Clusterfrag

Mick runs their fingers down the seam in the silver elevator doors, somehow shockingly cold to the touch. The ork looks to their left at the door just to the side, but frowns. In the scheme of clearing the rooms, Mick somehow suspects that W should be last. Instead, the ork turns and moves toward the door to room Y and puts their ear to it.

(( I'd like to attempt to enter after a quick perception check. ))

Yung absentmindedly maneuvers the wheelchair through the doorway, drifting in and out of introspection. He avoids looking at Mouse as he parks the chair next to the closed elevator door.

Having already encountered one concealed control panel, his suspicions begin to mount that it was a design feature of the facility.

He blows a raspberry, trying to reassert his casual demeanor. "Gotta be a control around here somewhere, eh?"

(( Perception to look for a hidden control, similarly place to the first elevator ))

The plasteel door is cold against Mick's ear. There's no sound from the room beyond, though whether that's due to a lack of it or the sealing properties of the door, they aren't sure.

Meanwhile, Yung examines the elevator doors. After several rounds of peering, prodding and careful inspection, he determines that the door must be controlled by an external apparatus or centralized security system.

He lets out a sigh, resigning himself once again to the temporary fate of impediment. This fraggin place. A high pitched squeak pierces the silence, not overly loud, but grating, diminutive nails on a miniature chalkboard. Yung spins on his heel only to see the wheelchair rolling ever so slightly along the indiscernible slope of the hallway.

“Where you goin’ doc?” Yung asks rhetorically to the unmoving form, before taking a single step and grabbing the handles. He turns the chair to face down the hallway running away from the elevator doors, setting the wheel brake to ensure no further antics from the doctor.

He walks around in front of the doctor before lowering himself into a crouched position, scanning unconscious face Ishii-oji. “You wanna keep an eye on things for us, eh?” He says, smiling to himself underneath the mask. Fishing a hand into his breast pocket, Yung pinches the frame of his glasses and plucks them from their repository. “It’s pretty dark in here, might need these.” He says, unfolding the legs and sliding them over the bridge of the doctor's nose. “Watch our backs, yeah?”

Yung strides down the hall towards Mick’s position, stopping at the first door to spin the wheel, but waiting to open the it until the rest of the crew is prepared. “Don’t expect much, seems like this place is lost to time, but we gotta find a way to get that elevator movin.”

Yung opens the door and steps into the room.

As the beam of his light swings across the contents, he can't help but be dumbfounded.

The floor is a soft, rich plush carpet of a peach color. The walls are cherry pink, having been plastered and painted. Here: a tiny bed of exquisite craftsmanship, all pink lacquer, wicker, and a heart-shaped headboard. There: a dressing table of ivory and pink teak. There's a miniature, regal harpsichord. There's a masterfully crafted but strange doll-house. There's a mountain of doe-eyed, fluffy plush toys. All this, nestled within an array of child-size furniture in varying shades of pink. To tie the bizarre scene together is a heart-shaped chandelier dangling from the ceiling, constructed of hundreds of tiny pink glass beads.

A sickly saccharine aroma encroaches on Yung. It's some parody of perfume, inspiring visions of Parisian hedonism.

Each new feature evokes an increased curiosity, questions which unfortunately will probably never be answered in this lifetime. Still, the desire to enumerate the exquisite environment and extrapolate is engrossing. “The fuck.”

Yung’s left hand slowly rises to his face, grabbing the wolf mask and sliding it on top of his head. He stands wide-eyed, staring into the room in spellbound. Frozen. “You gotta see this…”

If the security host had been the ruins of a torched building, then this room may as well be packed with empty gas cans. In this nightmare factory of a lab, it’s this bedroom, in all its whimsical flourishes, that stops Mouse in her tracks. She swallows hard, and cranes her head first toward Axel, then Reiya, before breathing out the answer that’s been haunting her subconscious. “...otaku.” As she forces herself to form the word, her brow furrows with intensity, her look one of silent desperation that either of them might fully understand the gravity of the situation, and the very real danger that they're in.

