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The Janitor      The Operahouse-3 space hub is not having a good day. The blaring red-alert klaxons are visible through the windows as rolling crimson pulses, giving the whole saucer-shaped structure a Jack-O'-Lantern-ish feel. But that isn't what the Colonial Coalition wants the Elites there for- they're more concerned with the spinal-cord-like tube connecting it to the planet far below, and the heavy steel industrial elevator racing down it.

     Given the circumstances, it looks like a tall hourglass with a single plummeting grain of sand. Waiting on the surface is a horde of local police and military- one way or another, this ends in blood when it gets there.

     For those who don't have their own transportation, the CC provides a small dark-steel technician shuttle which zips through the thin upper atmosphere to the tether's midpoint. Inside, television screens flicker across news reports showing looping footage of the kidnapping. It docks with a vertebra-like maintenance chamber, connects airlocks with the pressurized tube with a pop-hiss, and opens to allow the Elites access to a catwalk-balcony overlooking the steel-and-glass tube's interior. The elevator shaft's only fifty feet across, but looking down is positively dizzying.

     Above, the elevator hisses and rumbles like a freight train as it descends at autobahn speeds. There's a fraction of a second where it's safe to make the leap onto its exterior! Any earlier and you'll get caught freefalling underneath it; any later and you'll plummet for hundreds of feet before catching up and landing on top.

     The elevator box itself is a heavy cube of steel thirty feet to a side, meant for carrying goods as much as passengers. Tough windows ring half of its equator, allowing the occupants to look out into space as they ride. The Elites will have to get inside somehow, whether that means prying open the emergency hatch, blowing the roof off, smashing in the windows, or something more esoteric. Fortunately, the pressurized air inside the robust tube means that breaching to space isn't an immediate concern.

     Inside, wooden crates are stacked up in maze-like fashion, piled ten or twenty feet high in places. They contain industrial materials, shipwrights' tools, tanks of fuel, food, spare parts, and prefab furniture; everything a burgeoning spaceport might need. To anyone else, that's an IKEA. To the Janitor, it's an armory.

     The smell of blood hangs in the air. It's smeared across the floor where someone's been dragged. In the center of the maze, the Occasus candidate- clad in an orange spacesuit- hangs suspended in a haphazard assemblage of metal and wires, bear-traps and hooks dug into his bones, with liquid fuel mixing in a pool with blood at his feet. He's still breathing (and mercifully unconscious), but it'd take a surgeon and a bomb defusal squad to safely extricate him.

     A familiarly unfamiliar someone stands just next to him, her hand resting on the side of the metal contraption. Her other hand holds a glass of water. She's relaxed, impeccably at ease even as the Elites enter. A Colonial Coalition emblem is sewn onto her mechanic's outfit; her flat cap and dark bangs hide her eyes even as she tilts her head back to take a sip. The aura of mundane wrongness around her is palpable.

     She doesn't speak. She doesn't need to. Just waits.
Theurgus     Theurgus, The Mad Magician, steps into the space elevator tube, adjusts her hat then summons a rod of silvery metal. She intones a simple word: "Access." and in a burst of prismatic light, changes into the Divinity known as Diamond Soul. She doesn't need to time her jump, she floats out after the elevator passes, and with a kick off of a large spell circle in the air, launches herself towards it and matches speed. Not really landing in the traditional sense.

    She does wait for someone else to make an entry point, her magics are powerful and would likely just blast the entire contraption to pieces if she brought enough force to bear. Once inside, she sizes up the death trap, and the non-descript person beside it, a flicker of recognition passing through her mismatched eyes, but quickly fading. "What do you hope to accomplish in doing this?" she asks, stabbing her Relay into a box nearby... an obvious weakpoint.
Starbound Flotilla     The Space Elevator descends, and George has to descend harder. Of all the Flotilla, of course, he's the most effective at maneuvering in the context of freefall. "Wish you'd get your dumb ass kidnapped on another day." George mutters as he descends. "'Cause these joints are /hurting/ something fierce." With his microthrusters, he can perform fine adjustments to his descent, almost "flying" if there were such a thing for this, though he has to maneuver oddly due to the nature of the "slipstream" in the tunnel.

    George knows the engineering necessary to pop a hatch. Who do you think he is? He's an engineer! With the right welding, maintenance-panel-popping, wire-cutting, and heavy crowbarring, he gets inside, slamming onto the ground with a heavy roll. As soon as he's in, his crimson space hardsuit armor is on and his shotgun is out. "Oooh! Anyone got some experience with that ancient art of Tetris? I hear it's perfect for this." He says, as he wanders cautiously through, wincing every so often as his joints rebel. He jams a cigarette into his mouth and sets it alight with a welder in a clean motion the moment he turns the corner to see The Janitor and her work.

    "Christ, J." He mutters. "Have you been... getting /further/ into this? Holy shit..." His voice catches a bit in his throat, seemingly fearful of the idea that she's not just as bad as he remembers, but somehow even worse. He racks the shotgun once. "Accomplish is the wrong word." He mutters softly to Theurgus, and grits his teeth anxiously. He's glancing about just a little behind that flat-panel visor of the hardsuit helmet, trying to gauge wordlessly how the others are stacking up to deal with this threat.
Lory Thumper      Lory is pretty anxious. It's her first Multiversal action. She tries to remind herself that she has trained for situations like this...sort of. She isn't confident she'd survive jumping onto or even at such a fast moving target, so she readies her grapple gun. When the elevator races by, she leaps and deploys her grapple with expert timing, using the tether to absorb the actual impact over time. And silently being jealous she can't just fly like a magician.

     Once on board, Lory makes her way to the emergency exit and pulls out a tool kit so she can open it as quietly as possible. Once that is done, like some kind of bunny ninja she carefully drops inside and rolls quickly and quietly behind some of the crates.

     With George and Theurgus making a fairly noisy entrance, Lory uses the opportunity to move closer through the maze. She is quiet as a mouse and knows how to move without being seen, so she should be able to get pretty close without giving away her position. Once she is there she peeks out, a taser gun in hand.
Zenos yae Galvus The heavily armored figure of Zenos yae Galvus, General of Garlimald sits on the transport provided for him.  The Empire did not have quite the ability to send ships that could easily deal with a lack of oxygen.  So the provided ship was better, but given how they would enter, it would take time for his own forces to get enough manpower there to be helpful.  So instead, Zenos pushed forward alone.

A perfectly timed leap sends the oddly agile man across the gap and into the traillet, crouching as he hit the platform inside the train.  While others waited for a way forward into the facility, Zenos sighed, and in a flash of movement drew his sword.  It would be nearly impossible to follow what he did...

Until his sword returned to the Sword Revolver.  And the top of the train fell to pieces, allowing them to get off.  Zenos continues at his slow, methodical pace as he walks into the room with the box maze.  Another flash of his sword and a stream of boxes explode, enough to allow the Garlean to pass through them without taking a long way around.

He just walks with the serial ki-I mean, methodical pace as he approaches The Janitor.  His eyes look to her handiwork, and then to the calm demeanor in which she watches them.  With a sigh, his mask turns slowly towards her.  

