ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

[cross_grave]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

Grave did not believe Host's claim of not corrupting anyone or anything. He was pretty damn sure that the bastard would gladly do it, if he would benefit from this somehow. What got a reaction from him, however, was the part directed towards the squad. A quiet growl and a sharp glare would serve as a warning before the darkling focused back on the mission. He had to admit that the reptile's worry was not unfounded, and managed to supress a sigh at Rapture's reminder. Bloody pen-pushing retards, making his work unnecessarily hard. He moved to the back of the group, positioning himself so that anything coming at them from behind would have to go through him first. He kept his guard up, looking out for danger, which seemed to ignore the squad for now. So far so good.

 

[Shrike7]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

"Maybe this is simply one of the handiest places to find discarded bots. From what Copper told me, there was several large waves of them already beat back before the entire toonpimp incident. could probably spit from that same wall and hit several rather large piles of dead bots." Shrike commented idly. She had a look of stern concentration on her face, however, belying her calm tone as she focused on her mental dealings, trying to gain any additional insight.

Once her name was mentioned again in regards to prying information, she spoke up again. "I don't really know how to dig for information, I just watch the surface thoughts, and that works best when they don't know I'm doing it. That said, shouldn't be too hard if we can have someone else asking the questions."

She fell silent again until after Rapture organized them again, speaking up shortly after once more. "Got him. He's been panicked, apparently the front door had some sort of security we didn't bypass, but he cant be sure it isn't a glitch..." She pauses for a few seconds, then continues in a hushed whisper. "Hold up, he sent some bots to check the elevator, they can't be more than a corner or two ahead of us, headed this way. And he's got cameras on them as well, we should take a side passage if we still want to sneak up on him." She explains quickly, nodding her head back to one of the other corridors they had passed.

 

[Host]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

“-Completely ignore what I said previously and go the other way…!” Host announced about as quickly as his mouth could make the words, but unnecessarily as Rapture had already started running back, quietly barking a command for the rest to do the same. “Back! Around the corner!”

Shrike had managed to get out her warning soon enough that most of the squad had barely moved. Only Grave was a little ahead, thanks to his impressive speed - which also simultaneously allowed him to back up again with little issue. Soon after getting clear, the sounds of several marching metal feet came from the direction they had been heading for. “Nicely done, Shrike.” Rapture announced, but didn’t stop to pin a medal on the telepath’s chest; the squad wasn’t quite out of the woods yet. The bots would be coming to the elevator and stairwell – and the ULMFers were down the passage directly to the right of it. The bots ‘chasing’ them weren’t exactly fast, and a hurried walk would be enough to get them around the first corner along the corridor – either of them, as the passage split in the four cardinal directions not more than thirty meters ahead.

“So our entrance gave us away? Oy. Should have figured a big intricate door like that would be monitored… Whose idiot idea was it to just carve through the thing?” Host asked, so deadpan that you could almost miss the joke. “Still, without a less-literal hacker than Shrike, I doubt there was any other way to get inside. Is he thinking anything el-oof” The demon, walking right at the front of the group, physically bumped into someone at the right corner of the intersection as he reached it. Given the place that they were in, this ‘someone’ happened to be made of metal and holding a gun. With the exception of its ribcage, which was one solid lump and presumably the machines’ vitals, it was incredibly reminiscent of a human skeleton. The bones had joints between them and were larger than might be expected, and the whole thing was made of metal, but otherwise the resemblance was total.

For a frozen moment, its distinctly skull-shaped head and Host’s looked at each other. The Lurker’s fist moved sooner than the bot’s arm, and he punched right for its gun-hand. Unfortunately, all he managed to achieve was prove that the bot had a strong grip, and wasn’t as much of a pushover as the ones that had been outside the building. It attempted to get the barrel of its gun to face the reptile, but Host was intent on not letting that come to pass; he grabbed the bot’s hand and tried to keep it away. Unfortunately, for all the demon’s physical strength, the machine’s mechanical force was the greater, and slowly managed to aim closer toward him.
“Killit-quietly-killit…!” Host hissed rapidly, moments before the bot’s spare forearm slammed into his gut, dislodging the lurker and quite distinctly winning the exchange of forces.

