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Owner	Pose
Lilian Rook	"Look up ahead." She points through the (slightly damaged) windshield, but there's really no need to. The road slopes down and away from here, and at the edge of the horizon, behind the yellow atmospheric scattering of the shimmering air, the blinking lights and crisscrossed beams of a tall radio mast can be seen, and the tips of black walls beneath it. "And gear up."     Lilian parks the jeep pretty far away once the hill rolls down far enough that the coral landscape has risen up to occlude the higher view of the compound again, and thus by extension, an hypothetical reverse view back. It's a solid bet that proceeding on foot is less likely to be immediately picked out by whatever early warning systems they have, and the less time the facility has to prepare, possessing unknown forces and resources, the better.     An initial familiarity is a sleeker, brutalist-angled, matte black version of the pylons that had surrounded the Urban Center recently left behind. They of course have the exact same effect as before, but Lilian immediately theorizes that they can't be penetrating indoors at all, or else nobody would be able to get anything done. The physical walls surrounding the compound are almost token, though they're still certainly more robust than a chain link fence; enough to crash and burn a car on for certain. Despite the gigantic communications mast however, ostensibly rising well above the interference of the pylons, no transmissions on any wavelength can be detected.     Numerous military vehicles like the one seen capsized on the edge of the road can be seen lined up in a simple asphalt parking yard, with a second yard given over to a small handful of what appear to be re-painted G.D.F armoured vehicles and drones, including a couple of those heavy robots. Another open-air lot is used as a simple storage area for crates upon crates of basic materials that aren't terribly sensitive and can be safely left outside in metal and plastic containers.     Given that there's no sign of where electrical power is coming from, Lilian points out that it can be safely assumed it goes underground, which would explain the outdoors presence of only a few buildings; a runway and small hangar, rows of rather meagrely sized barracks buildings, a domed greenhouse(?), a monitoring building, a small security station, and what is definitely the main outpost, showing no signs of its strict purpose from outdoors.     Though there are places where a checkpoint or a watch tower would be, tere are, somewhat eerily, literally zero people outside. Despite minor similarities, this is not a military base; there are no soldiers with time to kill or menial duties to perform, period. Everyone here must have a purpose already.
Ishirou	I4 studies the facility the best that he can, coming to more or less the same conclusions.  Power would be below, but who knows how far that is..?  He also notices the tower, and with that...the signals can't be disrupted on the inside.  This means once there he might have free reign. Obviously, there would be security to deal with, but he's not worried about /that/.   I4 starts by raising a hand up, and sending his hacking self forward, trying to once more get into the pylons.  Obviously, they should have some connection to the power source, and from there he could try and figure out what he could about the base, but if he goes too far in he might be cut off from his body.   So he'll play it carefully until he can get a feel for what they're dealing with.  Maybe that tower would have what he needs to bounce around?
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Find the guy >Arthur: YOU KNOW WHAT YOU'RE HERE FOR     Arthur paces, gritting his teeth. He ponders all manner of war crimes. He disregards them, but only after a long, long contemplation. >Arthur: OPEN UP THE SKY >Arthur: FEED THEM TO THE MAN IN THE MOON >Arthur: SMITE THEM JUSTLY AS THEY DID TO CAELTON     Arthur shakes his head. No. No guarantee it'd work, and it's not heroic. >Arthur: Focus. What about Kent's intel?     Does it have any final words? It's unlikely. Arthur will have to improvise either way. "Bring them fuckin' pylons down. Hate those goddamn things, and I can't hit 'em all at once." He rambles to I4. "I'mma hit the ground hard. Gimmie that signal when you got however much done you can get." >Arthur: Ground-pound into the main outpost building, best you got     He mounts his broom, kicks it into a low-exhaust, low-thrust mode, and ascends silently into the sky, gliding up to the space above the main outpost building. He positions himself above it, hovering. And the minute I4 calls out that he's gotten as much of the magical interference down as he's gonna get, Arthur will drop with unbelievable speed, letting off small waves of plasma as he accelerates into a ground-pound straight onto the main facility. He's trying to just smash into its interior spaces where he'll have even less to worry about from the interference, and start blasting chaotic magical bullet-hell in every direction from his broomrifle.
James Bond	Nobody's outside. That makes this easier and more difficult. There's no human element outside to deal with--no need to distract with conversation. But there's also no place to take. No one on some routine patrol to disappear and fashion a disguise from.     Bond eyes the small barracks buildings, and imagines he'll make do, as he racks the slide on his palm pistol.     Lying prone on the hill that overlooks the place, he procures a pair of sunglasses and slips them on. Tapping at the frame, he magnifies the view. They won't have someone outside on guard duty, but they will almost certainly have automated security systems. Cameras at the very least, possibly more--they'd want to be prepared for a broad range of antegents, not to mention other denizens of this place, assuming the being in the river isn't the only one still here.     He checks the usuals--roofs, awnings, light posts--even some unusual places, like those pylons, the inner portions of the walls where visible. Once he's certain that there's either no cameras, or that he can plan a route to the barracks out of their view, Bond heads down the hill and makes his way to the outer wall, tucking the shades away to keep from their glare giving him away.     The wall is scaled with a fluidity and speed that ought to be out of reach for a man half his age. He tucks and rolls for the landing, to keep it as quiet as possible, then takes the quickest and most discreet way to the barracks--the outside of them, to be specific. A palm-sized circle is pressed to the wall, held there by a suction cup while Bond attaches a tiny line-in and inserts an earpiece. The microphone should transmit what's inside, and give him an idea of how many personnel he'll be dealing with, if any.
Staren	Whatever Lilian's plan was, people now wanna GO LOUD. Staren can hold back, or she can help.     1. Rita's monster horde could use enhancement. It would be... somewhat better if Staren had had time to prepare *specifically* for enhancing a horde of mooks, but she can improvise something!     That something is warping in a squad or two of robots -- basic humanoids with riot armor and assault rifles firing ramjet rounds -- equipped with magitech backpacks. The backpacks deploy a wider forcefield over the monsters surrounding them, not able to protect the front line in melee but able to make it harder to just spray the back lines with ranged weaponry. Magical enhancement fields are also projected, generally enhancing the strength, speed, and toughness of the monsters if they're not already moreso than Staren can make. The robots, once the pylons have been dealt with, coordinate with eachother and with Staren wirelessly to arrange optimum placement of their fields.     2. From the staging area, Staren looks at the pylons as best she can. She sends camera drones to circle the area from the coral-line, if feasible, and uses their data when they return to plot firing solutions for targeting all of the pylons.     And then the moment people say GO, Staren just starts warping in missiles and sending them out in waves, rising up from behind the coral and arcing down on the pylons and com tower!
Rita Ma	Rita, perched atop the shoulders of one of her Antegent thralls, still looks a little queasy from the river escapade. When Lilian points out the research outpost, though, she straightens up with admirable pluck, her expression growing harder. "Right. I'll do my best, Ms. Grier." Tragically, she has no gear to up.      After she and her swarm get a little bit closer, Rita elegantly dismounts, smoothing the wrinkles out of her skirt and glancing around. "It's okay if my monsters die," she says. "I'm getting rid of them after this anyway. But I don't want to waste them. They'll have some kind of defenses. Soften them up for me, okay?"      She fades into invisibility, and a little kickoff-puff of dust and the sound of receding footsteps are all that mark her path.      The wall is no obstacle for her; she simply leaps over it, her landing on the other side only perceptible as a little indentation in the soft earth. Soft slithering noises and more light, muffled footsteps are all that mark her traversal along the lofty transmitter-antenna, finding a perch halfway up where she can see the rest of the facility all at once.      Her swarm still lies dormant without orders, hopefully outside of detection range. Here's the "softening up": 1. Rita decloaks. Her whole body becomes a vivid human-shaped display screen that strobes an awful sequence of colors, dozens per second pulsing and swirling over her body in dizzying eddies. This is entirely "mundane", but it's also a brutally effective cheat code for the human brain- anyone looking through cameras or otherwise observing her will be mentally paralyzed. Whether it'll work before I4's taken down the pylons is anyone's guess. 2. Rita takes a deep, deep breath, deeper than ought to be able to fit in her lungs. For a moment she grimaces, scrunching her own eyes shut in anticipation of what's to come: an ear-piercing scream that shatters glass with its high notes and reverberates bones with its lows, painfully audible for thousands of feet around. It's sufficient to bleed ears, to blur vision; even to bruise flesh, for those close enough. The sound of it may be familiar.      "KREEEEEEEEE!"      The point of the scream is twofold. First, to rupture windows, camera lenses, glass containment chambers- anything susceptible to the world's worst opera singer. Second, to map out the facility's gross shape with the massive sonar pulse: she can't get fine details, but the gross shape of its rooms and corridors ought to suggest weak points and routes of infiltration for her swarm.      Pretty soon I won't be thinking clearly. It's best to get all the smart stuff out of the way at the start.
