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Bloody Revelations     Full Scene:
    Though Thorns is a city ostensibly readying for war, it is not a city on alert. Indeed, for being a brutally conquered stepping stone for an expanding empire of the dead and damned, it does an almost-convincing job of acting the distant, unconcerned capital of a cosmopolitan nation. Despite the infamously mighty military city-state of Lookshy being weeks from the first frontline engagement, by all expert estimates, the slow stream of trade and mild trickle of visitors has barely slowed in and out of the city. Probably, the people who voluntarily come here do so for reasons less casual than trading goods and plying wares that they could anywhere else, and even more likely, they believe in their capacity to be gone just before the fighting starts.

    Compared to the relative ease with which moderate efforts had allowed Elites to either blend in or escape notice within the walls before, any increase in security is subtle. There had been a note left (barely legibly, crammed into the margins of an existing book) by a certain wizard that indicated that the Mask of Winters is by now very much aware that there are people from the Multiverse around, due to one particular spy, but even then said news is a few days out of date. It wouldn't be surprising if the tiny increase in watchful ghosts, nearly invisible at various corners and crossroads, if simply due to him not knowing they're already in his city. At least, that's the hope.
Bloody Revelations     Team Alpha:
    Though it might be the last day they have of effectively unimpeded travel around the city, before someone catches on, it isn't difficult to find one of the many sewer entrances, seemingly as used as they are guarded: not at all. Down the hole, it's fairly typical of what one would expect a mid-Renaissance waterway to look like, with its masterful stonework left better alone than the rest of the once-artisanal city. Even standing on normal flagstones and listening to the trickling passage of ordinary water down its central channel towards the sea at the west, there is an uncanny, uncomfortable chill about.

    This particular area had already been scouted once before. Retracing some steps, it becomes increasingly full of completely amateur, and yet un-triggered traps; the kind that kids whip up thinking to keep the adults away, ranging to the kind that a home handyman would hammer together with household tools. The lamest of them are simply rattling cans in the dark. The worst are spring-loaded boards with nails driven through them. Take that as one will. Nothing of particular note happens for a while, until the traps disappear completely at the threshold at a set of stone stairs, which leads down to . . .

    A road. One that stretches far off into the dark, indistinguishable from being outdoors on a pitch black moonless night. It isn't a road that belongs here either. As cracked, dusty, and eroded as it is, anyone can tell that they're walking on asphalt, and their lights glint off the faded flakes of reflective yellow paint. Advancing far enough that the stairs are no longer visible, turning those lights to the side will find that concrete buildings have somehow clipped into the gradually widening channel walls, like an empty city was badly loaded and glitched into existence. They're all eerily well-furnished, as if someone were living in them minutes ago, but the road has absolutely no detours, or even alleyways, until a single four-way intersection up ahead.

    It's already apparent that something surreal is going on to anyone with a pair of functioning eyes. That's to be expected, if these sewers supposedly brush up against a realm of morphic reality. It isn't until someone catches sight of the rusted, beaten up and crooked road signs at each path of the intersection, that the situation the trespassers are in becomes more deeply, stingingly obvious, like finding a photo of yourself from hour ago slipped under your front door.

    Where they would usually indicate a turn, speed limit, slow, height barrier, or similar, they each bear the classical stricken red circle, indicating that the black silhouettes within are not permitted beyond their respective roads. One is a motorcycle. One is a magitech bike. One is undoubtedly a tachikoma.
Candle A normal person ends up in situations like this on purpose. Candle ends up in situations like this because he got bored, wandered off, and ended up in the wrong Creation on his way back home. The only reason he briefly registers on anyone's radar is because he's blatantly some kind of supernatural being, but even the Underworld does business with the odd something or another. How, you might wonder, did he end up getting into the sewers though?

The answer is that he assumes that, much like Luthe, that everywhere has secrets under the floorboards and that the sewers simply lead to whatever those secrets happen to be. Candle doesn't really care what /kind/ of secrets, he's really just looking for a gigantic heap of trouble. Which he will inevitably get, of course.

The party finds him and his entourage of armored weirdos and misfits a little ways into the strange, morphic roads and its creepy references to all of the people besides him who have actually been here before and therefore set off alarm bells. Candle has his massive jawbone blade in one hand, and he is using the teeth to... scratch his head quizzically.

"Now, I know what this kinda sign means," He swings his ludicrously oversized blade to draw a circle around the outer border of the sign, "but the stuff inside it ain't sensible at all. Except that one, I guess. It almost looks like a spider, if it were made by somebody who had heard of a spider but never seen one and just kinda made shit up as they went to fill in the blanks."

"Dunno why they wouldn't want any spiders tho."

Candle frowns, and resumes using his astoundingly overwrought jawbone sword as a head-scratcher.
Bloody Revelations     Team Vermilion:

    Those who are interested in something different, are lead elsewhere down the maze of corridors beneath the city's deathly silent midday streets. What they seek will not be found where there yet remain breathing human beings without the spark of defiance beaten out of them. The two are mutually exclusive. They are well off the beaten path, such that one has to enter from the far end of the underways, where giant pipes of stone empty out into the water, quiet and greyish black as the ocean is when standing so close to Thorns. The dock is even less difficult of a place to enter, bustling with foreigners on dubious business and crowded with dead labourers as it is. They have one particular contact arranged: the same one who had left their "present" at the post office not too long ago, delivering a full compliment of those strange onyx and smoky quartz rings of dubious nature that allow the wearer to see ghosts in the daylight and ward away their attention.

    By special request, of course. Somebody had sought her out regarding "mission specifics". When those who were promised a glimpse into the core of the Mask of Winters' secret industry arrive, Bloody Revelations is already present (unsurprising, if the Underworld and Thorns join together as most claim). By the looks of it, she has just finished a number of spells, judging by the pitch black staining of the walls around her, and a number of droplets of blood on the floor, as well as the last echoes of unintelligible whispering. A haze of shadows seems to hang around her, and when she looks to assess the group, her eyes are an ashen grey, and the dull red mark of a sunburst is just visible on her brow through her hair.

    "Just so you're aware, I'm not here. I never was here. In fact, I've never been near Thorns. A useless waste of space, vanity project to the Mask's ego as it is, it couldn't possibly attract my attention, never mind my presence. Got it?" she says without a hint of worry, as if expecting someone to divine some deeper meaning. "Things will go much more smoothly if you follow my lead and don't get in my way, so shelve the delicate snowflake act for today or else get lost."

    With that, she starts walking down the passageway, each footstep echoing incredibly loudly in the tubular cavern, but she doesn't go for long. Rather than following the maze deeper and deeper until it gradually slides into something disjointed with reality, she turns sharply at a section of ordinary grey wall, and rips away instead a foot thick curtain of petrified cobwebs, caked in the native stones of Thorns as if it had stood for an age, which clatter to the floor with the fossilized corpses of spiders.

    This of course makes zero sense. None of that is chronologically, never mind structurally, possible, and yet the ragged gap opens up into an entire second tunnel, going sharply downward. An iron ladder makes it look as if it naturally leads to another part of the sewer that /should/ be there, but the walls are all a shrouded cocoon of webbing and spun rock, never having been chiseled out in reality. A shortcut into the chaos. Venturing down it, climb turns out to be very deep, descending easily a hundred feet into the dark, with the top of the ladder swiftly becoming invisible.

    Reaching the floor itseems to open up into a dead end, but an eventful one. Layers of more recent webbing cover the gunmetal grey silhouettes of what looks to be lab equipment, heavily obscuring what it actually is, but at least recognizable as tables, books, freezers, a centrifuge, and shattered tanks of something that drip with a luminous blue ooze. Going near it stinks of nose-burning ozone and bile.
Kyoko Takada     Alpha-39 advanced the way she'd gone last time, picking over the traps, making it increasingly obvious where they were for those who come after her, and peering suspiciously ahead at every turn. Last time, she'd lacked the trinket their "friend" had prepared for her, but this time she's wearing it, having eventually acquired it from Gawain. She's certain that what she'd seen down here was another hallucination.
    Much to her dismay, the sewer turns into an area that's just as bloody impossible to be here. She doesn't doubt that someone could build such a thing, but she can't believe anyone would /know/ to. It can only be a result of picking at her memories. And yet, there are things she doesn't remember. Given that, it can't be in her head, either.
    "This looks like a road. Those look like buildings, to the side. Those are road signs. Is everyone seeing this?" Carefully, she focuses in, through the red eyes of her mask, onto one sign in particular. It takes her several moments, and then looking to the side, to make the connection. "That's a silhouette of your robot. Which has never been here before. Right?" At least the bikes are familiar shapes, though she can't tell why there'd be a distinction between the types. "Why three different restrictions?"
    For the sake of not rewriting the above, this is the point at which she gets close enough to see and hear Candle. Unfortunately, they haven't met. "And," she quietly begins, "who's this guy?" She tries to sneak /around/ him and his entourage, toward the "no motorcycles" sign, having no desire at all to trigger any additional party events. Whether the others near her do the same is up to them, and more likely to start something. Even without Candle standing there, she'd be sticking to the sides of the widening cavern just to avoid having open space surrounding her. Walls are ever the best way of watching your back.
Staren     Staren's concession to blending in today consists of a hooded cloak worn over his armor. So that his mere presence doesn't scream HEY LOOK POWER ARMOR, at least.

    He doesn't seem to divine Revel's deeper meaning, instead wondering why she has to harp on it for several seconds when 'I was never here' or even 'mention this and I'll kill you' would have sufficed to get her point across.

    Huh, stone spiderwebs. Okay. Well, Creation is pretty weird... but when it becomes clear their shortcut goes entirely through such webs, he gets a little suspicious that something larger is going on, and scans for spatial distortions -- although at this point, it is only to satisfy his own mild curiousity.

    When they come out in a lab, he waits expectantly for a moment. This could just be another part of the labyrinth, he wouldn't assume its their destination. Still, if Revel doesn't lead on, he starts looking around. Unable to identify the mysterious ooze, he first looks for written materials -- books that might indicate what sorts of things the scientists here needed to reference, or even better, lab notebooks recording what was actually being done.
Batou Batou sits inside the Tachikoma, regular lights kept off as his thermals scan ahead oh him. Again, the cold air makes it easy to notice any warm bodies, but harder to spot cold areas, the dark colors murky. A Public Security OP is the only way he'd end up down here, and with Eye on a parallel mission, but not nearby, Batou is unamused.

Batou takes a look at the missive he acquired in the camp, the strange symbols still eluding him, and then puts it away. That's what he's here for: info from the resistance. But, sneaking is probably a good idea, considering Sir Gawain's... blunder? More like quirk.

There's no way in hell Tachikoma is on the ground rolling through the canal. It rides along the wall, attached to it as they roll further into the widening tunnel.

As soon as the buildings start to appear, though, they're forced back to the ground. "This is the strangest goddamn architechture I've ever seen. Looks like a bad render in one of those crappy simulations..."

