RP Curio Squad: Soul Transferred

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

The distraction had to be pushed away, unless a ship rose from the swamp or they were given new orders, the former long-term XO kept going, when they were relieved of responsibility for the cleanup, she, like her Nekovalkryja counterpart, stopped thinking about it. The pings between she and her right side meant she only had to concentrate on Effie.

The second she could get any location she would fly after it, and could she ever fly. Misaki was not sure if their quarry could intercept their telepathy, so she wanted to keep on line of sight at the very least until they could be sure, and she had not had time to give them an encryption key for their fire team.

The sounds gave her a chance to hear something odd, but she could not be certain if Akahana or Effie were alone still. In seconds, she changed her eyes so they could percieve the infared, in the hope of being able to immediately take flight after whichever direction had the missing amount of body heat. If it WAS some kind of horrible remnant of the second war, the veteran preferred to be contaminated herself, being the most resilient against parasites. In all honesty, the chusa was trained and selected to help people, and they were her people.

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Approaching Mud Fields

She was fast.

Seemingly faster than her, possibly faster than any Tennyo. Accordingly, Akahana didn’t anticipate being able to keep up, which meant that she would have to rely on her digital mind’s processing capabilities to try and anticipate her movements. Unfortunately, the Analyst doubted that Effy could be of much assistance if she was relegated to trudging through the mud, potentially leaving just her and Misaki to complete the mission.

Target is leaving the net and heading into the mud fields, due north of my position. Transmitting coordinates.

Akahana sent the transmission as she floated at near-maximum speed towards the mud field. In the process of doing so, the Snowy Neko began to think: What was around the field? Where might the ghostly woman go next and how could she drive her into a corner?

Regardless of the conclusion she arrived at, Akahana had her NSP out and set to stun, ready to make the capture.

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

Effy huffed as she watched Misaki carefully, but her fingers were working. She took over controls of the Ke-O6-E3100-ss through her bracelet and led it a few steps, where the icy pale woman had first appeared. As she worked, shoveling a scoop of soil herself from the ground and into the robot dog's receptacle, she murmured, "Come on, come on..." to herself. Her lip tugged up as the results processed and she kept her eyes on Misaki Kurusu. Effy trusted the Chusa's field of vision to track the entity best, despite not knowing she had switched to infrared. A non-augmented soldier like herself hadn't gotten far without trusting -and perhaps relying on a bit- the tools around her.

What Misaki saw was the heat suck of a figure levitating. Indeed it was still close to Akahana. In the seconds after the woman had been closely studying Akahana from the shadows of invisibility, something else had ripped her attention from snowy Neko that had made her gasp before jumping away to run. She was still a few body lengths away from Akahana, but moving fast to take a zig-zagging path that the many trees in the forest necessitated of her for her to get to the muddy field.

At her range Effy was unholstering her SiZi and locking her shoulders, an eye pinched. She had seen Kurusu's vision snap to something, but the Ke-O6-E3100-ss had done more, following the scent trail based on where the apparition had first crested the hill. It was racing now like a true bloodhound and only Kurusu would see it was inches from the figure's heat sink at times. The chasing bloodhound was now a clear indicator of the running ghost's position. Effy's shot wasn't clear and Akahana was the closest to the runner, as was Misaki. Due to the factors, the elf relaxed her shoulders an inch before raising them once more and swiveling ten degrees to her left, buckling her finger and shooting on the instinct of what her peripherals had just seen.

Another figure had appeared, moving quickly some fifty yards away. But she wasn't moving now. Her naked alabaster body, with its icy blue arms and legs splayed out under and beside her, had been stunned.

"One more over here!" Effy called, gun and eyes trained on the woman with her ear towards her comrades. She knew they might continue the chase on the first that they and the robot dog were after or they might back her up, only time would tell. But for right now the stunned body's thin cyan arms were groggily moving, gaining purchase to steady herself as if to get up. She took took another shot and the muzzle exhaust's calm blue plasma plumed a second time, thunking the woman back down. Effy's feet started hitting the hard forest steadily as she raced forward to identify what this was before it raised once more.

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Approaching Mud Fields

Wrong direction!

