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Flamel Parsons     SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE...
    Letters are exchanged...


                                                                                
                    ...                                                        
                                                                                
                        You're invited to make use of it as well, at any point  
                    you want, Deems.                                            
                                                                                
                    Regards,                                                    
                    The Director of Project Mystic                              

To the Acting Director of Project Mystic,                                      
                                                                                
    Behavior like this is intolerable in any civil society.                    
In my authority as head of investigations of the Psychogate                    
Incident, consider the Parsons Institute of Anomalous Study                    
to be formally dissolved, all materials and organizational                      
structure pending reassignment or shutdown, and the                            
Psychonauts organization itself illegitimate until                              
immediately acting upon the demand to reject the Parsons                        
Institute entirely.                                                            
                                                                                
    You are hereby and formally relieved of the authority                      
which you disdain, Director. The world and its sensible                        
adults have no place for your kind, and incidents like the                      
Psychogate Event only prove that efforts to bring you into                      
that world are a useless squandering of essential resources.                    
                                                                                
    No appeal of this decision will be accepted at this                        
time. You can cite 'universal law' to me all you like, but                      
after everything you've studied, you of all people can know                    
most of all that our will can be just as absolute and                          
universal. I've no interest in throwing lifesavers to                          
someone who has chosen to drown in an ocean because he says                    
water is not a cosmic truth.                                                    
                                                                                
                                                                                
Director Deems,                                                                
International Psychic Affairs Regulation Bureau                                
Flamel Parsons     CURRENT DAY (108 HOURS AFTER INCIDENT)
    THE MOTHERLOBE
    ATRIUM

    There's been a steady supply of food, water, and useable materials. The Gates have provided: Useful chemicals, useful mechanisms, useful flora and fauna, useful raw resources. One could forge a whole ecosystem out of this, if it weren't for the irregular door storms that surge through here every so often and present a persisting threat.

    The Psychonaut agents have been hard at work on getting Dr. Alex Barre back on his feet. They handled the mentals, but Kramer explains some of their struggles: "We're running into some brick walls in there. I think it's got something to do with outer nerves? I don't know what's going on!" Yet, you know who's going to know what's going on? Tamiel Luxis. Ahn, likely, as well. Even Hiromi's survivalist instinct will pick it up. It's *impossible* to restore a man's mental health while his physical health is in a bad way. But it's the only thing that Kramer and Crenshaw can do -- in their operational doctrine, it's the only thing they know *how* to do. The idea that they might have to medically navigate around refeeding syndrome and other things like that just didn't occur to them. And they just don't have any sodium lactate, any saline, any *anything*.



    There has not been a single medical kit in this whole building.



    Tamiel's healing light can surely keep this man alive, but can she synthesize essential compounds? The survivors finally have a lead. But only one that's delirious, nigh-catatonic, guilt-ridden, sobbing and weeping as he struggles to manage a sip of water and a mouthful of inoffensive food, and take in whatever anyone can put together to deal with his poor electrolyte shock. Without specialist care or constant healing, he might just manage to die anyway. The agents lack Flamel's unique psychic abilities to take the others into his mind, as well, so they can't break through whatever is walling out the Psychonauts...

    The disaster that happens comes in a rush, when the faster, more high-reflex people aren't on standby in the Atrium at the moment, likely on one or more tasks. During one of their sessions, UPE-892 suddenly stops strumming. A danger-warning? It retunes, it adjusts... It begins playing something else: a soft, bleakly self-destructing tune. Kramer and Crenshaw both simultaneously let out a scream in the middle of their psychonautic trance, struggling and recoiling, stumbling back from the couch they've been working on, and-- Barre, in an agonized, howling mania, is unthinkably lightning-fast for a man so starved and deprived when he grabs one of Vertin's stashed UPE-494s and one of Ahn's UPE-1210 fertilizer experiments in a single clean motion. Material for explosives.

    Then, he bolts straight into Hiromi's den. Which ought to be a dead-end. It was before. But now, all of a sudden, it's not. The metal wall Hiromi found (and potentially re-buried) is bare and visible, and seems to have reacted to the man, this researcher for the Parsons Institute. Here, there stands a hefty metal blast door where previously there was nothing but a brushed, industrial surface. One that bears the Psychonauts logo. Plus a biometric reader (unlucky) and a reader for that Parsons Institute card (luckily), though it's likely as anything it could be torn open physically just as well. One could work on getting that open, or one could help Crenshaw and Kramer, who will surely give more context about what exactly is happening...
Rufus Shinra When there's downtime, Rufus draws up plans. This is the second time he's been stuck in a science facility for a week, and that's one time too many. At *least* this time they're not trying to kill each other (yet).

"Some sort of pocket dimension - enough to stash a whole *month's* worth of supplies, stored in some portable form; something I'm *never* going to be without," he mutters to himself. "That, or some way to... generate them."

"Has to be *something* like that somewhere out in the multiverse."

> There has not been a single medical kit in this whole building.

Rufus throws a fit when someone points this out, or when he connects the dots on his own.

"The heck? Not *one*?"

The stage direction here for reading Rufus's dialogue is that of a libertarian discovering the necessity of unemployment payments immediately after being fired.

"What if someone was injured - I mean nevermind the situation we're in! Nevermind that we've got someone deathly sick - there's... I mean people get hurt all the time, and it'd be too late if there aren't safety kits already there... right? Shouldn't... "

There's some inferences to be made, but he's having trouble making them on his own. "Isn't there some law - isn't this a *government agency* - you need to have first aid kits up! And there's not a single one?"

This is the state Rufus is in, pacing back and forth, when Kramer and Crenshaw both scream and recoil. He doesn't catch what triggered it, but he does run over. "What? Hey?"

If no other solution for calming them presents - the group does have water now. A bucket of water, thrown over one's head, works to calm people down in the movies, at least. "Hey! Snap out of it! What's going on?"
Vantablitz Remnants     Five days is . . . kind of at the point at which Ahn is starting to run out of 'I've had worse'. She could still say so, but that was a lifetime ago, and nothing she'd want to compare anything to; she wouldn't even think of it if it weren't for that chilling confrontation at Gate 2080. Five days is touching the lower limit of determined human survival for the average person; a figure she knows from experience rather than theory. From time to time, she wonders who would have died if she weren't here.

    Still. Things could be a zillion times worse. Her experiments with UPE-1210 were the first big breakthrough, but not the last. Now with a supply of healthy vegetables (sorry Regulus) to ration several baked potato with soup and cauliflower streaks today, Ahn is pleased to add forage to the pile; enough to serve Rufus' and Aika's first. Stone retrieved by Vertin and 'Schneider' goes straight into being assembled as a shell layer around the somewhat fragile hut, coordinating between herself and the Psychonauts to assemble it when she can only see like a quarter of the bricks herself, ultimately dramatically improving the structure's insulation.

    Fluid filters are put to use by splicing into the building's water mains; the fact that Ahn still wants to keep a rotation of snow melting when there's a month of sludge in the tanks here is a bit worrying though. Wood vengefully hacked off the dojo has been put to expanding the little hut into more of a backwards viking long-house, while the sprouts and oddities from Gate 0026 are now being experimentally grown in a greenhouse Ahn has assembled out of the stained glass from Gate-0105 with requested earth-related help from Hiromi; she herself wants to keep it separate from the clear glass one, laboriously assembled out of a thousand melted lightbulbs over two days as it was.

    At the limit of what she can accomplished in twenty-four hours with a team of able-bodied and anxiously bored survivors to help out, even sleeping rather minimally, she has mostly left the mechanical scrap to Regulus and the 'real' engineer, and set aside the Inversion Modules for her crackpot idea later. The mysterious broadcast codes are better off with the radio jockey, after all. She mumbles something about having Tamiel monitor her fiddling with the Caustic Amnesia compound before passing out for not quite long enough, intending to leave Alex in his coworker's hands.

    Fool that she is.
Tamiel Luxis     Tamiel's healing is, as most will come quickly to realize, a bandage on the issue--and one that remains particularly taxed. Her wings sag, slightly, and the light from her hands flickers, but she remains strong. "I can fix the damage the malnutrition caused," she explains. "But if we can't get him what he needs, it'll just keep happening all over again..."

    Not to mention, that kind of healing was going to a specacular magnitude of power. It was one thing to mend a broken bone, to energize a body's immune system--it was another entirely to try to restore cell after cell after cell of starving cells, falling apart in the absence proteins, subjected to god-knows-what aberrent energies from the portal--not to mention whatever damage a manifested fragment of Flamel Parson's subjectivity. Was experiencing by virtue of its very nature out here, in the world.

    Tamiel is forced to revisit the man hour after hour, taping his body together in new and exciting ways at every turn. There's not a lot of time for her to work on other thing--Ahn's muttering earns a mute, half-aware nod from the angel. Her focus has been stretched thin, and exhaustion takes his toll.

    "Did the music just--" Barre's sudden burst of energy takes Tamiel completely by surprise. As he throws himself upright, he sends Tamiel staggering back--more startled than overpowered, falling unceremoniously onto her back.--more

    She stands up, opens her mouth to protest, but the man has already scurried off. Without knowledge of what exactly the man took, or what it might be for, all Tamiel can manage is-- "--Hey!"

    "He's--ngh--still not well!" She pushed up to her feet with the help from her quarterstaff. But her pursuit of the man isn't half as fast as it needs be.
Vantablitz Remnants     Ahn awakens to screaming. Usually an unbelievably heavy sleeper when she gets any, Ahn rolls out her makeshift bed brandishing her weapon before she even registers what's going on. She's quick enough to see Alex rushing out of the door, and bleary enough to still be looking for a monster somewhere around Kramer and Crenshaw when he does, sleep-deprivation making the reflexes most resilient to it addle all those that aren't. By the time that she grasps a therapy session has gone wrong, she's already dully transfixed by,

    'Isn't there some law - isn't this a *government agency* - you need to have first aid kits up! And there's not a single one?'

    "Wuh? You guys didn't screw up like crazy bad did you?" Ahn burbles, half-awake, flat on her ass on the floor with a shotgun still in her hands. "I told you that we shoulda got him some pedialyte before we started doing all that magic mumbo jumbo . . ." Ahn yawns, rubbing her eyes. Then she jolts. "Oh f-- Where is he?!"

    She picks up her backpack at the same time she staggers out of the impromptu cabin, scanning the den-hole only because it's right next to everything else and thus closer than the doors. Duct taping her flashlight to her gun in a motion that has the same sense of impressive practice as cowboy revolver flip-tricks, she slides down the entrance on her butt and stares misgivingly at the mysterious blast door the second she reaches the bottom, not going a step further.

    "Hey are we . . ." She turns her head and cranes her neck at the tunnel again. "Are we like, seriously . . . ?" Going in. For some random asshole they don't know. When they already have enough on their plate. "We'd need Crenshaw or Kramer, right?" she says, gesturing at the biometrics pad. "So, um, maybe he's fine on the other side actually. It's a panic room. So he has to be fine." Ahn has now decided that this guy has the psychic power to manifest: Bunkers. Yeah.
Regulus Regulus built that portable rechargeable battery that Vertin ask she make, and Regulus has also built what she SAYS is a radio booster which looks like an apple with wires sticking out of it. She has shoved both into her bag until Vertin asks for one or the other.

But she feels like something is wrong with her body. All this running around and vegetable eating has resulted in strange effects for Regulus. She has noticed that she has been able to run for a little longer, and doesn't lose her breath quite as quickly. Regulus has heard about this sort of thing happening, of course. When people on the edge of survival get that last burst of energy before they die from exhaustion, fatigue, and defeat.

Her body... must be in the process of giving up! She hasn't had meat in over a week! She hasn't had a delicious snack in nearly as long!

"Ahn... I don't know how much longer I can go on... If this is the end... you must help Vertin in my stead..."] A tear twinkles in her left eye. "I'm counting on you." She looks to Tamiel. "You too!"

She breathes in. And breathes out. "My body could give out any minute..."

But she doesn't give up! She follows Ahn with the gear to check out this latest disaster.

''Are we like, seriously . . . ?''

"I don't think that's a great idea... A hefty blast door like that is there for a reason... That's probably to keep something quarantined."

She spins around, taking a look at her surroundings and--

--She sees, in the distance, a small glint of metal.

She squints her eyes. It's getting closer.

She slides down her sunglasses and--

She sees, in the distance, a cube shaped robot with whiskers slowly approaching.

"Oh shit... Oh shit! We gotta go!" Regulus says. "I mean, nevermind, we really gotta get inside as soon as possible!"
Timekeeper     When bringing the potentially edible animals, weird selectively-invisible Cherubs included, back to the base, Vertin is a second hand to Ahn at preparing them for consumption. Whether that means skinning and gutting, removing electronic components or pens or whatever other bullshit, bleeding out mysterious fluids; it's not their most natural area of work, but they're a practiced hand at it. Their rubber gloves are slick with caustic fluid from an animal that no one else is able to see, but once it's cleaned, is probably... an edible meat object?

    The problem, then, is that Vertin apparently can't cook for shit. She's got the sense to forage for what's edible, but her methods of preparation nearly make it all inedible again anyways, and it's really hard to give her advice for making it otherwise when the meat is *invisible*. This results in a sort of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes type culinary experience, where it's a group activity to result in, eventually, a hot meat meal in order to save Regulus from starvation. After the laborious preparation of which, Vertin suggests that making a stew instead would pretty much completely bypass the invisibility of the meat.

    Cartoon nonsense aside, a fifth day of being trapped here feels like it begind to pass some kind of event horizon. While Vertin herself is almost supernaturally capable of doubling down and enduring, the fact is that it's ceased to be a setback and has become a catastrophic failure bordering on hopelessly lethal. The focus on survivalism, and particularly giving tasks to the rest of the people trapped here, now that they have food and water and shelter, is less to help them stay alive and more to help them stay sane. Once people stop feeling busy, they'll have to confront that they're no closer to finding a way out of here now than when they began.

    The retrieval of Dr. Alex Barre is both a relief and a stressor: the ability to save someone's life means the obligation to do so too, and Vertin isn't Sonetto *or* Mesmer, she isn't magically talented on either the physiological or mental side of healing. His emotional state is uncomfortably familiar; the word 'madness' comes up, in the sense of being induced rather than natural, and no explanation of Gate-2080 alone makes that seem plausible.

"Isn't there some law - isn't this a *government agency* - you need to have first aid kits up!"

