Scene #5493: Seat of the Ego-2

Owner	Pose
Priscilla	The name 'Maw of Tyrants' has really started to catch on, regarding the shattered ruins of the Citadel, demolished just as thoroughly as Njorun, but in a completely different way. Looking upon it from up close (closer than last time, too), it's easy to see why. When you're looking at it practically, the gargantuan constellation of architectural fragments, suspended in hundreds of miles of warped space, really does work out such that the chaotic mess of floating ivory towers and building shards look a lot like the gleaming fangs of a massive, fanged, all-consuming maw. Where the Union had died nobly and rotted tragically, the Confederacy has died violently and disintegrated spectacularly. A fitting ode to its first and last intentions. Previously, the Concord had to contend with a living attack warpgate, exhibiting violates of Multiversal back-end physics that absolutely should not be possible by all previous understanding of how warpgates work, summoned by some strange fragmentary phantom of the old Vermilion Sunset administration AI. From there, they'd advanced into the famous Hall of Doors, where a seemingly endless stretch of dark walls and pillars is illuminated by blue flames on silver chandeliers and slashed dramatically by cobalt carpet. The many, many, /many/ passages, some small and ordinary, some grand and ominous, have been thoroughly charted and mapped over the months since last time by dedicated teams, and most have been found to be either /thoroughly/ unsafe, dead ends, or leading seemingly random or totally unproductive places. Only a few still seem to go anywhere consistently, and only two are viable routes towards the reaches members of the Concord has chosen as their destination; the Field of Trials. Artificial warpgates thankfully still seem to work in this more plain and stable space, and so, like Njorun, a temporary advance base has been set up for convenience of entry and supply, with personnel rotated out regularly to avoid whatever kind of harmful, destabilizing energies might be present here too. Priscilla is here to direct again, after a break last time, and it doesn't take long to explain to arrivals what their choices are. One path leads through the shallowest levels of the infamous, and probably exceedingly awful, Confederate prisons, designed to put prisoners of war and convenience to hard work to support the superfaction. The other leads through the magnificent observatory that once peered all across the entire Multiverse with all manners of powerful and exotic devices and magics. Put it to a vote. Splitting up is as inadvisable here as it was in Njorun.
Alexis Maaka	"Hard to believe this used to be enemy territory for me." Alexis muses, as she leaps from a perch consisting of crappy debris piled upon itself like a mountain of scrap metal. She's wearing her STALKER suit right now, and uses her boosters to slow her landing as she hits the ground with a muted THUD, clutching a high-tech assault rifle in her hands as she begins to head towards that path idly, keeping that X95 aimed down the path before lowering the gun. It's surreal how this used to be a mighty monument to conquest. But then again, regimes rise and fall every day, usually in bloody fashion. "Oooookay. So who wants to go down to check the prisons?" She asks warily, not sure if she just saw something move or if it was just her imagination taunting her. Either way, she keeps her rifle close by.
Captain Flint	"Try not to stare at it," says a gravelly British baritone. Captain Flint's seafoam eyes are focused on the traveling pack set before him on the workbench. The Concord sets up a pretty decent advance base, and he and his men are able to supply themselves with suitable first aid and dungeoneering supplies--rope, lamp oil, et cetera. One such fellow isn't busying himself with preparations, however. "How'd you know?" this voice comes from that fellow, one John Silver, turning around to face Flint. "I would've done the same, not so long ago." A terse zzzzzip as the bag is shut. Given the choice between a place where there's not likely to be /any/ cool stuff, versus a place where there's likely to be loads of it, Flint, Silver, and the four other men with him quickly reach an agreement. "The observatory," he says. "There might be more defenses, but I think there's a better chance for profit." His lips curl downwards slightly at the last word, as if he doesn't quite like the taste of it anymore.
Haguro	Things have changed a lot over the past... Year?" Haguro taps her chin lightly while checking over her gear: Turrets, guns, and armor! Also, way too many cameras as she'shad a tendency to pack with her over the past few trips around Njorun and the Citadel. She's keeping her eyes open, of course, but taking pictures for use in reports is the name of the game! Again. "I... I don't really want to, but if that's what everyone else decides on, then..." She swallows nervously, trying to put on a braver face and likely failing at it. "... I'll go wherever I'm needed. A-although the observatory might have some interesting data there, too, and it might not be so unpleasant." That's about as indirect of a vote as she can manage.
Staren	The SSC Stranger than Fiction is in orbit. If the warpgate is big enough, the Star Hawk stands by just outside it in case it's needed. Whether it is or not, Staren is in his robot body today, every precaution is taken, every scrap of power he can muster is available. He won't be caught unready and nearly killed again. He hopes. So, they can either go through the awful prisons or the observatory full of cool science, magic, and magic science stuff?! "Do you really need to ask? I vote the Observatory."
Kushiko	Even though the notion of names wasn't something Kushiko overly spent much time herself dwelling on, she concurred (or at least Ordis had pointed out as well) that it was suitably appropriate and maybe even 'awesome' as names went. <"It was nothing in particular to us, no more than Njorun was to you."> the slight feminine voice remarks, without presence and more upon the incoporeal aspect of the air around her and others. It definitely didn't come from the petite Nova Prime Warframe, make no mistake. The slight pulsation of energy funnels casting it's own glow besides, she had traversed ill terrain with terrifyingly casual ease, sometimes producing oneway 'gates' of her own that blipped her forward for others to follow into. <"We mislike the notion of what could be in the prisons, even if they were empty given what we've seen of living systems here. The Observatory is what we like."> she remarks, tucking the twinbarreled (if ornate) Tigris variant shotgun against one arm as the frame seems to 'glance' about to follow the desires of the operator, who then seems to regard Haguro a bit sympathetically? It's hard to say sometimes. The young girl who occupies the technorganic battle golem does understand a little of what the ship secretary goes through and tries to look out for her sometimes. <"On the other hand, we should be prepared possibly for weirder things via the Observatory route."> she honestly notes.