Lilian Rook	As before, hacking anythingis a massive pain even for (or maybe especially for?) I4, seeing as the pylons themselves are, obviously and inevitably, part of the pylon coverage. However, once Staren's first missile strike actually damages one, this becomes substantially easier; just one corner of the net weakening like that allows his signal to penetrate much better, and seize control, finally shutting off a reasonably wide pie slice within the minute. However, trying to warp any of the missiles close in has rather erratic results; teleportations that should be sure things vary widely in angle and placement, sending missiles careening off into random stretches of yard and surrounding terrain, making it an exercise in very slow and careful, long range fire, or raw saturation and crossing fingers.     Bond does also find that there are cameras *everywhere* here, but a route isn't impossible to work out; they're placed for security purposes rather than spying on their own personnel during their downtime. He has a short pre-game time to get into position, and listenin in for just a little bit before the alarms go off with the missile impacts. There's hardly anyone in them. Most of what he hears is the quiet rattling of computer keyboards here, the dull noise of headphones there, and a hushed conversation between two tired-sounding men about being unable to go inside unless they get their 'pins renewed', one of them lamenting having left something important indoors, especially having been here eight months without leaving. There's a brief discussion about whether the administration could get them in anyways with an expired 'pin', but they oddly decide that's 'too dangerous'. They settle on appreciating 'seeing the sun, kinda' after all this time.     Rita blows up all the cameras from there and renders them a non-issue. The men that stream out of the barracks are haggard and under-dressed for the situation, not exactly seeming like the station's finest, but more like a place to put people who can't be inside. They still manage to grab and load assault rifles out of lockers and strap on helmets, but the very first of them have barely taken a couple of shots because they've been dropped on the ground by Rita's visual/auditory brain paralysis, deafly howling and clutching their heads with full body seizures. He can't tell     There's no telling if the flash worked through the cameras before they exploded, or if there's even a human on the other end, but she can get a rough sonar map. The facility appears to go down a shocking ten floors, each one slightly larger than the last in a weirdly regular pyramid shape, hardened on the outside like a ship's hull. What she'd guess is probably engineering is actually right in the middle; the bottom four floors are all locked down so tightly that there are no open spaces for a sound wave to propagate through. Mostly she gets a map of, in descending order, an open lobby/commons, a transport nexus with a hell of a lot of corridors and elevators to different quadrants, a depressingly dense office space, what might be a sprawlingly oversized medical ward, an armoury and very large open indoor space that she might loosely guess is for training, and what she can only guess is a laboratory and server floor, maybe.     Arthur smashing his ass through the roof blows right through the lobby, only catching a flash of warm tiles, potted plants, soft music, and a whiff of dinner, and even through the transport floor below that, only glimpsing dark steel hallways, stunned human shapes, and the smell of oil and sound of lifts. The office space below, where the sheer thickness of the solid metal floors finally stops him by crumpling under, is shockingly banal and out of place, filled with faux-glass dividers, open concept desk plans, blue carpet, mediocre electric lighting, odd kiosks, and holographic computer screens.
Lilian Rook	Of course, pretty much instantly, loud, grating alarms begin blasting. Most of the people inside, universally wearing black or white, with various pins and badges and patches on their clothes, panic at his appearance (recovering from Rita's noise) and begin fleeing the scene. Black-armoured security guards swarm around and begin shooting, cutting off all routes around him, flash grenading him, and spraying him with accurate fire that evinces ex-military training.     Evacuation warnings begin sounding on the upper floor, directing people to the elevators and the surface, and hands below to emergency stations, especially regarding power, servers, and 'containment'. Orders are being given about removable media and saving work, and expect 'tier 6 personnel' to shelter in place instead, and give some kind of warning about the plants(?) and operation of a tuner.     Those coming in behind them are of course met mostly by people who happened to be in the commons or between jobs, who now really have nowhere to go, and immediately surrender out of barely suppressed panic. Pale and blandly tired-looking ordinary men and women in fitted suits, heavy jackets, and short coats, armed with no more than glasses and PDAs for the most part. The smooth and uniform way they do so suggests that they're probably following a handbook procedures; kneeling and arms up. However a few, mostly apparently janitorial staff, actually start approaching the Elites immediately, running as if they expect to be caught going over to the other side at any moment.     Lilian's last reminder is: "At least some of the senior staff need to be left alive for me to do my work. Otherwise all we'll have done is cut off this particular tentacle-tip and be begging for a repeat or a reprisal in a year's time."
Ishirou	I4's head hurts, these things are the worst, but also the best things.  It's interesting, but also very very annoying to deal with at the same time.  Hopefully, he won't have to have to brute force his way into one of these places for a long time, but right now, he is able to help take down the defenses, which will make other elite's jobs easier once they can get going in there.  People escaping doesn't concern him too much, Rita is likely able to handle that with her monsters.   Meanwhile, I4 does see the holographic screens and shoots some of his beams to them.  The moment they can connect he attempts to force himself into their network.  The first step is to try and take control of any security that might be there.  Both trying to gain control, but also attempting to lock their forces out of it so that he can manipulate things as he sees fit.   If he can, he'll turn any defenses on those trying to shoot at them, like those robots.  He'll also try and lock people out of the system so that nothing is taken that he can't go over and recover later, letting Lilian do her work without having to repeat this process again in a year's time.  These people needed to be brought to justice.   "Trying to get control of the defenses Lillian.  Anything you want me to look for while I'm here?" he asks, not JUST Lillian, but anyone else who is with them.
Lilian Rook	"Our dossiers." Lilian says, following after Arthur and Rita by air already. "Anything on the 'tuner'. Who they hired or installed for those leave-behind cells in the British Isles. Chain of command; names and jobs. And what the fuck they're doing here."     Lilian replies to I4.
Ishirou	"Right, I'll look for those as I'm having fun," I4 says, because he rarely gets to be the big boy on the playground.
Staren	After the initial wave of missiles goes mostly awry, Staren focuses on taking down the comm tower; the huge decrease in effectiveness after taking down any part of the pylon network suggests diminishing returns. She gets back in the mech and tries railgunning the pylons as she flies over them, over the base. Doesn't seem necessary to take down every pylon, it's time to move in.     'Moving in' means flying after Arthur in the mech. The thing being as wide as a car probably makes things a bit cramped but DAMN has it got to be worth some intimidation points, right?     Staren lands the mech in the Most Dramatic Position behind Arthur, railgun turret swiveling menacingly. As some people run *towards* the elites, something feels off. She has the mech sweep its sensors over the base employees, looking for anything weird like secret robots or bomb-like implants.
