Night 73: FITNESS/WELLNESS CENTER (THIRD FLOOR)

[lighthearted]

[From here.]

After stepping through the door, Sora didn't immediately find himself in another room. There was a few seconds where he felt like he wasn't really anywhere, or in some in between place, before he staggered out into...

Some kind of gym?

He blinked his eyes a few times, trying to dispel the dizziness. Sora had traveled by unorthodox means before, so he wasn't as thrown off as he could have been. Besides, the institute had decided to warp them around before, so this wasn't exactly new.

"So this is the third floor?" Somehow he'd been expecting something more... intense. Not an empty gym. But Landel probably didn't want them to arrive anywhere close to his actual location, so it kind of made sense.

He glanced back at the pad that they'd stepped off of, which glowed with a purple light. "So we have to find more of those, I guess." But for now, there were some doors they could go through, and that was really the only path available to them. Seemed pretty straight-forward.

Comments

[fourstonewalls]

[from here]

At the top of the escalator, everything lurched. Just like it had when the doors had gone haywire. Lana swallowed, hard, and kept her dinner down. None of her associations with that sensation were good ones, but she knew she was being irrational. Instead, she looked around.

They were standing on a glowing platform, in the middle of a small, nicely-appointed fitness center. It was about the same size as the library, but until they made it out of the doors, she wasn't confident that their location would match the map. Random teleportation would fit Landel's modus operandi, and it would make this a lot more difficult.

"Well, we're not going to find anything here. I don't know enough about electronics to try anything with this device," she added, stepping down from the platform, "so unless you're actually an expert in teleportation devices, I think we should keep moving."

[ryuuzaki]

"Ha." His laugh was short, dry, and bitter; it couldn't be mistaken for anything but ironic. If he had been allowed to address this situation from the outside, with his usual resources, he might have made short work of it. "No. No, I'm not. You're all right?"

He glanced around the room as he stepped down from the platform. It appeared to be nothing but a normal exercise area, the kind you might find in any hotel or office. Next, he retrieved the gun from its holster.

The presence of the pad itself, as part of an implied series, was interesting, though. Was this how the ordinary users of this level of the Institute were expected to travel? That seemed counterproductive, but security measures were often inconvenient. The task force members had sometimes had trouble with his own security at headquarters. So, were the pads a security measure, or were they there merely to make things more difficult for any patients who were able to find their way to this level? It had taken long enough. If it had depended on his own interest in English poetry, it might have taken forever.

What had happened at the top of the escalator had felt just like using the rings, something he never enjoyed. Was it possible that the rings themselves were a sham--that they only triggered hidden pads? The technology was very advanced, and it was easy to think of a few ways to extrapolate the concept so that it explained their earlier experiences of teleportation.

The problem with this theory, he thought, was that when it involved doors, you could assume that something was hidden under the threshold or in the frame, but when it involved any random location, you had to assume that the entire floor of every location in the Institute, as well as the ground in Doyleton and in some other places outdoors, was pressure-sensitive and concealed a similar apparatus. It didn't seem likely.

"I don't know any more than you do. We're looking for more pads like that one, some kind of device that will shock us if we're carrying metal, and eventually, some kind of security system. I don't know if we should take the first pad we come to, or if there's a specific sequence, but without any further direction...." He finished with a small shrug.

As they moved through the door on the right, he didn't say anything else.

[To here.]