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Yuli Sin     There's always a particular quality to calls coming from true desperation --from people who have exhausted all their other options, and have nowhere to turn but to pray that someone, anyone out there, is listening. It'd strike you immediately as an accident that you'd even heard it, because trying to trace it back is wonky and unintuitive, not beamed properly along the existing channels, and requires you to go through an uncharted Warpgate. More importantly, the Warpgate opens almost *exactly* where you need to be. A stray signal through it.

    You might probably wish you didn't end up exactly there, though. The moment you're through the gate, your senses are *assaulted* with the smell and taste of mercury, cobalt, arsenic, chloride and fluorine, with an undercurrent of copper and ash. Your eyes are stung hideously on their first few blinking exposures to the air, irritated by some fine particulate you can barely see, though you can feel it rasping in your lungs, making breathing already painful. It feels like you're trying to navigate a sandstorm, but the air is calm and still, as well as mostly clear, save for a thin, fine gold glitter sedately swirling through it like dust in a sunbeam.

    The ground crunches beneath your feet. Not in the poetic sense of snow or gravel, but quite literally crunching. Looking down reveals that you're walking on a bed of iron filings, like beach sand, stretching to the end of the mesa you've arrived on. Growing out of it are lush beds of creepers, curling herbs, blooming flowers, and thick moss, all glimmering like polished gold with stalks of cobalt, swaying faintly in the breeze. Where berries or stamens would bud from them, tiny, radiant lights reflect from every strange, twirling leaf and vine, over-embellished like an illuminated manuscript of plants, rather than sensible ones.

    Far ahead of you, the mesa continues to rise into a set of foothills, then mountains, each gleaming with shades of gold, bronze, cobalt, and diamond lights. To the left, the landscape rolls out into a slow level of thick grasslands, equally gaudy and decorated stalks soaring twice as high as any human for miles, shin deep in water that flows and ripples like liquid silver --almost definitely massive concentrations of mercury, responsible for part of the smell.

    It's dotted with tremendous, mangrove-like trees raised on webbed roots, each the size of a skyscraper, bearing canopies of solid gold leaves that slowly shed precious dust into the wind currents, coming from a massive wall of dark storm clouds racing quickly towards you across the sky, already crackling with violet lightning.

    Down from the drop to the right, a river runs sharply through a canyon valley to the other side of the mesa. It flows in much the same opaquely reflective way as the wetlands to the left. A bridge appears to have been hammered across the gorge at some point, made of ramshackle scavenged cable and random pieces of ancient, rusted metal plating, though it looks like it hasn't been there for long. On the other side, even further, the landscape begins to lose its golden lustre, and turn gradually more dark and bare, though the sky is crystal clear.
Yuli Sin     These directions would probably be corresponding to north and west and east, were compasses even remotely useful. Magnetic north is *fucked*, like dipping into some spooky haunted forest.

    From out of the grassy front, splashing through the mercury and clambering up the side of the mesa, the source of the message, no doubt, comes running. A group of people probably twenty some strong, half being men, a quarter women, a quarter small children struggling to slog through the toxic water, are making the fastest possible time they can towards the higher ground. They're swathed in thick layers of white robes trimmed in gold, but beneath them are heavy duty black trousers and boots.

    All of them wear gilded masks over their faces, carved into various ornamental extrusions and patterns, though they appear to ill-fit the children, like their extremely waterproofed heavy boots. They have heavy bags made of canvas and some kind of ivory shell stitched together, and are lugging more straps and boxes than they could possibly carry at any great speed. The ones in the lead have already retrieved makeshift grapnels from their myriad nomad pouches, hurling them up the mesa wall, and stabbing climbing spikes into the hard, rocky wall, rapidly throwing chains over the extrusions at the top of their climb and setting their bags as counterweights, creating pulleys to haul other people up as a sliphshod but clearly rehearsed plan of action.
Sumiko Mikoto really wishes she did not pick up that call for help, her eyes watering as she enters the world.  This causes her to rub her eyes, which might only make the situation worse, the terrible air awful for breathing.  It's hard to breathe, it's hard to see...it's just awful.  Coughing a bit and hunching over she reaches into her backpack to pull out a handkerchief and ties it around her neck like a bandanna, covering her mouth.

She doesn't have anything for her eyes, so that's going to need some adjustment.  The coughing isn't /as/ bad, but she doesn't enjoy this air.  She looks down the side of the mesa, only to see a group of people coming from what looks like mercury water.  

Of course, they kinda look like cultists, but then again, it could be something to survive in this world...assuming they weren't naturally comfortable here.  Though they seem to be in a hurry, and if they're coming up the Mesa, then it's likely they're heading towards the Warp Gate.  It stands to reason that these people are the ones who sent the distress signal?  

Still, she can't be sure...so she decides to keep her position, and instead with a flash of ~Magical Girl~ sparkles, she transforms.  Her blade immediately thrusts into the ground to release birds who take flight, they move to watch the group and scout out the nearby area.  

She coughs again...ugh...this is the worst.  She might just need to leave if there isn't wind or something to blow this stuff away.  
Starbound Flotilla "We have received a distress call. One that sounds quite urgent."
"Worried. We should go help them right away!"
"...Why?"
"Hm. What is a 'golden--"
"Oh, let's go help them."
"Well that was a whole stupid argument we fast-forwarded through."
"Floran will huuuuunt! Ssstab ssstab ssstab lionsss!"

    The Flotilla surges through the warpgate on hoverbikes. They're all in their standard Durasteel equipment! Moonfin, the fishman, is in elaborate full-body durasteel armor that looks like a powered cross between a diving suit and a samurai's armor, glowing cyan at the faceplate. Biteblade, the humanoid plant, is in durasteel plating with elaborately carved wood and bone ornaments over glowing powered components that glow an intense green. Pavo the bird-girl wears a divine-aesthetic set of mesoamerican-style armor, with yellow runes and inscriptions lighting up on stylishly gleaming golden armor and robes. Albert the monkey-man is wearing what looks like lab technician gear with extensive sets of tools and chemical protection, which integrates thin, resilient plates of durasteel, and lines of bright white. George (just plain human) wears a futuristic combat EVA hardsuit that glows a gentle red at the flat faceplate. Seft, the robotic Flotilla member, is wearing full-on medieval knight armor with a soft energized blue glow below the plates on her body, and especially around the eyes. Each has a heavy industrial-yellow two-pronged plasma-cutter-like tool strapped to their side, a Matter Manipulator.

    "Surface hazard, level 2." Albert grunts. Each of them click buttons at their wrist, and seams along their armor gleam for a moment, indicating their protection from the elements... literally. This, at least, is a hazard they're okay at dealing with, by sealing oxygen feeds. They won't be able to deal with high concentrations though, and they'll have a tough time with staying long.

    "Sssurface is busssted. Can't get navigation. What isss wrong with magnetic field?" Biteblade wonders as they drive up to the edge to get a good look at the surroundings. But then she notices the people! Moving fast. "Hey! Hey!! Where isss chasssing danger! That way?" She gestures wildly over towards the direction they came from. "Floran can go hunt! Floran can go ssstab!"

    "Or maybe you guys want stairs real-quick? Wait, no, chasing shit. You're about to do a defense thing, aren't ya? Hey, everyone huddle if you gotta get that O2." George hops off his bike, projecting something out of his Matter Manipulator. NANOSKINS! All dispensed out of a little cylindrical pillar-like console. Acid-hazard nanoskins are less their usual wheelhouse but they're good enough to last a little while if you take the capsule and smush it against yourself, giving all the needed oxygen and such.

    Biteblade is already setting up her big metal mag-bow and drawing a hefty tungsten arrow back, pointing down the mesa wall at whatever might pursue the nomads. "How gold is gold lion? Sssoft like gold? Good for sssell? Floran gonna hunt! Floran gonna ssstab!"
Majima Goro     Somehow, it had never occurred to Majima that worlds of the Multiverse were not necessarily breathable.
That that wasn't, somehow, a thing. Reality has struck him harder in the lungs than his pack-a-day habit.
"Cu/haauuugh/, /haaaaaaagh." He's doubled over, hands on his knees, as he tries to breathe in the...ugh, whatever horrendous mixture of whatever is in the air here. His one eye closes mostly, as he...hm. No, he ain't got jack to breathe through. Alright, fat lot of good he's gonna do as a rescuer. Who's breathing all of this without issue?

On the upside, the Concord provides, apparently. He manages to stumble his way over to the pillar, and...with some mild instructions, eventually manages to acquire himself the necessary capsule to slam onto himself so he can actually breathe properly.

"Aahhh. Hah. ...cufhuuulth," Majima lets out, spitting out a...glob of congealed weird crap that had accumulated in his lungs.

"Arright, never feelin' bad about my cigarettes again. Now, what's the plan, eh?" He looks to George. "This ain't an office buildin' full of goons, so it ain't my tactical expertise, ya know?"
Shigure     Shigure and Yamashiro exit the gate, and instantly regret rising from their wrecks. Luckily, they can withstand some of the effects, but it isn't a pleasant experience either way. Bandanas are pulled from rigging ,and tied much like Mikoto's done, "Visibility will be limited, radar will be useless with all the particulate matter... Yamashiro, launch spotter plane, hopefully they can provide some early warning." says Shigure to her taller partner.

    "Understood flagship. Type 0 Recon plane. Launch!" A catapult rail unfolds from Yamashiro's rigging, and a small 'toy' plane is fired from it, engine struggling in the particle-filled air, but managing to gain altitude. The fairies piloting it seem more resiliant against the atmospherics, at least for the time being. "Recon plane launched... receiving reports."

