lostcarnival | ⇨ POLARIS 3.0

Entry tags:

⇨ 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

Eruka doesn't really have a lot of time to process Peridot's order. She manages to clutch at the sword at it's thrust at her with slightly frozen-feeling fingers, the cold aura the Mother of Invention's used to try to blast them off affecting her slime's composition, and her eyes about bug out at Peridot's order. Save him? What does she look like, a fighter?! She doesn't have time to whine about it before the gem goes full Rambo on the Mother of Invention's insides, though, and she can't stay here clinging forever.

Of course, then the Mother of Invention begins to topple and she shrieks as one of those hands comes swinging for her head, slapping ineffectually at the chassis. Fae, apparently, don't go down easy. She teleports away, still clutching the sword Peridot's passed to her tightly, and where she ends up is not too far from Ignatius, actually.

Eruka recognizes dying throes when she sees them, but she has no sympathy for the Mother of Invention, so where she stands is pretty clear.

"We need to kill her! If not, she'll be back!" Eruka wails, completely and totally projecting on the situation at hand from her own experience. Her hands are shaking so hard, the sword looks like it's wobbling.

Something about standing and watching makes Papyrus shiver uncomfortably, an odd feeling he can't quite name. Maybe it's just how the metal on the outside feels, when cold sweat tries to cover his bones. It's not really a surprise, though, this is a thoroughly discomforting experience.

He's not so distracted by the odd feelings to miss that streak of green go flying near the flailing limbs, at least, and gestures emphatically to put extra power into pulling the gem out of danger.

Yukio is trying to ignore the pain of his injuries, but then West tells him off and ignores him. There isn't time for this, there isn't time to wait for anesthesia to kick in and Rin to pull and pick and irrigate the gravel out of his injuries. He grits his teeth and turns to Rin, clearly angry and in pain.

"Nii-san, do you have full control of your flames?" Without waiting for an answer, he launches into his plan, with a gesture at his side. It's not any worse than what Rin did to him, when he walked into the med tent and said 'I want you to take these crappy blind eyes out of my head'. "I need you to burn this clean. Just the contaminants. Do it quickly so I can go help Dr. West."

Rin can probably do this, he's done it before, just burned away clothes and left flesh untouched.

Tyki's down in a few short seconds, his Dark Matter the only thing keeping him alive as it fights viciously within his body. Were he at 0% power right now he would be dead out of sheer bad luck. If anything, he's still conscious given that opposition of two forces fighting themselves.

He feels a hand on his shoulder and glances up at the face of an ang- oh wait, no, it's just Beau. He can hear her and he lazily looks at her towards the battle in the distance. He wants to watch. He needs to watch.

"Miss Beauregard... I would appreciate some assistance even if it is towards the nearest wall."

Rin grins a little when Dr. West puts Yukio's arrogance where it belongs. But the smile is gone as soon as he looks back at Yukio, his feeling of vindication short-lived.

"Eh? Just the debris...? Mmmm... I should be able to do it, no problem."

He thinks, anyway. He hasn't used his powers in a week! Either way, he helps Yukio into a sitting position so he can better visualize the injury. His flames come easier with his heart exposed, so he unsheathes Kurikara and sets the flaming sword to one side, the blade not even leaving scorch marks on the floor. Rin's form changes accordingly, his ears longer and his flame-horns burning over his eyes.

"Ok, here goes..." Rin holds his hands over the injury and focuses, hard. He breaks a sweat and bites his lower lip. Then, Yukio's injured leg is engulfed in blue fire. His clothes, his skin, none of that burns. But instead of just turning into ash, the debris is fairly resistant to his fire. Stupid winter court magic. But, if nothing else, the warmth of Rin's flames help chase off some of that coldness from the smog.

"Nnngh... I can do it, but it's going to take a bit... hold tight, ok? It might get a bit hot."

Everyone seems to be looking to him for direction for reasons he doesn't really understand, so Ignatius tries to shake off the disquiet rising up inside of him in order to pursue a coherent direction. He guesses he probably knows more about faerie soul death than anyone else.

"We need to kill her fully," he says, "and then we need to raze everything that remains. Her soul will break apart, and we will have to destroy everything that's left. That's assuming she doesn't have pieces of herself contained in other places within Polaris..."