James Bond	The device is plucked from the wall, stuffed back into the motor pool jumpsuit that served as his earlier disguise. When they filter out, Bond waits until the last of them is--on the ground. "Remarkable girl."     He drags the last guard to have exited, howling and spasming, back into the barracks--not just to dispose of him, but to be clear of that noise. To eliminate the risk of seeing Rita's strobe. Can't go inside. Pins need renewal. Has-beens? Black sheep? Rotations?     Bond's hands make quick work of the guard, a short, sharp twist immediately silencing him with one final, grisly crack of his neck. Closing the door of the barracks allows him a moment of relative secrecy to change into the dead man's uniform, helmet, and rifle. He also searches his person for this pin--be it a card, subdermal implant, RFID tag.     Even if it's a code they each memorize, he won't be stopped. His wristwatch contains a sophisticated cryptographic resequencer, a microprinter for spot adjustments to IDs, and a few other integrated tools able to passably spoof credentials. It won't be perfect, but it should be just enough to get him inside--especially with all the chaos that's going on aboveground. <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "Might have a way in." <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "Not that I expect that'll be a problem at this point." <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "Seven, eight... ten floors underground. The lower ones are the biggest. The bottom four are really protected." <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "What we want will be down there, probably." <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, with a sudden start: "Oh. Right. Don't look at me, please. Not for the usual reason!" <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "Understood. I'm moving now."      Despite the chaos, Bond is patient. He can afford to be, with Rita having handled the cameras so soundly. All he has to do is wait for the response from the main outpost, stay out of their sight. Let them engage the others, keep what buildings he can between them and move towards the objective--all without looking at Rita.      He waits a few seconds after every few yards, anticipating that responders from inside might try to fan out and set up a cross fire. His disguise will give him an advantage in that situation. If necessary, he pre-emptively shuts down fan-outs with short, controlled bursts from the appropriated rifle, timed right when one of Staren's missiles explodes to muffle the sound. I want those names. Wherever they are, I want them.      If he can just make it to the main outpost, his methods of falsifying credentials won't be perfect--but in this mess, he's banking on them being good enough.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Strife!     Bullets, grenades, flanking. But I4's just managed to cut coverage on those suppression devices, and the interior should be shielded. Arthur manages to shield himself against much of the incoming damage, enduring bruising and burning and blinding. He yells, in a roaring, pain-infused shout:     "NOVA GREEN UP IN THIS MOTHERFUCKER! BRING ME THE BOSS ON THE CAELTON OP OR BRING ME YOUR CRUNCHY FUCKIN' SKULL BONES, BECAUSE I'M FULL OF BREAKING AND IT'S ONE OR THE OTHER, YOU BASTARDS! WHERE'S YOUR OMEGA ONE NOW, FUCKHEADS?!" >Arthur: Descend further     A palm is slammed to the ground. How much further down can Arthur get in this facility? Now that he's probably able to use magic, a crushing wave of gravity and plasma is surged under him, blasting out in a shockwave meant to slam his attackers to the ground while he tries to melt a fresh, wide hole below him. More floors. More descent. As far as he can burn his path. As much of a breach as he can make. As loud of a yell as he can roar. He has no idea where he's going, but he's just gonna figure it out as he goes. Just break into geofront. Whatever. He don't give a fuck.
Rita Ma	The Cycle of Tears revs into action at Rita's mental command. In the distance, galloping footsteps rumble. She turns her head to face the gunfire, then hops down from her perch on the antenna to land next to the writhing security guards; invisible tentacles unwrap from her body and whicker for a split second, dispatching them permanently with a minimum of fuss. After a second, a grimace crosses her face underneath the swirling cognitohazard display, elicited by more than just the familiar smell of human blood.      I haven't been sure how many people I'd want to kill here, exactly. The ones in charge, definitely. The ones with the guns, okay. But everybody else who makes up this machine, whose deaths could slow it down...      Ms. Grier has more experience than me. What would she say? Ugh, I don't know. I don't have a nuclear bomb, or an ultimatum.      The Cycle reaches the exterior wall and begins to climb over, if Staren hasn't already obliterated it. Under Rita's instruction, they bridge it using each others' bodies as ladders, then the next-to-last ones pull the last ones up. It's like a tide of army ants washing over the facility's surface. When they first make contact with human beings, she has to decide on the rules of engagement:      Kill anyone who's armed, or seems to have more authority than a cubicle worker. Leave *one* member of senior staff alive. If the others want more, they can spare them themselves.      The chitin-black-and-glowing-blue horde pours down the hole Arthur's left, spilling out onto the shallower floors first in a stampede of eerie soundlessness and then percolating downwards almost like a collective liquid. On meeting anyone who meets the relevant criteria, whickering claws lash out to separate heads from bodies without coming to a stop. The horde is not slowed.      Her objective, simply, is to use her force of numbers to cull the most experienced and the most important, salting the earth of this and future projects. There is no point in surrendering to the swarm of Antegent; either one is marked for death by station, or one isn't.      Rita is not at the tip of the spear. Resistance thus far has been softer than expected; it'd almost be a waste. Instead she drops through the hole and lands next to Staren and Arthur, cooling her mindfuck strobe art for the moment and reverting to her normal appearance. From the floors above, the Cycle of Tears' rampage is dimly audible.      "It seems... normal?" she says hesitantly-queasily. "Well, almost." One of the fleeing janitors gets a concerned flag-down from her; she leans in with a dissonantly worried expression given her indifference to the terror of the white-collar workers, a fist clutched to her chest. "Hey, what's wrong? What are you running from?"      But before she can get her answer, something that's said on the radio makes her abruptly jolt upright, eyes open wide. Plants.      Without so much as a "goodbye", Rita leaps straight back up out the hole and starts scampering across the surface towards the domed greenhouse. Her monsters can handle the butchering of doughy managers well enough on their own.
Staren	The handful of robots escorting the horde prioritize protecting it with their fields, anything that they attack or that shoots them becomes a valid target for kinetic ramjet penetrators. Staren didn't want any autonomous program making decisions beyond that.
Lilian Rook	I4 gets is first run for his money at this for a long time. For a change, the people in charge of this did not fuck around when it comes to cybersecurity. The vast reams of data, broken down into endless roots of sub-categorized and individually encrypted folders, would be grossly inefficient to actually enter passwords for, and appear to be hard-ID verified. Furthermore, each computing block is physically separate from the other and has no network crossover; there must be a dozen individually isolated sever systems in this singular facility. The fact that, obviously, personal computers of top staff that are actually just turned off, aren't part of the network, is also rather salient.     He can get the security floor by floor with his magic hacking beam power at least, which is entirely outside this world's (and almost all worlds, really) e-warfare paradigm, but that means he has to physically follow the others and acquire line of sight. Shutting down doors and lifts with emergency overrides immediately cuts off the flow of paramilitary reinforcements from below, saving everyone approximately ninety percent being shot at. The first few files he's looking for can be found in the office block, as well as a handful of names: Unfamiliar ranks, three assigned to 'Chief Medical Research', 'Chief Esoteric Research', and 'Chief Special Operations', --J. Turner, C. Smith, and T. Grant, respectively-- underneath the name that Arthur gets from Kent's data stick: B. Jackson. All of them appear to be pseudonyms, but good enough. The former two are out of the country, it seems, but the latter two register as being 'on tour' here.     Further, some important data that corresponds directly to what James is after: While the security cards he recovers check out against the database and appear to be up to date, he also finds a flat, thick, and narrow rectangular pin --the literal kind pinned to clothes-- on them, made of an oily rainbow of obscure earth metals, laser etched with simple geometric shapes to incredibly fine detail, carrying a faint electric charge. The database reads these patterns as 'expired' somehow, and though they mention 'tuner compatibility', searching for that goes no further from this floor. Reproducing one from scratch would probably be a nightmare, but reformatting this one with a new electromagnetic pattern from the databanks could be done so long as Bond has 'a magnet and a battery'. It's really questionable what it actually *does*, but allegedly it's dangerous to be inside without one. From there, it seems he should have unrestricted access down to the sixth floor.
