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Owner	Pose
Gawain	Well, that solves the problem, Gawain thinks, as the door is blown open. Though before he can go in, Chorus appears like she's about to step in the way...and recoils when he mentions the name Bloody Revelations. As she freezes up and starts to back away, he holds a hand up. "Ah, wait! Don't go, we could still use your assistance inside! I know not your issue with Bloody Revelations, but we're only her ally of circumstance. You can trust us." Hopefully, Chorus will follow after them, as Gawain waits several moments, and then moves to enter the door, squeezing through the chains as fast as he can. Once inside, Gawain's sword remains drawn, as in a flash, his armor covers him, as the knight moves to make sure nothing leaps out to attack them. When nothing does, he steps forward...and notices the tanks first. There's a brief glance towards Albert, who has been giving enough of a pattern that Gawain can actually guess his reaction, though Gawain says and does nothing, instead glancing out the window, and then pausing as that voice reverberates through the room. Excalibur Galatine is pointed around, the Knight of the Sun unable to find a source. Gawain waits several moments for that horrible voice to stop speaking, before he shouts to the room. "Eye and Seven Despairs, show yourself! I, Sir Gawain, Knight of the Sun, will strike you down where you stand. Be honorable and allow this to be a proper battle, instead of hiding." His voice is firm, cheerful, if slightly unsettled. "Tonight, your crimes will be brought to justice!"
Tomoe	The place is nightmare fuel to use a term from her home world, there is no other words that come to mind for her. As the party thanks to the group effort to get inside. She will not focus on it too hard but she will keep an eye out for trap, then it comes. She hears the voice it gets a primitive part of her brain, that feeling she got from POH, Red-Eyed XaXa aka Death Gun. Worse it's much like that feeling the man who tortured Tomoe and murdered her friend Mai instills in her. The Salamander woman doesn't think she acts. "Righteous Cross!" She will buff everyone in the party which should give them a decent bit of a stamina boost but more important a measure of damage mitigation as this is likely going to get bad /real/ fast. "Treasure? You would be only so lucky if I was just here for loot, and any of the loot here's likely bad news. You also presume all of us are here for loot." She has Caliburn out at this point and the mourning wall is held ready, she knows things are about to go down and it's time to keep this one? Focused on her if she can.
Lemeza Kosugi	"Idiotic treasure hunter... idiotic... IDIOTIC?!" Oh man, Lemeza sounds /triggered/. "Okay asshole, I'll have you know I've kicked asses less kickable than yours, so what makes YOU think you're anything SPECIAL!!" Um. Okay. Wasn't there a calming effect on this place? This is exactly the opposite of calm -- and, to be frank, out of character for Lemeza. He's normally much more reserved about his grudges, and much less direct about resolving them. "COME ON. You and me, RIGHT NOW!" Huh. It actually seems like he's working himself into a frenzy on purpose, as he does have his gun drawn but isn't waving it around all willy-nilly. Instead, he's got it held low, very much waiting out the situation until this Seven Despairs dork shows himself. He's... not actually taking note of the others around him, aside from tracking their location so he doesn't cause any friendly fire. This foe sounds like just another of those guardians he put down in La-Mulana, maybe the goat-demon Baphomet? Yeah, that sounds right. The spooky magic death theme seems to fit, right down to the labyrinthine bullshit he had to go to get here. Although there's a lot more theatrics on the boss's entrance this time around, that's neat. This is neat. It's been a while since he'd had a real challenge!
Ryu	Ryu ignores everything in the previous room he didn't understand, puffing a little disappointed sound when he realizes it doesn't provide him any insight. He's not terribly disturbed by the weird biological experiments, but it does help give him an idea of how angry he should be with Eye and Seven Despairs.     The next room makes him sick to his stomach. These are new experiments. New victims. He looks at each of them in turn, and briefly considers reviving them... but would they ever truly be able to live after the trauma they endured during what may have been vivisections? He crosses his arms, claws extended, and then whips his hands out to his sides with a whipcrack noise. His voice picks up into a decisive sound, and he does the first thing that comes to mind, as impulse-driven as he is.     "Sirocco."     He throws a machinegun fire of exploding fire spells at each and every carcass in the room that he can readily identify as properly dead. He does so without pause and without blinking, his arms moving in a blur and bolts of magical light flying from his digits like fastballs. He can't take the chance that any of them will get up to attack them or that their foe isn't hiding somewhere in the gore and horror.
Starbound Flotilla	"If I can't burn everything, then help me find everything related to the virus." Albert says, grumpily. "I'll burn only that. Sweep the ash away and you'll have your Cold House perfectly fine the way it was, and Mask of Winters won't have any reason to come here." He's very insisting about this, and seems to brook no real discussion about whether or not the virus burns, just exactly how much burning is going to go on today.     And then here comes the lab. Like before, the visions hit Albert hard, and his VEP surges. His heartbeat intensitfies, blood fills with terrible viral payload, and Albert's eyes gleam white. He knows this kind of place, and he knows this kind of person... Even if he is more familiar with them in the context of aged, screaming old men.     "I'm here for no treasure." He says, in gruff and angry tones that are boiling over with hatred. "I'm here to burn." Gawain's glance can see the gleam of white under the chemical protection helmet, the twitch in his fingers, and most notably, the intent of action. He hoists his heavy ray-cannon and points directly at the apparatus where biochemical materials are being frozen, what he assumes and hopes is the viral work. And then, depending on Tomoe's buffs to make sure he survives the inevitable reprial, he steps forward, jams several switches into dangerous ON positions, and fires an overcharged blast at the lab equipment. The first of many; until Chorus gives guidance (unlikely) or Seven Despairs interferes (very likely) he plans to start blasting anything that looks like viral research.
Azure Armature	When her blast of fire and boot to the door didn't dispatch the soulsteel chains, Azure Armature joins Albert in simply attacking the problem at hand: getting through the chains by hook or crook. Were this some controller-based Action RPG, there would be stick rotations and button mashing and awkward motion control use to get through the chains, taking a few steadying steps once inside to tactically sweep the room with outstretched glowing weapon-hand, technomagical rings of red highlighting the ruffles of her dramatically flowing scarf (which somehow did not get caught on the soulsteel chains) and backlighting her quietly whirring eyes. "A disembodied voice." She speaks quietly, while Tomoe buffs the party and Albert reaches a fevered BURN THE HERETIC lather. "Yes of course, foolish, grand designs." She deadpans, moving directly to the dusty cobwebbed cloth over the black coffins while she is Cutscened At. "I am feeling very intimidated, and also feeling fear-emotion." She continues to deadpan as she tears away the covering. "You should explain how I am going to suffer and or die and or serve your plans and or fail in my goals." She finishes, placing her hand on the COFFINS if she has an opportunity to get that sweet sweet SCAN DATA.
Staren	Arguments with the door guard become academic as the door and its seal are broken.     This is a BIG room. And it's still carrying on some experiment... How long ago did this deathlord supposedly die? And corpses that look fresh, and what /might/ be the monstrances that were supposedly given away.     The deathlord is a kid. Not even a teenager, an actual kid.     That doesn't really affect Staren's estimation of him though. Even beyond however long he's been undead for, Staren was working on and piloting mecha at that age himself. He's been there. It does make Staren wonder how many tropes about being unable to grow or mature as a person once dead apply to deathlords, though.     Staren actually starts considering what to say for a couple of seconds, how to verbally put this villain in his place.     And then he remembers that this is the real world, that lives hang in the balance, and that likely no amount of talking, least of all from Staren, could turn someone like this away from their cause.     Staren's arm tenses. He'd raise it to fire, but... where is Eye? Staren sweeps the room with his sensors. Better to keep the kid talking. "Angel of the Abyss, huh? What's that supposed to mean? Or perhaps you'd like to explain just what it is you're doing here, and what terrible fate will befall us for breaking that seal..."     Maybe they can get the kid monologuing. That could buy /minutes/ with someone this smug.
Empty Tidings	Falling Rain is rifling through desks and poking bits of machinery like some kind of treasure hunter when the door goes down, and is still doing that when the proclamations of their doom start. She dimly registers that there's something unsettling in the room over there, and that they should probably do something about it, but really, she's just feeling pretty relaxed about the whole affair -- Everything begins to explode. The warm blanket wrapped around Falling Rain's mind is abruptly ripped away, and she's struck with a sensation like she was just rolled out of bed and yelled at, shocking her out of her comfortable reverie and flipping a switch from 'happily cozy' straight to 'legitimately mad.' Falling Rain closes her hand into a fist. A delicate piece of artifice left out on display, previously subject to her examination, now resembles a crumpled piece of miscolored paper. She disappears from the hallway, taking several steps towards the door and fading out of sight and out of mind. When she comes back into view, she's in Blue's vicinity by the coffins, slipping out of hiding and backing her up with a hand on her sword and her eyes sweeping the room. No form of darkness or, indeed, mundane obstruction less than a wall can escape her sight. She looks incensed. She sounds collected, if angry, asking "Is that them," in a low, flat voice.
Miari	"It would be wiser to forsake your masters and find your own way in life than defend this place and be in our way, miss." Miari advises airily down the hallway to Chorus. She bites her tongue with disgust at Mr. Bones' warning and turns away from the artifacts - and then ALL the blood in her body runs cold.     She turns, shivering, to look at the newly opened chambers... and hurries to join the group.     Her body ripples and wavers, turning dark... and a shadowy substance just DRIPS down her to join her actual shadow, which deepens briefly then absorbs the darkness without a trace... leaving her looking largely the same, but with markings on her skin reminiscent of dark feathers, skin that now bears an oily sheen. Her eyes are vermilion and vaguely reptilian.     "Presents? Flattering as that sounds, I will decline." Power bubbles up from her soul and outwards as she begins to work a spell. It's hardly easy to do way down here in the Labyrinth, but the Element of Wood responds and spreads outwards through her allies. Anyone who accepts it might feel a bit scratched as if embraced by a bunch of leaves... but this is a regeneration ability that will last for a while.     "So, you are one of the so-called Deathlords. Millenia of wisdom gathered throughout the First Age, and this is how it is used. Only using four Deathknights ever. You gathered the panoply of a whole circle of Solars, from the look of it... someone has a grudge held for millenia, it would seem. What befell you that brings you so low? I see so much wasted potential."
Touta Konoe	As access into the next room becomes viable, and everyone begins surging through the entrance, Touta's more focused on getting Carna and Chorus off each other. He's still under the impression that Chorus and Bones are the two people they should be making sure are okay. After all, they were still victims of this Deathlord as well. As Miari tells Chorus that Touta speaks up, "Were you listening before?! She's not trying to keep her master safe, she was stuck working for him. If anything we should try to find that monstrance or whatever it's called too." He knows that their goal was to find this virus, and the virus only to make sure that it wasn't in the wrong hands. Yet, if they were trying to save a multitude of lives shouldn't they be trying to help all of them? Even Chorus' life? Maybe it was just Touta being too thoughtful. No, it wouldn't be a mission accomplished if he wasn't able to help out everyone he could. Though when he sees Chorus begin to freeze up he tries to snap her out of it. A simple nudge here and there. "Hey, if you don't want to go in you don't have to, but tell me what that thing looks like would ya? Maybe we'll see if we can help you quit this job if you know what I'm saying." He tries to give a reassuring smile to the DeathKnight. Even if they were here for one thing, he honestly intended to help her and Bones out. That is...If they wanted it. It's at that point he here's an unfamiliar voice cackling from within the unsealed room, and the sounds of hostility. Whether it was because of the group or the voice he wasn't sure yet, but he was going to end up running into the firing zone apparently to find out.
Bloody Revelations	No sooner has the Deathlord filled the grand study with his giddy, screeching laughter, has half the group here to kill him unloaded their weapons into the room his voice had just come out of. A rain of magical fireballs converges on the dissection side of the room and turns it into a solid wall of scorching fire, bathing the surgical tables in so much heat and flame that the corpses on them turn to ash before much else. Most of the metal plugged into their bodies melts and turns to slag, and so does much of the equipment. What's left, aside from piles of carbon and bubbling alloy, are the specific implants and mechanical pieces made of that cold, black, iron-looking substance, which howls and wails audibly in the blaze, even though the fire doesn't seem to damage it. Unfortunately, this precludes hitting the war-zombies in the tanks just yet, which weather the firestorm without cracking.     It seems a similar amount of preparation happened in the middle of the room. Albert overclocks the lap equipment and then fires his weapon into it, and blows the entire drip assembly to tiny pieces, going up in green smoke which then immediately combusts into ghastly mustard-coloured fire, and melting through the table straight to the floor, destroying the vial assembly. Said vials scatter all over the floor in a clattering heap though; for being made of soulsteel instead of glass, they survive the initial explosion undamaged.     About half the rest of the study meets the same fate as Staren dumps beam and missile fire into the room as well, indiscriminately torching and blasting the maze of shelves and desks and experiments. Most of it is completely obliterated on impact. Though some of it survives surprisingly well, the remains seem to be limited to bits of the room (like the spindly table) that are part of the manse themselves, and particularly heavily magically protected work stations, rather than useful cover, so when the smoke clears and Eye and Seven Despairs is nowhere to be found in the freshly leveled room, it's a bit of a surprise.     It takes looking outside the room to get it. Just past the web of chains where they'd all entered and left Chorus of Midnight behind, someone else is standing and peering in voyeurishly behind them. Rather, due to the completely lack of any sign of Chorus, it is quite probably that they were here all along. The figure is short, though not tiny, and appears predominantly as an emaciated corpse with sunken eyes and a rictus grin that nevertheless conveys a sense of precocious, psychopathic delight. A dimunitive mummy with gleaming, luminous pits for a gaze, who titters to himself with his bony fingers fiddling with the soulsteel chain links. The most notable thing about him is that his entire left arm, shoulder, and part of his chest, are all completely made of physical soulsteel, grafted to his technically ghostly body (though he looks quite solid and real). It's an incredibly complex mechanical assemblage that could easily be called 'cybernetic'.     "Oh gosh you really are the worst! Ahahaha! Looking for treasure and the first thing you do is try to burn it? Not very smart! Ehehehe! Oh my oh my I can't /wait/ to take some of that apart! Some of /you/ apart! No worry no worry, I'm certain you'll replace all those things you broke quite nicely! Ahahahaaaaa! You're one to speak of wasted potential! I could do more with your bones than you could ever accomplish in your entire life! Weeheheeehee!" The withered thing is practically bouncing up and down on his heels, staring at the destructive gear and magic like a kid in a toy store, with the horrible unblinking eyes of a violently mentally ill inmate.