    The pair then join the others that have arrived.
Staren     Staren runs through the warpgate... and briefly pauses, doubling over and coughing before he purges the chemicals and switches over to internal air. After that, it doesn't really bother him, though if the bed of filings is deep enough to make walking a problem he'll switch to flying.

    Of course, others may be less prepared. To all who'd like them, he'll offer smart vacsuits -- a small oxygen tank that can be worn as a belt or torc, and an orange-sized lump of smart material that, over a few seconds, spreads out over the body into a skin-tight, safety-orange suit with a thin but hard helmet. It also has a headlight and a fully-functional computer that displays to the HUD and projects a virtual keyboard to type on if needed.

    Staren has to take a moment to take in the utterly bizarre plantlife, but only a moment, there are people in distress after all. And soon enough he sees them. Are they wading out of a river of /mercury/? Staren starts setting up a line at the top of the cliff, then hits his helmet with the heel of his hand as George mentions stairs. That's a /really good idea/, so Staren sets to work extending scaffolding and stairs down the side of the cliff, made of black-and-white-striped wood.
Nie Li     Though the radio's a new tool, Nie Li knows desperation when he hears out. What's a good-natured Demon Spiritualist to do but check it out? With a little help from the Concord to trace it, he finds the warp gate...

    And within ten seconds of emerging, he grunts, shielding his face from the harsh environment. He has to wonder if anyone has managed to survive in this place... "If I hadn't reached at least Silver rank by now, this would've been quite troublesome." The boy murmurs, relieved that he's able to tolerate this mess... for now.

    And what a mess it is. As he wanders away from the warp gate and takes in the sights. Like absolutely notghing he's ever seen before. "Once again the Multiverse throws something at me that's unlike anything I know." And that means it's DANGEROUS.

    With the Flotilla zipping past though, and seeming quite adjusted to the strange environs, Nie Li does the sensible thing. A ripple of dark energies swirl across his body for a brief half-second as he merges with the Shadow Devil, causing his irises to go full empty black and shadows around him to deepen. In this form though... he breaks into a mad dash and executes a series of low leaps that has him ALMOST matching pace with the hoverbikes, though he breaks off to locate a vantage point to observe the nomads once they're spotted.

    Upon realizing that they do indeed quite know what they're doing, the young man instead focuses on sharpening his vision as well as possible to peer out into the distance and see what, exactly, they're heading away FROM, if anyhthing...
The Janitor      Somebody steps through the warpgate. Not "nobody", but somebody, because in a wasteland like this there's no blending in. She's dressed in a garbageman's dark-green coveralls with a matching cap, and her messy dark hair flutters and flaps in the wind. The slight slouch in her shoulders, her aimless posture, her expressionless face- they'd make her supremely forgettable in any locale where her presence would be less jarring.

     The air stings her skin, but doesn't enter her lungs- she simply decides not to breathe. In the recesses of her brain, she taps into ancient meditative techniques to modulate her immune response against the nanoparticles. Then she walks forward, after what externally appears like a momentary pause. Her footsteps don't make a sound, even in the metallic sand.

     George will find a hand resting on his shoulder from behind. She doesn't say a word.
Starbound Flotilla     "Tactics? Am I a guy who has tactics now? Lord, when did I become a /tactics/ guy. It's like when I found my first gray hairs." George mutters, idly just having a life-crisis instead of explaining anyhting to Majima.
    Biteblade covers it."Plan isss to hunt! Floran hear 'lionsss'! Will run with, will ssstab! Rappel with Floran if they come up messsa wall, fight hard! Keep mobility down on preymonssster if there isss." She calls out, already gearing up with grappling hooks and other equipment of her own, available for use by those who might wish to make the cliffside a battlefield.

    An ache in the joints.

    George doesn't know the Janitor is here for a pretty long while, and even after her hand gets on his shoulder, he doesn't realize it for a second. Amid the other efforts, he hands off a nanoskin. "Heya newbie, grab a nanoskin." He says, handing one off before he double-takes and nearly falls over. "SHIT!!"
Yuli Sin     Birds and recon plains sail up into the air. After they gain more than a moderate amount of altitude, the wind currents become abruptly and unnaturally rough. Like a second layer of air over the ground, or maybe with the faint breeze close to earth being the anomaly, ascending past a sharp 200 meters results in being buffeted by heavy storm wind blowing off of the encroaching monolith of black clouds and flickering electric arcs. It's coming *really* fast.

    At greater height, they can see that the golden landscape roll out further, and start to become rough rocks and high rises again, and the darker, bleaker landscape on the opposite side start to become an impenetrable bank of mist. Watching the fleeing group of people, at least there don't seem to be any stragglers, but the gilded grass and curling fronds shake wildly with the passage of four large entities moving at considerable speed. Formula One kind of speed. They're very far behind, but they'll catch up in minutes, if even that. Trying to get a good look or read on them is basically impossible for the aerial craft/familiars, with how dense and reflective the terrain is.

    Stairs rolling down from the mesa top cause the group in white robes and gold masks to suddenly hesitate and back away, pushing the children a safe distance from the steps. Pressed for time however, one of the men places his foot on the bottom, leans his weight on it a couple of times, and then waves the others on, who begin taking the fastest route now available, ditching the heaviest of their shell and canvas bags to the pulleys to haul them up.

    They arrive to the top of the mesa, staggering up one after the other, their heavy breathing rasping through the carved and fanged mouths of their masks. Two younger men and a taller woman at the front, barely distinguishable save their difference in frame and more masculine/feminine masks, look at the group out of the warpgate, and instead of trying to warily make first contact or panic, they rummage wildly through their bags to pull out spares, and try to shove them on anyone with an exposed face, grabbing them and pulling and buckling straps behind their heads.

    The way they go about it doesn't seem hostile however. It has the exact air of a parent on an airplane hurriedly fixing the oxygen mask over their kids' faces after the emergency light went on. Whoever puts up with it finds that the vaguely eastern masks hiss and click when they fasten around the neck, and function and rebreathers, with little goggles in the eyes. Lights flash on in bright red, spelling out something in Sanskrit, and showing flattened vital signs in the corner of one's vision --flatlined as of hours or days ago.
Yuli Sin     "Oh thank the goddess! The bridge is still here! The directions were true! We might just make it!" one of the men at the lead yells. A couple of others fall to their knees in relief, rummaging through their folded robes and clutching little rosaries or lockets of some kind in reverence. "This is your first time coming to the west." another one states. It isn't a question. He can tell. "You shouldn't go any further. You aren't prepared. I don't know what hideout you came from, but you should abandon it now. If you live this close, he'll find it today. Come with us! To the promised land to the east!" He points towards the bleak landscape and bank of mist, with a hand encased in a thick black glove.

    An older, taller man is attempting to coordinate the rest of the group, making a number of motions that result in some of the younger ones dropping their packs and assembling what look to be cobbled together primitive mechanical spears of the alligator or shark killing variety. A few of them pull out canvas bandoliers fitted with some flasks or capsules.

    "Are you armed?" the first one urgently asks the group. "We need as many weapons as possible. The lions are coming and there's nowhere to hide between here and the glasslands. If you have weapons, the warriors can hold the rear while the rest escape. Quickly!" he yells, garbled a little through his mask, before he and the other older man produce long, arquebus-style rifles from under their robes, pulling bolts that cause lights to sputter on and the weapons to make an unsteady charging sound. "If you don't have weapons, then flee with the women and children. Fast as you can! It's only a couple of miles! They can't get all of us!"

    Nie Li can start to get an idea of what the incredibly tense atmosphere is about. What this particular underground railroad appears to be fleeing isn't normal. He can tell that humans aren't coming through the grass. They're big and heavy, tearing up the ground and shredding the mercury-laden water. At least the weight of a rhino, minimum. Four legs, judging by their stride. He can hear the pinging of hard stalks hitting something metallic at high speed. He can smell chlorine and ozone coming from them. They're fanned out in a chevron formation, matching speed with each other, and then spreading out, like an eerily synchronized wolf pack. They'll break through to the open field at any moment.
Majima Goro     "Heh, hell if I know whatcha good at, eh?" He cracks his neck side to side. And then, some...completely non-descript girl claps a hand on George's shoulder. George acts like this is a tremendous, terrifying event. Majima's brow raises.

"Eh?"

Then George plays it off like absolutely nothing is important in the slightest, and the girl in question...doesn't look offended by it. There's a moment, before he nods and cracks a wide, wide smile. "Hey, then! If he ain't willin' to spend time with ya, maybe I can, eh? Ya got a card? Neeehehehehe!" He asks, suddenly both obsequious and mildly concerningly overbearing at the same time with that cackle.

"Come on, we'll go, uh, go see what's goin on down there together, eh?" He leans his weight back, bending his knees forward. It's...really frankly on the borders of what humans should be able to do with their bodies.

Since the stairs are ready to go, he just swaggers on over. His face has some..kinda nano thing, right? They ain't gonna try to grab him with their weirdass masks? Excellent.

He flares purple, pulling out his knife and stepping to the top of the mesa.
He...still doesn't really understand what they're fighting, but he's gonna fight the hell out of it.
Starbound Flotilla     "..." Albert looks to Staren when they are asked "We need as many weapons as possible." "Yes." He says, succinctly, clearly expecting much of Staren. "State your preferences. Squad, deploy gear. We negotiate trade later."

    "Because not even a god like me does work pro-bono, but we /work/." Pavo says, stepping forward and gesturing wide. Moonfin and Seft were already on either side of her, setting up two armory racks. One offering thin metal armor segments with some motion enhancements, another offering powered melee weaponry -- Moonfin has some finely-crafted powered naginatas and wakizashis that may particularly entice the group's warriors. "So whoever outta you was praying, guess what! You've got your answer and you've got your miracle, because today, I'm bringin' you a blessing! No idea what goddess you were looking for, but you've got one now!"

