Denice goes back to her mapping.

Sadde waits, watching curiously.

It looks for all the world like she's staring vacantly off into space, except every so often her head moves slightly.

She won't interrupt.

And eventually she's done. "Ready?"

"Yeah," she says, jumping to her feet.

She gets her backpack and leads the way.

She follows!

It's similar to following her to the library; she moves like she's been this way a thousand times before.

She continues keeping an ear out for Picassos. It takes a little while to get to the first place she wants to check.

There aren't any Picassos on the way. She hears one at the very edge of a non-Euclidean turn but it goes away.

Oh good.

She stops when they get to the first place. "Dunno, how... normal, we need; better places farther along, but, check here?"

"The exit looks like... a flicker out of the corner of your eye, something you wouldn't see head on but you might see if you're distracted. If there are better places, and they are better rather than, say, a perfectly normal bathroom hiding chainsaws everywhere, they're probably more likely to be closer to the surface, though."

She nods. Even if there is an exit here, she's probably not going to find it - vision has never been her forte - but she starts looking anyway.

There are no flickers of unrecognition.

Yup. Well. On to the next place.

Indeed!

Eerily quiet, all around. Actually, really eerily quiet, with the annoyingly stale and unmoving and muffled air, the unchanging rooms. Some rooms clearly several decades old, looking/sounding like it's only been days.

Well, she's doing the best she can to get away from it. Onward they go.

The Sideways continues to get less weird and twisted as they advance, until it's... pretty normal. Sure, it's still a building's entrance hall connected to a butcher shop, but nothing repeats and the number of walls isn't in a quantum superposition.

"I think we should be able to find an exit in one of these rooms, probably."

She looks around again.

—strange flicker over there—

—she can barely hear through it, when she's not paying attention—

But if she can hear it at all it must be what she's looking for.

"Hey. There." She points.

"Oh! Great—"

The shadows of the room grow thicker, darker.

// no. // NO. // nonononono. //

my friend // stealing my // MY friend. // my FRIEND!

The voice comes from everywhere, but the girl starts materializing in a corner, a distorted mix of parts and images and ideas that together somehow form the twelve-year-old girl made of darkness and tendrils of shadow. A thousand eyes focus on them, and a hundred frowns advance on them.

She grabs for Sadde and lunges through the portal.

Annnd they're out, inside someone's basement.

"Wow. That was close."