The triage area has been picked clean; whomever was handling it either ran out of supplies (given the level of trash and discarded cores lying around, that could be a distinct possibility) or they valued their supplies enough NOT to leave them lying around. You can see areas where someone (or maybe a couple of someones) lay bleeding, quite probably while their wounds were being tended to: the systematic way the area is laid out (and the evidence of where the trash/discards lay) makes it nearly impossible to tell how many there actually were; it's the procedural equivalent to marching your troops single-file, as it renders any possible causalty-count virtually impossible. A quick check of the puddles shows different layers of drying, which only goes further to prove that fact. At least those guys were professional, right? Or maybe the casualties didn't come in all at once - THAT could be encouraging, maybe.
You find lots and lots of hand-sized stuff for picking up and throwing. Some of it is actually NOT covered in blood!
When you look on the Astral plane, you see (kind of) what you expect; the pools of deliquescing blood are already lost as astral connections go; the mechanical stuff all appears "empty", Ace provides a double-image of Astral shadows: one is dark and black, kind of a skeleton of a huge monster, maybe troll-sized in nature, but symmetrically mecha-dead (technology doesn't appear lively or colorful on the Astral plane - it appears rather shadowy, cold, and dead in that purview) and with unbelievably fluid motion - it appears to be scanning the area, looking up and down, almost always in motion, and even the outline appears to have been etched in a charcoal-pencil-rendering --- the other looks mostly human-sized and shaped, but the head is overtaken by lots of crystaline, metallic, and ceramic interforms - like what you might see on someone with entirely *TOO* much headware. There are other stands that follow the body contour, but the head is overtaken by technology. And that overshadow, maybe it's a ghost or something, because you can't see anything between you and Ace on the (normal) visual spectrum. You flip back into Astral, and you still see that double-image, one through the other, like maybe a bad over-exposure or double-shot on the same piece of film. You flip back to the "normal" world view; still nothing there but Ace. |
