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Zwei     The scanning . . . sphere, seems to read Arthur just fine, little pulses of light going down all of its visible branching neurons with a sound something like water trickling and legs skittering. It won't open up until the others square up or leave, until Reyes just telemechanically override it. It's not a pleasant affair though. Somehow, interfacing with the thing feels . . . slimy. Like Reyes' hand comes away coated in a thin layer of goo, except it's like his brain instead.

    The night-fluid drains from the elaborate, whirling etching in the door, compelled by its own bizarro gravity to flow back into the walls, and the rounded door, set into the wall two inches off the ground, splits into multiple pieces and retreats into the frame. It's pitch black in the room beyond, and the *reek* of many different kinds of blood washes outwards, apparently just fresh enough to have a rotting stench rather than a stale one.

    The light doesn't actually extend beyond the door frame, only revealing blackness when shone through, but, well, Staren's drone already scouted the reason why.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur stumbles back at the stench, holding his sleeve over his face. "Ghhh! Hhhh. Fuck, it /reeks/." He says, uneasy. He's never good with corpses and gore, and this sure smells like a lot of it. "What the fuck is--" He turns to Staren. "What, this is a /thing/ and not an /event/ or a /place/ or whatever?" He brandishes the broom in a defensive stance, ready for it to lash out at him. "YO, HOMIE! Show those SLAMS to SOMEONE ELSE, dog! We got BUSINESS up in this bitch, WHAT'S YOUR DAMAGE? Step off!" Unless the thing responds, he's going to start off with jabs and prods, and escalate to full-on high-intensity fulldoorway gravitational pressure to try to clear to the next area.
Septette Arcubielle      'Squaring up' is not something which comes naturally to Septette. She knows how to intimidate people well enough, having seen the indirect silhouette of that art in the mannerisms of terrible eldritch things- but a sensor? She awkwardly puts her hands on her hips, pushes out her chest, and revs up her core with a high-pitched whine and a ruddy glow that shines through her shawl, all while trying not to look like the embarrassed kid in a family photo.

     Thank god that they have a monster to fight after that. She's all too eager to get into it: as soon as she gets an opening around Arthur, she'll throw a trio of arcing lightning bolts that curve just around him- directed by subtle distortions in the air- to strike at the dark shape blocking the doorway! "Lowell! Back up!"
Reyes     Reyes is NOT so sure this is a great idea. Force this thing to override a safety when they aren't even sure what the safety's for? Screams bad idea. But people seem to want it so...

    So he does so, and afterwards, REELS BACK step after step with both hands quickly going to the sides of his head and whacking at the helmet. "Aughblhr... system... feels.... all kinds of wrong. Yeck. Never thought any tele-interface would feel WRONG... am I okay...?" He's just gonna stand there for a bit, getting a handle on himself and briefly meditating to make sure there's nothing WEIRD going on in his head, psionically.

    "Man I'm getting a -really- bad feeling about this." He mumbles while looking down at the ground, having not even yet looked into the chamber at what has occured. Given his helmet, he isn't smelling the stench at all.
Staren     The door opens! And its guardian... just keeps blocking the way. And the light.

    It doesn't block the stench though. "Eugh..." Staren holds his breath for a moment as clean air cycles into the suit, then takes a deep breath. "...Ahhh. ...It's not attacking, but it's not letting us through, either." He turns expectantly towards Arthur... who starts fighting it. "Uhh, are you sure that's a good idea?" If it fights back, he joins in with the beam cannons and the RAISER rifle on a lower setting; If it just continues blocking the way, he tries to send the drone out to see if it will actually stop something nonviolent.
Zwei     It attempt at being a sneaky cave mouth predator ruined by Staren's pesky drone hovering out of the . . . whatever those little arterial shafts are for, the hulking thing filling the doorway lurches out of the way with a gurgling bellow when multiple lightning bolts strike it directly in center and a blast of gravity detaches it from the frame with a loud, sucking pop, leaving mostly the scent of ozone and burnt flesh behind as it thuds wetly against the opposite wall.

