Lunabella has obligations to respond to Outsider issues. Some of these are expressed in the Iron Tablets. Others of these are expressed nowhere public, are in no way magically binding, and don't have formal consequences if broken.
Lunabella cares deeply about informal consequences to pride and security, and isn't subtle about it. The general expectation among emergency responders is that if a Lunabellan team is supposed to show and doesn't, Lunabella is probably itself under attack.
When not as many Culicarii as much Culicarius as many Culicariuses or other Lunabellan witches show up to Deumos orbit as expected, Division Leader Caldwin is not angry, nor does she look especially scared. Reality is always at risk. Leading her team to handle an Outsider attack is a situation where she knows where more of the risk is than she usually does.
She looks at the Culicariuses, confirms her intuition, and asks one if they need help on the home front.
"I do not maintain my usual level of synchronity when handling these matters, but I do not believe we do."
In theory, the faction with the strongest presence is generally most likely to be giving orders in a situation. That faction right now is Lunabella, who even at diminished strength still has a turnout reflective of the fact that everyone important considers them effectively responsible for stuff within Sol's asteroid belt that isn't too close to Earth.
However, theory is a strange place and rather costly to visit.
Julia May Caldwin is extremely psychologically stable, and her lack of witchcraft makes her a less intuitively appealing target. Lunabella's comparably stable people aren't present.
Sort of. Culicarius is stable, but at the expense of a lot of capacity for insight. It's a complicated hive thing.
The point is that there is not enough Culicarius-power here that he's taking lead. His team will follow Caldwin.
By the time you notice outsider corruption on a cosmic body you aren't on, either you're a very [un]lucky diviner or it's gotten pretty bad.
Deimos is currently experiencing the latter.
The situation is, in fact, comprehensible and describable. It'd be a lot easier to engage with if it weren't.
The silver lining about this situation is that it is on an unclaimed rock in the middle of nowhere, which means nobody is going to complain if they just throw as much firepower at the situation as possible. The ORC can edit footage of the really good telescopes and can arrange illusionwork good enough for the less good ones. If it serves the interests of humanity for Deimos to melt, melt it shall. Repairing an inert rock isn't that hard.
In scenarios of this scale, it's wise to raze even superficially uncorrupted areas. Sometimes Outsiders like to embed all kinds of information at small scales into environmental details.
A distant part of Culicarius finds this for complex reasons displeasing in this scenario. The present portion is thoroughly focused on Firecalling.
Eventually there is a hunk of uncorrupted mass that's at least broadly around the right composition, size, and shape for Deimos.
Also, Lunabella has acquired an additional large and uncorrupted crater.
If what used to be there gets replaced with anything, it's going to be a memorial.
The Lunabellans including the Culicarius group head home. The greater Culicarius does some thorough self-pruning and facilitates re-integration.
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