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Lilian Rook     It's been a little while, but that's the nature of auxiliary units; if they're needed all the time, then something has gone severely wrong. There's also the matter of trying to find an appropriate mission to challenge the '''promising rookies''', without risking something turning it FUBAR. Not one of them doesn't have a satisfactory score, but . . .

    It seems they've leaned on the side of overkill, sending an alert for a 'free contract' to basically everyone who'd obtained an Immunes Auxiliary License, firing off brief details, a location for staging grounds, and a time to assemble by. Not arriving by then is presumed intent not to show. The threat has been initially classed Giant level, Silver class, Catastrophic Immaculate type. It'd been previously tracked, but for whatever reason, had changed its movement pattern to a direct beeline to the city many were just in yesterday since last night, and has been traveling overland at a steady pace since then.

    It doesn't appear to be in a hurry, or else it isn't capable of moving very quickly, and so strategic command had apparently left it at a middle priority and held back on waiting to see if other forces would free up, but settled for activating the Elites with six hours on the clock left to go --time enough for a plan C should they theoretically fail.

    It seems they're expected to operate on their own; they aren't in for any nannying by a veteran supervisor, likely because if there was one available, they'd base a team around them instead. Their 'staging area' isn't much, given its distance well outside of city territory, amounting to more or less a depot out in the wilderness (funny that it can be called that nowadays, in a country so small and normally banal), clearly of the sort meant to be broadly scattered around so that operatives could go to the nearest one when necessary, and track their position by their distance from each.

    It comprises a radio mast, floodlights, positioning tower, mini weather station, a net of mounted cameras and various sensors for thermal/acoustic/seismic/etc. activity, a small sheltered area with a vacuum seal on a lightweight door with emergency and medical supplies, a cleared landing space for small vertical takeoff craft, a circular scatter of small barricades inside a wider fence, surrounded by a wider ring of wards of unknown purpose both inked and engraved on the limits of the artificially surfaced area, a few crates of standard tools, and rations, and more robust crates filled with limited quantities of alchemical components and occultic items.

    There are also sentry guns mounted at a handful of points, wired strictly to the computers rather than meant to be used by a human operator. A brief check by anyone with gun savvy will confirm that they're inadequate for dealing with anything beefier than a car. They're solely there to deter human beings coming to take anything.
Lilian Rook     Using any of the provided imaging equipment gets them a good sight of their target, though even on arrival, around the time the mission clock starts counting down to T-minus 0, one can already feel a sort of vibration in the air. It's almost like the thrum of a huge subwoofer playing white noise at distance, but it also carries a similar sort of cadence and charge as a live power transformer. Very, very subtly, the air 'flutters' in a way faintly reminiscent of a heat haze.

    The target is at about the limit of visible distance on relatively flat ground, having crossed out a section of barren and rocky hills and out onto relatively plain grassland, approaching a wide and fast-flowing river of seafoam green water surrounded on both banks by reaches of strange red and pink plants.

    It's debatable at first if that's what it actually is or whether the long distance sighting gear is having a fit, since it appears to lack almost all physical definition compared to the two other kinds seen before by some. More like a mobile mirage than a monster, a floating 'core' of strong white light and deep black shadow, mottled and whorled together like a marble and shifting as if liquid, is passing slowly over the landscape, maintaining an objective height rather than one relative to the ground. Where it passes, it leaves a deep, hemispherical trench gouged into the earth, as it seems anything that comes within thirty meters or so, on an exact threshold, is near-instantly broken into tiny pieces and suched into the whirling cloud of debris that already surrounds it.

    High velocity streams of sand, dirt, rock, wood, and metal chips already howl around it in a multitude of orbits, crackling with sparks of electricity or flashes of embers from the inherent friction. It's easily a few tons of mass, but probably not even close to how much it should have picked up moving cross country for such a distance, begging the question of where it all goes after a certain point. Even though it's only picked up innocuous natural material (so far), the anomalous orb definitely looks dangerous to approach, even if only just for trying to get through so much micro-debris moving at such speed, never mind whatever is disintegrating a big spherical field around it.
Zenos yae Galvus So, finally, they get called on to do something interesting.  Zenos comes, as he was called on because he has indicated interest in these things.  They are a sport for him, rather than considering them a serious threat to his nation.  After all, it isn't his nation and at the end of the day, he is here to test his limits.  

The Magitek armor was repaired from his last battle, dark Garlean steek with various bits to draw out its features.  When the creature approaches, Zenos draws a single blade and leaps down from the wall to slowly start approaching it.  

A core with a giant tornado of debris around it.  Likely the debris both act as a weapon and a shield.  He wondered how much would it hurt to withstand the field, and just what the creature could break apart and use.  There had to be limits to this, but they had to just find the right way to crack the nut.  

Oh, this was already going to be a challenge.  Beneath the mask, he grins, already working his mind to try and figure out a first best approach.  
Aranea Highwind     Lilian had warned Aranea there'd be work the next day, yesterday; and so she'd made sure to have a clear schedule, and to be within reasonable distance. Money is money, even if it's coming from a government that's collecting life-debts from children who didn't have a say in it.

    Already armored in her red, white and black Niflheim uniform, the dragoon arrives from an arbitrary direction, landing atop the radio mast with perfect balance. Her cellphone flashes into her hand, forming from the telltale red light of her magitek, and she snaps a selfie from the top of the tower. The cellphone is dismissed afterwards.

    It's a cultural thing.

    With how easy it is to tell being near that thing is a bad idea without understanding how it works, Aranea remains atop the radio mast, waiting for others to arrive - maybe, waiting for others to risk disintegration before she just up and leaps into that field.
Roxas Roxas arrives at the staging grounds from a swirling black portal that comes into existence out of nowhere shortly after Aranea arrives. He's almost certainly not /alone/, and even if he is the portal remains open behind him for several long moments before it slowly disappears into the ether again. He stops a few feet out, pulls his black coat off, and stuffs it underneath his shirt. Where it, evidently, doesn't actually physically /stay/, because he doesn't look like he just shoved a big black trenchcoat underneath his clothes.

The sight of somebody on the radio mast immediately gives Roxas the idea to go up there, so instead of entering the staging area proper he runs right up the side of the mast and joins Aranea on the opposite side.

It has to be running, because his jump distance isn't nearly what Aranea's is.

A light ringing sounds as he thrusts his strange-looking oversized key through a gap in the mast's structure, using it as a temporary handhold.

"Hey." He says, with a wave of his empty hand.

He pauses and looks around.

"Are we, uh..."

"Are we supposed to be up here?"

Then he looks out, towards the barely-visible... /thing/, that is one of the creatures they were training to stop. Roxas blinks slowly, "That... that looks like a magic enemy to me. Does that look like a magic enemy to you?"
Doctor Strange      Unlike his previous visit to this world, the Sorcerer Supreme is both on time and dressed for the occasion. It's his usual blue tunic along with the Cloak of Levitation, as well as various occult accessories upon his hip--a potion, a few unassuming leather pouches. His portal is placed inside the rendezvous point, or otherwise as near to inside as the wards will allow.

     When he steps through it, he doesn't remove it. Instead, he turns his wrist as if manipulating an invisible dial. The scenery on the other end of the portal flickers as if it were a television flipping through channels. Now, it displays the distant threat, an ambulatory vortex chewing up the landscape and creating clouds of deadly, seemingly electrified debris which buzz around it. The wizard's brow furrows.

     How do you get rid of a vortex? Well... he could try and make it tear itself apart. Fighting from range, Strange's tactic is rather simple. An outward thrust of his palm sends the portal in front of him flying towards the Antegent, while another turn of his wrist followed by an upward flick set both 'destinations' to be inside of the vortex.

     Flinging both arms into a martial stance, Strange manipulates the portals. Each one moves to a different end, setting the vortex's own pull against it. Man... he hopes that's actually gonna work.
Staren     Staren's mecha is in hybrid mode, resembling a metallic grey fighter plane with arms and chicken-walker legs. He flew over from wherever the local warpgate is, and now...

    Well. He's deployed a bunch of small camera drones into the air, so he's fairly certain he's not seeing that thing wrong. So, the first Antegent he gets to fight isn't like... a kaiju or superpowered monster or something, but what looks more like a quirk of space or something. How do you kill such a thing?

    Well, robots aren't alive and how do you 'kill' them? By removing their ability to move and affect the environment. So... they just need to figure out enough of the operating principles of this thing to break it.

    Perhaps trying various stimuli -- electromagnetic and magical, perhaps -- and seeing how it responds? He's not really set up to do that well, though. And they're on a clock.

    He does have a plan B of course -- filling the area around it with a ton of thermal energy and hoping that high-energy physics disrupts it -- But it doesn't feel very certain. This needs an outside-the-box solution that's going to look incredibly obvious in retospect but is hard to see from now.

    Morg, I sure could use some inspiration now, he thinks to himself...

    And then, ooh, Dr. Strange is thinking with portals! Staren watches with interest.
Alexis The vibrant thrum of insectoid wings heralds Alexis' arrival at the designated staging point, coming to land next to the scant depot on the back of her Flygon. Hey, there's an actual landing pad here, convenient. Once she's settled to the platform and her wings stop buzzing Alexis slides off the dragons back and gives her shoulder a pat. "Keep the motor warm, we may need to take off soon." Then ambles down to the structure proper.

Alexis briefly makes a face as she spots Zenos hopping down from the structure to start approaching, but shoves it aside. This was professional business and no room for personal spats and annoyances with others. Especially when for the time being they are technically on the same side.

Instead she focuses on getting to work, walking to the end of the depot's structure and holding up a hand. "Binoculars." Her pack ruffles around a little, and then a cream and pink colored fox-like creature pops out of it. "Sylveon," she chirrups, handing over the requested item with one of her prehensial ribbon-like feelers. Alexis holds the electronic binoculars up towards the slowly moving, churning 'storm' and fiddles a few moments before getting the very edge of magnification to pick up on it, the non-composed nature of thing making it hard to focus on at first. "Great," she snorted afterwards, "It's like a whole pack of Tyrannitars with Sand Stream."

She hands the binocs back. "Gonna need my Go-Goggles and helmet, Caddy." "(Yes ma'am.)" The fae-fox ducks back into the bag a moment and comes up with the items. "Thanks." Alexis pulls the goggles on over her eyes as she's walking back to the platform, and straps on the riding helmet. Then makes sure her overcoat is securely fastened up before climbing onto the Flygon's once more. "Looks like high winds and sandstorm-esque conditions, Mirage. Going to need your speed and mobility to get close and see if we can't find the source of this rising storm." Or if it in itself is the monster. That would... actually be kind of interesting and different.

Looks like Strange is trying... something. It's magic with those funky portals of his, that's the most she can make of it. "Good luck magic man!", she calls to him, then gives her peculiar steed a heel nudge.

Wings buzz back to furious life, lifting the Flygon off the landing platform much like the VTOL craft it's made for, as well as the dragonfly her form partially resembles. Mirage squints through the insectoid lenses covering her eyes like goggles, and once clear of the rest of the depot structure takes off in the direction of the monsterous storm.
Touta Konoe      Touta is one of the auxillary units to receive the call, and when the call comes he arrives pretty quick. He wasn't one of the few to be around the day prior as he had some other business to attend to at the time but now that it had been addressed, he could return back here to give a helping hand.

