Zenith : In Character → Threads, Logs, Events

Who: Lennon, Harper, Tobias, Marco and [OPEN]
Where: the bouncy course!
When: morning

( spend your life doing strange things with weird people )

Who: Oliver, Edwin, Felix, Jack (cameo) and [OPEN]
Where: The bouncy course
When: Morning

( Zenith Playplace )

Day 69.

Weather: Light rain on and off throughout the day.

Events: And now for something familiar that hasn't happened in a while. No one wakes up where they went to sleep the night before. Everyone wakes up some time after 8am, on a wooden bench in a small, windowless room. The floors are bare concrete, the walls white brick. The ceiling is dominated by harsh fluorescent lights. Does this sound familiar? Yes, that's right, they're just like the little rooms everyone would wake up in when they had underground arena days. And sure enough, those rooms open up to two locker rooms, one for the men and one for the women, where everyone can find lockers with their subject numbers, and a comfortable change of clothes waiting for them inside, as well as a water bottle and a couple of protein bars. Their phones are not in their lockers. There's a bathroom in each of the locker rooms, too, thankfully. We all know that TPTB aren't always nice enough to provide that when waking people up in a new setting.

So, if all of this is familiar, does that mean that everyone's back under the Mount Zenith Town Hall? Well, it's hard to tell. The locker rooms do open up to an arena, but it's hard to tell if it's the same arena. It's also hard to tell just how large the arena is, because only a few feet out of the locker room exits are entrances to a massive labyrinth of a bounce house. There's no way around the bounce house if you want to get out of the arena, so you'll have to go through.

And boy, is this thing a beast of a bouncy structure. Entering the bounce house, everyone's met with three possible directions that you can go in, and while one may start with less difficult obstacles than the others, the paths are winding and intersecting and none of them will take you directly to the exit. It's truly, literally, a maze, and one that will take a while to find your way out of.

So, what's standing between our subjects and the exit? Well, it depends on the turns that each person takes, but it seems like each obstacle is repeated several times throughout the maze. The obstacle room types include:

Trampolines: These are just empty, bouncy rooms, like a standard bounce house. Not so much an obstacle, but still present throughout the maze in an assortment of bright colors.

Pillars: Inflatable tubes fixed to the floor that you can jump into and bump out of the way and push through.

Slides: You climb up one side, then slide down the other. Pretty straight forward, but it's also one of the only places that you can get up above the course and see where other people are. The slides are various sizes and heights, so some views are better than others.

Hurdles: Inflatable hurdles that are about hip height. No one will judge you if you go under them instead of over, but you do you.

Tunnels: Two tunnels, next to each other, made up of the same inflatable material as the rest of the course that you need to crawl through. Some go straight, and some just sort of meander for a while.

Ball pits: Basically the same as trampolines, except these rooms are filled with plastic ball pit balls. Being bouncy makes it better than the McDonalds Playplace, right?

Climbs: Slopes with small ridges on them to work as foot holds that you can climb up. These are generally how you get up slides, but there are also some that are just walls that have a straight drop, or another climb, on the other side. Luckily, if you jump off the other side of one, it's just more bounce house there.

Pyramids: Two pyramids next to each other. You can climb up them or roll through them.

Ropes: Not actual ropes, but thinner inflatable tubes that stretch random ways across a room. This is similar to when people tie ropes around a hall to simulate one of those laser grids you see in spy movies.

Balls: Big ol' inflatable orbs in a row that you can hop across the top of. Or you can go around.

Creatures: Some rooms just have inflatable creatures in them. Some are aliens, some are dinosaurs, some are really big bugs. They take up most of the room and don't do anything other than make it hard to get past.

So, that's fun. Everyone gets to bounce around until they can find their way out of the maze. And don't worry, there is a way out, at the end of one of the slides. There they'll find an elevator, which will bring them up to the hallway of the dilapidated old outpost to the southwest of the mill (Marker 7 on the map). It seems like maybe the weird tent a few days ago may have been signaling the impending arrival of the elevator. Once our subjects make their way up the elevator, they'll find their phones waiting for them on the front desk in the entrance room, plus more water bottles and protein bars, and a pair of shoes for everybody. There is a down button on the elevator from the hallway, allowing people to return to the bounce house if they please.

It shouldn't take people until nightfall to find their way out, at least, and there's nothing keeping anyone from hiding out in the bouncy course overnight if it does become an issue. Though, you'll have to climb up the slide. That's probably fine.

Happy bouncing!