Scene #7507: BIOMARE: Alpha Clearance

Owner	Pose
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Members of the Watch receive a self-destructing digital message. Maybe it's an email, or a text, or even a private message on some ancient forum. But the content is the same. As is the image of a dancing man clearly cropped from some movie, which displays when one attempts to save or screenshot it. Hey, it's Phreak. Remember me? Yeah, you do! Check it. The 'shuffle papers at people who want to kill you' clan has a line on an OT black site. Threw out a few lines, did a few favors, worked a little of the old magic. Turns out, this site's the same one that guy in the subway was cribbing from for his little army. We can wait for Terra Nova to finish their investigation, or I can get you guys there and inside and whatever happens, happens. If that sounds like a good time, you can meet me--kinda--at OAG. That's 'Old Athen Grid.' All the way at the north end, big wide building, left side. Don't worry if you don't see me. I'll see you. Old Athen is a city of conflicting architecture. Though much of it is dense with prefab towers of blue and gunmetal hue, the streets are the sandstone brick and mortar of the Clans. Dotted intermittently throughout the city, there are ramshackle corrugated metal huts and vendor stalls, in stark contrast to the uniformly shaped towers. This dense sprawl opens up to a courtyard in the middle of the city, with trees and grass. As aircraft come and go on landing pads above, throngs of people enter and exit giant teleportation booths, their destinations displayed clearly in neon. But your destination is the Grid. It's all the way at the north wall of the city. As Phreak said, there's a big wide building just a little ways to the right--he didn't mention that building was the Vanguard HQ. But that doesn't seem to matter for the small crowd of people huddled around the squat terminal helpfully labeled THE GRID. Their clothes are wildly varied, one even wearing a shirt with a bootleg depiction of Xion on it, though the one thing they all have in common is apparently an interest in computers. No one here, not even the one or two huge, bulky homo sapiens atrox, is without some kind of gadget, and this is as much a spot to hang out and bullshit as it is a public transit. As a few of them hoot and holler around a pop-up match of some fighting game played on someone's home-made rig, a tall nanomage woman with Places to Be shakes her head and accesses the terminal with a palm-sized device on her person, and simply disappears, the terminal's internals humming slightly louder for a moment. Every so often, the reverse happens, someone materializing on the spot to attend to business in the city. Bercilak is here. He's naturally hooting around the fighting game, dressed as you might expect. But someone else is here, too. Kinda. [Team] Bercilak: Thei art here. [Team] Phreak: Yo, what's up? [Team] Phreak: Oh, and, uh, h-hey Liza. Look around though you might, there is no sign of the guy talking to you. But after a brief, broadcast warning from said guy to gather up...
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	THE FIXER GRID A blue inverted pyramid is talking to you. You, yourself, are also a blue inverted pyramid. In this virtual realm, there is mostly darkness, save for the illuminated shapes of ringed platforms, with elevated spots meant to be interfaced with. These rings extend ten times, to a towering height, with destinations on hovering blue signboards dotting the structure like the fruits of a tree. There is almost no one here but you and Phreak. "This is a little... unofficial extension to the Grid," explains the blue pyramid which is presumably Phreak. He's angled himself towards the Liza-pyramid, his voice (or everyone's understanding of it) conveying clear excitement. "It's a virtual space, just like hopping onto the public Grid. You guys are data, the triangles you're seeing are representations of the 'containers' your molecules--or the data they've been rendered into-- Bercilak clears his throat, though which of the pyramids he is, is anyone's guess. "Yeah, yeah, whatever. Fine. The biz," says Phreak sourly. "The name of the place you guys are after is BIOMARE, and wouldn't you know it... there 'just so happens' to be an exit right outside of where this place is," Phreak smugly notes. "Sixth ring, exit F, 'Longest Road.' Just look for the little up-arrows and stand on 'em. Think about moving, and you do. Faster than Whom-Pahs, more subtle than the public Grid. /Literally/ right at the front door. Pretty fuckin' cool, yeah?" After a pause... "Here's the thing though. The place is huge. It's got a fuckload of guards. We're probably not gonna get rid of it with just one raid. Especially not with reclaim. You want this place gone, you gotta get dirt, and you gotta get the director. And to get him, you're gonna have to make it all the way to the bottom--which means if we want you there before next year, you want clearance. Corps love fuckin' cards," notes the blue pyramid, eagerly zipping left and right with no indication of friction or weight. "So you find one, you let me know, and I can use it to get you through all the bullshit and cameras and guards next time. We work our way down, one level at a time, boom boom boom..." You get the feeling there's a hand gesture. "And three ops later, we put the kibosh on this place, a hell of a lot faster than whoever Terra Nova's got creeping around in there. Any questions before we go?" "'We?' I was not toknoue that thou wert withcominge," says the Bercilak-pyramid teasingly. "Yeah, well, get over it," huffs Phreak.
