RP: ISC Phoenix [Mission 1] - Feel the Pain

Suprise was the word that summed up Bronzi's emotional state over what had just transpired before him. He did not show it on his face. He simple remained silent and puffed his Cigar. Slowly his gun was placed back into its holster.

Bronzi responded to Melissa rather flatly. "Maybe....girls don't start bursting like that until I finish..."

Bronzi snorted and raised a hand signaling to the sniper watching his ass that they were about to continue moving forward.

He grunted and reached over taking his shot gun off of his shoulder. "Next move."

Zeta frowned, it seemed that the girl was some sort of neko. Maybe that is why she was immune. Her eyes checked over the others, but it seemed that did not hear anything. The girl talked with Zeta. Was she using telepathy? As far as Zeta knew, cats could do telepathy the same Luca does.

Before she could give it more thought Seiren called her on the radio. "Yeah the pink girl is not affected," Zeta responded to the girly boy. "She seems to be immune, or at least she did not contract whatever it is by now. Where are you Lass?" She asked him and headed the way she saw him walk before.

"Oh," she stopped an turn around to Bronzi and others. "I am going to Seiren, he is alone. You guys head on and just... explore or something." With that said, she started walking, using her armours IFF to locate Seiren's signal.

'Hey girl can you hear me?' Zeta thought loudly, while looking around. The bodyguard wanted to now a little more from the girl. Maybe the girl was invisible and following her around. Zeta turned her radio broadcast off and repeated the sentence aloud.

"Explore or somethin?" Bronzi snorted suddenly growing wide eyed. He realized this was not a military outfit, but those words struck him as down right incompetent.

Bronzi shrugged, and looked at Enzo motioning to start heading deeper into the town. "May as well look fer trouble."

"Oi, Boss." Melissa radioed Luca as he was sitting on his motorcycle and waiting for Vita to either hop in with Ellen or with him. Luca grabbed his earpiece. "You aren't gonna believe what I saw."

"You say that very often, Mel." Luca replied. "Hit me."

"I think the girl that Bronzi 'n Enzo were tryin' to shake for answers decided to explode into poly... poly..."

"Polygons." Luca filled in the blank. Melissa chirped happily.

"Yeah, you seen anything like that before?" Melissa asked Luca, who chewed on the question for a few moments.

[Mission 5.5] - Stormin' the Castle said:

Mindwrecker was a bit slower to react, but snatched up a cylinder the size of a thumb from her pocket and pressed a button - the device immediately appeared to burst into a purple psychic blast (through holograms) and threw it towards Luca...

Click to expand...

He nodded to himself and mulled this over.

"Remember N-357?" Luca asked Melissa, who murmured a yes in reply. "Yeah. I wonder whatever happened to that woman?" Melissa mumbled another reply, indicating a general indifference to the question. "If that pink haired girl shows up again, do not engage." He then tapped his headpiece again and looked over to Vita from his motorcycle. "Your call, V."

From where she leaned against the red door of the sports car, Vitalia shrugged.

"See you later, then." Luca replied as he flipped up the kickstand and drove towards the oil derricks. The others seemed to have the rest of the town covered, so he took one of the areas that wasn't occupied by one of his team.

"Everyone, status report? I need something to send to Panther and Scott." Luca asked the rest of his team as he rode his motorcycle towards the derricks, kicking up a cloud of dust in the dirt.

"Still waiting." John replied from Sargasso.
"Perched 'n waiting," Melissa replied as she kept her binoculars up. She lowered them and took a sip of water from a bottle she'd bought with her. "Very little activity, I see the occasional wanderer 'er person starin' out a window like 'ey've seen a ghost but they're spaced as."

"N0 W3B ACT1V1TY. QU13T 4S C4N B3 - N0 P0RN0 31TH3R." Echelon reported. She'd been watching the InterNep lines in and out of town, and they were open. If you wanted to download something huge, the entire town was literally waiting for you to do so.
"I'm getting nothing either." Allison piped up as she was watching the utilities in and out. Power fluctuations and water lines. They seemed to be under a normal load.

"Scott, Panther, any progress?" Luca asked the two via a longer distance line. "We're finding weird shit here. I'll get the others to send you photos and I'll get John to drop you both off here when you're ready."

