Scene #7976: RIFTS: the Neuron Beast

Owner	Pose
Lilian Rook	Given the dual testimony of both Kale and Mack in learning where their mutual (well, everyone's) foe is, the pursuit really isn't very tough. Fleeing from 'getting shot by a nuclear death rod', what Mack assures everyone is a 'neuron beast' had fled off into the Colorado wilderness in a fairly linear and predictable way. Plus, as it turns out, it's kind of . . . Big. Actually. All of that talk about 'manifesting in the material plane' was clearly bullshit fed to Kale while posing as an ancient nature spirit. Following the creature's trail pretty quickly confirms that there are only so many creeks and dusty lanes that it could use, given the amount of scraped bark and cracked foliage between them. Presumptively it didn't just fly because it was in the middle of manipulating three different people who could all do just that. Thus, a fortuitous ground trail. Barely a couple of miles from Boothill, on the fringes of being alarmingly close to the Paladins base, an old riverbed dried up to a shallow creek bends around a steeply sloped hillside where it looks like the rock simply cracked and rose out of the ground and had been worn smooth and colonized by grass and wild brush since. An honest to god cave, nestled in the crook of the bend, is discoverable in rather obnoxious fashion by chasing the trail up until it runs into 'the illusion of' an earthen wall. Beyond that, pushing aside some overgrown roots, it leads into a dark, decrepit, and utterly dirt-cacked passage --all worn and faded metal, paint peeled right off-- set into the hillside. It doesn't appear to be designed to actually lead to a door, which no longer exists; it's like a cross section or diagram. Possibly previously buried. There's no power and no connection to a grid; the wire-caged bulbs layered in petrified dust are useless, and the corridors just run off into the dark.
Mack	Mack is the local subject matter expert. Once they'd identified what the actual culprit was, he took it upon himself to make sure nobody went in unarmed. After all, you know what they say about information. "Your average Neuron Beast," Mack says, walking while he speaks, "is approximately twenty feet tall and weighs in at about a ton, sports four arms and anywhere from ten to fifteen tentacular appendages, and has far more body spikes than is frankly necesssary." His eyes flash. An artist's rendition is helpfully transmitted to the briefed. http://www.merzo.net/Gallery_Rifts/RIFTS%20NeuronBeast.gif It is not a particularly pleasant-looking creature. "They're psychic vampires, and malicious ones to boot. They like to stick around places where trouble's been stirred up and make it last as long as possible. They usually pose as minor deities or powerful spirits, whatever will appeal to the locals, and do the wish-granting thing to get people to do what they want." Mack follows the trail. He doesn't seem to have much trouble with it. Maybe he can smell the monster. "They're nasty," he continues, hopping a fallen log. "Strong enough to punch through cement, smart enough to know how to beat you without having to. Expect direct mental attacks, magical misdirection, strikes from ambush, and any kind of trickery you can think of. Because it's listening to you in here, too." Mack raps a finger on the side of his metal-sheathed skull. "If you get in close, watch out for the talons and the paralytic barbs on the tentacles. And be careful -- it can telekinetically hover, so fighting in two dimensions is just gonna leave you at a disadvantage. That said, they're more naturally-inclined to warmer climates, so if you've got some kind of ice gun, now's the time." Mack does not sound like he is relying on anyone secretly packing an ice gun. "Blessed weaponry, too. Think of 'em as a particularly alien kind of demon." Mack stops at the earthen wall. His sensors tell him it's open, so he walks straight through the illusion, exhaling a wheezy sigh. He turns back to the others, eyes alight in the tunnel beyond. "Any questions?"
Hellwarming Trio	After the debacle from last time wherein Rin nearly roasted Utsuho who nearly roasted Kale, the youkai are looking a little more awkward as they head towards the lair of the neuron beast. Although they're not actively fighting, there's still a clear tension in the air between the youkai as they glide along to follow that ground trail to the cave. Utsuho is further up with her rod strapped firmly to her arm, and Rin is hanging further back with her wheelbarrow in tow while muttering to the fairies lurking underneath the tarp covering it. At least there's Mack's description and image of the Neuron Beast to keep them distracted. Utsuho starts counting the legs while Rin perks up at the mention of what it actually does. Rin: "Is that... That's what was happening! It was messing with our heads! So how do we get around that?" Utsuho: "Blow it up, duh." Rin: "But it'll know we're gonna try that if it can hear us thinking about doing that!" Utsuho: "So don't think. That's not hard." Rin is clearly not the type of person that can do that. She's already looking like she's freaking out again while Utsuho continues to just look generally nonplussed about the whole matter. Disappointed, even, although she looks fully prepared for a fight already between the control rod and the big stoney boot covering one of her legs.
Ioanna Langstrom	Ah. Psychic monster. Ioanna Langstrom is, at least, prepared and capable when it comes to psychic monsters. She'd trained herself long ago to deal with that kind of thing - unwilling to end up a puppet or a pet like many other ground forces units, sheer stubbornness and mental fortitude had made her strong against psychic intrusion. Lilian had once claimed that it made her Elite-tier by default - that anyone who could resist an Elite on natural talent was an Elite. It wasn't exactly the flashiest Elite ability. Still, in situations like this, it's a great one to have, she supposes. As they enter the cave she has to duck (she is not a short woman) to get the oversized, ludicrous, multi-barrel multi-chamber mess of a gun the O.C. has chosen to take the form of inside. Mack transmits an illustration. Ioanna glances at it in the F.C.'s HUD, helpfully layered over her eye like a mechanical headset-and-visor-eyepatch. "Huh," she says. Yikes. "Paralytic barbs, enhanced strength, ambush predator. Weak to ice." Matter-of-factly Ioanna pumps one of the barrels of her gun. A blue streak of light runs along the side through a number of vents like a meter slowly filling. "Roger." The two Gensoyko Junior Detectives banter. Ioanna glances over at them. "Dissemble," she says, "Psychic noise. Think about a lot of things at once instead of not thinking about one thing. Think about numerous attack angles, keep it guessing. Or just think loudly about lunch, dinner, breakfast, meals you like, people you like, stories you like, music you like...music in your head is generally effective to some degree against psychics. Not especially powerful ones - but it's a baffle effect that helps force them to focus instead of just broadly read your surface thoughts." "I've been remembering a lovely squid-based opera from a group of krakenids who recently integrated. The burbles are really intriguing musically. They actually use the bubbles and bursts as instruments unto themselves - like singing with water. It's marvelous."
