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Penumbra	=== To whom it concerns === Who I am isn't important. Neither is how I got this information to you. The information is the important part; it always is. More important than anything else, in this Multiverse big enough that it loses itself in its own scope. Read close and read carefully. The superplanet has broken more than once before. Different times, different causes; different names, different faces; different people and different things responsible; but isn't it a little odd that something so vast, so huge it defies the imagination, could snap in half three times in fifty years? How long does the average world go without something of that scale? Usually forever. Often just once in its history, a thousand years ago or so. And a single world is small, relatively speaking. Doesn't it make the opposite kind of sense for something built out of millions of them, then, to be so precariously balanced that it creaks and groans whenever enough people become too ambitious? Or too stupid. It was people the first time. It was people the second time. There's plenty of reason to believe it's people again the third time. Nobody saw them this time. Nobody knows why. But there's no reason to believe, scientifically or intuitively, that it'd somehow happen on its own. People are the moving parts of the Multiverse, after all; people are what cross the borders, bring the rules with them, bleed worlds into other worlds and test the integrity of the whole tower of blocks, making it figure out a way for it to work. And it does work, doesn't it? People always work. No matter what, the one thing that always works just as it should, world to world to world, no matter how far out there, is a person. The most complicated piece of machinery is the most robust. So that means everything that isn't a person must be more fragile. Of course we've had theories --not just about Side Five, but all of them, and the way things looked five years back. Fifteen years back. Forty years back. We weren't the kind to check them though; you've already met the ones who were. The problem is that they're people too. What they're testing and verifying is more plastic than they are. Like a diamond anvil testing the strength of building brick. The rules work for them, but when do the rules work with the rules, and when do they just pretend to because no one is looking? Is it right that anyone looks? Because the last three times people had a lot riding on looking harder than the other guy, it fell out from underneath them. Every bright idea anyone ever had about changing, harnessing, rebuilding, moulding the Multiverse in their ideal image, ends up like that. It's never the conquerors. People who fight the Multiverse often win. No amount of war and destruction even shakes the scales. The Emperor isn't the Orb. The Sky-Sea isn't the Tree and the Telescope. The best of ideas are the ones suited to being the most uniquely bad. But then if we never learn anything about where we are, why we're here, what brought us to now, when it all started, and who eventually gains, then what's the point of it? As I communicated in our last missive, Unification isn't random. How can you hope to answer any of those questions without knowing a little bit about how it works? What do you believe? What answers are you after? And where do you think the line is? You must have one. Otherwise you wouldn't be who and where you are.
Penumbra	We may have gone our separate ways from the others, but we still have a vested interest in looking out. Maybe it's not wrong for mastery of the Multiverse to start and end at the point of a sword; history is on your side there. Common sense too. But mixed in with the dangerous dreams, there are some good ideas --as good as swords, if you ask us-- and we'll all benefit if they can be extracted from the parts that are poisonous to touch. You'll get it soon enough. Just use your judgement. Keep in mind where your line is. And think about why, when the world gets so much bigger, people somehow become the biggest things in it. === Missive self-terminates in thirty.
Penumbra	The coordinates are different, and equally as impossible to place, and yet it seems the destination is the same. Similar sights and sounds, though a first for some. The fragment of land that floats who knows where in a soft white sea that lims the horizon in the distance, before which spreads a gleaming expanse of ocean, roughly lapping the pale beach to one side, and sloshing with against the dark, jagged granite to the opposite, where this mysterious island steadily rises, and terminates in towering cliffs overlooking the ocean. Lush green coats the winding jacknife trails that gradually escalate from a low, semi-tropical valley, punctuated by stark black stonefaces and sheer drops, standing down like castle walls, though scorched earth, churned sand, and shattered stone pocks the lower half of the landmass, blackened trails cut viciously through the greenery with ragged holes turn out of the natural edifices. Formations of odd, glittering crystal jut up out of the ground here and there, wispy and translucent, as if half-there, gradually bleeding a diffuse white light. Large enough to support a small city, but known to house far fewer now. Sprinkled with tiny complexes, what looked like small treatment plants, storage houses, or heavy equipment workshops, interlinked with spidery silver pipes and thrumming, translucent wires, are known to be the many temporary arrangements of two score styles and fields of eccentric research and delicate invention. The third lowest to the beach have gone still and dark, either emptied out and switches flipped, or visibly caved in by traumatic force, but those higher and further away still glow with surprisingly cheery light from within, puffing out steam or crackling with electric jolts here and there, creating a sense of hodgepodge communal purpose The far flung feeling of an Arctic observatory is completed by the tower that sits at the peak, and the terminus of roads, five times the size of a lighthouse and broad as a castle keep, slightly diminishing in diameter as it rises, and ringed by spiral ramps of translucent, floating steps and cable rails. Sheer walls of gleaming steel and glass sit on foundations of rune-scrawled stone choked in fast-growing island moss and creepers, bright lights flickering at its peak. Where it once filled the airwaves with information traffic, the only transmissions come from personal devices, scattered wide and far, unworthy of note. A shimmering, translucent dome irregularly flickers in and out of existence around the tower, briefly giving brilliant flashes of prism-split rainbow light around its edges, only to become bleary smudges of slightly unwholesome, difficult to describe colour shortly after. The story of war waged on the shoreline is told in the scraps of broken barricades and ugly grey fulgurite glass, the sea having smoothed away the shapes impressed in the sand, and dragged its detritus out into nowhere, and the soft, colourless, sourceless light having, in some sense, rubbed out the stains. Anything that once moved, glowed, or fired, has been thoroughly stripped away and carried off, as evidenced by veins of cart lines and wheel tracks in the rough roads.
Penumbra	The commotion of a few days later is localized to the opposite end; the cosmopolitan tower of clashing origins at the island-fragment's peak, aglow like a chandelier, but all in hues of stark backup lighting off-white and throbbing pulses of emergency red. Heavy-tread armoured rovers trundle and bounce down the rocky read paths, laden so heavily that packs must be lashed to their rooftops in the same way that they hang from the saddles of overworked beasts of burden, from oxen to giant lizards. Sleekly hovering carts dart to and fro along the switchback path behind the tower, transporting individuals, sealed crates and file cabinets, and bundles of fuel supplies. An automatic minecart puffing steam can be seen lugging glittering coals and timbers, the opposite way of distant figures wheeling pallets and strapped-down mechanical viscera to airfields, where helicopters impatiently wait with churning rotors. Most of it is headed to a sheltered cove behind the cliffs, where a dock harbours a few dozen yacht-sized craft, next to a small tanker already heaving out to sea, covered in more containers than should comfortably exist even in the basement of a building of that size. Trains of cargo outnumber passengers a hundred to one, insistent that none of it be left behind. None of it is headed towards the only Warpgate on the island, despite the apparent lack of anywhere else to take any of it. It isn't hard to tell why one would want to get away from the tower, now. Where it previously shone with a hundred kinds of esoteric energies and crackled with the thrum of a dozen different data protocols, the air shimmers with a haze of sweltering heat that rises from its bricks, girders, and windows. The grass and trees around it have greyed and withered ashen in its proximity, and a carpet of the seemingly native crystals have grown from the earth like fungus. Displeasurable blobs of pseudo-matter, like the blotches left on the inside of one's eyelids after staring at a bright light, sieve away from the upper floors, shrouded in enough ionizing radiation to make the tower's outline seethe and crackle on sensors. For reasons unknown, there is a faint, rank smell of burning flesh, or perhaps boiling blood, coming from everywhere and nowhere in particular. The carefully constructed leylines beneath the earth palpably bubble beneath the magically sensitive's feet, as if backed up or irregularly depressurized, and seem to crisscross and intermingle with underlaid power cables. Whatever the damage done, it can't have been so simple as to have simply resulted from some stray attack, and it can't have been so insidious that so many things should come to a head all at once.
Robin Sundance	"Oh la la." "Someone certainly is going to an awful lot of trouble." Robin Sundance has been watching the convoy move for a while. He's not just watching where they're going - he's watching where they're coming from, and how regularly. He's not just looking at the people - he's looking for something else. A moment to exploit to get inside. Oh, yes. It's obvious why anyone would want to get away from the Tower. It's collapsing in on itself. The bubbling magic. The burbling non-existence. The esoteric energies, the thrum of data. It's all very impressive and all very, very dangerous, and all very, very, very potent. It's a sign that something happened here beyond just the little attack that he helped with last time - beyond the people trying to slaughter sixty-eight human beings for the crime of disagreeing with them over science. Robin purses his lips. There is an intelligent decision, and a foolish one. A beat. A shake of the head, and a tug of the incandescent, rippling scarf. The intelligent decision would surely be handled by others. He is Masked Ranger Thief. He makes the decisions others will not. B-B-B-BURGLAR! The Masked Ranger armor forms around him. A black bodysuit spreads over his body. Red and gold armor locks around his hands and feet and chest. Black coattails stream out from his waist. A pair of key-shaped antennae form over his eyes as green jewels click into place over his gaze. Masked Ranger, Thief. He drops out of the tree and out of sight, making his way towards the tower. When he gets close, he starts paying way more attention. Wards. Defenses. Things gone wrong he can bypass with a Breaker Key, things he can open up. Ways to get into the tower and take a closer look around. He knows he won't have much time. But hell if he's not gonna try.
Strawberry Princess	Strawberry Princess is here, but not in her full magical girl regalia- not quite yet, anyway. The gangly, six-feet-and-too-many-inches twentysomething holds a slightly undersized magic wand loosely in one hand; it has an ominous-looking gunmetal-gray reactor bolted to the side, but it lies inert and cold. Best to save those precious five minutes for if things get really hot. Instead, she wears a sharply casual white button-up shirt and black jeans, with a comfy surplus jacket open and around her shoulders. A patch with the green shield of the Paladins is sewn onto the right sleeve like a girl scout badge. It's hard to mistake her for non-combat personnel, though, with the awful scar that curves from her cheekbone around her temple and deep into her scalp. From her comfortable spot sitting on the edge of a jutting black rock, Strawberry stares down at the convoy with a trained and measuring gaze. Reaching into her pocket and pulling out a modified flip-top phone, she spots a cargo-bot that doesn't have any human eyes on it and tries to barrage it with wireless signals until it responds to something, then reprogram its destination to come to her. Once it's obediently arrived, she'll cut open some of its packages to find out what's inside.
Damocles	In a flash of violet fire, Damocles, Sorcerer of Chaos, appears on the edge of the floating island. Like before, the esoteric path he was forced to walk to get here meant he wasn't able to teleport directly here, but instead had to mostly take the path laid out by the mysterious benefactor. However, his experience before means that he was at least able to bypass the final step and teleport in an unexpected location. As before, he takes a moment to observe before moving in. Mostly because he has no idea what's going on and last time there were a lot of explosions. Looks like looting, which isn't interesting to him, and the magical energy around the tower seems like it might literally be eating itself and inverting reality. Okay, that last part seems interesting. Damocles isn't really made for stealth, being SPESS MAREEN HEUG, but he does the best he can, moving cautiously and slowly towards the tower, aiming to avoid contacting the convoys all together so he can better examine what's going on at that tower.
Doctor Strange	AEGIS ASTRAY The Sorcerer Supreme and the Knight of the Sun stand over a scrying pool, powered by the mystic guidance of the former. A few other pools are in use by seers for other Paladin concerns across the Multiverse. This one, in particular, is focused on the sight of the clash between the Tempest and the Unifiers. The tower is a mess. Strange's brow furrows with concern at the sight of it, zooming in to watch one of the blobs of poisoned ur-matter floating slowly up. "Just gonna warn you, Gawain--the smell probably isn't gonna be great." After a moment of discussion between the two, they decide on a landing point--the harbor, where people actually are. Well, Thief is going to the tower, but that's his problem. Not Strange's. He leans back, the waters of the pool are calmed, and the distant vision fades, the pool returning to just a seemingly ordinary font of water. Turning around, Strange gestures with a scarred hand to Gawain. 'Step back,' that gesture says. He then extends the opposite hand, adorned with a two-fingered brass ring. Extending his fingers, he carves a hole into reality which will deposit the both of them to the harbor. The Sorcerer Supreme will approach the nearest Person With a Clipboard or Clipboard Adjacent Thing. Those guys are the decisionmakers, or at least, more likely to be than the people moving boxes. "Hey. Hi." He gives a curt wave. "It's Strange. Sorcerer Supreme. The guy who told you guys this was a good idea to do. It still is, by the way," he says, frowning archly with a slight inclination of his head. Looking over his shoulder at the portal, "And the guy coming through that any second now is Sir Gawain, one of my Wardens. We're here to see how much of this stuff you can afford to let go, and before you say you can't, remember." He holds out his red cloak with one hand, flapping it a little. "Sorcerer Supreme." A jerk of his thumb towards the portal. "And Knight of the Round. There's gotta be something we can do for you or get for you. Gawain... thoughts?"
