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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.

    I doubt you ever looked at a map of the Multiverse. Especially not one within the past three years. That's because there hasn't ever been one worth mentioning. We all know that different worlds fit together, stitched together like everyone's favourite quilt or tapestry metaphor, because the first thing that someone with the capacity wants to do, is to go out and see it for themselves. We know you can walk over the borders. We've seen them with our own eyes, blend smoothly or clash harshly, split down the middle by something shared, or mangled together and frayed at the edges. Could we fit them all together like a jigsaw though? Put names and numbers on all of them and pin them to the board? No. Not a chance.

    A complete map of even a single world is rare enough, and once that world Unifies, chances are that it needs redoing by a fresh wave of explorers. The math behind how satellites adjust is interesting, but not useful. If you've ever seen someone try to project an accurate globe, you should know that round planets especially just don't unravel that way. We've cared to look this time. Us, and some like-minded. You should be able to predict it, right?

    Nothing ever arrives totally in one piece. Even a process like Unification has to work with the basics to some extent. It makes cuts. Trims edges. Folds and unfolds seams. For everyone in a world to wake up one day, breathing air, walking on their feet, and not floating in a million pieces in the void, the Multiverse has to find a place for them. It has to know the place of everything else. It has to edit and fudge the numbers until it all fits. And it does it, most of the time, subtly enough that we don't notice for a while, and don't care when we do.

    The constant is Warpgates. The natural ones, that is --the kind that just appears one day. With the distances involved, the only unit of measurement that matters to the Multiverse, and the people traveling it, are how many Warpgates you have to rout through. A Warpgate pins a place's distance in infinite space, and map a feature, a city, a world, to a real, concrete presence. We started watching how they propagate. Little ones popping up in the middle of nowhere, testing the waters and mapping the grid. Big ones, then, in the places where everyone lives, or everyone goes. Their first introduction to everyone else, and everyone else to them, where the flow changes and the system is tested. Then when those are stable, those fingers reach further and further into deeper places, of more specific interest.

    A world has to be a well-known quantity, with plenty of eyes and ears and travelers, well-tested and trodden, before it fully opens up. Until then, its shape is a little molten too. Stretches of ocean nobody visits end up as part of a bigger one that nobody claims. Strips of mountains peeled off and inserted between worlds that end at their peaks. Sometimes towns and tribes, villages and communes, drifting derelicts or hidden palaces, are excised wholly and become someone else's exciting experience, mysteriously tucked away somewhere more fitting. Lightyears away, but just two minutes if you know the right gate.
Penumbra     Doesn't that sound intentional to you? Some of you might know about compiling code. Others of you might know more about incanting a magic circle. Maybe you're more familiar with laying the foundation for a house before getting to the walls, then the furnishings. It just so happens that the process results in the most livable situation for everyone who comes along. So, logically, people living in the Multiverse has to be the point. Or part of the point. Otherwise we'd have half-planets haphazardly jammed into the crust, stacked on layers of flat worlds unified underground, pouring their molten guts out on each other.

    If we told you that the Multiverse is building something, you'd probably say 'Obviously. It's a superplanet'. Then we'd all sit around asking why. Is anyone at the helm? Doesn't seem like it. Is there an intention to it? Not really. How about what, and who, unifies? Sure. There's a pattern. You'd think if the Multiverse pulled randomly from all across infinite time and space and possibility, it'd be a lot wilder than it is now. Not somewhere that you wake up to the sun, breathing air, and walk on your feet out the door, either to work thirty minutes down the road, or a reality five universes down, thirty minutes of Warpgate between.

    Even the worlds with no common origin at all still have enough common shape to work. You hear half-serious cautions about everything being out there, but when's the last time you've ever really saw a world where the air is dirt and everybody lives backwards? For that matter, when's the last time you ever saw a world with nobody in it at all?

    As far as we know, there is no reason whatsoever for a Warpgate to exist, except to allow people to go somewhere; it performs no other function. If a Warpgate appears, someone is supposed to go through it. If you want to attribute intelligence to an automatic process, you could say that the Warpgate network actually wants you to use it. And it sure seems to have a target demographic in mind.

    Help our friends out a little, would you? I promise we won't tell on you.

    === Missive self-terminates in thirty.
Penumbra     The coordinates sent are different, again. With the barely studied fluidity of the nexus of Sector Zero, going by 'the Soft Expanse' these days for its soft white light, it could be the same place a third time, for all anyone knows.

    It isn't. But it could have been.

    Instead, the responders are taken to the glistening peak of a mountaintop in all but one step, briefly blinded by a breathtaking vista of snow capped natural spires and boreal valleys, arrayed around a frozen lake so broad and deep that it could be called a tiny sea, and so flat and evenly iced that one could count their fingers in their reflection with a powerful enough pair of binoculars. Though there are scattered clusters of warm, orange lights that indicate lone cottages and miniscule townships, and faint flashes that indicate something approximate to a port town on a far, frostbitten shore, the area is so broadly unsettled that there is no marker of any particular world worth talking about. Someone who lives here is someone who intends to live far from civilization for the rest of their quiet life.

    Despite the greatly increased magnitude of the locale, though, it's clear that the world-fragment still lies somewhere peripheral to the Soft Expanse. From sufficiently high, one can see that adjacent regions of mountain range are ill-fitting chunks jumbled together from different places and times, often divided with significant gorges or 'underground cliffs'. One can also, with the right equipment or senses, see the misty stripe of hazy white on the very edge of the horizon, providing half-light that adds together with the distant radiance of a too-far sun to combine to full daylight.

    It doesn't take anything special to see the tremendous threads of some silvery, protean substance that run through the sky, end to end. So far in each direction that they vanish into the limitations of sight and light. They fork and branch in places, and run together and cross in others, like the veins of a leaf, the threads of a web, or the wires of a circuit panel. Though it's difficult to judge their distance, they must all be many, many miles from solid ground, and it seems as if whatever they are made up of is something that either constantly flows, or is constantly changing its surface.

    Directly above the lake, passes the lowest thread that can be seen. It has no reflection in the frozen water, but the thing hanging from it does. A tremendous piece of advanced construction, like someone had pulled a large, modern city from the ground, shuffled its blocks like playing cards, and formed a deck out of them, gaining a substantial volume of depth in three dimensional space. It has the basic shape of half a dozen aircraft carriers joined together like petals of a flower, surrounding both rising and falling futuristic tower sprawl, like a mirror image of itself.

    It is visibly fastened to the gigantic silver 'thread' by countless cables and several structures that resemble primitive 'space elevators', and is supported by the near-silent burn of scores of major engines all over its bottom and sides. Webworks of support structures tie themselves to its bulk, using their own engines to perform tiny, automatic maneuvers to shift the trillion ton mass in accordance with tiny changes in the silver threads' tension, and spreading their support fixtures to its many smaller branches and fractal roots.

    Enough of them have been chained together to form what looks like a six mile sequence of super-lifts and aerial traffic lanes, from the frozen lake upwards. Massive cables and pipes run the entire length, through many suspended or hovering substations, to reach the water, and the town around it, most piercing the ice. Many ships still populate the ice, moving slowly to and from, with an orderly flow of cargo.

    Nothing is exploding. Odd.
Cantio Thinking about how the Multiverse pieces together really hasn't occurred to Cantio. Why would it? She knows of her own world's regions being within understandable limits, but actually thinking about it... She's never quite thought about that fact all that much since it all just works.

More questions to keep in the back of her mind as she follows the coordinates to the unrecognizably familiar area. After the last time, she's made sure to wear a thick winter coat and even a scarf this time around. Following the threads is easy enough, thanks largely to using her eyes like a ssane person would and following the closest one to the gigantic sprawling city-like thing above the lake.

"Do you think anybody's up there?" Cantio asks nobody in particular as she starts her trek towards it, eventually beraking into a light jog to get the blood pumping. More likely than not, she'll need once she gets there, especially if her expectations of fantastic machines littering the whole place prove to be true.

If she gets there without being stopped, her next step is looking for one of those support structures (especially if it's connected to one of those threads) tracking down where that connects to in order to follow the trail towards whatever may form thenucleus of the floating city pile.
Damocles Back at his tower, Damocles sips his morning coffee as he reads today's mysterious missive.  The messages are getting more esoteric.  More philosophical.  Less focused on practical matters.  That's something to keep in mind. 

"Tell me, Knower of All Truths, who is designing the multiverse?"

What an odd question!  You're designing a multiverse right now.


****


Navigating the newly laid path through the twisting mire of the multiverse  proves no more difficult than any other time, if still as tedious.   As always however, Damocles doesn't attempt to shortcut the journey via teleporting through the Warp, as this particularly laid path seems designed to disallow his kind of cheating.  Perhaps it's a matter of the nature of the Warp itself.  These places were designed to be secret, and the Warp respects that kind of clarity of intent.

Arriving at the location, Damocles takes a moment to take in the impressive view of the sweeping mountains.

"Wow.  Just look at those majestic hunks of matter, reaching well above the statistical average in both height and slope.  With its...visible effect on local weather patterns, and likely permafrost due to low air pressure."

Who are you talking to?  Is the sarcasm for my benefit?

"Sarcasm isn't for anyone's benefit.  Oh look, the sky is all kinds of messed up.  That's neat!"

The last shard, Damocles moved with careful caution, but that place was an active battlefield.  This place feels more like a tomb, and so Damocles is much more bold in his exploration.  The city is the thing here, so in a flash of violet fire, he teleports form the gate area, down to the edge of the city.  He doesn't move directly in, but he does pop close to the nearest 'spoke' of the city, just past its reach, to get a better view of what, precisely, we're dealing with today. 

Also, if he's learned anything, it's that these 'invitations' are sent out en masse, so while he's inspecting, he also keeps a keen eye out for other explorers.
Gawain Dressed in his winter coat and jeans, Gawain pushes forward. He doesn't really know Cantio, but moves alongside her. "There's ships moving, so yes!"

Gawain moves to join Cantio in trying to get to a support structure, in order to scale to the city(?) above and talk to somebody friendly to learn what all this is!
Tomoe The letters were not stopping, who was this and how had they got ahold of Tomoe's actual mailing address? That was a concern but it was out there in the old Union Records. Could be someone got their hands on an old database. She'll worry about that later, the only map she had was a partial one that was no longer valid after the big barf. She closed her eyes for a moment and then went back to reading the letter. She finishes with the message and throws it away before it does something like explodes on her. Well, it seems she's curious about what she might become aware of this time.

She half expected to be at the island again. This time she's elsewhere she's at the top of a mountain and she'll take a moment to flare out her wings, spreading them wide as she takes in the place.

"Huh interesting."

This was the sort of place for one to just get away from the madness of the multiverse but it would be a lonely life indeed. Yet for someone who was a vet of the old war? It could be what they would want. She takes to the air at this point to get a better view of things. It's quite the sight when all things are said and done and she will take a few pictures while she's up there.

Then comes to the strange sight upon the lake.

"What ... what is this?!"

She mutters to herself the strange structure has her attention as she'll be moving to go check out the strange town below it seems there are people here she'd like to try to find out more.
Tamamo     'Help our friends out a little, would you?'

    It was an unusual request, made no less so for being the third she'd seen by similar hand, but Tamamo still chose to heed it. She comes to regret this immediately. "A-ah, no, no! This is more than a step too far!"

    The coat that immediately appears around her was insufficient. Being placed, all at once, on top of a mountain above a winterscape is simply too much, no matter that she'd just been experiencing an English Winter, nor any other experience. She hugs her arms to herself, slides her hands into opposite sleeves, and shivers right up to the tips of her ears. When those hands come out again, it's with a pair of talismans that promptly burn away, let go from her fingers just short of singing, the ashes swirling around her until they've become all but invisible.

    Snow and ice in her vicinity begins to melt. This persists as she finally begins to walk forward. Stepping onto the lake would likely cause problems, but surely, someone else will provide her convenient means of transport.
Njall Rinc The first thing that Njall Rinc feels upon reaching the coordinates and passing through to the destination is wistful. It is not an 'empty' place that they arrive at but, rather, a place that has not yet reached capacity-- indeed, it has barely begun to be filled. Perhaps it never will be. If an ideal place to go about living were to bubble up within his dreams, it would probably look quite a bit like this.

Perhaps in a place with warmer weather... but that's not a detail that would trouble him. Coats are an excellent accessory.

He is not alone. A woman in blue-and-white with golden trim and a jeweled brooch flanks him on the left, long-haired and wearing an enormous wide-brimmed hat with a fabulous feather emerging from it. On the right is a floating sphere with a blue-and-white helmet, metallic rabbit-like ears, and a pair of two-fingered, single-thumbed hands hovering in space alongside it. A pair of eyes 0 0 gleam out of an otherwise pitch black 'face'.

A completely ordinary, bubbly-looking young lady who is a bit underdressed for the weather stands behind them, alongside an enormous horned figure that is definitely some kind of demon pretending to be a wrestler.

The woman in blue-and-white transfers her shawl to the underdressed girl, who thanks her cheerily.

The floating sphere moves ahead of Njall to float alongside Cantio, answering: "Greetings! It is probable that such a structure is in some degree of active use, but whether it is presently occupied I do not know, but surrounding circumstances suggest that it is. It most likely requires considerable maintenance and attention, however."

"I would say," Njall finally weighs in personally in response to Tomoe, falling in with the group as his own people spread out and take their own meandering paths forward, "that it might accurately be described as a 'Wonder'."
Doctor Strange      There's a familiar sound. The hissing. A familiar sight. The sparks. An unfamiliar world, serving as backdrop for a very familiar man. The Sorcerer Supreme steps through the portal, which closes behind him. The mountaintop... brings back a memory. Sink or swim. Strange's brow furrows, his breathing tightens. It was a place like this which taught him to ignore the part of his brain which said 'you can't.' High, and distant, and cold.

     He exhales. "Oh, boy," he says, peering down from the peak at the superstructure hanging from that silvery thread. Or vein, perhaps. Let's study it a moment. Get a feel for it. Whatever it is, it has substance, but casts no reflection. At least... it appears to have substance. The engines at the bottom of that superstructure--would they otherwise be making those minute adjustments in response to movements from that thread?

     "Almost certainly," says Strange to Cantio, appearing alongside her in flight as the other Strange returns to the Sanctum to peruse its library. What information, gathered in his own travels, or from Sorcerers Supreme before his tenure, might there be, about 'the blood of the Multiverse?' He has a feeling that unformed softness all around might be exactly that--and these silvery threads, its veins.

     For the benefit of Gawain, Cantio, Tamamo and anyone else who might have to rely on the elevators, the Stephen Strange Taxi Service is willing to ferry passengers to any level of their choosing. He himself, dressed in a contemporary parka at odds with his sorcerous tunic, picks an arbitrary level of the tower--the middle center, and steps through once everyone else has picked a spot.
Strawberry Princess      Strawberry Princess is here in her inadvisably summer-ish casual outfit; thin surplus jacket over a button-up shirt and black jeans, with a patch showing a green shield sewn onto one sleeve. That marks her as Paladin; the trifecta of an ugly thin scar that swoops from cheekbone to scalp, a holstered handgun of perfectly mundane nature, and a long carrying case slung diagonally across her back mark her as 'definitely not support personnel'.

