Rebel_Scum

Sadly Ildela had no such ability. For all her power, even she had limits. And the only Dragon she knew of was way back at the Elves' forest. Or that was where he'd been when she'd left, anyway. Chances were he'd moved since then, she thought. Either way that was all the way back there. And she didn't want to go back just yet. So what was she to do....? Sadly, she didn't see any other options.

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"Not reversed", Paxtera replied, not looking at the elf but clearly talking to him. "But certainly rectified", she continued, obviously holding a seperate and different meaning in the two words. "Thanks for the offer though, always good to have help." She may have been going to say something more, but something grabbed her attention. And at the same time, a lack of something also grabbed her attention.

Wait... that wasn't there before. What was it, where'd it come from and where was it going? She flicked her hand at the images, shifting them around in an effort to find out. And after that, she still needed to look into what was making the tokens disappear - since it seemed to affect both of them now. Something about that still struck her as suspicious.

Given its general unkillableness, she had no intention of going anywhere near it. Rather, she continued doing exactly what she'd intended to do, and doubled back the way she came rather than taking any of the other three paths. She still had a door to open, and now that she could presumably do so without an angry robot trying to squish her while she did she might even manage it. Assuming it didn't come after her again the moment she touched the door, of course.

Remaining (Hopefully) invisible, she made her way back to the door at a slightly more sedate pace than she'd left it at. Along the way, she kept an eye out for anything that might provide a way in without having to go through said door, even if she had to do the whole shadowform bit again to do it.

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"We might point out that it's also what people like him almost always do when confronted - run away like the cowards they all refuse to admit they are", Paxtera commented, not looking at the zombie. Rather she was looking at a series of faintly glowing lines she'd apparently drawn in midair in front of her, just to one side of where Bisys had fallen. Those in the know might recognise them as timelines, or at least an easily comprehendable representation thereof.

"Well fine, come with me then." Precisely what she'd wanted it to do anyway... sort of. She'd been hoping to put distance between it and her before it started following her, but she could work with what she got. As she flew, she paid no attention to the thing beating on her. Even when one of its strikes actually did get through her shield and dealt her a nasty gash across her back, she barely let out a peep as blood showed through the rip in her coat. She simply kept flying, taking turns through the city seemingly at random.

Or maybe not quite so random. She knew what she was looking for, just not where it was... There! Ahead stood a fork in the road, so to speak. Three seperate directions, only one Reaver following her. Fairly decent odds in her mind. Flipping around, she flew backwards for a short moment as she again casually waved a hand in the machine's general direction. And again it would find its sensors temporarily scrambled... for just long enough for her to shimmer out of sight for real just as she reached the aforementioned crossroads. Hopefully, once her trick wore off it'd pick the wrong direction.

Oh yeah, that wasn't good. Abbie dropped back to the roof as she shifted directly from Nova to Dwarf form, charging at the overgrown Troll with a savage roar. Placing herself between it at the other heroine she attempted to attract its attention by swiftly punching it in the face with one massive claw, in the hopes it'd focus on her rather than the apparently not as tough as she looked other one.

Oh great. Is it talking to me, or the troll?

The troll, I think.... might pay to watch yourself anyway.

Good plan, let's go with that.

And so she did, continuing to battle the troll while keeping one eye on the.... whatever that was. Some kind of demon, she thought.

(( You do? Well, please do explain where you thought it was going cause apparently I got it wrong. And thanks for just throwing my character into limbo, I do so love not being able to post. ))

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That much, the peacebringer figured out fairly swiftly. Well, at least that the satyr was gone. And short of actually reversing time to stop it happening in the first place (Which she could do, but the last time she tried it put her in a coma for a month), she didn't know what there was that she could do. Unless... She looked over at Jade. "Jade", she called sharply to him, in the kind of voice that tended to make people sit up and pay attention. Once she had his attention she gestured for him to come over to her. "As much as you may deny it, you were her master. Use the token she gave you, it might provide some answers as to what happened to her", she told him once he came over. Assuming he did, of course.