Ignatius obviously takes no joy in this - he would like it if she stopped screaming. With her grounded and slowly dying of iron poisoning, though, it's much easier to destroy her body. He summons a glowing blade, channeling as much of his disturbing new power into it as he can muster. Then, he leaps down onto her chest, piercing the blade through the same hole the iron knife entered.

He unleashes his strength through the blade, filling her chassis from the inside out. Her seams begin to leak white fire, yet her screams seem to have gone silent. There's something oddly peaceful about the expression on her face as Ignatius tears her apart. It's only in her final moments that she speaks.

"You've come so far," she breathes, her mechanical arms mostly falling limp. "All of you... the most fascinating... study yet. I only... wish I could S-^see more. Learn more. ^D-Do mo_re..."

Her voice trails off with a mechanical drop.

"Her soul will dissipate now," Ignatius explains, flatly. "We must destroy it all." Bit of bluish soul will float from the burning chassis. "Hit the body with everything you have."

Yukio hates those blue flames, but they're working (slowly, but more quickly than pulling the rubble out with tweezers would) to clean the injury. He just grits his teeth and turns his attention to his tail. It caught the edge of the coldfire blast, and the burn is worse than he thought.

"Just hurry up." There are still explosions and shouts and Yukio is doing absolutely nothing. He pulls a half-empty healing draught out of the bag he's carrying with him, and waits. As soon as Rin's done burning the rubble out (and it hurts, it's too warm and too hot and too blue) he'll down that and go back to helping West deal with the injured.

Zangetsu watches the Mother succumb to her injuries with sadistic glee. Good. Now, to make sure she stays dead. He intends to destroy the soul fragments floating away, and he starts going after them with his sword, cloaked in his Hollow energy. There’s plenty of others around to finish off the chassis.

Rita watches from atop Lambert's back as the Mother seems to break down.

At Ignatius's instruction, she'll nod firmly. "Got it. Let's finish this."

She'll raise a hand - the one not holding the dagger - and conjures a mass of pale fire above it. Wherever she sees that soul-essence, she blasts it with magic flames, while relying on Lambert to take her closer.

Miss Beauregard, ugh. Beau's expression twists at the unexpectedly mannerly greeting, from this guy who's probably concussed... Maybe that's it, maybe he's just concussed, because she sure hasn't done anything to make herself look ladylike today.

"You look pretty pummeled, man, but if you want to stick around..."

She helps haul him to his feet, glancing back towards the dwindling sounds. It looks like the Mother's down after all, some kind of bullshit winning strategy pulled out of their collective asses. Maybe it's safe for this guy to sit against a wall and watch, waiting comfortably for help to come to him instead.

"Yeah, okay. If you don't mind being where more enemies might come out, I can haul you to that brand new door to the farm. Or we can sit you against that piece of broken sky bridge over there. Just, don't take too long to decide, or I'll pick where to haul you."

The lizard boy and his dragon are here. It's pretty unsettling that fae murder has to turn out this way, but the two help with blasting the soul fragments as well- letting loose twin beams of plasma.

(Meanwhile the dragon actually has a cool new gem stuck to their sternum. It starts blinking in a countdown sort of manner.)

Now that the darkness effects are fading, Sans will let his aura die down to something more manageable. More specifically, he's looking for Papyrus in the crowd, trying to visually confirm that he's okay. He ends up spotting him tugging people out of the way of the Mother, and drifts down closer to meet the group.

Fire guys says to destroy the body, and Sans is completely willing to help. He summons up three of his blasters and channels his angelic and monster magic through them, blasting the spaces where souls bits seem to be emerging. Funny, seeing something like this on a bigger scale. Yet, no matter how much razing they do, it doesn't feel like this could be fully over.

He doesn't specifically enjoy the process, nor does it bother him. Really, he just feels sort of numb. What goes around comes around, he guesses.

Ignatius said to hit the body with everything they have, that's what Strange is focusing on. He focuses his magic on the already burning chassis, keeping the fire burning hot and adding his own flames to the mix.

For all that he wanted to wanted to kill the Mother and get the hell out of here, Strange is oddly quiet during this endeavor.

"You're not the boss of me," Lambert tells Syrlya, in a low rumble. As the Mother of Invention starts to flail around, thankfully, they're not in the immediate radius. Peridot is, though, and it's a good long worried moment for Lambert until he sees Papyrus's magic whisk her safely away.

