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Zwei	As far as weirdness of stuff that turns up in the Soft Expanse, there's not a lot for a point of comparison. Very few people bother to go there, those that do know it's pretty dangerous, and the study groups being sponsored by the main factions are relatively small and somewhat underbudgeted, for the place being more of a curiosity of how the Multiverse turned itself inside out, rather than anything potentially useful.     There aren't really any expectations that can be had of the place, save for its common features: the strange silvery light that fills the space where there seems to be an actual gap in the Superplanet, far beyond a crater and more like an actual empty space, filled with fields of stars above and below the mercurial ocean. What can actually be found here at any given time is completely random, or at least seems to be, and even from the furthest edge of where the surface of the Superplanet begin crumbling away like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, anyone can see all kinds of strange things floating around in the void, like tiny fragments of unified worlds that are still pieces of said puzzle sitting on the side while a cosmic architect tries to find their slot.     The particular chunk of note is something like a flying island of the 'blown out of the earth' variety, a few miles deep at the tip, and a few across up top. Despite existing in isolation, the weather here is overcast, grey, cold, and snowy, and the ocean of silver beyond is barely more than the suggestion of something like the Aurora Borealis. It's not terribly dissimilar to a chunk lifted out of Antarctica in the darkness of winter, albeit the snow and winds are soft enough to be less overtly lethal, and more simply ominous and depressing. Of course it's dead silent. There aren't any birds or wintering mammals, nor any real access to water. It's rolling 'dunes' of snow and flats of craggy black rock that have broken and tilted out of the ground at angles just steep enough to stay clear of snowfall, along with the odd plateau of solid ice.     The main fixtures of any interest to follow are a a system of flags and cables planted in the ice, no doubt to lead someone around in a blizzard, with still-working electric heat lamps connected to underground wiring. The extremely sparse line of glimmers and creaking, frost-covered cable trails far off into the distance, where the hulk (or faint heat signature) of some kind of base or observatory is sat deep in a gradually sloping trench, far past which are the starts of tall, black mountains. Aside from that, there are only odd deformations in the ice and 'tracks' in the snow here and there, and a surprising level of background radiation, like the midst of a magnetic storm.
Wandering Dog	Weird stuff is happening in the Soft Expanse. Adventurous stuff. And it's probably dangerous. Wandering Dog might not be a smart or scholarly guy, but he can definitely hold his own and loves to adventure, so he's jumped on board the mission. He's wearing his silk tunic with a thick layer of coat over it, the martial artist actually wearing boots, as he treks through the snow of the flying island, keeping close to the flags and cables and not separating from them. As they get closer towards them, the adventurer climbs one of the craggy black structures, using his keen sense of sight to spot that there's something up ahead. "Alright, looks like there's something up there. Let's get to it, shall we?" Following the cables, Wandering Dog will start dashing alongside them at a superhuman pace, keeping one hand out to trace them. He's heading towards the observatory area, hoping to be one of the first ones there in case of problems so that he can intercept and probably punch them. "Man, wonder what this place's gonna be like. Has to be some sort of ruin or something, probably frozen over a bit, yeah?"
Grave Matters	One of the benefits of magical girl transformations seems to be protection from the environment. That way, even when sleeveless or in unreasonably short skirts, they can fight without being numbed by the cold. It's still UNPLEASANT, but better than frostbite. The fact that the trio who have responded to someone from their new faction's small research team asking for help in investigating are not quite what one generally thinks of as magical girls, so much 'wizards with a programmed series of spells that, when taken together, replace what is currently being worn with an enchanted garment in extra-dimensional storage, and then apply Protection From Cold and similar accessory enchantments, in a way virtually indistinguishable from a magical girl transformation' doesn't in any way diminish their efficacy.     Nor does it diminish their complainting.     "Yesterday we were fighting computer programs, and now we're floating over some kind of weird ocean-space thing to go investigate an abandoned arctic research station or something. They weren't lying about this new assignment broadening our work experience, huh?" A red-haired girl in a scarf, purple sweater, striped skirt, and sneakers says. Matsuri is hugging something as she flies through the air. "I should have included pants in my Instant Wardrobe spell.     "Wait! Arctic research station!? I know about those! That's usually where aliens or parasites or parasite aliens wait to hide inside of warm bodies! ...I'm naturally colder than you humans, so I suppose I'm safe. Onwards, minions!" a lighter-red-haired girl with a ponytail says, her crown, black and red diamond dress, socks, shoes, and fingerless gloves marking her as Also A Magical Girl. Ruri asks while also hugging onto something and flying, "Why do you need pants though? This nice brisk wind on my legs is refreshing!"     "Could you two settle down? We should be on the look-out for anything troublesome." A gray-haired girl in a spider-themed witchy dress says. She is holding onto something too. A parasol, in fact. Shiho's cheeks redden a bit as she breathes a bit of steam and says mildly unstably into the below-freezing winds, "Besides, this looks like it's going to be really spooky! If there's freakish parasites and aliens like Ruri says, I totally want to be ready for them! Do you think they'll let me keep a tentacle? Or maybe an eyeball? Ohhh, I can't wait to add them to my collection!" She starts rubbing her cheek on the parasol handle.     Matsuri and Ruri are each hanging onto one of Shiho's legs as she flies them through the air. They look up at Shiho, seeming put-off by her creepy horror fixation. "Ugh." "Ugh." "I think you, out of all of us, should DEFINITELY wear some pants."     "Quiet you." Shiho coughs into her hand. "Ahem. At any rate, let's be on the look-out. From what we've heard, this seems like something that existed before this... Phenomenon appeared, rather than a new world. They need us to investigate. So we should carry out our duty no matter what."     Matsuri looks off across the wintry expanse, the rattling cables leading onwards to... Somewhere. "Seems reasonable I guess. And if there's actually some sort of zombie parasite thing, at least we'll be in our element."     "One can only hope~!!!" Shiho says excitedly, her reasonable and mature demeanor vanishing just like that, amidst crazy eyes and steamy breathing.     "Ugh." "Ugh."
Rory White	Rory White has EYES AND EARS EVERYWHERE! ... Or, well, only in the places of interest. A number of her drones operate autonomously in the region, occasionally needing to be replaced. Small, silvery Saucers that periodically dock with one or two boxy, lumbering Dwarfs - mining drones, but refitted as mobile supply, repair, and transmission bases for the Saucers.     The very bizarre, unstable region's many odd readings and sights are a treasure trove of information AND cool visuals, and Rory's r-Rep score has surged every since she dedicated some time and energy to studying and monitoring the region.     Sadly, not much of use has COME from the studies. Argonaut Science isn't anywhere near the level needed to unravel what's HAPPENING here. Rory's not even sure where to BEGIN.     For now, one of the Dwarf-and-Saucers is meandering across the floating chunk. It's completely autonomous, so it has all the time in the world to map and scan and explore.     But for those with Wireless capabilities, or who specifically speak to them, the drones ARE fully equipped with identifying signals of ownership, and purpose, falling back to microphone and speakers for verbal communications for lesser equipped individuals. So, yes. Calls for help or to identify themselves? Will be answered. So very thoughtful, their programmer.     But for now, their limited AIs have picked up on something weird. They have begun to follow the trail of flags and cables towards the distant heat source... and send an alert back to home base over a securely encrypted wireless signal.     In no time at all, the lumbering, boxy dwarf picks up the pace!
Arthur Lowell	Arthur is here, and he's at least dressed for the environment. His robes are fur-lined and warm, his shoes are much thicker boots, and he's equipped a cosmetic aura of a few tiny orbiting stars to provide some more substantial heat. It's enough to give him the warmth to comfortably swagger along the way to each flag, along each cable, cheerfully humming and striding in some way that somehow manages to keep up with Wandering Dog while not actually running at the same speed as him. An observation post? Is that what's kicking off the sensors? Or were the sensors in the observation post? Well, heading along the path ought to be informative enough. If he can prod and poke at the observation station itself to get a better idea of what needs finding, or explore the thing itself.     He checks that background radiation though. Something natural, on a decay? A reactor leak? A true, proper magnetic storm? He tries to gauge it, 'triangulate' it a little, and examine what kind of source it might have, using his own keen understanding of radioactive and atomic processes. He also wanders on up to one of Rory's drones, giving it a couple mashes of his INTERACT (Y) button. "YO! You a LASER FIGHTY DRONE or a HELPFUL kinda DRONE? Get up in this BIZ! There's SHIT AFOOT."     Time to head for the observation station either way, and throw the doors open if he can find any, to wander on in.
