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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gideonpepys" data-source="post: 7835034" data-attributes="member: 79141">Session 241, Part OneAmbush Squad Battle - Round 1Quratulain was first off the mark, strafing the enemy with force beams from her blaster, to test their defences. She hit a construct, Nicodemus’ host, Pardo, one of the occultists and Justin Rollins. None of them dropped save Nicodemus, who fell to his knees. His head sagged on to his chest.  Only the fact that he raised his cigarette to his mouth betrayed the fact that he was still alive.Uru delivered the killing blow to Rollins, without pausing to consider whether or not the royal technologist was compelled or dominated in any way. Though Rollins stopped chuckling in his usual, avuncular manner, and his legs gave way for moment, he stood back up and kept on going, though the way his limbs moved was odd.Leon teleported into the ideal position to bathe the foe with a pacifying light from the Wayfarer’s Lantern. When they levelled their weapons at him, he realised it hadn’t worked; the Ob were not to be undone by their own weapon! Quick as a flash, he teleported out of danger again.With Lauryn Cyneburg involved, Leon was not the only one to bampf around the battlefield.  She appeared in the very midst of the fight, cocked her head for a moment as if calculating, and then the entire battlefield shifted.  Everyone was repositioned according to her whim; individual unit members moved adjacent to foes who appeared to be waiting for them.  Then she teleported away again, to the top of the ziggurat.Pardo was now next to Gupta.  He pounced and knocked her prone, then used his devour anima power to draw one of her key powers out of her mind.  She had seen him do this before, guessed which power he was after, and resisted.Korrigan counselled his allies to conserve their strength if possible: from what Nicodemus had said, this was going to be a long day. Then he responded to Cyneburg’s manoeuvre by giving tactical orders of his own: Gupta jumped back to her feet on his command; Uru leapt out of Campion’s reach; Rumdoom – surrounded by a half-circle of constructs, protecting the two occultists who were already weaving a spell against him – dashed forward to knock these defenders out of the way.  Quratulain said, “I’m fine, thank you,” and stayed where she was, surrounded by constructs.The construct squads attacked everyone they could, either with grindsaw arms in melee, or with a turret fusillade.  Quratulain was beset by a dozen of them.  She fought them off as best she could, then lobbed a grenade at her own feet and excluded herself from the blast with the firesight eye.  The constructs were badly damaged but kept on coming.Pardo sought to keep Gupta from escaping him:  a barely visible coil of psychic energy streaked from his mind into hers.  Again she fought it off, realising at once that this was not an ordinary aspect of his suite of capabilities. Something was amiss here.Justin Rollins had been planted in the very epicentre of the fight, where he was able to draw a bead on all enemies, and lay down suppressive fire with his pistols. He also summoned a mechanized shotgun, which hovered in the air beside him, and began firing repeatedly at Korrigan. Having done so, he tried the same sinister psychic trick that Pardo had, but Korrigan’s mind was a bastion.Cyneburg had cleared a nice big space next to Xavier Sangrea.   He took out a glowing crystal, threw it into this space and thereby summoned a gargantuan entity which most of the unit recognised from their adventure on the Avery Coast Rial Line:  the Screaming Malice!  He muttered arcane words of control and the beast lurched towards the unit.Uru was right next to it, backed away as best he could, and cried out, “Ash wolf! We call upon your promised aid, here in the very place where we rendered ours!”Campion Price-Hill wasn’t about to allow his target to slip away further. “Come here, you slippery little wanker,” he snarled, trying to use the same strange psychic power that all of these Ob fighters seemed to possess. But Uru was no longer the slouch he had been when it came to sheer willpower. He was a titan-in-training!  Campion gave a cry of frustration when the spell didn’t work and launched himself at Uru wielding long knives.Keen to put some distance between herself and the relentless Pardo, Gupta used her Golden Icon of Apet. Instead of taking her up to the first tier of the ziggurat as intended, she found herself diverted to the very top. (“A dimension beacon!” Leon realised.)  This planted her right next to Lauryn Cyneburg, and so she used the very power Pardo had tried to strip from her, asking her a question to befuddle her mind: “Did you really think I didn’t want to be next to you?”  But it didn’t work! Cyneburg’s mind was shielded in some way, a fact Gupta reported to the others. (It must have been something to do with the hivemind phenomenon Pemberton had warned them about.) Cyneburg responded with a spiteful punch.  “This really wasn’t how I wanted to spend my afternoon,” she sneered. Gupta found herself thrown through the air, landing on the steps further down the ziggurat.As Rumdoom crashed towards them through the construct squad, the Ob occultists worked together to summon shadowy tendrils that curled all about the Stone of Not, and sought to wrest it from Rumdoom’s grasp. Rumdoom yanked it free, and Notted one of the nethermancers, obliterating him entirely.The Screaming Malice shrieked a bloodcurdling shriek, freezing the marrow of both Uru and Rumdoom and, having thus fixated them, sought to swallow them whole. Uru only just managed to throw himself out of harm’s way.   Rumdoom found himself caught in its great maw and struggled to free himself. It was tempting to grow to giant size, but he decided to save that for ‘important people’. …At the very edge of the battle, Amielle Latimer appeared.   Her arrival provoked disembodied wails of protest and anger that seemed to emanate from within their foes!  “They’re possessed!” Amielle shouted, taking aim with her rife.  “Controlled by the ghost council!”They needed to be freed – at the very least, Cyneburg did.  (It was too late for Rollins, and Pardo was in duplicant form.) Uriel, watching all this, unseen, felt that he could help, if only he could make himself known somehow, or better yet manifest on the battlefield. As he focused his mind and strove to convert what he was seeing from a mere vision to a new reality, testing the idea of translating himself form once place to another, he was struck by a sudden realisation: The act of doing so would be the very thing that prevented him from returning from the Gyre as the others had. It would stretch his soul too thinly. If he pulled back, he might be able to find away to return to Lanjyr in physical form.Uriel brushed aside all of his doubts and concern for himself, and determined to communicate with his friends at all costs.</blockquote>

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