     The lack of foresight in clothing is visibly getting to her; her hands find their way to her pockets whenever possible, and her cheeks are starting to tinge red from the chilly air. Even with the treacherously slick footing of the frozen lake, she keeps her eyes on the sky above and the silver brooks that flow across it.

     Strawberry trudges alongside Strange and Cantio for a little while in companionable quiet, though making sure to introduce herself to the latter and offer a handshake. "There has to be, right?" she finally says. "All that stuff... it wouldn't keep running without someone to run it, I think. And you wouldn't make it just to leave it."

     She declines Strange's portal for the time being, preferring to make her way up the assemblage of pipes and elevators and threads with nimble-but-mundane parkour- "it'll keep me warm," she said brightly, with the unspoken side-effect that it'd give her an up-close look at the flavor of the tech around here. Though cautious at first, once she's a decent ways off the ground she becomes bolder- the point at which she could ignite her wand and take flight should she slip and fall. Still, to an outside observer her frost-slicked ascent looks harrowingly precarious, especially when she does fumble and nearly fall a couple of times.

     When reaching platforms with more stable footing, she periodically takes out her heavily nonstandard flip-top phone and pokes around for wireless security holes in anything that looks like it might hold useful information. Shipping records, maybe? How about thruster logs- does this city go places, or is it stuck here? Perhaps a local intranet, if she's lucky?

     A few minutes later, Strawberry finally reaches the top, pulling herself up a horrifying ledge with her bare hands not too far from Damocles before dusting the frost off herself with a sheepish grin. She gives the massive, ominous sorcerer a little wave after taking a moment to catch her breath and notice him, and shouts muffledly across the distance: "GREAT VIEW, HUH?"
Penumbra     The lack of imminent, exotic disaster is almost an eerie change of pace. Even throughout the whole ascend down a mountain, or trip around a dark, lush, and cold rural valley, there is no obvious sign of anything going horribly wrong. Fears of the trillion ton mass of construction plummeting out of its surreal place in the sky may feel very well-founded, but ultimately it seems that the oddity is far more securely placed and designed than that.

    This place is so generally peaceful that it is possible to make brief encounters with deer and birds on the lower mountainous paths. The hum of machinery is only barely audible over the alpine breeze and crisp echo of crunching frost and twigs. The surface of the lake sounds like walking on museum marble. Shining a light down, one can see the shadows of fish moving around the liquid water many feet below.
Penumbra     Heading down to the lake bowl at the foot of the mountains, those splitting off for the town are easily able to track it through the woods by the winking lights that are faintly visible against the mountain shadows that dim the earth early in the day, reminiscent of boat and aviation pylons. The estimation isn't far off once they reach the several miles of cleared, frosty meadow surrounding it.

    Far away from a haphazard pile of individual eccentricities, the construction of the lakeside is consistent with that of a small slice of the shipping area of a wealthy metropolitan city port. Expansive warehouses, tall office buildings, a sleek traffic control tower, electric rails, humming energy plants, warmly glowing apartment blocks, and carefully swept streets have been erected firmly on a foundation formerly of sand and permafrost. There is no surrounding sprawl that suggests an 'out of town', nor any obvious connection to any of the tiny villages, cottages, or farmsteads anywhere else in the valley. The simplest buildings look to match turn of the twenty first century design, by standard Earth metrics, and the fancier kind issue trickles of steam into the air, and naturally warm the street around them.

    It's all obviously in service of the shipyard, which runs the whole length of the town-occupied shore, hosting no less than thirty major docks given over to six shipping lanes. The ships themselves are of an odd sort, seemingly built to glide across the ice, and be buoyant as a secondary concern, functioning more like trains. Given the slow speed of travel and the perfect reflectivity of the ice, the constant traffic paints a glowing network of boat lights to and from the touchdown point and the docks, made up of everything from container-laden tankers to small yachts.

    Perfectly ordinary workers help load and unload cargo, direct ships in and out, and work on a great profusion of pipes, cables, and power lines that lead from the city, to the docks, and out along the ice trails. Occasional radio traffic directs small hovercraft to take off and land.

    Those who are any shape of familiar with a shipyard can tell that there appears to be some sort of holdup, causing aircraft to idle on the pad or take holding patterns, and most of the shipping lines to remain parked on the traffic, flashing brake lights and with their crew standing around with cups of hot cocoa. The nature of it is uncertain, but seems to be more of a frustrating ten car pileup situation, rather than a disaster.
Penumbra     Going straight to the touchdown point itself isn't hard; the lanes aren't guarded by anything more than, probably whatever security might be on the ice ships to prevent theft or unlikely piracy. The site itself is anchored both to and under the thick, frozen sheet, spreading its strain across hundreds of main poles of space-age flexible materials, and those each anchored to hundreds of extra cables and ties. The air is warm and humid here, mostly due to carefully cut and fenced-off holes in the ice that gradually billow steam, no doubt from waste heat being pumped into the water through the massive, road-wide pipes that circulate through it.

    There is a complex maze of lanes and checkpoints for various sizes of vehicle and personnel, which winds through something like an oil rig broken up into a hundred lego pieces, but traffic in and out appears to have completely stopped. At the center, one can see a number of gigantic lifts, sized for hauling even the largest tankers miles into the air, flashing idle lights, choked with workers who have nothing to do but set up tape and wait. There are plenty of individual cable cars moving up and down, and magnetic lift capsules running at a much faster and more frequent pace, none of which seem to be carrying much in the way of supplies.

    Examining the area for digital traffic, it's easy enough to figure that the majority of the structure 'has wifi'. All of the active components seem pretty recent, and there's a solid overlap of router, transceiver, and higher power coverage. Pretty much every lift and checkpoint has been put under lockdown, but it's not significantly more secure than any random naval base might be. Unfortunately, the lowermost mile and a half of the multi-stage, mid-air boat locks, are powered down and non-functional, requiring either esoteric means to bypass, or long and involved climbing minigames on metal scaffolding and carbon cables that involve getting yelled at by various beings in hard hats.
Penumbra     Examining from the ground or the air, it becomes pretty clear that the long funnel of air structures and supports that reach from the flying city's base to the lake's surface aren't there to help keep it up, but to provide a steady and reliable means to bring things, and people, up and down without endless fleets of expensive and fuel-hungry aircraft, or installing reams of teleporters or the like.

    The entire thing is very heavily engineered, but under a roughly singular paradigm, aesthetic, and overarching design agreement. It could have been done much more cheaply with little difference, but none of it appears to have been strictly extra effort. Its fleet of support structures that hover or hang at its own level, which is about that of an airliner cruise, are roughly a cubed city block in size, relatively uniform, and dedicated to a singular purpose. Some of them hiss with white smoke suggesting power plants. Others thrum with lights and radio traffic. Still others look to mostly be habitation blocks, with many fantastical cable cars running to and from them and their surroundings. The diffuse design minimizes any points of potentially dramatic failure, improves sensor and communications coverage, and most certainly helps with the fact that it's actually a little warm and stuffy at that height, from so much heat being pumped out.

    All of them are inhabited. There seems to be little space in which anyone doesn't either live or work, here. Once one gets going and knocking on doors, figuratively or literally, it doesn't take long to find someone dressed in some mix of sky and lake blues, silvers, cloud whites, and slate greys, configured into an appropriate work uniform, on the job as they are. The range of shapes and sizes is considerable, going from place to place, making it clear that most of the personnel to encounter are certainly Multiversal, given the number of overall-clad androids casually welding things that identically dressed, barrel-chested trolls haul out to them.

    It's the central 'city' that shows the oddity. Though the many carrier platforms that fan out around its edges like playing cards in a hand, or petals in a flower, thrum with life and industrial noise, they're choked with idle craft and lashed down cargo, with nothing moving. The outer rims of buildings, square, sleek, and futuristic as they are, still hum with light, but as they rise gradually higher into the major spires at the center, subsequent, inner blocks look to be under indefinite blackout. The number of people cluttering the outer regions suggests that they probably left from inside, and are waiting to return.
Njall Rinc Njall accepts Strange's offer of transport with a quick 'thank you' -- also selecting the middle of the structure, though he just takes a few steps away and stops immediately after arrival. His companions split into two groups: The ordinary-looking Natia grabs the robot called Treasure by one of his hands and pulls him along towards the distant town. About halfway there she asks him to carry her the rest of the way, which he does-- grabbing her by the back of her dress and simply flying her the remaining distance like a kitten being carried by their mother.

The disguised demon follows that pair.

The woman in blue-and-white, Cecilia, remains beside Njall.

Having reached the middle of the structure by way of STRANGE-AIR, the airline that can sometimes get you where you're going before you left to get there, he's around the middle of the structure and takes some time to look around.

His perspective changes, plunging down through the floor and zooming partway out. Most of it is skippable, in that it is operating relatively normally, but he stops when he reaches the part that is in sort of lockdown. His perspective zooms in, searching for either a cause or some sort of recognizable construction crew that might be working on the problem.

Cecilia clears her throat. Njall looks up, but it's obvious that he's not really perceiving the surroundings of his body in that moment. At least, not with much detail.

"I'm sorry. I found a section that appears to be nonfunctional, but I haven't ascertained why yet," Njall explains, to Cecilia and whoever happens to still be around. Probably Dr. Strange.

MEANWHILE, towards the city...

Natia torments Treasure by determinedly seeking out whatever passes for street food, behaving herself like a particularly enthusiastic tourist. She has an enormous, literal sack of cash. Her second stop is 'buying a real coat', if she can find any such thing.

The demon trailing them just sort of hangs out a distance of those two. Sometimes his hiding places are very conspicuous; lurking in bushes, behind trees. But he's too big to really use human-sized cover.
Damocles "Well sure the view is nice," Damocles responds to to Strawberry's greeting, "But just imagine the commute!" 

He motions vaguely towards the city with his staff, his glowing cyan eyes narrowing as he stares at the activity, and lack of activity up by the port.  Seems pretty mundane, actually. Which is, in and of itself, pretty damned weird. 

"This place looks surprisingly ordinary for a hidden realm made up of broken shards of existence.  Where are these ships even going?  Who are they trading with?" Damocles's eyes sweep over the city again as his mind tries to process what's in front of him.  The previous tower was purpose built.  It was created to facilitate research.  This doesn't feel like this.  It seems like its just a city.  Maybe some kind of trading hub.  Could this be just a place where the people from those weird fallen empires still live?

Damocles watches for a moment longer before he shrugs a little, and casts his glance at the few explorers who took the same path he did.  "Well, what's the worst that could happen.  They fire massive, tower-based beam weapons at me?"  He pauses for a second, his glowing eyes getting a bit more round before he says, "Well, I'm going anyway." 

Staff in hand, Damocles begins stalking toward, doing nothing to hide his towering frame as he marches step by step into the city.  If they're going to confront the giant wizard, let them.  He has some questions of his own.
Cantio "I wouldn't rule out the possibility of machines doing all of this. It's unlikely, but imagine if that really was the case?" Cantio can't hide her excitement at that possibility, and it almost keeps her distracted long enough to not notice that known Paladins are nearby.

Almost. She's heard Gawain's voice in the past, though, as well as Strange's, and she's heard of their exploits and Strawberry Princess' frequent warnings. She's most certainly met Tamamo before as well as her terrifying master, and her jaw stiffens as she tries desperately not to look any of them despite responding and even taking advantage of Strange's taxi service. It takes Njall's floating sphere to get her to nearly jump out of her skin, and she just to play that semi-scream as an incredibly awkward and unbelievably forced laugh.

"Th-th-that would make sense, right?! Maintenance is important, but I've... Uh. I've heard stories of machines working for decades... Centuries, even, without anyone servicing them." She finally manages to get out by the time her fear subsides (somewhat). "Something this big would be such a massive pain to maintain without some kind of self-sufficient system behind it."

Following the mass of support structures, Cantio wastes a fair bit of time just observing the things, her curiosity getting the better of her. She also finds herself sweating just enough that she has to take the coat off, especially in light of the magical/artificial sun. Tossing said coat into her digital stuff-holding space, she takes notes of the many workers and the lifts ferrying them about. "... Hm. I guess that does mean it's all maintained normally."

She sounds mildly disappointed by that realization.

Cantio finds her self bumping into people and having to apologize a little too often as she maneuvers through the crowded space, however, only finding a bit of relief upon reaching the city proper. She does some more gawking like any self-respecting tourist, of course, but focus soon returns to the odd blackout around the inner blocks. She tries to hail down one of the locals closer to the blackout zone in order to ask them about what happened and when, and if they can provide directions to whoever's in charge of the area to ask more questions. If they don't seem receptive, she'll offer a modest bribe as well.

Nothing insanely generous (since she can't afford that huge of a bribe), but certainly enough to eat a day's worth of decent food.
Penumbra     Getting special arcane senses and analyses on the superstructure digs up some relevant information right away. There are many points, mainly having to do with the power conduits, thrusters, and support fastenings, that have sufficient arcane resonance to have obviously been prepared for use with magic, but haven't been activated.

    Patterns for drawing up energy from leylines that are dark and empty. Sigils for anti-gravity assistance that are useless decoration. There's no sign of damage to these areas; they look as if they were installed recently, but either nobody got around to finishing, or the process was interrupted. Overall, the entire area is left running on a purely tech-based paradigm, for the time being, running the tight 'orbital elevator' spectrum of advancement.

    It also seems like that many thrusters shouldn't be running all at once, all the time, just to keep it in the air. The exotic threads that run through the sky seem perfectly sturdy enough to hold it. The majority are anchored by some sort of exotic, hexagonal pylon design, which clamps around the protean silver corona of each conduit without physically attaching itself, absorbing a soft white glow which concentrates into a solid, fastening ring. The energy required to do so doesn't seem to be channeled anywhere else, so there's no power being drawn from the thread itself.

    What is that cablework in the sky, though? That colossal map of liquid platinum veins in three dimensions, standing out against the hazy white distance? Who knows. The only information on them is that they're 'known to exist' in the Soft Expanse, and generally lead from its edges to its center. The most exciting thing on record is that Warpgates sometimes briefly appear around them, allowing for fast, random travel around the area, but nobody has made anything useful of them, rare and chaotic as they are, despite their presumed number.

    They're certainly channeling a tremendous deal of 'energy', in an abstract sense. Like a bowling ball perched atop a shelf has a lot of 'energy', in the sense that it could fall and flatten someone's foot very suddenly, but isn't at all useful just sitting there.
Tomoe So far so good nothing is on fire, she's not had anything try to kill her as she'll set down in the town to get a look about. It kinda looks like home in some way, she seems to be looking about now taking in the place looking for signs, ads or anything else. She sees the hulking form of Damocles nearby. She feels very uncomfortable about this, but it could be worse. Then again with someone like him, it may very well. Regardless she falls in after the hulking chaos space wizard.