The Snowy Neko immediately shifted her heading, realizing that she had been tailing after a ghost rather than the ghost. Simultaneously, the racing Bloodhound’s intentions registered in her digital mind. Akahana grunted with exertion, then made the transition to infrared vision so that she could better see the feminine apparition the drone was chasing after. It was the longest three seconds of her life up until that point and worse yet, the Analyst could do almost nothing to expedite the process. Nevertheless, when the ghost’s heat signature finally registered in her vision…

She opened fire.

Her NSP snapped towards her target with unerring, surgical precision. Then, with two full pulls of the trigger worked by dainty stiletto-nailed fingers, the weapon unleashed a pair of heavy stun pulses from a little less than five meters away, aimed to strike the ghost in her upper torso!

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Edge of Mud Field

Akahana's target had made great strides, but with the Nekovalkyrja's vision enhanced and trained on her back, the running woman glided in the air momentarily, pushed by the momentum from her last intertial enhanced footfall, then her body slumped in the air. Her arm and shoulder had cracked underneath the weight of the fall, contorting the stunned woman's body where it lay.

She was downed, much like the one Effy had shot before those long three seconds. Her dark black hair was wet and caked with mud as it was smeared against her back and shoulders, swept across them in her fall.

The robot dog stopped inches from the woman's body and pointedly seemed to be staring at the inert white and blue heap. The robot sent the information to both santo hei that the target had been acquired. It bounded away shortly thereafter, seemingly into the woods. Akahana could hear a groan as the woman's head moved slightly. Unlike Effy's target, this one made no attempt to get up despite the moan.

Several SAINT agents from the field had heard the shots and were moving off of medical care duties to begin stalking the woods, trying to get a read on the situation. A blonde girl approached the woman Akahana had shot and trained her own NSP on her while Tsubei was close behind.

"Is it hostile?" Tsubei asked Akahana frankly.

Woods

Effy's special duty revolver's condensed plasma cartridge popped out another .50 FAT slug of the special purpose slug ammo, knocking the teetering woman as she got up once more. She checked her communicator, confirming a wireless communique had been sent out by the Curio Squad lead. Both hands on her SiZi, she popped the special ammunition out and put a grey and teal light cartridge in, ready to shoot again- this time with ammo meant to do more than stun.

"Stun longevity ineffective on target. Requesting further instructions," Effy said into her communicator, hoping it reached the officer that had joined them or Tsubei. She could see movement coming from the muddy field- black panels in the treeline looking to assist after hearing shots fired. Something about the way the ghost near Akahana had sprung into action only after that made Effy paranoid about using digital transmissions again. She motioned with her hands to keep eyes on the forest around them and the target she was nearing. The forest floor here was harder than the muddy floor and easy for her athletic body to sprint on, but having backup from the best and most augmented soldiers in the galaxy stamped out any concern she had about facing this threat alone.

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

Misaki made the choice to catch up with Effy, becoming only the sound of a zephyr as she nodded to Effy's signaling. "Understood, closing fast. Keep it down."

Good work. Backing up Penihatolapsoa. Misaki sent to Akahana and the command post. She also requested proper restraints, and scanners in case they weren't already forthcoming. They would need to get a transport as well, in case a transfer to a more...controlled environment would benefit them.

The chusa met up with the Elf, and when they reached the body of the woodland ghost she ventured, "So there were two, that means there might be more. I'll keep my eyes out." Kurusu REALLY meant all of her eyes. She was continuing to monitor in every direction once she appeared where Effy was, training her own pistol down at their, for the moment, captured prey. Settling down on her feet, she changed the setting on her weapon and restrained the bare ghost with her knees, facing down. The barrel was promptly pressed to its back as well.

They could easily investigate it while it was pinned on the ground. She estimated there was a lower risk to herself from danger if she came into contact with any of their former aggressors. If that was even what it was.

"The others are coming." The Nekovalkryja announced, checking in on Akahana, "Status?"

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Approaching Mud Fields

A sharp exhalation escaped from the Snowy Neko’s glossy cyan lips as the ghostly, blue-skinned woman crashed into the mud, an agonizing crack reaching Akahana’s furred ears as her target collapsed into an inert, contorted heap.

