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For over two hours the spells have been flying outside, wearing down the wards on the arboretum. Some attempts were made to dispel the scrying windows, but those who made the attempt were soon the focus of magical attacks and forced to retreat. Yoshitsune eventually counseled to let the wards fail and to let the attack come. Buy what time could be bought through counterspells, get the council into the hall under guard, and defend the tree at all costs. He's turned out in full regalia, Oni mask strapped to his face, daisho at his side. While everyone else runs about making last minute preparations, he's painting a haiku and sipping tea.
Balm is present with her familiar, seated in her wheelchair, only now she has an AK-47 in her hands, a kevlar vest on her body, and several spare magazines in her lap.
Epiphanius bowed out. Not because he wasn't willing to go down with the ship, but because he was ordered to safeguard the Archives, and has taken a contingent of mages to go and see to that.
Word got out, and some people were able to portal in to reinforce the situation. Still others are stuck outside, unable to approach for fear of getting picked off along the way. One person tried-- Charleville --and had to be portaled back out again after being knocked unconscious. Even the Assembly has mustered its Minutemen to respond, it seems.
The ghosts of the Lenape stand in front of the tree, brandishing war clubs, spears, and tomahawks. They're ready for war, clearly.
Finally, after hours of wearing down and probing effects-- finally --a spell passes through the wards and slams into the perfected glass overhead, causing a massive series of cracks to form in the material. It's at this point that Yoshitsune sets his tea down, puts what may be his last poem aside, and rises to his feet to draw his weapons.
"Fight to the end. Then be like them and keep fighting." Yoshitsune glances back at the ghosts, then looks up at the fracturing glass overhead. "And in any case, die well."
Fox came up out of the Astral and into a naked body, which, while it isn't objectionable to the Orphans of Proteus in general, is not the easiest thing to armor. So, before Liezel casts Aegis, she goes digging through the backpack she carries everywhere, and comes up with a shirt that reads some ridiculous thing with six fonts about how the owner of this shirt has a wife with yellow eyes who was born in May and has a sweet nature but a dislike for stupid people and mess with me and they'll never find your body and yes she bought me this shirt.
So basically, it's Vasha's.
Speaking of the Guardian, when he arrives to cast spells and help people out before going off to wherever Guardians go when their players are running the scene and thus he can't stay, Fox murmurs something to him in Russian, quiet as can be, before laying a kiss on him that lasts possibly a little longer than propriety calls for. Your possibly last kiss should count, after all. She smacks him on the ass and sends him off to do his thing, while she...
... growls. And yells. And burns a pigeon feather. And stomps in a circle, and ... you know, just, is a Thyrsus, casting ritually. Don't ask too many questions. And especially don't ask too many questions about why, through the door that she asks someone to open, suddenly... there are... pigeons? Not one, not two, not three, but sixty-four pigeons, over whom Fox stands and warbles like a generalissimo giving orders to the First Winged Battalion, giving directions. You don't have to command them via magic when you can just talk to them. It's possible that Fox is giving the same sort of talk to the pigeons that Yoshitsune is giving to the Awakened.
That's likely, actually.
She shifts the heavy pistol that Liezel gave her into her right hand, and rests a brief touch on her wrist. "Ready, Elizabeth?"
"Yes, Sir."
Liezel is clothed as ever she is, practical to the last and armed with, as is appropriate, a longarm and a sidearm. A rather brutal-looking revolver, heavy and gleaming with purpose, hangs in a holster off her hip, and she carries what... look, at first glance, to be an assault rifle, but contours are wrong, as if it had been fused carefully with a much larger weapon.
Which was precisely what Master Juno has done.
Her weapons and Fox's all carry an impressive sheen that screams Death. It's not a mere spell that enchants the weapons, but one of the Attainments of the Orphaeans, and these weapons have been sculpted to deliver unto Hades his due. She has been singing songs of death and mourning in ritualistic focus for nearly their entire time preparing, and only now has stopped, checking her weapon with the fanatical efficiency of a dedicated soldier.
