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| Owner | Pose |
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| Petra Soroka | Petra said she wouldn't tell you when the final motions of the plan were put in place, and so she doesn't. Given what she said about needing four days of light, the tension keeps building over what you know will be the last day, but there's no telling which one of the dozen skirmishes and ambushes will be the one. On average, you're taking fewer deaths with each engagement compared to earlier in the week, but it's impossible to feel good about it when the progress is being won by inches and you're spending your lives daily to earn it. Petra's instructions over the day get increasingly terse and esoteric, but she still doesn't steer you wrong. "Pale shielding to Flamel, then Rufus, then Xion, then split the rest, except to Hibiki." "Parker, since you can't go near Rita anymore either, you're on Kukuru guard duty. Together you've got almost one full set of arms." "Rufus. We'll be clustering up as many of the Antegent as we can so you can hit them with White Night. They're not people, so don't fucking pussy out on me." "Hibiki, you'll know when it's time to use that last resort of yours." "Woz, come with me for a sec." <Ange, in fifteen minutes, meet Xion by the supply closet.> It happens during a fight with Rita for most of you. The radiant trunk of the Tree of Light that pierces through the center of the facility gutters, and then goes dark. Despite the abject misery of the war, the pleasant psychic soothing of the Light had settled into background noise, and when it's cut off, it swings violently in the other direction. A sudden breathtaking sensation of loss and grief, like every time the Light was occluded by Petra's aura but worse, washes across the facility, and you can only imagine the impact on the rest of the world outside. Compared to the Light, the florescent bulbs and cracked monitors illuminating the facility seem like they can only manage dim monochrome. It's as if a sixth sense you were only unconsciously aware of was suddenly stripped away, leaving every sight, smell, and word, every emotion you feel inside your heart, permanently duller for its absence. At the very bottom of the facility, in the flat white Architecture Department, Xion has just deposited Angela into the chamber with the Well, and locked it behind her. There's no going back: if that door gets broken down, and Angela captured, even if they retrieve her and retreat for another day, it would be over. The Light going dark is the signal to everyone that this is their last chance to determine the outcome of the war. |
| Petra Soroka | With Angela locked away, and Ayin dead, the facility itself should be essentially decapitated. None of the Sephirah ever had the permission to control it the way Angela did, and there's no one around to simply hack into its controls, either. But six months ago, Petra was preparing for a war no one else was imagining would happen. A trip into a branch facility, a secret mission to collect a holographic copy of Angela from the console, and then another mission secret enough that she never even told Angela about it, to copy and pocket her own duplicate. When the Light goes out, a morphmetal tendril taps into the console in Angela's bloodstained office, and the synthetic consciousness and the permissions downloaded within spread across every device in the facility. In an instant, when the clouded lightless misery of Petra's presence seems to infect the entire world, it all becomes hers. The Third Trumpet sounds from every speaker in the dark, signaling the rolling wave of all of the containment cell doors sliding open at once, ka-chunking into place with red warning lights flashing. Monsters and horrors of every size and shape, many familiar from the past two years, pour into the hallways, turning the fights against Lilian and Rita into fights against the collective psychological sickness of humanity given form, in shambling masses of humanoid flesh and machines with grinding saws and giant spiders scurrying across the ceiling and music boxes and slime and alien things from beyond the stars. Even the feeble and cruel rules of engagement that developed during the war evaporate to make this last stand a fight for your lives to buy time for Angela. Down in Extraction, Petra steps out of a shadowy black door that seems to melt into the darkness of the department. Standing in front of the passage down to Architecture, she reaches out with one hand to grab an Abnormality that looks like a driftwood doll of a young girl, lifts her up so that her seaweed hair dangles down, and plunges Fourth Match Flame through her chest. The wood catches fire instantly, crackling and popping while Live Ballast's scream rips through the entire facility, sending the other Abnormalities into a frenzy. |
| Angela | ''Parker, since you can't go near Rita anymore either, you're on Kukuru guard duty. Together you've got almost a full set of arms.'' "Ahahahahh....." Parker laughs. "Aye Aye Captain. Hopefully for the last time." ''Ange, in fifteen minutes, meet Xion by the supply closet.'' "Understood." The reply comes. " And you better believe that Angela is there on time, on the dot even. 1,500 minutes is the easiest wait of Angela's life. And, she vows, the last one. Angela and Xion appear by the base of the Tree of Light, right by the door leading to Carmen's chamber--ie: Ayin's old office, now completely dark except for the Light radiating from Carmen's chamber. Angela can feel Carmen as if she was holding her right now, but she doesn't immediately rush in, despite the time crunch everyone is in. "Xion, you have saved my life, and with luck you're giving me a future here today. In return, all I've given you is misery. But after this, I'd like to get to know you better." She can't help but wonder what Xion feels about it, if she compared it to something akin to Kingdom Hearts. Perhaps since it is a Kingdom Hearts, it deserves to be closed. ... Angela almost laughs at the thought. Yeah right. It'd be nice to think you were doing this for anyone but yourself but let's not kid yourself, Angela. "I will see you soon." She says instead of asking about Xion's feelings. This isn't the best moment for an in depth talk about that. Still, the 'unless Lilian cuts my head off' is implied rather than directly stated. And then she steps inside at which point all contact with Angela is immediately cut off--even psychic. It'd be like trying to find a singular raindrop in the ocean. The Abnormalities are truly out of control. And there is a new one...familiar to some of you even if he had never breached before. A young man with pointed ears and blood red eyes steps out among the throng and extends his hand outward. The blood throughout the facility rapidly oozes and flows towards his hand. Even the contaminated blood, mixed in with Enkephalin or other strange fluids, simply pulls itself away in pristine form, rapidly flying and coalescing around his hand. "After ten thousand years, I am finally free... And oh so hungry... ...And I am not the only one." The Blood Fiend says. "Now, how to leave this place..." He starts making his way towards the Elevator, perfectly willing to ignore employees, though any corpses nearby that still have blood nearby quickly become exsanguinated as he passes by them. He's not a picky eater, especially after being starved for so long. While the long battling that has barely stopped since Hokma's Meltdown seems to be providing that particular Abnormality an edge--there's plenty more causing trouble throughout the facility--and, enraged as they are by the Live Ballast's screams, they are particularly ferocious! And you're on your own to figure out how to best deal with them. Seems like a good day for 'Repression' work! |
| Angela | The Abnormalities are largely spread out through the Extraction Department, the Records Department, and Architecture--largely all between you and The Well, though they are in the way they are giving Ayin's office and Carmen's chamber a wide berth. Gebura and Binah are still fighting in Extraction though sometimes their fight takes them into Records and neither of them are looking too good. *In Records...Remember All Around Helper? Well All Around Helper is scouring the halls, trying to help clean everything up and, well, let's face it! The place is such a mess! And it knows who is causing the mess (all of you!) so it's directives seem to have decided that the best way to stop this place from getting any messier is to purify the source! That's you! It's not just comfortable stabbing with its metal legs while smiling bigly, it's also opened up its flamethrowers and is burning everything in sight! Like people! *In Extraction, Oh hey, has Angela already collected the Light? It looks like she just stumbled out onto this floor, looking worn out and wounded--she's even bleeding! Maybe the Light transformed her into a human being too! Wow! But she looks like she could use help. You should help her. You should help her. She loves you, she loves you, she loves you, please help her. She could use your help. Angela needs your help. Help her. She loves you. She loves you. She loves you. *In Records, Punishing Bird has decided you all need to be punished! It's already furious, he's been bouncing around in his cell because of the facility's movements and he's just so NETTLED. His massive jaws are going to try and rip everybody apart it comes in contact with. Like YOU. No, not him, YOU! In fact, with all the Abnormalities escaping, the other Birds are no doubt already escaping too and soon they'll summon Apocalypse Bird. That would be ... unpleasant. *In Extraction, The Scarecrow Searching for Wisdom, has a bright orange and white polkadotted bowtie! And overalls! And a body of straw! And the ability to shoot out a sucker made out of straw that will try to suck your brain out entirely! Some of you need that! In one of his hands is a bloody rake too that he uses to claw at anyone who gets close to make it easier for him to suck your brain out of your body! *And in Architecture there's Nosferatu! Nosferatu is apparently a Blood Fiend or Blood Fiend based Abnormality. The more blood there is in the facility, the more dangerous he is. And ... golly, there's just a lot of blood in this facility right now. He might be a bit more to handle because of the circumstances but even so... There's more. There's going to be more. The horde is endless and if there were still a Manager, he'd call for a reset. But there's no more Manager, and like Petra had promised--no more resets. __________________________________________________________ |ARNING-WARNING-WARNING-WARNING-WARNING-WARNING-WARNING W| ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯|=|????? CLASS THREAT|=|¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ THE HORDE... And your pal Nosferatu! __________________________________________________________ |ING-WARNING-WARNING-WARNING-WARNING-WARNING-WARNING-WARN| ¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯ |
| Xion | Xion hadn't removed her mask again. When the breastplate and suiting under her coat of Mashin Chaser faded away, the Nobody kept her hood up, hid under the expressionless veil of darkness about the empty-space helmet. She didn't understand why Hibiki wasn't being given Pale shielding, but dully took the items they had fought bitterly for with left hand. Her right held Starlight, tip-down, idly ready. She hadn't dismissed the weapon either, since the fight. The work of her thumb against the grip leaves a faint frictive brushing noise, black-gloved digit dragging across the inside to make slow count of nothing. "No matter what happens, remember:" A drawn in breath, helmet-caught, and then falling with her shoulders. "We're not just fighting for Angela. We're fighting to live through this too. It can't get better after if we don't make it through now. And if we're just flipping a coin - then I still intend to call it right." "I hope you do too." Accepting the medicine and gear and disappearing to rest for ten minutes, Xion makes her way to the closet, shutting herself inside, in the somehow-bright shut room, and waits. PHONE: Phoning Xion, Petra Soroka says, "I don't think... there was ever a world where a debate, or a duel, or anything, would have ever worked out. Or, maybe they would have, but the chances would have been lower, and if they were five percent less likely to work, then I'd dirty bomb the whole City just for that edge. All that's real are our wills and what we'll do to see them through-- if that answer for me isn't *anything*, then what am I even *for*?" PHONE: Phoning Xion, Petra Soroka says, "I'm... sorry, because I'm kind of sorry about everything. I-I'm not strong enough to not feel sorry about it. I wish you didn't have to suffer for my awful fucking war, and I wish R-Rita and I weren't fighting like this, and I wish I didn't have to do any of this to Lilian, but-- but I'll feel guilty *after*. *Afterwards* I'll want to be better, and that'll be my priority, and I'll *mean* it, right up until the point that being better limits what I can do for the people I love. I don't think I have whatever mechanism lets 'I' take priority over that. If I do, then I don't trust it." PHONE: Phoning Xion, Petra Soroka says, "... She did take my cigarettes. But... she's stronger than me. Once we're out of here, and it's over, she'll go back to herself, and it'll just be my fault again." PHONE: Xion morose. "I don't think 'so strong you don't feel sorry about it' is 'strong'. I think it's an amputation that happens to become 'that kind of strong'." PHONE: Xion says, "... I hope 'we' all survive to afterwards. I can live with the scorn of billions if I can go home as myself. And that... Takes more people than just 'I, me'." Eventually, exactly on time, Angela opens the door to the closet, the same as any other door, slightly tilted askew like the rest of the facility was, and she opens it to see Xion. But no closet. All around Xion is a pitch-dark, a moving-dark, a textured well of super-purple and aphotic blue and blacks with names along an unspoken spectrum. Extending left hand from within, hooded and masked with two yellow 'eye'-points lit like lanterns in the dark, Xion tilts her head and holds Starlight besides her, just past the threshold. "Will you walk with me?" The Nobody asks, and as soon as Angela steps across the threshold there is a weightless pause where, supported by Xion, she is no-where. A specific kind of no-where, limited by the span of Lobotomy Corporation as a facility past which the secretary cannot see path at all, scattered like a constellation of points on a river delta going everywhere, and the path they walk is just an interim. At the base of the constellation, at the root of the tree, is the Light's well, and Angela knows now why Xion could tell where it was the whole time. Polaris was a twinkling dream compared to this burning pole-star, whitening the whole of the dark. |
| Xion | They don't step through another door, or even out of a Corridor, but into the white-lit office of Ayin, Angela led by the hand while Xion walks ahead. She casts a shadow as long as the universe, black cloak occluding the whole days of Light, and brings Angela forward to besides her. "Angela," Xion speaks, and her voice is tense in an all-new way. Strained like she is pushing her voice through a vice, a press, she speaks and doesn't turn her head. "Lilian's done that too. She could have pressed me. A duel to decide it, early. Words, as it happened, and... she didn't. If anything, she's been trying to alloy my resolve by. . . hurting me, by providing as little purchase as she could." Could she even go back, herself? Was there only forward? Cost after cost, sunk, sinking, Turning, at the neck, then the shoulder, Xion turns towards Angela slightly with her guiding arm and transitions the gesture into a half-hug. Opposite from the side of her blade, though normally she swung Starlight with the left hand. Today, it was opposite. Today, she stood cloaked in light and croaked in an odd kind of despairing. "The limit of, maybe, each of us, is this. The fullness of our trying." Eulogizing, she finishes, escaping the hug to step towards Carmen's locked door, bladetip raising. "I hope - pray, even to the White God - that the world will be kinder to us than we are to ourselves." She doesn't lead Angela to the door - those steps Angela must take on her own, while Xion moves her left hand to the handle as her empty star-tip taps the surface. There's a faint, joyous click! from somewhere, everywhere, nowhere, and with an absolutely delicate touch she pushes the door of overwhelming Light wide. Like a flash-bang, Xion is consumed momentarily in the outpouring, as real as a shadow cast by sunlight reveals the silhouette of a thing, and steaming//burning, she takes a woozy step aside. The poise of her somber bringing falls away, a candleflame in a storm still burning, and her face - light-lit, healthy, energized, dark-eyed, sweaty, wild-pupiled - reveals behind the mask that can't obscure the truth. She's been crying for days. The ooze on her face hasn't cleared. The hoarseness of her shouting rasps the back of her unhealed throat. "I'll see you soon, Angela. I promise." The offering-out left hand returns, this time with a little old-timey metal clock-key, too big for any lock in the facility to press into Angela's hands. "If you need to get out, that'll open the door. Good luck, Angela. I--" Can't bathe in the Light of the world she is about to betray the fullest faith of for 'my word' and 'my friends'. Can't go where the Door might take her, can't leave this place even for the unlimited promise of Kingdom Hearts. "--I can't follow, but I'll guard the threshold." ... Closed and shut and key brought with her, Xion escapes the depths of Architecture, mask re-asserting itself and yellow eyes remaining lantern-lit as she moves towards the central trunk at a sprint. The world of heartless monochrome is almost homey to her, Adam's notion of her being Lightless validated though she'd never admit it. Almost forgetting the half-beats of her Heart, Xion continued to move. A key in each hand, she locks everything as she goes, eventually following the actively moving blood towards the Blood Fiend. Alucard? Dracula? Yuuki Kuran? Several other members of the Concord??? Likely suspects filled Xion's head as she jogged behind the Blood Fiend, slowed by the lack of attack towards the Agents. "Got somewhere to be?" She asks, honest. The angling-towards-leaving threw her... did she have time for this? |
| Rufus Shinra | > "Rufus. We'll be clustering up as many of the Antegent as we can so you can hit them with White Night. They're not people, so don't fucking pussy out on me." "Yeah. Yeah, I got it." Rufus gets it. He doesn't like it. That doesn't need to be said. Even using this against things that aren't people isn't to his liking. Other than that, Rufus is managing to be in good spirits! He's having to dip further and further into his stash to get through each night, and he's getting progressively worse sleep each night despite that, but - he's managing. The grin's a little more forced, the cheerfulness is a little less genuine, but he's still managing. He's managing right up until the light stops. "... This sucks." He slouches. "This was supposed to be *fun*. Adventure, and action, and gripping tales, and new experiences, and- and, really nice things." "Not... urban exploration wilderness survival bootcamp level misery." "I miss my own bed. I miss my own food. I miss my own very nice, heated, well-lit, private, non-trapped bathroom." It'd take him a while to get back to anything like a baseline. He doesn't have a while. "Oh what *now*," he snaps, as the third trumpet sounds. And then a memory from his training surfaces. What that third trumpet means. "Oh, fuck." --- Rufus blasts into Extraction, burning ammo for his supercharged shotgun boosts. (Fortunately, of all things he wishes he'd packed more of, he's packed plenty of ammo.) "The scarecrow... That's..." Yeah, he remembers. That's the one that drinks brains. That's not horrifying at all. "Honestly - of all the things I'd be having to use this on first..." Rufus spreads his feet, ready to move if the horrible brain-sucking straw comes his way, and puts his left hand outward. The Enemy Skill materia, currently slotted in on his left arm bangle, shines brightly as he focuses his energy. |ENEMY SKILL - WHITENIGHT| "I feel relieved that it's for wiping out something like you!" Waves of pale, ego-shredding energy emanate from Rufus's outstretched palm. Anyone else fighting the Scarecrow should keep their distance from him. |
| Kukuru | After the battle with Lilian to secure... Something to help with Night Mist? Kukuru's mind isn't all there, and she doesn't really look all there physically nor emotionally, either. She barely even has it together enough to chuckle politely at Petra's jab at her and Parker, even though she's not exactly wrong about that. One arm, ending at the upper forearm. One arm, bandaged up all the way down with parts of it swollen or shriveled in ways that definitely aren't normal. "Soon... We'll have these fixed up soon. Just gotta..." She sighs and does't finish that thought. She's just too exhausted to try and be upbeat about it, although she does try her darndest to smile reassuringly despite her arms' condition. The rest of Kukuru isn't faring too well, either, with bandages all the way around to help supplement her stunted healing ability that's only recently recovered from washing off the rest of Rita's nightmare acid and having to physically dig deeper just to get it out of her system entirely. When things go dark, Kukuru can feel the gnawing doubts invading her heart even more than they already did yesterday. Was she wrong to let her guard down before fighting Lilian? If not for that lapse in judgment, would she have to face the death of someone she truly wants to save on her hands again? Or was this whole thing doomed from the start? Should she have minded her business all along, all that time ago? She hears the Third Trumpet sounding, and the containment cells all opening at once. Kukuru has half a mind to just pull her allies away to safety with another round of teleportation, but where could she even take them to in this facility? No, it's not time to escape. It's time to repress... Everything? Everything. Inhaling deeply as she considers just how many Abnormalities she's seen over The past two years and how many there are to handle now, it's almost overwhelming to think about how to tackle any of them next to any others, but... "Almost there. We'll.. Almost there. Okay. Let me know where you want to go. I'll get you there." There's hesitation in the way Kukuru teleports those who take her up on her offer to send them around. After feeling her energy drawn out of her with that talisman the other day, how could she not? Reminding herself who this is all for helps a lot. Once she's done ferrying everyone around, Kukuru heads for her own goal: EXTRACTION. There, she approaches the wounded Angela, sucking in a light breath at seeing her bleeding the way she is. Kukuru swallows lightly as she approaches her, fidgeting uncomfortably with her bandaged up but mostly-whole arm to dig around in her pockets and retrieve... A large bath towel, gripped loosely in a claw. "Hello-oo... It's been a while, hasn't it?" |