     He wears his usual attire given the fact he hadn't been able to go shopping with some of the others when the time had been presented. The usual black jacket, black pants, and red shirt combo is a tried and true look for the vampire. Resting on his shoulder is the black katana that he just always seems to have out without a sheath.

     Upon his arrival to the staging area he takes in how organized this place seems with how small it is overall.

     "Wow, these guys really take their defenses seriously."

     Though it looks like plenty of familiar faces are already here as well, one of whom he sees is already taking the initiative to try and deal with the strange vortex like structure that felt like it was disturbing the very air itself by using some sort of portals.

     As for how Touta's preparing to deal with this situation should these portals prove somehow ineffective is...He's bringing out a hula-hoop?
Aranea Highwind     "Oh, hey kid," Aranea greets Roxas, simply.
    "Me? Yes. You? If that's your style, sure. We've got a better view of it from up here, for now. Seems that thing has a field that's tearing things around it apart. Probably magic, yeah."

    Doctor Strange makes a point of showing off his own magic, and Aranea whistles. "You don't see that often. We'll see if it helps making the area around it safe. If not, we're probably going to have to just deal and take the hits."

    A side-glance at Roxas. "Remember to let me know what you're looking for, training-wise. It's paid, 'after all, I just need a time and place."
Xion After a brief episode of showing off her sweet new ID card, some unimportant stuff, and getting super awesome food in Denmark with the King of Heroes, Xion had gotten an entire new wardrobe, a bunch of fashion tips, and had gotten the opportunity to BANISH her cultish black coat and jam-jams to the negative zone.

That's why when she steps out of the Corridor of Darkness with Roxas, Xion is...

Still in her black hoodie coat. Yep. Roxas goes up up up the radio mast, while Xion dithers around with the equipment down below. "Huh. You know, I don't think these guns would help at all."

Watching Doctor Strange manipulate his portals with some interest, Xion peeks and peers over his shoulders and around his body. "You're pretty good with those corridors. Are you a master of darkness? Do monsters come out of them? Do they always throw off those sparks? Is what you're doing going to reveal the monster's core?"
Arthur Lowell     Arthur Lowell receives an @everyone that lets him know that it's business time, and he's quick to make his way there. CATASTROPHIC, that's mass scale. IMMACULATE, that's high damage resistance. Arthur is already beefing up his gravity shield every so often just to give himself a little room to breathe. He can't exactly bring in the LOSAF Beam on a Giant threat, which puts him off slightly, but he can deal with fighting something at this sort of size if he has to.

    He's been building up Aspect in his body ever since he got here, sort of drifting above a spirographic circle patiently. And playing a game on what looks like an old Nintendo DS. He snaps it shut when they get to about a minute before launch, and readies himself until it hits zero.

    Arthur Lowell takes off.

    On his broom, he rushes forward. Where other people see a swirling, horrifying mess... Arthur sees something familiar. Something horrifically dangerous, something lethal and ultraviolent, which will take tremendous effort to slay.

    But most of all, he sees danmaku.

    And, a long long time ago, Arthur did a lot of combat against danmaku monsters. And so, with his metal battle-broom blazing its rocket-thrusters, he rushes straight at the storm, intending to weave, dive, and zip around wildly in ways that match any patterns he can find in attacks it might make. He intends to open fire with bolts of fusion energy and gravity, pure starlight and black gravity intent on dumping raw damage on the black-and-white core. But, most importantly, he intends to look, and understand. Is this thing twisting space around it? Turning geometry to break up objects it gets near? What is the nature of its magic? His goal is the analyze it enough to identify a way to use space magic to create a damage resistance field in the sphere, to let the melee types get in close.

    But, of course, he also speaks, which is really just awful.

    "HEY!" He screams. "FUCK OFF, YOU FAT FUCKING ORB! We got HELLA DUDES up in this shit and they don't wanna get TURNT like this! Go back to whatever HELL DIMENSION you fuckers COME FROM you OBESE FUCKING TUMBLEDRYER!! You wanna get SPINS, you wanna DIG SOME EARTH, I'mma SPIN YOU INTO A FUCKIN' GRAVE! COME GET SOME, YOU OVERWEIGHT CLASSROOM GLOBE REJECT, I GOT PLENTY!!!"
Note     Note has answered the call to action! And as usual, pondering about recent confrontations has her made her abort any notions of going Leeroy Jenkins on the situation. She's been waiting restlesly atop of the tallest tower, fidgety as hell, and frequently departed for a scouting flight around the area.

    Study your opponent. Study your opponent CAREFULLY. That's been her response to some of the weird things that've cropped up recently. The barrage of strange tests in Lilian's backing organization gave her a good idea that most things they fight aren't something she wants to get up close with unless she's gotta.

    And, today, that notion is proven very correct. She feels it before anything else, and the sensation sends a shiver from the tip of her tail to her neck. She hops to her feet atop the tower instantly, gazing out across the distance.

    "What... is.... THAT?!" That's not an ENEMY. It's more like a TORNADO. Funky weird magic things!

    Without bothering to power up. she extends a palm towards the distant thing and briefly looks like she's about to test its defenses with a ki blast... but then she frowns, lowers the arm, and glances around at what her allies are doing. "Uhhhhhhhh...."

    Brute force isn't gonna cut it here. She's pretty sure of that. She needs someone who's SMART. And so she looks down at the Sorcerer Supreme... then launches herself herself off the tower, sailing through the air and tumbling only to slow down at the last minute and land gently nearby him, off to his right. "Hey! Mister magic guy. I've got a feeling the direct approach isn't gonna work today. You got any advice?"

    While standing there, she tenses up briefly, closes her eyes... and focuses her energy. Power flickers around her, then erupts into a by-now-familiar bonfire of golden light burning around her body. Her hair follows suit, rising up, splitting into an array of spikey locks and shifting into a bright golden-yellow shade. When she opens her eyes, they're now a light shade of green, and contain a fierceness that wasn't there before. As though this transformation brings out something... primal.

    The air around her sizzles with so much energy now that it's almost tangible.

    NOW she aims an open palm at the distance, and sends a lone bolt of Ki screaming towards the distant... THING. All to see what happens.
Gawain Gawain is not the most suited to this. He's a primary melee combatant, and this thing eats up melee combatants and spits them out. But he's also an Immune Aux now, so he's not going to pass up aid. When he arrives at the facility, it's on a black motorcycle, the knight fully armored with his sword in a hilt at his side. He parks the motorcycle, moves up to the equipment, and to get a good look at the enemy. Well. That'll be a problem.

Listening to the others, it's Strange he's focusing on. After giving him some time to use his portals and watch with the equipment if they do anything, Gawain will regardless move to jump back on the motorcycle...and prep to head that way.

<"In these conditions, I'll likely be able to best withstand the creature's nature. I'll begin proceeding - my motorcycle is sure to be destroyed if we cannot take out the effect it possesses.">

And so, Gawain starts to drive, trying to get as close as he can without his motorcycle immediately horribly exploding and keeping up communications over radio. He intends to find what is hopefully a cure and stab it, and a close eye might be what he needs.
Staren     People are starting to move in. Much of his armament will become problematic if they get too close, so... "Well, here goes."

    Sixteen missiles -- the kind a human would need a big shoulder launcher to fire, rather than the miniaturized ones Staren usually uses -- launch from under the wings, spreading out to attack from various front and side angles before turning in and zooming towards the anomaly. They detonate just outside the edge of the disintigration effect, dumping a tremendous amount of heat into the air, enough to strip electrons from atomic nuclei, so that the antegent will be sucking in high-energy matter that hopefully... burns it or something.

    Seconds after hitting the button, Staren suddenly wonders if all this might do is make the debris orbiting it even MORE of a pain to navigate. That would suck.
Lilian Rook     Strange drops portals right inside the Antegent's strange sort of interior horizon. Two sparkling orange windows into different places appear precisely where he aims them, apparently unimpeded by any weird twist of spatial coordinates. He sees debris go flying through one, and debris go flying through the other, and the two currents crashing into each other at the entity's front, now glowing molten orange as the energy of the collision starts melting the material caught in it.

    A second later, and his portals 'fizz' like agitated soda, their structure bubbling and frothing and then shaking apart, breaking into countless little particles of orange magic which are ripped free and twisted away, until both gaps in space are somehow shredded as paper. He can see orange sparks and teeny tiny glimpses into other parts of the field whirling around in the maelstrom as well now, on top of red hot liquid rock and sand.

    Gawain approaching on his bike at high speed can *feel* his physical proximity to it. As he gains ground, driving straight towards the oncoming anomaly, the thrum in the air and the ground grows so strong that his bike starts rattling beneath him, as if all of its parts down to the screws are all trying to escape one another, as if simultaneously shaken in all directions rather than just up and down. When he starts getting close enough to more clearly spy the perfect orb of white and black between the shrieking curtains of fine rubble, the hum has slipped the boundaries of his ears and become a current in his head that starts drowning out his other senses --not just his hearing, but even his sense of touch becomes pins and needles, and his vision slowly becomes jittering static. The sound becomes all-consuming going much further, like a solid wall between thoughts, making it hard to distinguish so much as where one is facing and where their hands and feet are in relation to their body.

    Arthur gets the same while *flying* straight towards it, seeming to emanate from the center of the Antegent in all directions. When he starts firing into it, he has much the same effect as Note, whose ki bolt streaks dead center into the spherical field, obliterates a hefty chunk of debris in an instant, turning it into a swirling current of gas, and then the golden light is, as well, unraveled and torn to ribbons, which go streaking luminous circles around the center. Fusion bolts burst into so much dangerous particle current, and gravity orbs crunch globs of detritus together into compact stones, but none of it penetrates all that far. Granted, thousands of heavy and dangerous objects might be more convenient than hundreds of millions of tiny, only slightly less dangerous objects, but . . .

    After a sustained bout of shooting, he sees the boundaries of the sphere contract inward, just a little, jerking inward like a very small heartbeat. He feels the thrumming pressure recede from his head just a smidge. He then sees the air around him, in a thick, forward facing column, judder as if he were looking through millions of exceptionally clear marbles. The humming pitches up with the thankfully intuitive progression of a capacitor whine, and then the entire column of air becomes a highway width and length pillar of incandescent orange air plasma, the atmosphere literally split down to the atoms and used as a vector for a gargantuan discharge of heat and radiation.

    Just a moment after doing that, the field expands back to its original proportions, and then contracts a hairsbreadth several times in succession, stuttering briefly as dozens of now-molten globules of fused sand go spraying out towards Staren's missile cluster, spat out in walls of supersonic glass buckshot, taking them all out at once at a distance of two hundred meters.
Zenos yae Galvus Zenos observes the situation before him, it disburses magic, it destroys energy, and it appears to mess with the senses of those that get close to it.  It opted to destroy the missiles, but not block the energy.  Hm.

Zenos feels he has a strategy, as he starts moving forward.  Strange has a similar goal, though their methods would likely differ greatly.  However, as Zenos approaches, he makes sure to stop outside of its zone, before dropping blades from the sky in front of him.  