She also pulls out her smartphone from her inventory and starts to check for a signal if she can get on to the wi-fi she's going to check for any local government and tourism sites that could be up all the while she keeps an eye out for ads as well.

"Not shocked to see you here, curious about this place as I am?"
Damocles "Oh, you know how it is," Damocles casually chats with Tamoe as he walks.  "Mysterious message sent by an unknown sender, which mysteriously vanished shortly after being received.  A sender whose insistence that their identity isn't important only helps underscore just how important their identity will probably end up being."
Tamamo     Tamamo shortly does make use of Dr. Strange's kind offer of transportation, nigh as instantaneous as a jump cut. This saves her from coming close enough to the lake to thaw through the layers of clear permafrost. As for her immediate surroundings, it's not so much like she's emitting heat as like flipping a light switch, with only that little delay between her immediate surroundings being 'covered in snow' and 'almost uncomfortably warm.'

    As it turns out, this provides little enough difference once she's in the middle of the above-lake city, outside of prompting Tamamo to unzip her coat. The patch of Summer she'd left behind will be reclaimed by Winter, soon enough, if not covered until snowfall.

    Though the threads in the sky attract the most attention, reaching her senses, or even specialized magecraft for the purposes of analysis, tells Tamamo little of it, beyond that it's not powering anything *here*. That in itself is strange. "Why choose this place, of all places, then? Surely there are other spots from which to build high in the cold?" The question isn't wholly rhetorical.

    Checking the leylines is the very next step, and the results here are more confusing. There had been something, but it was unfinished. Geomancy was expected, but not provided. "The Seekers had engineered their own leylines, as wasteful as that is. Perhaps these desired the same, and have, as yet, not." Curious, for other reasons.

    Someone wanted her to help, here. She knows that something is wrong, but not who needs help, nor why. Well, there's nothing but for her to find out. There are people, therefore, there are sources of information.

    "Excuse me, please. Who might hold authority over this emergency?"
Gawain Once they've teleported to the city, Gawain also unzips his coat, and splits off from the others to join Tamamo in asking for people's managers. He walks forward, glancing around, and extends his own magic senses, but most importantly, when Tamamo moves to talk to people, Gawain does as well, once they reach someone of suitable importance.

"Sir Gawain, Knight of the Sun, Warden of the Paladins. I've been 'directed' to help here, and I would like to help as best as I can. What can we do to assist you?"
Tomoe Tomoe says "I do, got a world being turned inside out by the multiverse. Yeah I know how it goes. Makes me think of the old Union HQ a bit around here...and I have to admit it's quire breath taking as well."
Doctor Strange      MYSTERIES OF THE SOFT EXPANSE was the closest title in the Sanctum. It had some information on thsoe veins, but not what he was looking for. Future!Strange closes the book, stroking his goatee thoughtfully... well. He's already here, and the past him might have some benefit of other knowledge.

     "Nothing to be sorry for," says Strange pre-emptively to Njall. He's only a little less in-the-dark here than anyone else. Well. The missive mentioned something about giving these people a hand, so he might as well put his own uses to it. "Why don't we see if we can find somebody who knows their way around the place, and we can find out... straight from the horse's mouth... what the hold-up is."

     After a brief examination of his own, the Sorcerer Supreme manages to find the same issue as Njall, through use of a visible scry-mark that flits about under his guidance. "Matter of fact, there's some people riiight..." An illusory reconstruction of the level they're on--quite detailed, in fact--appears before Njall, with markers denoting their location and the location of some of the idle residents. It pings helpfully. "There." Then the illusion disappears.

     With that, Strange makes his way to the outer regions of the city, where those who are without power wait, presumably for it to return. "'Scuse me," says Strange, waving a scarred hand to flag down one of the idle residents. "Hi. Doctor Strange, Paladins, Seneschal. Heard you guys needed some help, and I can see why. Gimme a rundown of what happened, would you? Shouldn't that... big... silvery thing be providing power, here? I'm assuming the wires aren't *just* to hold the place up."
Njall Rinc "That's what I'm looking for at this particular time," Njall says, straightforwardly. He hasn't moved.

Cecilia sighs. She wears a rather annoyed look on her face. She's used to this.

He doesn't reel back in to his body until he's being shown a map, and immediately turns his attention towards the marked points directly. The pair of them follow along with Dr. Strange, having no particular reason to take an alternate route from the one that Strange follows.

Helpfully, he adds to Strange's approach, "If it's an infrastructure problem, I might be able to help. I see some magical components here and there, but none of them seem active, and I can't identify quite a few of them. They aren't my area of expertise, exactly."

Cecilia, on the other hand, is a little more interested in the pre-emptive response by Strange. She adjusts her hat and asks, "Seneschal Strange, might you be a seer of some variety?"
Penumbra     Despite ostensibly being a wholesome chunk of a real, nice city, Njall's crew wandering around the streets stand out in a way that's difficult to really parse. The population is dense and highly 'multiversal metropolitan', but even in casual clothes (including appropriate winter wear), none of them have the touristy kind of feeling the two give off. Attempting to buy food and coats with sacks of cash is looked at pretty oddly. They're questioned about why they're here, but 'just fed' for free, and if satisfied with a very plain-looking off the rack sky blue coat with cloudy white fake fur, that comes free of charge as well.

    Njall himself scanning for signs of lockdown finds that the perimeter of the blacked out area, spatially immense as it is, doesn't seem to have been highly secured. There are barricades equivalent to heavy construction work, or lanes reserved for secure travel of some major public figure, with flashing lights and neon signs, but they aren't exactly bristling with traps and defenses. At most, checkpoints of what looks like private security, in the same work-colour-scheme as everyone else, well-armed but inactive. The area seems to have been evacuated in a very orderly fashion, probably no earlier than yesterday. It couldn't have been fully inhabited, top to bottom, in the first place.

    He detects no signs of dramatic damage, environmental hazard, pollutants, or something ready to fail. There are significant lengths of 'street', now not much more than dense concrete and chrome, which still have parked trams, locked up workplaces, and running generators, behind each barricade. Further in beyond those, however, there is a second line of unmanned, more substantially chained off area, where the skyscrapers grow wall to wall and fuse into what may as well be considered a single, very irregular obelisk. It looks distinctly unfinished. None of the lights, even for the antennae at the top, are even running on backup or idle power.
Penumbra     The bulk of investigators hitting the streets up on high find themselves quickly feeling as if they'd gone to some spacious, ultramodern downtown, when the artificial landscape firmly occupies both ends of the skyline. It's easy to forget they're even ten miles up in the air. Only the silvery, flowing webs of mysterious Multiversal substrate hanging overhead tell them otherwise.

    Though it's a pain to navigate such 'efficiently planned' roads while no traffic is moving, everywhere fully exposed to the sky is backed up, and where every small park or public area is full of people stuck outdoors with suitcases and work kits, it isn't very difficult to do so.

    Tomoe scouring for local signals finds that there's a perfectly functional internet facsimile here, though there seems to be no broader connection to anywhere else, thus rendering most of her search redundant. Most of what she finds equivalent to anything 'government' are publicly accessible PSA's from 'the Makers' Council' about a major power shutdown and overhaul due to 'unforeseen circumstances', citing an 'unexpected delay in delivery' and a wall of instructions of what to do, and occasionally repeated apologies about the 'ongoing power rationing'. There are some notices cautioning that the 'greater communal quarter' is perfectly safe, and so is the 'industrial' and 'processing' quarter, but that they should 'comply with directives from 'safety technicians' to stay outside the line. The 'situation in the Listening Post' is apparently 'contained' for the time being. There is no ETA on when people will be able to go back to work.
Penumbra     Damocles strutting into the crowd is met with about what one would expect for a huge and spooky looking dude shoving through a crowd of bored locals waiting on their metaphorical lawns for the gas technicians to tell them it's safe to return to the building. Nobody stops him until he arrives at one of the barricades, where a mix-and-match team of individuals in variously sized sets of gear that look like a mixture between hazardous materials and cargo-lifting exoskeletons warn him away. One of them, with the most silver and least blue, on his person, asks Damocles if he's bringing news from 'Zone Five' or if he has any kind of pass from 'the Safety Council' to go in ahead to the 'restricted area' inside.

    Cantio finds it impossible to effectively bribe anyone, and essentially pointless. Despite the ongoing emergency, everyone seems to be pretty well off. There are still various kinds of major canteens and cafeterias operating, and trams and small hover cars manage to route around the park areas delivering large amounts of small necessities. The water is running, the heat is on, and nobody particularly seems to have any desire for her cash. 'Where are they going to spend it?' seems to be a prevailing attitude. She's only told that the 'Safety Council' is obviously in charge of the current situation, and nobody there is helping her reach them.
Doctor Strange      "Of several sorts," says Strange with a nod at Cecilia. "As a matter of fact..."

     Strange makes the sign of the Eye. As his fingers 'open,' he is bathed in emerald light, disappearing briefly as he travels into the past to do the reading from before. "Okay," he says, reappearing not even a second later. "So, not a lot of help there. Buuuut..."

     Having satisfied the time loop, he peers into possible futures. Again, the Sorcerer Supreme is bathed in emerald light, adopting the lotus position as he pores through possibilities. In particular, he's looking for ones in which the power has been restored. In each of those futures, what seems to have been the root cause of the power outage? Did someone merely turn it off, or was there a failure of some kind? Are they temporarily off pending installation of some new upgrade?

     Most importantly, across those possible futures, what, most commonly, is the safest way to get the power back on? Does it tend to contradict the advice of the Safety Council which Cantio mentioned? That might... shed some light... on why it hasn't been turned back on yet.

     As that Strange looks for answers, another appears from one of those futures. "Hi," he says, nodding to Njall and Cecilia. With a flick of his wrist, there is a chime, and an orb of glowing light appears floating by his shoulder. "Wanna check it out, see what the issue is? I can get us there, and make sure we have light to see what we're doing." To ensure that he, and presumably Njall and Cecilia, can see where they're going, that glowing orb follows along. He traces another hole in space, leading to the structure which Njall described on the radio--that wired, seemingly melded-together building.
Penumbra     Tamamo is privy to the same basic information, but given her considerably greater social bonuses, is told to talk to the 'Mattermancer Administrator' of the Safety Council, and gets the name 'Timaeus Jung'. Gawain, flashing the Paladins badge, can act on that information to hassle his way up the rungs of the supply shift handing him off to the security teams handing him off to tired and sweaty logisticians handing him off at last to a city block split across a major thoroughfare, straight from the main elevators, that seems to head directly under several major bridges, down a gradual trench, into the exposed, 'basement' side of the tower forest at the center.

    There are monitoring vans, worker RVs, security cordons, and outdoor equipment tables all around, mainly around a checkpoint comprised of a vacated travel bureau, some sort of pump station, a fenced off transformer yard, and a breakfast stop. It all seems to be given over to a motley crew of radio monkies, people staring at glowing computer consoles, hard hats working the transformer yard to no avail, and a group of less physically oriented men and women (plus a huge rock person and a screen-headed robot crammed into posh blue-white-silver three piece suits) holding some sort of 'sixth coffee of the day' meeting in front of a touch-whiteboard in the breakfast stop.

    He is, of course, waved down outside for wanting to know *exactly* what he's trying to do here, along with Tamamo. She doesn't read any real hostility off of anyone present, but tired, strung out, nervous frustration. They clearly didn't expect, or desire, Paladins to be here, but expected *someone* else to be here, whom the Paladins are not, but at this point may as well be a 'good enough' replacement for.
Gawain As they finally get through with the power of charisma and a badge, Gawain approaches the one waving him down, and nods. "Do not worry! I understand that a foreign peacekeeping organization coming in may feel like a threat to your sovereignity. We have no interest in imposing on your lovely city. We're investigating the Soft Expanse and came across this place - and that there was a problem that we may be able to help solve." His words are true, and his smile is genuine. "Please, if you'd have us, give us the rundown and tell us what we can do. I'm sure between at least the two of us, we could do something, correct, Tamamo?"

A gesture to his companion. Gawain knows everything will go right with the number of skilled Paladins around them.
Njall Rinc Cecilia looks quite curious about what Dr. Strange is doing, but doesn't appear to be able to follow it. There's a greater sense of awareness coming from Njall, though he can't see the actual time shenanigans themselves directly.

"One of the instructors at the academy was a supposedly great seer," she says, conversationally. "We were always skeptical, but she could predict a few things here and there. We always tried to catch her tricking us, instead of predicting things, but..."

She smiles sheepishly.

"Yes," Njall agrees with the newest Strange to appear. "I do. Is that... tiring, what you're doing?"

He follows through the rift in space that Strange generates.

    MEANWHILE, IN THE CITY...

"Why, we were sent to help, of course!" Natia exclaims. She's a bit too bright, a shade too sunny. All that is offered for free she accepts, with only the slightest hint of perturbation that nobody wants anything in return.

The robot called Treasure elaborates, "Master Njall, citizen of the Commonwealth, agent of the Paladins, received a message, and so we came."
Penumbra     Strange, flagging down literally any random person of any persuasion, gets a look like he may be kind of a dumbass when he suggests his apparently offensively incorrect knowledge about the esoteric engineering principles in play. They, in fact, seem suspicious that he'd been asked to help at all, and form up a vaguely communal sort of 'wall of silence' against his questioning, largely about who could have possibly asked him for help while also explaining nothing about even the basics.

    It's fair enough, since he, nor anyone else here, actually knows who asked.

    Njall's more concrete offer gains him some additional information, but people are very prompt and very samey about pushing him off --in a 'not my department' kind of way-- on the 'Paramancer Oversight Council' somewhere in 'who-knows-figure-it-out' who are responsible for anything to do with magic.

    When it comes to those who are more sympathetic to the pair, he can glean from their chatter that none of the magical additions *have* ever been activated, and in fact cannot be activated, until something and some people arrive from 'Zone Five', which haven't yet, and the communal government hasn't really explained why. Likely, they don't actually know. They seem to be relatively confident that it'd probably work, though it seems the overwhelming majority here are not of a particularly magical persuasion themselves. The 'Paramancer' division is new enough that it can be presumed they were responsible for installing magical additions on top of the robust, unified tech-theme, and are now unfortunately useless.
Tomoe Good news Tomoe gets some useful information when she gets her phone working. It's not what she expected at all but it gives her some useful information. One this is a local network only, there's no connection to the multiverse outside so far as she can see. That's interesting she also makes sure to save the PSA's as well as she notices some issues is going on that the government is dealing with. This is useful she will then take a moment to run a search on the Maker's Council to see what she can get and also if she can dig up anything else on what might be going on. Or even just what the safety technicians are saying.

"Looks like things are going down, power rationing something else is going down also at the listening Post. It might be worth checking out..."

She will also notices Damocles is catching some attention of the locals as well and she'll try to follow after him for now.

"Hey wait up!"
Damocles Damocles stops when the silvery blue enforcer stops and questions him.  His glowing eyes betray no emotion as he impassively listens to the questioning.  He's got nothing.  Neither news nor authorization.  However, he does have one ace in the hole.  One he really dislikes lean on, but needs must.  