"Guys, send photos and whatever data you can to Scott and Panther." Luca made one last announcement over radio. "They've got a lab and better tools than we do. I'm by the oil derricks. They seem to be completely still." Luca's bike rolled to a stop and he killed the engine, flipping the kickstand down and looking around. The motorcycle locked itself, awaiting its rider as he looked around. They were all still, and the smell of oil hung in the air. There were reserves of crude oil hidden deep beneath this stretch of land - just waiting to be milked.

-

Seiren heard the girl blow her nose into the tissues. Pppbbhthbhthbtht. "Th...thanks." She sniffled before blowing her nose ag-Ppthhthbhtpthpbhtphb. Eww, it was blue.

"Er, anytime," The inventor replied, visually cringing at the snot. "You can, uh... keep-"

ShotJon said:

Before she could give it more thought Seiren called her on the radio. "Yeah the pink girl is not affected," Zeta responded to the girly boy. "She seems to be immune, or at least she did not contract whatever it is by now. Where are you Lass?" She asked him and headed the way she saw him walk before.

Click to expand...

"Oh, good, you're back on comms. I'm just a bit past the town square, towards the docks!" Seiren said into his communicator, looking down the road and expecting to see Zeta. Of course, she was in a different area at this point, so he saw nothing.

Waves upon waves of nothing were crashing down the street towards Seiren, inflicting nothing upon him.

"Man, I feel like some creepy narration was just made," He shuddered, stooping low to face the girl. "Ever get that feeling?" She looked up at Seiren and gave him a questioning look, tilting her head to the side somewhat. If nothing else it took her mind off her immediate worries for the moment.

On another note, he mused on the fact that her snot was. . . blue. That's not any normal colour, not one bit. Using his built-in handy-dandy Yamataian telepathy, he called out to Echelon. "Can you do a search for things that would cause snot to turn blue in yamatians and nepleslians?"

"S0UNDS L1K3 W1TCHCR4FT." Echelon replied once it got to her end and she had to load that Yamataian-Telepathy to Freespacer Binary, which had 0's, 1's and -1's. "S34RCH1NG... S34RCH1NG..."

"1 TH1NK 1T C0ULD B3 4N 0V3RD0S3 0F L0R4TH DRUGS... L00K." Echelon sent a picture to Seiren of someone passed out with what looked like blue coming out of their nostrils and mouth.

"Well, it's worth a shot. Could you open your mouth for a sec? Say, 'aaa,'" he requested, pointing to his mouth and sticking out his tongue. She opened her mouth and made the requisite 'aaa' and he spotted flecks of blue on her gums, and in the flesh of her cheeks and the back of her mouth. Seiren could see that it was a while since she'd eaten.

"Tell me what you can remember, as far back as you can go," Seiren asked the girl, probing further. He sent a second message to Echelon, this time asking, "Could you research if any of those drugs cause memory loss? And whether less severe doses leave flecks of blue in their mouth and stuff?"

"4LL 0F '3M D0, 1T'S G0NNA B3 L1K3 F1ND1NG 4 N33DL3 1N 4 N33DL3ST4CK... W44441T 4 S3C... H3Y, S33 1F Y0U C4N G3T S0ME0N3... 1 TH1NK 1 S4W 4 L0R4TH L34V1NG LUK3'S 4PP4RTM3NT 4 C0UPL3 N1GHTS 4G0. M1GHT ST1LL B3 1N S4RG4SS0."

"Well, that's helpful all the way out in. . . wherever we are now! Any chance you've got footage or something- no wait, that's not helpful. I don't know any Lorath. Well, keep searching for symptoms. I'll continue with the wild wilderness that is an amnesiac's mind, see what I can find."
"G0TCH4."

"Um... Um..." The girl hesitated, she tapped her foot against the ground and tried her hardest. "I think... we got here... on..." She fished through the pocket in her hoodie and held out a communicator. "Says..."

Communicator said:

(8 Days ago) @passion_blossom: We found this awesome place - we can do whatever we want here! Aoi showed us!

Click to expand...

"That's good, but do you really remember anything? Or is it all sort of not there in the wibbley ethereality?" Seiren asked. He passed along the message to Echelon, hoping that she'd pick up on the queue and track down as much information about these people. Yamataian social networks weren't Freespacer-proof, after all. On a side not, he tacked on a little message for Echelon to send on what she found to the not-Smith and Catman, since they seemed to be more well versed in poison.

