and more uncertain through clockwise.

    A figure suddenly stands apart from the crowd. Shuffling into view, a man of spectral white passes through the crowd, weaving between black shades and solid people in the direction of-

    So Xi Sil was a carpenter. He was twenty eight years old when he died, along with his wife and child of nineteen and three. Their names were-

    The man turns to face the party, revealing a raw, bloody scar on his ghostly white forehead, roughly in the shape of a sun, as if applied by a branding iron. He changes direction, swerving to face them, and then slowly begins to pick up his pace, going from a walk, to a brisk stride, to a quickly accelerating jog, gunning through the crowd that ignores him. He breaks free and into the local clearing. A carpenter's hammer, with a head of solid cobalt, is clutched in his hand like a knife. His eyes and wide and wild, frozen in some kind of sudden terror, and yet he comes at them with blind murder in his gaze. He comes for Flamel at first, rushing up to meet him, drawing back his hammer, the cobalt covered in brassy verdigris and blood up close, and then suddenly jukes at a near 90 degree angle to lunge at Staren, suddenly forgetting all about the Psychonaut in his drive to tackle and bludgeon the catboy to death with animal brutality.
Priscilla     As far as Flamel sees as he scopes out the alien auroras that run the sky above him, whatever the light represents is largely inactive. In standby, thrumming with voltage like power lines, but merely circulating, charged with voltage in readiness for something or other. As far as he can discern any further, it isn't anything conscious. It doesn't seem to be 'a thought process'. It is something in the background of the actual mindscape, surrounding and outside of the real thoughts going on, networking around it.

    There isn't too much more to glean from it, until the spectre appears, at the blue lights in the sky abruptly flicker and pulse like a snapped wire. A handful of strange, liquid stars flash with electrical charge, and then streak down, like tiny blue comets.
Priscilla     Flamel was not estimating in error when he said it would be difficult to do real damage to Priscilla's mindscape. Of course he spoke from a perspective of willpower, but given just to look at all of this -at the enormity of it- and how long it has been here, slowly, gradually freezing into place over countless years, as everything outside its bounds steadily dissolves into the void of the unknown, and the same thoughts and feelings become almost zen in their twilight, uncanny serenity, it'd take a miracle to affect substantive change.

    The imaginary duplicates of the Sword of Rupture are powerful, even as mere astral projections of Gilgamesh's limited comprehension of the divine relic. Where they blast away down the stone road, people scatter away ahead of it, running frantically from the twin pillars of red light that wash away the crowd of shades as easily as a hurricane whips away stray leaves. The air, so stubbornly silent before, is whipped into a whirling, howling frenzy, turned glittering vortex around the use of a double Ea, and sending crows finally fleeing from their perches in puffs of black feathers. Snow and ice erupt into great white plumes from the sheer force of the disturbance, rapidly surrounding Gilgamesh in an impenetrable blizzard of his own making, practically blind as he kicks the perpetual winter around him and demands that it wakes up.

    It doesn't like that.

    Where the distantly panicked cries of startled pedestrians begin to die down, as the hole in the frozen haze fills back in with insulating silence, Gilgamesh is suddenly left in an isolated bubble of his own. He's lost sight of the others through the wall of blasted snow. It doesn't matter, as he charges toward the mountainside, rushing for the highest vantage he can find, until he has been running for well long enough to have put the cloud behind him. The peaks, frozen as they are, had been clear from a distance, yet he is surrounded in thick white mist on all sides, hindering his efforts to find something else to blast at. He can't see the streets, never mind the shades.

    It starts quiet though. The ansi singing. The whispers he hears calling, urging without form or word, softly echoing from somewhere below. Like a thick, crawling vapour, they crawl over the stone beneath his feet, following him where he walks, getting louder in some insubstantial sense, without picking a direction, except nebulously below. It isn't until it becomes almost maddening close -loud in his head, rather than his ears- that his shadow bleeds, softens, spreads out, and then erupts into grasping fingers of stinging black embers -arms of inky, numbing frost -claws of voracious flies -faces of bottomless dark static, set with only twin white pinpoints that leer at him from his own shadow. They reach out to him, grabbing hold of him, not to feel his glory, but to take him away.

    Where their touch alights, burning him even through his astral armour, tarnishing and corroding its illusory substance-

    
It is always understood that mortals stand opposite of immortals.
Men opposite of gods.
Mundane opposite of divine.
Flawed opposite of perfect.
This is how it has always been.
They are complete antonyms.
They are matched only as being as far from one another as is possible, never doubted or debated in the mind of any world.
Yet, in that moment-
.............................................................
Yuuki Kuran 'Things that don't belong' was hard. Too hard. Yuuki has a problem, her emotions pressing forward. But it was worse, here. Here was seperate, was different. Her conscious mind was purely the human for fourteen years, unshackled from the urges and needs of her monstrous reality.

Here, where there were so many colorful leitmotifs of Priscilla around, Yuuki was paralyzed with shoujo indecision.