In the echos of his mind, where the boundary of 'self' and 'eternity' blur, he reaches out to that small cyan whisper that is never far away with a simple question:  "How about it, All-Knower?  Do we have any news from 'Zone Five' to share?"

Zone Five?  AKA Side Five?  AKA Facet Five?  AKA The Fifth Way?  Oho there's a lot I could tell you about that place which would help you!  They've been waiting for the Seaker's report here for some time, you know.

And then, nothing more.  There's a reason Damocles doesn't like tugging on that thread.  It always unravels more than it reveals. Still, it's never without value.  You just need to work with what you have.

Damocles glances down at the one stopping him, his glowing eyes arching a little.  "There is a lot of information the Seakers want relayed from the Fifth Way, but you aren't the one to receive it.  May I be allowed to pass?"  Damocles's voice is cool and drawn like razorwire, his piecing, glowing blue eyes the only hint of an expression visible under his hood as he stares at the one barring his path.
Tamamo     What exactly /are/ they trying to accomplish? 'Finding out what's wrong' doesn't seem like it'll fly, here with a group that have, no doubt, been discussing everything they know of what's wrong for hours and reached an unproductive combination of fatigue and stress. Tamamo can't read minds, but she can read a room.

    "It is so," she says, agreeing with Gawain. "We have been summoned," and they can ask 'by whom,' but she doesn't know, "and so, we have arrived. I cannot help but notice the arrays prepared for leylines that are not, in fact, present. Perhaps we shall begin on this point? Or else, perhaps, on your missing visitors?" They'd been summoned, but no one called ahead. That's curious, too.
Cantio A lead! It's a somewhat obvious one in retrospect, but it's still better than nothing.  She doesn't feel particularly bad about not having to fork over any cash, either, although the lack of real direction on how to find this Safety Council is still a problem. Exploring the area further, there's both a sense of relief at things not exploding as well as frustration at not getting quite as many leads as she was hoping for.

There's still hope, though, as Natia and Treasure take their own approach towards trying to get info on the situation. Tagging along with the two, she listens closely and keeps her eyes peeled for people that might look like they belong to this elusive council: Uniforms or other signage indicating themselves as such, people headed towards the blackout zone with toolboxes or bulky equipment instead of escaping to safer ground. Should she find someone matching that criteria, she'll start asking about what happened  to the blackout zone and what needs fixing while bringing out some of her own drones in a show of trustworthiness or, at very least, technical competence.

Also, because having those things around helps put her at ease. Not by much, but it's something. Should she not find anyone useful, she'll just start heading right into the BLACKOUT ZONE anyway, relying on her floating drones to light the way.
Doctor Strange >Looking at the back of the book for the answers

     "It's a pain to do correctly, but not tiring in itself," Strange offers Niall and Cecilia, his eyes still closed, still hovering in the lotus position. The newer Strange answers at precisely the same instant, using the exact same sentence and inflection, smirking wryly at them. Just a bit of showing off.

     "Okay," says the newer Strange, guiding Njall with gestures of his hands into the darkness. "So. This is what we're supposed to see." His visions had relayed to him a certain picture of events, which he guides Njall through in order to satisfy causality. "And this is what you're supposed to find out." Namely:

-The power is off, pending installation of a major upgrade.
-The magical components for this upgrade never arrived--Strange directs Njall's attention to empty talisman receptacles, unpainted runestones, and the like.
-Were these components to arrive, and be installed, the generators would behave dangerously and erratically. This, he demonstrates, by conjuring an illusory diagram detailing several different magical paradigms working in tandem to produce unforeseen consequences, calling books from the Sanctum to supplement his arguments.
-It is possible for power to be restored, safely, IF the magical components aren't integrated. This, the sorcerer explains, is a no brainer--it was working before, after all.

     "So," Strange continues, gesturing to that huge spire. "Safest thing to do is to forget the upgrades, reinstall everything the way it was, get the power back on, and then turn this huge... thing back on." He furrows his brow. "It uses a lot of power, so we're gonna want to save that for after everything's back on. The problem is..."

     He dismisses his earlier diagram. A new one appears. It shows the main power generator, with a conjured graphic of the classic /!\ symbol for DANGER. "There was a planned burst of energy from the formless..." What's a good word for it? "...not-yet-stuff of the Expanse, which was only supposed to be a temporary thing. I have a feeling they were using that as... superglue... to sort of hold all of these different magical upgrades together." He strokes his goatee thoughtfully, one hand behind his back as he peers at his second diagram. "Which... is probably why 'proceeding as planned' is dangerous. It seems like trying to exploit the Expanse's energy and apply ordered systems to it causes it to act in unpredictable ways, the more distinct disciplines you apply."

     He pauses, allowing for questions or comments as if he anticipates them.
Penumbra     Though the people out here don't seem to want anything in particular to do with any of the major factions (this area of Sector Zero would certainly be the place to go if one were to desire such a thing), Gawain's hard efforts as a member of the Paladins make him very recognizable and easily researched and vetted when he names himself. With the equipment they have on hand, it only takes a station operator a metaphorical Google search and scan of his wiki page to claim an all clear, and bring over a supervisor to hover and frown over his shoulder, before deciding that it can't hurt.

    Tamamo is a lesser known quantity, but with reasonably good reviews so far. Besides, if she's accompanied by Gawain, there are scarce fewer people any less deceptive than the knight to be found. Given that she's been specifically told to seek the 'Mattermancer Administrator', it's easy enough for her to maneuver into the clean-swept and brightly lit abstract space Denny's, and to the head of the rectancy of pushed together tables. Timaeus Jung appears to be an older gentleman with a curly beard of proportions reserved for busts of Greek philosophers and depictions of dwarven explorers, with dark, broody eyes and a hairline streaked with grey. Despite 'mancer' being in his title, his outfit is a charcoal white and silver suit under a white and sky blue greatcoat resting across his shoulders. He dismisses the table for coffee with a few words and a wave of his thick, calloused hand, before answering questions.

    "This isn't a city, though you'd be forgiven for mistaking it." he replies to Gawain in warm, rough baritone. "This is the prototype listening post of the Unifiers. Now provisional headquarters of the Makers. We are equipped to handle round-the-clock self-sufficiency of course, but our issues are of a nature pertaining to completing our grand work here."

    He adds to Tamamo. "Those recent installations are outside my purview. I deal in the hard principles of matter. Building things that you can hold in your hands. Though it's no fault of the Paramancers, we were never even able to turn those things on. This area isn't equipped to handle mass amounts of magical energy draw. Our design was intended to include a discovery of our allies. One that can draw the limitless, protean energy inherent in the Soft Expanse, condensing that thin white ether into proto-power, and converting it into the necessary metatypes. It would have allowed us to expand this post's capacity dramatically. We even removed half of our fusion coils for the effort."

    "But those designs, and those pieces, never arrived. We heard that several of our allies strongholds came under attack from Zones four and five, but apologies and platitudes don't put bricks together." He grunts. "Worse still, part of the listening post is still exposed to the void of the Expanse. That ether has been leaking into the core through our accumulators. It's unsafe to go there. When left on its own, it condenses into . . ." He is audibly at a loss for words. "Things."
Njall Rinc "How very useful. Although I think it would be burdensome, in a way, for your literal time to be able to be weaponized in such a fashion," Njall comments, flashing a slightly restrained smile. It isn't a shot. He sincerely thinks that such a power must be difficult to carry around with one's self.

Cecilia rubs at her chin thoughtfully. "Yes... but think about all of the hours you can use that you normally lose."

"People should lose hours," he replies, though there is no hint of criticism in the words.

For the most part, Njall seems able to follow along with the instructions. It's the magical stuff that seems to elude him the most; the physically explainable seems to track more to whatever analytical abilities that he possesses.

"Well... I can probably handle infrastructure re-construction," he says after the explanation and guiding is overall done. One hand is extended outwards, and a small pedestal pops into existence underneath it. A blue sphere sits atop it, and Strange can probably tell that it's sort of a location anchor. It gives a lot of range to otherwise short-range teleportation.

"Be right back!"

Briefly, he leaves, collapsing into a point of light and vanishing.

A moment later a portal opens alongside the sphere, and a half dozen people come out. On the other side, a dark-haired woman waves before apparently closing the portal.

A gentleman with salt-and-pepper hair surveys the surroundings, nods to himself, and starts directing the other five to start building in accordance with the instructions relayed from Strange to Njall and now to them.

Notably, they do not **repair** precisely. They use tools, they perform what appears to be manual labor in fast-forward, but they appear to be using some unseen pool of resources to just build the damn thing back up wholesale without incorporating the magical parts. At one point when they need elevation, Cecilia draws what appears to be a flintlock pistol that actually projects portal surfaces that hang at specified locations, allowing work to be conducted above while still on the ground.

"Ah... is there any chance you could make certain they're fine with this course of action before we actually turn it back on, Seneschal Strange?" Smiling a little sheepishly, Njall admits, "I don't mind giving them a load of replacement parts, but I wouldn't want to activate this once it's done and fry somebody a mile up because nobody was asked if the power could be turned back on and they happened to be on cabling that wasn't supposed to be live."
Doctor Strange      "Generally, yes," says Strange to Njall. It's unclear whether he's saying 'yes it's a burden,' or 'yes people should lose hours.' Maybe both. He doesn't elaborate.

>Can you make sure that the local authorities are okay with this?

     Strange snaps and makes a pointer-finger at Njall, nodding in approval. Apparently, that's what he was anticipating. "Yep."

     First thing's first, now that Njall is on the right path, he needs to go into the past and put him on that path to complete the loop. He vanishes and returns an instant later. The Strange who had been stationary, peering into alternate futures, has disappeared.

     First thing's first, he's gonna need to talk to the Safety Council. That's a name he remembers from his earlier poring through possible futures. Finding them, largely, just involves asking around again, in the event that his earlier foray wasn't enough to give him clues as to their location or leadership. If he gets sassed again, there's always the Eye, wherein he can find a future where he spoke to someone helpful and guide that timeline into being. No matter how he locates them, he's quick to introduce himself, flashing a Paladins ID.

     "Doctor Strange, Paladins, Seneschal. I need to talk with the Safety Council about the planned upgrades to the power system. They're not gonna work even if they do get here, and I'm not sure they will considering what happened to the Seekers." He's got that same assortment of books and conjured diagrams to argue his point, if need be, gleaned as it was through trial-and-error future-peeking. He can also conjure depictions of what happened at the tower, as well. "They had similar systems in place at their tower to draw on the proto-energy of the Expanse, and they weren't able to safely utilize it either."
Penumbra     The words Damocles puts down on the field are obviously specific enough verbiage to get the security personnel's attention. It's not exactly a complicated code phrase, but there's only a small group in the Multiverse so far that should be using it, and only very recently. Without much pause, he stands aside to allow the sorcerer to continue. It's fortunate by sheer coincidence that him calling down the team allows Cantio to slip through as well.
Gawain Gawain hms at the information given, rubbing the back of his head when it's explained that they're not in a city. He listens about the energy, the stronghold attacks, and that they're exposed. "How could we make it...not exposed?" A pause. "Ah, since the Seekers were attacked, your shipment may not appear at all. But, if there's anything we can do to stem the tide, that'd be appreciated. Our Seneschal is on the scene as well - and he's seeking to talk to your Safety Council."

Gawain bites his thumb, briefly. "Ah, an ally may be curious. Do you know where the paramancers can be located, if they need to speak to them? We're all on hand to help - as I said before, our chief goal is to discover what's happening with these various factions in the Soft Expanse, and why we've been directed here, and you have so far been worth it, in my eyes." It's not a blind trust - he's weighing the fact that they have an entire city against the Tempest's armed conflict strategy and the Seekers' goal to hoard everything for science. Cities are nice.
Damocles Damocles nods, and motions for Tomoe to follow as he strides forward.  The glowing eyes are still impassive, as if this were the most normal exchange in the world, they are past the guard.  At that point, Damocles's eyes take on a much more / . \ expression, and he looks down to Tomoe. 

"Whew, that was close.  I bet 'Zone Five' has something to do with the tower.  Maybe should go meet with these 'Keepers' and see what they have to say.  Then again, it might be a bit early yet.  Someone else mentioned that there's a big hollow space below, and that the tower up there is empty.  Might be worth checking those out, too." 

Both options seem about equal to him right now, so he looks to Tomoe.  "What do you think?  Up or down?"
Penumbra     Strange's foray into locating the Safety Council takes him close by where Tamamo and Gawain have gone. It makes sense that they'd be near the Administrative Council at the time, after all, if the situation is potentially dangerous. Given that two Paladins are already through the cordon, he's waved through with only a cursory check.

    The Security Council is much smaller in number, occupying only a single armoured monitoring truck, the seats typically occupied by radio and scanner technicians in front of glowing screens now coopted for use by several gruff men and a hulking android. They've been warned a minute prior to expect him entering, but the lot of them seem like they were deep in a discussion, and aren't precisely happy to have him intruding. They're still largely suited up, having only left the cargo-adjacent exoframes folded outside to fit through the door, as if they expect to see danger later in the day.

    They also don't like what he has to say. They *really* don't like what he has to say. He only gets halfway through his explanation before different members are taking turns to cut him off and argue about the details of schematics and simulations that they've been assured are very much the opposite to his claims. As a medical professional, he gets the idea that these people aren't fully certified professionals of what they're preaching, and have been informed by people who are, but that they're bright enough to have absorbed as much information as needed until they have a solid understanding of the concepts.

    No doubt those 'Paramancers' had sold the idea to them before they'd agreed to allow the installation in the first place. That much would be the most sensible conclusion. Their combative arguing only decreases in intensity once he begins showing them footage of 'the Unified Tower' at 'Side Five'. They, of course, politely demand he surrenders the footage and any further data he has for their analysis. That *is* the part they're professionals at.
Tomoe Tomoe will finish her search on the Makers Council later, she pockets her phone at this point and will move to tail after Damocles partially he seems to have a good lead on where they could go next. She also wants to keep an eye on him. She will move after him at a fairly good clip She dog along after Damocles and looks him over for a moment.

"Down, trouble always seems to bubble up from below in my experience."
Penumbra     With the amount of clearance obtained by the Paladins as a whole now, Njall and co. aren't meaningfully harassed on the way in. The couple of the security they pass by hold to their earpieces as they request and are updated on the situationin real time. They do tell him, twice, to stick to outer perimeter and not to cross the 'event horizon' until they have a working plan. Which he will probably do anyways, but he can lie about it, or just not say anything.

    Going down the darkened 'streets' towards the blackout zone is neither difficult nor dangerous. A little spooky, seeing so much sprawling, futuristic architecture lying dark at midday, bereft of even a single window glow on either side, but not hard. He arrives at the massive fusion of towers, where a 'downtown' of skyscrapers had given up on maintaining streets and all run together into a kilometer high steel and onyx version of the Giants' Steps. The hazard zone in question must certainly be inside, awaiting repair and reinstallation.

