One by one, the party climbed into the wrecked orb, Hans doing most of the lifting. This first room, though filthy, looked innocuous enough, but as they got deeper inside, they could see that the room visible through the ladder seemed to be humming and blinking with multi-colored lights.

As Harry climbed down the ladder, he saw that there was a large room with no flat floor. It was rounded, just like the orb, composed the entire bottom of the orb below the floor, and a sizzling, green liquid with some kind of steam rising off was pooled all around the bottom of the ladder. The source of the liquid seemed to be a broken cylindrical tank with a metal dome base on the other side of the circular room. The base had a smoking, sparking panel on the side underneath the tank.

Sticking straight out of the liquid at a slight angle were about 10 metal rods distributed evenly in a circle around the room. Each of the rods had unbroken glass terrariums stuck on top of them, and the tiny plants inside seemed to be moving. On the opposite side of the room from the tank, there was a large wooden box with an unlocked lock hanging from its latch. The wood looked extremely out of place in the otherwise totally metallic orb.

As Harry was looking around and taking in the utterly foreign surroundings, the rusted rung of the ladder his feet were resting on broke off from underneath him! The broken rung clanged against the one below it loudly and landed into the green liquid with a splash, all of the noises echoing deafeningly around the metal room. To Harry's relief, there was no sizzle as the metal rung hit the liquid, indicating that it was not in fact a cartoonishly acidic substance as would have been the natural assumption in this situation. In spite of this relief, Harry was still hanging there, and the rung he clung to began shifting under his weight.