[center][h2]Startup[/h2]
[b]Sector 7[/b]
Goldlewis, Roxas’ [@Double], Karin’s [@Zoey Boey], Midna’s [@DracoLunaris], Pit’s [@Yankee]
[b]Word Count:[/b] 5112 (+6)[/center]
[center][hider=for Midna]
[b]Data Soup[/b][i]A canned consumable stimulating vitamin drink with an acquired taste[/i]
[b]Bone Potage[/b]
[i]A hearty canned consumable healing drink full of minerals, viscous and a little weird[/i]
[b]Energy Spike[/b]
[i]A device that can restore the power of whatever device it's stabbed into[/i]
[b]Chitinous Shell[/b]
[i]Useful when powdered as a crafting agent particularly for curing leather[/i]
[b]Zenny[/b] x768[/hider][/center]
Midna was hot on Goldlewis’ heels when it came to springing into the fray. Though her mouth was filled with the lingering unpleasant mix of bile from what she had had to do, and a combo of oddly tasting Data Soup and Bone Potage she had acquired and then drunk to heal and reinvigorate herself, she had the steel needed to do what needed to be done.

Her wolfos leapt down from the semi with the princess holding firm to its coat with one hand, and her one handed interdimensional ax in the other, its demon blood caked blade crackling with electricity. 

Just behind them, Pit cleared the top of the truck. Though his eyes light up briefly at the sight of the orbital laser, his face otherwise kept the same expression of serious concentration that it'd had since the end of the last battle. Technically they'd been successful, the gate had been closed and they'd dealt with the... monsters. The way it concluded though had been miserable, leaving a grim feeling hanging over the Seekers. The way Pit usually coped was by focusing on saving as many people as he could.

He used the bow as a makeshift pole to vault himself from the roof of the truck, giving himself more momentum when he went for a flying kick at one of the clawed aberrations the laser had dragged toward them. It connected with the hunter's head, though with not as much force as Pit hoped. It reeled but kept on its feet, swiping its claws up as Pit pushed off of it. Directly above it he shifted the bow into its two blade halves, and with one held in forward grip and the other in reverse he drove them both down in a vigorous double slash. The aberration let out a howl as its shoulder and the side of its neck were sliced through. It brought its one of its huge claws up to prevent further damage as Pit landed in front of it and kept up the attack. Its other hand lashed out, catching only the edges of the angel's tunic before its shoddy guard was broken with an upward slash. Flipping the reversed blade back around Pit stuck with a forward cross chop, tearing into its abdomen and finishing it off.  

[color=lightgoldenrodyellow]"Moving in!"[/color] he stated, snapping the two blades back together and leaving the remaining hunter and the axe wielder in order to even the odds against the small horde of aberrations the officers were fighting against.

Instead of fighting, Roxas focused on using his flowmotion to slip past the hostile aberrations. His goal was to make a bee-line for the shelter, since he figured there were probably people inside in need of help getting out.

[color=Gold]”I’ll try to get the people out!”[/color] he told the Policeman when he made it to the vicinity, [color=Gold]”Is there another shelter they can go to?”[/color]

Midna charged the big aberration giving a battle cry of [color=Aquamarine]”I’m putting you down!”[/color] as she pulled back her shadow hand and then drove it forwards in a massive punch. Her fist met the aberration’s tree-felling chop in tremendous trade of blows, resulting in damage to both unusual limbs. As Midna reeled her shadow hand back from the blow, she had her wolfos leap to the side of the mutant so she could dart in and out to deliver a harassing ax blow to its flank, the hack of a strike bringing down a bolt of lightning atop its target should it hit. Her bolt from the blue struck true, but this monster wouldn’t go down easily. With its size and range it could just about keep up with the wolfos and its rider, its hard-to-stop blade swung again and again.

Karin leapt into the fray, dropping her heel against one of the clawed monsters. It blocked and slid backwards, giving her enough time to spin around and drive an elbow into its back, before tripping it with an elegant sweep. She brought her foot down upon its head, and it screeched, slashing up at her in futile retaliation. Karin back stepped easily. An accosted Filfthwing then stuck an arrow into her shoulder with a painful yellow spark. The clawed creature in front of her swiped up her torso, and she stumbled backward. [color=fff200][i]”Aah!”[/i][/color] The monster advanced and she jumped over its head to avoid the next swing and back walked to temporarily retreat into her allied lines, not wanting to get caught any more out of position. When the clawed creature approached again she kept it at bay with well placed, well timed kicks, and blocked another arrow fired her way. 

