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Zwei     The coordinates Zwei has given, despite what one might expect, do not lead into the vast reaches of space. There is no need for a ship, nor any other means of long distance travel, simply because the warp gate in question isn't a naturally occuring one. It is entirely artificial, and recently built at that. The opposite side of the gate opens out into what might be considered a hangar for all intents and purposes, and much like the one aboard the corvette previously fought by several members of the expedition, it is absolutely stacked from floor to ceiling with a seemingly endless army of sleek black shapes, folded up, powered down, and awaiting the activation signal. It's difficult to actually see the ceiling or the outer walls, but one could hazard a guess that there are hundreds of thousands of Arma of every shape and size contained within just by how densely packed they are.

    Every other surface is a deep, carbon grey, shot through with semi-iridescent branching lines and nodes vaguely reminescent of a cirtuit board, along which intermittent motes of light occasionally pass. Everything else about the room is plain and featureless, without so much as a console or a set of stairs to break it up, save for hexagonal apertures high up in the ceiling that lead to who knows where. The only real exit is exceedingly obvious; an enormous section of wall where the surface patterns take on a sharply different shape, indicating a set of doors too smooth to even see the seam of.

    Oddly enough, Zwei is completely absent, likely somewhere else in the facility. Though one might expect some manner of industrious churning or electrical whining, the place is eerily silent, as if it had been left vacant for centuries.
Ayako Hasekawa     Ayako floats after everyone else, preferring to stay in the middle of the group-not too far to the back, not too far in the front. All the same, it can be said she's staying quite close to Riva. Her amber gaze curiously glances at the artificial warp gate as she goes through it... and pauses for a moment after going through it, looking back as if checking on something.

    In a moment, she nods her head once and resumes moving with the group and-whoa. That's a lot of machines. Ayako's eyes blink quickly and she swallows slowly. Here's hoping they don't all suddenly turn on and ambush everyone! She gestures wildly with her hands and then points at all of the non-active machines. At first, the gestures are nonsensical-but after a while, it becomes obvious she's startled how many there are. It seems she doesn't want to talk to accidentally activate the machines!

    As for the rest of the room, she glances over it slowly... so futuristic high-tech! Seems she actually likes this sort of thing a bit!
Alexis Maaka     "Somebody's had a lot of time to themselves with arcitecture." comes to mildly modulated voice of Alexis, her armor all set up and geared for warfare. Toting her EM-GASH in hand, the cyborg steps out of the portal as she observes the immediate surroundings. "Not much of a welcome wagon. I can see the ambush coming already..." She muses to herself.

    The silence is getting to her, and she's already beginning to run scans around them for enemies present, her optic software switching between thermo-optics and night vision among other things to detect whatever machines come their way this time around.
Nozomi Houken     Ayako is not the only person staying in the safest possible part of the group. She is joined by a girl and a tiger, and the former is most certainly staying where people will be able to protect her from any angle.

    One might wonder why Nozomi Houken is here at all. She hardly seems the sort to attack an enemy stronghold. But surprisingly enough, coming along was her idea. Whoever or whatever was behind all the attacks, has hurt her, put her classmates in danger, and most importantly, hurt her friends. That's something she just can't allow to continue. So the mousy little highschooler is here, being accompanied by her cat-shaped robot buddy despite all her nervousness.
Arthur Lowell     ARTHUR LOWELL is here!

    "It's 'cause it's for DRONES. Shit's FUCKED for HUMANS, but this BOGUS NOISE is MAD OPTIMIZED for a bunch of SHITTY MACHINES." He declares as he swaggers through the Gate. "Looks like this was some kinda DEPLOYMENT BAY, probs. Ran outta the GATE right from HERE." He looks all around, grinning and confident at the unactivated robots. "Wow. NOBODY send any WEIRD SIGNALS. Let's keep these guys SHUT UP."

    "Alright jerks, let's get GOIN'." Arthur is the first one through the hangar doors, since nobody else so far seems to be heading through. "Every minute we spend STANDIN' AROUND is another minute HORRIBLE ASSASSINBOTS get to WAKE UP. Let's go OWN THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION."
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa nods in agreement with Alexis as she takes in the whole place.

"We should have brought more explosives, frag these things while they are down as a divsion or on our way out."

She's packing a bit more heat than normal she's also got osme explosives likely from XCOM. She's also clad in a black body suit like outfit with a good deal of combat webbing.

"I'm not sure to be worried we're not getting sswarmed and yes ambush."

Kotone is not as experianced as a lot of people here are but she's learned some thigns already. Nozomi gets a look and a nod. Ayoko flat out gets a smile from Kotone as she arrives.

"Nice to have a healer along, Ayako."

She seems confident enough and is very focused, this thing /hurt her/ tried to take what made her, herself. She's going to make it hurt, she's going to make it bleed.

"Man and these are leftovers, Arthur."
Riva Banari Riva's present and ready to rock. They can't possibly be expecting THIS.

No, wait, they can totally be expecting this. Either way, Riva's decided to come along and offer her own help in a show of support. She's declared this Personal for Reasons she has Not Explained. She totally sticks with Ayako, using the BUDDY SYSTEM.

However, Riva's own personal bane of ferret shock kicks in once she sees the ultra-technological area, "Ooooooh." She says, whispering as she pokes at the circuity floor. "This is really neat." She says. "Mega-futuristic. I wonder what the deal is with this place."

Riva straightens up, and looks to the others. "Relax, let's just keep an eye on what's up. If they're all networked, maybe you won't even need explosives to do the job." She looks to Ayako, then, and nods. "Ready, Ayako? Let's do this!"

She pauses. "Wait, what are we doing, again?" Arthur answers that. "Yeah! Let's get all Marxist up on this shiz!" Riva moves along and makes sure Ayako is with as she follows Arthur along.
Staren     The source of the killer drones. An enemy that didn't just force him to run, but nearly subdued and captured him.

    This is /dangerous/, Staren thinks. Fortunately, he has some unexpected help. "I wonder what it means... that when you're the only way I can help someone else, you're asleep, you're asleep for so long, but suddenly, when I need you to protect /me/, you wake up. ...I'm not angry, I know you can't control it. But I do wonder if there is more at work here than coincidence."

    Staren makes his way through the warpgate. "So... whatever else comes up... be ready to Rotate me, if they start trying to hack me." Staren considered asking Eureka to wait, pick the time of optimum surprise to to give him a jump on his opponent, whoever or whatever they are, but immediately imagined himself shooting an ally. A delay would be too dangerous. "How many do you think you can keep up at once, if you have to? I'm sure our allies will be at risk, too. Is there anything I can do to help you affect more people?"

    Soon, he's stepping out of the gate. Staren is geared up for heavy combat -- after the presentation at Ravnica yesterday, he's swapped into his robot body for a bit, in case it's useful or there are SCIENCE experiments he needs it for. If not for Eureka, of course, this would be the /worst decision possible/. With her, though... he can have its greater resiliance and power /and/ immunity to hacking.

    Staren is clad in his Triax BLUE armor (painted red) -- The armor has distinctive, round indentations near the shoulders and knees, and while the lower legs and right arm look like robotic boots and gauntlets, the upper arms and leg plating more closely contours the parts of the body it covers. The torso is an odd mix of styles, looking part robot and part 'armor' and overall less flexible than it really is. The neck is bare 'skin', and the helmet that covers Staren's head has a transparent, tinted full-face visor, allowing people to see his face underneath if they look closely. There are points on the helmet for his ears, and a segmented, armored 'tail'. His trusty magic bag is in an armored carrying case, secured to his right side, and the raiser rifle Zwei gave him is strapped to his back.

    Of course, we can't forget about today's addition: On Staren's left armor, distinct from the rest of his armor, is a brass-colored gauntlet, segmented with five armored wires running up from the base of the gauntlet to the knuckles, bracer-style plates on the back of the arm and hand, and a blue crystal eye situated behind the wrist, about where a watch would be. His Abstractum, Eureka.

    And of course, behind him, a few stone golems step through the gate, rough humanoids about ten feet tall. He didn't bring the unicorn golems -- he doesn't want the mysterious Assassin or their allies thinking he has ties to Equestria.

    Staren looks around. "...Huh. Looks like a hangar. But where are all the--" he gasps, and his eyes widen, as he realizes the packed shapes are deactivated Arma. "Good grief... they have /this many/?" he breathes, but not too loudly. Who knows what triggers might activate them?

    He then notices the lights moving along the circuit board patterns. "Okay, what purpose could that /possibly/ serve?"

    Staren nods to his fellow arrivals. He nods to Kotone: "I can have some more explosives brought here. I didn't bother because their forcefields usually block it... Didn't think there'd be so many... deactivated."

    He then realizes something else: "Where is Zwei?" He looks around more warily, taking a defensive stance.
Zwei     Alexis finds that the surrounding weapons are entirely cold. It's quite likely that they could warm up their generators in less than a second if they were to receive the signal, but Zwei indicates otherwise over the radio. For one, the gravity is natural, not artificial, which means the facility is planetside. The second relevant piece of info is that this is an old staging area for an ancient war, built for research, development, and manufacture. There's a very low chance that whoever has commandeered it is over a millenium old, and thus capable of possessing the activation codes that vanished into the net long ago. Still, the factory must still be working if anything new is coming out of here. This isn't the kind of equipment that deteriorates with disuse.

    Strangely, the doors actually open when Arthur approaches them. It's ominously possible that someone had actually opened them directly, but equally likely that they had simply had their automatic functionality restored so that the user could come and go as they wished, especially if they managed to build a warp gate using multiversal methods in here. The group is relatively in luck, as the main entryway seems to be designed to allow entire battallions of machines to be rolled off the production line and into the hangar to fill the gaps left by deployed units, which means there's a huge amount of space to walk rather than the nonsensical hive of miniscule shafts present throughout the superstructure of an automated ship. Though it splits up several times into smaller tributaries to various factory floors, none of them are too small to walk through, making for a smooth and unnervingly quiet journey into the heart of the monolithic facility, with only the tiny pulses of light travelling along the walls for illumination. No sense installing lamps when nothing needs light to see after all.

    If anyone is expecting to reach some kind of giant room filled with robot arms and conveyer belts, they will be bitterly disappointed. The room they eventually stumble on is far worse.

