I Always Hated That Picture (Takashi Agera)

I Always Hated That Picture (Takashi Agera)
Date of Cutscene:	15 July 2024
Location:	Paris Catacombs/Dusk Zone/Dark Kingdom
Synopsis:	Leave no trace.
Cast of Characters:	Takashi Agera

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As Paris is rejuvenated from the blasted warzone it was to the beautiful ancient City of Lights once more, a trio of helicopters, flying from the eastern side of the city, soars overhead. On the outside, an Obsidian Corporation logo is on the helicopter. Inside, packed in, are a mixture of mostly youma with a few others, faces cloaked in shadow. The youma forms all shift, until they take the illusory forms of masked, rather modern military troopers. Outside, the logos on the helicopters similar change, from Obsidian's logo to the logo of "Commandement des Opérations Spéciales" - French Special Forces.

But this is no military exercise, no Call of Duty. The disguises are merely that, as the group has very different, very magical business to attend to. The helicopters land and one of the riders snaps their fingers, causing a large Dark Energy explosion to rip through the ground, but it doesn't rip a hole to the catacombs - it rips a hole to the Dusk Zone, the connection within the local area, to the Dark Kingdom that Beryl and Metallia built.

"Take everything you can move. Drain everything else dry and destroy it. Leave nothing behind where the traitor's kingdom bled into this world but stone and bone." the order is given, and half of the youma-troopers jump down into the hole as though they're not about to fall hundreds of feet into another dimension entirely. The other half remain, to ferry items back to the helicopters, protect the operration, and to prevent civilians from seeing anything by pushing away any onlookers.

Deep within the Paris Catacombs, where this world bleeds into the Dusk Zone, into what was the Dark Kingdom, the teams of youma spread out, draining the residual Dark Energy from the walls, picking up shattered flecks of energy-infused bone, capturing a rat with red glowing eyes or two, cataloguing and extracting tiny shards of crystal, and severing the connection between this world and the Dusk Zone that Beryl and Metallia created within the Catacombs. Taking the last remnants of Beryl's Dark Kingdom and disassembling it to the last fleck.

The sound of dress shoes on ancient stone echo down the halls and tunnels through what was, for a brief time, Beryl's inner sanctum. Soon it will be as it was before, in those points where tunnels bled from one world to the next... these ancient catacombs, seemingly as untouched as they ever were, even footprints in the dust erased. Only one thing is added in the depths of the catacombs that wasn't there a month ago - a now-empty picture frame, still smoldering, as the visage of the sneering woman with long red hair it once contained has been reduced to ash.