    "Movesss like turbofauna, but worssse... You sssay, can't fight? Floran think, can! Floran wanna fight! Can we! Pleassse pleassse, can fight if /sssuper ssstrong/, right?" Biteblade is visibly flexing at the dire warnings, eager to dive into things, but she is, distantly, aware that some threats are best regarded the same way one might regard a hurricane, so she tries to gauge their impression of the incoming threats and guess how that categorization works.
Sumiko A mask is strapped onto Mikoto's head, she fusses a bit at first, not sure what's going on here, and her personal space is violated.  Given that Mikoto's personal space limit is something like...standing on the same carpet as someone else, this is very flustering.  That is until the mask kicks in and she can breathe, and hey, she even can /see/ now.  

Well, that's convenient, this also gets her looking sideways at the bottom corner of the layout.  Ok, figure this out later, she can see and breathe and things are less awful again.  The people start pleading for them to come with them, which causes her to tilt her head to the side.  

"You are the ones that called for help right?  Yeah, we're it.  YOU keep running...oh and thanks for the mask!" She says, pulling out the jade longsword over one shoulder and looks down to what is obviously the approaching monsters.  

She gives Majima a sideways look, "So hey, it's not assassins we get to join forces to beat up first.  I mean, the day's still young?" she says, with a grin.  She starts going down the stairs.  Whatever is going on here is weird, bad for people, and obviously now being chased down.  East is apparently 'safe' but, what is west though?

"So, what's west?" She asks the guy warning them about the danger.    
Staren     Once the stairs are built, Staren flies to the top, taking an adult or a couple of children if they'll let him, to talk to the people at the top. "We are explorers from another world who heard your cry for help. The portal out of this realm is that way," he points, "You're welcome to escape that way if you wish. The captains and I will provide your people with weapons." And he does start passing out the usual submachineguns, perhaps not the ideal weapon for this situation but they're what he's mass-produced, along with an assault rifle and even a HEAP missile rifle and HEAP missile pistol and some plasma grenades and spare ammo for everything, though he doesn't have much of the missiles.

    Staren pillars himself up with the matter manipulator, trying to sight the approaching creatures. Someone said something about a golden lion, he's not sure he wants to try lasers first and their range is limited, anyway, so he readies an infantry railgun instead and tries to sight the approaching things and then fill them full of hypervelocity metal.
The Janitor      The garbageman takes the nanoskin from George, and rather pointedly puts it in her pocket instead of applying it. "Thanks," she says simply. If there was any doubt as to her identity, her reaction to his startling proves it. A normal person would flinch back. A sadist might show a quirk of a smile. The garbageman shows no response whatsoever. Even with her eyes hidden, she gives the impression of staring right through him.

     Her face turns to sweep over all of those assembled here, but- for some reason- particularly the Flotilla, dressed as they are in armor of similar make. "I see," she says in George's direction, in response to nothing in particular.

     She does, in fact, have a business card for Majima, and presses it into his palm. It's simple manila, with letters printed on it in dishwater-gray.

     Clean and Doe: the Custodial Firm
     Residential Cleansing, Circumstantial Bleaching, Crime-Scene Scrubbing, and Assorted Disposals

     On the reverse:

     We take care of messes.
     Call us.

     She doesn't answer the panicked men if she's armed. She takes the push broom off her back, and rests its head on the ground. Whatever's coming, she doesn't plan to move.
Shigure     Shigure and Yamashiro gently push away the masks, "We are not human, we will endure." says Yamashiro, before her plane sends reports and she closes her eyes to 'see' through it. She reports the rbougher weather and the incoming threats, before turning her attention to the warnings. "We will strike them while they are distant. Hopefully we can slow them down."

    Shigure looks between the refugees and then the Bridge, before clocking what one of them says. "Ah, we are not local... we arrived through a Warpgate... this is not important right this moment. Have your warriors stand behind Yamashiro and I. We will be your vanguard." she says, before unhooking her backpack rig and taking aim, while Yamashiro's turrets hinge out, elevating and zeroing in on the approaching Lions. "Main battery, load Sanshiki. Set for airburst ground strike. Staggered fire, 2 second break." The Battleship's cannons shift, subtly adjust, then with the roaring report of heavy artillery, spit an octet of Beehive shells that explode before impact, showering the area beneath them with burning magnesium and high speed shrapnel.
Nie Li     Between his exceptional sight and sharp hearing, Nie Li pieces together what's going on. Immediately his thoughts turn towards how similar this situation is to some very nasty events that in another time, another life, he once found himself in. At that time, he wished that someone, anyone, could come and help...

    ... but nobody came.

    Frowning - and finally starting to show signs that the environ's getting to him with a cough - the young martial artist disperses his Demon Spirit merge while he stands atop his perch. A wisp of smoke flows from his Interspatial Ring and gathers in his hands, congealing into a rusty-looking longsword with a dirtied blue blade...

    The moment he raises it and injects some SOUL FORCE into it though, the blade's crusty exterior peels away and it shines with an azure-white radiance. The sharp tang of ozone joins the other myriad smells of this hellish landscape. Around Nie Li, some of the flora sparks and sizzles with tiny electric arcs as everything metallic around him reacts to the weapon's aura.

    "Even though I can only draw out maybe one ten thousandth of this sword's power... it should be enough to scare off whatever's out there." He states confidently, and focuses his spirit through the blade.

    With that said, a torrential mesh of bolts fly every which way across the blade, filling the air with a screaming howl of high voltage and serving as an incredible beacon for spiritual senses as the priceless artifact awakens.

    At the same time, the ground around those stalking THINGS sparks to life with a power surge, a brief harbinger of what's to follow. In no time at all, a brilliant bolt from the blue strikes the center of the distant formation and forks every which way into the different foliage where it doesn't meet beast. A sharp *BOOM* of defeaning thunder's likely to startle what the lightning splaying everywhere doesn't fry...
Starbound Flotilla     TWENTY YEARS AGO...

"Bastard! What have you done to the airlock! Such treatment of a Hylotl Moonfin is unconscionable, how dare you--"
"Me? Naaaaah. /I/ didn't touch the airlock!"
"Let me out, you subversive scum!"
"Plenty of gray area in something like that. J, you mind cleaning up?"
"WAIT--"


    NOW...

    Moonfin tilts his head at the Janitor curiously, briefly clearly out his visor to look... but recognition simply fails to connect in his mind. Not even a bow, just a contemptuous quirk of the eye. "Hmm." He takes a deep breath to dispell that subtle feeling of shortness of breath.
    George grits his teeth and says, "You sure don't, J." He shakes his head, but not in a disagreeing way, more in a cloudy-mind-clearing way. He's getting out the guns.
Yuli Sin     Even with the ornate mask over almost all of his face, Staren can tell the guy he's talking to is staring at him with the hurried but calculating patience of realizing that he's met some crazy wasteland hermit but that he doesn't intend to leave him behind, and is figuring out how to best work with his delusions.

    "No, no, we can't lead him to that. If the bridge is here, the rest of the directions must be correct. Just a couple more miles. You'll see it. You're so close to the promised land! There you'll live under the protection of the goddess! You can always leave later, but we need to *go* or else they'll take you back to him as well! Leave it for now!" He begins actively pushing Staren.

    The other older guy takes his chance immediately, and starts directing the group to the pile of gear the Flotilla puts out without a moment's hesitation. There *is* no hesitation from this group. No confusion. No second guessing. A racket of clattering metal and charging electronics follows as everyone arms up, and even the young children are saddled with handguns.

    "To go any further west is to run right into the Necromancer's hands. The golden king. Don't do it." the third guy urges Mikoto. The first just replies to her with "Blessings upon you. Those of you who fall will not be forgotten."

    With that, half of the robed group returns to sprinting at full speed over the bridge, not bothering to look down for an instant, they jump and slide down the reverse side of the mesa rather than rappel, gaining a head start on the dark bed of iron filings and eventual exposed rock beyond, running as fast as they can across the bleak no-man's land. The other half stops on the opposite side of the bridge, those with spears and swords stopping to form a front row ahead of the ones with just guns, bracing their spears into the ground with one hand and using the other for additional firepower. Most of them are shaking.

    Staren and Shigure fire into the shifting grass right away, getting a head start. The thundering boom of the Kanmasu cannons showering the area below with incendiary ammunition seems to startle a couple of the escapees, but imparts a little bit of renewed confidence. A couple whisper something about 'old-type weapons' and where models that dated could have been dug up, but seem more confident. Staren taking up his firing stance and spraying railgun fire into the incoming vectors more purposefully causes one of the two older men to wave him back towards the bridge.

    Burning magnesium falls all over the field, and rather than catching fire, turns circular sections of it to orange molten globules of splattered gold. The indiscriminate scatter fire lands on a couple of the approaching entities, creating trails of smoke and the smell of burning rubber.

    Staren blasts away at the lead of the chevron . . . and hears ferrous flechettes rattle, crack, and bang off of an extremely hard surface, seeing sparks fly along the front of his moving target. Nie Li's lightning blast flows through the field much more like the more usual wildfire would, melting rows of foliage and crackling wildly off of the things inside of it.
Yuli Sin     A moment later, they're exposed. One could certainly call them lions, and definitely golden. As by Nie Li's estimation, they're a little bigger than the largest white rhinoceros can get, churning the earth beneath them, quadrupedal, and with most of the body plan of an extremely heavy and front-loaded feline. Their skin is completely covered in gleaming gold, with a finish that seems almost liquid as they move. Their four feet have massive claws with a 'second set' of them folded back over their toes, like a velociraptor or praying mantis.

