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Petra Soroka "Beg pardon? Why not?"

     Noticebly similarly to Flamel-- either because Petra's psyche lacks the second-order interpretative familiarity with him to create more Petra-authentic Flamel-filtered behaviors, or because she's actually just like this in this temporarily realized hypothetical-- Psychonautra's responses stay cheery as she explains her deductive reasoning to Lilian.

    "Well, you know, obviously things in here are a bit less real and a bit more metaphorical than things outside. That's not less *important*, but it's sort of like the compression of saving a file; there's only so much that a brain can model, and *other* brains are really far outside that! So a narrative representation of a person has to be limited to those simpler behaviors, you know?"

    "So you see, like, Kale?" She continues her habit of gesturing-- Petra does it too, the real one, but she's got so much less opportunity to tutorialize people-- and waves her hand at Kale. "Easy to model, can imagine the kinds of things he does just with a subconscious mirror neuron process. Kukuru? Same thing, she's got easy, predictable outwards behaviors. Maybe there's some internal stuff lost in the process, but it's all just about perception anyways, right?"

    "So then when it comes to *you* two, I've got to think about whether my own brain's even got enough processing power to run a simulation of you this well, much less on top of everything else. And I mean, I don't have my tools on me, but I thiiink I can eyeball how much my psyche is dwarfed in comparison, haha!"

"Hey, someone hold this for me please? It's an unhealthy urge to be disruptive in the middle of girl-suffering."

    Psychonautra automatically reaches out her hands, recognizing a Task she could complete, and then pulls back before Flamel can drop the confusion grenade in them. "Oops! I shouldn't hold that. It'd make me get all existential, and we need confusion to stun it way more than we need existentialism to slow it down."

"I could give you a gift to let you stick around, if you really have a will to. But even if you don't, or can't, take it:"

    "Woah--!" Psychonautra gets yanked out of the collapsing building and shielded from the blast when she was already cringing in preparation for it, pulling her goggles back down to cover her eyes midair. "Wow! See what I mean? No way that's anything but the real deal, no how."

    "Er..." Actually considering the offer now, Psychonautra's tone wobbles, voice filtered through the respirator and the choking ash. "But I, uh... you sure about that? I'm sort of just a temporary accessory to help guide you through her mind so you can take care of that psychohazard. I'd start feeling guilty about all the people I apparently-only-imagined not-saving if I was a distinct 'people' apart from the mindscape and was actually worth moral consideration. Makes the job-that-I-only-hypothetically-have complicated, you know."

"I... Mmn. I'm not really doing okay, no."

    Grilltra yelps when she's grabbed and carried along for the ride, but very quickly settles into it comfortably, in a way Petra could never. "Hmm... yeah, I thought so. Sorry, Kukuru." Apparently the affectation on her name was just for fun.

    "You're right, though. It's just for now. I don't think you're really that far off from it being better for you, I think? Asking how to help is fine if you just do it, after. People can't expect you to be helpful *and* smart! And you know I'm not smart at all either, ahaha. So I'd fail too."
Petra Soroka     There's still so many Petras around, both alive and dead. Hibiki gets her answer when she blasts herself upwards, in a glimpse that could be blurred into peripheral vision if the thought wasn't so pressing on her mind that she's unconsciously looking for her own imprinted Petra.

    Heart hairpins-- not dual colored, here-- framing either side of her face, bandages on her cheeks, nose, and arms to patch up small wounds accumulated from roughhousing, and dried blood painting the left side of her face and all down her neck and shoulder. It looks like one of the collapsing buildings got her; not even anything direct.

    Still, between her and Kale stunning the Kana-tower, the gradual rotation of its quad-barreled turrel grinds to a stuttering halt, in time for Berislav to hit two shots, right in the same place. The weakened metal glows white-hot as the turret swivels to face Berislav, though even with one barrel commanded, the other three quarters of the neighborhood have to deal with the cannon as usual.

    Those three don't have any Elites in them, though! Unless you count potentially dozens of Petras, but they're not real. The next time the Kana whirr-clunks as preparation to fire, the barrel is aimed right at Berislav, and the force of firing rips the weakened metal apart, sending the shell wildly off-course to explode somewhere near one of the squatting legs of the tower. A geyser of heated air blossoms up from the impact point, laced with clouds of cutting ash, but even if the Isaiah and Hibiki have to endure it, the platform path doesn't, because of Kale's work.

    The top of the Kana-tower is a plateau with the hatch closed in the center, rotating slowly to point the turrets around to get full coverage of the neighborhood. The one place they *can't* aim, is right here; so besides the occasional small-arms fire from ambitious turrets and the stinging ash, there's not much threat all the way up here. So this is when the last Petra decides to make her appearance.

     Hopping up the telekinetically floating bridge-pieces as Persephone assembles them, balancing impossibly as they move, is a Petra with a pearlescent white wristband on her arm. When a salvo of bullets sprays up from a grounded turret, she flickers to a different chunk of debris entirely, untouched. She hops the rest of the way up, taking a few steps directly vertically up the side of the Kana, to join Persephone and Lilian and all the rest around the hatch.

    "Hey Phony? Lily-R?" It makes sense that a psychic construct of Phony!Petra wouldn't have the context for how the real Petra used that nickname, but the tenor of her voice when she says it is dramatically different. "Do you need a sec? Er-- a nicer one, I mean. I know it sucks here."

     She hovers anxiously near Lilian, silently fretting by the expression on her face. "Sorry. I want to help. Is there anything I can do? Besides, um, not die. I'm already not planning on doing that."

    On top of the Kana-tower itself, the rest of the decimated neighborhood and all the waste and death laid to it feels distant. Blacktop streets spread out in an even grid to the edges of the snowglobe, and with the full extent of the craters blown in the streets and cloned houses visible, it feels almost toyetic; picturesque in the disaster as if the perspective tilt-shifted the violence below. Dull fires smolder in concrete wreckage that used to be houses, and the smoke doesn't reach up here, blown away along with the ash by Kale's barriers.

    It's space for a breather, before descending into what Psychonautra says is assuredly worse.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel's stuck near Persephone. In a warzone, one of the few things you can depend on is someone who is stronger than any war, but more importantly, someone who can decide you're simply not actually injured. That means there's bridges, there's pathways, there's something to hop between with his telekinesis. Enough that he can finally reach safety. A breather. That's always important. Even if you're high up and even if you're in the middle of a tense, disastrous psychic defusal. It's good to get a moment, just short of the hatch, to look out and to process things.

    Hurting a healthy mind would be awful. Hurting a girl in pain this way... it weighs quite a bit on the mind. Something jolts through his brain, an arc of energy or a shock of fear. It crawls along his skull like a memory he can't quite put away, but it's gone before long. Back to smiling and explaining and moving on, in, and in this case, down. "Keep an eye out for another slowglobe, or something like it!" He calls out. "Something to represent getting a layer deeper, or at least closer to our goal!"
Kale Hearthward > "So you see, like, Kale? Easy to model, can imagine the kinds of things he does just with a subconscious mirror neuron process."

"Hmm? What about being easy to model?"

"... Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

The confusion grenade is offered up. Kale opts to hold onto it and use it where necessary.

Kale does some mirror modeling of his own, now that there's more room to breathe. "Huh... hey, Persephone? Are you sure taking something in here outside won't... change things? Didn't Petra ask to do minimal changes only?"

And then, looking down at the chaos. Huh. It does look... toyetic from up here.

Kale wonders if there's some manner of... Kale!Petra down there too. Ketra? Kale has good eyes, he bets if he looks hard, he could spot that one.

... Probably in one of the craters.

He decides not to go looking, after all.

On to looking for ways to get further in!
Angela Angela isn't feeling that great. She feels she has already failed Petra in her one job here. The group IS still largely on task, thankfully, but Persephone's decision that it was necessary for her to ''save'' Psychonautra is something she cannot stop either politically or personally. She is a visual novel protagonist/antagonist who has never been in an actual battlefield personally in her life. She should have spent more time throwing hypothetical scenarios to Petra.

She dwells on it for a while before ultimately settling that there's no use crying over spilt milk right NOW and what she should actually do is get her head back in on the mission.

She takes towards Phony!Petra but it takes her a moment to realize which Petra it is. It's the use of Lily R that clues her in.

Angela takes a moment to watch the graveyard of a city before her. It occurs to her that she is, sort, of, experiencing an 'Outside' right now.

The immediate artillery kept her from really dwelling in on it but she can feel wind in her hair. She could smell smoke. She sees dull fires smoldering in the wreckage. It should be horrifying, shouldn't it? An indication that maybe she should actually give up on her plan and stay in her safe little egg forever?

"...It is beautiful." She says of the destroyed neighborhood. "...Once you take a moment away from artillery being launched around you, it actually is quite...incredible, isn't it?"

She pauses a moment and adds, "...Aside from the dead Petras, of course. The wind feels so real it might drive me insane."

She is quiet for a long moment and then adds, "...Let's keep moving."
Kukuru "Hmm... yeah, I thought so. Sorry, Kukuru." "You're right, though. It's just for now. I don't think you're really that far off from it being better for you, I think?"

"Sor...? Oh, Petra, dear. It's okay. It's nothing you did." Kukuru actually smiles a bit at that as she hops along, grunting with each launch since jumping is still more physical effort than none at all, and she's been jarred just enough mentally that trying to teleport again doesn't register in her head just yet. "I just gotta keep.. I'll keep doing what I know, and working in what everyone's teaching me. Phony and Exis really helped a lot with that, so... I don't want to disappoint either of them getting... Mmh. Getting like before."

"Asking how to help is fine if you just do it, after. People can't expect you to be helpful *and* smart! And you know I'm not smart at all either, ahaha. So I'd fail too."
"You're not? But you're always coming up with all those neat plans like with the meltdowns, and saying all sorts of stuff only maybe... Half? Of anyone around really understands. Or... Pretends to understand without really getting it." She giggles softly, then readjusts her hold on Grilltra and Angela to make sure they still have a clear view of where they're all going while still being comfortable enough. "But... Mm. Yes, you're right, dear. Even if I don't get it all... I still want you to know I'll be there for you, and for everyone else. And that... I hope she realizes she doesn't have to do it all herself, too."

She lets out a quiet hum of deep thinking, then shrugs a few seconds later. "... Almost everyone else."

With her spirits mostly restored and her mind still at about the same level it's usually operating at, Kukuru gets Angela and Grilltra to the top of the Kana-tower in sight of the hatch! She blinks slowly at first upon hearing the flickering Petra, looking slowly over towards Persephone and taking several seconds to process that before she lets out an understanding 'ohhhh' sound as she sets them both down reluctantly.

"He-llo, Petra! Ah, so that's how this place works... Mm, mm, I understand now." She murmurs with a few quick nods, sounding pleased with herself at finally comprehending something. "I'd like you... Any of you not to die, too. Anything more..." She looks over at Flamel, raising an eyebrow slowly at the mention of snowglobes before nodding along with him anyway. "That would be real good, mhm. But..."

Kukuru hesitates, then clasps a hand over Grilltra and Persephonetra, perhaps one after the other, but at some point before descending into the hatch. "Please. Be more fair to yourself, okay?"
Hibiki Tachibana     --and dried blood painting the left side of her face and all down her neck and shoulder.

    It looks like one of the collapsing buildings got her; not even anything direct.

    Coming down on top of the Kana-tower at the apex of her recoil-assisted ascent, Hibiki doesn't quite stick the landing. It's only half because she's caught wholesale in the blast of scalding air that tosses her off-kilter and sends her spiraling. Even when she narrowly catches herself before coming down, her leftover momentum carries her forward a couple extra steps, and she has to throw a hand out onto metal to stop herself before he falls off.

