lostcarnival | ⇨ POLARIS 3.0

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⇨ POLARIS 3.0

Who: Everyone!
When: Day 115
Where: Polaris
What: On the morning of day 115, a couple hours before the technicians would come to pick up the test subjects, the escape plan will officially come into effect. If your character has been left out of the loop up till this point, feel free that someone hastily explains the plan during the initial phase! The meat of everything else will be played out via megathreads and any private toplevels people want to make.
Warnings: Probably violence.

PEER REVIEW↴

The plan starts with getting everyone out of their cells. Childermass is going to be using his Gilded Mark to enhance his shadow movement abilities, unabling him to teleport himself and other people out of containment. If your character has other ways of escaping they are free to pursue that, but on a base level, it can be assumed that everyone gets out thanks to Childermass. (Thanks Childermass!) Once everyone has been removed from their cells by some means or another, they will be forced to split into teams as swiftly as possible, as the moment people start breaking out, negative attention from the staff will start building. The area is poorly guarded at first, but as people become aware of the breakout, more will arrive.

Gild, speaking on behalf of her inside plant, will say that those that 1) want to get their stuff back, 2) want to find Ignatius, should get the assistance of their allied Deltas to access sector A5. From there, they will have to access Polaris's storage in A3, a neighbouring sector, and find access to C2, the station where Ignatius is being held. They should expect to be met with armed resistance, but with any luck allies will be there to assist them.

In general, characters will be most effective if they back one of these major objectives:

► TEAM LOOT: This team is trying to get back the items and pets that were confiscated when the group was brought into Polaris. Their objective, according to their allies on the inside, is to get to A5, and then make their way to A3. The important thing is being able to locate their stuff among a sea of other items, and to make it through security in order to reclaim it. Gild's plant has said that they will assist with this. After getting these items, Team Loot may wish to merge with Team Rescue.

► TEAM RESCUE: This team's primary focus is to get to A5 and then make their way to C2. If desired, they may wait for or join with Team Loot, or they may strike out ahead in order to take advantage of the element of surprise. The key factors are obtaining a way to access C2, as well as being prepared for armed conflict with the technicians guarding it, as well as possibly the Mother of Invention herself. Though, the ideal is that Gild will be distracting here at that time.

► TEAM DISTRACTION: This team can do their thing wherever they please, as their main intent is to sew general discord and distract the staff from the teams doing more important things. They should be prepared for armed resistance, but what tactics they pursue beyond that point are highly variable.

► TEAM FORTRESS: This team is attempting to set up a protective base of operations in the original sector in order to survive the conflict and protect their noncombatant comrades. How they accomplish this is also highly variable.

Other objectives may exist, of course, and can be made with their own separate top levels. Chunks of these megathreads will have to be played out in summary form, so when characters are simply trying to get from place to place and specifics aren't necessary, feel free to stick to that format. Assume that everyone is already out of their cells for the purpose of the megathreads.

Here is a shitty map of how the sectors connect, from a side view of the central Polaris hub.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"That means using the bloodbond," Lambert catches on immediately to what Ignatius is getting at, ignoring Herbert completely. The implications are clear enough to him, as is the realization Rita will hate that ... but she'll hate being used to hurt her allies even more. The mother's words, on the other hand, are a cause for concern. If she can sense Ignatius through Rita's new heart -- a procedure he knows in painfully intimate detail, now, thanks to the transferred memories -- then trying to keep Ignatius away from her might be a losing battle.

"There was something a teacher of mine used to say," he starts. "'Never pounce on an advantage as soon as it appears. Wait till it stands to have maximum effect.'"

His eyes search Ignatius's face, trying to find something more than half-baked uncertainty and fear there. His expression hardens.

"If you know about the bond, then she probably does too. She might be testing that." Seems like the sort of sick thing the Mother of Invention would be into. Either way, they can't drag along the unwilling, so he'll finish by shaking his head.

"Either stay or go, general, just lead."

Edited 2018-11-07 20:33 (UTC)

Second verse, same as the first. Strange continues to try and match what Rita's doing and gains enough control of the water to send another tendril towards Rita, though this time he's aiming to have the water envelop her head. If he were at full power, then this would be easy enough. But the fact of the matter is that at this moment, Rita's stronger than him.

"Nature has limits for a reason!" Strange yells in Rita's direction. "This—" But he gets cut off as some of the water goes for his head and completely envelops it. Strange can only make a gagging spluttering noise because at the moment, wizard is straight up about to drown.