 

[cross_grave]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

Grave was already moving to follow his commander when Shrike voiced her warning. However, he didn't spend months on speed training for nothing - he retreated in a single moment, getting back to the group and moving out of sight with them. He didn't exactly want to bother with an alternate route - he'd rather force his way in through the bots than avoid them, but orders were orders. Avoiding the pursuit was laughably easy, considering how slow the bots were. The real issue would be choosing the right path. The darkling wouldn't be of much use here, considering he had few skills that could help. As he mused over this, he almost missed the fact that Host bumped into a bot. He decided to keep ignoring the reptile for now to preserve his patience, and only noticed that something was wrong when the demon stopped talking.

By the time the machine landed a blow to the Lurker's stomach, Grave was already leaping forward, his automatic reaction to hostility kicking in. A blade of darkness projected out of his right arm as he slashed, focusing his magic into a thin edge. He intended to disarm the bot first, then turn it's chest into loose scraps of metal with a series of strikes. As his arm swung forward, a part of him noticed that he was basically saving the reptile's life. Ironic. Well, maybe he could use this later to annoy the lizard a bit. Or force a favor out of him. Still, he had to wonder why this particular bot seemed to have such... Minimalistic design. Some kind of test type? A freshly-made soldier? Perhaps the tech guy in this base would answer that question.

 

[Shrike7]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

Shrike nodded at the complement, then answered Host, with an apparent lack of notice to his half-hearted insult. "Some sort of pressure seal. I thought there may be some sort of sensor, which is why I left the outside edge of the door intact and only cut out the middle, instead of the whole thing. Best I could do without seeing the inside." She explains with a shrug.
She was still focused 'listening in' to the man's thoughts, and missed for a few seconds that Host had run into another bot. By the time she realized, Grave had already halfway taken care of it, so she stayed back and focused on the man instead. Risking discovery, she put herself in his thoughts momentarily, trying to nudge his thoughts in the proper direction.

How else can they get to me? I should send more bots to cover the elevator, before they make it down. She nudged, masking her presence as one of his panicked mental ramblings.

 

[Host]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

Grave’s strike managed to remove the gun in the machine’s hand – just not as cleanly as he could have hoped. At the last moment, the machine noticed his attack, and rather than take of its arm, the darkling only knocked its gun away. Reacting with much less clunkiness than the bots before, the skeleton jabbed fingers every bit as sharp as knives at the darkling’s arm as he tried to strike a second time, forcing Grave into abandoning the strike and dodging back. The bot wasn’t as fast as the darkling, but it wasn’t wasting a moment on its own safety; the machine knew only how to attack, jabbing and slashing without quarter, attempting to break Grave’s guard. Giving a gun to the seemingly melee-designed bot had clearly been a mistake – if Host had run into it while the bot was unarmed, the demon’s claws would have been the only things holding his guts in by the time Grave arrived.

The attacks on Grave came quickly enough that breaking his guard was risky, but the darkling got a few shallow slices into its chest where he could. Given that the bot was continuing to attack, he hadn’t yet managed to carve up anything vital. He would surely win eventually, but there were still the bots catching up to the squad to worry about. Rapture had her gun drawn on the bot, as did Host, by this point – but while guns would kill it quickly, quietly was another matter – and the squad needed the fight to be both. Grave’s darkness blade would cut silently enough, but wasn’t going to do the job in time, not by itself, and while the bot had him halfway pinned.

 

[cross_grave]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

Grave's eyes widened slightly when the bot managed to avoid losing an arm, but he was hardly worried - it had no other weapon. The darkling stepped forward, executing a quick slice to end the fight, only to be forced back. That was a suprise - he didn't notice the claws at first. His attention was focused on the gun, and he assumed this bot was a ranged fighter. It turned out, however, that not only this one seemed to be more suitable for melee combat, the bot was actually good. Sure, he took a few hits, but seeing as he was still in the fight it meant the cuts were superficial. The damn thing managed to keep up with the mage! However, Grave was hardly worried. Sure, the bot was somewhat challenging, but the resident battle maniac was actually willing to see this as a pleasant suprise. Sadly, he had to end this quickly - drawing the battle out would give away their position. The darkling continued to strike, keeping the pressure up, though now he focused more on making sure the damn thing couldn't launch a decisive counter and break through his defence. In the meantime, he gathered dark energy in his left hand. After a short moment, he lowered his guard a bit, exposing his head for a moment. He expected the bot to go for the opening. He intended to dodge it's predictable attack, then impale it with a lance conjured from his left hand through the middle of it's torso.