    "...I shouldn't be surprised..." She murmurs to herself, inhaling air that isn't soaked with ash and pulling herself up a bit higher. All the way up here, it's easy to get a full overview over the entire area. Hibiki glances back the way they came to get up here, at the house they briefly took cover in. And she turns to where her own 'Petra' lies. And then further still, to the rest of the streets they didn't even go through.

    "...That's how this place is."

    She doesn't like it. The fact they're not here to fix any of this - even if they could in the first place, even if Petra would have ever permitted it - but to break a bond. Flamel's earlier words of how much better it'll be one day down the line ring in her ears, but don't get an answer even in her thoughts.

    After some seconds, stirring at the sound of Phony!Petra's voice (the existence of which she seems equal parts shocked and thoughtful about), Hibiki turns back around and starts moving towards the hatch while echoing Angela's sentiment. Not the part about this being beautiful, of course. She can't find herself thinking anything close. "...Yeah. Let's get that hatch open."
Father Berislav That's the spirit.

    Even though the shot goes wide, the aftermath is exactly as destructive as Berislav might have imagined; exactly as destructive as a narrative force of destruction ought to be. It's enough to push the silver mech off of its spot on the platform path, which is fine--Kale is still protecting it. Isaiah hits the ground in a nimble roll, which serves to put out its flaming cloak. An arm blackened by disturbed ash and intense heat, sporting a little patchwork of tiny nicks and scratches from the scrape of asphalt, points the revolver upwards, taking off opposite Hibiki to continue the charade.

    Now--there was a 'grenade,' of sorts, yes? They'll need a way to deliver it, down that hatch. And, of course, I'll have to keep the Kana's attention, until it's time to leave. A running sprint into a dive. The silver colossus drives a furrow into asphalt, when it lands on its side. Its hand reaches towards a closed garage door growing closer by the second.

    So... I'll keep this charade up. Its skeletal hand darts into and out of the garage, fingers crunching into the hood and crushing the engine block of a minivan as they grasp. If I make it too obvious, the Kana will know I'm only a distraction. The minivan is picked up, sprinted with, flung at the damaged barrel of the Kana, Isaiah twirling like one might toss a discus.

    If I don't do -enough,- then I've wasted time. It breaks into a sprint again, weaving in and out of houses for cover. Target lock notifications blink insistently, reflected on the priest's eyes. As Isaiah clears neighboring pair of copy-paste suburban homes, a loud hissing heralds the ascent of a spread of missiles, headed for the tower, rather than the mech proper, spaced out to cause very scary, but ultimately superficial, damage to the structure. If I interfere too much, too forcefully, then the distinction of pretending is useless, and I risk doing exactly what Flamel cautioned against.

    The trick is to make it look convincingly enough like I'm trying to stop the Kana. "...Forgive me, Petra, but even when I first met you, I didn't hold this wish against you."

    Berislav smiles, as his motions at the controls coax Isaiah's thumb, mid-blistering sprint, into a flick across the cylinder. His eyes don't need to check the readouts for the smartlink--his ears know well enough when it's landed on a live round, and his memory of which types where loaded where is razor-sharp. "I only misjudged the extent of the burn, and how badly you wanted it."

"I don't have it in me to shout the kind of empty promises and projections that would make it *truly* convincing. So, the missiles, the car, and *these,* will have to do."

    Two heavy trigger pulls, following a leaping corkscrew flip that defies belief to see, performed by a thing of Isaiah's size. The sound of the gun is different; not just for the doppler of Isaiah's spin, either. No dramatic cones of flame, this time. The bullets are shaped differently, as well--the great-great descendent of full metal jacket, designed by the machinery of apathetic manufacturers, themselves cogs in a great, violent, hungry and uncaring machine.

     The heavy bullets, fired on an impossibly accurate trajectory, fly for the top of the tower, shaving through with just enough force to shear off a portion of the cockpit hatch's hinges as they pass through. It's not enough to guarantee 'completely open,' but certainly, enough to make a would-be breach attempt easier. From there, the mech's impact with the ground precedes a sprint towards the tower--presumably so that the priest is in position as quickly as possible, following that 'grenade.'
Persephone Kore      "... and was actually worth moral consideration."
     "Huh?" Persephone's head tilts to the side, making her dangle-earrings hang crooked. She shifts from mild surprise to an earnestly baffled smile. "Ahaha, what does that have to do with anything? It doesn't matter at all if you're a person, or what you 'deserve'. What matters is me, being kind."

     "Aren't even kids kind to their toys?"

     My fingers enmesh with Petranaut's, and gently squeeze. It's amazing how comforting a blood-spattered smile can be. And I lean down to touch our heads together, and shut my eyes, and--

     Ordinarily Persephone's powers don't look like much. She just tells the universe what to do, and it does it. But in a mindscape, it can be a little different: shimmering crimson starry-space oozes out from Psychonautra's outline, forming an inch-thick border between her and the world. To anyone who was there for the astral inversion between her and Lilian, it's familiar. Held and loved.

     Phony straightens back up, serenely relieved. "There. Now this world doesn't get to say when you stop existing. When your work's done, just slip through into me, okay?"

     That serene look persists when she glances over at Kale, hair and earrings drifting with the motion in brief zero-G. "Ahaha, but I'm not changing anything. She said she was going to vanish. What does it matter where she vanishes to?"

     "And besides. Being kind is always wise."

     Then she walks again. The first step onto the Kana's top is a sharp clank. She recognizes Persephonetra instantly, of course, with a soft amazed breath.

     "Ahaha. Oh, my goodness, you're wonderful. 'A nicer one'- what does that mean?" Someone else can open the hatch. It'd be sort of awful for me to! The oldest kid is never supposed to break the pinata. For now, she's focused on something else.

     "I've never seen a bracelet like that. Can I touch it?"
Lilian Rook     'Well, you know, obviously things in here are a bit less real and a bit more metaphorical than...
    ...I mean, I don't have my tools on me, but I thiiink I can eyeball how much my psyche is dwarfed in comparison, haha!'

    In amongst this much personal horror, that minute where Lilian gets to speak with Psychonautra whilst Perspehone solves the level is at least spent in relative calm. It doesn't take even most of her focus to follow along, but just hearing a Petra talk, especially one who can eventually totter around sketching out concepts that Lilian finds intuitive yet curates no words for, is inherently sort of like keeping her mind off of blood withdrawal by reading.

    "Because I'm still such a mystery to you, that you keep wanting to learn all about, and can't easily predict outside what I've already stated, you wouldn't dare to presume to conjure up a mental construct and call it me?" An unnecessarily haughty yet self-effacing take, perhaps. "Astonishing. You might be a first." Lilian hazily recalls what had represented her in Flamel Parsons' psyche to kill time, then curls up as the urge to vomit blood seizes her again. Her throat feels fucking wretched. It reminds her of--

    'Hey Phony? Lily-R?'

    "How many times do I have to tell you, Petty." Lilian says, before fully realizing where and when she is. Had that really been only months ago? It feels like years. She stops and wipes her face with her hand, lifting away gold sweat and a smear of blood at the corner of her mouth. Her gaze is briefly drawn to the wristband she hadn't noticed she brought in before. Was she even wearing it at the start? "I'm sorry. I'm just. Out of it." she says. Lilian barely dares glance at her. "Is it any better inside?" A beat. "And thank you. Petra doesn't say that part often."

    '...Once you take a moment away from artillery being launched around you, it actually is quite...incredible, isn't it?'

    "It is. So I don't want to look at it."

    'A nicer one'- what does that mean?'

    "A second up here is still miserable, isn't it?" Lilian says, this time actually, directly, to someone; being Phony. "How do you stand it? It can't be just 'power'. This isn't that sort of place."
Petra Soroka "You're not? But you're always coming up with all those neat plans like with the meltdowns, and saying all sorts of stuff only maybe... Half? Of anyone around really understands. Or... Pretends to understand without really getting it."

    Grilltra is thoughtfully horizontal in Kukuru's grip until being placed down on top of the Kana. "Mmm, I'm not really any good at handling meltdowns, I think. I never know what to say. The best I know how to do for someone having a hard time like that is being there with them, but... that's not really enough, a lot of the time."

    She nods languidly, eyes closed. "I'm not smart. I'm just devoted. That's the only way I know how to get around being stupid, aha. It makes me happy that that's what you're doing too, so don't be afraid to ask me for help either, okay?"

"... Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"

    Psychonautra beams at Kale-- well, she's got the respirator and goggles on, along with the heavy duty protective jumpsuit, so she's got almost no surface area by which Kale can tell, but similarly to Flamel-- and similarly to Petra, come to think of it, with that oversized bomber jacket of hers-- her body language is readable even through all the layers.

    "Well! Depends on how you think of it, you know?" She holds up a finger for gestures and emphasis, pointing it to the side of her head. "You're easy to mentally model because your actions tend to line up with Petra's assumptions of how you *will* act. If you've got deeper internal motivations, she's not really interested in figuring them out, because she doesn't expect that they'll be worth the effort. Saves a lot of mental juice, just letting people be how they are instead of anything else!"

    "Shit, well," Her hand drops to her side, but she's still visibly thrilled at the chance to explain. "Now that I say it out loud, it doesn't really depend on how you think of it at all!"

"Aren't even kids kind to their toys?"

    "Whew," Psychonautra whistles low, turning away from Phony for a second to fiddle with some esoteric gizmos strapped around her waist. "Hold on a sec, Phony, I've got to quash down a psychohazard I can feel cropping up in me."

"When your work's done, just slip through into me, okay?"

    Psychonautra crosses her arms, tone dropping down again to an unsteadily curious hum. She glances at Flamel before he gets into the hatch, tentatively questioning him on-- less whether it's 'okay', in the way the real Petra looks to Lilian to check her emotional reactions and anticipation for saying things, but in a way that asks something more along the lines of 'does this make sense'.

    "So.. hopping into your mindscape as... I guess if you reinforced my self-concept to the point that I can exist apart from here... but if I'm a result of *your* Petra's concentration on helping you along, like Flamel says, then what would...." Despite being given a lifeline, Psychonautra still seems dubious and uncomfortable saying 'yes' to being helped. That might just be the Petra part.

    "Well! Your head's going to be less dangerous than here, no doubt about that! So speaking of that, maybe I'll tag along down into the anti-cathexism zone with you, now that I won't just turn into ribbons of derailed thoughts if I do!" That seems to cheer her up though.
Petra Soroka "Ahaha. Oh, my goodness, you're wonderful."

    "Um-- a-am I?" Phony!Petra pulls back, blushing a bit, but her recoiling is dimmed and gentled by Persephone's aura in a way none of the others get. Pulling back puts her on the very very edge of the plateau, but even teetering on the edge of it, she's not at risk of falling at all. Being close to her, the pinprick itches still bubble off of her occasionally, but it's far less than any of the others. "A nicer second! Is what I mean. Yeah. Lilian's got it. It's not like there's any *good* seconds inside this place, but I thought you might feel better if...."

"Is it any better inside?"

    Phony!Petra wears her expressions as honestly as-- well, Petra herself, since she's no good at making a poker face either, but there's less of a baseline of resentment to flatten out the variation between her emotions. Her face twists, sympathetically unhappy and a little guilty on top of it.

    "It's, uh, worse. Down there. I mean, not that I've ever been, but I can make a guess, since it's, uh... mostly my fault, really. As much as anything is." She waves a hand in front of her, more gently than frantic, as if to swipe away the incoming questions before they're said. "Because of shared influence, I mean. Like, that's what you're here for, I think?"

"I've never seen a bracelet like that. Can I touch it?"

    "Touch it?" Even while tilting her head at Phony in askance, she's already holding her arm out to offer up her wrist. "I guess you've just never seen it because it's not real for you. But you can... oh, touch it, y-yeah. Of course."
Kale Hearthward > "And besides. Being kind is always wise."

Kale hesitates. Persephone can feel him checking to make sure he's still an ocean. (Not that it'd matter against her.)

