Scene #9199: S&M: SS3a

Owner	Pose
Petra Soroka	Strategically, every plan that Angela's alliance came up with is dependent on not fighting both Lilian and Rita simultaneously, because even the full team of Elites and Agents can't match up to their coordination. So, hours later, when one team goes out to strike forth into Disciplinary to collect the Pale shields and neutralize Rita's ability to wield White Night against them, another team uses Angela's surveillance data to track down Lilian while she's on her own. In the interim hours since the strategy meeting, people cycle the snippets of sleep they can get so that Asiyah is never fully undefended-- typically, there's a natural circadean rhythm to the dimming and brightening of the lights in the sleeping area so that the underground facility doesn't cause every employee in it to go insane earlier than necessary. Petra hotwired it for her own control. This is both convenient, because she optimizes the artificial solar cycle to encourage people to sleep at their allotted times, and horrifying, because Petra has essentially hijacked your bodily clock.-- and occasionally endure frantic, bloody skirmishes with Lilian and Rita. The Baba stew idea is regrettably busted by the Apostles' ashes being scattered among the other rubble in the intervening two and a half days, but the others are promising. Petra offhandedly mentions that the bathrooms might explode if you use them, and that all of the remaining vending machines should be checked for every poison you can think of. The only light at the end of the tunnel is a desperate Hail Mary that will instantly lose the war, and Angela's life, if it fails. And there's still several steps to go until that play can be made. One of which is another loomingly one-sided fight against Lilian to bait another impalement or slit throat, just to keep her away from Disciplinary for an edge to the other team. The fact that Xion isn't assigned to this one is an unspoken, if temporary, 'suicide mission'. Still, there's more than usual going in their favor this time. Flamel was able to preemptively lay Sarracenia's traps around the area, and her precognition evidently hasn't warned her of the upcoming ambush. This wing of hallways in Welfare are cobalt-blue, lined with shattered computer monitors and shelves stripped bare of medicinal supplies or crumpled under the violence of the past week. These hallways are much narrower than the ones that the Containment Cells branch off of, and more confusing to navigate, though Petra knows them by heart. Each intersection and, at Petra's suggestion, door, is boobytrapped with Sarracenia's bombs, and knowing that Lilian would be able to trigger them at any time accidentally or not, she advises that people keep their distance from those known areas as much as they can. The hope is that this will limit Lilian's movement more than their own.
Rita Ma	For the past day, solo forays have been just as untenable as being in a united group. Rita's Cycle of Tears has continued escalating, both in number and individual strength. Bugs that used to crumple to one good hit now take two or three; beetle-tanks the size of a small bear and blade-limbed humanoid sprinters have started appearing as 'elite units', but following this trend, they might be the standard rank-and-file by the week's end. It becomes apparent that either letting them get off an alarm, or killing them, pinpoints your position to Rita- which, courtesy of Kukuru, means that she can blink-attack to you from across the facility in the same heartbeat. Rendering the bugs merely unconscious can prevent the death-signal, but that's tricky to manage without dedicated nonlethal capabilities. Anywhere outside of the Angela-elites' immediately held territory is swarming with those Antegent patrols; plus the goo-minions created by feeding (you can hope) Cycle bugs to Melting Love, which might as well have a Touch of Death without Xion having a copy yet; plus the ragtag Ordeals she's managed to enslave, though only the chitinous or stony ones. Maybe the fleshy Ordeals were just eaten. But holding a firm territory against the burgeoning swarm is risky too. Every few hours, Rita 'blind-fires' the Yin-Yang Dragon through approximately the center of whatever perimeter she senses, roaring through rooms like a ghostly freight train. It passes directly through the sleeping area once, mangling anyone who isn't on their toes.
Rita Ma	Angela's cameras spotted Lilian in Welfare, not far from where Melting Love's quarantine was; now thoroughly shredded open since Rita called a breach. The central monster itself isn't especially fast, and (to the frustration of Xion's plan) hasn't made a direct appearance, so it's probably still lurking not far from here; occasional splatters of sizzling pink goo can be found on doorways and along halls. To take her off-guard, it's necessary to evade the Cycle too. But as long as you're careful, it's possible to come up on her just off the bug-swarming-and-Tree-lit central area, doing something with a hidden cache of Enkephalin near what used to be a maintenance closet. She's hunched over, hair briefly shrouding her face, but as she straightens up the look revealed in her eyes is worryingly dissociated. Night Mist hasn't left her hand, still slick with some-Ordeal-or-other's red blood. Her slide into a ready stance is unhurried- fatigued?- but smooth, with just a bit of hollow-eyed relish. "My my. Look who it is. Again."
Flamel Parsons	An invisible man is the perfect sapper, as long as he's given the right target. He's got the right target, hasn't he? His own complex precognition has not much to say on the topic, though thankfully it gives him just a bit of forewarning when the dragon passes. It's taken some complex maneuvering to get around the bugs anyway -- he might be able to defuse their brains, but it's tough for him to go properly nonlethal in a dedicated sense, so he can't handle larger groups in the way someone with proper capacity would be able to. He's gotten enough impalements to learn his fucking lesson, after a certain point. Flamel's approach is invisible. He does his best to scan Lilian, looking for a gap in her perception, a moment of dissociation-perception lapsing in a vulnerable way. All doors and intersections are rigged, by now... but Lilian herself isn't near one. What can he do with this? Well... Enkephalin is a neural byproduct. And if there's one thing Flamel knows a lot of, it's brain-matter. Let's take a moment to talk about chemical safety. Non-supernatural standard leu-enkephalin (Tyr-Gly-Gly-Phe-Leu) is largely not considered hazardous. Not fit for human consumption, by any means, but it doesn't have any oxidizing properties, conditions of instability, or potential hazardous polymerization. It's, broadly, very unregulated, a fairly straightforward neurochemical harvested from sufficiently-prepared animal carcasses. However: You can boil the absolute shit out of it to force a thermal decomposition and release a huge amount of carbon monoxide into the local area. Which is what Flamel's been trying to stealthily do, using his pyrokinesis, for the last while, advising the others to stick near the few functioning vents like he is to avoid any issues, and to subtly inflict massive headaches and subtly-building disorientation on Lilian without provoking her into timestop-decapitating him. She's already headachey enough, right? And, really, this is the only way to psychically attack her... Ah, right, and to rig the local area to flash-burn, when needed. Someone else can handle setting that off, if they're willing to forewarn everyone -- Flamel's got his own Barrier to deal with that when it comes time!
