More fun
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Chapter 23 by south_paw south_paw

Where will you go next?

The grey metal door.

The next door you pick looks pretty darn serious. It's a big metal bulkhead thing with a chunky, rubber-insulated handle and what looks like rubber insulation all the way around it. At first you're not sure that it's a door you can even choose - it looks like it could be an electrical service hatch or something - but it's in between two other doors so you decide to give it a shot. The handle takes a little muscle to move, but it opens smoothly enough.

The room behind it is so cluttered and claustrophobic that you suddenly get the strongest feeling that you must be underground. A few dim yellow light bulbs shed some illumination on the room, but most of the light comes from the innumerable flickering displays and LEDs of the crazy electronic equipment that's piled up on shelves all around you.

No walls are visible, everything is just floor-to-ceiling iron shelving units stacked up with circuit boards and monitors and the cracked plastic shells of a million dead appliances. Or not quite dead - most of them are still blinking, twitching away, possibly fighting for life.

There's a big wooden table in the middle of all this - that too piled high with electronic detritus. And on the other side of the table from you there's a girl. Because of the dim light in the rest of the room and the bright work light in front of her, you can't see much more than a silhouette, but you get the impression that she's pretty skinny, with messy, dirty blonde hair kept off of her head with a pair of pushed-back goggles. As your eyes adjust you see she's wearing a simple sleeveless cotton top, and her arms are bare. She has her back to you and she's hunching over a desk, working on something. An electronics whizz huh? This could be interesting...

She's wearing headphones too, or ear protectors or something, and she doesn't look like she's heard you come in. This could be the first time you can take advantage of the element of surprise.

Hang back or try to sneak up on her?

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