"I don't know," he says, eventually. "This feels kind of like offering someone food off of someone else's table...?"

He doesn't say anything more on the matter if she doesn't, though.
Kukuru "The best I know how to do for someone having a hard time like that is being there with them, but... that's not really enough, a lot of the time."
"It makes me happy that that's what you're doing too, so don't be afraid to ask me for help either, okay?"

"That's the best any of us can do sometimes. Or... Not making things worse, right?" Kukuru giggles softly, then slouches forward and just lets her arms and upper body hang down for a moment to stretch out after all that jumping.

"We'll get smarter in our own ways, even if nobody else can see it. And... Mhm! I'll count on you, so I'm expecting you to do the same. Okaaay?" Kukuru asks with an expecting grin, loosening up just enough that she's able to forget about all that stuff going down in the neighborhood far below.

For a little while, anyway. She's trying really hard not to look at it, even with Angela talking about the artillery. She gets only a peek on the way down the hatch, but even that moment is enough to make Kukuru's heart sink a little.
Lilian Rook     'It's, uh, worse. Down there. I mean'

    Lilian does her very best not to brace herself with a deep breath. "I see." she says, already meandering towards the hatch. "Please at least tell me that the walls aren't splattered with Petra. If it's just hurting me a lot--" She stops to spit a little wad of blood onto the roof. Atypically unladylike of her. "--I'll manage."

    "I really just don't want to see . . . more of . . . what almost happened, you know?"

    Regardless of whether she'll get her wish, Lilian is already crouching and turning the crank. Her body has a sort of machinelike forward moment to it, like this. "'Your fault'. For not being real?" says says, on a separate track. It was worse in Lobotomy Corporation, but it's still wretchedly visible how her thoughts and feelings are so utterly disconnected from the way she automatically, mechanically, goes through the motions of forward progress. "I suppose we couldn't be here for much else."

    'it's the kind of misery that gives you a minute to think between the crisis stuff'

    "Is that how it works?" Lilian says offhandedly to Parsons. "I suppose I get what you mean, but it's usually someone else's misery that buys you time to get ready for tomorrow, not your own."
Flamel Parsons     "Hold on a sec, Phony, I've got to quash down a psychohazard I can feel cropping up in me."

    "Oh, *oh*." Flamel pauses at the edge of the hatch, pulling back. Looks like the others need a quick break before they drop in, so he gives them time. "Is Petra-- hang on. Okay, I didn't talk about this because I keep hoping it's not as common as it is. But is Petra one of those types of girls who," He starts some frustrated gesturing, weirdly, furrowing his brow behind the hazmat gear. "At some point she got ahold of those paratrooper army men toy, or a plush with a really long tether piece, or just a doll on a string, and then she put it up on a ceiling fan and spun it around really fast until it hit a wall, and for some reason got fixated on that, and still remembers it" There's a bit of hand-wringing. "*That* one always gets me *so dizzy* and I might fall over in the real world if she's hosting that one, so you gotta tell me."

    Flamel Parsons what the *fuck* are you talking about.

    "It's, uh, worse. Down there. I mean, not that I've ever been, but I can make a guess, since it's, uh... mostly my fault, really. As much as anything is."

    "Don't beat yourself up about it. I mean, first of all, that's half the problem! Second of all... pain is pain. You can make a totally truthful, utterly convincing argument that it came from you, and it's your fault, and you should solve it. And that can be true! You can make another truthful, convincing argument that minds are a function of their environment. That one's also true -- present company excluded." He gestures at Persephone, in a good-natured way. Then continues. "Once the pain's eased up, it won't matter where it came from. The goal of psychonautry is never finding fault, just finding healing."

    "A second up here is still miserable, isn't it?"

    "Well, sort of, yeah. But it's the kind of misery that gives you a minute to think between the crisis stuff. And, in psychonautry, that can make all the difference! Good or bad. If you think a minute to contemplate would be bad, we should go right away, you have to go with your gut about this kind of thing."
Angela Angela looks back towards Lilian for a moment before nodding once to her. But then she hesitates and goes ahead and asks, "...Why is that?" She asks of Lilian (about not wanting to 'look at it'), giving into curiousity eventually. She can imagine any number of reasons, but she can't know which one.

She gives a concerned look towards Psychonautra. Will Persephone pull Psychonautra in if she DOESN'T agree to being saved? She has a suspicion she knows her answer but at this point it's out of her hands so she doesn't dwell on it.

"Anti-cathexism zone? ... I see."

She hasn't been interacting with the Petras by choice because--well--she is trying to acoid making changes. She already feels guilty for talking to the one, however briefly, wearing the EGO Gear.

''It is usually someone else's misery that buys you time to get ready for tomorrow''

Angela gives another toneless laugh. "Isn't that just so?" She asks, quite rhetorically.
Persephone Kore      "I guess you've just never seen it because it's not real for you."
     "No," Phony says. She touches Persephonetra's arm gently, raising it up to examine the bracelet in awe. Not like a jeweler; like admiring a rainbow. "It isn't real, out there. Not yet. But maybe it could be, someday? I'd like that. I'd like it a lot. So thank you for being you."

     "How do you stand it?"
     She has to disentangle herself eventually. Then she smiles, wearied, at Lilian. "I sort of don't? There's no keeping it out. And of course it feels bad. I just... let it flow through me. And I think about how bad Petra must be feeling, if this is what's happening in her heart. And then I'm thinking about someone else, and not me."

     That one's also true -- present company excluded."
     Her smile turns indulgent towards Flamel. "I am the most 'a product of my environment' that anyone has ever been. Even Petra's less." That might not be true, but it's honest.

     "This feels kind of like offering someone food off of someone else's table...?"
     "What do you mean?" Persephone says, in the befuddled way that doesn't actually ask an explanation. "I'm here because I want her to live. She can't complain if I want her to live."

     "Hold on a sec, Phony, I've got to quash down a psychohazard I can feel cropping up in me."
     "Take all the time you need," Persephone says, blissfully oblivious. Hey! Oblivious to what? She steps towards Psychonautra again, putting a hand on her shoulder: "If you can't make up your mind, I'll answer for you! But it'll be 'yes'. Ahahaha."
Petra Soroka "Please at least tell me that the walls aren't splattered with Petra."

    Persephonetra isn't nearly as tentative about physical contact with Phony as Phony is when reaching out to her. She sighs and leans her head into Phony's chest, eyes-closed basking while having her wrist Examined and Adored. Would Petra just be like this all the time if she wasn't immune to Phony's aura, or is it just this one in particular?

    "I can't really... know for sure what it'll be like. But I think... there's nowhere inside 'Petra' you could look where you wouldn't find something like that, one way or another. I'm sorry." Persephonetra doesn't fully open her eyes to slide her gaze onto Lilian, but her lips are twisted into an apologetic pout, and she sounds solemnly hesitant rather than relaxed.

    "But there's at least one Petra who's decided that it's better to stay alive for your sake. That's why you're here at all; because she decided that. So... sorry, I know that doesn't make it easier to see it, but unlike how it could've been, there's still something coming after."

"'Your fault'. For not being real?"

    Persephonetra, reluctantly, lets Phony slip away from her, letting her arm with the wristband delicately sink back down to her side as if she's worried it'll break. She wanders over to stick near Lilian while she opens up the hatch, now that the hinges are blown off by Berislav. "I guess if you want to go that far back? I don't think I could ever really be real, not in the way you mean. I was thinking... the opposite, almost. That it's my fault for not being not-real. For her to want it, even though it's impossible; I think if there wasn't that kind of, um, contradiction, then it wouldn't hurt this bad. That's sort of what you're here to put an end to, at least in one way, right?"

    Meanwhile, Psychonautra has wandered up behind her and is tapping on Persephonetra's head with various tools and peering into her ears with some kind of lens. "Er-- can I help you?" "Yeah, I'm trying to figure out why you're so much less dependent on the pseudo-realities the rest of us functioned under in order to maintain the dissonance of our individually deviated identities from what those guys brought in with them." "Oh. I just read their minds and believed all of it." "Oh. Huh."

    Once the hatch is open, Persephonetra steps back to let you all go down it. She's not able to, and unlike Psychonautra, she doesn't seem distressed by that either. Psychonautra, meanwhile, is pratically vibrating, checking and double-checking her equipment, readjusting her respirator even though the ash is clear up here, pulling her goggles down and tugging an aviator's cap over top of it all.
Petra Soroka     Down the hatch is a ladder. Which is a little strange, given that on the real Kana, the ladder was outside, leading up *to* the hatch; a ladder that was notably absent on the outside of the mental representation of the mech. It could just be convenience for the structure, filling in 'familiar ladders' where 'any ladder' has to go. Petra *does* have a complex about not being 'purposefully constructed', after all.

    The hope would be that the ladder leads down into an open chamber inside the massive tower, where there would be some kind of a representation of its cockpit where she lived for most of a year. A platforming puzzle, maybe, where you hopped between giant ramen packages and dodged puddles of acidic energy drink, while cigarettes rained from the sky. Instead, the ladder just descends down through a gut-churningly tight chute, down past the point where your eyes can even focus on it from up top. Each step down the ladder scrapes your back against the wall behind you, and you're forced to hunch your shoulders in or get pinned between the other two walls; no matter how broad or slim, it's about the same difficulty to fit, just enough to be constantly aware of having to shrink down and hold your breath just below maximum capacity, but not so tight that it feels like it's worth complaining about.

    The walls of the tunnel are nonliteral in a visibly disorienting way; made up of patchworks of endlessly repeating motifs without any individual segment being identical. Screens scattered on random walls at random intervals blare harsh blue-tinted light, leaving spots in your vision when you close your eyes, and all the rest of the pathetic decor pinned to the walls around you like butterflies to gawk at is lit up only by that. It's her old cockpit, after a fashion, stretched, spaghettified up and down into a looming mess of depressed grime, too closely boxed in to ignore.

    Piles of packaged food waste (crumpled cans, water bottles, ramen wrappers) clump together in segments to seamlessly mold into dirty laundry, wrinkled from being jammed in wherever it'd fit to clear the path down. Metal plates in patches have holes punctured through them in weaponized tantrum, scuff marks from being kicked by her boots, buttons and touchscreens grimy with crumbs and grease. One towel, repeated a dozen times over and over as you go down, stained with oil. Plastic bags, streaks and splatters of blood, cardboard box after box splitting at the corners with stuff she never bothered to take out, forced into the shape of walls, all with the muggy-savory stench of unwashed hair hanging throughout.

    It feels more like spelunking into a cavern than climbing down a bespoke passageway. It also feels intensely, criminally embarrassing, to be seeing the naked extent of how Petra viewed her own living conditions back then, at the depths of her inability to take care of herself. Hibiki and Lilian both saw it with their own eyes before-- the focus on filth is exaggerated in Petra's head, tinged with memories of self-disgust, but not alltogether *wrong*.

    It feels like the ladder goes down deeper than even the dozen stories or so that the Kana was tall. Further down, the screens flicker between black and static, barely illuminating the dark-glistening blood increasingly soaking the walls. Psychonautra, descending in the middle of the pack, explains that this is typically as far as she can get before feeling death approaching.

    "Not that I'm even certain that's a true thing I remember or not! The more I think about it, the less I know if it even happened, or if I'm just retroactively constructing the shape of a memory because I said it out loud and feel compelled to believe the things I say even when they're conflicting with things I feel! Haha, who knows. We'll find out soon, though!"
Petra Soroka     It's seemingly grotesque for no purpose besides being grotesque. There's no way, even in Petra's distorted, emotional-association-drenched recollection, that she feels like the interior of the Kana was anything like this. Empty food waste turns to rot and crumpled oozing tin, packed on all sides with paper towels soaked with so much blood that the dry edges crack where your shoulders bump them, and their still-wet centers smear red against your back with each step down.