Sarracenia	Sarra was selected to go fight Rita because there is an army of bugs and Sarra has a plethora of ways to squash bugs. Bombs, fire, giant hammers, all are usually pretty good at squashing things. But, Sarra might also be unexpectedly helpful against the Melting Love minions because...ice! Ice flower power is used in abundance whenever one of those goo-minions appears or if sizzling goo is found. Ice worked pretty well last time Sarra fought Melting Love, anyway. She also tries pre-emptively freezing whatever alarm sending abilities the creatures have, but that will take some time become proficient at if it even works. And she doesn't let being mangled by a giant ghost dragon slow her down for too long, though she is quite unhappy about losing what little beauty sleep she had managed to get. Still, after talking with her allies and forming some sort of plan, Sarra is feeling much more hopeful. When they encounter Rita, Sarra waits a moment for the others to get in position, then... 'My my. Look who it is. Again.' Sarra mmphs. "Well, so much for surprise..." she says, bob-omb held in her hand. She huffs softly, then throws it. "Why are you down here all alone, Lilian? That does not seem like you! I would have thought you would be busy hunting us, not monsters!" Sarra calls out after the throw before dashing away, leaving a trail of mines in her wake. And of course, Sarra will be quite capable of igniting a flash burn when needed. If...she didn't already with that bomb.
Angela	Parker, being the toughest Agent on Angela's side right now, has been selected to go with Team 'Suicide Mission' to add some tough backbone to the suicide mission. She has a knack of getting out of difficult spots. Parker is a young blonde-haired blue-eyed woman with a lithe build. She is fully equipped with Apocalypse Bird EGO gear as befitting company policy despite her clear lack of loyalty to LobCorp. Her Gear, actually called Twilight, involves a large zweihander with a guarded brass hilt and a massive blade that looks like it combines all three of the Birds into one weapon. The many eyes of Big Bird are sprouted up along the blade, itself while the Punishing Bird's mouth forms the base, and the head-wings of Judgement Bird provide some ornamentation near the hilt. Her suit is the Apocalypse Bird in miniature, a gaping open mouth in the center of her chest, wrappings around her arms and legs, and feathers sprouting out from her wrists. A singular black wing with numerous golden eyes staring out from it sprouts out from her back. She smells more like Abnormality than human at this point, though all Abnormalities feel varying levels of human even when they aren't, like not-so-distant relatives. Hanging off her shoulder is a bag of POWERUPS that Sarracenia has provided, though Parker hasn't utilized any of this just yet. Parker doesn't act cautiously once she spots Lilian. She darts in and takes a quick swipe at her right then and there--of course she's expecting a trap, but her gear renders her incredibly durable. She's going to be relying on that. She doesn't linger too long, largely because people are boiling gas and throwing bombs.
Hibiki Tachibana	Say what you need to in order to get through this. But it's already too late for all of us to live after. ...Not yet, Petra. Me, Xion, the agents and the Sephirah, and everybody else including you... life's going to keep going on after all of this. ...Though I don't really know what shape it'll take yet. Except for the ones who actually take up the offer for mind-wipes after the fact, maybe. She doesn't think she ever could. Her stuck-awake ruminations staring at the ceiling get put on hold when she hears the rumbling of a dragon coming this way. "What the h--" ... That said, the buoying sentiment Hibiki drew from during their short-lived rest and planning is dimmed. Buried under the weight of the reality of their situation, of the endless back and forth of both sides and the equally endless wearing down of one another. But it's not gone. Like a rock sunken beneath the waves, even if it's harder to see and hold onto, it's still there nonetheless. Doing anything today would be pretty hard, without that. When it comes to the bug apocalypse swarming the halls, the Symphogear wielder doesn't have /dedicated/ nonlethal powers - but she certainly has her fists, and a lot of experience in fighting people just hard enough to disable but not kill. When slipping by undetected is an impossibility, it's the best she has. The same can't be said for Melting Love's sub-Abnormalities however; having had enough of that thing for one lifetime, whenever it becomes relevant, she just uses debris and rubble to crush them rather than melee combat. And eventually, find who they came here for. After the last few days, intentionally suicidal battles against Lilian Rook are starting to feel worryingly... normal? "...Us. Again." Hibiki doesn't actually even finish getting those words out before she's already moving. Right behind Parker on her rushdown approach, Hibiki closes the distance in no time at all - the agent goes for a swipe, while the not!magical girl sweeps low to try and bowl her off her feet at the ankle. Of course, she knows Lilian is far too fast, even without having 'all the time in the world' to be unsettled that easily. But any little bit of potentially slowing her down counts, with Hibiki using the low stance to immediately spring back out and away afterwards with Parker, before Sarracenia's bombing ignites the immediate area.
Petra Soroka	Being on equal footing, outnumbered ten to one, or outnumbered a hundred to one, doesn't change what Petra has to do. If Rita will throw wave after wave of disposable minions at her, she'll do the same in return. Not with the ratbots, unfortunately, since she doesn't have the materials to keep constructing them in here, and her supply is limited without access to Hydrochoeria; they're relegated to guard duty and surveillance with the hope that if she doesn't advance them too far into Lilian's territory, Lilian won't be able to muster up the malice necessary to destroy the little toy-like bots. Her resource is instead, wielded like Cycle of Tears but without the ability to learn and grow, the other Elites. Occasionally she gets inventive with trying to counter the horde of Antegent, by dragging the corpse of a clerk over to see if they know not to set off a false alarm, or having Flamel delicately and secretly plant a charge on one to detonate later and bait Rita farther away. It's a losing battle. It's exactly reminiscent of the fight on the Union Busan, a thought that makes Petra directionlessly frustrated and sick to have stuck in her mind. <She's in Welfare, and as far as I saw, Rita's not anywhere nearby. Melting Love's basically top three worst things in the facility even undirected-- I mean, usually. Right now it probably wouldn't even make top five, haha-- but it's our best shot to snip a little of its main body off and get it to Xion later. And remember to think about and believe in that goal, because it's true; and also, because if Lilian reads your mind and any of you are thinking about this as 'a distraction', we instantly lose.> At some point during the past few days, it became necessary for Petra to make mission-talk with her telepathy instead of speech, just to avoid alerting the bugs. It's easy to imagine how poorly this could've gone if the project had completed a couple months ago, when Petra was still handicapped by not having the Beauty of Ash back and all her suppressed psychic powers with it. But she does, and here she is, utilizing the gentle dissociative presence of her mirror-stored mech to coordinate a depraved war effort. You can read her mood, or at least her focus, by how much of her psychic interference leaks into her telepathy like painful TV static; it's rarely less than 'moderate'. Without the Beauty of Ash being returned to prime condition yet, Petra has to take a step further down her escalation ladder and hold her transteam gun by her hip readily. She can't pull the trigger for Sting Silver without making a deafening racket out of the low-quality speakers, so she doesn't right up until the moment they go loud, hopefully with a massive simultaneous shockwave of explosives. It's too much to hope for that Lilian would just be taken off-guard by them, though.
