Burn climbs into the vent and starts slowly crawling forward.

"Allright. Give 'em hell, guys!"

Terry listens to the frequency they picked up from the ork's radio while looking at the strongest willed (the lady) of the former hostages.

"Young lady," he says in a strong, emphatic voice, "someone needs to be in charge once we're all gone until we return. Right now I say that's you. Keep your people focused and set them tasks...have some watch the entrances, have others scrounge...delegate in general."

He gives them all the once over again, slipping into the astral and using his empathic and phsychological abilities, looking for troublemakers.

Resting himself in the corner, Reaper simply listens to the radio chatter in the background while keeping his attention more focused on drama unfolding before his eyes. His own thoughts parallel that of Kadel's own regarding the pair of dwarven mercenaries hired by the Ritz - one'd think that after spending so much on the construction of a place like this, skimping on the security didn't seem like the wisest of decisions. I wonder what other corners they cut?

When asked by Roland for aid to be provided to the injured girl, Reaper asks quietly over his own comm, "Can it wait uh few min? I'm uh a liddle winded." Yet even as the words leave his mouth, he feels the burgeoning magic buildup nano's before it bursts into the physical plane - unfortunately for the dwarf, he was not within the magical defenses that Reaper had constructed around his teammates. Realizing the source of the deadly blast had originated not from some outside threat did not relax the troll, although he was impressed by the power she wielded. While he understood the girl's motivations, she was still unstable and could prove even more of a liability to the team - frag, if she wanted to give Papa dwarf what he deserved, she shouldn't be horrified at the results.

In any case, the other didn't seem to mind so much - not much loyalty there, not even for his own blood; then again, Reaper was all too familiar with that aspect of life.

Moving over to Swiss, he gingerly examines her wounds to see what her condition the elf was in.

Kyle readies his weapon and nods to Slash, "On your six."

Slash bursts through the door, swords in hand, ready for anything.

Kyle follows close on Slash's heels. He cuts left and scans the room for hostiles doing his best to keep the sword swinging adept clear of his line of fire.

What a drekfest this is!

Roland looks at the elf, she doesn't appear to be hurt too badly, and he tries to coax her awake. Maybe she can tell us what happened here. Well, her friend is here too, gads. But at least she doesn't look badly hurt just winded and bruised from the dwarves. But the best thing to do is start moving along, we're not paid by the hour and there's still a nuke to disarm....

Roland stands away from the elf and nods to the others. "She's mainly just bruised and stunned, she'll recover in time. But I think we should start planning our next step, how about a small scout from the elevator shaft before we actually announce the world upstairs that we're coming up?"

Roland moves over to the elevator car and looks for the paneling to open up above into the shaft, he motions for anyone to come help him. "If we can get up there, listen to the door and look through the gaps and also open the doors a crack without alerting anyone, we can do a small peek to see the close is clear. Plus, I have a small dental mirror to help us look around outside the door, this should be quieter then us using the elevator and having the doors open fully to a room full of terrorists who are itching to shoot everything in sight."

Roland shirks his harness and some of his weapons to make himself lighter and starts moving the crates out of the way of the elevator, and says with a smirk, "Anyone wants to go ninja with me?"

Well that sounded all cocky, hope I don't piss anyone off, but I really hate surprises and with this many people to move....

Team A

The lady seems to understand the situation and whilst still looks a bit shaken, nods at Terry's words. She begins to slowly talk to the other three hostages and calms them down considerably. Currently she's just trying to get them to stop crying, but one of them has already calmed down and apparently plucked up his courage; he volunteers to watch the door you came in through whilst you move on and yell if anything happens.

Burn climbs up through the vent, though it seems a rather tight squeeze at first, the metal is polished enough to allow you to move through. You round the corner of the vent and face the end of the short vent, which connects to the stairwell leading to the second and third floor balconies of the theatre. It's almost pitch dark there, but from the vent you can see out of the doorway leading to the stairwell from the theatre, and some faint light is coming from the theatre itself.

Team B
Sundancer calms down and composes herself. Her friend Swiss is coming round again, her face and body full of bruises and other blunt trauma damage, but has suffered no lethal wounds and she'll be alright if she has a good deal of rest.