"If someone gets eyes on someone important, sound off. I need priority targets, or I'll simply be firing on targets of opportunity- much lower impact. I can hide the wounded and raise protections if need be, but we do not have the option of winning a defensive battle. Our duty is not to die for our side."
She clicks off the safety on her rifle and brings it to shoulder-height, sighting down the scope at the fragmenting glass.
"It's to make them die for theirs."
After performing her own ritual castings - one of them with Liezel's help - Kotahitanga visited the armoury, selecting a Steyr F88 for herself before returning to the Arboretum proper. Whereupon she places herself next to Balm, nodding at Yoshitune's words. "Ka whawhai tonu mātou, āke, āke, āke." Not that anyone here is especially likely to understand her ancestral language.
It was customary for Aletheia to wear extravagant and dramatic robes, as Solomonists often wear such garments when they intend to do rituals or even enter into the Astral Realms. They empower the Key Bearers as they are signs of leadership. Aletheia's white robes were no different, elaborate golden sigils were embroidered upon her robe, words of truth etched into its silk and a necklace of various keys was hanging from her neck.
She wastes no time, moving swiftly to lend what aid she can, her path tool in one hand as she proudly displayed her Shadow Name. She held no weapon of the material world for the powers of the Supernal realms were her's to wield and rightfully so.
"Our home is under attack, do not falter, do not yield, if you must die; die for those you love and for the Consilium for which you have aligned yourself. But do your best to not meet death today, show our foes what happens to those who dare to strike at our hearts!" Her voice ironclad and resolute.
After the cracks appear in the glass dome, there comes a lull in the action. Which causes Yoshitsune to chuckle to himself. "Now it begins!" And sure enough, a few moments later, something occurs overhead. It's like the air ripples and begins shooting closer and closer.
A shockwave.
It slams into the ceiling and sends glass showering in every direction rather like shrapnel, forcing those below it to find cover or otherwise cover their faces to avoid a rather painful outcome.
In the wake of that comes a literal rain from the skies. Spirits of various sorts; Goetia and Ghosts; a whole cavalcade of cannon fodder to absorb the brunt of the Diamond's defense of their seat of government and the Tree it was built around. And some of them are already firing off numen and sending fire down ahead of their freefall.
With a sharp coo, Fox sends off six of the pigeons toward one of the spirits. Of course, Liezel is about to spray the area with autofire, so that may be in fact the definition of dying to friendly fire, but, you know. That's how that rolls, sometimes. Poor babies. A single shot from Fox hits solidly, though who knows what armor these things have brought to bear?
Six of the brave, intrepid pigeons fly up to meet their fate, buffeting themselves against a particular spirit. One even gets a beak in the thing's eye and shakes its little pigeon head back and forth like a puppy with a rope toy. The hail of bullets that follow after them don't do them any favors, though. Not them, nor anything else in the sky.
They keep on coming, though, save one that discorporates into a haze of essence.
Seeing as the pigeons have already been brought down, Kotahitanga doesn't have to feel at all bad about opening up on one of the goetia, sending it fleeing back out of the material world with a swift staccato of fire.
"Goetia and Spirits against a Solomonist?" She asks with an arched brow, extending her as her nimbus flares up, all of the Spirits and Goetia are suddenly sent into a never ending mental loop. They're still mid travel in their minds to get to the location!
Unfortunately, they keep coming. The spell takes hold, but it doesn't take hold of their minds.
The Goetia unleash a pair of sonic blasts at Juno, like having a thunderstrike land on her head. It's loud. Curiously, the third of them balked. The numen sputtered out before ever leaving the creature's corpus.
In response, the Lenape warriors give a shrill battle cry and fly into the air to meet the falling rain of ephemerals with clubs, spears, and axes flying. They carve clean through the already shredded corpuses of numerous of them as the battle is well and truly joined.
Until the battle reaches the ground, Yoshitsune's blades are of minimal utility. So instead, the old Master releases a shout and points his blade up at one of the descending spirits. A bolt of lightning flashes from the heavens and cleaves straight through it to the ground right there in the arboretum with deafening thunder. But the spirit evaporates in the wake of it.