Petra Soroka	"My my. Look who it is. Again." Petra has accumulated several more superficial wounds of the variety that resist Kukuru healing them, around her neck and collarbone. When Lilian says 'again', she acts like she's been called out personally, and automatically her fingers to touch them. She squints in confusion that she can't quite place. "Of course it is. But--" Through a callout of STING SILVER and an explosion of glittering-black mist, Petra's telepathy calls out to everyone before the Kamen Rider suit is revealed through the pyrotechnics. <Something's weird. That's not her normal language patterns at all, and especially not for this situation. Flamel, is something up with her mind?> Her first thought is the incredibly improbable but plausible explanation that some Abnormality has somehow gotten to Lilian, in a way that wasn't planned for or expected. Lobotomy Corporation isn't just the battlefield, it's a dangerous environment in of itself, and even though the Abnormalities passively aren't the biggest thing to worry about this week, that exact kind of threat assessment could be what leads to Lilian getting got in a moment of distraction. A stretched pillar of morphmetal forms into a spear in her hand, and she rears back and rockets it at Lilian to stay out of range of the explosions happening from Sarracenia. "Parker! Don't expend your EGO's durability too freely; once it's worn down, Lilian will be able to get you through your shadows or blood. Sarracenia, Hibiki, stagger your attacks out so she can't dodge both of you with the same movement!"
Rita Ma	"Of course it is. But--" "Why are you down here all alone, Lilian? That does not seem like you!" That moment of scrutinizing hesitation. Lilian tilts her head as if she were rolling her eyes, but knows better than to let her gaze shift for a moment. "You're more than a little bit stupid, aren't you?" It is Lilian's voice. The intonation, everything. But . . . If the carbon monoxide gets to her, it doesn't show at all. She drops the small Enkephalin container from her off-hand, puts away a glowy syringe the same color as the psi-juice, and then puts both her hands back on the blade. Her moves are fast and crisp: slamming Parker in the chest with the flat of the blade to force her back; stepping back from Hibiki's low dive with a little flicker of conservatively-spent time, then stomping on Hibiki's ankle to keep her down for just a second longer; blinking after Sarracenia and slashing her between the shoulders from behind-- Wait. Lilian actually covers intervening space in stopped time, doesn't she? Shouldn't that have triggered the mines? She's crisp, too, when she pivots from striking the Princess to parry Petra's spear. The javelin hits Night Mist-- --pierces through the sword's flat-- and sticks in Lilian's head. Huh?
Rita Ma	Right behind Petra, there's a softly wet slithering, and-- - - - - DIE. - - - - (You'd think you'd get used to the soul-raking, vision-blurring agony of Pale Damage. You really, really don't. If anything it's a tiny bit worse every time. Maybe by now you've got less 'self' to lose.) In the same instant as the pulse, 'telekinetic' force constricts everyone visible: Hibiki around her throat in an air-choke, Parker around her arms and chest to keep from reaching the powerups, Sarracenia hoisted by her legs and bashed against a wall, and Petra on the wrist holding her gun, wrenching it above her head. The cause fades into visibility as the 'Lilian' vanishes. Those blue tentacles, clammy almost to the point of being slimy, each like a super-strong constrictor snake- except Petra, who's being gripped in Rita's own hand. Her other hand tries to find the compact mirror, maybe to crush it. Rita in the white dress. Rita with the blooming tentacles. Rita with one eye blue and cruciform and both dull-and-dead, skin pale and shot with subtle dark veins, Rita looking gaunt and scuffed-up; she's stopped bothering to heal her minor cuts. There's precious little humanity on her face. A tape recorder tumbles to the floor next to her. "Have fun, Rita," it says. Clack.
Sarracenia	'You're more than a little bit stupid, aren't you' Sarra mmphs. "I am not stupid! What good would hanging around in the monster area do you?!" she exclaims before yelping as she is slashed. Her the back of her dress and her actual back are flayed open, and she goes down...only to be hit with Pale damage. Her vision goes white and her mind goes fuzzy as she struggles to maintain herself. then smashed around by 'telekinesis'. Once that all of that is over, Sarra is left barely moving. She tries to stand, but her legs don't quite seem to work. She mmphs, then lets out a frustrated growl as she reaches a shaky hand to her purse. She pulls out a green mushroom, and it does enough to let her stand again. "Rita!?" she exclaims as she sees who it is. But, this Rita is different. "...fun? There is no way someone like you could have fun doing this, Rita! You are much to kind! The least monstrous monster ever! I did not even want to fight you! Do you want to know why? Because I know that if you thought it was possible you would help us save Angela and the Sephirah -and- the City all at the same time!" Sarra grips her hammer. "And also because...I like you! You have been kind to me at every encounter up to this one! Even when you fought me in the simulation! Even though you and Lilian are closer friends than I could ever hope to be with anyone!" A prismatic glow starts to surround the head of the hammer and flows down the handle, then over Sarra. Her grey hair starts to float about her almost like she is underwater. "A Grade Six Fixer has little hope against a Star. But...you look like you are losing yourself almost as much as that Pale damage is making us lose ourselves. I hope you do not push yourself too far..." she says before the hammer's power fully infuses her. The princess starts hammering away, leaving small craters in the ground and setting off her own explosives around Rita in the process. The hammer fills her with strength and rage the princess can't hope to unleash on her own. After that brutal attack, she knows she can't hold anything back. She won't last.
Flamel Parsons	Flamel yelps, shocked out of his invisibility by that pale pulse. It seeps through his barriers! "A-AUGH! Dangit, that's why I couldn't get a read on Lilian--!" He shouts, stumbling back. He pants heavily, steadying himself against a wall, staring down one vivid blue eye and not the other. "Ghhhhh... One of. One. One. One of the reasons it sucks being on the wrong side, is that it always seems to be. Seems. It always seems. Seems to be the losing one." He mutters softly, taking a battle-ready stance and trying to shake the soul-damage off of his sense of self. Fighting her reminds him of fighting the fastest martial specialists in Elibe. It's so hard to get a lock on her mind when she can move so quickly! So he works on moving faster. His hands spread out, jolting his body bad. One rushes down the hall, down the hall, down... to the Tree. Where the palm presses against it. Fine, if there's Light to work with, he needs to work with it too. It's not the kind of high-bandwidth channeling that Angela's going after, but... maybe he can still get a paltry mental lumen to overclock his psychic power. Where the hand tries to draw out psychic energy, the brain, still in this chunk of hallway, gleams a shining red... And opens fire, with both his own strength and whatever power he can yank from the tree. The crystal in one eye-socket is visibly surging its growth just behind the sunglasses, millimeter by millimeter, but it's hard to see as the telekinetic hands grasp his head and concentrate the beams harshly, trying to pick off Rita with high-precision shots.
