Scene #6483: Satellite Response

Owner	Pose
Lilian Rook	For those who were dumb^5^5 brave enough to sign up to do this job voluntarily when they could be doing a million other, safer things, Antegent responses outsourced to Multiversal quantities are still relatively rare. Whether that means the system just works and rarely has overflow, or whether they're all just going to be terrible like last time (or maybe the latter is just incidental), is something that will likely be found out pretty soon. This alert is different for two immediately obvious reasons. One is that it reads as a lower response level, necessitating/authorizing less escalation of force, sitting at a Crimson Beast assessment. The other is that the urgency is way higher. Whereas before the issue had been a day out of town and handed down to Elites with precautions in place for their possible failure, this one is an immediate emergency issue. Why? Because it's a developing situation happening right now in the middle of a satellite colony. A habitation area for those people even dumber/braver than you living outside the walls. Lilian had said something about these before. Something along the lines of that they tend to do very well for some period of years with so much space, nature, advanced sustainable energy and fabrication resources available, and pre-Onslaught salvage, and then abruptly disappear off the map one day and only sometimes see any survivors return to tell about it. Today is the day that people will get to see exactly why. The colony is pretty far from the city. As in, well over a hundred miles. There is no comfortable commute back and forth; running someone to the hospital like from a country farm would just not be possible. No contiguous road runs to it that isn't destroyed or reclaimed by nature along at least one major stretch, and no urban center, dead or otherwise, is within sight. It's more of a commune fit for maybe half a thousand people, set near the bend of a river and high atop a hill, above trees and trails, where it can get the most sunlight for a very obviously 'solarpunk' aesthetic, exhibiting a central series of light white easy-assembly buildings, running water from the river with flexible pipes, and generating electricity from unfolded 'fans' of solar harvesting films. Pallets of fertilizer, cement, machine parts, sandbags, and tools are kept beneath them, surrounded by semitransparent hard domes filled with benches and racks of hydroponically grown food, compact water filtering assemblies, and partially finished jobs building and/or repairing things from fans to clothes. Beyond those, obviously newer buildings, mostly made using white cement and printed hard plastic, have been built up over time as the population probably increased, adjoining a couple of garages where only four trucks could fit, all of which are parked and accounted for. There are some grounded transformers and pumps at a couple of points to regulate how the electricity and water spread out, and weatherproof metal crates and lockers for storage. A big departure from the city: there are no cameras, and no sensors of any kind but for the weather. There's just the one radio mast, and no runways or helipads of any kind. There appears to be no security beyond what amount to privacy locks, and it's only much further down the hill that one finds a perimeter fence, with a trio of trails leading to the brush and trees past it. The only commonality here between this hab and the little resupply and rest posts out in the wild is that this one also has tiny automatic machine guns.
Lilian Rook	It is, unfortunately, dead quiet. It'd be much easier if there was a lot of running and screaming and panicked gunfire and big monstrous shadows on the walls to follow to the source of. Unless everyone was wiped out in the five minutes it took to get here due to the independents (intelligently) setting up their own cheap and cramped emergency warpgate, the problem obviously still has to be ongoing, and somebody would have had to have been operating the warpgate up until very recently. It seems not improbable that might have happened though, given the state of mess that is 'enough that something very bad happened, but little enough that it seems nobody had much warning or opportunity to grab their stuff and escape'. There are definitely dead people already, going by the sheer amount of blood all over the place at certain intersections of outdoorsy buildings, but no corpses to be found alongside them. Some of the stockpiles have been disturbed, as if collided with, climbed on, or cut open, and some of the plastic domes have had small holes punched through them or crumpled in on their sides. Other than that, no blast zones, no charnel fields, no overt supernatural mutation. It looks like everyone just ran away somehow, without unlocking the fence or starting any of the vehicles. The electricity is still running, and the hum of a smart device watching an internet video or a shop tool still spinning can be heard here and there.
Link	A bit of an oddity to the group, but there nonetheless, is someone who doesn't have an Antegent-Slayer Membership Card. A young man, probably a teenager, dressed in a green tunic and matching green cap over his short blonde hair, rides a reddish-brown horse across the wilderness, very comfortable riding through a rural region. Link is armed with a sword and a bow, and is extremely quiet. If anyone asks 'who the hell are you', he just replies with his name. There's a plain sword sheathed to his back, as well as a bow and quiver, and a large bag is strapped to the side of his horse. When they approach the front gate and fence, Link stops his horse, gets off her, gently pets her mane, and then removes the bag. "Good girl, Epona." Strapping the large bag to his lower back, he removes a pair of gloves from a pocket, pulling them on firmly, and approaches the fence. Assuming the machine guns don't go off as people approach, Link's going to just start scaling the fence with remarkable finesse, using the gloves to stop himself from getting cut, and then drop to the ground in a roll on the other side, withdrawing a shield from his bag as soon as he sees blood. The hum of devices immediately get him moving, as he starts investigating those building first and foremost, trying to find some signs of what happened. The fact that machinery is moving means this was recent, and that something bad Definitely Happened.
Aranea Highwind	Being reckless and taking up awful jobs pays the bills better than staying home and safe. That's just how it tends to be! And so Aranea does not care if Antegents are awful, because dealing with awful magical bullshit is basically what she's paid to do. And for all her daily usual was much more straightforward to fight, it wasn't any more pleasant. Arriving in the middle of the village following a jump, because why would she ever walk when she can jump halfway across a city, the dragoon, already donning her Niflheim uniform slash cool armor, helmet included (though slid up over her head right now, rather than in front of it), immediatly sets about kicking a locked door down (the more important-looking the building the better, so the ones that look damaged are prime targets) to see if there really is no one left. Or if there's anything resembling a clue as to what the Antegent wanted/wants here. Maybe someone even started filming and dropped their phone. That'd be convenient.
Zenos yae Galvus	Zenos yae Galvus slowly marches along the path towards the city, having been dropped off from his transport. Ordering his men to return to the portal and remain on the other side until extraction was needed. Zenos thought better to think ahead, just in case, it was something that the rest of his 'partners' could not handle. Moving over the hill the sound of a hum coming through the mask and giving it a slightly electronic or hollow tone to the sound. The blood was a dead give away, but the fact that things were running until now either tells him one of several possible things. Either people ran, people are hiding, people are all actually dead and just recently perished, or that it's a trap and their opponent is intelligent. A slight smile under the helmet comes to his lips, the thought of an opponent that could match them in wits. Zenos continues down along the path towards the village itself. The clank of his armor was apparent, and possibly the only sound happening in this village, nor did he make any attempt to silence it. He does not call out, but instead occasionally checks to see how fresh the blood is. After all, blood still warm means that it is likely on the road to their prey. Approaching some of the nearby houses, Zenos moves towards it, checking to see if it is locked...and then kicking the door in if it is. When he enters, his sword hand rests on one of the blades in his sword revolver. A center of calm in a storm, he continues to move on. Trying to find if there was a central shelter, a place the bodies were being stored...or the beast itself.
