"Great," she mutters, as her gun resettles into its inert form at her side. "...thanks for the help. It's easier with backup." Not that that's going to make me feel any better if I get this kid killed.

Onward and pumpward?

Onward and pumpward! Dairine contemplates potential refinements to the shield spell that won't result in their air getting cut off and also whether it's worth trying to talk to the coolant pumps or whether the reactor as a whole is too likely to be either sick and grouchy, or just an asshole. She's talked to her parents' printer and getting it to admit it has a problem and accept help is an entire thing.

Through the door a little to the left on a slanted wall is yet another sign, with directions to points of interest. NSC Power Plant is to the right (back the way they came), and NSC Coolant Pumps and Furnace Chamber are to the left. 

The hallway to the left slopes downward slightly, and then flattens, leading a metal-barred gate, beyond which is an ominous red glow. The rest of the room is full of various tanks and equipment. 

As they walk down the ramp, the building shakes and shudders, and a box above the door is jostled loose. The box bounces and slides a few inches before coming to rest, and the gate slides shut before they even have a chance to get close. 

Power cut. Replace the parts.

The voice comes from nowhere, sourceless, but it's clearly Ahti's. 

The box blinks, the yellow lights on its surface turning on and off in a rhythm, and the metal part above the door where it was recently attached blinks its own yellow lights. They are almost, but not quite in sync, and slowly getting more and more out of sync in the way things that have very nearly but not quite the same periods do. 

...ah. She's gonna have to do the thing.

She extends a hand toward the fallen box, and her will with it. The box levitates. As usual, her fine control... isn't. "I really hope I'm not about to break anything," she says, and chucks the box at the socket.

When the box gets close to the receiver, the box twists suddenly, and the face most closely oriented to the wall jerks into alignment with the socket. It snaps into place with a satisfying clang, and the lights on the box turn a solid and unblinking green as the door slides back open. 

"How does that work? The thing you just did."

"I'm... not totally sure. There's objects, with powers, and when I save them from the Hiss, I get their power. That was the one for throwing things. It's usually a lot more destructive. I haven't had it for long, I'm still getting used to it."

"Neat. Can you talk to them?"

"Not exactly."

"What's it like instead?" she asks, poking her head through the now-open door.

"I get... feelings, impressions. I'm not sure how to describe it. I'm not sure I'm not imagining it."

It's difficult to tell exactly what the room looked like originally, as right now its construction is overrun with an eruption of concrete blocks, most of them the size of a human or larger, sticking out of walls and floors and stairs and balconies and each other. Some stairs are still partly functional, from the perspective of the door, the room looks almost like a very steep amphitheater or stage, with everything sloping downwards (as viewed from a distance, as everything is at right angles to the floor, and quite haphazard,) until it reaches a small circular area in the center of the floor, which is flat and devoid of blocks. 

Suspended above the the center are several human figures. It is difficult to tell exactly what they look like in the blood-red light, but all of them are clearly wearing military outfits. Dairine's head poking through the doorway doesn't appear to have affected them. Yet. 

"Bad news in there?" asks Jesse, who has a worse vantage than Dairine at the moment. She has a guess about the answer; she's already readying her weapon.

"More floaty guys and also the walls sprouted a lot of little baby walls. They're not moving right now though. The guys or the walls either."

"Great, okay, let's do this."

She steps into the room, shooting at the floaty guys on the assumption that they're going to drop and start attacking. They tend to do that.

Dairine shields and gets ready to levitate them both if the walls start getting up to some shit.

They do in fact drop, and immediately open fire, as best they can from the bottom of the room. Shooting at that angle is somewhat ineffective, though. 

Then one of them throws a grenade, landing in between the two of them. 

Jesse tries to telekinetically throw it back, but she can't quite get a grip on it, maybe because it's so small or maybe because she's so stressed out by its presence. She vacates the immediate vicinity, letting loose some words along the way that she would perhaps prefer not to be using in front of a twelve-year-old.

It's okay, Dairine already knows all those words. What's less okay is that she also runs directly away from the grenade, which means Jesse ends up out of range of the shield.

The grenade explodes, spraying a large chunk of floor in the air as dust. 

Without the shield the rangers will be able to do significantly more damage to Jesse, though they are still having trouble shooting at both of them from their position down in the middle of the room. They are soon aided, however, by the appearance additional grenade (thrown at Jesse), a couple of twisted human figures (near to Dairine) and a levitating half-naked humanoid (floating above the center of the room) who appears to be capable of tearing chunks of masonry from the walls and tossing them at Jesse and Dairine. 

Aaaaaaaaa that's too many things! Dairine starts trying to run more or differently away, then remembers the levitation idea and launches herself into the air with a stream of Speech, which makes her a very visible (albeit still shielded) target but gives her the freedom of maneuver to move toward Jesse again. In fits and starts, because she does not want to find out whether her shield can tank an entire giant chunk of masonry at once.

Floating in the air appears to at least partially stymie the twisted humanoids, which circle ominously around one another directly below Dairine. But it does make her a much better target for the soldiers on the ground and the shirtless one in the air, which promptly turn their attention to the much more exposed target. 

The bullets are as ineffective as before, not that the entities seem to notice, but the chunk of wall and exposed rebar currently hurtling at Darine's head very well might not be. 

Swoop dodge try to end up in the vicinity of Jesse despite not having enough time to accurately track Jesse's location!