Starbound Flotilla	The STARBOUND FLOTILLA are here, in their standard Durasteel equipment! 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, glowing cyan at the faceplate. Biteblade, the humanoid plant, is in durasteel plating with elaborately carved wood and bone ornaments over glowing powered components that glow an intense green. Pavo the bird-girl wears a pirate-aesthetic set of mesoamerican-style armor, with yellow bands of energized fabric linking the pieces to her central piratey longcoat. 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, and lines of bright white. George (just plain human) wears a futuristic combat EVA hardsuit that glows a gentle red at the flat faceplate. Seft, the robotic Flotilla member, is wearing full-on medieval knight armor with a soft energized blue glow below the plates on her body, and especially around the eyes. Each has a heavy industrial-yellow two-pronged plasma-cutter-like tool strapped to their side, a Matter Manipulator. "I believe we can all agree on the observatory." "Isn't that a little racist?" "...Hhh. Will regret this. I'll bite. How?" "Because five of us are aliens." "Regretted it." "Confused. he has a sort of a point?" "Wh... No he doesn't! Pick the observatory! More profit in it, like the Cap'n over there said." "Floran think, give better insssight into entire Maw too!!" Looks like the Flotilla -- they only get one vote because of Reasons -- is voting for the Observatory themselves. They're also going to set off rather quickly. Flint, Maaka, and Staren are all well-known and well-liked by the Flotilla, and the Flotilla group up among them based on who likes who most. George and Pavo stick close to Flint and his group, Biteblade and Albert stay near Maaka, and Moonfin and Seft keep near Staren, but all six are planning to head out immediately, with a methodical but swift pace. They are dungeoneers, albeit not as a /primary/ business. With weapons ready and mobility techs prepared, they're heading on in!
Carna	Carna had pushed for claiming both the Citadel and the ruins of Njorun at one point. Had been nearly fanatical about it. She does not recall why. She wrote down what happened, but the emotions that had consumed her, the desperate NEED to lay claim to these exceedingly dangerous ruins, is now lost upon her. She does not know from whence it originated or where it has gone. And now that she stands here in the Citadel, the concerns she had before joining this expedition, of there being some deeper reason why she might want to come here, some dark motivation in the whispers she hears nigh-constantly, has vanished like bloody mist before the predator-haze of a Lantern seeking power, sustenance, and answers... And not necessarily in that order. She is keen to danger, alert for anything out of the ordinary, armed and ready, but never having been here or even come into conflict with the Confederacy when it still existed, she is even more out of her element here than at Njorun. Sure, sure. One might ask, 'What, a zombie woman stalking the devastated ruins of a mad labyrinth? Isn't that what she does basically all the time?' And yes, fair enough, but this is not the land of the dead, and this has an entirely different feel to it, and shut up it's just not the same okay. The observatory, whatever that is, has been described as containing magic and power and so on and so forth. Carna thus votes in favor of such if her opinion is asked for, because obviously. "The observatory sounds the most beneficial. Whatever lingers in the prisons below will be better faced when armed with tools of power."
Priscilla	The vote seems pretty decisively for the Observatory. Since the base staff have no authority to sway it (if they even wanted to), and Priscilla wouldn't have put it up for a vote in the first place if she'd intended to cast one, it is a quick and orderly procession through one of the largest and most grandiloquent doorways at the far end of the Hall. Despite the Citadel's austere and monolithic atmosphere, it's light-years more simple and reassuring a trip than wandering the tunnels of Njorun. Maybe it's the simplicity of the Hall's basic framework. Where Njorun's crazy bastard shell of myriad magics and forms of arboreal life mixed together had come apart into a physics-defying slurry, the marble, cobalt and mahogany making up much of the Hall of Doors is basically untouched; only what lies beyond the Doors themselves have been radically altered. The same cannot be said to the slightest degree of the Observatory. Beyond a few more sub-halls and relatively functional, baroque elevators, a grand passage that is thankfully wide open (it seems the Citadel didn't or couldn't lock itself down like Njorun did), the utterly, stupendously huge chamber that once served as the Confederacy's omnipresent and far-reaching eyes and ears is in disarray, in the sense that an exploding star is 'hot'. Rather than being a dome, the structure has somehow mirrored and inverted itself along its X axis, becoming a full sphere, with edges that flow together like the seams of a kaleidoscope. A sea of cobalt blue, lit with hundreds of millions of twinkling stars, surrounds people in every direction, the walls that support them so far away that they appear as, and for all intents and purposes might as well be, an actual night sky. The geodesic lattice of pathways that once shot across the void on every level have been shattered and cast asunder as if by some great implosion. Though the infinite pieces seem, individually, perfectly stable in structure, they constantly drift at varying speed on eddies of twisted space that flows like water, with some blinking in and out of existence at various, repetitive points, like one of those awful vanishing platform challenges in a videogame. That much is relatively mundane compared to what happened to the observation equipment itself. The many magical mirrors and crystals, technological holograms and quantum viewfinders, and the more esoteric astrological lenses and orreries, have all gathered to the perimeter of the galactic cluster of fragments, uniformly gazing inward from all angles, arranged in a drifting, multi-layered sphere of viewing ports. Most of them still show different parts of the Multiverse, though all of them are very different from before, though many of them flicker randomly between views, and some are badly corrupted. Many of them gives off the intense feeling of /watching/ passers by, and frequently, the hair-prickling sense of a 'presence', or even presenceS, seems to scroll through different stations, as if something metaphorically behind the many looking glasses is drifting in orbits around them, like windows looking in on the Observatory as some kind of terrarium, rather than being a structure that looks outwards. here are many exits, but most are far across the colossal expanse, and the space between isn't solely occupied by fragmentary solid ground. In amongst the serene chaos of superficial microgravity, pockets of air fizzle and pop, space visibly contorts and ripples, time runs backwards when platforms pass through it, rays of light become solid and solid matter becomes light, and spiral galaxies and burning pulsars shed their ominous radiance where they pass. It's quite a sight.
Staren	"I wonder if they chose this aesthetic, or if this is just what solidified hubris looks like?" Staren comments, re: the finely-decorated hallway. And then they enter... "Woah." Staren looks around. After a moment, he starts deploying drones, a half-dozen or so small ones to fly around their immediate area just to check for any places that, oh, remove you from existance if you pass through them or something like that. He's sure people will work out how to cross. In the meantime, he makes his way (via flight thrusters) to one of the observation stations -- perhaps he can get at least a cursory understanding of what sort of machine it is, enough to tell if it'd be helpful to study in more detail later.