Mick pushes open the door and steps inside. They squint against a sheen of unexpected illumination.

A rectangular catwalk circles the perimeter of the room, with a sizable hole in the middle. Mick is surprised to find that there is no floor or ceiling beyond the threshold. Instead, a cylindrical shaft stretches both upwards and downwards. The shaft's wall is lined with tightly-packed matrix servers, adorned with flickering LED's and all emitting a quiet hum. This configuration repeats over and over. It's one giant, subterranean host-farm. Transparent tubes full of a roiling liquid feed each of the servers, like veins. This complex conduit runs into the earthen wall.

Mick steps up to the hole and peers down, grimacing at the sudden onslaught of heat that rolls off the innumerable servers. The machine-lined shaft plummets down, down, down... Mick idly wonders just how many servers there are and how deep it goes.

Mick leans over the server pit, staring down a ravening techno-umbilical that, for all the adept can tell, might reach to the very center of the fraggin' Earth. "Mouse!" the ork calls out, leaning sharply away from the open mouth of the room's anti-floor as a wave of vertigo steals over them. Mick touches their left hand on the hind wall to ground themself, finishing "Need your eyes here!" The words echo up and down the inscrutable shaft, tumbling down into the nether in a round rumble, losing a little bit of energy to entropy with every odd reflection.

Suddenly, the cold wet recesses of Bongoland seem like a safe space. The scene tickles recollections of an old cult flatvid series, but beneath the mountain of distress the name eludes him. As Mick calls out, the level of alarm in their voice indicates this likely isn’t the only evidence of some kind of warped reality.

While the pieces of the puzzle are in no way coming together, their presence is indication of what Yung felt was true. Something fucked Mouse up, something scared her on such a fundamental level that she couldn’t even talk about it, but what, this?

He closes his eyes tightly, mustering what willpower he can to turn away from the scene, despite its alien aesthetic intoxication. As he loiters blindly in the hallway, his mind once again wandering back to mere minutes ago when the group entered the underground complex.

“Let’s see how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Straight out of that old-timey classic flatvid, The Matrix. Did Mick know how true that would be? They couldn’t have, it was a joke, right?

The answer doesn’t matter. Don’t get pulled in, don’t get distracted, stay on task.

Yung opens his eyes once again, staring down the hallway at the doctor who remains vigilant, watching his back as requested. “Good man.”

He walks back toward the wheelchair bound sentry, summoning every ounce of determination to avoid looking at whatever is in the room Mick is investigating. “Nothing down there Doc.” He says flatly upon arrival, before releasing the wheel brake and turning the chair ninety degrees to face the only remaining door. “Maybe we find what we’re looking for here, eh?”

Yung approaches the last unopened door, placing his hand on the wheel before letting out a sigh as he lowers his head in supplication, hoping for something normal to lie beyond. As he turns the wheel it suddenly hits him, the memory lodged in the hidden recesses of his mind.

Twin Peaks! The pink room. A chill runs up his spine, the hairs rising on the nape of his neck as he recalls the scene that had imprinted itself in his memory.

Despair comes hand in hand with acceptance. Mouse might be terrified, hopeless, and trapped, but the one thing she's not is surprised. After all, she was right. She just had never wanted to be.

The sound of Mick's voice rattles the decker back into motion. At least temporarily, she manages to think outside the immediate danger implied by the room, and instead, makes a squeezing gesture with her empty hand, snapping a few rapid fire stills of the area before she leaves. While she's skeptical that any of her nearby friends might grasp the significance of the scene, she knows at least one other person who will- one who will recognize the familiar shapes of a matrix wasteland, by virtue of having once been trapped alongside her.

With that, she pivots on her feet, leaving behind the child's room, and any remaining gawking teammates, to instead join the ork. "YOU CALLED?"

