Casey had just started to actually grasp the ladder and move to descend it when all the unrest began. He paused, changed his mind, and turned back again, gun at the ready. He was stepping sort of slowly to the door, but he paused before he passed by Pax and Tyra.

"Shut'cher mouth, Gulo!" he barked suddenly, reverting to Military Mode, pointing vigorously. "You signed the papers yesterday, so get on the threat and respect your superior or you're gettin' a trial instead of a paycheck! Move, move!"

He then pointed at Fenn. "Th' lieutenant's busy enough! You handle it!" He then hastily wheeled around toward Ivan. "Ivan, Clarke: help us out—keep'em from gettin'emselves killed out there!" And, to Geoff: "Hawkins, don't let anything get in here! We need time!"

Pax may have been the commanding officer, but Casey must have felt a strong need to be his backbone and support. Pax was very green, very new, and seemed very easily shaken; it was Casey's job to be that grizzled, rock-steady foundation.

"We'll worry with the trouble, just do what you can from here, a'right?" he reassured, or perhaps requested, looking very... intent. "Quickly..."

Ivan's ears perked when he heard some thumping footsteps from where they came, followed by the piranha girl darting into the soon-to-be-fray. He hesitated for a moment, looking around at the others. He didn't really need to be told to head out, but Casey barking orders reinforced that it definitely needed to be done.

He was off down the hall, following close behind the revolver-weilding ex-cop.

The first thing Avatar would see racing up toward her was a strange, small aircraft, red and yellow, and a little on the boxy side. "Small" was of course relative; it took up a good portion of the hallway, but, still, it was at least capable of fitting in the hallway.

As soon as it saw Avatar and the others, it reacted by immediately altering its form. In just a blink of an eye, it went from being a slightly doofy-looking little hover-vehicle to a looming, bipedal, sharp-armored killbot, and immediately let loose its main weapon at at the first to approach it. A tremendous, six-foot-wide, continuous energy beam from its right arm nearly consumed the hallway, and put a huge, smoldering, concave impression in the wall where the ray eventually terminated.

The beam, comprised of some sort of repulsive, thermally-charged chaos energy blast, would be survivable, but quite injurious—anyone caught in it would suddenly feel as though they got hit by an 18-wheeler—speeding, and on fire. If indirectly struck, they may have simply tumbled to the side after suffering the blow; if squarely and directly, they'd probably have the misfortune of riding it all the way to the back wall, where they would become a fixture in the dented steel.Additional image, just for reference:


Meanwhile, Fenn would find that there was indeed an option to cancel the call for the E-2000. However, if attempted, it would acknowledge, but report back that the unit was "presently engaged with enemy." Additional options he would find included...

- Tactics (sub-options included Attack Mode, Aggressiveness, Intercept, and Withdraw)
- Diagnostics (mostly troubleshooting and maintenance software, from the looks of it, including Servo Calibration, Memory Check, and Reboot functions, among others)

And so on. It was a lot of menus to thumb through, for sure.

Over at Pax's station, progress would go pretty well with bruteforcing through the password prompts. Again, Eggman did not built his systems with much concern for "hacking," and little had been done by Chimera to upgrade each and every ship, so it only took seconds to get through. Communications arrays were soon disabled, and with a little more effort, it'd be easy enough to ensure that reports would no longer be sent back to HQ once they were reenabled, nor commands received. A hangup came in another form, though: a synthesized voice.

"Warning: Current depth: 250 meters. Hull pressure is at approximately 25 atmospheres. Maximum operating depth is 290 meters. Rate of descent: 1 meter per second."

If Pax didn't turn things around quickly (a little math revealed 40 seconds), the robot in the hall would be the last thing any of them had to worry about.

"I will!" responded Casey to Desmond. Then, the alert sounded. If Desmond started to leave, he'd find that his shoulder was grabbed.

"Cancel that, you will!" blurted the hog, before he made haste to take the helmsman's seat. Could Casey fly an airship? Or... pilot a submarine? Or... well, control whatever the heck it was? That remained to be seen, but as he scoured the controls, he at least looked like he knew what he was doing.

"Lieutenant, helm controls are locked!" he shouted in brief report, probably in hopes that Pax could do something about it.

Much to the party's misfortune, the huge beam did not behave as they might have anticipated. That is to say, even though they breezed to the side, the damned thing sustained for several whole seconds, and the robot steered it into their dodging path, as if turning some sort of flashlight beam of destruction onto them.

There were two fortunate things, however: It stopped after just a couple seconds more, and it was not a laser, or they would have already been dead. (Here, "dead" means "turned into a steamy vapor formed from the various fluids and solids that used to be their bodies.") It was but a CE-variety beam weapon (but a darn big one). It seemed to prioritize almost entirely on Geoff, which was extra bad since he'd just thrown himself defensively against a wall. It probably involved the fact that he was a hedgehog, and this thing was an Eggman robot. That, and maybe some remnant of his identity confusion from back in the Eggman Empire days not so long ago...