Colin pushed open the wooden door and walked into the hall.
Directly opposite the wooden door was a massive stone slab. Text formed from points of light appeared on its surface, like an announcement board.
"Test Station Five, occupied. Test Station Six... Test Station Twenty-One, available." After finding an open spot, Colin turned from the slab and entered the public research hall behind it.
The layout here was similar to the workstation area of a corporate office or a graduate student lab.
Along the right wall of the hall were over a hundred individual cubicles, each partitioned by stone slabs.
Most of these cubicles were occupied by apprentices, toiling away with their heads down. Everyone was so busy they hardly had time to look up.
Colin found an empty cubicle and sat down. Inside was just a desk and chair, a small, perpetually glowing lamp, and some tools for processing Casting Materials, such as flasks, alcohol lamps, a mortar, and a pestle.