She passes through the new threshold of the server farm with only a muted reaction: a thoughtful hum as she scans these new surroundings. In any other scenario, she would've been all too happy to investigate this beating heart from the inside out. This time, it's the drop, not the machinery, that captures her imagination. She leans her weight over the side of the catwalk as she peers out, keenly aware of the tender brush of heat against her cheeks as she indulges in this call of the void.

(( Visual perception, I guess? Looking for any kind of control or port within reach, or barring that, any visible data cable nearby.

Could check Matrix perception too, but I'm honestly not expecting an external broadcast. ))

The vertical server array is disorienting. Mouse knows that the configuration is ideal for a distributed liquid cooling system, but to see the installation in such a confined space is bizarre. It's almost like a horror trid. The bottom of the shaft disappears from sight, just a recursive halo of flickering status lights.

Another puzzle is the sheer horsepower likely generated by this host configuration. One or two servers would be more than enough to run a security system-- so why hundreds? She fails to see what objective would require such overwhelming computing power.

Her gaze drifts to the closest server, which happens to be just below her feet. She recognizes it as a Mitsuhama Washi Six Series, which is a pretty generic data processor. In its OEM configuration, the server should have a bus full of DNI ports on the back.

Mouse points a finger outward, lazily tracing the route of the theoretical wiring to the back of the Washi Six. “THERE.” She crouches down to once again unspool her micro-wire, this time leaving it disconnected from her deck until she’s plugged into the server. (The last thing she needs is to lose control of her center of gravity while dangling precariously over an infinite drop.)

“SET-UP LIKE THIS COULD HOST AN ENTIRE CITY, AND THEY’RE KEEPING IT NEXT TO THE TECHNOLOGICAL EQUIVILENT OF A DIRTY-BOMB.” She muses outwardly as she swipes her hand down and around from the catwalk, toward the DNI ports. The words flow a little more freely now, maybe because she doesn’t expect Mick to fully grok the implications, or maybe because she knows Mick, of all people, would understand what it's like to witness some statistically inconceivable, mind-melting drek.

Below, she can feel the cable click into its port, and Mouse sits back up, thoughtfully turning the free end in one hand. “THERE’S MAYBE A 5% CHANCE THIS NETWORK ACTUALLY TOUCHES THE ELEVATOR. MORE LIKELY, I’LL FRY MY NEURONS JUST TRYING TO INTERFACE WITH THIS MUCH PROCESSING POWER.” She offers the ork a grim smile, as if in the midst of such bleak calculations, she suddenly remembered she had company. “...TO OUR LIFE CHOICES, NE?”

She plugs in.

Reality is whipped away, a painting on some fragile fabric. Mouse encounters the sensation of being transported a great distance, as if riding a roller coaster in the dark. Her persona finally settles on a grid, feet touching down lightly.

From her perspective, the decker seems to be at the bottom of an enormous valley. Shapes of a size beyond reckoning flank her, forming a geography that stretches to the limits of comprehension. They're not so much buildings as massive assemblages of data-stores, like structures formed of millions of tiny cubes.

Except.

Except, they're all empty. Skeletal. The containers are there, sure, but the contents are not. These looming datastores that could contain a thousand copies of Mouse's consciousness are utterly devoid of data. Not just that, but ruined. Flash wiped.

The Mouse persona floats into the carcass of one such data store, passing the matrix equivalent of blast marks. Double zero filling? It's fascinating to see the scorched earth technique firsthand: a data erasure technique so thorough that it fundamentally destroys the infrastructure of data storage devices. The logistical scale hits Mouse at all once. Not only did somebody go to the trouble of excavating and building this array (not to mention the astronomical cost of the hardware itself) but for some presumably sound reason, had to decided to cripple the equipment in an attempt to obliterate any trace of whatever had been there.

