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Bloody Revelations     Even after taking the Brass Leviathan's underwater Manse, located by some incredibly sketchy happenstance and exploited through a five shades grimmer form of 'hacking', the eponymous vessel doesn't return to port immediately. More accurately: it can't. Its roaming range around the Western Ocean is massive, and sea travel is far from instantaneous. Having two days to prepare is on the relatively low end, all things considered.

    That isn't helped by the general dearth of space to prepare. Space itself could hardly be more plentiful, granted, but secret Manses don't tend to be placed under convenient and useful islands, more likely to be found and colonized, and so it's open water for many miles all around, only broken up with occasional flotsam, and below, by lightless coral reefs at slightly below 'absolutely crushing' depth. This far out to sea, they are at what amounts to the oceanic desert zone, with only eclectic swarms and shoals of open water migratory jellies and fish, and the odd giant shark-like creature passing by for company. Not even seabirds frequent this territory.

    Revisits to the Manse tend not to be productive. Even if the thoroughly broken AI has the power to send a recall signal, it doesn't accurately track the Brass Leviathan, nor can it remotely operate the thing (in fact, there appears to be no way to send real commands of any kind at all). Hopeful acquisitioners have to wait for the legendary vessel to show up on its own, and when it finally does, it appears at great speed, hitting the edge of detection nets at a casual 40 knot pace, despite its evident size.

    Whatever the few present Elites who had signed off on this insane and dubious plan might have expected, the Brass Leviathan probably isn't it. Despite being easily the size of a modern aircraft carrier, it neither cruises on the water's surface, nor resembles a boat in any way shape or form. The thing's sonar profile is that of a giant, aquatic serpent, or perhaps something more like an elongated coelacanth, and it undulates uncountable interlocking segments from side to side even as huge turbine propellers push it along its own jetstream under the water.

    Covered in slab-like plates of gleaming orichalcum as big as houses, the sheer amount of gold on the thing is almost nauseatingly wasteful, but must surely be a formidable defense all the same. To-scale clockworks can be seen working away in the gaps, but they look no more vulnerable for their construction of grotesque amounts of magical materials, nor do the fiercely glowing gem-like eyes studded into its fanged, 'bony' head. It is very much a baroquely ornate and grandiloquently sculpted sea beast more than a warship in design. Just looking at the thing, it's questionable how anyone could pilot it at all. It's all too easy to take as a dizzyingly tasteless vanity project of a self-obsessed nautical artisan at first glance, but the danger is not entirely hidden; not its tremendous and totally unmasked energy signature, nor the six (6) gargantuan cannons along its length, of such old and advanced design that they dispense with things like barrels and platforms entirely, and instead resemble huge crystal orbs embedded into the armour like jewels in watch bezels.

    Despite its speed, it appears to be actively slowing down, as well as diving to 100 meters, 200 meters, 300 meters, as it aims to return to dock. There is plenty of time to intercept it in open waters, before it can reach any kind of cover or safe harbour, but with override access to the Manse, it'd also be possible to wait until it docks, and assault it from inside the secret base itself.
Starbound Flotilla     George is going to take that kind bit of Water Functionality buff from Wandering Dog. He keeps his armor totally unpowered as the creature approaches, and lets it close in, assuming the others will too. Now, he doesn't have a way of getting inside -- that is to say, he lacks a metaphorical /entry methods/ paradigm of operating -- but there's something important here. There's already an entry, one that few people think about, and one that fewer people use.

    When the creature comes in to dock, George detaches from the underside of the docking area as if a piece of debris shaken loose, drifting limply through the water. "That's it big boy, come on home." He mutters, letting the waterflow pull him. He's heading... Right for one of those turbine sections! When it starts to suck him right through it, he flashes his armor into active mode, going spread-eagled and just BARELY holding his body away from the hazardous turbine, using its own movement and the movement of the water around him to mask his own as his armor's powered systems strain to keep him out of spinning blade death.

