Night 75: West Wing, North Hall 3-B (third floor)

[redcladidealist]

[From here.]

The room Lloyd stepped into was a whole lot larger than the one they'd just left behind. It almost felt like a hall, especially with all the doors Lloyd could see - one, two, a third... maybe four? It was hard to see around the corner into what looked like a little side hall. It wasn't as long as the other halls in the Institute, though, and there were a few pieces of furniture - rolling carts with lab equipment, crookedly parked as though hastily left behind. Something about that bothered Lloyd, but he didn't think about it for long. There wasn't any sight of the next warp pad, and that's what they needed to keep their minds on.

"Everyone pick a door," he suggested softly, moving toward the nearest one. "Call out if you find anything. But don't split up." It would be bad if something attacked while one of them was too far from the others to be helped.

Comments

[fourstonewalls]

They'd stopped pointing out the obvious to each other; now they trailed along silently in Lloyd and Castiel's wake, letting them handle the locked doors. Lana preferred the running commentary, if she was honest about it. It was comfortingly familiar, if bordering on juvenile at times. Scientifically speaking, facts can't be whining, she could almost hear Ema arguing. One had nothing to do with the other, but sometimes it took trying out a few leaps of logic to find the truth.

She couldn't lose herself in thoughts of more pleasant times for very long, though; the second door opened on a large, empty space. Or, at least, a larger and emptier space; it was still rather cluttered, as if recently abandoned, and just large enough to be unnerving rather than spacious.

She raised her eyebrows at Ryuuzaki, before pivoting and walking towards the second door. The knob turned in her hand. "This one's open," she called out, loudly enough for everyone to hear.

[ryuuzaki]

The decontamination area they'd walked through had been dry, which meant that the likelihood they'd picked up anything nasty was small. He hoped. It raised a question: when all of this was over, if they survived, would they be able to clean themselves up?

A lot of doors in the next area, and evidence of hasty abandonment, probably recent. The kind of equipment used by people, not creatures. That could mean a couple of things. Someone might be hiding -- that caused L to keep his hand on his pistol. That, or they'd used the pads themselves. With the banging and scraping at some of the doors, he doubted that anyone sentient would have chosen to run into the halls... and if they had, why would they have locked the area behind them? No, it was more likely that they were behind one of these doors, or that they had already used the pads to go ahead to another area.

He followed Lana to the second door. At a better time, the little quirk of her eyebrow might have amused him: they communicated well, but it was at the cost of her sometimes treating him like a working dog.

The small room itself, when he cleared it with the beam of his torch, appeared to be empty. It was obviously used primarily to store chemicals -- the suggestion that the showers nearby were to remove chemical agents rather than biological ones quashed most of his remaining worries about having walked through the decontamination area itself.

Lack of a purple glow meant the pad wasn't here, either, which meant that the area was of little interest for now. They didn't have time to go through the cabinets, and it was probably nothing they hadn't seen before.

"Nothing," he called out, then dropped his voice to speak more directly to Lana. "Where next?" They were close to at least two more doors, and he was content to let her take the lead, for now.

He'd found that he hadn't liked it when Lana was injured, but it was still always better if someone else was the first to open a door.

[freewill]

Castiel also took note of how this area looked as if it had been abandoned, and in a hurry. The door they were able to open (the first appeared locked, though possibly able to be broken through) looked like yet another workroom for scientists.

Since it didn't offer them a path through, Castiel ignored it and moved to one of the northward doors. The one on the right refused to budge, and while they would need to try and force their way in if they had no other option, he would rather search every door first.

So he moved onto the next one. While Lloyd worked on the lock of the first door, Castiel attempted to get through this one. He'd grown tired of breaking locks, especially when it wasn't that much of a barrier, although it would have been even easier if he'd had his powers on hand to blast through in a second or two.

The room inside was sizable and filled with a few different things: another chamber like the one that had attempted to suffocate them, along with a refrigerated area for what looked to be live samples. Of what, Castiel had no idea, and he imagined that was probably for the best.

But what stood out the most was the warp pad which bathed the whole room in that familiar purple glow. "Here," he called to the others. "A way through."

[redcladidealist]

The lock on Lloyd's door was stubbornly resisting his attempts to break it open. He was pretty sure it was about to give at any moment, but he hadn't yet managed it by the time Castiel called their attention to him.

Lloyd perked up. "You found a warp pad?" Immediately he abandoned his attempts at his won door and moved across the room to join Castiel. His eyes darted down the short hall to the right, still nervous after the monster they'd left behind not long before, but eagerness to keep moving prompted him to toss some caution to the wind, and he took the initiative to pass Castiel and step into the next room.

[To here.]