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Priscilla     'Keeping going' is a bit of an obvious answer. After dealing with Secretaries, the desire to stay in the dim, sterile, hospital white and vacant mines, is deep in the negatives. Though the air no longer tastes of tangy metallic smoke and recycled air, instead infused with the strangely crisp, clear atmosphere of the rest of the Purified Zone 1, there is nothing left for anyone there but horrific, mysterious, warped infant Impures.

    From there, it's the Metal Farmsteads of what used to be Pentel, but is now letneP. Here, some sort of action seems to have taken place. The cows have disappeared along with their metal farmers, leaving empty pens with open gates, but the ores themselves, originally lumped up into robust pyramids and stocked beside and between buildings, have been scattered all over the place like legos, strewn across the path forward in obnoxious, mazelike arrangements, still bound together into pallets that are impolitely tall and heavy. There's absolutely no way some last second surge of panicked Elsens did this. They're also, like everything else, bleached out, though they gleam like actual silver and nickel and steel now, individually, instead of random jigsaw mishmashes of minerals that shouldn't grow together, all coloured those bright primary greens and purples. The rail is somewhere up ahead, if the structure of the land itself is fine, but the tram has been a questionable quantity so far.
Starbound Flotilla     It's kind of frustrating. You know, George doesn't move all that fast when he's out of combat, on account of how fucking old he is. And he doesn't seem inclined to hop the walls; he has the general expectation that someone else is going to get far ahead of him in this little maze-like arrangement. So unless folks /really/ decide to wait a /loooong/ time, George is going to be in the impolitely-tall maze for a while, just strolling at the rate of precisely one Old Person worth of speed. Might just be glad to be out of the mines, and having an opportunity to relax. Not too much to worry about, at the moment.

    Chances are the math-babies are restricted by the maze, after all.
Doctor Strange      The Sorcerer Supreme has offered his services to anyone without the means to access the purified zone. Once a neutral meeting point is agreed upon, Doctor Strange cuts open a hole in reality with the Sling Ring. The usual burning ring of sparks appears, and he ushers the others through it with a mock-magnanimous sweep of one gnarled hand. He is the last to step through.

     Strange's first order of business after that is to take to the sky. He already knows what happens to the Elsen. The Batter probably won't be any help there, given his response the last time he was confronted. No, what he's after this time is proof that this is actually a good idea--proof that what happens here is worth what happens to the Elsen. Is there new life here? Are the specters completely gone? Are there any more of those giant baby things? Or is it as he feared--completely and utterly sterile?

     He gets his answer pretty quickly, spotting several Impures. Of course, it isn't enough to damn the Batter without him just trying to gaslight him all over again. He's just going to say something to the effect of 'well they're only there because you and your nasty little friends brought impurities in.' He needs to beat him at his own game. Zone 2 has already been purified... but that could be used to his advantage. Possibly. Strange touches down near the rail, and begins bending space again, this time in an effort to pull literature from zone 2 for some information on PURITY. What is it? Why is it good? Is it a good thing at all, or is it just a force of this world's cosmology?
Thomas Alva Edison Edison is happy to have to not deal with those Secretaries.  He has been more silent than most, trying to logic out the information found.  There was a LOT to take in.  Also, he is probably still nursing his wounds, he hasn't been thrown like that in a long time.

The path before them becomes a maze of stone, the metal bleached like silver and steel is of interest to Edison he leans over to pick up the metal.  Pulling out a small lab kit, he attempts to identify the actual composition of the metal.  Silver, in his eyes, would be in fact a logical assumption.  Not just because of the color, but also because of silver's inherent association with being pure or clean.

Standing back up, he continues walking around the maze.  He could probably lift things and throw them around, but who knows what attention that may take.  It would also take time, and Edison was all for putting distance between himself and those things.  
Yuuki Kuran LAST TIME...

Yuuki Kuran offers her killer death scythe, Artemis, to George, and asks him if it'd be better to just wipe the Secretaries out, having bound them up in a prison in the corner of the mines. There's a sort of 'are we really just to leave them there?' impression in her tone, in her eyes, but she doesn't press.

She believes wholly that George knows best - in this case.

