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Priscilla     With the pages inserted back into their respective books, there's little to do but the group agreed-upon course of action except to head back downstairs and inform the librarian. A short jaunt through the deep, deep blue halls, and back down the solid metal stairs, you find things exactly as you'd left them. Of course the librarian hasn't left his post, but the same guy is still standing on the same patch of floor standing at the same patch of wall, even. It's as if no time had passed at all. It'd be good to check, but looking around there are no clocks. There hasn't been one anywhere in Zone 2 so far, actually.

"I've returned the pages to their books." the Batter says, urged up to the front desk.
"Ah . . . ha! That . . . That's very good." replies the librarian, in a certain tone of profound relief. "I . . . I'll let you up then." He glances past the Batter and to you.
"That . . . That's great. The fourth floor's now accessible . . . for you and you only." he adds.
"And . . . that cat. Since it's . . . it's already there, I guess." referencing his oblique line about a mysterious cat before.

    The fact that the vast majority of the books here are plastic fakes, incapable of being ruined or giving papercuts or making frightening page-turning noises, is nowhere more evident than the way to the fourth floor, which entails taking a twisting S bend of staircases where bookshelves have been crammed up against the corners between stairs in the last place anyone would want to read them, and the least convenient places to reach them. You have to practically squeeze past to reach where you're going.

    That floor turns out to be mostly crates, of all things. Crates and chairs. What's in them? Who knows. They look identical to every single crate you've seen in this entire world, whether for packing metal, meat, or postal forms. They might be full of plastic books, since they're stacked right beside plastic bookcases glued to the walls. At least there is indeed a cat here. A big white housecat, with an unnaturally large head, huge, staring eyes, and a strange and toothy-

    Wait that's not the Judge.
Rather than a great big toothy Cheshire grin, this one has a stare that is so intense and wide that it feels like it's going bore right through you, or like the eyes of someone having a bad trip of biblical prophetic importance. Its bared teeth are borderline skeletal, fixed in a rigid semi-grimace that leaves dark gaps outside them. It doesn't purr to speak, making an odd, hissing squeak almost like a chirp.

"Who . . . Who are you?" the cat asks. Its tripped out eyes glance down to the Batter's bat. "What is that in your hand?"
"You're not the Judge." the Batter correctly surmises.
"The . . . the Judge? No. No, I am not." the cat replies.

"My name is Japhet. I am the creator of this city. I am also the one leading the phantoms, the royal instruments of my revenge."
Aoko Aozaki     Up, and up they go.

    Aoko follows, juggling a trio of awful plastic books that aren't books at all, still rebelling against the rules of the library. Almost assuredly intentionally, to see just how rattled the drones get.

    The sight of the cat who is not the Judge, and his immediate answers, causes Aoko to catch her three books and stop juggling, setting them aside to approach the critter immediatly, with her best and actually honest friendly smile.

    "Heeeeey, horror-cat! Japhet, sure! Can I pet you? I can, right?" If given the go-ahead, she will. Aoko loves cats. Most cats.

    "So phantoms, huh? You mean the specters, or something else? Oh! What revenge? What makes them royal? C'mon, don't leave us hanging, everyone else has been so stingy with the information."

    Seriously.

    Finally, someone who's honest and straight to the point.
    How odd that he's a cat, then.
August Kohler As they go up, moving through the winding and squeezing corridors of the library to see the Judge, August is very disappointed that it is not in fact the Judge, and is in fact his evil twin or something. August listens to the Batter's chatter, and is about to try and greet Japhet when he says 'I'm am the one leading the phantoms'. That must mean the spectres.

August's hand slides into his coat, onto his knife, waiting for a fight to break out, but Aoko moves up to..., well, interact with the cat. So while keeping his hand on his knife, not revealing it, August speaks. He's a little tense. "Yeah, do you mean the spectres? If so, where are they?" Aoko asked the rest of the important questions, so...
Janine Liberi     Janine did not help in the slightest with returning the pages to the books, citing, "I only have one arm, it's not efficient." In reality, she just took a chance to take a quick power nap and revitalize. The librarian insists that only the Batter is allowed to go up, but Janine just ignores him, not even dignifying that with a response. Not like he was going to try and check up on them, none of these guys do. The mention of a cat catches her attention though. Oh boy, more riddles.

    But no! Instead of the Judge and his big smile, she gets a different cat with big, uncomfortable eyes. "I think I would have preferred the Judge," she bemoans, leaning against the wall until this 'Japhet' introduces themselves. "You're leading the phantoms huh? So that means... if we deal with you now, we get to purify this Zone early?"