But... hang on. Mouse examines her own persona. Not everything was destroyed. Enough of the host was left to protect the facility; the evidence of which had just sent IC after her not several minutes prior. Clearly, there's enough data left for a stable host environment. The mystery is confounding.

It's completely hollow, like the empty husk of an abandoned wasp's nest. Her persona kicks up off the ground, speeding between empty stacks, the blanked stores whipping past in one long blur as she seeks out any change in the pattern. As she moves, her form shimmers in place, materializing as she diverts her power from silent processing, either out of sheer conviction that no other entity could be active in this host, or daring one to come find her.

(( Matrix perception for… well, anything? (Including silent icons?) Otherwise, she’ll just switch back to a sneaky Sleaze mode and jack out. ))

Mouse sends out a cursory data scan. The results are, well, very little. It seems that nearly all of the remaining code in the host's construct is responsible for making it a suitable VR environment. On a whim, she sorts the code and follows the remaining errant bits. Her persona drifts around as one algorithm leads her to another. And another. Digital breadcrumbs.

At the end of the trail is perhaps the only remaining sub-routine that hasn't been scrubbed. It seems to be an integral part of the host's security process, as it hasn't been erased. No IC attacks her. There are no firewalls. Placing marks is as easy as asking.

It's as if the host itself is braindead-- operational, but without any sort of faculties. Mouse looks around, trying to envision the software that was just recently out for her blood. Only the cold silence of a deserted construct greets her.

The intact cube explodes into a three-dimensional control panel. It seems the facility is now hers to command... what's left of it, anyway.

Thoryne lumbers toward Yung, his massive form swallowing the hallway in the vastness of his silhouette. Unslinging his weapon, he shoulders the stock and sidles up behind the young adept. Giving Yung a nod, he reaches his massive left hand forward, takes the wheel of the hatch handle, and gives it a hearty spin in concert with his teammate.

The empty system is apparently all Shell, no Ghost. This, at least, she can handle. The digital Barrens may stretch out to infinity, the sensory silence may be in itself maddening, but this extreme formatting and data destruction- that at least was all man made. Not like… whatever she saw in the security host: corruption.

The controls materialize under her virtual hands, alongside the simplest of command consoles as provided through her deck. The operations are straightforward, even in their blend of logical construct and physical rerepresentation. She skims lines of code, what little is left of it, flipping switches in time with every replacement she makes, almost soothing in its banality: [SetDoorState(doorHash, false, false)]. She draws down a physical lever: one she can only hope corresponds to the elevator.

Then… that's it. Racks of servers that stretch from the sky to hell, and she's already exhausted them all. <<Doors unlocked. Time to go.>>

At least this transition is peaceful: the persona lifts gently into space until it dissolves into reality, resuming its quieter, passive operations. Mouse's eyes flicker open, and she's greeted once more with ambient heat surrounding her, unyielding metal of the catwalk beneath. She disconnects her physical tether and sits back up, her joints cracking softly in protest of the lack of cushioning as she draws herself back to her feet. She swipes one sleeve against her eyes, which still burn from her previous deluge of tears. In what feels like the first time she can remember, offers Mick a small, but genuine smile, and a thumbs up. "I THINK WE'VE SEEN ENOUGH OF THIS SPOOKY HOSPITAL FOR ONE DAY, DON’T YOU? THE MORE TIME WE SPEND HERE, THE MORE I WANT TO TORCH THIS WHOLE PLACE."

Mick holds Mouse's gaze for a moment before nodding emphatically. "From your lips to the devil's ears. Let's get the fuck outta here." For a moment, the ork is unsure if the decker needs assistance, and goes to slip an arm under Mouse. The decker had been so beleaguered for the previous several minutes that the adept comes to conceptualize her as injured-- as needing a hand to steady herself. The motion, however, misfires, as Mick moves toward Mouse just as the elf begins to move herself. The result is an awkward almost side-hug, glancing and knobby and full of too many limbs.