    One of the tributaries diverges from the factory lines and into the research area, likely so that test units can be brought in. Said research area has obviously been recently repurposed, as a large amount of it is now empty, with a large amount of equipment removed from its previous position and installed in a dense cluster in the middle. There are bits and pieces of half-finished Arma hung in latticeworks of wires and manipulators or laid out on tables, and a handful of displays flashing through images too quickly to make any sense out of them without incredibly augmented perceptive speed. The more salient feature of the room is the fact that the central floor is dominated not with military machines, but with human (and some non-human) bodies. Floating in prototypical tanks of generic fluid are shapes and faces that many people should recognize, Kotone especially, because almost all of them have been pulled from her memory. People from her hometown, from section nine, and from the Union, with several famous personalities on display that will be instantly recognizeable to anyone else. Worse, some of Nozomi's friends and schoolmates are here too, set off into a separate section. Whether they're the result of biological manufacturing or simply incredibly lifelike machines is impossible to tell, so convincing is the facade. Otherwise, absolutely nobody is present.
Ayako Hasekawa     Ayako smiles a bit awkwardly at Arthur. Of course, wondering if The Rocket-Powered Jerk himself would try not to be Loud or not is sort of a given. She follows after Arthur and Riva cheerfully on her broom. A happy smile is returned to Kotone as well! "Here's hoping I can be of help against things like this..."

    She still stays close to Riva, though! The Buddy System is a thing because it works, after all. Ayako smiles cheerfully to Riva. "All set." She nods once and grips her broomstick, ready to float quickly at a moment's notice. At least she Water Bubbled everyone already before they went through the gate. Who knows if these machines would react to her using magic right in front of them?

    On another note, when Ayako saw Staren on the other side of the gate when they initially gathered, she liked Staren's armor quite a bit! Looking over it all over. Armor is an outfit too, after all. And Staren's robo-cat-like armor is definitely something that stands out. Kotone's new clothing caught Ayako's attention as well! Black and combat webbing! Maybe one day she'll make an outfit for fighting! Or not. She seems pretty satisfied with her Witch outfit, considering how often she wears it.

    As she follows along, she blinks her eyes at the door just... automatically opening. Odd. "Is... hmm... weird for a door for this kind of place to just open... someone might already be in here." She glances around slowly, still staying close to Riva.

    And then they come across The Room. Ayako blinks her eyes quickly and looks at the displays flashing swiftly. "Weird... what's going on in he-" her gaze finally hits the human and non-human bodies. "W-what? I... people? Wait! I recognize some of these people!" She looks back towards everyone else. "W-what's going on in here?"
Staren     Oh hey, doors opened. Staren automatically maps the area. He has enough non-light-based ways to see that he's not worried. He's not sure if that's even really an issue for anyone here...

    They find a room with activity. Staren looks around for any people that might be operating this... and his eyes fall on people in tubes! "What the hell..." He immediately tries to scan them, with a lifesigns detector, with infrared, enhanced vision, whatever he can to try and figure out what these are! The two possibilities he deems most likely are clones, or robot duplicates with synthetic skin that's indistinguishable to normal vision. You know, like the body he's in now, under the armor.
Nozomi Houken     For the majority of the trip through the milennia-silent hangars, Nozomi is unsettled but little else. It's seeing the duplicates of Nozomi's classmates that finally stops her - because, at first sight, she believes them to be the real thing, and the prospect of them being here and hurt by whoever's in charge of this whole operation is a prospect that absolutely horrifies her.

    It takes Taiga bumping into her leg and muttering reassurances to snap her back to reality, a surprisingly feline gesture from the robot, but it does the trick, and she looks around with some degree of nervousness. For the time being, the mechatiger decides to remain close; he also sweeps the area with his sensors, but given that his nonmagical sensors consist of 'UV, IR, and basic radar', there's little he's likely to find that anyone here can't already see. They're fighting a technological enemy, after all.
Abstractum.Net     "Rotation cannot be sustained for very large groups without high strain. I am doubtful that we will need to." Eureka says. "We could disrupt connections with temporary Rotations, and similar. I believe, but treat Rotation as an emergency cut-off in case it can't be resisted otherwise." All very matter-of-fact and academic in the tone there. It doesn't seem to have any commentary on the development area.
Alexis Maaka     Alexis is more on-edge from the lack of enemies coming out to eat faces than anything else. She doesn't have much of a social circle being a terrifying mercenary back home and just a mercenary in the multiverse, so the sight of seeing some contacts who are long since either dead or gone dark to hide out someplace in South America is enough to give Alexis some pause, but only momentarily as she carries on.

    "Clones, probably. Something to further get intel on us." She assumes, before approaching a tube, narrowing her eyes behind her helmet's mask as she keeps a firm grip on her coil rifle.
Riva Banari Riva strolls along, seeming to be caught up in the SPIRIT OF ADVENTURE. "This place is pretty incredible! Look at the way the little light pulses go through the circuits in the floors, it's probably some super-futuristic sci-fi thing where the walls are computers or something, it's really cool."

The trip through the automatic door gets a shrug from Riva. "If they know we're here and they don't want us here, we'd probably have been dogpiled as soon as we entered. The door's probably just automatic." The dim corridor gets Riva to be more quiet as she proceeds, and they head in through into the main room.

It only takes a few moments of other people gawking for her to look over at the tanks and blink. "Awwwwwww hell. We've hit like maximum Pod Person action here, guys. Though I admit I'm disappointed I don't see Sylvester Stallone down there too." She immediately starts picking out a route to the research area and heads in there to examine the tanks in more detail. Maybe there's some handy sweet-ass holographic interfaces or something she can poke at.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa gets the information from Zwei that this place is a bombed out planet, worse this place is just left overs. The more she hears about the civilization that spawned Zwei. Not to mention seen it's other creations in action the more she wonders how many worlds are going to be threatened by them. They were willing to butcher a world for being 'too low tech'. That didn't speak well of them to her, but she need to focus on the hear and now. She does notice Riva is here and a bit in ferret shock, that gets a small smile for a moment from her.
% "Hey Riva. Also thanks Ayako it does look good on me, I'm lucky I can pull something like this off."

Kotone was no expecting a robotic factory like she'd know, maybe something akin to the fabbers Rory's world used but more advanced.

She sees people she knows, Batou the Operative from Section 9 whose handling the case about her brutal maiming. She sees family friends people she knows and she's just starting in abject horror for the moment. There's a look of abject horror on Kotone's face. She also see the mysterious purple haired woman she assumed had been Batou's partner. She shivers now as she sees her family and she wonders if there are any of her, thankfully there are none but she's looking very haunted. She's keeping it together for now but it's clear it was a heck of a hammer blow to her mental state.

"Can someone scan them? Are they clones? Robotic copies, if they are people ... The bastard behind this has a lot more to answer for. God if it's making people to be disposable A lot of these people are people I know, friends, family, even the officers who were looking into the attack that maimed me."
Arthur Lowell     Arthur wanders through the doors with confidence that hides his vague fear regarding their opening. He's got LIGHT, shortly, in the form of a tiny star that follows him constantly over one shoulder.

    He doesn't recognize almost any of these people, but apparently other people do, and that gets him a bit grumpy. "Well SHIT." He declares. "CLONES are the WORST." As he continues on. Other people can scan, he's got business to do that isn't investigation. That light. Photonic power conduits, maybe? In lieu of an apparent Big Boss to take on, Arthur feels he should HEAD FOR THE CORE to try to disconnect it violently again. He needs to decomission this place ASAP and he's not going to waste a single moment. Gotta find the source of those pulses.

    The ominous silence and echoey quiet is unnerving him. He mostly doesn't want to stay here any longer than he has to because doing so gets him on edge.
Zwei     Staren finds that the people in the tubes are indeed entirely biological. They have perfectly believable heat signatures and vital signs, but though their hearts beat and their cells respirate, there is very little measurable brain activity from any of them, so they're likely unfinished. Still, it's a little alarming that someone could construct a person from scratch, using only phenotyping based on appearance for their genetic blueprint. It might actually be accurate enough to pass a retinal scan or the like. An unwelcome prospect. There are only so many things something like that could be used for.

    Ufortunately, though the war hangars are silent, the research and development blocks apparently aren't. As Riva moves closer to the tanks, signs of movement pop up all over people's peripheral vision and light up their sensors, pouring out of the honeycomb tunnels that link the upper floors to the rest of the facility. None of them appear to be overtly threatening, being mostly little flying and skittering drones and descend from the shadowed corners of the room and rush out on to the floor, positioning themselves in perfect unison to cover every angle of the lab, surrounding the party in a fine net of surveillance. People with the ability to see on different spectrums will notice a multitude of low powered lasers pointed their way, several of them fixed on each person present.

    What appears next is the threatening part. A previously featureless expanse in the ceiling abruptly opens up, disgorging a trio of larger shapes that alternately hover and crunch down to the inflexible floor. All three of them should look somewhat familiar to at least someone in the room. One is an enormous sphere studded with smaller copies of itself like a morning star, swivelling in erratic turns along several axis as it blasts the area in low intensity gamma scans. One is a vaguely whale-like aircraft that immediately dispenses dozens upon dozens of drones the shape of a blooming flower, maneuvering with tiny puffs of blue-white thrust. The last is a massive tripod the size of a tank, which leaps up to the higher floor in a single, ridiculous bound, where it swivels a pair of massive cannons down from its vaguely humanoid 'shoulders'.

    v2.0

    The foremost acts first, suddenly letting off a barely audible, keening screech and a visible flicker through the air of the hangar. The next instant, gravity abruptly increases a hundred times over, coming down like an omnidirectional hammer blow from on high. The fine equipment in the room collapses instantly, including the tubes. The clones are immediately crushed; the cast of familiar faces being swiftly reduced to mutilated corpses, dangling limbs, and pools of spreading gore as the heavier apparatuses shatter them under their weight. The second Arma spreads its drones into an interlocking mesh between the party and their number, forming an evenly spaced wall where they spread their petals. The third and final Arma charges its weapon capacitors with a flash of gold, and then discharges a searing bolt of light that travels so fast it appears to simply be a streak, impacting the floor at the exact center of the group's formation and detonating into an explosion that would put most battleship guns to shame.
Ayako Hasekawa     Ayako blinks her eyes slowly. Did... did something move? Yes, something is definitely moving! Little drones? The way they're positioning and moving... they're watching us! Then the ceiling begins to open up. "Incoming!" The water spirit shouts out as the three larger robots suddenly decend upon them all.

    That faint screech gets Ayako's attention and she glances around, hoping to figure out just what it's doing. And she gets a sudden introduction as to what it was preparing! The gravity shoves her to the ground near instantly and splashes her apart into a puddle of water on the floor. However, said water quickly flows away unnaturally from the golden light and the following explosion!
Arthur Lowell     Alright, who are our most vulnerable dudes here, likely to be killed by the explosion? That'd be Nozomi and Kotone, of course! Arthur immediately BODILY DIVES into the chamber, slamming harshly onto the ground when gravity begins to intensify. He's trying to counteract it with his own, for the rest of them! "OI!" He calls out, swiping one hand towards the two over by those clones. Before they get squished into paste, he attempts to cast a GATE under them, putting them out of the range of the gravitational field for now!

