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Priscilla     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8INeip9pioI

    The Sagittarius card, The Centaur With The Bow, is the key piece to the third and tallest monument. Bearing it like a talisman ahead of you --a ward against the accelerating singularity of this place's tangled twists and dense confabulations-- the upside down bunker turns itself inside out, upside down, and underneath, and then right side up as you walk through it. Without the infinite hallway, walking in a straight line feels anything but; the experience of simply never getting through the exit becomes that of a knot being gradually untied, with yourselves walking perpetually over its outer surface, until you can see the curvature of it with the way your Perspective finally swivels over yourselves in the right way and settles into place.

    Yet, the next iteration of the Room is so simple. There are no bleeding floors. No mysterious artwork. No puzzles. No shadows. No untoward symbolism of bars and whispers. Not even placeholder Elsens. Outside of some new electronics and far fewer crates and boxes, there are no longer any real changes. All of its fuzzy or empty portions half-remembered are gone and filled in. The inconsistent hallways that lead into stranger places no longer seem to exist. It's small. Banal. Perfectly clear. Perfectly empty. Once again, you find yourselves alone.

    The child's bedroom is just a bed and a huge teddy bear again. There is no poster, nor dresser, and there probably never was. The place where the calendar hung on the wall only shows the ripped stump of one, the last of its date pages finally torn off, who knows when. All there is of note is a book lying in the middle of the floor, discarded by a child having finished with it or become distracted. It hardly looks technical or important though. In fact, it looks hand made, rather than printed. Printing paper since laminated and stapled, filled with almost-professional artwork done in india inks with an artist's fountain pen. It looks for certain like a picture book, signed with looping cursive that anyone with a giant teddybear by their tiny bed wouldn't have written in.

    The air inside the Room is stale. Dustier and more bitter than before. It seems somehow quieter, and more still, with a thin grey haze clouding it just slightly, visible in the diffused glow of the computer monitors, tuned into the same programming. There are no unopened boxes anymore; all remaining crates have had their lids popped and their contents mostly depleted. The last additions to the Room, as if the manuscript had just dotted its i's and crossed its t's, are racks of blinking hard drives, and a powerful portable radio, all of them broken.
Tina Natsumi There's something severely wrong here. It's too... Normal.

Where's the screwed up perspectives? The ominous figures talking about things that barely make sense even in context? The rooms full of strange smelling and stranger looking ghosts?

Tina's not falling for it. She's seen too much of this place to just let her guard down like that. The huge teddy bear must be some kind of defense mechanism for that book on the floor, and she's not going to let that thing out of her sight.

Her phone's still on and recording, of course, so she can't let the paranoia be too apparent. "Alright, what do we got here... A book, some hard drives, a... Radio? Huh. Ain't never thought I'd see one o' those again in this day and age." She leaves the teddy bear unmentioned, but her gaze is fixed right on the thing as she shuffles towards the picture book to pick up, then hold up so she can look at it and the teddy bear at the same time.

"Huhn. Signature's kinda weird, ain't it? Wonder if there's any other clues or-" She pauses, tilting her head sideways briefly to watch that bear. She doesn't trust that thing. "-anything useful or cryptic in here."
August Kohler Well, this is positively normal. As they step forward, August squints at the room, as confused as Tina, but unlike Tina, he doesn't think it's a trap. His first decision is to move over to that radio, and try and open up the back if he can.

His goal with the radio is to use his mechanical engineering knowledge from school to see why the thing doesn't work, and what he'd need to do to fix it. "If I had known we'd be going and needing to fix some stuff, I'd have brought tools. Shit."
Janine Liberi     Janine strides away from it all. From the uncomfortable, sickly hospital-evoking giant Elsen, the distorted view of herself and the world, from the bizarre labyrinth to the exit. Her sigh of relief is loud, filling the empty, dusty room with the opened crates and broken gear. "Okay. Back to what passes as normal here. The sadness of an empty room as opposed to that of a hospital bed." She may be a little delirious now.

    She joins Tina in the bedroom and watches as the girl keeps the teddy in sight at all times. With a roll of her eyes, she walks up to the thing and kicks it right in the middle. "It's a soft toy," she says dully. "If everything in this place was dangerous, it would be less nerve-racking than it is."

    Dipping a hand into her pocket, she finds the candy she found under the bed in what feels like a lifetime ago, and so gets on her knees and checks under this bed as well. With how spartan this room is, she would be amazed to find anything, but you never know.
Starbound Flotilla     "George" is here.