Xion	"Wow! I have fans now? I've really made it as a hero! I'm glad to be the hero of your heart too!" Xion greets, before being GREETED by PHREAK WITH A PH, BUT YOU CAN KEEP THE D from the wicked-cool realm of cyberspace. YOU MAY THINK XION IS TURNED INTO A BLUE PYRAMID in the scene transition: That's because you haven't hung out with Xion in weird alternate planes of existance. HER blue pyramid has, contextually, a topping of weird black that has the digital avatar marker equivalant of having black hair. Or a black coat? Black highlights? She's got some darkness there. Why Bercilak isn't green here is anyone's guess (Xion guess he's Uncle Trolling) but Xion can follow along just fine. Her avatar bobs in the data-space. "Could we just teleport inside and have Liza kill everyone and then Maricel put everyone back together again? Hibiki and I can have a friend adventure! It'll be a good time." Yep. That's the roles. Xion & Hibiki - Friendship DOCTOR Maricel Thorne - Hypersurgery Liza Grier - Hyperviolence
Hibiki Tachibana	Hibiki is also here! She doesn't remember Phreak because she's never met him before, but he seems like a nice enough guy, as nice as anyone with an intentionally misspelled name can be - but she's heard enough to be willing to sign herself up for crashing the operation alongside her good friends like Bercilak and Xion, and it's not even her first installation raid! She has experience. They were making killer robots and weapons of mass destruction instead of mutants, but honestly, close enough. Old Athen is still somewhat more pleasing to the eye than back there too, which given the interspersed put-together shacks and stalls, says a lot about industrialism. What she's no so sure about the Grid that their conversation takes place in after some attempted poking around the fightan terminal herself. "I don't really get that one bit," the Hibiki-pyramid says straightforwardly at the hacker's explanation of the space they're in, with a tilt to the left and right for emphasis. She'll just think of it like an upgrade of the VR training rooms they have back home and call it a day. "But I'll go along with it." Especially when it means a convenient arrival at their destination. She continues listening to the rundown with some thoughtfulness - not that it's apparent at all with their current avatars - until the time comes for questions. She'd raise her hand if she currently had one, but she settles for some blipping a little higher and then back down. "So we collect the cards to get further ahead, and if everything goes well, we'll be done in a couple of runs. Wouldn't it be simpler to just blow a path straight down in one shot? This place must be /really/ big..." Hibiki sounds almost disappointed by that. "...And maybe we can skip the 'kill everyone' part." Even just merking the security detail aside, she's not entirely sure about Maricel's idea of putting everyone back together, even if she doesn't say it out loud.
Liza Grier	Even here in the ass end of town in the ass end of space, a thousand years into the future, in a crowd of weird misfits playing on home made electronics on a street corner, one can still find Melty. It's a testament to the human spirit that truly brings a tear to the eye. Aside, "I think I saw a movie like this once." opines triangle Liza. "Can we get a different shape than a pyramid though? I feel like this is the closest I've ever been to a ruling class." Unfortunately, as a collection of triangles with a well-developed deadpan delivery, it is impossible to tell what level she is operating on. After hearing the process described, Liza actually favours Phreak with a "Not bad. Weirder than I go in for, but maintaining secret and convenient access to secure assets, without playing their game or using their infrastructure, isn't common and isn't easy. Ops live and die on their resourcefulness. You did good." Her own pause. "The fuck is a Whom-Pah though?" There's a sour noise at the mention of keycards. "Fine. I can do multiple ops, whatever; but I'm not dressing up as a janitor. I don't mess with that style. If I find you a terminal with access to schematics though, you're going to tell me about the power grid, whatever is generating it and wherever it is. I'm short on plutonium at the moment, unfortunately, and I don't do 'dirt'. If the director is the director legally and legitimately, the system isn't about to be fixed by the system." There is a feeling of tangible, wistful disappointment when pointed at Xion's pyramid. The palpable sense that Liza wishes hers could at least have been red. "It kind of defeats the point if you just put them back together again right after, doesn't it?" Then to Hibiki. "Okay, but on one condition: You give me a better idea." There will not be an idea she likes better.
Maricel Thorne	Maricel emerges into Athen with a spring in her step and a smile on her face. The middle-aged-ish doctor takes a deeeeeep breath and gazes up at the sky with a hand shading her eyes. "Ahhhhh. The air, so crisp and clean. The suns, so un-red and bright." Fwoomp, goes her white parasol. Clickthhh, goes her cigarette lighter. "Dis-gus-ting," she says in a melodically bright tone, now safely shaded and breathing suitably toxified smoke. "Someday, you people will learn to build a proper city." With that she saunters off towards the meeting spot, her stained-and-frayed labcoat fluttering in the breeze behind her. The blue-pyramid VR-space seems to discomfit her surprisingly little- "Yes, yes, a parallel bud-existozone," she says, hustling along Phreak's explanation. Her pyramid twists from side to side, as if checking its nonexistent pockets for something. "This particular existozone had better give me back my parasol when we leave, or I'll have to teach it a lesson." Though she bob-nods along with Xion's plan for the most part, she interjects after Hibiki: "It's, ahhhh... famously unethical, you know, to bring someone back to life. If you're dead, you can't ask to be made alive again. That's why I stick to the maiming- keeps me in business."
