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[Nikitian]

((Here it comes. Well, can there ever be an IC explanation for OOCly deciding not to waste time for the sake of everyone's enjoyment, to avoid the protracted boringness? (Especially after M17?)

This isn't an OOC remark in IC defense (that'd be extremely bad), it's just me remembering things and wondering how other mission commanders would ICly rationalise such OOC decision. I know how Maurice did, but I'll keep it stowed until it's his place to speak. ))

[AoshimaMichio]

"There was no particular reason to go in so fast. In fact, I was going to perform simple test specifically to ensure the anomaly was in fact not a trap, but was prevented from doing that. The approach was way to hasty in my opinion."

((Your doom!))

[Radio Controlled]

"Ok then, Steve, would you kindly scan the hangar and see if there's any unwanted visitors? If yes, shock them unconscious so we can throw them out. Then, once the only people in here are the M21 people, Milno and myself, shut the hangar doors, tight. Also warn the people that if they come within a dozen meters of the hangar or the hangar doors, or if there's interference with the trial in another way, they get shocked unconscious. Be sure to do so as needed."

I deactivate my camo.
"HISSSSSSS"
I then begin typing on my wristpad, but have to make a lot of corrections, so it takes a bit.
((Miya's out of line here. again. and I IRL am in a rush.  RC, you're out of line too. why is Miya taking extra precautions against specifically Lyra without your meta-knowlege of her presence. Do you really need me to make my actions via PM because you can't exercise self-control?))

((I kind of assumed that Lyra getting killed due to being spaced and getting retrieved would be pretty noticeable. I mean, how else would they have scooped her corpse out of space?

Either way, if pw says Lyra could conceivably get thrown into space, die, get picked up, get resurrected, and sneak back into the hangar without anyone noticing anything, then I will concede the point and just let her stay. Even though Miya has cameyes that should pick her up easily, I'd rather we can just get this moving again.))

[Nikitian]

"There was no particular reason to go in so fast. In fact, I was going to perform simple test specifically to ensure the anomaly was in fact not a trap, but was prevented from doing that. The approach was way to hasty in my opinion."

((Your doom!))

((Hey, no fair! They didn't allow anyone else to speak yet! I'm keeping my mouth shut, after all!
 
Also, fun thing, I just understood that Maurice is more and more heavily leaning against the fourth wall as a result of his scientific research. Completely ICly, that is. Hmmm, this might even be referenced in his defense.

Oh, and I would really, really laugh if the main charge against Maurice would be incompetence in rashness of entering the anomaly. Please, do better than that, guys.))

[Lenglon]

PFP:((His cameyes need to be in a nonstandard vision mode for that. and PW simply had her thawing take slightly longer so she wasnt doublekilled. ))

[Radio Controlled]

((The avatar has six cameyes, of which at least two should be cycling through vision modes if the old standing action still counts. Also, if she had to thaw for longer suddenly (even though you stated she was thawed in time initially) she couldn't have sneaked into the hangar the first time. But whatever, if pw is ok with all of this and he states she remains undetected somehow then whatever, I just wanna get moving again.))

[Lenglon]

Edit: redacted hostile statement to RC

[AoshimaMichio]

((I would like to direct you both to OOC thread.))

[Nikitian]

((Aww, you're no fun, Ao. We've almost resurrected the days of no OOC thread here!
*Nikitian shakes his cane at the kids on the lawn* ))

[Pancaek]

((Well, this got out of hand pretty fast. What's the OOC problem this time?))

[Lenglon]

((Well, this got out of hand pretty fast. What's the OOC problem this time?))

((RC is going on yet another power trip))

[Radio Controlled]

((Ok then. If you really want to see things be retconned so you can have your way, I'll remove it. I won't even ask pw for a decision on the matter, just to get this back on track again.))

[Lenglon]

((Ok then. If you really want to see things be retconned so you can have your way, I'll remove it. I won't even ask pw for a decision on the matter, just to get this back on track again.))

((Thank you. editing out my past posts.))

[swordsmith04]

"Now then, where were we?

... Ah, right. That was a clear explanation Hasala, thank you. However, there's just one thing I'm not entirely clear about. Am I understanding it correctly that, after some initial light testing, you were all ordered to go in simultaneously, and only discovered the way out was blocked once everyone was in already? Also, was your mission under any sort of time pressure at that moment?

Other than that, you can continue."

..."We were ordered into the anomaly all at once without significant testing of the barrier, yes. As for time pressure; none at all. Even less so than a normal mission, in fact, given that we were requisitioned several weeks' worth of food each prior to mission start." Hasala pauses momentarily.

