Breaking

Rather than spend today wandering around looking for a flight of stairs that may or may not exist, I visited every scientist I could find. None of them, not a single one, knew of any stairs. I'm starting to think I'll be trapped down here until the lift is working again. Maybe I ought to find something explosive and blast it open. It seemed to work for the other lift.

Most of the scientists I spoke to were desperately trying to get their equipment to work. The lack of power isn't the main problem; most of the strange-looking stuff draws its power from alternative sources. The problem is that nothing works anymore. Or at least, it works sometimes, but those intervals seem random.

I watched one scientist tinkering with a device that looked like a piano with a brass satellite dish on either end. He hit some keys on the front and the dishes began to rotate. He gave a little cheer, but they stopped almost immediately. Frustrated, he grabbed a screwdriver and opened a side panel. I could see right into the device. Thousands of metal ball bearings rolled out onto the floor, leaving the device an empty wooden shell. The man fell to his knees, his face empty.

I'm going to get a team together and see if we can get the generator working. If it's a lost cause, I'll have to think of some other way to escape. It's painfully clear that the facility is breaking down.