Coming to a sudden halt, Akahana briefly gazed down at the woman with no small amount of surprise and shock laid bare across her alabaster features. It went without saying that the Analyst had doubted her ability to capture the ghostly being and now that she succeeded in doing so, she almost couldn’t believe it.

Ametheliana said:

"Is it hostile?" Tsubei asked Akahana frankly.

Click to expand...

“I-I…” Akahana stammered out, snapping out of her stupor. “I don’t think so. Not anymore, Taii! I think she’s injured.” She answered, before transmitting the same message to Misaki, in response to the Eihei’s request for a status update.

For a moment, Akahana simply stood there, her expression blank as the other SAINT agents approached the downed woman. Then, she shifted her attention back to the pink-haired Taii holstered her NSP, sensing that the woman was no longer a flight risk.

Regardless of how the day’s operation ended, Akahana sensed that she would have a lot to contemplate.

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

"Right away, Chusa," Effy said. Each of her three words had been punctuated by a pause as she tapped at her personal communicator to get Kurusu Misaki's requests in, barely glancing up to see others approaching. A loud groaning sound echoed in the woods again, followed by a wet gurgling sound and some SAINT agents calling to one another. When Effy looked up again, less were approaching their position and more had fallen back to the field where the sound emanated.

"Should we get her on her feet to check on that?" Effy asked warily, eyeing the tropical blue and white streaks of hair that was the back of Kurusu's head, not knowing that the Eihei was able to see her doing such. The elf had been happy to put the Chusa between her and the downed target as she approached her, but now that Effy was looking from her communicator to gauge the Chusa's expression, she caught herself looking past the woman she served with and at the woman she had shot, with her face in the dirt, then back to the Chusa.

Neither looked all too different from one another. They both had furry ears with a beautifully delicate face shape and perfectly unblemished skin. At Kurusu Misaki's dark violet gaze, Effy's pale ones shot from her superior to the woman on her belly below them, trying to recall if the woman had the same dusky eyes, too. A nervous sweat on Effy formed when she wondered if she had just shot a Nekovalkyrja.

"Maybe we should see what she is first." Rifling in her butt pack, Effy began looking for a scanner, unwilling to sit with the idea that she had pulled her trigger on one of the very creatures she worked alongside, tried to be as good as, and -in some ways if not small- protected.

The woman had tried to get up after that first special stun shot, but the actual SiZi light cartridge shell had done enough to knock her down for a solid half a minute. After that time since being shot, Misaki would feel a slight pressure against the butt of her pistol as the woman stirred. She then remained still except for her head, which she was turning almost imperceptibly to look towards her captors.

Approaching Mud Fields

Tsubei's hands tapped at her elbows before she turned slightly at another groaning sound. From their vantage, Akahana and she could see that some of the operatives in the field were taking scans on the outskirts of it. One of them had hopped up into the air further when the sound turned to that of a wet gurgling noise. Large dollops of mud arched into the sky a few meters up as something was sinking in the wet field.

"What have you got?" Tsubei said in a line of sign telepathic message that she said aloud, giving no indication she wasn't speaking to Akahana. She then quickly turned to the black and white haired woman at the table in the tree line. "Requesting a Grav Beam Shuttle to pull it up."

"Did she say or do anything to tell you who she could be?" Tsubei asked as she unfurled her crossed arms. "If we don't know if she's hostile, keep a weapon on her while I check her vitals. No bleeding that I can see, that's good." Kneeling down Tsubei began to assess the woman. Her eyes were on the broken shoulder while she pulled her pink hair away and over her black-paneled shoulder and swept her ear to go just over the pale woman's back.

At this distance, Akahana could make out the strange colorations on her target. Where major veins and arteries were, light blue veins could slightly be seen under the alabaster woman's pallid skin. On her arms and calves those veins of color took over and the white faded, fully azure in color save for the mud that had splattered onto her in the fall and on her feet during her run towards the fields.

