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Priscilla     Weeks into the effort, a strange path winds its way through the ruins of the Undead Burg. A passage bored into the cratered heart of the sprawling castle-world, where the ground yawns open and exposes an artery of almost pristine city. A branching route that spirals deeper and deeper down, where the surroundings have been rebuilt to such a degree that they appear as if they were somehow miraculously spared the calamity that rendered the rest to molten wreckage. The one navigable route amidst a skybox of dramatic and ominous ruins.

    One can walk the streets, descend stairs and ladders, and cross bridges, passing pillars and arches and overhangs, without difficulty or peril. The path is hardly straightforward, cutting along the once confusing and labyrinthine roads and walkways faithfully, and steering around areas of extreme danger, and thus the journey is somewhat of a long one. There are places here and there that one mustn't tarry, for the way the uncanny shadows and stains of ancient impossibilities linger in them, but the way down is broad and safe enough to traverse without much issue by an armed party moving at a brisk pace.

    It isn't yet the end, though. Its ultimate destination is still uncertain, its terminus more of an educated guess more than anything, making for a significant risk of being left wandering wide in a deep and dangerous place at the end. Though most of the unwholesome things lingering here have been driven away, or buried for good, some have slipped through the cracks, leaving a certain element of unknown risk later, but not one that the Abyss-delving Knight of Gwyn finds concerning.

    It is the very last level at the dark recesses of the Undead Burg, running around its foundations, where the deeply settled taint of something newer and more hateful had finally proved too onerous to deal with, and was deemed best left alone, where that risk compounds. Finding routes by cutting through the ancient, abandoned passages and sublevels in the Burg's proverbial bedrock had worked well enough, but more than once accidentally disturbed worrisome remains, unearthed ominous curious sealed for good reasons, and released glimpses of old ghosts and faded dark magic.

    Such things are within tolerable parameters, according to the strangely resonant expert, but they are a complication. One at least moderated by the fact that nobody will be contending with the terrain itself so far, the routes below still immaculately clear of any additional rubble, collapsed passages, dangerous rifts, or inaccessible routes. So far, it seems like the final expedition will hinge on making quick progress; finding the right place somewhere in the area, before time pressures exceed allowances for ambient hazards, will be aided by easy navigation and relatively fewer threats, but distinctly chancy, for the uncertain length of the excursion multiplying the risks of encountering more of them.

    Given further levels to get through, however, this state is not yet final. There are still opportunities to hedge potential difficulties and correct missteps. There are also still opportunities to make things much more difficult.
Priscilla     The final barrier over the deeper recesses of the earth melts away, cracking open and exposing its innards. Some wandering of the route arrives at a place where the underworld comes close enough the surface to scrape its dark and disused corners, the boundary traversable through a series of overly broad and tall tunnels of different, rougher, older-styled stone than the Burg's foundations, stacked together to form the walls and floors of steep ramps, deep channels, crossed corridors, and finally, a massive, vertical shaft that leads straight down for at least a third of a mile.

    Intentional holes in the walls and ceilings along the way suggest myriad canals and ducts shot throughout the bedrock of the Burg, far too small for anyone to enter, thus certainly for collecting water, given their rusty streaks and splotchy spreads of variegated mosses in strange purples and reds. Nothing has flowed through here except rainwater for a long time, however, and now barely even that for some years.

    The older, simpler architecture, more reminiscent of a true dark age than a renaissance wearing a gothic skin, is permanently dank and unpleasant to the touch, stagnant water pooling in cracks, ditches, and shallow dents in the ground, frequently host to unpleasant films of some organic substance or oily sheens of another. Equally unpleasantly large insects and associated crawlies are common, sightless amphibians and glistening millipedes slithering into the cracks when light draws near, but there isn't so much as a single fly.

    Somehow, there are still rusty old gates to contend with, ranging from barely more than a wrought iron fence, to heavy flow regulators operated by multiple old and brittle levers and chains. Ladders are an occasional find, as are holes in floors and walls that allow for slightly unsafe and uncertain shortcuts. Steep pits and deathly drops lead into miles deep abysses, after which where the water goes, no one knows. The occasional tunnel has largely caved in, or been sealed by centuries of decay or deposits, and in some places, the cataclysmic fallout of the disaster above has reached even down here, melting inaccessible shafts down through the maze.

    Much of the route is already lit to some degree, by torches, even, but their presence here doesn't feel amusingly odd, or entertaining to speculate on, but rather morbidly uncanny. It's made a little worse each time a closet of a stone reservoir is furnished like a jail cell, or a dead end room is host to rough, waterlogged tables, empty chests, and rusty chains. There is no good reason that even the most reviled pariah would choose to live in exile here, compared to the very darkest crevices of the Burg.
Priscilla     Striking a ROUTE through this ancient maze of stagnant water and ominous detritus will not be as much of a matter of rebuilding and paving a road, but more so locating or creating as desirable an exit as possible. The INTEGRITY of the venture hinges on where to break the flow of the underworld's stony sprawl, lest some places where it may be best to take advantage. The TAINT here appears to be of a mostly less-occultic bent. Some of the dire energies from above have trickled and pooled, but it seems you should expect more tangible threats to flesh and brain than peril of the mind and soul. The ABOMINATIONS are of the sort you can already guess. There are already signs of an ecosystem here. A hideous and unwholesome one, but one that overwhelmingly predates the alien shadows and prowling wraiths above.

    The uppermost levels present little pressure for now, allowing some time and freedom to make a few initial overtures and preparations that may help in attacking the many floors below -- but only just. What little you know of your destination so far indicates that what you seek is nebulously in the throat of the earth, beneath the last of these signs of civilization; easy enough to find one way or another, but with no guarantee that the way you find it will be desirable. No doubt whatever had once ventured up from that pit has settled in here for long enough to become its own separate biome, thus it can be presumed that there is either no way, or no purpose, for anything here to move between the two places -- perhaps until now.
Raziel 'Progress had come, but now our works come to a head, as the deepest levels of civilization threaten to hinder our path even more.  Water from above had, once, collected here and where it went was anyone's guess.  However, in these stagnant pools, filth collects.  Ecosystems thrive based around the stagnancy of these pools, with obviously increasing sized creatures eating smaller ones.  Those that manage to become the largest no doubt infected with whatever taint plagues this place.'

Raziel makes his way down to get a look at the deep catacombs himself.  Right now, if they were going to make any headway, he felt that the ROUTE was going to need to be improved.  Running his hand through a pool to see just how bad the water was, he frowned at the filth and wiped his claw on the stonework.  