The elevator doors slide open, revealing a very similar elevator to the one that brought them to the complex. Inside is, again, a single safety switch. For all the attention paid to the subterranean complex, the elevators are pure utility.

At the same moment, the door at the end of the corridor opens, emitting a hiss of compressed atmosphere. A long, dark corridor awaits beyond.

“Ah-!” The smallest sound escapes alongside her startle response- the sudden jolt of muscles before her brain can fully register what’s going on. Comprehension sets in. What she’s feeling is touch: physical, social touch. This is that thing that people, who exist and interact in meatspace, do when they are trying to express comfort and solidarity. She forces herself to exhale, letting out a slow, shuddering breath, in a desperate bid to relax her frozen muscles and to return her pulse somewhere below the level of ‘trapped rabbit.’ Her gaze, however, remains firmly fixed on her own boots, even as she lets out a breath of self-conscious laughter. “Fuck… I’m that obvious, huh?”

It is about this time that her dormant sense of etiquette awakens long enough to remind her that the socially correct response would be to return the gesture. She dutifully lifts one trembling hand, and attempts to snake it around Mick’s back. Unfortunately for her, between being ‘vertically challenged’ for her metatype, with proportionately smaller limbs, and her sudden, intense focus on the floor, her first attempt falls tragically short. Instead, her hand grasps somewhere decidedly closer to the ‘hip’ region. Recognition sets in, and she retracts as though she’d instead touched scorching hot metal. She immediately course corrects, this time successfully landing along the much safer, less-fraught small of Mick’s back.

Pat.

Pat.

Crisis averted! Not that this information seems to fully process, as Mouse synthesizes a response around her own gritted teeth. “I’M OKAY. REALLY. DAI-JOU-BU.” For the first time, she’s grateful for the relative darkness of the facility, especially as the distant pneumatic hiss mercifully interrupts her comically poor attempts at lying. “WE SHOULD GET MOVING… YEAH?”

Staring into the depressurized void in front of him continues to build upon the unnerving reality of the sub complex. Yung turns back to the doctor, saying almost apologetically, "I guess we got no other choice."

As if on queue, the message from Mouse comes through, accompanied by the soft *ker-thunk* of the elevator doors opening. "Or maybe we do, eh? Check this out doc." He releases the hand brake once again, spinning the wheelchair around to face the carriage. "In we go, time to get the frag outta here."

Axel suppresses a grin at the interaction between Mick y Mouse, the scene briefly letting him forget the sense of dread that has been growing with every minute spent underground.

He nods quickly at Yung, as if the man had been addressing him, rather than the unwitting and perambulated doctor now in his care. "I hear that," he says, the growing sense of pressure starting to show in his voice. He stops himself and takes a breath. You're just nervous because you're only proving yourself to these people for the first time. The thought isn't as helpful as he'd hoped. His mind goes back to Bongoland, and the sense of frustration he felt at being sidelined by the environment and happenstance. Then the long train journey, as the others swapped war stories, while he looked on with no small measure of jealousy, with nothing to add to their experiences. The odd man out, the fifth wheel, the—STOP IT. You're in danger. Get your head in the game, Elias.

He finally lets out the breath that he forgot he was holding. He whistles and beckons toward the elevator. The drones don't need to be told twice.

Thoryne scratches his chin. An uncharacteristically jubilant expression adorns the troll's rugged features. He looks rather like a child that's been handed a large present. "Elevator, huh? Guess that mean's we don't need the other one..." His demolition pouch clacks he has slaps it gently with his oversized palm, to make obvious the unspoken suggestion.