Nanoha Takamachi	Nanoha is in the middle of reviewing the results of a lesson from earlier in the day when she's interupted by the chime of her Device, <Master. There is another message.> Nanoha frowns, easily guessing what type of message is being referred to. The memories of what happened after the last one are still fresh in her mind. Still, it's not something that can be ignored. Whether it's because of a feeling of responsibility, of which Nanoha is very familiar. Or simply because of curiosity. Soon enough, Nanoha emerges from the island's warpgate, once more wearing her combat dress with staff in hand. The coordinates had been different and yet Nanoha finds herself at the same location. She looks around, confused for a moment. But it does certainly seem to be the same place. Though a little different, due to the evacuation currently underway. Not wholely unexpected given what happened. The strange number of distortions affecting the tower are slightly more unusual. Nanoha has doubts that any weaponary used in the siege are to blame. She didn't see any evidence at the time that they might be reponsible for an effect such as this. More likely that what was being researched inside the tower has escaped confinement. Deciding on a plan of action, Nanoha advises her Paladin allies to it and then proceeds to raise her staff into the air. She calls out, "Wide Area Search!" Orbs of pink appear in the air around her, before blasting off in multiple directions. They begin to fly towards various points across the tower, trying to find their way inside. And should they manage to, they begin to search through the interior, trying to find signs of a source for the distortions. Or anything that might provide information about what the owners were researching there. All of which Nanoha waits for outside, a series of holoscreens popping into existence around her and showing the view of each magical probe she released.
Sarracenia	Sarracenia has no idea why she was sent this information or these co-ordinates. She wasn't involved in the attack on this place. But, the intrigue is enough for her to get in her flagship, the Sovereign, and head to the location. If anyone was looking for a distraction, the 100 foot long wooden sailing ship flying through the air on masts sporting propellers instead of sails might work. With a low rumbling that often accompanies large airships it moves in over the area where supplies and salvage are being loaded. Then, the Spanish Galleon-looking airship slowly lowers down and lands in the water. It isn't in the way of the shipping lane though. Once it is settled and anchored, a young woman in a red royal gown looks down from the stern of the ship and surveys the scene. "So...what are we supposed to be doing here, Tomoe?" she asks her lady-in-waiting. "The message was a bit...cryptic."
Gawain	Gawain is at the Aegis Astray with Strange, waiting. He nods and smiles as his boss warns about the smell, taking a step back as gestured. "Of course not! It never does, Seneschal." When the portal opens, Gawain walks through. He's dressed in a winter coat over a long-sleeved shirt, long warm jeans, and boots. His Paladins badge, desiginating him as a Warden, is pinned to his jacket. "Sir Gawain, Knight of the Sun. It's a pleasure." Gawain says to whoever they track down. "Are you familiar with the KonMari method? Only keep that which sparks joy? There must be some stuff in here that is overkill!" As Strange prompts Gawain, the blonde knight scratches his chin, and then gestures to the ships. "We can scout ahead for you, if you don't have your own methods, or alternatively help with some of this cargo carrying. We can get supplies - rations, clean water, medkits, if you need those as well. Not to say you aren't supplied - because you very obviously are!" A goofy smile. Gawain's trying to seem friendly.
Shyra	"Ooooooh. Pretty!" The high-pitched sound-effect 'voice' of Shyra the Holy Healer continues to be, well, what it is. Still, at least she's not talking in text boxes still. The erstwhile white-mage analogue looks over the vistas present with wide eyes, looking over what is clearly a devastated clash of energies and events like some kind of rube gawking at a train wreck full of shiny things. She could probably spend weeks picking this place over and poking at things and not really figure things out. Then again, figuring things out was never really her job now, was it? She still hasn't really gotten out much. That said, she doesn't wander off on her own, immediately attaching to Strawberry Princess and following her around with a supportive smile. As she watches the re-powered Magical Girl look down at the convoy, Shyra looks down curiously. "Why don't we just go down there?" She asks. "But don't worry! I've got your back!" For what it's worth, anyway.
Tamamo no Mae	Tamamo's soon to arrive on the scene, the fox-like Servant slowly shuffling towards at least one familiar figure, that of Doctor Strange. She does move to cover her nose with her outfit's sleeve, the rank smell from the area is doing a number on her senses. "Ugh, the smell is nasty..." she complains, "But, I am here. I'm here to see this part through." there's a small pause from the Caster... Gawain is there. "Busy making some deals for information, Doctor Strange?" she grins from under the cover of her sleeve, "My name's Tamamo-no-Mae, an acquantance of the good Doctor." there's a bow towards Gawain, then towards the dock workers, "Whatever thy request is, I believe we will be able to handle it." "After all, my mind is itching to study some of this as well."
Tomoe	So another letter? Who was this sending them and why did they pick her? It didn't matter why though, not to Tomoe. This was a chance to find out more about what was happening to her world and herself as well. Tomoe would be airborne by the time she got close to the island. The location was different but she swore this was the same place as it likely was. She would take note of the battle site had already been stripped clean for salvage and who knows what. Though Tomoe was not in the perfect form today either she'd still been recovering from the beating she took the last time she was here. She was glad for being able to save energy by catching a lift with Sarracenia, and she would look to her friend for a moment. "An origination had been looking into how the multiverse works and had a violent scheme with itself. Some are arguing it needs to burn but were might make the right sort and I got shot up pretty bad by them. I'm hoping to learn more about how the multiverse works and what is going on with myself and my homeworld." She'll head off the ship first making sure things are safe before Sarracenia will get off the ship.
Strawberry Princess	Strawberry drapes an arm around Shyra's shoulders amiably as she dangles her legs off the edge of the rock, kicking idly like a kid sitting on a swing. "Why don't I just go down there?" She frowns slightly. "Well... we're with the Paladins, right? They might not like it if they- you know, find us looking through their stuff. And if they get mad at us, that'll make it harder for Dr. Strange to be friendly with them, I think." She turns her phone to the side, letting Shyra take a peek at the Very Cool Hacking UI currently displayed on its screen. Lots of green-on-black gibberish text! "So instead, I'm making their stuff come to us. Just to find out what they're shipping." Her intent frown shifts into a sly smile. "Safer that way, right? Because then instead of seeing us going through their luggage, they just- see a robot that decided to go loopy."
Tamamo	A different day, but the same island... supposedly. "Has the island drifted, perhaps?" Tamamo says, stepping out behind Gawain. She's already, this time, replaced her outfit with an exact fascimile of her previous, on the chance that the denizens will recall it--though she suspects they weren't doing anything so dangerous as 'looking outside,' last time. It is not accurate to any real police uniform, but it does have something that looks like a badge, and the gold trim matches her eyes. There are others about, but rather than taking the time to socialize with the other visitors, she says, "I shall leave this particular matter to you," to Dr. Strange, gives a polite tap to her cap to any nearby who didn't arrive with her, and walks off toward the tower. Along the way, she gives a closer look to the leylines. Just what had they done here, and what had gone wrong with it? Was it breaking a cause, or an effect? And, perhaps importantly, were the effects on this island something that already existed, to make it an important location at which to build, or did they bring everything with them, geomancy included?
Sarracenia	Once Tomoe is on the ground, Sarracenia hops down from her ship and heads toward the tower as well. She looks at the various goods being carted away by the boatload on the way up, then once they reach Strange's group she smiles coridally and curtseys to the others. "Greetings! For those of you who do not know, I am Princess Sarracenia Sundew, Crown Princess of the Sundew Kingdom. And this is Tomoe, my lady-in-waiting. It is wonderful to see you again, Doctor Strange!" She then addresses the person Strange was talking to. "I am also quite curious about what these materials are. I presume you are taking them to a buyer? If you could set aside a collection of samples from each I am sure I could compensate you quite fairly. I do have the resources of an entire kingdom at my disposal."
Penumbra	Scooping one of the robotically controlled cargo conveyances from the network of flowing materiel lines isn't too difficult for Strawberry. While some of them roundly reject her attempts to interface, and others seem at first to be likely candidates, only to present no ports at all, their sheer number and variety ensures that plenty enough are vulnerable. The drone she has tottering off in her direction, out of an elbow joint in the line, laden with backpacks and saddle bags, looks like it's barely an alteration from some of the walking droids that had shot at people the day before. There doesn't seem to be a lot of rhyme or reason to its haul, other than being relatively more fragile than what you'd want to strap to a cart rather than something that can navigate with something approaching discretion. Between her and Shyra, searching the assortment turns up half a haul of individual replacement parts for who knows what, a selection of what might be cybernetic hands and arms, sterile room equipment and dress, some kind of hyper dense batteries, and hefty, metal-capped transparent cases the size of plus sized energy drink cans, suspending what look like root cuttings within, contact free, and the fluid-preserved remains of perfectly common fish, rats, and amphibians one could find on any world, divided between wildly afflicted with extra heads, limbs, colourings, and textures, and withered to a husk. From an outside vantage, there isn't much further that can still be done, but Tamamo's examination of the leylines is one. For one, most of them are far too regular and shallowly imprinted to be natural, having been carved out in neat grids by some unknown tool of both impressive and baffling 'terraforming', which seem only to lead into the whiteness several miles away, lurking on the horizon. From where the magic flows, one can only guess at, but the damage feels reminiscent of a storm surge, having collapsed certain channels and caused others to bubble over. Where the metaphorical, stagnant magical sewage soaks through the ground, growths of crystals appear. There seems to be no explanation as to why some of it bleeds into, and fills up from, the physical power grind, which may possibly be hydroelectric or geothermal in nature; she's not an expert on that part.
Doctor Strange	"You could say that," he says to Tamamo-no-Mae. It's kind of what he's doing. "Princess," he says courteously with a bow of his head. There is, apparently, some discord that's brewing. A disagreement over who gets what, erupting before an offer or an inventory has even been made. "Ok. I'll tell you what. First, we can assume these guys aren't going to give us the WMDs, because the sheer state of neener-neenery--no offense," he asides to the dockworkers, briefly glancing their way, "--means they're probably gonna keep that on hand so they can keep their infinite mandala of 'nuh-uhs' in top shape. So, since we're not getting the A1 stuff, we don't need to act like that's at stake. Second..." He holds up two scarred fingers. "If there is anything that's dangerous, let's take a look at who's here, right now, in this Semicircle of Fun. We've got a knight of the round table, a princess, a courtesan used to having the ears of rulers, and me, Mr. Bargains with Gods and Ancient Douchebags Every Tuesday. Between the four of us, we can sit down, look at what's actually on the table, and come to an agreement about who gets what and how it's used. Now... gimme a sec. Gawain, take over for me." He peers into the future, looking into alternate timelines. Of the things that could be bargained away here, which are the most dangerous if misused, and what possible effects could their misuse carry with them?
Penumbra	Sneaking into the tower, by contrast, isn't even that difficult in this state. Days ago, it'd been an impenetrable stack of absurdities, seemingly designed to be unapproachable seemingly for the sake of seeing if it could be done, and activated almost as a surprise to its occupants, once it was suddenly put to the test against actual Elites. However sustainable that was meant to be, this certainly isn't it. The physical wards that should tangibly bar entry flicker on and off with irregular gaps. Security wires and sensors abruptly power off and cycle back on twenty seconds later with each backup generator failure. The occasional camera or alarm whines to report an intruder, and its signal goes nowhere, or is lost upon an evacuated operator room. Places where dormant robots or hulking golems lie waiting can be waltzed right through; all examples of their guards have been either recovered already, or seemingly forcibly disconnected from their power units and motive talismans, intended never to be used again. Some automatic defenses, operating on closed circuits, still prove to be a challenge, having been forgotten or deemed too time-consuming to deal with, meaning the odd ambush by a laser gun, lockdown trap in a rapidly flooded room, or similar, mostly entrapping remote scouts. No followup ever comes to them. It's a sprawling labyrinth of regretful inconvenience, now, built by not even a tenth of the number of people that it'd require in the loop to keep all of it monitored. Only two floors, in ring-shaped portions around the tower's central conduit area, are still meaningfully populated, by perhaps two dozen souls of almost random description, no two of whom look alike. Some are rapidly scraping desks, consoles, and workbenches for personal affects or downloads, shoveling potion bottles and hard drives into their bags, but many are dressed in semi-identical white and green coats and jackets, moving around under orders of superior personnel. Nobody involved seems very wary, nor even the slightest bit combat-savvy; even a genuinely commanding attitude, rather than that of a senior boss, is rare, though even they wouldn't fail to notice a space marine clomping around the same halls. From what an infiltrator can gather, beyond hauling everything they can outside, there are three areas currently experiencing some kind of major malfunction stress. A central map can be found easily by Nanoha's bits, indicating a hexagonal arrangement of sub-sites around the tower proper, three of which are reporting dark, three of which are pulsing emergency red. Any of them could be entered by Robin's determined efforts, but not simply waltzed into. Their labels are not exactly friendly, apparently unintended to be read by any sort of layman or visitor, but from what they can gather, they appear to be power substations. Damocles can make out that one is experiencing some kind of 'energy event', while another is suffering problems to do with its 'intrusion countermeasures', and the third simply mysteriously impossible to get anyone into. All three have a small legion of medical helpers, staff, and equipment around them, being the main sort of supplies that can't be found outside.
