DeviousMe

An extensive investigation using the proper methods, unfortunately, wasn't in the cards. An extensive investigation using the im proper methods, however, certainly was. When their literal poking around didn't yield any results, the masked greycoats went to bashing around, looking for the hollow echo indicative of hidden passages.

That they'd open up an unhidden passage with the same effort hadn't even entered their minds, but happen it did, and they started in surprise...
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"Hey, it's okay." the Khelari approached Trisys when she saw the creature backing away, offering her a hand, "I didn't mean you. It's fine. See? All clean."

Jade meanwhile took a few steps to the side of his own, not wanting to panic Trisys any more than he already did, turning to the three women of a family in the process, "I think sooner better than later..."

OOC:

Looks interesting. Is this for Union characters only or can anyone participate and the thread's just using source material from Unionverse?

Northern Reaches

"Me?" Jade stopped mid-step, his balance system keeping him upright despite the odd, bent-over position, which ended up looking a little comical before he straightened up and took a few steps back while he spoke, "But I...what...?"

Then Ildela told him of the blood on his hands and his head snapped down to look at the clawed palms, an expression of shock appearing on his face, "Oh! damn! How...urgh! I'm so sorry! Um, yeah, water...stuff. Yes. Uhhh...ma'am, can you watch them while we're gone?"

"Mh?" the Khelari stopped her tugging on the stone necklace for a moment, realizing she'd been spoken to, "Aw. But I wanted to come too. I like meeting new people."

"Thanks, I got it." she told Scar as he approached, pressing her claws into the spot of the stone she'd worked thin by now one last time, causing the whole thing to crumble off the stringy necklace, "There. Hm. A thought: would breakfast keep you guys happy until we get back?"

The tip of her tail briefly pointed in the direction of the slain behemoth as she said this...
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Weapons Factory

The gunmen investigated...

Jade on the other hand noted none of this, the bulk of his focus on Trisys cowering in their midst like that, the concern for her overriding the more analytical and deductive parts of his mind.

"It's okay." he said softly, approaching her with an outstretched hand, completely oblivious to the blood she'd gotten on him earlier, "No one's going to hurt you. You're safe now."

The Khelari meanwhile returned the from the same direction she'd gone, but not quite in the same way. Leaping down from the ridge, she wasn't only spotless, but also grumbled quietly as her claws picked at a necklace of solid stone she'd apparently acquired while away. Closer observation would however reveal that it was exactly the same she'd had before, just coated in rock.

Unsatisfied with the progress her fingers were making, she tried to twist her head and the necklace into a position where her teeth could reach the thing and chew the rock off instead, but despite repeated attempts, she wasn't having any luck with that, and looked rather annoyed because of it...
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The gunmen kept firing after the spider, but with most of those that had carried a good bead on it blinded with sticky webbing, it wasn't likely that any more rounds got to it. Those that could still see well enough soon came running about the perimeter of the escape pod, but found no more target. Disappointed and still hungry, they lowered their weapons.

Grumbles and mumbles were soon replaced by orders and acknowledgments, and before long the APC moved toward the bunker garage once more, taking the 'egg' inside while the remaining personnel de-webbed their compatriots.

Once inside, the expedition's CO in turn came outside, leaving the APC to take a closer look at their catch - and discovered the opening. That was certainly odd. He didn't quite know what to make of it. Readying his weapon, he motioned a troop of gunmen to him, then ordered two of the heavy tanks be taken off standby and moved to flanking positions. Only then did he command the escape pod be lowered enough so they could climb into the opening and investigate the interior of the thing, poking this, that, and of course the blinking lights both with fingers as well as the barrels of their guns...

Very interesting. I have to ask though, because now I'm curious - why did you post this in the roleplaying section?

"I think that's her doing that." Jade commented as he wiped the last of the blood from Trisys' body, being much more concerned with her wellbeing than where water was coming from. He didn't have the attention to note that there didn't seem to be any around this place - at all.

Someone not so distracted, however, may well have noted the importance of someone who could make water in such a seemingly barren, hostile land...
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The personnel of the APC didn't seem very impressed. They were disgusted, but not impressed. As the sticky webbing covered their lenses, they kept shooting at the last place they had seen the spider, knowing that though their assault rifles could do a lot of damage, the vehicle's heavy armor would simply shrug it off.