    The lion part probably comes from the huge mane of flexible spines that covers much of the first third of their body, though the head in the middle is that of an eerily a human face, with closed eyes and a buddhist-like third eye, giving the impression that they're serenely charging forward blind. Their back and sides give rise to half a dozen lengthy and oversized human arms, palms and fingers and all, all still gold.

    The one in the lead is covered in dents and pockmarks over its front where Staren's long ranged fire has scoured away some of its gold exterior and exposed cobalt innards, a couple of which bleed some iridescent fluid. Lightning and magnesium burns dot the rest of them, with carbonized patches of skin obvious, but the subtle lagging in their gait being more telling.

    When they reach the mesa, it doesn't take them but a second to climb it. All four of them leap catlike up the fifty meter sheer face in one motion, crashing over the lip, and barreling through the group. Where people are in their way, the spread of lanky golden arms that blossom from each swoop down to snatch them up, batting away their weapons and squeezing them with absolutely crushing force, crushing and shaking them until they stop moving, but aren't dead, aiming to carry them off. Where people dodge, long, segmented tails armed with a huge curved blade slash at them on the way past, a flick enough to take legs off.

    The group holed up on the bridge opens fire in both ranks immediately, pounding the front 'lion' with concentrated fire from ten different weapons, scorching, blasting, puncturing, and peeling away its mask, front legs, and chest, blasting off sparking pieces of its mane and filling its arms with bleeding holes. It staggers and skids towards the bridge, almost stumbling over, but stops just in time. The other three intend to simply leap the chasm.
Sumiko Mikoto's heart was thumping in her chest when she saw the beasts, their human-like face, their spiny 'manes' and their all-around horrible disfigured look. They also come faster than expected, and casualties are already building.  The thought of one of these people dead makes her sick to her stomach...

She swallows, she has people with her.  Majima and Staren...she can do this.  When she sees three about to jump, she calls it out, but she moves.  Her sword moves in a circle across the ground before she shoves it into the ground itself.  

From the chasm, a very large phantasmal giant squid peers over the edge, holding itself up with its many arms.  It lashes out the rest that are not busy holding itself up against the retreating lions, less about trying to do damage and more about trying to delay them from leaping to the other side.  

Mikoto runs to catch up, blade over her shoulder as she runs forward.  The Giant squid roars the only way a giant sea beast would if it could scream.  Ok, maybe it shouldn't actually scream, but it's also a giant squid out of water.  
Staren     Staren's not sure why he was waved away, but the railgun isn't working quite as well as he hoped. "Are you kidding me!?" He keeps firing though -- it's gotta be doing SOME damage, right? Then the 'lions' get in close. Staren's on his little sniper tower, but... eugh.

    Staren puts his weapon away and takes to the air and flies towards the bridge, firing a couple of beam shots down at the lions. As he approaches the bridge he pulls out another missile-rifle and mimes pulling a nonexistant front trigger. Speakers on his suit belt out: "SECONDARY FIRE! AT THEIR FEET!"

    If everyone with his weapons so-equipped picks up on and follows the instructions, that should add up to a pretty sizeable quantity of riot foam gumming up the lions' legs!
Majima Goro     Okay. These are giant kinda liquid lookin' lions that have crazy leg claws, are bleedin' a fuckin' rainbow, and can leap fifty meters. Aiyah. This is some bullshit. Unfortunately, Majima does not have the sort of ranged options his colleagues do.

    He doesn't have the fancy tools. What he does have is a tried and true method of dealing with monsters larger than himself, as he rushes towards one of the lions. "...Ah, come on, don't leave without me! I'll miss ya too much!" Is it a good idea, by any stretch of the imagination, to try to tackle atop a lion? No.

That by no means has stopped him before, and it won't stop him now. The snakeskin-jacketed madman pounces as if he were the predator and the golden rainbow-blooded lion the prey, seeking to just jam his knife in--anywhere, really. He needs purchase. If he can even stop one of 'em from jumping over, that helps, right?
Shigure     Shigure fires more rapidly than Yamashiro, her lower caliber shells aimed to disable and hem in the charging beasts so Yamashiro's fire can take better effect. However, the things close too fast to get a second volley. Yamashiro tsks, "Should have used the armour piercing. Reload, Type 91 Armour Piercing. 20 seconds." But the things just leap up the mesa's side with no discernable effort.

    Shigure grunts, putting her rig away and drawing a short blade from the small of her back. "No time. Switch to emergency tactics!" Yamashiro nods, and the pair aim for one of the remaining Lions, Shigure going low to strike at legs, aiming to damage the joints, while Yamashiro moves in front of it, and attempts to just straight up grapple the thing, digging her feet in and doing her level best to be an immovable wall, while smaller turrets fold out of her larger turrets, firing smaller caliber shells into her grapple target from point blank range.
Starbound Flotilla "Incoming. Hostiles on twelve, almost here."
"Yeah yeah yeah! Floran isss gonna go!"
"Anxious. We need to make sure they don't move!"
"Then you hit the legs, toaster!"
"Alright, legs it is. Probably /have/ to."
"Let us tame the beasts."
"Jumper! STAR TWO! STAR FOUR!"

    Seft and Moonfin rush. Battle-axe and a shield on Seft, and a heavy katana on Moonfin. "Fifth Sea Hylotl Style: Deathly Currents." Moonfin moves fast, trying to slice motive parts of the hind legs. Seft rushes shield-first, trying to crash against the face and kill its momentum!
    "Star Three! Follow Goro's lead, reverse wings!"
    "Aye! I'll drag the bastard to hell!" Pavo shouts, leaping, wings going wide, and then sweeping down to the flanks of the monsters and trying to slam into the handsy body cutlass-first and flap /down/ instead of up.

    "Star Six! Crush it with me!"
    "I hate doing anything with you, though." George rambles, as he and Albert move in fast to flank around Seft and batter at the face with a heavy powered baton and a huge hammer from George and Albert respectively.

    "Star Five! STAB!"
    "FLORAN SSSTAAAAAAB BAD PREYMONSSSTER!!" And Biteblade moves in as fast as she can. If the Starbounders' tactics worked out, one of the lions will have been slowed to as complete a halt as they can get it, and Biteblade can leap in, daggers gleaming. and start trying to rip out the guts of this vaguely cosmic-seeming mythic beast by viciously blendering its side.
Nie Li     SERIOUSLY?! A full blast from his Thunder God's Meteorite Sword and... and the unnerving THINGS that are finally visible seem mostly unscathed, not even slowed down by it. Nie Li's response is to man up - quite literally. With another surge of Soul Force, his form shimmers, expands outwards and... FLASH-solidifies as a much girthier existence. Two feet taller, bulky, and now covered in brown fur, FANGED PANDA Nie Li now stands in place of the youth that'd been there before, and stashes away the sword back into his Interspatial Ring.

    "These things don't look like animals... some kind of construct?!" He'd read about such things of course, and there were known examples in the Multiverse. But, at a glance, it's quite hard to discern the nature of these golden buddhist-sphinx things!

    The obvious capture-tactics make it even clearer that these things are on a MISSION, not just hunting for food..

    And so Nie Li begins to inhale mightily, clapping his palms together and focusing his Soul Force deep within...

    With a noise that's something between a kiai and a ferocious roar, he opens his maw and belches forth twin orbs - one white, one black, both glowing brightly! They fly towards his target zone - wherever he can hit the MOST of these things without catching anything else in the blast. Because a blast there will be - upon nearing the ground or said target, the orbs merge together and detonate in a SPECTACULAR explosion that leaves an eight feet deep, sixty foot wide crater.
The Janitor      "I sure don't," she replies, in a way that might be mocking if it shared anything with George's tone. Her gaze hitches on Moonfin for just a little longer than the others.

     "Jane" stands still on the mesa, staring down at the 'lions' as they race up the side. Her brain's running subconscious calculations- how this goes if she can't breathe, how much anaerobic exertion her muscles can take, what the angles of threat on those multi-jointed golden arms and swishing razor-tails are. But she doesn't posture to anticipate the charge, doesn't set her weight against it. For all the world, she looks like an idiot mundane about to commit suicide-by-bull.

     What happens as they charge her gives the lie to Majima's theory on her presence- it's the opposite of an advertisement. Only in the instants where the Elites' "vision cones" towards her are blocked does she lash out, smashing arms and gouging holes on the two that pass on either side of her with her broom, and deflecting the razor-tails with nothing but the wooden handle. Logically, it seems impossible for a wooden weapon to damage an iron beast. With no evidence of it save the clanging sounds of her fighting and the wounds she leaves behind, it's difficult to imagine how she manages despite that.

     As they pass her by, she breaks into a blinding dash after them, keeping pace with the barely-human speed of an Olympic sprinter. One of the two she's attacked prepares to jump. She runs up behind it and leaps over the lion, soaring overhead in a magnificent thirty-foot longjump above the empty air of the chasm. As it passes underneath her on its own jump-arc, she twists in the air and swings her broom down hard above it, aiming to spike it directly down into the abyss and give herself an upwards "double-jump" boost at the same time!

     Even so, it looks like she can't possibly clear the harrowing leap- until at the last moment, she does a momentum-defying figure-skater-like twist and hooks the edge of her push broom onto the very brink of the mesa, hauling herself up by that tenuous grasp. The garbageman tidies up her hat a bit, rolls her shoulders, and turns back around to face the lions one more.
Yuli Sin     The phantasmal giant squid is the first major obstacle the Golden Lions run into. The first couple that try to jump the chasm are blocked and hit back by thrashing tentacles, walled out for the first pounce. The ranks of defenders on the opposite side shout and fall over at the sudden sight of it, but even *that* doesn't cause them to actually fall into confusion or panic.

