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Septette Arcubielle      As the flames from impact friction and spilled chemicals die down, the deep-sea-styled cavern adopts a soft blue luminescence. It would almost seem peaceful if not for the wheezing and quiet moans of the injured. The chamber they're in now is perhaps two hundred feet tall, with coral-rimed stone columns and rough smoker vents extending upwards like trees.

     Beyond the debris-strewn impact site, the rock formations break up line-of-sight to such an extent that it's hard to tell where the cavern's walls are, much less where any tunnels or warrens might be. Hand-sized jellyfish drift overhead peacefully and little minnows cautiously emerge from crevices to see if it's safe, swimming through the air like water. If not for the guns pointed inwards through the gaping hole in the asteroid, it might almost seem serene.

     Most of Carcer's crew seem happy for the weapons Staren offers them (including Orchid's one, once he recovers a bit), but Carcer herself waves him off. "Fuck this," she groans hoarsely- maybe at Asche, maybe at the situation as a whole. She reaches across her body with her remaining hand and pulls a softball-sized metal device from her pocket, still sparking from ragged wires: those familiar with Starbounder technology might recognize it as a teleporter core, likely ripped from the Blind Tiger at the last moment. "Not gonna catch my double-decker here. We're gettin' out."

     She staggers to her feet, pins the teleporter core to the ground with her foot, and twists the head of her cane. It pops free with a click, and extends a thin white energy blade with a snap of her wrist. She steadies herself, then plunges it into a specific point on the core. Immediately, the air around her shimmers and distorts. Something like a green portal materializes, but when she reaches out to touch it she draws her hand back as if burned. "Hck. One-sided... Bruno! Gimme your arm!" Bruno still seems a bit too dazed to respond.
Septette Arcubielle      At the far end of the cavern, occluded by the stalagmites and smoker vents' swirling dark fog, there's a distant grinding shriek. It sounds like the muffled, profane bleating of an electronic locust, and it carries a mentally-intrusive frisson of dread. Alicia visibly tenses as she looks back over her shoulder. Her crewmates freeze for a split second, seized by an animalistic fear.

     "Bruuuno," she says in a shakily sweet voice, "HURRY."
Staren     Staren quirks an eyebrow at the jellyfish and then exclaims, "Oh, COME ON!" when minnows swim through the air in blatant defiance of physics.

    Alicia was carrying a teleporter! That seems like a good idea... but then a portal opens instead? "Uhhhhh... I'm not sure that's safe. George...?" He gives the one among them who's probably dealt with this technology most a questioning look, and moves to restrain anyone who tries to go through the portal, although if someone starts to fight him over it he lets them go. "...Do you think maybe wherever that goes is where the five thousand ended up? Could something be messing up erchius teleporters here?"

    There's a monster noise and the mercenaries get scared. Staren sighs. "Calm down. I'm sure we can fight whatever that is if we have to."

    It's cheating, perhaps, to force his robotically synthesized voice to be calm when he felt that supernatural dread too. But it's hardly the first time.
August Kohler There's a shimmer through the portal. A familiar redhead to many in a thick gray coat steps forward after the distress call comes out, visibly armed with a custom revolver and a combat knife, mirrored bracelet on his wrist. August Kohler takes several seconds to look over those there, asking simply and with both urgency and slight deadpan, "What's the situation."

As he joins with the group, the screeching immediately has him on guard. Hand moves to revolver, ready to quick draw it the moment a hostile appears, supernatural dread washing over him. He takes a breath, and pushes on towards Alicia. "I got your distress call. August Kohler, here to help."

And as he does so, he tries to make line of sight. Better to shoot something if you can see it, right?
Nova Terra     Nova freezes at the same time as the Tiger's crew...

    ... Not because she's afraid, but because she's trying to pinpoint the location of those sounds. As has been pointed out, if there is something hostile here (and by those sounds there probably is) then it's likely on its way here right now.

    Working out the approximate direction of the screeches, Nova reaches a hand into a small suit compartment on her wrist. Pulling out a spherical plasma grenade, she proceeds to twist the device and separate it into two. She throws both of them to either side of the most likely approach to where the group currently stands. They attach themselves to the coral, before beeping to signal their arming.

    Nova drops down to one knee, bringing her visor down over her eyes and raising her rifle in the same direction. She takes a few deep breathes as she patiently waits for the first sign of movement, finger slowly moving onto the trigger.
Android 17 Seventeen takes a breath and tries to think of how to approach the situation until he gets distracted by all of the strange forms of life he can see here.  Shaking his head, he can sightsee later, trying to get to the bottom of all of this comes first.  Of course, a few things happen first...

First, the transporter comes down thanks to the captain, but instead of a transporter, they get a portal?  He's not sure how knowledgable Staren is on any of this.  Thinking about this, it's hard to say how trustworthy anyone around here is, because they don't know who sabotaged the ship.  There was more than one call to not worry about it.  

Of course, this makes him worry about it more.

However, as the sounds of some far off creature, and the shiver of fear running down his back...yeah, of course, things weren't going to be /easy/.  Stretching out, Android 17 nearly has been exposed to the vacuum of space, crashed through a large rock, and now about to fight some fear-inducing things?  Could be animals or monsters, could be just about anything.  

"Easy guys, if it can do fear like this, obviously it's trying to put you off guard.  If it's trying to make you afraid, then it's itself afraid," Probably...even he can't be sure, but it's better than telling them to panic and scatter.  That /NEVER/ works out.  Let me tell you, Seventeen has seen a LOT of movies in his time after liberation.

They're neat!
Captain Flint      Flint feels the invasive element of fear. This would be the third time that he's gone on a mission where a hostile presence exerts unnatural mental influence upon him. Naturally, it'll be exerting that some influence on Silver, and on the men. Silver might work with him, but the men... he can't afford for them to fear anything but him.

     "Mr. Packard. The weapons." A hairy-chested bear of a pirate nods, venturing into one of the breach pods to retrieve a weathered duffel bag. He sets it on the ground, opens it, and retrieves an AK-47 from the bag, loading it briskly and stepping away. The remaining four Walrus men--Flint, Silver, and their two crew members--do the same, each retrieving a weapon likely stolen from a place far more modern than their native world.

     "You all feel it. You all hear it." The captain looks between his crew, then points in the direction of the unnatural sound. Apparently, Seventeen's logic falls on deaf ears where the non-native group of pirates is concerned. "Kill it." They all move to get line of sight on whatever's causing the sound.