The crows were birdlike and austere and silent, and the gently crumbling structures reminded her of the times she had been to Anor Londo. It was normal, to her. She had accepted it.

Because she was no expert on minds. But, worse than that, Astral Yuuki was too accepting of these things that appeared within the mind. Certainly, they were within, and certainly, they fit. It aligned. It blended in.

Yuuki's mind was a complete mess, or so she envisioned, with what kind of a life she led.

She was far too forgiving and accepting of Priscilla, and it meant she was blind to her friend's small flaws and demons. "Oh, Zero, but they're birds! And I'm sure I saw one in..."

He's blasting them, though, so with a sigh Yuuki joins in, making a 'pkew' sound with her mouth under her breath as she fingergunned down the crows with little kinetic 'pops'. It's almost fun, if it weren't so bitterly cold. It's almost-

Hey there's a dude jumping Staren murderously! Yuuki raises a hand to help him, before considering, with a pregnant inactive pause.

"... Is that the part of Priscilla that dislikes Staren specifically? Her frustrations?"

"It's not harming the mindscape..."
Zero Kiryu The Memory of Bloody Rose blossoms. Vines spread outwards and meet the murder of crows as they join one another in trying to fight Zero Kiryu's murderous onslaught. He stops shooting at them, even as they peck and scratch at him, and simply allows nature to take its course. The vines will find them as he bleeds, and they aren't very strong-- they are /defined/ by not being very strong, it would seem.

Oh, a voice says, Zero, but they're birds!

The vines recede slightly, and Zero stops to just look at Yuuki. It's such an innocent response that he's having a hard time turning it over in his head. The parameters are clear, even though he didn't catch them earlier in the mental dive.

"Yuuki."

He angles the memory of Bloody Rose towards the ground, the vines writhin around him steadily.

"How many things with my face do you think you would have to kill if this was me?" He asks, trying to make a point.
Gilgamesh      This is something that isn't part of Gilgamesh's understanding.

     Or, rather, there is no word for it. The moment he's nicked, the moment he's struck, the moment he *feels it begin*, Gilgamesh's response is instantaneous, dancing backwards and away. He understands it, in the deep core of his being. If it wasn't for the golden armor - imperfect replication as it is - he would be more than simply nicked. He would be dead. It would have cut clean through him and destroyed him.

     As it stands, the imperfect memory of his armor has been cleaved straight through, and there's a piece missing from his flesh. It's not healing. It's just gone.

     If this was his body - if this was his TRUE SELF - this would be endlessly worse. As it is, it's his mind, and his mind is far more resilient against such cracks, such imperfections. Even against something that is fundamentally against the gods. Something that is fundamentally the opposite of the gods. Not human. Not divine. Un-divine. Divine.

     In that instant, for the first time, the impossible happens.

     Gilgamesh falls in love.

     His laughter is wild. He's delighted. He's more than delighted. This is more than mortal danger. This is immortal danger, absence in its truest form. This is something beautiful and precious, something that does not exist in his treasury because it *cannot*, because how can Man conceive of nothing, how can Man conceive of absence, how can Man imagine such a thing in truth? They can contemplate it, wonder of it, look up at the stars and see some glimpse of it, but they cannot Know it, cannot Take Possession Of It.

     And so he wants it. He is in love. Not with Priscilla, no, though the affection he has for her is obvious in that he is here and doing something Real and Helping Her with no expectation nor desire of reward. No.

     No, the King of Heroes falls in love with the Lifehunt. The Divine falls in love with its opposite. Something that was made to reinforce the will of the Gods sees something perfectly opposed to it, and opposites attract in an instant, and the lust that made the King of Heroes famous as one of history's greatest tyrants stirs within him.

     Oh, he *needs* it.

     Oh, he more than needs it. He *must* have it. The greed in his eyes is without compare. Greed for that which is the opposite of greed. Need for that which is the antithesis of need. It is something so precious and so flawless and so perfect that Gilgamesh can hear his heart roaring in his ears and feel his face flush and his eyes wild and is smile the smile of a man smitten. /Everyone in the room/ can *feel* the change in his aura, can *see* the change in his eyes, the smile. That smile is wild. That smile is incredible. That smile is the smile of a man in love.

     And he goes at it. This is a thing of incredible beauty. This is a thing he must have.
Gilgamesh      He smashes the twin Eas together again. They're degraded copies, mere memories of a treasure he hasn't used ever before and likely never will, for what could ever truly draw the Sword of Rupture from the gate? The explosion of force smashes outwards once more, as he leaps backwards, backwards up the mountain. His torso armor degrades and disappears. He's left shirtless in the freezing cold, and he doesn't give a damn. His nipples are diamond hard for reasons /entirely unrelated/ to the cold. The cold could not kill what is happening to him right now. The heat of his lust is like *fire* in the mental world, an unbelievable passion that borders on insanity. If ever people have wondered about his true character - about the man who held his head high and took sons from their fathers and daughters from their mothers - then wonder no more. Gilgamesh is on display, and the fire of his love and greed is even hotter than his aura, and he does not care a whit that he is freezing to death.