Bloody Revelations	"Really though you are /impossible/! People full of rrrrrage are so easy to manipulate! People full of ch-ch-chivalry are so easy to trick! But you're all a bunch of misfit freaks who bungled in together without anything in common! It really is quite frustrating! Haha! I'm almost upset I didn't have anything more elegant prepared for you! I'm /really/ upset none of you look just right to replace any of my old toys! But at least I get to show you something really really special! Hoho, you can be the first field run!"     "Oh! Oh I know this one." suddenly says Mr. Bones, practically jangling in Falling Rain's hands. "There's a thing I'm supposed to do here! Uhhhhhmmmm . . ." the skull ends up deep in thought, while she and Azure Armature pull the (now badly burned) canvas from the heap. As they do, the compass needle in his head goes crazy, bobbing and spinning around as if put under a shower of falling fridge magnets. What greets them, at least on the top layer of many more tarps beneath, is what . . . appears . . . to be a sarcophagus, though only just /barely/ large enough to fit an adult. The entire thing is constructed of some kind of ghostly, crystallized bone, and at least hundreds of pounds of soulsteel, but there is no doubt that a craftsman had no part in it.     Aside from there being no joins, welds, seams, or obvious way it fits together, there is no way to actually open it. The construction actually hurts to look at. None of the angles make any sense. The colour is undefinable. The geometry of the whole thing is so confusing that it causes visceral, physical nausea. The tiny markings that cover every square inch of it make any part of it impossible to visually focus on. It hurts the brain to try and mentally describe. The best impression one can get of it, is the primitive checklist the brain ticks off when it thinks it seems human facial features, subconsciously categorizing the whole thing as some kind of gigantic, distorted, screaming face, rather than a coffin. Mr. Bones isn't really paying attention, too absorbed in trying to remember something, just making a whole lot of "Hmmmm" sounds.     "So sit right there, and marvel and gawk to your heart's content at the unfathomable"... "Oh oh come on, I know I know, there's a thing I'm supposed to say." ..."years of loving craftsmanship, every one of them the /very embodiment/ of every step of necroscience's dread march of progress towards"... "Oh it's on the tip of my tongue! If I had one anyways. The mistress told me the thing to say!" ..."introduce to you the ENVENOMED ASSEMBLY"... "Oh! Oh right! I remember now!" ..."TO END! ALL! HO- "Yeah that's it! Don't bother!"     While Eye and Seven Despairs shrieks away, the tanks on one side of the room swiftly drain of their ice blue liquid. Frigid steam issues from the cracks in their soulsteel casing, and the transparent panes draw away. Black lightning sparks through their crystal wires, and sickly green lights wink to life in recesses in their perfectly preserved corpseflesh. Plugs and filaments disconnect as the horrific, cybernetic abominations stagger upright, tilting their heads, twisting their necks, forcing open their stitched jaws, and bellowing and shrieking as their tear their way out of confinement, turning towards the party and encircling them in the room now devoid of places to hide.     Just as they get a few steps, Mr. Bones speaks up, and the last words he says briefly cause the emerald wicks in his skull to flatten and blink bright scarlet, while the brief, fiery ghost of a sunburst appears on his polished, bone-white brow. The armed and armoured zombie supersoldiers suddenly stop in their tracks, gawking emptily into the near distance. A brief, chill wind of magic flows through the room, escaping from some higher pressure zone.
Bloody Revelations	". . . what? How did . . .? Let's try that again." says Eye and Seven Despairs, more than a little confused. The skeletal little monster has stopped bouncing now, and stops to begin performing a number of complex hand gestures, gathing out that fell wind into a swirling vortex around himself, where the gloomy blue candles wink out in a corona of shadows that builds around him, surrounding him with inky tendrils of darkness that begin to infiltrate the room. THE ENVENOMED ASSEMBLY! TO END! ALL! HOP-" "Nope!" chirps Mr. Bones, suddenly resonating with a blast of ice cold power that collides with Eye and Seven Despairs, and causes his building magic to violently explode into a fireball of roaring shadows, scattering uselessly in every direction.     "Oh /confound/ it! I'll just have to seal you in there until I can think of-" "Nu uh!" When Mr. Bones speaks again, all the black runes around the door burst into flame, melting through the wall and causing the chains to sag and fall from their spikes. "This is really fun!" the dangling skull says, as chipper as the Deathlord looks seethingly pissed off.     "AHHHHHH! CURSE THAT- FINE! HAVE IT YOUR WAY THEN! PREPARE TO MEET THE JUDGEMENT OF: THE FATAL ARBALEST OF QUIETUS AND ECLIPSES!" screams Eye and Seven Despairs. His cybernetic arm suddenly bursts into a convoluted mess of moving parts, rapidly transfiguring into a full-sized soulsteel crossbow mounted much like an arm cannon. A razor thin string of crackling Essence draws itself across the bow, and then without any loading motion, he sprays a sustained uzi blast of energy arrows deep into the room, wildly hosing everyone inside with a full barrage, before cackling and cartwheeling off down the hallway and around the corner. +-----<<Fatal Arbalest of Quietus and Eclipses>>-----+         TARGETS: Everyone         TYPE: Raw Energy         HIT: Likely         THREAT: Low         EFFECT: None +-----<<Fatal Arbalest of Quietus and Eclipses>>-----+
Starbound Flotilla	Albert is ready to open fire on the cybernetic ghouls -- he seems to be prioritizing destroying the lab over fighting Seven Despairs, oddly -- before Mr. Bones intercedes. But when it becomes clear what the nature of this fight will be, he takes a flying LEAP onto one of the charred tables, roaring and brandishing his gun... Before the uzi-blast of energy slams into his body and knocks him out of the air.     "GHHHRRRGH!" He cries out, slamming back into the laboratory, armor sizzling and sparking. And then he's gone! Dammit! AFTER HIM!! Albert thinks hard, trying to find a way to properly catch up with him, as well as to avoid the issues of navigating a Labyrinth zone... His eyes fall on the Envenomed Assembly, locked down and seemingly deactivated. Albert leaps into action... And dives headfirst back into VEP madness.     He knows one good thing in particular: Mecha construction. And there are a LOT of robot parts here. Even if they come with... Some meaty attachments. Albert scrambles to his feet, roaring in rage. "Get back here you /coward/, face what you deserve!" He's going to... Attempt to violently dig in on the Envenomed Assembly, pulling out a massive Power Hammer and trying to angrily reduce some of them to parts, from which he intends to rapidly reconstruct some kind of corpse-mecha.     The idea is that Seven Despairs, in all his genius, programmed a Labyrinth-proof homing function into his Envenomed Assembly, to call them to him to defend himself. So the hope is that Albert can rapid-craft one hell of a skittering mini-mecha and chase him down without suffering obstructions from the Labyrinth.
Staren	WHERE IS HE?     ...Behind them?! Staren turns. Oh. The death knight was just a disguise. So, the kid can act... or could the illusion have been reading their minds for a story that might buy sympathy?     Wait, does that mean that Eye and Seven Despairs was locked out of his own room? How the hell...     It's almost humorous (humerus?) how Mister Bones uses the ghost of solar(?) powers to shut off the zombies. At first, Staren presumes it was some kind of shutdown keyphrase programmed into them, but it's soon clear that it's some kind of magic disruption effect. Huh!     And then Eye busts out telescoping robot tech like a zombie cyborg Jenny and blasts them all!     For once, someone's not blasting Staren with a shower of physical projectiles. The translucent amber sphere of force that suddenly becomes visible around him eats the arrows, then quickly 'heats up' to glow white before the outer layer shatters in a shower of fading sparkles, and one of the discs on Staren's chest explodes in smoke and a shower of sparks.     For having just been surprised by a deathlord, this has gone pretty well! He's less damaged than usual from a surprise attack, and the enemy isn't keeping the pressure up. Staren reflexively takes a few steps back into the hall before stopping. <"Wait. This place is a freaking maze, who knows what he'll lead us to? We can't just fight him."> Staren advises on the radio.     And then he starts looking around in alarm, scanning the room with infrared and ultrasonic sensors. <"And given we've seen he can use illusions, how do we know he actually LEFT?">     Oh look, Albert's got some kind of plan. Better than rushing off! Staren hurries to his side as he sees some kind of robotic contraption taking shape. "What are you making? How can I help?"
Ryu	Ryu doesn't know what to make of the empty room. His ears wiggle, and his mouth tilts into a big frown. He looks around at the cyberzombies that start crawling out of the wreckage, but then blinks in a startle as they start to collapse. He wheels about and observes the sight of the one they're here to destroy. He watches with a soft smile as the skull apparently uses built-in magic to completely shut down Eye and Seven Despairs in his attempt to use some kind of magic against them. And then a barrage of energy arrows is fired at him.     "No you don't."     A noise like a thunderclap goes off. He's suddenly no longer standing where he was, but instead mere inches away from Eye and Seven Despairs, and his claws are already primed to reach out and grapple him. But he doesn't do his standard attack. He instead tries to jam as much Resurrection Power into him as a rapid-fire barrage of claw strikes as he can, to weaken him. The sheer flood of white magic would be completely at odds with the entire fabric of the Labyrinth, and would give him a good idea of just how much he's fucked up by making Ryu angry.     Lemeza, this is Angry Ryu.
Gawain	Well, this is quite a situation, as Eye and Seven Despairs reveals himself, having led them into a trap. Gawain immediately points Excalibur Galatine in his direction, and then realizes Chorus isn't anywhere to be seen. The conclusion Gawain comes to is a bit from the truth, and his reaction expresses it. "Where is Chorus? What did you to do her, you fiend?!" And then, Mr. Bones is trying to remember something. Gawain glances at him briefly, but then finds himself moving as he sees the tanks, which release cybernetic zombies. That was going to be an issue, when suddenly Mr. Bones does something, stopping the zombie supersoldiers from advacning. "Mr. Bones, what did you do?" And then Eye and Sever Despairs tries again, and fails again. Gawain realizes at this moment that Mr. Bones is doing something, and smiles brightly. "Thank you, friend. Eye and Seven Despairs, your defeat is nigh! Surrender now and your death will be swift!" But that isn't what he does, as instead, that arm turns into a horrible crossbow cannon and fires arrows into the room. Several pierce into Gawain's armor, cutting into his flesh as he grunts, drawing blood and slicing the platemail. As Eye and Seven Despairs runs down the hallway, Gawain moves to force himself through the chains, knowing full well that this is probably what the man wants. Ryu's faster and may be able to stop him, but Gawain's goal, if Eye and Seven Despairs doesn't surrender, is to slam his sword into the Deathlord's cybernetic arm, trying to damage it. "I will not allow you to continue!"
Tomoe	Tomoe does not move to attack in the first wave, no her job was to make sure people would stay up and that's what she's going to do. However now once she's doe what she's needed to as things are purged ash and ruin is left int he party's wake. It's likely they will have to deal with he war zombies sooner rather than later, she starts to chant again, in old Norse, it's horribly accented for those who know it, golden runes dance about her body and her blade bursts into white hot holy flames. "You really have drunk all the kool-aid haven't you?" "It seems Mister Bones has a few more tricks." Tomoe's going to end up moving to cover whom she can as the mourning wall comes up and Tomoe's moves to intercept what she can of the blast it hurts her, the damage i clear horrible red grid lines appear as nature of Tomoe's form become more clear and she's got a look of pain on her face then she'll attempt to charge the death lord in a full on rush aiming to go after them through the chains, knowing it's likely to lead to a trap. "Where do you think your going?!" It dawns on her now Chorus has been dead for a hell of a long time already. Damn this bastard is very tricky, she's soon past the chains and making good with the chase. She moves rapidly as she sets up a sword art which will set her flying at the Death lord like a bullet and launch into a series of rapid and savage sword strikes.
Lemeza Kosugi	There's the main boss! Eye and Seven Despairs. A little more ghostly than corporeal, and cybernetic instead of ancient, but hey. A boss is a boss. And, HEY! He was right, they SHOULD have just beaten the shit out of Chorus while they had the chance! And now they get to. Let's do this. And what boss fight would be complete without minions? Team on team action. Robo-zombies really do fit the theme here, very flavorful. Wait--Mr Bones is contesting control of them! Okay this is getting even more interesting. Maybe vie for control of the undead army, and winner gets a power boost? Oh that would be so cool-- PEWPEWPEWPEWPEW. The whiny bitch gets fed up with not having his rotting metal minions do his bidding, and just unloads at the party. "OH COME ON! We were JUST at the good part!" Lemeza sighs heavily as he dutifully raises his shield to block the crossbow laser shots, which hit hard enough to knock his blocking arm around quite a bit, but not enough to actually break through to his body. Once the tantrum subsides, and Eye flees, Lemeza quickly moves to reach into his backpack--oh. FOOM. A dragon is now conspicuously not here, and instead a brief blur moving the same direction as their quarry. Albert and Staren are both working on their own catching-up device. Gawain intends to give pursuit as well. Huh. The professor grumbles, muttering something about fun and fighting, as he starts looking around the room he's still in. There is, in fact, something else that needs doing, something less heroic but more important. Find the artifact that causes immortality, and destroy it. He may not be /intimately/ familiar with Exalt-style technolomagic, but he's got some idea of what he might be looking for... this isn't the first immortal opponent he's needed to find an artifact to beat, so he's got some intuition about what artifact might resonate with 'immortal energy'. Let's just hope his analysis is on point here.
Touta Konoe	Touta being the last to enter the room is surprised to see Despair pop out of nowhere? How did that happen?! Wait where did Chorus go?! It takes him a moment to realize that he's been bamboozled. To add insult to injure this guy waited for Touta to go in with the rest before trying to attack them all at once! He fell for it hook line and sinker. Thankfully, there's a humor to having Bones end up being the one to thwart this all power-ful, genius-immortal out of the blue. It definitely makes things easier when most of what he has planned is denied with a blatant 'nope.' That being said,Touta braces for the Uzi blast as well as he can just bracing his arms in front of him as he just lets the attack take its course. The boy is covered in wounds and bleeding from head to toe from where the blast hit him. Thankfully though, Eyes and Seven Despairs isn't the only immortal in this place. It only takes a matter of seconds before a white steam slowly comes from those same wounds and they're sealed as if Touta had never been shot in the first place. Though the holes in his close would say another story entirely.was the last to enter the room before the big reveal. So it makes sense that when Bones helps hinder Eyes and Seven Despairs that he should be the first one available to get out of the place. Or so he thought, Ryu and Gawain already make their charge towards the escaping Seven Despairs so in that case... Touta's going to join the fun as he leaves the room, he has to make sure there's no obstructions. "Grasp the world..." He whispers the words to himself before he launches off the ground! His body accelerates to a speed difficult to track with the plain eye intending to catch up with Ryu and possibly pass Gawain as they begin their assault. As he reaches Seven he raises his Black Katana above his head with a smile on his face. "Don't think you're the only immortal in town pal! 2000 FOLD!" The sword would swing down on the mummy-like immortal but with a bit of a twist! As the blade would strike it wouldn't feel so light, in fact as it make contact with the sword that it was like getting hit by a heavy utility truck with a blade!