"Or just stand there," gripes Herbert, absolutely refusing to take the point of Ignatius' look. "She might only want to, stare at you! Can we please do something--are we just letting her come in? I doubt that shield will stand up against her? Why don't we leave if we can, if using your, bond won't work?" He was already freaked out and he's obviously not getting any calmer.

Luckily for Strange the MoI isn't super interested in killing him right there, so it mostly just wants to dunk him in the pool and keep him distracted. Drowning, for the moment, is fairly distracting, so it works out.

Rita gestures her hand again, batting away the next tendril of water with force borrowed from the fae controlling her body.

"Limits exist to be broken," she says. The Mother focuses on the connection between their hearts, reaching out to Ignatius in turn.

Ignatius feels her attempt, and it sends a chill down his spine. He's reached out to Rita a few times during this whole thing, and he's grown increasingly familiar with it - this is all wrong, though. He hates it. He hates that the Mother was the one that made it happen in the first place.

He looks at Lambert, almost as if he resents the direction, and then moves to shove his way through Yuya's barrier, heading towards the outside. He'll pass through anyone inside of the shop, arriving to meet Rita at the door.

"There you are," Rita says as she sees him, apparently fascinated. "A fast recovery... but not complete, is it?"

Ignatius approaches and grabs Rita by the shoulders, with the MoI apparently allows. Pushing her outside of the shop, he stares into her eyes.

"Get out," he growls, and in that instant, Rita will feel sensation again - like those strings are there, pulling at her, but then like a fire is rushing through her, burning them away. It hurts, but with the flames comes a fraction of her freedom. The MoI isn't quite gone, but Rita is aware, and she can push back.

She was going to fight. Rita was going to fight with everything she had when the Mother of Invention tried to invade her mind... but instead, she finds herself here, paralyzed and staring up into Ignatius's eyes.

How did she get here? This isn't right. Did she really lose herself so easily...?

She tries to speak, but something's holding her down. A powerful, heavy presence, invisible bonds, a puppeteer's strings...

Get out. That presence doesn't belong here. It has to go. She'll latch on to that feeling of fire inside of her. She'll try to fan the flames, to encourage them to grow stronger and burn away more and more of those strings. She'll muster up all the anger and determination she can find and try to scream.

Get out, get out, GET OUT!

There isn't any choice but to follow through. After he's latch on to Rita, and he feels her consciousness start to resurface, and he can see Strange struggling with the Mother's attacks... the point of no return is here. He pours himself into disrupting the connection, demanding that his kindred come forward.

As the connection reaches it's peak, however, something reaches out from the Mother's side, straight through Rita and into his own essence - Rita will feel her hands lift, and grab Ignatius inside of the framework hole still opening his chest. The nanotech poison in his own body surges with her power, sending a shock that shakes him right down to his soul.

He collapses at the same moment Rita does, the Mother having loosed her control over her body. The water trying to strangle Strange falls. Ignatius lands on his side, his body glowing more blue than red for a moment, before gradually fading back to that ugly purple, swirling with renewed energy. Rita will find herself in control once again, her body limp, the presence of the Mother seemingly vanishing from the implant.

Edited 2018-11-07 21:56 (UTC)

Yuya slowly lowers his hands and the shield as Ignatius pushes by. He follows after a beat but keeps a few feet of distance as he watches with hope that Ignatius can free Rita.

But something takes a turn for the worse, Ignatius turns colors and they both collapse.

"Rita! Ignatius!" He scrambles to their side immediately, falling to his knees and reaching to shake them both.

Crumpled on the floor, Rita's quick to stir with a groan, groping weakly at her face until she manages to get a firm grip on her visor, which she pulls away, revealing eyes wide with bewilderment.

"What the hell just happened...?" she mutters, looking first to Yuya, then to Ignatius.

Herbert runs an anxious hand through his hair (which doesn't really help and just makes him feel a bit worse with the soul-coldness) and hesitantly approaches the door to peer out.

"Is the Mother back in Yukio?" he projects, not yet feeling up to leaving the room. "What's happened to Ignatius?"

Well, that’s that. But if Ignatius fading to blue means what Lambert thinks it means, then—

Lambert flexes his fingers, trying to call forth a bit of flame.

Hey, he's not drowning any more. As the water falls around him, the flames of Strange's hair start valiantly trying to light themselves on fire again. As both Rita and Ignatius were outside, he was able to see what exactly happened...though his understanding of what was going on is still a little hazy.

Strange has to take a moment to get his bearings and cough up lake water before he woozily starts to make his way towards the room.