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	oCould we just teleport inside and have Liza kill everyone and then Maricel put everyone back together again? "Shit, that's basically what we're doing now, only it's machines that'd put them back together," Phreak says. "Probably on-site, but without the processing power of the other machines reclaim network, it'd take a while for 'em to come back. So, y'know," he says, swiveling towards Maricel. "They'd have time to think about if they wanted to be dead... or something." Bercilak's pyramid is revealed when, at the mention of a Friend Adventure, one of the pyramids 'jumps' into the air. "Hel yea!" Edging away from the Bercilak pyramid, Phreak angles towards Xion. "Yeah," he says, in response to Liza. "She got the hang of it pretty quick. Everybody can see it, but there's a third-party addon you need to actually make one. I could send it to you, or get you the gridsite!" oThis place must be /really/ big... Phreak's pyramid whirls slowly around. "Yeah," he says with a hint of seriousness that'd otherwise be lost in his hacker bravado, "It is. It's almost as far out as the terraformed regions go, and as far as we can tell, it's been running for years. We think it might go down for miles--and there's a good chance it's hardened, too. But I know OT," he says, confidently. oIf the director is the director legally and legitimately, the system isn't about to be fixed by the system. "I bet you a million credits he ain't," says Phreak. "A mine's one thing. Mutant factory's quite another. But... I agree with you, so it don't really matter." "The dirt ain't for some ICC suit to shuffle around. It's for us. So we know what they're up to, how they think, how to take their shit apart when they make something that actually works." He chuckles nervously. "They... do that. Often. You don't notice it, because of all the shit in the desert they throw away. But they do."
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	BIOMARE Floor 6. Node F of the 'Fixer Grid' deposits you in the middle of what appears to be a canyon--in truth, a ring of golden-brown rock with a narrow, four-person wide exit passage. It's night, but the notum mine is illuminated by gently humming industrial lights which cast bright impressions into the otherwise dark asphalt. A huge refinery apparatus, with a bulbous tank and a network of tubes disappearing into a high-powered extractor are all encompassed by a buzzing laser fence. Guards in dark armor with menacing cross-shaped visors patrol the area, protected fuel rods glowing brightly in compact, bullpup configuration energy weapons. They haven't noticed you yet. Phreak motions towards a door that says Foreman's Office. It's hidden away beneath a rocky outcropping. Bercilak clanks over towards it, and naturally, the guards notice. Burning globs of violet plasma are hurled your way by those guards, and more are being alerted. The 'foreman's office' doesn't offer much shelter either, at first. There are several guards, in white armor, with similar weapons, posted on the inside--and it's easily the size of a ballroom, with the only cover being overwrought columns bearing Omni-Tek banners. The cool blues and greys of this reception area are starkly contrasted by the blare of an alarm from the camera. Guards coming in from outside, and above from below. What will you do?
Maricel Thorne	Maricel materializes in a casual posture- one hand holds her parasol (safely returned!) daintily over her shoulder; the other rests in her labcoat pocket. As she waltzes into the Foreman's Office, one of the guards fires a lucky shot directly at her head. She lazily leans out of the way- KCH-SSSS. -but doesn't quite lean far enough. The plasma shot burns a nice gouge through her eye socket and out her temple, steam rising from the side of her head like from a boiling kettle. "Well," she says in a cheery tone while jabbing herself in the neck with a glowy green syringe, "it has been quite a while since my last recreational lobotomy." By the time she fishes a spare eyeball out of her pocket and plopped it into the socket, the head injury's already closed over, with only residually glowing veins to mark the site of the injury. By way of retaliation, Maricel makes a claw-like gesture with her hand, which is promptly shrouded in a nauseating neon-staticky aura. A few of the guards' heads become wreathed in a similar aura- and, as she violently twists her hand, an abrupt telekinetic force attempts to fatally wrench their necks too. "Unfortunately for you," she says musically, ducking behind one of the columns for cover against the next barrage, "I only need ten percent of my brain for this."
Xion	Getting dropped out of the Fixer Grid in an entirely different location is a strange experience for Xion. Normally she would wander between places, finding shortcuts in the slices of darkness between bright lights. Normally she wasn't a triangle! Dropping into the canyon area, Xion pops up in a muted but wide-eyed 'wow!'. "Now we're here! We surfed the web! I really didn't know. Does that mean we're inside the computer? Are we a glitch?" Xion only deals in fantastical magic. Making sure Maricel has her parasol when she rezzes back into realspace, Xion surveys the area for a quick moment for pastel treasure-chests in corners, marking the location of the goons, and takes in the sight of the Goofy Green Giant tromping right up to their target and drawing all the attention. "Oh no! Bercilak--" Xion ducks a plasma blast and dives behind an outcropping of pre-modelled ground terrain to buy a few moments of cover. "Oh no! Us! Let's go with --" Xion draws a medal out of her jacket, purple, with a cyclopean yellow eye and meshed opposite on the face. "-- turning this key!" With a 'shwink!' Starlight appears in Xion's left hand. With a flourish, she swipes the medallion over the silver length, transferring finisher energy that fills the metal with a dark, crackling purple energy. Snapping around from cover, she leaps up over Maricel's claw-gesture to sling her weapon across the field to slice through the guards. "Super X!" Pronounced 'super key'. FULL BREAK greeblevoices Starlight aggressively as it saberthrows around in a wide and controlled arc.
