Clusterfrag

Just as soon as the sudden, vicious combat ends, a ventilation shaft erupts with flames. Smoking debris spews into the laboratory.

Max's reverie over Sinjin's violent grace is broken by the explosion, and the elf runs the remaining length of the hallway to grab the blood-soaked hostage and make for the door through which the terrorists emerged.

Tyros redirects the charge he began towards where the terrorists previously stood and angles for the exit. He is constantly impressed by the team's speed and efficiency when taking down hostiles. Their reaction time puts the big troll to shame as the battle is often won before he can close to striking distance with the enemy. Hard to race bullets, even with magic propelling him.

"Save some fun for me next time boys!"

The team crosses the laboratory, dodging flaming debris and the chemical fires erupting from enviornmental vents. Glass beakers explode under the heat, filling the air with shards of glass a midst the embers that float and dance like fireflies.

Tyros stumbles, experiencing a wave of dizziness as the astral background count begins to rise.

Adams charges forward, keeping his elbows tucked in, and avoiding the eruptions around him.

"Chemical seals, NOW!" He shouts, before slapping the face place of the helmet closed.

Val slaps closed the visor on his helmet as he barrels after Doc through the maelstrom of flame, smoke and dust. His shoulder is struck by a flying graduated cylinder a split second later, sending shards of glass skittering across his visor. Val directs a wireless thought to the state-of-the-art armored suit, and peeks at the suit status just below the biomonitor feed in his visual field periphery.

>> ChemSeal_Status = OK
>> Int_Airflow = 1

A soft hiss reaches Val's ears as the suit pumps oxygen into his sealed helmet from the auxiliary air tank. Val keeps charging.

The elf fumbles for a moment with his visor before getting a bearing on it. The smoke and gas in his eyes makes it hard to gather his wits about him, but eventually his fingers find home and awkwardly snaps the seal closed. Max breathes relieved gasps as the toxic outside air is closed out and filtered by the new armor he's coming to really appreciate. His air now secured, he charges ahead out of the maelstrom with renewed vigor.

Catching his feet, Tyros slips his respirator into place and shuts the visor of his motorcycle helmet to protect his eyes. For a moment he regrets not having one of the fancy new combat suits with full environmental seals the rest of the team is sporting. But one glance at his costumed, superhero look alike friends reminds him why he chose not to. Making his way towards the exit, Tyros switches to astral vision and takes a hard look at the mana in he area (roll assessing to figure out what is raising the background count).

The blazing inferno fades as the team pounds through the laboratory corridors, replaced with a miasma of toxic gasses. The only light comes from emergency strobes that flicker sporadically throughout the ravaged halls. An eerie silence fills the air, punctuated only by the reverberating breaths of the Firestarter mercenaries' chemical scrubbers.

Max takes the hostage he saved by the shoulders and asks with urgency,

"Can you tell us where the others are?"

Slightly out of breath as he struggles to get sufficient airflow through his respirator to satisfy his sprint, <"Val, where are we going?! it's a fraggin' maze in here.">

A retort comes unbidden to the tip of Val's tongue about someone not using the software he provided the team, then he remembers that not everyone has the luxury of an AR feed. Considering that, he supposes he can't blame Tyros for not stopping to pull out his commlink in the midst of this drekstorm. He calls up an AR window in his own cluttered feed. The clutter doesn't bother him nearly as much as an entirely clean field of view. The sensation that brings is much like being naked for a decker as constantly immersed as Val. He scans the route that the team's PAN blips are taking, attempting to figure out where they're headed, and whether there's a discrepancy between that and where it looks like they should be headed.

A volley of throwing knives whips through the air and riddles the BioDrive employee in Max's care. Her body jerks under the impact and she slumps over, having been killed instantly.

Max spins immediately from the dead hostage with his shotgun drawing from the sling over his shoulder. In the tension of the moment, Max realizes to his horror that Marlowe is riding into combat at half ammunition capacity, but there's no time to deal with that now. Max dives behind cover and peeks out with his weapon, looking for hostiles.

Adams gets against the wall, and sweeps the rifle across the smoky hallway. The helmet's ultrasound cuts through the haze, and overlays his vision with a wireframe recreation of the ruined corridors.

