[A day prior]
It was a surprisingly rainless Sunday at New Oak. The sun peaked through the clouds. The footways weren't flooded. There was a surprising humid warmth in the air for September. Kelly laced her sneakers tightly, slung a messenger bag over her shoulder, and headed out for an adventure.
The old campus was in shambles. Buildings were caved in on themselves from water-damage, concrete sidewalks and asphalt roads were splintered and cracked, and vegetation clung to every surface. There's something beautiful about it, even when it isn't so bright out.
She spent her early morning finishing off an essay for one of her French language classes in a collapsed planetarium in the astrology building; it was one of her favorite spots. Ten pages, hand-written, no English. At the end of it, she could barely think her native tongue.
After, she spent time splunking in an old gymnasium. Slipping her small crowbar from her bag, she set to work jimmying lockers in the changing rooms. Her efforts went unrewarded, many of the lockers were long since emptied out. A few held ratty old gymwear that was mid journey toward either becoming rat nests or assimilating with mildew around it. So, she moved on to the physics building.
Navigating the halls, she found that part of the building was in remarkable condition. While the outermost halls of its frankly labyrinthine layout were just as rotted, rusted, rank as the gymnasium, some of the innermost halls were nearly pristine and clearly well maintained. Most pristine were the halls that centered on one room with one door. Curious, Kelly tried the knob - unlocked.
"Fait chier!"
She pulled away from the unlocked door. It was unlatched, unbolted, unbarred. How could she get in? Perhaps with other unlocked doors, entry was simple, but with this one, Kelly's perception was at odds with reality itself. Picking the lock was useless; she couldn't reach the tumblers in its unlocked position. Prying with her crowbar yielded a similar result; without so much as a pop, the door swung open wide. Not only was the door unlocked, but it was wide open, too? Kelly exhaled. This would take some effort.
As she sat, contemplating how to break into an open room, a figure wordlessly approached the open doorframe from the other side. She was a young woman with typical angular features, broad shoulders, narrow hips. She was dressed in an open-back hospital gown, barefoot. On anyone else, those gowns would probably make the wearer look as if they were a patient being prepped for surgery, but on this girl, it was clearly just an everyday regular fashion choice. In other words, there was nothing out of the ordinary regarding her clothes. Her demeaner was meek and somewhat nervous and, silently, she halted her cautious approach right where the door would be, had it been closed.
"Ça alors! Are you okay? Are you trapped in there?" Kelly spoke through the open portal.
"안녕하세요. 제가 여기 갇혔어요. 도와주실 수 있나요?" says the girl.
Kelly narrowed her eyes. "Say again? I didn't catch that." She knew the girl was speaking English, that much was obvious, but she couldn't make out the words.
"당신을 이해할 수 없어요. 당신도 영어를 말하고 있잖아요, 맞죠?"
"Hmm..." Kelly pulled a notepad and pen from her bag, proceeding to scribble out a brief inquiry onto a mostly blank page. Then, lowering to the ground, she attempts to slide the notepad and pen under the threshold of the wide-open door. It slid across the floor surprisingly effortlessly; for a moment, Kelly hadn't thought it would fit.
The girl in the fashionable but casual patient gown squatted to the floor and reads Kelly's note: 'Can you read this?' Excitedly, she nodded. Of course she could read it; it was in English, afterall! She jotted a response and sent the notepad sliding back to Kelly through the open doorframe.
'Can you get me out of here? The door's stuck unlocked.'
The notepad slid back to the girl.
'Stand back. I'll try to bash it down.'
Wide-eyed, the girl stands up and quickly backs away from the door. Kelly wasn't the largest or the strongest, but she couldn't think of another approach. She backed against the wall behind her and, following a huff of effort, Kelly launched herself at the open doorway. When there was no contact with the open space where the door once was, she stumbled, tripped, and tumbled, contacting the floor instead. She was inside! And the door was still wide-open behind her? How was that possible?
The wide-eyed male-figured gown-clad barefoot girl padded hesitantly toward the open door and, experimentally, waved her hand through the open doorway, retracting it in fear almost immediately. Much like when the student on the floor lunged through, no contact with the open doorway was made. It was as if it were nothing but air. Realization. She then, gathering her courage, hopped through the open doorway to the hallway on the other side. Following a brief check of herself to be sure she was really, truly okay after seemingly phasing through a solid open doorway, she grinned triumphantly at Kelly from the hall.
"다시는 문을 믿지 못할지도 모르겠어. 고마워," she mumbled softly in what Kelly guessed must be thanks before dashing swiftly down the hall and out of sight.