    Its game found out, the *thing* pries itself from the green metal, leaving a sticky imprint behind, and surges forward through the door again, colliding with Arthur and attemping to simply bowl him over and under it, where hundreds of stabbing hooks and acidic goo will simply trample all over him as it keeps going, dragging him along for the ride where it tackles Septette next, shifting aside some of its (tentacles? flesh?) mass to produce a pair of wickedly hooked, bony sickle claws, and bring them down on both her shoulders with a sudden snap movement like a firing hammer. Some hidden gland sprays a heavy dose of armour melting acid on Staren and Reyes behind her, given it being almost four feet taller than she is.

    The sounds of movement, loud and irregular and multitudinous, come from further down.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur backs up as much as he can when Septette orders it, almost on impulse, but it's not fast enough. It slams into his body and tumbles him back. "AAAAAUGH WHAT THE FUCK, IT'S GOT ME HOOKED!!" He shouts, trying to wrench himself off. His flesh sears and simmers, and there's the stench of burnt meat on the air. "Ghhhhh...! Fine! You wanna bring sick fires, motherfucker, I've got some sick fires for you!" His whole body suddenly burns with starlight, as his outer layer undergoes fusion. "You want a piece?! You want to take a fucking piece?! Let's do it! Get some you gross fucking blob!!"

    He tries to wrap both arms around its morphic form. "Come on! You wanted the heat!! TAKE IT!" Arthur begins to chaotically shift gravity around, in circles. Those near or around the beast may find themselves caught up in the process! His intent is to slam against the wall, then shift again, and slam against the ceiling, then back onto the floor, into a wall, and so on... Intending to wrestle, burn, and disorient it enough that he can catch it off guard with gravity directed back into the quarantine zone, keeping it from getting out!
Septette Arcubielle      The bony hooks come down- and Septette's arm comes up to meet them, bone striking ceramic with a queasy reverberation. Soft flesh is amorphous, and any vital organs are unidentified. Hard body parts are difficult to manifest on short notice. Conclusion: attempt to declaw it, then go for the kill.

     First she grabs the tips of both organic scythes with her free hand. A moment later, a curved blade erupts from her blocking forearm like a switchblade unfolding, but with the sharp edge already facing outward. Depending on the amorphous creature's structural integrity, it might either cleave right through the bone or tear the claws out of its body.

     Of course, this is all before she achieves LIFTDOFF. A moment's gravitational uncertainty gives way to an uncanny dance of calculated momentum as she tries to maneuver defensively in the distorted space. "Damn it, Arthur! Don't TOUCH that!"
Staren     Wait, it was trying to EAT THEM? That's a disturbing realization, but now the fight is on! "Arthur!" He calls out, bombarding the monster with energy blasts. Its acid spit attack is a surprise -- he's a little slow to dodge, acid eating into his armor on one side. "Damn it..."

    On the bright side, he's already holding what is potentially a very big weapon -- he doesn't have to switch weapons or anything! He turns the RAISER up from '556 NATO' level to as high as he thinks he can get without making shockwaves that would endanger his allies, with enough penetration to not bounce off bone claws.

    And then he just starts emptying its power reserve into the beast with a series of medium-power shots, hoping to fill it full of holes!
Reyes     And just like that, all HELL breaks loose. Reyes comes to his senses of checking over his mind just in time to -- "OH SH--" SPLAAAAAAASH!

    A whole half of Reyes's body gets DRENCHED in the horrible acid stuff, before he even has a chance to raise his Armor of Ithan. The acid's sheer force sends him staggering backwards, melting chunks of the ceramic armor and RUINING a good portion of the intricate circuit-glyphwork.

    After a few seconds, far too late, the remaining enchantments flare to life, projecting a half-intact blue wireframe shielding layer that's sputtering and wavering in its glow intensity.

    Reyes curses, LOUDLY, but if there's a saving grace here... it's that the wing pack is intact. The skeletal structure unfolds, then blazes cerulean as it fills with a feathery texturing stretching many feet higher than Reyes's head. The wings flap slowly, taking Reyes a few feet off the ground and no longer concerned about things like balance or stepping in acid.

    And he finally notices the situation Arthur's in. The young man's heart starts pounding in panic!

    "I -knew- this was a bad idea...!"

    Too late now, though. "Damn, I didn't come with heavy weapons..."

    Which means the best course of action is... well, actually, run. But he can't. Not with allies in trouble!

