"Sheesh! Don't you guys carrying anything?" Arlo grumbles.

"I've got some wire about that size. I can twist it into three prongs that should do the trick."

As he says that, he pulls out the can of spray paint and paints the number 1 on the first door. He half expects the paint not to stick to the door, or else some effect wipes it away as soon as it's on.

After he does that, he passes the can to Steve, and then pulls out the wire he mentioned and begins working with it.

Steve takes the can from Arlo and, grinning widely (though it may not be discernible through the helmet), starts spray painting numbers on all the doors. He makes them a bit smaller than Arlo did to try and make what little paint is in the can last.

"You got a point there, Arlo," he comments as he and Arlo work. "What we carry is a wide range of other stuff. Didn't really expect to need something so detailed. I didn't bring any paperclips or bubble gum either."

"He could make a bomb out of that!" Harry grinned inside his helmet.

In reply to Harry McStubbin (msg # 294):

"Need a hand Arlo? I'm willing to try and help if you do."

He'd just finished twisting the wires together, held it up to the door and adjusted them to fit in the three holes.

"I'm not fastening the other ends together until I'm sure there's no current coming through," Arlo explains to Roland.

"I'll use the VOM on them first to determine if there's current and what kind of resistance there is. If resistance is high, then it doesn't need  current--it's probably just a mechanical release. Makes me wonder if these aliens had fingers like that."

After connecting the twisted ends to his VOM, he then slowly inserts the wires into the holes. He has the VOM dialed up to the highest setting, just in case, and then slowly starts dialing it back down.

"No current, high resistance. I think it's just a latch."

He pushes the wires in a bit farther, and then says:

"Okay, someone try to slide the door aside... or even up!"

In reply to Arlo Thresh (msg # 296):

Roland tries to open the door in all directions, in, out, up, down and left and right.

Without visible hinges (though hidden hinges are always possible) and with the door recessed inside the casing, it has the appearance of a sliding door.

Roland places his hands on the door and tries to slide the door, succeeding when he pushes it to the left. It's a bit of a pain at first until the right hand edge comes into sight and he can slip his fingers over it and pull it open to the left.

There's a dim (emergency?) light in the room beyond, just enough to show that it is some sort of laboratory. It looks like some sort of electronics or physics lab, rather than, say, a chemistry lab.

There are banks of electronic equipment against both side walls and the back wall, though the middle of the back wall has a door in it. Two tables are in the room, running length-wise on the left and right. There is what appears to be a desk to either side of the door.

While the equipment is clearly electronic in nature, there is something just a little bit odd about it.

The tables, or perhaps they are counters, seem a bit high. That makes you notice that the ceiling is a bit higher than it needs to be. The emergency lighting comes from a narrow of tubing (?) that runs along the ceiling-wall seam on either side. And you now realize that there is no sign of light fixtures in the room.

In reply to StarMaster (msg # 298):

Harry steps in to investigate. Leaving Roland to hold the door to make sure it didn't close and lock. He used his equipment to film the room and make a record of it as he went around.

Forge looked into the for something to wedge the open before entering.
"Whoever used this place before must have been taller than us, judging from the height of these counters. Might see if we can find something in here with wheels or such so we can take anything that is not bolted down." he suggested

Harry and Roland continue to look, at and for everything including a cart as Forge mentioned.

Oddly, there are no chairs in the room, which would be a logical item to wedge in the open door. The best you can come up with is one of the smaller devices on the counter. None of them seem to be bolted down. Anything that could shake the room enough to knock a device off the counter would probably be doing a lot more damage to the whole facility.

"Stating to feel like we should have brought a shopping cart!" Arc comments as he looks around as well.

"I can't tell what any of this equipment does, but it looks kind of familiar yet strange. Really, if you think about it, would an alien popsicle look any different than one we'd eat? Same for a lot of stuff."

"If one of these doohickeys measures radiation, for instance, that'd look kind of familiar, right? But the symbols would all be different. And they might use a different scale... base 8 or base 12. Hell, for that matter, they could use base 7 or 17 because they are prime numbers."

He attempts to pick up one the devices that's about the size of a breadbox and haul it over to the door.

Roland searches the counters as well with Arc, looking to see what is in the room.