Lilian Rook	With most of the security currently trapped underground until they wrestle an override away from I4, Rita's horde pours into the breach with minimal resistance. She can hear the cries of bloody slaughter within: screaming, gunfire, the odd explosion, frantic yelling about being unable to work the doors to corral the influx of enemies. Automatic turrets pop up, expend thousands of rounds, and go silent. Fire extinguishers whirr to life to spray burning halls before all the oxygen is used up. Scores of mental presences blip off her map at the head of the tide, but there are hundreds more where they came from. Staren's robots are dealt with less efficiency, but their failure diagnostics report what appears to be massive blasts of radiation.     The workers on the top floor shake in terror, some sobbing and hyperventilating as the horde rushes past, some turning to ghost face silence, a few openly praying. Though her order is somewhat arbitrary, and she might expect the commandeered Antegent (or splinters of one at least) to act inconsistency based on difficulty telling the difference, for some reason unbeknownst to her, the quadrupedal versions, here and there, tackle seemingly ordinary personnel to the ground and eviscerate them before they can even get out a full scream, splattering their closest coworkers with blood, leading to heightened panic and a minor stampede.     However, something feels especially off to her as well. Staren's scans appear to show nothing amiss. No implants, no metal bits, no abnormal vitals; looking at her displays, the most they show is elevated heart rate and body heat from figures who look like janitorial staff, cooks, warehouse workers, and similar unimportant people, making a break for it, displaying absolutely no loyalty to the blacksite. Rita's monsters almost universally run past them, but some stop and stare for short periods of time, for some reason.     A terrified janitor catches Rita's waving, running up to her with the look of a castaway seeing a helicopter approaching. He's yelling something to her, between bouts of 'don't go!', stumbling over the wreckage. Reaching indoor speaking distance, she sees a pale man with ordinary brown hair and grey eyes peek out from under his cap at her, panic-stammer "You're from outside right?! Please, you have to listen! They--"     The next instant, Rita is splashed with his blood. She feels Lilian's hand on her shoulder, pulling her back. A black sword goes through the corner of her field of view and straight into the janitor's throat. Lilian herself stares at him in jaw-clenched disgust. A moment later, Rita will realize that the warm red blood doesn't stimulate her sense of hunger at all; there's no stirring from the monstrous other sharing her system. And once she notices that, it all sort of falls apart.     She's staring at a tall humanoid creature, gangly and hunched and outrageously thin, limbs like grey twisted ropes with long two-clawed fingers and toes. Its head is massive, like a lump of brain coral that has been gouged and pitted by vicious sea storms into a tryptophobic nightmare. A long, pointed, bony appendage has extended out of the lower point of its head, and stopped where her face was just a split second ago.     Not that kind of plant. This kind of plant.     A similar act plays out with Staren and Arthur. Without the pylons, Lowell melts through one floor, then another, and another, passing a white-tiled clean room, a firing range, and an ice cold server farm, but quickly enough, a terrified lab tech runs over, waving her hands for him to stop, yelling something loud and cautionary about what's directly underneath him, whilst his brain deceives him by telling him that there is no stabbing proboscis aimed for itself through the front of his skull at all. Nope. Definitely just a normal person that isn't about to drink his mind out through a straw.     Staren, in a big-ass mech, is a step removed, seeing a trio of line cooks waving her down and trying to yell at her to open the cockpit.
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Listen to the reasonable civilian begging you not to breach     "FUCK OFF," Arthur shouts. "BREACH FOR BREACH, SHITHEADS! RUN OR BRING ME YOUR FUCKIN' BOSS!" He's lost in the sauce. This boy is NOT gonna do a single reasonable thing, and if an illusion or, like, a mind-control demon thing wants to get him to do anything, the least effective way to do it would be to present the opinions of a reasonable expert. He keeps breaching. The lab tech will have to navigate the plasma. The plasma and gravity destabilizing this space is the only thing that manages to stop him from eating complete shit in an ambush if the "technician" chooses to close in.     SHUNK! The proboscis slams through his jaw, barely evading his throat and jugular, skimming his spine and brain. Arthur, in a shock of pain and confusion, reels back. Then, in that same instant, he realizes what is trying to kill him now. "WHAT THE FUCK?!" He continues yelling, this time in a bit of a panic. He sweeps his broom hard, trying to smash the thing (and likely leaving it embedded in him. OH GOD, FUCKED UP NEEDLE!!) >Arthur: Holy shit a fucking monster!!     Arthur instantly dashes for the thing, tries to slam it to the ground with an overhead swipe, and then just blend this gaunt thing to death with his bristles. "FUCK OFF FUCK OFF FUCK OFF!" He yells, before trying to pull back and resume his breaching. He shouts up to Staren, "DON'T TRUST THE CIVS!! SHIT'S BREACHED AS FUCK, FULL OF CRAZY BRAIN ILLUSION SHIT!"     But the monsters didn't want him to breach further. Right? So... he should keep going. Or at least, that's the sentiment. He clenches his teeth hard, biting through the proboscis and spitting out fragments. "Twice." He mutters under his breath. Twice now, he's encountered this. The fucking CIA just arranging to work directly with the monsters.
Ishirou	There is a lot of data to go through, and more so to smash through.  Slightly annoyed that he never gets to just be a giant monster on the internet because /gosh/ people are smart about information security.  Ok, to be fair, it's more fun when it's something he has to work at, he admits to himself.  Though it is also fun to sometimes go Godzilla, and be the big monster in the small city.   He stays with an adult, either Lilian or Rita (or both) depending on when he's less distracted and able to see at the time.  Arthur is too much of a mess of a human being and too busy being a human bomb to want to stay near.  Bond is too cool for him, and thus being so cool he can't really follow him.   I4 continues on to the next level, once he at the very least gets his information from the servers above, and cautions to not do TOO much destruction to those who listen to him.  He only vaguely is aware that there are monsters being used here, which he's glad he's near people who can kill them easily.   "I need to get lower if I am to get us lower and control their security," he says to anyone who will listen to him.  A pause, and he looks at the monster corpse, "Hey where did that come from?" he asks.
James Bond	With a newly resequenced pin courtesy of the standard-issue 00 watch, Bond enters the facility through the front rather than through the hole.     They'll be too focused on the breach to worry about someone coming in from the front. Especially with Lowell yelling like he does. Even then, I4's probably locking the place down this very moment. <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "What's the 'tuner'?"     He'd heard that word. Once in Caelton. Once, moments ago. The guards in the barracks. <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "I'm going to assume a security measure."     No... maybe not. Here, they'd mentioned pins, in the same breath. There had to have been a reason the Letter Agency personnel at Caelton were able to coordinate without worry of their own antegents. <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "They had something to do with the conveniently timed 'wild zone' Antegent attack on Caelton, simultaneously with the MM event." <J-IC-Scene> Lilian Rook says, "That's all we know."     Inside the facility, Bond is in his element. Infiltrating. The pin, the ID, the combat helmet, the rifle. They all can be used to paint a picture--the picture of the unlikely hero, following the attackers the only way he can. I4's got elevators locked down--but that's fine. He's got access, and he's good enough at playing this role that he can deflect questions if he needs to. <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "That must be why it's 'dangerous' to be inside without one." <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "Guards in the barracks mentioned that. It makes sense now. The tuners direct antegent aggression. The pins mark you as safe. There must be antegents inside, somewhere in the lower levels."     Objective right now is finding the names of the operatives dispatched to Caelton. I want to be the one to do it. But if I let on that I do, they won't let me. She won't let me. She'll say I have an emotional interest in the operation and send someone else.     In cases like this, the people manning the kinds of places he's looking for are likely going to be taking shelter wherever the most secure place on the level is. If he has to follow signage, markings, he will. If he has to stop someone--armed or otherwise--and make a 'sidekick' out of them to match his 'hero' act, he will. Retrieving the earpiece from a pocket, he adjusts a dial and attempts to passively absorb directions to whatever database has those names, through whatever chatter can still be heard in the tumult.
Staren	Something feels off. A memetic weapon? Septette would know. She's not here, that's paranoid. I can't assume... The line cooks get Staren's attention. The mech turns to 'face' them, tilting the body downward so that she can look up/out at them through the windshield; Staren and the four empty seats^H^H^Hseats fulla guns easily visible through high-tech windshield and windows.     Open the cockpit? That feels like a bad idea... "What is it?" Staren asks. "If you have information, I can hear you fine. If you want to escape..." She glances at the chaos surrounding Arthur a short distance away, then looks back to the line cooks and shakes her head. "I'm still going in deeper, You'll only be put in harm's way. I can't fit everyone in here, but maybe we can work out how to evacuate you on the way out. What is it you have to tell me?" Could it be it doesn't work through transparent surfaces or through recording devices? That WHAT doesn't work through transparent surfaces or recording devices? Some memetic thing! I feel skeeved out right now! I'm not opening the door anyway. What wouldn't go through it, sound frequencies? Something visual? Didn't Rita just do some crazy thing with her skin and then shriek all the glass broken? Oh yeah. Definitely keeping the door closed and window up...     Arthur shouts something about brain illusions. Fuck. Wait, how do I know Arthur REALLY said that and not the brain illusions?? Fuck this!     Staren fires a warning shot by the cooks' feet. But if they leap onto it, she's gonna have to try dislodging/scraping them by ramming into walls/ceiling.     Staren tries to keep pressing on in an Arthurwards direction, railguns ready for obvious foes. "Keep the holes wide enough for me to fit down! I don't think getting out is a good idea..." She looks out at the 'civvies' trying to get her to let them in, then releases her seatbelt and climbs around to the back to start putting body armor on in the cramped space; bearing some aesthetic resemblance to her old armor, it's a 'plastic man' suit covered in magic-looking runes, bits of gilded cloth, and other obviously mystical ornamentation.