The sole remaining spirit makes an attempt to blast at Little Fox, firing off a bolt of green light that smacks the Thyrsus square in the chest, deflecting largely harmlessly off her armor. Finally, something has come to ground. A single heavily wounded Spirit thusfar.
Balm's feeble old arms lift up that AK-47 and she unleashes a rain of bullets at the Goetia, cackling like the old biddy that she is. One of them fades away into thought and potentia, the remaining Goetia reaching the ground near discorporation.
A single enemy ghost reaches the ground, likewise. It smacks Yoshitsune across the face with a viciously clawed hand that leaves chips in the paint of the old master's mask. One gets the idea that Ghost just made a fatal error.
The portals overhead -- of which there are several now -- flicker and flash as though things are coming through, only nothing can be seen to be doing so.
Nothing alive is coming out up there, but we'll know if they do! comes Fox's thoughts through the telepathic link established. The senses of the Web of Life -- tuned, everyone will know, to birds, humans, and insects, -- pulse through the link. That means something is coming through up there that isn't alive! I've got six spirits coming through, anyone else got something?
Five pigeons swoop over to attack the ghost which has attacked Master Yoshitsune, who, it must be noted, is using a sword, and not a gun. There's deep and genuine upset through the link at the fact that someone shot her birds up like that.
At the news that things are coming through in (probably) Twilight, Kotahitanga drops her gun, trusting the strap to hold it in place as her hands move through a series of patterns, chanting in High Speech all the while. Ephemeral Enchantment is up. Use it wisely.
Dead. Half-dozen. I can't touch the spirits until they're made manifest. I'm engaging the ghosts- thank you, Kotahitanga. The words rattle off like short bursts of verbal gunfire, briefly before actual gunfire races up into the air above them, sweeping across the incoming swarm of ghosts, suddenly an actual threat thanks to the infusion of Prime! As the last of the shots ring, the weapon clicks- empty. I'm dry- reloading!
Aletheia actually looks slightly annoyed that her spell didn't do what she wanted it to do . . . err well it had taken hold but it didn't actually really accomplish what she set it out to accomplish. She flicks her wrist and sends out another spell towards one of the gates
As before, the spell clearly goes off and the targets are clearly carrying her nimbus now, but they shake off whatever it was she was trying to do and keep right on dropping towards the Arboretum.
The Goetia that had been on its last legs turns away from Liezel and focuses instead on... The Martyr's tree.
Another sonic blast booms across the arboretum and smacks into the tree hard. Leaves go flying off in the wake of it, and the longest of its limbs cracks audibly before sagging to the ground.
The Lenape Warriors shout something in Unami before they, as one, rush up towards the oncoming ghosts and unleash hell. They slaughter what's left of the oncoming ghosts, shredding their corpuses with tomahawk and war club. They are clearly enjoying this.
Yoshitsune pivots away from the creature that clawed his mask when that numen blasts the tree and swings up his wakizashi, sending a blade of forces magic through the air to strike the creature and leave its corpus sagging to the earth in two pieces. "THE TREE! DEFEND THE TREE! THEY ARE ADAPTING TO OUR DEFENSES!"
The spirits may not be visible, but their numen flare out of Twilight all the same, peppering the defenders with probing fire in much the same way the wards were peppered before. Apparently Yoshitsune was correct. They're seeing where the team is vulnerable and exploiting those vulnerabilities.
Balm can't really move from where she's at and fire, so she stays put in her chair with her shawl over her lap and hot casings raining down about her liver-spotted and slippered feet. She trains on the ghost that reached ground a few moments ago-- the one Yoshitsune abandoned to take out the spirit that attacked the tree --and lets a few rounds burst free, sending it back into twilight to think about what it's done. "Not today, motherfuckers! I'm living to see this orange stained shitgibbon voted out of office!" She tugs out her magazine, muttering to herself, and finds another to slide into place before running the slide with a satisfying click-clack, "THIS GRANDMA'S PACKING THE PEOPLE'S CALIBER!"