Batou hears the voices of a guy much too loud for a sneaking OP, and stops short. "Tachikoma, stay here, I'll investigate further"

"Roger!" Tachikoma silently chirps through the comms, and out steps Batou, his therm-optic camoflage switched on as he sneaks forward, hugging the same wall as A-39, only his sidearm and knife with him.

No need to give up his cover just yet. But he addresses the obvious operative next to him in a quiet whisper.

"Come here often?"
Tomoe This place was a horror to Tomoe, it was not like Priscilla's home world or Lumiere, no those were a natural part of their worlds, even when things were broken. This? This is an aberration and she need no power to know this. She's not the most stealthy sort so she'll leave finding the Resistance to others better suited to it. She's managed to disguise herself somewhat by not wearing her traditional armour at the very least. She knows it may do little to nothing to help but it's something.

She's fallen in along side staren ant the stone spider webs do get her attention.

"Understatement of the year there Staren."

The lab was not something she was expecting either. It could be another part but there might be something of use here. She'll start to look around much like Staren is looking for clues.
Gawain When they arrived through the underways to meet Revelations, Gawain wasn't too surprised that she'd be the contact. The knight was dressed in armor and formal fur, sword hilted at his side. "So a secret kept is what you wish in exchange? Well, then, you will not hear a word from me, despite your scheming being quite clear!" Gawain wasn't going to /lie/ about it, but he didn't need to bring it up. Despite his dislike for Bloody Revelations, he was well aware that working with her was necessary for some things, such as dealing with the Deathlords - who were far worse than she was, from her accounts. In the end, he had faith that the Paladins would arrest her after dealing with the rest of the Deathlords.

Moving through the tunnel, Gawain glanced at the spiders on the floor briefly, which didn't fit...but this place already didn't make much sense. The knight turns on a flashlight as they descended down the climb, shining it for the others.

When they reach the dead-end, Gawain speaks up again, taking a step forward to the books, before noticing the freezers and heading over to them. "So, what are we searching for here, if anything? You've yet to tell us that!" The blonde knight bends down slowly to open the freezer and inspect the interior, trying to see what might lie inside.
Starbound Flotilla "Increase in security. Subtle."
"Whelp, time to just give up and go back home, right?"
"Hmph."
"It is not /meant/ to be a deterrent, I believe."
"Aye, more meant to catch, not deter."
"Tense. She's here, do you think that...?"
"Ehhh, nah. Being dissscreet, jusst follow isss easssiest probably."

    The Flotilla approach Bloody Revelations with a sense of respectful caution, and Moonfin and George nod firmly through the thick refugee clothes that drape around. "Discretion is not only the better part of valor, it is also the better part of scheduling." Moonfin says smugly, and seems to have understood at least some kind of message.

    "That'd be getting lost in the literal sense down here, yeah?" George says, grinning and looking around with a wide-eyed cheerfulness. Albwert is as wordless as ever, but follows most closely, even when Bloody Revelations loony-toons a passage open, though he gives a look of a sort of... Concern? He follows her in and immediately recognizes a laboratory.

    The Starbound Flotilla do plenty of science, and they do plenty of building, and so a secret lab is something they're not entirely unfamiliar with. Albert digs into investigating what the equipment itself is meant for. Industrial chemicals for equipment or construction? Something more "pharmaceutical"? Something supernatural? If Albert assesses the gear itself all around, hopefully he can get some insight into purposes for it. He's particularly interested in the blue ooze. Does it make odd energy emissions that perhaps could be detected? What were the tanks hooked to, in intake or outtake? Hmmm...
Azure Armature Alpha Team

Securing a grip on local matters had been a project of days for Azure Armature, who had spent a long time just observing from various angles. Then there was the tailing. Then there was the journaling. Then there was processing. Then there was the dumping of small caches of supplies hidden in crannies of the city for the inevitable - for Azure, it was a matter of when, not if, there would be extended urban combat - battles later.

There was the painstaking mapping of habits, of routes, of establishing patterns.

She had it all. It was clear before her eyes. Her planning was clad in iron and pressure-sealed. From outside the city, she checked her 'watch' - a chronometer display hovering over her left wrist, adjusted for the local time. "The shifts should have changed. Right."

She dismisses the wrist display by simply dropping her hand, crouching down as if to 'pull' something from the ground, and then flashes away in a muted 'pop'.

When she reappears, it is before Candle, coincidentally, a small utility knife gripped thumb-along the back to snip a tripwire right as she pops into existance, looking up at the man using a Great Big Weapon as a butterfly comb.

It's a little ridiculous. "Oh. You're here. Watch the traps." She notes, before re-folding her knife and standing up to a tactical forward hunch with her knife transitioning to her other hand.

"There is a resistance group of some form down here. Thankfully, intel suggests there are none of the pee-oh-eye in..."

Azure looks dead on at candle for a moment, her eyes squinting.

"The rebels are down here. Be as loud as you like." She decides to summarize for Candle, before moving with purpose down the path at a quiet jog.

At the sign, she gives it a gander for a few moments, standing in the darkness and giving the strange road symbol a few taps before shrugging and heaving a gravelly sigh before just resolutely walking deeper into the awful anomalous new terrain.

Really, she had so little idea what was normal and what wasn't that it didn't make a difference to her.
Miari Miari's at peak disgust with this entire debacle. Not only has she failed to dig up much more info than the stealth team did, but she nearly got caught and her disguise is now probably being watched.

    So the young woman who screams Wood Aspect is nowhere to be seen today. The Wagon has been retired for some other purpose.

    She's stopped disguising her Essence or appearance at all. The young lady's still wearing her emerald-and-gold floral pattern kimono of shogunate stylings, but her skin glistens with an oily coating and her eyes are crimson, vaguely reptilian.

    Up until she's safely within the passagesways though, and has met up with the others, Miari wore a drab bland cloak to draw less attention and not stand out.

    "Naturally. None of us were, come to think of it." Is her response. As always she's wary around the Deathknight, but she falls into step with the others and follows through the creepy, mind-bending tunnels and on into the workshop.

    She's none too nimble about this and probably one of the last ones down the ladder, but minor grumbling and grunts stops the moment she spots the books on the tables and perhaps shelves.

    Then her eyes ALL BUT LIGHT UP! "Ahh!!"

    She gives the room only a cursory glanceover with Essence sight for sorceries and traps... and is beelining immediately for some of the books!
All-Seeing Eye "I'll play nice," comes a lilting, melodious response to Revelations' ultimatum. The voice is undoubtedly that of the Exalt who described himself as All-Seeing Eye. He's wearing a warm, tailor-made black pea coat, with a slightly lighter turtleneck, matching slacks, and a black fur ushanka. Eye fixes Revelations with a coy smile, hiding the expression slightly with his hand as it idly plays with his raven hair.

     "I must say," he says after a thoughtful pause. "It is so /wonderful/ to finally put a face to the name." The image of her face is saved to the memory crystal of his Mobile Sensory drone. When Revelations moves to leave, he steps aside, gesturing courteously for her to lead the way.

     Gawain poses a question that elicits a tsk-tsk from Eye. "Gawain, darling, isn't it obvious?" He gestures to the books, the shattered tanks. "We're looking for anything that might help Lookshy's war effort." This he utters with the utmost ease, which remains in his body language as he begins to search the room.

     "Miari has the right idea," he says approvingly. "Don't you just /love/ her zeal?" He smiles brightly, attempting to penetrate the freezers with his vision. What's being kept inside--can he even see into them, or are they made from something that blocks his mass-penetrating scans?
Bloody Revelations     Team Alpha:

    While some slip past the crossing and others linger behind, the time they have to decide to move as a unit is passed. Batou is just over the worn away line that would have been a crosswalk by mere inches when the rumbling starts. For a moment, it sounds as if something very heavy and very fast is rumbling across the streets overhead, churning iron-shod wheels so loudly that the grinding and rattling can be heard all the way down here. However, the rumbling becomes a dull roar, and as it rises in volume, it sounds as if it is rising in proximity as well, coming from the "east", where the crossing should hit a sewer wall, but plainly doesn't. The sound grows even more uneven, but it isn't the clattering of stone; rather, the rasping growl of either a dying engine, or a slavering beast.

    It is plenty of warning, but it does not last very long. A mere second later, up in the air above the junction, a bright red light flashes into existence, mockingly suggesting there had ever been an indicator to guide anyone. It blares an awful, squealing sound like the doppler of a car horn right before a crash, and then Candle, his entourage, and the Tachikoma at the crossroads are dead in the path of a sweeping black something so huge that it fills both lanes and scrapes the buildings to either side, shattering windows in its passing and carrying the glass shards in its howling wake.

    For the split second they actually get to see it, it is only the murkiest impression of a man, thrown as a shadow in some giant size, either seated atop, or frozen into, an even more colossal mount. The "neck" suggests some kind of horse, or perhaps a gargantuan dog, but there is no body to it, but only a whirling mass of shadows below it, carrying it as far too many legs moving with such speed as to appear like wheels. The only definite thing about it are the two scorching white lights in the pit of the rider/beast/vehicle's face, shining down the road with blinding intensity, and the very real, very solid spear it sweeps down from its side to catch the unfortunates up on its point. To Candle or Azure, it is probably recognizable as soulsteel. To anyone else, it looks like an unusually black and unnervingly writhing light pole, turn down as if by a crash, with the shorn point used as a lance.

    It goes straight from "No Tachikoma" to "No Magitech", ploughing through one and then the other, without turning down, or even glimpsing at "No Motorbikes", leaving those over the line out of harm's way if they choose not to interfere. While the red light is on (and seemingly only while it is on) a garage door in an empty driveway anyone could have sworn was locked down and strung with a chain now yawns open, revealing a deep, sliding incline which splits like an underground parking route. To the left, the asphalt is knee deep in murky black water and rot. To the right, the smouldering embers of a gas fire still burn, and the air reeks of the vapour.
Bloody Revelations     Team Vermilion:

    "Mmm. Portents. Auspicious signs. Things that don't quite fit, especially in repeated sets." the Deathknight answers absently to Gawain, dropping the ladder behind the group, in reference to somewhere that already doesn't fit anything else about it. "Themes come and go, especially this shallowly, where the Labyrinth merely kisses the waking world and its shape is all the choice of the beholder and nothing else, but missing details or especially wrong assumptions colour the artist's work. A corpse with thirteen fingers, a lotus in salted water, when the heartbeat you hear strokes three times instead of twice, or where you find your own footsteps when you haven't gone in circles. Those are where inherent meaning is at its loosest, and where a little push makes ten steps into a thousand. We have a lot of distance to cover if you want to get there before night, but only a little walking to do."

    The freezer, when dusted off, appears to be the kind with multiple shelves and glass fronts, though nothing can be seen through the front with how the frost within has completely fogged the slides. Inside are rows and rows of blood vials, with inscriptions squeezed into tiny medical stickers on each, but written in what must be a local language. They look partially coagulated, as if scooped up off the operating table.

