Lily vs Vegas

[wooliefrand]

Who: Lily
When: ????
Where/What: WHO WANTS TO GO ON A FIELD TRIP

[AT SOME POINT, LILY'S PROBABLY GATHERING AT THE FOUNTAIN.

SURELY THEY AREN'T GOING ANYWHERE THEY SHOULDN'T BE.

ping me when yall have completed prep and are ready to go!!1]

Comments

[audacity]

[ FIELD TRIP!!!

cepheus is probably pacing a bit, carrying any supplies he helped bring over or was given to hang onto. riptide is in his hand, but in pen form, twirled idly between his fingers.

the movements could read nervous, but he's eager, flashes a grin at anyone glancing his way. ]

[endsjustified]

[passing out sunflowers to the other Lilies and explaining, mostly for the demigods’ benefit]

Everyone take some of these. We’re going to try for stealth, so don’t activate them, but there’s very little better than pure sunlight for what’s in the mist. If it’s someone made of shadows with a mask it won’t be as effective, though, so just use it to blind them and then try to break the mask.

[and also little techno gadgets for people to carry in a pocket or something]

And one each of these. Aides wants to further test electronic communications through the mist, though these will just ping to a beacon in Peony’s barn, we can’t actually use them to call the pasture. We’ll be dropping a booster for Peony’s satellite while we’re in the city, too.

Watch yourselves. If it looks like we’re about to get thrust into the mist, grab onto me. We truly cannot navigate in there without a Weed, so we need to be especially vigilant.

[audacity]

[ accepting the gadget, which goes into his pocket, and sunflower, turning it over in his hands ]

How do you activate a flower?

[endsjustified]

Twist the stem like so—

[the one he’s holding activates, beaming a bar of solid sunlight into the ground]

—and again to deactivate it.

[audacity]

[ sun...flower....what else did he expect ]

Any idea how long one lasts?

[endsjustified]

About a day if you don’t turn it off, but they recharge if replanted in full sun. We trade out the ones around the mist greenhouse regularly for this reason.

[audacity]

...That's better than I would've expected.

[ actual useful tools, as much reminder as anything that this isn't home or gifts from the gods ]

What about the mask dudes? What does breaking the mask do?

[endsjustified]

Their souls are trapped in and protected by the masks, so it’s the best way to put them on the defensive or make them lose their intelligence.

They do turn into feral shadow beasts when the mask is broken, but they’re a lot easier to kill that way.

[audacity]

Best thing I've heard all day.

[ "this is a stealth mission" okay but listen, ]

[endsjustified]

It’s still early. You might hear better.

[audacity]

"There's a monster who needs killing over here, Ceph," or "Turns out the Wolf King has a critical weakness to seawater" would be pretty great, yeah.

[endsjustified]

There’s always a monster that needs killing.

[a little sigh]

I do expect things to go wrong at some point. Clover may be trying to counterbalance stealing our luck by blessing us daily, but flock powers don’t hold in the mist, so we can’t rely on that.

[audacity]

I know you're worried, and I don't want you to think I'm not taking this seriously, but those kinds of odds have basically been every day of my life. Kevin's too.

Things always go wrong at some point. We'll improvise. We'll have each others' backs. We'll beat some wolf ass, if we have to. Maybe pick up some souvenirs before we make it back to Lily in time for dinner. I've always wanted a wolf snow globe, personally.

[endsjustified]

I know. Honestly, I’m glad to be going in with a team that’s fully combat-ready, this time.

[straightens up; he’s got a few sunflowers strapped to his own back, but otherwise anything he’s prepared is simply hidden away in the depths of his coat]

Let’s hope we can retrieve some decent information, though.

[audacity]

[ would be more worried about the lack of obvious weapons, but he's seen the shepherd spell-cast. and suspects that, much like athena, charon always has a plan ]

Tips on where to look first to find what we need? Or is this gonna be more of a general recon thing. I don't think I ever heard how much we actually know about this place.

[endsjustified]

It’s an urban center and as far as we could tell last time, unoccupied save for the building used to hold kidnap victims. What interests me is that that building had computers.

If we can direct the teleportation, I want to start in the park Bluebell found that held wolfsbane—we can see if we can harvest any more, and if it’s signifying an unmarked grave we may meet the ghost Death pointed us toward.

Then—mm. It depends what the wolf presence is at this time, but we could either see what they are up to if they are there again, or if not, we can locate a city hall or library and try to find—documentation, data, anything we can bring back and use to help decipher what happened in the past and what might be happening now.

[audacity]

The lost, wandering soul. Yeah, it's worth checking.

[ does not bother suggesting the city should still be empty if it was before, which would instantly jinx them with worse luck ]

So we're talking books, hard drives, information-information.

[endsjustified]

Mm. We don’t really have more than glimpses of how things went on the wolves’ side, so…

[shrugs]

We should prioritize anything we can find on the war and the King and his family, but honestly, whatever looks promising at a glance. We can’t linger, so we likely need to just steal it and go.

[spinebuddyandme]

[ Inspecting one of the little techno pinging gadgets ]

So even if the satellite booster thing works, these still won't communicate back to the pasture?

[endsjustified]

They’re supposed to communicate back to the pasture, but it’s just a signal, so we’ll be bringing them back. Aides just wants to see if he can even make technological communication possible in the mist at all or if it will be blocked at a certain distance.

The satellite booster is separate, and as far as I could understand it is just meant to make anything from the city itself more…audible? to the satellite if it successfully launches.

[spinebuddyandme]

So it's just for testing; got it. It'll be pretty cool if the satellite and booster work out the way he's hoping. It'd be nice to have a heads up if the Wolves are actually doing anything out there.

[endsjustified]

Mm. Any leg up we can get from this would be good, really. I didn’t try to overplan for this one, since we don’t have anything to go off of other than what we managed to glimpse on the first trip, and we don’t have the safety net of a friendly Weed.

Other than wanting to start from the park Bluebell described, we’ll be winging it.

[audacity]

And we don't know if we'll be able to come back any time soon, so we'll have to make it count.

So we gotta get in, try to find our ghost, hope we don't run into anyone else as we try to find useful information, steal anything promising, and get out. Am I missing anything important?

[endsjustified]

I think that’s the gist of it.

And don’t get separated. …if you do and you end up in the mist, call for the deer, the Earth Spirits.

[spinebuddyandme]

That makes sense. Even Scarab wasn't paying attention to, like, anything but the building we were going for the last time we were there. The place could be filled with nightmare factories for all we know.

Do you know what you want us to do if we do find something suspicious?