< Drek! Did anyone see where that came from? >

Tyros, still viewing the world in astral vision, scans the room again, looking for living auras. No shadow or flimsy wall can provide a hiding place in the astral realm for their ambusher.

In the back of his mind, Tyros wonders why their would be assailant targeted the hostage with his surprise attack instead of the obviously much more dangerous shadowrunners. What could the hostage have known that would make him a first priority target?

Whatever is in the air interferes with Tyros' astral perception. Flakes of something glitter around him, obscuring his vision of all things magical.

Max eyes the eerie stillness of the room and glances back at the body. Estimating the source of the throwing knives from the angle of their penetration, the elf digs into his pack and produces an high explosive grenade. He pulls the pin, waits a second, and lobs it overhand in the direction of the assailant's possible cover. As the grenade leaves his hand, the elf comms subvocally to the team,

<Fire in the hole!>

Frustrated and unconfused by the astral background count, Tyros switches to normal vision and ducks his large frame low to avoid any flying shrapnel from Max's grenade.

The grenade arrives at its destination, but in two distinct halves. Something shadowy and impossibly fast flits around Max's peripheral vision.

Max's anxiety is slowly on the rise as he remedies the half-load of his shotgun, frantically jamming rounds into the weapon. Calling out to the team, he asks,

<Who's got IR that might be able to see this motherfragger? Or maybe roll a smoke grenade out there so we can track its movement through the haze!>

Adams looks at the room in a combo of IR, thermal, and ultrasound, trying to pinpoint their foe on any spectrum available to him.

< Stand back! >

Aiming in the direction that Max threw the grenade, he fires twice from the underbarrel MGL-6, the airburst timers set to detonate in the air approximately where Max's grenade was sliced in half.

(( I'm assuming this is far enough away to do this safely ))

The brief illumination from Doc's mini-grenades reveal a humanoid figurine, just for a brief moment. Something hisses through the air and the lab table next to Max appears to bisect itself and collapse.

The elf spins and fires blindly in the direction of the sudden destruction-- a violent knee-jerk reaction that gives the team reason to believe that it would be a bad idea to ever throw Max a surprise birthday party.

Adams thinks a command to the MGL-6, and the magazine slides out and clatters to the floor. Reaching into a slim pouch on his battle armor, he withdraws another magazine--a special magazine that he'd hoped to never have to use-- and slides it into the grenade launcher with a slightly trembling hand.

He fires off two more grenades that detonate against the walls with a quieter thump and then a hiss.

< Keep your chemseals on, boys! > He comms, as the hallway floods with breathtaker gas.

Something, out of the team's line of sight, begins wheezing and stomps off down the corridor.

Max stands up quickly at the wheezing and fires a wide burst of slugs down the hallway in hopes of at least winging their assailant.

<"We have to keep moving! Whatever that is, we are at a disadvantage standing here. Let's make it come to us where we can choose the battlefield.">

The invisible troll moves to a half crouch and moves off towards the exit.

Not relishing the thought of being left behind with whatever lurks these halls, Val charges after Tyros.

< Tyros, does that thing have an astral signature? Can you track it... or better yet kill it? >

Val's finds himself wondering what it would be like to have a hostile Sinjin around, making japes at him while mopping the floor with his blood. He shudders and suppresses the thought before it can give wings to his fear.

The team creeps forward, finally emerging from the gas-plagued laboratory sector and emerging in a huge maze of large centrifuges. Surprisingly, the air is alive with the hum of equipment. The centrifuges are running.

Val sweeps the room with the muzzle of his rifle warily before letting it fall on its sling. Keeping one hand on the grip of his weapon, he strides quickly to a lab table next to a centrifuge cluster and begins rifling through its contents for some clue as to what's substance is being processed.

<"I couldn't see anything in astral space back there, something was clouding my vision...">

Tyros checks astral vision in the centerfuge room, hoping that he can see clearly once again.

Tyros' astral vision is murky. The background count persists in this room, though not quite to the same degree as before. There seems to be astral energy coming from the centrifuges.

Val peeks over the safety glass into the specimen tray. Several rows of tiny purple crystals are being loaded into the centrifuge in batches.