Alexis Maaka	Not like Maaka cared about which way to go. She agrees with the consensus, the Observatory may be more fruitful than going through an old torture hall. She nods to Biteblade and Albert, before motioning for the two to follow her as she begins to take point. Her rifle sways and is aimed here and there, as Maaka advances forwards. Her eyes glance towards the pirates and their captain as they arrive, narrowing behind her helmet. She must look like something they never imagined, a technical super soldier, to their eye. It's rather amusing, but she can't keep dwelling on that. She whistles in awe at the observation equipment, lowering her X95 and folding up her helmet, revealing blood red hair and robotic, golden eyes so to speak. "Hard to say. Maybe they wanted an aesthetically pleasing workspace." She comments to Staren, echoing his approach as she suddenly takes off with a boosted jump, springing herself into the hair ten feet or so, before using her magnetic grapples to begin ascending her way up toward another observation station, climbing like a certain web-slinging superhero. When she nears the top of whatever she's climbing, Maaka stops to stare out at the light, watching it solidify before becoming light, and spirals swarm the map.
Haguro	"It could be that, or even a combination of... Um. Everything exploding?" It's time to take pictures of... Something weirdly sensible for once. Relatively sensible, anyway, considering that Haguro's pictures are of the inside of a sphere somehow, but at least the general shape of the whole place is recognizable as an actual shape. She's also taking pictures of the equipment and the images they're showing. It might not look the same way once she finishes getting these developed, after all, and bringing these back is still a risk! It's not one she isn't considering, though, and the shipgirl soon turns to her allies while trying not to get too distracted by the more nonsensical lighting and crazy gravity shenanigans. "There is a certain... Elegance to all this, I guess. Aside from the..." She makes a vague round shape with her arms around her. "... All of this shape here."
Captain Flint	Flint pauses as he enters, observing the shifting footholds. "Grapples," he says to his men. Upon his command, Silver and the others reach into their bags, producing grappling hooks. Used to using them for boarding, employing the devices for more vertical ascents isn't too hard a change. Flint takes a moment on one of the platforms to peer through one of the displays as well--he never likes feeling watched. "It looks like someone's dream," John Silver remarks, equal parts wonderment and worry.
Kushiko	Distantly, as some others begin to show up, Kushiko's memory is jogged when it comes to the members of the Flotilla. Ah. She remembers them, from that chance encounter quite some time ago, before the superfactions were sundered as they were, though such a thing was in passing. It'll be nice for the manpower on top of everything else, she wagers. On the subject of the Observatory, if Nova had eyes, they'd be lit up--even when it comes to being /stared at/ from something from the great beyond, it's either a soothing presence or something she's so accustomed to in general when it comes to her existence and the Void that she doesn't seem to make a great vocal note of it. She complements Haguro's own phototaking with her own, her Warframe's sensors taking in a vast amount of visual data through the cameras and the scanner equipment she herself has, though it'll take a prodigious amount of it that she can't quite spend the time on. Silver's comment breaks her out of her own personal reverie, before she speaks in that odd fashion of hers once more. <"We like it. It reminds us of... something, we're not sure of. Something familiar, something not."> The faceless Nova cants her head slightly. <"Some of the equipment resembles the starchart we use."> As to actually getting places, the Warframe decides to help out somewhat--gesturing with a hand and causing a panel of flickering energy to appear with a reverbing noise. Lilac with black inversion, it draws a single, almost chaotically wriggling tether from it's origin point to one of the observation stations, before she herself goes through it. This makes another wonky little sound as she instantaneously shows up on the otherside of the apperture thread. <"That should last for another six or so, if we need more, let me know."> she offers.
Carna	Like every other time Carna has seen a night sky, or indeed a sky at all, whether actual or simulated, it just doesn't seem 'real' to her. It's not her sky. It's not the sky she is climbing towards. It's not the one in the World of Ashes. So it 'doesn't count'. She views the spectacle blandly, searching more for some hint of a monster lurking among the the stars than taking in any particular wonders. In particular, she is quick to point her hand crossbow at anything from which the sensation of being watched seems to be coming from. Creatures camouflaged among the 'sky'? Chamelon-like, changing pigment? If they move too quickly, will they be exposed? Are they bending light somehow? Or are they simply outright invisible as Priscilla herself is capable of? She has no intention of trying to navigate across a vanishing block puzzle while unseen creatures lurk, waiting to simply knock them off and to their doom or something. "Kushiko. Staren. Do you have the means to discern if we are truly alone? I receive the impression that we are not."
Starbound Flotilla	"This is unspeakably beautiful." "Then don't ssspeak. Duh." When it comes to enclosed platformer-challenge spaces, strange outer space, and other suchlike, the Starbound Flotilla seem well at home. Captain Flint has the right idea, and the Starbound Flotilla intend to use it as well! Brandishing grappling hooks, the Flotilla power up their own mobility tech microthrusters to grant them some superior platforming mobility. Its Pavo and Albert that split off and head towards the equipment, though; while the group traverses the observatory with double-jumps, air-dashes, and other suchlike, they're going to focus on approaching those machines, and specifically on recovering them. Sensor equipment of such a startlingly varied sort is quite valuable! Though they'll try to be careful of security systems that might detect theft, they're far more focused on an effective gathering, to be able to recover some of that technology and magic. It's the rest of the Flotilla that settle on, it seems, collaborating with Kushiko! As long as there aren't any pressing concerns, they can use their RAPID ENVIRONMENT SHAPING abilities here to focus on construction! By collaborating with her wormhole generation, they're hoping to establish some platforms and walkways that the group can use to bypass a little of the difficulty! People like Carna, who seem to operate with more caution, are the ones they're working to help out here.
