At Sasha's question, Joanie held up two cards. "Just these two," she said. After forfeiting her cards to Sasha, she had only picked up two from Dylan as he moved along. Just as she was about to try and figure out how many that meant they had left, Dylan pulled out the four of spades triumphantly. She had to resist the urge to hug the strange man. Instead, she just grinned, clapping her hands together and bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet. "Oh my god, we're done!" With a half-laugh, she looked to Sasha, even Vlad, with joy. "So now-"
Just as she was about to ask what happened now, a low rumbling filled the room. Gasping, Joanie crossed her arms warily, holding a hand firmly over her mouth as she watched the room shift. The strings of silver bells vanished, as if they had been erased from existence. At the same time, the thicket of mannequins began to shift around them. Joanie pressed back against the group, trying to take up as little space as possible as all the mannequins moved. The ones hanging from the ceiling slid back, as if on tracks. Those on platforms and their own legs stepped back, as if animated, to create a bare walkway that started with the group of four and ended at the nearest wall. When the mannequins stopped moving, a door was visible in the wall.
Eyes widening, Joanie looked back at the others in surprise. "Did that just?" She paused. "Yeah. I'm not gonna finish that question, because this is Bellum." They needed T-shirts that read 'You can't scare me - I live in Bellum Letale.' She made a mental note to look into that. "So we might as well see what lies ahead." She tried to keep a walking pace, but found herself half-jogging to the door in her haste to get out of this crazy room.
She grabbed the doorknob and twisted it, pulling the door open with very little caution. After all, what was on the other side of the door couldn't be any worse than the creepy vampire that was in there with them. She backed up with the door, pushing it aside to look into none other than Bellum's lobby. Eyes widening in surprise, she looked back at the other three with a wild grin. "Look!" she squeaked, scrambling through the doorway into the lobby. "Oh my god," she said quickly, pushing her hands through her hair and sighing with relief. "I never thought I'd be this happy to see this fucking place." Laughing with nervous relief, she stepped towards the mailboxes, looking back at the other three.
"Hey," she started, expression sobering. "If this happened to us..." She paused. "Where's everybody else?" Suddenly, she was worried. She wondered where Luther was, and if Russell was okay. Aiden and Micah, too, might have been somewhere even worse than the mannequin Holocaust. And in the very back of her mind, she wondered if Faith had gotten caught up in this as well. Maybe they were already in their apartments, done with all this nonsense. She could only hope.