     Flint stops them, setting up a position behind Nova. "Fire at will." A cacophony of gunfire, all of different makes and models, fills the air, the sound itself seemingly trying to drown out the unnatural noise. Perhaps this actually will kill it--or perhaps it will only provoke it. In the event of the latter, his position behind Nova's mines was chosen deliberately, to try and afford an advantage.
Zwei     As established earlier, during the period the flames are dying down, Asche has already headed outside to the damaged gun. Whatever Zwei did earlier, the defenses are non-hostile to them now, so the larger Armiger unit magnetically attaches itself to the gun ring, then begins pulling the shrapnel and dust back in as well, conserving as much time and energy as possible by re-grabbing all the metal (even vapour) and fragged components, and collapsing them back into place, matching pieces together as best they fit and filling in the cracks and gaps with the raw elements floating around.

    Once the breach is roughly reconstructed, Asche hunkers down to spin up the Transcience Delta Drive and begin matter manipulation, fusing the pieces into seamless wholes and fabricating the remaining fraction of lost material from scratch. He remains wirelessly connected to the gun's systems, reading them himself until there's a green diagnostic.

    Weiss has meanwhile been hassling Carcer about her arm, scanning around for biomass until she finds the missing half of the limb, and then pestering her to stick it back on before cell necrosis starts setting in. Why she purports to care is fuzzy, but provided the missing arm is present and *relatively* intact, Weiss will start 'stitching' it back on with the equivalent of laser-operated surgery, teeny tiny beams (maybe nanobots too? it's not like one would see them) fusing nerves and blood vessels and muscle fibres back together 'one at a time'. Provided she can do that though, she still tells Carcer not to use it for a while; her body needs to actually heal the damage and biologically reconnect the tissue before she'll regain full function.

    Weiss doesn't seem surprised at the teleporter failure. Theoretically, Zwei could choose to just never visibly show surprise period, but it somehow feels pretty legitimate. <<"What did I *just* say?">> she asks rhetorically, though Asche had been the mouthpiece that time. The two of them are currently busy with their chosen courses of action, and seem to be willing to rely on the big mob of Elite muscle to deal with the screamy monster.
Starbound Flotilla     George actually shrugs a bit at Staren. "Well, teleporter cores aren't, you know," He gestures vaguely. "My deal, exactly. Moonfin's the expert. But, the way I heard it, it's tough to make a teleport kill you or anything, as long as you're not doing what the Holos were doing." And then suddenly, here comes August out the gate. "Huh. You wanted to get involved in this, Gus?" He says, taking a caught-off-guard posture, before that posture evaporates. "Well, getcherself ready on it."

    Whatever "getting ready" seems to mean, he's focused on it. He undoes his helmet, and then pulls out some kind of fast-injection syringe to jam into his own neck, then plugs his ears with some kind of protective earplugs before restoring his helmet. He draws a heavy bat that he's acquired recently, something fresh and strange now of note. The Harold Bat! Alongside it, a hefty pistol ought to do the trick.

    "Quick rundown is, the containment guns are a tad compromised, and we just blew a hole in the cave. That means whatever's in here that was being contained is probably gonna make a break for it. Need a bit of cover to let Zwei bring the gun back online, you know? Don't know what'll get out, but best we don't breach something too bad."

    George is mostly at work on emplaced defenses; with his selected weapons holstered, he sets up several turrets, robotic arms, and a few brutal flame traps and electrification traps to use and abuse, trying to key them not to strike allies but to help them deal with the swarm, centered on chokepointing the breach hole.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa is now safely clad in the vacsuit thanks to Staren and she's armed and ready to go as she can be. Carcer and her crew get their footing and have a portal? It seems to teleport core they may have a way out. Something seems up with the core, however. Then comes the sounds of a likely monster of some sort.

"This is so not good."

She keeps calm as she can though making ready, and thankfully some backup makes its way through the portal in the form of August Kohler.

"More help is welcome."



Kotone is not able to use her cloak system today but will move to find what cover she can to get ready to fight.

"If we panic we'll all go down, you clearly proved you good enough to stay alive in a crisis or we would not be here now."

Adding to the attempt to keep the mercs calmer and she seems about as ready as she can be for whatever is to come after them.
Septette Arcubielle      "Right, here's the crab. Space colony's got an overcoat, decided to dry-gulch us, we breezed on in here, and now some kitchener buttonman's gonna try and keep us from gettin' the wounded from crushin' out. Clear?" The mobster-looking gal who's greeting August might not have the best grasp of the situation herself- if her cauterized arm-stump and clammy skin are any indication, she's seen vastly better days. She grudgingly accepts Weiss's help with 'stitching' her arm back on, though she seems tense through the entire process. "Don't see the point in that. Either we make it here or we're canned. Arm like that won't help me either way."

     Asche's work on the gun is about halfway done- the systems cooperate with him, but the damage is deceptively deep- when Flint's men open fire into the murky clouds. The shrieking intensifies for a moment, then goes abruptly silent. All noise in the chamber disappears in fact- conversation becomes impossible, gunfire is wholly muted, and even the beat of one's own heart fades away. The first signs of movement shouldn't be visible through the smoker clouds, but they are: an indistinct shape shambles forward, seemingly oblivious to its own visibility, but clear as day through the opaque black smoke as an impossibly dark silhouette.

     Then the mines go off, and the spell is broken. Their explosion is silenced too, but sound returns with the ringing tinnitus and scattering of debris- just as the shape surges forward into the crashsite clearing, staggered but not slowed, and seemingly heedless of gunfire directed its way. It looks like an elephant-sized chromatic aberration, its black central mass fringed with shifting hues as if in a subtractive color diagram or blacklit kaleidoscope, and shifts between vaguely bipedal and quadrupedal stances as it moves towards the party.
August Kohler People fill August in and greet him. Others open fire on the monster, and the mobster-lady with her weird speak gets an affirmative from August, who only somewhat understands what she just said, and has no idea who the 'kitchener buttonman' is. "Clear."

The situation's solid enough for him, though as all noise disappears, August tenses up. He actually draws the custom reflective revolver, as something shambles forward, and the mines detonate around it, scattering debriss and staggering the monster. And that's certainly a monster. As they gain the ability to speak again, August says what everyone's thinking.

"Ah, shit."

The revolver is pointed at the monster, and fired. One. Two. Three. Three shots let off at its center of mass. If that's not enough, another three let out, emptying the chamber of the revolver, as August preps to grab his speed loader if he doesn't get attacked in the process. They're just ordinary bullets, and it's meant to gauge the monster's attack more than actually try and kill it right here (though August is hoping it does). When he wants to do something big, he usually uses his Persona, after all.
Android 17 Seventeen looks towards the spooky space ghost thing, after a moment, he probably says what anyone who has never seen one of these things before says.  

"What the hell is that?" he asks, just about as shocked as probably almost everyone else is in this situation.  However, as people are already shooting at it, and it DOES seem to be working, and it /ISN'T/ an actual unshootable ghost, apparently.

