There is a muffled song coming from somewhere. It's not a song she's familiar with. In fact, the whole place is nothing like anything she's familiar with. She seems to be in some metal-and-glass pod, for starters, which is itself inside a rather peculiar...
...room.
There are no doors.
But the portal disappears from the wall before she can go through it again.
She scoops up the radio, and out she goes.
Is there another of those stupid blue sparkle things there.
"Do you have a fond sentimental attachment to the continued existence of this Material Emancipation Grid," she inquires.
"The continued existence of Vital Testing Apparatus is crucial for the safety of test subjects and others."
"And yet," she says. "If I have to go through it, it is not going to be in a condition to emancipate any material at the time."
She really doesn't want to ground-rip another one so soon after the first, though. Her ground is still unpleasantly sparky. So she sits in front of the Emancipation Grid and closes her eyes and inspects it. How does it work? What is the deal with all this not-aliveness? It's almost like - veins or nerves, in an alien metallic sort of way. Maybe she can do the equivalent of severing an animal's spine instead of ripping its whole ground away so it collapses into a pile of dust.
Yep, all these veins and nerves seem to connect to each other and to a single vein/nerve place that leads away from the thing.
Ooh. Tiny metal wires, with the not-aliveness flowing through them, going to all the places where stuff happens...
She retreats around a corner again, but this time reaches out much more precisely. Better do both sides at once again, but if all she has to do is cut a few wires on either side...
The power goes dead instantly on both the wall fixtures. She barely even winces. A couple tiny morsels of copper is nothing compared to last time. She can still see the previous set of wall fixtures splattered across her ground, slowly being absorbed.
"For your safety and the safety of others, do not disable Vital Testing Apparatus."
"You have totally failed to convince me of the safety of the Vital Testing Apparatus."
To the elevator! With her mug and her knife and her radio and all of her teeth!
"You're doing very well!" the voice says when she reaches the next floor. The sign, no highlighted hazards again, is on the wall to the left. Directly ahead there is a window that lets her see the test chamber.
There is a weird machine in the middle, being rotated clockwise and pausing every ninety degrees to shoot a beam of blue light. When that beam hits a wall, a blue portal disappears from where it previously was and appears there. To her right there are descending stairs that turn left to an empty corridor.
The portal-shooting thingy rotates once more, pointing in the direction of the wall between it and the empty corridor Sable can descend to, and there's a tiny square aperture on that wall. The thingy shoots a portal through the hole and a portal appears on the wall Sable can access.
Unsurprisingly enough, she steps out of the orange end of the portal, from which she can step down into the room where the thingy is. There's a door to her right, between her and the chamber's exit.
The thingy seems designed to be held: it has a place she can stick her hand into and something to hold with her hand in there and a little trigger thingy for her index finger.
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