Ian opened his eyes and gasped, jerking to alertness like he had been awakened by a hypnic jerk. It was dark here and his eyes had not yet adjusted. It had been light enough before--

Before what? Where had he been before?

After struggling a moment to remember, the red-haired boy shrugged it off. It would come back to him, hopefully, and for now, it looked like he had other problems on his hands. The dark, for starters. He could hear something like dripping water, too, but it echoed around him, and he could not pinpoint the source of the sound. Really, though, it seemed prudent to worry first and foremost about finding out where he was and how to get out. This place, where ever it was, did not seem right (and certainly did not smell that way).

He was seated on uncomfortable stones, which were slightly damp and slick when he put his palms against them to try to stand up. They slipped under him slightly, but he did not have far to fall back down onto his bottom, fortunately. Ian made a face and wiped the heel of his hand on his pants, then tried again, this time with more success. Then he scrubbed off his hand on his clothing again and reached up to fix his glasses, and realized that he lacked them.

Frowning, he crouched and started to feel around in the dark for the narrow-lensed pair of glasses. Ian needed them for distance, and even then, his sight was not really all that bad, but still, losing them would suck. It was harder to read the blackboard in class and so forth, but he was hardly blind.

The red-haired boy made a face as his fingers poked blindly through dust and moss and other decidedly icky things that spoke of the room's disuse for a long period of time. Then his fingers encountered a corner, going upwards - so there was a wall there, at least. That was a start. He could follow that to try to find a way out. But first, if he could locate them, glasses....

Ian's fingers met something else, which he retrieved to examine with fingertips on both hands. His eyes were starting to adjust to the dim light finally, and he could see that the object was not his glasses. It was smooth and looked to be maybe a light color, with sort of an organic feel to it, with little grooves like grain to it like maybe wood or--

"Bone," he said aloud, grimacing and dropping the thing as though it had burned him. The thing pinked to the ground lightly, the sound also echoing along with the boy's voice.

A moment later, he caught a spot of light glinting off of something, and noted with relief his glasses. Ian picked them up and lifted them to look through the lenses in order to check for dirt ... and realized that it was still too dark to see if there was really anything on the glass or not. With a small shrug, he put them on, and then put his left hand on the wall and stood.

He knew a good tactic for mazes and such was to always follow one wall. Or, it might not be the fastest tactic (there was some way to figure out the algorithm's efficiency, but really, that could wait), but it worked most of the time, Ian knew. With the nearest wall to his left side, he could see a torch up ahead anyway, so this seemed like a good direction to start with. The torch was maybe ten or fifteen feet ahead of him, and the light looked feeble with all the surrounding darkness, but with any luck, the boy would be able to reach it to take the light from its wall sconce to take with him.

Bones crunched under his sneaker as he took a first step in that direction, and Ian winced slightly. Light was definitely a good first thing to get.