So, with or without the street justice execution, they continue on.

THE EMPTY STABLES

Yuuki wanders along, breathing in every few paces loudly before exhaling. "The air is much better here!" She notes, having to dodge about the empty yard full of misplaced things. "Don't you think we should re-sort all this? Thomas? Stephen?"

Yuuki starts trying to shove around the Inconveniently Everything'ed pallets of Actual Real Metal back towards the stables, sorting them into more orderly ways in an odd fit of neatness.
Zero Kiryu There's a part of Zero that is paying attention to the blip -- and smell -- of George. One thing he learned about this place and what's going on in it is that the Flotilla members seem to have gotten their hooks in deeper than most, and it would probably pay to mind what they're doing and how they're doing it. In this case, he's not really sure that he's on the right track at all though.

The metals are of some interest, though. He's educated enough to recognize them-- and to recall that they took extremely different forms last time he saw them. Which itself is interesting, as it lends some measure of credence to the idea that Purification is not merely destruction. It seems also to be that, true-- and whether or not it is actually a preferable state to what this place was before, Zero still couldn't say.

But returning the minerals to a sensible, coherent state, along with the water and the air, says more good than bad about things. But then, why does so much of it get washed out in empty brightness?

"Ah...?" Drawn out of his observations by Yuuki's interest in rearranging the surroundings, Zero shrugs and moves to help rearrange the pallets.

It is, suddenly, a lot easier than it should be for him and he doesn't seem to really notice.

"Isn't it a little strange that it ended up in this configuration?" He wonders aloud.
Tina Natsumi Investigating the purified zone has been rather relaxing for Tina, all things considered. It's not just the clean, if overly sterile air (although it certainly helps), but the lack of Elsen around to get in her way or be weirdly annoying is providing some long overdue peace and quiet from their incessant and vaguely passive aggressive muttering.

That quietness is also maddening. "So we've got a whole lotta weird pallets fulla rocks and stuff right here, but the cows've all gone home! Or..." Tina sweeps her phone towards the empty pens, nearly walking right into a pallet in the process. "Their home planets? Who knows where the cows in this place ever came from. Who knows if the people here ever really ate 'em? We'll find out soon as we see a new one!"

She laugh, but it's an uncomfortable one. She's clearly trying to keep things from getting too quiet, glancing back and forth while occasionally nudging some of those pallets with Uncle Sam to help Yuuki and Zero out with their task. "Y'think? Hm... Who woulda put 'em out like this, though? Can't be the Elsen 'cause they all poofed, the babies are too screamy, and... Who else would there be?"
Priscilla     Edison finds that, this specific time, the metal is exactly what it looks like. He can even run a voltmeter through it. Silver is silver. Steel is steel. Ridiculous, improbable amounts of it, but it's decided what it wants to be. Sort of like the rest of everything. 'Corrected', perhaps. Focused into shape. Like an oppressively boring and strict teacher had gone through a messily written science essay and thoroughly revised all the the outlandish assumptions and vague handwaves of a not-right-in-the-head student.

    The metal is metal, the air is air, the water is water, and there's not much else to it. It's like it doesn't matter that everything is utterly useless to anyone now, or that there is no one around to use it. It's Correct. It's Fixed. It all Checks Out. There's supposed to be metal here, so here's Real Metal that has the real, detailed, boring attributes of metal, by someone who did their research. What point is there to it now? Doesn't matter. Real life doesn't have a point. Do something with it later. A pedantic science nerd correcting poorly done sci-fi. A strict and dispassionate dad informing his daughter that she can't be a mermaid when she grows up.

    Thomas has conveniently enough strength to shoulder shove one around, but not when it's backed up against a second one. The maze is 100% a shity block pushing puzzle. Yuuki can woob at it if she likes, and in fact, doing the dignity of sorting it all out into a navigable path opens the way to another set of incongruous white chests that hadn't been there before, divulging an INSPIRATION, a MOLOCH'S MEAT, and a WEDNESDAY; perhaps something Zacharie missed (where does he source his stuff anyways?). They'd be invisible under so much cruft any other way.