    Meanwhile, the acrid blue liquid leaking from the tanks seems as if it were storage, or rather, being pumped into storage before it shattered. Even the slightest look at any kind of environmental scanners deems it hideously radioactive, and it even feels hot just to approach, though not so much that Albert couldn't get close enough to see the human bones floating in it. They don't look dissolved, like some kind of human specimen were in there when something went wrong. They look scoured clean, as if they were fed to something, and they bear unmistakable scalpel marks.

    Most of the equipment could be somewhat considered 'pharmeceutical', or at least chemical in nature, constituting huge amounts of gear for separating, freezing, electrolyzing, and boiling liquids, as well as a number of what look to be glass and moonsilver petri dishes, filled to bursting with their sealed cultures, which pulse excitedly when someone draws near. It could have been medicine, genetics, or bioweapons research for all anyone can tell, all of it seemingly 'mundane' to magical analysis, and very solidly real. The books are without titles, but instead are filigreed with elaborate diagrams of human (and unnervingly non-human) musculature and skeletal structures easily compared to the Vitruvian man.

    Opening them, Staren finds that their contents don't follow suit. Splattered heavily and with pages stuck together with blood, it's as if the writer were tasked with filling them, and slashed his own wrists to cut the time it would take, scribbling in a frenzy to complete the task in the few clear margins while his life ran out. "-4517: I couldn't help him. I couldn't stop him. They took him away and when I found him again, he was in pieces. I would have killed him myself, had I known what they would do to him. They'll be after me next, if they think I know. I just have to pretend to be one of them. Bide my time." Miari cracks open another. "-1329: I told him. They're not pets. You don't give them names. Don't humanize them. We're supposed to be taking them apart, and if we don't handle this with the utmost care, they'll be just as glad to do the same to us. Does he think he's some kind of saint? The greater good doesn't mean what we're doing isn't foul."
Candle So here's the problem with just ignoring the loud man:

Candle gets bored of trying to puzzle out the incomprehensible signs and... actually gets approached by somebody. He stares at Azure Armature as she comes up to him, blinking in non-comprehension until she dumbs down the explanation. He looks left and right, and squints into the surrounding... well, whatever the hell this place actually is. He's not sure, and doesn't care, except that it seems like there's shit to do.

He stares at where Azure Armature was for several long moments, then turns and looks at his entourage. Candle hooks in the nearest guy with his jawbone blade and asks him, "H-hey... did that lady from that place just show up outta nowhere and tell us there's a resistance group somewhere in here?"

"Yep." A young man in crude armor wielding a scythe converted into a spear replies.

Candle releases his subordinate and without further remark. Be as loud as you like, be as loud as you like...

"OK." He says.

Flames unfurl from underneath Candle and all of his subordinates, spreading into the surroundings like the magical wildfire that they are. Accompanying them are his actual iconic display, a thousand gleaming pinpricks of light springing to life above him and twinkling in the dark. Each has the teardrop shape of a candle flame, lingering in the air without a single candle to support them. A surge of power exits him and flows towards AZURE ARMATURE.

It's another offer of shared power.

Candle shoulders his weapon, and begins to saunter down the middle of the road... which is about when things get immensely dicey. Now, Candle is a fool to be sure, but he knows a thing or two about big ol' beasties and the first thing he knows is that you don't let the bastards get ahold of you. But there's not REALLY anywhere to /go/.

"All together, now!" Candle roars, swapping from his properly oversized weapon and igniting a blade of flame within one hand. Each member of his entourage answers in kind, and as they do so a matching blade of flame springs from the bulk of their formation as if struck from the hand of a giant.

It meets the charge and the great black lance with a massive outpouring of flame and red light, sparks bursting from the point of contact like tiny dying stars scattering into the surroundings.

Candle doesn't understand the boss mechanics at hand so he just does his damnedest to block it. Whether he's wholly successful or not, there is a tremendous CRACK as the entourage-magnified blade bursts from the effort of the mounted defense and the whole body of them are hurled back from the explosive force of contact.
Staren     Hey, that goo is radioactive! Seeing a warning on his HUD, Staren warns the others -- though he wonders if anyone here is actually vulnerable to and not shielded against radiation. The way the cultures pulse when they approach is interesting, but less immediately useful than books.

    Reading over the bits he and Miari find, he starts trying to piece together what happened. "So they were experimenting on people... or at least some category of being that there was contention among the researchers whether they were people or not. I wonder what that might mean? Some actual inhuman thing like fey or demons? Or just another race of humans? Or perhaps ghosts?" He shows Miari one of the sketches of clearly inhuman anatomy. "Any idea what creatures these might be?"
Kyoko Takada     No alternative reality is proposed, and so Alpha-39 must accept that Batou is seeing the same unlikely scenery as she is. "No," she answers over a direct, low-amplitude line. "Just the once. And none of this was here. There was a subway, last time." At least those obviously Japanese signs aren't around, this time. She's just as little idea why.
    Azure then appears, and addresses Candle. A-39 is entirely still as she watches the informative encounter. Switching frequencies, she momentarily cuts Batou out of the loop to ask the (also secretly and secretly also) Watch operative something. The importantly relevant line is, "Do you know those men?" She gets back an answer, and then continues to not tell either Azure or Batou anything about each other. There's no particular reason for the secrecy. More importantly, there's no particular reason to avoid secrecy.
    A terrible thing occurs, and A-39 stays the hell out of its way. She doesn't know if that thing is a guard or just an environmental hazard. Either way, it isn't directed toward her, and everyone else here is a grown whatever-they-are who can take care of themselves. Probably. Hopefully. She doesn't actually think /badly/ of the loud, weird guy with the monstrous weapon, but she's still leaving them behind if they don't keep up.
    "Advancing," she transmits across several local frequencies, knowing it won't get out of this cavern in any case. All lights off, she moves at a quick, yet oddly silent pace toward the opening garage door. Reaching under her camo, she pulls out a door-opener, tossing the remotely-controlled explosive toward one corner, and the anchor for a climbing line up to loop onto the door's rail. So secured, she begins her descent into what is just as likely to be an even more dangerous environment.
    The explosive won't do anything, unless the door closes behind her and someone asks for it to be opened.
Bloody Revelations     Scanning through the freezers is obtusely unhelpful. Though All-Seeing Eye can see into them, the view comes back entirely as black silhouettes of vials with no contents, which sort of look like rows of severed thumbs, actually. When Gawain wrenches one open, breaking the frost, he can plainly read the text however, and see through the labels into the contents.

    Each one of them has a person's name, age, sex, blood type, weight, and other vital statistic as he'd expect, but at the bottom of each there is a seemingly nonsense edict. "Removal of mandatory poster." "Hearing unapproved broadcast." "Implied anti-Ministry sentiment." "Gene regression failure." "USCM sympathizer." "Anathema cultist." "Refusal to submit to invasive search." "Failure to endure questioning." Somehow they don't all seem to go together.

    "Said no one, ever." Bloody Revelations lazily shoots back, though whether at Eye's declaration it's great to put a face to her name, or declaring Miari has the right idea, it isn't clear (one is more likely than the other). She mostly watches Tomoe go poking around the room, until she winds up at a centrifuge, completely out of power, where it seems a great deal of blood has been separated out from the same blue ooze as the tanks, and further than that, tiny flakes of moonsilver identical to the sole magical material present in the otherwise oddly sci-fi room, involved in the hideous tissue dishes.
Batou Batou is helpless as he watches Tachikoma fly into the air and crash into a building, just barely able to catch onto it with its grappling hook.

"Shit, Tachikoma!" Batou shouts through his comms, following A-39 towards the garage in a sprint. "You just start lobbing grenades at that overgrown mutt and we'll investigate inside. Don't get hit again like that or you may not be able to drive out of here."

"Don't worry, Mr. Batou, only my casing was damaged! Still fully functional!" Tachikoma whirs, opening its clawed hands to start lobbing grenades and machine gun fire from a good height above the intersection.

Batou takes out his sidearm as he follows alongside A-39 into the darkness below. This is pretty tight security, so this is exactly where he wants to be.
Miari Miari has a better answer, after Staren comes over and presents his findings and she reads out hers. She gives the scientist a PEEEEER, leaning in and tapping her fingers together while -

    ... While the book she was just reading continues to hover in the air, unsupported by anything...

    "... Strange. No, I don't. Maybe they're working on Genesis-tech somewhere... or this is the result of some odd sorcery." She can only hazard a few guesses. But she isn't terribly happy at this book's entries...

    So she reaches out to the book she was just reading and focuses her spirit. Eye-straining green-white light flickers around her fingertips and the Third Eye sigil burns into existece on her forehead as she focuses hard on that book and murmurs in a low growl of Malfean Dialect Old Realm, "Who wrote your entries?"

    She's not going to piece together tiny bits of evidence when she just cut straight to the chase... hopefully!

    Her spirit surges forth to assault the script and rip her answer free!
Starbound Flotilla     Albert's EPP systems, contained in a sort of high-tech backpack, activate abruptly on exposure to the radioactive fluid. It'll keep him from going Walking Ghost. The bones, though... Albert moves into action. He's got tools and eyes, so he knows what to do and what to find out.

Radiohazard. Atomic processes or essence processes.
Bones left behind. Flesh consumed. Blood, tissues, everything but bone.
Pharmaceutical and chemical apparatuses. Searching for mixtures.
Petri dishes. Testing chemical or bioweapon applications.
Medical and anatomical books.

    Something inside Albert rises, something Albert hasn't ever shown off to anyone before. It may occur to anyone who knows him that they've never actually seen Albert in a laboratory before, and the absence of that sort of situation is strikingly clear when it's shown how he behaves.

"So, we gonna push some buttons and--"
"Move, moron."

    Albert's already got a thick set of goggles on, pulled out of his Matter Manipulator. Vials, containers, beakers abound, so he yanks them. Some blood samples, unless All-Seeing Eye stops him, get poached; he'll use his own otherwise, urgently cutting a finger with a combat knife. He moves... Less like a military man now, and more like some kind of mad scientist as he sets up his processes. Centrifuge the blue fluid. He looks like a musical instrument's string, tuned so tight that he'll snap violently any moment. Anger, determination, a complete mess.

    Blue fluid. Residual essence processes. Blood. Mix. Centrifuge.
    Bone. Crush. Powder. Blue. Mix. Centrifuge.
    Blood. Blue. Mix. Heat. Irradiate. Irradiate? He has a radiation gun.
    Gene-regression failure. Microscope. Examine. Blue. Mix.
    Heat. Chill. Compress. Expose to lasers. Find something. He doesn't care.

    The VEP-infected material churning in Albert's veins rises to a boil while the traumatic history he has with this sort of environment puts him in a tense and distressingly emotionally vulnerable spot, as apparently evidenced by how Seft and Moonfin shove George off and try to keep pace with him and calm him down. And fail, of course. There's a reason Albert surrounds himself with nothing but spartan martial equipment, and that's because of the deep and intense conditioning and genetic inclinations that exist inside the Apex, and exist inside his damaged mind, which are /roiling/ right now.