    From here, ideally, if this thing docks, its turbines will shut down -- and as they do, he can use the last bits of residual movement to mask himself slipping into one of the engine sections, darting in as fast as he can to try to get into whatever passes for an engineering section of the huge mechanical sea-creature warship.
Azure Armature The Plan, such as it were, with almost certain add-ons, riders, and contingencies created by the team while they waited, had been simple - The Brass Leviathan was an artifact of extreme power, with naval essence cannons fit to blast most things into their component atoms, exalt each component atom for being special, send them to Lytek, and have him disappointingly have to shuffle off each individual atom back to the cycle of reincarnation.

Even a "Perfect" defense-weilding Exalt would be hard pressed to deflect firepower of the Brass Leviathan's magnitude.

So, 'Blue' proposed a much simpler plan: Wait for it to dock, while the more technically inclined set up any shunts, hooks, spoofs, or worms in the Manse's mainframe computer, and then the whole team move in through the dock to take on the internal defenses - and suborn the creature-weapon.

Doing so, Blue reasoned, would leave the highest amount of external defenses untouched, a key consideration when one intended to use it as a weapon of siege warfare.

Gathered at the dock-hatch, Blue ran a shimmering cloth along the edge of one of her extremely boring utility knives, eying the edge before sliding it back into a holster under her puncho and stepping up as the Leviathan ground into dock.
Staren     Staren actually DID expect a giant mechanical sea serpent or dragon. Why would anyone in Creation build a normal submarine or ship? He's come as a robot this time. Even that wouldn't be enough to protect him from getting crushed by the ocean if he gets caught outside and Wandering Dog's magic fails, though.

    Staren is impressed with George's maneuver, but doesn't trust himself to have the agility to pull it off, so he waits with Azure Armature. Maybe if they're really lucky, the Leviathan's docking hath will actually open to let people in rather than force them to blast through it!
Wandering Dog Wandering Dog is neither super tactically smart nor stealthy. He's a direct man who does direct things, though he can understand a good plan, and allowing the 'eggheads' to do their part. His own plan is simple: he's going to wait near Blue, having shared his ability to function underwater with the group, and the minute he sees some sort of opening, hopefully a hatch in the Brass Leviathan opening, and if not, the turbines if they shut off, Wandering Dog will propel himself off the surface he's standing on and move to jet through it in one straight motion.

"Man, the Realm's scared of this thing? Look how gold it is! Can you really be scared of something so shiny you can clean your teeth in it?" Not that Wandering Dog isn't slightly hesitant. But he can handle it. He's the hero, after all!
Bloody Revelations     As George anticipates, the Brass Leviathan (is it really fair to call it brass, honestly?) pays just another piece of floating junk no mind. With no significant energy signatures, and no motion against the current, he doesn't stand out in the least, and the massive, beastly warship goes cruising past him with only its broad and forcefully turbulent wake to show for it, nearly punting him away, and then almost sucking him into the turbines on the backswell.

    When he finally gets in and grapples onto one of those turbines however, ending up on a circular, golden rim that surrounds the exposed propellers within, somewhat reminiscent of a modern turbofan design, he finds something fairly unusual. When the Brass Leviathan dives to an absolutely dangerous level, and the Manse opens up a section of its black jade exterior to allow it through, its turbine propulsion shuts down and it reverts purely to some kind of passive, Essence-based water traversal, allowing him the chance to clamber through the enormous blades, but what he encounters within isn't connected to anything. There is no sign of access paneling, no engineering corridor, no space for damage control personnel, or even much of anything but a cramped and narrow chamber filled with gears and crystal braids to clamber around, utterly disconnected from the hull. By all accounts, it seems utterly impossible for any hypothetical crew to do anything with the turbines without climbing out of the ship and swimming into it as he just did, which is patently absurd.

    Its docking position isn't exactly drydock either. The Brass Leviathan ends up stopping in a stadium-sized, partially flooded chamber, with a giant 'pool' taking up half, and the actual 'docks', mostly comprised of ornately tiled jade and bronze floor piled high with still-abundant stockpiles of ancient materials, taking up the other. It doesn't exit the water at any point, though the complicated water locks behind it obviate all pressure concerns from outside. Resting there, the docking chamber comes to live with large numbers of spindly automata, crawling and rolling out of charging stations to start looking over the thing and assess potential damage. Some immediately grab orichalcum-bolted crates of standard maintenance parts, oblivious to the early cycle. At no point does any sort of hatch, command deck, or egress ramp open up or make itself obvious. Even the maintenance robots only crawl around on its hull, without ever entering.
Azure Armature "Staren, you are possessed of scanning apparati - I'll scan the upper third, and you should take the middle. With George in the turbines, perhaps he'll find the artisan's maintenance. There must be some form of entrance, bridge, control center, or other form. There must. The data doesn't make sense..."