Angela	Parker was expecting some kind of trap. She wasn't expecting 'Secretly, Lilian is Rita!' Why would she? She didn't know Rita had this ability either. Her EGO Gear is amongst hte strongest in the facility against Pale Damage, but that just means it's resisted. It doesn't mean that she can just tank it again and again. Parker hisses as the Pale Damage surges through her spirit, threatening to shatter her like how she was once shattered. But she screams through it, even as the tentacle seizes her up. The very plans Petra had JUST shouted at her is suddenly put into question. Those were For Lilian orders not For Rita orders. "Suppose when you're fighting Rita and Lilian..." She says through gritted teeth, straining to try and reach her powerup bag. "That puts you in the position we usually are to everything else." She slices at Rita's tentacle to get her to drop her before rushing over to Petra, drawing out a fireflower from her bag now that she has an opportunity to and lifts it up, spraying a burst of fire towards Rita, less to harm her and more to give some visual and olfactory obsufucation from whatever she's going to try to do next. This is it Sarracenia! Finally, after all these centuries, Agents are using your powerups! It's happening! It's real!! It's a little bit goofy!!! But Parker was never one for formality, poise, or dignity. "So any new orders Captain?" She asks.
Petra Soroka	. . . and sticks in Lilian's head. The way that Petra simultaneously recoils in horror, and still follows through on the command to have the spear impaled in Lilian's head disintegrate into a cloud of razor flechettes that pin through her body to force her to the ground, is the result of the kind of practical dissociative digust that she insisted to Flamel that Lilian couldn't possibly be experiencing. The sympathetic tactile sensation of Silver needle through flesh is disconcertingly off enough to clue her in on something being wrong, and it takes her just an instant too long to place the gummy-muscular give and pierce feeling as being identical to the moat monster. DIE. Petra's more resistant to Pale damage than most in the facility right now, partly because of training, and partly because she lives and breathes immersed in it, from long before Lobotomy Corporation had even unified. The impact is like a tidal wave slamming into reinforced glass, cracking with a groaning thud that's held in perfect rigid formation by the lattice of steel within it. Petra's helmet droops and the armor on her wrist creaks in Rita's grip, and more dramatically than the response of her suit, is the morphmetal that floats outside of it. Stalled in their telekinetic paths, the flechettes contort and loose surface tension into individual droplets, all shuddering like water on top of a speaker. They ripple away in the nonphysical shockwave and shakily web into alien crystalline patterns and warped fractals in a way that can only be interpreted as 'pain'. She recovers quicker than anyone, though, and wrenches her wrist away with a double kick to Rita's chest, boosted by a pulse of the thrusters in her armor's calves to try and force her back. The disparate droplets all snap back into her palm to accumulate back into a spear, with one increment more complexity than the sheer spike of metal she was holding before. It's hooked at the end, with a thin prehensile cord of metal that links it back into the rivulet-veins of the Silver flowing down her arms. <J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "You people never fucking tell me anything!" <J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "She's a fucking skinwalker too?!" She wheels around and faces Rita with the harpoon in hand, stomping on the tape recorder without looking at it. "Cool fucking trick, Rita. I love how fucking instantly insane you got. So what's next? Now that Cinder's fucking dead, tell me which room you want me to go to to kill myself to make you happy. Fucking bitch." Sting Silver skids across the ground with speed rivaling the whipcracks of Rita's tentacles, thruster-boosts and psionic momentum control letting her change her trajectory on a dime to fakeout towards Rita's main body, then whip her harpoon to the side to bury the barbed hooks in her thickest tentacle and rip it out again the long ways. More morphmetal drips down from her arms to pool loosely around her, warily coiling in a way that she's always done, but never noticed-- never considered-- was particularly tentacle-like. "One of the reasons it sucks being on the wrong side, is that it always seems to be the losing one." "Wrong on both fucking counts, Flamel. I'm not going to fucking lose here!!" Petra raises her voice into a scraping shout, mask directly focused on Rita's blank, almost puppet-like face, framed by the echoes of White Night. "How many people do you think I have to lose until I'm on the right fucking side, huh?!"
Hibiki Tachibana	An ankle stomp. It's slows her but doesn't stop her. That's fine. Wait. That /should've/ triggered the... ... Every instinct in her body is telling her something is 'wrong', but it's too late to react to it. Not before any momentum she's gotten on her retreat is abruptly cut by the 'telekinetic' force strangling her out, the rest of her body and limbs jolting with the sudden stop before she's left hanging in mid-air. After what Lilian did to her throat before, you think that'd be what gets her scrunching her eyes shut in a voiceless scream. But no, it's the Pale damage. Just like having to deal with WhiteNight all over again, the inside of her skull burns. Her vision hazes out and runs over crimson. Her hands shoot up to the constricting tentacle and dig in with nails that sharpen to a fine point, only briefly. Her head clears up enough after a second to put two thoughts together, one eye forcing itself open to settle on Rita. Damnit. Her...? Here, now...? The first thing that should come to her mind is how this is too early; she can't afford to go all out against her right now, or there won't be any gas left in the tank for when it actually matters down the line. But instead... It's on the look on her face. Opening her mouth just to /bite/ down on her own lower lip hard enough to draw blood, as if it'll help keep her mind centered where it should be - and the spiked jacks in her leg armor eject two feet forward before they slam back into their moorings, releasing a shockwave out the opposite end. With that boost, she swings her whole body up to plant herself upside down on the ceiling, those same jacks re-aligning and shooting backwards, embedding into the surface to lock her in place. And with the best leverage she's going to get, Hibiki shifts her grip onto the tentacle choking her out and /yanks/. Either Rita is going to give and get tugged off the ground and brought up her way, away from the others - or she'll /rip/ it clear off and free herself that way. None of this really is pleasant at all.
