—something changes.

Yes, yes it does.

Her first impression is that everything's moved - the people, the buildings, the roads, none of it is where it was a moment ago - but that doesn't make sense, not all at once, not over the miles of distance that she can tell the change extends to.

More likely she's moved, somehow, and the building with her.

This is probably not a good thing.

She goes to the break room - she still hasn't turned on a single light; she doesn't need to - and sits and pays attention to what she's hearing, to get a more detailed picture of where she is now.

It's definitely a city.

It's definitely not New York City.

It's definitely not any other city she's ever seen or heard of. Buildings next to buildings, some aligned but many askew. Buildings that have nothing to do with other buildings, a twenty-story building next to a quaint little squat shop next to an empty lot. Roads that zig and zag and zigzag, traffic zigging and zagging and zigzagging with them. Sewers zigging and zagging and zigzagging, following no pattern or rhyme, lacking all sense and order and sense of order, sometimes looping around themselves, vanishing off into the distance. Subway stations here and there, connected in sequences just as tangled and chaotic in this spaghetti of a city.

There are people—not many people, not out and about, it's late, even here—and in fact, even fewer people than there should be, for the time, very few people indeed. People are inside, people don't leave, they return home from work and stay there.

There are people, and her building is between two other buildings like it'd always been there, and there are people driving, and some of them are driving towards her building.

Okay.

Okay.

This is alarming, but, okay.

She picks a nearby loop of subway and tries to trace a route to it, keeping an ear on the approaching vehicles as she does; she can hear the whole subway system at once, at least the parts within her range, but the maze is still a maze.

They get close before she has it fully worked out. She slips out the back door again, taking a moment to re-arm the alarm, and heads off to the nearest unused subway entrance.

There are sirens, which are not quite like the sirens she's used to, attached to the cars driving in the direction of her building. She slips off unseen and down the subway entrance easily, but she can naturally still hear the people arriving at the store and walking in, heedless of the alarm. Well—one of them walks in heedless of the alarm.

"Dammit, Lewis, I told you to stop just barging in like that, third time this week..." one of them complains.

"Sorry, sorry," says the not very apologetically sounding counterpart.

The third member of their little group is silent, and walks into the store.

People are confusing, but that's definitely weird. She keeps an ear on them while she walks, and ducks into the first sufficiently hidden nook she comes to so she can listen to the conversation without distractions.

Nooks: are aplenty. This city is almost nothing but nooks.

The quiet one quickly disables the alarm while the other two look around. "Looks like just a regular clothing store," says Lewis. "No one here, after hours..."

"Cubism?" asks the quiet one.

"No sign," answers not-Lewis.

"Alright, guess Resources is gonna want to annex this ASAP," says Lewis.

Well, that's not very elucidating.

She finishes working out the route to her chosen bit of subway and heads off again, still listening to them.

They don't actually talk much after that. Mostly small talk, about what bet they lost to be taking the graveyard shift today, about not-Lewis' daughter and Lewis' girl and quiet one's coming promotion. They catalogue every item in the store, then one of them radios someone: "Got a clothing store at 98th, no sign of cubism, no imports, everything catalogued. Over."

"Copy that," a voice from the radio answers. "Be there in ten. Over."

So, wherever this is, suddenly appearing buildings are common enough that they have a system for them. Okay.

She reaches her chosen hiding spot and starts cataloguing nearby resources, looking most urgently for grocery and clothing stores and someplace to get a mattress. (This isn't the first time she's had to start with nothing but the clothes on her back. Not even the second; it took a little while for her to resign herself to just how far she'd have to go to avoid having her hiding places found, and when they were, it always seemed safer to just let them go than to give anyone any more clues about herself. She'd hoped not to have to do this again, but it's an annoying setback, not devastating.)

As she reaches her chosen hiding spot, she notices... something. Close to the very limit of her range, the sounds get—weird. Muffled, perhaps, except 'muffled' is not quite the right word...

In any case, she can easily find a crummy grocery store and a clothing store that-a-way and perhaps that's a place that sells mattresses, in descending order of how close they are to her, with the grocery store being about half a mile in one direction and the clothing store one mile in another and the mattress place three miles in a third direction.

Weird muffled sounds can wait, her first priority is dinner. She sets out for the grocery store.

The city is really twisty. She has no trouble navigating, of course, but it's really really twisty.

She doesn't run into any people at this time, and even the people who got into the clothing store she arrived in have already left, being replaced by some other official-sounding people.

Of course she doesn't run into any people. It's not that hard not to, when you can hear where they are and what they're doing like she can.

She checks the store's dumpster, first; if she can get a couple meals' worth of food that way she won't bother breaking in.

One meal. Not a couple.

She can try someplace else tomorrow but she does need dinner and also breakfast first - ideally lunch, too, but that's not worth outright theft for. She checks for a security system.

Not much of one. This is a very crummy shop. Very crummy district, too.

She's not actually much good at disarming them, though. Her usual method is to wait until she hears someone put in the code and just copy them, so she doesn't have to.

She puzzles it over for a few minutes before deciding to just try a different store.

Another crummy store! This one has a lock and that's it.

...well, that'd be it for a regular person. She can hear the soft hum of electronics connected to the door.

Yeah, she's not messing with that. Dumpster?

Not much there at all.

She'll try another couple stores, and then head back if she's still not finding anything.

No stores seem to completely lack any security systems, as far as she can tell.

She prefers to avoid breaking into places anyway. (She will if she has to; nobody's throwing out coats in September.) Their dumpsters?

Somewhat better filled than the first two, she can probably scrape a second meal from them.

All right. She heads back to her hiding place and spends a few hours mapping out the city in her head - she wants to go to a better neighborhood, where the security isn't so tight and the dumpsters are more generous; that might not be close enough for her to find it from here, but she should at least be able to work out what direction to go in and find a route - and then eats her dinner and curls up to sleep as the sun is coming up.

From what she can hear, it's quite likely she is in one of the "better" neighborhoods—there are squatters and dumpsters galore and there's that muffled thing at the edge of the city...