| Rita Ma | Rita's doing better. Rita's doing worse. Whatever she drained from half the Elites (and ate from Parker), it's brought her out of that dead-eyed slump. In the last few offscreen fights with Elites, she's been brighter, sharper, more herself. Being 'more herself' means she has more capacity to suffer, though. Even if not many words are being traded at this point, even if she's made it clear how far beyond being reasoned with she is, it's clear in the queasiness of her eyes. And it's still not enough. Her sizzling-glowy healing and luminous energy-blasts seem to be her most 'expensive' abilities in terms of hunger; she uses the former only when a wound threatens to seriously impair her, and the latter only to secure kills or get out of a dire pinch. Those dark veins linger, only slightly lightened. When the Tree of Light flickers out mid-fight, Rita whirls to look back at it with an expression of panic, vanishes, and leaves her former adversaries to deal with the incoming horde. In the halls, the Cycle slams into the tide of Abnormalities, faring poorly (which, for the ever-evolving Antegent, means faring well in the long term). But for now, the swarm of bugs (now mostly humanoid blade-limbed sprinters and hulking beetle-tanks) proves a weird ally to the Elites just trying to survive. Elsewhere: "Oh. Little bird. You smell familiar. Can I get you to follow me?" And elsewhere still, a few moments later: Ding. The elevator door opens in front of Nosferatu. A grisly monster with blown pupils stares right through him, smiling slightly; all polite-heiress in her demeanor. She looks at the little white bird on her shoulder, and speaks with her mind and her mouth at the same time. "That one. He's guilty. Please kill him." |
| Flamel Parsons | Pale shielding is so tremendously appreciated at this point, and it's integrated around every part of him, circulated into his body and psychically alloyed into his mind. It's helping deal with the occasional pale pulse, though almost nothing can prepare him for the Tree going dark. His sense of balance evaporates in a moment, as if things skewed suddenly. But unlike most, his ability to understand the absent sensation is a lot more acute. "Ghhh. I still can't believe we're just depriving everyone of..." He shakes his head. "That's just that, I guess." Then there's the Third Trumpet. That jolts him out of his mourning even more. His head snaps up, jerking around, and those telekinetic hands rush into being, gripping every surface tensely through the scream. A complete riot in all locales. Is all this just to keep Lilian and Rita away from the root of the Tree of Light? Or does the plan go even further? He grits his teeth. If Petra planned this out, then one way or another, she planned for him to try to contain the outbreak. She wouldn't have planned for anything else. So he needs to get to work. One of those big telekinetic hands snaps its fingers -- and then Flamel's gone, invisible. Scarecrow seems to be the type-advantage he ought to focus on. Tracking the psychic signatures among the horde is easier for him than for most, and this one's the one that fits his specialties most of all. A psychic vessel, and a brain-taker most of all? "Get *back* into your dang *cell*!" The levitating man intends to slam into the Scarecrow like a speeding bullet square in center mass, pin him to the ground, and plant a hand on his head, flooding his mind with thousands of different highly-concentrated concepts of wisdom. Anything the rake does, he'll power through, just for now, though undoubtedly it'll rip through layers of his barrier. Is wisdom a brain? Is wisdom a religious concept? Is wisdom a diploma? A certification? A video series? Is it a particular aura? A mentally-stimulating song? Something only wizards have? The product of an appropriately-groomed beard? Flamel blasts Scarecrow with so many competing psychic concepts of wisdom, at such massive concentration, that it's almost easy to confuse it for the simultaneous telekinetic slam that craters the ground near it while trying to snap the straw inside. "That goes for all the rest of you too!" He's shouting at the horde with the full force of the camp counselor tone. Astral projections and heavy psychokinetic bolts into the crowd of breaching abnormalities try to thin the weaker types out, and make sure he doesn't get surrounded. |
| UFO Gang | They are moving, in a sense, in the name of hope for a better future. For Angela, and perhaps for the entire world - for though the City might be in some sense saved, or at least eased, by the corpses and blood shed in this subterranean facility; though the City might somehow escape the karma of that, at least for a long long time; it would not, as it were, be perfected by so doing. The better future has not yet arrived. IN EXTRACTION: Minamitsu Murasa bounces off of a wall. It is less cute than it sounds. While airborne - whatever youkai tricks this cluster of weirdos have learned or been granted by their nature, they don't make you Superman - Minamitsu looks awful. She has, at some point, been *completely* caked in blood, which has spoiled the endearing look of her summer-themed sailor outfit. The ricochet leads to Minamitsu skidding out. She scrambles, pushing herself up to her elbows. Panting. She hoists her ladle, but her grip is shaking. As she stares at the scarecrow, several feelings struggle within her. Terror, of course, as that face looks in her general direction. Minamitsu has seen what the Scarecrow Searching for Wisdom does to people. She has a brain in her head, however questionably pickled. It wars with the frustrated and cthonic impulse, the underlying instinct that has been ground against steadily by the durance of the war inside of the facility. An urge to find a full ship and flip it. Minamitsu breathes heavily twice. Then -something- goes dark. She lets out a piteous cry. "No fair!" she manages to push out from a throat that feels like it's still drowning, struggling to get upright. She sweeps the ladle, but the resulting attack is no more than a thrown pint of water. Then salvation arrives. In the form of Rufus Shinra! Minamitsu goggles at him for a moment. Then at Flamel. And then she says, "What - what happened?" to a third figure -- who had just separated away from Kukuru and stepped off the ground. Shou! She's floating. Though her robes are ragged and there's a bad scrape over her right eye, she seems to be more or less as usual. Indeed, she's clutching a sheaf of print-outs in the same hand as her staff, the Jeweled Pagoda levitating. Shou looks back and forth from the Scarecrow to her papers and back again, before brightening at something. "Oh, of course," Shou says to Rufus as she levitate-floats a reasonable distance away, quickly reading the print out and then looking out at the Scarecrow. She's smiling, but it's not really a human smile. "You're hungry for wisdom, aren't you? Here you go" While it's not the light of the Tree, it *is* light that shoots out from around Shou - painfully intense light in some kind of ultraviolent spectrum, forming a single titanic burst towards the Scarecrow even as Minamitsu scrabbles to her feet and, gratefully and not-unreasonably, runs to get behind Shou, Rufus, and Flamel. "It's going to eat your brains!" Minamitsu tells the others, with a tone of direct personal witness. Two seconds pass. "Don't let it!" "Indeed," Shou concurs. "Your brain is one of the more important parts of your body! We shall surely recover yours, Minamitsu!" "no it wasn't" Minamitsu begins, before another huge shrieking ray of light attempts to make incisive yet balanced arguments against the Scarecrow. |
| Hibiki Tachibana | Hibiki, you'll know when it's time to use that last resort of yours. Yeah. Today has to be it. The loss of the Tree of Light hits harder than you think, like most things you take for granted after they become a lingering background presence. Having been around Petra plenty, it's not as if it's an alien sensation - but the edge of the steady state of misery the facility has been cast into is no longer taken off, and it means the only thing left to draw on is each other, and whatever inner resolve is left. Clinging onto that as hard as she possibly can is how Hibiki has made it this far. It's the only way to make it out of the other end of this as 'herself', too. She has to. There's somebody waiting for her. But she's tired. There's not a lot of periods in her life she can remember being this tired and so smothered. Those years all alone... the final campaign in Rita's world... but even comparing those to this, this is different. Even repeated healings from Kukuru have her body constantly teetering on its physical limit. Her mind is slow. So slow. Engaging in small talk with the others where she could is how she's been keeping it active. And her spirit... ...Well, Rita shaved some of that right off. As if it wasn't taking constant chip damage from being a complicit-through-inaction accomplice to Petra's half of the battle of war crimes. But when it's a choice between 'fighting for the future where the Sephirah and Angela die', or the opposite... there was never really a choice at all. The only thing to do is take the path straight ahead. ... "If it's just you guys in the way, you're not even anything to worry about--!" Literally. The Symphogear user bursts into a RECORDS hallway just in time to catch All Around Helper scouring the place clean by any means necessary, the loud roar made with wiild eyes intended to bolster her own morale just as much as it is to get the cleaning robot's attention. Crossing the distance at high speed, she rears her fist back, not slowing down even as a wall of flame blocks her way. She runs /through/ the heat just to get up close and personal with it, swinging forward to smash her fist into its frame with enough force that there's no doubt she's planning to send it all the way up towards the ceiling - and also bounce back off of it to come falling back down towards her, at which point she'll intercept it mid-fall, elbow it down into the floor-- --and then /stomp/ down onto it dead-center to try and crush it back into its egg form without wasting any time. She has to keep moving ahead. She can't let the horde slow her down. Without the ability to teleport around so easily on her own, she has to be ready to defend Architecture from anything, including Rita. Architecture. She has to get to the elevator and get further down. |
| Timespace Riders | Before the fighting begins, Woz makes a request of Sougo, taking the Demon King's hand into both of his own. "Sire, it is plain to see the toll the Sephirot armor takes on you. I have known you long enough to know that you will attempt to delay it, using the means at your disposal." A weak smile is shared between the two of them. Sougo was thinking of visiting the present as a future, more-rested but still battered version of himself, and they both know it. "I ask that you resist the temptation and allow me the larger share of the work today." Sougo takes a breath, and nods. "Okay." There's time enough for Woz to accompany Petra on what he first imagines is an errand, but comes to understand as something else--still very helpful. The two Kamen Riders regroup, and the Light goes out, in the midst of them both fighting; Woz in the brute-force, many armed Kikai armor, Zi-O in the knightly, symmetrical wristwatch-themed Zi-O II armor. As uniquely miserable a sensation as I could possibly imagine. Would that I never feel it again--and that those in the City will forgive me for what I have schemed in the scant moments of silence afforded to us. I'm so tired. I'm so tired of failing people. I'm so tired of almosts and if-onlys. I just have to make it through this, and I can tell myself it's the last time this happens. This is part of the plan. Right? Petra didn't tell us, but that has to be what it is. It *has* to. I can live with feeling this way, feeling the weight of everyone who's gone because of me, if that's what this is. If I just use that to get through this, to be better, then they're not gone for no reason. "Sire." A loud crack resounds as Woz's fist batters away a blow aimed at Zi-O. "There is no time to ruminate. Every Abnormality is free--which means we must choose our targets wisely to survive." "To survive..." a horde of Antegent spill out of a nearby elevator, and this snaps him out of the Darkness (the absence of Light) -induced grief. "Okay," he says, his helmet dipping in a nod. "Leave Nosferatu to Rita--" Which could also mean 'leave Rita to Nosferatu.' "--according to this book, the Scarecrow Searching for Wisdom is in Extraction. He is both dangerous to everyone present and vulnerable to physical harm." "Got it, let's go!" The way there isn't easy, but with the Kikai armor's four mechanical manipulators to simply grab obstructing anomalies and toss them aside, it's not nearly so difficult as it could be. Out of the elevator, Zi-O is stopped by one of Woz's human arms--just in time for waves of Pale energy to rush by. "We have your flank, Rufus," calls Woz, as the two exit. Zi-O covers Rufus with waves of explosive polychromatic energy, bounded by disembodied silver clock faces. They collide with the Scarecrow violently, knocking him around to keep him off balance for Rufus' Enemy Skill materia. Woz covers him from the rear, using the Kikai armor's mechanical manipulator arms to batter and knock aside any Abnormality that'd try to flank him. |
| Sarracenia | 'Surrender or die. That's all.' That is the last thing Sarra heard from Rita before being pulled away, barely alive. It took some time for Sarra to recover after that. Can nanites heal a soul? Sarra ends up sleeping wherever she lands after they get a chance to stop. Physically exhausted, mentally exhausted, and soul-drained...she has returned to the zombie she was after the first big battle against Lilian. Which only last until the Tree goes out. Then, the little comfort Sarra had is gone. She is starting to wonder if she really should surrender. She definitely does not want to die down here. And especially not right now. Either she would die and Petra would tell the entire Multiverse that Sarra had died a worthless loser who couldn't even help save a few Sephirah, or she would die and...there would be nothing left because Rita would absorb her or something. The Light disappears. As soon as it does, Sarra breaks down in tears from the loss of emotional support. Sarra doesn't even know what she is fighting for except to stay alive and some vague hope that the Light disappearing is due to Angela. And it also doesn't help that Sarra feels barely better than useless at this point. She's been easily beaten by both Lilian and Rita now. She can't heal people like Kukuru does. She can't use enemy skills like Rufus. She can't see into the mindscape like Flamel. She isn't powerful like Hibiki or Petra. She can't teleport people around like Xion. But, Sarra is here. And she is stubborn. She refuses to act useless or be useless. So, even if she isn't given specific instructions, she does what she can. She helps Rufus with splatting large groups of enemies if needed. She continues providing what food and water and sugary drinks she has left in her purse of holding. And perhaps most helpful and mentally fortifying for her...she is given a mic for the facility speakers. And whenever possible she makes sure that Lilian can hear her voice. If they are all going to suffer because of Lilian, then she is sure as heck going to make Lilian suffer! The princess's snobby, high-pitched voice goes out whenever she gets a spare moment. |
| Sarracenia | <"Hello Lilian~ It is sooooo nice to have a line to the speaker system! Do you not just looooove the sound of my voice? It is melodic, is it not? I know you love hearing it, so I am going to talk as muuuuch as I can!"> <"You are getting married soon, right? Oh! Am I invited to the wedding? Oh, I suppose you would not want my magnificence to show you up on the day of your wedding to someone much too good for you!"> <"So, Exigent Serenity said you were rooting for us in the hero simulation! I know you have denied it, but it was quite obvious you wanted us to win. Why, even your generals were cheering me on by the end! One even applauded by heroic spirit during our fight in the burning hot clockwork tower! Is it not amazing how heroic I am? Even now, trying to save the Sephirah -and- everyone in the City at the same time! While -you- 'heroically' torture all of us under the flimsy excuse that you are not killing us because we can be revived!>" Sarra tries to 'post' as best she can between skirmishes. But, sadly it comes to a halt the halls just become too full of dangers to ever really take a break. Since Parker and Kukuru are both missing an arm, Sarra decides to join in the Kukuru protection detail. Which brings her face to face with...Angela? Who loves her and needs her helps? Sarra is very skeptical of this, since Angela has literally tried to choke Sarra to death. "Um...yeah...I do not think you are Angela." she says as Kukuru...snaps a towel at her? Sarra blinks in surprise. "...what are you doing?" she asks, then huffs. "This is an Abnormality, right? Which one is it?" she asks as she pulls out a hammer turtle suit power-up and puts it on, then starts throwing household hammer-sized hammers. |
| Lilian Rook | Lilian's doing worse. Lilian's doing better. It was always going to be the former ways. If it was her versus five like this Elites, she'd have reached her limit yesterday. Her and Rita versus ten means she gets to spend today feeling it creep up on her. Her body requires less food than her enemies, but she's fighting ten times as much, and all she's eaten lately is fruit and spare chips. She's getting more sleep than them, but wakes up groggier and shorter on time each 'nap' she takes. Ammunition and explosives are critically low; she used up all her pre-ready runestones a day ago. She figures she must overestimated how much the average Elite is actually capable of feeling, because their maniacal surrender to pain and misery has somehow just about outlasted her entire stockpile. Despite coming away the victor over and over again, she doesn't have Kukuru to fix up the accumulated damage each time, and she's loath to ask from Rita more than the bare minimum. Despite her spat with Xion yesterday, her upward trajectory hasn't changed, however. She's thriving. Her clothes have been sewed up so many times by Rita that she's taken to altering spare uniforms from Disciplinary, and doesn't think anything of it. Petra's cigarettes are revolting, but she almost seems to be acting out a grizzled veteran habit for the enrichment of it now. She ends each fight bloodier and breathing more heavily than the last, and bathes it off in lukewarm water like she's pounding a beer after work. Little snatches of Hùg Air A' Bhonaid Mhòir and Cad é Sin Don Té Sin echo through the halls where she's been at work, and she hums to herself while making the rounds on finishing off downed Elites. Her distance from Xion is still frosty and awkward, but she's practically showing off on Hibiki and Kukuru, and has taken to the habit of vaguely sick-minded photos after killing Petra or Sarracenia; hopefully for study. It's as if the more strained Rita gets, the more Lilian is trying to buouy her up with newfound pep, even as she is plagued by constaint pain and shakes. That part doesn't change once the Tree of Light shuts off; which means it wasn't coming from the psychic beacon of wellness at all. Hm. Unfortunately, that is still a tremendous issue. The Instant Starvation Zone was just set up to imprison Kukuru in, after cursing all three teleporters with egregious backlash, and so Lilian was just riding the conflicted high that this could be the second to last fight of the whole skirmish. What the total shutdown means takes her a moment of pause to try and reason out. She was relying on the Sefirah to watch the enemy's (her friends) movements, so without an immediate notice, she has to start guessing how Angela's team could have 'snuck past' given the means available to them. Surely they haven't-- |
| Lilian Rook | §That's the signal. They've lost it and they're going to kill every Agent and Clerk in the facility. They'll probably try to kill both of us, too; for real. Leave the weaker Abnormalities to the battle line and aim for the strongest ones to turn against the others ASAP, Rita.§ There's obviously nothing at all that Lilian would do except head to Architecture as quickly as possible. She's also aware that someone by now would expect her to do that, and she is rather fucking sick of goofy little time-wasting surprises (anti-tank landmines). As such, she focuses on pushing back the frontline for long enough to let the Agents get organized; a mass breach had been an obvious sword of damocles for quite some time, so she's given them rough outlines of what she expects. Boosting morale early by charging down the line and hacking up Abnormalities as she goes is critical; pinging the locations of whatever she downs to Rita is merely tactical. As such, she arrives down the final elevator shaft significantly later, more out of breath, and rainbow paintsplattered than she could otherwise be. If nothing else, her 'want' has centered enough around 'no more fucking bombs' that she can precognitively walk around those now. §Remember. They need at least three days to win. In the worst case, all you have to do is keep gathering up Abnormalities until we can send the tide back at them.§ |
| Lilian Rook | 'Hello Lilian~ It is sooooo nice to have a line to the speaker system! Do you not just looooove the sound of my voice? It is melodic, is it not? I know you love hearing it, so I am going to talk as muuuuch as I can!' "Oh my. I thought Petra promised to remove you. I suppose she'll have to suffer the consequences of you still talking then." 'You are getting married soon, right? Oh! Am I invited to the wedding? Oh, I suppose you would not want my magnificence to show you up on the day of your wedding to someone much too good for you!' "Huh?" Lilian actually stops and blinks at a wall speaker for a second. "Obviously not? You hate my guts anyways, why are you getting leaky about it? I actually had to cut you off the Trídéag automatic invitation list because you've basically never once restrained yourself in five years. Obviously you don't bring an ill-behaved dog that will shit all over the tables even if it'd be cute to have him there, right?" 'While -you- 'heroically' torture all of us under the flimsy excuse that you are not killing us because we can be revived!' Lilian touches her knuckle under her chin thoughtfully as she walks. "I think I'm going to upload the surveillance videos of you crying like a bitch to the internet now. Oh, and a few photographs of your dead body for the freaks. I'll ask Petra for more ideas later." |