"I will hear your demands, I will hear them only once.  If they are acceptable, then the business will be done, if they are not then I will handle this the way my allies have asked me to," Of course, this leads the question of 'who his allies were' in this?  
Tanya Degurechaff     Tanya von Degurechaff arrives under her own power, clad in battle coverall and carried by the armored boot of her flight unit. The repaired Thompson hangs by its strap, supported but not at the ready.

    A blonde swordsman helpfully opens an entrance for himself, and it is this same opening that Tanya utilizes, dipping into the orbital elevator car without touching down. Her hand goes to the stock of her weapon, bringing it to a readied position as she lifts up to close by the ceiling. Glowing golden eyes skim over the 'box maze', searching for traps, until that same golden-haired swordsman just removes it.

    Jeez. She closes those eyes for a moment to maintain composure, and while Zenos and George both address the assailant-- Tanya simply lifts her free hand and swipes it to one side. Magically projected screens materialize in the wake of her hand, images fixated on the strung-up politician as well as the person Zenos addresses. There's no point in wasting words repeating the Prince's request, after all.

    Rather, Tanya seems more interested in the politician himself, and the situation he's been put into.
Staren     In another timeline, the elevator is outside the tether instead of inside, and Staren gets a totally sweet entrance by having his mecha fly alongside the car and punch a hole in it! Alas, that is not this timeline.

    Staren takes the shuttle ride with the others, wearing his usual armor. He jumps just after the elevator passes -- he doesn't need to time it THAT perfectly, he can manifest wings and adjust his fall. He's getting out explosives to blow the hatch when George already has it. Alright then.

    Inside, though... inside is...

    Yikes. Staren winces at the condition of the kidnappee, and continues to look kind of uncomfortable just being near someone in that much... ugh. "Geeze. Why didn't you just kill 'em? What's the point of all this? I'm counting on you to stop any Imperium forces from attacking my new planet, but if you do it by turning space marines into creepy serial killer art projects that miiight kinda turn the people against me, you know? Also this is just messed up."
Shepherd     In space, no one can hear you scream.

This is because space lacks the required medium for sound to vibrate through and be received by audio equipment, though some craft are outfitted with sensors that can translate various subtle kinetic forces into audio cues for those who require it.

Fluff aside, this is actually moderately irrelevant because the tube the elevator is running down has pressure. The alerts and critical nature of the developing situation trigger various data collection systems put onto common Multiversal communications systems.

    Location identified.
Critical failure points identified.
Conflict zone estavblished.
Peacekeeping protocols initiated.

Soon a silvery mirror-sheened triangle slides into view, a spherical protrusion extruding from the 'top' of as it thrums through space. A pseudogravity array speeds it along like a mirrored knife through the night, using the umbilical itself as a surface to build the requisite speed. It does not need precision to board the elevator. Instead, it outpaces the cargo elevator, penetrates the side of the shaft and slips inside, replacing and sealing it with a flick.

A moment later, the elevator splatters the thing across its bottom, spreading the majority of it spilling about like mercury with the exception of a baseball-sized sphere that is cushioned against the impact. There is a flare of red light from the sphere as a light flickers on, and the innumerable beads of the splattered thing halt and draw back towards, forming into a spiderlike entity formed of geometric triangular shards that hangs inverted off of the base. It simply slides one leg-tip along the base of the elevator, shearing its way in as if the reinforced steel was glass for it to cut through. It slides inside, surrepetitiously sealing the hole behind it, and rises within, skittering along one wall to climb it and observe the situation from above. Sensors pulse, beginning to analyze the area and identify principal actors. The Janitor is of course noted, as is the dignitatry. The lines indicate the problem of bombs or related, and Shepherd expands its search pattern to include them and other potential hazards. It does not speak immediately, lacking the information to theorize as to the Janitor's motivations or objectives with a high degree of certainty at this point.

Also, the heroes are a distraction that allows it to work.
The Janitor      The anonymous kidnapper considers the demands of the Elites currently menacing her. Her face turns from the dark general with the enormous sword, to the blue-haired witch and her silvery staff, to the man in his futuristic armor. She sets down her water bottle on a nearby crate, reaches into her pocket like she's about to give change for a coffee, and pulls out--

                    BANG.

     --a long-barreled pistol, and fires it through the hostage's neck. The staggering ease and casual air of the action makes it difficult to even process. Fragments of his vertebrae and spinal cord paint the far wall. His head slumps forward bonelessly.

     "Shut up," she says in the clammy antebellum silence, her voice a Platonic ideal of blandness. The gun-smoke is sucked upwards by the whirling draft coming through the gaping hole in the ceiling, rattling the shattered crates and sending piles of printing-paper swirling around the assorted Elites. "I'm doing my job. You're in the way."

     She raises the gun again. The next bullet goes up through the now-open ceiling of the elevator, ricochets off of something, and jams its descent with a metallic shriek and a dramatic spray of sparks overhead. The sudden abrupt halt launches everything up into the air with the force of a car crash, creating a geyser of crates and flotsam- and then the entire thing starts to freefall, turning the entire tube into de facto zero-gravity as the rings blur past!

     Jane Doe soars sixty feet "above" the open elevator, twists around in an acrobatic flip to grab a stapler from a crate in one hand and a piece of rebar in the other, and then kicks off of one to effortlessly dive back towards the ground! Her dancing movements set off a chain reaction of crates splintering and bursting open as they graze the tube's walls, filling the air with splinters of jagged shrapnel carried by the howling wind.

     Shepherd's scan will discover little evidence of the environment being rigged- there's no bomb, just a fuel mixture intended to flashily immolate the hostage. That doesn't seem like a strong concern anymore.
Theurgus     Well, that didn't go to plan... did they even have a plan? Who knows anymore. The hostage is dead, and now the entire world is a hail of pain. Luckily the Drive Core Controller has a backup, since her Relay got toasted.. and is now a bent, useless wreck somewhere in the shrapnel storm. As her transformation wavers, she summons a crystal into her hand, and presses it into her chest, where it seems to absorb and reinforce her Divinity Drive.

    That moment of hesitation means she gets a wave of shrapnel stuck in her, lumps of broken wood, and bits of metal jabbing into her body and taking chunks out of her Processors... but leaving only a hole full of red damaged code, and a spiderweb of the same from each impact point, that are already starting to rectify. She jukes and dodges, avoiding the worst of the incoming, before summoning a staff in her left hand, giving it a flourish. "Ye Lords. Masked in Bits and Code. A flutter of winds, thee who bear the name of Program. Truth and Temperance. Strike thee upon this sinful pall, and unleash a measure of thy fury. Chain Lightning!"
Zenos yae Galvus Zenos turns his head only slightly to the right when she responds.  Then her hand moves into her pocket, which causes the hand of the Prince to fall on his sword.  Of course, the shot wasn't heading towards HIM...but the hostage.  He does not try and stop it, and instead simply allows her to do his work for him.  

"How tragic," he says, without a single ounce of actual care in his voice, this was merely a distraction for him, an and attempt to gain allies in other spheres.  However, as the room turns into chaos, Zenos is caught in the shrapnel hell.  

His sword revolver spins, as he draws out a blade.  There is a burst of wind all around him as he cuts through the very air itself...which, unfortunately, sends the shrapnel right towards the victim of the gunshot, except for the pieces that did manage to impale him before he was able to react.  "Well, I suppose he shall have to serve as a martyr for his people, instead of a hero.  We do not all get to choose our role to play."