She gestures to Dog. "Your water capability is the best - mind the weapons, but check the eyes and any 'gill' areas, I'd suggest. Eyes are a classic view-port area, and if there is an access area there, you are capable of breaking or prying your way in."

Armature extends her right hand out, a digital display hovering in front of her as she starts D-Buster scanning the massive creature for places to enter - or even a layout.
Wandering Dog Blue's plan is way better than Wandering Dog's, which was 'get myself eaten and see what happens'. "Sounds good. Let's go!" Swimming through the area, he plants his feet against the first solid object he gets, and then propels himself with a burst of essence, moving to rapidly swim towards the eyes of the Brass Leviathan. He'll probably get spotted in the process, but his goal is to hopefully find that they are in fact a viewing point, and then decide what to do from there, which is probably 'break them open'.

Though, the giant cannons aren't entirely ignored. As Wandering Dog swims, he does so in a fashion to try and avoid from being direct center of any of them, so that he's not easily blasted out of the way.
Staren     "If it's not entirely autonomous... maybe it's warped space? Like the inside isn't /inside/, it's some kind of pocket dimension you need a portal to access?" He can at least scan the essence flows for anything that looks like a door or generally suspicious, though.
Starbound Flotilla     "Alright there fishface. What's your deal?" George mutters, peering around for panels and access points. "You're a big guy. If I take this out, will you die?" He reaches for a single gear, and tries to pop it out with a quick burst of assisted strength and mechanical expertise. It's not meant to deal damage, obviously. He slips back in the turbine, trying to see how the obvious, easily-detected damage gets handled. Are there repair drone ports? Some kind of weird, metal-manipulating repair system? He's gotta find a way in somehow, and there's gotta be a way to work on something as critical as turbines out here.

    Of course, he'd follow in any repair drone if he can provoke one. If he can't, he's gonna go for the next best options. Looking for viewports, access panels, or similar suchlike, /near/ the turbine. There's gotta be something somewhere along the body of this thing, you can't have a warship and not have a way for crew to get in and out. Right?
Bloody Revelations     Azure Armature starts the scanning process first, and very quickly finds even more oddities to add to the pile: as far as she can tell, the Brass Leviathan has almost no hollow space in it at all. The 'routes' through its lengthy, serpentine body are barely large enough to crawl through at their biggest, and don't connect to each other for an uninterrupted journey, ruling them out as accessways. Most of its length is dedicated extreme numbers of power conduits and what actually appear to be primitive (by her standards anyways) Charm arrays. As far as she can ascertain, there doesn't seem to be proper support structure for a scratch-built Animating Intelligence, like the Manse has. The only significantly hollowed space is inside the head, starting behind the eyes and reaching the base of its 'skull'. Staren's alternative scans find the entire thing radiates an extremely high amount of Essence, but without any central source to it, simply circulating the immense amounts of energy through its body like a bloodstream. There appears to be no reactor, even a weird magical one, powering the thing at all, and no spots for Hearthstones like what frequently power Lookshy's bigger weapons. It just kind of Has Essence.

    When George wrenches one of the smaller gears out, crystal braiding snaps out to attempt to retrieve the errant cog and pull it back to twist it into place. If he intends to play keepaway with it for long enough, a rolling bronze ball plunges from the balcony above and sprouts spider legs, clambering into the turbine section to check it out, where George is not in an optimal position to deal with anything like a hypothetical cutting torch, though it might be telling that it isn't bringing a replacement gear with it. It's difficult to tell what purpose the gear actually has, since logically nothing like this actually runs on clockworks.