    Still, of course, in the window. But now, he's not turned away. He's leaning forward. "At the end of stuff, you start getting to see a lot of things you haven't seen in a long time. I think they say it all flashes before your eyes." He comments. "Signatures are pretty important. Everything made has a Guardian who made it. You can't tell a lot about a person from their signature, graphology is a hack science. But there's a few things you can know with the right context."
Yuuki Kuran "I don't think this is a memory... is it?" Yuuki wonders, inspecting the boxes with the curiousity of someone who is pretty sure they already know the answer.

"The escape pod, like George said, even if it's safe, even if it's life, can't keep people going forever. It's not a whole world."

"They lost that world, even if Biteblade said it had fight left."

A semi-fond glance towards the empty space where Stephen Strange should be - but isn't, for now - is spared for the Sorcerer Supreme. "Well, perhaps there's still time for one last ride. It'd be callous to discard the efforts of all of the Flotilla."

Another glance, this time to George, facing 'forward'. "As long as we fit it in before the end of the night."

It's absolutely clear that she's not referring to the objective idea of 'night'. What the dawn is...

Well, it's probably bright.
Priscilla     The radio hasn't been broken physically, nor is the place out of power, from whatever mysterious realm it draws any from, given that the computers are still displaying their strange feed. Popping the dark and unresponsive piece open, August finds that the wires themselves are simply burnt through. The beefy piece has been used so much for so long that it finally expired, and there aren't replacement radio wires sitting around.

    The teddy bear flops over sideways with a sad, heavy flumph, a thin cloud of dust rising from the floor and settling back down. Obviously nobody has cleaned in a while, but it also seems as if all air circulation also stopped, to leave things this stale and musty. The Batter trivially confirms what Janine puts on the table. "It's inanimate." he says out loud, after only cursory examination, like making it doubly clear as a reassurance. There's nothing under the bed. If there ever was something hidden away there, it's long past the point it was retrieved or used up.

    He picks up the book, looks at it for a few moments longer than necessary to determine what it is, and says "It's . . . an old comic . . ." This is easy to expect, given the last thoughts that'd passed you by on your exit from the fractured Room of the more distant past. 'Amateur' is certainly the right word for both the concept and writing. The cover, in block letters, titles it PANIC IN BALLVILLE, and the interior starts with a rather prosaic and uninspired exchange between a muscular man wearing boxing gloves and star-spangled shorts, unimaginitively named "Boxxer", and a man wearing a pinstripe baseball outfit, with a helmet, bat, and catcher's mitt all in one, called "Ballman". The dialogue goes something like:

Boxxer: "Ballville is at peace today. Let's hope that nothing bad happens to spoil the magical blue of this glorious sky."
Ballman: "Ahaha, you're not taking my diabolical genius into account! . . . And my new invention! The cloning machine!"
Ballman: "I filled Ballville with replicas of my evil self! you can't stop us now, Boxxer!"
Ballman: "Oh and I also kidnapped your girlfriend."
Boxxer: "Oh no. Maybe it isn't such a good day after all . . ."

    The age of the intended audience is pretty obvious. It goes on for pages of the Boxxer fighting through seemingly infinite baseball pitcher clones using various absurd maneuvers, such as the box bomb and justice uppercut, with lots of Whacks and Pows and Zots, going on for pages of low brow visual candy, until he reaches a singular gigantic swarm of clones, right about the time the comic book runs out of sunny town scenery. The climactic encounter has such a thrilling exchange as:

Ballman: "Ahaha, Boxxer, this is the end for you! Vigilante my ass! Even for a superhero, this task is impossible! You've never had a chance of success!"
Boxxer: "Whoopsiedaises, this is a real invasion!"

    The Batter shuts the comic and drops it to the floor like a pile of unwanted newspapers.

". . ."
"This is really stupid."

    There's a moment's pause, obvious with the activity on the monitor displaying the computer operator trying to select the comic book again.

"No, I'm not reading that."
Starbound Flotilla     "Memory is kind of a bad way of thinking about it." "George" explains to Yuuki in broader gestures. "The Guardians were dead, but you saw them, didn'tcha? Is that memory, or is that just how time is around here? ...Gotta say, I can't know for sure. But I know someone lives here. But you're plenty right about other things."

    "There's only a couple hours before the sun gets into all this."

