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| Flamel Parsons | (URGENT, FOR IMMEDIATE REVIEW AND TIMELY RESPONSE) To the Director of Project Mystic, Following a review of available information concerning the Psychogate Event, it has come to our attention that you and your subordinates have not furnished a complete set of information and materials concerning activities undertaken before and during the event, especially as concerns outside contractors brought in from offworld. Records regarding persons involved, hour-by-hour activities thereby, and most importantly, interactions with the Collective Unconscious or any activities occurring within a "Gate Expedition", have not been provided. These records are essential for analaysis of the Psychogate Event. International law regarding psychic activities requires these records to be kept for exactly this sort of scenario. Provide them in a timely manner for immediate examination by the IPAR Bureau. Yours, Director Deems, International Psychic Affairs Regulation Bureau |
| Flamel Parsons | THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS PSYCHOGATE EXPEDITION ONE The jeep takes a bit of work to get out of the gleaming mud near the bank of this particular stream of consciousness. The stagnant thinking nearby is so still during the seasonal depression it hardly counts as a stream, and mental fog rises from it in this chilly temperature. Unlike the real world, this ecosystem was hardly seasonal with its fauna. Tiny little Bad Ideas, just lightbulbs at that stage, buzz around as thick as mosquitos in the dead heat of summer. They're latching on and biting to gather attention, but undoubtedly White had some measure to help with that. Meanwhile, Agent Kramer asking Agent Crenshaw to please, generously, slam the accelerator while she shoves it from behind telekinetically. It's been a day or two of camping in thick psychic wilderness at this point. There's nothing to eat and so many things turn out to be inhospitable to humanoid life. Exotic zones are entirely impossible to navigate. But finding the right doors in the right sequence are finally getting them close. On the horizon, a truly massive volcanic formation, hewn from thick, soot-blackened mental blocks, bellows smoke into the sky. If you look at it from the correct angle, it looks like a man with a shock of medium-length blonde hair, mid-laugh, with eyes locked in perpetual contempt. Shrieking fauna of some description can be seen crawling at its base. Surrounding it, thick woods burn in perpetuity, struggling to grow rapidly and always being consumed by the inferno. Flamel has been trying to get a camp set up as close as they can to that, but how can one keep the growth, and thus the flame, from reaching their camp? How would one deal with the smoke? The screams? "We gotta get rid of that guy." Is Flamel's firm, yet resigned, sentiment on the massive volcano-statue-man. "God, I *hate* Narcian." They'll need a camp, which means getting through the wetland zone. The camp will need protection from fire and smoke. And they'll need a strategy for both exterminating the many thousands of Nightmares that occupy this zone, and *also* a strategy for collapsing a volcanic formation. It's a lot of ask, and it'll be an effort of many days. "Anyone got ideas? Good ones," He swats a red lightbulb off his shoulder. "Much preferred! We want to be back before a week's up, so don't think *too* long-term, but this won't get fixed quick..." They've got Agent Crenshaw, who's top of the field in sonikinetics and broadcasts, but he knows plenty about pyrokinesis and geokinesis. Agent Kramer is a powerful herbaphonist and a remote viewer, but not a clairvoyance specialist -- she also has great marksmanship she still wants to show off. They've also got everything anyone could pack into the jeep or load up onto their own, as well as any staff anyone opted to bring transit for themselves. Flamel's got some prefab shelter stuff in a kit in his backpack, but he really wants it closer to the burning area of operation... |
| Rufus Shinra | "A stream of consciousness. As in a literal stream. That's..." Rufus leans forward in his seat. "Fucking amazing, actually?" He seems genuine. He's also no help at all for getting the jeep unstuck, but that's just how he is. He *is* good for having supplies on hand, at least. The Days of Darkness and Light are still very fresh in his mind, and he's put a lot of care into his packing. It actually helps that he doesn't have the nature pips needed to understand that you can *forage* for food while camping, so there not being anything natural to eat is accidentally already accounted for. > "God, I *hate* Narcian." Rufus nods, sympathetically. "War crimes. The cause of and solution to all of life's problems." Plans! "Alright. Now that we know what we're dealing with, I can bring in some more supplies." He puts away his walking stick (the one that obviously has a sword hidden inside of it) and gets out his shotgun. "As far as dealing with the nightmares, I've got shotguns and magic to pass around for anyone who doesn't have a personal defense solution. I'm not gonna assume real world logic holds up one hundred percent here, but since they're fire monsters they should still be weak to ice like in reality, right?" "For getting in close, could bring in the helicopter. Might need to disassemble and reassemble it to get it through the psychogate, though, so that'll add at least a day, maybe longer." "And for leveling out a mountain..." He plucks the pale yellow materia from his shotgun, and spins it around his fingers as though he's in a stage production of Labyrinth. "Firmament Driver. It'll level just about anything. Actually, since it's based on my memories of the real thing, maybe it'll work *better* here? And if I can get Agent Kramer's remote viewing to paint my target, we might not even need to get that close." |
| White | White might be unaccustomed to leading this kind of expedition, but she's done the necessary work to come prepared! Aside from more typical camping supplies packed into the jeep, she's prepared a bit of a stockpile of food in her extradimensional storage space, along with cartography supplies, and a modest stack of lumber and sheet metal, nails, hammers and the like. Most unusual traversal-based situations can be handled with magic or silkwoven means, and even the little bug-like Bad Ideas are easily handled with a periodic flicker of the Jinxing Evil Eye to drain them of their energy... Though it might be strange for some of the others to get used to seeing them drop out of the air or off their bodies. She doesn't need to eat or sleep throughout, either, so she's up at all hours of every day. Really, in spite of how she's constantly active and on guard, she doesn't seem to spare much time for personal whimsy here like others might... Throughout their time together, White finds lulls to politely ask each of her team members "Would you... Allow me to Analyze you? For planning?", taking stock of everyone's abilities as much as they'll permit her to. She's perhaps a little noticeably careful with approaching Liza, given this is their first in-person meeting and she's likely only ever heard her name from Rita and has to construct an understanding of her on the spot. Provided she gets her permission to do so, it's done with a polite haste and capped off with an offer of a treat; everyone who lets her use the Evil Eye gets a little bag of skittles! Yay! She's not particularly demanding of the team either way, mostly making gently murmured suggestions to ease some of the natural hassles of the environment while knocking down small problems herself as they come up. But, now after a couple of days to acclimate to one-another, they've got a 'boss fight' to handle. Though, the fight is less against the boss and more against the consequences of the boss existing, isn't it? White starts with the common sense step of beginning to Analyze the Narcian-mountain, deriving what particular vulnerabilities it might have in its defenses or its ability to react and respond to their interference (if any), along with any dangerous 'wild card' abilities it might produce under stress. The Nightmares seem like typical beater-type threats to her, but she gives them a look over for any tricky elements too. She neatly records whatever information she can derive from doing so without looking away from those threats in the distance, and it takes her a short time to actually wind her way around to speaking, a soft murmur sounding more like she's asking questions herself. "Bombarding the Nightmares," she starts, having presumably been given a brief crash course on basic psychohazards at *some* point, "Would be effective. But cleaning up... The stragglers, would take... Some time. From the base... Mister Crenshaw... And myself, might trigger... A collapse, but... Weakening a few areas... First, would make it... Faster. I could... Provide masks, to help... Filter the smoke. But it's 'low tech'. We could... Destroy some of... The trees, to prevent the... Fire from spreading more." She pauses there, fixating on the mountain's face despite not recognizing its source of reference. "Mister Flamel... How likely is it... That 'killing' the volcano... Would make its influence vanish? Say... A shot... Reaching the center... Of the skull? Or is it... 'Just a mountain'?" She glances over at Rufus and his little gun-twirl, at that. "Ammunition limits?" she asks, trying to be sure they aren't going to waste a single-shot weapon carelessly. |