    Wandering Dog floats out in front of the Leviathan's massive head, easily large enough to inhale him by accident, were it a living creature. Getting close to the glassy green orbs of its eyes, he finds them completely opaque, with no suggestion of being connected to anything behind like submarine glass would be. They're too far ahead of the hollow space Azure detects to be connected. He can, however, glimpse deeper into the mouth, where there at first appears to be a second set of jaws buried deep inside, almost buried in nozzles and emitters that cluster around it, but which appear to be sealed shut to be watertight, rather than merely decorative. If he decides to venture in to check on it, the machine gives no sign that it even acknowledges him, until it suddenly slams its gigantic jaws around him in an incredibly deliberate, ambush predatory-esque bite fit to chop a trireme in half.

    Secretly, it is paying attention.
Wandering Dog So the eyes aren't the entrance...but there's something in the mouth. A door? Wandering Dog decides that this is probably where the cockpit is if it's in the head, and he's confident enough to just swim there.

And almost get crushed in half. As the jaws slam down, the martial artist tenses up, and moves to swim forward as fast as he can, thinking of a mouth and how it's still open deeper inside, and will get him closer to his objective. To assist himself in doing so, essence flows through his legs, suddenly launching him at the surfaces of the mouth, which he propels off, basically zig-zagging against the inside of the Brass Leviathan's teeth at rapid paces straight for the hatch, and to move and try and open it if he can get to it.

Dragon-Blooded Essence flows through Wandering Dog, which he worries might piss off the giant Realm-hating dragon, but hopefully there's nothing it can do from /inside/, right?
Staren     It continues to make little sense. Staren can't make heads or tails of this with his limited knowledge of essence... maybe they should go back and search the manse again for records. Videos of this thing in use would be great.

    And then Wandering Dog either just found a way in or is going to be very difficult to free... Staren supposes he'll at least stay to see if they need to try and blast through its mouth now...
Starbound Flotilla     George lets the little thing go about its business. It's becoming increasingly clear he planned to infiltrate a warship, when rather, this has a design that's more like a personal craft, grown to gargantuan size. He's used to something that's like a large bus being the larger end for a personal craft, something warship-sized fulfilling that role is insane to imagine.

    His approach was a bit of a scattershot, but he can't fault the thing for being what it is and in doing so avoiding his infiltration. it sounds like the massive thing is quite busy with eating Wandering Dog -- or something like that, anyway -- and George decides to use that distraction to get moving right back out of that turbine. Using his Dog-endowed water motion and some clever grappling-hook work, he launches forward along the underside of the creature, intending to sneak forward and zip to a point around the rear of its jaw. He plants his feet there and launches, as best he can underwater, a pair of hooks that are meant to swing around and latch to the jaw at the front, slipping between gnashing teeth. George is gonna try to slow that down a little bit by tugging from below, trying to give Wandering Dog a little spare room to work!
Azure Armature The whole situation is confusing - and entirely Unexpected. This staggers Armature as her scans reveal only a small open area in the entire section she scanned, entirely unlike a warship.

"It is as if they created a titanic, respiring creature instead of a war machine. A great beast, or living Process..."

She thinks back, to Juggernaut, which had the Necrotech equivalant of access routes and the like...

"Built into a living being." She stands up, dismissing the display and drawing out a knife with her left hand, gesturing at Staren. "Staren! ..." She raises her voice, a small rakish grin. "Improvise something. I'm going to get Wandering Dog."

With a pop, she disappears, to get into the mouth of the creature. This is a terrible idea.

Worse yet is her glowing, circuit-lined right hand, which she immediately tries to slap on the tongue or side of the mouth as she appears.

Because if it's alive, then it may have scan data usable by her own bullshit supertech weapon.
Bloody Revelations     George scoots out of the turbine hold just in time. Kicking off, he swoops right under the crawling automaton just before it reaches, which swivels after him and flashes some kind of red light, but he's out of reach and out of sight before it does anything. Firing his grapnels, he manages to swing fully around to very fore of the craft, entangling its massive golden fangs in his wires and using his suit's power to try and hold back the gargantuan bite, even if only just a little, which allows Wandering Dog just the time necessary to slip through, with its teeth practically grazing the backs of his heels, and the water pressure propelling him further forward.