    Strange takes to the air though, and sequence breaks shitty sliding block puzzles that take forever. Up at his altitude, he can see much, much further than he could before, for miles in each direction, with a vista he'd see on an ethereal, but not physically implausible, bright midday fog by the dark ocean. Considering how much of Zone 1 is unimaginative, rambling, ultra-spartan construction, not much of it is terribly interesting, though he can see most of the tram circuit, and confirm one having come to a stop halfway between this station and the next, out of power on the rail and eerily abandoned.

    He can also confirm the presence of more Secretaries, thankfully few in number, wandering around formerly populated areas here and there, with the menace of a zombie horde hunting an abandoned city, with all the collective threat condensed from thousands of undead to singles or pairs of the most deformed and aggressive Impures so far. As far as they give off any impression at all, from a bird's eye view, their movement gives the impression of scavengers. Some large, pen-apex predator stalking the fallout of a brush fire, having come from their usual hunting grounds far away to pick through the wasteland for easy meat.

    Opening a portal to Zone 2 works fine from here, despite how badly it fucked up when he opened a portal to this Zone before Zone 2 was Purified. Rummaging through the library, he finds that none of the books are plastic fakes anymore. Unfortunately, none of them have been given titles or contents --they're just 'proper books' now. A handful of the ones that had been filled out, like the Frog Prince, are now just masses of endless question marks. All mention of Japhet having ever existed is scrubbed out. All that remains is the one bit about the Queen, the weird nature diagrams from an encyclopedia, the madly scribbled text about 'the seven hundred thousand children of sin', and 'I have run out of oxygen-------'
Priscilla     Going through the stables to reach the next leg of the tram does find one additional detail. Where the cows had been before, or rather specifically, where the Fat Spectres had been eating them, there are bloodstains on the floor. So absurdly old by now that they've lost basically all their colour, but they give off a whiff of strong, tangy iron and copper, as well as a smidge of organic rot, faded by simple age and decomposition, and with that beer-like slightly sticky floor texture.

    More time spent roving surreal, empty rails lies ahead. It'd pass right by Shachihata, though that stop before had been to find Dedan's office in the Postal Service, and all its cryptic clues, without strictly being necessary to progress through. Alma lies beyond that, and its grotesque Meat Fountains.
Doctor Strange A sigh escapes the sorcerer as he flips through the books. A sour, ill-tempered thought runs through his head. 'God forbid I should get anything I can use to hold that dickhead accountable.' It doesn't occur to him that all of this so-called purity is someone's attempt to do exactly that. With a flick of his wrist, Strange sends the books back, in time to hear a question posed by Yuuki.

     Strange's brow furrows in annoyance when Yuuki asks her question. Why should he bother fixing any of this when it just gives the Batter more fuel for his 'do-what-i-say-without-question' fire? "I'm not--" He pauses, holding up a finger. Hold on a second... the Batter blamed the Secretaries on them. Said it was because they'd brought impurity into the zone, or some stupid crap like that. Here's an opportunity to test the truth of that claim--or at least see whether the supposed impurity is inherent to each person or not. If it wasn't just a lie, maybe it's an atmospheric thing, like leaving a door open and letting the AC out. "Actually, that's not a bad idea. See if it..." He makes a vague circular motion with one hand, nodding towards the metal. "Goes back to normal when you touch it." George corrects him over the radio. He shrugs. "Back to the way it was, then."

     As it turns out, this is not what happens. If that can be done without some kind of impurity explosion, and if the portal can, too, then it must mean that Impurity follows some sort of AC rule--it's a force that's let in or out, not something inherent to him or his allies. So, that explains, possibly, the Secretaries being here. Maybe that's his fault. Big M on that. Maybe.

     But it doesn't explain the way they're acting. If they're hunting around like that, they either expect to find something or hope to find something. Maybe that something is 'meddling off worlders.' But maybe it isn't.

     Strange observes the Secretaries, hoping to find out what they're looking for, and what their reaction will be upon finding it. What does a giant weird math baby hope to find here?
Thomas Alva Edison Edison looks up towards Yuuki, "Sure, just about done here.." he says, running a current through some of the metal.  He frowns...it has all of the properties, all of the hallmarks of being what it is on the tin.  Edison tosses the pieces of metal back into the box and stands.  He doesn't say anything for a bit, as he pushes boxes in the right way to free a path.  