Also, everyone else seems mostly interested in staying away from it, Seventeen charges the monster, aiming to fling himself at it in a very quick burst of speed, aiming to flip midair to try and slam his feet into the side of the thing's head, before flipping off and landing in a three-point stance.  

Seventeen was a much better brawler than a blaster, after all.
Staren     Staren can make no sence of Carcer's briefing to August. What the hell language was that? he has no time to worry about it though. There's gunfire, and then silence. Staren spots something in the darkness, and shoots at it with his beam cannons, then with his laser rifle.

    Then sound comes back. Fortunately Staren's ears can't ring at the moment.

    "Come on! We need to keep it away from the wounded!" Staren urges.

    Any crewmen who recover enough to use the weapons he's handed out find them to be automatic firearms using caseless smart material rounds that harden for penetration against hard targets and soften for tissue damage against soft targets.
Nova Terra     The silence is eerie, Nova turning her head left and right as she tries to figure out if she's suddenly been struck with a case of deafness or if it's everywhere. The looks on some of the other people's faces give her the answer she needs. Relieved, Nova returns to looking down her scope. She spots the shape moving in the clouds... She doesn't fire.

    The grenades she'd placed down work well, not only in rattling the creature into attack but also in breaking whatever strange silence effect had fallen over them. Nova briefly shakes off the effect of the explosion, once more looking down her scope. She still doesn't fire.

    The strangely chromatic monster comes rushing towards the party, charging with all the fierceness you'd expect from a strange alien creature in an oceanic space station. But Nova doesn't panic. She also doesn't fire.

    It's not until the very last moment, when she has the perfect shot, the Nova pulls the trigger. Immediately after her rifle barks out one of its large bullets towards the creature, Nova rolls to the side to avoid its charge. She then jumps to her feet, beginning to reposition.
Starbound Flotilla     George looks about as placid as someone can be under the circumstances. The screaming void in space is one that he focuses on hard, keeping the Harold Bat slung at his back while he takes solid, level shots. Each one fires smart-bullets, each bullet tags and tracks the target. Any automated defenses the Flotilla has built are keyed into them, trying to focus them down hard! By electrifying, burning, and blasting the creature, he hopes he can start the process of dumping enough damage into the beast to keep it from making it out the cave exit!

    He seems a little zoned-out, moreso than he usually is, but more deliberately lethal with his approach. It's liable to put his defenses and emplacements at risk, from how much he's sort of alpha-striking the thing with his constructions. "Don't worry," He says to Staren. "Don't think this guy's interested in killing the wounded." Why he thinks that is totally unclear, but he doesn't clarify in the least; he makes sure to call that out where those wounded crewmen can properly hear it.
Captain Flint      Flint and his men continue to fire, even after silence takes over. They attempt to communicate to each other, once their initial salvo is complete, that they're reloading, only to find that not even their voices carry. The explosion of the mines and the return of sound carries the tail end of a sentence from Flint. "--the mortar!"

     Silver is the only one who both hears and understands. He reaches into the duffel bag, tossing his crutch aside for the moment to shakily stand up straight. The quartermaster grunts with discomfort as his prosthetic digs into his skin, but manages to pull what appears to be a small cannon, with a fuse and everything, from the bag. Unlike those aboard a ship, this one is quite short, and pointed primarily upwards. He and Flint work hastily to load a wad and cannonball into it. Flint points at the stalactites above the creature, and Silver nods.

     While the crew reload and continue firing, Flint and Silver aim the mortar at the stalactites, light the fuse, and let a cannonball fly, sending it crashing into them and dislodging them, creating a rain of sharp, fast-falling projectiles mixed with blunt, smoldering rubble.

     Amidst the chaos, Flint shouts an order. "If you're one of mine, form up on George!"
Kotone Yamakawa The Captain is healed up by Zwei's two remote units she waits as something else happens now she can hear the shrieking then all sound stops? That's quite creepy to the cyborg, then the mines go off and something is there. There's no sound from it and there is something else now. It's time to open up as some horror born of the very fuel that runs her ship is making right for them. She'll level her weapon and line up a shot she'll open fire at whatever this horror is and try to pump as many rounds as she can into the central mass of this thing.

Brass goes flying and Kotone will not move from her cover just yet, she knows she won't be able to hold it for long and will have to keep on the move. At least that's her plan right now do some serious burst damage right now, might actually pan out.
Zwei     <<"See? What'd I tell you about weird monsters you find in Erchius mines?">> says Weiss when the 'monster' finally reveals itself, nothing even close to being along the lines of the strange jellies and coral growths. It doesn't belong 'underwater'; at least nominally. Zwei can think of . . .

<<Not leaving Weiss to deal with it solo.>>
||Repairs will take approximately nine times longer with a smaller field diameter.||
<<There are other guns if one really needs to be used. The ring aperture rotates, right?>>
||Ostensibly.||
<<Cool. Castle.>>
||Castle.||

    Once again, Weiss and Asche switch places, the former seamlessly picking up on the latter's job, and the lattern now picking up the 'having to fight a big nasty' task. Asche appears directly in the creature's line of charging movement, only just short of George's minefield, crunching into the dirt and coral. One shoulder segment pops open and fires a vertical sheet of tiny explosives into the silhouette with a simultaneous volley of electric cracks, followed by implosive thumps and bright flashes of fire and hard radiation. The opposite wrist levels and flicks open the multi-weapon aperature, sweeping a powerful pulse laser from the edge of the chromatic abberation to its dead black center, leaving faintly visible plasma trails.
Septette Arcubielle      The hail of bullets and stalactites strikes true, driving the creature back for a moment just before it can strike Asche: its polygonal edges ripple and squirm where it's hit, hinting at injuries underneath. In place of blood, its wounds dribble a thin translucent purple fluid- liquid erchius, though the cauterizing plasma laser gives off a smell of burning flesh anyway. One of the stalactites pierces into its body, quickly adopting the same chromatic-black coloration as the rest. Seventeen's feet strike true, finding an unexpectedly solid surface beneath the angular obscuration. For a subliminal instant, the censorship seems to break, giving an impression of-

     Three oval eyes, arranged like the petals of a lotus. Yellow sclera, red iris, cold malice.

     As soon as it recovers from the fusillade, the bizarre creature lashes out with an angular polygonal tentacle, sweeping up the teleporter core from the ground and snuffing out its portal- Carcer leaps away, more concerned with her immediate self-preservation. Two more tendrils start to do... something to the device. After a moment, the core is engulfed by the same shifting chromatic darkness as the creature itself, obscuring it from view as if by contagious association.

