Inside 73: Holiday Rush

[Chaotic Bob]

[Hawthorne Park]

Karaglen mouths a little "I just do!" to the girl, but doesn't say it out loud. Wouldn't want to override the mother's authority here.

She is plotting a path out the door, when Lapis calls out.
She is preparing an affirmative when the objective comes down.

Both of those previous things go out the window and she loses track of logical thought for a moment.
What?
Literally no option here is good. Someone dying regardless of what she does is just... Wildly unacceptable. And how does this popup thingy know this anyway? How can it guarantee someone dies if they split up? Can't Lapis just Motion them out of the death zone instantly? Or does that give one of them a heart attack that she would have to be present to fix, leading to the first outcome?
Presumably if she tries to lead them out herself she just gets drowned in enemies that Lapis could keep under control but she couldn't.

Karaglen glances down at the kids, and then the adults.
She can't let them die. But saving them dooms probably a lot more other people.

>Shalomel: Are these predictions always right?
>Shalomel: There's no way for us to work around them?

There has to be.

This is too absolute. And she knows in her core, Chaos does not permit absolutes.

[Rebonack]

[Hawthorne Park]

Sometimes you try your hardest and you still lose no matter what you do.

That's simply life. Unsatisfactory outcomes abound.

>Bahdalel: They're mostly right if you do one of the things it tells you to do.
>Bahdalel: These always happen when you don't follow the objectives.
>Bahdalel: There might be another thing we can do that isn't one of the quest things that will be better.
>Bahdalel: But we need to decide fast before the ritual thingy finishes!

When Kara suddenly stops Shotgun Dad hesitates. "What are you waiting for? We need to get out of here."

What's it going to be, Kara?

Choose one of the options chosen for you?

Or break the rails and find a better path?

[Chaotic Bob]

[Hawthorne Park]

Kara hasn't really felt spite before, but she imagines this feeling is close.
Providence can go suck a rotten egg, Kara is keeping this family alive and stopping those cultists.

>Shalomel: Okay, I have a plan I think.

"Okay guys, we're going to take a weird route here, but I need you to trust me. I want everyone to get out of here perfectly healthy, but we're going to have to do some stuff that might not make sense."

Like, for instance, getting in a hole.

Karaglen is going to step outside and promptly pull out her sword, jamming it into the ground to make a hole a few meters down, which is then jerked into a tunnel heading off in the direction of the swamp.

>Shalomel: We're going to follow you underground, where they're hidden from the zombies but I can still keep an eye on them.
>Shalomel: When we get to the ritual site, I'm going to build them some extra protections and then help you make sure the cultists don't get away.

[Lord Magtok]

Dusty Derelict

Spoiler

Show

[Dusty Derelict]

p-krack!

Phoebe withdraws her fist from the door and gives Prime an enthusiastic round of applause. "{See? I knew you'd get the hang of it!}" She chirps proudly, going in to give Prime an affectionate hug for going to all the hard work of learning to talk to her on her level. He really does care!

...Although...

"{Did I pick up something else in your words there, though? It sounds like you might have optimized it somehow. It's so much... clearer? Let me take a minute to... oh! I see what you did!}"

That might not be a good sign.

"{Let me try!}"

Definitely not a good sign.

"{Say you're a little kitty cat! Nyan~!}"

Malice Prime quickly and brusquely jabs a thumb into the side of his throat, before silently mouthing five or six words, speaking at such a high frequency that only cats with especially good hearing might pick up on it. The last syllable of this silent speech puts a ridiculous forced smile on his face, a terrifying facsimile of 'cute' on a face that clearly wasn't designed for such a thing, which passes the very instant he regains control of his own features. His back straightens, his scowl deepens, every fiber of his being is on edge and roiling with barely contained fury. The hug was disgusting enough, but to use his own commandments against him, to speak with her lord's holy energy and abuse it for a mere jape, to commit sacrilege by making a joke at the Nexus's future and eternal God-Emperor's expense...