And there's weirdness. Weirdness everywhere. Some buildings have floors that, apparently, do not exist. As in, from the outside the building is perfectly normal, but from the inside there is a whole floor that is completely absent. Some buildings sound like different buildings got mishmashed, some buildings are not completely there, some buildings can't seem to decide what shape they are or how many floors they have. Especially near the muffled parts.

Well. She definitely doesn't want to go near the muffled place.

She wakes up around noon, eats the rest of her food, and listens some more, paying particular attention to how people handle the weird buildings - do they seem to be safe, aside from being weird?

As it gets to be evening she starts listening for security system passcodes for the grocery stores she visited yesterday and a few more she's identified since then.

The buildings that are wholly weird are avoided altogether. The buildings that have weird parts are lived in and people just go around the weirdness, used to it.

Not all stores have passcode-based security systems, but she can definitely get the passwords of the ones that do.

Okay. That's food sorted out, at least in the short term. The weird buildings are still worrying, but easily enough avoided.

She spends a couple more days there - gets ahold of a change of clothes, too, during that time - and when she has a little stash of food and feels like she has the hang of how the city works, she sets out in the opposite direction from the muffled place, hoping to find somewhere better to settle.

The city doesn't seem to get any less crazy as she moves closer and closer to the central urban area. If anything, it gets crazier, with even twistier roads and misaligned building. She continues to walk and—

—she trips on something that wasn't there—

—and finds herself elsewhere.

It's a hospital hallway, but shorter than it should be and all closed doors. And behind these closed doors it's—surprisingly hard to hear. Almost like the rooms haven't decided what they contain, but that's of course preposterous.

Hospital hallway.

And she can't hear her surroundings.

aaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

...did her hand just flicker a bit...

She's far too busy freaking out to notice such trivialities.

Her surroundings do not react to her freaking out.

But she starts hearing again. It expands from where she is, as this strange place settles on what it wants to be. It's not much, at first, very muffled like the edges of the city, but she can detect hallways and rooms. They are very much not hospital rooms, though. There is something that's probably a living room, and something that sounds a lot like an office full of cubicles, and the door adjacent to it leads to a police station in a way that should cause both rooms to intersect each other but somehow they don't.

AAAAAAAA

AAAAAA

AAaaa?

ah?

What the heck?

She scoots over next to the wall and sits up, leaning against it with her arms around her knees, and keeps listening.

Her hearing... definitely does not reach nearly as far as it ought to, and what she does hear is a non-Euclidean complete mess. There's one door that is absolutely and completely soundless, like there's nothing behind it. There are several rooms and hallways and mishmashes that make absolutely no sense. The intersecting office has a bathroom door that leads to a ballroom and another bathroom door that leads to a laundromat. Outside the window it sounds like there's a model of a city instead of an actual city. The stairs never end, and the elevator is an endless pit. Similar craziness touches wherever she can hear, and there is this one hallway which she might be distinctly sure loops around itself seven times without intersecting itself before leading to a restaurant's kitchen.

Okay but it's not actually a hospital wing with a bunch of closed doors, Jesus FUCK that was terrifying. (You're not allowed to close the door, when you're a patient, they want to be able to hear you. So a closed door means they're doing something they don't want people to know about: aaaah.)

She stays put and keeps listening, hoping to hear a way out - the soundless door might be one, she'll give that a try if nothing more obvious shows up - and also keeping an ear out for any people moving around.

If there's a thing she can be sure of is that there's no way "out" within her range. Only in, rooms after rooms after hallways after rooms after more rooms, all inside, twisting around themselves incomprehensibly.

And at the very edge of her hearing, past a non-Euclidean knot so convoluted even her hearing might not be enough to make it out, she can hear movement. It's not a human's movement, however. It's—something else. Like there is no one, or a hundred people, or three, all at the same time. Like the person has three heads and five eyes and one arm and seven hands and is smiling and screaming and crying and talking and walking.

She's curious. Not enough to go look, but enough to pause and listen to the - person? creature? - for a few minutes, and to keep checking back every so often while she tries to catalogue the place. (The rooms stay put, right? At least on the timescale she's working with? Not that she's going to trust that yet regardless, but...)

They do stay put. Quite put, actually—the air is pretty stale, almost like time passes more slowly in there, and everything is really, really still. No hint of insects or people or anything living really other than the occasional plant and that... maybe-a-person-maybe-not-who-knows.

Well, she's not moving without a good reason, and she's not seeing one yet. She keeps listening.

Eventually she gets hungry, and eats something from her pack. While she's eating it occurs to her to see if she can just go back the way she came; when she's done with her meal she tries that.

Nope. She cannot. She can't even hear the way she came, it's like she's somewhere else entirely even though it was a completely clear and continuous transition between the two places, like she'd walked into a hole in the air.

She couldn't hear this place before she fell in, either, or she wouldn't have. Oh well, it was worth a shot.

If she's going to be stuck here she's going to need more food sooner or later, what do her prospects sound like on that?

There is a kitchen a few non-Euclidean turns away that seems to be stockpiled with food, as well as this one dinner room that seems to have food everywhere—even on the ceiling.

She heads for the kitchen.

Past a bowling alley into a bathroom, a stall that leads to a garage, a hall of mirrors in all directions, that hallway that folds around itself seven times, and the restaurant kitchen. It's... pretty normal, relatively speaking.

Oh, good.

She looks around a bit - it wouldn't happen to adjoin a bedroom of some description, would it? - and settles in; her plan is to stay here while the food lasts.

It doesn't adjoin one, but there is a bedroom a few more turns that-a-way.

Of course, it happens to contain seventeen identical beds and the wardrobe is made of cheese.

...she'll haul a mattress to the kitchen.

The mattress will submit to this indignity.

And then she has a bed.

She listens to her surroundings for a while longer - having so few people in range is bizarre, even with the competition it has for that status - and eventually drops off to sleep.

When she wakes up she's no longer alone.

Not that there's anyone there. She can hear no one. But she is nonetheless pretty certain she is not alone.