Priscilla	Staren was . . . well advised, to do that. His drones zip off into space, gradually becoming little specks in the cavernous expanse, and one by one, they abrupt, strange, and extremely terminal ends, until every one of them is done. Some simply bumble into invisible pockets of space that crushes them into little marbles, or others wind up 'rewound' into pristine, disassembled screws and plates. Others are victims of spontaneous, atmosphere explosions, and others are actually /pounced/ on by seemingly predatory celestial bodies. The hazards are scattered wide and far between, but the extreme difficulty of anticipating them is . . . troublesome, to say the least. The observation equipment floating within grapnel or jumping range to the door (being at the very edge of the odd sphere they make now) does not seem to be guarded with perturbing traps of that nature. Not yet, anyways. Staren winds up at a relatively understandable holo-image, full 3D with simulated tactile feedback and motion trackers that make its various displays simulate physical interaction. It seems to be focused on some iteration of Creation, portraying a massive city reduced to smoking rubble by the telltale signs of orbital bombardment, clearly not native to the place, and probably old enough to have happened shortly after the Reality Quakes. Nothing appears to be immediately wrong with it, save for its odd choice of view. Flint winds up at a more traditional 'magic mirror' instead, replete with a gilded mask of the comedy/tragedy sort sculpted into its frame. Briefly, he only perceives himself, reflected standing there as normal. Then, the silvery surface shimmers with the image of a great, storm-wracked ocean of violet water, where great, shadowy collossi seem to stride across its surface in the thundery distance, like moving mountains. Then, his reflected self abruptly ceases mirroring him, and falls into the water beneath it with a look of terrified shock, silently kicking and thrashing to stay above water, and then disappearing beneath the waves for good. Nothing happens to the real Flint, save whatever effect seeing something that creepy might have. Watching the light beams, Alexis won't see anything immediately dangerous about them. Testing them out at all, she finds that they'll support any solid object she throws at them, until the glinting reflections from the orbiting observation glasses fade and shift when they're eclipsed and renewed, making them quick, but temporary kinds of possible routes. Ones that have very definite and predictable spatial properties, too. Haguro (and to a lesser extent, Kushiko) will quickly find something disquieting about their recorded images. While they seem to work better than Njorun's vaults, what they show is more than what they see with their eyes. Rather than obscuring detail, like before, they add it. Approximately a fifth of the viewports they capture resolve as myriad, bright and staring eyes, some beastly and intimidating, some eerily human, some with alien triple-pupils or unearthly glows, and others still stranger. All of them seem to be looking at the source of the recording, and nothing else, even when doing so would be impossible by corroborating moments of video taken at the same time as the photographs.
Priscilla	Kushiko is in for a little extra surprise when Nova's wormhole does not, in fact, deposit her at the station she had aimed for. She can /see/ it at the correct spot, but she steps out on top of an extremely high and fairly far away chunk of gradually tumbling marble that looks down on it. A bit of a problem. The same problem besets members of the Flotilla who attempt to use the Wormhole to span extra walking space. Whatever blocks they push through it all appear in seemingly random positions within a roughly 200 meter wide sphere around the exit, making the work incredibly imprecise, albeit, not actually impossible if they're willing to simply dump enough raw resources through. Building pathways or platforms elsewhere works about as well as could be expected. Their personal construction is /supremely/ stable, subject to /none/ of the oddities of the Citadel's native mini-islands, to the point where anomalies in space that intersect what they build are instantaneously obvious in their position and what they do, when matter translocates or disintegrates once placed. Their Matter Manipulators don't seem to suffer any targeting anomalies, for /some/ reason. Those who opt for the equipment will find that almost every single function /but/ the sole purpose of 'viewing' is completely and utterly FUBAR. All of them are still capable of the task of scouring the Multiverse, but all human control of them seems to translate as nothing but random inputs, and frequently damages the quality or shuts down the display altogether. Whatever security they had must surely have been wired to Vermilion Sunset, and there's no way the AI, even at its full operating capacity, would be able to see into this Moebius Mess with all its local infrastructure destroyed. A lot of the equipment falls apart when dismantled, and most of it ceased working when removed. A predictable pattern emerges, however: The most exotic and feats of integration and optimization, especially the ones blending technology, magic, and the supernatural, are extraordinarily prone to falling apart, whilst those that seem to be the most 'vanilla', appearing to be of a fairly standardized and unadulterated design, remain largely intact. A very small few return their functionality when retrieved. Unfortunately, none of them stack in Manipulator space. Carna, as the sole member of the group not occupying herself, begins to feel a slow, steady thrum in her bones, halfway between acoustic vibration and electrical static. It seems to grow in intensity with each station fiddled with, broken, or removed.
Alexis Maaka	Huh. Maaka stares at the light constructs, narrowing her eyes. "Hey, that looks like it might lead somewhere." She points out towards them as they form in and out of existence, like platforms in a video game. She bides her time, and springs herself with a boost of her suit's thruster pack. Thank you, Zwei, for giving Maaka those upgrades. Seriously makes this better. Maaka throws out her grappling hook, aiming to grab onto the platform so she can reel herself onto it before it dissipates, so she can scramble toward the next platform, or wherever she remembers seeing the construct form in front of her.
Staren	Staren frowns a bit as the drones are destroyed. He brought extra drones for exactly this reason, but to see them destroyed so quickly... He may need a lot more. Still, they showed that it was safe to travel to some of the observation platforms. And... there's what looks like Creation maybe, but not any they're currently in contact with. Where is it? Is it even in this sector, he wonders? He fiddles with the interface, trying to see if he can bookmark this location or see an indication of where it is in the larger multiverse or anything. Trying to ascertain the capabilities of this device. To Carna, he replies, "Of course not. There are undoubtedly an endless variety of creatures in the Multiverse I don't have good means to track, and of course it's quite possible that the... the Citadel itself is watching us. Still, I'll double check with what means I have..." So he also takes a quick look around in the full EM spectrum, including as much active scanning as he can (there's a burst of static on the radio as he does this.) He uses a portable device to emit a sonic pulse and check for echoes, too.
Haguro	Haguro's face contorts slightly as she notices the differences almost immediately, glancing over at Kushiko to see if her picture-partner's having the same reaction as the shipgirl. Sure, Nova might not have quite a face for her to discern much from, but still! "How odd... The viewfinder's showing me different images from what I'm seeing on the equipment. This... Can't be normal, can it?" A pause, and then the shipgirl shivers slightly as she snaps another picture and catches sight of yet more freaky eyes. "...Then again, none of this is normal. P-perhaps... We should bring some of this equipment back instead?" She suggests, already digging out a sack to put some of the lighter-feeling equipment with images that had the less freaky-looking eyes. Haguro can't be too careful if these things could be haunted by monster-eyeballs!
