Utterly Mad

The door wouldn't give at first, prying was mostly impossible without some structural alteration taking place, but after an hour of ramming into the portal with a post driver it finally popped loose. There was no flood of water like they expected. No sudden rush of screamers or other beast that could have slipped in sometime between the destructive end of the facilities operation and now. What did meet them was light. Day light. The small room was the double of the wrecked one upstairs except for two major differences. First, this room was built with a narrow shaft leading at an angle up and out to the surface. The other was a set of plinths on one of which spun a grey cylinder. The walls were lined with them, each and every one of them lying still on racks. That's not to say that the room was not without damage. Several cylinders lay scattered and twisted in the corners, and the inside of the door showed why it had been so difficult to knock down. It had expanded. Not like a wood door soaking water, but like a sheet of metal heated and beaten to fill a mold.

"I say," George mouthed, " that is quite the sound."

"Yeah... How do we secure it?" Felicia mouthed back. Catnip staggered through the room, looking at all the cells. Broken, broken, broken. The more of them she examined, the more she found which had ruptured in some way. Only, the room hadn't been so badly damaged by the cells Sudden detonation. It seemed the only unbroken cell was the one still spinning on it's plinth. A cradle of sorts sporting a pair of pins which held the cell in place while it exerted itself. It was from this, the cell rubbing it's ends in infinite rotation against super alloy pegs, that the sound Catnip had heard came from.

"The others must have worn through their cradle or something..." Catnip suggested quietly. The one spinning cell was precisely what they needed. The emergency generator in the next room could, if Catnip got it up and running, finish the job of draining the towers main chamber and after that they would be home free. Simple. But not really. First, they had to get it off it's spindle and that was not just hard, but also dangerous. The cell spun fast enough and with enough force that any attempt to grab it would end up peeling the skin off any hand that was laid on it. This was sort of proven when Felicia attempted to prod the cell with a handy piece of aluminum shelving. It was bounced away hard enough to drive the strut into the concrete wall.

It was then that one of the workers hit on an idea. "Why don't we cut the spindle?"