Four torn up and bedraggled spirits reach the ground to join the one that landed prior. Overhead, the portals fire again. And apparently they've settled on how they plan to deal with the Consilium's defenses now, because the ephemerals that spill through are truly terrifying both in size and appearance. There's plenty of the smaller ones coming, too to try to take the heat off. And if that weren't enough, four figures appear in the arboretum. They simply come into being, as though having teleported or simply popped into existence.
There is a woman in a black suit, Emily Blunt style, bowtie undone, mirrored sunglasses in place with a smart haircut and a bullpup Israeli machine gun.
There's a frumpy looking man in a tan trench coat and a thin tie, a badge on his waist. He's carrying a pistol in one hand and a cigarette in the other.
There's a rather androgynous figure of indeterminate gender, bald, dressed in track suit and carrying a fucking flame thrower on their back.
And lastly there's a truly enormous looking man. Think Zangief. He's wearing overalls and carrying a sledgehammer that is decidedly not a conventional sledgehammer.
Those aren't alive! Those are some sort of Forces spell! Possibly an illusion! Fox sends through the telepathic link: they make their information fully available the moment they have it, and it's possible to see the way that Fox senses things. Her peripheral Mage sight instantly reveals to her what the Arcanum that go into a spell are.
But that probably means that whatever is coming through can hear us. Please, keep it in your thoughts. And then there's a secondary little thought in Fox's head: thoughtsandprayers! as she begins to work on her mudras, forming the signs and symbols for Matter. Her Nimbus flares, all bright and green, petrichor and a sense of calm companionship, before the Tree is encased entirely in air that has gone completely solid.
Ad hoc armor, Fox style.
The ratcheting clack of an empty mag discharged and replaced sounds as Liezel squirms on the ground to replace the dry mag with a fresh one, mentally marking off- one fresh loaded, two fresh left. Thank you for the intel, I was seriously considering blowing my ace on one of them. Well done with the barrier, as well. Help me mark primary targets, watch what they do.
Kotahitanga is going for her gun at the illusion-people's appearance, only to abort that into forming an Imago on Fox's calling them out as such, hands twisting through the familiar mudras of Prime. Fuck that noise. And then they disappear as quickly as they came, the Obrimos's Nimbus flaring with the sound of roaring waves.
mutters to herself a little bit as she flicks her wrist once more, the other PCs feel a defensive spell take hold upon them and the tree gets some wind idly moving its branches
The Lenape Warriors descend from above on the spirits that have managed to make it to the ground. Apparently the fact that everyone is trying to defend the tree has them deciding to join in on that endeavor, too. The tear into the already shredded corpuses of the spirits and rip them apart with a rain of heavy blows.
Their celebration is short lived, however, as a truly massive blast rains from above, one of the cthulhoid abominations releasing a bolt of purple lightning that just evaporates one of the warriors outright. Pfft. Gone.
A second such bolt clobbers into Balm, and when the flash is gone the old woman is lying on the ground, he wheelchair smoking, and her tongue steaming as it lolls out of her open mouth. Along with her dentures.
The third bolt slams into Yoshitsune and staggers him backwards several steps. He responds by gathering himself up and dancing forward in a flurry of dancing steel before thrusting his katana up into the air and letting out a scream of primal fury.
The skies answer by parting open and sending lances of lightning down on the battlefield on all nine ephemerals still standing. Or in this case, descending. None of them discorporate, but they definitely felt that.
Naika! Tend the Elder!, comes Yoshitsune's voice.
The spirits that cluster around the larger trio unleash a series of withering blasts that rip into the remaining Lenape warriors. Four more of them discorporate into ectoplasm and air. The remaining pair are on their last legs but show no signs of backing down. But if anything close to that volley takes place a second time, they'll be removed from the board entirely.
Another image winks into being on the ground. This time it's only the trench coat and badge bearer. He's dangling a white handkerchief this time. No pistol. At least none is drawn, anyway. The cigarette is in his mouth this time.
And the fucker is grinning. "Let me know when you're ready to negotiate."