    Vertin is helping glue more broken shards of stained glass together to add onto the greenhouse during Dr. Barre's healing. Somewhat distractedly, she says, "Are there psychics specialized in healing that staffed the clinic in place of medical kits, perhaps?"

    The handful of UPE-494s that Vertin was given are being stored in a mug that says 'World's #1 Greatest Replicant Infiltrator', and she shoots upright when Kramer and Crenshaw scream. "Hey-! Wait!"

    The question of whether to follow him doesn't even exist in Vertin's mind, quickly press checking her gun and shouting over her shoulder back at the two Psychonauts. "Some of you stay and make sure they're alright! We have to stop him before he runs into somewhere dangerous!"

"Are we like, seriously . . . ?"

    Vertin still has her fake ID card that Oleander gave her for the infiltration, and she's pulling it out already. "Whatever the case, we have to follow him. This isn't a way we've gone before, and if this tunnel leads underground, then we've got to check it out to see if it leads out. If we're not looking for an escape, then our mission is survival, and that means ensuring his as well. Either way, we have to give chase."
Flamel Parsons     Both agents are out like lights. But a bucket of water does wonders. I mean, smelling salts would have worked too, but--

    Crenshaw is struggling to his feet. "His brain... his brain was rigged, stop him! Stop him!! Don't let him get to, don't let him get into Agent Parsons! He'll--"
    Kramer's eyes are blazing with fury as she falls to one side during the maneuver. A solid blast of psychic marksmanship slams Crenshaw in the back of the head, ensuring they're both off their feet and spraying the water they're soaked with everywhere. "Go!! Get to the brainstem!" She's shouting, crawling, then scampering to pin Crenshaw. "Don't you even *try*--! Flamel has to be stopped now, no matter what, for everyone's sake, everyone's *survival*! ...Hiromi, I *accept*!!"

    "Ffffrrrrrhhh, *KRAME*!! NOT *YOU*, NOT *NOW*!! Ghhh, sorry, Aika!" Crenshaw clenches his hands, tapping the reserves of Aika's shared biological boost dispensed earlier, and surging huge pyrokinetic energy along his arms. Steam gushes off his body. "This is bigger than anyone, bigger than *everyone*, *all of us*! IT CAN'T KEEP GOING LIKE THIS!!" He kicks her back, and her levitation snaps into place, giving her a skidding glide around the Atrium -- before they engage.

    The shockwaves of their mutual impact slam the skylight. The shattered rim of the glass pelts the atrium in a rain of fragments as partial repairs and precarious pieces of glass slam into the ground. Light flickers as the lightning-in-a-bottle UPE-1999-B's unstable nature struggles to stay contained, arcing electricity slamming into the walls. Neither Kramer nor Crenshaw are willing to turn back on each other long enough to rush into the Den. None of the other Psychonauts staff survivors know enough about what's going on to do anything but cower as best they can and try to keep nearby potential Gates from breaching, struggle to stop the Atrium's structure from falling apart. But they're willing to cry out to the others to try to get them on one side or the other.

    Crenshaw shouts over his own fire, because inevitably someone will want to know: "Trying to-- trying to make something better for once! Psychonauts aren't *enough* to *save people*, all we're doing is making them *feel better*! And asking the Psychonauts to give up what we have so everyone else can have something better-- it's *right*! If the Motherlobe is ripped apart by the Psychogates, that'd be *fine* when they'll *help people*, because we CAN'T! We can't stop the wars, the Storms, the *feuds* even! All we do is *stabilize* things so whatever was horrible stays just as crappy! IF *WE* CAN'T *FIX IT* WE HAVE TO *LET THEM*!!"

    But Kramer is howling too, mustering fresh strength from newly absent exhaustion, wielding re-energized clawed telekinetic grasp. "Parsons is *rogue*! What we have *works*! Whatever neo-psychonautry crap this Truth Phenomenon is, it's not *his*! He doesn't have any right and he doesn't know how to *use* it right! It *belongs* to *them*, to Rook, and S.H., and the Timekeeper, even *ZEPHIEL* has more of a right! I won't *give up* on Psychonautry just because a Cold-War rock said that it takes a little longer to stop a war than we thought! And I won't let him sacrifice the Psychonauts, or the Motherlobe, or me, or YOU, CREN, just to make that happen!! THIS STORM HAS TO BE *STOPPED*!!"

    UPE-892 strums tense tones as everything rumbles. Someone here is maneuvering for an advantageous position to telekinetically spike the other down into Hiromi's den. Meanwhile, down in that den next to the door, Vertin finds her fake Psychonauts card doesn't work! It isn't even recognized!? Why?! But the security card she'd gotten from GATE-0105 works, once she tries it... Even though that doesn't make sense. Shouldn't they be equivalent? Shouldn't all the security systems be down anyway?

    But once she swipes, it opens, into...
Flamel Parsons     (???)
    THE BRAINSTEM
    http://files.at.decompressed.space/EJq08QBE
    http://files.at.decompressed.space/gxvIpFeM
    An infinite landscape of cubicles, offices, test chambers. A sprawling mass of mineshafts and tunnels. Somehow they've woven into each other, forming alternating structures of brutalist government office-space-slash-bunker and a vast abandoned psitanium mine. Huge clusters of purple crystal pulse like they're experiencing a heartbeat. Nobody would ever have built a facility here, not with any common sense. Yet it's merged right into the living rock, and often that rock, clustered with purple nodules of crystal and shining stone, shapes into hard-angled pseudo-concrete architecture.

    There are people here. Men in ties, desperately working. Still clacking away at their keyboards, with a frantic urgency that's impossible to describe, as if it would account for the handful of cubicle walls that have been smashed over by someone who presumably just barged through here into this massive, sprawling, labyrinthine space.
Rufus Shinra "If nobody put up any medical kits..."

This is the moment when Rufus realizes the error of his ways, that he stops following in the Shinra Electric Power Company's corporate footsteps, and instead starts his path towards safety, workers rights, environmentalism, and being in general a better person than the laissez faire nepobaby that he professes to be and doesn't aspire to be more than.

This results in a brighter future for, well, pretty much everyone. The resulting effects from this day can't be overstated. This is the pivotal moment! This is the canon event! This is-

> "Are there psychics specialized in healing that staffed the clinic in place of medical kits, perhaps?"

"Oh? That would make sense, then... That's why there's no medical kits. Nevermind."

                          ___________                        
                         /   ~~~     \                      
                        /   ~         \                      
                       /     ~~~~      \                    
                      /    ~~    ~~~~~  \                    
                     |  BUT THE FUTURE   |                  
                     |                   |                  
                     | REFUSED TO CHANGE |                  
                     |   ~~~      ~~~~   |                  
                      \        ~~  ~~   /                    
                       \     ~~ ~~~~   /                    
                        \      ~~     /                      
                         \___________/                      

Good job, Vertin.
Rufus Shinra Kramer and Crenshaw clash. Rufus looks from one to the other, taking what cover he can from what's going on. He grabs his shotgun and coins, and fires an angled laser blast that tears upwards and diagonally in the air between them to grab their attention. "Hey!"

"Parsons *was* onto something!" Rufus calls up at them.

"This is big! This *can* change things! I don't understand all of his ideas, but I knew a rising star when I saw one, someone who was hell set! We should be hitching our hopes on him, not trying to figure out how to stop him!"

"At least he's *trying* something! And the alternative is, what, going back to how things were? Doing little therapy sessions? Pondering the meaning of existence or whatever else you do here?"

"And..."

He racks his shotgun. "I want to see what happens next. I want to see what the big payoff is. What he's got planned. Why he's put everyone to so much trouble, if he thinks this is still so all worth it that he's not out here trying to shut things down with the rest of you."
Tamiel Luxis     Tamiel arrives by the door as it slides open, alongside Vertin and Ahn, her eyes flitting back to the fight behind them. "...They don't understand," Tamiel mutters to the others intent on pursuing into the buker, as she looks back to Rufus, to Crenshaw. "You can't FIX a zeitigest like that. It's too big--even if you change it, can you really say you understand it? That you wouldn't break the world worse...?"

    The bunker door crawled open. "--And Kramer's right. These aren't even his worlds to risk." She looks to to Ahn, Vertin and Regulus. "If Crenshaw thought it was that important to stop him, maybe Barre is going to try to stop...This. And we can try to be sure Barre makes it there safe...!"

    She's still not as quick as she'd like--but even if she wasn't well, a shadow always outran its light. Tamiel makes a sharp motion with her hand, and little droplets of dark drop from the fingertips of her shadow, like rain flicked free--and suddenly splitting into streaks of dark, carving across the floor.

    Kneeling down, Tamiel touched her own shadow--and then slipped into it with a ripple, like falling into dark water, before making her own pursuit.
Schneider Greco      UPE-1929, 'Survival Instinct'- that is, 'Schneider Greco', as everyone's decided to call her by now- has recovered a nice reliable steak-like food source from the Kagoshima Chapel:

     Cherub meat!

     Unfortunately it tastes completely vile.

     Fortunately, as long as it doesn't come from the one color of cherub aligned with your personal perception (ninety percent odds it doesn't), it looks, feels, and tastes as though you're not eating anything at all, only perceptible through the fact that you mysteriously stop feeling hungry a little while later. (Sorry Regulus!)

     This fact leads to Schneider trying to personally feed Vertin forkfuls of the red cherub steak that they can't perceive, while having them feed her their likewise-invisible white steak. It's the only way, or so she claims.

     - - - -

     Perhaps unsurprisingly for something named 'Survival Instinct', Schneider's focus is first on procuring indefinite subsistence, and second on escape. The entire business with Projects and Truths and Gates, she hasn't commented on much.

     She's just returning from one of her many casually-fearless supply runs when the hubbub breaks out. Like a little dark-jacketed wraith, her delicate steps swish her past Rufus, past Kramer, past Crenshaw, and down towards the bunker without a question.

     The threat is there, so she is magnetically drawn to it. Before Vertin's second card scans, Schneider's gun is cocked and pointed at the biometric panel, ready to shoot it out.

     She nods and spends the bullet elsewhere:

     "This is bigger than anyone, bigger than *everyone*, *all of us*!"
     BANG.

     Those words, from any mouth, mean 'threat' too. A big silver gumdrop of a bullet intersects bone at several points through Crenshaw's pelvic girdle, breaking psychic focus with blinding pain.

     "Not bigger than me, my-lord," comes a murmur as delicate as winding gunsmoke.

     Then she's stepping through into the BRAINSTEM.

     - - - -

     "Come on, my dear lord. Don't ask me why," she says to Vertin, briskly pursuing Barre down the trail of smashed cubicles. Seven bullets remain in the left gun; six in the right. She knows that just from the weight.

     She stops just long enough to assess what's on a random worker's screen, and decide whether it's worth making it six-and-six.
Hiromi     Ostensibly, one might assume, Hiromi is on Flamel's side. She participated in his expeditions into the Collective Unconscious, and they are fellow members of the Concord. Flamel is not, however, 'one of hers.' He is not of the pack. She does not hold that specific obligation to protect him. For someone else in the room, that is about to change.

    'Flamel has to be stopped now, no matter what, for everyone's sake, everyone's *survival*! ...Hiromi, I *accept*!!'

    There is a ceremony for this. There is a method. Not a single one of Hisako's sisters has had fewer than two types of secret tea, preparation never revealed to outsiders. There are, also, exceptional circumstances, and a different, more expedient method. In all cases, there is blood.

    Hiromi appears in front of agent Kramer with a suddenness unfitting her presence, slices her own finger with a far too practiced motion of her nail, and then steps that finger into the agent's heart. Hiromi's arm retracts with a slight twist, and one beat later, the wound is healed. Rather, in the next beat, Kramer has healed the fatal wound on her own, and been filled with all -- and more -- of the strength due the greatest night's sleep. That feeling will persist for the next several months, in the increasingly likely event of her survival.

    "Good! Fight for your belief, your world, your path! Worlds only yield to strength. The one who decides, who leads, who forbids, can never be weak." A price has been promised, and will be paid. Another price is being paid now, in Kramer fighting Crenshaw. Hiromi removes herself from the crossfire with full approval of its continuance. If Crenshaw had accepted the same, she still wouldn't refuse -- but the fact is that Kramer did, and that willingness to take greater risks for her convictions instantly endears the psychonaut to the Archwolf.

    Her own convictions remain unchanged, but that's both natural and irrelevant to the fight at hand.
Storm Investigators Every day that Greta and Marcus are here, the more their misgivings grow. A malnourished doctor with no electrolytes and other supplies to get him back into good shape? No medical kits whatsoever? Constant bickering between various heads?

The third thing is the one they're used to seeing pretty often, actually, but the other two have both of the Foundation's investigators agreeing with Rufus' sentiments about the situation.

"If we could only grow some tomatoes here..."
"Why is that?"
"Tomatoes are high in... Potassium and magnesium. Then we would have something for the doctor's dehydration rather than nothing."
"We can keep an eye out for seeds the next time we search the Gate."
"Or avocados, or perhaps even oranges?"

While trying to keep their minds off the fatigue with idle chatter about what they hope they might be able to gather next in one of their many trips to the Gate, they're snapped out of their momentary distraction by the screaming and the bolting. Trusting Vertin's direction to stay with the agents, Greta and Marcus both move to start helping Crenshaw and Kramer up, but their sudden outbursts of psychic power force the pair to back off considerably just to weigh the situation unfolding right in front of them.

Scrambling behind cubicle cover, Greta keeps one arm over Marcus protectively while Marcus clutches her bookcase tightly at her side to try and be as small as possible so Greta's not sticking out too much. They listen, they look over at the agents again, and they listen to Rufus and Tamiel addressing the matter of understanding in their own ways.

"This is getting to be too much. We need to stop this before it gets any worse. Marcus, thoughts?"
"W-w-we are well in over our heads and should not be here?"
"Besides that. Can you read the doctor's thoughts, to find out what he's planning?"
"Oh! Yes, if we can catch up to him."
"Good. We'll decide our course from there."
"But what if he's...?"

Before Greta can question Marcus about that question starting to form, their attention is grabbed by the sound of 'Schneider''s gunshot. Lacking any proper medical training between the both of them, they both hurry to check on Crenshaw briefly, but they soon have to divert to join the chase on Doctor Barre. They're relying on everyone faster and stronger than them to clear the way to the Brainstem, and Marcus relies on Greta to help her keep moving along.
Hiromi     ...a greenhouse Ahn has assembled out of the stained glass from Gate-0105 with requested earth-related help from Hiromi...

    Gladly given, Hiromi's own lack of eating continuing to make little difference. Even less, when purposefully asked.

