It's always enticing to explore a new cave system, but this one is different. The deeper you delve, the more it seems to tug at you; the pools of darkness beyond your lamps feel like a vacuum that sucks at you and propels you forward into its embrace. The shadows play hypnotically at the edges of your lights, so entrancing to you that when the rough natural stone of the cave floor gives way to neat arrays of polished flagstones it hardly seems strange at all. Running your hands along the smooth vertical walls, enjoying the cool feel of the stone, you startle slightly as you feel, more than hear, the bass rumble of heavy stone collapsing ahead. Glancing behind, you see the passage is obscured by darkness as thick as molasses, beckoning you to melt into it. You must have gotten turned around; somehow you intuit that the collapse you felt ahead was your way out. You are trapped here. Your lamps flicker. The batteries ought to last for hours, but they seem to be dimming so fast you can watch them darkening. Are LEDs even supposed to do that? You light a match experimentally, and it goes out almost immediately with a hiss, like the darkness pinched it. This is all very wrong.

Despite your misgivings, a feeling of lassitude steals over you. Perhaps you should submit to the velvety presence here. Maybe that's the easy way though.

Somewhere deep under the downy blanket of sleepiness, you feel a tiny spark of panic rising, urging you to get through that collapsed tunnel ahead somehow and escape.

Inside that fuzzy panic you feel a hard ember of courage. You can right this wrong, if you dare to descend deeper into this inky maze.

The choice is yours: submit, escape, or descend.