Scene #7882: Signal Echoes: Desert

Owner	Pose
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	PETRICHOR V ABANDONED AQUEDUCT Origin of Tar The blinding white of infinity retreats from your vision. Rushing to fill the space is a collage of earth tones--a desert. Long-forgotten stakes, marked with crimson bands that blow in the wind, outline the boundaries for safe travel, beyond which vicious sandstorms blow. You stand in a circle free from the vicissitudes of such sandstorms. Here, the sand cannot completely conceal the dark brown peaks of rock formations. It doesn't come close to burying the deep brown arches of a towering aqueduct. Black ichor streams endlessly from this aqueduct, pooling into a chasm in the ground. In places, bones from massive, bygone creatures peek above the surface of the sand. The Engineer has set up a defensible point on a ridge not far from your entry point, which overlooks a half-buried plaza resting askew, as if the planet were in the process of swallowing it. His ambulatory turrets patrol in tight, perfectly synchronized circles, while the approach is littered with square, four-pronged mines. The Captain is making minute adjustments to a drone--the kind that speaks to a lot of experience with this very thing. Curiously, the drone seems to have constructed its own imitation of his point-defense microbot. Huntress watches from the peak of the ridge, a shimmering arrow pressed against the string of her electrobow, loosed to strike a larger, more brutish cousin of the beetles from the plains directly in its cyclopic front eye. "More of them on the way," she says. "A little more frequently than the plains. What are we waiting for?" "We had no idea where that first teleporter was gonna take us," says Phreak, speed-typing on the console affixed to his wrist. "Which of the two destinations it was gonna be. But there's a way to lock it in. Hypothetically." "Well?" asks the Captain. "Don't keep us in suspense, my young friend." As the Engineer's turrets ash a leaping lizard-person before it crests the ridge, Phreak explains. "We ran some diagnostics on the teleporter as it was charging. The power source is local, but it gets navigational data from a remote processor. Up there," he says, pointing a lightly armored finger at the planet's moon, faintly visible through midday haze. "Without getting into specialized quantum mechanics bullshit, we -also- found that somebody set up a locally accessible backdoor." "Access is granted via phyiscal authenticator token," the Engineer elaborates, his shoulder-mounted grenade launchers flinging a volley of spherical explosives to rain down the mountain on a cluster of approaching floating masks. Their fires wink out as the [wood?] [clay?] is cracked. "Phreak can spoof it, but I'd feel better if we could find the real deal. Those blue pods we saw--the access terminal should look similar to those, and the token... I'm certain it'd be one of the coins M found. Rita's not escaping that nickname, it seems. Phreak nods once. "Either way we do it, that terminal needs to be accessed before the teleporter, or we're stuck chancing it, and these fuckers don't go in reverse. Everybody good? Cool, let's rock." POINTS OF INTEREST: -On a shelf of rock jutting from a cliff wall, a knee-high blue shrine, surrounded by deep blue, pointed crystals. It doesn't seem as though it belongs here, and yet, is strangely inviting... -Pressure plates, two of them, on opposite ends of the area. One rests beside a rock near the endpoint of the aqueduct, while the other is near the end of the safe boundary marked by the stakes. -Here and there, blue pods that seem halfway between mineral and plant, with seams that indicate they'll open, if given the right incentive. -A smashed communications relay, the sole sign of former human habitation in this place.
Raziel	Raziel listens to the situation as it stands. Simply put, going into the teleporter is the goal, and calms things down from a metric shit ton of things that want them dead. On the other hand, they have no control of where they are going if they do this...and need a way to do this better. While the controls seem to be on the moon, there should be a local solution. Engineering is beyond his expertise, and he won't pretend otherwise. "I'll leave that to others," he says, with a shrug. "I will, however, look over other things to the best of my ability. Specifically.." he points to the two pressure plates. Moving off from the group, Raziel keeps quiet and low. If creatures still ignore him, he lets them for now, while looking at the pressure plate at the aqueduct first. The first thing to do would be to see what happens if one is pressed over the other, and see if there were any changes. 'A pair of pressure plates. If these were designed like those in my home, I would have to find something heavy to depress one, or both. Something is likely to change in the area, but rather for good or ill is still unknown. However, without someone with the ability to see into the future, there is only one way to find out.' "I'm going to press this one, please be ready in case something dramatic happens." With that, he steps onto the pressure plate, aiming to depress it. If it does not depress based on his weight, he'll attempt to slide the rock onto it.
Liza Grier	The first thing Liza has done since exiting the teleporter is getting to the top of a pylon and high-spec energy scanning the area, feeding back her signals to Phreak to show everyone else; thermal blots, energy signatures, electrical equipment; ideally this should include any crates and terminals as well as enemies in the blowing sand. The second thing she does is swipe through some lesser-used menus and dial in new teleporter drops, finessing blue holograms into place on stable ground, whereupon beams of red light splash down from, vaguely 'the sky', and plant four equadistant stationary tripod guns around the area Engineer is fortifying, each with their own ammo box, which sweep the dunes with thermal optics and automatically burst 14.5mm fire on unidentified targets until they stop moving. Following them, two belts of claymore mines, which Liza detaches and plants by hand, right in front of the turrets for anything that gets close, and behind and between them for anything that gets past. She's already fully reloaded and checked all her weapons from the care package last time. She occasionally examines the blue band, and its eerily appropriate inscription, she has hesitantly snapped to her wrist, and mutters something about the sand being bad for firing conditions and how she doesn't really like energy weapons. "Anyone got an idea of what that black goo is?" she suddenly calls out, voice crackling extra in the ambient sand. "I know it's not doing anything, but I never, ever trust goo colours other than green." "Okay. Comms relay. I'll pull the data from it this time. Group account; credit check." When she sees Raziel going for a pressure plate, she makes sure to chuck him a spent ammo box, filled with empty brass, that weighs a good ten kilos, to drop on the other. "Rita, is that shrine anything like what you saw last time?" Of course, she's asking while making her way over to the broken relay. Cryptographic sequencing is a fairly standard affair; or rather, Liza, being a team of one, had made sure to learn it, lacking a dedicated hacker like Neutron. It'd been easy for him last time, so it should still be doable for her. She slaps the last claymore at her back while she works, bringing back her submachine gun to fire quickly on the move and put down the thinner groups of enemies while the respite lasts.