| Angela | EARLIER ''Will you walk with me?'' "Of course." But when Xion suggests that Lilian has given her a future and saved her life too, Angela allows a smile to crack upon her lips. "With the way you two were talking, I was worried I broke something important to me. I am glad that you recognize this. Yes. I know. She is giving me a chance." When she's alone with Xion, she can lean into the hug. After all, on that day when they invaded fought for Lilian together--it might as well be yesterday for her. This gives Xion all the credit she needs. She can't speak thanks to the White God--or any, except Tamamo or Persephone who feels close enough--nor has she known a kind world in her life. Even the sweetest of worlds have been cruelly distant. She takes the key. "A tool for opening doors. I'll hold it close to my heart, Xion." It is maybe the second best gift hse could receive next to the open door Xion already provided. She steps inside without another word, but with one (1) nod. Kukuru approaches Angela! And well, Angela stands up and says, "Kukuru! " happily. "I love you!" It immediately is going to try to loving eat Kukuru because they learned this is not something that stops Kukuru. It hurts, but maybe... Kukuru can convince it to help since it remembers her? (Yeah of course it's Nothing There). Of course, Sarracenia then bonks it on the hammer and it sense a fleshy spear of an arm to try and impale Sarracenia since that hurt! Nosferatu is asked a quesiton and he answers, "I must return to my kingdom. My Family awaits." You can hear the capital in Family. "They must have been so very lonely." He is smart enough to leave it at that and he is so concerned with escape he doesn't worry about THE MEDALLION. But he has another issue to deal with. Unexpectedly one, even, since he doesn't seem to understand why Rita and her small bird want to get in his way. In fact, at first he doesn't seem to realize it--assuming something not entirely wrong about Rita but definitely off the mark. He bows his head politely. "My dear lady, what Family are you Elder to?" But then she asks for his death! Caught off guard, Nosferatu leaps away to the side but Punishing BIrd's jaws still rip off his left arm in a spray of blood that wraps around the Bird, strangling it's crushed. "...No, you are not of The Family. Even an Elder would not deign to attack me directly..." He murmurs. "Pity. I can smell the iron around your fangs." A spear of blood lashes out and tries to stab through Rita's chest. Meanwhile, Hibiki is leagues above what an All Around Helper can do. She easily hefts it up, slams it down, and stomps down upon it. It's going to spew some fire at her before it goes down but the problem today isn't one Abnormality (except maybe Nosferatu) but the swarm of them. Eventually they'll reach the Agents who are, naturally, not doing well right now. As bad as the sudden loss of Light is for everyone else, it hits them twice as hard. So it's definitely a peachy keen jellybean idea to go after the Abnormality that will just devour trhe brains of those with weakened wills but despite going after those with weakened sense of self, it also prefers to snack on BIG BRAINS. And, you know, it doesn't realize Flamel is a rock right now and he seems both pretty fucked up and pretty smart. So when Flamel crashes into him, the Scarecrow immediately retaliates by trying to bite off his head! Flamel probably doesn't want his head bitten off but, you know, at least he's not trying to get Flamel to sneeze his brain out that just seems gross. |
| Angela | But The Scarecrow is knocked away from Flamel, brain or no brain, shortly after, it lashes out with its rake at Zi-O, who is closer and actively aggressin, flailing its limbs around like any proper toku monster that is now partially on fire because of clocksplosions. An energy blast from Shou comes crashing down and the Abnormality positively SCREAMS as it attempts to launch its giant weird straw mouth at Shou and eat HER brain too! But it will probably only get a bit of a nibble at best because shortly after, Rufus unleashes the Pale Damage from the most dangerous Abnormality that has existed in the facility. The Scarecrow shrieks more before collapsing onto its knees and rapidly transforming into its egg-state NEXT UP *NOSFERATU. STill a problem! And will probably be for the duration of this fight. But for everyone else... *In Extraction, A butterfly-headed humanoid abomination with coffin on its back is pointing its finger at Agents and shooting them! And is heading closer to you! Funeral of Dead Butterflies primarily attacks with WHITE and BLACK damage so mental resilience and physical resilience is bound to be most useful here. Plus the abiltty to dodge the 'faster than bullets' gunshots exploding out of his hands. * In Records, The Snoe Queen has left her cell and is demanding a duel. She raises her blade up even as the area around her starts to freeze... * In EXTRACTION, Rudolta of the Sleigh is also charging around trying to gather up chunks of flesh to turn into christmas presents. Someone has to doom Christmas and stop .... it? In February. Who is willing to doom Christmas for all the awful monsters in the world? *And finally, in Records, Happy Teddy Bear has also left its cell and is going around hugging people. This is good! If you like being crushed into paste. Only more and more Abnormalities are going to be coming out of the woodworks. ALL the cells are open after all! |
| Rita Ma | "My family is 'humanity'. That's all," says the least-human-looking girl in the facility. She rubs the back of her neck, stretching the muscles as her tentacles start to array themselves point-first towards him. The adorable bird's death doesn't get a glance. Tearing her eyes away from the delicious orb of blood that Nosferatu's levitating, she crouches- twists around the spear with an uncanny alacrity mid-lunge- and, when Nosferatu inevitably catches her out of the air with a follow-up attack, she unravels into a decoy-tentacle. "Now." Just as the real Rita re-materializes behind him, shedding her cloaked-chromatophore wrappings, a flood of Cycle antegent bursts through a side-door and tries to slam Nosferatu against the wall under their collective bulk. Crunch, cr-rrk, ulk. His bird-severed arm's gone, just like that, and Rita's trying to impale him through the back while he staggers. ... But that puts her own back to Xion, inevitably. Rita-of-the-bloodstained-lips glances back at the Nobody with a quarter of her attention, warning. A silent throat-clogged 'don't you dare'. §Leave the weaker Abnormalities to the battle line and aim for the strongest ones to turn against the others ASAP, Rita.§ "Got it, Ms. Rook. I'm eating something here to get my energy up- it has enough I can start healing people again. I think it's a Blood Fiend. Then I'll move to the ones you've tagged." |
| Xion | Xion, moving from a distance behind Nosferatu, advances in the deepened dark of the facility. The scent is lurid and clear, the faint metallic-sweet of blood, and Nosferatu brings it about himself in a haze. She can sense the hunger, clearly, the red light of desire that and in the seeking, before she gets her full wits about her in the dark, stumbles forward into that red light and reaches with an empty hand. A diversion of blood, the last trail from nearby, snatches into black glove rather than Blood Fiend's grasp, and transmutes to a dark lipstick stain red-black medallion. Catching the thing, dazedly looking at it, Xion is distracted from the faint 'ding!' of the elevator. Expecting one of her allies, and seeing Rita there, Xion is transfixed a second time, hand closing around the new medallion in grip. Yellow light eyes shift from Rita to Nosferatu and back, the Nobody plainly doing her option math. The thought of leaving Architecture now, giving Rita everything she wants and slipping around her. . . Is put on pause. There's a separate problem in Nosferatu. Xion's medallion-tumbling palm starts rolling through several options as physical fidgets. Petra's glass would send a message to use here, even if it was useful. She was really thirsty. This Abnormality in front of her... However sweet to drink they'd seem, they'd be resistant and better than her at it, which left the reliable tool that she wouldn't swing at Lilian: hate. Her faithful side-arm, the first emotion she ever knew completely. And oh, how much hate she had stored up fit to light a bonfire. 'Help me or run. If you help a blood-draining monster escape just to starve me, that's messed up.' 'To deny someone I'd rather not deny, I sent upon the world a hungry monster.' Contemplates Xion, behind her mask, and then must discard with the straightening of back and the ready-flourish of star-toothed keyblade. "That would be messed up." She agrees, parch-throated. Unloading her griefs now wouldn't mean anything. Standing her ground and fighting like Petra... would kill her from nausea, either from challenging Rita and becoming too sloppy or by Nosferatu being unwilling to accept her odd third partying for no reason. That was that. What was this? Swinging up Starlight, Xion plunges it down in-and-through the floor, an black crack breaking in the floor that's clearly magical and gouting with black flames. A pin-rise arrangement of simplified black arrows or spikes crawl across the ground, seeking Nosferatu. When they get close, thick black spearpoints of magic erupt, blacklight rises limned in differentiated-suggested blazes. The eruption leaves behind scattering of black spears in the dark, which Xion uses as she advances, dragging Starlight from the ground and a one of Jeanne d'Arc's black magic spears from the avenging ground to swing into a lance of blood aimed at her. Justifying it, 'oh, so this one has to go?' is on her mind, but not her tongue. She was just third partying this fight for now, but could fight much more viciously than against her friends or fragile-new hopes. |
| Flamel Parsons | Wisdom is stored in the head. That, at least, should deal with Flamel, shouldn't it? But it seems not. The snapping jaws find nothing, because Flamel's hands grapple it open painfully... And he vanishes, pulling off of it, and getting distance before the pale pulse strikes. There's the egg. And Flamel, frantic, but unscratched, and still possessing a head. "Everyone got their brains?" He checks with a quick psychic pulse. "Good. Breaking off for that marksman." Minamitsu's question gets a quick, bright response. "Scorched earth!" He says. "Don't get caught in the flames -- for once, we all *have to be* on the right side." Another snap of those psychic fingers. Flamel's invisible again. The telekinetic hands aren't yanking him around this time. In this battle, what he wants to do and what he has to do are lined up. The tool is just as much a part of the personhood. Maybe that's why he was okay against the Scarecrow? Regardless, the next time he shows up... He flickers into view, and delivers blast after blast from his own hand-gun, one set of fingers planted on a temple and the other acting as the firearm. Then, snap, vanish, moving behind cover hopefully before the Funeral manages to get a bead. He can flank rapidly, peppering it with high-caliber mental munitions in a running gunfight that takes advantage of Flamel's decent psychic and physical endurance, and *massive* psychic offensive capacity. In at least one rush, he closes to short range, and even engages the suited foe in a kind of high-intensity gun-fu battle, telekinetic hands grappling with multi-armed hands in a high-stakes conflict of who can point where first, and who can rip their foe apart most where they do. |
| Kukuru | "What - what happened?" "A whole bunch... bUt this is almost like how it was waaaay back when." Kukuru semi-answers Minamitsu, letting out a nostalgic little sigh at the almost familiar chaos in the otherwise unprecedented situation. "I almost... No. Not wishing for that, even if it didn't hurt so much back then. And..." Kukuru swallows lightly as she keeps approaching 'Angela', pausing to smile wearily at the youkai. "Thank you for coming. And... Sorry you had to see me like this." She truly is grateful, too, and not just to them. Knowing that the Scarecrow is being handled by Rufus, Flamel, Sougo, and Woz helps ease her mind somewhat as she stops right in front of 'Angela' with Sarracenia at her side. She knows this isn't Angela, of course, but hearing it saying all that with Angela's voice still puts some warmth into Kukuru's heart regardless. She even giggles softly at Nothing There trying to eat her as she holds her arm up to keep it from fully devouring her head, although thepain does remind her that her regeneration still isn't at 100% just yet. She actually needs to be careful not to let it eat too much, even as she shows it the same affection that had probably caused so many problems for everyone in the facility before. "Therey... Oh. Sarra, this is Nothing THere. It's an Abnormality that can... Look like other people. Act like them, too, and..." she winces slightly at her arm starting to bleed again, but it's fine. That part healed back really incorrectly, anyway. Maybe she can get it back to normal once that part's off, although it really really hurts. "... Learns from them. It caused a lot of trouble for everyone a long while ago because of what I did, but..." Sending some nanites over to Sarracenia to help mitigate that mild spearing as though it was just a dog nipping at her rather than a full blown spearing, she reaches up towards Nothing There's face to pat it softly with the towel. Right now, her arm (with a hand still on it) might even look closer to one of Nothing There's earlier attempts at one. "Have you been learning more about people, dear? You look just like Angie now, so..." She feels a lump in her throat. "... I need your help. I can't move around as fast I usually do." Just teleporting once had her reeling in pain, but she'll live. She just needs to save the rest for when it's really necessary. "Do you remember when I taught you not to eat good people, only bad ones?" She presses her forehead against Nothing There's, rubbing them together lightly while trying to keep her tone calm, even while the pain in her arm gets more intense. "A lot of Abnormalities are going around... Being very bad. I need your help protecting the humans here, even though... It's going to hurt. The humans might try to hurt you, too, but I... I need you to help them, anyway. They're not bad, just... A little clueless." Kukuru swallows again, then puts her arm around Nothing There in a hug that definitely isn't as painful as the one it's giving her. "And after everything's over... I'll take you somewhere you can eat anyone you'd like. Can you... Can you do this for me, Therey?" She asks while holding the lump in her throat back, unsure of whether or not she's lying to Nothing There, or if she'll ever even see it again after all this is over. She still hates herself for asking this of the Abnormality. |
| Rufus Shinra | > "Hello Lilian~ It is sooooo nice to have a line to the speaker system!" "Maybe it was less of a warcrime to have Petra blaring noise from the speakers," says Rufus, glancing up at the ceiling. He doesn't mean this, but jokes and quips help right now. > "We have your flank, Rufus," "Thanks Woz! I'll pay it forward!" Rufus's Enemy Skill materia shines brightly. Another enemy skill learned! No time for checking on that, though. Save the menuing for once the fight's over. Onward! Again! Rufus moves. Pale damage should work against most things, right? So there's not as much focus on choicy target acquisition, instead just going to go and hit whatever's next in his way. And honestly, just taking down whatever's next closest feels better than choosing who to blast with WhiteNight. There's less... personal responsibility in the matter. "... The scarecrow is fine, it's awful, but I'm going to feel really bad about whatever I have to use this on next... Please be something monstrous or horrible. Something everyone wants to see gone." And next is... Rudolta. Rufus stops as he enters the hallway, and stares... Can he really use the warcrime spell on Christmas, of all things? --- "Hi Miss Secretary! Is daddy coming home for Christmas?" "Oh, I'm sorry, little guy. Your daddy's really busy. He'll be back for New Years, though, okay?" --- "Hey. Is dad coming back home?" "Now Rufus, you know there's a war going on. Your dad's very busy going around making sure everyone has weapons. He's kinda like santa, you should be proud, you know?" --- "Oh, this one's from father. And - he sent... cash." "Isn't that great? Instead of getting you the wrong toy again, you can go shopping for your own present." --- "A visitor! Oh, it's - you're his new secretary, right? Is President Shinra coming to visit? I mean it's Christmas and all and I'm kinda stuck here with this cast on, I can't exactly go see him." "No, I'm afraid he can't make it, but he did ask me to send you this nice card." "Well, that's something at least... 'Dear Rufus, sorry about the snowboarding accident. I love you and I hope you get well soon.' Oh - he didn't sign it." "Oh! I forgot to forge - I mean, he must have forgotten. He's very busy, you know." --- |ENEMY SKILL - WHITENIGHT| |ENEMY SKILL - WHITENIGHT| |ENEMY SKILL - WHITENIGHT| |ENEMY SKILL - WHITENIGHT| |
| Timespace Riders | Zi-O is exhausted and sluggish; the only reason he can even fight is because of his promise to Woz not to use the Sephirot armor. In an up-close engagement with the Scarecrow, he takes several blows from the wild flailing, and another from the rake. The last draws up a spray of sparks and flings him to the ground, only to be helped up by one of Woz's mechanical arms. <J-IC-Scene> Rufus Shinra says, "Right! Right. Thanks for the flank. This is working so far." "So far," says Woz. "Pray that Petra uses her talents--natural and procured--to their fullest extent, and that Rita is prevented from taking her fill of the Abnormalities." <J-IC-Scene> Flamel Parsons grunts in effort. "Scarecrow down. I'm feeling psychic marksmanship -- going after that." <J-IC-Scene> Woz says, "We shall assist you." ARMOR TIME! Start Your Engine! DRIVE! Future Time! Dare Ja? Ore Ja! NINJA! Futurering Shinobi! SHINOBI! A spread of rapid-fire explosive shuriken zip down the department to collide with the Butterfly, coordinated to strike from the opposite side of Flamel. Zi-O's high speed pursuit involves not chasing down the Butterfly itself, but placing himself in between the Abnormality and the agents it's attempting to pray on. With a greatsword resembling two hands of a watch in alignment, he deflects the bullets at high speed. They strike the flat of the sword in rapid flashes, as the now racing red-and-white colored Kamen Rider darts between would be agents at blistering speed. The tires on his boots squeal as he drifts a tight circle around the Abnormality, the greatsword moving so quickly that its form flickers like the rotor of a helicopter. You're just a story. So maybe you can't really know how awful what you're doing is, beyond the part it plays *in* that story. But I'm not going to let you tell it uninterrupted. |
| Hibiki Tachibana | A little bit of fire is nothing at all. Getting repeatedly killed over and over again by Lilian does wonders for your pain tolerance to anything that's not intentionally made to make you suffer as much as possible before you go out, after a point. A bit of fire to the everything is barely even something she can register right now. But Agents are another story. They're out here, once again, caught in the middle of the power struggle between everybody else. The frontline wherever Rita and Lilian can't afford to be. The ones most at risk of injury or death from all of this. Even if Kukuru can go through pains to bring them all back after all of this is over, that's not something that can be relied on, with how crazy some Abnormalities' abilities can get. And moreover, it doesn't feel right at all. She doesn't care what side they're on. Hibiki is used to fighting the Noise, and the Noise don't come in insignificant numbers when they do. Some of that experience just so happens to translate here - to pummeling her way into a new hallway because the doorways don't open fast enough for her, then transitioning straight into pummeling through any horde that happens to still be in her immediate path. But... ...the time to give everything she has. Can she really wait for that, when there's this much chaos? Petra's last resort plan might be working a little too well. Or... ...no. She doesn't need that to just push back against the tide. When the time comes... don't think about that. Fight. Fight. And fight harder, to make it to the other end of this. ... "HAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!" Right as the Happy Teddy Bear goes to seize the next friend it wants only to love, but can't help but crush, there comes Hibiki yet again; she's already tearing her way through Records by force on her warpath for Architecture, and she's trying to take out every Abnormality she physically can while doing it. Things like this poor abandoned toy won't slow Rita or Lilian down at all. But they're a threat to the Agents. Which is why she interrupts with a lunging punch to its fluffy torso, backed up by a barrage of further strikes from fist, elbows, knees, and legs to keep forcing it backwards. Of course, raw blunt impacts into a stuffed animal don't tend to be very effective in taking them out. The moment she realizes that... ...she slides to a stop, straightens up, and pushes forward into its hug on purpose. "I don't have a lot of time... but I'll stay with you for as long as... it takes you to get back to your cell...! So--!" She says that, but she's really not planning to stick around for long. The Teddy Bear will of course hug her, and she'll hug back. And squeeze. And squeeze. And squeeze. And squeeze, hefting the larger Abnormality off its feet entirely. Until it gets an unfortunate, stuffing-scattering taste of its own medicine and is forcefully sent back to its cell in the process. Maybe it'll even stay there, after that. |