Rita Ma	Rita's eyes are open so wide that they might fall out of her head. Her hands are clasped over her mouth, choking down a shriek of terror. Through the hand on her shoulder, Lilian can feel the rolling shudder of revulsion that washes over her at the exact moment of recognition. Her eyes trace along the edge of Night Mist, to the "plant's" head, then back down along the piercing proboscis that fell just short.      The not-janitor is chunked into a dozen slices by invisible whip-crack tentacles a second later, just to be thorough.      "What was that, Ms. Rook?! What is that?!? Are they just letting them walk around??? That can't be... That's..."      This is disgusting. Humans working with monsters like this... the pins, they know. They have to know. Every single one of them decided to work with monsters like this.      The Cycle of Tears abruptly halt in their selective slaughter. That pause lasts two or three seconds while Rita gives new orders: Everyone. Everyone. Nobody leaves here alive. If Staren doesn't like her robots following that lead, she'll have to tell them otherwise.      Rita reaches into the disassembled impostor-monster's guts and tears out its heart, or the closest visible analogue. Walking off, she casts a glance back at Lilian, full of jumbled-up gratitude and anxiety and queasiness. "Don't worry, Ms. Rook. I'll fix this. It won't ever happen again."      Averting her face from the Immune, she takes a huge chomp out of the Antegent organ in her hand, chews and swallows, then gulps down the rest whole. Can she command the "plants" through that connection?      She walks to the nearest elevator door, rips it open with her bare hands, and resumes her mindfuck strobing before jumping down as far as the shaft goes. A small handful of her own Antegent follow her, while most switch from tactical assault to wholesale butchery on the upper floors.
Lilian Rook	The antegent Arthur encounters has some reservations about getting plasma seared even as it thirsts for his mental viscera, which is about most of what saves him from worse. Retaliating on it, the 'illusion' persists for an unnervingly long time, even after he's smashed the physically unremarkable monster to a pulp, sheerly from the very human phenomena of 'cognitive dissonance', rather than a spell; even smashing it to bits, his brain wants to double down and find some excuse, some rationalization, some way it could still be human. This does not save it from being a crumpled up puddle.     As expected, the 'unimportant' staff ignore Bond completely. It's not just that he's 'on their side' though; the glassy way they don't even acknowledge his presence, not even a quick glance or turn of the head, not even moving out of the way in the hallway as they walk past, is thoroughly creepy. Not even an actor could put on that perfect air of pure soullnessness.     He is able to reach the bottom floor ahead of Arthur like this, if he so chooses. As the panic escalates, the movement of troops becomes much higher of a priority with every passing second. From what he recognizes of the radio chatter, the 'tuner substation' is at the very bottom, with administrative offices on the floor above. The eighth is dedicated to something called 'stellar processing', and the seventh involves someone yelling about keeping the 'cycle' locked down.     The chilling news is that the administrators are now signing off on activating a nuclear device as per 'code grey', on the ninth floor. He can safely assume it to be an asset denial affair, and that the bosses turning the keys probably have some kind of way out-- and nobody else.     Continuing to tear through the computer systems as the seventh floor is breached turns out heavily encrypted personnel files for several different purposes. One is a post-Caelton update on a dozen Elites, amongst hundreds of others. One is related to the operation there, under some kind of special unit called 'NAZCA', which seems to strangely have been a 'plan B' after something with the callsign 'Shrike-Flicker' was denied. The last is the personnel dossiers of all the minor staff the Elites have been seeing so far. It seems sort of absurd to have these fake credentials set up for Antegent covers, until I4 can probe into their hiring information, and trace them back to real people. All of them hold 'tier seven clearance'; higher than the administrative staff.
Lilian Rook	Arthur drilling through to the next floor finds himself in a webway of snowflake-fractal corridors that lead to what at first seems to be some sort of robotics bay; the kind from a sci-fi movie with hundreds of machines in storage racks, mounted half-assembled on maintenance frames, disassembled on tables. A few seconds under the weird cyan lighting, he recognizes that everything here is an Antegent similar or identical to the ones Rita had brought in. The humanoids and quadrupeds alongside skittering multipeds, heaps of spines, dinosaur-grade skeletal frames, and some enormous serpentine thing coiled up in a cold pressure vault all to itself.     All of the personnel on this floor are also Antegent, though many of them are now wearing the shapes of low-tier scientists, playing out everything from cleaning to hauling to maintenance to computer diagnostics to even filling out reports. There isn't a single human being here. Everything about it screams 'research sample'.     And on the eighth floor below, endless shelves stacked with what are unmistakably black boxes, supercooled processing farms churning away at some incalculable volume of data, rows of tiny closed cells for god knows what purpose, a room with a one way mirror, a room dedicated exclusively to massive numbers of manilla files and shoeboxes, and a hangar filled with tarps and crates and trays straight out of a military museum, in which he can catch glimpses of something chrome. The communications mast actually terminates down here, a spine connected to a heart that bristles with wires and electromagnetic tubes and sealed laser cells, and a control deck straight out of a NASA deep space listening and command post.
Lilian Rook	Staren's shots at the cooks make them flinch back, but they only look for a short amount of clearance from the torn potholes in the floor plating. After her first attempt, they actually surge forward, banging on the exterior of her vehicle like desperate extras out of a zombie movie. Only after she has her armour back on does she spot something odd:     All the instrumentation is flashing warnings at her about those extras. It has been for two minutes now. When she'd looked at them, they'd been all green, but clearly there has been no electrical fault or hacking attempt. In all likelihood, she'd seen the red warnings with her eyes, and her brain had convinced itself that the display read all green anyways.     Rita deciding to put everyone to death causes a mass panic on the top floor. However, the runners aren't exactly going to get very far; her minions, even halved in number now, still outnumber them. Those in the office blocks and the medical wards can only run and scream and try to barricade doors or hide in closets and bathrooms, buying minutes at best as they're relentlessly hunted down and cornered. Those on the training floor have an opportunity to reach weapons, if they're fortunate, but only one unit is actually scheduled to use it, and it swiftly turns into a mere eight comrades trying to hold back the tide. If this were an action movie, their back to back last stand, surrounded on all sides, would be sympathetic, even heroic. But it is not.     The ninth floor is where all the remaining troops have been locked down by I4. That floor will be stuffed to the gills with actual, highly-trained soldiers between Elites and the administrators-- and the nuclear device.
Ishirou	I4's senses are more focused on the real world in an instant when he hears monsters.  It's confusing for him at first because he wasn't entirely focused on the real world, instead focused on the digital.  These things make way more sense to him.  To a degree, digital things work as expected, even though human programmers attribute a life of their own to them sometimes.   The real world was messier. However, he's back here and see's the dead monster.  He asks a question, which gets an answer.  His blood, if he had any, runs cold.  It's just like the worms...just like Langley.   He's assaulted by flashes of Langley, the undead magical girls, slowly walking towards them.  The scene of him carrying one of them out, so that she could get buried.  The conversation with one who had to face the end again.   The Worm closed in on his mouth.  Other androids around him, controlled by those monsters.  Occasionally seizing up, as if the android inside was trying to fight for control.  Seeing I2, who was trying to kill him a second ago nearly fall to their control as it wormed its way into her mouth.  The feeling of being covered in the remains of an android that he was forced to self-destruct when it came for S6.   He snaps back, these things trying to overwhelm him, but Rita's shark-like tone shakes him aware.  She shouldn't have to do this alone, right?  Bond's warning gets his attention, but Rita is determined and he spares her a look.  It's not sympathy or fear...but understanding and acknowledgment.  "I'll help," he says firmly.   He reaches the ninth floor and FORCES himself into the systems.  He ignores everything else for the moment.  Rita will handle the Nuke, he's just got to make her path clearer.  Instead, he works on cameras and auto defenses.  Taking control of both first, before turning the auto defenses on waiting soldiers.  Occasionally shooting biohacking bolts out of where he can to cause defenders to unload their guns.   I4 is going for maximum disruption, not murder.  He wants to make their lines, their defensive capability as low as possible.  He wants them to know fear the moment before Rita or Arthur burst through and their own forces turn against them.