    No one has asked her what became of her own fight, and apart from her outfit reaching dangerous levels of disrepair beneath a broken layer of mud, there's little to guess by. Perhaps she healed her wounds. Perhaps her skin was the less penetrable barrier than cloth. That 'cloth' keeps up with her activities at all is a strong sign to it being some manner of magical artifact, but if that's the case, she seems less concerned than one might expect for the damage.

    There could be time for repairs, if...

    The metal wall Hiromi found (and potentially re-buried) is bare and visible, and seems to have reacted to the man, this researcher for the Parsons Institute.

    Hiromi did leave a portion 'unburied' in the sense that she kept a tunnel down to it, though not a perfectly simple one to get down. The dangers of spelunking mean little to her physique, which only makes following her path more of a challenge to others. She'd explored, too, a great stretch of it, looking for features, weaknesses, shape... without more information, 'just breaking it' hadn't yet become a safe and sensible idea. She wouldn't be extremely surprised if someone sought to delay her with an illusory dimension of solid metal, and she definitely has better things to be doing.

    But she's not so busy, nor so detached, nor so accepting of the 'just let the mind-trap trigger and explode Parson' idea that she's not going down to at least follow Barre and see what's there. The pivotal decision point is further in, along with answers still elusive.

    Delayed, briefly, in thought -- which turns out to be a positive, as it reveals a mystery regarding Vertin's keycards. The bunker door goes unpunched, and Hiromi is not then the first through.
Vantablitz Remnants     'Are there psychics specialized in healing that staffed the clinic in place of medical kits, perhaps?'

    "I was kinda assuming that, but . . ." Ahn says, halfway to sleepyburble in the pause brought on. "But that's still kinda . . ." She's struggling folks. "Dumb. Leaving it all up to them. What about when a janitor is stuck here after closing or whatever?"

    'Whatever the case, we have to follow him.'

    What feels like moments later, Ahn slowly lowers her gun, letting it dangle from the shoulder strap she wore to bed over her fluffy sweater (undamaged for being inside her parka all the time) and makes a Face. "If you're just gonna keep using facts and logic all the time then you're gonna make people unhappy for not being able to argue with you y'know." she says, unhappily.

    She doesn't get any happier when she hears the shouting from below. The sounds carry underground, with Kramer and Crenshaw both vying for leverage around the entrance. Ahn flinches away from the racket in a way not dissimilar to a teenager hearing their parents going at it; she'd just come to feel as though she could rely on them, and took for granted that they'd get along with each other. Seeing their camaraderie fall apart in the process of looking after one of their own is something that hits in the worst way at the worst time.

    Ahn had taken sides in their arguments before, too. Not out of a preference for any one of them, but simply by standing behind whatever got said that was closest to what she was going to do already. This time she doesn't like either.

    'Trying to-- trying to make something better for once! Psychonauts aren't *enough* to *save people*, all we're doing is making them *feel better*!'

    <<But that's important. If you can't do that, then people stop wanting to survive.>>

    'And asking the Psychonauts to give up what we have so everyone else can have something better-- it's *right*!'

    <<That's not something you can decide. None of you can decide that individually.>>

    'All we do is *stabilize* things so whatever was horrible stays just as crappy! IF *WE* CAN'T *FIX IT* WE HAVE TO *LET THEM*!!'

    <<Didn't I tell you? Sometimes there's no path that goes upwards and all you can do is push through until there is one. Why give up hope now?>>

    'Parsons is *rogue*! What we have *works*! Whatever neo-psychonautry crap this Truth Phenomenon is, it's not *his*!'

    <<What he has is what you have, isn't it? Why is he different? Why is he separate? You all made these things from scratch before, didn't you?>>

    'He doesn't have any right and he doesn't know how to *use* it right!'

    <<But who else was going to do it? Even if he's stupid and selfish and wrong, saving the world by saving everyone's souls isn't a bad thing. Isn't that what brought you here?>>

    'It *belongs* to *them*, to Rook, and S.H., and the Timekeeper, even *ZEPHIEL* has more of a right!'

    <<Who? Vertin? That evil king everyone hates? How do you know these people? Why would you say that? Aren't you hiding a lot from me?>>

    Ahn isn't brave or articulate enough to say those things when it would count. Frozen stiff by the unbearable tension, the reflexes drilled into her nervous system are 'fight', 'run', and 'hide', not to wield a finely honed ideological blade. The muddy brook of stressful thoughts bubbling up and trickling through her mind only serves to paralyze her further. In the end, the only thing that cuts through, clear and true, is,
Vantablitz Remnants     'And I won't let him sacrifice the Psychonauts, or the Motherlobe, or me, or YOU, CREN'

    "We aren't at the point we have to sacrifice anyone yet." Ahn says, and in the moment she takes the following breath, she knows, unpleasantly, in her heart of hearts, that she's going to go after Alex now. "That means him too. So stop calling him a rock whenever you're mad at him. If you can't treat your own comrade like a person then you don't deserve to be helping anyone else."

    She turns her back on the two out of fearful avoidance more than genuine confidence. The only way to go if she wants to make that a final note is through the blast door that Vertin just opened, after all. She doesn't have her climbing rope for this. But before she steps over the threshold, some bile impulse commands her to speak all the same.

    'You can't FIX a zeitigest like that.'
    'This is big! This *can* change things!'

    "If you have the time to be arguing about that then I've been too easy on you."

    Through the other side, in the electric gloom of the 'Brainstem' Gate, Ahn draws, cracks, and drops one of her chemical lights on the floor, marking the only place in that dreary maze that matters to her. There's no need to draw on the walls when they don't go up to the ceiling. Hustling down the central aisle, she only sweeps the first few cubicles with her flashlight (and thus her gun) before getting the idea. She tenses at hearing the gunshot from outside, but pushes further in rather than stopping to go back out and check. Only once she runs out of shattered cubicle walls does she reluctantly turn to either Hiromi or Marcus and Greta-- whoever is closest behind her-- and asks "Do you have any way to find his trail? The others aren't prepared to split up looking for him."
Regulus Regulus is apparently the type of person to eat mysterious cherub meat though she immediately stops once she tries it because, of course, she gets the cherub that tastes absolutely vile for her specifically. She's not a lucky person! Ninety percent odds might as well be ten percent odds for her! She makes a BLECH noise and tries to scrape the taste out of her mouth with a turnip. She does not eat the turnip. But she will eat the stew at least. Similarly, REgulus doesn't think things will be so easy that they'll just be able to leave it to someone else, though Tamiel gets a sympathetic look for the hope of it all.

But at this point, the freaking out psychonauts, even the mission at hand, is secondary to one primal instinct: She has to get away from that cube-shaped rat robot that's after her. She throws herself recklessly into the cubicle world which is almost as bad, she's sure, as whatever Petra has in store for her.

"Oh no... this entire area is filled with OFFICE DRONES..." Regulus whispers in quiet terror. "They're probably worried they'll get sacked if they don't type as hard as they can... My friends...! Look up and see the world around you, it's getting real bad out there! People are having a difficult time out there! Uh ... have any of you seen a guy with black sunglasses who looks like he's about to tell you that the UFO you saw was actually just a weather balloon? Around here?"
Hiromi     ...the handful of cubicle walls that have been smashed over by someone who presumably just barged through here...
    'Do you have any way to find his trail?'

    "I can," says Hiromi, because of course. But she doesn't drop to four legs to sniff it, this time. Instead, she lowers herself to put an arm around Ahn, and continues, "So can you, swiftly, yes? Only look for destruction."

    Hiromi's grip shifts, and she lifts up Ahn -- oh no! Will this be a repeat of twelve hours earlier?!

    ...no, she's only lifted to Hiromi's shoulder so she can see over the labyrinth.
Storm Investigators "Do you have any way to find his trail?"

"He took some things, didn't he?"
"That's right... The UPEs! It is a long shot, but if we can detect the signature of one of the ones he took-"
"-or what was in them-"
"-the fertilizer! If I can find traces of that fertilizer in the air..."

And so, Greta and Marcus join in Ahn's and Hiromi's efforts to find Doctor Barre's trail. Greta, taking out some complex-looking doohickeys from the Foundation, tries to filter out the ambient magic in the facility in an effort to tune it to the stolen UPE-1210 or UPE-494s that don't match the ones already held by Vertin. Marcus, meanwhile, starts reading the air itself, looking for traces of whatever fertilizer was in Ahn's experiments among the rest of the words that might already be flooding her vision.
Flamel Parsons     THE MOTHERLOBE
    ATRIUM

    Kramer falters a little at Rufus' words. Teeth are gritted around bloodied lips. She knows that, above all else, and *if nothing else*, Rufus knows where to see excellent opportunity. Is this just a refusal to see a rising star? Is this just a failure to grasp the opportunity in the future? Kramer's clawed telekinetic hands loosen a grip on Crenshaw when she averts her eyes. But something renews her focus when he starts to burn into a better position, licking blood at her lip. "What goes *up* comes *down*, and a falling star hurts when it hits. I can't let it fall on my home, and these people..."

    The bullet that slams into Crenshaw's lower body is enough to make sure his efforts can't re-maneuver here much more. He has to draw even more on Aika's borrowed power to evade some of, and power through the rest of, that injury. He only has dregs of that silvery reserve to work with, but he'll use what he can. "Hhhghhhhh, come ON! Aren't you, why aren't you the one who wants this most?! Dammit, he's *doing this for you*! Aren't you sick of needing him around?! Listening to guys *exactly like me*?! Why aren't *you* the one who *most* wants this?! He wants to do whatever it takes to give you the tools you need to help yourself, and to *stop hurting you*!! If that means blowing over the Motherlobe, why do you care about this place?!"

    There's pounding impact after pounding impact. Crenshaw's fumbled focus is definitely more impacted by a bullet than Kramer's is by words. She shoves him hard into the Noodle Bowl area, two telekinetic claws slamming the whole thing shut harshly. She bolts for the door, following the others. Crenshaw's going to be no less than eight, maybe ten seconds behind, limping and levitating over his bullet wounds. A conga line of violent, ideological chasing.
Flamel Parsons     ???
    THE BRAINSTEM

    Inside the labyrinth, the Tamiel-Shadow will have to out-maneuver the many buzzing, searing incandescent lights, and the various anti-breaching equipment (in disrepair) here. But she can surge forward when the pulsing lights of psitanium dim between "heartbeats". The others are quick behind. "He's targeting something of Flamel's." Kramer is explaining as she storms through. "This is him. This *is* Flamel. We figured out what was happening in there, when we ran into one of the barriers. 'Truth Phenomenon'. Flamel pulled some, I don't know, some crazy idea out of the half-dozen girls he hurt. Based on the Green Needle effect. So his Parsons Institute has been studying it for years, and he just figured out how to put it all in the real world too. He thinks he'll blow it straight through the Motherlobe and out into the Multiverse, targeting somewhere in the Soft Expanse zones."

    Ahn is going to find a sensible path using her perspective. The places where the cubicles are disrupted are indeed a perfect guide, and they give the right places to jump to try to get ahead of the researcher. And Crenshaw, far back. "No! No, wait! Barre's part of his old mindset! He's tryin' to kill off a *dream* here, a goal! Parsons-- Wait up!! Parsons *put himself in the entire psitanium vein*!! That mental image's going to *bomb out* the entire lobe of the mind that Parsons is using for this! Even if you want this stopped, you have to stop him!" The psitanium pulses again. The Parsons Institute inches further into the world. The labyrinth expands a little more, but not so much that they can't get further on.



    That's why the mountain looked different. It's Flamel now. The entire mountain and the entire psitanium vein therein, including the second-largest continuous deposit in the world, has become that man and that man alone.



    One of those worker drones turns to Regulus. "Director Parsons. Busy. With Project Mystic." He says, in a voice hoarse enough that it sounds like he hasn't spoken in months. "That way." He trembles when he gestures towards a department labelled "LIGHT CONTAINMENT - EMPATHY SIMULATIONS". That's where more of the trail leads. The cubicles stop here, but Greta's able to find the chemical signature of UPE 1210 on the air. It's quite close to common improvised arcane explosives, after all, and Tamiel's shadow will have scouted ahead.

    Doors here. A lockdown, heavy metal doors with thick bulletproof glass display "CONTAINMENT BREACH - SECTOR UNAVAILABLE". Behind that glass, indistinct figures wander, distorted and caricaturized simulations of people Flamel knows. A thin, broad-shouldered Rufus directing his fellow mental images in a complex process towards something further in is the clearest indicator of what's happening, but he's limping, apparently having been burned violently with a flare by someone passing through. UPE-494 smoke hangs in the air past here. That old chunk of mindset intends to simply blow up the Empathy Simulations department entirely, to put a stop to something. "He's doing something in there." Kramer explains, trying to operate the controls before Crenshaw catches up. "He's got some process. It was too much for him, so he's trying to channel the doors through and away from the Motherlobe. Might shake this whole place apart. Could bring the 'Lobe down on us. And him too."

    Another biometric scanner that Barre used -- and another spot that Vertin's card will work.
Aika Rosewater     Aika is not a doctor. She would like to be, sometimes, on top of everything else she knows, to fill a little bit of the much more meaningful everything else she DOESN'T know. Though she can 'heal' people, it's rudimentary compared to proper medical care. It'll handle a wound or a cold, but when you start getting into the real nasty conditions...

    Not to mention Tamiel's already on the job.
    If Tamiel's not cutting it, she won't either.

    It's when the man bolts away that Aika jolts out of her standing nap, noticing then the change in music and atmosphere too.

"Wuh? You guys didn't screw up like crazy bad did you?"

    "Shit, did we? What's-- what's on fire??"

    She sniffs the air a few times-- the doctor's trail heads out, and that's NEVER something you want to suddenly find out about a man who was shortly before in and out of his deathbed.

    "Oh boy."

    She blitzes off after Ahn, because if there's a mess in there she'd rather be on the frontlines to take the first hits.

    "That's-- that's new, right?" she asks Hiromi the obvious.

"His brain... his brain was rigged, stop him! Stop him!!

    "Rigged? Like, mind control?"

    Now they're *fighting*. They'd been disagreeing before but...
    What the hell did she nap through?

    Everything is going so quickly. Arguments-- Vertin has the door open. Kramer and Crenshaw at each other's neck over Flamel and his goals, which she's so, so underinformed on to make a good call about.

    Beyond disliking this whole situation, broadly. This place sucks, and it's dangerous, and she'd much rather it all stopped, too.