He turns, with the Swell in hand, as he swings the blade three times towards The Janitor, bursts of wind searing out towards her to try and rob her of her acrobatic advantage by trying to force her to deal with her own trap.  

"How interesting, perhaps you shall give me a sport?  Perhaps this all wasn't a waste of my time!" he says, a bit more excited.
Lory Thumper      ...and just like that the hostage is executed. If he ever was a hostage and not just a way to get people here for some reason. Lory can only stare in shocked disbelief from her spot in hiding.

     And then chaos. The mysterious aggressor somehow stalls the elevator and causes things to go from crashing stop to free fall. But, Lory's quick reactions keep her from actually being harmed by the sudden stop or the sudden debris.

     With her grapple gun in one hand and a futuristic looking pistol in the other, the rabbit officer pulls herself to a wall and uses the grapple to brace herself. "Whatever your 'job' is, seems like you need to be put out of business!" she exclaims as she fires a few shots. "What was even the point of this if you were going to kill the man as soon as we arrived?!"
Starbound Flotilla     George grits his teeth and grinds. "J. You... you can't do this shit, this is--" He's starting, but she isn't listening, and she's certainly not stopping. Neither, it seems, are they; the fall begins as he rushes forward to intercept the bullet, and they're all in the air. Even his cigarette is ripped out of his mouth, not to mention his shotgun flying out of his hands. George moves fast. He knows how to move in zero gravity, but that's not enough to keep him from being crushed between two crates worth of shrapnel.

    What is enough to keep him from being crushed between crates is two hefty clips of hyperglass that light up at each calf, accelerating him well beyond what safe g-forces should allow to dart between crates. His helmet's faceplate even pops open so he can snatch his half-smoked cigarette between his teeth.

    "Fine." He grunts, wincing from harsh pain in his joints. "No talk." The Janitor will recognize it; the inherent familiarity of this environment lets George, for a moment, slip a little into his old mindset. Hello again, old friend, George's hands and movements seem to say as he rushes through the air. How have you been? Says a movement to snatch her rebar by bouncing hard off of a crate behind her and move to where it might be moved to strike. Same as ever, I assume? Says an effort tangle clean into her body in a short skirmish of flying, swirling limbs. Momentum, grip, and leverage are a language with which George says, sorry, but I'm really tired. Can we catch up later?

    He isn't looking when he snatches something from outside his field of view -- a chunk of an office chair -- and tries to use the leverage, grip, and momentum to drive it through Jane's body before kicking off into weightless freefall again. It's almost like how he moved in old times, and for a moment, his joints are painless. But the Janitor, above anyone else, will know how to knock him out of that focus state, as tenuous and fragile as it is.
Tanya Degurechaff     Flying has its advantages. And its disadvantages. When the elevator car suddenly stops, Tanya's not expecting it, and the matched descent via her Flight Unit slams the girl into the car's floor with a grunt. When it enters free-fall, she's already bouncing up off from that impact, and takes a second to re-orient herself to what's happening.

    So the hostage was a trap. To lure who in, the Elite? That Imperial Prince over there? Herself? Eyes narrow from a pained expression to a more severe, suspicious one. No, that useless God wouldn't bother with... Or would it?

    Just in case; Fuck you, Being X..! Even if this isn't your doing, you've no doubt done something warranting a curse or three recently!

    Thoughts catch up to body and Tanya's dazed state recovers, whirling around in simulated Zero-Gravity. And in this environment, the girl who can fly has the advantage. No love lost for the (apparently) slain politician, Tanya instead increases her altitude to a level that makes her awkward to get to for close combat. Only one magic screen remains, zoomed in on the Janitor herself as she collects her weaponry of choice.

    The Thompson is lifted. Red indicators charge in from the screen's corners, locking on the rebar-armed woman as a reticule, "Your mistake was taking the tight space where your assassin training held the advantage," The bolt is racked, "And transformed it into an open arena. What do you hope to do when you so easily gave up air superiority?"

    The burst of rounds Tanya releases are magically enhanced, leaving trails of golden light and not travelling in straight lines-- Rather, the bullets converge on that locked target the second George separates from her.
Staren     It's fine. It will all be fine. Staren can just cut off the head and make a run for it, but Shepherd has other plans. The gravity shenanigans are briefly disorienting, but it's not like Staren hasn't had to work in zero-g before.

     "Alright. If you're just doing your job, and you can't morally justify it... then what's it take for you to turn /away/ from a job? I need to know. In case people decide to help the Imperium get ships through."

    He tries to line up a shot. She's in the air -- how easily can she change direction and velocity while floating?

    ...Probably more easily than he'd like, but it's something.

    While taking aim, a sudden shower of crate shards covers his armor in nasty gouges! Some stay lodged in there. "Gnh!" He fires a double beam cannon shot at her!
Shepherd     The wires are mostly what they appear to be. This is good, there is less chance of a sudden explosive event removing the elevator entirely. That said, Shepherd is unable to prevent the Janitor from shooting the hostage.

The target profile is duly updated while the silver spider immediately moves to deal with the situation... Or would, if the elevator did not get severed to move into a freefall event.

"This is suboptimal." Shepherd observes, the flying shrapnel tearing through the silvery thing and shattering several portions of it. The effect causes it to collapse for a moment, taking the time to reconstitute itself partially and resolidify itself. "Hostile events acknowledged. Initiating multiplex functionality."

    The silver spider splits open, the softball-sized sphere within rotating in opposite directions, the object splitting in half and suspending itself as a second wave of silver begins spinning out around it, forming into a slightly larger globe. It hovers forward, the silver flicking and spinning around itself, absorbing wires and fallen shrapnel to increase its mass until now there appear to be two Shepherd units present. The spider reforms as well, reshaping and flicking into an array of floating conical shapes surmounting the central sphere. "Multiplexing complete. Preserving human life and subduing target."

Globe Shepherd moves forward, beams of light neatly severing the shot man from the wires as he begins to float in the air, laying him flat. Around the sphere, more blue-white flashes begin to spawn into place, smooth, durable layers of metal that it welds into place with speed and precision, building a coffin-capsule around the man as he it securely locked into place within to prevent further jolts and shaking. Tubes, fluid cyclers, and other devices are attatched to the capsule as it is floated away from the combat, the silver being efficiently constructing some kind of armored, insulated pod to hold the hostage. A canister is then locked into a feed, and with a low, pleasant shime, there is a whirr and hum, the surface of the capsule immediately frosting over as the temprature begins to drop inside.

In the meantime, Spiky Shepherd hums pleasantly towards the Janitor. "Please stand down and surrender to prevent loss of life." As he speaks, the cones arrange in a spiralling pattern and a white beam fires from it, attempting to strike at the Janitor with a potent stunning blast.
The Janitor      The Janitor maneuvers the cloud of crates and shrapnel around herself like a spider tugging on the strands of its web, deftly defending herself from Theurgus's incoming lightning and bullets- and then weaving around the storm when it's turned back on her by Zenos, her defenses stripped away! Two of Lory's bullets go wide; the third pings off the stapler in Jane's hand as it's somehow blocked, leaving a dent in the black metal and a spray of sparks as the only evidence of its passage.