    When the Batter seems to be unwilling to express more interest, George is the one who responds through the window to... someone, nobody in particular, but perhaps exactly who should be spoken to. "Hey, don't worry about it. The devil isn't in the details, exactly. All you need to know is, what kind of person it was made for, and what kind of person it was made by. Don't get caught up looking for tricks or secrets, the forest is always worth more than the trees. Think about why a comic like that is here in a place like this, and you can do that while you move on."
Janine Liberi     As predicted, the underside of the bed contains only dust. Janine gets back to her feet and catches the Batter reading the comic. She peeks over the side to read along with him. "Wow, this is some trite-ass shit," she comments dryly as the Batter flips through. Boxxer and Ballman huh. And then the Batter drops it and makes a subjective statement (well, mostly subjective).

    "Wow, to think that you have tastes in media. Or are you just salty that the baseball player is the villain in this?" Janine comments. He speaks again, seemingly to no one, and Janine catches that the Puppeteer just tried to make him read it again. Interesting... "Well, if you don't want it, I'll have it," she says, bending down and picking the comic up. "I got a kid brother back home, he's more the target demographic. Might have to censor that 'ass' on that one page though."

    She tucks the comic under her armpit and steps out into the crate-filled room with the monitors. "Yo," she says to George and Yuuki. "Did the Puppeteer do anything just now?" she asks, indicating the lit monitors.
Tina Natsumi Tina braces when Janine kicks that bear, breathing a small sigh of reief when it doesn't burst into flames or something strange like that. Thankfully, the phone's focused forwards, so it does't quite catch Tina's apprehension from before. "Of course it is. What'd make you think it wasn't?"

She's still keeping that thing in her peripheral vision just in case.

"I've looked at a bit of that graphologing stuff before. Pretty interesting, yeah, but I haven't seen it used in anything besides some detective dramas." She pauses for a brief moment, then snickers upon recalling something (probably stupid). " Still, this one..."

And then she turns her attention back to the comic. She follows along with it, still mulling over the significance of the signature even as the Batter dismisses the book itself for being particularly stupid for some reason. "Content's definitely the right level for a little kid, but the signature... Nah, that's way too fancy for a kid."

Tina lets out a thoughtful droning noise before tapping her chin thoughtfully. "Must be the writer's signature, then. Kinda like those little dedications in the fronts of novels or whatever." A shrug, and then Janine scoops up the discarded comic when it becomes obvious that the Batter isn't keeping it. "Good plan. Might even need it if we end up finding a boxer or a girlfriend."

She laughs, but stops when 'George' mentions the time, the sun, and the why. "Kids like comics, people write 'em for kids. We're in a kid's room, but if the time's a thing..." Tina feels like she's on the verge of something as she recalls the page where the comic runs out of town scenery.

"The sun's gone in that last part, right? Maybe we're supposed to be..." 'Whoopsiedaises, this is a real invasion!' "Is this painting folks like us as the invaders? The villains in all this?"
Starbound Flotilla     "The Puppeteer does everything. That's their job, remember? They wanna see, and they wanna know, and they can do that by being what moves a man too holy to move himself. That's the trouble with detachment from the material world, you know? There's only one thing you can do all on your own, and he's not where he needs to be to do it." "George" elaborates to Janine.

    "But if I was guessing, I'd say she was interested in the book. Wanted to know more. I think she wants to see a lot of this story, and know about the things and people in it." He runs his fingers through his hair a little. "Part of why I tagged along instead of trying to get all this done on my own. Wanted to make sure she always had a smiling face and some bad jokes along for the ride, lil' sugar to help ease the pain of all this is. One piece of candy can do wonders."
Starbound Flotilla     As for Tina, "George" has a quick laugh. "That's a matter of perspective!" He says. "I mean, didn't those Guardians seem like pretty awful monsterous people to you? Look hard enough from whatever direction you pick, /anyone/ looks like a villain! It's like a magic-eye picture, except instead of seeing a cool castle, you see a dumb villain."

    Then he strokes his beard. "But, hey, are you clones? I mean, that's /not at all/ a problem if ya are." He says that part with an odd enthusiasm. "But I didn't think you were. Doubt they see you as clones or anything. Remember who has the cloning machine? Or all the iterations of efforts?" George is saying this in a tone that seems especially intent on persuading, but he's said enough things that it's not clear which part was so focused.
Yuuki Kuran The mini-drama around the comic book unfolds as Yuuki messes with empty and stacked up boxes, though the reading of it draws a little laugh from Yuuki. "Batter, no, don't be mad... Bats hit balls - I suppose you're the 'good twin' of the Ballman." She consoles, as if the holy avatar has REAL PEOPLE FEELINGS.

