T - Xenon, Jenn, Kitty, Soli

[Nathalia]

Ah, dear, dear, dear.
What a mess of people we have trapped here.
It would seem that Nova, Soph, Felaria, Karkat, and a strange Josiggy mix Opossum named "Ted"; have all awoken trapped in odd adjacent cells in a smelly, mildew-damp building.
After all awoke, fought bitterly with one another, and finally negotiated a way out, they found to their horror, that strange vines and plant matter have taken to growing in corpses, on ceilings, and everywhere else it can manage to jam its roots into!
Oddly semi-sentient in its movements, it does, at the very least, appear violent...judging by how many times it attempted to throttle Felaria and Nova...good thing Nova can turn people into a fish...and that he has a very thick neck...

Though he seems tortured to insanity by his need to find stairs that lead "up", Nova did at least, manage to burn half the building down in his dim-witted struggles...
Or maybe that's a bad thing...
Regardless, Ted seems to have passed out from smoke inhalation while the group was debating how best to maneuver about the room they are now trapped in.
Fire raging behind them, stairs leading down before them, a dank, musty room with very little in it overall...how will they progress?
The room contains a small table with three tightly locked drawers that their key doesn't fit. Also, there's an odd, half-shredded tapestry hanging from the wall that seems to depict a tall, handsome-looking Human with a thick, gold mustache holding some potted plants...anything else you could have seen in it appears to have been destroyed.

Good luck...

[Kitty]

The flame hued canine paced the room, sniffing here and there before sneezing due to the smoke. His sneeze, thanks to the blow to his face from Felaria, dotted one of the walls with a spray of blood, some fresher, some partially dried. Hopefully his nose would work a little better after this.

He needed those stairs, the voices kept telling him they were good and he needed to find them, but he was reluctant to travel further down. He needed stairs that went up, but maybe those went down? Bah, decisions.

He paused in his oacing by the tapestry, ears perking for a moment. There had been trapped doors under dead bodies.... so why not a secret staircase behind a tapestry? It looked a little damaged, but his tail swayed in a cheerful manner as he stood up on his one good hind leg, front paws and on the wall, and stuck his nose under the tapestry. Sniff, sniff, sniff....

Sophrosyne was starting to get more then a little done with being held by the scruff like a naughty bander. Her tail started to dance a bit in aggitation and her ears slid back.... but she tried not to convey too much of that anger in her tone by lacing it with some good old diamond charm.

Can I get down .... please?

Hopefully the magic word worked, but she wasn't exactly going to hold her breath. Or maybe she should, by the looks of Ted and the unhappy way her head and stomache were revolting.

[carcinoGeneticist]

Awww, fuck. This was just great. One of the two sane members of their rag-tag little group had been reduced to a useless heap of unconscious man-fat. He had really begun to enjoy the man's company, and the fact that he could be relied on when the Court-brat and the Fire-asshole both got too fucking stupid for words.

The goat-lizard leered over the unconscious possum and experimentally poked his side, the corner of his lip turning up. "Fuck. Ted. Wake up." He poked a little harder. How were they going to move him? Felaria was a Club, true, but he really would rather she save her strength for fighting. The fire-dog was also a Club, but Karkat trusted him about as much as a sane man would trust any raving psychopath. Which wasn't much. His tail twitched, an outward sign of the anxiety he was currently feeling.

Had to work some of that out somehow.

"God-FUCKING-damnit!" he hissed, rounding on the table and kicking rather passionately at it with a hooved foot (18). It wasn't going to improve the situation, but it might at least make him feel better. And it might result in gain of more monetary bonuses. Either way, Karkat needed something to de-stress on that wasn't the canine's stupid ugly horrible face. Or the whinging little brat.

[The Jenn]

Shit. SHIT. Shit fuck shit damn. Felaria stared down at the prone body that had only recently slumped to the floor, her face somewhere between surprise and a grimace. Pretty well into both, actually.

Fucking hell but this was not what they needed. The Corvie seemed to be losing what little cool he had to begin with and she just didn't want to deal with this bullshit anymore.

At least the kid was being less obnoxious and more mutinously cute now. "Fuck. Yeah, fine, y'little snot. Git." She let go of the Selkie mix's fluff and flung her hands out, as though 'done' with anything to do with the girl.

"Kitty, when you's done with your little pissy fit on over there, I want you to get that fuckin' flaming moron to help me drag Ted. We ain't leaving him nowhere 'til I find someplace less likely t'burn."