     Rather than attempt to cross the rest of the minefield its form distends with long forearm-sized spikes like a hedgehog raising its quills, then fires them in an omnidirectional burst! As if in deliberate defiance of George's words, one of them embeds itself deeply in Not-Bruno's chest, dropping him like a sack of potatoes.

     Its long tendrils scoop up another of Carcer's crewmen- the one in Staren's orange suit- knocking the gun from his hand and methodically dislocating his joints with a series of cracks, working its way inwards towards his torso. He screams in unison with it, shaking the chamber with an eerie cacophany, and the blurred colors around its edges intensify visibly in hue.
Zwei <<There's something underneath it then.>>
||Cognitive camouflage. Ambush predator, not an Erchius apparition.||
<<At least Erchius juiced though, which is a problem.>>

    Asche is at point blank (and also huge) when the inverse-chroma spines come flying out. Due to his vanguard position, he takes a great many of them (though that's sort of intentional, given he's standing in front of the Blind Tiger and the more vital crew). Suspecting something up with the Erchius blood already, he actually guards his head and chest with his massive forearms, whereupon the spines make contact with the plating, and punch an inch deep all over without any of the subsurface weave activating at all. No flash. No flickers. No drops of light. A lot of cracking metalloids and trace escaping carbon vapour.

<<Yeah fuck this.>>
||Mass-drivers will be fine.||

    While shill at point blank, the creature's spines still in him, Asche reaches out to grab hold of its tendrils in his massive clawed hands, grappling the creature in close proximity as his shoulder pylons both snap to a different slightly-open configuration, and from the exposured apertures, he double shotgun blasts back his own 'spines', in the form of dual close combat fusillades of massive carbide blades with flash-superheated edges, like giant, extremely dense, 10000 degree knives. Both wrists cycle to gauss weapons, driving hypersonic slugs into the grapple as well, close enough that the magnetic discharge outright burns. It's all extremely loud, blasting waves of pressure through the ground.
August Kohler Well, that's a horrible bleeding monster and bullets don't put it down. August is about to summon his Persona when the forearm-sized spikes launch forward. He rolls forward, dodging most of them, but one impales itself in his shoulder, causing August to let off a scream of pain as the blood oozes from the wound. Before, he'd probably need immediate medical attention. But now?

August holsters the revolver, and moves his hands to grab the spike, removing it with surprising strength. As soon as he does so, the wound...begins to repair itself. Blood begins recirculating, flesh and bone knit themselves back together, It doesn't stop that arm from feeling weird and funky to use, or the pain from setting in, or the exhaustion from healing it from being there, but it allows August to quickly raise his mirrored bracelet to eye-level. "Come out, Dietrich!"

The redhead's Persona appears in a flash of grey and dark red, a giant mechanized black knight with a large mechanical greatsword, upon whose back August mounts himself. The Persona charges forward at the horrible monster, moving to swing that sword directly into it, but seconds before it impacts, inky black darkness surrounds the blade, moving to give it a horrible corrosive kick that'll sap the monster's strength. The sheer superpowered strength behind the blow is possibly enough to send the horrible thing flying backwards, if August is lucky.

"Something about Dietrich is so much more intuitive than the Tin Soldier, and I love it. Let's get this party started."
Android 17 Seventeen can do a lot, but avoiding tentacle spikes in every direction was a bit much, even for him.  Not that he could even begin to expect that.  The ANDROID BARRIER comes up to try and protect him, but even that wasn't enough.  While it does do something, he still finds himself on the uncomfortable end of spiky hell.

Hitting the ground, with a new gash in his body, he rolls to his feet.  Wincing in pain at the new injury and looking at his bloodstained shirt.  Well, he's going to need a new one of those.  

'Yeah fuck this.'  Seventeen cannot help but to wholly agree with this sentiment.  

He flips back, trying to put some distance, and brings both hands down.  What follows is a massive blast of energy, electrified, that aims to soar down towards the creature and explode, leaving a nice electrical charged explosion when it all finishes.  

Landing, he does not take his eyes off the beast.
Starbound Flotilla     George's placid, deadened approach doesn't falter as spines whirl and whip through the air, slamming close to him. A set of four heavy pylons emerge from the equipment at his back, sparking and surging with crackling electricity that dances between heavy columns of hyperglass, and George simply steps aside from each lethal strike that threatenes to impale him. It's expending a lot of enriched hyperglass, but it sure /looks/ effortless, as if there's just not that much threat to the spines at all. Despite the fact that they are clearly, brutally lethal.

    George isn't focused on actually preserving the people, but rather something wholly different, for reasons that seem to be hard to parse. "See? Not really focused on the lethality." He keeps blasting away, away, away at the mass of hostile nullification, moving among his emplacements and such to weld damage and rerplace lost parts. Then, there's a brief pause in his shots.

    "Ah, shit!" He whispers quietly, seeming to slip in his aim before firing a shot dead on at the head of the abducted, tortured crewman. The shot, unless halted, is liable to pierce clean through the amygdala, among other parts of the brain, with surprisingly enhanced precision. "Sorry!"
Captain Flint      Carcer's men aren't the only pirates to be struck by the beast. Flint, Silver, and two of the Walrus vanguard manage to make it to George's fortified position, but Packard, the hirsute fellow who'd gotten the guns out, is skewered like a pincushion, falling to the ground in a silent, bloody mess. Flint holsters his pistol and makes a hasty dash back over to the fallen crewman, reaching for the AK and scooping it up.

     While Asche grapples with the creature, Flint gives an order to Silver and the surviving crew. "Focus fire on the tentacles!" The captain shoulders the assault rifle, looking down the ironsights and releasing controlled bursts. If he can maim it, perhaps he can deny the creature its long-range options, and force it onto George's minefield. His men join in, although the element of fear has them firing with much less control than the captain or his quartermaster.
Kotone Yamakawa Well it seems they might be doing some damage, she sees the thing bleed purple and has a damn good idea what that stuff is. Memories of the horrors under the mine back when she worked directly for the starbounders came back to mind even as the attacks were underway. She moved without much notice as soon as the thing looks her way she's gone she's moving she notices the thing has tendrils. She hates that so much that that thing has and she gets hit very well. It was close not a direct hit but it still did a fair bit of damage she's also likely lost the seals on her suit due to the damage, there's not much more she can do about that.

Her SMG comes up again as she finishes emptying the magazine into the thing before she'll slam in another and keep on the move, this was going to be a rough day and what's worse is it's targeting the mercs and pirate support. She does something stupid or beave, maybe both. She's going to move in firing several shots to distract the beat as she's going to try to reach it and rip tendrils apart with her bare hand and cybernetic strength trying to free the man but also putting herself as a major target for the thing.
Staren     Everyone knows that porcupine monsters shoot their quills! Staren turns on his forcefield and hits the deck when he sees what's coming!