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

"We should, I thought we would have to wait for the others. Whatever is going on there, we can go after we see to this. She will not escape with the power of strength alone." Even if somehow the rousing creature underneath her had more power than she had, gravity manipulation was on her side when they were skin to skin, but she did her the courtesy of ensuring the mystery yurei would not suffocate on the ground.

"She could be related to me, somehow. At least superficially it seems so." The Chusa observed, "That just raises more questions, though I am forming more theories. We will have to eliminate them-with data."

Misaki exhaled, she estimated that even if it was not waking up, it would do to at least try to get through. "Do not resist. We were responding to an emergency in the area. Can you understand me?"

It stood to reason to her that their new captive was some kind of hybrid, which made her wary, but it was just as likely that somehow they had missed survivors of the devastation. Those were just some of the ideas computing through her brain while she made a study of the creature's face as well.

"I have not seen someone use one of those weapons in a while. Other than on a range." It made her think of Black Sands, which had courses in an interesting array of weapons one might have to improvise with in the field, as well as just seeing what others would bring to open training time on one of the ranges.

"I will get her up, she is light enough for me." That would have been a joke from anyone else. Misaki did not even have much of a functioning one until her stint aboard the Eucharis. She picked up their new blue friend and drifted from the ground slightly, making it easier to move her than trying to walk. "I will proceed facing you, floating backwards. In case she needs another round from yours."

With that, she slowly moved into position and towards the sound of the chaos while taking as much input as possible from her body. The Chusa's back effectively turned into her front. Misaki watched Effy as well, nodding slightly to her while they went on. "If the ground seems dangerous I will stop. If it starts to fall reach for my hand, I will catch you."

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Mud Fields

“Running scans now.” Akahana piped up as she moved in closer to the injured yūrei. In doing so, she pointed her left arm towards the pallid-skinned woman, utilizing the bracelet on her waist to run her scans. “If this is a Nightmare, it doesn’t look like any Nightmare-type I’ve heard of.” The Analyst added, as she took in the azure hue of the creature’s arms and calves.

Ametheliana said:

"Did she say or do anything to tell you who she could be?" Tsubei asked as she unfurled her crossed arms. "If we don't know if she's hostile, keep a weapon on her while I check her vitals. No bleeding that I can see, that's good."

Click to expand...

“She didn’t say anything.” The Snowy Neko replied with a frown, but she quickly took her NSP back out, trained on the injured woman in case she attempted to move again. “Was I supposed to wait before stunning her?” She asked, feeling slightly anxious at the prospect that she might have botched her assignment.

With field work, there were rarely any no do-overs, unlike the analytical clerical work Akahana was trained in. She could edit a report as much as she needed until it was perfect, but in a situation like this, she had only one chance to get it right. It was one of the many reasons why she had chosen analysis over operations, a decision which she had thought appropriate at the time, but was now starting to question if only for the fact that in this context, she lacked the confidence that operative training might have given her.

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

The dark-haired woman sneered at Misaki's words. Her fanged teeth opened, as if to speak, but to her wide-eyed surprise a gurgling sound came instead. A bubbling of orange liquid sprouted from between her teeth and a small trail of orange liquid pushed from her mouth and her hands instinctively tried to go to her own throat and failed due to the constraining hold, making her dark eyes simmered. Effy's scanner moved to the mouth of the pale bodied creature.

"She's fine, it's hemosynthesis, like... Like what we have. I'll continue scans, so far showing a lot more hemo, just not constituted in her body like it is in yours. How she's even standing is beyond me." Regarding her weapon choice, Effy said, "If I'm not a living weapon I might as well use all the ones at my disposal to come close to as good. Aghk!" Effy grunted as she was trying to take scans on the woman, but as Kurusu lifted her she started flailing and hissing. Though Misaki had a steady grip on her and was too strong -if not in humor than in bodily strength- to let go of her with a simple kick or attempted head butt. Effy saw her clasp her blue hands, one in a ball with the other over it before she brought her elbow in to Kurusu Misaki's side. The elbowing wasn't much of a hit, though, as Effy had shot her in the shoulder and the woman had gone limp before the impact into the white-paneled officer's jacket.

