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A light grows in the darkness. Is it the afterlife, or a return to purpose and duty? Flint doesn't know for sure, but he moves forward towards it, hoping for the best...
Waking up from his near-death experience, Flint sees the radiant face of Belmarniss above him, framed in the roiling plasma of the Burning Mother overhead. He pulls her tenderly into an embrace, saying softly in her ear, "I feared that Iomedae and Sarenrae might not share the same paradise, but they must, as you are here with me..."
Her attack catches him mid-flight, tearing into his legs...She grabs him, tears him away, and flings him across the room
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From his spot crumpled over by the wall, Ordyt gives Bel a weak little wave of acknowledgement. "Yaaaay."
Acutely aware of his many dozens of aches and pains, the oread slowly pulls himself up into a sitting position and starts checking comm channels for the Breath of Embers. "Ordyt to Breath of Embers, come in. Dragon...dragon is neutralized. Powering down the Resonator," As he speaks, he slowly pulls the det-packs from his satchel one at a time, followed by the detonator. "One way or another. Come in Embers, what's your status?"
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A light grows in the darkness. Is it the afterlife, or a return to purpose and duty? Flint doesn't know for sure, but he moves forward towards it, hoping for the best...
Waking up from his near-death experience, Flint sees the radiant face of Belmarniss above him, framed in the roiling plasma of the Burning Mother overhead. He pulls her tenderly into an embrace, saying softly in her ear, "I feared that Iomedae and Sarenrae might not share the same paradise, but they must, as you are here with me..."
Belmarniss gives something halfway between a chuckle and a sigh before kissing Flint full on the mouth.
"You're alive, you ridiculous poet! WE'RE alive! We won!"
Sammad lets out a war-whoop as he sees the dragon fall, then hurries over to Ordyt. "Well, that was reckless yet spectacular. I say you've earned a long rest, friend...but only after we make it out of this horrid place." He reaches into his jacket and draws forth a healing serum, swiftly injecting Ordyt in between crumpled plates of armor, then sits down and leans over to rest his head on a broad, stony shoulder.
As the injector heals him Ordyt sighs as one of his pains dissipates, leaving only several dozen to go. Patting Sammad on the back in comradely commiseration, Ordyt hands him one of the demo charges. "Resonator, exfil, and take stock of how the battle down below is doing. Any word from our allies?"
Relaxing languidly into the kiss, Flint's eyes suddenly fly wide open as he hears Ordyt speak and Belmarniss makes her proclamation of victory.
What little of his body that is not already burned turns red with embarrassment, and he replies softly, "To be continued..."
Struggling to his feet, he intones, "For victory! For the heart! We are victorious!" As the rush of urgency returns to him, Flint assesses the situation.
Using another serum on himself , Flint calls out, "Status report. Where are we on disabling the Resonator? Should we expect more incoming?" as he pulls his sidearm and moves to cover an entrance.
Ordyt tunes into the comms link back to the Breath of Embers, but hears nothing but crackling static. Without that intermediary, you don't have a clear link to the battle in progress at the base of the tower and within the lower floors. Looking out the balcony windows, distant explosions and the movements of groups behind cover shows that some of the fighting has spilled back out into the city. Whether that means the Anassanoi rebels are being beaten back or are simply fighting on multiple fronts is unclear. It certainly doesn't look one-sided, either way.
Looking over at the Psychic Resonator, you can tell the device remains completely intact. It seems Nysteryx was studiously avoiding any attacks that would damage it. As Mari recognized earlier, it's currently primed to trigger another psychic impulse within the bounds of Khalannal, which it will then capture and amplify into another wave directed out of the sun. Damaging the monolith would likely cause the already amplified psychic potential to go wild, but sufficient magical or technological skill may be able to defuse the existing pent up energy and disable the Resonator. This looks like a complex operation that would likely take at least 10 minutes to accomplish.
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”Right, let’s get to this,” says Flint, moving over to the resonator and trying to help with its mystic controls.
"Right there with you, Captain. Now that I have a chance to properly look at it, the psionic channels are powerful but delicate--if we push at it like this..."
As he works, Flint says, ”Sammad, do you think the Commander’s computer setup a level below us might allow you to assess the tactical situation? Any early warning of incoming foes—whether from above or from the levels below—could be critical to our success.”
