You wake up in a stark corridor, with a fully illuminated ceiling, black walls and large square white tiles the width of the corridor tiling the floor. Looking around, you notice a small piece of paper on the floor:
COPY A mixed-up RICE plate
You decide to head down the corridor. Looking in front of you, all the branches are to your left. You reach the end of the corridor and turn left. Immediately, you spy another piece of paper.
destroy runes CARER
You notice that the adjoining corridors are again to your left, and the walls and corridors alternate, same width each time. At the end of your corridor, you realised you've gone up a bit. There is a person sitting on a box, crying about not having something, sitting on the crack between tiles just as you step into the corridor.
On the second tile after the person, you find a pair of glasses on the floor in a red dot. After one more is another corridor, to the right. Two more, and you are at the end.
You turn left again, into a descending corridor. Another slip of paper waits ahead, and a red dot with a picture book lies in front of the first corridor you come to:
do PUT IN a bent oval, with singing
You notice that apart from the paper, the dot and the slope, this corridor looks identical to the 2nd corridor you went through. Coming to the end, you find yourself back where you started.
You turn around and turn right into the middle corridor at the dot. Someone who claims to be a hairdresser and complaining about your hair is on the tile just before the intersection at the end of the corridor.
You turn left twice, then right. Another slip of paper is on the ground:
Moves SHREDS after E
You come to a 4-way intersection, but keep going up. You are forced to turn right three times, finding three more slips of paper:
lengthy, spoilt LIME
PARDON defence
Atom's form IS a RING with a small shark
You reach the end of the hallway, but it's a dead end, so you turn around and turn left at the next tile. At the intersection is a red dot with a few pieces of hair on it.
At the end of the hallway is a teenage girl, complaining about feeling sick. You turn left again, and find some paper saying:
questioning EXISTENCE of surjective boolean algebra
At the end of the hallway, you turn left, heading downhill. One tile to your left at the next corridor is a scientist gabbling about something that was taken, but you keep going straight. Another slip of paper tells you:
morning after a confused fox TRIES to prevent starvation
On the last tile of the corridor you find a red dot with an apple on it, and you turn left. On the crack between tiles is, apparently, an artist who is complaining about their teacher. At the end of the corridor, you turn left, and in the middle of the hallway you see a red dot with a pair of identical bracelets. A piece of paper is on the floor just past that:
senior used TO browse for good OLD songs
You turn back down the hallway, right at the end and then left two tiles later, down yet another corridor. Thinking about the last few corridors, something seems familiar about them.
You turn three times at the ends of corridors, picking up the papers as you go along, thinking that this definitely looks familiar.
the RELATION within is a conflict
Depart Being Without Doing s
brown HASHES talk extensively
SOUNDS like A good, moving greeting
You come to another dead end, so you turn around and turn left. At the second last tile of the corridor is a red dot with some buckyballs and a piece of charcoal, and coming down to the last tile you find an old man who is feeling the walls and floor with his hands. You turn left, then realise you're back to where you started.
You think over everything you've seen. You realise that even if you could take each person straight to what they wanted, each other's needs and wants would get in the way. And even if you took them out, there'd still be something missing.
You wonder how you can get out. You think back over where you've been, and realise that one of the corridors had a keyboard, and a screen with an input field and title "Missing, 'till the very end". You can't remember where it was, but you can't bear to be in this maze any longer than you need to be.
Where do you need to go? How do you get there? What do you need to enter?
Hints
Given on chat:
The next step is in the 2nd-last body paragraph.
Not given on chat:
What's the shortest distance between two points?