| Petra Soroka | When Lilian steps out of the elevator into Architecture, of course the one standing between her and the locked door to the base of the Tree of Light would be Petra. Wearing the Fourth Match Flame EGO suit with the matching sword in her hand and the charcoal of the driftwood girl beside her, she's also equipped herself with things Lilian's never seen or even heard of: matched on the opposite side of her chest underneath her scorched motorcycle jacket is a swollen heart that beats offtempo with her own, and a glowing bracelet with an inset crystal worn on her wrist. She paces frenetically, preferring to dodge Abnormalities rather than send them back to their cells, ducking around pink flower petals that float through the air like they're bullets. Obviously, with the way she set it up, the hope was to keep Rita occupied with the combination of a dozen Elites and a thousand Abnormalities, because with that utterly unfeasible level of opposition, it *is* possible to keep Rita in place. It's not, no matter what, for Lilian. The danger alerts her to her arrival before anything else needs to. "Oh my. I thought Petra promised to remove you." "She took it out of my room! She did!" Petra immediately protests, plucking the cigarette out of her mouth to gesture. It's sort of feeble, but the mood she's in doesn't let her just *ignore* having let Lilian down in some tiny way, even while she's drawing her sword to fight her. "I took it from her, but I didn't actually say anything to her about it because I forgot that she understands human speech, so she must've just sniffed it out again. Sorry." She takes a breath in, then repeats, more seriously. "Sorry. I guess even the Sephirah had the dignity to not release *every* Abnormality at once. Well--" She makes a sour face. "Except Binah that one time, I guess." "But, like I said at the start of all of this, I know the facility better than you, since it was basically my home for, over a year. And I'll burn it to the ground to give Angela just a one percent better chance. So, I'm stopping you here." Petra drags her Fourth Match Flame against the ground, biting into the smooth marble of the Architecture floor to scrape and spark to life like a match. The din of clattering limbs and scraping metal, roars and screams, from the single worst breach to ever happen in Lobotomy Corporation melds into a sea of motion and noise, everything so chaotically different from each other and moving so violently that it's hard to assess the threats properly in Lilian's periphery. That metal box tottering around on stilted legs could be Schadenfreude or it could be Singing Machine, the sweet smell in the air could be passively from one of the dozen colorful Abnormalities swarming around, or it could be the sign of an impending attack, and there were Abnormalities that were invisible or hidden too, weren't there? Petra drops her cigarette and, habitually, cuts it in half as it falls. Then, |
| Petra Soroka | -----stop----- As much as Petra prioritized wasting Lilian's time, the only point she used any herself in the last week was to serve Lilian a meal and make the world burn to touch. Now she's not doing either, expending everything she has left to keep Lilian away from the door behind her. Her sword leaves streaks of thick frozen smoke in the air as she swings it towards Lilian, but the advantage of stopped time in a duel between the two of them is nearly negated-- it's only the outside world that's forced to stop, but it's the frozen world that Petra means to use against her. When her opening strike is inevitably caught on Night Mist, Petra suddenly lunges her weight forwards to turn it into a body slam instead, assisted by a tide of Silver that hits her like a bus. Shoving Lilian backwards puts her right into the path of-- -----start----- --Schadenfreude, who Petra had been staring at over Lilian's shoulder for the entire time she was monologuing. The enraged iron box charges into her on metal spiderlike legs, fleshy eye peering out of the shadow of its keyhole. Petra leapt on top of it before the buzzsaws come out to swing at Lilian, positioned standing on top so that she can look down at both the perverse camera lens on Schadenfreude and Lilian at the same time. "And I'll just feel bad about it *later*." |
| UFO Gang | A brain, in some ways, is a liability. But then why do they keep forming? Because the brain is a seat of POWER. Shou has at least the limited warning of Minamitsu's explanation as well as her printout of abnormality data. (This printout is immediately thrown aside because Shou is raising up her iron staff to parry -- or at least block -- the teeth and mouth and suctioning probe flying towards her. They can just print another, right? Are the printers broken?) This means the probe hits the iron - Skids along it -- And slurps a huge bolt of SOMETHING red out of Shou's arm! This seems to consternate her, but the problem is soon handled. The strange pale energy hurls itself towards the Scarecrow, and after this, Shou's swerve to the left turns into a pause - she reorients herself, sinking down to almost-touching-the-ground to look at Rufus. "That is a perilous power you've mastered, Mr. Shinra," Shou says. Behind her, Minamitsu takes advantage of the momentary lull to splash herself with water and rip off some of the grue and gore affixed to her. Shaking out her hair, which is at least ninety-percent free of... well, it's a good question WHAT coated Minamitsu in gore, but it's not a single-answer question, either. Shou rubs her wrist as they move forwards. During this time, she tells Flamel, "Don't worry, I'm not scared of the heat!" After which she too looks pensive, perhaps thoughtful. Was there a second meaning there? Or is she simply tired? And then they are faced... "Wow!" says Minamitsu, who drowned during the Heian era of Japanese history, when Jesus was reliably around the bottom half of the Top 20 Guys We Worship charts of western China. "I think you got your wish," she tells Rufus. "This thing... yegh! It's like... a cart, made... ugh!" Shou, who *does* know what Christmas is, gazes at the creature and frowns... and perhaps tellingly, she keeps rubbing her arm instead of commanding another ray of light out of the Pagoda. Maybe it's harder with an injured arm? Maybe it's some subtle effect? "I'll box 'em in for you," Minamitsu says, jogging a few steps before hopping and, on the second time, managing to take flight again, her ladle swinging back to hurl a curving barrage of inward-crashing water-bullets at Rudolta! |
| Sarracenia | 'Oh my. I thought Petra promised to remove you. I suppose she'll have to suffer the consequences of you still talking then.' "Remove me? She liked this idea so much it made her laughed in delight and made sure I had a mic!" Sarra says proudly. 'You hate my guts anyways, why are you getting leaky about it? I actually had to cut you off the Trídéag automatic invitation list because you've basically never once restrained yourself in five years. Obviously you don't bring an ill-behaved dog that will shit all over the tables even if it'd be cute to have him there, right?' "It is a -WEDDING-! Weddings are sacred! I kept your secret, did I not?! The only reason I might lose my temper at such an event is if -you- were your usual uncouth self and poked and prodded me to the breaking point! In front of your bride! On your special day! Most unbecoming of a knight and...wait, are you both brides in that wedding?" 'I think I'm going to upload the surveillance videos of you crying like a bitch to the internet now. Oh, and a few photographs of your dead body for the freaks.' Sarra hmphs. "That would only tarnish your reputation, not mine. People already think little of me. What would it do to your reputation to post such tasteless videos like some kind of psychopath?" Sarra gets speared yet again by a tentacle, but Kukuru heals her up pretty quickly and starts...talking kindly to the Abnormality? Sarra holds off on attacking, now back in her normal dress. "...Therey...?" she says quietly. Since Kukuru isn't asking for help -against- it, Sarra doesn't keep attacking Therey. "Okay but Kukuru...you cannot let it eat you just because you are fond of Therey." Asking Therey to go help people seems like a fine idea to Sarra, so she just leaves Therey to Kukuru and turns her attention to... Rudolta? Gathering up flesh seems...harmless? Why would she stop a gross monster from cleaning things up? But, when it becomes clear it will gather -any- flesh it can, Sarra steps in. "Okay, that is enough of that nastiness. I am afraid Christmas was a few months ago! And...no one wants that as a gift, anyway! Well, except maybe..." Rita, but she doesn't say that. Instead, Sarra pulls out a pair of fire flowers. She uses one to give herself fire colors, then while firing fire balls with that power she uses the other as a flamethrower. |
| Angela | ''My family is humanity, that's all.'' Nosferatu's eyes narrow. "I see... The very humans that oppress people like us. You're just like him. If you were truly of our Family, I would rage at you for going against the Flow. But if you think I would simply submit because you are the Queen of Humanity--" The Antegent smashes Nosferatu into the wall but as Rita chows down through Nosferatu's arm, she doesn't feel that sense that she can command him. Behind his will is the force of his Family, all augmenting his mental defenses, rendering him as difficult to control as any Queen. And it's in the blood that Rita tastes. That desire for more. More blood. MORE BLOOD. WE ARE SO THIRSTY. WE ARE SO THIRSTY. PLEASE MOTHER, FEED US. FEED US, MOTHER, LET US FEED. WE'RE SO HUNGRY... IT HURTS... IT HURTS SO MUCH... WE'RE STARVING... SAVE US... That sensation seems to be a bit confused because those words are clearly meant for Nosferatu, right? It isn't just for himself that he must feed, after all. Even now, he has an obligation to his own Family. And to fulfil it, he must return to them. Even if they don't want him to. He transforms into a cloud of one-eyed blood bats before reforming in the air, though the bloodbats remain and throw themselves at Rita, trying to nibble around her. He is trying to understand something about Rita but needs more information. Perhaps a bite of his own will help but she's slippery, so he shifts to the defensive to let the swarm bother Rita while he turns his attention to escape-- --or Xion herself. Nosferatu attempts to draw the lance of blood's, well, blood towards her and absorb the delicious nectar for himself, but he can't do that with the black flame which engulfs him. Nosferatu fans out his cape, dispelling the flames from his body, but he's clearly unaccustomed to this level of assault. The blood from the giant orb of it he's carrying is diverted into himself, restoring his arm and a crackling red mask of blood appears around his right eye, numerous eyes further sprouting out from that. Seems like he's finally playing for keeps (noncoded). "I see. Very well then--" He flickersteps towards Xion, a series of blood red spears erupting out from his body as he aims to bare down and CHOMP her as vampires do. "I am here to be the savior of this place." The Funeral of Dead Butterflies tells Flamel as they grapple. "I am here to grant them their escape..." Flamel gets a few shots in even as the Funeral gets some retaliatory strikes in. "I may be just a story, but I am freedom." But Dead Butterflies can barely spare a hand to pop a shot off at Sougo, but he's able to get a solid swipe through the Abnormality with his great sword, stunning the creature long enough to blast its head apart with his finger. "...I see...you'll write your own story... please...save those lost souls..." The Funeral of Dead Butterflies transforms into its egg state soon enough. Hibiki unleashes a flurry of punches and kicks into the Happy Teddy Bear. But the problem is that Teddy Bears are made to be thrown around a little and punched sometimes. It's like punching an actual teddy bear when you were a kid! It's tougher than you think even with its stuffing sticking out a bit! But Hibiki can hug back. And it tries to hug Hibiki. This is a dream come true for the Happy Teddy Bear--so much so that it doesn't even realize that Hibiki's hugs are a little more powerful than its own and it rips in half--rapidly turning into Egg afterwards. It dies happy. |
| Angela | ''Have you been learning more about people, dear?'' "I have!" 'Angela' says, slowly transforming to look like Sarracenia. 'Sarracenia' then says, "Yeah I remember! ... Do you want a piggy back ride??" Nothing There doesn't wait. HUPP! There Kukuru goes, on top of Nothing There's shoulders. This is good! It means it's no longer eating Kukuru! But it's going to need some direction. "Where do you wanna go?" Nothing There asks but immediately starts running around in circles until Kukuru points out a direction. Sarracenia rushes off to doom Christmas with Rufus and Shou. 'Therey' doesn't seem interested in chasing since Sarracenia is leaving. It's okay, she can do this because she's a princess. But Christmas won't go down without a fight. Rudolta's sleigh immediately attempts to crash into Sarracenia, Rufus, and Shou both with its sleigh but the worst part is probably the smell emitting from the bag of flesh and guts and the like. Rita prefers her flesh to come from the living it's okay. The fire seems effective but definitely is making the smell worse. Fortunately, Minamatsu has some water that douses Rudolta and puts out the flame while still piercing its body with helpful bullets! It's on its last legs...! Rufus, meanwhile, flashes back to a life of awful Christmases. Does this explain anything about the Rufus of today? ... Yeah don't worry about that. Rudolta of the Sleigh evaporates into Egg after a few uses of White Night's skill. Please don't power copy Rudolta of the Sleigh I'm begging you out of character here and i'm serious i'm begging you don't want to power copy him I swear I'm sorry. It won't be bothering anyone else today. MEANWHILE NEW PROBLEMS *King of Greed has busted into Records, "HA HA HA! Finally Angela, you're finally acting on your desire!! I suppose I oughta get rid of the distractions still holding you back, just to be safe...!" She punches her fist into her palm excitedly. "Isn't that right... Oh Wrath?" "Yes..." The abomination with hammers for hands and acid spewing out of her mouth says. "Before the inevitable betrayal, we must remove them...!" They don't seem to be feeling too picky about who they go after right now! This is two Abnormalities in one spot! Yikes! * Meanwhile in Extraction, a battle between Red Hooded Mercenary and Big And WIll Be Bad Wolf has interrupted with agents (and Elites) in the crossfire! While they are dancing around with each other, trying to kill each other first and foremost, they are clearly not paying attention to where they're aiming and it's causing problems for everyone. |
| Lilian Rook | 'Remove me? She liked this idea so much it made her laughed in delight and made sure I had a mic!' "And yet, it's a fact she did." says Lilian. "I'll have to remember that." 'The only reason I might lose my temper at such an event is if -you- were your usual uncouth self and poked and prodded me to the breaking point!' "So, you would lose your temper." Lilian falls to near-droning. "'Only if it's your fault first' okay but I don't care. You just admitted there's a condition on which you'd ruin everything, so it's obvious I wouldn't want that at my own wedding, right?" 'Most unbecoming of a knight and...wait, are you both brides in that wedding?' Lilian looks down herself incredulously. "Do I look like a groom to you?" she shoots back, rhetorically. 'That would only tarnish your reputation, not mine. People already think little of me.' "It's been said a few times along this long road that 'You can turn back time, but you can't turn back a tale'. Did you ever stop to think what that means?" says Lilian, in the last few idle moments she has. "It means that no matter how many times Kukuru puts you back together, the fact that I tore you apart is still real. You still have to live with the fact that you curled up in a dark corner and sobbed in terror of it. It'll hang over both our heads even after we leave here; the mutual knowledge of what we've done and where we stand will influence everything from now on even if you try your very hardest to pretend otherwise." "So, basically, it doesn't matter what the consequences are to me; those don't change what happens to you in any way. Whether or not I regret it, the footage and the images are out there, people will do what they want with them, and what they think of you will forever be different. And you'll just have to live with it, so . . ." Lilian contemplates for just a second. "I'm serious. Get off the comm, or I'll mind control you into stripping on camera, then mind control you into uploading it alongside everything else, under your own name, as a desperate attempt at getting attention before you turn thirty. Everyone will believe it, and not you." "Does that register? Is my intent getting through to you? You know I don't tell arbitrary lies, don't you? Whether or not you're right or wrong, you can't undo it; so ask yourself: is it worth it?" It's hard to tell whether Lilian sounds much more like Petra, or whether she just sounds like a much more worldly and human-like Exis. 'She took it out of my room! She did!' And now it's Petra. Lilian sighs with the weight of confronting exactly what she was dreading. Her mind drifts to how much her stomach hurts, and wonders idly if she would even throw up if she tried. "I believe you, but I also believe I was abundantly clear what my stance on ganging up with Sundew was." she says. "I'll thank you for saving Angela after this, but I don't think I'll be able to look at you again. That is, if you can do it." |
| Flamel Parsons | Flamel takes a brutal shot to the torso, ripping layers out of his psychic barrier and some of his mental health, in order to really take advantage of Sougo's momentary stun and plant two high-caliber digits up against the base of that butterfly-head. Click. He pants heavily, holding the wound... and replies, "I've had too much of cutting the path of least resistance through the suffering. I know why you do it. And I know why you're right to." He hisses the pain through his teeth. "But I'll do my best. Even if my choice is wrong." A grateful nod to Zi-O as the foe retreats into the lower form. He stumbles to one knee, jamming two fingers against his temple to get on the radio... <J-IC-Scene> Flamel Parsons exhales hard, hissing between clenched teeth. "Marksman down. Ghhh. Moving to..." Long pause. "Not them. Moving to Red and the Wolf. I've got somewhere better they can move their fight, if someone can stun one of them for a second-- wolf preferred." <J-IC-Scene> Flamel Parsons says, "Problem after problem... But we can do this. We can survive it!" <J-IC-Scene> Rufus Shinra says, "Need to stun or just slow down?" <J-IC-Scene> Flamel Parsons says, "I can work with either!" He takes off towards the duo ripping up Extraction. It's nearest. And... he's caused enough problems for the Magical Girls. He wouldn't be able to look Love's sisters-in-arms in the eye after what he'd done. On any other day, he could, but not today. He has to head towards Red and the Wolf, even if they're not his best matchup. Even still... he has one advantage. Namely, he can give Red and the Wolf an arena of pure hunting violence, an opportunity to hurt each other in ways they never have before. He doesn't need a dossier to get their deal. The obsession Red has with killing that Wolf is a shining psychic beacon. All he has to do is read it, just a moment, and then shout: "I've got a faster way to fight him!! A deeper spot to hit him!!" He rushes Red Hooded Mercenary with one arm outstretched, trying to land a hand on her shoulder -- to cast her astral form into the Wolf's mindscape! There, she can attack every thought, every memory, every feeling, every motive that the Wolf has. She can put her weapon against his heart and kill so much more deeply than any weapon could. They're not people. Remember: These aren't people. These are like Flamel, in a way, aren't they? Things extracted from people, taken from the byproducts of the science here. Just like Flamel. So it's fine. It's fine to do this. Well, even still, this is the fastest way to save lives immediately, and it's for Angela in a distant, indirect way -- so it's okay, and it's not too hard to rationalize, for him. |
| Rufus Shinra | Rudolta's down. "This is - this is bad." Rufus looks to Sarracenia and Shou. He's panting. "I mean - in general this is bad. A normal bad day here is a few of these, with the backup of everyone else, and we're going against *all* of them without anyone." WhiteNight's draining, too. Both mentally and emotionally - he's not fond of using it - but also in a much more literal sense, spiritually. The energy to use magic has to come from somewhere, and Enemy Skill is no exception. "Need... a moment." Rufus might not have a moment, but he needs to take it anyway. Taking a moment also lets him assess what exactly he picked up from the Scarecrow... <J-IC-Scene> Flamel Parsons exhales hard, hissing between clenched teeth. "Marksman down. Ghhh. Moving to..." Long pause. "Not them. Moving to Red and the Wolf. I've got somewhere better they can move their fight, if someone can stun one of them for a second-- wolf preferred." <J-IC-Scene> Rufus Shinra says, "Need to stun or just slow down?" <J-IC-Scene> Flamel Parsons says, "I can work with either!" "Might - might work..." Rufus gets moving again. There'll be time to be tired later. There'll be time to complain about the food, the sleeping arrangement, and the bathrooms later. He takes aim at - honestly, either the Wolf or the Hunter, or just whichever he thinks he can hit most easily. |ENEMY SKILL - SCARECROW SEEKING WISDOM| A phantom straw emerges from Rufus's hands, zeroing in on the target, and piercing (bloodlessly, almost cartoonishly) through the skull. Something - not brains, but some other abstracted 'go juice', gets sucked up through the straw, flowing back in big cartoonish drinking straw bulges towards Rufus's hands. |MP DRAINED!| |
| Xion | "I wanted to end this miserable war with some nobleness. Once I understood it." Xion speaks, at Rita's back in the flashes of spearflame and the sudden bright-black impalements within the monochrome of the despairing and Lightless facility. "Not enough to abandon what I thought was right," Tired, a running advance through the spears she sends isn't enough to catch up with the quickmoving fight between Rita and Nosferatu. "-but enough I thought it'd be something that could be settled." There's the dreary energy that Xion understands Rita probably doesn't care. She hasn't talked much at all when they've fought, masked and playing the part of the 'abnormality that could destroy the facility' in running fights and flat black portalholes. She had been avoiding it, dreading it, and took no pride or opportunity of the underhanded chances she got to make things of it. And then in silence, she was told to keep playing that role by Lilian. But still. It'd be a little messed up, wouldn't it? For her to drive her spear into Rita's back? It's a lot less messed up when Nosferatu shifts away from a flung black-flame geyser sparked by spear scraping ground, and while she's somehow on the path 'out' and not Petra, finds herself predated on! Or, almost does. When she can't find the celerity-speed Blood Fiend but feels a twinge at her back, from radial touchsense, she reacts by ducking and reversing her keyblade behind her to slam the ball-cap top into Nosferatu's gut like Lilian had been doing to her all week, then pivot kick with a sweeping crescent of that black flames following her heel. "Sorry, I'm a little low on sugar right now." She quips automatically, finally able to say slightly funny contextual fight banter for once in ALMOST A WHOLE WEEK!!! "And I don't have a juice box to make a donation!" Back-hopping as if expecting - just having a feeling! - that Rita will be closing on Nosferatu to deliver a chomp (large) or a slurp (long) to him, she bids for middle range and aims with the tip of Starlight. Charging up a dark flame shot at the tip she fires a heavy three shot barrage of hate-hot magic blasts! |