     "I love it!"

     Another clash. He's trying to clear the snow with the force of the thing, even temporarily, even long enough just to see a path. He's trying to force back the flies. He's trying to obliterate his shadow.

     With two of his great and beautiful treasures in his hand, no matter how awful, how undetailed, how pointless they may be as mere phantasmal copies, he feels that he can do it. The change in his attitude is so profound and so apparant that as he disappears into the driving snow people can *still* feel his presence, his overwhelming joy, his overwhelming *urge* to *HAVE*. To POSSESS. To OWN.

     He has to figure out how to do that first.

     "If you are guarding this path, then I will smash through it!" Ea swings, and it cuts upwards, a trail of red starfire behind it. "If you are guarding some foe, then I will break it!"

     "Whatever it takes to make you mine!"

     Reminder: he's talking to the Lifehunt.

     The actual Lifehunt.

     Not Priscilla.

     Though, admittedly, the difference may be academic.
Staren     Staren attempts to see if just thinking about something hard grants you free power inside the mind.

    It doesn't work that way.

    Most of the things he tries to call, he /has/, although he doesn't get free power armor. A staff appears in his right hand and a gauntlet on his left, holding one of the resonance cannons, and Staren grins, but then...

    The staff and the gauntlet don't do anything. They're nonresponsive, just like the real ones. And looking at the gauntlet makes him feel sad. He hangs his head and closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, and puts the items away. He shouldn't have tried that. It's like it cheapens the memory. The cannon, looking like some kind of two-handed magitech device, he saves for later, for an enemy that requires it.

    Staren fights birds. His armor shocking those that get close, as he tries to thin out the flock with his beam cannons. He's no aerial dogfighter, so he mostly relies on flying away from them while shooting back at them.

    Eventually, the catboy flies closer to the center of things and finds statues. It's slightly heartwarming in the cold to see this. Memories of old heroes he hasn't seen in a long time. And of those still around Priscilla sees worthy of such monuments. He lands close to Flamel as a lone figure approaches them. "Hey! Hey there, who are you?" Okay, the dude's brandishing a hammer, but does that mean he's going to attack? Staren doesn't feel that same dread as he did with the shadow. And then it comes for HIM, and shocked, he raises an armored arm to block. "Hey!" Activating the shock function and firing the beam cannons point-blank is a reflex at this point. Only THEN does he hear Yuuki's comment, and he starts trying to back away from his assailant instead. There's always the option of going back to the sky, right?
Yuuki Kuran MEANWHILE, during 'Gilgamesh becomes sympathetic with the lost cause of Comics Thanos' and 'Staren is beaten by a vicious apparition that Yuuki is convinced is just Part Of Priscilla Which Is Annoyed With Staren Specifically', Zero asks Yuuki a question.

But he doesn't really ask Yuuki Kuran a question. He asks Yuuki Cross a question. Astral Yuuki, seperated from her body and her unconscious mind is much more driven-snow pure, even if she lingers upon the powers she has in the waking world.

"Well... All of the night class..." She starts counting up on her fingers. "Except Hanabusa." She lowers one finger. "Then, every pureblood you've ever met." Her fingers count up by four. "That jerk Hunter's Association president who turned out to be a vampire plant." She starts using one hand to count tens and the other for ones, hooking fingers to continue her hand-abacusing.

"Your old partner, whatever his name was..." One finger goes up. "Mmmmaybe."

Zero blasts more birds with his vines and Gilgamesh erupts in tremendous power. Staren backs off from his foe becuase DREAM SHOUJO YUUKI IS THE RIGHTEST AND CORRECTEST, YES GOOD.

"Oh. And me." She raises a finger. "I think I got them all!" She shows him her hands, with most of the fingers showing in both tens and ones. She tilts her head, a little 'yeah, yeah' smile playing across her face, a pang of emotion flickering across her eyes that glow red with the unhindered blood from her nose (she had to put her handkerchief away to count on her hands).
Flamel Parsons     "Woah! Woah woah woah! Hey!!" Parsons calls out, trying to muster a personal shield as fast as he can. Instead he winds up in that defensive position for a full second before he realizes it just made a break for Staren instead. He gets a better idea of what's going on. His response here is to Yuuki. "No, no-- It's like a cancer! I get it! Moonlight isn't purging something that's in rigid equilibrium." He explains while Staren tries to fight the guy off. "Oh, wait, shit-- One second!" He tries to enhance this effort with a quick psychic grapple from a massive telekinetic hand!

    Then he pops into invisibility. He's already lost a fair chunk of psychic energy, they can't afford to start big fights in the middle of this constant drain! He's gotta try to push through /evasively/.