Still an illusion, Fox informs the rest of the group, as their fingers form the mudras for a Yantra that they know oh-so-well.
"Lick my spicy butthole while I fart," the Orphan offers cheerfully aloud, moving her body between the illusion and the downed Elder.
"Negotiate?"
Liezel stares at Balm's steaming body, glances to Yoshi, still on his feet.
"Negotiate?"
Liezel turns and looks up at the spirits overhead, at the smaller ones on the ground.
She takes a deep breath and starts to sing.
The notes are melancholic, threnodic, mournful- and furious. Liezel's Nimbus rises, celestial voices mimicking hers, thundering guns in the background playing percussion to her dirge for the living.
No, not thundering guns...
Just ... thunder.
The storm that follows is judgment, raining from the skies onto every single spirit. Some smaller ones are only struck twice- most, including the largest, suffer three lightning strikes, as the bolts crash down two dozen times in the space of a second as, in the same moment, the dark bruises on her form fade entirely, as do the wounds on the rest of their number.
"All you've made us do is reload!!!"
"Ka whawhai tonu mātou, āke āke ā-fucking-ke, arsehole," Kotahitanga agrees, tilting her head towards Liezel even as her hands move through the mudra for Dispel Magic once more. And then Trenchcoat Arsehole blinks out again.
He has the good sense to look mildly exasperated before winking out of existence again.
"When you're ready to play for real . . ." she says as her left hand moves to take off a key from her right wrist and her right hand moves to take a key off the left, then moves to take one from her necklace. The keys are then idly placed on the ground, she then merely smiles
They may be on their last legs, but the massive spirits are still ... massive spirits. The shambling horrors turn their attention to the tree and lash out at it with massive, spiny tentacles. Two of them do, in any case. The other quivers in place, hesitating.
But that's enough, in the end. They shred through the hardened air around the tree, lacerate the bark like some sort of sinuous chainsaw, and shred it upwards like it's being fed through a tree harvester. Limbs fly away with loud snaps and cracks, leaves and branches go flying in every direction, and it's quite simply torn out of the ground by the root and slammed back onto the ground in pieces. Not quite obliterated in the literal sense, but well and truly destroyed in a physical one.
And then, with their orders achieved, they turn docile. Not that this keeps the Lenape warriors that remain from charging them, or Yoshitsune from blasting them with a final series of lightning bolts that send them back into the shadow for good.
And then, one by one overhead, the portals begin to wink out.
The Orphan of Proteus howls as only an Orphan of Proteus can -- the sound that comes out of Fox is absolutely inhuman, filled with anguish and fear and horror. If one has not heard a fox scream before, the sound is pretty terrifying all on its own, but this is a fox's scream backed by incredibly powerful human lungs, literally inhuman levels of stamina and strength.
The urge to heal the tree immediately pulses through the telepathic link, and the feeling that follows it is soon, soon, analyze, fix, heal, before it's permanent. But with all of the discipline and focus that it requires to become a Master, Fox -- still screaming as though someone had killed a member of her cadre in front of her eyes -- opens her Active Mage Sight and stares up in furious focus, committing to memory the Signature Nimbuses of all the magic starting to fade above them.
One, two, three, four... she passes the magical fingerprints out to her compatriots, sobbing and screaming all the while, until she has counted no fewer than sixteen distinct Nimbuses. More than one Pylon, for certain.
As the portals wink out, the Thyrsus runs toward the tree, ignoring the ephemerals and still, still, screaming.
"Someone with Time! We can go back and stop this but we have to go now, I can get a portal up and we can yoink whoever over here."
The image passes through Fox's mind of Anthelion, who is probably stoned. It is literally the mental image of a blonde lazily sprawled across a couch holding a bong. This image comes paired with the mental image of Vasha, who is unavailable for various and sundry reasons. Fox's sobbing is under control, mostly.
Liezel is already weaving a second onslaught from above, but it's too little, too late. She blanches, looking physically ill at the sight of the tree being devastated, her nimbus releasing the violent imago on the spot while the Lenape and Yoshitsune rip the spirits from the sky. Her gun clatters to the ground, staring at the wreck of the tree, listening to that horrific, shrill keening. It's only when Alethia speaks that she seems to focus back in for a moment, blinking. "That- that would work. We can stop them this time. We can."