     George swoops in and tangles with her, every movement of his countered by a pre-determined dance number from her. Disarm attempt, grab his wrist. Counterattack, twist his arm to distract. When he pulls out the chair, she rips it out of his hands, kicks off his chest with both feet to get distance and bodily hurl him towards Tanya, and then blocks most of the shots with the folding chair like an oblique shield, though her wrist bends in peculiar ways with the kick. Shepherd's stun bolts get essentially the same treatment, crackling at her fingertips as she swings the chair between them, and then twists around Staren's double-barreled beam shot so it just barely grazes her calf.

     Then, after an action-packed four seconds, she lands on her feet on the elevator's floor, hooks the folding chair under a crate full of fuel-tanks, and heaves them into the air to scatter like a handful of marbles. She throws the stapler after them, which hits the nozzle on one and contact-sparks at the precise same time, setting off a chain of explosions that fill the air with gouts of flame and battering shockwaves.

     Seemingly picking the closest person, she advances on Zenos with the folding chair's legs held in both hands and starts battering him with it- swinging hard enough to jam and numb his wrists on a parry, to dent the floor on a miss, and perhaps to crack his armor on a direct hit. She's relentless, trying to hammer him into a bad position, shove him down, knock him off-balance with presence far greater than someone like her ought to exert. When the folding chair breaks, one way or another, she turns on Theurgus with the two broken legs, trying to batter her down in exactly the same way!
Theurgus     And then she gets dragged into melee. Theurgus is at a clear disadvantage when it comes to throwing down hand-to-hand. She brings her staff up, and tries to swat the chair legs away, but she just gets battered and pummeled into a corner, unable to recover. Damaged code sprays off of her like blood flecks, and her Processors all flicker and the power starts to fade out as her Resource is directed to protect her vital functions.

    She gets a repreive when The Janitor goes off to find another target... or gets distracted by someone else coming in to attack her, and takes a moment to recoup some of her faculties. A mental rearrangement transfers some Resource back into her combat systems, but it's not much.

    "Rampant Wings of the zealous angel. Many grasping arms of the daemon. Tear forth and consume. The Balance of cosmos demands its due. Starfire Fury." she intones, summoning a quintet of bright white lances of white magic, which lash out like missiles towards The Janitor... they're not very potent.
Starbound Flotilla     George twists, maneuvers, and flips about to avoid the Janitor's grappling pain. He dances with her, almost but not exactly keeping up. It's a tenuous state of mind, and it's dangerous to depend on. It's George's effort to dip a toe back into the pool that he used to splash the shallows in. A pool the Janitor has long claimed the deep end of.

    But for now, his focus is unbroken. He's hurling towards Tanya. On instinct, he lashes a hand out in her direction without even looking at her. She can use it to help maneuver, or perhaps even use him; his instinct says she'll find something to do.
Staren     EXPLOSION! Staren sees it coming with the fuel containers, and puts up his forcefield first -- it shakes and flickers with the force, and an outer layer shatters into amber sparkles and fades away.

    His muse also brings something to his attention. He frowns. "So that's what this is about. This guy is a speciesist. And you've been hired by someone who thinks assassinating people will make nonhumans more accepted? Tch. He'll just become a martyr and they'll nominate ANOTHER human supremacist. That's not how you win hearts, and it's not going to end human supremacists until you kill every--"

    While the Janitor is beating someone with a chair, Staren fires staggered shots -- the beam cannons interspersed with HEAT micromissiles, hoping that SOME of it gets through.

                                     *PEW*                                      

    --last--"

                                    *FWOOSH*                                    

    "--one!"

    He staggers the timing a bit too, so there won't be rhythm she can exploit.
Zenos yae Galvus There was a ferocity in The Janitor's attacks that was unmistakable.  Sword met rod, and for his efforts, his hands went numb from the strike itself.  Then it hit his arm, feeling the feeling drop right out of it, even as his armor cracks from her strikes.  The force of the blow enough to force the Garlean to stumble.  

There was no sound of rage, no sound of anger or false bravado.  Instead, there was just a small chuckle from the Garlean.  How rarely was he pushed like this?  How GOOD did it feel to feel this kind of pain?  To feel /alive/...it was enough to break his icy exterior and reveal the bloodlust within him.  The chuckle became full-fledged laughter after a moment.

There is a burst of aether around him, drawing the blade as he rights himself.  Beneath the helm, both eyes glow with strange red light, as he takes a step towards The Janitor.  "Ah...and who would have thought you could provide such sport!  Hahahaha...YES!  Show me just how much lust for war you have deep in that cold exterior!"

While still recovering, Zenos was not known for holding back once he got going.  His blade comes down in a series of slashes, aiming to try and cut through Jane's defenses and force her to pay attention to his attacks.  "LET IT LAST FOREVER!"
Lory Thumper      Lory is pretty light on her feet...but how do you dodge an explosion?! Grappled to the wall, she has no option but to try and get her shield into place. But she isn't fast enough this time and gets blasted full force by one of those fuel tanks. The explosion sends her bouncing about the elevator hard enough to pull her grapple free.

     When she finally loses some momentum she pulls out a police baton even while smoldering from the fire. "Okay...let's try this." she says to herself. She fires her grapple, this time right at Jane. Whether it hits Jane or something near her, Lory uses it to pull herself into the fray. She tries to deliver several quick blows before momentum or counter-attacks push her away. "You shouldn't encourage this!" she exclaims to Zenos.
Tanya Degurechaff     It's raining men. Except it's not rain, and nobody's going to celebrate this. When George is hurled at her, Tanya immediately swings her submachine gun up and away to avoid the risk of hitting him. It's not that she cares about the man, but very much that it'd be a pretty bad look for an officer to be shooting her subordinates for no reason.

    All the times she would've wanted to shoot him, he wasn't in range. Doing it now would just look petty.

    She lets go of the Thompson, pulling a plunger grenade from her belt and holding it out for George to grab onto. With this 'handle', she spins to redirect his momentum.

    "TEN SECONDS!"

    At the appropriate point, Tanya slips her hand down the plunger's handle until it slips out of her grip, the cord and ring of its pin still in her outstretched hand. The device starts hissing in George's hand.

    Tanya adjusts her position amidst the shrapnel still filling the shaft, ignoring the pain from the cuts and the shoulder she nearly dislocated just now, by virtue of adrenaline.
Starbound Flotilla     Snatch. Swing, Launch. George is in motion, again, now in the opposite direction.

    "nine. eight. seven..." Explosions in the air, at least, George knows how to deal with intuitively. Even with broken focus, he might have been able to perform that smooth and elegant microthruster weave through the fire and the flames, rolling with the pressure. He clears his mind as he does, and tries to deepend his connection to those old, grey shores and their persisting tides. Dig deep for the choice, and reject it instead of accepting it as his material connections would demand. "six. five. four." What a monster like The Janitor does as easy as breathing, George focuses his entire mind to achieve a fraction of.