Effy's heavy breaths made the elf's SiZi ebb up and down in the air before she lowered it, holstered it, and started searching in her butt pack for something better suited to the task at hand than light weapon rounds.

Mud Fields

Tsubei looked up to Akahana, "Absolutely not. You did everything as necessitated, Santo Hei. I am happy she's breathing, though. There's no way to know who or what she is, whether she deserves death." The woman's mind thought of all that could have happened had the downed woman been hostile AND able to keep running towards all of the other field agents. In the current climate of special intelligence operations, they couldn't afford to lose anyone else. She started lifting the woman gingerly, making her groan aloud. A dribble came out of her mouth and smeared a gooey trail against the dark of Tsubei's black panels as she did.

Her lavender eyes met Akahana's varied teal ones to tell her, "Rather her with her face in the mud than one of our own, aye?" Tsubei heard the gunshot from deeper in the forest as Tsubei began walking with the woman on her shoulder towards the mud field where Akahana had started her mission this morning. "Maybe a broken arm's preferable to whatever our colleagues are doing, anyway. What did those scans say?"

Akahana's scans had pointedly found the cellular makeup of the creature to be an NH-29.

"Chusa, you better look at this!" came a call from the mud fields. Akahana and Tsubei could see the black and white hair of Kamikaze as she darted from her position, gun drawn on the field. With some periscopic vision, they would be able to see the mud of the field had sunk in dramatically, but within it was a writhing mass of filth that crawled upwards, out of the pit. Like a hoard of maggots on a corpse, another and another form could be made out in the greyish muck. Covered as they were, unseeable as anything but muck taking form and pulling themselves out from the ground, there was only thing that similar between them and the ones Akahana and Effy had shot. Akahana could see it feet away from herself and so could Tsubei- the woman below them had the same caked mud on her hair as that which the writhing masses were covered in.

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

Misaki was happy to take a beating from the creature, though she preferred not to. The mission came over her well-being, depending on the severity and importance. It was not an assumed, but she had made that sacrifice before.

"Your reactions are commendable. Well done." The Chusa reassured Effy, though she also sincerely meant it. The Eihei's instinct had been to just take the hit, rather than risk killing their prisoner, such as she was. The way she responded didn't give her much hope that there wasn't anything to do with the war going on. The fluid definitely reminded her more of those times. The messiest enemies so far. Her body still had the capability to expunge some of their more insidious parasites, for a reason.

Whatever was going on away from the woods was something they would have to contend with one way or another, and she made detailed recordings of their position and the surrounding environment to include with the report later. "We should find out what is going on, and report back with her." The creature looked enough like herself, as far as she was concerned. "So she has hemo but something is intensely wrong or sub-optimal with it? Perhaps this is a medical intervention more than some kind of intentional plot. One can hope." Her eyes landed on Effy again, and she nodded towards their starting area when they were called.

"We must hurry." She ordered, lifting from the ground again to dart the direction of the disturbance. When they got to the edge of the woods, she paused and stopped, trying to analyze what the mass exactly was. "Can you get a reading on that biomass?"

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Mud Fields

Akahana gave a soft smile as the Taii picked up the icy blue form of the dazed creature, before following after the pink-haired Operative as she led her back towards the mud fields.

“My scanner reports the subject as a NH-29.” Akahana said, her luminescent gaze going wide with surprise. At the very least, her initial guess as to the nature of the being was somewhat close. If her initial hypothesis had been correct, she would already be dead.

There was something good to take away from being alive and not waking up in a backup facility, at least.

Suddenly, the striped zebra mane of Kamikaze came into view, the frenzied register of her voice compelling Akahana to accelerate as fast her inertia controllers could push, until she reached the mud fields. Taking in the scene, the Snowy Neko pulled out her NSP as the disgustingly writhing figures emerged from the mud, like rats scurrying under a carpet.

“Permission to engage, Taii?” Akahana said, as she drew up her NSP, transmitting a telepathic packet to let Tsubei know that she intended to stun, rather than kill the strange creatures.

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

Effy took the praise and redistributed it to the robot dog at her heels, which she patted. After, she was again shuffling in her buttpack for another gadget and nodding along to the Chusa's words.