"Rend," he says, firmly, as the blades start to swirl with wind ether, green energy that starts to surround them before it releases a massive burst of tornado force winds to try and strip the physical objects in its orbit away from it.  

Zenos does this repeatedly, attempting to see if he can stop the force of the very air itself, while also trying to buffet the debris around it and blast away at its protective shielding.  
Staren     The missiles are broken apart and fall to the ground as debris. Seconds after, Staren realizes he should have had Strange use portals to get them closer. Damn! Oh well.

    It seems like energy attacks might be efficacious in messing with the debris field -- Staren wonders if Note and Arthur could just burn up all the stuff and expose the core -- but Zenos also suggests high speed physical attack. Nothing like a railgun, right?

    It's worth a shot. Staren doubted it could be as easy as 'shoot the core' before, but if it's taking action to protect itself, that means there's something vulnerable that /needs/ protecting.

    The mecha transforms to humanoid mode, now over 40 feet tall, and the right shoulder pack unfolds into a long sniper-rifle-like construction, about as long as the machine is tall, maybe longer. The right hand grabs a foregrip and aims. At least a sphere moving in a straight line is easy to aim at the center of...

    Capacitors charge, saving up seconds of nearly all of a nuclear reactor's output while the mecha stands still. Stabilizing pylons deploy into the ground from the heels. Magical energy gathers. And then it's all released at once as a hypersonic metal shell around a magic bomb, crossing the distance between Staren and the antegent in the blink of an eye so fast any air in the way is torn apart and ignited in a sideways pillar of fire, and a sonic boom echoes over the battlefield afterwards, the bomb set to explode just after it enters the debris field so that hopefully a high-speed mix of metal and exploding magic will impact the core.

    Thrusters fire on the gun's stabilizer fins and the mecha, and then the pylons retract and it starts to hover into the air before Strange does whatever it is that's going to remove the ground, while green steam starts to pour out of the base of the weapon as coolant is vented and refreshed.
Aranea Highwind     Good to know it doesn't instantly tear up people, it just messes with their senses. That means quick hit and run strikes are an option. But Staren brings up a good point; why did it expend effort on the missiles but not the ki bolts?

    It could just be a matter of its awareness, but it could indicate something about the weapon type, too. Maybe it doesn't like things that disrupt its field, its core, or its vortex.

    "Well, you make sure if you're going to hit it with that key that you don't stay in melee too long. No telling how long someone can withstand its effects, and nevermind that explosion it let loose briefly," Aranea warns Roxas, before her spear forms out of red light and she takes to the skies, leaving the radio mast behind.

    Bolting rapidly like a blur of red magitek light, she eventually comes to a stop just long enough to gather up a vortex of green winds of her own, building up around her weapon like it's the eye of a small storm.

    "Aerora!"

    She makes a motion as if she were hurling her spear, but all that launches is the now vaguely spear-shaped tornado of wind, a pointed vortex of swirling green winds.

    It goes straight for the Antegent's core, or at least tries to; that vortex might have a thing or two to say about that.
Alexis Alexis and her Flygon lag behind the others a little. Not out of want for speed, but out of strategic observation as the Trainer keenly watchs a few others instigate beginning attacks. Even at a bit of distance she can feel the vibrations in the air and the wash of heat from some of the monsterous storm's actions. As can Flygon, hissing softly and beating her wings harder to keep her flight from being disrupted. They were going to have to keep a reasonable distance, and using her Ground attacks would mostly just add to the cluster of debris being slung around that thing.

All things considered Alexis cocked her head a bit. "Caddy, we need some defensive assistance." "(Yay, helping~!" chirups the fae-fox as she climbs onto Alexis' shoulder, and then jumps up onto Flygon's head. Two of her ribbons wrap around the fly-dragon's horn-antennae to brace herself, while the two from the bow on her head spread out to the sides a bit. Glittery sparkles appear at first, then spread to engulf pokemon and trainer in a protective Light Screen. It won't stop the attacks this thing can put out but it will help damper their output a little. Hopefully.

"Alright them." Alexis grabbed onto the Flygon's shoulders firmly and hunched forward a bit, looking more like the jockey on a back of a racehorse trying to keep their resistance down. "It's dealt with energy and missiles, let's try something else. Mirage, use Boomburst!"

Swooping in as close as they dare to the perimeter around this thing Flygon pulled up into a hover, but rather than stopping her wings started beating even faster, producing their own vibrant buzz as air reverbs around them, being churned and pressurized until it becomes a visible volatile sheen around them.

But instead of the usual harmonious vibrations that earned Flygon it's mystical reputation it's released in cacophonous roar, a sonic blastwave with the same concussive force of an explosion hurtling towards the gigantic Antegent.
Doctor Strange      "Maybe, no, yes, maybe," says Strange to Xion as his martial wizardry continues. Aranea and Staren get a trembling but unmistakable 'ok' hand, tucked behind his back in between erudite mudras. Or maybe it's part of one of his spells. Who knows?

     Note comes asking for advice. He gives it freely. "You're right. Getting in close'll be tough," he says. The Sorcerer Supreme waits for Note to make her attack. As the beam flies through the air, he places a thumb upon the Saiyan's Crown Chakra, and a mystic eye opens up in the air near the Antegent. It reveals the cloud of deadly debris to her, allowing her to see it as if she were right there. He removes his thumb, and the vision fades, as does the sigil burning in the air. "I'm worried blasting it might just give it more stuff to throw around, so I'm gonna think of it more like a natural disaster and save the firepower as a last resort."

     This momentary pause proves costly. As the energy of the Antegent's insides tear at his portals, Strange tries in vain to keep them up. His motions, especially to Note, look like those of a pugilist on the back foot, parrying and deflecting some unseen assailant's attacks with increasing urgency. The Sling Ring upon his hand grows hot from the effort, until he has to tear it off just to avoid a severe burn. The portals are shredded, but he's learned something--it's storing whatever it sucks up to use as ammunition. And if the response to Staren's missiles is any indication, it does at least occasionally put effort into defending itself. The Sling Ring is, for the moment, returned to the Sanctum Sanctorum.

     Strange steps forward, still at range, pain ringing in the fingers which bore the ring. He brings broth arms forward, raised upwards in a blocking motion, then withdraws, his upper body flowing backwards as if rolling with a punch. When he makes his parry, it's a forceful, double-palmed thrust. A wave of what appears to be broken glass at first glance travels across the landscape, beckoned by his attack. Upon closer examination, it's not glass, but little pieces of... reality. There are half-reflections of dozens of different Zenoses, Toutas, Notes, Stranges, Alexises, Starens (he's probably used to that), Arthurs, Araneas, Roxases, Xions, ang Gawains, all in the midst of actions they themselves finished just a moment ago, and some they haven't done. Or won't do--yes, some are alternate realities.

     With a sound of stone grinding against itself, the earth itself folds open like a pop-up book, breaking in half and rotating at an impossible angle to leave a paradoxical abyss of open sky, with another sun and teseelating clouds beneath it. The two halves of the earth spread apart, leaving the arena in a state that looks like someone corrupted an old N64 game. It's fucked up.

     It is probably especially fucked up to those Elites who can't fly--but Strange has them covered. Or, temporally speaking, he will have them covered. Before anyone can fall into the chasm, Strange appears from the future to weave a second spell. Brightly burning glyphs appear upon the backs of those who can't fly, sprouting into orange pairs of butterfly wings which allow them to navigate the air as freely as thinking.
Roxas "It's, er..." Roxas rubs at the back of his head, "it's probably going to be pretty basic. It's less about the fighting and just more about... you know. Stuff. We're pretty good at fighting, but there's a lot of things we just don't know."

He looks towards his Keyblade, and shakes his head, "I'm going to try to avoid getting that close to it, I have better options at a distance! Especially with... with /that/ going on that close! What type is this, anyway? Is it a--"

Then she's gone.

He follows Aranea's lead, but gets /much/ less air time than her, soaring through the air momentarily before dropping into the field about half as far as Aranea herself managed to travel. Roxas whips his keyblade about, shouting, "Blizzara!" As he lands, sending a sheet of ice racing along the ground in a straight line that carries on to one side of the Antegent.

Roxas hits the sheet and slides along it, his momentum from the fall carrying him closer. He does /not/ close to range with that thing. Instead, he raises the tip of his Keyblade up and fires a spreading volley of hazy, burning lights towards the Antegent's core.

Then he suddenly has butterfly wings as the ground yawns open. Roxas gives a yelp before realizing that, in fact, he's flying. After which the yelp turns into an excited laugh.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur identifies the targeting column. Weave, duck, and avert is the only way. His visualizations show a clear line along where he saw those marbles, and the whine builds up with a red flicker. "FUCK!" He screams, diving to one side. Just the heat and radiation singe him, but this is, admittedly, one of those things he knows how to deal with. Heat and radiation are his wheelhouse, and so he can flick an arm to one side and disperse the fire from his body. "C'mon! C'MON!! Hit me with MORE of that GOOD SHIT!" He screams to the vile sphere. "Don't you got a LITTLE MORE in there? COME ON, YOU LARD-FAT GYROSCOPE, are you a SPHERE or a fucking CIRCLE?!"

    Arthur's mind races. Light refraction and portal disruption indicates dimensional lensing or probable fabric-shifting, but analyzing it for space magic somehow picked up nothing at all. Even space technology should be picking up something. What could possibly be making this happen? Staren suggests maybe some kind of telekinetic effect, which Arthur considers to be unlikely and some manner of fake. But he leans into it. If this thing has mostly telekinetic abilities, maybe it doesn't have /any/ spatial ones. Maybe that was light-telekinesis he saw earlier or something? And how is that core warping light around it so much, maybe some kind of invisibility magic instead of space magic? He's gotta hope.

    Now that Doctor Strange is clearing out the turf, he gets to work. He begins circling the thing, round and round, below and above, forming two tremendous spirographic spellcircles as he goes, and within those two circles, two massive green eight-pronged whorls that begin to twist rapidly.

    He's not quite able to identify the nature of this thing's /twist/, apparently even after substantial analysis, but if he can identify patterns, broad strokes of movement, or even a rotational direction, he's planning to focus the entire thing on... not attacking it, per se, but moving the space it moves through in the opposite way. If it spins counterclockwise, he spins space within the dominated geometry clockwise, roaring with the effort it takes to move over over a hundred thousand cubic meters of space rapidly in directions they ought not go.
Touta Konoe      There's a bit of surprise when the portals end up fizzling out. Did this thing have magic canceling properties of its own, or had it ended up just sucking up the magic that had formed the portals themselves? He wasn't sure. But watching Gawain and Arthur try to get close seemed to give an indication that even trying to get into close proximity with this thing was dangerous. It's only as he watches Arthur's magical bolts and Note's ki blast that he notices some sort of weird inward movement by the sphere. It's also right after that moment a huge discharge is released but in that moment... It makes the boy think.