    She draws her sabre and lunges, bringing the blade down on the cat with the piercing stare!
Septette Arcubielle      Ordinarily Septette would be scurrying about, subjecting things to analysis and trying to figure out how a place like this works. The prior experiment on pain thresholds and suffering among this world's inhabitants seems to have sated her appetite for that sort of thing, though. In more material aspects, this world seems built to be inscrutable- there's little sense trying to 'scrute' it. Better to wait and see what it drip-feeds out.

     So instead of browsing the books or keeping her head on a swivel as the party heads upstairs, she's toying with an egg-sized device on a keychain. "I just fed you, George," she murmurs, pushing its buttons with a bit more force than really necessary. "I swear..."

     She still seems preoccupied with the device when they reach the cat, though "seems" is the operative word. Others seem to have the general bases covered. Instead, she keeps a careful eye on it while 'obliviously' giving August a gentle elbow and showing him the Tamagotchi. "Aug, is this thing broken? I think it's broken."
Yuuki Kuran Libraries are wonderful, grand, quiet places with just the lightest hint of 'people'. They're perfect places for retiring to and relaxing in, most important for their inherent property of their comfort within time. Few are the places where the weight of forever felt lighter, looking back across things.

Well, at least, that was the thought. Yuuki was only, like, twenty, and the books here were plastic. Dreamily, though, she waited in the foyer trying to read a plastic book to no avail.

"Oh, I got lost... I think. What're we doing?"
Replacing the pages in books, ok.

Fast forward to Janine declaring her intent to attack the ''evil'' cat, around the same time as Yuuki brightening. "It's a kitty!"
Starbound Flotilla     George is already smoking again. For some reason, it always gets a little difficult to see his eyes when they're lit mostly by the glow of the cigarette. Now that they're up here, he keeps HAROLD BAT at the ready. "Doing a good job with those ghosts, for sure. Got these folks in a real spook, aside from a couple. If I had to guess, they're suffering pretty bad for what happened to you, Other Jay. Probably why folks got a purifying Batter sent down here, don't you think? Must have really ticked off someone even further upstairs than the fourth floor here."

    He tilts his head to one of his companions. "Hey, Batter, got a Wide Angle for us?" He'd already armored up by the time he hit the top of the stairs. Where Janine goes for the rushing strike, George walks more casually with the bat over his shoulder, not even towards the cat. "Well, Other Jay, don't worry. Usual business on my part. You do you -- I'm just gonna make sure there's not enough haunting left after you do it to piss off the Queen." His focus is on the surroundings. The crates, specifically; perfect hiding places for all manner of ectoplasmic threat.

    The moment any of Japhet's alleged spectral forces assault, he's going to rush to attack with heavy swings, focusing on them; like Dedan, it seems George is refraining from actually going against them himself. Presumably some respect for the Flotilla's arrangement here?

    Digital George has nothing to do with this, of course. Insolent little shit though he may be, there's no relation between him and the Tamagotchi.
Priscilla     Unlike most of the strangely useless or obnoxiously cryptic people here, Japhet seems to be one of those rare individuals with enough competence to answer questions, or at least the ones he so chooses.

    "Specifically, they are my arms, sent to me by the Queen to restore justice to this Zone." he says. "You must have been very determined to have set foot onto the stairs of this library. I recognize in you a certain courage; an exceptional trait for a fear-riddled place such as this. However, my revenge will not leave anyone unpunished."

    The Batter seems only to want the moment to be placidly sure of something. "You're the chief of the spectres?" he states, almost rhetorically, but not quite, awaiting the confirmation. "I am the one who will inflict rightful punishment on this Zone! Thus, you shall be the first to succumb to the blasts of my ectoplasmic army!" the cat hisses.

    Janine lunges first, and the tip of her sabre draws blood, though the cat reels back in surprise at having been dealt the first blow, just so much that it is a shallow injury. The Batter acquiesces, raising his bat, turning sidelong, and taking up his stance. A wave of odd floral reticles ripple over the cat.

The Batter used Wide Angle!
Japhet
Royal guardian of Zone2.
Second boss (?)


    When Japhet is practically goaded to send out the ghosts though, he goes on to say "I do not need any spectres yet to eliminate you, either you buffonish wrench-wielding toilet technician, nor you poor sport pajama-wearing clown. I will finally get a taste of justice!"

    The cat parks his butt right there and stares in that blank-stared death grimace at you, and without moving, a volley of nipping, cutting, fanged bites somehow happen across the room, little white graphics of snapping teeth snatching flesh and blood.
August Kohler Janine attacks Japhet. Well, that means they're not going to get much time to talk - but Japhet confirms he's the leader of the Spectres, so...

