Welcome to Gaia! ::

"What the hell kind of god is The Slavemaker? I mean, it's like the Aztecs, worshiping someone who hated them. Couldn't even come up with another god to worship to beat up their first one. Lot of ancient civilizations like that, seems like. Sacrificing to appease gods. Even the Jews, on some level, I guess they were afraid of Jehovah. They say he spoke to them. Think it's possible?" Cassandra hardly seemed to have breathed in throughout her statement.

Ty shrugged away metaphysics like an uncomfortable scarf around his neck. It chafed, and it choked - there was no reason to keep it around except the flair, and in this case, the cons beat out the pro. "So the Ryu are... basically a bunch of doofuses with nothing better to do than argue over things that don't matter?"

Religious warfare was one of the least sensical things Ty had learned of during his soft upbringing. Fighting about something no one could ever prove, and that didn't matter until you were dead, anyway. Nothing was accomplished by deaths in a religious war.

Cassandra nodded. "Religious warfare is a bit pointless. Why would God want you to kill people? It just doesn't make sense.

"They were a bit... under-equipped. They weren't even hiding their mana signatures, just Chameleoniced like that'd be enough to be invisible. O'course, I was lucky not to get hurt back there. If he'd tried to finish me off somehow, or if he'd gotten the chance, he almost certainly could've."

The irony of Cassandra being unable to act against what she could see and Carlyle being unable to see in order to act was lost upon - well, Cassandra at least.

That was why the captain had said something about assigning her as a partner to Carlyle, though.

After about half an hour of talking, they were ordered to move out immediately. Complaints about this being less time than they'd been told they'd have were ignored; they soon were on a hovertruck bound for the nearest city, cruising through the darkness with an escort of three thaumatanks.

A steady humming began to fill their ears. Dremmeur Sai blinked twice, squinted, and groaned. "Desert Raiders... s**t," Sai muttered. "Of course they wouldn't miss this chance."

... A man, wrapped head-to-toe in dark-gray cloth, riding on some sort of hovering construct. Without Sai having already been staring at him, Isaac never would have seen him. The construct consisted of four metallic bars equally spaced from each other, emerging from a spherical center. Three were almost against the ground, kicking up a small cloud with a hoverfield emitted from the spherical tips of the... the thing. The man was hanging from the upright central bar, his feet on the tripod-like projections and his head wrappings trailing behind him.

"There'll be more to the other side. And ahead. And coming up behind us," Sai commented.

The man swung his weight around and the thing spun; one of the bars turned its hoverfield off as it swung up to the top; the former top bar activated its own hoverfield as it bounced off the ground; the Raider now had his legs wrapped around the tripod projections from below, and was hanging from the bottom as the new top broke from the 'four equally spaced projections' format to a 'gee, that top one kind of looks like a small thaumacannon' format. It began to glow.

Uh oh.

As Isaac fired, the Desert Raider reciprocated. A blue bolt flung at their hovertruck and the recoil kicked the Raider's tetrapod hovercraft back; the Raider spun it up onto a single pod and balanced on its lone hoverfield, controlling its precarious balance with his own body. As the bullet flew past him, he paused before spinning around and dropping the pods down, putting all four on the ground and standing as it began to approach the hovertruck.

Carlyle swore. "Of course we can ever have a mission where we don't get jumped three times in spite of all of our efforts at secrecy!" he moaned as he drew a bead on the other Raider and fired. "That would be too simple! That would make sense! Fah!" Angered, he continued to squeeze the trigger until roughly half his clip was gone.

Cassandra, as her vision returned, realized she was in the prison of the Coven base in Australia where Dremmeur Sai had been attacked. Moments later, Isaac emerged from the wall, landing awkwardly on top of her.