Mari, still groggy from her brush with death, lends Bel a hand with the damned machine.
At a touch to an otherwise unmarked section of the Resonator, a series of ridges rise up at ground level along the surface of the structure. As an interface, it's certainly unusual, mixing more magic than machinery in its makeup. With careful adjustments, you ease down the gathered psychic energy, dissipating it in a broad spread away from Khalannal. Then, once the device is stable, Ordyt takes the lead in shutting it down. As you turn it off, a series of smooth violet rods slide out of the structure and fall to the floor around it. While many are warped and damaged beyond repair, you're able to recover one that appears sufficiently intact. It vibrates with psychic noise, seemingly functioning as a violet phrenic scrambler.
When the Resonator turns off, those of you with telepathy feel a sense of airy lightness as the device is no longer resonating off your emotional state.
Flint remembers from before that Commander Gorchak's computer below had a live tactical feed, with comms geopositioning, video streams, and various connections to the Legion squads.
Assuming Sammad takes care of the tactical interface, Flint finishes helping with the resonator and goes over to inspect the body of the dragon. While he is not skilled in skinning creatures, he wonders what might be useful from the carcass.
Sammad sighs as he rises, giving Ordyt a good-natured pat on one shoulder. He gives Flint a brisk nod, moving to the elevator. "Whatever I can do, Captain - I'll certainly be no help with that contraption."
He enters the elevator, keys in the appropriate floor, then waits out the ride, letting out a deep, long-held breath of steaming air. He chuckles, then says the empty air, "All thanks to the Fertile Flame. Continue to light our way, Goddess."
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"I...didn't realize the weight my mind was feeling from this thing until we turned it off!" Belmarniss comments.
She picks up the rod and winces a bit when she touches it.
"Ugh...feels like microphone feedback, but psychic instead of auditory," she comments. "This thing can block limited telepathy and makes full telepathy scrambled unless you share a language with who you're communicating with...AND it can weaken the emotional and mental defenses of someone you're casting a spell like my school emblem at. I...could probably get some good use out of this. If the anassanoi give us permission to keep it, naturally. Speaking of which, we've still got a battle to finish."
With that, she follows Flint over to Nysteryx's body.
"It makes me wonder...what could the Legion have possibly offered her that would have persuaded her to fight at their side...A dragon's hoard is usually so great that they don't have to hire themselves out as mere mercenaries..." she wonders aloud.
Slipping his hand gently into hers, Flint looks down and says, "True enough. Would it be crass to see if any portion of the dragon's body could be used to craft items that could be of use to us?" He looks at the body, seeing if any scales or other items of interest have fallen from it.
"I...Captain I know the stories are full of dragon fang swords and scale shields and whatnot, but...it--she was a thinking, sentient being. Trying to carve up her corpse to make something useful feels wrong somehow."
”Fair enough, Ordyt,” responds Flint. ”Sammad, have you been able to get a message through?” he says into the comms, ”What does the tactical situation look like?”
Nysteryx continues to glow for several minutes before slowly fading enough that you can inspect her without shielding your eyes. Though some unscrupulous collectors might find a solar dragon's body parts to be a valuable novelty, the era of dragon-tooth blades and scale armor is long over. Flint is also fairly confident that the dragon's augmentations are unsalvagable. However, he does find a small-ish pouch affixed to the back of her left claw.
Inside the pouch, you find four strange black disks, as well as a copper-plated access card similar to that carried by Commander Gorchak.
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Downstairs Sammad checks the current tactical situation on Commander Gorchak's terminal. At first, it's difficult to make sense of the barrage of uncoordinated information, but he makes some broad conclusions after a couple minutes of navigating the various screens. It seems the occupying Legion forces have fallen back into an emergency command structure after losing contact with their Commander. This leaves them with individual cells operating largely independently, which should put them at a significant disadvantage against the Anassanoi. However, it seems the Anassanoi rebels, not used to the kind of persistent defense the Legion has mounted, have been pushed back despite this. Rebels are actively being isolated, outmaneuvered, and incapacitated.