As the bites come (shockingly, since Japhet isn't moving), they tear into August's flesh and rip bloody wounds. August bleeds, but to some, something new happens. He begins to heal - flesh repairs itself, as he lunges forward, drawing a combat knife. He moves slightly faster than he should, and he's /much/ stronger than he should be, with superhuman (but not extremely superhuman without his Persona) strength.

As August gets into range, he moves to take the knife and slam it into Japhet's neck if he can, with precision and skill of a hunter putting a deer out of its misery. He's not expecting it to kill, because Japhet probably has strange superpowers being a Guardian, but it's a visceral attack that's certain to do some real damage with that strength behind it. Though it also puts August into melee range...and that might be nasty.

"I like cats, but you need to take a long nap, now."
Aoko Aozaki     Aoko's arm is bitten! It sucks.

    And clearly this asshole of a cat wasn't planning to answer every single question, at least not without some motivation. So why not play along?

    "I'm usually pretty pro-revenge if the other guy deserves it, why don't you at least tell us that much?"

    Aoko's stance shifts, and blue circuitry shoots along the floor, before turning a large part of the library floor into intense blue light. Specifically, where the cat's butt is parked.

    It's like a game of the floor is lava.
    But the floor is lasers, instead.
Janine Liberi     Janine smirks as she draws blood from the cat, whipping her sword about to send it splashing to the floor in a neat curve. "Thanks for fronting up about it right away. The sooner I'm done with this place, the better." She hops on the balls of her feet as Japhet claims he doesn't need his army of spectres to deal with them. "Oh you're really gonna regret thinking that, hairball."

    She lunges forward, aiming to land a deeper cut this time, but phantom teeth gnash at her all over, pushing her back some. Others give her ideas though. August aiming to bury his knife into the cat's vitals and Aoko making the floor lasers...

    "Biancabella!" she shouts, her maimed Persona appearing behind her, and launching her into the sky with a massive gust of wind. Janine flies overhead as Japhet is harried on the ground, before another gust of wind sends her blasting down, blade first, aiming to skewer their foe!
Septette Arcubielle      The nippy disembodied jaws chomp Septette's Tamagotchi neatly in half. Her eyes flick up from its sparking bisected screen with comedic timing as the teeth plink off her ceramet skeleton, punching little toothmarks into her shawl in the process. "Right then," she says in a vaguely irritated tone. "This is how it goes."

     In one moment she's on the floor. The next, she's crouching on the ceiling and the ground where she stood is cracked from the force of her jump. She takes off in a peculiar upside-down sprint towards the cat with inhuman elegance, swapping between bipedal and quadrupedal scurrying between strides, while lashing out with sprays and fusillades of pen-sized magical icicles from a magical circle at her left fingertips.

     "Auuuguuuust," she calls out chidingly as she rains projectiles from above. "You've got things you're not telling me about? Terribly rude."
Starbound Flotilla     "Queen gave 'em to you?" George tilts his head and narrows his eyes. "Why's the brain giving the reins of the fever to the /bacteria/...?" What? The explanation is likely not forthcoming. He eats shit from dead-on slashing strikes, interposing the bat to block some of the damage but still suffering battering strikes that knock him about the room, leaving him rolling with the blows. "Hell." He mutters. "Alright, I guess this is the way your end of things decided to start working. But christ, Other Jay, Queenie can't have given you the fever just to burn the body. There really something you told her that made her think that Elsen's gotta get disciplined?" He swipes with his bat, striking out at some of those distant, proxy blows.

    Not that he wants this battle to stop. He speaks in a tone that lacks understanding and the willingness to reach across the barrier, in a tone that insinuates antagonism in awful ways. While he speaks with a knowledgeable tone, it's not one that implies he wants anything besides the Guardian getting defeated in combat.

    He moves forward, dodging about and moving gracefully to swing hard, going for a heavy cracking strike with HAROLD BAT with surprisingly enhanced strength. Since this is a cat and not, you know, something at shoulder height, it has to be overhead; there's enough force to dent or crack the floor as he swings for it. It'd be cartoony, if it wasn't so direct.
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki is quite useless at the start, on the back foot since Janine went sprinting for the finish like while mashing left and right bumper to move Samus forward extra pixels to save precious frames. Of course, she's also on the back foot because she's distant and 'sleepy' from the transition into the dreamlike and detached setting of the Zones.