She stays perfectly still.

The shadows in the kitchen get thicker, deeper. Almost as if the opposite of shining a lamp on them was happening.

And from them, emerges a girl, or the idea of a girl, through a kaleidoscope and depicted in a cubist painting. Seventeen smiles and twenty one green eyes greet her, as a superposition of voices speaks.

// hello. // hi. // hello! you're new // not old // not from here. // who are you? // new friend! // hi. //

Well that's, uh, new.

She sits up. Looking at the girl is disorienting, but she's fairly used to that; she does it anyway. "Hi."

Inasmuch as there is a girl to look at as opposed to several girls or several parts of a girl aligned in a way that gives the vague impression of a girl. Her five lopsided grins turn around and upside down while seven right hands wave.

// hello! // new here? // are you lost? so lost. // a new lost person. // you're not afraid. // are you afraid? //

who are you? // not me. // not anyone else. // just you. //

The tiles where the girl is "standing" warp, melting into each other, and the appliances and objects start shifting and changing before her eyes, floating and twisting. A pan becomes a kettle becomes a kitten becomes a puppy becomes a plush toy, cutlery dances and fights in a disorganized army that becomes chess pieces from another dimension.

She is, in fact, a little bit afraid. But the girl doesn't seem threatening, exactly, and, well, you meet all sorts of people when you live in an institution. This takes several cakes - perhaps as many as forty - for that, but freaking out about nonthreatening weirdness helps nobody.

"New," she nods. "Lost. Denice. You?"

// so lost. // will you play with me? // chaos. // bedlam. //

why aren't you afraid? //

(One of her pairs of hands takes a few twisted bits of metal from the kitchen and starts building a creepy doll house.)

"Is there a reason... to be afraid?"

// me. // the sideways. // all my friends. all the monsters // madness // chaos // nightmare // me.

everyone else is afraid // terrified. //

'I'm weird so everyone's afraid of me', that's a familiar story.

She gestures at where Bedlam's surroundings are being warped. "Dangerous?"

yes. // very dangerous. I destroy // create things. // perfect nightmare. // monster under the bed. // will you be my friend? //

She considers for a second, then gets up and starts looking around for interesting things - spice shakers, a dishcloth - to pass her for the dollhouse, avoiding the warped area as well as she can.

...well Bedlam will accept it, and distort them and turn them into small furniture.

// you're still not scared. // afraid. // terrified. even though you know me. // who // what I am. //

Some of the overlapping voices sound puzzled, and the girl tilts her head. She tilts her head ninety degrees, but still, the gesture conveys its meaning.

She shrugs, and a few items later offers, "they said... I was... scary, a monster, too. Wrong, sometimes."

// wrong. // so wrong. but right, too. // very right. // terror. // you can't be afraid if you're the scary one. right? // right. //

why did they say you're scary? // a monster? // you don't look like one. // sound like one. // smell like one. // not one of my friends, not yet. // why?

Another shrug.

"I don't... talk, eyes, stuff. Not dangerous, just not... person, they think."

// they're wrong. // WRONG. person. // people. // we're all people. you're not a monster. // not yet // not now //

you could be. //

"I know they're wrong, I know they're wrong, I know. I left. I know."

// yes. // embrace the madness. // be one with the chaos.

The house is done—and then it's twisted, there are horribly realistic dolls everywhere, dismembered or murdered or maimed, blood spattering the walls and floor, torture chambers and implements...

Okay that's disturbing. She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath before opening them again.

// why did you close your eyes? // heart? // soul? // mind? //

are you afraid? // so afraid. // it won't harm you // if you harm it first. // 

i can make you like me // my friends // like all of us. //

you won't ever need to be afraid. // THEY'LL be afraid.

"I don't... want to, hurt people. Do you?"

// no. // not hurt. // hurt them. // hurt THEM. // hurt us, they hurt us. //

but I want to be friends. // friends with everyone.

She nods, and considers for a few moments. "I can stay."

// stay // you can stay // stay with me // with my friends //

become one of us // yesyesyes // yes?

The enthusiasm gets a little grin.

"Meet one?"

// ...one? // one of my friends? //

yes. // yes you could meet one. // then you'll see. // you'll BE. //

be right back. // bye!

The form dissolves/walks into the shadows, into what's surely a door except there's no door there.

She grabs a piece of fruit to eat and sits back down on her bed and waits.

...she can hear it long before she can see it.

"It." If there's a gender there, she can't tell. It's like Bedlam, but somehow more // less organized, chaotic, with only the barest hint of a purpose. That hint is going towards her but it's twisting and turning and wronging everything along its path.

And it's screaming. Horrible, blood-curling screams of pain and terror and despair, sobbed pleas in superposition with the screams. What she can make out of the thing's body is being lacerated again and again by knives, razors, scissors, wire, all manner of sharp things cutting and flaying and destroying but somehow never killing, never ending.

...uh.

She seriously considers fleeing - works out the start of a route, just in case - but that seems... not quite correct, as a response to this situation. And only partly because the other girl seems entirely capable of finding her again wherever she goes.

She does get up again and get as far as she can from the door the ...person, they went over this, that's definitely a person... will be coming in through; that warping effect doesn't sound very voluntary from here.

The screams get closer and closer. She can, sometimes, also hear the girl, when she appears to talk to the ...person... and remind them that, yes, that's where they should be going, yes, going there will help, yes, she's sure of this.

She's decided to stay, she's staying.

Actually, after another moment she decides to head out along the path they're coming in on, to meet them halfway.

They get within her visual range.

They are... a mess.

There is blood everywhere, shifting and mutating and changing, and more than sharp objects there is the idea of sharpness cutting the person over and over, in their unstable number of arms and undecided area of exposed skin. Their face is in a superposition of agony and fear and anger and despair, in a dizzying multitude of expressions that make no sense and make her head hurt.

// Anthony // hello! // this is Anthony, Bedlam says, appearing somewhere. // Anthony // this is—//

I don't know // who are you? // what's your name? // Denice.