    So instead, he ducks low in the air, kicks his feet out behind him and WHOOOOOOOSH. Swoops in towards the monster!

    His Techno-Wizard energy saber's yoinked straight from a pouch and flies into his right hand, while a silvery six-shooter flies to his left. The blade emitter ignites with a scorching heat, orange-white flames erupting from it with the fury of dragonbreath. The pistol... well, on approach, he pulls the trigger again and again, but there's no bang? No sound of a shot. Only a little sizzle, and a ripple traveling through the air...

    Those bullets, though, have the power to PUNCH HOLES THROUGH 21st CENTURY TANK ARMOR, being constructs of pure telekinesis.

    And as he zips in, Reyes attempts to STAB THAT BLADE INTO THE CREATURE and DRAG IT ALONG as he flies, hoping he can just rip it open with the scorching weapon!
Zwei     Whatever that creature is, it must be regretting getting into a game of grapple chicken with Arthur Lowell of all people. His body surface bursting into fusion energy begins melting through it right away, burning its lower body into so much sludge, and then so much steam, as it shrieks and bubbles, slowly losing inches of height as if sinking into quicksand. Septette's forearm blades flip out and sever both its bony extrusions at the base, twirling into the room on circular arcs of thick purple blood and clattering against the tables.

    Multiple shots from the TK revolver punch into its soft bulk, jerking and rocking it back over and over to give Reyes the clear line to swoop in and carve its hooked appendages right off Arthur, freeing him up to lift it up and start ragdolling it around the room like a shrieking toy, smashing several of the sample tanks in the process of beating it to a bloody, disoriented pulp. The final shot from the ghetto RAISER rifle seals the deal, blowing a massive, steaming hole straight through its center of mass, leaving a perfect circle punched out of its 'most of it' and glowing cherry red as all its internal surfaces are glassed.

    The blood soaked, sticky theatre floor is accessible beyond, as is the long set of 'stairs' down, not so much discrete rectangular steps as a winding, back and forth helix of crossing ramps, for god knows what kind of legs, littered with empty vials and broken equipment. Papery buzzing and clunking footsteps resound up the dark, downward passage, though traveling down it for any length, one can see the sickly teal glow at the end, and feel the air thickening like gaseous jelly. There are those arterial vents all over the walls now, high in the still-circular architecture.
Septette Arcubielle      The little killbot rolls her shoulders, smooths over her cloak, and boils off the purple blood on her armblade fastidiously before stepping into the surgical room beyond. If nobody else is going to cremate the amorphous abomination, Septette conjures up a small drone bristling with arcane energy to 'babysit' the thing until they're done here. She doesn't trust anything that's survived so long to conveniently stay dead.

     Absent anything particularly eyecatching in the surgical room, she attempts to wrest the point position away from Arthur as they head towards the staircase, subtly urging him to get behind her dammit. Her heavy footfalls pause for a moment. "Does anybody else hear that?"
Staren     It's... down? Faster than expected. Staren looks over those gathered, but everyone seems to be as much okay as one can be after getting surprise attacked by a monster. He puts the RAISER rifle away and starts to walk ahead, though he stops when the air thickens, pulling back to see if whatever it is is stuck to his suit, and also deploying drones to see if the tiny ventilation(?) tunnels are also full of air-jelly.

    When Septette asks that, he freezes. "Hear what? The kinda... buzzing and clunking noise?"
Arthur Lowell     Arthur takes a moment to catch his breath. His Aspect bar recovers slowly, his Health Vial does not. He snaps his fingers, summoning a small handheld sun, then amps its power up a few times and condenses its emissions to a sweeping beam. While throwing this thing into the sun isn't a good idea, Arthur intends to make sure that quarantine is preserved, and things are decontaminated; for what it's worth, he does take that sort of thing seriously. He sweeps high-intensity ultraviolet radiation around, scouring the room of potential disaster vectors. The presence of blood and the absence of bodies concerns him, but he lets it go, as long as there's no /corpses/.