    It... well... could have been worse? Some quills go over his head. The ones that don't shatter the forcefield, the first ones to hit losing their momentum but later ones spearing into Staren! Afterwards he watches as the people they saved are attacked. Damn! He gets up, pulling the quills free of the holes left in his armor (his metal 'skin' underneath is only scratched so far) and flies to the side of the one who just caught a quill in the chest, yanking it out and applying a nanobandage to try and stabilize the guy, but who knows what these quills do. Poison? Disease?

    He fires beam shots at the monster, his laser rifle dangling from its carry strap, but for the moment his focus is on the injured -- monitoring sensor readings from his suits, and looking for an opportunity to snatch the guy who is systematically having every bone in his body broken.

    He can fix that if he can get the guy help too and it doesn't squish the brain!
Nova Terra     Nova is running. She sees the formation of the spines and anticipates the sudden burst. Nova jumps, avoid arond one, twisting her body around another... But the numbers are too much as a third hits. It doesn't penetrate her suit or skin, but it does knock the wind out of Nova and send her tumbling.

    Nova hits the ground, rolling to a stop. She groans quietly, the blow having taken a lot out of her. She slowly gets to her feet once more, only peripherally aware of the battle still raging. But during her brief disorientation, there's a flash of recall... Three strange eyes.

    If it has eyes, they represent a weakness.

    Nova's focus recovers and she starts moving again. She aims her rifle in the rough direction of the creature's head. It's hard to tell exactly due to the strange distortion around it. But if she can confirm the location of the eyes, then she can use that.

    Switching the canister rifle to automatic, Nova begins firing bursts towards the monster, continuing to move.
Septette Arcubielle      Asche's close-ranged blasting is less effective than anticipated- the creature is fleshy, but feels uncannily flexible and almost amorphous. The high-tech barrage punches through its tissue, but whatever vital organs it has squirm out of the way- and then it's torn out of his grasp by Dietrich's blade golf-walloping it back a dozen feet, leaving several of its tentacles crystallizing into solid erchius in Asche's grasp. As soon as George kills the man it's holding and Kotone closes in to retrieve his corpse, it tosses him aside like trash and lunges for another- only for its remaining tentacles to be pruned down by Flint and crew's concentrated gunfire and Kotone's attacks.

     Nova's rifle-fire catches at least one of its eyes, if the way its vague head-shape abruptly snaps to the side is any indication. Despite its bleating in pain, Android 17's electrified blast is responded to with seemingly supernatural alacrity: it holds the modified teleporter core aloft in its "hands", conjuring up a functioning portal to some distant green field that absorbs the majority of the attack. The periphery of the blast still strikes true, drawing out a pained hiss from the creature. Staren's shots have a similar effect. He's able to patch up the impaled crewman nicely (no awful diseases or poisons that he can tell), though when he reaches the orange-suited crewman, he'll find the fellow's already been shot through the brain- George's bullet, not one of the monster's quills.

     Rather than close in over George's minefield, it attempts to shove Asche and Dietrich back with a surprisingly powerful shoulder-check, then tilts its head back and lets out a silent keening howl. Again, all audible sound in the area is momentarily suppressed- but this time the imperceptible 'volume' of its roar feels as though it shakes bones and ties muscles into knots, along with the mentally-invasive effect of its earlier screech. The black veil over its body subliminally flickers in places-

     Clammy chalky flesh, bruised sickly pink and green. Repulsive to touch, bristling under the surface.

     -and Bruno, one of the few members of Carcer's crew to remain in the fight, collapses to his hands and knees. His muscles visibly contort and writhe under his skin, squeezing the air from his lungs, then cracking his ribs and long bones as if he were crumpling under intense pressure. The creature shakes itself, visibly revitalized by his suffering, and stands upright.
Android 17 Proving to be more uncanny than he was expecting, the best shows just how horrid it is.  People start dying, and worse George is putting them down...of course, he sees why a moment later when the big guy is...eaten.  Not really eaten, but uh...

Consumed from the inside out.  It's absolutely horrifying to watch...and very anger inducing.  His own shield was just not able to push the creature's wail back.  Staggering as his entire body feels sluggish and hard to control...

He bursts forward again, this time heading for the face of the creature and aiming a punch directly for the side of its head to try and stop that horrible wail, before flipping back and aiming another energized ball of energy towards the back of the creature's head.  

This time, he stays in the air, trying to find a way to better hurt this thing, but right now he's feeling not so great.  
August Kohler The strike impacts and knocks the creature back, and everyone works together, but this is one tough monster. Dietrich is shoulderchecked back, cracking armor and knocking him off guard enough that his attacks are wobbly. August groans in pain, but maintains his grip on the handholds, and decides to continue his assault, even as his knight Persona has to start repairing his armor and August is unsteadied heavily.

The sword is swung again, but mid-swing, it transforms with a whirring of gears, becoming a chainsaw-bladed whipsword, which moves to try and lash around the torso and grapple the creature, before wreathing itself in flame, preferably setting it on fire enough that the fire will persist for quite a bit, and the chainsaw gears start grinding into it as well. It's a precise blow...but is it precise enough with the unsteadiness?
Captain Flint      Being posted up with George, Flint is able to observe his little 'mistake.' He trusts the other captain enough that he doesn't care what sort of 'mistake' is made, so long as it doesn't endanger him or his crew. There is the question of why, though. Gears turn in Flint's head as he reloads. He doesn't have to ponder for long--the beast appears to have healed itself through sheer malice, or perhaps something resembling schadenfreude.

     The keening howl sends one of the two remaining crew members into a spasmodic fit as his muscles knot together. He collapses to the ground and is impaled by a stalagmite, his mouth open in a soundless scream, his shotgun clattering silently beside him. Flint turns an eye to Silver and the sole remaining conscious crewman--both focused on killing the creature.

     In the silence, Flint lifts his boot and crushes his struggling crewman's neck beneath it. He looks over his shoulder--the act is unseen, at least by Silver and the remaining crewman. Better that this one didn't become a liability. Unbeknownst to Flint, a crewman in the drop pod has regained consciousness.

     As the creature stands upright, the effects of its roar nearly send Silver to the ground, too. Flint catches him, fire in his eyes, and shoves him into a prone position atop an outcropping, thrusting the fallen crewman's shotgun into the quartermaster's arms. 'Fight,' his seafoam eyes command. They brook no threat--and they convey that same command to the sole (wholly) conscious crewman, as well, rallying his men without a verbal command.

     The captain reaches into his longcoat and produces a heavy bottle of what looks like liquor. It's actually pitch--a thick black, extremely flammable liquid he's learned to keep on hand for instances just like this one. Grabbing the bottle by its neck, he tosses it overhand, shattering it upon the beast's occluded body.

