[video] now the question is, how much are you willing to risk?

[animusnpcs]

The network connects to a new feed an hour later, at eleven. It's not as stumbling as the previous connection--while a blast of energy accompanies it, this is a more precise one. If Zo's connection was a sledgehammer, this connection is a scalpel. Ruana and Dax are sitting across from each other at a table. The display is off to the side, and so both are displayed in profile.

Neither seems especially cheerful at the moment.

"You should see all the damage they did downstairs," Ruana says; the tip of her left shoe taps against the floor rhythmically. "Jason's labs still have dead monsters in them, Riki is going to have to fix all his security, they went into my bedroom--" Ruana growls, but composes herself. "I know it was you."

"I wasn't under any impression I was being especially subtle," Dax says, and his tone is ice cold--efficently emotionless. "We can't keep doing this. We're hurting them--all of them."

"We're saving them."

"I'm sure a lot of them would have rather died. Some of them have told me as much."

"We're saving them! If we have to save them from themselves, too, then that's just part of--"

"I'm saving them!" Dax slams his hands down on the table. "From the monsters, when I can keep them down here. From Jason, when I can keep him from cutting out their veins or rearranging their nervous systems for fun! If I have to save them from you--"

"From me? Dax--"

"--it's not that much different from what I do all the time."

Dax slams a hand against the table again and it falls apart--chaotically rearranged, as Dax's powers are wont to do. Ruana shrieks with something more sinister than laughter.

"Is this a coup? Oh, dear." Ruana vanishes, reappears next to Dax. Her voice drops to something slower and sleepier than her normal trill. "You're being a very bad dog."

The entire room falls to pieces--Dax has used his abilities again. A moment later, Half of RUana falls apart, too, in a mix of pulped organs and shattered bones. But a moment later she reappears on the other side of the room, still regrowing bits of skin but otherwise looking fine.

The wall spikes suddenly through her chest and the feed cuts out again.

The feed comes back on an hour later. Ruana and Dax are sitting across from each other at a table. The display is off to the side, and so both are displayed in profile.



Then the world falls apart. The room is dark and half-destroyed. Wires and beams litter the ground, things are half-melted and there's blood everywhere.

Ruana is bent over a corpse. Her face is smeared with blood and sinew as she tears and chews and swallows and who knew her teeth were so sharp, sharp enough that bones snap in two, sharp enough that it's no problem at all for her to tear down into what was Dax's chest and swallow up his heart bite by bite.

She crawls on hands and knees like a feral beast, turning her head a bit too far to look at the mess all around her. And then it all shifts, rearranges itself, fixes itself, until it's as if nothing happened, as if Dax's body had just appeared in the center of the room on its own.

"Your psionics are delicious," Ruana giggles in Dax's ear before she gets to work consuming the rest of him. While working on his brain, though--and oh, how the skull can fall apart under the right sort of pressure--that she gags, chokes, and vomits. "No," Ruana gasps, vomits again. "No, I don't need that part. You really were going soft. Your mind went all rotten. Disgusting."

She twists again, turns to look at the monitor. For a moment, it's like she sees everyone on the other side, sees you and knows what your insides feel like. "Visiting hours are over."

The atmosphere of the Tower changes--reorganizes itself, finds a new sort of order with only the dull taste of blood in the back of your throat to mourn the old way of the world. What were Dax's powers if not control of order and chaos--and Ruana uses them now to rewrite things, to claw out the tumors the universe said were inoperable. It is not so much removing Nyarlathotep as tearing him out of the fabric of the universe, not so much closing a door as writing that door out of existence before and after and forever.

Nyarlathotep, and all the visitors who came with him, are shunted violently through the universe back to where they came from. It's a rough ride, the sort you might expect to get if you intruded and were tossed out, and there's no time to even register what's happening until it's happened.

Silence settles over the Tower, and the feed turns off.