     With that in the back of his head, it seems like Strange already has an idea in mind on how to deal with this thing. Giving the heads up to the rest of the group Touta prepares himself for a free-falling experience and to some degree he's correct as he watches what looks like the very earth itself splitting apart and there's a moment he feels like he's about to fall into said abyss. The good news is that Strange is thinking ahead with those butterfly wings. The bad news is that...The ones on Touta look like they're quickly dissipating. It really sucks when you foreign magic and you don't mix. He's really hoping this is just a dilution of the butterfly wings and not a full on, this buff is gonna disappear in a few seconds. But if it is, he's gotta make good use of the time he has.

     Many of the others try shooting more attacks into the orb like before trying to see what works against it and what doesn't and Touta's gonna try to do the same. Only instead of going for 'what attack works' he's going for 'when does the attack work'? So he's gonna wait until he sees the sphere like object begin to contract inward like it did last time, which would likely be when the other attacks finished, that's when Touta's attack will strike.

     Touta starts hula-hooping while in the air as odd as that seems but there's a reason thankfully for this goofy display. He was going to use Magic Cancel. Touta throws a punch and from it a beam of white light is shot forth towards the sphere. Unlike most of the other attacks this wouldn't really help break up debris or cause any physical harm, but if this thing was just a giant sphere of magic than this attack would prove more than worthwhile as it would attempt completely negate the magic of the sphere, whatever kind it was. Though if this thing wasn't magical at all this would be really awkward. At least they'd no it wasn't magic based!
Xion The situation seems pretty dire all told, and Xion hasn't even started doing anything! Normally, even if enemies have a gimmick, even when they shrug off attacks, even when all hope seems lost and the butterflies are rioting inside your stomach, there's the shred of hope that 'something hittable' presents.

This lacks that very specific grippable hope, and as Xion watches Strange's portals get torn apart, the black-coated girl retreats further into useless standing-around like an NPC whose pathing broke.

If you can't hit it, and it sucks to be near, but you can't shoot it, what's there to do? Is it a trick enemy? Was this the normal thing that Lilian fought?

The 'why' of how extreme the culture is, and how important people chipping in and doing their best became.

"Maybe there's something it wants. Something it needs, and that'll be the secret!" Xion announces, closing her blue eyes to reach out with her mind, to feel the desire of the Antegent and to pro-

As if struck, Xion collapses to her knees, and then loses even the footing of the ground as Strange reconfigures reality around the Mirror Dimension.

Tumbling through the air for a few seconds in free-fall, Xion squints in consternaton. "But Mister Strange is nice! He wouldn't just drop me out of the air! He's--"

Big orange butterfly wings flutter around the corner of her vision. "He put the butterflies on the outside! He's a magician!"

Flying back up, while Roxas whoops and flies in after Insane Spearlady Aranea Highwind (and Chad Gawain), Xion taps both index fingers to their respective temples and rubs. "Think... Think... How to help? There's got to be a way to help! It's sucking up everything, and wants to kill, and that's it. What if..."

"I've got it!"

Channeling dark purple particles around her hands as she clasps them together, Xion starts 'pulling' the energy apart like soft taffy, as her gravity magic reaches out to yank out he chunks of things out of the Antegent's sworling succ-aura, to remove anything she can magically reach. If there's nothing in the cloud - then it'll... ...

Ok, so maybe it's just 'doing the opposite of what it's doing already' but IT'S A PLAN!
Gawain Gawain's senses go haywire. He can feel his tongue being weird, which makes it difficult to speak, and he loses track of his vision and hearing. Quickly, Gawain knows he'll go off track with the bike, and can understand that the ground is about to go missing, so he leaps off it, backwards to get some distance from the effect, and loses it in the chasm. Paladin expenses will cover it, no worries.

Though he has a moment of 'where will I land', the butterfly wings keep him in the air, so Gawain instead tries to rethink this. He's a melee combatant. He can't use Excalibur Galatine at the beginning of the fight, it's best served as a finisher, after all, even if it's his trump card. But he can't also not fight.

For now, Gawain starts to pull back, He moves to see if the various effects to damage it do anything, and if they don't make the scene better (or if they do, which is what he's hoping for), Gawain internally goes 'screw' it, tries to make some speed as he gets a hang of the wings, and moves to dash forward straight for the core.

He has hope that he's tough enough to get close and stab this thing with Galatine. Or at the very least, get close enough to see just how dangerous it is for the rest of the melee combatants.
Note     With Strange expressing concern that throwing energy at this thing just makes it STRONGER, Note withdraws her hand after seeing her blast ripped apart. Just in time to be strangely... enlightened by the spell. "Ahh!" She backpedals away from the touch moments after the spell settles in, rubbing at her forehead for two seconds... then stops to think. And explore this strangely distant awareness of focusing on the distant vortex.

    "This thing... is there something ALIVE -INSIDE- the vortex? I'm feeling it, so it has life energy. Though... could you steal that energy? Would I still feel it...?"

    For a kid, she is certainly not stupid. But she seems QUITE overwhelmed at the freakish RIPPLE that Strange somehow whips up... and decides to fly of her own power up into the air with the others, to observe what is to come.

    But while this is going on... she brings her fists to either side of her waist and starts to tense up and focus. Force her breathe through her teeth in a tight hiss. Her power begins to surge and seethe as she draws deeper and deeper. Just in case it will be needed.
Lilian Rook     Wind magic from two different sources of magitech streaks into the approaching orb, smashing into the screen of tangible matter, pulverizing the larger objects back into fine debris and blasting clouds of the lighter stuff free of the edge of its reach. The green wind magic travels in a little bit further, rippling through the many layers of sheeting terrain, and then warps and unravels like strings, pulled into long threads and laced with the ki and fusion energy circling around it in glowing, highschool diagram atomic orbits.

    Light magic falls in with the wind, peppering the outer edge of the rubble cloud with a layer of bursting explosions, burning off enough matter that there is now a visible slipstream of superheated gas underneath it, as well as motes of white light joining the show, rapidly multiply the number of different kinds of magical attacks caught in amber. Touta's beam, conversely, pierces straight through, snuffing out a straight line of preserved magical energy sources, without being interrupted by the field and . . . whatever it does.

    The other thing that goes straight through is Staren's Annihilator railgun. The roaring hypersonic slug punches right into the cloud, liquefies a tunnel of matter, and then shoots right back out the other side and careens over the horizon. Through the narrow hole, he can spot that he's missed the core, or rather that the core is off-center now, having shifted either itself within the field, or the field around it. It keeps ploughing on without hesitating, relentless in its breakneck five miles per hour pace. It's gotten over the river, now boiling it away into as much steam as it sucks up water itself. A fish haplessly attempts to swim back down the twisted stream, and then all of its scales fly off, followed by its muscles, then its organs slip out of its skeleton, and its bones all come apart in sequence, turned to dust an instant after.

    The sonic attack seems utterly ineffective. The visible warping of air from vibration hits a solid wall of more vibrating air at the boundary of the Antegent's influence, bursting apart as destructive interference scatters the waveform all over.

    When Arthur ceases his P1 shoot'em up gameplay, the mobile anomaly ceases paying attention to him completely, breezily grinding right past him as the teeth-rattling vibration intensifies, then lessens. When he fixes the spirograph above and below, it floats straight ahead and between the two, immediately caught in the counter-spin of space being wrung out like a towel. All around it, the layers and layers of churned up landscape slow, one at a time from the outside in, until they look like they're barely drifting through space at all. Caught like this, Xion's gravity magic rips them out of place, yanking them out of its intangible grip and into a floating scatter all around it, like building a stereotypical dreamscape level.

    Then it becomes an *actual* dreamscape level when Strange shatters reality around them all. The ground folds away, the sky rotates in double, the sun is reflected in the floor and the future and past are reflected in the present, viewed through countless shards of time. This is where the black and white orb at the center of the disturbance continues gliding, out from the frozen cluster of its tangible accretion, paralyzed by space and gravity while it itself is apparently not.

    It continues on a little ways further, the omnipresent vibration now even *stronger* without being muffled by the defensive and offensive cloud of matter. Even in the realm Strange has created, everything thrums and shakes. There is the sound of tinkling glass, as if all the little shards are jingling against one another.
Lilian Rook     The orb reaches the approximate 'center' of the arbitrarily geometrically defined realm, and then stops dead. Hovering stationary for a moment, the vibration, now only really graspable by feel and intensity without a lot of material to show its boundaries, draws inward and pulse outwards, fluttering, thumping, pitching up and down, forming irregular spikes and drags that can only really be perceived as heightening and lessening levels of mental fuzz and disorientation, and 'sound' so base it is felt more than it is heard. Yet, even as something somehow mentally subsonic, the pattern and cadence of the deep, bass, pulsating hum, has the distinct impression of 'speaking'. Unintelligible words spoken in a language nobody understands and through a filter that renders them impossible to grasp, but it is certainly just like the soundscape of a couple of sentences, rendered into physical force lightly hitting one in the face and chest.

    The orb expands massively and then condenses down to a tight point in a tremendous, circulatory *thump-thump*, then slowly regrows to its original size. The ribbons of light, from ki and ether and magic, come swirling forth from the debris cloud left behind, spaghettified and dragged in as if by a black hole. When Gawain makes his charge on the exposed core, he is immediately met by a devastating flurry of razor-fine magical energy ribbons, swirling around it to cut him to ribbons.

    The altered reality takes on that perfectly clear marble look again, radiating in spokes and rings in all directions around the orb. The spherical 'shield' of vibration shrinks down to a quarter of its size, and just a moment later, the fake sky Strange has created becomes a blinding, fiery hell of fusion columns aimed in all vectors. Thick pillars of rolling combustion and light thrust outward like innumerable spikes, then begin to rotate around it, spinning in circles, crossing over one another, scissoring up and down.

    Cascades of muffled thumps erupt all around its circumference, firing 'solid slugs' of its field-mass which completely shred anything they come into contact with. A sound like the crack of glass follows, and teeny bits of portal still following it eject at high speed like a claymore mine, spraying everyone with the impossibility of tiny, irregular shards of 'this space leads into another one'. With those away, the 'slugs' become an automatic barrage, actively chasing targets down while the beams move around in alternating patterns, harrying them into the streams of fire. Where the shots miss the real thing and hit one of the Elites' many reflections, they . . . impact the future/past/alternate mirror of that Elite, and injure, maim, or even kill them quite brutally, as if they were actually present.
Doctor Strange      One Strange crosses his hands over his chest, thumbs pressed to forefingers. They open as he drags them across, mimicking the opening of an eye. The Eye of Agamotto opens, and that Strange disappears into the past to assist himself and prevent his flightless allies from falling. The other remains, completing the loop.

     He turns slightly and makes an affable, if trembling, finger-gun at Xion as she discovers his contingency.

     His attention turns back to the Antegent. Now that it's left that cloud of debris behind, and Xion's pulled even more away from it, there's even less for it to use--which means presumably, it can only attack with whatever it's directly gobbled up. He's proven right when he witnesses the counterattack upon Gawain.