 

[Host]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

The skeletal bot took the opportunity Grave presented to it, its programming apparently having no understanding of that level of subtlety. In its own exposed moment, the darkling’s lance tore a hole in the creature’s only obvious concentration of vitals, and it collapsed, no longer moving. Rapture’s eyes darted between the possible paths, now that the most pressing concern had changed to getting clear of areas in the line of sight of the elevator.
There’s no going back, and there’s no continuing straight on, not if we want to avoid the bots looking for us. Left or right, either will work… Right puts us closer to the human sending these bots, which is where we want to be, but also more dangerous. Left takes us in the wrong direction, but hopefully leaves us safer…

Host makes up the commander’s mind for her, with a general call of “Rightwards-ho.”
With no better alternative, their commander nods, and Host hoists the bot’s body onto his back, heading down the right-side passage with it.

 

[cross_grave]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

Grave followed the lead, returning to his position in the formation as the group began to move again. He frowned as he replayed the short fight in his mind, analyzing his opponent. The bot seemed incomplete, with a rather bare body and easily identified (and damaged) weak point, but it's combat abilities were worrying. Granted, someone like him wouldn't have problems with one or even a few of those machines, considering their skills were basic, but regular ULMF troops? Fighters on his level weren't really common. With it's superhuman speed and strenght, this bot would easily triumph over regular humans in close combat, and while it's skills with firearms was an unknown factor, they were probably at least passable. In a big battle with a regular army, those things could be potentially devastating shock troops if their other abilities were on the same level as their melee prowess. He doubted this thing was shipped over here to act as a guard - it's seemed only partially assembled, after all. It was probably a test type, or maybe a prototype. If that was the case, it was likely created here... Which meant the facility was more than just a recycling plant. Interesting.

 

[Host]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

The back of the squad’s formation had barely gotten around the corner, when the demon made a pained groan; the ‘dead’ bot Host was carrying suddenly stabbed the demon in the back, leaving a pierce wound that bled white. “Ow, little shit! Learn how to stay down!” the reptile growled, ramming his back against the corridor’s wall with a *Dongggk*, before throwing the bot off him. It was still quite clearly damaged, unable to get up – just obviously not totally broken yet. Host kicked it in the head… not that it seemed to have any effect, one way or the other. “Man, Toonpimp really dug up a treasure in this one…”

Shrike, her mind on the human in this facility, would be able to inform that the sounds of battle weren’t reaching the human monitoring them. Her concentration would also probably cause Shrike to miss the odd bent Host’s thoughts suddenly took...

Yo, home base. Tell me what I’m looking at, here.
A bot.
OH USER, REALLY?! I didn’t know that. What -kind- of bot, where is it from?

There was no indication of any psionic communication occurring, but he distinctly seemed to be getting answers from thoughts that, while coming from him, did not seem to be his own.

All right, I’ll check the records, give me a minute. Why do you want to know, anyway?
The only time I’ve seen a bot this powerful, it was part of an %^&*$^@$%$%&. I want to know how Toonpimp has something like –that-.

The thoughts, should Shrike follow them, self-censor a certain part of themselves as she reads them. His mind, open though it is, apparently has a couple of implanted psionic defences…

Rapture speaks up while Host thinks to himself. “We should be clear for the moment.” She does, though, look to Shrike for confirmation before continuing – “If we head on without thinking, there’s a good chance we will just run into another patrolling bot – though maybe not as literally as Host. Stay here for the moment; I’ll scout ahead and try to determine a safe way through these patrols. Sinful, you’ll be commanding if something happens while I’m gone. If one of us ends up tripping an alarm, use your best judgment to decide whether to continue or escape.” With a single wave, Rapture continues on, and quickly disappears around a corner.

While talking with and waiting for a response from his contact, Host didn’t simply stand around looking dumb; he moved up to the wall he had run into, looking at it critically. Is it just me… or were there one too many g’s in that *dongggk*?

