Extraction (TWS)

The five of you stand in an airlock. With the doors open to the troposphere's upper reaches, it's more a cavern too large to make for comforting shelter, barely less-exposed than the outside. The gusts bounce off the inner door, catching loose clothing and consort-ghouls and flinging them every which way.

Blaze is already at the inner doors, Leiche taking point where he can draw and fire fast if they open unbidden. Their hands move from pocket to pocket, weapon to weapon, practiced as a prayer, which you suppose it sort of is. The controls at their end of the airlock are different, screens and keypads versus the no-nonsense button which Rook's planted a fist upon. Eirie's entourage is flooding the chamber, congregating around Eirie and getting in the way of your past-sight. They smudge your vision, getting worse the longer you spend trying to peer through them.

They're not obscuring much. This passage is too small for a full Enforcer dispatch, not to mention you didn't seen any aircraft suitable for carrying personnel outside where you landed the helicopter.

You studied the memories, shades a different hue of insubstantial marched through the sea of birds. Watched the pipes filters vents bores speakers arrayed on the ceiling, lookeding for a pattern where Eirie's flock's not already probing. "Nothin' for my lot in here," he affirms over the grudge-force gale ricocheting into your ingress. "'m stockin' up."

Leiche is getting impatient; the airlock's reaching capacity. Blaze was overlaid with soldiers, tapped away at the controls, their faces lit in stark contrast from below, threw shadows that barely registered against now's ghost-swarmed overcast drear. You signal to Rook - she almost glances to Eirie for confirmation before remembering who's in charge.

The outer doors begin to close, the wind subsiding from its in-your-ears roar to an impotent howl against thick metal. You've got a minute of birdsoul jostling around to avoid phasing through warm bodies before the chamber goes dark.

You let your beleaguered ears adjust to the relative quiet. The intermittent sounds of machinery are now faintly audible, along with the staccato tones of what might be gunfire.

The shadows on Blaze's face align with the soldiers', those that stood there before Leiche whips out a penlight, casting the beam out across a sea of birds and scanning the apparatus'd ceiling.

"Cameras," Eirie mutters to his sparrow-shades, and they crawl all over the walls. One nestles in Rook's cupped hands, watching its kin run at tidy right angles, an organised search pattern. It'd be calming if you could see it.

Blaze is motioning to you, resisting the urge to accentuate his gesture with an errant spark. He doesn't recognise these controls; knowing he serves the team chiefly in his insider knowledge of the Vault (however fragmented), it won't do Blaze well to let you all down this early.

Clearly labelled controls include an intercom to listeners unknown, and the bulk of the screen space is dedicated to an array of options crammed under the heading "Neutralisers". Each has a symbol, and a colored square in either green or background-white. Fingers tapped at the Neutralisers in no discernible sequence, though some held a finger long enough for the pressed portion of screen to expand out, showed further info. Some options, like KOg and StnFlr, are almost always activated. In all configurations you saw, at least one Neutraliser was activated before a subsequent option appeared to open the damn doors. You think. It's hard to seen past all the hands.

Blaze defers this to you, Director.