Ishirou	"Why are we going into its lair instead of just...I don't know...collapsing it on top of it?" Ishirou asks to the 'any questions' comment. Though he is sure there is a /practical/ reason, for him going into a very dark mining tunnel with a monster that will tear him to shreds if it gets into melee is not a fun time. In fact, it sounds like the absolute worst thing to want to get involved in. Though he sighs, committing everything that Mack says to memory and starting to put a mental profile of the creature together in his head. Though once they were down there, and had to choose which way to go he decides to deploy the power armor. Instead of flight, he switches to burrowing mode just in case they have to fight in tight spaces and starts looking. Alright...keep it together Ishirou. Just don't think about the claws tearing you apart, or the tentacles impaling you with the paralytic barbs and eating you. Don't think about these things, because it's a psychic beast and will likely use it against you. He starts scanning, trying to find which way it was likely to be. Looking for anything it might have left as a trail. Psychic residue, tracks in the ground, and so on.
Go Shijima	"No questions," says Kamen Rider Mach. He steps through, too--but only once he sees Mack do it. Armored up in the sleek, aerodynamic FiveS armor, he glances over at Rin and Utsuho. "It'll probably hear a lot of us," he admits. "I'm hoping it'll be too much to keep track of. If not, well... I still think we can do it. It'll just be a lot harder." He nods at Ioanna, giving Rin a consoling pat on the shoulder. If nothing else, he's come to notice it takes longer for these kinds of things to affect him than most people. Mach slots a Signal Bike into that laser pistol of his--the decal on the rear wheel looks like a roadsign for an approaching split. The belt's AI cheerfully announces 'SPLIT.' "The suit might be able to handle the venom, or it might not. I'll keep my distance unless I see a big opening or one of you needs an assist."
Lilian Rook	There are no tracks on the ground beyond the swirls of disturbed dirt and dust in the entry stretch, because as Mack has established, this is a floaty monster, and as Ishirou's own eyeballs establish, the floor is hard metal. Actually it looks . . . almost exactly the same as the floors he had accidentally dug up with Strawberry just over a mile away. Huh. Unfortunately, Go is almost definitely right. The sound of footsteps carries ridiculously well in here. Not far in, the halls are too deep for anything from outdoors to even blow in by the wind, and they become a sort of harshly industrial brutalist 'dusty pristine', where lights reflect mostly off tile gleam, faded sealant, perforated metal, exposed wires, and jumbles of everything from weaponry to water coolers and plastic plants in slightly slanted room corners. It can probably be assumed that the beast isn't waiting to ambush them in one of the eight foot clearance rooms for . . . whoever used to be here, but none of the forking doors are closed or locked and there's nothing at all to even slightly muffle sound off of any of these hard angles. It must know they're coming. Ishirou can trace a trail just fine at least. Quickly scanning the area shows him the very minimal number of corridors --cargo transport routes, main thoroughfares, tall ceilings and tram tracks, things like that-- that could even be used by it. The depth underground this entails going is a little worrying. Especially when all the lights go out. No, the lights are working fine, actually. In the middle of a long, broad hallway, littered with crumbling decorations politically pertinent to centuries ago, warped benches and trashed cleaning robots long without power, the group suddenly just loses the ability to see. Or, well, they can see the glowing points of their light sources, but nothing the light should be hit. It's like every surface but the air itself is painted vantablack, even the hands in front of their faces. It feels difficult to keep one's balance. It'd be easy to step off or into anything. Outside of instantly halting progress, it's a very good way to enhance the wave of unease that seems to crawl out of the walls. The floor. The clutch of cold hands in thin air. The slithering brush of some unidentified motion around the ankles. Hairs prickling on the back of the neck, screaming their miniscule alarms of something warm and clammy and far too big, looming just behind. A sense of being exposed. Far too exposed. A rabbit in the shadow of a hawk without a tree for a mile. Realizing that it's psychic interference doesn't really help all that much. Rationally knowing something rarely masters irrational thought. The primal compulsion is to run. The backup urge to is to crawl forward as slowly and nervously as possible, triple guessing every single step and vividly imagining a sudden end matching every single one of those aforementioned things Mack had described. The darkness isn't psychic, which is annoying, though magical energy is faintly detectable, as well as a proximity and direction; only a couple of rooms past the end of the hallway.
Ishirou	As they walk through, Ishirou notices the material the walls and floor are made out of, as well as the deeper they go, the more of the old world they find. "This is just like the facility we found..." he says, looking around. This might mean something else to look into, which is one way excites him but in the other, he's still put ill at ease. This place feels awful to be in. Ishirou at least can help guide the group to the trail of the psychic beast, trying to find where it has crawled to, but the deeper they go the more that feeling gets. Right until the lights go out. Well no, the lights didn't go out, he can't see. It's like there was some sort of sight suppression..? No no, he... He starts to hyperventilate, he wants to run very far. He doesn't want to be here, why can't they just bomb the entrance and seal it away or whatever? Right the structure of this place is probably resistant to that. They can't just let this creature alone either. But why him? Why go into its home? Why not draw it into a trap? Oh right, Kale and the two bird brain detectives messed that up. So he moves at a crawl, but he speaks to his POD. "POD, radar mode, and filter everything into my head..." if he can't see, then hopefully his robot's radar vision can overcome this disability. Hopefully, this can overcome the effect. Hopefully, his neck hairs will stop raising, and the feeling of something walking over his grave will go away. He hopes he will be able to see the thing coming. If he can scan it, and understand it, it can't make him afraid of it. Right..?