A cold sweat breaks out across Mick's brow as their eyes go wide, the ork suddenly finding themself in the midst of an unintended and profoundly awkward half-hug. And while the ork's budding and distinct like of the decker makes it not an unwanted gesture, the accidental nature of the embrace halts their respiration and and freezes them in place. Mick can bob and weave through a hail of gunfire and glide glassy and smooth around a battery of fists and feet, but the ork doesn't know any defensive measures to take against misread affection. Time dilates for the ork as they stand in suspended animation, unsure what to do next. How long does the moment last? Two seconds? Ten minutes? Mick would have to watch a third person replay of it from a security feed to know for sure.

The oddly mechanical pats to their lower back eventually break the spell. "I, uh.." Mick begins, the road between their brain and their mouth moldering and falling into the sea, "Just tryin' to help you to your feet." The words are rapid fire and come out neither defensive nor accusatory, but rather as a bald statement of fact– a reestablishment of basal reality upon which to rebuild some semblance of executive function. They steal a glance at the decker that lasts only the briefest moment before the gravitational pull of their boots sucks their gaze back downward like a rubber band snapping to neutral. "Yeah, we'd better get moving."

The ork breaks away from Mouse and moves toward the elevator, avoiding eye contact with Axel en route.

“OH.” There’s a beat of silence, followed by more awkward pat for good measure, before Mouse’s arm drops, freeing Mick to slip away toward the elevator. She follows behind in silence, clearly operating on auto-pilot. It’s probably a small mercy that following the mass reanimation of long-buried traumas, she has as little capacity for embarrassment as she has for social graces. She'll have plenty of time to be mortified once they've all escaped the island.

Thoryne returns to the B block elevator. Reaching inside the carriage, he hits the safety switch and then leans back, allowing the elevator to begin its ascent. The shaft now clear, he sets about installing a motion sensor to the inside of the shaft. Next, he places two kilograms of commercial explosives and wires the sensor to be a detonator. Satisfied with his work, Thoryne jogs back to join the others.

The elevator carriage creaks as everyone steps aboard. It's a tight fit, with the addition of the wheelchair.

Mick positions themself to be closest to the door, figuring that, once the elevator its terminus, they're best suited to taking a peek without being noticed.

As the team assembles, Axel jogs back into the hallway until he reacquires Echo's signal. Once confident that the connection is strong enough for a command to pass through without packet loss, he commands the tiny drone to fly back out through the opening high on the wall, and to seek out a similar opening over at cell block C. He throws in a few conditionals to cover likely edge cases: If there is no opening, hover and wait for re-acquisition of signal. If there is an opening, pause there and wait out of sight.

He closes the connection, saying a silent prayer to the machine gods that the little drone will be there when the team emerges from the bowels of the earth. A shiver runs up his spine as he passes the child's bedroom. He furrows his brow and stares straight ahead, willing the image away. The other drones are waiting patiently when he returns.

He nods to Mick as he takes position behind them. Looking at the array of lethal protrusions from both the drones and flesh members of the team, Axel pockets his Alta, and withdraws the Narcoject One from his coveralls. "Let me handle any lab coats we see," he says to the others.

With a low thud, Mouse hits the back wall of the elevator, allowing the others to fill in the space in front of her. She can’t relax yet. She can relax when her team’s off the island, out of the darkness, out of the grasp of whatever corrupted thing still lurks below.

Even now, there’s work to do. With elevation comes signal- a lifeline to the outside world. As such, she begins drafting a pair of messages, to be sent the instant she regains an external connection.

The first missive is a particularly belated notice for their island counterparts, whom she can only hope have held on since taking the comms tower: <<Merc team is reporting in- all still alive and accounted for. We found the subterranean bunker under B but lost signal there. We’re on route to C and Luis de Leon now.>>

Then there’s the matter of the other message, infinitely more fraught, and at least to Mouse, infinitely more consequential. In a vain effort to focus on her words, she closes her eyes, only to be met with flashes of sensation from her own immediate memories: dissolving foundations and unraveling code.