"Picking up where I left off, I was given permission to continue scouting around the edge of the anomaly. Over comms I heard Pancaek say he was lifting one of the students to the rest of the team's position via his mass manipulation amplifier, though from comms and shared Mad Hatter feeds I could tell that this attempt did not work, the body resisting enough force to lift a much heavier animal than a human. Shortly after that, I encountered several more unmoving people behind Building 8, the first building I came close to while moving around the edge of the anomaly. They looked like they were trying to climb through a window, and although they themselves were unaffected by the elements, the room through the open window was heavily damaged. Dr. Sanctor was flying over the campus at the time, and he also spotted several unmoving people, scattered around, though the vast majority of those frozen were in the large group we'd seen upon entering the anomaly.

I tossed a few bolts through the window, but nothing out of the ordinary occurred, and being neither willing nor able to get any closer than 5 to 7 meters to the unmoving people per Dr. Sanctor's order, I went around the building and attempted to enter it through the front door. It was around this time that Morul used his voidsuit artifact. When he returned, he said that there were glowing bubbles in the normally-empty void.

The front door of the building was barricaded from the inside, and as I was getting ready to force entry, I noticed a head sticking out around the corner of the building - it was one of the "unmoving" people I'd seen climbing through the window. They'd all gone around the building in the opposite direction from me while I wasn't watching them. They continued to remain stationary once I'd noticed them again. I reported this to Dr. Sanctor immediately and attempted to talk to the students in a non-aggressive matter, but they did not respond. Dr. Sanctor ordered squad one - his squad, and the one I was in - to my position, while squad two, Pancaek's, to investigate a building in the opposite direction. He also refused Morul's request to re-enter the void and attempt to interact with one of the aforementioned bubbles. It was around this time that the bodies began experiencing injuries, like legs being rotated 180 degrees in their sockets. The injuries became more numerous and severe as time passed.

Maurice ordered us into the building, via the rooftop. Since the 'puppets', as I started calling them, had moved, I knew that the window from before was now accessible, so I alerted Maurice to what I intended to do and went back around the building again, entering from there. No one realized it at the time, but that meant that no one was watching the puppets again, the condition for their first movement. I was alerted over the comms that puppets had started encroaching upon the rest of my squad on the rooftop while they weren't looking, and turned around in time to see the same few puppets from before climbing through the window again, trapping me inside the building.

From this point I paid little attention to the rest of the mission team. I was aware that the other squad were similarly entrapped in their building, and that Dr. Sanctor had ordered the rest of our squad, still on the roof, to fly away and toward the building in the center of the anomaly, leaving me behind, so I was left to make my own way out. Like the building's front door, that room's door was barricaded, but from my side, so I shoved it out of the way and backed into the hallway after checking that the immediate vicinity was clear of thermal signatures, of which there were roughly two dozen in the building. They had all moved closer toward my position than the first time I had checked, as well. As I wasn't sure how quickly they could move and could only keep an eye on one direction at a time, I chose to spend as little time in the hallway as possible, going for the internal room across the hallway from where I'd entered, rather than another external room. I closed and barricaded the door, but the dormitory's rooms were too small to ensure I was always outside the safety distance. I managed to avoid coming too close to any thermal signatures thanks to my CamEyes, though they seemed to be able to sense my presence and were getting closer the more time I spent in the building. I used my generator-powered laser rifle to cut through walls and ceilings, eventually making it out of the building safely. After that, I flew over to the building the rest of my team had entered - they'd blown a hole in the side of it and were moving toward the room containing the exact centre of the dome. By the time I'd arrived, the entrance they'd used was blocked by what was probably most of the puppets in the anomaly, stacked into a human pyramid so as to read the second floor, where the squad was, so I hovered in the air outside, watching them. While I did so, this private conversation occurred via wristpad."
Hasala taps on his wristpad for a few seconds, then every other wristpad in the room beeps to indicate a new message.

Spoiler: Copied from M21 thread (click to show/hide)

Oh, and one more thing... While you are at it, I want you to strafe that pile of people with your laser. Remember that they don't "die" even with heads lacking, but probably can be inconvenienced by dismemberment and/or lack of limbs. If doing it while observing them doesn't work, consider closing eyes or using a Mad Hatter snapshot instead of video feed. The "foundation" of the pile has nowhere to go, anyway.
Spare them not; this an order. I take full responsibility.

Is that really necessary? They won't be going anywhere as long as I continue watching them.