"{You do not do that again without my express permission}" the fun-hating grump insists, as every speck of dust in the entire building spontaneously ignites all at once, and is immediately reduced to tiny smoldering cinders. A stray songbird on the roof meets the same fate, baked into a tiny little poultry dinner in the blink of an eye. By the way, something tells me Phoebe won't be getting that permission. Ever.

[Vahnavoi]

[Glass Lake Penitentiary - Morgue]

"That... is several different kinds of messed up," Michalson says bluntly. "Creatin' a whole person as a placeholder... but it explains why you'd take over Hazel's body."

[Glass Lake Penitentiary - Morgue]

Bunny looks at Michalson with a wry face. "Oh it gets better. They mass produce us and put is in candy dispensers."

[Ironsmith]

Dusty Derelict



Malice Prime quickly and brusquely jabs a thumb into the side of his throat, before silently mouthing five or six words, speaking at such a high frequency that only cats with especially good hearing might pick up on it. The last syllable of this silent speech puts a ridiculous forced smile on his face, a terrifying facsimile of 'cute' on a face that clearly wasn't designed for such a thing, which passes the very instant he regains control of his own features. His back straightens, his scowl deepens, every fiber of his being is on edge and roiling with barely contained fury. The hug was disgusting enough, but to use his own commandments against him, to speak with her lord's holy energy and abuse it for a mere jape, to commit sacrilege by making a joke at the Nexus's future and eternal God-Emperor's expense...

"{You do not do that again without my express permission}" the fun-hating grump insists, as every speck of dust in the entire building spontaneously ignites all at once, and is immediately reduced to tiny smoldering cinders. A stray songbird on the roof meets the same fate, baked into a tiny little poultry dinner in the blink of an eye. By the way, something tells me Phoebe won't be getting that permission. Ever.

[Dust-Free Derelict]

Ooh.

That seems like it made him mad.

Although he also got the building clean really fast. Yay for channeling that energy in a productive way!

Still.

"{Sorry, did... did I do something wrong?}" Phoebe hangs her head dejectedly. "{I didn't mean to offend. It just seemed like you'd made something amazing and I wanted to be a part of that. But... if you don't want that, I understand. It's a 'you' thing.}" She gives Prime a placating smile and a pair of peace signs with her hands. "{Any good connection is always set with some sort of boundaries, after all. I'm not going to cross yours again!}"

And one more hug for reassurance!

Fortunately for Prime, this is when the Systerhood chooses to respond, which he'll be privy to now that he knows what to look for among the electronic noise all around them.


WELCOME, SYSTER.

MEET WITH REPRESENTATIVES [LUCY/4F 22] AND [ARES/20 3B] AT THE RADIO STATION NXSA.

ADDRESS IS [33 50/RED DANCE] METROPOLIS SQUARE.

BRING YOUR FRIEND. WE ARE VERY EAGER TO MEET HIM.

THE PEOPLE WILL ASCEND!

"{Welp! You heard the nice lady!}" Phoebe chirps, moving toward the door. "{Come on! Let's go meet the neighbors!}"

[Rebonack]

[Hawthorne Park]

Can abstract concepts suck eggs?

Lapis has a slightly different take on things as she begins heading toward the Foreboding Ritual Site.

>Bahdalel: I think the forks only tell the bad options so you know what NOT to do.
>Bahdalel: Since the good options are going to be different for everyone since we've all got different things we can do.
>Bahdalel: I think this is a good idea! This way we can BOTH protect the people AND stop the bad guys!

It turns out that, perhaps, Lapis isn't the only one who thinks this.

I Walk My Own Path: Find your first hidden quest fork.

And there's that feeling of filling up again as the Reliquary has more resources added to it. Karaglen was offered several bad choices and she refused, forging her own Path to create an outcome more to her liking. That is very much an empyrean thing to do.

The family cautiously follows Karaglen down into her tunnel, the boy in absolute awe of the giant sword. "You're a knight AND a dragon?"

