A bottling room.

She slides down from the top of the wall into a massive room. Her feet land on a large wooden crate, the sound reverberating off the walls. The sound echoes as she stands still, seeing if anything stirs from her disturbance. Nothing.

Looking down, she stands upon piles of crates that are stacked neatly along the wall. Navigating a path, she climbs down to the floor. She turns back and reads that all of those crates are marked as Fragile: Glassware.

Kara investigates a nearby crate with the lid ajar, and inside are a bunch of empty glass soda bottles. She picks one up and reads the label that has been printed on already: Cooling Mist Cola.

Kara gasps.

“Aw! I used to love these! I didn’t know they were made here.” a smile appears on her face as she reminisces the times she would drink these with friends on a hot summer night.

She sets the bottle down on the lid of the crate.

“Focus Kara, where’s that cat?”

She turns to face the room and sees multiple conveyor belts that are still loaded with empty glass bottles. Each look as if they were stopped mid operation, bottles at different stages in the conveyor process. All of the bottles are empty however, as if empty bottles were being packaged up. Her attention turns to the thin layer of dust that has settled across the entire room. She looks down and sees paw prints that lead further into the factory.

“Oh oh oh, I got you now kitty.”

She glued her eyes to the ground as she followed the dust trail the cat had left behind. She walked across the entire room before she bumped her head into something.

“Ow! What the?”

Looking up, a pile of crates had fallen across a set of doors which lead further inside. She gets down on her knees to look down at the gap and sees that the cat has taken the keys through the fallen debris onward through those doors.

“Damn it.”

She stands up and brushes dust off of her as she inspects the collapsed stack of crates. She reaches her arms around a sideways crate and attempts to move it. After some nudging, the top of the crate opened, spilling all of its content of glass bottles down. Kara jumped back as she watched a waterfall of bottles fall out and smash into shards all over the debris.

“SHIT!”

She jumps back even further, protecting her face with her arms. After the last of the bottles finally settled, the debris glittered as broken glass now reflected light in all directions. She threw her arms down to her sides as she thought about her options.

Looking around the room, she could see some possible areas that might be a work around for this blockage. Walking back around to the end of the conveyor belts, she notices that there is a narrow gap in between each line for possible workers to pass through. She tucks her bag close to her body as she starts to shuffle her way through. Along the way she looks at all the machines used in the process of bottling. She passes by a bin filled with brightly colored bottle caps.

She makes it to the front where she can see this area was meant for the workers to be. A set of controls are set up in front of each conveyor belt, with rubber mats as spots for the workers to stand. On this side of the room, she can see that each line has a different colored vat for each soda syrup used. Each vat hovers above each conveyor belt and connects through a series of tubes to a contraption she passed by.

Cooling Mist Cola, Red Root Beer, Energy Ball, Flaming Fuel, Electric Sparkle.

She walked across the line, mentally reading each soda flavor, until she got to the end of the room which had completely different bottling machines from the others. A line of tables stood, each with its own small bottling machine. Every table was equipped additionally with a mini fridge and various chemistry equipment. Peering into the fridges, she could see soda flavors that didn’t match the others or any that she has heard of before. Only a few of these bottles sat in each fridge unlike the hundreds waiting on the conveyor lines.

Pearlescent Pear, Melodious Melon, Bountiful Berry, Crystal Clear, X?

The last one wasn’t named like the others, which Kara thought was strange. While looking into the last fridge, her foot accidentally bumped an empty bottle on the ground. She turned her attention to the bottle when it rolled into a set of doors which looked like a path she could take.

“Perfect.”

She took one step forward before she stopped.

...I’m kinda thirsty from all that running earlier.

She turned her attention to the nearby tables of new flavors.

“Which one should I try? No one would mind.”