    "So there's the crows -- they must be near-native or low-key outsiders that don't draw the attention of Moonlight. It doesn't have a thought-process, but it has... some kind of discharge threshold! And it doesn't affect something big enough that it'll drain too much of its power to fight it. So it must be like a balanced current. You spike above the threshold and present a path of least resistance, and it discharges into you! That makes so much /sense/." Parsons rambles as he continues.

    He notes what little he can see of what's happening to Gilgamesh. His eager happiness is... well, faltering a /little bit/, but it sounds kind of like Gil is having fun? Sort of...? At least he's making a very clear opportunity for Parsons to really get a good reading of a Moonlight Effect discharge. He keeps his Clairvoyance locked on him for a moment while he scales up towards the citadel, just to gather extra data about things.
Kotone Yamakawa There isn't too much trouble with the crows. A they move onwards, she reloads her weapons only out of reflex more than need as this is a mindscape right? So would she be shooting mind bullets? That thought vanishes rapidly as she beholds the statues. She knows several of them, she sees Pysber, Nathan Hall, Reiji, Staren, Arthur, Mizuki and several of the Gate Crasher's Union leadership as well. She takes note of how the older statues seem more and more defined too.

"That is interesting..."

she pauses as someone else appears she looks to the man for a moment and they move to attack.

She will take a moment to move to defend Flamel but the attack is a ruse. The target is Staren, she curses and attempts to change her course but it's going to take her a second to catch up.

If she's able to she'll snap off a controlled shot in the defence of Staren, rather than firing wildly.

"What the blue blazes is this?!"
Zero Kiryu Initially, Zero looks only slightly miffed at Yuuki actually standing there and going down the list of names at him. He doesn't stop her, but there are two points in the list where his expression changes slightly-- once in the middle, and another at the end. His lips part as if to say something on both occasions, but...

The moment comes,
and goes.

Once again he finds himself upset, and he couldn't actually tell anybody what feelings he's experiencing because it's such a storm of furious impulses that there is no one single bad feeling to point out. It digs into his gut and empties him out and that feeling just hangs there inside of him.

The first coherent impulse is to fire back-- to point out that not a single one of her tutors could care less about her, because every single one of them was a Kuran toadie too afraid or enamored with the Vampire King to do anything with Yuuki but keep her wings clipped.

Again his lips part.

Again, he says nothing.

He just shakes his head and, dull-eyed, returns to the task of brutalizing crows.
Priscilla     It is perhaps a good thing that Priscilla can't actually see what is going on at the moment. Else, she might conclude Gilgamesh is categorically insane. It's also technically fortunate that of all people he could have picked to go off the chain like this with, it's in the ancient, near-ancestral memory of a very old being sharing a bloodline with eternal stone creatures from before time eternal. Even the fake Eas might be too much otherwise.

    In his frenzy and lust, he quickly becomes hopelessly lost in the mountains. In the city proper, one can turn their head and see where the a blizzard moves up towards the peak, flashing hues of scarlet from within like a thundercloud the hues of bloody snow. Deep inside the chaos himself however, the world around him is a crazed labyrinth of jagged rocks, howling wind, stinging snow, and slowly killing frost. Removing his armour --well that's what people do when they reach a certain stage of hypothermia. They feel too hot and they take their clothes off, and die soon after. Such is the case here. The hot blood pounding in his veins eagerly forces itself out through his skin, bringing more of his body heat to the surface to leech away into the wind, forcing his muscles to move in the frenzy of the moment even as they slowly freeze and begin to tear.

    Blowing away his shadow works for a time. The things that reach out from somewhere else disappear without it. With the strobing lightning and thunder of twin Eas cracking off in earth-shuddering carpet bombing, however, there is no shortage of shadow. Each time he fires, he obliterates the murky things from before him, only for the scarlet light to cast stark blackness from the crooked rocks around him, giving birth to twenty more. He has soon worked himself deep into a blood of Andhaka situation, surrounded by shapes uncannily close to human, and yet all the worse for it, lacking all of the precise individuality of the shades that so naturally walk amongst men and women, set apart by their featureless white 'eyes', pits of nothing-radiance so utterly bottomless that they are every bit of the endless holes that their opposite colour would usually be.
Priscilla     He can't afford to brawl with them. His twin Eas are absurdly, obnoxiously powerful, but all it takes is one of the things to shamble or crawl or fall onto him from above, and more excruciating existential agony is inflicted in an instant, as if hit by his 'divine antimatter'. Being wounded exacerbates the bleeding, which exacerbates the cold, which exacerbates the exhaustion, which leads to being more easily wounded, until the spiral is an abyssal, drowning vortex, all the way to the bottom of the ocean --the event horizon of a black hole from which there is no escape, only a subjective eternity of being pulled to pieces. At his coldest, most drained, and especially most delirious, for a second, he could swear that somewhere, half cloaked in the blowing snow that erases all distinction from the landscape, he can see an equally black, equally fuzzy shadow of Priscilla herself, armed with a scythe of pure Wrongness, present as a wraith of crackling, disjointed static, as some kind of final boss to a gauntlet, peeled out of space

    He might have imagined it, or it might have been a trick of the circumstances. A moment later, he finally stumbles out of the edge of the blizzard, and slides off black ice onto one of the four, huge, torch-bearing platforms, landing only a stone's throw away from it, on the edge of the stairs. Suddenly dropped into its warm, neutral light, slightly flickering and tinged with flecks of gold, the shades are nowhere to be found. The snow clears in the breeze, revealing his pursuit has vanished, as if they had never been.