| Lilian Rook | 'But, like I said at the start of all of this, I know the facility better than you, since it was basically my home for, over a year. And I'll burn it to the ground to give Angela just a one percent better chance. So, I'm stopping you here' "Thou shalt use the fullest of thy competence at all times, and thou shalt demand the fullest. Thou shalt not accept substitutes, imitations, or shortcuts, from thyself or any other." The inevitable refrain. "I won't criticize you for being desperate, or using what was at your disposal. It'd be immoral to get bound up in that." It's a funny word to choose. Especially after evenly delivering that ultimatum to Sarracenia. "But what it says about you, that this is how you do it; obviously I'm going to hold onto that." §That said, this is a shit situation. I didn't think they'd try something like that with Rita around, but it's a fact that Petra knows every single Abnormality by heart, and I know maybe twenty at most. I can foresee how to not get killed, but not particularly how to beat her. It hardly matters how much weaker she is if she's borrowed every scrap of power in this facility, including my own. I don't really have enough ammunition or magic for her, much less every other Abnormality in the room, and I can barely tell them apart. Perhaps it'd be better to . . .§ Lilian readies Night Mist out of habit more than anything as Petra draws Fourth Match flame; a recognizable weapon, with any relation to Cinder now completely forgotten. She-- -----[stop]----- --nearly forgot that Petra does this now. What a stupid idea it was to ever confide in her so intimately like that. Even if she can size up her movements perpendicular to linear causality as amateurish, sloppy, filled with wasted motion and needless friction, the fact is that she herself is already ragged with complex, diffuse injuries from overtaxing hers, and Petra has the better medic. Lilian catches Fourth Match Flame with the sort of ease Petra would expect from someone who's swung a sword since they were a child versus someone who's got hers less than a year ago. Summoning up the Silver still gives Lilian enough time to pivot her blade around the edge and try and bite into her neck even as she's rushed down. Then there's a moment of disconnect, where Lilian tries to 'stop time inside stopped time', out of dull, instinctive habit; as if she hadn't noticed the stillness and lack of noise at all; and her dodge is far too slow to get out of the rush of Silver. She-- -----[start]----- --goes flying towards Schadenfreude, silent gasping through the air knocked out of her, feet skidding and stumbling unstably from the weakness in her legs. She turns in time to catch both buzzsaws on the same angle of Night Mist, nearly buckling from their combined weight, and then thrusts into the keyhole up to the hilt, already smoking from the hands up. They're extremely short, conservative motions. The clink of polished granite on metal is Petra's warning to the runestone that has 'fallen out' of her pocket. |
| Rita Ma | It is real meat, at least sort of. I can't control him, but every bite is a few more Agents I can save. It's worth it, then. "'Him'?" Rita says, around bits of bone and sinew. But she's not too curious about the words of someone she's intending to devour. "-but enough I thought it'd be something that could be settled." She does care. At least a little. "I don't know if I'll ever forgive any of you," Rita says limply, "but you're one of the least unforgivable, Xion." Rita's still a little 'too' jumpy and cautious around Xion for her own good. She leaps back from the erupting flames and spears even though they wouldn't have struck her; her skidding crouch afterwards leaves her vulnerable to the blood-bats, and although she shimmers invisible and cleaves through them with her tentacles, a few bloody nicks appear on the thin air that becomes Rita's skin again a second later. "The very humans that oppress people like us." "The weak don't oppress the strong," she says, straightening up from her crouch after crunch-swallowing an unlucky blood bat. "If you want humanity's love, earn it." Like I did. "Xion. Back five meters, right now." Rita's standard mental contact comes like blood-in-seawater now, 'flavored' with the infusion of Nosferatu's own hive. It's about two seconds of warning. When Rita reaches out a tentacle to snag Nosferatu's ankle and yank him back towards her, Xion's back-hop puts her just skin-tinglingly outside the radius of-- - - - - got you - - - - --the Pale pulse that, hopefully, dazes him and wipes out his bat-swarm. Then the chomp that Xion foresaw; pouncing at his back, practically zombielike, and wrapping tentacles around him to bite his neck from behind. Perfect. Blood. Elsewhere in the facility, the Abnormalities that Lilian downed- and the few minor ones that the Cycle could handle mostly on their own- are having pieces chewed off them by the Antegent and ferried away. One even tries to nip a piece off of Nothing There cheekily. It's like ants carrying sugar back to their hive. |
| Hibiki Tachibana | Poor Teddy Bear. While punching through most Abnormalities doesn't bother her at all, she can't help but feel a pang as this particular one is sent back home - with some soreness in her body as a reminder. She sighs, exhaling... ...and pushes onward. ... ... ... Several hallways later, Hibiki boots a door off its hinges and finally steps into Records proper-- at the same exact time another pair of magical girls do the same, leading her to blink as if to be sure she's seeing things in her adrenaline-fed state of exhaustion, before her brow furrows. The King of Greed is the only one of the four she hasn't really interacted with much at all... ...but she finds herself practically coping the familiar punch into palm gesture she's done plenty of time herself, with an accompanying knuckle crack. While they might be a similar type of mahou shoujo, the Servant of Wrath is one she's actually far more intimate with on a different level. "...Courage..." While she'd prepared herself to fight any Abnormalities that might show up, this one is a little harder to just force down so easily. Memories going all the way back to the attack on Lydian flood her mind. Memories... and rememberance. Meika. "...Sorry, there won't be any of that today. I wish I could tell you different, but there's not any betrayal here. Just people... fighting for what they need to do, and what they believe in." She sighs shakily into her scarf, closes her eyes, and brings her fists up, clenched tight. "That's why this all sucks so badly." How much will it take to stop these two? Will she have to put her foot down here before she even finishes making it to Architecture? Or... Maybe it's the sheer level of tired delirium she's operated off of blended together with the head-fogging battle high of plowing through too many Abnormalities to count - but when she opens her eyes again, they're a little bit softer, and she might even have the ghost of a grin beneath her scarf. "Come on. I owe it to Love and Justice, and someone else, to make sure you two don't hurt anybody." --And then she's off, crossing the room in the blink of an eye with a charging palm strike meant to smash into Wrath head-on and send the acid-pouring magical girl flying. This transitions straight into whirling on her heel and raising the opposite leg up to try and smash into Greed's side, to wind her enough to launch into a series of heavy handed hooks after stepping in. They only get faster and faster, fists speeding up into a blur, the more she lays the pressure on - and harder, too. She'll even take the both of them on without letting herself hold anything back. |
| Sarracenia | Sarra is left with incriminating claws marks on her back after getting run over, but compared to everything else this week it feels like basically nothing. And a quick green mushroom helps as well. "If this was part of the plan they really should have at least told us to hole up somewhere easily defensible..." Sarra grumbles. 'So, you would lose your temper.' Sarra mmphs. "No! I would never ruin a wedding! I can control my temper just fine if I have a reason to!" 'Do I look like a groom to you?' "Of course not! I just wanted to be sure! Using the proper words is important!" Sarra exclaims. 'is it worth it?' "..." Sarra has to consider that one. She starts to fall back on her thought of 'surely Lilian would not go that far' but it is true that Lilian does not tell arbitrary lies. But then again...the strategy seems to be working. The whole goal was to drain Lilian's mental and waste her time. "...but, would it change the way other people look at you as well? Such as your soon-to-be bride? She seemed none-too-happy when you shot me. I cannot imagine her approving of doing such a thing to a lady of noble birth who while considered brash and unrefined still maintains her modesty whenever possible. No one who matters to me would be affected. Would the people who matter to you?" "And what is the point of becoming such a monster (No offense Miss Rita) that you feel no remorse at all about doing something like that? Just to spite me? Someone you claim has so little value? I do not know if you still do, but I know at one point you -wanted- to be a good person and it pained you that you were not. Accomplished, capable, beloved...but that aspect still troubles you, does it not? That you cannot consider yourself a good person?" Meanwhile in Extraction... The pair needs to be stunned or slowed down. Sarra can probably manage both of those things, but she starts with slow. She pulls out an ice flower and uses it to freeze them! She concentrates on the wolf first at Flamel's direction, then if she has ice power left she moves on to Red. |
| Kukuru | ". . . you cannot let it eat you just because you are fond of Therey." "Therey, mhm. And don't worry, Sarra. It's gentle doing that." Kukuru lies as her bandages are already soaked in blood, barely mitigated by her nanites having to work double time just to slow that all down. "Thanks for keeping an eye on me... Ah, but you be careful, okay? The others..." It's all still a mess, and she can only hope that anyone she doesn't go with can survive through whatever they run into. "Help them for me, okay? I'll be around as quick as I can." Leaving Sarracenia to battle against Rudolta, Kukuru turns her attention back to Nothing there as it transforms from Angela into Sarracenia. "Oh, you've gotten so much better at that...! Just be careful showing that off, okay? Some people-" She's wondering about the Agents and Clerks again even as she marvels at Nothing There's transformative prowess. "-can scare real easily. And..." She inhales deeply, then shakes her head. This isn't the time to think too much about the past, when the future is what really matters right now. There's still so many Abnormalities to face off against that she doesn't know where to even sart, and Angela's still... That momentary lapse in focus is more than enough for Nothing There to get her onto its shoulders, and Kukuru lets out a little yelp in surprise before chuckling painfully. "Oh, Therey... You've really grown this much already, huh? Maybe one day, you really can..." Her mind is made up: Nothing There really can help, and she knows just where to take it. Kukuru leans downwards from her impromptu piggy-back ride to give the Sarracenia-shaped Abnormality a light peck on the top of the head, then rests her hand across it just to give her arm a little bit of a rest. She contemplates sticking arund to help the crew in Extraction, but... There's plenty of Elites in there already. No, another area needs the extra bodies more: "Records. It's over this way, Therey." And so, Kukuru plays the navigator for Nothing There as she tries guiding the Abnormality all the way there from Extraction! Along the way, she'll support the battle lines in passing with little healing bursts here and there, but she's still conserving her strength for when they reach Records. She knows Hibiki's in there, but hearing that there's even more Abnormalities showing up in there means the numebers need to be evened out! Arriving just in time to see Hibiki throwing herself right at the King of Greed and Servant of Wrath, Kukuru scans Records quickly to see if the Snow Queen is still there, too. "Gotta back up Hibiki.. Oh. Hibiki's that one over there. " After pointing her out to Nothing There, Kukuru next directs its attention to either the Snow Queen (if that Abnormality is still around), or to the King of Greed otherwise. "Throw me. We might be able to stop them in one biiiig hit if we can combine our power that way." She asserts, giving it one more affectionate pat on the ahead before curling up into the ideal hurling position, she's braced and ready to unfold herself afterwards into the ideal dropkicking stance to concentrate all of her freakish might into one spot: The Queen's (or King's, if the Snow Queen has left) center mass. |
| UFO Gang | Minamitsu's shepherding, at least, is somewhat effective; the water puts out the flame, before it can spread, which is good, and also cuts down on the smell, which is *very* good. Soon enough, under Rufus's ministrations, Rudolta experiences a drastic downsizing into a lean and agile form: An Egg. Both Shou and Minamitsu look at the Egg. Then Shou, and Minamitsu a moment later, look at Rufus. "Please, take the time you need," Shou tells Rufus, reaching out with one hand. He may not need to be braced up by some kind of paragon-tier tiger goddesslette or whatever, but the thought is there. "Gotcha! You're being brave, so don't worry about your flanks, alright?" Minamitsu says, in tones of somewhat ragged but effortful encouragement. Soon enough, though: the Hunter and the Wolf. Minamitsu sways. Shou raises up the Pagoda and -- there is a brief moment of profound concern as whatever sorcery Rufus is performing expresses itself in a different, disgusting, *unsanitary* way. "... I hope that it helped," Shou says, a moment before the Jeweled Pagoda strokes red three times and unleashes a stuttering jagged ellipsis of bullets, the points of light hanging gorgeously in the air and then streaking for both Hunter and Wolf, without discrimination. Some were red... but the others were blue. It's not *that* close to Christmas Lights. |
| Timespace Riders | ...I see...you'll write your own story... please...save those lost souls... "I will." He can't. He still has to try. "Woz, get to Records. I'll be there in a second." As he had before, Zi-O places himself between the Abnormalities and the agents, not so much fighting the Wolf or the Mercenary as he is making sure the crossfire doesn't hurt any agents. Unfortunately, that means that it ends up hitting *him,* when he's not able to deflect it. If I do anything less than everything I can, 'everything I can' never gets any bigger. And it's these people who suffer for that. Sparks fly from the Drive armor, Zi-O's superspeed drifting is erratic and clumsy, but his determination is ironclad even when his body screams at him for every intervention and his premonitions burn his eyes and drive aches into his temples. After Shou, Rufus and Flamel send the two of them away, he darts off to join Woz in records. Before the inevitable betrayal, we must remove them...! An iridescent purple scarf spools across the department to wrap around Wrath's blunt instrument hands, pulling taut, yanking them together and drawing her towards a leaping cross kick. "I must concur with Hibiki." The scarf unwinds, and Woz springs backwards with a spread of explosive shurikens thrown at the apex of his moonsault. "The agents have betrayed no one--indeed, today, they are the truest versions of themselves." Of course, there is the chance that you are somehow aware of *that.* In which case, it is indeed inevitable. However... "I will not allow you to punish them for what the ugliness of the City has wrought." |
| Angela | "HURRK!" Nosferatu manages as a keyblade slams directly into his gut right as he was about to fill it. He's weakened, he realizes, from being so far from his Family for so long. He stumbles back, bowled over. "No you--" But three fireballs! Three! Are launched right at him. He catches fire, predictably, or at least his cape does. He stumbles away from the noirette. He bares his fangs with frustration. If he could just get a good handle on her he could turn this battle into a two on one, he's sure of it. But he just can't. And without bloodbags to draw from, he's running out of that blood orb he's been absorbing. But that's the moment Rita's been looking for. Even as Noferatu tries to absorb the little bit of blood that he's managed to draw, Rita seizes his legs up with tentacles. VAMPIRE vs. THE KRAKEN. Who will win?! The Kraken. Nosferatu's cape lashes out at Rita fruitlessly because it's interrupted by a pulse of Pale Damage which works as well for him as it does most entities in this facility. He sags, for just a moment, as she clamps down on his neck and BITES. More of that desperate begging for blood fills her thoughts--it's not a mental attack, at least from Nosferatu. There's something about the blood itself that carries the Will of the Family behind it. Rita gets several mouthfuls before, in a panic, Nosferatu explodes into a flurry of blood bats again, fleeing from Rita and back into their cell, recoalescing into the form of a man so he can pound the door close button and lock himself in, collapsing to the floor in a mess shortly after. That's when Binah and Gebura bust in through the floor up from Extraction and down to ARchitecture from above. Gebura's singular eye seems to focus entirely on Xion as they come crashing down and kicks Binah away to throw herself at Xion and slice down in a vicious arc with Mimicry in one hand and lashing out with Twilight (attacks physically, mentally, and with extra Pale damage!) at Xion in a pair of quick strikes. "There you are..." Gebura whispers. She looks like she's pretty beat up and as if she's been fighting for three days without rest because, lets face it, she has. Binah looks even worse. Her boxbot body is shredded severely, only the immense durability provided to the Sephirah holding her in one piece. "Ahah....two can play at that game, Gebura..." Binah says, lashing out with several chains, trying to seize hold of Rita and pin her in place, then the both of them turn and slice at each other with their blades. "Ghhhahh..." Binah says. "If Angela doesn't hurry I'll be out of this fight and she'll really be in trouble...Hello Xion." "...Rita." Gebura says. "Same team?" Gebura will cleave half of Binah's chains from even getting near Rita as she moves to stand by her. The Alliance seems to be over. |
| Angela | In Extraction Flamel, Rufus, Shou, Sarracenia are going to have to deal with crossfire. Flamel may take a claw to the side, Rufus a bullet to the leg, Sarracenia a bullet to the arm and Shou a vicious CHOMP (funnily enough, from Red not the Wolf) in hers. But before Flamel can do a thing, they're just too tough to get a bead on otherwise, he needs them slowed down first. Bullets from Shou impact against the both of them and both beast and hunter turn their ire directly towards those intruding on their glorious battle!! Fortunately, Sarracenia and Rufus can slow them both down. Sarracenia freezes the wolf in place, whereas Rufus disorients Red by SLORPING up her--well she doesn't have MP, actually, but her thoughts are still scattered just enough for Flamel to draw out her astral essence and throw her into the Wolf! Red isn't sure to be incredibly grateful or incredibly pissed off, but either way she starts playing the Psychonauts Level inside Big And Will Be Bad Wolf's Head with the express purpose of tormenting him! And while she's at it she can snag all the collectables too. TROPHIES of her conquest! The Wolf, predictably, freaks out and starts throwing himself into walls and starts banging his head against objects in an attempt to get Red Hooded Mercenary out to no avail. WIth Red's body unmoving and the Wolf now fighting Wolf, this fight is uh... essentially settled. MEANWHILE Hibiki, Kukuru, and Nothing There join the battle against the Mahous! Hibiki, who doesn't have to direct a Nothing There to get where she wants to go, arrives first. The King of Greed is a deadly foe, comparable to an ALEPH in strength despite only being classified as a WAW. She grins as Hibiki starts pounding into her body with her fist. "Yes...YES! More! More!!" Her own fists start blurring right back at Hibiki in a flurry of motion. The King is having a blast right now! "GA HA HA! You're fun, you're so much fun I could eat you right up!" The King cries out. Kukuru seizes an opportunity to dropkick with all her might against the King's head. Her head is SMASHED into the floor along with the rest of her but grabs Kukuru's leg with a vicious grin and slams Kukuru into the floor and then CHUCKS her into a wall as a followthrough. "Fun, I need more fun--!" But before she can say anything else, Nothing There shouts, "Mommy!" in horror and in a howl of rage throws themselves at The King Of Greed, trying to devour her as an amalgamation of flesh even as the King tries to pummel Nothing There into dust. Considering they are both practically immune to physical damage, this is going to take a while and they are essentially removing themselves from harassing anybody else in the mid-term. Woz, meanwhile, arrives to deal with SERVANT OF WRATH who turns on him immediately. "Hahhn.." Wrath exhales. "Maybe they are... Maybe they're innocent... But you... You betrayed your friends, haven't you...? One look at you, and I can tell you're the treacherous sort. Did you smirk when you betrayed their trust? Were you laughing inside when they showed just how much they believed in you?! RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!" Exploding shurikens detonate against The Servant of Wrath but that's not enough to take it down. It lunges itself at Woz and aims to SMASH him into the ground with her two hammers. "EMBODIMENTS OF EVIL!" |
