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Zwei     Considering the crew is let into orbital descent the same way they had been over a week ago, there's the question of whether the narrow safe-corridor through Earth's exo-atmospheric blockade is opening and closing at the behest of the Reclaimers down below, and thus how long it'll go before someone notices it, or whether the flyby hacking was done once on the way down and will remain for a certain length of time, and thus just how long they actually have. It's a worrying one, but perhaps not worth the trouble when there's already so much in store, judging by the state of affairs on the ground.

    Almost the entire population of the outpost has been emptied out, leaving only a skeleton crew behind to monitor and operate the defenses if need be in absence of human guards. The task force is split up between the massive, eighteen wheeled rovers that had been parked outside before, carrying huge piles of weapons and equipments up the vast boarding ramps at their rear and settling into the armoured cockpits. Two people have resleeved into reaper morphs, which means they've downloaded their consciousness into rare, expensive and illegal, military-grade bodies like giant, disc-shaped legged tanks, which apparently have jet thrusters as well on this model.

    Anthony and one of his personal guard have reserved one of the rovers specifically for the off-worlders, likely wanting to keep an eye on them all at once rather than spreading them across the entire brigade when they get other ideas. The man himself is sealed in the driver's cabin, but someone assures them that the tiny locator chips handed to each person come from him, which are little more than sequin sized pieces of transparent sapphire with an adhesive layer and a tiny, pulsing light that gives a compass direction and a sense of hot-cold.

    Stepping out of the miraculous green-zone in the middle of the unnatural, ceramic jungle is less awful inside of a vehicle of some description, since nobody has to smell the stench of chemical rot or feel the hot, dusty air on their skin. Clearing the faux forest and entering the barren, windswept wastes means the torture on the shocks ceases, but gives the lovely view of an out-of-control grassland fire happening miles off in the other direction, and an encroaching, two mile high wall of swirling grey sand, shot through with lightning like a thundercloud.
Nozomi Houken     Parked in the back of the Offworldermobile are a now-familiar schoolgirl and her equally familiar robot tiger. He takes up a fair bit of room, but one almost gets the impression that this is at least partially by his own intention. He might curl up a bit tighter, but he is cat. Also, Nozomi needs room for herself.

    She's also procured for herself one of those paper surgical masks, apparently using it to filter the worst of this world's stench. It probably helps a little! Maybe. Possibly.
Starbound Flotilla     The Starbound Flotilla's Core Fleet is here! They've come suited up in their near top of the line survival and combat gear, DURASTEEL SEMI-POWERED ARMOR, mostly because the products of their Spellsword Project are currently under repair. Moonfin, the fishman, is in elaborate full-body durasteel armor that looks like a powered cross between a diving suit and a samurai's armor. Biteblade, the humanoid plant, is in durasteel plating with elaborately carved wood and bone ornaments over glowing powered components. Pavo the bird-girl wears a pirate-aesthetic set of mesoamerican-style armor, with bands of energized fabric linking the pieces and powering them. Albert the monkey-man is wearing elaborate dystopian commando armor reconstructed with a 'rebel spy' aesthetic: A sleeker faceplate, a slimmer form, and a more chaotic design that integrates thin, resilient plates of durasteel. George (just plain human) wears a set of futuristic EVA-combat and exploration armor in a suit that glows a gentle blue at the faceplate. Seft, the robotic Flotilla member, is wearing full-on medieval knight armor with a soft energized glow below the plates on her body, and especially around the eyes.

    The Flotilla has all attached the chips to their Matter Manipulators, which seem to have slots for them, somehow! Seft operates a sensor suite in the vehicle, but also doubles as a convenient holoprojector, using her ROBOT EYES to provide a wireframe mesh in the air of the current data they have, both mapped from above and based on their sensors. Albert's voice provides the briefing while they get closer and closer to the DC area.

    "An unknown third party backer assisting the Reclaimers has requested the retrieval of an unknown objective in the DC area. We are here to locate the objective, assess its nature, and retrieve it." He says. This isn't entirely true. They're also here to destroy it if it's very dangerous, and try to determine the true identity and intentions of the third party. But Anthony is in the front, so they don't quite say that.

    "There are various dangers between us and the objective. Nanohazards, biohazards, cognitohazards, dangerous military hardware." He grunts a heavy, apelike grunt. "You will remain vigilant for every hazard that you can conceive of and as many possible that you cannot. This way, we will survive the excursion, retrieve our objective, and claim our rewards. Use your locator chip to determine its current state and location. Scout and sustain a clear path to and from the objective. That is our goal."

    The Flotilla will immediately move out in a well-practiced deployment as soon as necessary.
Staren     Staren doesn't bring the giant robot this time. For all he knows, they're going to end up exploring an underground complex, and no way is he leaving his robot outside where it might get hacked by killbots.

    He is, however, himself sleeving into a robot. No reaper, it's humanoid, and human-sized... but it's super-strong and equipped with weapons and armor and internal structural materials from his homeworld, where technological advancement was largely focused on military use... At a glance, he just looks like an armored human (well, except for the ears and tail...), but sensors should be able to tell the truth.

    Since he doesn't have to worry about stench, toxins, or disease, his brief stint outside the vehicles is somewhat less unpleasant than others'. Familiar faces are nodded to, and he takes up a position at the front where he can see out the windshield. "So, that weird... mechanical forest thing that we just drove through, /wasn't/ full of dangerous nanites that will attack the vehicle? Or are our defenses good enough that we can drive through it safely anyway?"
Kyra Hyral     Back out in the field after the attack on the moonbase already, Kyra was a girl intent on moving forward. Sparing little time to reflect, she pushed herself to be here even though the last time she came here with the Flotilla, she found herself completely lost by the high science. It was almost discouraging but rather than letting it repel her, she tags along again with the strong hope of slowly getting how things work on this world through exposure.

    Knowing that they're heading into dangerous territory, Kyra's opted for the Tomoyo-created outfit which affords her pants and a hoodie lined with all sorts of pockets on the inside. She has her goggles with her and a set of fingerless gloves on to protect her hands. A loadout of chemicals that is a mixture of healing items and mostly explosives has been dragged with her today, carefully arranged in bandoliers, pouches, and pockets. Over her back is the CURE-ALL, held to her by a shoulder strap. Combined, her gear remains quite a bit but Kyra moves like she's grown used to carrying massive amounts of stuff around.

    Kyra places the locator chip behind her ear. While riding on the vehicle, she's taken the CURE-ALL off her back and set it on her lap in front of her.

    "I'm going to drop the usual 'we shouldn't split up' deal but I'll amend it into 'we shouldn't split up into too small of groups out here' since we don't know what kind of threats we'll run into." Kyra suggests.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa has been left wondering about eveyrthing and is once more here. The young woman seems to have a lot on her mind as she thinks about this dead world, which might live. Should they be able to clear the cancer that infests it out. She's armed and ready for things, wlel as much as she can be. She looks to the gear she's got and she ponders for a moment with the locator. She seems quieter than normal as she listnes, she recalls her short talk with Nathan Hall eariler about dangerous Memes.

"I'm with Kyra on this, we don't split up and keep watch on everyone else for any odd behaviour. Also for the love of God, do not directly jack into anything we find."
Ark Line "Woah."

Ark Line, Hero of the People [He Didn't Kill] hangs out in the Flotilla's truck, gazing out into the distance. He's fixated on the dust storm and the distant grassland fires, both of which are things he just frankly has never seen before. His world is a hole, but it's a step beyond this in unliveability... well, depending on who you ask.

Wearing light, environmentally-sealed armor normally designed for run-of-the-mill humans, Ark is currently a uniformly steel-grey figure staring in wide, amber-eyed awe at everything they pass. There's some thin mesh and some kind of plating on it to resist damage, but it looks more like milspec utility wear than combat gear. He does carry a gauss pistol and some kind of advanced personal defense weapon on the exterior of his armor, along with what looks like a folded Chinese war fan made of some kind of bone.

"Are you seeing this? This is /intense/!" Ark leans in as if he can get a closer look from within the vehicle.

Next to him, similarly dressed but armed with a pistol and a bag full of useful scientific gear, a thinner, older, less openly-enthusiastic man sits and waits. He's been quietly but intensely attentive to the briefing, and looks like he's been taking notes on a tablet computer, though doing it with a style and handwriting that's a little awkward. Maybe he's not used to it.