For a few moments now Goldlewis had been facing off with one of the gladius-wielding swordfighters. It sliced at him with such aggression that he’d been locked down in defense mode, but the veteran wasn’t just blocking there helplessly. He watched closely, getting a feel for the timing of his enemy’s attacks, until he could finally execute a carefully-timed instant block that gave him the advantage in the closest of quarters. His ensuing shoulder barge beat the aberration to the punch, comboing neatly into a backhand blow to the jaw. It recovered faster than he expected and clipped him with a swipe, but as it went for a second Goldlewis ducked back to launch the aberration with an impressive [url=https://i.imgur.com/ATpBM6f.png]double high kick[/url]. As it flailed its limbs in the air, an upward [url=https://i.imgur.com/BgFrita.png]Behemoth Typhoon[/url] from Goldlewis smashed it behind him toward the semi. Whether it lived or died was of no concern right this second; the veteran could see Karin under assault from several angles, and whether or not she needed his help he moved in to assist. 

He opened with a Thunderbird grenade to hit the hunter in its unprotected back and send it stumbling towards Karin, then made for the backlines where the Filthwings flew to help get the archers off his allies’ backs. One of the defenders, Juliette, had the same idea but got accosted by the slugger on the way. It dished out haymaker after gut-busting haymaker, but Juliette moved nimbly. She swerved between its blows and planted a kidney shot in its side with her gauntlet, sending a shockwave of pain through its body. It went for broke with a wild hook but overextended enough to turn sideways, and Juliette stepped in to seize its dangling leg with her off hand. As she pulled it toward her she punched it square in the back, slamming it face-first into the ground. She prepared to finish it off with a punch to the head, not noticing the archer charging a shot.

“Incoming!” Goldlewis hollered, forcing Juliette to take notice. She grabbed her target’s head instead and picked it up to use as a ‘human’ shield, and once it took the blow for her she sent it flying toward the archer with a soccer kick. Though he took a few of the other archer’s shots on the way, Goldlewis hurried over to slam both other Filthwings into the ground with another mighty Behemoth Typhoon.

That left just one archer with a clear shot at the veteran’s head, but before Goldlewis knew what was happening Julietta had run over and sprung off his back. “Heads up!” She braved the danger to unleash a flying wallop with her gauntlet that sent the Filthwing into the highway wall, the heavy impact cracking both concrete and chitin.

Previously, when Goldlewis’s slam had sent the Hunter towards Karin, she was the one doing the pouncing. [color=fff200][i]”Orochi!”[/i][/color] She zipped forward, turned, and thrust her back towards her opponent, crushing it bodily. It crumpled onto its knees just in time for Karin to finish it off with a series of advancing palm strikes and elbow thrusts. Outwardly, Karin didn’t seem any worse for wear from the damage she had taken, but it was still damage, and once it broke the threshold of her health she would be extremely vulnerable. Karin still felt the wounds of the blunt damage from earlier, the slashing up her chest and the arrow in her back.

Once Roxas was in the shelter, he could immediately see it wasn’t ideal. Namely there was a group of wounded kept protected in a back corner where they would hopefully stay out of the danger. But Roxas had an idea, and went back to the corner where they were all sitting and laying before summoning one of his Keyblades, [color=gold]”It’s okay, everyone. I’m here to get you all back on your feet.”[/color] then he held the weapon straight up and thrust its tip upward in the direction of the ceiling, [color=gold]”Heal!”[/color] at this command, a trio of yellow and green bell-shaped flowers appeared over his head and seemed to shake as if ringing once or twice. Immediately Roxas and the wounded around him felt a refreshing green aura wash over them - open wounds closing and bruises seemingly washing away as if they had never been there.

Outside the battle raged on, although in Midna’s case she was in the midst of leaving it rapidly behind, the once again bleeding princess riding hard and fast away while the ax brute pounded after her, barely being slowled by crates she was portaling in behind her to trip it up.

[color=Aquamarine]”Come on come on come on, there!”[/color] the princess took a sudden right, darting between vehicles and then into a dead end in the shade of an abandoned truck.