As Sammad watches however, he sees a sudden shift in the battle. A surge of Legion forces emerges from the Spire... but rather than moving to reinforce the other cells, they appear to be fleeing. Following on their heels comes a massive wave of silver fluid. The silver tide spirals and churns, rearranging itself into spines and blades as it chases after the Legion troops. Behind it emerge at first dozens but quickly hundreds of Anassanoi. Though clearly weary, these Anassanoi clutch the weapons of their fallen captors and immediately put them to use against the Legion troops the silver wave missed. It looks like the Anassanoi prisoners have been freed!
It takes no more than a few minutes for this shift in the battle's momentum to ripple through the Legion's remaining forces. Some stay to fight, but others make a fighting retreat, heading north.
All the different tactical views make it difficult to locate it, but Sammad does eventually spot the Breath of Embers. Or at least... what's left of it. The burning remains of the starship are crumpled up against a half-collapsed structure to the south of the Spire.
Pulling out the access card and the little disks and stowing them, Flint hears the news on the Breath of Embers.
”Quick—find us transportation if you can, Sammad! With the access cards we can hopefully commandeer a vehicle to get us to the Breath of Embers quickly.”
With the front of the battle moving north, you reckon you can make it fairly swiftly to the site of the crashed Breath of Embers on foot, probably within 15 minutes. Likely just descending down the Spire will take half that time.
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”Belmarniss, Mari, is there any way we can rig the resonator to be inoperable for a time or backfire if someone sneaks up here and tries to start using it to psychically batter people again? Or is it just better if we reduce it to slag now that it is powered down?” asks Flint, not wanting to leav a powerful weapon behind for the enemy to reclaim.
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Belmarniss frowns.
"Something like this is going to take a lot of work to set back up, so every moment we spend working on that is a moment our friends get closer to death. The Legion is in retreat, I don't think they're going to have the time or technical and mystical skill to reactivate it that quickly. We need to GO!"
Bel is fairly confident that this particular piece of Legion tech won't be functional without the containment rods (the phrenic scrambler) that she removed from it. Unless someone arrives with a full set of new rods and installs them, no one will find it easy to restart the Resonator. Of course, destroying the device would be even more foolproof.
Accepting Belmarnis’ assessment of the resonator, Flint says, ”Right, let’s go, fastest available route,”. Moving with rugged determination, he forces his tired and badly hurt body to keep going in the hopes of saving more of his friends.
Agreeing to prioritize the Breath of Embers and its passengers, you make your way down successive sets of elevators to where you entered the Spire, then continue further down through floors that get progressively more damaged as you go. By the time you emerge on the ground floor, the fighting has well and truly moved away from the Spire and you have a clear run across the pockmarked terrain to the urban blocks where you saw the crash.
Upon arriving, you see the wreckage of the Breath is still smoking. Those of you with engineering experience can see the patterns of anti-air explosives traced across its hull and see where one round breached the engines. Crashing into the building likely did as much damage as that initial explosion. It doesn't look like the ship is recoverable. Worse, it's so twisted that it seems like it'll be extremely difficult to get inside to check for survivors.
Just as you're beginning to despair, you hear a voice call out from atop a three-story building nearby that still stands "Flint! Belmarniss!"
A battered, dusty, but otherwise uninjured Taeress peeks out from the building's roof, an unconscious ysoki on her back. "I think you did it! Sorry about the ship. Nib... Well, we can explain."
Breathing a deep sigh of relief, Flint calls up, “A pleasure to see the two of you alive. Do you have someplace defensible up there, or do you want to come down here?”
"I'm so glad you're alright--hold still, what injuries does Nib have?" Ordyt picks his way across the rubble towards the pair. "Forget about the ship, we stole it from the Legion and we can steal another."
Taeress laughs, relieved "Coming down there will suit us just fine."
It takes her a minute but she manages to descend through the interior of the building and join you next to the remains of the Breath. "While we were, well, crashing, Nib got hit by a piece of the console that ripped free. Right in the head. I was so worried..." She purses her lips as she looks over her shoulder at the ysoki. "Of course, once we were down and she woke back up, she was sharp as ever." She shakes her head "Now she's sleeping. Through all this. Would you believe it?"
Indeed, you notice that while Nib seems badly bruised up and might have a broken nose, she's not as badly injured as you might expect someone who was in a crashing starship to be.
While you talk with Taeress, Bel starts picking her way through the wreckage. It's not long before she's stymied by twisted plates of metal and torn up conduits blocking the way to the center of the bridge. It looks like it'll take a long time to cut away or peel back enough of the damaged structure to get through. Taeress calls out "Please be careful. The reactor core might be buried in the ground right now, but the ship isn't stable. Something could collapse on you."