"The biomass, right. Oh, she's an NH-29, Akahana-hei figured that. If I specify that then... they are too. Their cellular makeup is in flux. I don't think they're as structurally sound as the ones in the woods like her," Effy commented with a jut of her jaw towards the woman Kurusu-chusa dragged. She noticed the white panel officer was wearing her hair in buns like Effy's, just one more, and smiled. Even with the vast differences between Nekovalkryja and Elf, similarities could still abound.

"We should scan her while she's still unconscious," Effy acknowledged. They were now at the edge of the woods and near the table that had been set up out of the autonomous medical unit. She started moving aside the many little orange jewels of hemosynth which had sprung up out of the mud, the mystery that had started it all.

Mud Fields

"Just grreat," Kamikaze growled when she heard the body type Akahana had scanned. To her request, "Denied. Kyo-chan, what'd you say?"

"We need more information on them. Willing to get your hands dirty?" The pink-haired woman had turned slightly to Akahana. Her black ears were down and her grimacing expression relayed more than a transmission could. Regardless, the santo hei got the same sort she had given to the Taii. Kyoka wanted to dive in to the muck and mire and find the source of the women crawling from it now.

"Cover us!" Kyoka was already bounding towards the mud fields in gravity assisted hops and had yelled to the blonde black panels nearby.

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Mud Fields

Ametheliana said:

"We need more information on them. Willing to get your hands dirty?" The pink-haired woman had turned slightly to Akahana. Her black ears were down and her grimacing expression relayed more than a transmission could.

Click to expand...

Akahana thought once, then twice. A flash of a grimace manifested across her alabaster features, before disappearing. However, in spite of the fact that she had worked carefully to avoid getting herself dirty up until that point, she didn’t hesitate in her response.

“Yes.” The Analyst said, her tone neutral and utterly dispassionate, resigned to the fact that she would be spending the evening working mud and slime out of her hair.

Lowering her NSP, Akahana placed the weapon back in its holster before taking a deep breath and following after the pink-haired Taii via her own inertia controller-assisted bounds. The buxom Snowy Neko’s movements were fast and graceful by the standards of a baseline human or a Nepleslian, but for a Neko they were clumsy even beyond subtlety. Nevertheless, Akahana was only a couple second behind the balletic Operative. At the very least, she was able to keep up with her!

Upon reaching the mud fields, Akahana sucked in her breath and did a quick check of her equipment to make sure it was secure on her person. Then, with one last intake of fresh air, the Analyst let herself fall into the sickening embrace of the writhing masses of biomatter and filth within the mud fields!

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

"We're just doing preliminary work, but it should be detailed and verified against other examples as you well know." Misaki replied with a nod. She still felt ill-at-ease with everything going on, and was more interested in securing the rapidly changing investigation perimeter rather than scanning, but there was a bit of satisfaction in having a bigger picture. One goal could lead to another.

The Chusa ensured that the scanner cleaned itself before putting their oh-so-friendly subject down and securing it. "I wonder if they had a long gestation period or if haunting reports mean they've been..." She hesitated to use the word, "...spawning here the whole time, since the battle? Speculation is well and good but they'll want answers."

"Reporting." Misaki used a communicator after cleaning her hands mostly just so Effy could hear her too. "We've got one at the scanner and are implementing one now. She is subdued. If you need more assistance we can put her under guard and link up." All of the quaking of the earth had her weighing what would happen where and next, by probability given the local topography and the rapidly revealing variables in the field. It would be in the mud as much as anything else, as far as she could estimate.

"What is your take so far?" She asked her elven counterpart while they waited on the scans.

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Mud Fields

"With me, Santo Hei!" Tsubei relayed her position in the mud as she tried a breaststroke downwards, then had to do a doggy paddle sort of pushing of the heavy mud. It wasn't as easy to glide through as water and the intense pressure hurt her frame, but she let her pain receptors take a break for the moment as she persevered deeper. After about a dozen feet she hit something more solid. With shut eyes and only her hands to guide her, Tsubei searched around for something, anything.