[carcinoGeneticist]

Kicking the table did make Karkat feel a little better, as it turned out. He let out a small breath, closing his eyes for a moment. They had to keep it together. Well. He and Miss Bitch did, since the only other person with brains in the group was currently still passed the fuck out. Leaving him behind wasn't an option. He gave Felaria a drawn out stare, then nodded slightly. "If we can get him to a smoke-free area for a few minutes, he should recover." In theory, at any rate.

He walked over to Nova, ears pinning back with distaste. The stupid asshole owed him. Karkat had saved his fucking skin, and ruined his favorite shirt. But no one seemed to give a shit about any of that. It was quite irritating.

But what about this wasn't? He stood next to the pacing canine, resting his hands on his hips and narrowing his eyes.

"Alright, dude. Here's the deal. We'll help you find your stairs if you'll help us carry Ted. Seem reasonable? Otherwise, we're not going to be leaving for a while."

[Nathalia]

The tapestry lifted to reveal nothing but crumbling stone wall...wait...crumbling?
It smells damp beneath it...maybe it's worth your time to kick in, maybe not. Those stairs that lead down might be of use though.
Still, it's getting hotter in there and an eerie whining sound is now emanating from behind them.
A multitude of collected sounds, all rising together in pitch and mass...
The smoke is getting thicker and Soph is now feeling herself begin to choke on the smoke as it infiltrates her tiny lungs.

[Nathalia]

Maeve awoke with a start as she felt a blast of heat hit her face!
Good thing she's still all dolled up as a Card, seeing as all of the echoing voices nearby certainly sound big enough to be a batch of them.
What's she doing here? Where is here?!
Small and cramped, it almost looks as though she's been shoved into a wa-
Oh, God. Say it isn't that bad.
Please say she hasn't been crammed inside of an old dumbwaiter in a wall...

It's a pity when you're right sometimes.
It feels as though the heat from above her, just by a few feet is becoming stronger, and she can see a soft, faint glow through some cracks in the dumbwaiter shaft.
Maybe she should yell for help?

[Dark]

Perhaps she had grown careless. She had become much more bold about traipsing through heavily Card-populated areas once she had ensured the effectiveness of her disguise. Perhaps too bold; someone might have seen through her guise (though as far as she could tell it was still intact). Even if that were the case, it didn't explain her current location.

Maeve tried desperately to control her breathing, but it was--stressful--being jammed in such a confining space. She didn't like the dark, though she couldn't quite remember why.

She focused on the heat and the muffled voices. Cards, most likely. Her captors?

She couldn't quite recall what had happened, but she could think of no logical reason for her to have been stuffed in a dumbwaiter. It was not conducive to--anything.

Maeve considered her limited options. The growing heat made up her mind.

"Is...anyone out there?" she called, "I'm trapped in here!"

[Kitty]

The crumbly state of the wall was kind of intriguing, the sort that was right up his alley actually. His ears twitched and he paused to give Karkat a mildly posessed looking stare before blinking and nodding slowly.

Give me one second and I'll be right there.

He'd said the right hting, they'd help him find his stairs if he helped drag Ted to safety. Maybe having to be dragged by two Clubs might make the possum consider a diet? Probably not, but hey.

The canine's attention shifted back to the wall, he swore he heard a new voice and that that voice had been behind a wall.... this one maybe? He fixed his ears back, danced back on one hind leg, which was quite the feat actually, and launched his scaled front legs at the crumbliest part of the wall .... his club strength still active. [13]

_____

Sophrosyne was thankful to be on her own paws again, but that's when things really started to get to her.... and not just the smoke either. Logic [20] told her to creep away from the fire ad smoke, as far as possible, and stay as low as she could. Her belly fur swept the ground as she made her way to the farthest door and flopped down, trying to stick her little nose underneathe it. Hopefully she'd be greeted by some fresh air from a non flaming room, hopefully. If not, well, she was right on the edge of of throwing a hissy fit... or passing out ... whichever came first.

[Nathalia]

Nova breaks through the wall easily and can see the hunched form of a...Card, it seems, about 25 feet down, in a broken dumbwaiter.
Careful though, pulling on the rope will show that it could easily break...dropping the poor thing to her quite possible death.
We wouldn't want that.
Work with your group mates, maybe you can come up with a way to help the poor thing.