Miari	That is a LOT of sorcerous sabotage to be going on right now. Miari's impressed, grinning as she realizes exactly what Bloody Revelations must've done to ready to Mr. Bones.     But her inquiry has gone unanswered. Unless the energy arrows are an answer! She narrows her eyes and space around her sharpens and gleams, unleashing a few tight beams of sweeping lasers that sweep and pulse at most of the arrow eyes coming towards her! She succeeds in 'shooting down' the black arrows of twisted Essence with scorching white flames. Only a few actually reach her, and one pieces her arm as she keeps it from striking her face! Three or four arrows strike, causing her to stagger and stumble.... but she stays upright, bleeding slowly from the grounds and hissing in pain.     "Coward... hard to imagine our assailant was EVER a Lawgiver!" But he has run off, and she, wisely, is NOT going to go chasing... in fact she cries out, "DO NOT chase him haphazardly down the halls! This place is a sorcerous MAZE. He will use it to split us up and pick us off! Stay organized, stay together!" She screams out boomingly to her allies, words carrying a freakish hint of Force to them that screams Obey!
Empty Tidings	The hail of crossbow bolts stitches across Falling Rain's front. Her sword flashes out, and Essence-generated ammunition crashes and breaks against the blade. A few get past, though, and get slowed by the defensive buff and stopped by her breastplate. The force of it drives her back against one of the coffins. Falling Rain, confident, puts weight on her leg as she slides it forward -- and finds it difficult to move it. She glances down and finds a bolt sticking out of the side of her leg, shot into the joint at her knee. With a quick tug, she pulls it free and casts it aside, a wet spot growing and then stopping as the sorcerously-bestowed aspect of Wood closes the wound. The Deathlord promptly bails. Falling Rain grinds her teeth. She flicks the tip of her sword downward -- and it breaks, the bolts having broken the very mundane weapon by absorbing that kind of fire. She clenches her fists and discards the mangled weapon, more frustrated than before. There's a moment where she looks like she's about to flip her shit completely -- -- and then, abruptly, she settles down. Her eyes close. A curiously sad expression comes over her. Falling Rain's eyes open. They flash, glowing with blue, watery light. She /grows/, getting bigger, taller, muscles swelling. The fastenings of her armor, ill-suited for such treatment, start straining and bursting, green plates falling off of her and leaving her in her heavy coat. The expansion makes her bigger metaphysically at the same time, and astrology and thaumaturgic divinations abruptly begin to go completely batshit all around her. THE MONSTER IS HERE, they say. THE MONSTER IS HERE. She crosses the burned room in a few long strides. Exhaling a furious breath, she drives her fist into one of the windows on the far side of the room, hitting them once, twice, then again and again, every blow getting stronger and more savage with each one that preceded it. Eventually, she yells, as if the vocal venting of her frustrations was the culmination of her entire apparently otherwise-pointless purpose. Falling Rain turns and stalks back to the coffins. She picks up Mister Bones from where she left him, loops a grappling line over him and wears the skull like a necklace. Then, she plants her inhumanly strong hands on the Monstrances and, one by one, starts to push them towards what seemed to be windows to the outside world.
Azure Armature	A cavalcade of stupidity happens, the room is destroyed in a hail of weaponfire, the host isn't there, and then More Magical Effects Occur. There are so many, it would be retreading a bunch of poses to list them all! But it happens. Azure Armature stands, joined by Falling Rain, near the non-euclidian face-cophagus. Her right hand shimmers unsettlingly as it touches - rubs - really gets into the strange dips and spikes and such of the surface, before pulling away her hand and checking the wrist display. "Well, that'll take a moment. Onto more pressing matters." As the Deathlord fires a spray of soulsteel bolts into the Edgily Uncaring bescarfed and poncho'ed back of Azure, the operative paying for her Extreme Acts of Edgery that are Nothing Personal as she staggers forward and gacks over one of the monstrances, turning and giving an evil gaze to the fleeing Mummy Shitter. "I don't have to kill you. It's not even a secondary objective. I just have to destroy everything you know and like and leave." 'Blue' brings her right hand up to her face, this time not running a hand through her hair, but instead 'clawing down' a mask, like a hood, of soft-light over her visage. Where there was once bright eyes, there are only empty sockets set with opaque glass lenses. Dark rubberized material approximates a gas mask, and a large mouthpiece pshh-oks with heavy breathing. Her voice resonates like a horror villain, when she speaks. "Ghosts - creatures of memories held together by power. What happens when I don't 'encode' your information, but simply delete it?" Drawing out a large greatsword from thin air, the grinding of dull metal audible down the hall, Azure Armature begins to attack the room - aiming at the 'legacies' left by the Deathlord, with a weapon borne out of the Labyrinth itself, a memoricide weapon gained when she had to deal with this fucky place before.
Miari	Miari is NOT going to run off with the rest of the group. Why? because she hasn't seen Mr. Bones leave the room in chase even if others are ignoring the advice about the manse being a sorcerous maze! "Well.... these warriors have an uncanny knack for pulling off the most reckless of manuevers. I'm inclined to hedge my bets, though, when it comes to the Labyrinth. Let them deal with him..."     The woman who's glowing a faint hint of nauseating green turns her gaze towards Empty Tidings.     "... I imagine those are your thoughts right now, hm?" She's regarding Falling Rain's own transformation curiously, not intimidated whatsoever. Miari will stick with her and lend the strength of her Mind-Hands towards moving the monstrances. If at all possible she'd like to secure at least ONE of them. Preferably one with an Exaltation still inside.     "I do hope you realize that stealing these things will draw much more aggression from the Underworld than EVER before. An Exaltation is beyond priceless."
Bloody Revelations	Albert will quickly find that there is a /lot/ of mechanical equipment to salvage. The 'Envenomed Assembly' had /extensive/ internal cyberization as well as external, far more invasive and (dare one say) elegant than any of the effective but crude metal-welded-to-flesh the Mask of Winters employs en mass for war, up to and including entire soulsteel skeletons and moonsilver nerves. Unfortunately, not all the pieces are there to construct an entire whole from them. There are many redundant parts, but things like a control assembly or power source are obviously lacking due to being replaced with magic, and some use must have been had for blood circulation and brain matter due to the lack of instrumentality or proper cooling.     Nevertheless, robots are robotics. If he can solve those issues of lacking features, he probably has enough machinery to build something like an industrial power loader --not a full military mecha or covering armour, but enough to ride around on with a heavy degree of protection and weaponry. Exactly as the mad monkey suspects, when reactivated, the cybernatic double-zombie double-chimera orients itself towards where its master had run, automatically tracking him as a bodyguard. Really, it just makes perfect sense. "I don't really know!" says Mr. Bones, quite happily, to Gawain. "I just remember the mistress told me to do the thing when the master of Cold House did the other thing! She said his Necro/mancy/ was second rate, so I guess it is! Wild!" His tone gets a little more withdrawn when Gawain asks about Chorus. "I think Chorus at Midnight is probably dead already. I think I remember now. I mean, I think I remembered when I got a good look at him again. A long time ago, all three of us conspired to toss him into the Void, and to save the poor lady he renamed Star of Dirt and Doubt from him, and we thought it worked. Eventually, I figured out that he had switched places with her, though, and we ended up killing her instead of him. He was wearing her skin for years. Turning everyone against each other. Making them jealous and suspicious. I guess he killed me when I found out, since I don't remember anything after confronting 'her'. If the others are gone too, they either killed each other in paranoia, or he killed them when he got bored of pretending to be their lover." Even the carefree skull buddy quiets down in recognition of that particular brand of sickness.     Scouring around the room for a convenient mcguffin that generates immortality is unfortunately a fruitless effort. Crazy as a shithouse rat as he might be, Eye and Seven Despairs didn't just leave a phylactery sitting on a desk in a room full of violent heroes. Lemeza's finely tuned mcguffin sense does find /something/ however. Something distinctly different from the rest of the convoluted machinery and medical technology in the room. In the wreckage, he finds a tiny soulsteel cage holding a robin's egg-sized stone of smooth, polished onyx, covered in swirls of gloomy blue like the interior lighting of Cold House, and radiating much the same sense of brain-deadening tranquil sleepiness. There doesn't seem to be any obvious use for it, but when he picks it up, he too can begin to feel that deep, downwards vibration that Carna had felt earlier, and a faint magnetic pull to the bottom floor. At least, as far as Staren can tell, no ninja smoke clones happened. The room is actually empty, thank god.
Bloody Revelations	"Quite the contrary! Hahahaha!" Eye and Seven Despairs finally cackles suddenly from several halls away. "I got my start in the muddy hell that was the pit of the First Age and only went up, up, up! from there! All of the Deathlords owe me you know! This whole 'Deathlord' thing was my very own idea! Ahahahahaha! So what if they have different ideas? My things are mine to do with as I please, and I've more than earned it! Hehehee! A genius is entitled to his mementos!"     This of course makes it very easy for Gawain and Tomoe to find him, never mind for Ryu and Touta to catch up with him. The withered runt is practically skipping and dancing around the halls, wheeling around pillars and sliding on banisters as if he's having the time of his life --fast, but not making efficient use of it. Ryu closes with him first, and seeing his claws crackle with life giving energy, the hideous little cyborg ghost ahead of and under the dragon suddenly flickers with an aberrant static of shadowy 'heat-shimmer', splitting his oversized, corpse-like head with a wicked, skeleton grin.     This is where it actually gets stupid. Though Ryu is far faster 'flat out', the high speed flurry of blink-and-you'll-miss-it claw swipes is like swatting at air. The tiny Deathlord clasps his arms behind his back and begins skipping and hopping merrily backwards, ducking and weaving with uncanny, even prescient supernatural prowess, leaving serpents of dizzying afterimages in his wake. Even when Gawain and Tomoe throw themselves into the fray and join the assault, he rolls and dips with their sword blows as if he isn't even there, becoming the most impossibly slippery little bastard anyone is likely to have ever seen. None of his motions make any sense, and he doesn't obey any sort of rational stop and start rules, ignoring inertia and vector logic until he is all but a bouncing cat toy. It's like the very gusts of air that are caused by attacking are enough to blow him out of the way before it lands.     "The one you're working for, stupid!" he calls out down the hall, easily conveying the message all the way back to Staren. Apparently, he can monologue while he scampers. "This is my house you ignoramus! Why wouldn't I be here? You're the intruders, remember? Hahahaha! And you don't even know anything about the one you're working for?! Incredible! Stupendously stupid! Your terrible fate is sealed either way then!"     When Touta jumps ahead and brings down his katana, Eye and Seven Despairs moves one arm from behind his back, transforming the crossbow back into a hand, and outright flicks the edge of the blade, intending to casually swat what he sees as a rookie attack out of the way. Instead, he is the one to make the rookie mistake, as the sheer weight of the attack sends him /flying/ away and smashing down one of the stateroom doors, colliding with the back wall and leaving an almost Looney Tunes-esque crater of his body in it.
Bloody Revelations	"Gaaaah, you're so annoying!" he croaks, clawing his way out of the hole, and quickly yanking the pull switch on a wall lamp next to him. Instead of turning on the light, it instead morphs the wall into a long set of stairs leading downward, which he happily skips away on. "Would you mind going away somewhere else for a while? You're crowding my personal space! A good guest gives their host some time to set the table you know! Weeheehee!"     The staircase drops straight into the middle of the second floor, and into a procession of ghosts meandering their sad, endless ways around the corridors, just sort of extending from the ceiling at an unnatural slant. He lands right in the middle of a quartet of them, and in the blink of an eye, tears right through them with a flick of extendable claws from his soulsteel hand, ripping trails of ghostly energy from their wounds, which he absorbs into some kind of capacitor built into his arm. The ghosts scream in agony as they are drained, collapsing to the floor and convulsing on the spot. Their absorbed Essence quickly coalesces down the length of the mechanical limb as his hand becomes a crossbow once more, and is fired back at the group as a bundle of ghastly, necrotic flechettes, filling the staircase they must chase him down with a wall of buckshot.     From there, he starts scampering off again, cutting down a trail of ghosts on the way, charging himself up off the trapped residents of Cold House crowding the way. At least it prevents them from slowing the group down, though it does leave a trail of suffering in his wake. +-----<<Fatal Arbalest: Will-Slaughtering Pattern>>-----+         TARGETS: Ryu, Gawain, Touta, Tomoe         TYPE: Ghost Energy         HIT: Very Likely         THREAT: Low         EFFECT: Energy Depletion +-----<<Fatal Arbalest: Will-Slaughtering Pattern>>-----+
Bloody Revelations	"Whoa whoa! Hold on! You're making my noggin spin!" Mr. Bones cries out at Falling Rain in the meantime, his (now green again) eye wicks spinning wildly in their sockets as he's suddenly worn as a necklace, and his compass goes even more batshit. Falling Rain of course finds the windows as sturdy as a solid pane of diamond, mostly just shuddering under each beat of her fist, until fine cracks begin to form after a full couple of minutes pounding on them, slooowly spreading to each corner in a grand spiderweb of threads as thin as spider's silk.     It also turns out that the maddening sarcophagus weighs exponentially more than it had already looked, and it takes every muscle in her body to drag it over to the windows, scoring deep furrows in the supernaturally hard floor. Wrenching back the curtains, of course, has revealed that the windows do look directly onto the manse's 'front lawn', albeit, now through a fog of jagged white seams.     "Whoa whoa! Calm down lady!" Mr. Bones squawks as Azure Armature starts going ham on the study room. "What do you think you're going to do exactly?!" Smashing things with the nightmare-distorted facsimile of a marine's artifact weapon doesn't seem to do a lot more but smash things at first, until Azure Armature eventually makes her way to striking the golden artifacts on the wall. The chopping blade in her hand phases right through them, and as it does, the sound of shattering glass mixed with snapping rope echoes from them, and droplets of black fluid spray out of them as if she'd severed some kind of artery inside the orichalcum relics.