Standing up once more, he took careful stock of his surroundings, before pushing forward.  He will assist where he can, but his primary focus was trying to focus on improving the ROUTE, as they may have a chance here to do just that.  

'Pushing forward onto pathfinding for my allies again, my unique abilities suited for this, without putting any threat to the INTEGRITY of the tunnel.  Pushing through anything that looks to block our path, I look to see if it is best left alone, or pushed through.  Better myself, than someone else.  More so, because I can not die so easily.'
Starbound Flotilla     The Flotilla navigate with difficulty and discipline. Here, the mechs and the heavy equipment cannot go, and they must be left behind. George regards it critically. "It's like someone took European civil engineering and smushed it in a hydraulic press." He judges it. "Seriously, this is so much rennovation debt. There's just so much 'I'll fix it later' and now it's later. This is what later is like." He steps in some water that's been sitting there for longer than he's been alive. "Jesus *Christ*."

    But the Flotilla are no strangers to horrid, dank depths. In fact, ancient problems require modern solutions. They have heavy industrial-grade dehumidification equipment that Biteblade and Albert are carrying on their backs, heavy-duty tarping to lay down, and, of course, Moonfin and George's dedicated effort to recreate the architecture as it once was, long ago.

    Almost as it was long ago. The heavy gear the Flotilla has on-hand is smart-turrets. They pack them behind sections of wall that they repair, ready to pop out, and to otherwise remain entirely unintrusive. Something to help with the path, and its traversal, when it comes to more dangerous physical threats. They don't try to optimize the route, of course; others convinced the Flotilla that it would be better to specialize than to try to generalize the properties of the path they're laying down.
Zero Kiryu "You noticed it too, huh?" Zero asks Raziel, distantly. Up until now they had been spending most of their time choosing to compromise the ROUTE over all other concerns. In prior regions this was reasonable enough, since the pressure of time wasn't a strong one. But down here, where the hazards seem to mostly be best mitigated by spending as little time as possible around them, he thinks that approach isn't likely to benefit them terribly much. Or at least, not as much as it has prior to now.

Where Raziel forms up the forward scouting of the effort to make a speedy ROUTE, Zero forms up the front-middle, extruding vines to wind their way through the earth and widen or outright form initial tunnels where it seems viable, creating a crude mine-like structure that can be expanded upon by others if they so choose.

Glancing behind them, he adds, "The regular people accompanying us were starting to disappear a while ago. I don't think they'd do well down here."

To George, he replies, "Yeah... I expect the people working on it ages ago thought the same thing, just a little ways further up. Then they made their own shortcuts, and moved on. On, and on, all the way to the mess at the top."
Eryl Fairfax     The lack of occult energies and mysterious shades takes Eryl by surprise. He had been expecting them to be a constant threat during the whole descent. But these structures are layered, with entire ecosystems being built atop one another. And this one is less Dark, and more... dank.

    Terribly so, in fact. He has to immediately disable his processing of olfactory sensations, the smell is so awful. This layer is a hive if disease. Every puddle of stagnant water is a trap, the crumbling architecture a host to all manner of moulds. He looks around at the party. While there are some that, due to their makeup, might not have to worry about disease, there are many who do. The TAINT must be excised, if only so they have a safe base of operations to work from.

    He gets to work requisitioning equipment from the Flotilla. Water blasters, powerful detergents, brooms and mops. He systematically begins cleaning without break, purging the stagnant water and grime and filth.
Mordred      Mordred is quite the risk taker as she descends with the group heading towards the deeper depths of the Undead Burg and beyond, surveying the area as she moves and finding none of it pleasant. Entertaining in some parts, to be sure, with excuses to beat down the rather unwholesome creatures in their way, but it's less of a hunting mission for her and more of a...

    She's actually not quite sure what to make of this whole venture. A way to aid the First, certainly, but Mordred's never been one to sweat more complex details. "Goddamn, this place is a confusing mess... We really need to make this place easier to get around. We should just make a giant staircase through this place." She points further in the distance at what appears (from the knight's perspective) to be the edge of the burg, drawing her hand down towards the path that's already being directed by Raziel and Zero.

    "That's good. Gotta make it big, though, so there ain't any weird corners that stuff can ambush people from. We make it nice and simple, and it gets easier to fortify against the weird crap later." Sounding rather sure of herself, Mordred takes it upon herself to start flattening things along the way with brute force, moving larger piles of debris by hand to fill in holes that would look like good places for things to hide in. It's not an elegant solution by any means, but it's something.
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki had spent weeks splitting her attention between deliberate management to make things 'better' - in the fussing, obsessive way of someone with real stakes not just in the work being done but in someone else liking the result - and messing around on her phone.

A lot. Thankfully, being two places at once helps productivity even when you're looking up architecture and civic infrastructure details to get better ideas.

"George, do you think an aquaduct would be helpful? I was reading about how copper pipes are naturally disinfectant - so if we overhaul and invest in the things that Zero says the prior builders neglected and shortcut around, we could improve things?"

Yuuki seems to press this at Moonfin specifically. "The amount of stagnant water and build up of yuck-" it's a very technical term, 'yuck' "-and thus, the amount of pooling that vileness gets up to could have a lasting cascade all the way down if we fix it!"

She smiles. "It's like... trickle-down economics?"

No it isn't.
Starbound Flotilla "George, the Grandmaster has requested cleaning supplies."
"Why are you lookin' at me? Ugh, right, okay, hang on."
"Seft, can you provide Tomoe with one of our cave scanners?"
"Helpful. Ah! One moment, I have one for you, certainly!"

    Supplies! Why does George have cleaning supplies like this? I mean, /he's/ not The Janitor, after all. Well, it's the same reason she's The Janitor. George brings the gear out of the Matter Manipulator, and if Eryl Fairfax had a precise understanding of the business, he'd know it's not specialized for cleaning, it's specialized for cleaning up crime scenes. It's because of all the crimes. But what is Lordran if not a massive murder scene?

    Seft has a scanner for Tomoe! A little hand-held tool with a broad screen on the back. These are designed to find open chambers in massive caves, and that sort of works here. Especially because of everything being mostly stone! It should turn out well, and display the layout of the many chambers around them when she pulses its energy emissions.
Starbound Flotilla     Moofin nods grimly at Yuuki. "This place is poisoned, in a way that seeps lower and lower." He agrees. "Though I have doubts that there will ever be life here again, perhaps there is some merit to the effort. Yet, do not expect to see too much of our change propagating down. I lack the expertise of the grandest of hylotl eco-engineers, and could do little to concoct any purification agents that would reach such depths, and staunching the wound now may do little."

