Backrooms Decrypted: The Basement (Enigmatic Level)

The Basement is the enigmatic level of The Backrooms. This file contains a collection of Back forums discussion threads that explain The Basement. 🥵👾🔫

• Trish, the former soldier who was trapped in the backrooms with her now-dead squad, was having a hell of a week. In one of the Backrooms' many sinister, enigmatic levels not too long ago, she just barely avoided a bestial bunny in the depths of Barnaby Bun's Fun Emporium. Thankfully, she was able to act quickly and narrowly avoid being killed, but it cost her assault rifle. She had no idea that she was soon to stumble into another enigmatic den of horrors. She had returned to Level 4, the Abandoned Office, the world of mindless, grey corporate tedium, where she had long since grown tired of the drab carpeting and dusty old partitions after leaving Barnaby Buns Fun Emporium. She needed to leave this place and hopefully find a more welcoming area of this strange new dimension.
• She decided to approach this as methodically as she could, drawing on her military training as she checked off each sector of the area until she discovered a safe exit. Even though it would require a thorough search of every corridor, conference room, office, and maintenance closet, she would succeed. Office chairs were one item she grew tired of seeing repeatedly. The same subpar, plastic three-wheeled abominations that seemed almost engineered to crash and injure their users the moment the warranty expired. In Level 4, they were about as common as dust particles, and since they were all identical, many of them simply blended into the background. She was, therefore, genuinely drawn to the unique chair when she first saw it.
• Remember that special does not always imply superiority. The chair actually appeared to Trish to be a glitch in an old video game. Its back appeared to be oddly long and curved at the top, and it had several wheels protruding from it at odd angles. What an oddity! Trish felt compelled to approach for whatever reason. She was determined to find out how someone would actually sit on this thing. That's why she blinked and noticed that everything had turned yellow after making the mistake of touching this strangely glitched chair. She was suddenly surrounded by garish yellow wallpaper on all sides and could feel the damp carpet squelching under her boots.
• Her skin strangely felt like it was being crawled all over by insects as the air was filled with an obnoxious buzz. Trish had no clipped into Level 0 while she was unaware of it, which is frequently used as a gateway to access the backrooms as a whole. She would spend hours pacing these filthy yellow halls, growing increasingly uneasy as she came to suspect that there might not be a door leading anywhere. Trish, however, was no pushover. She has always thought that making your own door is the best option if you can't find one. Her handy entrenching tool, a small, fold-up shovel that came in very handy in situations like this, was the first thing she took out of her bulky backpack.
• She used it to help remove a piece of the unsightly, soggy carpet so she could see the floorboards beneath. She was starting to move forward at this point. This location had to make sense in some way; there had to be somewhere above and somewhere below. There were only a few frail old floorboards in the way of her reaching it. There would be no difficulty in this. With all her strength, Trish smashed through the floor, exposing a secret chamber beneath her as she did so. Perfect. Although there was no light down there, the constant buzz of the yellow halogen above her in Level 0 did not make up for it. In order to avoid falling into oblivion, Trish pulled a piece of wood from the crumpled boards and dropped it into the gap.
• A moment later, it made a loud clunk. While descending into the shadows, she sighed. As Trish landed, she felt pain in her knees and then, after a brief period of darkness, a new light flickered on, revealing the plain, industrial room she was now standing in. Trish had entered a new level of enigmatism, but she lacked the knowledge to recognize it. One is appropriately named The Basement. There won't be any problems down here, I assure you. Nevertheless, Trish was relieved to be in a place she recognized. She had spent countless hours in similar basements at various family homes throughout her life. This was positively cozy in comparison to the other nightmares she has experienced in the backrooms thus far.
• She was eager to learn more and explore further after experiencing this level of basic comfort. A set of eerie stairs leading down into what appeared to be a flooded basement filled with foul-smelling, murky water was visible when she approached and opened a nearby door. Even though it was obviously not Trish's first instinct to dive into the bilge water below, she had developed a kind of "in for a penny, in for a pound" mentality where anything less than being chased by an unkillable, homicidal bunny rabbit didn't seem like that big of a deal. Now that she was being pulled downward by curiosity, she was moving forward. She braced herself before starting to descend the stairs in the direction of the frigid waters' embrace.
• Trish found herself in a large, dark tunnel with a curved roof that extended into the distance like a giant sewer pipe or an abandoned train tunnel. She waded through ice-cold waters that reached her lower ribs because there was no other way to move but forward. She needed to make sure she had a tactical flashlight in her backpack because it was so dark down in the tunnel that she didn't want to end up going in circles. The actual water was so opaquely dark that it was almost impossible to see anything beneath it. She was extremely uneasy about it, but she repressed the feelings and continued to move.
• The only result of panic would be death. Hours eventually became minutes, and Trish just kept wading. Up until something brushed up against her leg underwater, breaking her focus and sending a shudder up her spine, it had been a largely comforting, uneventful rhythm. What the heck was that? Was it some random piece of floating trash that happened to brush up against her leg, or was it something alive like a fish or a leech?