    Approaching the massive brazier, more like a bowl of solid gold large enough to sleep in, an increasingly painful sting would to wash over his skin for approaching, growing more intense with time rather than proximity. This becomes recognizable as frostbite thawing out of the flesh, and soon he'd begin to feel actual warmth --something steady and natural and untainted, pulsing with its own vital force. Like practically everything else here, the flames make no sound, roaring away in mute slow motion atop their kindling. Looking over the edge, 'atop' would seem to be the correct word, as the base of the fire doesn't quite touch the stacked pyramid of ashen bones and white sand filling them instead of oil or wood.

    Strange as it is, and unsettling as it might be, the radius of light that extends from the giant flame is something safe. Something familiar. Something natural. A place where even a psychic representation can thaw out and heal. The fog of diamond dust ceases to exist within its bounds, allowing them to see clearly within, even if not looking out, like some strange opposite of being trapped inside a snowglobe.
Gilgamesh      Gilgamesh is categorically insane.

     It's a fact. He's a creature that doesn't exist within the framework of 'society' but rather defines it from on high. He cannot /be/ sane; to be 'sane' is to be 'human'. Gilgamesh is an existence that thinks, feels, and acts in entirely different ways, no matter how often people insist that he definitely, totally, absolutely can be a human being, no matter how often people say 'you can come down and be like the rest of us', and this is one of the moments that prove it. Each blistering agony of self-inflicting flagellation deletes another piece. Frostbite slows him, and he recognizes it in the back of his mind, because he's been frostbitten before in a time long ago, chasing frost giants through a glacier when he was a small child. As he slows, he gets weaker, and more horrors rise. There's too many of them, more and more and more, and each touch is agony, each slash makes it worse. He is Divine; even his mind is Divine, and this is its opposite in so profound a way that even the touches hurt. As he starts falling, more wounded, more easily wounded, more excited, more delighted, more desirous, more pained, more hurt, more need, more greed, more, more, more, the spiral continues on and on and on, and he sees the shadow of Priscilla, and his cold lips part and begin to speak the words, and one of the Eas starts to spin furiously. This is a *challenge*. It is an amazing, incredible challenge, with an astounding prize somewhere to be had. It is glorious. Joyous. Divine. Incredible. Even as he tumbles into a deep black hole, as agony becomes half of his existence, he cradles it joyously. There is even a moment amidst all of them where, enraptured by his joy, he shatters one of his Eas in Broken Phantasm, and the power released is a Star from Heaven flaring up through the blizzard and stabbing into the night sky as if to say I AM HERE. I AM HERE. I AM HERE, a single red FLARE of pure and overwhelming power that lets itself be known and pushes back the blizzard for one, brief, instant before it dies and the blizzard rushes in. It's a novel, joyous experience, to be pushed to the brink of destruction, to use a shadow of his greatest treasure in such a manner, to taste the glory of a situation where he is, indeed, in a position that can threaten him, so vanishingly rare it has been. Caught in this rapture, as the remaining Ea continues to whirl, as he prepares even a shadow of the greatest of his powers, he finally stumbles out of the blizzard, and into the stinging, painful fire, and the words die on cold lips and he falls against the flame and laughs and laughs and laughs.

     He falls onto the ground and his hands press against his face and he is not bloody but he is bloody and he is not healing but he is healing and he is not burning but he is burning and he is not freezing but he is freezing and he is and he is not and he is not and he is and he is. He laughs again as he determines that he is, as he lets the fire burn, as he lets himself heal.

     He is categorically insane. But he is Gilgamesh, King of Heroes, King of Babylon and Uruk, King of all that Is, Was, and Ever Shall Be, and no word from his mouth is idle boasting, and so he is alive, and so he laughs in the warm light of the bonfire.
Priscilla     -they were wed for three years. He built a home for his family with his own hands, taking six months, which his neighbours-

    The shock function doesn't do anything to stop the spectre. It smashes staren with the extremely odd carpenter's hammer, and the blow is like a cannonball. It is the volley of a firing squad. The drop of a guillotine. The crack of a judge's gavel. It- no, it's not, it just really hurts.

    Blasting the bloodthirsty phantasm as it crashes into him, wrapping its arms around him and trying to take him to the ground, seems to work well enough. Where lightning had failed, beam cannons scorch a pair of blackened craters into its corpus, causing it to reel in unthinking agony. Kotone hits it directly in the head, with a shot that would blow the brains out of a normal human, snapping its neck to the side like a violently shaken doll, but it slowly straightens itself all the same, turning to her next.

