Investigation Time

Ice. Cold. Empty.
 
This is not an inviting place to be. I wonder around trying to determine where we are, how we got there, and how to get back. We are in a playground obviously, but there are some very odd things and it has obviously been abandoned for a while. That could be because it is winter, but since it has what looks like a school, I am guessing it has been abandoned for a different reason. That could be due to the metal content here. I say that because most of the metal here has either been replaced or it has actually rotted - metal rot! I turn my attention to the device that would probably be our best bet for getting home. I find my companion also checking out the device and he wants to run some experiments. He feels that investigating the town or the ice wall would not be the best use of our time or energy. Since I am hoping he is my best option to not die, I agree. I do take a few minutes to look at the city. My intention is to see if anyone is interested, but I get distracted by the fact that while the city looks modern, but none of the boats do. They actually have sails - real live 1800 sails. No steam power is in evidence or metal hulls. Some beautiful and well loved fiberglass hulls, but no metal ones.
 
I drag my attention back to the experiment that my companion wants to do and I help by grabbing two rocks from the playground area. He leaves the playground and gets both dead and live branches. We then place one set of the materials into seat two and another set into seat four (or what we have decided to call two and four!). The device begins to spin and it is in constant motion - not fast, but steady - for eight full minutes. When it finally stops all momentum, the rocks and dead branches are still there, but the live evergreen branches are gone! From this first experiment, it appears that a successful transfer requires mass and living tissue. Makeshift heads out to the nearby forest area to see if he can find some animals to use for the next experiment. I do my best to keep watch and stay warm.
 
He comes back with a small squirrel - only one. We duct tape it into chair number two and give the device a spin. It spins and stops and nothing changes. This makes us think that we need living material in two of the chairs. He heads out to find another squirrel, but comes back with a dog - which is not a squirrel. We get the dog to sit in chair number four and give it a spin. There is a flash of light and poof - dog and squirrel are gone. We look at each other and shrug, then remove the rocks and branches and sit down. The device starts spinning as soon as we set foot on it and we barely get settled when there is a flash of light and we are no longer outside the city of Boston. Instead we appear to be in Toronto, but not a Toronto that I have visited. Instead it has walls around it and the city design makes it very obvious that it is a ROMAN city. Which conclusion is proven by the two centurions that turn around from petting a dog to look at us. Makeshift at I look at each other and quickly scramble back into the chairs we just vacated. Flash of light and we are back in - BROOKLYN?
 
We teleport outside to see if the statue garden is the same, but we pop out and there is a person just standing in front of us. He drops a smoke bomb and jumps twenty feet up into a tree. Once the smoke clears we can see him, but he does not talk. We check around the area and the statues are the same colors and in the same placement which leaves us confident that we are back to where we started. We share a few theories as to where we went and why those places in particular. How much impact does the chairs themselves have? Do those three cities form a pyramid? Does the elevation of the cities have any impact? What about those light swirls? Where they designed to lead us to be test subjects or are they a side effect of the device itself. I go back to the consoles to check them out, but I cannot read them at all. Makeshift thinks that perhaps it is related to a computer language so he pulls down some of the books and begins to see if he can come up with a translation program. I wander over to the pile of tools and discover that none of them have metal. I didn't take time in 'Toronto", but metal does not appear to be a good thing around these devices. The only exceptions I can see are the four towers in the corners. These have lightning arcing and metal rings around the outside.
 
I can deduce from the state of the tools and the workspace that there has been a person who has been working who does not care about his tools at all. Even if there was an urgency to what he was working on (and yes, I use that pronoun on purpose) or perhaps he is used to having someone to clean up after him. BUT, I am fairly confident that this is a normal size humanoid. It could be that they are from the Boston area as that could not have metal and therefore the no metal tools would make sense, but perhaps that is just part of all of the worlds connected to these devices. I give up that line of inquiry and move towards the redish tower. As I get closer, I can feel the heat rise and I share that with Sahara to see if he can fix that first once he can translate the consoles. Then I get closer and notice that there is a lot of notations on the metal band. Based upon what I can deduce from the writing, it appears that a small group of people were working on some mathematical solution and each person was working on a different section.
 
So much going on and yet nothing that can be really known. Frustration!