Staren	Staren can't get here fast enough. Even as his ship drops out of FTL high above, he's still in the tank, having his brain scanned for transfer to the robot. He's almost ready but still needs more time. The Star Hawk detaches from the castle-shaped ship and flies down towards the surface. More directly, robots beam down. A handful of basic humanoid bots in SWAT gear, which in turn release quadrotors to search the area. Blood. So much blood. No humans? Dawn, the support AI overseeing the operation, is not an investigator. But there is something she can do: Check the local infosphere. All this technology... some of those constructions look 3D printed. Surely they have computers? Wireless internet? Perhaps social media that might happen to have caught the beginning of whatever this was?
Spider-Man	Operating outside of an urban zone requires certain special considerations. Among those considerations is the fact that it's hard as hell to swing! After trudging through swamps and other suchlike, Spider-Man is sick of it, and he's not gotten a learner's permit, so someone else is going to need to get him a ride here. Please? If he has to get a ride from the Immunes, he'll definitely take it. Speaking of the Immunes, he's got his IMMUNES AUXILIARY SUIT on today, the one that's a sort of recolored version of the training suits issued at the House of Seven Worthies, with a full-head cover and a fancy set of tapering goggles. As soon as he arrives, he's looking around fairly urgently. "Hello?! Hello!?! Anyone still here?! Wow, I /really/ wish I could take a look at more of this eco-friendly stuff, it's so great. Gotta focus, gotta focus." What to look for, what to look for... he goes for a few things, tools out and ready. Chemical traces at the piercing and crumpling spots, something he can analyze to see if it's organic or something traceably supernatural. Atmospheric analysis for traces of energetic processes, looking for things like ozone. Who knows what else, all condensed and analyzed with his goggles and a few choice smart-interface systems. Any clues about a direction in chemical traces and other suchlike will be tremendously useful! And, of course, his passive danger-sense and suite of keen superhuman senses should hopefully be useful; he's attentive to any of those tingly sensations of danger being in a particular direction.
Xion	PREVIOUSLY: Two cult kids disappeared into a consuming realm of darkness, one of whom had a knife, and a vague mission from a ninja and then refined by a... ghost (?)... to stab... Another ghost? Things weren't clear, and time is extra super weird in The Darkness. NOW: The City of Prefabsville is under attack! Maybe? Probably! People are called there! Heroes! Do-Gooders! X-Cut Users! This has nothing to do with why a portal to tenebrous darkness rips open, and from the yawning maw of black, Xion dives knife-first into a bush, as if ambushing the shrubbery with a knife. "Take this, Marama! You'll warlord no more!" Standing up confused, Xion rises to look at the collection of people meandering around, including: Guy in Green Tights Guy In His Hero Jam-Jams *Guy(?) in Darth Vader Armor with Rotary(!!!) Katanaswords. "Heck!" Xion cries, delivering the HEADY HEIGHTS of NONO WORDS in mildly empty frustration. "We came to the wrong place! It was gonna be so good, and skip so much stupid stuff, if I just stabbed the guy, and then..." Xion tosses the knife UNSAFELY over her shoulder. "Now we're... here. What's going on here?"
Roxas	Roxas isn'there intentionally today. He steps second through the swirling hole of darkness from which Xion emerges, pulling his hood down as he does so. His expression is immediately a little bit lost. They'd gone meandering through the Corridors in search of an exit point near a specific assassination target who happened to be 'some undead warlord that ninjas wanted dead', but near as /he/ can tell this place doesn't really fit the bill. Only one thing really coincides neatly, and he's certain that it's temporary. This locale has obviously been attacked, and a 'place that has been attacked' is quite often linked through the Corridors for only brief periods of time, as the attack itself is carried out. "Uh..." He scratches the back of his head. "Xion, this doesn't..." He trails off as Xion identifies the problem herself, catching the knife that she threw with an expression of distant surprise. Roxas puts the DISCARDED KNIFE in his inventory. "Hang on, this place seems kind of familiar..." He decides, surveying PREFABSVILLE curiously. He turns 'round wordlessly and wanders through the portal for a few moments, then wanders right back out. "This intersection of corridors looks really familiar, I think we've been here before for sure." Roxas offers, mostly unhelpfully.
Lilian Rook	The guns immediately acquire Link on approach, blinking lights at him and smoothly tracking his motion. They don't shoot, though. Unlike the Immunes-owned supply points, these ones aren't wired to gun down human beings, further illustrating the attitude divide. The city expects someone out in the country would only come to take supplies for themselves that could be mission critical later. The commune expects someone out in the country would also only be here for supplies, but that they might want to let them in and help them. In fact, it seems none of the sentries have been fired one. No brass. Aranea goes kicking down doors. She finds some rooms that were empty because nobody was using them, with their electronics powered down and their lockers closed. She finds some that were left in a real hurried but automatically locked behind, and with them, the fact that it seems all buildings seem to involve bug-out bags packed by the people who live here, which is good because it lends credibility to the fact that people might have just gotten out ASAP, and also sort of stressful because it implies everyone realizes this is an eventuality. She then kicks down one that seems like a bit of a jackpot, since it's more heavily locked than the others, which turns out to mostly be a sort of guns closet, where the community's firearms are kept safely. A small handful of what are probably old, cheap surplus weapons (i.e. turn of the millennium) are gone, along with small boxes of ammo, but the rest of the room is just a sticky tapestry of blood and scattered ammunition plastered to the floor and walls in such quantity that there's NO way it all came from one, or even three, people, and they'd have to have been handling the bullets at the time. The blood Zenos finds is pretty much room temperature, but not fully dry; it would have been shed in the last hour at most, but it's older than the distress call by quite a bit. He does more door kicking and finds that none of what appear to be habitation domes have any signs of ultraviolence. Though there is frequently large amounts of blood out in the 'streets' (pale instant cement walkways), especially right outside doors, none of it is painting any windows from the inside except in larger, communal places. The cluster of fancier, eco-white buildings at the center seems like where a shelter would be, but walking up to the front of what would probably be the monitoring building, he can see that the cafeteria adjoining it is so already so badly bloodied that peeking through the windows is hard.