Pain brings her back into reality, the ranged fang-bites chewing up yet another outfit lightly dappled with plastic, drawing spluts of crimson and a mostly-marshalled yip of pain as she shoves back and away, batting away the phantom jaws for what good that will do for her. Thankfully, as is the pattern, her blood doesn't go far, and her wounds don't seem to 'stick' so well, giving the impression to the casual observer that the bites never breached skin in the first place...

Except for all the damage to her clothes, and her complexion paling incrementally.

"Virus? Like a body? Is that why they're bottling meat and mining smoke? I don't think that explains the plastic, which is in the books."

Septette and George trade words about knowing more than what's being let on, and Janine finds solace in the lack of responsibility. "Well, it feels like a dream, to me. And more than that, just attacking everyone means you're a bad cat."

Yuuki cocks her hand back and tosses her (stolen) plastic book, hurling the thick-spined shiny object at the cat like a bullet.
Priscilla     "I am afraid the only one experiencing a fever here appears to be you, in your diseased delusions of escaping your rightful retribution." Japhet shoots back at George. When all the attacks come flying at him though, he gets his butt right back up again and begins leaping and charging around the room like only a cat that's decided to sprint away for no reason can do.

    He narrowly dodges the lunge of August's knife, leaving a shallow cut along his furry cheek, arching, well, cat-like under another sweep of Janine's blade, nicking his tail. Swishing his paws in both their directions, they're suddenly the subject of a number of nasty claw swipes that skip the intervening space and collide with them like a shitty old JRPG battle screen. Right after though, Yuuki manages to bean him right between the eyes with a plastic book at superhuman speed, though the "AUGH!" sound he makes is extremely offputting with the way that his eyes don't even blink and he doesn't so much as twitch a whisker at the impact, though it seems like a fragile cat nose-bone broke.

    He goes reeling and bouncing head over tail into Aoko's magic circle, and then immediately explodes into lasers, skittering and scurrying out the other end with charred fur puffed up and his tail on fire, tucking into a mad roll to put it out. He leaps just fast enough to for George's bat to tag his hind paw instead, then jumping off the bat to slash up his face with too-long curved claws.

    Bounding off his head, he narrowly escapes a set of flashing white code brackets suddenly slammed into him from both sides due to a flash from the Add-On, hissing and curling up as a spray of icicles hit him dead on. He twists in that feet-towards-the-ground way under Septette's blade and tries to chomp her directly in the neck with pointy cat fangs that have no actual way of damaging her exterior, yet work on bizarro logic anyways, before seeing that Batter coming, and for a moment, visibly *panicking* as that particular bat comes out, abandoning his robo-jugular assault to scarper ASAP, running between Yuuki's legs to cut at her hamstrings and scratch the air in the direction of Aoko's face.

    "All the people of this Zone deserve my wrath!" cries the cat, fighting like a cat, albeit a cat working on worryingly bloody Looney Tunes physics. "They care for nothing but their own petty problems! Deluded as they are, they forgot that they were to me as many children! I gave them everything they take for granted, and all they can do is complain! You imbeciles wouldn't know; you're still trying to talk to the cat."
Aoko Aozaki     "It's probably because you look like a cat!" Aoko points out, bringing her arms up in an X and letting the phantom claws dig lines into her forearms instead of her face. For a lot of reasons, most of which can be summarized with the sentence 'getting hit in the face sucks'. It's not rocket wizardry.

    Although, Aoko certainly is a rocket wizard.

    She pulls one of her arms back, the elbow letting off a howl like a jet engine as her magic circuit(s?) rev up and release a gush of blue fire/light from it, as if it were a thruster.

    "C'mon, c'mon, educate us if we're so blind! If it's not the cat we should be speaking to, who is it? When people screw up you're supposed to point out what they should be doing instead!"

    But then again if you ask the Association, Aoko is not a good teacher. So take her instructions with a grain of salt.

    And a rocket punch, because she's going to rocket punch that cat. Or whatever it thinks it is.
Septette Arcubielle      There's no visible injury, but Septette's neck briefly flares with an almost cartoony arc of lightning reminiscent of blood spurting from an artery. It doesn't seem to slow her down much- she does the Sensible Super-Strength Thing of grabbing the cat by the neck and, instead of throwing it into a wall Hulk-style, just wrenching and twisting in all sorts of terribly unpleasant directions with her viselike hands.

