RP Curio Squad: Soul Transferred

[Ametheliana]

RP Date

YE 44

RP Location

Winsonville

((To RP in this thread you do not have to have an approved character, you do not have to ask me to join. This is an Open Roleplaying thread I am GMing. Just post a black panel and I am happy.

 Character Requirements: No minimum rank, Shosa is max rank, Star Army SAINT personnel only (analysts, operatives, and wiki listed NPCs not being played are all okay).))

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville

"Keep up." said the Taii in front of Pano.

Pano Uma groaned, "Sorry if I love myself and I would rather be doing something useful with my time." The yellow headed and well-muscled Nitô Heisho looked absolutely miserable. Despite it being 5:30 am Kyoto time, the large team of SAINT operatives and analysts had been pulled from the already disheveled ranks of blue and black to pull on some waders and slop around in the mud. Now they each stood a few feet apart in a grid pattern with bags and buttpacks over their with their eyes to the ground they slopped through.

"Ugh, you're-" murmured the operative Uma had been wading through the mud right next to. Before he could respond, the person to the right of Pano Uma laughed in response to her.

"I didn't join SAINT to pick up dog shit or whatever this is." They said with a toughened expression of someone used to wading through it, "but orders are orders. Bag it and tag it, Miss!"

There were in a swampy clearing that was usually the meadow within the forests of Winsonville. Once an arid bed of wildflowers and tall grasses in between the haunting blood trees of the forest around them, it had changed as of late. In the last month localized landscape in this clearing had gone from a sweet looking flower meadow to a newly barren swamp.

And within the wettened earth, little red orange globules had appeared. In the light they shone like opaque gems and closely resembled amber, just closer to the maroon hues of blood like the forest around them.
Once she spotted one such minute object in the muck, Pano fished out a bag from her pocket and shimmied her hand inside of it to pluck the little nugget out. With a zip of the bag and a plop into her waiting butt pack, Pano looked to the trees lining the muck she was in now. The blonde wondered about the top of chain of command for her mission today, since all of them had just been told what to look for and not why. Deep within the sickly red and white of the dry woods were the shadowed figures of two officers. Her eyes narrowed on the Chusa stripes of one of them and wondered.

Were they the curio squad?

In the millisecond that she had started oggling their rank stripes, the black panel at the forest-line shifted their hand, holding them at their chest and in such a way that Pano could no longer see the gilded stripes of the rank. With a scoff and her attention diverted back on the job, Pano looked back to her work on the ground.

Though this forest was taken care of by Xiulurian elves, the forest's caretakers felt the disturbance was far from natural to the area and reported what had been happening to Star Army. The natural landscape changing alone had not worried the Elves, though. It was the appearance of something these woods had not encountered the presence of for many years.

The forest was haunted once more with what had consumed it before: ghosts.

((From SAINT's Special Investigations Office to you: A Special Investigations Personnel Project
Special Thanks to Wesley Davis))

 

[Immortal Cyan]

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville

A haunted swamp.

When Akahana had decided to train as an Analyst, she hadn’t ever expected to find herself working in mud. In fact, she had chosen the clerical side of intelligence work specifically to avoid being tasked with duties such as this. She wasn’t very physical for a Nekovalkyrja, instead preferring to hone her digital mind, rather than her body. It showed in the fact that she carried more fat relative to her height than many of her sisters, but that didn’t make her weak! Even so, Akahana envied Pano Uma’s well-muscled frame as it seemed perfect for this kind of grunt work, making the Analyst wonder why they hadn’t brought more Nekos like Uma for the expedition.

Regardless, Akahana had resolved not to complain like many of her sisters and so far, she hadn’t. It helped that she made constant use of her inertial controlling emitters to float above the mud, keeping herself clean where others had ruined their uniforms. However, the effort of maintaining the emitters was still quite exhausting, to the point that the Snowy Neko sensed that she might be hungry afterward even though she had already eaten her meal for the day.

Scanning her surroundings, Akahana’s eyes widened whenever they came over one of the red-orange nuggets she had been tasked with looking out for and collecting. Careful not to let any of the muddy ick drip onto her bodysuit uniform, Akahana placed each one she found into one of her waterproof bags, hoping that command would have answers pertaining to their objective for the mission, soon. At the very least, knowing that would give the Snowy Neko’s well-honed mind something to chew on while she worked.

