Scene #8738: Sinnorot Aleph: The Ordeal of Black Vespers

Owner	Pose
Petra Soroka	A non-emergency summons from Lobotomy Corporation is rare. As potentially deadly as its daily doings are, it's typically only for Sephirah Meltdowns or particularly catastrophic breaches that Elite assistance is called for, given that if every Abnormality rampage was worth sending out distress calls for, the Elites would spend every day at the facility. When the distinction between 'apocalyptic' and 'routine' is so razor thin, it's hard to imagine what balances exactly along that boundary. Out through the Warpgate, then down the elevator to the massive main chamber of Central Command, ceiling soaring dozens of feet above, with white-gold pillars and chiseled decorations, draped with grand orange curtains. The floor bustles with activity, and tired-looking clerks in gold and pink suits direct you down the hallways, because for once, the sounds of battle aren't there to cue you in to where to go. A ways down, the first sign of damage is visible, a jagged scar carved through the golden wallpaper to expose raw concrete beneath, with a couple clerks in green suits leaning beside it, a roll of replacement wallpaper and glue sitting ignored while they chat. The damage gets worse as you get closer to where Petra is waiting; buzzsaw gouges on every surface, containment cell doors scraped in gleaming lines by what must have been thin metal spears. Petra is slouched against the wall beside a vending machine, opposite a wooden door that's been crushed inwards with the bottom half splintered away, like it was hit by a car. She's sipping an energy drink and tapping on her phone, wearing her typical work outfit of her grey EGO suit and trench coat, Pillar of Creation on her back, and black-gold collar around her neck. She straightens up off the wall at your approach, crumpling the can and trying to toss it into the trash can embedded into the wall. She misses. "Hey. Um." She stares at the can on the ground, mental preparation jarred until she wanders over to pick it up and finally dispose of it properly. "Yeah. So the deal is... we had a Schadenfreude breach, some people didn't look away fast enough, and it went on a bit of a rampage." She kicks some splintered wood aside to get to the door, asiding, 'Yeah, we'll be out of here soon,' to a clerk in blue with a broom, then tugs the half-broken door off the hinges and tosses it aside to gesture inside. "But when it slammed into the wall here, we found something weird." Inside the narrow closet, behind the debris soaked with water from broken pipes, is a pitch-dark entrance to something that stretches deeper into the walls than you can see, only revealed by the concrete in front of it being shattered. Petra picks her way through the debris and shines her phone flashlight down the hole, revealing absolutely nothing. "They were just going to seal it up, but... there's apparently no record that this tunnel exists at all. Angela doesn't know about them, the Manager doesn't know shit or won't say shit, and they're not on any of the maps of the facility. And then, even fucking weirder," She rustles in the pocket of her trench coat, pulling out a little yellow device with an antennae that starts beeping when she points it at the tunnel. "There's Enkephalin readings coming from it." "So, uh..." Petra looks back up at the Elites, leaning on her black spear with one hand, and the other vaguely gestures in a shrug with the Enkephalin detector. "We're going in. See what's up."
Solty Revant	Solty Revant is always a bit nervous when coming here. This place is...scary in ways she doesn't have a lot of exposure to. She takes in the scene then listens to Petra and follows after. She looks curiously at the device with the antennae, then hesitates. "Um...What Enkephalin?" she asks. When told they are going in to see what's up, she clenches her fists lightly and nods. "Right." The girl with green hair and big furry green ears instinctively moves to try and be in the front, since that's where she can protect everyone. And with her super hearing she might be able to detect anything moving around down there. She really doesn't look equipped for combat. Her outfit is unusual, she has no visible weapons or armor, and really doesn't have much of the demeanor of a trained fighter or experienced adventurer. "Will Angela or one of her representatives be coming with us?"