| Vantablitz Remnants | Oh thank god. It's just a shitty swampy jungle full of bastard bugs. This is actually the easiest thing in the world. The last time Ahn had to camp outside in the dead-assed early summer, she had a quarter as much gear and everything was, at best, trying to eat her. Ahn, despite being here by accident, and looking for the earliest opportunity to run away and find the Watch physically possible, is acquitting herself admirably. Despite being considerably softened by shelter living, there's only so much that putting the light back in your eyes can do to unready you for a rematch. Her supplies are immaculate, her water condensation trick works just fine (at a hilariously slow drip rate), her propensity for quickly clearing brush and debris is unmatched, her sense of direction is superb, and her ear for the jeep's woes is bizarrely green-thumb-like. She is also not sharing, like, anything with anyone. Except maybe Xion if she asks. 'God, I *hate* Narcian.' "Do you think maybe that's why he's a giant volcano?" Ahn says, sort of still unclear about what this is all a representation of. "If you hated him a little less then maybe he'd be like, a rocky hill. You know?" Expert therapeutic advice from someone who only doesn't seem like she has every trauma because she vegged out for multiple decades on a sofa about it. Unfortunately, that's not really a very helpful solution, so . . . |
| Flamel Parsons | "War crimes. The cause of and solution to all of life's problems." "Ever thought about going in for Psychonautry yourself?" Flamel briefly mutters, in a vague, blank way. He does tap his fingers against their opposite upper arms for a minute, thinking, "Ice is probably a good idea. But we can't just hunt them all ourselves, we have to force them out of the local ecosystem. There's a lot of miserable children in Araphen now, and that's overfeeding their population. No matter how much we beat them up ourselves, they'll keep coming back." He does shake his head though. "A firmament driver... that sounds useful! But it won't be based on your memories. This gate, it's physical. We have to bring it in directly." |
| Vantablitz Remnants | Ahn mentally rolls up her sleeves! She catches herself actually rolling up her real sleeves a second later and feels really stupid. Protection from smoke is easy! She doesn't have a lot of experience with it, but Ahn's suggestion is that, if things go reasonably well, she can treat wood --"Is it real wood? Is it an idea of wood? Woods representing an idea? . . . Ideawood?"-- on the outside to not burn a second time and set it up to funnel the smoke along a controlled slope, up and away, since it wants to rise --"You know ancient people all over the world--" If this idea is incredibly stupid, she will immediately scuttle back into the jeep and lock herself in for a while to cringe and also tinker with an air filtration system completely batshit gonzo hackfraud style, then announced "Done." after. She either has no solutions for fireproofing or simply doesn't intend to announce them unless it's a last ditch situation kind of thing. She very politely asks Crenshaw and Kramer to "Do something about the . . . you know?" while making semi-comprehensible hand gestures about lava floes and tree breaks. Exterminating thousands of Nightmares? "Don't wanna." Ahn uses her big stupid backpack as a shield to ward away responsibility for this task. |
| Flamel Parsons | "Would you... Allow me to Analyze you? For planning?" "Just don't go revealing my identity." Agent Crenshaw had said in an incredibly chocolatey voice. "You can only do it 'cause I'm *allowing* it." Kramer had poked White a little, smirking. "How likely is it... That 'killing' the volcano... Would make its influence vanish?" "Well, how much does killing someone erase the trauma they cause?" Flamel says, shrugging vaguely and fundamentally misunderstanding that, actually, it often *does* tend to solve a lot of trauma for someone in a position of institutional power who did a lot of evil stuff to get killed. Let's set that aside for now -- "Something that big would do something, but I doubt it would finish things... Let's approach it as a mountain. That's what Araphen is feeling him as." |
| Vantablitz Remnants | 'Would you... Allow me to Analyze you? For planning?' "Please don't????" Ahn squeaks, the comedic number of verbal question marks meaning she has no idea what White even means. 'I could... Provide masks, to help... Filter the smoke. But it's 'low tech'.' "I'm not sharing mine . . ." she mumbles. Ahn definitely does actually have a gas mask and she is super keeping it to herself. Sharing something that touches your face and recycles your breath is just . . . depraved, right? The talk about bombardment and ammunition makes her shrivel into a cartoon depiction of someone who wants to go home. Metaphorically, if only just. |
