There was a knock on the door. "Uh, are you girls okay?" came a tentative, squeaky male voice.
Tiff relaxed a bit. She recognized the voice -- it was Tim Baxter, probably the biggest nerd in the 11th grade, and reasonably harmless. "Uh, I'm not sure!" she yelled back.
"Did you follow us here?!" yelled Katie.
"Uh, yeah, I was walking by and saw you sneaking into the house," admitted Tim. The latch on the door jiggled. "I can't get it open."
"We think there's a computer program that's got to run, or something!" yelled Tiff.
After a few seconds, Tim's voice came back, a little fainter. "Oh, yeah, here are the controls. It looks like this thing is waiting for an input."
"Shit," said Katie, quietly so only Tiff could hear. "So I guess it's a good thing he did follow us, if we can't get out until someone enters more stuff on that computer."
Tiff yelled for Tim's benefit, "So keep giving it input until we can get out!"
Tim yelled back, "I'm not sure what some of these choices are!"
Tiff rolled her eyes. "If there's a default, pick that, and if not, just pick the first thing in the list!" The fog was starting to make her body feel strangely tingly.
Finally, a squeaky, "Okay!" came back. Katie sighed.
After a few more seconds, the fog started to dissipate --in fact, quickly enough that there must have been a vacuum pump somewhere sucking it out. The chamber door hissed and opened a crack.
The door opened the rest of the way. The girls stepped out. Tim started talking from behind the door. "Thank goodness it opened. I figured out I could just press the space bar on the keyboard. I think this thing is supposed to be some kind of quantum --" His acne-riddled face peered around the door and his jaw dropped.