"Here! Come up." the Taii transmitted. She had found a crevice in the underside of the object and pushed up. With a groan, like the one they had heard earlier, the object sunk a foot deeper. But inside there was a pocket of air and Tsubei took a breath. There wasn't a lot of oxygen left in this little cave of space, though. She transmitted as much to Akahana as well as the words, "I owe you a proper bath. No, Kamikaze owes us both a bath. Mmmph..." Telepathically the sound was more of a feeling of soft yearning. "Got a flashlight? We're in some kind of starship compartment but the rest is difficult to make out."

Woods

"They have a finite control of their bodies, don't they? They can use optical camouflage with ease but they ran instead of utilizing gravity manipulation. She could barely speak. I think whatever's... spawning them isn't optimal. It's like it's made half of an NMX Neko..." Effy said as her eyes went to the pink, white, and black blurs jumping into the field. She thought of the orange flecks of hemo that had begun surfacing.

"But why now? Why now did the Tinudant Elves notice something wrong? Maybe the unusually high temperatures over the Summer months are the cause, unless it's something more intentional. It would make sense that they've which has haunted this forest," Effy said before her tone grew weightier with concern. "If you're right then there could be more."

"I've got this." By this point, Kamikaze had come over and inspected the woman as she groggily hissed at all three of them. The black and white haired woman nodded to Kurusu. "If she's right we'll have to delegate our already distracted operatives to comb this place for months. Is there anything in particular that you remember that got their attention? Made them uncloak? We could bait them out now rather than search later."

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Mud Fields

Much to her surprise, Akahana realized that it was possible to swim through the mud.

While moving through the thick, molasses-like substance was painful and physically demanding, she could do it in such a fashion which allowed her to follow Tsubei’s telepathic signature. However, she could only open her eyes in brief intervals to see what was ahead. Keeping them open for longer than a second or two hurt. Nevertheless, the Snowy Neko continued until she arrived at the solid object the Taii had located, before following her mane of pink hair up into a crevice at its underside.

Coming up, Akahana took a deep breath to refresh her lungs as she assessed her surroundings. Using one of the functions of her bracelet, a ball of white light illuminated the area, revealing what appeared to be a starship compartment.

“A bath sounds wonderful, right now.” Akahana agreed. “Maybe with a nice, aromatic bomb too. Mmmmf~” She added.

All the while, Akahana set her digital mind to the task of attempting to identify what kind of starship she was in. As an Analyst, she was trained to identify enemy equipment based on little more than silhouette or parts of a wreckage. In doing so, she used her bracelet to connect to SYNC and PANTHEON, in addition to referring back to the databases loaded into her digital mind.

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Woods

There was a lot to consider about the situation that they had ended up in. How and why did they appear when they did? If they were sentient could they be soul transferred to more stable bodies and educated? "Barring outside interaction from off-world somehow, there are several possibilities: they might be getting closer because Nekovalkyrja specifically are nearby, and thus they identify us as either their kind, or perhaps an enemy. There could be sympathetic responses in their biology to us, or just their mindset." Misaki ventured carefully, "Another possibility could in fact be that they came from wreckage underneath that is slowly degrading, making it impossible to continue living down there or using it as shelters. More ground penetration scans might tell us more, if that is the case?"

The Chusa glanced to the subject on the table, wondering just what went through her mind. It gave her the thought to try and communicate with the blue hybrid mind to mind.

Do you understand me? We mean only to help, if possible.

"It is also possible that yes, an environmental change forced them to activity for one reason or another. I suppose that will require more consultation and going over data, but I feel the answer will come from out friend here more easily."

Planet Yamatai
Forests Outside of Winsonville
Under Mud

Akahana would be able to tell it was an NMX flagship's interior from memory banks alone. Visual scans showed it to be a cloning facility, with some unfinished creatures still being created in hemo tubes.

"Some answers," Tsubei said. Whether a statement or a question was impossible to tell.

Woods

The woman looked up groggily, then under smoldering eyes spoke to Misaki's digital mind as she stared daggers at her.

Trying to help? My sisters are coming for me, they'll-

She crooked her neck uncomfortably, looking towards the clearing where those like her were being stunned in the mud. The light in her eyes faded.

Help.