    Still, it's worth it to do things up here. Moonfin has knowledge of eco-friendly environmental design, which he'll apply here. If, you know, burning the place down still isn't an option.
Tomoe It, not an enjoyable experience, but it has to be done as far as Tomoe is concerned about the whole affair. Good progress has been made so far but it's not enough they have to go deeper, thinking about her ability to fly she gets an idea to help push the route forward more.

"That is the best way I have ever hear to describe this place, George."

Tomoe takes a look around, as she too ends up stepping to water that's older than she is, hell it's likely older than her nation and the nation that founded her homeland to boot.

She will talk briefly with the Starbounders about getting some extra gear to help map the way down.

"Thank you Seft."

With that out of the way she will press on down the route using the Cave-Mapping fear to map the way as she either flies or makes use of her parkour skills to traverse the way down. Hopefully, she can find a good way to aid the rest of the team reaching the objective.
Raziel Raziel nods to Zero, though he does elect to speak after a few moments. Especially when Mordred appears, "Everything from above has pooled here over time. While it may not look immediately dangerous, I feel that it might only be because of physical seperation. Our path will join these two. We may want to invest in some sort of..." he isn't sure of the word, as it is something beyond his normal understanding, "Air lock? Reguardless, the less we stay here, the better it will be for everyone."
Priscilla     Unimpeded at the entrance, a variety of relatively safe options make some early headway to positive effect. Though exceptionally orthodox, purging the general aura of filth to the place with cleansing chemicals and industrial processes does its work. Though many of the alarmingly large vermin seem stubbornly resilient to the attempt, scraping and spraying a tolerable passage down ramps and shafts works well enough, providing a cumulative benefit of reducing +1 TAINT. Oddly enough, the purplish mosses seem to be completely unaffected, albeit, after some analysis, at least safe to touch.

    Mapping the route manually is a fumbling effort, only helping broaden the number of options on the table at any one time so as to hedge against poor choices and locate the least circuitous routes down, but without much of an idea of where to go but 'down', there is a sharp limit to how much that peeling back the fog of war can help, petering out at +2 ROUTE when bored open by Zero's tunneling and Mordred's brute force digging to open up a better hub of options and more degrees of movement, though they already begin to run into the issue of this place's less robust construction, when 'not being built to support thousands of tons of gothic architecture' results in a loss of -1 INTEGRITY. Rigging the pass up with turrets is of little immediate help, but may pay out greatly when ABOMINATIONS begin rearing their heads, depending on how they are dealt with.

    But the skin of the nameless underworld beneath the Undead Burg did not prepare anyone for what lies below it. Beneath that thin skein of crawling omens and unwholesome warnings, the 'merely uninhabitable' stonescape quickly becomes almost something else entirely.

    Water starts to appear where by rights it should not. Thick and cold on the ground, there are pools of filth so silty and densely teeming with scum and algae and colonizing parasites that they become mud, and yet barely a stone's throw away from them, places where landings have flooded up to the first or second stairwell, where the water is crystal clear.

    Cramped archways and overpasses complicate the maze that is soon furnished with stairs and doors, dead ends and gratings, surprise hatches and ascents up to nothing, or gates that stand out in walls with no access, or else open up into the void. The ground is water worn enough to be essentially paved, or even resemble concrete, but the complex ducts are all gone, and water shouldn't flow outside the deep and broad troughs that'd make for miniature underground rivers, never mind pool up in stairwells and random corridors so deeply that one has to swim to get anywhere.

    The air becomes unreasonably humid, and in contrast to the frigid water, stiflingly warm, almost as if it's sweating. Traveling beyond any of the flooding emerges into entire underground highways running between and across massive chasms of architecture, thoroughly and hideously colonized by networks of repugnant growths. They pass as some kind of fungus only at a distance in the dark; given any scrutiny, they can't be seen as anything but tumours growing from the very rocks. Some carpet the ground in veiny sprawls, while others pile up into entire drifts, and yet more swell into huge, quivering buds the size of a man. They exude foul oils when stepped on, and bleed red blood when cut, though their interior seems to be little more than a mishmash of discoloured flesh, without bones. The vermin have completely disappeared.
Priscilla     What has taken their place is significantly worse. Splashing and skittering noises all too often fail to be 'just your imagination' when followed. Rats, centipedes, blind lizards, fanged roaches, have lived long enough hear, absorbing scraps of spiritual essentia from devouring each other for centuries, to bear the occasional 'apex predator' -- and due to their sheer numbers, they have done so over and over and over again.

    Though one might guess otherwise by the sight of milky eyes, mangy fur, open sores, bloodied skin, oozing chitin, and exposed bondes, these repulsive creatures are not the walking dead. They are every bit as fast, aggressive, and dangerously poisonous as they'd suggest, most of which have developed extraneous combat-oriented anatomy their mundane cousins never possessed, and yet they are canny and cowardly enough to run away and ambush you again later should they be threatened.

    Here, the INTEGRITY of the level is difficult to meaningfully damage, as the construction has been stacked upon many times to handle increasingly massive quantities of water, flowing from all over the area into limited numbers of larger and larger trenches, until you're walking the bottom of narrow once possibly-sailable canals. There are many opportunities to dive deeper by finding where they empty, progressing the ROUTE forward, but those that drop the most steeply and skip the greatest numbers of nonsense stairs and nothing halls are the darkest, most treacherous, and most severely infested, making for a gradient of unpleasant choices.

    The TAINT is blindingly obvious, yet its nature is a mystery. The networks of fleshy growths don't seem to menace in any significant sense, outside of smelling utterly foul and being extremely unpleasant to walk around. It obviously plays some part in how this place has come to be, rather than simply being a symptom of something else, but how to be rid of it, or what effects it might have, are a total mystery for now. Allowing it to proliferate into the frontier you push may have severe effects later, but interfering with it now might cause an unfathomable reaction.

