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So you commit yourself to just that; listening, waiting and praying. Of course, your current position - or perhaps <span class="mu-i">predicament</span> would be the better word - is ill-suited for listening or waiting, to the point that you frustrate yourself attempting either. Tucked away as well as you are, you cannot hear the footfalls any longer. In fact, you can hear nothing more than your stifled breathing and the almost imperceptible sound of the wind outside the window. Moreover, between the contortion required to get and keep yourself under the table, as well as the impedance of the corset you are quite distant from any comfort at all - and that is to say nothing about your nerves, about the stress of the situation. If you don't hear anything soon, then you will need to come up with a count, to make sure that enough time has passed that you can safely extricate yourself. You always agonize over those. To be sure, you <span class="mu-i">should</span> agonize over coming up with a safe count, but still, you -
You can just barely hear something. If you hadn't heard footfalls earlier, and if you weren't listening for them now, you might not have even ... no, no these are definitely footfalls. And they are definitely getting closer. Your entire body - save for the site of your Hide-Eyes Scarification Glyph - goes cold. As you press yourself even tighter against the floor beneath and the wall behind, your gaze falls to the bundle you have with you. Pattern's Perdition! You should have been Socketing the wand, or at least considering doing so, not just ... fraying woolgathering! If it were to come to it now, all you would have are the pin-stilettoes and casts of Salt-Mitigation, neither of which you could possibly hope to use while remaining in concealment. Panic suffuses you to the point that your breathing becomes noticeably more ragged, and in a bid to keep quiet you just end up holding your breath, which proves difficult, as between the way you have done yourself up - under the table and in a corset - you have not been breathing particularly deeply. Your lungs begin to ache almost immediately, so you seek to relieve them through your nose to marginal effect - you aren't going to suffocate anytime soon, but any further relief is beyond you.
All the while, the footfalls are louder and nearer - and most certainly plural. Your head pounds to the point that in a flight of fancy you imagine your brain trying to batter its way out of your skull to escape. Suddenly, silence imposes itself on the common room. A moment later, this silence is broken again by the sounds of shuffling, which you would imagine to be someone turning around on a spot, surveying the space. Then -