Of course, said vehicle wasn't idle either. Now that the spider had jumped atop it, the arachnid was a sitting duck for the turret operator, and she didn't hesitate to pull the triggers. With a rapid rhythm of cracks, the high-caliber machine gun began pumping shells similar to 20mm rounds toward the beast at point-blank range...

Jade didn't even note the blood that had transferred to him. He couldn't feel it, and due to the fact that he quite literally saw red all the time, he wouldn't find it unless he actually inspected himself. Right now, getting the stuff of Trisys was his focus.

"How strange." the Khelari could only remark, looking at the blood that still covered her hands, wondering how it could hurt someone. Then again, life in different places and all that, so she supposed she'd better get herself clean as well in order to not endanger the new arrival.

"I'll be right back." she declared, setting her step toward a nearby ridge, then swiftly climbing up and over the rock formation to disappear behind it...
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At the gates of the weapons factory, the two frontmost guards turned to one another in confusion at the giant spider making a break for their garage in the rocks. Though both wore their helmets and masks, they could clearly see each asking the other what the heck was going on behind the opaque round lenses.

And then they shrugged.

"Food!" one of them yelled loudly, and the other personnel within the vehicle bunker took notice, some only turning around while others came forward from behind or out from underneath the machinery they'd been working on.

The second meanwhile performed the action nearly all of them mimicked a second later: he swung up the heavy assault rifle that had until now hung harmlessly beneath his left shoulder by its strap and started blasting the spider with rounds comparable to a .30-06.

The personnel in the APC didn't stay idle either, and though the escape pod it pushed prevented the vehicle's gunner from targeting the spider now in front of it, the armed graycoats emerging from the rear loading ramp had no such inhibitions. Everyone here was hungry, and spider stew didn't sound bad on an empty stomach...

"I think it is, yeah." Jade gave a nod to Lazardarus regarding the blood, watching the eleven man work to clean it off, "You have any more cloth?"

"Got anything that gets blood off?" he then replied to Kethara, Paxtera, Ildela and the Khelari regardless of Lazardarus' answer. If the man did have more, he'd ask for one and begin cleaning up Trisys as well. If not, he'd ask him to hand over the one he had so he could take over the job, feeling guiltily responsible for her current state.

The reptilian female meanwhile wasn't sure what to do, only looking on helplessly. There wasn't any surface water around here, and she somewhat doubted the satyr-like being could be cleaned off by means of a lava pool. Licking her clean probably wouldn't be very appreciated either, and she definitely wasn't carrying any sort of cloth...

"Oh, good." the Khelari gave Lazardarus a toothy smile, perching atop her kill in preparation for the slide down, "The last guys who tried that tasted terrible. Even cooking didn't fix it."

She dropped to the rocky ground with nonchalance, regarding the Gre'shil pack (and especially Scar) with a playfully malicious smirk, "Then again...some of you do look pretty tasty."

She let the tip of her long, whiplike tail brush gently against his leg as she walked by, almost suggestively, though both that glimmer in her eyes as well as the smirk faded at a closer look at Trisys, "Uh-oh. She...doesn't look good..."
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Now without its cloak, the APC's progress came a good bit more swiftly, and it didn't take long until the main gates of the weapons factory came into sight. If neither the 'egg' nor the spider proacted soon, the former would be taken in by the heavy steel gates, the latter locked outside by the very same...

"Hey, hey, c'mon..." Jade spoke softly to Trisys as he sat up, attempting to stabilize her head by supporting it from the back with one hand while the other wrapped gently about her back to do the same there, the metal Dragon attempting to cradle her protectively like one might a child, "It'll be okay. It's not your fault. It's mine. I should've told you we were coming. It'll be okay. Everything'll be okay..."

"I am." the red-and-green reptilian gave a somewhat puzzled nod to Paxtera, "How do you know that? No one around here even talks to us. Did you visit the homeworld? I thought it was gone?"

"Wait..." her eyes wandered to the Gre'shil, "You're the guys from the south, right? How'd you get here?"