Not to mention, her bags were already beginning to get full!

 

[Ametheliana]

Effy didn't really have a choice when it came to floating above the muck. But she had been in the field long enough and had trained hard enough to have pushed her body beyond its limits to at least try to be toe-to-toe with Nekovalkryja as an Elf that had retained her less than capable body.

Depite wading well, she still wasn't able to control and manipulate gravity, so she waded in the muck like the brutes that enjoyed it. For her part, she was using the time to recount key details of the mission she had been tasked with recently. Depite her cool expression and demeanor, the delicate gold tiara she wore on her forehead was marred with a bit of mud. To add to her disheveled look, her grey hair had a bit of mud in it and looked like that of an old human's, not a young vivacious Elven woman like those quasi-native to these parts of Yamatai.

"Santô Hei Effy Penihatolapsoa, would you?" With that request, a SAINT officer near the tree line had stepped forward and beckoned Effy with their hand. They were a gracefully athletic Taii with long dusty pink hair that she wore long, ending around her hips. From the distance, the colorful officer suddenly stood out amongst the somber white, red, and plum wine colors of the haunted swamp after she had taken her few steps out of the shadows. Like a colorful beacon with a deep black panel juxtaposed right in the center of her, she stood patiently waiting with her purple eyes on Effy.

"Akahana-hei," She was close, so Effy spoke in a low, deep voice. "will you come with me? Because your bags are full, you should deposit your collections in the larger receptacles." Those large receptacles were next to the officers behind the tree-line at a table they were working at.

With a quiet stillness, the silvery haired elf next to Akahana lowered her shoulders, almost as if dejectedly giving up on the hunt. But her next movement made it obvious she was bending down, moving intently. Her fingers laced the loops on her right foot's wader boots and tugged steadily. She had pulled her boot and leg from the muck quickly, then did the same for her left foot, too. Effy turned to look towards the officer at the tree line, then turned back to Akahana.

 

[Immortal Cyan]

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville

“I’ll be right there, Penihatolapsoa-Hei!” Akahana answered back to the Elf. Glancing back, the Snowy Neko quickly took note of the graceful, statuesque Taii who had stepped forward, then Effy herself. Her eyes went wide upon seeing the mud caking the Elf’s form, especially the muck on her gold tiara, which almost made her cringe. While Akahana didn’t like to judge those who chose not to transfer into superior bodies, especially if their natural species couldn’t line up with a Minkan body—like a Separa’Shan, a Phod, or a Kodian, for Effy, she wondered if the trouble of slogging through the mud was worth it.

Refusing to dwell on the thought, Akahana moved to clear out her bags of the red-orange nuggets she had collected over the last half-hour, before reporting to the Taii.

“Kanzaki-Hei, reporting.” The Snowy Neko placed herself before the pink-haired SAINT officer, lending her a respectful floating bow as she did. She took care not to float so high as to place herself above the Taii, but not so low as to risk getting mud on her boots!

 

[Ametheliana]

With a terse node of her head as she stood from squatting, Effy went into her buttpack with both her hands. In one hand she had procured small bendable black flats which she slipped on, then in the other hand was a small container not unlike a clamshell holder for a lady’s blush. But when she opened it in front of her face, a small black and gray flurry of activity sprung from it to her tiara and chin where the mud had caked. Around her tiara it looked like it had lifted momentarily, displacing her bangs as the nanomachines even got underneath the soft woven gold. She had closed her light blue eyes and she pressed her lips tight as they scurried over them, but soon the multi-purpose nanomachines had done their job by cleaning her face. Even the periwinkle of her collar’s piping had been removed and processed by the Type 39 nanomachines. They cleaned Effy’s important parts -at least when talking to an officer- then they had plopped back into their clamshell case. Effy had closed it over them, clean of the muck.

“Right behind you, Kanzaki-hei!” Effy said. Truly she did put a good effort into straying into the driest areas while jogging quickly to catch up. The little elf had taken the time to find if there were any benefits to the trouble of keeping her less superior body, deciding years ago. But days like this, her sky blue eyes looked to the sky as she simply had to trust in the decision of her past rather than justify it in the act. For now, she reached the Taii just behind Kanzaki with an orderly bow next to her.

