Foxfire Project Room

Gosh, this is exciting!

Entries

The most likely entry to this room happens via the multiply locked doorway to the south-southwest.

Entry via alternate route might conceivably be through the floor. The translucent inset seems solid. It does takes up most of the center of the floor in this cinder block shed. Are there circumstances where the grid lines vanish, taking the translucent surface away as well?

Sensory & Appearance

Molasses perfume the air of this space more than anything else. The sharp, bittersweet scent is strong enough that many would notice nothing else.

Beneath it, a subtle layer of pinecone dusts the back of the throat -- dull, dusty, ever so faintly tinged with fungus. The most discerning nose might also pick up on old traces of Windex ^(R) if given long enough to discern the nuances. No expense is spared to keep up the best standards of clean!

Every surface is dust-free, streak-free, stain-free. Most surfaces are smooth, but matte. This helps prevent the walls and ceiling from bouncing light and sound everywhere.

Despite the passive damping effect of the outer surface, light in this space feels incredibly artificial. It flickers due to the motion of the light patterns in the whatever-that-is. Each pattern seems to have its own mathematical intricacies. The concatenation of all the patterns overlapping one another is more than most new visitors would care to sort out.

The majority of the floor, however, goes beyond "smooth" into "lustrous" -- except for where it creates the optical illusion of not existing at all.

When a visitor glances at the light ripples, the electric arcs, the swirling energy, all of that roiling activity convinces the brain that a roar of sound is also present. It must be at least as loud as an oncoming subway train within a snug tunnel.

And yet … silence.

E

xcept that this room is not silent at all.

The four Van de Graaff generators do create the usual popping, crackling noise. The pair of complex machines near the door, with their continual link of live electricity, contribute ozone zaps and generator hums as they go about whatever their business may be.

The four yellow crystals create a high-pitched hum, similar to a finger continuously sliding around the lip of an ancient wine glass.

No roar of great power in flux; no shaking of the floor, the walls, or the contents in this shed.

No sounds travel in from the world outside, either.

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Contents & Furnishings

As "Hidden Lairs" go, this temple to Mad Science has got it all!

• An
  armillary sphere
  , a shade over 2.5 feet in diameter, made of seamless jasper where it is not made of some ultradense resin.
  This armillary sphere does not qualify as "Ptolemaic".
  This armillary sphere does not qualify as "Copernican".

• Each corner of the shed has a concrete pillar.
  At the top of each pillar, a
  Van de Graaff generator
  realigns itself according to requirements not obvious to a visitor.
  The generators do not all revolve at the same time.
  The generators do not all spark at the same intensity, nor for that matter with the same frequency.
  This implies embedded control mechanisms related to the activity closer to the center of the room!

• Eerily luminescent, ultrasonically chiming
  crystals
  . Each crystal appears to be mounted atop a sculpture or structure that, in an entirely different environment, would be a water fountain.
  Are those yellow sapphire?
  Are those chalcopyrite?
  Which answer would be more concerning?

• Four
  throne
  -like chairs, all arranged in a single row on the east side.
  These are certainly designed for formal usage, not for relaxing or for crafting work.

• Many
  bookshelves!
  Every Hidden Lair needs "dead tree edition" tomes, right?

• A stone
  workbench
  supporting signs of the project currently under way. Reference books or work journals are open to various chapters. Transparent acrylic clips weight the pages down so that the ambient static electricity will not flip the pages away.
  Too bad no writing is visible.

• Tools!
  How can Mad Science happen without tools for measuring, manipulating, mutating, and marking the subject matter?

Alterations

One definite alteration to this building has been that the physical dimensions of the interior do not match the physical dimensions of the exterior, even before taking into account the limitations which would necessarily be imposed upon the working space by the thickness of the green cinder block construction.

Another obvious alteration to this building, added sometime well after its original construciton, would be the center "floor". One might also consider the hollow space that appears to exist below said floor.

The motes of twinkling stardust that flow through the surrounding ground to enter the cavernous space below this chamber
-- the cavernous space of dry air which, as any geologist or longtime resident or civic engineer would know, cannot exist in this part of Brooklyn so close to Hudson Bay --
are likely also a post-construction alteration to the original building. One might hypothesize that they add volume to the complex energy structure within the lower chamber.

No one has had an opportunity to inspect the roof as of yet.

Architecture

Consistent with exterior observations, the walls and somewhat flat ceiling of this building appear to be green-tinted cinder block. If utilities such as electricity, water, sewage, and perhaps fuel for heating have been installed, the pipes for each were placed before the cinder blocks were layered into place. It is reasonable to expect that the outer pipes would have been chosen so that they would fit inside the hollow cores.

Type

Lair

Related Report (Primary Locations)

• Epiphany 9: Ekphoria

Related Report (Secondary Locations)

• Epiphany 10: Incarnation

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Purpose / Function

Almost certainly, the original purpose of this single-room building matched its outer appearance: this was a gardener's shed. It housed the tools and off-season movable features of the Waterfront District Garden, or perhaps of whoever is the direct owner of record for this sheltered green space surrounded by typical Brooklyn buildings.

Almost certainly.

A meticulous, methodical description could find the most likely location of bolts where tool racks were once attached to the cinder block walls, and workbench legs had formerly been fixed on the stone floor.

Of course, that would be more logically consistent if this interior were of an appropriate size to match the dimensions of the building exterior.

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Map
Reference
Point

Info

North

Perhaps it is more accurate to say that this is the direction in which one would have pointed "north" from outside the building. Here, inside, GPS can receive no signal. Analog compasses based on the world's magnetic field are disrupted strenously by the energy field below the center of the building.

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Exciting Science

Hey, this looks GREAT! Very complicated! With nearly zero labels in any recognizable language!

Wait. Is that maybe Braille on some of those keys?

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Scattered Tools

Someone left a random mass of hand tools here on the concrete floor. Not all of them are broken. Screwdrivers of various types and sizes, allen wrenches, plieres, ratchets, saws, planes, chisels, all sorts of things.

Interestingly, none are made of any metal at all. Some are hardwood or ivory, some have resin parts, a few of the screwdrivers are horn or have inset shell, the saws are mostly deer jawbone with a leading edge of obsidian splinters.

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Studio Audience?

No one seems to be seated in these formally placed chairs. They do not have obvious safety straps or sensor probes or any sort of blatant control panels on the arms. Why are they spaced like that? Why are they present at all? Where is the side table for one's popcorn and beverage?

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The Glass Floor

In fact it is probably not glass. Either the floor here is a generated force field, or else it is probably something like acrylic.

So long as the grid is visible, it is reasonable to suppose that a solid yet mostly transparent floor is in place.

Otherwise, it's a long way down.

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Trenchcoat Entry

No matter how you described your initial entry into the Foxfire Shed, your exploration began here.