Grunting in tired acknowledgment at Taeress' warning, Ordyt takes a few quick steps and puts a hand on Bel's shoulder. "I'm sorry about Popoko and the ship, but I can't let you go in there in your state. Not for a ship's computer. Come Starknight, our duty is to the living."
Flint passes over one of his few remaining med serums. ”This should help,” he says, concerned about the wounded Nib.
”Ordyt’s right, Belmarniss. Whatever state Popoko is in right now, rushing in and getting ourselves killed will not help matters. Once we have recovery equipment available, let us carefully retrieve what we can,” adds Flint.
”In the mean time, we need to get somewhere relatively safe and mend our wounds for a few minutes while we follow the progress of the battle. Can anyone contact any of the Protectors?,” he asks.
Sammad takes a healing serum from his pocket and offers it to Taeress. "I don't know if she'd want to do this while she's still sleeping, or wait until she wakes...so I'll leave it with you, since you know her best. Either way, it looks like it would do her some good."
As Bel makes her way towards the wreckage of the Breath, Sammad sighs deeply. "So much for my damned salvage rights...that ship could've made my career. Catapulted me up the Cooperative's ranks...But I suppose if she had to be lost, this was a good fight to lose her in." The smallest trace of a smile appears on his face as he mumbles those last words.
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Belmarniss only puts up a token struggle against Ordyt's grip and her head sinks. She sobs a bit.
"It was like an annoying but delightful little kid. The kind you don't wanna see get hurt, even if it's just a hologram," she chokes out. But Ordyt and Flint are right. This was a war, and casualties were expected. It didn't stop them from hurting, even if they were just a computer interface.
Hearing Sammad's half-hearted complaint breaks her sadness for a moment and she chuckles. "Well, considering you may have just opened an entirely new market for the Cooperative here in Kahlannal, I think you'll still get that promotion..."
Sammad chuckles in response to Bel's joke. "Well first we'll need to figure out a way back to the Archipelago. But before that: checking in on our pet resistance movement. We did them a solid, taking out most of the Legion's higher-ups here, but we should see what else we can do for them now."
He casts a long look over his battered and exhausted companions. "As long as it isn't more fighting...I think I'm the only one who could take another round at this point!" He punctuates that last statement with a toothy grin.
Taeress gladly takes a med serum from Flint and Sammad, promising to have Nib drink it after she next wakes. As for contact with the Protectors, Taeress shakes her head "The comm link... we lost contact with the Protectors even before the Breath went down. One of them we had a visual on. They were taken out of the sky by that dragon. And now, well, with the Breath like this I don't think we'll be getting in contact with them again easily." She ponders for a moment before adding "Though if you dealt with the Resonator, maybe the Anassanoi's natural telepathy is back to normal and they'll be able to reach out to us. Based on what we learned from them while you were doing all your sabotage missions, it seemed like they had that power before."
She hefts Nib into a little more comfortable position on her back "But getting somewhere safe sounds good. Safe enough to rest for a little. The fighting looks like it's moved away from us, so we could try the ground floor here. They had some couches." She indicates a nearby building that is surprisingly still quite intact.
"As much as I would like to disagree with you, Sammad, you assessment of my injuries is accurate. I need rest, and I would be more of a liability than an asset in the upcoming battles without it," says Flint glumly.
"Maybe we can get an uplink to that commander's computer on the floor below the top of the spire and do some monitoring from here while some of us sleep and regain our strength," he suggests.
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Unfortunately, having not set any connection to the commander's computer up earlier, except for the one to the Breath, you don't have any easy way to access it now. However, as you're in a fragile state you set to rest first.
Following Taeress, you find a lounge within the ground floor of the nearby building. At one point it may have been some kind of meeting place - perhaps something like a coffee shop - but it has long since been scraped for any useful resources. Its long, constantly vibrating couches on the other hand are still intact and serve as a surprisingly comfortable place to rest.
Exhausted as you are, it doesn't take long to fall asleep, and when you do its into a particularly deep sleep. You subconsciously unpack the trials and tribulations of the long day that's now behind you, and by the time you wake you feel invigorated.