Rita Ma	Petra's double-kicks pass through empty air; Rita's cerulean eye zips to them, and her body moves more fluidly than a human's ought to torque Petra's arm in the process of twisting away. Hibiki reels her up towards the ceiling- or rather, tries, and Rita complies by tentacle-springing up towards the ceiling and slamming into her- shattering, if not Hibiki, the concrete above, and denying her an anchored position. The tentacles, too, spear into a wall and jerk Rita down and to the side to avoid Parker's spray of fire; the eye zips between a half-dozen converging threats, Flamel's sniper shots and Petra's harpoon and Sarracenia's shrapnel, and as if it were wired into the tendrils more directly than the rest of her, parries and weaves her near-limp body around each danger as a dozen limbs and a dozen 'blades'. In a clearer state of mind, Petra calling her an insane skinwalker while throwing a harpoon at her would be a sharp anguish. But here, it's queasy and dull. "I love how fucking instantly insane you got." "That puts you in the position we usually are to everything else." "you look like you are losing yourself..." Monster. Monster. "Sor-ry," Rita mouths, almost-groggily, while hanging from her tentacles. So she isn't nonverbal. This would probably hurt less if she were. "I-hi-I'm, um, not doing so good. It's... it's hard. It's really hard. But I have to do my best, right?" She vanishes as soon as the aggregate fire isn't pinning her down. It's 'Hibiki' who materializes right in front of Sarracenia then, swinging an uppercut before hooking a foot under a mine and kicking it up into her face. "Abnormalities don't, um, have... real meat in them," comes from 'Hibiki's' lips, in Rita's haggard trembly voice. 'Sarracenia' appears in front of Hibiki, in turn, and tries to make a mess out of her with an emulated hammer, followed by a claw-swipe when the disguise's hesitation has been spent. "And all the clerks went bad by now, so, ahaah..." 'Flamel' materializes to grapple with Flamel by the Tree of Light, grabbing him by the shirt and shoving him backwards to try and force his head into the beam of energy. If he can charge from it, he can be overloaded too- and maybe in the tussle, his allies won't know who to shoot. "I, started, really losing it, yesterday. A hundred thousand calories a day. Kukuru's arm, it-- it only goes so far, right?" In the distance, Sarracenia and Flamel's traps are going off like popcorn popping. That can only mean the Cycle is flooding in. Thick pink goop drips from a ceiling-vent, creating a spreading puddle, and something heavy surges up there. 'Parker' appears in front of Petra, and 'Petra' appears in front of Parker, at the same time. The former only suffers slicing cloaked tentacles, desynced with where 'Parker's' attack seems to be. The latter, though... 'Petra' steps in, grabs Parker's left shoulder, and starts twisting like she's trying to break her arm. No- maybe break her arm off. Her eyes are so, so wide and so, so dull. One pupil glows that subtle blue. "It's... all Rita... right? It's, not, like I ca-ha-an't control myself, but... I really might have to kill some of you, to keep going. S-sorry." 'Kill' is a euphemism.
Sarracenia	'Sor-ry' "Nn. I suppose you do have to, but...will you be alright after? " Sarra asks. Just before getting uppercut and having a mine kicked at her. It goes off almost as soon as it is kicked, so it is not quite as bad as it -could- have been if it reached Sarra's face and exploded. She is still blown up in the middle of an unintentional somersault thanks to the uppercut though, and sent sailing into a wall. She coughs as she lands on her hands and knees, then another green mushroom is sacrificed for the cause. "Y-you do not eat people anyway! Right?!" Sarra exclaims at Rita, then blinks. "...a hundred...thousand?! How can one even eat that much in a day?!" Traps go off behind them and goop starts dripping down. Sarra is much more worried about the goop and immediately pulls out an ice flower, uses it, and starts freezing the sources of goop as best she can betwen throwing bombs at Rita and trying to set up more mines to keep the bugs away. "Miss Rita! You -cannot- start eating people! I am quite certain you said you do not do that! If you lose yourself because you ate someone how will you and Angela go to Apple Tree Island together?!" Sarra doesn't know for sure that Rita might go full on crazy or mindless monster if she starts eating people, but she is fairly confident that Rita would get even more guilt on top of all that she already carries. "If it really gets that bad, then..." Sarra starts to offer to share some of her sashimi supplies that she keeps in her trove of purse-bound food, but...if she did that, then Rita would be even stronger, right? "And what if someone you...kill...cannot be brought back by Kukuru?!" "And what even is a skinwalker?!" Sarra adds after all of that. She doesn't know it is a slur.
Angela	Parker isn't sure she would count Petra a FRIENDLY face. But her next swing instinctively stalls just so--emotional attacks against her heart seem to work well against her!--that she hesitates with her swing just enough for Rita to seize up her arm and grab it. The bad news for Parker is that she's wearing some of the toughest EGO gear in the game. That's a .3 resistance modifier to Red, White, and Black Damage and a .5 for Pale. She's TOUGH. Which you might think was a good thing if Rita wasn't still strong enough to rip that arm off. What it does do is make the ripping process slower and more torturous. grunts, pushes back, and when Rita pushes through her resistance anyway she screams. And boy does she scream. It's a blood curdling scream worse than death. But boy howdy! Rita can pop that arm off and get a quick snack as blood pours out of Parker's stump. She gets some flashes of the Apocalypse Bird power, even if it's a bit hazy with only one small piece chowed down on. But if she'd like, she certainly can copy the Apocalypse Bird monster power too and get BOTH superboss abilities under her belt! Yum! However when she shoves Flamel's face into the Light--well that's when shit gets weird. The moment Flamel's mind hits The Light, he feels it. What Angela called The River, the Collective Unconsciousness. Under the City and beyond into the Outskirts and beyond into the Ruins and beyond he sees it, he feels it, all those minds and thoughts blended together like a collective soup. Can he pick out the stories therein? The essence of the Abnormalities that they fight in the facility? This is where the vast majority of them came from but if you think about it, perhaps all life in this world came from this River. Even the humans. Even the rock. The surge of cascading thoughts slam against his psyche. Billions of whispers, few of which are directed at him, speak in half-formulated concepts before moving on. It's like drowning. It is drowning. He can feel himself... S I N K I N G ...Like a rock. ...Until a singular Voice amongst the crowd of whispers reaches down and plucks that rock up. Ssh ssh sshh.... not yet, Flamel... You have so much Psychonautry left to do. Rita doesn't shove her own face in, but she's close enough that little specks of light fleck against her and with each little fleck she gets a snippet of memory. She sees a young blonde-haired girl in an abusive home. Her father yells at her and hits her. She sees that young girl leave home, still barely a teen. She sees that girl turn to crime in the Backstreets. She gets good at it. She largely goes after the (relative) wealthy. The Wings are too out of reach. She meets a gang of similar ne'erdowells and they form a Syndicate, determined to punish the greedy, the wicked. She falls in love. One day they break into Lobotomy Corp. To punish them for the Smoke War. But they weren't expecting the monsters. She's the only one who survives. Binah, as a kindness, locks so much away...And now? The visions fade. Parker, still screaming with tears in her eyes keeps swinging at Rita, but now with far less finesse.
