Session VI

"Useful idiots."

Players Involved: FBH

Return to Ascension Isle: Legacy

Aranitha is in neXen's golden tower, and Alice and the Rafaelan woman are having a drink together. Aranitha isn't terribly fond of being snarked at by Rafaelan hicks, so she's wandered off. Alice can look after herself with that one anyway - they seem on the way to becoming fast friends. The elevator is reserved for important guests, and guarded by a possessive bellhop, so to get a better vantage of the Ward Aran takes the stairs. The whole complex, like a lot of Jibril engineering, is ridiculously tall, some 80 stories, but Aran jogs up the stairs without any bother, enjoying the exercise.

The stairs end in a windowless gallery of unpainted concrete criss-crossed with girders, with a locked green door in the wall, rattling a little from an external wind. Rather than bother with the lock, Aran checks for security, then just smokesteps through it. She finds herself on a wide balcony near the top of the tower. Ostentatious golden Cherubim cavort around her, and floodlights stand canted, waiting for night to light up again. From here she has a good view of the ward. There are several other buildings nearly or as tall as the tower, but not so many they block her sight. And Samelrand Spire rises over them all of course. The Laser Megalith is huge, at least 150 stories, even without the "horns."

She can also see the layout of much of the Ward and it's military installations. Aranitha pulls out a note pad and pencil from the depths of her maid outfit and starts to sketch each camp in turn. There are nine separate camps in Zeta Ward. Nearest the Rose Way are Zeta Camp, which is the barracks for the 510th and 677th Crusader brigades. It's a massive cross shaped fort, with sloping sides, surrounded by fences of wire and guard towers. Next is the Constabulary's Ward Station 6, which is a slightly less forbidding building, looking a bit more like a cluster of fortified office towers. The Crusader and Constabulary bases are about 2km from each other.

Then there's the seven enlightenment camps beyond, spaced in a ring around Samelrand Spire. They're named after the levels of purgatory - which is in fact what the whole area is called. Each camp is a stack of prefab containers, piled 9-10 high in rows. They're surrounded by higher walls, topped with wire and defense emplacements. Over top of the camps run rows of girders and rails, from which scanners and turrets can sweep over the camps, or cranes can be lowered to pick up and move whole prison blocks. The center of six of the enlightenment camps is a massive industrial building with several smokestacks. The seventh is a sorting camp filled with masses of traintracks coming in from beyond the wall, and large holding pens around the massive station blockhouses.

Aranitha can also see a lot of cabling strung over the camps, maybe power lines. The lines look to be a new addition. Someone could maybe swing over on those. Most of the lines go to Samelrand Spire, but others run toward the Rose Way, and the Crusade and Constabulary camps. It looks, to Aranitha's admittedly non-engineer eyes, as if they're taking power out from rather than in.

As she finishes her drawing, Aranitha sees a large steam powered truck roll up to one of the gates at the Constabulary's Ward Station. Then all of a sudden gendarmes are running or falling, and the truck lurches forward, crashing into the barricade. A Gendarme sprints in front of it, and unloads his carbine. . . and then the whole area is hidden by a flash, and a huge ball of smoke. The sound of the gunfire and explosion rolls over her a few seconds later. As if on cue, Aran hears the pop of more gunfire starting to break out across the ward, sporadic, but growing. There's now a huge pall of smoke hanging over one side of the Ward Station.

Aranitha peers at the Selki in her astral sight. "Hey. We're going to be in danger. Can you look out for threats from this side and like, warn me?" The little yellow fairy flaps its wings in agitation, "If you ever want to get home that is."

After a moment's consideration the Selkie buzzes around Aran's head, a flickering golden butterfly, and she get a sense of watchfulness. She also gets the sense it's watching [HER] too, and still making up its mind.

Deciding that running down 80 flights of stairs is a bit slow, Aranitha runs out over the outstretched spear of the Chosen Ithuriel, then swan dives off the tower. She falls the 80 stories, golden gargoyles flashing past her, then smokesteps just before she hits, blowing to ether and reforming cleanly in an alley below, out of sight of any onlookers.