     As Silver and the remaining crewman make another salvo of bullets, Flint nudges George and pantomimes lighting a cigarette, then points at the thick black fluid which runs down the creature's body.
Staren     Staren briefly frowns when George murders the guy who got tentacled, but he put fair odds that the guy was gonna be converted into another erchius monster, so that's probably reasonable. The wail makes his body strain against itself, metal creaking silenced as motors push too hard. He tries to shut motor functions off for a few seconds, if it helps.

    As soon as he can move, he rushes over to Bruno's side with another nanobandage. Damn, why doesn't he carry painkillers? Or knockout drugs? He's never really needed them before, though...

    This fight is not going the right way. He needs to nudge it back towards victory. Weakening the creature without overextending himself.

    Kneeling by the fallen Bruno, Staren takes aim at the monster's center of mass and fires a burst from his laser rifle. Then again, overriding the safeties, and again and again until it burns out from emptying so much energy into one tiny point. He can fix it later. He has tons of other weapons.
Kotone Yamakawa There's nothing that can be done sadly for the man who's been tentacled he's dead and maybe it was indeed a mercy kill.

Kotone also keeps moving and this is what saves her from the wrath of the beast for a moment. She just barely gets clear of the attack on her and makes it time to return the favour.

There's no time to worry about the dead right now the living are what can be focused upon and have something done about it. Maybe they can learn something from the body later? For now, though they need to put this thing down as hard and fast as they can. As the fight continues on Bruno. Wait? Is that thing feeing on it's suffering it looks like it /is/.

She sees Staren is on Bruno right now that the best she can help for right now as she switched up her tactics from using her SMG to pulling a grenade that is clearly a bit past her world's native level of tech. the plasma grenade is armed and she lobs it for the beast.

"CATCH!"

She calls out to it and then follows it up with a burst of fire from her rifle as she keeps up the pressure.
Starbound Flotilla     George glances to Flint, and gives him the sort of quick bounce of the head that shows that he much approves of and appreciates his efforts to deal with the tentacles. He keeps laying into the thing, but soon he's off his feet and on his knees. The earplugs are helping, but not nearly enough. The silent scream actually causes many of his guns to malfunction badly, and power conduits pop and burst dramatically. "God, guh, god damn it, shit..." He groans, struggling to his feet.

    He fumbles with his gun, but it's hard to manage to reload the damn thing when he's so brain-blasted by the assault. He glances to Bruno, seems to run numbers in his head for a moment, and then makes his decision. Now, instead, he draws the Harold Bat, acquired from Zone 1, and surges forward. The great thing about this is that the foe hasn't damaged his armor, only his body, and that means his microthrusters are still gloriously active. He surges in as fast and hard as he can, and swings the bat with a superhumanly strong strike meant to get it off its balance briefly.

    Then, unfolding his helmet just for a moment, he reaches in, grabs his cigarette, and tosses it on the body of the beast, meant to light up what Flint just set into motion, before diving away.
Nova Terra     Nova smirks as she manages to take out one of the eyes... She thinks. But it should confirm the location of the eyes. However before she has an advantage to truly take advantage of the knowledge, the silence suddenly returns. Nova is able to resist the mind intrusion effect of the wail, but she can feel her body cry out as it is warped. She silently grunts in pain, dropping down to one knee as she struggles to keep the pain from overwhelming her.

    Struggling to reach a hand down to the flashbangs attached to her thigh, Nova manages to grip one and pull it off. She then rears her arm back, activates the device and throws it hard towards the perceived location of the monster's eyes. Hopefully penetrating the distortion around it first, the device explodes in a blinding flash of light and energy to try and stagger the creature.
Zwei <<Confirmed. The creature is emitting sounds that are destructively interfering with all ambient noise for effective perceived cancellation.>>
||I had wondered if this phenomena would be capable of inflicting injuries if amplified.||
<<Looks like yes!>>
||Its origins are perfectly obvious now. Beginning planned countermeasures.||
<<Let's see how the theoretical setup works off of the whiteboard!>>

    When the roar comes at Asche first, the tesselating lines invisibly etched under the exterior black plating all shimmer at once, like facets in a diamond caught in just the right light. The white that then runs through them turns gold, and a wave of tingling static washes out in a spherical radius, attenuating sharply at its edges. The sound that is not a sound crashes soundlessly against it, where instead of some kind of barrier or energy shield flaring up, the waveform splits to either side instead, rippling out as per the venetian blind.

    ||"The opportunity to test variable interdiction field entanglement is valuable, but at this point, it would be best if you died."|| Asche intones to the horrible Erchius critter, shattering the crystallized tentacles in both hands. Freed up, blue static fills his grip, and the shape of a tremendous two-handed fluked sword replaces it, as seamless, black, and minimalist as the rest of his design. The edge all around flares with gold light, but no heat emission, as if caught in a loop around its length, or constrained to its edge.

    ||"In imitation of a wise design, I will locate your vital organs promptly enough."|| he rumbles, before swinging the sword through a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cleaving arc through the creature, as well as the coral, rock formations, and any unfortunate marine life, splitting the air with both a perfect line of radiance, and a whirling vacuum wave around it. It's only when it cuts into the monster that heat explodes into the wound --specifically from hard photon collision. Solid light decohering into insane thermal energy bloom.
Septette Arcubielle      Seventeen slams into the side of the beast's head again, sending it reeling even before he strikes the back of its skull with his energy blast. It lurches forward unsteadied, seemingly dizzied by its accumulated injuries- and sees Dietrich's blow coming just a little too late. Its left arm comes up to block the chainsword, which cuts and burns through flesh to halt at bone before it shoves him back again. It brings up its elbow to strike Dietrich on the chin, then twists around to backhand Seventeen out of the air with more alacrity than it's shown so far!

     That pattern of accelerating movement continues: it rips a chunk out of a stalagmite with what looks like a clawed foot and hurls it at Flint and friends in retaliation for the bottle of pitch, then leaps over the minefield as Staren blasts a chunk out of its chest and brings both hands down overhead in an attempt to smash him and Bruno both. Bruno manages to scramble out of the way despite his obvious agony- and is saved by Kotone and George's relentless assault, the microthruster-boosted bat-swing knocking it back over a smoker vent. It tries to retaliate by swinging hard at George and throwing another chunk of rock at Kotone, but its aim is skewed by Nova's timely flashbang. They shouldn't have too much trouble getting out of the way.

     It appears to open its 'jaws' to speak as sound returns- though difficult to notice until now, the polygonal blurriness surrounding it has consolidated and tightened over time, hugging its true form a little more closely. What comes out of its mouth is a sussurrus of hoarse babbling whispers, shorn of any discernable content by the electronic-locust-shrieking overtones. Even to detailed auditory analysis, it's just barely too fuzzed over with noise to decrypt anything useful.