Janine's question about the Puppeteer gets a shrug. "I think she does everything. Especially the not-doing-things. But if you meant did she drop the book, no."

George speaks about one piece of candy. "I'm sure we found one or two in the room before. I think I stuffed some into my pockets..."

Yuuki checks her COAT POCKETS for the little bits and bobs and interesting-or-less-than-interesting stuff she had gathered up last 'memory'.

Speaking of Memory: "I think it's a Memory, because Memory goes back and forth. You can't go forward in time - can't jump ahead. With memory, you can jump around."
Tina Natsumi Tina smirks when George replies. "They did! 'cause we were fightin' 'em, but I reckon they were the heroes of their own stories. Just like the whole rebels versus terrorists thing they got in those space movies and whatnot."

That certainly helps add some perspective to things, and George keeps bringing up further points. "Same reasno I'm here, honestly. I don't really get most of the stuff here, but like hell I'd leave my buds alone after being here this long." Tina flashes a wide grin at Janine, August, and Yuuki. Perhaps curiously, she does the same for the Batter and 'George'.

"But yeah, nah, I'd be pretty surprised if they had human cloning tech back home. Good internet's barely even a thing outside the campus and where I was living!" She laughs, then checks her phone to make sure it's still recording. She doesn't even know if she's streaming successfully, but at least keeping a record of things will be good for referencing eventually. "But someone else doing cloning stuff..."

Again, she's got it on the tip of her tongue, but it's not hitting her mind just right to actually spit it out. She looks towards Janine, Yuuki, and August to try and get an assist! The talk of Memory has her trying to connect some dots that aren't quite there, too, and the brief straining expression fades after a few seconds.
Janine Liberi     Janine stares daggers at George and Yuuki. "Yeah, I get she directs the Batter, I'm not stupid. That wasn't what I was ask-forget it." She gets a semi-answer from them both at least. She was indeed curious about the comic, but the Batter himself refused to engage with it further. And then George makes a comment about candy, and she freezes up. Her hand dips into her pocket and fingers that single piece. Is he dropping a hint at her? She glares at him again but says nothing.

    Tina comes to the rescue thankfully and asks a question that gets another frustrating answer that goes over her head. Clones... at first she thinks of the Elsen, but George makes another comment that gives her pause. 'Iterative efforts.' She whispers, "Is it talking about the Purification cycle? Was the Batter involved every time?"
August Kohler Well, August can't fix the radio without wires, so he leaves it alone. He shuffles over to read the book with the Batter and Tina, and then, after The Batter rejects it and Janine takes it, August comments about her brother. "Aren't you Italian? You guys care about swears?"

And then, he steps over to her to see the picture book. "Hey, how does it end?"
Janine Liberi     "Wow, racist," Janine says in blatant hypocrisy of all the times she made fun of August for being German. "I care that my younger siblings grow up to be wholesome. I'm not a role model, but I can be a cautionary tale."

    "But, that's a good question," she adds, producing the comic and flipping it open with one hand, carefully using her thumb to flip through to where the Batter stopped and continuing from there.
Starbound Flotilla     "Dedan made a cloning machine once." "George" says to Tina, as if that were simply the most normal thing one could say. A casual line to drop at the bar, or when making conversation at work. It gives context, but certainly doesn't explain the Ballman clones. Or even gesture towards explanation.
Starbound Flotilla     Was the Batter involved every time?

    "Nah."

    That's just all "George" says, without further questions.
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki gives an apologetic laugh to Tina. "Oh, I'm probably totally wrong. I'm awful at puzzles like that." She admits, with a sad shrug and a shake of the head. "But I'm okay wiht situations. Usually. I'm really just stubborn. It's worked out that I'm stubborn about things that turned out to be useful - and lucky, a lot."

"A clone army, being struck down by a hero of justice, a boxer. A good person."

"Maybe what this world stopped needing - ran out of - were heroes, and it was up to the villains to finish things."
Priscilla     The phone records, but it doesn't stream. The date is wrong. 2009. The wireless works fine, but there are no stations in range. No networks to pick up on, save an obligatory local encrypted wi-fi between the work computers.