    But hey, at the very least this is likely to be informative.
Azure Armature Azure Armature brings a hand to her jaw, two fingers pressing through her scarf as she subvocalizes on the radio as she walks, while Candle ropes in a guy to figure out what the heck. It's not her problem. Candle is the opposite of Azure's problem. Candle is a wonderful asset that just so happens to be an easily directable force of nature, in the sense that 'nature' is 'a moron and a bunch of his goons, who are also on fire'.

The giant soulsteel... doomtrain... vehicle... thing?

"Necro... strider?!" Azure Armature external monologues as the huge 'monster' bears down on the Tachikoma and Candle-Stack, causing the 'bullhorn fire moron' to ignite totally on fire and bring out a giant fire sword, loaning her his power at the same time.

Normally, she would turn down TEAM LASER EXPLOSION powers in a stealth operation. This is no longer a stealth operation. She finds herself filled with a burning light, which thankfully doesn't spill out of her visibly, but crackles at her core, and she calls to hand a SUSPICIOUSLY AK-47 piece of magitechnology to her hands, loading a magazine that is On Fire At That Moment In Time before firing short, controlled bursts at the light as she walks backwards.

"Come on!" She shouts at Candle, as A-39 heads into the parking garage that was locked moments before. "This isn't our target, so move!" She barks, her tone that of a field officer and not a loaner at all. She continues firing flaming, stacatto bursts to draw its attention as she strafes back, trying to draw attention or time for her friend the burning retard to get clear and into the path that opened.
Tomoe So Tomoe is going about the labs she does not break into any contains or storage units. She odes not know what this stuff is, this likely magical in relation to creation, so who the hell knows here She does take note of the various things here and has to wonder what was going on here? She;'ll let Staren work on them. She'll look over the shoulders of those with the books and pale a good bit.

"This is ... shadows of things from ... my great grandfather's time."

She muses darkly what could make someone from earth compare a time on earth to something in creation?

The warning about the goo comes quickly enough for her to avoid it directly. She is looking spooked though.

"Radioactive?! Lovely"

Okay this is bad new, very bad news. She'll look to Miari for a as she finds something near.

"Miari you might want to come take a look at this. Looks like they were doing something with the blood hear, seperating maybe and there's something else in it...Christ. This place is only the tip of the ice berg too I suspect."
All-Seeing Eye The only response given to Revelation's clarification of what they're looking for is an airy hum of mild interest.

     As his vision pierces through each consecutive layer of obstruction in the freezer (including Gawain), a slight frown develops on his soft face. That frown curls into an amused smirk when the Abyssal's retort reaches his ears. When Gawain's curiosity reveals the labels, that expression loses some of its warmth.

     "Ah," says the Exalt knowingly. "These people were criminals, Staren. They were being experimented upon, owing to their status as non-persons." He says this without turning to face the scientist, but with certainty in his voice.
Gawain "Got it!" Gawain replies to All-Seeing Eye. As Staren mentions that the goo is radioactive, he makes sure to inch away from its direction, instead focusing on looking into the freezer. Revelations said things that don't fit, especially in repeated sets. Carefully glancing from vial to visal, Gawain realizes that they all seem to be for 'different crimes' except one. The knight turns around the 'Gene regression failure' vial, glancing to get an idea of the name, age, and statistics of the person listed to see if they're relevant at all. In general, the knight's frowning at the different crimes. However, he doesn't get a chance to say anything, because Albert's snatching the blood vials. "Albert, wait!"

And then, Gawain turns to Eye, tilting his head. "Well, most of these crimes seem pretty unfair. And the gene regression one doesn't list a crime! Even if it was illegal, experimentation certainly seems cruel." Gawain tries to argue, not exactly knowing he's arguing.
Bloody Revelations     Team Alpha:

    The shadowy rider (of what?) is on Candle and his crew like something somewhere between a hurricane wind, a jacknifing semi, a rolling avalanche, and a barely remembered nightmare of a horrible motorcycle accident. Half of those things shouldn't make any sense to any of them, but the blaring lights and deafening screeching put the same general qualia into effect somehow. The soulsteel lance collides with the giant sword of flame, and as the embers cast their light, the figure remains drenched in shadow, but the faces and hands of dozens of victims within the metal can be seen clawing at its surface from beneath. The road is carved up with dirt and sparks, like a million horseshoes pounding furiously in the same spot.

    While he hold there, the light of the group's fiery swords is joined and intensified by the sudden fireworks of exploding grenades and flashing tracers, both physical and magitech, brightening the firelight in short bursts. The rounds appear to have no physical effect on the stubbornly undefined 'rider', but each burst of heightened light seems to make it fade more and more, driving away its half-remembered substance, until it completely disappears just as the giant sword breaks, and drops its silently screaming soulsteel pole-lance into a massive, brand new crack in the road.

    At the same time, the red light, and the awful siren, dim down, though astute observers will notice that the sound of it dimming is that of a train crossing warning, when it had started as something completely different, like the creepier version of an error in film. The garage door is indeed closed again (though A-39 would have at no point heard or seen it closed), but the explosives solved that quickly, ripped open just as easily as a typical, solid one.

    Dipping further into the underground parking space, anyone following winds up wading through ice cold water that must be from a blown pump, though the longer they go, the less likely that seems. The shadows of parked cars can be seen distantly to either side, but by the time anyone can approach them with a light, they turn out to be nothing but suspiciously car-shaped rocks, standing out of increasingly swampy and brackish water. Any further, and the concrete pillars are colossal mangroves, making for an almost jungleish environment, save that the heat and humidity is completely imagined by the stench of gasoline.

    Moving further on, until anyone not getting creative would be waist deep in the chilling, greenish black water by then, another source of light can be seen in the distance. Fire, both in the form of a pit, and torches carried by a group of men huddled around it, their features impossible to make out as their lights cast everything else about them into shadow. One might wonder if they belong to the resistance movement, but only for a second. Over the fire pit is something that would be cooking if it weren't the wrong way up, crucified and hung rather than spit and laid.

    When the scent of blood joins the gasoline, burnt rubber, and a faint whiff of gunsmoke, they can make out that the sole lit figure is that of a woman's body, carefully skinned head to toe as if prepared for an exhibit. Except . . . not a body. She twitches, groans, alive and barely conscious. The mystery gathering doesn't seem to notice.
Candle Candle is climbing back to his feet covered in soot, with debris embedded here and there in his body and his armor. His fellows are in similar condition, as they regard the place where the giant was a moment ago. He isn't really certain what's going on right now, except that the giant thing is gone and left its weapon behind. He stares at the soulsteel telephone pole lance for several long moments.

He takes quick stock of his inventory, which tells him he DOESN'T HAVE ROOM for the HORRIBLE SCREAMING SPEAR. It would be a pain in the ass to wield anyway. It isn't until Azure Armature shouts at him that he actually has a direction to go now that the giant thing is gone, which is fortunate because he might've just tunnel visioned it.

"Fine! We're coming."

A cloud of ember-filled smoke is what presses past Azure Armature into the garage, and finally rematerializes directly into horrible icy water. If she chooses, she's able to dissolve into their midst as well. Candle and several members of his entourage yelp as they reconstitute into properly physical beings, swearing in a number of different languages.

"Mother FUCKER that's cold!" He complains, igniting a fire in the palm of his hand that just sort of sits there. But actually moving through the water seems to come natural to him. In fact, Candle seems totally unimpeded by it, as if it yielded to him like it were simply air.

Other than the initial complaints of the cold though, he's fine wading through it all into the firelight. That is, until the skinned woman comes completely into view. Candle stops, holding the flame in the palm of his hand up in the air.

"Holy shit, how bad are you people at cooking things? It's not fucking politics, you just put the thing you're cooking over the gods-damned fire and wait until it's however not-raw you want it to be!" Candle exclaims, appalled but not for the reasons any normal person would be.
Batou Tachikoma whirs from the side of the building, watching the group disappear, but decides to hang back even though the creature is defeated. The train warning is going off, and Tachikoma wants to see if there's something to gain from watching it arrive. It climbs higher, and keeps its eyes peeled on the intersection, feeding the video of both the beast, the giant sword weilding entourage, and anything else from the intersection into its memory banks for later review by the Paladins.

Afterwards, it simply opens a channel to Batou's optics to watch and record what happens there while monitoring the intersection.



Batou is nervous around water. Not because he can't swim, but because he is a 1000 pound piece of metal that sinks faster than a rock. He quietly sloshes through the water, his thermoptics forced to switch off in the water, and he is revealed to everyone in attendance.

He grimaces at Mr. Big Sword's comment, both offended and disgusted. He isn't sure if this is real or not, but it's better to assume it is. Imperial America was fond of this kind of skinning in South America during the fourth World War, and he sees these people are even more eager.

"Hey, Big Sword. Can you keep it decent, you're looking at a victim of cruelty right there. Don't you have a fucking heart?"
Kyoko Takada     After her door-opener goes off, Alpha-39 retrieves her climbing line, checking it for damage. No point trusting her weight on something she blew up. Satisfied, she coils and stows it back away, the line zipping into its container at a press. Stealth is going to be harder after this, but not impossible, depending on the parameters. Wading without a ripple is difficult. Worse is the possibility of something being under the water that her sensors can't pick up, and once things start getting up to her thighs, and the pillars have turned fully into water-rooted trees, A-39 opts for any unforeseen dangers of the latter over those of the former.
    Candle's the only one who hadn't necessarily seen her, and this makes the easiest opportunity for someone to, as she climbs and swings herself up onto relatively dry bark, taking advantage of the colossal size of the plants to counteract what would normally be too spindly a plant for the kind of maneuvers she has to take to continue traversing the path forward. She might be strong and fast, if not inhumanly so, but increasing your inertia can make the parkour traversals more dangerous, particularly with equipment. In this case, she's less worried.
    Batou asks her, in the meantime, for her name. She gives what she has of one, then adding, "Don't trust anything, down here," as she sees the figures and makes out what they're failing to cook. "Fucking magic." However, "Can't be hallucinations if we're seeing the same thing."
    Okay, thinking time. What are the options?
    A. They're all ghosts, nothing to see here.
    B. The skinned woman is a deserving victim. Leave her here.
    C. The skinned woman is an undeserving victim, but has no relevance to the mission. Low priority rescue.
    D. The skinned woman is an undeserving victim, and has relevant information. Increase rescue priority.
    E. The silent figures have relevant information. Approach or interrogate.
    They don't seem talkative. They might not be alive. The chance of them both having information and being willing to divulge that information looks low. The woman might be a worthwhile bet, but the risks of rescuing her, along with her chances of survival, are unknown. She might not be alive, either.
    "Finished thinking. Opening fire in three. Two..." As high up as she could get, rifle braced, scope off, she sights down the naked steel and lines up targets. She'll take the ones closest to facing in her direction, first. Assuming they react with hostility, she'll just keep going. If not, just downing a few of them should tell her whether they're made of straw.
Bloody Revelations Team Vermilion:

    When Miari commands the book, its secrets remain anything but secretive. The thing bursts into bright green flame in her hands, and bursts even more violently into loud, raucous, cackling laughter, with its pages and covers flapping and heaving in twitching, tittering mockery. It tumbles back onto the desk, burning away the cobwebs in little flickers of lurid emerald, before --reduced to malicious snickering-- whispering out loud "Down there . . ."

