A Choice of Two

"What... is it?" I sincerely wanted to figure out what the wide world we were looking at.

"I don't know... I know the Russians back in the day were doing crazy experiments up in the bunkers but... what is this even supposed to be?"

We were both unmoving, continuously staring down this hulk of... something. A bright purple glow illuminated the entire room, all of it coming from a single source. An Oblivion Gate sized doorway of some sort of energy coursing back and forth quickly from two metal rods protruding from the floor. They electricity, for lack of a better word, coursed so quickly, it looked like a solid beam of pure purple energy that shifted around with the looks of a hurricane.

"Do you think it's... some sort of portal? I read and watch a lot of sci-fi, and this fits the bill." Zach pondered. Man, he was a massive geek.

"Probably not, we don't have that sort of technology yet."

"Maybe, but who knows what they were able to cook up up here in these labs."

We continued to sit, dumbfounded by the tall, bright-purple wall sitting in front of them. It didn't occur to either of us what we were going to do about this thing. We still needed to find food and water.

"Before we screw around with this thing, let's try to see if we can find a mess hall." This seemed like the logical course of action.

"Yeah, sounds good." Zach usually agreed with me on things since I was the more critical thinker.

We left the room and once again began to trudge down the corridor, we left the blast door open so we didn't forget where it was. After quickly glancing through every room we passed, we found what seemed to be where food was stored, most of the food there was completely and utterly botched, most of it was barely recognizable as food. Luckily, there happened to be a few boxes of non-perishable items, probably for situations exactly like this. All of the cans were unlabeled so we decided to crack one open.

Wide smiles spread on both our faces.

"Beef stew, now that's a score if I ever saw one." This was honestly the best luck we had had so far on this trip. I was actually glad for the first time.

We heated two cans of beef stew up in an old, yet still functioning, microwave. The smell was almost irresistible, not that I wanted to resist it. We dug in and had downed both cans in less than 2 minutes. Since there was around 10 boxes of these, we made 2 more cans, and downed those just as fast.

"Ok, from now on we preserve our supplies, no gorging like we just did, it's for the better." I told Zach.

"By the way, if that does turn out to be a portal, we may want to fill up a few bags with this stuff." Good job Zach, you thought ahead for once.

"Worst case scenario, it's a damn deathray and we're gonna walk straight into it." I laughed.

We found a few bags that had not been affected by any mold and didn't instantly turn to dust in our hands, and filled them to the brim with cans of beef stew. If it turned out that this wasn't a portal, they would at least have over a month to figure things out before they ran out of food to eat.

We happily walked back towards the room, stomachs full for the first time in days, but the happiness was slowly replaced with nervousness as we got closer to the purple room. We arrived and stepped inside. We remained yet again staring blankly at the purple lightning coursing back and forth.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked Zach, just to make sure he was ok with this.

"What other choice do we have?" He had a point there.

"We could always just, wait for the end?" I implied that we sit here a over a month and starve to death.

"Leave it to you to..." He trailed off. "Honestly, I've never met anyone in my life that gives up as easy as you do, and this is coming from me, the one everyone thinks is the laziest person in the world. We have to try, try anything, something... if we don't then what's the point? We might as well just kill ourselves now."

"...Sorry... I guess you're right. Let's do this." I felt bad for suggesting we do what I said and just kill ourselves.

"Ready?" Zach inquired.

"As I'll ever be."

We both took a running start, sprinting at the wall with all our might. As it came up to meet us, I started having second thoughts. What if this thing really was designed to kill things? What if it killed us? I pushed these thoughts aside, if I didn't die here, I would die of starvation anyways. Too late to go back now.

We were falling.