    "Hey." He calls out, to the tech-savvy duo. "One'a you able to snag DNA off homeboy over there? I'm... not seeing any bodies here, so I..." His bravado breaks slightly, before he shakes his head. "Just, y'know." He finishes up his sweep and starts heading towards the light and the staircase, and-- "Hey, what? Aw." He actually /pouts/ a little, but gets back in line. After a moment, he says, "Yeah, sounds like moves, not the kinda moves of big and blobby there. Sounds like someone's working on something, or they been walking a damn long while."
Reyes     DOWN goes the monster. Reyes.. lands in the closest spot of not-covered-in-acid that he can find and immediately sets about pulling some gadget from his pouch that looks like a laser pointer. He aims it at the splashes of acid that remain on his armor and the goop's burned away. Afterwards, he takes stock of the armor's damage...

    His left leg is nearly exposed, and took mild scorching. The left torso of the armor's full of little holes, and the enchantments are ruined. The stuff ALMOST got to his belt. "... aw no... no no... this armor's totally RUINED now."

    He takes a minute to cast a spell to smooth out some of the areas, accomplished by turning the relevant portions of armor to a putty-like consistency and MOLDING away the holes SOMEHOW.... but it's of minimal help.

    The freaky thing is, that acid, which should probably have melted a leg if it touched it... hasn't melted Reyes's leg? There's just a burn which he treated. A burn that's slowly-but-visibly healing. Reyes isn't looking at it though. Instead...

    Instead, he adjusts his helmet, looks at Arthur....

    And uses telekinesis to send a few little bottles and a knife to try and stow some samples of the creature. Assuming the sample containers don't melt or anything!

    "Yeah. Just. Override the safety. Open the door. No idea what's on the other side making all the noise. GREAT idea...."
Zwei     Floating knife and bottle surgery quickly and efficiently carves neat little shavings off the oozing, smoking monster for later. Sweeping curtains of high intensity radiation thoroughly sterilize the area; it's very unlikely even highly alien bacteria survives direct, actual exposure to a sun up close. Staren's scouting finds that the 'vents' are where the air is thickest and heaviest, the oxygen and nitrogen bound together with some unknown extra gas. It doesn't appear to be toxic (at least not immediately), but it feels like breathing in runny soup, and the air itself tints greenish, rather than scattering blue.

    Nearing the bottom, they emerge into a much larger chamber, completely spherical from top to bottom and awkward to walk on. A flat ring has been cut all the way around it, making it something of a hub with a surrounding 'walkway' that leads to many 'spokes' of passages. The doors are all either left open, or broken down, exposing views into vast tanks of not only night-liquid, but varieties of fuels and solvents, what must be engineering sections dominated by still-functioning holographics, storage rooms lined with pill-shaped capsules, rest quarters *drenched* in blood, various other laboratories for actual study purposes, and tall tanks of finally stereotypical variety, suspending various organisms in fluid stasis, ice cold on thermals.

    The center of the room, however, is dominated by a 'core' of pulsating teal light shining through a sphere of pulsating teal tissue, webbed over itself, but not fully enclosed, spreading sticky tendrils to anchor it to the walls, floors, and ceiling, like something that should be microscopic and inside a body. It throbs like the beating of a heart, albeit with a strange triple rhythm instead of double, and exudes low levels of radiation, as well as glittering green 'spores' of some variety all around the spherical depression.

    They aren't alone, as presumed, but what they're with is perhaps unexpected. A number of beings are there which were likely once human beings, now with translucent skin and flesh like jelly, exposing bright red bones and webs of purple blood vessels and hair-thin silver nerves --their faces without mouths or noses and their eyes blank and luminous green --their fingers long, triple jointed and webbed, and their feet split into slithering snakes. Five of them are set . . . somehow 'maintaining' the pulsing thing dominating the room, a few with alien tools, some with flesh samples cultivated from who knows what, and one with a meter of arctic ice being inserted like a fuel rod, with several more still in refrigerated glass tubes scattered amongst the empty ones at its feet.

    As soon as the party enters, they turn on them, burbling unintelligible noises between each other, and drawing oddly circular, hook-shaped sidearms similar to the ones from the security station, synchronously firing on the group with concentrated, lashing and writhing beams of green and white, crackling like lightning, squirming like a snake, and flaying their targets by disintegrating them from the outside in.
Staren     Man, this place is weird.

