>>425
You aren't sure how to do that.
>>426
You agree ambiguously. To what, you're not quite sure.
>>427
"Tight osprey ankles." you say.
>>428
You are now playing as Ariadne Aaronova.
You pick up the little black object from the floor. It appears to have been damaged by high temperature, and recently - it's still warm. The longest sides are rougher than the other surfaces, as though they had some texture which has been melted into oblivion. You cannot even guess what it was supposed to be.
At any rate, you decide, you must mediate this altercation outside. Really, why can't Aaron and catkind simply get along? It's so frustrating! You hurl the mysterious object into the fray. It misses Jimmy and instead strikes Aaron in the right foot. He flinches and yells out something incoherent, at the same time dropping that odd white device he used earlier to dispose of those troublesome undead grunt bits. Jack dives in and catches it, points it at Aaron and demands that he relinquish his jetpack. He submits, returns to the ground and is again viciously attacked by Jimmy. Jack straps the jetpack on, launches away and traces a long trajectory off back across the river, without so much as a backwards glance.
>>429
She left you behind! You feel quite betrayed. Your mood goes down, down, down, down, down. Dragging your feet despondently, you head inside and begin to descend the spiral staircase into whatever dark, chthonic realm lies below. Moments later, Jimmy joins you, carrying that small black object in his mouth. The two of you make your way downwards in silence, one step at a time. The staircase continues for a very long time - it is at least five minutes before you reach the bottom.
Upon rounding the last corner you suddenly find yourself in a large open cavern, roughly fifty metres by fifty metres by three metres. It appears to have been formed from two parallel extinct lava tubes, with the intervening space bored out, and the floor and ceiling levelled off to a uniform height. Fluorescent strip lighting suspended from above illuminates row upon row of odd rectangular pods, each the size of a small bed, and each with a rounded cover of frosted glass.
"Would you believe, when I got here they were all empty?" asks a familiar voice. You whip around to find labcoat Jack standing beside you, having just emerged from a door to the left. "They're bodies for generating clones, in case it wasn't obvious. This is the little project I've been working on. Oh, and just in case you had an silly ideas about cloning that sorry bastard I blew up earlier, I already deleted his entry from the database, along with any others besides myself and the default "grunt" model. Anyway, is there anything I can help you with, oh partner in crime? Shouldn't you be out looking for Con-- for that girl?"
You are on a small metal walkway above the southern edge of the room. Behind you is the staircase leading back to the surface. To your left, two metal doors are set into the wall. One, from which Jack just emerged, is open, revealing a room containing a desk, computer, chair, and various shelves and boxes of miscellaneous spelunking equipment. The other door is closed and locked with a large padlock. There are four large, unlit tunnels leading out of the cavern; two to the north, sloping uphill, and two to the south, sloping downhill.