At this distance, both junior operatives would be able to see that while the others had been collecting the small orange objects, the two officers had set up a simple station out of a basic autonomous medicine unit. Tsubei Kyoka collected the bags and carefully scattered them on the table, then one of the long arms on the MEU above the table picked an orange morsel up, scanning it through a full sensor array.

They had placed the medical table next to the deep red bark of a tree. Its pure white leaves filtering the early morning light cast a lot of light on the table solely while the other darker purple needled coniferous trees made the surrounding area marred with shadow. Effy tried to get a good look at the Chusa working the medical table, but soon she had turned to them to read out the results. She had eyes cold and blue as a glacier and hair split black and white like Heaven and Hell. It was Kamikaze, infamous for her piloting tactics as a younger officer.

"Inconclusive electroencephalograph, weirdly." The Chusa spoke in a hoarse voice, then moved on to other parts of the readout, “Definitely hemo.”

Tsubei turned to look at the meadow, scowling, “Kuso, shit… then they have to stay out there collecting. You two, do you have a knowledge of these woods?” the pink-haired woman asked.

 

[Immortal Cyan]

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville

The Snowy Neko immediately looked towards Effy for the answer to the Taii’s question, hoping that she might be able to offer more than Akahana herself could. As this was the Snowy Neko’s first time on Yamatai, she didn’t know the planet any better than anyone else in the vicinity, though it helped that she had downloaded a few maps and some cursory information on various locations, including the Kinren-rin forests. She knew that people had once visited this area in order to seek out their final deaths, a practice which had ended sometime after the Great Plague.

Now, it was a forest of ghosts.

“I know that this place is said to be haunted, but…” Akahana paused in order to consider her words, not wanting to offend Effy or make herself look stupid by saying too much regarding something she knew nothing about. “I don’t know much more than what I downloaded.” She finished.

All the while, Akahana tried to see who or what the black and white-haired Chusa was working on at the medical table, but she couldn’t make anything out. She was beginning to sense that there was something mysterious and potentially alarming about the entire situation. There were too many unknowns—a fact which was slowly beginning to annoy the Snowy Neko, yet simultaneously compelled her towards uncovering them.

“Tsubei-Taii, I apologize if I’m out of line, but what exactly are we investigating here?” Akahana asked, after working up the gall to do so. “If I might offer some speculation…” Once more the Snowy Neko paused, knowing that there could be some gravity pertaining to what she intended to say next.

“Could it be Mishhuvurthyar activity from the old ship debris? I know it’s a wild guess, but…there’s a chance that something could have survived the battle, then crashed into the mud and gone into stasis.” She suggested.

“And maybe, it’s just now waking up.”

 

[Ametheliana]

Tsubei looked to Kamikaze, who didn't do anything at all.

Tsubei said, "These woods were haunted. Not anymore. Not until a week ago when reports of Nekovalkryja-looking spectres started freaking even the Starfall out. So we're here, Santo Hei, to investigate that. With not much time in, we've already deduced it's hemosynth you've been collecting. Any speculation into what would make hemosynth material go globule?" Tsubei asked.

"Did you say the EEG test was inconclusive?!" While she asked this, Effy was lifting up her sleeve to begin scanning with her Type 34 bracelet, but Kamikaze gruffly stopped her.

"No life signs, just electrical activity like we would see in a brain," Kamikaze had jutted in to say as she eyed one of the amber gems. "We'll continue to analyze, but come to us with any developments or insights. Your speculation is noted, I've already conducted certain passive psionic scans with no findings, but there is a wider gamut to be run. Whatever it is you are right: it is just waking up. Let's work fast." Kamikaze's icy eyes had turned cryogenically cold on Effy.

"Now, Penihatolapsoa-Hei?" Tsubei asked like a clay bell tinkling in a mountain's wind.

”Yes chusa, I have knowledge of these woods.” Effy had chosen the same words as Tsubei when the Taii had asked them both the question.

“Hai,” Tsubei said knowingly. “We need to search the area for any more deposits.”