    The ABOMINATIONS are persistent, bloodthirsty, and have a total advantage in this territory. They are practically without number, and will replace themselves in short order even when picked off, able to scuttle and slither in from tiny spaces and sheer walls. The multitude of entries for them could be sealed or walled off to reduce their presence, but doing so preclude any deviations from a chosen ROUTE, having no immediate effect, but severely limiting options later on. Heavily sterilizing or fortifying the area to keep them at bay would at least help, but either force an aggressive interaction with the TAINT, or have to compromise the INTEGRITY of the area. Leaving them alone means no shortage of nasties tailing you into the depths, even though they are individually small threats.

    The madhouse of weird and seemingly inaccessible entrances and exits could be exploited to draw many shortcuts throughout the area, with a bit of extra building to cover the gaps, helping link together the ROUTE by a small amount, but it does also allow the TAINT and ABOMINATIONS to proliferate just as easily by accessing any areas you open up.
Starbound Flotilla     Albert's been asked for the heavy firepower of fire that they have on-call. He's the Flotilla's gunsmith, and gunsmithing encompasses custom flamethrowers, incendiary grenade launchers, dragon's-breath shotguns, and other suchlike; if he's given enough cover, he'll deploy a very large case of such things, a cargo container bearing a rack of the weapons that Eryl Fairfax can freely take. "You can have what you can carry." The weapons are heavy-duty; it would take truly superhuman physique to Doomguy this entire inventory.
Eryl Fairfax     Eryl can immediately guess what the purpose of the tools George provides him is. But that's okay, this whole place is a crime against decency. It's like poetry, it rhymes.

    He keeps at it without break. Centuries - millennia even - of accumulated filth waits for no man. He spends several full days cleaning without break, using all of the benefits of his augmented nature to eke out a clean, safe place to set up base camp before descending even further.

    Further down is worse, much so. Hideous creatures grown fat on generation after generation of soul dregs accumulating. Enormous tumorous fungi that bleed and spread even before their eyes. Gravity dictates that their roots and spores will drift downward, so it's only going to get worse from here. Better to deal with them top-down than bottom-up.

    The power washers and detergents are returned to the Flotilla, and replaced with flamethrowers, accelerants, and explosives. Eryl dives deep into the thickest patches of TAINT and begins burning them out. The larger ones he just blows off at the roots with bombs and lets them fall into the depths. They may react poorly to flame, so he's banking on his body's ability to handle sickness and toxin to deal with it.

    Further, whenever the local ABOMINATIONS poke their head out, he chases them off with flame and explosives. Whenever they poke their head out of a crack or a crevasse, flames chase them back in in hopes of clearing out a nest. All of this is probably awful for the INTEGRITY of the place, but they've done a good job thus far of reinforcing things, and the strange architecture here provides a lot of redundancies he can exploit.
Mordred      "Airlocks... Eh, I'll leave that to the more sciencey bunch. All I got in here is an eye for stuff trying to get the drop on me." Mordred replies to Raziel as she packs more gunk into an inexplicably narrow passage, blocking it off with the packed in crap before turning her attention back to the progress being made.

    It's something, at least, even if it's not structurally sound. She does't seem too worried about that simply because of all the water and sludge, although there is some visible discomfort at the former being so much higher than it should be even as the group continues their descent.

     And then it starts becoming physically uncomfortable. The knight pays it no mind at first, of course, but her movements become a bit more sluggish as the heat and humidity grows worse with each passing moment into the underground. She tries to distract herself with stomping on and cutting up the weird fungi, but the stench and bleeding discourage her from doing that more than four times.

    "Nasty. Think this stuff is keeping everything away?" She notes the lack of vermin, but the long silver blade never leaves her hand, especially as she hears the strange noises preceding the arrival of the tainted creatures. Naturally, Mordred's first instinct is to slaughter the creatures as they come, but their sheer numbers force her to actually think about how to proceed sooner rather than later.

     Her thoughts wander back to the disgusting fungi, and she raises her blade. Red lightning begins to crackle around it as Mordred takes aim, eyeing the clumps of fungi (relatively) further in the distance. "... Bet we could get 'em out of the way if we start popping 'em all at once. And if they start swarming, then that just saves us the trouble of hunting 'em down."

    Mordred sounds a little too eager about that, and she starts blasting away.
Starbound Flotilla     Biteblade seems quite concerned about the horrid meat. "Augh. Aughhhh!! Thisss... thisss isss so horrible!!" She recoils. "Grosss meat! Too grosss for even Floran eating! What *isss* thisss!!" She seems quite focused on joining this effort, albeit in her own way. This needs to be sustainable, you know. This needs to be long-term. It needs to work, in a persisting sense.

    Biteblade's own unique form of rapid construction takes longer but tends to persist more. She decides to work to purge the taint and reduce abomination presence and available foodsource in a way that is uniquely Floran. She's no Greenfinger, but she has a reasonable understanding of plant-based genetic manipulation. And there's an *awful lot of ash* right now.

    With a focused disgust, she brings out GLEAMING SEEDS, which she plants in ash left behind. It takes them mere seconds to sprout, and begin to intensely absorb every ounce of gross nutrient left behind by undifferentiated biomass.

    Florans shape the world through plants! And Biteblade has chosen to try to out-compete the horrid growths with her own god-awful fucking kudzu. To soak up the water and steal the space, these plants will grow and grow, trying to out-compete the baleful influence in a way that's a little less hostile to humans passing through.
Raziel Mapping out anything is impossible, leaving him walking in circles.  Unfortunately, he didn't recklessly shoot beams into the darkness or have magic plant powers.  This means being undead and solving the problem with not needing to sleep or eat isn't going to work.  

Then people decided that, fuck it, let's just burn it with fire.  Raziel isn't very confident in this as an answer, as the things that live here are simply unending.  If the mushrooms ARE being used for food...

Raziel has an idea.  He uses his telekinetic powers to try and reach at the mushrooms, popping them at a distance, and tossing the remains into the far corners of the place.  The aim here was to place pockets of 'bait' into locations, and then hope they're more focused on that stuff than fully healthy and capable fighters.

Hopefully, the vermin are opportunistic hunters.
Zero Kiryu Zero decides that it's probably best if he continues to focus on the route-- but he does take a moment to address Biteblade, "I doubt it's the case down here, but... a lot of the time, a foul smell is just there to ward predators off. It doesn't always correlate to a foul taste. There is a rare fruit that has a smell of rotten meat, but if you can get past it supposedly it tastes quite good. It comes from a very obscure and distant region of the world, though, so I've never tried it."

"Good plan, by the way." He remarks, regarding the seeds that she's planting. A seed of his own is extruded from the palm of his hand, and dropped-- allowed to sink, down, down, into the dangerous and flooded passages, where it begins to grow once it reaches a particular depth.