Septette Arcubielle	Why Septette is here in advance of anyone else is a bit of a mystery. Blind teleporter mishap seems unlikely; maybe her factional contacts have been feeding her info, or perhaps she's just bought a few drinks for someone on the research teams. Nevertheless, there she is, sitting on a black craggy rock just off the main path, her shawl lightly dusted with the snowfall of the last few minutes.      Glowing purple eyes survey the other arrivals as they trudge along the cable-marked path; once they catch up, she hops down from her perch and walks alongside them. She manages to keep pace despite sinking in to the knee with each step, and starts to radiate warmth like a cozy fire. "That's four fresh faces- five, maybe, but I can guess who lies behind the fifth, and I know the voice for the fourth." Her voice is friendly and emotive yet static-burred, like a human's put through some light synthetic filter.      "Are you three the Paladin newbies, by any chance? I'm glad to be able to make a pleasant first impression." She snaps her fingers and a small red globe of energy pops up on the opposite side of the cable, spreading the warmth around a bit. It follows the group along, bobbing up and down slightly. "I go by Septette. And as for the ruins, Dog... I hope you're wrong. If the lights are on, maybe the heat is too."      She might have the least reason of all of them to complain of the weather, given her toasty magic(?), but it's good to strive for solidarity nonetheless.
Rory White	The 'Dwarf' bot that Arthur has poked is roughly the size of a top-quality draft horse. So, BIG. And much like an equine, it walks on all fours. Four piston-like legs in this case, with minimal articulation and heavy on the load lifting. Its body is HUGE and weighty, and this one is currently home to two recharging Saucers with ports for six more across its back and sides currently empty.     It stops as Arthur pesters it, and vents a FWOOOOOOOSH of excess heat into the snow beneath.     The silvery monstrosity doesn't seem to have anything akin to eyes or a face. ANY of its four sides could be the front. And yet...     A neutral voice (not Rory's) announces helpfully, "Greetings, Arthur Lowell! This unit is equipped for exploration and cartography, with minimal weaponry. Currently tracking an anomaly. Do you request ass--"     The voice blips. A few blurps of static and digital noises follow.     THEN, of all things, the entire SIDE of the machine facing Arthur shifts colors and textures, as if it doubles as a display, and Rory's human-style face appears on the machine! now her voice DOES come through the Dwarf.     "Hello! I should pay attention to this one personally if other Elites are on the case. Is everything alright over here?"
Zwei	Spaceboy checks on the radiation. It clearly isn't coming from the atmosphere, but instead 'leaking' from the ice itself, and in an advanced state of decay. A few weeks ago, it probably would have been lethal to walk on, but it's very rapidly cooled down. The few particles he picks up are pretty blatantly unnatural though, shifted so high up into the reaches of the gamma range that there should probably be another name for it, to the point that a drone might not actually /have/ the equipment to detect more than the lower tail end of it.     The air up high is frigid and the flagpoles covered in white rime, but there seems to be little probability of everyone getting trapped inside by a freak arctic storm any time soon, so bee-lining for the outpost isn't hard (save for the risk of accidentally melting a hole through an ice sheet and falling into a crevasse). As expected, the lights are still on, and so is the heat, but probably not any further climate control systems if the thick fog that coats every window from the inside is anything to go by. There are a number of vehicles outside, mostly being heavy transport trucks, motor sleds, coring equipment, and the prodigious amount of equipment required to set up one of the more generic brands of artificial warpgate, which appears to be mysteriously fried from the inside. All of the engines are completely dead.     There are fresh footprints and tracks in the area, but it seems like they milled about the facility, then went off to the north, then left, so they probably don't belong to the original inhabitants of whatever world this place is presumably a chunk of; most likely the Multiversal survey team that confirmed the place's older date of Unification. It looks like a semi-typical science outpost, low sloped walls, thick steel construction, giant radar dish, random tarps on everything -the whole nine yards. There's really no good reason for the front door to be 'open' (as in, the keypad is active and totally unsecured by any need for a code or card), but it is.     Shiho's hopes for something untoward may be moderately well-placed. It certainly has the quiet, oppressive air of some horror movie come and passed. It's also bizarrely humid, to the point of actually being kind of uncomfortable and sweaty, despite the fans and vents being on. Early in, it's just a collection of rec rooms, kitchens, bunks, and comms, as befit general staff facilities, and the huge freezer room is filled with what appear to be cases for ice samples (which is typically one of the three big reasons anyone does research around a lot of ice). There also appears to be a chemical laboratory, and oddly enough, a room full of star charts and a closed folding roof for a giant telescope, which seems like a strange addition to an arctic outpost.     Luckily for Arthur, there aren't any grotesquely mutilated corpses lying around, nor any shambling parasites (yet at least). The first really suspicious things are that every single electronic lock in the base has been permanently set to open (instead of for a few seconds after getting the right code), including the desktop passwords on the research computers, that the infirmary is totally emptied of seemingly absolutely everything, that elaborate spreadsheets of constellations cover tables alongside medical charts, and that there are rather unusual and specific burn marks to be found here and there in the halls. They don't look as if they were made by fire, or even heat magic or thermal weaponry; they're basically spots of floor and wall that have been flash carbonized in a fine, smudgy grey layer, with clean imprints of what look suspiciously like boots in the middle.
Septette Arcubielle	Either not realizing or not caring that the front door is perfectly functional and unlocked, the war-machine digs her talons into the metal frame, pulls it back over the protestations of its motors, and then closes it after the group. Once inside, Septette's little fireball condenses to a pinprick of light, then expands to a churning fractal crystal of ice that sucks the unpleasant moisture from the air.      A trio of softball-sized hovering drones materialize around her, then disperse down the various hallways, peeking under various tarps just in case any hold anything interesting. Septette herself comes to a stop in front of one of the carbonized marks, kneeling down and pressing her hand to it.      "Think I can get some data from this. One moment, please..." Her drones abruptly refocus from tarp-peeking to searching out and cataloguing the various scorchmarks around the facility. From the thoroughness of carbonization, the scattering of ashes, and the damage (or lack thereof) to surrounding walls and structures, it ought to be possible to determine the approximate properties of whatever 'hit' them!
Arthur Lowell	"YEAH, DOG! Shit's RAD up in this BIZ, but check those RADS. This shit's so past GAMMA it's INSANE. Probably off your CHARTS." Arthur says to Rory. He strides in in that same easygoing, swaggering way, but he refuses to get near that carbonized residue. Carbonized residue means carbon, and carbon meant... Well, he doesn't think about it. At least it's not guts. He leaves that to Septette, and presses in to examine other matters. Stars, stars... This place had plenty to do with the night sky, and Arthur is well eager to prod at everything there about THAT at least.     He knows space. He knows geometry and mapping, too. What's going on with these star charts? What were they trying to find? He digs into the spreadsheets so intensely that his magic physically hoists them and turns them into a rotating, shimmery circle of paper, constantly churning. He also checks the computers where he can, adding the data therein wherever possible to the churning mass of information that flows around him. He could look for search terms of examine histories, maybe, but that would be easy, and Arthur refuses to be /easy/.     Yep, he's just gonna gather every inch of celestial data he can find in all his extensive wanderings and movements all throughout this place -- even opening the telescope back up if he can -- to find any surprise aspects of the data, points of notability, or other highly relevant connections. Were they trying to plot something? Navigate somewhere? Locate something? What was it that made this place important enough to wind up like this, what was in this data?
