She turns around to look at whatever that is, moving over to the side of the hallway so she can keep him in her peripheral vision.

And the door clicks open! Sadde's holding lockpicking materials in his hand, which he... surely took from his pockets, yes?

"Ta-da!"

She looks back over at him. "I didn't realize you had a lockpick," she says.

Bad feelings. Bad feelings abound.

"You can't walk around in the Sideways without this kind of thing," he assures her, and opens the door.

(Did the doorknob change? Surely not.)

On the other side is a regular-looking apartment with regular-looking furniture and regular-looking rooms. Sadde goes check a room that proves to be the kitchen and says, "Ooh, good, there's food here, I'm kinda peckish."

"Cool," she says. "I'm not hungry right now."

Rachel reminds herself that she needs to smile normally. She's slightly stressed on account of being an import, so that gives her some leeway, but she is totally fine.

Sadde himself looks absolutely at ease. He starts making himself a sandwich.

Rachel looks at ease too! She's totally at ease. Outwardly. Mostly.

She'll just lean against a wall, making sure to keep Sadde in her line of sight.

Om nom!

She continues to wait.

She might get out her phone and see about pretending to read something, like a book, but she'll probably still keep mostly focused on him.

Then he's done eating!

"Okay, so, there's a trick to this. The deeper you are in the Sideways, the weirder it gets. So, the more normal stuff is, the closer you are to the surface. An apartment coming from an apartment building's hallway is good! But it never gets completely normal, and if everything's too normal for too long you should suspect it's actually not normal at all."

"Okay, but if everything looks super normal, what kinds of not normal is it actually? Just, the fact it doesn't fit in with the Sideways as it should be, so it's therefore not normal by virtue of that alone, or does it have hidden not-normal properties?"

"Usually hidden not-normal properties that aren't readily apparent." He starts exploring the other rooms of the apartment.

"… Does the other option seriously count as being not normal, because really, it seems like it's not actually hazardous to be in a place that's too normal unless it does something weird like freezing time to keep things 'normal', but then I don't consider that normal."

She realizes how she just phrased it and then clarifies, "Anyway, I realize that my definition of normal isn't necessarily what this place uses."

"I didn't understand much of what you said," he calls from within a bedroom. "I—ooh, okay, fire station, this is a nice change, come on."

"Oookay," she says, going into the bedroom and following him.

"I mean, in what ways might they not be normal if they don't have the hidden not-normal properties."

"When a bathroom door opens into an empty fire station, I'd call that not-normal," he shrugs. "The gravity thing earlier was not-normal. Sometimes places are covered in gore for no apparent reason. Or the floor is made of lava, that's a personal favorite."

Looking around the fire station woo.

"Yyyup, I already encountered a room with a floor of lava, think I told you about that," she says, then looks around the fire station a little, mostly following and keeping an eye on the slightly weird stranger.

"Did you? I suppose you might have."

The slightly weird stranger looks very interested in the fire station!

How wonderful.

"Are you looking for anything in particular?"

"Yeah!"

"Care to elaborate?"

"Trying to find places that are normal. Like, things you'd expect to see in a fire station, especially rooms that ought to connect where they do."

"… This sounds like it's gonna take a while if we go one direction and have to keep checking that we're going 'shallower' by doing a probably-not-too-concrete check of how 'normal' a place is."

"It could take a while," he admits, "but I'm good at this. Aha." He opens a door that leads to a stairwell.

"Is there any particular reason that a stairwell is a good sign?"