The man screams.

Yeah. Well.

"Hey," she says gently. And then to Bedlam, "why the... knives?"

// so lost. // little Anthony. // very brave. // so very lost. //

wanted to end it. // end it all. // never find himself again. // fell here. // I made him into a friend. // saved him. //

now he will be here // forever! // and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever and—//

you can be my friend, too.

Yeah, no.

"Not, good, for him."

// why not? // he's past caring. // past feeling. // future feeling. // present feeling. // all feeling. // he's beautiful and terrifying // terrified // happy // sad // ...

The person—Anthony—takes a step forward. Or rather, he's suddenly a step closer without crossing the intervening space.

She's not fleeing yet.

"Sounds like hurting."

// it's not. // not hurting. // you'll see. // i'll show you. // you'll be one of my friends. // join the nightmare. //

powerful. // you'll be so powerful. // yesyesyesyes. // they'll never get you again. // never ever ever. // you'll stop them. // you'll get them.

"Help // hurts," says Anthony. "Can't // oh god I'm becoming Picasso aren't I // I'm sure this building's safe // End it, I need to end it—"

Yeah, fleeing now.

// nononono. // NO. // don't run! // you'll be my friend! // EVERYONE will be my friend!

Anthony screams and runs after her // from Bedlam. "These are knives // I can stop // end it, before I turn cubist // AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!"

There's a sense in which Anthony is the less scary of the two but it's certainly not a sense that's going to make her stop. She focuses on not trapping herself in a dead end, and tries to find some way of losing him.

It's hard to lose him. Sometimes he stops, as if forgetting about her, and then he's ten feet closer to her, then another five, then he takes a detour, returns, and goes after her. It's not a very continuous or linear chase, and it's hard to say whether he's gaining on her.

And at the edge of her perception, right in the middle of the path she'd planned, she can hear another anomaly just like him. This one isn't screaming, but it's talking to itself.

The last thing she needs is to be chased by two of these; too easy for them to pin her, if they can cooperate at all or even just by accident. She looks for another path.

There's a door she can't hear through, there, and a fractal set of corridors that might leave her trapped literally forever, and this one room that sounds like its floor is made of lava but surely she'd be feeling the heat if that were the case?

No, none of those.

The new 'friend' is still a couple miles off, surely there'll be something between here and there?

Distance is a funny thing. Now the new friend is only one mile off.

"Come with me!" says a girl who literally appeared out of literal nowhere a few yards in front of her, gesturing at a door that definitely wasn't there before. "Hurry, before they catch you!"

Yeah, she'll do that, she can hardly be more fucked right now.

The door opens into a twisty hallway with hundreds of bedrooms that are also the same bedroom on one side and a single bathroom on the other, and the girl leads her to the bathroom. "They'll forget about you if you stay out of their sight long enough," she explains as she leads Denice through what's as far as she can tell a random selection of doors and rooms.

She follows, keeping a bit of distance between them, and tries to catch her breath.

They don't cover much distance at all, but at the same time they cover a lot of distance. Non-Euclidean geometry. They reach an unremarkable room and the "friends" are out of Denice's range and the girl stops and heaves a sigh of relief.

Ugh she was avoiding the non-Euclidean bits for a reason, that's really disorienting. Being out of range of Anthony is worth it, though. She flops into a chair and stares off into space, reorienting.

Another set of nonsensical rooms and places connected to each other in unlikely or downright impossible ways. They're in a nice sitting room that happens to contain a copy of itself on the ceiling, upside down.

"Hello," the girl says.

She doesn't quite make eye contact, but close.

"Hi." She sounds more tired and wary than appreciative.

She doesn't mind. "How're you holding up?"

She wobbles her hand in an 'enh' gesture.

"Yeah. How long have you been here?"

She is not really enthusiastic about the talking right now.

Okay, that's reasonable.

"Do you want me to do anything for you? We're, ah, eventually going to need food, but if you'd rather I just stay quiet for a while and wait I can do that."

(The girl is not particularly good at not talking but she will make an effort.)

She shakes her head.

After a few seconds she picks her backpack up from where she dropped it on the floor, rifles through it, and tosses the girl a wrapped pastry.

—well.

"Thank you," she says. "I'll eat this later, no sense doing it when I'm not particularly hungry."

Nod, shrug.

She goes back to mapping. This place is the worst, it really is.

After a while, she seems to remember that the the other girl is there, and asks, "do you... know, how to get out?"

"Yeah. Or sorta. I know what to look for to get out."

"Tell me?"

"It's—complicated to explain. It's more intuition than anything. The Sideways are... well, they are different in different places. They get weirder and more non-Euclidean the deeper you go, but even very close to the surface they never get normal so if everything looks completely normal it probably isn't. So you need to look for this... sweet spot, kinda, where it's not too weird but not too normal either."

"Mm."

She taps her chest: "Cape. Thinker. I hear..." she gestures around.

"Uh... huh? I'm not sure what you're getting at."

She squints a little, like she's confused at her confusion.

"Parahuman? ...superpowers?"

"I have never heard the word 'parahuman' before, do you mean you have superpowers...?"

Nod. "I hear."

"Uh... huh. How well?"

Lessee, what would make a good demonstration... well, there's a fancy private library sort of in the middle of her range with a path there that's complicated but mostly Euclidean.

"I show? Library," she stands and shrugs on her backpack, "this way."

"—okay," she says, scrambling to her feet and following.

She leads the way, moving steadily and not looking around at all. She does keep an ear out for Picassos, but she can do that while she walks.

No Picassos.

Good.

It's a bit of a hike, but they make it there without incident. Half the books seem to have melted like wax, and the desk lamp is a stuffed seagull, but it is the promised library.

"You knew this—by sound? What's your range? Shouldn't this make nearby sounds be unbearably loud?"

"Hundred blocks? Nearby is... more, not bad."

"More... well you could hear that a place was a library that's pretty... incredible. Wow. Wow. You can totally find your way out of here more easily than I can."

"Need to... know, what I'm... looking for. But yes."