Hibiki Tachibana	"...!" Rita taking the initative in coming at her with that attempt of hers wasn't entirely unexpected, but Hibiki still has to buckle her knees and spring away as quickly as she can to get out of dodge as the surface practically caves in on impact. She goes tumbling back down towards the floor, spinning to catch herself on her feet... ...just to immediately double over, a hand resting on her scarf over her throat as she dry heaves and gets oxygen back. She can't afford to stay off her guard for long though, whipping back up to a proper stand so fast that she stumbles back a step before bringing her fists up in something resembling a ready stance. I-hi-I'm, um, not doing so good. It's... it's hard. "Rita--" It shouldn't be any surprise at all that Hibiki, of all people, would let out a sound of sympathetic discontent for the starving girl who severed Kukuru's arm (and ate it) and is sending dragons to their sleeping quarters and is siccing Melting Love on them, among other things. The sort-of logical explanation would be 'they're all doing terrible things, so holding Rita's against her is unfair'. But Hibiki is just sort of like that. "You don't have to keep pushing yourself this far...! If you do, you'll--" And all the clerks went bad by now, so, ahaah... Rita is gone before she can finish. And it's 'Sarracenia' who's immediately in front of her now. Especially on days of lacking rest and food, even knowing Rita's tricks doesn't really fully eliminate how a split-second of shock and struggling to separate 'what she sees' and 'what she knows' can be taken advantage of - she backpedals back another step to avoid the hammer. And then has to raise both arms up to block the claw, which rips through skin and leaves bloody gashes in one of her forearms still, forcing an exhausted flinch of pain out of her. Like most of the ones recently, it's not really even mostly because of the physical hurt. What is she supposed to do about this...? By the time they get to what they're trying to do, the state Rita'll be in... "Damnit, if beating you... is what I have to do to stop this--!" It's a bold statement that doesn't really hold much water when Rita is as abhorrently dangerous and strong as she is, and Hibiki is generously running with a half-full gas tank physically and mentally, even if not quite emotionally. 'Sarracenia' gets a fist slammed into her gut, courtesy of Hibiki twisting her body to belt it into her, which leads into a follow-up from her other arm meant to /slam/ her down into the floor. An agonized wince on her face, she blitzes past the copy of her friend towards-- --too late. Way too late. The most she can do is let out an equally agonized shout of pain and effort as she turns her momentum into a lunging punch for Rita's face, coming in hard and fast from the side to help bail out the now one-armed Parker.
Flamel Parsons	The replication of people is maybe least effective when it comes to Flamel. The man sees more in clairvoyance than he sees with his eyes, at the end of the day, and that means the raw, seething ball of hunger that sits square in Rita's gut shines like a beacon once he has his eyes on it. Flamel's shoved, grappled, forced against the Seed of Light's vast product. He recognizes a lot of risk here, and there's a struggle, for a while. One has to assume that an important reason that Angela doesn't choose to draw it out from any old area is that it's safe in some locations and deeply unsafe in others. That's why a dozen telekinetic hands struggle to hold him away from the beam... but... "Nnnnnhhhh... GGGAAAAAAAHHHHH...! S-STOP...!" His face starts to sink into the column. Artificial flesh rips away again, revealing the overgrowing crystals, and then those crystals of psitanium are subsumed into it. Psychic-energy-amplifying metal is saturated in pseudo-psychic energy. And now... He sinks. Falls into whispers. Takes their words into himself. And then he's dredged up. "C-...CARMEN...!" He screams, pulling himself away. His crystals have heavily grown in that skull, and the body stumbles limply. But the floating telekinetic hands look more energized than ever. They snap the limp body up, and his words hum in telepathy. "You're right. Not yet." He says, blearily. Then: "Ghh-- The one time they should have sent a Gastronaut to do a Psychonaut's job." He whispers. And then his telekinetic hands reach for... His bandolier of food-sustainance psychic-impression construct autoinjectors that he's been making since yesterday. One in each hand, and six big hands in combat position. One yanks him away from the tree, the other six rush to try to jab Rita, with the phantom-injectors, in the most efficient delivery site where the genetic impulses are most concentrated[1] and mess up her hunger processing with a flood of psychic food-falsehood. "Your heroism... your dedication... is... stressing you OUT!" He shouts, in an urgent, pained tone, trying to overload her defenses with swing after swing and really get something into her brain that takes her off her game.
Petra Soroka	"I-hi-I'm, um, not doing so good." Upon taking in Rita's face, the instant, heartstopping thought, that punches into and through Petra to wipe away her flash of anger with tinnitus-white horror, is, Did I do that to her? Remorseless escalation has always been Petra's strong point. Enkephalin down the elevator shafts, an endless horde of Ordeals bought with blood, severing plumbing, denying sleep, starving them out allying with a supervillain, editing a grade sheet, planting a camera, dialing a number. Brutal, dogged persistence towards the singular tasks that she sets her mind to, hijacking her priority=0, to justify the means by the end and regret it only once she has what she needs. It's all she knows, and all she's good for. But for the second time in the span of as many minutes, the fourth time today, she's gutted by the guilt of assuming that it's all her fault. Worse than the shallow wounds Rita has inflicted so far is the suffocating sensation that the tides of blood and filth shed in the facility are all on her own hands, from Hibiki being dragged into the room by a resentful-seeming Xion with her viscera hanging out and then being sent out again an hour later on her comand, to the purple-marbled clerks pushed into the corners like garbage, Lilian's frustration and disgust, feeling Shajo's spine start tearing in her jaws, this haunted look on Rita's face, Cinder; Petra has, intentionally, chose for all of it. The calculus in the head assigns every one of those variables a value of zero for her decision-making, because, it has to, or none of it makes sense at all. Practical calculus can't keep her from stumbling and gasping, wide-eyed, "Why? What happened?!" "I, started, really losing it, yesterday. A hundred thousand calories a day." Oh. Petra recognizes the look now, even with one blown out blue pupil and black veins spreading under the skin. She's wasting away. It's impossible not to connect every necessary dot together in that same instant, and skittishly flicker away from Rita with the instincts of a prey animal seeing a cat's eyes dialate.
Petra Soroka	"O-oh. I ask you people to tell me things, and this is what I get." Taken out of tempo by two consecutive internal cutscenes, the Parker in front of her takes a moment of mental calibration to understand, that lets the Apocalypse-looking tentacle carve sparks out of her armor. She staggers back and then flinches upright, rapidly getting her mentals back in order now that she knows the cause of Rita's distress. The next time the tentacle whips around at her, she catches it on the underside of her harpoon hook and pulls it through like an axe to sever the thinner end of the limb. Carrying through, she hurls it directly at Rita's center mass, with the uncoiling silver cable behind it taking a tip from Galle and snapping to redirect it after her when she dodges. "Parker! ALEPH breach protocols; treat her like a combination between Nothing There and Mountain of Smiling Bodies! Shoot any corpse with Execution Bullets besides the Elites! Identify everyone by spoken codes! Any one of those bugs that touches Melting Love, Execute them too to prevent spreading!" "--Parker?" Petra spares a glance over to her while her harpoon whips back into her hand. She sees, Parker's blood on 'her' own hands, a brutally realistic metaphor of her guilt wrenching off her subordinate's arm. "Shit--!" Trailing droplets from her spear flatten into a mirrored plane, and she snatches her revolver out from the reflection. Two bullets are quickly thumbed into the cylinder before she flicks it shut, and fired in quick succession, one at 'herself' and one at the severed arm in 'her' hands. The former hits the other Petra to slow its movements down and give Parker a chance to retaliate. The other instantly disintegrates the available biomass.