Hellwarming Trio	Ioanna can tell almost immediately from the confused looks on their faces that the pair is thinking she means 'disassemble' right before she actually explains the word. Utsuho: "But breakfast comes before lunch and dinner." Rin: "That means it'd be harder to think about. And if it's harder to think about..." Utsuho: "... It's harder to read!" They start celebrating Ioanna's breakthrough, whooping and jiving for a few brief moments before realizing that they're doing so. Rin looks away quickly and retreats back into talking to her wheelbarrow fairies, and Utsuho scratches her cheek lightly while turning her attention forward again. Mach's reassurance, though, does at least get Rin to pull her head back out of the wheelbarrow. She still looks anxious, and she waits until he finishes talking about the suit's potential advantage against venom before nudging him and trying to get into whispering range. "Hey, bro... Do you think she's still mad at me?" Rin asks quietly (but not that quietly). Utsuho doesn't notice despite how not-super quiet Rin is. Upon heading into the cave itself, Utsuho looks like she's about to just charge on ahead, but Ishirou's guidance keeps her in check. She tails him instead, keeping a low baseine level of energy going in her control rod just in case she needs to start blasting immediately. The occasional noises have her on edge, but she remembers those directions given earlier. "... So what'd you all eat for lunch yesterday, anyway? We had eggs and fish." She asks aloud, clapping her hands together once to listen to the echo while continuing to float a good foot off the ground instead of walking. "And then dinner was... Uh... Wait, no. /Dinner/ was eggs and fish. Lunch was... Sandwiches? And then dinner was eggs and fish." Utsuho's mind, at least, is just a constant jumble of fish, eggs, sandwiches, lunch, and dinner. She still hasn't reached breakfast yet, and the plan is already far out of her mind. Rin, meanwhile, is still preoccupied with fears about how Utsuho may or may not feel following that scuffle earlier. How she might get in trouble back home if their master was to find out she attacked Utsuho to try and save her own skin. What the Paladins might think if they find out what happened. It's certainly not the attack she's planning on the Neuron Beast, but it's also not particularly useful to herself, either.
Mack	"Because the tunnel system might run under the base camp, and it'd be real inconvenient if all that newly-erected infrastructure tumbled into a yawning abyss," Mack tells Ishirou, grinning metallically. "I'll try an' keep an eye out for it. Let's go." They move in. Uncharacteristically, Mack actually draws his old fashioned-looking sidearm on the way in, keeping it pointed at the floor and moving with steady, measured steps down the wide, tall corridors. He seems smaller than usual. That's not particularly surprising, however, when the place seems to be scaled for giants. He moves in a straight line, at a steady, predictable speed -- and his active sensors paint the whole area around him while he does it, building a wireframe overlay on his HUD. He's watching for things like yawning abysses that were already present, and unhelpfully -- and mystically -- concealed. "Sandcrab cakes," Mack asides, upon being asked about food. He doesn't so much as turn his head to answer. "Pretty good. A little gritty, but I'm told that just brings out the flavor. The --" Darkness. Mack does not slow down. Instead, he reaches out to his allies nearby, issuing a mental 'knock' in the form of shave-and-a-haircut, and then letting flashes of the shape of the corridors follow. His psychic senses broaden from his immediate vicinity, crawling along the base's walls, carefully searching. A third eye opening to see what it can see. A bloodhound's nostrils flaring as it scents its prey. "-- cook sounded pretty proud of the dish," he finishes, hardly missing a beat.
Hellwarming Trio	Once their ability to see goes, however, Utsuho tries using her control rod to light the way while Rin does the same from the rear with a large, gently flickering flame floating in front of her. When THAT doesn't seem to help, though, their reactions vary greatly. Utsuho just sounds a little more irritated as she keeps the conversation going with Mack, still drifting forward blindly with the light from her control rod being the only thing she can actually see. "Crab cakes sound good... Wait. Is the sand in the crab, or is it what the cake's made of?" She starts hurrying forward, though, spurred by the urge to run instead of taking her time. The faster she gets through all this, the faster she can find the culprit! Rin, meanwhile, just latches onto Go's arm while that flame fwips back and forth in her ever-growing anxiety. She hisses at every unfamiliar noise, fighting back the urge to just start setting everything on fire. It's definitely a plan, though, and she soon starts becoming preoccupied with different ways to attack the Neuron Beast once it shows its face. To her credit, it is technically a bunch of different approaches rather than one, but mostly borne from freaking out and not knowing what to use first rather than a conscious effort to obfuscate her thoughts.
Go Shijima	Go punches three digits on the keypad slotted into his belt. The hubcap just below his shoulder extends on a telescopic wire, attempting to illuminate the darkness--but it's no use. All of his instincts are screaming that this is a bad idea. It's hard not to feel the steady, grinding pressure of a suppressed fight-or-flight response. Suppress it he does. "I was kind of in a hurry, so nothing too fancy or heavy. Just a salad with a side of fresh fruit," he answers Utsuho, following Mack's mental guidance through the darkness. "Don't worry," he says firmly to Rin. "It might be with bumps and scrapes, but we'll be out of here before you know it."