Rita Ma	Rita's subjugated swarm of monsters, all lizardpeople and smaller beetles, are mostly passive until she instructs them to move. The commands she gives them aren't spoken aloud, but with how faithfully and exclusively they're executed on, one can easily extrapolate her intent. Go there. Attack that. Defend yourselves. In lieu of a ranged attack of her own, a synchronized barrage of dozens of lizardman fireballs is turned on anything that gets too close to the staging area. Rita herself is splashing her face with a handful of water from a little canteen. The desert is even worse for her than the tundra would've been. "I don't like this place at all, Ms. Grier," she mumbles despondently. "It's like a beach, but not nice enough to have any water." Of course, that intention to move on as quickly as possible manifests in rapt attention towards Phreak's plan. "So the backdoor will get us there? Or, you think that whoever set it up can help us?" But the distinction isn't that important to her. There's only one thing around here 'similar to a blue pod, but not': that knee-high shrine up on the high shelf. "Exactly like that, Ms. Grier," she answers, and promptly takes off to reach it. Its inconvenient location is barely an issue for her: she leaps towards the rock wall, finds miraculous fingerholds and toeholds, and kicks off of those immediately with improbable strength to land on the ledge in a low crouch. Her investigation of the idol is focused on three aspects: 1. What happens if she touches it with her hand? Anything like the shaped glass? 2. What happens if she prods it with the glass artifact? 3. Does it have grooves for a coin, like the orb did? Assuming the third is true, she thinks back to the strange blue coin she'd discovered in the last zone and surreptitiously tastes the air with her tongue. Copper and nickel have their own distinctive scents. Did that blue coin have one as well? And if so, can she use it to track one down here?
Liza Grier	Of course, the minute Rita complains, Liza teleporter drops a pallet of water bottles for a single telecrystal too. Apparently a twelvepack was as small as she had bundled and ready. They're still cold. Probably straight out of a cooler then. "If that's your biggest complaint, then we should be fine." she says, as warmly as she can while she sounds like a yandere Combine-tan.
Hiromi	Hiromi comes through with her stone army, largely intact. Not yet seeing a direction they should be charging, and having already made them understand the proper identification of 'friend' and 'foe,' she leaves them to wander around the immediate area on their own, forming their own patrol lines, as she goes to investigate the area. Sandstorms, like so many other things, don't appear to bother the Archwolf. She strides through with that kind of implacable energy most at home in stories of helpless terror -- though there isn't anyone around to appreciate her gradual appearance in low-vis conditions, this time, the local creatures having correctly identified her as 'not human,' and therefore not their concern. If that's changed by her commandeering of the stone men, she'll deal with it, as necessary. Sharing Liza's curiosity with the black goo, Hiromi stalks over to stick a claw in it. If nothing special happens at that, she might give it a taste.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	"I do, yeah. It'll at least get us there. And if we're lucky, the person that made it'll be helpful, too." Rita does know what the black goo is. Or at least, it smells eerily familiar, even from over here. It smells like the beetles. Her investigation of the altar provides the following information: 1. Newts. Hundreds. Each is about the size of Bercilak. They're swimming through not-water. One struggles to keep up. Blind, disfigured. Ignored by the others. He doesn't care--there's a tidepool he knows of. Doesn't want his brothers and sisters to know of. 2. There is a slot for one of those coins. As luck would have it, they seem to materialize as some sort of byproduct to whatever process reanimates the creatures here. They do have a distinct smell, easy to track down, though difficult to describe using any earthly word. 3. The shaped glass, touched to the altar, conveys no particular memory. But there is an odd pull. Tidal, almost.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	The lesser beetles and lizard people don't bother the party, and instead join the ranks of Rita's assembled forces. You must still contend with self-destructing jellyfish, larger, more aggressive and territorial beetles, and flaming, animated masks. The larger beetles have tougher armor and greater physical strength, and are able to attack with earthen shockwaves driven up by powerful forelegs. The jellyfish are easy to predict but unnervingly driven. The masks hover out of up-close reach, mustering their strength to blast with concentrated lances of heat. The latter two are easy work for Liza's turrets, not being particularly fast. The more aggressive beetles are both fast and tough. The Engineer's mines uproot themselves and rush towards the beetle guards as they approach, staggering them. Liza's finish the job. There is relative peace, for a moment. Phreak zips (he's unnaturally fast) over to Raziel. "Here," he says, lifting the spent ammo box with... effort that's a little embarrassing, actually. "I got you, champ," he wheezes. Despite being weighed down and the funny way it affects his gait, he's still pretty fast on his way over to the opposite switch. The earth rumbles, with both plates pressed down. The groan of metal on metal. A door, opened somewhere. Raziel feels memories that aren't his own. A story he never read. A [hero] from the stars, riding a blue dragon. He was honored for [his] kindness, a great temple constructed on the surface. [The Lemurians] sang and danced in the tunnels carved into the belly of their new home, in celebration of their salvation. Two stomping gaits draw nearer and nearer. Two giant lizard-people--Elder Lemurians, he now knows to call these larger versions--joined in hands. One is wreathed in flame that follows in his step; the other chills the very air around her. They attack, with breath of fire and ice, in unison, each easily twelve feet, claws large enough to crack stone where they miss Raziel in their swipes.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	The pods, by design or by genome or structure (who can say? is it flesh, or stone?)--respond to the presence of those blue coins Rita is hunting. But as Phreak mentioned, it is possible to deceive them, to find the negative image of what they're looking for, and conjure a convincing fake. Like making a mold of a key. It reeks of spacetime bullshit--the kind that you'd find xenoarch bringing aboard a station, or scientists poring over, or housed and powering said station. Neutron's guess about who might have set this system up seems on the money. The pods, the altars, the coins--they're more like protrusions from some other space than they are truly a part of this space.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	With her affinity for earth, Hiromi can tell that this sandstorm is a work of design, not an act of nature. The grains are hurled by winds so fast as to flense the flesh from mortal life. That seems to be the point. This is a quarantine zone. What, specifically, it's quarantining, is the tar. A will not her own crashes and breaks against the Archwolf's immovable will, the moment it touches her tongue. The stone giant in her service rumbles a warning. MONUMENT TO THE WEAKNESS OF HE WHO SHALL NOT BE NAMED. IN SAVING THE DUNEPEOPLE, DAMNED THE DESERT. Unable to overcome her, the tar burbles a wheedling request. The language is like a strange dialect of the earth--different, very much so, than her stone servant. -Spread me, that I might feed. Accept me, become one with me, and become stronger even than you are now.-
Raziel	Raziel uses his telekinesis to halt the spent ammo case box, lowering it to the ground near him. He looks up, "Appreciated Ms. Grier," he says, but before he could pick it up again, Phreak goes to help and the strain he was under was slightly amusing. He does, however, help carry the burden with focused telekinesis...before he sprains something in his back. "I appreciate it, friend." Placing the rock over his switch, while the other one is handled... 'My consciousness was taken from me for a moment, memories that I did not have before flooded into my mind as this planet seemed to share with me a story. As well as a door opening somewhere.' Raziel dropped to a knee for a moment, reeling as the memories flooded into him. Something was feeding him information, adding it to his own collective thoughts. Though he was not incapacitated, it did take some time to get used to these new memories implanted. 'A hero from the stars, riding a blue dragon. Honored for kindness and a temple constructed in his honor. The lizards, now as I knew them as Lemurians, sang and danced in the tunnels that were carved into their new home. All of this is in celebration of their salvation.' The stomps from the oncoming Lemurians did not go missed by Raziel. He waited, until the last possible moment before he would react. 'How these memories got to me I did not know, but I could sense the vibrations of something large approaching me. I knew it would not be friendly, given that my allies did not make these large shakes in their movements. I would be quickly on the defensive...' The moment the claws came down, Raziel seemed to fade out of existence. He seemed to be smoking, avoiding the claw strikes as he leaped back, narrowly avoiding those strikes, and the elemental effects they had on the world around them. His hand reached out, finding one of the nearby suicidal jellyfish, and grips it in his telekinetic grasp, before launching it out towards the pair, aiming to have it explode on the pair of lizards before they could react. "Two large Lemurians over here, and I felt a door open somewhere, as some...memories being sent into my head," Raziel said, through quick breaths.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Liza is able to pull some data from the comms relay. Oddly, not a broadcast per se. It's someone's personal log. A straggler from the original survivor party was left behind. They must've been bouncing it to the relay before it was smashed, in the hopes that someone would either double back and find them, or that help would come from UES in time to retrieve them. "My healing drone won't come near me any more -CHIT-. The beetles see me. I know they do. But they aren't attacking. It's like they're waiting, and I don't know which is scarier." "The voice is getting louder." The mic picks up a sickly heave from the survivor, followed by clicking. Whether the beetles are a means for the tar to spread its influence, or merely a convenient template it hijacked for survival on harsh planets, is unclear, but it is evidently capable of both mental and phyiscal changes in its victims. There's also a standard-operating-procedure coded message, UES cipher. The Captain is able to decode it for her, assuming for some reason she doesn't have a sequencer handy. It lists the active number of survivors as even smaller than the number that made it here. Only 40 made it to Rallypoint Delta.