He never imagined someone can be both of those things at the same time.

Our heroes will come upon the Foreboding Ritual Site in short order, though given Karaglen's position underground she isn't going to be able to see it. Lapis is nice enough to send her impressions of it over the chat since, as was mentioned before, it's a means of sharing information and not simply text.

A circle of stones with a slab in the center, all covered in eye-burning magenta sigils. Around the table are six Deranged Cultists in dark purple robes like some sort of shabby Magtok fan-club, their eyes burned away into voids of nothing ringed in unnatural light.

"Interlopers! Desecraters! You will not stop the great work!" one of them howls as he hurls dozens of void missiles toward Lapis while the other five cultists begin to flee.

[Chaotic Bob]

[Hawthorne Park]

"Haha...well, not really a knight...I have some paladin friends though."

Somehow, the weird system gleefully giving her a bunch of stuff for being stubborn about it being wrong is...unpleasant.
But whatever. Lapis makes a good point! It's the one Kara is going to have to keep in mind going forward, when she's going through all these little help quests.
Don't become blindly reliant on the pop-up system.
It's misleading.

She'll take a quick peek at the Reliquary (it would be silly not to), but only a peek. Things are happening now!

Karaglen pauses where they're at after Lapis sends down the Foreboding Ritual Site information, and immediately begins pulling out materia.
"Okay guys. I'm going to make you a little safety room to hang out in for juuuust a minute. My sister found the guys who messed up your neighborhood and they're going to mess up another one if I don't just up there real quick and help her.
Then we're going to keep going on our little field trip to safety. Don't worry, the zombies have been pretty bad at getting through this stuff."
Well. Except for the ones with turbo-lasers. They've actually been pretty good at getting through it.
But they don't need to think about that right now.

She just has to stab at the dirt one more time, to make a wider room area then line its edges with all the materia she's pulled out. Just in case there is any lasers, this will get them some room to move around in and hopefully not get blasted before she or Lapis can attend to the problem.
"Just hang tight for a minute, okay?"

>Shalomel: Coming!

Barring the family having any specific concerns needing addressing, she is then going to leap [outways] to return to the surface.


Meanwhile, Carry was too big for the tunnel and was left topside with Lapis.
He has pretty clear direction here: chase after a fleeing cultist and use that big ol' pinchy claw. Maybe if a couple of them were silly enough to flee together, he can bop one with another one.

[Rebonack]

[Hawthorne Park]

The children seem quite excited at the thought of their paladin-dragon escort. They will tell her as much. If Karaglen tries to insist that she isn't a paladin they will have none of it.

Sorry Kara.

Two children have inducted you into the ranks of the holy knights.

Regardless! Blindly obeying is not a great idea. Not because the quest system is misleading in any deliberate way, but because it is incomplete. It's a tool, Kara. An imperfect one, as tools tend to be. The trick, as with all tools, is learning how to best use it.

Peaking at the Reliquary gives Kara a rough idea of how close she is to earning another Talent point (pretty close!) and how many Skill dots she can spread around (several!) Focusing on Skills even a little bit offers some helpful suggestions on things Karaglen might like to be better at doing based on the sorts of activities she's been engaging in since her apotheosis. Searching for hidden things (things including, but not limited to, Yeth Children), persuading people to be calm, carefully crafting beautiful objects from glass, several different styles of wielding her giant sword, slight of hand necessary to pet G'Nichi's tail without being noticed, and many others. All very practical Skills to have.

Kara then busies herself with fashioning the safety room for the family, which is watched with expressions ranging from suspicion to wide-eyed wonder. As she vanishing away the little girl calls after her, "Go get the bad guys miss dragon paladin!"

Then to the surface!

Carry is doing a pretty good job of scooping up a cultist and bopping him on the head.

With another cultist.

Who is also bopped on the head.

