Eve walked into the massive warehouse and flipped on the light. "What a mess..." she commented to herself as she started to move through the aisles. She had been hired by the local Police Department to help them catalogue an old evidence warehouse that was going to be closed soon. They needed to know what was still a part of active cases, what could be returned or what, in the case of several items of the more unusual nature, should be turned over to the proper authorities for study.
Many of the items hadn't been looked at since they were put into storage, although several of them had just been dropped off a few weeks earlier. She set to her task diligently. Most of the boxes contained what you would expect to find in an evidence locker, file folders with pictures and documents upon documents. It was the more unusual things that caught her eye. There was an entire shelf dedicated to these strange dream catchers that had been popping up in the city. Multiple people had ended up missing several work days in a row, and a clever cyborg police officer suspected that a succubus might somehow be responsible. However, they hadn't figured out how the dream catchers were related yet. There was another shelf full of strange weapons; guns that would fire energy beams that could hypnotize, or immobilize, or shrink, or even petrify the person that was hit by it. You'd think these things would be in a weapons locker or something, but no, they were just out in the open on a shelf. Gun safety is a myth apparently.
After several hours of cleaning she came upon a large item that was under a tarp. She carefully tried to pull the tarp away, her own clumsy nature always foremost on her mind, but she was pleasantly surprised when the tarp came away without incident. As she was folding the tarp she examined what was beneath it. A large glass cylinder with an opening large enough for a person to step through. There was also a small set of controls on the side of the tube and two buttons on the inside.
Eve couldn't help but examine the tube as she finished folding the tarp, but as she was looking at the tube she slowly moved past one of the shelves and reached her arm out to set the tarp on the shelf. She missed. The tarp fell to the ground with a thud which scared the poor girl. She jumped and looked back at the tarp and giggled, but then tripped over a cord on the ground and fell right into the giant upright tube. She managed to catch herself in such a way that she stayed standing, despite tripping into the cylinder. She felt proud as she stood up just in time to see the tube slide closed and seal her inside. "Crap..." was her only response.
She looked around, trying to figure out how to get out. There were of course two buttons on the control panel in the tube. "Clearly one of them ... must... open the door" she thought to herself. "But which one... Oh well, what's the worst that could happen?" She reached out and pressed the top button. As soon as she did her entire body was sprayed from both the top and bottom with a cryogenic mist. She didn't' even have a chance to react before her body and mind were put into deep cryogenic stasis.
Ten years of bureaucratic bullshit later...
Trisha turned on the light to the warehouse and walked in with an overwhelmed look in her eyes. She had been trying to decide on what to do for her semester project, but nothing had appealed to her. But her professor had told her about a large supply of devices having been recently shipped to the university from overseas. She hoped she would find something in the mess that she could use for her study project.
It was an odd assortment of devices big and small, the smallest seemed to be about the size of a laser pointer. "Ok...I don't know why anyone would need to study that..." she said with a sigh as she moved on. The largest Item in the room was what looked like a large cryogenic tube. Trisha moved towards the tube as she brushed her blond hair back behind her ear and adjusted her glasses. "This shows promise" she thought as she started to examine the pod. "It's an early model from the looks of it." She moved her hands along the glass to try and clear the dust off of it only to realize it wasn't dusty, it was full of cryogenic mist. This was a bit odd since once the test subject was covered in the mist it was common practice to drain the mist to save it. She sighed as she powered up the control panel "whomever shipped this like this was careless as hell, if the pod had broken it would have leaked gas out all over the place. Who fills it with gas empty anyways?" She realized she was talking out loud and shook her head "I'm getting stressed, I need to relax. Alright, Trisha" she said to herself "Let's see if this is usable." She fumbled with the controls and activated the suction on the cryotanks to empty the tube of the gas.