    Coy and gleefully awful as it is, the direction is real. The trail of burning cobweb embers spreads down the desk and then quickly across the floor, peeling away inches of spun silk and stone in minutes. Where it reaches roughly the geometric center of the room, it reveals a hatch, though one of blatantly old and rustic black ash, shod in iron, jammed right into the middle of gunmetal and rust ultramodern flooring. It has something that sort of looks like a keyhole, but it certainly doesn't fit any sort of key. One could fit an entire finger in there, but judging by this place, it'd be bitten off in a heartbeat.

    "Give me that." Bloody Revelations suddenly intrudes, snatching the 'gene regression' vial from Gawain while he's talking to All-Seeing Eye. She turns it over quickly in her fingers, before apparently deciding it is authentic, and walking over to Albert with it, apparently understanding further level of significance. She holds it up to her lips, whispering to the dusty vial of crimson as if there were some extremely private secret to share, and when she does, it quivers and vibrates in her fingers, stronger and stronger the closer she gets to the equipment Albert has commandeered, specifically the centrifuge.

    Without actually warning him, she removes the stopped and splashes it into intake just as he fires his chemical laser, drenching the compressed and frozen cube of solution left before firing, and throwing up a huge cloud of foul-tasting black steam. Coated in apparently 'failure' blood, the frozen solution flash melts away, and reveals the first genuinely magical thing in the room: a tiny chunk of moonsilver blended with soulsteel, near the exact size, thickness, and profile, of an especially long and grotesquely etched fingernail extension, with a tiny fringe of fine moonsilver wires clearly meant to go under the skin. Unlike the surrounding surreal clutter, this one item is very distinctly 'of Creation' and registers immediately to artifact-compatible senses. The finished product of Albert's furious, near-complete experiment, only lacking an final touch of obscure, occult significance.
Bloody Revelations     It would take someone significantly dumber than anyone in the room not to notice that pushing it into the finger-shaped keyhole is a perfect fit, and there is no reason to assume everyone would take very long to figure it out. The hatch opens up into the slatted stairs of a deep cellar, which wind further and further down, taking them a further jaunt almost twice as long as the ladder above. There is suddenly a very real question to be asked: how much of the lab was actually in use of the Mask's necroscientists, and how much of it was purely conjured out of the mind? How much was the real thing and how much was the warped clay of the Labyrinth accepting people's impressions of it?

    What lies ahead is definitely real though. The surroundings are too consistent, too sensible, and too lacking in symbols and omens to be anything but. The stairs lead through the ceiling of a vast cavern (though the stairs clearly weren't intentionally built there, they just stick out of a seemingly random place) and onto an outcropping of pitted basalt, which gives arrivals a panoramic view of a mineshaft deep enough to bury a skyscraper in, exposing layers and layers of jaggedly carved walkways and ridges lined with honeycombs of tunnels.

    A glittering, chalky black ore is exposed in massive amounts along huge veins in the walls, and is being carted out en mass, along with rarer, pale white and ghostly glowing crystals, kept in separate cars being hauled along a rail system. There are several hundred workers at least, toiling with picks and chains as often as they are with powered magitech tools, almost all of them zombies (most of the people of Thorns), save for a handful of ghosts where finer tools are used. A number of living humans are amongst them, though starkly different.

    One class of them wears the armour of the Thornguard, serving as an entourage around what could best be described as an undead triceratops, crudely made into a cyborg, as it pulls a huge flatbed wagon full of cages, holding the other class of mortals; prisoners to be precise, clearly terrified out of their minds. They aren't being put to work. There's no need for that. Instead they're being transported to where a gargantuan skeleton appears to have been partially unearthed, with no indication of what it belonged to. It's so massive that a dedicated team is butchering it for bones, which go into a pile of machinery either being assembled or repaired with them. It's not difficult to tell where any of these places are; the cavern has open sight lines in every single direction, and the only reason the Elites got in without instantly being noticed because there wasn't supposed to be an entrance there at all, and so nobody is watching it.
Azure Armature Azure is, overall, not fresh-faced at shouting orders at tunnelvisioning gumbies. In fact, were Candle not possessed of an incredible amount of skill himself, she would think he was some miltae officer.

"In a few lifetimes, you could really be something." She manages to murmur, some scant praise, as they "fall back" towards the blown parking garage. She waves off the help, instead leaping to the side of the shaft and wallriding down from strata to strata, unphased by the smoke and mild oil fires, before dropping into the freezing water. She does not swear, but she does make a tired noise as she drops into the water with a muted splash, after Candle's swearing gaggle makes groundfall.

Continuing through the indoor swamp through the chilled water, she spots Batou as his camouflage is dismissed, guessing that he had come along for the ride, same as her.

That suited her fine. Working throught the mangroves, she heard the torchbearing goons around the corner before she spotted them. "Contact." She breathes, raising a fist (which the GROUP SHE'S SIGNALLING - Candle and Co - probably won't get, before breaking for a stone mangrove.

She spends a second removing the magazine from her magitek AK, and, satisfied, sidepeeking around the corner. She's crisp and precise, which Batou may like.

Her words, however, are filled with derision. "Lumpen savages or worse - Apostate." She mutters, for the benefit of Batou and Candle, as A-39 goes high and takes a position.

Becuase this Seems to Be The Agreed Upon Plan, she checks back at Batou for a moment, signalling five with her fingers and that she's going to go around the tree with hand signs, before doing Just That.

What she didn't signal was that, as she comes around, she drops to a crouch in the swampy water, firing two-shot taps into center of mass, woking from the other direction that A-39 was starting her sniping from.
Batou Batou nods to Azure, and to A-39, pulling his sidearm out and holding up behind a rock, before jumping up and firing at their arms, attempting to disarm after Azure starts. "Freeze, bastards!" he shouts, launching himself over the rock as he runs as fast as he can through the water towards the group.
Staren     Intelligent women levitating their reading material is hardly an unusual sight for Staren, but the lack of tell-tale aura around a floating object in his peripheral vision does get the book a brief glance. He doesn't comment on it though, what sorceress wouldn't learn telekinesis? He holds out the book of drawing for her perusal, but is soon distracted by Albert... conducting experiments? "What are you doing?"

    And then Miari's book bursts into flames AND laughter and he jumps back, raising his arm to take aim...

    Conceniently, Albert's experiment and Miari's flame reveal both key and keyhole. "Well... we've come this far." The catboy comments.

    Down they go! To... some sort of mine? "What is that stuff?" Staren leans over to Miari to whisper. He assumes that while it might not be a Magical Material, it is likely a magical material that she might know.

    "It's not combustible, is it?" Staren adds, as he takes note of all the people here and starts planning how to blow up the Thornguard if it comes to a fight.
All-Seeing Eye All-Seeing Eye seems quite surprised by Gawain's observation. He shuffles out of the way of Albert, not wanting to get in the way of what could be a very profitable search for information. With his back against a wall, the Exalt offers a response with raised eyebrows and a curious frown. "I didn't expect such sentiments from you, Gawain dear. Some worlds /need/ laws this strict to maintain order. The question isn't the justness of the laws, it's the justness of the leaders."

     Rolling his neck, the Alchemical folds his arms in front of his chest and looks over his shoulder towards Gawain. "Luckily," he says with a confident smile, "The Mask's complicity in the perversion of Creation is proof enough of his guilt." Is it?

     When Revel rushes over to snatch the vial from Gawain (the poor knight can't catch a break!) Eye waits, then approaches, attempting to lay his concerns to rest with a hand on his shoulder and a more warm, personal smile.

     Before the sun knight's eyes, that smile shifts into a curious frown. Eye doesn't quite seem to be focusing on Gawain once Revelations makes her discovery. The Exalt's ultra-peripheral vision reveals, behind him, the chunk of magical materials. Turning around, that curious expression again shifts, this time to an expectant look.

     "Well?" he asks, stepping aside so that Gawain can see, but without taking his eyes off of Albert and Revelations. His hand gestures between the obvious connections, the Alchemical apparently annoyed that the hatch isn't being opened faster. He even snaps his fingers twice.

     Once everyone is in the mines, Eye takes cover behind anything he can. It doesn't have to be perfet--just big enough to hide him from view. A rock, a minecart, a supporting beam... anything. His right eye slides out of its socket, carried by spindly optic nerves held out like the legs of a spider. An obvious prosthetic rolls into place to replace it, and the original crawls down his body, quietly creeping into the mines.

     The drone takes a few pictures of the enormous skeleton, then hastily crawls across the ground, scurrying up a wall to follow where the shipments of white crystals are being taken.
Starbound Flotilla     Albert looks about as close as a living being can get to that sensation of tension that you get when the elevator you're standing in stops and drops an entire floor when All-Seeing Eye says what he does, especially that second bit in response to gawain. "Experimentation. Torture. Murder. There's no rightousness in it. An apparatus of power disparity. A structure of self-sustaining violence. An engine of suffering driving a machine of war. Greed and sadism and sociopathy and the enabling of dictators through technology. Get out of my way, I need more blood." Says the monkeyman, all of his characteristic militarism utterly dropping away. It's Bloody Revelations who helps out here, and in short order.

    It's not a /stable/ state of mind for a person to yank a finger out of a disrupted cloud of experimental detritus and shove it into the opening. "The only thing more fragile than societal freedom is control based in ignorance and the /empirical monopoly/." He says, before seeing what's going on here and approaching the... quarry of sorts. He doesn't care how much of this was illusiory or labyrinth pain, he knows that it means some measure of necroscience abusing the people on their way to the skeleton is going on.

    Unless someone stops him, he's likely to approach. His armor is already suddenly back on! 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. He's taken a flask of that DANGEROUSLY radioactive substance -- labyrinth or no -- and plugged it into that radiation gun he got out before, and jammed a larger generator onto it, ad-hocing an assault-rifle raygun and equipping his armor as he walks towards the undead triceratops and, apparently, intends to well and truly get Thorns on lockdown all on his own.

    Unless someone's intercepted him by the time he's far out past the hatch, he's gonna just start opening fire on the horrid cyborg.
Gawain "But do we even know if these people were truly guilty? As you said, the Mask of Winters is a corrupt and foul person." Gawain replies to Eye, frowning, but is distracted by Revelations snatching the vial out of his hand, watching what happens afterwards. As it creates a finger nail, his eyes widen, as he nods. "I see! It's a strange fingernail...made out of some sort of metal?" Gawain starts piecing it together, but isn't the one to figure it out and open the door.

As they pass through the mines, Gawain glances at the metal around them only briefly, when he spots the people...and the panicked prisoners. It takes him only a few seconds before he decides what he's going to do, as he draws his blade...and as Albert moves, to which Gawain calls out. "Wait! If you use that, you'll risk us! Use a less dangerous weapon!"