The dwarf can only shrug at Kadel's remark. "So you want me to tag along?"

Axe checks the open vents for wards and climbs into the vent as well, to follow Burn. He keeps his eyes open to the astral as the light on the physical is too faint to be of any help for him. That, and he is concerned about walking into a ward.

Axe doesn't see any wards in the vent. However, as the both of them near the edge of the vent, both of them catch a glimpse of something moving down the stairs slowly. It looks humanoid in form, and on the astral Axe can see that it is indeed a human dressed in camo and carrying an assault rifle of some make, though it doesn't appear to be a kalashikinov model. The vent's grating adds to the already very dark conditions of the place, and the human, an european looking man in his late thirties, sneaks down the stairs without noticing the both of you. The place is eerily quiet.

While the others continue to clear a path to the elevator and begin to make their way up into the shaft, Reaper continues to rest in a corner of the room - he keeps his eye on the trio, especially the dwarf and Sundancer to try to prevent any further "incidents" from occuring.

Roland notices that the car is at the bottom of a shaft that rises up three or four levels. Oops, that's a lot higher than I thought.... well, I guess we can take the normal way and ride up the car to B1 level or something....

"Well, it looks like I was mistaken, we're at the bottom basement level and we have several levels above us to go. I guess we should just ride the elevator up to either the ground floor or just below it and take the stairs up.... We really need to move and stop the terrorists from achieving their goals so that means if the bystanders can tag along fine, but if not, I think this room is as safe as any other place because our team will probably be drawing a lot of fire soon as we proceed on up."

Roland pauses for a moment.... Shall I tell them why we're trying to hurry? Maybe they'll understand and plus, I doubt they can cause a panick since they're stuck in the building with us already....

Roland retrieves his gear once the way to the elevator is clear and walks over to Sundancer and tells her quietly. "Sundancer, my team has to hurry. The reason is that the terrorists in one of the towers has threatened to detonate a tactical nuke and my team has a long way to go to the top."

Sundancer looks at Roland with a rather undecipherable look on her face. You don't quite get the impression that she fully believes you, but the urgency of your words and the situation she's in is getting her thinking. She nods anyway, then goes back to helping prop her friend on against some of the straw and softer foam from the arms crates, which serves as a rest in lieu of anything really comfortable.

The dwarf bursts out laughing when you mention a tactical nuke, though it only lasts for a second before he goes "Oh wait. That makes sense. Erm. Okay." He looks down and thinks for a moment. "Wow. Really? A tacnuke? hear? Wow. Wow. This is like some lousy two-bit trid program. wow..."

Then he looks up again.

"Uh, and what am I supposed to do? Go with you? I'm still your prisoner, aren't I?"

The door slams open as Kyle and Slash rush into the main theatre, but the moment they do, a series of loud yells (in English) resound across the chamber.

"Fire!" "Over there!" "Shoot! Shoot!"

And then you see three more humans dressed in urban camo standing at the far end of the theatre, packing assault rifles. More importantly, one of them is lying prone at the far end of aisle of seats you can look down, and an LMG rests upon a bipod on the floor in front of him. The moment the door moved, he pulled the trigger, and Slash and Kyle are met with a hail of supressive machinegun fire. The door breaks into shards and splinters behind them, and the hostages begin to lose it again.

Back in the vent, the mysterious person Axe and Burn spotted hears the yells and gunshots, then begins to rush up the stairs to a balcony overlooking the theatre.

Kadel turns to the dwarf and the ladies. "A word of advice...once you're out of the building, the media is going to go straight for your throats with their questions as soon as they realize who you all are. Do not mention anything about the nuke to anyone. I don't think I need to tell you why."

He takes a look at the lift and frowns. "Yeah, I think going up to B1 is a better idea, although there's no reason for the stairwell to extend to that level since the lift already goes there.

'I'm no electronics whiz and don't really know what they have up there, but maybe the professor can rig up some sort of contraption to kill the building's power supply and hook it up with a remote control device. Wouldn't do us any good now, but it'll be an interesting ace to have up our sleeve."