    But for now, that's all he needs. He approaches with a muted, humble manner despite flying through the air. He lands, skids... "three. two. one." And... he swings hard. It would be nearly impossible for a normal human being to effectively turn a grenade into a melee weapon like that, but George is trying to tap the stream that's beyond that. Assisted by his heavy hardsuit's enhancing motor systems, George accelerates the grenade so hard, and with such a precise angle, that its explosion shouldn't land any shrapnel or even pressure on him, and should only send it at nearly double speed towards the Janitor. She'll dodge much, surely, but there's gotta be some of it that she can't.
Shepherd The target's mobility is proving to be a problem. The Shepherd continues to accue damage as the Janitor promptly detonates half of the AI construct, setting it aflame in the middle of the dangerous and potent wash of heat and kinetics that cause it to spark and whine. "PlEAsE be CaUTiOuS of InteNSE hEAt DamAGE." He warns, before the cones spin around the sphere to begin splashing chemical flame retardants to reduce much of the potential continued damage, then it floats back towards the cryogenics pod in a protective hover as Sphere Shephers rolls in.

It creates several large rolling protrusions to quickly begin navigating through the increadingly blasted and battered area. This time, however, the machine works to begin using its abilities against the Janitor in a different way, a nozzle poking out and begins... spraying a foamy mass at her. Blocking it isn't going to help much, and if she tries to move she might find that thr ground under her feet has become hyper-slick thanks to a mix of flourosurfactant and silicon-carbon based hyperlubricants.
The Janitor      Those four lances of light swoop in towards Jane's back- and are promptly batted away. She turns with superhuman alacrity and awareness, sweeping three of them aside with the broken leg of a chair and grabbing the fourth with her bare hand, hardly reacting to the sizzling noise it makes in her palm. She uses that to ward off Staren's micro-missiles, carving through them just before they get in proximity-fuse range and rolling around the beams so tidily that it seems like she's deforming around their path like smoke- but one missile cuts in through her blind spot, detonating close enough to bruise and stagger her with the shockwave. She tenses as if to charge him and enact some kind of revenge...

     But Zenos is there right on top of her, and someone who's only a flesh-and-blood human can't leave herself open to an attack like that! She turns into his swing, placing her hand on the side of his blade and brushing it aside by such a thin margin that it rustles her clothes. The nex she can't avoid- she blocks it with the heel of her hand, unbelievably halting his steel with mere flesh and bone. A trickle of blood runs down her palm from the shallow cut. "You don't know me," is all she says in response to his challenge. Lory swoops past and tries to batter her with the baton; she takes the blows on the remaining leg of her chair and her forearm with a meaty thwack, betraying no pain in her face even as the baton strikes bone through the thin fabric.

     The space lube, she doesn't even bother reacting to. Not because it doesn't threaten her, but because- as Shepherd will soon realize- it benefits her. She moves on the unbelievably slick foam like a figure skater, defying gravity and friction both in the impossible dance of her intuitive combat.

     Tanya's grenade hand-off is somewhere in her peripheral vision. She notices it, and sets it aside. George can tell, in the violence-accented sign language they share, that it's because she treats him with some level of contempt. Whatever ELO she held him at in the Old Days, it's atrophied considerably by now. She doesn't move to defend herself when she hears the hissing, or when he moves in through the explosions; it isn't until literally the last second, as the grenade passes through the air, that she starts moving to protect herself against it. She spears her chair-leg into a passing crate and swings it around like a goofy oversized club, lunging forward to swing and knock it away batter-style while simultaneously using the bulky object to shield herself from the explosion! It shatters the crate and hurls her backwards in a rolling tumble, the shoulder and back of her jumpsuit briefly on fire, but she's safe from the brutal shrapnel.

     In addition to the passive hazards of simply being near a maelstrom of violence like Jane, another peril suddenly rears its head: the space elevator stops, coming to an abrupt halt once again as its anti-freefall safety measures come online. Anyone standing on the ground is subjected to a jolt like they've just hit the ground skydiving; anyone in the air will plummet towards the suddenly-onrushing floor, likely to meet the same fate.

     Jane shows no such inconvenience, jumping and twisting in complex acrobatic maneuvers to bleed the momentum of the impact safely before picking up a wrench and a long nail and advancing on Lory and George. They're subject to the same brutal manhandling that Zenos and Theurgus got moments before- she hammers and pushes at them in creatively, blasphemously, unrelentingly violent ways, trying to bleed their ability to maneuver and fight in every way possible.
Theurgus     One weird quirk of Theurgus' mode of flight. It seems to modify itself to her surroundings automatically, even with the sudden jolt of the elevator stoping, the floating Controller dips, and lands with a dainty tap of her feet on the floor before lifting back up again, shifting her position and leveling her staff at The Janitor. "Swirling winds, howling zephyr. Converge, ebb and flow. Rasp and erode gather the maelstrom and impose thy law. Gale Sprite." she intones, erecting a set of walls around The Janitor, trying to block her mobility, if only briefly with razor-wind barriers that lacerate and slice if touched. Strangely, they only affect The Janitor, anyone else that touches them have no issues moving through.
Lory Thumper      Suddenly...breaks! It is only through quick use of that grapple that Lory avoids splattering on the elevator floor, but the grapple line snaps and she ends up smashing into the floor anyway. At least that means there is actual gravity again. She groans as she gets up, then looks over at Jane. "Okay...we need to slow her down." she says to herself, then reaches to pull a yellow disk off her belt.

     With a quick flick of her wrist it goes flying like a throwing star, and when it hits it explodes. But, less with violent destruction and more with a splash of foam that hardens within moments to try and restrict the Janitor's movements. Lory closes in after that, aiming more blows with her baton. She takes several whacks from that wrench and nail combo in the process, and winces. "Cheese and crackers...this is as bad as fighting that Majima guy!"
Staren     Everything stops so fast. Staren's wings appear and start slowing him down at the last split-second, but he still hits solidly. "Oof!" The wind is kind of knocked out of him -- he struggles just to fire a couple of warning beam shots in the Janitor's direction, then draws his SMG and one-handed sprays taser gel bullets in her general direction, just to keep up the pressure while he recovers.
Zenos yae Galvus The force of the trainlet coming down is nearly enough to cause Zenos to his knees, but not enough to actually do so.  He's in pain, that's for sure, but unlike some of his station, he's loving it.  Living in the moment like this he's enjoying the fight and the situation the Janitor has put him into.  Perhaps a little /too/ much.

The sword comes back into the sword revolver, as it spins again and he settles into a drawing stance, staring at Jane with perfect clarity.  She tells him that he does not know her, but to that, he chuckles.  "Don't I?  Tell me then, 'Janitor' why do you accept jobs like this?  Do not say, 'the money' because I doubt that is true.  The thrill?  The enjoyment out of killing?  Because it is /who you are/?"

Because Zenos is literally trying to get to know her right now.  Let that sink in.

However, he dashes in, this time 'The Ash' igniting as he swings the blade around, the air around him exploding into fire bursts, uncaring about his 'allies' or the fact there is cryo stuff being set up.  Oh no, the only thing that has meaning for him right now is /her/.  Probably.
Starbound Flotilla     George is battered. George is slammed. George is jolted and smashed and his focus is shattered. "Hhhh-- ghhh!! Fuck!!" His voice breaks. "Shit, shit!" Terror creeps in, and he loses his focus. His trance-like state of connection with those silver shores is gone, as is his balance. He ends up on his back. "No!!"

    There is value, though, in panic. George may have been knocked out of the Janitor's perfect violence mindset, but this shocks him back into using his armor to its fullest extent, which means... getting the fuck out! "Get away!!" The last flicker of his old Grey Tide enlightenment state surges to let him reach to one side and grab the shotgun he lost a minute ago.