Grave Matters	"Hey, I see some people running around down there. They're headed for that big bulky thing." Matsuri points out.     Ruri leans across, bending Shiho's left leg at a weird angle. "Nani, nani? Where?"     "Excuse me!" Shiho protests.     Matsuri says, ""Right down there. I'll try contacting them on the radio. They might be friendly." She summons her radio from her pocket space.     "Ehhh? Let me do it!" Ruri swings back the other direction, tilting Shiho and causing all three of them to swing dangerously.     "Do you want me to drop you!? I'm trying to get a better look at this abandoned facility! If I miss the monster peeking out through a window because of you...!"     Matsuri calls out on the radio for survivors or investigators and gets Septette's reply. She confirms, yeah, they're with the Paladins. That should be reassuring or something, right? There's a brief argument about if the place is actually spooky or not, and then Shiho is dropping the other two girls off in a snow pile deeper than it appears, before pirouetting through the air to land daintily by herself and fold her parasol.     "Others have gone in ahead already... We'd best hurry. If they are here to cover up evidence or some such, I'd rather accompany them to prevent it." She darts inside through the open doors, assuming others opened them when they arrived, though the state of everything being set to open and unlocked by default indicates against that assumption.     After Matsuri and Ruri finish digging themselves out of the snow, they follow after their witchy companion. Matsuri isn't about to enter into some abandoned spook facility unarmed, especially when she sees footprints in the snow, heading off to the north. Maybe that was the research team that called them. Maybe it wasn't.     A black rod flashes into existence in her hand, and she puts it over her shoulder before proceeding within, eyeing the dead vehicles and the scorch marks visible inside.     Shiho is standing over a few more such scorch marks when the whole team is inside. Her spine is definitely tingling at the horror themes present, but she's trying to keep her composure. "Automated weaponry that incinerates people or a radioactive monster that burns people to nothing?"     Ruri wanders into one of the rooms to peek inside, wafting a hand at her face. "From a chill like Cocytus to a stifling heat and mugginess like Tartarus's hot springs... This place is making me homesick. Oh, except for all these computers. We didn't have those." She leans back out into the hall. "No monsters so far!"     Shiho has moved on to the freezer in the hopes of finding bodies hanging from hooks or something, but no, only ice. "I supppose there may have been something in the ice. More credence to that parasite theory, if so. Is there any surveillance footage, miss?" the witchy wizard calls to Septette.
Wandering Dog	Wandering Dog keeps good stride, not seeming to get exhausted during the long jaunt. Once at the base, the explorer grins, and takes a sweep around for any signs of life, before confidently heading through the front door once Septette's pulled it open. A lot of computers and science stuff, not much Wandering Dog can work with. He does best with people and things that need to be smashed or moved, but there is something he can do, as he also starts looking for anything that stands out as a good souvenir to take with him. Ice samples would melt, otherwise they'd be perfect. In general, though, Wandering Dog starts walking the area, concentrating on his hearing. He's looking for a hum, something that sounds like it might be a generator based off what Septette told him. Once he finds a rough location if there is one, he'll head in that direction, cracking his knuckles idly. If there's anything there, he should be able to deal with it, and if there's not, at least he'll be able to do /something/ for the group.
Rory White	Two more of the Saucers flying around in the heavens drift down to join the lumbering Dwarf that's now tagging along after Arthur with all the speed it can muster. It does so right up to the point of reaching the front entrance. At this point... there's not a whole lot the Dwarf can do, because it's TOO BIG for the door.     "..." Rory's face-avatar just blinks a few times At Arthur's use of heavy slang. She's probably relying on her Muse to translate that into something more... ordinary.     "Radiation IS abnormally high." She acknowledges, having known about it but quick to affirm it. "It is no wonder the area is abandoned. Unprotected individuals exposed to this would suffer severe radiation poisoning in short order."     The Dwarf cannot fit, so instead... a panel on the dwarf opens up, and it spits out what looks like a metallic fox. Its form ripples much like Rory's feline-flexbot, but this has less than an eighth of that Morph's mass, and it moves far less naturally.     Just stomps up on into the facility along with Arthur and Septette, and on into the facilities.     The Robo-Fox does pause to study the Grave Matters girls, but for the moment ignores them in favor of setting up at the computer stations and examining the materials around. It's nimble, and the paws can shift into normal human-approximate digits, so using the keyboard is not a problem once Rory loads the appropriate adapter data over her remote link.     It's slower than her usual approach, but she's intent on figuring out WHAT they were studying here, who they were affiliated with, what the current date is and when the facility was abandoned.
Zwei	What the drones find under the tarps is /largely/ uninteresting. Something like a year's worth of food supplies, large amounts of bulk cargo and fuel, spare parts, and other things one wouldn't want to expose to the cold or get swept away. There appear to be some heavily sealed, lead-lined containers that appear to be holding actual uranium rods, so that's a thing. There are also large crates of untouched supplies for caving of all things, along with piles of unused sensors and sample tools of clearly Multiversal origin, bought and gathered up for this expedition, but apparently nobody got around to making use of them.     The carbon residue indicates that it was flash heated at such insane intensity that it not only sublimated on the spot, but the majority of it atomized. Assuming they're where human beings were, there's only a few grams of it still left. The very minor damage to the surrounding area indicates an incredibly controlled burn however. It's thorough overkill if the goal was just to kill people, and far less expedient than setting a big fuckoff bomb if getting rid of the facility was the point. There's no magical echo in the place, so that rules out a disintegrate spell or something.     Arthur consults the stars. The charts of stars at least. They come from a pretty huge variety of sources and pretty much every day of the year and every position on Earth to be looking at them from. Many of them actually correspond to different time periods altogether, going by celestial drift. They mostly seem to be a huge aggregate of star map data to more and more precisely home in on a single spot on the planet, of a narrow enough area to bother going on expedition, and they also correspond to a specific phase of the moon and tilt of the Earth. That'd mean probably 'one night in a hundred years' normally, but being floating out in the Soft Expanse, it's quite probable those conditions are stuck like that outside. The data is largely archeological; scientists are going by reconstructed archeological and modern cosmological data to find something here, and most likely deep under the ice. Unsurprisingly, the best guess appears to be to the north. Needless to say, Arthur is probably better at it than they were.     Most of the ice samples are pretty boring, being meter tubes that have clearly been broken off from a single sample that was many dozens of meters deep (far deeper than arctice ice should go, actually), repeated several times in different spots. There's the usual stuff where the ice is striated by bands of different composition owing to ocean temperatures, salinity, bacteria, silt, etc. over the centuries, but poking around in them, they seem to have been identifying flakes of some unknown metallic material, and something organic. Disappointingly, the organic material looks like some kind of faintly glowing algae spread across the ice in thin patches, full of hair-fine cilia, rather than some fanged and betentacled horror. The cultures under the microscopes are dead, either from air exposure or just sitting around abandoned for a while.
Zwei	The hum of the lighting and heating is that omnipresent, dull, drab background noise that makes a place feel weighty and dead rather than functional. Tuning in really closely, Wandering Dog can hear the vibrations of the main power unit, beneath the floor. When he goes down a couple of concrete stairwells, he arrives at doors that /aren't/ randomly open, and has to contend with steel frames and annoying electronic locks. Past that, there is a large and bulky hybrid generator, like what one would see powering a hospital, thrumming away on one quarter fuel, but also a completely separate one disused in the corner. It appears to be loaded with power cells about the length and width of an airport luggage case, and they glow green from within, clearly being exponentially higher yield, and far beyond the electricity needs of the facility. Even the martial artist can tell that the ominous glowing fancy mcguffins sitting around suspiciously unused meant the expedition had some big plans.     Rory finds that literally everything on the computers has been exhaustively searched before. Like, everything. In one sitting. Every folder is open, every password is cracked, and every file had been opened and/or edited within the same hour period. It contains piles of data and math corresponding to the star charts Arthur has already checked by this point, but also materials composition analysis on the ice samples (the metalloid is unknown, the organic stuff is supposedly some kind of silicate organism as far as they can tell, and presumed biohazardous at the last point of writing).     There's regular logs of contact with the outside, which ended about two months ago, lists of equipment, piles of entertainment files for the long stay, and a bunch of notes about some kind of artifact or ruin someone expected to find out here, with a lot of intra team debate about the exact coordinates, date and time were the correct one. They'd planned to stay for six months, but radioed to extend it another six upon retrieving the ice samples.     There are also personnel journals. Most of them are boring garbage about day to day happenings, progress on work, personal feelings, who hates and likes whom, etc. but then a wide trend of growing dissatisfaction with the project leader for poorly explained reasons, an overall rise in hostile takes on other expedition members, and then a few bits of incomprehensible bullshit before they stopped being filed. It'd be more cliche if at some point someone started inserting endless repeated phrases or ominous poetry into the entries, but the later parts read like someone high out of their goddamn mind rather than someone traumatized or possessed by cosmic evil.