Strawberry Princess	Strawberry slides down the rock to meet her hacked cargo-bot and makes quick work of a couple of the saddlebags, working her utility knife into them and ripping them open to spill out their bizarre contents. After poking through them for a bit, she waves Shyra over with her wand-bearing hand. "Here- you've got your 'inventory', right? Grab a couple of these samples and one of the batteries. We can look at them later." That's about all they're going to get out of that, though. She thumbs the ignition on the gunmetal-gray reactor anxiously as she stares down at the docks from her vantage point. "Dr. Strange and Gawain are down there with... Bad Tamamo and non-Paladin Princess. That's even-er than I'd like." She shears off the rest of the heavy industrial robot's cargo with her knife, then does a bit more creative reprogramming and slaps its side to send it on its way. Its combat routines reactivated and its friend-or-foe routines overridden, the robot begins trundling back down towards the docks along its original path. On arrival, it'll stay in standby mode, hopefully blending in with the menagerie of other machines and beasts of burden- but if a fight breaks out between the outsiders and Gawain and Strange, it'll join in on the side of the Paladins. That done, she turns to Shyra again, dusting her hands off on her jacket. She tucks the knife away, but holds up her phone to the healer, showing a crude map of the area with the generator-sites highlighted. "Do you think you can get us into one of those?"
Damocles	For Damocles's part, he's being particularly cautious. It's not because of the warnings the others gave. He's not even a part of their little circle of mages. One of the advantages of staying quiet, you tend not to be dragged into politics. However, his sense of the magic here is about in keeping with what they've concluded. Something is...wrong with the magic here. This worries him a bit, because unlike the Princess on the radio, he does not draw his power through weird rocks. Where he comes from, the human body is a conduit between the physical and aetherial, and a sorcerer who isn't careful will quickly find themselves corrupted by the very energy they seek to control. He moves slowly towards the tower that's at the center, still careful to try and avoid contact if possible, but more careful to not get overwhelmed by the energy here. Someone mentioned that it felt like the magic was 'diseased' here, and while that feels close, it feels a little off. Not quite diseased, but...necrotizing. Is the energy here dying? This calls for more experimentation. The three substations all look to be under particular disasters. One in particular is very interesting as he can't figure out what's going on. Some kind of magical embargo that his senses can't break. For the moment though, he's got to be cautious. Fortunately being a Chaos Sorcerer, he's learned to be very cautious with magic. The first thing he does, is find a position that's as close to equidistant from all three stations as he can. Once he's got a location planned, he draws a quick set of glyphs on the ground, designed to channel and sustain a spell. Once the ritual is prepared, he channels a very slight amount of energy, looking to create a tiny, flickering Warp flame. If it works as intended, the flame will be no larger than an apple, and will be sustained by the regional energy, rather than that he channels. That should give him something tangible he can watch, and see what the effects of the local energy on a 'living flame' will do.
Tomoe	Tomoe would look to Doctor Strange and is glad to see one of the best mage in the multiverse is on site. She will nod to Doctor Strange and bow a bit to him. She'll then fall in with Sarracenia for the moment. she takes a look at everyone else who is here. She'll let her friend handle negotiating on things Tomoe's more interested in information than items when it comes to this. She would take a look at the items curious about it while Doctor Strange and the rest? Work to come out with a deal for the items. she's curious about them to be sure. She's taking a look at the various things wondering just what the deal is with them. They could just be junk but who knows about but those batteries do visibly catch her attention. Maybe they could help with storing power for the GU's castle... "I wonder how those batteries might hold up for power storage for a small village..." she'll look to Doctor Strange trusting he'll be bale to catch any magical landmines with the salvage here.
Tamamo no Mae	Tamamo's tail is frizzed in anger and annoyance at Gawain's impudence, at fully disclosing her past. A fist balls up, no... not right now, it's not the time. "He is right. If there was anything world devastating, they would not be so kind to hand it over because we asked or paid." she still as a look of displeasure upon her face, be it from that or Gawain... it's because of Gawain. "I'm much more than a courtesan, Doctor Strange. I'm knowledgable of a variety of magic, so I believe I am a bit more use than you might think." Tamamo does look at the Princess, wait, when did she come in? "I believe that would be fair for /everyone/ involved, and be it that there's two Paladin members, one from the Concord and... the Princess, you still come out on top." beat "And I'll disseminate my findings with the good Doctor here once I'm done." Tamamo takes a slow, measured breath, "Should you need, I can use my Authority on the Moon Cell to assist in what you need to study, should you find anything lacking. Though, I make no promises that it can find what you might be missing either."
Robin Sundance	If it was easy to simply waltz into, Thief wouldn't be nearly so interested in getting in there. While it's an absolute falsehood that nothing easy is ever worth doing, it's absolutely true that the most interesting stuff is never kept anywhere that can just...be accessed. If it could just be accessed then it wouldn't be interesting. No, no. The interesting stuff is kept in places where people can't reach. And, of the three places - one with the energy event, one with the intrusion countermeasure, and one with the mysterious impossibility - the one that Thief chooses is of course the hardest one. Gotta live up to your own hype. Break down the tasks. Simple. Efficient. 1) Deal with the guards without being noticed. (Doable.) Preferably without knocking them out so they can't retreat. (Doable?) 2) Enter the area. (Doable.) 3) Don't die to whatever's in the area. (Doable?) 4) Retrieve whatever's in the area. (????) 5) Escape. (Doable.) A tsk. Damocles assures Thief that he can get the folks out. That's a huge relief. Thief, hanging on the ceiling nearby, purses his lips and disappears. When he reappears, the communicators the staff are wearing are crushed in his hand. The Rifler snaps up to pop them in the head one by one with the efficient dancing Thief has already become accustomed to. Get them out of the way. Then approach the door with a Breaking Key drawn so he can pop it open and see what's inside. Theoretically.
Penumbra	For those same reasons of nobody present appearing to be especially predisposed towards violence, authority, or rigorous discipline and organization, the approach of 'just make contact' goes over surprisingly well. The personnel overseeing the movement of goods are very light. Having heard a specific number the other day, Strange can tell that there are more people here than there were during the attack, but the majority of them are wearing that white and pale green outwear of varying stripes, and hurriedly performing basic tasks under the guidance of only a couple of people in clothes that suggest they put them on this morning. The most generally put together of them is a rather tiny woman with slightly pointed ears and literally frameless glasses, stuck using a very ordinary megaphone to make herself heard while standing on top of an empty crate on a stony overlook. She affects a few moments of blinking bafflement at his arrival, then her face lights up --in a strangely neutral way-- in recognition. "Oh. You." she says, without inflection. "Yes, you were a lot of help, I think. Right. Would you mind then?" Upon Gawain's introduction, she makes a hurried hand-shaking gesture with the air, being too preoccupied to climb down and make contact with him properly. "Verity. Facet Five Archlogician. Pleasure to meet you, and all that." She waves his initial gesture off both physically and vigorously. "No no no forget about all that. We can secure such basic things anywhere. What's important is preserving our work. Samples. Records. Things that can't be bought again." Her tone becomes slightly sheepish towards Strange. "You may know already that our primary procurers have come down with a case of disagreement, so there's little we can afford to leave. You're just in time, though! Some extra, skilled bodies would be a great relief." Sarracenia's suggestion that anything here might be for profit seems to peeve her, as Verity purses her lips together in a way that'd look severe if she were tall and sixty years old, and not a foot shorter than the princess and unable to look at her over her levitating lenses. "Of course not! In fact, we've put down great expense on acquiring most of these ourselves! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get this kind of-- no no, we haven't the time to waste! If you have able bodies, we need them at the transformers immediately!" She even points at the Caster joining them, generally heedless (or intentionally ignoring) the disagreement, and saying "Either get moving anything you can, or report to one of the lockdown areas, pronto! If you can't tell, we're in the midst of an emergency here!"
Shyra	The Holy Healer pokes at the objects found, creating a little 'tink' noise as one of the fluid-filled containers is jostled. "Wow. These are weird." She says. "It's not like a tiny fish tank at /all/." The girl looks up as Strawberry suggests that they take samples, and she does so, picking several of the containers up and tucking them into her robe. As she does so, the objects simply vanish into a literal abstract representation to be put in at the end of an arbitrarily large list. WITHERED RAT: 1 MUTATED FISH: 1 RAINBOW TOAD: 1 HYPERBATTERY: 1 After acquiring the objects indicated, the Holy Healer looks at the map of the area. "Sure, I should be able to get us inside! I mean, they have walls like anywhere else, right?" She says brightly. This will probably make a lot more sense in the imminent future... Or for anyone who's seen Shyra's less-advertised skills menu.
Penumbra	Clearing her throat, she continues at a slightly more measured pace, rather than continuing to rush her words. "We don't know how --and the how isn't important regardless-- it happened, seeing as thanks to your timely intervention before, none of the Tempest faction were able to reach our sample storage, but all six of the transformers that convert essentia from the Expanse into usable power for our outpost have suffered catastrophic failure." "We've successfully shut down three of them, but three more are completely resisting our efforts. Unfortunately, it seems we weren't prepared for these particular eventualities, and so far we've yet to locate the correct tool capable of doing the job. There are a few of us trying to whip something up on the spot, capable of getting inside, but I don't have high hopes, so I've coordinated the mass removal of sensitive work." A beat. "And evacuation. No doubt this island will be completely uninhabitable by tomorrow night at this rate." Doctor Strange's examination of his alternatives here shows slim pickings. The woman he's talking to strikes him as very laissez faire about any number of favours, but unbelievably recalcitrant about asking her for anything being moved out of the tower. Obsessive, even, about the importance of almost every single item, ostensibly claiming all of it to be too important to 'donate' to outsiders, but much of it seeming to involve some small amount of jealous reluctance and nervousness. Most of it by bulk is probably no more dangerous than any given Elite researcher; it's the potential combinations of them that ring future alarm bells. A sprawling, interconnected web of potential interactions between any number of myriad 'mildly risky' materials. I doesn't require much intellectual genius to figure out that the power system involved right now is the greatest example of playing with fire currently present. No potential futures involve some towering nuclear fireball in the next five minutes, but he has the sense that there is some item in particular that this woman especially wishes to retrieve above all others.
Nanoha Takamachi	Nanoha watches the holoscreens arrayed around her intently. The tower seems quite empty of anything interesting. No doubt most of it's been packed up already and on its way to a new home, somewhere. A place they likely could not follow without assistance, if the difficulty of reaching this island is any indication. Assistance they may once again receive in the form of a cryptic message... Which of course begs the question who's sending them. But those are questions for another time. After locating the three potential sites of interest, Nanoha waves her hand and dismisses the screens. Though she keeps the magical probes active for now, letting Raising Heart continue to monitor them in case something else pops up later. Nanoha then slowly lifts into the air, taking the short flight to join up with Strawberry and Shyra. Nanoha gently lands next to the two just in time to catch the tail end of the two's conversation. She smiles at the prospect of getting a teleport in, "Excellent. I'm afraid my own skill at entering difficult to reach places is a little... Explosive." She laughs briefly, rubbing the back of her neck as she does so.
Strawberry Princess	Strawberry waves up at Nanoha as the other magical girl approaches- if one can count Shyra, they're practically a small coven now. "You too?" she asks with a laugh, holding up her own wand for Nanoha to inspect. The reactor bolted to the side of it is enigmatic, but someone so experienced with staves might be able to pick out a funny feature of the wand itself: the feathery wings that sprout out beneath its dull crystal tip are precisely arranged for use as iron sights. So that's her game.
Sarracenia	Sarracenia is genuinely surprised when the shorter woman reacts so angrily. "Oh! Forgive me! It is just that after incidents like these I would have expected those involved to simply disappear into the aether. That seems to happen a lot with clandestine operations that have encounter insidious undermining." Not that the princess would know. "Well, if you need extra hands, I have an entire crew ready to go!" She pulls out her cell phone and dials a quick number, then taps her foot a moment. "Captain! Deploy the men!" she says, then hangs up and puts the phone back in her purse. A few moments alter a large door opens in the side of her airship and a long ramp extends. Piranha Plant people start pouring out, dozens of them. "Here you are~ They are not the brightest, I'll admit. But, there are plenty of them. And I can of course assist as well." Sarracenia pulls out her DK Hammer, which is just as tall as she is. "If you need a way in, I am sure I can smash whatever is blocking your path." she says confidently. She also motions to Tomoe. "And naturally my Lady-in-waiting is at your disposal as well."
