At 6:32, a train arrives. Its doors slide open with a chime, showing an empty and reasonably clean car.

Finally!

She steps in and takes a seat.

After about a minute, the car's doors slide closed and it travels into darkness.

She puts her backpack on her lap and tries to nap.

The fluorescent lights don't flicker too much, and the car continues to travel through the darkness in silence, with either smooth acceleration or constant velocity. Nothing in particular prevents her from falling asleep.

Zzzz.

There are a few more instances of very smooth acceleration and deceleration, and sometimes a tiny shift in angle, but other than that, nothing changes over the next forty or so minutes.

She groggily opens her eyes, feeling a little... odd--

Wait.

Shouldn't she be there already? Did she miss her stop? Oh, no.

She jumps up, catches her bag before it falls, and looks out the window.

Still perfectly dark, aside from a tiny bit of the side of the car below the window, illuminated by the light from within.

That's... strange. Normally there are flashes of lights mounted on the walls, or bits of the tunnel walls.

She pulls out her phone. What time is it?

It doesn't have a GPS signal, or internet connection, but its internal clock seems to think it's 7:14.

Okay, so she definitely should be seeing something else here.

She squints out the window some more. No luck.

Maybe she could ask another passenger what the last stop was.

That would work, if there were any other passengers, but she seems to be alone in the car.

Nope, this isn't creepy at all. Not at all, you hear?

She's just going to walk down the length of the car and look around. She is on the 7 train, right? No other trains stop at her stop...

Well, there aren't any labels indicating specifically that it isn't the 7 train.

There aren't any other passengers, but there's a pad of paper jammed between a seat and the wall, a brochure under one of the short perpendicular benches near the front of the car, and a scrap of shiny plastic under a seat near the back.

She looks at the brochure first.

It's a threefold sheet, printed on soft and thin brown paper, with a scaled texture pressed into it. There's a cartoonishly-drawn picture of grinning passengers filling a subway car and hugging each other on the front.

The second flap advertises the subway, praising its benefits for traffic, ease of movement, speed, and formation of happy memories. The inside shows a list of times and stations, a stylized route map, and a bulleted list consisting of what may have been cut-and-paste formatting indicators or unusual unicode characters originally, but are now garbled symbols interspersed with empty boxes. The map doesn't particularly resemble any part of New York, or any subway route she's familiar with, but that could conceivably be the application, or the brochure could be for a different subway.

This is a little too cheerful to be an ad for the subway. She flips over to the map. Maybe a tourist dropped it and it's from another city?

The list of garbled text is kind of unsettling, though. First she misses her stop, then she finds herself in an empty car, and now this... She doesn't have to be a horror fan to connect the dots. She really hopes she hasn't found her way into the plot of a horror movie.

She puts the brochure into her backpack and moves on to the notepad.

Its front cover shows a colorful – tree? seaweed? abstract collection of squiggles? – with a collection of crossed lines and circles in two rows across the top. Each page has a 43 by 97 grid of dots, with a scattering of triangles between them. About two thirds of the pages have connections drawn between the triangles, and long chains of zigzags around them, blue lines in a smooth and waxy substance, although a handful of pages have been completely scribbled over.

These are... someone's doodles?

She flips through the notepad, and when there doesn't seem to be any useful information, she puts it in her backpack, too. (There's no such thing as not enough notebooks, even if they're already used.)

What about the shiny plastic?

It's extremely flimsy and already torn nearly in half. There's a bit of something like green rice stuck to a corner of the inside.

She pokes at it and decides against picking it up.

Is it still super dark outside?

The plastic remains on the floor.

Yep.

She really doesn't want to be stuck on this train. What if it never stops?!

Maybe she can check out one of the other cars? Can she open those doors?

None of the doors seem to open. Actually, looking out the doors' windows, there don't seem to be other cars, either to the front or the back.

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?

There sure is! In various metals, with varying amounts of rust and patina, respectively. Some of the wires are thick, but others are thinner than pencil lead. Some of it might be a little hard to extract from its heap, though.

She will attempt to carefully extract some wires that look thin enough to bend but thick enough to hold some weight.

She can eventually find and extract such wires. They feel a bit dubious, with the oxidation, but they seem sturdy enough underneath.

She takes the longer pieces and folds them in half. Then she ties some pieces of not-glass to each end, twisting the wires so they stay in place.

