"We can come back, sure," Jonnoperest whispers. "That bubble's gonna be a son of a whore no matter when we come back, though."

"Well, now that we know where he is, we can come back later with better equipment and code and get access if we have to. He is on the Cortex, right?" Davis asks. "If he is, see if you can mark where we are or record it somewhere, and we'll back out of here. Never know when having a hotline to the mind of the Emperor could come in handy."

"I got it, I got it," the Bashakran answers. "Luis, get us out of here."

Luis nods, and starts to back them out slowly, slinking off to somewhere they can cut the connection without being noticed or leaving traces.

Luis leaves the glass eagle-thing alone in its spherical armored shell. He zigzags through the fish once again and spins the silver connection back around himself as he rises up from the murky depths of the pool. Luis bursts back into the fresh air of the minimum-security Cortex and cuts his connection.

"Nice job, Homeworlder," Jonnoperest tells Luis. "We only saw the security feeds 'cause that's what we need for the job, so that's what we crashed through. No doubt there'd be way more processes down that deep if we had a more invasive break-in point, but it's not worth the trouble at this stage."

"Do we need to alter the plan, Davis?" Arketta asks. There is no murky pool, of course, no golden fish, no glass bubble, just data and processes and tap-tap-tapping on projected controls. "The Boranai assault leaves in a few hours - if we need to abort we need to do it now."

"No, we'll just keep this in our back pocket for later," Davis says. "We'll only get one shot at penetrating the Emperor's mental security, we want to make sure that it goes off without a hitch and we know what we're going to say and do in advance."

He stands up and opens a bottle of something like a carbonated coffee beverage. "We need to be careful about who knows about this, though. I know how Sturgis, Hogue and the rest of our military would react, they'd want to use it for a strike right away." He looks over to Jonnoperest. "Can you imagine your leaders doing anything different?"

"Can't say I can," the golden-eyed man agrees. "We've got a good plan, let's stick to it."

Luis nods, "Right. Stick to the plan, keep out of trouble."

"For a few more hours, at least," Davis says. "Jonno, if you've got some safe place to back up that Cortex location, do it and let me know where you've got it and how to get at it." On the Turai suit gauntlets he's wearing, Davis checks the timer that they synchronized with the Boronai teams back on Earth. "We should start packing up and getting ready to move out, Boronai's going loud in a few hours and we'd better be in position."

He looks back up from his wrist, and looks the rest of the team in the eyes in turn as he speaks. "Well, ladies and gentlemen, this is it. After this, we're not just walking into the enemy camp, we're doing so with the intention of poking them square in the eye. It's gonna be dangerous, but I know that everyone here is more than good enough to get the job done. Follow the plan and do your job, and everyone should get out of here in one piece." He pauses for a second. "That should about do it. Are we ready to rock and roll?"

Angel hangs of the balcony, his cloak fluttering slightly in what he's sure is a terribly heroic looking poise, if he wasn't scared out of this goddamned mind. Its a quick handhold down, and an awkward landing before he's back in the room.

He doesn't stop to watch the results of his little bug placing foray, electing instead to carefully remove his cloak and slump down on the floor.

"This...this is gonna be fun."

Mission Time 02:03:11

The team moves with measured steps through the outer corridors of the Imperial Palace. Ornamental pillars curve into archways overhead. Busts and relief sculptures of past Emperors adorn the walls while scenes from famous battles and victories shift and move across hanging tapestries.

The day has come. Angel and Luis lead Davis, Arketta, Ngawai, and Jonnoperest through a circuitous route that should read as a standard patrol path. Swims-the-Black trails the group, using his old Caretaker skills to discern if any of the human inhabitants the team passes are overly suspicious. So far, so good.

The entrance into the Eternal Gardens is Luis and Jonno's first real challenge of the operation. Angel's timed their path so that the regular Turai guards are patrolling the next corridor, but the machine surveillance must still be dealt with. Two drones and a scanner array log every person passing through the Garden entrance.

Luis, Davis and Jonno tug on the silver cable linking them back to that dark pool where the Emperor sits. Cold and dark, glints of golden light, then they're in. Davis spots the two drones they need - two circling fish in this virtual space. Luis and Jonnoperest swim up from below, quickly, quietly. A brief nod and both men snatch up the golden fish and wrap hoods over their heads. With the drones blinded, Davis is free to swim past. Spoofing the sensor array with null values is an easy task, and the team enters the Eternal Gardens.

A gaggle of nobles hastily clears out of the team's way. Clad in decadent, flowing robes (one might almost call it architecture) too unwieldy to exist without impeller-assisted microdrones, the nobles stumble most indelicately out the Gardens' entrance. They don't notice that the surveillance drones aren't tracking them.

A multicolored expanse stretches out before the team. Gently rolling paths stroll through a myriad of artificial settings; an interplanetary arboretum showcasing flora from countless planets. You stride slowly past a vista of bone-white skeletal tree-things stabbing up from snow-covered ground and wonder where the pink-flecked glittery flakes are coming from when the display shifts, like time-elapse film, into a roaring mountain crag buffeted by winds. The mundane displays are static here in the Gardens, populated with actual flora - and in some cases fauna, as Luis discovers when a curious dog-sized scrofa snuffles at his boot - but the rest are rotating through false vistas projected by bleeding-edge holograms.

You start to notice the animals now - as if some of these creatures were so easy to classify. The Eternal Gardens are a museum to every species the Imperium has encountered, and that collection is vast indeed.

A flight of combat skimmers darts overhead, just black arrowheads against the blue sky. It's hard to tell whether the view above is real, hologram, or piped in from somewhere else.

The team walks on; not too far now to the Garden exit and the security checkpoint into the Repository of Benevolent Spirits. Nearby, a brazen lord-merchant eyes Swims suspiciously, intentionally remarking to his green-skinned statuesque companion, "The beast is in the right place, it's just on the wrong side of the fence." The verdant female giggles, lightly admonishing the purple-crested merchant.

Swims says nothing, but the slight glow to his fur suggests he's looking forward to what is coming.

On the far side, the Eternal Gardens lack the scanners and drones. The foliage grows up around the pathway, changes slowly to red vine-encrusted corridor, then gradually fades to smooth gilded tile and imposing buttresses; a gothic look reimagined by Salvador Dali and Apple. The hum of thousands of machines is felt more than heard as the team approaches the ROBS. Unlike their exit from the Gardens, this entrance to the Repository is watched by a trio of drones, each wrapped snugly in a ceiling mount some four meters overhead. A massive set of double doors form a formidable barrier, although it seems practicality has won out in some small fashion - a small access hatch forms a sort of door within a door. A typical access panel is seamlessly integrated into the luxurious wall decor, and is augmented by a vox array likely linked to some security station inside the Repository itself.

There is a snag, however. The intel said all you had to do would be to spoof the drones and hack the door. None of the information Davis, Luis, or Angel gathered said anything about two Whiirr cased in golden carapace armor standing guard.

*Oh fuck,* Jonnoperest spits over the vox. *Jade Careta-*

*Calm,* is all Swims can vocalize over the encrypted connection. Anything more and the alien's visual language could very well give up the group to the Whiirr bodyguards.

The corridor doesn't necessarily lead directly to the ROBS, Davis remembers from the floorplan. The team could just be taking the long way to the Hall of Tranquility. The question isn't where you're going anymore; it's whether the alien watchdogs will be able to discern any false intentions from your body language.

Angel forces himself to stay cool. He knows his team is walking into a fight. It is a certainty. But who starts it? When do you pull that trigger? How much time do you give the enemy?

Luis feels a twinge of excitement as he realizes the Jade Caretakers protect the Emperor and His avatars. What's behind those doors?

*Okay everyone, stay cool,* Davis says. *They can't see our faces through the suits, so just stay calm and we should be fine. We're just here to check on the security system, so Jonno, crack that panel and plug in. We need you to "accidentally" break the door and drones, don't bother cracking them, just jam them in a way that makes it look like you broke them, make it look really embarrassing. Everyone else, look bored but stay alert.* Davis moves himself between the Caretakers and the rest of the group, putting on the airs of every other self-important, high-and-mighty Imperial officer he's seen so far.

Jonnoperest draws the eyes of the Caretakers for a second, but Davis quickly finds himself fenced in by two golden giants as the aliens step forward.

Suddenly there's a loud bamf and Jonno skids a foot across the slick floor. The surveillance drones wail high-pitched whines of protest as their crimson sensor banks go dark. A puff and then a black curl of smoke pours from the access panel. A few of the machine's guts, spewed from the blast, crunch under one of the Caretaker's feet as it turns to inspect the damage.

