Study participant

You seem to have been walking down these stairs for a while now. "Long way down huh?" You attempt again to start up a conversation with your guide. She turns back from a couple steps ahead of you but doesn't break her stride as she continues to head down without misplacing her feet once. She frowns as if you interupted her thoughts. "Yes." Another conversational dead end.

You're starting to wonder if you should have read the documents you signed a little closer. Research trial... blah blah blah... reasonable compensation... blah blah... an amount of money which struck you as generous but not suspiciously high compared to the amount you'd got for other trials you'd done... blah blah. All of the previous ones have sort of blurred together and you assumed injections were the worst you'd really be exposed to. Maybe some terrifying questionnaires and a rectal thermometer or two. But now you were heading down, way down. Your and the assistants footsteps echoing oddly in the open space of the many steps behind and ahead of you. And you'd started at ground level. Why would this research need to be so far underground? You're weighing up how desperately you really need this money, but have to admit you'll need to see something a little more substantial than a big staircase and an almost mute assistant before you would consider coming up with excuses. Because at the end of the day you do need that money.

You're doing a bad job of trying to not think about your finances and the choices that led you here when you realise you've reached a landing, finally. You turn to look up back the way you've come, the stairs stretch all the way up in a straight line to the distant door that leads the waiting room you initially walked into. A small part of you wonders if the study was 'how many steps down an endless clinical looking staircase with no turns will participants take before giving up'. With this thought in mind as you turn you're glad to see the assistant opening one of the doors on this level rather than leading down the next staircase which doubles back the way you came. She gestures to you to head inside and something about the way she holds to door makes you think this is as far as she goes.