"Meanwhile, I'm going to go up to B2 and take a look around. Might be useful to know what else they have stored down here, if anything," he says with a glance at the crates chocked full of heavy weapons piled all around the room.

He looks at the dwarf and shrugs. "Don't ask me, ask him," he says, nodding in Roland's direction.

Axe curses under his breath and flings a spell through the grate at the human.

Roland looks back seriously in response to their incredulous looks and replies. "It might sound like a trid of the week special, but -what was that phrase? Life imitates art... Plus, I'm paid a lot of nuyen to stop it. So you decide if it's true."

Roland looks directly at the dwarf. "Yes, you're coming with us. I doubt this place will remain as safe as you imagine it will be once we move on up."

Roland assembles his gear and looks to the rest of the group, "Ok, team, we're going up the elevator to the next level for reconnaisance. Last person leaving the car," Roland looks over to Theodor, "will place something to block the elevator doors from closing so that no one else will can use it."

Roland looks at the 'civilians', "We will try and get you out of the building when there is a chance, that's all I can promise. Ok, team, let's gear up and get ready to move out."

"Kadel and Downtown, you two are scouts again, oh and take the dwarf with you. Go up to B2 and take a quick look, then send the elevator car back down so we can follow you. Reaper, can you an astral peek upstairs to give Kadel and Downtown a heads up? Theodor, can you make sure no one comes through the door we came from? I don't want anyone coming up our rear. I'll help these folks along."

Roland moves over to check on Sundancer and her friend. He eyes the elf and makes his expert determination of how long before she can be mobile.

Team A
The human terrorist stops in his tracks as Axe's bind spell constricts his arms and feet, causing him to stumble on the stairs he was running up. He falls backwards, tumbling down the short stairs, dropping his rifle and getting a rather nasty bump on his head in the process. He wriggles on the floor, trying to break free of his invisible bonds, grunting and tossing in confusion and fear, but to no avail as the bonds hold fast.

Team B
Sundancer nods as she sees Roland is truly serious. The dwarf is staring into space, rubbing his chin, wondering out aloud "but if I talk to the newsnets I could receive some serious nova hot cred..." When he snaps back to reality and notices everyone glaring angrily at him, he shuts up.

The sun shamaness looks over her friend's wounds, which seem to serious, but thankfully superficial in nature. She asks for some bandages and then helps her friend by wrapping the soothing medicated bandages around the more serious wounds.

Burn drops out of the edge of the vent and springs to attention, drawing his sword and scanning the room for any enemies other than the one Axe just immobilized.

The hail of bullets scream at him, and two of them hit Slash. One of them manages to penetrate his armor, but only nicks his skin before being stopped by the powerful chi auro surrounding his body. Reacting with superhuman speed, Slash drops one of his sworda and snatches a grenade from his chest, pulling the pin with his teeth. As he moves back behind the doorway, he tosses it a short distance to land near the terrorist who just shot him, taking cover behind the wall as he waits for it to go off.

"Mon ami, if you spill the beans to the newsnets and end up inciting massive citywide panic, what the government is going to do to you will make that nova hot cred seem like nothing."

Kadel raises an eyebrow as Roland finishes giving out his orders. "What happened to going ninja with Theodor? Eh...nevermind. If you want us to scout out level two before you head up, that's fine by me."

Turning to Downtown, he nods and says, "Alright man, let's hit it." Moving onto the cargo lift and drawing his gun, he thumbs the B2 button and keeps a wary gaze towards the above as the lift starts rumbling to life.

Kyle's lock with those of the machinegunner. The latter's narrow, the fomer's go wide.

"Fffu-" the rest is drowned out by the sound of heavy weapon fire.

Kyle thows his body back around the corner of the doorframe. A handfull of rounds slam into the armor fabric covering his left shoulder and flank making the areas go numb.

Releasing the Colt to hang by its sling Kyle pulls a flash/bang from his vest with is right hand, flips off the safety, thumbs the plunger on it and tosses it through the doorway.

"Fire in the hole!"

He shuts his eyes to shield them from the flash.