She returned to addressing the group at large, "How did any of you get here? And manage to sneak up on me? That's not supposed to happen. You guys are good. Real good. Ohhh no...please don't tell me this predatory beast you guys want is one of us."

Lazardarus may well have been surprised to not find any more Khelari in the vicinity. It did indeed seem she was the only one here. He did however spot a number of tree-like, crystalline structures spread out (rather widely) over the local area. With milky cores and transparent, refractive outer layers, the crystal trees looked more like modern art gone wrong than lifeforms, but the latter they were - and as the Khelari female voiced her concern, the elven man may well have felt something akin to their 'attention' turning toward the group...

"Whoa, hey!" Jade called out to Trisys with concern, stretching his hands toward her in an assuaging fashion while his own footsteps began to follow hers, "Calm down, it's..."

Then he saw the thing.

Calling it a behemoth would've been an understatement. Not that it was terribly large, although being the size of a small Mack truck wasn't exactly small either. No, the appearance came from its anatomy. It looked like someone had taken a rhinoceros, an elephant, an armadillo, and a hedgehog, started mashing them together, then stopped halfway through and called it a day.

The main body sat atop a set of four squat, column-like legs, plated from the eyeless head to its short, fat tail in tough, gray-black segments of organic armor. Its toothless maw instead held an upper and lower ridge, respectively fashioned like a serrated form of a hammer and an anvil,and from the gritty fragments of rock embedded therein, it wasn't hard to guess what this thing usually ate. Judging from its rank breath however, it wasn't picky about being carnivorous, and from the dried blood upon the long spines that extended from the back of its head, its shoulders, and the tip of its tail, it didn't look like this being had much trouble making living things prey.

Normally.

Right now, the thing was wheezing pitifully and leaking syrup-like crimson blood from a large number of scrapes, cuts, gouges, and bite and claw marks, especially from the neck - and on the back of that in turn clung the thing that had apparently caused the former.

At first glance, it bore faint resemblance to a Gre'shil, especially being almost completely covered in the thick blood of the beast. At second glance however, the differences were immediately apparent: plantigrade feet, five digits both there and its hands, their claws nimble extensions of their parent limbs, and a deep-green hide that hadn't a trace of a scale. Upon closer observation, the being's build looked lighter as well, slimmer and lankier as if meant for swimming or squeezing into small spaces. The smooth, leathery hide further supported this appearance, as did the lithe, yet forcefully rippling muscles below.

The only thing the creature wore was a small, crystalline pendant that dangled from a thin, fragile-looking string about its neck, though if that was supposed to be a sign of intelligence, it was duly counteracted by the grunting, snarling viciousness with which the reptilian jerked upon the much larger beast's neck again and again, lower jaw dug into the flesh of the being's neck beside and below the spine and thus forming a clamp filled to the brim with razor-sharp teeth in conjunction with the upper jaw. By first impression, it was just as likely to be a collar of some kind, given to a hunting animal in the fashion a human would bestow one on his or her dog.

Paxtera likely knew better, but Jade for one certainly didn't. He just watched with wide eyes and an open mouth as the large beast came down under the bestial assault, rushing toward Trisys with all the speed he could muster to snatch er up and out of the impact zone that his system had virtually painted in white onto the ground in his crimson HUD.

Grabbing the satyr-like being and pulling her close, the metal Dragon then swiftly backpedaled, letting his balance go and falling backwards until he'd reached a nearly seventy-degree angle from the vertical. Only then did the prepped system sequence fire his boosters, blasting both of them away - but only for a moment. Jade hadn't the time to actually establish a flight pattern, and thus shut down the engines less than a second later to land in the rocky, ashen 'soil' of the basalt-and-slate-dominated volcanic terrain flat on his back (or rather his wings), skidding for a few meters before he came to a stop.

And as he looked up at the orange-red, black-cloud-covered sky, the tremor of the beast's flank hitting the ground ran unnoticed through the metal of his body. If it hadn't been for the sensor reading, he wouldn't have even known it was there. But that didn't matter right now. He knew what was there. That was the important part.

"Hey." he looked 'down' toward his chest at Trisys, "You okay?"