Hiromi	Prepared for something like melting flesh, Hiromi only has to deal with something attempting to invade her mind. That's far easier, as it happens, and she rolls around the bad candy between her teeth long enough to ask it, Where do you come from? Past that, she's no reason to heed this request. She spits back into the flow of goo, trusting her body to be strong enough to handle the rest. She's yet to find anything she really couldn't eat, though plenty of things are just unpleasant. Glancing back, she finds Raziel... fighting? She's pretty sure he's fighting, though it's not clear, to her, how he's doing it. In lieu of directly supporting him, she plucks her warbanner from the earth, where she'd placed it in case of acidic goo, takes two steps, and throws it like a javelin, arcing through the air until it embeds itself in the stone near him, briefly far harder than the terrain for her own influence lingering on it from the moment it left her hand. A warbanner should be where one wars. She'll come back for it later. What did the engineer say? Something about blue pods. Hiromi drops down to her four-legged form, her macabre pauldron still over her shoulder, next to the bronze bands and silent bells, and goes hunting for some of those.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Surprisingly, the elemental affinity isn't the only trick the two Elder Lemurians bring to bear against Raziel. The two of them seem absurdly, abnormally lucky. It takes easily three or four of those jellyfish to actually stop the both of them for good--glancing blows and improbable bursts of wind conspire against them. When they're both killed, their hands remain clasped. Clenched between them is an alien clover--57 leaves. It doesn't take him long to find the spot of the door. It leads into a dusty chamber beneath the aqueduct proper. Once, this might have been a home. Ratty skeletons of what once might have been furniture, all sized for the slain Lemurians. Dust-caked glass baubles. Dented, tarnished vessels. A relief etched into the wall. Centuries of dust and grime must first be wiped off, before it finally reveals a seven-eyed, many-armed figure, astride a great, coiled serpent. Lemurians large and small are carried, through a field of stars, rescued from a cracked and crumbling world. At the edges of this relief, other, similar stories are told. The [hero] saves, in these two stories, a group of masked, horned craftspersons; a great many serpents of undoubtedly the same species he is shown to ride.
Rita Ma	The water bottles' packaging is sliced open, and one of the bottles mysteriously floats up to Rita sixty feet away. She waves down exaggeratedly, positively beaming. "Thanks, Ms. Grier! You're the best!" While she's distracted with tasting the air, one of the jellyfish survives her lizards' barrages and explodes in the middle of her forces, taking a substantial chunk out of them. Her lips twist into a little frown. Can I eat those safely? There's not much left of them when they die. If I tried to eat one alive, it might just blow up on me. Eugh. They look rubbery, too. Priority target, then. Her lizard-people begin to focus on the jellyfish preferentially whenever they drift near. If any get through regardless, her beetles try to shield higher-value creatures with their bodies. Rita leaps between high stone structures, weaving around the flaming masks' beams. Globs of horribly corrosive blue venom fire from the space around her with no clear physical origin, striking them back with remarkable accuracy. Down below, her swarm begins to move too. They're in search of at least one blue coin- or, failing that, of enough creatures to kill to get one to materialize. As soon as she has even one, the next phase of her plan can start.
Raziel	Raziel keeps the tosses going, and is thankful that they are so many of these Jellyfish around to throw at the two large beasts. Neither of which he wanted to get close to due to their elemental fields. Also, it likely, had some sort of weird elemental duo thing, which never ends well. With the pair down, he searches for the opened door and finds it. 'The door leads into a dusty chamber, the years have taken their toll on this abode, and given the memories, I had been given, this had to have been a Lemurian home.' Raziel walks through the home, taking time to look over items, and try and piece together what may have happened. Until he found a wall. Wiping the years away from it, he finally came to find what was here. 'Underneath the dust and grime, I saw a picture of what looked like a figure. The figure seven-eyed and multiarmed person, riding a great coiled wyrm. It seemed to depict the Lemurians, being rescued from a cracked and crumbling world. On either side of this, is the same hero rescuing horned craftsmen and serpents. What could this be? An origin for this world? Were these invaders to this planet, or accepted into it to be saved from their own dying worlds?' Taking measure of the room, and checking to see if there was anything else here...other pictures, or stories or things to trip, he turns to leave. At least they now know how so many species were brought here, but there seemed to be a missing reason as to what happed after.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	-From the stars. Birthed, burbling and frothing, in the cradle of a meteor. This is how the Tar spreads. But never was I more warmly received than Aphelia. The aqueduct you see here is a pale imitation of the great works wrought for me to spread across that world. I only regret that Providence discovered me before I could properly spread across this one.- It doesn't take long to find a pod. Nor, with the murder squad currently combing this desert, does it take long to procure a coin to open one, if she cares to go looking. Opening it, by coin, by Phreak's deception or by sheer brute force she's known to have, provides a crown. With it, a thought. Spiteful. Bitter. They were doomed for good reason. You have made our garden into a wretched carnival. Dunepeople--lost to worship of parasites. Lemurians--destined to pick their own planet clean. The insects--a plague. You disgust me with your vanity, brother. Inviting vermin, wretches, rats, monsters, all without restraint. You entertain planet killers as guests, coddle them like children, say that you're protecting them, but forbid them from leaving, weave constructs of destruction and destroy their ships. She should have died for me. Not for a slaver. A gatekeeper. A hoarder. You will die, and that planet will be mine. If she dons the crown, she will invite a benefit and a hindrance--her strikes alone will generate credits for the security boxes, but -being struck- will deduct them.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Rita finds a blue coin with ease--between Liza and the Engineer's fortifications, Hiromi's stone servitors (including the giant one) and Rita's own murdermob of monsters, the planet's defenders are outnumbered and outgunned. Prioritizing the jellyfish is easy, and equally so with the wisps--neither of the flying hazards are particularly agile. The Captain has apparently found another drone. Some manner of interplay between his microbots and the drones allows the tiny rotorcraft to construct its own. He has, more out of curiosity than anything else, decided to hang around Rita. He displays an unusual (but perhaps, for Rita, knowing as many real-deal Harpoonists, familiar) lack of any fear response for how relatively lightly armed he is, standing relatively still in the thick of combat and applying precision, tight-spread blasts with his shotgun prosthesis. "What do you intend to do with that, I wonder?" he conversationally asks over a stunlaser bounced skillfully between two stone pillars to explode a jellyfish.