Getting up and drawing his sword, Burn sees no enemy besides the poor soul trapped in Axe's binding spell. "It's clear," he calls to Axe as he starts walking towards the sound of the firefight. Almost as an afterthough, he dispatches the terrorist, severing his spinal cord with the blade of his katana, killing the man with a minimum of bloodshed. As he walks towards the fight, Burn dissapears, activating his invisibility focus.

The machine gunner looks at the projectile headed his way, jaw hanging wide open. He tries to roll away. but the grenade lands right next to him, blowing him and his mounted LMG sideways as he tries to roll away. The blast blinds him and slams his body into a row of seats nearby. He's now prone and stunned, and doesn't look like he has much of a fight left in him by the way he went flying and the way he isn't making much of an effort to move.

The female terrorist boldly dives for the grenade that landed several metres away from here within her row of seats. She scooped up the grenade, landing on her side and throwing it back at the door. However, her wrist was shaking badly and the desire to get the active grenade out of her hands made her mistime her throw. The grenade bounces against the side of the door and back several metres, then erupts in a brilliant fireball as high explosives do. Kyle and Slash, taking cover behind the door sides, feel the brunt of the shock as the explosive tears through the hardened plaster-like material. But the grenade was too far away and the walls too thick to suffer any real damage.

The other three in the back start to...well, you can't exactly see.

Slash grabs a frag grenade, thumbs the trigger to set it for impact deonation, and tosses it towards the three terrorists at the back of the room.

Only one of the terrorists are in range of the grenade, and he ducks back and covers his face with his arm as the frag grenade explodes several metres away from him. The fragments embedd themselves on his armoured camourflage, causing him a few cuts and bruises on his face and arms, but he seems largely uninjured.

Terry, hearing the noise of battle states loudly yet calmly to the hostages, "stay here and listen to her," as he points to the woman he left in charge. He heads to the door and opens it, staying behind the wall as he pokes his head out to see what's going on.

Axe scrambles out of the vent, but is too late to stop Burn from dispatching the person bound by his spells. "These guys look different... I was hoping to ask him a few questions. Oh, well."

He lets the spells he had binding the body drop and brings his astral vision up to watch for more wards as he trails along behind Burn.

Reaper floats through the lift cab and up into the lift shaft, meeting the dwarf's watcher that he saw before floating through the openings of the vents and maintenance exists in the small shaft.

Floating through the doors to level 2, you come into a rather large room with lots of random machinery and equipment either wrapped up in plastic, in crates or tossed haphazardly about. They range from personal computers to maglocks to first aid kits to cutlery. A sign on the room says it's only one of several general storage areas, and you get the idea they didn't have time to tidy it during construction. The room is pitch black as the lights are off, but on the astral you see that the far end of the room has been blown apart, probably by something explosive, and beyond that are sewer pipes like the ones your team made their way through earlier.

The room also has a maintenance ladder and vertical passageway that leads upwards. a sign near the ladder says it leads to B1.

Stepping out of the lift a few seconds after Reaper arrives on the scene by astral, Kadel flips on the light switch and scans the room as the darkness is washed away. Spotting the mutilated wall at the far end leading to another part of the sewers, he frowns and moves towards it for a closer look.

Running down the stairs, Burn sees the terrorists preparing to counterattack against Slash and Kyle. He quickly flings a manabolt at the terrorist with the rocket launcher. The terrorist drops like a stone, bleeding from his nose and ears, brain-fried.

Kadel sees that the walls have large black char marks on them, and going by the shape of the hole, it's easy to see that it was made by some high powered explosive device.

He gazes down the sewer pipes for awhile, thinking to himself. Softly, Kadel speaks into the comms to the team, "One of the walls in B2 is blown, and it leads to another part of the sewers. Probably done by another team to gain entry into the building. One of you can give it a more thorough inspection when you come up, but I'm moving on."

Tightening his grip on his gun, he turns and heads towards the maintenance ladder marked B1. He climbs up the ladder and emerges at the room above with his pistol in one hand and flashlight in the other, eyes alert and ears sharp.

Roland listens to the radio message from Kadel.

Roland activates his team communicator and radios back to Kadel. "Roger, we'll probably join you on B1 once you've secured it. I don't think we have that much to linger and examine B2 level. Roland out."