Lilian Rook	Spidey gets grabbed. His spidey senses do not tingle because it is not a very dangerous sort of grab. After he starts yelling 'hello hello', a woman pops out from an outdoor shower storage area and yoinks him inside, furiously "shhhhHH!!!!"ing him in a way that is both angry and panicked. She is alone, and keeps her voice as low and quiet as possible when talking to him. "Don't go looking out there." she says, staring him unblinkingly in the goggles. "The others are either hiding, or there's no point going after them." She glances to the frosted slit window off to the side, standing on her toes to peek at it. "I think it's still around the corner. One of them. Don't go that way. You'll walk right into it. It'll get you from behind like I did." As for what he can scan with the extra time, the only real residue he finds on the holes are a) copper and gunpowder, for a handful of bullet holes, and b) human bone marrow, actually. Most of the holes having different DNA. There don't seem to be any overt exoenergetical things going on. Staren goes examining THE CLOUD. He finds that there is actually pretty much one of those. Anything that seems like internet is all connected to the main communicator mast like a giant router, but people have obviously been doing video calls, looking up internet tutorials, and watching movies, up until recently. Nobody took any time to post #antegentattack on twitter though. There are tons of smart devices and monitors, but none of them take audio/visual records. That seems to be intentional, even when it'd make sense. Something rebellious against the ideas of the panopticon they'd left. Oh and one of his swatbots isn't there anymore. It just . . . Isn't.
Zenos yae Galvus	Zenos rubs his fingers together, coming to the conclusion that the blood is not that old, but not fresh either. It would put it before the distress call, but that is unhelpful. Standing back up he comes across the shelter and his eyes flash slightly. His hand comes out, reaching towards one of his blades. The Squall, the name of the blade, comes to his hand as he moves towards the door of the building covered in blood. His sword swings, aiming to tear the door off of its hinges. However, thanks to young Parker, he knows that danger is still out there and that there are those still hiding. Zenos slowly moves to enter, blade held at the side as he scans the interior, but also making sure to keep an eye on his surroundings. He tries to invoke his gift, attempting to get an analysis of what was happening, and perhaps try and get a glimpse of his enemy. It would be much easier if he could find someone nearly dead.
Aranea Highwind	As good as it is that the buildings have emergency supplies all bagged up ready to go, the fact the bags are still there tells another story, and Aranea frowns. With her empty hand, the other trailing her spear behind, she lowers her helmet, not that it especially covers a lot. But it's better than nothing. The gun closet just puts her more on-edge. She has no use for any of those firearms, and the blood mens the people never had a chance to arm themselves. So either the Antegent was smart enough to not let them, or it just happened to hit this place first. The state of this place is why she doesn't have any qualms backing ideas like 'maybe the military being the police is a good thing' and 'maybe people shouldn't be so quick in abandoning the safety of countries and empires'. Some freedoms are worth giving up when they yield things like 'the ability to keep living monster-free'. No bodies. And from the sound of radio, not a single person's seeing anything hostile move about. Aranea's spear crackles with electricity as she raises it, and with a thunderous clap she unleashes a lightning spell across the interior of the building, lashing out indiscriminatedly in every direction. If it's invisible, she'll just have to draw it out. If someone's hiding, she'll flush them out. And if not, maybe wrecking half the weapons depot will reveal something. Or not! Sometimes it's nice to just blow steam, too.
Link	The machine guns pivoting on Link causes him to startle, but he still climbs the fence, especially once he realizes they're not going to fire. Finding nothing but tutorials and movies and tools working, he listens to the radio to figure out where to go next. Staren lost a drone and gave coordinates! Perfect, that's where to go. But while caution is somewhat necessary, finding this monster and where it took everyone is more important. Link starts strolling over to the coordinates, drawing his sword and shield, holding both up. He doesn't have supernatural senses, but he's actively listening and has fast reflexes, so if something happens to approach behind him, hopefully he'll hear it fast enough to quickly strike at it.
Spider-Man	Spider-Man is, of course, the only guy talking a lot. As /usual/. "Woah woah woah!" He whisper-shouts. "Okay, okay! What is it? We've got a team, we'll take them down. What can you tell me?" He looks around, trying to plot a course in his head. He shouldn't go around that corner, he should try to find an alternate and unexpected route. The shower storage area should let him kind of leap between sections, and he is a terribly stealthy kind of guy, after all. If he can get a rough explanation out of the woman fast, he'll get right into action. Specifically, wall-climbing up the storage area, then beginning to leap between upper areas with silent grace. Whup, whup, whup, the noise is nearly indistinguishable from the gentle background noises of machinery. He's going to try to get the drop on whatever was around the corner, by maneuvering around it from above. If whatever the woman can get said doesn't contradict his hopes, he hopes he can blast it with a spray-blast of webbing and then land on it and smash downward with both fists. From the sound of it, others elsewhere are making this go rather loud anyway. Best to move fast and strike hard. All unless, of course, some of what he's told or what he sees would interrupt just such a course of irresponsible diving-in. He's talkative, not stupid! He's kind of stopped rushing into things abruptly since the Scorpio Bombings incident.
Staren	The last thing he remembers is laying down in the ego bridge -- unconsciousness was induced artificially, and now he just... is, standing inside the locker where his robot body is stored. Picture-in-picture views on his HUD show robot feeds and the location indicator. Staren steps out. With the disguise off, the robot is obviously not human, covered in red and sea green plating with eyes that look like bike reflectors and sections of transparent mega-damage materials showing part of the mechanical muscles and brain underneath. He walks aft out of the lab and past the hub to manufacturing, where assembly robots circle him with armored plates, snapping them into place. Staren commands the drones on the ground to form groups with at least two quadrotors in each group keeping eyes on all the members, and selectively re-enables the disguise, a glow washing over his head and neck leaving synthetic hair and skin in its wake. He takes his helmet from a robot arm -- friendly tinted visor this time, rather than skull faceplate -- and pulls it on as he walks back to the hub. Staren beams down and immediately releases another pair of quadrotors to keep an eye on him, then starts looking for someone to pair up with. Well, Link's still outside. "Hell of a first mission to come out in the Multiverse on. Don't suppose you've ever seen something like this before?
Link	"I haven't." Link responds to Staren, simply. Despite being a little brusque, it's much easier to tell in person over radio that Link doesn't mean to be rude by it. He's just quiet, as he looks over the helmeted ally and up towards his drones before continuing onwards.