    Flamel snatches it in his psychic grip at just the right moment. Seized completely, the weakened apparition kicks and struggles in wordless outrage, hoisted and slowly crushed as it bleeds from its wounds, in much the same way Flamel, Staren, and Kotone continue to bleed, gradually worse with each passing minute. The spectre thrashes tirelessly while Staren has his opportunity to back away, trying its damndest to break free, and slowly exhausting its psychic energy in the process.

    The blue stars streak from the sky, and finally slam into the invader as a spray of comets from heaven accurately would. The ghostly being bursts into cyan flames, huge chunks of its mass blown away instantly in a blaze of cold, sorcerous fire. The thing Flamel holds burns away like a wooden doll thrown into a fireplace, slowly dwindling down to a skeleton that is burned to glassy crystal, rather than blackened ashes. Some tiny spark escapes it at the last second, falling back down into the obscure and bottomless unknown at the foot of the mountains. A sound like vibrating glass remains in the area for several seconds, its ringing slowly fading as the blue fire dies out, and its glowing moats slowly float back up into the air, until the threat has passed.

    He seems to have been right. They're free to move on.
Priscilla     Finally, when they close in on the citadel, they find that, more than its enormity, its elaborate construction, its breathtaking gilding and carving, or its sheer architectural robustness as a veritable fortress fit to laugh at the mightiest armies of antiquity and modernity both, what stands out is that there are no longer any people. The crowd has thinned out more and more, as humans steadily give way to more shades, the balance steadily shifting, street by street, until there are only the latter left. The huge, central plaza, steep spiral stairs down, and broad bridge over an abyssal drop ahead, is a dense, shifting maze of flickering black silhouettes, walking in and out of sight with all the regularity of phantoms.

    The colossal double gates, constructed to impress and overwhelm even the giants who must have once lived here, are firmly shut and barred, shod in some black-hued kind of steel that must be a foot thick or more in places. The windows are gorgeous, but dark inside, covered in frost and architecturally geared for war. It is a mercy that no archers stand ready anywhere.

    The density of shades drawn to it is already incongruous with the structure ostensibly representing the most royal and holy places Priscilla knows of, but one additional feature is even more defiant of expectation. The statue with the privilege of standing before the citadel's titanic doors, in direct view of all supplicants, is not Gwynevere. It's not Gwyn. It's not even Seath. It is no figure of Multiversal note. It isn't Priscilla herself, symbolic as that may be. It's a woman nobody has seen before. Dressed in long, flowing cloth, barefooted and with voluminous sleeves. She has thick, windswept hair that reaches all the way down past the small of her back, and her eyes are closed, at first appearing to be subject to spiderwebbed cracks and weathering on her cheeks due to advanced age, but quickly becoming apparent as intentionally carved designs, like tattooed tree roots extending down from her closed eyelids. Hers is the only statue which the crows touch, crowded over her outstretched arms and shoulders, partially draped in snow.
Staren     The impact of the hammer knocks Staren on his ass and sends him skidding across the ground. The armor where he blocked is badly dented and cracked, the arm under it stinging, and he gets to his feet, keeping his distance while Flamel holds it steady. After a moment or two of watching it bleed away, he comments, "If it's not a psychohazard, it was being destroyed anyway." And, to ease Flamel's burden, he raises his arm to fire -- and blue stars take it out instead. Strange.

    "Thanks." he nods to Flamel and Kotone, and makes his way onward. The shadows are a little offputting, now, but as long as they don't notice the party, they only make Staren a little nervous.

    And then they're confronted by a statue of obvious import but not obvious identity. "Who is /that/?" he asks those who've come with him, looking up at the statue, circling it, and then finally thinking to check for a plaque.
Flamel Parsons     Parsons lets out a breath. Phew. Okay, that's one issue mostly neutralized. So Moonlight is able to stabilize everything here... Interesting! He's gotta check out the readings on that when he gets back. Who knows what Priscilla might be able to do with some in-depth knowledge of her sword! He heads in, keeping his invisibility up, and staying silent to match the shades.

    He flickers out of invisibility once he gets to the strange structure. This has to be the Resolution, right? He double-checks, just to make sure before Yuuki does what Yuuki is sure to do in a moment. A tap to the temple with two fingers is all it takes to summon up a pulse of clairvoyance, with which he can hopefully scan the construct to determine its nature. Those crows are definitely more psychohazards though, and he can see their decay. Maybe this is what feeds on her motivation energy? Low-level psychic parasites? It must be the only thing that can fly under Moonlight's radar! In any case, his fast scan's results will be visible to any who've followed him.
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki watches Zero, eyes full of hope. An innocent, young hope that nothing will be wrong. He asked her, she answered. It was a game, almost. The topic being depressing...