Hibiki Tachibana	"Miles...guess it can't be helped. We'll do it the proper way." As proper as a raid on a giant facility can be, anyway. Onwards and forwards, Hibiki experiences a slight sense of vertigo when the conversation gives way to their teleportation, and she's left regaining her balance and running a hand through her hair as she takes in the sights. "Sheesh, I still don't know how that's supposed to work..." Dark, but they'd have to be blind to miss where they're going. And its defenses. Laser fences? Not that big of a deal, she thinks. Guards? They're seriously armored up, and those rifles look lethal, to say nothing of the menacing 'bad corpo' aura that the dark color scheme gives off. Alright. Any singing she does will draw attention to them, so until they're noticed, it's best to stay quiet. If their first goal is right over there, as helpfully pointed out by Phreak in the flesh... TWO SECONDS LATER: "Balwisyall nescell Gungnir tron...!" With stealth out the window, Hibiki runs straight into the barrage of plasma with a golden barrier of light encircled with musical graphs deflecting the bolts. She bursts out of it as it shatters with a sudden leap, her casual clothes replaced with the popped-collar undersuit and armored-up limbs of her Symphogear, tied off with a set of big headphones and a flowing scarf. "Alright, I'm going in!" Then she starts punching them out of the air, singing on her gauntlets not slowing her down one bit. Then she starts punching the people responsible. A totally reckless rushdown that'll have her going to blitz right through them on a path to the office, hopefully drawing fire towards herself rather than Xion or Maricel in the process - despite that, her blows are more aimed to disable than be fatal. Disarming their weapons shouldn't be too hard. Or sending them flying a good dozen meters with a good hook. That's also how she's going to make her entrance into the room, foregoing the slight amounts of cover to instead try and dash through their ranks as swiftly as possible, using the columns to launch off of and fling herself into groups and start going into roundhouse kicks and elbow strikes. Even with reinforcements coming, they'll have some time for someone less punchgirl-brained to come up with a proper plan of action.
Liza Grier	"Don't try and favourably pitch the work reclaim network in this case, Phreak. We both know whatever they think doesn't matter for the sake of 'you work for us even after you die'. And we both know that they have it more than coming for even being close to our BIOMARE designation activities." Liza says such when the utterly bizarre subject of consent to not be dead comes up. "I think we usually just call that kind of 'dirt' by 'intel' instead, but . . ." Arriving at the site is free. Liza just gets to motion at the powersuited guards patrolling a perimeter locked down by an energy fence and say "See what I mean?" through the internal radio. Not that she cuts a more heroic figure wearing the bloodred Syndicate strike suit and its glowing green quad optics in the night. The fact that she'd even bothered to use the internal comm is pure operational habit, though, as Bercilak 'existing' makes any approach the beyond the one a non-question. "Y'know, there's a good reason for the twenty minute warning. But I guess if they're going to come back at the end of the day, we can consider most of them moot right now anyways." There's a radio electrostatic-garbled swear when the plasma starts flying. "Out of all the people you could worry about-- Him? Xion?" Still, this is the opposite of an unfamiliar situation for her. Given the crap availability of cover, Liza ignites the e-shield embedded into her armour's left arm on the spot, bringing the glowing blue disc around to cover her hunched, sideways posture like a Spartan of old, and unlimbering the CR-20 from around her chest the moment after. She has to suppress the situational urge to start calculating all the possible firing angles of the reinforcements, creating a mental priority list of targets, keeping running totals of shot counts, labbing out the movement speed of squads from cover to cover, and all that good stuff. If this can't be their first and last visit, she believes she has a fairly simple and direct objective. Shielding herself from the barrage of plasma fire with her portable full body cover, Liza pushes aggressively up a side lane of the area, where she can trivially flank the pillars and fences that'd provide the security teams hard cover without caring around a lack of her own. Lined up so they all have to fire at her from one direction, she blitzes straight down the lane in one go, flushing them out into the open with withering bursts of automatic fire and the occasional stun grenade, leaving a trail of brass, pins, and empty magazines and canisters as she goes. The e-shield handily takes the plasma fire for long stretches, and once she feels the emitter starting to get hot, she puts it down and snakes through the pillars, letting plasma melt the architecture and splash off the recharging shields of her body armour, then putting the e-shield right back up again once it's cooled a little. Her objective is of course the very first thing she can find with any kind of ports to jack in digital equipment. If security doors or overwrought traps are an issue first, she applies liberal use of the CRYPTOGRAPHIC SEQUENCER to brutally and harmfully crack the electronics with zero hope of them being fixed, never mind 'debugged', in the immediate future. Anything locked manually gets a glowing energy knife shoved through all the places locking bars and struts will be, or blown off with gumball wads of plastique. Once she has access to a computer, the first thing to do is to download as full of a map of the facility as she can, with its power routing and current usage.