Take it slow and steady but it doesn’t really help matters.

You sit back in your control room, a little disappointed in your little Pet. You had completely and totally hoped that she would either choose to get hopelessly bound up in the rose bushes or run haphazardly into more danger. Instead she carefully and steadily made her way down the first stretch of the walkway at a snail’s pace. It was really too bad considering you had several fun little devices you had hoped to use on her just around the second corner but at this rate, it could an hour for her to get to even the first one. No, you needed to interfere in order to keep things interesting, and it just so happened that you had the perfect thing for this kind of situation. If she was going to be difficult so could you. All you had to do was wait the several minutes it would take for her to creep down the path to a particular eight foot section right at just past the three quarter mark of the hallway. You slid your hand to a small keyboard the controlled every aspect of the greenhouse’s mechanisms and your finger hovered anxiously over a little blue button, feeling like a hunter waiting for your target to get within your crosshairs.

Velma took forever to advance, just waiting for something, anything to happen as she bounced along the soft rubber pathway. Nothing had happened thus far but that didn’t mean much. She knew from experience that it was usually right when you got the feeling that you were safe that things suddenly went wrong. She had mostly crossed the first stretch and she felt confident about making it to the first turn; only about 15 feet away now. She cautiously stepped as if the entire path was made of landmines, aware she could trigger a trap with every minute movement and her eyes darted up down sideways and behind her, afraid she might break a tiny tripwire. She had no idea that she didn’t need to worry about triggering anything herself. What was about to happen next was truly beyond her control.

Velma finally entered what you considered the kill zone and barely took another tentative step before you pushed the button. The floor beneath her tilted towards the startled girl, forcing her to fall forward before sliding feet first down the hidden slide, hopelessly trying to claw her way up the steep slope as she slid into the bowels of your mansion.

Velma let out a scream as she slid through pure darkness, having no idea what she had done or where she was headed. The drop was too steep and the width of the chute too wide to try and catch or brace herself against the walls, not that she could see the walls in any case. There were no turns or curves, she just careened down a cold metal slide for nearly 20 seconds before a flash of light foretold the end of her brief journey as she came flying out of the tunnel and free fell for a few terrifying seconds. She was unable to really observe her surroundings in any real detail; her world was a spinning flash of greenish blue light before she finally plummeted into a body of cold water. The sudden landing and the chill of the water sent greats shocks of electricity through her entire body. She tried hard not to inhale a lungful of water as she slowly sunk to the bottom of the pool, her bearings totally lost. She was quick to hit the bottom, indicating the pool wasn’t that deep and she quickly got her feet under her and kicked off, more out of instinct than anything else. She broke the surface of the water easily and gasped for air, quickly clawing through the water to the edge of the pool. She felt solid ground and managed to crawl out of the water and curled up into a tight ball, shivering with cold, her clothing completely waterlogged and now freezing.

She tried to look around and figure out where she wound up when she felt her stomach lurch with a new terror. She mostly had her eyes closed as she managed to tread water and the cold had distracted her from the fact that she seemed to have lost her glasses in the fall, literally just about the worst thing she could have imagined, save landing in a pool of piranha or a shark tank that is. She could only make out turquoise splashes of color and many dark indistinct shapes. The only true thing she could make out was the rippling reflective pool of water which broke her fall. As the cold air began to increasingly wear on her resolve, she realized she had a daunting task in front of her. The air down here was crisp but there was no breeze and if it weren’t for the sudden dip onto what she assumed was ice water, it wasn’t necessarily that cold. She needed her glasses, that wasn’t even remotely up for debate but at the same time, going back into the water to try and recover them could give her far more serious problems than just a mansion designed to wane on her sanity. Then again, if she actually tried to go ahead and sacrifice her ability to see, she was sure she had no chance of making through another challenge, no matter how simple it might have otherwise been. She silently cursed herself and wondered why she didn’t just pick the rose bushes.