"Places that make sense? More or less? You'll probably notice the weird things if your hearing is this good—and wow I'm gonna want you to tell... or write... or communicate me about these superpowers later, if that's okay with you? But anyway, yes, places that make sense. A door to a bathroom that leads to an actual bathroom, less non-Euclidean shenanigans, stay away from one-way doors by the way, buildings that don't intersect other buildings..."

She nods.

"Need sleep, soon. Nap."

"Okay. You got a good place to sleep in range? And would you wake up if you heard a Picasso, do you think?"

She nods. "Picasso, monsters? Yeah. Bedlam quiet, though."

"Bedlam. Child of madness. Bedlam, chaos incarnate, yes, she's quiet for a while then she shows up. You met her? Most people don't. They think she doesn't exist."

Nod. "Creepy. But... sad?" She makes the wobbly 'enh' hand gesture again.

"Bedlam? Or Picassos?"

"Bedlam. Picassos, just sad."

She backs out of the room and heads toward a reasonably sensible nearby bedroom, making sure Sadde is following.

She follows.

"Yes. The child of madness wants friends, doesn't understand her friends and discards or forget them later. She doesn't have much of an attention span."

Nod.

"Asked if I... wanted, that. Didn't..." the pause is particularly long this time, and ends with a frustrated sigh rather than words.

She shakes her head. "Bedlam always wants everyone to be her 'friend' even if it's terrible for them..."

Nod. "Didn't understand terrible. Something missing," she asserts, tapping her head, "wonder why."

"Who knows? She's a goddess, you don't question them, you accept."

She snorts, and walks on without further comment.

She follows. "I mean, I understand that on Earth gods don't really exist—you're from Earth, right? Only way you wouldn't know Bedlam. Anyway, the City has Bedlam. There are rumors about an Echo but her I've never met."

"Mmhmm," turn here, pick her way through the assorted plastic toys covering the floor of this room, "met her. Kid." Don't step on the rubber chicken it'll make an awful sound, "powerful kid, weird kid, still, kid."

"Being a kid doesn't make her less locally omnipotent."

Shrug.

"Also she's, like, at least like thirty years old? Probably more."

"Huh."

Walk walk.

Follow follow.

And shortly, a bedroom. It's sort of repetitive but at least none of the furniture is food. Denice takes off her pack and flops facefirst on the nearest bed.

...well, then.

"I'm Sadde, by the way," she introduces, lying on the bed and staring at the ceiling.

"Mm." She lays there for another second and then rolls onto her side to pull her legs onto the bed.

Sadde closes her eyes and waits.

An introduction doesn't seem to be forthcoming. After a minute she switches to the second bed and burrows under the covers.

Sadde doesn't mind not having an introduction. She's just waiting for sleep, really.

Denice doesn't have to wait.

Assuming nothing wakes her, she'll be out for three hours.

—whispering—

Yeah, she's awake. She doesn't move, though; what and where is that noise?

Nowhere. Sadde seems asleep.

...she'll just hang out here paying attention for a little while then. Something woke her.

Nothing out of the ordinary, apparently.

After forty minutes or so she lets herself fall asleep again.

Nothing disturbs her this time.

Oh good.

It's closer to four hours, then, when she wakes up again. Is Sadde still asleep?

Mmhm.

She'll let her sleep, then. She has something to eat and starts working on a route out while she waits.

Now that she's paying attention to it... there is a certain sense in which some parts are less... chaotic... than others. Directions that are not really directions but which nonetheless are more directional than the other directions.

Good, she'll aim for those, then - if there's a particularly unchaotic place she'll map a route to that, with an eye to checking lesser unchaotic places on the way.

Sadde stirs and opens her eyes.

She ignores her for a few seconds - mapping out a particularly twisty bit - and then nods a greeting and offers her another pastry.

She accepts—and eats.

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."

Denice is still breathing heavily and not especially responsive. Maybe she's just listening, maybe she's in shock, it's hard to tell.

They are in fact in a basement—an abandoned one, very close to a muffled space beyond which her range drops quite rapidly. She's not in the same place she was living before, though. Somewhere else entirely, completely unfamiliar buildings and streets and subway stations.

Sadde waits for Denice to recover.

Her breathing slows, and after a minute or two she quietly proclaims "safe", then blinks and looks around the room.

The room has a boiler that has a few more twists than it should—probably a casualty of past cubism—and stairs leading up into the rest of the empty building.

"Did you go through Orientation?"

This gets her an extremely dubious look and a headshake.

"...do you... want to go through Orientation? They're supposed to teach you stuff about the city and find you a job and give you an ID..."

She shakes her head, alarmed, and then looks away.

"No? ...okay, I guess. It'll be a bit hard to find a job without an ID—unless you don't want to find a job? If you have a superpower maybe you don't need one."

"I..."

Yeah, she's definitely getting more stressed rather than less.

"Not safe. For me."

"It's okay, you don't need to go through Orientation," Sadde tries to reassure her. "I can help you and tell you about the City." Pause. "If you want. If you don't then I won't."

'Reassuring' would be a bit of a stretch, but that at least doesn't seem to make anything worse. She takes a deep breath and thinks about it.

"I don't... people, job, things. Don't talk, not okay. Don't want..." another long pause; it's not very clear whether she's going to continue talking.

"That makes sense. And here people would be—" Pause. "Um. They might be—afraid, that you'd go Picasso. Even though that's not how it works!" she hastily adds. "But everyone thinks it is."

Nod.

"Not safe, people." Fact of life, that.

"Yeah. But... if you don't have a job or anything, how do you get, like. Stuff? Food?"

Shrug. "Trash, stealing." She makes a face; apparently she doesn't like this much, she's just resigned to it.

"...that's not a very good way to live," she observes.

"Better, than..."

She shrugs, and the tension starts to return to her shoulders.

"...I could maybe help."

Again, 'reassuring' would be a stretch; she seems more wary, if anything. But she doesn't argue or object, just shrugs.