However, answering what happened wouldn't get Bisys back. It might be a start, but to complete the process Paxtera imagined they would need to locate and retrieve the satyr's real token, not the borrowed one she'd given Jade.

(( Placate ingame is autohit with only a very small chance to have no effect. Ildela's is the same, no matter how it's described. And no technically they're not, but she reinforces them with her energy field so technically they are. Again, ingame they're just as effective at stabbing stuff as the Vanguard ones so the same applies here. ))

(( Oh, so you're intentionally godmoding then. Ok. Got it. ))

"Dirty cheating son of a...", Ildela muttered angrily as again her attacks had far less effect than they had any right to have. She'd hit almost everything up to and including Lord Recluse himself with the same weapons she held now with more effect than she was having on this thing. Somehow, it was more resilient to her attacks than the avatar of a god. That just wasn't right. It was ignoring rules somewhere.

But hey, she could deal with that. Chaos demon. Ignoring rules was something she was quite capable of if the situation warranted it... which it did, she decided. And she'd bet she was better at it than any damn robot from another dimension. "...Alright then, let's play a game", she commented to the robot as she flew backwards with a casual wave before turning and disappearing around a corner. She didn't bother to cloak again, this time. She wanted it to follow her.

How right she was. Seemingly from one moment to the next, a good half dozen things happened at once. Before she even moved Bisys was down... Jade, Rotten and Akat seemed to all be playing wrath of God, there was not one but two dangerous lunatics present... She sighed. How slow one's reflexes became when they had all the time in the world to do things.

Still, the others seemed to have their respective lunatics contained or at least occupied for now. So rather than join the fight she turned her attention to Bisys, muttering quietly to herself in half a dozen different languages at once as she knelt down and tried to ascertain the extent of Bisys's injury. If it was as simple as replacing the drained energy, she could do that.... assuming the satyr could accept Kheldian energies as a source. Either way, it was all she had so it was what she tried. And it wasn't like she didn't have way too much of it anyway, two symbiotes and all. Hell, even outright giving her one of said symbiotes wouldn't be entirely out of the question if it was really necessary.

Oddly enough, the Reaver was hardly the first opponent to think of seperating her from her swords. A number had even tried the same way the Reaver tried, and drained them so they didn't work. To say that Ildela was resigned to the fact that almost any fight she got into would inevitably include some attempt to disarm her would be an understatement at the very least. Thus, she was fully prepared in more than a few ways to either acquire new swords or simply fight on without them. Typically she took the first option, but to get herself some time to do so she almost casually waved her hand at the machine...

...And quite promptly disappeared off its sensors as what it would most likely believe to be some form of software virus rendered it completely unable to target the stalker and quite probably unable to see her too. Thus giving Ildela plenty of time to reach into apparently thin air and draw a pair of curved scimitar-like blades from seemingly nowhere. And plenty more time to, for want of a more descriptive term, stab it in the chest.

(( And for the record, Placate does in fact work exactly like that. Even if the target can see you, it can't target you to retalliate until you damage it or otherwise break the placate effect. Additionally, none of this machine's previously displayed powers would render it immune to placate. Apparently I have to state things like this explicitly or people simply decide it doesn't affect them. ))

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Since none of them appeared to require her continued presence, Paxtera turned to leave. Kethara hurried over and took her hand, not really wanting to be left behind. But Aineruda stopped her.

"Hmm...?" Paxtera looked in the indicated direction, noting the building in question. "Yes, we suppose we could do that", she replied, turning back to the elf and holding out a hand. Not to take, but to open a roughly elf-sized portal in front of her. "Go through, but you might have to watch your step at the other end. We've never been particularly precise when transporting other people, particularly to places we haven't been." Specifically, when Aineruda exited the portal she'd find herself indeed in the middle of the Council chamber, but perhaps a couple of feet above the floor.

Once the elf was through she lowered her hand again and the portal obediently closed itself. Again, she set about making herself and her daughter scarce. And again... she was interrupted. Specifically by the arrival of someone she didn't particularly like. And someone else who she'd never met or heard of, but who was apparently important and/or powerful enough to immediately attract Tafari's attention at least.

