More weirdness!

Well, if there's nothing else she can do, she's just going to sit down again, maybe look at her phone.

Still no GPS or internet, but its battery seems to be doing fine.

Fiddle fiddle.

She's not in the mood to play any games right now. She takes out the brochure and tries to puzzle out the strange symbols instead. 

There are lots and lots of ampersands and comparison signs, quite a few combined or overlapping characters, a scattering of Hebrew and Chinese letters, a handful of wingdings, and piles of diacritic marks and subscripts and superscripts overflowing from their original lines. There isn't anything that seems particularly decipherable.

She tries anyway; she doesn't have anything better to do.

Every few minutes or so, she glances up at the windows to check on the train's progress. She's not used to having all this free time, and it's making her somewhat antsy.

There still aren't any particularly clear patterns. She can make out what might be the words "fare", "streamline", and "travel", in otherwise incomprehensible lines, although this could just be over-enthusiastic pattern matching.

After about twenty minutes of this, she can feel the train start to decelerate more quickly than usual, although the windows are still dark.

She puts away the brochure and starts looking out the window instead. She also checks her phone, just in case.

No signal but the battery's about the same level.

A few minutes later, the car emerges into dim orange light. It slows to a stop, and she can see sloped ground below the window, covered with something smooth and shiny.

There is a chime, and the doors slide open.

This doesn't seem like any station she's seen before.

She looks cautiously outside the doors.

The air is cold and thin. The - floor? - is either metal, or painted with a metallic coating of dark bronze paint. There is a tall arch made of something dark, a short way in front of the door. The area near the doors is clear, but there are piles of scraps of variously colored metal, and bits of either glass, plastic, or crystal, further down the slope.

This is... definitely not a station she's ever been to.

She glances back at the inside of the train, and then back outside. Stay or go? On one hand, the train is more familiar. On the other hand, it's also kind of creepy and there's no guarantee if or where it'll stop next.

She presses her lips together, does a quick eenie-meenie-miney-moe, and then steps out the doors.

The air feels really thin. Her shoes clang a little on the floor; it probably is metal.

This "station", such as it is, seems to be the side of a large mountain of the same metallic substance, with a tunnel for the subway set into it. There are a few paths cleared of debris, both down and around the mountain. Nobody else is visible. Some gentle clicking noises are approaching from around the corner.

Noises?

She stays where she is, and tries to get used to the thin air. She should probably go down the slope, take a quick peek around and see if there's anyone who can tell her what the hell is going on.

(Tap click-click-click,  Tap click-click-click, Tap click-click-click.)

If the mountain is relatively symmetric and the noises are about as loud as footsteps, whatever is making them will probably get here in less than a minute. Sounds seem to echo particularly sharply here.

She doesn't like the sound of those clicks, but they're a ton better than the constant lack of people. 

...against her better judgment, she'll go and peek around the corner.

There is something approaching, from a bit farther but more quickly than it sounded. It has three long and sharply angled legs and arms, each with spindly, clawed digits, covered in dark metal and radially symmetric about its torso. Its masked head and torso are loosely wrapped in dark fabric, ornamented with sparkling bits of glass or plastic. Each step it takes produces a gentle tap on the ground, followed by three clicks as the leg straightens.

...prrrobably not an ax murderer? And not human, either.

She is decidedly less surprised than she feels she should be.

"Um. Hello?"

It tilts its head (long and cone-shaped, with two eyes, assuming the mask's shape and lenses correspond) at her, and makes a low whirring sound, then continues on its path in the general direction of the subway entrance, giving her a wide berth.

It... doesn't want to talk? Okay. Not unexpected. It's a subway station. At least it doesn't seem hostile.

She picks up some scraps of metal and plastic from those piles she saw earlier. If anything, they might help her communicate.

And then she heads further down the mountain, looking for more creatures or directions of some sort.

The sparkly clear stuff is a bit more like glass, now that she's actually holding some, but it's not sharp in a way that feels likely to cut her, shaped into blobs and lenses and smooth-edged geometric shapes. The hints of different colors (mostly faint blues, greens, and oranges) are more visible up close. The metal scraps seem to mostly be made of heavily rusted iron and verdigrised copper or bronze, formed into gears and cogs, nuts and bolts, rods, wheels, chains, wires, coils, tubes, and flared hollow cones.

The metallic floor seems to be textured enough that her feet don't slip on its surface as she goes down the slope. There aren't any other creatures visible nearby, but a cluster of structures and yellow lights in the distance comes into view as she rounds a bend in the trail.

Ooh, the sparkly clear stuff is pretty! No wonder they decorate their clothes with it.

She wonders if the metal scraps are used for this place's technology. Too bad she isn't an engineering student; maybe Vince would know what they were for and how to put them together.

As she approaches, she slows down and looks more closely at the structures and the yellow lights. 

There's a cluster of about twenty windowless structures of dark cloth supported by metal frames, arranged in a circle, each with a glowing yellow crystal mounted above the door-flap. A few larger yellow crystals sit in the middle, providing most of the actual illumination. A few of the creatures, similarly clad to the one she saw earlier, are walking around the area, between buildings.

She starts to head over, but before she actually reaches the--village?--she stops in her tracks.

What is she doing. These are--well, "aliens" probably isn't the right word given that she doesn't know where she is (and she's trying very hard not to think about the implications of that), but... aliens. She's not an anthropologist, or linguist, or genius what-have-you. She's just Stella and she's very alone.

Um. Maybe she'll just sit down here for a moment and fidget with some pretty not-glass and try to calm down.

One or two of the maybe-aliens seem to look at her, but soon look away and return to whatever it is they're doing.

The ground is chilly and hard and metallic, but not otherwise unpleasant to sit on. The not-glass pieces make faintly musical clinking noises when they bump against each other.

Okay. Breathe.

(She's pretty sure panicking on a mountain would not be a very good thing to do, given the thin air.)

She's in a strange place with the only familiar thing being the subway station. There's a village not far from here where she can talk to the maybe-aliens but she isn't sure if she can actually--talk to them. But she could give it a try? Or she could go back to the subway now and hope the train loops back again to where she was--should be. 

Ugh. Now would be a great time to mysteriously acquire a babel fish or something. (Though she isn't actually sure if the maybe-aliens have ears. How would that even work?)

While mulling over her choices, she idly wonders if she could make a little windchime-esque thing out of the not-glass. Maybe she could tie some wire around some pieces? Is there wire around here?