    So aggravated, the Brass Leviathan ceases pretending to be dumb and dead in the water, and begins violently thrashing, curling and twining in its water dock and hurling George against the sides of the deep pool by his cables, not to mention slamming and pinballing Wandering Dog around in its mouth. After a prolonged period of blunt and violent rattling, the sound of a deep, rasping inhalation can be heard from somewhere deep inside the machine, even for those well outside its mouth, despite the obvious lack of air or breathing thereof.

    A second after the sound reaches its climax, white hot coruscating lightning spews forth from the back of its 'throat', with Wandering Dog caught dead in the way. It isn't some kind of internal defense mechanism though; a plume of thundering, supercharged Essence lightning escapes even through its closed teeth, blasting into the dry portion of the dock and raking across the platform in a chaotic storm of random arcing bolts. Staren can't make heads or tails of where the Essence is coming from or which weapon is firing it; it just sort of happens.

    The Alchemical Exalted is in for it either way, so teleporting into the maw is only somewhat more dangerous than being on dry ground. She's just in time to be there with Wandering Dog at ground zero just before the thundercrack goes off, albeit not quite as in the way as he is caught when it fires. When she scans it with her Buster, instead of tech plans for weaponry, what she gets is a library of Creation's more fundamental, individual and intuitive magic.

    Some of that is immediately put to use. When the Brass Leviathan goes wild, the dock floor begins to flash with red light and blare a screeching klaxon from brass pipes in the walls, beginning to flood the area and raise the doors. As more water comes surging in, water-aspected Essence totally unrelated to Wandering Dog surges into the salty current, whipping it into a raging whirlpool, complete with rapidly forming stormclouds and hurricane winds, absurdly cramped into the indoor space. The giant serpent turns around and heads back for open water, not about to remain inside when an ambush is detected, but no sooner does it get to the airlocks than they suddenly cease their cycling, and begin to close again, locking the colossal mechanical creature in.
Bloody Revelations     The brass pipes cut out their warning and instead play the broken and static-marred voice of the badly shattered Animating Intelligence of the Manse, simultaneously flat and artificial as well as wild and erratic. "EMERGENCY FLOODING PROCEDURES ABORT-- It's already inside-- UNAUTHORIZED RELEASE OF SAFETY-- inside me and inside you and-- LOCKDOWN ENGAGED. ALL PERSONNEL-- oh gods save us it was there all alon-- ARE NOT TO LEAVE THE FACILITY UNTIL-- get it out get it out get it out get it out-- DELIBERATIVE ACCESS CODE ACCEPTED AND AUTHENTICATED; PERMISSIONS OVERRIDDEN-- can't you hear it? the sound of water when you-- TOTAL ISOLATION PROTOCOL IN EFFECT."

    The Brass Leviathan seems somehow surprised, and begins slamming forcefully against the airlock doors, attempting to break them down via brute force. After confirming it isn't an error, but someone elsewhere in the Manse somehow forcing the system, it turns its flank to the airlock, and three of the six giant lenses flash in its side, quickly warming up to a blinding blue-white glow.
Staren     "Agh!" Staren gets essence-lightning blasted! His armor withstands it, but is this going to turn into a fight?! Staren backs away, trying to see if Wandering Dog made it out okay.

    And then there's the announcement. And the leviathan clearly gets /mad/. A fight it will be, then...

    A moment later, though, Staren realizes something else: It didn't just /understand the announcement/, it /inferred that the manse had been comprimised/. It's intelligent!

    "Hey!" Staren shouts. "We didn't realize you weren't just a vessel!" Even if it DOES have a pilot, if they've been in there since the First Age it may as well BE their body at this point. "Listen, we want your help to stop the Skullstone Archipelago, and the demon pirates, and... how much do you even KNOW about what's happened over the last few millenia?"

    Perhaps they can bargain with it as an intelligent being!