Caster shushes Ark while other people say important things. Ark shoots him a dirty look but quiets down, and Caster remarks, "Neither of us possess the necessary cybernetic implants to make that mistake." He pauses a beat. "Are hostile nanotechnological hazards expected, and are we equipped to defeat them?"
Rory White     When Rory decided to come, she ended up resleeving back into her Synth and leaving the Menton behind on the Cognizant Odyssey, which is docked to Mitre Station and currently being gaga'd at by lots of Argonauts who are talking with a beta fork and getting up to speed on things.

    The 'true' Rory White's situated with the core Flotilla members. She's carrying several weapons mounted to hardpoints on her skintight TRON-styled combat armor. A half-dozen saucers and other things are tucked into a backpack, and she's carrying an Ecto with the locator chip equipped. Unseen but present are a host of security systems, from nanophages to antivirus software. Why carry the ecto? It is NOT CONNECTED at all to her Personal Area Network, and even that's been set to reject EVERY connection attempt offhandedly. She's taking as few chances as possible.

    "My purpose in the team shoudl be clear by now. Surveillance and medical support. And beware of EVERYTHING. Even the clouds."
Zwei     Apparently (well, predictably) able to hear the conversation going on in the cabin, Anthony turns on the intercom, interjecting into the end of Albert's speech once questions have been asked. "If you're wondering where the disassemblers are, look at the window to your left." He's clearly indicating the gargantuan, electrified sandstorm brewing on the horizon. "Thirty thousand tons of airborne nanomachines, drawing ambient electromagnetic energy in and stripping down every solid object they come across. They mostly ride the wind currents, so they don't get into the solar farms. Those forests we just passed. They /will/ choke off our exit if we're not in and out in under six hours however, and it'll take them all night to pass." Reassuring news. "We're equipped with the best sensors possible, but on that kind of time limit, we probably won't be able to pick up everything. I fully expect fully half of this task force to die." It is said with the casual air of someone who has died dozens of times before, perhaps forgetting off-worlders don't have that luxury, or else simply assuming they do as well.

    One of the rovers to the right swerves sharply to avoid going between a mysteriously intact pair of telephone poles, the drones following behind it failing to follow suit and flying out the other side in a spray of pieces like a neatly sliced orange from their high velocity trip through monowire. Another rover turns sharply to avoid going through a line of what what appear to be bushes, four of its left side tires getting shredded down nearly to the axle in the process, causing it to gradually fall behind. The reaper morphs abruptly peel off as something comes up on the sensor module Seft operates. High speed aerial contacts approaching from both flanks as the convoy closes the distance to the city. The flying tanks choose only one side to break through, which all of the drivers follow, threading the needle down the closing jaws of the formations only just visible by the flashes of light and the delayed booms that can be seen in the sky as the Reclaimers engage.

    They don't so much as slow down as they hit the city, bumping heavily over toll booths, broken bridges, and shell craters. One would expect the post apocalyptic highways the convoy traverses, drowned in sand and dust, to be littered with the wrecks of abandoned cars, but every vehicle seems to have been stripped down to the tires and windows left lying in the road, crunching under the wheels of the rovers. Breaking into the city limits themselves is even more eerie, as there appears to be almost no evidence of combat. The buildings have turned into crumbled, dilapidated, grey and brown hulks on their own through age and nanoswarms picking over them, rather than having been blown to pieces by heavy artillery. It seems strange for a major military center to have seen such little action.

    Ten years ago anyways. Nowdays the place is crawling with warbots. The sensors light up all over as dozens of machines wake up from sleep mode every couple of blocks, the streets steadily filling with the hum of rotors, the roar of engines and the stomping of heavy feet. Anthony seems to be intent on barreling straight through it, tires squealing as he sharply rounds each corner, the guard operating the gun turrets on the roof. It isn't long before shapes come into view from behind, announced by the deafening thumping of the railguns on the roof. A motley horde of flying drones like miniature UAVs, gun skiffs, and more organic, dragonfly-like shapes preceed a lumbering wave of quadrupedal hunters like something out of a Boston Dynamics nightmare and the two-storey hulks of a pair of giant, humanoid, four armed robots, chases the rover like rabid dogs after a mail truck, homing in on it from all directions seemingly without any kind of strategy or higher intelligence, filling the streets like something from a zombie movie.

    "If you're going to do something, start doing it now! We're ten kilometers out and they're going to start shooting at any second!"
Nozomi Houken     "D-don't say things like that," Nozomi says in response to Anthony, with a tone surprisingly firm for her. "Not all of us can... we aren't all able to just make copies of ourselves. We only get one death." She actually seems slightly offended he'd take death so lightly.

    But it's a wild, fast-paced, dangerous ride, and for the rest of it Nozomi looks more than a little worried. Taiga, on the other hand, seems as calm as ever; simply coming up on all fours, stretching in a surprisingly lifelike movement, and sauntering over to the rear ramp. "Please open the rear exit. I am curious to see how their defenses will respond to magic-based energy projectiles."

    And true to his word, as soon as someone gets the ramp for him, Taiga's twin shoulder cannons begin tracking and firing independently, each picking a target to unload a barrage of yellow energy shots towards.
Staren     The /first/ time the aerial warbots show up, Staren's already pulling a seeker rifle from his bag and hurrying to a door, but they're blown up by allies.

    "We're tougher than you think. We'll make it out of here." He replies to the comment that half of them will die.

    Once it's clear that the warbots are amassing again... He runs to a hatch, and climbs up onto the roof. Looking at the amassed robots, he rethinks his plan to use the rifle. Instead, his shoulder launchers lift into position, and unload all six missiles into the mechanical crowd. Plasma warhead mini-missiles, his favorite kind of missile! Superheating a 15' radius to ionize the air and burn anything less than advanced, military-grade materials to ash. Hopefully, they'll at least do a lot of damage to killbots, too...
Kyra Hyral     "Yeah." Kyra chimes in, staring out the window in horror as she looks at the gigantic cloud off in the distance. "Some of us can't just resleeve into invincible robot bodies." she adds to Nozomi's interjection. "If things were to go my way I'd make sure nobody died though I don't think that's feasible. Just let me stick with the people that definitely don't respawn."

    She looks a little unnerved now, bothered that her nature clearly makes her and a number of other people complete liabilities here. Her discomfort only grows as she sees the kind of response their entry into the city has garnered. "...that is an insane amount of killbots." she says with dismay.

    Leaving the cure-all behind on her seat, Kyra climbs over to one of the hatches. She slips her goggles on over her eyes before opening up the hatch and peeking out. Sure, she could throw explosives but part of her feels that her napalm would be like throwing popcorn at a tank and a waste of material. Instead, she opts for calling on white magic, immediately breaking out the metaphorical big guns and going for one of her very few offensive spells. "Holy!" She starts dropping them continuously, small 'novas' of white magic blossoming amongst the hordes of robots as the transport moves.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa says "Yes, and we have defence nanites. If you haven't been given them yer we can give you them before we get out. We are armed as best we can be, Ark. I would be lying to say if things were full proof here. This thing did drive everyone off this planet."

Kotone's own network is offline for now too. She's forcibly shut it off and physically had the link turned off. She doesn't want to risk something tricking it on and making her think it's off, right? Kotone is sticking with the Core Fleet to because this is dangerous she knows it. She listens to how casual their native comrade is.

"That's foremost on my mind, we can't cheat death like you do where I'm from."

Then things go belly up for some of their native comrades, Kotone doesn't even think about it much but crosses herself without even thinking about it. Any help her allies? Divine? They are going to need every bit of it to get through this nightmare of technology.

Kotone was carrying a number of alien grenades thanks to XCOM hopefully she'd have some data for Shen on how these high powered alien explosives worked.

She holds the laser rifle in hand now as she's bracing herself she knows things are about to get messy perhaps more so.

"I'll cover you."

% She'll follow Taiga and move to give him any covering fire she can to help him make use of his own magic. She looks for anything she might be able to pick off and she even throws the odd armed grenade out after the horrors chasing them. She's going to trust in her friends right now such as Kyra's ability to keep everyone together, and thencomes the holy nuke, okay she didn't know her friend could do that.
Rory White     "Hard as it might seem to believe, Mr. Cereza, this crew has never died once. And we've been through some extremely trying situations! Even ones you would never imagine happening in our solar system. Granted, none of them have involved near the level of unusual hazards as Earth..." But she's less worried than originally, at least?