| Rufus Shinra | Rufus's analyzing elicits a menu! Actually White might have seen it before. -------------------------------------------- | ATTACK | | MAGIC | | >Fire | | >Ice | | >>All | | >Lightning | | >>All | | ABILITIES | | >ENEMY SKILL | | >>Firmament Driver (1/4) | | >>Silent Orchestra (3/4) | | >>Hell Train (2/4) | | >>Silent Girl (4/4) | | >>Recoome Eraser Gun (4/4) | | >>Scarecrow Seeking Wisdom (3/4) | | >>Bullet Bill Dash (4/4) | | >Gil Toss | | >Trick Laser | | ITEMS | | SEED OF LIGHT | | LIMIT | -------------------------------------------- Nothing strange or new there. "So this is sourced from the real world, right? We're making changes in here to affect reality, but at the same time reality can cause changes here, right?" Rufus waves a hand vaguely towards the nightmare wetlands. "If this is an ecosystem then can we starve the sad thoughts out with happy ones? What if I just... airdrop a million dollars worth of ice cream and circus clowns on the village in the real world. Engineer some happy thoughts, even just temporarily for the duration of the mission." |
| Flamel Parsons | "Do you think maybe that's why he's a giant volcano?" "No, he's actually a giant volcano because he flew into a town with a big wyrm and burned down an orphanage." Flamel says idly to Ahn, scratching the side of his head and frowning at it. "I really hate that guy, man." The woods, if you look at them, seem to be massive thickened neurons, jutting out over huge axon trunks which root in telodendric formations. "These have to be the neurological damage from the trauma... They're children. They're trying to regrow and heal, but they can't get out of the cycle... Treating them rather than controlled burns, that feels less morally bad. If you can figure out some way to work with Kramer's herbaphony and get that going, that would work well." Crenshaw's geokinesis can partially redirect the searing lava flows, but he'll want a bit more planning -- any buildup becomes a later flood, so this'll have to be coordinated with collapsing the volcano, or else direct the pain elsewhere. |
| White | White manages to not look noticeably disappointed by Ahn's declination while nodding her understanding; White's pretty sure she hasn't even caught her name yet, but doesn't know how to fix that! It'd be prying! Well, if Flamel isn't being weird about her being on the team, then she supposes it's not a problem that she doesn't know who she is? Just gotta move on then. No skittles for Ahn yet, but the agents get some. Surely she'll get jealous. White also doesn't particularly get what Ahn's getting at, talking about treated wood and such, but White doesn't have much of an idea herself aside from making silk masks to pass out to the others; her body needs little enough oxygen and self-corrects for damage so automatically that she doesn't seem to use one herself. Flamel's answer about the Narcian-cano prompts a small, disappointed nod. If just destroying the mountain isn't enough, then... "... We replace it. After it's rubble... We turn it... Into something else?" It sounds like the most obvious way to overwrite the previous effect of Narcian on this mental landscape, and she delivers the idea with no sense of gravity at all for the scale of that, up until she regretfully announces, "I'm not... Much of a sculptor. Not with... Stone." Or in other words, she's pretty sure she could put the destroyed rubble back together into *something*, but it wouldn't be meaningful in an artsy psychological sort of way without help. As for the 'trees', she mimes a soft sigh upon hearing that they have greater significance too. "... I can't... Create large amounts of water... With magic. But maybe... Smothering the fire... And making dividers... With sand..?" Back to Rufus, White sits silent for a few moments, up until right before it starts to feel kind of judgey. "... Some people... Are scared of clowns." Oh. Well, that's true. "Maybe... Wildlife. Thin the Nightmares... And then... Make a new ecology. So that things are... Normal again?" She thinks a little longer, staring at Rufus long enough to even settle a hand onto her chin in Thinky Posture. "... You can copy... 'Attacks'. If I used something... With a offensive... Component... Could you imitate the... Whole spell?" |
| Rufus Shinra | > The talk about bombardment and ammunition makes her shrivel into a cartoon depiction of someone who wants to go home. Metaphorically, if only just. "... Hmm." Rufus notices the reaction, but he's not sure if he's parsing it right. Who doesn't like bombardments and ammunition and nuking the natural world until it knows who's the boss? (Who is the boss? Not the natural world, that's for sure. High five!) Ultimately he just assumes that he's reading Ahn wrong and then moves on. > White sits silent for a few moments, up until right before it starts to feel kind of judgey. Should Rufus say something? Oh, wait, she's continuing. > "... Some people... Are scared of clowns." He looks at her as though she's started speaking gibberish. "Impossible. Everyone likes clowns." > "... You can copy... 'Attacks'. If I used something... With a offensive... Component... Could you imitate the... Whole spell?" "Long as the attack is memorable enough." Then a moment later, he holds up a hand. "Hang on, hang on, there's a trick to making it more memorable." Rufus has packed pretty efficiently, but he's still found enough space to stash away a small bag of popcorn, a tiny soda, and a little bag of sno-caps. "Okay, go," he says, after perching in his camping chair, and starts watching White closely. |
