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Starbound Flotilla     "The Void" used to be a term for the space in the planetary interior, but before that time, it had life as a different descriptor. The Void is the barren spaces between stars and other gravity wells, where nothing of interest collects, nothing lives, and nobody goes. There are no stars, nebula, asteroids, or stellar bodies of any kind. You could drift there for millennia without encountering a single piece of microdebris. There's no reason to be there, no reason to go there, and no reason to stay there. The only ones who make their homes there are hermits and illiterate Floran pirates, and the chances that you will ever find them are miniscule.

    It is emptiness. It is nothing. But there is something there.

    The silent fleet can be detected on active scanners, and not on passive ones. There seems to be no end to them, and no formation. The massive capital ships are blocky, industrial, clearly prefabricated in a way. This swarm of stellar titans drifts, all in near-unison, with no clear destination and no clear origin. They respond to no hails. There are at least three hundred thousand of them. Since finding these ships, it seems only possible to find more and more of them.

    The Starbound Flotilla are operating George's salvage ship, the SFS Mendacity II. Passage aboard is offered to those who don't have their own ships -- alongside EVA hardsuits, zero-G maneuvering kits, oxygenating limited-time nanoskins, a selection of military firearms and melee equipment, and other suchlike. New gear is available here: The Goop Guns and Goop Missiles crafted from the technology in the last excursion offer a chance to fire the unusual super-stasis-fluid at foes, and simple cans of the stuff are available as well. Ramblades are available, rocket-powered polearms made from the Spikedog bodies. Also of note, several inactive KEYCARD STATIONS are being worked on, though compromising them to acquire their cards will reduce the overall profit of the operation. A deployment bay has been pressurized, awaiting each individual's exit. From here, viewing ports allow the ship itself to be seen. There are no windows. There are only the greebles of surface hull systems and a few hatches.

    The hatches bear the blinking lights of active power.

    The dead ship lies before them, ready for its autopsy. The drifting SCOUT SHIP has a set of prodigious engines at its WEST end, making that inaccessible unless someone wants to travel through the mechanical pains of an exhaust passage. The NORTH and EAST hatches bear those red blinking lights, indicating that breaching them will be difficult, require a KEYCARD, or cause a probable alarm! The north end seems to be some kind of communicating array, while the west end is some sort of complex deployment mechanism, bristling with small ports. The SOUTH END has the only unlocked hatch.

    The briefing begins anew...
Ezra Mochizuki Ezra, the contractor, is set up in a hardsuit, with a specialist longknife, a zero-G maneuvering kit, and a Goop Gun. "Alright. I'll go south. Perhaps we can find a keycard inside and unlock the other doors."

Once the briefing's over, he nods, and then moves to infiltrate, heading SOUTH.
Kotone Yamakawa It had been a long time since Kotone had a salvage job like this. She was not going to say no to the extra gear that has been made accessible for this job. She will take a Goop Gun, and Missiles along with her normal selection of gear. Which is loaded into her matter manipulator after she makes sure the weapons are loaded and ready. She seems to be clad in a light space suit of some sort over her normal stealth gear in the event she will need. She knows they have a decent team for this and as she listens over her com? Several gun turret drones that look a bit like spiders skitter beside her.
Lilian Rook     As with all things of marvel and wonder, the comprehension-defying scope of everything around the Mendacity, and the novel nature of its place, is largely lost on Lilian the second time. Chopped up bits of her recording had performed more than well on social media. What is less quick to shake off is the uncanny feeling that approximates dread that had been building up since her flashlight had since fallen upon a mountain of bones those days ago.

    The loadout arrangement is the same this time as before, save the additional of further hard cases, some of which are being used for purple stasis 'goop', and the lack of self-commentary over the merely habitually taken footage. The air of someone about to walk through the empty halls of Area 51 is replaced with that of someone with a kind of score to settle, even before taking on the entrance she believes herself best suited for: the WESTERN engine side.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      As before, Bercilak arrives badly frozen, having to rip the helmet from his head with an unnerving, icy tearing sound. The burst blood vessels in his eyes gradually repair themselves, the swelling in his skin going down as the ice thaws in the Mendacity's controlled atmosphere. He takes one of the O2 nanoskins, his armor briefly deconstructing so that he can apply it properly. This, he does with casual ease that would imply (along with his armor and the thickly armored hoverbike) citizenship or familiarity with a world of similar technological development as the Flotilla's.

     "Gramercy," offers the Green Knight, in thanks for a can of GOOP. That will come in handy later. Despite his clear appreciation for the craftsmanship of the Ramblades, he remains faithful to his axe. The GOOP CAN is deconstructed and stored in the memory of his nanite cloud, to be called forth later as needed. The viewports are his next destination. He studies silently each of the visible entrances. The West end would pose an amusing challenge, no doubt, but this place has already passed his muster. He knows it'll be a challenge no matter where he goes.

     East would also be counterproductive, in this instance, as the mark of his hunt this day is information, not sport. What happened to these people, and what were they looking for? NORTH seems to be the way to go, or at least the end goal here. That would likely have communication logs with the other ships in the fleet, maybe even navigational data, if they're lucky. But... that core will have to go, as Albert says.

     He'll head SOUTH as well, this time at least making a minimum effort not to piss off the ship's defenses. He's still in a heavy, clanky set of armor.
Starbound Flotilla     These doors are straightforward to operate, though somewhat difficult. You pull a handle, which is sized for a gripper about one and a half times the size of a human hand, bearing five grooves for what looks like three fingers and two thumbs in an alternating pattern. Pulling it requires a lot of work, but when you do, the airlock cycles automatically -- pressurizing the space within with some unknown, unbreathable gas that at least prevents more freezing -- and reveals what is beyond for each...

    The interiors are dark. There is not one single light source among most of the visible areas. It looks massive, definitely even more industrial. Huge, blocky metal walls and absolutely massive air and material circulation systems -- the interior space is surprisingly huge. The high walls are densely packed with crevices and small overhangs, upon which unknowable technologies or artifacts have decayed into nothing. Several of these crevices contain esoteric selections of bones in repose, drifting in the zero-gravity environment. For those who came here with their sense of smell active, the smell is like an ancient library, times a thousand. Where one rests their hands or feet in zero gravity, an almost inch-deep layer of oxidization or some other sort of decay has accumulated.

    However, signs of art etched directly into the walls with industrial tools can be seen on several corners. Who it came from and why they made it are unclear.

    And at the south door...
Starbound Flotilla     The internal spaces are just as wide as usual, but they're densely packed with fuel-moving systems that make cover and obstruction, and have long since become useless. A dozen systems of turrets, little rounded structures with hunched shapes coiled within, are always actively scanning, and nearly impossible to avoid without some kind of invisibility or active cameoflage. The drifting shapes in the dark are a bit less alert; ranging from about six feet long, moving like fish, to hulking eight-foot shapes, they sweep shining eyes with infrared vision around the environment constantly, and listen keenly for sounds...

    Sounds like those turrets opening fire! If you want to not get hit immediately, you'll want to take them down! But if you're willing to wade through the security drones, you'll... still want to kill them, because their brutally burning plasma blasts are *dangerous*!