     With less fuel to use for counterattacks and defenses, he figures he's got a way to expose that core for his allies, without providing it further ammunition. Alexis mentions that Antegents don't like to play by the rules. That's fine. When two people play chess and one of them cheats, it's irritating. But when both cheat, it becomes /Chess Without Limits./

     A choir of attacks come from a choir of Stranges, stepping from a choir of portals. Even the one hovering near Xion seems to have stepped through a portal to make an attack. Some of them use their martial sorcery to weave projectile attacks--lances of lightning, cones of cold, classical fireballs, prismatic sprays. Some of them fly straight towards the Antegent, artifact weapons held high. If the Antegent has any level of higher intelligence, it may be smart enough to realize that the Strange with the airhorn and the Strange with the fire extinguisher are fakes. Certainly, anyone who knows him and what he's capable of can probably suss that out.

     In truth, every single one of them is fake--even the one hovering near Xion, which is actually just a flat projection, a facade behind which the real one furiously weaves all the illusions, going so far as to affect looks of discomfort upon their faces to reflect whatever mental fuckery Gawain mentioned. Hopefully, it can't tell that there's no actual brainwaves coming from them, because the goal is to provoke as many counterattacks as he can, to spread the Antegent's resources as thin as possible...

     ...so that the Strange appearing from the future can slip the Sling Ring back on and redirect those attacks into one of the chunks of earth currently out of its grasp. They are all vaporized immediately when the Antegent decides on a scorched earth approach, and the two /actual/ Stranges very nearly so. Future!Strange tackles Present!Strange, pushing them both out of the way of a superheated slug, only for Future!Strange to have a swath of the skin on his abdomen suddenly teleported to a different space.

     Present!Strange stops the bleeding, then travels back in time with the Eye to save his own ass.

     When he returns, his tunic is stained red at the front, one hand gingerly placed upon it as if it might subdue the pain. Unfortunately, he's educated enough in the medical field to know it doesn't really do that. He takes a moment to listen to the radio--picks up two key words. 'Staren' and 'rapid.'

     Once more, Strange opens the Eye. This time, however, he points his hand at Staren, and drags the other to the right, 'fast-forwarding' the scientist's actions on top of whatever else Staren might have up his sleeve.
Zenos yae Galvus "Hm.  Troublesome," Zenos says, as the blade shifts in front of himself.  He has just but a few moments to defend himself, as the thousands of shards come to tear through him.  However, while others were learning magic, he was studying the blade.

The blade swings, carefully, in measured but rapid movements as the shards come to impale him.  However, he has a plan, Staren's high-speed weapons were effective, as he thought.  It also appears that Strange had a plan.  Good, this falls in line without needing guidance.  Which means...

"Do not give up.  Throw everything you have at it," Zenos says, while the blade dispatches more of the tiny lances.  When it all stops, his armor has a few telltale signs of impalement, but it would have been far greater if he had not been studying the blade as long as he had.

Zenos decides that it is time to stop holding back.  His eyes blare, even as his body bleeds.  Tiny clocks would form, and visible if not for his mask and helmet.  His eyes can see the future actions and flow of aether as to guide him to what the creature would do, and how it would defend.  

He uses this to give Staren the correct place to fire his weapon, while also bringing his sword up.  

"THIS IS THE END!" he reveals, as his own Aether buils, and slams the weapon down.  All around him an eruption of energy washes out to try and consume the creature, aiming to try and take away it's strength to fight.  Again, trying to make sure Staren can get the shot on it.
Gawain Gawain flies in, moving in a straight-ish line to keep his sight as working as unmessed with as he can, trying to see it. Trying to sense it. Horrible magic ribbons cut into him, slicing through his armor and drawing blood from his skin, but they have an issue. That is, injuring him far enough to actually be likely to immediately kill him. He's /extremely/ tough, and the armor does keep back most of the slicing, allowing Gawain to just withstand it and does what he needs to do.

Gawain wreathes his sword in holy fire, and moves to slam it straight into the core with a strong thrust, hopefully slicing into the creature, at the same time that Staren's missiles move to strike it. He is almost certainly going to be in their blast radius, and get blown up a bit, and honestly have a '''fun''' time.

This is okay. Everything is okay. Maybe.
Aranea Highwind     In the midst of the sudden onslaught of slugs coming from the... Thing, Aranea puts extra effort into zipping around and avoiding the obviously lethal shots. The thrusters on her spears go into overdrive, providing more than the usual short bursts of red light so that she can rocket through the incoming slugs without losing a limb, or a huge chunk of her body.

    Judging by the reflections, that's the best course of action. Best not test her shields to see if they can withstand this.

    She uses the occasion to fly by Roxas, ever in control of her movements. "So more teaching less training? Got it. We'll go over that sometime we're not busy not dying, and all that."

    She launches back upward, uninterested in hitting the ground in its current state, and entirely too used to her rocketing about to use those wings.

    Her spear clicks, and a few chunks of magitek visibly separate. Physical attacks seem to do a bit better against it, and the way it's shrinking and growing back up...

    "Going in, pull me out if I get sucked in!"

    Spoken to Roxas, possibly? Or Strange.

    Aranea's ascent stops, and she suddenly rockets right back down, upright on her spear as if riding its head with one foot. The gleaming red blade underneath the magitek is exposed.

    "Let's find out how you tick!"

    She aims to dash through the vortex and graze the core - not stab through it, that seems entirely too dangerous. But a graze should be enough. The spear will attempt to halt the core's regeneration, but also attempts to eject a few chunks of magitek into it, which will burst into nasty red thorns inside, magically fixed in place and defying removal.

    And then, hopefully, back out the other side without getting shredded. And she makes sure to use attacks as cover - like Zenos' big, nasty blast of Aether.
Staren     "Oh COME ON!" Staren shouts when the railgun shoots right through. He quickly stows it and gets ready to move, though...

    And things get weird as the antegent and Dr. Strange together create a very Definitely Final Boss Battleground. The 'marbling', or perhaps 'bubbling' effect gives Staren a chance to evade the pillars initially, and then they start moving -- itself a difficult if video-gamey challenge he can barely keep up with, before the field bullets start shredding through his mecha -- it's a good thing it's so massive and can operate with some holes! It's all he can do to try and add a little bit of random zig-zagging to his dodging of the fire pillars and HOPE the sphere aims wrong.

    Suddenly, though, everything seems to slow down. Dodging becomes much easier. First, Staren wonders what happened. Glancing around, though, he soon sees Strange doing the time thing. And Zenos... Zenos is showing him where to aim so he /doesn't miss/.

    He gets the sniper rifle back out. Plenty of time for it to charge again, now. Staren winces as he sees faces in mirrors replaced with blood splatters. And sees how many mirrors show blood splatters already. That's existentially /horrifying/, and he can only imagine how many unexpecting people -- and given this group, unexpecting people on whom others' lives depend -- are suddenly being wiped out with no warning.

                         ~~~Meanwhile, Somewhen Else~~~                        

    Staren's face appears on TV screens across the Multiverse. The catboy is clad in the distinctive black power armor engineered to keep up with the Tekkamen, complete with flowing black cape. The helmet is off, just in case anyone doesn't recognize the armor. "You may have heard that the Union Elite Forces are currently fighting my army of golems. I am broadcasting this message to let you know what is about to happen and why." He holds up a remote in view of the camera. "When I press this button, de-unification devices planted in New Washington and New Pyongyang with the help of good citizens -- oh don't go looking for spies," the catboy glares, "I saved their dying relatives with science YOU refused to touch and helped them and their families find new homes."

    Staren takes a breath. "Now then. When I press this button, New Washington and New Pyongyang will de-unify, taking out the centers of power of the Union and Confederacy! The war will be OVER." Staren grins, then grows somber and hangs his head. "I know that families will be seperated. Lives will be disrupted. And a lot of people will probably die." He holds the remote high. "But this is for the greater good! Far fewer will die today, than will throw away their lives in this pointless war!" He raises his other hand, finger poised to press the button. "TO A BETTER WORLD!"

                                    *SPLAT!*                                    

    The now-headless armor collapses, leaving the camera transmitting nothing but a bloodstained wall for hours until elites find it and shut it off.

                                      ~~~~                                      

    At last, the indicator on his HUD reads 100%.

    Staren fires.
Xion Xion has many a problem. Peeling back the layers of the tennis ball - or onion, as things may be - of the Antegent reveals not a nice squishy shootable weak core AS ALL GOOD THINGS MUST BE, THERE ARE RULES, THIS IS HOGWASH AND BALDERDASH!!! but a murderous orb of shooty-space that shoots Killer Space, The Space That Kills all about.

Shattering reality, smashing perspective, and tearing up Xion's coat (and also her Xion bits) with cartoonish blastbacks that send her crashing through walls and depleting precious hitpoints that slowly start regaining - much slower than enough to simply 'tank through' all the mechanics, Xion is pressured and overwhelmed.

And there's a Doctor Strange next to her! He looks hurt!
He also looks FLAT!

"I'm sorry in advance Mister Strange!" Xion calls, reaching out a black-gloved hand into the illusory copy of Strange, 'tearing off' his illusory Eye of Agamotto with a sharp yank of her hand and consuming the fragment of Strange embodied by his illusory double. "But you're very smart, and if you're going to be speeding up people - I'll borrow that power and do the next best thing!"

Leaping out of the rubble and dodging through shots of beams to find the real Doctor Strange - or his Future self. "SorryforstealingyourpowerHERE! Hastega!"

Clocks - big, golden, stupid cartoon clocks start ticking all around the good Sorcerer Supreme, ticking up, and up, and upupUP, louder and louder as he accellerates Even Further Beyond.
Roxas Roxas barely understands what's actually going on in front of him. He can tell that his attacks got through -- it seems like anything generally intangible can get through, and anything too material doesn't? -- but the /counter-attack/ is mind-boggling, and the noises this things makes are so /weird/. It's almost, ALMOST understandable. A pulse of agitation races through him. It's only the fact that Xion explicitly outlines /what/ this thing wants that stops him from trying to talk to it.

If what it wants is to 'kill humans', then it has enough of a mind to be a person for certain, but it's so diametrically opposed to them that talking it down just isn't possible.

Like a Heartless.

The fusion columns start coming down, and this Roxas is prepared for. It's almost like watching his own attack being executed, only from the wrong perspective. He races through the pillars, moving out of the way of the thrusting blows and managing to find a gap between them as they begin to spin and cut and generally be horrible boss mechanics.

It's the "slugs" that manage to get through to him.

He comes about on one of them with his Keyblade, bracing one hand against the back of it as he catches it -- inexplicably -- against the segment that would be for cutting if keyblades actually cut anything with an edge. Roxas struggles against it for a moment, and then LOSES THE QUICKTIME EVENT.

Darkness flows off his body as the slug gets through his defenses, and Roxas is thrown tumbling to the "ground" (more like sent into a dive that he loosely recovers from). Roxas is just in the middle of picking himself up when the /follow-up/ barrage starts to come, eliciting a look of surprise and intense exasperation.

The FIRST ROXAS plunges a hand into the ground and vanishes into a corridor of darkness.

The SECOND ROXAS springs up and splits his Keyblade in two, beginning to parry the oncoming barrage with greater proficiency than previously demonstrated.

A THIRD ROXAS emerges from his entry point near the staging area and gets shredded by unexpected range from the overall attack, vaporizing into a cloud of darkness.