Wandering Dog	Concentration and fine senses win the day. Wandering Dog heads downstairs towards the generator, and actually smiles as he sees that stuff is locked. "Alright, something to punch!" With his knuckles cracked, he concentrates his energy, and forms sharp black claws over his finger nails, using them to rend through the steel with strike after strike and force his way through the doors. Once inside, he glances around the generator, moving around to see if there's anything interesting down here, taking any if they don't seem horribly radioactive, and then relaying the information about the energy cells to the others over his radio. Once he's done that, WAndering Dog moves to rejoin the others, especially since Arthur might make a portal. Once upstairs again, he repeats what he found. "They're using a lot of power down there. Big green and glowy cells, more than they probably /need/. We want to do anything with that?"
Grave Matters	"Radioactive monster? I'm not sure radiation does what you think it does." Matsuri remarks as Shiho wanders off to look for corpses. Arthur's explanation of what might have happened to people is no more reassuring than if it was a radiation monster. And when it's confirmed that, yes, there actually are high radiaton levels. Matsuri drops her arms to her sides from where they'd been behind her head. "Wait, seriously? Isn't that dangerous? I didn't design this outfit to protect against radiation, you know."     Ruri pops up behind Matsuri and chortles, "Oh-hohoho~. Not to worry, little Matsuri. If the radiation comes for you, I'll hit it with my fist and show it who the true Princess of the Underworld is!"     Matsuri turns to stare at Ruri.     Ruri stares back, smiling. Then she asks, "What's radiation anyway?" :D     Shiho tries to sense for the presence of magic, but detects nothing. Either none is present or none is being actively used. Which doesn't necessarily mean anything. Most of the problems they face don't involve magic, but rather otherworldly spirit powers. She doesn't see any ghosts walking around either. Though by the sound of it, that might be about to change.     Matsuri is reminded of her specialty, necromancy, via radio conversation and she decides to try to raise some spirits to question them about what happened. She tries to find as much of a large open space as she can, which might be the very freezer that Shiho is hanging out in.     She holds that rod out in front of her, hooked to her palms with her thumbs. She closes her eyes and begins to chant.     "Turn again, turn again, ye restless departed     Turn away from the great dark     Hear my call and appear before me     Within the crest I carve     So that you may know my will     And yield up the secrets kept by the dead!"     Her eyes snap open, and a cloud of many small ghosts erupt up from the ground beneath her, flaring into an aura of supernatural power, staining the room in the colors and energies of death and dancing ghost lights. Then she draws back that pole, and a scythe blade springs from one end. When she swings it, she carves a shining cyan circle of spirit fire around herself, which spreads until it forms into some complex assemblance of glyphs and markings.     Matsuri slams her scythe's non-sharp end down on the ground and flings the circle away from herself, so that it slides to a stop several feet away, now the place where the dead should appear if there's any ghosts in the area.     Ruri claps her hands politely in the corner.     Shiho inspects the ice samples and finds them disappointing. She's not a scientist, due to being a wizard, but what she sees doesn't speak of horror. Still, they clearly found something out here. Just maybe not what she'd hoped. Is this something, these metallic flecks, tied to whatever killed them? Did they bore into an alien spaceship buried long ago or something?     "I am limited in what I can determine here. I never attended a proper school, so my familiarity with the realm scientific is very much not." Shiho announces as she looks through the microscopes at dead samples.     Maybe they can make the spirits of the dead samples tell them what happened.     Haaaah.     Ghost micro-organisms. Now THERE'S a horror story.
Arthur Lowell	"ALL GOOD, dog! When shit gets TOO HOT TO HANDLE, which is NEVER, I can run some PROTECTION!" Arthur assyures the newbies worried about radiation. "It's my GIG! I'm TOO RAD for it." And Wandering Dog mentions the cells... "Well, if we need POWER, I got TONS. We just gotta find what's NEEDING POWER. You find anything all FLICKERY from NOT ENOUGH JUICE, you let me know. Maybe we can find something they were trying to HOTWIRE?"     Hmmmm.     So, precisely homing in on something. Precisely homing in on... What could they be going for? Arthur snaps his fingers several times, highlighting data on the various sheets, collating it and collecting it. He heads out of the facility itself, seeing if he can get a good angle, some good "reception" for his longer-range Gatework. A few more snaps, and ominous, wide, concentric spellcircles begin to form around him, leeching data away from those many sheets of paper and the many lines of data he's yanked out of systems.     Whatever SPECIFIC thing they're targeting, he's going to try to home in on it and pop a Gate to it open. With all this background radiation and with the unusual terrain and, really, with the general shenanigans going on in the Soft Expanse, there's no guarantee he'll get it where he's going with any precision, but he wants to check something. Did they not dig up their objective yet? Or... Did they dig it up already? If he can get a Gate open, and pop over to the other side, can he find anything of note, or just the site where stuff's already been well dug up?     And, you know, if things aren't dug up, obviously he's gonna check to see if he can investigate and do that himself with huge amounts of gravity. And if things aren't dug up, he's gonna head back inside and try to find signs of where what they dug up might have been stored.
Septette Arcubielle	"If they were using some kind of equipment out at the digsite that runs on those power cores, Dog, we absolutely want them. And it seems likely they are, if they're not used to power the facility. Did you get a look at how much fuel the generator had left?" The sound of magic incantations draws her attention to the other room.      She enters just in time to catch Shiho's chatter about the metallic flecks, and gestures for the witch to move away from the microscope with one awful blade-fingered hand. "I'll give it a look as best I can. Just might be able to figure something out, if it's what I think it is."      Septette peers into the microscope once she's allowed her turn, and places two of her fingers on the slide. Her other hand is held out beside it, palm-up. Seven purple lines, long and thin and horizontal, materialize in the air above her hand- some kind of arcane apparatus, it seems. Motes of light dance back and forth along the 'strings'- sluggishly at first, then ramping up to dizzying, flickering speeds as sparks jump across the microscope slide from her fingertips!      "I suspect the samples they retrieved were, in fact, some kind of nanomachines. It's the only thing that connects all the dots here so tidily," she muses, staring into the dizzying display as if she can actually make anything out. If her hunch is correct, she ought to be able to figure out their purpose or nature and how to (re)activate them!
Zwei	Out of all the potential dead who might have wished to linger here, there is only one. Of course, the population of the outpost wasn't enormous to begin with -maybe 25 people by Rory's count- but despite something highly significant happening here, it might seem slightly odd there aren't more ghosts. The sullen, gaunt, and extremely faded spectre that Matsuri manages to call looks like he's barely there even then. Dressed in an arctic coat, heavy pants, and steel spiked boots, only the stitching of a company logo and the name "DAVIS" on the breast pocket identifies him. More importantly, he was clearly outside when he died if he was wearing all that, and the narrow hole and dark blotch in his jacket suggests he was killed by a gunshot wound. He appears to float about a foot off the floor, looking at Matsuri with a heavily shadowed and seemingly blurred expression, saying only "What do you want?" in deeply depressed and haggard tones.     Closely peering through the microscope, Septette seems to have made the best guess that could be made. It initially appears to be some dead and withered sample of the weird algae, but on closer inspection, appears to be highly developed colonial organism, with only the most trace elements of carbon bonding, or even water usage. It's difficult to tell whether to call them nanomachines, within the context of whether they're artificially constructed to fulfill a purpose, or whether they're unusually sophisticated monocellular "life", but it's probably safe to assume that they are super not safe for people to be touching, or possibly breathing in.     The ones under the slides have no real energy signature of note, however they do faintly resonate with the use of magic. They appear to have flat out decayed or degraded, which means fresh ones would have to be cultivated from the ice cores in the freezer. The best her examination can get her is that they seem to have some kind of rudimentary transmitter setup -that is over distance rather than in the sense of neurotransmitters- and appear to have the necessary functions to break down proteins in order to do so. They are also apparently radiation-proof, as they show no signs of irradiation whatsoever. They may even absorb it, if that accounts for the background levels outside.
Rory White	Of course, with absolutely every password already broken, Rory wastes no time in doing everything in her power to download the entire system's worth of data and relay it to the Dwarf, if she can at all manage that. ANY scientific information MUST be preserved! Any and all. Even if she's not necessarily going to be the one to sort this out, she'll get it to Argonauts who WILl give it a good look!     But as soon as that's done, the Robo-Fox drops away from the workstations, still trying to figure out the nature of -WHAT- exactly the researchers were studying. Or THOUGHT they were studying, at least.     Since that's going to take a while, the Dwarf deploys a SECOND Robo-Fox to do the exploring, since the first is likely going to be downloading data for quite some time!     And this one rejoins the group, trotting up next to Arthur!     As usual, it's slow to do anything useful, given the slow remote connection. It doesn't move very smoothly or gracefully, taking robotic and precise steps everywhere it goes.     The biomimicing form is probably for aesthetics and basic mobility helping only.     Of course the Grave Matters gang manages to DREDGE UP AN ACTUAL GHOST!     So of course, Rory is INCREDIBLY intrigued at this, and so her robo-fox drone BOLTS over to these proceedings to observe.     Of course, this also means scanning with every sensor she's got on that thing, from thermal to basic echolocation to see what sort of traits a GHOST actually has!