Angela	Rose has to get back to work eventually. Rose's eyes have turned red and green acidic fluid drips from those eyes periodically. She isn't wearing the MAgical Girl of Courage's EGO Gear anymore, she's back to wearing and wielding the Crimson Scar set--for those new to that set, the Crimson Scar set is a red and black outfit with bloody grey wrappings around the forearms and legs. A red hood is pulled up around Rose's head but her eyes and horrifyingly scarred mouth are easy to see, her mouth is but a set of large sharp teeth. With her is OHNO, a green haired woman with silver orbs floating around her--at the center of these orbs are a black heart with a bright blue outline. "Babadam, dam, daaaam." OHNO 'says' as she looks down The Hole. "Maybe this will be what finally kills me." Rose mutters. "Sure, we can do this job. Got WAW and ALEPH Gear with us." Tiphereth is overseeing via a tablet but Rose has it held at her side, Tiphereth's face facing inward rather than out toe the others. "Maybe we'll be lucky and run into Sweepers." Rose adds, looking over to Solty. "It's the energy we produce." Rose then pushes OHNO into The Hole.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	Madeleine finishes a stretch as she steps of the elevator, looking around the vast main hall of Lobotomy Corp with clear interest in her surrounds. She traces a finger along one of the gouges in the wall, wondering what kind of monster caused the damage. As Petra explains the situation, Madeleine nods along, content with pretending to know what a 'Schadenfreude breach' is. Rose catches Madeleine's attention, but the huntress tries not to show it, casting occasional glances at the scarred woman throughout Petra's makeshift briefing. "If the Manager doesn't know, and is letting you send Elites down there, I'm inclined to actually believe the fellow."
Dysnomia	"Enkephalin, huh?" Dysnomia wasn't on terrible terms with Angela, and she was bored, so she followed up on the transmission. Her eyes rested on Petra a moment longer, then to the tunnel. "Guess we'd better solve the mystery."
Petra Soroka	Petra swings the flashlight around, looking at the walls to either side, and the light gleams on something stuck on her boot. She makes a confused noise and points it down, revealing a glob of pale ghostly-green slime stuck to it, and shrieks. "Ghosts?!" Despite being right beside the others, her voice sounds distant and hollow, like she's shouting from a football field away. She flinches and kicks her foot to try to dislodge the goop, accidentally dropping her flashlight in the process, and everyone-- even those who don't need to rely on light to see-- sees their vision range start diminishing rapidly. At arm's length, vision blurs as if trying to squint at something on the horizon, sounds are echoingly distant; any distance between people who aren't already touching becomes impossible to cross, somehow without slowing movement at all. The Enkephalin meter in Petra's pocket starts beeping wildly, and Dysnomia can see-- the slime, leaking from the walls and on Petra's boot, has a psychic presence, for whatever reason.
Petra Soroka	"Maybe we'll be lucky and run into Sweepers." Petra scoffs and rolls her eyes. "Jesus, you're such a fucking downer. First thing out of the medbay and all you do is whine about going back." Petra kicks a chunk of concrete into the hole to open it up enough to hop in, and it thuds against the floor just a few feet down, followed by her. "If you want to die so bad, just let me know and I'll give you some tips. I could even do it for you if you ask nicely." "If the Manager doesn't know, and is letting you send Elites down there, I'm inclined to actually believe the fellow." "Yeah, probably. If it was just me then I'd wonder if he wanted me to get killed, since it's not really a secret that I want him dead too, but you're probably right, um." Petra squints at Madeleine in the faint light coming down from the hole, when she follows Petra into the tunnel. "Er-- who are you?" The tunnels are completely lightless, with seemingly zero infrastructure meant to make them tolerable to exist in. Concrete and squared-corners, with black metal pipes running along the walls, they're clearly man-made, but the floor is stained and filthy, soaked with ancient unidentifiable fluids and scattered with crumbled detritus like a cave. Petra frowns and holds out her phone flashlight, which continues to do next to nothing, and then puts it away to take out her real flashlight instead. The beam of light is pointed in either direction, its feeble illumination only revealing that the tunnels seem to go on forever. Petra sweeps it across the upper corners of the tunnels: no security cameras, unlike every other inch of the facility. "Um...What Enkephalin?" "So that's the thing." Petra says after a long delay of looking around, totally ignoring that Rose already answered Solty. "That's the energy we get out of Abnormalities. But there shouldn't be any of those outside of the cells, obviously." Petra pauses and then looks down at the pipes along the wall. "Oh, wait. Maybe these are the pipes that it's collected through? If that's all this is, that'll sure look stupid." Just to check, Petra points the Enkephalin reader at the pipes, and it doesn't react. Then down the hall into the darkness, and it beeps. "Cool." The light fades quickly behind them as the Elites move, swallowed up by the dark faster than it seems like it should. Only the Lobotomy Corporation agents are forced to rely on Petra's flashlight, but even to the others, the delve becomes sensorally unnerving soon enough. The temperature starts to drop, cold radiating from the pipes on the walls, inside which Solty is able to hear the constant flowing of some kind of fluid. Further down, she hears thick, viscous dripping, like a heavy 'plop' every minute or two, falling onto the concrete floor. It's after about fifteen minutes of walking or so, during which there's been no direction changes, no other entrances or exits, and no change of scenery at all, that Petra slows to a stop and shivers. "This sucks. There's literally nothing here; it's just gross and spooky. Where even are we, in the facility? We've been walking forever."