A FOURTH ROXAS -- which is in fact the 'real' Roxas -- darts through the air and performs a spinning maneuver that illuminates the air around him, bleeding force out of oncoming slugs and still getting battered and bloody along the way, but managing to push his way through.

"R-right!" Roxas calls to Aranea, following after her.

"Cura!" Roxas calls, spinning in mid-air as he trails Aranea to cast a field of sparkling restorative particles towards Doctor Strange.
Alexis Well, shit. So much for thinking outside the standard types of attack. Alexis had kind of hoped sound would travel fast enough to get through the winds or spread them apart but apparently not. Though at this point she is hardly surprised this thing is not obeying typical metaphysics.... Which is saying something, considering some of the odd stuff that Pokemon can do. Nothing on this calibre though, at least not without being some diety tier Legendary.

Mirage emitted an irritated buzz that almost sounded like a sigh at the ineffectiveness of her attack. "Yeah, sorry girl." Alexis murmured reassuringly, then tried to shift tactical gears. "Looks like we need less unorthadox and just more outright pow--" The miasma around the thing contracts again. "--NOW, MOVE!"

Blinding speed was one of the reasons Mirage got the name she did, dropping from her hover and aerial rolling to the side to barely avoid a stream of fury being spewed out of the Antegent. The heat wouldn't bother Alexis' choice in pokemon much, but that intense radiation-like energy is something they'd rather not be in the direct path of.

As more and more vectors of intense energy are expunged from the miasma Flygon does her best to avoid them, swooping and weaving amongst the barrage with Agility. The output is intense enough that the shield Sylveon is casting around them can be seen glowing into the visible spectrum, barely keeping them defended against the worst of the assault. Neither pokemon would of likely endured that onslaught alone, but working together as a team to combine evasion and defense they managed to come out of it with less damage. Not unarmed though, as even with the shielding Flygon has visible energy burns from several close calls, and Sylveon was panting and whining from the energy put into the Light Screen. Alexis is just uncomfortable in general, both from their strain and the amount of heat this thing puts out. She's feeling hot and sweaty from it, and normally heat doesn't bother her. It's all the -other- energy this thing is flinging.
As is she stays hunched down on Flygon's back even as she ends her evasive maneuvers. "Caddy, you okay up there?"

But rather than answer her the Sylveon pushes herself back to standing, still supporting herself with ribbons wrapped around Flygon's horns and neck, while her normally blue eyes flicker in shades of red and her entire form's usual glittery sheen takes a much darker tone. "SYLVEON! (THAT WASN'T VERY NICE)" ... And that would be a fae-fox going into rage mode. "(YOUR ICKY NASTINESS AND MEANY BULLY STORM SHALL BE PUNISHED!)"

Though instead of attacking herself Caddy still lives up to her assistant name, channeling the energy of that rage into Flygon instead and giving the dragon a boost in offensive power with Helping Hand.

"Well okay then." Alexis sits partway up because it's time to be dramatic, and points at the swirling monstrousity. "Use that boost and hit it with EVERYTHING!" Mirage emits a buzzing roar, energy in purple and indego shades building around her otherwise tired form. The power, boosted farther by Sylveon's assistant, rolls around her a bit before she opens her mouth and seems to suck it all in.

Then spit it out in one massive shearing ball of draconic fury, a massive projectile crackling with indigo sparks and fueled by both rage, determination and teamwork!
Touta Konoe      Touta's attack proves be one of the few that are able to puncture the sphere completely along with Staren's slug and it reveals to be the core of the sphere in question. Though even piercing through the sphere doesn't stop its mighty traversal. It was clear that only hitting the core of this thing was actually going to end this.

     And that's when it happens. The vibrations get stronger, sounds of jinglings glass, and the orb reaches the center of this weird reality before stopping ominously. Spikes and drags, the disorienting base sound that could be felt throughout this reality like an earthquake. At that point it contracts and expands once again before expelling everything. Magical energy ribbons, fiery fusion columns, pillars of rolling light, it felt like this was some sort of video game level at this point, but he'll need a professional opinion from Arthur later to confirm that.

     There really isn't time to look into the altered realities and how they end up changed from these attacks because he's trying his best to avoid said obstructions with very puny orange butterfly wings. Much less for his own safety but more because if this hula-hoop gets destroyed he's can't imagine how he'll be able to help any further. It's a very odd experience when you're more relieved than an arm or a leg got eaten by these attacks than a hula-hoop. Truly, truly, strange.

     It seems that the overall consensus for a plan is that Staren's attack would be the finisher. If that was the case Touta would try to help him get a better shot at the core.

     "Staren, you got this!"

     And without another word Touta would launch another beam of white magical light. Shooting it past magical ribbons, pillars of light, spikes, and other such magical obstructions it had developed so far inorder to protect itself. While the original idea was to have Magic Cancel shoot out into the sphere again to give a better idea of where the core actually was for Staren and Gawain to make their attacks, at the same time the path the beam had traveled would likely give a straight path unimpeded by any of the magical obstacles from before which would hopefully make Gawain's charge somewhat easier, and give Staren a clean shot at the sphere and a better idea of where the core wasn't.
Arthur Lowell     A bar has been incrementally filling. Now that its hazard is reaching a peak, Arthur finds himself dealing with it at its fullness. He flinches as several odd STATUS EFFECTS suddenly apply to him! Icons of static or television test signals overlayed around eyes, ears, and brains float now above a Health Vial that abruptly drops a chunk when a hefty piece of solid-slug magic crashes into his torso, knocking him back. He clenches both palms together around it to shatter it dramatically around him, before his eyes flare wildly with light and energy. He's not gonna be able to dump the magic required for another of those space-warpy things again, not by a long shot, but he can at least manage more portals.

    Diving and weaving, he zips around with that broom again, working deftly in the gaps between slugs. The shards of portal are ones he can deal with, simply because his ability to manipulate gates gives him easy ways to shut them down, but the slugs glance off him and often force him to strain to dodge. He casts one deep into the interior of the warped space. It can boil portals... But it takes a moment, doesn't it? Arthur rushes in, doing his best to prevent something he saw earlier. His mind may be filling with static and his status effects are piling on, but with luck, he can pull himself together enough for a targeted rush. He blasts a portal, close to the core! Then dives clean through, layered in gravitational portals as much as he can.

    He can't dump much DPS here, right now, but he CAN layer on the gravity hard. He saw that miss Staren ate before, and he intends to stop it from happening again. He reaches out with both hands, making a harsh clutching motion, and draws the thing as close as it can get to the surface of a snap-generated black hole nearish the center of the field. A boost to Staren, but one also hopefully to Alexis and Gawain as well, ikn their own efforts. It wouldn't have dodged if dodging wasn't important to keeping it alive -- so he's going to stop it!
Note     Note is growing increasingly confused by all of the strange things happening around here. Or, more precisely, all of the Strange things happening around here! She ceases powering up as TONS of the Sorcerer Supremes start flying around in this weird null-space they've all been dragged into. She didn't complain about that. She didn't even question it.

    But with multiple copies of him flying around, and they all feel genuine to her senses, she starts spluttering in bewilderment...

    "I... I feel like SUCH a one-tricky pony next to these people." She exclaims, stupefied as the amount of craziness just keeps ramping up further and further.

    It's really enough to take some wind out of her sails.

    But now does seem to be the time to let 'er rip. And so she does exactly that, bringing both hands to the right side of her waist, palms apart....

    "Kaaaaa... Meeee... Haaa... Meee.... HAAAAAAA!!!"

    All through the chant, power builds between her hands. A blue-white sphere glints into existence, then grows and strains to escape the prison of her fingers. Spears of light radiate through near the end as she compresses an enormous amount of power all at once down to a single point... and then aims those palms forward, framing the vortex!

    The result is an onrushing torrential FLOOD of blue-white light shaped as a pumping beam, brilliant enough to illuminate everything in stark contrast of light and shadow.

    This destructive mass of power, the sum total of all the power Note cultivated up over these last few minutes, is heading for the Vortex. ALL AT ONCE.
Lilian Rook     Strange splitting himself into a million (fake-ass) temporal clones illustrates the general effect further. As more and more of them appear, the Antegent begins firing out more and more lasers, or rather, spreading more and more of its horrid quaking substance into columns and beams. Ten, twenty, fifty more lancing rays join the rest, more 'slugs' of violent disintegration pouring out of its midsection to swat and pulverize those that aren't skewered and obliterated by energy beams. As it does, the hazy mirage of jittering air surrounding it shrinks and shrinks, growing again when a beam peters out, but pulled in once more when another one fires, like stretching out an elastic or liquid body of a determinate volume rather than firing beams.

    When Zenos goes fully ham on it, the bizarre entity dumps almost all of that field straight into him, suddenly swinging around several beams and converging them into a single, tenfold intensity pillar of disintegrating energy that clashes against his Aether blast and pierces deep into its dead center, splitting the massive magical attack around it as an offensive defense. It'd probably crash all the way through, where it not joined by Note unleashing the kamehameha wave, adding to the competing force, and making the Antegent pour the dregs of its field into the extra firepower needed to push them back and incinerate them, leaving only a few feet of it thick around the orb.

    During its moment of maximum output, the field remaining around the core itself shrinks enough to allow Aranea to actually graze it without plunging face first into it. The second her spearpoint dips beneath the event horizon, she feels the weapon vibrating horridly in an impossible number of different directions simultaneously, traveling up the shaft to snap her wrist, if not liquiefy her arm bones. Gawain comes charging from the opposite direction to just ram Galatine right into the center, and though the blade is certainly extraordinarily sturdy, he gets even worse feedback for the direct approach, enough for the reverberations to crack his armour without actually touching it.

    The ejected magitek bits crumble to tiny pieces in instants and fire their red thorns back at Aranea. The holy flames surge and twist and come back at Gawain in roaring streams. Both blades connect, if barely, and where they cut into the melded, liquid black and white, they leave clean slices that briefly do nothing, and then spray an almost pressurized wash of deep crimson blood all over them, reeking of entirely too-familiar copper.

    The massive complicated attack array sputters wildly after, bubbling and distorting as if a shockwave had gone down every vector, causing beams to twist into wild spirals and fragment into dozens of randomly aimed lasers, ironically becoming vastly more dangerous to the real Doctor Strange. The wounded orb, dripping blood straight down where it puddles on midair, begins to accelerate back to the frozen mass cloud, whipping its captured magic into a storm around itself again after being sufficiently beaten on to start phase 2, necessitating it be made vulnerable two more times. Arthur's gravity clutch seizes it halfway, and the dragon rage crashes dead onto it, burning away the white light rather than the black pools, leaving it a horridly bleeding dot in space.
Lilian Rook     It aims directly for Alexis and Arthur, splitting its massive gigabeam in two and swinging them both back around to them, firing out walls of disintegration slugs to catch sideways dodges as well. Just as it does, Touta fires magic cancel again, a split second between a thinner beam suddenly sweeps fully around it and straight through his middle, swerving up to cleave through the Star Hawk from between the legs and up to its cockpit, but a moment too late; hyper accelerated time cat Staren has just finished charging and loading the Annihilator (had it been timing his recharge?) and fires again straight through the hole in the defensive screen of attack magic it'd created.