She hesitated for another moment and her train of thought was derailed. "Ummmmmm..." Wherever her head was at the moment, it was in some wibble and wobble.

-

Enzo and Bronzi, meanwhile, wandered into the thicker residential area, in search of 'trouble' of a sort. The duo continued to be met with little resistance on all sides, and they steadily begun to understand why people would come here, move in, rob everyone else blind and sit on their laurels - there was nobody to prosecute them. Nobody to bop them on the nose and tell them to put that back. In a sense, it was liberating, but the euphoria of hard earned and hard won loot was missing.

That feeling you got when you pried your just dues away from the blood and filth from the weak and vanquished after they'd truly tried to kill you to protect their shadowy masters or their own interests. They could smell smoke, and Bronzi's nose eventually led them to a campsite that was set up in the park using supplies raided from a camping shop. The setup was elaborate for a makeshift camp, and the facilities there seemed have been erected within the past month. Scrawled upon a tarpaulin in Yamatai-Go were the words: "OUR PLACE!"

The smell of half cooked food was hanging in the air, and looking further into the camp, Enzo was able to spot half eaten food, left there on the table and waiting. However, the odd thing about it was that it didn't look rotten. Time had not gotten to it. The question in the air was, how long was it there?

"W...No...Ba...Sho..." Enzo sounded out the characters on the sign, his thick Nepleslian accent trampling over the delicate language of the Yamataians. Shifty eyes panned the sign and the dinner beyond it. Enzo shifted the cigarette in his mouth and and shuffled into a chair at the table. He sunk a plastic fork into a cocktail sausage and held the abandoned delicacy to his scrutiny.

"Why," He asked Bronzi, his finger testing the temperature of the discarded treat, "Do yous think she ran away from us, if we can't hoit 'er? Maybe she has friends here she wants to protects, yeah?"

Enzo was familiar with the brand of sausages. Wednesday night compliment to a decent Salisbury steak meal. He was able to recognise when they were starting to get on the nose. These ones ... these ones looked okay to eat still. If the sausages were here, the box wouldn't have been far away so he could confirm when they were supposed to expire. Of course, Enzo wasn't that kind of detective. He just shoved the sausage into his mouth and chewed on it contemplatively, his mind telling him whether it was four hours or four days old. Enzo's distinguishing palette for Nepleslian fineries told him that this was beyond the four day limit. After a few bites, he extinguished his cigarette on the surface of the table and took another sausage between his lips.

"Or maybe-- maybe, she just don't likes us, yeah?" He asked Bronzi again, with his fork twirling in the air. "Cuz dis stuff 'eres been out quite a while."

And then there was an after-taste not native to the sausages. It tasted velvety, as though they'd been dunked in something for a moment and dried quickly - although the taste of it pervaded his palette. Vaguely tingly in sensation, he blinked as he tried to catalogue exactly what it was.

"Is dis?" Enzo asked the sand beneath his feet, "Is dis some drugs!?"

He didn't recognise what it was - it didn't have the Nepleslian or Yamataian taste - it wasn't like the little bits of stims that come in the Neppies Nepburgers that put lead in your pencil, or the artificial umami taste of Yamataian fare. It was distinctly un-food-like.

"Yo, Greenskin," Enzo barked, forking another sausage and turning on his chair to offer it to Bronzi, "Put yous schnoz on this, Mister Smells Everything."

Vitalia looked over to her fellow teenager and considered her.

That much consideration seemed unnecessary, however; instead, Vitalia slipped into the vehicle and paid more attention to the interior than the owner.

"Perhaps we ought to get going. Everyone else seems to have."

Ellen hopped into her side of the vehicle, and slammed the door shut, clipping her seatbelt like a good little girl despite the fact that her dress was more appropriate for a thug- torn jeans and a jacket with bullet holes will give that vibe- And pressed the button to turn the vehicle on.

"Follow that motorcycle!" she asked the car, and it did so. She turned to Vita and apologized, sort of "I can't actually drive the thing, luckily, it drives itself. But It's kind of embarrassing, you know?"

Zeta walked the streets to where Seiren was waiting. She wondered what really happened in this town, keeping her gun close to her hands should she need it. This did not seem like a problem that could be resolved by guns anyway. Not to mention that only danger she could face here so far was if one of the braindead folks walked into her, because he or she would not notice her. If they are even able to walk.