Xion	"Okay, but, look." Xion begins, after Roxas catches her knife. "What if... this IS where the Ninja wants us to go." She reasons, tugging down her own hood and pointing at the shelters and the overall state of 'nothing at all happening'. It's such aggressive nothing that Xion in fact makes a broad sweeping gesture with her black gloved hands, a singing-in-the-rain spin. "There's nothing here! No ghosts. No ninjas. No warlords. It looks like Lilian's world, but beyond Spider-Man and Zenos over there, and I think Miss Highwind, there really isn't anything going on. And the Corridors don't take you to places where nothing is happening. They always take you either where you wanna go, or someplace interesting. Or, well, black potholes of utter darkness filled with yellow-eyed monsters that want to eat you, but, you know!" Xion windmills her arms. "So anyway, let's just find the ghost. Got any good ghost-finding tricks?" With a twin 'shink!' of metallic windchimes and twinkling light around both of her hands, Xion produces one (1) cast iron skillet and one (1) brass ladle, and holds them to either side of her body. "Ok, so, on three, Roxas, you get your weapon out and get any ghost who tries to get me, ok?" Without room to 'no, wait, don't!', Xion - feeling keenly the shared desire to Know, and to Draw Out, begins smashing her ladle into her cast iron skillet with an egregious rapidity, creating an instant din fit to wake the dead. "MISTER GHOST WARLORD WHERE ARE YOUUUUUU?!"
Roxas	"H-hold on, if Spider-Man, Miss Highwind, and Zenos are over there then something is /definitely/ going on. Unless they're just getting ice cream, but this place doesn't really look like the type of place for that." Roxas cautions Xion nervously. He doesn't know what's going on because he isn't a part of the OFFICIAL PARTY here, which is the problem with random encounters like this one. "Ghosts? Well... we haven't dealt with them a lot, but let me think..." Xion decides that she has her own solution and starts to MAKE A BUNCH OF NOISE. Roxas summons his Keyblade to hand with a ringing noise and flash of light matching Xion's summoning of a skillet and a ladle. He adopts a cautious combat stance, and just sort of... waits. /That/ will usually get /anything's/ attention. "With ghosts," he says, while scanning the surroundings, "I think you usually have to sort of invade their space. Because they're all about stuff they knew before they died, so they get really attached and can't let go. Something new bothers them. I think...? Wizards say we're a lot alike, but I don't really see it."
Xion	"Wizards also regularly try murdering us for weird reasons, so, I'm kinda not really all-about their opinions???!!!" Xion replies, over literally QTE Speedrunning 'Making The Biggest Fucking Racket In This Godforsaken Land' with her extremely potent physical traits. The ladel is starting to be more like a spatula from the impacts, and the skillet reddens under repeated rapid force.
Lilian Rook	Predictably, there's no one for quite a ways around Zenos. After the bloodbath the central area had become a while back, they'd gotten quite some distance. It actually seems that, given the bloody handprints here and there, that this might have been the 'ground zero' of the whole thing, and spread out from here. It might explain Aranea's findings with respect to the fact that most of the rest of the violence is concentrated around the first places people would run to in a disaster; the gun closet is definitely drenched in gore after the first couple of guns were taken and something got smart. The woman in the storage locker shed seems to only get more and more panicky as Spider-Man introduces him as the response team instead of an inhabitant in a suit. When he asks what there is to know, she mostly just starts clinging to him and incoherently urging him not to go outside --to stay there with her and just wait it out. When he gets out of her grasp, she looks briefly very, very sick, then manages to regain enough cognitive ability to at least say "M-make sure not to . . . don't touch its . . ." she can't seem to find the right words, so she just sort of spreads her fingers and wedges the sides of her against her face. ". . . things." When he climbs up there though, he doesn't really see anything. He doesn't get the feeling he's been rused though, because he can definitely feel it. The tingly sensation of something very dangerous lurking nearby, not so much any kind of sense of 'eyes' or something aware of his presence, but the kind like sitting down to eat lunch about five feet from a live grenade on a tripwire; something inert and ambient, but waiting to kill someone all the same. Waiting while stuck to a wall, he can finally see something right after Xion just begins slamming a skillet with a ladle to make as much mose as she possibly can, in that incredibly responsible way Xion does this after bumbling into somewhere. The sense of danger actually diminishes, and then he sees a piece of the wall start to move. Rather, it's something that seems to have the same sort of colour and texture as the wall, but is also thin and semitranslucent enough that it's borderline opticamo. It's like watching one of those incredibly specialized leaf insects suddenly start crawling from its hiding place on a branch, but even worse on the eyes. He can actually spot a few of them, with keen spidey-eyes. Zenos is subject to one moving right past him, sliding along the wall as if it were 2d. Even seeing it with his enhanced vision, he doesn't get any sense of a mental presence from it. He'd have been in sword reach if he moved a few more feet over, but then possibly within reach of . . . whatever it is too. The two of them are ignored for the greatest sound of noise instead. Link and Staren find the missing SWATbot shortly after. It's actually . . . not even mangled. Barely even damaged. Some neat holes have been punched easily through its chassis in a few areas, and then it was dropped like an ugly doll. The transmitting equipment is mostly undamaged though, so there should be no reason it blinked off. It's like the second it was stabbed, it was cut off from everything else. Ceased to exist? Taken into a pocket dimension? Concealment magic? Oh but something pale and thin and basically invisible against the white plastic and sun-drenched eco cement just turned a corner behind them. Link can hear the faint crackle of grass right by his ear.
Lilian Rook	Where Roxas is waiting by Xion, he can see a part of the white cement peel itself off . . . no, it just sort of leans up, like the gradual fold of a pop-up book, and making about the same papery, creaky sound. Multiple, long, stick-thin legs, with at least five joints each, easily lift it to twice his height and then some, leaving him staring up at where they all join together into a whorl of papery, semitransparent white material --almost like a partially unraveled wasp's nest-- from which actively unfurls a pair of elaborate 'fins' like coral mesh or lionfish spines, one to either side of it. It angles itself on too many legs and too many joints to leer over the two of them with gyroscopically perfect balance, turning right and left, its fin-appendages twitching and fluttering with quiet leaf noises. It . . . can't seem to figure out where they are, actually. Another one unfolds from the pavement. Another detaches itself from the side of a plastic hab. They're easier to see against blue sky and green grass, and soon there's a whole collection around the two, agitated by the banging of pans, but unable to figure it out, 'staring' in the precise direction of the sound in a towering crowd of paper rustling noises all around them. Then Aranea lets off a lightning blast in an ammo shed. It explodes. That's how that works. Thousands of rounds cook off and the sound of fireworks puts thousands of little holes in the pavement, the surrounding buildings, the plant pots and screens inside them, and sends many more flying into the sky. Aranea smells something very much like bone marrow left on the grill for too long and starting to burn, and feels flakes of ash land on her. She then gets to turn and look as the whole swarm around Xion and Roxas all just come in at her, moving really, really fast for having so many 5 meter tall legs. They seem to be able to 'see' her perfectly fine, and if she doesn't get out of the way quick, one or the other will scoop down like a dragonfly and pluck her off the floor in a cage formed of its mesh appendages, lifting her to dangle a good ten feet off the ground. Some of the filaments around her aren't hard and brittle, but flexible and prehensile, and taper into needles so thin that she stops being able to see them by the tip. Obviously, she'd get stabbed a whole lot even in the nooks of her armour (but it doesn't seem like they'd do much damage?) if she just let them. Oh, and the one that Link had felt comes back. It turns around the corner of the building, having gone a full lap, and swishes down almost silently to yank him into the air.
