trustfell | Take Responsibility.

The door at the bottom of those stairs is unlocked.

It opens as though of its own volition - with a heavy click and a light outward swing toward the staircase leading back up to the dorms, not enough to harm anyone who might be standing in the way but enough to give them some slight encouragement to move. As for where the door will lead everyone...well, that has yet to be seen.

The first thing to be noted is that it's dark - not pitch-black, granted, there's some slight illumination bouncing off the walls, enough to show you that you're at the top of yet more stairs and giving everyone something to move toward, but the fact remains that it's dark, and this stairwell looks long, and the walls are all made of smooth concrete. Bunker-grade, almost, the sort of thing one would expect from a professionally-built basement designed to withstand almost anything; do be careful not to trip on the stairs, whether through a lack of coordination or simply nerves, because the concrete floor at the bottom is likely to be...unforgiving.

Eventually the stairwell ends, however, and everyone will find themselves faced with a room that seems designed to survive the apocalypse itself - a high-ceilinged room made of concrete and steel, stark and bare in comparison to the wallpapered rooms above. In the center of the room is a circle of podiums, thirty-six in total, arranged so that everyone standing at them can see each other. So everyone can look each other in the eyes, if they so choose. The podiums are interlocked - there's no cutting across the center of the circle, and for good reason, it looks like there's a lot of nothing down there where the floor should be - and each is bearing the title of the person who's assigned to stand at it. No names, just adjectives, emblazoned across two brass panels on the very top and the front of each podium.

Affixed to the podium itself is a panel with buttons on it, thirty-five in total; next to the buttons are smaller strips of engraved metal to serve as labels, bearing the titles of everyone that's been present in the Academy, living or dead.

All of the podiums are identical, except for the one intended for Jean and the thirty-sixth slot. The podium that should bear Ascendant's title has had a black cloth draped over it, and a copy of Jean's profile photo is sitting on top of it, framed and colorless, an image in greyscale.

The thirty-sixth slot has a podium there, but everything that should be on it is notably blank.

Once everyone has found their spot in the circle, the public-address system sounds out across the room, crackling to life moments before Jericho's voice can be heard

"Ascendent's been taken from you, and it's up to you to decide what to do about that. I guess you could do nothing, but that'd be kind of a waste, yeah? Unless he really meant that little to all of you. But you're all a bit less of a generalized trainwreck than that, I think.

"Do what you can, hold them responsible. If not...well, Rule Seven's still a thing, and someone's trying to see it through to completion.

Guilty or innocent, it really doesn't matter. Do your best!"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I... don't know... [as much as she'd prefer that it be someone else] They specifically want us to kill each other, right? They could just use the second time limit as a motivator if they killed one of us.