"Somebody do something about that thing in their heads!" Strange yells, not really up to doing anything right now because again, almost drowned. Any more yelling is put on pause as Strange coughs up some more water.

Edited 2018-11-07 22:48 (UTC)

The flame Lambert is summoning arrives, as expected. Maybe there is a bit of flickering to the strength supporting it, but it'd be hard to tell without pushing his limits more.

Ignatius has his arms clutched around his middle, shivering and clenching his eyes shut, but he doesn't seem completely unconscious. Mostly just in pain. His skin initially feels very cold to Yuya, but it will start gradually warming up again.

It's gunna take him a bit before he can reply to Rita.

He's relieved. Yuya draws one hand back as Rita stirs, briefly conflicted on whether to tell her. "The Mother of Invention was--Ignatius forced her out of you, but then something happened to him."

He looks down at Ignatius, focusing until he realizes he's conscious but pained. Maybe he shouldn't have encouraged it, but they have Rita back and out of her control again...

"Hey, hang on. It worked, Rita's okay now."

Edited 2018-11-07 22:57 (UTC)

Well, magic works, which is something. But that doesn’t make Lambert feel good about that glow.

“West, stop standing around and be a doctor, will you?” Lambert says. He’s still wearing Ignatius’s form, so this is all probably super weird to hear coming out of him.

“Rita. Good to see you back. Look him over and tell West what you see.”

He doesn’t offer either of them a chance to ask clarification before he’s concentrating on bending space, opening up the door and striding through. When he comes back, it’s with a blanket in his arms and a couple of vials of phoenix juice in his hands, and he’s shifted back into the Gamma from before.

"Who--" Herbert manages and then watches him open the eggspace and go in. So. Presumably? A Supervisor? He doesn't even know, and nobody's telling him whether or not Yukio is repossessed outside. But if that wasn't even another fae the whole time then he's not substantially safer anywhere, really, which is great. That feels great. This is all. Fine.

He stares flatly at Rita and Ignatius on the ground outside for a moment, and then starts over towards the door out of the tuck shop, lifting his tail up and around so that he can hold the end and run his thumb over the blade of the scalpel repetitively as he walks.

"If she's cast something on him you're aware that's not my speciality," he points out.

Rita manages to sit up, disoriented but trying to comprehend her changed surroundings. The presence of a second Ignatius throws her off, though, and she squints back at him as he casually barks orders at her. She raises a finger to point weakly at the doppelganger, looking to the others for clarification. "What..." and then he's wandered off into a portal. Okay.

The suggestion to look Ignatius over isn't a bad one, though, and she turns her attention back to the fae, scooting a little bit closer. There's a conflicted look on her face as she sees how much pain he's in, and manages to piece that together with what she just experienced.

"You..."

He saved her, and this was the result. That much, she understands.

She takes a breath, then extends a hand out, trying to conjure her magic hacking interface, using that and her third eye to try and perceive what's hurting him.

Rita (and Strange once he's less busy coughing up water) will be able to see the same magical energy within him that she saw before, except much more buzzing and active. It's like his flesh is full with little specks of intense ice magic, like nanomachines that are fighting against his fire element at every turn. Right now they are particularly bright with power, freshly charged by the Mother's touch.

Ice is the antithesis to everything Ignatius is - they are polar opposites. The only place Rita will have seen them play along is in the Blue Rose, strange and powerful in its ability to embody both elements at once. Ignatius doesn't have that mythical balance, though. Trying to put both ice and fire inside of him is just resulting in them destroying each other and forcing him into a constant state of internal warfare.

How long they can power themselves is uncertain, but right now they seem practically fresh. Ignatius barely manages to crack open his eyes, looking at her - they glow a sickly blue like they did back in A2.

Eventually, Strange gets up to the group. Surprising no one, his focus is instantly on Ignatius and starts to focus on the magic and see what happened. As he sees Rita's display, he knows what she's doing and starts explaining for those who don't have cool magic viewing skills.

"She's injected him with these tiny little ice-like machines. I tried to dispel it before all this happened," said with a vague wave of his hand, "but there's something about the technology itself that impedes my spellbreaking."

And that's when he looks up and unintentionally examines a different set of magic, the one surrounding Lambert. And despite the form he's wearing, Strange recognizes the magic of Lambert's ring almost instantly. The wording of Strange and Lambert's contract is vague enough that he doesn't go for the kill right then and there. He does summon a fireball to his hand and fix Lambert with a calculating frown while deciding what to do next.

"So it's something crawling inside him?" That's disturbing. Yuya looks up and around at the rest of them, misreading Strange' body language as his gaze drifts to Lambert. He's seen this trick already, so he focuses more on the blanket and the vials. "Mr. Strange, that's just Lambert."