And then the knight is dashing forward himself towards the prisoner caravan, pointing his blade as he shouts to the guards. "Stop right there! I am Sir Gawain, Knight of the Sun, Warden of the Paladins. Release those prisoners immediately, or I'll be forced to engage!" Despite his worries about Albert...Gawain doesn't actually interfere with him. He assumes that someone else will intercept, and that it won't hit the prisoners, even if he voices his concern. Instead, if/when the guards become hostile, Gawain breaks his defensive stance to attack, moving to try and disarm them with his blade and take them out with rapid slashing.
Tomoe Tomoe watches in a mix of shock and fear as the book reacts to Miari she looks at it for a moment follwing the embers. She follows the trail looking it over for a moment, her own discovery has slipped her mind for the moment. She's not going to shove her finger into that, hell now. However someone has an idea of how to open. Was this real? Was this something spawned out of their nightmares? She doesn't know and dares not assume. She will assume it's real enough to harm her though.

They make their way through, the hatch gets popped though and she's going to make her way down with the rest. She looks at the strange place and tries to not focus on the ore here she suspects it's not good for her to touch and then there are people here working. Well Zombies and worse there's fresh meat bring brought up, she summons her spear and her outfits hood up and covers her face as she stalks after Gawain, moving to follow after him. She knows how this is going to go, and she looks to Eye. Then back to Gawain whim she's following after with her spear in hand hell she's reading a fortgying spell for the prisoners to protect them from any back blast. She also sees Alber is going to be opening a can of whoopass soon as well.
Bloody Revelations     Team Alpha:

    For the tachikoma waiting at the crosswalk, there is a long, long period of silence as the others disappear down the garage ramp, leaving just the faintly smoking ruins of the door behind them. Nothing stirs down here, and without even the footsteps of several humans and cyborgs, it's so empty that the tachikoma could theoretically decide its sensors must be broken and not have any real way to test. After a very long time, the echoes of the dying train crossing alarm finally disappear for good, and then without any warning, a swift, lengthy black breeze blows through the crossing, this time from 'No Motorbikes' to the way they had come, and snatches up the lance in the crosswinds, carrying it far, far away. Some other force of the Labyrinth has it now. Or is it the same one, ready to replay the same scene?

    In the mangrove swamp that reeks of the moments before a tragic arson, the ominous murmuring of the encircled men stops abruptly as Candle's voice cuts through their furtive talk, drawing all of their attentions simultaneously --/really/ simultaneously-- and turning the crowd towards him. With their torches held in the direction he's looking from, he can make out a cadre of identical men in identical uniforms, some grey-green drab like the armed forces of some nowhere third world country, but clad in heavy duty gas masks and piles of work gear more like part of a survivalist/labourer cult of the mad, save that they clutch matching Wavecleavers as well.

    Whatever their terrible significance was, it's cut short by a three way burst of surprise gunfire, one from the trees, one from the opposite direction, and one head on. Bullets rip straight through the dank and humid air across multiple angles, punching bloody splashes through their heads, arms, and chests, which seem to work perfectly fine in dropping the entire lot in a vicious spurt of gunfire.

    The symbolic play lost forever, anyone is free to approach the skinned young lady held over the fire, who by now appears to have either slipped into a coma (very plausible given her condition) or dead (equally plausible). Not far behind her, the ground opens up suddenly into a vast, yawning hole, dropping down wide enough to drop a train through. In fact, there are tracks sticking vertically up from it, coated in familiar rust. Broken pieces of the dilapidated subway A-39 had found here first, like smudges of a line drawn too hard after the eraser has claimed the rest, stubbornly blemishing the page.

    It had been hidden there because there is no expected rush of falling water. The water, in fact, doesn't go over the edge at all. It stops there abruptly, as if invisible glass held it at bay, leaving the vertical shaft beyond it completely dry. This one at least /looks/ like just plain stone.
Miari Miari ALSO yelps when the book bursts into flame. She immediately backs away from it and sticks the dainty, blazing fingers into her mouth as if they were burned. Sparks of concern flare in her eyes but she remains transfixed on the blaze, even as a scowl spreads across her lips. Deep, dark, and plain frustrated. She unleashes a FOUL swear in Malfean Old Realm, the words actually causing the air before her to curdle and spirit away in a tiny gust of fright.

    As other events unfold though - in particular, she turns her eyes away from the trapdoor once revealed to focus attention on Albert in his Wicked Science Fugue...

    The results of which bring a triumphant smile to her lips. "... Excellent. So it was a puzzle. Moonsilver, Staren. Curious to see Luna's metal used in this regard, but it has a reason.... hidden wisdoms are one of her core tenets. This place is steeped in symbolism..."

    Of course the MINE that they tread into is anything but steeped in symbols. Peeking carefully about before finding shelter to hide with the others, she purses her lips. "Soulsteel ores, by the look of it. And other things. Who knows? OUr guide might."
Candle Candle regards Batou with a sort of unique bafflement that betrays how utterly foreign he is to that sort of thinking at all. He shakes his head, and with a voice of profound wonder replies, "I was planning on putting her down in just a second here. What exactly do you think decency is?"

His lack of understanding immediately shifts to Azure Armature, who gets a questioning look, "Lumpy /what/? They don't look all that lumpy to/me/."

Without really meaning to, the Prince of the Earth manages to miss all the action while simultaneously acting as a distraction that permits everybody else to get shit done. He stares around at the pile of dead guys that he didn't get to do anything about and frowns. That's fine, though. There will be other guys to make dead, probably. Somewhere. Eventually.

Candle meanders up and seizes one of the dropped Wavecleavers to give it a good look. It's not made of a material that PERSONALLY OFFENDS HIM, but it's also not something that he earned so he doesn't want it.

"HEY, you lot! Spoils are yours, I didn't do shit here so they sure as hell aren't mine." He waves the wavecleaver in the direction of the woman, "If you want to mercy kill her, use this. It'll promote the magic inside something like this. Gives it a story."

He plants the wavecleaver -- this one's blue -- upright in the ground, and meanders on towards the newly opened hole. The only reason he doesn't jump right on ahead is because he wants to see what they do with the skinned woman.

As a contrast to Candle himself, the vast majority of Candle's entourage look very uncomfortable milling around the skinned woman.
Batou Batou springs forward towards the skinned young woman, and pulls her away from the fire, cursing. "Dammit! Fucking cultists, I bet." He looks over to the unconscious-or dead-skinned woman, and sighs. The least he can do is end it quickly. End of the line.

He looks up at Candle and shakes his head. "Nah, no magic needed. Just a simple bullet."

"Tachikoma, end feed for now." a quiet acknowledgement and the upload goes black. Batou pulls out his sidearm and places it to the woman's head, closes his eyes, and fires.
Kyoko Takada     Alpha-39 keeps watch after every hostile--assumed hostile--is dropped, waiting for a counter-ambush. None materializes. She descends rapidly, stealth momentarily a total non-issue, and finally lands in the still-cold water. There might be blood to warm it, but probably not that much.
    She examines the woman, first. No hope for her. Bandages, specialized medicine and poison, antiseptics, splints--none of these will do anything for her, that she's packed. There's nothing to do but leave. Batou does the decent thing, while A-39 refocuses, thanks to Candle's words, on the "spoils." She hadn't thought anything of the swords, but if he says so, maybe they're worth something. She's not so weighed down that she can't scavenge some arms, tie and bundle the lot together, and sling it over her equipment to let her drop it if necessary, and carry it easily enough, if not. "Yeah. Alright."
    Subway tunnel. Vertical drop. Concerning. "Looks like what I saw last time," she says, peering over the edge. "Only, rotated. And it's not full of ghosts. This isn't a boarding platform, either." Okay, so not that much like what she saw, after all. She backs up a few steps. "I don't think anybody would make their camp on the other side of this camp of..." she gives a corpse a soggy kick, "...whoever these were. We must be off-trail. That, or..." she frowns, delaying a moment, "the trail changes each time you take it."
    A place that necessarily gets you lost every time? What a horrible place for a base camp, if you ever wanted to return there. It would be great for losing pursuers, but only the once. The child soldier doesn't hold back her sigh, the sound of her breath odd within her mask's filters. "Fine, let's see where this goes." She has her climbing lines with her. It takes a minute to secure one around a mangrove root, but then she's ready to enter the subway.
Candle "She'd be just as dead if you killed her with the sword, and it would probably become something pretty special because of it. But that's fine, too." Candle replies to Batou with a shrug. He doesn't bother with securing lines. A gust of wind howls up the hole into the subway, and Candle steps off onto it as if he was simply boarding an elevator. He descends quickly but at a reasonable, survivable pace. It's possible to step off precisely where he did and follow him accordingly.

His entourage follow after in precisely this way.
Azure Armature As the group scythes down the goons, Azure doesn't flinch or seem to feel the recoil on her weapon, surgically applying a pop-pop rotate. When they fall, she rises to her feet, clearing the angles and moving up, before moving to a half-crouch over one of the bodies and scanning the others for signs of life. Noting that she only has a few rounds left, she puts an extra bullet in the mob of cultists' gas masked heads for good measure, before tossing the empty weapon away into the water, useless.

"Clear." She mutters, as Batou and Candle moves up. While the mercy killing goes on, she picks up a wavecleaver with a curious eye. "Strange klaives. Decent heft, though."

Candle asks her a question, and Batou is busy. "Lumpen. Not lumpy. Dregs, nonworkers, vagabonds. Easily swayed by cults and apostates. Fodder."

Her right arm shines for a brief moment as something happens between palm and sword-hilt before she tosses the blade in a lazy arc to Candle's goons. "Your soldiers fight well. You acted quickly. Don't leave useful tools on the ground because of sentiment." She notes with a small smirk, the corner of which rises above the rim of her scarf.

She moves to the edge of the drop, past Batou, whom she pats on the left shoulder once as she passes him, in a moment of acknowledgement, before she's looking down the subway shaft with A-39, nodding along with the assessment.

"I'm not getting data that makes sense myself." She agrees mysteriously, a bright red flare materializing in her hand that she cracks and drops down the shaft.

"Your smoke trick will probably help here." She notes, before she checks a hovering display panel on her wrist. "Hmm. End's not too bad."

With a flash, she just decides to zip to the end, as wallriding an entire subway tunnel down would be painstaking and totally ruin her already damaged attire.
Batou Tachikoma, once the feed is cut lowers with its grappling hook to just above the road, then rips the wire free as it speeds into the garage, trying to avoid an encounter following the trail all the way to Batou and the group. Tachikoma is familiar with Batou's feelings about these kinds of situations, so holds off from mentioning anything.

Batou smiles at Azure for a moment, and looks down the shaft, and whistles quietly. "Damn, quite a drop. Tachikoma will help out with this."

With that, Batou enters the tachikoma and closes the latch shut, walking to the opening and hanging off the edge.