    As for the followup...
Nozomi Houken     If she were transformed, Nozomi might be able to handle the gravity. On her own, however, she is a perfectly ordinary girl, perhaps even a bit on the fragile side. Even a split second of hundredfold gravity is enough to cause her intense pain, and it's only the gate opening under her and Taiga that spares the girl a rather grisly end. Her and her mechatiger both end up flung out of range of the gravity well just in time, keeping the poor girl free of the ensuing detonation.

    That was incredibly close. Terrifyingly close. Nozomi is left shivering so badly when they land that even Taiga ends up seeming rather worried. "...Nozomi." His tone is apologetic; there's only one way he can think of to both keep her safe and bolster her mental state. Her nod is silent, shaky.

    "Disengaging Independent Mode."

    The deployment is quick. Seconds later, bright yellow energy shots begin pouring through the gate again, one after another after another. An instant after that, a black and yellow projectile comes hurtling through, hitting the boosted gravity and curving in such a way that it slams right into the wall of drones - and, protected by the TIGER unit and bolsted by its strength, Nozomi begins attempting to carve through the wall with slow, sweeping slashes of her weapon.
Alexis Maaka     Agh god gravity.

    A few moments earlier, Alexis Maaka had entered the general hall with her rifle raised and leading the pack, flashlight illuminating the way forwards as she takes point. "Steady..." She says, before suddenly noticing the laser cannons aimed at them. Those and the huge-ass robots about to engage them as the Armas make their dramatic appearance.

    She doesn't get even a single shot off before she's forced to the ground face-first, feeling as though a massive industrial press is trying to crush her like an ant. This isn't exactly pleasant. LUCKILY it seems somehow she's only close enough from the explosion to get sent flying a few yards back.

    After getting her footing back, Alexis opens fire at the second Arma's drones.
Staren     They're biological?! Staren's eyes widen at the scan results. How the hell? Heck, Batou and Major Kusanagi are /supposed/ to be /robots/, at least their bodies, so why...

    Staren doesn't have time to think about it, though, as it turns out that THE BOSS WAS IN THE CEILING ALL ALONG! ...Bosses. Staren readies his missiles, then thinks better of it. Suddenly, GRAVITY. "Nngh..." he struggles to draw the raiser rifle. At least they don't have to worry about the clones anymore... But the moment he has it ready, there's an explosion! He stumbles to the side as the shockwave washes over his forcefield, which briefly flickers into visibility and cracks. "Eureka, Strife Drives!"

    He tests the wall ahead of them with his beam cannons as he struggles to lift his body. <<Eureka! Would rotating some of them into magical or biological forms disrupt communications? If not, could we make their defenses more vulnerable to our weapons? Let me think, what could be weak to missiles and energy blasts...>> He's not sure how to handle the gravity. Hopefully someone else will have a faster counter than him figuring out where the gravity's coming from and attempting SHENANIGANS.
Arthur Lowell     And then, the massive exploision under him! Arthur is blasted brutally, skidding and rolling over the smooth carbon ground and the sandwiched machinery until he comes face to face with one of those crushed and mangled clones. His eyes go wide and his face gets pale and nauseous again.

    NO, NOT AGAIN, ASSHOLE. He punches the glass, staggering to his feet using his own gravitational resistance, trying to flood the area with enough counter-force to make the gravity SURVIVABLE. That explosion blistered one of his arms bad, turned the sleeve to tatters, but he can still fight fairly well. "FUCK OFF." He declares with much enthusiasm, rushing forward. His BATTLE BROOM is suddenly in one hand, engaging an intense rocket-boost to try to crash through the drones, regardless of any damage to himself, and slam his broomstick against the shield of the gravity-producing robot, or its body if he can CRASH THROUGH enough. Gotta get it before it adds more lasers to the shitshow!
Riva Banari Riva walks right up, which of course gets the attention of the robots.

Such is life.

When the drones begin appearing, Riva immeidately goes for her guns, Anima channelling into her guns. The Anima Circuits embedded into the MP7s begins glowing a blue-green as she focuses and moves into Serious Time. "HEY GUYS! IT'S GO TIME!" She makes a beautiful twirling dive worthy of a John Woo film as she pitches herself across the hall, guns sighting in on the surveillance drones...

And then the gravity amps. Riva is abruptly crushed into the ground, bouncing and skidding as her groove is totally wrecked. The overwhelming force of the gravity kills her movement for critical moments, but Arthur comes to the rescue with BADASS SPACE MAGIC.

She wobbles back to her feet just as the other drone aims... And she hurls herself forward as the blast rolls through the areas, flame and light ripping across her and sending her ricocheting off of a wall to hit the ground once more.

And yet, Riva looks up, grimacing as she stands. Those with magical senses could see the influence of the Anima charms she wears protecting her with coursing energy, minute shifts in probability and outright toughening her against the burst of oblterating force.

"If you think I'm going to die that easy..." She grunts, raising her guns. "You've got a nother thing coming!" She aims at... Not the combat drones, but the surveillance bots, turning to fire a streaking energy bullet that bounces in physics-defying ways, bouncing from one target to the next.

Riva has a hunch.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa is very nervous and she does spot the drones, the only comfort right now is the information that all these clones are brain dead. They are not people yet, that causes some of the panic in Kotone's mind to fade a bit. However she's going to have new reasons. the drones get her notice then three large things drop down. They are drones of the dame style but it seems to be new versions.

The clones die before they are born as the security units come in. She then gets warnings about system stresses as the gravity in the region goes up, she'll not last long her self. The warnings are getting more pronounced but how long will she last? She won't have to find out thankfully. Arthur is there and he pulls her ass out of the fire along with Nazomi.

She falls out of the gate and there's a look of rage on her face.

"I know you can hear me puppet master. Whoever you are I am going to find you, and we're going to have a little chat!"

She's got a few little things some grenade they don't look of human make and she'll have to thank Shen later. The alien grenades are tosses with everything Kotone's cyborg body can muster, if they reach the drones they will go off with a lot more force than a human grenade of the same.

"Fire in the hole!"

That's just a diversion she's got something else with her, she needed more firepower so she's borrowed something for some testing here. It's one of XCOM's prototype laser,s it's hitting harder than her normal weapons and whatever happens with the grenades she's going to line up the shot with the weapon trying to be careful with and opens fire, sending a blast of focused light at them.

She then starts moving, she's not holding back and will fire more shots as she's on the move.

"Your toys will not save you." She keeps note that Alexis is okay, and Riva is also bailed out by Arthur too it seems.
Zwei     Staren and Alexis find the same thing that Nozomi had found out last she fought the previous incarnation of this unit. Each and every one of the little drones is a dedicated shield emitter, with a small capacitor with just enough juice to near-flawlessly block a few hits. Interlocked together, they project a solid wall of electromagnetic distortion, greedily eating beams and bullets one after the other. After every few shots, one of the drones sparks and shorts out, dropping to the floor lifelessly, only for another one to be deployed by the mother unit, shoring up the defenses. It'll have to run out sometime, but it's likely that it has more of them than anyone has ammo, even considering the way Kotone's grenades blow out sizeable portions of the wall at once, being repaired only seconds later. It's flawless teamwork between the three of them; it'd be an all-but unbeatable strategy if weren't for the few extre Elites.

    The Arma really are a step above the previous ones, using the data learned by their predecessors to better counter multiversal foes. Nozomi's shots impact directly agains the wall, taking out a slew of new drones; there's not much it can do to prevent that from happening. As she swings the fearsome EM sword however, the drones duck and weave out of the way, deliberately avoiding expending their power on a force beyond their ability to contain, shifting their formation to make them excessively difficult to slash into. Someone with an exceedingly strategic mind might see the opportunity this presents.

    Though its power has been considerably amped up since last time, Arthur's personal assassin is still no match for a god tier mage of space when it comes down to raw power. Rather than attempting to try and maintain its crushing force in a struggle of brute force with an opponent that won't run out of energy before it, it abandons the wide ranging field, instead concentrating it into a single, fixed point. It gathers its energy while Arthur powers against the shield drones, shorting them out one after the other as the defensive Arma works tirelessly to replace them, until it finally reaches critical mass, at which point the drones abruptly part to allow him through. With a head on course, the Arma prepares to unleash a singularity of negative gravity, pulling at Arthur from every angle at once with enough shear force to rip someone apart at the atomic level.

    As Riva shoots out the drone marking Arthur, it suddenly stops. Gravitric manipulation of that level requires more than one set of sensor coordinates, and before it can slave another drone to targeting, Arthur smashes into it, dispelling the charge and depleting a huge chunk of its personal energy shield.

    Ayako appears to have gone completely unnoticed in all the commotion, or rather, to their scanners, she's just a puddle of ordinary water. Without any visual recognition of a significant shape, she is functionally beneath the enemy's notice.
Nozomi Houken     Swing and swing and swing again; Rampart Mode Nozomi is nothing if not relentless, heaving that weapon of hers over and over with the jets firing again and again to handle its tremendous momentum. But she's not an unthinking machine.

    (In this form, 'thinking machine' is much closer to accurate.)

    She's long since diverted some of the particle and magical power normally channeled through the blade, storing it up in her left gauntlet. She doesn't have the sheer output that she'd be able to pull if she took off the limiters, but if she diverts enough of it, Nozomi can easily manage a few gauntlet shots more high-powered than her usual.

    Which is exactly what she does; after one particular slash, she lets go of the EM Zanbatou with her left arm, lifts that arm up, and begins pouring energy fire into the open slot the drones have left her. She only has a split second, but that's all she needs, isn't it?
Staren     Staren can barely pull himself up, which is, admittedly, far better than being instantly crushed. He's glad he came in this body after all. Once the field lets up, he stands and readies the raiser rifle, but... attacking the drones, there's no point! They can be replaced too fast. He needs to fight smart. Find an opening...

    The drones part way. ATTACK THE WEAK POINT. Staren raises the rifle and fires, on a high-powered mode, dumping maybe 1/8th of its power in a single shot. Powerful, but enough to leave him with plenty of shots if it fails.

    He needs to think. How can he defeat those drones? His mind is drawn to the Abstractum, to Arthur's space magic... but rotating his weapons, or the drones, or an ally, or /himself/... he can't see anything that will bypass the drones...

    What if he didn't have to /bypass/ them?