Rita Ma	"Y-you do not eat people anyway! Right?!" Rita's limp, groggy, dissociated look at Sarracenia- with Parker's ripped-off arm in one hand, and holding Flamel into the beam of light with the other- -is utterly, miserably wistful. "I'm sorry, Ms. Sarracenia. I- tr-ry to be good, but... I wish I was as gentle a person as you thought I was." Words she can't possibly say while looking at Petra, whose guise she's dropped because it made her feel unwell. No matter how dissociated she gets, the ache between them still feels blinding. The skitter-away that Petra does- and the way Rita can't help her eye snapping to the preyish motion- makes it throb behind her eyeballs. Crunch. Crr-rr-kk. Glk. Parker's hand vanishes. For a second its fingers spasm as Rita chews down on the ligaments; then it's all rendered into a slop of bone shards and meat, and swallowed with one last glipse of its fingernails in the back of her throat. A heaving, trembly sigh of almost-ecstatic relief foams pink at Rita's lips. She relaxes. She seems normaler. Maybe it's a trick of the light, but her dark veins seem to recede. Oh, god. Finally. Not quite enough... Petra disintegrates the rest of the arm, then. Rita's eyes swivel up to her, disbelieving. She sways for a moment. Her jaw trembles. Why? almost crosses her lips, but it's pointless to ask. Because I don't matter to her. Stupid. She leans around Parker's swing, grabs the agent by the throat as Flamel squirms free, lifts her up as a shield against Petra, and opens her mouth again. The flecks of light against her back, against her cheek, wrestle with the ache that feels like it's going to drive her crazy. What are you trying to tell me, Carmen? I don't get it. I hate this. I hate you. You were always too nice. Only Rita's human eye cries. She wavers. Then Flamel injects her with his wretched little tube of false satiation, and after swatting him away, that tips the scales. With a sound of raw frustration, she hurls Parker off to the side, sending the poor agent rolling across the floor with her trail of blood. "You don't have to keep pushing yourself this far...! If you do, you'll--" "Everyone up there is depending on me!" Rita practically shrieks, at both Hibiki and Flamel. One bite gave her a bit more clarity. Her tentacles unravel from around her again, a dozen swaying vipers with their wicked life-drinking points. "You- haaah- forgot, to bring anyone who warps. No escape. And Kukuru-- can't, bring you back from this. You surrender before I have to do this." The traps that held off the Cycle are done for. Near the back of the room, where you'd want to escape, Melting Love's main body descends. The black-shelled insects, with their sprinters and tanks, barge into the main hall through three different doors and start to snap and shred- though they ignore Parker if she stays down. And Rita strikes. One tentacle to spear through each person, and drink their life force in sickening pulsing gulps. It's not every day you get to see your soul leaving your body, less still as glowing bubbles draining along the feeding-probe. It makes sense, immediately, that if this were to kill you there'd be no coming back at all. It's a bit like pale damage, but it doesn't even hurt. Millisecond by millisecond, you're just a little more gone.
Flamel Parsons	Flamel's got some soul in there. It's weak, but it's there. The fact that he gets through this encounter is more down to the fact that there's less fluid to conduct it than the fact that it has any strong attachment to his body. Artificial flesh withers, and boiling fragments of metal surge along the conduits. In the roiling mass, one can see something that looks like blurry historical photos of airbrushed-face anonymous men and women in backgrounds. Flamel Parsons isn't above asking. "S-stop... please...!" He struggles to speak. "Rita... What would they think...!" He can't land a hit on her psyche, but could he secure an escape through the basest manipulation of focus? Well, not only that: He does an emergency vent of all the confused mental psychic energy that came from the overload, the soul-integrity loss, all of it. Like a smoke-screen from no smoke bomb, he floods the space and goes for a heavy swipe on the tentacle, willingly suffering whatever wound is needed to separate and then yanking as many bodies as his telekinesis can grab as he tears away. The external hands aren't responsible for this one, it's all him trying to get away. Melting Love being involved here is far past too much. Even just Rita was too much. He has to get out, and get as many people out as he can when he does.
Petra Soroka	When Rita looks up, distraught and betrayed, Petra is looking back at her over the smoking muzzle of her revolver. For the first time, both of them relatively more lucid than they have been, Petra meets her eyes with her own stunned horror. At herself, equally as much as at Rita, but the desperation of being blue-stomached might make it hard to tell. The cold moment of eye contact across weapons only lasts an instant before Petra slams her revolver back into Qetra's hands and it vanishes into the mirror, leaving her free to two-hand throw her harpoon dead-on at Rita. A pseudo-spinal muscular flick within the cord of morphmetal whips the serrated hook tip away from piercing into Parker held up as a shield, veering around at an angle to catch Rita in the dense cluster of tentacles at her back. Petra dashes with thruster support and dives for Parker, catching her in one arm while the other hand grabs the tearing-rebound of the harpoon above her head. "Everyone up there is depending on me!" "'Up there', there's someone who's depending on me. You don't get to buy permission to kill my best friend just because you saved me, o-once." Her voice wavering and cracking behind the mask makes her heroic(?) defiance against the monster less convincing. She sucks in a gasp of air that distorts through the voice alteration of her helmet, and then it chokes off when she's hit in the gut by the life-draining tentacle. "You- haaah- forgot, to bring anyone who warps. No escape." Petra doubles over and grips the tentacle speared through armor, black-sparkling smog and leaking Silver ichor oozing out of the impact point along with glowing essence. Even without that, they're pinned in here, between Cycle of Tears and Melting Love, and with Parker disabled she's not sure she'll have the backup needed to stop Rita from causing a mass outbreak by feeding the Antegent to Melting Love and guaranteeing their loss. As one last movement, she pulls the chain of her mirror and snaps it, and then a pillar of morphmetal flattens it in her palm with a dull crunch. The Beauty of Ash, crystalline beautiful but still wounded with neon hydraulic fluid leaking out of its scars, unfolds around her, clutching Parker with one of its one and a half arms, the other ending in a roughly exploded-arm cloud of damaged glass. Its twice-human scale doesn't seem nearly as impressive in the sea of Rita's tentacles, but the sudden boost of speed from shifting into her mech lets it dart around and snatch the collapsed Sarracenia up in the crack in its snoutlike head like a mouth, and roughly swaddle Hibiki and Flamel in the cloud of glass fragments, pulling them to its chest. They're still vulnerable; there's nowhere to go with Rita's minions closing in, but-- A black and purple doorway appears in space behind the Beauty of Ash, silhouetting the iridescently-translucent mech against the Tree of Light. Swirling clouds within it tempt her to immediately dive in like Xion has a thousand times before, but she lingers for a moment, twitchily on-guard for a sudden ravenous final attack. The frosted color blotch of Petra within its chest shifts unreadably. <You know, I'm a bit of a cannibal too, actually. Just not as literally. But if you're a monster for the billions of people up there, I'll just keep escalating until I'm as much of one for the one person I care about more than any of them. Sorry. But I won't regret it until after, just like you.> And then she's gone with the others, into the Corridors of Darkness and back to safety.