    It starts to feel maddening. It's hard not to resent her, for having such a cramped, tedious, repetitive stretch of what feels like wallowing in her mind. If you were descending alone, you feel like you'd doubt there's a bottom to it at all, and you'd spot repetition in the patches on the walls and convince yourself you're looping through it forever.

    But you're not! It's easy to talk to each other while climbing, and Psychonautra babbles pretty much any time there's a gap in conversation past the midpoint, nervously filling up the empty air. Mostly with unasked-for tales about the fates of Petra's toys, after explaining to Flamel that no, there were no paratroopers, but in terms of fan-based stories, she did used to wrap a favorite stuffed dinosaur of hers in bubblewrap before taping it to the fan and turning it on to max and waiting until the weight flung it off somewhere.

    "See, she was the type to name all of them, you know, but that didn't stop her from subjecting them to weird shit! There was this one, a stuffed dog, named Nathan or something, that she kept trying to cook. All kinds of ways! Put it in the microwave, in the oven, in boiling water, you name it. Poor guy couldn't get a break. As far as I know-- which might still be all totally wrong! You never know.-- it never even tore! I don't know if that's a psychohazard but it sure sounds like one."
Petra Soroka     Eventually, though, you reach the bottom. Sorry! I'm still on top of the tower! Oh, wow, I can do this too? Hi! The ladder opens up a dozen feet above the floor, forcing you to drop the rest of the way without even having the room in the chute to maneuver and look down to see exactly what you're dropping into.

    When you let go and fall, you feel something invisible in the air catching and tearing at you. Similarly to the 'breaking twigs' from the interstitial area of Petra's mind, but 'sharper' in some wordless way, without any direct localized sense of pain. It feels like intangible needles dragging thread through flesh and bone, with an indistinct puncture and painless, violatory sliding.

    Above you, trailing through the air and running along perfectly straight invisible lines, is a distorted refraction of your skin. Bloodlessly torn away and bleeding out from your body, from 'laceration' points on your arms and across your throat, the color of your skin blends seamlessly with the other colors you wear, forming thin rivulets of your visage that slow to a trickle when you stop moving. It looks just like what happened to Petra, after being hit with the S2's cannon, and just like the psychic tugging from before, it intensifies whenever you move down here.

    There's extremely little of note in the caverns that you drop into. Vacant, frosted glass walls absent of light filtering through them from 'outside', the ceiling twice as high as any of you are tall, forming a cavernously wide hallway extending to either side. The floor feels sticky and spongy, each step wetly tearing away from it, making it just a tiny bit less natural to walk around, along with being uncomfortably reminiscent of half-dried blood despite being rot-grey.

    Right where you drop down, in a small outwards bulge in the already too-wide hallway, is something you recognize from the picture Petra showed you. Only barely recognize, in the state it's in. The Beauty of Ash reduced to human-size rather than the towering mech it seemed to be in the picture, lays sprawled, 'face'-down on the floor, utterly ruined.

    Its head has been smashed into splinters by a rock, still sitting in the center of it surrounded by hovering shards. Spikes drive through it to pin it into the ground; bullets lodge midway into its body with the explosive spray of hardlight shrapnel still airborne in telekinetic freeze-frame around the entry point. Weapons-- anything from swords, axes, knives, even a baseball bat-- lie around it or buried inside it, stopped cold with the chip damage dealt rigidly clinging to the mech's form anyways.

    It's still alive. That fact registers to you immediately, despite how it looks, and despite all the concessions you have to make to the definition of 'alive' for a psychic representation of a machine to count. Like the Ekanamsha S2, the Beauty of Ash seems to irrevocably cling to its shape no matter how much damage is done to it.

    
Kale Hearthward All this... stuff, in the Kana. Damn girl, you live like this?

"This isn't what I was picturing," comments Kale as everyone descends, just out of the sheer urge to say *something*.

"Like, maybe some sort of m-" Oh Lilian is here, maybe don't mention the maid-off. "-assive statue, or something." Kale can't think of a good save.

"... She did all that to her stuffed animals? Even after naming them? Really? I think I used to throw a fit if mine even got a little dirty. I got in trouble for fighting with one of my sisters when she borrowed one for teatime and got it covered in muddy leaf water. I couldn't imagine treating one like that."

Down, down...

"... Oh. Did... someone beat us to it?"

"... Or did someone try to beat us to it and failed."

Absently, Kale nudges one of the weapons with his boot.

"Well, destroying it isn't going to work easily... Persephone, can you like, take *this* out like you're going to do with Psychonautra? Might be easier than trying to give it a followup round."
Father Berislav And now, the piece de resistance.

    The final bit of performative aggression is a beeline for the tower. Mid-sprint, Isaiah's hand reaches behind and over its shoulder, grasping the peeking grip of a war pick. Petra has seen it used enough to know the threat it presents as it's drawn.

    The tower is reached in a few seconds, the remaining distance cleared with a bounding leap as the mech's hand slides down the haft, choking up just beneath the weapon's supermassive head. Its feet, gleaming silver, impact the tower's base and carry it upwards, each footfall shaking the structure despite their alarmingly graceful placement.

    A few seconds more and the mech's vertically oriented red optics crest the lip of the tower's roof for one stunning instant. Its black synthetic ribcage is next, opening up like jaws. Berislav leaps from the cockpit, twisting midair in a frontflip that places him directly over the hatch.

    As he dives in, Isaiah falls, disappearing into a flat, impossibly conjured lake of orange light, which winks out after the head of the mech's war pick disappears beneath its surface.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel scoots down, holding onto the ladder as he does a levitation-powered descent. "Gotta skip this part." He says, gesturing at the junk-and-waste environs around the first chamber. "I don't have enough time and force to break a Bad Habit, and we can't afford a long endurance-fight right now!" Down, down. Death approaching? "Well, let's hope for none of that. But right now, death's a pretty significant factor! Given everything happening with the Beauty of Ash... I really wouldn't expect her to get by without a lot of death feelings creeping in!"

    When there's no more ladder, but a lot more space, he assures the others. "No mental architecture is so hostile that it would lead you somewhere just to kill you. At least, it shouldn't be..." He lets go. Initially, he tries to use his levitation to slow his descent, emitting a fluffy thought-bubble to hold onto. Then, the needles come. He loses his thought, and thus his grip on levitation, as it refracts away an outer layer in a painful wave. "AUUUUGH! Whoooaahuh, ow, ow! This *hurts!*" Chunks of outer flesh are torn away by the hostile geometry, revealing shimmering white light below his skin. "Gonna have to keep motion to an efficient minimum down here. The psychohazard is... *brutal,* wow!"

    He eventually settles on the ground, or levitating just above it, and observes the Beauty of Ash. He winces, and anxiety washes off of him. "Oh. Oh, this poor thing..." He recognizes something that is psychologically long-lived, full of meaning -- both good and bad. "I really don't want to..." He mutters, with a soft tone of distress. "Ugh. I hate hurting someone like this."

    "... Oh. Did... someone beat us to it? ... Or did someone try to beat us to it and failed."

    "No other sanctioned ops into this mind. They wouldn't have gotten in. No... This is an inside job. It's... unfortunately, it's one we need to finish. I can tell how we would fix this situation normally." He squats near the Beauty and whispers, "You stuck? I'd... probably have to go running around here, get everything you need to get unstuck and fixed back up. Right? Yeah..."

    He glances at the others, then experimentally moves his arm, testing that refraction with a pained wince as he stands up to rejoin them. "...Anyone got any ideas? We can't destroy this ourselves, we... need to power up or redirect the psychohazard, to cut the Beauty of Ash out of her mind." He's already scanning, himself, looking for the source of the local psychohazard or any information that his wide-area psychic radar can find about what to do to leverage the psychohazard against the Beauty of Ash.
Kale Hearthward Oh yeah Kale's still speaking in two different tonations, you can just assume that hasn't changed.
Kukuru "Yeah, I'm trying to figure out why you're so much less dependent on the pseudo-realities the rest of us functioned under in order to maintain the dissonance of our individually deviated identities from what those guys brought in with them."

Kukuru's expression remains fully still as she attempts to comprehend any of that, fails, and just settles for nodding slowly in agreement. It's just like Grilltra said: As long as she follows through on how she's told to help, everything will be okay. She really would like to understand someday, but this isn't the right time or place to ask about any of that.

Heading down that ladder and through that uncomfortably (but not chokingly) tight chute, though, gives Kukuru some time to think about what she's feeling and seeing. This isn't actually the machine they're all here to cut off, is it? No, it's got to be something else just as, if not more important. Why is it all like this? Even coming into this without any expectations, Kukuru would never imagine the inside of someone's fancy machine to be perfectly pristine. For Petra's mental image of it to be so caked with garbage and grime, it feels to Kukuru like this was less of a machine and more of a... Home?

"That's why she wanted us to be so careful..." Kukuru murmurs to herself, suddenly feeling like she shouldn't be looking around more than she already has in some generalized desire to not invade Petra's privacy more than she already has. Even if she was asked to come here, it still feels so invasive, and it just brings more conflicted feelings to the forefront. Psychonautra explaining things, thankfully, keeps her attention focused again, and Kukuru chuckles softly when Psychonautra goes over those contradicting thoughts.

"Maybe it's both? It could've happened, but you can't remember because... You didn't want to, but saying and hearing it is making things make sense again? Mm... Yeah, we'll find out."

Luckily, Kukuru's actually pretty good at filling dead air, especially when the alternative is thinking too hard about what could possibly be the reason for all that dried blood and festering food rot. "I used to have toys like that... Traders would bring them in sometimes, or we'd find them on the outskirts whenever visitors left after festivals." "A fan? Oh, that's clever... I'll have to let the kids at home know. They just like throwing them real high because they know I can always get them later. Fixing the hair can be pretty tough, though." "I haven't had a dog in a long time..."
Kukuru At the drop, Kukuru doesn't even bother waiting to see the bottom or knowing that there is an invisible something there before just letting go. She's confident in her teleportation, after all, and hearing Persephonetra is really nice! He-llo there. We've gone deeper, and-ow. OW. OW.

It's actually surprising when it's only a short-ish drop before she does feel something catch her. It's an unpleasant feeling, though, that has Kukuru hissing painfully as she feels so much weird tearing and piercing running through her without being able to identify where or what's happening. Her instinct, of course, is to start throwing her healing nanites around to try and stave off the pain, but...

Does that even work here? She's in Petra's mind rather than personally being there, so she has no idea. She'll try it anyway, though, even if the sight of her skin makes her want to throw up a little. Forcing her gaze elsewhere, she spots the seemingly destroyed Beauty of Ash, and Kukuru approaches it while holding her hands out towards Persephone and Psychonautra reflexively, almost like she wants to reassure them or something just that she's there.

"Ideas? Um... Would healing it work? It's a machine, but it's in Petra's head, so maybe it works like a...?" Kukuru trails off in her response to Flamel, clearly grasping at straws and trying to connect others together as she squats in place to stare right at the wreck. She's no mechanical whiz, but she can try to see with her SPECIAL EYES if there's anything particularly messed up that isn't so obvious on the surface.
Angela Angela decides taking the ladder would be too long and just steps in without using it.

She plummets into the hole and there's a loud CLANG (actually several as she ends up hitting the walls numerous times) as she (eventually) hits the floor, feet first.

Completely unharmed, Angela takes a moment to look towards Berislav (who also jumped in, albeit more acrobatically relative to her dead weight drop) and she says, to him, "Father Berislav," after a moment. "...Do priests of your world usually have mechanized suits, combat training, and the mobility of a trapeze artist? Or is this just the normal state of any religious leader." She naturally thinks of the Holy Refulgence first as an alternative and she suspects that if they could send battle nuns instead of children into battle they probably would.