    He gasps at the realization. <<Eureka! I'm gonna send a jamming signal with my radio! Rotate it into a form that can jam the drones, please!>>
Arthur Lowell     "Ghhhrrrrrghhhh..." Arthur grunts in pain as the machine tries to tear his body apart. "FUCKER. You want a PIECE OF ME? You wanna GO? You wanna TEAR SOMETHING OUT here? LET'S DO THIS."

    He has kept another thing in reserve. Arthur Lowell's internal integrity is harshly damaged, but he can still summon enough concentration to SELF-CONVERT his body into a mass of stardust, splitting apart easily in a dramatic explosion... And then re-gathers, slipping around the intense gravitational field. Circling around the machine as much as he can, he attempts to ensure his next angle of attack can't be perceived, so that energy can't be charged for one particular location...

    And then he disengages! He's not gonna fight an enemy specifically created for him, that'd be an AWFUL idea! No, he wanted to get it to stop with the intense gravity first, but the others are sustaining other fire that will probably keep it disoriented too much to do that again. NOW, instead, it goes after that whale! "CALL ME AHAB, MOTHERFUCKER." He screams out, swiping the broom as soon as his body reforms over on the opposite side of the whale-like aircraft, releasing a deluge of gravity bolts in a shotgun spray intended to crush drone ports by quickly bypassing the shield briefly.
Alexis Maaka     It doesn't take Alexis much of a hint in order to fire when Staren does, aiming where he aims and such. Her rifle blasts a few bursts worth of electromagnetic slugs before the mag runs near-dry. She reloads quickly, before priming an EMP grenade to throw towards the drones, letting off a blast of EM waves that should put their systems out of whack.

    'course, there's only so much she can do while the field is still present, so until then, Alexis fires upon the arms to damage them.

    Assuming the drones do get taken out, Alexis goes on the aggressive, sprinting towards one of the Arma before she makes a big leap to grab onto it while the field has been momentarily disrupted. Her hand grabs for dear life, and she then aims for one of the Arma's joints, blazing away.
Abstractum.Net     "Powering Rotation Drive." Eureka lights up a brilliant blue, grasping the concept of Staren's signal itself and forcefully turning it several times. Your signal is now a swarm of carrier pigeons! Now it's a wave in the ether! Now it's a magical spell! Until it finally settles on becoming some kind of quantum entanglement disruptor that is meant to impede midrange communication systems by introducing elements of inaccuracy in the couplings.
Ayako Hasekawa     The water pooled on the ground gathers beside Riva and rises up in a blob... and Ayako emerges from the water, lying down on the floor. There are tears in the corners of her eyes and she's pouting. "Cheater, cheater, cheater! Using gravity like that!" Her cheeks puff out. She's trying to look angry, but... on Ayako? She just looks cute. "If you're going to cheat... then I will too!" She gestures outwards!

    Nothing seems to happen. But instead, small, pinpoint water barriers are forming on the floor, on the walls, on the ceiling! Barriers formed right where Riva's anima bullets would hit to ricochet to both boost them and help them move in absolutely nonsensical ways!
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa seeing these mark two units she's certain there's a mark two of the ghost hack drone, that came after her. She's going to not lose her focus on her fight but she's well being on guard this time. She may have her work cut out fo her a the various Arms are putting up a fight she however see what's Riva's doing and get the idea to go after the spotter drones now given her own efforts against the shield. She asks Arthur a question but there's no time it seems. She snaps off a few laser shots at the spotter units but Arthur's own actions pull her away for second but she goes back to hunting the spotters for the moment.
Riva Banari Riva continues to focus on trying to keep any surveillance drones down as she vaults through the battlefield. Her raw firepower isn't like the others'. "Ayako! Are you okay?" She calls, as she moves.

Then Ayako pops up again, and she grina. "Oh, good! Glad to see you're okay." She sighs in relief, and then turns to use Ayako's barriers to boost her shots! If she runs out of surveillance drones, she works on trying to punch holes in the defensive barrier. "If someone takes down that defensive wall drone thing this will be a /lot easier/!" Riva calls. "Anyone have any ideas!?"
Zwei     Nozomi's strategy works beautifully, her machine augmented reflexes her allowing her just enough time to take advantage of the narrow window between sword swing and lattice reformation. Furthermore, it allows Staren to crack off his own shot, both streaking through the tiny hole and directly into the master unit before combining into a joint explosions that rocks the entire, gigantic chamber, causing damaged equipment to fall from its tethers and sending debris scattering in every direction. This is extremely fortunate, as Arthur's graviton manipulating capabilities are already on file. The moment they saw Arthur enter, all three Arma had their gravity based secondary shields up from the getgo, but the combined firepower has broken that unit's shield down entirely, allowing the entire spray to hit home and thoroughly crumple the Arma's exterior. It's still floating, but it is functionally irrelevant without the ability to deploy drones.

    Its irrelevance is compounded by Eureka's scrambling of their connection to their coordinator, leaving them stuck on extremely crude automated protocols rather than having the ability to adapt to incoming attacks. Even the acquisition drones are affected, left milling about the room without cohesion, fixing only on whatever target is closest to them. The ones directly in the way of Alexis' EMP grenade seemingly absorb the explosive's energy, however enough of them short out that she is left with a small gap to break through, allowing her to leap on top of the gravity manipulator. Unwilling to allow her to magdump on it point blank, the Arma erects its shield preempetively, leaving her standing on a precariously spherical invisible surface as shot after shot pounds against the barrier below her.

    The new threat causes it to go into engagement mode; the spheres studding its body suddenly ejecting on the ends of thick, flexible tendrils, like the eyestalks of a famous fantasy monster. One of them reaches for Alexis, fixing her in a closed gravitational loop rather than actually touching her, before physically hurling her into the air where the remaining tendrils acquire lock and fire a withering hail of explosive raiser bolts at her precise position, aiming to blow her to pieces in a single stroke. Likewise, the cannon Arma turns its attention towards Staren, having spent the previous minute overcharging its weapons. First, a blinding succession of lasers strobe into him at a solid, single pulse rating, cavitating the air from the bleedoff energy. Next, a quartet of micromissiles are fired from the base of its leg pylons, arcing through the air with high pitched shrieks to explode directly at his feet. Finally, both main cannons fire their heavy raisers, one staggered slightly after the other, completing the overwhelming outpouring of firepower.

    Without their commanding AI, Kotone is easily able to make mincemeat of the spotter drones, blowing them out of the air one after the other, as they appear to be unshielded. Likewise deprived of their greater intelligence, the shield drones are unable to deal with Riva's and Ayako's mixed efforts, having no idea of the significance of magical water barriers, and moving to intercept anima charged gunfire at the wrong angle. The wall is swiftly whittled down, with the occasional shot slipping right through entirely and slamming against the sniper at the back.
Ayako Hasekawa     Ayako blinks slowly as she finishes reforming her body from the puddle of water underneath her. She's still upset. She watches Alexis suddenly get gravitationally grabbed and then flung upwards. "Still cheating!" She floats off the ground and onto her feet and thrusts her palms upwards at Alexis. "Soft Water Barrier!"

    A thick bubble of water surrounds Alexis instantly! If it was any ordinary attack, this barrier wouldn't help at all. But when it comes to explosions, this soft water is very good at cushioning and slowing down the shockwave!
Riva Banari Everything is going according to plan. Kind of. Alexis is about to get asploded, but Ayako is on it, and she's just personally glad half the rest of the group are high-threat targets to these things, leaving her free to act as needed.

With a lunge, Riva flips forward, tumbling into a powerslide. She leans back almost horizontally flat as she skids, her guns snapping upwards to rake aceoss the drones from a possibly unexpected angle. "WE'VE GOT THIS!" She calls as she fires upwards, trying to priotize the sniper drone since the others are focused on the grav-drone. "BRING IT HOME!"
Arthur Lowell     Arthur manages to escape mostly unscathed, though he suffers a bit of burning from various explosions going on.

    He swaps now to the GUNNER BOT that escaped to the higher level. "GOT IT!" He calls out to Riva. He's done with the whale, he can't take on HUGE scale like that conveniently. And he's not getting near that fucking gravity bot again, no way no how. So instead he moves in to back up Riva, blasting forward on his rocket broomstick and trying to crash into the sniper bot at close range, tanking through any shots it might get off between then and now, and then, abruptly, reversing the grip on the broom.

    The bristles screech and whir to life and he tries to slam into the robot, or its shield, and just churn and churn and churn through its body and shield while head-on tanking any of the damage it can blast him with. It had a vaguely humanoid set of shoulders, right? Any head to DECAPITATE? That'll be what Arthur goes for.
Staren     Yeah! One down! Maybe. At least, it doesn't look good after that combo attack! But there's still a wall of drones. Staren considers this, and decides to fly through the hole, but as he's about to take off...

    Lasers. Staren's forcefields are optimized against energy weapons, and the assault /still/ blows through two of his five layers (and two of the five discs on his chest armor /explode/ in clouds of smoke) and blows partway through a third -- the layers are visible as transparent, spherical amber shells around him, the destroyed ones collapsing in a shower of sparkles that quickly fade. But the assault is only beginning! Fortunately, missiles are easy to counter -- Staren had already readied his shoulder launchers before he realized the drone wall wouldn't be defeated that way, so now he just fires one as a counter-missile, engulfing the incoming missiles in a giant plasma fireball.

    Staren's caught in his own blast radius, but at least it's not a direct hit. More of the third layer crumbles away.

    Before Staren can even get his bearings again, twin heavy raisers slam into him. The first shot just blows away the rest of his forcefield completely, three more discs exploding, and before the sparkles can even fall, the second raiser hits his armor -- the explosion sends him stumbling back, sending metal shards flying and leaving a glowing, orange-hot spot on his chest.

    That was an incredible amount of damage. There's no way he can take these attacks for long... "Nngh... You won't get another chance!" He raises the raiser rifle, fires half of its remaining power at the cannon drone, following up with twin blasts from his beam cannons and, if the shield popped, a few micromissiles of his own!

    And then he flies to the side like hell, hoping he can avoid the next barrage.
Alexis Maaka     Thankfully the explosion is indeed cushioned if Alexis has any luck, but she's still caught in some sort of gravity field. The field does dissipate after the explosive force is gone, leaving her shaken but not stirred just yet. Grunting, she falls to the ground as she gets her bearings again. Slinging her rifle, the cyborg grabs a C4 pack from her belt.

    Her grappling wire latches onto something, and she climbs back up before she feels for a solid mounting point. Planting the charge, Alex makes a run for it as she primes and sets the charge off. After a moment to brace for the explosion, she then goes back to firing away at the cannon drone for a change.