Finally, on the other side, he speaks calmly, "It is just metal.  What it looks like, nothing odd or out of the ordinary.  In fact, it is /very/ ordinary.  Normal air, normal water...normal metal.  Everything is completely unremarkably normal...except for the fact there are no people, no animals...nothing."

Edison continues along the path until the streak of blood is found, which causes the brow of Edison to raise slightly.  "That's odd...why is this still here?" he asks and then... "This was caused by a spectre..." he thinks and moves to look inside.  He specifically looks for messes made by the Spectres, and the blood splatters they made when they died.

There had to be something to this.
Tina Natsumi Stuff! Tina helps acquire THE STUFF, providing a maybe-useful pack mule for Yuuki and Zero while her attention keeps jumping all over the place. It's not until she sweeps her phone over the pens again that she notices the bloodstains, letting out a long and uncomfortable noise even as she approaches them.

"Hey... Uh. Were these here before? 'cause I don't remember seein' these here before." She sniffs the air, then wrinkles her nose. "Smells old, too... Uch. That confirms the question about if anyone actually eats 'em, though." Tina rubs her forehead, doing one more quick sweep of the stables before heading back towards the main rail to rejoin the rest of the group.

"But why would there be blood like that in somewhere that's supposed to be 'purified'? I'd thought a purified zone would be a lot cleaner than this." Edison's explanation of the metal and water being regular old metal and water has her furrowing her brow further. It's not until a good minute later that she snaps her fingers.

"Hey! What if the purified zone really is how these places were supposed to be? Like a... That plastic water ain't plastic anymore, but water, right? Maybe the blood and the cows were somethin' else weird before! And now they're... Normal regular blood-havin' cows?" She pauses, then grunts again. "But then why would someone even change this stuff to plastic and smoke and weird shit in the first place?"
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki collects a Wednesday. "Oh man! Score, now I get to be the queen of a day too!" She quietly 'yey-s' after sorting all the boxes with Thomas and Zero, pumping her fist in meaningless victory.

"Stephen, did you notice? Things were bad when the secretaries were around. Not not-right, like before, but Wrong in the simple sense. A heebie-jeebies sense, a headachey sense. And their attacks - it's like being hit by something weird, isn't it? It's hard to think about that."

Yuuki pockets a LITERAL ENTIRE DAY. "Well, they could also be the cleaners? Everything's so super-normal here, and they were shooting blasts of decoloring energy. Maybe it's not that they're evil, so much as they are cleaning supplies, and impurity is more like... mold in the bathroom? So you need the bleach and drain cleaner: but you'd never want to drink or smell that stuff, never ever."

"Maybe they're... like that, you think? When you introduce a powerful cleaner to a bunch of colorful gunk, everything starts getting all fizzy and bad, too."
Zero Kiryu Zero collects the Inspiration. He's mostly ignored items and chests before, so he doesn't really know how these work all that well, beyond whatever instinctual nonsense he gets out of it by picking it up. He turns to trail after Yuuki, sniffing lightly at the air as they go.

Blood. Dried blood, but blood. It doesn't have the same washed-out smell that he expects from the Elsen, at least not as far as he can tell. Unthinking, he follows the smell of it to the dried smears. Unlike the others, he doesn't really recall the incident with the phantoms. A lot has happened since then that has dominated his attention too thoroughly.

He crouches down to get a little closer -- he's not about to stick his face in it -- and sniffs at the blood, to try to identify whether or not he assessed the scent of it correctly, or if it's still kind of "wrong".

"You're saying that they're an immune cell response," Zero asides to Yuuki off-handedly, "but that's a little strange. The Batter could be a similar entity, but he is more discriminating. So why the aggressive monsters once he's done with someplace?"
Priscilla     Unfortunately, try as Strange might to decipher the intentions of surreal quasi-mathematical embodied baby monster amalgams, there's just no useful information to be gained by watching them. They don't really *express* enough to make out any kind of reaction, and frankly, their environment is too empty of anything noteable for them to be likely to encounter whatever it is they're searching for, if anything. If they're not interested in rails and rocks and metal chunks and industrial buildings, they're not going to find anything interesting. They're dumb. Or at least, they operate on a sort of thought and scale of time that doesn't make much sense to the observer.