    Microthrusters blast to full power, pushing him back away from the janitor on his back. Sparks fly, and he blasts gunfire a bit wildly and substantially off-mark to try to keep her away and get some space. For someone who always has that subtle confidence, the fear and panic that grips his stomach and his throat really say something about his history with The Janitor.
Tanya Degurechaff     Tanya was expecting the elevator to do this. When the elevator arrests its motion, she ascends at top speed-- enough that she doesn't splatter against the floor but rather just slams into it and bounces. The unit strapped to the front of her hips emits a series of sparks as she recovers mid-bounce, trailing smoke from her flight pack.

    The smoke traces her path up into the tunnel above the elevator car once more, and it's some ten meters up before Tanya levels out and whirls around. Bringing up her hand, she sweeps it aside to produce a fresh magical screen, zoomed in on Jane as she fights those more inclined to be at close range. Those red brackets scoot in from the corners until their corners meet. As Tanya raises her weapon to her shoulder, the brackets move-- from head, to center of mass, and a little further. And then she waits.

    "Though I walk through the Shadow of the Valley of Death..." she murmurs the beginning of that classic prayer, "...You won't."

    In the instant Tanya sees the woman's back, those crosshairs centered over the base of her spine, the young Major squeezes the trigger. Accelerated by magic, the bullet moves so quickly it traces a blue streak like a laser beam, carrying an explosive spell to its destination.
Shepherd The ability of the Janitor to adapt and avoid losing her footing on the foamed superlubricant is outside Shephard's estimated calculations. "This is a level of violence that I have never observed before." it states. "I will have to continue to modify my tactics to deal with them." This, however, is just before the elevator jolts.

The Spiky Shepherd, floating as it is and keeping a hold of the cryogenics pod, is unaffected, but the Sphere Shepherd promptly is launched upwards and does a reeenactment of when it arrived on the elevator, shattering into innumerable pieces that rapidly melt across the ceiling while the exposed half-core crackles and sizzles while it works to come to terms with the intense damage mounting within it.

"This cannot be allowed to continue." Splatterd Shepherd enunciates with static and sizzling undertones in its autotuned voices, and it drops, reforming into the spider-form once more. This time, several of the legs are tipped with hypospray injectors, with which it uses as it pounces towards the Janitor.

All it needs is flesh contact, and a hissing wave of debilitating, peace-enforcing chemicals will begin to surge through her body. Not nearly enough of a dose to subdue her, but enough to begin dragging down the impulse for ultraviolence...
The Janitor      The elevator grinds as it roughs over whatever inner workings Jane jammed with her earlier bullet, and then starts descending at a sane speed again. Unfortunately, whatever backup systems it had are not up to code: the floor sparks, momentarily electrified, and then the flammable puddles of fuel and scraps of wood scattered across the elevator catch fire, shrouding the area in unhealthily thick smog and guttering banks of flame, carved into uncanny shapes by Theurgus's wind magic. Now that she can see them, she can avoid them- for the most part.

     "It's a living," Jane tells Zenos, completely unruffled by the bruises on her arms and the blood trickling down her fingers. She's not even breathing hard, and her voice is dead even as ever. "I'm not anybody." She says that while swinging a flower-vase at his head hard enough to potentially concuss him through his armor.

     Staren's taser gel has less of an effect on her than it ought to, flesh-and-blood though she might be. Her muscles visibly tense where she blocks them with her arm and catches a couple on her hip, but where an ordinary person would drop on the spot, Jane powers through them- even when Lory's foam grenade explodes near her, momentarily freezing her foot in place. Nailed to the spot and briefly weakened as she is, she still mannages to impeccably parry the rabbit's blows with a straight razor and a tennis racket grabbed from the IKEA debris, answering them by trying to shank her in the kidneys through the body armor as she tanks a blow to her abdomen!

     George's spray of bullets has little hope of hitting her, but it does accomplish something of value- as she's forced away from him to get into a space where she can weave and move around the chaotic spray, she's forced back into one of Theurgus's cutting wind-zones, landing a few scrapes on her back before she limbos around them while simultaneously bullet-dodging. It's eerie to watch- miraculously, wherever the attacks ought to land, she isn't. It's hard even to keep your eyes on something like that.

     But Tanya manages. She has her shot lined up. Jane's out in the open. Her back is turned, so she can't see the muzzle-flash. The round is supersonic, so it's impossible for the sound to reach her before the lead does. And an explosive bullet to the spinal cord is enough to drop any human being of flesh and blood. But whatever's inside Jane's head, it's not a normal human brain. She whirls around, as if on raw instinct, and faces Tanya as the bullet's fired. The weapons drop from her hands, but they haven't even hit the ground when the bullet approaches. Her fingers close around the shell as it nears her abdomen, twisting out of the way as the friction of her bloodied palms slows it down. By some unreal feat of prescience and coordination, she catches the shell and hurls it away just as it explodes. Even so, the explosion so close to her fingertips is enough to bruise her whole hand purple.
The Janitor      And then sports happen. Reaching into an overturned crate while taking cover behind a pile of debris, Jane pulls out a metal bat and a solid ingot of platinum, tosses the ingot up, and slams it in a line drive that professional baseball has scarcely seen the like of. It pierces the elevator's window and the elevator tube both, destabilizing the whole structure along a precisely-chosen fault line. It splits vertically in a great yawning wound, the tube starting to disintegrate with an earthquake-like rumble. The thinner stratospheric atmosphere outside equalizes with a deafening roar, sending the burning shrapnel in the room flying anew as it's sucked towards the hole!

     Jane remains unfazed by her own devastation, because- as part of a definite emerging pattern- Jane is categorically not fazed by anything. As the reformed Shepherd grazes her with one of the hyposprays, she lays one hand on its surface, perfect metal touching bloodied-and-bruised flesh. And then she shoves it towards the floor, tries to cudgel in the cephalothorax with her baseball bat over a dozen times, and then finishes off with a savage kick in the direction of the shattered window, utterly unmoved by the harsh chemicals in her blood. Whatever defective antisocial wiring is in her skull, it seemingly transcends neurochemistry.

     That done, she turns her hidden gaze upwards, towards the roof. She leaps, sprints up along the sheer vertical surface of the distintegrating tube, takes a flying walljump off of it, and brings the baseball bat down towards Tanya with both hands, trying to Chaos Dunk the little brat directly into the floor for her temerity.
Theurgus     And then the elevator starts disintegrating, and burning shrapnel peppering her as she channels Resource from non-vitals into her combat systems, leaving precious little to mitigate the damage that's building up on her body. She's crisscrossed with damaged code, and her voice statics and jitters like a poorly optimized computer program. She can't muster any further magicks though, as the entire assembly begins to fall apart. Instead, she aims for the hole Jane created, and just launches herself out of it to disengage, arcing gradually down toward the planet in a near-freefall.
Staren     A lot of things happen. This is becoming a ridiculous setpiece battle like something out of a movie. All that's missing are the giant bees.

    The fire... normally his armor could take it just fine, but it's so beat up now that it worsens things a little. The debris doesn't help either -- Staren keeps toggling the forcefield on to deflect stuff, but it's steadily being worn down. "Enough."

    Staren keeps firing taser bullets until the magazine is empty. At the same time, he fires all of the tiny missiles on the underbarrel launcher, pen-sized things that explode into globs of foam. There's six of them, and it would take a couple good hits to slow someone down.