Gawain	Gawain's missing isn't helped by Miari's command, which suddenly comes shouting out. He halts slowly at it, because something with that much force should be heeded, but he shouts back across the hall. "Miari, I cannot allow him to get away!" He forces himself to keep moving, keep pursuing down the staircase that appears. As they head downwards, Gawain notices the ghosts, and then notices Eye and Seven Despairs draining them. "Stop what you're doing to them!" He shouts out as they scream, but their essence becomes flechettes, and Gawain's an easy target. They slam into his armor, the physical impact of them doing some decent damage...but the drain being the actual problem. Briefly kneeling as his energy is sapped from him, Gawain huffs. If any of the others move to stop for him, he ushers them away, as he steels himself and forces himself back to his feet. And then, Gawain starts dashing. He pushes forward, before leaping upwards and trying to get an aerial strike through the hallway down and on top of Eye and Seven Despairs. Mid-air, Gawain flicks his wrist ever so slightly, as the blade begins to burn, coated in fire. "Do you have no sense of empathy? No sense of regret? You still have a chance to give it all up!" It almost sounds like pleading. He probably feels a bit bad about stabbing an undead child.
Starbound Flotilla	Albert digs into the problem, filling in everything he can. A magical control assembly, a power source... Albert jams his insane rad-gun into things, demanding Staren assist with a boost of magic. Is it safe to inject a blast of magic directly into a nuclear reaction? What exactly is that going to do? Well, apparently science will discover that now, because Albert intends to find out. He also intends to use Staren's neural interface to hard-boot the control system directly into the ecto, basically just fudging the lack of souls on-hand with a vague soul-shaped smash from Staren's interface.     He leaps into the thing, and cries out, "I will not have my works halted by /inferior science/ and /small minds/!" The gun mounted on that mecha unfolds and seems to expand, and he clenches a huge mechanical fist made of multiple smaller arms. Blood is likely dripping down the entirety of his body, leaking from the corpse-machine he's crafted.     There's enough time for Staren himself to hop onto the machine if he wants. It's an easy guidance system. He takes off, activating the orientation systems and homing in on Seven Despairs, and intending to close the distance. He tears through the path already made, leaping down the stairs and utterly disregarding them, charging up his heavy artillery. He intends not to mess around; his plan is to fill the entire hallway, wall to wall, with a blast of radioactive fire, to overwhelm with pain and to overload electronics with sheer charged DPS. This is... Admittedly difficult for others to dodge, but at least it'll be well-telegraphed, so they might be able to re-maneuver as he tries to fill the hall with necro-powered magical nuclear light.
Lemeza Kosugi	Upon hearing that the way around Eye and Seven Despairs' immortality is merely to beat him up and drag him outside, Lemeza immediately stops looking for any such related artifact. But, hel-lo... what do we have here? An untouched, mystical-type onyx that seems to be gently urging him downward. Nice and relaxing-like--waitaminute. That's bad juju. Though, between Mr. Bones saying that it leads to the Heart Room and various Exalt-looking types not objecting one bit, Lemeza decides that yeah, we're following this thing after all. Though, he could use some backup. Going over what he just learned: this is a Hearthstone, it leads to the Hearth... Room, and following it is probably a good idea, but "down" is apparently dangerous. Creation is not a place to trifle with, and he still doesn't know what to expect down there, so he calls for someone to make the trip with him just in case. "Hey, Miari! Care to make sure I don't wander someplace bad while I follow this? And maybe you can fill me in about this world while we walk."
Staren	Staren trusts Albert to interface the necrotech with the computer and seems alarmed with the idea of trying to focus magic /through/ a nuclear reactor, but Albert seems to know what he's doing so here goes! While it starts up, Staren argues with the others in the room about things like 'splitting the party' and 'finding their way out again' and 'are those windows really windows because I think dumping Monstraces into in-between labyrinth un-space or whatever is a bad idea'     When it's time to go, it's time to go though, Albert's sure not slowing down! Staren opts to follow in his own power armor rather than weigh it down -- the new and improved armor can actually run pretty fast!     Once they reach the deathlord, Staren uses the mini-mecha as a shield, popping out from behind it to fire beam cannons and a missile launcher that fills the hallway around Eye with enough heat to turn the air into plasma -- You know, just to make sure and to keep him busy whenever Albert's reloading or on cooldown.     Staren's not feeling the witty banter tonight, but he manages to find some words as they work on blasting the hall into a radioactive hellscape: "This /ends/. If you're really a deathlord, then you should be happy we're sending you to oblivion. But you don't really believe in the cause, do you? You're just mooching immortality off your masters while prolonging others' suffering. Well, your end is now. Should've picked your cause more carefully, because a now you're gonna get outlived by a bunch of 'idiotic treasure hunters'."
Tomoe	Bones gives some useful information about what happened? Yet that's filed away for later she's got to worry about the big bad as she's managed to get up in his face. "I just see a puppet." Is Tomoe's reply to the Death Lord's ranting for the moment. She does finds him she catches up with Ryu and joins the assault on the death lord. She knows Bloody Revelation is dangerous is insane, but it's a matter of one less front. Bloody was upfront they would fight someday, but right now they have things they both want gone. It's not been an easy choice, but it's one she's had to make. She finds the death lord's quite good at evading her strikes but he can't dodge forever nothing can, right? Then comes the ghost? Is it a Ghost? Is it something else? Shes' not sure she knows it' bad and it's tapping her energy as she goes, there's no wire frame but she does feel to be worn hell there's a brief ripple of wire frames across her body and for a moment the detail of her face is gone. She presses on she will not let him get away, no this being is a thing of nightmare what he's done to creation? What he could do to a world like her? Drives Tomoe on harder, and she sees Gawain shouting trying to pleed with Eye still.
Ryu	Ryu's fury is maximum. He absolutely cannot hit this guy even once, and he tries much harder than even most Solars would. It is very dangerous to stand in front of that blender-alike blur of claws while he's doing that, his wings beating furiously as he tries not to through himself into a spin with each superfast strike. And then Seven Despairs is hit, and sent flying, and the dragon actually huffs and puffs, his body trembling with adrenaline and fury. He scrunches his snout and crouches, then he considers his options involving following him.     He allows the shots to graze him, moving with slow twists so that he doesn't get hit directly, but he flinches from the brief energy drain. "Hrnf!"     He closes one eye, and focuses on regenerating that wound, a scar present for a day or two from the energy drain. He decides not to get into a slugging match with Seven Despairs right now. He'll wait until the others soften him up.     He flicks his wings, and turns to catch up with Lemeza and whoever else wants to follow the artifact's pointing. He will probably wrap his tail around Miari, and grab on with either claw to Lemeza and another, and begin moving as fast as he can to their destination without killing his passengers in the process. Well... he can probably revive them if he did that, but thankfully they're probably sturdier than most!!!
Miari	Miari's been lending her power to helping Falling Rain drag the Monstrances of Celestial Portion to the adamant window and breaking through with more calculated and focused blows to key parts of the cracks to further weaken the windows... but when Lemeza makes a pretty spectacular find she turns to gaze his way...     And eyes the Hearthstone! Smiling QUITE happily at this development, she turns about... "You seem to have this manner dealt with, Falling Rain. Save one of them for me and I will be sure to reward you!" And it sounds like she means it. She REALLY wants one of those things. WHY is anyone's guess though.     And yet, the mortal explorer over there waves for her attention and she'll abandon these priceless treasures on something far less certain? What?     But yes, that's what Miari does. She about-faces and dashes over to Lemeza, a hand over her heart. "Let's go!" She's still mildly glowing green, and the aura brightens just a hint as she begins casting spells to bolster her explorer ally further. His skin will shift to a tough metallic bronze sheen and great strength wells up inside to help keep him safe for the journey!     ONly for... "WHA?" RYU comes rushing in, causing her to flail her arms wildly at first and get YOINKED in a rather undignified fashion. She puffs her cheeks up all huffily. "Some warning would be nice!"
Azure Armature	Rising from the ichorous drippings of the panoply of artifacts she thrashed, Azure Armature's masked, heavily pshh-okk'ing body lets the pyramidhead wavecleaver in her grip fall idly to her side, her digitally gasmasked visage scanning around the room, before wandering over to Falling Rain's HULK SMASHING at the window, looking between the Dragon-Blooded, the Monstrance, and the window outside. Gathering up the dark energy within her copied weapon, she hefts the wavecleaver up in her hand, it becoming a trembling, crackling, smoking weapon of memoricide alone, before hurling it into the window to 'help'. The mask tatters and falls away as she fires the 'charged shot'. "They want to secure this place. Foolishness. We have a plan - a mission. I intend to stick to it." She offers Falling Rain, as her inner ear radio goes completely mental. "We may not have infinite time to do so. You are quite strong and supernaturally ferocious. Is that normal for your kind?"
Empty Tidings	Moving the Monstrances is horribly, terribly straining. Falling Rain breathes hard when she gets them over to the cracked windows, looking up at the damage with continued irritation. She takes a second to breathe deeply and steadily, nodding at Miari while so clearly distracted (and perhaps a little off-put by her nauseating aura), and then turns back to the diamond-hard panes. "You aren't," whap-crack, fist and gauntlet against clouding pane, "in any extra," whap-/crack/, another pair of blows, "danger." Falling Rain talks to Mister Bones while she plays urban destroyer. It's a steady one-two punch that doesn't, at first, seem to be doing any extra work. Except... Except her gauntlet is breaking. She's warped the metal around her knuckles. The plating is being pulverized whenever she hits the window, the weaker material giving way to the stronger. Her right-handed blows continue to get stronger and stronger, with ever savage punch shaking the aperture more and more. She yells, she swings, and the gauntlet explodes into fragments. A glove of reddish material beneath survives, though the surface has begun to split. Steam rises from the gaps, and she stops using her left hand entirely, winding up longer but building a cacophonous rhythm. Falling Rain works like a fury-powered piston hammer and addresses Azure Armature. "I like to think," CRACK, "I am a cut," CRACK, "above the rest," CRACK. She flexes her right fingers, examining the glove and frowning for a second. She glances back at the Alchemical, eyes burning with the color of a stormy sea. "I'm with you." CRACK. CRACK. /CRACK./
Touta Konoe	There's a certain amount of smug that Touta can't help but have when the guy ends up taking the full brunt of his swing. He's somewhat surprised he wasn't sliced through, but I gues it went to show how tough this immortal really was. As he prepares to chase Seven Despair's down the stares he's prepared for himself, he watches him maul the souls of the quartet without remorse! Touta grinds his teeth ready to launch himself at the guy once more, but watches from above the staircase as his arm changes back into a crossbow aimed at him and the group. Not caught off guard this time around he takes the opportunity to pull out of Despair's line of fire hoping to avoid the blast in it's entirety, but he's unfortunate to be grazed by one of the shots he fired. The wound heals with no issues but something feels wrong...Like...He's not poison but he feels a little off. He forces him to slow down a bit, just a bit...Though it does let him listen to alot of chatter going on from the people who hadn't decided to fight directly with Seven Despairs. Like Lemeza who found some sort of stone that was attracting him to the bottom floors, and Mr.Bones who said all the answers would lie in the Heart Room. Or was it Hearth room? Was the name all that important? Actually he's not sure why but something started to click in his head about something Albert had said earlier too... The info that was supposed to help the group deal with Seven Despairs...It didn't make much sense with those three words. Extract. Relocate. Execute. "Wait...Maybe that means...Oh shit!" And suddenly he thinks he's got an epiphany. Before Ryu can pick up Lemeza he shouts out to him "Oi! Remember what Al said! EXTRACT! RELOCATE! EXECUTE!" And like that...Welll Miari and Lemeza are already picked up by Ryu to the Heartroom. So he ends up repeating himself over the radio. Hopefully Mr.Bones is right and that one way or another the answer is in that place otherwise...Well, these guys seem smart when they aren't trying to go wild on everything so he has some faith here. Touta for the meantime we'll do what he said he was going to do and make sure that this Deathlord doesn't catch up to them and act as the diversion that they'll need. Plus, he just really wants to smack this guy around a bit more. With that in mind, he actually has started lagging behind a bit. He hasn't even made it down the stairs yet, that energy down was really nasty apparently... "Guess I need to get my blood flowing again..." So with a smile he pulls out some sort of metal wire like contraption and undoes it. It's a giant ring...No...It's a...Hula-hoop? Yes it is! Touta starts spinning it around his waist. "Alright, guess we'll give this one more go. Grasp the earth!" With that he dashes down at that immense speed from before intending to catch up not with Ryu, but with Staren and Albert instead. It looks like they're already laying the heat down on Seven Despairs, but Touta knows from the hit that this kid is sneaky one. So when he tries to pull something slick against Staren and Al, this immortal's going to be in for a rude awakening.
Bloody Revelations	"Nope! Can't make me! You're not the boss of me! Hahahaha!" Eye and Seven Despairs just cackles back to Gawain as he disappears around another corner, agonized, weeping ghosts lying in his wake like falllen leaves. "Oh sure I do! I 'regret' not smashing that stupid compass the minute I saw it on the doorstep! Once a problem, always a problem, am I right? Ahahahahahahaha!"     Miraculously, the cobbled together soulsteel abomination actually starts! The abominable confluence of implanted cyber arms and legs stapled together takes off at a quick but extremely wobbly pace, and easily bashes down the odd door or screen in the way. With its homing tracker, it lets Albert, and Staren hitching a ride, easily cut off Eye and Seven Despairs as he flees from Gawain, outright bashing the wall down and dramatically sliding and crashing into the corridor behind him just as the knight of the sun comes into view.     "How did you-?!" is as far as Eye and Seven Despairs gets before the entire hall is instantly filled with an obliterating wave of nuclear flame and beam and missile, drowning him in overlapping explosions and crisscrossing rays that are so dense, no amount of magical dodging could find anywhere safe to put him. The Deathlord flees from the onrushing blaze, his ghostly flesh starting to boil and bubble away on his back, before he runs smack into Excalibur Galatine's holy fire, and screams like an electrocuted cat. The impact drives him straight through the floor, unable to withstand the stress of the combined attacks, and collapses the ground beneath Gawain and the mecha as well, sending them tumbling down to the first floor along with him in a pile of dust and rubble. Tomoe arrives just in time to see them both drop, and just late enough to avoid necessarily falling in herself. Touta lags behind that the hole is already there when he arrives, and he has a top down view of the floor below and everyone on it.     The aggressors wind up in a foyer of sorts, now covered in chunks of broken rock and wood, and littered with the prone bodies of ghosts, some knocked out by the explosion, some pinned under rubble, and some of them having fallen from above, still weakly howling and twitching after their very essence was flayed by the Deathlord's claws. Eye and Seven Despairs shoots one hand up out of the wreckage, slowly wriggling his way out with constant grunts of extreme effort and panic, making for an incredibly easy target with his back to Albert and Staren especially.
