(The website is primarily viewed by people who need to fill out forms to ask for things from a government program. She feels like if there were not multiple somewhat-state-funded organizations, some responsible for helping people fill in forms and some responsible for reviewing forms, it would free up enough funds to just restrict the program less.)

She does amateur sports, which are still fake, and tries running with those run-away-from-zombies audio tracks, which are also fake, and she climbs a mountain and that's at least almost not fake but it's quite expensive and she can't repeat it regularly.

She tries to get into hunting and it's not as fake as some things are, but she's still playing a game with rules that someone made up. She's always playing a game with rules that someone made up. She knows that it wouldn't really be possible for billions of people to coexist without these games but she just once for five minutes wants to do something that's actually real.

She daydreams about it, sometimes. She imagines being in one of those implausible bits of prehistoric fiction where there are cavemen and dinosaurs and wooly mammoths, all together, or of a zombie apocalypse, or of being some kind of nereid hunting kraken. She always wakes up from it.

One day it's just far too miserable in her dark cubicle, and she needs to be anywhere else, and she just leaves. She takes the shortest path out, which happens to be through an emergency exit. She doesn't care about the alarm. She doesn't quite know her destination but her legs seem to.

She feels more and more frustrated as she heads to wherever she's going and then suddenly she's in water, sort of. It's vividly red and there's a jellyfish and she grabs it, somehow, and tears it apart. The body releases some kind of cyan fluid and she feels good.

This is clearly supposed to be the fakest thing that has ever happened to her but it doesn't feel fake. It feels real.

It feels real but also she's not at her most emotionally stable and it's getting a bit tedious, and she's not really sure that any of this is safe to eat. She's also not really dressed for being underwater. She would like to go somewhere else now.

She could go back to where she left Earth from? It's not that far.

She is not going to go right back into her old life which notably includes all of her coworkers who are probably baffled by her spontaneously walking out and might want to ask her concerning questions even if she's already fired.

Does she want to go somewhere else on Earth? What about this big city with lots of canals and no humans?

Maybe if she can't do better. What are her other options here?

Tropical island with giant dragonflies and also dodo birds?

She'll take it!

She is going to hunt a dodo and eat it. Maybe she should re-establish a breeding population on earth at some point but she doesn't really want to do it right now and eating one dodo is probably not going to fuck it up.

The air is thick and humid. She can catch a dodo, but it is absolutely going to bite her.

Ow.

…she still wants to eat a dodo at some point but maybe she should look for some eggs or recognizable fruit.

She can find some, but she's going to get a lot of bug bites if she sticks around.

She will go somewhere else now and come back later with more preparation.

Would she like to go to this cramped studio apartment? It is very specifically hers and it is not on Earth.

Yeah, okay.

Now she's in a bathroom. The sink and the shower look like they can't be active simultaneously, the lighting comes from what looks like a gas sconce, and there's only one bath towel, but it is a bathroom. It even has toilet paper and soap and a clothesline over the bathtub. Its door is open and leads into a room with a cabinet, a waste chute, and two solid blocks approximating a chair and a table.

Huh.

She will set her food down, dump her clothes in the tub, wash her hands and rinse the food, and then eat it.

It's satisfying but eating a raw egg is kind of a mess and now she has wet eggshell. It can go in the garbage chute even though she's leaving wet footprints across the floor.

And now she is going to take a shower.

Sure, she can drip some cold water on herself.

She will simply unhook the showerhead and bring it close to various body parts to compensate for this abysmal flow rate.

The showerhead hook is conveniently located right where she'd want the showerhead positioned for rinsing her hair, while also not being too high to comfortably reach.

She can wash herself, and give her clothes at least some amount of rinsing with soap and water, and hang them to dry on the clothesline. And then go sleep on the floor, her phone is fried and she has no idea how long she's been awake for.

And now to see what's in the cabinet.