    They're already *wired* with adrenaline, terror, and determination, and absolutely sticking to a plan that must have been practised a hundred times in secret. They keep firing through the barricade of tentacles, emptying magazines and charging cells and throwing them into the gorge, putting as much of the Flotilla's elemental firepower onto the enemy as they can, slowly building up mangling damage that breaks the Lions down from the outside, ruining their facade and chipping away at their manes and limbs.

    One lion finds a gap and jumps, and then is spiked right out of the air by the Janitor, turning its all momentum into the cliff edge, and hit by five explosive spears from the front row, punching deep into its back and flank with incredibly unsafe detonation charges. It falls short of the ledge, and goes crashing and scraping down the side. The robed nomads have to discard the spears, being one-shot affairs. One of them screams hateful epithets at the falling Lion, until it rights itself midway down and begins clawing its way back up with piston stabs of its secondary claws, jerking and staggering with the damage of the broom to its spine and the spears in its chest.

    Staren's beam cannon strikes a Lion dead on, and then seems to 'splash' on its exterior, creating a superheated area of soft hide, immediately torn away in a molten streak by the Janitor. He calls the fire order at the opportune time, and the group actually responds, blasting a lake of hardening riot foam at the three still on the other side. They begin powering right through it before it has time to fully set, but Yamashiro throws her weight against one and manages to hold it still until its legs are cemented in, and Shigure goes stabbing into its joints, numbing feedback running up her arm from the sheer harness of what she's hitting, and her blade coming away slick with opalescent fluid.

    Seft rushes to the fore and does much the same with Moonfin, halting the second Lion's sprint, and then having Moonfin's powered katana slash through its rear legs, causing them to wobble and spasm. Pavo crashes on top of it and forces it to a kneel, sticking its lower half in the foam, leaving George and Albert to thrash it viciously with their blunt weapons, crunching in its bones, smashing away its mask, and breaking its joints. Biteblade leaps on top and begins wildly stabbing all over, splashing rainbow fluid all over and tearing out thick grey muscle and coils of guts.

    That's sort of how it goes for Majima too. The lion the two Kanmasu have is the easiest target to actually get on top of, and there's plenty of damage caused by the railgun, sanshiki, and lightning alpha strike to jam his tanto into, feeling himself severing tough, rubbery muscles, and wedging the blade into some kind of spinal cavity, causing it to seize up.

    Nie Lie is only able to catch the third with the yin yang explosion, given their tactical fan formation, and after the blinding flash and deafening boom subsides, he can see it rammed deep into a crater in the ground. Blackened badly and with two of its arms hanging brokenly. Before his eyes, it begins to judder and shake, and then wrench its legs one by one out of the deep holes they'd been driven into.%
Yuli Sin     The battered, blackened, and varyingly mangled Golden Lions look to each other, and then an ethereal, echoing voice, older and male, ripples between them.

    "Category two forbidden weapons detected. Dharma retrieval unit integrity at risk. Begin lethal elimination measures"

    The weird human face masks suddenly split open, revealing HAL9000-esque glowing optical orbs beneath, swiveling to rapidly track each person with a point of blue light. A moment later, they discharge blinding spears of searing light, striking the squid, the bridge, and the cliff edges. Where the light strikes, the terrain explodes into white hot vapour clouds that shake the very earth and leave the air crackling with hazardous secondary electricity.

    Several blasts are focused on the phantasmal cephalopod until it ceases to exist completely, one more obliterating the bridge span and leaving its two ends glowing red hot and dripping. Those still on top of the Lions find the arms suddenly trying to batter, grab, and then throw them --mostly up into the air, where they are then shot directly with the powerful explosive rays where the collateral damage is more minimal. Those stalling their charge are electrocuted by massive static discharge through their manes.

    The pair with the less damaged legs begin brute forcing their way out of the riot foam, tearing it up with sheer strength. The remaining Lion climbing up the cliffside is hit with a salvo of what are absolutely definitely high explosive grenades from the refugees, and goes tumbling back down again. The lead Lion, damaged by the first alpha strike, then the refugees, then the entire Flotilla, is unable to escape the foam, and stays as a stationary suppression turret, blasting away anyone who approaches the remaining two.

    They leap the gap with much less elegance than before, having to scratch and claw a bit at the edge, then go lurching right *past* the rear line, and straight down into the grey badlands. Their movements whine and spark, jerking unnaturally, but they're still moving at a good forty kilometers per hour, liable to overtake the women and children in Not Long. Also, one is still carrying Majima.
Shigure     Yamashiro grunts with the strain of holding the thing back... and then cries out as electric current runs through her, knocking her away with the repulsive force. She skips against the ground for a bounce, then manages to right herself, turning her turret into the way to intercept the explosive laser. She hunkers down, the struck turret dripping molten slag before being jettisoned. Red eyes track the leaping Lions, and her remaining turrets, despite being peppered with suppressive fire, turn to track them. "Armour Piercing loaded... leading targets. Stagger fire, one second delay." She grunts, and staggers as she's struck again, steadies her aim and unleashes hell on the lion that isn't carrying Majima.

    Shigure, meanwhile, isn't as fortunate. She's snagged by one of those mane-arms, tossed into the air, and only doesn't get vaporized because she too sacrifices a turret, bringing it around to absorb the blast, before discarding the slagged cannon-tonfa over the edge of the mesa, where it detonates midway down. She lands, skids, and slowly gets back to her feet, taken out of the fight for the moment as she recovers.
Majima Goro Majima did not, per se, have a plan in mind when he leapt upon a weird lion. He had less of a plan when their human-shaped masks broke apart and they started shouting at each other about forbidden weapons and retrieval of Dharmas.

That said, being on the lion when the blinding spears of light start destroying everything in sight? He's arlight with that. All HE has to deal with is the grabbing arm things. "Eeyah! Not that kinda guy, lion, get offa me!" He's slipped back just a bit, knife firmly embedded in the...apparent robo-lion's back, as he twists and kicks around to keep from being beaten up too much, before he's flung up into the air...

And as the blinding light is shot upwards to annihilate him in a single blow, he twists. He bends his body, and achingly barely curls himself around the ray like a finger going through the hole of a ring. He catches on his knife-handle again, jacket flapping in the wind as his eye widens.

"...arright, this is dumb, but I ain't got any better ideas..."

He had told George earlier that his weapon loadout for the day included his knife, bat, a cannon stuffed inside a taxidermied marlin, and a metal kettle. Obviously, of these four weapons, only one remains viable in this circumstance.
    The kettle. TThe kettle just seems to appear in his freehand, as he crawls and pulls himself forward. Alright. Sure, these are robot eyes. This might not even work, but it works in Kamurocho. Maybe..just maybe, it'll work here.

He bites his lip, and tips tThe kettle. It's filled with boiling water, as it turns out. Hopefully, robot lion robot faces and optical equipment are not prepared for boiling H2O? He's got nothin'.
Sumiko Several blasts tear the Squid apart, Mikoto frowning as her invested mana just goes up in smoke, as the phantasmal creature disappears.  She is still running towards the lion creatures, trying to catch up, but before she can get there, they leap across.  

So she just starts running faster.  Very fast.  Sonic speed fast.  She leaps over the bridge, having more than enough speed to make it, even as she swings her sword to cut the beam of energy in her way.  The beam is split down the middle, and Mikoto runs through it like a rock in a stream.

Not without cost, as her arms are heavily burned from the exchange, and she's looking less than wholesome, but it's far better than taking it head-on.  Her speed kicks on again, as she runs right for the back of one of the lions, leaping up into the air...

And coming down like a guillotine aiming to shove her blade right into the back of the lion's neck.  The jade sword trying to slice through whatever it can.  "Hey, your prey is right here.  How about you try picking on someone way smaller than your size!"

Nailed it, Mikoto.  Would Sempai be proud?
Nie Li     GAH! What are these things?! So ridiculously durable... and increasingly creepy. Nie Li's grimace turned utterly SHOCKED. This situation is out of his control! Completely! Or... so it seems. Somehow, they're still a threat, but they've been pummeled pretty hard...

    Seeing this, Nie Li shifts back to his previous form, the panda girth melting away as the Shadow Devil's stealthy and speedy nature boosts his agility. He swiftly gives chase, managing the leap following the Lions with ease... and coming down through the air with eerie quiet, aiming to JAB one of them through its spine with a bendy-skewering blade of shadow that sprouts from his wrist and dives for its target!
Staren     Staren doesn't relax, he just keeps attacking. When a voice mentions 'lethal' measures, he shouts, "It wasn't 'lethal' before?!" and keeps shooting, a mix of particle beams and miniature High Explosive Anti-Tank missiles.

    HEAT warheads detonate just outside the target, concentrating nearly all their explosive force into a shaped piece of metal, which is injected with so much heat and kinetic energy that it becomes a heavy plasma that goes through normal tank armor like it was a thin sheet of liquid. Normally it's hard to make them smaller than a soda can, but Staren's MULTIVERSE TECHNOLOGY has them down to about the size of a magic marker. Neat!

    Staren is really hoping, from the sight of some of the lions 'bleeding', that they have some form of internal organs that can kill them if he pokes a few narrow holes into them. Starting with the conveniently-stuck one that's a nice still target.