Ioanna Langstrom	She plays along. The psychic interference is annoying, but it's also overconfident. Something that can reach into your mind usually is - especially something like this, playing ambush predator and mind games. Ioanna probably could rebuff the mental brushes and prickles with willpower and her usual training, but when the room goes super-black, that changes the landscape, and so she plays along. She lets hints of (false) fear through. No over-exaggerations, no shrieking or girlishness, but she's definitely allowing the creature to feel that she's feeling what it wants her to feel. Let it believe that it's in control of her emotions. She's actually thinking about a complex jumble of a different krakenid opera than the one she mentioned to the team and a paper she's writing for a journal on the identity and nature of memetic societies, but as far as the monster can tell? Pure uncomfortable nerves. She hopes that the celebration from the Junior Detectives wasn't just some goofishness on their part, and that they're taking things to heart. "Take-out," she says to the group, "Chinese." There's a beat. "Earth Chinese. It was Ogawa-san's turn to cook." That says more than anything else ever could about that relationship.
Lilian Rook	The good news is that the unnatural darkness is purely visual. Radar still works. Ishirou can map out the rest of the causeway that is now a tunnel. An indoor tram rail continues ahead, forking at a cross junction not far down, its center split disappearing behind an extremely heavy cargo shutter, hydraulics locked in place and long without power, into some storage area beyond. Mack's psychic impression is similarly effective, but . . . That is the only good news. The psychic residue of just this one main thoroughfare is rancid beyond belief. It's been painted over and over again with extremes of fear, hatred, panic, and agony, like layers of streaked stale blood pasted over each other into a rusty patina, going back some arbitrarily long time before they become indistinct. The Elites aren't the first people to come here, but they may be one of few who did willingly. The actual emanations of the beast are clearly coming from the sealed area at the end, but pinpointing beyond there proves strangely difficult. Fixating on things like food is some reprieve from thinking too hard about being scared or letting the imagination run wild, but it's abundantly clear in short order that it is not the darkness itself, or even the situation in particular, that makes the stomach churn and ice flow through the veins; the knock-on effects of a fear response being beamed straight into the brain are only so rational. Trained minds that can step out of it entirely and examine it for what it is will notice that the effect is nonspecific and undifferentiating; the source doesn't seem to know what to make anyone scared about yet, and is just playing on the basics (at this range?), leaving people's brains to pick and choose a rationalization and get afraid of whatever they were already worried about the most. Mack's senses can also tell that they're close enough for the monster to be feeding on the negative mental energy, though.
Ioanna Langstrom	Ishirou's mapping is critical right now. The Alter Gear does a lot of things, but sensory systems were cut for budgetary reasons (of course they were) and mechanical trouble (hard to make them work through the transformation hexagons). So Ioanna is relying on Ishirou for direction, the huge gun shouldered, the RIFTS(tm) Earth (tm) patchwork armor-coat ready to absorb damage from any direction, the appropriately post-science-apocalypse-magi-fiction eyepiece offering her what HUD it can in the pitch black. "Make sure you paint targets," Ioanna reminds Ishirou, not because she thinks he needs reminding, but because the grounding through the fear helps. Helps them. Ioanna's felt this kind of fear enough that she learned to push through it. It's still there, but it's something she simply...doesn't worry about. In fact... Well, she's an excellent dissembler. As they walk through the darkness she's letting (false) surface fears dance around her surface thoughts for the creature to read - common things, like spiders, clowns, heights, and other things Ioanna's never been afraid of in her life (the last time a clown harassed her she shot it in the head and it was an alien anyway). Let it read her falsehoods, let her see the depths of its ability - and let her then use that against it. "Stay ready," she says, again, needlessly - just grounding people in common jargon.
Hellwarming Trio	The psychic residue, for lack of a better descriptor, kind of sucks for the youkai. Having someone able to read their thoughts on a regular basis is one thing that they've already long become accustomed to, but having that same being push things /into/ their heads is another matter entirely. It certainly isn't pleasant, and it's already giving them a reminder of how they had felt back when they were still trying to track the neuron beast down earlier. This time, though, they're a little more prepared for it. The thoughts of food (and also not eating a lot prior to coming here) keep them a little more distracted from revealing the plan that they most certainly haven't already forgotten the details of. At least it means there isn't enough information for the beast to actually grab onto even if they did try to think about it. The fear response, though, is already having different effects on Utsuho and Rin. The former, already somewhat headstrong in general, is already looking like she's ready to start blasting at the first thing that crosses her, as though such a show of machismo might allay any doubts about her bravery. The latter, being the more skittish of the two, looks like she's ready to turn tail and flee even though she's already in the back, but she's got enough sense to stick around so nobody can blame her later even if she has to phone it in a little if things start going south.
Ishirou	Ishirou updates the map for people's HUDs, though it's still up to them to navigate. However, the feeling of this place still puts him ill at ease, and without the full use of his senses, it makes him more nervous. It piles on to what might have been minor fears into compounding paranoia. His senses and radar location are all over the place. He's constantly scanning areas he isn't sure about. He's worried about getting ambushed, worried about not detecting it. Worried that someone will get hurt because he's going to fail at this. Fail at what he's supposed to be best at. He moves forward, trying to stomach his fear and push forward. What was it Ionna said? Think about lunch? "I think I had...um.." he says, checking something again, distracted from the conversation because he simply can't stop thinking about things. His mind works incredibly fast and can handle multiple thoughts at once. It is very hard to just think about one topic. The moment his mind isn't focused on one thing, the other thoughts creep in again. "Ramen, there was a shop that someone recommended to me..."
