At an unmentioned point during years gone by, a fellow named Irving Montrose took up residence on the Coalition of the Condemned's central island. Sitting along the mountain village's frigid outskirts was the homestead in which he occupied, lined by thick stone walls, shutting out both the cold and the Coalition's common folk. Idle conversation and good fellowship were inessential concepts to Mr. Montrose, and apart from showing his face when the situation absolutely called for it, he led a solitary life.

The few who knew of the timber wolf referred to him only with his surname. 'Montrose', from his perspective, carried far more depth than 'Irving' ever could. And along with reading, researching, and the occasional grand scheming, depth mattered a fair bit to Montrose. Each and every situation, setting, and person presented their own unique variables; they required careful consideration before being acted upon. It was a thorough - and oftentimes lengthy - process, but this fashion of thinking has served him well thus far.

Anyways. Today's circumstances were a bit different. It would seem that depth, in a literal sense, was his undoing. During his once-a-week supply run, taking the exact same path which he always did, the snow beneath his paws inexplicably gave way. It was only a smattering of moments ago where the wolf stood on relatively solid ground. Now, he found himself in a rather deep sinkhole.

Comparatively speaking, it wasn't all too deep. If Montrose stood just four feet taller, he would have little trouble escaping its earthly clutches. But the walls of soil encircling him proved too immense for the canine's physical form, and in such an enclosed environment, there were little variables to consider. Thus, in a rare turn of events, Montrose acted on impulse.

"Assist me! Anybody!" he howled from below. Although he would much rather make his own escape and avoid face-to-face interaction, the only way out would come through external aid. And as he realised this, Montrose writhed. "Down here! In this gods'-damned sinkhole!"

Apprehension was welling up inside Montrose at a steady pace. The initial fall had caused a fair amount of grief, and every moment spent down in the sinkhole frustrated the wolf even further. Alongside frustration was the embarrassment that came with feeling so helpless. And the embarrassment did not help the situation at all. He shuddered at the conjured image of how laughably pitiful he must look in this situation. Marooned in a sinkhole approximately five metres deep. Stuck in all that earth. Lost to the worms.

An indeterminate amount of time passed before aid came. It may have been seconds, potentially minutes. But a leopard of the snowy variety, someone from the Coalition like he, soon answered his pleas for rescue. Their physical form triumphed the wolf's when it came to size (and probably muscle mass), and to top it all of, they bore an impressive set of wings. Taking these factors into consideration, Montrose was quite satisfied with Saturn happening to be the one to locate him - there were far smaller members of the group, after all.

"Unfortunately, I am not," the canine responds from below, his tone hardly concealing the underlying frustration in his system. Optimistically speaking, however, he would be free from the soil's grasp soon enough."Help would be greatly appreciated," Montrose pressed on, an undesired wag taking hold of his tail. "It's hardly comfortable down here. Are you able to grab me, and fly me out?"

The outlines of two more individuals soon came into view, gawking down at him from the sinkhole's overhang. Both appeared to be felines of some sort, although one of the new arrivals greatly prevailed over the other in terms of size. While the hole's summit proved itself as too far beyond Montrose's own reach, the wolf had no trouble in understanding those who stood above him. And frankly, he was growing a tad frustrated with their lacklustre rescue attempts.

"It hardly matters who's getting me out," he asserts in a somewhat impatient tone, unknowing of Saturn's blindness, "as long as it's sooner, and not later. I don't want to become food for the moles and the worms."

Next, he fixates his attention on the third creature to answer his pleas. She clocked in at a meagre fraction of the sabretooth's body mass, and yet, the floral-patterned pussycat was contributing more to the extraction effort than the other two. The chunk of trunk that she deposited into the sinkhole was long enough to span from the bottom to an exit point.

This would have made quite the impact in the current circumstance - had he been born a feline. Regrettably, Montrose lacked the catlike nimbleness which would have allowed him to climb on out. Thus, when he did try to scale the log and escape the earth's clutches, he hardly made it halfway out before ragdolling down to the bottom.

"If you would be so good to grab me and haul me out, good sir," Montrose implores the xenosmilus, unconcerned about how uncomfortable the procedure might be, "I will owe you one. I just want out of this fucking hole." What an embarrassing way to cordially meet everybody, he thought.