When she was further from Bronzi and Enzo she opened her helmet and lit a deathstick. She then callled Luca. "Hey Luca," she said with worry in her voice. "I was contacted by someone who still have her brain in this mess. That pink girl. She said she came with her friends to fool around, but her friends were affected by all this and she was not. She can play around with volumetric in a matter I have no seen before. I think she is some kind of neko. Oh and she could speak into my head like you can. Just giving you an update."

With that she reached Seiren and the girl he stood next to. "Allrighty lass I am here," she said and gave the girl a nod. She seemed pretty out of it. "So what do you got for me?"

"I smell it fine from here..." Bronzi said as he skimmed over the camp.

"She prolly don't like us." Bronzi said holding his shot gun. "Ey...I have an idea..."

Bronzi said eyeing up several hiding spots. "You pick a spot...an I'll pick one, when who ever stays here comes back we can get tha drop on em."

Bronzi radioed in on the private channel to Melissa. "Setting up an ambush, goin silent."

"Well, it looks like we've got an amnesiac Yammie who may or may not been poisoned by Lorath Drugs. Seems kinda fantastical, that the drugs make their snot and stuff blue, but hey! I don't make the pharmaseuticals, I just watch as freespacers diagnose 'em. Whaddta think, Zeta?" Seiren asked, standing up and stretching out his legs. Crouching down for so long irritates the knees, after all.

"Righto Bronzi - but question 'fore ya-" And then the radio went silent on Melissa's end, delivering static as Bronzi's radio was shut off. "Oh fer fuck's sake," she growled before trying to contact the other person who was accompanying Bronzi. "Oi," Enzo's radio sparked to life: "Who th' piss are ye gonna ambush? This's a ghost town."

Meanwhile, over by the oil derricks, Luca was picking his way through the dragnet. Looking amongst the derricks that once pumped, a smell hung thick in the air. Thick enough that if you struck a match, there'd be barely enough oxygen for the flame to ignite.

Luca was very glad that there were no reasons to do such a thing. He couldn't help but wonder what the town had done to deserve its current fate, according to the pictures and dialogue Seiren was sending to Scott and Panther back at Sargasso. It made his stomach turn - perhaps this was the sort of thing that'd sprung up in his absence.

Contemplating, he knew that fighting the symptoms of some greater cause was no way to solve the world's problems - but if some alternate solution arose that'd allow him to cut through all the cruft and bullshit and just destroy the worlds problem - he'd take it. After that however, then he'd have no other problems to solve and he'd be made redundant by the powers that be and back where he started. He wouldn't be able to live with that. He had to be doing something, otherwise doing nothing was equivalent to dying.

And then Luca realised that he was not cut out for needless philosophical introspection as he bumped into and tripped over a crate that was not supposed to be there. Eyes rolling about in his skull as he wondered just what he'd tripped over as he was lost in thought.

He got up off of his kneepads, dusted himself off and looked at the offending object with a scowl. "How dare you interrupt my train of thought!" He said indignantly, knowing that there was nobody around or at least a mile in all directions - save for his team further inside the city. He gave the box a swift booting, before realising that this was a poor idea. The crate was made of Durandium - his foot was made of flesh and wrapped by leather and stone thread. The results were less than stellar.

He leapt into the air clutching his foot and hopping on the other leg before standing down and looking at the box, clearly aggrieved. He bent down and then pushed the box upwards on an angle, before pushing it over and tipping its contents out.

The contents of the box appeared to be the foil blister packages that contained pills - with all of the pills missing in each one, alongside spent syringes, bloodied instruments, discarded gloves and masks and broken glassware.

"Huh..." Luca's train of thought coupled itself to a different track, one that he was unfamiliar with. "I wonder what all this is supposed to do?" His limited medical knowledge meant that he was short of an answer as he looked at all the rubbish on the floor.

And he wouldn't dispose of it thoughtfully - the container had wronged him. "I wonder if Scott can make arse and ends of this?" He asked himself before answering his own question by getting his communicator and snapping a picture of it. He strewed the rubbish about and turned parts of it over with a stick.

He was then getting prepared to send them off, putting them in a folder file and sending it to Scott. However, in this area, there was little reception for his long-distance multimedia send - and he kept having to retry it. He growled at his communicator and pocketed it - files ready to be sent once he found a better line.