    Examining the blood, one easily arrives at the conclusion that there isn't enough of it to have been the vivid red spectre blood from that battle. It's just around the cow pens, and looks like it dripped all over the floor instead of being spattered against the wall by violent bat swings. Zero finds that it isn't a terribly substantial smell, but specifically because it's so old and broken down. What's actually there is pretty standard. It's like a butcher's shop. Coppery and slightly sour, like what would waft out of a plastic bucket under hanging ribs. Essentially as if someone had retroactively inserted cow bloodstains where the animals were chomped by ghosts. There doesn't seem to be any remaining sign of the Spectres themselves. No more than the Elsen.
Starbound Flotilla     Paying attention to George's smell isn't a bad idea. He's lagging behind the group, a bit conspicuously. What that means may or may not be relevant. He seems all at ease until he sees the blood. The /moment/ he sees the blood, it's like his own just ran cold. "Fuck." He mutters, kneeling and looking at it, as if he's going to recognize something about it. "You didn't seriously get..." He starts, before squinting at it and then seeming more uncertain. "Nah, no way." He loses his sense of urgency as soon as he gained it.

    "So, someone wanna send a letter, or are we heading back for to the fountains? Gotta warn you though, postal service might be off today. You know how it gets on religious days." He says, looking off in the distance down the tracks as if he's going to spot something or someone in particular. He's not here to push anyone in one direction, just to answer questions and be cryptic and, most importantly, sometimes hassle Yuuki Kuran.
Thomas Alva Edison Edison frowns, no...no connection. He thought he had something for a moment, but upon seeing the entire picture his hypothesis ends in a non-starter.  The patterns and area lead him to believe that this too, is normal...what you should expect to see here.  Why is that...what is everything as expected?

George has a moment, and Edison looks towards him.  "Are you alright?" Though the moment passes, he gives the man a curious glance but does not expect much.  

"Indeed...I don't think the mail is the way to go, we would do better going to the source of the final battle.  Maybe something can be gleaned there...or maybe I'm just wrong again and will waste our time." He says, perhaps a little self-defeating.
Zero Kiryu "What's the matter? It seems... normal, if old." Zero asides to George, rising from his crouch and dusting himself off a little.
Doctor Strange      Nothing doing.

     Strange runs a leathery hand through his hair, sliding it down his face to stroke his goatee. So far he's... mostly struck out, on the whole purity thing. "They are the cleaners," says Strange to Yuuki matter of factly. He nods towards the non-plastic water. "My concern was never whether they were evil. True good and evil are... rare," he says. "It's not that they're evil. It's whether the Elsen deserve to be sanitized like this, and whether 'nobody' has any more claim on this place than they do. So far what I'm seeing is like a germophobe torching a rotten log because it's 'icky.'"

     "Anyway. I'm with Edison."
Tina Natsumi Tina's own thoughts of what the purification process actually consists of will continue milling about in her head endlessly. Strange's interpretation gets a slow nod from her after a while, though. "Yeah, I getcha... I mean, that log might have some unique stuff in it, right? For research or meds or... Somethin'. But germs and whatever the Elsen are and the plastic water..."

She furrows her brow once more, then lets out a frustrated yell before starting to walk along. "Gah, all this theoretical moral talk is stream poison. Let's get to lookin' at some more weird stuff!"
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki nods along, happy that she's right. "Ah, sorry, if that was obvious. I thought I was getting ahead of a puzzle for once, but really I'm more a step behind everyone else again, aren't I?" She muses, as the group fully forms up. The blood - real blood, animal blood - draws her attention like a spotlight. Zero is already there, and she toes it with the tip of her shoe, having quietly slid off her blindfold between investigations.

It's George's reaction that draws her confusion. "George? Isn't that supposed to be here? It's not like the other bloods, but... It's a cow pasture. There'll probably be blood here. It's cow blood! I think."