There's a splayd, a bowl, and a lot of food. There's not a lot of variety of food, though. At the front there's dehydrated potato flakes, rolled oats, soy milk powder, crackers, and peanut butter. With some rummaging she can turn up powdered eggs, rice noodles, and shortening.

Courtney thinks this might be nutritionally complete but she's not really impressed with the selection. At least it's not taunting her with milk she can't digest?

If she comes back here again she'll have to remember to have her fruit and fresh eggs or such with the pantry food. And bring a cup, she likes to have a drink with her meals. For breakfast today she'll have a bowl of water and then put together cold peanut butter oatmeal.

She washes her dishes and checks on her clothes. They're dry, but they smell a bit weird. Still, they're what she has, so she puts them on.

She might want to go back to Earth and empty her apartment, even if she kind of doesn't want to deal with it. The longer she waits the more likely it is that she'll be declared a missing person or evicted or something.

She can't actually go to Earth from here. She can go back to the dodo island, though.

Sure. It will probably be easier if she's not dripping wet.

Okay, now she can go to Earth.

She arrives in a park but gets the feeling she can teleport right into her old apartment, which is correct.

She starts moving her possessions into the stone room. She can't fit everything but her couch was really more of an aspirational purchase in the event that she ended up having friends and there's no way she gets a television signal in another plane. Conveniently, she does have backpacking gear, including a hand-crank washing machine.

She turns off auto-pay on her bills, emails her family with something vague about exciting new opportunities that will interfere with her telecommunications access, and … ugh, she might want to buy ammunition at some point and it's possible that if she just vanishes on her lease it might interfere with that somehow? She's not sure but she should maybe properly terminate her lease instead of vanishing.

She checks that nobody's looking and teleports the couch out to the dumpster. She will leave the television, it's much more mobile and it might conceivably have resale value and it shouldn't go in the dumpster.

The building manager at least doesn't have many questions once she pays the early termination fee.

She will go somewhere discreet, head back into her unearthly apartment, remember that she can't actually go places from her unearthly apartment besides where she entered it from, head to the dodo island, head back to her unearthly apartment from there, and get changed.

Now she has some appropriate clothing and weapons but she is not carrying a sleeping bag or a tent because she can just go back to her unearthly apartment every time she wants to sleep. It's great. Where can she go from here?

Lots of places. The place that seemed kind of like a zombie apocalypse but on more awake inspection seems to have a weird amount of castle for that? Colorful ocean she was in earlier? Hard vacuum? College? City she saw earlier? Teleporting around here? Some of the directions feel concerning but not all of them.

She is not going to go into hard vacuum without a space suit, that seems like a terrible choice. She is also very done attending college and does not want to go to the Plane of College. The sea is fun but she could use a swimsuit. The zombie apocalypse might also be interesting but she would like a gun for that.

Teleporting around here might be neat, she'll try some non-concerning directions that aren't too close to where she is.

Freezing area with wooly mammoths! Desert that could plausibly exist on Earth! Dinosaurs! Fortress that seems to respond to her presence!

What kind of response, though.

It seems positive and friendly. It's not literally rolling out a red carpet but mostly because it doesn't have access to good textiles right now.

Let's have a look. If things go wrong she can teleport out, because she is a teleporter and it's great.

Does she want to touch this handprint shape on a panel that's beeping at her?

Sure!

It is going to prick her finger and apply liquid bandage.

Ow!

It stops hurting pretty quickly (maybe there's an anaesthetic in the gunk on her finger?) but she still is going to take her hand away. What else is around here?

It's hard to tell what's going on. There are tanks of liquid that could fit a large human, one of which is now gently illuminated, and some holographic maps, but everything else is more confusing than those.

She should get a camera but she doesn't want to go to Earth. Maybe the other city has some for sale? She's not feeling a route to the other city but she did feel a route when she was in the ocean.

She will … go home, put on her swimsuit, head to the ocean, and then hopefully head to the city from the ocean and pop home from the city to put on street clothes.