"No wasting time taunting the Seers, just focusing on destroying their minions," Kotahitanga adds grimly.
"Please, a name and location. I'll take whatever backlash the abyss throws at me. We can prevent this!" She looks to Kotahitanga "It was a bluff, I was trying to get them to attack me because I'm running on fumes over here, but we don't have time for this."
"I don't know where she is, but you can cast to her directly," Fox answers, and runs to her backpack to grab her phone. An image of Leta and Fox together is held up on the screen. "She's probably at home but I can't guarantee that and we don't have any more time to waste on guessing."
- Aletheia looks at the picture and forms a connection in her mind then a portal appears, Altheia seriously looks like NOW she's out of Potentia: "I'm out . . . that's all I can do, go and I'll hold this as long as I can."
Sometimes -- nay, especially -- when it's your motherfucking Destiny to protect this funky-ass tree, you're just inexplicably ready to ride to the rescue. Even when you're currently tripping out of your fucking gourd on peyote tea. Even when you're currently in your motherfucking pajamas because who the fuck has time for clothes when you're this goddamned high and everything that's touching your skin just feels irritating and unnatural and- holy shit why am I wearing pants.
A twig-thin blonde -- wearing nothing more than a pair of rose-tinted tea shades, and very sheer nightgown covered in little bats -- steps out of the portal with her hair in a messy bun... because when someone calls you to step through a dimensional waygate? To grab Destiny by the balls!? Fuck clothing! Let's get this loving, testicular caress on the road, motherfuckers!
"Hey y'all, full disclosure I'm- Oh, what the fuck!?!?" Leta lifts her glasses and rubs her eyes. "Oh..." She's already working the spell before the rest of the sentence. "Yeah, that's bad."
The world around Anthelion twists and distorts as a corona of unearthly, extradimensional light wreaths her head like the hidden sun during an eclipse. Let's go back! To before this was a problem, wheeeee!
"Go back in Time, and warn us, you'll be the only one with the memory of this."
Time whirls around Leta like a VCR rewinding an old tape, and in the exact moment that Reality rights itself, Leta screeches at the top of her little smoke-laden: "PROTECT THE FUCKING TREE FROM THOSE LITTLE SHITS OR I SWEAR TO GOD I WILL STOP BEING HIGH AND NONE OF YOU WILL BE HAPPY ABOUT IT."
This has all happened before. It will happen again!
Another image winks into being on the ground. This time it's only the trench coat and badge bearer. He's dangling a white handkerchief this time. No pistol. At least none is drawn, anyway. The cigarette is in his mouth this time.
And the fucker is grinning. "Let me know when you're ready to negotiate." He gives Leta a doubletake, tilts his head, then starts laughing and applauding slowly. "I guess the answer was no, huh, Twiggy?"
The thing about living with lots of Time mages is that you stop being surprised when they just fucking appear out of nowhere. "Goddamnit, Leta, get behind me," Fox snarls, and sadly does not tell Trenchcoat Dickweed to lick her spicy butthole while she farts. Her fingers move in the complicated mudra which heals literally everyone. Balm all better now.
"Negotiate?"
Liezel stares at Balm's steaming body, glances to Yoshi, still on his feet.
"Negotiate?"
Liezel turns and looks up at the spirits overhead, at the smaller ones on the ground.
She takes a deep breath and starts to sing.
The notes are melancholic, threnodic, mournful- and furious. Liezel's Nimbus rises, celestial voices mimicking hers, thundering guns in the background playing percussion to her dirge for the living.
No, not thundering guns...
Just ... thunder.
The storm that follows is judgment, raining from the skies onto every single spirit. Some smaller ones are only struck twice- most, including the largest, suffer three lightning strikes, as the bolts crash down two dozen times in the space of a second as, in the same moment, the dark bruises on her form fade entirely, as do the wounds on the rest of their number. Left are just the largest spirits, smoking, barely corporeal.