Captain Flint	There are, basically, two different interpretations of the vision in the magic mirror. Either it means nothing, or it means something. Leaving alone the first possibility for now, he ponders the second. What /does/ it mean, if it means anything? "The future?" asks John Silver, looking over his shoulder. The captain's lips pull into a tight scowl. "Perhaps." He's not afraid to admit that the vision could be a warning, especially not to Silver, who he still doesn't entirely trust. "Perhaps simply a message." Pause. "Mr. Warrick," he says tersely. "The mask." Flint gestures to the mask on the viewscreen. The aforementioned Warrick reaches out with a bare hand, which Flint intercepts, locking eyes intensely with his crewman. "Gloves." Warrick slips on a pair of thick insulated gloves taken from the base camp, and, using some simple tools, attempts to pry it free. As the others have found out, however, his attempt to do so only causes the device to crumble to pieces. "Subtle," says Silver flatly. "I don't think it was anything to do with his approach," says Flint. "Look." The captain gestures to other devices, doing much the same as others attempt to tamper with them. "It's as if the place is coming undone at the seams." Silver swallows nervously. "What does that mean for us?" "Good question."
Starbound Flotilla	"It's like an outer space haunted house." "Something has bled badly into the reality of this place." "Mh. Observation." "Perhaps." "It's made all the loot fall apart. I want it fixed." "Hmmmmm... Floran hasss idea! Metal friend, get sssensor." "Dawning. What do you... Oh! One moment!" "We gonna poke the den?" "What a wonderfully risky scheme." The Flotilla pull back from the unlootable goods. Raw materials are good, but not worth the unstacked space! They collect with each other again, through warping jumps and maneuvers. They kneel down, and begin rapidly assembling a small platform using their still-functional construction systems, something stable. It's nothing major, a basic plasticement platform to float in space, with a small generator and a simple console operating one of their own sensor units. Well, something about this place is reacting either VERY WELL or VERY BADLY to sensors. And so, in order to puzzle out precisely how to best interact here, the Starbound Flotilla have elected to take a very direct approach: They're going to run high-powered high-density sensor pulses straight into the observatory. They're less focused on receiving data, which they know is likely to be skewed, incomprehensible, or otherwise damaged. What they're more focused on is the act of sensing itself; if there's something bad about observation equipment, they may be able to best navigate by preventing as much sensor use as possible. If there's something good about those sensors, they may stumble upon the mechanism.
Kushiko	<"We doubt we are alone here,"> Kushiko answers in regards to Carna's question pretty serenely. <"As to our ability to discern /what/..."> If she could blink owlishly in confusion--or at least if her Warframe could, it absolutely would. Seeing as that's not the case, she seems to be at least reflecting the surprise at NOT being at the platform she and the rest of the Flotilla should've been, at least collaboratively. If anything, this isn't... the best? Of situations, but it isn't completely awful. She works to at least move resources, collecting and shifting and moving, and taking advantage of the fact that gravity is a suggestion to the Void-infused Warframe most of the time. <"Mmmnho, that's not normal at all,"> Kushiko muses lightly towards Haguro. The frown is evident in her voice at least. <"We're going to be extremely cautious with our abilities further. We manipulate antimatter and generate it, so while we may be able to do something with what's going on here, we cannot quite control what fuels it so..."> Frankly, the fact she trails off is enough to suggest it would be possibly Hilariously Awful to do so. Don't get any ideas, Flotilla. :\| Regardless, the way things that seem to be fused together or general merges of concepts and ideas has her cautious for another reason. <"Somatic Link's holding still, at least,"> she adds, 'feeling' her link from innumerable distances away. The Lotus, companion to the Tenno starts to transmit on an audio-visiual feed. Except when she does, it seems completely and utterly buggered. Like seriously, for her, for the Flotilla, Staren, any number of ones with the 'tech' side would notice something amazingly not normal kind of thing is happening here.
Carna	Carna's anxiety increases as the thrumming feeling in her bones increases. She does not bother offering a rejoinder to Staren acting like it's ridiculous to rely on the person known for having a wide variety of tools to actually have the right tool for the job. She tries to figure out what is causing the increasing sensations, turning around and around, watching each person fiddle with various stations, try different things, and notes how the level of this disturbing feeling rises in concert with their efforts. She can come to no other logical conclusion, so she provides her theory. "If you continue to alter and interfere with these devices, we may soon come into conflict with whatever is watching us. There is a sensation growing in intensity that coincides with what you are doing. Take note, and prepare accordingly. I will be standing by, prepared to act regardless of your choices." She tilts her head down a bit, her huge hat falling into her gaze, as she puts away her hand crossbow and holds her hands out to her sides as though grasping invisible weapons. In her hands form a pair of blades connected by chains. They bleed dying sunlight and rising darkness, reflecting the death of hope in their dull, molten coloration. After the last time she fought something during one of these expeditions, she is not going to risk losing any more of her Dead Lights because her weapon was not powerful enough. She is also prepared to let some people take the brunt of the attack in order to narrow down what her target is, if they continue messing with stuff.
Priscilla	Alexis scrambling across the criss-crossing rays of light finds the work intense and repetitive, but a rare commodity of predictable and fairly safe to assume. Because of the way the light seems to reflect from the center of the room, the angles the beams shine at cut fairly directly across the huge sphere, though never through the geometric center itself, making for extremely rapid progress. Pretty soon, she is quite far away from the group; it actually seems like much further than she should be, considering the actual speed of her legs and thrusters, even if weird light is involved. Following the logical pattern of rotation around the chamber, a long period of travel gets her more than halfway across, before a hovering star explodes in her path, becoming a whirling accretion disc of gas and plasma that arcs over her like some kind of manhole-sized cosmic shuriken. Staren screwing with the interface has limited results. The picture warps and flickers at the slightest touch; badly. He can pan around a little to see the extent of the destruction, and mixed in with the scorched earth, tens of thousands of deep, precise holes in the ground. He can tilt upward a little also, just enough to catch the sight of titanic, matte black shapes hanging motionless in the sky, pulsing with little golden lights, before the entire thing collapses and winks out. Acidic smoke hisses dejectedly from the projector on the floor. Haguro grabbing hold of equipment has pretty much the same reaction as the Flotilla's attempts, though, when she lays her bare hands on any of the surfaces identified, a deep, visceral, but thoroughly imaginary electric shock runs up her arm and down her spine, vibrating her bones as if her heart had beat once, impossibly hard and loud. She will notice, in her last photo that crosses the center, something that Staren notices just now, only for the single instant his EM scanners achieve good clarity, before it disappears again: an electromagnetic and chromatic aberration so bad that it comes out as little more than a ball of grainy, quantum fuzz and loud static that hurts just as much to hear as it does to /see/, like some kind of badly malformed a Basilisk Hack, which now only conveys a sense of intense, unstable, incomprehensible 'power' and 'potential'. As for the Flotila: a tiny handful of the observation items /are/ salvageable in a state that could be fixed. The most impressive feats of multi-world engineering at the Confederacy's prime aren't, but even the simpler pieces still seem to have abnormal Multiversal reach. The simple act of generating a platform and propelling it normally across space also seems to work almost comically well, continuing the trend of the least ambitious solutions seeming to be the most reliable (albeit, more drones would be a good idea to map out any more anomalies). Funny, that.