Bloody Revelations	It's probably a given assumption that somebody will take the opportunity to shoot (or stab) him, but when someone does, they'll find that he collapses all too easily, and then his corpus warps and takes the form of a spectral butler instead. Staren and Albert hear "What does it say about you, then, that you think I don't believe in the end of all existence, but your 'Angel' really does? What has to happen to someone, to make them want to erase everything? Not even out of revenge or misery or hate, but because they /really want to/?, whispered almost into their ears with poisonous, childish resentment. One of the maimed ghost behind them ripples and changes its form to that of the Deathlord himself, apparently having swapped places with her (a female ghost) during the collapse, and leaps on them from the back.     The claws come out, sheathed in hazy, electric Essence, and tear through armour and mecha alike in a blow enhanced with powerful cybernetic strength. This is exactly what Touta had expected, however, and he has a valuable window of opportunity to act before Eye and Seven Despairs hops from the impromptu mecha and jumps to deliver the same to Gawain, and then starts skittering down the hall again, towards the rear of Cold House, laughing madly to himself all the while.     +---------<<Fatal Arbalest: Savage Shade Claw>>---------+         TARGETS: Albert, Staren, Gawain         TYPE: Slashing/Raw Energy         HIT: Fifty-Fifty         THREAT: Middling         EFFECT: None     +---------<<Fatal Arbalest: Savage Shade Claw>>---------+
Bloody Revelations	Others begin the long chase down an alternate route through Cold House. Without the sophisticated Labyrinth-navigating compass loaned to them by their benefactor, following the vibrations of the Hearthstone becomes an ironically appropriate game of Hot/Cold, trying to feel out which passage is resonates the most strongly with. Many times they wind up taking four right turns and ending up somewhere completely different instead of where they started. Sometimes they go straight on for a while and end up /exactly/ where they started. They end up passing right by the study room they'd just left no less than three times, starting to feel like a completely hopeless endeavour, but the thrumming of the Hearthstone is consistent, and it starts to get easier to tune out the background and figure out where they're going, muscling past lost ghosts on a mad run up and down disconnected stairs and around illogical corners until they start making steady progress down towards the first floor.     Soon, they get far enough down that they can hear the sounds of battle crashing through several intersections away from them, rapidly approaching, but likely to overshoot if they don't say anything. The place where the Hearthstone buzzes until it puts Lemeza's hand to sleep is a seemingly completely blank wall, with nothing interesting about it. No doors, no suspicious candles, not even a painting of a bowl of fruit or something. It's right at a corner, making it even more of a weird spot, since one would expect any sort of hidden passage closer to the middle of a wall.     Nevertheless, this is obviously the spot, even if it does basically amount to a blank canvas of old wallpaper. Cursory examination of its magical signature confirms that the wall section radiates something very strong, but also gives the impression that there is nothing behind it. It's quite likely that, just as Cold House lies outside of Bonetree, the Heart Room lies outside of Cold House as well. They don't have long to figure it out, with the chase Eye and Seven Despairs is leading.     Up in the study, Falling Rain's relentless pounding causes not only the reinforced manse windows to quake, but much of the third floor around it, and starts to cause the halls to fill with the high pitched sound of fine, shearing friction and shaving glass shards. Finally, Azure Armature just hurls the bulky chopping blade of faux-soulsteel straight into the center of the radiating crack pattern, and deals the finishing touch, shattering the window completely. The sickening sense of indescribable uneasiness blows into the room like a cold draft, chasing away the soporific comfort that plagues them otherwise, aptly signifying the outside of the house leaking into the inside. Approaching that broken window, it certainly looks out onto Bonetree but . . .     Why would anyone want to leave? It's so comfortable in here, and it's so awful outside. They know how to get out. They can leave whenever they want, right? No need to do it /right now/. They can take a moment to rest, can't they? The others have Eye and Seven Despairs handled. Just a few minutes to catch their breath before approaching that awful gap into the outside world. That'd be fine. It's so easy to relax in here, where it's warm and quiet.
Lemeza Kosugi	Twisty turny, twisty turny. The journey is actually rather relaxing. The hearthstone leads them through a whirlwind tour of the manse, finally leading them to a... wall. A blank corner of a wall, with no secret passages and no nothing. Oh well. With adrenaline no longer pumping through his veins, and his curiosity totally satisfied by this totally complete answer... curry time. He whips out a perfectly neat bowl of curry from his backpack, sits down RIGHT IN FRONT OF THE CORNER, and starts eating. Another bowl. A couple more, and FLOP. Seriously? All that impetus to follow the stone and resolve this matter, and he just falls asleep!? Well... he does manage to hand the stone off to Miari before he does. Then mutters "this goes outside..." before flopping asleep in a nice, serene feeling of nice sereneness.
Ryu	Ryu skitters to a stop at the end of the path, which brings them to a location that doesn't actually contain the Heart Room. He blinks slowly at the sight of it, and then again at Lemeza as he picks now, of all times, to fall asleep after eating a big meal. The dragon stares in utter disbelief at the timing this strange adventurer has, and then breathes a big, long-suffering sigh. Then he scoops Lemeza up and drapes him over a shoulder and gestures for Miari to know he intends to make another superspeed dash.     "This is nonsense."     But... he tries to scoop Miari up, and step into the corner as if it were a doorway, briefly and gently testing it before trying to leave with her. If he gets a bruise, so be it. The oddity of this spot isn't lost on him, and he can't just leave without trying first...
Starbound Flotilla	Damnation. A trick!! Albert's limited field of view doesn't let him defend very well against something like this!!     The savage claw plunges deep into one of the arms, the one hoisting the gun. It sparks and bleeds badly, but Albert keeps it well between him and the incoming claw. Though the shock slams back into his body, he blunts much of the impact, sacrificing a chunk of his mecha to defuse the external danger, before the child leaps off. Albert pursues, unloading blast after blast of radioactive fire, keeping the thing trained on his foe.     "And your motives are so much more grand? So much more well-rooted in the truth of the world? What Bloody Revelations chooses to do, I will stop or I will support as it comes, as I see and know it. I am a scientist! My will is born in fact, and with it I'll create or destroy whatever fits that will; truth makes my decision, and my decisions will make truth! Not revenge, not misery, not hate. You think what you're doing is greater because it's rooted in some personal experience more? I don't /care/. Inefficiently cruel science without a fire-forged will for changing the world is /small-minded/ and /stupid/. I'd be an accessory to a million of Bloody Revelations' schemes before I'd ever call you anything more than an overblown egotistical /technician/!" The machine's activity intensifies more and more, gleaming with mishandled, excess radiation. "Now /hold still/, you cretin! I've got an /experiment/ to perform on you!!"     Albert rants and raves as he angrily assaults the child more and more, trying to close the distance and get those many arms attached onto his awful industrial loader to snag the boy skellington and crunch that robotic limb as hard as possible. He needs to get this child outside before the house overcomes him, even with his crisis-minded state buffering against the effects slightly. He's gotta make sure he can get ahold of that corpse and bring it out for the required instructions fast! This asshole doesn't even stop to help out Gawain because of how much he really wants to murder this child! What a jerk.
Miari	Miari ponders quirming out of Ryu's grasp as they near the unusual corner, but she feels her concentration and motivation slipping. That haziness that comes just before falling asleep. The feeling leaves her a little dazed and confused. "Mmmmh?" She doesn't seem to comprehend the idea Ryu's swinging her way, or Lemeza's actions. They just don't register as so odd...     She yawns, quite uncharacteristically, and sort of gives the wall and Lemeza both blank stares. R    Then... then as Ryu keeps moving, her brow furrows, teeth grind a little... and she circulates her power inwards, through her mind and spirit. The swirling green-white energies around her sharpen expand another notch and Miari snaps out a snarling noise of wordless protest!     "We shouldn't tarry here. Do what we came to do and leave! That's it." With her mind temporarily clear and singing with the crystalline arrangement of her patron's Essence, she can fend off this influence... but not forever.
Azure Armature	It's easy to relax. To allow yourself to be less than what you could be. To take a knee, and let someone else handle things. Such are the failings all can understand. Whose overcoming is a struggle and a strain. Azure Armature's shoulders sag, and her now empty main hand moves to start pulling crossbow bolts that had been tearing her back apart. It was a holding pattern, a necessary but also non-forward-moving action. Stationkeeping. Taking stock. Necessary little things that bought her 'tired' mind precious cycles. Being vigilant the entire time, with the thick soporific effect of the place, had nearly tapped her mental reserves that cracking the wall and washing her face in the biting soul-chill of the Underworld had only started to recover. A psyche, even a heroic one, was a finite thing at the end of the day. Falling Rain, however, a faithful second in her plans, was also there to buoy up her spirits, and if nothing else, those where Blue was from ever endeavord to never falter before those that championed. It is so easy to just breathe, and stop working. And that is how the base, clawing hands of the do-nothings, the lumpen, the less than heroic masses of the useless, and worse - apostates - wormed their way into your heart. A disease of the soul. Moving a hand up to tighten and adjust her scarf, Azure moves to help Falling Rain moving the strange boxes into better 'getting out of the place' locations, before doing a quick scan of the remains of Eye and Seven Darkness' Nerd Cave and aiming a plasma blast at the highest concentration of lingering magic, as if it would help to do. "Mission timer is running down - I started one upon learning we only had a day, and halved it when the source turned out to be hostile. But this place, the... 'Labyrinth' does strange things to time. So, if you are to do something, Toriki Falling Rain, to speed this up, we can extract and return with reinforcements. And sufficent sapper equipment to level the place, if need arises... or the others fail."
Empty Tidings	The house starts to shake. The sounds of glass cracking echo through the upper floors. Falling Rain continues her furious work. The shearing sound gets worse and worse. The glove starts to suffer. The leather splits more and more, worn away like the gauntlet, but it survives the onslaught a little better. The gaps are smoldering, smoking from some inner heat likely built up from the relentless hammering. The strange material wears away, and a glint of something black and hard is visible from beneath. She slides one foot backwards, winding up -- The soulsteel blade hits the windows and explodes the lot of them. Falling Rain takes a full step back, seemingly driven there by the unnatural sensation. She stares through the shards, out into the Shadowland beyond. The feeling makes her confident that they made it. Now for the simpler part. "You placed some sort of artifice on the skull to know where it would be, yes?" She turns to Azure, then gestures to the Monstrances slid up near the windows. "Do the same to these. It will make finding them later much simpler." She puts her hands on her hips and breathes, turning and staring out the windows while she catches her breath. It would be so easy to just relax... ...but she can relax once she's sure they're done. Once Blue has done her thing, she steps up to the first Monstrance. "Step back," she says by way of warning, an almost friendly caution given to the woman with the strange face. She pauses a moment, reaching into her coat and withdrawing the small medical kit she had carried before, and tosses it lightly out the window. Falling Rain waits a moment to see if something awful happens. She nods to herself, then takes hold of the Monstrance. Falling Rain steadies herself, adjusting her stance, and lifts the end of it off the floor. She plants her feet, draws in a deep breath, twists her body, and /heaves/. It drags across the reinforced floor and digs another furrow into the ground. She rotates, and it rotates with her, spinning, picking up speed until the other end is off the ground. She swings it towards the window, releases her hold --
Empty Tidings	-- and then, spinning her whole body around, /hits/ it. The sound is like a cannon shot. There is an actual shockwave from the impact of her right hand against the Monstrance, blasting loose objects and burned debris back from her spot by the windows and casting them across the room. Mister Bones almost gets taken for a ride, but stays firmly attached to the grappling line she's wearing like an amulet, flapping in the sudden Essence-borne wave of force. Her glove finally gives up the ghost, tearing to shreds and scattering across the chamber. The Monstrance, assuming no superior force suddenly stops it, goes sailing into the sky. It does not come back down anywhere in sight. Falling Rain's right hand is nothing normal. Where there should be flesh and bone there is instead black stone and an inlay of delicate brass filigree. There is a flare of acrid green light, and Old Realm characters stream up her forearm, cast in viridian as whorls of green fire stream around them:     Once, there was a maiden...     ...who struck an iron wall until it shattered her hand.     She did not stop, though cracks spread throughout her bones.     She did not stop, though blood sprayed her eyes.     She did not stop until she shattered the wall.     "Survival is fury," she said. "One down," she breathes, voice bubbling with mirth. She takes hold of the next, and it follows the path of the first. There's less to muffle the crack of unnatural, indestructible stone against the soulsteel edifice now, and the thunderous boom echoes far and wide, over and over again. Her body is further tested and further worn by each horizon-spanning throw, but still she persists in trying to crack the sky itself with the terrible coffins again and again. Until they're gone. Then, she tries to take a step, feeling light as a feather -- -- and crumples to the floor, shoulders canted unnaturally and leg bent in the wrong direction. She doesn't feel any of it, just blinking owlishly as the total lack of pain prevents her from doing anything but embracing the soporific warmth of the place. The flames on her arm gutter out, and the words vanish. "I think I need a moment's rest," she says, thoughtfully. Her head hits the floor shortly thereafter.
Tomoe	Tomoe is lucky to be a moment behind the others, as she sees her friends ahead of her drop, she herself? Is able to not fall in, she flips backwards form the edge lands a crouch and is back on her feet also looking down for a moment, she only has a brief flicker of her wings if she were to use it, after all there's no real proper light for them to actually work. So she takes a half second to get an idea of what she can do. She is not subject to direct attack this time and that gives her a slight breather. It is not long as she will find her with with those who had not fallen down. She goes to hell with it and will use her experience Parkouring to get the hell down she'll land in a couch and once more make a go for the death lord across the wreckage as he attacks her allies. "Burn." She swings Caliburn as she gets close, it still burning with a holy fire trying to catch the death lord off guard while he attacks her comrades. "Your supposed to be on me!"