"It smells kind of like uncooked steak, at least." She adds, quite uselessly.

"I think this was the place where... Well, what did we 'not seriously get'?"

"I may have accidentally killed a spectre with Artemis, but I dumped it into the water. And it looked just like if the Batter hit it! Mostly."

"Hey, worst case we don't have to swim in plastic to go get it!"
Priscilla     Skipping by the Postal Services may be a safe move, if one isn't too concerned about whether more mysterious slips of paper with bizarre half-histories on them have appeared. It was part of chasing Dedan. The journey along the rails becomes longer for it, but the titanically, impossibly tall visage of the Offices serve as a decent landmark. Or do they seem shorter somehow? Like they no longer pierce the smoke into infinity. Just kind of get fuzzy in the hazy white day fog. One can't see the top either way, but it's an impression more than anything. A ten thousand floors was patently ridiculous.

    For whatever reason, the Secretaries never haunt the rails, making for long, uneventful, introspective journeys, distorting the perception of time. How they got to each section of Zone 1 is up for debate, but so is everything else about them, including how important they are, if at all. Alma (amlA) eventually looms into view, with its fortress-like outer walls of an exclusive gated community built by someone who only knows fortresses. The tiny lobby room leading through it is, of course, empty. Though the little snippets of performance calendar on the walls, as part of that arbitrary questionnaire puzzle before, are oddly left untouched and unaltered, the lack of Elsen in the room to quirkily and confusingly obstruct their way leaves a depressing sort of air to the clean, grey room.

    Beyond that, is the sound of gushing waterfalls, and the smell of a pool. Emerging into the light again, the sight confirms it. The water circuits and basins are still exactly where they were, but the surreal and faintly nauseating sights and smells of endlessly churning and collected meat-fluid is gone, replaced with plain, dark water. The walls of the pools are visible for a foot or two under the surface before it gets two dark, showing swimming pool-like tiles, the sight of which subliminally intensifies the faint whiff of chlorine. The boxes are all still there, as plain and iron as they were before, and not scattered all over the place like the farmers' assortment of metal, but who knows what they're for now.

    Oddly, one of the things to stick is the pedalo recovery point, or, at least, the graphic of a walking man and a pedalo itself, its innocuous duck shape bobbing in the water. It'd probably be harder to go up the waterfall this time, without the grippable viscosity of meat to pedal against, though there is also a notable lack of floating password puzzle cubes from before, their nonsense banished to somewhere else. It means the Alma gate is probably still open from last time, but opens up a route they hadn't been through before.
Tina Natsumi The meat fountains have become water fountains. That certainly seems to confirm the idea that purification turns things into a more normal state, but the lack of Elsen is still jarring to Tina. "Did purification really get rid of all of 'em? That's..."

She seems a little less on edge this time around, at least. The waterfalls may be helping. The recovery point gets her immediate interest, and Tina inspects the thing itself. "If purification hit everythin', maybe... We can see where it stopped around this thing here." Still propping her phone up in a breast pocket, Tina starts circling the point to try and get a better idea of where things stopped changing with the purification.

What does she plan to do with that information, even she doesn't know. Knowing the point of stoppage might help her smarter companions, though, so she'll stick to gathering rather than applying!
Thomas Alva Edison As they walk, Edison speaks to Strange, "Doctor.  The Elsen, as we learned, is not a people...they are a person."  Edison does not correct himself.  "They are apparently reflections of one person.  The idea that this place is a hell for them is...well...entirely more probable now."

The trip, assuming no more questions happen, is in silence.  Edison retreats to his thoughts, and to him, it doesn't matter how long it takes.  He doesn't have to eat, things that living people have to do have little meaning to him.  When they get there, he is broken out of his dark thoughts again.

Water.  

Again, nothing but water, the weirdness of the place is replaced by banal sights.  Taking a breath, he tests the water again by running it through his fingers.  Yes, it's in fact water.  Chemically treated water at that...so you shouldn't drink it.  Now swimming, if it wasn't a fountain...

