"Ditching them sounds wonderful," he says to Grey-Robes and Sparkly, "but I don't particularly know of any way to do so. If either of you - or you," he points to the oddly still blue alien, "have magic powers that can get us out of these... glowing threads... then I would strongly advise using them."

"You." He points to the cultist holding him. "What the hell is going on here, and if you do not present me with a better alternative than 'run at you with my fists like that guy' then that is what I will do."

She starts to run towards the violence and will then stop, shocked in several ways, if nobody else is running toward the violence.  Some of her foundational assumptions must be terribly mistaken in this place, and so may be her reflexes.

Oh, so that's what we are doing.

Yan raises his left hand. Five yellow runic circles form around his arm, five thin black tendrils extend from his sleeve and wrap themselves around cultists' throats. Then lightly squeeze.

"First, stop magic. Then, answer."

Another set of tendrils, from his right, are snaking their way to a non-crumbling platform somewhere below, forming a ladder.

"Argh, you all insane!", he chokes out. He taps his bracer, the lightning winking out. His fellows follow suit dejectedly

"Silence!", another shouts, apparently shutting up his comrade.

He tries to keep chanting with his throat lightly closed off, but the moment the lightning threads winked out, the purple glow pulsing through the ichor also faded.

He screeches in frustration and swipes at the tendril ineffectually.

'You don't understand!", he finally stammers, looking around wide-eyed at the now quickly disintegrating platform.

As the edges of the platform crumble, the rock under Mordi gives way, and he tumbles through space. The cultist he was fighting with whips his arm up and grabs on to the tendril around his throat. Supporting both his own weight and that of a clinging Mordi. He uses his other arm to hold on to the man with considerable effort, especially with the additional pressure on his wind pipe.

The cultist closer to the lady in yellow lifts her cowl ever so slightly. Below is the face of a very young girl, 15 at most, eyes wide with terror.

"help", she whispers with the little air she can manage. She rolls her eyes toward the white portal behind the elder. "He won't ... move us. Need to tether to teleport ... Soqol blocking ... I'm not allowed to talk ... please... He's insane ... I ... please..."

"Sure would like to understand. What are you doing and how do we get to safety with as little sacrificing people as possible? Answer quickly, any of you."

- and there's some falling people. "Someone get them back up here! Ideally you - don't know names - " he points to the man in grey robes.

The man in front of you grunts in annoyance at first, then growls "Silence" again, this time at you. When you look more closely under his cowl, you see a middle aged man with an eye grafted into his forehead. He glowers at you. His hands come up slowly, pulling at the tendril around his neck, testing it.

Then a moment of silence... and he taps his wrist, applies the tether to the tendril around his neck, and yells:

"Soqol, NOW"

"Argh" he grunts in annoyance, then slips his brace off his arm and throws it through the portal behind him.

The moment the brace makes contact with the portal, the tendrils disappear in a haze of light, teleported far away to a location behind and above the stable portal.

How does this effect the tendril-emitting persona?

Mordi and his new acquaintance find themselves falling through endless space. It is remarkably easy to breathe at this speed. Especially when one is not getting choked.

The cultist struggles to orient himself in free fall, and keep ahold of Mordi and ... finally touch his bracer and extend the little bit of lightning to Mordi.

They reappear at a random spot on the platform that entirely coincides with the arrival location of their blue guest. Luckily their teleportation did not involve preservation of momentum. However, it did involve preservation of configuration, such that you are now a tangle of three bodies.

Cultists: not all bad actually, who would have thought.

After his tendrils disappear, Yan rushes new ones to grab two falling people only to notice them wink out - hopefully to safety.

Ladder did not disappear, being made from another hand, and is now finished, people who aren't afraid of heights can start climbing down. Yan gets ready to catch everyone when the last part crumbles - it's going to be wild for several seconds, but he is confident he can compensate for the falling momentum with a calculated swing.

"Name's Yan".

He doesn't regrab the rest of the cultists by the throat - the point has been made, hopefully some explanations are soon to follow. Yan is not showing it, but he is quite lost.

Imagine a surgeon.

The humanoid body is not aptly made to be standing for hours and hours while doing very slow, very precise work on very delicate squishy bits that are most definitely not meant to be seen let alone touched and yet the surgeon must take a knife and gut the person just so in order to come out the other side better for it.

To do that perfectly, it's helpful to remove distractions like itchiness, fatigue, pain, disgust, fear, empathy and awareness of one's surroundings. They do not serve a purpose when the purpose is to cut just so and then sew it back together as well.

Now, that is good protocol taught within the algorithm but only when THE OPERATING ROOM IS NOT A BATTLEFIELD.

Thankfully, the attempted manual mind merger was still in its early phases when 300 pounds crushed onto Shard of Research but the effect is still that of a surgeon body slamming into the exposed guts of a patient he just opened.