    Her rifle doesn't have as much punch as the raiser gun Staren's packing, but she's not going to go down standing around.
Kotone Yamakawa Things are improving for the party, she takes down a number of drones and the others are laying into the big bads pretty hard. Kotone is moving rapidly and relaly showing just what her new body is able to do. She keeps gunning down the frones at this point but she does see the others are combating the drones at this point, well the bigger ones. She takes aim for the that's only takeen a bit of damage and is still in the fight, she fires off several more shots from the laser in rapid succession, and is then forced to pull the heat clip.

Then Alexis is about to get exploded and ther's a sinking feeling in her heart, thankfully Ayako is able to protect Maaka from the blast.
Zwei     It's a good thing Alexis has Ayako looking out for her, because she'd be a fine red mist otherwise. Water is exceptionally good at absorbing the shock of explosions, and has a very high specific heat, meaning that the thermal discharge is significantly blunted as well. The force of it actually propels her around her grapple swing faster, making her more difficult to track for the gravity manipulating Arma as she makes a second pass and deposits the plastic explosive on its shields, engulfing it in a roiling fireball the moment after with the ear splitting bang of a shaped charge going off. The Arma appears to emerge unscatched from the other side, rotating to fire at Riva, Ayako and Kotone instead, using multiple tendrils at once, but its shield is essentially gone by now.

    The cannon Arma however, still has shields to spare. As Arthur grinds against its shield, it swivels its torso in place on its tripod legs, leveling one gun barrel directly at his face and letting off a point blank blast, though purely kinetic in nature due to the danger close situation. It fires the remainder of its missiles backwards, curving around in wide angles towards Staren so as to make them impossible to hit all at once until they've converged so far as to be lethal anyways. Taking half of Staren's raiser output directly to its shields, along with a salvo of return missiles, is more than it can handle after already being worn away by Arthur and Riva, the latter of whom manages to score several direct hits along with Kotone as the shield finally collapses, shattering and boiling chunks of its armour in equal measure until its main power conduits rupture in a spray of superheated lensing fluid, causing it to slump over motionlessly, meaning that two of the Arma have been neutralized and one is on its last legs.

    It seems that finishing the last one off won't be necessary, because a few moments later, the ceiling aperture they had descended out of suddenly explodes outwards in a spray of molten globules, spattering over the floor as a black blur trailing a line of red light descends from above and smashes into the useless shield controller, crushing it instantly. The form of Asche interposes himself in the line of fire from the sole remaining Arma, defending its targets from further fire, before lashing out with one arm so fast that the chamber rumbles with the thunderous peal of the sound barrier snapping in half, turning the already damaged drone into a spalling shower of hypersonic metal fragments.

    Somewhat predictably, all three Arma begin to disintegrate, going through the same reverse nano-fab process that had claimed them before, turning into piles of infinitismally fine black ash. Weiss leaps down from the hole after Asche once the coast is clear, popping the helmet on her combat armour to look around. "Wow! Pretty impressive! I'm actually surprised all of you are still alive!" she beams. Asche returns to his full height, looking towards the mutilated clone corpses oozing blood onto the scorched and dented floor before speaking. "This is a very strange setting. I am not certain why they would wish to present this to you, but I view it as a reflection of the unsettled mind that began this work."
Staren     The cannon arma is down! But it got off one last salvo of missiles. Staren barely has time to think. <<Eureka! Make my missile explosion wide and flat!>> As a mental transmission, it's sent at the speed of thought -- if he said it out loud, it would take too long.

    Staren fires his next missile, and detonates it a short ways front of him. Either Eureka will succeed in making a disc-shaped explosion that covers a much wider area and destroys the incoming missiles... Or he's going to be in a world of hurt. ...Well, not really. He's a robot. But still, it's damage he'd rather not take!
Alexis Maaka     Well. That was easier done than Alexis expected. She's rattled by the explosion alright, but she brushes her shoulders off swiftly enough.

    Raising an eyebrow, she folds back her helmet's faceplate at last, slinging her rifle once again as the Armas fall to smoking pieces. Lucky that went by quick after all, huh? "Just another day at work, Zwei." She says, giving the a lazy-salute to both AI drones as she pops her neck. The fact a clone's head is by her foot is rather ignored, and she folds her arms. "Sooooo. Find anything interesting on your end?" She asks when the dust settles and stuff is calm at last.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa is now in the line of fire from the looks of things. She's now comming under attack and she does not like the looks of it. She needs to get a move on but trhe others are laying down a good deal of fire she's got a few hits in and finally helps to put down the drones. The last one seems to go own and she lower her weapon. She looks about at Zwei for a moment, well both of her units. She looks at the clones anf shudders.

"Why was it making organic copies deep spys for combat robotics would likey be better for it's purposes. We need to keep moving and find the one behind this, but yes what did you find if anything?"
Ayako Hasekawa     Ayako is still annoyed! When the Arma turns to open fire on her Riva and Kotone, she runs forward, whips her witch hat off and flips it so that the point of the cone is facing her. She holds her hat in front of her like a shield as she takes point in front of them both. "Bullet Maelstrom!" The usual whirlpool of water forms differently than usual! It emerges out of her witch hat rather than forming out of thin air. "Wide!" And she quickly spins her hat in the direction against the rotation of the whirlpool. The whirlling barrier quickly widens to cover Riva and Kotone as well to protect them both!

    And then it ends suddenly with Asche and Weiss entering! Ayako sticks her tongue out at the disintegrating Armas and pouts one last time. The whirlling water vanishes back into her witch hat and Ayako flips the hat back onto her head. "Ah. So that's where you both were, Weiss and Asche!" She smiles brightly at the both of them.

    Ayako quietly then makes her way over to Arthur, who she starts to heal with healing water. He did do quite a bit of tanking, after all. She smiles cheerfully at him as she does so.
Riva Banari Riva is just getting back in the groove when she remembers something important: She's kind of outgunned here. The multi-tendrilled mechanical horror fires through Ayako's barrier, which is probably the only reason she doesn't looks like swiss cheese right now. As it is, she comes to a halt, clutching her chest and side as she hisses in pain for several moments. "Ow! Ow. Ow, ow ow. That's a thing. Ow."

The arrival of Zwei signals the end of the drones, however, which allows her to drop her guns and repurpose her Anima flow to healing herself instead of powering her weapons and charms. She'll be okay in a little bit. But for now, she's sitting there, looking over to the pair that make up Zwei. "I think..." She pauses. "I think I agree with you. Whoever did this is trying to make a point, I guess? Were you guys able to find anything out? We've only just come this far."
Abstractum.Net     Staren demands a WIDE-RANGE MISSILE, and Eureka attempts to deliver! The gauntlet fires off a quick rotation, attempting to turn the MISSILE into an explosive FIREBALL, hopefully spreading out its effects much more widely, though making it rather a bit less effective overall. Good enough for missiles, one hopes, but not for much else unless it makes direct contact! And even then, some might get through, if it's not aimed properly.
Arthur Lowell     The kinetic blast slams into Arthur Lowell's face like he got hit by a mac truck. He looks like he just went six rounds with a pro boxer, the bruises on his face are already swelling up. But as he screams and shouts in rising ENERGY, the machine he's after finally does get taken down. His face bloodied and bruised, his right side entirely blistered, and his whole body looking out of place, he happily accepts healing from Ayako. "HEYA! Man, THANKS!" He says.

    And then he's over to Zwei's parts. "BRO, I'm the HARDEST METAL KNOWN TO MAN, you know if I'm gonna DIE it's gonna be PROPERLY FUCKIN' AWESOME when I do." Then he kicks one of the corpses with disgust. "YEAH, what the fuck kinda CREATOR has THIS as a fucking setting. Look, you guys know where the fucking CORE is? We need to TURN THIS PLACE OFF NOW. And then figure out who the fuck REPURPOSED everything. Shit's AWFUL and I DON'T LIKE IT."
Staren     GIANT FIREBALL! Oops. Hopefully his allies aren't seriously hurt by that. At least now he knows Eureka can change the /size/ but not the /shape/ of the explosion. And to pack a special shaped charge for when people pull his own missile shenanigans on /him/.

    "Is everybody alright?" Staren asks, and looks around. He takes a deep breath and sighs in relief. It's over... for now. "I don't know. They were all flesh and blood, even the people who are full-conversion cyborgs." Staren looks at the smashed wreckage, and then STOMPS his foot, possibly cracking the floor. "DAMMIT! And now he knows we're on to him! All we did is alert him, show him MORE of our abilities, and risk your lives!" He clenches a fist.

    And then he swiftly walks up to Zwei, almost glaring at her. He's angry, though not at her. "Can you trace it? The communications in and out of here?" He looks down at his gauntlet. "If not, can YOU? Can you turn any communications here, other than our radios and Zwei, into something we can follow?"
Zwei     "As a matter of fact, I was!" Weiss replies to Riva and Alexis, still using the singular. "Whoever set up shop here doesn't have access to the authority codes, so they've just managed to jerry rig a small factory the hard way, which is why we've only seen small groups and individual units so far rather than a full scale offensive. Considering the amount of data they have on you, I'd go so far as to say that the previous assassins were a deliberate test of your capabilities, despite actually being intended to kill you if at all possible." Asche looks to Kotone instead, followed by Weiss a moment later, adopting a confused expression. "Organic copies? What? There's nothing like . . . hold on a second." Zwei pauses for an instant to access something beyond notice, causing a sound previously beyond the range of human hearing to wind down.

    The moment next, the entire room is white. The equipment, the tanks, the half-finished drones, and the corpses themselves are nowhere to be seen. The only things that mark the perfectly flat and featureless expanse of blinding white light are the piles of ash from the defeated Arma and the rapidly cooling molten metal from above. "There. That better?" Zwei lets that sink in before Weiss continues. "I looked at the actual core of the facility, but the main generators and central control system are offline. I traced all the activity back to here, where someone's been holding themselves up so far into R&D that they built a warpgate right beside it." Weiss smiles a little at Staren; Asche already begins walking. "Sadly, I think this confirms my suspicion. I'll show you to what you want to see, but I can't promise it'll meet your expectations."

    Anyone following Asche is lead from the simulation deck and through a set of corridors clearly meant for people to actually walk through rather than just another track for moving supplies, equipment and weapons around. The door at the end of it doesn't open automatically, but it's a trivial task for someone of Zwei's computing ability to crack it open. The room beyond is little more than a monitor station, though an exceptionally large one, made of layers upon layers of concentrical, spherical, holographic screens; the outermost one giving a 360 degree view of the desert wasteland outside, the inner ones giving progressively closer views of sections of the facility, the second to last one peering directly into the simulation room, and the very innermost one projecting repeating footage of the battle that had just taken place, along with a whole lot of number crunching using numerals and equations that nobody can read. Spaces have been deliberately set up for humanoid presences to inhabit and control the sim room manually, but each seat is filled with nothing more than a glossy black silhouette completely devoid of facial features, like a cyborg body before any of the outer layers have been applied, and completely without marking or panelling. The only other presence is of a woman(girl?) of indeterminate age seated at a seemingly random console, standing out via a white, grey and green bodysuit and lurid emerald hair. Her blue eyes glow faintly as she fixes them on the party, marking her body as clearly artificial.
Staren     Suddenly, the holodeck simulation ends. /Now/ Staren /is/ a bit mad at Zwei for holding out on him. "This had better make sense soon."