"The entrance might be unlocked...hopefully it is.  Though I can rig the Pagalo again if we need to."
Zero Kiryu "I don't... think it matters all that much. He didn't chase every little thing down. Just the big ones. I am sure there are things we missed entirely." Zero replies to Yuuki, dully. Perhaps the 'incomplete kill' caused things to be a little messier here than they would otherwise have been. Just a little impurity. But on the whole it doesn't seem to have resulted in anything quite so ruined and banal as the original configuration this place was in.

A part of him wonders exactly /why/ the Guardians anchor this specific configuration in. It's always them that the Batter has to deal with to finish the job, after all.

His attention swims back to the surface as George speaks. A little evasive, a little straightforward. It's not, he thinks, altogether honest. But it isn't altogether dishonest, either. It's the sort of thing that Zero is used to hearing around him by now, but he couldn't tell you what it means. Not really.

But, it strikes him that there is somebody who most definitely /could/, at least up to a certain point. They had the script, after all. He frowns a little.

"Yuuki."

"It is because the quality of 'caring enough to do something about it' does not exist in sufficient distribution across all people. It is difficult to feed the hungry, and it's easy to assume that someone else will do it. A crowd gathered around an emergency..."

"... Will dawdle about in a haze. Someone has to take control, or nothing gets done." He concludes.

Zero's attention lingers on the pedalo. It's strange, the kinds of things that lingered. Or maybe it's not. Maybe a few ragged old vehicles are what's supposed to be left when the world ends.
Starbound Flotilla     "Got rid of what's impure, y'know? And, honestly, you saw him when he burned out, right? Bleh." George says to Tina as he wanders. "He's alright, don't worry. We'll meet Elsen up ahead in Zone Three! Don't worry about 'em." He checks out the recovery point, activates it, and trusts that... well, by the nature of things, he's going to be assuming it'll get them where they need to go regardless of what happened to the reality of the world!

    "So, we taking the old approach, or heading the new way that opened up? I mean, I did kinda fall out the last time, I wanna see what it's like to ride the thing for real! Maybe you guys take the shortcut, I can take the ride? /Everyone else/ got to ride it but /me/." He sounds legitimately pouty about that. What a weirdo.
Yuuki Kuran "Okay George! Enjoy your ride!"

She whispers something into his ear, before pointing off at the NEW DIRECTION the party can go.

"Let's all explore that way, and then, we'll meet up with George going the other way! It's fine, right? I think August still has the two specal items, so George can't even run off with stuff."

Yuuki starts tromping off in the UNEXPLORED DIRECTIONAL AREA.

"Have fun, George!"

Zero falls in with her, remind her of the realities of sad things. "Well, I don't think George really wants to save the starving children. But it's true that reasons can be simple, like being born at a bad time, or unluckily. I suppose I'm truly blessed, many times over."

She taps her lip, just over where her canines would be. "But even as blessed as I am, sometimes I go hungry too." Then, breaking out into a smile, she elbows Zero feather-light. "I was just bantering with George, Zero. I'm not that much of a fainting lily."

She looks with some interest to Doctor Strange. "Are you going to use your portals to make the Pedalo work?"
Zero Kiryu Zero glances sidelong at Yuuki, eyebrows lifting in a decidedly skeptical look when she claims that she goes hungry sometimes too. He looks away for a moment as he turns the idea over in his head. It feels like a weird sort of social bait that he doesn't want to grab onto, so he doesn't.

Instead, he returns to the central topic of their conversation.

"I know," he says, "the Concord exists."
Doctor Strange      "It sure did," says Strange to Tina, continuing his analogy. "If what Edison says is true, it burned the whole log, fungus and all." He came into this party a little late. "Don't suppose anyone knows what happens to the reflections when a world is purified. Or--" What happens to /the/ Elsen. That'd be it, then--Edison's response makes it click. George's reason for being here. To ease some pain. It's actually kind of irritating. If he'd come right out and said 'I'm here to get someone out of their own personal hell' /and/ 'these are all just reflections of the same guy,' all of this sleuth work and suspicion could have been avoided.

