Extraction (TWS)

What do we know about Rook? How did she get caught up in the Uprising?

What you don't know personally, someone else among the ranks can almost certainly fill you in.

Rook's the sole reason the Uprising can think of itself as a family, instead of a military outfit. There wasn't much wriggle room in security protocols for volatile moods to cloud common sense, not when that security banked (more often than not) on one person's powers keeping your living armaments/intel/resources off the Vault's radar. Designing Headquarters (which you've had to do on multiple occasions, each with no time for sentimentality, after a raid) was a tripwiresome shipping grid, logistically and interpersonally.

Who was essential to the Uprising's long-term goals. Who was needed on the front lines. Who was emotionally low-risk. Who was a target, of known interest to the powers above. Who was trusted. Who spelt a mortal blow to your mission if-but-when they were swept up in the Vault's next raid.

A series of values, none of which had any place being thrust upon a child. Not while there were relatively safe havens for them elsewhere. Rook could've had a normal childhood, grown up reasonably carefree in a kidlot, her power monitored and nurtured for eventual gainful employment Vaultways.

Instead, Rook grew up among militants and revolutionaries. She'd sat, patiently, at the edge of many a midnight gathering, seen not heard and simply watching plans coalesce. It was a frustrating two-thirds into coordinating a supply run that someone half-jokingly suggested bringing her in - the rest, as they say, is history.

History's full of child soldiers. You couldn't with good conscience cast her out, but the insubordination ate at you.

Nineteen years later and it'd honestly be more surprising if Rook didn't wouldn't do everything in her power to help the cause. They're all her family, after all.

you should probably just address everyone and let them know what they're likely to face up there.

Before you know it, you're topside. The teeming disorder of ordinances below breaks like a sea's surface, revealing cleaner-yet-cluttered geometries of the Vault's upper surface. It's like the built-up hillsides of a Mediterranean port, with a brutalist metal veneer. Windows are absent.

You don't stare at it long enough for those walls to flicker, for their unwelcome surfaces to feature construction crews, antlike. Plenty of time to pore over it once you've safely landed the damn thing.

Leiche lets the craft hover, the cockpit juddering in protest at the errant gusts bouncing off the Vault. Eirie's got the helicopter's rear in a kerfuffle of phantasmic feathers, to Blaze's evident discomfort. Rook pets a ghost-crow, halting its croaks-

You lurch into motion as Leiche swings the helicopter into descent on a flat surface, but the cockpit continues to rock and sway from the wind, safe landing or no. Leiche kills the engine, turning to grin at you. You consider a few choice words here, but Blaze interrupts, knuckles white.

"Fuck me, Leiche. You fly like we've all got a corpse to spare."

"They landed us best they could, with this much wind," Rook counters, before giving you a guilty look. "Sorry, Qu-Director."

"It's fine, Rook. We'll get out of this creaky thing and inside." You grasp the door, giving your squad the once-over. Eirie gives a thumbs-up; somewhere out of sight a door is opened to a haunting goose-honk.

...LOADING...ATRIUM...