Link	As the grass rustles nearby, Link takes a breath in anticipation. And then, someone starts banging pots and pans. That's no worry- A building /explodes/ as someone throws a lightning bolt in an armory. The noise distracts Link long enough that while he knows there's a threat behind him, he's not fast enough to actually deal with it as keenly as he'd like. He's able to prepare for a slice, but he's lifted into the air in the cage made of legs. This is bad, very bad. Link actually panicks a little internally, to the point that if he didn't have to react heroically, he'd start hyperventilating. But if he doesn't fight this thing, it'll kill him, and then it'll kill someone else. The sword swings. It moves quickly, but speed isn't what's exceptional here. It's a mixture of keen accuracy, with perfect form /even/ while being carried off into the air, and raw power inside those arms that even for such a young age, Link can be the hero. The blade moves for filaments in the legs if there are any, trying to cut them where they're weak and force the creature to drop him, shield moving up if the needles come out to stab him, though if they're all around him, it could probably jab him in the back pretty easily. Link's current goal is to get back on the floor and grab his bow. To Staren, he just shouts out. "Help the others!" They probably need it more, what with the murder swarm. But it's also a stupid risk, since the two of them together could defeat it faster and go help the others, but...taking stupid risks is what Link's all about.
Aranea Highwind	Exploding ammo and shrapnel isn't much of an issue for Aranea. A dim red light seems to form a bubble around her, the mundane shells and metal scraps either bouncing off or turning into even smaller pieces of metal and then bouncing off anyway. Magitek shielding is useful. That's probably why it's such a grind to get the best one, a low drop off a rare enemy. But that hardly solves her problem. "2D monsters? Or just extremely advanced camouflage bordering to alteration of perception. Hm." The whole mind control resistance part of the tests make sense, now, if that's what it is. Or they could just be awful 2D monsters, too. The swarm converges on her instead of Xion and Roxas, which is good. What's not good is spotting them. A hand reaches up to her head, grumbling something about kids and being trouble magnets and her job just getting harder. Not intending to stay still and to just wait for those things to surround her, Aranea's foot taps the ground experimentally, and then with a sudden motion, her speartip is upward, and then she's launching into the air with the speed (and looks) of a red lightning bolt. Juuuust as that nasty thing scoops down for her with infinitely small needles and a cage of appendages. On one hand, she's probably going to jump clean through it and get a good feel for how sturdy they are and what touching them might entail. On the other, she's going to jump clean through it and get a good feel for how sturdy they are and what touching them might entail. Them and their infinitely small needles that are probably really, really sharp. Several layers of armor and shielding, don't fail her now. Whether or not she ends up a bloody mess, she intends to land by Roxas and Xion, pretty much strictly to chide them. "Are you on another mission, or do you just enjoy stumbling into trouble?"
Staren	They're on the walls, spider-man warns! An invisible enemy? Damn, he should have taken precautions sooner. He THOUGHT about it too but figured no, invisible enemies are too... normal. The explosion in the armory doesn't make him jump, because his focus is on the virtual sensorium coming from his drones, so his sudden refocusing of attention doesn't even need him to turn his head. Suddenly, Link's in trouble! Where did that thing come from? Is there another one behind him? The drones don't see one. Staren quickly raises the arm with the beam cannons on it, levelling them at the beast's spidery legs... then decides to go for the main body instead. Built-in safeties will make sure he doesn't fire on Link unless it has lightning-fast reflexes and uses Link as a shield the moment he fires. Pew pew! Meanwhile, the remaining SWATbots, as the narrator has taken to calling them, turn on the swarm that was attracted to Xion's noise and fire their caseless assault rifles. Without Staren overseeing their aim, they're barely as competent at marksmanship as soldiers fresh out of bootcamp. They try to make up for it with sheer volume of full-auto fire and inhumanly steady hands. As an afterthought, Staren replies, "I am helping them."
Zenos yae Galvus	Zeno's head turns towards the creature he detects. Just narrowly they are out of each other's range, but Zenos notices that the monster is not very interested in him. His head moves slowly towards its direction, attempting to figure out its path. However, the lack of a mind means either it can shield itself or that it does not have one that he can tell. The horror does not bother him, instead, he turns very slowly to follow behind the creature. For the moment, they can stay out of each other's path, while Zenos continues to trace and understand his prey. It would be interesting, trying to find something very very capable of stealth. He wondered if their bodies just mimicked the qualities of the material they touch, or if they become it? Finally, he comes to see the mass around the pair. His hand slowly returns the sword to its sword revolver. Was he just going to stand there and watch? It seems that way, for a moment. However, his hand slowly moves towards the revolver again, as it spins one of the blades forward. Slowly he grips the blade, waiting. When they get close enough for his liking, but before they would pounce, Zenos with a blazing blur of speed would move towards the two cult kids, aiming to stand in the middle of the circle, and then swing the sword in a massive thrust into the ground. The ground underneath him cracks, as energy flows outward from him in a massive circle, causing a shockwave to tear through the area as well as hopefully the creatures. The attack aimed to attempt to try and put them down for the count, attempting to simply steal their vitality and Incapacitate them in a single powerful move. If nothing else, it would hurt like hell.