| White | Memorable... So in other words, it needs to look cool, right? And ideally it should be easy to recreate the motions of it; kids love imitating super-moves from games and stuff, right? Okay, she can work with that. Even if seeing Rufus get out an armful of snacks makes her want to push him over just a little bit. So, finding a space where she won't be causing collateral damage by turning over the soil abruptly, White rolls her shoulder and picks a stone up off the ground. She works a dark-orange magical glyph with her fingertips in the other hand, passes the stone through it to 'mark' it with the spell, then grunts softly and pitches the stone. By the time it hits the ground about sixty meters out, she's cocking the same arm back and dropping onto a knee to punch the ground. The glyph seems to melt into a current of energy and jolts through the ground as a faint glow until reaching the stone, and then- It's not as loud as a munitions explosion, but the way the dirt around the stone's landing point suddenly flattens and condenses into stone on the spot before peeling quickly up and away from the center, lined with bristly spikes on both the inside and outside, still creates quite a bit of noise. The end result seems to be a little thunderdome meant to contain combatants in a small space and harm anyone trying to break in or out, with walls too high for most creatures to clear without flight. White pushes herself back upright comfortably, and gestures away at it like she's indicating a funny little animal in the distance. "Terrain Arena." Every attack that goes into a menu needs a clear name, and it just so happens she had one already. |
| Flamel Parsons | "What if I just... airdrop a million dollars worth of ice cream and circus clowns on the village in the real world." Flamel scratches his head and tries to turn that idea over in his brain. Two men who don't understand dialectical materialism try to solve this puzzle and Flamel's answer is, "Well, we probably can't do something like that for every single case of mass psychological dysfunction. It might work here, but we'll run into other roadblocks -- we need to study this and figure out how to solve it from this side, but if we can't, keep the ice-cream and clowns plan in the pocket." For White, the stone and soil here are odd. In the first areas, it was brainstuff. It slowly turned into a sort of gleaming blue rocky material with long lines of neuron-like layout. Here, in the psychological region of Araphen Youth, it looks to be primarily like burned wood chips and splinters, crumbly volcanic rock that looks like pieces of wyvern statues, fragments of castle stone, and other similar materials -- the experiences people endure form a foundation upon which everything else grows. The larger features of terrain resemble pieces of a castle itself... Which is why the terrain arena's structure winds up formed with Lycian architecture, albeit in a particularly grid-like fashion. "Thin the Nightmares... And then... Make a new ecology." "That's what I'm thinking." Flamel squats near the arena, peering down into it. "See if we can divert into any other similar regions and bring something in. What psychological element would thrive well in a young ecosystem recovering from this sort of trauma?" |
| White | Following Flamel as he steps forward to examine the arena's interior, White doesn't think much of reaching an arm around his side and short-range warping the two of them straight up; they end up atop a semi-translucent floating platform, a sort of temporary crystal-like material in a perfect square tile with thin colorful lines of energy running through it at angles, like circuitry. It's a better view from there, so Flamel can examine the jagged walls, see where the ground has slightly lowered as material was drawn upward, and get an idea for the scale. Holding onto him seems to have just been so that he doesn't stumble and fall once they're up there, though, since she lets go once he's had a moment to notice the shift. It gives her a chance to mull over what he's asking, too. He said 'psychological element', so he's probably thinking about the intuitive meaning of whatever's brought over, rather than the sense of naturality or more realistic effects of a manually-made ecology. It's tricky, but since it's about kids rather than complex political ramifications on a nation's economic whatever-the-hell, it's not entirely outside of the scope of her imagination at least. She remembers being small, helpless, and afraid