A heartbeat leather the brute charged in after her, ax raised and coming down with a devastating chop, only for it to find itself alone as the twilight Princess vanished into shadows and her steed into a portal. Momentarily confused, it spun upon hearing a call of [color=Aquamarine]”Pin it down!”[/color] from behind.

Standing now at the entrance to the dead end she had lead it into, the princess’s command was obeyed by her initiate strikers, which caused roots of psychic energy to burst from the ground and walls of wreckage and to wrap around the hulking mutant.

It struggled, snapping swaths of its bindings with every movement, but it was a delay and that was all she had wanted. A quartet of icy javelins speared the juggernaut from her other strikers, her maxed out Vibrava blasted it with its fiery dragon’s breath. The princess herself shot a stream of lightning from her ax blade and slapped down a twilight volley bomb using her shadow hand, all while riding her cyber bear. Its cannon blast was the last of her veritable barrage of firepower against the mutant, its goopy projectile exploding and showering it with burning goop.

While the Seekers dealt with their opponents and Roxas took care of the civilians, both soothing and safeguarding them from further harm as he guided them toward extraction, Atlas and Hayato handled the remainder that were under fire by Pit’s light arrows. The Neuron officer put aside defense to rush the last few aberrations down. He struck them with a flurry of baton and gladius strikes in a prolonged beatdown, then dodged whenever the going got rough to keep up the pressure. Though not as speedy or combo-oriented as his fellow, Atlas took command of the battlefield so long as he kept possession of his ball. His charges, shoves, and blocks forced enemies to reposition while his intercepts took the heat off his allies’ backs, dictating the flow of the fight. When Hayato knocked a monster down, launched it up, or knocked it back, Atlas would roll in to polish it off with a beefy coordinated finisher.

He and Hayato made short work of the last hunter and swordfighter, and once Juliette cratered a Filthwing archer against the sidewall, a goal shot kick from Atlas smashed the monster through to plummet to the ground far below as it died. Off in the background, the drones carried all three civilians on their stretchers off to a waiting helicopter. Goldlewis let his shoulders sag for a moment as he caught his breath. Considering the scale of the chaos around the Seekers, it was a small victory, but a complete one, and any victory was worth celebrating.

“Here, are you hurt?” Atlas offered the Seekers a couple pills of Medicine.

All too soon, however, an explosion in the sky grabbed their attention. A different helicopter spiraled through the air, swathed in flame and surrounded by Filthwings. The nearby officers’ radios lit up with panicked yells. “Mayday, mayday!” a voice shouted. “I can’t shake them, I’m going down!”

Grimly aghast, Goldlewis couldn’t avert his gaze. He watched as the helicopter hit the highway a couple thousand feet up ahead, but it didn’t explode on impact. The officers exchanged a glance, brief but very communicative. “You go on ahead,” Juliette told the others, nodding. “We’ve got things under control here.” Hayato dipped his head in respect, then turned to sprint toward the new crisis. With a sigh Goldlewis hefted his coffin and followed.

The helicopter had landed, slid messily across the pavement, and finally come to rest against an almost horizontal semitruck blocking the entire road, the flames burning especially bright in the shadow of another elevated overpass just ahead. By the time Goldlewis arrived on the scene, Hayato had already reached the helicopter pilot, who’d been extracted from the wreck by a [url=https://i.imgur.com/WXZ377A.jpg]female officer[/url] with a striking resemblance to him.

“Hey, are you okay?” the woman asked him. “Stay with me!”

The pilot shuddered, clearly in great pain. “My leg… my damn leg… I can’t move like this.”

Hayato stepped in to assist without a word. Together the twins hoisted him between their shoulders, then turned to begin the long trip back to the evacuation checkpoint. They tried not to put too much stress on the pilot, but they moved as urgently as they could, perhaps instinctively sensing that their time was short. Barely did the pair get three steps from the crashed chopper before the air around the highway began to flicker. Arcs of red lightning crackled violently as fresh gates tore open in reality, not just cracks like the one Hayato closed earlier, but full-on crimson portals. Inside, Goldlewis could see the faintest suggestion of an alien world, black stone and red crystal suspended between two immense plates, with a diagonal column of light on the horizon.

“A gate?” Akira gasped, her eyes narrowed. Then the gates rippled, and [i]something[/i] came through.