"What you just do?" grunts one of the Whiirr in guttural, questioning Imperial.

Davis turns angrily towards Jonno. "What this dumbass just did is blow up the Goddamn panel!" he shouts. He stomps over to the panel, shoving Luis and Arketta out of the way, and kneels down, looking at the panel for a second to figure out how Jonno blew the panel. "You idiot, you sent the access query to an open circuit! Didn't they teach you recruits proper input parsing?" he shouts, poking angrily at the remains of the circuit board.

Davis stomps back over to the Caretakers. "Look, I'm gonna make this simple so you can understand. We got called down here to check out this panel, and Turai Soon-To-Be-Reassigned here just made it connect to a powered circuit, which is very bad and made it blow up. Now we need to get to the other panel on the other side of those doors-" Davis points to the doors to the ROBS, "-so we can get this checkpoint back up online and let you two beasts get back to staring at the wall or whatever it is you're doing."

"Watch mouth," the more verbal of the two Caretakers growls. "Master send you to Boranai." Its comrade snuffles a laugh and keys its vox, speaking in its native tongue and punctuating normally-visual cues with Imperial words.

"Master, a half-Quad requests access to the Repository to repair a hatchway. I'm sorry, it was a catastrophic failure. Ceiling feeds are out as well." A pause.

The second Caretaker carefully watches the group as the first one waits on a response.

"Yes, master." The talkative Whiirr looks at Davis again. "Fix widget." The armored alien wrenches open the now-unpowered access hatch and a dull roar of hundreds of studious, quiet initiates poring over cogitators rolls over the group.

Davis motions for the Sept to step through the opened access hatch. "Crack that panel and get this checkpoint back up!" he shouts through to them. "It'll take at least a few hours to fix the damage that this idiot did, and we can't have it down a second longer then necessary!" Davis turns back to the talkative Caretaker. "Be sure to secure this hatch after us. If someone gets past this checkpoint because the drones are down, it'll be you that gets sent to Boranai."

He steps through and jogs after the team. *Okay, that was close. Luis, are we being watched? I mean, more so than usual. And Jonno, who are we looking for to take us to the Cortex proper?*

Luis taps his helmet feeds delicately, easing far enough in to watch the streams for a second. Examines the dataflow rates and priority traffic volume, he tries to judge if they've been made.

(OOC: If necesary, a WD or two to make this stealthy enough and get solid data.)

"Normally, you'd want a Keeper of Secrets," Jonnoperest answers, his voice suddenly wavering. "Normally g-got golden cerebral implants, can't miss 'em... but I b-bet THAT'S got access." He nods subtly, trying to draw as little attention to himself as possible.

Luis sees exactly what Jonno's pointing out, just from a different perspective. He's snorkeling back in the black pool when the glass eagle-monster in the shield bubble breaches the water's surface meters away from him.

Luis taps commands with lightning speed and goes two-dimensional, edge-on to the avian creature's vision. He's all but vanished.

Davis looks down the first of three football-field-sized rooms where row upon row of Scholar-initiates fact-check Cortex squirts and flag items for revision or addition. Truthseekers glide slowly through large circular aquaria overhead. Keepers oversee each monastic vault from central command kiosks.

One vault over, a 7-foot tall golden man-thing strides slowly through its Repository. Two Caretakers accompany the Avatar of the Jade Emperor. The creature/automaton/armored suit seems to be taking a report from one of the Keepers Jonnoperest mentioned. The man's definitely in the same line of work as old Hethna Varos - same golden yamaka, same austere robes.

Davis looks over at the Avatar, then back to the wall, looking for the nearest access panel to the jammed door. *Stop staring at the fucking thing and do the job we're in here to do, which is fixing that door. Swims, watch the Caretakers and Angel, Arketta, Ngawai, watch our backs without being obvious. Everyone stick together, remember, we're just fixing a door.* He walks down the wall, towards the corner of the massive Repository, away from the central vault and still looking for the panel. *Okay, I'm going to assume we can't spoof the Avatar's ID and get into the Cortex that way. That leaves us with spoofing a Keeper, talking one into taking us in, and talking the Avatar into letting us in. If we talk our way in, we're going to need a reason, which means dummying up orders to check and guard the Cortex from rebel attack, and I assume that spoofing an ID isn't as easy as getting past the scanners. Jonno, which would you pick?*