    The front doors are quite tightly sealed. The ramps down into what must be cargo and vehicle bays are even further shut by heavy, explosion-proof gates. Windows have been latched down with fire hatches. It seems the m(M)akers of the 'listening post' hadn't been so gleefully intent on installing every single thing they could think of, up to and including 'teleportation wards', but the physical security is very robust. Most importantly, a cursory examination seems to indicate that it's primarily designed to keep things *in*, and incidentally functions to keep him out.

    His architectural analysis finds that the construction is both durable and expensive, using a lot of advanced alloys and clever techniques that'd take some very skilled designers, builders, and resourciers to pull off. All if it is very stable right now, created mostly through raw ingenuity and talent. Breaking down any of the blast doors to the main bays is probably going to be absurdly, wastefully difficult. One of the personnel access lanes would be easier, but set him on a long course into the interior of the building. There are no doubt further security systems inside, but it seems unlikely it'd be teeming with killbots. There are waste heat and gas ducts that'd normally boil the flesh off his bones for climbing through, but given the lack of power generation at all, he could try those and cross his fingers for where he ends up.
Doctor Strange      He'd had some inkling that what he had to say wouldn't be received well. Frankly, getting interrupted by people 'who had been assured this would work' is a refreshing change of pace compared to 'ideological dogfights' and the myriad other ills and perils he and his fellow Paladins must often endure. "Sure," says Strange, having patiently endured the interjections up to the point--albeit not without his characteristic deadpan frown.

     The footage is handed over. "Assuming the Seekers have gotten settled in at their new position, Verity should be able to support this evidence with a first-hand account," he adds, just in case there's any further need. "I've got a guy working to get your power back online now. The safest way to do that is to go back to what you had before. He's going to set you up for that, but he's not going to flip the switch until you give the go-ahead."

     "Now," says Strange, folding his scarred hands behind his back. "While you guys look over that information, I'd like some of my own. I'm guessing it was the Paramancers that sold you guys on this idea. What I wanna know is... why now? This place looks like it's been here for a while." Maybe the upgrade had something to do with powering that mass of computers.

     His brow furrows. "What's this outpost monitoring, exactly? New Unifications?"
Damocles "Fair enough.  Let's go find some trouble," Damocles agrees with the plan as such.  However, at the moment, they don't really have any idea how to access the lower sections.  Or even where the lower sections actually are.  All they know is some comment on the radio.

Still, proceeding further into the city seems like a good first step, so that's what Damocles does, striding with purpose, deeper into the cordoned off area.  It's reasonable to assume that they didn't plan for 'unauthorized people' here, so they probably wouldn't hide access points, so as Damocles moves, he keeps an eye out for anything like stairs, elevators or subways that could lead them deeper.

At the same time, he also looks for other people within this area.  Past the security, most people here will probably assume you belong here, and from what Damocles has seen, this group contains all kinds, so he isn't worried about blending in.  If he does find someone, he'll simply ask them, claiming he has 'been dispatched with an issue below' and 'isn't fully familiar with the area just yet.'
Penumbra     Following along with Gawain so far, Jung responds to his primary question with the deep heaving sigh and roll of aching shoulders of a man who's been trying to answer that question all day. "Physically plugging up the area exposed to the Expanse, for one, but we're talking about at least a couple of square miles of area in the main converter chamber. Then, disabling the accumulators; while the control network is down, so, manually. Then you'd have to clear out all the haze from inside. It's simple in theory, but we don't have the means or the resources to mount that kind of thing carelessly."

    He laughs tiredly and hoarsely at the mention of 'all the factions', though. "They're not my division, but the Paramancer crew is with us. If you've met some of the others, you have the gist. A year ago, a lot of people who wanted nothing to do with your big groups had the bright idea of making their own. Too loose a mission statement, in retrospect, but the idea of comprehending the Multiverse and harnessing what it's given us, instead of merely controlling or correcting it, had its appeal."

    "Turns out, what that means is pretty different between different folk. Internal divisions happened. Unofficial subfaction names. Then official ones. Became more than a matter of voting difference. So here we are. You're talking to the creative and constructive core of the whole operation though. They don't call us Makers for nothing. We have expertise from all over Sector Zero, and as far as we're concerned, the future of the Multiverse is in equalling out the haves and the have nots. Proliferating the best, the finest, the most rugged, most reliable designs into the many hands that need them, and coming up with our own. Build a legacy we can all be proud of. Not a continental treefort of an ivory bastille."

    He clears his throat. "Some disagree, but we've been lucky that none of them have been all that violent about it so far. This piece here is our first big project. An autonomous, self-powered, fully inhabited and crewed super-computational cluster attached to the Protean Loom. We call it a listening post because it listens out for new Unifications. When they come out through the Expanse, they make metaphysical disturbance. Vibrates through the loom like a radio wire --or spider's web if you like bugs. Then we can use the cluster to narrow down its point of entry, roughly map it out, and update our Warpgate network map to perfect currency. I guess they're *all* interested in that."

    He grunts again. "Not interested enough to help finish, though." Slowly shaking his head, he says "The Paramancers aren't here. They're all on leave until this is sorted out. No use having them stewing in a meeting room while they literally can't do a thing. No magic power, no point."
Njall Rinc Faced with "directions" and not their "actual work site", Njall and Cecilia lead their new Crew inwards. The actual crew seems to be doing most of the leading, because while they all have expertise of various stripes, and those are abstracted out, they're still distributed. Njall understands the structural tidbits broadly, but the actual whole understanding is routed through the construction workers.

"Do you suppose this is a viable shortcut?" He asks.

The salt-and-pepper haired foreman shakes his head and chuckles. "Nope. Well, it could be, but it's a hell of a safety violation. We want to get a look at the real intended structure of the place anyway if we're going to do construction. Let's get going."

The Foreman takes point. Every now and then they stop again to lay down another teleport node.

"I wonder how long it took to put all this together. It's not exactly small, is it?" Njall muses aloud.

"I don't know... we can build things pretty fast," Cecilia comments.

"Even we'd take a while for something like this," The Foreman replies.

Cecilia makes a grudging noise of agreement.
Cantio As creepy as the blackout zone is, Cantio's decently prepared to scour the darkness! She keeps her drones' lights on to help her see where she's going, providing convenient lighting for the rest of the crew also headed down there as well. She does seem a bit more anxious once she joins up with Njall, Damocles, Tomoe, and any others venturing further down, but at least they're not all terrifying.

"Watch your step, everyone. Even if it's just a power outage, there could be sudden steep drops or steps to look out for." With that warning given, she begins her own search for the actual hazard zone that's (presumably) the cause of this entire blackout. With so many gates and hatches closing things off, however, Cantio's thinking starts to wander.

"What do you think they even have in here? A place this large would need its employees to be able to get in and out efficiently, but all these precautions seem anything but efficient." Furrowing her brow, she looks over briefly at Njall and Cecilia. "Right? I'm more of a machine tinkerer than an architecht, but there's definitely something worth poking around at in there. And if we can find anything along the way, that might give us a better idea of what's even broken."

Thus, she heads for the service route, keeping her eyes peeled in particular for signs of automation, pipelines, and other natural-enough flow of things that might give her an idea of where the backbone of the facility might even be.
Tomoe It is indeed spooky as Tomoe head down following after Damocles Tomoe is clearly on edge. Then again who wouldn't be given what powers Damocles? She doesn't have much choice in the end soi down they go. She keeps with him not pulling her weapons yet that would be a bad idea to do so.

She gets down then she looks for a moment at the city then takes moment to size things up as she looks at her 'partner' for a moment.

"I wonder how long these people have been here...you know I was there the day the Multiverse barfed? I wonder if they are related to splinters off of the old mega factions..."
Gawain Gawain nods to the Mattermancer, and clearly likes what he's saying. "I understand. Thank you for the information. If we can help finish, we may like to do that, pending approval from both my superiors and your group - what you've just said, about your goal, resounds with me on a deep level. For now, however, my allies are seeking out a plan for the current disaster. I wanted to ask you something, for the future."

"Who, besides the Tempest, is the most dangerous of these groups? Any of them we need to keep an eye or ear out for? You're the third we've met, and frankly, the most amenable."
Penumbra     Dropping the 'Archlogician's name seems to win Strange some begrudging credibility points. The reception to Verity in particular appears to be ambivalent to the point of barely better than neutral. The Safety Council indicates that they haven't gotten any kind of call from them yet (probably reasonable) and firmly request what line he has to her.

    When he asks about the purpose of the listening post, he receives a similar answer to what Timaeus Jung has given Tamamo and Gawain in the diner slash command post. The answers largely seem to come down to the practicality of having to do much less maintenance and fuel delivery, and having some systems that should at least keep the thing up in the air indefinitely, even in the worst case scenario. It takes a good half hour of semi-polite argument before they finally agree to forestall the upgrade process. The argument that wins out is that their job is to ensure the installation's safety in all respects, as their name indicates, and not prioritize finishing projects above it. It's the other departments' problem until they can prove it's not going to blow up.

    This is incredibly fast by anything even approximating a city council's judgement. Sure, there aren't many of them, but it's measured in minutes rather than days.

    With Gawain himself, is treated to some more headscratching and tired grumbling, then made to wait as Jung holds up a finger to take a call (from the Safety Council, updated by Strange's information). Turning back to the knight, his opinion takes a while to fully form into words, coming out ponderous bit by bit, as if concerned about being misquoted. "If you've had a run-in with the Tempest under less than amicable circumstances, you have my condolences and all, but I wouldn't naturally say they're 'dangerous' in the main sense of the word. If you cross them, sure enough, but the past six months have been nothing but altercations across the board. Some more or less violent than others, depending on how hot the disagreement turns. Pointing guns at them is just asking for trouble of course, but at least you know what you're getting into."

    "You've probably in more danger if you're compromised and sold out by the brains who used to run the Hub."
Penumbra     'Searching for trouble' 'down' between Damocles and Tomoe, and searching for the site they've been fed information about within Njall's team, amounts to a common intersection of paths and purposes.

    Cantio dedicating her time to observing the mechanical parts of the facility, with her extensive personal knowledge, has a very practical solution to the problem. The architecture is weird and difficult to figure out, but it serves the pragmatic purpose of housing, layering, ventilating, powering, cooling, and providing efficient access to machinery all throughout the inside, making it easy enough to figure out with a skilled engineer's intuition.

    Machinery she's very familiar with, actually. Following the routing of power conduits, coolant pipes, fans, electric groundings, and other such things built into the tower cluster itself, she quickly arrives at the conclusion that most of that bulk must be filled with computing equipment. Vast, towering stacks of it, spaced only as far apart as demands of heat, field interference, equipment space, and personnel movement require. It must already consume exponentially more power than an ordinary small city would just from people living in it.

    It also helps her find an appropriate service route without issue, locating a rather nondescript set of access hatches in the side of one of the lower ramps, where a still-functioning simple water cooling loop is bound to lead her to the primary heat source in the facility. Between the several Elites, a few sealed security doors, locked stairwells, dark bullet elevator shafts, and obtuse locking mechanisms aren't too much of a challenge.

    Locating the steep dives where cabling has to drop many floors at once, only plausible to follow with flight, saves them a ton of time, rapidly taking them into the dark bowels of tower cluster. Soon, their path is lit only by red emergency lights, silently bereft of any siren. The floors have been reduced to mesh catwalks, exposing the thrumming casings of machines below that require the air flow. Looming obelisks of flat and angular computing blades rise up on all sides like halls and chambers of gargantuan statues. Even though this whole block is completely dark outside, they can still hear the chugging grind and crackle of millions of miles of circuit-equivalents exchanging their static charge and scanning their drives.
Gawain "The Hub? ...espionage, I assume?" Gawain makes a guess, and waits briefly for an answer or explanation. Once he gets it, he nods, but before he can say anything else, he gets a phonecall. He checks the number, and...

"Ah, I need to take this. Thank you for your information - despite your not wanting to truly get involved with the factions, I still hope that the Paladins can be of use to you and yours. Please do not hesitate to contact us, and if I guess correctly, my allies are already working on solving some of the problems here if they can. As"

After a nod of the head, Gawain moves out to take his phone call, and then head off to eventually rejoin Strange for a portal back to the Aegis Astray.
Doctor Strange      "I'll look for her, I'll find her, and I'll talk to her." This is the closest that the Council will get to a promise. "Frankly, I like your way of doing things a lot more than hers, so--while I do that..." Strange tears a hole in space to retreat to the Sanctum.

     Another Strange appears before them in a flash of green light, having already searched for Verity. They don't need to know that, though. "Why don't *we* talk about some safer alternatives to your energy problem? Assuming you can... spare someone from analyzing the data I handed you, I mean." He pauses. "...you guys must have thought of something besides 'plug into the unshaped not-yet-stuff of the Multiverse.' Right?" He frowns archly, inclining his head towards them. "Throw out an idea, I'll run some projections. We'll have fun."

     He'll also look into some ideas of his own. There are multiple threads here. This place is heavy and it's huge. Would decentralizing things here, breaking up the devices and tools, or maybe outsourcing some of the work or surveillance to the surrounding town help cut down on operating costs?

     Meanwhile, in the Sanctum, Strange searches through some of the worlds given as suggestions to the Seekers for places to travel to. Are they doing the 'set up in one place' thing again or the 'convoy' thing he suggested? Can he even find them? If he can... he'll seek Verity out, give an explanation, in as succinct a way as possible, and ask for her insight on how the outpost can be powered safely. It's also a good opportunity to check in and see if the Seekers have learned... literally anything.

     Hopefully, after the incidents at the Tower, Verity's input is informed by the necessity for safety, responsibility, and not slapping your own personal sticker on things barely anyone apparently understands.
Cantio "Is this some kind of... Central cooling system? No, there's too many parts in here for this. But there's definitely..." As she gets more into the zone, Cantio's muttering becomes more pronounced and increasingly incomprehensible. She follows the paths well enough, although her attention is all but monopolized by trying to understand how everything fits together and figuring out the design process behind it all.

"This isn't just a power source. It's more like a massive computer array. But putting them all in here means the range...? And then there's those support structures from before..." Following the routing further, it takes Cantio a while to finally notice that one service route, but she does finally point it out once her curiousity is mostly satisfied. "It looks like the main heat source is that way. Something might have burnt too hot, though, so watch out if you're holding anything flammable."

Eventually, the frequent drops and general difficulty of navigation convinces Cantio to give up on pretenses. There's a flash of light as she transforms, giving her the convenience of flight despite still using the drones to light the way forward and downwards to safe-looking landing points to speed up the group's travel time. Upon reaching the obelisks, she keeps her drones around for visibility, but there's a short while where she's trying to just process all of this.

"So it's all running from here... Erm. Probably. I-i mean, it would make sense if they did that and kept everything in a central location, right?" She laughs awkwardly, trying to keep things from getting too stifling in there despite the job at hand. Once that dies down, she closes her eyes, taking note of the noise of functioning circuits.