Staren	~~Now~~     Staren feels the weight on his back and sees the damage indicators as claws start digging into his armor, the grappling-melee attack bypassing the forcefield and basically being the worst thing for Staren.     Dammit, Staren thinks as of all things, some stupid sales pitch comes to mind. He feels a little bit like he's in some kind of military-grade infomercial.     But seriously, this is bad. Even though these claws can't tear all the way through in one swipe, if that guy stays back there long enough he'll be able to tear through to the armor's squishy center soon enough. Staren's left spinning and flailing and trying to wave a beam sword over where Eye is. "I am not a fucking infomercial! Get him off me!"     Hopefully Albert can do just that! Staren's happy to take the chance to pour on some more damage with point-blank beam cannons if the boy's grabbed, and happy to put his armor's strength to the ends of holding in place or crushing or whatever Albert may need. "What do we need to do to make him STOP?! I guess we're finding out..."     Also, he makes a mental note: Get some freaking spikes.
Staren	They crash through the floor... not really a problem for Staren. He's surprised that's even possible. How does this mansion even work? Still, landing from one story is no problem, the power armor takes it with a little bending of the knees.     Seeing Eye pinned, he chooses now to unleash the missiles loaded into his armor -- a dozen missiles that airburst to propel heavy nucleii at physics-breaking temperature and pressure that could punch through a tank like paper, aimed to skewer the deathlord from a dozen different angles. And then...     Damn, did he become some kind of Double Ghost? For some reason, Staren's mind jumps to that rather than the trick he's seen before and really should expect now. ~~Some time ago~~     Staren walks along with the crowd of people through a wide hallway of opulant stone of some sort. There are assembled men and women of various species -- a mix of hardened adventurer-looking types, engineers, mechanics, and people in nice suits -- And as they walk, Staren overhears a conversation between two young men in military uniforms. "I'm telling you, when I first saw it I thought for a moment they took a zaku and just replaced the head with a gun."     The group comes to a halt in front of a large window, and the man leading them speaks up. "And up next, we have the Demon Slayer!" The window overlooks a large courtyard, cratered and scorched, with a man-sized armored figure standing in the middle, surrounded by dummies with various horned, winged, clawed, tailed shapes. "Imagine: Hunting a monster, or a cult has brought you to a rift. Or perhaps you and your pals are caught in a freak leyline storm." A couple of the grizzled adventurey types nod. "On the other side, you find yourself surrounded! A man or woman against an army of fiends! But not to worry, because you're wearing -- you ARE a DEMON SLAYER!" The armored figure sprays gouts of flame and magic freaking lightning bolts at the dummies in front of it, while gatling turrets on the shoulders riddle the others with silver spikes. "Techno-wizard weaponry optional." the presenter comments, conspiratorily.     The dummies lower into the ground, but new ones rise up, closer. "Perhaps you've followed them to their warrens, or you're braving a Xiticix Hive. You're in close quarters. Don't worry, you're covered!" The armored figure draws forth a silver -two-bladed sword- vibroblade and proceeds to do a bunch of flashy moves that look AWESOME, neatly cleaving right through the dummies with spinning strikes and detaching the blades for cool dual-wielding moves. "And yes, that's silver, like the spike cannons before. Deevils and vampires that can't be hurt even by the mightiest laser or" the presenter rolls his eyes rolls his eyes "'boom gun', fall before the mighty DEMON SLAYER. DUAL SILVER VIBRO-SWORDS available ONLY with the Demon Slayer, by the way!"     "Ahh, but you don't always see them coming, do you? Demons prefer to pounce on you from behind. Have any of you been attacked from behind by demons?!" One of the adventurers nods. "He got me good. I died... my buddies got me outta there and they rezzed me, or I wouldn't be here t'day." The presenter nods, seemingly unsurprised. Staren wonders if that guy was a plant.     Meanwhile, out on the field, one last hidden hatch opens behind the demonstrator, obviously a person in power armor done up to look demonic. "Exactly! The evil beast has snuck up on you! Before you know it-- It pounces!" And it does, leaping upon the first figure to start clawing at it... but then it waves its arms wildly and slides off, streaked with fake blood. The back of the armor has extended silver, now 'blood'-stained, spikes. "But the DEMON SLAYER is ready! Only it has SILVER VIBRO-SPIKES on the back! With the DEMON SLAYER, you won't fall to their ambush -- in fact, you'll bloody them just for trying!"     The man positively beams as some of the crowd nod to themselves. "Northern Gun! WE'VE GOT YOU COVERED!"
Touta Konoe	Touta was right to think that this kid had something up his sleeve, or apparently under the debri would be more appropriate. Touta had watched from the back seeing Staren and Albert really bring the heat...Literally. Honestly, Touta might be an immortal himself but even he sure as hell wouldn't want to have suffered that kind of attack. That's the kind of attack that would scar someone for life. Immortals are always so difficult to deal with though.The endeavor is hapless, and the immortal rises once again just as they do. It ends up being Albert who tries to give the final strike to Seven and in doing so exposes himself to the vicious counter-attack that would ensue. With his limited field of view he was willing to let the claw plunge into his arm to mitigate the damage. Staren might literally have it completely impale him through his armor There was no need to for that, because whether it was an angel or a vampire someone was watching from up above. "That's not going to happen!" Just as Seven expected to get the jump on the others, it was him who was jumped. Or well, Touta jumping down from the second floor to get inbetween the immortal and the others. Now some might have expected that he use the weight of his blade once more to increase the speed of his fall and use that force to slice that arm off. Well he probably could have done that and that would have been great but if the immortal had any other tricks up his sleeves it would be too late to deal with it. If they wanted to secure this immortal they had to do it in a way that was going to catch him off guard and completely immobilize him in the same instance otherwise he'd attempt to scamper off. Thankfully, Seven Despairs was willing enough to help in his own defeat! Touta stops the electrically infused cybernetic claw not with his sword but with his left hand. How this happens would probably make no sense to a man of magic as he hadn't done anything to make it seem like he used a spell, or even as a man of science as he used nothing but his left hand. The reason was something a bit different. Using Ki, Touta had been able to reinforce the point on his hand making the area in question capable of blocking bladed attacks. Sadly, that wouldn't stop the electrical essence from hitting Touta. So why was it that he wasn't getting shocked? Actually, why did it feel like all that electricity had disappeared? "Magia Erebea: Circuli Absorptionis."
Touta Konoe	Touta is by no means a mage, or even someone who considers himself savvy with magic. But he does have access to a certain type of magic that allows him to absorb other abilities or magic, so when electricity surges into Touta's right hand, it doesn't shock him it's just...Gone. "Complexio!" That electricity was going to be put to use real quick though. By absorbing the electricity through this strange magic his body had changed... What appeared as a kid wearing mostly black up till this point had gone completely white. His hair grew down past his neck like a mane of some sort, he also had something spinning around his waist, and his body was covered in electricity. No, that wasn't a correct explanation. By taking that electricity and assimilating with it, his body had become electricity itself. "Great Vigor. Thunder in Heaven." In truth Touta could only hold onto this sort of form for a few moments so every second counted when using it. That'd be all he needed though in this form. Touta would lower the left hand that was holding the claw in place and raised his right hand holding his blade. Before Touta had been able to move at a speed that made him look like a blur, though with this technique his speed was closer to actual lightning itself and with it he was going to use this speed to slash at Seven Despairs quicker than he could ever hope to keep up with. He would slice through his cybernetic arm, his regular arm, and his legs in but the blink of an eye. It was the only way Touta knew how to deal with an immortal. Immobilize them swiftly before they had the chance to retaliate, and hopefully this was swift enough because just as quick as that change had occurred, he had already reverted back to his short, spikey-black haired self.
Gawain	"Very well, you've decided your fate!" Gawain gets in, right as the horrible flames pour through the hallway. Gawain can't move out of the way fast enough, with how he's striking down. The flames engulf his body, burning into the knight's skin, though he braces his head for it, rendering most of the flames to his armor. The platemail is burnt horribly black, as his skin is singed terribly, horrible burns across it. Even so, as his body screams in pain, and his hands burn, Gawain keeps the strike going as they smash through the floor below them. In the wreckage, Gawain spends several moments not moving, but still clearly alive, breathing ragged. The knight very slowly wobbles back to his feet, looking around for Eye and Seven Despairs, the burns on him making his determined look slightly spooky, but the burns are slowly healing, supernaturally regenerating even if they're clearly putting the knight in immense pain. There's no blame or grudge towards Albert, though, even if his behavior troubles the knight. When the claws move to strike Albert and Staren, and then Eye and Seven Despairs comes for him, Gawain braces... And Touta moves to intercept the strike, with his own hand. "Wait!" Gawain shouts, not wanting him to take the blow for him...but that's not what he's doing. As Touta starts to channel the electricity through him, Gawain's eyes rise, and Touta transforms. At this time, Gawain takes another breath, shouting as he suddenly dashed forward. "Thank you! Now, together, we can pin him!" Rushing forward, the flames die down on Gawain's sword, as he moves to ram it through Eye and Seven Despair's torso, trying to pin him on it or incapacitate him with the strike, if it can't actually kill him. It might be slightly off-base due to the pain Gawain's in, but it should hopefully atleast hit him in the side. "Your time ends now!"
Bloody Revelations	As the battle works its way further and further downstairs, closer and closer to the very heart of Cold House, the duo who have stayed upstairs finally feel their diligence repaid. Though the effort is grueling and the cost to their psyches and their magical reserves more than merely considerable, the adamant windows of the dimensionally bounded manse give way beneath Falling Rain's fury, and one by one, the horrific, brain-nauseating artifacts are dragged to the jagged breach, and one by one they are punted out of the warm torpor of the mansion and into the dim, cold world outside.     The true brilliance of Cold House's construction is ironically at its most poignant here. A lesser genius might have built something like this, but forcing through the walls would just dump the two Exalted out into the Labyrinth, or perhaps even nowhere. Eye and Seven Despairs had built his manor so meticulously that even when its very substance breaks, the Outdoors are Outdoors, and the Inside is Somewhere Else. What a waste of intellect. Needless to say, anything thrown out the broken window lands without incident, and it can in fact be used as a route of egress if anyone so cares to. The copied tracking data that Azure Armature had recovered will certainly point them to it without fail, if not without annoyance, perhaps ameliorated just slightly by the incineration of a magically warded tome on Airfolk biology.
Bloody Revelations	Down below, the chaotic rollercoaster of a fight continues. Just as Eye and Seven Despairs gleefully leaps onto the two tech fighters, cackling maniacally as he begins flaying them alive with his Essence-charged claws, Touta has already seen through his ruse, and a moment later, the boy's body itself blocks one of his vicious swings. The soulsteel claws will easily put a hole through his flesh, but that's something the immortal can deal with. The Deathlord instead cocks his oversized cranium with a "Hah. What?", and is then blasted free of the jury rigged mecha in a blinding cascade of literally lightning fast slashes, tearing his corpus to shreds and sending him into spasms of howling pain as the magical electricity shoots through every filament of his dead body.     Eye and Seven Despairs lands with a wet splat, darkening the floor with faded, washed out blood, too desaturated to really be red, but the morbidly spry ghost springs upright anyways. He wheels to Gawain, weaving around his sword in almost choreographed bullet time, lunging on the knight and swiping at him with his now quite ordinary claws. He vaults off the Heroic Spirit's back, and leapfrogs over a spray of missiles and beams from behind him with an enthusiastic, cackling "Whoop! Haha!", but Tomoe leaping out of that blind angle causes her own burning sword to collide with the side of his head, sending him spinning through the air and crashing into the floor, though not before he gets a swipe in at her as well. +--------------<<Fatal Arbalest Claw>>--------------+         TARGETS: Gawain, Tomoe         TYPE: Slashing         HIT: Possible         THREAT: Medium-Low         EFFECT: None +--------------<<Fatal Arbalest Claw>>--------------+     He barely staggers upright in time to get away from the crushing stomp of Albert's mechanized feet, but he doesn't scramble away quickly enough to avoid the crushing clench around his already badly mangled cybernetic arm, and with a sick, ripping pop, the whole assemblage comes out of him with a high, hissing squeal of agony, where the Fatal Arbalest is then crushed and slagged in Albert's relentless march.     AHHHHHHHH! You . . . b-bastard I'll- HHHHH . . . I'll /get/ you f-for . . . HNNN!!! Eye and Seven Despairs turns and runs, ducking a couple more shots, but clumsily, taking another energy blast to his melted back, where his ghostly flesh is growing increasingly more translucent and deformed. The Essence capacity in his arm is gone now, which means he doesn't have much energy left. It's all he can do to keep ahead as the main fighters chase him towards the others, driving him like a pack of wolves.
Bloody Revelations	Ryu had assumed that the corner had to be an impossibility in the house's construction, and that it should prove no obstacle to his advancement. When he runs straight into the wall with Miari, and then /through it/, that assumption is proven correct. He is the first in a long time to discover that the Heart Room does not exist in Cold House. It doesn't exist in Creation. It doesn't even exist in the Labyrinth. It may not exist anywhere at all. With the others in tow . . .     They cross that threshold, and abruptly step out onto . . . nothing. What their footfalls sound and feel like, tells them that they're running over stone, perhaps marble, tiling, on a flat, slightly rough surface that is open to the air. Reaching out a hand or wandering too far from the corner they'd entered from, they'd even feel the gritty shape of a baroque guard rail under their fingers, though there is none to see. There are the sensations of entering onto some kind of . . . balcony, perhaps, but it is completely invisible to them. A piece of architecture that they will just have to trust with their minds eye that it actually exists, and hope that it doesn't suddenly cease to.     Around them is little but blackness. A black so absolute that no degree of magical vision will pierce through it. Producing light to see by, the radiant area it covers actually squashes, stretches, and becomes a distorted oblong pointing down, as if the light itself is being dragged downwards, smeared across reality as the invisible pull exceeds the constant of C. There is a sense of powerful gravity on flesh and bone as well, making each step across the platform of nothingness increasingly laboured, but it isn't evenly distributed, more like their feet are trying to fall away from them rather than simply being put under a higher g level.     There are ghosts here. A few of them. They sit, kneel, or lie down in scattered bunches across the 'balcony', all of them vacantly staring into the utter blackness below, unwilling to move, or to even pay attention to the group, as though the feeling of unnatural comfort of Cold House had broken them completely. Actually, stepping into this dark, floating abyss, one gets the impression that it hadn't been Cold House at all. Rather, that sensation seems to emanate from this spot, as a kind of formless, radiant energy that deadens sound, slows thought, and fills one with the creeping, dreadful, and yet not at all unpleasant assurance that this place --this nothingness-- can finally put their minds at rest. That it can answer all questions. Soothe all woes. Grant all desires. That it is a suitable place to end one's journey, and that all of life's trials and frustrations are finally at their end. It is a feeling of surreal, eerie . . . /peace/, that has the dead here completely enraptured, and it vibrates in the very air around them.     Oh, the air is definitely vibrating alright. The reverberation that Carna had felt, and that the Hearthstone seemed to resonate with, isn't some kind of imagined, metaphysical thing. The atmosphere quivers like the thrum of an endlessly fading violin string, both palpable and audible. It also seems to come from directly below, the sound artificially deepened and deadened as it sluggishly rises against the strange 'gravity' of the place, and is stretched out and unraveled. It's quite a physical sound, and it might take a moment to place exactly what it is.     It is the sound of the air itself being annihilated; the low rumble of a permanent vacuum somewhere far below, generating a faint, artificial current of dwindling atmosphere, as the air within it disappears from existence. One should perhaps be glad that they can't see the bottom. At least, not from here.