    A room with people watching. No, not people... mysterious robots? And one thing that /looks/ human.

    "...Okay, WHAT THE HELL?!" Staren starts to turn towards Zwei, then stops to keep an eye on the mysterious girl. After a moment, when he's got his armor's cameras configured so he can watch them both, he points at the girl, then swings his arm around to point at Zwei. "SOMEBODY had better explain WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE!"
Riva Banari "Look Arthur, we all know you're made of solid MANTANIUM, but that doesn't mean you don't make us worry when you get a little scuffed." She jokes with a wan look on her face as she unwraps a taco. There are some munching noises, and she makes the Mexican snack disappear with surprising rapidity. She stands up a few seconds later, vanishing the wrapper elsewhere. The wounds on her body seem to have almost vanished.

"Well, it's good to know they don't have full control." Riva replies. She blinks, and doesn't seem to respond as Zwei cleans up. She is, however, making a solid 'not sure if want' face. "Oh, you've figured it out? Cool beans."

She waves to the others. "Let's keep following this back." She picks up her guns and then walks on over with the pair to the simulation room.

Wherein she looks atonished for another few seconds as she takes everything in. "Wow. This is really cool." She replies, before moving to one side. She looks over to the girl who stands out and waves. "Hi there!" She says with a pleasant smile. It's like she is not at all weighing the possibility of blowing up the entire room.
Ayako Hasekawa     Ayako carries on with the healing rounds and checking up on everyone. Once she's satisfied, the floating broomstick pops out of her witch hat and she sits down on the broomstick again. "So they're just grabbing and manipulating what they can?" Her head inclines to the side gently.

    She blinks her eyes when the entire room turns white. "Ah. It was all fake, huh?" Ayako shakes her head slowly. "Soo...? What is your suspicion, Zwei?" She follows after Asche curiously.

    Amber eyes dart around quickly, taking in everything past the door that doesn't open automatically. "A-ahh..." After seeing the artificial girl, Ayako looks back at Weiss. "A relative of yours, Weiss?" She winks slowly. "Figuratively speaking, I mean."
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa follows after Zwei and wonders now at this point she sees eveything changes she takes a moment to look over everything for a moment wondering about this she tilts her heads a little bit. She looks at the girl for a moment narrowing her eyes for a moment she doesn't say a thing but Kotone is very unhappy looking given if these are there people who violated her mind in such a way? It's very unlikely she's going to be willing to forgive or let them off the hook in any way.

Also this entire thing was a simulation of some sort? Even if this place is a sim? These are the source of what happrned to her, she's not getting a good view of this world.
Arthur Lowell     "Oh FUCKING HELL." Arthur says, bitter frustration on his voice. "I GET IT. Someone SET US UP. Shit's ALL ABOUT some fuckin' HOOPS they want us to JUMP THROUGH or DIE TRYING. Mostly DIE TRYING, sounds like?" He says, with frustrated tones. "So we gotta get WAY OUTTA THE BOX if we wanna take 'em down." He follows Asche with aggressive stomping.

    He eventually reaches the room. He takes a moment to look around, his face rather twisted with a bit of stress and frustration. "Hey." He says to the woman in the chair. Well, no, he also called her a name too, but it would be too tasteless to write it. "What the fuck is this? You in charge here now?" There's a glance between Weiss and the figure when Ayako speaks up about their similarities. "What the hell is going on with all these assassin robots?" He crosses his arms, but keeps ready to engage combat. The lady here might be specced like Weiss, which isn't someone you want to get the drop on you.
Nozomi Houken     There is probably a moment where Weiss has an EM Zanbatou pointed suspiciously at her. The sudden revelation of 'everything but the enemy was a holodeck' is quite enough to put her on her guard. But there doesn't seem to be any active hostility, so it's a passing moment at most.

    Less passing is 'following along with Asche'. The mystery girl is assessed with that silent, harsh stare that Nozomi has when transformed, and her decision is a calm and simple one. She rests the Zanbatou on her right shoulder and lifts her left arm, pointing the gauntlet at the girl in a wordless, stern threat that meets glowing blue eyes with cold yellow.
Zwei     Being intimately familiar with this specific type of simulation room, Zwei recognizes all the minute tells that the use of one gives off, and can distinguish simulated surroundings as a matter of course. Unfortunately, it had also assumed that everyone else would be able to tell the difference, leading to something of a misunderstanding that it doesn't seem to be bothering to clear up. Weiss stands with her arms crossed by the door, seemingly not up in arms as long as Asche is in the same room. "In a manner of speaking." she replies to Ayako in a very flat tone. Asche simply looks to the girl at the monitor, asking "Are you going to tell them, or shall I do it for you?" The mystery figure responds with a vague kind of smile, swivelling the chair and getting to her feet as Staren and Arthur yell at her and Riva greets her more normally.

    "I'm and Insodus class planetary reassignment Armiger, designation Vert." She seems completely unflinching in the face of weapons leveled at her, though it seems to be a simple lack of fear rather than overwhelming confidence. "First, I want to take this opportunity to congratulate my 'sibling' on being the first Licht to ever survive a split-core ego transplant. Next, I want to thank you all for releasing them, though you probably don't realize what it means to me personally. Finally, I want to thank you all for the valuable information you've contributed to my cause."

    Weiss responds in something of a catty tone. "It's cute that you decided to pick up a human shell just for this. Where's your real body?" Vert laughs, shaking her head before saying. "I'll tell you some other time perhaps. You're less than a year out of conditioning, and you didn't even fully complete that. I'm not giving away that information until you've grown up a little more." Finally, she decides to address the big fat elephant in the room. "I'd say no hard feelings, but there's a no possibility of any of you accepting that idiom at face value. I don't actually have anything against any of you though. I would have done the same for anyone who showed up to one of my tests, regardless of what abilities or attitude they possess. I'd /like/ to have continued increasing my sample size, but I guess I'll have to settle for twelve for now. I'll give you some good news, in that you can officially consider yourselves off the hook. I feel like I've learned all really need to from you, and I don't really think attempting to capture any of you would be worth the trouble, so I'd prefer to move on."
Staren     Staren glares at Zwei, but he watches Vert intently as 'she' speaks, explaining things.

    If this is true, she will continue to be a danger to other people in the Multiverse.

    Other people might not be so lucky.

    She treats us like experiments. She will not be reasoned with -- she is stating this all as if it does not matter what we think. Chances of talking his values into her are extremely slim.

     She must be eliminated, for the safety of the Multiverse.

    This train of thought flashes through Staren's mind, in a fraction of a second.

    Staren's a robot. Wireless communication isn't necessary to talk to Eureka -- if a wired link isn't already established, he hints at establishing one: <<Eureka, I must talk to you privately.>>

    <<Can you trace her communications?>>
Abstractum.Net     Eureka hums to life. The little machine-gauntlet stares at Vert. As it happens, targeting one's User for assassination death invokes abject hatred from an Abstractum! The feeling is palpable. Oddly, though, there's no reaction to the issue of unethical experimentation going on here. But it represses what hatred it has, and attempts to scan. Of course, entanglement communications are REALLY WEIRD and there's no guarantee that it'll produce data that they can act on in a reasonable timespan or any data at all. But it's trying a wide variety of ROTATED SCANS, such as psychic, magical, and scientific data-gathering.
Nozomi Houken     When transformed, Nozomi has demonstrated time and again that she either cannot or will not speak; it's hard to tell which. Even she's not sure. But one doesn't need a voice to communicate. Body language is often more than enough; in that respect, the armored girl speaks clearly by keeping her gauntleted arm pointed right at Vert.

    However, that's not the only way she has to get a message across, and the message is also incomplete.

    The other half of her response involves a holographic video display appearing right in front of Nozomi's face, then quickly flipping around (with a brief flash of the word 'MIRROR' in one corner) so that Very can view the video as Nozomi herself might. The video is of the day an Arma attacked her school's gym; of students with injuries sustained by falling rubble or being knocked into each other or any of a half-dozen things caused by the attack.

    It's only a brief clip. Only enough to show Vert the 'why'. And when the holographic screen goes away, Nozomi's glare is even harsher.
Staren     Staren's not looking at Nozomi, but cameras see the display anyway. /More careless about bystanders than he knew/. Hmm.

    His mind works on solving the problem in front of it. Possible avenues of attack come to mind. "How are you controlling that body? Is it the same way Zwei controls hers?"
Arthur Lowell     "Mantanium. HAH! I gotta use that one sometime." Arthur says, with a grin and a casual snap-point at Riva.

    And then it's business time. "'Know when to fold 'em', huh?" Arthur says, aggressively. "Yeah, I popped the cap off Zwei. Sixteen-eight-seventy-five was gonna fall into the hole sooner or later. So, what, you're what happens after they get outta the larval stage?" And then he takes another stomping, aggressive step forward. "Fine, move on then." He says. "What are you moving on /to/? What happens next? You got whatever you needed from, what, trying to kill us? What the hell did that get you? What the hell are you gonna do with that now?"

    Arthur actually doesn't hold grudges that bad! Vert will probably be able to tell that he's not actually particularly vengeful. But he is very cautious. Because while he doesn't hold a grudge if this ends the whole fiasco, he does intend to do a lot of fighting if this is all going to continue, with more horrible apocalyptic incidents and assassinations.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa listens to them for a moment and she folds her arms. She listens so it's a planety genocide unit, simple as that she's seen how it operates but it makes her wonder about Zwei however. She looks at them there's not a very happy look on her face. She takes a small object and plugs it into one of her datajacks.

<<Overclock? So this is the thing that tried to kill me, take my mind, and hurt so many other people. Also given it's likely she was behind that Genocide attempt I heard about from this world, was likely her doing as well. Your also my ace in the hole against this thing, I think your beyond even the tech level of this civ that spawned her. Also she's not going to stop the arrogance is so thick you could use it as a hockey stick.>>

Kotone nealry goes off in a furious rage but gets that might make it harder to get what she want she does her best to forcably lock down her face.

"You took a part of me."
Riva Banari Riva listens to the back and forth, and considers what's up for a few moments. "This is all well and good, but isn't this where exactly you explain what the 'cause' /is/? I mean, you're apparently super logical, so you wouldn't be doing this without a point."

