Kalia made it up to the third floor to discover another already there, a woman in robes of a strange shade of orange. The light coming around the edges of the slab intrigued her, but when she saw the stranger already investigating it she shied away. There was of course no telling what kind of person the robed woman was, and the fear and dread that gripped Kalia's heart upon the thought of what horrors might lurk within the heart of that stranger was enough to start her walking away. She hadn't stopped to look at any of the halls leading off the first or second floor, so she figured she might as well do so now. She made her way around the ring in a clockwise direction, looking at each of the passageways leading off of it, hoping to find some other light that she might work toward alone.

She found nothing of the sort. Each hall was much the same as the one she had first found herself in, minus the water. They went on for a ways and ended in a broken statue. The walls of all of them seemed to contain more of those stone pods, the things she and the others had apparently come out of. Plants grew here and there, more evidence of the structure being old and abandoned. Kalia couldn't help but wonder if each of the pods held people in it, and the thought sent shivers down her spine. The place seemed devoid of intelligent life, but if each pod held another person...

She walked to the railing and looked up, trying to estimate just how many floors there were. There was no end to them that she could see, dozens of floors extending upward until it was impossible to make out where one floor stopped and another ended, and then up to the faint light from above. Her best guess was that there had to be hundreds of floors to this place, and maybe fifty pods per hall, six halls per floor. Three hundred pods per floor, countless floors above. There could be thousands of people in those pods, just waiting to be released. The six of them who'd found themselves in the flooded hall below could have just been the first wave. Soon this strange building could be like a crowded city, with people pressing in on all sides, making the air foul with their various odors, and all the monsters in human skin just walking around like normal people, and they'd make the place just like a city too with all the fighting and rape and murder and evil and...

Kalia found herself clinging to the vines hanging in front of her face with a death grip, knuckles white. Her heart was pounding and her breath came in shallow gasps. She closed her eyes and tried to picture her favorite place, a tranquil little pond in the forest near her home, where she would often sit for hours at a time, just watching nature. The image was almost immediately ruined by the thought of a horde of people coming and trampling everything, and her eyes snapped open. She instead pushed some vines aside and looked down at the pool of water below, trying to calm and control her breathing. This place was not nearly so lovely as her pond, but it had a beauty of its own nonetheless. It was also very clearly devoid of swarms of people, which helped quite a bit. She could see further floors going down into the depths, presumably with more halls full of pods extending from each of them, but they did not worry her. If there were people in those pods they would probably be dead due to drowning, or they would die in attempting to find their way up to the surface. At most she imagined only the first few floors beneath the water could feasibly send out more surviving people, assuming they were good swimmers and did not panic, and a few hundred more people atop the thousands above did not worry her much.

Once she had mostly gotten herself under control, Kalia turned and saw a vine now leading over to the slab. The woman in orange was looping it around the stone, and her intent was pretty clear. She wanted to pull the slab down and open the way past it, toward the light. When the woman stopped without actually trying to pull it away, Kalia made a decision. One stranger, or even five if it came to that, was far better than thousands. She wanted to get out of this place and away from those pods as quickly as possible, and perhaps the only way to do that would be to work with these other people. The slab looked heavy enough that it might take all of them to pull it down, and if that was the case then so be it.

Kalia took a deep breath to steady her nerves and walked over to the woman in orange robes. "I am Kalia. I will help you remove this barrier." Kalia knew that she did not look very strong, but she figured any offered help would be welcomed, even if the one offering did not look extraordinarily strong. She was slim and on the short side for her species, but being an elf that made her about as tall as an average human male. Her dark hair hung down to her shoulders, with the tips of her ears extending far enough to be visible unless she made a particular effort to hide them, which she had not done this day. She walked over and placed a hand on the vine, readying to help but not yet pulling, waiting for approval and for the other woman to give the signal to start.