    She wants to go into the brainstem, cover the others, but fact is Crenshaw is using her powers and if she goes away he'll lose them.

    "Will you two idiots STOP IT?"

    Angry cat. Aika's smile has fully faltered, and she bolts after the two agents to put herself between them, trusting that she's not needed past that door considering Hiromi's with them anyway.

    "Neither of your stances bloody matter if we don't make it out! *I* want this place shut down and you don't see me beating on Blondie over there even though I know he's *responsible*, now do you? So put your arms away, calm yourselves, and sit the fuck down, or I'm going to break both of your legs and put you in opposite corners!"

    A huff.
    And then a deep breath, as she rips the shreds of her tie off her collar.

    "Please."
Schneider Greco      "Aren't you, why aren't you the one who wants this most?!"
     It's a very good question.

     If Flamel can't crack this thing, if he can't solve the Storm, surely Schneider- at least, the Schneider this 'Schneider' is based off of- is the one who has the most to lose. By shooting Crenshaw, isn't she sinking herself?

     What should she care about the Motherlobe, about anyone else here?

Schneider is twenty years old. Forget-Me-Not dangles salvation in front of her in exchange for loyalty.
Schneider is nineteen. Her swearing-in, she's told at gunpoint, didn't really count.
Schneider is fourteen. Her family can't feed her. She steals to feed her family.
Schneider is twelve, and dying. There is no bread at Eucharist for her.

     This simulacrum of that waifish girl is a little too faithful for Parsons' own good. The look backwards she gives to Crenshaw crackles radioactively.

     "Wouldn't that be nice, my-lord."
     'Schneider' is an artifact of survivorship bias, defined by the scatter of bullet-holes on a plane. No girl who that name belongs to has ever been able to believe in a savior.

     - - - -

     Still, it's cruel to deprive a man of his dream.

     - - - -

     Schneider's feet briskly crunch cubicle-fragments, paperbaskets, staplers, and stray desk-lights. She moves through the office space with the measured urgency of a hunter in a wood.

     BANG.
     A shot lined up through a half-dozen cubicle walls where she anticipates Barre pathing. Miss.

     BANG.
     Miss again. Six bullets and five, now. "Porca madonna..."

     She leans against the doorframe, slightly out of breath, while waiting for Vertin to scan their card. "So he will collapse himself, cut out his wish-to-help, be-cause he could not live with not saving us. What a strange man he is, my-lords." Not entirely a compliment, nor entirely a condemnation.

     "If you grab someone drowning... they might on-ly pull you down. Some-times they must swim themselves. Your Motherlobe does not teach this?" To Kramer, but it's hardly a real question.

     Do your best, Schneider.
Hiromi     'That's-- that's new, right?'

    "Yes." Did Hiromi remember to explain about the mysterious wall? Well, that's not important now.

    'Will you two idiots STOP IT?'

    Delivered with all due gravity, "Fights cease when 'right' is decided." Then adding, "What will you <sacrifice//give up//transform to devotion> to declare your <truth//path for others to follow>?"

    . . .

    'He's tryin' to kill off a *dream* here, a goal!'
    'That mental image's going to *bomb out* the entire lobe of the mind that Parsons is using for this!'

    Hiromi's laugh spells out absurdity, not humor. "This, he took from that <pinnacle warrior//embodiment of strength>? The wrong lesson learned. Was the teaching at fault?" She hadn't seen it. She only knows of it, and it causes her to fall into thought.
Storm Investigators "He's targeting something of Flamel's."

"Wait, Doctor Barre is... That does not make any sense! Why would he try to kill one of his own dreams?"
"It could be a dream he no longer wishes to pursue. Or perhaps one that's in the way of what he's trying to do now."

Following the trail to Doctor Barre over to the Empathy Simulations department, things start clicking together for the pair relatively quickly when they aren't busy maneuvering through the labyrinthine office. Following the chemical trails, Marcus' read of the traces combined with Greta's general knowledge and guidance lead them to a straightforward enough conclusion.

"He's going to destroy the part of himself that empathizes with others."
"But that's im... No, that wouldn't be impossible. We are already walking through... In his mind already?"
"And on. It'd be quite impressive to look at, if we were not in the probably blast radius."

Their suspicions are soon confirmed by the sight of the injured Rufus, the smoke, and Kramer's own stated thoughts. Kramer commenting on the possibility of UPE 1210 and 494 possibly destroying the Motherlobe with everyone inside it has Marcus visibly fretting while Greta looks slightly more inconvenienced than she normally does.

"He wouldn't... That sort of risk would be too high, would it not? If he destroys his ability to feel empathy, then... What would be the point of any of this? He may not even finish what he started!"
"He would be in the best place to finish what he started. He's likely weighed the risks and decided that he can help the most people if he forsakes the individuals and never feels guilt for them again."
"But that's..."
"The math works out. It's rational."

Greta's frown deepens slightly more at that premise.
Timekeeper "If you're just gonna keep using facts and logic all the time then you're gonna make people unhappy for not being able to argue with you y'know."

    Vertin makes a small, tight smile with an unknown amount of actual humor at Ahn. "Apologies. I'll try to be more impulsive."

    Vertin brings the ball of her foot down to the tile floor mid-run, skidding to a stop the moment Crenshaw and Kramer's shouting voices follow behind her. She sets her jaw and hisses a swear under her breath, swiveling around in a brief pause to her forwards momentum. Now that weapons have been drawn and the tenuous survival alliance is collapsing, the philosopher in Vertin is absent in favor of quick, curt responses.

    "If this could end the Storm, then I'll curse myself until the day I die. But I don't trust a man whose only solution is himself. So. S-.... thank you." The gunfire rings out before she can ask for them to be disabled by any means necessary. This method leaves a bitter taste in her throat, but the thanks is sincere, before she pivots and sprints after Barre.

    "Regulus, focus your attention on keeping them from fighting again." Just as she gives the order, Vertin spots the metal box of the pursuing ratbot out of the corner of her eye and clicks her tongue. It's all spinning plates now, after five days of this. Accounting for Regulus's personal distraction, "Tamiel, you too. If anyone makes another aggressive motion against any of us, including Crenshaw, I want you to disarm them."

    Vertin slows to an uncomfortably brisk walk once inside the Brainstem, drawing another UPE-494. She lights the flare and angles it around, sweeping the illumination around to catch the trail of the psychic presences of the UPEs Barre carries, walking just ahead of Schneider to avoid catching her in the light.

    hat this is 'Flamel's Gate world, effectively, feels natural, given the man's absence until now. Kramer catching up is... another alert piling up in Vertin's HUD, but ultimately fine, because they're not getting out of here without a Psychonaut's help and the tentative party position at the moment is closest to Kramer's.

"That mental image's going to *bomb out* the entire lobe of the mind that Parsons is using for this! Even if you want this stopped, you have to stop him!"

    "Nothing's getting blown up. Parsons' plan has made far too many decisions, far too quickly, with too little consideration for any other perspective besides his. We're long past the point of having a reasoned discussion over the merits and risks of the Truth Phenomenon. All we can do in the moment is ensure that none of these disasters spiral into something irreplaceable."
Regulus Regulus is immediately empathetic to the worker drones. "Oh buddy... You gotta get screaming and shouting or you're gonna lose your voice in the most literal way possible. Maybe drink plenty of Dr. Pepper to help wake 'em up first. Or uh ... water." She frowns, but at least she's temporarily safe from the Petra Cube after her.

Frankly, as the future letter shows, REgulus is starting to be uneasy with the Psychonauts as an organization. Certainly, the things they are shouting about are probably worth shouting about, but Vertin's talks about not just announcing your plans and goals in public has stuck to her, at least somewhat, and more to the point it feels like ... they're just sort of fraying--fraying like SHE is--except even more so because this is their business whereas Regulus's mind is mostly preoccupied with when she gets to finally eat a cheeseburger which, to the Psychonauts, is a sort of mental defense.

Also people are like getting shot and that's really worrying as a general rule even IF the bullets aren't going into Regulus. Because sometimes, when someone shoots people who aren't Regulus that just means they haven't gotten around to shooting Regulus yet. Sometimes, REgulus is the third or fourth person to get shot and not the first one. Her shoulder aches in the long since wounded limb.

But frankly she doesn't need to be loyal to Vertin to agree with her here. "Y-yeah, at this point does it really matter what his hopes were when everything's gone so wrong? Gotta worry about today nad tommorow before we can worry about next month." God she hopes that she's not trapped here for another month. At this rate, Petra's robot won't have to consign her to exercise hell because she will have been fully converted to a healthy diet. She's certainly been running around a lot this past week. "Seems like these guys know where to go."

She pauses for a moment and then turns back around to look at Kramer and Crenshaw. "Um. Also remember...this started with a band right? Like a music band. And maybe figuring out the perfect right thing to do isn't as important as grooving with each other. So uh... If you fight and yell at each other more, you're going to..." She thinks about the sort of dire threat that will really get to a Psychonaut. "Really make me have trust issues. In my brain."

She hopes this means that she doesn't have to start throwing flashbangs around. She's already dying of vegetarianism. She looks towards LIGHT CONTAINMENT - EMPATHY SIMULATIONS and looks to Vertin, "Seems like we know where to go?"

''Could bring the 'Lobe down on us. And him too.''

"Okay that'd definitely make me have trust issues. Towards architecture." Regulus tries her best. She looks to Schneider for a moment, realizing that she's kind of totally agreeing with her here. Why is she agreeing with Schneider so much lately?! UGH!
Tamiel Luxis     "He thinks he'll blow it straight through the Motherlobe and out into the Multiverse, targeting somewhere in the Soft Expanse zones."

    "That doesn't make any sense--Gah!" She winces back, holding a hand to her heart as a line of breaching defenses casts through one of her shadows leaving it arcing in a silent scream before disintregrating.

    --But there were more where that came from. "--The Soft Expanse doesn't have anything to do with the Storm, or the City...And it's so unstable..." She trails off, briefly. "...Is he going to try to force something to manifest? But what? Why?!"

    The full assessment of what Barre was up to changes the arithmetic. somewhat. 'Chase and help him' becomes 'chase and stop him' seemlessly.

    "So he will collapse himself, cut out his wish-to-help, be-cause he could not live with not saving us. What a strange man he is, my-lords."

    Tamiel points out a spot for Schneider, a spotter with eyes everywhere. "He'll be--THERE!" She points. "Sometimes, it's too much, to hear everything wrong, all the time. Everything and everyone you can't help. Or shouldn't." Her wings curl in, slightly. "But my teacher says, turning away completely is cowardice."

    "But. I don't know. She's not a psychic rock--?" She pants, the running getting to her. "--Mountain? But, I can't believe this makes it right--" Another defense breaks through another of her shadow, and Tamiel doubles over, gasping.
Flamel Parsons     Something sings in the halls as you move through Light Containment. Mr. Wonderwall's voice carries even here, does it? No... it's echoing, now, as if a chorus. The remaining mental images, anomalous UPEs representing dozens of people, wandering in Empathy Simulation, are softly singing something together. This massive containment breach in Empathy Simulations was orchestrated, and has fully taken the space, and the sound, within it. The melody surges in every listener's heart and gut.

    It's that song that Mr. Wonderwall was always coming back to. But now, it has a reverent tone. A ceremonial tone. A tone of things culminating. Its melody thrums with meaning and the danger it was warning of is finally realized in this moment.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpo3sYO6ulY



                "Look in the center where the cinders blaze,"                
                     "Sift through the shadows for days,"                    
                            "Look in the corners,"                            
                           "But you can't see me."                            
                        "You can't see me, I'm free."                        
                                                                              
                     "I'm gonna burn it all down today,"                      
                            "Down today, okay...?"                            
                     "I'm gonna burn it all down today,"                      
                      "And sweep all the ashes away..."                      



    The tunnels are leading further down into the mountain, but some of them are opening up into wide chambers. Carved along the walls are mental images that have gotten so large, so fundamental, they're now structural, integrated into everything. A hand so large it cups an entire broken-open hall turns out to be the hand of Persephone Kore. Lilian Rook's form is repeated in a thousand chambers, frozen in time, rendered in metal, glass, concrete, bakelite... Three girls in magical girl outfits, one whose face is rendered blank by great blades, twine hands around a huge spiral passage down that requires everyone to navigate the back of a titanic winged snake that looks awfully familiar to those who know the City. Huge blast doors are framed by Eliberian armor, blue with gold trim.

    And there's Schneider's men. Or mental images of them, anyway, distorted into cartoony forms. Barre wounded them on his way through, burns torn across their face and chest. But even the mental images rush to the aid of the Survival Instinct, just as they were moments ago taking orders from a flickering empathic simulation of Schneider. They're more numerous in Flamel's mind than they've ever been in reality, in fact. They guide UPE-1929 quickly to where a team of them have taken cover, at the vast blast-door opening of a chamber. But they can't offer much information. They're taken up in the song with the others:



                  "Count up the keepsakes in the cabinets,"                  
                   "The keyboards and the chemistry sets,"                    
               "Look in the attic where the blinds are drawn,"                
                             "You won't find me,"                            
                                                                              
                                 "I'm gone."                                  
Flamel Parsons     You're closing in on Barre. Almost there. God, please, almost there. Kramer is the only voice that isn't in song. She's making the situation clearer: "That part of Flamel's old mentality would rather self-destruct Flamel than let all this happen. Flamel... he's trying to spread the doors out, send the Truth Phenomenon out. Out past here, out to somewhere near the Soft Expanse. I can't let that happen either, but I can't let his regrets stop it by destroying the Motherlobe, killing everyone! But the Psychonauts, they might still never recover if Flamel's plan goes through, if his experiment works."

    Anyone with a sense for architecture or some ability to interpret that rumbling will know she's right: Something's happening, and if Flamel's plan is allowed to continue, the Motherlobe may be badly wrecked when it discharges the Psychogates into the Soft Expanse. Untold psychic data and expertise lost, and even a chance of deaths. With Ahn's hard work, Hiromi's den, the support of Marc and Dylan, surely many of the people trapped here will survive. But there's a chance some won't. And the Psychonauts might never recover.



    Crenshaw isn't caught up, staggering and struggling to keep pressure on a bullet wound. "No! You *can't* stop this, the Psychogate, the Truth Phenomenon, it's the only chance we've ever had to *fix* this problem! To let people *heal themselves, together!* Isn't that what the Psychonauts were founded for?! What good are heroes who would rather keep their *clubhouse* than *solve the problem!?* We were founded for this! We're supposed to make sure this happens, not stop it!! We don't have the strength to fight the Storm, or the skill to make a new Seed of Light, or the *decency* to treat some of these people the way they deserve -- we need to let them take what they need, not get in their way!"