Bloody Revelations	Pushed forth in his desperate flight, and seeing Lemeza napping on the job (and thus no threat), the Deathlord pitter-patters along behind them, and dives straight into the hidden sanctum of Cold House's Heart Room, completely unaware that someone else has gotten to it first. The ancient, insane ghost, though quite powerful, is missing an arm, his main weapon, most of his energy, is badly wounded, and essentially staggers over the finish line, dripping pools of pallid, lifeless blood onto the hard face of thin air, leaving levitating spatters in his wake. He collapses on both knees and his one remaining hand, heaving in ragged, but oddly distorted tones, only to look up at the Elites who have already invaded this secret place, and then /hiss/ at them like a cornered animal, trembling in both exhaustion and utterly psychotic fury. He starts crawling towards them, speeding up like something out of a J-horror movie, skittering over the non-present floor to get them, but moments later, the fighters will arrive hot on his tail, and then he is completely hemmed in.     Finally, Cold House is gone behind them. At least it seems that way. It's just the Elites, Eye and Seven Despairs, the indifferent dead, and the void deep, deep below. For a moment, at least. There is a Cheshire Cat with them, more disturbing for the place she pops up in, not for its atmosphere, but for the apparent fact that she'd found it without entering Cold House. The Abyssal Exalted even resembles the cat's floating stripes here, as the strange, ink-black of her unusual outfit melts into the total darkness, so that she is visually little more than a levitating head, hovering patches of bare skin, a silver compass, and the red calligraphy on her scabbard, sat atop an invisible railing, a scant inch from falling into total oblivion.     "It really is you." spits Eye and Seven Despairs, struggling to push himself to his feet, but only falling forward again as he slips in a pool of his own corpse-blood. His voice sounds hushed and deadened by the inexorable pull that drags it swirling downwards, like everything else in this place. Even then, it cannot entirely steal the thick, acerbic venom from his words, but nor can it fully mask his . . . fear?     "Really now? They went and told you?" says Bloody Revelations, not seeming to mind one way or the other. "How sloppy. Not that it matters. You'll be gone soon." "You really think this will kill me? Haha . . . oh and here I thought you were supposed be /clever/. Brilliant, they told me! Ha . . . so much for being a prodigy amongst Necromancers, if you think a little dip into the Void will keep me from coming after you, eheh . . ." The deranged, skeletal grin broadens on his face, but the Abyssal's lips start to turn up into a smile of her own.     "Oh, I do~ And do you know why?" she asks, clearly intending to continue, but then all of a sudden changing her mind, and deciding to let the thought peter out and sharply waving her hand in dismissal. "Oh, what does it matter. I know your master far, far better than you ever did. Than you ever tried to know. The poor thing. Stuck with /you/ for a servant. I'd rather not prolong his suffering, so let's just have you out of his sight forever as quickly as possible. No time to waste~" She leans even further back on the railing, in mortal peril of meeting the same end herself, but extending her arm out towards the endless blackness below with the pleasantry of a hostess. "Now then~ If you would, kindly show our guest to his new, permanent room~" Bloody Revelations says, her fervid anticipation visible in her smile, and nothing but icy, glittering bloodlust in her eyes.     "Do it."
Staren	Get spikes. Get turrets too. Yes. Good ideas.     "He's going all ghostly! How will we catch him if he starts phasing through stuff?!" Staren asks of Albert as they give chase. Do ghosts work that way here? Do secret /double/ ghosts work that way? Does ANYONE know how deathlords work, besides the one they're trying to kill right now? Staren keeps his sensors scanning all around, in case Eye teleports behind them again.     They chase through an illusory wall into-- Woah, what the hell. Staren's given pause first by the oddity of it, visually. and then by the feeling of... endings. It feels so natural to stop here. They can kill the deathlord, and then be done.     Wait, don't they have to take him somewhere else to kill him? Okay. Kill the deathlord, go REALLY kill the deathlord, then come back. Yes. That makes sense.     ...     Staren's thoughts... or lack of thoughts... are interrupted by the appearance of Bloody Revelations. Staren's a little surprised, but doesn't find it impossible. Clearly, she can do some pretty heavy space-manipulation-witchery, just like the boy must have to put the hearth of a manse in... whatever this is. Terms like Oblivion and Abyss come to Staren's mind, but he doesn't recall ever hearing of a physical place like this in Creation's cosmology. Still, WHAT it is, if not where, is pretty clear after a moment's observation.     Staren looks at the boy.     Then he looks to his Apex compatriot. "Albert, I believe you would like the honor?" Not that he'll actually try to intervene if, say, Ryu decides to throw the boy to his doom first.
Gawain	The sudden dodge while he's so injured shocks Gawain, who is unable to retaliate to the claw swipes. They strike against him, stumbling the already badly-wounded knight backwards, and allowing him to escape without a counter from Gawain. Gawain stays still for several moments, another burn healing off him, before he moves to pursue. And where they pursue to is...bizarre. The sensation it gives causes Gawain to stop entirely, allowing his wounds to heal as he just breathes. The burns slowly knit themselves together - they won't be done by the time they're out of here, but the worst of it is gone. As Bloody Revelations shows herself, the knight just calml stares at her, using all his willpower to keep in a state of mind that doesn't involve wanting to stay here forever. "You planned for this. What will it mean to throw him in here? What will it do to his soul?" Though Gawain asks, he's not sure he has the energy to stop the others from pushing him in, and not sure that that isn't the only way to end him. "Wait. Before you push him in...Eye and Seven Despairs, do you have any last words, any last wishes?" Even with such a horrible foe who absolutely deserves to be thrown into the void, Gawain wants to treat him right. So he makes sure to ask this before presumably Albert ends him once and for all. "Everyone deserves the chance to say such. Even him."
Tomoe	Tomoe says "No you won't get us for this, time's up." Tomoe knows he's still dangerous he is a Deathlord and will consider him a threat no matter what she sees he's running low though. There's no trash talk there's a look on Tomoe's face which is pretty intense. She parries the strike this time and moves in. " Then they person and something is alien here there's nothing? She's not sure how to describe it save she's only seen something sort of like this once before, the Abyss. She shudders now she's had the shit kicked out of her pretty well tonight and given how hard she's been chasing after the deathlord too she much in the same boat as Gawain she might have a bit of a push in her left, but then again she thinks Ryu's idea She does muster though enough to move in support of Ryu.
Azure Armature	Azure Armature, scooping up Falling Rain onto her broad, strong, augmented hero proportion shoulders, hooks her new-favorite adjutant via her giant... green... stone and brass claw arm around her to steady, and leaps out of the created window, slowly floating down to the ground and exiting the premisis of Cold House. "I hope those others remember to finish the mission... going back would be frustrating." Azure Armature mutters, looking back at the blown-out third story window. Once they clear the first few steps, with a muted pop of imploding light, the pair are gone. %
Ryu	Ryu doesn't like this place. He stepped into a wall of darkness and nothingness. He felt his very will struck by this thrum of constant, distant destruction. He knew something about it was awful and wrong... and so he knew he shouldn't linger.     It stands against his very being. The inescapable void feels like peace he doesn't want. It feels like an ending to a story unfinished, like it seeks to steal something from him. He bristles and barely manages to keep himself from losing his cool in the utter blackness, but then a scene unfolds around them, and he turns to look upon the Deathlord they had been chasing and fighting. He frowns at the appearance of Bloody Revelations... and their exchange rankles him more than anything else. It's more than just an experiment now. He doesn't want people falling in here. He refuses to allow it, he refuses to play accessory to Oblivion.     So he approaches Eye and Seven Despairs, and places his hand on the ghost. He then emits a surge of life energy, an incredible wash of it that might send him back to the surface or revive him here on the spot. He'll try to pick up the ghost, too, while he does this, and try to carry him out, defying this place of death as hard as he can, in whatever way he can.     "You don't have to go like this," he tells Seven Despairs. "This isn't right. I don't care if you're a fucking mass murderer. Your souls shouldn't be destroyed forever."     This is the worst possible place to be trying this, and yet the best possible time to stand up and say 'No' to what's going on.
Touta Konoe	Unlike Gawain's wounds, Touta's had already recovered long before arriving at the Heart Room. For a place called the Heart Room it definitely didn't look anything like he was expecting. Darkness all around them that vanished any sort of light. One could barely tell where they were and need rely on their other senses if they wanted traverse this space with their sight so impaired. Having reached this point though meant it was over. They had brought Seven Despairs into a corner...No really, the Heart room's entrance is in a literal corner. With it he was at the end of the line. Though what awaited Despairs now. He was a psychotic, demented, childish, and abused the souls of other for millenia. To some, being able to send this immortal into the void where he could finally suffer at the hands of death was too good of an opportunity. In this darkness, where light succumbs and the sensations of endings envelops all it couldn't be more opportune. Though as an immortal himself...No as someone who was living right at this moment, he didn't want to kill Seven Despairs. He didn't like the guy, or forgave what he did. But if this guy was allowed to die so easily without repenting on his actions, than did it really mean anything? He's glad at the moment when the others decide against it as well. To go against Bloody Revelation's option and look for a path of redemption. A path of life for this guy. Of course, that's only if it ends up working... <Come on Dragon guy.>
Miari	Miari's power is sizzling through her mind, clearing out the urge to sleep and rest and let all her worries drain out her ears. The absolute darkness is contested by the light of Ligier melded with the white flames of She Who Lives In Her Name burning heatlessly around her skin in this forsaken place.     And so she responds rather emotionlessly and calculatedly when Eye and Seven Despairs plunges out onto the invisible balcony she can only HOPE is actually there.     And seeing him in such a weakened state, she reacts instantly. Her force of will - strained as it is - lashes out tangibly to close around him and thicken like molasses, but isn't quite GRABBING him... not yet. Not unless he makes a move.     Her gaze swerves over to Gawain. And it is PURELY INCREDULOUS at the nobility on display. She sighs with an amount of half-repressed disgust and exasperation.     "Your nobility is as inspiring as it can be appalling. I doubt this man's thousands of victims would grant MERCY. And as one whose duty it is to rule and safeguard this world, mercy is a highly irresponsible decision. So you will be responsible for this man's actions... assuming he survives."     Then she turns to watch Ryu's actions, crimson eyes shifting to a swirling white-green and a burning Third Eye symbol appearing on her forehead as her spiritual vision is cranked to the limits. She's not going to miss a MOMENT of this!
Starbound Flotilla	"There is no meaningless action." Albert says, with a growl and a hateful look, standing between Ryu's path and the door. "There is nothing that occurs in a vacuum. There is no observation without reaction. Mercy here will show them weakness. Letting him go will free the root of a societal cancer that I've seen sicken civilization and his virus will kill millions." He approaches the ghost, and a fuel rod slips deep into his radiation gun.     "Your neurochemical compulsion to avert any ounce of guilt will be just as satisfied if you go down fighting for him." Albert says, the gun glowing more and more, turning red-hot under the strain of its capacitors. Ryu will learn enough about his resurrective reactions, one hopes, before Albert takes action. And Albert takes action.     The heavy necrotized mecha-suit dumps unspeakable amounts of energy into the gun; he plans to use it well. Ryu is fast, but he's only as fast as what he's holding, and what he's holding is a much slower ghost. Gawain is tough, but he's only as tough as the daylight, and there's no daylight here. The others, less immediately dedicated and more observing, Albert will try to deal with as they come. But for now? One hopes Ryu's resurrection will get its reactions fast. Albert steps forward, fires his tremendous radiation gun several times aiming for center mass, grabs at whatever may be left -- ghost, fresh human, or anything in-between -- and does his best to throw it.     "I'm done with pointless arguments and I'm done with compromising with the faulty morality that ended with bad-faith parlay with disguised phantoms."
Touta Konoe	Touta hasn't been more dedicated to this debate because of one thing and one thing only. He respects Albert. He respects the Starbound. They've all helped him so much in the past that he enjoys their company. He enjoys chatting with them in general and the schenanigans they do. He enjoys their help around the Multiverse. The last thing he wants is to make an enemy out of him. Not because of how powerful he is, but because he honestly does consider Al a friend. But when Touta can see the light of the radiation gun illuminating.... Remember in that last pose where he thought he was really glad he wasn't on the receiving end of the radiation gun? Well, he was /really/ glad before that he wasn't on the receiving end of this gun because it's agonizing. Touta literally takes the bullet with it just in the spot Albert intended to shoot, in the center of mass. So it does, and leave a gaping smoldering hole in the middle of Touta's chest. The good news though is, even though it hurts like Hell, Touta isn't dying. Though he wouldn't attempt suggest Albert go anywhere near him, after all he's probably still covered in that flaming radiation. "Oi, Al, I get where you're coming from. This guy's definitely no good. But don't make assumptions just cause of what you've seen. Cause I've seen shit too. I've known plenty of 'evil' people, people who ended up killing till the corpses piled like mountains...And those same people ended up changing. Saving peoples' lives. Saving my life...So if you keep talking about how you know what's going to happen if we let this guy live...You're going to need a bigger gun to get through me..." By the time Touta's done talking the wound was already sealed, his sword raised and ready if Al really wanted to do this. "I don't want to fight you, Al..."