".... and cue all hell breaking loose", she commented with a quiet sigh, as if remarking on the weather.

The problem with that though, was this time she wasn't surprised by the machine's impossible speed. She'd been fully expecting it to dodge around her, and thus had planned ahead. Well, as much as Ildela ever planned ahead anyway. Thus, as the robot's fist came down, Ildela simply stopped. Not slowed down and came to a stop, just outright went from full speed to stationary in the blink of an eye. Thus, she wasn't where she should've been and the machine's blow barely grazed the edge of her shield.

And as it did so, she was already in the process of a spirited attempt to swiftly cut the thing into tiny pieces - the Vanguard blades she was using had been designed to take on Rikti with their advanced armor, after all. She highly doubted they couldn't at least put a sizable dent in whatever this thing was made of. And now that she was up close and personal with it, sidestepping her attacks wouldn't really help it as much.

Being knocked into Abbie wasn't all the other heroine had to worry about, though - as soon as she was in range the Warshade had opened fire, spitting a rather rapid stream of energy blasts at the Troll. Getting hit by one of those would likely hurt far more than hitting Abbie herself. Novas after all were rather squishy... though the fall after impact might sting a bit if she was unlucky.

Unless it learned to do so in less than about six or seven seconds, it wouldn't need to. It might detect a faint energy buildup in Ildela's general location, but what type of energy it was would be unclear and the stalker herself remained invisible. Well, until she was done charging that is. Specifically, charging up a big old blast of that same shadowy energy she'd turned into before, which she proceeded to fling in the robot's direction before hurling herself in the same, glowing Vanguard-issue energy blades in each hand. As she went, the normally invisible shielding around her became almost blindingly visible, so bright that the stalker was difficult to make out inside of it. The machine would find no weak points in it now. Oh sure, it still held the same element of randomness as before. But now the 'weak' parts were as strong as the stronger parts had been before as Ildela poured everything she had into it, overloading it far beyond what was generally thought of as safe. "FINE, overkill it is then!", she yelled at it.

Every dirty trick she knew had failed, so she'd decided to stop trying them. And true, running may have been advisable. But this thing had annoyed her with it's complete imperviousness to every trick in the book. So it was going to die, or she would fall in the attempt. It was that simple. She had three minutes, and she was fairly sure that would be enough. The energy blades she used were perfectly capable of putting dents in all kinds of things up to and including Lord Recluse himself, no goddamned alien robot dragon was gonna stand up to them for that long.

(( In game terms: Moonbeam, Overload and quite probably a sizable amount of red inspirations. IE: My usual method of soloing EBs with Ildela plus a snipe for good measure. ))

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"Quite probably", Paxtera replied. "Assuming the treant we spoke to wasn't in fact the cause of them and trying to distract us from that fact, it would seem the forest and its fae are both quite blind to this corruption. Hence why neither of them are making any attempt to fight it - they don't believe it to be there."

"So, it's up to us then?", Kethara asked enthusiastically, like it was all just another adventure to her.

"So it would seem", Paxtera answered her daughter, before looking back to Akat as well as any of the elves still present. "Admittedly we were never particularly good with plants of any sort, plus we still have a missing Token to locate for Bisys. Can you fight this thing off without our help or would you rather we stayed?", she asked them.

Abbie glared, and quite promptly returned the favor by pulling essence from Darkgloom to heal the hits she'd taken in the fight. "You're right, that does feel much better", she commented. "Now where'd that Troll go?" Figuring Quex, Josiah and Dreg would be more than enough to keep the villain contained, she shifted into Nova form to fly up through the smashed roof to look for the Troll. Given he'd already been engaged by a passing hero it probably wouldn't take long to find him.

Sadly in her current form Ildela simply didn't have the reflexes to dodge something with that kind of speed. Not that it stopped her trying, but despite attempting to hurl herself aside she wound up firmly grabbed anyway. At which point the machine immediately tried to bash her into the ground, cutting off the usual snippy comeback and forcing her to go straight to action. The machine suddenly found itself grasping thin air as Ildela quite abruptly dissolved into a cloud of shadowy energies. "Well fine, don't be reasonable then", came the stalker's voice from inside the cloud somewhere.

