There is a knock upon the door.

Rescue probably would have radioed ahead.

Please don't be more thingbits.

Emily opens the door.

If this is a set of thingbits, then it's a set of thingbits that have put themselves together to take the shape of a young woman with too-red hair and clothes not at all appropriate for Antarctica. She's pretty, though perhaps a bit too pretty in the way that the photoshopped women in magazines are pretty. Too pretty, too perfect, to a degree that's a little unnerving to have standing in the flesh in the middle of the snow.

"Hi," she says, with a tentative little smile.

"Hi. Please tell me you're not secretly a hypercommunal slime mold from outer space."

Blink.

"... I am not secretly a hypercommunal slime mold from outer space. Or even openly a hypercommunal slime mold from outer space," she confirms. "I saw the bodies and the - bits of things that used to be on fire, are you okay?"

"There were some casualties in preventing the hypercommunal slime mold from outer space from assimilating humanity. My sister and I are alive. Everyone else is either dead or assimilated or both."

"Oh. I - might be able to help with that, the assimilated ones, anyway, but I'm not currently sure how. I can keep you both from freezing or starving to death, though?"

"That would be lovely. Although, uh, it did succeed in turning us into slime mold. Just--we got lucky and kept our individuality. So we were very unlikely to die. If you can help any of the others--well. We can try to find them again. We buried them in ice to hibernate in case the slime mold was ever safe to let wake up again."

"If they're currently stable then I think I'd like to leave them for now, I expect to be moderately busy soon. I'll try to help them later. Would you like me to fix your building so it's better at keeping you warm? I can get you food, too, but that's a bit trickier."

"Modifying the building would be lovely. What do you expect to be busy with?"

"... If I didn't take too long getting home, I'd quite like to see my family again," she says, very quietly.

Then as if she hadn't said this at all, she walks past them to peer at the damaged parts of the building. The damaged parts of the building are - swallowed by an impossibly dark night sky, like she has ripped open a void to the vacuum of space. Then the void fades away, leaving repaired bits of building in their wake. It doesn't quite match what it had looked like before it had been damaged, but otherwise, it could be new.

"...I'm sorry about your family. Do you know what the date was when you left?"

"Thank you. Even if they're dead by now at least I've found Earth again, which is - not nothing. August 13, 2012."

"It's 2017. Good news: Obama got re-elected. Bad news: we somehow managed to elect Donald Trump last year."

"I have no idea who that is," she says, a little amused.

"Really? I was pretty sure he was already famous in 2012. Anyway he's terrible at being President."

"Oh. Well. I'm an unborn eldritch abomination that houses my mind in another dimension, I'm not sure I count as a US citizen anymore. So it's probably only distantly my problem."

"Well, you'll notice we ran away to Antarctica, we hardly have a right to quibble."

Snort.

"Where you were attacked by slime mold. No safe place to go, apparently. What are your food supplies like? I don't think it'd be safe to just make you food, but I could probably do a decent job of fishing. Or pick up supply drops that you've been unable to get, or something."

"We have enough food, we were mostly just worried about the cold."

"Oh. I might be able to get your generator back online if it's not too broken, then. At the very least I should be able to keep the building warm."

"Good. We--would have survived regardless. But. It's good that we won't have to hibernate and not wake up until aeons after our family was dead and dust."

"Let's have none of that," she says, firmly. She looks around at the building, and hums thoughtfully.

"Actually, do you want me to just. Move you to a non-Antarctica location. Because I can do that. It's probably at least a little bit unnerving because most things I do are in that vein, but."

"I am so tempted but it would be very inexplicable to the people we radioed for help and also it's important we prevent them from poking around looking for us and accidentally waking up some slime mold and getting assimilated."

"I could put the slime mold into a slime mold container, from which it cannot escape. That's probably better, anyway, really."