Septette Arcubielle	The nanomachines' nature as communication relays, as well as their radiation-absorbing traits, gives Septette a distinct idea. She swiftly assembles some kind of crude basin out of office supplies, like an oversized petri dish, and surrounds it with a glowing red magical circle. One of the ice columns with a prominent number of silver flecks is shattered over her knee and thrown into the dish, and a small red drone sets to very gently melting it.      Meanwhile, she heads back out to grab one of the bright green power sources that Wandering Dog located, and grabs a few containers of uranium for good measure. Both of them are precisely punctured and opened like cans, then poured into the now-slushy ice samples and crudely stirred with her armblade.      Then Septette purges her armblade with scorching heat, sits back at the edge of the magical circle with one hand on its glyphs, and waits expectantly. One of her other drones watches the ghost (and the Grave Matters gang) intently, but her primary focus is here: if the nanomachines unexpectedly start reproducing or somehow make a break for it, she'll activate the magical circle and blast the entire setup to hell. If things go as planned, though, this is likely their best shot at communicating with the entity that did this!
Zwei	Wandering Dog finds that the cells are almost definitely insanely radioactive, but that's what their heavily reinforced casings are for in the first place. They are also /obscenely/ heavy, clearly filled to the brim with some isotope or another that is much more dense than solid gold, and so one per hand is about the most he can manage without dragging them around using his back, where anyone but Septette would be hard pressed to scrape even a single one across the floor.     Arthur is in luck. Even if the spatial region of the Soft Expanse this chunk of Antarctic has suddenly be stranded in is full of messed up coordinates, navigating by "just look at the stars bro" is actually really solid. It gets his portal to cut many miles north of the facility, opening up to an icier, windier region near the basalt mountain break. Looking to the south, the fresh tracks of the Multiversal study team have stopped and turned back a while ago, but at the destination, older, mostly snowed in tracks of heavier vehicles lead up to a part of the mountainside that has been opened with crude blast excavation followed by industrial mining, judging by the abandoned machines, engines just as dead as those back at base.     Other equipment of completely different and totally unknown purpose is lying around, including much more portable version of the generator Wandering Dog had seen, rigged for a single fuel sell to be jammed in the top to look like a glowy pylon, and also including completely standard desktop computers. All of it is rigged to a constructed "arch" of sort around the blasted entry, and beyond that, the arch is wired to what is quite blatantly a door, buried under many meters of volcanic rock. It's a rough, oily-looking greenish metal, speckled with thin, stone-like veins of a more luminous colour. Someone clearly kludged a way to feed power into it a while ago, though none of said power has been consumed in a long time, apparently only needed to open it each time. There are obvious signs that parties have been in at least once.     The equipment is relatively simple to toggle, mostly because it has once again been completely digitally subverted. Switching it on sends a huge power charge through the arch, which coruscates bright green and shines a focused light on the door, which opens up under the concentrated radiance. Entering past there, one would be forgiven for thinking they'd gone from some buried alien ship to the inside of an ancient temple, for the fact that the architecture abruptly transitions into pillars, arches, stairs, and similar, albeit without any right angles anywhere.     A large interior hall sits before a very long staircase, flanked by pillars carved with green glyphs, and walls running with tubing that pumps some kind of fluid that can only be described as the night sky in liquid form. The hall at least has been set up with amenities clearly meant for overnight camping, possibly to keep people fed, hygienic, and relatively comfortable if a storm suddenly happened outside and cut them off from base for a few days, but there are no signs of recent use.     Further past those stairs, if one is very brave, the relative dark leads into a perfectly round room with a slightly concave floor and ceiling, polished to a weird, warped shine, like an ancient bronze mirror covered in the same green glyphs around the edges. Three other corridors split off from it. One directly ahead seems to lead back up, and those to the left and right lead down, but are completely flooded with that weird night-fluid, and impossible to see down.
Zwei	The bigger room is also heavily burnt, filled with signs of much less controlled flash heat and flying debris, as if someone had set off a very large missile inside of it. The place that is the least damaged is actually the direct center, where the floor is absolutely pristine for a few paces with a razor sharp boundary into the worst of the damage. Sitting in that space, or rather, kneeling heavily, is a rather large figure that might be some kind of very large powered suit or small-end mecha.     It would not easily mistaken for native for the fact that it is built of smoothly angled carbon black plates with fine hexagonal iridescence in the subsurface, constructed with so little in the way of panelling, seams, or any real way to get at the mechanical insides, that it almost resembles a suit of knightly armour. Its proportions are distinctly non-human however. The arms are a little too long and thick, the chest is heavy and forward-jutting and the the torso below is narrower with a natural slope. It has triple-jointed legs with an exotic "therapod" foot structure, and a helmet with only a pretention at a visor. There are tiny, smoothly geometric swirls of fine, pitch black lines on parts of its exterior with no clear purpose.     It appears to have slumped over deactivated, and with its arms supportive part of its weight, hunched over a second figure in its shadow: what could probably pass for a human woman if not for having a bit of an uncanny valley of indeterminate age and ethnicity, stark white skin tinted blue-greyish like space-age resin, and hair that looks like strands of metallic nickel. She too is slumped over like a doll in the larger figure's arms, and appears to have been originally holding something that is no longer present.
Grave Matters	Shiho says, "Hm. Yes. Nanotechnology. Very good." to Septette's report. She has no idea what that is but it sounds very scientific. "How is that ghost questioning going, Matsuri?"     Matsuri snaps, "I'm starting on it, okay? He only JUST showed up! Geez!" The scarf-wearing yellow-eyed girl turns her attention on the Research Ghost and says, "Yo. Sorry to wake you up. We were hoping to find out what happened here. Get some answers on who or what killed everyone. Though looks like you might not have been inside when it happened..." And also he looks like he was maybe killed by other means. Was there a scorch mark for him outside somewhere? Maybe covered in the snow?     "Would you please help us out? I can help you get out of here if you do. And get your story out there if you'd want that, in case there's anyone you want to know what happened." She doesn't explicitly say he's dead, because if he doesn't know or doesn't accept that fact, it can lead to ghosts getting emotional and then you have to try to reason with them and snap them back to sanity. But she leaves it implied enough that if he knows, he'll know what she's talking about when she says 'get out of here' and 'if there's anyone you want to know what happened'.
Zwei	Septette conducts about the most ghetto science possible under the circumstances, which means it is going to do absolutely nothing, or do a whole lot at once. When she has the slush in the circle and is jamming it full of radioactive green (actually entirely separate from the uranium), the water begins to churn and bubble (expected of radiation that intense) and then rapidly crystallize over with silver-green fractual patterns (not expected).     The whole basin pretty quickly becomes a dizzy mesh of metallic wire and prisms, spreading up the sides like a super fast creeping mold. The same translucent cilia arise to the surface like the algae, but rapidly grow in side and length, becoming a foot tall before "blooming" into shapes similar to weird, deep sea "marine snow" feeders.     Honestly, Septette doing it was about the best outcome possible. It's been literally moments since the first few of them bloomed, and she is immediately besieged with a battering tide of high-bandwidth non-radio signals that attempt to interface with her every way possible, flooding her with waves so intense the air shimmers, and lets off a keen, hideous screeching sound. The "flowers" not engaged in zapping her begin swivelling around the room, as if looking for others, while the "moss" at the foot of the blob swiftly creeps all the way to the edge of the circle, with the clear intent of going further.     Elsewhere, separated by space and genre, Matsuri questions a dead guy. His features, and his voice, are weirdly vague and slurred, as if under some kind of censor, or part of his communicative ability had just kind of melted. He seems to be pretty aware of being dead though, and sulky about it.     "I bet it was Willis. No spine. Like a little girl. Only he'd shoot me in the back. Only he'd pick up a gun because I wanted to go back. Nobody else would agree to go with me, sure. They were all nervous wrecks by the end, yeah. They weren't complete and utter bastards like he was though. Calling it now. Whatever you're asking me about, he did it." The ghost gives the blurry impression of a slow, fuzzy blink. "God, they're all dead aren't they? People started getting weird and pissy after the first few cultures turned up negative on testing, but really? How'd they go stir crazy enough for that? We were maybe four or five months out from fully mapping the site too. Not my fault it's full of that weird shit. How was I supposed to know what it did?"