Liza Grier	<J-IC-Scene> Liza Grier says, "So there's more than one ancient catastrophe buried here?" That seems to be Liza's takeaway, both from what she hears of the black ichor, and from the fragmented data retrieval. Not enough to be useful, but enough to tell her exactly what to do with it. <J-IC-Scene> Liza Grier says, "The comms data is a straggler. Only fort of the original survivors made it past here. Thank fuck it sounds like the sorry bastard who got left here is a lone case. I don't want to see this. Not again." Hotswapping her weapons systems again, Liza equips herself with a gigantic .50 calibre anti-materiel rifle, having to strap the box magazines to her waist to carry them. Careful beads are drawn from her thermal optics through the sand, aiming for the core points of highest heat, and one shot is fired at each target, verifying impact before a second is fired; rarely. Each box has only a few shots, so she frequently switches between them, using high explosives to rupture the soft bodies of jellyfish and composite rigids to crack the shells of the enhanced beetles and tumble through their insectoid circulatory system. The fact that she is shouldering and firing it without any kind of bracing is sort of ridiculous on its own. The fact that she is hitting anything, never mind accurately and under these conditions, is additionally so. Once again, though she is no crack sniper, she is north of good enough to do it, herself. The masks are too small and numerous and flighty to be an appropriate weapon to use against them. Quickly realizing the heat-based attacks are terrible for her e-shield and dangerous for her explosives, and that if they're weird magic stone idols animated by fire, energy and chemical weaponry won't be very effective, Liza jumps straight to doing the first thing that makes sense. For a moment, her optics flicker ghastly purple, fixed on an aquaduct instead of the enemy. A moment later, the surface bristles with smooth points, fixed in the direction of the masks like liquid compass needles, nearly breaking the surface tension. And then moment after that, scores of droplets of animate liquid are accelerated into the air as a hailstorm of small, incredibly solid bullets, buzzing like hornets at tremendous speed and blanketing the masks with ideally enough wide area fire to simply smash them to pieces. Once she has that much cover, Liza begins scanning in earnest for the terminal that Phreak had mentioned. If it's connected, or even capable of, connecting to a station on the goddamn moon, it should have some electromagnetic signal she can pick up. Her steady efforts to blow the guts out of anything along the way, advancing steadily, firing a fifty-cal from the shoulder at targets unfairly far away, is to try and pick up her own coins along the way.
Redshift Operators	Neutron finishes up. "Don't think I can break this without risking the stuff inside." They say, holding up a shaped charge but sort of weighing it with their hand. "We need coins. Or we need not-coins. But they're coming from somewhere. They're injected in. These things, I mean." There's discussion on the radio. Something about where the creatures came from, something about how the creatures got here, and more importantly, the fact that they're not native. Something brought this technology with them, and the coins operate it. "We need more coins." Is all they say when Rita Ma finds one, heading to her. "Lots of infrastructure here interacts with it. I think it's the token that will help us breach the teleporter network. Or open those pods. Or other things. Someone who can understand geometry better should watch when you use it too."
Hiromi	Hiromi examines the crown. She's pretty used to having to judge the worth of old, buried things she's dug up. 'Thoughts' don't usually travel with them, though. That is rather new. Hitting many times before something explodes isn't really her style, nor is avoiding attacks that wouldn't otherwise harm her. That makes the magic on this thing (as she assumes and understands it to be) uniquely poorly suited for her. Looking around, it's easy enough to spot, and remember from the last area, who's putting out the greatest volume of attacks while avoiding getting hit, in turn. After she speaks that acknowledgment, Liza gets the crown tossed in her direction, thrown in a precise arc aimed over her right shoulder at the minimum (if still substantial) speed that would reach that point. But 'crowns' aren't what she'd been after. Somewhere around here is the key-thing they'd wanted, to make the teleporter get to where they'd like to go. Hiromi drops to four legs again after making the toss, and resumes her hunt. While she hasn't been bothered by many of the things on this planet, she still instinctively avoids notice while stalking about, low to the ground. At a few points, she stamps the ground lightly, listening to something back through her feet that will tell her if what she's looking for is buried nearby. The stone men don't really need any direction from her, but it's faintly pleasing to see them helping.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Liza's clever attack shatters the masks almost in their entirety. What's particularly odd is that there were smaller concentrations of the tar trapped beneath the sand. By the sensation of it, the shape of it--in elaborate jars, and, chillingly, humanoid bodies. Jagged splinters fall to the earth as credit displays tick up on her AR HUD. The Huntress picks up on the local radio. "They're turning the heat up. We'll want to find that terminal soon." She has a few moments of peace to find the terminal. It ends up being that altar which Rita had found. A subspace tether to another place. A hiding place. It's capable of connecting to the moon because it folds the distance between the here and there, along a very narrow crease. Not the kind that can be ridden straight to the moon, even though that ought to be possible with this design philosophy. Maybe whoever it was thought that'd be a bad idea, for whatever reason. Either way, they're appearing more regularly now, alongside the jellyfish--more concerningly, in elemental variations. Electrified, with increased resistance to damage via a faintly visible barrier. Their attacks generate localized explosions after the fact. Liza will almost certainly have a few coins on her, by the time she reaches that altar with Rita.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Neutron, heading to meet with Rita and Liza, may very well find some coins of their own--though the frequency of monsters is increasing, it's nothing that can't be handled by the overwhelming force being brought to bear. After only one coin is slotted into that altar, the slot seals up. There is an electric tingle on the back of the neck--even for those nowhere near it. "Winner, winner, chicken dinner," announces Phreak over the radio. The Engineer groans. "What are you, a fuckin' cyborg? Live a little." "Yes, actually." "Oh, well... okay. Anyway, all we gotta do now is find the teleporter. Remember, look for red motes, and don't turn that thing on until you're ready for a fight."