Rita Ma	This is the worst thing I've ever seen. Even Dr. Foid would be scared. Blood and gunshots and monsters, I can't take it anymore. I'm so scared. I'm so hungry.      But for once, I trust 'you'. We both want the same thing here. Here's your chance. <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "Administrative offices on the ninth floor. In short order they'll be turning the keys on a nuclear device." <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "I'll stop it." Her glassy-eyed, sharklike expression is audible in her voice. <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "Good." <J-IC-Scene> Arthur Lowell tensely, "FUCK THEM UP, PRINCESS." <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma notably does not whine about that.      As Rita disembarks from the shaft onto the seventh floor- not the ninth- a visible shift comes over her body language and gait, like someone else has abruptly taken the controls. She walks in a slouching, dazed, almost zombielike way towards the center of the floor.      Her orders to the imitator-antegent throughout the whole facility are simple, brutal, and vindictive: Loose the Cycle from containment. Then kill any staff you can see. Then kill yourselves. Within a minute or two, there won't be any of them left at all- not the tactically soundest choice, but an expression of her sheer disgust.      (Of course, incidentally, this means they stop bothering Staren.)      At regular intervals during her walk through the seventh floor, she unravels tentacles to spew corrosive cyan venom onto the floor, dissolving it and opening holes down tot he eighth. When she reaches the exact center, she stops, floats slightly off the ground, and turns ghostly-translucent.      Whatever life-signature is directly below her at the center of the ninth floor, she swoops down through the ground and ruthlessly cannibalizes it to bypass all intermediary defenses. An instant later, her whole body pulses with mind-eroding colors, and she throws back her head and screams again and again, turning the whole room into a sensory hellscape for a moment before her tentacles turn it into a blender instead. If that isn't the nuke room, little stops her from doing it again, and again.      To the liberated Cycle antegent, Rita- or her monstrous half, now firmly in the driver's seat- gives an order that is raw impulse more than words. But if it were articulated, it might sound like: Smash through the eighth floor. Kill everyone on the ninth.
Staren	Fortunately, putting on environmental body armor is part of Adventuring 101 and Staren doesn't have to think about checking seals and all that, it's practically automatic.     Staren does a double-take at her scan displays. The scans suddenly showing different just makes sense, though, Staren immediately concluding what happened. She double checks the seal on her helmet, then grabs her laser pistol, braces herself, remote-controls the mech to slam it into a wall and pin one of the creatures, and cracks the window just enough to shoot it. Her armor is less tough than the mech, but it's hopefully enough. After doing this once or twice, Rita's gotten control of the plants and they take care of themselves.     Now she can proceed.     Annoyed, Staren announces like an elevator attendent, "Seventh floor, science crimes, xeno-corrupted telos, and More Needleface Motherfuckers!" as she takes aim at the 'scientists' only to realize they're already taking care of themselves as well. Alright then.     "Eighth floor, more awful research and info than I can possibly take home, goddamnit."     "Ninth floor, a whole bunch of motherfuckers who are already dead." Staren sounds... tired, about halfway through that sentence. "I didn't want to have to do this again. Not after the Slaughterhouse Nine... the hundred-and... however many the fuck there were." She takes a deep breath. Then another. Opens her hands and then grips the controls again. Sighs. Glances at Arthur, and then at whatever they're about to break through into the hornet's nest.     "Alright. Let's do this. We'll figure out how to keep our sanity after, right...?"
James Bond	Ignoring me. Not even in a panic. Why? Not important. Names. Useful information is heard in the chatter. A tuner substation at the bottom, administrative offices above, 'stellar processing' above that, and directly below him, someone who appears to actually have a human response to this situation. He keeps the others posted. <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "Administrative offices on the ninth floor. In short order they'll be turning the keys on a nuclear device." <J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "Oh shit...where is the device???" <J-IC-Scene> I4 says, "Maybe I can cut it off and stop that!" <J-IC-Scene> Rita Ma says, "I'll stop it." Her glassy-eyed, sharklike expression is audible in her voice. <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "Good." <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "Tuner substation on the tenth. If I'm right about what it does, disabling it could make things easier for us." <J-IC-Scene> James Bond says, "'Disabling.' Not 'destroying.' My people will want pictures. Details. Countermeasures." Best I see to that myself. Ninth floor is where the administration is. I won't bother with them--just their information, if it's there. Then one floor down, get pictures of that tuner substation for Q Division.      If someone down here is human enough to express that kind of frustration, then they're human enough to feel stress. To feel fear. He can work with that. Bond narrows in on the signal from the ninth floor. With everyone ignoring him and the movement of soldiers increasing, he can blend right in on his way there. Clearance isn't a problem.      Neither is opposition, thanks to Rita. Bond is undisturbed, walking through the carnage. Stepping over it, in places. His eyes are locked forward. Offices, vacated by Rita's methodical rampage. They're searched through, with a kind of calm urgency that comes from years of experience doing this very thing. Once upon a time, there was a thrill to this--there was a sense of some essential goodness being protected, by swooping in at the last minute like this, as doomsday devices ticked down.      It's just business. Work. If he has to comb every office on this floor to find them, he will. It isn't just about dismantling this operation. That would be crushing a tick without removing the head. If those operatives are allowed to, they'll continue gumming up the works.      That's what he tells himself. It's what he'll tell M, if she doubts his integrity. If she thinks he's 'compromised.'      Manila folders, personal computers or otherwise, he will have those names.
Arthur Lowell	>==>     Arthur glances to Staren. The blood streaming from his mouth through gritted teeth, the weary expression, shows that he pretty much hates this. He looks more than a little red-eyed. A chunk of proboscis is still lodged in him. Looking up, heaves a heavy sigh. Rita's got a plan to clear nine. It's not his business. He's not a killer. Despite pulping a being who insisted to nearly the end that he was a real human, he's not a killer. >Arthur: Open the floodgates to clear level nine.     Arthur Lowell is not a killer. >Arthur: OPEN     He clenches both fists and stares at the ground. "Yeah. Guess the only solution *is* the ironic smiting one, huh?" He mutters to Staren. "We'll figure it out." Normally, there's an aspect of deniability to this next part. To enabling the lethal. But somehow, it feels more weighty this time. He accepts his role in this, and breaches with all the plasma and gravity he can muster, to open the way for Rita's horde, and mark his space for the final breach.     He's trying to aim this one so that he can focus on breaching to the nuclear device. Startlingly, atomic processes like this are one of his specialties, and he can focus his attention on the complexities of nuclear matter, which you wouldn't think would count as a Space thing, but *certainly* does when you know Space well enough.     Whatever happens with what Rita does, he's going to try to look away.
Arthur Lowell	>==>     While Arthur burns the door open, he speaks to the ninth floor, over an open, unsecure short-range radio broadcast. Nobody's obligated to listen, but anyone can tune in; it's likely someone down there will.     "Hey, assholes. It's Nova Green. And right now, I wanna break your jaws, your noses, your legs. Sons of bitches, you turned that whole fucking town into a suffering hellscape, and for fucking what?" He exhales hard, through teeth. "But I don't wanna kill you, or get killed. Got that? Rather you assholes not die, even if you're *fucking scum*. And rather not die myself. So figure something out. I don't know. No fucking idea. You were smart enough to side with the Antegent. So be smart enough for this."     "And don't give me that shit. Don't tell me, 'we didn't side with the Antegent'. Don't fucking tell me 'we're controlling them'. You infected people. You *slaughtered* people. Your fellow fucking humans, you buried, and sickened, and *killed*, with monsters at your side. The quads, the needlefaces, the multipeds, the frames. The fucking *moon*. You figured out how to get on their side."     "So for god's sakes. Figure out how to get on mine, you bastards."     It's begging for mercy in a way. Arthur doesn't want to watch a slaughter. He also, of course, doesn't want to get shot to death. Both, here, are immediately relevant fears.
Staren	You are a cold and unfeeling robot. Bodies are machines made of meat.     Staren... was psyching herself up, but now awkwardly, Arthur is trying to talk? Staren tries to maintain detachment while tensely waiting to see if they'll shoot first. If they do... She opens fire with railguns tuned for tearing through heavy power armor and military-grade cyborgs, and the sheer volume of fire aims to demonstrate that quantity has a quality all its own.     Break each bad machine and then the next. Keep going. This is just debris. Broken parts. Components and fluids vital to the function of evil machines which have now stopped.
