At lunchtime, Karyn went to the library to check her email and found what she had suspected. It was a note from Brooke, her girlfriend.
"Karyn! It almost worked, when you came over, but somehow I wasn't able to come back with you. They did something in that lab. Now whenever I'm around them I find myself having to do everything they ask. Please, Karyn, save me..."
Karyn knew that Brooke hadn't been seen around lately. She had gone to the only place she could guess Brooke would be, Eric and Keith's lab. Brooke worked there as a lab assistant. But that lab was so crazy. She had suspected they did some kind of experiment that had hurt Brooke and that's why Brooke had never been seen again.
It turned out she was partly right. Brooke was there at the lab. She acted okay, but seeing Karyn must have given her the courage to at least send Karyn a plea for help... if they had used mind-control to force her to be submissive it would have been incredibly difficult for her to work against them in even this one little way.
How could they do this to someone she cared about?
Karyn's first step was to hide by the lab at least long enough that she could find out exactly what they had done to her girlfriend. She knew where the lab was, but it was on the third floor and hiding outside would be obvious in the daytime. Even in the nighttime there were lights around.
Fortunately, there was also a delivery that day. The delivery people had left a box containing several pieces of equipment outside the lab door. Karyn quickly opened one of them to find as metal cylinder, big enough for her to enter from the top. Perfect! She climbed in and pulled the cylinder lid shut. There was no way to fix the box, but hopefully they wouldn't notice.
A half hour later, Eric and Keith finally ordered Brooke to bring the equipment into the lab and unpack the metal cylinder, which she left to one side. Karyn was able to hear quite a bit. Unfortunately while they gave Brooke orders, they didn't say much about what they had done to Brooke. Until Karyn heard one of them talk about making a wish on a magic rock.... Karyn wasn't sure if that could be real, but she bet it was at least some kind of code word for a scientific instrument. Maybe it was some kind of ray projector disguised as a rock.
So she just had to get out of the metal cylinder, get past Brooke (who probably had orders to catch intruders and couldn't let even her girlfriend go), and steal and use the rock. But that would be far from easy....