Priscilla	When they crank the sensors up, they are the last to perceive what exists, hanging in space at the geometric center of the warped Observatory, like the superdense core of a galaxy bending spacetime around it. They get just the same as Staren and Haguro, and then a brief /visual/ glimpse of some kind of head-sized spherical object, onyx black and patterned in shifting wavelength patterns of deep cobalt, which then winks out of existence, along with its unstable signature. Perhaps it exists somewhere else, like a quantum particle having to decide its position after being observed. The thrumming that Carna had senses is gone. Whatever power it was radiating, it was incredibly intense, and extremely unique. The mirrors themselves are much the same as what Haguro had seen, though it's unclear why their sensors pick up the oddities, but not Staren's, or Kushiko's technological extras (merely any indirect visual preservation). They can actually follow the progress of the presences drifting around 'outside', through some kind aquarium space in another, overlapping dimension, into which the portals to the Multiverse seem to see both in and out of. 'Aquarium' is a good descriptor, even. The patterns remind one of schools of fish, rays, or sharks, circling around their territory, interspersed with some passively floating signatures to be whimsically imagined as jellyfish or octopi, and much larger ones to be more anxiously framed as whales. They can indeed track one all the way around a circle of the Observation's cosmic sea-sky, until it comes all the way to Priscilla, minding herself and examining a crumbling castle through some kind of magical painting viewport that has caught her attention (for obvious, if entirely coincidental reasons). They can track it as it stops right there, waiting in place, just behind the canvas-glass, where Priscilla grows bored of the sight and turns away. They can watch and see as it drifts closer and closer to the port, almost 'touching', before Priscilla's tail fur suddenly bristles, and a slashing streak of fatal black and silver surrounds her, ripping through the observation painting in a single stroke of the scythe, and winking the presence out of existence with a burst of sensor static and the audible impression of some hideous shriek. If they have any thoughts about it being an anomaly supported merely by the crossbreed's instinct, they are put to bed when a glowing mote of soul-stuff issues from the shredded canvas. An ominous sign, considering it had provoked the reflexes of a hardened Lordran survivor. They aren't alone in that. Shortly after the little soul-ember passes from the 'outside' dimension to the 'inside', Carna gets a whiff of it, and then, like eyes attuning to the dark, she can sense them /all around/. The impressions aren't just creepy artefacts and phenomena. They are most certainly alive, and of unknown intent and capability. They're actually flocking to the 'cage' the more things are tampered with, drawing them like a light dipped into the deep sea, growing brighter as more stations crackle and die.
Staren	Staren doesn't mess with any more machines after Carna's warning. "I don't know what it is -- maybe the Citadel, maybe something else. There's just too much we don't know." If the primary presence hadn't left so swiftly, he'd be considering advocating scrubbing the mission -- as it is, he deploys more little swarms of drones and goes to follow Maaka's path, trying to make it around to their actual objective.
Haguro	Haguro learns her lesson fairly quickly as she yelps and jumps back from the shock, shaking her arms and pacing around rapidly for several moments to try and get that feeling out of her system. "Gh...! M-maybe we can just... Focus on pictures, then." She whimpers slightly while stomping out the rest of the shock, not quite sure how much of it was real and how much of it was weird Citadel reality screw. Thankfully, the shipgirl doesn't just focus on the pain. Instead, her attention soon shifts to the newest photo and the strange abberation. She cringes again, of course, despite not being able to 'hear' a picture compared to just seeing it. Once that second shock wears off, she takes another look at her picture while holding it a little further away juuust in case. "Did anyone else see that? Ah... Are you okay over there?" She calls out to Alexis and, following Carna's lead, draws a revolver with her free hand rather than getting those turret guns ready. Haguro's not going to risk blowing up anything in here just yet, although... She has no idea where to even aim. She'll probably figure it out soon enough, considering that lurking feeling of being watched the entire time. "If someone's out there... Um. Show yourself, please! We won't hurt you if you come out peacefully."
Captain Flint	John Silver feels a chill run down his spine. He's without the sophisticated technology of his fellows, but he's personally witnessed Priscilla mowing hardened Spanish soldiers down like stubborn weeds. If something can unnerve her, it's definitely above her pay grade. He edges slightly away from Flint. "Can we... leave soon?" "No," rumbles Flint. But, Silver is right to be concerned. He turns to face the cook and the rest of his men. "We move forward. Don't touch anything in this room save for what you need to secure purchase. Advance patiently--if you're not entirely certain you'll make it, wait. We'll take this slowly." He looks to a floating platform in the distance, having the same idea as Maaka. His men steel themselves, bolstered by his confidence. Flint throws a grapple out, the hook clanging against an ornate brass pipe on the underside of the platform. In truth, he doesn't like this either, for much the same reasons Staren has outlined, but much needs to be done to secure a future for Nassau, and he's already sequestered funds that should've gone to his men. Too much is at stake to give up now. As Flint and the other crewmen slowly ascend, platform after platform, Silver reluctantly follows. Just like that, he can inspire men to risk their lives, to push just that little bit harder. Is this what Billy warned him about? Haguro poses a question, to which Flint replies, "Nothing--but that doesn't mean it /is/ nothing." Intangible spirits and phantoms aren't his specialty, but he's a quick learner. Just because he doesn't see anything, doesn't mean nothing's there.