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Hibiki's gift of healing from her covenant with Bercilak is well used--because from the moment she makes that leap to get the others clear, she's prioritized as a target. Adjusting settings on the gun, the streams of plasma widen, attempting to catch her in the air. It isn't enough. The guards at the rear, in those black suits of armor, are the first to fall, flung across the facility. Augmented or not, there's no quick getting up from that. Inside, Phreak has his back pressed against Bercilak as Liza rushes past to the end of the hallway, and is currently... waving his fingers around? No... he's typing on some kind of interface only he can see. In a moment, his body is replaced with a blue wireframe simulacrum. Two big, blocky submachine guns appear, one for each hand. "That's better!" He joins Liza in the forward charge, and she'll see a strange message on her HUD: Thank you UNREGISTERED NANODECK2 for your subcription to MiniMed. Whatever black market shit Phreak just hooked her up with is slowly repairing what damage the guards are able to do. Which isn't much, at first, thanks to Maricel and Xion. Maricel's attack causes the first wave of them to crumple before they've even reached the door--but a few show a curious kind of resistance. Certainly, not the kind that'd last long--and when Xion leaps over Maricel, her weapon strikes each one still standing, lifting them off of their feet, striking weapons out of their grasp. It's just enough of a distraction for Maricel to decisively overcome what mental resistance they could muster. As you advance down the hallway, the pillars give way to a large cargo door. That's the door where reinforcements are coming through. In fact, it opens again. An extremely pale man with invasive facial cybernetics storms out, flanked by cyborg guard dogs. Swarming out from behind him, a cadre of security in white armor. A rear guard armed with batons, and an advance unit armed not with plasma weapons, but with precise ballistic firearms. The dogs are enclosed within a rapidly made cage of thick tree trunks. As Bercilak bellows a hearty laugh, mocking the cyborg dogs by barking back at them, Phreak leaps over him. The man lifts a pistol, but a helical stream of lead silences him from above. The fixer lands and is already upon him a scant second later. The SMGs kind of 'holster' to his waist even though it's just wireframe Gridstuff. Liza, meanwhile, is colliding with the reinforcements like a hurricane. These guys are really stubborn, as if it were a point of pride not to allow the attack to progress any longer. But they aren't prepared, like she is. They don't have answers for the plethora of options she brings to the table. When the CR-20's projectiles bounce from blue energy shields, her stun grenades can do the trick. After a hard fought wade, you've earned a moment of reprieve--Phreak has even managed to shut that annoying camera alarm off. "That dickhead in red was the receptionist, according to his PDA," says Phreak. "I shut off all the cameras on this level, but they still know we're here. Got us a map, too, but only for the areas that guy had clearance to. Upper third of the facility. His card's fried but there'll be others." "Liza, you said you wanted deets on the power source?" "And I bileve Doctour Thorne lest toknoue of the shade-bestes." "Okay. Alpha-level clearance card, info on power source, info on shade-mutants."
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	You have three choices, according to the map of this level. Through that cargo door there is a path SOUTH, EAST, and WEST. And in true sprawling complex fashion, each of those paths splits off two ways. To the SOUTH, there are distant sounds of heavy machinery. To the WEST, the faint trace of a foul smell. The EAST path is neither noisy nor stinky. But you are being looked for. Patrols of white-armored guards ensconced in forcefields, armed with all manner of sophisticated weaponry spanning energy weapons, ballistic firearms, and even melee weaponry, search for you in packs of threes and fours.
Maricel Thorne	Maricel casually steps over the bodies, long tendrils of candyapple-red meat extending from the neon-staticky portal between her shoulderblades to casually, impossibly "un-snap" their necks. It's more of a nervous tic on her part than anything; there's no immediate purpose to fixing them, and they've been paralyzed and asphyxiating for long enough that they'll stay unconscious for a good while after being fixed. On approach to the melee at the back of the room, she fashionably shields herself from assorted shrapnel and viscera with her parasol, with the expert grace of someone who's definitely spent weekends in the thunderdome equivalent of a SeaWorld splash zone. Once everything's all tidied up, she applauds with polite but genuine enthusiasm. "Ah... maaaarvelous work, friends. I'd forgotten how fascinating my Watch colleagues could be. It's strange, though- giving simple guards like that psio-vaccination..." Her shoe taps the temple of one of the fallen guards, and her shoulders lift and fall in a puzzled shrug. She seems, herself, completely oblivious to what the tendrils of meat behind her are doing. The portal on her back disgorges a heap of disorganized meat and organs the size of a minivan, and her tendrils immediately set to work shaping, carving, and assembling them with an artist's touch, with no remark or visible concentration from the doctor. They coalesce into three different meat-creatures, each larger than a man: a slithering bone-plated serpent with hypodermic quills on its spring-loaded tail, a tangle of lithe tentacles with a napalm-dripping beak at the center, and a crab-like beast with its claws augmented into bioelectric 'lightning cannons'. As the sculptor-tentacles withdraw into Maricel's static-portal and shut it behind them, she seats herself atop the crab in a profoundly lazy posture and points WEST. "Something awful in the air there," she says brightly. "Reminds me of the old-fashioned flesh vats of my youth. If they're making monsters anywhere, it'll be there- and I simply must see it." In the inevitable skirmishes against wandering mobs, Maricel seems extremely content to (literally) sit back and let her crafted monsters do the work. They operate with a natural degree of tactical coordination, hinting at some sort of psychic connection: the serpent and the tentacle-beast take point (and the brunt of any punishment), while the zap-crab hangs back and takes potshots where it can.