Mack	"This place is ugly," Mack murmurs. "Old. Layered fears; layered everything." He sounds like he's talking to himself more than anyone else, speaking lowly and observing the surroundings in the manner of a supernatural detective on a TV drama. "It's been here a long, long time." Mack's mental defenses tighten up. A meditative mantra rolls through his head, more like a memorized clatter of chiming metal and corroded scrap scraping together than an actual chant. His own history, where he comes from, it provides a bedrock core to resist the palpable unease he's wading through step by miserable step into the tram tunnel. "Where I'm from," he continues, "things we call 'entities' would do the same thing. Usually less deliberate, though. The sheer pressure of so many restless spirits, juicing up one that clings tenaciously to the wreckage of its long-lost home --" He runs a hand along a wall. He doesn't touch any physical patina. He disturbs the psychic residue though, intangible psychic power sliding like scalpels to cut through the curtains of offal. "It leaves a stain. And the thing slurps up the leftovers whenever anyone stumbles into it." He chuckles, despite the growing intensity of the situation. "Wild, right?" He turns. Mack broadcasts an image of him turning down the left fork ahead just before he does it, weapon up, and then starts ahead again.
Go Shijima	Go's always had a strange talent he couldn't easily explain--but things have a hard time getting into his head. He's far from trained, so it's all Go can do to fight the influence. He's holding it off, for now, but if someone pinpoints the source, it likely won't be him. Natural talent The most help he can give to to is keep a calm exterior, as he searches through the beast's den. He nods at Ioanna, and follows along with Mack and Ishirou. "I've got something ready for it, alright," he says. It's a good thing the helmet is hiding the grimace on his face. A small bike with a symbol on the rear wheel is slotted into the laser pistol. The symbol's a road sign, an incoming turn. "Let me know the minute you see it, and I'll get us the first strike." The moment the beast is within range, whether lured by Ioanna, tricked out by Mack's illusion, or imaged as some sort of obstruction on Ishirou's sensors, Go fans the trigger and sends a flurry of homing bullets that swarm through the air, tracing complicated paths, winding around allies and furnishings to find the beast.
Lilian Rook	Were Mack not also a counterpsychic, there'd be a solid chance an illusion like that wouldn't work. Were Ioanna just unreadable rather than a faker too, there'd be an equal chance that simply doesn't work. But they are, both, and so even a reasonably cautious and very experienced psychic monster succumbs to the essential arrogance common to RIFTS Earth: that everything with SDC bones is inherently inferior and couldn't contest it. Not that it ever comes into view. It's only by assorted extrasensory prowess that the group is alerted to motion --the shifting of the psychic emanation field and the active use of magic-- in response. Looking right at the epicenter, the creature is presumptively invisible; which would certainly explain Kale's experience. It can be tracked, floating above the ground to make no noise, stalking the illusory Mack a little ways down the left, then lurking in a corner for the rest to pass by. There's a sharp pulse of active energy as it clearly attempts to brainjack the separated Mack --likely to send him back to the group as a sleeper agent and start doing the horror movie thing for the hundredth time-- and a fumbling pause where it fails. A pulse of magic --rather than psychic-- energy sweeps the area shortly after; Ishirou recognizes it for sure as a sensor spike to try and account for all members of the group and to discern real from fake. It does also pinpoint it for Go, however, and in moments, a flurry of energy bullets curve around the corner and make a string of audible hit pips. A six by six by six foot cargo container, hollow and dented, comes flying out of the fork at tremendous speed, most likely thrown in a rage and not well-aimed, but enough to block futher bullets in this narrow path with little room to actually dodge.
Go Shijima	There isn't much room to dodge. This is true of the bullets, and it's certainly true of Mach. As he drifts around the corner on the FiveS suit's ankle-mounted wheels, he's forced to make an immediate adjustment. Mashing the button on his belt causes a red-hot lance to flare from the Mach Driver's exhaust. The bleep-bleep of phone keys being pressed sounds off three times, and the tires at his ankles change. Larger, studded, with thick treads, they give him just enough grip to shoulder-check the flying box. He impacts it head-on, a shower of sparks and a grunt of pain escaping at once as he does. Still, the belt revs up, and Mach glides around the impact, racing up the wall... That hurt... but at least Turn can find it. And that means... He's racing along the ceiling now, tire marks left along it as he dials another code in. Feathering the trigger as he goes, Mach watches the flight of the homing projectiles, then kicks off of the ceiling. Before his foot impacts, a pneumatic jack pistons out from the back of the armor's leg, adding extra force. Propelled rapidly down, he lets those energy darts guide him into a high-speed knee from above, aimed at the invisible form and driven home with a blast from the suit's flight system.
Ioanna Langstrom	Invisible. Good! Good. She really should tell those people at R&D to 'stop screwing around with your hexes and figure out how to let me see things that can kill me without letting me see them', Ioanna decides. That, or get Shinji to teach her some ninja tricks for it. Something like that. The magic burst is absorbed, mostly, by the Alter Gear. The MCM eats the hit dead-on; some superficial damage passes through the transformed coat to reveal several of the orange hexes below across her body. The cargo container is much easier to deal with - Ioanna simply plants her feet when Go shoulder-checks it, and when it goes up in a shower of sparks, she catches it in both hands and sends it flying back - next to Go, to close the dodge gap for the monster substantially. Unless it was also intangible. Then she had bigger problems.
Ishirou	There was the spike, his head swivels even though he doesn't have to because he can't see. It's more likely a human kind of thing, a learned behavior because people found it creepy when he talked to them without looking at them. It's something he can go on, and if he can go on it then he can help the others. However, his pathetic love of BOXES causes one to fly through the air. Ishirou tries to duck out of the way but is smashed by the flying object and smacked to the ground. Rolling, he couldn't keep himself from yelling out in pain. However, a barrier seemed to form out of nowhere, aiming to help absorb some of the damage. A moment later, covered in power armor thanks to the storage system he uses, he stands up. Flight mode would be limited here, so he opts for Burrow Mode. Giant drills replace the wings, and systems are in place to help him burrow and dig through rocks. However, he immediately sends a shot out, aiming to try and establish remote hacking and attempt to do something. The first is trying to use his ability to hack to debilitate his ability to continue this darkness. The second was an attempt to physically hurt him, aiming to try and cause his body to go into shock. Successful or not, it would hurt.