Alexis Maaka	Maaka narrowly avoids getting an arm shorn off, as she feels one of those shurikens streak past her armor, cutting through armor, cloth, and flesh as she grunts in pain. "-Fuck! Guess there are defenses." She grouses, trying to run and jump to the next platform, using her thruster to extend her leap like a double-jump. She hauls -ass-, trying to not have another one of those stars explode in her face while she grapples to the next platform. Whatever's at the end of this little trek better be worth the effort. There's odd little signatures buzzing about, like that interference from Lotus' audio-visual feed. The cyborg keeps a hand close to her X95, as she keeps going across each platform, throwing her grapple and climbing nimbly.
Starbound Flotilla	The Flotilla seem to finish the effort, drawing in and going into tight formation. They seem to have a new understanding of the situation, right or wrong, and they fully intend to make use of it. Velocity, changing position, light, and what occurs in close proximity between two objects, these things are matching up. They tell a tale of a potential interpretation of this, that the people within the observatory are acting out the part of particles being observed on a quantum level. That Core... Was the Observatory trying to do something about that? By selectively focusing observations, were they giving that Core a certain space to occupy, or to not occupy? The Flotilla needs to figure this out. But they know that something demonstrating quantum processes at such great a size is something to focus on. Something to chase. They want it. Now, though, they need to focus. How can one take advantage of this situation? How can one attempt to make use of this interpretation? They can think of only one way. If this situation is a mirror of quantum mechanics at a macro scale, they need to find a way to represent true quantum mobility. And true quantum mobility emerges from a subatomic particle going from a high energy state to a low energy state, and simply kinetically launching. Which means charting a path on those mobile platforms! Grappling hooks go out again. They search out those platforms. They chart their paths as best they can. They do all they can to identify the direction of their flow, the "current" they're following. Would this be one of the rough equivalents of an electron falling from a higher energy state? Would this, in turn, allow them true quantum mobility? If their motions attempt to obey the laws of photons, will they be able to chart a path right to the exit? Or maybe Moonfin's an arrogant piece of shit who's completely full of himself and doesn't know what he's talking about, which is frankly a very likely thing and possibly more likely than success. They still, unfortunately, know nothing about what strange presences may orbit and intend to strike out against the group, or what interference may occur when they do.
Kushiko	It might, and we do mean might as in /yes/ be a good idea to try and advance out of here before anything else peculiar starts to come out. While Kushiko herself doesn't have the particular senses that say, Carna or Priscilla does towards this, something does kind of gnaw at her. A little bit. Given the qay things are existing in that quantum state, part of her is... /really/ tempted to try something that may or may not work, especially after what Priscilla slashes her way through. Add what Moonfin says over the tactical frequencies, and she begins to ponder at least something small--not something vast, given what's going on. She sweeps her arm slightly, the control rods on her arms expanding then compressing briefly as she generates and solidifies a set of nine orbiting little balls of antimatter, radiating a faint light and compressed into silvery-looking 'shells' that resemble some kind of hard liquid. With them so orbiting, she then gestures again, sending them outwards with care. See what happens as /these/ motes of antimatter move outward, particles that are quite different from the usual quantum numbers and might be something that perhaps can interact with what they can't. Besides, given the quantum state of antimatter, it could work out really well. Either way, she'll be keeping a visual and technological track on it as she works on getting to another platform to continue observing the results of this.
Carna	The powerful thing that Carna could feel has vanished, and so has the power she felt. And in its absence, now that she has actually seen it and has a target to seek, she feels hunger where she previously felt only apprehension and fear. Those do tend to be the two extremes that the emotional axis of something as tattered and broken as a Lantern operates upon. 'Is it dangerous?' and 'Can I eat it?' Rather human in a way. But as glowing creatures start to swarm towards them, Priscilla taking one out and leaving motes of soul-essence drifting behind, she has new targets. And her blades go to work. Past one of her allies on this mission, a huge gleaming blade like a solidified pool of blood, sharpened, and reflecting the last moments of a dying light before dusk claims all, zips out on a black chain. It strikes at its target, and then snaps back to Carna's hand, the chain retracting magically just as it lengthened. The blade strikes out again. She does not appear to be interested in dialogue, unlike Haguro. Even if Priscilla hadn't struck first, giving implicit consent to use violence to resolve this situation, it would have been her first choice of action. Having their leader kill one in front of her just acts as unofficial permission to kill them herself... Whatever they are. The rattling chains ring out amidst other noises, the sigh of a blade carving despair into the air, snuffing out hope with every strike, just as it may be snuffing out the lights of strange creatures, becoming a rhythm of steel and singing blood. She is glad that some have seen fit to heed her warning, but until they have either eliminated all threats or chosen to retreat, she can not spare much more attention for the rest of the team right now.
Priscilla	Moonfin is full of a lot of shit, but only partially today. Something in that crack idea of his must have been particularly inspired, because when the Flotilla fall in and essentially become a part of the bounded layers and drifting orbits of the Citadel's still-material debris, their sensors crackle once again, with the ghostly after-image of the orb's energy signature, as if coyly revealing itself to those who don't stand out. Or maybe it isn't that they're blending in and becoming invisible, so much that they aren't exerting themselves on anything? Like their passivity somehow makes the area just a little less . . . stable? Either way, they can confirm it is most certainly occupying some other possible position right now, which might be practically anywhere in the Citadel, but they can get a good recording of its energy signature, and with any luck, cook up some means to track it later. Moonfin escapes looking like a complete idiot for today. Flint seems to have clued into the sensible idea. The slow, steady, and highly generic way, gets him and his cohort where they're going just fine, albeit at a pretty plodding rate. Unlike Maaka's mad dash across flickering sunbeams, they aren't beset by galactic arrows or exploding space. Their grappling hooks and sensible planning somehow feel like they're tip-toeing by something very big, and only shallowly asleep, nebulously threatening to wake up, but unable to 'hear' their highly pragmatic and simple methods. Maaka is not /quite/ as lucky, firing boosters and magnets and the like from a highly optimized cross-technological paradigm suit. At two more points, pockets of spacetime explode outwards with severe force, directly in her path, and at another three, tiny celestial bodies erupt with beams of radiation or cutting heat. She is saved from much worse by Staren making sensible use of expendable labour, as the remainder of the wandering cosmic hazards seem to choose his drones over her, while those directly and closely tailing her basically 'ride her wake', where nothing disturbs them. Kushiko flicking little antimatter balls for science through the giant, surreal particle accelerator that the group seems to be using the Observatory ruins as, has perfectly 50/50 odds of either winking out of existence the moment they bump into an anomaly, or blowing up in a way that leaves lingering energy trapped within their horizon that makes them blatantly visible to the naked eye. Between her and Staren and Maaka, a clear path takes vaguely defined shape. Priscilla takes an opportunity to hop a few platforms to the Flotilla's makeshift raft, and guide it to the end destination of Maaka's chosen hard-light beam, while they're all busy humouring Moonfin.