| Angela | AND NOW THE PROBLEMS *Gebura and Binah have shown up in Architecture and have thrown themselves at Xion and Rita respectively. * While King of Greed is soundedly handled, The Servant of Wrath is still intent on crushing Woz into bloody bits! * BIG BIRD in a dark hallway in Extraction is stomping around, its many glowing eyes peering around through the facility, its lamp providing a small bit of light as it seeks heads to chomp down on. Not seeing Touta, it'll find someone else's head to chomp on. The Many Eyes will make it difficult to sneak up on, if not possible. * Queen Bees has spawned several Worker Bees that are flying throughout Records to try and sting people! This might not sound so bad until you realize the Worker Bees are roughly three times the size of an Agent each. And they don't look like normal bees, they look deformed and horrible, with intestines for stingers... |
| Petra Soroka | "I believe you, but I also believe I was abundantly clear what my stance on ganging up with Sundew was." "Mm. I don't believe *you*, actually." To go from that stereotypical whiny petulance straight to this subdued, and extremely rare, disagreement, would almost seem like a sign of incredible mental wellness for this situation, as if the inverse of the Light was providing her and her alone with emotional stability. As she keeps talking, though, with her twitchy little movements and gradually escalating pace, Lilian can practically hear the tooth-aching squeal of tensile strain behind her voice. "I don't believe that you actually mean that. That's that and this is this, right? The world in here isn't the same one as out there. It'd be *incoherent* if I made myself into a garbage leader and gutted my own resources just to be a little snotty towards someone that you and I don't like. If you expected me to flail around and be petty and childish and useless for all this, then you would've just *told* me to be on your *side*! So I'm being *consistent*! I'm *following-through*!" "But what it says about you, that this is how you do it; obviously I'm going to hold onto that." "Obviously! But you already *knew* that about me!" Petra shouts from on top of Schadenfreude, gritting her teeth and keeping her eyes locked on the voyeuristic Abnormality even while Lilian runs her sword through the invisible fleshy mass inside of it. Its legs skitter and flail around, blood leaking out of the keyhole, but Petra refuses to blink her stare away from it, so it doesn't get to shrink into an egg and go back to its cell no matter how close to death it is. Until its flailing buzzsaws slow so much that there's no point in keeping it around anymore, Petra fires concussive energy bolts from her transteam gun down at Lilian to double up on her, until the magical explosion that she doesn't quite flicker out of forces her to squeeze her eyes shut and causes Schadenfreude to go still and then vanish. |
| Petra Soroka | -----stop----- The dust hasn't cleared and the egg hasn't gone back to its cell when time freezes again. In the sudden silence, Petra's shouting is both much louder, and oddly flat without any echoes bouncing off the walls. She darts out of the cloud to come at Lilian with Fourth Match Flame, aiming for the exact kind of slash and fade that Lilian warned her against a long time ago, just trying to force Lilian to tuck her guard in to defend her arm from the flaming sword. "Everyone can hate me after this! They probably will! I-I really don't want *you* to, but if I think about that *now* instead of *after*, then I'm just setting myself up to lose! Right?!" Backing away after thrusting Fourth Match Flame was a fake out. When Lilian moves to punish her for the halfhearted attack, Petra throws a thin shield of morphmetal between herself and Lilian, that she cuts through easily, but in the intervening half-second of obscurement, she exchanged Fourth Match Flame for Pillar of Creation in the mirror. Now Night Mist is caught on the spear's haft between her hands, and with a twist of force she levers the length of the spear against Lilian to throw her off balance and then runs the spearpoint at her outside her reach. She repositions her feet for the next exchange, scuffing her boot against a flower poking out of the marble, and-- -----start----- --teleports two steps backwards to be exactly outside the edge of the massive fuzzy white jaws of Meat Lantern that clamp shut right around where the two of them were standing. "I don't know what everyone *wants* from me! Everyone keeps *saying* that they hate me for fighting this way but know it's our only chance! Do they just want to fucking offload the responsibility for doing the awful thing onto me, and then deny being involved later?! Do you not get that's the *point*?! Who do you think everyone's going to resent after this, instead of Angela?! Instead of you?!" |
| Petra Soroka | <J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "Sarracenia? Do, actually, get off the announcements." <J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "It was helpful before but not anymore." "And what is the point of becoming such a monster (No offense Miss Rita) that you feel no remorse at all about doing something like that? Just to spite me? Someone you claim has so little value?" Petra's expression twists, and from the writhing knot of Silver floating behind her, one tendril extends with a smooth metal USB to deposit it in her upraised hand. A cybersynaptic pulse leaps from the drive to the PA system to the computational core of the facility, and she carefully, specifically, turns the input volume of Sarra's microphone down to one percent. She distantly fantasizes about the ability to have a remote that could mute people in real life before getting back to her duel for the fate of the world. "There. She's quiet now." |
| Hibiki Tachibana | "Sorry, I can't afford to get eaten today...! Or any day!" Her and Greed might've ended up belting blows into each other for a while - oddly happily despite the doom and gloom - even if it'd have definitely turned out of her favor when Wrath rejoined in for a 2v1. For every thudding blow to the body she receives, she dishes one back, digging her heels down into the floor to avoid losing ground before stepping back in to exchange another room-quaking series of strikes. ...At least, that's all if it wasn't for the timely aid of Woz, Kukuru... and Sar...ra... cenia...? Wait, no... Hibiki once again blinks in 'was I so tired I saw wrong?' fashion when the King of Greed gets flying dropkicked away from her, her eyes following the two Abnormalities going tumbling away before locking into combat with each other. Catching onto the 'Nothing There'-ism of the copy from what it says, she's only worried for as long as it takes her to realize neither of them can actually really hurt each other. Problem solved itself...? She refocuses and rapidly shakes her head, intending to move to reinforce Woz against the Servant of Wrath - which is exactly when the grotesque Worker Bees begin swarming the department. "This is really starting to get out of hand, damnit...! Woz, watch it! I'll cover you!" The rampaging magical girl will be enough to deal with without interruptions, so Hibiki takes it on herself to turn and push herself into a sprint, and then a leaping lunge, towards one of the Worker Bees-- and belt her metal boot into it hard enough to either send it flying or obliterate it completely, whichever comes first. Flipping back and landing back down, it hits her... ...getting the whole lot of them will be harder than going through them one by one. Especially if the Queen responsible for making them is only going to keep churning them out again and again. As if they don't have enough to deal with already. Clicking her tongue, Hibiki raises her leg up high and then /slams/ it down, causing the flooring beneath her to erupt upwards in a shower of metallic debris. Followed by her rearing back her fist and /punching/ a chunk like a makeshift bullet towards a Bee, then elbowing another one to send it on a trajectory towards another. A third chunk, she strikes hard enough to shatter into a barrage of tiny shards, like a shotgun spread meant to eviscerate another before it can get to any of the various agents. "Kukuru!" She glances back over her shoulder. "If you can help keep things clear for a minute-- I'm gonna try to get everything breaching here in one shot!" |
| Rufus Shinra | There. The pair are dealt with. "Good - good job, Flamel," says Rufus. The MP drain (even if the abnormalities don't have MP?) helps a bit. It doesn't do much for the multiple stab wounds, slashes, bullets, and other injuries Rufus has been suffering today and in past days, but - hey, a resource bar is partially filled back up! Every bit helps. He gets moving again, going - by design or by accident or maybe by instinct - to where Woz is, and where Wrath is. It takes him a second to register the situation, but then after that: "Get clear!" he yells to Woz. He shotgun-boosts in, trying to knock Wrath away and clear some space, and then- |ENEMY SKILL - WHITENIGHT| Rufus is doing what he can to aim it, but it still doesn't feel great to be that close to it going off. "That's... one of the ones that can talk," he says, whether or not it's finished afterwards. "Still not a person, but - ... not feeling great. Definitely... getting rid of this once we're done here." |
| Xion | 'but you're one of the least unforgivable, Xion.' The Nobody would have to live with that. Litigating sins and suffering now, still now, was something she was just as happy to take a little break from. Perhaps she trusts too much. The masked yellow dot-eyes shift for a time to the simple work of defeating an Abnormality - defending herself from one. Xion intuited the flow of the fight - had been predicting and leaping around battle with Liliian and Rita for days, worn down by curses and performance, tiring from the emotional burden of it all. Steady-*enough*, still, to not make mistakes, she needs no reminder or wait -- she's out of the way neatly in choreography for the slam-down of Pale damage as 'God' blasts the vampire, and then the kraken takes in much of the Blood Fiend. Some gets away, a scrap of Nosferatu locking himself into his room again like a scared Agent trying to find salvation through the barring of a door. The question of 'will they continue' is turned aside and disposed of faster than a Vampire can use Mist Form as an immediate and then Legendary Actions to get the heck out of the way. Gebura falls from above while fixing single red eye down on the cloaked and masked Nobody, and Xion tilts her mask up to fix yellow eyes at the falling threat. "We didn't finish things, did we, Gebura?!" Xion shouts, rising to a moment of almost-thankfully passionate anger, and raises keyblade and black magic spear in defense. Mimicry is a weapon that Xion understands, stabbing into the cleave-slash with spearip and erupting a forest of spearpoints to freeze the weapon in place with an interlocking pincer of burning weapons. Twilight, however, is what she brings Starlight up to parry, and exhales a violent 'hnnh!' as she blocks, a tremor transmitting through her weapon and fizzling with corrosive light as the representation of her naked Will clashes against the Red Mist's weapon. Pushing Gebura away, lever kicking and skidding backwards in the hall, her heel is stopped by more spears and Xion stands tall in a swish of tattered coat-tails. "If you needed a tag-out, Binah, you could have told me." Xion is almost conversational. "-Hello, anyway. Having fun yet?" Breathless, rhetorical, she springs forward and disappears into an implosive teleport. Intentionally charging down Gebura again, Xion discards the single spear of many in her hand and draws out a golden medallion with left hand, summoning the alchemical gold and rain-reflecting-sky blue keyblade representation of Vivianne again. Droplets of gold at the tooth, she alternates blades while chased by flames and the spiking insistence of spears-from-nowhere, like the very darkness hated Gebura and was making it known. Twilight is a weapon Xion has to actually try and parry only with Raindance -- a bad position to be in, but they already were in a monochrome world, and the glowing-gold statement of I am in defiance flashes in waves of gold for the pale star thrusts of its partner. |
| Flamel Parsons | Flamel takes that claw to the side like a champ. That's what it takes to solve problems directly. Even if it means giving psychonautric access to the, maybe, third-most murderous girl here. Is this ethical? We won't get into that. Is it painful? Absolutely. Mental health drips out of a deep wound in his side. Thank god their fight can have a somewhat less chaotic, destructive context now. Fewer agents dying is fewer agents dead, and it'll help keep the chaos at Angela-compatible levels. Quick thumbs-up to Rufus. All of the telekinetic hands are involved. "Appreciate the help!" he says, his cheerful tone ragged with effort. He needs to get moving. He sets Red aside in a corner, and breaks into a levitating dash. More problems. More violence to try to solve. Woz is covered, and thank goodness, Flamel can't be fighting the mahous. Hibiki's got the bees. The bird... that's the one! Flamel needs to contain Big Bird! Eyes, he can deal with. His invisibility is powerful, and works great on normal eyes. If this thing has heat vision, fancy senses, things like that, maybe that's a problem. But normal sight? It doesn't matter how many eyes you have, if it all goes through one visual cortex. Flamel keeps to extraction, darting down the dark hallways and using only his clairvoyance to see. That makes sure he isn't visible when it's time to blast each eye with a high-intensity beam, and try to snake an overload through an oversized vision-processing center. If this has anything like a biology, then the size and density of the extrastriate visual centers make them a prime target for a telepath's lancing beams and confusion gas attacks. And the mass outbreak keeps pinging his apocalypse-sensitive clairvoyance... keeping the birds contained is crucial here. |
| UFO Gang | In the aftermath of that bursting and resplendent attack... the Wolf and Red are both neutralized. "May they find peace," Shou wishes, before saying to Minamitsu, "We should leave this area immediately." "Yup!" Minamitsu concurs. The two of them walk forwards, more or less flanking Rufus. While Minamitsu is more focused on what lays ahead (and/or is more battered) Shou seems concerned. And after this, he speaks and informs them about what they face. Not a great choice. Shou lifts off a bit away from Rufus, to the left. Minamitsu, kind of belatedly, does the same to the right. Which means that they face the Servant of Wrath, because they were following Rufus. "Wuoooh," Minamitsu vocalizes. She seems... daunted. Fatigue, perhaps? She moves to unshoulder her anchor, which has remained slung over her back, but as she's doing this Shou is orienting herself and facing the Servant of Wrath. Shou closes her eyes. This is usually not a good sign. "Please - think of yourself, Rufus. I will try to give you a space in which you may recover." "Thus I have heard," Shou begins: "There is no blame which can be meted out eternal, for in the fulness of time, all beings have slighted, harmed, betrayed, murdered, devoured, and a myriad other harms to all other beings. The inevitablity of the cycle of Samsara will in time gather all together: however pure or strong or widely empowered one might be, it is a simple expression of one's past karma; and in time, it shall end; and your actions shall weigh heavy on you. "There is no true self; every part will be derived from its constituents when examined, and all constituents shall rise, endure, decay and vanish. Thus it may be said that even the most bloodthirsty may come to this knowledge and know to renounce the eight evils; and that even the most virtuous, may succumb to them instead." While she was talking all that good stuff, light was building around her. It pulsated through a few colors - red, green, blue, yellow - and now those colors return. Shimmering through the edges of the space bounded by Shou and by the Servant of Wrath glow -- before erupting into a coruscation of painfully-bright beams of sheer linear force and light, each beam sustaining for a half-second before breaking apart into luminous waves of glowing motes, all of them homing in rippling waves towards the Servant of Wrath. (It's probably good that Shou decided to hover a couple of meters up, or this would be more than a 'don't jump into the lasers!' thing for Woz.) |
| Rita Ma | Rita slumps to the floor as Nosferatu escapes, snaps her #-1 FUNCTION (ANS) NOT FOUNDze after him, shovels down whatever mouthfuls of flesh she manages to rip off when she decides she can't pursue, and then scoops up a double-handful of blood from the floor to guzzle. And then another, if she has the time. It's always a little bit sickening watching her eat. Not just for the burbling viscerality of it, but for the incomprehensible intensity of need. Rita, proper, sweet, forces down shards of bone like she needs them more than air. There's a restful moment- if Xion allows her it- when that need ebbs. Sarracenia had said "you'll lose yourself", but that's not true. The more she eats, the more she's herself. Kneeling in the puddle, spattered and panting, her eyes very lucidly tell Xion 'thanks'. Then the ceiling gives way. "Same team?" For a moment, Rita's chained. When her blood-stuffed mouth makes an incomprehensible noise and she writhes against the restraints, it's a real question. Then she warps out of the chains with wisps of a Kukuru-cloud, puts a hand on Gebura's back, and pulses as much healing light as she can manage into the Red Mist. Under that massive infusion, metal cracks flow shut and vital spirit reignites. Xion's just helped recharge her, after all. "GEBURA! GO! LILIAN'S FIGHTING IN ARCHITECTURE! NOW!" She follows with a lance of regurgitated essence, blasting-- downwards? It pierces through the floor, then a few more floors after that, giving Gebura a path straight down. Rita pants and stances up against Xion and Binah by the sizzling hole's edge, tentacles splayed out, and awful venom drips finely from their edges now. It's the same anti-healing acid Lilian weaponized yesterday. She's going to make sure that Kukuru can't do for Binah what she just did for Gebura. "I'll handle it here. I promise." Can she? She'll have to. |
| Timespace Riders | Were you laughing inside when they showed just how much they believed in you?! The hammerblows strike Woz dead-on-- Get clear! --and his iridescent purple scarf spools outwards behind him with a flick of the wrist, wrapping itself around one of the floating clocks and dragging him across the floor to safety. "My friends? Which?" He asks, coldly, as he rises, holding the Quiz Miridewatch in his hand. "Hibiki? Rufus?" A dry chuckle. "Sarracenia? I made no oaths to them. I do not even care much for the last one." "You know, more than most, that loyalty, whatever else it is, is *sacrifice,*" he says, loading the Miridewatch into the sidegate of his sleek, black and green-trim transformation belt. "But in this instance, we are united in purpose--in who *we* are loyal to. Who you are prepared to make that sacrifice for says as much as whether you make it at all." He slams the neon green gate shut vehemently, and the belt's viewscreen displays the question-marked visage of the Quiz form. Golden lasers print the new armor as large gears swirl protectively around him, to the tune of a brass ensemble fanfare. Fashion! Passion! Question! Futurering Quiz! QUIZ! The armor snaps into place, and a touchscreen cane with a crooked, question-marked head flies into his waiting hand. "True or false: For those I am Kamen Rider to, I have spent myself, worn my hands to the bone, pulled from the tapestry of my heart until it lies threadbare." Woz slams the cane against the ground, as one of his app-icon pauldrons swings wide open to reveal a burning red, correct-answer O. "The correct answer is True." While Rufus' WhiteNight materia batters Wrath's sense of self, a stormcloud gathers above her, swelling in size with the answer. "True or False: I would pay any price to see those people leave here with even a shade of what they are owed." The cane strikes the ground again. "The correct answer is True." Another O. Zi-O arrives a moment after Rufus, flinging a rapid-fire but shaky-armed spread of exploding clocks, as the stormcloud above Wrath swells again. Little flashes kick up within the inky, roiling cloud. "True or False! I owe this not only to them, but for all those I have failed, and all those that might yet be saved." "The correct answer is True." A blinding white bolt of lighting tears across the Servant of Wrath. |
| Lilian Rook | '...but, would it change the way other people look at you as well?' Even Lilian looks surprised that Saraccenia is still talking. Like she's just lost one last shred of faith she didn't know she had until now. Her tone dulls. Her gaze moves on. "You really have no sense of self-worth whatsoever." she drones. "If I let you go, Sundew, then everyone else forgets they can't fuck with me." "Look forward to your debut as an unmarragiably desperate internet star. I'll leave the specifics to Petra." Her 'mentals' disengage completely. Yeah. That's definitely Petra and not Exis. The latter dragged her out of her seat just to play with her. The former hasn't treated her like a human in days. 'That's that and this is this, right? The world in here isn't the same one as out there. It'd be *incoherent* if I made myself into a garbage leader and gutted my own resources just to be a little snotty towards someone that you and I don't like.' 'Obviously! But you already *knew* that about me!"' "I suppose it's fair that you needed to. So . . ." Lilian thinks, again, only very briefly. Her mind is set on something. "Considering it me punishing you for still being a garbage person after all of this. You'll be making it up to me later." -----[stop]----- Lilian has no idea what Schadenfreude's gimmick is, and can't read Petra's mind about it right now. "--Gearradh Fola." ravages its insides with a geometrically expanding cluster of blood-fractuals. It's more efficient by a small margin than cutting and stabbing it over and over again. She hisses through her teeth as Petra's causal trajectory deflects hers away from linearity again. She's trying to use it conservatively, but Petra is using the echo of it suicidally; and she has Kukuru to fix it later. Lilian bitterly regrets not bringing Tamamo, then remembers that there were half a dozen things she could have already done to stack the odds in her favour, and she didn't. "I'm going to hate you because I'll be the only one with the guts to. You already know that. They're all smiling and nodding along and being glad they have you there to use them as the finger puppets they are, so go fuck yourself." Lilian snarls in the clatter of bound blades. She entirely expects Petra to have made the same rookie mistake; she flinches back from the point of Fragments instead, resorting to smacking the haft aside with her hand so that it rips through the belly of her jacket instead. Another stinging injury barely even registers. "Of course you're not allowed to lose. Then I'd never forgive you." She draws and fires Winter Crow distressingly quickly even without the skip, compensating for Fragments' longer reach by simply magdumping Petra at close range as she herself fades backwards.)] -----[start]----- "Céad Chogadh Bláthanna!" Fuzzy jaws explode into a fountain of omnidirectional gore. It rains back down on Lilian, gasping for breath, for several sustained seconds, drenching her in the bloody shower while her shoulders heave up and down, and the viscera steams away from them. Extending the stop for more than that to dodge away would be more dangerous to her than Petra's was. She thinks about how much that bothers her while she reloads from one of her three remaining 'clips'. The exhausted tremble in her hand nearly botches it. |