There are probably others who can help Syrlya more than Lambert can right now, largely on account of having opposable thumbs and shit. Ignatius probably has the right idea, though as Lambert scans the field, his eye catches on the rabbit and he frowns.

"No sign of Gild," he tells Syrlya for his benefit, since his line of sight on the ground is all of jack and shit right now. "Try not to die until we take care of this, will you?"

With that, off he goes, waddling and tail swinging. He pours as much of his dragon breath over the Mother of Invention's chassis as he can to support Rita's magical attacks, focusing particularly on areas with ripped-off limbs and other damage in the hope of weakening the structure further with heat.

"The broken section is fine," he says outloud, trying to move a little to lean his back against something. He has to see this to the end. With that he'll mostly be quiet for the rest of the time to observe.

His hand opens to allow a few hundred Tease to flit into the air mostly to rush off in the direction of the soul fragments, firing large bursts of Dark Matter through them. Unlike his Noah body, they aren't affected by any light aura or song. They are just here to destroy with large bursts of energy.

"Ha." Syrlya's expression twists into a crooked smirk, which is about the most motion he can manage without causing more pain. While Lambert scans the field he tests his body again and flinches.

"I'm--not dying," he hisses between teeth. "It's fine."

And when Lambert turns to go, he closes his eyes and lets out a weary breath. Okay, it's not really fine, but he'd rather they not fail to kill the Mother of Invention worrying about bones they can't fix immediately anyway.

Peridot will be grateful for the save whenever she manages to regain her senses. For right now though, she doesn't look so hot. She basically ragdolls for the whole distance over to Papyrus, a pained expression marring her features. She isn't unconscious but she doesn't seem particularly aware of her surroundings either, and just lays in a limp heap wherever she happens to get pulled to, the edges of her form flickering occasionally.

Just as Peridot flickers, Gongenzaka isn't entirely doing the best either. He was sitting with her through the entire STAB STAB STAB after all, urging her on until his own voice faded under strain. It might not be his body, but it was certainly his own soul still exposed to the iron, the Mother, and so on.

His strain and injury differs of course- he wasn't the one personally handling iron at the end of the day. But as weariness takes hold he has to remind himself that getting to his body is important as well. Dimly he can hear something about striking the Mother as she dies- and the screams echo painfully in his mind. And...he supposes there must be danger around them, then..? He...

"Peridot," he says quietly, uncertain of if she will even hear him. "I, the man Gongenzaka, feel I may need to stay with you until the chaos quiets a little more..."

He sort of wishes he could just sleep honestly. But he's pretty sure that would be as unwise as trying to track his body during an all out attack.

Wail on it.

Well. Carly can certainly deliver. Drawing her bow, she aims at what she can pretty well guess is the Mother's body, forming an arrow of that persisting burning flame. She draws, and she fires- landing the shots best she can toward where the screaming had been and toward what few details of machine she can tell apart, Carly's own face marred by rage and exhaustion both.

It takes her energy to burn this fire after all.

Eventually she starts running out of steam however- finally collapsing to the ground and. "A-AAAHCK-!"

Annnnd she's discovered the broken leg.

Edited 2018-11-12 13:52 (UTC)

He'll get to that.

For now, Yuusei, having retrieved Steven's gem by this point, bounds through what remains of the Mother's mist around her fallen chassis, spotting where Syrlia's been set on the ground out of her grasp. He doesn't want to waste time dawdling and telling Steven things he doesn't know, though for a moment he does wonder if Steven will be alright so close to the Mother. Either way, he returns his gem after setting him by Syr, murmuring a brief "You're doing great," before racing off again.

He undoubtedly passed Carly on his way to Syr, and for that he feels kind of bad, hoping she didn't see him and wonder why he didn't stop or acknowledge her. Soon, though, he's at her side, kneeling to examine her legs.

"...this is going to hurt," he tells her, as if she wasn't already in pain and wouldn't continue to be regardless of whatever he does next.

Which, he decides to lift her off the ground, starting his arm under her good leg first before taking the other. He tries to be gentle, but how gentle can one really be with a broken leg like this? Either way, he heads back toward the tuck shop where he hopes Herbert is still waiting, his pace slower than it was with Steven on account of Carly's limb.

He's maybe a little impersonal at first; there's no attempt at conversation or even a friendlier gesture (though he can't do much right now), but truthfully he feels there will be a time for that, after the Mother of Invention and after Polaris.