”Yes Chusa.” It suddenly made sense to Effy why none of her attempts to redirect herself off this mission had worked. Realizing that, Effy noted to add “perseverant” to her files on Kyoka. The elf groaned, wondering if being a Neko and not obviously Xiulurian would have gotten her out of being in this haunted swamp.

“Oh, and take the dog out for a walk, would you?” Kyoka was referring to a Ke-O6-E3100-ss that she was powering up. It stood on its four slender legs and was a variable configuration mission adaptive drone set for terrain. “Programmed for bloodhound to find any more deposits like these and soil scooping for collecting preliminary samples in any new locations. We need to see if any other areas around her are susceptible to these... environmental changes.”

“Kamikaze-chusa has programmed it to look for the same chemical compound as the sample that you have collected.” Kyoka added. The Taii gave a cheery smile and whipped her dusty pink hair off her Type 35 jacket’s shoulder to look at her counterpart.

The white and black-haired chusa was staring at the woman with her light blue eyes, which were warmer now, as her hand lifted up to be on Tsubei’s shoulder. It looked like both officers were ready for the two santo hei to scram into the haunted forest with the robot dog.

 

[Immortal Cyan]

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville

Nekovalkyrja spectres. Hemosynth globules. Mishhuvurthyar ship debris.

Akahana’s thoughts immediately veered towards Nightmares. What else could it be? And yet, the two officers didn’t seem as sure as she was. Perhaps they had evidence that pointed towards something else, which she didn’t have access to.

Ultimately, it came down to two conclusions: Did she place more trust in her superiors or her own judgment?

Akahana decided on the former, but she still intended to take the necessary precautions to assuage her own fears.

“I don’t know what would make the hemosynth change state in that manner, Taii.” Akahana answered. “Are there any readings on it? Maybe it’s contaminated.” She suggested, though the Analyst wasn’t sure if that was even possible given hemosynth’s self-repairing nature. Was there something bypassing it? That in itself was another potential hazard that warranted investigation.

With Kyoka’s order to take the drone out, Akahana offered the pink-haired Taii a shallow bow, before linking her digital mind to the drone’s systems and compelling it to follow after her and Effy.

“Penihatolapsoa-Hei, I think we need to set our NSPs to heavy. Be ready for anything.” The Snowy Neko commented after she was a good distance away from the two officers, far enough that her voice might be inaudible to their sensitive Nekovalkyrja ears.

“I have a bad feeling about this.”

 

[Ametheliana]

The officers had more readings to take to begin to answer Akahana’s questions, let alone those of their own. So the enlisted SAINT operatives left the tactical operations center where Kamikaze had brought Tsubei in closer to inspect the hemosynthetic globules. Effie was tapping into her bracelet after they had left the TOC. When Akahana spoke, she listened by cocking her head slightly, but her duty revolver reminded at her hip unchanged.

“Truth be told,” Effy looked up at the purple leaves that were shaped like grabbing hands. Though they had just been in a wet area, where they walked now was hardened earth in some places and loamy where organic matter piled under the trees and wine-colored shrubs. Unlike the swamp patch, it felt like a normal arid forest.

She persevered to look past the ghost maples around them, searching for any threats and watchful of their full visual coverage. The agent kept an eye on any sensors that she could pick up from her wrist’s device as she thought of the loan words to use to describe her relationship with the ghost forest here.

“I was a Young Starfaller in the seasonal enclaves. It was something like a summer camp for kids, if you did that.”

“So, I spent a handful of weeks near here once when I was very young, but never in this part. This is the Tinudant Elve’s land; they know its complexities as I never could. If the Tinundant are worried then your concern is founded too, Santô Hei Kanzaki Akahana. Oh,” Effy said as she looked up measuredly at the uncannily luminescent cyan eyes or the other hei. She nodded tersely, then looked away to scout for threats as she spoke softly. “Call me Peni-hei if you want.”

Between her own scans, the drone scooping up the muck, and the forest as a whole, Effy was ready for one of the three to indicate what was amiss. Despite saying she didn't know the land like the Starfall did, it didn't take an Elf to feel uneasy in this forest.

 

[Immortal Cyan]

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville

“I did a lot of ice camping during my socialization on Vicky.” Akahana said as she worked to process the readings coming in from the Bloodhound. “It was part survival training and part recreational camping which was meant to prepare us for the military, but it didn’t take place in what you would call ‘summer’ weather.” She continued. “I had fun, but I was never really all that outdoorsy. That’s why I’m an Analyst, I guess.” The Snowy Neko shrugged.

