Boxcar nudged Nora's leg and whined with his best convincing puppy dog eyes look.  Nora, with no defenses against such a technique, found herself putting together a plate of the fajita mix minus wrap and set it down for him to eat, which he did greedily.  [i]Nothing in it that'll hurt him,[/i] thought Nora as she reviewed the ingredients in her mind.  [i]And it'll keep him quiet - him talking seemed to throw this girl off very badly, and I'm not sure how well she can take the shock of that again.[/i]

Ashley's report startled Nora visibly, and she had to adjust her glasses from where they had become unbalanced on her nose.  "A...secret door in the basement?  Nobody told me about that!  Justin didn't mention it during the tour, so he must not have known about it, and I don't know if Cybertronics knows about it either."  It seemed hard to believe that her company had inspected the lodge and not found this secret door, yet Boxcar had found it within the first few hours of the lodge's first day of operation.  Still, Boxcar had senses that the robots and normal people who inspected the location didn't have.

Nora was distracted briefly by the arrival of Lady Jane, and then by Jaiden after her.  With his arrival, that completed her expected roster of guests for the lodge, and that also meant everyone was here for lunch.  This was remarkably satisfying for Nora, as a checklist was mentally completed in her head.  It was also mildly terrifying, since it meant she now had no real schedule to follow.  Theoretically, she was here to observe and offer opportunities for allowing the lodgers to test their abilities far from civilization, in the safety of the lodge's environs and the surrounding terrain.  Realistically, she hadn't done anything quite like this before, where there wasn't a rigidly-defined plan or schedule of events.  She was on her own.

As the lunch progressed, however, she went over what she remembered about the lodge from the meeting with her superiors.  The lodge's previous owner had bought several crates of machine parts from Cybertronics Unlimited, as well as building materials from several other companies, but through what must have been an oversight, Cybertronics had been the only company left unpaid.  Her briefing hadn't told her who the previous owner was - her superiors were very careful, she remembered, not to give any details, citing that they couldn't tell her due to privacy concerns - but there was enough information between the lines that even Nora could tell the owner had been some kind of criminal, and that the lodge had been built with far more materials than the building they had just toured couldn't reasonably have contained.

This led her to the conclusion that it would be in their best interests to explore the hidden passage themselves.  Nora was already in enough trouble with her superiors as it was, which was why she was out here to begin with, and if she asked for help so soon after getting to the lodge, it might cost her any chance of salvaging her job.  And, at least for now, this was where she would be living, along with all of these other people, so it was in everyone's best interest to know what lay beneath the lodge.  This, combined with sitting through a lunch with the lodgers and finding that nothing went wrong, gave her the confidence she needed to formulate an idea.

Toward the end of lunch, as everyone was eating the last of the fajitas, Nora stood up at the head of the table and addressed the group.  "Thank you all for coming here - I'm Nora Minder, effectively the property manager for the lodge as appointed by Cybertronics Unlimited, who invited you here.  Some of you have already introduced yourselves to each other, but we're all new to each other, and my hope is that, while you are here at the lodge, we'll all become friends in time."

Nora adjusted her glasses, a motion that nudged some of her blonde bangs away from her blue eyes as she surveyed the group.  "It's come to my attention that the lodge has a secret basement door.  Justin Hobbes, our handyman-on-call, did not seem to know about this, and neither did the company, though according to what I've been told, this property was collected by Cybertronics as payment by the previous owner who may have had ulterior motives for building this lodge out here in the middle of nowhere.  Since we will be living here together for the foreseeable future, I want to propose we do an exploration of this secret underground passageway, so we'll know what we're sitting on top of and don't have any nasty surprises later."

"Of course, this could be very dangerous, and I have no idea what might be down there, which is why I'm not asking any of you to go down there unless you are willing to do so.  I will be going, as it is my responsibility to ensure your safety.  I wouldn't mind company, though, and would welcome anyone who wants to come along with."

Truth be told, she was kind of excited.  What kind of secrets did this strangely-built and located lodge hold?  What was under the lodge that required a secret door to hide?  And how had her company overlooked something like this?  She waited for the response from the others, knowing full well that she might have to go on her own if no one else volunteered.