    Well all traces of bravery vanish when the ground starts thumping UNUSUALLY. The moment she has a moment she tosses one of her six saucers and slaps it against the rover for a magnetic seal. In this way she stays safely inside but has an external view!

    The little thing uses all its sensors to build a picture of how many things are coming, where they are, and accurate firing solutions for anyone able to tap into Rory's tactical network!

    "...Good luck, everyone. I'll be ready!"
Starbound Flotilla     "Half of us gonna die, eh?" Pavo says, jauntily, hefting her stolen Laser RCW -- a large energy assault rifle of sorts -- in both hands out of her Matter Manipulator. "We best start flippin' our coins." Seft takes up the Pew Pew, her looted laser pistol, Biteblade draws her futuristic Railgun Bow, and Albert draws his heavy grenade launcher. All four line up at the back of the vehicle as the ramp goes down.

    "Fire at will." Albert says, vehemently, grabbing whatever's conveniently nearby to grip and steady himself, as the others do -- except Biteblade, who just doesn't fall down, /somehow/ -- and all four open fire. Albert focuses his fire on the swarms of smaller groups, while the three others immediately begin blasting at the giant humanoid monsters with waves of light and heavy steel bolts, intending to lance through them with their energy weapons and their railgun slugs. Going right for the legs. All they need to do is prevent the chase.
Ark Line Caster frowns when the 'half of you will die' estimate goes out. He eyes Kotone for a moment, and then nods. "Thank you. That is all I wished to know."

Ark is looking back towards the front end of the vehicle when Caster turns towards him. When he glances back, he spots a look of disapproval and a fair amount of disbelief on the Servant's face. Ark shrugs a shoulder. "Hey, you wanted to come. Don't get mad just because there's a little... enormous, flesh-rending nanostorm out there."

"No," Caster says, composing himself, "I simply must confess my surprise at the sheer number and variety of killing machines activating along the exterior."

Ark looks towards a window. He draws his automatic weapon, sparing another glance at Caster before squinting at the horde of death robots. "Sooo," he asides, "don't suppose you want to make this really easy? You could just --"

"The resulting radiation pulse may draw more attention than we already have," Caster says. "Besides the necessary draw on your Grain reserve, we may damage the objective in the blast." He folds his hands on his lap. "I'm sure you have it handled."

Ark spends a couple precious seconds with a flatly disapproving stare directed at his so-called Servant. He feels it is worth it.

Then, he pops the window. Ark raises his gauss gun, lining up shots on flying units as they come into his line of sight. Armor-piercing rounds or not, he's uncertain if he can make a serious dent... so he chooses to exercise another piece of equipment. Ark puts his finger on the trigger. An amber glow traces the edges of the bone fan affixed to his suit. His eyes become momentarily luminescent. "Correct Future!"

The gun fires, an almost electric flicker of the same amber light accompanying each short burst. While nominally anti-personnel rounds rated for use against light vehicles, the amount of force they strike with is more comparable to boulders being slung through the sky at much higher velocity. Ark clenches his teeth, struggling to handle the kickback as the compensation mechanisms in the weapon fail to do their job. All that extra power is definitely causing some real kickback on a weapon that doesn't normally have it.
Zwei     "Hm." Is all Anthony has to offer over the intercom as the rover vaults half of an upraised bridge, sails through the air, and lands hard enough on the other side to crumple a manhole cover under the wheels. Had the fact that his passengers don't have backups waiting for them honestly not occurred to him? At the very least, he seems determined not to die himself, because the driving that ensues as the killbot swarm makes its presence known is nothing less than the kind of absurd that totally and completely incapacitates someone with even the slightest degree of motion sickness. He reacts not so much to the sensors as what appears to be an ingrained knowledge of his enemy's behaviour, probably learned through trial and error several times by now. He anticipates the moment they arrive at a collective firing solution and close to optimum range, at which he immediately drives the rover off of the side of an overpass and onto the road below mere moments before the bridge is annihilated by a coordinated strike from each of the parallel and perpendicular highways.

    Only seconds after the hatches pop open, the robotic entourage returns fire, broadcasting a deafening wave of electronic whines and howls before unloading their collective arsenal. High calibre bullets and hypervelocity slugs spang and rattle against the armoured vehicle's exterior, ripping off chunks of plating and spalling fragments into the cabin. Incandescent bolts of plasma fire and the hissing, invisible trails of lasers and particle beams scorch off sections of ablative defenses with explosive clouds of vapourized metal. Half of the vehicle's protection is whittled away in instants, just before Anthony swerves a shrieking cloud of seeker missiles.

    The Elites inside opening up into the densely packed crowd is even more devastating. With such numbers and on such tight roads, forced to pursue at top speed straight ahead, there's little the enemy can do to mitigate the fire that comes their way. The fliers can dodge and weave to some capacity, but Taiga's cannons pop them out of the sky one after the other, followed by a second wave of them going down under the screen of plasma mini-missiles that incinerates the replacements. The ground pounders, clustered shoulder to shoulder, wind up taking each other out as the explosive Holies catch several of them at a time in each radius, compounded by XCOM's alien grenades causing them to tumble into each other. Coordinated by Rory's network, the Starbounders are able to make mincemeat out of the hordes that pour in from the adjoining streets, attempting to swell their ranks. For a while it seems as if their weapons are having no real effect on the warbots, simply sprinting face first into the barrage while firing all four of their guns in return, but a solid couple of minutes of shooting finally causes the left leg of the leader to blow out from under it, and send it crashing into the one behind it. The rover rattles and rumbles under the sheer recoil Ark is generating with each blast of what is ostensibly a handgun, causing the course corrective software to go into overdrive to stay on the road, but he is rewarded by the blossoming fireball of munitions cooking off as both staggered warbots explode in their tracks.

    With the hordes momentarily off their back, Anthony takes a sharp detour from the road, diving straight down a ramp towards the grey, silent hulk of what looks to have once been some kind of factory and slamming the reinforced nose of the rover through a sealed bulkhead, crunching through layers of nanomachine corroded metal and ceramic and skidding into the darkened interior until the vehicle collides with a concrete pillar and comes to a stop. The door behind them begins to repair itself, sealing up with some kind of transparent membrane as the built-in nanoswarm starts to machine replacement material. A few moments later, the lights flick on, probably taking power from an isolated undeground generator rather than the main grid.
Zwei     It appears to at least be a garage of some kind, and in very good condition, seeing as the vehicles back into it are still in one piece. The local mesh network has long been destroyed, but the holographic signs and floor markers still work, as does the air conditioning. It'd be strangely serene were it not for the discarded clothes piled up on the ground around the doors and elevators, which reveal almost complete skeletons inside of them at a second glance, solely missing their skulls. They seem placed conspicuously, as if they had died scrabbling at the exits, or had been killed and then moved out of the way purposefully.
Zwei     It should be noted, now that everyone has a chance to check their locator beacons, that they're definitely in the right place. The pulse is rapid and centered, which means it can only be straight down from here.
Kyra Hyral     A squeak of alarm escapes the white mage when the killbots all start bombarding the transport with a variety of weaponry, some of which Kyra does not immediately recognize. She ducks back in the transport so her head doesn't get taken off, chanting her spell words as she hunkers down. When ready, she pops back up again to frantically direct her magic into the aggressors again. It quickly grows exhausting to do so and eventaully she pops back down into her seat to let the others take care of the shooting.

    As they accelerate, Kyra puts on her seatbelt-good thing too because the entrance into the building is a rough one. She also loops her weapon around her shoulder, preventing the CURE-ALL from flying out of her grip.

    Once they've finally come to a stop, she works her way off the transport, stepping outside to see the damaged incurred. Kyra winces at that and what she sees are piles of clothing. "...well, good as time as any to give it a try." Kyra clasps her hands together and concentrates. "Heal! The scar of the glowing sun!"

    It is not white magic but in fact a form of time magic that makes this particular variant of healing work. It's for that reason it can actually heal objects as well as organics. Kyra directs this on the transport, trying to undo some of the damage. There's a lot, she realizes, and the object is pretty complex but yet she tries.

    Soon afterwards, Albert will find the teenager lingering at his elbow. He makes an impressive tank after all.
Starbound Flotilla     The outrageous driving nearly makes Biteblade fall out the back, but despite a close shave where George has to snag their hand quickly and let them climb back in, everything turns out mostly okay. The guns being fired by the large humanoids in return will mostly be handled by the vehicle, but what few of them head for the Starbounders -- and any that he can get that are getting near Nozomi, Kyra, Kotone, and Rory -- he'll be trying to tank with his heavy dystopian armor, suffering burns and bruises but holding with the durasteel plate.