Bloody Revelations	"Of course I planned for it." Bloody Revelations says to Gawain, a little impatiently. "I told you the broad strokes, and you inferred enough of it to follow it exactly as you should have. You sound like you think I secretly manipulated you." She gestures again at the humming, bottomless well of utter finality, some arbitrary distance below, if distance is indeed meaningful here, and not just another victim of the end of all things that gnaws on its tail, so close at hand.     "Below here is the Mouth of the Void. You can't see it from here, but trust me. If you throw him from here, you guarantee his demise. Any other way of killing him, and he'll just come back. Do you understand? What happens to him is irrelevant. You either toss him in like the garbage he is, you let him go and he possibly kills half of Creation and you fail in your campaign to defeat the Mask of Winters, or you try to capture him and one or more Deathlords are dispatched to obliterate you because he then becomes an unacceptable security risk. You don't have a choice in this."     "Last words? H-haha! Are you serious?!" cries Eye and Seven Despairs, struggling upright once more, but now caught in the grip of Miari's Mind Hand Manipulation. "What makes you think they'll be my last, idiot? Moron! Do whatever you want! I don't care! I'm /immortal/! You can't kill me any more than you can kill gravity! I'll be back, and when I /am/, I'll inflict it all over again on you ten times over! And if you're already dead, I'll inflict it on your family! I don't care! No matter what happens, you, can't, win! Haha . . . hahahaa!"     "Don't try to patronize me!" he suddenly spits at Ryu, effectively powerless, but suddenly alive with seething, indignant fury. "You think you're better than me?! You think I owe you anything?! That I should be grateful?! You think I wouldn't throw you over the edge /laughing/ if we weren't reversed right now?!" he screeches, flecking ghostly blood as well as spittle on the invisible floor. Whatever else he had lined up to say, goes unsaid. Ryu's claws are on him, and the anathemic energy of life is shot straight into his ravaged corpus, where it begins the explosive mixture with the Essence of death that comprises his very being, burning like acid and combusting like fuel.     Of course it hurts. This ghost sold everything about himself to the very antithesis of life. He took their power into himself to get back at the things he hated in life, and let death suffuse every fibre of his existence. He screams, loudly and in more agony than he had when burned by Gawain's legendary sword, as the prolonged attempt to resurrect him draws a soft, translucent shell of spirit-stuff around him, attempting to refabricate his life giving lower soul. Where the 'positively charged' material touches him, it is burned away by arcs of silent, writhing consumption, which reach out from within his corpus and eat away at the living shell attempting to graft itself to him.     Black blotches begin to become visible through his increasingly transparent body, not burns of any kind, but amorphous, shadowy masses, seemingly implanted somehow into his soul. They roil and crackle with non-light and the absence of sound, and soon they arc upwards into Ryu, raking up his arms where they painlessly disintegrate the flesh the bolts come into contact with, almost . . . retaliating, with Eye and Seven Despairs having no say in it, caught in a hellish limbo between the death he embodies and the life he had happily given away forever.
Bloody Revelations	Albert tries his damnedest, and for that, he will certainly earn something later. With Touta getting in the way, like his meddlesome, heroic self, it falls to the last person present to break the horrific stalemate between Ryu and the veil of life and death. Somehow, just two words cut through the constant, unceasing chorus of the shriveled Deathlord's screaming agony, as if they occupied an entirely different auditory band altogether.     "You're pathetic."     A booted foot flashes out of the corner of Ryu's vision, far too quickly, and with exactly enough force to send him flying over the railing like an empty can, if not break several ribs. This isn't terribly meaningful for the fact that Ryu can fly back, albeit fighting against intense, difficulty supergravity, but the thick, dead, glacial drip of Bloody Revelations' final judgement doesn't stop there. She struts across the balcony, firmly grabs Eye and Seven Despairs by the collar, and physically hurls him to Albert like a baseball fast pitch, quite capable of bowling Touta over flat if he heroically gets in the way.     "Second chances? I'll give /you/ a second chance to fix your /fuck up/. Feed him to the Void or we're /done/." says Bloody Revelations, each word like a dagger slamming home. "All of that, everything you've seen, everything you know about this pestilent blight on existence, and you hesitate /now/? All of those big speeches and heroic oaths, all of those righteous condemnations of these sworn enemies of Creation, and in the end, you can't even pull the trigger yourselves? You're disgusting. You're so disingenuous and cowardly that it makes me want to vomit. How does this miserable wretch have more of a spine than you do?"     "This is a really simple choice you gutless, sniveling retards. You want to defeat evil? You want to save lives? You want to enact justice and stop the end of the world? Then grow a pair and /do what you came here for/! You don't get a pass. You don' get an option C. You don't get an undo button. You don't get a way to make everything magically better. You get the real world. If you're going to avert you eyes, twiddle your thumbs, and /bullshit/ up flowery ways of saying 'I'm too much of a pussy!', then get out of my sight or I'll show you what it's like to /wish/ for non-existence! Now DO IT!"
Miari	This turn of events isn't entirely unexpected by the Defiler Caste of the party, who is well aware of Bloody Revelations... volatile philosophy and attitude. When Ryu goes flying... she hardly misses a beat in diverting her invisible Mind-Hands to wrap around him and exert a counter-force and help right him, even struggling against the pull of the Void.     She glares daggers at the Deathknight.     "Come now. Look at who's come to answer your call. This group can hardly decide what to cook for breakfast, let alone what justice is or isn't. But we have come here and reduced this great and mighty Deathlord to the sad, tortured husk you see here. Something you were not willing to do yourself. You lack any right to complain about what a victor does with their spoils. Honestly, what /DID/ you expect from a group like this? For that matter, what do you expect this haranguing to accomplish? You should know well the kind of spirit needed to brave this place and overcome its master."     She purses her lips and furrows her brow at the wreck that Eye currently is. "So lesson learned. We cannot trump a Deathlord's power by resurrecting them. The Neverborn's grip is just too strong. That leaves us no choice but to utterly obliterate him. Nothing we do can strip that power."
Starbound Flotilla	Albert is teamed up with Bloody Revelations. It's a /startling/ situation, and it almost feels incorrect to Albert himself. And yet... Everything they said rings true in him. Strange. Why? A heavy robotic hand grabs the damaged ghost as it slams over Touta, holding it by the neck. As Ryu flies back up, no doubt still fighting against gravity even when helped by Miari, Albert strides purposefully to the balcony. His words to Touta are simple. "No grudge. You don't understand the truth of things yet." He has less to say to Gawain, if he moves to interfere; the gun remains trained on him as Albert hoists the ghost by the neck over the edge.     He drops the child into the soul-rending Void. Is it merely cruel coincidence or calculated cruelty that he did it at just the right angle to leave his damaged form just out of reach for Ryu's grasp? The angry, hateful way he immediately turns and stalks right back out of the Heart could answer that more than the wordless Apex himself.
Gawain	Gawain had vocally sided with the resurrection plan, in that if they brought him back, he was going to defend Eye and Seven Despairs. He had no intent on physically interceding, he was already too weak. The knight had just stopped smiling, frowning at the situation, as everything went wrong, and they had only tortured Eye and Seven Despairs, not helped him. As the Deathlord is bowled towards Albert, Gawain's frown sharpens. Bloody Revelation's words seem to actually get to him. He did make those declarations. But at the same time, he strove for mercy. And he'd do it again. But what did that say about him? Was he a hypocrite? How did he feel about that? "Go ahead and do it, Albert." Gawain's voice cracks out with sadness. What he's sad about is probably a lot of things. "We shouldn't prolong his suffering." Gawain will have things to say to Albert. But right now, he has nothing but guilt. Memories stirred over centuries. A failure. When they return, he'll probably forget about grabbing healing potions until his wounds had already naturally healed.
Ryu	Ryu's arm is EATEN THE HECK AWAY, bones exposed and flesh torn away, but constantly regenerating in a constant flurry of pain and struggle. He isn't going to just give up immediately, but eventually his arm just crumbles and he gasps and jerks back before he can collapse. He cannot fight several Primordial Beings of Death at once telling him to choke on their big death sandwich, and he gets kicked right as he reacts to the Deathlord getting shot. He cartwheels into the Abyss, briefly stunned, feeling the air sucked from his lungs.     His wings snap to full, and he cauterizes his wound on his STUMP in a moment of desperation to force his consciousness to stick, and flies back to the balcony, struggling against the pull of the Maw in a very clear display of incredible power also fighting a cosmic force of nothingness.     One way or another, he'll get back to the balcony. But he's in no shape to fight. He looks like shit. The color has been sucked out of his scales. He couldn't stop Albert from doing what he wanted.     "That's what /you/ wanted," he wheezes at Bloody Revelations, "I did what I came here to do. I even told people I would."     With the kind of self-satisfied snort only a dragon can muster, he spits a gob of blood onto the floor, and staggers his way out of her and probably out of Cold House with the others.     "'Don't just tell people, Ryu,'" he mutters, mockingly, when no one else can hear it.
Staren	Independant of everything else, trying to revive Eye of Seven Despairs is an interesting experiment that might tell them useful things for dealing with the other deathlords.     Independent of everything else, if Eye COULD be redeemed that would be great, but Staren rates it as pretty unlikely, although perhaps concievable if it turns out the Neverborn are a corrupting influence, and freed from it Eye becomes a completely different person.     So it is that when Albert moves to fire, he holds out a hand in a 'stop' gesture. "Albert, wait!"     Touta does something crazy. (Staren's surprised he survived, that's good to know) Which gives them the chance to see: Ryu's vaunted resurrection power isn't working. Eye's words merely harden Staren's expression under the helmet. Revel's speech is... annoying, but it doesn't feel like it entirely applies to him, since he was pretty sure they were going to have to kill Eye.     He does briefly wonder if it'd be possible to chuck Revel in the abyss too, though. One more deathknight down, right? She's obviously planning to betray them later.     He's sure she's planned for the possibility someone would try it here. But if someone /else/ tried it, he might not step in to help her...     Before acting further, he watches to see if Albert's able to finish the job here.     They've chosen.     Staren waits a moment to make sure Eye doesn't rise up as a triple ultra super ghost or whatever, and then approaches Bloody Revelations, standing just out of arm's reach. He points. "YOU don't decide what we do. For now, our interests align. You can keep feeding us heroic missions and think of it as manipulating us, I don't care as long as we're making Creation better. But when it comes down to it? 'Option C' is who we are. We can't always create our ideal world, but we make things better through our choices. And you know this. Otherwise our power would be useless, undirected, aimless. It's why you need us, or you'd just go make more powerful undead creatures to do your bidding."     "You don't order us around, and if you want our continued help, you should go home and make some progress on making that perfect world you told us you dream of."     Staren lowers his arm and steps back to Albert's side. "Let's go."
Touta Konoe	Touta gets caught off guard and is downed like a bowling ball. It's only for a moment that he's down but it's a moment too late. He can already here Al's words, 'No grudge...' <Don't do it Al, there has to be another way.> '...You don't understand the truth of things yet.' "AL! STOP!" But it's too late. Seven Despairs was thrown into the void, and was no more. Never would he cackle in a demonic passion, never would he harm another soul, never would he learn to feel guilt for his actions, never would he have an opportunity to redeem himself, and never would there be an opportunity for him to change. Because once you're dead, everything truly is over. Slowly Touta wonders towards the railing into this void. Apparently even immortals were capable of death if brought there. Even he was able of dying if he fell in... On one hand, the world probably is better of without Seven Despair, but did that mean he had to die? Was that really the only choice available to them? Was Bloody Revelations speaking the truth? Well apparently Staren didn't agree as he gave his nice hero speech. It was pretty surprising to hear from the guy. But considering he did try to stop Albert too, he shouldn't have been too surprised. So he decides to join in. "Hey, you might have asked people to come but let's get something straight. They didn't come for you to talk big or tell us what to do. They came because they wanted to stop that virus. To save people. I'm not going to pretend that bastard was a good guy, or even going to change sides in the next hundred years. But don't say we're twiddling our thumbs or averting our eyes. If anything it's those kinds of people who are looking the hardest for that option C. If you're going to call them pussies then from where I stand, you're the sniveling retard..." And with that he starts heading out of the Heart room. "Also, if you try threatening my friends because of what they believe...You'll be wishing that I shared Al's thoughts about killing." Okay now he leaves.
Bloody Revelations	Bloody Revelations' stare is something beyond hard, or cold, or furious. As she watches what the group finally does, she does so with what could only be described as the eyes of such barely restrained violence that they verge on animal. "Whether you fail and die is beneath my concern." she says to Miari. "Whether you shoot each other to death in a fit of disagreement is likewise. When you /waste my time/ with actually succeeding and yet stubbornly doing the single most unimaginable stupid thing you can think of, your problems go far deeper than simply having different opinions. You continue to live on a trial basis. If you think you're in a position to make demands of me, you sorely underestimate the leverage you've already given away by being here."     She starts on Staren. "You follow my rules because you haven't evinced the mere /idea/ that you can succeed without me. Don't mistake my willingness to include you for a crucial need for your cooperation, and don't mistake your lack of comprehension of my reach for being above it. Or have already forgotten?"     Then, in the instant Albert marches to the edge, the clockworks click into place, and it seems that she knows exactly what to think. Her attention completely detaches from harsh, back and forth sass and shots fired, and the Deathknight loses all interest in keeping her unruly 'subordinates' in line. She shoves past Staren to follow the mecha to the edge of total blackness, and when Albert finally drops Eye and Seven Despairs cackling madly into the Abyss, Bloody Revelations suddenly leans heavily against the invisible railing with a sigh of dizzy excitement.     At the exact moment that the Deathlord hits Oblivion far below, Bloody Revelations is no longer with them. The cold, impatient, bloodthirsty tones are gone as if they never existed. Just as Mr. Bones had hinted at, she immediately begins talking to nobody at all, looking nowhere in particular when she begins ardently gushing to thin air.     "Did you see? Oh I know you did~! I /knew/ you'd notice~! I told you, remember? I promised you~ And now look! Haha~ No, no, of course not. They're idiots, they have no idea. Him? You think? Oh of course you're right~ You're always right~! I'm sorry that part had to happen, but it's good, right? I made you happy, didn't I? Didn't I? Oh you~ Yeah? Mhm. Of course! Anything~ Three weeks, tops, I promise~ Relax and watch~ I'll have it done in one day after they couldn't do it for five centuries. You know I can do anything. I /will/ do anything~! Ahhh~ You're really the best~!"