The item Arc selected lifts easily enough in the light gravity, and he carries it over to the door and sets it on the floor between the door and the jamb to keep the door from closing.

While it is 'lightweight', he can tell it has mass to it, meaning it is probably fairly dense and therefore sturdy enough to hold the door. If it isn't, then those doors are super dangerous!

Roland doesn't really see anything different from another angle.

A few of the larger pieces of equipment are sitting atop metal cabinets that appear to have storage space underneath, but all the ones in this room are empty except for a lone beaker with a strange funnel-like top.

He does get the impression, though, that this is a materials lab... meant to analyze various substances.

In reply to StarMaster (msg # 305):

"Should we go to the next room then?"

"I like the shopping cart idea," he commented as they all looked around the room. "We could pile a lot of this into it. Getting it back to the ship could be a problem, though."

"You'd think some of it would be valuable, though, right? The archaeological sophontologists construct an entire species and culture based on their artifacts. Of course, that's mostly pottery shards. A place like this would have them... well, let's just say it would be ecstatic! Heh-heh."

"Sure, next room. Hopefully, Arlo's makeshift key will work on that one, too. Just a reminder to everyone: just because one door works one way doesn't mean every door will work that way. Remember, these are aliens. At least, we assume they are. The next door may have 4 holes, or an eye scanner or a pull cord! Until we have enough evidence to decide they think like us, ASSUME that they don't!"

"Since the door is open, let's drag the stuff out to the main hallway and pick it up on the way out." Forge suggested.

In reply to 'Forge' Harris (msg # 308):

"Good idea!" Roland and Harry carry and drag stuff into the hall.

As Harry and Roland drag equipment out into the hall, they quickly realize that there is a lot more equipment than will fit into the hallway conveniently.

Meanwhile, Forge, Steve, Arc and Arlo move on to the next door on the same wall. It, too, has the three little holes, and Arlo's 'wire-key' does the trick again. This is another 'lab'. Or maybe it's more of a machine shop. The apparatus in here all seems oriented toward mechanical things, though clearly not vehicles.

The equipment in here is more readily identifiable, such as a metal lathe and the tools you'd use to shape the metal. Most of these items would have a sale value of about 600-800 credits for normal stuff. If this alien, that could double or triple it... to a collector or even a museum.

At this point, you can see the central 'door' in the opposite wall of the hallway--it's clearly an airlock door, though it still looks like the other doors, except it has a large window in it.

There are doors on the opposite wall of the hallway, too, but Harry and Roland seem intent on blocking them with equipment.

"Lets leave it, too much and we need a passage through too." Harry says to Roland.

In reply to Harry McStubbin (msg # 311):

"You're right, hang it all. Machine shop is nice!"

"If we can find a way for craft to use it, it might still useful as a base for the local forces." Forge suggested as they made their way through the place.

"I don't know about that," Arlo answers Forge.

"It's more like a spy base. Unless there's more to this base than we've yet discovered, I don't see how any ships could get in here."

"It was clearly a mine, but it also looks like some research was being done here. That means it was either corporate or government. Well, or alien. It might have made sense to an alien mind or culture. Consolidated effort... that sort of thing."

Due to his general hunting experience, where you always clean up your campsite before you leave, Arc first notices that there's no scrap, trash or waste in the two rooms. It wasn't obvious in the first room, but in this one, he was almost expecting it.

The second thing he notices is that there are no raw materials.

And thirdly, he realizes that the benches and counter and cabinets are all made of some synthetic material. It could be plastic (one of the hundreds possible), but it could also be composite. In particular, there is no wood. Anywhere.

As ARC notices these things, a puzzled expression crosses his face.

He then points his observations out to the others.

"Neatness counts, of course. Keeping this place clean is a good way to prolong the life of the machinery. Nothing to gum up the works," he comments.

"And in a sealed environment like this, that's almost mandatory."

"However, it would also seem to indicate that when the aliens left this base, they did so in an orderly and methodical way. It wasn't abandoned in a hurry. They might have taken all the raw materials, but don't know why they wouldn't take the equipment... unless they were planning on coming back."

"On the other hand, I don't even see any place for storing raw materials. I mean, there are a few pockets that could hold rods and bars and such, but that hardly seems sufficient."

"Are we missing something?"