Halfway back to the embassy, Neville sagged against the side of a fairly intact aircar. "Whew. This is harder than I expected. I mean, I did just go through a war, but most of it wasn't quite this … protracted."

Harper sat down near him, watching the other direction. "This is going to sound weird, but how long was your day before you got here?"

He considered the question for a moment. "Um, it was about mid-afternoon, I think? And I spent most of the day helping to move pieces of incinerated trash. Then I've been here for something like eight hours now? Though I spent most of the first two hours searching through some storerooms for this." He activated his omni-tool briefly, checking the communication bands.

"I disappeared late at night, after getting into a fight to the death with an Egyptian vampire." He raised an eyebrow at that, and she grimaced. "Then I got thrown in here, and woke up in a closet with a salarian in the room with me."

Nodding sagely, Neville glanced around. "Um, which ones are those, again? The tiny lizard-like ones?"

"From what I've seen, they might be amphibious, but since I got a whole single minute of conversation with him, which didn't even include his name, I can't be sure." She gestured to her own omni-tool. "Last thing he did was change the language settings on this so at least I could use it." Her eyes went somewhere far away for a moment. "I'm hoping that when we figure out what's causing this, and stop it, that there's still some locals around. I want to know what his name was."

Soberly, the young wizard nodded. "You're the first non-cyborg person I've seen. Though I did get some mystery messages even before I got this thing." He levered himself to his feet, peering carefully over the car. "I think that group moved off. We should get there soon."

Returning to silence, they moved down the walkways, avoiding the cyborgs where they could. Another hour later and they finally reached near the embassy stairs, seeing from further away the sheer mass of cyborgs patrolling the area. "Well, that's less than helpful," Harper grumbled. "See, this? This is why I didn't want to use open communications with Adam and Blackjack. Hopefully they haven't already made it here."

Neville shrugged. "I don't suppose you found anything that's explosive? Ah well, just a thought." He studied the pattern of the patrols for several moments, counting under his breath and twitching his wand back and forth. "Actually, I'm sure I can get us up there to the room itself, but none of these guys is bunching up enough for me."

"That technology-exploding spell? It did seem to come in pretty handy." She looked around. "I can't guarantee that I can get us up there either. There's some paths in the recent occupied past, but if whoever's running this freak show put guards in the embassy itself, I don't think we can avoid them."

Neville looked around the area, and pointed to the broken bridge spanning the artificial lake. "How good are you with that pistol? We might be able to start sniping them from there."

They studied the other side of the Presidium, the air still hazy with smoke old and new. "I'm proficient – have to be, to carry concealed weapons in Seattle – but I'm no Navy SEAL." He gave her a blank look. "Um, I don't think I'm that good, even with my ability to manipulate time. Also, I can't see clearly enough to know what's on the other side."

"Right. Plan B – I didn't explore the inside well, but these things," he gestured at the building-slash-rooms that stretched up the wall of the Presidium, "should have some connections on the inside. We backtrack a little bit, and start exploring inside for another way in." Grimacing in displeasure at the idea, she nonetheless gestured for him to precede her back around the ring. "Plan C is we get on the comms, and try to come up with a code for where to meet up with two people we've never met before on a station none of us has even heard of and probably isn't even in our universe."

"Okay, okay, I get the point," Harper grumbled. "I just don't like the possibility of getting flanked inside a building like this." She sighed. "If we're going to signal, then let's do it now, rather than lead them to the next spot. These things aren't terribly fast." She waited for him to gesture assent and take up a guardian position before triggering her tool. "Adam, Blackjack, the embassy is surrounded by cyborgs. Neville and I are ok, but we're going to look for a safer meeting place somewhere else on the Presidium."

They waited a moment, and a double squelch came back. "That's Adam, so he got it."

A moment later, a completely different voice broke in on their channel. "Copy that, music lady, Rubber Duck will be there soon as possible," and the two magicians looked at each other in wild confusion. "Keep an ear out for gunfire and cleavage." A slap accompanied the last word before the transmission cut off.

"What the bloody hell was that?" Neville asked, before turning his wand towards the first group of approaching cyborgs, causing them to seize up for a few seconds as they turned to run.

"No idea!" Harper replied, firing a trio of shots behind them as they jinked around a burned-out aircar. "Find out later!"