Tamamo	Several things happen that catch Tamamo's attention, one involving Caster and Gawain speaking of her--of a past. Another involves her own musing and Dr. Strange's explanation. Finally, she asks whether there are more inside, not yet being accosted by one elite or another, to answer her questions. When Nanoha responds in the affirmative, Tamamo says, "Ah, very good. If you would, please guide me in their direction." Though lacking such conveniences as handheld computers, holographic displays, and smart glasses, if Nanoha is able to indicate the directions clearly enough, Tamamo shouldn't have a problem getting inside, using the advantage of others having already scouted the place rather than put in effort for her own infiltration. The defenses largely being on the fritz certainly helps. Tamamo slowly affects a swagger in her step, humming to herself, and miming twirling something around on a finger. When she arrives in the same room as 'people hurrying to clear out their desks,' she zeroes in one person purely by intuition, trusting in her own blessed luck, and turns up the force in her mentally-compelling aura of 'legitimate and unqestionable authority.' It doesn't matter whether this place is under the legal jurisdiction of anyone in particular, or that she isn't carrying so much as a truncheon. One would have to resist her weaponized charms to avoid just sliding past those details like so much dream-logic. She is The Law, and you are most assuredly Being Detained. Even if someone calls it 'an interview,' you know it's really an interrogation. The imposition of feelings, by magical brute force, skips all the time that would be spent in establishing the context and necessity of the questions themselves. When Tamamo opens her mouth to speak, it's already clear that her unfortunate listener is on trial, and has no choice but to provide a defense of some kind. Their way of life, philosophy, and social position require some justification, and no one else is there to help them. Delaying an answer just confirms guilt. "You and yours stand accused of breaking the Unifiers before they could begin. Of repeating the mistakes of the past. Of straining fragile reality, and of preparing the way for another disaster. Of studying fundamental forces that do not even exist, to control what cannot be. Of betrayal, and of using names unearned. What say you in your defense? Can you prove what is wise and what is foolish?"
Gawain	Gawain blinks owlishly as Verity tells him to get to work, with a quick introduction. Things are that bad? His first reaction is to go fix the reactors problem, but he wouldn't know how, and others are on it. He has a skill, though. He is the Buster Gorilla. "Understood! Let me start moving things! Any instructions?" He's already moving, trying to find where the cargo that needs to keep being transferred is, and trying to load it. Busywork! He keeps an eye on Tamamo (Concord) if he gets a chance - hopefully, she stays near him so he can make sure she doesn't go cause trouble!
Doctor Strange	Okay. "Good to meet you, Verity," says another Strange who appears while his present self searches the timelines. "Tell you what. We'll help you. We'll get this stuff loaded away, and, like Gawain said, we--all of us," he says, gesturing not just to himself, but circularly, to every representative of each faction gathered before Verity. "Will get you some information on places where you could set up that you might not have been aware of. Places that would be good for you to continue your research. We will also show up to keep the Tempest away, if you give us a call. In return, you keep us in the loop. We keep each other in the loop." Strange gives each Elite present a meaningful glance. "You let us know what you're working on, you keep us updated, and if any part of our little committee tells you to stop, you do--with a breach giving the offended party the option to back out, and disagreements between those parties," he says, glancing between Gawain and Tamamo, "To be handled solely by those parties, without involving you guys." "That's my offer. I'm going to fix the transformers as a freebie, becuase no one wants to be around if the remaining three blow. You can discuss it with that me, who should be finished... now." Future!Strange then portals over to the transformers. The green light surrounding the other Strange disappears, and he stands, having previously been hovering in a lotus position. "By the way," says that Strange, "I saw it." He didn't--but he can tell that she's anxious enough about something that still remains here that she might fall for it. "I also saw your manifest, and I have to say, you know better. Nothing that you have is dangerous on its own--but you have a startling number of kerosene lamps packed in next to newspapers and ragdolls, and you know it. Whether you agree to the terms future me just gave you or not, you know better--and no matter what happens today, I'd strongly suggest you start keeping some of those things apart, and consider a mobile operations base instead of saying 'come get me' to everyone. Like I said. Someone will, and as you saw, even we can't always do more than hold them off."
Penumbra	Damocles can find a quiet spot well enough, which is probably ideal for how little success he'll have trying to maintain stealth around busy disaster zones. Creating his personal flame is a task that encounters no significant difficulty. It burbles away as merrily as a warp flame can for a short while --and then begins to gradually separate like oil from water, pulled in several different directions. Towards one point, it gradually disintegrates into nothing. Towards another, the flame 'freezes', and falls to the ground in solid bits. Towards a third, it flares up and singes his fingers through his gauntlets. Still, it appears to have no trouble gathering power to sustain itself. Sending the cargo robot back isn't very difficult though. It totters off obediently and rejoins its place in line. The convoy is so stuffed that nobody notices. Reaching the mysteriously inaccessible 'transformer' isn't too difficult for a skilled capital T Thief. Again, the fact that nobody here, at all, seems to have skillsets of any variety that don't involve a workshop or laboratory, surfaces as a glaring deficiency. The trivial ease with which Robin is able to divorce random white-and-green-coated personnel of their communicators and lay them out would be insulting to the dignity of a professional thief if he'd been challenge to heist the place, starting to put into perspective just why this place had been built the way it had. Thankfully, the automatic medical servitors on station manage to locate and haul away any KOs he leaves around. The Transformer area seems to have a thematic about it. Luckily, it's one Robin is familiar with, affecting a heavily industrial-brutalist style that blinks with glowing lights that reflect from gunmetal finish, bristling with tripwires, energy fields, and sweeping sensors. It's situated a ways underground, requiring an approach down a darkened transport ramp, only faintly lit with crimson emergency flashes. When he arrives, he finds a sequence of blast doors, a firebreak area, and an airlock, easy enough to bypass, leading him past empty viewing blocks, down vacant stairwells, and through vulnerable vents and maintenance crawlspaces. The issue comes when he stumbles into the first thing that stands out. Past a very stereotypical laser hallway and the roving beams of (hopefully non-lethal) turrets behind a firing blind, he runs into a shimmering wall of force that occupies the entire corridor, which isn't projected from any kind of high tech emitter, but demarcated by four paper talismans at the corridor's corners. Using his breaker on it results in it passing intangibly through, like an illusion, finding no security of note at all. Trying to enter means slamming his face against something incredibly hard and solid. He could go the other way down the same T-shaped intersection, except it's a dead end, terminating only in an incredibly poorly planned solid slab of welded bulkhead.
Tamamo no Mae	"If you'll excuse me, Strange, I believe I am being asked to help move some items." she lifts up the hand with the Moon Cell Authority ring and gets ready to do something, until Sarracenia speaks up, and that vertiable army of walking plant people. "Ah, I see I'm not the only one with subservant minions." there's a snap and a dozen of her own 'Warriors', Moon Cell Automata, come flashing in with a ray of white light. "I believe mine are a bit more... robust." Not wanting to do the work /herself/, her Automata start to lift items, "I promise not to start trouble, for your sake Strange." an eye is given towards Gawain and she shakes her head, before turning towards Verity, "Good day. All I need to know is where these are going." there's a strangely innocent smile in her visage, "And Strange is right, should you need us, we shall come. We haven't failed yet with the two summons we've gotten yet." With that out of the way, and with directions given, she's with marching orders with her small army of Automata.
Tomoe	Tomoe takes note of seeing Shyra there and smiles at her. "Good to see you Shyra." She'll look back to the woman again and then back to Sarracenia for a moment ass the offer is made to get to work? She'll note. "I am pretty good at being a roadblock as well when need. If we get through this I do have a few questions. She'll also get to work with making ready to move things. "Just let me know if there's anything special I need to do." She'll grin at Gawain as well glad to see him here too. She'll pause at Strange's words and looks back Verity.
Robin Sundance	Interesting. The failure of the Breaker Keys to break the barrier is noted and discarded. Not important 'why'. Just 'that it doesn't work.' Once he notices the talismans, though, Thief immediately comes up with an idea. He removes one of the Breaker Keys from the keychain and ties it around the end of the Rifler. He points it up at the talismans. If the Breaker Keys pass through, and the talismans are the source of the barrier, then logically all he has to do is snatch the talismans using a Breaker Key.
Penumbra	Sarracenia and Gawain finally promising to provide immediate manual labour is well-received by Verity, who seems to be much more comfortable directing goons around than she is in a tense social situation. Strange's offer seems to be completely inoffensive to her, uncoincidentally She regathers a little of her unimpressive stature, straightening out the elaborately pinned and decorated twists of her hair, and clears her throat performatively. "Very well then! I can see that you mean as well as before. If I may:" She isn't really politely asking. "Transformer six has become completely inaccessible to our staff for reasons unknown. The systems that some of our number installed when it was first built are working just fine, but the later installations, especially those most recently implemented shortly before the attack of the other day, are showing extremely abnormal behaviour, and I don't believe we have the time to study just why." "Transformer four has encountered some sort of issue with the intrusion countermeasures installed by its architects around the same time period; namely, all of its systems are targeting anyone and anything that enters for any reason. We've already cut power, transmissions, and applied antimagic and wave disruptors to the area, to no effect. We've run out of most of our sub-personnel workforce trying to reach the core." "Transformer one is somehow operating at two hundred and forty percent efficiency. We haven't had any difficulties getting into it, but all additions and upgrades that were installed in it over the past six months can no longer be accessed or switched off. All of the drones we've sent in have immediately run out of power, and the only golems and elementals we have on-hand were dispelled just as quickly. Attempts to remotely access the controls through psionic or druidic means have resulted in unconsciousness and immediate foliage death respectively. I've forbidden any staff from entering." "All three of those Transformers are still powering the critical field equipment keeping our prized Throne samples in their sterile environment, at the tower core. We can't remove them without cutting power, and suffice to say, after the 'disagreement' with our former coworkers, we will have a very difficult time securing replacements. They're our top priority to transport out." Verity waits specifically to be alone with the other Strange to respond to him. Despite presenting as a prissy lab boss, she seems to possess that much conspiratorial acumen. "We'll have to look at revising our protocols either way. Most of our specialists have parted ways on . . . short notice, shall we say. There's only so much I can do to keep a staff purely made up of research enthusiasts in line. It's already come to my attention that our collective still isn't prepared to replace, or even equal, the proclivities of our previous departments. The shortcomings in that well-fought but ultimately futile attempt to repel the Tempest faction with the means at our disposal have been painfully evident." "Our best bet at the moment is our lifeline to the Maker faction --our comrades I believe we remain on best terms with. In fact, many of these samples were being prepared for transport to one of their craft sites in Facet Three, as a goodwill gesture. Our faction simply lacks the resources, even as premiere intellectuals, to remain both decentralized and self-sufficient."
Strawberry Princess	Strawberry weighs their travel options out loud- now that she's making tactical decisions, her voice sounds a lot more confident. "Your airship... it sounds wonderful, but these reactors might be time-sensitive. Plus, we don't know what anti-air defenses they still have that something big might set off." Switches are flipped, confirmations are pressed, and two of the fuel rods on the gunmetal-gray reactor creak and pull out of the core, accompanied by a hiss of steam. There's a slight taste of metal, a little skin-tickling tingle in the air, and then the red display on the wand's side flickers to life. 04:59 A quick flash of pink light, and Strawberry's clothes are replaced with a pastel yellow-and-pink costume halfway between 'frilly mahou' and 'superhero'. No time for elaborate transformation sequences! "Hold on tight," she tells Shyra brightly, and waves her wand to ensconce the healer in a translucent pink bubble. Translucent wings of white sparkles form behind Strawberry's back, and then- There's a rustle of air, and she and Shyra are gone, accelerated as fast as she can without risking giving her friend whiiplash. Strawberry's flying stance shifts fluidly as she rockets across the island- first a 'standing' position as she speeds up to make sure the G-forces don't force all the blood into her feet, then a head-first stance as she reaches cruising velocity, and finally back to 'standing' as she decelerates and touches down seconds later. As her feet meet the dirt in front of the 'intrusion countermeasures' power substation, she dispels the improvised-bubble-sidecar to release Shyra too. "Well," she says brightly, "we've got about two hundred and eighty seconds to fix this. What's your plan, Shyra?"
Shyra	Shyra seems to really love the concept of magical girls and has expressed her desire to emulate them in her own special way. Sadly, the Holy Healer Sphere doesn't really quite mesh, sticking to more typical healer-type actions more than anything else. She does, however, have a nice silver staff! She kind of fits in with the other two! "Hiiiii!" She calls to Nanoha and sort of hovers there as they compare wands and Magical Girl styles, her eyes almost gleaming as they swap observations on wands and flying styles and everything! She also looks to Tomoe and gives her a wave, "Hiiiii!" She calls to the warrior, and then looks back to the pair of Magical Girls. "So you want to get to the place on that map, right? I can call out my airsh-" Nope! That's too slow. Shyra gasps as Strawberry Princess fires up her nuclear-powered wand and gets them on site in short order. Once they're at the Transformer, Shyra hops onto the ground, blinking. "Woooooow... That was so /amazing/." She comments... But then there's the problem of getting inside. There's a lot of security and junk inside in the way on the Transformer, and two of the three people here use giant death beams as skeleton keys. But Shyra squints at the various defenses within the Transformer, and frowns in concentration. "All right... I think I could try..." DEV TOOLS > MAP EDITOR A hand cursor appears in the air with an 8-bit BWIP noise, highlighting a chunk of the ground. The noise repeats as the world is effectively being interacted with in a gridlike pattern, the bwips continuing as the hand continues scrolling through the area. Where the hand passes, locked doors simply vanish, turrets vanish, tripwires vanish. And the entries continue to accumulate - LOCKDOOREVTA: 1 TRIPWIREEVTA: 1 BULKHEADEVTA: 1 TURRETEVENTA: 4 GANTRYTRSFMR: 14 Pieces of the defenses vanish with little THUMPs, holes in various locations replaced with generic blocks of 8-bit-rendered granite castle wall or flooring where necessary with more THUMPs. She's literally map-editing the area to give them a clear path inside.
