Mia's ID - she thought she had stopped carrying it, but it was still in her wallet so she could suppose she must have kept up the habit - clattered into the little slot in the door. It felt a little ridiculous right up until the moment it actually, miraculously, and against all sense of probability - let alone practicality, truthfully - it did manage to work. It shouldn't have, but she had decided, to debatable success, that she might as well just accept the sheer insanity of her predicament rather than let it drive her outright mad trying to find the little gaps of rationality where there weren't any to be found.
Of course, this was the rationality of someone who was at their wits end and then fallen right off the end, but she could suppose she had been balancing on the edge of this for more than long enough for it to become commonplace. As much as it could become commonplace, at least.
The doorway lead to a gloomy little passageway, the candles truly having their work cut out for them even trying to stand their own against the losing battle against the darkness that seemed thicker than it should have possibly been. Fortunately the ornate art-deco inspired elevator used electric lights, which seemed a stark difference to the more cosy albeit inefficient light of the candles.
Perhaps it would have been wise to take one of the candles along just in case, but that was a thought that one would only have after the need had come and gone. It was only a matter of moments after she activated the elevator before the lights started to flicker, the only real relief that could be found in this being that it didn't fall to a complete stop when her whole world fell to a total and all-encompassing darkness. The lights could not have been off for more than a cluster of heartbeats, but considering how quickly her heart was racing, that had might as well have been an eternity and a day before the world was once again bathed with a softly buzzing light.
Her breath caught in her chest and seemed to burn a hole right through her lungs. All about her, taking up any visible space that could be found, was the phrase 'Where did you go?', written in a hasty scrawled paint that seemed to have been there long enough to peel in places despite having not been there moments before.
There was little dignity in her dash to - escape - leave once the elevator door opened. She needed to get out, to get back into the sunlight. She didn't want to be trapped anymore, she needed the sun, the breeze - as icy as it might be - any and everything that would remind her that she was free. She was free. She was running. She was running outside. This meant she was free. Right?
Why, then, was it that the tunnel leading outside seemed to stretch on forever no matter how much she ran.
But that was impossible, she was already out of the cave. She was out of the cave and bent over to catch her breath. She was out of the cage and she was alright.
It wasn't just the thundering of her heart and the resulting uncomfortable awareness of her blood in her ears that she could hear. The roaring that Mia could hear was not entirely inward, but rather the consistent rumbling of a waterfall that seemed to be singing out an eternally sombre song that she did not quite understand as it was.
Her most pressing concern was not the sound of the waterfall, however, but rather the fact that the spray it produced made the little path along the cliffside a little bit more slippery than she was comfortable with. While she could not quite see where the drop off lead to, thanks to both the mist and the fact she was keeping an almost excessively safe distance, she was quite content with leaving this as a mystery that remains exactly that. Happily unsolved.
Through the mist came a gate. A very large gate. Excessively so, and she briefly found herself wondering if it was supposed to be keeping something out or keeping something in, and she hoped this would join the ever-growing collection of questions that she would be content leaving unanswered.
Behind the gate, of course as it would have been rather odd to have a gate that lead to nothing, was a house. A rather large manner house that, while weathered due to the close proximity to the waterfall, nonetheless managed to look delightfully grand in its nature. Most of the windows were boarded up or otherwise obscured, making it difficult to properly gather much information just from examining the outside of the building.
Her approach was briefly put on pause as she turned her attention towards a rather elaborately cared for patch of yellow flowers. She had passed several on her way there but had not really thought all that very much about them until that moment. Mia had assumed they were some sort of local wildflowers that she was not familiar with that she had been too preoccupied to notice previously, but seeing them arranged and tended to with such a loving care she could assume that her previous assumption was quite incorrect.
She pondered the plants for just a moment longer, but she could hardly imagine that the answers to why her little family was to be forever forced to undergo hardships that were so wildly improbable that they would not even find a place in the nightmares of the unimaginative and yet seemed to play out for them more often than normalcy found a place.
But of course she would not find the answer to this hidden in flowers, for she already knew it already even if she did not wish to actively admit it even to herself, let alone to anyone else.