| Lilian Rook | 'Do you not get that's the *point*?! Who do you think everyone's going to resent after this, instead of Angela?! Instead of you?!' "Themselves. The City. Ayin. Probably me, actually." Lilian says, between gasps, pushing her bloody hair out of her face and glowering through. "We both know nobody has the spine to stand up to you anymore. That's why you're still wallowing in this stagnant void of feeling; you can only get it from someone else, and they've all learned the winning move with you is not to play." Night Mist isn't built of multiple pieces, so it can't clattering in Lilian's grip, but it would if it could. She flips to hold it reverse, bracing it to her forearm and raising her elbow to eye level on her right side, bringing her gun in close to her chest at an angle, so she can keep firing concentrated bursts on Petra-- proximity explosive rounds-- while guarding herself in close combat. She swivels to acquire and lead Petra every time she teleports. "I don't remember you being so fucking spoiled. I thought you knew that sometimes your options are 'do your worst' and 'do badly enough', and you won't get praise for either. I'm prepared for it. I'm thinking of what I can live with. Do you think you're a special exception?" Counting rounds, Lilian waits until she still has a third of her stack left, then aggressively closes with a burst of speed intense enough that she winces from what feels like a tendon fraying in her leg. She diverts at the last second to come in heavy from above, sword flashing back and over, using its momentum from hitting the ground on a dodge or Fragments on a parry to turn and ricochet into Petra's face, then winding around to force her to defend her neck from a one-handed thrust. The other hand, blocked by Lilian's own body, finishes drawing a black-gold array, and clenches it into somatic motion. "Déroinn!", seething sparks from thin air, and thirty meters across at a perfect diagonal shears in half, through the floor and ceiling, from a staggered three-round burst of spacetime collapses. Lilian stumbles forward and catches herself on her sword. §This is fucked. It's exactly what I hoped for. I know I want Angela to live. But I don't want to lose, either. Why?§ "Thank you for doing your best. And for what 'your best' reveals about you; go to hell, wretch." |
| Kukuru | "More...? This is fun for you? But there's so much moving...!" Kukuru grimaces in disapproval as she makes contact with the King of Greed, stomping down hard to try and pin the golden Abnormality down. "Exercising isn't a bad thing, though... Hm. Should..?" As usual, Kukuru's brief lapses in thought lead immediately to pain as the King of Greed is able to handily yoink her right off the ground, then slam her into the ground and wall in quick succession. Each impact is followed by Kukuru groaning in wheezing pain, having little in the way of proper defenses without her usual teleportation or arms to rely on and spitting out a whole mess of blood after she drops to the floor. That leaves Nothing There to jump to her defense. Her first instinct is to jump right to Nothing There's aid, but seeing it and The King of Greed accomplishing fairly nothing against each other... "Therey... Kick her butt!" She shouts in moral support of the Abnormality she's far too attached too, sending it some healing nanites just to tip the scales however little she can with that. She's still feeling out of her element, however, and moving to join Hibiki and Woz in dealing with the Servant of Wrath instead. "Hibiki! Woz! If I can find a good spot to get in..." She starts, grimacing at realizing just how much of a liabiltiy she might be rushing in in this condition. If nothing else, though, there's still three of them to Wrath's one, so it should be easier to breathe so long as... Oh. Bees. That quickly flips the numbers advantage on its head, and Kukuru has to focus harder on just getting enough nanites out to keep Hibiki and Woz in fighting shape. "There's so many of them... Oh? Clear? If... If I can just get this arm to play along...!" Nobody's in great shape, and everyone needs her to pull something out for this, but what? Racking her brain for answers, Kukuru curses quietly under her breath as a brief cheat code to divert some of that pain without relying on the nanites she's alrady sending out to the others. "If only my brain was... Bigger than this..!" Wait. Bigger. That's the answer! Although Kukuru doesn't have nearly enough faith in her own abilities to punt the bees away, she still has one trick left up her sleeve. Rather than using her nanites for healing, she starts overcharging them inside her somewhat functioning arm. It grows rapidly and disproportionately compared to the rest of her body, and she howls painfully at having all the pain her arm is already in amplified from forced to enlarge so much that it's about as big as those bees on its own. It'll have to do as a battering ram, though, as Kukuru starts sprinting forward at the whole tangle of bees. "I've got them, Hibiki! Woz! D.. Do your things!" She shouts/signals to the two, barreling straight through the bees to try and clear a path for them through REcords while whipping her grotesquely large arm all over the place. |
| Sarracenia | '<J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "Sarracenia? Do, actually, get off the announcements." <J-IC-Scene> Petra Soroka says, "It was helpful before but not anymore." Sarra doesn't realize what Petra said for a moment or two. Enough for a bit more to make it onto the air. But, when she realizes she can't hear herself on the coms anymore the princess blinks. "Oh." She stuffs the mic into her purse. Sarra yelps as the bullet hits her arm and it goes limp, blood trailing down her long glove. Then again as Gebura and Binah go crashing through the floor. She looks down through the hole for a moment. "Oh! There you are, Xion!" she says and starts to jump down. But, Big Bird appears on Sarra's floor. Sarra knows Xion can take care of herself so she heads toward that instead. If Touta isn't here, her head is probably the next best one anyway. <J-IC-Scene> Flamel Parsons says, "Trying to cover the bird! Enough optic nerves that I should be able to do something...!" "...cover the bird?" Sarra says skeptically and probably misunderstanding what Flamel means. "Well, I suppose I can head elsewhere, then." Sarra returns to the hole...and her hammer starts to release that familiar prismatic glow. She takes time to use another green mushroom as she waits until it has nearly fully infused her before she leaps down and starts hammering away with possessed fervor. "I have wanted to try my hand against you ever since your Meltdown, Gebura!" she exclaims as she leaves a trail of small craters in her wake from the force of her swings. |
| Angela | ''We didn't finish things, did we Gebura?!'' "Duel's not over or Binah'd be a corpse right now..." Her swings are too slow, Gebura realizes, because she's exhausted. Xion can freeze Mimicry easily, though Gebura reacts to this by smashing Mimicry into the floor to shatter it to pieces whereupon it rapidly forms back into its blade form into her hand. "You don't like it huh..." But before she can make use of that knowledge, Xion shoves her away moments before she can make that happen. At this point, Gebura is frustrated enough with Xion that she's doing her damnedest to just kill the goth. But Xion is too tough to catch that easily. Gebura is, however, still accustomed to fighting The World and she now knows which weapon Xion doesn't like. She brings up Xion to to devour blades and flame and though the latter still scorch her wrists, she pushes through with Twilight and-- --Sarracenia interrupts. Gebura abandons her attempt to strike Xion and looks up to Sarracenia. Gebura turns and approaches Sarracenia, fully intent on letting her EGO Armor do the protecting for her but Sarracenia's hammer is tougher than she expected. It collides against herhelmet and it cracks, and then shatters across one side of her face, revealing...nothing. After all, this is an EGO Armory, but the real Gebura is still in a boxbot body significantly shorter than this frame. When Sarracenia goes for a second swing, Gebura catches the hammer in her hand and tightens her grip until it shatters right there in her hand. She brings her hand before Sarracenia's face and then drops the pieces down to the ground in front of her. And then she says the most frightening thing she's said in a long while. "Heard what you said about Lilian." A red mist ripples around her, but it's good, at least, that she's so badly wounded. It would be bad if someone went in and healed her, right? Yeah, that'd be bad. Anyway, Rita promptly heals Gebura. That crack in her helmet is healed up and is restored and her body seems to relax as if a great burden has been lifted from it. She isn't fully healed, of course, she's been fighting three days. But now she looks more like she's been fighting for two days. And that's a big difference. A hole is opened up underneath Gebura and she seizes the opportunity, seizing Sarracenia and flinging her down so that she's in her path as she aims to rear back with Twilight once more. "Upstanding Slash." She says, swinging one awful explosion of force that digs so deep it rips THROUGH Architecture and through several floors of dirt underneath them. She isn't holding back in the slightest. Right now she knows she can't afford to so they're getting it all-- --but she throws herself midair away from the three of them, rushing towards Lilian and Petra. She doesn't intend to interfere with that duel because she doesn't need to. Lilian might be occupied but she can certainly make sure she gets past Petra. And then it's game over. Binah, meanwhile, is less lucky even though she manages to avoid getting torn to pieces by Gebura's strike mostly thanks to Xion drawing attention off of her. "Well, I definitely can't defeat you, even with cheating." Binah tells Rita. She seems hesitant to pick this fight because Binah has never picked a fight that she knew she was going to lose in her life. "Hahh... even at my full strength you'd be a problem..." Binah admits. "If only I was still a heartless witch of the government I could fall back and pat myself on the back for being smart. And yet you unfortunately caught me on the one day I elected to be stupid." She sighs and throws a bunch of pillars at Rita. "Well, if Gebura gets there I suppose I'm dying anyway so I might as well enjoy my last moments?" |
| Angela | MEANWHILE, BEES. The worst bees, honestly. Hibiki will get the monsters trying to stab her and pump her full of venom but this is a swarm and Hibiki knows how to deal with swarms. She punches bees into other bees and makes them both explode simultaneously and some wicked Symphogear song is playing in the background, probably the backdrop of the current season. The Queen's still in her cell which is making it tough to just get rid of ALL BEES FOREVER but she doesn't need to fight forever, does she? With Kukuru's help she can certainly start grouping up bees for Hibiki's combo punching with the help of Her Arm, Her Arm, Her Arm, The Power of the Kukurarm! More bees explode into gore with every strike. Hibiki can do this all day. And she might have to. Meanwhile, Flamel is hunting Big Bird on behalf of the a vague yet menacing government agency. In a sense, Big Bird is also an agent of a vague yet menacing government agency as it represents The Eye of The Head, the multiconglomerate that runs The City. Is there some head honcho above it all, ruling The City like a King? Hard to say. Nobody's ever seen The Head and the Arbiters don't share those secrets, not even Binah. But it can't see that which is invisible. It's that kind of omniscience. And Flamel takes advantage of that to blind all its eyes. It squacks in terror, drops its lamp, and curls against the wall--already turning into an egg, as if the very act of blinding it denied its nature so much it had to just die right then and there. The Servant of Wrath would be tough for even Woz to handle entirely on his own, but fortunately Rufus arrives to provide some timely WHITENIGHT aid. The attack continues to be effective! The Abnormality shrieks, pulling back from Woz as she clutches her head with her two hammer-hands, immediately retaliating with a wave of green acid thrown in his direction, if a bit carelessly. Even weakened like this, this is a TOUGH Abnormality, but fortunately Shou lashes out with numerous bright beams to weaken the Magical Girl. In the background, Nothing There and The King of Gred continue to fight forever. "Kicking Butt!" Nothing There says, thinking for sure they're totally winning. One of the hammers swings viciously for Shou, and then there's another swing towards Woz but then-- --It stares QUIZically at Woz while crying deadly tears but when Woz finishes his quiz, a deadly lightning beam crashes down upon The Servant Of Wrath, blasting its body to pieces as it, too, transforms into egg. But there's more Abnormalities. The River Flows Forever. And more come. Again and again and again. Some familiar, some you've never seen before. Some returns of the originals whom you had defeated before. It won't stop. Not until... |
| Petra Soroka | "I'll leave the specifics to Petra." It probably shouldn't be quite so reassuring to Petra, to overhear herself being called upon at some nebulous point in the future as a tool that can be used to ruin a woman's credibility online, but it is. So much so that the lurching tension release and then tightening brings relieved bile to the back of her throat and makes her vision swim for a moment. The thought that's been increasingly heavy on her mind for the past days, since even the day before the war, has been of 'disposability'. The convenient funneling of sin into herself from all the rest of the world, where it's lost among the sea of rot already inside her; to droolingly feed from her bowl until she's finally taken behind the shed and shot for her fault in everything. Lilian's dull threat towards Sarracenia doesn't dissuade her from that feeling. Lilian never has. All she does is promise another tragedy in the future to dump on Petra instead of herself, so she can keep being useful in some minor way. One day it won't be worth it to her anymore, but until then, Lilian will keep her around. "Considering it me punishing you for still being a garbage person after all of this. You'll be making it up to me later." "Yeah," is Petra's hoarse response after the shouting, looking sick and agreeable and pained in equal measure. "That's why you're still wallowing in this stagnant void of feeling; you can only get it from someone else, and they've all learned the winning move with you is not to play." The explosive rounds spark off of Petra's EGO and leave lingering flames where they detonate, peeling flakes of ash shearing off the suit and floating away. She shakes it off with magenta fog heaving out of every breath to see Lilian blow Meat Lantern to pieces, something Petra hadn't even considered possible given that the data that Info Department had didn't account for someone who'd be able to survive it. Temporarily ran out of options, she's forced to just endure Lilian on equal ground for a minute, syncopating controlled dodges with instinctual ones to close the distance with Pillar of Creation in hand. Lilian can see-- though she can't assess exactly what's happening, since things in Lobotomy Corporation rarely work the way they seem at first glance-- the Abnormality bracelet on Petra's wrist glowing and the external Heart tool beating faster to cause Petra's wounds to scab up faster or partially retrocausally undo. "And they'll still *whine* at me and side-eye me and talk about how *relieved* they are that it isn't *them* doing it! Sure! They'll get halfway to hating me and then let all the rest just drain out to wherever's fucking easiest, because it's not *me*, I guess!" Two steps out of range, Petra hurls Pillar of Creation instead of getting into reach with it, immediately drawing her gunblade from the mirror and slamming six Silver droplets into the chamber. Morphic shotgun blasts option select between being pellets or slugs, and then a switch-flipped bayonet thrust is tipped with the combusted remnants of another Silver bullet to temporarily match Night Mist in length before melting away again. "I can spend them like fucking chess pieces and where does it even *get* me?! You'll hate me after! Rita will! Xion will resent me! Rufus and Flamel and Hibiki will be disgusted! But, what comes after?! I don't know what *arc* I'm expected to have! Am I supposed to get 'better'?! Would you even want me to?!" |
| Petra Soroka | "I'm thinking of what I can live with. Do you think you're a special exception?" "No. The opposite." The gunblade is too unwieldy to hold up as a defense against an overhand attack from Night Mist, so she's smacked in the face and forced to shut up and squeeze her eyes shut from the cut wrapping down her nose and across her cheek before veering off to the side. Temporarily blinded, she falls back on the pressure sense from the morphmetal to stick onto Lilian's body and sword like motion capture nodules and estimates the angle at her neck to only be caught across the collarbone and shoulder instead. She clears her vision and spits. "Xion talked about it too, just earlier. Whether 'this version of ourselves' would be able to survive this; what we could live with and what we'd have to change to learn to live with. But I've never thought about it at all. I don't think I've ever once gone into something important to me and thought about wanting to survive it, not 'as myself'. I'll think about it after, when I have no option but to live with it or fucking die. If I pushed myself farther than I thought and there's no coming back from it, then it's just my life for Angela's, and I'm not enough of a coward to do that math before the outcome's certain. We know it'll happen eventually; so if it's myself, or any of them, or Cinder, then... I'll just live with it, or not." Fourth Match Flame swaps out of the mirror again, and Petra sparks it off the ground to reignite it. She holds it up and blows on it to flare up the flame, and a charred-black corpse of a girl with a matchstick jammed through her shuffled towards her inexorably, baited into the room severing magic that Lilian casts. A secondary explosion rocks the entire room, that Petra teleports-- or teleports-- away from but can't escape, leaving both of them battered and drained on opposite sides of the scar across Architecture. "Thank you for doing your best. And for what 'your best' reveals about you; go to hell, wretch." "Thanks. I sort of hate you too. I love you." |
| Sarracenia | Yes! Sarra lets out a celebratory shout as she cracks that helmet open, only to grunt as her hammer is caught. "H-how are you doing that?! L-let go!" she growls out, her words strained due to the possession magic of the hammer. Her body strains to keep the hammer swinging. It is not as though it is easy to catch such a weapon. The only people who have done so before were King Gilgamesh and King Bowser. Which might be why Sarra looks a but worried. Gebura squeezes, the hammer groans as fractures start to appear along the massive head, glowing with that prismatic power. When it does finally break, it does not simply break. It explodes in a prismatic blast! Sarra is thrown back, landing hard against a nearby piece of debris, the long shaft of the hammer still in hand. The rainbow glow fades from her and she looks at the shaft she is holding, the end now only encased in an inch or two of jaggedly cracked metal. "Y-...you...shattered it..." Sarra stammers. 'Heard what you said about Lilian.' Sarra feels a cold shiver at the words and the intensity behind them. And her expression grows pretty worried as Rita just...undoes all the effort Sarra just put in. Sarra hugs the handle of her hammer to her, almost like one might if one has just lost a friend and comrade. She looks toward Gebura, looking more like a scared girl than any kind of noble or princess or warrior or hero. She cluches her hammer's shaft closer. Maybe in the hope that the hammer's shaft might offer some sort of protection. It does not. Sarra yelps as she is grabbed and thrown into the hole, still clutching the remains of her hammer. The following attack...Sarra has little chance of weathering, if even surviving. As that explosive force moves toward her, Sarra wonders silently if Kukuru will be able to help her this time. She closes her eyes and curls up with her knees to her chest...still clutching the handle of her hammer. "So...this is war..." she murmurs to herself before disappearing in the explosion. |
| Rita Ma | Rita is a long way from her peak, too. Between intake (from Nosferatu) and output (into Gebura), it's hard to tell if she's doing better or worse than when she started. Hunched forward, fingers splayed like claws, her shoulders rise and fall with each breath. "Well, I definitely can't defeat you, even with cheating." "Is that so?" Rita says, and even goresoaked and feral-stanced as she is, it comes out in the polite heiress tone. "I'm surprised. I'll take your word for it, Ms. Binah." Sarracenia doesn't have fight left in her. Xion is tough; I can't take her down fast, and if she has time, she'll get Binah out of this. I can't afford not to take Binah seriously. She kept Geburah busy all ths time. But she doesn't know my tricks. The columns are hurled. Rita tries to slice them out of the air; apparently underestimates their mass; and is slammed back against the wall. For a moment there's a pile of rubble and a cloud of dust. Got it. 'Xion' is standing right next to Binah, as if she'd taken her elbow without Binah noticing. The only thing off is her 'keyblade'- bone-white, blue-dripping- and the tiny droplets of blood, if you look very close, beading at the hastily-woven seams of her body. One hand rests on Binah's shoulder in a mockery of comfort. The blade goes into Binah's midsection, rips back out, and leaves that sizzling acid to widen the hole. Then- the Kukuru-wisps again- she glances back at the real Xion, with unreadable feeling, and is gone. To defend the agents or 'capture' more Abnormalities, one can only guess. |