Ellen's car did as it was told, and whisked the two girls across town post-haste, showing up a few minutes after Luca- Ellen had neglected to ask the car to hurry, and so it had sort of taken its time.

When they arrived, however, Ellen hopped out immediately and looked over at the box and all the things in it which had accosted Luca.

"The heck is all that crap?" she asked, not that Luca Knew.

"It's fresh." Bronzi grunted back to Melissa.

"Looks like its been used more then once...and then the... literature." He snorted as he lifted lifted his right hand pulling his goggled over his eyes. Melissa, Luca and who ever else were on this little net work would receive uploads of what Bronzi was seeing.

"Half eaten food, fresh waste...this camp was prolly rockin and rollin not long before we got here.....an its too well made to be just a temporary area."

"Yer call, you have a better idea lemme have it."

As he took a step out of the craft, Smith surveyed the dying town.

Everything was as they had said. Practically dead silent, with hardly a sign of life anywhere as far as he could tell. It might have been the lenses of the gas mask he wore, obscuring the living from sight, but even over his faint respirator breathing, it was well and truly silent. Dust was caught in the lonely wind as it sighed in disappointment while a tumbleweed rolling by to better lands and better places. "This is Smith here - we've arrived on site with some things we hope will be of some use," he cued his comms.

The gravel crunched under his nice looking shoes as he stepped forward.

"Eh..." Enzo finally swallowed his last bite of sausage and gazed around the camp with a wide yawn.

"I thinks we oughta gets to some higher grounds er' somethin'." He suggested, eyeballing nearby buildings for drainpipes and exposed gutter.

Bronzi looked in the same direction Enzo was looking at. "Scared ta get a little blood on ya eh?"

Bronzi then began calmly walking towards the building. Bronzi was surly, though he held his shotgun almost naturally as he moved. He was no crime scene investigator or scientist, but he had seen camps like these before. Who ever had built it did not belong here, and they were probably up to no good.

"Prollem with all of this runnin around tho? If them fucks who built that camp do decide ta come back, erry bodeh is all scattered about....makes for easy pickings."

"I gots plenty blood on me already, pal." Enzo commented, mounting a drainpipe and pulling against it with his boots to test its strength. After deciding it was well below what was safe for his weight, he began scrambling up it anyway in a shower of rusty bits of metal and screws.

With a swing and a grunt, the wiry conman hefted himself onto the roof of the building and peeked down at Bronzi. As his hat was caught in the wind and wafting its way down to the Gartagen, Enzo suggested, "Maybe easy pickins', sure. But it's easier pickin's from above, partner."

There was a contemplative puff of smoke before Enzo disappeared over the ledge, standing to get that better view he'd been wanting.

His voice echoed from above.

"Will yous grab 'dat hat an' holds onto it fer me? You can wear it til' we have our tearful reunion, yeah?"

Bronzi reached out and picked up the hat in mid air. He held it between the tips of his claws in his right hand and looked up. "Monkeys." He chortled as he stared up at the wiry Nepleslian.

Bronzi looked about and decided that he would give Enzo some credit and join him. In a much less dramatic fashon Bronzi bent his leg joints and then launched him self up. He caught on to the ledge of the building and hefted his bulk up. Bronzi rose to his feet and offered out the hat to Enzo.

"Don't start yer make out session with me jus yet. I like ta wait until after tha fightin."

Scott and Panther had touched down where Lina had left the others earlier, and was free to listen in on their radio activity once Echelon sent him the frequencies.

"1T'S B33N QU13T." Echelon observed as she continued monitoring the idle network connections whilst Allison was still monitoring utilities - and becoming bored, playing on her communicator. "LUK3S W3NT 0V3R T0 TH3 D3RR1CKS. W3NT QU13T. B4D R3C3PT10N."

"Yeah, someone hasn't paid the phone bill in a while." Allison radioed forth, sighing as she continued watching her instruments and waiting.

The duo were sitting down in the shade of someone's house with a portable computer and surveying tools set up and drawing power and interNep connection from a series of landline that was snaking into the house. They were sitting back to back with each other, Allison wearing a headset.

"WH4T'S THE B1G ONE H3R3?" Echelon pointed to a large power spike on their location by highlighting it on Allison's screen.
"That's us, Ech." She chuckled.

