She's lying in the middle of the road, shattered glass all around her. The nearby twisted pretzel of a car is a bit of a hint for sequence of event reconstruction, but approximately nothing else is. Everything is very... orange. Extremely, aggressively orange.

Except for the one thing that isn't. A large twisted dark mass floats above above her, black tendrils weaving threads of shining orange-gold. It's probably the source of the orange.

What the hell is that? She doesn't want to be near it, whatever it is. She scrambles backwards.

It doesn't seem very interested in her, whatever it is. It hovers for another few seconds, then languidly floats away, trailing orange wisps as it goes.

Well. That was a thing. She'll just. Take a second to get her breath back under control.

The floating tendril monster doesn't return to accost her. It definitely looked like it had some interest in her, earlier, but she seems to have lost whatever made her novel.

That's probably good? Whatever.

She can look around more carefully now. It looks like some kind of riot happened or something.

One could say that.

Everything looks to be in pretty bad shape. Shattered glass, crashed cars, conspicuous bloodstains that may or may not be hers. But riots don't involve omnipresent orange light stuff floating everywhere. This - seems like it might be more than a riot.

This doesn't make any sense at all.

...She doesn't even recognize this part of town.

It'd be hard to recognize even if she knew this part of town. There's a humanoid figure walking through the orange gloom up ahead, talking quietly to themselves. Maybe she can ask them.

"- damn teenagers, always too busy texting to look at the road..."

It doesn't seem like that should really be a major concern.

"Hey! You!"

It turns to look at her, then keeps walking as if she hadn't said anything at all.

Something seems... off about its silhouette. And its voice too, actually. Both are slightly distorted, unnatural. Its limbs are too long and spindly, its voice slightly garbled, like a bad recording of someone.

"- and I bet he never gets out of the house, oh no, can't leave the precious wifi even for a moment -"

Something here is deeply wrong. Alien invasion or eldritch incursion or something, total societal collapse, et cetera.

Is there a handy rock or piece of metal she can chuck at the 'person'?

There's a bit of car debris that's small enough for throwing nearby. She can throw it at the person if she likes. It's even a little bit sharp.

She picks it up and throws it.

It hits, bouncing off the creature's body. The creature hisses, turning towards her. It disappears into smoke, then reforms several feet closer to Ellie, staring at her with a pair of eyes that seem to glow white.

Oh now it's going to pay attention, sure. Seems like a point in the 'eldritch incursion' column.

More throwing debris?

Yep! She already grabbed the smallest throwable bit of debris, but there are some heavier things that she can throw if she'd like.

Her eldritch incursion stops its approach. It just stands there, watching her. Muttering to itself about tax returns.

She grabs another projectile.

"What the fuck are you?"

It falls silent, and answers only with creepy staring. It tilts its head, slightly, then turns to walk away.

She chucks the- what is this? A piece of fender? She chucks the piece of fender at the back of its head.

Thonk.

It roars, then turns and begins flicker-walking towards Ellie, clearly angry. She has time for perhaps one more thrown object before it gets to her.

Oh, it roars. Okay.

She eschews throwing another thing in favor of finding something swingable.

There is another slightly longer piece of fender available! It's kind of heavy, but that should be good for beating eldritch abominations to death, right?

Well, if it isn't, it's too late to switch. She now has an eldritch abomination made out of amorphous black goo, smoke, and tendrils bearing down on her. It attempts to swat her with one of its hands.

She swats back.

It misses, and she successfully hits it! It reels back, growling.

Then it flickers and reforms to her left, and this time it successfully hits her. It is very strong, and has sharp claws.

Yeah, that hurts.

It's faster than her, if she stays moving maybe she'll have better luck not getting hit. Attack if it's staying put.

It's tricky to get the hang of fighting this thing, it keeps teleporting and coming at her from a different angle, but it soon becomes clear that this thing isn't very smart. It gets a few more hits in, but once she gets a feel for where it tends to teleport and how long it tends to linger in a location, the fight becomes a bit more one sided.

With this knowledge, she can eventually beat it until the liquid-mist-tendrils lose integrity, and various pieces of it shrivel up and tumble to the ground, inert. This takes a while, and she's more than a little covered in black goo, but it looks to be dead.

Good.

She's now in the middle of the street, covered in eldritch black goo, standing over the corpse of an eldritch monstrosity, surrounded by an orange light web and various bits of car debris. What would she like to do?

...She'd like to wipe this goo off. Post-apocalyptic etiquette says it's okay to rifle through other people's houses. Let's go exploring.

There's an apartment building over there! Maybe one of the apartments is unlocked.

She goes to see what's what.

Most of them are locked!

One isn't. The door's propped open by a corpse that is shriveled and grey. Like something sucked the life from it and callously abandoned the empty shell once it was done with it.

That's a little nasty. She'll just sort of prod that out her way.

Is there running water?

Yep!

She'll get her face and hands first, then see if there's anything resembling a change of clothes.

Possibly, but before she can get there - is that a desk lamp? On the floor? It might be a sign of whatever struggle that occurred to kill the doorstop, except -

- the lamp shifts from an ordinary lamp into a small black four limbed thing, that leaps at her face.

What the fuck- She raises her hands to block instinctively.

It wraps itself around her arms and attempts to pull itself closer to get at her face.

Nope nope nope nope. She slams it against a wall.

It makes a sound that is probably unhappy, but this is like wrestling with a four limbed octopus; it's squishy, flexible, and agile. It attempts to slither towards her face again.

Nnnope, keep hitting the thing and keep it away from her face.

It's tenacious. But then, so is she.

Eventually she manages to grab hold of one of its spindly limbs, and from there the fight becomes much more one sided. It's heavy, but not so heavy that it can't be swung around by its limb and forcibly introduced to the wall with great prejudice. Multiple times. It manages to wriggle out of her grip, but never recovers its ground. Soon enough, it's another addition to the black goo collection she'd started on.

What fun.

Note to self, keep an eye out for innocuous objects in incongruous locations.

Aaand now she needs to wash again.

The faucet is here for her!

It doesn't look like there are any other innocuous objects in places they shouldn't be. Notably, though, there's a perfect copy of the lamp that turned out to be an eldritch monstrosity, this time on an end table. Maybe that's relevant somehow.

Does the lamp break in a lamp-like fashion if she throws something at it?

Yep! Smashes to pieces precisely as expected. Bit of a cheap lamp, actually.

Okay, so probably the thing to be on the lookout for is duplicated objects.

And clothes. She was looking for clothes.

There aren't any other bizarrely duplicated objects in this apartment, but there are some clothes that might fit her. They're a bit too big, especially for the pants, but there are a few belts available if she'd like to make do.

She'll use a belt.

With that out of the way, the next thing is drinking water and food.

There isn't any bottled water in this place, but there are a few thermoses that would work pretty well for transporting tap water. Food's a bit easier, there are a number of easily transportable foods here that will keep approximately forever, but there isn't an obvious way to carry them.

Food doesn't seem like as obvious of a priority as long as she stays in the city, and she has not plans to leave just yet. She can eat now and gather more when she finds a backpack. She will take a thermos of water.