"... But it sounds like the machines are still working fine. There shouldn't be a blackout here unless it tripped a failsafe or something." There's another pause as she starts floating around the structure, looking for busted parts that she might be able to just fix on the spot with liberal application of lasers, lights, and the occasional bash of her sword. "Or maybe... Is it possible the blackout was intentional?"
Njall Rinc "Ahh, we'll be fine," The Foreman responds to Cantio, with a wave of his hand. He and his team do appreciate more luck, however.

In reaction to her question, Njall smiles knowingly and replies, "If I had to guess, 'a wonder of the Multiverse'. But I said so when we first arrived here. It looks very grand, doesn't it? Depending on how grand, we might have to do something about it, but I don't think so. As I was just saying, it doesn't feel like it is a construct of purest hubris."

As to what's down here, Cecilia responds, "I wouldn't think of it as dangerous in the way that we usually would. More like... a nuclear power plant, maybe. You don't mess around with the sort of stuff going on in there, but it's not necessarily deliberately threatening, if you understand my meaning."

Njall scratches his head quizzically. In response to Cantio's suggestion on the radio, he asks, "Like a thrown breaker? But that's not the impression we've gotten or the instructions I was given. There is an expansion of the system that cannot be installed, and would cause a disaster if it was activated successfully. In other words, yes, as far as I am aware the blackout was intentional."

"Cecilia, if you please," he reaches towards her, and she hands him her pistol.

Njall shoots a portal on the floor, and then points... at the ceiling? Yes, at the ceiling. He fires, and the shot travels up through the entire depth of the building, stopping at the limits of his perceptions -- which is Really Damn Far -- and opening up on natural sunlight.

Cool mountain air and light open up onto the computer chamber from the portal, illuminating it more clearly and maybe cooling it a little too.

"H-hey, how did you..." Cecilia stammers.

"The shot distance is based on your perceptive range," he explains.
Penumbra     The area where the new installations were supposed to go is so obvious that anyone could figure it out after first seeing it. Shafts for swift, fast-moving personnel elevators arrive a singular chamber that couldn't have been made out of simply conjoining enough towers and knocking down the walls, big enough to fly a sufficiently maneuverable aircraft around in circles inside.

    Not only is the center of it so much empty space, where thousands of ports, cables, hoses, pipes, and transmitters bristle without connections in the walls and ceiling, an enormous portion of the flooring, circular and probably more than half a mile in radius, has been stripped away completely, flooding the chamber with dim, pale white light, from the hazing nothing outside, visible through the hole.

    Which makes no sense, because the hole should just peer down into the bottom side of the facility. Not outside.

    It's reasonably clear where everything should go. It's complicated beyond believe, but neatly organized and clearly labeled by some significant number of Elite engineering specialists. The problem, besides the significant lack of a floor, is the way that the soft, effervescent light spills into the chilly interior, and becomes a weightly, misty white haze that overflows its edges. Though the haze itself doesn't seem to be harmful in any meaningful way, what has been keeping the workers out is obvious within its reaches.

    In scores of places, indistinct, fuzzy white light-mist coalesces into bright humanoid shapes, milling about the vast space in disorganized clusters, as if lost and looking for an exit. Though there are whole throngs of them in places, they never seem to stray all that far from the edge of the gap, only repeating meandering circles around it, for the fact that it seems that once they stray about half a kilometer away, they begin to lose brightness and substance, compelling them back.

    They are, unfortunately however, dangerous. Approaching the cleanly cut breach zone, any Elites immediately attract the attention of the faceless, senseless, seemingly intangible entities. Where they enter into the radius of the overflow of light, the apparitions suddenly speed up, charging at them at lightning quick running speed, making only the soft echoes of thumps where they run, and collide in flurries of vague and indistinct violence. It's hard to make out any particular source of harm, but they all feel familiar. Sword blows, heavy punches, burning stabs; whatever comes to mind. Those that wisely keep their distance are no better off. Embers of light from the Expanse flicker to life inside their astral forms, converging into glittering sprays of white projectiles, that hit, and hurt, like bullets, fire, damaging spells, and small explosives.

    They are, at least plausible to destroy without much effort, dissipating into harmless ambient fog again. However, they only appear to be receptive to attack when engaged in combat themselves. Double however, they reform (or new ones form, up to a limit) from the light of the breach every few minutes, leading to a theoretically endless supply of problems. Little wonder why the security teams had decided to retreat and draw up a plan.
Damocles The trail that leads Damocles along the path the others follow is a simple one, starting easily enough. A power line leads to an access port, which leads to a conduit, and on and on until he meets up with the others. He's actually a little surprised to see them this time, and his eyes arch up a little to show that.

"Oh, hello there," He greets in a friendly enough voice. "Fancy see you here." He doesn't recognize any of them, but it's clear to him that they're also exploring. "I'm Damocles. We've probably spoken over the radio at some point. I trust you're also all here seeking answers to the..erm..the whole..." He gestures around vaguely. "This."

The trip downward requires little be said, though the ultimate destination is interesting. Glowing mist and...monsters, he supposes. "Interesting," He muses aloud, "They're almost like..echos. Reflections of people cast through too many mirrors." The attacks are less welcomed, and after some consideration, he voices his opinion on the situation.

"For my part, I'd recommend caution. We have no need for haste, and forcing a conflict will probably only escalate things even more against us. A slow and measured approach is called for here."
Njall Rinc This space doesn't make any sense whatsoever and Njall hates it because he can practically taste it. When they finally intersect with the other group, he smiles genially and waves towards Damocles.

"Njall Rinc, a pleasure. This is Cecilia, The Foreman, and company," he introduces himself and his crew. Cecilia bows, the Foreman waves, and the crew just sort of grunts.

But he halts his crew when silhouettes begin to appear in the distance, and instead withdraws a short way beginning to issue orders to his work crew. They create a small building -- a hut, really -- that houses one of the recall pedestals he made, hopefully a decent ways outside of the aggression range of the strange figures.
Cantio "A power plant... Yes, that would make sense for something this size on a structure this size." Cantio nods slowly at Njall's assessment, tapping a finger to her chin during her inspection. "It'd be far more efficient than reying on countless batteries, especially if they need something more consistent. A flying power plant still sounds so dangerous, though..." She shivers lightly at the thought. That, or something even worse.

"... Eh? You got directuons? nobody would even give me the time of day before." She sounds rather dejected about that fact. Luckily, she gets distracted shortly afterwards as Njall opens up the ceiling to natural light, looking between him and the hole several times just to get that possibility of things happening locked in. "I'm Cantio. It's good to meet you all! Erm. Again."

Alas, her awe at staring at new stuff has to take a back seat when her inspection leads to finding more physical oddities. Namely, the lack of a floor and the strange beings in the breach zone. Cantio looks uncertain as she floats forward slowly, only drawing her weapon when they start to charge at the group. "Incoming! Don't get surrounded!"

Defensive combat is thename of the game for the time being as Cantio recognizes the sheer volume of light... Whatevers being a potential problem without knowing what they're capable of.  Damocles' recommendation gets a nod for her as she holds her ground, slashing apart the creatures that draw close enough to her without actually advancing further herself. Her curiousity gets the better of her, however, as she pops a segment of her laser-ish sword open, revealing a long tube that looks kind of like a whistle.

Against her better judgment, she turns on her tech-whistle, launching a brief yet incredibly sharp chime at the light beings to see how they react.
Tomoe Tomoe and her unlikely partner today head deeper. She and Damocles keep moving and then it turns out they are not alone there.

"Tomoe."

She notes to Njall and his companion and as she's about to say more? Something happens things start coming after them.

"I would have to agree running in yelling my name."

She doesn't get to say more as they end up under attack she'll pop a few defence abilities and nods in agreement.

She'll attempt to fend off any who get too close as she will start to back off with, Njall's crew and hopefully Damocles. She will also take note of Cantio, but getting out of the range of agression of thes things seems to be her main focus at the moment. Well if the things even have such...
Penumbra     12 HOURS LATER

    The situation has not significantly changed at the site designated 'listening post'. At the edge of the Soft Expanse, the city-computer that hangs suspended from the silvery threads of proto-world-stuff in the blurry white sky, and its support town built around the frozen lake miles below, are still caught in deadlock. As the sun begins to set, the surface of the perfectly smooth ice is alight with the signal glow of bow to stern ice ships that have been there all day, and the expansive outer decks of the installation itself, largely exposed to the sky for civilian purposes, are still backed up with increasingly tired and irate people who can't go back in to the cordoned off inner half and its blacked out work-streets. Thousands of people in the gunmetal greys, sky blues, snow whites, and steel silvers of the splinter faction called 'the Makers' have been waiting all day for this problem to be resolved, some having moved off to the web of smaller support structures that help distribute the listening post's vast, metropolis-weight across the sky, rather than continue to argue to with the work-exoskeleton-clad security blockade.

    Discussions with repeated emergency convenings of the local board have made the situation clear, mostly liaising through the 'Mattermancer Administrator' Timaeus Jung. The listening post's extensively designed, yet never activated, magical upgrades lie dormant, after dire warnings about the fate of the 'Unified Tower' were finally heeded by the Safety Council. However, this leaves the facility on something of a soft timer for how long it can continue to provide power to its thrusters, now doing the heavy lifting, since the issue in the first place was the wholesale removal of the whole power core complex to install some sort of special invention from the Seekers that never arrived; a system capable of drawing energy directly from the unformed potential of the Expanse itself and converting it into multiple energy types, necessary to power the preexisting, robust electrical systems, and the attempts at new magical and metaphysical ones.

    Having penetrated deep into the humming core of the main computing blocks, at the center of such much computing equipment it forms towering spires one can walk around inside, harkening Elites have found the nonsensical hole where the center of the facility has somehow been exposed to the indistinct, glowing white void of the Soft Expanse, through a hole over a mile across, inside a chamber of according size and lined with exactly as many plugs and ports and cables and lines as one would expect. Sealing that breach by itself would be a very large project, but the fuzzy white fog that rolls up over the edges also keeps coalescing into luminous humanoids of mysterious, yet hostile description, complicating efforts further.

    Due to information delivered by Elites, the Mattermancer Administrator has managed to reestablish contact with a previous contact --a high-up in the Seekers by the name of Verity 'Tas. After teleportation arrangements were constructed into the core, at a safe distance from the spatial breach's hostile boundary, the delay has been well-used to ship in rather special 'emergency supplies' for the situation.
Penumbra     A small group, lead by Verity, and clad in the danger green, yellow, and white of the Seekers, has come bearing the only currently available samples of some 'prototype tools' that were in R&D for their Maker allies, before the catastrophic deletion of their ~~tree fort~~ laboratory tower. Though they are only a half-dozen at most, significant effort has been spared to securely transport what at first appears to be pairs of mo-cap glove frames, fitted easily over any humanoid hand and adjusted to size, made of a dazzling mix of metals, plastics, wood, and ceramics, but with unmistakable, tiny discs of polished, fractured white marble at the knuckles, and black fingertips that glow like coals.

    The Mattermancer has come as well to at least view the efforts. A brief meeting outside the range of the breach draws out a general plan. Volunteers are needed to use the prototypes in some fashion that can fill in the cut-away area with functional construction, sufficient to provide power to the whole listening post again; both its support equipment and infrastructure, *and* its sensor and computing equipment, of course. They'll be under attack by the seemingly infinite shades until the job is done, and, unfortunately, the secret weapons are going to be drawing power from the listening post's immense reserves, somehow, limiting the time they have to work.

    However some dubious super-nerd Elite powergloves are going to help isn't very well described. Jung makes fairly clear that anyone wearing a pair is going to be responsible for the construction, and will have to make arrangements for their own safety. Verity, the five foot nothing pointy-eared blonde in glasses, to his burly bearded ancient Greek philosopher look, demands that you utilize them to your best efforts to provide enough burst power capacity to maximize the station's SENSITIVITY in its intended purpose of detecting new Unifications, enough raw power flow to sustain the FIDELITY of its readings when surveying and mapping warpgates and destinations in those future regions, and enough safeguards to maximize its RELIABILITY in case of any number of fluctuations or unforeseen events in the Expanse. Jung, by contrast, merely asks that you, whatever you do, be THOROUGH about it, and to 'not just come up with the wildest thing you can imagine', but to 'stick to what you know; even if you don't know how to build it yourself, make it something you're familiar with."
Eryl Fairfax     In the interim time, Eryl has seen fit to arrive and assist with matters. The situation is clear; they need to get things up and running, and to do that, they have been provided... something. Original Face struggles to analyse the gloves as Eryl slips a pair on, flexing and wiggling his fingers. "So these can fill in the gaps with anything I can imagine? That's quite incredible..." Frankly, he would rather spend this time picking the Mattermancer's brain. But work must be done.

    Wasting no time, he rushes off to get started. Jung had insisted on THOROUGHNESS. That they all draw from what they already know, rather than coming up with anything they please. Eryl is quite frankly suspicious of this. A very roundabout way of stealing secrets via having them be integrated into this place's new systems. But at the same time, creation comes easier when its drawn from what you know. He will have faith in the well-meaningness of the advice, for now.

    And so, it is for that reason that he has his implants bring up Eryl's own blueprints from his memory banks, and draws from the bioelectrical circuits that meld his implants and nervous system. By drawing from these, he paints new lines with his gloves, filling in gaps in the connections between the electrical and magical systems, aiming to improve FIDELITY while also adding in enough redundant circuits based on branching nerves to also makes things RELIABLE.
Cantio After floating around the strange computing structure the last time, Cantio's gotten a vaguely better idea at how the thing works. It had taken some more time than she'd like to realize that the weird hole was not an intended part of the design, but recognizing that does make things a bit easier as far as figuring out what the next plan of attack is.

"I don't quite understand it myself, but it's certainly an interesting function... Let's see what we can do this!"

In this case, Cantio's going to leave the actual attack and defense against the strange shades to everyone else. Her specialties/obsessions lie with messing with weird technology and machines, after all, so this is the perfect opportunity to try and get this station made just right. Best case scenario, it'll keep working long enough she does't have to come back ever again. Worst case scenario, she'll have a better idea of how it all fits together if and when she does.

For now, her options appear to lie with working towards either Verity's or Jung's specifications. As she gets to work, she takes it slow and carefully at first, making sure to inspect those prototypes to try and actually understand how they work before trying anything too outlandish. To start, she's focusing on being THOROUGH with her work, trying to establish a strong base mimicking the construction of her own home city as something she's actually familiar with. In doing so, she's also working on a RELIABLE base with redundant support structures to keep things stable as a secondary focus.

She'll worry about trying more radical and experimental stuff after she gets her bearings.
Doctor Strange      Strange will assuredly request a pair of those gloves. Having facilitated Verity's liaison with the Safety Council was probably a good first step towards proving wrong any preconceived notions about the Paladins. He's hoping that will earn him enough good will for a pair. If not, or if there's not enough to go around, he'll just grab a pair from a timeline where the repairs were completed.