too. Spiteful about how the whole world seemed out to get her despite asking for very little. "... They need safety. A future to... Look forward to. Something stable... To count on. And a... Sense of agency." It's hard to think of a specific thing to represent all of those at once, though. "... They need to feel... Like 'nothing like this... Can ever happen again... If we work hard.'" The temptation is there to suggest that the children need some kind of power, to feel like they control their own fates, but even she can quickly reach the conclusion that kids aren't suitable for using power in ways that help themselves, usually. "... Some kind of... Guardian angel... Would be nice. Like how... Sariel used to... Protect humans, from things... They couldn't overcome. But the humans... Still had to work hard... And handle what they could." |
| Rufus Shinra | Rufus applauds politely, and then sips at his soda. "Neat, neat! It's like in that one movie, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, where they make the thunderdome." He's never seen Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, he's just heard quotes from it and he assumes something like this happens at some point. The yellow materia in his shotgun is glowing brightly. That probably means it worked? > "Well, we probably can't do something like that for every single case of mass psychological dysfunction." "Oh, right. We're trying to make the Trauma Eraser Gun marketable and mass-producable, that's right." "So great, artificial ecosystem engineering, but on a mental social level. I can get behind that." > "What psychological element would thrive well in a young ecosystem recovering from this sort of trauma?" Rufus considers. There's an obvious answer close at hand. "If they've lost their homes, camping maybe? Experience getting to set things up however they want, learning how to control their own surroundings while dealing with whatever nature has to throw at them, nature being a stand-in for the terrible luck of their old home getting burnt down by a dragon and all." He finishes off his soda, and then crushes the empty can against his forehead. He tries to think a bit more abstractly. "Or just... some other sort of control fauna? The ability to pull themselves up by their bootstraps," suggests Rufus, who has never even seen a bootstrap. "Agency, that's the word, thanks White." |
| Vantablitz Remnants | 'No, he's actually a giant volcano because he flew into a town with a big wyrm and burned down an orphanage.' "Oh." 'I really hate that guy, man.' "I kinda hate him too now." Ahn squints at the volcano, just in case it got any bigger. 'These have to be the neurological damage from the trauma... They're children.' "H-huh?! Like, literally?!" Ahn blurts out, before realizing she's asking if something is literal inside of an astral mindscape, and clamming up. 'Impossible. Everyone likes clowns.' "I like clowns . . ." Ahn very weakly volunteers, trying to get back into the ingroup. 'Terrain Arena.' "Whoa--!" Ahn does not speak Japanese. She doesn't even speak English particularly fluently. She thinks that name is so cool and repeats it out loud several times to get it down. Having no intention on dealing with anything that involves 'thousands of nightmares', she shows herself off to work with the two other agents. She isn't exactly great at trench digging, but she is, for various impossible to explain reasons, a professional at herbology and gardening, somehow. She glues herself to Kramer for as long as she can be useful, documenting what passes for an ecology here, page by page in a shitty conference binder, then using 'a little green thumb magic': micro-inclusions of don't-worry-about-it into the soil, which absorb the thermal energy and minerals of the lava, feed metabolic byproducts into the trees, and grow themselves into weirdly shiny black reverse-roots that, by virtue of mostly being water and metal, firebrake each root system individually by several feet; not enough individually, but en masse, actually very useful for sharing the burden of diverting a literal volcano. She did this about zombies, once. |
| White | "You can use it... To redirect the lava... Or hem in the Nightmares, as needed." White says to Rufus, seemingly leaving it up to his discretion; he had enough dangerous sounding stuff on his list that really, she doesn't feel like there's much to feel guilty about in handing him a slightly dangerous landscaping tool. It also isn't particularly common to get an awed reaction for her magic, especially not just for the names, but White does think that's one of the cooler spell names from among the stuff she's carried over from the System. She doesn't go as far as to pose or anything, but Ahn finally seeming less flighty is at least worth a little thumbs-up back. "So, Mister Rufus, Mister Flamel. I will create... Pits... Or maybe a moat, in the ground. The removed