Yet more explaining that doesn't really explain anything! And scene setting, of course. This place is quite wide.
"This is a sim-"
"It's not a sim."
"Yes it is!"
"Then why can't you control it?"
Tris paced, frustrated. Tobias and her had rooms so close they could have been conjoined. So close that they'd heard each other through the walls as they woke up. She almost wasn't sure where she was, at first. Her room was a sandy sort of beige color, flicks of black on the glossed over walls, a plain bed with wooden posts in a corner. It reminded her of her home faction Abnegation, perhaps mixed with the Dauntless she had come to know, if only because of the specks of differentiating pigment. If she wasn't so hurried and frustrated and annoyed, she might have come to like it.
She hadn't seen Tobias' room, but when she asked if it was any different from hers he told her it was black. Straight black, with waves of blue creeping up from the floor to the walls and white surrounding the edges.
So now Tobias was in Tris' room, sitting on the floor while Tris restlessly tried to come up with a solution.
Eventually she slid against a wall, glowering in Tobias' general direction. "I hate it when you're right."
…
Newt woke up with a splitting headache in the wrong bed.
It wasn't a terrible bed, it just wasn't his. Newt groaned and pushed himself up, blinking rapidly.
It wasn't just the bed, it was everything. The whole room was white and large and empty. The same way he thought a prison would look like.
Which didn't matter. Newt had been in confinement before. He wasn't planning on being in one again.
However, he was counting that the someone- Fletcher... -wasn't going to keep them in all those little boxes to death. At least, they would provide some source of output or food.
Newt shook his head again like it was in slow motion. In truth, he couldn't remember much of what happened yesterday. He tried to think, but thinking was so hard with all the blinding whiteness and the colors in his head and the irresistant pounding-
Newt cocked his head, stopping for a moment. The pounding wasn't just in his mind. He walked around the room, searching until he found a slit on two sides and a half cup looking circle with a slash through it, almost invisible from where he had been standing.
If this isn't a door, I don't know what is.
He thrust his hand down the cup and turned it clockwise in a jerky movement. Minho's face was on the other side. Attached to his body, which was a relief.
"I hear there's food in this joint. You gonna stay in there like the brilliant shank you are, or join me?"
"Nice to see you too." Newt's face split into a grin, then one of pain as he rubbed his forehead.
"You nearly woke up half the world with your pounding."
"If you don't come quick, there might not be enough food. Some people don't know how to restrain themselves."
Newt looked around the long corridor to a set of swirling doors.
Yeah, some people…
"Then what do you need me for? To fight them off?"
"I was thinking more on the lines of an extra pair of pockets. Although now that you mention it, fighting would be a bit hard without the use of my hands."
Newt laughed, a harsh sharp laugh that pierced his skull to no end, but it didn't stop him from grinning. He looked down- still in his clothes from when he left. He'd been through worse. The bleached red carpet was soft but smoothed over under his feet.
"Right," Newt whispered, leaving his door open the barest crack, "Where exactly can we find this place?"
…
At the end of the hall were two split-off corridors, a lift, and stairs.
"I vote not to take the lift," said Minho.
"Agreed."
They eventually decided on the right path, an average morning chill sweeping past them. It was strange, Newt thought, how quickly the walls could change. Warm colors gave way to hard glass, showing a rounded courtyard the color of dust. Probably, Newt thought, because that's what the ground was made of.
Then he looked up, and Minho whistled.
"That's a lot of space."
Towering figures of glass and steel meshed together in a staggering height, the highest rooms blinding with the sun's reflection. Level after level after level in a sea of opaque blue ripples, always reinforced by sparkling grey, perhaps a tint lighter. The bottom held many doors, going around the courtyard in a clockwise placement. Each door was set between two white columns which the continuous line of rooms rested a shielding upside-down balcony upon.
Minho stated what was gradually being realized in Newt's mind.
"He said we had the south wing, right?" Newt hesitated, not remembering the exact details.
"Yeah."
"So if this is the north wing we're staring at…"
No wonder we need a lift.
