Even as the elevator clattered to a stop, her safety not secured but certainly landing her a deal more better off than she had been in the basement, it was feeling very much like her heart was never going to return to its regular rhythm. Mia was not entirely sure what was louder at that moment, the way the elevator doors opened - oh and thank goodness for that, she would not have been surprised if she had found herself locked in after everything else that had happened that, frankly, she had not signed up for at all, thank you very much - or the way her blood seemed to be roaring louder than the waterfall outside was roaring. Really, far too many things were roaring at that moment and she was not in the mood for it, as it was really far more dramatic than it had any need to be.
Truthfully, everything was a great deal more, well, more than it had any need to be and she was finding herself to be quite sick of it all happening all at once.
Of course, all things considered, she should have expected things to not quite go her way because they never seemed to.
What was strange, however, was the fact that everything seemed to be swimming before her eyes. There was no real steadiness to anything and she was left with the distinct impression that everything was swaying like it was at sea. Fortunately she was not one to usually succumb to seasickness, but that just meant there was a different reason she was finding herself to be getting increasingly more nauseous with every step she took. Much like her vision, her steps staggered and swayed to the point where she needed to rest a hand upon the wall to not only guide herself down the hallway, but to keep herself upright.
But she was not navigating the hallway alone, for it seemed her gracious host had been kind enough to leave guides for her. Dolls of neat and prim dress sat leaning against the walls.
They were leaning against the walls.
And they were laughing.
They were laughing at her.
They were laughing at her misery and her misfortune and they were laughing at her.
They were laughing and no matter how much she willed them to shut up - shut up shut up shut UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP SHUT UP - they just kept laughing.
It was so hard to draw even a single breath, like something was - filling - compressing her lungs with an iron grip until she was sure that she would die there and then. She would die there, and the certainty of this came at such a staggering force that she could not think of a single reason why she should not simply accept this as fact. This acceptance actually made it just that little bit easier to push on through until she reached the door. In reality this only took a matter of moments, and yet it felt like an eternity spent trudging through thick mud dragging her downwards until she was sure she would drown in it.
While everything did still have the unpleasant shimmering haze about it, the laughter that echoed so loudly in her ears only moments ago cut off and her world was plunged into complete silence. Even the waterfall, that she had been tuning out, had fallen silent and the absence thereof made her wonder if she had lost her hearing all of a sudden. She had gotten accustomed to ignoring the sounds, but things felt a great deal worse without them.
And them, to make matters worse, she realised she was not alone.
"Don't leave," a wispy voice pleaded, sounding - a sound! She was not deaf at all - tired and disused, "I can't let you."
If Mia was in any better mindset than she was presently, the fact her first thought was that she was facing a ghost would have felt a little too farfetched for her otherwise rational mind. But she was not in a particularly good mindset at all, in fact, it seemed the rationality had found itself shaken loose and she was quite sure it was by the very spectre, so elegantly donning a rather tragic - the context making the tragedy, as the attire itself was lovely and spoke of aged riches, much like the house itself did - mourning attire.
But as soon as she had seen the ghost - the woman, she was flesh and blood and breathing just like everybody else - then she was gone. The doll that woman had clung to for comfort remained, rising from the floor rather appropriately like a marionette, as a doll should as far as Mia was concerned.
"Oh, you're still alive, huh?" asked the doll with a manic glee that suggested that, as far as a not as inanimate as one would hope object could, she was thinking of ways to rectify this very pressing issue.
The damnable laughter started back up again, and she found herself horribly aware that she was surrounded by more dolls than she cared to count. This horror was only magnified when, with a clacking and chittering, the first of these dolls sprung at her face. She did manage to avoid significant harm by bringing a hand up to shove this doll, and those that followed after, away before the odd blades that were hidden away on their tiny bodies managed to find a home in her flesh.
"You'd better find me quick, before my friends murder you!" challenged the doll over the ruckus of the infinitely less sentient dolls, "Tick tock! Your life's on the line!"
By the time the onslaught of dolls, which had been more to disorient her than actually cause her harm, the wedding dress clad doll had vanished, and the others had resumed their insistent teasing giggle. Mia rubbed her eyes, trying to force some sort of clarity back into her sensed, but it seemed a clarity of senses was a privilege that she was not going to be afforded at that moment.
"Try and find me!" Angie sung out from somewhere and everywhere and nowhere all at once, the voice melting into the cacophony that seemed to hum unnaturally in her ears.
She gave up her attempt at clearing her thoughts. Under the eyes of the dolls, the threat seemed to be all that really mattered. Find the doll and live, fail to find the doll and die. It was nice and simple, tied up in a bow of acute mental distress to make it nice and neat, and entirely horrible for her.