     As pragmatic as the attack is, it might not be terribly efficient against something that runs on Loony Tunes anatomy, so she heats her hands up to a visibly searing red for good measure, and holds Japeth out for the rest of the party to beat on until it manages to squirm out of her iron-maiden-like grasp.
August Kohler The knife is narrowly dodged, but August doesn't lose his footing. As Septette speaks to him, he just says simply, "I self-actualized." And then, being the one keeping secrets for once, he pulls back as the paws claw into him, cutting him further and drawing more blood. "Agh!"

August stares into the blade's mirrored reflection, and shouts out. "Dietrich!" In a flash of red and grey, the power armored black knight, over eight-feet tall and with a massive sword, is summoned, directly in front of August. Climbing onto Dietrich's back, August stares Japhet down, and then speaks up.

"I don't care whether you're some sort of super animating force or actually the cat or whatever you're hinting at, if you lead the spectres, you've got to die." Dietrich suddenly bursts forward with absolutely superhuman speed, as the sword is swung in Japhet's direction. If Japhet moves to dodge out of the way, though...it suddenly whirs mechanically, and splits into a segmented chainsaw whip, which moves to grapple around a limb (or neck, if possible) and start grinding into Japhet's body, in a spectacularly bloody way. It's incredibly accurate, and supposed to be incredibly dangerous.
Janine Liberi     While there may be many ways to skin a cat, this one isn't sitting still long enough to do it. Janine scowls in frustration as the edge of her sword only nicks the beast's tail, and before she can free it from the ground, its claws find her face, causing her to yowl in pain. Dropping her weapon, she raises her only hand to her face to try and stem the blood flowing from it.

    "All right you little shit! I'm gonna stuff you and give your desecrated corpse to a dog to savage!" Uncommon problems require uncommon solutions. How do you stop a cat from running around? Janine's answer is 'take it away from the ground so it can't run at all.' "Biancabella!" she shouts, summoning the Persona who begins flailing her stumpy arms. The wind begins to pick up in the room, sending a few boxes tumbling before it all consolidates underneath Japhet just ahead of where he was running to blast upwards in a massive cyclone, aiming to send him skyward!
Starbound Flotilla     The bat slams down, and the cat leaps off of it straight at George's face. The too-long claws risk near-decapitating the man. "Risk" being the operative word; with a deft motion, he yanks his head down and out of the way so fast that he leaves his cigarette behind when he does. He snatches it back with two fingers out of mid-air to take a fresh drag of the hospital-smelling thing. Just the end of it has been sliced clean off by the claws; George has to re-light it. "Sheesh, Japh." He hisses through clenched teeth, trying to get a good angle on the next strike. "We know Queen likes Elsen too much to add even /more/ onto his suffering like that. Lady like that doesn't do things by halves. Well, at least she does things by the better half, anyway."

    His next move is to approach, swinging another overhead strike, but this one's a bit more odd. Instead of holding in a two-handed grip, he swings with his dominant left hand, and shoves the body of the bat down with the side of his lower right arm. That's so that, when Japhet moves or dodges, George can sweep his elbow /hard/. The others are interrogating, but George seems to have some tiny amount of comprehension already, and is more interested in Japhet himself.

    "You don't gotta do things by halves either, Other Jay. You know this place is nothin' but sufferin'. Felt it yourself, right? Why not take it all the way? Get their goat that one special way Dedan sampled? Could get some of the revenge you're after while you get some relief from never getting what you deserve." What does he mean? He doesn't elaborate, but he hopes Japhet's mind isn't too much warped by the circumstances of things to not have his weird efforts go to waste.
Yuuki Kuran "Hate, then? And revenge? Against what? Hate isn't worth holding in your heart. It's something that's exhausting!" Yuuki retorts, a flare of anger bringing sharpness to her gaze and a flush to her cheeks. "And why does everyone in this place seem to think they're the only people who understand managing others? It's frustrating, so why do you all keep insulting everyone? It's like you can't even hear us!"

That last part strikes Yuuki in a thoughtful pause, and that pause strikes her in the ankles, tumbling her over in a fluffy 'whump' of coats and girl as she gets rapidly dropped to the ground, cracking her face on the ground. For a moment only capable of rolling and sitting up, Yuuki is vulnerable to further cat-astrophic attacks.

From her position on the ground in the 'anime lady sprawl with her (bloody) ankles showing', Yuuki grabs for the cat's tail, aiming to quite directly grab the strange toothy creature and toss it into the closest wall with a velocity equal to her previous book-toss.
Priscilla     Japhet just barely escapes Septette's horrid crunching burning knifehand death grip, wiggling out between her bladed fingers in a way that shouldn't be strictly possible, like taking the 'cats are a fluid' meme to the next level. He ends up briefly hurled towards the ceiling by Janine's cyclone, opened up to a near-direct punch from Aoko's enthusiastic rocket fist scratching and flailing about in the midst of a lashing by Dietrich's chain-sword-whip, before grabbing hold of the ceiling, and managing to run across it upside down, sprint-flipping to the top of a pile of crates from there.