Solty Revant	"Oh, right." Solty says of the Enkephalin. She smiles at the others who arrives and offers an introduction and a handshake to each, ever the friendly robot. "Hello! I'm Solty Revant! Nice to meet you!" Solty's ears twitch at the sounds. Plumbing, maybe? The weird plopping dras her attention, and she hmms softly. She is about to mention it when Petra shrieks about ghosts and drops her flashlight. Solty reaches out to catch it, but...suddenly everything looks and sounds wrong and distant. She misses the flashlight and lets out a worried sound. "Wh-what's happening? How did everyone get so far away all of a sudden?!" she exclaims, quickly panicking. The poor android doesn't have the strongest of minds. "Are they really ghosts?!" she exclaims in fear, and picks up a large piece of cement block. "G-get away, ghosts!" she shouts as she throws the large block as hard as she can off into the darkness toward that plopping sound.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	"Name's Madeleine," the huntress says to Petra. "I believe we've spoken on the radio channels." As the group makes their way through the tunnels, Madeleine keeps her eyes mostly on the floor and walls, looking for any sort of trail or indication that something else might live down here. When the space between Madeleine and the rest of the party begins to stretch, she sighs and mutters something to herself, too quietly for her now-apparently-distant cohorts to hear. She closes her eyes and draws her spear from her back, carefully probing ahead of herself with its blunt end... if this is only a trick of perception, she reasons, and not a true change to the space around her, it may only extend to sight and sound but not touch.
Dysnomia	"Dysnomia." She said, first to Solty--they seemed the forgetful sort, and then to Madeleine. "Nobody special. Let's take care of this." The cave would feel almost homey, to Mia, if it weren't so eerily... "You're right. There's nothing. Shouldn't the direction at least have changed?" She mused. "What even is this place? Why seal it off? And why FORGET about it...?" After all, whatever this was, it had to have been something even Angela hadn't run into before. It set her on edge. (But then again, what didn't?) "Come to think of it. If it's Enkephalin. Doesn't that mean an Abnormality left it--?" She's interrupted as Petra stumbles upon the goo, her eyes widening as catches a whiff of a familiar Something. But her recognizing its signature for what it is doesn't protect her from its pressure. She's ripped from all the others, alone, like a galaxy watching the rest of the universe redshift past an impassable horizon. Her eyes lock onto the agent...On Rose, especially. You can't keep them from me. I'm everywhere. Spectral limbs of mist attempted to materialize before the distance grew too terrible, to try to link them together enough to bridge the impossible gap in the few moments before the gulf became unbridgable!
Angela	"Rose, don't pick fights." Tiphereth says. "We've invested into you so it'd be selfish for you to kick the bucket now." "...Yeah, sure, maybe." Rose follows OHNO in, OHNO of course gives Rose a dirty look and the two of them settle in, they take time looking around and then get walking. "It'll be real boring until it gets real excitin', pardners." Rose glances to Madeleine around the third or so glance but she quirks her head and says, "You're new, right? The Hunter. You probably've dealt with similar monsters around here. Fortunately unless we run into Abnormalities here, they can die. Otherwise..." "Shababadababadoowow," OHNO adds gravely. Tiphereth doesn't get a good look for a while but she does answer, "These tunnels move throughout to other branches. The City is far too large for us to patrol all the tunnels--it's odds that we won't find much but if we do find something it'll be something dangerous. Or even someone dangerous." Tiphereth explains. "If you find Sweepers we should probably make a run for it." Petra shrieks Ghosts but before Rose can snipe back at Petra with a quip like 'ghosts aren't real you goober', she notices that Petra sounds... f a r Away. She swears under her breath and draws her weapons despite there being nothing to really attack. OHNO and Rose weren't touching and they try to but can't quite manage it, and the gulf increases with every passing second. Tiphereth sees the goop eventually. "Fluid from the Well. Abno Goop." She murmurs. "OHNO, make a lot of noise." OHNO makes a lot of noise. She also uses actual words for the first time ever. "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKERS DON'T LEAVE ME FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCKIN' BEHIND!" There's no heat to it, she just likes to swear. Rose just reaches out towards those spectral limbs, figuring that's the best she can do.