With no other option presented to her, which seemed to be yet another show of her gracious host, Mia swallowed some of her dizziness back before pushing onwards and into the house. She wished briefly that she had taken the time to properly acquaint herself with the house when she first arrived, as there was very little body memory for her to go on when it was hardly made the most practical to navigate by functional memory. At the best of times, her memory still held odd and unpleasant little holes that she could not stitch together with threads of existing memory, but this managed to exacerbate this to the point she was left utterly and hopelessly bewildered. She stumbled about the house almost blindly, not in a literal sense but on some strange level that she could only really understand at the time she had the misfortune of experiencing it first hand.
She had no way of knowing how long it took, but after managing to hit her shin rather embarrassingly as she tripped and fell up the stairs, but finally she set eyes on the doll that she was looking for. It was a bit like looking for a piece of hay in a haystack, or more literally a doll in a dollhouse, but unlike all the others she passed, the eerie doll in a tattered wedding dress managed to skip over the unsteady swimming of her sight. Which was arguably worse, because it seemed this doll was the only thing in the entire world that escaped this and that not only caused her to stand out notably, but also managed to make her a great deal more unsettling than the ones that she was quite sure had been clacking odd blade-limbs together as if to urge her onwards.
It took her a moment to register the pain.
She had reached down to touch the doll, to win the first part of the game, and then the next she was recoiling away as the wooden jaws lurched and snapped hard against her hand. The carved teeth were too blunt to outright pierce the skin, but the blunt force had been enough to tear the skin anyway. Reflexively, she shoved the doll away, which proceeded to jerk upwards, letting out an odd laugh before drifting away on strings that were not there, and yet managed to dictate the movements of the figure.
"Why are you even trying? You'll just leave anyway!"
With the fear that there would be a second attempt to bite her, she swiped at the doll again, and this was more successful than her first attempt. The doll's head clunked against the windowsill, which prompted the laughter to swell around her. But, of course, it simply floated back up again and, with a twirl in the air like she was dancing, Angie made her way towards the door that Mia had used to enter the room.
Before she had the chance to stop this, the doll had vanished from the room. She did use this as a moment to assess her new injury, which was fortunately not all that bad at all. She won what would certainly lead to a bruise, but it would not have been as bad as her shin, and even that had managed to fade away into nothing more significant than background noise.
The second time she managed to find Angie, she managed to avoid getting hurt in the process. The doll had settled herself among a gathering of her fellow dolls by the fireplace, and Mia made the point to knock the doll away before there was the chance for her not to be the one to act first. The woman grasped the doll, which just laughed at this.
"Is this what you did to him after he tried to help you?" taunted the object that really should be more inanimate than it was.
The comment succeeded in making the woman recoil, and in this the freedom for the doll was won. Before there was a chance for her to react, the figure slipped off again, the only sign that she had been there at all being the laughter that managed to linger a little bit longer than it really had any right to.
"Shut the hell up." Mia hissed out, taking a moment to cover her ears. Not even she was completely sure of whether she meant the doll, the laughter, or her own thoughts should shut up, but at that moment they very much seemed like they were one and the same.
Evidently she took too long to find Angie the third time, for a giggling doll in a chartreuse dress managed to gain a pattern of ruby red petals on the hems of the dress curtesy of Mia's forearm. Had she been even a moment slower, and she could thank the reflexes she gained from her training for this, she would have certainly gotten off a great deal worse considering the intended target had been her face. A gash in the arm was not ideal, and she hissed out in both pain and alarm at it, but it was better than a lost eye or significantly torn cheek, so she cut the loss.
It was odd, the third time she found the doll, it was as if the figure had been trying to get to the elevator. That wasn't fair. They were playing a game and that was breaking the rules, and if she was not frustrated already, this certainly did not brighten her disposition. She pounced at the doll, trapping it so that there was no way she would be able to escape nor be able to land any more bites upon her.
"You're never getting out of here!" This taunt seemed almost desperate, at least in comparison to the others that had been tossed her way.
"Enough!" Mia shouted, evidently having left her volume control back down in the basement, "I'm not playing your game anymore!"
With all the strength that she could muster, she cracked the doll's head down hard against the ground. Strange tendrils from the doll's eye cavity tried to pry the woman's hand away, but this just motivated her to bring the figure down again, and harder this time, and with a more satisfying crunch.
And then she brought Angie down again.
And again.
And again.
Again.
Again.
AGAIN.
As Mia fought to catch her breath, the strange haze before her eyes seemed to fade. The broken body beneath her hands was not that of the strange bridal doll Angie, but that of the Dollmaker Donna Beneviento. As the woman she had pinned to the ground let out her final breath, the hand that had been trying to push the other off her dropped limply to the ground.
As the body began to crumble away beneath her, Mia recoiled away, falling back with a startled cry.
She hadn't meant to kill her, but that was one problem that she did not have to think about anymore.