Winter stood there, in that empty room, and pondered how she could have possibly gotten there. She seemed to have been placed in this room with no distinguishing features without any mental state, as some bizarre god would start a Turing machine with a blank tape. She thought through all her memories and tried to identify any salient facts she could. The first thing she was able to find in her inexplicably blank mind was that she had friends. She knew she had friends and she knew she loved her friends. She had, however, little success dragging any other facts from her memory.
After spending several minutes attempting to gain some insight into her present situation by analyzing her internal state, and having those efforts proven entirely fruitless, she decided to attempt to learn something by analysis of her external circumstances. The room was square, and she estimated that she could lay twice in it head to toe along a wall and roughly approximate the dimensions. The walls were white, as was the floor, and if there was a ceiling above her head, or simply a white horizon, she was unable to discern which.
Curious. she said. She reflected on the irony that this room was in fact one of the least curious things she had ever seen, but cut herself off when she started getting distracted by the meta-irony that she couldn't remember ever having seen anything else.
Her clothing was almost as uninteresting as the room. She was clad in plain white hospital robes of some unidentified kind of fabric. She felt the surface of the walls and it was glossy and smooth. No break or seem was to be found in the surface at any point. Having no other readily apparent course of action available to her, she sat in a corner and waited for something to happen.
Nothing did.
Lacking any measure of time except the consistency of her heartbeat the only salient thing to hear in this place of silence and stillness she waited only as long as her patience told her she had not yet reached a state of total boredom. Upon reaching this state, she decided to try and escape this place.
She had no shoes, nor any other implement with which to strike the wall without risk of harm to herself should it prove more durable than she hoped. She decided that she really didn't have any other choice to hope or be injured, so with a sharp smooth motion, she drove her fist into the wall with all her strength.
Her fist passed through the wall with little resistance, leaving a nice clean hole and revealing the compromised wall to consist simply of two panes of what Winter recognized as sheetrock. Peering through the hole she made, she was able to see what appeared to be an abandoned tracklit concrete hallway. No other change seemed to have come over her world as a consequence of her destruction, so she proceeded to create a rough, full size exit from her chamber.
She exited, and proceeded down the hallway for a short distance until it begun to curve to the side. At this point, concerned about traveling blind curves in possibly hostile territory, she made a short leap to the ceiling, the only featured construct she had yet encountered in this place, and grabbed onto a superfluous bit of metal framing holding the long chains of artificial lights in place on the ceiling. The bar was of a small gauge, and torqued downwards under the strain of her weight. With some small amount of effort, she was able to break it loose without harming the lighting.
She reflected that the framing of the lights was terribly unusual: it almost seemed as though there were pieces of metal placed on the roof for no structural reason whatsoever, and it seemed to her unlikely that anything could have been done for aesthetic reasons in this barren place. The curiosity was slightly distressing, but nothing was to be done about it, so she simply filed it as an opportune chance to acquire some sort of equipment beyond her own body and flimsy gown.
Alas, her efforts shortly proved unnecessary, for the next feature she encountered as she proceeded down the hallway was a pair of unadorned concrete chests embedded in the wall at her left. She opened the one closest to her place of origin and found it to be filled with her personal equipment. Her environment suit was there, as were her traveling clothes already packed into her well supplied backpack. Also there was her Guardian knife and her weapon of choice: the katana. Her katana, engraved with the names and emblems of all those she loved. Every name and symbol in the pantheon shone with a blue glow, faint, but filled with intensity. Her friends were safe.
















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