The scaleless, blood-soaked reptilian meanwhile had as its first reaction only a confused blink, the realization of what had just happened only slowly setting in, though it made visible progress in its amber eyes. Eventually, it clamped-down jaws un clamped, and a long, singular tongue swept from left to right to lick the majority of the viscous blood from its lips and teeth.

"Oh..." came from its mouth in a tone one might've expected from a young adult human female, along with a rather awkward, self-conscious look as her eyes swept the group, "Um...sorry. I...didn't see you there. Was this your breakfast...?"
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It took a while, but eventually the cloaked APC made its way out of the artillery range and back into the more 'neutral' stretches of the Desert. Still, it didn't disengage its cloak for quite a while - not until it made it into good proximity of the coast of some inland sea. There some green still grew, and among the jungle-like plants, embedded into the side of a marine cliff, lay their destination.

"Weapons factory in sight, Sir." the driver told him and received a satisfied nod as he continued, "M-Team says the bomb's all prepped and ready to go. All that's left's to strap it on."

He looked out the froward viewport with a grim sense of emptiness. He couldn't bring himself to truly care. It wouldn't bring them back. All the thought gave him was a meek flicker of revenge. The fire it had once been had been gone for some time. But the tiny bit that remained would at last be sated by destruction.

One way or another...

Animated tails? Sweet. Now then, any chance animated long hair could come along with that was well? Pwetty pweeze?

Unfortunately, Jade didn't have the presence of mind to note as much. The only thing his thoughts wished for was for her to be careful and come back safely. His subconscious added to that the contemplation that she might be better off if she took the form of a Dragon again, but that didn't make it to anywhere he could catch himself. Whether it made it to her or not was of course another question entirely.

"I understand." the metal Drokar answered Scar with a nod, glanced at Lazardarus thoughtfully, and then looked back to the Gre'shil again, "So if we go there together, then split off, would that work?"

If the reptilians confirmed, he would then ask Paxtera to take them there. They could meet back up with Trisys when she arrived, which considering the Kheldian's travel method would probably be after their own arrival...
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"Looks dormant, Sir." spoke the electronically modulated voice of the observer in the turret above him, the man's seat at about the height of his own head, "At least for now."

He gave a nod, the modulator in his own helmet picking up his exhale and turning it into a strange grunt. He mentally sighed. How had it all gone so wrong? He still remembered the sun setting on the first day he'd spent in the Desert. Back then, they'd been so horrified at the prospect of this place being dead...only to find out that it being alive was so much worse.

Well, now they were going to do something about it!

"Get us over there." he told the driver with a warble, and the floating vehicle set itself into motion once more, gliding stealthily down the hill. He looked to the men and women in the back of the APC, sitting on the benches to either side of the personnel compartment, armored and geared just like him. If it hadn't been for his insignia of rank, it would've been nearly impossible to tell them apart.

Not for much longer.

The invisible APC made its way over to and past the perimeter of the 'city' artillery, all inside holding their breath as they waited for the guns to start firing. But they didn't. The cloak worked. The enemy couldn't see them. They were safe...sort of.

Hovering beside and up against the 'egg', the vehicle then attempted to lift the object from the ground by extension of the field that kept it aloft...

Nice, haha. Good to see you're still going.

((Okay, let me see what I can do about this...))

As Jade explained the where and why to Paxtera, the 'metal egg' that had so conveniently crashed down near the Twin Cities received further visitors. Well, not directly. At least not yet. They came within a few kilometers, their quietly rumbling APC cloaked with the best they could manage, hiding it from visual, thermal, and electromagnetic detection. The gravity manipulation that kept the invisible vehicle aloft less than half a meter off the ground hid behind a veil as well, but it was a new development, and sporadic at best. Still, it seemed to be working well enough against the machines. No HKs in sight.

Slowly, carefully, the APC crested a rocky hill and its operators turned their sights to the object that had come down. With passive means only, they attempted to discern things such as its heat profile, material composition, and naturally whether or not anything moved on or around it. They knew they were being reckless, but they weren't about to be stupid. If they were going to steal a Demon egg, they had no desire to get eaten on the way...

"No, not as I wish." the metal Dragon told Trisys with concern, "If you don't want to go, please don't go. I don't want to make you do things just because I say so."