    The slug skewers straight in, causing the whole black blot to ripple like a water balloon. It doesn't even make a bounce in the opposite side, never mind create an exit wound. The muted eruption of magical light and blast of thunder is little more than a flash and a fizzle from the raw and bloody entry hole. A split second later, as if it'd somehow taken a moment for the explosion to fully happen, its 'skin' splits apart like an orange, spraying the entire area in red gore and fragments of bone.

    Where the orb breaks, a small mountain of dirt, stone, metal, vegetation, and water spills out, growing exponentially by the second. As it goes on, tiny chunks of architecture, little pieces of wind turbines and water pipes, shreds of tires, and other odds and ends join the heap. Blending into them, the torrent turns to mounds of crushed brass and lead, shell fragments, pieces of armour and slicks of fuel, and the occasional glint of an apparently undamaged item, muddied and bloodied but still radiating magic.

    All of it is mixed in with human remains --mostly human blood, as anything more solid has been rendered down to fragments or soup-- not so many at first, but as the debris becomes less nature and more rural, the amount of blood washed into the terrain and stained into the tools increases, and then as it becomes distinctly military, every inch of the spat-out architecture and armour is awash in it, with the very last of it disgorged at the top of the mound being a truly abhorrent amount of human jelly. The very last part --the remains of what must be thousands of people-- is completely devoid of anything magical.
Doctor Strange      "He'll get over it," says Strange in fast-forward to Xion. His reaction is actually pretty neutral, for the short span of time she can observe it. His wounds knit closed, even faster thanks to the combination of Xion's Hastega and Roxas' Cura spells. It's a little tender now, but far better than it was, and definitely not cause for a trip to the ER later. The doctors there will be thankful--some doctors make terrible patients.

     The haste spell ends up being quite timely for another reason. It allows Strange to fly through the spasmodic attack array, making adjustments to his own gravity to yank himself out of the way of random lasers. At one point, the sorcerer simply moves /everything else,/ and everyone within his zone of fucked-up-shit can feel it moving. It's like being inside a kaleidoscope, but remaining on your feet no matter how it turns.

     He can't evade it all, and one of the lasers clips the Cloak of Levitation, setting it ablaze and sending Strange tumbling into the void. The Eye opens in his descent, and he forces gravity to push him towards one of the two cubic islands of upturned earth. Time rewinds in high speed, putting out the flames and allowing the Cloak to recover. It isn't enough to keep his landing soft, and he slams into the hard earth with a pained wheeze.

     The wind's been knocked out of him, but thanks to Hastega, he recovers faster. The sorcerer gets to his feet, observes the result of everyone's final attacks... and does them all a favor by turning the whole place upside down. No one loses their footing thanks to bullshit spatial manipulation, but the mountain of gore and refuse should hopefully tumble into that nice bottmless blue-sky void he's created.
Gawain Gawain gets in a strong slash, but in exchange, his armor is further cracked, and the feedback actually is enough to feel like it's smashing him further, feeling it in his bones. It's a bit of a foolish risk, charging in like that, but it was worth it, as the monster bleeds (which is horrifying), and the group prepares for the big attack. Staren fires...

And he hits. Gawain doesn't make it far enough fast enough, and the outcome of bone fragments and horrible gore splatters him, bone jabbing into his already bad injuries. He's tough...but this is causing him to expand his mana. Using the wings he has, he moves to fly to the closest surface, and kneel for some air (and to get the gore off his face).

Mission accomplished, but Gawain's going to need some rest, eating, and refueling. At least it worked! Which is just going to encourage him to do similar in the future.
Zenos yae Galvus Zenos' attack clashes with the full might of the beams of disintegration from the creature itself.  The two forces collide, as the shockwaves wash out over the nigh-endless mirror dimension.  However, the monster summons more energy...

And then a beam of energy from Note smashes into the beam.  Grinning as he puts more force into his wave.  The collision becomes more intense, as it devotes everything it has into it.  Parts of his armor start disintegrating as the forces collide, but the wave of energy just narrowly holds the monster at bay.

That is, until, it finally collapses thanks to the shot.  The coordinated assault paid off, and the monster starts dumping everything it has consumed.  His armor sizzling, but still enough of it to spare him the overwhelming awful sent of the corpses.  

The blade shatters, however...causing Zenos to look at it dismissively and throw it to the ground.  "A pity."
Touta Konoe      Touta strike finds a mark, but not before the strange sphere entity returns the favor. While Magic Cancel looked like it would have been enough to protect Touta from those beams or tentacles or whatever they were the fact of the matter was that only applied when that hoop was spinning. Unfortunately for him, as the thinner beam pierced him it had also disintegrated his hoop before doing so leaving him as easy pickings for the smaller beam.

     The result is that the young vampire is impaled through the torso. Much like how the sphere had been punctured to the point that one could see through to the other end, the same could be said of Touta as one could look through his stomach to see the mirror like surroundings on the other side as blood spilled from the open wound.

     The overall result is victory. Strange inverts the gravity so that no one has to deal with the mountain of gore which is definitely appreciated but there was obviously a few scratches and the like on their side as well to get to that point. Frankly, he's just glad that it was him that ended up taking a hole in the stomach and not someone else. He coughts up blood briefly as the group celebrates before the hole solely begins mending itself similar to the hastened curaga that Strange had received if not just a bit faster.

     With a bit of time to think now he's tryig reflecting on what the hell just happened.
Aranea Highwind     It is extremely lucky that Aranea has the fine control over her equipment to immediatly unsummon her spear and the magitek bits the moment they turn against her. It's less fortunate that she didn't predict that happening and got sprayed by so much blood that she delayed acting long enough for the thorns to stretch and tear through armor here and there.

    In the wake of the sphere withdrawing - and eventually, being defeated and spraying its contents absolutely everywhere - Aranea tumbles away from the splash zone onto a lucky piece of ground that's still there, and rumbles about the sting of those grazes.

    It's good to know it worked, less good that it turned on her. The pay better be worth the pain this'll be for the next... while, actually. The grazes refuse to close if anyone delivers healing, at least not without significant effort to fix them.

    "That was a pain and a half. You alright, kid?" She is slightly more concerned for Roxas, but that's just how she is.
Alexis Derect hit this time!

But the victory is short lived as the monstrousity pinpoints on them and retaliates with it's waning power.

There's barely time even for the speedy fly-dragon to react. "Flygon!" "Wait just a--" But Alexis doesn't get to finish objecting as Caddy jumps back onto her. Mirage does a partial flip to buck the human off her back, then grab Alexis as she swings around and uses Dragon Tail to fling the other two high into the air and out of the path of the massive energy blast. Then folds down her own wings and curls up into a ball. The energy blast slams into her, glowing brightly as it burns through the remains of the Light Screen, and hammers Flygon with enough force to send her hurtling away at only a slightly lower arc than she threw Alexis. All she gets out is a groan, severely burned and knocked unconcious by the assault.

"Dammit all to hell!" Flung tumbling through the air Alexis huddles Sylveron under one arm, and grabs a pokeball with the other hand. "REDLINE EMERGENCY AIR RECOVERY!" She smacks it against her arm to trigger the pokeball instead of throwing it, spilling out energy that quickly consolidates into her Charizard. "Char?!" "GRAB MIRAGE!" Alexis shouts to be heard over the rushing air as she lands on his back, barely leaving enough time for her and Sylveon to grab on before the winged reptile loops over and dives into a spiral, using Dragon Dance soley for the speed boost. It's just enough to catch up to Mirage's lower arc and grab the Flygon by the tail. Then snaps open his wings wide, using them like a parachute to break the entire groups descent.

Even then it takes some time for them to get close to the ground, and Alexis to retrieve the right pokeball to recall the unconcious Flygon. "Good job, girl. Good job." That's tucked back on her belt and she looks at... the remains....

"Ugh. These things are even uglier when dead. Totally squick."

"Syyyl.." It's hard to tell if it's from the sight of the creature's remains, or from a fit of vertigo and air sickness, but either way as Alexis holds her out at arms length and turns her own head away Caddy proceeds to hurk and hurl off to the side.

Being a Fairy type it's arguably the prettiest puke you'll ever see, being glittery and pastel colored.
Roxas Roxas wasn't a part of the attacker group just then, so he wasn't subjected to much more of... well, anything. He supposes that... /thing/... wasn't especially interested in somebody playing support. Maybe it didn't understand so much? He isn't sure. It doesn't matter anymore. He floats backwards, a hand rising reflexively to cover his mouth and nose at the raw /stench/ of the pulped human remains being left behind. His vision swims at the sight of so much /blood/, and the sheer absence of actual people.

He turns away from it, swallowing a lump in his throat.

"I don't know." The reply to Aranea is reflexive.

"I guess, maybe?"

"You're bleeding." He observes, dully.

Clarity seems to return to him, a little. Roxas looks around, but averts his gaze from the Human Goo immediately again.
Xion It's nice, in a strange way, being off to the side. Xion helps Strange, and he appreciates it. The kaleidoscope of force is 'easy' to avoid when you spend your entire time high-speed dodging between tossing buffs at various Strange time-clones. It's, in essence, the phenomenon of simply being offscreen that benefits those not really being rendered and thus immune to damage.

Well, she had a lot to dodge, but nothing directed at her. Then again...

She was 'literally Nobody'.

The Antegent barfs up a chronological path of stuff-and-people it had consumed. While Roxas was grossed out, Xion just curled her nose and held it to ward away the stink.

"Hey, Mibstr Strangee, ube yor time powr to fib it!" Xion nosehold-speaks with a hopeful, expectant tone.

Obviously, someone who can turn back time could just totally fix all the problems! Totally.
Note     Somehow, the group perseveres. The strange vortex cracks and shatters... and then pours its contents over EVERYTHING. Contents that cause Note's face to turn green with nasusea and disgust.

    She floats backwards a few feet, trembling... and then turns around and...

    BWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARF.
Arthur Lowell     Arthur immediately eats shit with a dead-on beam. He's already torn up by exposure to what field remains, and the rest of the battle. It slams him back and away, while he presses both hands up to a projected gravity barrier. The shockwaves roll through his arms before he manages to firm up and keep from being ring-outed on the mission. That mental static that layered on him means he STILL can't muster all his Aspect though, and eventually it breaks through in a blunted way, slamming him out of the air, leaving him drifting weightlessly in the vast void. His Health Vial is flickery, showing severe exhaustion, but not emptied. Thank goodness.

    He only recovers partway through the death throes of the beast. Soon enough to see the piles of human death of all sorts ascending into the sky. Even his basic antigravity falters a little bit, as he clutches his mouth and shuts his eyes. Ugh, ugh ugh ugh, no, look away. But the image is seared on his mind and he's reacting badly. His Aspect meter even starts to drain a little, until Arthur manages to disperse those status effects entirely. Looking a little green around the gills, but... He can do his best to shout a lot on the radio as he drifts back up and gets back towards the staging zone.
Aranea Highwind     "Yeah, don't worry about it," Aranea says, ignoring the matter for the time being to check on Roxas. "First time dealing with this much gore and blood? Come on, let's not stick around, the smell only gets worse from here on out."

    Worse does not begin to cover what this will be like when the goop starts rotting. Someone else can worry about cleaning this up, if anyone is going to bother at all.