Hellwarming Trio	Rin: "Sounds like everyone's got something ready..." Utsuho: "That means it's fine if we don't, right?" Rin: "We gotta have something!" Utsuho: "Then we've got... Uh..." Proving that she's the brains of the operation, Utsuho tries to pull something out of her ass by observing the others in the group for ideas. It's easy enough to stick with the group thanks to Ishirou's map, and Ioanna's reminder helps Utsuho come up with an actual plan when it comes to dealing with the neuron beast: Shoot it really hard. "... Ooh, did it have eggs in it?" And then she's side-tracked almost immediately by the mention of ramen. "Me and Orin found a place that has really good ramen because they put a lot of eggs in it, but-" With Utsuho so easily distracted, it actually becomes easier for Rin to relax enough to start getting her own plan figured out once the creature reveals itself. That ends up being much sooner than expected as it hurls the cargo container right down that pathway, and Utsuho's already in position with her control rod raised and building up energy into it. Utsuho: "Plan A, Orin!" Rin: "We had a plan?!" Close enough to one. Utsuho's rod glows a bright yellow for a few moments longer as she weathers the initial impact from the flying container with considerable aid from Go and Ioanna getting there before her. She keeps drawing power into her rod until the box hits something before blasting a massive beam down the corridor afterwards. It's hot enough to melt through a good chunk of the container and the surrounding area as well, and it's clear that Utsuho's not aiming so much as she's going for a big show of force right off the bat. While Utsuho handles the reckless firepower side of things, Rin tries to get ahead of the neuron beast. She launches a long trail of smaller flames that go right past where Utsuho is shooting, exploding at a couple of choke points up ahead to try and block off the neuron beast's potential escape routes ahead of time.
Mack	Mack's experience with psychic phenomena is almost entirely in dealing with the hostile kind. He's got a couple of useful tricks up his sleeve, like spoofing mental map broadcasts. Actual tangible illusions, though? Not so much his bag. Which is why the mental fake does not at all slow down the cargo container. Mack tucks and rolls. He flings himself to the side of the big tunnel, folding himself against the wall and only getting clipped by something that, at that speed and size, would probably drop anyone of his apparent weight class anyway. Unfortunately for the critter, he is a lot tougher than his fragile appearance lets on. While fragments of scrap steel go scattering down the hallway, and sparks light up the supernatural darkness for a fraction of a second where the impact passes, there is no terrified shriek, no surge of panic, and no hyperventilating wheeze. Instead, there's... something else. Joy. Excitement. Ferocity that far outstrips his size and shriveled demeanor. Mack's system floods with natural adrenaline and artificial nanotechnological equivalents, and all fear flees him. In the darkness, amber rings of arcane heat ignite, overtaking the faint green glow cast by the lenses inset into the Headhunter's bionics. His eyes brighten to match. The hunched figure straightens, the metallic pops and scrapes of a ravaged half-scrap body preparing itself for terrible violence echoing off the corridor walls. A weird aura grows, the faint cyan haze of mystical energy puffing out in clouds as it respirates through his techno-arcane augments. The cloud abruptly shifts to a shining metallic hue. Pinpricks press out from the nonexistent skin of his extended arms and open palms. A cloud of gleaming silver needles rips down the corridor, ricocheting off walls and curving around friendlies, filling the intervening space between Mack and his unseen quarry.
Lilian Rook	The neuron beast is not intangible. Go combo kicking the crate into Ioanna's tender and loving feminine hands (unpleasant to men for being overly muscled) sends a very large object flying right back at a monster that is (invisibly) twenty feet tall and cannot possibly avoid it. The crunch is deafening. The crumpling is visible. That means it's not all that deadly, as the monster is more durable than the crate, which largely serves to absorb much of the heat of Utsuho's beam, but the molten slag sticking to it renders its invisibility largely moot (to say nothing of the hissing psychic scream) as do the walls of flames after. Ishirou's Pain Beam has its desired effect for about three seconds, where he can see the floating globules of glowing MDC box corners twitch from the spasming of the underlying mass of invisible tentacles, which is plenty enough for Go to drop a flurry of seeking shots and dive kick the creature at its most vulnerable, feeling squelching tendril and breaking bone under his heel, adding oozing purple-blue blood to the invisibility-spoiling patina, before incredibly powerful thrashing throws him free. But then when Ishirou's hacking is launched, something unexpected happens: Targeted Anti-Magic. The powersuit's diagnostics immediately alert him to the magical equivalent of ECM and counterintrusion. Rolling mind battle dice is apparently something the neuron beast especially will not permit, given to the reams of furious gibberish scrolling his displays as garbage dump text and the drain on his mana batteries. The cargo bay doors are broken through. The melty section superheated by Utsuho is sliced through by raw force and a giant square of glowing metal is hurled dangerously free. The neuron beast surges through-- and is immediately shot dead in the back by Mack's double typeweak critical favoured enemy cannon. The invisibility flickers out instantly. A twenty foot tall heap of barbs and tentacles, claws and spines, and a mouthless horned head, crashes flat against the floor and slides on a streak of its own blood, ejected from the front of its body before it hit the ground. The holes smoke. What happens next is exceedigly unpleasant. The furious demonoid floats back up off the ground, clenching all four of its fists in bloodied, stanced-up fury, the wounds not caused by silver already starting to gradually regenerate. Baleful glowing eyes from its alien face fix on the group, and the psychic impression of words comes unbidden: VERY AMUSING, VERMIN. NOW, AMUSE ME LIKE ALL THE OTHERS BEFORE YOU. Fifty ISP worth of bodyjacking is dumped into an instantaneous, massive brute force attack against all assembled minds. The goal is-- To march them through the same hole, into the cargo room. No longer filled with neatly stacked crates and equipment, the way it's been strewn into organized chaos is reminiscent of exactly what it is: an arena deathmatch game. Countless human and DB skeletons are left where they lay, still largely possessed of half-charged, semi-functional weaponry and gear to scavenge, their protective wear attesting to the fact that they'd all stabbed and shot each other, months, years, decades in the past. The overpowering hijack compels the Elites to walk themselves into the sadistic cargo-arena and start doing exactly the same thing, while the neuron beast rises to the oversight deck to watch (and presumptively feed from the negative emotions). Those who don't comply are immediately set upon by a crushing hail of invisible telekinetic 'bullets', barraged with psionic blasts until they either comply or die.