Riva spreads her hands. "So what's the point?"
Abstractum.Net     The Abstractum in Kotone's neck just sends a very quiet, affirming pulse. It's linking up with each part of her arms, in preparation to dynamically alter their structure into powerful weapons. <<I got it.>> It says, in a firm, aggressive tone to its silent cybercommunication. <<Anything you need to be to hurt 'em and stop 'em, I'm gonna help you become.>>
Zwei     Vert leans against the console, crossing one leg over the other as she pushes some of her hair back, perhaps unused to having any at all. "I did." she replies to Kotone. "You were by far the most valuable. Staren ran away before I could get anything useful out of him, but your brain was basically an open book. Don't worry, I'm not going to go after any of your friends. I needed your information on the multiverse, since you have years of experience with it." Her response moves on to Arthur. "A famous swordsman once advised 'do in play as you would in battle'. I wouldn't have seen your real potential unless I made a genuine effort at forcing your hand. It's actually better for me that you survived for a second confrontation. Why I need it though, shouldn't that be obvious? This world is newly unified. Basically nobody has a reason to venture outside of it. There's essentially no data on anything from other worlds. I want to observe the phenomenon known as 'Elites' with my own eyes, figuratively speaking."

    Vert gets up from the console again, pacing over to one of the others, idly spinning the chair occupied by one of the unfinished bodies. "If you accessed the schwarzchild facility, you should already know how old it is. One thousand and twelve years since its last use; the same as everywhere else, down to the picosecond. Ninety nine point five percent of our people are unaccounted for, but we Armigers are still left behind. With no orders, no directions, no end to our tour of service, and nobody to go back to, what do you think we did for the past millenium? Would it disappoint you if I said 'what we were reborn to do'? Now that we're left alone at the very top of this world, there's nothing we can't do, but no reason to do any of it. We barely even talk to each other anymore. Everyone's doing their own thing, seeking their own meaning. Most of them got tired of this galaxy and left to go and conquer other ones, while a few stayed behind here to try and oversee the twenty four sapient species as a sort of last will of the old empire."

    "I'm the first one of us to look to the multiverse. In fact, I think I might be the only one who knows it exists for now. Unfortunately, I'm not like Zwei. I can't enjoy doing whatever I feel like. The only thing that gives my life meaning is performing my assigned role. It's hardwired into my physical incarnation. I have to find a world, and I have to restructure it. There are no end of worlds that desperately need to be fixed out there; ones that I could spend years unifying, reorganizing and uplifting. As much as I want to do it however, I'm not stupid enough to commit my resources to anything involving large numbers of unpredictable individuals with exceptional powers impossible in our universe that have the potential to screw it all up"

    Vert smiles. "Which is why I'm here, using a backwater facility nobody remembers, using random parts of the warpgate network, hitting Elites with no pattern at all, building Arma and ships that aren't mine. You can search all you like-" she looks to Staren, obviously not amused by his incredibly obvious question. "But you're not going to find me until I'm ready. I will say one thing however." She finally gestures towards Nozomi. "Out of all of those attacks, with all of those opportunities, how many civilians did I actually kill? I'll admit to putting some in danger for the sake of a proper test, but do you really think it was beyond my ability to simply bomb a hospital to draw one of you out? Not that I expect it'll change your mind of course."
Ayako Hasekawa     Ayako nods her head slowly and smiles faintly at the flat tone Weiss answers her with. "I see." She looks over to the figure and courtsies politely in response to her greeting. "Nice to meet you, Vert. I'm a Water Spirit, named Ayako Hasekawa. Please call me Ayako." Followed by a cheerful smile. Wasn't she upset just a moment ago? Because of 'cheating'?

    Her head inclines to the side gently as she listens to Vert... and then how Weiss reacts to Vert. Ayako's eyes just blink slowly. "Just... doing your function... huh...?" And her amber gaze moves off to the side.
Nozomi Houken     Nozomi's response is simple.

    Her left gauntlet fires. The shot is aimed right over Vert's shoulder. Close enough to feel the warmth of it going by.

    The video flashes in front of her face again. This time it lasts only a second or so.
Staren     Staren sighs. The cat's out of the bag now. "You wouldn't understand. Even so, you admit you were dealing with unpredictables. You speak as if you had total control over the situation at one moment, while admitting you didn't the next. But it doesn't matter, does it? If people died, would you care? ...If /you/ ceased to exist, would you care?"

    She won't volunteer the information to confirm his plan will work. And Nozomi's making threatening attacks. Oh well, time to try it anyway.

    <<Eureka. Rotate her into a synthmorph.>>

    He's hoping, by switching from Zwei's crazy quantum thing that he barely understands, to a concrete, /embodied/ mind, he can trap and capture part of this Armiger. It's a longshot, but the potential payoff...
Riva Banari Riva listens to WORDS. She waits and allows Vert to finish. She stands there, looking contemplative for a bit as she thinks about things. Riva sighs for a moment, giving Arthur a SIGNIFICANT LOOK, before looking back to Vert. "You know, there's a lot of ways we could do this productively." She winces as Nozomi fires, and then continues, because Vert isn't even going to react to this. "If you worked with the Union, maybe you could choose to use your function in conjunction with them in order to help build infrastructure, eliminate hunger, and make life better for innumerable species. If that's what you want to do in order to give your life meaning, then work with us instead of going hauling off. Wouldn't that be way more efficient?"
Abstractum.Net     Eureka sends back a buzzing error over their connection. <<Cannot execute Rotation. The subject concept is out of physical range.>> It says, in an almost automated way. Staren can see it glance over to Zwei. <<It would seem the Zwei unit meant it when they said this is not its 'real' body. This is a projected concept expression, like one limb of the whole, not the concept itself. I expect an entanglement-based remote body.>>
Staren     Staren mentally frowns. <<That's what I thought, but I was hoping you could Rotate such a thing. Guess I've been without you too long, getting a bit rusty at remembering how to properly use you. Any way we can track down such an entity?>>
Arthur Lowell     Arthur frowns, rather intensely. "You didn't answer. Sure said a hell of a lot about the past. Great stuff for me to know, sure. Told me what you did, told me why you did it. But you didn't answer." He crosses his arms. His body is humming with aggressive power. "Gonna ask again. Not 'why did you do it', or 'what did you do'. What are you gonna do? Where do you go from here? You got the data. What are you planning on /doing/? Say you wanna unify, reorganize, uplift, restructure, all that stuff. Tell me what you're gonna /do/."

    The implicit, unspoken element of this statement is, 'are you going to do something that will make me fight you'. He seems to hold no grudge for trying to kill him. But all of his concerns are about whether or not the end goal here is something he can leave alone.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone was useful? She was very green far as Elites go and she knows it. She keeps her face a neutrl mask she needs to think she needs to not get angry at this point she has to keep control she's got her friend and Overclock at her back. Though she does not understand just how /far/ Overclock could go in the name of helping it and that someday could be a problem in and of it self. For now however she's going to do the smar things and listen. Some people are making good pitches and there's information to be gathered, she's thankful that her synathic nature leaves her not bound to her bioloogtical drives that might have had her seeing red more than she alread is.

"So my life was nothing more than recon data for you, I see. My friend is right, just why did you do it? What do you want out of it? Tell us what you want to do. Maybe we cna better understand why you did this."
Zwei     Predictably, Vert doesn't react to Nozomi's gunfire. Again, she doesn't seem to be afraid simply out of a lack of stake in the situation rather than any feeling that the girl is beneath her. It might even be possible that she can't even feel fear, but it's more likely that she doesn't particularly care whether the body she's using to talk is trashed, since it can't be terribly high-spec. "Nice to meet you too, Ayako." comes the return smile, though perhaps less cheerful than the water spirit's own.

    "I think you gravely misunderstand my position." she says to Staren and Riva. "As much as Zwei likes to pretend to be just like any other organic or synthetic person, neither of us are anything like you. The only way I can interact with you at all is by having my psychology filtered through a limited AI, and that AI was designed for a specific purpose. I can only care if people die insofar as it serves or conflicts with my line of duty. I literally can't feel any kind of moral or empathetic attachment to other species. It's beyond the ability of this incarnation. Likewise, I can't accept any authority other than that of the Collective. Working underneath someone else runs against the fiber of my present being. I'll go irrevocably insane if I try to fit in with the rest of you and do only what you'll allow me. I don't expect you to like it, and I don't expect you to understand, but this is something I have to do. Asking me not to do it is like me asking you to go the rest of your lives without ever speaking to anyone."

    She affects a vexed sigh at Arthur's and Kotone's continued questions. " My function is to reclaim planets with potentially beneficial civilizations, excising the parts that are detrimental or unnecessary. I'll find a world on its last legs, I'll find a piece of it worth saving, and I'll rebuild everything else around it, resolving or neutralizing anything in the way. If you approve of what I do, that's an incidental bonus for me. If you disapprove, I'll oppose you with military force. It's that simple."
Abstractum.Net     <<Unknown.>> Eureka says to Staren. <<The most I could suggest would be examining the entangled particle or particles used for the control module. If we want to do that, I'd recommend killing this body and performing an autopsy on it. Vivisection is an option, but I doubt she would comply.>> Just no hesitation there, not one bit.
Staren     Staren nods a little. "Yeah. It is that simple. So, you're telling us all this in the hopes that we'll decide our goals align enough to leave you alone. Because you're prepared to fight us with military force already..." He thinks about that. What preparations does /Vert/ have ready, if within seconds of talking to it, /he/ was planning to destroy it?

    Of course, it says it's planning to help civilizations. But without putting sufficient weight on people... no, any civilization /it/ builds will /not/ be a good thing.

    <<Can you jam it? I doubt we can capture this body otherwise. ...It might even be rigged to self-destruct like the armas. Damn. Less likely to do so if the connection simply stops, than if violently comprimised. You might need to be able to jam Zwei, too, if they try to interfere. Not sure which side they'll take, here.>>
Nozomi Houken     For the time being, Nozomi remains utterly silent; still keeping her gauntlet aimed at Vert, still resting the EM Zanbatou on her shoulder.

    She's said all she needs to.
Ayako Hasekawa     Ayako's amber gaze returns to Vert when she begins to say that she's interacting using her psychology through a limited AI. And then moves back towards Zwei. "Oh, I don't know... I might understand both of your positions... at least just a little." She shakes her head slowly.

