>Explore
>Explore
>Explore

Succeeded. The trio spends only a minute in a panicked search -- scrabbling to feel out a hidden exit on the walls, or unearth some secret cellar door from beneath the rotting rugs -- before slowing to a more concerted scan of the room. There is nothing beneath them, save for cold, wet earth and bits of buried detritus. Nothing to their sides but cold, hard brick. Nothing above them but the ceiling, which had no convenient cracks or hidden handles, and lastly, the hanging lightbulb. It is The Laborer, the first to give search and the first to calm down, to finally give the lightbulb further notice. Something is off about its cord, he realizes. It is far too thick for a simple wire. He reaches up and wraps a hand around the cord as a jolt of trepidation shoots through his veins. With a hesitant pull, the room is thrown into sudden darkness, the feeble bulb extinguishing with an almost inaudible electric hiss. In the inky void, the trio's breaths mingled in the silence.

As their eyes strained against the darkness, an unexpected transformation began. The cord, now taut in the laborer's grip, resisted his pull, its fibers groaning against his growing efforts. A slow, reverberating creak resonated through the room, like the reluctant stirring of gears and wood. With a shuddering release, a section of ceiling above them yawned open, releasing a gust of cold air into the stagnant warmth as a ladder slowly unfolded to the ground. The cord had been rigged to a pull-down ladder's rope, installed into the ceiling of whatever room they had inhabited, its seam hidden by a thin, crumbling layer of plaster. Somewhere in the back of his mind, the Laborer remembered a similar rope set-up once leading him to an attic.

With cautious steps, the trio climbed one by one. 

As they entered, they exchanged awestruck looks, eyes widening as the realization dawned upon them – the trio had certainly been underground in the room they had been chained in, and were almost certainly underground still.

The room they enter is a bunker of some sort, perhaps three times the size of the quarters they had been chained up in, though cramped with survival tools -- walls lined with shelves bearing row after row of canned rations standing sentinel beside kegs of water and packages of medicine, each whispering the faint promise of safety. There is a large map on one wall, a pneumatic door on another, and a cot beneath an American flag on the third. The walls, ceiling, and floor appear to be made of metal, and there are no windows. There is a pair of boltcutters leaned on the cot, and a first-aid kit on the wall by the pneumatic door.