Go Shijima	Thrown clear of the beast, Mach uses the momentum to aid in a self-righting somersault. His feet hit the ground, but... Keep moving. Utsuho managed to counteract its invisibility... ! He doesn't stop--but the immense mental presence of the neuron beast does make his approach more erratic, as if he were fighting for the wheel with someone else. At first, he tries the direct approach, but the volley of invisible bullets quickly prove too exhausting to deal with--all he's got is speed, and he'd gas out trying to avoid those before the beast tired from shooting them. But... He plays along, 'complies,' speeds into the impromptu arena. He even beelines towards a barely-charged defensive gadget of some kind--but slots a different bike into his laser pistol as he does. The Mach Driver's AI announces it as 'SPLIT.' Running up the wall, he levels the pistol at the oversight deck and fires. Thin blue needles of energy seemingly fail to penetrate the building in each of the various angles he tries--until the true nature of the projectiles reveals itself. Blue portals open, in the order the original shots were fired, just as Mach is coming down from the wall. From each of those portals, a rapid flood of sharp energy needles spews, creating a hectic crossfire inside the beast's observation area. Mashing the buttons on his belt, he speeds up, his form losing definition, his passage lifting the lighter gear and equipment up or otherwise disturbing it as he goes. He'll need that speed to avoid the reprisal, he's sure.
Ioanna Langstrom	Well, it's not intangible. It is, however, very frustrating. The wounds regenerating means she can do nothing to make the damage permanent; the MCM isn't set up to handle specialty banes or enemies. That's the kind of thing that you- -that you wait for the Elites to show up and handle. The clench of her hand, the nails digging into her flesh (sort of - the MCM dulls it); that's more distracting than all the psychic hijackings in the world. She powers straight through the hijacking; pure frustration at herself, again. Over and over and over she keeps being reminded of that basic fact: Ioanna Langstrom is not an Elite. And this is her project! This is her base! She put in the work to get the budget filed! She put in the work to scope out locations! She put in the requests for materiel, she pulled favors from old friends, she did this! They're here because of her! Not because of the Dame-Commander! Not because of the girls from her academy! Not because of Go, or Mack, or Ishirou, or the two demons, or anybody else! Because of her! And she can't even take care of this problem? She doesn't march. She just plants her feet. She unshoulders the massive gun. Fuck it. If nothing else she can distract the hell out of it. Something something, teamwork when you're the underdog. Or, as her mother had said on one occasion after some frustration at a high school sporting event, 'whether you're underwire or softcup doesn't matter - hard support or soft support is still support even if you're not the star of the show.' She had told Shinji that and he had looked at her funny, looked at her dresser, and gone very quiet. The gun starts charging. Orange hexagons spin in front of it in layers. She settles it under her arm, supports it with her other arm, raises it to point at the thing, and pulls the trigger. The cannon fires. This is RIFTS(tm) Earth(tm), of course - it can't just be a laser. It's a railgun shot, superheated by the two hexagons. Nothing that's going to cause permanent damage to this thing - but hopefully enough to break any concentration it might have.
Hellwarming Trio	The neuron beast shows itself! Rather than recoiling in horror, though, the youkai just sort of wince at seeing the extent of its injuries already. Once it projects its clearer message, however, they actually start looking almost confident again. Annoyed, too, and a fair bit excited as well, almost as if they're not actually sure what to feel about finally seeing the thing speaking to them telepathically. Utsuho: "Hey! What's your problem?" Rin: "Yeah! These humans ain't all bad!" Utsuho: "I mean, they're not all good, either." Rin: "Well.. Yeah, but these ones are okay! You should be comin' with us!" When that mental attack hits them, though, it works about as well as expected. Their mental defenses are sorely lacking, perhaps even hampered by how simply open their minds are from their lifestyle. Charging into the room, they spot all those skeletons, and that's when things start getting a little weird. Rin, being the resident corpse robber, starts looking for viable corpses to gather up in that mass grave arena. Utsuho, meanwhile, starts looking for burning holes to start throwing said corpses into as per her routine. Neither of them are likely to find whatever they're looking for, of course, and being compelled to start grabbing weapons and attacking everyone else is what ends up tipping them off that something's off here. It's not so strong a signal that they can resist it fully, but there's too many inconsistencies for them to really ignore and just follow directions like good minions. For starters, neither of them are particularly proficient with wielding melee weapons. Secondly, neither of them has ever fired a gun before, and their best guess even after picking up some guns for themselves is pointing them at the nearest person while pinching the grips and rubbing the back or something that wouldn't even work without being Mach or some kind of Kamen Rider with guns that work that way. With their minds starting to waver, they join each other in the sky while still clutching those guns. Although they're still being compelled to start taking swings at each other, they also pull themselves together enough to start generating flaming bullets. Instead of firing them at anyone in particular, however, they start launching them all over the place with pained yells from the psionic blasts starting to batter them. They're halfway-complying with the 'kill each other' order, but still suffering from those blasts thanks to halfway-ignoring it to try and catch the neuron beast with more of those flames than their own allies.