Priscilla	That destination, finally, appears to be within jumping distance of an exit. One just wide enough to set up a new warpgate in, hopefully beyond the bounds of whatever spatio-temporal fuckery is going on behind them. At least, when they move deep enough into the recessed corridor, they feel the eyes and electric prickling off them. Ahead of them, it doesn't seem quite so simple. Far in the distance, where the other gate should be, they instead perceive a titanic wall of searing and sizzling static in luminous cobalt blue, flowing upwards like a sheet of flames. Getting close starts to badly scramble technological and supernatural senses, and hurt the skin to boot, but a very wide, open space can be glimpsed beyond it. A problem to figure out later, probably. Right now might not be the best time. When Carna starts laying into all the view stations she can reach, the giant Observation room begins to shudder like an animal aggravated. She can smell them. The things that wait beyond the wall. She can envision their lithe, non-euclidean forms shifting and slipping elusively away from her blade, flowing into a different one of the Citadel's eyes just as she destroys the last. They're crowding in on her. Congregating. Like she's coming into focus on the other side, through /their/ malfunctioning windows. Haguro gets to watch as a giant TV screen stealthily floats up behind Carna, and then drops itself overtop her like a fly swatter. Should Carna's bloodlust be strong enough to dominate her focus, she will very abruptly find herself dumped in a completely random place . . . Anywhere in the Multiverse.
Kushiko	SCIENCE! Because why not fling antimatter into the great quantum unknowns. It's severely tempting to further this by releasing a greater, radial wave of those particles but she has NO IDEA if it'll work properly, and the type she'd do is more of the 'render explosively unstable' and that might be worse than what she's done so far. So she doesn't. But given everything /else/ that's going on, maybe something a little bit more direct could be potentially done. So another gesture, fingers splayed out as she generates a tightly compacted ball of antimatter energy first--resembling again, a marble or even liquid given solid form. And then she blasts it, immediately, which causes it to seemingly collapse into a flickering, still perfectly spherical orb of flickering black amidst amethyst, a maelstrom of potential energy vastly more proportional. <"Oh I hope this works,"> she murmurs to herself as a warning is called out. And then the antimatter drop goes hurtling for where Carna is--possibly to collide with the TV, or even the shards and more. Yet she's controlling it: the vast, insane degree of potential power if it makes it there later could easily obliterate a great deal including Carna. But she tightly weaves and controls it so it'll be rather exclusive to everything /except/ Carna and everyone else here. And in this, turn it all--or as much as possible--into motes of light with thunderous fury. Or it might just make the portal become somewhat energized or amplified or gods know what. But the alternative, doing nothing? Yeah, that's not good either!
Haguro	Haguro barely bothers aiming her camera as she just brings it up with one hand to snap haphazard shots at the bizarre entities attacking Alexis and Staren's drones to try and salvage some sort of evidence of what they're even being attacked by. It couldn't possibly be tied to that warpgate coming alive that last time, could it? Considering how a /TV/ is attacking Carna, it wouldn't be too farfetched of a conclusion. "Ah... Miss Carna, above you! Dodge!" She's not quite sure if her warning will get to her in time, though, and the shipgirl brings up her revolver for a quick shot at the TV! It's... Actually, wouldn't that just make things worse if it really is just a TV made of glass and other dangerous-to-skin chemicals? The moment after she fires, of course, she'll shout out a quick "Sorry!" even though her haste in shooting AND apologizing likely has her aiming too high for the shot to really help nor hinder the rescue attempt!
Starbound Flotilla	The Starbound Flotilla seem to have passed through this without too much issue, with their raft and platforming and general shenanigans. They seem to be puzzling hard to figure out the full extent of this situation, talking among themselves incessantly in that way that scheming schoolchildren do around a lunch table, and with only marginally more responsibility. The others have risks they're dealing with, problems they're grappling with, but they've got them well in hand. Or, well in screen, as far as Carna's case goes. "...Think that it might be a control motivation." "Thoughtful. What about guidance? It could be a navigational..." "...Not possible. Has to be an obedience system. The nature of..." "...Have to go with Moonfin's idea, a rogue power core that..." "...Charge-basssed quantum sssuperposition meansss, need oppossssite charge for..." "...Absolutely must acquire, I believe, if we are to..." Whatever they're discussing, they're having a heated debate about it, but they've acquired a scanner signature and they're gonna use the heck out of it. Later, though; for now, they're going to settle at the exit area, their destination. They're great at a very small number of things, and one of those is quickly and efficiently setting up camps, which all six of them get to with insanely practiced ease, almost entirely without even interrupting their constant chatter. A gate is deployed without incident, and from there, a sprawling mess of a camp spreads through the whole safe area... As each Flotilla-member finishes their duties, though, they all eventually settle on standing in front of the big staticky wall -- at a reasonable distance, once Biteblade fries a claw -- observing it like a great, awful, compelling piece of art.
Carna	Carna is reacting to instinctive threads of danger, vague sensations, and ambiguous shapes that seem to morph out of the path of her attacks. She doesn't question how she can feel such things, just responding to threats in one of the two ways she knows how. The other being fleeing. And given she has yet to face any attacks or danger, she is not concerned with fleeing. But the failure to make contact results in her stopping her own assault for the moment, waiting for the enemy to think perhaps she has exhausted herself and now is the time to strike. That is what allows her to notice the cry of warning, the shots fired as she turns at the last moment, right as some big glowing thing comes down her and she lashes out with her blade a final time before it seemingly smashes her flat. Or so can be assumed by the fact that she's not around anymore afterwards, possibly just dissolving into Dead Lights to resurrect somewhere distant and inconvenient after some period of time. It happens. What else are people to assume other than... YOU DIED