Another voice came through Hayato’s radio. “Come in, PD025! Corruption levels just shot up over there, what’s going on?”

Goldlewis drew in a sharp breath. He couldn’t see it but something was there. The air shimmered ever-so-faintly, the only real sign of their presence being the subtle distortion of the background as seen through the space they occupied. But that distortion moved with weight, the stop-start of a living thing. He couldn’t make out details of any kind; it was like trying to track a fly on the wing, there one second and gone the next, only for another twinge to turn his gaze in another direction. But the veteran grit his teeth and gripped the chain of his coffin tight. Obviously this wasn’t good, but from everything he’d heard he did know something else. “Chimeras!” he barked, having quickly come to an important realization as his attempts to trace the strange movement were confounded. “At least two of ‘em! Maybe more!” Unable to sense the invisible beings, he searched the ground for any sign of their movement in the traces of dust and ash. When he finally noticed something that wasn’t a false positive, it was too late. “Agh!” he grunted, clamping his hand down on the fresh claw slash that had suddenly opened up on his shoulder. “They’re fast!” He swung his coffin and hit nothing but air. This was going to be rough.

Karin got into her finding stance, turning around and searching for any sign of the creatures. 

The warnings given at the SOU meeting filtered back as Goldlewis declared the name of their latest foe. [i]The most dangerous,  invisible to the naked eye, their very presence infects their surroundings with Red Matter.[/i] It stood to reason that they would want to take care of the Chimeras as quickly as possible, but...

[color=lightgoldenrodyellow]"Invisible enemies are such a pain!"[/color] Pit griped. He had, of course, followed the action, and now held the two halves of his bow defensively in each hand. His eyes darted around the stretch of road, searching for any sign of the extra-dimensional beings. With the crackle of fiery wrecks behind them and the general commotion of the city around them, it would be difficult to hear where the Chimeras would strike from if it was even possible at all - not to mention with the unnatural lighting on all sides, Pit's go to strategy of looking for a shadow would be futile as well. If they were to fill the same role as before and keep the monsters away from the Neuron officer, the only one capable of closing the gates, they had their work cut out for them.

Midna, running low on healing items, was here too and, after her failure to stop an invisible unfriendly friend back in Al Mamoon, she was determined to make a difference this time. For this she had two tricks. The first was to raise up her shadow hand and to project a dark energy field around her as a kind of ward to be tripped should an invisible foe come after her or anyone close to her. If it did trip it, her twilight Vibrava was on hand to blast it with dragon breath and earth power.

The other half was an alteration to her failed strategy against Ciella, the princess dumping out sand from the twilight realm, concentrating it into a large cloud, and then sweeping the cloud it across areas of empty space like a net. It would not do not do much if any harm on its own, but the singing sand’s tune should change upon impact, giving the location of the invisible foe away if the way it distorted the flowing sand did not.  

[color=Aquamarine]”Come out come out wherever you aaaaare”[/color]

[color=lightgoldenrodyellow]"Good idea Midna!"[/color]

At least it was in theory. The sand screen did not move as if the full mass of a living thing pushed through it.

Pit's gaze flickered over to the twins; at least one of them would have to be unburdened by the pilot in order to start the process of closing the gates. The angel started towards them with intent to take over getting the man to safety, calling out to [color=lightgoldenrodyellow]"Trade spots!"[/color].

He swapped the bow for orbitars, but in that brief moment between desummoning and summoning equipment when there was nothing to protect Pit something struck him. A bodily slam that he didn't see coming, quick enough that the shift of sand left no time to get out of the way. His side crumpled from the impact and he went flying with a pained shout.

In the last few moments, Karin had her eyes on Pit, figuring his movement might make him a target. When he got hit, she was quick to react. [color=fff200][i]”Tenko!”[/i][/color] She called out, flashing toward the invisible target with an upward palm strike. She hit [i]something[/i] but she had no combo follow ups, no idea of if the attack connected or not. She felt something, but nothing like she’d ever felt before, as if the matter of her arm didn’t interact with the matter of the creature in a normal -or intuitive- manner.

[color=fff200][i]”Tch!”[/i][/color] Frustrated, she backed up and went to protect Pit with her guard. As for Pit’s goals, that remained up to him to accomplish - and so far the prospects of that happening weren't looking good. As Goldlewis stated before, the Chimeras were fast. They were, from what Pit could tell, darting between everyone present and attacking at every opening. Pit had scrambled to stand after getting flung, saved from a follow up attack by the orbitars automatically snapping to his defense at the last moment. Whether it was a claw or some bladed limb, it crashed against the shield and was gone before a retaliatory shot could even be made.