    The Batter hesitates on answering Janine. When the man is so constantly, infinitely patient, the difference between waiting for an answer to come to him, and stopping to decide on one, is strikingly evident even without making a single noise. After a moment, he says "Okay.", and "Taste isn't worth bringing up. Everywhere in this world is either simple or ugly. There's nothing to talk about."

    "That comic is ancient anyway." he says to Yuuki, verbally shrugging as he exits the bedroom again. It isn't grave or meaningful, but like he just remembered that it is. "The Zones are filled with wickedness and impurity, Spectres run rampant, the Guardians have all turned back on their duties, the sickness is at its peak. They have to be Purified. Along the way, the evil have stood in our way, and the righteous have stood with us. Obsessing over a stupid comic is pointless."

    Yuuki goes rifling through her pockets for the clutter taken from opened boxes in past. String and bandages and reflective tape aren't any use, and bottled water and dried meat don't seem to be necessary, given that it never seems to have been long enough for anyone to get hungry. The field guide would only be useful were they outside --were anything outside. The portable transceiver has an obvious use. She has to peel open one of the packaged MREs to find the soldier's and survivalist's delight: a wrapped candy bar, its brand name smudged into the suggestion of letters that can't be read.

    Pulling these supplies out and getting them everywhere has an undesired side effect. Rising as if from a collapsed or prone position, ghastly white shapes melt through the floor, exuding through invisible pores in the Room as if awakened by some immaterial scent.

    hosts, obviously, going by their paper white ectoplasm and sketchy outlines, but far from the scribbled childish abstractions of Spectres out in the halls. Moreso than any, they retain most of a humanoid shape, varying in size and build, with the dark, stain-like suggestions of ties and starched collars, cuffs and pocket protectors, boots and overalls, gloves and helmets, amongst many things. Their faces are nothing close to human, though, having the same staring, empty black pits as any Spectre, just as bottomlessly hungry and full of malice as ever. Their mouths are contorted open into uneven, too-wide holes, filled with oversized, rictus-bared teeth, like howling skulls. Huge, arched horns protrude from their brows, curved in image of the devil himself.

    They swarm in around Yuuki almost immediately, though two more break off and stumble towards Janine. They don't float properly. Their footsteps are heavy enough to come with faint, echoing thuds, though bleary and indistinct. As a group, their toothy maws howl and scream like tortured wild animals and men gripped in indescribable agony, nothing short of Demonic. The Room itself distorts around them. Its soft black surfaces extrude beds of wicked nails. The dust combusts into scorching, asphyxiating embers. Chairs burst into showers of obsidian splinters. Cables rise to strangle you to death. The smell of stale air is tinged hot with the whiff of sulfur and blood. The walls and ceiling quake with the sound, as if shaking itself apart.
Starbound Flotilla     "Shit!" "George" calls out. He leaps up, snatches the top of the window he's outside of, and swings in, crashing through feet-first as the first specters rise. He rolls in, and comes up onto his feet with a cigarette in his mouth. "Goddamn /ghosts/. 'Course they're in the Room too, all the buffer zones are gone. How long has it been--?!" Flicking a spinning welder in his hand like he's twirling a pistol, he lights it fast and then works mostly on fighting the room.

    "Bats! You got a Wide Angle in ya?" He calls out, trying to suck down a little more omnizine smoke deep into his guts through a choking wire. It's tough to re-weld parts of the environment into place under the circumstances, but "George" has done work in more hostile workplaces -- one time he had a job at /corporate/!

    "We got no more buffer zone! Gotta get to that Queen ASAP, otherwise we're gonna run out of sights and sites to sightsee, see?" He shouts, trying to choke a wire down and pin it across some nails.
Tina Natsumi Janine gets a noncommital wave of Tina's hand. "Mmmaybe? He's been with us for just about all this stuff, but if he wasn't around when it happened other times..." That seems to be the implication George is getting at. Maybe. That, or Tina's reading too much into that question and answer. "He was around for Dedan, at least. But if there were other times this Purification business went on, then it obviously didn't stick."

As close as Tina might get to the answer she's looking for, it's constantly out of reach. Yuuki gets a laugh in return, though! "That makes two of us. I usually just brute force answers into place for puzzles, anyway. And in somethin' like this, I'll trust in the judgment of smarter folks than myself." She reiterates, then starts connecting some more dots in her head when Yuuki speaks aloud, and the Batter expresses his own thoughts about the Zones. The impurity. The need to Purify.