    When they finally come to a stop, George and Seft are the ones who lead the way. "Well, that was tense, huh?" George says, in an upbeat sort of tone, jerking a thumb to the opening they crashed through. "Dunno about you guys, but I'm not looking forward to going back out there, kinda Night of the Living Glitch out there."
    "Humorous. That seems racist somehow." Seft say, as they both head on over to the elevators. Straight down... If the lights work, maybe those elevators do? The elevator shafts, at least, will make for a clear passage. George doesn't look it or act it most times, but he's pretty smart here. He's going to try to call an elevator up and observe its actual current position. If it's down, then people who were underground never left, so there could be extra risks down there. If it's on the ground floor, then whoever was underground made it to the surface. Either way, he hits call while Seft sets up her sensor array again, trying to run scans on the interior of the building in tandem with Anthony's vehicle.

    Albert grunts, assuringly, at Kyra. "We have completed nearly half of our operation." He says, in professional tones. "Continue doing what you've done so far. We will complete the rest."
Nozomi Houken     Taiga looks supremely satisfied with his performance - or rather, that of his weaponry. Somehow. Despite being a robot.

    Meanwhile, even with all the confusion, with everyone firing weird guns and magic and - is that some kind of high tech bow? - the robotiger's user remains relatively calm... which is to say, 'scared out of her wits, but trusting everyone to keep her safe'. But now that they've reached their destination, driven the swarms off, and closed themselves in a huge garage safely, there are entirely new horrors to be seen from which simple 'trust' can't protect her. Nozomi is shivering faintly almost the instant she steps out of the vehicle, and Taiga opts to remain very close. They both end up staying close to certain members of the Flotilla they've come to trust as protective and safe.
Ark Line Ark doesn't have much trouble with the recoil in the getting-thrown-around sense; he's aware of what kind of firepower he's trying to control, so that doesn't do much to him. What /does/ give him trouble is crashing through a wall and coming to an abrupt stop at the end. Ark is nearly thrown towards the front of the not-quite-bus, but Caster reaches out and snags him, holding him fast before he potentially breaks something in an embarassing accident. Ark mutters a 'thanks' and gets his feet back under him.

Then he gets out of the truck. The front of his environmental suit is peppered with hot metal shards, several of which have breached the mesh. Two smaller slivers are lodged near his forehead, alarmingly close to an eye. Ark reaches up and pulls his helmet off, shaking out his matted purple hair and wincing at the damage. He starts going about extricating the worst of it from his suit, sniffs once, and goes into a coughing fit.

"What -- what the hell /is/ that?" He covers his mouth and nose with one hand. "Ugh! Shit!"

"No..." Caster steps out, adjusting the strap on his bag and taking a look around, "...that would be the pollution, and probably the rot."

"Rot? Okay, what is 'rot,' and why does it -- /ugh!!/" Ark is not having a great time with the cornucopia of smells.

"Something," Caster says, "the Land of Steel could use more of." He does something slightly more useful, drawing out a piece of sensory equipment and trying to check for any heat or energy signatures around and below them. He looks to the Starbounders. "Do we have any idea what we should expect inside?"
Staren     Staren doesn't think a half-dozen missiles will be enough, of course, but he's not sure what his allies are packing... He whistles at the impressive display of firepower as they take down the warbots. The geography helped, of course, but still... Fortunately, he grabs a handhold with robotically-strong grip before the ride gets really rough!

    Staren climbs back in, approaching the other elites and pulling more missiles out of his bag. Armor-piercing warheads. "Can you reload these? Here..." he explains how to load the launchers on his shoulders.

    Once they're there, they find... partial skeletons? Staren shudders inwardly, but breathes a sigh of relief when his nanodetectors don't detect anything still here. He examines one of the skeletons. "...Why would they take the--? Oh." Staren frowns. "...What would they have wanted with their egos?" A mystery for the ages, to be sure.

    Staren scratches the back of his helmet as Kyra heals the transport. "Man, how the hell does that /work/?" He doesn't know about the time magic. He shrugs at George's comment. "Well, we have more ammo, right? We just need to take care of this quickly, before more can gather in this area..."
Rory White     "Hold on--" Rory's nearly knocked over by all of the crazy driving. It helps that she doesn't have a lunch to lose but she still arm-flails for something to hold onto and nearly goes out the rear herself. Thankfully she engages full magnetic grips for extra grip to the passenger's walls. "This is exciting! And awful! all at once!" The AGI babbles.

    Either way, they have made it mostly intact. She crawls out of the rover and cautiously steps foot on the grounds of DC. A few saucers emerge from her backpack, flying low and relying on passive sensors for now.

    The lightweight rifle she's been carrying is unshouldered and checked.

    Looking over her shoulder at Caster and Ark Line, she reaches into her backpack and offers what looks like a mini-mal rebreather or gas mask of some sort. "It'll help!"
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa has to change thermal clips at least once and is trying to make sure not to lose it but given the situation she may have little choice at this point. For now she sees that the enemy is coming but they are getting cut down. The problem is there's hordes of the darn things and she's not sure how many of them they can stop. The grenades do take some of them out which brings a faint grin to her face for a second. There's not much time to celebrate. She's able to keep her footing shockingly as they make it though into what seems to be a factory of some sort. She is glad Kyra is here with the others. She looks at the piles of clothing then the bodies, worse the heads are all gone. They'd been killed and their heads taken. She attempts to keep it together.

"Come on let's move there's nothing we can do now. Likely more nasty surprises watch for clouds and anything that still moving. There's likely leftovers left here."

She keeps with the party and her weapon ready, she's also fallning into habits and training picked up from XCOM, she also got a remote scanner ready if it's needed.
Zwei     Well enough for Kyra, the rover appears to have been specifically built to sustain large amounts of damage to its exterior without compromising the internal mechanisms. Obviously built for a war zone, or perhaps hostile exoplanet exploration, the damage seems to have been contained to areas specifically designed to absorb it, as catastrophic as it may be. Restoring all of it proves infeasible, but layering back on the less complex elements of the armour is more than doable restoring roughly two thirds of its overall integrity. George finds that most of the elevators appear to have been deliberately destroyed; sealed off with high explosives. Only one of them seems to have been either deliberately left intact, or was rigged to blow too late. The car itself is in the down position, and smoothly rises to the top with a cheery little 'ding' at the call of the button.

    The scans in tandom with Caster's equipment show that the building alone is powered independently of the rest of the block, as it houses the only regular signals for a significant distance. There appear to be heat and motion signatures on the floor below, which is never a good thing, coupled with some kind of chemical or biosignature below that. A great deal of the building's power output is concentrated on the very bottom level, where it has been running uninterrupted for over a decade.

    Anthony climbs out of the transport a little unsteadily, still a little shocked from the collision. His guard stays behind to monitor the vehicle, the gun swivelling back and forth on auto while he runs the sensors. "Judging by the fact the others haven't reported in, I dare say we got off light. They must have attracted the bulk of the 'bots before we got here. That also means we never would have made it here without your help! Thank you! We'd need two dozen more reapers before we could get that kind of firepower!" He briefly stops to fiddle with his entopic display, likely to coordinate orders for the rest of the Reclaimers after they wake up from respawning.

    Following that, he starts for the elevator, keeping his environment suit sealed regardless of how many combat veterans he'll be surrounded with. He connects to the elevator's limited AI on a sandbox device, monitoring the data with a visual display rather than connecting to it, in order to say several steps removed from contracting whatever kind of worms might be in the system. "Built thirty years ago. New construction. Government dollar, not hypercorp. Military? It's designated a VIP area. Used to have shoot on sight orders for tresspassers. No idea what was actually in it though."
Staren     Staren looks at the scans people are getting. "Movement and heat down below? Any way to tell if it's survivors or... more killbots?"