Petra Soroka	"I believe we've spoken on the radio channels." Petra stares at Madeleine, and slowly nods, clearly not remembering at all. As she visibly tries to figure out when they would've talked, her gaze gradually slides off of Madeleine herself, staring past her, until she makes a long-belated noise of realization. "Oh! The huntress with the blog, that was going to hunt down Ishirou! Yeah. Cool meeting you." "These tunnels move throughout to other branches." Just before getting slimed and isolated, Petra hums at the tablet on Rose's hip, more willing to address it than the person carrying it. "Is that really what this is? I thought those were, like, lit up. And people used them. And Angela would know they existed. This is like...." Reacting instantly to her distorted senses, Dysnomia manages to grab on to Rose, the two of them alone in being adjacent while the others are made paradoxically distant. Once touching each other, each of their visual ranges snap out to include the others-- not that they see with each others' eyes, but that the impossible stretches of distance only seem to start where either of their bodies end, rather than just their own. Combined with the ethereal spread of Dysnomia's cloud, this gives the pair of them far more maneuverability than the rest. Madeleine probing discovers that this isn't exactly an illusion. The distances that need to be crossed are exactly as they appear, insurmountably far-- there's not a mental trick involved, but it's not just spatial bending either. The end of her spear blurs when she opens her eyes to look at it, like it's exponentially farther away than it is. Petra, freaking out about the slime on her boot, mutters a long string of nervous swears to herself that all sound like they're bouncing off the walls from somewhere far away, overlapping with themselves. She yanks off her boot and instinctively tosses it, causing the goop to slide off harmlessly and the boot to land on the ground. She reaches out to grab it again, to shake it off and put it back on so she isn't standing lopsided with a sock on the ground, but the distance between it and her stretches out, her fingers never quite reaching it. "Fucker! My boot!" "Fluid from the Well. Abno Goop." "Huh? Like-- Carmen? What the hell would that be doing down-- up-- here?" Petra looks down at the slime that came off of her shoe, then up at the ceiling to figure out where it came from. She reaches for her flashlight, fails to come in contact with it, and frustratedly throws Pillar of Creation at it instead-- and the moment the spear leaves her hands, it travels easily to smack the flashlight, sending it spinning and briefly illuminating the thin trails of goop coming out of the corners of the walls-- and the momentary flash of golden runes faintly glimmering within the concrete. And the ceiling, even when light hits it, isn't illuminated at all. "Wait, but if that's just goop from the Well, then what's causing--"
Petra Soroka	Dropping down from the inky black ceiling as if they were previously part of it, a cluster of black, roughly-spherical smudges with a twinkling cluster of glowing points like eyes starts to hover over the group. Swirling around in circles above them, the smudges clearly aren't affected by the same distance-stretching phenomenon-- so it's a pretty easy guess that they're causing it, and when Solty grabs a chunk of concrete and hurls it, it flies right through the air, slamming into one of the smudges, and briefly allowing her to move totally freely. Petra twists around towards them with her Enkephalin reader out, and distantly and faintly, she shouts, "That's where it's coming from, but-- these aren't Abnormalities! There's no way an Abnormality would be down here! So... an Ordeal?" Recollecting themselves, the inkblot monsters bob around in a circle above the Elites, and with each rotation, the length of the hallway and distance between each of the Elites swells. Light dims, movement becomes less effective in traveling despite not being slower at all, and even the ceiling seems to stretch away; ten, twenty, thirty feet above.