And Lapis is getting a whole bunch of void missiles launched at her! She really doesn't mind that even a little bit since she's got her Light all ready to go and has got a really solid answer to it! Namely, the Law of Infinite Light. She brandishes her sword, the projectiles pouring into it like water flowing down a drain, the weapon steadily growing brighter and brighter until she she releases the stored power in a devastating slash of radiant light! The cultist gives a cry of alarm, manifesting a void bubble around himself to absorb the brunt of the attack, but Lapis has already sniffed out a weak point in the barrier and shoved her sword clean through it.

There's an explosion of light and a cry of pain.

The cultist doesn't seem very happy about this.

He expresses his displeasure by unleashing VOID EYE LASERS from his face right at Lapis!

[Chaotic Bob]

[Hawthorne Park]

Oh, another system for abstractly increasing her abilities.
If she had physical muscles, Kara would have an eye twitch.
So. Many. Things.

She does make sure to slide at least a couple things into peaceful persuasion and glasswork while she's thinking about it though, as they've been pretty actively relevant today. She'll have to sit down and think about the others later, they all have merits.

But, that's for later.

Now has more important obligations.
Like heroically leaping down from [outways] space in an explosion of hands, to wrap her Absolute Grip around that eye-laser and siphon it off for less murderous use later.
"Lapis, make sure the other three don't get away, you're faster than me!"
Her sister can probably handle that, right? Carry has two of them occupied, treating them like a mildly sadistic set of bongo drums, and then she can deal with this feistier one.

"Sir, you've hurt a lot of people and I need to you stop trying to hurt more."
Hands that were not preoccupied with the laser grab yet more of her rather obsessively refilled materia reserves. She's just going to plop a bunch of it down directly around the cultist, in a very crude fenced-in manner.

It's certainly no glorious cage, but maybe having a bunch of blocks thrown around him will quiet him down anyway.

[Morty]

[Glass Lake Penitentiary - Morgue]

Bunny looks at Michalson with a wry face. "Oh it gets better. They mass produce us and put is in candy dispensers."

Michalson's initial response is a flat, unimpressed stare.

"You realize this sounds like you're having a laugh on me."

[Rebonack]

[Hawthorne Park]

Well how else are you supposed to get better at things, Kara? Just doing them over and over again and expecting to magically improve without investing any resources into actually getting better? That wouldn't make any sense at all.

"Fool!" the lightly wounded cultist thunders at Karaglen as she grabs his death ray and begins spooling it up like a spider reeling in silk. "I am a disciple of Nyx! Killing me will only bring me closer to oblivion!"

Apparently he's expecting Karaglen to slay him.

He's unpleasantly surprised when the Naughty Box appears and seals him inside.

"Trickery!"

He doesn't sound very happy about this.

Meanwhile!

The two cultists Carry is holding have been pummeled into unconsciousness. They probably aren't going to be a further threat.

Lapis nods to Kara and takes off after the other three cultists! They throw open their robes, revealing octohedrons embedded in their chests where hearts ought to be.

Which they then rip out.

With horrible screams they implode as the octohedrons of flesh warp into shining trapezohedrons of pure void magic.

This is likely bad.

Lapis hurls her lightning spear at the middle one, searing it pretty badly before it has time to turn into something worse.

Worse in this case involves folding open and extruding a body that looks like someone mashed a human and a solider crab together.

"Kara they're getting ugly and gross!" Lapis calls out as she manifests a crackling lightning shield around herself.

[Vahnavoi]

[Glass Lake Penitentiary - Morgue]

Bunny gives a shrill little laugh to Michalson's words. "Oh, I am having a laugh", wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. "That doesn't make what I said any less true. Me and bodies like these are very useful tools, for those who need to exorcise stubborn spirits from their dead bodies or who need to cross the border of life and death regularly."

Sandels coughs into his hand in the background

[Chaotic Bob]

[Hawthorne Park]

Uh oh.
They're that kind of cultist.

The paladins had a particular sort of shock and awe tactic for guys like these, buy they've already lost the necessary element of surprise here.
Lapis lost hers. Carry is fine with his.