“All this mud just makes me feel even worse.”

 

[Ametheliana]

Akahana and the Bloodhound robot dog would both note the absence of any of the same compounds that they had been scooping elsewhere. The Bloodhound dropped the soil sample unceremoniously and stayed still for a moment, like a hound dog considering the scents on the wind. Effy was still scoping their surroundings and had given pause like the robot dog beside her. Any animals that called this forest home had cleared out at the first few black panels bringing in supplies.

Despite that, a humanoid form crested a little hill maybe 20 or so meters away and within Effy and Akahana's line of sight.

Akahana may have gotten a better look with her hemosynthetic eye's ability to zoom in on a distance. From that distance, she would have seen the other woman, pale like a sheet and wearing nothing save for muck that weighed heavily on her shoulders and hair. Mud smeared down the rest of her body in patches and covered one side of her chest, though her other exposed nipple was blue as the ice where Akahana had camped in her quasi-youth. Even her glabrous middle had a ghastly pale blue hue, much like her hands and feet. With a mournful look away from them and towards the forest, the figure turned within the second she had crested the hill and evanesced, disappearing where she had stood.

Effy was taking scans, unable to get a biolectromagnetic at this range, she got faint energy emissions only in the small instance the creature was visible. Her little bracelet sent the scan over to Tsubei Kyoka as she tapped out the comm code. Effy looked back, she could still make out the marshy field their comarades were slogging in. The TOC where command was, she didn't have the same luck getting visual on.

"Can you report what you saw?" Effy said snappily in a hushed request. "I'll relay it to command. We need to get closer, though." She wouldn't have been able to scope in with telescopic eyes like a Nekovalkryja, but she knew when to rely on her sisters in battle and their superior bodies to do as such. And she knew the next time the figure appeared, she wanted to be close enough for her scans.

 

[Immortal Cyan]

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville

An instant to a minute.

Akahana saw the pale, blue frame of the semi-nude feminine creature and immediately pushed her digital mind’s processing systems into the highest gear, with the intention of slowing down time from her perspective so that she could get a better, longer look at the woman’s features. Correspondingly, it went without saying that Akahana processed as many pictures as she could take, hoping that she might be able to record the moment to send to command.

Simultaneously, the Snowy Neko shifted her hands closer to the NSP on her hip, but by the time she could reach it…

The woman was gone.

“I will.” Akahana answered. “I just hope my pictures registered correctly.” She continued, her pale features turning slightly red from the mild exertion. The Analyst actively worked to train her mind so as to increase its overclocking capabilities, but she was by no means a master at it. “I pushed my mind in order to get a better view. Sending them to you now.”

 

[Miyako]

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Mud Fields

One of the soldiers working the muck stood and considered the last of the globules in her area. She was glad to not have to touch them with direct contact, if anything just for the chance they would contaminate the samples somehow. All of her tropical blue hair with interspersed strands of shock white were held up in three buns, which seemed to hold together with a triangle of pins that she somehow interlocked after sticking through.

How deep she had waded in search of the nuggets of mystery did not hide the fact she had a white panel, it rather sticks out at a SAINT operation. Still, she worked under the same orders, and same commander as everyone else trying to unravel what started to happen that could creep into the imagination and nightmares of anyone visiting. It made her understand why there were people convinced that it was haunted.

She just thought it was interesting.

No longer mired in the mud, Kurusu Misaki deposited all of her samples carefully, and reached back first to where she placed a sword longer than a katana on her back, though it looked more like a working power blade more than a ceremonial one. The purple-eyes of the woman glanced around her body and she lifted the blade from contact with her belt. The grime smoothly shed itself from her body, ending up in a sloppy, heaped pile that she stepped out of.

"Reporting: no more in my area."

 

[Ametheliana]

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Mud Field

When Misaki reported no more in her area, Tsubei Kyoka looked ready to give her a new assignment as she signaled with her hand to come over while simultaneously sending a telepathic message.