    It's the kind of thing you SHOULD encounter more often in an infinite multiverse -- devices and structures of alien design, built by beings that think differently and experience a different sensorium, that will require careful examination to determine the workings of and yet whose purpose -- if the concept even applies -- remains inscrutable.

    Staren takes it all in -- and sees humanoid figures that react to their presence! "Hey," he offers a friendly wave, "what are--" he starts to speak, hoping the translation effect will apply, but then they shoot!

    Staren activates his forcefield in time, but then dodges the wrong way, jumping right into a beam -- the forcefield behaves strangely, layers just shutting off and the remaining ones flickering as the system recalibrates, the disintigration effect eating away both at the field and at the emitter discs on his chestplate!

    Staren tries to lean out of the beam, drop his forcefield, return fire with the beam cannons, then re-engage the field and run for cover. If his allies don't swiftly finish off the threat he's going to need to think of a better tactic. Like indirect missiles or something. That sounds good...
Septette Arcubielle      It can't really be said that Septette is surprised by the lashing green projectiles: she's subtly maneuvering even before the red-jelly creatures show hostile intent, and breaks into a sprint towards the nearest one with her arm-blade drawn as soon as they lift their weapons. It's more that, by the time she's analyzed the serpentine beams' trajectories, there's no more time to maneuver in: she subtly twists to bend her vital components out of the way, but it still superficially scorches the insides of her ceramic plates.

     She retaliates by feinting with her arm-blade, then swinging with an almost prosaically simple punch at the closest humanoid's chest to see what happens when its vitals are distorted. The silver nerves, in particular, catch her attention: "It's the cognitohazard from the ice! Be careful!"
Reyes     Reyes is kind of grouchy as adventurers go, but on the other hand... this freakish alien place just wrecked his environmental protection. He's got reason to be worried about contamination! Too late now, though...

    "Some kind of... biological experiments from Hades." is Reyes's guess at some of the creepier things to be seen as the group moves along... "Using living stuff instead of machines for tools, maybe...?" He can only guess, really, and he's incredibly unhappy about having to smell all of this, but he keeps trucking on with his weapons in hand...

    All the way to the mad, burbly humanoid-THINGS... he's just pondering how to say hello when they all turn and he gets... another bad feeling. quickly.

    "Uh... hey, guys?" He calls down to the alien-things!

    Only to get shot at. This time the NASTY HAZARDS slam into his Armor of Ithan, which largely blunts the momentum and causes the majority of the energy to splash out in every direction that isn't him. Still, Reyes is knocked back, scorches on chunks of his armor that are still good. He again takes to the air though, and this time whips out his OTHER weapon - a bulky, wide-barreled oddity-gun cobbled together out of crudely machined parts. Looks kinda like a short net gun, maybe?

    Which is what it is. He takes aim and *GWOP!*

    Sticky mystical energy splashes down on the whole gaggle of weirdos, fully capable of sticking them all up and keeping them pinned to the floorr.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur moves up fast. Septette taking things head-on means, hopefully, he has enough room to rise up and drift to a good combat position. It's not as good as he hopes, because impacts blast him, taking chunks out of his Health Vial, and evoking sprays of energy impact. "The cognitohazard...? HEY!" He shouts, aggressively. "Hey, you big pulsating fuckface! You wanna take shots, take some fucking shots!" He begins unloading waves of arcing light over the chamber, blasts that rise and fall in heavy wide-area bursts over the bodies of the humans. They're... close enough to inhuman that he can justify striking with lethal force, right?

    "HEY! HEY!! Open right the fuck up, /right now/, motherfucker!" He directs some of his energy to the pulsing mass in the center of the room, lancing it with a thin lash of energy intent on boring a long, thin slash into it and popping it open. "You going all chrysalis on me? Get the fuck on the /horn/ bitch, I got /words/ for you!" He breaks into... an entirely different language, on a hunch. Is he speaking in eldritch syllables?! "<I'm the Mage of Space, Prince of the Moon of Derse and envoy to the Furthest Rings! By laws of the Noble Horrorterrors and the ancient cosmic minds, you're getting up to some /shit/ here! And you best calm right the hell down, motherfucker, if you wanna get your ass going where you wanna get!>"

