The noise slowly increases in both pitch and intensity, rising from a moderately annoying low rumble to an almost room-shaking hum. Lily clutches your leg, and you kneel down and put your arms around her. "Alex, isn't there any way to stop this?" you ask. She shrugs. "I don't think so. Our dear mad scientist seems to have set the chamber door to lock the subjects in until the experiment is over, so if we can't force it open we'll just have to wait it out."
Several minutes later, the noise is nearly deafening, and Alex has to shout to overcome it. "I DON'T GET IT!" she yells, hands over her ear-holes. "I ONLY SET THE DAMN THING FOR A MINUTE! WE'VE GOT TO TRY BREAKING THE DOOR OPEN AGAIN!"
Ashley and Kenton, the most muscular members of your group, try their best to force the door open, but it holds fast. Whatever the doctor put in this machine, he sure didn't want it getting out. Just as it seems that the noise can't possibly get any louder, the lights in the room flicker briefly, and then everything goes black.
For a moment, the only sounds are Lily's soft whimpering and a ringing in your ears. Then Alex snorts. "Huh. Stupid thing must've overloaded the generator."
"I wonder why the lights cut out, then?" you say. "Didn't he have normal power company power as well?"
"Probably," Alex replies. "I dunno, maybe there's a breaker switch around here or something. I don't know how we'll find it, though. I can't see a damn thing right now."
"I can," Kenton offers. "Ashley and I can go take a look for the breaker panel, if we can get out now."
"You ought to be able to," Alex says. "I think it was magnetically secured, so with the power off it ought to just swing open."
You hear soft, padding footsteps pass by you, and the hinge of the door groans softly. "Opens fine," Kenton chuckles. "C'mon, Ash, let's get some light back in here." Two sets of footsteps move away from you and into another room.
"Alex," Jeanette asks, "do you think the chamber'll come back on when the power's restored?"
"No idea," she replies. "I suppose we'd better get out of here, just in case the door seals again." You hear her feeling her way around the perimeter of the chamber until she exits through the door. "Come on, Lily," you say. "Let's get out of here."
As you're feeling your way to the exit, a hand lands on your breasts. The sensation is unfamiliar enough that it takes you a moment to realize what it is. "Hey!" you yelp.
"Gah! Sorry," Jeanette says, quickly withdrawing his hand. Slightly perturbed, you make your way out of the chamber and sit down on the lab floor, waiting for the lights to come on.
"So, Alex," you say, "Jeanette says he's been out here for almost two weeks. What about you? How did you get here?"
Alex chuckles. "Eh, I was trying to follow up on some postings on sci.nanotech on Usenet. Some guy was making allusions to his supposedly highly advanced private nanotechnology experiments. Everybody figured he was crazy, but I tracked down his IP and found that he lived about an hour away, so I figured I'd do a little amateur espionage. Unfortunately, when I found out that his claims really were backed up, I got too curious, and he found me snooping around his lab. One tranquilizer dart later, and I was a caged dinosaur. That was about a week ago. I made an escape attempt...yesterday? Today?"
"Early today," you reply. "I was taking a walk in the state park, and I guess I must've stumbled onto his property. He drugged you up just after we met, and I helped him get you back to the lab. Then he offered to show me how he made his creatures, and things went downhill from there."
"Interesting," Jeanette says. "It was three weeks ago that the Kentons disappeared. We figured out that they were on a camping trip in the park, but it'll be good to get the full story from them. You're sure we were the only human victims?"
"Yep," Alex replies. "According to the doctor's records, it's just the five of us. Well, Lily too, but she's not in the records, for obvious reasons."
Just as you're about to ask where the Kentons are, the lights come on. About a minute later, the two sabertooths return. Alex powers on the computer and waits to see what it will do. Not surprisingly, it fails to boot; the hard drive must have been wiped when the magnetic chamber overloaded. "Dammit," Alex mutters. "Good thing we backed this thing up."
"So what now?" Ashley asks, his tail twitching nervously. "We restore the backup, I guess?"
Alex shrugs. "That's a start, but if the field got out here, it almost certainly bricked the nanobots."
"Wasn't that what we wanted?" you ask.
"Well, yes," she replies. "We did want to disable the nanobots in our bodies, so that's taken care of, but what I meant was that it disabled all the nanobots in the entire lab. If we had a supply from an outside source, we could just program some more, but unfortunately all we have is the doctor's own manufacturing device, which uses nanobots to make nanobots, given the raw materials. And since those nanobots are down, things are a little more complicated. We have all the documentation needed to produce new nanobots on the backup DVD, but we're going to have to try and arrange for someone in the field to make them for us."
"Oh," Jeanette says. "So no easy change-back, then?"
"Nope," Alex sighs. "I'm afraid we're looking at being this way for at least a few months."