    But that's not all. While doing that with one hand, Staren reaches into his bag and starts hurling vials with the other. Where they smash, each suddenly becomes a bush of rapidly-growing, entangling vines that grows bigger than a man in a second and then stops.
Zenos yae Galvus The elevator was exploding and coming apart around them, but this does not cause Zenos to fear, oh no...he's /excited/.  He laughs, as the aura around him builds and his sword returns to his sheath.  He listens to other people, but that...level of concentration and focus she has.  Ah yes, it might be something he could never obtain, he was far too emotional, he knew that.  

Even if he quelled it...but still.  It was something to approach.  "Nobody hm?  Ah yes, empty yourself of everything, I have heard it.  You have achieved such a state, hm?  Haha...are you even human anymore?  It is not where I would go, instead to be human you must embrace violence for its own sake...but still!"

He holds his weapon at his side, eyes focused squarely on her as even his position starts to crumble.  "You fascinate me!  Lets test that resolve...!"

Zenos is gone, simply gone in a flash as he seems to appear in three places at once, each one holding a different sword.  The sword of the wind strikes, aiming to try and launch her upwards, as the lightning sword appears right under her and releases a blast of lightning in a ball square at her form.  

Zenos appears once more in the air above her, firing a slash of fire down towards her, aiming to scorch and char...but it wasn't over.  The three Zenos move as one, each one then hurling towards her with a single strike.  Three strikes, but they strike with such precision that it feels as if a single blow happens, as the real Zenos appears next to her, releasing energy that crackles the very ground around them.  

"Yes!  MORE!"
Lory Thumper      Lory really hasn't experienced this level of chaos before! It is only her natural instincts honed even more by her training that keeps her from being caught by Jane's razor, and again when things start flying around the room once more! The agile bunny leaps off of debris, spin dodges through shrapnel, and finally manages to land on her feet again once the.

     Just in time to watch The Janitor leap -out- of the elevator and run up along a crumbling glass wall before divebombing back down. As she comes down, Jane finds a small volley of those disks Lory keeps around her belt flying up to meet her. More explosives, this time flash bangs and smoke grenades meant to disorient a target as much as damage them. Having no means of flight, Lory has to stay on the falling elevator as long as possible. She just hopes she can find a way to get out when all of that collapsing space tube comes down...
Starbound Flotilla     George's armor sparks and shatters as chunks of burning shrapnel slam against it. "/Fuck!/" He shouts. "She's taking the whole tether down! The space elevator is coming apart!" He latches onto the ground with a grappling hook to avoid getting sucked out into space, and activates magboots necessary to stabilize. Shepherd has promised some help. George has to hope he can get it. He pulls out a grenade of his own this time. It's not one for the Janitor, though. He pulls the pin, counts, and eyeballs the wind...

    Then he lets go. The grenade flies out to the hole, and explodes into a huge rush of instant metal-foam hull-patch. It's instant in both senses. It'll instantly fill the hole, and it'll also instantly fall apart if George doesn't reinforce it /fast/.

    He pulls away from the fight, grappling up to it and starting to deploy nanotube lattices, shouting for Shepherd's help to provide more once he's out. From there, as he works over the gap with the latticework, he pulls out a small concealable pistol and starts blasting at Jane from a distance, trying to make openings for his fellows and trying to deter one of her superhuman rushing assaults while he makes a desperate, haphazard scaffolding and webbing in the wall. Maybe it can last long enough to at least safely disconnect the tether? Maybe even get a /proper/ repair? God willing, because George is running out of options with startling speed.
Tanya Degurechaff     Tanya lifts her weapon clear immediately after firing the shot, staring for the half-second it takes Jane to contend with a bullet she had no conceivable way of knowing was inbound. Parried. With her bare hands. Those glowing golden eyes narrow, a tense frown on the young girl's face.

    Someone who can bare-handed parry magically-enhanced artillery. Irritating.

    The girl floats back and upward while gauging her next move, ejecting the spent magazine. As she's reaching for the fresh one-- that's the opening the Janitor takes advantage of. That half-second of distraction. And suddenly there's a murderous custodian in her face. Without thinking, Tanya thrusts her SMG up, braced with both hands as the bat crashes against it. The force breaks the wooden stock and bends the metal, with enough force to hurl the girl down against the elevator floor. She lands on her back hard enough that it must have broken something, though she's not stationary for long-- An 'ascend' command to her flight unit scoots her across the floor before she can be hit with a followup down-attack of any sort.

    The Thompson is discarded, clattering across the floor. Tanya produces in its place her sidearm. This, too, has explosive rounds. Though the smaller bullets hold less magic to detonate than the .45s of that Thompson.
Shepherd Shepherd begins to realize even more intensely what it is dealing with when Jane shrugs off the chemicals in a far more efficient manner than it had calculated. It didn't expect her to be disabled from that dose, but the ease with which the chemicals are effectively neutered and metabolized are far beyond any of its projections.

    It then gets smashed repeatedly, the impacts bludgeoning into it, shattering it apart and punting the remains out the hole, sparking and barely functional. Is there a Roboticist in the house- Oh wait.

Spiky Shepherd takes the novel solution of dragging the pod /out/ of the elevator, tugging it to hang in low-earth orbit alongside while the cones swivel about. A moment of examination of the material George is using,(there's a lot of ways to pack nanotubes) and it begins to rapidly produce more sheets of them in the form and size that George is using, the uniform production allowing George to undertake his quickpatch work with a stream of additional material.

    Meanwhile, Smashed Shepherd works to recoalesce, finally recomposing itself into a dagger-like shard that covers its core in an angular set of mirrored sharp angles. It hurls itself through space, trying to close with The Janitor and hazarding the reach of that bat as the thing flicks up before her... And then blasts an intense wave of light, attempting to momentarily blind her while it darts in for an attempt to tase her!
The Janitor      The Janitor evades the bulk of Staren's LTL weaponry, as is her penchant, but enough of it sticks- or at least, gums up her environment- to perceptibly slow her movements. She tilts her hat and bangs in the direction of Lory's flashes, but they take their toll too, as evidenced by her uncharacteristically conservative motions- not feeling her way along, but hedging her bets, like a blind man navigating his own house. She's staggered enough that when Zenos closes in with his brutal triple slash, she can't defend against it with quite her usual uncanny competence.

     She's swept up, battered down, and tossed around- each time, she twists around the blow, but not quite quickly enough to avoid being grazed by the baleful elemental energies. Then he finally brings down the three conjoined swords, and-

     Crunch.

     In their path is a half-shattered coffee mug, held there by a quivering, straining arm. The Janitor blocks the worst of the strike overhead, though it's enough to dent the metal under her feet and make the bones of her shoulder groan uncomfortably. A normal human would keel over from the pain. A normal human's heart would burst from the exertion. Jane isn't sweating as she steps forward and tries to drive the mug's jagged handle through the neck of Zenos's armor, to push him off-balance one more time.

     Regardless of whether the blow connects, she ducks under his arm and slips past him, glide-skating across the space-lubed floor and towards the hole in the window. By this point they're at a low enough altitude for camera-drones to be flitting outside, trying to document the chaos inside the tube.