    If you've got any sense for magic, any sense for psychics, even any sense in your lower spine, you'll see some truth in what he's saying. The energy thrumming up ahead, through that twenty-foot-tall blast door, is something truly, sincerely made to connect the Collective Unconscious to the real world. It would truly allow access to some fraction of the astral realms, to its anomalies and hazards and opportunities, for everyone. *Everyone* could share in that healing. Is that something you can give up, just to keep a government building upright and a government agency stable? Are the Psychonauts that important to you?

    You can't have it both ways. One precludes the other, or so the Psychonauts seem to think. Save the Motherlobe, or save the healing opportunities and exploration possibilities of the Psychogate. Who knows what might be sacrificed if you try to save both?



                     "I'm gonna burn it all down today,"                      
                            "Down today, okay...?"                            
                     "I'm gonna burn it all down today,"                      
                       "And sweep all the ashes away."                        
                       "Etch an outline on your heart."                      
                  "I'm gonna blow the whole circus apart..."                  
Flamel Parsons     Here it is. UPEs, wired together or affixed in machinery or simply contained in powerful fields, at a central experiment platform. A dozen, a hundred different elaborate psychic instruments form a halo around this collection of anomalous objects, as power surges through them in circuits and waves, all contained in a chamber five storeys tall and just as wide, where rubble has settled in scattered patterns and where the Parsons Institute constantly weaves and unweaves with the psitanium mine erratically, ever-changing. A twisting mess, not unlike a Storm, or an Astral Inversion, or a hidden cave in the Kagoshima volcano... Always twisting and churning around that central arrangement of core ideas.

    A few might be recognizable.

    UPE-1999, the Storm in a Bottle -- The processed psychic structure of the Storm Syndrome. A simple, unlabeled glass bottle, containing raindrops ever moving upwards.

    UPE-1057, the Shattered Mirror -- The processed psychic structure of the L57 Incident. Fragments of obsidian-black glass, held in the shape of a desk-top mirror by a twining strip of red cloth.

    UPE-1967, the Kagoshima Poison -- A retrocausal antimemetic you cannot describe, no matter how hard you try to remember what it was.

    UPE-1630, The Eliberian Divergence -- a dagger, the hilt of which bears the semi-noble construction of the crest of General Murdoch of Bern.

    And... Petra is here too. Beaten and blasted by all the chaos, somehow there is a Petra here, in Psychonaut uniform. Somehow you can tell she's not Flamel Parsons' mental image of Petra. She's not joining in with the song, after all. She and Barre are in a desperate, life-or-death telekinetic grapple, trying to keep him from igniting the suicide explosive with his flare.



    And Director Parsons. Not Flamel himself, but a display of what he sees as decisive ego. A gray-haired man, surely in his fifties or so. Hairline mature, suit well-fitted, sunglasses off but face just as unreadable. Telekinetic hands, trailing back to his skull, are on each UPE, even the back of Psychonautra. He, too, is singing. Playing an aged guitar, on a seat amongst the device and the instruments. His eyes are closed and his physical hands are occupied with the strumming. Behind the eyelids, a terrible power is building. The Truth Phenomenon behind all of this channels into his heart, into the core of the being of Flamel Parsons. The heat of it is burning away his meager flesh. After all, Parsons isn't the sort of deeply ensouled person he always harms for the greater good. He doesn't have the strength that they all have, the strength to channel the Truth.

    But it seems Flamel Parsons knows a *lot* of people who do. And he cares for them in some way. Not the way that would help, not the way that would give them peace or joy. But in his own burning, painful, awful way.



                "Reckon the remants where they land at last,"                
                   "The shattered aftermath of the blast."                    
                "Look for me everywhere the burn marks form,"                
                    "Trying to find a place to keep warm."                    
                                                                              
                     "I'm gonna burn it all down today,"                      
                            "Down today, okay...?"                            
                     "I'm gonna burn it all down today,"                      
                       "And sweep all the ashes away."                        



    It won't take a clairvoyant to tell that Kramer's warming-up telekinetic blast is going to aim for Director Parsons, not Barre, when she stances up at the entryway. Or that Crenshaw, staggering and disoriented, plans to move to reinforce him. But there's still time to decide, now that the truth is clear.
Rufus Shinra "We shouldn't stop it."

That's been Rufus's throughline even before he really realized what was at stake here. There's selfish reasons behind his choice, to be sure, but there's also...

"It's a chance to change things, in a way that hasn't been effective so far. It'll ruin some other things in the process, okay, but... nothing effective is really done without at least some sacrifices. If we stop to worry about a few lives lost in pursuit of saving magnitudes more, then we'll never get anything done. No great omelette is made without breaking a few eggs."

So says Rufus in full knowledge that it's not his own eggs at stake.

He joins in and tries to wrestle the suicide explosive away. Petra looks different today, but he's not 100% sure why.
Aika Rosewater     Trying to interpose herself between the two agents had proven fruitless. Stubborn and willing to push themselves to the brink, traits of her own she can nonetheless hypocritically denounce because how dare THEY be the ones pushing themselves and not HER, and with her ragged down from days and days of slightly less sleep than usual, less food than usual, and more fighting than usual, and the cold and the--

    Well, she's tired, and a bit cranky.
    And on the whole, what she knows of this place, of Flamel, of the Psychonauts... isn't a lot, and it's what she's been able to absorb, here, between asking questions and listening.

    It doesn't feel like enough to deserve making a call.

To let people *heal themselves, together!*

    But the cost is...

    "As much as I want to see this place torn down, tearing it down at the cost of those trapped here isn't right. These kinds of sacrifices are for people who signed up to make them. Even if, objectively, the long term benefits are there... you can't seriously be thinking it's alright to write the next chapter with this one's participants' blood?"

*Everyone* could share in that healing.

    "And everyone would partake in its miseries too. We've spent a week holding back awful horrors and things that wanted to eat us, or worse; you'd be unleashing that too, wouldn't you? You're making the cost even higher."

If we stop to worry about a few lives lost in pursuit of saving magnitudes more, then we'll never get anything done.

    God she knew she hated Rufus' guts, as much as she kept the smile on because she can't do otherwise. Aika rumbles, ears bent back and sharp teeth more prominent.

    It's a bit of pettiness that causes her to lunge at Rufus, like she might have if she had a bit less self control than she does the first time he was so nonchalant about unleashing horrors. She's faster, and stronger, or so she reckons; just pinning him down should keep him from interfering, but she only has so many hands.

    "You are the *worst*. How many fake oil spill apologies have you gotten to make on TV so far? Does it get easier after ten?"
Regulus Regulus thinks it's pretty dope to walk across the back of a giant winged serpent thing but before she can really enjoy it, she's already feeling a little skeeved out by walking into this guy's head like this. Not that it isn't, like, totally fair frankly for her to do so but sometimes something being actually totally fair to do doesn't really make it feel good. As someone who is basically totally uninvolved in Flamel's traumas, she doesn't really recognize events though she can, of course, recognize a Lilian and a Petra though with Petra she absolutely just believes that it is the actual Petra who just also happens to have a job as a Psychonaut too. Petra's got a lot of irons in the fire! This is, like, the one thing she knows about Petra! She has to get out of this alive so she can throw a robot at her, now more than ever! She's especially reminded because there's some sort of ratbot right outside trying to KIDNAP HER or, even worse, MAKE HER WORKOUT LIKE IN A GIANT HAMSTER WHEEL OR SOMETHING in order to drink actual water--not dr. pepper, WATER--out of a little bottle no she refuses she won't succumb to this fate.

The truth is, the 'potential healing' of the Psychogate doesn't mean much to Regulus. When she's upset she wants to sit in being upset for a while, not have all her concerns and frustrations fixed up!

By the same token, she isn't really someone who supports the Psychonauts organization in general, but there are people in the Motherlobe, see, and there are people in the Motherlobe who don't deserve to freeze to death. In fact, Regulus doesn't think even Flamel deserves to freeze to death.

''It's the only chance we've ever had to *fix* this problem!''

Regulus's last order from her best mate, Vertin, was to keep Crenshaw and Kramer from fighting.

It's weird, she thinks, that there are two people here taking precisely opposing viewpoints much in the way a devil and an angel on Flamel's shoulders might be arguing. She wonders if Flamel's subtly influencing them, here, based on their original predilections but she can't really be sure. What she can be sure of is that she doesn't have telekinetic power or the ability to stop this.

"...Hey, Flamel told me once that you had a 'Storm' of your own, once." Regulus says to Crenshaw. "But how're you gonna heal the world like this when you can't even heal Flamel? Are you listening to that song, bud? He's depressed as all out, love. What's it gonna do if that breaks containment and spreads out all over huh? Nah, I mean, even if he deserves this he doesn't deserve ''this'', you know?" She exhales. "I mean, he's not even healing himself, you gonna heal the whole world like this?"

''If we stop to worry about a few lives lost in pursuit of saving magnitudes more--''

Regulus glances over just in time to see the owner of that voice triyng to save one life but doesn't linger on it. She doesn't think she can really stop Kramer or Crenshaw from acting on their ideals so the only real way to follow Vertin's order is to stop the thing they're fighting over.

So she rushes over to Regulus, not even knowing what her own plan is. Good luck reading her plan out of her mind when she doesn't have one!

"Flamel! Everything's getting kinda crazy! People are getting hurt and cold and I haven't had soda in months!" It hasn't been months but it's months for Regulus. "You're... not gonna get any better playing on your own, love! Even great soloists team up to make some real wicked tunes, you know! I uh. I don't know the SONG but I think I got the gist of the melody, how 'bout you let me have a go on that thing for a while, let you rest your mind a minute?"
Tamiel Luxis     "...We need to let them take what they need, not get in their way!"

    "You don't get it, Crenshaw!" Tamiel rounds on the Psychonaut. "A zeitgeist doesn't have levers on the real world--it's the RESULT of it!"

    "You'll never fix these things by tampering with the back of minds like that...! You do it the slow and dirty way, one by one, helping people in the real world! These things...Trying to meddle with the fabric of the collective unconscious ...it doesn't change the REAL things that made them feel that way! That started...ALL this!"

    "No matter how much you tinker in the background...The hungry will still hunger! The cut will still bleed! The dead will stay dead!" She pants. "What will meddling with the background do to stop that...? Will you make them forget to mind starving? Make bleeding not hurt? Make them forget the people they lost...?"

    "If everyone forgot everything, EVERYTHING, if it ALL got reset from the start--they might just recreate all of it--because the things beyond the Psychogates aren't what made them like this. It's all...HERE!" She made a wild gesture. "It's not the minds that are sick--They're just doing their best, trying to make sense of a sick world!"

    "Helping people move on--that's good! It's great! But if you want--If you want to change the world...! A permanent difference!" She breathes. "You fix the CAUSES!"

    "...Schneider." Tamiel points somewhere past them, using her shadows as a spotter, reminding herself that Barre is just...A suicidal of Flamel's psyche. Still, she hesitates. What would Zazel do...?

    Her hand steadies. "He's there."
Timekeeper "Also remember...this started with a band right? Like a music band. And maybe figuring out the perfect right thing to do isn't as important as grooving with each other."

    This is why, despite everything everyone else might say about her, Vertin ultimately puts her trust unhesitatingly into Regulus. The medium for a significant portion of Flamel's feelings and intentions has been song, and it's Regulus that's attuned to that more than anyone. When the singing starts in chorus with every psychic manifestation of Flamel's experiment, Vertin grimaces and glances back towards Schneider to make sure that she hasn't been caught up in it too.

    "This isn't good. It's not just Doctor Barre caught up in the swell of Parsons' emotions, but now every psychic apparition is too. One way or another, he intends for this to be over *soon*."

    "Regulus!" They raise their voice to be audible above the singing officeworkers. "How can we stop their singing?"

    Along the walls, down the tunnels. It's prehistoric, sort of, cave paintings on the metal walls, and given the theme it's no surprise to Vertin to see Lilian patterned among the symbols of Flamel's fixations, even if she doesn't recognize all of them. Footsteps pound against the floors, hastened by the intensity of the chanting song and its indistinct threatening end, almost like a certain poem read off of the back of a newspaper.

    Her hand goes to the gun in her jacket when the singing mobsters turn their attention to Schneider, but then, despite the clear indication that Schneider's not 'one of them', they're still helpful. Vertin's eyes probingly find their cartoony ones, where they aren't hidden by the shadow of a period-appropriate hat or the burns that Barre left. Shortly, through the lyrics that they don't stop singing, they say "Thanks," before heading through the blast doors.

    "Stop it!" When Crenshaw and Kramer start fighting again and all hell breaks loose, it's Vertin's baton-wand that comes out this time, readied at them and at Flamel and at Barre too. Breathing heavily from hurrying here, and feeling like it's difficult to catch their breath under the sound of the singing, Vertin's shouting tears at her throat to be loud enough to hear.

    "These reckless decisions and badly considered arguments are exactly why we can't let this go any further! Parsons' choices have already caused so much damage from his inability to consult anyone else, and unleashing that, whatever good it might do, on the entire multiverse, isn't a decision *anyone* can make alone!"
Schneider Greco      UPE-1929, who bears the name 'Schneider Greco', tries to move briskly. But every so often she slows.

     She doesn't know most of these names; most of these stories. The sigil of Bern, the girls from Kagoshima, they don't mean anything to her at first.

     But when she sees the first impression of Lilian that bears enough detail to recognize, she slows, and tenderly strokes her gun-barrel across its metal cheek.

     The words Lilian had said, about people failing to come to her side-- if that's true of everyone else here, and this is a temple to Flamel's failures...

     The situation comes into focus for Schneider, slightly better. A tightening settles somewhere between her windpipe and gut, as her pistol drops to her side. ". . . What do you make of all this, my-lord?" she says offhandedly to Vertin, trying to make a little lighter of it than she really feels.

     Further on, she slows in her urgency again, seeing a wisp of her own crimson feathers vanish around a corner and her blurry-faced men join her. "Cosimo? No... Gaspare, Milo?" For a tense second her gun is lifted against them. It passes. She lowers it again.

     No sense viewing them with suspicion, when she might not be 'real' either.

     "Please," she tells them, before catching up with Vertin again, "for the sake of my dear lord, stop singing."

     And in the final chamber...

     "He's there."
     "Stop it!"
     "Thank-you, my-la-dy Pet-ra, for keep-ing him this long." Schneider takes Tamiel's instruction, pauses just long enough for Vertin to say their piece, and ends it with a punctuation mark.