With nothing more than a blink, the demon’s sight changed totally, not that anyone observing him would be able to tell. Yep… it’s hollow. Ah, how I love x-ray vision...
The demon could make out a room, probably 30 meters square. It contained a number of pillars, with a canopy of wires falling away from the roof, but was otherwise empty. Host wasn’t about to believe that for a second, though. He knew exactly what the room contained, but nevertheless hid the grimace of worry his body wanted to make...


(I had actually made this longer, but I shortened it for the sake of not rushing through events. As long as nobody minds me ending these posts without distinct, important events to comment on, I'll keep using this format.)

 

[cross_grave]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

Grave was already moving into a stance when he heard Host groan in pain. He tensed as the bot hit the wall, visibly relaxing only after realizing that while still active, the machine was crippled. Letting the reptile worry about scrapping it, the mage merely watched the bot curiously. While getting some first-hand knowledge about effectiveness of his attacks was nice, the darkling was forced to change his earlier assessment. This model was much more resilient than he assumed - nothing short of extreme mutilation of it's insides would stop it. Putting this on top of it's combat abilities, an army of those things would be too much for a regular force to handle. Grave's scowl got harder - this didn't change the likelihood that it was still some kind of prototype, and that Toonpimp was preparing more. This was not good.

The darkling glanced at Rapture as she issued order before leaving, then took a look around, idly noting what his allies were doing. Shrike seemed awfully focused on something - probably probing that techie. What caught his attention, though, was the fact that Host seemed to stare at the wall he smashed the bot into for some reason. Curious, Grave moved next to him, giving the reptile a wary look. "Something wrong with this wall, or did you just hit it too hard?"

 

[Shrike7]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

"We're still undiscovered as yet. Buddy doesn't have direct control over the majority of these bots, something about him not knowing how to program in wraith, I think." Shrike says calmly, confirming Rapture's unspoken question. She took the moment to lean casually against the wall, though she still appeared ready, should something happen.

She hadn't noticed the internal mono(dia?)logue Host was having until he mentally shouted back at whoever he was conversing with, which drew her attention. She mentally shrugged, filing away the tidbits of information so she could ask later, when they weren't in a combat zone.

A smile crossed her face as Grave went up and started talking to Host about staring at the wall, but didn't comment herself. Trying to listen in on two separate minds, one of which moderately alien to her, was taxing her concentration as it was.

 

[Host]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

“I hit it? No no, it hit me - and now I must glare at it with maximum ferocity to re-establish dominance!” Host answers, blatantly giving a false answer before moving on to the real one. “Also, to look for secret doors while Rapture is away. I mean, what kind of roguish character would I be if I couldn’t do that much?” Satisfied that there was no door in the section of wall he was looking at, the lurker placed his hand on it. “Open… Pavlova” accompanied a push to the left, doing nothing as the wall held in place. Satisfied at the lack of a door, the demon moved further along. “The passages we’ve been walking through cut this section of wall off from everything else… and it seems like a shame to not do something with so much space, y’know. From an evil interior designer's perspective, if no one else’s, this place just screams for a secret room. Open… Lamington.” Again, nothing occurs as the demon attempts to push the wall aside.

The next bit of wall, further up the passage proved to have the slightest of creases before it ought to. Host spent a good few minutes looking it over, expecting a booby-trap of some kind, first looking at the place in normal and then x-ray vision. He found none, which only made him nervous, and he spent a few moments very carefully physically checking parts of the wall… until he remembered he was looking at one of Toonpimp’s installations, not his own. The door wasn’t so much secret as just incredibly difficult to spot, having no handle and nothing to differentiate it from the walls it attached to. When the demon pushed it with an “Open… Macadamia.”, it slid to the side without doing anything other than revealing the room beyond.

It was the chamber Host had seen… and contained the bots he had guessed at. Forced standing by cables attached to the pillars they clustered around were a little over three dozen of the machines. They were all exactly identical, hairless human males with an expression that looked like it had been trying for neutral, but had been kicked into the uncanny valley, and somehow ended up seeming like wide-eyed, straight faced terror instead. It was the face of the particular breed of bot the wraith had thrown at ULMF, and each one here was one of the very bots that the forum had defeated. Each had torn and damaged skin somewhere, showing off the mechanical pieces underneath, though none were actually all that badly mauled; presumably, they were all still capable of working. Thankfully, they were apparently all inactive.