Finally, she shifts the wires so the bends in the middle line up and loops a smaller piece of wire around them. There.

Hopefully, when she lifts the whole thing by the loop at the top and shakes it a little, it doesn't fall apart at once. 

It clinks cheerfully enough, and doesn't seem like it's about to fall apart.

That's good.

By now she's calmed down enough to decide on what to do.

She hooks the whole thing onto one of her jeans belt loops and stands up, stretching. Rummaging through her bag, she takes out the subway brochure, folds it to the map part, and draws a little Earth in the corner in pen. She doesn't know if this is an actual map or just a mock-up of one, but it's better than nothing. 

Time to do her best impression of a lost tourist. Are there any maybe-aliens that look like they might be friendly?

At her current distance, the maybe-aliens in the maybe-village are all possibly-politely possibly-hostilely ignoring her, although it's hard to tell if any of them are stealing glances under their masks, if that is even a thing they are capable of doing.

That isn't the best sign, but what does she have to lose? (If any of them turns out to be actively hostile, she can always run away really fast. The subway's not that far away.)

She'll walk closer to the maybe-village until she's within earshot. "Umm. Hello!" The not-glass tinkles quietly at her side.

The nearest creatures make clicking and whirring sounds and gesture at each other for a few seconds, until two of them come to her.

Stella holds out her map. "I came from the subway," she says, gesturing at the brochure and then waving in the general direction of the station. "Can you tell me where this is?" And then she gestures at the village and points at the map.

The taller and closer of the two takes the map from her hand. It runs a section of thumbtip not encased in metal along its surface, and trills, then holds it out for the other creature to feel. It rummages for underneath the top layer of its garment with its other two hands, until it finds and pulls out a length of untarnished bronze wire, and several green-tinted droplets of glass. It carefully winds segments of the middle of the wire around the droplets' stems, then gently rolls the brochure into a tube and wraps the wire in a tight coil around it. It bends the wire anchoring the droplets, until they lay flat along the tube.

It inspects the tube, holding it up to both lenses in its mask, and turning it to see every detail. The other creature holds two hands out for the tube, inspects it similarly but more slowly, makes a chirping noise, and then passes it back to the first creature, who holds it out toward her.

She watches closely, nervousness temporarily replaced with fascination.

When they're done, she carefully takes the tube and examines it in detail. (She probably hasn't gotten her meaning across properly, has she.) 

They watch her, unmoving and silent.

It sure does seem to be a rolled-up subway brochure wrapped in wire with little bits of green glass or crystal attached to the sides.

"...Thanks? I... don't suppose you could tell me what this is for?"

The smaller creature whirrs, imitating her tone, and stretches out the arm furthest away from her. Neither seems to understand her words.

Yup, this is going as well as she'd expected. She really should have gone back to the station, but leaving now seems... rude.

What happens if she holds out her makeshift not-windchime? 

The smaller creature takes it this time, and they both peer at it. The larger one buzzes and searches beneath its cloak (she can catch glimpses of what might be a bag) until it finds a scrap of dark cloth and a red-tinted sphere of crystal, with opaque grey liquid sloshing inside. The smaller one gives the wind chime a few shakes, then starts individually tapping each neighboring pair of pieces of metal together, while the other presses the cloth to the container and twists it, then inverts them until the cloth is damp. The larger one takes the wind chime from the smaller, and begins wiping the wires with the cloth, while the smaller rummages in its bag for some two-legged and long-nosed metal tools, a long strip of cloth with small metal teeth on one end and loops of thin wire, coated with sparkling dust, on the other, and a set of tiny, parabolically-curved discs of copper, each with a hole in the center.

After a few minutes, the larger creature uses a dry piece of cloth to wipe the liquid, along with most of the rust, off of the wires, then hands it to the smaller one, who carefully removes each crystal chime from its wire, then uses the toothed end of the cloth to scrape away a segment of the bottom, occasionally tapping it with a metal tool, then rubs the entire crystal with the looped end of the cloth until it again has a smooth finish. It replaces each crystal on its own wire, but threads a copper disc into each wire first, then uses the long-nosed tools to bend the wire to grip its crystal's upper surface in a tight spiral, and then taps it against each of the other already-finished wires, which occasionally prompts it to remove, cut down, and smooth the crystal before placing it back again.