Penumbra	Yet again, the extreme lopsidedness in expertise in this area becomes egregiously apparent when the officially clad Tamamo begins stalking the premises. There'd been a valiant, even credible, effort at repelling Elites previously, but relying completely and entirely on engineered contrivances and proxies to handle any sort of context of abilities has such rendered such gaping flaws that it'd barely be worth remarking on. Face to face in the research commons, there is clearly no such place for a 'cognitohazardous content filter'. Tamamo has the first Seeker she finds the minute she turns on the Charm. "Th-that's not fair! That's so unfair!" stammers a young man with odd green tattoos and atrocious fashion sense. "Nobody here betrayed anybody! They turned on us first! If anyone is to blame for breaking anything, it's not us! We're just-- the Seekers are dedicated only to understanding! We want to defend the Multiverse! Preserve things as they are, so we can come to know and explain them! The people who went raiding the Frayed Zones for samples and data --they did that of their own volition, and they're not with us any more!" "We don't want to use any of this for war! Or controlling the Multiverse or anything like that! We're not like the people from before! The fact that we didn't want to make more weapons --you already saw what they did, right? This has to be their fault! Everything was fine until they threatened us! You have to believe me! What we're doing here is critical for everyone! Otherwise we're just going to have another disaster another five years from now! The others just don't get it; don't listen to them! The voyage of learning, preservation, understanding --that's the only thing that will lead to peace!"
Nanoha Takamachi	Nanoha watches with interest as Strawberry transforms. It's somewhat amusing, what with her own magic essentially being both magic and technology. And here with Strawberry being magic supported by technology. Or so Nanoha can guess from what she has observed. The specifics are obviously beyond her knowledge, not knowing that much about Strawberry's world. Nanoha also can't deny its effectiveness as Shyra is whisked away towards one of the emergency sites. Transformers, apparently, if the information being relayed from Verity is to be believed. Nanoha quickly follows with her own flight abilities, softly touching down once more outside of the transformer they've chosen. Its security looks strong. Nanoha imagines that with some effort she could blast her way in. But that brings with it a risk of overload and further damage. Thankfully, Shyra proves to have a skill to help with that. Or perhaps a cheat is a more appropriate term? Nanoha watches with some awe as the healer works on trying to alter the world itself to remove the obstacles in their path.
Damocles	Damocles takes a half-step back, shaking his hand as he's singed through his power armored gauntlet. He shakes his hand a bit, not so much to chase away pain as much as just feel the blood flowing back to his fingertips and make sure no digits got burned off. The flash certainly hurt enough, but Damocles is too focused on how confusing his results were, to really focus on it. Looking at the way the three flames died, none of that is anything like what should have happened. Or at least what he expected. Now, what does it imply for the location? Damocles quickly charts things out, and then his glowing cyan eyes narrow a touch. "Oh. Oh boy. Okay." Time to cast some spells. The big sorcerer starts moving fast, headed towards the embargoed substation that Robin went into. As he does, he searches out with his mind a little, looking for one particular spark that he saw before. There are others putting together a plan to fix the substations, and he's sure one of them will be the other notorious sorcerer, Doctor Strange. Distantly, where Dr. Strange is, he would hear Damocles's voice, slowly manifesting, cast from one mind to another: "Doctor Strange. Please forgive the interruption, but we don't have much time. I was conducting a aetheric balance study, and the results turned up something very important if you're planning to fix the problems. These stations are currently tearing the energy in the area apart. This balance is currently maintained on a thread. If we aren't extremely careful about the timing we repair things in, this entire house of cards could come crumbling down."
Sarracenia	Sarracenia nods at Verity's explanations, then turns to her plant people. "Okay, we will head into the tower and clear out any personnel and materials still in need of evacuation. I'd get those throne things, but that sounds like you'll need a specialist to keep them preserved during transport. Once that is done I can head to Transformer Four. I unfortunately lack much skill in handling computer or magical systems, but smashing defenses I can do." With that, Sarracenia heads to the tower with her collection of plant men. "Tomoe, you are welcome to accompany me or head to one of the transformers. Your strength might be more useful there." And assuming she is not stopped for some reason, Sarracenia and her piranha plants seruptitiously collect those men that Robin knocked out earlier and bring them out, along with as much useful stuff as they can collectively carry.
Strawberry Princess	Strawberry's hemispherical visor covers the upper half of her face, making half of her expression unreadable- but one can still tell from her body language and the movement of her mouth that her eyebrows have climbed very far up her forehead. "Holy shit," she mutters softly, forgetting the urgency of her time limit as she watches Shyra terraform the area's hazards out of existence. Then, more loudly: "That is- so cool, Shyra. And you didn't even blow anything up!" She does, eventually, remember herself and point her wand down the now-hazard-free main hallway. Near-invisible shapes flow off of the wand's tip like a heat mirage, dissipating into even harder-to-see jumbled shapes that disperse into the transformer building's interior. Nanoha's scanning magic finds an equivalent here, too- Strawberry's version may not be quite as fast, but it's subtle enough that even her own teammates are unlikely to notice it in action. That's the idea, of course. Some things you have to keep under your hat. "I think I've got a pretty good idea of what path to take," she says confidently, as her awareness expands and fragments into fractal branching paths that aim to map every nook and cranny. Where does the source of the problem lie, physically? She'll start heading in that direction. Even as she does, she pulls out her cell phone again and tries to access this site's security systems- are there any signs there of why the intrusion countermeasures have become corrupted?
Tomoe	Tomoe listens as Verity gives the rundown on the transformers and other notable issues. She's not much of a fixer, she's far more of a heavy lifter and defender but that sounds like it's going to be needed with the state of things. Then comes the map edit from Shyra she's seen it before but it still amazes her. She'll give Shyra a thumbs up and follow after Sarracenia now. "Yeah, I should be able to do that pretty well too." with that she'll follow right after Sarracenia again. "I think I'd be best assist you, I can also store small things in my inventory as well." Not much but she could store papers, books data drives and the like. There's a lot of firepower here that can handle the transformer and if not she can haul tail to it.
Nanoha Takamachi	Nanoha probably shouldn't be surprised when Shyra's efforts prove to be effective. I mean with all their intelligence, Nanoha imagines that trying to anticipate a game character using developer tools to manually edit the world around her is probably not high up on scenarios to consider. Plus this place is so damaged that its structure and defenses are probably compromised. But not completely gone, as the reports about this transformer's security systems suggest. Which is why when Shyra is working to clear their way and Strawberry is scouting out a path and trying to hack the system, Nanoha decides to provide protection for the both of them. In case they get taken by surprise. To that end, Nanoha raises her hand, a large, pink spell circle appearing beyond her palm to provide directed cover for all three of them as they move forward further into the transformer.
Tamamo	Tamamo scratches down something onto a pad of paper as the young man speaks, marking this as the first time anyone would have seen her writing more quickly than with a proper calligraphy brush. Mostly, it's so she can remain standing. Only her heels let her keep looking down at her victim, literally speaking. She's probably recording, but there isn't a visible device. "Now, you say 'of their own volition,' but did you not use what they returned? Are you not, even now, 'preserving' those goods? Was there truly no request that the Frayed Zones be entered?." Her persona may be strained by the archaic, courtly language, but that can't be helped. At least it properly translates. "You have been accused of 'ill-gotten' gains." It was 'ill-gotten holds,' but never mind that. "Are these the same samples to which you refer?" She taps the pad of paper. "'The current breakdown is caused by the weaponry,' is this your chosen story? So long as you do not make weapons, you can safely defend the Multiverse? Now, can you see the issue with your story? In the first place, can you claim that the very same power grid that causes you to flee would have been perfectly safe were it not for the island's need for defense?" She's already gotten the perspective she wanted, but since she's already here, she keeps grilling him.
Penumbra	Sarracenia and Tomoe arriving on scene to clean up after Robin find that the automated medical staff (as almost all 'staff' on this island is, built by someone or another to fill out the lack of dependable and expendable bodies) have done most of the work for them already. Attempts to haul the relevant material out of the area have been largely successful, as stockpiles of deactivated canisters, projectors, turrets, and other security equipment, have been stripped out and piled up for movement. When they go about loading it up, they become immediately, painfully aware of why it hasn't been moved already. A holographic camo projector fires a burst of bullets from its projector port when picked up. A turret spontaneously activates, swivels its sensor beam, and a plant soldier keels over from knockout gas. A canister explodes the minute it's handled by Tomoe, into a closed metal cell around her, no doors, no windows, no escapes, except that she can just walk right through the intangible image. Robin on the inside still has time to work. He's pretty deep in, and nobody has come as far as he has yet; the Seekers apparently lacked skilled Thieves amongst them. His keys go through the forcefield. They go through the talismans. The talismans sputter and flicker exactly like a disturbed illusion. Little electric sparks fly from them as if he'd just cracked someone's expensive camera. Yet the barrier remains cold, hard, smoothly textured, and very much solid. There's a startlingly loud sound behind it. He misses the cause, but can see the tremendous crack now shot through a corner of the inexplicably, badly designed dead end that sits obstinately six feet down the opposite hallway in the other direction.
Penumbra	Shyra has no issue making her way through the functional remnant's of the tower's defenses. Though still perfectly robust, the whole plan unravels at the seams once any particular 'genre' is left unaccounted for in its obnoxiously over-thorough and over-engineered design. Reaching Transformer 4 is almost trivial, and creates a wide path for the other Paladins to follow. Strawberry begins her second hack --and finds that absolutely none of the electronic systems here are up and running. The thematic of Transformer 4 is different enough from 6 that it certainly seems to have been made by an entirely different set of architects, but despite the more lavish trappings, better fit to a luxurious east Asian corporate building, and the rather strong prevalence of esoteric geometry, spatial loops, and illusions, there are still plenty of visible electronic systems to be tapping into. The fact that none of them are available at all is a clear abnormality. Scattering her semi-metaphorical Strawberry Seeds into the area has a more pronounced and dramatic result. The sheer bulk of them is enough to brute force them through the myriad of passive misdirections and cram them through tiny gaps in gates and around pressure plates, mines, and trap circles. It doesn't take them long to arrive at the heaps of scattered wreckage and debris from the broken servitors that entered earlier. Chic, expensive pop-up turrets sweep the halls from tastefully disguised floor hatches, roving sensor beams obviously showing that they're still active and processing, vigilantly watching the heaps of melted scrap across from them. Ambulatory jade statues of eight foot tall soldiers strut up and down the corridors, crunching bullet-riddled rubble underfoot, peering around corners and decorative edifices with glowing eyes. Roving hover drones buzz from room to room, pulsing each area with exotic energy pings and making all kinds of ominous, sawing drones and beeps. Glowing energy weapons mounted to each size train on the various crushed and bisected forms they run menacingly whining laps around. Here and there, she can just barely catch glimpses of something trailing from the moving units, like translucent museum wire, or the filaments of jellyfish-like deep sea colony creature. Several of Strawberry's scouting figments are noticed, but not even close to all. Which of them are detected seems to occur without rhyme or reason, though they all result in immediate termination. A blast of bullets incinerates one ephemeral copy in mid-flight. A colossal jade sword perforates another in thirty places and dissipates it into mist. The fiery flash of twin plasma beams splits another in half from head to toe. It doesn't really make any sense by any convention but it happens. It isn't consistent enough to prevent Strawberry from continuing to look with the bulk majority of her copies. However, it does draw attention. It doesn't actually matter that the three haven't been spotted; all of the defenses are naturally designed to coagulate at the entry and block outsiders from coming in. Nanoha's shield is put to the test less than a minute later, as flying drones round the corner and abruptly interrupt the trio with vicious weapon salvos. Turrets pop up out of revolving segments in the walls nearby, having shown no sign of being there previously, and especially not active, still electronically unreceptive, yet somehow powered and capable of deluging them in withering fire.
Robin Sundance	What a frustrating defense mechanism they've designed. Thief puts his hand to the side of his head. He'd probably say something aloud like 'oh la la' or 'zut alors' or some other enormously French statement to express his frustration were he not deep in the middle of the infiltration. Idly, he twirls the Rifler around his finger like a gunslinger. The crack on the other side came from something, somewhere. Did it come from him shooting the wall? Is it a reflection on the other side? He flicks the Rifler once more and fires it several times down the hallway. Light blasts of energy streak down to hit the area around the crack as he reverses the gun and fires the hook down through the barrier again.
Doctor Strange	Six is inaccessible. Four thinks everybody is an intruder. One is operating at over twice its normal efficiency. "Okay. Damocles--not sure if you've met him, he's not one of mine--just told me that if we do this incorrectly, there's going to be a potentially drastic result. So here's what we're going to do. I'm gonna satisfy causality real quick--" He vanishes, going back into the timestream to have the conversation with her a few minutes prior and then to teleport over to the nearest Transformer. And then he appears, via Sling Ring, right back there. "And now that I have, you and I are gonna work together. We're only gonna get one shot to do this right, and it's your tech, not mine." He makes the sign of the Eye, bathing himself in green light. "First, I'm gonna see what happens if we turn them all off at the same time. If that doesn't work, then you're gonna start giving me suggestions for an order to do it in, and I'll see what happens. We keep doing it until we find one that works, and then I tell the people who are already there when to do it. And that starts now." One Strange begins peering into alternate futures. Can they just solve this by turning them all off at the same time, or do they need to work in a specific order to avoid catastrophe? If the latter, the Strange not looking through the Eye will solicit Verity for order. Starting with... "How about... forgive me if this is.... completely and totally wrong, again... your stuff, not mine. Six, Four, One?" He frowns archly, studying her for a reaction. "Six is inoperable so it's not doing anything anyway. Four is working at normal efficiency, one is supercharged so I'm guessing it can handle what four will send its way. What do you think?" If she likes that idea, it'll be the first combination the other Strange tries, assuming 'all at once' isn't valid.