As is often his Way of doing things, Zero spreads his roots into the shorter-but-more-dangerous ROUTE, coaxing his vines to feel their way through the passages and find places where they can bore strategic holes in order to drain the water and keep the route on-track.

"I've never asked. I know you like meat, but is your diet solely carnivorous?" Zero wonders of Biteblade.
Tomoe Tomoe does her best with the mapping effort it's something but she could have done better she thinks. The party goes deeper and deeper things get nastier the deeper they go the water, the smells, the whole thing down here.

It's also humid as all get out, she doesn't seem happy with it she's almost wilting from it. She however keeps going and the fungus does seem to be one heck of a problem to deal with. The oils also make note she wonders should they try to burn this stuff out to would it end up going worse. The replacement of the vermin she knows are horrible a that seems to be the way of this world when things get bad.

There's so much TAINT down here and ABOMINATIONS are almost worse in a way. This place has turned out to be a total madhouse for Tomoe.

When the group comes under assault by ABOMINATIONS She will use sword, shield and fire magic to drive them off as the others move and work.
Yuuki Kuran Yuuki sympathizes with Biteblade, largely due to having quite the powerful nose (and thus has been passively revulsed for a while), but this is a new and special hell.

And lacking any real 'big shaping effects' beyond blasting, that's what she's got. Adding her considerable muscle to the clearing efforts, her work enters the fever pace of someone finding an extra-dirty corner of the pantry and deciding a whole-ass purge is in order. The tao of spring cleaning.

She's not afraid to get her hands dirty or in danger! The kudzu, however, does get some worry. "Isn't that highly invasive? Well, it'll probably take out a bunch of problems before it becomes a problem itself. Plus, if it eats the yuck trickling down, it could be quite nice!"

She winces. "For kudzu."
Starbound Flotilla     Zero has a much greater command of plants in a sense, which Biteblade admires enough to let him in on all the details of Floran physiology. "Yeahyeah! Floran ssspecies eatsss only Floran or meat! Isss vegan, only people or thingsss that can't suffer."

    Wait a minute.

    Oh, now she's replying to Yuuki! "Huh? Floran thinksss 'adaptable'. 'Invasive' isss word for when you like old thing more. Floran likesss thisss more than grosss badmeat. Floran alssso hope will eat downssstream thingsss! But badmeat infessstation isss very heavy, intenssse."
Priscilla     Taking a massive gamble on aggressively attacking hideous nightmare flesh infestations of abandoned stones is an extremely risky maneuver, never mind tackling it with fire and blade and purging toxins and aggressive regrowth. The halls are awash in viscous blood, with floating puddles of what can only be skin oil separated from the mass. Tatters of flesh accumulate in the trenches, and begin to rapidly regrow by the next day. The walls and floor blister and pimple where new fragments land, but the hateful diligence of purifying flame and hard sweaty work eventually seems to pay off.

    Miraculously, nothing especially bad seems to happen. The obnoxious spread of infamously invasive kudzu is a bit alarming, as the usually green plants turn quite decidedly crimson from soaking up the remains, but whatever this is about, it strangely allows them to keep proliferating without sunlight. The kudzu growth doesn't seem to be about to start eating people either. For now, at least, it seems entirely like a blessing, clearing the way by +3 TAINT.

    The only downside is that the red kudzu grows a little bit out of control, colonizing deeper and wider than anyone really wants, regrowing frequently enough that having to cut or burn through it every day is an obnoxious delay, but not significant at the macro scale. It has the unfortunate side effect, as it turns out, of *attracting* new creatures that come to feed on it, as well as the corpses of all the previous mega-vermin killed off. Though these appear to be less thirsty for blood than the strictly carnivorous, suicidally aggressive predators, their number is a detriment of -1 ABOMINATIONS.

    Draining away conglomerations of drowning breaches doesn't particularly help with finding a concise way forward at this point, but it does have the unexpected benefit of being mildly beneficial to the order of +1 INTEGRITY when going forward, not so much from strict damage to the area, but the fact that the release of enormous amounts of cumulative water stress deeper down reduces the increasingly present risk of collapses if disturbed by sufficiently adventurous impact.

    That may be a relevant point. Deeper and deeper still, you find the crimson plants have outpaced you, but failed to oust what was already here. Where one would expect that the creatures that live closer to sources of food would be nastiest, and going into the cold and spartan depths would reduce them in size and number, they would be unreasonably disappointed.

    Gigantic slithering shapes move through the water that has pooled consistently deep here, after flowing down repeatedly from above, looking like jungle anacondas, but revealing themselves to be enormous, fanged worms and what seem to be living colonies of organisms that equate to horse-sized predatory amoeba. Broodmother rats ranging from the mass of rhinos and upwards make dens in dead ends, some so old and huge that you can spot ancient, rusted weapons still embedded somewhere in their bodies, sealed in by scar tissue.
Priscilla     Worst of all however are the amphibious things that seem right at home in their damp environment, toxic as it is, gliding around easily with webbed feet and broad tails, 'sunning' themselves on flat landings, and warning of their presence by slow choruses of clicks and croaks from many halls down. Man-sized creatures with clammy grey skin but vivid red underbellies, with almost comically gigantic, unblinking yellow eyes, rather than adapting to blindness.

    Their wide maws full of needle teeth are irrelevant. What makes their infestations impassible is the thin yellowish mist that hangs around in their presence, and which they vomit at the slightest provocation. Being exposed to any dense quantity of the sickly vapour causes something like rapid petrification, turning the flesh into some sort of greyish mineral, but grown from the inside out -- agonizingly painfully. There are scores of statues down here, nothing like a 'lifelike' visage left by some gorgon, but more like rough suggestions of onyx, host to jagged spikes of crystal erupting from their backs and heads. Many are rats and other vermin, more than a few are human.

    At this point, drying out the area would be an enormous undertaking in of itself; you are now at the point of an entire underground lake complex, where all the water has run to and has no reason to leave. Only the highest raised pathways and bridges create 'dry land' to walk on, like hugging the walls of a sewer tunnel with deep drops all around. You can hear the sound of rushing water, somewhere far in the distance, echoing dizzyingly down miles of convoluted tunnels in some maddeningly elusive place, but it surely isn't the utterly still lagoon you're mired in.