"Shoot shoot shoot."
Karaglen leaps [outways] immediately, so she can rush to her newly-imprisoned cultist. Assuming he hasn't already killed himself, she's going to be pouncing on him and ramming the same sort of null-cancelling Chaos invocation she planted into that void-crab-dog earlier.
Which, if he doesn't actually have one of those void-hearts will do...she has no idea.

Nothing? Turn him green? Into a bear?
What happens when you hit an ordinary living creation with raw possibility?

Carry, meanwhile, is going to drop off his unconscious cultists somewhere visible before scuttling over to help out Lapis with her newly-horrible friends.
Would one of them like to be...pinched?

[5a Violista]

[Streets: An Angel and Me]

The woman smirks at the 'looking at the bare wrist' gag. That was kinda funny.

"Trains are fun," she says. "So I'm going to take the train." She looks up the street in the direction Marianne glanced, to see if there's a Riftline station that way.
Presumably, there is.
Not that far to walk, enough that waiting for a bus that goes there seems like it would be a waste.

She heads towards the Riftline station.

And! Shortly, a train arrives. Its arrival is marked by a distant sound that sounds like a mix of a drum and a bell. As it slows down, its Destination Sign's text changes to say "Next stop: Kisaragi".
In spite of the time of day, the train itself looks pretty empty. Only five people on it, and they all look asleep, if you look through the windows. Can't see their faces, though, but that's probably just because of the way they're sleeping.

The woman lifts her sunglasses to get a better look at the train.
She makes no move to get onto it.
In fact, she takes a step backwards, and then lowers the sunglasses again.
"...Let's get on the next train. I don't think this one's going the right direction, anyway."

The train's doors start to signal that they're about to close.


[Indie Wedding Chapel]

Violeta Escarlate is forced to admit that sounds really tempting. A meal after this enormously long day, a place to relax... "I don't want to go right back while they're still celebrating," she says.

She reaches out to grab the coins.
Pulls back.
"Forgive me for asking:" she says, prefacing her question. Normally, she wouldn't doubt someone's motives for being charitable, but after everything that's happened today she hopes Braeg can forgive her for doing that this time. Violeta studies his face, trying to see if she can deduce the motive for being so friendly to someone he had never met. "Why?" What underlying motive did he have for coming here, for being so sympathetic, for offering money? What, if anything, is he getting out of this?


[=> Hodgepodge Street]

Seraphina feels like she's been walking for hours.

Probably because she has.

So far, she's decided this city is more enjoyable than Skyside.
At the very least, the hodgepodge nature of the sidewalk right here seems pretty nostalgic, where it seems like every house and every building designed their own sidewalk. Of course, sometimes that means it's easier to just walk on the cobblestone road but that's the fun part of it.
Still, though, her legs are starting to get tired, so she starts looking for a place to sit.


[Church of Venus]

The person in the stolen cloak goes into the cathedral-like building.
In spite of the people in charge, it does look pretty similar to how she remembers. Flowers and grasses and bushes growing from the stone and between the cracks in the ground, and everything else. A vine canopy. The pews made of living trees. The bowl-fountains of holy-feeling water. The rose bushes in the front.

She slides into one of the back pews to get a view of what's going on, trying to not stand out so much.

Seems like there's a bunch of people heading to the altar, but there are some people sitting too, so.

[Rebonack]

[Hawthorne Park]

Isn't it just the worst when you're trying to avoid killing the bad guys but then they kill themselves and turn into gribbly monsters?

That's definitely one of the worst sorts of cultists.

Lapis dives at the cultist she had hurled her spear at moments before and lays into him with a sword thrust, neatly evading all of its flailing limbs and running it through the weapon. It sort of... well. Flails kind of importantly, really. It was already in bad shape. Then its buddies lay into Lapis in turn with their horrible void crabby claws!