Rita Ma	During a lull in the cycles of mass violence and respawning, Rita takes a moment to examine one of the Captain's reactivated drones. She gives it an uncertain, wide-eyed little wave, as if unsure whether it's a person or not. When she reaches out with a hand to pet it, her eyes dart to the Captain first to silently ask for his permission. "Thanks for staying with me, Mr. Captain," she says, then second-guesses the doubling-up of titles with a mildly embarrassed look. "Ah, I mean- I haven't gotten any of the flying things yet. So your little machines are a big help. They fill a gap." When a blue coin materializes, she leaps down from her lofty perch atop a high rock to snatch it up immediately. "I have something that might work, Captain. Keep your fingers crossed for me, okay?" Returning to the central plaza where the Engineer has his turrets set up, Rita places the blue coin in the palm of her left hand, shuts her eyes, and takes a deep breath. Her right hand begins to sizzle with steam, glow white from within, and flicker with weird energies at the edges: ultra-high-energy biology interfacing with dimensional phenomena and ingested bits of solid cyberspace. A duplicate coin materializes in her right hand. And then another, and another, and another, until they're spilling out from between her fingers and piling into a comically oversized heap on the ground. Only when they've reached the point of "far more than anybody could possibly spend" does Rita turn off the spigot, clenching her hand and wringing her fingers to get the flickering energies to stop and gasping a little from the exertion. "There. That's it, Captain. I did it." The downside is hinted at when one of the coins in the pile sprouts legs and ugly little jaws, and scurries away at high speed. From the instant any of the duplicate coins are touched, a countdown starts. Within a few moments they begin to degenerate into horrible little gribblies with indiscriminately slashing claws, sizzling acid teeth, or writhing stinging pseudopods, becoming a hazard to whoever carries them. A little longer than that, and they dissolve entirely into a smoking puddle. By taking from Rita's pile, anyone can open as many pods as they want, but they have to be quick about it.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Hiromi doesn't have to do much hunting. Between littered UES security chests and less secure reliquaries of the same, she's able to find a few, left behind in the wreckage of fighting between her stone servitors and those suicidal, exploding jellyfish. This ransom may be spent on the pods nearby, or saved--there is a sense of permanence to the coins. Not in the usual way that things are permanent--even mountains must begrudgingly bear the claws of time. But whatever natural processes, whatever underpinnings of the universe all entwine with one another to present that which we contextualize as 'time'--they have not, and will not, lay their hands upon these coins, nor the pods nor the altar.
Rita Ma	Rita demonstrates their use soon after catching her breath: grabbing a replicated coin from the pile, she makes the ascent to the rocky ledge with the strange blue idol again. This time, her movements come with a sense of urgency even though it's right nearby. The real coins last 'forever', in some esoteric sense, but these definitely do not. Around the time it's trying to sprout jaws and twist around to bite her fingers, she slams it into the notches on the idol to activate it and heaves a little sigh of relief. The fake coin, if not consumed in the process, reverts to sizzling juices not long after. "See? Safe."
Hiromi	Hiromi wasn't the one to find the key-thing, but that's fine, so long as it was found, and Phreak announces they have it. Once she hears that, Hiromi picks up the coins, and rather than spend these on the pods -- having little space in her mind for the concept of spending coinage, and even less for the imaginary money the AR display racks up per kill -- she immediately switches goals to 'finding the red motes.' After that, she just has to retrieve her warbanner and commence with the next fight. Maybe with this one, she'll join in. Just a bit.
Liza Grier	Liza makes sure to spend a few of her own coins on what pods she can find directly along her route, but when Rita drops a pile of fabricated coins, and one bites (thankfully into her suit's shield layer) her finger, the hardened operative has a crack idea in a fraction of a second. "Hey Rita, hold your breath for a moment. Phreak, pod coordinates." Removing her helmet for the second time today, Liza bites into her lip harder than human safety brain is supposed to actually let her, and tears a little gash in the skin. The fine veins around her eyes spiderweb bright red instead of delicate blue through her nearly translucent skin, even more intense around her eyes. Her lunatic idea goes as thus: flick drops of her own blood on a fistful of coins, aim for where Phreak has designated a reasonably near pod, and then psychokinetically accelerate the little gribbly bastard item using her blood as a marker, slamming it into the slot without actually having to go any of the distance. She does this until there are no pods within her ability range. Strangely, the cut doesn't bleed after the first few seconds. Right after, Liza catches the hurled crown with strange ease, despite its considerable speed. She looks at it distastefull for a second, and says "Never thought I'd ever wear one of these. I guess it's fine, if it came off a corpse, right?" Having been told what it's for, she slings the huge rifle across her back, slides the crown over one arm so that it's fixed to a magnetic hardpoint on her upper arm, and this time dials in a new rifle that somehow must weigh almost as much as the last. Black, bulky, studded with vents and capacitors, glowing blue along its chamber line, its sleek, black, corporate minimalist design betrays that it certainly doesn't legally belong to her. As far as she knows, this works on a per-hit basis, so she makes sure to dispense another series of turrets as she goes, spreading them out to cover as wide an area as possible rather than concentrating them to focus fire, until the group has a holdout point. With her helmet back on, targeting thermals from long range again, Liza intends to rapidly rack up disgusting amounts of credits from the automatic bursts of ten turrets lying around the desert, and the deadly beam gun in her hands with its enormous internal battery.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	The Captain nods his head. The tines on his helmet move on their own. The resemblance to an axolotl's frills is more than passing. Rita may pet the drone. It hums. It beeps. A thousand thousand tiny parts, many moving, others tricked into thinking by the currents of electricity. It presses against her palm. "Strange, no? That an implement of violence could be so endearing despite its purpose. This is their strength. To be underestimated, until they may overwhelm. They are... old friends, even if I have not met these ones personally." The cryptic remark is punctuated by a gesture, with his index finger, to the tines on his helmet. Then, he crosses his fingers. Upon her return: "Ha ha. A clever trick, and just in time," he says, uncrossing them and gesturing with a sweeping palm to Raziel, the last of the party to gather here after Phreak, the Huntress and the Engineer. His boot stamps down on one of the fleeing coins. "Let us gather what we will, and then be off." "I got you, Liza," says Phreak. "Looks like three remaining. Uploading to your HUD now." Three offerings, three items. Near Raziel, a wrapped chunk of moonrock, undoubtedly from the moon of this world. It glows ominously. It will grant incredible point-defense, but over time, will greedily, self-aggrandizingly consume any items he picks up to make more of itself, save his EQUIPMENT (the dragon egg.) Near Hiromi, a beautiful crystal. It looks like starseed, tanning in dirt. It smells like hot stone, and tall grass. It tastes like spiced fruit, sweet and hot. It feels like solar winds, and solar chimes. It sounds like two brothers, chasing glass frogs in the sun. This crystal will provide a notable increase in speed, at the expense of what she understands to be 'bad luck.' Near White Dwarf, a mysterious string of beads. They don't seem to do anything, but...