There is a whistle in the air, and Aran sees several smoke trails arc across the sky, and then a wooooshBOOM as a rocket impacts a nearby building. Masonry falls into the street, and she slips away, staying low and heading towards the sounds of heavier fighting. She hears another distant explosion, toward the south boundary wall. More shots ring out, from snipers taking potshots down Rose Way, and she sees several bodies, civilians, police and soldiers, sprawled across the asphalt. "Get down woman," A gendarme in a ruffled black coat shouts, and pulls her into cover behind a large bus, with the words, 677th "As Is Just" Base Shuttle, stenciled on its side.

"Oh my god!" Aran affects shock and horror, "My mistress is in there! What's happening?!" Another bullet plinks off the street, whining past.

"Fucking elves, that's what!" A Crusade Armsman with a black cross on the breast pocket of his white shirt snarls. "Can't wait till we've wiped out the lot of them, them AND those Coreve slitlovers."

Behind the bus are three gendarmes, one of them wounded in the arm and the other tending him, and the scowling crusader. And Aran, who debates killing them, as the soldiers of her enemy.

The first Gendarme peeks around the side of the bus, then ducks back? "You hear those drums? Those are Red Brigades. They hate elves as much as you do, Crossman."

"They SAY they do." Scowls the crusader, "So does their Lord General Saint-Just, but she still shelters them - she's been an elf lover going all the way to the War."

The gendarme ducks out, fires a few pistol shots, and then rolls back. "You're crazy, lackwit. Everyone knows Saint-Just hates elves, kills them personally."

"Yeah," scowls the Crusader. "You blackheads 'll believe anything you hear, but I was there during the War, and I saw her. Let this elven spy we caught go free, even threatened my captain if he tried to execute the slit. Don't believe what you hear, she's an elf lover through and through, and she's behind these Red Brigades now, just waiting for her chance to wipe us out!"

Deciding they can live, for now, Aranitha asks; "What do we do?"

"Stay here." Says the Gendarme. "They'll be telepting the camps now, and organizing a responses. Don't worry miss, you're safe here."

On a rooftop across the street Aran sees a figure with a scarf wrapped around their head rise up holding a large rocket launcher, aiming down at the bus. "Look out!" She calls, pointing. "Rooftop!"

The Gendarme spins and fires. Down puffs out from the hits through the Red's heavy jacket, and the rooftop figure staggers back. The rocket fires, going high, and slamming into the third story of a building beside them.

Deciding the street isn't quite so safe after all, the small party relocates into a corner shop, taking refuge away from the shattered windows. The Gendarme, corporal Dyle, doesn't look inclined to move further, and so Aran slips away to a back room, then smokesteps through the ceiling to the next floor, and makes her way across the rooftops towards the Constabulary Ward Station, glamouring her dress to look like that of a Red Brigadier, complete with red and black armband.

Approaching the Constabulary she sees the outer fence is mostly torn down, the front gate is smoking, and there are fires burning across the grounds. There are scores of bodies strewn along the streets outside, and inside the compound walls, Constables and Red Brigadiers both. There's clusters of Red Brigadiers bunched up around the Station's outer compound walls, and wounded being carried out between several burning armoured cars to an impromptu hospital in a nearby chapel. Aranitha drops back down to street level.

There are regular fusillades of fire coming from the building, and occasionally machinegun fire rakes the streets below. There are Red Brigadiers running all over the place down here, and a lot of shouting

"What's happening?" Aran grabs one of the runners.

"George says he can't make any progress! The blackheads have got the inner corridors barricaded, we've lost a dozen men already!"

A nearby soldier with a young face covered in stubble and soot and currently bandaging a wounded leg looks up, "you a runner girl? Well, it's a complete shitshow in there. Trying to get down to the holding cells to get Valdemar, but it's not looking good." He winces, trying off the bandage. "Tell them - anyone - we need reinforcements here."

"Right." Aranitha says, "Who's in charge?"

Smoke now is coming from windows near the top floor of this wing of the Ward Station, and it looks like a fire has broken out on the top floor.

