At 6:32, a train arrives. Its doors slide open with a chime, showing an empty and reasonably clean car.

Finally!

She steps in and takes a seat.

After about a minute, the car's doors slide closed and it travels into darkness.

She puts her backpack on her lap and tries to nap.

The fluorescent lights don't flicker too much, and the car continues to travel through the darkness in silence, with either smooth acceleration or constant velocity. Nothing in particular prevents her from falling asleep.

Zzzz.

There are a few more instances of very smooth acceleration and deceleration, and sometimes a tiny shift in angle, but other than that, nothing changes over the next forty or so minutes.

She groggily opens her eyes, feeling a little... odd--

Wait.

Shouldn't she be there already? Did she miss her stop? Oh, no.

She jumps up, catches her bag before it falls, and looks out the window.

Still perfectly dark, aside from a tiny bit of the side of the car below the window, illuminated by the light from within.

That's... strange. Normally there are flashes of lights mounted on the walls, or bits of the tunnel walls.

She pulls out her phone. What time is it?

It doesn't have a GPS signal, or internet connection, but its internal clock seems to think it's 7:14.

Okay, so she definitely should be seeing something else here.

She squints out the window some more. No luck.

Maybe she could ask another passenger what the last stop was.

That would work, if there were any other passengers, but she seems to be alone in the car.

Nope, this isn't creepy at all. Not at all, you hear?

She's just going to walk down the length of the car and look around. She is on the 7 train, right? No other trains stop at her stop...

Well, there aren't any labels indicating specifically that it isn't the 7 train.

There aren't any other passengers, but there's a pad of paper jammed between a seat and the wall, a brochure under one of the short perpendicular benches near the front of the car, and a scrap of shiny plastic under a seat near the back.

She looks at the brochure first.

It's a threefold sheet, printed on soft and thin brown paper, with a scaled texture pressed into it. There's a cartoonishly-drawn picture of grinning passengers filling a subway car and hugging each other on the front.

The second flap advertises the subway, praising its benefits for traffic, ease of movement, speed, and formation of happy memories. The inside shows a list of times and stations, a stylized route map, and a bulleted list consisting of what may have been cut-and-paste formatting indicators or unusual unicode characters originally, but are now garbled symbols interspersed with empty boxes. The map doesn't particularly resemble any part of New York, or any subway route she's familiar with, but that could conceivably be the application, or the brochure could be for a different subway.

This is a little too cheerful to be an ad for the subway. She flips over to the map. Maybe a tourist dropped it and it's from another city?

The list of garbled text is kind of unsettling, though. First she misses her stop, then she finds herself in an empty car, and now this... She doesn't have to be a horror fan to connect the dots. She really hopes she hasn't found her way into the plot of a horror movie.

She puts the brochure into her backpack and moves on to the notepad.

Its front cover shows a colorful – tree? seaweed? abstract collection of squiggles? – with a collection of crossed lines and circles in two rows across the top. Each page has a 43 by 97 grid of dots, with a scattering of triangles between them. About two thirds of the pages have connections drawn between the triangles, and long chains of zigzags around them, blue lines in a smooth and waxy substance, although a handful of pages have been completely scribbled over.

These are... someone's doodles?

She flips through the notepad, and when there doesn't seem to be any useful information, she puts it in her backpack, too. (There's no such thing as not enough notebooks, even if they're already used.)

What about the shiny plastic?

It's extremely flimsy and already torn nearly in half. There's a bit of something like green rice stuck to a corner of the inside.

She pokes at it and decides against picking it up.

Is it still super dark outside?

The plastic remains on the floor.

Yep.

She really doesn't want to be stuck on this train. What if it never stops?!

Maybe she can check out one of the other cars? Can she open those doors?

None of the doors seem to open. Actually, looking out the doors' windows, there don't seem to be other cars, either to the front or the back.