“Oy… I hate being right.” The disgruntled demon declares. A contemplative look crosses his features, and he smirks. “…Well, sometimes.”
Entering with more caution than he showed, Host weaved his way through the fairly tight forest of robotic forms. “Bugger me… he could do some damage with these. …Or, well, maybe not - I suppose you have beaten them once already.”

Tucked away in a corner at the opposite side of the room, the demon managed to find a PC terminal, built into the wall, the computer already running and a program open on a green screen and in what looks like… well, DOS at best. Cracking his fingers and a smile, the demon took up the keyboard, scanning the program. “Looks like they don’t only dig their tools of war out of the garbage. Okay, it looks like a list of serials – probably bots – and some stats… mostly techie crud I couldn’t give a stuff about, but there’s a model name here too. And… ah, I think that one’s their current status.” The reptile down-arrows his way down what proves to be a rather long list. “Well, this has to be more than just this room, maybe all the bots he’s got. Twenty say PT, which I’ll assume means that they’re ParTying, or on a slightly less likely note, Patrolling, while the rest are all ‘IAct’. Probably about sixty, seventy total have “wraith” as the model description, but… I don’t think I saw any other model names on this list repeat once - and this is somewhere around two-hundred serials long.”

Host gets up from the terminal, his own expertise on the issue exhausted. “Well, if one of you knows how to hack into a… Commodore 64, or whatever the hell this is, now would be the time to speak up. Otherwise, I suppose we could always try random commands for shits and giggles, and see how long it takes to accidentally activate all the bots in this room…”

What in my hell? Half of these non-wraith ones I don’t even recognise, and some of the half I do were only ever active in areas hundreds of miles away from each other. And most of them absolute ages ago, at that…

 

[cross_grave]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

"Uh huh." Grave gave Host a look that clearly conveyed his rather low opinion of the lizard. Still he did nothing to get in the demon's way, observing the search for hidden door with moderate interest, speaking only to comment on Host's remark about evil interior design. "Makes sense you'd be an expert on that... And that's an interesting choice of passwords you got there." The mage watched for a bit before getting bored, seeing as Host seemed to be getting nowhere. He wondered whether he should just forget about looking for doors and "bypass" the wall with brute force when the reptile finally managed to open a way inside. Curious, the darkling moved over to take a look himself, entering the room right after Host, glancing around.

"That's a nice collection. Though why he keeps something we already chewed through and spat out is beyond me..." Grave muttered under his breath, staring at the bots and making a mental catalogue of their "wounds". It seemed that the damage wasn't enough to destroy them, so why were they inactive and hidden in a secret room? The darkling turned his attention to Host as the lizard began to speak. He waited patiently until the demon finished, his eyebrow rising slightly at the mention of sheer variety of bots available. "I don't think we have a computer specialist in our team anymore." 'Damn you, TP...' "I wonder why he keeps so many different models in this complex. You think he might be researching how to mass-produce them without relying on classic methods, the way he's recycling the remains of old bots?"

 

[Shrike7]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

"Austrailian desserts?" Shrike asked when Grave made his comments about passwords. As He was near the front of the group, she waited till near the end to enter, and stayed near to the doorway. She eyes the inactive bots with a look closer to curiosity than wariness, then places herself beside the door and watches the hallway.

"If you didn't need a password to get in, you probably wouldn't need to hack it." She comments with a shrug. "Weren't all the commands. Like /list and /help, back then?"

 

[Host]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

“Australian staple foods.” Host corrects, grinning. “Host’s staple foods. And now you know what to serve for my birthday party.”

“Well, being a terminal, this thing probably has only so many commands it can perform. I doubt we could shut the whole operation down from this room, not without bypassing some kind of security. Though if I'm wrong, I'll be laughing all the way to the exit.” Despite his misgivings, sitting back down, Host typed in ‘/help’ - only for “Error – invalid command” to come up. ‘help’ without the slash brought a help screen, Which the lurker skimmed through until he found a list of commands. “Release, don’t want that one. Display/Select terminal/all, looks like it changes the list of bots being looked at. Exit, help, print log… deactivate, there we go. Lets try…”

Select All
Deactivate
<Admin Only. Enter Code.>

A sigh accompanies the failed attempt. “Yeah, I thought as much. Shrike, is there any chance you can plumb it out of his head?”