Lilian Rook	From what I4 gets of the camera feeds, the forces he's trapped down here number something like four hundred paramilitary. This is grossly disproportionate to what it'd take to secure the complex itself, and so is no doubt put together to suppress a mass outbreak or failure of containment without error. Judging by the seventh floor, it could be *done* with a quarter of this number, theoretically, but nobody involved with this was taking chances.     His attempts at subverting the auto-defenses cause quick bursts of chaos, inflict a scattering of casualties, and then are promptly shut down or blown to bits. There are squads stationed in every room and hall down here with overlapping lines of action, and they're all on high alert to electronic subversion. Anything they can't hit the breaker on, they tear the wiring out, and if they can't do that, they simply shoot it to pieces. Turning on fire suppression systems just has four hundred pairs of thermal optics light up. Closing doors has them crowbarred open by teams on either side right away.     Rita, Arthur, and Staren, drop down into what can best be called 'kaizo x-com'. Blast doors have been dragged halfway along their tracks to make shields, bulletproof tables kicked over to provide cover, corridors blockaded with heavy crates to form chokepoints, tripwires have been strung up and tied to grenades, and closed circuit 'suitcase turrets' have been set up at intersections. Once they realized they weren't getting off this floor, two companies of paramilitary experts locked it down and prepared for an assault.     There is no square inch where less than forty men have line of fire on them at once, no junction that is un-trapped, no corridor that isn't a chokepoint, no room unoccupied. Roving chevrons of SPUR robots attack them wherever soldiers fall back. Specialists with anti-tank weaponry run low to the ground through back rooms to wind around the dense space and get shots at the mech from behind. Expert snipers attempt to get shots on Rita with the barest glimpse down six hallways through bulkhead windows. There's even rattling around in the vents from the bad guys using the air ducts to sneak around. Aside from the overwhelming onslaught of electromagnetic bullets and explosives all crammed into blocks of favoured terrain, at one point, a massive blast of hard ionizing radiation, fit to actually fry circuits manually with gamma bombardment, is used against them, and at a separate point, several halls are closed off and the area flooded with nerve gas, alternately threatening to different people. Even their body armour is on par with Staren's, and their physical conditioning within the realm of mildly superhuman. After Rita's initial opening wipes out the teams she lands on, special visor and audio filter modes are being used in their helmets. The only mercy is that nobody has had the chance to power lift any of the APCs or battle robots down here.     Even if the entire seventh floor broke down, this would easily put down the outbreak. However, this is the seventh floor, plus the Plants, plus another couple of hundred Antegent from outside, plus multiple extremely powerful elites. Without the seething tide of ablative bodies, and I4's surveillance of the entire floor at once to feed them real time tactical information, even Rita and Staren and Arthur might be in overwhelming danger, but by sacrificing waves of Antegent pawns, they can slowly grind their way through.
Lilian Rook	Nobody questions James, dressed like them, moving like them, running around in the chaos. There could not possibly be more perfect cover. The admin computers have what he wants. At this point, it'd be quicker to haul a cowering suit out of a corner and hold a gun to him to just enter his password in all of this. There's not time to look over all of it in the middle of the firestorm, but enough to download the important parts.     Following the trail on 'NAZCA', he gets the impression of a special initiative started up sixteen years ago, operating in stealth cells in the UK, the Japanese mainland, and the Siberian provinces, with one stationed on permanent home guard in Alaska, of something --a person?-- only referenced as 'Jormungandr', the former three under 'active monitoring', 'lookout', and 'tracking' status respectively.     As far as he can follow regarding Caelton, the operation had been carried out by two NAZCA teams with only post-Onslaught experience, but a laundry list of 'esoteric augmentation' projects a page long, with the senior members of the NAZCA company in the country split up between the 'Clan Pendragon Reclamation', the 'Roots of Ulster', and the 'Ring of Solstice'. The information on 'Jormungandr' is locked down tight. Carlton appears to have been a secondary job, not their primary purpose in the country, which explains why Kent, a spy from a separate bureau, was involved, and why outside contractors were hired at first; it seems like the head of the 'NWOR Council' had demanded it be taken care of, and misappropriated the line to NAZCA operatives in the area.     There's also some information on this facility in particular. Though it is now pulling double duty as an Antegent research station, it was originally a deep space communications station, operated by a pre-Onslaught government task force. It's mainly built to receive quantum communications from god knows where. However, the few bits of information he finds are disturbing: They'd been studying a transmission they'd interpreted as an interstellar warning signal of, four years before the Onslaught, and attempting to investigate the possibility of making contact with its point of origin. The last two times it received anything were sixteen and three years ago almost precisely, and . . . something is future-dated to December?     The 'tuner' appears to not be an actual device, but a some kind of terminal that serves as an end-station for a much larger project; the radio wire to a broadcast station. There's no information beyond how to repair, operate, and diagnose the substation on the floor below. Implicitly, there are several different models, and the example here is an attempt at 'Antegent Template Origin Psychoparadigm Inversion', whatever the fuck that means.     NAZCA goes all the way up the chain to Alaska as a semi-independent military organization. NWOR is a political group with ties all the way to Washington. The signal being received by the tuner, according to what he knows, is roughly possible to pinpoint as Manhattan Island. Convenient that the rep from NWOR who gave the order appears to have been quietly assassinated by yet another Letter Agency security bureau, and the man who used Kent's information to pull the NAZCA op is Director Jackson right here.
Lilian Rook	Arthur warps in on top of a nuke. It's a pretty simple early century hydrogen bomb model, but certainly large enough to annihilate this whole site if detonated underground. It's fairly trivial for him to nullify the nuclear reaction process, leaving him in a room with the two photos he most wants to see: The tall, blue-eyed, salt and pepper-haired man under the pseudonym 'JACKSON', and the shorter, broader, bearded and balding 'GRANT', both with keycards in the ignition, surrounded by a gaggle of grim-faced men in white military jackets who know they aren't getting to take the executive way out.     His pleas to the soldiers fall on deaf ears, but breaking the certainty that comes from 'knowing they are minutes from certain instantaneous death' shakes the already strained resolve of the command staff here. He catches a trembling fist clutched around a cross in one corner and a pair of dead eyes staring through spectacles at a family portrait. They have no intent of resisting him, now.     Only one of them, a messy non-regulation haircut and a junior executive badge up front, finds the words to offer Arthur what he wants: Evacuate 'according to procedure' from the self-destruct, be picked up by an NWOR special extraction team that he's sure will appear to get a full debrief from them if both of the senior staff can't be reached (thus throwing Grant and Jackson under the bus), and wear whatever wiretap bullshit the group thinks they can stick on them to spy on their boss's bosses whom they've never met.     Only Grant is quick enough to pull a sidearm and plug him on the spot, ostensibly ex-mil himself. Lilian appears just in time to grab Jackson, and say "I'll be taking this." in deadened tones, before disappearing again.
Staren	Oh fuck they absolutely planned for this. Oh fuck they ABSOLUTELY PLANNED FOR THIS.     It's around the time that anti-tank specialists shoot the mech in the back that Staren realizes she's really in trouble. It's a credit to her piloting skill that the mech is 'only' in bad shape after that, but this machine was NOT designed for this engagement; she has to pull back and be extra cautious, trying to work out a strategy that doesn't rely on 'warp in tons of gear' since that's so inaccurate here. She really, really, really should have carefully warped in a bunch of shit outside; she just didn't think that such a remote facility would be filled with THIS MUCH military opposition.     Well, one thing she can do is reanimate the toughest-looking antigent corpses (some of the monsters sent from level 7) as golems and send them back into the fray as bullet sponges. Ordering them to charge into the enemy (and-remote-detonating bombs she's strapped to them) when they look close to going down a second time.     She thinks about pressing on. If she's just careful enough, maybe--     Then she remembers getting shot in the back and knows: She's *not* careful enough. Arthur and Lilian can teleport and Rita can take care of herself. Staren pulls out, trying to find somewhere quiet, free of opposition, where she can work on trying to warp things in again. Whether it's robotic reinforcements, combat gear, or time to break out the tacnukes.