"Like. I don't—have a place either. But that's because of—" She pauses, and frowns. "Anyway. I could get a job? And then help you?"

"Not gonna..."

"Don't trust you."

She nods. "That's fair, okay."

"Okay."

"I... 'm good at safe. Just. Need to do it. You complain, I'll go. You find me, I'll go. Let me safe, we're okay."

"I don't... want you to be unsafe. I mean, yes, I'm a stranger you met a few hours ago in a maze of horrors, but honestly... you look like you need help. You look like you need good food and a place to sleep and I don't wanna promise anything I can't keep but. I wanna help. And if 'help' means just leaving you be I can do that, too."

"...mm."

"So... should I... go?"

Tentative headshake.

"Talking, 's hard, hurts. Need to... think."

"Okay..."

"You, okay?"

"Hmm?"

She looks pained, like she's doing something effortful and coming to the end of her ability to keep doing it.

"You go, where?"

"I—honestly I think I'll go to Orientation and see if they can find me a job and a place to live so I can... start over, I guess."

"Okay."

"I listen, here; you come, wait, I come."

"Okay, I can do that."

She nods, and waits a second to see if Sadde has anything else to say.

"Is there anything you'd like me to—do?" she asks, when it becomes clear Denice will say nothing more.

She thinks about it, then shrugs and shakes her head.

"Okay. So, um... see you later?"

Nod.

"Luck," she says, and heads out into the city; if Sadde follows quickly enough she can see her heading into the subway.

Sadde won't follow. Off she goes to Orientation

Denice keeps an ear on her until she's out of range, and then settles into the work of learning how to get by in this neighborhood.

Compared to the Sideways, it is completely sensible and good and not crazy at all.

There are still the muffled edges, though.

Yup. She's still not getting closer to those than she needs to - one of her criteria in picking her new lair is 'away from them' - but her stay in her previous location showed her that they don't move or have anything weird come out of them or anything, so she's not too worried.

If she ever goes to the street level and tries to look at what these edges are, she might understand that the reason why stuff is muffled that way is because it's less... real than the rest of the city. More the idea of a city than an actual city, with fake buildings and fake space and a fake(r) sky.

Except for the one tower jutting up into the sky, large windows reflecting the sun, perfectly defined in the undefined edges of the city.

Her curiosity does get the better of her, once she's settled in and not worrying about where her next meal is coming from, but mostly she explores the area by ear while she waits for Sadde to return.

Sadde returns four days later.

...it is Sadde. But it... also isn't Sadde? Sadde is different. Uh. Anatomically.

He also has a basket that seems to contain food.

She is not actually sure whether that's Sadde or not. But he's sure acting like Sadde, and if he is this's the, oh, fifteenth? twentieth? weirdest thing she's dealt with over the last two weeks, so, hm.

She makes him wait half an hour, just to be on the safe side, and makes sure her escape route is clear as she approaches.

He waits half an hour. He brought a book for just such an eventuality. When he spots her, he smiles and waves.

She manages not to startle much.

She seems to be doing okay; she's had a shower since he last saw her, and she's wearing a different, clean outfit, and she doesn't seem especially hungry or anything - still wary, but that's to be expected.

"Sadde?"

"Hello." He offers the basket. "I got some food and other stuff. There's, ah, a couple clean clothes—they're some hand-me-downs Orientation gives us, not exactly your size—but you got some?—anyway, and there's a cracker, that's a phone that's like super cheap so cheap it's basically free because it's infinite, and a couple of books, I didn't know what you liked and I still don't exactly have money I bartered for them and um there's a thing I should tell you but it's kinda bad and some people react really not well to it."

Please wait, brain processing... "Thanks. Bad?"

"Um... I don't think it's bad, it's just weird and I realized you wouldn't know it because you're not going through Orientation so someone should tell you." He shifts his weight a bit.

"...okay..."

"Okay so. Um. Ah." He looks around, as if trying to look for inspiration, or something that will make him not have to be the one to tell. "You. Ah. People are like..." He clears his throat. "Um." He looks down and says, very fast, "Youareactuallyacopythereisstillayouwhereyouarefrombutthisoneisjustasrealitjustisn'ttheoriginal."

She blinks, looks vaguely concerned; sways gently in place, toward him and then back. "Okay."

"...okay? Okay! I was worried. A, um. A lady um. She k—she took her own life yesterday, when she found out. She thought she wasn't real just because she was a copy, but. Um. That's not true at all, I was born here and I'm surely real, right? So you're real, too."

Ahh. Yeah, okay.

"Hug?"

"—yeah."

Hug, slightly squeezy; she'll stay until he seems to want her to let go. "You okay?"

"Yeah. Kinda. I think." He pulls away. "It happens a few times, I think. People don't take the Echo Revelation too well, or there's religious stuff around it... I don't know. I am my thoughts and my memories. Even if I were copied... well, so what? A copy's just as good as the original. I think, therefore I am."

She nods.

"Okay. Good. So I met this guy at Orientation who knows pretty much everyone and he said he's gonna find me a job and he helped me get this stuff."

"Good."

"Yeah, he's pretty cool. Is there anything in particular you'd like me to bring next time?"

She considers, and then shakes her head.

"If you need..." she gestures to her ear, "hearing, ask."

"Okay, I will."

She nods.

That's... probably it, for this visit? They seem to have run out of stuff to talk about, but she doesn't seem especially eager to get going or anything.

"Right-o, then. I think I'll get going."

He gets going.

Sure, that's fine. She takes the basket and heads home.

A couple of nights later, she hears someone purposefully go into the muffled spaces. Two people, in fact: one armed with several spray cans in a bag plus some other navigation tools, and another in a suit carrying a ladder.

That seems, uh, less than wise? She's definitely not going in after them, but she keeps a close ear on the expedition.

Unlike the surrounding environment, they are not muffled. And in fact, the girl with the spray cans tags every other building, and this somehow causes the area around them to become less muffled, almost normal.

That's interesting.

She continues listening.

The path they trace remains unmuffled even after they go through it, and after a while it becomes obvious they're making their way to that one tower, which is just beyond the edge of her hearing.