Solty Revant	With the distortion cleared for a moment, and a more obvious target to go after, Solty uses a power she doesn't often use. With a 'hyaaaah!' a yellow-orange glow surrounds her, flowing off of her in waves like the shimmer of light through water and she takes to the sky. And then...time stops. At least from her point of view. She Overclocks herself and moves with speed that makes it seem as though she teleported. In an instant she is no longer where she was standing and instead is among those clusters. She can't maintain the timestop while attacking, but at least one punch is done during the timestop. After that, she is flying in the opposite direction of those spinning globs, trying to catch them and deliver a powerful punch to each one. Her punches are strong already, but now she is augmenting them with her kinetic force generating powers. Her fists seem to blur as if vibrating very fast, adding a bit of extra power to her attacks. "I don't know what you are, but you are trying to hurt my allies and I can't allow that!" Of course, all this reality stretching is starting to leave cracks along her body, revealing a metallic sheen and some sparks of electricity along her joints.
Dysnomia	When her grasp found purchase, she wasted no time. She surrounded Rose, coiling her in mist and smoke that clung close, lest they release and lose her again to the swelling abyss. Greedy, desperate tendrils coiled around her. I won't lose you. I won't! The mist of her body unfurled around the pair, in the impossible gulf of space, like a blossoming nebula stretching across light years in violets and teals. She stands with her back to Rose's, the acrid scent of ozone filling the air, as the clouds spun and tightened and tightened in her hand into an ever smaller line, spiraling gas spun into plasma, like a memory solar flare handspun from starstuff, clutched in her hands like a solid thing. "Abnormality, Ordeal...It won't matter." Her mouth twisted into a snarl, looking at the things that were trying to rip them apart. But, Dysnomia was used to plotting strikes across interplanetary distances. This was nothing. Like a lance, she threw it through the air, dissipating as it left the cloud, changing from a line of burning light to a great arcing cascade of plasma, painting the inkblots in fiery radiance.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	Madeleine returns her spear to her back and unstraps her bow. She waits until Solty is out of the way - coinciding with the moment Dysnomia's attack illuminates the foe - and unleashes a flurry of shots, one arrow directed at each of the orbs. All she needs is a moment of freedom from the space-warping effects, and she'll be able to close the distance...
Angela	"...But they look quite similar..." Tiphereth murmurs. Petra's got a point, though she's not quite sure how much Angela would know about the parts of the facility that are--technically--outside of it. "Rose, show me around." Rose does so with a few gestures from the pad. No lights, just like Petra said. "How could this have been built--or even dug, without us noticing? I know not even what in the Outskirts could do something like--If this is from the Well, our own minds could be making this real..." Her words trail off into murmuring and theorizing. ''Huh? Like-- Carmen?'' "I don't know either." Tiphereth admits. "I hardly ever have to deal with Extraction.--wait! those runes--they look like the runes in Binah's chamber. What is going on?" ''But--these aren't Abnormalities!'' "It has to be an Ordeal." Tiphereth agrees. "Not all monsters are Abnormalities. Some are even stranger." She shudders at some memory you're better off not knowing. Rose and OHNO are trying to run towards each other but their weapons are useless like this unless-- The inkblot monsters, OHNO thinks, and sending her the little orbs foating around them to fire intense sonic pulses towards the goop, trying to splatter them with gaping sonic force. Rose shouts, "If we don't deal with these quick, we won't be ABLE to meet back up! We could be lost down here forever and just STARVE." She feels a presence around her and she grabs onto Dysnomia if she can, holding on tight because she's not sure what else she can do.