Sarracenia	'I'm sorry, Ms. Sarracenia. I- tr-ry to be good, but... I wish I was as gentle a person as you thought I was.' 'Crunch...' Sarra stares, mouth hanging open, as Rita starts to chew. She can only watch for a moment before she has to turn away, feeling much like she did during the Carmen memory. Turning away lets her see Parker though, and she gasps. "Parker!" Sarra rushes to Parker with a green mushroom. She gets it there, hopefully stopping the bleeding. Only to realize they are surrounded by bugs and Melting Love and tentacles. "...I understand why you have to. But...you do not actually have to! I believe Angela will do the right thing! She is going to-" Before Sarra can finish the though, she is stabbed by a tentacle. She cries out and grasps at it, then gasps at the very odd feeling of...just being drained. "R-rita...?" Sarra says, her voice strained and shivery. "You...you said you did not want to kill me..." Sarra says, her eyes tearing up a bit. "I guess you did your best, but I suppose in the end all friends of Lilian want to kill me." Sarra does not have a lot of spare 'I' left. She might disappear in a matter of moments. She pulls out that tanto again and tries to cut at the tentacle, but she is fading fast. By the time Petra pulls them through the Corridors of Darkness, Sarracenia hardly has any light left in her barely open eyes.
Angela	''What are you trying to tell me, Carmen? I don't get it. I hate this. I hate you. You were always too nice.'' Do you really hate me, Rita? Because I think you're the most beautiful and the kindest of all It saddens me that you resist your nature But I think it is incredible that you accept who and what you are... and still use your power to protect others. You're fighting to protect my dream but at the same time, I sort of want to support Angela's too because she's my cute daughter. ...I didn't ask for her, you know? But she reminds me of the parts of me I had to step away from to become a Voice. You said something about Love, not too long ago. There's a big difference, between someone who loves one version of you, and someone who loves every version. I want to show everyone that their everything can be loved. So that in turn, they love their everything too. I want that for you and even Parker too. Parker isn't in condition anymore to take Petra's advice, especially once she's CHUCKED into a wall. She might be the strongest Agent on Angela's side right now, but she's not like a Harpoonist with the killer instinct to fight through a missing limb while her soul is peacefully sleeping away. She wants to live. She wants to live. And in this she's like Angela. She hears the threat. But more importantly, in her blearyeyed vision, she throws herself through the portal that appears. Wherever it goes, it's gotta be better than here. Unfortunately for Team Petra, they're running out of meat and they're running out of time. If there was one human whose flesh always regenerated, who did not feel pain, and you could eat to satiation with never killing them... Would you, Rita?
Hibiki Tachibana	Everyone up there is depending on me! In the moment where Hibiki opens her mouth to respond to that, just to cut herself off to look back over her shoulder towards Melting Love's breaching entrance-- Stabbed through. She staggers forward, letting out a soundless choke as she clutches loosely at the tentacle impaled into her - just to wince, going wide-eyed and then hazily half-lidded the instant she not only feels, but /sees/, her spirit physically getting drained away. Right. She does know that this really would kill her - any of them, for good. The permanent state of exhaustion she's in, and now this, almost urges her body to collapse on the spot, drink by drink of her soul making her legs grow all the weaker. Maybe it's end-of-life desperation. Or maybe it's a diminishing 'self', like with Pale Damage's effect on her. Or maybe it's just a sudden burst of adrenaline even as numbness flodos her, that has her head whirling back up towards Rita, eyes wild, voice somehow louder than ever. "AND /I/ HATE SEEING YOU HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS, RIGHT NOW!" A few unsteady pants escape her after, beads of sweat beating down the sides of her face. "But... it doesn't matter, does it...? We both... have positions... we can't give up on. I already told you... no excuses from me, for the ones... I want to save... and you've made..." Her face contorts again, then loosens back again into her stare. "...it pretty clear, how far you're willing to go..." "...Fine. Keep doing... what you have to do. I'll... have to, too. Even if I hate it..." Her mouth opens, and her breath hitches. She can't see straight. Soon she won't be able to stand straight. But with Rita right there, and Melting Love closing in, she can still give it her best shot to wipe them all away in one go, in one moment, right here and now, can't she...? If that's what it takes for her and the others to survive this, it's worth it. It's, probably, a good thing that she doesn't get to do whatever she had in mind. That's exactly when the Beauty of Ash's storm of glass shards severs her from impalement and sweeps her away, her body limply falling against its frame without any resistance. "Damn...it..." That's all she can murmur as the Corridor sweeps them up, and she barely moves her head enough to look back - before everything goes black.
Rita Ma	"Rita... What would they think...!" Liza Kana Bota Teon Lisa Rook Rita hesitates for just a moment. There's more life in her eyes than before- now that she's stolen it from everyone- but that face of hers has only gotten colder. "They'll say I should've killed you the first time." "You...you said you did not want to kill me..." She softens only the tiniest fraction more for Sarra. "Surrender or die. That's all." That's what all violence is. "AND /I/ HATE SEEING YOU HAVE TO BE LIKE THIS, RIGHT NOW!" "It's your fault," Rita says as blandly as she can manage- which isn't perfectly- to the magical girl she's killing. "You're making me do this. If you care about me, give up. If you don't, I hate you." <I'll just keep escalating until--> The Beauty of Ash eats tentacle-slashes as it scoops up its allies- some intended to 'kill' those it rescues, just to make more work for Kukuru. When Petra hesitates to send that message, though, she only gets so far. It's not that Rita cuts her off. It's just that Rita expressionlessly raises a hand towards the Beauty and starts to charge it with a searing light. Flee through the portal or eat a blast. I don't want us to have anything in common at all, she thinks, but doesn't 'send'. Thinking about Petra any more will just make her eyes ache again. Her swarm washes over the portal, and a decent number probably pour through before Petra can close it, but once it does the rest go still. It's quiet in the chamber, all of a sudden. Rita bends down and picks up a reflective fragment to look at the specks of light on her cheek. ... No. I don't hate you, Carmen. I'm sorry. I just can't handle this being any harder. I need them to be evil, so I can feel okay fighting them. When you're nice to them, how can I protect your dream? ... I wish Ms. Angela could be happy too. Just not like this. A long pause, broken only by the drip of goo and the idle skittering of antegent. Thank you for loving me, Ms. Carmen. It's hard for me to. But you do make me a little braver. Would you, Rita? ... Only if they loved me.