"Scouting agents have reported sightings. Advising them to continue information gathering." Kyoka had sent the coordinates, though the faint movement of the girls could be seen from the muddy field if one was looking, and one of Akahara's many pictures was relayed to the Chusa to give her a better scope of the sighting. She followed with, "The two Santo Hei Akihara and Penihatolapsoa could benefit from your field experience."

Woods

"You got a lot of good evidence." Effy said, then after she looked at Akahana more astutely, added, "I'm appreciative to have a comrade that can make such full use of their equipment." They made their way over to near where the woman had been, but Effy's scans yielded nothing. "We can have the Ke-O6-E3100-ss sample the area. There he goes scooping, good robot dog," Effy added in an emotionless monotone as she stared at the dog, then double checked her own readings.

In a small part of Effy, the Young Starfaller part, she herself didn't expect Akahana's mind to have captured a recording as it had.

She shared why: "We were taught that the ghosts that inhabit these woods wouldn't show up on film. They were more illusory than what was here. Like real ghosts. What do you hypothesize it was that we saw?"

 

[Miyako]

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville

"Understood. I'll make my way there presently." Misaki replied as silently, and bowed respectfully to Kyoka. She lifted herself from the ground just enough to make certain there was not a chance of her making excess noise on approach to the pair, and was soon away from the command area, verifying that her service pistol was set to stun. A living captive means a potentially talking one.

Woods

When she was approaching the pair and their shuffling drone, Misaki sent the pair a warning of her approach to the one of the two she knew would receive it. Her path to them was fairly direct, and it might be easy to spot her hair amid the odd colors of the woods, but she was floating very quietly while weaving between trees so it was best practices. "Inbound on your six.", The alert came maybe a minute before she arrived, all the time she needed to further analyze what was sent back to the command post in a preliminary fashion. There were still too many variables on the table to know what it was with certainty, but there was a strong possibility that the globules they were out collecting had something to do with the ghost.

"Akihara, Penihatolapsoa. I am Kurusu Misaki. I've been sent to back you up. We could create a three person net and fan forward, to flank her, or herd her to a location.", Already she was reviewing what topography might aid them, marking where the pictures showed the sighting was, and extrapolating a search pattern from there. Her eyes moved to the 'dog', the shape of autonomous sampler made her smile very slightly.


There was the matter of how similar in color the sighted creature and the local trees were, was something causing hybridization? Another seemingly outlandish theory to collect more evidence on. That would be the only way to learn anything, more pieces of the truth. The soldier's eyes went back to scanning, and wordlessly projected a color to better camouflage herself onto her hair while waiting for input from her two compatriots.

 

[Immortal Cyan]

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

Akahana nearly snickered at Effy’s pet words for the four-legged drone, which continued to dutifully take scans and samples of the area as the the two SAINT Agents worked. However, upon registering the elf’s next question, Akahana took a few moments to ponder over the strange, blue-skinned being she had seen—the process transpiring over a split-second in real time. At the same time, the Analyst received Kurusu-Chusa’s warning, acknowledging it with an affirmative response, while transmitting the pictures of the being she had just seen in order to get her up to speed

“She doesn’t have the carapace of the Nightmare-type, but it’s possible this one in particular has the ability to hide it or maybe she never had one to begin with, so I’m not quite ready to abandon that hypothesis.” Akahana answered.

With Kurusu-Chusa's arrival, Akahana offered the officer a quick, shallow bow, forgoing anything more extravagant in the interest of time and to avoid marking her out as their commander in the event that they were being watched.

“I’ll take the left flank.” Akahana piped up. “We can collapse in on her and make a capture attempt.” The Snowy Neko added, giving her assent to the Chusa’s first suggestion.

 

[Miyako]

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

How different Akahana looked from whatever she was expecting caught the officer a little off guard, but she stowed her slighty bemused but mostly inquisitive thoughts for later about the pair.

Pair of soldiers.

"No need for that out here.", Though, like she was programmed, Misaki still bowed back as they began to go over things. "I will take the middle, it will make it easier to get to either of you in case it turns out hostile and bolts left or right. If we close smartly, it should be simple enough to get a stun off." Though she was planning on flying in a burst for the last part, she knew there was a high chance if it was not already watching them that they could get in range for a chase, and being in a general sight line of one another was more safe given the size of their detail.