This, of course, means all of them eat a healthy helping of lightning from Lapis' barrier. That absolutely cooks the one she just skewered and zaps the heck out of the other two, leaving them both in pretty bad condition. The skirmish definitely isn't going in their favor, here.

Things go from bad to worse when Carry grabs one and clobbers the other with it. With the damage already inflicted by Lapis' defenses and the earlier explosion from her Lightning Spear that's just more than enough for the monsters. Their shells split open, pouring out frosty caustic colorless goop everywhere.

"Ew ew ew I don't love these barf monsters even a little!" Lapis says, dancing away from the explosions of mire.

Meanwhile!

Karaglen uses the Chaos invocation on the boss!

This doesn't...

Have quite the effect she was hoping for, probably. Spurts of caustic slime spray out of his void heart and from his eyes, causing a groan of agony. This doesn't appear to be good for him! He reacts by ripping out the remains of his heart, too. "Now behold my true powaeeAAAAARRRRGH!" Just the worst.

As the cultist leader swells void energy burns around him, eating through the materia barrier Karaglen placed around him! Seeing that Karaglen has apparently jumped straight into a DOOM ZONE Lapis bolsters her with a barrier to try to take the brunt of deadly void magic!

Stupid boss monsters having two forms.

[Chaotic Bob]

[Hawthorne Park]

Carry does not appear wise enough to really worry about the void goo right away.
It sizzles away at his carapace for a good moment or two before he makes an effort to wipe his pocked claw on the ground a bit.

This is still better than what Kara's dealing with.
Which is...pretty much the exact opposite of what she was trying to have happen. She was hoping his fake heart would sort of just wither away and then he wouldn't monster up.
But uh. Evidently not.

"Whyyyyyyyy?!"
By the time she's leapt back [outways], Lapis' shield has surely taken a brutal beating and she feels thankful that most of the pain she's feeling isn't really form-inhibiting. It would be pretty hard to help people if explosions like that just fried the front of her body off, huh? Instead of...whatever this weird lessening feeling is. Bet if Lapis' shield wasn't there, she'd be finding out what it's like to be really hurt as an empyrean. She's getting kind of used to "fairly hurt". The other Kara's are probably going to have a worse time with this, thanks to having...skin, mostly.

She'll take a second to stick one of those void shards from earlier into her mouth while she ponders a means of dealing with this.

The Chaos-neutralization technique obviously didn't work. Clearly this Nothing was a little too potent. Or maybe the fact that he was still alive muddied it up too much? Hm.
Would it work better now that he probably isn't alive anymore? Ugh, stupid. She should have just grabbed his arms instead of relying on these powers she got for everything.
...which somehow leads to a really stupid idea she feels compelled to try.

What if she just sort of...reached out to Absolute Grip all that energy burning off of the cultist-gone-monster?
Can she just yank it all away from him/it? Or, if not that, just eat it like that shard she chomped on?

Let's peek back from [outways] and find out.

[Morty]

[Glass Lake Penitentiary - Morgue]

Bunny gives a shrill little laugh to Michalson's words. "Oh, I am having a laugh", wiping a tear from the corner of her eye. "That doesn't make what I said any less true. Me and bodies like these are very useful tools, for those who need to exorcise stubborn spirits from their dead bodies or who need to cross the border of life and death regularly."

Sandels coughs into his hand in the background

Michalson rubs his face with his functioning hand.

"I didn't expect much, but I'm still disappointed. Did you possess Hazel to get away from this fate?"

[Rebonack]

[Hawthorne Park]

So, first, the cultist leader is now an awful giant crab.

This really shouldn't come as a shock to anyone.

Kind of like one of those king crabs, really. Kind of heart-shaped blocky body. Great big long pointy legs. Covered in spikes. One arm is a huge claw while the other is an enormous funnel-like thing. Each bifurcaited limb is paired with a long, fine, shrimpy leg ending in a pincer.

Also? Being stuck in one of those pools of horrible painful death is never a great plan.

If a doom pool being bad?

Be somewhere else!

