"The key is, are all the mechanisms here fully automatic?" Harley asked quietly. "No one's controlling them from behind the scenes?"
"I don't think that's very likely," Pamela said. "Forget everything else—take that blood-donation room earlier. If we go by the logic of the mechanism's design, everyone would pass through there. Then if we just stayed there and refused to leave, wouldn't we be able to run into the teams behind us?"
"No, that part's easy enough to solve," Harley said. "We might not have been heading to the same room."
"Then how could the blood be put into the same scale?"
"It doesn't need to be put into the same scale. Just record how much blood everyone donated, then pour water in. Otherwise, why make that basin opaque?"
"Oh, now that you say that, I remember," Pamela said. "There was some pale pink liquid under that machine. It looked like blood diluted with water. Don't tell me everything in that basin besides the blood you donated yourself was water?"
"Probably. But I don't think the level designer would cheat with the amount, because that wouldn't be fun," Harley said. "They probably just split everyone into different rooms, then converted the amount of blood donated in the other rooms into water and added it into the basin."
"I think I get it," Pamela said. "Before we arrived, the scale had already been weighed down. Even if what was inside was water standing in for blood, we wouldn't know, because we didn't see the blood being poured in. And if we donated blood ourselves, we could see blood being added to the scale, so naturally we'd think the liquid weighing the scale down was blood too. And the blood we donated would be weighed, recorded, and added as water in other