Spider-Man	Spider-Man manages to get a certain understanding of the creatures. It's the kind of understanding that makes his goggles shock wide dramatically. They're going to be hard to track. Harder to fight. Especially for someone like him. But he thinks he has a plan. They like using the walls, they like the ceilings, they take the paths over simple surfaces like pavement. If Spider-Man can interfere with those, he'll stand a good chance of slowing them down and helping the group. There's enough here for a swarm, and Spidey leaps into action with enough webbing to catch a swarm. That is to say, he starts to apply webbing to walls, to ceilings, to simple-surfaced ground areas that he can identify, and other places that are at risk of the creatures passing over them. If he can create enough sticky hazards, surely he'll immobilize them! Enough that the others can strike them down effectively, and enough that it'll be easier to see them. The swarm around Xion and Roxas is one that's particularly going to be vulnerable to spray-webbing, or so Spider-Man hopes anyway. He tries to keep his jokes sub-vocalized. "Wow, never thought the flatlanders would get this hostile. At least they're taking the 'when in Rome' approach, even if it's not for the people." He rambles. "Getting all of these things is going to be really close to impossible. This is gonna be like trying to wash glitter out, if we can even get this tide turned the right way."
Roxas	Roxas is completely baffled by what comes next. Sure, that sort of thing usually gets something's attention, but usually not in a way that stops it altogether from actually figuring you out in any way. He raises his weapon defensively as the papery /thing/ rises nearby, getting ready to strike it-- but then something else attracts its attention. The exploding ammo shed assumes all aggro, and suddenly it's Aranea who has to deal with all the bullshit that's going on. Rapidly, he looks between Xion and the pot-and-ladle she's been using to make noise. What does /sound/ do to them? They're attracted to it... but they seem to realize where /Aranea/ is, so how...? His Keyblade warps violently as he tears it in two, the pieces reforming into the distinct black-and-white Oathkeeper and Oblivion. "Looks like you had the right idea! Keep making a lot of noise!" Roxas calls to Xion, banging both keyblades together in rhythm with the POTTERY SYMPHONY as he creeps his way towards the mass of murderous Antegents. In response to the various attempts to help them specifically, he calls, "Miss Highwind got their attention, don't worry about us! It looks like a lot of noise confuses them? See what happens if you make a lot of persistent racket!"
Xion	Xion shreds away at the pot and ladle like she's really riffing out on some extremely CLANGCLANGCLANG death metal, except instead of- oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooah! -growling it's more of an arythmic aural attack via metal vibrations. But really, she owns it, off in her own little 'musical' world of smashing two metal objects together and tingling her fingers with the sheer vibration of her two implements. Her eyes closed, the nobody Feels The 'Music', and the cacophony of going absolutely ham with pot and ladel. Roxas joins her in a virtuoso performance with his two keyblades, and Spider man is on Rythm Webshooter as he starts webbing down the Flatties, while Aranea... Oh, she brings the bass boom that makes the club go crazy. When Aranea addresses her, and Roxas urges her to continue, Xion twirls once, raising her pot and ladel high and keeping on going. "WHAT? I CAN'T HEAR YOU! YOU'LL HAVE TO SPEAK LOUDER!"
Lilian Rook	Spider-Man guesses pretty much correctly. Given to specifically placing themselves flush against backgrounds where they're really hard to see, splatting webs against them in the direct path of the freaky, stalking things results in a whole bunch of them suddenly getting stuck --even ones he wasn't aware of at first, as they catch up from lurking other parts of the colony to reach the noise. Despite being strong enough to lift a person off the ground no problem, their limbs don't seem to individually have that much push, and he winds up with papery phantom giant insect things looking like they're stuck trying to pull themselves out of the walls and pavement. The ones caught between Xion/Roxas and Aranea are the really vulnerable ones, all just rushing directly towards the latter, and so when Zenos arrives, they can barely so much as twist towards him as he slams his blade into the ground and puts a battle shockwave through them. The lower joints of their legs break to pieces all but instantly, halving their height. Their abstract, wasp-nest bodies bounce with about the same weight as one would expect, and then all they can do is try to drag themselves in his direction, easily dispatched. Aranea using >JUMP finds that they're quite hard, but fairly brittle. It seems like most of them is kind of empty space, like the hollow spaces of bird bones taken to the absolute extreme. She crashes right through and flies well above them without issue, outside of their reach. The needles scrape on her shield and don't accomplish much. Staren and Link have opposite results. Staren's beams all but pass right through his target, too thin, too insubstantial, and too transparent, for the energy weapon to actually impart much heat. The bullets from his massed team certainly put a few holes through the things, but they're really hard to hit for how freakishly skinny they are, and putting 'just holes' in them doesn't seem to help much, save where a lucky bullet breaks one of their legs. By contrast, Link being a swole country boy with a strong sword swing is dramatically more effective, as the strength and heft behind the blade manages to hack through a decent portion of the monster's grip on him like chopping through a thick bundle of very hard, dry sticks, letting him tumble back out onto the ground. They more or less laugh at the modern weaponry, but reel from strong guys with strong swords. Also, one folds out of the sidewalk behind Staren and yoinks one of the robots, apparently unable to really tell the difference between him and one of them, and doing it at random. The bot is snatched off the ground as if hit by the trap line of a predatory silkworm, hauled up into the dragonfly cage, suddenly stabbed with about forty tiny needle filaments, and then it and the creature disappear right before his eyes. A second later, they both reappear, and the bot is dumped straight to the ground like trash, and the creature moves on to a different bot. Once again, Staren loses all the tracking info from it. If he spares the time: this is because the battery is dead. The clock is also way off. It just keeps sifting through the robots, apparently looking for something it's not getting. Zenos had gotten the right idea though. As far as he can tell, none of these things have even weird nutso alien brains. They could be automata. They could be eusocial termite-type things with only an emergent collective intellect. They- wait no, they'd been ambushing people who went for the guns and the radio, right?