    He's got no real guarantee that whatever horrible cosmic intelligence is operating this cognitohazardous being actually subscribes to the eldritch systems and rules that his own Noble Horrorterrors do, but he makes an effort anyway. He IS a Derse Dreamer, and through that, has the ability to commune with ancient eldritch mind-hazards directly!
Zwei     Septette's body blow sinks into her target's translucent flesh easily, causing it to ripple outwards and snap back in like ballistics gel, and snapping several of its crimson, distorted ribs. Purple from broken blood vessels blooms inside of it --and then begins sucking back inwards, retreating into its arteries as ribs knit together and flesh reforms around her wrist, silver filaments branching through its flesh to find her hand and attempt to take root in its surface, albeit Septette herself doesn't experience much except the entity now just firing at her at point blank.

    The adhesive carpet gun does the trick in anchoring them to the spot alright. Spending a few seconds trying to move and completely failing, the former humans simply give up and resume shooting from a standstill, not sweeping their sinuous tendrils of weapons energy around the room so much as hosing the Elites down with them like highly lethal proton packs. They trade blow for blow, losing big chunks of themselves to Staren's beam cannon and Arthur's stellar energy attacks, body parts falling to the floor with chunky wet splats, then starting to regrow, just committing to a DPS race against the party with their health bars ticking back up.

    When Arthur slices into the blue 'cocoon', lime green light spills out in a brilliant ray, exposing what he can only compare to a hypercube directly in its core, shifting and spinning and glowing as much as it can with the organic material glued to every surface, as if it'd grown from it --or around it, like how plants grow towards the sun. The spores surrounding it catch fire.
Septette Arcubielle      One of Septette's eyes flicks over to examine the green light spilling from the cocoon- just one, like a chameleon eyeing its prey- but she's not at the right angle to see just what Arthur's uncovered. The point-blank shots wash over her body in waves of coruscating green to little apparent effect; she simply stares through them, taking a split second to make sense of what she's seeing inside the creature's body.

     They're made of mostly water, aren't they? And resistant to brute force. The silver-stuff puppeting them seemed fine with being frozen, so that's unlikely to work, but... what happens when you heat up something mostly made of water?

     Septette's hand is still lodged inside the creature's torso when it becomes hot enough to glow yellow, a red magical circle dancing at her fingertips inside its body. With any luck, the incredible heat will explode it like a microwaved egg- at which point she'll turn a stream of magical flames on the next-closest creatures, testing if they'll fare any better.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur recognizes something geometrically terible. It puts him into a strange mental mood, one focused on dealing with Dersian issues, a sort brash princely way of behaving that's actually slightly out-of-character for him, even though whatever intelligence is here certainly had nothing to do with the Furthest Ring.

    Septette asks the group to break line of sight with her. Which is, uh... Don't ask Arthur to do that in the future. Because he interprets it literally. Arthur fractures the geometric concept of lines near Septette, casting a distortion of geometry itself into the space around her and her foes such that she briefly occupies a non-euclidean contained space where she literally cannot see anything besides her foes, because no lines exist that can be drawn between her and her targets, and her allies. It makes it, functionally, /impossible/ for him to suffer even a tiny bit of damage from their sustained fire.

    This is a pretty high-stress thing, so he stops pretty fast. While he does, he disperses it to the other Engineers that menace the group, setting them into the warped space and then unwarping it. What comes next shouldn't be gory like a classic Portal Slice, or brutal like some kind of gravity-dismemberment, it should instead simply and brutally take the form of geometric separation and distending, leaving their warped forms warped too much to function so that they're left vulnerable to being finished off and unlikely to remain combat-capable if they're not.
Staren     Septette warns them about the nerves. "It's here?!"

    For his part, it turns out diving behind cover against foes with DISINTIGRATION GUNS doesn't work as well as he'd hope. They eat through the cover, then the rest of his forcefield, and start eating away at his armor.

    He was going to use a more steady attack, but now time is of the essence -- a DPS race indeed! A swarm of tiny missiles launches from his back, upwards over what's left of the cover before swerving all in different arcs, projectiles about as thin as a magic marker but much longer, mostly to carry propellant for extended range... an aspect that goes to waste here. The dozen-and-a-half missiles all curve at slightly different angles, spreading out to try and avoid counter fire before swerving 'close enough' to the humanoids trapped in position. They explode in fireballs of intense heat, and using this much firepower indoors will almost certainly result in singing his friends too, but it shouldn't be anything they can't handle as long as they're not in the center of the blasts.