"Very VERY good question." The man says. "Was Kearn, but he's dead. So Wallace took over, but he's dead. So Limey took charge, and it looks like they're carrying him out now. So. . ." He shrugs.

"You walk?" Aran asks.

"Lack of revolutionary spirit." Gasps another man, flopping down beside the one Aranitha is talking to. "Lazy bastard could barely shuffle before he took one in the knee." Both men laugh.

Making a decision, Aranitha pulls out her arclave and extends it, the silvery metal breaking apart, glowing red ether hardening into a larger blade.

"Woah."

I'm your reinforcements." Aran says.

The men are clearly impressed. "Hah, you're one of the Fly Boys then? Didn't think they were on this op." Says the bandaged Red. "Well, fuckit, I can still shuffle. Lead on."

Aranitha grabs a small squad of six Brigadiers from the local wall, then takes stock of the immediate tactical situation. The best entrance is a nearby door, but there's a machinegun emplaced above it hozing down anyone who breaks the cover of the compound wall to make the 20 meter dash. Aran takes a couple of grenades off one of her ad-hoc squad, the smokesteps, blowing to a stream of ether, and then reforming against the wall, beside the second floor window. She jams her arclave into the wall with one hand to hold herself in place against the side of the wall, then posts a grenade through the window. The wall jumps with the explosion, and she follows through, Arclave blurring, the stunned and wounded machinegun team falling in a split second. Black armoured, the elite of the Constabulary's Black STAR (Special Tasks and Responses). Aran snags some armoured gauntlets and greaves from one of the bodies as her squad whoops and storms the ground floor.

There's shattered armoured glass, and an internal commissionares desk here. A few brief bursts of gunfire as the Reds execute the wounded. The guy with the bandaged leg, "Limpy," pulls out a crinkled waxpaper map. "We're look for the holding pens on the basement B2." He says, "in this wing."

Aranitha leads the way deeper into the building, moving tactically and with some caution. Aranitha catches her inner fire, and directs it to her eyes and ears, improving her sight and hearing, alert for any threats. Peeking around the corner she sees a wide foyer with empty elevator shafts, and the tangled bodies of Reds and Gendarmes - the remnants of a previous failed assault. And standing over them all is a a huge Giganger. The selkie circling her head recoils in fear. The Gigganger is a massive Artech Construct of lumbering armour plate and massive fists hunched some 4m tall, with the undead husk of a Mikaelan mountain ogre trapped somewhere within. They're the kind of monster best faced with weapons for fighting large armored vehicles. "You guys might want to get back." Aranitha pulls the pin on her second grenade and posts it around the corner. The grenade lands right between the Cogmek's feet and explodes, and Aranitha follows it up, a blur.

The Gigganger meets her charge with a roar of steam, a massive fist thundering through the air, and Aran has to abort her lunge and parry it, rolling backwards with the massive blow. The Gigganger's other fist swings in, but Aran is ready for that one, and slaps it aside, then ripostes with a quick stab against the monster's armoured forearm. Aran lets the force of that blow carry her up over the Gigganger, and strikes another quick blow against the monster's head, before flipping behind the lumbering construct and rolling clear; "FIRE!" The retreating Reds unleash a storm of bullets, scores of sparks striking off the armoured monster, but one strikes an armoured eye, shattering it in a spray of blue fluid.

Aranitha spins to re-engage, and the Giganger roars steam and meets her, catching her blazing red Arclave in its massive Archenium fist, woman in the blowing greatcoat and fur hat straining against the massive construct for a second, and then Aran folds out of the way, dropping low and slashing deep into a gab between the Gigganger's chest plates, severing several tubes and spraying sludgy brown liquid down the creature's side. Her follow up blow slams it back into a wall, crushing plaster and stone.

"Fucking. Die."

With a defiant roar of steam, the Giganger pulls itself free and thunders back towards her.

"Sorry, this just isn't that kinda movie." Aran says.

She blocks his last wild swing, then follows up with a flurry of blows. The glowing yellow selkie spins around her, caught in the release of her ether, a storm golden butterflies. Aran deflects an arm down and leaps off it, throwing all her power behind one final blow as she buries her arclave in the creature's neck. With a groan the massive construct topples, crashing backwards onto the tiled floor, shattering several.