"All you've made us do is- Leta..? Oh, no." Liezel looks between Leta, the tree, the spirits- and screams.
"HIT THEM WITH EVERYTHING!!!!!"
"Ka whawhai tonu mātou, āke āke āke!" Kotahitanga screams, hands flashing through the mudras of Force, pulling down a set of three lightning bolts, one for each of the big spirits.
With the targets down, Yoshitsune sheathes his blades into their saya and strides forward to stare up at the illusion of the Trenchcoat Man.
"Speak your words, scorpion. I will bear them to the Hierarch." The Paragon holds up a hand to the others, indicating they should hold off dispelling the effect, even as the portals overhead begin to wink out one by one.
"Finally, a reasonable person." The man glances over Yoshitsune to Leta and gives her the gunfinger, "Tch-tch! Nice work. Real recognizes real." Then to the others, or more to the point Liezel and Kotahitanga, "I don't speak te reo, lady, and I think you now appreciate what we can do with just a few paltry minions." And down to Yoshitsune again, "We know where you live now, old man. Just like we know where that pretty sword you care so much about is located. Just like the Exarchs know everything. The irony of all of this is that you people climbed the literal manifestation of your pathetic hubris to get to the shores of Oroboros, that you had to rewind events because we succeeded in this show of force. And yet you still imagine that there's a way out of this situation that doesn't end with that tree picking prime rib out of my teeth. You people are unreal. I don't really care about your consilium, and I don't really care about you all. I genuinely don't. I'm sure you're nice folx. I like the old biddy's moxie, especially. We don't need to do this. You can just destroy the damn thing and keep all your pretty buildings and ancient tomes and happy lives. Go on believing you can escape the prison. We don't care how you choose to delude yourselves, we just need that thing gone. I'm sure you'll say no, but I just wanted to be the kind of person that gives you all the chance to come out of this alive. Not this this. But." He points at the tree, "This."
"They want it gone, it's going to go. Don't be in the way." He then leans down onto his knees and smiles at Yoshitsune. "Tell Penance I say hi."
Liezel stays silent. She has thoughts. She doesn't consider this nearly the open and closed case the man thinks. Does she understand what they can do with minions now? She absolutely does.
Does she know better how to wipe them off the face of existence?
Oh, but does she.
Kotahitanga just turns around and... is she mooning Seer Dickhead? Apparently!
The Thyrsus sort of tunes out, placing herself between Leta and the illusion and looking up toward the sky; her strange gold-green eyes catch some light and there's beautiful eyeshine, making her look less human than ever. She just sort of checks out of the Fallen World for a moment, completely subsumed in Mysteries, which is very obvious over the telepathy. Fox does immediately share what she knows, though the player does not have the information yet.
Anthelion -- blitzed out of her mind, and wearing a Very Sheer night gown -- leans out from behind Fox, and grabs her junk, before extending a righteous middle finger at the illusory Seer. Real doesn't recognize... anything resembling reality at the moment, actually. As previously stated, she is tripping balls like a mothefucker, but there is no real here to recognize, sir.
"I will bear ... the essence of your message to my hierarch," Yoshitsune states bluntly.
"But she'll tell me to go and fuck myself," the man answers.
"That is so."
"Well, I tried."
"Try harder next time. And come in person."
"I'm sure you'd like that."
The man regards the room, laughing with genuine mirth at both Kotahitanga and Leta, once more applauding with good natured amusement. "You people seem alright. It's a shame, really. Well. That's it for us. I've got to get out of here before you send your Talons after me. I know how this works." He glances at his watch and then up again with a big grin, "Let's see how quickly you get here, shall we?" He pinches his watch, and the effect drops unceremoniously.
And with that, Yoshitsune turns about and states bluntly, "Scry him before he severs his sympathies. You." He points at Leta. "Fetch your people. We need your shinobi. Assemble an infiltration team. If he is there, kill him. Bring me what intelligence you find." And with that he swaggers off towards the hall to inform the Hierarch.
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