In effect, the three would-be members Eric, Yan and Captain Cost-Avoidance, Determined Rebel and Efficient Problem Solver of the hive Mind will get a skull-splitting headache that will blind them with white, and if anyone was concentrating on anything like spellcasting, and if that someone can't manually turn off pain, they are definitely gonna forget all about it for 20 seconds of agony or so.

Shard of Research will remain on the floor and emit abject horror at the two bodies on top of him, making them feel exactly how dangerous what they just did was and how horrible the consequences could have been according to Shard of Research's own valuation. That, unless they have experience with Telepathy, will cause a more minor headache along with the intended emotional intensity.

When they seem sufficiently contrite, he will stop the emission and try to do damage control on the rapidly "bruising" ends of the three would-be hive Mind members

Mordi has a little experience with a lot of kinds of magic, and telepathy is one of them. He can even manage to block out mental effects sometimes, when he's focused.

Mordi is super not focusing right now, and winces at the sudden unnatural emotions and headache. Let's just crawl a few feet from the ??blue?? man who does not want to be laid on and collapse a little bit, shall we?

WHAT KIND OF DRUG IS THIS

he can manually turn off pain! ...does it count as "manually turn off pain" if he grits his teeth and sternly repeats to himself that he is ignoring the pain while blindly stumbling around? come on he should be better at this!

When his head stops pounding enough for him to see straight, Eric turns around and starts climbing down the ladder towards the faraway platform, where there are hopefully fewer people and therefore fewer headaches. "If anyone has the slightest clue what they are doing and doesn't happen to be bashing people's heads in at the moment," he snarls back to them, "then would you very kindly fix this. All of this. Mostly the rampant destruction and attacking people."

She's not particularly oriented enough to trust herself with actions, right now, but her probability of being immersively insane did just go way up.  She says "Tsi-imbi" again, in case it didn't take the first time, and devotes more of her attention to consistency checks on her apparent thoughts and environment.

There... was very little counter-emiting. Is this a test? Is this how Shards of Decisions are made and decided upon?

This Shard of Research has always wondered how they choose to slot people into positions but he assumed it was an ever evolving valuation of qualia and results produced, not a test but... it would make sense, in that case, how it would be possible to be among people yet disconnected, if this was a test, if he was supposed to be the central Hive instead of a nodule. Is that what is happening?

He will think about that later. First of all he will stand up and go to his patients and start fixing the quarter-formed psion-bridges that were violently jostled, just as carefully as before, gathering the Fraying edges and spinning them back into thread and weaving them back into cloth and sewing the cloths together into one. 10 seconds later the pain will have been considerably alleviated to only a slightly pounding headache. In a minute it will only hurt if they try to emit strong emotions to anyone other than their hivemates.

One crisis at a time. Each member only has to deal with one crisis at a time because there are others for the rest because multitasking just has you do multiple things badly.

Mordi, when he catches his breath, looks at the cultist who he brawled with and offers shallow nod and a slightly awkward "err.. thanks". He's not offering his parole or anything, but the cultist did just save him from falling into the void around this platform. If the red robed man isn't going to pick up the fight, Mordi wont either.

He glances at the blue man, and visibly bites back some residual horror. "Please... Don't do that again," He says, then adds "and do you have any idea what's going on?" Probably at least one person here knows what's going on, and it follows that the powerful mind mage probably also knows what's going on.

(How strong are your emotions of inquiry? Specifically, would you say they match or outclass a my-patient-is-bleeding-and-I-need-to-cauterize-his-blood-vessels intensity of emotion?)

(Mordi is pretty confused, but has way too many other emotions going on right now for his confusion to be that focused and strong)

You know that emotion that waiting lines wish could make you feel? The thing they try to make you feel with the calming music, the pleasant call center operative etc?

You get that feeling projected onto you for a second or two, something in it reminiscent of a surprised reflexive twitch, then it subsides.

Sure, if a powerful mage tells you to wait, you wait.

He sits and recovers and eyes the cultists (and his fellow victims) warily. The red robed guys seem to have definitely bit off more than they can chew with this summoning/kidnapping. Are they going to acknowledge a stalemate here or double down?

If no one is taking further drastic action, he'll just... pull some oily bandages out of his pack and start wrapping his hand.

Why isn't anyone taking further drastic action yet? "I would recommend moving from the disintegrating platform and onto one with less disintegration," he calls back up. "Unless this ladder is even less stable - Yan, is this ladder the sort that suddenly disappears when one's climbing on it?" Now there's a question he should have asked before getting onto the ladder.

He keeps trying to wake up or change his surroundings, but keeps failing. It doesn't feel at all like any dream he's ever had before, and he wonders if he's actually moving around in real life but just having fully realistic hallucinations. Well, in that case, moving his hands and feet as if he's climbing down a nonexistent ladder is probably a lot safer than moving as if he's getting into a fight with nonexistent people.