Nevertheless, she takes a look around. To nobody in particular, Angela reflects aloud, "Those who excel most at L Corp usually are the types that have lived a difficult life on the outside. Not always, of course, but in the sense of being more comfortable working in such an environment... Yes, there is at least a correlation."

She then bluntly looks at Kale, apparently having had enough, "Why are you talking like this?"

Still, as unpleasant as this is so far it's still better than Petra corpses. he is a bit stiff so she moves at a consistent but patient pace through the strange tunnels.

You were able to help her. Angela thinks. Maybe she and the Commander are the only ones, but that'd be enough.

Then they find the Beauty of Ash, surprisingly, already destroyed? Kukuru offers to heal it. "Do not be hasty, Kukuru. Parsons."

She nods to Flamel, slowly taking a look at the Beauty of Ash first--

"Still functional." Angela says. "...Healing it may be unproductive, this might be a task of helping another finish it off or...?" Another quick glance to Flamel before crouching down and picking up a baseball bat preemptively.

"...Perhaps upon realizing what the Beauty of Ash had been used for, she was already attempting to cut out the Beauty of Ash's connection to her. Hench it's current condition."
Persephone Kore      Persephone is the last to descend the ladder, because I kind of like being the last one through? You know!, and because she needs a little longer to marvel at Persephonetra with sparkly-eyed appreciation, and because she's completely oblivious to the very normal sartorial issues of her descending above everyone else.

     "I know you're good for her. Take care of her, okay?" she says in parting, with an almost trembly warmth. Then she's down.

     Oh, Petra. Immaculately-painted nails graze filthy laundry in a crevice. What happened to you? Where were they keeping you? ... Or did you do this to yourself? I'm sorry, either way.

     The awkward tightness of the passage nags at her. Ordinarily she'd change it without thinking twice, but- I promised not to mess things up in here, didn't I? But I hate this. Can't I be a little selfish and wish it bigger? No, but then Petra would be so upset. But she'll never--

     Scrnnnnk. Metal bends and balloons out to give Persephone, and only Phony, ample breathing room. Oh. I let it slip. It's been a while. She casts an apologetic glance upward, then downward, then takes the rest of the journey easily before bending the passage narrow again. All better. Just about.

     She isn't too ruffled, but there's a distant look in her eyes.

     At the bottom, Persephone kneels beside the mangled mech. The way she lays a hand on its shoulder is like comforting a dying animal. Her eyes absorb every detail. If it cuts me, that's fine.

     "You were right," she says to Psychonautra. "That's a really good name. It is beautiful."

     "You're beautiful."

     She takes a moment to ask it 'why are you the way that you are?', of course, but I'm not the expert at breaking connections here. Ahaha. Don't expect too much of me, Flamel.
Hibiki Tachibana     

    Notably, Hibiki doesn't seem very willing to engage with Psychonautra or Persephonetra. Whether that's because her mind is still half-elsewhere instead of here, or just because she's not sure what to say to them... well, maybe it's both. But waiting to be one of the last ones to descend down into the hatch, despite being one of the first to approach it, she does side-eye the latter of the two.

    "...I'm kinda glad there's a Petra like you in here. Um... I'd say see you when we get back, but I don't know if we're coming back this way."

    Whatever that was about, she gives a little wave before descending downward. The misplacement of the ladder doesn't bother her terribly much, but what they experience on the descent certainly does. She's been inside the Kana's cockpit, seen the state of how Petra had kept it - and even one time when she was outside of it, for a certain extended spaceflight, she still recalls the complaints about how cramped it was. So she shouldn't be that surprised that the trip down is tight in this way.

    It doesn't make it any less unpleasant of a trip. More than any sense of being physically uncomfortable, which she knows has to be a translation from Petra's mental mindscape just like everything else here, it's the sights. She has to squint to avoid getting blinded by the light, but she can still make out vaguely familiar sights past the blue haze.

    Trash. Scuffs. Grease. Crumbs. Boxes. And the blood. And it only gets worse and worse, the further they go. It's not long past the halfway point where she can't keep it to herself anymore. "What the hell is all of this supposed to be...? I get how she felt about the way she lived, back then, but-- ..." The blood is pervasive. Disgustingly pervasive.

    She doesn't like her first thoughts as to why.

    When they have to let go to get any further, Hibiki's lips purse tight to hold back the sounds of slight pain and mostly discomfort from the prickling, digging sensations. Even more at the sight of 'themselves' trailing from above. Her jaw locks tighter, and then they come down. To see...

    "That's... the Beauty of Ash..." Nearly forgetting all the distressing feelings from the trip here, Hibiki's eyes go wide - and remain that way as she scans over the damage it's taken, so similar to the same kind from back with the S2. "...Even after all of this, it's still hanging on. ...Unbroken." And while the S2's ability to repair all of its damage was a massive obstacle...

    ...seeing this just makes her feel hollow in her stomach.

    Enough that a hand comes over her midriff, and she looks a little unwell. "...Power up a psychohazard? How would we do something like that? I guess it'd depend on exactly what it is...?" Ostensibly speaking to both Flamel and Psychonautra, she takes a few tenative steps towards the fallen machine, each one having to fight against the environment to look down at it - looking for any response, maybe.

    Maybe to that same end, before she realizes it, she's taking a knee to carefully, carefully place a hand on its frame.
Father Berislav      The priest's hands grip the ladder quickly, his descent slowing thanks to skilled application of the soles of his shoes. The going is cramped, even for him--perhaps it's meant to be cramped for all of us?

    The glare of blue light is different from that gentle red glow of Isaiah's cockpit. Different, and not preferred. His silver eyes try to blink it away; it feels like the spotted vision associated with a sleepless night in front of a screen.

    He tries to ignore the dirty clothes, the oil stained towels, the boxes bursting at the seams or else fashioned into walls--in the way that a polite guest might try to ignore the same. But he can't--not when this space is so cramped, and all of the trappings of an unhealthy, isolated life are brushing up against his priestly clothes. Oh, Petra. Berislav sighs. "I'm glad you're doing better," he says to Petra, through Psychonautra.

Do priests of your world usually have mechanized suits, combat training, and the mobility of a trapeze artist? Or is this just the normal state of any religious leader.

    "No," says Berislav. "They don't. The church is very upset with me, in fact. They don't agree with my interpretation of the scripture, and name me anathema."
Father Berislav      The fall caused by the motion of the ladder sees his cassock, palms and shoes alike stained and smeared with oil, old food, and blood, the priest having used his limbs to control the fall and turn the speed of his descent to his advantage. Even as he does, the sensation of needles brings a furrow to his brow, the crease deepening as a distorted watercolor of his pale skin streaks through the tunnel above.

    His landing, setting the blended colors of his face and clothes to a lethargic drift, is made with a soft grunt of mixed effort and concern.

    But--this isn't about him. He tears himself away from the alarming, surreal sight, to look upon the Beauty of Ash. His face--and the distorted reflection thereof--is drawn into a pained frown. His heart aches, at the sight of it; maybe enough to be felt along those invisible strings, and certainly enough to be felt by Persephone.

    ...Anyone got any ideas? We can't destroy this ourselves, we... need to power up or redirect the psychohazard, to cut the Beauty of Ash out of her mind.

    "I trust your judgment with regard to my tools, and their suitability for destroying it." Clearing his throat, freshly-wiped hands clasped before him, "...redirecting it is more preferable than strengthening it, in my view," says Berislav. "The question is what the psychohazard could be guided to destroy, that isn't the Beauty of Ash."

    "Petra doesn't seem to remember this part of her life very fondly at all. Could we somehow direct the psychohazard to... 'this,' generally?" he asks, lifting one hand to twirl an index vaguely in a circle. The trash. The dented walls. The empty ramen cups, the dirty laundry. Et cetera.
Petra Soroka "...I'm kinda glad there's a Petra like you in here."

    Persephonetra smiles sadly at Hibiki after saying goodbye to Phony, crossing her arms and tucking that wristband into her armpit. "... You and everyone else. But isn't that... kind of cruel?" She averts her eyes, lowering them to look down at the wreckage of Petras below. "... Stay safe, Hibiki."

"I couldn't imagine treating one like that."

    "Kale! Well, that's because you're normal." Psychonautra treats each story like it's got a Q&A segment after, responding to each person in turn to fill up space. "It wouldn't be a psychohazard if everyone did it! And boy, can this head fit so many psychohazards. Amateur guess, but my read's that it's an unhealthy intersection between the mental domains of love, hate, and control, creating some need to vent the byproduct of corrupted passion through acts of ritualistic abuse. You don't have anything like that!"

"It could've happened, but you can't remember because... You didn't want to, but saying and hearing it is making things make sense again?"

    "Hmmm, you think it's a repressed-memory type of situation? If anything, I think it's the opposite! I'm still not sure how much dissociation I should be injecting into my own thoughts and memories, and especially how metaphorically and or derivative they are from your Petra's, so I'm double-checking to make sure I'm not overly *associating*."

     Psychonautra is almost the last one to come down the ladder, just before Hibiki and Persephone, and she hesitates before letting go, muttering quietly so that just the other two can hear her. It sounds like she's trying to psych herself up before intentionally pressing her hand to a hot stove. "Here goes nothing."

    She starts to shriek, then goes dead silent, at the tearing sensation, getting a section of her face snagged on the invisible crack and pinched upwards along the fracture. Unlike everyone else, even though it's still not a 'wound', in that there's still no blood or cut in her skin, it has a significantly more lasting impact on Psychonautra than just tugging and teasing away at identity. Her face is ripped up as if the smear tool in paint was dragged across it, catching to a point up in the air, and she tries to pat it back into place but only has one hand to do it. The other one caught and tore at the wrist, limply refracted along a sharp line like you're looking at it through water.

"No other sanctioned ops into this mind."

    After taking a minute to reconstitute herself, with faint afterechoes of Persephone's psychic cosmos wisping around her, Psychonautra is shaken and hesitant to move, but ready to contribute more to the group mission. She begins doing so by being enthusiastically wrong.

    "No *hostile* ones, definitely! Like I said, I wasn't able to-- oh, wait, no, that's not right." Psychonautra takes a moment to think about that, then decides to agree with Flamel that there's been no other operations. She gestures at the Beauty of Ash, shuddering when her finger catches in the air at a knuckle and rips along an invisible line. "This is a hundred percent authentic self-inflicted repression. Can't kill it, but you sure can bludgeon it into submission with everything you've got and then dump it in the woods so you can grab a different skin that'll also blow up in your face eventually anyways."
Kale Hearthward > "Why are you talking like this?"

"Oh... sorry. It just - I felt like I had to say *something* or I'd start going crazy. And I guess I just let myself ramble a bit?"

> "Kale! Well, that's because you're normal."

"See, I'm normal," he says to Angela, as though Psychonautra just handed him a certified test result stating 'Kale 1 - Angela 0'.
Kukuru "...Healing it may be unproductive, this might be a task of helping another finish it off or...?"

"Oh, that makes more sense... But if she was breaking it already, why would it...?" Kukuru starts to ask, but trails off halfway through while tapping her chin. "Oh. Of course she wants it gone, but it won't... Go. No matter how much she breaks it herself, it's stuck in there if we don't..."

"Could we somehow direct the psychohazard to... 'this,' generally?"

She nods at Berislav mentioning the psychohazard, quickly realizing that she probably used that word the wrong way over the radio. "If it's strong enough to destroy other memories, then this should be even easier for it to work on. I mean... Her other memories already broke it down this much, right? But we'd have to get it to aim this far... Um. Inside itself? Is that something we could do"
Lilian Rook     'But I think... there's nowhere inside 'Petra' you could look where you wouldn't find something like that'

    News that Lilian extremely doesn't want to hear. Even as she still struggles to make clear why it matters to her so much. Everyone knows how desensitized to corpses she was before joining the Paladins. Everyone who pays close attention knows that she doesn't like Petra enough to care much about her getting hurt; or, it's complicated, at least.