    Seft's sweeps and local sensors indicate that among the twisty fuel passages, a SENTRY CONTROLLER and an ALARM MANAGER are near! There's also one of those NUMBERS STATIONS nearby, counting in alien numerals, offering a single KEYCARD, though jealously guarded by turrets. This might allow one to exit out the side and flank to the EAST or NORTH, by tearing up the turrets to get to it. Or it might improve access to the NORTH SECTION, as the bulkhead leading there is visibly locked! The east section is less locked, thankfully. Is there passage to the western engine compartment from here? It'd take some extensive scanning or searching the twisty passageways.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa takes heed of Moonfin's warning she knows what she's been hired for and she seems to be ready to go. She'll look over to Lilian for a moment. Seeing the West and South appear pretty well covered? Kotone will head on north. She takes note of Bercilak for a moment watching him as she heads off, she'll also deploy one of her small scout drones to go on ahead as she heads north. Hopefully, it can give her some warning of trouble ahead.

Kotone will make sure her comm is active and will keep tabs on the rest of the team as they go about the ship exploring and doing their best to reclaim this long adrift vessel.

Still she thinks about what Moonfin said this is a tomb and the interred are still active...guarding it.
Starbound Flotilla     Deep in the engine, there is a feeling of Wrongness. It's unlikely that Lilian has spent tons of time on spaceships, but literally any of the time she's spent near or on *any* spaceships, or studying, or seeing them in fiction, or *anything* could make it clear that there is Something Wrong with this engine design. Unless looked for specifically, it would be hard to say what exactly it is, but there is something missing here, from even a layman's understanding of what a spaceship ought to be.

    That doesn't make it any less hard. Getting in through here is gonna take some *work*. Nobody was ever meant to enter legitimately from the engine block. This means Lilian has to deal with, first and foremost, awkward clambering. Getting into a hatch and squeezing through maintenance spaces is the order of the day. But more than that, old fuel catalysts and other dangerous toxic substances are frequently being injected into old chambers where fuel once was, and no longer is; these gushes of exotic industrial chemicals would sear flesh off of bone, or more likely boil or freeze one's body inside a suit, if not outright corrode the suit itself badly. Strange repair machines, drones in the traditional sense, float about, about seven feet tall and mostly cylindrical, bearing robotic limbs with which to make repairs to anything damaged.

    They drift near Lilian, unless evaded, and blankly examine her with stupid AI. Whatever they determined about her, they emit a complex sound only just inside the human upper range of hearing that sounds vaguely religious, make a strange shunning gesture involving drawing lines across their own limbs, and drift away back to work.

    Here, Seft's scans and local scans indicate, the western area contains the CORTEX CORE, as well as the NUCLEAR POWER SUPPLIER and the DOOR SECURITY SUBSYSTEM, all in different rooms. There's a similar density of SENTRY WEAPONS here, which are much more active, aggressive, alert, and immediately open fire on almost any non-drone entering their room. Fewer drones are here, though surprisingly, Lilian gets to see one emerging from one of those teleportation portals. It's one of those bigger, seven-foot-tall shapes, the ones that had big guns mounted on them before.

    Passage to the east, and to areas beyond, is hard to find.
Starbound Flotilla     At the NORTH wing of things, there's a locked hatch door. Breaching it forcefully will require something that deals significant damage, and provoke alarms! Local wireless is a *nightmare*, since those old haywire scanning systems are clogging up every goddamn frequency from here to x-rays, but close enough and she might be able to find the door's wireless control systems.

    There's not any way to hack it on a software level, but Kotone is a true master of the craft, and that means there might be a way she could hack in on a hardware level. An outside signal, hard-wired, seems to be controlling the door to keep it locked, in some way that's hard to entirely decipher, and monitoring its state. Is there some way Kotone has to manipulate, dispell, alter, or interfere with these things on a hardware level?
Ezra Mochizuki Ezra wants that keycard, but Bercilak indicates him to the alarm system, as the turrets go off, and his brain is already firing six million ways. As they confirm which way to go, he turns on his mobility and grabs the longknife, and moves to boost over the turrets, trying to kick and cut at them with superspeed as he passes by. The big energy blasts he tries to wade between, even as they might hit his suit and knock him back, forcing him to push off again, injured.

Ezra's goal is that ALARM MANAGER! He's going to try and shut off the alarms, so that Bercilak can get to the sentry controller!

Silently, he breathes, and thinks. Time comes to a still for him. He's hoping to use this to locate where blasts may be coming in and avoid running into shots, returning to normal as he actually moves and ducks to and fro.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Bercilak listens silently to Seft's advisories, nodding to himself. Clanking his way down the hallway, it's only a matter of time before his heavy armor gives them away, or his body heat. With limited time, he doesn't speak, instead nudging Ezra's shoulder. He points in the direction of the ALARM DEVICE. Then, gesturing to himself with a thumb, he points in the direction of the SENTRY MANAGER.

     A one-two punch, given quickly enough, might be just what they need to get that KEYCARD with minimal agitation of the ship's defenses, and equally minimal harm to themselves. Ezra seems to be taking a moment to compose himself. Bercilak nods.

     He gives a silent countdown in the darkness, holding those thick, articulate-plated green digits before Ezra's face. Three. Two. One.

     Bercilak breaks into a sprint. For a guy who's seven and a half feet of bulk and in full armor besides, he's fast. Not 'speedster' fast, but formidable for his size and encumbrace, for sure. He breaks around the corner, likely drawing fire despite his speed. The GOOP CAN is materialized in his hand, and he throws it in advance of his rush, hoping the movement will cause the turrets to fire upon it, and splatter them with the aforementioned GOOP.

     His axe is materialized in the other hand, not two seconds after the GOOP CAN is thrown. It won't incapacitate every turret, just the first few. That's fine. He cuts a noisy swath through the remainder in search of the SENTRY MANAGER, his axe causing brief sparks of light as the blade splits the domed surfaces of those turrets. Height is no concern for him, either, for even as hot plasma crashes into his armor, scoring and pitting the plates, he makes great microthruster assisted leaps, swinging at the apex of each to slay his opposition.

     Where's that CONTROLLER?
Starbound Flotilla     Ezra is sent off, decapitating turrets as he goes. The drones that hear their shots won't catch up qwith him! Get that ALARM CONTROLLER? Good idea. This big son of a bastard is what Lilian ran into last time: A massive robotic eyeball, covered in complex, shifting robotic plates. It's in a subtle, tense mood of stress, and whatever tiny noises Ezra has made on his way in have it twitching, glancing around and spinning its plates to whirl bright red laser tripwires in the air. That's the state it's in as time comes to a still.

    Getting to this eye means avoiding those lasers (so as not to be swarmed by the drones), dealing massive damage to the exposed machinery (the eye, suspended by the robotic limbs that torture it), and likely getting out fast.

    That'll mean evading turret shots, lasers, and the stray SPIKEDOGS that drift in this chamber all at once! Can he do it?
Kotone Yamakawa To say local wireless is a nightmare to Kotone? Still, it's not impossible for her, she's going to take a moment and attempt to hunt down the door's systems. She would rather try this before she attempts to force the door open and sets off who knows how many alarms.