    Although, if the fact that they're working with Bloody Revelations ever comes out, this proooobably isn't going to work ._.
Wandering Dog As the Brass Leviathan hurls its mouth around, Wandering Dog moves to try and control his water mobility, attempting to both swim and leap off the surfaces to avoid getting too battered by it. However, when that white-hot essence comes flying forward, there's a distinct look of 'oh shit' on his face. This is probably going to fry him alive, with how point-blank it is. Only a second to react, will he do it?

Hell yeah he will. "Hraaaah!" As the lightning slams against Wandering Dog, watery black and blue essence circles around him, forming into a massive swirling personal barrier, sort of like a whirlpool shield, excepting it's more of a spinning dragon in shape. As the lightning hits it, the barrier reduces most of it, though some of it still breaks through, burning Wandering Dog's skin and injuring him. But he's safe from the brunt, and alive.

But when it ends, the massive swirling barrier doesn't just go away, as Wandering Dog sees the hard way. The barrier blows back, exploding against Wandering Dog and injuring him with a massive blast of energy. The physical wounds aren't the worst, but it's clearly hurting him as he has to force himself to stifle what is probably a very painful scream, and stops moving for several seconds. And then, suddenly, Wandering Dog jerks his body in Azure Armature's direction.

"H-hey! Could use a lift out of this maw, get me inside the cockpit so I can teach this thing a lesson, yeah?!" The Westerner is both angry and in a /load/ of pain from using that technique.
Starbound Flotilla     George is practically smeared on the bottom of the thing by its flailing. He expected infiltration!! Augh!! He should have brought the Starstrider, or /any of his other Flotilla members/! He lets go and flings away as fast as he can, then fires off microthrusters and surges up to the surface of the water, breaking it like a dolphin doing a fancy maneuver. Well, he can't deal with this thing, but at the very least he /can/ deal with what he's already infiltrated! He's not about to let this thing escape, and so to buy a little extra time for whatever intense glowy energy things are going on inside that mouth to resolve, he pulls a pair of heavy hull-repair grenades and slings them for the airlock, trying to give it extra, ablating layers of armor to block it off.
Azure Armature Armature is riding by the seat of her pants, and that's bad for her. She is an actor that strikes with a perfect plan, a single swift stroke of a knife, in and out with a flash and a smirk. An extended operation can be planned for - but a direct fight with a gigantic living weapon-creature wasn't what she had kitted herself out for. Stealth infiltration, sure. Disassembly of components and skill at creating an ingress? Sure.

Frontal assault?

Hell to the no.

Armature's head fills with useless life-form data, which she mentally dismisses as the lightning blast fills her eyes. Both hands come forward, summoning a cone of barrier walls to ablate the overwhelming essence, and each is shortly after blown away. She could flicker out of existance - but a sustained attack over the period of the Brass Leviathan would take specialized defenses she simply doesn't have. She fries, convulsing in the water as the head thrashes about, causing her to hang limp for a few seconds. She looks... different, in the water, lines on her face like segment parts running up her brow from her eyes, and down her cheeks and neck. When her eyes snap open, they glow with a soft inner light, and her skin has a strange blie 'glitter airbrush' effect to it, from what's visible.

She blinks around the area seemingly at randim, before appearing in the water at Dog's side. "Control Center. Location unsecured. Good luck." She notes, a crackling portal hemmed in hard-light circuitry irising next to her before the operative grabs Dog by the shoulder and bodily throws him through.

That'll be fun!

Armature blinks back to 'dry land', mentally cataloging data as she then blinks closer to George, another portal irising near her. "George, Staren, this is not a fight we win! Inside, quickly - I've sent Dog ahead!"
Bloody Revelations     Staren's earnest efforts to plead with the monolithic, glittering gold sea dragon seem to go to waste. The storm only intensifies around him without response, threatening to sweep him into the air even in his heavy armour. Worse still, it seems the crackling lightning that races through the almost pitch-black indoors stormclouds is aiming for him directly, because he is then summarily assault with further bolts of electricity from the weaponized, magically induced storm all around. It seems to consider him absolutely beneath speaking to.

