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"Oh, right," answered Europa, meekly, withdrawing the screwdriver. She hadn't been able to get it to do much of anything yet, maybe the movies had lied to her. (This was probably the case.)

"It was, um..."

This required a bit of thought. She frowned at her fingertips, but resisted the urge to lick them again. "Jam," she said. "But it tasted like sadness, I think."

She paused and looked over at Tate. "Is it possible to taste sadness?" she asked quizzically. It was probably a dumb question - reason said you couldn't taste an emotion. Europa dropped to her hands and knees and peered under the door, trying to see if there was anything visible on the other side.

Europa pulled away from the door with a shriek, rubbing her eyes furiously as she scooted across the floor. She was getting assaulted by this room from all corners! What had she been hit with now?

She blinked at her gloves. Already stained red with jam, they were now also covered in bright blue-green ink, and although she couldn't see it, her face was stained with a peacock-colored bandit's mask.

The door had squirted ink at her.

Wait a minute.

Doors didn't squirt ink. Even if there were some kind of ridiculous high tech security in place, doors didn't squirt ink. There had to be someone else on the other side of the door, and that meant that there was someone who could open it from the other side. Maybe.

Europa set the screwdriver aside, got to her feet, and gave the knocker a few more slams. "Hello?" she called. When this proved ineffective, she set about pounding her fists on the door. "Please open up! Do you know where we are? We just want to talk to you-"

She was past the point of feeling silly about this. Silly had been the doorknob made of jam. This was just ridiculous.

"Please! Open! The! Door!"

She stopped pounding and waited to see if this yielded any sort of response.

The terrorist's shriek set Tate away from the window; the brunette practically threw herself, in fact, and she hopped hurriedly on one booted foot to catch herself. She was expecting to see the sailor scout eyeless, possibly bleeding to death, not... blue. In the face. Her composure held for a good ten seconds and then she started to laugh as the newly colorful senshi banged on the door. Of course it wouldn't work; if someone had been there, they would have opened it the first time the blue-haired scout had knocked. So Tate let her bang on the door and attempted to chill out.

When this was accomplished, she unwrapped her arms from around her torso and, still grinning, pulled the doorknob out of her pocket. "Give me that screwdriver," she said, examining the brass device. Presumably there was a knob on the other side; if it hadn't fallen off, the doorknob should reattach just fine.

Why hadn't she thought of this sooner? Tate chalked it up to the weirdness of the situation, took the screwdriver and set about attempting to reattach the knob to the door. In a chirpy, cheerful tone, she told the sailor scout, "I like your mask." Her mood only dipped slightly when her attempt to reattach the doorknob didn't work; she sat back on her heels, staring into the keyhole. She could still feel the draft--it went somewhere, didn't it? Tate tapped her fingers against the brass, thinking.

"Pretty bad," said Tate, still grinning. She outlined the ink's spread on her own face, with her (luckily) still-clean hands. "Why don't you take off the gloves or something, you're only going to--" The sailor scout was going for the jam doorknob again, and Tate's eyebrows were inching towards her hairline. Crying was not going to help anything, but if she wanted to be stupid, well, that was the scout's choice. Then the sailor scout explained, and Tate perked up again. "Be careful with that!"

Then, as she stood up, she considered: the doorknob meant to be on this door hadn't worked. That meant that the chances of this 'jam' doorknob working at all were slim to none--but then, so far she had woken up on a pile of shoes, seen a doorknob made of something that looked like jam in the first place, and then an ink-spitting door. Things were not exactly playing by normal rules here.

For a moment, Europa looked surprised that her solution had worked so far. The fact that this sort of twisted logic worked where nothing else had caught her momentarily off-guard, but then the full ramifications of what had just happened caught up to her. So far, it was working!

"It came off!" she exclaimed exuberantly and rushed over to Tate, her prize cradled securely in both hands. "Try this," she instructed the other girl, holding the jam doorknob out to her. Noticing her hesitance, though, she added, "I think it only makes you cry if you actually taste it."

She was pretty sure that was how it worked, at least. And if it didn't open the door then they'd be right back where they'd started and she'd have gotten all excited for nothing.

She gestured with the doorknob again. "If you won't put it on, I will."

Getting things done right always came down to doing them yourself. Nine times out of ten, at least. (This was most likely an exaggeration.)

It would really, really suck for Europa is the doorknob didn't work.

There was a liquid schlup! noise as the jam doorknob twisted into place. The door clicked invitingly. The keyhole opened, just like a mouth, and suddenly it recited:

"Like needs like to be resolved.
What was the meaning of the puzzle you solved?"

It waited.

Tate looked uncertainly back. Well, not so much uncertainly as expectantly; Reiter had figured out the puzzle in the first place, something that the brunette was definitely feeling a little resentful of. Why should it fall to Tate to explain why the scout had decided to put the jam doorknob in the jammed--

Wait.

The riddle was that they'd used like to solve like, wasn't it? Something like that, Tate hadn't really applied herself recently in any of her critical thinking exercises. "The door's jammed. The doorknob is made of jam," said Tate. "You needed a jam doorknob to open a jammed door?"