Better and worse both; more and better hiding places, but she doesn't know which ones are safe and which ones will have people in them.

That grocery store sure looks empty, though, maybe that's a good one. She gives it a try.

It's locked but she can walk through walls. Behold, a grocery store, closed for the night, rows of freezers humming. There's a sound like maybe there's a guy with a mop humming in the produce section.

She almost turns and leaves immediately - she's looking for a hiding place, and this isn't a suitable one, with someone here - but food. She walks down an aisle at random, picks up a bottle of juice and a pack of applesauce cups, and - is she going to be able to carry them, actually, if she phases out again? She sets the juice down and tests it with the applesauce, holding the pack with the back of her hand on the shelf where it'll land if it doesn't phase with her when held.

Nope, she can't bring it along.

Well, at least it's a quiet thump.

She puts the applesauce and juice back. She has no way of carrying them; they might not be missed if she took them but she can't eat them here without leaving an obvious mess, and her best bet is still to not give anyone any clue of where she's gone.

She closes her eyes, then, aims away from the humming, and walks until she feels the night air again.

She's in the parking lot. The lights overhead glare down at her. Occasional cars separated by a minute or two each whoosh down the road.

She pauses just long enough to take a deep breath, figures out which way she was headed before she tried the grocery store, and sets off again, avoiding busier roads as best she can.

Avoiding busier roads will have her on quiet stopsign-studded residential streets. There's a closed convenience store which doesn't even seem to have a guy with a mop.

She checks the convenience store and takes a nice break, making a meal of a bag of tortilla chips and cheese from a vending machine. Before she goes, she checks an idea she had on the walk - if she gives herself a nice thematic bag, and puts things in it, and then phases, does that work?

Nope. The bag helps, but not that much.

Well, it was worth a shot. She cleans up and heads out again. (She'll keep the bag. Even if it isn't useful right now, it will be eventually, and she wants to know if any other ideas she has along the way work with it.)

Houses houses nail salon bank restaurant restaurant laundromat houses bar restaurant houses library swarm of monsters spawning on her six.

....what. She turns to look.

Coming into existence on the surface of a pine tree in a park, like slugs and pillbugs morphing into tiny tree octopi, cicadas, spiky radially symmetrical things that ooze through the branches. Moving around slowly, staying more or less together but with individuals going in a variety of directions. They descend the tree trunk.

They don't seem to be a threat but this also isn't something that just happens, as far as she knows, and the magic warned her about it; she doesn't want these things hanging around maybe being a clue about where she's been.

She makes a cartoon box with a funnel on top, and a scoop, and tries scooping them in.

They do not want to be in the box or the scoop. They start growing more wings and flying into the air.

That's kind of alarming.

How about... she drops a cloth on the swarm, followed by a pile of rocks.

This successfully geeshes some of them and inconveniences others! Many wriggle out around the edges of the cloth and help the survivors underneath chew through it.

More rocks, then, while she tries to come up with something else - a big flyswatter might work if there were only a few of them but she doesn't really like her odds even with a chunk of the swarm incapacitated. Sticky paper might gum them up enough to stop them from moving, and then she could squish them. Or just stickiness, no paper - does that work, dropping a layer of goo on them?

Gooing them inconveniences them! They can shapeshift out of it, and they get underway on that, but it seems to take a while.

Plenty of time for more rocks, then, after she clears out the existing rubble, nice flat ones for maximum squish.

Once the earlier rocks are out of the way flat rocks do a decent job on the remaining swarm. There are only four unsquished ones - there and there and there and there -

Flyswatter time, then. Squish squish miss squish squish. (Ew.)

Hooray! She has defeated a swarm!

Hopefully that doesn't happen too often. She cleans up again and continues on her way.