<</dev/zero: I get it- you’re always busy, but as soon as I’m off this job, we need to debrief. In case anything happens to me before that, know this: the Saito Regime is fucking around with something dangerous below their black site. I think it’s one of the otaku, still alive… and twisted.>> She makes a pinching motion with one hand, obfuscating the message in a familiar layer of encryption, before sending both messages to her outbox, ready to seize the next signal outbound.

She forces herself to breathe as she reorients her attention to the task at hand: dealing with whatever awaits them on the surface.

(( Whenever the elevator starts heading up again, assume she'll start running regular Matrix Perception tests again for anything obvious/silent in the vicinity. ))

Axel stares up into the dark void above the shaft. While it's true his other children are at his heels, he feels a bit naked without Echo's feed in his vision. In his mind's eye, he pictures Echo riding currents above the island as it follows its last directive. He feels a slight pang at leaving the little drone to fate, but it's a necessary evil.

The sound of his teammates breathing and the intermittent creaking of the elevator seems profoundly loud against the sepulcher silence of the elevator shaft. There's a thump against the elevator-- has to be Mouse. Axel suppresses a grin.

An AR feed materializes, but it's heavily pixelated. Echo must be close. Axel moves to the center of the carriage and looks straight up. The feed improves, but is still largely dominated by artifacts and comes in like a slideshow of still frames:

Cell block C appears to be very similar to B in terms of layout, although it's a bit larger. From the angle, Axel deduces that Echo has stopped at the narrow opening just below the roof. Although the image is far too distorted to resolve specific detail, Axel realizes that there are a number of men gathered around the top of the elevator shaft. He counts what looks like three men in fatigues, and one large black figure that can only be a Kuroikaze. Curiously, the men seem to be holding position, facing the elevator shaft. He activates the audio input, but the men seem to be silent.

Axel swallows hard to force his heart back down his throat and into his chest.

"Frag me," he says to the others in the elevator. "Bastards know we're here, and they know where we're going. Take a look at Echo's feed." He rocks back on his heels. "Ideas?"

One eye peeks back open at this new development, before the decker simply answers, “PETUNIA.” This much seems self evident, though she follows that up with a shrug and further explication. “I MEAN, IF THEY’RE GOING TO JUST STAND THERE, MIGHT AS WELL SEND HER UP TO GREET THEM. THERMAL SMOKE OPTIONAL.” She shoots Axel an almost pained, apologetic smile. “I CAN’T HOLD HER MARKS FOREVER, BUT AT LEAST THIS WAY, SHE CAN GO OUT WITH A BANG. OR IN THIS CASE, MORE OF A BRAAAAP.”

Axel lets out the sigh of a child who didn't get what they wanted for Christmas, and all the presents left are for his siblings. He nods once, mind running along the absolute nightmare of patches and technical debt that he witnessed when giving the deadly drone a once-over. He smiles wistfully.

"Yeah... Yeah, that makes sense. Honestly been worried that a single cable working loose could unleash this thing on us." He kneels as he speaks, retrieving a grease pen from his toolkits. "I truly don't know how she's even running right now. I'm pretty sure the dog brain is pulling power from the propulsion rails." He pauses and throws his arms up for effect, as if the others will know what he's saying and sympathize, "They're not even the same voltage! How does that even work?"

He stands back up and admires his work. "There you go, sweetheart, all dressed up for the ball." The word "SMILE!" is scrawled above the gatling gun barrels. The exclamation mark has a stylized heart for the point.

The squat sentry regards Axel with the cold indifference of an adorable killing machine. It hasn't moved more than a meter from its charging port. Curious about this lack of activity, Axel rifles through the drone's command module. Nearly all of the patrol routes were destroyed along with the host, essentially crippling the sentry's ability to navigate.

Axel sighs in disappointment as he eyeballs the programming. The drone isn't designed to operate outside of the pre-designated environment, which excludes the elevators. While he's confident that Petunia could be used to secure a position down here, there's no guarantee that the drone would continue to function if somehow moved aboard the elevator carriage.