    "You know nothing of the Queen." he hisses down at George from there. "And Dedan and how he runs his Zone is not my concern. If he so chooses to treat his subjects as mere cogs of industry to whip and berate and replace when needed, perhaps he wasn't wrong to do so. Perhaps I was the one mistaken to treat them like my own progeny. This Zone was perfect. I did everything to make it so. A paradise, and yet the miserable fools have created their own little hell, as if they want to suffer. That's the way of humans."

    He leaps at George, dodging the bat, but falling for the elbow faint, getting bounced across the floor and towards the useless bloody woobie, then pitched like a softball by the tail, yowling as the Batter is Suddenly In The Way, lined up to swing, and smashes him with a sickening-sounding home run that fires spinning, dazzling white stars off the collision of his bat, seemingly hard enough to obliterate a normal cat.

    Bloody and battered, Japhet rights himself and skids back across the floor, digging little furrows in the metal with his cat claws. "Your spirit is a valiant one . . ." he growls. "And your arms are made in its image. I must confess that I may have underestimated your collective capacity for belligerence." he growls. "Unfortunately for you, I would discard all manners as a gentleman when necessary. Especially for a new enemy."

    He parks himself back down, assuming the posture of Sitting Cat, crying out without moving his grimacing teeth "Spectres, come to me! Dance together and echo the song of the righteous!" then to you "The torment of men heals my wounds . . . Your body will feed the intangible spirits for eternity . . ."

    There is a long pause.

    ". . ."

    "Phantoms? Phantoms, come to me! I command you!"

    Nothing.

    "Curses! By what magic, baleful humans, do you manage to prevent my ectoplasmic acolytes from joining me?!" A question asked in full seriousness, yet there appears to be no evidence of Spectres having been anywhere around here. "No matter! You will taste my wrath!" He yells

    The air is suddenly split with a physical wave of perfect pitch. The platonic ideal of an Alto manifests as tangible waves of radiant sound in the air, each vibrational ripple visible in bands of brilliant white, which collapse upon you, predictably, at the speed of sound. There is nothing cat-like about it. No claws or fangs. The Alto crashes down on you with a powerful, unique energy of its own, feeling as if it's pulverizing your insides by magic, and splattering blood as if by the bite of a spectre instead. It comes out of nowhere and hits dramatically harder than the cat-themed attacks, this sort of vastly stronger power apparently having sat in the pocket until now.
Aoko Aozaki     If the cat has answers, it clearly prefers to wax poetic about the past and the rightfulness of his vengeance than provide context or directives. So that means there's not much else to be said.

    The musical note speeds towards Aoko, whose body reacts and revs up even faster than the note travels. A flare of blue, her limbs strengthening, and she leaps back, getting clipped but not trashed by the powerful blast. And sometimes that's the best you can hope for.

    If it's getting serious, she might as well too.

    "Barrel, set. Fuse!"

    A Bounded Field expands, created and established in a fraction of a second, as if Aoko'd muttered several chants with only three words. The room's function is overridden.

    Matter collects Ether. The room is a cannon, fueled by it. Aoko lands, and dumps as much of her own mana into the ambient air as she can, before snapping her fingers.

    The entire room becomes a sea of blue light, mercifully dancing around Aoko's allies, as if inside the, appropriatedly enough, barrel of an energy weapon. Provided the walls aren't especially sturdy, from the outside, it's going to look like a floor of the library just turned into a beam cannon, blazing out a blue pillar up into the sky.
Janine Liberi     Janine cracks up laughing as Japhet finally buckles, calling on his phantoms, only for the call to go unheeded. "I told you man! I TOLD YOU! You would regret thinking you're such hot shit, and now look! They don't even want to help your flea-bitten ass! You are a fucking joke of a boss! At least Dedan had some respect in the form of fear!"

    The cat is mad, and lets it be known in the form of hitting some pure, awful note that fills the whole room. Janine counters it with a personalised vortex of howling winds that surround her, the air distorting the Alto enough that it doesn't ravage her ears and body. It's a contest though, she and Binacabella hunched within the winds, pushing back against the blinding sound until its reverberations stop. She looks at Japhet, with plain disgust on her face.