     BANG.

     And then four, five, six more, so densely-packed the noises almost blur together, ventilating Barre in an off-genre smear of violence. Before seeing whether he falls, she points the still-smoking barrel back- one bullet left- at Crenshaw.

     "Restrain him," she says coolly to her men, and then when they seem to have that under control, she aims it at Rufus instead.
Storm Investigators Since their arrival in the Motherlobe, neither Greta Hofmann nor Marcus had made a decisive statement on whether they would try to stop the project or see it through. They had only agreed to monitor the situation rather than intervene directly, only expecting to come and go in disguise to see to it that things didn't explode, and to report back or get reinforcements if things did explode. Unfortunately, getting stranded in Motherlobe for so long meant that the only ones here would be the reinforcements, and that puts them into the tricky situation of what to actually do about any of this.

"He... I don't think he wants to hurt anyone."
"He doesn't, but he has. That's going to continue if this project is permitted to continue."
"Yes... Even if he's planning to save more people than he hurts with this, Mister Parsons-"
"He is looking at the big picture... No, several big pictures. He is willing to sacrifice the few for the many. Looking purely at the numbers, it's a logical choice."
"I-it is, but it still feels... I don't like this."
"Nobody here does."

Pointedly not looking at Rufus after what he says and quickly sidestepping around Aika when she goes after him, the pair of investigators hurry to join Regulus over by Flamel. Or is it Director Parsons now? Like Vertin, they're putting their trust in her, especially after hearing that she knows far more about him than either of them do. By virtue of being the larger one of the two, Greta keeps Marcus covered while she draws her pistol and keeps an eye out for anything or anyone that might be firing their way.

Marcus, meanwhile, brings out her lantern around the same time that Vertin brings out her baton-wand.

"The Timekeeper is correct! If this much chaos is unfolding just in this building alone, the odds of succeeding with this plan on a broader scale is... Ah. They must be quite low! Unconvincingly low!" She tries to call out to Crenshaw and Kramer, although she's unable to get her voice out THAT loudly between all the about-to-fighting and also realizing that shouting might draw attention to herself.

Instead, she starts to trying to get her Reading going on Director Parsons himself, although she isn't immediately sure what to even look for. Noticing that particular look on Marcus' face as she's trying to use her ability, Greta turns her attention his way as well, banking on trying to nudge his thoughts just so that Marcus might be able to pull something useful from that. "Parsons! Do you believe he can do this on such an ambitious scale? With your colleagues fighting like this? Have there been any tangible results yet?!"
Timekeeper     The arguments that Rufus and Aika make are considerably less important than the fact that Aika lunges at him, pulling him away from *Barre*. Before Rufus indicated any violent intent towards her! "Animus Alight!"

    A bolt of colorless rippling energy flies out of Vertin's wand, impacting the ground nearby Aika and Rufus and bursting into a bright flash. "Don't start *fighting* each other! If we get distracted by that, then no one will have any say in how this goes! Now Barre is--! Stono Swift!"

    With Barre freed from Rufus and the two closest people to him tussling with each other, Vertin sends another incantation hurtling in his direction, striking him with a flash and a punch-like burst of force energy. Turning to Kramer, she says urgently, "Is there a way we can safely 'unplug' this? Sever those telekinetic connections?"
Hiromi     Delivered with all due gravity, 'Fights cease when 'right' is decided.' Then adding, 'What will you <sacrifice//give up//transform to devotion> to declare your <truth//path for others to follow>?'

    'We're supposed to make sure this happens, not stop it!! We don't have the strength to...
    ...we need to let them take what they need, not get in their way!'

    "Strength is not the first to fail." Hiromi considers the growing confrontation and her words for half a moment before continuing with, "<Strength//Power to Act> follows <effort//preparation> and <sacrifice//destruction>. Weak ones should yield the path, yes. But, tell me this. Who gave you permission, to <give up//roll over>? Is this your path of <honorable suicide//fighting until every bone is broken>? Are you telling me you've done your best?"

    'No matter how much you tinker in the background...'
    'I mean, he's not even healing himself, you gonna heal the whole world like this?'

    <Short-sighted//snapping only the meat in front of you.> Strangely, Hiromi's snort doesn't specify who she's referring to. Maybe it's several people.

    The heat of it is burning away his meager flesh. After all, Parsons isn't the sort of deeply ensouled person he always harms for the greater good. He doesn't have the strength that they all have, the strength to channel the Truth.

    "You've taken my help, little stone. Now, I'll give it." Hiromi walks forward. She might be hit by something in the meantime, but she pushes through like a force of nature, implacably determined.

    '...and unleashing that, whatever good it might do, on the entire multiverse, isn't a decision *anyone* can make alone!'

    "<Compassion//care for the pack> is a <virtue//right way of being>. But know this, little one. All strength is decided in action. Indecision is weakness."

    Once she reaches Director Flamel, Hiromi swipes her hand across her teeth in a swift, practiced gesture that's followed immediately by plunging it into his heart, fingers spread to grasp. Her own blood reaches that of the strumming psychic, and her grasp keeps his heart beating for several pulses, strength -- here, unusually, visible as light -- flowing into him, before she pulls out her hand with a wet sound few should expect to survive hearing.

    "I've decided."
Vantablitz Remnants     'So he will collapse himself, cut out his wish-to-help, be-cause he could not live with not saving us. What a strange man he is, my-lords.'

    Out of all the chaos, all the tension, the exlosive emergency and the unfolding truth, those words most sharply break the skin for Ahn. Her mad dash through the broken cubicles ends in an unprepared stumble, halting just short of the Empathy Simulation Department doors. Looking back over her shoulder as if stricken, Ahn mouths a silent word, swallows, and rasps out "If he wants to drown trying then that's his decision to make. I don't want to tell him that's wrong. I just want to get out of here. That's all."

    Ahn firms up her grip on her weapon, takes a shuddering breath, then kicks through the door the instant Vertin unlocks it.

    Ahn seems to barely even notice figment-Rufus on the way through; unless he suddenly lurches into the way, which earns him a shotgun blast on spinal reflex. She didn't quite understand at least a third of what Kramer and Crenshaw were arguing about, but 'the place comes down on us' was abundantly clear to the physiological systems that matter. A pounding heartbeat and a steady trickle of adrenaline drive Ahn down the forking halls at a dead sprint, sliding past corners and pushing off the opposite walls to keep going without slowing. She doesn't recognize Persephone, or Lilian, or the Kirenais, and barely understands that the snake is meant to be Love, but the words 'half-dozen girls he hurt' fill in all the blanks she needs for why the structural architecture of a research institute is so twistedly dedicated to these images. 'It's one of those situations' only makes her heart beat faster.

    Ahn only doesn't engage the simulated goon squad on first contact because she looks for a route around them first. Seeing them rush to form up around Survival Instinct instead causes her to hold her breath until they pass her, and then is put out of mind as quickly as possible. She doesn't know if more muscle can even help, but one less obstacle can't fail to. She only thinks that she's the single most appropriate UPE to have turned up here, given . . .

    'That part of Flamel's old mentality would rather self-destruct Flamel than let all this happen. Flamel... he's trying to spread the doors out, send the Truth Phenomenon out. Out past here, out to somewhere near the Soft Expanse. I can't let that happen either, but I can't let his regrets stop it by destroying the Motherlobe, killing everyone!'

    "The Multiverse isn't helpless; the people trapped in here are. I'm not gonna let him just kill the people who can't stop it just to prevent a maybe; I didn't sign up to die for a big man to save the Multiverse."

    'No! You *can't* stop this, the Psychogate, the Truth Phenomenon, it's the only chance we've ever had to *fix* this problem! To let people *heal themselves, together!* Isn't that what the Psychonauts were founded for?!'

    "If it's what you're here for then why are you freaking out about the first chance that comes up?!" Ahn snaps. She shouts so loud that she surprises herself, even, blinking off a wave of startlement; and yet the pause to gather herself only makes her madder. She shouts, inexplicably balling her fists, until she runs out of breath, "Don't just desperately swallow the first crappy offer you get! If it's such a big deal then can't you be hopeful instead?! Stop being so willing to take every sacrifice and side effect just because you're frustrated! Aren't you researchers?! Why do you want to fix everything but this?!"
Rufus Shinra Rufus gets lunged and tackled to the ground by Aika. "You're supposed to ask for my safeword first," he says at a volume only intended for her to hear, as he tries to push her off. "Everyone's always on about the oil spills but never says 'thank you' to the oil for keeping their house from freezing over in the winter, you ever notice that?" he adds at a more normal (loud) volume. "Everyone complains about the price of progress and then acts shocked when progress doesn't come without a price."

> "Animus Alight!"

He takes that distraction as an opportunity to get loose, only to end up with a gun pointed directly at him. A gun that was *just* shooting at Barre a moment ago. He freezes.

"How quickly are we resorting to violence? Do your ideals really only carry you so short a distance before they can't be borne further than by anything more than common thuggery?" calls a man who can see he is clearly outnumbered.
Aika Rosewater Schneider aiming at Rufus.
"Animus Alight!"

    It doesn't take too much to make Aika back down. The Timekeeper, especially, who's been nothing but professional this entire time-- but Schneider trailing weapons on Rufus, means she really doesn't need to be on him.
    Or escalating.

    "Sorry," she says, whether it's to Rufus or to Vertin remaining unclear.
    Both, probably.

    She can sort out Rufus another time.

    She straightens herself out, dusts the rags of her suit like it matters. Like a cat caught embarrassed and grooming itself in response.

    Everyone else has the better points. Ahn is already locked in on the good arguments-- wait what's Hiromi doing???
Vantablitz Remnants     It's just the surge of confusion and anger she needs to burst in on the incomprehensible scene without being totally overwhelmed, and given even the slightest resemblance, shout out "Petra!!" with a genuine crash of relief. Even if it isn't really her, and even if it makes no sense to be here, 'Petra' is someone that Ahn sincerely believes that she can simply trust no matter the situation; even setting aside their clearly shared objective she was right to back in the City, and so surely it'll be the right thing yet again.

    Mid-sprint, Ahn wheels around to face behind her, and snap-fires the shotgun right past Kramer's head; a gesture meant to distract and startle less from firing at flamel and more from her slinging a canister of Storm Goo underhand in the same motion, gambling on the fifty-fifty that it'll completely deplete Kramer rather than restore her.

    She'd reached for it out of habit-- it hangs from a place she used to strap bottles of gasoline, after all-- but processing what she threw and why makes Ahn stop to consider something else.

    'Is there a way we can safely 'unplug' this? Sever those telekinetic connections?'

    "Amnestic and inversion mirrors; I have both in my pack." she says, trying to convey the messy plan in its fragmentary form as quickly as possible.
Schneider Greco      "How quickly are we resorting to violence?"
     "I hope no hard feelings, my-lord," Schneider purrs, which is some very sweet talking for a woman whose safety is still notably off.
Petra Soroka     Petra often seems to change into an entirely different person when putting on certain themed outfits, but this Petra even more so than usual. Jumpsuited, with a respirator hanging around her neck and goggles on her head, pockets and pouches and packs full of weird little electronic gizmos and psychic gadgets, it does seem a lot like Petra has simply taken up another job as a Psychonaut to those not familiar with Psychonautra. She's not manifesting hands like Flamel does to wrestle with Barre, instead balancing on a ball of telekinetic force to scootch around and get in his way continually, tossing glass balls of dissociative emotion that poof into glittery sparkles when they hit him.

    She's seemingly delighted to have a bunch of Elites barge in, even while she's ostensibly defending Flamel. "Ooooh, hello! Shinra, right? I'd recognize that stew of apathetic derealized narcissism anywhere! Thanks, bud!"

    Then she yelps and stumbles away when her target is shot repeatedly, levitation ball popping underneath her to send her tumbling to the ground. "That must be Schneider then, huh? Scary! Y'know, it takes a certain kinda woman to colonize that much of Agent Flamel's mind so soon after meeting him! Though, from what I heard, he's also just gotten better at pattern recognition."

    Petra claps her hands to her mouth, muffled through the fabric of the jumpsuit. "Oh my god, is this gonna be one of those fights where everyone shouts about their feelings while doing it? I've always wanted to do one of those! Hold on, hold on, give me a second."

    She takes out a journal full of sticky notes and crumpled pages stuck between other pages, flipping around it to find her place to read out from her notes. "Um, so! It's pretty apparent that, with Agent Flamel's help or not, none of the psychological issues underlying the tapestry of the collective unconscious of any individual world ever really gets *solved*! These 'toxins', as I like to call them, accumulate in certain culturally downriver individuals, positioned such that the beneficial practices are largely sorted out and absorbed by the majority substrate while psychological waste material continues to those allocated less! This happens through a process of uncountable invisible mechanisms in the material world, designed by a unified motivation accessed in the collective unconscious but only observed in facets by any individual material actor, thereby dissociating responsibility and even *awareness* of the phenomenon!"

    She snaps the book closed, looking eminently pleased with herself. "The Psychogates will make those processes visible to everyone! Really, I think Flamel's way too hard on himself for beefing it so often. If every problem is caused by a lack of visibility to the internal mechanisms of society and the soul, then even a Psychonaut can only do what a Psychonaut can do, right? Oh, though, I'd love if we found a way where he didn't die after all this. Any doctors here?"

    She pauses, and then hefts one of her dissociation orbs like a baseball. "Um, should I throw a bomb at someone? Is that how this works?"
Rufus Shinra > "Um, should I throw a bomb at someone? Is that how this works?"

"How about the crazy-"

"- she/her, right? Right."

"- crazy bitch pointing a gun at me, for a start?"
Schneider Greco      "- she/her, right? Right."
     If UPE-1929 were formed with cultural knowledge of 'tagged: femboy' and the other evils inflicted upon flat-chested queer women, there's a decent chance Rufus's brains would be all over the wall.

     Instead, she says: "I what, my-lord?"

     "- crazy bitch"
     She smiles with something vaguely approximating fondness, like he's being a little endearing.
Hiromi     'How quickly are we resorting to violence? Do your ideals really only carry you so short a distance before they can't be borne further than by anything more than common thuggery?'

    Hiromi is not, as a rule, fond of lies. It is something she's spoken on.

    She'd still be more disappointed in Rufus, by far, if she thought he was being honest.
Flamel Parsons     Crenshaw's given some heartening by Rufus' words. His eyes surge with energy and light. "You get it, you *get it*. We're the ones who *want* to give things up for the sake of this...!" And Director Parsons, eyes still closed, hands still strumming, straightens his back and firms his posture despite the agonies and pain.