She'll check the local wireless, as she does so another idea strikes her. If she can directly jack into the hatch's controls she might be able to directly override it. So out comes a few tools and she gets to work to first locate where the mechanisms are and get into them for a direct connection. Still, it might be using the creators' equivalent of NFC. So it might only remove a single layer of difficulty in popping the door.

Once she thinks she's found it even if she's got to cut her way into to it? She'll jack in, attempt to work at popping the hatch.
Ezra Mochizuki Ezra, in his mind-space, is stressed. This is going to be frustrating. Turret shots, lasers, and spikedogs. He's gonna get hit. He can't avoid that. But...he can still do Big Damage. He'll cut this Gordian Knot with one fell swoop.

Taking his maneuvering kit, he launches himself forward, narrowly dodging a laser, but into the direction of a shot. It hits his mechanical arm, painfully knocking him backwards and damaging his suit, but - out of the way of another shot, and giving him the propulsion he needs to get past another laser. The GOOP GUN comes out, moving to spray anything that gets in his way, such as a spikedog and then the knife comes out, and is driven into the mechanical parts, trying to carve them up. There's no skill to it, it's basically 'dig-slash-slash-dig-slash', just sped up to be much, much faster done than it should be.
Starbound Flotilla     The SENTRY MANAGER is...

    Holy shit. The moment Bercilak enters the chamber, about six different sentries start trying to light the motherfucker up. The seventh is the SENTRY MANAGER, which is an absolutely massive thing, a gun no less than about twenty feet long and eight feet wide, with a barrel that mechanically expands to a size like a canon a man might get shot out of with a massive, ominous "KA-CHUNK". Every inch of it is armred with unthinkably thick armoring besides one: A sharp glowing purple mechanism inside the mouth of the gun pulses like a gland pumping.

    Its exterior has been decorated with an engraved, hellish mouth, added by some particularly artistic Cryptizen, and an alien cryptizen skull (one for each kill?) can be found engraved among the teeth. Amulets have been hung from it, about the size of a human fist, clearly meant for a neck of a larger size.

    There's a gradual noise like a scream played in reverse. There are about two or three seconds where this core is exposed, and then it's dumping plasma directly at Bercilak, in a volley that lasts ten seconds or more. This doesn't even trigger the drone responses, there's just so much noise that none of them can even tell where it's coming from. But what *will* trigger them is the set of laser tripwires projected across the chamber.

    They'll go down the moment Ezra completes his work. Bercilak is going to suffer an absolutely massive amount of damage or a significant delay if he sleeps on this, but does he trust Ezra's combat efficacy enough to dive in and hope the tripwires will shut down while he works?
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Bercilak is absolutely willing to trust Ezra. After all, Ezra trusted him, on their previous hunt. Besides... last time was fun, when the drones came in, so even if Ezra can't get those tripwires off, there's that.

     The gun is large enough for a man to fit inside, the barrel is lined with teeth, hung from which are fist-sized baubles. That's a challenge issued, if ever he saw one. So he accepts. Eight feet wide is plenty for him to work with. Holding his axe close to his body, Bercilak charges right into the maw of the cannon, whether those tripwires are gone or not. Refuge in audacity, or perhaps stupidity--for he assumes, right or wrong, that the drones would have to risk incineration by the cannon's plasma in order to extricate him.

     His towering form disappears in that plasma stream right before he leaps into the maw of the cannon. Fighting against the stream, he grunts, then bellows with defiant, exultant rage-glee as he forces himself in. The constant stream of superheated plasma blinds him, blackens his armor, but his immense strength sees him stubbornly crawling his way through that tunnel.

     Straddling the cannon's innards, he blindly advances as his flesh is stuck in a ten-second, agonizing loop of being cooked, healed, cooked, healed, and so on--not only externally, from the plasma's direct contact with the armor, and the armor's contact with his skin, but from his myriad cybernetic implants, superheated by convection, melting the very sinews they're meant to augment. His nanites are taxed to their very limits, torn between maintaining the armor and maintaining the man. His bellowing echoes down the cannon's shaft, his ears ringing, his voice perpetually on the edge of rawness.

     The axe is white-hot in his hand, but he grips it even as its haft melts his gauntlet. With his thrusters giving one last fire before their vents are melted into slag, he thrusts with both arms, attempting to impale that gland with sheer brute force, slamming the blunt eye into that gland as hard as his inhuman strength can manage.
Starbound Flotilla     Ezra has managed to get the goop gun focuzed on that drone, and it slams into the skeletal shape with intense chemistry. The balefully freezing influence slows the security machine, as well as making it convulse nearly constantly as acid eats away at its surface. Similar effects are found in each turret, with those intense convulsions starting to make it far more difficult to hit Ezra -- while they last, at least. Several survive the onslaught because of their unique shielding, but many are picked away.

    The alarm system, unfortunately, doesn't. Carving up the eye's internal machinery, it starts to panic, to make a noise beyond human range of hearing that might be a scream of panic, and it even shifts its armoring plates to try to block off the strikes... to no avail. It rips to shreds.

    The case blasts apart, eye-chunks knocking in multiple directions. Ezra is successful! The ALARM for the Cortex Core is now disabled! Unfortunately, it looks like it was being supplied NUCLEAR FUELS by the NUCLEAR POWER SYSTEM in another area! The microfusion reaction still ongoing is disrupted, and an expanding wave of radiation starts to spread! Ezra's better get out before that sphere of shining blue reaches him and cooks him alive!

    Luckily, these nuclear self-destructs of a sort don't seem to harm the Derelict Fleet ship. Must be shielded!
Ezra Mochizuki Ezra remembers the warning about radiation, so as soon as he sees that nuclear rod, his eyes widen, and he pushes off, moving to dash out. Luckily, 'a race against time' isn't a problem for him, as he blurs out as quickly as possible.

Once back on the field, his target is the NUMBERS STATION, so he can grab that keycard, carving through more turrets if that's all that's in the way. He'll probably be done by the time Bercilak is back on the field, he wagers.
Starbound Flotilla     Kotone is going to find that there's, of course, not exactly any kind of USB ports or anything. Jacking in with a *wire* won't work, but she could find a NFC network, and get her brain *real close* after popping one of the maintenance hatches.

    There's another mind in here. Rather, all of the systems are arranged around another, central mind. It's a living mind, no simple artificial intelligence. The construction of the network is more like a throne designed to torture whoever controls it; as Kotone briefly taps into the airlock using brain-based hacking, she'll find that she can sneak about the central throne and manually input the opening sequence directly into motors, but the infrastructure there expects the central mind to be *tortured* into forcing it open with a different input.

    Due to the alarm subsystem dying, the central brain cannot entirely notice Kotone yet; it's slightly blinded, but only slightly. Better get inside quick.

    Speaking of inside, Kotone can now access the interior! Her interior spaces are much like the others, with their zero gravity, their layer of decay, their huge walls and open spaces, their bones, but it seems more focused on some kind of complex drone deployment, conveying drone parts and assembling them to ready at ports on the north side of the ship. Are these the probes they were looking for?