Petra Soroka	Taking advantage of the moments where distance rubberbands back into traversability, Solty stretches out time to land punch after punch on the floating Ordeals, shuddering the warped space to allow for unreliable mobility for the others. Once actually hit, the psychic splotches aren't that durable at all-- Solty slams one down to rocket into a wall at the same time as the wall springs close to her again, splattering it like staticky ink against the concrete. Once flattened, a few seconds later, a pale-green gas starts rising up out of where it was, while the black vanishes. "Well, that's proof it's an Ordeal..." Petra says, looking up at the splotch after using one of the space-impact shudders to grab Pillar of Creation back. Looking at Madeleine and assuming, correctly, that she's lost, Petra adds a bit of distantly audible context before hurling her spear through the air to skewer another one of the orbs. "They're like Abnormalities-- wait, do you know what Abormalities are?-- but, um, they're not." Maybe she's not that helpful, actually. "We don't really know what they are, other than that they come from the Collective Unconscious, we can't predict them, and unlike Abnormalities, they just-- disappear. There's documents on known ones, but-- not this." Dysnomia's solar flare lances through most of the ones that are left, the psychically-produced darkness flickering away simultaneously with the flash of blindingly-bright light. The harsh illumination scours away the fuzzy shadows around the core of the floating monsters, which is apparently: a perfectly smooth black sphere, even without the starshining eyes, that shatters rather than splatters when shot through my Madeleine's arrows. "If this is from the Well, our own minds could be making this real..." "That--" Petra stops to consider it, laying a hand on one of the black iron pipes on the wall as if doing so will verify anything about it. When she does, a hissing, irritating itch washes over everyone, burrowing like tiny spiders biting under skin, or a million glass splinters shifting within contractions of muscle. It fades after a moment, and Petra shakes her head, confused. "I don't think that could be it. I mean-- nothing can read my mind, or-- well, Carmen, once, but...." While Petra is musing, and while her spear falls down through the air for minutes after she threw it before she can catch it again, despite ostensibly only being a dozen meters above her head, OHNO's sonic pulses blast out and shatter the last of the shadowy orbs. They're completely outclassed by the Aleph gear, which helps place them on the lower end of the spectrum of Ordeals. Petra catches Pillar of Creation, pauses for a second looking further down the hallway, then pulls out her Enkephalin detector. It starts beeping wildly again, and she nods, once slowly, and then a second time urgently. "Okay. We should not go any further, we should probably run." The pitch darkness, far beyond Petra's faint flashlight, deepens further, crawling down the tunnel walls towards the Elites like a massive, fluid tide. The abyss further down the tunnel yawns infinitely dark, an unfathomably formless, empty space, with a lurching appeal that isn't quite strong enough to override the instinctive, screaming desire to run. "We should definitely run!" Petra, forgetting her boot on the ground, turns around and starts sprinting down the tunnel towards the breach they all entered from. While the Elites run, pools of blackness open up on the walls, ceiling, below their feet, disorienting them and threatening to swallow them if they misstep.
Madeleine Cadrasteia	Madeleine slings her backpack over her shoulder as she hustles after Petra, rummaging around for something. After a moment she finds it - a handheld grapple-gun fitted with a wicked metal spike. Taking aim past the other Elites and Agents, she fires. With a 'fwizzz' the spike soars through the air, a fine durable cable unspooling behind it, until it at last finds purchase in a far wall. And not a moment too soon: as the cable goes taut and begins to drag Madeleine forward, the pools of inky darkness behind her are just lapping at her heels. Bouncing along the concrete floor is not the most dignified way to travel, but it does the trick as the huntress speeds ahead of the encroaching shadows.
Solty Revant	That solar flare hits very close to Solty, and she yelps in surprise and backs away before The darkness starts closing in and flowing toward them, and Solty takes off for the exit. Flying gives her an advantage here, but she isn't about to just run and leave everyone behind. Unfortunately, she doesn't have a lot of powers other than smashing things and moving quickly. So, she flies quickly, smashing through anything in her way that isn't a person and creating a clear path to the outside! "Hurry guys! Follow me!" she calls out, and even picks up those who might need a quick ride out. "I'm sorry, I can't do much more than this!"
Angela	''I don't think that could be it. I mean--nothing can read my mind'' ''well, Carmen, once, but...'' "I can only speculate. We didn't come nearly prepared enough to investigate this properly. WE don't even have Sal her e." Tiphereth admits. "..." It's hard to keep caring knowing how nothing ever changes but... "A new Ordeal will be good to pass over notes from, particularly if it's one Angela of all people hasn't experienced. ... Wait, could it be...because of the Multiverse?" Tiphereth's eyes widen but she can't speculate any further even if it's hard to imagine a brand new Ordeal--none of this matters if the team can't get back alive. ... Well actually they can all die, Tiphereth isn't down here with you, but she isn't so far gone in her malaise just yet that she's willing to kill everyone. OHNO actually removes her earbuds, "Mmhm mmhm." OHNO agrees. "Bad vibes--" The tunnel expands, temptingly-- --but not temptingly enough. OHNO dashes ahead like one who has learned to be faster than her teammates. Rose is the slowest, no doubt thinking about throwing herself down there before she can be changed even more. Be brave, she tells herself quietly before she turns and--almost but not quite paradoxically--and hightails it after OHNO and the others.