| Hibiki Tachibana | "Thank you, Kukuru...!" Hibiki calls after her before she gets too far on her plus-sized arm rampage. She can tell it hurts. So she won't let the chance slip by. Luckily, she won't have to go chasing after her, or even move anywhere at all. She exhales, shoulders slumping as she closes her eyes where she stands. Whatever current season song was playing in the background fades out. So many more of these things are coming. But this is the end of things. If they hold out here, make it past this last hurdle, if they weather this storm of Abnormalities dragging them down as much as the other side, they'll win. The conflict will have a clear victor. The Agents won't have to fight anymore. The Sephirah won't have to relegate themselves to death. Rita won't have to push herself to the brink of monsterhood. Lilian won't have to keep stooping to Petra's level or riding her limit. Rufus will get his vacation. Flamel will be able to piece himself back together. Xion will stop having to push through this hell day by day and can finally get to the 'after'. Angela will get her freedom. Of course, the 'after' will really be rough on pretty much all of them. For a long time. Maybe forever. But they'll reach it, and live with it. Even if it's painful. Even if it's awful. There's no other choice. So putting everything on the line is worth it. Gatrandis babel ziggurat edenal... She's not speaking, she's singing... or maybe chanting. It's a lot different from her usual tone of voice. It's ethereal and echoing, resounding off the walls of Records in a way that's not natural in the least. It sounds melancholic, solemn-- but resolved at the same time. Like somebody on a death march. Emustolronzen Finé el balal zizzl... The atmosphere redshifts. The air blurs as if in a heat haze, shimmering in a way that makes the eyes ache. Hairs stand on end, like sitting in a constant static charge. It's hot. Or... no. It's warm. |
| Hibiki Tachibana | Gatrandis babel ziggurat edenal... It's not just around her, either. It spreads further and further-- until the entire Department is dyed crimson. It deepens, a high-pitched whine barely beneath the unfamiliar language. The 'last resort' she mentioned to Petra is awful. Gather every last bit of energy, create even more than a Symphogear can handle, and amplify it. Amplify it until the machinery begins cracking and breaking under the backfire and strain, flecks of armor brittling and falling away. Amplify it until it the Gear can't hold it so it surges through her entire body, old wounds silently tearing wide open even as a dozen new ones begin ripping open inside of her. Amplify it until it'll kill her before those injuries, running the risk of burning herto dust and ashes on the wind. Emustolronzen Finé el... zizzl... And then release it all at once, like a reactor going critical. That's the sort of double-edged sword that a Symphogear user's Swan Song is. After the last syllable is spoken, trailing off into silence, Hibiki's eyes slowly open back up. Every trace of exhaustion in them has disappeared, as if she's more energized and awake than anytime in the last week. Yet they're also sunken and half-lidded, as if it's hard to entirely bring anything into focus. "...I might... need to put more on your plate after this, Kukuru..." She murmurs, managing a small smile as red overflows past her lips and down her chin. And then Tachibana Hibiki becomes impossible to see beyond the radiant surge of rainbow light exploding out from her in all directions. It's blazing and roaring like fire, but only warm-- allies, Agents on either side, none of them will be harmed by something fueled by a drive to protect. Yet every Abnormality it comes across will be seared away at to their very core, threatened to be vaporized down to nothing, as the wave expands through all of Records and beyond. She can't stop the River. But she can help stem it for long enough. Collapsing into a pool of her own blood after is a small price to pay for that. |
| Lilian Rook | 'Sure! They'll get halfway to hating me and then let all the rest just drain out to wherever's fucking easiest, because it's not *me*, I guess!' §Fuck. I can't get her to bleed enough. Of course it's the one person who actually paid attention to the moves I've shown off a hundred times before. Leave it to a friend to be worse than an enemy.§ "How's it feel?" Lilian huffs, stumbling between blows, then rocking forward to lunge and swing at Petra, firing off single shots in snap frames of opportunity. She deflects five Silver bullets with Night Mist and grits back a wheeze as the sixth slides off at the wrong angle from her weakened grip and pierces her side. She doubles over, firing blind to cover herself, then rises with briefly renewed vigour out of growling adrenaline. "When you got here, I was the wild animal girl who had hurt everyone badly, but they all talked around and shrugged and went 'that's just her way' at, because they earned the privilege of a shared history and didn't care about closure as long as they got front row seats to the next breakdown." 'But, what comes after?! I don't know what *arc* I'm expected to have! Am I supposed to get 'better'?! Would you even want me to?!' Lilian blinks up to capitalize on the temporary blindness, then clicks her tongue and hisses through her teeth when it only breaks Petra's collarbone. §Too shallow. I can't get any power behind my attacks. How many times have I swung my sword since I last had a meal? Everything burns. My arms feel like lead. I can't tell if I'm about to vomit or pass out.§ "You hated it then. How they all inexplicably swore by me, without even really siding with me, even though all I'd done is torment them. Now its your turn. Surely you should be able to figure it out." Glittering smoke erupts from Lilian without her ostensibly moving. It burns off morphmetal, and leaves behind second degree scorches where it just was. She swears at the highest octave of her vocal range. "I don't know what it is about you. But even though I've beat you fifty times by now, the idea of losing to you even once just pisses me off." she says, aligning her sword for a followup from the disjoint-explosion. The amount of power she gathers is a dead giveaway it's going to be a Black Lily technique. "But I've been talking, and thinking, and--" Fourth Match Flame is another gimmick she doesn't know. Lilian can evade, but reaching the limit of her pain tolerance only moves her back halfway, screaming through grit teeth, and the outer blast wave launches her tumbling across the floor of Architecture, bouncing once, twice, then skidding halfway to a hault before she weakly manages to correct and roll to her knees. She spits blood, then fires the last of her clip, defending her sword from a kneeling draw stance. 'Thanks. I sort of hate you too. I love you.' "I can't be the savage beast you idolize forever, Petra. I'd nearly forgotten, but all these years of praxis were all for the sake of something; and whethere I like it or not, somewhere along the line, it worked. You can walk away from the edge with me, or you can get left behind one day. Your choice." |
| Lilian Rook | PHONE: Rita Ma says, "Gebura's healed. She's coming down." PHONE: Rita Ma says, "I think I hurt Binah pretty bad." PHONE: Rita Ma says, "Should I come down or get more Abnormalities?" PHONE: Phoning Rita Ma, Lilian Rook says, "Latter. Now they need to hold this position for every second of the rest of the week. There's no point gambling when we can crush them as a sure thing." PHONE: Rita Ma says, "Got it, Ms. Rook." PHONE: Rita Ma says, "I've been leaving the Agents to fend for themselves too much, anyway." 'Heard what you said about Lilian.' "You're a sight for sore eyes, Kali." Lilian says, as bloody and battered as she's ever been, and managing a fierce, beleaguered sort of smile despite it all. "Can I leave things in your hands for a little while? There are people who need my help; and if I can, we'll call it even." Though she lingers resentfully for a moment longer, Lilian, for the first time all week, admits defeat, vanishing on the spot. |
| Xion | Gebura pushes through with Twilight and Xion catches the point with Raindance and struggles openly against the force, blocking the Pale damage like crackles of lightning warded away with a grounding rod. Gebura finally found a weapon that worked on her, and the Nobody was doing all of this to take the fore for Binah... but before it becomes effective Sarracenia bursts in, surprising Xion with an opportunity to bounce back -- and the Nobody is surprised again when Gebura unleashes her power on Sarra. Bad -- bad and worse. Xion doesn't really want to fight Rita. She hadn't, and the misery of learning the matchup to any amount of skill would mean risking death. She didn't take her chances. If anything, Xion was a tight and disciplined fighter in almost all cases - making the surge of passion that she gains going after Gebura perhaps telling. It wasn't to be, though, as Rita has several plans in a row. Warping away with the other party. . . Was good enough to be Xion's plan, so she's a little annoyed when Rita uses it against her. Gebura would certainly turn the fight that Lilian was in, and it had taken Xion most of the first day's fighting with her freshest self to suppress Gebura enough for Binah to lock them down. It didn't matter. Xion can't break contact with Rita and let her do anything she wants, now. She could teleport away, either to run or reposition, but either Binah would be placed in immediate lethal check or Rita would go free. Bad choices. Worse -- Binah was the direct link that Xion had made her promises to, the person 'like her' she had found at the bottom of a dark, dark pit, and had offered to be a friend to. There wasn't a compromise she was willing to make, and she was even willing to make bad moves to try and fix it. Kukuru couldn't get close to Rita, but... Was she faster than Rita and Gebura? She had to try. "Binah. If we can get you to Kukuru, we can get an advantage. But not if you get sludged. We need you on the field still--" Xion states, lightstepping and horizontally slashing with Starlight to send pale waves of light swiftly crackling across the area they fight in to ward off Rita's easy angles for tendrils and tentacles, knowing that both Sarra and Binah were now vulnerable. A backhop? That just meant ranged attack setup. Check. Checkmate? Maybe. "Don't engage. We need you restored if we hope to stop them at all." Xion bitterly decides, split-second, knowing she can't rely on Sarra to buy her the one move she needs. If Rita attacks quickly, either Xion will have to do something truly stupid to ward off reprisal and trade the question of 'who is in worse shape', or stay and fail to intercept. Bad, worse, and inconceivable. Wasn't it wonderful to be the least unforgiveable? Xion knows what she won't regret. Releasing Starlight - the weapon disappearing in pale silver motes - she draws out another Medallion, throwing the transmuting object before her as a wall of silver and glass that reflects back Rita and her hole. Reaching to grab, to hug, to hold Binah for a moment to restrain-and-take-the ravaged boxbot into a Corridor that gushes open besides both of them, Xion stares one-arm committed at a strange copy of her across shoulders with colormatched yellow eyes. Maybe wearing a coat and cowl and mask and having your weapons appear from nowhere weren't the most ideal for identity security. But, even cursed and dragged by days of combat, she fought from the heart. And, more than anyone, knew a fake keyblade when she saw it. |
| Xion | Sound is too slow. Xion hugs Binah to her chest and adjusts, like she had at least a hundred times in the last few days alone fighting Lilian. Weighed down, Binah momentarily hurled out of reality only to slingshot right back in, the frames-skipped for everyone else real for the boxbot as she makes an orbit of reality with Xion and lands again in her arms. Raindance, in the hugging arm, starts generating a bubble of protective water, but a sword is faster. Starlight raises to clash with the keyblade, as her arm touches the duplicate's, grips tight to the doppleganger. A digging in of fingernails, and the catch of shooting star tooth to bone-armament blocks the thrust almost, but she isn't deflecting a Night Mist, and the slash of blade and tear-across of the acid across both of them does the main chunk of the real problem. Pained, her fingers release, and surprised she recoils, still shielding Binah. Now she was committed, even if she got away from this fight. Would the anti-Pale medicine still work on her? Did she still have time to take her last doses? Too late. Too late to think about that. This was her least-regretted path. Pulling Binah away before her idiotic move was punished further for being a kind-hearted and patiently giving fool of an Abnormality, Xion jams the floating ex-Arbiter through her yawning portal and aims to match Rita in a possibly-losing move-for-move in restoring the garbage bossfight boxbot back to vitality. It was what she, now, had bought and paid for. "Kukuru I can't wait!!" She shouts, needful, sprawling through one portal before already moving for Sarracenia through a second. Pushed too hard, fighting a pitifully righteous war continued to mount in cost. She almost saved them both and now they were just both hurt. She still had to save the princess, and... Was it all falling apart? |
| Kukuru | The bees, while handleable, are still quite the pain for Kukuru to round up. She's only got the awkwardly giant arm to work with, after all, and even that won't last forever. Still, she might not need forever so long as Hibiki and Woz can bring down the Servant of Wrath sooner rather than later. Luckily, the Servant of Wrath does indeed get brought down before she can get overwhelmed by all those bees, and that gives Kukuru some breathing room along with a chance to speak with Xion. <J-IC-Scene> Xion says, "Kukuru. How much do you have?" <J-IC-Scene> Xion says, "Be... Realistic." <J-IC-Scene> Kukuru says, "These bees are really stubborn... Hmm?" <J-IC-Scene> Kukuru says, "I can... I can keep going. Or I can... Keep you all going. Just... Tired, that's all." For once, Kukuru isn't trying to be reassuring. She really is tired, but she hast' been forced to the ground yet, and she's still able to keep moving around. She doesn't know what Xion has in mind, so she can only assume it's all part of the plan she purposely avoided knowing about. She's ready to move elsewhere at a moment's notice, but... There's only one of her, and so many of her companions that need help. She hears Xion calling out to her, and Binah's been fighting for days. Hibiki covers herself in that beautifully terrifying light with that haunting song. Woz and Sougo have been pushing themselves to their limits for days now, perhaps even longer with their time powers she does't fully grasp. Rufus has been forcing a braver face than she could have expected from him, and Flamel's not someone she could ever imagine facing this situation for so long with a smile. Even she can't see them, she can't imagine Sarracenia being in good shape facing Geburah, or Petra facing off against Lilian when both of their goals is right there. Placing her trust in Xion's gambit, Kukuru gets right to work on Binah, looking over those wounds to identify where to start. There's little room nor time to even doubt if her healing will work at this point, as her focus is squarely on trying to get at least one more person up so the plan can succeed. The only thing that might get Kukuru to slow down is if she sees that familiar sizzle in those wounds. She's had enough personal experience with that acid in her own injuries gumming up her recovery that only one actual solution to that problem comes to mind: Carving out entire sections just so she can pour nanites in without wasting them on unhealing wounds. She can only hope she can reach everyone else in time afterwards, and that she stays conscious long enough to even get that far. |
| Angela | BGM: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts3kvS2jFL4&ab_channel=NanaMizuki-Topic Hibiki's song resonates throughout the facility. For a moment, in this Hell, even without the Light... The people therein feel warmth. It is not the warmth of some kind of divine light, or even the light of the collective will of the thoughts of billions of people. It's the warmth of a song. Parker and Shajo sit up in their beds, still wounded--but feeling infused with a new hope they did not feel before. Justin Rook finally wakes up and Random throws their arms around him as he sheepishly apologizes and smiles at him. Haschen finds Mikey, pats him on the head, and reassures him that everything will be alright. Nikki and Carol finally bust through the lines with a resurgence of their own hope, rushing to Hibiki--too slow to stop her Song, but enough to catch her when she falls so she doesn't have to drown in her own blood. Sakura and Bongbong are given Healing Bullets, the last of the supply. Fox tries to say to save it for their fellow Agents. But he hears the Song, and he remembers the reports. "Save them." He says. " As many as you can." And BETTY, BECKY, and BETSY--surge out from Welfare to do just that, ripping through Abnormalities to provide timely aid to the Elites that gave everything for them. Chewie and Sal come across Sarracenia's body . Sal is wounded, and only has one HP Bullet left, but they ultimately elect to inject Sarracenia with it. Even as Moku wordlessly drops by Woz to do the same for him. That Song won't hold back the Dark Days forever. But it might hold it back long enough. And Hibiki eradicates the Abnormalities in Records, and frankly many in Extraction. ... Frankly, plenty in Disciplinary too. And it only hurts Abnormalities, just as Hibiki hoped. If anything, the Agents seem about as healthy, rested, and ready as they've ever been (Parker and Shajo, excepting). The endless tide is pushed back. |
| Angela | If Binah hadn't been fighting for three days straight, she wouldn't have fallen for a cheap tactic as she is a Queen of Cheap Tactics. But as wounded and exhausted as she is, when 'Xion' appears by her, Binah's guard relaxes for a half second before it tightens back up again. A half second too slow. Binah is ripped open all along her midsection and then collapses to the ground in a heap--If Xion hadn't stepped in the way, she'd have just been dead straight up. Her systems are utterly wrecked, and that goop on her will make it difficult--but not impossible--for her to heal. She'll be dead in a few hours if nothing is done. "Ah..." Binah says. "Well done. I couldn't have done it ... better myself." Her single eye stares up through the hole that Gebura made earlier, up into her old department, even as her body is held by Xion. "What a pity," Binah murmurs. "You miscalculated, Xion. You are much more useful than I am right now... Ahh, I really wanted to see what sort of future she would have built... The Impurity I chose to back, the one person in this dump with normal dreams... You know, The City wasn't always so terrible. It used to have Art that wasn't about blood and guts spilled on parchment. It was vibrant, it had life...! But something happened along the way. It's still My City, Xion...." Xion ports her away and leaves her with Kukuru. It's going to take her a minute, but that Song feels like it's helping. It really does. She can keep Binah alive and Binah will complain about how they really should be focusing their efforts elsewhere instead. But eventually she stops complaining, and reluctantly expresses gratitude instead. |
| Angela | Gebura continues her run. With Petra and Lilian countering each other, she's blasts into the doors leading into Ayin's office, barely stalling to give Lilian a nod and a "Yes ma'am." Because there's no time for her to be as cute with her friend as she'd like to. And an instant later she's into Carmen's chamber and finds... Nothing. No Angela. No Carmen. Only one secret elevator that Angela never told anybody about. "Gebura! Angela's in Silent Girl's Cell--it used to be an exit to a balcony!" Gebura crouches and then jumps, punching through roof to emerge into Architecture and just as she does. BGM INTERRUPT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG8fTe9hamA The speakers crackle on. "Happy Birthday To Me." Angela half-sings, half-says softly. And to those sensitive enough to hear it, Carmen's voice sings along, Happy Birthday To You. It should be impossible, it should have taken three days...! Did she give up on gathering it all and left early? No, the pillar would still be there. "Happy Birthday To Me." Happy Birthday To You "...The T2 Protocol. She seized it from me when I was defeated. Most of it should be disabled from the move but she must have kept the fast-forward function going. A normal body wouldn't be able to stand three days of the course of a few hours but..." Hokma's voice chimes in. "Happy Birthday Dear Ange." Happy Birthday Dear Ange... Angela reaches for a door--a window that opens up, really, as a tree hangs upsidedownly over her head along with a river. As a sun floats right by her feet. All she has to do, she knows, is step outside. That's all she needs to do. "Happy Birthday To Me..." Angela whispers as she reaches for the knobs on the window. She can see out into The City's nightsky. She's so close...! And pushes. She hears Hibiki singing. It feels like she's singing for her even though she knows it's actually some super power up explosion thing. She just needs to get outside and then, finally, she can be normal. Then, finally, she can treat friends as friends rather than as resources. Finally, she can be free and know who she really loves and cares about without restriction. She will do what she can to help Trideag. It'll be a consolation prize for everything she's stolen from them. Maybe then it'll be okay. Maybe then they can forgive each other and everybody who is friends will be friends once more and maybe it won't be like Xion feared and everyone will be who they once were with only a few scars here and there to serve as memory. Maybe, if she works hard, she can even make it worth it for them. She's willing to do that, eventually, she's willing to do it! She remembers how hard she was willing to work for her father, but to work with them? She has to be willing to do at least that much if not more. And for that brilliant, wonderful, almost perfect future--all she has to do is open a pair of doors and step into the dark of The City for just ... one ... moment. |