Aranitha yanks her arclave free and steps off the Gigganger, with her glamour gone now a dark elf in a battered coat. She flicks the blood and oil off her blade.

"Horrible things. Are we going to get your leader?" She says, "Comrades?"

"Fuck. Me." Says one. "You fucking flyboys are something else."

They take the stairs down to the holding cells. The Reds hit the bottom of the stairs and start to move into the hallway through the smashed door of B2 when gunfire rips the air. WHACK! One is hit right between the eyes! He goes down with a thump as his comrades pull the body back, firing wildly. There's a firing line of Constables behind a makeshift barricade some 20 m beyond the door. Aran peeks out, judges the distance, then ducks back as the Constables respond with another hail of fire, and jeers.

Aranitha holds out her hand for another grenade, and Limpy drops one into her palm, then she blows to smoke again, briefly reforming behind the barricade to drop the grenade. A constable spins and fires, but she blows to smoke again even as his bullets pass through her, reforming on the other side of the barricade and ducking aside as the grenade explodes. With a roar the Reds charge, leaping over the barricade in a rattle of automatic fire. "Man fuck those guys." Aran says.

The Reds fan out through the cells, to the shouts and cries of other prisoners within, and quickly find what they're looking for.

"Here! He's here! Cover up boss!" One of them winds det cord onto the cell door, and then BOM! It blows open.

A thin man with glasses in a one peice yellow coverall stands up.

Aranitha doesn't know, him, but this is apparently Ion Valdemar, the leader of the Red Brigades. She breathes deep and regains as much power as she can.

He looks at Aran, then adjusts his glasses and peers at her again, clearly seeing through the remnants of her disguise. Aran's selkie flutters wildly, and recoils away from him, taking shelter under the collar of her coat. "Any port in a storm, eh comrades." Valdemar says. "Well, we'll deal with *it* later."

"I think there's a better phrase. The enemy of my enemy." Aran says dryly. "But we should leave."

The other Reds look between the two. "She's with the Fly Boys, boss. Stell hired them to help out."

"Wouldn't have made it without her, she killed a Gigganger like it was nothing, with a *knife*"

Whatever his philosophies, Valdemar isn't going to make an issue of them now, "You're right, of course. It's time to go." He says, taking a coat from one of his men. "Lead on then, enemy of my enemy."

Unwilling to trust in Valdemar's generosity, Aran stealthily bails on the rescue squad before they leave the building, taking a detour into one of the archive. She stuffs some files on 25th Libra into her coat pockets that she thinks may be of interest to Chey, then slips out the burning Ward Station by a window. She's making her way back through the streets when she runs into the advancing cordon of the Constabulary's response force, and is detained as a random civilian, until her lady can return and speak for her.

Aran is sitting shivering beside the street with several other civilians who've been rounded up. There's still fighting going on as the Reds withdraw. She can see Arthrodynes overhead now, firing bolts into the city below as they buzz in circles, massive armoured gun beetles seeking prey. A huge man in jet black uniform, with a high collar, swirling black cape, and a golden star at his throat on a purple ribbon strides down the street. He's flanked by several aides and even more soldiers in the black armour of the elite Constabularly Black STAR forces. A priestess is with him, maintaining a telepathic link through a teleptex, as he talks to other commands. They stop on the street in front of where Aran and the others sit shivering, and she can hear his words.

". . .No, I don't give a flying fuck about Ward 5 or Ward 7, let the Nobles deal with that shit." His voice is low thunder. "We clear out Ward 6 and the Reds first. And we find that goddam sword weilding bitch. She was here. I have reports."

"Sir, there's no confirmation it was Artemis Crimsene," And aide says, "It-"

The huge officer glares at him, and the aide swallows. "Well then confirm it with her corpse, shit for brains. Too many fucking excuses today. Heads will be rolling by the end of it, and right now YOURS is on the block."

"Y-y-yes m'lord Marshal!"

He strides off, a man intent on murder, down the still smoking battlefield that was once the street of Roses.

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