Despite the brief gun debacle and the general suffering, the MILGRAM hadn’t been all that terrible a place to reside. Your world was small and stifling and painfully far from any home you knew, but you were very definitely not alone. Not literally, nor in the kinder sense of others keeping an eye out for you. Odd how that went.

While it was less odd to find a chair or piece of furniture moved, some of you had begun to notice some pieces had vanished entirely. An odd chair had been taken from the dining room, leaving an unlucky prisoner to either stand or sit on the floor. More surprisingly, an entire shelf had seemingly disappeared from the warehouse, its contents stacked neatly in place where it once stood.

But the wardens were still missing, and with them any hope of new requests or at least some vague sense of progress. How long had it been now? How much longer? Was time really moving forward at all? It felt sluggish at best.

Perhaps you should push it forward yourself.

Stagnation felt like death to him; Kaoru couldn’t handle sitting and waiting and sitting and waiting. The chorus of voices told him he’s smart, and he knew he was—he started bouncing ideas off of them. The majority encouraged him. So, learning a lesson from last time, he elected to recruit the two people he could trust—or the two people who would be most mad if they weren’t told. Luckily both of these described the same two people.

While he’d made it clear he was going through with this anyway, he’d been excited to get up to something with company—excited, even, to see what they’d pitch into the plan! So, he found them to explain his idea to break into the Wardens’ room, already dragging his stolen chair with him and turning it around to sit in it as he pitched the idea.

He asked with a grin, excited to convince people to make bad decisions, “So ’s already a *good* plan, but, like, y’know— we can make it *better*, right?”

Vincent nodded to Kaoru with his usual intensely serious expression. “It *is* a good plan, though I will of course be requesting to assist in both the physical exertion of things and the preparation of tools we end up using to limit harm that might come from it. I assume you have more experience than I do in physically breaking down a door, though.”

Harm to Kaoru, especially, but at the very least he wanted to divide the physical risk between them. Vincent had said yes in an instant, both because he didn’t want to leave Kaoru to do things and therefore risk punishment by himself, and because he had admittedly also been thinking of doing something similar at some point himself, if time just kept ticking on with no end in sight.

With the wardens *and* Ellie missing now… Would they *have* to do something in order to move things forward? He didn’t know, but this was as good a chance as any to find out, and so now, he readied the makeshift battering ram that he’d prepared with Kaoru to wedge into and physically ram the door.

Vincent finally turned to their third accomplice, giving her a questioning glance to make sure she was still on board with everything they’d discussed, trusting her judgement to stop them if there was anything obviously missing.

“Are you ready, Akemi? We’ve got everything prepared on this end now, so I’ll wait for you to give your mark to begin.”

Akemi, for her part, had no expectation to be included in the sorts of schemes the other prisoners thought up. After directing several scoldings toward others, she was mostly resigned to being the ‘killjoy’ or ‘wet blanket’ that would, at most, receive a heads up before the next thing exploded.

So, she couldn’t conceal the genuine shock she felt when Kaoru explicitly approached her to not only tell her of his plan, but to include her and seek her input on it.

“…yes, it is admittedly a reasonable plan, Naito-san. Barring any unforeseen disasters, it is far less likely to hurt any of the others than previous attempts. I’m grateful you included Vincent and I… So, thank you.”

A chance to make something happen. To move forward and take even the smallest amount of agency. The wardens coming back meant that some restraints could be loosened, for those who had been suffering. But, it also meant inching closer to the end of whatever all of this was.

Having seen firsthand the punishment Ellie and Robert received, Akemi wanted to do whatever she could to ensure none of them would risk the same fate. Moreover, Akemi was keenly interested in keeping the risk to the other prisoners to an absolute minimum. So, even as she would contribute very little physical labor toward their scheme, she would do her utmost to lend a careful and thorough mind to making it as water-tight as possible: the timing, the materials, the method, any possible hang-ups, she would consider every angle so the others could direct their energy toward making their plan actually *happen*.

At Vincent’s prompting, Akemi paused for just a few moments. She offered a brief smile, comforted that they were so intentionally taking her hang-ups into account, before falling back into a stern and serious face that better suited their current activities. Still, she hesitated, looking over what they’d put together, running over the plan in her mind for the umpteenth time, and mentally preparing herself for something, *anything,* to go horribly wrong.

Nothing to be done for it, now. This was the most control she would likely ever have, over their situation. So, looking to the two of them, she nodded firmly.

“I’m ready.”

She went to take her place on look-out, both to assuage the inevitable onlookers and to warn them if the Jackalope began an early approach following its usual mealtime prep. While doing so, she braced herself for the incoming commotion.

Some of you heard the sound of thudding, the sound of wood on wood. Even if they were alerted by it, no one arrived fast enough to interfere. Down the hall, the missing warehouse shelf, inadvisably broken and provisionally sharpened just enough to fit, was crammed into the crease where the wardens’ door met the frame. Vincent seemed to be the driving force of getting it in, and now Kaoru hardly waited to bash his shoulder against the wood, trying to bust this shit open. Deep enough to work as a crowbar, you could witness the cracking of the doorframe being broken around the lock while the lock itself remained rigid, keening and splintering until breaking, swinging wide open from the force applied. The piece of wood that could no longer be called a shelf clattered to the ground, twisted and broken in the middle.