Hibiki Tachibana	Would Hibiki be as reckless as she is if it wasn't for the blessing of regeneration from Bercilak? Hard to say. Throwing herself into the thick of things seems to be second nature. But it sure helps a lot, meaning instead of just powering through the sting of plasma that gets past her defenses, she actually is able to keep pushing on and forward. Her tenacity would probably be scary, if she weren't a 5 foot magical girl. Thanks to everyone's efforts though - even that really tough-looking guy who stormed in from the door - she has a moment to stop and breathe once the fighting and the screech of the alarm are finally quieted, taking a brief moment to look between the group to make sure they're all alright. Bercilak, she's not worried about at all, but the others...well, maybe not Marciel either. She's--yeah. But she actually did un-snap their necks. Huh. There's a moment of regarding the woman with ahe absurd pile of gore causes her to immediately turn away. "If they know we're here, no reason to even try sneaking around. So we know what we're looking for..." The girl takes a second to consult the map, in the form of glancing over Phreak's shoulder to peep it, and then stepping past the bay door to investigate the split paths. Her eyes narrow in the direction of the churning machinery, but after a second, "...You can smell that past the...?" Hibiki regards the meat-monsters. "...Nevermind. But if that's what I think it is..." As much as part of her would rather not, she sprints right alongside Marciel and her creations down the WEST path, contributing to breaking through the patrols in her own way via her bullrushing tactics much as before. The interior of the complex offers a lot of opportunities for acrobatic stunts to keep on the move, and despite the presence of perfectly good (literal) meatshields right there, she keeps to the front to help break lines and blow apart cover with destructive punches whenever possible.
Liza Grier	Liza does not respect the so-called pride of shitcurity. The fact that they're proud of their assumed ability to stop an incursion is another kind of pride in inherent superiority. In this case, a usual superiority in numbers, armament, training, and willingness to do harm, but the way they respond to her in tone-deaf confidence only reminds her of some extremely misguided cousin to racial supremacy. It becomes a rolling brawl, all the way from the party and back to the limits of the room. For personal health, however, she's doing more than fine. Like she'd demonstrated on the first and second operations to even get the name 'BIOMARE' on a dossier, her personal setup seems selected for as many rotating layers of self-sufficient defense as possible, making it impossible for a vast mob of armed professionals to put a lasting dent in their single enemy without being able to relentlessly concentrate a degree of firepower she doesn't allow them to assemble onto her for a length of time she doesn't allow herself to be exposed. That hardsuit seems only slightly less robust against ballistics, gaining the odd chip or spang of toku sparks where the shield flickers for a moment, but ultimately seeing her through without issue. "I'll be clear on two points." she says to Phreak during the very brief downtime. "The power grid itself should reveal where all their heavy-test laboratory equipment is, and the power flow through it should show what's in use. I can't picture this guy doing what he does without chugging megawatts to do it. The other thing is that I dont care how it actually keeps the lights on, only that power is energy, you need energy to dissolve molecular bonds, and the more energy in one place the better. Catch my drift? Knowing what it is and where means I can plan to go for it later." Given the presence of extremely shiny and self-important looking guards to the EAST, Liza almost can't seem to help herself. She attaches the CR-20 to her suit's holster, then fiddles with her wrist-PDA, entering some kind of macro with an affirmative beep, and then a rapid fire chun-crak chun-crak of something small and glassy breaking. The device spits half a dozen mentos-sized red crystals like brass, dull and glassy and obviously broken, and a ruby red bolt of light materializes a much larger and heftier belt-fed machine gun right in her loving arms. A loud and dramatic rack of the charging handle follows.
Liza Grier	"Well, I'm glad you're having fun." she says to Maricel, a few moments before taking off in opposite directions, back to back. "Knowing they'll just be right back to it, making excuses and swearing to get us next time, kind of takes the point out of it for me. That and the fact that they'll probably remember it, so getting artistic at this point is a waste; I don't really want them knowing what I have up both sleeves until it's too late for them." From there, she begins PARTY TANKING by wading into the reinforcement corridor. Another teleporter light drops down two chunky slabs of FOLDING COVER over which to brace her bipod, the e-shield overlapped ahead of that so only the muzzle and a tiny sliver of helmet are exposed, and then the main choke point is drowned in the fierce, echoing roar and spattering metal waterfall sounds of someone who isn't paying for the bullets. "YOU KNOW, YOU'RE LUCKY." she manages to yell over the gunfire, though the voice modulator only makes it a horrid, garbled radio snarl. "NORMALLY THE GUYS I DO THIS TO DON'T GET TO RE-THINK THEIR CHOICES. DON'T COME BACK TO WORK." She doesn't actually seem to be engaged in the sound tactical practice of hosing each enemy down in sequence, however; they have too much of a cover, numbers, and tight quarters benefit to be picked off like that. Rather, she sweeps the rooms back and forth until their forcefields collapse and their armour is punctured somewhere, and then chucks a capsule half the size of a soda can, bouncing and clacking down the hall. It immediately explodes into a river of bright yellow-green ceiling fumes that quickly floods the corners and corridors, with fairly predictable results.