earth... I will reduce to small grains. Then I will focus... On the Nightmares, and flatten... As many as... I quickly can. Once the group... Is thinned, Mister Rufus... Can aim the Firmament Driver... At the volcano. Mister Kramer and Miss-" She still doesn't know Ahn's name, crud. Play it cool! "Will focus on... The trees. Mister Krenshaw will help... Direct the lava... And smother fires, as needed. Mister Flamel... Help keep track of the situation. Use the... Loose sand and stones... To help Mister Krenshaw. Once the trees... Are more or less safe... We can clear the base... Of the mountain, and perhaps try... To reshape it. I should prepare... Replacement masks. Exchange them often... While away from... That machine." She gestures with a head-tilt at Ahn's purifier; Ahn asked not to be analyzed, but White of course wanted to know immediately what such a gadget was going to do when it was brought out! White, at least, is only at risk of getting her clothes all smokey; the deep breath she takes after speaking is entirely from social exertion, and trying to be so specific with instructions. Normally, the Tenth Army more or less delegates on its own after she passes down an order. "... Then the 'new ecology'. I'm not sure... What it will entail... Yet. Do we need... To prepare for that... In advance, Mister Flamel?" |
| Flamel Parsons | Flamel wanders back and forth from, now, atop the arena walls, plotting this out, in his head and on paper. He's so caught up, maybe he didn't even notice the teleport! "Alright... No, we don't need to prepare, we'll find something." Folks gear up. The Psychonauts use the silk masks without hesitation. Whatever works, right? Though they ask for it in black. In the next several hours, Crenshaw works with Rufus and Ahn, extensively mapping out the upcoming flow redirection combined with fire management and arena creation. Kramer works with Rufus primarily on targeting the firmament driver against the structure of the volcano, as well as with White on tracking down psychically compatible fauna to replace the Nightmares. Pounding down the volcano is arduous. It takes days, literal days, and a constant effort of treating, re-treating, and re-re-treating entire acres of trees to resist fire. The flow redirection is often miserable, sweaty work. Even with smoke redirected, the camp will struggle to keep air clean at times. But the arenas and the redirections and the treatments will take. After the first 48 hours or so, White finds a good candidate for her idea to replace the Nightmares, and Flamel confirms it. With careful ecosystem manipulation they can properly seed it in: One of the local species of Fixation can survive extremely well in a highly burned ecosystem like this, but Flamel will ask for Rufus' help too. The Fixation is a little squat, stout psychic construct, dealing merch and plastering up posters -- and this one is for digital pets, battle monsters, and other 'take care of this and see its numbers go up' fad items! With enough of this in place, someone will devise an enchantment or some trader (Rufus) will provide enough tamagochis for the kids to become truly irrationally attached to, and in doing so, things will heal. But what about the Nightmares? Fighting them off the entire time is horrible. The Psychonauts sustain plenty of injuries, since these things move fast, create plenty of explosive Personal Demons, and viciously strike with twisty, many-limbed bodies. And the strength of the wyvern memories infuses all of them, giving them flight, dive-bombing maneuvers, and vicious teeth and claws. Nobody has a solution to solve that, they just have to fight the whole ecosystem of them off while working and eventually get to a point where the Good Ideas are feeding off of the local Fixations enough to monster-battle them out of here. If Xion shows up tomorrow it'll be *really nice* to help deal with massive Nightmare-tornado that shows up... The Psychogate is eventually moved up here to the prefab Psychonaut science-camp, where the titanic shattered visage of Narcian, and the stunted, blocked-off lava flow that seeps through it, are surrounded by a much healthier, albeit slightly obsessive, ecosystem of pet-game Fixations hawking various Good Ideas in the many arenas that were forged to redirect everything. It will give the children the sense of control they need. It will make them stop having those nightmares. But everyone might need a *lot* of baths and a *lot* of bandages -- Kramer and Crenshaw certainly do by the end. |
| Flamel Parsons | To the Director of the IPAR Bureau, You've should have received all necessary data for your functions. What happened that day and in the following days is clear, and additional details carry the chance of providing biased parties with material to leak and damage the reputation of the Psychonauts. This is an unacceptable and existential risk at this delicate time. You'll receive additional records when those records are also available to the general public, which will be shortly after the IPAR rescinds its emergency moratorium on Psychonaut public communications. Best regards, The Director of Project Mystic |