Redshift Operators	With Rita counterfeiting the coins, and Liza likely to address the "terminal" issue (and Neutron guaranteed to if she doesn't) the Redshifts can focus on sampling the extracted contents of those pods. What's in there? A simple string of beads? White Dwarf wraps them around her ponytail's tie, leaving them dangling just a little. A convenient spot to grab later, of course. And then they're all off as fast as they can go, back to the teleporter. Because it's gonna start soon! They remember how this works. "That energy system's gonna rile them up bad again. No idea what's gonna show up this time. Something like those beetles? Or something like the lizards?" The gunman weighs an HE grenade in one hand and an incendiary grenade in the other, but readies his grenades... The ninja draws her blade, and readies the goo-clone for dual-techs.
Hiromi	Hiromi snaps up the beautiful crystal, recognizing some aspect of importance in it, in its scent and sound, before she tastes and feels it. She hurries on to join, inevitably, the others, as they find the teleporter. They cannot help but to do so, once the red motes are sighted, whenever this should occur. And on that moment, Hiromi returns to a two-legged stance, stabs her warbanner down into the ground, and extracts her crystal and the blue coins from around her tongue, to deposit the latter in a leather pouch half-hidden by the shadows of what she wears, and to take a cord to tie and hide away the crystal inside her skull-faced pauldron. Along the way, she addresses, without the need for words, that all of the stone men should once again join them, abandoning their one safe zone for this maximum danger zone.
Raziel	Raziel looks at the piece of the moon that manifested near him. He takes time to look over it, eyeing it. 'This piece of the moon above hummed with hungry energy. It was not unlike the Soul Reaver attached to my arm, though its hunger seemed to be for anything I was holding, that was not equipment. Though I was reluctant, the bear would be better served in the hands of others...should I die, it would be an inconvenience for me...should someone else...' He floats the bear with his telekinetic power towards Rita, making sure she has it firmly before he reached down to take and store the piece of the moon in his inventory. Already feeling its effects...and surprised at them. 'I could feel the defensive aura about this thing, and feel that being swarmed by the enemy would be impossible. This would go a long way towards helping me in the field, and I wonder if it would affect the equipment I had received.' Returning to the safe zone, Raziel reconvened with the others.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Hiromi finds, and starts, the teleporter. That distinctive pop. The rumble beneath the earth. The subtle change in the air. It's begun. https://youtu.be/DDcRbrZWFno The army--for that is what it is--holds the line against encroaching defenders. The air is a chaotic mess of projectiles. Lasers, from the wisps, and counterattacks from Hiromi's stone golems. The largest of them brandishes its own, cutting wide swaths and glassing sand in its paths. Fireballs from Rita's Lemurians fly in concentrated arcs, exploding jellyfish. The Captain's drones quietly chip away and the tougher targets, until they're focused down by harder hitters. Hiromi's warbanner speeds your attack, lightens you on your feet, makes it all seem so much more natural than it is. But something massive disturbs the sand, tunnels up from below. Golden grains tumble from two massive, ruddy brown horns, large enough to credibly topple the aqueduct, were enough force applied. Sand coruscates down, streaming past gleaming insectoid eyes. Forelegs pull up a body nearly as long as the intact portion of that aqueduct. It's not uncommon for insects to have queens. This is the queen of the beetles. With an unearthly caterwaul, she makes a deadly sweep with a razor-sharp leg. Eggs, laid on the spot, hatch into flying larvae that dive-bomb their targets, effectively saturation-bombing the area with their own movement-impeding lifeblood. Alongside this bombing, there is acidic bile spat up by the queen. All the while, the area is flooded with thick concentrations of those flying masks, and the exploding jellyfish. The Captain's drones--more accurately, the point-defense microbots near them--provide an area of relative safety, but their limited numbers can't shoot down everything.
Raziel	The teleporter activates, and this of course kicks the beehive off. The ground rumbles as creatures start to swarm them. Raziel at first takes it casually, wanting to preserve his strength. The armies clash, their armies and the armies of the bug people. Raziel uses his claws to great effectiveness, taking a somewhat martial stance as he uses them to slice through bugs that get near him. Jellyfish are less of a problem for him than others. Even as small-scale explosions centered around him protect him from some of the swarms, he uses his telekinesis to send the Jellyfish flying into the horde as it increases in ferocity. That was until the queen arrived...forced to look up at the creature, he feels finally the need to draw a weapon. A spectral weapon comes into his hand. The energy that was swirling around his arm now manifest into a blade. Those sensitive to feelings could sense the hunger radiating off of it. It was dangerous, but it was also controlled. Raziel activates the equipment he had, and becomes a flying fireball, aiming to try and clear a path towards the queen for others, his focus was to keep creatures from blocking for the queen and keep the field between them clear. Fire and explosions rain around him, and when the flames were gone... The Soul Reaver flashed. The blade easily cut flesh as it would spirit, absorbing the souls of the creatures it slew. He also used it defensively, sending fireballs fired at him away with carefully controlled strokes, before once more closing the distance between himself and them, and slicing through.