Well, Yuuki Cross had never been precisely good at speaking or being spoken to. She was kind of depressingly awful at pretty much everything compared to Zero and the Night Class.

"I'm sorry." She leans forward. "For not remembering everyone. Next time, tell me the right answer, okay?" She urges softly, like she used to, and then continues on. The Staren-Hating Apparition* isn't really her concern as it's clearly a part of Priscilla.

The dark "spectres" thicken and replace all the people, and at the gate, Yuuki pauses. "Are these... ghost darks-" She calls them darks, because they're empty static shadows of darkness, she's not Randomly Hyper Racist "-the problem? Should I..." She waggles her hand 'through' one, but that doesn't seem to do much.

"Mmm... They're just kind of here. That's not damage. But hey!"

She looks up at the statue of the strange woman nobody knows. "This is wrong. This doesn't go here. I know!"

Yuuki heaves up the entire fucking statue with her noodle-arms, easily lifting the massive edifice of stone as if one would heft the grocery bag with two gallons of milk - with deliberate ease.

"Be right back!" Yuuki calls before... zzzzzipping down the dream-hill to the other statues of Memory.

"Well, since this one's super old and finished it goes overe here..." She sets the statue alongside other similar memories. "Aaaaand I need the right one... The right one..."

Going to the back, with the unplaqued empty projects, Yuuki takes an empty statue dias... and smiles. "This is the one. I know it! It's a fact."

She heaves it up to bring back to outside. "This is a Priscilla statue."
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa looks to STaren "Why do I have a feeling there's a hell of a story behind that thing. It was almost telling the story of a caprenter's life. Anway good your okay Staren."

With that she turns to hed onwars until the mysteirous statue she does not have aby idea whom it is, so like Staren she looks for a plaque.
Priscilla     When Staren circles around for the plaque, he finds it, but he also finds that the gold surface has been viciously vandalized, thoroughly scratched out by some hand that insisted it be forgotten. Even at the crux around which the rest of Priscilla's mental landscape seems to turn, she herself doesn't know that name. Odd, considering this oldest and most forgotten of statues is the one that holds the place of most central importance.

    When Flamel gives it a pulse, he finds two things, and verifies one obvious fact. The citadel palace, dark and shuttered and bolted dow, rejecting all entry and surrounded only by people that do not exist, certainly happens to be the most core and guarded part of Priscilla's mind. That much seems intuitive. When he scans the statue, the crows are obvious as minor, nibbling psychohazards, but the statue itself is neither Hazard nor Resolution. An /overwhelming/ amount of psychic energy is concentrated in that weathered sculpture of a mysterious woman with no name, so much that it's like stumbling across someone's darkest secret or most treasured memory just right out in the open, like the mind had forgotten to hide it.

    The other thing is that the Resolution is here alright. Up above, to be specific. Perched atop the royal cathedral tower, the gargantuan shape of a four-winged horned beast is visible to everyone, grey and translucent as it may be. The vague definition of a massive creature, with a serpentine tail coiled around the architecture, and threads of silvery fibre running down its spine, is in of itself representative of the Resolution that psychohazards would be drawn to. It is a surprisingly large and ambitious one -moreso than one really would take on just for a rest run- but still new and not fully formed, missing a lot of details.

    The relative lack of psychohazards is almost certainly due to the fact that Moonlight's influence is draped over the entire city, most likely walling out all the common forms of psychic parasites and predators with ease, before they even arrive at the streets; a subtly permeating grid psychic energy that destroys fear and disorientation and doubt on contact. No doubt it's an incredible influence on someone's mental stability while they're holding it. It might not slip his mind that it could very well be addictive to some people. Dangerous in some hands, if it would go so far as to guard against what could be neurologically normal hesitation, fear, and/or guilt.

    Then, Yuuki commits the cardinal sin of Lordran: finding an old, important, mysterious-looking environmental feature, and /touching it/.

    Ridiculous shoujo strength winds up wrenching it off its base, where she finds that it isn't simply carved into the stone, but that it is firmly attached to . . . what looks to be a ridiculous amount of incredibly complicated, incredibly big, and incredibly old machinery underneath, connecting to gears upon gears that go deeper than any well and spread who knows how wide beneath. It's like the capstone on some incredibly vast mechanism --something that might theoretically go throughout the whole mental city, either supporting it, or responsible for some hypothetical unknown configuration, likely never assumed before, judging by the advanced state of rust and thick sheets of ice freezing it all together.
Priscilla     Taking the statue away, somehow, miraculously, doesn't break anything. The unexpected reveal into a dizzyingly deep and dark ironworks of complex psychic mechanisms, no doubt built up over centuries of experience underneath the surface, is blessedly brief, as ripping the statue free unleash an unholy stench of blood, as if there were an ocean of it sloshing about the gears and chains somewhere far below. The whole dias buzzes with static grain, like hallucinatory dots popping in the eyes after a severe blow to the head, whining like locusts and crackling like snapping ice, the sound itself intensely disorienting to the point of nausea.