| White | Coordinating with a team is honestly the most stressful part of this operation, and once the plan is hammered out and agreed on White doesn't spare many more words outside of answering questions aimed her way. After filing off the complexities and delegating the annoyingly delicate parts to others, as well as making the required protective masks and digging the holes and trenches that the redirection project would require, White is mostly left with the gruntiest work of the lot; slaughtering the enemy. She does so in bursts throughout each day, rarely stopping to do more than fix damage to her clothing or briefly assist with earth-moving. She vanishes and reappears often enough to potentially be stressful to the others, brandishing her scythe in one hand from near the bottom of its haft and teleporting into different tightly-packed clusters of the Nightmares to hit them with blindsiding sweeps, explosive bursts of dark magic, and flesh-eating waves of energy from her scythe. The sheer number of enemies she wades through to keep the mass of them from gathering into a more threatening frontline aimed at their camp leaves her almost inevitably plastered with soot, dirt, and a mix of her own blood and the crumbly dissolved material of the psychohazards' bodies. Her brief 'breaks' back at camp mostly consist of her washing her face, repairing her dress and boots, and waiting for her regenerative effect to catch up with the number of nasty-looking but mostly unserious cuts and gashes she inevitably catches along the way. She might not be happy to be bathing in filth and fighting nearly day-in and day-out, but the matter-of-fact way that she keeps diving back in could fool a stranger like Ahn or- well, for the most part, anyone here except Flamel most likely, into thinking she relishes the chance to get back into the fight, like a dog playing in mud. The simple reality is that she's already sure of the outcome in her mind, and it's by being so proactive and taking so few moments to herself during the process that she is assured that the situation is under control. Sure, she can't keep every Nightmare away from the camp, but she keeps the force at large from condensing in a way that might bowl the others over entirely, and the Nightmares begin to dwindle over time as she keeps blasting and sweeping her way through the thickest parts of the pack. She turns the Personal Demons against the others, teleporting them around before striking them with magic if she can make them explode in opportune places, or snaring them in thread so that she can move just around the boundary of their explosive range (after eating one of those explosions head-on, probably). The ones that rely on dragon-like divebombing are met with a gradually morphing battlefield that resembles teeth of stone strung-between with innumerable sticky web-strands; of course a spider hunts flying prey just fine! The Evil Eye's mass-range stamina drain sustains White throughout the battle, and helps illustrate why she was personally so willing to fight the entire force directly. |
| White | After days of work by everyone, White is perhaps as much of a mess as anyone has ever seen her since she has had human legs to stand on; even with repeated repairs, her dress probably resembles a white-leafed bush for how many holes there are in it, and her long braid is completely ruined with gunk and dirt, wrapped around her chest after a point to keep her hair from flying wildly around her as she fights. She takes an hour or two after the Fixations have gotten settled in and the Good Ideas have helped push back the remaining Nightmares, cleaning herself slowly and carefully with Water Magic and a very stiff-bristled brush while taking in how the place has changed while she's been fixated on battle. She's quiet, thinking about things like whether she aught to visit the village that Flamel spoke of after all of this, or if the rest of the war in... Elibe, was it? Is proceeding alright. She supposes it isn't really her business, but... It would be nice if this project, at least, did something good for those kids. It'd be kind of a bummer if she couldn't ever find anything worth spending almost a week's worth of sweat on that didn't backfire somehow. You hear that, kids?! Make it worth the horrifying amount of shampoo White's going to use after this!! ... It'd be nice if not every kid needed a Sophia-like training arc to get a life they could be happy with in spite of a war. Damnit, now she's just getting depressed. Brushing isn't going anywhere; maybe she can find a firetruck and get the driver to blast her with the hose for a couple of minutes when she goes home. |