     She doesn't look at Shepherd as it tries to flash her again- she just shoves it aside as it assaults her senses, grabs a bottle of luxury wine from the shambles of the debris, breaks that over the fork's body, and gouges it with the broken glass all in passing. Staren gets much the same treatment as she passes by, weaving around George's and Tanya's handgun-shots while getting the loose folds of her jumpsuit perforated by harrowing near-misses.

     Throwing a heavy floor-tile ahead of her to blow out the glass, she swan-dives out the shattered window, passing through the rift in the tube as George and Shepherd mend it, falling past Shepherd's coffin without giving it a second glance, and swiftly vanishing from view. Even the camera drones miss her as she swerves around the tube, running along it straight down at speeds exceeding terminal velocity alone. She drives in a single shard of glass at a second fracture-point as she descends, tearing open more of the elevator- not irreparable, but enough to keep the engineers busy.

     For a moment, there's almost total silence in the tube. The maelstrom is over. The custodian has left the building.

     Then the elevator's brakes give out one last time, in the end of an enormous trail of sabotage-dominoes that have been falling since that first gunshot, and it falls the last five hundred feet before slamming into the surface. Just a little parting gift.
Zenos yae Galvus The jagged handle of the mug comes for his neck, and Zenos brings the blade up, the two colliding as she tries to stab a vital area.  However, with that he pushes forward, trying to drive the blade into her.  What he gets, instead, is overextended, as she slips under him and dives out the window.  

Hm!  Interesting, he considers, the maneuver would nearly be considered instant death, but apparently, she has set things up enough to make sure she could escape.  

Of course, then the train's emergency brake gives out again.  The train drops and all Zenos can do is laugh the whole way down.  Oh, this was /fun/!  Not easily is he this pushed, this strained, and the thought that he could die here...that the possibility EXISTED was so novel for him, he who had obtained the highest power.

However, and unfortunately for Jane...Zenos' eyes were still glowing, in that strange clockwise way.  He moves, the sword in his hand swinging down and creating a burst of wind at just the right angle to try to slow his PERSONAL momentum separate from the train at the last second.  

The crash happens, and when the dust clears, when people come to evacuate or check the rubble, a single blade cuts it's way out, Zenos, bloody with injuries and impaled with shrapnel and limping his way along dripping blood.  

His forces rush to help him, escorting him to receive aid.  Meanwhile, nothing but a smile remains on his lips.  Oh, that was intense...
Starbound Flotilla     George almost gets dropped lethally. It takes a lot of presence of mind to avert it. The ground gives out, and he has to use the little bit of time he has to push off of it to launch hard and fast towards the edge of the interior. He slams hard into it, magnetic attachment systems failing to latch on as he starts descending hard. For a moment, just a moment, he's parallel to the Janitor as she runs down.

    "How..."

    His magetic attachment systems catch. With a screech of metal, he comes to a painful stop, holding onto the side of the inner tether. Panting, exhausted, he presses his head against it and rests for a moment. His joints ache so damn badly. He detaches one hand, enough to jam a fresh cigarette through the damaged faceplate of his hardsuit when it pops open.
Staren     Staren's forcefield has more than enough left in it to block the broken bottle, but getting slammed this way and that... Fresh into the fight, it'd be an easy dodge with his wings. But he's worn down. Maybe if he were a robot... but he's not, today.

    Today he's battered flesh and bone, and left lying on the floor again. "Uggggh." He groans as he pulls himself to his feet, checks that everyone else is alive, and approaches Shepard. "Are local medical facilities enough, or have you got this, or do I need to take 'em?"
Shepherd     The action was effectively spitting in the face of the Janitor, and she reacts appropriately. Unfortunately this time, the makeshift weapon punches right through it, shearing through the core and causing the entire assembly to spontaneously disintegrate as the security systems cannibalize themselves to prevent replication and analysis.

There is a low screeching and modulated noise from the other half of the fork as processing priority is destructively shunted back onto what is half of a processing unit. While the half of Shepherd is effectively in no danger from /falling/ there is the matter of the debris involved and various minor catastrophic failures making the environment hazardous. It moves as rapidly as it can, the unit absorbing falling chunks that threaten to strike the cryogenics pod, its systems overburdened and emitting low feedback hums dangerously.

When Staren approaches, the being simply swivels it right around to present the pod to Staren. "I do not know if local medical facilities can repair the damage. It is a standard cryogenics unit, you should be able to thaw the occupant and heal him in short order if you have the skill and technology. Do as you must."

In the meantime, the half-an-AI turns to scan the elevator. "What a singularly unpleasant and catastrophic event. The Multiverse is far too violent and dangerous of a place." At that, it putters off to dedicate itself to patching the elevator as best it can until the thing is under no more threat of imminent collapse.
Tanya Degurechaff     The elevator floor whisks out from under her again. In the following freefall, Tanya's face forms a sort of pain-influenced 'this again?' expression. She twists her body uncomfortably to right herself, thrusting her right foot downward. The glowing exhausts of her flight unit grow more intense as she arrests her momentum. Something sparks, a component erupts out the side of the canvas case the device is carried in.

    Teeth bared, Tanya shoots a look down when the telltale golden glow from the top of her device sputters and dies. With a grunt, she produces her bayonet, slicing the straps and cutting the device free... and continuing to descend at a leisurely pace.

    That is until some wreckage from further up the shaft catches up with her, and the young girl's fairy-like descent becomes more like a comet complete with a plume of flames shooting up from the impact.

    Even Tanya is surprised when she crawls out from under that twisted metal under her own power. Once free of the flames, she collapses, then rolls over and covers her eyes with one bloodied sleeve.

    "I need a vacation."
Lory Thumper      Lory is basically in some combination of awe and fear as she watches The Janitor work. And the bunny thought she had put herself through some rigorous training! Did Jane seriously block swords with a ceramic mug?

     And then, with a sudden and skillful leap that Lory herself might have trouble with, Jane is out and running down the elevator shaft. Lory doesn't have gecko-like stick to wall powers, so she has to turn to her grapple again. She fires it through the hole in the top of the elevator and grabs the center of the shaft just a few meters before the elevator hits the ground, and while she wrenches her arms painfully in the process and gets hit with plenty of debris on the way out, the bunny cop emerges alive and dangling by a tether.

     Lory just hangs there for several long moments, trying to catch her breath. When she finally feels calm enough, she disengages her grapple and flips through the air to land carefully on the top of the crashed elevator, then makes her way out of the tube as quickly as possible. She takes a seat at a moderately safe distance and pulls her riot helmet off, then just looks at the wreckage. "...not exactly the outcome I was hoping for on my first mission outside my world." she mutters to herself, ears lowered.

     When Tanya emerges and crawls free, Lory hops up and goes to check on her. "Hey, are you alright?" she asks, holding out a paw-like hand to help.
Staren     "Sure." Staren takes the pod. It's unwieldy, but the armor's strength can handle it. He stops to kneel by Tanya on the way out. "Is that your blood?" If she replies in the affirmative, he pulls a nanobandage from his bag and gives it to her before he makes his way out of the elevator -- if there's no doors, he makes an egress with the matter manipulator and then steps out to where the media can see. He looks around for a couple of seconds, armored tail lashing -- this is clearly a NON-HUMAN who participated in the rescue -- and then he and the pod beam up, person-size bolts of red-white energy zooming into the sky.