There was no real fanfare behind her entering the building itself. There was, however a notable creak when she opened the door, further solidifying her impression that nobody had been that way in a sizeable period of time. Or, not that she particularly wanted to dwell on the idea, had left there in this time. Mia very much hoped to remain the outlier for both of these points, thank you very much, and if it were possible, she would also like to not have to linger about too much, but the way things were going, she would be content with whatever meant she would be able to leave at all.
The very first thing that she noticed was that everything had a fine dusting of, well, dust on it. An odd dust with not the most dust-like consistency but she was hardly an expert on dust so she paid this no real mind beyond a brief observation. An observation that was followed by a second. There was a total absence of any sound beyond the dull roar of the waterfall, and she was finding it increasingly easy to tune out the falling water.
Maybe, she hoped with very little conviction behind it, whoever's house this was might simply have gone out, leaving the flask she was there to find altogether unguarded. Before she pondered this possibility for too long, however, she chided herself for even entertaining such a foolish notion. If things really were as dire as they were presented to her, there was no way things would be allowed to progress so easily for her.
Really though, compared to everywhere else she had been, the dusty entrance hall seemed to be the most homey of it all. Had she come across the house under any other context, she would not have thought twice about it, perhaps even finding herself seated upon one of the dusty chairs and sharing a hopefully not dusty cup of tea. But things were not normal, and the supposed normalcy managed to do little more than set her on edge as she crept forward into the house.
The more she moved, the more she noted things that were not quite so ordinary. Dolls were scattered about the place, well-crafted dolls that seemed to have taken expert, skilled hands to create even if they were not quite in the most pristine of conditions. The confines of the passage of time had not affected them equally, some seeming as if they had only been set out the day before - and perhaps they even had been - while others were finding their neat little suits fading and the hems of their dresses fraying, or even worse still was the chipping and discolouration of the faces, which brought with it an eerie sense of the uncanny. The discolouration bringing something oddly human, the chips reminding her that they were decidedly not human. It was this, and the impression that their little glass eyes were following her every move that set her more on edge than she expected she would be.
It was not just the dolls that seemed to be watching her. A large portrait, on display yet also shuffled off to the side so it would not catch immediate attention, depicting a perfectly human looking young woman dressed in black clinging to a strange doll, seemed to be watching over the runnings of the house.
Perhaps it was just the stillness of the house that meant this bothered her as much as it did, but she shuddered rather significantly and picked up her pace just a little, not wanting to linger too long in one place.
She found frustratingly little of relevance to her plight upstairs. A teacup set out on the table suggested habitation, as did several vases of flowers that came with several degrees of freshness, however there was nothing that would actually help her. It was this observation that had her relent to the elevator that she had rather pointedly ignored the first time she had passed it by in her loop of the house.
Her first experience with an elevator within the confines of the property had brought very little in the way of offering reassurance, but it seemed there was nowhere else to go but down.
Beyond several fidgets with the sleeve of her coat, however, nothing of real concern happened and so she breathed a sigh of relief. She could have giggled at how silly she had been, jumping at shadows and the like, but that seemed to be pushing her luck a little too far so she kept it to herself. Besides, she had seen the way that some shadows jumped back in the past and was not particularly fond of the idea of a repeat performance.
On a glance, the lower level seemed no less ordinary than what was above. With a thoughtful little hum, she made her way down the corridor before her, briefly noting that there was a healthy collection of books in the shelf she passed but not bothering to extend this noting to what the texts actually were. Nothing particularly stood out to her, rather elegant paintings that were beginning to peel adorned the walls and it seemed a little more dusty, but she saw no real significance in this beyond the age of the room.
Beyond the first door she opened was the very flask she was looking for.
The flask was being cradled almost tenderly in the arms of an old doll in ornate - if not a little tattered - wedding attire. Mia found herself swallowing nervously but, when a glance about her suggested that it was not a trap, at least as best she could, she dared to approach the doll.
"Can I have this?" asked she to the doll feeling like it would be rude not to, but also feeling like it was a little silly to ask an inanimate object for permission.
Evidently the answer to her question was 'no', for the second her fingers brushed the flask, her world suddenly was bathed in sudden darkness.