The side they were staying in had to be at least as high. Newt stepped back from the glass, a feeling of uneasiness coming over him.
Rooms so high…
He would make a point to stay as close to the ground as possible.
"Dude, the food better not be up that high because somebody will die if I have to walk up all those stairs." Minho's remark brought Newt back to perspective, although he did have a point.
"And that person will probably be you." Newt continued walking, gathering his airs around him with each step.
"As long as I don't find some metal bug with WICKED written on its wings, I think we're gonna be fine."
…
They eventually found the Dining Hall, if only because of the ruckus. The cause was only the clanging of a copper pan, of course, these things are usually small, but it was a great tip. The one downside was the knowledge that they hadn't been there first. Newt watched the sole two people walking around, analyzing them.
They looked like kids, they looked…actually, they looked a lot like Chuck. Acted a lot like him, too. Jolly, despite everything that had happened. Newt remembered seeing them at the edge of the courtyard when Fletcher began his speech, not much besides that. Everything about that day was a bit...gone.
They didn't seem that scared when Minho and Newt walked in, just began conversing with each other quietly, too quiet to hear. Newt didn't pay attention to them either, once he noticed his surroundings.
Food filled everything. Cooking appliances covered the walls (thus the copper) each part divided amongst themselves, with vegetables in wheelbarrows and barrels full of who knows what stacked up against the brick wall, with one side piled up and up on frosty walls next to empty tanks with butter and milk and ice cream, of all things, with a line of wheat-stalks bundled together in piles with string, with hard, round cheeses sitting on a counter and a knife stuck up to the handle in each one, and pounds of meat hanging in a corner, waiting to age. Everything, everywhere, every color. Newt was pretty sure that the corner split-off visible in the back connected to a full-blown kitchen.
"Now this," said Minho, "is a buffet done right."
Newt could only think of the catastrophic results of what would happen if order was misplaced. But he doubted it would. Whoever built this place -outside, inside- had done it meticulously. There was no way they'd let it go to rot.
A double set of blue painted doors near the assumed kitchen led them to a wide room filled with tables. It was completely shaded with blue, from large near translucent windows to the slate mix of concrete for the floor. But the walls, they were pale- almost not a shade at all. It was as if the room was made for stability and, in a last minute effort, was given an attempt at friendliness, but ended up instead with estrangement from the earth. Given that the whole place was meant to be a quarantine sanction, that was probably what happened.
Everything about this place is unnerving.
The other two that had gotten there before them took one glance at the room and moved to stay by the barrels in food-filled peace.
"Good call," Newt murmured. He let the doors close.
A sudden thought occurred to him that all the rooms might be like this.
"Aw, c'mon, you can't heave now. At least have something in your stomach to come back up." Minho already had a plate half filled. He handed Newt a separate one, empty, then gave him a friendly push to the larder.
"That's right, off you go."
Slowly Newt walked over, in a half daze. "It's all real." He turned to Minho. "Tell me all of this is real."
"Newt," Minho said, "You're a shank if you don't believe it by now." Newt nodded. "Now go eat, or I might take that plate back for seconds."
Newt gave the barest of a smile and began to fill his plate.
He was having trouble breathing.
...
Kitty Pryde put her hand against the smooth white wall and pushed.
It was empty. Just like the room nearest to it. And like the rooms across two doors down. There had also been another room empty, but she'd heard snippets of conversation and left, not wanting to have to explain herself if 'they' came back. Being that close, it was likely they might, whoever it was.
She thought about leaving, leaving the whole building, but she didn't want to leave. She heard the warning about the quarantine. At the particular moment, she didn't feel like testing to see if it was true. And there were so many other rooms to explore.
So Kitty put her hand to the wall and pushed, straight through it, until she was back onto the other side.
I hope you enjoyed it! I'm sorry if it's confusing because you do not know a certain fandom. In a later chapter, things may be revealed to help, but you could also just pretend in the meanwhile that they are just very well-developed OC's.
Of course, not made by me.
This was a bit of Divergent (Veronica Roth), Maze Runner (James Dashner), and MARVEL.
Thanks for reading!