     Arriving at the Nonsensical Hole at the center of the facility, with a pair of gloves, he begins his work. His primary concern is RELIABILITY. Sorcery is essentially the ability to access certain tools in reality's developer kit. Spells are essentially 'programs,' so there are a number of ways that he can write safeguards into the structure, no matter what means of power capacity and flow the others decide to use. His work, for once, is made to be easily understandable by onlookers.

     Sigils and mandalas carve themselves into the spaces before those myriad plug-holes, sockets, and the like. "Think of what I'm doing here as like back-up power cords," he explains. Each one inert for the time being. However, baked into each is a simple IF/THEN. If at any point the transference of power through normal means fails, two things will happen. The sigils will activate and attempt to draw power directly from the source, whatever it may be. If no input is detected from the default power source, they will instead ping an alert to the station's control center and begin drawing a minimum necessary power from any of several 'energy dimensions' Strange is aware of, spread out to reduce the station's footprint.

     Another Strange appears in a flash of green, this one without any gloves. He will focus on defense, via binding and banishing those hostile figures which emerge from the formless white nothing of the Expanse.
Gawain Gawain, twelve hours later, is still in the listening hub. Once they're all set up, organized, and being given the gloves, he declines. "Grandmaster, I'll cover you." He tells Eryl, as he summons his armor and sword.

Once they're in the space and on go, Gawain's blade is moving, slashing left, right, and stabbing forward to try and clear hostile specters and keep Eryl safe. He sticks close, but not too close to interrupt, baiting the figures towards him and then moving to behead. Hopefully, he can keep the pressure off while Eryl does his construction.
Tamamo     "Things with which to fill the empty void of the machine, is it? I know less of machines, though I do something of... several matters that may be of use, harnessed energies and empty voids among them." Tamamo accepts a pair of gloves and carefully tests the fit against her nails. "Though I might also assist with the matter of controlling the field against assault, that would be difficult to focus upon at once, and should have focus when performing. To attempt anew should not be relied upon in setting the supports of a home."

    Once she has the chance to follow in and begin to work, she focuses on those 'supports' first of all. They wanted power, to be put to several purposes, but the main point is that they needed *power*. Nothing will be usefully done without it. Though the gloves are plenty curious on their own, Tamamo immediately taps into her own divinity and lets it flow through them, creating a good, secure fit on that immaterial plane, so she can skip over the part where she'd play around and see what they can do. If they don't work as advertised, then she won't accept any blame for having leapt straight into it.

    There is, essentially, no good groundwork of leylines in this place. The usual basis of reliable history either barely or doesn't at all exist, thanks to the unformed nature of the Expanse. Lacking that, there's still one avenue that naturally exists within vast voids practically bereft of external support, and with which Tamamo is intimately familiar.

    Those supports that appear, golden-glowing geometry tightly inset with nigh-invisibly-sized writing, extending into rotational orbits that contain their own orbits, all exist for a single purpose: to contain and connect the blazingly bright miniature sun that appears in the center of the space, the most independently reliable source of power Tamamo could conceive, though in the words spoken of in their instructions, this should instead be termed work towards high FIDELITY, in providing the power the sensors will require.
Robin Sundance      There's someone here who looks kind of out-of-place.

     He's a big, mechanical monster sort of thing. Cybernetic, maybe, except for the fact that he's half plant, with leaves growing out of metal and metal growing out of leaves. It's like looking at a bush that decided to start walking around and get prosthetics. It's lopsided and asymmetrical; the right metal arm is much better than the vine tentacles hanging off the left side. It only has one eye, a weird red camera thing peeking out of the tangle that is probably its head. It's eight feet tall, too, and the robot arm is at least three, and its legs are a mix of vines wrapped around metal.

     It has introduced itself as Zorbrax, and it has very cheerfully signed up to work with the the gloves. Zorbrax has worked its tendrils into the gloves with some difficulty. However, it's enthusiastic, if not...great...at the task. It's fairly uncreative - just sort of making very simple, very reliable, very...basic reinforcements, focused on RELIABILITY. Supports. Architecturally-boring, but safe.
Tomoe Tomoe survived her little trip with Damocles, she's not dead so she'll call that a win. Soon other groups' efforts have paid off with getting them in contact with Verity. That's gone pretty well all things considered and they were going to try to do something about the power issues. While she'd like to help with the repairs? It may be better to help deal with the shades so the others can work a bit more easily. When it comes to the SHADES Tomoe will be trying to keep them focused on her even if it means she ends up taking one hell of a beating for her efforts.
Doctor Strange      As a further means of ensuring RELIABILITY, Present!Strange is, in fact, tearing out the Makers' recent additions, quite literally. Holes in space are cut, time is reversed in localized fashion, old runes are scratched out. All of this, in service of preventing the future he previously saw, wherein activating the power as-is would be catastrophic on the level of the Unified Tower.
Penumbra     Surprisingly, or perhaps not at all, depending on one's expectations at this point, the powerglove items seem to fit with zero adjustment. They even seem to steady Strange's scarred up fingers, to a degree. The only one who finds any kind of difficulty with them is 'Zorbrax', whose finger frames just stubbornly refuse to adjust nicely to his tendril arm. Oh well. Nobody is looking too closely after the first couple work; not on this timetable.

    The lack of explanation seems almost purposeful now. Perhaps better described as a lack of preconception. Without instructions to learn, there are only the most intuitive motions to rely on, and the utilization of the hands to make things is one of the most intuitive things of all. Summoning the will to Create fills them with a thrilling tingle of static and potential, and envisioning the desired outcome makes them whirr and click and churn like dozens of tiny asynchronous hard drives in motion. The gripping, sculpting, squeezing, pulling, sweeping, pointing, gesturing, and grand orchestrations of make-believe building of things cause their glowing points of cobalt and fire to flash brightly, and then stain that foggy whiteness in the colours of the creative imagination.

    For instance. Clapping hands together around a wisp of colourless fog causes a tremendous amount of the Expanse's light at the center to crunch together into a pure white core, and then ignite into a miniature stellar body that fills the entire chamber with light and warmth, and the subtle tug of gravity, without the fiddly and unwelcomely detailed considerations of being boiled or poisoned, though Tamamo can feel an invisible, magnetic pressure between her hands, in facsimile of holding and containing it, until a proper apparatus is devised.

    Dragging fingertips through the luminous mist pulls it taut like guitar strings, condensing and coalescing into the translucent pathways of optics and axons, in great, miles long ropes and branches that follow Eryl as fast as he can run, splitting into tailored ends to the plugs and ports he chooses that are complicated enough he doesn't *quite* get them, but they *feel* right. Bit hand flattening motions, like smoothing out a carpet, begin papering over the breach with immense quantity of high-tech and heavy-duty chassis familiar to Cantio, letting her stomp around and condense computer plating out of the light and slam it down into place like fitting a jigsaw, then rise thick and solid pillars and struts and braces and connectors from it like a jungle of steel. Strange has merely to draw his sigils once each, and thousands of identical drawings appear all around him, like an audience in the risers, blazing to life synchronously in eerie mimicry of drawing on a tablet connected to way too many open windows of the same image editor. Removing old runes is as easy as rubbing them out on a whiteboard. Holes can be plugged by pinching and wadding up a crude suggestion of space to stuff in with a finger.

    Despite Robin's best efforts to remain inconspicuous and do nothing special, he finds that goal difficult. For *everyone*, the way that these tools respond to every last bit of their creative potential, realized and hidden, is deeply, instinctively thrilling. Exciting. Even a little addictive. Easy to get carried away with. It'd be easy to say that the tools yearn to be used, pulling at the leash that Robin tries to hold them to, and fulfill a greater purpose, but really it's more like his hands themselves want to betray his staunch desire to be uncreative, and fulfill their human tool-manipulating purpose. Who could resist this sublime moment of demiurgic expression and remain happy? It takes considerable willpower to keep it suppressed, or else little details, personal and pleasing to him, pop up like stubborn daisies between sidewalk cracks, embellishing his work with satisfying flourishes and things he personally finds beautiful.
Penumbra     The main impediment to really getting carried away are those strange wraiths of potential that form out of the very same mists, however, condensing out of the crawling fog like beads of moisture. Where it remains untouched by human thoughts and hands, it forms itself into the image of humanoids, albeit both faces and hands they universally lack in their mirage-like indistinctness. Whether or not they are hostile to the Expanse being cut off, or simply hostile to the Elites in general, is both uncertain and irrelevant. They are harassed the whole time.

    Tomoe and Gawain have a tiring journey ahead. There are more Elites to protect than they can easily protect between the two of them, albeit they are the ideal types to do so, being tough endurance fighters themselves.

    Tomoe's tanking skills work exactly --almost weirdly too-exactly-- like she's familiar with in the SAO and ALO games, and she finds managing the crowd around her very, very similar to managing a mob of high-level AI enemies. Though their attacks are, for the most part, merely suggestive of close combat assaults, and blasts and rays of indistinct glow, they tug at old memories in odd ways, feeling as if she's seen them before, and knows their patterns. They cause high values of HP damage on hit, but are very consistent about how much, and some even inflict familiar slowing or poisoning status effects. When she cuts them, glowing red lines are traced through the wraiths, which shatter into shards before dissolving back into the light.

    Yet Gawain doesn't share the same experience. At the other end, his shades are few in number, bright in intensity, fast and aggressive, and yet they duck and parry his blows with caution and canny intellect and beams of coherent white light that suggest primitive weapons. Some of them surround him with rays of light sized as swords and spears, which occasionally flash with energy, and bite his armour. Others pelt him from afar with smaller, thinner rays, sized like arrows. Occasionally, a hulking plus-sized shade charges into the fray and tries to bowl over Eryl or Strange or Tamamo in a frenzy, which requires excessive power to put down. Once or twice, one forms out of thin air to launch a surprise attack the next instant. Occasionally, he's charged down by tall shades at super speed, or blasted with powerful explosions of that raw Potential light by one in a back row. Crossing blades spits sparks of clashing steel. Plunging it into them feels like cutting flesh and armour just before they dissipate.

    Stray attacks that do manage to imperil the working Elites are, universally, familiar to them. If one might trouble Strange, it wouldn't be dissimilar to bits of broken windshield. Tamamo might feel the sting of a passing arrow. Eryl the feeling of a bullet hitting his vest. Robin or Cantio a greebly energy blast. As the building continues, the area that is lit by the Expanse shrinks, and cuts down the radius the entities can roam freely, as it appears they can't go more than a few hundred meters from the edge before their light fades and their coherency weakens. They become more aggressive as this happens, and especially target those who are forming the most matter. If left to their own devices, they will attack and destroy the finished architecture too. The small blessing is that it seems there can only be a limited number of them at once, though they constantly re-form out of the same mist some time after being slain. The reverse edge to this is that the crowds of them are more dense as the working area grows and the breached area shrinks.
Penumbra     Verity, in the back, a safe distance away, bounces up and down the entire time watching it work, bringing out a number of hovering lenses properly belonging to a jeweller or clockmaker to survey and scan the whole things on innumerable holographic screens, even expediting the process by scribbling on a piece of paper with a fountain pen. She constantly yells encouragements and almost gremlin-like egging-on of pushing the hand-tools even further, though she also quips and sasses about the whole thing still lacking enough capacity for SENSITIVE instrument power feed.

    Jung is the one who has used some sort of ability to set up a transparent power screen to block stray fire that might endanger the two of them, and is carefully recording blueprints of the construction as it goes using a sci-fi-looking levitating stylus. He urges, stoically and insistently, that you slow down, don't get carried away, be extra THOROUGH rather than worrying about the mysterious entities and general time limit, and to not pay attention to Verity.
Robin Sundance      Zorbrax is clearly used to being hit by Toku Attacks. This is obviously because he is a Toku Monster. The stings of the spectres get burbly responses, weird tinny shouts and grumbles that sound like an octopus strained through an autotuner and then remixed in a blender. He groans. He moans. He grunts. He complains, loudly.

     "Rude!" The Weird Thing says, "Rude, rude! If I wanted treatment like this I'd've stay at home! I thought it was supposed to be different out here!"

     "What's a monster to do?" He wails in his weird tinny autotuner burble.

     But, to his credit, he's still trying.

     But...the gloves want to be used. They *need* to be used. They want to be used to do marvelous things, to do wonderous things. They want to make magic.

     Robin struggles. He really does. But at the end of the day, he can't, not for long. Slowly, something creeps through. Daisies, at first, creep into the supports. Then ivy binds its way around. A support is replaced by a heavy tree. Then...

     ...kudzu?

     Crawling up in the wires?

     Weird.

     Zorbrax shrugs it off if asked with a burbly gesture at himself. No kidding he likes plants, *duh*.

     He's a plant.

     But...Robin...well, Robin likes flowers, right? Not...*plants*.

     So what's up with the kudzu? What's up with the...is that a venus flytrap binding its way around another support?

     Huh.
Doctor Strange      Present!Strange is mostly unharmed. Future!Strange however, who is very much not a tank, sports several cuts on his face, and more still on his hands, where his efforts to protect his past self have done him harm. It's hard not to be reminded of that night, of the rocky shoals rushing to meet him, of the helpless terror he felt at his utter loneliness in that moment. But he fights hard, to grant himself the time he need(ed) to work.

     Present!Strange, in the meantime, takes his time. He has to, and tries very hard to resist calling upon the Expanse to make more expedient his work, It's difficult to resist using the gloves at all, but if he can just make use of his sorcery, without calling upon the mist, he tries to. "It'll be done when it's done," he says dryly back to Verity's urging for more sensitivity.

     "Get me a schematic of how this place looked before the upgrades, please." If he's going to get rid of the additions, he'll need to know what to remove. "Unless you want another Tower." Working with that schematic, he'll do his best, up to and including more localized reversals of time, to remove the myriad additions and upgrades. He's trying to follow a very plain, simple schematic here: 'What Was Before, Bolstered by Sorcery.'

     It's the second part where things get complicated. Strange's ego is still very much alive, just in a different way than it was before. Once all of the previously installed upgrades have been returned to their prior states, he does begin working on SENSITIVITY.

     To provide the necessary power capacity, Present!Strange goes a little overboard. Actually, a lot overboard. Self-contained monolithic exotic energy reactors from long-dead alien cultures rise from the floor and descend from the celing like the closing teeth of a stony beast. Covered in sigils, segmented, each segment rotating in opposite direction to the next. They'll provide plenty of power generation, but... did he use the mist for that? He's not sure. And caught up as he is in demiurgic satisfaction, he doesn't think to check.

     Only to bask for a moment in silent appreciation of his efforts.
Eryl Fairfax     It's all quite exhilerating. Eryl's creative practices in the past consisted of the rudimentaries. Shelter designed for that, aesthetics be damned. The most rigid, optimised fields for crops. Nothing like this. Watching circuitry bloom with a snap of a finger, branching like nerves. Had he a single pair of these back then...

    A stray blast sears his side, causing him to hiss through clenched teeth. It makes him recall one of his earliest wounds; a man (Frederick Esther, 32 at the time) who shot him on approach. The blast even struck him in the same place, just below the liver. "Gawain, are you faring well?" Eryl asks upon finishing his task, taking the moment to consider what to do next. They have power flowing, but require means to sense Unification...