Lilian Rook	It gets weirder, and much, much worse, when the massive amount of noise draws the lady from the lockers out of hiding, stumbling out into the road beneath Spider-Man, and clutching her head, she turns towards him, and starts clumsily trying to clamber after him. "I'm sorry . . ." she repeats, over and over again, sounding like she's about to throw up. "I wanted you to . . . I was just . . . so . . . hungry . . ." She collapses in the street, and then rolls over onto her back. Her body jerks, her head lolls back, and her back arches with the convulsing of her throat. The sight and sound is something like the moment before the hard-hitting body horror in the first third of a movie, like where the chestburster rips its way out, or the zombie gets back up and starts screaming, but it's not even as dramatic as that. Something long and thin and white pours out of her open mouth, gradually extending into the open air as she chokes and spasms. At first it looks like some kind of respiratory cordyceps abomination, but then it splits apart, and bends, and scrapes against the floor, and like a crab wriggling out of its molted shell, it drags itself out of her body and slowly wrestles its way into the light, unfolding more and more joints --more and more height-- from a compacted, worm-like shape capable of crawling out of a human throat. The grotesque twitching and cracking sounds like her skeleton is trying to escape. That's because it is. The translucent, spidery thing emerging into the open, visible mostly for still being slicked with blood and spinal fluids like a butterfly straight out of the chrysalis, fat and wet and with wings not yet functional, is just the same composition that his goggles had picked from from the hab damage; human bone, recombinated into this stalker-hunter thing. Presumably, all of these things here came out of someone. The no-doubt dead woman immediately disappears, like one of Staren's robots, leaving no trace but the copious quantity of blood forced out of her mouth, still dripping from the creature, sunning itself and waiting for its skeleton re-harden. The banging and smashing and crashing Roxas adds to the cause diverts several more of the things towards him as well, but just like Xion, it can't figure out what to do. Seeing that the ones after Aranea are circling and waiting for her to land, now completely ignoring the ammo blaze, and the couple around Staren are snatching and attacking his bots as the source of more loud noises, it doesn't seem to be the sound itself. They're attracted to it, but there's some reason they don't know what to do with Roxas and Xion specifically. Still, Zenos can feel the dying lady's mind up until the point she vanishes into thin air, and nothing from what came out of her. It's really like trying to read the mind of someone's skeleton, even weirdly re-sculpted as it is. It's questionable that these things '''are''' the Antegent itself.
Staren	The monsters are transparent to /particle beams/?! "That's bullshit!" Staren shouts, reaching into his bag and deciding what to try next. Link's got that one covered, though. Staren manifests wings and takes to the air on those and thrusters. On the bright side: He thinks explosives are probably worth trying. On the less-bright side, those are hard to use around allies. He can't check the robot now, but he will later unless something prevents it. The remaining bots fall pretty quickly, but at least he should be able to reuse the parts after. Not that he's concerned about that now. Wielding a rocket launcher that's shaped more like a high-caliber assault rifle, Staren just shoots explosive mini-missiles down at the ones around his downed robots. Some of the quadrotors catch sight of the person vomitting up a monster. Staren winces. Damn, that's rough, but it's too late to save anyone now... They have to stop this from spreading...
Link	Nothing like old-fashioned swordsmanship. As Link starts cutting through the monster's grip, ne rolls to the ground, sheathes his sword and puts his shield away, and grabs his bow and an arrow oout of the quiver. Inhaling sharply, he decides to lure it towards him. "Come and get me!" And then, he fires an arrow at the most 'control' seeming thing about it, whatever could possibly be the head/brain of the thing. And then he quickly draws and fires another arrow. And another. All before it can reach him again. But it's unlikely that just plain arrows are going to work. So he reaches into his quiver for something special. An arrow with a miniature powder bomb attached. Quickly lighting it, he nocks it, right before the creature would be able to strike him again, and then fires, hoping to detonate it and kill the thing in one on one co mbat. The others will need help. But first... Link needs to learn to understand his enemy. Abd also not get jabbed, because he realized the needles turned you into one of them.
Aranea Highwind	The lack of harm from the needles is surprising. Aranea ponders if they might have had another purpose. Poisoned, at the cost of power? Or maybe they're just meant to tear apart easy prey, not soldiers. That puts into context this Antegent, or swarm of Antegents, being less dangerous, but more urgent. And then it turns out they're the people. So these aren't the threat. They're the expendable bodies. The actual Antegent might not even be here anymore, or maybe there's no actual Antegent. Maybe it's like a sickness and there's no actual core body or original. Questions for later. Up high, Aranea's spear twirls and reangles, the tip straight down and her foot settling on its head. She heads straight back down, a bolt of red light aimed for the ground amidst the largest cluster of those things she can actually see. The impact releases a nasty shockwave, red lightning that splits the earth, and plenty of generic magical oomph to go with it, without factoring the unlucky one she intended to land on top of. The thundering crash should be a nice source of noise, too. But killing the hordes of bone-monsters is kind of a band-aid solution. Where's the actual culprit? "Round them up and use wide-area attacks! No sense trying to single out those things, they're too thin and mobile!"
Zenos yae Galvus	Zenos watches the things fall apart before him, looking towards Roxas with the barest of considerations. He takes a step forward, bringing the sword down as he walks through the field of easy prey. His sword slashing through them like a farmer through a field of wheat. This is until the woman comes out. He can sense her mind for a while, up until the creature comes out. He attempts before she sub comes to get more. To get something out of her about the period up until the people started to explode into gross monsters. The amount of life lost does not bother him, but rather the fact that there may still be prey about. He moves towards the woman until he is upon her, before slamming his sword down in a massive strike, attempting to cleave the monster in twain with a powerful blow. So hard that the ground behind it splits and the force of it continues until it hits something. "The game is afoot," he says, looking around. This is far from over, he feels.
Spider-Man	Spider-Man is a bit horrified. At the very least, though, this time he didn't have to participate in the death. He's now had a few people die on him, so he isn't immediately debilitated by the stress and pain of it. All that happens is that he tries to ease her seizure, and then... steps back when he sees what's happening. He pins it fast as he can, lacking his own lethal ways to deal with it, and leaves the issue to others as much as he can. "Nnnnhhh, no, no no no, this can't..." He mutters, in stress. He taps his goggles several times, and starts fussing with something. Something chemical...? He unfolds something flattened, something that looks sort of like... a breathalyzer mask. If the marrow is coming out of their mouthes, infected people ought to have trace chemical signatures of myeloid tissue on their breath, right? If there really are other survivors, he needs to make sure they're okay! So his intention is to swing into action, searching out those who're still okay, and creating webbing to further help with cleansing the place of its many existing monsters, those who weren't caught up in the swarm. If he can find any survivors, he needs to administer his ad-hoc skeleton war loyalty test fast, to make sure that people don't get too trigger-happy about purging the place!
Xion	Xion has a hard time coming down from her JAM SESSION, but, to be fair, no mere brass ladle can contain such tremendous musical prowess. Demyx has an entire super-sitar just for playing Wonderwall all day every day with. Xion only has common household cooking utensils. With a 'twangggggg!', one mighty smash of cast iron pan against ladle sends the ladel spinning off, halved by the force of her bashing it against the big Cast Iron Energy of the noble and well-seasoned cast iron pan (which has not even been mildly harmed in this process), finally opening her eyes to see... Flat, wobbly bone peoplethings? "Baby... Dusks?" She misses the whole 'Spider-Man's helpful friend having her spine go on BONE STRIKE and decide that now the noble marrow is the powerhouse of the body, not some fake-ass Mitochondria. Instead, she sees the weird marrow creature fanning itself off and lowers her pan. "Awww, it's like a baby deer... Well, mmm. They don't have enough zippers to be Dusks, so, maybe they're..." Xion doesn't grasp the inherent body-horror, but with her sonic terror field lowered, she just kinda gormlessly stares at the monsters that Aranea calls for blowing up. "Oh, uh, Roxas, should we..." Xion wonders, maing a handgesture that approximates 'cast the blasty boom spells that do the damage numbers' in shorthand.