The first ocean spot she tries doesn't seem to offer a connection to the city. When she tries to go back to where she was last time, she gets to somewhere she could reach the city from, but the ocean doesn't look at all the same.

It's an ocean, they're not supposed to be completely static. Time to visit the city!

The first thing she notices when she arrives is that she's still in water. Namely, she's in a canal, with some kind of vivid algae bloom and an octopus bumping into her leg. There's a barge approaching.

She would like to get out of the way of the barge!

She can climb up the canal side and over a railing and onto a sidewalk but she's going to need to avoid a skateboarder on the railing.

She's fast.

Now she is on the sidewalk and this tricycle cart will politely navigate around her. She can't read the label on it but there are some cooked fish pictures. Also, the driver appears to be a rough stone statue who can somehow pedal.

This is a very exciting city and the multiverse is a very big place.

She can take more of it in in the absence of a barge. The canals stretch throughout the city, with elevated rails above many of them. Massive skyscrapers stretch towards the heavens. Flashing neon signs label shops in a script she can't read. Spare surfaces are plastered with logos and graffiti tags, sometimes layered enough that it's hard to guess their original colors.

All of the locals seem like stone or metal statues, or perhaps a child's idea of a robot unhindered by constraints like balance or flexibility or power supplies. Some of them wear suits, but there's no real evidence that a swimsuit is going to stand out much, at least for a human.

It's not, actually, incredibly loud. The stores don't seem to be playing music and the trains are quiet as trains go. She can overhear vague conversational snippets that suggest people here speak English.

Well, that's convenient. She'll pop back home and get changed.

The city is just how she left it, aside from how she'll need to dodge this electric scooter that has a bundle of balloons tied to the handlebars.

She can dodge the scooter but is going to be hit with the balloons. It's fine.

Can she buy electronics? A generator and fuel? Armor? Weapons?

There are a lot of businesses around here. Would she like body painting? Fried calamari? Rooftop garden tickets? Sharp suits? Safety gear? Lightbulbs?

Safety gear and lightbulbs look promising. She'll head into the electronics shop, the safety gear she saw on display seems to fit an inhumanly skinny frame and she's not sure how representative that is.

There's batteries and lightbulbs and resistors and music players and all kinds of things!

She'll take some promising-looking batteries to the counter and ask if they're rechargeable and whether they sell generators or know where to buy gasoline for them.

This is a reputable business and we would never sell generators like that. Leave and don't come back.

What did I say?

Sorry, we can't hear you over the sound of us trespassing you.

Well, all right, she'll investigate the safety gear situation. Maybe there is something in her size.

There's a pretty solid selection.

She will try things on and take some to the counter.

Great!

The price is in bytes.

She didn't think this through, did she.

Do they take US Dollars?

"This is an interesting art collection but we don't actually take payment in art."

"Is there anything besides bytes you take payment in?"

"I don't take barter, sorry. There's an open-air market north-northeast of here, sixth story, you might want to head over there and see what they're selling."

"Thank you." It's a good thing she brought her compass. She'll leave the gear behind and head that way.

The cashier is not sure why this person needs a prosthetic for this but doesn't comment.

She can find the market. It's using a floor of a parking structure. She can take the stairs up to the market no problem but if she wanted to go to the roof garden above it she'd need to unlock a door she doesn't have credentials for.

It's crowded. Someone is busking with a theremin. The market reeks of rotten fish, but nobody seems to really care about this.

Eeeeewww okay she does not have to and in fact cannot buy the rotten fish and she can hold her nose and look at what's for sale.

Shoe shining, scarves, fish bones being served like snacks, seaweed salad, essential oils, wire sculptures, potted plants, caricatures, paints…

She should not sell her apartment's food even if she seems to have a big supply and access to more, but she does have access to exotic plants. She'll approach the plant booth.

"Excuse me, are you in the market for exotic plants to resell?"