Roland looks at Swiss' condition and wonders if a stim patch will help her be mobile sooner.

"Sundancer, does Swiss have any magical abilities like an adept or mage? I'm thinking of using a stim patch to help her be mobile sooner, but not if she has awakened abilities, I've heard there's bad side effects if I do that to those who are magical abilities."

Kadel notices something about the shaft upwards just in time. A claymore mine had been armed and placed halfway up the ladder.

Back with the rest of the team, Sundancer shakes her head. "Nah, she's not awakened. If it'll help her, then I guess it's okay."

"Jesus fuckin' Christ!" Kadel curses as he lets go of the rung he was holding and drops back down to the floor below him.

"This damn ladder is rigged with a freakin' claymore mine," he hisses into the transceiver. "Roland, get Theodor up here to disarm this shit. It would've taken my head off if they placed it on a section of the ladder up in the room above me."

"Oh yeah, and bring Sundancer with you. I want to see if she recognizes this."

Theodor's headware radio picks up Kadel's cussing and swearing. He heads over to the shaft, opening a reply channel to the frequency of Kadel's transciever while he's at it.

"Da. Am hearink. Vill be there."

Kadel points out the location of the claymore as Theodor enters. He uses his vision magnification eyeware to study the claymore from a safe distance...

"Hmm. Is standard model, but is awkward placink...still shuld beink able to bypass."

He turns to Kadel.

"Please to be vaitink outside...am not vantink more zan vun to beink in blastink radius. "

Disarming a mine halfway up a ladder isn't any laughing matter, since one hand must be holding tightly onto the rungs to avoid any risk of falling off. Thankfully, however...

As Theodor increases the magnification of his eyeware, he notices a telltale wire loop on the mine's top right. Ah hah!

Vell. Must be rushink for time, whoewer set zis. Is forgettink to conceal fuse virink.

He searches his lab coat pockets, pulls out a pair of wire cutters, and deftly slices up the wire that would have sent the detonation spark to the claymore. He taps the mine a few times to ensure that it truely is disarmed (much to the unease of anyone watching).

Nothing happens.

"Zere. Is done....Hmm. Am to be needink vun for future research."

He grabs the now disarmed claymore and stuffs it (and the wire cutters) somewhere inside his lab coat, then climbs back down.

A bullet rebounds off the metal frame of a theatre seat right next to the female terrorist. She shrieks as another bullet soon follows, cutting through the chair and glancing off her armour. It embedds itself in her shoulder, but her injury is minimal.

Turning to the dwarf, Kadel asks, "What part of the building where you in when the terrorists started assaulting the place?"

The mage picks his ear absently as he looks back over his shoulder, trying to recall.

"Erm...I think we were on ground floor, at the entrance foyer. Why?"

He shrugs. "Just curious. Did they come from below, above, or through the front entrance?"

"Bastards started coming down from the shopping arcades and offices above, come to think of it, but my unit was intercepted whilst making a break for cover. Oi, lemme tell you, that old adage about having to run faster than the dwarf to survive ain't true one bit." He allows himself a bit of a dark smile. "But I digress. Fools were pouring out of the woodwork, kicking up chaos and confusion every which way they went."

"Above, huh?" He gazes thoughtfully at the hole leading to the sewers. "Heard any explosions while you were hiding out down there?"

"No, but I can see where you're going with this." He glances at the shattered wall. "What I know of this place, it's pretty soundproof for some reason. Our employer never mentioned exactly why. If something went boom here I doubt I'd hear it topside."

Terry hears her little scream and knows the hit was minimal. Maybe that mage could use her...let her run back to her buddies and he use her blood to follow and see what's going on. First they gotta survive it, though.

He sqeezes off two more shots. Well, that was half his clip gone. Good thing he had 4 more!

"Give it up! You're outgunned, outclassed and out of options!"

Soundproof? The upper levels I would understand...but why in God's name would they blow the money to make the basements soundproof?

"Way too many coincidences," Kadel mutters as he shines his flashlight up the ladder to make sure there are no other nasty surprises waiting for him up there.