Hiromi	Hiromi is doubly faster, for the little magics affecting her, now. She can't trust to luck, but neither has she, until now. It doesn't well serve her, to trust anything so much as her own strength. The stone golems begin the fight on their own, but aren't without her aid, this time. Her ears flick, her eyes shift, she smells the air, and by her will, they move as she directs. Defensive lines and exploiting terrain are her specialty, and with enough force, the terrain can be remolded into more convenient shapes. With her aid, walls of sandy earth rise for the benefit of gunners and beam attackers, while baffling sloped lines funnel the planet's defenders -- this circle of land's attackers -- into narrow areas to be cut apart by shorter-ranged weaponry. No longer left to wander randomly, the golems array themselves in purposeful unevenness, covering gaps in the line, reinforcing those other members who most lack 'big, heavy punches' in their own arsenals, and blocking up points most useful for a minimally intelligent attacker to assault. There's little danger of overthinking the opponent's tactics, for the first step. For herself, Hiromi's steps make the earth tremble, and the larval blood that would impede her sinks instead beneath the sand, drawn beneath its motion. When she kicks the ground, it's with the force of directed artillery, striking masks and jellyfish with rending, mineral storm-winds to clear the way. Following behind her would be easy, but everything to the front is a wholly unreasonable field of destruction, each attack followed too quickly by another to begin to consider how to find her vulnerable. The sweeping leg is another matter, massive enough, and hard enough, not to be destroyed by wind and sand, alone, in the instant before it would strike. Buoyed by those extra boosts of speed from crystal and banner, Hiromi sets her feet and strikes down at the leg at an angle, redirecting it to plow into the earth, and launching herself over it in the same reactive moment. She keeps moving, intuiting the physics rather than reasoning, first dropping over its other side, and then running, sliding in below it, just before the flying larvae can take advantage of the end of her explosive walk to actually hit her. It's easiest from below, with the earth at her feet. She has all the support she needs to strike, even should the planet gain new craters for providing it. She doesn't stop at just one, flat knuckles explosively impacting the queen's underside as if a hundred times the size over and over again, wishing only that it could satisfy her by lasting a few seconds longer. The queen's own weight is what most ensures it won't escape her, no matter what breaks. There's no hope of ever tiring her, yet Hiromi continues to wish someone, someday, could let her body feel more than warmed up and ready for more.
Liza Grier	Finger on the designator, Liza calls in the ammo package as soon as the group sets up shop, anticipating that they'll need it. She, of course, anticipates correctly. However, the healing drop is nowhere to be seen, for reasons unknown. Liza commits the last of her turrets she's really willing to use here, another two belts of mines, and after partially exhausting her beam gun, puts it away, drops the anti-materiel rifle, and rotates the L6 machine gun back in. Chest high carbon plate folding cover is dropped in at several points around the teleport pad, used until the position becomes untenable. She replaces the barrel of her weapon twice, cycling out the overheated components to keep up the deafening stream of fire she needs. Explosive grenades are hurled sparingly where the horde packs together. The e-shield covers her from parabolic fire, and protects her head visible above the barricades. The giant queen showing up is a greater issue. But not an unforeseen one. Liza points the laser designator just ahead of the encroaching queen, quickly doing the math in her head, and then calls in the healing pod-- specifically, so that the high speed orbital drop will smash right into the queen's back. From there, Liza is committed to something fairly specific about the enemy assault; chemical warfare is one of the myriad things she knows; at least, well enough to bully anyone who doesn't. Ever handy multi-functional pull pin canisters come loaded with neutralizing spray, suppressant gas, and absorbent hardening gel compounds, perfect for dealing with acid, toxins, and sticky movement debuffs, given that nobody on her side is using them; it's just incredibly rare she actually has to cover such a wide area, never mind tactically airburst them. The beam gun comes back up. She burns the rest of it in a few enormous, incendiary pulse-lances focused on the queen.
Rita Ma	Rita dutifully holds her breath with puffed-out cheeks on Liza's request. A baffled expression turns to giddy wonder and applause at the blood-telekinesis stunt, and then to awed and slightly flustered warmth when she realizes the reason for Liza's request. As soon as it's safe to breathe again, she slips in close and hugs her friend's arm. "Thanks, Ms. Grier," she murmurs softly. "You really are the best." She disentangles herself only to accept the white teddy bear. "Thank you, Mr. Raziel! I'll take good care of it, I promise!" It goes in her satchel, right next to the less-pristine older one. They can be friends. Somehow, it feels like they could keep each other safe. The pile of counterfeit blue coins gets left behind; there's no safe way to keep them long-term. She does, at least, keep the unspent original.
Rita Ma	Armies of monsters slam into each other like waves beating against the rocks. The types under Rita's command have begun to be outclassed by their opponents- the hulking beetles here are four or five times the size of her own- but they are still terribly numerous, and her coordination makes them deadlier. Waves of fireballs thin out the flying masks. Her smaller beetles swarm their larger cousins and pull them to the ground, then stab and chew at their joints. For a few moments, she seems content merely to coordinate her subjects. They are dying in droves, but respawning in droves too; the team is playing a waiting game, so a bloody stalemate suits her fine. The Beetle Queen's emergence threatens to break that stalemate. So of course it has to go. Rita stares up at it emerging from the sand, like a whale breaking the surface, with wide and terrified eyes. A gasp escapes her, almost drowned out by the uproar. There, again- that lack of easy confidence, despite everything she's done and been doing. It takes her a moment to remember herself; to scrunch up her fists, breathe deep, and dart into the fray. She's inside the monster's reach before it's in hers, but the distance is crossed with unnatural and augmented swiftness. Rita slips between globs of acid with perfect ease; the dive-bombing flying larvae are snipped out of the air by invisible blades before they can touch her; a sweeping leg seems to find her, but merely strikes a decoy that dissolves into nothing while the real Rita is revealed safe elsewhere. By the time she's in close, her initial delay means the Beetle Queen has already been softened up by the others. But that's perfect. Rita can't conceal the substance of what happens next, but she can at least look like a normal girl while doing it, and that's the important part. Don't think about what's happening. Just let your body do the work. It's so I can be helpful. It's so I can protect people. It's so I won't have to be a burden on the others. Her beetles surge forward to tackle it, stagger it, cling onto and restrain its limbs for just a heartbeat. Rita stands in front of the monster and holds out her hand. Four cloaked tentacles unwind from her disguise and reach out, visible only by the aquamarine corrosive venom that drips from their points. They stab into the Beetle Queen's body in four different places, each one gouging and burning a smoking hole through its chitin. Once they meet flesh, they start to drink. The tentacles themselves are still hidden. But the glowing azure energy itself that drains in audible gulps, along four curving streams that connect the Beetle Queen's wounds to Rita's upper back, can't be concealed- the flesh is cloaked, but can't muffle the radiant light. Nor can she hide the way the giant beetles, the Queen's guards, seize up and begin to follow her orders in wiping out the rest of the hostile monsters. Nor the fact that, as its life is drunk, the Queen begins to disintegrate as if it were turning to ash. But all of that is less important than the fact that she looks human while doing it. It could be assumed to be a very strange kind of magic. Wouldn't that be nice?
Redshift Operators	"That'd be the answer." Says the grenadier, already lobbing his grenade. The group keeps distance from the slashing leg, shoved back by the ninja as phantasmal selves are bisected in front of her. The astronaut with their marksman rifle instantly opens fire on the dive-bombers, the ones that aren't close yet, while the fists of the giant fall on the ones that do approach, enduring their damage straight on his denting, sparking armor. He doesn't need to move, this is where he can stay, especially with Hiromi offering up walls to enhance that defense with. This way, at least, he doesn't have to stand in a dozen blood-puddles. And it gives the ninja the perfect place to lob her gooey friend, who can stand at a great height and cut down the attackers and their incoming shots, drawing fire away. Liza's right, though. The gunman is instantly on the ammo supply, lugging out its munitions and sending them downrange fast. He's focusing on the masks and jellyfish, letting the superhuman allies take the massive core threat after that grenade blast. He knows his specialty lies more in the mass-slaughter, in the end, rapidly moving in a nearly rhythmic way to strafe, slide, and back-hop to get good angles and dodge what damage it's possible for him to evade.