     That realization strikes Strange next, and he nearly goes on one of his curt little tirades. "Oh, for--" He stops himself when he realizes how hypocritical that'd be. He's... actually /still/ keeping several secrets from his allies, even from those in his faction. "Eh. Actually, I'm the last person that should point a finger here. Carry on, George." He probably couldn't tell earlier than he did without losing the support of the 'Chorus' he'd mentioned. Or the Puppeteer. Both words that imply a story is being told. Both powers that might not want it told out of order. He's actually okay with that--he can't act any other way but his own way. Given that the Batter once corrected them on the use of a certain word in reference to the Elsens, he feels he has an idea of what happens to them, too. Which makes it two for two.

     George mentions wanting to try the ride, which he presumes to be the pedalo. Strange raises some nondescript pool-tile pillars from the water to ease the old man's entry into the ride. "Watch your step." His next step is to call forth a ray of freezing cold, blasting from a promptly-formed mandala which floats before his hand. It freezes the water, and Strange's precise application of the ray forms pedal-shaped 'footholds' that the pedalo can use to 'climb' the ice. It'll have to do, since he hasn't yet made a bargain with the Grease Harlequin, master of the Plane of Meat.

     "Thought about it," he says to Yuuki. "Figured that might be more fun for us." Yes, 'us.' Strange floats in the air a few feet from the pedalo, arms crossed. "Ready when you are," says the sorcerer.
Priscilla     The water even freezes realistically. It makes ice. Stark, glassy, colourless ice, without any of those impurities that would make it any kind of opaque, but it works as it should. Pedaling up chunks of ice is rough, but certainly feels more natural than pedaling it through elemental meat slurry.

    Even up top, it's not really clear where the water comes from. The meat was always the central building, where Dedan made his lair that no Elsen was smart or brave enough to nagivate even once, but it still just looks like it's pumped out of nowhere. Given that the basins aren't overflowing without workers though, it's probable it's just draining away and being recycled, instead of being infinitely generated and consumed.

    The path untrodden leads not very far, through some narrow canals of pool-smelling water and white step-offs of no real significance, into an odd bend that seems to serve no functional purpose, before coming upon a platform nestled between two buildings that stick much further out, hiding it from view until you're right in front of it, and the darkened doorway just beyond it.

    Entering into the room there finds a dead end chamber of barely bedroom size, all stark steel walls with no windows or furniture. What is cryptically noteworthy is white paint slathered on the back wall, top to bottom, depicting a pattern of spades, as the card suit, in the same slightly sloppy hand as the mysterios symbol on Japhet's library tower. The same one where someone was ripping out all the book pages that were printed on card suits. There seems to be no real reason for this room to exist. Given the pair of white chests, it may *not* have existed before. Nobody has come across a previous chest that has now been bleached white. All previous chests are gone, all white ones are new.

    One of them contains a FORTUNE TICKET, but the other has already been opened. For the first time, one of these out of place containers that nobody seems to acknowledge is laid bare and empty before you. Taped to a wall is a note scribbled in spidery cursive. Most of it is now converted to ????s, but a bit of it remains.

    'It's a tough job. It has to be done on time, every day. I'll do it then. Punctuality and schedules are what I'm good that. I learned those in the army. I'll have it all done on time.'

    It's signed -Tall Mister
Thomas Alva Edison Edison hovers behind the Pagola, and once more silent.  There is a lot to think on.  He thought what he saw was something that he did to this place...but now he is not so sure.  There is so much grey in the way, but that was life.  Not all questions had clear answers, not all things are objectively correct.  

He had to think long and hard if he would continue to support the Batter...but is it because he doubted the Batter?  Or was it because he was afraid of the consequences?  Edison could never take everything on faith...he couldn't take anything on faith.  He had to have the principle, reasons...the Scientific Method.  

It put him into a place he didn't like...the thought he would have to make a decision without having enough of the picture to feel he could make an informed choice.  That was it, wasn't...uncertainty, and an excuse he needed to express his displeasure in it.  With the Batter being the excuse.  While he did not believe in the faith the Batter had, nor his blind faith...there was no reason why things had to go the way they did.  

Finally, they reach the end, and Edison's head snaps back up to read.  He takes a breath, he wasn't sure...he couldn't be sure.  Not completely, but there was little room for doubt.  "You don't think this is...?"