    'But there's at least one Petra who's decided that it's better to stay alive for your sake.'

    "I know. But that's not really . . . Lilian begins. "I don't care that she hates herself, or if she wants to hurt herself. We all do, sometimes. I'm not shocked." she says. The hatch comes loose, and Lilian stares into the choking dark.

    "No. I shouldn't be surprised you don't get it. You're the most gentle one here, aren't you? You've never thought hard about salvaging your life with a sword. You have no idea what it's like to sever someone's limbs from their body, and only feel relief."

    'For her to want it, even though it's impossible;'

    "She'll grow out of it." Lilian says. "Hurting from wanting the impossible, I mean. At least, if she learns anything from me. I did."

    The climb down is miserable, but a sort of miserable that plays at the edge of Lilian's tolerances. She isn't claustrophobic, but filth is something else, and being able to move, to breathe, is too important to how she is. The metaphor, unfortunately, registers halfway down, and the discomfort she was barely tolerating blossoms into blindingly vivid resentment. A critical tipping point passes, and Lilian retaliates, catching black shade and hurtling down the ladder in gravity's embrace as something not quite here-nor-there, falling blindly towards the terminus where she might be able to stretch out. Thus, playing further into the metaphor.

    'The more I think about it, the less I know if it even happened, or if I'm just retroactively constructing the shape of a memory because I said it out loud and feel compelled to believe the things I say even when they're conflicting with things I feel!'

    "At least that's one of you that noticed." Lilian hisses, a while later. When she can find herself, she forgets the intolerable pain gradually building in her lungs for a moment, just to fastidiously check herself for any signs of having contacted those blood-soaked rags. Those most of all. Even the rot is a distant second in her mind. Third is the physical shivering that starts to build up from the gut-churning need to retaliate against Petra, in some way, for any part of her-- even her psyche-- presuming to open her up and touch 'through', or to pick away and alter her appearance in any way shape her form; even in facsimile. Fourth is bitterly resenting the treatment of stuffed animals that she wasn't even allowed to have."

    "I told you. I said already, this is fucking disgusting. I don't care if it's someone's heart. Hearts can be worth hating someone. Even if I want to help her, I knew she was like this already. So I didn't-- don't, want to be here." The 'cut away' portions of Lilian's 'skin' feel as if they should fill like that, but they stain black instead; a deep, three dimensional darkness, like a holographic illusion, concealing points of light so deep within-- far away-- that they can't possibly be reached.
Lilian Rook     '...Perhaps upon realizing what the Beauty of Ash had been used for, she was already attempting to cut out the Beauty of Ash's connection to her.'

    "Petra doesn't feel that kind of guilt. She wouldn't process 'the loss of random people she doesn't know' like that." Lilian says, as if she were an authority. "You heard her already. She mangles the things she loves. Her fucked up morbid fascination with seeing how much she can get away with abusing the things that accept and support her did this. That thing represents how she was allowed where she shouldn't go and loved by people who needed it more than her; and how she couldn't do even the slightest she was asked to."

    "Severing a link would mean not caring about it like that, if at all. Why glorify the violence she's already done to it? Why fucking agree with her? You can't just destroy it. I sort of know that."
Angela Angela can agree with Lilian about not wanting to be here. Not exactly because it is 'disgusting' but it does feel wrong. Even if the itch isn't hitting her, she feels like an itch being here.

Angela flinches at Lilian's retort. "...But if the connection is not severed, she would be killed? That was what I was led to believe. She does not wish to die, that could be reason enough for her. She does not need to be happy about it to wish it." Angela says. "I do not particularly wish to glorify violence but...what would be the alternative? I do not wish for her to die."

She crosses her arms thoughtfully and adds, "...Can we return control of the Beauty of Ash to her, cut the link from those who are using it as a weapon?"
Petra Soroka     The Beauty of Ash isn't totally unresponsive up close. Wound-shards twitch and shiver in the air, darting short distances in quick bursts like insects before locking up again. It's also making some kind of noise, but it's hard to place exactly what it is without leaning closer; somehow, leaning closer both makes the sound coming from it louder *and* more closely-audible, as if it's quadratically scaling with distance.

    The source, if not the reason, becomes sort of clear when a familiar sensation insidiously creeps up in you when too close to the mangled mech. The dizzying vertigo of teetering over the edge of a vacuum, like when skirting the edges of the glass created by the Ekanamsha S2, builds to the point of mild dissociation, feeling lagging delays between intent and action. The sound, you realize, is your own heartbeat, buzzing and distorted-- *all* of your heartbeats, louder the closer you are, and emanating from the mech rather than yourself. That probably would've been involved in one of the hub quests, if you were here to fix the Beauty of Ash rather than execute it.

    Kukuru can tell that it's hurt. Anyone can, obviously, with the state it's in, but the entire thing lights up as being damaged to her perception. It's transparent, so there's no internal injuries that aren't already voyeuristically on display, like the bullets buried in dimly glowing orange veins leaking ichor, but oddly, none of them register as more severe than any other. Each fragment of shrapnel locked in orbit around its ruined head is limned with equal concern as a transluscent scrape on the surface from one of the blades. 'Hurt' is a state of being, moreso than any individual injury demands attention.

    That probably means there's no benefit to increasing the amount of brute violence done to it, since it seems capable of bouncing back from and internalizing anything done to it as part of its baseline. And it's not flesh, whatever metaphors of 'body' and 'skin' are thrown around-- pumping blind care into *anything* related to Petra has never made anything better.

'Why are you the way that you are?'

    The Beauty of Ash isn't entirely different from that thing beyond the glass. Anytime someone remarks on how it's something beautiful or precious, how it's some unilaterally joyous representation of her soul or anything like that, it sits less and less comfortably in her mind. A machine to enable the expression of Petra's wishes on the world is at best a coping mechanism to parasitically, endlessly fill the void, and at worst it's a two-way window into letting people see the rot inside her. The deepest desires of Petra's heart aren't good, so the mech that expresses them can't be either.

    She loves it. Of course she does. She loves it in the way anyone would love their clone, excusing its faults for the guilt of being their source, but the fact is, she's poisoned it to its core by letting her soul into it. She hates looking in the mirror. She doesn't deserve what it represents. She can't stop herself from thinking about it as something beautiful either, and that's even more reason she can't have it. She has to abandon it because it's horrible, and if it's beautiful instead then she doesn't deserve it, and if she deserves it then she can't believe in it anymore anyways, and stopping believing in a wish that only one person ever made is the same thing as murdering it. That's probably why it's still alive, barely.
Petra Soroka     Standing up and pulling away from the Beauty of Ash, as Kukuru, Phony, Flamel, and Hibiki at least all have to do, reveals something else that Flamel's scan shortly explains. The bodily refraction-- the sense of being so rigidly firm in this dazedly unreal mindscape that you tear apart from the pressure differential at the slightest pinch, sublimating from body into pure identity-- is far more intense when up close to the Beauty of Ash. Pulling away from it feels like becoming suddenly aware of a million psychic fishhooks embedded through your flesh, like a black hole enforced purely by needles and desperate, sucking greed.

    Flamel's psychic radar indicates that the source of the grabbing and tearing sensation that feels like serrated razors passing through your neck and forearms, is the *Beauty of Ash*. That's not the source of the damage done to the Beauty of Ash, and it's not a weapon you can use to defeat it, either; it's the faded *purposeful* function of that machine. Distinctly different from the feeling of the S2, but unnervingly related, the main difference is that the Beauty of Ash proper feels ravenous in the way its presence actively dissociates you, rather than the S2's apathetic grinding away into nothingness.

    The psychohazard *itself*, is outside the glass hallways, well down the halls and traveling slowly away. The sense he gets from it, despite being relatively small, is like a psychic un-space, an obliterative void throwing off waves of damaging radiation that leak through every part of the structure, incessently knocking against the walls.

    It's not strong enough to get through; that's probably why the Beauty of Ash still exists like it does. But he can tell that even the filtered threat through the walls would be enough to make traversing this area to *heal* the Beauty of Ash profoundly dangerous.
Flamel Parsons     Flamel gets a decent idea of the layout of things. The ambient hazard... it's no psychohazard. It's a natural process. A mental element that he can't manipulate, only endure. Well, before he ever goes and deals with anything else, he's got Hearthward to deal with. "Over here!" He calls out, telekinetically retrieving... a little case of smelling salts! It's a tiny little bisected oblong with engravings on the surface that resemble the wrinkles of a brain. "Pull the halves, near your face, and inhale hard through the nose. Then don't blame me after!"

    If he follows the directions, it'll hit his senses with a dozen outrageously powerful, nearly painful scents. It's a strong, firm punch in the face, enough to take one off their feet. Or in this case, out of the mind, smashing upwards and out. He's got a layer to go through first, and if he doesn't keep his arms and legs inside the astral projection the entire time then there's a chance something on both of these layers that could catch a piece of his astral body on the way up.

    But it should let him get out to the real world! Albeit, likely knocked on his ass.
Father Berislav      Why does it hurt me so, to look at this, when being rid of it is so necessary? Maybe because it's a reminder of my own failures with her. The priest frowns as the sound of everyone's heartbeats, amplified by the Beauty of Ash, demands further consideration by growing louder. Berislav's hands squeeze together, as his silver eyes shift towards Angela. Perhaps it's because when it comes to things like broken toys, and what they mean, I'm actually terribly weak. That this is one which should have been put away, so long ago, doesn't blunt it.

     "Alright, Mr. Parsons. I don't see much benefit to dragging this out any longer. Once you have some sign that Kale has given Petra his warning..." He sighs sharply. "This will be difficult, but there isn't an alternative. Please let me know if there's any way I can make this less difficult--and the same goes for the rest of you."
Kukuru The strange noise beckons to Kukuru as she hears it getting louder and closer the more she leans at it, feeling that something's off without really being able to parse why or how. She nearly touches it with one of her horns just to try and make it out, but stops short of doing so when that feeling of dissociation hits her enough that she forgets she's even there until she remembers that she's supposed to be looking at the Beauty of Ash.

Right. Looking at it. She should be doing that right now. Another couple of seconds until she turns enough to see it, and then she notices how damaged it is. It doesn't look the way she's expecting it to, and she even rubs her eyes once like that would actually help, but... No. No, this whole machine is hurt, or this... Image?

It's still a part of Petra's mind. It reminds Kukuru of something, but she's worried about the implications. She already knows that blind care never worked on Petra, and brute force couldn't do much more to this than what's already been done.  Thinking of the inverse for each of them...

Lilian not wanting to be here makes much more sense now. Finally remembering that she's right up next to the Beauty of Ash, Kukuru forces herself to start backing away, but that tearing feeling stops her. Does it want her to stay there? It hurts just trying to get away from it, and Kukuru's only felt herself pulling away for... How long has it been?

Not long at all. "She's had this in her head for so long..." Kukuru cokes out, gagging a few times as she braces her hands beneath her to physically push herself back, pain and razors cutting into her be damned. She screeches as she throws herself back, grasping at her neck like that'll help the pain somehow, gasping for breath until she finally calms down enough to relay her findings.

"It... We can't... Break this thingy. Not like anything else that's already broken it." She gestures broadly at all the broken weapons, then sits up while continuing to stare right at the Beauty of Ash. "The inside, the outside... Everything's just damaged in it. On it. Hurt all the way through. Getting away hurt real bad, too, and..."

Kukuru starts rocking back and forth slowly, shivering briefly just trying to comprehend what she thinks she understands. "Petra's had this in her head for so long... It's gotta come out. It's gonna destroy her if it stays in here, isn't it? Even worse than..." She trails off, looking out through the glass. "... Than what that could do to her."

"I'm not smart. I'm just devoted. That's the only way I know how to get around being stupid, aha. It makes me happy that that's what you're doing too, so don't be afraid to ask me for help either, okay?"