    Something mechanical very loudly clunks somewhere behind the heavyset barred doors to the citadel. The bestial Resolution's outline stirs, craning its neck to look down at them, as its perch shudders and grinds, causing snow to sift and fall from its myriad arches and balconies. The idea that the doors might open, as soon as it is conceived of, instantly strikes as very, very, veryvery bad. Taken as symbolism, it might otherwise be thought of as some secret key into Priscilla's inner thoughts, which might normally be intriguing, but the gut instinct that /screams/ at it feels more like those gates were locked for a very good reason that supersedes only privacy. It is a 'run away' instinct. It is a 'you shouldn't have done that' instinct. It is an instinct that blares alarms and says that one does not want to be there when those doors open. Even the absolutely least psychic individual knows it in their bones.

    It's also the threshold for mucking about with the scenery that finally causes a mental landscape to take notice. Where the absurd mass warfare of blasting off twin Eas hadn't caused so much as a psychic twitch, Yuuki picking up that particular statue sets off a full-on psychic rejection. It is incredibly, stupidly fortuitous that it does, since it results in them being kicked out of Priscilla's brain before whatever happens next, happens, so that it /doesn't/ happen.
Flamel Parsons     Oh! There's the Resolution then. Parsons was sure that was it before, but then he shifted his thoughts, and now -- huh, what /is/ Yuuki doing? He tilts his head curiously, peering at the process as she starts it. Deep psychological machinery, massive mechanisms at work, unspeakably vast depths and tremendous heights of function... That feeling that washes over him when it looks like the doors to the inner sanctum might open is gut-wrenching. Oh SHIT.

    He's halfway through reinforcing the astral projection when the massive backlash slams into him, knocking him clean out of Priscilla's brain. The others are likely to be taken with him from the force of the blast; there's actually a shock of physical force as one re-enters their old body, almost but not quite enough to knock one out of their chair. The door itself is even launched off of Priscilla's forehead abruptly. "GaaaauuuuuUUUUH!" Parsons cries out as he waves his arms around to steady himself, desperately grabbing up his sunglasses and restoring their place on his face. "What in the heck was in /there/! Jeez, I can't even tell if what you did made a permanent effect-- What was /that/ all about? Who was /she/?" He shakes his head in a baffled way.

    "Oh crap! My data!" He says, eyebrows shooting up behind his sunglasses as he rushes to gather it up. "That's at least one, maybe two major discharges, and oscillation events I can read up on, and psychohazard levels I can correlate with activity, and..." He starts, immediately diving into the data.
Zero Kiryu It's a reasonable request.

Zero hates the way Yuuki is looking at him, and he hates the fact that she took this dumpster fire of a conversation, emptied a fire extinguisher into it, and told him to tell her when there are flammables nearby. But he doesn't actually get an opportunity to answer her up front-- he's still trying to decide whether he wants to say anything, and what he wants to say if so.

Her request is not a request that he will refuse.

But then she picks up a giant fucking statue and walks off with it. Zero has no idea what the ramifications are of rearranging things in that way, but he doesn't think it's good. There is just one problem-- when it comes to exerting maximum brute force and speed, he cannot keep up with Yuuki going full tilt.

If he was close enough he could knock her down, or unbalance her by applying force to the statue at an odd angle. But there isn't anything he can do to simply compete with her once she's gone.

... And then, he woke up.

Zero rises from his chair almost immediately, brushing a hand through his hair in a momentary display of unconscious frustration. He moves to Yuuki's dentist chair and, waiting until she is stirring, replies:

"I was not 'into nothing'. I failed a semester to re-align the timeline of our educations. And..." He heaves a sigh, "there is not a Zero Kiryu for whom the trigger is light enough to shoot Yuuki."

The hunter circles the room to look towards the oversized chair that Priscilla is situated in.

"Priscilla," he seems utterly uninterested in the Actual Results, "are you alright?"
Staren     The name is scratched out. But this is a psychic representation. If the name were never known, there wouldn't be one. If it were forgotten by accident, it would be too worn to read or something. Scratching out speaks of deliberately forgetting... Why would she forget the name of someone, while they remain still so important?

    And then Yuuki reveals that she has superstrength, and Staren thinks something like 'Oh, so THAT'S her power, it's always been kind of weird that the XO of the Concord never displayed any special abilities besides diplomacy. I wonder what else she can do' And then he can only begin to puzzle at the gears before the doors open.

    NO.

        BAD.

            IT'S GOING TO GET YOU

                                     TERROR                                    

                                     . . .                                      

    He's sitting in a chair in Flamel's lab. Under his armor, he's soaked with cold sweat, and there's a bit of a vomit taste at the back of his mouth. "What the hell was that?!" He looks for Flamel. "What just HAPPENED?!" And then around to check on the others. "Is everybody alright?!"