"Need assistance with this drop, Thirty Nine?"
Bloody Revelations     Team Vermilion:

    Bloody Revelations follows behind the group instead of taking the lead this time, emerging into the cavern after they've landed, possibly to make sure the passage stays open, without shifting in the wake of another ripple in reality. "The black ore used in soulsteel, only mined from the Labyrinth.. This is what it looks like before you fold a ghost into it, hopefully after beating the sentience out of it." she intones, drily and dispassionately in response to Staren. "Of course, sometimes soulsteel simply shows up fully formed, but you can't bet on that. The rest are soulfire crystals. Essence-charged gems that can be tapped and recharged. I won't bother to explain why they're obviously valuable."

    "The Mask of Winters' /guilt/ is in being an egotistical fool playing at diplomat and warlord like he were a part of Creation in the first place." she objects to 'Eye. "Treating with the Confederation of Rivers and soliciting trade from the Guilt, writing missives, running a bureaucracy, governing some piss-poor city already crushed by Lookshy once like a dollhouse. It's pathetic. A self-aggrandizing little play to recapture the days when he was alive and important. /That/ deserves killing."

    The false eye (for a definition) goes skittering over the stones, too small to be worth notice from the massive undead workforce here. The Mask clearly hadn't lied about some things, and one certainly is that corpses do all the backbreaking labour here, though definitely out of efficiency rather than utopian charity.

    The skeleton is enormous, but rather than being made of a normal number of equally huge bones, it appears to be an impossibly complex jigsaw of millions of normal sized bones, fitting too well together to simply be a mass grave. The work crew appears to be picking out specially sized ones, working them into the mechanical lattice of . . . some sort of suit of armour? There's something else too. The crystals are sent up along the tracks, same as the ore, likely to Juggernaut itself outside. If they're all fully charged, there's no telling what that much Essence could be necessary for.

    Then Albert, and then Gawain following him, charge out in front. Doing so, they're spotted instantly, though the first thing the apparently-savvy guards do is bark out orders to a crew of ghosts working with actual magitech tools, who immediately abandon their site and fly up the incline at high speed, zipping through the tunnels with the massive advantage of intangibility to raise the alarm.

    Simultaneously, the lead guard leaps atop the undead war beast and mounts an ebony saddle, swiveling a piece of black machinery that appears to actually be a cannon crudely bolted into the creature's rotting flesh, which charges and fires a powerful beam of icy blue-white energy into the advancing pair. The guards armed with pikes and axes, likely heavily enchanted, seem eager to rush into combat, rather than the ones outside who seem broken to even be at their posts, and when Gawain engages them, he finds them an order of magnitude more skilled, with a steely, lifeless glint to their eyes, wholly unlike their companions ceremonially watching the walls.
Bloody Revelations     It doesn't last too long. Bloody Revelations makes sure of that. Pinching the bridge of her nose, she mutters "You people." before abruptly raising her voice and snapping her fingers, both her words and the punctuating click echoing harshly off the walls for what must be a mile. The air crackles with a powerful, dark energy, instantly diffusing throughout the entire cavern, like the waves of sound carry a spell on their occult vibrations, but still she doesn't sound booming, mighty, majestic, or terrifying, like someone with that kind of power might cultivate. Her tone is a demand; flat, anticipatory, and used to never hearing 'no'.

    "Kill them."

    The mark on her brow flares a fiery red in tune with those two words, and every zombie and ghost in the whole area, including the ones fleeing to sound the alarm, stop what they're doing immediately, turning in unison on the Thornguard. Still clutching picks and Essence torches, they swarm around, and blessedly /past/ Albert and Gawain, and set upon the guards in a frenzy, dominated utterly by the Necromantic command.

    "So, now that you've nearly sent word back to the Mask of Winters of who exactly was here and what they were doing in his mine, to which he would respond with at minimum scouring the region for you for the next year and at maximum sending a troupe of Deathknights down here immediately, how about you do something useful useful instead, hm?" Speaking to the living in the room, her tone of voice is as saccharine as it is nasty. "You came here for the materials. The technology. The intelligence. Likely sabotage. How about you /do it/ instead of /dawdling about/? The monkey can't drag /all/ your dead weight." Unsurprisingly, only Albert escapes a direct scolding. Despite loading up and blasting guards with a raygun on sight, apparently that isn't an issue; according to the Deathknight, it's everyone else's problem for not enabling his outburst and pitching in.
Staren     Before Staren can snark about how Bloody would prefer the Mask just roll his undead army over Creation (at least it'd be honest of him), the battle begins. Having already set targets, Staren launches plasma minimissiles immediately, aiming to reduce the guards and beast to ash. The ghosts spreading the alarm are a problem -- He didn't expect that, and snaps off a couple of beam cannon shots at them, but he can't stop them all. Can his weapons even HURT ghosts?

    That turns out not to be a problem when Revel takes control of them.

    Time is now of the essence. At the mention of materials, he'll try to stuff a bunch of the crystals into his bag if he's got a clear shot at them, but if the guards are still in the way, he'll just run.

    Staren briefly wishes he'd thought to carry more powerful explosives, and wonders if Miari can set her nuke spell on a time delay. It turns out: Yes! Since Miari's got sabotage covered, Staren's NEXT target is the research -- rushing back up the stairs and grabbing all the books. Maybe leaving some missiles there as improvised time bombs. After that, all that matters is that everyone on the team gets out.
All-Seeing Eye The Exalt has worn a resigned frown from the moment Gawain rebuffed his attempt to allay the knight's fears. It remained when Albert gave his vitriolic rebuttal. It remains when Albert and Gawain both rush into view of the guards, and is joined by a sigh. The drone is deactivated and comes scurrying back to Eye, its machine intelligence calculating the most direct route regardless of danger. That might cost him proof of whatever intel he gathers, but if the drone's mindless advance bothers him, he doesn't show it.

<Tac-Paladins> [3] All-Seeing Eye says, "Any luck on the missive, Batou?"
<Tac-Paladins> [4] Batou says, "None so far."

     It isn't all that Batou says, but it's all that Eye hears. His face, normally given to bright displays of cheer or sly, flirtatious smiles, hardens. He rises from his 'hiding spot,' and when Batou finishes speaking, his response is clipped and absent.

<Tac-Paladins> [3] All-Seeing Eye says, "Very well."

     Bloody Revelations has created chaos by setting the undead upon the guards, but the Alchemical strides through it with a purpose. With the gentle whirs and clicks of complex machinery, a slim, black metal spike extrudes from his palm--it is undoubtedly a refined form of the ore being mined here. Eye steps around Gawain and Albert both, not intending to stop either one of them. His target is the first guard or authority he can get his hands on. And if there are no such guards, the hungry dead will find he has no compunctions about putting them to rest for good.

     The first guard that comes into view is unceremoniously stabbed with the spike, even if they've surrendered or ar attempting to flee. As his arm swings towards the guard, Eye's face is one of disdainful, composed determination, not unlike a farmer forced to put down a rabid animal. As soon as the mind spike pierces the guard's body, that expression is frozen onto his face.

     Inside the mind of the guard, Eye forcefully, hastily searches for any correlation between the code-words in the missive Batou captured, and any hidden meanings those words might have to a servant of the Mask. Throughout the search, both his expression and his posture are locked into place, and he appears entirely shut off from the spectacle in the mine and its unwelcome guests.
Miari "That was the plan!" Miari takes Bloody's subversion of the necromantic control in stride, reaching smoothly up to her... hair?

    More specifically, the big brown bow that keeps her hair bound!

    And instead of undoing it, she carefully slides it ALL the way down to the end of her emerald locks... and off. One shake of her head and the ponytail comes completely apart, but that's not really the important part of things.

    The important thing is that whatever sorcery was keeping the ribbon's true nature disguised is undone. The brown ribbon is revealed to be a tight binding of purest gold, the finiest fibers of Orichalcum bound up into a cord and tied into a knot.

    As she holds it out... the chaos unfolds below.

    Green lightning and great sparks arc and flare from the Orichalcum, which ignites with a seething, eerie, downright malevolent aura. The air's thick with a heated, but refined roil of wrath.

    She doesn't need to go down out there and take off though. She simply gestures, and the tiny cord goes flying down into the chambers, drifting behind some collapsed ore piles. At the same time... as many SOulfire Crystals as she can possibly wrangle rise up from their carts and fly straight towards Miari and into a few sacks she pulls seemingly out of nowhere!

    "As soon as we're out of here and my grip on that cord loosens, it will only be a matter of time. Not very much time."
Gawain The guards are skilled. Gawain finds himself skidding back on his feet and instead moving in defensive manuevers, focusing on blocking and parrying over offense. However, the fight isn't long - Bloody Revelations' controlled undead (which causes a grimace from Gawain). As the fight comes to its end, Gawain sheathes his blade, turning towards Bloody Revelations. "I care not if they hunt for me, as long as the people who live their lives free and justly."

As that's happening, Gawain spots what Eye's doing with the mind-spike. "All-Seeing Eye, what are you..." And then, it happens. Gawain doesn't know exactly what 'it' is, but he's stabbing a person with a spike, and his expressions are...pretty horrifying. They'll need to talk later, as the knight turns his head away and begins to move for something more important.

Gawain heads over to the prisoner cart, moving to grab hold of it and release those inside. Since the others are moving to detonate everything, Gawain shouts to the prisoners. "Everyone, escape, please hurry! With me, if you wish!" Gawain then proceeds to flee for the exit, but doesn't leave until he's seen where the prisoners are going so he can make sure they're fine.
Bloody Revelations     Team Alpha:

    When Batou stops to put a bullet in the skinned woman's head, he is very lucky. He is just squeezing the trigger when she looks up at him, and her flesh tears off the front of her skull, letting loose an unearthly screech as the thing the 'corpse' has become leaps upright to grab him. It's already too late though. The round goes straight through its head, breaks the bone, and blows the brains out into the muck, dropping it instantly. Some other part of this whole sick little parade, no doubt ready to consume whoever stopped to tend to 'it'. A Labyrinth guide, the one other time any Multiversal had gone near the place, had wisely advised them to ignore any other people they see. This is probably why.

    Getting down the shaft isn't difficult though. Despite the oddity of the way it has been vertically rammed into the existing, already impossible chamber, nothing untoward happens about it regarding climbing lines, teleporting or other means of travel. It's a long drop, but not nearly as far as the other group has traveled, more analogous to the deepest reaches a set of catacombs would normally go, rather than obviously supernaturally deep. The walls return to regular flagstones, and by the time they reach the bottom (or the instant one of them does), it's clear they are no longer within one of those shifting pockets of insanity.

    Those descenders stand before a baroque iron gate, closed but not even pretending to be locked, looking over a wide, circular causeway shod with the same kind of railing (to prevent falling) all the way around. Beyond it are six more layers beneath, each concentrically shrinking into the middle, likely where many waterways would have originally gathered together into a main chamber. That is not the case anymore, as it is obviously populated.

    There are the lights of course, of many lanterns, but also a great number of candles practically drenched on any stable surface that is waist high. There is the unmistakable sound of /intelligible/ human chatter, rather than the half-imagined whisperings heard from anyone or anything so far. There is also a thick haze of off-coloured smoke, part of it from the aforementioned fires, and part of it pretty clearly a wide variety of probably-stolen drugs.