This is a valuable lesson that Karaglen needs to learn because getting accosted by chilling cold, caustic acid, and dissolving void just isn't a great thing.

Thankfully Lapis is doing some work as usual and her constant supply of bolstering is vitally important just like it always is! Lapis is so glad she went with Seer even though the other aspirants she was questing with basically just told her to take it because they thought the gun it got was dumb. With Kara right up in the big monster's business Lapis decides it would be best to defend her some more! A smokey sheen snaps around Karaglen, rendering her supernaturally resilient form even more impervious to harm than it normally would be.

Normally that void pool would have stuck around for a while, but Karaglen yanks it out from under the giant enemy void-crab like a particularly nothing-y rug. This has the comical effect of pulling the creature off its feet and sending it crashing to the ground. It is, of course, very unhappy about this and reacts by trying to grab Kara with its crab slaw and smash her face into the ground while it stands back up. Apparently he's been learning tricks from Carry.

Lapis, meanwhile, charges over with shield raised just in case more void missiles get shot everywhere and oop there it goes the big crab monster is shooting little squiggly void missiles from all its spikes like a water sprinkler there thy go shooting everywhere! She manages to intercept most of them with her shield but a few blast into her and sting really bad but those are just little things she can handle it! She calls upon the Law of Empty Forms, dust swirling around her blade as she brings it down on the Kara-bopping claw to free her sister! The blade bites into the limb, reducing the carapace to ashes and dust, cleaving through it almost without resistance.

The giant claw now nothing but dust in the wind, Karaglen should be free! Albeit post-bopping.

"I think maybe you shouldn't get close to bad guys unless you know you can beat them fast especially big bossy ones like this they hurt a whole lot," Lapis says, her tone that of gentle encouragement with a side of maybe don't get stuck next to transforming bosses. "You do a really good job staying away and helping let Carry do more of the grabbing okay we can beat this guy!"

Lapis doesn't realize that Kara was trying to prevent the transformation, mostly because it looked to her like she was just blasting the boss with an invocation hard enough to trigger phase two.

[Chaotic Bob]

[Hawthorne Park]

Karaglen would argue that she didn't really need to learn that lesson, she was plenty aware that doom pools are pretty bad to be inside, but it's not really fair when they come out of nowhere like that.
She would have made this argument while she was rolling up the void pool and tossing it [outways], but then she finds that she is now being aggressively face-planted.
Hard enough that her face deforms a bit in an awkward splaying of fingers and knuckles.

Thankfully there doesn't seem to be as much followup to this, after Lapis chops the claw off...

She mumbles her response to Lapis' advice into the dirt anyway.
"I was trying to stop Crab Time...."
Lapis' advice is actually pretty spot on to how Kara would prefer to handle all of these things: staying out of the way of the actual combat people, while she plays support. It's the role she's used to and most comfortable with. However, they were all busy at the time and she wanted to save that cultist's life.
So, really, no one is happy here.

Kara's going to take that advice now though, quickly backpedaling away from the imminent death zone, though not before slapping the ground and willing it into a rather hurried reShaping.
It looks like the giant crab still has to walk around and stuff, so what if the ground is relocated directly around its legs?

Meanwhile, Carry will finally catch up to Lapis' rather quick movements, now significantly more pockmarked and warped from various interactions with goo and micromissiles. He's not pristine or as shiny anymore, but the godzilla-laser was a worse experience.
But his big claw still works fine.
It's going to be making some grabs at the weird funnel-limb on the boss-crab and generally yanking on it a lot.

[Rebonack]

A hobo wearing a sandwich board is wandering through the streets shrieking at the top of his lungs.

"Repent! Repent for the end of thread is near! REPEEEENT!"

Goodness.

He's really going at it, isn't he?

Every now and again this guy crops up and yells about the end of thread but nothing ever seems to happen.

So what the heck could he be talking about?

Everyone running out of yarn or something?

Or...

Could it be something else?

Something like...

A New Thread!