Roxas	Roxas frowns. Why aren't they attacking? They're attacking everybody else, so it can't just be the sound. He abandons his defensive stance and, in fact, outright banishes his keyblade(s). Blue eyes sweep from the ongoing fight with Aranea back to the creatures surrounding them. They don't know what to /do/ with them... is it possible that they realize he and Xion aren't quite what they appear to be? The thought is disturbing, but he knows it isn't totally farfetched. "I SAID--" He begins to shout to Xion, but decides to just finish with a, "-- NEVERMIND." "Cura!" Roxas shouts, summoning a wave of soothing green particles to mend whatever injuries Aranea might have sustained moments before. A nagging thought lingers in the back of his mind. Could these be /Nobodies/? They sort of move like the ones that don't have anything of 'themselves' left, or at least nothing clear and distinct. But... Nobodies don't really just burst out of people's guts like that, and they're not this /hostile/. He's not even certain he /knows/ of anything that does something like that, outside movies. Then again, though... Xion was in a pretty sorry state, when he first met 'her'. He folds his arms over his chest and sighs exasperatedly, his mind swaying back and forth like a pendulum on what to /do/ about these things. EVENTUALLY... He takes out his cellphone, snaps a picture, and asks someone. Roxas#6186: @EmigreanScholar#3898 hey what is this thing Vexen: Ask @thelexiconthatneverwas#7107, I'm busy. *** Zexion is typing... Roxas lifts both hands (one of which contains his phone) in a grand 'I dunno' shrug at Xion, "I'm trying to figure that out, but Vexen bounced the question to Zexion, so..." He makes a rolling 'get on with it' gesture with one hand, to indicate that he expects this to be over before Zexion actually finishes saying anything.
Lilian Rook	At least one of Roxas' thoughts must be right, since even when he and Xion stop doing things completely, the monsters around them just lean back and forth looking really agitated, then slowly turn around and go off towards something making more noise (that is, the ones that aren't webbed to the ground, which are currently getting completely fucked). Zenos' theory on the sequence of events is pretty much near-totally accurate. He doesn't have nearly long enough to get much of a picture out of the now-gone and definitely now-dead lady's head, but it works back mostly through a rolling disaster in the direction of the bloodsoaked cafeteria building he'd started at, mostly capturing the latter parts of people disappearing off the roads and getting picked off by the walls and floor themselves. The vast majority disappear when grabbed like Staren's bots, and then it's only the bone creatures that come back out of nowhere. Not much of her memory is useful beyond that, due to having hid in a closet for a while and gotten sicker and sicker and hungrier and hungrier, though there is some vague memory along the lines of 'why did so-and-so bring that thing back'. Staren starts blasting things with mini-missiles, and that does the job just fine. The warheads blow the things to hard, papery tatters. Link finds that shooting the clock around the creatures' central bodies doesn't seem to really do anything, as if most of their design were entirely meaningless, but the bomb arrow also tears the one preying on drones to smithereens. The big horde that was most primarily on the offensive, concentrated around the supply buildings, is pretty much wiped out in one fell swoop by Lvl.99 >JUMP. They can't compete with real-ass combat magic in the slightest. What follows is mostly at Spider-Man's behest. The remainder caught in web traps have to be dispatched. A small handful of scattered surviving creatures are found still lurking in place, arbitrarily more cautious and waiting to catch people going by. There are still pockets of surviving people hiding out wherever the closest place was to duck into, which had opaque/sturdy walls and where they were all very quiet. There are depressingly few. Less than a hundred in total. Out of those, Spider-Man tests positive on fifteen of them. Three of them 'hatch' before much of anything can be done. Examining where Zenos' hunch suggests where he go, nobody will find anything of particular note in the cafeteria itself, nor any of the food stockpiles. The adjacent building, behind the cafeteria, and the monitoring building, turns out to be the only one with anything particularly interesting, which houses a small number sealed crates of military-grade design, ostensibly given out as part of the colony's 'moving out allowance' when it was originally signed off on, for whatever kind of rainy day pressures might happen out here, depending on whatever it is they contain (they're scan-insulated). Only one has been opened and emptied, and then was used to lock something else inside it. Poking it open, whoever does so finds an object roughly the size of a basketball, porcelain white and translucent like resin, just looking like knotted whorl of organic papery material that reaches a sort of optical illusion at its centerpoint. It seems like someone had hoped to put it somewhere secure by locking it in one of those crates, but that particular box has no magic reading on it; the non-tech seals are one-time 'check for freshness' deals, and opening it up to use as secure storage was a fatal mistake. Likely because the anomalous object itself is the only other thing with a 'magical' (for a stretch of the definition) aura of any kind, and nobody who lived here would have been able to sense or measure either one.
Staren	After blowing some up, Staren leaves the fight to start spreading taggant nanites around the edge of the settlement. With other monsters, it would give a pretty clear indicator (to the tacnet) as soon as anythingsleaves, but with these things... eh, they might just /not step on any/, but it's something. If Spider-man lets on that there are infected survivors... things may get grisly.
Zenos yae Galvus	There is a flash for Zenos, as he seems to stare into space for a few moments right before the woman dies. For that moment he relives the experience through her eyes and sees what she sees. With a grizzly tale of death and pointless suffering. When Zenos snaps back, the sword falls down towards the creature with other's assistance. Zenos oversees the testing of the remaining survivors and helps wrap up the last of the remaining creatures. He will allow Spiderman to save who can be saved and test the people, however... Zenos does not give mercy to the infected nor the creatures. When they are discovered to be infected, Zenos immediately moves to cut them down, without a second thought. Aiming to keep the spread of the infection down to these people and nobody else. When that handled, he calls for extraction, though in the time they have left, he brings people with him to check the area around the cafeteria. Searching through the crates until he comes to the one with the sphere. Observing it for a moment, Zenos takes little time to come to a conclusion based on this object and what he gleamed from the woman. He brings the sword down in another powerful blow, aiming to try and kill the creature before another outbreak spreads.