    The SENSOR JAMMER and the SHIELD GENERATOR (the priority target) are somewhere here. Seft's scans are failing, and navigating the incredibly twisty drone probe assembly area will take a lot of work or a much better view of things than a simple human's. Here... drones drift, patrolling and menacing. Kotone will see, now, what Moonfin warned her about. They are cyborgs of an unknown species, vaguely reptilian in their skull shape, and featuring no legs and withered arms. But the organic parts of their body are long dead; only the implants remain, implants that haven't realized their host is dead. The six-foot-long spikedogs have their few limbs amputated and drift with a swordfish-like blade on their head-encasing punishment mask, while horrible skeletal grins are permanently stuck on the face of every seven-foot-long heavy weapons skeleton-drone that keeps its mounted plasma repeater always at the ready on the base of its spine. Small turrets inside feature hunched-over forms -- smaller, maybe five-foot-long alien skeletons still sitting in their turret seats while the turrets automatically swivel to try to lock onto Kotone and blast her to shreds if they can get an optical view of her.

    The turrets are disturbingly alert, while the drones are drifty and have more limited vision here in the dark.

    Getting to the southern wing is blocked by another locked airlock, but the east is accessible, if Kotone were to finish up here fast -- or if someone wanted to reach here by routing through the east wing.
Lilian Rook     Lilian has done some small amount of research on space ship design between these trips. The sight of the crypt-fleet hadn't left her so easily as to go about her business as usual just after. Given the Multiverse's information, this had been much more practical than watching sci-fi movies. It also feels almost like a pointless exercise, the second she lays eyes on the inner workings of the engines.

    The fact that there are still bits and pieces associated with the fuel array at work here, despite the obvious, nagging issue with the engine, begins to bother her even more. Within minutes, the inside of the alien hulk has already recaptured her uneasy fascination. She can't just let things like this sit. The way it'd been living in her head is most of the reason she's back here; and had promised to bankroll a science ship expedition after this.

    She uses the radio. "Remember, we're here primarily for the navigational data, so don't destroy the computers. That is to say, I am, and thus by extension you are, if you hope to get anything out of this." Then she closes it.

    "If they'd intended to get anywhere, something . . . became of whatever warp technology they have, which could explain why the whole fleet is out here, millions of lightyears from anything but not an inch out of formation. Or, perhaps they planned to get there with a mountain of sublight fuel in the first place, which would explain the sheer durability and longevity of the design, but makes it even more of a mystery of why they'd be so far from their home galaxy that we can't even tell which one it might be." she theorycrafts only to herself. "Well, I can always see which is which afterwards."

    It *also* becomes apparent pretty shortly that she'd picked the hardest route by far to navigate; this suits her just fine, since she essentially assumes herself to be the only one here capable of navigating it then. Her training doesn't include a whole lot of wiggling and shimmying and crawling and action hopping suited for literal Tomb Raiding, but it does contain abusively mean obstacle courses, she's the smallest person here (somehow) and she Cheats Not Only The Game But Herself when it comes to anything with an element of timing such that she scrapes through with largely incidental chemical burns to the parts of her suit that are designed to handle it, and lost a few modular plates get chucked to the void before their freezing or heating spreads beneath.

    The drones annoy her though. After the third one, her native instinct to Be The In Group gets her to silently and bitterly yeet one into somewhere obnoxiously inconvenient to get out of.

    The sentry guns are another problem. She can sneak around them just fine, but she needs to enter their view cones to get anything done. She can also just skip right through said view cones, but due to lacking actual invisibility, she can't just stand in them and go about her work. Working out a plan of attack, she unlimbers the GOO GUN to trial it on the largest complicating factor in the situation; the heavy attack skeleton. She aims to lock it down, then shove it into the portal to block off any more reinforcements (and then not have to blow it up so it can be studied later).

    From there, it's a systematic process of strafing the turret arrays to try to thin them out. She has a better handle on microgravity fighting now, filtering out most of the structure's up and down in her brain, so she can zigzag from cover to cover, pounding turret nests with her assault rifle and lobbing grenades beneath them, easily able to glide through the lack of gravity at the same heat and speed as ambient debris. Once she's destroyed enough to get at the POWER SUPPLY, she breaks right through the overlapping gun angles and to a safe spot between them, not wishing to expose herself to more bullet damage than she already had, and start searching for those CABLES from before; failing that, one of those weird base-24 computers.
Starbound Flotilla     Lilian is right. The engine blocks were only sublight thrusters. There was not one single piece of FTL equipment in that entire array. For a *scout*, this is absolutely insane to think about. There isn't a gap where all the FTL technology used to be, there's simply not FTL technology at all. In this movement-focused ship, not one ounce of erchius fuel and not once piece of FTL technology can be found.

    The drone, yeeted into a jamming segment of engine block, clangs about loudly, beeping repeatedly. One of the Spikedogs streaks over after a minute or two of this. It cries out in pain when the thing jabs it with an electric prod on its blade-nose, trying to make it go back to work, and struggles ever harder with a constant, wailing screech.

    At the power-supply subsystem, Lilian finds a massive nuclear reactor, threateningly rumbling as a turbine within spins. Control rods make absolutely terrifying noises. And yet, somehow, the radiation here is only the natural background radiation that you would expect from an ages-old reactor that cracked in a safe way. Don't live here, but a hardsuit should shield the worst.

    No cables, though, just heavy pipes for nuclear fuel. Which, you know, if you want to breach that, it may well cover the needs, but you'll still suffer some similar issues.

    Another of those computers is here. But how to shut it down? It may even be hooked up to the rest of the network, if Lilian wants to extract something again in her strange way. Mapping on its aged, worn display looks like it's currently routing a huge amount of power to the north side, some kind of assembly area. Presumably for those probes that Albert mentioned! For *whatever* it was the Cryptizens were looking for.

    The turrets were mostly ripped to shreds. One was blown clean out of their emplacement by one of the grenades, leaving an entire turret drifting. Salvage for later.
Kotone Yamakawa It ends up she does have to use a NFC to try and get the door working. What else she finds is rather nasty too. First up she'll see that she can trick the door to open. However, it seems designed to torture whoever used this. What the bloody blue hell is this? It seems made to torture the central mind into forcing it open with different inputs. With that she'll jack out feeling more than a little chilled, zipping in before something else happens. She keeps note of Lilian bringing up they are here for data and not to trash the computers. Okay then she's got somewhat of a plan to do this, however, the shield generator needs to go first.

She's laying out here plan as her own drones follow her. Then she sees it and to say she has a look of horror etched on her face? Is quite the understatement as she beholds the grim gristly remains. The cyborgs of the ship were so cyberized? That they keep going long after all the flesh has died.

Yeah it's time to move as she sees the spike dog.

<<Kotone here, I'm going to make a go for the shield generator.>>

She will try to keep out of the way, knowing the cyborgs are basically without their flesh parts? She'll ready several of the goop grenades she got earlier and start chucking them as she attempts to hit and fade against the huge horror. Her main focus would not be restaining the thing from moving but focusing on gumming up that turret. Then she'll make to toss a plasma grenade afterwars hoping to cripple this crazy drone so she can make a better go to get the shields down.
Starbound Flotilla     Luckily, Lilian won't have to deal with more of those turrets. They go offline, suddenly, components burning out. Ezra finds the same, as the turrets start shutting down before he's done. Now he just has to deal with the drifting gunners and spikedogs near the keycard.