    George's hull repair grenades thankfully can't miss the titanic slabs of chiseled and engraven jade he throws them at, even with the crazy storm winds whipping up inside, and they spread and harden their payload without issue. With Wandering Dog and Azure Armature briefly incapacitated however, it isn't much longer before one of the Essence cannons in the Brass Leviathan's side fully warms up, and then a pillar of brilliant, scorching, pure white light unlike any First Age weapon seen so far, bursts from the gigantic spherical gem, and a spears straight through the hundred ton door of solid magical material, instantly obliterating a section large enough to drive a train through, and turning twice that area into red-hot molten slag that slowly sags into the now-steaming water.

    The sheer destructive force is so utterly obscene that it's only the skeleton of the rull repair material that even webs the first set of airlock doors together at that point, crumbling and burning away, whereupon the coiling serpent turns a few degrees more to bring the other two cannons to bear, apparently easily capable of blasting through a war Manse with raw power alone, due to whatever lunatic designed guns this grotesquely out of practical scope. It's promising if they can get a hold of it, sure, but . . .

    It doesn't seem that it'll be quite that simple. Azure Armature's scans of the interior are accurate, and already inside the mouth, it only takes a fizz-pop-and-a-'port to drop Wandering Dog straight into the hollow space she had correctly suspected to be a cockpit. Of sorts. Wandering Dog falls right into a luxurious bridge chair meant for sitting back and giving orders in, with no instrumentation at hand whatsoever. Looking around, he is enclosed in a crystal-paneled sphere that displays everything going on outside as if the surrounding machine were completely transparent, save for the grid of orichalcum between curved screens. There are control panels, but they are sparse affairs covered in Old Realm glyphs in lieu of switches, and out of arms' reach.

    He barely has time to look around his glorified passenger seat, before the intangible image of a coiling elemental dragon appears before him, large enough to fill the entire fore of the cabin. To add mystery to mystery, the projection isn't of a water dragon at all, but of a storm dragon crackling with arcs of electricity and swathed in curling wisps of clouds, unusual only for its dead, lifeless eyes, showing only completely blank, solid gold, rather than any hint of recognition or emotion. Only now does the Brass Leviathan speak, but only to him, the problem inside the cockpit, in a booming, feminine voice, which is believable for just a fraction of an instant, so fleeting as to be easy to believe it was only imagined, before becoming completely dead and flat. "I- require authentication from Deliberative tactical command codes before proceeding. Failure to provide at minimum the name, rank, identification, and orders of your Solar commanding officer will be met with immediate termination."
Bloody Revelations     At least, it doesn't come to that level of disaster. The sheer amount of commotion inevitably draws the presence of the one that some might rather forget is here, or at least, one of her darling friends. Before the second and third cannons fire, the temperature plummets, the water runs black and iridescent, icy mist fogs up metal surfaces, and then the gelatinous tendrils, translucent fingers, and glittering cilia of that dreadful, twisted, perversely mesmerizing /thing/ reach through the floor and the back wall, phasing through the solid surfaces and latching tightly to the Brass Leviathan. Within seconds, it is thoroughly tangled in the choking embrace of the bizarre Hekatonkhire only somewhat smaller than it is, as if in some classical painting involving a battle between sea beasts.

    Where its iridescent tentacles and eerily human hands grip the gleaming orichalcum hull, the lights in the Leviathan's systems begin to sputter and fail, starting with the dimming of the no doubt costly Essence cannons, and after a minute of prolonged thrashing, even the cockpit flickers and goes dark, as the cold embrace barely explained dead thing called 'Nilih' gradually steals the life from it. When the Hekatonkhire's central mass, with its bizarre dual female light-and-shadow core finally emerges, the Brass Leviathan has been effectively forced into sleep mode, as its rate of Essence production and loss stabilize into a minimum power state. Where it sinks to the dock bed, the ghost wrapped around it begins the unsettling and incomprehensible behaviour of gently caressing it with its far too numerous hands, almost cradling the machine like a sleeping child.

    More importantly, the escape attempt is stopped for the moment, and the dock automata are busy swarming over the horrifically damaged airlock doors now, desperately attempting to restore structural integrity ASAP. There are no 'command codes' helpfully forthcoming from the surroundings, but at the very least, the elusive (and insanely deadly) Brass Leviathan is secured, and not about to go anywhere, even if it can't actually be used for the time being.