Xion	Xion has an easy time of it, thanks to the benefit of the curative nanoprograms and her own natural zippiness. Her vaulting and air-dashing carries her straight through the area from the north. No plasma-spewing asshole intercepts her, their globular fire swiped through with blurringly-fast swipes of her purple-bladed keysword. Lunging down the SOUTHERN path, she twists in a floaty forward dash to look back and get-- VICIOUSLY QTE'D by a cyber-dog, tackled out from the side and skidding across the interior of the base's side path. With the hound attached to her right arm, she strains and stickspins moderately. Grunting with exertion, she loses some of her mash-out progress to draw back her left hand. Jutting out from the clenched fingers of her fist are two more medals. "Here--" Cocked back, she thrusts her fist into the nose of the cyberdog. "--we go!" X's command gem and fin, and the clenched fist of Shining Tiger, flash in greeble-imagery as she jams the medallions against her Keyblade, which glows and condenses into a ball of purple light. The purple light burns through the cyberdog's mouth and embiggens her arm in articulated purple metal with a thick buster-arm and oversized roboticized hand. "You're making me miss the cool friend stuff!" She huffs hot with anger at the other shitsec aibo units. "Take this!!!" Shoving her arm forward, the whole mecha-arm detaches to begin rocket-punching dogs. Simultaneously, Xion peeks around the corner to see what Maricel, Hibiki, and THE BOYS are doing. She knows what Liza's doing. Liza is doing hyperviolence.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	It's cold in here. You'd expect the AC on a desert planet with tropical and forested terraformed regions would be working overtime, but this is like 'soulless office building' levels of unreasonably chilly. It's probably the first thing to be noticed, once the initial adrenaline of that head-on rush expires, no matter which way you decide to go. Maricel's monsters are received well by Bercilak and by Phreak, who notes: [Team] Phreak: They're pretty rad. You're like a... meta-physician. The WEST hallway stretches north and south Hibiki and Maricel will make the trip there with Bercilak, but without Phreak. The boys have split up because the nerd from Hackers (1995) is crushing on the syndie. The high vaulted ceilings of this hallway do indeed give Hibiki plenty of room to dart around, and make it difficult for the guards armed with ranged weapons to keep a bead on her. More of those violet plasma clouds burn and scorch the walls and ceiling--but it's no good. There's precious little cover for the guards in this hallway, which seems far more opulently large than is necessary. This one doesn't even have the pillars the entrance did. The smell grows steadily stronger the further south one goes, and eventually, Xion, peeking as she is, loses sight of them. Gradually, one hears the rush of water. A ramp at the south end leads down. A sign overhead reads: PROJECT BRIEFLAB V PROJECT TRI-PLUMBO V V->PROJECT DHAMPYR Tentacle Beast looted Security Clearance ID Card - Alpha Clearance from remains of Base Protector. More to the point, the sound of rushing water is grows as one approaches the ramp. So, too, does that of wet, burbling mumbles and laughter, neither of which sounds human. As you enter into the sewer, the scientists have apparently fled, leaving the subjects to hover around for themselves. Workstations built into observation booths on the side have been abandoned with open doors visible from the protective glass. Floating through this part of the sewer are flabby blobs of armored, misshapen, inhuman leathery flesh. Each rests within a gently whining hover-apparatus which holds it up. They blubber unintelligbly at those who get too close, and attack primarily by attempting to club with their hoversleds or through crude but powerful mental assault. Xion's perseverance in dealing with awful shitcurity aibos in the SOUTH hallway is rewarded. The sounds of machinery were not the whining of dog chrome. After a brief trip down an elevator at the end of the hallway, she discovers easily a dozen robots, loading and unloading crates marked with all manner of warning labels. Of particular note is one which reads 'FLAMMABLE - FUEL CELLS- TIM.' Another, 'EYE BALM.' It's a big crate for eye balm. "I said to do the fuel cells first, idiot," says an ornery Opifex woman, sullenly shoving a robot trying to move the BALM. "If that strike team gets to the bottom and TIM ain't fueled up, it's my ass!" The robot whirrs in an ill-tempered fashion for response. "I know. I can't believe we're dusting it off, either. But snap to it."
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Liza's ultimatum only pisses the guards in this hallway off. But there's little they can do against someone so heavily armed. Though they take cover in the supply room at the north end of the hallway, creating a crossfire from behind girders, crates, shipping containers and even a cargo bot, Liza's determination for ultraviolence wins out. With Phreak's hyperactive, agile assault adding in, it's not only a win, but... "Jesus, you killed everyone," says an unknown voice. Stepping out with his hands up is undoubtedly a Cargo Tech. Instead of a jumpsuit, he wears a longcoat, but it's plenty brown. "You guys really screwed up my investigation." "Get over it," says Phreak. "I know you got a terminal in there. I'm using it." He looks over his shoulder, and Liza might imagine, were it not for the expressionless wireframe, that he's smiling. "I'll getcha the where-and-what of the power grid." He's off in a blur towards an isolated corner of the room, hidden away by two shipping crates. [Team] Phreak: Hey, just unga'd my way into a full map plus info on the power systems. Turns out it's a notum reactor, which means big kaboom. It's all the way at the bottom level. [Team] Phreak: Also pulled up some docs on the reclaim system. It's on its own network, and we got about twenty minutes till it cycles and another wave of goons comes up. I can get us outta here once you guys are good.