    Plasma spills. It moves, you know, like a fluid, not a laser. The thing is, it's *so startlingly rare* that anything, anywhere, would deflect it in a stream. It breaches the magnetic fields that usually resist it. It annihilates armor. It vaporizes flesh. But here? It spills; the water gun of death slams into Bercilak's body and it *comes off in rivulets*, globules of the stuff drifting through space and dispersing insane heat.

    By the time it's done, the cannon is desperately trying to close its maw and crunch an obstruction that by all rights should now be somewhere between ash and atoms. Instead, it strains against a frankly prodigious display of determination and musculature. And then? CRUNCH. The canon splits down the middle as its central core is destroyed!!

    Every turret in the room goes dark in a storm of sparks.

    The two halves of the ancient turret drift apart, and the elegant engravings and amulets are split. Now, though, it's time to *get the hell out*. Because a sudden spreading blue light indicates massive volumes of radiation. Plasma ain't nothing to fuck with, but this kind of breach is death itself. That goddamn nuclear power system again! And there's nothing to stop the drones outside -- a trio of gunners -- from still rushing moronically into the entryway and trying to blast Bercilak.

    Down south, the two systems are resolved, and the keycard gotten. Do they head west to give backup on the brain? Or try to find the source of those goddamn new drones coming in?
Starbound Flotilla     Ezra hits the numbers station and grabs that keycard. But he's going to have to deal with being spotted and gunned at by another set of those gunnerdrones as he does. Luckily: Not one sentry, after a bit! They suddenly shut down, good work Bercilak!

    While Lilian's managed to block off reinforcements there, not here. The south wing has enough noise to draw the attention of those drone reinforcements, and there's more gunners coming through. Is it worth it, to go destroy the drone fitting station in the east? Or to focus on what's to the north? Or should they look for the bulkhead to the west, the one that's so hard to find with the sensor jamming? How does this duo deal with a labyrinth of sorts, especially with this indefinite stream of foes?
Lilian Rook     Lilian taps her network transmitter a few times to update the group map, mostly through the Mendacity having actual systems for recording all of this, with both the location of the turret and the nuclear core, continuing in her due diligence. Examining the dented and lightly scarred plates on her firing arm, and checking her neck seal, she figures she is well off enough to continue.

    The state of the reactor is enough to break comms silence again for a little while, albeit she'd only held it to filter out distractions. Now that she knows there are no aliens in the loop anymore, radio transmissions aren't a security issue. "The fuel for the thrusters is long-dead, and this reactor isn't able to catalyze any more without a materiel resupply, but it's still hot. I can imagine it would be, given how long it takes certain kinds of nuclear isotopes to decay, and if water is properly sealed in the system, or an equivalent, it'd simply be down to the turbine's durability, but . . ."

    She ultimately declines to mention the FTL oddity just yet. "We know there aren't going to be any aliens still in stasis, so power isn't a concern anymore. I'm about to try shutting it down, at least partially, in its intended fashion first." This is something she does in a similar way to before, however this time she has the much more powerful medium of STASIS GOO for her runework; something powerfully, sympathetically resonant with this place and its deep, ancient history, slashed in angular patterns around the rim of the console so that she can probe its myriad possible operant futures for the one what Gives Her What She Wants.

    If that can't work, then all she's got for it is risking the nuclear problem. She has just barely enough in the way of explosive power on her to do it.
Starbound Flotilla     Hit and fade is good. These things hear sound, they listen. The air inside this horrid ship is thick enough that the sound calls out a significant distance, in fact, and brings in drones from all over, but hit and fade, as we know, is good. The cryptizens pursue, but only where Kotone allows. The fact that the stasis goop grenades slow the foes down considerably is a huge boon, for very, very obvious reasons.

    The shield generator Kotone runs into is a huge pylon with a mechanism at the tip that rotates an array of reflective energy fields, designed to protect the pylon -- and projecting, at times, over the cabling that it supplies energies through to its counterpart core. It's outrageously difficult to find a gap to the projector within, that glowing purple device that projects so intensely, but that's surely a weak point if anyone ever saw one. Is there some way of slowing this down? Or maybe calculating careful shots in the shield gaps?

    Whatever it may be, this will undoubtedly need resolving soon. The barriers themselves are nearly so resilience as to be impenetrable. Who knows how insanely resilient this thing is making the core?

    Several large turrets made clunking noises as Kotone entered, but none of them activated. Huh! Cool!
Starbound Flotilla     How do you Shut This Down?

    There is a way to shut this down.

    A single code, a numerical sequence that eventually came to mean "stop", "end", "shut down". It also means "despair". The numerical sequence is a date in a calendar system that no longer records anything anywhere, made for a planet whose orbit has long since decayed out of defining it. The nature of this date is meaningful. This number and date came to be culturally synonymous with the absolute and complete loss of hope. And now it can be entered -- *carefully* -- to work on shutting down that reactor.

    Who knows what one digit off might do? Better be careful while putting it in, and don't let any drones interfere, such as the spikedogs that drift by, sleepy glowing eyes sweeping broadly around the nuclear reactor room.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Globs of residual plasma slough off of blackened, wrinkled armor plates, trailing like burning tears across smoldering polyweave. From the empty, cracked cannon, there comes a sickly, raspy, wet noise. Rhythmic, repeated sounds perhaps described as 'wheegh, wheegh, wheegh.'

     In the darkness, there is the sound of heavy footsteps approaching Ezra's position. Over the displays and sounds of the NUMBERS STATION, there comes the echoing of that wheezing, raspy, breathy sound. It is interspersed with the dull thuds of heavy boots still burned to a crisp. In the darkness, with only the scant, flickering, dimg glow of the terminals... there approaches a figure, seven and a half feet tall, reeking of burnt metal--lingered with something worse.

     The sound becomes more clear, closer. In between that raspy, wet one-two-three there is a low, almost wailing gasp. It sounds, thus, somewhere uncomfortably between laughter and weeping. Also visible in the darkness is the flickering green glow of something other than the monitors. It is curved, inwards, illuminating a complex set of counterweights and machinery, affixed to some manner of pipe or pole. The hue of this light is green, faintly illuminating the beginning curves of a very sharp point. The point of an axe.


'Wheegh heegh heaHAHA! Ah, but to ESPY thy face!" Bercilak lowers the axe. In seconds, his voice returns to normal, the armor taking quite a bit longer to get there. It was undoubtedly a very dickful thing to do. Nevertheless, he's willing to drop it even if Ezra strikes him. Fair pay for fair sport, and what's this month without a bit of *that* kind of sport?

     "Quar-awei next?"
Kotone Yamakawa Hit and fade proved to be the right call for Kotone. She keeps it up knowing while she could take any one of these things down? She would be unable to handle a massed swarm for too long. If she can pick them apart like this? It should do far better to deal with them. These things are more than just creepy, they are downright disturbing. A very advanced version of an illegal technology from her world sometimes referred to as a corpse rig. She gets past them and slowly picks them apart. Now she'll find the generator which is her target.