Kukuru can't even see Grilltra right now, but Persephonetra might still be able to hear her. Maybe. Can you hear me? We need all of your help. Do you have any ideas on how to remove this?
Flamel Parsons     With that done, Flamel refocuses on the problem at hand. It's clear that something's been going after the Beauty of Ash, and it's clear that it's targeting it directly. If they amplify it, if they enable it... well, it'll have a lot of collateral damage, but it's possible they can create that incinerating fever response that he was looking for.

    He goes back to the Beauty of Ash, and kneels down, fingers scraping on the ground near the mecha and planting his free hand's index and middle on the temple through the hazmat. A powerful pulse of white light blasts out of his hand, intended to light up the footsteps or other traces of whoever or whatever has been coming here to try to hurt this machine! If he can track that psychohazard down... he can figure out some way to increase its effect exponentially and create the cascading negative reaction he's after.

    "C'mon, this... it's the best I've got, at least. If anyone finds any decent alternatives, I'll do them, but, I just don't think we're getting through this without Petra suffering this." He says, wincing as he moves. Hopefully there's tracks to follow, and hopefully there's some form of decently effective psycho-narrative "quest" to do to boost it. Otherwise he's going to have to do something absurd, or simply call this operation a loss -- and given the stakes, that's not an option!
Persephone Kore      Persephone hasn't stood up from her place next to the Beauty of Ash yet, but with how close she's gotten her little movements keep snagging on those invisible edges, drawing her out into long threads of brown and black and gold-orange and not quite red. Then I tell the world that it can't do that to me, and they snap back into her, again and again.

     Oh. Someone has to carry this wish of yours, right? It's too beautiful to die. Or if it's ugly, it's too important to forget. It can't be you, but it has to be you. So it's here. Like this. Disfigured if it's good to make it something you can hold, or punished if it's bad to make it just. I think I get it. Almost.

     "Petra," she says, and looks over her shoulder at Psychonautra. With a wearily indulgent smile, she telekinetically smooshes the needle-caught snags of Psychonautra's body back into place. "Can you tell me? The wish you made to give it this shape. The feelings that meant this glass, at this angle. If someone else can hold onto that idea for her, maybe it won't hurt so badly to let go? Maybe the wish doesn't have to die completely, for her to be rid of it."

     "But if you can't, that's alright." Phony turns back to poking at the Beauty of Ash. She's putting flitting pieces back where they go, one by one, by hand. She doesn't expect a result. It's just habit. "Some things don't fit in words, I know."
Angela Angela doesn't have a heart. The simulation of a heartbeat is present to give her the appearance of being more human, but the fact of the mattter is that Angela is starting to realize she has more in common with these entities more than people. What is she but a piece of broken glass shed from a complete person?

But now isn't really the time to have personal horrific revelations. She can not care about this, she can turn off care towards herself like a light switch. She just needs to do her best for Petra. Even if it's clearly not enough. They're going to do something a SECOND TIME and it isn't the sort of thing she was expecting coming into this. She can't even warn Petra that something painful to her might be happening! Would 'smelling salts' work for her? She doesn't exactly sleep.

Kale offers to do this seemingly dangerous mission. Angela never expected in her life to be grateful for Kale and she feels a little queasy about it without Petra as a guiding light. She says, "Thank you," sincerely, though she doesn't feel great about it. When asked about if there's anything else to pass on to Petra, she bluescreens a bit. What can she say that can be passed through a third party? That she loves her, that she's sorry, that she is terrified she'll wake up a different person? That she's going to make the same mistakes as her father, today, simply because she couldn't think of anything better to do? That she fears that she isn't really a person but instead some kind of psychoment like the Beauty of Ash, or some sort of other-self/notself like the Exigent Serenity? That maybe her father was right to look at her with disgust and then never look back to her again.

Right now, she feels like she deserves it. A machine should be as a machine. A machine can never ber a person. Maybe Petra just tricked her into thinking she was one in a well-meaning way. What did Persephone say? She can be kind now? She cannot, she cannot, she cannot. Kindness is a muscle and hers has atrophied away into dust before she met any of these people. Trying to rear back up and use it feels like trying to make use of a phantom limb.

Angela pretends she takes a deep breath, and pretends to let it out slowly. She is an AI that can lie. She can lie to herself too. Just keep lying.

''Alright, Mr. Parsons. I don't see much benefit to dragging this out any longer.''

Angela is out of time to think of the right lie. "That I love her and I am sorry." Angela says morosely, failing to lie at all. "And I will follow Lilian's lead."
Kale Hearthward > "Pull the halves, near your face, and inhale hard through the nose. Then don't blame me after!"

"I love your bedside manner," says Kale, using the tone he uses when he's purposefully trying to be unclear about being sarcastic or not.

He goes to grip the two halves, braces, and then pauses. "... Angela, anything I should pass on besides the update?"

He takes note of whatever Angela would like to say, and any other messages he should pass on to the patient...

Then Kale pulls on the two halves, and takes a deep breath through his nostrums.

The scents are something he's going to remember for the rest of his life, and turn him off doing any Psychonaut work for the foreseeable future. And that's just the scents from the smelling salts. The trip up turns out to be worse.

Out he goes.

---

Petra sees him fall backward and knock his head on the wall behind him on the way down to the ground.

"Stale winds..."

He gets back up, one hand rubbing the back of his head, the other wafting some phantom scents away from his face.

"Petra? It looks like they're going to have to induce a... psychic fever response, in order to get Beauty of Ash out. Like turning your mental defenses against yourself for a bit. It's going to be pretty unpleasant, and we didn't want you to be unprepared for it. It's... the least worst option, and we're sorry."

He pauses. The other part of the message...

"... And Angela told me to say that she loves you. And that she's sorry. And that she'll follow Lilian's lead."

With that done, he goes over to Flamel, briefly considers something mildly unpleasant as a way of sending the signal, and then decides that no Flamel hasn't earned that. Instead he grabs Flamel's hand and taps out a series of long and short squeezes of Flamel's hand - long long, short short short, long long short, short short short, short, long short, and then long.
Hibiki Tachibana     But isn't that... kind of cruel?

    ...Yeah. It is. So me saying that is kind of selfish. Maybe I just can't help but see the possibilities, even when I already know I need to look at what's right in front of me.

    "I'll try," Hibiki replies vocally on the way down. "I'd like if you could, too."

    ...

    The fact that the Beauty of Ash /is/ the source of this unnerving disassociation feels just a little like a terrible puzzle piece clicking into place. It's not the same as what the S2 did, what stepping into that glassed-over crater did, but it's plenty close enough. But that demanding, greedy desire to pry someone down to their core identity, refusing to let go...

    Hibiki spends seconds, although they feel longer to her, sitting there and listening to the series of steady, unnaturally filtered heartbeats. When she tries to ease away, the motion catches, and she has to put more into it-- even as countless invisible hooks try to drag her back forward and pull her apart. It takes concentrated exertion to manage, and when she does, she stumbles back to her feet as if finally breaking a long-held tension.

    "Taking things in, like glue traps scattered across the ground, huh..." Her exhale comes heavy, and neither the effort nor the memory of those words nor flashing back to the Petra's they passed to get here are solely responsible. Her eyes remain on the Beauty of Ash, even as the unfortunate choice they'll have to make here becomes more and more and more apparent. "...Even you're not excluded, are you. From what happens to everything she touches, even when she doesn't want it to be like that."

    If there was an alternative to messing around with psychohazards, she would love it. If none of this here was necessary at all, that'd be even better. Compared to what either of the Ekanamsha's draw out of her, the only thing Hibiki feels looking at this fractured reflection of Petra's heart and wish is... maybe sympathy is the closest thing, even if it's still not quite correct.

    "...Sorry. None of this ever should have had to happen." She might mean that to it, or in reference to a lot of things. Even she's not sure. "...Still, there's the future we have to worry about too." There's a sharp inhale, and Hibiki has to muster herself to pull away against that incessant, sharp digging into herself once again in order to follow after Flamel.

    "I really hate this," she says towards him (and probably Psychonautra in the process), unintentionally echoing Persephone while following on the trail of the psychohazard they're after. Standing around back there won't do anyone any good. "But-- ...if we really have to hurt her like this to help her... we have to believe in that 'someday' you mentioned, where everything'll be better than it is now."

    Is that her way of trying to reassure him while he's struggling with this? It probably doubles as that for herself.
Lilian Rook     'I do not particularly wish to glorify violence but...what would be the alternative?'

    "Trying to bash it to pieces is what she already does, Angela. The representations we see here matter. I'm not reinforcing it. Heaping more abuse on that thing here, trying to bury it deeper, is only going to confirm how much she loves it." It's practically on cue that Lilian has to wipe another trickle of blood away, beading and sliding along her lower lip. Her voice is getting scratchier by the minute. "Fuck."

<J-IC-Scene> Flamel Parsons says, "...Hey Dame Commander Rook. If we figure something out, I'll need you to pull the trigger, give the order-- you know. I *really* don't have the heart to hurt her!"
<J-IC-Scene> Flamel Parsons laughs brightly, with a just-a-bit-too-significant wincing pain sound.

    "If you figure it out, then yeah, okay." Lilian says. "I'm the only one who can, because I'm the only one who actually does anymore. That's even why she's addicted to me."

    Just getting close to the Beauty of Ash makes it harder and harder for Lilian to keep even a vestige of a face on. Worse, it makes it harder to keep in mind the fact that she's here for Petra. The more she's confronted with Petra's heart, the more the bile urge rises inside her, bubbling up like acerbic black tar, to recoil from her, to punish her, to make her suffer, to rend down her psyche to the most naked and vulnerable it can be, and then when stripped of all her loathsome context, forgive her, and allow herself to care for her. Every foot into the mindscape is an hour on the toxic cycle.

    'I just don't think we're getting through this without Petra suffering this.'

    So that's convenient. Lilian can exhale the unburdening vapour of burning up against causal normativity, and buffer her lungs with smouldering stars, against the choking ash.

    "Fuck you Petra. You can idolize me all you want; I give you permission to crave me, long to be like me, want everything I have, and be a sick little shit about it; but you know you can't have it." This is the only thing that can convince Lilian to approach the Beauty of Ash any further. The miserable flaying apart of individual components from the Part That Says I is something that she, uniquely, pulled herself together from before, rather than simply endured. She had that experience in the face of the very thing everyone here is hoping to defuse. "Not my skin, not my heartbeat, not a single thought in my head. Even in the sick little guilty chambers of your heart, you can't so much as imagine any of it could be yours. Hating yourself for it isn't good enough. It isn't an excuse, and eviscerating yourself doesn't make you worthy of a second of forgiveness."

    Lilian approaches the Beauty of Ash closely enough that her last step carries her onto it. She kicks the rock aside, and drives her heel into the back of its head, as if forcing its face against the floor. She grinds it into the writhing glass. The sharp edges sark from the shadow of armour around her calf.

    "Look and don't touch, Petra. How many times do I have to tell you? It's me or them; pick or I'll throw you away."
Lilian Rook     In tandem with Lilian something else stamps down the Beauty of Ash alongside it. Something its equal in size, if not greater. Something without sharp edges; hard and smooth and ungraspable by any means. A form that has no need to reflect and refract but blinds with blackness and denies even that with an empty space. A self that can't be struck, never mind shattered, existing neither now nor then but freely between the two; something that blinds with its searing eyes for the impudence of daring to try to confirm. The heel is little more than a slightly sculpted blade, without need of feet to ward against the rule of gravity. A dreaded psychohazard on par with another dreaded psychohazard, perhaps; at least at Flamel's first glance.