Maricel Thorne	Maricel doesn't seem upset by Hibiki taking the vanguard position- in fact, she claps gleefully for the magical girl's antics, coordinating the meatmonsters to back off and give her enough space to brawl. "Ahhhh, marvelous. Such proprioceptive coordination; such confident kinetics. The mark of an ennnnviously clean body-mind connection," she gushes. Of course, she leads her little raggedy band down the ramp without hesitation- rather than seeming repulsed by the sewer area, her demeanor is comfortable and positively relieved. Is this really her home turf...? As her noble crab-steed smashes down the protective glass barring her from the workstations, her merry group comes under attack from the floating flesh-things. One of them even has the gall to mentally assault her- that, she notes to herself, would be why the guards were psio-vaccinated. "Absolutely go fuck yourselves," Maricel says, haughtily sniffling away her new nosebleed as the flying fleshbags enjoy the full brunt of her own psychic bludgeoning. (Could she sic the monsters on them? Yes. But it's about making a point.) When it's time to leave, she heads back up- data chip with downloaded Project Dhampyr info in hand- and dismounts the crab-beast in style, patting it on the head. "Go," she says to the trio of battle-hardened beasties, waving her hand magnanimously. "Break things. Hurt people. Cause problems. I am so, so proud of you." When they disperse and she turns back around, it's with a teary, maternal smile, like she'd just dropped her oldest child off at college. "You know, you've got to let them go sometime. Live their own lives."
Hibiki Tachibana	Forward and onward - sadly without good friend Xion in tow, she is with them in spirit, and in their interconnected hands beyond the time - further ahead. Once she's actually in the thick of it, fighting alongside Maricel's creations isn't that bad! Maybe because it's easy to ignore the smell of blood and meat while she's focused on sprinting on walls or kicking aside plasma bolts, or because exposure is tolerance. And you know, Maricel herself is kind of affable! She wasn't sure about her at first, but that un-neck-snapping has really helped cement her as not a bad person. Friends come in all shapes and sizes, and that's really true here. She just hopes that 'ennnnnviously' doesn't have any deeper meaning. The sign as they proceed together is briefly regarded, with a squint. "Project Dhampyr...?" Her resulting frown remains as water starts being treaded underfoot, and she briefly peers into one of the workstations before uncerimoniously punching the glass open to help in information retrieval, stepping back out only to nearly get bapped by the hover device of one of the...what does she even call these? 'Byproducts' isn't seeming so wrong anymore, Liza was right. With an expression mingled between pity and disgust, and feeling her mind getting prodded at unexpectedly hard the moment she lets her guard down just a bit for those emotions, she angles on this being more of a mercy deal when she goes to roundhouse kick her aggressor and send it down the length of the sewer so she can leave alongside her companion. Where, as the tearful separation of creator and creations must happen, she sort of stands off to the side shuffling around a little awkwardly. Should...should she say something too? They go skittering and slithering off into the complex, and she ends up offering a shoulder-height wave as they depart, side-glancing to Maricel afterward for a whole second before facing back forward. "...Y-Yeah." She looks like she wants to say more, but just can't. There's a tug on her scarf like one would tug on their collar. She's learning a lot about her today.
Xion	Xion rides an elevator with her Force Break Fist weapon, a powerful combination of heavy, durable, powerful mechanized traits and super fighting robot stylings just sort of being... Large. She stands in the elevator for a bit, cold metal sausage tip pressing four elevator buttons at once. Bzz-bzznt. Nope. Sighing sharply, Xion summons Starlight into her left hand and uses it as a deeply magical stylus to punch down a few stories. Ding! There's people loading STUFF to a PLACE. "Hey, so, that sounded like some major proper nouns that I'll forget to tell people about later? I've got the perfect move for this puzzle and I want to get back to sweet monster friends doing cool stuff. So time to point--" Xion lifts her mecha fist, fingers disappearing into arm cannon as she starts shooting the containers with gloopy black inventory-shot that voids-out the cargo bins hit. She stops shooting once she's secured the EYE DROPS, shot color switching to plasma green as it charges. In her left hand, an eyedropper appears. She applies two to both eyes, grins, and blinks a bunch. "Okay." She lifts her arm cannon and unleashes a CHARGED SHOT at the explosive barrels. The eye drops help moisturize her eyes as she teleports backwards through the closed elevator door back into the elevator. She tries to hit the elevator with her FF7 Block Buster Arm and manages to hit every button. After an error noise... Xion resummons Starlight and taps the button, defeated. DING! "I hope I didn't miss all the cool meat mayhem!" But she had missed all the meat mayhem the team had time for.