If there was a problem, she also considered the option of just striking the creature and hoping to daze it, unarmed. It seemed better to go without her pistol drawn in case the ghostly being was just shy, but knew enough about their weapons and intent. If it was a hybrid, it might have more advanced capabilities than they knew of, but even that could be revealed by the hunt.

Plans always needed to be adapted on the fly.

 

[Ametheliana]

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

It was clear that Effy would take the right while flanking. She had given a terse nod to the commanding officer while her eyes strayed. She was looking at the treeline in all directions. She suspected if the womanly figure they had seen had originally appeared so easily, perhaps others might be just as simply seen. Her eyes tracked around the blood red trees, trying to penetrate into them with her searching greyish blue eyes. But nothing yielded and she started fanning out towards the right.

The area which they had seen the woman was on the crest of a hill which extended to the right where the treeline thickened- where Effy was walking. It sloped downwards towards the left, though. Akahara's trajectory would take her to a lower area, beyond which the trees thinned in a clearing much like the one the agents had all begun in. As the dawn's morning light cracked through openings in the the varying hues of bloody trees' foliage, rays of ethereal light burst through to illuminate small patches underneath the tree cover.

Effy and her comrades had taken up their fanning positions and begun, searching for a few dozen paces. From back in the clearing where the majority of agents were located, they heard a disastrous moaning of heavy metal bending and calling of a name with the rushed urgency of seeing a fallen comrade as someone yelled: "Pano!!"

Effy turned for a moment to look towards the two soldiers to her left and towards the sound. That aching sound was the only thing heard for a few seconds, then a telepathic message was sent to the two Nekovalkryja and Effy's communicator.

Sinkhole in the clearing. One injured. Resume your field investigation.
-Tsubei-taii

When Akahara received the message, she heard the slight sound of someone taking in a quick breath of surprise intimately close to her left.

 

[Immortal Cyan]

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

Akahana sent a telepathic message of affirmation to the Chusa, before looking towards Effy in order to assess her understanding of the plan. Fortunately, the elf was the first to set off and accordingly, Akahana followed suit in her own assigned direction. In addition, she followed the snow blue-haired Nekovalkyrja’s lead in having her NSP out, set to stun as the parameters of the mission dictated.

From there, Akahana began to search her assigned sector with all of her senses primed, her digital mind spinning up multiple sub-processes dedicated to each one. It went without saying that the act of doing so was a strain on her systems, but nothing beyond or even approaching the safe parameters of the Nekovalkyrja Operating System.

However, it was enough to make her sweat.

Suddenly, her ears twitched as they registered the painful noise of metal bending in the distance. In response, she spun up another sub-process dedicated specifically to analyzing the stimulus, increasing her digital mind’s workload in the process. Naturally, Akahana suspected it to be an intentional distraction, but she wasn’t so convinced of that belief as to ignore what might be an obvious cue. Fortunately, Tsubei-Taii’s telepathic transmission gave clarity to the cacophony, allowing Akahana to resolve the sub-process she had dedicated to it a few cycles before.

As if on cue, her ears twitched again upon registering another stimulus—a quick, surprised breath.

Within a millisecond, Akahana’s digital mind carried out a number of calculations in order to gauge the distance of the source of the noise from her position. Simultaneously, with surgical Nekovalkyrja reflexes, Akahana turned to face the source of the noise, her eyes immediately widening upon registering whoever or whatever it was!

 

[Ametheliana]

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

The Neko Santo Hei's processes would have determined the sound to be an accumulation of several structs bending in unison under pressure. Her inborn experiences and knowledge might point to the potential of a fragment of a starship bending under the weight of the operatives searching above. At least it was most probable, given that fragments of the Mishhuvurthyar flagship had rained down on this land, killing thousands. Now there were only sounds of the agents evacuating the field and gathering of emergency medical supplies being called for and brought to Pano Uma. A stretched, inflatable splint, and hemosynthetic injections were all the primary concern of those not in the trio Akahana found herself in.

At the newest stimulus, though, Akahana had looked. She could see nothing, but she could hear the displacement of air in the form of a soft wooshing sound that tingled the alabaster fur on her ears. Whoever or whatever near her -within inches before and probably a few feet now- sounded like they were rushing away, towards the field and out of the field agent's net.