An invitation to a party appears on various university billboards inviting people to the Kappa Alpha Frat house located in the mostly finished Castle Commonwealth mall on the edge of town. The notice instructs people to follow the access road at 67 Lost Nation drive and enter through the back door and promises that signs will be posted to guide people to the party itself.
"Yeah, or at least that someone or something put a lot of work into setting this place up before we got here."
"So what you're suggesting is that we are in fact rats in a really extensive experiment?"
"That seems...a little overkill for an immediate theory of what the fuck is going on," Joss says, closing the bin, and scanning the greenhouse for anything she might have missed.
"I think saying we're rats in an experiment is too specific, we shouldn't jump to conclusions."
The greenhouse has more plants, and some floor decorations, a couple identical ones distributed around the room are surrounded by grooves while most of the rest aren't, but most of the patterns repeat. The floor gently slopes towards some of those grooved patterns but not all of them.
She moves over to one of the grooved sections trying to figure out if there's any particular pattern to where the floor slopes and where it doesn't.
"We also shouldn't discount any possible explanation to why we're here," Joss admits. "But I want more information before I subscribe to any one theory."
Rex comes back at that point. He gestures slightly. "Doesn't...smell quite right," he murmurs.
The sections that are sloped towards are smaller and they have deeper grooves, they might be drains though more elaborately decorated ones than anything she's seen before. The larger grooved patterns are larger and there's fewer of them. Beyond that there aren't more clues to be found.
"Do you mean the food? I don't remember what greenhouses tend to smell like. As for getting more information, there's more rooms to explore, maybe one of those will have more clues."
Rex shrugs slightly. "It's...more than that," he admits, slightly more cautious now. "I have a very good sense of smell. I would expect to still be able to smell concrete and cement dust from the construction site. I can't."
"Then we should probably go and investigate those," she almost seems to be trying to distract from conversation about Rex's sense of smell.
Alice notes the deflection but doesn't comment. She walks over to the door and pulls it open. "Onto the next room then." The next room is a library. There are stacks along the sides with an area with tables and comfy-looking chairs in the middle. The far wall is a massive window. The wall they enter through has six computers lined up along it three on each side of the door. "Well, I'm not sure if this will have relevant information... but it's definitely pretty dense with some information."
"How do you even figure out how to find out what the relevant information is?" Tamaris asks, although she's eyeing the chairs and the shelves up speculatively. "I mean, we could try an internet search for 'abduction to strangely well appointed so not a frat house'?"
"Tam," Joss chides, striding over to the window - maybe it will give her some idea of their surroundings?
The shelves to the left seem to be filled with fiction books. There isn't any clear ordering but there's some sci-fi some fantasy and some literary, among other genres. To the right seem to be non-fiction books, there are textbooks but a cursory examination will not produce anything that looks out of the ordinary.
The large window reveals a large wall some distance off along with a garden, some small buildings and some sports fields.
"I'm not really sure what might be relevant. Certainly if we notice something out of the ordinary we can pay more attention to it."
"Define 'out of the ordinary'?" Tamaris says distractedly as she continues to lust over the books on the shelves.
"I also tend to find that if something pings as not right I'm paying more attention to it anyway?" Joss comments over her shoulder, a little bit less distracted than Tamaris. "Looks almost...to normal out here. Like someone built an ideal park? With place to do...everything? I dunno."
"It's a park of some sort it looks like, I do notice that there aren't any roads in evidence though. There were windows in the bedrooms upstairs and as I didn't roads in any direction, this building is just surrounded on all sides by park and that wall in the distance. There's also what I think is an olympic sized pool outside on one of the other sides."
"I mean, I've seen estates that you can't see any access roads for, but there's normally one somewhere. Have you found any doors to the outside yet?"
"You've seen as much as we have if you don't count the top floor. We were just stopping back to grab a bit more food and talk before we headed to the lower levels."
"When you're involved, always," she says, bumping their shoulders together. "And I'd prefer to not have to jump out of a window quite a way above the ground."
"I don't think we can gather anything else from here right now. Shall we?"
"We might look at the computers more in depth later but I think it's probably better to do our exploring while it's still daylight." The next room bears some resemblance to a compressed hospital ward, there are beds with various life-support looking monitors around them arranged along most of the walls. The far left corner has what looks to be an infant intensive care unit, and the far right corner has a couple tables with the fittings for telesurgery. In the middle of the room are several other types of tables for things from dentistry to the sort of exam table you'd see in a physician's office. "I'm not sure whether to be reassured or concerned."
"Almost definitely concerned," Tamaris says, moving over to poke at the devices.
(Rex follows her, sticking close now where he hadn't before.)
"Although, I have to wonder why on earth they've provided facilities for infants. And the telesurgery equipment seems somewhat more advanced than our current standard."
"Seems like whatever the reason whoever it was had for bringing us here probably wants us healthy. Or the lab rat thought was accurate and they intend to cut us open to see how we work."
She grimaces when Rex makes a quiet, distressed noise, and Tamaris shoots her a dark look.
"Does there seem to be a standard first aid kit? This is all well and good, but really, sometimes you just need a bandaid and some antiseptic cream."
Looking around the room there aren't first aid kits in evidence. "I think if this place was intended to cut us open it wouldn't be shown to us like this. But maybe I'm being overly optimistic."
"The lack of first aid kits is really weird now that you mention it. This place looks like a clinic with no storage for medical supplies of any kind."