And if she goes right up to the edge of the undefined zone?

She can hear the two of them talking. The one with the suit has spent the past few minutes repeating "This is nuts, this is nuts, this is nuts..." over and over.

Eventually the girl says, "Y'know, that's the kind of attitude that gets you Picasso'd. You start to panic, you slip away, and suddenly you've got eight-faceted eyes and your outline's jittery like you're on meth—"

"Not! Helping!"

Yeah, she's with him.

"I'm calm," he says. "I am a calm little lake in the middle of a calm little land next to a calm little tree. ...I am actually looking forward to getting to the tower, compared to this. At least the tower's a real place… y'think we’ll be the first people to set foot there?"

"You're the government stoolie, you tell me."

"That's Resources. ...or Safety. Or the FARTs. There's kind of a turf war for who gets to call 'First!'," he explains. "Orientation only mops up the aftermath. And since I haven't seen any paperwork about refugees from the Defined Tower..."

"Not surprised. It's useless to Resources, since you can't reliably run back and forth looting it," the girl shrugs. "And Safety is happy locking down anything even slightly strange."

"For extremely good reason," the man points out.

"So yes, I'm guessing we'll be the first ones there. Certainly the first ones to do what I'm planning to do. It’s gonna be... well, you'll see. Everyone'll see, when I'm done..."

And they reach the front of the building—the Defined Tower.

Inside of which Denice can hear the very distinct chaos of a Picasso.

Fuck.

Welp, in she goes, then.

The muffled space is... strange. Even the area that's become less muffled by the influence of the graffiti artist is bizarrely undefined: doors and windows painted on rather than real, fake brick, sidewalks that melt into the street...

The two adventurers have stopped advancing, looking up at the tower. "Island in the sea, eh?" the man comments, in awe. "Beats the hell out of the fake buildings. ...y'don’t think there's security guards, do you? Maybe a Picasso security guard or something...?"

"People have been looking at it for ten years from afar, and haven't spotted any," the girl says. "I did my research on this. The building's completely empty; we should be fine. Doors are locked, so... smash yon ladder through yon glass door there, hey?"

"Might set off an alarm..."

"Big deal. No guards, remember? It's an empty building."

She closes her eyes and speeds up a little. She's not going to make it in time, but hopefully she can at least get to them before the Picasso does.

"Even so... let's approach this cautiously, 'kay?" the man suggests. "We bash the door in, then wait five. If nobody shows up to greet us, then we go in. Look, I know you're brimming with confidence and I really admire that, that's totally awesome, but throw pragmatism a bone here. We need to be able to leg it if the ghost tower has actual ghosts in it."

"I thought you loved risky fun?" the girl counters, turning to face him. "You've got shots from crazy parties up on your website every week. Aren't you the guy who went skinny dipping in a swimming pool filled with champagne a month ago?"

"...you know a lot about a guy you claim you don't particularly like."

"When it comes to risks, I do my research."

He grumbles a little... but lets it out in a long exhale..

"I've done some downright ridiculous things in the name of a good time, yes," he agrees. "But this is not what I call a good time. And it's not a ridiculous thing I'm willing to dive into head first—and it's not my own head going in, it's yours, too. I gotta look out for my peeps. So. Break window, await response, and if everything's clear... I'll go in with you. We got an accord?"

"Whatever," the girl says.

With a nod, the man adjusts his grip on the ladder. Grasping one end, he hefts the cheap aluminum thing up, pointing it like a lance at the glass doors... and throws.

Glass shatters. No alarm sounds.

But the Picasso notices. The Picasso, someone who used to be a security guard, stirs from—his?—position at a security booth, a few floors up, surrounded by an uncountable number of security TVs, grumbling to himself. "Damn hooligans // why did I draw the short straw again // one day I'm gonna use this piece // shoot shoot shoot // so bored." He "gets up," inasmuch as this superposition of possibilities can be said to get up.

And the pair waits, in front of the building, oblivious to this.

Running.

Denice will probably not reach the Tower in five minutes, but she might in ten.

"Still worth making sure," the man says after five minutes of silence. "Right. Let's get in there so you can get your art on." In they go, towards the stairs and up.

The Picasso, meanwhile, dithers about what to do. "Elevators are faster // they'll take the stairs // maybe I should take a nap..."

The two have only climbed some four flights of stairs by the time Denice arrives, and the Picasso has gone downstairs, via elevator, in the meantime. Not very focused at all.

Stairs: Ugh. But the two aren't particularly hurrying, and she is; she'll catch up to them before too long.

They'll probably hear her coming: she can't run and yell, but she's also not trying to be quiet.

"Did you hear that?" the man asks nervously.

"Yes—be quiet," the girl whispers, gesturing for him to follow her into a cubicle somewhere. A regular human would probably not have heard her.

The Picasso, however, heard Denice, and starts making its way towards the stairs in fits and starts. "Damn kids // gerroff my lawn! // Could be a criminal // Do I use the gun? // Trespassing is a crime // So tired."

Fuck.

She slows down to move more quietly - she can be very, very quiet when she wants to, but she's just aiming for a little quieter than the other two were being - and goes up the remaining couple flights of stars to where they're hiding. Before she leaves the stairwell, she takes a moment to check; is the Picasso still dithering about?

"Dithering" might not be the best word. He seems to be arguing with himself, and isn't moving anywhere fast, sometimes completely forgetting what he's doing for a while.

The other two wait, crouched down hidden somewhere.

Good enough. She slips quietly through the door and eases it shut behind her, and goes to where they're hiding, stopping where they can see her if they look out and holding her hands where they can see them.

They breathe very quietly and stay hidden behind the counter thing they're hiding behind. The man's grip on the ladder tightens, and the girl tenses, hands around a can that's not quite spray paint.

...it's going to take a minute for her to be able to talk. She backs off some, finds a place to stand that's out of sight of the door, and composes herself, keeping a close ear on the Picasso as she does.

The Picasso doesn't move meaningfully, and the two humans wait.

