::A door opens further down the hall, light chasing the darkness away. Greenback peers in.::
I knew this wasn’t going to be the exit. What kind of place would have an exit here, even if it is marked EXIT. Of course, all the doors are marked as exits and they never go anywhere.
::notices Sunspace, Daithi Lacha and Feydeau::
Hey you three. I didn’t know anyone came down here. Ah well. Enjoy yourselves. I gotta run.
::closes the door
Hey!!!
:: Sunspace and Daithi Lacha run towards the door that Greenback opened, Feydeau in tow. They reach it and pull it open. Light streams in. They rush through, only to stop short in surprise. ::
<snicker>…check it out, Kythereia…they think they’ve found a way out…<snrk!>.
Hit that switch over there…no, not that one, the one next to it. Yeah, that one. Oh, this is gonna be fuuuuunny…
:: Trees.
Sunspace, Daithi Lacha and Feydeau were looking at a forest of incredible trees. Hundreds of metres high, the trees dominated the far slope of the valley that the open door overlooked.
They looked back. The open door indeed had a sign EXIT on it, and they sould see the cold concrete room with its pool of water and twisting vines within. The vines were desperately straining towards the light.
They looked around. The door was halfway up a green grassy slope in a high mountain valley. Great forests dominated the valley, but off to the right, beyond the mouth of the valley, a distant plain was visible, extending to a pale horizon.
A railway line ran along the floor of the valley. A train station at the centre of a small village lay directly below the grassy slope. A barely-visible sign on the station read, “La Kutimejo”.
There was no-one in sight. ::
Let’s prop that door open.
:: **Sunspace[b[ reached down to grab a rock and wedge it in the open door. ::
Oh, hey, my light is working again. Must’ve been some sea water or olive oil from Mariah that got in there…
Look, down the passage and to the left - there’s another doorway. I can see light seeping in from around the lintel. Also, notice how the singing has stopped? Or has it… Odd.
Say, is Feydeau OK? He hasn’t said anything in a while. What’s the matter, bub? Squid gotchyer tongue?
[sub] :: change to traditional prose posting style instead of double-colon bracketing :: [/sub]
“Let’s sit Feydeau down on the doorsill. I don’t think ey’s been completely here for a while.”
Sunspace helps Feydeau to sit on the sill of the mountain dorway. He feels the dank air from the room, with its smell of brine and concrete, flowing around them and down the mountainside. He looks around some more.
The doorway is set in a rough rock wall that from the outside seems to have closed off a small cave. The adjacent hillside slopes backward from the door.
He listens. There are faint sounds from the village in the valley: a ringing bell, barking dogs, a shout and an animal cry.
Feydeau leans back against the doorframe and relaxes.
Sunspace sticks his head back in the room. To his left, hopeful tendrils from the first door has almost made it to the open mountain door. To his right, the pool of water is rippled by mountain breezes, and the other two doors are closed.
The room seems entirely too large to fit inside the mountain slope.
There is indeed light coming under the lintel of the third door, the one Greenback opened. Daithi Lacha has his hand on the knob. He opens the door and walks through it.
There is a distant announcement over the Initiation Complex’s PA system.
" Newbie alert. Newbie alert. Would Kythereia, twickster, and Sunspace please report to the Cephalopod Room.Would Kythereia, twickster, and Sunspace please report to the Cephalopod Room. Thank you. "
Sunspace carefully places a large rock across the sill of the mountain door, blocking it open.
With a longing look at the green valley, he grabs Feydeau and re-enters the room. He turns right, looks through the open door where Daithi Lacha went, and sees no-one.
He yells trough the doorway: “Anyone there?”
There is no response.
“Damn! I can’t wait.” The Masters of the Initiation Ceremony were notoriously capricius, and things were unpredictable enough, even without the inherent danger of the actual events.
Sunspace hesitates, then makes up his mind. He turns from the third door, and goes through the fourth door, up the stairs, through the other door and the room with the pool and hoist and vats, and returns to the Cephalopod Room.
Mariah is in her tank, tentacles moving restlessly. The others start to arrive.
Daithi looked through the doorway and saw nothing at first, just a vague light source in the near-distance. It flickered, cool and blue, from what seemed a thousand miles but turned out to only be around twenty feet from the doorway.
He approached, cautiously. The source appeared to be facing away from him, toward the dim recesses of what appeared to be a room without walls. The sound of dripping water mingled with the low moaning of a breeze, and something else - the lapping of waves?
He could see more clearly now: it was a box, sitting on a mound of dirt. The light streamed out of one side of the box, and he walked around to see what caused the glow. The box appeared to have one side with a rectangular opening set into it, and this window was covered with something perfectly clear and slightly curved at the edges. Vague flickering images appeared from behind the window, and Daithi thought he heard his name called. He stood directly before it, and abruptly became very tired. “I’ll just rest here for a moment, and then catch up with the others,” he thought. “Just a moment, and I’ll go.”
Hunkering down on his haunches, he studied the quickly-clarifying symbols and faces that seemed to blossom out of the light. They burned thoughts into his brain, and his eyelids slowly closed…
Oooh, Sunspace is calling, I gotta go… I’ll be back! smooches Hal Briston, runs out
:eek:
OoooOOOOO! I’m telling kitten! 
:o :o :o
How much grovelling do I need to do now?
<Flips switch, drops Official Evil Overload Cone of Silence over harmless>
An unspecified amount of time passes. In the nebulous room with the dirt mound, Daithi Lacha suddenly comes out of his trance in response to an unmistakable and very basic urge.
“Cripes! I need to pee…”
He gets up from his seat in front of the box.
“How long have I been here?” He looks down at himself. There is a definite layer of dust on the parts of his thighs and arms and shoulders that had faced upwards while he sat.
He looks around and moves stiffly towards the door, which is oddly difficult to see. He passes through into the room with the other doors and the pool of water. The door to the mountan valley is still open; it has been blocked open by a large rock. He goes outside to pee.
Afterwards, he looks around and breathes the clean mountain air. "Man, I’d like to bring the others here… "
“The others. Where are the others?”
He runs back into the room and looks around.
The pool of water is now quite a bit smaller. The steel chute from the trapdoor is still dark, but he can hear sounds of struggle coming down it. The vegetation from the first door has grown solid rootlike branches trough the mountain door and is now twining up the rock wall outside and leafing out. The third door that led to the room with the box has closed.
He movesover to the fourth door. The struggle is audible through it as well. A voice shouts, “Duck!”, followed by a crashing sound.
Daithi Lacha He opens the door to find a stairwell and runs up it…