    Staren shrugs to Anthony. "That's the way it is out in the multiverse. We've fought worse. Two dozen 'reapers', huh? I still have a lot of stuff I haven't used..." He follows Anthony to the elevator, curious, observing the AI analysis. "Sounds to me like perhaps a shelter for VIPs they wanted to keep the riffraff out of. /Or/ a secret lab." He shrugs. "I guess we'll know soon enough... We should probably have a backup plan if the elevator messes up. I can shoot a hole through it, I'm sure. Can everyone fly or something?"
Nozomi Houken     Taiga ambles forward almost lazily, but the way his guns remain in a 'ready' position, occasionally swivelling this way or that, betrays his high state of alert. He does, however, have enough attention to indulge in feline pride. "Naturally. I was built with opponents as powerful as elder dragons in mind. My combat parameters are exceptional." If he had a tongue, he'd probably be grooming himself.

    However, Taiga and Nozomi /both/ are rather wary of the elevator. "...shoot on sight?" Nozomi frowns. "...whatever's down there is... it must be really important." Taiga's concern is more practical. "If this elevator is still active, it is because they allowed it to be active. The moment we step on this elevator, we are in danger. Do not trust anything from here on to be safe, not even the floor we walk on or the lights overhead. Whatever is here is dangerous enough to mandate government kill orders, and important enough for the military AIs to not have sealed this elevator."
Starbound Flotilla     "Whelp." George says, not elaborating on his logical methods as he glances over to Ark Line's Caster. "Let's say I've got a..." He grins when the elevator dings. "Got a hunch, we'll find something downstairs." Specifically at the position the elevator was at. He'll go for that, specifically, if Anthony will let him pick. Biteblade, on the other hand, focuses on Staren! Despite a lack of face mask, she seems fine with the stench. "Hi cat friend! Floran will help!" She does, in fact, insistently help, with expert caution and tribal enthusiasm.

    "Such is our way." Moonfin says, smugly, to Anthony. "Results are our priority, and a corpse achieves nothing. Let us descend into this mysterious depth." He considers the data being given by Anthony so far. "If that is the case, we must remain defensively prepared, but perhaps less offensively, should there be something fragile or exploitable that can be used to bypass the violence. I advise, myself, that we not launch our own violent counterattack until we know what has those orders to shoot on sight." He steps into the elevator as well, and he gets the rest of the Starbounders behind him, one hand on the hilt of his power katana sheathed in his Matter Manipulator. He'll be immediately attempting to be the bullet-cutting tank here if whatever's at the bottom here strikes at them.
Ark Line Ding!

"Well, your hunch seems... well-founded." Caster looks from George down at his instruments. "There seems to be... something moving below us," he says. "It's very warm. The vast majority of the power in the structure is on the lowest level. Of course," he adds, in a somewhat grumbling tone, "it /would/ be."

Ark looks at Rory's proferred minimalistic rebreather. He frowns, but takes it, hanging his helmet on the back of his armor. "Don't know how you seedlings put up with these things," he mutters. A second later, in a more conversation tone, he adds an actual, "But thanks. Appreciate it."

Then he looks at Staren askance. He's donned the mask and seems less bothered by the stench. "Of course not. I've got a climbing kit if I gotta. Maybe we can just avoid blowing out the elevator, huh?" He starts that way, towards the elevator. Caster follows, albeit at a safe distance.

"I didn't have any illusions of safety when I saw what this place looked like from on high," Caster comments to Taiga and Nozomi. "Still, perhaps my young Master will heed cooler heads before his loud one is bitten off."

"I'm standing right here," Ark says over his shoulder.

"Yes," Caster replies, "I know."
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa grimaces about the fates of the other teams nodding to Anthony and shakes her head.

"Yes we di we can't sit still. Looks like the Virus got to them here from the looks od thing or maybe there's people left who knows. Keep alert they might even be infected."

She keeps alert and she's on edge for a moment. She looks ready to go and she she's checking for anything of note and she looks to Ark and his partner.

"Easy we're on the same team lets get this done and get out of here without losing anyone on the team."

With that she heads into the elevator.

She does halt to give Rory an attempt of a reassuring look before however.
Kyra Hyral     If anything, at least Kyra is reassured that her spell actually works. This way, she'd be ready when trouble came and she was needed to heal that instead of a biologial-based entity. "It's time magic, Staren." Kyra explains aloud, "It reverses time in a very small area. I feel it's best cast the sooner you can after something is damaged. Smaller amount of time to reverse is all.

    She smiles brightly as Albert comliments her. At least, that is, she'll take it as a compliment. She doesn't spend a lot of time dwelling on it, going into hypervigillant observation mode, heeding the earlier words spoken that anything could kill.
Rory White     "Why would 'killbots' be congregating below ground? There is little efficient about such an arrangement. It's more likely there are survivors or some other grouping of individuals below." Rory declares.

    "But be wary. They might be hostile to visitors. It's dangerous either way, I just doubt it has anything to do with any large-scale hunter-killer operation."
Zwei     Unfortunately, Rory will be disappointed. The front doors of the elevator are transparent, and so that means as each floor scrolls by, the party is privy to the collective fates that have befallen them. It seems that this facility, likely along with the rest of the city, was hit by an overwhelming combination of cyber, nano and biowarfare vectors at the same time, rather than relying on nuking the place into the ground. The upper corridors are the only things that bear signs of an armed struggle, being full of holes and plasma burns from long, drawn-out firefights, and stuffed with makeshift barricades around the elevator exit itself. Now only drones pick over their remains, sealed into space they had once invaded once the other lifts had been collapsed and unable to break the barriers down to the one that still works after their weapons had run dry. A handful of them can be seen carrying human skulls clutched in their insectoid legs, once intent on carrying them off somewhere, for reasons that analysts can still only guess at.

    The lower floors were clearly never reached by the headhunters, but devastated all the same by nanoswarms and engineered plagues. On some of them, the exits have been sealed, the lights cut, and the oxygen sucked out. On others, putrefied stains run up the walls and over the floors, extending from every partially liquified skeleton on display. Still on others, the people appear to have been replaced with ossified statues of foreign minerals, or reduced into a faint outline of their surface on scoured metal. One particularly alarming floor is half filled with an ocean of grey liquid; one that seethes and buzzes as the elevator passes, and produces vibrating humanoid shapes from its surface, waving at the elevator or hammering at its doors in crude, nano-scale mockery of the people the swarm had originally consumed, as if expecting someone to be fooled by it.

    The final floor is where the invasion appears to have finally stopped, though only after it had killed the last staff left to defend it. The elevator stops off at a series of catwalks and observation rooms connected together in a loop around a larger, pitch black room. The biosigns originate from here, and it isn't hard to tell why. The corpse of a technician is spread out over the console of a mainframe access terminal; spread in the very literal sense. His chest cavity appears to have erupted with the growth of some hideous tree made of cancerous human tissue, sending meters and meters of veins and nerve clusters sprawling over the floors and walls like crawling roots or climbing vines, and a trunk of solid bone scraping the ceiling, from which hangs dangling 'fruit' of swollen blood blisters. The locator goes nuts as Anthony approaches the console, who uses a knife to pry the revolting growth away from the controls without hesitation.

    This is the point at which one should wonder about what someone could possibly want to retrieve from the computer in the sealed basement of a top secret military installation, and whether or not it might be a good idea to hand it over.
Rory White     It is perhaps for the better that Rory has no stomach; Its contents would undoubtedly be all over the elevator were this not the case. As it is she looks like she DESPERATELY wants to retch at the sights assaulting the party floor after floor. What can make an AGI shiver as more than a random physiological action? This can.

    This definitely can.

    How very wrong she is.

    Both the Argonaut's shoulders slump down heavily.

    Even walking into the room with the strange terminal and the cancerous tree-growth has her looking nauseated and jumpy. She releases another Saucer just to have eyes in every direction - increased trauma potential, but better than getting jumped.

    "Never... have I been... more wrong..."
Nozomi Houken     Each floor they reach is worse and worse. It doesn't take long for Nozomi to be looking away from the doors. When they reach the bottom, she begins to turn around again, but-

    "Nozomi. Don't look. Stay just outside the elevator, but don't look."

    The words come from Taiga, in a tone far less 'subtly mocking' and far more gentle than is normal for the robot. She makes a startled noise, and then gives Taiga a small nod. The robotiger looks to the denizens of the Flotilla, and says simply, "Please, one of you stay with her. I have no preference who." Then he begins to amble on ahead, both cannons trained on the black room in the middle.
Staren     "Thanks." Staren replies when Biteblade helps reload his missiles. As an afterthought, he swaps out his seeker rifle's magazine from plasma to armor-piercing as well. It won't do to make giant fireballs indoors.