    Staren's trying to keep an eye out for any lasers pointed at him and raise his forcefield against them, but all this is a lot to pay attention to -- hopefully his defenses can take it.
Starbound Flotilla "Hell! Ghh-- It's after me!"
"Stressed. It's after all of us!"
"This thing-- What /is/ this? Some form of weapon?"
"It seemed spiritual, at first, but it is more clearly a construct."
"Let's deconstruct it, then, hell! I'm electrified bad!"
"Wait, hey! Other preymonssster getting away!"

    Pavo is tossed, blasted out of the air, and then lands heavily in the crunchy mesa dirt a ways away. Albert, Moonfin, Seft, and George all suffer an intense electric shock! And Biteblade eats several heavy shocks during their slashes. But it's looking, at least, like this one is covered. "Break off! They're getting away!" With the foam mostly handling this one, and with it pretty significantly damaged, they break off, taking a break from the electrification and rushing back to the hoverbikes.

    Biteblade leads the charge with her bow in one hand, cavalry-firing heavy bolts. But the others, aside Moonfin, have pistols, a one-handed grenade launcher, a sawed-off shotgun -- in Pavo's case, even a fancy set of three swirling orbs that she can lash out with that return to her! They intend to ride alongside the pair surging forward, dumping damage into all of them while Moonfin rushes to batter back strikes and defend his fellows with his katana. Mostly he has to try deflect the work of the left-behind lion, using his katana to shield against the energy blasts and suffering the bulk of their impact in order to keep his wounded allies' aims steady.
Yuli Sin     "They're just going to catch the others and come back for us!" one of the refugees yells in dismay, even as he turns on it and fires his 'arquebus', firing a hypervelocity shot of his own that sends him reeling back and up into the bridge post. "Dammit no! We can't let them get past us!" another yells, two fellows alongside him hurling themselves in front of the Golden Lions, slashing and stabbing with their Flotilla-provided powered melee weapons, getting a few good hacks and slashes in before they're either smashed out of the way or grabbed up and carried off screaming by the eerie arms.

    The rest of the squad turns and fires as fast as they can on the Lions running past them. Yamashiro catches one from directly underneath and cracks the underside of its chest with several, point blank armour piercing rounds, causing it to spin out, roll onto its back, and then haul itself back up like a crashed motorcycle before rejoining the chase, bleeding a trail behind it.

    The creature stuck behind remains blasting away at the entire enemy group, but as the squid disappears and Shigure loses her turret and tumbles out of the fight, it begins mostly hammering Staren's forcefield. Each shot drains it as if he'd been right in the sights of a heavy military robot's laser cannon, pounding it into nothing devastatingly quickly.

    The pile of HEAP warheads blast against its scarred golden hide and skewer it in dozens of semi-randomly chosen places, causing cracks of energy and sprays of burnt liquid to fly from the narrow holes, but not going so far as to punch out the other side. After a briefly sustained, furious slugfest, it finally sputters out and collapses against the hard foam, most of its body melted, mangled, or sparking.

    With that one taken care of, the nomadic warriors that'd stayed behind immediately start to give chase, sliding down the eastward side of the mesa rise as fast as they can, hollering and firing as fast as they can move at the gradually more distant targets. Even when the Golden Lions start catching up to the hard-pressed survivors with few weapons and no options, the women start shoving the children forward and turning to stand and shoot as well, risking almost certainly being grabbed as well, but possibly dealing enough damage to slow the Lions down enough to let the young kids escape.

    The hoverbikes easily overtake them, at least, and soon the Starbound Flotilla is riding Max Max to either flank, pelting them with combined fire on both sides. The optical orbs have essentially 180 degrees of coverage, meaning they barely have to turn their heads to fire back sideways while running, blasting the road with those huge explosions that turn the iron sand into mushroom clouds of crackling plasma. It doesn't look they can keep going too much longer.%
Yuli Sin     Majima just swings down in front of his, throws a kettle of heated water in its face, the water sizzles off the orb, unaffected, but the energy ray that projects out of it is diffracted by the water and causes a point blank fireball in the creature's face, causing it to twist violently, skid, stumble and roll over, its entire 'head' a blackened, smoking wreck, as it lurches off blindly, veering off course and correcting itself over and over as it uses some other secondary sense to drunkenly chase. Its legs and back whine and creak with every lunging step, its whole frame shuddering from the joint pounding of the Flotilla and the robed travelers escaping 'the Necromancer'.

    Nie Li and Mikoto catch up right away, landing on their targets with contextual takedown prompts that stab deeply into their damaged prey and tear more of that thick grey muscle and hard white and black bone out, splashing their faces with thick, oily, arsenic-smelling liquid, and flashing dangerous electrical feedback at them. Their choice finally careens face first into the ground, front legs no longer working, scraping gradually from high speed to a halt just in front of the last line of armed refugees.

    The front and rear ranks circle around it as the runners slowly catch up, avoiding its arc of beam vision, and begin emptying hundreds of shots into it from a barely safe distance, melting and shredding the colossal beast that'd been pounced on, until it too stops moving, left as a smoking, steaming pile.

    Finally, the weaving and wobbling Lion left blinded and deprived of its heavy weapon by Majima starts to approach the group, bordering on the edge of the heavy mist, and then Majima is thrown bodily free a good twenty meters by the Lion's body rippling, contorting, then sharply expanding outwards in every direction, as the blind and oblivious Lion runs into something that completely guts it from head to stern, its badly stripped body warped completely around a gigantic cylindrical hole punched through it.

    The iron sand explodes into a molten dust cloud behind him, and then the actual *bang* reaches the group a moment later. The final Lion crumples to pieces, and the refugees gather together ecstatically. They have to wander a little through the dense fog here, calling out each other's names, urgently tracking one another down to account for all heads, and then using powered blades to cut the captured members out of the dead Lions' fingers. Members run out to pick up Majima, and drag Shigure along as well, fussing over Mikoto's burnt arms and the Flotilla's battered suits, amongst the sprains and broken ribs of the grabbed warriors.
Yuli Sin     The atmosphere is equally elated as it is reverently cautious. Mothers gather up and hug their children, young men whoop and holler together, they all go up in cheers. "I can't believe it! We really did it!" "What absurd fortune! The goddess must be smiling upon us!" "He won't send any more Lions this far! He wouldn't dare! This is holy ground!" "Thank you . . . wherever you came from; it's only thanks to you that we made it all here. Look!"

    The oldest one points ahead, deeper into the mist, where that massive shot had come from. The ground slowly ceases to be dark grey iron dust, and instead becomes some sort of grass. Dark black grass, with a sort of textured carbon finish, and sort of rubbery to the touch. It chokes and strangles out the gold herbs that try to grow here, and the gilded flora wither where the landscape changes.

    Up ahead, you can see the vague, foggy shapes of huge, narrow, arrow straight trees of some kind, seemingly made almost entirely out of glass. Translucent, gleaming foliage gradually packs the area, like a dense, mountainside jungle. Complex formations of platinum titanium exist inside the glass, as if frozen in amber, giving everything a sort of silver 'skeleton' inside of it, supporting sheaths of carbon black cables and internal cells. A continuous canopy far overhead, of a deep, blue-black sheen, blocks out almost all the sun. The trees drip with cable vines and hanging lotus flowers with glass petals. Red lights glow inside some of the flora, refracting ruby beams dizzyingly through the jungle.

    "That's it. The border into the holy land. We only need present our talismans and our offering. Clearly fortune smiles upon us today. It will be fine. We have enough for you as well. You'll be granted passage."
Staren     Okay. Getting into a shooting match with the lion turret wasn't pleasant, but at least after emptying a couple of magazines at the thing he has clear evidence they CAN be killed. His forcefield is overpowered, but at least that's all -- Staren arms and armors himself as if he /expects/ to be fighting heavy military robots on foot, for some reason.

    With that one down, Staren turns and flies after the running fight. He may not be able to catch up, but he doesn't HAVE to: He just has to get the /missiles/ there/. Using guidance data from the guns he handed out, he can-- Oh, it seems all targets are down.

    Staren eventually lands with the group, distributing nanobandages to the injured.

    "Your cooperativeness is appreciated. It's nice to see the people we come to help actually able to be proactive about it for once. Also, let me know about any of you that are beyond your doctors' help. Maybe I can do something about that. Actually, I should probably get on that..." He leaves a radio to talk with him through, and flies back over the battlefield to search for any fallen whose heads are still intact.

    <"What is this holy place? Who sent those creatures after you? Where did you come from?"> He asks, over the radio.
Majima Goro You know what was a good plan? Pouring boiling hot water on the robot's eye.

It wasn't a good plan for, say, any of the reasons he'd done it for, mind you. It was just a good idea. The energy ray diffracts wrong, and as he clings desperately to the knife embedded in the Lion's back, he's front-seat to a massive explosion.
"Wheeeheeeheeehaaaaahahahaaaaaaaaaaa!"

His celebrations are cut short, however, because the Lion goddamn explodes. Majima's body is bounced off the lion. Off the ground. Off the ground again. This -             hurts-
a great -
         deal -

...and eventually he skids to a stop, on his back. The jacket has torn off in the process, and the man just lays there, criss-crossed with gashes and tears winding a network of bloody cuts along his body. His tattoos become obvious, now, a red demon, (Hannya, if you're one of those demon enthusiasts) visible on the back. The last tatters of the jacket flutter atop his shoulders, the sleeves and rest long gone.

"...ehhhhhnnn.." At least someone's picking him up.
Sumiko Covered in multicolored blood, Mikoto breathes heavily as she finally stands up from the corpse of the lion she had toppled, picking the sword up and hitting the lion a few more times to make sure.  Of course, things were about to go very wrong, until a shot from out of sight tears through the sky, shooting another lion and saving lives.