     "### ### ### ### ## #####! #### ## ### #### ## #####!"

     Zwei may have a lock on its behavior, but the predictive understanding seems to be mutual. It catches Asche's blade in its hand with an ugly crunch, then opens another portal with the core in its off-hand and wrestles the blade inside before it can detonate and headbutts him directly (with a brief revelatory flash of too many eyes, splitting like raspberries, drooling blue blood).

     It takes a step back, surveys the assorted elites, and makes some kind of decision. It slams the modified teleporter core onto the ground, rapidly materializes a gate to some pleasantly sunny meadow on another world, and tries to squeeze itself through the human-sized aperture with a series of gruesome, violent crunches. It'll take a few seconds to wriggle through...
Staren     Staren wonders what the hell that field thing Zwei is doing is. No time to think about it now.

    Also: Damn RAISER swords are cool.

    Staren sees the beast coming, grabs Bruno, and dives out of the way -- thrusters and wings pushing him so fast he barely stops before slamming both of them into a stalagmite!

    Staren lets go of Bruno and turns around...

    Oh, that is NOT good. They can't let it escape!

    The armor pops off Staren's arms, clattering to the ground as he kicks off the Stalagmite, flying in an arc at the beast and trying to drop down on top of it. His arms start glowing, shining with light as he crosses them, then makes a chopping motion just as he impacts, like a dual-wielding swordsman doing some kind of X-strike technique. Similar principles to high-frequency weapons tear matter apart where his arms touch, and on top of that he just dumps a tremendous amount of electricity into the beast!

    Then he jumps off it and hits the ground like a sack of metal potatoes, steaming and smoking as his systems recover from the energy expenditure.
Nova Terra     The wail finally passes and Nova can feel her body free of whatever effect was twisting it. Thankfully there's nothing broken or badly torn, but she can feel pain across her whole body. It's going to take a little while to recover from that.

    Rising to stand, Nova is breathing hard. However, there is still fierce determination in her eyes as she looks at the creature trying to retreat. She spits out a small amount of blood that had gathered in her mouth, before saying, "Not so fast."

    Nova snaps her hand up, an aura of telekinetic energy flaring around it as she grips the creature in her mind's grip. She attempts to pull the creature back, trying to keep it from making it through the open portal if even for only a few more seconds. More time for her allies to get attacks in on it to kill it. But Nova is not just trying to pull the creature back. No, that would be too merciful.

    Nova's not inconsiderable power is trying to pull the creature apart. It pulls in quick rapid bursts from numerous directions, to literally rip large chunks of the creature's body away from it.
Android 17 Smashed into the ground as it retaliates against Seventeen.  The shield taking a bite out of the worst of the damage, and smashing him into the ground as he slides across it.  Hurt, but not out yet, the bleeding Seventeen pushes himself farther.  

Flipping back to his feet, he builds up power, his body glowing as he starts to power up, making a low roar as he knows it's now or never.  If they did not stop it here it would get out, and THAT world would suffer.  

Throwing himself into the attack, he aims to fly right towards the side of the creature.  Aiming to press himself against it, trying to force his momentum away from the portal and to splatter across the ground if he can.  

He just doesn't stop with that either, both hands charging with energy to slam into the creature, repeatedly barraging it.  
Captain Flint      The stalagmite strikes Flint square in the chest, as he's the only one not prone for cover. The force of the impact lifts him off of his feet, hurling him backwards and sending him rolling across the ground. His travel ceases, putting his eye inches from a broken-off chunk of stalagmite. The captain coughs, gritting his teeth. His gun is empty, with no more ammo, and the beast is on the retreat.

     What if it comes back?

     No.

     Flint draws his cutlass, stabbing it into the ground as Silver unloads into the retreating beast with the automatic shotgun. His shooting is panicked, but by comparison, the captain's resolve seems almost calm. The fine filigree upon the blade, a calling card of Andre of Astora, glimmers in the light. Using the sword as a crutch, Flint forces himself back to his feet. He tears it from the ground and charges.

     At first, the attack seems stupidly obvious--enough for Silver and the remaining crewman to shout clipped warnings at the captain. His sword is even raised over his head in what appears to be a tell. But then it falls to his side, and scrapes against the ground, kicking up an obscuring cloud of dust and flinging it towards the creature.

     Flint tumbles, rolling past it, and drives the blade into one of its legs with both hands, bringing it upwards in an arc to try and cut it completely off. Another hand dips into his jacket, and blasts the creature's underside with a flintlock.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone is quick enough to not get hit full on by the rock that's thrown at her, it is however not entirely avoid as it does clip her mid-movement seeing her take additional damage. She skis along and she moves to get back up she's not sure what the thing is saying and she doe not want to ti know really. She now sees the thing going for the teleporter.

"Oh hell."

She says as she brings up her gun again and she'll lay all her remaining firepower brass goes flying again as she just attempts to do as much damage before this horror escapes into the multiverse at large.
August Kohler Dietrich is striked hard in the chin, again cracking armor and causing August to actually fall off the back of the Persona, hitting the ground hard, as his shoulder is cracked from sheer impact. While he heals it, it takes a lot of stamina to do so, and he's going to need some rest and more healing, even if he can currently still use his arm. Exhausted, August sees the horror starting to escape through a teleporter...

"Fuck no, you're not getting away."

...and lashes out with the whip again with Dietrich as he rises, the whipsword moving to wrap itself around one of the creature's legs. Both fire and darkness cover it, making it excruciatingly painful to touch the elementally-coated grinding gears, and then, with superhuman strength, as it starts to force itself through the portal, Dietrich yanks /hard/.

If somehow the creature manages to get through the portal, it'll hopefully be missing a leg, torn straight off. But preferably, it gets annihilated by everyone before that.
Starbound Flotilla     George can deal with swinging. A swinging massive bestial nightmare part is basically the same as a swinging piece of industrial machinery, technically speaking. Both are fully capable of and fully intent on decapitating you, and both urgently need maneuvering; George is able to shift around and out of the way of the strike as it whirls over his head, swearing and having to prop himself up off the ground using the bat in order to prevent from falling and just breaking his goddamn head.

    He leaps back in, keeping close, moving fast. He can see it trying to wiggle through the gate, and he doesn't like any of what that means. George moves for where those limbs grip the teleport core, where they've been immobilized by the strike. And he puts away the Harold Bat...

    And gets out the power screwdriver. He tries to pop the damn thing open, get at its innards, and use his knowledge of mechanical matters to shut the thing down while Flint's attack limits its motion and capacity to avoid or retaliate. He doesn't know a /lot/ about teleportation, even in his home galaxy, but he knows enough about power to try to find and rip out something like a battery in there, to force the gate to close on the beast.