-

Bronzi and Enzo were doing a different kind of waiting. Instead of merely observing, they were anticipating something and they'd made appropriate precautions to deal with whatever it was they were anticipating. If it ever came out, they'd be ready for it. The smell of the half-cooked, drugged food was hanging thick and heedy in the air. A headache had begun to develop in the rogue and the Gartagen, as though they'd just rolled over from a bender and spotted something whose species had a few too many apostrophies to pronounce correctly.

"Yo, greenskin..." Enzo muttered with a hard rub at his eyes before reclaiming his hat. "Yous don't thinks that the reason this town is so stupid is they's poisoned the sausage supply, does yous?"

Enzo's radio crackled to life again. "I can see ya, monkey man." Shot the voice of that gruff Delsaurian real woman, Mel.

"Really!?" Enzo shot back, pressing the device to his face, "Yous gots good eyes, beautiful. How does I look?"

"Like shit," She shrugged, peering at the rogue through her adjustable x32 magnification scope, finger off of the trigger. "But it wouldn't be you any other way. Anythin' come t' ambush ya yet?"

Enzo squinted over the horizon at the surrounding collection of sand, rocks, campsite, and other assorted boring nothing where a town park once was before replying with a muted, "Nope."

"Damn shame." Melissa sighed, grumbling as she grabbed the barrel of her rifle and folded the tripod. "Fuck it. There's nothing to do here. I think we're gonna die 'a boredom instead of some hokey disease." She swivelled her rifle upwards and started looking towards the sky for some flying targets. She then switched channels to talk to her commander. "Oi Lukes."

Static. "Luca?" More static. "Fucksocks." She switched channels to Enzo. "Oi can you call Captain Dunnybrush face fer me?"

"Sure, why nots?" Enzo replied. He thumbed a few buttons on his radio with a furrowed brow and keyed the mic for Luca's frequency. "Yo, Cap'n Pavone. Pick up, jerk."

-

Luca was fiddling with his communicator and giving it some percussive maintenance as he tried to figure out why his signal had dropped. He was paying top dollar for that world wide coverage. "For the love of-" he groaned. He groaned. "Bloody useless TitanNep PTT." He rolled his eyes as he closed his paperweight of a communicator and looked at Vitalia and Ellen. "If I am to guess what this is, its medical and, perhaps, chemical waste."

He sighed. "See once mad scientist and what they do, see 'em all. Right?"

-

"Yeah, it ain't happenin', sister." Enzo told Melissa, switched back to her again, "Yous wants I should take the greenskin an' go checks on 'im?"

Melissa nodded at her headset, then remembered that headsets do not pick up the Nod motion unless they are Yamataian headsets with the fancy head-tracking built into them. "Yeah." She said.

-

Zeta squated next to Seiren. She took a cigarette out of one of the pockets on her belt and lifted the faceplace of her helmet. Lighting the deathstick she looked at the boy. "So what do you got Lass?" She asked him with raised eyebrow. "I met some pink-haired girl that could remotely control volumetrics in a way it made them feel like something solid and real. I think she was a neko or something. It seems she was not the cause."

"Oooof course she was! 'Cuz Nekovalkryja can tooootally leave Yamataian space!" Seiren responded sarcastically, popping out a not-contaminated piece of candy into his mouth. "But it is strange. She could have one of those Origin thingies."

Zeta raised an eyebrow. Did Seiren forgot or did not know about Naoko? No he was still aboard when they picked her up. "Believe me honey, there are Nekoe's outside Yammie space," She said with a smile, remembering Vita's mother once again.

"Pretty unlikely that they'd leave Yamatai itself on a pleasure cruise, though. From what I gather, that one neko we had on staff was a military neko that was forgotten on the front or something, yanno? All the evidence here points to so somebody that left Yamatai - meaning CUSTOMS, man."

Zeta took a puff on her cigarette and patted Seiren on the shoulder. "Lass, believe me. There are nekoes outside Yamatai. I mean could you be living in land like Yamatai?" She asked him. "I bloody could not and I can believe there are nekoes who just want to run aways. For like... adventures and things. But anyway, what do you got?" Her mechanical hand pointed at the girl next to Seiren.

The girl didn't acknowledge the hand, continuing to squirm as she tried to make sense of everything that had happened around her.

