Quoted By:
You could hear Steele's voice faintly through the side of a thin wall, covered in a large mirror and adorned with various... <span class="mu-i">oriental</span> decorations.
Across from that wall lay a bed, its coverings sparse and its construction shoddy, pushed up against a wall with nothing but gaudy wallpaper to its name.
Straight ahead of you was a chinawoman.
A rather <span class="mu-i">angry</span> one, at that. Her already-slit eyes glared at you, her pupils nearly impossible to make out, the sheer disgust with which she regarded you somewhat unnerving.
She spoke with heavy accent. "You tell me now, how, why, who."
Your request for clarification was met with the unsheathing of a sharp knife, its material indiscernable, its point nearly as sharp as the teeth this woman now bore at you. She kept going on about... things that you couldn't make out. Some "yao-guai", a brief aside to hush something that sounded like a curse in some foreign language, something about trees?
Those sores and bruises felt like nothing compared to this. Even with their relatively mild presence (quite the surprise given where you last remembered yourself), this kind of harpy-like shrieking was shredding your eardrums.
A delayed headache soon began to dominate your thoughts, making hearing her even harder and asking proper questions nigh-impossible when all you could think of was what the hell was going on. Where was Mary-- the eagle, where-- how come...
The yellow lady was offended by your silence. She kept yelling at you for a time, but you couldn't make out half of what she said. Her grey hair, tied neatly in a bun, grew far more frayed she turned her back to you and began speaking that other language again. When she returned to you, later, that evil expression hadn't left her.
The last thing she was able to make out before going silent was "You not pay entry. Better pay entry now."
What on earth were you going to do.
>Try, very politely, to ask what she meant by "entry" and explain that you were willing to pay whatever fee was needed to be here.
>Try your luck and fidget as much as you could with the restraints. These ropes were fit pretty tightly around your wrists and knees, but you could reach the knot from here. Maybe you could free yourself?
>Chastise the lady's audacity, loudly, and explain that you have no idea what is going on and want to know.
>Attempt to call out for support. [Specify to whom. Steele, Mary, Florian, Indiana, bug?]
>Write-in.