"George"'s comments about perspective. It all starts making sense, and Tina too hesitates on whether to even say anything in the presence of the Batter rather than lacking something to say. The choice not to (at least for now) is made for her when her attention gets diverted by the supplies turning into ghosts that join with the room in uddenly attacking them all.

"Shit... Someone remind to ask some dumb shit when we're done here!" Flipping that phone out of her pocket, Tina peers at the decade-long error for a moment before switching to the camera, taking a selfie, and drawing out that familiar America-themed robot. She lets Uncle Sam do the heavy lifting in swinging around and blasting away with a pair of SMGs at the cables and nails to mitigate the worst of the immediate dangers, although she finds herself nearly falling onto one of those nailbeds while grabbing and yanking at cables trying to choke her out.
August Kohler As he's waiting to read the comic, listening to the Batter slightly, demons come out of the floor. August reacts swiftly, drawing his revolver and firing on one of them, before summoning Dietrich as quickly as he can. As soon as the knight manifests, he dashes forward, massive sword going snicker-snack as it moves to sweep into the demons and cut through them.

"Come on! Let's dance!"
Janine Liberi     'No.' For once, a straight answer, but it's not what Janine was thinking. Damn. But hey, the Batter actually gives an answer of his own. 'Ugly or simple' huh? "Well, you're not wrong," she agrees. And maybe obsessing over a comic isn't good, but she still wants to see how it ends. Sunk cost fallacy and all that.

    But before that, ghosts.

    Janine notices them dogpiling Yuuki, while some drift over to her. "Looking for an escape, huh?" she asks herself, before drawing her sabre. "Well, I'll give you a permanent one. Catherine!" The shackled bride arises behind her, the fingers on her crossed hands wriggling as golden threads trace throughout the air, criss-crossing from walls, to the floor, to the roof and back again. The Persona's hands clench into fists, and all the wires abruptly collapse, pulling towards each other like an extravagant game of cat's cradle. Unfortunately, all the ghosts in the way will either be carved to bits, or corralled together into a tight net should they prove to be more substantial.
Yuuki Kuran Loosening from her pockets a rain of SEMI-PRECIOUS THINGS (in the same way you can buy semi-precious stones for ten dollars in a bin at the museum's swag store and fill as much as a drawstring bag can carry), Yuuki attracts fucking GHOSTS, and quickly disappears under a gangbeating ambush of the lion's share of the spoops.

From the start she barely fights back, cradling the chocolate bar in her hands and keeping the wrapped bar close to her chest, warding away with one coatsleeved arm in a dismissing set of sweeps that prove ineffective at ectoplasm.

Spatters of wine-dark liquid patter around her to show proportionally how much Hit Point damage she's just soaking trying to hold onto this one special thing she remembered.

George crashing in helps break her out of her reverie. "Wait, you can come in???" She wonders, as Janine's aid allows her to break out, swinging a plane of semi-visible force into the horde of office ghosts with a gesticulation of her arm. "They just attacked as soon as... Ohhh, these are from an earlier point? Memory? Maybe they came because I was cheating!"

A grim frown tugs at her expression. "Maybe that's the same thing that happens with all the spectres."
Starbound Flotilla     "No, no!" "George" shouts back to Yuuki. He's grunting as he wrassles a cord. "There isn't a metaphor or, like, a metaphysics thing about these guys! They're-- Ghh! They're exactly what they look like. They're ghosts, and they're super, /super/ hateful and angry, because of the dying!"
Yuuki Kuran "Oh!"

Yuuki looks better about everything except how horribly spiritually-physically she had been torn up by fucking ghosts mere heartbeats ago.

"Okay then, no metaphor. Much easier!"
Priscilla     The Comic continues as you might expect. The Boxxer is swarmed with infinite Ballman clones for pages, the dramatic fight going to his last legs, until he finds the cloning machine and flips a big switch (exactly like the ones you've seen everywhere) to turn it off. Ballman is defeated and the Boxxer rescues his girlfriend, only now revealed to be called Daisy. There are some more pages after, but the interruption comes before Janine can finish.

The Batter used Wide Angle!
Infernal Spectre x8
Horned ectoplasmic incarnation with history.
Strong weakness against bats.

    The trend continues. These spectres are worst then the last, in turn than those before them, and the ones before those. The entire space around each of them is a little slice of Hell. A vortex of attacks from above and below, from every side and the air itself, surrounds each of the demoniacal, bellowing monstrosities. Fire and cinders in your lungs. Nails in your feet and hands. Strangling nooses about your necks. Their claws are wrenching madness, and even their blood, spilled from wounds like cherry red tar, sizzles and burns like the oozing wounds in the Room from before. Even the sounds themselves, unleashed from their starving maws, physically claw and rip at your faces and clothes, like razor tipped fingers scrabbling over your skin.