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	Raziel cuts through the crowd of flying monsters like a knife, setting all of them ablaze as he passes through them. The final detonation sets the beetle queen alight, as well, staggering her and throwing a volley of bile off-target. Every few seconds, an explosion rocks the earth as an orbiting bomb conjured by that mysterious stone slams into an encroaching monster. Between his use of Soul Reaver and those bombs, nothing on the field save the queen can challenge him in close combat. Phreak, chased by a pack of wisps, runs vertically up the length of Hiromi's wall, flipping off at the apex to spray them with a tightly controlled helical pattern burst. Bullet-sized chemical pellets rip through the masks as the Engineer's hoverjets carry him slowly up to the vantage point. Rocket-guided harpoons punch into bulky royal guards, knocking them aside in time for a hail of hard-light arrows from the Huntress to skewer them. The Captain, too, takes up a position at the top of the wall. Non-prosthetic hand folded patiently behind his back, he fires his stun-laser strategically before White Dwarf and Goobo Jr, effectively stunlocking them for easy combos in the staggered slopes Hiromi's made. The queen reacts almost in a frenzy to the Archwolf's proximity, eight legs frantically spearing the earth to send up conical bursts of sand and harry Hiromi. The Archwolf is correct, however--this creature isn't used to being fought up close, and won't tire her. Already, as the horde thins, the cracks in her chitinous armor grow. Pale green lifeblood, mingled with Tar, ooze outwards. Her underbelly is so vulnerable that when Hiromi's strike is done, the offending limb is stained that same pale, speckled green. No matter how frenzied her expectorations, manipulation of the earth, nor how many larvae she sends to their deaths, the beetle queen cannot overcome the fortified position Liza's set up on the teleport pad. "Hm... probe launch detected. And where shall it fall? Oh, a fellow artist," muses the Captain with quiet admiration. "What the fuck are you talking about--" The healing pod punches a hole straight through the queen's thorax, eliciting a shriek in equal parts pain and fury. A litany of smaller holes are punched through her carapace. Shattered masks and jellyfish flesh rain down upon that carapace, the gunman clearing the air and keeping it clear. Two ninjas prove better than one, beetle guards and fliers alike sliced in twain with dramatic flourish, as the astronaut pops stragglers before they become a problem. Rita's approach is frustrated with every means the queen has available, but the giant's fists severely limit her options by crushing and flattening what forces she's able to muster in advance of Rita's approach. Even where her desperate attacks find purchase, the Captain's healing probe quickly undoes such handiwork. The Captain himself watches Rita's finishing blow, amidst all the chaos, shooting only sparingly, when something isn't cut, crushed, burnt or shot down by the others. Rita does have the appearance of a normal girl. But normal girls don't siphon essence, in that way--whatever way she's using, he's uncertain of. But he knows the picture it suggests. "To be bitten... to be clawed... this is an invasion. Dire, frightening in its way, but fallible, also. To be drank... I think this is a terror in a class all its own. An utterly inescapable imprisonment." As the ashes settle, Phreak, having just zipped back to the top of the wall for a quick reload, catches this, and nudges the Captain to get his attention. "Hey. You're fucked. Do you hear me? You've got fucking problems." "Perhaps you are right, Phreak. But better a madman than a company man, no?"
Rubi-Kan Vagrants	As with last time, there is that chest-thumping, thunderous -pop-. It sounds as if some great gear, hidden within the crust of the planet, suddenly clicked into place, and the feeling is not altogether reassuring. But--something new. The air has been torn open, or perhaps peeled back. This wound in space is bright, shimmering like the surface of water, and blue. That'd be the backdoor Phreak and the Engineer mentioned. Rita obtained Queen's Gland. Engineer obtained mocha latte and tri-tip dagger. Huntress obtained syringe and leeching seed. Phreak obtained mocha latte x2. Captain obtained gunner drone x2. Hiromi obtained Purity. G obtained Brittle Crown. White Dwarf obtained Beads of Fealty. -The master of this world is a benevolent protector. Our savior. Despite the nature of our many neighbors, despite our own, he has made a peaceful place here. Peace has its cost. Some things are strictly forbidden. Above all, there is an item one cannot be permitted to have. A set of beads, strange in their heaviness, deceptive in their simplicity. To have them is to provoke the hand of Providence, the mighty protector, into taking a life he swore to protect. There is no encorcelment, no will-working upon these beads to elicit this response. Their danger is in what they represent--a a pact, which only the owner and Providence himself may truly know. Raziel obtained Egocentrism. -I know you can hear me. You trapped me on this forsaken rock. For what? For your little pets? For the disgusting creatures you love so much--more than your own brother? I can't even call it love, the way you treated me. You stabbed me in the back. How could you do this to me? The only one who looked out for you after her death? The one who showed you how to create? Who HELPED CREATE the very power you use to invite VERMIN AND PESTS into our home? HOW COULD YOU LOVE THOSE IMPERFECT, FLAWED, UGLY THINGS, BUT NOT ME? AFTER ALL I'VE DONE FOR YOU? HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME? ...Say something. Captain's Log As the portal shimmers idly, the Captain records another log, his soft German lilt giving the musings a weight beyond the words themselves. "What a curious thing it is, to protect. To impose your will, not only upon the world around you, but also upon that which you would protect. Where lies the difference between protection and confinement? Between an embrace and smothering, choking, asphyxiation? The desert here is littered with bones. On this world, where even death is no escape, I am called to wonder what transgression these creatures were guilty of, or perhaps, by what clever means they slipped the collar." Area Cleared: Abandoned Aqueduct
Rita Ma	In the aftermath, between the portal opening and the group moving on, Rita makes herself very quiet and very small. Despite the influx of energy, she is spent in more ways than one. The hot electric fear of "I don't want to be a burden" has given way to the clammy queasiness of "I don't want to be abnormal". She sits on a rock, and sips from another Liza-provided water bottle, and glances up at the Captain once on uneasy suspicion that she's being watched. But his helmet keeps her from knowing for sure, and she's not close enough to hear what he's saying. Her legs are crossed, her arms are crossed, and her eyes are fixed on the sand. After a while she reaches into her satchel and pulls out the sad teddybear, the one that's singed and torn up and 'bleeding' stuffing in multiple places. It's known a lot of patch-jobs before, in its long and well-loved life. She pulls out a needle and some dark thread after it- then, a moment later, reconsiders. The gold thread instead. It brings to mind something about pottery. Sewing it back up like this feels soothing, for more reasons than just giving her something to do.