Penumbra	Strange 'cheating' with his powerset is visibly welcomed by Verity. During a break in the discussion caused by his time looping, she even says "Says, when we're through with this, would you be interested in interviewing for a Logician position with-- ahem. Later. Of course." Right back to business. The Doctor's visions see no particularly disastrous consequences of disabling all stations simultaneously, nor any issues with any combination of orders, save specifically taking Transformer 1 offline well before the others, which in those timelines, causes some sort of vague, critical disaster within the core pylon of the tower itself. "Certainly. I can guide you through the exact procedures for a safe full shutdown and cycle." Verity puffs. There is a very strong possibility they may not have that luxury, and might just have to apologize later, at the rate things are going.
Tomoe	Tomoe ends up arriving after Sarracenia, she'll take a moment to look around as she'll aid Sarra's troops in loading things up and then she finds out why it hasn't been moved already. They start firing out as she handles a canister it explodes, into a cell around her. "What the hell...?" She will take a moment to look around and then start to test the wall with the tip of her sword. It takes a moment and she'll push through it. "What the heck is this? Great this stuff is live and unstable, we might have to ditch the weapons unless you have an idea of how to .... humm I wonder could we freeze them. Humm maybe we should power them down..." Tomoe's going to be more careful with removing things expecting other things to explode. She's eyeing the things trying to figure out which would be the safest things to load up.
Sarracenia	Tomoe may be being careful, but Sarra has never been the type to practice restraint. The supposedly deactivated defense equipment starts activating, and Sarracenia yelps as a holographic bullet hits her. Did it actually hurt her? She isn't sure! It doesn't matter! She swings her hammer and crushes the offending projector and is soon playing whack-a-mole with those devices that are still active! As one plant falls, the others start spitting fire balls to subdue any devices that are still active! By the time it is all over the amount of useable salvage may have just been drastically reduced, and Sarra's dress may be in tatters. And her hair may be quite frazzled now. But, she isn't one to break her word! So, she and her plants dutifully carry whatever is left out to the docks. "Hmph. Deactivated. As if. Are you alright Tomoe?" the princess says grumpily as they head back. "And the people were already taken care of, too. What a waste of my time and the hour of styling my hair this morning." Whether there are more things to bring out or not, Sarra heads to Transformer 4.
Doctor Strange	"Yeah, that probably won't happen from what I'm seeing. ...the safe shutdown procedures, not the Logician. We'll Talk about that later," says the Strange peering through time. Both disappear. One reappears. "One is your problem," he says. "That has to be shut down last... or, at least, 'not significantly before the others.' But 'last' is easier to explain. So, once second." "Listen up," Strange says, tapping an ear to his finger. "Turn off Transformer One last. That's where the problem is. If you don't turn it off last, that's the bad news Damocles saw with his experiment. Okay? One last."
Damocles	Given everything he's seen, Damocles assumes that this substation is the one that's consuming energy at a distressing rate. That's a bit problematic, because if he tried teleporting through here, there's a good chance only part of him would make it to the other side. However, it's better than the others, which have even more uncontrollable effects. Still, this leaves Damocles only the power of his own two feet. Fortunately, those two feet are quite impressive on their own. He still has a dramatically increased physical profile, and he puts it to work. The path has already been opened by Robin, so all Damocles needs to do is follow in Robin's shadow, rushing forward with the kind of surprising speed an Astartes is known for. His goal is to catch up to Robin as fast as possible, and he doesn't bother to interact with anything he doesn't have to, short of moving any more unconscious people to where they can be more easily recovered. He did make a promise. He doesn't wait until he gets to Robin to start coordinating, though, once again reaching out with magic to communicate. "Robin? I have a plan, but I don't think our friends in the Paladins would approve. Last time I was here, I saw the 'core' of this place. There are two artifacts there that were serving as the center of all the power being channeled here. We might have a chance to 'relocate' them when these substations are brought down."
Penumbra	Tamamo bullying a poor unprepared Seeker off in the commons proceeds without interruption. This is clearly not someone who is used to the idea of being interrogated by a 'cop'. It's quite possible he's only ever heard stories of them in general. He looks somewhat ill-suited to his coat. "What does what we used it for have to do with anything?" he replies, both nervously and shiftily. "They were committed to the cause; it's not like they're somehow any more right than we are! H-how dare they even say that! They were perfectly fine with scraping the Crater and the Maw for anything they could find! They even kept most of it! We paid them fair and square! And what they turned over just went into weapons that they then used against us! I-Ill-gotten-- I swear I'm going to-- ghhh!" He seems to become more agitated as he goes on, gesturing animatedly, and eventually pounding on the half-cleared desk adjacent to him. "The Transformers worked fine all year! We improved them several times, even! Obviously it's not a coincidence that things would go wrong right after we were attacked! This has to be their doing! What else could it be?! Just because we developed the Throne prototypes doesn't mean we know everything about what they can do! Especially now that they're in the hands of veterans who already had their own ways before! The rest of the prototyped equipment is going towards peaceful purposes! We all understand the Multiverse is a dangerous place --nobody is ignorant of what it takes to go out there and bring enlightenment to people in need --so it's only natural that we'd rely on those kinds of experts, just like they'd rely on the same experts for sourcing material, or building infrastructure, or gathering information! That was why it worked! In the end, those bastards just decided that the only thing they needed to fix the Multiverse was a strong enough sword so they could stab all its problems to death, and this was the result!"
Robin Sundance	Robin tilts his head sideways. "Well, monsieur." He taps the side of his head. "The other day, Les Paladins attempted to arrest me for being on school grounds as a teacher. Today, I was challenged more or less directly not to take anything from this place by Les Paladins." "Et I have this awful problem, monsieur, because un voleur, you see, does not get along with la gendarmerie by nature, so when la gendarmerie says 'do not', I am compelled to do, non?" "Practically daring me." "So open me a door and I will make off with whatever is in there, non?"
Penumbra	In Transformer 6, Robin obtains one more piece of what precisely has gone horribly wrong. Blasting away the out-of-place dead end causes scorched chunks of metal to flake away, exposing crumbling earth behind it. He is underground, but that means that six feet of corridor just terminates into the natural ground upside. At the same time, the corresponding corner of the magical wall behind him sputters like a faulty television set, briefly winking in and out of existence, causing ripples of static distortion to shimmer through the ostensibly arcane array. Firing the hook works fine. It passes through once again, now with a 'malfunctioning' flicker, however it remains stubbornly solid in his way. Attempting to climb up through the obviously compromised corner, being the extremely obvious second thing to try, finds that his fingers grip a jagged, crumbling section in the forcefield that he can't actually see, though he can't do much more than jam a fist into a shallow, invisible hole. If he cares to check his handiwork again, burnt scraps of paper litter the floor around the dead end he'd shot. Sarracenia reacts to the startle rather predictably. Smashing the holographic camo projector causes it to explode into a fireball of snapping and crackling ammo cookoff, flinging bits of hot brass and burning gunpowder everywhere. Crushing the turrets causes them to rupture in half and spew foggy pinkish gas that will likely incapacitate another number of her underlings. Incidental shockwaves burst more canisters, crunching them into so many glassy fragments, broken circuits inside sparking.
Strawberry Princess	Strawberry's response to the drones is immediate, even before they round the corner and open fire. She yells something to the effect of "incoming at three!" to her teammates, twists to minimize her profile in the three-dimensional 'The Enemy's Gate Is Down' way that magical flight provides, and... And pulls out an honest-to-god handgun, holding it crossed over her wand in CQC style. Not glowy, not sparkly, not anything. It's just a real and actual pistol. The drone closest to her promptly gets as many bullets in it as it takes to drop. Any party member who's being focused down enough for Nanoha's defensive magic to start fraying gets the benefit of one of Strawberry's protective bubbles; emerging turrets and 'glass cannon' type enemies are engulfed in a force-field too, but this time to blunt whatever offensive they had planned. Whenever she needs to reload, she tucks her wings and rolls back behind the nearest corner or solid obstacle, then darts back out a second later- always from a different angle, so enemies aiming at her last visible location can't nail her. When it's more advantageous, she uses her flight to stick to the ceiling, using door-frames like low cover in her relentless advance. Nanoha had said earlier that she was fire support; Shyra's ostensible role is obvious. So Strawberry assumes the role of 'point' with the effortless elegance of someone exhaustively experienced with their own powerset, blunting the enemy's offensive before it can be brought to bear. All the while, her scouting eidolons that haven't been found out yet search deeper- but now they have a clue. Where those gossamer 'threads' connecting to the roaming enemies can be spotted, she tries to trace them back, hoping to find a common source for their mysterious reanimation. With any luck, it's just like puppets.
Doctor Strange	"Okay. Now that we've got... broadly... a path to fixing this transformer thing. Tamamo, if you wouldn't mind heading to Transformer One. Take some time to figure out a way to get it shut off. If you have to, coordinate with Verity--" He pauses, reaching through a hole in time and space to provide Verity with a radio tuned into the local broadband, assuming for some reason she doesn't have one. "And she can walk you through how to shut it down safely, assuming that's even possible at this point. Sorry in advance, Verity. Here's the deal with that one," says the Sorcerer sternly. "All the changes they've put into it since six months ago aren't turning off. They've pulled the plug, even hit it with... ugh. Antimagic. And that didn't work. You might just have to brute force it. Just make sure you don't actually turn it off until Damocles and my people are done with Four and Six." He pauses. "One last thing. Every remote kind of... worker bee... thing they've sent in has had its batteries sucked dry. So if you're the 'powerful artifacts' kind of Caster, keep that in mind. Verity, if you can give me a schematic of the place, I'm gonna scout it out so I can give Tamamo some more ideas of what to expect." With Verity's pinpointing the location of Transformer One, Strange peers into the place where it's housed--does the anomaly there drain and futz with his scry-mark?
Shyra	The initial defenses aren't that much of a problem as she simply world-edits them a path inside. However, that doesn't mean she's disabled the encounter tables. And boy are they some tables. Shyra yelps as the sudden surge of resistance begins, the JRPG Healer not quite perceptive enough to understand the swirling, confusing layers used to obfuscate the nature of the defenses and how they're being powered and directed. What she does understand, however, is how to deal with things attacking them. While Strawberry takes point, Shyra is already waving her silver staff, Azkrepys, forming shields of light to defend Strawberry, and throwing healing spells to help keep her allies topped up. The healer herself has a stunning array of defensive statuses that makes 'focus the healer' not precisely an optimal choice, either. "I've got your backs!" She calls, trusting in her allies to figure out what's going on and solve the problem.
Tamamo no Mae	Tamamo finally breaks from her thing and turns towards Strange. "Transformer one, huh?" she gives a bit of a nod, dismissing her summons. "So, number one has decided to do its own thing and it doesn't respond to anything else huh?" Tamamo looks a bit in thought, at least until he mentioned antimagic.. "I have one, so I'll make sure not to summon it." beat "I may have to use my Lancer self~." she smirks "Don't touch until Four and Six are fixed." there's a look towards her ring... She isn't taking that off for anyone. Except maybe Seifer... "Okay, I'll head off." and with that, she starts going. "Time to see what is there..." she smiles, "Say, I may not have been paying attention but why are they going insane?"
Tamamo	Tamamo continues taking notes, even as her 'interviewee' becomes agitated. This could probably go on for awhile, even limited as she is to parroting terms she'd heard the once and asking open questions. She reflects, without any outward sign, on the apparent truth that humans do like to talk, and especially so when under attack. "Thank you, your answers have been very helpful." She takes a moment (to remember the phrase) before finishing, "You are free to go." She smiles, and the statement becomes true. He is now freed from the wholly imaginary sense of being locked in a small room with an officer of the law. She's still there, and still wearing shades of blue, and still concerningly authoritative, but no longer 'someone with whom he is required to interact.' This is doubly clear when she turns on her heel, and leaves by the same route. Along the way, she speaks into her radio.
