Wailing steel awakens you, your fitful sleep undone by the rising tempo of the tracks. Through the open doors of the empty freight car, you see the scenery pass by in a blur. The moonlight fails to pierce the canopy of the trees that loom over. Your joints loudly creak as you stand, barely passing the test of time.
The train curves endlessly to the right, eternally curving into the forest steadily. Carefully extending your head out, you see the next car ahead, windowless and tubular, its steel exterior spotless and white as snow, while the one behind is soot black.
You move back inside where a single door is found, and it leads forward. As you stand in front of it, the world whirrs into life. A blank display lights up slowly. In a quickening cascade, a pattern begins to emerge. Below it is a keyboard; above it is a blinking space hinting at a missing key.
>[Passcode]
>>1146435
>easy
The screen flickers and shuts off, the door breaking apart and sliding into the walls in fourths. You walk through, and it shuts once more. Walls curving into a perfect cylinder, it is when you step to the side that you realize you fail to discern the ceiling from the floor, the sky from the ground, the world above and the world below. Gravity pulls at you equally at all turns.
Your eyelids slowly shut, but the rhythm of the wheels cruising along the rails opens them again. When did you get here?
Another screen appears. Yet another pattern.
>[Passcode]
>>1146487
hello wanderer
It signals completion when it retracts again. Gears and pneumatics shift as the entire wall separates. Latches undo themselves as the gate opens like a camera aperture, curving to the right to another room.
It is similar to the one before, indistinguishable if it were not for the slight gradient of the interior as white transitions into a soft green.
You notice your assistant is gone. It’s been quite a while now. Your head aches with a dull buzz when you attempt to remember her name.
>[Passcode]
>>1146965
Attack