Rory White	"It does seem that everyone is either dead or gone." Rory affirms a little somberly. "I saw no unused tarps outside the facility, so the former is more likely. Though I wish otherwise." Rory has... never spoken with a GHOST before. The simple facts of Resleeving on her world make this a complete Not How It Works situation!     So seeing a GHOST like something out of an old fantasy story is kind of unsettling. Not that she's showing it.     "Can I ask you what you were researching and mapping here? Based on the current evidence, it appears to be something that fell from space."
Grave Matters	When Shiho sees the creepy creepers growing and crawling and assaulting Septette, the alien eerie 'otherness' of them as they spread rapidly and seek all around them, possibly for host bodies to infest, she claps her hands to her reddening cheeks and breathes steam out of her nose. "Ohh~! These things have their own kind of charm too~!"     Ruri asks, still standing in the corner -- way, way, WAY back in the corner, "Shouldn't you, like, help or something."     "Let's wait and see what happens to her first!"     "Shiho-saaaaan!"     "Tch. Fine."     "'Tch'!?"     Shiho wanders up to Septette, grimacing, and extends a hand up unwillingly while looking like somehow Septette is responsible for doing something wrong. "Oi. Do you need help?"     .oO(Wh-what's with that attitude!?)     Meawhile, Matsuri nods sympathetically. "I hear you, sir. I know how it is. You're the only one who came up when I tried to summon some answers, but there's a bunch of scorch marks that look like they used to be people, so the safe assumption is they aren't around anymore. Do you think it's possible this weird stuff was... Affecting them somehow? Controlling them maybe? Someone here thinks it might be nanotechnology. And you know what THAT can do." She is trying not to look at the gross growths, and she does not actually know what nanotechnology can do, but she's read sci-fi novels so she is guessing 'a lot'. "Either way, there's no reason for you to have to hang around here anymore. Anything you can tell us to help would be appreciated, and then you can finally go home."
Wandering Dog	Wandering Dog hefts up two of the power cells, leaving one in the base for anyone if they need it, before moving after Arthur through the portal. He holds the remaining cell with one hand and noves through the portal, before taking a look around the excavation site. It's the portable version of the generator he focuses on, putting his fuel cell in it to power it if necessary. "Alright, let's get this thing open!" Once the door's open, Wandering Dog moves inside, and splits off towards the corridors. The left and right ones have strange fluid similar to that in the tubing, so he pulls out a bit of wrapped rations from his pocket and moves to drop it in the liquid to see what happens to it. "Alright, you gonna dissolve horribly or something?" If the liquid seems to actually be relatively safe, Wandering Dog will stick a finger in it. He's not going to just dive in, but knowing if it's dangerous is helpful.
Arthur Lowell	Arthur concludes that what is afoot here is well and truly properly going on at this dig site, that's the center of it if it's got all this fancy door and arch stuff happening. He peers at the door, squatting near it, and whenever his friendly neighborhood Meandering Canine comes by to start up the arch, Arthur kinda waves at him vaguely, telling him to just start it up even with Arthur in front of the radiation beam. He's no Septette when it comes to main physical damage, but at least he sure doesn't give a shit about being radioactive.     Something about this feels familiar. Yet...     He presses on as soon as it pops open. Still walking with a mixture of personal respect for the dramatics, and an effort to maintain something resembling style, and certainly not at all out of a sense of caution that he /ought/ to be feeling. He approaches the fluid, and... No, he's not gonna go swimming. He examines the way up... No, that's not good. And then he heads for the center. Whatever nanohazard is elsewhere, he seems to abruptly mentally disregard.     "Are you..." He mutters softly, in an uncharacteristically quiet tone. He squints, eyes twitching very slightly, like he's trying to remember the code to his locker while the bell rings. He glances fast at the glyphs further back, and the pulsing lines, the empty hand... And he thinks of the blasted carbonized smudges. He blinks several times, and then surges forward. "Hey! Dog! Uh-- Shit, Sept, you in here?! Help me get some of this goddamn plating off of them!" He shouts, with some sudden urgency. He's looking for a power conduit, and he knows these two are too hard-built to have one of those just out there and exposed; he leaps onto the shoulders of the larger unit and starts trying to wrench up something or another that will let him get to the parts hidden below, something that should gleam just a little more.     He's gotta get his palm over it, and flood it with just a burst of energy... Gotta feel the flow of it, inject some fusion materials deeper in there...
Septette Arcubielle	Even before the deep-ocean-like tendrils and spires appear, Septette's moving to contain the alarmingly swiftly-growing nanocolony. She extends a hand and makes some bizarre contorted gesture that would be impossible for human fingers, and the air around the makeshift dish warps sharply like something's tugging on the fabric of space.      A transparent magical kinetic barrier, presumably impossible for a nanoswarm to chew its way through, materializes in the shape of a hollow sphere around the spreading structure that even penetrates the floor just in case it decides to dig down. Then the flowers come up, the screeching starts, and a strange shimmering appears in the air-      Foreign connection attempt screened and logged.      Known Enyo vectors, unknown payload.      Nonthreat, no action needed. Restructuring.      -but she can't quite make out anything else. Her earfins twitch slightly as she places one hand on the outside of the kinetic dome, reinforcing it with several further layers that should keep the monster she's created from getting out for quite some time, though- for better or worse- they can't block light or communication in or out.      "Think we've got our culprit right here. Rory, care to take a look? Reminds me of that 'TITAN' stuff a bit."
Septette Arcubielle	When Septette looks over her shoulder at Shiho, her eyes are glowing a dazzling purple. After a fraction of a second, though, they dim to their usual dull violet, and she smiles cheerfully. Whatever is 'with' the witch's tone, she doesn't seem to take any umbrage at it. She does take her hand, but only as a formality: Sept doesn't really pull on her for help at all, instead pushing herself up off the floor before letting go.      On closer inspection, her hand is almost entirely sharp cutting edges arrayed like the bones of a human skeleton. Ick. At least she was careful enough not to nick Shiho's fingers! "I think I'll be peachy, thank you. Albeit, I feel like you might be better served by plugging your ears..." She winces sympathetically, gesturing with her head in the dish's vague direction.
Grave Matters	Shiho says, "They're unpleasant sounds, but they won't kill me probably. I think. What's a little bleeding out the ears and agony between fiends?" She frowns a bit as she feels Septette's hand. Then she seems to relax a bit. It feels skeletal and creepy and is so sharp she's in danger of being cut if not for Septette's caution in preventing such. It comforts her a bit. She smiles. "Should we seal it? If it's what's responsible for these people going mad as Sir Ghost says... Well, it's a bit outside my realm of expertise on how to deal with it."     Ruri is definitely plugging her ears, and Matsuri can't afford to because she's doing Ghost Negotiations.
Zwei	"The only one huh." Davis . . . appeeaaaars to feel morose about that. His facial definition is getting fuzzier, and his voice is getting fainter. "Who knows. Might have. Katherine swore up and down it'd be fine, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was toxic or infected or whatever. Someone might have been screwing with it while everyone is asleep. Who knows." At the mention of 'controlling people' specifically, Davis makes some kind of face. "I still don't know if I buy into that. My money remains sternly on object of extraterrestrial origin, or it would if I had any, anyways. A bunch of my crew were all hopped up on old myths and superstitions about being an ancient temple or some subterranean civilization BS. Probably believed in fairies and magic too." Then he looks down at himself. "'course, apparently I'm a ghost, so what do I know."     "Speaking of what I know: not a lot. Dedicated crew. We came out here on a lot of old tales and groundbreaking research. Expected to find- well, we /did/ find something alright. Planned to stay for the rest of the year to grab as much as possible before we published. Don't leave anything but the peer review for anyone else, right? Evidence of ancient extraterrestrial life, civilization even, isn't something you want to fire off the minute you find it. People started getting real agitated. Irrational. Nuts I guess. Obsessed over the samples. I had to put the whole freezer under permanent password lockdown so nobody could sneak in there. Eventually I got sick of it and said I'd take the damn things back. Apparently Willis objected to that and shot me. Bastard. It's not like we couldn't have come back for it. Why the hell do they care? Did, I suppose. Everyone was still alive when I bit it. Guess they don't have any unfinished business or something. Maybe I'm the only one still bitter about it."     The barrier Septette places around the swiftly growing . . . thing, certainly seems to do its job of sealing it in. In fact, it grows and grows until the barrier is almost full to bursting with curled fronds and wiggling tentacles, pulsating with little signs of that greenish glow. This is probably not a good sign. When Shiho sets herself in front of it, with far less robust protections than Septette, she can immediately hear it in her mind. Some bulk of whatever wavelength it's operating on must be screened out by magic, oddly enough, but even then, she can hear the urgent, compulsive klaxon-whisper in her head. It uses no specific words; she gets the idea mostly through impression. What the freaky alien nano-plant stuff wants her to do is very simple:     Gather up as much of it as possible, and report to a specific place to the north, before the sun rises.