    "Short and mysterious over there seems to be handling it unusually well," she takes the time to note, jerking a thumb towards Xion.
Doctor Strange      "Okay," says Strange over the radio. "Back to real space in three, two..." A cascade of shattered reality washes over the battlefield, bringing everything back into the physical plane. As it turns out, this means a lot of folks end up sideways, though the levitation spells Strange cooked up mean that no one (except maybe Touta!) is dumped out like pocket change.

     There is a ground again, only one sun, and no more disconcerting endless expanse of tesselated sky, nor glimmering shards which are themselves doorways to other worlds. This was a victory--but a pyrrhic one. He's not blind--the Sorcerer Supreme definitely saw the results of the Antegent's attacks on the alternate realities. Either he's found something the Mirror Dimension can't contain, or he's not so responsible as he'd like to think. He never likes meeting an opponent he actually has to take seriously--nor does he like the lingering possibility that Mordo's condemnation of his approach to magic might've had some basis in fact.

     Well, doesn't matter. Can't let the gang see him expressing doubt. Then they'll ask questions, and the answers'll just make more questions, and no one will much like /those/ answers. Best just to avoid all that entirely. "Portals to your home worlds, going once, twice..>" Strange slips on the Sling Ring and offers to ferry anyone home. After the last of them, or if no one wants to, he'll make one to the Sanctum and make an appointment with one of its enchanted recliners.
Staren                                       ~~~~                                      

    "Join me." The black-haired woman with red eyes and dressed in a black outfit that involves long gloves and boots and a dress with a lot of intentional holes holds out one hand.

    "Never!" The catgirl in a flashy, skirted outfit holding a magic stick shakes her head. "Your cultists kill innocent people and for what? To summon some eldritch god and end the world? I stopped them, and I'll stop you!" She glares at the woman with DETERMINATION.

    The villainous pulls her hand back, holding fingers to her forehead. "Ugh. Those stupid fools, I never should have entrusted... wait. Killing innocents? That's what you're worried about? Listen, what do you think happens when people die? That they just disappear? When people die, they go to the underworld where they slowly lose all feeling and memory and descend into madness!" She clenches her fist, "They become shades of what they were! Think of an old person with dementia but a thousand times worse! They lose everything! Everyone you've ever loved who's died, everyone you've ever known who WILL die, they're being tortured for all eternity until their existence is nothing but PAIN!"

    The magical girl stares mouth agape in wordless horror. Her cat bounds to her side. "Don't listen to her!"

    The villainess continues: "When the Old Ones destroy the world, I'll be able to use the..." she fumbles for a word, "quintessence of what it's made of to fix the underworld! There won't be life and afterlife, just an /existence/ that's better than anything there is now!"

    The catgirl thinks. "I... so... if I help you..." She starts to walk forward, while the cat pulls at her boot with its claws, begging. "Don't listen to her! It would be better if you died than to give her your power!"

                                    *SPLAT!*                                    

    The woman and the cat stare in surprise and horror. Then their eyes meet... and she starts throwing bolts of red energy at it as it grabs the henshin wand in its mouth and flees for its life.

                                      ~~~~                                      

    So this is the lifehunt. Staren knows in his bones that it, too, deserves a chance to live. To be more than just a force rejected by the world, and, perhaps, by its carrier. Even at the price it asks... after all, would it disrupt the future any more than any other life being born? He might lose something, yes... but so might some random baby set in motion a course of events that could make him never meet someone, or never learn of the ultimate power that controls the universe. So he gives it the piece of his future, willingly, just as all the others do.

                                    *SPLAT!*                                    

    It came to collect sooner than anyone expected. Right through the cortical stack, too.

                                      ~~~~                                      
Staren     "Would you believe I once considered trying to de-unify New Washington and New Pyongyang? Not that I know if it would've worked..." Staren hangs his head sadly for a moment, as they sit in the field. Twilight puts her hoof on his shoulder. "Terrible as that might sound... It was a thought that came from love for people, and in the end you /didn't do it/. What's... what's brought this on, Staren?" He turns and looks into her eyes, his own full of tears, then hugs her, resting his head on her shoulder. "I'm... I'm sorry for bringing that up. I just... I had to tell you my darkest secret, before..." He lets go and stands up. "I asked you to meet me here to tell you... I've decided to retire. I'm not going to fight in this pointless war anymore. I'm going to retire here, to Equestria. There are plenty of ponies to help, and... I'd like to start a family."

    The purple unicorn tilts her head to the side slightly at the conversational swerve at the end there.

    "I hope you don't mind the lack of some grand gesture. But this isn't a book. This is just two people who love eachother." Staren gets down on one knee and pulls a small box from his labcoat pocket. "Twilight Sparkle, will you mar--"

                                    *SPLAT!*                                    

                                      ~~~~                                      

    "You're early." A brown-haired man with light skin in a red T-shirt and sea-green cargo pants looks up as the raven-haired, slightly-tanned woman wearing a shawl over a sweater and jeans walks in. She shrugs and sits down across him at a table with a GM screen, battlemat, and some dice already laid out on it, before retrieving a character sheet, pencil, and dice bag and setting them in front of her neatly on the table.

    "Can I get you anything? Tea?" He asks. She nods, and he gets up and goes to the next room, and there's the sound of setting up one of those pod coffee makers. "As long as we've got some time, what about discussing philosophy?" "Sure." "So, you know I love crossovers and stuff. And time travel, alternate dimensions... stuff that explores what-if versions of already established characters." "Yeah..." "But how far does that really go? How different can someone be before they aren't themselves?"

    He comes back into the room and sits down, hands idly rolling dice behind the screen as he talks. "Like... take mecha shows, for example. If my parents built me a giant robot -- I mean, first of all, AWESOME -- but if I was out there fighting supervillains or monsters all the time from when I was a teenager... I mean, I wouldn't have had time for /college/, or videogames," "Or running this game." She interjects with a smirk, and he nods, "yeah! Or like... hell, all this philosophy talk! I wouldn't... I wouldn't really be who I am, even if I had the same genes and was still called Staren."

    The woman tilts her head and speaks in turn, "Conversely, though... Suppose somewhere in some sci fi universe, there's a robot girl. Built in a factory, no parents or being raised or anything. But through an entirely /different/ set of circumstances, she comes to develop a similar personality, similar concerns, like... she still wants to make the world better and do it efficiently, heck, maybe she even ends up going to school to learn how to make a better AI--" "--But she's designated 7-R.Q.B.L." He interjects, with a smirk, and she nods, "Right, sure, because she's a robot. But anyway, is she /me/?"

    One of the dice Staren rolls falls onto the floor, and Staren bends over to get it -- and SOMETHING shoots through the air where his head just was and bores a hole through the wall. "What the FUCK?!" Staren looks up in alarm, and Septette gets up to inspect the hole, "I don't... a meteor or something?" She looks in the other direction, "But where's the entry hole...?"

                                      ~~~~                                      
Staren     As the time comes down to the wire and his finger presses the button, Staren wonders if he'll be able to move out of the way of that beam fast enough.

    Fortunately, the source of the beam dies before he can find out. And then a mountain of debris begins to re-enter space, and if needed he puts his mecha hands to use grabbing people and flying them out of the way -- although, with two portal wizards here that's probably not necessary.

    He begins the cooling sequence as he flies to a safe distance, the gun venting another cloud of green steam before folding up again. Staren watches his cameras grimly as the debris eventually turns to liquified human remains. There must be hundreds there. Thousands? Where did this Antegent appear, in the middle of a military base?

    And then there are today's allies. Some of whom seem to be hurt pretty badly. He almost feels bad that he escaped unscathed, but for a few holes in his mecha.

    <"Is everyone alright? Does anyone need--">

                                    *SPLAT!*                                    

    The canopy isn't painted red because of Staren's helmet. Right through the cortical stack, too...

                                      ~~~~                                      
Staren     As the time comes down to the wire and his finger presses the button, Staren wonders if he'll be able to move out of the way of that beam fast enough.

    Fortunately, the source of the beam dies before he can find out. And then a mountain of debris begins to re-enter space, and if needed he puts his mecha hands to use grabbing people and flying them out of the way -- although, with two portal wizards here that's probably not necessary.

    He begins the cooling sequence as he flies to a safe distance, the gun venting another cloud of green steam before folding up again. Staren watches his cameras grimly as the debris eventually turns to liquified human remains. There must be hundreds there. Thousands? Where did this Antegent appear, in the middle of a military base?

    And then there are today's allies. Some of whom seem to be hurt pretty badly. He almost feels bad that he escaped unscathed, but for a few holes in his mecha.

    <"Is everyone alright? Does anyone need help?"> Staren offers nanobandages and if necessary, transport to wherever they can get medical help.

    <"Thanks, everyone. I, uh... I wouldn't have had time or the aim to do that without you."> He scratches the side of his helmet awkwardly.
Roxas Roxas looks back towards the slurry, then towards Aranea. He nods, "She's... experienced a lot of things? Probably more than any of the rest of us. I guess... probably, she doesn't need teaching as much as I do."

He finds himself 'standing sideways' a moment later.

"Oh, um-- thanks, Doctor Strange," He rights himself, "but Aranea, Xion, and I can get back okay. Well, Xion and I can, anyway. I don't know..."

He looks up at Aranea, "I don't know if you can use the corridors? Maybe that armor would work, but..."

He lets the thought trail off, "I guess we'll figure out what we need to be taught later. Um, maybe Xion will be able to help with that, actually..."

"Hey, uh... you do this stuff all the time, right?" He asks Aranea, "So... when do you want to stop?"
Alexis Anything, ANYTHING to avoid looking at the hideous remains of a hideous monstrousity. Even with the nasty shit she's seen in her time, of broken worlds and bitter minds, Alexis doesn't want to look at -that- right now. She stares too long at Sylveon's prismatic puke as it is. It's disugsting but much less mentally scarring that the pile of miasmic goop and humanly remains.

Fortunately Strange provides a quick and easy diversion with his offer. "Please and thank you Doctor. I've got one unconcious and one sick to get taken care of." Alexis is roughed up too, but of course she's thinking of her Pokemon first and formost. Plus it means not having to look over there much longer. "And good job, everyone."

When Strange opens a portal back to Hoenn she gives a brief half-salute to everyone else, followed by Charizard as she hurries through the magical opening in space-time. In a hurry to get somewhere reasonable before--

--The sound not unlike a cat barfing up the biggest hairball in history, followed by a distressed "(THE CARPET)" from some other pokemon can be heard before the portal whizzes shut behind her.
Aranea Highwind     "Pass on travelling through the darkbad dimension," Aranea confirms, uninterested in testing whether magitek shielding is Darkness-proof. "I'll find my way back, it's fine."

    The thought Xion experienced 'more than the others' is curious, considering she doesn't look any older than Roxas.

    Her glance turns back to him, and she shrugs. "When I'm done, I guess. Never really thought about it. It's not like I hate my work." Usually! There's some parts she'll less fond of. The parts that wear a hat and dress fancy, mostly.

    "Anyway, you two go on, you probaly want some showers pretty bad right about now. I'll be in touch."