Taking care not to stir up too much of the dust that coats everything in the room, Falcon methodically sorts through the bits and bobs and pieces of paper that litter the surface of the old workbench; or rather, as methodically as he can, considering he hasn’t got a singular clue what he’s looking at. The flaxen Courser supposes some of the old trinkets might have been prototypes for some of the schematics he can’t understand, but he suspects that if anything in this pile of junk ever worked, the passage of time probably put an end to that long ago. He nudges a strange amalgamation of miniature wooden beams aside with his nose, and the resulting click makes Falcon freeze with alarm. Before he gets a chance to truly react, the very ground beneath his hooves begins to shudder, and Kasios takes flight from his shoulder with a fearful trill.

Harrier is interrupted from his careful examination of a decrepit bookshelf when what sounds like something beneath the floor itself creaks in a horrible way, and his teammates all nicker with shock and confusion around him; Dusk clings tighter to his mane with a warning hiss when the room starts moving. Trying to suppress the instinctive panic rising in the back of his mind, he glances around the room to do a quick headcount; as far as he can tell, everyone’s safe, but something about the way Falcon leans away from the workbench he’d been looking at gives him a solid idea of what just happened…

“Oh for the love of-” The bay stallion grumbles under his breath as he glares at his bewildered brother and his spooked osprey. He knows that guilty look on Falcon’s face all too well; the expression of a horse who knows he just fucked up. “Falcon, what did you do?!”

Between the shifting floor and the Pygmy Drake racing over to climb her shoulder for safety, it takes Nightshade a moment to regain her balance, and she lets out an anxious whinny. But once the initial shock wears off, the grullo Courser realises that whatever’s happening, it’s not happening very quickly; the wall in front of her face appears to be moving, but only at a snail’s pace.

“Hey, fuck you, it was an accident-” Falcon stubbornly defends himself against his brother’s accusations, ears pinned back as he struggles to keep his footing.

“Well, you sure seem to have a lot of accidents, don’t you!” Harrier bites back with a stomp of one hoof; he’d seem almost unbothered by the situation if it weren’t for the slight wobble in his legs. “Really, would it kill you to keep your nose out of-”
“Is now really the time to be pointing our hooves at each other?!” Exasperated, Nightshade cuts in, and in that same moment, the room stops moving; coming to a halt with the same awful grinding noise it had roared to life with.

Warily, Beryl stares around the now unmoving room with wide, green eyes, unable to convince herself to abandon the wide, awkward stance they’d adopted to steady themselves. Pyrite’s tongue slowly pokes back out through their teeth, a sure sign that the mimic has noticed everything has quieted down too; Beryl maintains that it might be more pleasant if the damned chest were to poke its eyes out to investigate instead, but on the other hoof, she’s not entirely convinced that they actually… have any. That at least eliminates the question of ‘how the hell do we stop the room from moving’, but another question still remains… Why had it started moving at all? The champagne mare glances at the nearest door, and her heart sinks as it slowly dawns upon her that there had definitely been a torch in that hallway before the floor had begun to move.

“The corridors,” Beryl calls out to their teammates, sounding increasingly fed up with every word she says. “They’re all different now. We’ll have to regain our bearings…”
Harrier’s tail gives a single, irritated flick, and he shoots a sideways glare at his brother. “Good one, Falcon…”
Before Falcon gets half a chance to respond, Nightshade steps in to reprimand Harrier. “Oh, would you shut it for once? We won’t make heads or tails of this if we’re too busy fighting over how it happened!”