"You guys on the other hand..." he turned to the Gre'shil, "Yeah, no. No offense, but I don't trust you guys not to try and snack on someone if I'm not around. We're staying one group. Now, um...Kethara, did your mom answer, or should I go look for transportation...?"

"That sounds like a good idea, actually." Jade agreed, hedging much the same beliefs as Kethara. Besides, all things considered, what was the worst that could happen? The Gre'shil tribe could try to eat them, and in that case they'd just all fly away. He could carry several people easily, and the Kheldians probably could probably grab one or two as well, so that was that. For a moment, the metal Dragon even caught himself in a smile at the thought of Kethara grabbing Lazardarus, Paxtera doing the same with Ildela, and all four hovering out of Gre'shil reach while the reptilians tried in vain to consume his heavy armor while he facepalmed.

Amusing as that thought was however, he really hoped it wouldn't come to that.

"Mh?" his casually wandering eyes came to rest upon Trisys, who seemed to be getting more and more agitated and uneasy around here. Jade didn't really know how - she wasn't doing anything visually or audibly perceivable to indicate such - though he suspected it had something to do with that token in his torso compartment.

"You know," he said to her softly, "you don't have to come with us if you don't want to. If we're all going to them, we could use someone to check out that place those guys were talking about over there and find one of those animals. You know, to make sure it's not sentient. Would you be okay with doing that...?"

Y'know, I wasn't going to say anything, but dude - that makes no sense. If I buy a country music album knowing full-well it's country, I've got no right to complain that it was country. I can complain if it's country done badly, but not that I got exactly what it said on the box. If an arc delivers exactly what was advertised, it's exceedingly rude to say things to the like of 'the arc was about X and I knew that when I started playing it, but I don't like X, so it's not a very good arc'.

Long story short, the problem is that one shouldn't give a 'review' - especially the unsolicited kind - of something one doesn't like in the first place, as it's nearly impossible to do so without a bias stemming from personal preconceptions. 'Reviews' written in this manner are helpful to neither author nor audience since they almost invariably focus far more on the topic the reviewer didn't like rather than the quality of the topic's delivery.

I hereby suggest:

The All-Seeing Eye, Arc ID 57352, by @Steele Magnolia

"She's not." Jade stated decisively, yet still in a neutral, nonconfrontational tone, "We've got something like a High Mother too, and ours made laws that say killing people is wrong. But they also say that if someone tries to kill you, you're allowed to fight back, and you tried to kill us first. No, I'm not blaming you. I'm just saying what's done is done. So let's not add any more deaths to the ones we've already caused..."
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While the mechanisms about Paxtera were plentiful, her search for a terminal to access them bore no fruit. Though they had once existed throughout the interiors of the structures that sat atop the 'plate', they'd been stripped long ago, their interfaces dismantled and their connector lines shut down and cut off from the system they'd once served.

If she proceeded down into the 'underground' however, she'd eventually find that the entire area within a radius of roughly sixty meters from a point halfway down the centroidal axis of the substructure had been rendered inaccessible to individuals without the means to bypass the thick blast doors that blocked the way into that section. In fact, they were practically walls to themselves, and if it hadn't been for the colored lines and markings that indicated that they in fact led somewhere, an untrained observer - or just someone who wasn't familiar with the language and symbols - would've taken them as exactly that: walls that made dead ends...

'Grandville Lite' may have been the words that came to Paxtera's mind as she got closer to the 'city', the bluish-gray, metallic-looking material that composed the bulk of it arranged in much the same manner, though without the many pipes, pylons, bridges, platforms, and of course webbing and Arachnos insignia of which Recluse's fortress harbored so much.

In fact, the architecture bore a faint resemblance to what Crey might have built given enough free hand, though the dead plant life that would've signaled an assault by the Devouring Earth in such a case seemed strangely...in place. Like it belonged here. It was almost as if the tall, still somewhat reflective buildings and their once-lush overgrowth had come into existence together, at roughly the same time - not one after the other, as was usual for abandoned human cities on Earth.