Yes. I might need your eyes elsewhere, and so far it appears that even momentary decrease in observation leads to them moving out of sight. And their high concentration means that if this works - of which I doubt - this single action might hamper them enough. We need to know if it would work at all, if anything.
I would not order to cut someone up out of simple scientific curiosity. But in this particular case it might give us the tactical advantage we sorely need, ensure Team I survival if not whole mission success. This is a lawful order to take action against effectively enemy combatants as part of military operation; responsibility is all mine.

"After the last message, I noticed that the puppets had begun moving perceptibly, albeit only slightly, so I obeyed the order..." Hasala's tone, dry and formal for the length of the recounting up to this point, turns slightly bitter for a second.

"The laser severed the puppets into multiple pieces, though they did not fall apart while I was watching them. While we had been... arguing, squad one had reached the centre of the anomaly. Dr. Sanctor gave another round of cursory orders; I recall him declaring something 'interesting', but not ordering anyone else to investigate whatever he thought so, and then while I was looking away briefly to test the effects of being cut in two by the laser on the puppets, something was triggered. I have no idea what they did, because when I looked back at the building a whole host of things were happening. The temperature had lowered to near absolute zero in some spots, and risen to hotter than the core of a star in others, and these spots were swirling around one another. There was some sort of radiation, but my CamEyes couldn't process it, simply spitting out errors. Air was being sucked into the building. All of that was according to my CamEyes; nothing at all appeared to be happening, according to regular vision. I also lost comms and Mad Hatter feeds with the rest of squad one.

As Pancaek had gotten too close to one of the puppets and become one of them, at some point, this meant that the Hephaestus-mission command chain Dr. Sanctor had set up - himself on squad one with Morul as lieutenant, Pancaek in charge of squad two - was gone, I took command, per the general forces chain of command. I stayed in place over squad one's building, while squad two, who had gotten through to the roof of their own building, were told to head towards the building with the banner hanging from it, checking out the spot where the large group of puppets had gathered previously. The whirlwind of anomalous behaviour was only in existence for a minute or so, though. After that, a black sphere expanded from the centre of it, pushing furniture, debris, et cetera outward, though none of it seemed to be affected by gravity, and everything it touched was consumed by black flame. After growing larger than the building that had been there, it collapsed inwards again, forming a black figure coated in white flames. The black figure - and the puppets, despite being in my field of view - all began moving toward the courtyard where we'd initially seen them, at this point. Squad one, bar Morul, also re-appeared in the ruins of the building. The puppets were forming concentric circles and dancing around the centre. The centre of their circle and the area around the black figure had the same anomalous effects visible only by CamEye around them, the black figure in particular. Some of the team fired their weapons at the dancing puppets, trying to disrupt their ritual, while Maurice... did something to gain the figure, whom he claimed was Morul,'s attention. At any rate, it stopped walking toward the circles and turned to look at him, then the area where he'd been standing moments before rocketing off erratically, the entire building and an expanding cone of area behind it, turned solid black. Then it just blew away like specks of dust in the wind. The attack also destroyed a section of the dome, freeing us... though Bartolomew had still been buried in the rubble that was blown away.

Ulrich attempted to use an amplifier on the black figure, but it did something to resist him. Some sort of substance was pulled out of him and fell to the ground, and he was momentarily unconscious. I retrieved the substance after he abandoned it, and it was... well, you could see that it was there, though I couldn't describe it to you now. Incomprehensible. It had a physical presence, at least insofar as I could pick it up in an forcefield artifact container. We destroyed it with the Origin tech later on, to be safe. Pancaek managed to regain control of himself around the time Dr. Sanctor decided to create a makeshift nuke from his suit's reactor and several forcefield containers, and after that we fled from the anomaly. Steve overloaded the manipulators aboard the ARM warship in orbit and put it on a collision course for the dome; the shuttle got us far enough that we weren't injured in the blast, though it was totaled from crash-landing. When that failed, he ordered us to destroy all Origin technology via QEC, then apologized to us, like there was nothing more we could do. A bit more questioning revealed that there was another ship on the planet close enough that we could steal it and potentially escape in time. We removed our amplifiers and destroyed our Origin technology, got to the ship, blew a hole in the side and sealed ourselves in with Sticky Goop, though we didn't manage to send the signal in time to prevent the Lurker in the Angles from infecting other Origin technology on the planet. That's... everything, I think."

Hasala clears his throat and wishes he had brought a bottle of water with him.

[Nikitian]

Maurice calmly smokes throughout both parts of Hasala's statement and Ulrich's interjection. The beeping message on the wrist brings some of his attention, but recognising its content at a glance, he looks away and takes another pull at the pipe.