You push the button.

Ding.

The pedestal is gone, and with it goes my desire to describe things to extremes. Let me chuck the thesaurus behind me, and we can get on with our lives.

Looking around the now-familiar room, you see… nothing.

No table, no new light fixtures, no pile of random things.

You decide to wait and see if something appears.

Nothing appears.

…Odd.

You walk to the wall, wondering what you’re supposed to be doing. Or is it possible that this is the first room you were dumped in?

Spoiler: it’s not. We have many, many rooms, and it would be kind of pointless to send one person through the same room more than once. You personally aren’t going to be seeing that first room ever again.

Unless you really wanted to, and asked nicely.

Maybe.

Anyways! You touch the wall, and find that it’s quite warm. Not hot, exactly, but certainly very warm.

Moving to the next wall, it feels like a normal temperature for a concrete wall. There seems to be nothing odd about it. Which in itself is odd.

The wall opposite the warm wall is freezing cold. It’s just under the point where frost would form on it. Or, just above that point, I suppose, since cold is down. Usually.

And the fourth wall is… It feels like it has a heartbeat. You put your ear to the wall and hear a steady, rhythmic thumping.

That’s not worrying in the least, nope.

You look up again, trying to find something to do in this room other than examine walls, and discover that the light has a pull chain hanging down from it. Presumably it turns the light off and on.

Will you pull it?

You won’t?

...What if I say please?

Is it because you’re afraid of the dark? I can assure you that when you pull the chain, you will not be left in complete darkness.

I promise you.

Will you pull it?

You pull the chain.

For a brief moment there is darkness.

A complete, all-encompassing darkness. The kind of darkness that triggers fear in the very center of your soul.

And then your eyes begin to adjust.

Painted on the walls with glow-in-the-dark paint are stars.

Not those five-pointed things that kids draw, no. These are simply dots, painted to resemble the night sky.

Usually these things look best on a dome, trying to emulate the feeling of watching the night sky in some dark area. But even painted on perfectly flat walls, the effect is cool.

First you find Orion, the three dots in a row that are usually pretty easy to find. From there you search your memory for maps of the night sky and what you studied about constellations in school.

The dots around you were painted based off pictures of the sky from the northern hemisphere (of Earth), so you find the Big Dipper, and then the Little Dipper. After that you try finding the Ursas, but your brain isn’t quite clear on whether or not Ursa Major is just another name for the Big Dipper, or if they truly are distinct constellations.

You try to find the zodiac signs, and think you have them. But you don’t really know.

All in all, you spend about twenty minutes in the dark here, looking at and admiring the stars.

But eventually the glow starts to fade, and the darkness starts to close in on you.

Left in the darkness, straining to see, you can’t seem to find the chain to the light. But you can see the button, glowing a faint, ominous red in the darkness of the room.

DO YOU PRESS THE BUTTON? Yes No