Penumbra	Between three 'actual combat Elites', the automatic defenses in Transformer 4 aren't getting anywhere fast. It's a valiant effort, but as the Seekers have recently found out, not as wildly effective as it seems like it should be on paper. Between Nanoha's barrier and Shyra's slew of support spells, they aren't able to put a meaningful dent in the three despite the combined effort. Strawberry's return fire finds mostly mixed success; the hover drones are fragile enough to shoot down with accurate shots placed into their float pods, but the huge jade warriors closing in are a little more than her handgun can quickly deal with. It's a run of attrition for a while, whilst her phantasms continue scout deeper into the area, until they finally arrive at what seems to be the core area. All static security systems seem to have reverted to failsafe status here, left open and inactive without any connection to the central security system, allowing even a person to hypothetically waltz right in to the circular room beyond, where a ring-shaped observation and control deck overlooks a decoratively flooded lower level, from which rises a two storey tree. Pale, papery bark barely covers even half of its exterior, creating a webwork of cracks through which one can peer into its innards like an abyssal fish. Inside its core, Strawberry can see the outline of a throbbing red heart, the size of her head, pumping loudly enough to echo in the room. Its branches don't bud or bloom, but simply divide into smaller and smaller twigs, irregular fractals breaking down to seemingly infinitely fine lines that fade away into thin air. Doesn't much look like a power transformer, but . . .
Tomoe	Tomoe will keep working with Sarra but when she starts smashing up things. "Princess wai..." It's just too late to stop this from happening. Tomoe curses and gets part to why it's a good thing she stuck with Sarracenia. Her friend would end up in a lot more trouble without her around. "It's a chain reaction! We need to recover this not destroy it!" It might just be a wash on those at this point, she will however try to stop Sarra from smashing anything else. "Let's see if we can find something to shut em off!" She will attempt to find to see if there's anything that could either shut the thing off or something that could stablize them.
Damocles	Damocles almost skids to a stop when he catches up with Robin, his armored boots digging into the floor to stop his furious charge down the decaying hallways. He's actually glad to see someone else who is alive and functional. This place has been spooky. He takes a look around at the situation, and whistles a little. "This place has been put through all kinds of weirdness, huh?" He notes conversationally. His attention is immediately drawn to the field blocking the path. "Looks like some kind of shifting displacement. There might be a minor shift in the spatial relations between..." He cuts himself off as he looks down to Robin. Right right. "Okay, so here's what we're looking at." Damocles very quickly runs down the list of what he saw and how to approach the core. He outlines the security systems he noted, and focuses on the glowing marble and burning branch on the central pillar. He doesn't bother to explain their significance, since it doesn't matter right now, but does touch on the state they are likely to be in. "Keep an ear to the radio," he advises. "If the substations are still active, the results of messing with them could be...unpredictable. Station 1 is going to go down last. You should have a window to remove them right as it does. With the situation like it is, the path might be a little risky, too, but it should be pretty empty, at least." Speaking of, he turns his attention back to the force field. It seems like energy is being shifted around. Maybe he can use that. "Okay, now stand back a bit. I'm going to try magic science." His staff is raised, and slowly, very slowly, he starts channeling energy into the field. Normally, this would reinforce it, make it even stronger. However, if his theory is right, and he channels just the right amount of energy, it might act as a magnet for whatever this weird draining and displacing force is, and cause it to be removed from their path for a time. Or, if nothing else, it might at least give him some insight about how it works.
Penumbra	Verity shares the floor plans with Strange, begrudgingly but without hesitation. He'll notice they don't seem entirely complete, which she assures him is due to the main architectural team for Transformer 1 bogarting the full details over some petty division within the group --but it should suffice. His scry mark appears for barely long enough to spy a distinctly arboreal shape in the middle of a blinding blaze of light, radiating fractal patterns of incandescent glare on everything in sight, before the mystic energy used to create his mark is expended. The mark doesn't disappear though. It's expended rapidly, many many times per second, straight from his personal magic stores. It feels like the energy is being pulled right out of him, through the scrying window, until he closes it, limited only by the bandwidth of a relatively small and efficient spell. Special Police Tamamo's captive subject bails as soon as she's done with him, scooping up everything he can from the desk into his arms and running before he can be summoned to court again. For Caster Tamamo, the route to Transformer 1 isn't complicated or difficult to follow, and with Verity's cooperation and directions, isn't difficult to get to. All the personnel in the area have given up and been evacuated already, leaving her in front of an unsecured entrance into an elaborately hewn marble cathedral slash indoor garden and atrium, all signs of whatever defenses it once had having vanished, and all leafy greenery that once completed its image having crumbled to dust, under the hellishly intense light that blazes from the pool at its center, splitting every shadow into six. The difficulty is intuitive and obvious. Getting close to the tree-shaped conflagration at its center begins draining one's metaphorical MP bar at an exponentially massive rate, and when that bottoms out, it starts pulling from the metaphorically matching HP bar instead. The Transformer is certainly 'working' at an impossible efficiency, because it's doing so by transforming and converting power it isn't supposed to have access to: namely every single thing that comes close.
Robin Sundance	Thief gives Damocles a two-fingered salute as Damocles runs down the map of the base, the security system, the direction, the pillar. "Merci beaucyou~," he says cheerfully, "Mais, do not worry. I will be in and out quickly. Preferably they will not notice me, mais, really, if they do, it is their own fault for daring me, oui?" There's the sense that he's winking, but, obviously, his armor has a mask. Thief takes off at a run down the route Damocles has given him. Straight for the core that Damocles found last time, straight for the two objects, Damocles has told him to grab, straight past the defenses with all the efficiency and skill expected of a man who made his life's mission stealing from very dangerous monster organizations with very good security.
Nanoha Takamachi	It was going too easy. Of course that was going to change. Thankfully Nanoha already had a barrier up in preparation of that inevitability. Unfortunately, the barrier's integrity is not infinite. And as the deluge of fire continues to rain down on it, it begins to fracture. Thankfully again, just as Nanoha's barrier breaks and shatters into motes of pink light, Shyra's similiarly magical defense pops up to take over! Nanoha gives the healer a quick smile, "Thanks!" Now with Shyra supporting their defense and Strawberry taking point, Nanoha reverts to her usual team position of fire support. While Strawberry draws a lot of their fire, protected by Shyra, Nanoha switches to more precision barrages. Pink orbs forming in the air around her and beginning to fire of equally pink beams at more and more of the defenses as they are distracted. It's a bit of a brute force slog, but it seems to be working and they're making progress! Until they finally reach the core of the transformer and find not some kind of electrical device, but a tree. Not wholly unusual to Nanoha, who's used to unusual artifacts being used to 'power' something. Though it does present a problem... How exactly does one shut down a tree? Nanoha turns to look at Shyra and Strawberry, the question clearly written on her face.
Doctor Strange	Strange cuts out the scry mark. Okay. That's awful. He touches a finger to his ear. "Okay. Casko--you're gonna be on a time limit from the minute you're in there. Something in there is sucking all the... mana, prana, whatever you want to call it, not just out of spells and servitors but out of people. I'm gonna press the urgency of that on the other teams real quick." He glances towards Verity. "Alright. Verity, my people are on four. One of them's requested the safe shutdown procedures. Lay 'em on me. We gotta get this done quick." He listens to her explanation, and relays it with perfect clarity to Nanoha. After that, there's one more thing that's on his mind. "So." He crosses his arms, nodding to the tower. "When I spoke to you guys the other day, you said that you know who the Paladins are. I'm guessing you guys also know about the Watch and the Concord. I appreciate you giving me the floor plan. Sincerely. Thank you. While we've got a precious second, let me say--" "I can't commit to a Logician position. Not me personally. Maybe another Paladin, or maybe even a Master from my order, if one's available. Sensechal and Sorcerer Supreme, that's... a lot. What I can do, and what I will do, gladly, is advise, when and where I can. I've got one /really/ good piece I can give you, once we've got this done."
Tamamo no Mae	With the route to Transformer 1 obtained and... easy to get to, the Caster Tamamo keeps a distance away. She moves closer towards it and visibly retracts as she feels that strange force draining at her, backing away quickly. "Hmmm, they weren't kidding... It's eating every bit of magic..." and with the light from the pool in the center, "And life..." she shakes her head a bit and snaps a finger. Her mirror appears adn floats around her as she stares. Kneeling down, she pulls out some talismans and sticks them to the ground, concentrating, trying to study the magic in the area, drawing what she can around her. Her mind races, pulling up magical formulas in her head, trying to parse the magic of this area, what it truely is.. what it might be. She reaches to her ring and starts to say something, "Strange, I'm going to go silent. I'm going to just study for a moment. I'll go on the offensive as soon as you say so." Once that's taken care of, she goes back to studying this.
Sarracenia	The many knocked out Piranha Plants are carried back to the ship by those who are still able-bodied. Hopefully they will be okay. Sarracenia was headed toward transformer 4, but that one sounds like it is under control. Transformer 1 sounds pretty nasty, but also seems to be under control with Tamamo and Strange working on it. So, she heads for 6. She isn't sure if she'll be of any help to Damocles, but it seems like the only option left. "Sorry Tomoe! This hasn't been the most enjoyable outing, has it?" she says with a bit of a dry laugh as she runs to join up with Damocles.
Penumbra	Damocles is confronted by one, additionally jarring fact: attempting to channel magic into the arcane field doesn't do anything. That is to say, nothing magical seems to be there to receive his magic power at all. The dead end at the opposite side of the hall makes sparking sounds. The solid metal wall over equally solid dirt. Robin's blitz through the rest of the largely-evacuated tower is met with no credible resistance. Not with his skillset. Not in this chaos. Not with his mission. The core section of the tower is basically impossible to miss, but Damocles especially had been right in front of where Robin aims to go, and he soon arrives at the same, vacant observation hub. It wouldn't be difficult for him to breach the access window meant to replace sensor equipment and plug in manipulator arms, though the wisdom of doing so while a glowing cobalt blue beam is still actively flickering through most of the chamber seems questionable. Levitating inside is the same chunk of shattered, snow white marble, and the interconnected mesh of ebony wooden growth, still smouldering with veins of glowing embers. It's grown a little since last time, bridging more floating stone shards. He can pretty much stuff it in a bag the second the Transformers are down.
Damocles	Damocles peers at the field suspiciously for a moment when his spell seems completely unable to take hold at all. That wasn't what he was expecting. He reaches out to knock against it with his staff, before shaking his head, his cyan eyes narrowing a bit. Well this just isn't fair. It's like two completely different rooms in different areas. Wait, that makes a degree of sense. Positions aren't lining up because things aren't lining up here. He looks over to the sparking wall again. IF that's what is happening here, then...well how the hell do you navitage that? He takes a deep breath. Okay. Well, what he's seeing isn't working, so let's try something different. He walks up to the sparking wall. It looks solid enough, but let's look a little deeper. He closes his eyes, raises his staff again, and channels a burst of static lighting. Not a powerful one, in fact just enough to spark, but in a wave that shoots forward, looking to hit the entire wall at once. With his eyes closed, he can't see the results with them, but he still watches, 'feeling' out the effect with his arcane senses. At the forcefield, there was nothing there his magic could touch. Let's see what his magic 'touches' here, and if it might reveal a hidden path.
Penumbra	The Caster trying to study Transformer 1 finds that the situation is excruciatingly clear cut. The magical structure of what originally made this station work is now completely irrelevant. The delicate framework of arcane rules and sympathies is in ruins. The core is running rogue, independent of the limitations of its ley lines and bridging boundaries of physics and genre. She won't be able to get rid of a giant energy-devouring singularity by applying magic to it. It's doubtful she'd be able to walk up to the control panel to disable it without her spiritual existence being completely absorbed. The equipment is still there, styled into the architecture, but it rather seems a luxury nobody has at the moment.
Tomoe	Tomoe would smile at Sarra as she falls in to follow her. "I have had to deal with worse a lot worse!" With that she'll haul tail to get to the next location.
Strawberry Princess	Even though her handgun proves largely ineffective against the bulkier enemies, Strawberry shows a remarkable self-restraint in dealing with them- when necessary, they're just detained in her force-fields long enough for Nanoha to line up a devastating shot of her own. As she adjusts to Shyra's bolstering magic, too, she becomes bolder and bolder in taking advantage of openings and drawing enemies' attention- she takes a few hits in the process, but with two allies' defensive wards layered on top of her own, it's nothing she can't handle. Finally, they reach the heart. Strawberry doesn't hesitate- she's been staring at this damnable thing through her eidolons' eyes for the last minute, already thinking about how to shut it down. Despite the conversation on the radio, she's already disengaging the safeties on her wand. Its control rods rattle and blossom outwards, removing a third of the restraints on its glowing plutonium heart- then half, then two-thirds... 03:13 "Firing on medium! Three," she says, stepping forward. She shuts one eye, braces herself, and sights it up along her staff's winged iron sights. The reactor shrieks like a horrifying animal, building exponentially in volume and pitch until it finally leaves the range of human hearing. A sunburn-prickling and a taste of metal fill the air. "Two!" The darkened crystal at the tip of Strawberry's wand gutters to life like a dying candle in reverse, the exhausted magic of her soul being briefly sparked back to life by the infusion of terawatt quantities of fissioning plutonium. It glows brighter, and brighter, and brighter, until it erases every shadow in the room and replaces everything with a searing white. "O-" _________ _________ ______ ______ ___________ _____ ________ _ __________ ________ ____ _____ _______ _______ _____________ ________ _______ ______ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯ There is a noise like thunder that's felt more than heard, a reverberating wall of air that resonates inside one's lungs. The pink-white beam fires, consuming all the energy of a nuclear reactor on the verge of meltdown. It is a lance of light so bright as to burn itself into one's retinas even through closed eyelids. Everything that can burn, burns. Everything that can melt, melts. Everything that can evaporate, evaporates. Everything else finds new and exciting states of matter to become as it eats the brunt of a nuke-powered magical laser. Several hundred feet of solid concrete, dirt, and rock behind the transformer's heart are turned into fine gray dust or lava. With any luck, the heart fares no better. Elsewhere on the island, the ground vibrates slightly. An overfilled coffee mug spills over with the ripples. A book or two falls off of a bookshelf. A few birds take flight out of the jungle.