She moves back to where they can see her.

"Hey. There's a... Picasso, downstairs. Basement."

The Picasso returns to his post, then (five of) his eyes flick to one of the monitors and he says, "Damn hooligans // how'd they get inside? // not on my watch." He gets up again.

In the meantime, the people here—freak out. Well, the man does. "Picasso! Fuck, Marcy, I told you—"

"Way to reveal our status, dunderhead," the girl named Marcy sighs, and stands up, turning to look at Denice.

Shit.

"Picasso coming," she looks pointedly at the door he's most likely to come in by. "Quiet, c'mon." She heads toward the far bank of elevators.

"Come on, Marcy, let's go," he says, going after Denice.

"Nuh uh. Dude, if it's in the basement then surely I got time—I came all this way here—"

The Picasso... starts dithering again.

Dithering in the surveillance room, where he can notice them again any moment? Right, no. (Also, the government dude can just... not. Like, she's keeping it together but she is definitely staying out of grabbing range and ideally also out of lunging range, thanks.)

"Coming. Sees us." She points to a nearby surveillance camera.

"...so we hide from the cameras, we don't have to go, this is important, Hollister, come on—"

"Look, Marcy, you want to go to one of the weirdest places in the City for whatever crazy reason you got, fine, but we're not staying around with a Picasso who can see us!"

"They forget, don't they? The Picassos. If they don't see you, they forget. So we just gotta avoid the cameras, destroy them or something—"

She is definitely not pleased with this argument but she has no comment at this juncture.

"You," she says, looking at Denice. "How did you escape the Picasso?"

"...I hear him. Stay away, don't see."

"What? You can hear it?"

"Could you keep us away from it?"

(The Picasso seems to have forgotten how to use stairs.)

She considers the request for a few seconds, clearly uncomfortable, shoots an indecipherable look at Hollister, and then nods, still somewhat reluctantly. "But... I say go, go, might not... time."

"Whoa, no. Marcy, no, what are you doing? You're gonna..." He trails off, glancing at Denice. "This is way too dangerous, what would Vivi think?"

"Look, I said I'd go with a spotter, and she might well be it if you're chickening out, but I'm getting my piece out there, it's too important not to."

"I—you—" He looks between her and Denice and throws his arms up in frustration. "Augh! If I die here I will haunt you."

She looks at him with a strange expression for a second then turns to Denice. "Where to? We're going to the twentieth floor."

She nods and heads off to the far elevator bank to jab the up button, not looking at Hollister.

"Shouldn't we be doing what she said?" he asks, looking around and fidgeting a bit. "Blocking cameras or something?"

She considers for a second, then nods. "Can. Paint?" she directs at Marcy.

"Yeah, good idea, point me at hidden ones," she says, looking for less hidden ones anddddd there she sprays. "Should stay in blind spots, too."

In the meantime, the Picasso seems to have figured out how to use stairs and is walking up them. And pausing and trying to remind himself of why he did that.

She freezes, her face aimed at the Picasso. "Coming, stairs, slow." She estimates how much longer the elevator is going to take... "Paint there, there," she points without looking.

Marcy paints, very quietly.

"...you really can hear it," he murmurs, blinking at her.

("Don't know why I bother // should take the elevator // what for? Could just watch the cameras // might sneak a nap in...")

If she ignores him maybe he will go away?

The elevator dings and opens. She holds the door - watching her move without looking where she's going is kind of creepy, she's still very focused on the Picasso - but waits for Marcy rather than getting in herself just yet.

Marcy returns, walks into the elevator, and paints over the camera there, too, for completeness.

Hollister follows, resigned.

(And the Picasso starts making his way back to his security booth. "Don't need this // could just wait // nap // stay // nothing ever happens here // where'd those hooligans go anyway?")

She relaxes, marginally, and joins them. "Wait, need to -"

"—to?"

"Not sure it's safe. Wait for, Picasso to see the paint."

"Oh."

The Picasso settles back in and his monitors multiply again. "...why are they black? // damned hooligans // broken monitors // gotta call tech // bet bosses won't even care // money money money // everything costs money."

She relaxes, lets the door go and hits the '20' button.

Hollister fails to suppress his fidgeting, but doesn't say anything as they go up.

"Not... focused, Picasso. Probably fine," she declares to noone in particular.

"Yeah, if it forgets about you you're fine."

"Could - lucky, but I hear it, we're okay."

They reach the twentieth floor, and the elevator doors open.

The Picasso notices. "Damn hooligans // how'd they get here? // didn't see // maybe fell asleep..." He gets up.

She holds the door and points out cameras for Marcy.

She hops to, blocking the cameras as quickly as she can and trying to stay in their blind spots when possible.

The Picasso flickers over to the elevator and presses the button. "Why 'm I going via elevator? // faster // but they'll see me // maybe go up to nineteenth // ninetieth // ninth // and stairs later..."

She hisses, softly. "Coming, elevator there, plan, hurry..."

"Shit—okay, this can't be done fast, but it might forget—here, I'll cover all the cameras and then we can hold the other elevator and if it actually starts reaching us here we can just take the other elevator down and wait until it forgets us again."

"Marcy—"

"Cameras, this elevator up, listen for forgetting. Think we're safe once the cameras are done."

"I didn't catch all that but sounds like a plan." She resumes spraying over the cameras. The elevator reaches the guard, and his superposition of hands presses... a button that doesn't actually exist. The doors close and the elevator starts going up through floors between the floors, taking longer to go up than it ought to.

...how much longer than it ought to?

Like one-and-a-half times? And the elevator reaches the floor that doesn't exist, and when the door opens Denice suddenly can hear it. It sounds like the Sideways, and the Picasso walks into it, looking around in some confusion.

Nope.

"Sideways, c'mon, go go go..."

"Sideways? Here?"

And now all the cameras are painted over.

The Picasso wanders about a bit before returning to the elevator and going back down to his little security booth.

"Other... elevator, does Sideways now. There," she points. "Picasso basement again. Maybe safe."