<<Generator insight>>

She keeps moving while she tries to figure out how to get past it and then she pauses for a moment she sees she could slow the thing down but there are shield gaps. Given the nature of the lock? She'd rather not, dive in too deep here, something is very unsettling about this ship's mere design.

"Let's see..."

She will get an assault rifle out of her matter manipulator. It doesn't take too long really and she'll ready it'ss grenade launcher as well. She will attempt to time her shots to get through the shield gaps and just rip up the shield core she'll even try the underslung grenade launcher, once she's confident enough in her timing to risk firing the shot off.

The turrets not working for her is a sign of success by another person on the boarding team, at least that's what she'll think. Kotone also does keep tabs on those turrets in the event they might open up again on her.
Ezra Mochizuki As Ezra grabs the keycard, he's ready to go find Bercilak, when he hears the noise. An approaching giant. The first thought in his mind is 'oh shit'. He spends a long moment looking like he's gonna attack pre-emptively.

But his mind moves so fast as to get a good look at the light in the darkness. That looks like an axe. Oh, fucking hell.

"Jesus christ, man, you freaked me out." Ezra says, overexaggerating, but clearly unnerved by this place and the joke. After a moment to calm down, Bercilak asks where next. The stream of foes is coming. "We'll waste time if we go for the drones, and you're probably up for some bloodsport. You're tough, I'm fast, we make a great team, right? Let's go look for the western bulkhead."

And then, with Bercilak hopefully tanking, Ezra moves to basically be super-fast DPS, trying to cut down anything that gives the two of them an Actual Hard Time with Goop Gun and blade.
Starbound Flotilla     Precise timing has to be *outrageously* precise. But, unlike the last one to rip apart a shield core, she has a heavy ranged option. It takes some time, as the shields begin to get more dense and spin more swiftly in response to the damage, but with some sustained, focused effort, the barriers can be blasted clean through -- and rip apart the projecting core.

    Of course, of cores, the main concern for today is the fuel. Supplementary nuclear fuel being circulated through other modules means that every single module, including this one, is rigged with a dangerous nuclear failsafe! Dangerous blue light begins to expand spherically from the site of the detonation that ripped apart the core. A sphere of lethal nuclear radiation! The Derelict Fleet ship is shielded against it heavily, but Kotone likely less so!

    She'll have to get out quick! And evade those spikedogs that have wandered in to sweep their lifeless, dull flashlight eyes around the area, and charging to impale whatever of Kotone or her equipment that they can get their sight on!
Lilian Rook     Given that she'd worked very deliberately to obtain this code, there's not a chance Lilian will decline to use it. Even if the distant, barely-remembered relevance of that sequence of numbers, resonant throughoug epochs of dead time, gives her the shivers. Figuratively. The physical ones come from using supercooling goo to mark runes, even with hand protection.

    Given the sheer sensitive criticality of the task though, she doesn't even begin until she's finished expanding her array, laying low and drawing out a double concentric spiral from the ring around the console, blending both lines together into a second ring, and marking the inside perimeter with rapidly drawn invocations, of the barrows and shadows, of the night and the surface of the waters. Within the small, demarcated area, the light fades, heat signatures go cold, and movements are muffled under heavy sheets of silence, blending into the cold, dead corners of the crypt.

    That should ideally give her time to manipulate the computer without being attacked from behind by a prowling 'dog'.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone doesn't make much noise over the comm's for a bit as she deals with the core. She's got the time and the firepower. Not to mention the slight edge in targeting due to her mechanical nature. It does take a good deal of work but finally, she gets the core down.

<<The Core is no more.>>

She will comm. to the rest of the team.

Kotone can take some radiation but the level's she's reading will fry her in short order. It's time to go. Kotone will order her drones out as she moves and she's going to use cover, and other tricks to get past the spike dogs. She'll only use her glue grenades when she has to, so she can keep fleeing. There is no reason to remain here she's got to get out and see what is the next objective she can help with is.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      With the ALARMS and the SENTRIES handled, and Ezra's work at the NUMBERS STATION complete, there's no reason to stay put. The cybered-up speedster suggests the western bulkhead. Bercilak shrugs. There ought to be time enough for that.

     Unsure of how much resistance to expect, Bercilak is, as one might expect, defaulting to 'as aggressive as possible.' Any time the shape of a spike dog, any kind of drone or sentry appears in the dimly lit halls of the ship, he is upon it, aiming to crack that shape in two. Where necessary, he shouts, clangs his axe against the moldering walls, or even body-slams those defenses, to keep them off of Ezra.

     When at last they reach the western bulkhead, he searches in the dim light for something that might be of worth. That's, broadly speaking, computer panels, foreboding looking doors, unusual machinery, or places where those drones tasked with maintenance rather than defence seem to gather.

     In the absence of that, he'll strike the bulkhead with his fist, aiming to see if he can gauge how thick it is, and whether there's empty space on the other side or not.
Starbound Flotilla     Using searching techniques to the west results in a much better potential result. Much in here could give an effective elite a hard time, simply through the sheer density and overwhelming lethality of the plasma, but since this area is dense with more complex pathways, it also limits sightlines. This means only having to deal with one or two of these plasma-spewing nightmare skeletons at once, which is much, much more manageable in the long time that it takes to find the airlock. Or rather, it would take ages, but Ezra is *fast*, and as a result, they can scout the clearer areas pretty damn quick.

    It's not too long before they find it. And this, too, was locked; good thing they have that card to work with. This gives them access to the same space that Lilian's currently operating in! The door's locked status was permanently removed, allowing improved access through that area! Not to mention, the scanning has mapped a proper route there.
Starbound Flotilla     Might need to get to "other tricks" for some of these guys, Kotone! The drones (those horrible, limb-amputated things encased in those awful punishment-mask and rocket-movement rigs) are insistent in their willingness to dive through radiation and scour the chamber. Drawn by the sound of projectile blasting, they're ruthless in their efforts, and the moment they spot anything they surge to impale it *violently* and *repeatedly*.

    Still, she can get out! Here, the sensor jammer remains, and the circuitous route through the east, or perhaps scouring for one of those keycards if she needs to head south -- now that the path west is charted from the south wing, it's an option! Seft's scanners, bouncing off of Bercilak and Ezra, have finally charted that path in the local tactical network!
Starbound Flotilla     Lilian Rook shuts down that damned reactor and thank god it worked. The spinning, that agonizing rattling, slowly, gradually comes to a halt. The nuclear engine settles, and its fuel ceases circulation. All throughout the ship, shut-down modules that were emitting that horrible radiation *finally* stop.

    Click.

    The whole fucking casing splits in half and some kind of nightmare plutonium core drifts out like it just hatched from an egg. A blue glow begins to spread. Fuck!! That'll be *great* for salvage but right now it's a nightmare to deal with. And a real important reason to get out of that room and get that brain annihilated quick.