"I mean, how do you listen for cleavage?" he clarified, whipping his wand at a salarian cyborg that exited from the storage area he had acquired his tool from, and slashing through everything on its neck but a trio of cables. The cyborg jerked around spasmodically for several moments, sending wild shots towards the bridge walkway above them before the dangling weight pulled the cables free of the skull. "It's just nonsensical!"

"Less talking, more running," she scolded as quietly as possible, and pointed at a visible balcony three or four stories above them. "Apparate us up there, quick!" He grabbed her by the elbow, and they blinked out of sight in a rush of displaced air.

Cautiously, they watched over the edge of the balcony as the cyborgs chasing them came to the exact spot they vanished from, then milled around aimlessly. "I'm very glad these things don't understand teleportation," Harper added. They scanned the room, obviously an apartment for someone fairly wealthy, and moved to check all of the exits. After moving a table, and using some clothing to dangle several metallic art pieces as an alarm, they both stopped, looking at the single large bed. "We can take turns," Harper said.

Neville smirked a little bit. "I am a gentleman, and while you might be single, I am very much in love with my Luna, and look forward to returning to her as soon as we figure this all out." Kicking off his shoes, he lay down on one side of the bed. "Six hours enough, you think?"

Rolling her eyes, she moved to the other side of the bed, kicking off her own shoes. "I'm spoken for too, by my boyfriend and my pet ferret." He snorted in amusement at that. "Sure, you laugh, but I'd wager that Chaos would make short work of these cyborgs. Skitter up a few and chew some sensitive electronics to pieces, then Quinton would turn around and start dismantling everything. Probably build himself a lightning cannon or a portal gun or something equally useful."

Trading a few other friendly comments about their respective lovers, they drifted off to sleep. Four hours later, the sound of a massive crash outside woke them both in a momentary panic. "What the hell?" Harper said rhetorically, her gun already tracking the doorway as she slipped her sneakers back on.

"It came from outside," Neville said, and a quick glance from the bedroom door confirmed that their barricade and alarm was still intact. Creeping up to the balcony railing, they stared down the hundred yards towards the embassy entrance, where a freshly-crashed aircar had just exploded, littering the area with several dozen cyborg pieces, in both moving and inanimate varieties. "Somebody knows how to make an entrance," he added.

"I'm just hoping they weren't in it when they crashed," she started, before a squelch from their omni-tools interrupted. She gave a quick triple-squelch in return, hoping he'd interpret it as Are you okay? like she intended. Unfortunately, while Quinton probably knew Morse code, she couldn't remember much beyond an SOS.

"Very creepy cyborg of an utterly different configuration on that balcony over there," Neville said, and she followed his pointing wand across the way. What might have been a small horse was barely visible on one of the balconies on the other side of the lake. "I might be able to Apparate us that far, but I can't see well enough to be sure."

"I don't suppose you know any spells that duplicate a good set of binoculars, do you?" She squinted into the haze as well, spotting a humanoid figure near the horse-like one. Of course, they might just be seeing another alien species they hadn't encountered yet. Most of them had been one of four races, true, but there had been the rare giant lizard or space ape ones too.

"It looks like a horse, right?" he said slowly, and she raised an eyebrow for him to continue. "Unicorns look like horses. I could signal them with just light, if you think it's safe."

"Can you control the timing enough to do an SOS? Three short, three long, three short," she clarified. Really, didn't these wizards know anything about the modern world? Taking a deep breath, he straightened his arm, sighting down the wand, and sent flickering pulses of gold light out as she'd indicated. At the first light, both humanoid and horse had thrown themselves to cover, but on the second repetition, the man stood up, and surrounded one hand in a corona of crackling electricity, gesturing towards ground level, then away from the embassy.

A moment later, her omni-tool popped on as the gesture repeated it. "You need help?" Blackjack's voice came over, "Or were you just getting our attention?" Neville grinned, changing the light gestures, circling the two smoke-wreathed figures, then executing a similar motion to Adam's. "Roger," the unicorn replied, and they cut off communication.

"Guess we'd better get moving," Harper said, rising to her feet and waving one arm widely just in case. A faint glow came from the other balcony as the two faded from sight, presumably inside the building. "Want to take us back down?"

Apparating back to street level, they ducked quickly into the shelter of a ruined storefront, then crept up the street. The next bridge was still intact, mostly, so they should be able to meet up there.