"Fine, you want to use dirty tricks like that? Then so will I." And with that she raised her arms to fling a series of glowing orangeish-purple beams at the machine. Upon impact they would wrap around it, lifting it into the air helpless to defend itself if they could. But that didn't change Ildela's next move. By the time her shadow form wore off, she was invisible again.

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"We have plenty of evidence", Paxtera replied, before shrugging. "But you apparently can't see it, so anything we say is pointless. Have fun being blinded by your own arrogance." With that, she promptly disappeared into one of those golden portals she was so fond of.

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Back at the Runner, the peacebringer stepped out of the other end of that portal and rather sarcastically commented "Well that went well." Kethara looked around, then ran over to her mother babbling something about how she almost got arrested but it wasn't the guard guy's fault cause he was just doing his job. Paxtera listened, then raised an eyebrow at the Captain. "We take it we missed something important."

So, the forest was unaware then. Would explain why it wasn't fighting it off, at least. Though the idea that something might be messing with her senses rather than those of the forest did occur to the peacebringer, she dismissed it as highly unlikely considering all those who'd seen the mutated plants saw them as far as she knew exactly as she did. Thus, either the forest was unaware of the mutations or it was actively encouraging them and didn't want her to know about it. And that was assuming this tree in front of her spoke for the whole forest, too.

Perhaps oddly, Pax seemed perfectly fine with talking to a tree. Some, especially outsiders, would've found such a thing to be more than a little weird.

Paxtera couldn't quite avoid slightly raising an eyebrow at the arrogant tone, but didn't comment on it. Instead, she proceeded to give the tree exactly what it had requested - a fairly precise description of the mutated plants as she saw them, starting with what she saw currently in the corrupted haven and going back from there to when she'd first seen the things growing on the Heart tree. "We take it you see none of this", she commented once she was done, seemingly fully expecting to be accused of making it all up or some such.

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And in turn it learned what Tafari had learned not too long ago - that attacking someone with energy based shielding using an energy based attack was just never going to be very effective. The vast majority of the lightning simply flowed away around the shields in question, with only the smallest amount managing to penetrate and actually hurt Ildela. Neutered as it was though, it did little more than sting and certainly wouldn't deter the stalker from her attempt to drain the machine dry. (Or at least enough to stop it attacking her.)

That, on the other hand, had a substantially greater chance of actually achieving more than superficial damage. True, most of those strikes were still rebounding off of her shield (and turning it a violent shade of purple in the process from the impacts) but the odd one somehow got through. Again, this didn't really deter Ildela in the slightest. She was stubborn like that, plus she had this nice neat energy stream coming in that she could make use of to heal her wounds. Admittedly perhaps not as fast as they were coming in, but certainly enough that it'd take far longer than the machine first thought to turn Ildela into the aforementioned bloody mess. And every second it took to do so, she drained that much more energy from its reserves.

Something it might notice however, if it was equipped to do so, was exactly why some of its attacks got through and some didn't. Ildela's shielding wasn't quite even. At any given time, certain points were weaker than others. If it had the processing power required to predict those points before they occured, it would have significantly better success in getting through the shield. Given the completely random nature of those weakpoints though, it would require considerable resources to do so. And resources might be something in short supply if that energy drain continued long enough.

And through all of this, Ildela somehow found time to make a suggestion. "Hey, how about you stop trying to kill me, I stop trying to take you offline and we sit down and talk about this like reasonable people, hmm?", she asked, oddly cheerfully. Not that she really expected the robot to do so, or even to respond at all. But still.

"sounds like a plan to me", Abbie replied, taking the makeshift restraints just in time to have her captive whisked out from under her by what looked like the biggest Troll she'd ever seen. "Hey, that's my prisoner!", she yelled after it. "And you can't have her!" She made a sort of grabbing gesture in the air in front of her, grabbing nothing physically but rather latching onto Darkgloom with the same energies she used to teleport herself around, attempting to neatly rob the Troll of his prize and deposit the villain back at her feet.