    "Yeah, hey, guess what jackass? Ungrateful, ignorant, looking for any excuse to be miserable? /That's what kids are./ Being a parent is taking all that on board and working to correct them! If properly raised, kids can be more than a bratty waste of space. How children act is a reflection of who raised them. If the people of this Zone are shitty, that just means you were a shitty parent. It's on you, Japhet. As they created their hells, so did you. But hey, you're gonna die soon, so all your problems will be other, you shit."

    There's nothing fancy this time, no launching Japhet into the air. This time, Biancabella just creates another gust of wind to launch the cat Janine, then another to launch the latter at the former. They meet in midair, and Janine's sword flashes to try and take his head.
Starbound Flotilla     George has tools ready to deal with this. Weird resonances, strange accelerations, these are things engineers are trained to deal with. They have to, in order to perform crucial repairs on fast-moving ships and dangerous deep-space machinery. But when George feels the pain coming on, he jabs his neck with the emergency syringe and... it only blunts. The full weight of the organ-churning assault hits him despite his effort to avoid its deepest damage. He groans with pain, shuddering and falling to one knee.

    "Fuck, fuck, fuck," He mutters quietly under his breath. "Run out of lung, ya damn animal." He grits his teeth and speaks up a little, to Japhet. "Come on, don't tell me you don't see the logic here. Queen and Bats may have the same eye for things, but they're not two sides of /that/ kinda coin, Japh. Otherwise why would         be pulled in to pull the trigger on this business? You know they want it done, you know you want it done, but you're too attached to the old side of this -- why not do it?" He's speaking as a way of ejecting the words from his brain, giving him a moment more of better focus.

    He waits for someone to do something big. Aoko Aozaki is the lucky winner! He's hoping her blast will interrupt ALTO. That's around the time he hefts HAROLD BAT, moving in fast to catch the cat at some point in the arc after Janine's strike, hissing tensely through his teeth and moving as fast as he can to strike it out of the air, where a bat ought to strike something.

    Unlike striking a baseball, a cat in motion is perpetually a kind of knuckleball. If Janine's efforts have left it in motion, and he can strike it, he's going to try to slam Japhet to the next attacker!
August Kohler As they fight, Japhet moves to call his Spectres. August braces, Dietrich flipping that chainwhip back in its direction...when the spectres don't come. August smiles. They can do this. Japhet's nothing. "Looks like your story ends here, kitty."

And then the air splits, and horrible bursts of sound come down on August.

The Alto is catastrophic. It hits not only Dietrich, rending through armor from the inside out, but through August. His arms rip open, as do his sides and stomach, spilling blood. He'll be able to heal it, but it's going to take a lot of effort, especially as blood seeps from his mouth. "What the fuck?"

August is mad. Dietrich sweeps in, converting the chainwhip back into a regular massive sword, and moves to leap up. It gets some air - and then it comes crashing back down, sword first, for Japhet. August is going to smash him into nothing, even if another strike could easily knock him out.
Yuuki Kuran "It was perfect, and then it wasn't. Humans made mistakes, and brought down your perfect world. The humans were to blame, and not the parent or ruler."

"And men's torment heals your wounds."

Yuuki's eyes narrow, as she climbs back up from her healed hamstrings. "You remind me of my uncle." She decides, reaching down to her hip to retrieve her baton-staff-scythe, Artemis.

The force - the 'perfect Alto' - puts a real stop to that, imploding the Kuran princess in a shower of woundless gore and turning her very nice, orderly people-insides into a messy insides-stew, a pain so great Yuuki doubles over and grips her stomach, her ears ringing and fit to burst.

"Dedan was a terrible manager, too. Thought people were idiots, and useless. I had thought that it was just Dedan being a brutal lower-end manager. Someone who was rough but efficient. But I think I'm coming to realize that the Queen's minions are people who are just thugs. Narcissists. That kind of thing."

A little wink at George. "With about a half-dozen exceptions."

Yuuki sighs. "But the words don't matter. I'm just here to play a role, a backdrop this time. I don't really think you hear me. And you certainly don't know who my uncle is." Springing from her crouch, she lunges for Japhet's Sitting Cat placement (or wherever he's been tossed aroud to), lashing out with a shining and electric arc as her weapon extends in her hands, trying to take the cat's shitty :E-ing head.

"My uncle was a terrible person too."
Priscilla     Unleashing the Alto, whatever power it may be, was certainly a choice too late. Japhet pays for underestimating the party and holding back (and casts a certain amount of doubt on how much leadership he claims to have over the spectres at the same time).