Zwei	Off in the difficult to classify ruins, the testosterone in the group is presented with a separate set of more simple issues and experiments. Wandering Dog drops some food into the star-stuff fluid. It warns him pretty aptly of the danger of touching it. Instead of dissolving like acid or bursting into flames however, the rations abruptly wither and rot and crumble to dust as if six weeks had passed in about six seconds, turning to nothing from hyper-accelerated ageing.     Arthur is left clambering all over a hulking figure not really designed with a lot of useful footholds, considering it was also designed without a place to put a screwdriver, swap out parts, or plug in exterior devices. It involves a lot of annoying slip'n'slide all over the sloped armour and trying to get feet on the right angles. Obviously, that chassis isn't something he's going to pull apart with his fingers, and so it will quite probably require gravity finangling or effectively slow fusion torch work to get at.     The shoulders are at least the right place to start, because when retractable exterior casing mechanisms are pried open or separated, there are charging points for something like docked drones or weapons. Obviously, they're not going to be directly connected to the main reactor, but it's worth a guess that power can be drawn back from whatever's connected as well, and jamming the local battery full of stellar energy seems to set off some sensor or another. Something very subtly clicks underneath him, and all the juice he'd flushed into the charging port is suddenly drained right out the bottom, commandeered by some kind of emergency recharge loop.     The faux-helmet slit in the huge figure's blank and angled faceplate flickers with a dull amber glow from within, building up through polarized synthetics. It doesn't move an inch, but apparently there's enough energy for vocalizing, and it's the voice like an ammunition fire played through an electric amp that he remembers. ||"I assume this is what it feels like when humans claim to be half-asleep."||
Arthur Lowell	Arthur immediately starts banging on the head of Asche with his fists. "Hey! Heyyyyy!!" He shouts, indignantly. "Wake up!! Wake up all the way!!" Bonk bonk bonk. He focuses on something else only long enough to cast a portal off to one side, something to link for Septette; it should be easy enough for her to get there from the nearer Gate, or for him to bring one closer to her gargantuan distant signature. "Do you need /more/ nanohazard or /less/ nanohazard?" It's a pertinent question. "I swear to god, this shit's already gotten a couple dozen damn people slit 'cause you two fuckin' dropped a /RAISER pistol/ and someone found it, if that's not enough to get you awake then fuck if I know what /is/."     He tries to get a better position, pry up some stuff. "Where's a main core conduit? I'm bringing Septette and some new chums up in this. You got somewhere I can dump a fusion reaction in there? Anywhere Sept can put some gigawatts in you? And hey! Get those nanos calming down! I've got someone on the phone yelling about them!" He immediately gets to work trying to force more energy in. "Where the /fuck/ did your singularities go? Swear to god-- Last time I did this you were at a damn event horizon, you owed me /double/ then and I'm doubling that so it's a quad now. WAAAAAAAAAKE UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUP!!"     If Septette and Wandering Dog have cleared a path to charge, Arthur brings both hands back, gleaming bright white, and tries to inject a vast amount of energy into one half of the Zwei units, hoping it'll bring them both online through their entangled links. He plunges his palms in and tries to juice them with at least a few hours of rapidly-fusing hydrogen.
Wandering Dog	The fluid has Wandering Dog backing off immediately to avoid touching it. "Oh, screw that." A shake of his head as something goes on over the radio, and he's requested to go help Arthur out. He sprints into that direction towards the wide room, where he spots the constructs. A large figure and a mechanical woman. Seeing Arthur trying to pry open the shoulders, the martial artist /leaps/ over there, moving to try and channel his own strength into the job. With a heave, Wandering Dog focuses all of his strength into trying to force them open. Realizing Arthur is talking to them, he decides to introduce himself in the process. "Hey there! Name's Wandering Dog, Creation's greatest martial artist. Let me give you a hand here, alright?" With how heavy they are, though, if he can even make any progress, it's probably going to be some serious strain on his muscles.
Grave Matters	Matsuri says, "Well, I think we've figured out what happened." as she listens over the radio. "I'm sorry this happened to you. But from the way you're fading, I think you'll be moving on soon. It'll be better than here. Do you have any family or friends you'd like me to talk to for you before you go?"     Shiho, meanwhile, has supplemented Septette's seals with jack-o-lantern force fields, to contain the spread of the 'nanocolony'. Upon hearing instructions, she turns the barriers into a sort of platform by angling them and then bringing them together underneath the mass. "Let's get you to this 'Zwei' then, shall we~?" hoping that will mollify the klaxon-whispering thing. Then she exits the facility, pops open her parasol and begins magically flying on unfelt winds to where Arthur and Septette and Wandering Dog are, to deliver the robosites to someone.     She'll be there pretty swiftly. She can fly fast when she's not weighed down by two additional magical girls.
Septette Arcubielle	The main problem for Septette's power generation is twofold. First, the vast majority of it is magical energy which- last she checked- Zwei can't directly interact with, let alone harness. The second is that while her production is high and indefatigable, it doesn't lend itself to 'bursts' of output.      She solves both of these problems at once by 'stacking' charging yellow magical circles around her left arm, from her fingertips to her wrist and elbow all the way up to her shoulder. As she sprints to the portal, new circles form at her fingertips causing the earlier ones to 'compress' closer together like some kind of arcane spring.      Finally, she arrives on the other side, leaps up onto Asche's shoulders, and slams her hand into the opened ports that Arthur and Wandering Dog have created! "Do you guys have any idea how worried I've been? If this doesn't wake Weiss up, I will find a way to actually cry real tears."      There's a noise like a flywheel spinning up as the circles condense into a single ring at her palm, and then discharge in a lightning strike that'd likely be deafening if it weren't muffled by Asche's frame!