Should it work, she would give Josiah his rags back and instruct him to restrain Darkgloom, before attempting to retrieve the fleeing Troll in much the same way.

"No", Kethara replied with a faint laugh. "If I killed him he'd have a scorch mark, not a stab wound. I assure you, for whatever my word might be worth, that he stabbed himself. As you said, probably so he couldn't betray the others once captured."

Kethara just sort of... stared at him. "Wait, what? I nearly get myself killed to get this guy for you to prove our innocence, and you're gonna arrest me anyway? That's so unfair."

She sighed quietly to herself. "Still, I guess if you really feel you have to..." She held out her hands to be handcuffed or whatever elves did to restrain prisoners. One thing her mother had never been big on was ignoring the rules of other cultures just cause they came from a different one. Besides, causing a scene would benefit no one. Even she could see that. So she went quietly.

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The robodragon would see nothing on any EM wavelength, nor would it detect any kind of smell. Unless it had very sensitive hearing, it would conclude that there was nothing there. And even if it did, Ildela's exact location would be hard to determine simply because she wasn't moving very much and thus wasn't making much noise.

OK, so no obvious weakpoints... Plan B it was. The robotic dragon would get maybe a half second of warning from shifting air currents and the faint 'whoosh' noise Ildela made as she flew towards it, wrapping herself around the thing in what could almost be taken as a hug, before a blueish-white energy field shimmered into existence around them. That it would most definitely notice, likely registering a sharp drain in whatever power reserves it had as the stalker did her very best to drain it of all its energy. Thus leaving it helpless against her, or at least that was the plan.

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Paxtera merely raised an eyebrow at the apparent animated tree. "Oh, so now you decide to talk to us. And we might point out that we wouldn't be blowing holes in trees if the forest hadn't decided to seal us in to begin with." Though in truth she could've teleported really. But hey, blowing things up was the best way she knew of attracting attention.

"We were merely seeking the source of a mutation the local elves seemed to think was malicious. Was it your doing?", she asked calmly.

Thus, she had plenty of time to cloak herself before it got anywhere near seeing her. Everything else she'd come up against had been hostile, so she doubted this thing would be any different. So she figured the element of surprise had better be hers, and promptly vanished from sight (and from most other senses) mere moments after she heard the thing approaching.

Confronted with what appeared to be an empty hallway unless its sensors were somehow more advanced than those of all the other machines she'd encountered, it probably had a right to look a little confused. Admittedly it looked kinda like Jade had before he got turned back into flesh and blood, but if it were she imagined it would've gotten shot at just as much as she had. So she still doubted it was in any way friendly and quietly began looking for a weak point on it, something she could take out to prevent it shooting at her but not kill it in the process... it might be able to open the door for her if she could convince it to do so.

"Speaking of honor...", came a familiar voice from off to one side. Looking over in that direction would reveal Kethara flying towards them, with the fallen assassin in tow. "I got the guy who attacked the elf lady. He kinda stabbed himself when it looked like I was gonna win, though. Sorry. Still, I got him." She landed near the apparent commander, depositing the dead assassin on the ground in front of her.

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"Ugh." Ildela sighed quietly to herself. "Totally should've expected that. And you, shut up", she added to the hologram, not even paying attention to what it said. It merely confirmed what she already suspected, that this place had originally been built by someone else before the machines took over. And regardless, that was the past. Her mother was the one concerned with the past, not her. She tended to live more in the now, and right now there was a pair of doors blocking her way.

"Where's Kate when you need her...", she muttered irritably. The brute would've been so helpful here, what with her talent for smashing things. As it was, Ildela was alone. And swords didn't work too well on solid blast doors. Hmm... what to do.

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"Hmm", Paxtera commented, unimpressed. "Very well then, if you want to be antisocial that's not my problem." She raised a hand, pointing in roughly the direction of where she'd entered and firing a highly destructive energy blast at the trees to make herself a way out.

Abbie saw the brute looking around for a way out. "No, you stay right there where you can't hurt anyone", she ordered, in the most insulting tone she could summon. Seeing the slower movements after Dreg's mental attack she proceeded to follow that up with a claw, to the opposite side from where she'd placed the shield.