"What the heck just happened?" Grumbled the language student as she picked herself up from the floor. After lightly dusting off her clothes and snatching her notebook off the floor, Kelly turned her attention to her new surroundings. Scanning the room, she noted very little of interest. It, oddly enough, looked to be a simple highschool nurse's office. Why it was in a university physics building, she couldn't say. That's not to say it didn't belong, of course it did, but it certainly wasn't what she expected to find. At a glance, the only thing of note was gurney sitting to one side. It looked particularly well-used. Kelly shuddered, but didn't know why. A gurney in a nurse's office wasn't a particularly sinister thing, and yet it made her skin crawl.
Hanging on one of the walls was a simple wall safe: sealed, barred, locked tight via a small in-built padlock. Kelly supposed no one could blame her for poking around, considering it was left latched like this. With a shrug, she tugs on the safe handle. Strangely, despite being locked, it doesn't budge. She exhales. "You remind me of a door I know."
A moment's consideration leads to a wry grin. "Maybe I'll treat you like you're unlocked, despite being locked." The whole premise seemed absurd, breaking a padlock that was already secured, but perception perplexities aside, the built-in padlock looked fairly flimsy, and she had a crowbar. Following a satisfying thwack, the in-built padlock popped inward, clattering around the inside of the safe. The safe door slowly swung open to reveal it: the bizzare remote.
It was love at first sight. It was an big chuncky piece of hand-held machinery, amateurishly cobbled together with no sign of cohesive design or artistry. It was elegantly ugly and primitively advanced. With it, sat a manual, however, it proved to be just as unreadable as the girl's speech was unintelligible, despite being printed in what appeared to be immaculate english characters. She pocketed the manual in her satchel, and curiously booted up the remote with a whir, causing text to dance into being in its foggy LED display. Fixated on the device, she fearlessly stepped back out through the curious open door and directly into the line of sight of a large lumbering janitor.
A janitor? Why would he be in the halls of the abandoned physics building? Why would he be on the old campus at all?
"You there!" He growled through stained teeth and a freshly lit cigarette. "What're you doin' here? The good doctor's office is off-limits. Don't you see the open door?"
"I... there was a girl trapped in there," Kelly's tongue stumbled over jangled trembling words. Slowly and, she hoped, naturally, she obscures the device behind her satchel. "She's out now."
"What's that you got there, little thief?" He smoke pours from his cracked lips and flaring nostrils. He marches toward her with an accelerating stride. "Takin' the good doctor's belongings, are we?"
With a nervous "Eep!", Kelly sprinted in the opposite direction. She didn't know what he would do if he caught her, and she certainly didn't want to find out. With every step, through narrow twisting corridors, she could feel the impact of her shoes striking the old floor shoot up through her legs. With every breath, she could feel the beat of her heart pounding in her head. The janitor gained. Though he started much slower than she, his speed continued to grow with time. Though Kelly started at a dash, she could feel herself begin to slow. Before she knew it, however, she was out of the building, colliding with another woman and tumbling to the filthy sidewalk.
The woman was a strikingly beautiful forty-something with deep black hair pulled tight into a bun and gleaming eyes that screamed they knew something others didn't. She had on a simple skirt suit, professional ankle boots, and a labcoat. As she fell, she dropped a manila folder, scattering various documents and diagrams everywhere.
"I-I'm sorry," says a scattered Kelly, partway through an attempt to pull herself back up to her feet. Her eyes caught glimpse of the countless documents and noted that, like the manual, they were illegible. "I didn't mean to..."
Before the woman on the ground could say anything, and before Kelly could fully recompose herself, she heard the echoes pounding of rubber custodial boots approaching from the darkened hall behind her. Eyes wide, she grabbed the device from where it had fallen with her.
ding
The sprinting janitor tripped over the heel of his professional ankle boots, tumbling to a stop at the doorway of the physics building. Kelly took the opportunity to disappear in the direction of the new campus whilest the large man cursed his impractical uniform footwear.
Kelly didn't stop running until she fell to her knees, wheezing breathlessly, her heart still pounding in her ears. Between coughs and gasps, her wheezing turned to laughing. "I did it," her ribs rattled. "I got away!" She looked at the jumbled device in her hand, finally noticing the text readout on the faded display.
"Subjects: [redacted data], Jim Reid,"
"Aspect: Footwear,"
"Aware: Kelly Atwell (user),"
"Unaware: Else," said the machine.
Kelly chuckled. "Shoes? Is that why he tripped? You saved me, little machine."
~~
