The Color of Danger

The next room Trick found himself in was lit with a pale yellow light. Or perhaps it was a pale yellow room lit with white light, it was hard to tell, although it was much like the last one in that it had the same strange ridges on the walls and the same hexagonal shape. However, unlike the gray room the yellow one had three doorways spaced evenly around the room. Furthermore, it wasn’t empty.

“Hello, hello, what’s this?” Trick said, walking up to the large table in the middle of the room. Most of the surface was the same kind of lustrous metal as the walls of the room, polished to a reflective sheen and slick to the touch. However there was a hexgrid in the middle of it and each individual hex seemed to be a button.

When he pressed one it turned red. Consecutive presses turned it orange, then yellow, then green, blue, purple, black, gray then blank again. “No, not blank,” he muttered, “white. It’s the colors again, Stan, this place is obsessed with the colors.”

He fished around in his pocket for a moment until he found the sheet of transparent vinyl with the hexgrid on it and laid it out on the tabletop next to the buttons. A quick count confirmed there were the same number of hexes on the sheet as buttons on the table. Trick considered that for a moment.

If this was all a part of the Escape House attraction he probably needed to make the lights on the table match the colors on the sheet. Yet he was having a hard time believing he was still in the house he’d entered with Stan an hour ago. Something about the way it felt, going through that hatch, told him the change had been more drastic than that. At the same time the Escape House had led him directly to that hatch. It had to be deliberate.

Did they know the hatch was there? Did they know what was on the other side? Did the hatch send people to strange places like the cloud world or these hexagonal rooms every time or had he and Stan done something specific to trigger this odd result? “Focus,” he muttered. “Or else you'll spend the rest of your life here worrying.”

So he moved around the hexagon shaped table until he was facing the doorway he’d entered through. Then he turned his sheet so the black and white hexes were on his left and the colors on his right, just the way Stan had put the numbers into the combo lock. That done, he pushed buttons until all the lights on the table matched his sheet. Nothing happened.

“Okay, why did nothing happen? Are we looking at it the wrong way?” He glanced at the white hex on his sheet. “Or do we need to do something special with that? It was laid out on a white sheet of paper but that spot is a white bit on a clear surface. Maybe…”

Trick pushed the corresponding button until it cycled through all eight other colors and returned to its original mode again. The nine buttons he’d pressed all flashed once then returned to the neutral state. Beyond the table he caught sight of the gray room he’d arrived in growing lighter and lighter until it looked as well lit as the yellow room. “There we go.”

A quick look around told him that the other two doorways out of the yellow room were now just as bright as the gray room. Still, his instincts told him not to leave any part of the place unexplored. So he headed back into the gray room to see what had changed and was not disappointed in the least.

The interior of the room had unfolded, revealing racks upon racks of hangers that had rolled out of the walls. On the pegs of the racks were belts with a dozen small pouches or slots on them. Trick found one in his size and buckled it on, assuming that he was going to find it useful at some point. It was wider than his belt loops and chaffed a bit as it moved back and forth but he could deal with it for the moment.

Back in the yellow room he discovered it had also transformed. The change was not nearly as large as the one in the gray room, consisting of a small opening appearing on the wall opposite the gray door that revealed three rows of crystals. Each was about as long as his hand and held a soft, yellow light. They were the perfect size to fit in one of the belt’s slots.

He had twelve slots and so far he’d seen six basic colors over and over again so he took two crystals and slid them into the belt then checked both doorways. As he expected, one led to a green room and the other an orange.

Ten minutes later he had completed a loop through six rooms laid out in a circle. Predictably, each was lit in one of the primary colors on his hex chart and each contained a rack for thirty six crystals, a dozen per row. In most of the rooms at least one crystal was missing, although for some reason all the purple ones had been in place. That didn’t stop him from taking two of those along with all the other colors.

The other features of the rooms were a bit more interesting. The green room contained a huge lattice frame of some kind with a scattering of dirt or dust around it. The blue was cold and contained a set of frozen pipes. A strange set of transparent walls divided the purple room into a series of half circular passages that forced him to walk back and forth a great deal. A pool of hot, nearly boiling water sat in the center of the red room. Finally the orange room had a set of interlocking rings spinning quickly in the center of them.

Unfortunately, while Trick could see some basic themes that tied the colors and the contents together he had no idea what they meant or how he should interact with them. The only thing he was sure of was that none of it seemed dangerous or useful. However there was a third door out of the purple room, just as with the yellow, and it led into a brightly lit room with highly reflective, polished surfaces.

Once he was satisfied that there was nothing to see in the color rooms he doubled back to it. As he threaded his way through the purple maze he started to hear something odd, like a repetitive beeping noise. It wasn’t until he got to the doorway that he realized it was a voice. It muttered to itself over and over again in a quiet but sharp tone.

Suddenly on guard, Trick approached the door with slow, soft steps and carefully peered around the edge.

There was no one inside. This room wasn’t like the previous six in more ways than just the coloring. There was a set of four raised podiums on the outside of a raised dais in the center of the room projecting a set of holograms in the air. One was showing images of the inside of the color rooms. The images rotated from one room to the next at predictable intervals. Another podium clearly projected a set of status reports complete with charts, diagrams and words written in an alphabet he couldn’t read.

The last two holograms showed the outdoors. The problem was Trick couldn’t tell what kind of outdoors he was looking at. Definitely not the parking lot of the Escape House or any of the Midwest farmland around the stripmall where it was located. Although, in fairness, one of the views was clearly pointed up towards the night sky.

The voice sounded like it was coming from the dais. More importantly, as Trick stared at the holograms and wondered if he should try to get a closer look at them, he realized he could understand it. “Attention, attention,” it said. “Starsight incoming. Prepare for combat.”