    Yuuki flashes forward and swings her usually specially reserved weapon for Japhet, causing him to abandon his blasting posture to dodge *well* out of the way of that one, hissing somehow louder than the electrical crack of the blade slicing shallowly through his breast and blasting energy into a scorch wound around it. Gales of summoned wind send the startled and improvising cat swirling around the room, catching heavy metal crates and plastic shelves in the whirlwind and smashing it all together. Right at the apex of the tornado, Aoko's !vector cannon goes off, and blows a great big hole through the side of the fourth floor of the library that is probably sure to make every person in town panic, Japhet just barely escaping what should probably be total annihilation with suitably cat-like corrective aerial posture, instead having all his fur burnt away and turned black along his back and tail.

    Dietrich takes advantage and brings the chain-great-s(aw)d down on him, and in the grinding screech and graphical VFX spray of blood, August can feel something oddly as if he'd cut right through the cat's flesh and then hit something much sturdier and harder than mere bones just below the skin. The blow punts him straight down into George, and he plays the baseball/pinball hybrid by knocking the cat flying into the Batter's way, who uses his Special Homerun again and redirect Japhet with a galactic explosion of tiny pure white firework stars, plastering certainly Spectral sanguinary decor across the utterly fake bookshelves.

    Despite the apparent fragility of 'a moderately supernatural cat' turning up against the earlier, lighter attacks, all of the later blows of tremendous force that should pulp something like that have made less of a dent than they really should have, painting a tapestry of animal abuse across the big white cat, but not striking anything vital or deep. Clearly wounded and exhausted however, Japhet crawls out of his crater, then flops to the floor, audibly wheezing as he shakily pushes himself up onto four paws. The Batter advances, slowly and faithfully.

    "hhh . . . hhh . . . hhh . . . Poor fools!" he yowls as soon as he catches his breath. "It is not yet time for me to reveal my true nature. Still, know that you will gain nothing by waiting, obnoxious buffoons. I will see you at the appointed time, and then you will learn of true despair."

    The cat disappears in a rising halo of light and a loud, electric *bwooomf*, warping out just like one of the red cubes that traverses the Nothingness. In his place, he leaves a different halo, emerging from the warplight and bobbing serenely in place, identical to the Add-On following the Batter. Without word and without question, he puts his hand to it, and the thing contracts and makes a snapping noise like the shutter of a camera, before joining the first halo at his back.
Janine Liberi     Janine would never admit it, but she's feeling a little dwarfed. Between Aoko's reverse orbital laser and August going full beast mode with that whipsword, her own kit seemed charmingly blase. However, it all adds up to render Japhet out of the fight. Cue the immediate salty johns that he couldn't 'fully reveal his true nature' yet.

    "Oh fuck right off with this! 'I didn't use even ten percent of my full power' says the guy who just got ping-ponged around the room!" She watches as he warps off, before angrily carving an 'L' shape in the floor with her sword. "HOLD THAT, YOU BITCH!" she shouts at the ceiling as she gestures at it.

    But hey, at leas the Batter got another power-up from it! She puts her sword away and pats him on the shoulder. "Good. Use that to pound his ass into paste when we catch up to him." She storms off, muttering something about how she should have kept napping through this one.
Aoko Aozaki     "Who knows, maybe he's not kidding. Guess that means next time we see him we need to take him even more seriously. If this guy's this Zone's Guardian, we have to assume he's somewhere on Dedan's level," Aoko muses, mostly about the fact Dedan hurt. A lot.

    No regards are given to the damage done to the library.

    It's ten shades of not her problem!

    "Too bad he was about as cooperative as Dedan, too. We're still behind on figuring out what's going on, besides the fact the people in charge clearly aren't happy with the state of things. And neither are the people." Or the Batter and his fancy-named superior, for that matter.

    Aoko stretches, leaving the Bounded Field in place. Shouldn't hurt anything! Probably. It's not like any of the drones should have the means to set it off.

    "Well, -I- think we earned our rest for the day, I could go for some popcorn and a warm blanket."
Yuuki Kuran Artemis lands a shallow cut, but Yuuki can't seal the deal, and the Shitty Cat has Shaggy Blanco powers. He, like, wasn't even using 1% of his power!

Jinkies.

With a flick of her wrist dramatically, which doesn't really clean the blade of any viscera at all, Yuuki notices she's being a dweeb and swings up the scythe perpendicular to the ground, so she can collapse it with the flat of her palm on the top of the pole. "I don't think most people give everything everything they have. It'd be really tiring. It's more comfortable for everyone to hold back a little, isn't it?"

"It's hard to have total and deadly seriousness be your normal. It cheapens... lots of things. I'm just glad everyone's okay."