Mack	Mack's intel is right on the money. The Neuron Beast goes down, hard, leaving a satisfying smear where it skids. He steps up -- It gets up. Of course is gets up. It could never be that easy, right? Mack opens his mouth to say something smug, or maybe biting, and instead, the biggest headache he's ever experienced crashes down on him from inside his own skull. He doubles over like he'd had actual weight dropped on top of him as the psychic assault strikes his defenses like a mental wrecking ball. Instead of giving in, Mack forces himself to stand up straight again. He does it with the kind of steady, deliberate motion that chronic pain sufferers use, acknowledging the effort it takes as a cost of doing what they want to do. In this case, it's not going into the death ring. "No thank you," he manages. A beat passes. His mental equilibrium recovers. Another, accompanied by a rattling breath. "I'd prefer -" Telekinetic blows force him that way anyway. As much as he'd like it to be otherwise, he still obeys physics, and the incoming force is more than enough to move something of his mass. He goes ass over teakettle, tumbling into the chamber, an internal gyro connected to his wired reflexes making him shoot his hand down to go from a roll into a one-handed vault back to his feet. He lands in a three-point crouch, a haze of dust and a plume of magic rolling out from him lazily as he makes it. Mack looks up. Up. Up some more. His sensor suite tracks his allies, painting them with questionable yellow markings on his HUD and his peripheral area map. He draws his legs underneath him, coiling like a spring. The Headhunter vanishes from immediate awareness. He's simply written out of the perceptions of those around him, with a gentle smoothing of short-term memory to ensure they don't think too hard about where he's gone. The flaming barrages going in every direction are far more worrisome. Don't sweat the small stuff, like someone who might not have even showed up. The Neuron Beast might be a little less convinced. Mack launches himself upwards in leaps and bounds, a sheen like molten glass periodically flickering beneath and around him. He follows it towards the observation deck, effectively super jumping over and over to get up there while it effortlessly glides. The psychic invisibility cloaks him from casual observation, but the flaming projectiles produced by his less protected allies means he has to hold it up for longer than he'd like while he's making the approach. When the more directed shots come in, Mack gets to the wall, going briefly vertical until he's made it clear past the Neuron Beast and ascended above its favored perch. There's a muffled hiss as the object affixed parallel to Mack's arm unfolds itself. A brief instant of mental effort fills the half-dozen chambers with a blessed silver payload. The diminuitive monster hunter drops from above towards the mass of tentacles, spines and malice, and with him comes a piston driving a silver stake capable of penetrating tank armor. Or demon hide. You know. Whichever.
Lilian Rook	There's no followup psychic message, but at the end of the brief pause in activity between brainjacking, it can be intuited that the neuron beast is probably thinking that this is not actually amusing. Of the four who walk into their assigned places, one is faking, and the beast throws up a psionic wall of force to block his gunfire, only for most of it to simply appear out of portals all aroudn it instead, suppressing it under an omnidirectioal volley of energy needles that force it to merely hunker down and cover itself with its many barbed tentacles and bony arms, the former of which are chopped and tattered away one at a time. Two are utterly useless at actually killing the others, and a lucky stray fireball knocks it flat against the back wall again, all the progress its regeneration had made suddenly rolled back in an instant. It's the perfect opening for the two who didn't. One to haul ass up onto the deck and, in a single deadly lunge truly befitting the 'hunter' suffix of his framework, skewer the beast through its torso with silver stakes so that it is pinned completely to the deck below. Glowing psychic blades ignite from each of its hands, which it just barely begins slicing the deck away with, while assailing Mack with poisonous barbs-- And then it is abruptly terminated by the overladed MCM railcannon shot to its skull. Regeneration or not, completely annihilating its brain into a charred and gorey fountain in a single instant is enough to rather take the question of psionic powers out of the equation. It's surreal to see a twenty foot psionic powerhouse interdimensional demonic monster do the exact same snap-limp crumple that Ioanna has had the misfortune of seeing take so many of her fellow grunts before her eyes. Even stranger that it was her doing. But the instantaneous absence of the psychic pressure is jarring noticeable. It's like a really loud sound was playing this entire time and suddenly turned off.
Hellwarming Trio	There's only so much mental pressure the youkai can take when their minds are already being stretched to capacity trying to comprehend all the new stuff they keep seeing. They sound like they're about reaching their limit if their pained yelling is any indication, but they're saved by the timely execution of the neuron beast when they just feel their heads being... Emptied? No, but definitely relieved, as all things should be. They both whirl themselves around rapidly to try and find the beast, only stopping when Rin catches sight of it over on the deck and nudges Utsuho to get her attention. They float on over to check on it, taking note of its apparent death via head-explosion, then start poking it with their guns to see if it's moving anymore. Utsuho: "Did we do it?" Rin: "I think we did it." Utsuho: "Huh. That's... Yeah." Rin: "... Yeah." Utsuho: "Yeah. Everyone else okay?" Rin: "Nobody dead? Holler if you're dead!" Other than Rin checking on Mack and Ioanna while Utsuho checks on Go (despite neither of them having any semblance of medical training), they're actually pretty subdued for once. They don't sound or even look thrilled despite an otherwise clear cut success. Rin eventually heads over to the body with a rusty knife, looking to slice off some tentacles and a finger to bring back in case... Well, someone smarter than her is bound to have an idea for that.
Go Shijima	At last. Quiet. The fight is over--both the one he'd been fighting with his body, and the one he'd been fighting with his mind. Go removes the FiveS car from the Mach Driver's chamber, and the armor dissipates. He's left standing in his usual white hoodie, hands in the pockets of his jeans. "Not dead," Go calls to Rin. As Utsuho approaches, he does manage to smile, despite the surroundings. "In fact, I feel better. Like a headache finally cleared up," he says. A look around brings a frown to his face. The beast is dead, but it certainly inflicted its share of suffering before it went. At least it's gone, now. No one else will be joining these people. "You did good," he says to her. "I'm going to get some pictures for my report. If you guys know anything about burial rites..."