[color=lightgoldenrodyellow]"How are we even supposed to fight them?!"[/color] There was no answer, unfortunately. Appreciating the street fighter's backup, Pit stuck close to Karin as the Guardian Orbitars spun around them both. Any shift in space or weird shimmer in the air saw a bolt of energy shoot at it from the floating weapons, but they hit the sand beyond their invisible targets more often than not.

“These things are like ghosts! They can hit us just fine, but we can barely touch ‘em!” Goldlewis swung at one of the shimmers, but the weight and force of his coffin barely seemed to register. The next second the chimera completed his attack, and with a brutal kick slammed the giant man onto his back. With the wind driven from his lungs by the impact he could only feebly attempt to roll over and prop himself up.

Over to one side, the twins were having just as tough a time as the Seekers, if not worse. Hayato and Akira attempted to defend the helicopter pilot as best they could, but they couldn’t effectively fight or even see what they were up against, and their dispatcher was of no help. “Hey!” Akira yelled. “Don’t hang up on me, damn it!”

“Ugh!” Hayato skidded backward, lost his footing and tumbled for a second before coming to rest on his side. “This is bad. At this rate…”

At that moment, a third gate appeared. Another shimmer emerged, larger and more oblong than the others. It descended, clamped down on Goldlewis’ back, and attempted to lift all five hundred sixty-six pounds of him into the air. “Aaagh!” he roared. “It’s…got me…!” Then a second shimmer arrived just like the first, joined its strength to the former, and together pulled the Secretary of Absolute Defense through the crimson portal. In a flash he was gone, his coffin left behind.

Midna, without a thought, tried to reach a shadow hand in after him, only to find herself dragged in by an unseen force accelerating the grasping fist’s lunge into something far faster that she could not resist.

For his part, Roxas had been rather preoccupied with tending the wounded. Because he was unable to cast Curaga without waiting about a minute in between uses, that pretty much kept him out of the action going on outside. He could hear the sounds of fighting, but dealing with civilians and healing the wounded ended up becoming his priority. At least until he heard the distant shouting of Goldlewis, that is.

Roxas burst out of the shelter just in time to spot Goldlewis in the distance being dragged into another gate that had appeared, [color=gold]”No no no no!”[/color] he shouted repeatedly after he broke into a sprint. After a few seconds he felt his MP return since the last time he used Curaga and used his Keyblade to shoot forth a Blizzaga spell to create another “rail” for himself to grind on in order to cover the distance. But only a few moments after, an attack from the chimera broke the “rail” and forced Roxas to improvise.

[color=Gold]”I’m not losing anyone else, you hear me?”[/color] Roxas shouted at no one in particular. He jumped from the tip of the “rail” and twisted himself around to launch a Firaga to fend off an incoming attack. After that he impacted a wrecked car and launched himself off the side of it. He continued doing this a couple of more times, looking like a ricocheting pinball before finally going sailing into the gate.

Karin watched several of her allies disappear into the gate. Gritting her teeth, she cast a look over at Pit, then at the struggling police officers. [color=fff200]”We’ve no choice! Onwards!”[/color] She sprinted forward and jumped into the portal. The angel was already on the move alongside her, heart beating fast after watching the others disappear. He passed through the gate just behind Karin, shouting to the people they were leaving behind, [color=lightgoldenrodyellow]"stay safe until we get back!"[/color]

[hr]
Upon entering the portal, the Seekers began to accelerate. Above and below them were dark planes cast in red light that extended infinitely into the distance, but ahead in that distance lay a bright horizon that cleft the planes in two. It felt like falling headfirst down an immense pit, but sideways. In an instant the ordinary world was far behind, vanished so completely it might as well be a memory. A handful of seconds passed in this transient, liminal space, and then, with the anticlimactic suddenness of jolting awake from a bad dream, they arrived.