    He at least doesn't target the one Septette is next to, but if they're clustered together he can't keep her far from the blasts. She'll be fine, right?
Zwei     The horrid bending of space, not so much cutting into the abominations as twisting them through the fabric of space in all the wrong ways, causes all sorts of damage as their bones warp and snap, their silvery internal meshes spasm and shred, and their translucent biomass flows how it isn't supposed to.

    Septette suddenly turning her fist into a HEAT KNUCKLE causes the organism it's buried into to abruptly just explode into a thousand wet and sizzling pieces, the next closest losing its lower half to the stream of flames. Curtains of missiles swerve into the room, coming down in high temperature fireballs that similarly vapourize the remaining enemies still firing back, until all that is left is a carpet of fleshy blobs and blown apart limbs mixed in with thickly steaming gel and purple blood.

    The collateral heat actually ends up melting the ice cores, dissolving their microbial contents into so much mercury slurry. Large portions of the gross teal cocoon blacken and flake away, coming off in brittle, dehydrated chunks, and bleeding the same silver into the bowl of the lower half of the spherical room. More rattling and banging can be heard coming from further in, but with the steam clearing and the enemies gone, the Elites can see that the former humans have *strapped the other infected subjects down* and been carving pieces off their regenerating biomass to somehow feed to the construct they'd built around the prism.

    Zwei has, of course, indicated that's the thing they came after the last time (in fact being what they'd asked around for back then), so taking the floating hypercube out of its gravitationally centered spot is probably wise. Outside of just being hot and radioactive, it isn't too hard to pull free, being nestled in a gravity well the equivalent of pulling something out of really thick and sticky mud. The lights don't go off or anything, which raises the question of what it *is*, but with that taken care of, the rest of the ship can be sterilized, stealed up, or just plain destroyed at discretion.
Septette Arcubielle      Septette tries to wipe some of the strawberry-jelly-like goo off of her face and shawl, swiftly decides it's not even worth attempting, and briefly spikes her temperature to burn it all off. Thusly cleansed, she scoops up a test-tube-full of the silvery fluid and freezes the entire tube in a chunk of magical ice before heading deeper in and turning the corner.

     "Don't mind the smell," she calls back in that cheery voice. "Or maybe do. Might be carcinogens." A moment later, she begins methodically burning the restrained subjects to ashes, starting at the head and working her way down. You can't just leave them, after all! They're probably sapient!
Staren     Well, that's that. The danger seems to be over -- although Staren is very careful not to step in the silvery goo. When he hears that Zwei wants some, though, he takes a sample and makes a mental note that he should find a suitable site to build the Concord a facility to study stuff like this.

    He's not sure if he should care about the restrained subjects, until he realizes they're /restrained/, but just frowns slightly. It's unlikely they're anything close to people anymore.

    He'll leave collecting the tesseract to someone more suited for it, like Septette who is probably immune to radiation, or Arthur who can probably just put it in a pocket dimension.

    Actually, how the hell is it a tesseract anyway, with only three dimensions to work with?

    Staren ends up staring at the lime green polychoron from what is hopefully a safe distance.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur finishes up, panting as he descends to the ground, leaning against whatever piece of furniture is nearest. He's terrified the moment he realizes it's one of the tables where the bodies are strapped down, almost falling over again, but but seems to catch himself and find something else to lean on. "Christ." He mutters. After a few seconds, he heads over to the hypercube-ish thing, and CAPTCHALOGUES it in his SYLLADEX. Now, not only is it a four-dimensional shape in a three-dimensional shape, but its three-dimensional space is in a two-dimensional card. He hands it off to Staren! Just to confuse him more.

    "Hey! Hey, No-Faces!" He shouts, banging his broom on one of the operating tables. "Gimmie three big slams or noises or whatever if you're all I Have No Mouth up in this bitch. Think we're gonna torch this, so anyone with any sane human minds left better make some noise!" He's hopeful, as ever, but he expects there's not much left to hope for. But it'll ease his mind about Septette's current... Cleansing. He sticks to decontaminating the non-person matters with sweeps of ultraviolet.