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Hey. Wake up.

She was lying on her back, sprawled on a rug that seemed to be half polar bear and half zebra, perhaps with some Siberian tiger stitched in for good measure. Her right foot was elevated, propped precariously on a stack of dusty old books that threatened to fall at any moment, and as Europa sat up, they did just this.

Wait. Hadn't she just been...? She rubbed her eyes and kicked her feet free of the jumble, then looked up at the other girl. Tate? What was Tate doing here?

She bit her tongue for long enough to recall that the other girl wouldn't have recognized her - she was, after all, still in uniform. However, this did leave the question of what she was doing here in the first place. Europa got to her feet.

"Well," she said, "this is kind of weird."

I'll take obvious statements for five-hundred, Alex.

Tate looked at the other girl. Well, peachy keen, she was in a room with a terrorist. Not a problem! She also had six doors to leave from. Maybe if she kept wandering, she'd find one of the more palatable terrorists.

You know, maybe Wolframite. He was an acceptable terrorist.

She abandoned the silverware to reach for the nearest door, only to find that firstly, it wasn't a door. It was just painted on. And secondly, it was just painted on. What the ********? It also brought her attention to her hand. Last time she'd seen her hands, they were bare. As in, not covered in white cloth. They were wristlet gloves, leading into a familiar emerald-green cuff. Her spencer jacket? Giselle had made it for her, she remembered, she had said that a general had to look, well, like a General...

Her moment of reflection, however, was interrupted when something clattered to the floor. She stared at it for a moment, before proceeding over to the fallen doorknob, picking it up and rolling it between her hands. "Hey, Captain Obvious," said Tate; she looked into the hole in the door where the knob had been. Palming the brass, she pressed her hand against the panelling and shoved. "Any idea where we are?"

Nothing happened. There was nobody on the other side -- or if there was, they weren't answering the call. Looking through the small hole where the doorknob had been fitted, there was a draft on the other side that whispered against your face.

That meant space, which meant the door lead somewhere. But there was no way of opening it, since the shoving hadn't worked.

"Right," nodded Europa, and left Tate to go investigate the nearer of the two doors. It opened easily, but her initial hopefulness was dispelled when she saw what it opened onto.

"It's a brick wall," she said, lamely, and felt it, just to be sure. Yes, definitely brick. She shut the door and skirted around Tate to check the other. After a good minute or two of tugging and twisting and pushing, she concluded that this door was also sealed shut.

"Not this one, either," she sighed, and turned to scan the room. One door was set high into the wall, too high to reach right now - it had to be at least ten feet off the ground! Who put a door ten feet off the ground? - but there was one at the far end that they hadn't tried yet.

Europa jogged to the other side of the room, finding it more difficult than it really out to have been in her senshi form, and stopped in front of the untried door. It was rather unassuming (all the doors were, apparently), and would have been utterly unremarkable if not for the fact that the doorknob appeared to be made of some unusual, gelatinous substance.

She gave it a tentative poke, and the doorknob jiggled. The finger of her glove came away wet and sticky, and despite having been warned against this very thing in chemistry honors for all of sophomore year, Europa put her finger in her mouth.

It tasted... salty? No, more than that... how did it taste?

Ugh. Nothing of use. Just a bunch of random s**t. A broken child's mirror--thank god it was broken, all the useful bits dumped out--one of the little plastic coffins Risk characters came in. It was the black characters, with what seemed to be a grenadier and a member of the cavalry clattering around. "Lame." She tucked the doorknob into her pocket.

"You look ridiculous," she said to the sailor scout as she passed the weird door. This prefaced her kicking the door that led somewhere, who the ******** knew where. It was their best lead so far, and she resented the fact that she couldn't really think of anything else to try. She was pretty tall, but not tall enough to reach the door in the wall; they could maybe shove the table up against the wall, put the chair on top, and then Tate might be able to reach it, maybe... "There's a draft from where the doorknob used to be," she finally informed the blue-haired scout. "It leads somewhere, I think."

They lunged powerfully at the door and hit it, square in the middle, shoulder-checking.

This did nothing but hurt their shoulders.

Well, that had been decidedly useless. Europa, from where she had landed beside Tate, sat up and rubbed her shoulder wincingly. She sniffled some more as she got to her feet, the impulse to cry outright becoming stronger - damn it, what was wrong with her?

She took to investigating the pile of rubbish, partially because Tate had suggested it and she seemed to have better command over the situation than Europa did, and partially because it was a good idea. Her ideas hadn't gotten them anywhere, she thought miserably as she tossed aside a cracked garden gnome and choked back a sob. It was useless, so useless!

She plunged her hand into the pile again and came up with a bent spatula. Glancing back at the door, she thought that no, that probably wouldn't work. What she really needed was a screwdriver, but it seemed unlikely in this pile of detritus. More rummaging brought up a box of broken colored pencils, a chipped teacup, two left shoes of vastly differing styles, and a dead tarantula which, when Europa tossed it aside, only made her cry harder.

Pull yourself together, Tallulah, she thought viciously to herself, and fought to wipe her eyes on her gloves again. Why did she feel like this? What was making her do-

She paused, staring at the red stain on her glove. The jam on the doorknob. It had tasted... sad. It must have been the jam. Europa stopped crying. This explained why she was miserable, but it didn't change the fact that she still felt that way. She gave the pile another search, her head feeling a bit clearer. Was that - it was!

Europa clutched the newfound screwdriver to her chest like it was her ticket out of here. "Found one!" she called shakily to Tate, and then rushed over to give the door another look. The hinges - what had Tate said about the hinges?

Well, there weren't any screws on the hinges, but she did remember a certain children's movie about talking sled dogs. If she could get the pin out, maybe they'd be able to pry the door open...

She stuck the screwdriver into the hole at the bottom of the top hinge, and gave it an upwards shove.