    Eventually, the strumming stops. Director Parsons tunes the guitar. His whispers, somehow, have the telepathic force to surge past all the sound, the noise of Petra grunting, the sound of machinery churning, lightning discharging into the chamber, fields and waves... He's audible over all of that, even at a whisper, when he replies to Aika: "Everyone in the Psychonauts signed up for the cause of mental wellness. We take the benefits of psychic power, supernatural learning. And the cost is that we stand ready to burn to make the world brighter."

    "*Not your choice!*" Kramer shouts, readying her blast -- Ahn's shotgun rips through her focus. "Fu--!" She stumbles to one side, dispersing her blast and bracing against nearby rubble to steady herself.

    Aika's objections draw a furrowed brow from the Director. A string on his guitar softly twangs. "A cost even higher..." His eyes shift under the lids. His heart feels heavy. "The people who most need healing and most need help are already experiencing this. Otherwise those terrible things wouldn't exist. They are what the people already experience..." Yet, despite her violence, something is needling at him. His body, wracked with agony, shudders a little more.

    Tamiel provokes something odd, not from Crenshaw but the man in the middle of the chamber. Finally, Director Parsons stands from his seat. As if there were an optical illusion, the man's full size is somehow eight, nine... ten feet tall? "There is one truth that we psychics must acknowledge." He says, his voice still an amplified whisper. "That the astral world does not matter to the material world, and the material world does not matter to the astral world. No matter what proves it wrong, we can't live believing that true. They converge only inside your mind, and nowhere else." He begins to hold his guitar at his side, instead.

    "Believe otherwise, and your mind will shatter irreparably."

    Tamiel, in this case, carries a 'true' argument against Crenshaw, but the one who answers is Director Parsons. She discovers something important, something crucial about Flamel's mindset and the mindset of the Psychonauts as a whole: No sane psychic can accept that psychic matters are beholden to material truths. She might be the first one to reach a secret, powerful, unspoken assumption. Speaking to the deepest part of Flamel's mind, she can access a core truth uncensored: Accepting something like that would put a psychic at odds with the material world -- and so they would be "insane", wouldn't they?
Timekeeper ". . . What do you make of all this, my-lord?"

    Earlier, Vertin lingers beside the Lilian impression with a similar expression as the one that Schneider wears, half-shrounded by the brim of her hat. "... That I'd have loved to hear about it six months ago before it was put into action without anyone's knowledge."

    She sighs and turns her face away from the engravings on the wall. "You're right, of course. It's hard to argue that his intentions towards you, or Lilian, or towards ending the Storm, aren't kind. So I suppose that it's sad that they won't amount to anything, because he kept them to himself."

"The Multiverse isn't helpless; the people trapped in here are."

    It's honestly that argument, among all the others about the fate of the world, that resonates with Vertin's feelings the most. Even with Ahn shooting at Kramer, she's concretely adhered to the construct of the 'trustworthy team' inside Vertin's mind, along with Regulus and Schneider-- it's not like Vertin didn't just fire an incantation at Aika a moment ago.

    "Conjecture about the future only matters once we can see it. This isn't a matter of the many vs. the few at all, just of trying to save ourselves and the people in front of us." And to that end--

"Amnestic and inversion mirrors; I have both in my pack."

    " Right. We'll need to be close, then, to intercept them?" Vertin nods decisively, then glances from Schneider to Ahn, and then directs her gaze towards Hiromi. She lets out a tense, almost breathless sigh, halfway exhaled.

"But know this, little one. All strength is decided in action. Indecision is weakness."

    "Understood. Thank you, Archwolf. I'll keep your teachings in mind."

    A floppy disk wings out of Vertin's hand, plucked from her jacket and hurled in the same swift motion. Hitting the ground beside Hiromi, it erupts into a fiery explosion to steer her away from Flamel, and Vertin grabs Ahn's wrist and *runs* through the smoke towards the 'Director' Parsons.
Flamel Parsons     The achingly tall man reaches out, as if to offer the instrument to Regulus. To have her share his burden. It's enough for her to reach out, and feel the searing heat of it, impossible to hold unless she wishes to suffer so much damage that it could wound her badly. "That's how," He whispers. "I have hurt every other one. I have seen the possibility of a better world, a world more well. And then, I see someone who says: 'I carry burdens. I have strength. I can make this happen, and you will continue on, to do more good.'" He gestures around him. Arching figures of unnamed dozens. Vulnerable young people. The chorus of the dead and injured, and a reply of sorts to Vertin. "The others I could consult. The many who are so strong for the budrens they have. I burn them alive to make a world brighter. I turn Cinder to ash, for nothing."

    "Let me and mine burn instead."

    He tightens his grip on the guitar. He holds onto the song -- but she might be able to break his sway over the larger mind if she works at it. He restores his hold on the great instrument. Barre surges in efforts to suicide-bomb Director Parsons--!

    And fails. First, the explosive he took, formed from Ahn's amazing fertilizer, falls from his hands, blasted into a stumble by Vertin's wand. In a panic, he reaches with telekinesis and shouts, "HE HAS TO--" UPE-1929's shots instantly ventilate him. He's dead before he hits the ground. Under normal circumstances he would disperse into mental energy. In these, he stains rock and concrete with blood.

    With Kramer cowed by Ahn's shotgun, the last bullet gets Crenshaw stepping back in tension. The mental image of Schneider's self-built support and strength surge to hold him in place. Gritting his teeth, he disperses the energy he's built, and stops moving to join Director Parsons. Someone else is, though. And they're closing on the Director, blood at the ready to help...!

    Vertin was able to rally against Barre and stop the worst of all outcomes. She *did* prevent Barre, the rogue regret, from bringing down the Motherlobe much more lethally and not even getting Psychogates out of it. But that flying floppy likely wont stop Director Parsons from taking the blood. Standing now, he'll move to meet Hiromi rather than let her be driven off by any explosive, and his burning body is long past being deterred by heat at this point. "If I have more to burn," He says. "Then I will make my light all the brighter." He adjusts his grip on that grand instrument enough to shift it out of the way, to let the blood slam into him, let himself suffer more of a wound. Letting himself take the blood as deep as it will plunge into his meager heart. His body goes limp, and his grip slacks on the instrument. Flesh and bone snap. Once to receive the wound.

    Soon enough, more, to recover from it too.
Flamel Parsons     Kramer is the one who can desperately gasp, "No...!" With the most sincerity, knowing what that blood will do for him. This isn't Flamel Parsons himself, but even for just this element of his mind, the effect that will have...

    The man's flesh cracks more, charred flesh healing and then burning again as the heat surges. Along with anyone else too nearby and too vulnerable, Kramer is blasted back by a wave of heat, still stumbling and struggling and trying to call out. "Ahn, Ahn's right, you have to disrupt it with... hhhh... to stop the memory...!"

    In one last moment of this, Greta gets a clear response. Marcus can see a clarity in the reading: If allowed to continue, his effort will work. It will eject a mass of Truth Phenomenon into the Soft Expanse, it will throw open a great gate and let anyone into and out of it that try. "I know that I can." He says. "And if I can't, then I have been saved enough to owe that I try with everything I have. They deserved better, and all I can give is this."

    "Listen. *This is my answer.*"

    The heat is coming off Director Parsons in wave after searing wave. His body shudders and his whispers turn to a long wail of pain. His body is inadequate to carry the light of Truth, but with the power of this blood he only chooses to carry more, not hurt less. A pained grip twists against the neck of the guitar, forming a terrible chord. The opposite hand strums, and the mountain roils with that sound. Cracks in the ceiling reveal the blizzard in the mountain outside, the flakes of which melt when they reach the painful heat of the Truth in the heart of the mountain.

    The blizzard turns to screaming, howling winds when this massive heat meets the cold. The storm is beginning in earnest. The Psychogate Project is reaching its climactic moment. Disrupt, defend, attack -- make your plans now and act on them soon, because Director Parsons is.

    He opens his eyes and lets the light of the Truth Phenomenon pour through him. "I can let no other share this burden. I can let this cycle of agony I inflict on the vulnerable continue no longer. We must never hold the gate closed, ever again." His whisper turns to a full-throated growl. "With the little strength I have, with the little kindling and fuel in my soul..."



    "LET THE LIGHT OF THOSE FLICKERING EMBERS OF MY LIFE REACH *EVERY SHADOW IN ALL OF THE MULTIVERSE!* The searing heat reaches its peak. The howling blizzard turns to white-out thunder and lightning, and the stone, concrete, and psychic constructs fall around the chamber.
Rufus Shinra > Hiromi is not, as a rule, fond of lies. It is something she's spoken on.

Sorry, Hiromi. Rufus may one day be redeemed. He may one day work for good instead of his own self interest. He may one day seek to better himself and the world instead of setting both on fire for his own idle enjoyment. He may even one day be turned away from the evils of capitalism, as strange as that may sound today.

But he will never, ever, in a million years across a thousand multiversal worlds, stop being the human equivalent of an oil spill.

Like right now - as soon as Schneider looks distracted enough, as soon as he thinks he can get away with it - he bolts, taking to a hiding spot and preparing. Gun loaded, MP bar refilled, coin pocket patted, and his power-copied trump cards ready to deploy.

How much he can do is up in the air, with the tide seeming to turn against Flamel and his plan, but he figures he at least has a shot.

And if he doesn't have a shot... well, trying and failing, *whatever* comes of it, is infinitely preferable to standing by and letting someone else make the big decisions.
Schneider Greco      With Crenshaw subdued and Rufus seemingly playing nice, Schneider swivels her gaze around to smile lazily, questioningly, at Petra. But it's barely a question.

     "You would-not bomb me, would you, my-lord...~?" Not that they've always gotten along- the real Schneider and the real Petra, anyway. But Petra doesn't seem especially the type to side against a crazy bitch.

     She leaves the gunsmoke behind to step further into the chamber, by Vertin's side, as Hiromi infuses the Director and the storm kicks up.

She'd half-formed the soft words she wants to say:
You're trying to be kind, I know.
But hurting with us won't get you what your heart wants.
It won't save me.

     Something along those lines. Tidier, neater-put. But the wind is howling too loud for her to be heard in that voice, right now; and his emotions are howling too brightly for a soft touch to steer him.

<J-IC-Scene> Schneider Greco says, "My-la-dy Hi-ro-mi. He can-not die, as he has your blessing, yes?"
<J-IC-Scene> Hiromi says, "He'll stand again, and again, and again, until he can't. He'll burn again, and again, and again, until he's less than ashes."
<J-IC-Scene> Schneider Greco says, "Thank you."

     This is useful to her. The Director dying probably won't kill Flamel, but it would shut the window she wants to reach him through.

     One bullet in her left gun remaining after disposing of Barre; eight in her right. Nine total. The beautiful handgun coalesces in her right hand; she turns her wrist outwards, and a white translucent 'ghost' of the Director is pulled out of his form, to the right.

<J-IC-Scene> Schneider Greco says, "La-dy Kramer. Where is 'guilt', in the brain?"

     Schneider sights up on the head.
Aika Rosewater "Um, should I throw a bomb at someone? Is that how this works?"
"- crazy bitch pointing a gun at me, for a start?"

    Aika shoulders Rufus with perhaps a bit more strength than is necessary to make the point. "Oi, be nice."

"The people who most need healing and most need help are already experiencing this."

    "Of -course- they are. God! I'm not saying you're not onto something but it's like they all said. Don't settle for the dirty fix that needs you to throw bodies into the machine to oil it. Come on. That's the best you can come up with? 'Good enough' ISN'T."

    Well, she couldn't come up with better if asked.
    Or if given decades, probably.
    So...

"So I suppose that it's sad that they won't amount to anything, because he kept them to himself."

    Aika makes a noise. It's the noise of having seen that a few times. Hunters thinking they'll do good and then just setting off a chain reaction that makes everything worse for everyone, but only because they didn't prep first. Didn't ask for support. Scale's a whole lot different here, but it's a story that repeats a lot.

"This isn't a matter of the many vs. the few at all, just of trying to save ourselves and the people in front of us."

    At least... Vertin puts it into words, where Aika hadn't.

    She seems to shrink, a bit. Hands in her pockets now. She doesn't have anything here; she's muscle, not a psychic, not a mage, not a handycraft survivor. The best she can do is to keep an eye on Rufus, and hope that incites Schneider not to pointlessly shoot him or anything like that, though she didn't seem the sort to do pointless things.

    Kramer, & Flamel heating up.

    Aika abandons her vigil of Rufus (who immediately flees, it turns out) to dash over to Kramer, and endure the heat waves from Flamel for her, since she's clearly not in a very good state, and her knowledge is invaluable.

    Then heat is picking up. The storm, too, and the chamber's quaking.

    "I don't think I can do anything about that!"
    Certainly not while shielding Kramer.

    That's always been her issue. Getting sidetracked by the life she can save right there and then, but it's what she can do Right Now.
Hiromi     Hitting the ground beside Hiromi, it erupts into a fiery explosion to steer her away from Flamel...
    ... he'll move to meet Hiromi rather than let her be driven off by any explosive, and his burning body is long past being deterred by heat at this point.

    An unknown magic isn't something that even Hiromi should take lightly, but her determined advance is met by Director Flamel, despite the risk. She meets her target, the act done swiftly -- decisively, as intended, while the Archwolf's opposite hand shields her eyes.

    'I can let no other share this burden.'

    "You'd die brighter? Is a stone's <path//destiny> to melt into <foundation>?"

    The searing heat reaches its peak.

    "To become alive is chosen. It can only be a choice. Life is action. Did you make your choice, knowing this?"

    A blizzard -- a storm -- isn't where anyone would want to be. It's a time to be weathered, a time to retreat underground -- but Hiromi's already given the psychonauts a den to retreat into. That's the very purpose of such a thing.
Storm Investigators "I've decided."

"Should we... Ah."
"We couldn't even if we tried. Besides, this may change things if it truly does give him the ability to bring about the results he's been pursuing."
"Do you... Do you really believe that it will?"

"The Psychogates will make those processes visible to everyone!"

Greta doesn't answer Marcus there, as her gaze remains fixed on Hiromi and Director Parsons. It's clear she's waiting for something, and possibly even trying to figure out how much to believe from what Psychonautra says. Even with those processes revealed for all the hurt people to see and act upon, would that actually be enough to offset the damage caused by all those 'toxins' accumulating in them in the first place?