Grave’s question was one the demon gave a decent amount of thought to. “If he is, that would explain why he would have a variety of bots, but only one of each, if he was searching for a powerful one to replicate… and from what I know, the attribute that causes a bot to be a bot is still unknown…” the exact change to the reptile’s expression was unplaceable, save that it became harder. “…shit. That might actually work – if there aren’t any difficulties coping or changing the programming, and if its bot-status is maintained when rebuilt from old bots, there’s a chance he could create a completely new bot without relying on any of the normal, costly bot creating methods. Only a chance, but… ^&%*, I hate not being able to be sure.” The demon finishes with a grimace, pronouncing the bleep with incredible skill (- people usually trip over the ‘%’). “One way or another, it looks more and more like taking this place out while we’re here would be a good idea.”

Shrike picked up the sound of metal on metal quite easily as she watched the door; another bot patrol was coming closer. Given a lack of any 'bot-moving' thoughts on the part of the human, the group - at least three strong - must have been independently patrolling... and on a very long route at that, for it to have not shown up till now.
Starting a noisy firefight would be risky at the moment, and the bot patrol was approaching the far side of the corridor; there was little chance she could close to melee in time - even if she could somehow carve them up fast enough to stop any from firing. If the rest of the squad entered the room and hid, perhaps luck would be on their side and the patrol would just go on past?

 

[Shrike7]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

"Doubtful, especially if we want to stay unnoticed. I can watch the surface thoughts, and nudge them a little to change his train of thought, but if it's too large of a gap in reasoning, people figure out what's up pretty fast. Already nudged a bit too far once to figure out he's not in hands-on control of most of these, so I'd rather not take the chance." Shrike explains, turning every so often to check on the progress of Host's hacking attempt.

She caught the sound around the corner, leaning a head out to better hear it. She picked out what it was quickly enough, and spoke again. "Small patrol coming, everyone in here quick." She said, just loud enough for people to hear. Once everyone filed in, she's slowly close the secret panel, waiting on the inside so she could strike quickly if the bots tried to enter.

 

[Host]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

At Shrike's warning, and on her own prerogative, Sinful grabbed the leg of the previous bot to have attacked them, dragging it into the room as well; no reason to leave it out where the new arrivals could trip over it. Shortly after all the squad was in, the bots definitively turned down the corridor the door was attached to, walking up it – and Host started to look a little sheepish. “…Uh... This is a bit too convenient, a new patrol showing up just as we find this room… there’s a chance they got called here; say, by someone trying to use a command they didn’t have access to...”

Sinful scowled at the demon upon his speculation, taking up the other side of the sliding door to Shrike. The reptile looked mildly concerned, though not about their sub-commander, speaking quietly. “…On top of that, are we sure they can’t just see us through walls? Crap, if our gunfight panics this guy into waking up all the bots in this facility, direct control or no I’m not sure we could make it out…” From the terminal’s corner, the Lurker looks about, trying to find some loophole that might miraculously save them.

 

[cross_grave]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

Grave drew his sword, getting into position near the door. "Great... Got any more good news for us?" This wasn't a very good place to fight. If the bots had weapons capable of hitting them through walls (or even worse, grenades), things would get bad really fast. He focused, gathering his magic. He wanted to have enough power for a defensive barrier in case the bots attacked, altough Rapture and Sin probably would rather avoid unnecessary battles. "Tch. What a pain." The darkling muttered under his breath. All this sneaking around really wasn't his style.

 

[Shrike7]

Re: ULMF the Third (RP Thread)

"If they can see us through the walls, then there isn't much we could do to hide anyways. Guess we'll just have to deal with it." Shrike says with a shrug, dropping her tall form into a battle crouch and making room for Grave to get up to the door beside her.
There wasn't enough space in the room for the entire squad to hide among the inactive bots, so if the bots outside decided to check the room, there wasn't much they could do but try to deal with them quickly and quietly.