    Looking around even for a moment, the place seems as if it was already a den of criminals and lowlifes long ago when the city prospered, but now those have to make do with sharing limited space with a great number of others, clearly differentiated by not wearing, eating, or smoking anything imported by the Guild, and the majority of them being huddled around a wide central table sprawled with a map of the surrounding lands; a rare, accurate one too.

    Only one amongst those gathered, rather than those wasting their time in illicit pursuits, looks to be not one of the people of Thorns, for his silk shirt and trousers, his long, black hair, hiding half his face, and for looking both healthy and pretty, clearly having not worked an honest day in his life. He seems to be an unofficial 'leader' of the discussion, though likely not the group, and judging by the way the ragged and gaunt townspeople hang on his every word, he is probably a very powerful ally of convenience down here.
Azure Armature Azure, just before she enters the wash of Cutscene time, drops to one knee after re-entering reality, frowning and pressing fingers into her jaw again.

She radios someone, which is left here for posterity and convenience.

<Blue> "Revelations, I've made visual contact with the resistance."
<Blue> "They may be useless lumpen drug addicts."
<Blue> "... Or normal drug addicts. Will advise."

She stands up, moving forward once the rest of the group arrives.
Candle "Fodder makes sense." Candle replies to Azure Armature, "Dregs too."

One of Candle's entourage accepts the wavecleaver a little nervously. The heft of it is a bit difficult for them, although it seems relieved after a moment.

"The smoke thing," Candle says, "that's for gettin' through spaces that aren't normally passable. It's pretty good for other stuff I guess, or maybe for avoiding dangerous things sometimes. This is just a hole." He probably doesn't understand enough of why this place is messed up to presume much worse things than he already is.

"Anyhow," he carries on, "I don't care if my people pick that stuff up but I'm really well-equipped already. I got m'sword, m'trident, I can make a smaller sword if I need to or if I just feel like it. S'all good."

The transition from extraplanar lunacy to whatever passes for a normal locale is a bit jarring, but not so much that Candle pays it much mind. This sort of thing just has to be taken in stride, or you'll never stop being fucking astounded by what the world just did to you all-around. He saunters to the closed gates, pulls them open, and proceeds inside. There is a whole lot of boring nothing past this point, if you ask Candle, but his entourage files after him with looks of relative relief on their faces.

Once they finally reach the central, populated chamber the Prince of the Earth turns to face the Autochthonian champion.

"Waaaaait... are you some kinda auspex? This seems pretty fucking 'Lumpen' to me." Candle wonders openly at Azure Armature.
Kyoko Takada     Booby-trapping corpses is common practice in some war zones, but usually not like /that/. Alpha-39 watches Batou closely avoid undead aggression, but doesn't comment. They descend.
    Once again, it is questionable as to whether they'll be headed back up this way. Alpha-39 leaves her line here, anyway, both to mark the position in case they do come back for it, and to make it at least vaguely possible for to her ascend without assistance or extreme effort. The jade swords will probably trade for more than climbing gear, anyway.
    And there the camp is. "Betting on the second option," she says, "where the path changes every time. Third option, those guys showed up recently, and no one yet noticed." She doesn't think "they'll ignore you if you ignore them" is even likely enough to be worth mentioning. This is already a little more talkative than usual, but at least Azure is her type of people, apart from being a damn commie, and that's... whoops, relaxed for a second. We can't have that. "Either way. Primary objective complete."
    This wasn't a scavenging run. She'd better get more than the wavecleavers out of a successful op. But that can wait for later.
Batou Batou, A-39, and Tachikoma descend with relative ease, coming to the baroque gate and pausing to step outside of the Tachikoma. Batou sees the large table in the center of the room, and then pauses to see the odd man out.

"Hey Thirty Nine, you know the phrase bourgeois, right?" and then gestures to the well dressed man. He is already recording everything in the room, saving it for later as he walks around. Maybe this will be the place to uncover the missive for Public Security is Eye hasn't already lost his patience.
Tomoe Team Vermilion is having a time of it as they are going in to get into the battle with the locals over the prisoners. They do have sabotage to do, which she thinks she can pull off when they wreck something here, well they can do so on the way out, right? She'll engage in the minions of the Mask of Winters, there is nothing to be set, only fighting now. She sees the guards coming in and she ill move to engage them as well, then Bloody uses some of her powers and it's a terror which will not be something she will easily forget here.

She now start looking to search about for thing of use she'll check the fallen guards seeing if any might hold rank, and might have orders or other useful thing upon their corpses. After that she'll see what she can help, burn or otherwise destroy which would hinder the Mask of Winters, and the breating is more than unerving given what Bloody Revelation could do to her. Tomoe is going to be on thin ice for a bit she thinks...with Bloody.
Starbound Flotilla     Albert's spared the brunt of the scorn, presumably by virtue of how he's just full-on embracing the madness of the labyrinth. George makes a big show of being all hurt and offended, and Seft actually seems legitimately ashamed of how things went, but Albert's still in his Labyrinth Madness. Now he's getting into the sabotage. Finding that powered magitech mining equipment and setting it to explode if recovered, setting drills to automatically bore into inconvenient places, lancing through supports, and other acts of terrain-shaping-expertise sabotage that match up with his sort of strange rage-science mood. Not just that, but any of these power systems he can get are left behind as dangerous hazards surrounding that massive skeleton, essence-electromagnetic mines meant to detonate on and perhaps even damage ghosts working to salvage the site. Don't just blow up the operation. Burn and salt the earth. Make it impossible for anyone to use this place for the next year. And...

    Locate any shipping manifests. Find where this was all going. That will hopefully get them somewhere new to burn down.
Bloody Revelations     Team Vermilion:

    In the chaos of hundreds of the dead and undead swarming in on the beleaguered Thornguard convoy, Staren firing off a couple of missiles (incinerating zombies along with guards, but frankly who cares) and dashing for the soulfire crystals is easy enough. They're scattered far and wide over the huge cavern, being comparatively rare, but the working corpses have already done him the favour of piling them into carts. He can stuff as many as his bag can fit, though they range from thumbnail sized to the size of an entire fist. Leaving missiles in them is likewise a cinch. The same goes for Miari.

    All-Seeing Eye has no trouble wresting the captain out of the fray, mostly for being completely disarmed, battered, bloody, and barely conscious at this point. Jacking into his mind is difficult, being that the man is already on death's door, but past that, it seems like large parts of it have been intentionally altered. Erased, even. There are holes that can only have done by powerful magic, and they conspicuously exist in centers of positive emotion or benign memories. What he retrieves is largely a huge list of code words without a lot of context, but knowing what they /are/ is a tremendous help. Thankfully, this is still the age where people carry paper orders and identification, and Tomoe can salvage that from him, the wax seal completely destroyed, before Eye does what he shall.

    Meanwhile, in the unfolding bedlam all around, Bloody Revelations has slid down from the high outcropping and to the workstation where the bones were just previously being worked on. While guards, ghosts, zombies, and the Elites scavenge, fight, and sabotage, figuratively and literally, for their lives in the background, she leans over and takes her sweet time examining the intricate mesh of bone, steel, and magical material, poring over the mostly complete suit and checking out the interplay of its gears and ligaments and what seem to be hydraulics, as well as the spells etched along the inside surfaces of its plating.

    Satisfied it's something genuinely original instead of a half-assed hackjob, she scoops the manuals the technicians had been working from, and then on her way back up, beckons one of the ghosts over with a finger, who follows her unhesitatingly to his eventual interrogation and possible doom.
Bloody Revelations     She walks past Albert on the way down from his mad dash around the cavern, eyeing him aside as he goes from hotwiring the soulfire fuel sources and boring collapse tunnels through the natural supports, to leaving mines all over the giant skeleton of unknown origin, likely forever destroying the answer of what it was or where it came from, and depriving the Masks's workers of their primary working examples of the tech, no doubt shutting this workplace down for good.

    Walking past the exact same bloodbath on the way back, she stops to touch the tiny obsidian skull that serves as her earpiece, mostly catching it over the noise.

<Vermilion> "Whatever. If they're stoned they'll just be easier to question>"
<Vermilion> "I've secured working necrotech, so I'll generously strike this particular example off your objective list for you."

    Looking away, she huffs in exasperation at seeing Gawain stopping to check on the prisoners, especially after Miari already set the nuke to blow. Taking her finger off her radio substitute, her hand ignites in hellish light that traces all the veins down to her wrist, concentrating to a scorching white point at her fingertips. Gesturing towards the cages, a sweeping hail of her signature magical blasts --shrieking daggers of fiery molten blood-- rake through the flatbed from end to end, instantly killing the trapped citizens with horrific, disintegrating injuries. Her finger then goes back to the earpiece.

<Vermilion> "Just cleaning up here."

    She gives Gawain A Look for dawdling to try and rescue people, before leaving well ahead of everyone else. The guards don't last long before they're completely destroyed by the undead tide, and so it's lucky that without her, all they do is stand around mindlessly in a big bunch, awaiting further orders, or more accurately, awaiting being blown to fine powder when the last person leaves, and all those bombs go off.

    You see, soulfire crystals are violently explosive. Considering the quantity there, absolutely nothing will be left when the last Elite bails.
All-Seeing Eye As Eye scours the last detail, two fluid motions happen. The spike is pulled from the captain's abdomen. As that arm retreats, the other raises. The sleeve of his pea coat bulges, pushed out of shape by a sudden, cybernetic extrusion.

     A curt, quiet rush of air, and a crossbow bolt is lodged between the captain's eyes. Eye's face is the quiet resignation of a custodian forced to deal with loathsome problems. The spike retreats back into his palm, and he begins patrolling the fallen soldiers, looking down on them.

     If Bloody Revelations' orders weren't understood clearly by the ghosts, they receive some assistance. Anyone still living, by judge of his augmented hearing, is put down in the same way, barring intervention from others.
Gawain What Gawain sees of Eye is terrible enough, but he's absolutely distracted by what Bloody Revelations does. The knight may frown occasionally, but it usually twists back into a smile immediately. Not today. Gawain's face drops into a frown, and then into a scowl, as he absolutely falls into rage. "Bloody Revelations! How dare you?!" Part of him wants to strike her down, but he can't. Not here. Not while they're 'allies' and working together. The knight hurries through the escape, only taking one second to look at the corpses and pray quietly.

One day, Gawain will bring Bloody Revelations in and try her for her crimes. Until then, he must help those who he can. And in the short term, he must have a talk with All-Seeing Eye.
Tomoe Tomoe will act quickly to get the papers, and makes sure to secure them in her inventory she will turn them over once they get out of here. Thankfully she has found something useful and she'll make sure to turn it over to the group shortly for now they need to finish up and then get out of here. She's getting ready to go then Bloody slaughters all the prisoners. There's something she can do to stop it, she's too far away from it, she starts to reconsiders even sharing what she pulled off the Captain, fuck this job.

She's going to get out now and for the moment she's not going to breath word of what she recovered she's going to think about her next action but the idea of just burning it and walking away? Floats up in her mind but another thought comes up. She /hates/ creation, she hates this God forsaken reality so much.