The fact that she can't definitively tell herself 'no' actually gives Greta pause, and she kind of hates that feeling of uncertainty.

"I know that I can."
"He does believe..." Marcus murmurs, teeth chattering briefly as enough comes to the surface from Greta's fishing that she can see Flamel's clarity of purpose in this moment. She can see the likely outcome in his ideal circumstances, too, and the conflict that Greta's feeling in her gut is mirrored plain as day on Marcus' face. "He could... He could even do it. The people he's trying to reach with this? It wouldn't be just a dream of his, but reality! They could enter and leave the gate at will, to heal themselves and their hearts! But then the people in here, the people being sacrificed, Mister Parsons himself..."

The more Marcus speaks, the more she's rattling herself, and the worse off she sounds on what she should be doing.

"Amnestic and inversion mirrors; I have both in my pack."
"We'll need to be close, then, to intercept them?"
"to stop the memory...!"
"LET THE LIGHT OF THOSE FLICKERING EMBERS OF MY LIFE REACH *EVERY SHADOW IN ALL OF THE MULTIVERSE!"

That settles it for Greta, at last, and she takes one step over to clasp a hand on Marcus' shoulder firmly before pulling her towards the cover Aika provides to Kramer and huddle up behind all that.

"Then our job remains the same, Marcus. We stop this project, and we prevent the sacrifices. All of theirs, and his own." Greta states, turning Marcus' unsteadily uncertain gaze into...

"Huh? But the people he could help..." Marcus still sounds uncertain as ever, actually, perhaps even more confused than before.
"Could, would. The expected results of success are still too vague, and the costs are too high." Greta answers as firmly as she always does, even with the lingering doubts in her chest. "We will aid the Timekeeper and those looking to prevent this the best we can. Do you understand, Marcus?"

Marcus takes a deep breath to settle her mind, finally nodding slowly with only the slightest amount of relief showing on her face. "Yes, Madam Hofmann."

<J-IC-Scene> Schneider Greco says, "Ahh. Good that it is to the front. I hope I do-not hit 'myself'."

That'll be as good of starting point for Marcus as any: Trying her Reading again to determine if Director Parsons' brain is still structured like a standardbrain anymore, or at least as standard as a Psychonaut's brain-inside-his-own-brain can be.

She's not worried about frying her own brain this way, at least.
Timekeeper "Let me and mine burn instead."

    Of all the words Vertin least likes to hear, among the worst are 'sacrifice me instead'. For all of their awareness of the readiness with which arcanists are funneled suffering first and more severely by the world, they rarely ever say 'me and mine' to mean arcanists specifically. Rather, far too many people, human and arcanist, come up against a point where they or someone else makes the choice to toss them aside for a greater goal, and all the justifications in the world don't change the end result.

    "No!"

    There was little hope that Vertin would be able to stop Hiromi from reaching Flamel with one floppy disk, and she's confident in the regeneration of the Archwolf's gift besides. Rather, in the heat and smoke, and soon after the howling wind of the storm, Vertin decisively dashes around to the back of Director Parsons, skirting around where Hiromi or Parsons himself would interfere and prevent her and Ahn from getting close enough to use her mirrors.

"LET THE LIGHT OF THOSE FLICKERING EMBERS OF MY LIFE REACH *EVERY SHADOW IN ALL OF THE MULTIVERSE!*"

    Vertin is forced to come to a stop and shield her face with her arm, narrowing her eyes through the dessicating heat that washes off of Parsons. The wind whips her jacket around, threatening to tear away her hat, and the precipitation swirling outdoors makes it nearly impossible to see where the telekinetic links between Parsons and the tools that manifest the project itself are anymore, in order to sever them with Ahn.

    This, though, is what Vertin has felt all along. No matter how guilty Flamel is, no matter how much he regrets his failings on however many other worlds, he can't envision his own sacrifice as doing anything besides making him a martyr, for one simple reason: he can't imagine a world where he doesn't exist anymore. In other words, he's selfish, and he's afraid, and Flamel, too, doesn't want to see the Motherlobe come crashing down on top of all of them.

    "I don't accept your sacrifice, Agent Parsons. Nor do I accept your means as justified by the end. But I'll accept your intentions, and some other time, some other way, I'd like to help you see them through."
Regulus Regulus reaches off. Of course she does. Philisophically, she has to be able to grab that guitar. Rock shouldn't be able to harm her, after all. It never has before. If it burns, it's because it burns with passion. And, okay, whew! That's a lot of passion. Her hand instinctively snaps back at the pure heat of it. "Guess the rock and roll that binds us all together is a little too hot for one person to hold onto. Maybe even too much for two people to hold onto!" Regulus says. She does, of course, try again like someone immune to being able to learn that stove equals hot but while Regulus's heart says one thing, the nerves in her hand say another. She can't grab onto that.

''I turn Cinder to ash, for nothing.''

Regulus isn't a Lobotomy Corp agent, and she's barely been to The City, and she definitely doesn't know who ''Cinder'', so she of course hears it with a lower case c. But she can understand it as a metaphor, at least.

"...You feel guilty, right?" Regulus manages. She doesn't see Flamel as a stone--nobody gave her that bit of backstory--but honestly even if she knew, well, her best friend is an apple and she doesn't see APPLe as an apple, she sees APPLe as a buddy. "So you're punishing yourself to make the world better--but that's not how you make a better world, love. That's just revenge."

She looks over to Vertin, feeling lost. She thinks of what others have said, about giving him a hug. But she can't hug someone who is on fire. Her body will tell her no.

"Flamel... a robot out there wants to make me work out and it's good for me but I don't want it, okay?" Regulus stammers. "Can't we take a break? Talk it out? Don't make me blast over your song, maybe if we work together nobody's gotta burn--"

And then Hiromi DOES THAT.

"HOLY CHRISTMAS!" Regulus jumps. "What was that? Why did you do that? What's going on??"
Vantablitz Remnants     'Ooooh, hello! Shinra, right? I'd recognize that stew of apathetic derealized narcissism anywhere! Thanks, bud!'

    That's totally different than how Petra acted last time, but that was totally different than the time before that; zero alarm bells ring in Ahn's head about this whatsoever.

    'That must be Schneider then, huh? Scary! Y'know, it takes a certain kinda woman to colonize that much of Agent Flamel's mind so soon after meeting him!'

    "She's like, a representation or a manifestation or something?" Ahn says, as long as a clarification she can give under pressure. She has no idea what she's talking about otherwise.

    'The Psychogates will make those processes visible to everyone! Really, I think Flamel's way too hard on himself for beefing it so often. If every problem is caused by a lack of visibility to the internal mechanisms of society and the soul, then even a Psychonaut can only do what a Psychonaut can do, right?'

    That's . . . actually helpful. Or at least it immediately backfills an anxiety-inducing void of naggingly critical-feeling information. Ahn still doesn't have the time to hesitate, especially when the violence escalates even more, but it clarifies that, as she expected, Petra is here in the capacity of a mysterious benefactor who knows everything already.

    'Right. We'll need to be close, then, to intercept them?'

    "We can trust her." Ahn first clarifies to Vertin, and then immediately follows up with "Touching the psitanium, yeah! I'm willing to hear any plans for that part!" Hiromi escalating everything even more throws her off; hearing Flamel called 'a rock' over and over doesn't prevent the gagging scream that she strangles in her throat. When Vertin grabs her wrist, she sprints without needing to be dragged; smoke is exactly the kind of opportunity she'd look for. The canister of caustic amnestic, lashed up where a molotov went decades ago, is slipped from its cord with her left hand, and slug down to her elbow by its carry strap. One-handing her shotgun, she reaches for the inversion mirror shard she'd sheathed in the same place as the knife on her chest, half-handled in light-sprout fibre.

    'LET THE LIGHT OF THOSE FLICKERING EMBERS OF MY LIFE REACH *EVERY SHADOW IN ALL OF THE MULTIVERSE!'

    "Vertin, behind me!" Ahn tries to shout over the lightning, leaping ahead with an additional surge of force. "Petra, please help!" she calls out, on faith, as the heat rises to peeling paint and stone and burning the air in her lungs. Gritting her teeth, squeezing shut her burning eyes, Ahn claps her mirror-wielding hand to the flower in her hair, and adds an extra name. "Lotus!! Come on!!!"

    Coils of thorny bramble and slick root bubble up from under her fingers, ripping her skin adding the red of her blood to the surge of coal-black water that gushes down the surface tension of her red and blistering skin, and nowhere else; a film of something that clings almost magnetically, drying in the unbelievable heat into a second skin shot; one shot through with certain lattices extracted from the genes of a fire giant she'd almost forgotten about.

    If 'the Director' is immortal now, the shotgun isn't much more help than to stop him for a moment. She'll shoot him to force him to regenerate, if she has to. Ahn's plan is to block Vertin in her shadow, get as close as possible, and douse him with the can full of amnestic dredged from the Kagoshima gate, followed by the piece of the Shattered Mirror to invert the inside/outside relationship of the astral projection-- outside the psitanium and not in.
Tamiel Luxis     She stares at the ruins of Barre's corpse for a long moment, hitch in her throat. He'd wanted to blow them all up! He'd wanted to stop the gates from touching the world. She'd done it to him--

    "...Had to." She muttered, before the momentum of the moment rushed her away from lingering on it.

    "No matter what proves it wrong, we can't live believing that true."

    "This isn't the only way to nurture the zeitgeist!" Tamiel insists, even in the face of the mounting realization of incompatible perspectives. Even though there oculd be no reconciliation, she had to voice it, had to complete her statement. "The mind fits the world--the world is shaped by the minds of the people--they feed each other. It's not enough to do just one!" She keeps using that word--Zeitgeist. Clearly, it means something quite distinct to her.

    It wasn't enough, of course. It would never be enough. A tear of stress leaking from one eye, she knew--she'd be better off screaming at a rock.

    She blinks, uncomperehending, at Petra, the wind momentarily taken out of her sail in this dramatic moment as everything the psychonaut(?) says flies right over her head. "...Probably?" She says, finally. "But I don't know who you'd want to throw a bomb at...?"

    Her apologetic pause is proof enough to prove the virtue of Hiromi's decisiveness--as she watches in horror as the archwolf RIPS out the Director's thought, Tamiel's first horrified thought is that she's killed the man. But, as she saw--felt?--the power pouring into the man's body, she knew, this wasn't an attack, but a gift.

    Tamiel grabbed at her own shadow, like it was a sheet, pulling it over her head as she was buffeted by light. Her hand emerged through the other side--gloves, fishnet sleeves, a hoodie, hair free, skirt, iridescent floating scarf. But her transformation wasn't steady--with gaps, flickering in and out of existence.

    ...Please be enough.
Petra Soroka "- she/her, right? Right."

    "Huh! Weird. For some reason, I got some really negative feelings when you said that! Could you repeat that into this tape deck so I can figure out why later?"

    Petra does seem hesitant to chuck bombs at Schneider, given that she knows, like, less than half of the people here, and most only through secondhand files. Intrinsically, there's no part of Petra's psyche that would decide to take the word of a man who says 'bitch' advocating for violence against a woman, but she's far too much of a self-interested government goon to really take a hardline stance on that. Instead, Schneider gets a awkward little wave as Petra rolls the orb around in her hand like a fidget toy helplessly.

    "... Y'know, I'm kinda feeling like I messed up the tempo of all this fighting and shouting. Maybe I'd feel better about attacking someone if people were arguing with me...? I don't know how you all do it."

"She's like, a representation or a manifestation or something?"

    "Oh, cool! Me too!"

    Petra claps her hands together excitedly, holding out the bomb-less one towards Schneider for a distance handshake. "UPE-000! Well, I made that up, 'cause no one else wanted to give me a designation. Everyone just calls me Petra, anyways. Now I'm super glad I didn't toss one of these suckers at you, because *wow* does derealization vaporize a psychic anomaly fast!"

    One thing Psychonautra is not, though, is a ditz. The dissociation-orb fitfully resting in her hands eventually finds its way hurtling towars Kramer when she tries to attack Flamel, with a guilty wince on Petra's part. "Sorry, Agent Kramer! You know I love the Psychonauts more than anyone! But they're just a means to an end, y'know? There's nothing worse than blocking up the flow of ideas just for the sake of comfortable stasis."

    Petra shuffles through her pockets until she finds a Psycho-portal, a door identical to all the ones popping up during the Psychogate event, but small enough to fit in her palm. She checks around at who's been most vocal about advocating against the Psychoportal project, then throws the doors, one after another, at Aika and then Tamiel, slapping against their foreheads like pieces of cheese. The doors open up, but rather than hopping inside, the psychic conditions currently surrounding everyone allow the Psychohazards within to squeeze through the doorframe and manifest physically, piling out into the real world.

    In particular, the gummy, gooey, purple and orange Doubts that represent all of their thoughts about all the terrible ways Flamel's project can go wrong! They totter around to block people from getting to Flamel and try to bite with their big orange mouths, and what's more: every one of them defeated is an argument or a rationalization for why Flamel's project is *good*, actually! So when fighting them, they'll have to continually argue against their own consciences in order to keep their opinions straight!
Petra Soroka     Despite her advocacy for the project, though, even Petra freaks out a bit when a ten foot tall Flamel has his heart torn through to accept Hiromi's blessing, and the chamber starts to become scorchingly hot in his presence. As her gadgets and gizmos hanging all around her have smoke pour out of them while their dials spin wildly, Petra starts to fret in panic.

    "Er, uh, the Archwolf's blessing, that works mostly on blood, right? So for a psychic anomaly, that's probably coursing wolf-ness through the rationalization pathways, making them... invulnerable with infinite plasticity of justification, increasing the stress load limit of a belief basically limitlessly.... Basically, Agent Flamel's gonna stick to his guns until there's no more guns to stick to, whatever he's got to cling to."

"Petra, please help!"

    "Um, help with what? I don't think we've met yet!"

    Petra squints nervously towards Ahn, ducking if she can to hide from the fire coming off of Flamel behind Lotus. While there, she lets out a low whistle at Ahn's hands, mumbling as a calming ritual to herself. "Oh, some sorta chameleonic adaptation matrix, huh? I'm no expert on DNA, but the sensory homunculus of that must be *crazy*. Think of the mirror neurons!"

    Edging backwards towards the pile of UPEs working together to channel the Truth, Petra adds, "Uh, er-- y'know, I'm thinking the Elite thing might not be for me, really. Probably the best way I can help is from here, while you guys fight over there! I'll be keeping an eye out, though!"