"That...was fortunate," Mikoto says, with some relief, as she drags the sword up to her shoulder.  Only to be fussed over again by one of the refugees.  She offers up a hand to ease the concerns, as her arms already seem to be mending on their own, restoring themselves to what they were before they were nearly burnt.  

"It's fine, my mana will eventually heal myself.  How are you all?  Is everyone alright?" Mikoto asks, concerned.  She came up expecting a good time and did not expect to be fighting so hard for people.  She looks towards mothers picking up their children.  Families and friends were happy to be alive.  

She had used her power only to survive, this was...a new feeling for her.  One she kinda liked.  

As they gather up she runs over to see if Majima is alright, "Majima-san!  Oh dear, you looked like you had quite the spill!" she says, now fussing over him.  She grabs a nanobandage from Staren and slaps it on Majima.  "Thanks!" she says to the boy genius.  

"So...who is this goddess?  As we said we're not from this world..."
Shigure     Shigure gets back to her feet, the arm she used to shield herself using her turret hanging limply, 'bleeding' a thick black oily substance. She waves off the fussing. "I've survived worse, look to the others. I am still able to move." she says, clutching the major breach in her 'hull' with one hand, staunching the flow of 'blood'. She frowns a bit at the looming forest of glass. She finds the look of it as dubious as the horror lions that were just destroyed. "Yamashiro, can you still move?" she asks, approaching her companion.

    Yamashiro, meanwhile, hinges her turrets back in against her back, then nods to Shigure. "I lost number 2 turret. Major superstructure warping from the periphery heat of the laser strike, but motive functions are unaffected." she says, giving a dubious look of her own at this 'Holy Land'. She sayss to the refugees. "While that is appreciated, we should return home. Our wounds require special facilities to be healed."
Nie Li     Thank goodness the things finally go down! Any further resilience and Nie Li might've been forced to back off and rethink his strategy. He flips away from the downed Lion covered in grime that he grabs some cloths from his Interspatial Ring to wipe off quickly...

    Seeing that the crew has matters in hand though, he takes this time to reminisce over some very unpleasant memories... where he was a traveling refugee like these people. The thoughts are dark indeed, drawing a scowl and a very determined, fierce look to play across his face.

    He snaps back to his senses hearing... a girl in distress. Because of course that snaps him out of her senses. The boy glances over, spots Mikoto fussing with Majima... and grimaces. OW, he went through the wringer...

    But Mikoto has that covered.

    So he approaches the nomad elder instead. "I'm Nie Li. We heard the call for help and found you. Whatever's happening here is a complete unknown to me... I've never seen a place where all the plants are made out of everything BUT leaves and wood. We're lucky those things finally went DOWN."
Starbound Flotilla     The hoverbikes whoosh to a stop, and eventually settle. The Flotilla dismount and stagger a bit. Except Biteblade, who never staggers, despite her electrified wounds and battered armor. Instead, she jumps triumphantly on a lion corpse. "Floran! Isss!! Ssstrongest!!!" She calls out excitedly, before clambering through the weird body-long head-to-stern blast trying to find which one of their group shot the blast by aiming along it. That /was/ one of them, right?

    No, it wasn't. She squints her eyes and darts out, scampering over. "Huuuuuhhhhhhhhh. Glassland. Remindsss Floran of The Line. Floran wonder, why isss like thisss? Wowwwww. Isss magic place? Isss that what 'holy' mean?" She tilts her head at the one talking about talismans.

    George is off to Majima. He figures what the guy most needs is a pick-me-up in the proper way that people like them work. So a couple of nanobandages, a shot of pain-killer, and a splash of water on the face ought to do it. "Up and at 'em man, we're at story time or some shit." He says, in friendly tones, inviting the man to get back on his feet outside of the lifting.
The Janitor      The garbageman's broom is singed and cracked to a sharp spear-point two-thirds of the way down the handle. She holds a piece of sharp metal from one of the Lions in her other hand, loosely yet securely, like someone carrying a knife around the kitchen. To anyone not paying specific attention to her, she'll have seemed to simply disappear partway through the latter half of the fight, only to reappear almost blending into the crowd as they reach the border of the 'holy land'.

     There are still only two signs of her efficacy: the Chaos Dunk maneuver over the chasm, and the fact that her green coveralls are still unsullied by blood and oil.

     She has no intention of becoming a naturalized citizen here, but she still asks one of the escapees to have a look at these 'talismans'. Afterwards, she assumes a point slightly ahead and to the side of the rest of the party, trying her best to look like she's moving casually while finding her footing with unnatural ease.
Majima Goro "Ah. ...gah. ...Eeeyaaaaaah..." Majima does seem to respond well enough to the medical treatments, including the splash of water. "...Arright. Ahh. Heh."

He stretches out a bit, the medicine doing its work. "...Eh, no hope of some barbeque instead, eh? Nah? Okay." He adjusts his eyepatch to put it in place. George gets a slight view--whatever happened to that eye, it was not done in one single go. There are way, way too many scars underneath that patch.

Anyway, he's back up on his feet, albeit with less pep than usual. "..."

He considers. "...eh, how long till that capsule thing wears off and I can't breathe again?" He waves a hand a bit. "...just wanna make sure, cause I ain't sure if anythin' in this air *ain't* gonna kill me..."

He looks around a little at the refugees. "...wouldn't be good o' me to die durin story time, eh?"
Yuli Sin     Spending some downtime to assess injuries, apply bandages, reload weapons or toss those that are utterly slagged and spent, count heads, and then drag out canteens of precious drinkable water, the robed walkers begin trudging on into the jungle, some of them stopping to marvel at the feeling of the 'grass' and gaze up and the beetle-like dark shine of the leaves overhead, little kids pressing their faces to glass trees and listening to the thrum of the silver frames within, tiny red lights flickering rapidly.

    "We came from the west." the man Staren talks to reasserts, still not really explaining how they know any cardinal directions. Stars maybe? "The golden kingdom. More truthfully, we escaped it. The Necromancer is not a kind master. Those who live on the land find tough times. They must constantly move to avoid his rot, contend with his mastery of the skies, seek out the places untainted by death, and always leave their own dead behind."

    "Those unfortunate enough to be caught spend the rest of their lives in his towers, performing his endless rituals as slaves, eating only the tainted food he reluctantly allows to grow, until they are filled with his curse, and shunned anywhere else. Those who escape are watched by the wind and hunted by his dead spirits, or worse, the Golden Lions, and dragged back, where he hollows out their minds and puts them back to work. Those cursed by him cannot even escape through death. He brings them back endlessly to eternally toil for him. He is . . . Jashid, the Golden King."

    He hefts his bag and begins moving again. "Stories of the lands bordering his are rare. He blocks out all the whispers that travel on the winds. Only those brave enough to smuggle in and out of his lands tell of elsewhere. Further to the west, there is only Hell, and the endless wars of the Devil Kings. North, and one encounters the Mother of Ghosts, and likely freezes to death, or else their soul is ripped out and made hers. The south only runs to the ocean, and afoul of the Infinite Maw."

    "To the east though, through the golden waste and over the mountains, is the glasslands. Nobody ever comes from there, but there are plenty of stories. They are a land reigned over by a goddess who doesn't eat humans as food, or turn them into fuel, or work them as slaves, or make their souls her playthings. A powerful goddess of bounty and vengeance, light and glass and war. They say there are places where the faithful are allowed to dwell on the surface, where green things grow out in the open, under the sun and the sky."

    "People from the surrounding lands attempt to make the pilgrimage more and more these years. Some succeed, and word comes back of the rituals and customs she demands, and the miracles she performs. Sometimes, she speaks directly to the dwellers in her lands, through the Mythics who wear the old armours that can hear her."
Yuli Sin     When the Janitor goes hassling to see a talisman, an older woman goes through her bag, with the spare masks, and pulls out a jangling chain of stamped factory iron, chiselled carefully into an ornately patterned pendant of sorts. She seems reluctant to give it over, but decides "Izmet has no use for it anymore. He would want me to pass it on. He was always our best at passing down the stories, and he taught us all how to create the holy signs. They have to be perfect. If they're even slightly flawed, you'll be struck dead."

    On the hammered and polished flat surface, is exactly and intricately etched, with expert precision . . . a QR code. It's literally a QR code. It's much, much more dense than the kind people would be used to, and really impressive someone could memorize that, but it's really just a QR code square.

    "You should change out your masks as well." says one of the women, lifting her gold faceplate, revealing almost maggot pale skin below, and changing the rebreather inside. "The Golden Rot doesn't reach here, but the air will make the unfaithful cough blood from their lungs until they die. We do not yet have the goddess' benediction." Different aerial contamination hazard. Fun. They hand out some extras from those bags. No doubt the spares came from members of their group who didn't make it, and have cost them a great deal from smugglers. No doubt that was a long time ago, since Staren's reconnaissance finds no dead.

    It's not particularly long heading forward into the glass jungle (the refugees frequently stop to point out which vines will electrocute someone, which fine fractal brush and flowers will shred one's skin open to the slightest touch, and which flowers are deadly to be near) before the credibility of the whole mythos is brought up. Perhaps only minutes. Just as the mist begins to clear out somewhat.