"It's a body restriction thing, Zeta. They'd make 'em switch to Minkan bodies before they can leave," Seiren sighed, turning his head back to the girl. "I pretty much told you everything I knew about her earlier, but she came with your pinkie to here for fun, essentially, and took some probably Lorath drugs and is now an amnesiac."

"So this is how it progress eh?" Zeta said and sighed, it seemed as if the girl paid no attention to them, even when they talked about her. Such a horrible thing to happen. Zeta threw the rest of ciggarete on the ground adn stepped on it, closing her helmet again. "Hmm drugs you say? That could be it. She needed to get them into herself somehow. Also if she is one some crazy joyride, she might have been doing drugs before she even got here."

"I dunno. Last I heard, Lor-drugs weren't taken recreationally by anybody. Then and again, I never went to college."

"Neither did I," Zeta shrugged. "I never did drugs too. Always was fine with alcohol and okay... had a weed few times but that is it. Still we are not any wiser then we were when we arrived. Care to go deeper into the town?"

"But what about the girl?" She looked up after being addressed by the familiar voice, and then looked back down when she saw the new, unfamiliar figure with a grey right arm.

Another shrug, "I believe it would be better to let her be here. We can take her with us if you want though." She then went and activated her radio. "Allyson, honey. You have a read on the power grid eh? Is there any place where more power is used? That pink haired girl has to be somewhere, she could be using more power than one would think."

Allison snapped out of her trance, playing InfiniBricker, and alt-tabbed to Zeta. "Oh, yeah, uh." She checked the map of electricity usage that'd been building in the background quietly, now fully compiled and awaiting analysis. "I can see a few spots in the built up areas where I'm guessing people forgot to turn off TV's or Computers, but I haven't been here long enough to note average use or on/off times. I - wait a sec."

She zoomed in on the Water Plant. It was not connected to the power grid, just like the Oil derricks were not connected, and not contributing nor drawing power. She then took her eyes off of the screen and radioed Melissa. "Hey, Mel, could you look at that water plant for me?"

"Hold on -" The sound of a crack could be heard echoing through the city. A pile of flesh and feathers that could have alledged to be a bird fell near Enzo and Bronzi's encampment. "Alright." She swivelled around, and took a look at the place. She took her eye off of the scope after a cursory glance and shrugged. "It looks like a water plant to me."

"Its not connected to the grid." Allison replied. "Where is it getting power? Its pumping water through the town. An emergency power supply would've dried out after a week."

"That means someone is controlling it," Zeta suggested with a nod. "Or maybe it is set on automatics or something. Still worth checking it out." Zeta hoped they might find some answers there. That said if this was caused by drugs, the Water Plant was best place to get them into people. Just drug the water.

"1 TH1NK F0UND 0UR MYST3RY G1RL T00, Z3TA." Echelon piped up, now starting to pulse the lines now that Allison had mapped them out, and she had a baseline of non-activity to draw from - noting the small spike coming from an apartment building near the campsite. "W3B 4CT1V1TY! N0TH1NG T0 D0 W1TH TH3 POW3R PL4NT TH0UGH." A ping came up on everyone's communicators to highlight the offending locations. "I F0UND LUC4. H3'S 1N 4 BL4CKSP0T 1F H3'S 1N TH3 D3RR1CKS."

Zeta frowned again and looked at Seiren. "Which one do you want to check first lass?" She asked him. "Plant or the appartment? Allyson, Ech care to join us?"

Panther stepped out of the shuttle craft after Scott, with his hood over his head and the him of the hood pulled over his face to keep the dust out. His ears were perked, and his nose attempted to catch any unusually smells in the air.

Panther was back in his element.

As Scott made his call, the assassin moved only a short distance away to get his bearings and mark places that would make good vantage points for an attack. His tail swished against the back of his hoody as he focused his awareness for danger.

Bronzi squatted on his haunches and began fiddling with the data entry pad on his left for arm. His suit had a few stimulants left, but he was evaluating his biology. "Damn it." He grunted. His suit hissed softly as he injected a pain killer into his blood stream. Bronzi shouldered his shot gun, and rested his MG on the edge of the building

"Humidity." Bronzi placed his re-breather over his face.

"What ever they used, its good. I can't smell nothin of it. My bet is the water. I'm hopin dat sniper is good at snipin, she is good at talkin..."

Bronzi spoke on the open band so Melissa could hear him.