    While it's tough to kill yourself while teleporting, it's not impossible, especially if you're a giant monster halfway through a teleporter gate two sizes too small for your roiling form.
Zwei     ||"A laudable attempt, but I am aware of how your kind is fought."||

    The creature seems to lose a hand struggling with Asche's blade, then casts the sixteen foot weapon through the portal, slamming its head against the Armiger. Asche leans straight into it, squaring his stance, digging in his talons, retracting his 'neck' into the torso armour, and colliding head on, even the sensor horn 'blade' going into the effort, cracking from the sheer force involved in pushing it into the monster's face.

    Somewhere on the other side of the portal, the light redshifts, and in Asche's hands, it blueshifts again. The giant RAISER sword is warped right back into his grip, now directly behind the beast as it turns to struggle into the portal while he was deceptively unarmed.

    Spinning it into a sort of high stance that looks odd for his unnatural range of motion, there is the briefest sound of a 'charging whine' in a moment of absolute stillness, before the giant blade is suddenly an entire arcing plane of light, so fast that the eye catches all of the motion at once and perceives it as a single contiguous glow, visibly warped by the extreme compression of air around it, before that just becomes a thundering *boom*, sweeping debris back along a blast wave.

    The weapon itself doesn't explode; where the glowing edge touches solid matter, 'nuclear explosion' amounts of energy are released straight along its cutting vector, as the hard light goes from a solid state of 'bullshit single photon-width edge' back to a waveform, and then back again, like being cut with an effectively infinitely thin plane, and then blown apart by nuclear fusion instead of seamlessly sealing back up.
Septette Arcubielle      The creature does its absolute damndest to squeeze through the gateway, even as it's dragged backwards, crippled, shot, stabbed, blasted, and portal-cut nearly in half by flickering edges. Whatever energy has animated it so far, turning it from a slow-shambling stalker into an agile terror, now gives it an almost irrepressible vital force in the face of overwhelming injury.

     Ordinary people stop because of pain. Adrenaline-fueled beasts stop because of biomechanical failure. This monster is seemingly unwilling to yield until there isn't enough of its body left to structurally hold together. Even as George sabotages its escape and Nova rips chunks out of its flesh and Seventeen crushes its spine and Flint ruins its leg and August damn near hauls it bodily back through the portal, it's tearing itself to ribbons to get away- and finally, one last surge of roiling motion carries two-thirds of its body through just as the gateway collapses. Its lower limbs are already reverting to inert purple crystal when Asche's blade annihilates them.

     The air is quiet for a moment. Then Not-Bruno lets out a choked sob, composing himself with deep and ragged breaths. Bruno staggers over to give him a hand up, and Carcer emerges from behind a rock some distance away- she's soaked in sweat like she's just survived a heart attack, and cut her own arm off again if the re-cauterized stump is any indication. Deep claw marks on her face and neck hint that the reattached limb attacked her.

     "Put the fucking battery back in," she says to George in a voice that sounds like she's gargled with brandy and glass. "We're leaving. There might be more."
Android 17 Seventeen hits the ground after the desperate assault and lays there for a moment.  They tried as hard as they could, but there was probably going to be a world out there that...was going to deal with a very weakened one of those. They had no idea where that was either...

Well, assuming how this goes, they'll know soon.  The feeling weighs heavy on him, but slowly, he flips up as a possible discussion might break out.  Seventeen was of the opinion on getting out for the moment and figuring this out at another time.

Though 'George' may not, and right now he has a sinking supicion based on actions in the fight about who the saboteur was.  He can't prove it, and might never be able to.  He'll keep it to himself for now, but the thought doesn't sit well with him.  

"Let's go."
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa is beat up, the monster has escaped to who knows where. Most of the party is wounded in some fashion and in need of medical aid. They need to get off here she looks to Seventeen for a moment. "Nothing we can do for now." She will get the heck out of dodge with everyone else. To heal and plan out their next move.
Staren     Dammit. It's LOOSE?

    The suggestion there might be more is chilling, and makes Staren really wish he hadn't just blown all his energy on that attack. "We do need to get Carcer and her crew to safety. But we also need to find out if there ARE more. Otherwise it's no good having this thing here attacking the next people who come by for gas." He slowly gets to his feet, retrieves the arm armor, and pops it back into place.
Nova Terra     Nova watches the empty space where the monstrous creature managed to wiggle its way through before the portal closed. There's a frown on her face... She doesn't like it when targets manage to escape.

    Nova lifts her rifle up to rest over her shoulder as she moves to follow the others out, seeing as how they offered. No point in risking a pickup. She does sigh a little though, "Guess we're not quite done with this place..."
Starbound Flotilla     George pants under his breath, cursing and swearing at the chance that the thing made it away with miost of its organs -- such as they are -- intact. He puts a finger up to Carcer, a "wait the fuck up", while he catches his breath. Then he stands, disengages his helmet, pulls the earplugs out of his ears, and injects something into his own neck, something that seems to wake him up out of zoning out again. "AaaaAAAAAUGH. Jesus. Alright." He tosses the battery between two hands.

    "Well, looks like Nessos might be more trouble than it's worth, y'know? Might be worth it to take the loss on your pocketbooks for this one, if you're askin' me." After a meaningful, heavy pause, so pregnant with meaning that its water just broke, he slings the battery back to Carcer. "Either way, we got cleanup duty now, Arms. Let's get on out of here." He's headed back for the Blind Tiger, lighting up a fresh cigarette, narrowing his eyes. He needs some distance from the others.

    Enough to get privacy. He slips a marked encryption key from behind one of his teeth into his earpiece and mutters, "Code Silver, Blue, Violet. Moving to check promoting pawn." He pops it back out and crushes it in his palm.
Septette Arcubielle      Carcer limps forward to catch the battery from George. She tries to glare daggers at him at the 'more trouble than it's worth' comment, but it's hard without eyes, and even harder when she's so enervated and lifeless. "Bruno. Carlos. James," she calls out, motioning for her remaining crew to come over. It takes a bit of finagling, but she manages to boot up the teleporter core, dialing it in to a civilian station a couple systems over. "Round up any of ours haven't taken the nap yet. Tiger's a lost cause. I'll put in a word with... well."

     She glances back over her shoulder at the rest of the party. "Your help's been appreciated. Sorry there's no vig to show for it yet. But I think we all know something's bent here. Haven't given up on un-bending it just yet."

     With that, she steps through to the other side. It seems wise to extricate oneself as well, whether through the portal or other means. Spending the night in a place like this doesn't seem viable.