    Speaking of which, one of the drones in the portal has managed to dislodge another; they're starting to reinforce this area again, more gunners approaching aggressively. More reinforcements from the east trying to teleport in, out in the main halls! Now, here remain only the DOOR SECURITY SUBSYSTEMS (less useful now, to destroy) and the CORTEX CORE, the chamber of the main objective -- now without its alarms and shield systems, thanks to the work of the other teams.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa is going to have to use some more serious firepower on the drones that are chasing her, she will attempt to use her mobility, doing things like double jumping and air dashing to avoid them as best she can. She'll also shoot at the drones from time to time as she makes for the jammer. She can't linger very long here, but she should be able to deal with that as she'll push for the, and bust out a rocket launcher that Albert gave her a long time ago. She'll line up a shot and just let it rip on the jammer.
Starbound Flotilla     Bercilak won't need to deal with the door. There's a key-card to address that! But his search, and the resultant lifting of the layers of decay, does reveal something important. Complex, scrawled artwork mentioned previously. They're hand-made star charts with exotic alien symbols, and strange drawings of vast cities surrounded by absolutely massive ancient trees. Strange calculations have been made in exotic math, describing in great detail some force that may have torn buildings asunder. This is etched artistic representation of a mathematical description of the baleful force that assaulted the homeworld! This would have been hard to find, and presents a useful bit of knowledge.

    The art sucks shit though.

    Now he's made it to the western area! Full, as it is, of the reinforcing gun-drones that are flowing in from the drone fitting station.
Ezra Mochizuki As they make it West, having scouted and opened the bulkhead, Ezra moves to Bercilak. "Let's kill a brain."

And then, he moves to just swim-dash past the drones where possible, slicing or gooing any Actually In The Way, but his goal is to get to that brain and then immediately jam a knife in its important meat once Bercilak catches up to him.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Bercilak dusts off the drawing to get a better look. His tone is quite interested--enough to see if Ezra can snap a picture. "Ileoqs. Maken theim planesperie, 'pon the hole." It isn't actually the hull, but Ezra can guess what he means well enough when he's pointing right at it.

     He's about to postulate upon it, having found something that he specifically was hunting for--but there comes a radio message from Lilian.

     "If you intend to deal with that brain-thing, this would be the time to do it. Near to the engine complex."

     "Hm?" Behind his helmet, he grins, as the cloak of leaves is at last regrown upon his shoulders. "Maken batail with thither brain, sayest thou?"

     Confirmation is given, from Albert and from Ezra. He charges behind Ezra, trailing but still making good time. Debris from drones slain by Ezra bounce and shatter against his armor. He plows through anything in his way just by virtue of bowling it over with his armored, bulky frame. He lets out an excited holler.

     "SOUND THEE THE WALRON," he bellows down the hall as he crosses the threshold into the room which houses the BRAIN. "UNHARDEL THY HOUNDES, TO ESPY ME TOSCAILEN THEIM ISCONDER!" In other words, he's looking for another fight, yes. As soon as he enters he gives the metal housing in which the brain sits a kick with all his might, hoping to startle it into summoning help. The last time was fun, and he knows what he's dealing with now, so it should be fine... right?

     He takes his time to allow them to arrive, circling around the brain and beating his chest with his free arm, the other twirling his axe to let it rest upon his shoulder. Five seconds does he allow the brain--and then he starts swinging for the wires.
Starbound Flotilla     Kotone gets going with the heavier-duty stuff. Double-jumps and air-dashes are doubly effective in zero gravity, where up and down cease to have meaning and where momentum can maintain indefinitely. The rocket launcher draws a lot of attention -- but only to where it lands, not as much to where it fires. This keeps the drones at a concerning density, but a greater distance -- *if* Kotone can move fast enough.

    Up north here, the sensor array is almost at the edge of the ship. Here, a massive dish array, meant to be deployed outside for scans, rumbles. Its deployment track is worn down by microdebris, but its essential systems are blasting constantly, scanning everything. The dish itself is heavily armored, but the glow of a core system can be found at the base, where its glow peeks out from behind the dish. Recognizing the intruders, the scanner -- built for deep-space telescopy -- can see an enemy here!! And it moves its dish in a desperate attempt to hide the core and scan the foe.

    Getting rid of this thing will mean getting past that armor, but it constantly rotates to face her! Any options for Kotone?
Starbound Flotilla     The brain is much like the one Bercilak saw earlier... lobed in many sections, partitioned into different functions. Another sextuplet of lobes that make up the main danger. And the brain does its best to muster what it can. A few drones manage to burst in through teleportation -- more gunners to lock on and try to annihilate Bercilak, plus a heavy sentry, with a massive energy shield, that was already present! But all eight turrets in here make a brief "CLUNK" and fail to activate. The laser tripwires spark. The shields fail to generate.

    THIS time, the team knows what's up.

    The brain is enraged. The deluge of violent psychic energies that it lets loose with are brutal, malicious, and ultra-violent. There were bursts and circular patterns before -- but with this? Now it's streams of them, in hundreds of directions, pulsing nearly constantly. This brain is a more powerful model, a more malicious mind, or a greater purpose.

    Unlike the other brain, filled with feelings of HATRED in every moment, though, this one reeks only of despair, a vicious and angry urge to kill a certain type of target out of sheer, utter painful vengeful despair. It is desolate and painful to experience; there is not an ounce of hope in this brain and its bursts of vicious purple energy will rend apart anything that dares to have any itself.
Lilian Rook     Oh good, it worked!

    Oh no, it worked!

    There are a lot of things that Lilian will strap in for and find a clever and efficient way to deal with. A floating Demon Core bouncing around in microgravity is absolutely not one of them. She isn't afraid of vaguely crackling background radiation, but she does *not* intend to stand in the cherenkov field of blisters and blood vomit for any length of time. She retrieves her GOO GUN and sprays the remaining volume of STASIS FLUID onto for at least the good measure of cooling, even if it boils off too fast to block any radiation with a sticky outer layer. She then floods both arms with energy and hurls the empty weapon so hard at the dense core that it shatters to pieces, aiming to at least slow its momentum if she can't send it drifting in another, less dangerous direction.

    After that, though, the final remaining objective is excruciatingly clear. She has no particular desire to assault the CORE in a one-woman-guns-blazing dramatic showdown, even stripped of defenses as it is, while there's no need to. There are no less than three other expendable shields here. Calling upon the contractor and the assorted help through the radio, Lilian delays precisely as long as is necessary to get them between her and the brain.

    Once they're absorbing the attention of the masses of drones, Lilian anchors herself in for the process of constructing and interlocking those esoteric black-gold-white magical circles of still unknown design, summoning up volumes of mysterious energy from nowhere and condensing them into concentric and enmeshing arrays that quickly start to overflow and scorch away her subtle runic enchantments of stealth. Like trying to hide a burning flare inside a clenched fist, she gives herself away by the time her array is fully charged, forcing her to deal with stray incoming plasma shots and spike dogs by putting it between herself and them, mitigating how much can get at her at once with the sheer density of energy contained within it, until she's finished her work.

