[Spruce]

I watched in horror as my teammate's attacks failed to have any sort of impact on the apparently super-powered absol, who quickly jumped and ran between my teammates, possibly even attacking a few of them. Unfortunately, she noticed that I was still up, and an evil grin spread across her face, with her saying "Well, well... seems that I've underestimated you, Spruce... but not much." Knowing that my 'cover' was blown, I slowly and clumsily got back up. I couldn't even stand correctly, and to the uneducated, it looked as though I've had too many X-eye seeds with how much my body was swaying back and forth. Desia then took this opportunity to slash at me using some sort of weird, shadowy energy, or, perhaps she missed? Somehow, by some miracle, I took no damage from the move. Sure, I coughed up a bit of blood from Desia's previous attack, but this one didn't seem to hurt at all. Desia seemed just as confused as I was, as all she reacted with "...Huh? D-did I somehow... miss? Gah, Quartzil! Get your lazy tail in here and attack this flea!" This was followed immediately with "Yes, ma'am." and an attack from the side. The attack seemed to simply consist of Quartzil, who turned out to be a haxorus charging towards me whilst emanating that shadowy aura, meaning that it was probably similar to Desia's attack. As intimidating as it was, the attack didn't to a dang thing to me... somehow. "Uh... miss Desia? I think we've got one of those, er, evasive pokemon." Quartzil reacted to his attack utterly failing. I then noticed something, where those two attacks hit, my body seemed to completely lose its coloration, reverting to a grey color, meaning that I now had a grey blot on my left side, and a grey slashmark (though, non-damaging) on the front. "Hm... Quartzil, is it possible that this freak isn't effected by our shadowy attacks?" Desia then asked her assistant, who nodded. The two then both attacked, one with dragon rush, and the other with psycho cut... which was more than enough to knock me out. They then started to focus on the rest of my team, no longer needing to pay me any heed. Desia started with M, an evil look came to her eye as she announced "You're next." to him, and a shadow-enhanced slash was thrown in some sort of effort to get him to stop mocking her, while Quartzil focused on Celes, using a dragon rush on her.

---
[Anthony]

"Are you sure we can't wait? I'm kinda tired from that fight... fine, I'll see if I can pull through." I said to my team once they decided on continuing onwards. Normally, I'd be all for diving head-first into danger, but, well, I was almost out of energy already. Hex then left for a while, leaving me with the weird dinosaur, the seahorse, and the jelly-thing for a little bit. None of them were very chatty during the time that she was gone, but when she came back, she came with some bad news... apparently, things were so bad up ahead that we had to use the shadows to get around. [i]Wait... I'm no good at sneaking around! Ugh... well, this is going to turn out well.[/i] I think as I try to look for any kind of shadow that I could hide in. Unfortunately, there weren't any in our immediate area, with the crystals' light erasing most, if not all, of them. I was certain that this mission's reward would be worth all of this hassle, and, with enough searching, I did eventually find a shadow, though, it wasn't all that large, and would probably only fit one of us. I took my place there, and simply hoped that the others would find their own shadows to hide in. I then tried to head onwards without detection, moving slowly and carefully and occasionally moving on the walls or ceiling to evade the eyes of our enemies. I ended up passing by a group of mawile, geodude, and even a gible as I did this, thankful that none of them could attack me while I was on the ceiling... given that they were already alerted to my presence... oops.