Once the gas was removed from the tube she looked up and screamed out of shock. Inside the tube was the perfectly frozen Eve. Standing with her finger extended out to the button on the side of the tube, a look of clumsy embarrassment on her face. The only way you could tell that she was in stasis was that there was a very fine layer of crystalized ice on her skin. It took Trisha a moment to catch her breath from the startle and she finally examined the situation. "Why did they send us... " she started but cut herself off as she realized the person in the tube had activated the cryogenic process from inside... "a person. They didn't know you were in here, did they?" She said, asking the frozen Eve.
Eve did not respond. Obviously.
Although this was an interesting find, Trisha had no real interest in studying a cryogenically frozen young woman, but figured leaving her in there would be rude. So she walked out of the warehouse in a huff to get some help. About 20 minutes later she walked back in with a smiling curly haired blonde. "See..." she said pointing to Eve "she managed to freeze herself. Who does that?"
The blonde looked in at Eve and then over at the controls "I'm not sure but we need to get her out of there, who knows how long she has been in stasis."
Trisha waved her hand at the blonde dismissively "whatever that's your thing, I'm busy. Hey what's this?" she said moving over to a group of boxes with a strange spiral logo on them. She picked up the manifest on the first box and read it aloud to herself. "Spirals Nightclub?" She started to shift though the boxes, she was hoping to find something she could use in her apartment for parties. All thought of her grad school project completely forgotten. The technology seemed a bit dated, but there was a lot of electronics in the box. What caught her eye first was a flat screen monitor. She reached and pulled it out "wow" she thought "I forgot how heavy first gen flat screens were..." She set up the monitor on one of the shelves and started to fiddle with it.
Over at the cryotube Laura was engrossed in her own little project. "It appears that this tube was decommissioned, it had a faulty motion sensor that would trigger the hatch. This poor girl must have gotten stuck in it and accidentally turned it on."
Trisha just dismissively commented "whatever" and kept working on her screen. "I think I got it!" she shouted, excited, as she flipped the power button on and the screen came to life. What displayed was a rather simple, black and white, spiral on the screen. "Ah man..." she said "I was hoping for something cooler, at least in color, not some simple... Stupid... Black and... White... " with each word her face started to go more and more slack as the subliminal messages on the screen sank into her subconscious. The screen had been designed to hang on the wall in the old Spirals Nightclub, and was designed to be viewed from a distance to put the guests in a relaxed and trancy state. But being less than a foot from the device, Trisha was pretty much overloaded by it. A few seconds after she turned it on she was standing slack jawed with her arms limp at her sides. Slowly wobbling on her feet and staring into the spiral on the screen. Hypnotized.
"I think I got it..." the blonde said as she flipped a few controls and hit the activate button. A cloud of gas filled the cryotube and swirled around the frozen young woman inside. A few seconds later the hatch opened with a hiss as the thawing gas spilled out of the cryo tube and a very confused Eve stepped out, waving her hand to get the gas out of her face. Her cheeks were red with embarrassment. "I'm so sorry... did I break it?" she asked the blond.
The blonde put her hands on Eve's shoulders to help steady her, "no, it was already broken." she assured her "I'm Laura, are you ok?"
Eve finished waving the mist away from her and nodded "I'm fine, just a bit embarrassed. I tripped and fell into the pod. I'm guessing, since the last thing I remember was pushing a button and then being surrounded by gas, that I accidentally put myself in cryo. How embarrassing. I'm Eve, thanks for getting me out." she said with a genuine but still embarrassed smile. For the first time Eve looked around and noticed she was no longer in the old warehouse. "Where are we?" she asked, even more confused than before.
Laura explained that they were in New Chicago University's Psychology department storage area. "Wait we're where?!" Eve asked rather confused "New Chicago... but I was, I was in Japan a few seconds ago how did I..." the realization washed over her face. "I was shipped her in that cryo tube. Didn't anyone check this before shipping?"
Laura shrugged her shoulders "I'm afraid not, but we should figure out how long you were in the tube. What is the last day that you remember?"