    Then she discharges the violent catalcysm of anomaly-energy into the CORTEX CORE in the form a sustained gradius super mode barrage, essentially relying on sheer volume and destructiveness of fire to make do even without precise timing. Razor edged lines of white and blackshifted boiling light make solid matter resemble TV static on contact, battering the physical protections surrounding the brain and spilling through the gaps to eviscerate its support machinery.

    It also has to double as her only real defensive option, which she moves around to intercept and atomize whatever attacks are aimed at her, and otherwise must trust her suit to absorb the glancing hits that get through. She at least has the decency not to catch Bercilak or Ezra in the way, given that she doesn't know either of them to be like the last guy she did.
Kotone Yamakawa Things are not quite over yet for Kotone, she's got an idea about the sensor array as it starts to spin wildly. She has a supply of freezer foam on her. Hopefully, this will hinder further issues with drones and make scanning the hulk a hell of a lot easier. She'll launch the freezer foam in a plan to gum up the works so she can get a clear shot at the core with some serious firepower namely the rocket launcher and some plasma grenades.

Kotone still using her manoeuvring systems to get around she'll start launching freezer foam grenades to goop things up if it does slow down or even stop the array from spinning? That's when she'll open up with her heavy ordinate, she thinks she should have brought her power armour with her for this job.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      Vengeful despair.

     It's a very particular emotion. If this is all that remains of what was... and their planet was so thorougly destroyed. Was this entire voyage the last gasp of these people? Was it made solely out of spite, to wound whoever wrought such destruction upon them with their very last? Here they are. Out in the great nothing, without everything--least of all their vengeance.

     Bercilak has, in his search for sport, made the only virtuous course of action more difficult for himself. His heart aches for these people, his boasting ending abruptly as soon as that emotion washes over him. But even that is too late, for the drones, the gunners and the sentry which have been summoned by his thirst for combat are eager to give it to him.

     The Green Knight turns his back on them, attempting to ignore his opponents and end the brain with one well placed stroke between the lobes. Instead, the blasting of the gunners melts his tendons momentarily, causing him to make a superflous hew which serves only to wound and further anguish this creature.

     The sentry's energy shield crashes into him, his towering frame splayed spread-eagle across its glowing surface as he's lifted up and away from the brain. He rises, attempting to make his way back, but the drones swarm and harass him, clouding his sight, knocking his arms out of position for a second swing. Instead of a killing cleave, he merely severs one of the wires.

     "Friken thee awei," says Bercilak, utterly absent the joy of the hunt. Why should it be there? This isn't a hunt. It's a mercy killing, and it's one he's made much more difficult for himself.

     Having failed twice now to end it in one blow, he turns his attention to the very help he allowed to get here, starting with a great circular swing about his head, to clear up some space, and working his way about the room as he's slowly blasted, battered and stabbed, his armor melting and cracking all over again. It's like the last time--but this time, but utterly devoid of the spirit or enjoyment.
Starbound Flotilla     Kotone's efforts here at the jammer are effective! Quick goop and freezer foam efforts start to jam the heavy dish, first slowing it and then totally preventing all of its movements entirely, allowing her to dash behind and ruthlessly annihilate it with heavy ordinance. Power armor *does* seem appropriate, with how these things seem to operate. And there's almost another rush of radiation, but...?! Nothing! Not a single rad. Looks like the nuclear subsysem was taken down!

    Elsewhere, that horrible demon core is put on ice. And one of the unspoken but very relevant things here is that the fluid itself is also a strong guard against radiation -- a conscious choice made by its creators, one must assume, to guard the occupants of the stasis pods from huge amounts of cosmic radiation. It's boiling badly, but a layer of the stuff *does* help with the radiation!

    The jamming influence is, abruptly, lifted. Seft's scanners now can fully pierce the hull, and pierce they do: Bercilak and the others (but most relevantly Bercilak) can now totally identify the exact positions of every single drone! Bercilak is the one who needs to know every angle they're coming from, though this does help Ezra in getting behind them and avoiding their brutal rush.

    This more advanced brand of CORTEX CORE, unnervingly, has another bit of functionality that wasn't present on the other one. Some of the lobes begin to protect other lobes. As the wiring is stripped, segments halt other segments. It can't be annihilated all at once while everything is interlocking in that way. But there's always one or another that's exposed, and that means there's always one or another that can be vulnerable to the deluge. A ruthless annihilation of the offending brain matter manages to tear apart segments of this, but the base still has its essential connections. Not for long: Ezra with his knife is doing a *lot* there, and high-speed melee coupled with high-output anomalous energy blasts start to truly, properly subdue this thing. They'll just have to manage the waves of psychic energy; while the drones are focused on putting plasma and blades into Bercilak, the same can't be said of the waves that blast in all directions. They'll have to find ways of dodging around the boilingly hot purple energies that threaten to remove flesh and armor (and save only the cybernetics, implants, and augments, be they cybernetic or supernatural).

    But with the double DPS and no backup or shields... it soon begins to fall apart. The lobes preserving other lobes falter. The center is clear. An axe comes and severs clean through. The now-vulnerable brain is sliced apart.

    Drones and security systems throughout the whole vessel shut down in a massive wave.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants      This was work. Hard work. The Green Knight's armor is again ruined, this time perhaps worse, as in some places it's completely shorn off by the sheer force of the brain's hatred. It is in the weathering of those anguished psychic attacks that Bercilak's cybernetics are revealed, his arm at one point stripped to nothing but the intricately made augmentations which lie beneath his skin. In that brief moment, synthetic muscle fibers glimmer in the light of the psychic assault, with metal bones and powerful, near-silent motors struggling to articulate his fingers without the natural muscle the implant is meant to supplement.

     Still. He is as determined in mercy as he is in sport, and Bercilak fights through the assault. He and Ezra eventually prevail, but there's no exultance to be had here, no laugher. Only cold relief that it's over. Stripped of his helmet, the large breastplate which sits upon his armor, and over half of the plates and fabric on his upper body, the Green Knight is whole again in the span of but a few seconds, save of course the armor. That always seems to take much longer, and it's likely that with the beating it's taken so far, it won't be done even by the time they leave.

     Bercilak's green face is burdened with a frown as he touches a finger to his ear, and makes a progress report for the Flotilla.

     "Hither lies the brain, ded sionmest. Wei-faring, I espied a planisperie, in the wall outkerven."
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa is able to take down the jamming system. Which ends up making the rest of the team's lives notably Seft's and Bercilak's lives a lot easier most notably the rest of the team just hammers on it Ezra, Lillian and everyone else just ends up bringing down the Cortex Core. It seems all is is quiet for now and they can go over the hulk in more detail. It also looks like it could be studied too. She will help with any exploring of any of the remaining computer systems.
Starbound Flotilla     The following ALIEN ARTIFACTS (10/27) were recovered in this venture:

STAR MAP FRAGMENT
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ALIEN ARTWORK
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ENGINE COMPONENTS
FOSSILIZED SKELETAL REMAINS
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AUTO-NAV LOG
EXPLORATORY PROBE
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RELIGIOUS ICON
STASIS FLUID SAMPLE
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CHIP
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CORE CEREBRAL TISSUE
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?????(CRITICAL CONTRACT OBJECTIVE)