Extraction (TWS)

You might want to keep an eye out for collapsing gun emplacements. While you're doing that, you should probably just address everyone and let them know what they're likely to face up there.

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...

oh boy time for nothing bad to happen to anyone

Try and keep your past-sight powers in check here. Assessing the present situation probably supersedes experiencing a past one.

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.

I'm not sure what KOg could be, but StnFlr looks like "Stun Flier" which would mean Eirie couldn't bring in the birds, possibly. Activate KOg only and see if the door opening option pops up.

I think StnFlr's more likely to be Stun Floor so definitely don't press that

You hard-press KOg for a tense second, before the stamp-sized icon expands to fill half the screen. Half of its allotted screenspace is for diagrams and tables for chemical composition, mass-dosage conversion, and a suite of side effects and warnings.

The other half has switches, touch-screen toggles that change state with a swipe. You activate KOg, scan the pop-up warning.

Ensure Acquisitions are sufficiently incapacitated before importation. Inadequate neutralisation procedures risk Acquisition escape, and threats to Processing personnel. If adequate Neutralisation would leave personnel incapacitated, contact Processing before Neutralisation to arrange a detachment.

Warnings swept aside, a big old DEPLOY button is now available, next to the intercom. You blink and shake your head, to get the dozens of errant hands out of your vision.

KOg is activated. PsiJmr's borders are blinking, almost like an invitation.

KOg = Knock-out gas?
PsiJmr is presumably Psi Jammer

KOg = Knock-out gas?

It would appear so. You press and hold until it until it expands out, switching it back to the deactivated state. The DEPLOY button is no longer available.

PsiJmr's window is dominated by a warning message: It's liable to incapacitate both operatives and Acquisitions, so operatives have to contact Processing before it can be used.

You peruse the other options, failing to find a completely risk-free option given the state of the room. Flmthr, Caulk, Bind, Cldstr, Deflec, PsiGrb...

"Flmthr" - Flamethrower. Probably raises temperature?
"Cldstr" - Cold Storage. Almost definitely lowers temperature.
"PsiGrb" - this makes me think "PsiGrab" but I have no idea what it would do.

Caulk, and Bind are already words, and Deflec close enough to "Deflect", but it's not clear exactly what they'd mean.

Cold Storage seems safest, Psi Jammer would be good for dealing with psionic enemies but we'd need to think about how it would impact our team. For instance, would it stop Rook from helping us coordinate?

Deflec seems like a safe choice, it sounds like it would create some kind of tactical buffer in between us and the enemies. Then we'd have more time to figure out what the rest does.

depending on the temperature settings cold storage could work, unless it flash freezes us

Cldstr's pop-up warns you: it's another Neutraliser needing a detachment from Processing. Blaze's fuel reserves are no use here if the chamber won't open before hitting cryogenic temperatures.

Deflec seems like a safe choice

- A psionic ability-jammer targeting reactive auras - primarily psychic/energy armor, passive force fields, things that'd render a prisoner immune to whatever incapacitators their captives are toting.

You toggle Deflec to on, double-check you haven't left anything else activated, then call out to the crew.

"You may feel a wash of energy. No permanent effects anticipated, though. Alert the team if you sense otherwise."

DEPLOY. A crawling, ominous sensation, reminiscent of an explosion - Flayer Base, nine minutes sooner than your orders had called for. Genshi's detonation was enough to rip out an appreciable chunk of cliffside - if you went back and waited around on the now-hillock, you'd see a decent amount of rock in your vision, experience a guilt-wracking lack of Genshi's last words to you (being about ten feet shy of the corridors you'd walked), and probably contract three kinds of cancer.

Present. The feeling - it's slimy, no better way to put words to it - recedes. You looked to the doors starting to open, seen ungainly six-legged clusters of men shambled down the hall, dragged their centres along.

There were others, at different times, waited on the other side of these doors with gurneys, cleared the airlock's contents with a coordination like Rook was in their ranks. With them, it's troops down one bend in the hallway. "Acquisitions" down another. You can tell by the uniforms, or lack thereof.

Leiche shouted is shouting, drawns a pistol. A shock trooper in the hall. He stands, isn't stood, against the hustled and bustled and flowed of foot traffic away from your ingress.

There's a rifle in play. A rising flurry of birds, through which you barely see Leiche's silhouette dart forward. Gunfire. No preamble, no warning. The thud of a fresh body. A tense minute, wherein:

Mere feet away in the ghoul-haze: Leiche's strained breaths, a single pistol round.
From the corridor: strangled noise, gurgling, a splash.

Blaze, softly: "he's down." You know he's not talking about Leiche. Still.

You stride into the now-quiet hall. There's a puddle of water stretching from the unconscious trooper to several metres down the corridor in your direction - his ability must've been manipulating water? The spare canisters on his belt confirm it.

It's the work of several seconds to strip the trooper of weapons and repurpose his handcuffs against him. Leiche is already back in action, stripping their corpse of its armory and outerwear, giving the pistol they used a once-over. Rook's hovering, a little shaken. Getting her head around Lieutenant Deathproof, understandably.

Eirie hunkers down in the dingy facility lighting, sending birds off ahead to start constructing a map. Blaze approaches you, a tremor at his fingers, and you feel a breeze across the unconscious soldier's face.

"You going to wake him, boss?"

No time to mess around with every enforcer, right? Gotta press on.

First one we've run into might have some clue about what's going on in this doomed ship, seeing how we certainly don't.

Intel might very well be worth the cost in time.

We don't have time for this. The guy is just a mook, he's not going to know anything important. What you really should be looking for is the guy the mooks are protecting, probably searching for an escape pod, middle-aged, clutching a briefcase, really sweaty... you know the sort.