He shifts over a little, then tries to get an arm around Ignatius' shoulders to try and elevate him a little, which he hopes won't make the pain worse. Ignatius being 8 feet tall and heavy doesn't make this easy, but he's supported Gongenzaka before so he has at least a little experience trying to leverage someone laying on the ground so he's in a slightly better position to drink the potions. "Rita... are you able to get rid of them?"

"Idiot..." Rita murmurs as her gaze drifts from the data in front of her, to meeting Ignatius's eyes. "You shouldn't have taken the bait."

And yet, even as her pragmatic side thinks that, there's a part of her that's actually kind of happy he did.

She nods to confirm what Strange reports, then dispels the interface with a sweep of her hand. To Yuya, she explains, "I can't do much either... Even if I could hack the machines, there must be thousands of them. They might run out of power by themselves over time, but we don't exactly have time to waste." The Mother of Invention must be counting on that, too.

Strange's fireball, in the meantime, just gets a weird look from her. He's not planning on trying anything weird again, is he? Like that kiss from earlier.

Thank fuck for vague contracts. Lambert blinks at Strange then shrugs it off — that contract is the farthest thing on his mind right now — and offers Rita the vials, which she’ll recognize as the ones Lambert gave her for Solstice.

“Here. Maybe it’ll give him some more energy.” In the meantime, he’s snapping open the blanket and dropping it over Ignatius as best as he can. It’s magically self-warming flannel or something similar, so it’s roughly like being shoved under an electric blanket. Not much help in this situation, but it’s all he’s got.

It's obvious that there's some big internal monologue going on in Strange's brain as he just continues to stare at Lambert like a goddamn creep. After Lambert drops the blanket, Strange snuffs out his fire and reaches over to grab Lambert's arm.

"We should leave Rita and Herbert to their work. Can we have a word in private?"

Should he make contact, he'll dig his claws into Lambert's arm hard enough to possibly draw blood.

Peridot has been on scene for a few minutes now, drawn in by the commotion but unable to act or help in any meaningful way. She hates being idle, being useless. She listens to the explanation of what is wrong with Ignatius in the hopes that maybe she can lend a hand where tech is involved, but of course that winds up being just as far outside her grasp as anything else on this stupid station...

Ignatius looks bad. The Mother being not-distracted enough to possess the Deltas and blather creepy things through them doesn't bode well for how their other fae backup is doing... As much as she'd like to think that they could take down their captor without any sort of fae help, she's also had far too much experience with their kind by this point to believe it to be that easy.

They need Ignatius in order to get out of here, and they need him to be free of the Mother's influence. There's only one thing she can think to do to help. She just hopes it's effective enough to make burning this favor worth it.

Quietly, she shuffles off the sidelines and directly up to Ignatius. Peridot has no idea how the heck using this boon on someone else is supposed to work; does she need to be touching him or something? It couldn't hurt, right?

If she can reach, she'll tap Ignatius lightly on the forehead with one claw and hold it there. Squeezing her eyes shut in both concentration and embarrassment, she says aloud: "Uh. Creation? If you're listening... It would be really helpful if you could burn out these nanites and give Ignatius the power to slay the Mother of Invention and get us all the heck out of here."

She flinches and cracks one eye open, waiting to see if anything actually happens, or if she just made a big fool of herself.

Ignatius is in a state of barely consciousness, so overwhelmed with pushing back against the elemental misalignment that he can only hazily glance through cracked open eyes as Peridot taps on him. He senses the warmth of the blanket, and he senses the presence of others, but right now he's so focused on maintaining his presence of will that he can't really do anything about it.

Creation isn't always obvious when it works, or how it works. When it comes to responding to requests, it doesn't pay much attention to specific wording, and instead to intent, and flows with the path of nature to make it happen. Healing, strengthening, stopping pain. Those are all things it can be used for in great effect. Sometimes, though, a heavier and more obvious hand is needed.

Everyone in the area will feel Creation's presence, then - like a holy ghost that flickers between them, until it settles into its target. Ignatius's skin will start to glow more vibrantly again, but differently - in a flash of blue, and then a flash of red. What is perhaps unexpected, of course, is the fact that Ignatius cries out as it takes hold.

He rolls around beneath the blanket like he's sweating out a terrible fever, turning onto his front and bracing his hands against the ground as he tries to keep himself steady, muscles straining. Finally, it's all he can manage to say:

"Get back," he breathes. "I can't..."

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