She doesn't lose continuity of experience.

Which makes dropping from the sky onto a cheap plastic bench – the same faux chairs as in the laundromat – without injuring herself at all... Surreal. It'd been nothing like falling in a dream, but also nothing like falling in reality – just. Wrong.

Lily had been trying to prevent the fall from killing her. That's obviated entirely – she sits, stiff, and tries to get control of her breathing.

There's someone else here. A girl – a bit younger than Lily, maybe late high school, maybe a very weedy college student – standing about a dozen feet away. She looks about as startled as Lily feels.

"Hello?"

"...Hello."

"Where is this." And what the actual fuck is going on. 

"...None of us are sure. I... I'm pretty sure I'm dead. The other two aren't sure, and... I was watching the laundromat, but I couldn't see anything after the laundry machine."

"...Sorry I didn't do a better job warning you. I was trying to yell."

So. She wasn't hallucinating.

She was just being haunted by a well-meaning ghost.

"...Not your fault I wasn't listening."

"...Still could've tried harder."

Awkward, unhappy shrug.

"Is this the afterlife, then?" She doesn't feel dead, but how would she even know what that feels like?

"It's a boring one if it is. I want a refund."

That actually successfully gets a smile on her face! "Who would we even take that up with?"

"Some deity or another, probably. I haven't figured it out yet."

"I'll help." She stands. Her hip and ankle hurt from where she fell, which is just plain unfair, but everything about this is unfair, so.

...Still.

"You said there were two others here?" Four people is a weird number for an afterlife or whatever.

She nods and gestures. "There's a couch over there. They're looking at... Something? I can't really see it."

She looks.

It's a TV.

"Looks like the TV from the laundromat," she says, only a little spooked.

"How, though?"

"How does any of this happen?" She looks around more. 

Wherever they are, they're surrounded by low-rise brick buildings – the backs, looks like. Some kind of industrial area. There's no cars, this isn't a parking lot, but maybe it's a loading area of some kind? There's no distinct sun, but from the length of the shadow's it's either mid-morning or mid-afternoon. The air's cool, totally wrong for July, and the sky above them is a featureless pale blue. The light is...

Thin, like it's been stretched and scraped over something dark.

The plastic bench from the laundromat is kind of awkwardly in the middle of the courtyard. The TV had been a little behind her, a little to her right; she finally turns to look all the way around.

There are, as promised earlier, two other people present. They're both sitting on a couch, one facing the TV unlike Lily's bench. One's a short, bearded, elderly white guy; the other's a tall, pretty Korean woman. 

"At last," says the man, "She is notice us. Very curtious."

"Leave off," says the woman. "She was focusing on Petra."

"My grand-niece is not curtious," he says. "She is not introduce us."

The girl puts a hand to her hand, wincing. She doesn't react otherwise to their words.

What the actual fuck is going on here.

She steps around the bench, intending to ask them some questions, even though her knees and hip feel a bit unsteady – but she pulls up short, because...

Both couch-sitters are staring at her. After a few tense moments, the man leans forward. His voice hoarse, low, he says: "How is it that you are do this? Did he not get you too? Did he not show you? How is it that you can stand?"

What?

"He didn't get me – who are you even talking about? Some... Weird corpse thing, it tried to eat me or something. I wound up here."

The man leans forward and starts gesturing widely, speaking rapidly in a confusing mixture of English and Russian. The woman turns to him, grabs his arm, says, "Slow down you old coot, none of us can understand you – "

– And there's a wire coming out of the back of her head. Her hair's short enough Lily can see the bloodless gash in the back of her head, the white flash of bone.

Wires do not belong there. Injuries like that also have no right being clean; this would honestly be less freaky if there was a respectable amount of blood. Lily's seen worse get splattered everywhere.

She'd like to wake up, now.