    The territory of the major ABOMINATIONS here is well-marked. It might be possible to evade them entirely, at *tremendous* inconvenience to drawing a sane ROUTE, or with enough dedicated hard work to make your own route and a hefty cost of INTEGRITY. Taking them on directly could be an option, as it seems these deeper reaches are host to 'natural' menaces, but clearing out their nests would be exceedingly dangerous, and no doubt spread their extremely hyper-lethal TAINT.

    Strangely, you find that the presence of lonely old abandoned man-made objects *increases* the further you go. Though it is mostly overgrown by crimson kudzu now, there are places that suggest they were used for . . . something, as recently as five or ten years ago. There are almost always bones scattered around these places, human and animal, as well as large numbers of rusty tools of unpleasant design. They may well be the first solid indication of a ROUTE you've stumbled across, or a complete red herring. They may also warn of yet greater ABOMINATIONS that displaced them, or perhaps the opposite, indicating that these areas were typically relatively clear of them. Why any human being would live here is still a complete mystery.

    Lastly, you occasionally stumble across enormous, circular shafts excavated and bricked at extreme length deep into the ground, now flooded wells of immense depth, leading who knows where, indicating even greater quantities of water, perhaps originating from lower down, or collected for a longer time than first anticipated. They're filled with all manner of strange, sightless, sometimes translucent, swimming things, up to and including sludge-like man-o-war creatures and massive leeches that walk on five-fingered maws like crawling hands. Nothing in them leaves their pools, making them harmless to navigate around, but the clash of 'ecosystems' here is very obvious -- the opposite of why they even *exist*. Many of them bear enormous gashes up and down their walls. They appear to be a complete wild card.
Mordred      After having just a bit too much fun popping the fleshy wall zits, Mordred takes some time to survey the group's work over the past... She doesn't know how long she's been down here anymore. Too long, certainly, but the kudzu's proliferation is a constant reminder of the progress they've made, to say nothing of the route itself being mildly less murderous with the less bloodthirsty creatures lurking around.

    Considering the petrifying gas spewed by the giant eyed things loitering further below, though, that isn't as much of a relief to Mordred as it could be. She studies their movements, almost looking inquisitive for quite some time even as she draws her blade once more. There's several moments where it looks like she's considering blasting them with lightning as well, but she holds off on it after much thought (and only several instances of letting the lightning build while thinking about it).

     Besides, there's those giant shafts with the strange jellyfish-y things in them. "Damn, those wells are huge! We could probably let all that stuff out into the hole and see if that drowns 'em or something." Mordred gestures at the bulging eyed things, grimacing after a moment as she turns her attention to the ABANDONED THINGS. "... Gonna need some fortifications against those first, though. Something high and dry with an overhang to shoot down from so the lizards can't climb up. Not like we can stick around for whoever's gonna be living in this dump." There's a distinct sense of annoyance in her voice as she starts investigating the ABANDONED THINGS, trying to determine ways to incorporate the objects and the way they're laid out to start securing the area against ABOMINATIONS through actual use of the terrain and not just brute force.
Raziel Raziel decides to check up on the remains of what might be or was life.  There is not much else he can do, at least what he feels that he can do, at this point.  The beasts that roam here are not going to be easily dealt with, and heavier weapons would be needed than what he has to clear them out.  He could take on individuals, but the best he could do is stick one on a spike and hope it scares the rest.

Knowing these creatures from observation, it'd likely cause an orgy and they'd get eight more creatures for everyone they killed and displayed.  On the other hand, if there were people living here...somehow, and people with intelligence, they MIGHT know a way to where they are going.

Or at least they could ID one more threat.
Yuuki Kuran Pools of... Fish?

Yuuki is almost painfully enamored, falling by the wayside to crouch at the edge of the wildcard pools. With a finger, she touches the water's surface lightly, feeling down the length of the tunnels with a gentle kinetic touch.

"What secrets do *you* hold?" She asks, her words more meaningful than mere musings.

Using her NORMAL GIRL EMPATHY she seeks the mystery of this new and exciting prospect: WEIRD FISH!
Eryl Fairfax     The fungi are replaced by red kudzu. Eryl worries they may have just swapped a problem for another problem, but at least this one is less of an issue, save having to hack through it now and again. They descend, and confront the strange, bug-eyed creatures. A hint of their personal fog just glances Eryl's cheek, and he hisses as it becomes stone, quickly bringing his arm blade up to slice the petrified skin off. As he cheek bleeds, he warns, "Keep well abreast of that fog," before getting it looked at.

    Frankly, he'd like to avoid them as much as possible. And it is for that reason that he delves into the places that look recently inhabited. He examines the old tools to get a feel of who might have been living there and why, as well as cuts through the kudzu to go deeper. With any luck, he might uncover a route that circumvents the local abominations.
Starbound Flotilla     With warning from Eryl, the Flotilla keep away from the fog. They may have EVA-rated gear, but magical effects often propagade through the heat-exchange systems, leaving spacesuits a poor defense against the threat. Even Seft has to stay away! After all, her DRM-locked robotics will fully emulate the sinister petrification.

    Mordred makes the call for fortifications. Albert answers. "Engineer support on-site." He says. "Establishing thundercloud. Area of operation is seven-five, two thousand units, eighty steps." Time for rapid building. "Settling perch for flock of ten, pressure options emplacing." What this seems to mean is the establishment, right at Mordred's designated site, of a reinforced overhang site with plenty of anti-climbing hazards and a couple of turrets to work with, something to clear the masses on a trip through.
Zero Kiryu "'People' or things that can't suffer." Zero repeats. It's not really all that surprising that she described it that way, but he's not quite certain he understands what a Floran considers to be suffering. He shrugs lightly, using his radar to navigate around problem areas as best he can-- when they end up coming across the strange-looking basilisks, he issues gentle psychic commands to keep them at bay. Simple things, that don't contradict the nature of a bizarre animal-- suggesting that perhaps these prey are too big, or that they're not quite hungry enough to be bothered unless they feel more threatened than they are at that moment.

Since disturbing the creatures here would cause infinitely more problems than it solves, Zero simply goes to work seeking an ideal area to begin an alternate ROUTE to establish, by a combination of sheer brute strength and vine support.

"How do you determine capacity for suffering?" He asks Biteblade.

There's a lot of space for something to live down there. Maybe just more of the same, but still... keep alert for something big coming up. He thinks at Yuuki, though his tone isn't particularly chiding. He 'sounds' more conversational.
Tomoe Somethings go better than hoped others don't go so well she doe she best with the ABOMINATIONS form before the good news for her is she's alive. She'll fall in with Modred as she looks over the various ABANDONED THINGS too. She starts to get an idea here. "We could make spiked barricades using the tools or some sort of pit traps."