After around fifteen minutes of this, when all the crystals and their wires have been thus treated, it gives the wind chime another shake. The sound is distinctly musical now, a set of harmonious though vaguely minor clinking chords, accompanied by surprisingly loud clicking noises as the copper discs move up and down the wires.

It holds the modified wind chime out to her.

She takes the wind chime and admires it.

That wasn't what she'd intended to happen, either. She suspects any other attempts at communication involving props will end in them doing more crafts. (And even if they don't, well, she doesn't want to risk it. If only she had something to give in return--but she's not in the habit of carrying around art supplies. She's abysmal at art.)

"Thank you," she says after a moment. Will they be offended if she attempts to give them back the wind chime?

They take it back, then click and chirp and gesture at each other. The larger creature finds disk beads, similar to the copper ones, but in dark iron and bronze and green-patinated copper, one of each, which it holds out to drop into her hand.

She lets the beads drop into her palm. Is this... currency?

She'll put them in her bag, then.

The creatures both bounce on their strangely-bent knees and close and open their fingers upward, making high chirping sounds.

Ooor not? Do they want the discs back? 

She just wants to end this conversation! And go back to the spooky subway! Why is this so hard!

"Okay, here you go!" She drops the discs into their hands and then starts backing away slowly.

They accept the disks back and turn to watch her go, but do not follow or make any further sounds or gestures.

She will backtrack to the subway station, then.

The station's still there. A creature is crouched on the ground near the tunnel, and there is no train inside.

This time it's Stella's turn to skirt her way around the creature. Its presence is a good sign, though. That means there's going to be another train.

...time to wait for the train. Again.

The creature crouches silently and ignores her for around five minutes, then a buzzing rumble from very close by fills the ground, and a subway pulls into the station. It looks the same. The creature un-crouches and walks into the empty car.

She doesn't know how she missed the fact that the train only had one car when she got on the first time. If she had been less sleep-deprived she might have been able to avoid this whole mess.

Into the car she goes.

The three-legged creature is sitting on a circular stool in the cluster of such seats on one end of the car. There are still benches on the other.

Stools? In the subway? Just when she thinks she's seen everything...

Though it does make sense; benches are very humanoid-oriented. Whoever's running the subway is very considerate.

She sits down on a bench on the other end of the car.

After another minute, there is a chime as the doors slide closed, and the subway accelerates into darkness.

She should probably make a plan for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, her future isn't so foreseeable, so all she comes up with is:

1. Don't die.

2. Get back home.

3. See #1.

Fortunately, it seems the subway isn't in the habit of eating all of its passengers, so that's progress.

That done, she looks around again for more clues.

Is there anything of interest here other than the stools? Subway map on the walls, upcoming stops, that sort of thing?

Lots of very dark darkness out the windows. A greasy stain on a few of the tiles near the door. A square, red button set into one of the handrails. A chunk of intricately twisted shimmery glass on a chain on a seat near the back.

She investigates the red button. Is it one of those "Press to Stop" buttons?

Maybe! It's unlabeled.

Pressing a mysterious button on a mysterious subway would be unwise, even though she kind of wants to. It's shiny and red!

Intricately twisted shimmery glass on a chain?

Smooth, with a twisty-tangly pattern of interconnected loops, in glass that shimmers between green and yellow, at different angles, with a golden fine-linked chain strung through two loops and fused to itself at the ends.

Pretty. She wonders who--or what--it used to belong to. Too bad there's no lost and found she can move it to.

Well, maybe she should take it just in case? Is that considered stealing? She took that notepad earlier, but it was stuck behind the seat like someone put it there.

(...if this were an RPG, she'd be rummaging around in the trash and taking everything. But this isn't an RPG, this is real life. Or, well, she thinks.)

She glances at the creature at the other end of the car.

It's sitting on its stool facing away from her, bending a piece of wire with two of its hands, and resting the third on the stool behind it.

On second thought, she's just going to leave the chain alone.

She goes back to the bench she sat on earlier and sits down again. Then she checks the time on her phone.

Still no GPS or signal, but the phone thinks it's 10:23.

Well, if there's nothing else she can do, she'll sit back and try to read a book on her phone, then.

It still has plenty of battery for that.

After about twenty minutes of traveling smoothly, the three-legged creature puts away its bit of wire, and wraps its arms in a spiral around its torso, tilting its head almost vertical, then holds still.