Ishirou	I4's has to work for this, though they might not know how he does it, they do know cutting him off works if they can keep him out of electronic things.  The problem is, is that he can be in a LOT of electronic things, and eventually when he can't make their day worse, he can make their day MUCH WORSE, by being a spotter for everyone else.   There comes a point where things come to a head, Bond has the information, Lilian has their person.  Rita's monsters will run through their monsters, THEIR monsters have already turned on them.  Rita's going to eat them, Arthur has more or less gotten some to turn on the others.   He gets a moment to try and go through what he can but is both interrupted by Staren, who can't keep the nuke in her pants, and also Lilian making him realize that they can't even hold this place, and likely nearby bases will come swinging.  She indicates ten minutes. So I4 will spend those minutes trying to get what he can from any computers he can from off the grid.  Aiming for those who were higher up on the chain.  Maybe they'll have something that'll be useful.  Eventually, he moves to leave before the time limit.  He'll at least get a chance to comb through someone's head.
Staren	Ten minutes? No point in sticking around, then.     Staren goes to floor eight and, curious cat that she is, tries to see what's behind the one-way mirror. Barring whatever it is requiring a different reaction, she takes a look around and just starts loading stuff into the mech's cab and trunk as fast as she can. No time to find the 'best stuff', just grab what she can!
Arthur Lowell	>Arthur: Shut down the nuke     Arthur is a mess. A spear-like chunk of antegent through his jaw. Bruises, burns, all over his body. He's been outright shot several times. His teeth are gritted. His knuckles alternate white and red.     "Hate this. Hate this." He rasps, holding up, in one hand, what looks to be a clump of every potent act of potential fusion the atoms in the bomb had inside them. He drops it on the floor and stomps it out like a cigarette butt. "If you're gonna move, it better be pulling a gun on me, not popping a cyanide. Fuck." And Grant is the one who did, in fact, pull a sidearm and plug him dead in the chest. He falls back, swearing. Slamming to the ground, he twists, burns his broom to quick-dash around the terminals and chairs of the room for cover, and moves to slam Grant in the knees with a wide flanked sweep. He is here for his kneecaps.     "Fuck off, warlord!" He shouts through gritted teeth, kicking the gun away. "Fucker. ASSHOLE!" He looks about ready to lose it, but it's the junior who gets him out of the stress moment. He spits more blood, and starts to work the horrid needle out of his head. "Got it. Got... some guys who can help. Where's that fuckin' agent..." He'll relay all this to James Bond, as well as to I4. Staren, Rita, I love you two, but you are definitely not suitable for organizing a wired informer. "They'll get you what you need. Make this right." >Arthur: Make this right.     He looks over Grant. Jackson's gone. He's tempted to brutalize the remainder. And for a moment, he just... basks in it. The tortuous pain of not getting satisfying revenge, and being in a room full of people who deserve their knees, jaws, and noses broken, and knowing that he shouldn't, and won't, because of heroism.     It is, in the most plain and honest terms, horribly masochistic. He soaks in the painful experience of solving this the heroic way. It's like he's in a trance. His body shakes with stress and his eyes tear just a little. At the end of this entire crusade of vengeance, he's in a situation where the only way to learn more about this is to let the others take the top dogs Jackson and Grant alive, and to not harm the others. To experience himself murdering humans, and then not even significantly hurt the ones truly responsible. And *that's* the pain that keeps him grounded, keeps him human. >Arthur: Stomp on Grant to get at least a little satisfaction. >Arthur: He's the obvious target. Lilian left him to you. On purpose. >Arthur: SHE KNEW WHAT SHE WAS DOING. NO MORTALS WOULD BEGRUDGE IT.     Nope. And denying that compulsion twists his guts up painfully, in the only way that will let him continue to be Arthur Lowell.
James Bond	A microfilm camera quietly clicks, squeezed in Bond's palm. It captures computer screens, correspondences, the contents of manila folders alike. Lowell's found Jackson. Here, an overview of the NAZCA cells currently in operation. Between that, these, and... Here, a diagram of a few different models of tuner. It should be enough to work from.      Bond nearly closes the drawer of the abandoned desk. But something catches his eye. Something old. Pre-onslaught. Very narrowly pre-onslaught.      Deep space telemetry? That late in this world's history? Bond leafs through the dossier, then glances towards the date displayed on the computer. Not only did they find something, back then--it might have been a warning signal for the Onslaught. Another one is dated for... "December?" This year.      "You knew. Did you not speak up, or did no one listen?" You know better. Than to think it'd be that simple. Even if they did speak up... someone else would've been thinking of a way to capitalize upon it. Think later. Move now.      Lowell's got someone to be an inside man. "I can handle him," says Bond over the radio. "I'll set him up--then we should leave."      He snaps the last few pictures, including one of a clearance denied message when attempting to track down more info on Jorumgandr. Then he's off, blending back into the chaos to rendezvous with Arthur and set Grant up with a wire. It's a simple thing, as easily operated as simply turning it on before heading out and leaving it be. As such technology goes, it's also remarkably unobtrusive even for its intended purpose. Only the best for the 00s.      "You're a survivor, 'Grant.' It sets you apart from the rest of these people." says Bond coolly, eyes flicking briefly over to Arthur. To the wound Grant inflicted. James Bond is a hero only in the vaguest sense--there is nothing heroic about what he does, and any ideas to the contrary are fiction for the benefit of the public. "We've been looking for you for a very long time." He doesn't bother to hide his accent. Grant will know, or think he knows, exactly what Bond means by 'We.' Not the elites. Not some lofty, idealistic police force. The other ghouls.      "People like you sometimes make mistakes," he says, eyes locked on Grant's. "Your survival instinct takes the wheel, and you're so eager for a way out that you look at a dead end, and you think you've found it."      "If you decide not to go through with this, you'll have no one. And I'll see to it you'll be very jealous of the people who died here today."      "Good luck," says Bond icily.
Rita Ma	It's probably fortunate for everyone else's comfort that Rita's horrible shrieking and brain-scrambling lightshow eventually find a counter. Even in her current feral state, she seems to register when they stop being quite as effective, shifting tactics seamlessly from "walking flashbang" to "ambush predator".      The sheer crush of bodies that she directs is used to flood hallways, block sightlines, and prevent retreat, ensuring a vaguely Liza-esque series of smaller fights. Once she's managed to get herself alone with a handful of soldiers in a room, the discretion cut to shadow-silhouettes and screams is presumptive.      The trouble is getting there. Even weaving mimic-decoys, even with several hundred bodies' worth of ablative mass, even spending more time invisible than not until the sheer quantity of blood caking her makes that untenable, she takes a good few bullets in the moments when sight-lines are open or distance can't quite be closed. Each one is punctuated by another unearthly shriek on her part, and then a retaliatory wet crunch.      Injury doesn't sober her up. It seems to do the opposite: after a minute of slaughter, she's heaving deep panting breaths through an open mouth and lolled-out tongue; her posture is preferentially all-fours rather than upright; her facial muscles are tensed in a nameless expression that no human has ever worn, and her eyes roll back in her head to show pure whites more often than not. There is a limit to her stamina, but not to her fury or her appetite.      "Rita, the human" puts the hard brakes on "Rita, the monster" halfway through choking down someone's vertebra while clawing out a different soldier's organs. The change is immediate, like coming up for air; she staggers backwards, heaves a sharp gasp, registers instant disgust at what she's just been doing, and leaps straight up through a hole in the ceiling to get away.      "You did exactly what I told you, I guess," she mutters to nobody in particular while climbing back up onto the eighth floor. "You could've been less gross about it, though."      Her legs give out from under her as the adrenaline starts to wear off, and she falls down onto her side. Pushing herself up into a sitting position is slickly tricky, and involves smearing blood all over the floor in the process. It's under her fingernails, on her skin and clothes, in her hair, most of all in her mouth.      I could keep going, but what's the point? The Cycle and the Plants will do work. Then Staren's going to blow this whole place up. I can't forgive anyone here, but they can get a few more minutes.      Rita coughs softly, then sniffles, then stares down at her hands with a queasy expression. I did it, right? I did something good. Innocent humans are safer now. The monsters are gone, or going to be. This was right. I don't feel guilty. ... But I can't feel good, either. All the things we saw today... it just makes me want to throw up, and cry, and take a shower.      She staggers to her feet, looking around the empty data-storage floor. Maybe I4 is here somewhere; she doesn't see him, if he is. "Ms. Rook?" she says softly, her voice quavering a little. "Lilian...?"      Then she changes her mind abruptly, shakes her head, and fades into invisibility again. Don't be stupid. She shouldn't see you like this.