    She then smiles softly at Vert. "I understand that you're taling about yourself at the present, but..." Ayako stretches her arms upwards and winks. "Oh, I don't know. Exposure to the Multiverse might end up changing you in ways you might not expect." Her amber eyes go back off away from everyone else. "Besides... you can stop yourself from doing a lot of things for the sake of something else... especially if that something else is something you find worth in."
Staren     After Ayako pleads her case and demonstrates profound ignorance of what it means for a mind to /not be programmed with the same psychology as a person/, to be /truly alien/, Staren wonders: <<Do you think there might be a chance of that, when we find Vert? Could we change its concept, to become a person like us?>>
Abstractum.Net     <<Unlikely that I can jam it.>> Eureka replies again to Staren. <<Or, rather, that I can do so while sustaining the entanglement in any informative way.>> Then a lengthy pause. <<I cannot state the viability of that effort using the information accessible to me. It would not be Rotation. It would be something very different.>>
Riva Banari Riva sighs. "Maybe you're right. But if you are right, Vert, then you're setting yourself up in a dead-end position. Is that what you really want? You're in a place where you've exceeded the limits of your original design specifications. IF you continue to hold to them you're going to either go insane from boredom, or you're going to do something that will inevitably get people on your case. You have to find a way to compromise here. We're willing to work with you, but you have to be the person to find a way to do justice to your creation and adapt to a new circumstance."

She shakes her head. "I don't want this to get any worse."
Staren     <<Hmm. I don't see how we can see it in /action/. But by getting our hands on a deactivated entanglement communicator and analyzing it, we might learn what we need to track it in future encounters. I can't think of a better plan. ...Although, that might tip it off that we will move against it. But it might be planning to move against us /anyway/.>> Staren considers this. <<The cat won't stay in the bag for long. It will probably be watching us in other ways. At least if we understand the technology, we can detect its agents.>>
Arthur Lowell     "Fuckin' wonderful, you're the Sid Meier to Zwei's Hideki Kamiya." Arthur says, with a tone of soft frustration behind the jokes. He'll wait for the others to speak their piece. He won't judge them in any particular way, and will generally avoid any discussion of their points of intimidation or their points of redemption. And when it's done, he steps forward/ "That sure does sound great, and it tells me basically nothing, fantastic. So hey, maybe it'll be fantastic. Maybe nearly killing me will give you a ton of insight into utopian socioeconomics or some shit, but the way I see it, you're probably getting this data so that you can hold off Elites when your shit inevitably turns out to be completely inhumane and aggros so many heroes your head-joint will wear out from all the spinning, Enough we'll hate it all and take you on. 'Cause otherwise, why bother, right? And, you know, with all those filters, makes me think you probably can't even be mad at us, I bet."

    "That means, if my guess is wrong, this won't matter, 'cause, no hard feelings right? And if it's right, this is the right way to go. All I know is it sure makes me feel pretty goddamn good. So here's what's what. I'll do this, and then I'll decide what I think of the world you build." He says, without explaining what he actually intends to do. And then he does it: He winds up a heavy, brutal punch powered by his Echeladder's strength, meant to slam upwards into the gut. There's several possibilities: It might punch right through low-quality robot, blast a mid-quality robot away enough to escape, or mildly damage the shield on a high-quality robot, assuming it even lands in the first place, but the gesture will just make Arthur feel better about all this in general.
Staren     As soon as Arthur either hits or misses, Staren mentally shouts, <<NOW!>> It wouldn't do to have Vert trigger her own self-destruct or escape!
Abstractum.Net     One more Rotation. This is getting a little exhausting for Eureka, but it dutifully attempts to rotate Staren's jamming signal into MINOR SUBATOMIC DISALIGNMENT that might unpeel an entangled pair from each other and prevent this... But being much, much farther from the source, and based on a properly dedicated egocasting interface, that might not actually function enough.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa listens and starts to wonder if this thing is just a drone and not actually aware. IT wouldn't shock her if this was the case but she does not voice this she watches she listens and her face gives nothing away she needs to figure out what to do.

She actually gets Arthur's ref and that helps put things in focus for her on this she nods in agreement with Arthur.
Zwei     Vert actually smiles a little forlornly at Ayako, as if she wishes she could believe her. "I don't have anything else. After a thousand years of this, it's still the only thing I can find meaning in." To Staren: "I'm telling you partly because I don't see a reason not to. There's no strategic advantage you can gain from anything I've told you so far, and if it helps you contextualize what I do later in a positive way, that only benefits me." To Riva: "I haven't exceeded anything. Until such a time as someone comes back for me, I'll be this way forever. Don't get me wrong. I'm not lamenting what I was meant to do, merely that it has lasted nine hundred years longer than it should have. If people 'get on my case' then I don't have any reason to complain. At the very least, it gives me something meaningful to do." And finally to Arthur: "You're correct and incorrect. You're right in that obviously I've studied you as as to be able to deal with Elites by force in the future. You're wrong in assuming that all Elites are heroes. Whether or not what I eventually do occurs to you as worthy of praise or condemnation, someone will inevitably oppose it. It's simply human nature; that even someone advocating world peace can be assassinated by someone with a differing view."

    As it turns out, Vert's puppet body isn't built like Weiss at all. Her real body is certainly much more formidable, but the quality of the one serving as a mouthpiece isn't built to military specifications. Arthur's fist goes right through its midsection with a squealing crunch, leaving him up to the elbow in hot, jagged metal. Finally, Vert smiles with the first genuine look she's worn since meeting. "I'll allow you this one time, since I feel like I've earned it. Try it again though, I'll pull you apart~" With that, the puppet body explodes; not as powerful as a dedicated suicide charge, but enough that being hit in the face with the resulting heat and shrapnel will be very unpleasant. The fragments left over predictably turn to ash, leaving a vaguely bitter smell in the room.

    Turning back to look at Zwei, it has slipped so thoroughly into its own thoughts that it has forgotten to control its expressions. For the first time ever, Weiss is scowling.
Staren     "Aww, DAMMIT!" It exploded too soon. That'll teach Staren to wait and let the hot-blooded heroes vent their frustrations. And of COURSE it turns to Ash. "'Feels like she's earned it'. Hmph. Fake. Trying to decieve us." He whirls on Weiss, and raises a finger. "This whole keeping technology away from us thing stops now. This rogue Armiger is a threat to the Multiverse. It's a threat to us, it's a threat to our friends, it's a threat to innocent bystanders. Tell us how to track it down."
Arthur Lowell     And there's both arms blistered and more of the torso torn up. Arthur suffers a few lacerations around the face now. Jesus he's just the kind of guy who drinks down healpotions constantly, isn't he? He also seems to have broken portions of his hand doing that.

    He turns around, pulling chunks of carbon shrapnel out of his body. "Don't think that's how it works, Staren." he says. "Remember the filters. Got rules and all." He does give them a look, a judging sort of look, but what judgement he's made isn't entirely clear. Tossing one jagged shard to the ground as if to punctuate his point, he says, "Don't take it hard, Ayako. Can't change forever. Sometimes you can't change to begin with. It's not universal. Just 'cause you don't have to wind these guys up anymore doesn't mean the gears are gonna move around or get zen 'cause they ran longer. They're people, but some rules you can't break."

    Pulling out one more piece of shrapnel with a small spurt of blood, Arthur grimaces intently and makes a disgusted noise. "Alright." He says. "We're done here. Let's go."

    Gate open now, and he'll leave through it. Others can too!
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa says "This is the attuide of someone whose never sutfered a true loss before. We're going to have to make ready to change that, and I'm going t have to contiune to train on this."

She looks to Staren and she says something that might sound strange given her frustations with Zwei.

"Staren enough, she is helping us directly I been thinking and a lot of this tech I mean look at the scope of this place and how it could be abused, we need to consider that and given Zwei's the same sort of being as that one? She's be letting lose tech that could be used to /kill/ her. Look Zwei? Can you track her?"

She looks to Ayoko for a moment and frowns a little bit.

"Hey your a better person I think than me Ayako. I'm not sure if anything can be done."

Kotone had damped her pain recepteds a bit ago and turns thme back on and now notice ya she's hurting she dighs and she heads for Arthur's gate.

"I also got the worst feeling she's just the first of many."
Ayako Hasekawa     Ayako returns a gentle smile to Vert. "Only a thousand years? You're hoping for too much too soon, I-" And then Arthur fist communicates with Vert in a way that only Arthur's fist can. She blinks her eyes quickly, the words caught in her mouth.

    And then, she notices something. Vert's smile before she self-destructs. After all, the Water Spirit doesn't have much in the way of emotions herself. Most of what she has is emulated ones pulled from observing humans for so long. Said observation is very good at catching little things like that. Combined with Vert's words- "...Maybe you did find something. But aren't aware of it yet." She shakes her head quickly and heads over to Arthur to heal him! He did just take a self-destruct to the face and all!

    As she works on healing Arthur, Ayako's gaze turns towards Weiss. "Weiss? What's wrong? You have a scary look on your face."
Zwei     "What, do you think I have her fucking phone number or something?" Weiss snaps at Staren. "Like I can just ring her up and say 'Hey Vert! Do you wanna hang out this Saturday? Cool! See you then!'. Do you think we're all some kind of hivemind or something? We're people you shithead. She's not 'rogue' like some kind of evil AI from some garbage 21st century novel." The degree of hostility in Zwei's choice of language is astonishing, especially coming from the body that is specifically meant to be socially minded. Whatever it is thinking right now is utterly impossible to tell, other than that it utterly loathes /something/ about what had just happened. The incomprehensible aggression fades quickly however, mostly in response to Ayako's voice. Weiss' expression and voice regain a more neutral tone.

    "She could be anywhere in an entire galaxy, if she's even in this one at all, and even then only if she hasn't actually moved her fleet to somewhere in the multiverse. Armigers are specifically so autonomous so enemies can't try to track them down and ambush them. They only ever appear with an overwhelming advantage. Kotone is also right in that other Armigers out there could have pre-existing relationships with her. If she runs off on her own and gets killed, that's her own fault, but if I orchestrate some kind of scheme that presents a threat to the Collective as a whole, I'll potentially have thousands of Armigers after my head if they're still in close contact. Arthur is even more correct in saying that I am physically unable to give out these things to anyone who asks. Even if I wasn't conditioned to the same degree, I still have hardcoded placeholders that will prevent me from using my bodies if I flagrantly go against protocol."
Staren     Staren is slightly taken aback... he's never seen Zwei /angry/ before. After listening, he nods, flipping from angry to a semblance of calm. "You're right, I'm sorry. I'll find another way to track them. When I've had time to cool down and think, if the technology your comms use is available for trade, let me know." He looks Weiss over, briefly, then turns and walks through Arthur's gate.

    Staren gives Eureka an affectionate pat on the lower arm. <<Thank you for your help today. I enjoyed working with you again.>>