    Staren rolls his eyes at Ark. "I said if the elevator /fails/. If it works, we won't need to bypass it. And who knows? Killbots can have infinite patience. Maybe they aren't programmed to leave the building when looking for new prey." Confident that he can escape if needed, Staren steps into the elevator.

    As floor after floor after floor /after floor/ of destruction passes them, Staren shakes his head. "How many people were killed here...?" And hey, grey goo floor. "I, uh... /that's/ not good..." he shivers.

    At last, they reach the 'survivors'. Staren looks around, and sighs and shakes his head when he sees the... person...tree... It seems like he should be more revolted, sickened, but... perhaps being a robot helps him dull troublesome emotions. Or perhaps he's seen too much shit in the multiverse. Or perhaps he's able to see it as nothing more than a malfunctioning body... It's not like there's a person alive there anymore. "/That's/ not good... wait, what the hell is the point of a disease that... does that? And where did it get all the resources to grow... /that/?" He gestures at the trunk, and looks around.

    Staren double-checks his nanodetectors.

    "Is what we came for data? Can we have a copy, so we can try to figure out what your... 'benefactor' might be planning to do with it?"

    "...Wait, didn't you say you detected /movement/ around here?"
Starbound Flotilla     Seft makes a... nauseous sort of beeping noise at the uncanny display outside the transparent door. She seems incredibly distressed at the sight of all this, for some time. It grows to an intense height for a moment before she seems to decide to manually shut down portions of her software associated with distress and disgust responses. All at once she takes a particularly inhuman stance. The rest of the Flotilla, oddly, has a grimly disgusted reaction, but a less visceral one. Each of them seem to acknowledge the intense danger it implies, but won't let themselves be overwhelmed by fear.

    Biteblade thinks it's fascinating, honestly.

    George, oddly, is the one who stays with Nozomi. "Yipes, wow, yeah, hey kid. Let's go ahead and take a nice look at this really interesting patch of wall over here." His personality might be hardened against this on some level, repressing revulsion responses as much as he can, but George always has a bit of a soft spot for young people and keeps Nozomi company and keeps her focused on whatever patch of wall doesn't involved flesh.

    "Dibsss!" Biteblade immediately calls. One has to hope that whatever horrid biohazard once turned flesh to plant won't affect the Floran, because Biteblade is going to pick at least one or two of the fruit. For later consumption. And planting whatever seeds are inside. You can burn the rest if you want.

    Albert and Seft approach the console, the latter more mechanically than the former. Her eyes are displaying a blank blue line now, instead of the usual pair of dots. She kneels down and gets out her sensor apparatus again. "Concern noted. Operating sensor array." She says, in that usual synthetic tone. "Attempting to locate points of interest."
    Albert keeps her close to him. He has seen this sort of horror at many Miniknog facilities, but as it turns out, seeing something a lot doesn't mean deciding that it isn't threatening. Every movement of shadows, every distant noise, draws his paranoid attention. But for now, he has to focus on the terminal. Determine its condition. Discern if it requires hardware authorization. Loot any access from the... Tree, if possible. Examine the console. And then, of course, prompt Rory and Kotone to come over here and establish some safety measures for interacting with the console, through which he intends to activate it and investigate the data therein.

    Pavo wanders off, disgusted in her own private way but impossible to read due to her Avian features. She's going to head to those observation rooms and see what's in them, loot anything of value, and similar.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa expression goes from neutral, to various states of horrified as they go deeper and deeper into the complex this place is a massive grave, who'd have expected anyone to be alive in here. Even if there are intact stacks they are likely infected, and then comes the remains of the tech Kotone dry heaves, the remains of her organic brain trying to do something her body really can't move anymore. The sight is beyond horror, beyond anything she seen she wants to throw up but can not.

"That thing needs to be cleared away with fire."

She recovers enough to get a hold of her self she pauses sat Staren commend and tosses a motion scanner into the distance using the XCOM tracker to pick up any possible movement here.

"Scanner up and ... god lets get the data then figure out what the hell it is before we do anything with it."

With that done she heads to console to for what she can for helping with it, she also ends up keeping tabs on the hand held counter part of the scanner in caae there is movement out there.

"I'm on it the sooner we're out of here the better.

Kotone is also clearly shaken and afraid from how she's carrying herself here.
Kyra Hyral     As they descend, Kyra is confronted by what seems to be more and more horrific ways to die. Surely it was all something that happened ages ago but the evidence was still there, from fungus crawling out of corpses to as-shadows of bodies to...grey goo. Kyra, in particular, grows very quiet as they pass that floor and the goo reacts to them. Once it has passed, she points back the way they came. "That! That is why I want something to deal with nanomachines!" At least she assumes that's what it was. The color kind of leads to certain assumptions.

    The final floor contains something arguably worse. A biological horror of some kind extended, twisted, from a final corpse. Kyra watches it like a deer might watch a passing human, unsure what to make of it, concerned that in any moment, it's going to get up and attack them. Idily she wonders if what few agents she has on it would infect it or wind up making it worse. As distracting as it was, as she moves in with Albert and Seft, the flesh tree isn't the only thing she watches. She looks everywhere, intent on catching any kind of movement or anything else out of the ordinary.
Ark Line "If the elevator fails, we'll tie a cable to you and /you/ can fly out," Ark says to Staren on his way into the car. "You can handle that, right?"

The elevator descends, showcasing a number of awful scenes. Caster stiffens as they pass each, watching with his face twisted into an increasingly horrified and disgusted expression. His mask of calm doesn't work, but it does keep him from just looking completely freaked out. "A gallery of terrible ways to die," he murmurs.

"How'd they even... /do/ some of this," Ark asks, largely rhetorically, staring at the sights as if transfixed. He touches the glass door, but lightly. It's hard to tell if he's having trouble processing what he's seeing, or if it's something else. He makes no moves towards the controls, though, especially not until they're down to the bottom.

The two of them exit the elevator silently. Caster moves with his head down, shaking it and muttering to himself until they encounter the tree of flesh. He gasps, staring at it wordlessly, while Ark walks past the worst of it as if in a trance. He stops next to Anthony, maybe a half-step behind him.

"What is it we're really down here for," he asks. He looks down at the console, and then at the man willing to cut away the growth so quickly. "You didn't even blink when you saw this. Did you know what was here?"
Zwei     Rory, Kyra, Kotone and Albert will find nothing else on this floor. After so many layers of redundant security, it seems that all that managed to squeeze through the cracks were the pathogens the last staff to escape had been unknowingly carrying. The final floor is as silent as the grave. As to why this specific nanovirus had gone for something so bizarrely and unnecessarily grotesque, one would have to ask the TITAN who designed it. It seems like either an overkill attempt at psychological warfare, or some bizarre, artistic sensibility was behind it.

    In either case, Staren finds that the trace nano-scale elements still in the room are more or less inert, having eventually run out of energy from pointlessly re-replicating human tissue and shut down. Pavo finds that the other observation rooms are almost exactly the same. It seems that multiple staff members were required to be at their stations simultaneously to lock down whatever it is in the larger room. It seems some of them may have stayed at those stations for quite a while, even as their bodies began to warp, to oversee the whole process. Biteblade will find that the 'fruit' really are just formations of human tissue, but with inert protein strings that suggested occupation by a previous micro-organism. At any rate, they aren't even close to human, so eating it, despite being utterly disgusting, will have no negative repercussions.

    Those working on the console find the the only thing that could still be considered 'active' down here. Anthony moves aside slightly to allow them in, hacking away at the human skin coating the console to free up precious inches of touch interface, speaking to Ark while he works. "Your guess is as good as ours. The TITANs are the ones who did all of this. Recursively self-improving artificial intelligence. Their grasp of science is so vastly far ahead of ours even today that we can't figure out half of the things they did. I've seen this particular nanovirus before though. The Uzumaki strain." He pauses for a moment at the second question. "I couldn't say. Probably something from the pentagon's database. TITAN research maybe? I couldn't care less at this point. Our backer clearly knows far more than I do, and I've made up my mind already on the risks." The computer is of very late 21st century construction, and almost all proprietary hardware, meaning that there are no ports for direct hard storage interface that will work with any standard equipment the group is likely to have on them, meaning they'll have to risk uploading it wirelessly.

