When she opens her eyes, she blinks briefly at the scene in front of her before putting the events of the previous day together.

"Mar, time's it? Uh, phones are working? 

"8:47. No signal, but they're charging fine. We should get breakfast, I'm starving."

"If we're eight years ahead of them we could sell those phones for a lot, assuming they can't precog future tech or something, should probably be careful with them."

She gets up, washes her face in an attempt to wake up fully, and then they head out to find a grocery store or someplace cheap to eat.

There's a convenience store a block down the road in one direction and a diner the other way.

Convenience store it is - they don't know how long they'll need to eat off Brian's twenty, though worse comes to worse they could pawn one of Daria's rings. As they walk, Mariam watches the people they pass, trying to catch the differences in how they carry themselves.

There are some! Short haired people tend to have longer strides and more confident carriage and sweeping gazes; long haired people have coy eyelash-batting habits and withdrawn or careless posture depending on what they're going for.

Hmm. Are there any that don't fit neatly into those two groups?

Some. That guy has an undercut; he's mostly doing the dom body language except when he winks at a pixie-cut girl.

Short hair seems to be a strong signal, so perhaps her longer hair and a dom presentation could be enough to be read as a switch?

She's not a good actor, as such, but she can match an archetype that's presented to her pretty well. She watches the short-haired people more closely.

Daria is looking around too, but with much less focus on the people,  trying to pick out any obvious differences around them.

Some of the people have collars. The collars vary considerably in style; buckles and locks and magnets and clasps, leather and webbing and metal and fabric. Many collars bear nameplates. Some people are pretty obviously subs but not claimed in this way.

Collars. Ugh.

Gawping like a tourist is probably conspicuous, so she tries to look subtly, pulling self-consciously at the ends of her hair and following Mariam closely. 

Mariam's stride becomes more confident as they walk and she has time to borrow cues from the short-haired passerbys. She straightens her shoulders, lifts her head slightly, brushes stray strands of hair away from her face. It's not a perfect copy, but she hopes to at least pass on casual inspection.

Nobody finds them remarkable enough to stop them and ask intrusive questions, anyway.

The convenience store has shelf stable junkfood. Milk, ice cream, juice, soda, overpriced bananas and red delicious apples. Donuts.

They pick something as close to a reasonable breakfast as can be found under the circumstances, then Mariam goes to pay with their lone twenty.

The lady behind the counter makes change and they get a receipt. It's a pretty normal interaction apart from the lady in question wearing a collar.

They return to the motel, Daria eating as she walks.

When they arrive, she pulls out a notebook and several small plastic containers out of her bag and announces that she wants to run some tests. With Mariam making suggestions and leaning against her to let Daria borrow energy to cast, she could happily spend the whole morning that way if nothing interrupts.

Nobody feels the need to burst into their motel room for any reason. Nor do any meteors fall, fires ignite, aliens invade, or tornadoes strike.

Everything with bone or hair or blood from people in the other universe they try works fine except location oriented casting seems to pick a direction at random. Their hair points at them. When Daria twists a diamond off her ring and tries a random pull, she gets a very confused spirit that tells them, after some prodding, that he's a switch.

Mariam heads off Daria before she gets too deep into trying to design a random pull for eclipsed specifically, and drags her out to get lunch when she gets hungry.

The lunch options are still convenience store, diner, or wandering farther afield.

Daria suggests they find a grocery store and buy bread and something to put on it; Mariam says if they don't get any news by the evening she'll call her alt to figure out the money problem. They head out.

Eyeing people in collars skeptically is probably a bad idea, but Daria doesn't like this world and its stupid status games.

People in collars do not like being stared at any more than people not in collars; she causes one sub to check her hair and another to walk faster.

Oh, for goodness sake, the subs are certainly not doing anything wrong.

Asking for directions might be useful if they take too long to find someplace, but they're not in any hurry and she's also people-watching, if in a less aggressive manner than Daria. They keep walking, paying just enough attention to remember their way back.

It's a pretty boring town, Billings, with pretty boring miscellaneous Americana. Occasionally they pass someone kneeling by their dom on a lowered structure next to a park bench - not generally directly on the sidewalk; there are bench accessories designed for the purpose. The jewelry store includes collars. The advertising is different; men are only a little less likely to be posed as subby objects than women, and there's even ads with sexy doms - anything more imperative than insinuating. There's a billboard with a hotline to call if you've witnessed something that should be forwarded to a precog.

Huh. Precog hotline, that makes sense. She repeats the number to herself a few times, fixing it in her memory.