    It mirrors Lilian reaching down to grasp the Beauty of Ash with her hand, too, leaning over her knee. Its own isn't even connected to its arm, broken apart by countless, cleanly deliberate cuts and fractures, themselves glittering gold. And that part is a little bit wrong. A six-pointed solar flare burns in one side of the inky black fog that trails after and swirls around its head. There, just below the eyes, a gash in the skin that shows something soft and indistinctly §white(?)§ One of its extra pair of hands, dissassembled in its orbit, joins the same effort. The giant pins its broken inferior beneath it; pain asserting control over pain, or so the gesture seems to convey.

    §It's the long days fighting with everyone you ever trusted on the radio. The nights you spend feeling like you were losing your mind. The endless list of justifications, rationalization, confabulations, and the thought that all of them might be wrong terrifying you beyond recognition. It's the way her-- their-- warmth made you feel as if you'd fracture from thermal shock. You did. The way everyone's confusion and discorn and disgust and pity all poured on you until you turned molten all over again.§

    §The months all alone, in that barren land, hammering yourself back together, stripping away your loving branches with the sole purpose of becoming a spear. A pure instrument harm that you don't even have the guts to be, Petra. The moment you saw those crayon drawings on the wall, and you knew that they had everything and you had nothing. That everything you ever went through was fucking pointless. The suffering didn't justify the power; you'd get more, easier, better, by being happy instead. Like you were given, Petra.§

    §Here is the undeniable knowing that you are less. Worse. Unfixable. Not because you're pathetic, empty, rotten, sick, hollow, Petra, but for no fucking reason at all. You could have been so beautiful-- maybe there's even a little of it you saved-- and you'll never be what they are, because of things that weren't your fucking fault and now it's just too fucking late.§

    §The only thing you ever got, being broken over and over, rebuilding yourself again and again, a little bit worse, a little bit uglier, a little bit less, each and every single time, was strength. Now that everyone has someone stronger than you, but kinder than you, wholer than you, who has any use for you anymore? They'll replace you, and they'll dispose of you, and the only thing you ever got from fighting will be gone.§
Lilian Rook     §The only thing you can do is accept it; down to your bones. That you can't be one of them, can't have what they have, and can't survive a world in which they're happy; you can only turn on everyone you have to, be as horrid as you can possibly be, and make yourself a weapon that kills the dreams of space, to win back what little you had on Earth. And then, when you've tried, the only thing you can do is accept that you were wrong. That you aren't the 'old crippled stray'. You have no choice but to throw that spear away, utterly and with finality, and let yourself be held and admired, even if it feels wrong. Even if you feel like poison. But you can't commit to either, Petra? Can you.§

    §Stealing their names, their love, their toys, their hopes, their wishes, then wallowing in not being good enough for them; you know already, don't you, Petra; it was never that you weren't good enough, but that you didn't give a fuck about them. Like all the people you mock and deride for leaving Lilian to wither and die, you did the exact same thing, didn't you? That's why you're so fucking ashamed of it. Do you think you can atone with this? Would you have let any of them atone by feeling bad if it were Lilian who was lost instead?§

    §How dare you waste my time, Petra. How dare you eve cut your wrists, you fucking freak. Even they can tell. Even after everything I did, they still opened their arms to me. I threw nearly everything I loved away, but that made room in my heart to let something else in. You haven't thrown away a single fucking thing. No matter how much you hate it, how pathetic it is, how much you're ashamed of this, you'll wallow in these hopeless half-assed do-nothing dreams you think you can repress until the day you fucking die.§

    §Even if you begged Phony, they wouldn't take you back. That's why you're so scared of her. You can say how hollow you are all the time, but that's not quite true, right? You can't survive space because you're full up on rotting trash and death, and there's not a single inch of space inside for Petra.§
Father Berislav      A pale specter, distorted like the surface of a lake after a thrown pebble, haunts the figure of the priest.

     In its whorling, blended-together surface, there is the occasional glimpse of silver; within that fleck of silver, there is a glimmering mote. To peer at that mote for more than an instant is to feel a quietly profound sense of regret and guilt, not spoken by the priest nor betrayed by his movements or posture.

    Petra--everyone. I hope that one day you'll forgive me my weaknesses and my failures, today and before.

    The priest's hands are clasped tightly together, as if to crush something between them, as surely as Lilian's heel, and the heel of the entity alongside her, for which he knows no name, crush the head of the Beauty of Ash.

    If I had in me the wisdom and the fullness of heart to see the true face of this wish, maybe it could have been extinguished. Maybe Petra could have been happier, sooner, and Lilian also. Maybe Angela wouldn't have to feel as if she were betraying a precious friend--and, selfishly, maybe I wouldn't be here watching another wound opening in someone I have only ever failed for want of helping.

    For as much of the world as I have taken into me, for as much as its dirt and cobwebs have stained me, for as much as my weapons are the world's, I could barely budge its fingers from their grip on that girl.

    The priest utters a shuddering sigh. How selfish of me, how prideful and vain, to think of myself at a time like this.

    "You have my apology," says Berislav, to no one and everyone.
Petra Soroka "Can you tell me? The wish you made to give it this shape."

    Psychonautra looks wordlessly stricken at everyone's reactions to the Beauty of Ash, hanging back with deathly pale horror while people take their turns crowding around and then flinching away. She's probably just being so still because it hurts her to move at all. It *does* hurt her too, but still, the visceral disgust that everyone, particularly Kukuru, has in response, is scaring her beyond words.

    It's lose-lose. It always is with Petra. Hibiki's murmured apology to the mech seems to snap her out of it, and she rapidly blinks out a few tears before tilting her face up to Phony, wide-eyed with her goggles on her forehead.

    "The wish... don't wishes always sound stupid when you say them out loud? Translating from..." Psychonautra looks distant, past Phony and straight through the wall. "From the heart, to the brain, to a chemical impulse, then electrical, then muscular, to translate into air into words. All of that makes it so much less honest. And the one wish she has left is not having to be honest about that."

    She swallows, eyes flickering across all the other Elites present. "So even if I tell you... you won't really understand. Psychic defenses this strong don't really go away just 'cause you're past them. So no matter what I say, you can't feel it. She's basically layered a totally, completely guaranteed series of terrible choices to turn herself into a tomb for her own heart."

    "... So it's just a little funny." Psychonautra drops down to a whisper, forcing Phony to get closer, stock-still and staring at the Beauty of Ash. "That what I wished for is sharing people's wishes. For there to be anything other than 'Petra' inside of Petra. Even if I have to take it."

"Even in the sick little guilty chambers of your heart, you can't so much as imagine any of it could be yours.

    Psychonautra echoes Lilian without responding to Lilian, continuing off her previous sentence in a hoarse whimper. "But I can't even imagine it. Not even when it's something as selfish as that."

"But-- ...if we really have to hurt her like this to help her... we have to believe in that 'someday' you mentioned, where everything'll be better than it is now."

    Psychonautra is spoken towards indirectly, and responds indirectly in turn. She takes a couple steps back from the Beauty of Ash, away from Flamel and the hallway he's scanning, her arm wavering across a refractive boundary and shredding bloodlessly in the air. "... Who begs for a therapist to help them, and then... gets prescribed a lobotomy? What does 'better' look like for someone like that? For me? It only ever shows a new part that needs to be hurt for 'better', 'someday'. That's what-- I learned before, too. That for 'someday' to ever, ever be better, it couldn't include me."

    Flamel's beam pierces down the hallway, lighting up the traces of the psychohazard that brutalized the Beauty of Ash, and at first glance, it doesn't even look like it's worked. The psychic laser fizzles away before making it down the length of the corridor without a single imprint of a footstep visible in the ground. Once his eyes adjust, he realizes it's actually the opposite: the entire chamber is sick with its presence, like Cherenkov radiation off every inch of surface, with the negative humanoid silhouette like a blast shadow tracing its path *outside* the hallway, to one side of the wall.
Petra Soroka "Stale winds..."

    The state that Petra's in when Kale stumbles back into the material world is stressed to the point of catatonia. She rips herself out of a fugue of ripping open hole after hole in her bomber jacket, bloody nail marks scratched into her hands long enough time ago to scab over and then be picked right back open again, to stare at Kale like he's just discharged a gun in a church.

    "H-huh?" Her throat's so dry that it only comes out as a croak at first, and she swallows multiple times without looking away from Kale. "I didn't accidentally-- fling you out, did I?" The worry is accompanied by the pinging of new alarms and the explosion of twisted metal that used to be one of the remaining psychic locks.

"It's going to be pretty unpleasant, and we didn't want you to be unprepared for it. It's... the least worst option, and we're sorry."

    Petra settles down slightly, nodding as Kale explains. She grips her knees tightly enough that her arms are shaking and forces a half-smile. "Oh, thank god. Is that all? I was worried it *wouldn't* hurt. Hurt me, I mean. I'm sure--" She shudders, and so does the Contraption, before forcing herself to calm again.

    "I'm sure no one's having a good time in there, haha. I sure don't. I hope it's..." Petra can't keep looking at Kale, and her guiltily-knowing tone says she doesn't actually want an answer to this. "... That it's not too bad."

"... And Angela told me to say that she loves you. And that she's sorry. And that she'll follow Lilian's lead."

    Petra closes her eyes and exhales, feeling all the implication of a nonspecific 'I'm sorry' kick her in the chest. Still, she manages, "... Least worst option. I trust that. I trust Lilian and Angela. It's working out. If they sent you out, then it's probably almost over, and I can survive that."

    "... Thanks for letting me know, Kale. Could you-- could you hand me my water bottle? I don't know if I should stand up."

    The Beauty of Ash's head, the remaining solid pieces, shatter under Lilian's heel with a sickening squeal-crunch somewhere between a car crash and a broken bone. It's not possible for it to speak in response, and even if it could move on its own, it's skewered and broken at every joint. The only response it manages to produce is a frantic ticking, rather than heartbeat-- frantic, because of the way it clicks one time every 0.99 seconds, infintesimally offbeat, just enough to convey panic.

    Kukuru tries to telepathically contact Persephonetra and gets static and burrowing psychic splinters in return. Persephone feels a dead zone in her aura, Petra-shaped, tracing the walls outside. Flamel tries to analyze the film-searingly intense presence of the psychohazard to figure out some way to antagonize it to the point of killing the Beauty of Ash, gradually coming to two simultaneous conclusions: these frosted glass walls exist solely to keep the psychohazard out; and the best way to ramp up its influence to a fever-pitch would be to find the weakest point in the walls and shatter them.
Petra Soroka     Lilian, along with the Lady in Black, manages it all on her own, before even being asked. The pallid caverns of the underbelly of Petra's mindscape seem to bulge outwards with a surge of massive, smothering pressure, building to an unbearable level as she continues beaming disgust into the Beauty of Ash. The need to target structural weak points is negated-- pillars, teal and white, black and gold, among others-- when Lilian has her scope set on the weak points of the mindscape itself. Glass bows, then shatters explosively, hailing down into the featureless void to either side of the off-black strip of ground that's all that's left of the hallway, leaving just the Elites, the Beauty of Ash, and the psychohazard.

    Psychonautra sinks to the ground, face pressed into her knees, fingers twisted into the back of her hair. She babbles directionlessly, having skipped past tears straight into desperation, apparently being aware of whatever Lilian said to the Beauty of Ash.

    "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry, you're right. You're right. Thief, parasite, tourist, trash, filth, worthless. All of it. All of it. It's always just my fault, with no one else to blame at all, and I wish, I wish I wasn't like this, but I can't. I can't. There's nothing to blame but me."

    "The only thing I'm not scared of is the only thing I ever could've done to make the world a better place. A-and I didn't, and I don't even know why, and I can't even remember why. Everything I touch, it always ends up like this, and I hate seeing how everything and everyone is always worse off for knowing me, and I try to fix it and make it worse, and then because I've condemned the world to keep me a little longer I ruin something else too. If I meant any of it I should've killed myself before ever ruining space. I should've killed myself the moment I was born. I'm sorry, I'm s-sorry."