Alice glances around the room, her eyes take in the various people milling around. Everyone seems to be settling in to some extent in bigger or smaller groups. Zahn, of course, was pretty close to her. Her eyes stop when she notices two new students walking in the door, one with a backpack on. Something about them reminds her a bit of Zahn, not in his melancholy moods but when he was excited about some project or another. "Hi there," she says walking over. "Welcome to the Interdisciplinary Meetup group. I'm one of the organizers Alice and this is my friend Zahn."
Zahn opens the door, revealing an enormous hexagonal room. Four of the walls have hallways off of them while the opposite has a door like the one they came out of. The floor has a pattern with six nested spirals on it and in the center is a circular ramp that looks to lead down to lower floors. The ceiling is an enormous skylight that give a view of the overcast sky above. "Well, this looks to be a pretty big place. Any preferences on where we go first? One of the hallways, the opposite door or down the ramp?"
Alice nods and takes the lead while Zahn hold the door. The first hallway has doors to six bedrooms. Each bedroom has a King size bed, a large desk, a dresser and a wardrobe. "Well this place continues to be ridiculously luxurious, each of these has to be more than twice the size of my dorm room."
"If this really is a frat house, bedrooms are kind of expected. But nobody's here, they don't look occupied. Next hall, bet it's the same."
"No bet." Alice continues to lead the way, and true to Nick's prediction the next hall has slightly different furniture but it is otherwise identical.
Alice opens the door to reveal a huge bathroom, with a large deficit in privacy dividers. Mercifully the six stalls off to the right had stalls surrounding them but the sinks further on, the showers in the middle of the room, the jacuzi-style tubs off to the left and the laundry machines mounted in the back wall all lacked any kind of affordances for privacy. "Well, whoever designed this place didn't design it with mixed-gender residents in mind."
"...Army barracks tend to be arranged like this from what my cousin tells me. Except no tubs and barely any showers. And the laundry machines, that's just weird."
"Laundry rooms are often near bathrooms in single family homes. Not generally in a place you need to walk past showers to get to but it has some similarity."
"At this point, a part of me is starting to come back around to the idea of aliens, but that might be my inner sci-fi fan talking."
The other two hallways mirror the ones they've already visited. If they travel down the ramp they'll have the option to stop at the next floor down or proceed further. "What do you think? Should we see what's at the bottom first or work our way down one floor at a time?"
The door directly opposite the ramp entrance reveals a medium greenhouse-type room lit by daylight bulbs. Right by the entrance there are a number of bins which when opened prove to be filled with fruits and vegetables. Walking through the rows they'll find familiar plants like potatoes, asparagus and tomatoes, and lettuce along with less familiar plants like the one with the orange berries or this other one with the large blue leaves. "Well this looks to be a renewable source of food, if we can figure out how to harvest and replant it."
"I wonder who or what filled those bins, something has to have been tending this garden before we arrived. I wonder if whatever it is will continue to do so."
"I have some concerns about the berries. Weird berries are frequently poisonous in the wild."
Nick has a hunch and peers around for evidence of robots. Strange boxes in out of the way locations? Wires and such? A small door somewhere?
There are in fact several large circles etched into the floor that on closer inspection might be hatches. If Nick thinks back he might remember similar etchings in other areas they've already explored, mostly on various walls. "What are you looking for Nick?"
Zahn kneels down to look where he's pointing. "Maybe, not from this side, but if it's robots or something tending the garden I'd assume that it's opened by an automated mechanism."