    When they finally arrive at the terminal's lock screen, still logged in but deliberately frozen for over ten years, the computer's controls momentarily seize up, and a window pops up like an error message. Taking up only a small portion of the screen, it appears to be some kind of extremely abstract mess of static and primitive shapes, designed to give some kind of rorschach impression of . . . perhaps a bird in profile? A set of spiral stairs? A sphere viewed through shuttered blinds? It appears simultaneously along with a sound broadcast from the terminal's speakers; multi-layered binoaural tones of humming, white noise and intermittent keening. There is about half a second for anyone to do anything about it before anyone who has had the misfortune of looking at the screen and hearing the sound issuing from the speakers is assaulted with the the effects.
Zwei     The decade old worm had been locked out at the last second, but it had remained in the surface levels of the isolated system, dormant for years. Now the first human operators in all that time come face to face with the Basilisk hack meant for the operators attempting to shut it down; a precisely generated sequence of visual and auditory sensations specifically constructed to trigger errors in the human brain's architecture. Essentially, the human equivalent of the infamous feat of winning super mario world by inputting the exact string of movements necessary to write the memory into the win screen. The effect is much less fun than that. The sound is accompanied by a crippling wave of vertigo, debilitating nausea, agonizing pain in the left side of the head, and almost complete muscular paralysis. It's quite likely that a human exposed to it for the entire length of the audio file will hit some kind of kill switch and die. It's also patently obvious however, that it only works on people with human brains, or else ones so closely modelled on humanity as to share the same vulnerabilities.
Staren     A half-a-second...

    Staren has enough time to realize what's happening and look away reflexively, but may be too late to warn anyone else. "BASILISK HACK! DON'T LOOK!" He's already deafened himself as he shouts, "COVER YOUR EARS!" It may be too late.

    It takes him seconds to screw with his body's settings, reducing the video and audio quality to something he hopes will smooth out the fine details and render the hack ineffective. Still, he avoids looking directly at it, and asks Dawn to censor the visual hack from his vision. "Ugh, blurry..." he holds out a hand in front of him, /then/ looks to see if anyone is still staring at it. If so, he grabs them and starts pulling them towards the door. "Cover your ears! Don't look!"
Nozomi Houken     The moment Nozomi hears the words 'cover your ears', she is doing exactly that. As far away as she is, however, she's probably fine to begin with. But it's still good to see she's got those reflexes!

    Taiga, meanwhile, ambles right up to the computer, rears up, supports himself on the desk with one huge paw, and begins lightly batting at the keyboard with the other. Paw. Paw paw. "...I am probably not the best choice for attempting to disable this device. But if someone tells me what to press, I can do so."
Rory White     Thankfully, Rory White was in the same boat as Staren. Having already accelerated her consciousness while waiting for the potentially risky data to be accessed, the moment Staren screams the dreaded word she turns away and engages her own preparations against the dreaded basilisk hack.

    That involves switching her vision to black and white and drastically cutting the resolution of her audio pickup.

    It's not quite quick enough and she goes toppling over, arms flailing, against a wall with a loud THUNK.

    Having no actual biology to affect, the fact is that a lot of her cognition is still based on human thought. Much of her neural architecture is organized similarly, if highly specialized in other ways.

    Even so, some of that blast of impossibly calculated sensory input wormed in and triggered something of a breakdown.

    For the moment, her entire Personal Area Network shuts down, as does her mesh inserts.
Kyra Hyral     Confronted with nothing else of danger in the room, Kyra resorts to watching Biteblade take samples of the human cancer tree with all the excitement of a kid in a candy store. Kyra seems to be fighting the urge to throw up, eventually managing to evade this, then forcing herself to confront her source of disgust.

    She takes out her phone and photographs the growth from a number of angles then moves to cut a piece of fruit free with a scalpel she keeps on her. She carefully wraps the sample in plastic, sealing it thoroughly before she tucks it away for safekeeping. As she does this, however, the Basilisk hack activates. At first Kyra does not look up from her work, not seeing the sequence of images flashed on the screen. Then Staren starts shouting about a Basilisk hack, warning everyone to don't look or listen. Not looking is instinctive to Kyra, having come from a place where the creature the hack is named after actually exists. Her head starts to pound and Kyra reels, her movements becoming jerky as she feels her muscles start to freeze up.

    In those moments, she clumsily digs her earphones out from under her hoodie, slipping them over her ears. Loud, tinny sounds of Mogstep start afterwards, blocking the enduring noise from her mind.

    Pawing about, Kyra removes the CURE-ALL from her back, setting the dial on it from CURE to REMEDY. Thanks to muscle spasms and nonresponsiveness, it takes way, way longer than she wants it to and even longer to prop the base of the CURE-ALL against the floor, barrel pointed upward, so she can fire directly up and thus get caught in the blast of esuna as it falls back down. Being a blast effect, those nearby have an opportunity to get caught in it too.
Starbound Flotilla     Albert and Seft are each not human. Their neurology is similar, in a way, but not nearly similar enough to suffer lethal effects, merely dazing and disorienting. Seft goes completely still, unable to move but primarily immune to the mental effects. Albert grunts and shudders, roaring in hatred. He feels the debilitating strike against his mind and he is full of /rage/. He is driven to kill the cognitohazard, in as much as anything can be said to kill it. "SEFT. HOLD STILL AND OPEN INTERFACE AT FULL ACCESS." He shouts, angrily. And immediately he links, wirelessly... To Seft.

    From within her mind -- which has disconnected certain neurological elements -- Albert is able to use Seft's brain itself as a neurological sandbox. By collaborating with Seft, who has tremendous psionic engineering expertise, his own computer science expertise can shine. In mere seconds of jamming buttons on his haptic holo-display, he rapidly attempts to redirect the basilisk hack's input, redesigning the post-neurological pattern into a sound that can hopefully, through Seft's psionic expertise, be turned into something like an antiviral cognition pattern. They then force it -- LOUDLY -- through Seft's audio systems. It's something that can only work on the cognitohazard once, if at all, and likely only partially, given the inherently dynamic nature of a basilisk hack.

    George is going to need that, as despite looking away, he's near collapsed next to Nozomi, barely keeping himself on his knees over there. Hopefully, he'll be getting back up soon. Pavo, on the other hand, keeps doing what she's doing, distant from this console. If things go well back here, she's going to come back later and try to get an arrangement set up for everyone to get to the observation rooms and un-isolate the area.
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa tries to not think about things.

"This poor bastard deserves to be put put down then let this mockery keep using their flesh as some /things/ twisted art project." She's working awya not wanting to think about She's getting to work at this point.

She's now working away looking at the thing they will have to attempt to wireless tech get the data, she notice the error screen but something's not right at all. She's now starting to look away at Staren yells out a warning she attempt to look away. Kotone brain can run faster than a normal humans however she normally dubs it down unless she's working for her own sanity. Kotone is in a lot of pain so much she can't disable her own pain receptors like she would in a situation involving something akin to this otherwise. She did look away and that helps somewhat, she's down on her knees trying to collapse and making sounds of pain. As Kotone drops to her knees in pain given her nature she's entirely locked up but there's too much pain and soon she's laying on the floor screaming. A cyborg in her world senses are tuned hire even the sense of touch for example and normally this can be counted by turning off the sense of touch entirely but well? She's kinda screwed here.
Ark Line Ark gradually comes back to a sense of normalcy about this all. His voice gradually sounds less dull and dreamy. Back to reality, kid. "...Huh. We've got AIs that run our unmanned vehicles and things back home, but we've never had a problem like... that. Or this." He looks down at the growth, following it to the source.

"That something like this is common enough to have a classification," Caster says, "is a terrible thought." He's still examining the flesh-tree with morbid curiosity. When the screen changes, he's only just torn his eyes away from the grotesquerie.

Caster has been paying enough attention -- and listened to the radio enough -- to recognize what Staren's talking about. He has that half-second to call, "ARK, HERE," and try to draw the Ether Liner's attention away from the console, while he himself seems... largely unaffected. The noise might be bothering him, but he isn't even weak in the knees. The shape of his legend, such as it is, renders him immune.

It doesn't do the same for his Master. Ark, though a non-human, is patterned closely after one. The hack hits him from both sides, the patterns caught at the corner of his eyes and the sound droning in his ears. He feels his muscles tighten, and he can't get the noise out of his head... but he knows what's doing it. He chokes out, "Ckh --" and starts to fall to the ground as one leg freezes and the other spasms instead.