Nanoha Takamachi	A plan is hatched. Nanoha is more partial to the shutdown procedure, having learned long ago that destroying magical artifacts is generally not the wisest choice. Would it be possible for one of her sealing spells to work on this? It's not technically a Lost Logia. Maybe with some modifications to the spell, it might work. But she doesn't have that kind of time! So she tries to convince Strawberry to wait for the instructions. And should they not be feasible... Well, Nanoha begins preparing for the alternative. She plants her feet into the ground, lowering her stance as she levels the tip of her staff towards the tree. A large spell circle appears beneath her, slowly spinning as she calls out, "Blaster two!" Four remote bits shaped like the head of her staff materialize, taking up positions in the air around Nanoha, pointing in the same direction. A large orb of pink quickly forms beyond the staff's tip, growing in size rapidly to the sound of charging energy. Slots in the staff's shaft slide open, wings of pink light unfurling from within. Nanoha calls out, "Divine..." The slide covering the staff's neck rocks back three times. KA-CHUNK. KA-CHUNK. KA-CHUNK. The orb's size grows significantly with each infusion of concentrated mana. Finally, Nanoha holds until Starwberry's count ends. They're out of time. They have to do this. Nanoha closes her eyes and finishes, "BUSTER!" The orb bursts, a torrent pink light rushing forth towards the tree, air blasting outwards from the blast of power. The huge beam rushes towards the tree to strike at the same time as Strawberry's. The result isn't all that different to hers either. The vast amount of magical energy disintegrating anything who isn't people in its path, blasting into the tree but not stopping there as it continues onwards, punching a hole through the surrounding infrastructure, out into open air where it continues far into the sky. A beacon of pink.
Tamamo no Mae	The normal rules don't matter. Framework is trashed and in ruins. Core's running on its own. This is something she's going to have to do without care in her own right. She takes a moment, snaps her fingers to swap into Lancer. The mirror goes away and her Lance, the beach umbrella, appears. "If I try to go in, I'm going to be unsummoned. And Seifer will not like that." She steps back a good foot away, placing a few talismans poured with as much fire magic in it she can get away with without detonating, try to let it eat away at that. "Tamamo, you have one chance..." she states, taking a breath.. a few more feet back. And she starts running towards the edge, picking up as much speed as she can, before /lobbing/ her talisman-laden lance to try and distract the magical energies to focus on the imbued talismans, letting it spin around towards the core like an angry top, the brim trying to cut into the core if it can. "If this doesn't work..."
Penumbra	Damocles approaching the bizarre dead end wall at the opposite side of the T intersection, senses no magical energy of any kind coming from it whatsoever. The dirt and broken metal looks very real, and yet so do the scraps of burnt paper from its destroyed corner. However, the precise opposite of the way Robin's Rifler had phased through the magical ward, his lightning blast is completely absorbed by the solid lump of mundane metal and earth. The ward that is now behind him glows brightly, crackling with Chaos electricity, until it sputters again with that broken television display behaviour. Reaching out to feel it, the opposite of Robin's inability to, himself, pass the intangible ward, greets him as well; his fingers pass right through the solid matter, and his hand sticks through the other side. A fizzling, hand-sized patch of chromatic abberration is visible in the flickering 'ward' across the hall. Absolutely nothing stops him from stepping right through it, and tracking down the third and final active core beyond.
Sarracenia	Sarracenia seems a bit relieved as Tomoe says that. "Good. I would hate to lose a lady-in-waiting because of a boring day!" she says. Making her way toward Damocles's position quickly, she arrives just in time to see him...reaching through a wall? "Damocles? I thought this area was impassable?" she asks, approaching cautiously.
Damocles	Always one to jump through weird, aberrant portals, Damocles gets while the getting is good, and moves through the doorway, hastily making his way along. He keeps an eye out for any more shifting tricks, but his focus is very much on hurrying to position, as he knows thanks to the radio that he's the one the rest are waiting on. "Alright, I'm nearing position. Send me the deactivation sequence, and I'll begin right now." Assuming nothing stops him, as soon as he's in position and has the procedure for shutting down this place, he goes right to work and powers down Substation 6.
Penumbra	The heavier defenses still blocking the way through Transformer 4 are more easily dealt with Nanoha's brand of firepower when the two switch off, allowing Strawberry Princess to dedicate herself to scouting a route to the 'core' of the whole apparatus in relative peace, under Shyra's faithful aegis of the RPG healer; the kind that can truly only exist in singleplayer games. The shutdown procedure that Verity pointedly, yet powerlessly, insists upon Strange, is exactly what one would expect from a cabal of crossover-obsessed academics and magic crafters: unintuitive, poorly documented, and in egregious need of streamlining. Furthermore, the procedure is different for each station, and the designers of each didn't share their notes. They, in fact, seem intentionally extra obtuse for anyone who doesn't meet the genre conventions of the clique of system-abusing intellectuals that built each one. Blowing it up is certainly infinitely more expedient. Especially on an uncertain time limit. It is also, as it turns out, wildly effectual. The unnerving, esoteric tree-system cannot be intensely insulated from its surroundings while still providing eighty different kinds of specifically demanded power. A certain amount of engineering hubris also seems to have assumed that any potential source of disastrous disruption would come from safely outside, where thirty odd countermeasures are smugly in place. At close range, from indoors, it's completely vapourized. Most of the station is, in fact, in a neatly straight line, twenty feet of interior melted to the ground in a saggy half-oval shape to either side of the path. Finally, all remaining systems in the area go completely dark. The remaining drones clatter to the ground, the jade warriors come to a halt, and the static defenses sputter out. Even the lights go off. The three of them can still see, however, courtesy of the sunlight coming in through the two hundred meter hole in the back wall, boring through the cliffs and out to a view of the sea.
Tomoe	Tomoe says "It would take more than a single boring day to lose me it would take a lot at this point." She's wary as ever of Damocles but she keeps with Sarra knowing they need to get this done and she'll pause for a moment. "Why am I not shocked Damoocles that you of all people found a way in... So what's the plan."
Penumbra	Things on the Caster's end go poorly, worse, much worse, and then serendipitously figure themselves out. The moment she enchants the fire curse talismans, her mana begins pouring out of her at the same uncontrolled rate that had befallen Strange not long ago. Without the ability to simply turn them off, the drain continues until she can detonate the talismans, and in fact multiplies according to the number of them, like open ports to her mana supply. Hurling the umbrella into the room causes the enchantment in the paper to dissipate immediately, hungrily devoured by the all-consuming light, rendered into worthless scraps of parchment. Then an otherwise ordinary umbrella, simply hurled with superhuman Servant strength, slams into the fragile, translucent tree growth at full tilt, and the tangible umbrella pole pieces straight through its papery bark and soft flesh, snapping the trunk in half along the line of impact. The light instantly rises to a blinding crescendo, then dissipates as a sharp wave of scalding heat and magical radiation. The room is plunged into blackness.
Penumbra	Damocles, for a change, has it boring. After finally circumventing the serious problem that warrants further study earlier in, he's joined by Sarracenia and Tomoe for just long enough that they can assist him through the obnoxiously long, complicated, and laborious-on-purpose shutdown procedure, until Transformer 6 uneventfully goes dark along with the others. The core containment field goes down.
Robin Sundance	The instant the three beams are down, Thief just scoops up the two items from the core of the tower and slips them into his coat. There is a moment where, as he starts juking back through the tower, flash-stepping in and out through the battlefield, he comes to a decision. The smart thing - the smart thing - would be to be silent. He could just...walk out. Just...leave. Pick the stuff up and go. He could get away and no one would be the wiser. ...and on the other hand... Would that really be fitting for him? His finger hovers over the transmission as he disappears out of the tower. ...of course it wouldn't be fitting for no one to know.
Strawberry Princess	Strawberry lets out a deep, deep, rattling sigh. Her skin's already starting to turn a little pink- but she turns to Shyra and Nanoha first and offers them each a high-five, even if it stings her tenderized hand. "You two were- you were both amazing," she says brightly, reverting from her heroic confidence to her usual uncertain tone now that the immediate pressure's passed. "You'll both be okay, right? I mean- of course you will, you can... you can fly, and you've got an airship, so..." A helpful little beep from her wand reminds her- she abruptly tenses up, turning around to soar out of the hole with a breathtaking acceleration. She's only got... 02:33 ... to do it in. She beelines for Tamamo's signal, orients herself directly above the transformer building, sights up with her wand over it, and fingers the trigger anxiously. Going below half her timer makes her antsy in ways that those who have easy and constant access to their powers might struggle to understand. And then- <J-IC-Scene> Tamamo no Mae nngh... "I... I don't think you need to. The room is black now. And I'm spent. At least the .. distraction worked?" Good enough. Strawberry swoops back towards the ground, aiming for the robot she'd reprogrammed earlier, just as it finishes trundling over to Strange at the docks. At the last moment she cancels her downwards momentum, transforms back into her casual Paladins outfit, cuts out her flight, and lands gracefully on the quadrupedal cargo-bot's back with her legs crossed sidesaddle as if she'd been sitting there comfortably the whole time. "We did it, Dr. Strange," she informs him cheerily as the robot clonks by. "Good job."
Sarracenia	As if the day wasn't disappointing enough! They reach Damocles just in time to do more boring stuff? Sarracenia has a very flat expression as they work. But, Robin's joviality on the radio makes her smile just a bit. "Good work! I am sorry I was so late. Have you met Lady Tomoe, my Lady-in-waiting?" she says to Damocles as they presumably head out of the complex. She makes her way back toward Strange. "Very well done, everyone!" she calls out as she nears him and those nearby. "I do not know about all of you, but I am quite ready to return home and take a nice long bath. Do we have any other loose ends to tie up?" she asks, as if one of her associates didn't just run off with the very important item.
Tomoe	Tomoe doesn't mind no real warpy stuff happened. Sometimes things not going crazy is good when things seem to be over she'll pause for a moment. "Yeah we have met." Tomoe's a bit tense here but she's not hostile she will look to Sarra as they head out of the complex. "So want to hit up a Buffet after we're done here?"
Doctor Strange	"We sure did," says Strange flatly, nodding at Strawberry as she approaches. "Telling people what to do and flipping to the back of the book for the answers is hard work, but I'm glad to do it." "There's one more thing I need to say to Verity here," he says, to Strawberry and Sarracenia both. Turning back to face her, he gives that piece of Advice he'd mentioned earlier. "The stated goal of your mission--if it really is about solving the problems worlds always seem to have when they show up... if it really is about giving everyone a good standard of life... about giving people a chance to have that life..." He smiles wanly, bobbing his head from side to side and lightly shrugging. "Yeah. It's a good goal to have." Here it comes. "But... your approach, your methodology... it's flawed. Deeply. I know that you're not gonna wanna hear this, but I'm asking you not to clutch your pearls. I'm asking you to listen and use that scientific impartiality to consider the merits of what I'm about to say. Because I do believe in what you're trying to do. If it is... actually... what you're trying to do. And I want you to succeed at it. The Watch, and maybe even the Concord, might want the same thing." "Your methodology, as I've seen it, wants to dissect everything. It wants to give everything a Name. It wants to label it, classify it, file it away. Sterilize it. Analyze it. You have to know that by now, there are things that resist that. Actively." He frowns. Then he turns, and points at the tower. "You've /seen that happen./ Here. Today. I can't tell you why your transformer was still on after you pulled the plug. Why we literally had to destroy them to get your toy out. You cannot... solve... /everything/ for X. I'm sorry. You can't. You saw what I did today. You're smart enough to know what I can do. I'm wrong sometimes." "And me going out and collecting other people's trash, or forcing my order on systems that pointedly aren't ordered... isn't going to meaningfully make me wrong less often." He sighs, rubbing his temples, then turns and nods towards the boats sailing off into the harbor. "There are things on those boats right now that, on their own, are fine--but shouldn't under any circumstances be within five feet of each other. And there they are. On a boat. Counting on decisions made by fallible people to get them where they need to be without touching. You guys have your hearts in the right place. But 'jealous hoarding' and 'aggressively forcing order on inherently disordered things...' I don't have to tell you what that sounds like. You all know your history. You all know where that leads." He lets it sink in. Without any further words for her, he opens a sling ring back to the Aegis for himself, Strawberry and any other Paladins who need it.
Tamamo no Mae	With Tamamo just alone at the first tower here... she looks at the darkened room. A job well done, even if it wasn't the result she would have hoped for. How did the magic here get so... damaged... it shouldn't have gone this far. Questions the Caster will just have to find out later. For now, a sliding rice paper door appears behind her... and she moves into it, heading back to the Moon Cell.