Everyone will be busy with destroying the remains of the Mother a while and generally getting themselves together. After several minutes pass, however, they will be met without another violent shake in the station - just in time for a huge beam of light to tear out a portion of the ceiling right out, at the far side of the room. Some debris fall, but the blast moves at an upwards trajectory, knocking most of the remains to some unseen place outside.

The rip in the ceiling exposes a pure blue sky, followed by the arrival of something that looks like an airship hovering into view. There is a gate at the ship's bottom, hanging open, with a few different people hanging off of it like the immediate plant was to dismount. There is some hesitation, though, when they see that the Mother is torn open like a tin can and lying dead on the ground.

"You finished her without me?" an unfamiliar voice calls. It appears to be a fiery fae with blazing hair and charcoal skin, with golden marks inscribed all over her body. She laughs, grimly. "Crying shame."

To anyone who has felt her magical touch, it seems obvious that this new arrival is Gild, as she stands on the airship platform, her golden bow at the ready. She looks like she's taken a fair number of wounds, black holes against her skin. Alongside her is Scald and a white furred fox, who raises a paw to wave.

"Samyaza!" Kerubi calls out. "You survived, then?" Then she looks to the others. "No escape plan needed, I see." Meanwhile, Scald is quietly scouting the area, most likely looking for his sister.

Edited 2018-11-12 18:44 (UTC)

It's around this point that Rita finally decides to get off Lambert's back, jumping down and landing with a wince as her broken wing flops about behind her.

"I was starting to think you'd never show up," she calls back, drawing closer to the airship to get a better look at the fiery woman. "So you're the Gilded Mark. Thanks for the help."

She speaks casually, but her gaze soon drifts to Ignatius, curious about how he's going to handle this reunion.

With the adrenaline of the fight wearing off, Lambert can’t maintain the dragon form much longer anyway. With Rita off him, he’ll shift back into being a man, of a particularly worn, bruised-looking one.

While the new arrivals have his attention, he’ll also glance to Syrlya to see how he’s holding up. He saw someone take Steven over there, but with the general cathartic feeling of letting all that fire loose...

“Maybe you shouldn’t be greeting a fae with an iron weapon,” he’ll murmur quietly as he follows after Rita.

Misunderstandings can happen, and all that. He’ll draw up beside her and hold out a hand for the knife, evidently prepared to take it back.

The Gilded Mark leaps from the ceiling entrance, hitting the floor gracefully - through she stumbles a bit after landing, as if still whoozy and exhausted. She holds one arm around her side, like she's clasping a wound. As she moves closer, they'll be able to see some blackened veins lifted against her charcoal skin.

She comes forward, glancing at Rita and seeming to recognize something about the way she feels, before looking forward in search of something else. She doesn't know for sure how all of this played out, but she feels... up ahead...

Oh.

Ignatius turns around to the sound, having been blasting the last bits of the Mother's chassis. He's caught off guard when he sees her, his eyes going wide. He immediately wants to go somewhere else.

"Did you..." Gild begins, only half processing the thought before looking utterly confused. "What...? Ignatius...?" She knows it's him. The golden mark on his face tells her as much. She takes a step towards him, reaching out a hand uncertainly, and Ignatius takes a step back. In a rash decision, Ignatius poofs himself into white flames, zipping off somewhere else that Gild isn't looking at him.

"Hey! Don't you dare, you-" Gild shouts after him, starting to run and then noting that he's already gone. He stops near Rita, looking at her with a flash of anger and confusion. "What happened to him?"

Then, before she even waits for an answer, she shouts after Ignatius again.

"Get back here, Ignatius! Don't act like a child!"

Rita hands the knife back to Lambert, then watches, eyes wide with bewilderment, as Ignatius just takes off as soon as he's faced with Gild. She finds herself freezing up for a moment as Gild turns to her with that question... then sighs.

She might as well try to fill her in. Not just Gild's sake, either... There are a lot of people here who didn't see what happened to Ignatius and might appreciate an explanation.

"It's complicated," Rita begins, her arms folded. "The short of it is... the Mother of Invention poisoned him with ice magic. One of our people tried to cure him by calling on Creation, and... the result was some kind of synthesis. Instead of purging the ice from his body, it fused it with his domain... or something like that."

It's a phenomenon Rita would love to study, given the chance, but there hasn't exactly been time to figure out even the basics of what happened back there.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject