Rey, Olesya, and Te Hwan will go free the children. Ambrose rigs the teleporter to send the children to the ship as they're freed. The rest head to the top of the castle.
But as they blink into the room, a force field activates, blocking them off from the rest of the room. Sergei, Sonya sees, has been Embraced. She carefully restrains herself from reacting. Danielle has been hooked up to an energy chamber full of chrysalis energy.
Downstairs, the children are guarded by two war ghouls. Rey casts a silence spell so they can sneak upon them. Olesya starts mauling. Te Hwan summons a totem spirit. They follow a long corridor to a shadowy door at the far end. Rey tries and fails to summon sunlight...but his sword begins to radiate it. The shadows are dissolved and they begin to free the children.
Upstairs, Ambrose hisses to Jonas, "Distract them!"
"Right. Uh..." But then Jonas sees Timon top of the Flux column. The Nuwisha unzips his pants and unceremoniously takes a whizz on Von Allman.
"That works," says Ambrose. He quickly recalibrates the transporter and teleport-hops them out into the room. Aila hesitates at the wealth of targets.
Danielle yells at them from the chamber she's trapped in. "Have you tried to break out of that?!" Sonya snaps.
"Yes!" the bastet replies.
"Have you tried shapeshifting?"
"Ohh!" Danielle transforms and begins ripping her way out.
Sergei, apparently under Rastov's domination from his strangely-wired throne at the room's far end, heads for Tim, who runs and moons him. Growing increasingly angry and frustrated, Sergei's building Rage seems to make him pause.
Caleb guns for Rastov. Sergei activates the Aegis Gift so that things can't hit him.
Ambrose fires at Von Allman with a plasma rifle he snagged from the ship, which doesn't activate. "Do you really zink I vould design a gun-" Ambrose whips out his laser pistol and shoots him with that.
Mark and Sonya exorcise spectre-ridden Empty Knights as they appear. Aila shoots spectres. Jared and Jonas attack robots. Lady alison shoots lightning bolts that drain the robots' energy into a receptacle she has.
Tim continues to tick off Sergei. Sonya takes a look around, noting that the body in the coffin smells more Wyrm-tainted than anything she has ever encountered. There's a pretty vampire, whose blood is being drained into a centrifuge.
RF covers Ambrose's back while Ambrose tries to shut down that centrifuge. "You fool, you'll ruin everyzing!" Von Allman shouts at him.
Caleb cuts Rastov and sees something moving under his skin.
When Danielle frees herself, Aila calls her over to her.
Tim winds up near Ambrose. "Wow, he's really chasing him!" Ambrose glances over to see Sergei chasing an illusionary Tim.
Jared notes that there's nothing stopping him from cracking open that chamber of crysalis energy and letting it go back where it's supposed to. In fact...when he thinks about it, he really wants to. He pauses briefly to think about it, but isn't really coming up with any good reason why not...
Robots attack Ambrose. RF defends him, smashing the things into each other.
Dr. Von Allmans backpack, it turns out, becomes an exo-suit. He goes Lex Luthor at the same time as Lady Alison breaks Rastov's control over Sergei...who looks at Rastov, then at the coffin.
Caleb is now dodging tentacles that emerge from Rastov's body. One darts past him and grabs Danielle. Aila shoots it with a plasma cannon. She's pleased with the success of plasma guns on vampires, so she goes on to blast the other vampires in the room.
RF has to now defend Ambrose against exo-Allman, slamming a robot into his legs and wrecking the servos. Sergei grabs the body out of the coffin, lashing it with the Sunspear Gift over and over again, killing himself along with it. Ambrose at this point has brainstormed the device's workings and start rerouting all power into the Flux column. Von Allman shoots RF with some kind of silver-energy cannon, just barely missing him. Caleb and Aila succeed in tearing Rastov's head off...only to have tentacles from inside suck it right back on.
Von Allman is shouting science crap at Ambrose as he tries to stop him: "Don't you see?! Vampires, zheir Avatar ist in zheir blood!"
"...Yeah, I do see!" Ambrose says excitedly.
"Then if I do this..." Lady Alison breaks in, pointing her gilgul wand at Sergei, and firing it, which sloughs the vampirism out of him.