Not having the means for making holes fairly well she'll opt to gather tools and try to fin other wreckage she can use spice up some makeshift barricades hopefully this will be of use to Sir Mordred's efforts.
Priscilla     The sheer nerve-wracking traumatic stress of clearing out basilisk nest after basilisk nest is a mark on the psyche that those assembled fortunately avoid for today. It's a bit of a stinging hit to the way the ROUTE was starting to align, as the combined efforts of both navigating around the worst of monster nests and walling up the other areas from which they might arrive costs -2 ROUTE, but the level of safety provided by the fortifications, use of terrain, implementation of automatic defenses, and careful scouting, provides an extremely robust +3 ABOMINATIONS, cleanly preventing anything from this level from following you deeper down, thankfully shutting out the nightmare of surprise basilisk and giant ooze attacks from behind in hte dark.

    Messing with the remains of habitation -- for it could not possibly be called civilization -- is a double-edged sword. Waterlogged barrels with corroded bands, broken tables and rotting crates, loose planks and nails, chests fused shut with rust, and other such detritus, hides a series of crawlspaces and 'secret' passages that cut from area to area, eventually heading through an only mildly flooded 'tower' of right angle stairwells accessible by climbing over broken down walls between staircases. People obviously *used* them at some point, and this seems like the way they would have retreated down; they obviously didn't climb up into the sunlight back then. It's a handy concession of +1 ROUTE.

    It also disturbs things that were best left alone. Failing containers clogged with putrid meat which spills itself down iron grates into floors below. Bones that tingle with the dregs of traumatic necrotic rituals and drag themselves together, coming alive as shambling chimera of dog, pig, rat, and man, and then either attacking ferociously or skittering off down ducts and shafts. No doubt a spread of -1 TAINT, but nothing spectacularly lethal, or which should multiply rapidly.

    The deep wells are something else. None of those grates or ducts or *anything* leads into them, nor do they seem to lead anywhere out, except maybe far past the bottom of this derelict system. The perverse life that teems inside them is of cold, reptilian intelligence, if even that, keenly lacking more than the faded dregs of instincts commonly understood to be vital to the preservation of a species. They are characterized, as much as they can be, by a constant, gnawing 'hunger'. A type of 'hungry' that is partly physical, but which seems to be impossible to sate with their digestive processes. A strange sort of unnatural compulsion -- an 'energy' -- bubbles up in those waters, where its old creatures are all mouths and digestive sacs, surrounded by graspers and tentacles -- all maw and stomach.

    It is definitely a separate biome. A watery cave, or portion of one, that lies beneath the labyrinth you're still traversing, where some ancient people drilled down to it here for purposes unknown, but likely predictable. Back when these wells might have been clean and its their life forms wholesome enough to eat. The trail, finally, shrinks the potential area of where you have to exit from 'the area covered by the labyrinth' to 'the maximum perimeter of the scattered wells', availing you +1 ROUTE, but the subject of having to brute force a way down between them in order to actually access the lowest levels of the maze costs - 1 INTEGRITY in the process.
Priscilla     It is, however if nothing else, certainly the last layer touched by human hands. So low down, crude, unevenly sized stones packed together with moss and silt have replaced bricks, worn smooth and rippled with condensation and age. The floors are broken up and irregular, like walking on a disused, ankle-breaking cobblestone path. The water here is mostly only knee deep when seemingly random depressions in the construction occur, and a thin sloshing sheen where it's raised by a handful of vestigial steps. It looks like the monsters from above seldom bother coming here. Little at all does. The constant filth recedes to a level more expected of a very dirty cavern, rather than a festering hellhole, and with it, the number of brushes with verminous inhabitants.

    But there are people. Somehow. Some way. If one wishes to be as generous as possible. The Undead Curse is gone -- that much is a well-impressed fact -- but one would be forgiven for not knowing it when they spot the misshapen silhouettes wordlessly shuffling and plodding their way up and down dank halls and in and out of blind corners. Pallid grey skin, sunken features, wobbling guts and cellulite put against visible ribs, long, strong fingers, slumped posture, long necks, and feverish white eyes, are the typical characteristics, barely dressed in anything beyond crude tunics of roughly woven plant fibre. Something about the way they wander around the depths is thoroughly disquieting, but they are unthreatening in of themselves, either not noticing you or briskly exiting the surroundings when they do, even when clutching old, corroded knives and sickles and pokers, often dragging sacks or ropes behind them.

    There are only some amongst them that are your problem. The odd specimen of irrationally massive build, simultaneously borderline obese yet seven foot tall giants of muscle. Ponderous, trudging creatures clad in thick gloves and smocks, wearing crude masks or even bags over their heads, cut out just enough to see. These ones drag around cleavers of the sort clearly taken off of large farming implements and wedged into a rough handle, alongside chains affixed with meat hooks, barbed nets of iron cable, and similar grotesque implements.

    They are overtly hostile on sight. Impossible to reason with. Ostensibly impossible to even talk to. It's very rare to see more than two, but not uncommon for them to attempt to pick off members of the group like horror movie monsters. Those that you find first are always, always, *always* in the process of preparing 'food', if you could even call it that. Cells are filled with stockpiles of butchered carcasses, scraped bones, and hanks of meat so enormous and oddly shaped that there's no telling where they came from. Hanging on hooks, split open on tables, piled in wet barrels. It's prepared into little more than raw and ragged cuts, bowls of fat and bone marrow, and heavy, slimy fillets. Even if one were to assume they intended to eat the mess of it, there's overwhelmingly more than anyone could consume. Even a single giant is busy thwacking away at more meat than fifty people could stuff down before it putrefied completely.

    The feeling that suffuses those pools is here too. The constant, tingling, nibbling caress of hunger. The shivering echo of being dazed and lost. The strange impression of being barely able to see, even when one can see perfectly fine in any portable light. A feeling like having forgotten something important. A foggy haze that matches a more literal, pallid mist that fills the most humid halls. The sound of rushing water is much closer.
Priscilla     Following the sound of the water should be possible now, ideally locking in the last chance at a concise ROUTE, but in that direction, the ambient, foggy TAINT grows strongest, unmistakably related. It's unclear if the latter can be helped much, if at all, though it's also unclear where else to go, except to wander around in search of one of the tiny handful of natural tunnels that gape open to the ruins of block stairs and worn stone markers set outside of the oldest of old construction.