    A thought strikes him as he looks up at the new sun Tamamo has made. Rooted in what he knows, but making something new... it might risk the THOROUGHNESS, but he wants to try. Moving throughout the facility, he begins making gardens. Anywhere with exposure to the new sun or the existing one, high and low, outside and in. And using those gloves, he makes plants in the garden.

    It's something brand new, rooted in something old. He brings to mind Njorun as the basis, but he aims to create a SENSITIVE plant, one that turns its head towards newly Unified worlds in the same way a sunflower looks at the sun. In thinking of the fallen great tree, he also recalls the mutated sapling that now rests below Aegis Astray, and tries to have his implants clamp down on it, hoping it doesn't make things worse.
Gawain Gawain is not faring well. Physically, he's okay, but emotionally, feeling that they're like people is screwing him up. "I'm fine, Grandmaster!"

The big ones are a problem. Gawain shifts to defending Tamamo as she calls out, trying to make sure her sun doesn't get shot down. He takes the blows meant for it, damaging his armor and skidding him back, rubbing his head, so instead, he decides for some literal firepower. With a flick of the wrist, Galatine ignites with sunfire, and Gawain starts slashing again, this time putting more force behind his blows and using the fire to burn them.

If they were people...or are supposed to be people, or something, the least he can do is put them out of their misery.
Tomoe Tomoe has a tiring journey ahead of them, but there is a very positive thing in her mind about this. She's alongside Gawain so she's in very good company. So she will press hard and she finds something strange. Her tanking skills are fully acting like it was back in SAO and ALO. As she manages the hordes which are on her.

Something comes to her mind as she fights. The things are fighting like AI mobs from SAO and ALO.

That is a question she'll have to look into later. She will however make use of this as she makes use of tactics that worked back during the climb out of the death game and back before? Things became entirely real after the escape.

"Sir Gawain! The things we're fighting are acting like enemies did in the games from my world!"

She's taking hit the wireframe injuries are adding up. What does get to her is? They are being damaged and dying like enemies from her world's game zones or the games that came before.

"Wait...."

She wonders is something here reacting to her and how she works?

It doesn't matter now she starts chanting in Norse and the elemental spells come, lighting, light and fire as she keeps pressing onwards against these things. She'll have to check her inventory later to see if these things are dropping anything as well. She'll keep trying to cut a path as Gawain covers people such as Tamamo who needs cover to do what they do best.
Robin Sundance      Eryl starts making plants. Eryl starts making a garden.

     There is a moment where 'Zorbrax' stops his work. He turns to watch. And then he bumbles over and shoves at Eryl the way only a seven-foot-tall toku monster can. It's not an aggressive shove, just kind of the monster equivalent of a belly bump. "No, no! That's no good-zor!" His tinny warble quavers. "Humans don't know enough about plants-zor. Just see the vine. Let me help you out. It's not just about the roots-zor. It's about the soil."

     "You make the soil to fit the plants-zor."

     'Zorbrax' holds up one of the gloves. The soil around plants Eryl's making starts...shifting. It's not necessarily *better*, per se - it doesn't get more fertile - but it's...different. There's little worms in it. There's a sense of *richness* to it, a sense of...*history* to it, like it's been formed over ages, with heavy geologic weight. Literally rooting the plants in history, though the history doesn't exist. They have the feeling of being rained on, of being eroded, of being weathered. The soil isn't level. It isn't manicured. There's grasses growing in it.

     It's a lot more THOROUGH, with a lot more FIDELITY, to buffer Eryl's work.
Cantio Cantio indeed finds the whole process rather exhilirating, seeing what should require actual architectural training just fitting together and working better than she could have imagined. Combined with having a better idea of how it all works, it'd be child's play to really start geting creative with it.

So she does. She's from a place calling itself the City of Songs, after all, so it'd be a disgrace if she didn't work that into her angle of the construction. If this listening station's detection capabilities work on any principles similar to how radios work, this chould be easy for her.

At least, it would be if not for the growing number of shades. She winces at as a stray blast hits her out of nowhere, and there's a moment where Cantio draws her blade, looking around for something familiar. It felt sharp, but not physically sharp. It was audibly sharp, a harsh noise reverberating through her head and reminding her of those strange things popping up back home.

But... That can't be right. This place isn't her home, so how could that blast have happened?

"These attackers... Are they drawing power from our memories?" She speculates as she puts the finishing touches to a base, then weighs her options. Keep building and risk structural damage, or deal with these shades and lose valuable building time? She notices the creatures reforming, their increased aggression coinciding with the fading light and matter formation, and even their effective area relating to the lit areas.

Thus, Cantio risks it for the biscuit. With the stable base in place, she starts building fast and massive on purpose, but she isn't building something to actually add to the station. Instead, she starts slamming pieces around to try penning the shades in with a giant mesh-y network of mini-stations. The sheer number of them certainly won't help with THOROUGHNESS or RELIABILITY, but... Well.

She had been considering going experimental, after all. In addition to trying to increase the station's SENSITIVIY with the rapidly-slapped down mini-stations, she's also trying to limit where the Expanse's light and, in turn, where the shades can come from with strategic placement of those mini-stations. With any luck, she might even turn that space into a narrower killbox for the Elites more focused on dispatching the shades to take advantage of.
Tamamo     Tamamo, for the moment, can only trust that the major dangers will be kept away from her. She has a sense of danger right in her hands, feeling that the new sun she's created isn't yet properly contained. The magic circles resembling complex orbital paths around it serve to help define its position and relation to its surroundings, but the full groundings and connections aren't yet there. If it weren't for Gawain turning his focus toward her defense, something far worse would certainly happen quickly. As it is, she still feels the stinging graze of an arrow, though not actual arrow was there. It fills her with momentary, almost instinctual dread, dredging up memories she'd rather not, remembering faces that have, shamefully, blurred together. It's an unwelcome distraction on top of the simple fact of pain. Pain is a terrible distraction, itself. Nothing should so easily penetrate her defensive enchantments, even as a grazing wound. It's a reminder of what real danger there is, here.

    And yet, as it happens, she does have the support she needs. She is able to push through it, to refocus herself on the task, to try and deliver that THOROUGNESS that was asked of her. It's a merely natural request. She doesn't want to go to any half-measures, either. The shapes begin to form as her fingers trace and twist the mist, her eyes alight. She understands exactly what she needs, but the material itself could not be created from nothing so easily, without the gloves.

    It's not gold, though it somewhat resembles it. That time in Whitewall had shown her many new sights, and her eventual learning of a material so closely attuned with her own divine nature had been wonderfully convenient and equally useful. An orichalcum cage forms, made of thin, curving bars that encase the miniature sun from a respectable distance, taking in and emitting the same light, such that they hardly create shadows troubles to trouble Eryl's agriculture. Struts form away from the cage to connect it to the components further from the center, the more important lines forming thicker, golden piping, covered in layers of carved-in enchantments to connect power directly in the direction of Strange's exotic generators.
Penumbra     As a change of pace, Jung easily gives up the schematics to the core room at Strange's request. Outside of the Paladin showing nothing but good faith so far, and the fact that it's all *gone* now anyways, the man has consistently shown steady-handed judgement on these matters so far. The worst he does is deliberately require Strange to come get the hard documents and physically pass them over Verity's head. It's all very solid stuff. Inspired design. Way outside of Strange's major. But it, like the rest of the functional listening post, is of a very clear pie slice of tech paradigm, and the magical accommodations added are easy to find, if time-consuming to erase, lessened by his sling ring and temporal multi-tasking. Even if he has no idea how those monoliths work, they do so exactly as their original, advanced architects intended.

    Though, despite the myriad methods involved, a theme seems to be coincidentally starting to form. The throbbing heart of a blazing, celestial sun, replacing the fusion coils before, encased in glittering greater-than-gold that substitute for advanced alloys. Its radiance is absorbed into the dense, seemingly ancient gardens that grow up around it, soaked into the living receptors and channeled into the semi-organic pathways where capacitors and cables once were. Looming monoliths, flesh colonized by ages of climbing ivy and kudzu, hum in synchrony around it, their own stonehenge of shadows cast from the sun. The pillars and struts, foundations, cables, and beams still necessary to connect to the power transformers, form elevated rings that leave a semi-open design, rising from those shaded regions and plugged into the ancient devices. Subtly organized fencing, safety barriers, and myriad substations and pylons, easily integrate into walking paths and cool in the shade of greenery.

    It's quite grand. But more than that, a certain spirit of cooperation seems to make it all work, somehow, in a way that seems greater than the sum of its parts. Bits and pieces that *nobody* added, appear when someone isn't looking, filling in the blanks, correcting the architectural oddities, shoring up stress points, distributing power flow. Extra wires and coolant circuits in the floor and ceiling that weren't there before. Subtly doubled braces. Water cooling from the lake has become an exposed, geometric channel system, though it's hard to remember anyone breaching a pipe.

    The collective synergy of all the pieces looking and feeling like they belong together has a resonance with the act of creating. What the gloves symbolize, evoke, and express. A harmonious creation, brought into existence because of the Multiverse, permanent and enriching.

    Eventually, the unformed, protean mist in the air becomes so thin that the remaining wraiths can no longer sustain themselves. Weakened and faded, they're easily obliterated by barrages of Tomoe's magic, and wiped out in droves by the collateral effects of Gawain's Galatine blowing away the unusually stubborn and difficult to kill larger specimens. When they're finished, the fuzzy, indistinct, whiteroom glare has gone, and it feels almost like being outdoors, save for the ultramodern, sleek black computer core look of the distant ceiling and chamber walls.

    At this point, the gloves become useless. It is no longer possible to create, overwrite, or even adjust the finished piece. Trying to do so any further gets the feeling that it's . . . full. There is not just 'no potential' left to shape, but trying to project the power of the gloves into the area meets with a kind of resistance, like trying to cram more items into a bulging bag, at eventual risk of fraying its fabric and causing wear and tear sufficient for an expensive replacement.
Penumbra     In a little bit of awe, Jung begins using his administrative channels to confirm green lights across the board, and begins giving the orders to turn things back on. Verity scanning the entire apparatus finds that the FIDELITY of Warpgate mapping that they can provide will be 'acceptable', and is reasonably pleased with satisfactory SENSITIVITY to the protean threads it hangs from. Jung is very grateful to the extreme RELIABILITY of the listening station after all of this, and is glad of the THOROUGH job that people were able to do while guarded from harm. He, in fact, indicates that those involved are welcome back here at any time. Verity sniffs a little, but admits you were useful.
Robin Sundance      "And this, also, is an apology, monsieur."

     Ah.

     'Zorbrax' blinks backwards, disappearing and reappearing a fair bit away. The disguise falls away - leaving the distinctive key-shaped antennae, the green eyes, the flowing coat-tails of Masked Ranger Thief.

     The gloves dangle in his hand. "Mais only one of these apologies is sincere."

     And then he's gone, flickering in and out as he bails out of sight as hard as possible.
Cantio The work is done, the station is complete, and the gloves cease working. Although the first two things are a relief, Cantio looks just a little saddened by the third. She turns the gloves over a few times to see if she can draw out any more of that power, but it does indeed feel that the station is done taking on whatever it was the gloves were putting into it.

Once she's done just looking at the inactive gloves, she'll check with Jung and Verity to see if she can take one of those gloves back with her as a souvenir and definitely not to take apart to sate her curiosity further. She's not expecting much, but it couldn't hurt to ask.
Doctor Strange      There is a moment where Strange begins conjuring, from memory, lengths of conductive silks and fibers to connect Tamamo's orichalcum to those reactors--but he is barely begun before the strange construction of the gloves, the spirit of cooperation, takes on a life of its own. Watching with crossed arms and an impressed reaction, Strange eventually removes the gloves, and returns them to Verity--or else to their correct point in time.

     When the last of the wraiths is gone, Future!Strange disappears, and the sole remaining sorcerer vanishes into the past, to defend himself from the encroaching Expanse-figures. When he returns, his face sports several cuts not unlike one would following a car accident; bruises and contusions, too, along his hands, and some new injuries there that will add to the patchwork of scars.

     Strange then reaches into his tunic and procures the schematics given him by Jung. They are returned, too. There is a moment of tension, following when Jung orders the power on. No disaster. ...thank God. He had no idea how those reactors were going to work. "...Have to say, Jung. I like the philosophy behind your operation." A card appears in his hand. "Give us a call if you need help again."

     Speaking of help, Gawain and Tomoe have put in a lot of effort to keep the repair crew safe. Two orange mandalas hum to life before his hands. Each performs a series of mudras, glyph-rings rotating and locking into place with sonorous chimes. Golden light washes over the Sun Knight and the tank, healing their wounds.

     That just leaves Verity. Upon their last meeting--at the docks, as the Seekers were on their way out--he'd struck an agreement with her. That they'd share what they were working on, and agree to stop anything too dangerous, in exchange for Paladin support. Couldn't hurt to check on that now, since she's here. Another Strange appears in front of her.

     "Hey," he says, arms crossed, head tilted inquisitively. Strange dryly rattles off: "Got any updates... new projects... difficulties... funny watercooler stories?"
Eryl Fairfax     Original Face pings Eryl, alerting him to a cable that had not been there before. He brushes it off as someone working while his back was turned. But then there's another. And more circuity. Pipes leading from the lake. The place is starting to build itself.

    Genuinely frightening. Building itself from the below-primordial cloud. Who knows what might result?

    He's on his guard as he finishes, but by the end nothing untoward has happened. It only seemed to be supporting what everyone was doing. Eryl swipes his hands, trying to add one last touch to a garden, only to get nothing. Looking only slightly disappointed, he returns the gloves, when -

<J-IC-Scene> Robin Sundance says, "Merci beaucyou, monsieur. Au revoir."

    He's making a face at being roused, but stays behind and makes sure to provide details on the care of those new flowers. As well as their name.

    Alouette. Scientific name 'Niorun alouette'
Tomoe The fight is tough she and Gawain fight their way though but Tomoe is looking fairly beat up from the hordes she had to deal with. Still, she's standing so it's all good there now as she has a moment to think more clearly. She looks around closes her eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath. When finish she opens her eyes and looks at Gawain.

"Good to fight alongside you again. She feels like she's outside and all things considered she likes that. she takes a moment to take in the computer core and the nature of the place.

She's about to comment further when she feels the effect of Dr. Strange's spell the wireframe damage over her body fades away taking on its true form and the pain also fades she'll look to Dr. Strange for a moment.

"Thank you I appreciate that."
Gawain Gawain, once the fight is over, is beat. Strange's healing gets a thumbs-up and a smile, as he moves to clap Tomoe on the back, and approach Eryl.

"Beautiful flowers, Grandmaster. I hope we can work with the Makers more in the future. They seem like quite lovely people, and have given me plenty of intel."

And then, Gawain heads off to find something to eat around here. If they're welcome, surely they won't mind him sampling the food, especially after the success.