Sonya throws up Luna's Armor and wades through the fire to help Sergei kill the thing. If he wants it dead that badly, then it's first priority.
Jared finally gives up pondering, and smashes the energy chamber open.
Downstairs, the floor is shaking. About fifty childlings go into chrysalis at once. The Boggan nanny with them--Rose, one of Jared's friends--steers them all onto the airship. "Just want to be there," she suggests to them.
Upstairs, Caleb finally gets a good grip on Rastov, crushing him into a bearhug and cracking his skin open. Tendrils and snapping mouths on tentacles and eyestalks and even less savoury things pour out of him.
Sonya shoves her fist into the gaping hole of the undead thing's chest to grab its heart, and fires lightning bolts straight into it, finishing it off. Sergei slumps to the floor with it, not letting go, dying. Hauling the remains of Abisimilliard away and tossing them into the fire, she scoops up Sergei's body and carries him back out to the others.
As the chrysalis energy lashes out in widening arcs, Jared and the Garou sense the forest spirits moving. All this activity has awakened the Leshyii. Caleb finishes crushing Rastov and the...thing inside him, then Jared freezes it in a tidal wave of Glamour-powered ice.
Von Allman is gone.
...because he has teleported to his airship's cockpit, in the chair next to Rey's. Who draws his sword and goes after him. Startled, Von Allman flees, but stuff in the cockpit activates--bombs placed in the castle. Rey calls the others to tell them to get out. Ambrose tells him he can't--he has to keep the Flux energy from exploding.
Te Hwan uses her joss and swats a button that just so happens to be the deactivation switch. Ambrose finishes stabilizing the Flux beam...and hears a bampf behind him. He glances over his shoulder to see a cyborg tyrannosaurus rex! After taking a second to gape wearily, he lobs a matter disintegration grenade at it.
Rey starts the launch procedure, noting something weird going on in the air with all the Glamour lashing out. It's beginning to coalesce into something... Balefires begin kindling all over the place.
Ambrose finally notes the ice-thing and Sergei's body.
Aila wants to put the werecat on the ship.
"I don't need to be safe," Danielle argues with her.
"You need to be safe or you'll disintegrate all of existence, sweetie," Aila tells her.
And then everything outside stops. Heading down, they find a rainbow key lying in the snow. The fae know, instinctively, that it unlocks Arcadia's gates. Lying near it is a horn with red and white dragons on it. Ambrose recognizes it: the arms of Arther Pendragon. Bits of the metal the key is made of are lying around, so Ambrose picks some up, and finds he can shape it with a thought. He shapes some into rings for Jared and Dierdre.
Rose the Boggan reams out Jared and criticizes Rey. He loves her. Jonas notes that Tim is awfully good at his job, and never sticks around. He's not a young Nuwisha.
Sonya goes to the edge of the forest to speak with the Leshyii. This is what Sergei fought for. She wishes to light his pyre here, and asks the Leshyii if it will summon those who would honor him to this place.
The Shadow Lords come, and the Silver Fangs. House Varich, and the Margrave Konietzki.
Ambrose's phone rings. He hesitates miserably before deciding to answer on grounds that it'd only be worse not to.
"Dr. Quintrell...what have you done?"
Um..."
The MiB starts to speak. Ambrose cuts him off with the story, which goes on for quite a while. The MiB mutters now and then, "Oh my god... Oh my god."
Still sounding a little stunned, the MiB finally finds his voice as Ambrose comes to the end. "Dr. Quintrell...you saved reality. Very well done."
"I'm a Son of Ether," Ambrose shrugs. "It's what we do."
"It's what Electrodyne Engineers do," the MiB counters.
"That's what I said," Ambrose agrees, then adds almost sadly, "We're not the ones who changed. That was you."
There's a brief eloquent pause, then the MiB tells Ambrose he'll be putting a commendation in his file, and hangs up before Ambrose can figure out whether to argue.
Ambrose catches Rey telling the children all about the exploits of "Doc Ether." He takes Rey to task, because he thinks that's an inappropriate name, but he's secretly rather pleased by the idea of earning a nickname. Rey, however, wants to stick by Doc Ether, and decides to run it past other Etherites.
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