    It's almost impossible to see at first. Another creature. Not quite as large as the Lions, but longer. It slithers down helically from the top of one of the gigantic trees, but has a body more like a wolf, with a trailing tail making up half of its body length. Made mostly of glass itself, it's appears as little more than a fabulously complex platinum skeleton and black ligamenture floating in a surreal void of other silver and black, distorted by so much glass. It leaps gracefully to a metallic arch that creaks and then shimmers under the impact of its claws. You can see all the fine mechanisms its inner parts working in a fantastically hypnotic display.
Yuli Sin     The lower half of its head is a solid plate like a knight's wedged helm, and the top half of its head is a blank, curved surface of black glass, upon which a series of shifting patterns lights up. Dark blue waves flow hexagonally up and down its surface, and then a bright red symbol blazes on its surface, something like a ruby red tree or raised flower made of geometric diamonds. Concentric rings ripple out from the red pattern, and then it speaks, in audibly a completely different language than the Golden Lions. It's smooth and feminine, and sounds like some bastard mishmash of Korean and Japanese with Mandarin and Vietnamese undertones.

    Its long, segmented tail swishes and clinks back and forth beneath it, symbolically blocking the arch. A visible 'scanning wave' projects from emitters in the side of its head, rolling over the group. More importantly, its back has a pair of hardpoints mounting what are obviously twinned sleek, flat, blue-black railguns of stupendous size, with visible ammo feeds that suggest enormous slugs inside it.

    "Old-type life forms detected. Present authentication code or turn back. Lotus-level clearance or higher is required to proceed beyond this point."

    The group in robes immediately drops to their knees, *now* fretting and fussing and breathing heavily as they rehearse lines, pull out their QR code talismans, hold them aloft, and assume a prayer posture. They begin chanting something in badly accented Asian creole. A couple of them try to urge the others to get down too, shoving 'talismans' in their hands. "Just do exactly as we do. Don't look upon the judge until it determines whether you are pure of spirit. If you show your faith, it'll accept our offering, and we'll be permitted past. Do not anger it. Pray that your body and spirit are pure of taint. The Glass Goddess doesn't allow the tainted."
Majima Goro "Shooeh pippi," Majima says with a resigned sigh. Sure. He'll...hold onto the weirdass talisman and sit in the weirdass position. This is some absolute nutball crap, but on the other hand, he just exploded a giant robot tiger's face with boiling water, and got flung sixty feet.

Ruining that kind of thing by getting everyone killed by the glass wolf thing would...ya know, it'd kinda ruin things a wee bit.

'sides, it ain't the first time he's had to go along with weird cult bullshit for a little bit. He's fine.
Staren     <"Wow. We didn't lose anyone to the lions! Good job, everyone!"> Staren returns to the group, now that there's no ticking clock to save people on.

    Eventually they find an arch and a wolf, and a 'talisman' is pressed into Staren's hand. He glances at it, rolls his eyes, and holds it out for the 'judge' to scan. He remains standing, though. He assumes that the kneeling and chanting is superstition but that the QR code and threat of railguns is legit. The mention of 'taint' is a little worrying -- what if the 'necromancer' is the only magic-user around and it targets magic or something? But oh well, if they end up having to fight the wolf that's okay.
Sumiko A talisman is shoved into Mikoto's hands.  She raises a brow but quickly catches on.  It's like a ceremony, ok sure.  She can get behind that, she says, holding out the Talisman and playing along.  It's not like they had to fight four other players in total fair and balanced RNG to get this Talisman.

'Sides learning about another culture can be fun, right?  It's not hurting anything.  It's not like THEY'RE going to be staying or anything.
Starbound Flotilla     Biteblade takes one of the masks, staring it over, before putting it on. "Floran have ritual too. Will take, but need to make sssure isss good for old fallen hunter, yeah." She takes one of her bloody hands and wipes a few odd tribal markings on the front of the mask, with the mixed Floran and Lion blood, before pulling off her helmet and settling it on her face. Some of the other Starbounders -- George, Seft, even Albert -- indulge the same. Pavo and Moonfin are the only ones who don't.

    Kneeling to the big Gamecube Clear Controller of a monster is done, but not with reverence, and Pavo and Moonfin don't do it. Biteblade, for her part, somehow manages to seem /excited/ about everything. "Helloooo! Floran isss very pure, pure ssstrong and bessst. Pleassse tell controlling thingy, Floran isss here to help and find more bad preymonssster to hunt! Floran will kill every Dharma, yesss." She probably understands that this is mostly automated, but maybe she assumes it'll pick up on keywords or something?
Nie Li     A great deal of this doesn't make a lot of sense to Nie Li. He can tell that these people are dealing with things that they don't entirely understand, but sadly that brings him no closer to understanding the full picture.

    He actually hates having to prostrate himself before ANYTHING... so the furthest he does is drop to one knee and hold up a talisman obtained from the group respectively. His head is unbowed as, frankly, he can feel neither majesty nor any sort of presence from this thing that's spouting weird ddemands that sound NOTHING like any spiritual tests he knows of.

    Truth be told, he's quite nervous, but he's willing to spring a confident smile anyways...

    And be ready to vanish into Void Form should anything go wrong.
The Janitor      Even with the QR code in her hands, the garbageman doesn't submit to the scan. Instead, her vital signs immediately plummet like a rock to the point where they're nearly undetectable without pointing keen sensors directly at her- her skin blanches pale as bloodflow's shunted away from it and her heartbeat slows to a sluggish thump, and her muscles slacken as her synaptic activity drops off a cliff too. If it's got any kind of 'bio-signs scan', she very likely just avoided being picked up as a blip.

     Keeping her hands out-of-view behind someone kneeling in front of her, she fishes the Flotilla nanoskin she was handed earlier out of her pocket, pops the battery out of her cell-phone, flips it over to invert the charge relative to the Flotilla's standard-engineering assumptions, and then cracks it in thin air instead of applying it to a specific person. An invisible bubble of inverse pressure-retention appears around the kneeling supplicants- only able to sustain itself for a minute or two at the increased size, but that'll be long enough.

     Without any air escaping from the bubble, they'll all appear to be unbreathing- no air currents to tickle any sensors that the glass sentinel might have, very little radiating body heat, no carbon dioxide emission. As if they all had fully-sealed environment suits.
Yuli Sin     As suspected by a couple of people, the kneeling and prostration isn't strictly necessary. The scanning wave focuses down when it detects the QR patterns and fills in the tiny etched square surfaces with light, flashing confirmation as it passes over each. For whatever reason though, those who don't join in the chanting actually have theirs checked three or more times before the 'Judge' reluctantly passes on with it. After it finishes with the group, the automated voice declares:

    "Twenty Lotus-class and one Lily-class clearance verified. No toxoplasmic anagathic or recombinator strains detected. No Pattern: JASHiD terraform strains detected. No Pattern: FAN Mi CAKAD detected. No Pattern: KOROLEVA PRiZRAKOV detected. No Pattern: NERO LOGiA detected. All personnel green."

    There is a sudden hitch in the repeating patterns on its black glass headplate, and in its vocalizations, and then its swaying motion stops, becoming fixed and rigid. The plate slides off and angles down over its head like a patterned festival mask, and the display flickers, is briefly overcome with hexagonal 'static', and then the red geometric icon turns partially white, and the diamonds reconfigure themselves to look like a pair of stylized human eyes, with red, kabuki theatre-fashioned eye makeup, looking through said mask, back and forth across the group. The volume and timbre of the smooth, automatic vocalizations changes, and a much more natural, resonant voice says:

    "Four Golden Lions for thirty human lives. This is an adequate offering. Transient slayers of tainted, inferior beasts, follow this creature as your guide to the promised land. Preservation area 107 is yours. Deliver unto the maiden your sacrifices from afar, and be blessed by the waters. Do not stray from the path. Do not remove your masks, until you are reborn anew and may breathe the air of the holy land."

    The display punctuates the end of its sentences with bright red gestalt kanji, flashing across the mask, and then when it's done speaking, it glitchily reverts to its previous state, and the heavy creature drops from the arch with a weighty thud, its tail a twisting ribbon behind it as it marches into the undergrowth. To the left and right of the group, the glass jungle clatters and chimes with the swift movement of many more, smaller contacts, passing them in moments, and rushing out to the badlands and the cleared mesa, no doubt to track down the fresh kills.

    The refugees collectively let out a roughly synchronized heavy of wobbly relief through their respirators, but when they get up, shouldering their packs again, they're already light on their feet again --weary with the adrenaline and shock wearing off, but excited and eager to keep going. To them, this is very much stumbling upon Atlantis or climbing to the top of Mount Olympus and finding out it's a real thing.

    The eldest turns and offers an excessively banged up and battered little square object with a dimly glowing display, appearing to be some sort of GPS, though who knows what it's locating by, since all positioning stuff so far has been crap. "I know you said you'd wanted to go back to your camp, or hideout, or wherever you're from, but you've been accepted by the Goddess now. Should the Necromancer find you, or should fortune disfavour you, just follow us back here. Follows us back here and utter a prayer to Yuli Sin. We'd be glad to have you again." he says.

    A couple of the kids come up and hug several members of the group, and the men give manly embraces, handshakes and backslaps to everyone except the Janitor, whom they've forgot is there, then adjust their clanking and clattering bags and canteens and ammo belts, and follow the automatic creature off into the jungle.
The Janitor      The garbageman stretches her arms and legs as circulation visibly returns to her skin, then pops the battery back into her phone and starts walking back in the direction of the warpgate. In passing, she brushes into George and presses the spent nano-skin into his palm. "Thanks."
Majima Goro      ...All of that happened. But--it ended /well/, and that's what matters. Yeah. Majima gets up, pulling out a pack of cigarettes and lighting one up. That one chick with the broom seems to be gone, or at least he hasn't noticed her since he got on the lion.
"...Alright," He says, turning away from the group. "That's enough....hero work..or whatever it is we just did for one night, ehhh?"

The smoke is removed from his lips, and he spreads his arms wide, looking up to the sky. "...I'm goin' to get somethin' to eat somewhere." Short of anyone stopping him, he's also headed towards the warpgate.