The bone implement suddenly burns with amber radiance, an incandescent energy washing out from it. Ark hits the catwalk on his side, but the light doesn't cease. The console stands out in stark relief from the rest of the room, like it was superimposed on a disgusting backdrop.

The sound from it doesn't stop, and the weird patterns on the screen don't fade out. The actual effects of the hack, however, just... go away.

"Thirty seconds," Ark says. He sounds suddenly exhausted.
Zwei     Those thirty seconds seem to be enough. With her body rebelling against her a little less with each second that passes, Kyra is able to pop off the Esuna, which immediately clears the secondary physical ailments induced by the hack. Albert's antiviral initiative may actually initially seem redundant, were it not for a fact that Rory will likely communicate later: basilisks hacks routinely like to program copies of themselves into people and sometimes gradually rewrite their minds. Of course it'd still be advisable to have a brain scan coming out of this place, but at the very least, they'll come up clean. After twenty five seconds of randomly batting at the keyboard, Taiga manages to awaken his cat-intefering-with-coursework insticts and terminate the process, deleting the window and switching off the sound in quick succession.

    Anthony finally pulls his helmet off, heaving the stale, recycled air as he deliberates for twenty seconds whether or not he's going to be sick. After finally deciding he won't, he retakes his position at the newly awakened console, staring at the empty authentication box as if only just now wondering how they're going to lift a lockdown that requires biometric and encrypted passcodes from four separate terminals in unison. Trusting in something he may have heard early, he unsticks his locator from the collar of his suit and presses it against the touchpad with his fingertip. The blue light on the chip's glassy exterior goes dark, and then a moment later, the projected keyboard begins to visually scramble, eaten up by rapidly alternating chunks of dead pixels like someone had pulled a cartridge out halfway.

    The reason his 'benefactor' had given the group these instead of simple coordinates now seems clear. The chips are programmed to break into the mainframe and download whatever it is she wants, then likely broadcast it into space and self-destruct. It's the only way to absolutely ensure that someone would come here and make physical contact with the closed system, with no chance to look at the data first and decide to destroy it if it turned out to be dangerous. The lights in the room beyond flicker on, fans humming to life and wires crackling with new current. The floor splits open like what one would expect of a missile silo, issuing gouts of crawling vapour that pools a meter deep into the upper level, obscuring what rises out of the depression with a wall of white fog. For several, long moments, there is nothing to look at but the dark silhouette of the recently reactivated machinery within the slowly settling mists, and to guess at what kind of top secret military project could have been worth sacrificing every man on the base to keep from the TITANs. The conclusion might be a little baffling.

    At the center of the room stands four, ring-shaped banks of what are unmistakably cryo pods. The vast majority are dark and empty, but six of them are still lit from the inside, illuminating the men and women that still sleep peacefully inside, as they have ever since the Fall. It's a strange sight to see, considering all records indicate that transhumanity only barely escaped Earth with the last tiny percent of its population. The main screen has nothing in the way of answers; only a single message in bright green text, repeated in the primary languages of each of the Elites gathered.

    "They're your problem now."
Nozomi Houken     Well, whatever Taiga did, that seems to have stopped it. He peers at it suspiciously for a few more seconds, before letting his full weight drop back to the ground and turning to amble out of the computer room. This, as it happens, is just in time for he and Nozomi both to see the rising cryo pods.

    Nozomi is, however, more concerned with George, uncovering her ears and crouching down to check on him carefully. "H-hey, are... are you alright...? If we have to, I... I can transform and carry you out. ...I'd offer to let you ride Taiga, but I don't think he'd like it."
Rory White     All at once, Rory White's mesh communications come back up in secure mode but EVERYONE and everything's cut out that might've been linked to them before except some text-only links to communications networks. Her eyes snap open and Synth Morph power back up out of a momentary standby. It's a very jarring thing to see, going from perfectly motionless to a smooth rise to her feet. There's no shaking her head or similar gestures, but she's STILL got her sensors operating in Low-Resolution mode, leading to blurry sight and somewhat poor audio reception.

    Hoping that, with any luck, this should filter out any further Basilisks.

    "... is everyone okay...?"

    She gets a look at Ark Line's bizarre glowing arm thing ... and the movement of rising Cryo Pods gets her outright boggling.

    "What?"
Staren     Staren has dragged Rory and Kyra to the door when Ark Line does... something. Staren spends the time trying to wake them up and plan a course of action while Keyboard Cat plays the basilisk hack off. "Finally..." He approaches the machine warily, taking only brief glances before watching Anthony use the device. Asking Ark what countermeasure he just used gets him something about 'turning off causality'. There is just not time to analyze that right now.

    And then the locator chips /hack the console/. "Oh /damn/ it! See if we can recover the data! Does a facility like this have hard drives we can take?"

    But... something's starting. Staren turns as the floor opens. Damn it, Vert tricked them into launcing a nuke! What is it going to--

    Wait, that's not a missile. Staren stares. People were in cryosleep down here? He looks at the screen. "Our problem? What the hell does that mean? Who /are/ these people?!"
Kotone Yamakawa Kotone Yamakawa is only recovering now, she had been of the mind to check out the data. She see Ant do his thing but hey he was hired for it, he did wait to make sure everyone was all right and hasn't like pulled a gun on them. She fears what the being she suspects is behind it might get but better to do something here. She gets back to her feet recovers her rifle and now pause a the floor spirt she sees the pods as they finally show up a bit before the others she also takes note of the message. She sighs and moves to shoulder her weapon.

She pauses making note everyone needs to get scanned. Every one she's already got her own securiy systems running hard. She looks ove to Staren.

"This was a top end Military holding, Staren. Think about that the entire base /died/ to keep these pods safe. Could be researchers could be something else. Either way they might know what the hell is going on in there. We need to get them out of here we can't leave em and they may have info that's of use. Ablert can we use the ship's teleporters once we get to the surface?"
Ark Line Ark levers himself upright, gripping the white bone Knight Arm with one hand while he does it. Rory might notice the flesh-tree's bits nearest it look a little... unhealthy. But then, it's hard to tell what 'healthy' is in regards to a /tree made of veins and organs and shit/.

Caster helps him up, pulling something out of his bag. Ark takes what looks like some kind of energy bar and scarfs it down like he was starving. Active sensors might point to it as a hazardous, high-energy material right up until he's ingested it. Must not be /that/ bad.

"Can we figure out what's going on here on the way /out/, please," Ark asks. He's clearly had enough of this after getting poked in the brain.
Starbound Flotilla     "Survivors." Seft says, in her usual emotionless tone, but this time without saying an actual emotion. Albert ceases his rage as the process is stopped, and he tears away in disgust. As soon as the data is done and the consoles are rendered essentially useless -- and of course, as soon as anyone else has completed any business they have with these things, conveniently -- he'll take to smashing these computers with his excessively large POWER HAMMER.

    George manages to get back to his feet, disoriented after all that. "Huh? Wha?" He says, in an uncomprehending state, and then, "Oh, shit, right, apocalypse earth. No, no, I'm... Good, yeah. I'm all good." He doesn't seem all good, but at least he can walk!

    "They're our loot." Pavo says, grinning wide once the cryopods are revealed. Walking as close as she can get to them on the catwalks, she limbers up briefly and then leaps a tremendous hop right onto the platform. Humans who are on-ice technically count as no longer living, for all intents and purposes. Which means she can pull out her Matter Manipulator and just... pop the pods cleanly out of the platform, stored away in her warped space for later deployment. These are important people. People who other people would die for. Someone, somewhere will pay a lot for them. And so she's going to get them off this planet.

    Without much more delay, she hops back and Albert, having expended his rage, slams the head of his hammer back onto the catwalk to get people at attention. "Our business here is complete and there is much reason to leave. Get to the surface." He's gonna try to order the group back upstairs! Once they're there... An attempt to use their Teleporters to extract! Plus Nozomi and Taiga, and maybe Ark Line and Caster if they want to ask.
Kyra Hyral     Once it looks like everyone has gone back to normal again, Kyra removes her headphones and turns off her music. She stares blankly at the cryopods filled with people, eyes sliding to the message, eyeing it with suspicion.

    "I dunno, people, in general, tend to make pretty bad loot." Kyra remarks, thinking back to Orphen's dungeon too. "Unless-oh, right, pirate. I don't know, it's been so long, whoever these people belong to might not be around anymore." She shrugs and reshoulders her CURE-ALL. At that point she seems just all too happy to leave.