As you pull yourself into the room, you wind up at an angle that allows - well, effectively forces you - to look at the ceiling of the room. And the longer that you look, the less confident you are about cutting through it cleanly, quickly and safely. In fact, by the time that you have pulled your way through the hole in the intake, and the substantially tighter hole between the struts, you have your mind made up. You will find your way through the hulk. Once you and toolbox are inside the room, you move to the door, keeping your ignited torch between you and the light fixture above, then the outlet by the door, as a precaution in case a conduit worm comes wriggling out at you. When you make it to the door without being accosted by parasites, you breathe a sigh of relief, and try to force yourself to relax, as a stressed body consume more air - not to mention that it cannot be good for your recovering heart.
With all of the complications that you have had to deal with this shift, you have expect the door to be jammed or sealed, but when you crank the seal open, then release the bolt, the door opens up easily enough, though you make a point of only opening it up a crack. The hallway beyond is as black as pitch in both directions - as is everything else that is not illuminated by your suit or your wisps - so you snake one of the mini-drones through the door. In the gentle light of the wisp, the hallway looks ... like a hallway of a hulk in disrepair. Trash, debris - and alarmingly, tiny corpses of conduit worms - are suspended through the space. Everything appears to be structurally sound at least.
After consulting the schematic for heading towards the power plant and desalinator, you carefully set out in the direction of a series of hatches and ladders that allow emergency movement through the hull. The hallway that you are in is short and tight, and the hallway that it leads to is similarly tight and barely any longer, but neither of these them are in an unreasonable state, considering the condition of the rest of the <span class="mu-i">Highest Heaven</span>. Still, you are awfully nervous. You can see light fixtures that have become completely subsumed by conduit worms. Most of them are either dead or in torpor, but even in the gloom of the halls, you cannot help by notice how some of the worms are swaying with you as you pass, the light from your wisps glinting off their tiny unblinking eyes in the darkness. As unnerving as the sight might be, you are glad to see the eyes, as otherwise it would be impossible to tell in passing the difference between an average sized worm and a massive worms feelers. Eyes though, scale with the worm.
But the small reassurance that is gets dashed away when you turn down a new hallway only to encounter a closed blast door. Tellingly, the point-of-use operators panel for the door has been removed, sealing it permanently. The question is, which side of the door is supposed to be sealed off?