As Paxtera closed the final few kilometers, the radius of curvature of the 'plate's' rim gradually straightened (or at least seemed to as it took more and more viewfield), until eventually the Peacebringer stood before a still mostly smooth metallic wall that rose up before and toward her at an angle of about thirty-five degrees from the vertical. There were no doors in sight (they existed, but had been buried in over a hundred years' worth of dust and debris accumulation), and there weren't any stairs or ladders either. Whoever had built this thing had apparently had no need for climbing aids.

Once she made it to the upper edge of the 'plate', however, the seeming lifelessness of the place dispersed in mere instants. Though the house-sized artillery batteries sat quiet and motionless, their many red-glowing lenses brimmed with activity. They scanned the areas that they should defend constantly, always analyzing, always updating, always reporting.

Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be anyone to report to. No people walked the passages between the buildings (they couldn't really be called streets, though some were wide enough), nothing moved upon the many perch-like platforms attached to the towers, and the dried remains of the overgrowth lay still and calm as everything else. Only the ongoing, barely noticeable hum of powered machines lay in the air...
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"Um...don't they have phones where you come from?" Jade asked of Kethara with a confused blink, "Or some other way of reaching her?"

For a moment, it may have appeared that he'd not perceived the token's information. In fact, it was quite the contrary. The pizza incident was still very fresh in his mind, and the metal Dragon had no intent to not carefully consider that he should be careful what he wished for.

For all he knew, Trisys could be putting herself in danger yet again. He'd learned a long time ago that just because people said something was no problem, or one shouldn't worry about them, or other such statements to the like, that wasn't necessarily the case. In short, he didn't entirely trust the token's information - and beside that, he wanted to go there with the Gre'shil, not suddenly find them elsewhere after the relocation had been completed.

"Some kind of signal maybe...?"

((Gonna wait to see if Dogma's egg does something before I post wrt Paxtera.))

Jade's eyelids dropped halfway across his oculae at the sudden flare-up of aggression, a very dissatisfied look coming over his face as a result. The grunt from his nostrils only gave it the final touch, and with a groaned sigh, he set Trisys' feet gently back upon the ground before taking a few steps toward the altercation.

"Hey, hey, hey, we're not killing anybody else here." he declared with an outstretched arm, the clawed fingers of its silver-gray hand spread in a gesture of desistence, glancing at Lazardarus a moment as well, "That goes for everyone. And if you have a problem with meat-eating animals, leave. Because I used to be one too, and if I could, I'd go back to it just like that."

The metal Dragon clapped his hands together in a glancing fashion to emphasize just how much he wanted to be his former self again, then turned to mostly address Kethara and Ildela, "Hey, uh, can I ask you guys for a favor?"

"There's a place where these guys want to hunt about..." he told them the distance his system had calculated based on the estimated velocity of a Gre'shil over four days, pointing in the direction the reptilians had indicated, "...that way. Can you teleport us all there? Or do the thing you use to appear places if it's not a teleport? Please? It would really help us out a lot..."

"I'll see what I can do." Jade told Trisys with a confident-looking smirk. He wasn't entirely sure just how to make moonlight happen, but he figured that if this planet had at least one moon, all he'd have to do was wait until night, then fly up above the clouds to find out. If there was, he could just take her there as well then. If not...well, that was the purpose of the smile.

"Four days that way, huh?" he then looked in the direction Scar indicated, returned the wave Ildela gave them with (what else?) the sharp metal tip of his silver-gray tail, and then commanded his optics to zoom as far as they could into the distance. Yeah, fat chance. The zoom lenses weren't that good. Oh well. Once the others got here he'd ask about that teleportation anyway...
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The artillery reacted to Paxtera's transformation with the near-instantaneous nature of the programmed machine. Not a millisecond after the 'human' vanished and the 'Kurukt' appeared, all the cannons that had been firing at her responded with the very same action, most likely greatly surprising the Kheldian.

They stopped.

Just stopped, from one instant to another. Then their barrels swayed away from their former target and returned to standby positions, coming to rest in a radially proportioned pattern about the 'city'. It was almost as if she'd gone invisible, disappeared entirely off their sensors.

In a way, this was true. In the form of a Kurukt, they no longer acknowledged her. That being was not on their list of hostile entities, and therefore not something their programming said should be fired upon. If she attacked now (or returned to human form), that would of course change, but for now the artillery simply ignored her...