[center][url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rd39LU-nwhk&ab_channel=Asestir][img]https://i.imgur.com/7hPS0iw.png[/img][/url]
[i]Click for music[/i][/center]
They’d landed on a platform suspended in the air, in a strange and alien place. Everything was angular, oftentimes cubic, black or off-black stone like obsidian, but streaked with thin veins of gold, like splashes of a paint brush. In some places they were perfectly smooth, and in others the sheer faces of the glossy cliff-pillars bore irregularities. Outcroppings of crystal, dark at the base but blood-red toward the tips, protruded from the terrain around them in clusters, and like everything else they bore only straight edges and flat surfaces, never curved. The spot where everyone stood seemed to be at the end of an odd sort of sky-archipelago, an array of interconnected platforms and walls that went on a fair way. Blip-lines in the air like static, or undulated barcodes, could be found all over. Two unfathomably immense planes existed an incalculable distance away to either side, slanted diagonally, and at the end of the infinite corridor lay pure white light, although to one side, an [url=https://i.imgur.com/e7wPgzP.png]inverted black pyramid[/url] could be glimpsed far away.

For right now, though, their focus lay on Goldlewis. They could see their new friend receding into the distance, still in the clutches of some nebulous entity–although, strangely, what looked before like a shimmer seemed now just a touch denser. Its silhouette almost suggested a giant, floating torso, carrying Goldlewis with beefy, disembodied forearms. If the team meant to follow and rescue him, they would need to brave this bizarre crystalline dimension. A series of bridges and islands stood before them, confronting them with an elaborate traversal challenge of platforms that moved on their own, disappeared underfoot, as well as blockers that only disappeared when enough floating targets were struck, or pressure plates weighed down. Yet the Seekers were not alone here. Strange beings, [url=https://i.imgur.com/Gg0o7cR.png]humanoid but never human[/url] distorted like the copy of a copy of a copy, wandered the place, stiffly lumbering around to hit and occasionally -with the aid of strange copied firearms- take potshots at any intruders.

Midna, having floated down into the world that was simultaneously strange and familiar in just the worst mix of ways, would have simply flown after Goldlewis, but the first barrage of gunfire from the replicas dissuaded that notion. She would have pulled out a gun and shot back, had the realities of being in a different dimension interfered with the regular workings of her portals, an interference she did not have time to hash out. The same issue went for her summoned steeds. 

[color=Aquamarine]”Just you then. Don’t let me down”[/color] she told her interdimensional ax, which was ready to add the blood of another realm’s denizen to its blade. 

That said, it would be acting mostly as a backup. Instead the main way Midna helped them progress was via twilight volley bombs, the princess putting herself behind cover, and then charging and hurling the massive explosives at the gun wielding foes own, flushing those not simply destroyed out into the open for the others to deal with.

As for the platforming? Well, if they could deal with the shooters, then the princess could simply cheat and float on past most of the obstacles, whl her massive shadow hand could help hoist others along her own. Any of the more elaborate obstacles were handily dealt with by Pit, whose target shooting and flexible movement made short work of buttons and triggers that needed to be pulled to clear the path, especially to keep up with the keyblade wielder.

Once he’d burst through from the gate, Roxas wasn’t given much time to take in the surroundings before even more enemies made themselves known. But he did briefly spot Goldlewis in the distance and knew these things were in the way. Roxas just summoned both his weapons and broke into a run, [color=Gold]”Get. Out. Of. The. WAY!”[/color] with each word he delivered another strike or Dual Slash against the humanoids trying to stop them.

As for the platforming. For Roxas, that was the easy part. Flowmotion made crossing these obstacles pretty easy for him. He could use it to launch himself between platforms, slingshot himself around pillars, or even kick off airborne crystals. And all that built up momentum could also be put into his attacks to enhance their striking power and resulting damage.

This was Karin’s first time in another dimension, if one didn’t count the World of Light. But she didn’t let it be overwhelming, instead she focused on the task at hand. Reuniting with Goldlewis and then finding a way back to Midgar. Clearly this realm had no shortage of threats. Karin followed after her allies, using a combination of her agility and grappling hook to navigate the alien terrain. 

A particularly troublesome humanoid shooter was brought to her with her grapple hook and punched through, sending it flying away where it couldn’t bother her anymore. After that it was a matter of pulling herself to a location, leaping as far as she could, then pulling herself to her next.

[color=fff200]”Mister Goldlewis! Shout for us!”[/color] She shouted, trying to make her voice carry in this strange space. She didn’t want to lose track of their quarry.