Zwei	||"I can hear you"|| says Asche, without turning his head. ||"I have insufficient power for anything other than low-resolution basic audio/visual and vocalization. I have no response from my reactor at the moment, and all reserve charge is dead. I cannot move."|| The following sound halfway between a breaker tripping and a flywheel charge sounds vaguely pleased. ||"Septette Arcubielle remains active as well. I see. I am sorry to tell you that the nanocolony present here is not of my own design. It is part of the reason I came here at all. I recommend against handling the remaining samples unnecessarily. I was forced to sterilize the crew upon arrival after they did."||     The docking port Arthur is working on splits along completely invisible seams, starting to rotate and fold back to expose a more considerable, bright silver power feed, almost like a twisted helix of cables made of refractive glass, but then jams halfway there. ||"The energy necessary to handle conversational-level cognition will not make this easy."|| says Asche, before just letting Wandering Dog handle the rest, manually straining and pulling at the mechanism with his Essence-enhanced strength to open it the rest of the way by force. ||"Creation. I suppose things were unlikely to change that much. I have fond memories of martial artists, at least. As long as they do not claim to be 'Super Saiyan', at minimum."||     It isn't really clear how the feed actually interacts with anything, other than it clearly involves the numerous sub-filaments condensing down something like a circulatory system towards a heart. Blasting it with electricity and fusion energy seems to work anyways though. Asche's plating rapidly heats up, and his optics warm to a steady gold, with similar pulses and flickers of light running through the geometric channels for several solid seconds. ||"It was not my intention to be away forever. I had assumed you were more patient than that, Septette. Things have been complicated, especially over the last year."||     After a few seconds, Asche properly turns his head, flexes his sharpened fingers into the floor, and then slowly stands up, gaining a good three meters in height from his crouch. Tiny verniers and apertures swivel and pulse a split second of blue flame at various points on his body. ||"Increasing cognitive processes to 1.2%. Equilizing power distribution. 'Cool your heels'."|| he says. A couple of seconds later, the female figure starts up as well, and her own eyes light up gold, along with various points of her outfit and equipment. It seems they settled on something more consistent than the contrasting red/green aesthetic some time ago.     <<"Oh my god I feel like I hit my head and lost like fifty billion brain cells. What the hell happened?">> she says in a voice like a humming glass rim. She is much more into the physical display of holding her head and slowly sitting up, as if actually physically injured and disoriented. ||"Unification Engine at zero percent output."|| <<"Jeez really? It'd been working fine for like, a solid year. Wait, where's that- didn't I just have-">> ||"Yes. It appears to have been relocated. Now would not be the time to go looking for it again. Even emergency conservation mode will not last more than a few hours."||
Zwei	Weiss finally gets to her feet, and upon spotting Septette, immediately throws her arms around her, picking the yggdroid up in the kind of hug only the Armiger would dare. <<"Oh excellent! My system clock was totally FUBAR! I was totally worried I'd have been asleep for like a thousand years again! If I want to date that junk up the stairs, something like . . . oh good, only 4.8 days. That's not so bad.">> ||"It still fails to explain why none of my emergency failsafes for Unification Reactor anomaly triggered, nor why none of my standby drones were able to locate me."| |<<"Yeah what's up with that? Unless my coordinates are busted too, this is like a jillion miles away from where we were a few days ago. Someone care to explain?">>     Entirely unrelated to the whole conversation, when the two get moving again, a big holographic Y prompt appears floating in the air in front of Arthur. If he takes the bait, he ends up engaged in the same exponentially more complicated double simultaneous bro pound/secret handshake combo he had used the very first time they'd met. <<"Please tell me you didn't start spreading the colony though. There's no way I'm charging any serious weapons like this.">> ||"I likewise doubt that you have encountered a space-bending prism anywhere in this facility either."||
Zwei	This mostly just leaves Matsuri alone with Davis, who seems completely uninterested in the portal. When the others jump into places unknown, the project lead mostly just looks kind of sad and wistful to the necromancer. "You're a surprisingly nice girl for someone who wants to talk to dead people. Nicer than anyone I've talked to in a good six months at least. Nah. Not really I guess. Just tell them some kind of storm or accident happened. Not this crap. I have all my personal contacts still on my PC. The password is 'FuckLovecraft', because fuck H.P. Lovecraft I'm so tired of hearing about him. I guess maybe if you're going to say something, tell Daisy that I was right, and don't let anyone else near the grant unless she wants to lose the house. Hah."     With that, Davis fades away. This leaves Shiho carrying the bubble of increasingly aggravated sea-alien-swarm critters with her in her magic bubble, though they appear to stop exploding in growth when no longer under the baleful radioactive green light. As she approaches the door however, close enough to sense something from inside, they suddenly "change their mind" and begin demanding she turn around, sending crude danger signals at her brain.
Septette Arcubielle	Septette makes a little noise of glee as she's picked up, followed by the distinctive 'vweee' of microthrusters a moment later. They tilt the center of balance of the embrace backwards by just enough for her to grab the floor with her talons, then lift Weiss up instead! The sudden reversal is followed by an elegant spin, and then by setting Weiss back down on the floor carefully.      "Aaaa! I'm not impatient, Asche, it's just-" I'm not used to people I care about not dying- "I get nervous, okay?" She looks a little pouty at the implication she might be immature or codependent somehow, but it hasn't dampened her mood.      What does is mention of the nanocolony. "I only reanimated it a little bit," she says in a tone that's somehow both defensive and flat. "It kept screaming at me. Figured it was yours." She glances over her shoulder, through the portal, at Shiho. "Come on, bring it over! I can freeze it again."
Wandering Dog	Once Asche is opened up enough for Arthur to power him, Wandering Dog moves aside, looking up at the big guy. "No idea what a 'super saiyan' is. Glad you're up again, though. Your friends here seemed awfully worried about you." A thumb jerked to Septette, as he watches the goings-on. Looks like there's some happy reunions, which leads to a grin from the martial artist. He's going to allow them that and move to talk on the radio instead.
Arthur Lowell	"YeeeeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!" Arthur shouts. The holographic interact-button Y practically explodes as he literally bounces between the pair in an elaborate handshake that is meant to make full-force use of Asche's entire hand despite his size, while maneuvering circularly around Weiss several times in the sequence. "BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM BAMBAMBAMBAMBAM!" Arthur shouts with each impact, before ending it with a dramatic flip. "Yeah, whole multiverse went INSIDE OUTWAYS. I'm still working on tracking whatever SHIT DUDE was responsible and then BREAKING THEIR FACE. Now where the fuck did your SINGULARITIES go?" He actually seems insistant about this, sounding sort of like a police commissioner demanding to know where a patrolman's pistol is.     "Yo, I can get you enough JUICE to get to some SOLARS or whatever, but that's about IT. The hell is all THIS? Why's there so much FIGHTING that went on? What the fuck is UP in this?" He queries in a way that's insistant and bordering on obnoxious, especially in the way he keeps kind of weightlessly shoving the questions from different angles.
Staren	Zwei's been found and needs help? Or, maybe doesn't need help anymore. Unclear. Still, this is worth investigating. Staren arrives on the 'island' and makes a beeline for the clearest signal he can find -- probably Rory's.     Which leads him to a broken door and a Dwarf. He tries pulling on it, but this armor gives 'human strongman' strength at best and may not be enough. If it is, he'll rush his way over to the others and make his way to Zwei, but otherwise, he's stuck awkwardly outside the door, looking at the dwarf. "Can you open this?"
Zwei	Asche lets off a crackling sound vaguely like a sigh at Septette. ||"A little. It is extremely unlikely the colony will have any effect on you, but i had remembered you as someone ever concerned with looking towards the safety of 'squishies'."|| <<"Oh whatever! Let her play with it if she wants! Pretty sure all the creepy things down here can't come up the stairs with them flooded like that anyways! The goo is just dumb goo. Totally useless unless it gets into your brain. I mean, I don't envy someone trying to incinerate it down to the molecule without proper weapons, buuut . . .">>     Arthur asks a very good question. Asche answers. ||"Some time ago, after extensive simulation, I deemed Sector Zero an unviable long-term proposition for any significant work. The conflict between the Union and Confederacy showed no signs of stopping for the foreseeable future, nor did their stance on abruptly cooperating when any agent or faction but themselves made significant traction, in order to maintain the status quo. I departed to a more distant sector, with minimal Superfactional presence, to perform intensive research and modification using Multiversal principles."||     Weiss continues. <<"So, you know how I used to have all those hard-coded restrictions and directives, right? They were super annoying, but it's not like you can un-program yourself, and it's not like I could find something heavier to do the job because I'm already as heavy as Licht tech gets. So, I turned to stuff from other worlds to get around the problem! A lot of stuff happened! I fully cleaned out the limitation software, opened up all the disused cognition channels, and then kind of realized that there was so much potential to do things by taking some shortcuts and substitutes from different worlds to go beyond what was already perfectly optimized by normal science! I've been busy in a lot of places! Getting things done! You wouldn't believe some of the stuff I've seen by now~">>     ||"My most ambitious project at this point was a full overhaul of the Rydelblitz Reactor model. An attempt to convert the virtual energy harvested from the background decay of a massless singularity and apply the existing principles to harvesting the virtual potential energy of the Multiversal background, hypothetically drawing from the same force that spurs Unification in order to surpass the limits defined by mass-energy. Promising, but quite possibly doomed, if the Multiverse sees fit to shift its physical laws so frequently. There were no less than one hundred and sixty interacting inter-world components in the design."||     <<"Sooo, yeah. Let's work on that. Good news is that I could theoretically process pretty much anything at this point! Bad news is that neither of these shells is optimized to run on anything you would bother measuring in megawatts. The scaling goes super loopy and stupid below that and I literally lose access to most of my ability to think. That makes working on the problem kind of hard, y'know?">>     ||"This location was one that I ascertained would likely bear a viable component to be put towards completing the Unification Reactor concept, but it appears to have been misplaced in the intervening time between sudden power failure and the present. If this world has actively relocated within the Multiverse, it would explain why no retrieval drones are present."||