    It puts a certain perspective on references to 'running out of time'. Cut and rent and burnt and shot and sliced and choked and crushed, they bleed like corpses, rather than tattering like paper mache, yet seem exponentially more durable than the usual ghosts, somehow strengthened by their hellish resemblence to humanity rather than weakened by it. They snap their broken and dislocated limbs back into place, cauterize bullet holes with pricks of fire, bite and tear at binds and hazards, even ripping parts of their body free to escape. More than they are stupid and hungry, they are furious. Hateful. *Murderous*. They are something unworldly.

    Possibly commensurate to their uncommon evil, the inexplicably powerful holy icon of the baseball bat is that much more effective. Tied together by Catherine, their alterations suppressed by George, battered down by Yuuki, kneecapped and hamstrung by Tina and August, they're rounded up, inch by bloody inch, into a narrow enough space for the newly Perfect Add-Ons to blast them with cascading volleys of Purifying debuffs and attacks, and for the Batter to cleave through their jagged and broken forms with luminous strokes of his intensely glowing bat, white like purest fire. The computer monitors blaze eerily bright, scan lines flickering through them in dark bands of static as they fill up with triply dense menus, the barely visible figure on the other side jacking additional cables into her hand arrays and manipulating orbits of white halos in a frenzy, machines crackling and spilling textual glossolalia.

    George is right. Even when the Spectres dissolve into nothing, rotting through the floor, you can hear more of them still, not far away, from the bent and twisted halls you'd come through at first. You can hear banging on the other side of a door --a familiar pounding of fists on solid metal, except this time the doors are giving way, steel bolt by wrenching steel bolt.
Priscilla     The only way to go --the only place to look-- is back into the bedroom itself, but backing up through the frame doesn't allow you to retreat to the safety of a child's room, even bleak and abandoned as it is. The time for the radio is gone when one reaches it, as the world dissolves into dizzying fields of white and the archway swallows whomever falls through it. The screaming fades mercifully into the distance, muted by far-away, but not forever. In the quiet, you can hear yourselves think. Yourselves, and one other person.

            'Today, mom finally picked me up.'

                Chapter 1
                The Queen.




    Solid ground. Cold, still air. The shallow churning of plastic, but only the smell of cool water. The faint light of the starting room, all over again, with the red block leading to the Nothingness, as if you'd never left. Yet, the air tingles with electricity. Your skin burns faintly as if exposed to the noon rays of the sun, blazing through a window into a cold house. You can see through the dark hallway that would lead on into the Room, and spy only stairs --stairs that lead up and up and up, towards brilliant light at the end, shifting and scintillating as if through a prism, in only all the shades of white.

    Sharing that little island with you and the Sagittarius cube, finally a beacon to the card, is Zacharie. Without explaining a thing, the masked man does exactly as he always has, and laughs.

    "The endgame is near my friends. I believe what is floating behind you is your final way back to the Zones. Perhaps it would be prudent to make your last decisions before you enter that door . . . and face the Queen. He he he."

    Somehow completely untroubled by any of this, as if his merchant sense of knowing exactly where to be before you had already foreseen this, Zacharie rolls out his wares one last time. "Now would be the time to spend the golden fruits of your carnage. Bis Vincit, Qui Se Vincit In Victoria."

Fortune Ticket x10 - Recover 200 HP
Golden Flesh x10 - Recover 20 Drive
Abbadon's Meat x5 - Recover 5 Hype
Katsuhiro Bat - Offensive Equipment for the Batter
Niel Tunic - Defensive Equipment for the Batter
The Eighth Colour - Gain 20 Hype after 4 turns.
Aura of Neglect - Considerably reduce 5 levels of attack.
Secret Day - Revive self once
Aura of Lunacy - Considerably increase 5 levels of attack.
Expiration - Deal cataclysmic damage once.
Cranial Epidermis - Begin with 150 Drive
August Kohler As the demons fight, August is cut up, growling in pain. As they slay the demons, finally, with the golden bat, more bang at the door, so they push back into the bedroom. And there is Zacharie.

"Hey, Zacharie. It's time to fight, isn't it? This is the end. So, assuming we don't see each other again...goodbye, and thanks for your service."

