[ The keypad isn't numerical, but composed of symbols. He watches Korra press her key into the node mechanism. There's a beep and then a click as the first lock disengages. He punches in the code next -- ♦ ✦ ➛ ♆ -- making sure she absorbs it. There's a trill of electronic tones, before the door opens like a slow, growing smile -- if smiles creaked -- to admit them into a nearly lightless entree made less obscure by the pale shoji paneling. ]
[ The apartment, almost Tokyoite in its precise spareness, consists of two rooms that feel taller than they are wide. The first is occupied only by a futon, a cool patch of whiteness on the dusty floorboards, with a sliver of a window that looks onto a Kafkaesque air shaft and admits no light whatsoever, even at noon. The second is empty except for a rickety low table and a bookshelf. It has a perimeter skylight on the sloping roof, throwing pink illumination from flashing red signboards on the roof, across a grid of exposed wooden ceiling beams inside. The room tone is flat. Soundproofed. A bathroom, a workspace, and a kitchen with steel surfaces. All strangely subterranean, time and air moving sluggishly inside it. ]
[ Shutting the locks behind them, Hei mutters, ] I haven't had a chance to clean up in here.
no subject
[ The keypad isn't numerical, but composed of symbols. He watches Korra press her key into the node mechanism. There's a beep and then a click as the first lock disengages. He punches in the code next -- ♦ ✦ ➛ ♆ -- making sure she absorbs it. There's a trill of electronic tones, before the door opens like a slow, growing smile -- if smiles creaked -- to admit them into a nearly lightless entree made less obscure by the pale shoji paneling. ]
[ The apartment, almost Tokyoite in its precise spareness, consists of two rooms that feel taller than they are wide. The first is occupied only by a futon, a cool patch of whiteness on the dusty floorboards, with a sliver of a window that looks onto a Kafkaesque air shaft and admits no light whatsoever, even at noon. The second is empty except for a rickety low table and a bookshelf. It has a perimeter skylight on the sloping roof, throwing pink illumination from flashing red signboards on the roof, across a grid of exposed wooden ceiling beams inside. The room tone is flat. Soundproofed. A bathroom, a workspace, and a kitchen with steel surfaces. All strangely subterranean, time and air moving sluggishly inside it. ]
[ Shutting the locks behind them, Hei mutters, ] I haven't had a chance to clean up in here.