    The ABOMINATIONS seem to have no goal but to accrue tremendous amounts of theoretically digestible flesh, somehow stomaching the freshest and most raw of it, giving very little to the 'lesser' creatures, and then dragging it the rest away in huge, burlap sacks and nets off to a mystery location. No doubt it is of some significant importance, and also the most dense with the horrid subterraneans. In this case, building walls or turrets won't suffice; they do have enough human cunning to deal with predictable, unmanned constructions, and ostensibly the strength to break down even thick stone barriers if left to their devices.

    Tracing the wells from above, you can find locations where breaching a wall would go straight into one of those shafts, and strategically flood sections of the labyrinth to your liking. It'd be an enormous danger to the INTEGRITY of your way down, but handily deal with both ABOMINATIONS and TAINT if you should fear them.

    Otherwise, the last contentious obstacle are the ragged wounds that exit into pitch black caverns older than civilization, crumbling away into nothing, making for treacherous traversal that scatters all manner of things into deep abysses below, both a danger to navigate and a roundabout way to seek the half-natural places where one can slide and shimmy lower and lower and lower still. Thoroughly reconstructing these decrepit passages would be a great help to the INTEGRITY at this final stretch, and a minor boon to the ROUTE, but would be likely to be attractive to a certain number of ABOMINATIONS wandering down the way experimentally.
Eryl Fairfax     People.

    Or what's left of them at least. The single-minded drive to gather and horde meat, almost as if a substitution for something else that they've lost. They're /hungry/. Eryl can feel it too, even as the sight of their messy butchery drives what little appetite he has out of him.

    They must have been Undead at some point. That's the only explanation he has for the massive stores of putrid meat. Gathered from those who died and returned, until they stopped returning. They'll die too eventually. Either their diet, their living conditions, or the inevitable lack of food pitting them against each other will wipe them out.

    That doesn't make it any easier.

    Opening his internal map of the depths they have descended, Eryl finds the points where he calculates the wells from above nearly intersect with these caverns and takes Mordred around, scratching large 'X's on where they need to strike, along with numbers to indicate the order in which they should be destroyed for maximum effect. Once he's made it clear, he pauses. "One moment, before we begin."

    Out come his armblades once more, and he begins engraving something on the stone walls. It takes him a short amount of time to leave a message.

THE TRIBE OF MINDLESS CARNIVORES WHO LIVED HERE WERE DROWNED DELIBERATELY. MAY THEY DIE QUICKLY AND REST IN PEACE.

    "Okay. Begin." He contributes, firing grenades from his knees to blow open the rock and let the water flow.
Mordred      With the water easier to track, it doesn't take long for Mordred to get her head set on the next task. She's feeling pretty good about that plan to fortify the previous area working rather well, so it doesn't take much convincing for her to get on board a plan that involves breaking stuff as a change of pace.

    Besides, the conditions of what those former humans are in is absolutely pitiful. Simply looking at them has the knight grimacing, and she alreadyy has her blade drawn as Eryl starts pointing out the strike zones. She doesn't blast right away, though, instead waiting until the headmaster unloads his grenades to fire.

    It's considerably louder and flashier that way. More dangerous, perhaps, with their combination of explosives and lightning, but Mordred isn't quite as concerned with that as she is with FLASH and STYLE.

     As she she's following the idea to get that water flowing. Where possible, she tries to keep larger chunks of debris nearby in case she can fill those holes back in after the fact, but it's alow priority compared to just opening them in the first place.
Starbound Flotilla     The Gang are rather unnerved by the uncursed Hollows. This fallout of the great disaster really is rather mentally stressful to deal with. It feels like something terrible from a distant context... Except for Biteblade, who seems to understand it rather well.

    She answers Zero. "Ssso, look at thisss. You sssee how thessse are? Isss made of meat, ssso, default isss, can't sssuffer, if Floran look at. Doesssn't sssay thing, doesssn't think thing. Isss walking meat, jussst go through motions. Never do great hunt, or cool drawing, or sssing fun song. If it sssay 'ow', isss just going through old ideasss that everyone in meat tribe thought up. Floran readsss all the booksss! Learn to know that meat hasss own sssort of way of feeling. Floran tribe thinksss not real way, but, isss different. Thisss, sssort of how meat-people look for Floran tribe. Make any sssense?"

    Well that's grim!!

    The rest of the Flotilla are hard at work on helping mitigate the damage Eryl is going to do. Rapid-pace construction does wonders for things that suddenly start crumbling, structures that are useful but suddenly imperiled, and other suchlike. It's very rapid, when they suddenly beam out a heavy durasteel pillar! It has to be done fast, after all. Moonfin, particularly, seems to be leading the mitigation effort, being the best at it among the Flotilla.
Tomoe Tomoe is not happy about the plan but understand, there is a risk to the mission here, and it's pretty clear to here these people were hallowed out or just an inch away from it. There's not much she knows that can be done for people like this.

She feels a sinking feeling none the less. This is a world she's fought for before. She has seen what the plague was like what happened to people who hallowed out. If there's anything left of the people that they once were it is likely a living nightmare.

She gets the order she prays briefly wondering if the god she's praying to is even listening. She then chants a chain of spells to strike at the point that Eryl indicated. She will then get the heck clear as fast as she can.
Yuuki Kuran "This is what Florans think we look like?" Yuuki repeats, mildly aghast.

"I never heard you explain that before. I think I'm insulted, but I'm not... sure." She admits.

"Eryl, do you need any help? You sounded like you had it well in hand."
Starbound Flotilla     "Floran can't tell apart." Biteblade says, shrugging. "Isss like how meat people think Floran looksss like tribe Floran." She, to be fair to "meat people", actually does look and act like a tribal Floran.
Zero Kiryu "It does, yes." Zero replies to Biteblade. He inhales deeply, and says, "Vampires are the same way, a little. It's not exactly the case that they -- we -- don't comprehend the suffering of others. But when something is your source of food, it becomes hard not to invalidate it at least a little. Hunters are like this too, sometimes, even though humans aren't prey to them. Personally, I've been numb to death for a long time. This is disgusting, but it's not upsetting in the way that it should be."

"It just makes me hungry. But I'm well-fed enough that it isn't bothersome." He admits.

To Yuuki, he shakes his head, "It's just the way people are... and she's helped too much to take something like that as an insult."