August takes a Cranial Epidermis, on blind faith that it'll benefit him. Soon, they'll have to enter that door, and get to work.
Yuuki Kuran It's simple to say that these spectres are not 'the least monstrous', but 'the most real'. 'Thank goodness', Yuuki thinks, 'that there's no metaphor to be had here'.

"We should go." Yuuki urges, though it's not clear on the right way to go without wasting time and fumbling around. "George breaking that window probably let something-s bad in."

She proceeds until Zacharie, but it is there she stops. "A secret day? I can have a secret day? That's... better than a Saturday or Sunday! I so wanted to collect them all, but I think we've run out of chances. Out of time. I think..."

She looks back, and doesn't see Stephen Strange. "We can't continue without Steven. 'Our last decisions'... If we proceed, we're out of time. If we stay here - if we can go back, and set anything right, or set anything to rest, this is our last shot."

Yuuki nods at George. "Unless we're out of time. You said we can't delay things, right? How long do we have. Enough for one last trip? Or will we have to rely on Steven's ability to find all the extra seconds for his own plan on the way?"
Janine Liberi     These ones are tough. The toughest yet for sure. Nails lash out in between the threads and catch Janine in the side, drawing a pained hiss between her clenched teeth. The flames burn the threads that bind them, racing along to scorch Catherine's fingers, making Janine's ache from the psychic backlash. But she corrals them, giving the Batter plenty of opportunity to purify them with clean strikes of his bat, his Add-Ons blasting them until they vanish. But there are many ghosts waiting in the wings, waiting to bash the door down.

    It's time to go and meet the Queen.

    Janine stares at Zacharie for a long time. Her hand grips her sabre before drawing it, waling over to him, and trying to smack him across the face with the flat of it. "You stupid asshole," she snarls. "We're at the end, and you're here peddling your shit instead of being with Sugar? You fucker." She snatches up Expiration and pockets it. "The moment we move on, you better get back to Zone 0. Or I'm coming back and ramming this up your ass."
Tina Natsumi Tina gasps for air as she feels that charcoaly feeling lingering in her throat, relying more on her Persona than ever before as they clear through the swarm of spectres hell-bent on murdering the hell out of the crew. Playful banter is absent in favor of focusing purely on surviving the encounter, and she's not nearly proud enough to avoid going for cheap shots so that the Batter can smash them apart with his holy cudgel.

By the time they fight their way back to the bedroom, she doesn't even care that the radio is gone. Or that the scenery is melting away into something far less plasticy and far more reality-like. Zacharie's a welcome sight, and the blonde lets out a weary groan as she all but collapses into a squat nearby themerchant. "Gonna need a minute. That was a... Goddang, I know I said I'd stick with ya the whole way through, but sheesh."

Maybe a little banter is fine. She smirks at the Batter, but the anxiety is hard to hide while she turns back to Zacharie. "You've been with us the whole time, too, ain'tcha? Well... Let's not disappoint the man." She forces herself up with a light stagger, steps aside when Janine approaches Zacharie, then gives those two a moment before nonchalantly snagging the Katsuhiro Bat. She raises it in her hand and gives it a few practice swings just to know what it feels like in her hand, then whistles and lobs it towards the Batter.

"You can make better use of this than I can. I'll stick with what I'm good at." She raps the back of her knuckles against Uncle Sam's hard exterior. "Just don't leave me hangin' when we get there, alright?"
Starbound Flotilla     "George" is chain-smoking hard after that last fight, seeming like he's trying to recover something lost. "If Stevie Wonder wants to do what he's got to do, he'll have to do it now. There's no save blocks after this, and that means you go right for the ending." He's looking upwards when he says that. Huh? "We can wait a little, but not long. There's only so much reality between us and the ghosts now -- at least, reality that isn't swarming with Secretaries."

    He takes a deep breath, and approaches Zacharie. "Thanks for stickin' by us, Zee. Kid's right though. You got a lovely lady waiting for your company, I'd say it's not a bad idea to head back. I think these folks are about to blip for a bit -- stick around until just after that, then scramble." Then "George" checks the wares. "We're gonna need the Katsuhiro Bat for sure, for Batty. Bats, mind if I get the hand-me-downs and all? This one's gonna be tough. What else..." He fusses and worries about arming up, actually quite focused for once on the arming up. With Tina handling that purchase... "Let's get the Tunic too. Don't want you going down on the way to home base."