- she pauses, for a moment, scribbles down a few sentences on the hack of the paper, and follows him out, walking backwards.

She hands him the paper, and then attempts to jump. No dice.

The paper says: ‘This world is strange. I think you and Woman in Green are connected. I could kill you, see if that brought me back. May be urgent; do not know how this place works, seems bad idea to linger.’

“Do it.”

She hugs him, suddenly and tightly, and continues hugging him for several seconds.

The tip of her pen finds his eye, and pierces it, with a horrible squelch; it continues on for several inches. The body in her arms goes limp.

The scarf around her neck, and the scarf around her wrist, feel like they’re pulling her, impossibly, bruisingly -

the 

world 

fades.

She wakes up on a hard linoleum bench.

The washing machine that she’d seen spill behind her is gone, now; there are a few smears of mud, on the floor.

She’s just going to do the prudent thing and leave immediately before she has another panic attack -

No.

No, she isn’t.

Zeke seems to be on the other end of the glass door. He’s wearing a heavy coat, holding the same bloodstained shovel that she’d seen earlier, and -

A bright green scarf, for whatever reason, of precisely the same style and pattern as the one worn by Amaris’s grandmother.

Quiet hyperventilation it is, then. She steps back from the door.

He opens the door, steps inside, and perfunctorily locks it.

”Hey. God, I hate the police - ‘why are you carrying a shovel’, they say, as if I’m going to say ‘well, you see, I’ve had to kill a bunch of people today, super big bummer’. ‘Least I got that one traffic cop, he gets to meet the Lady...”

... she has no idea how to react to that.

Sympathetic nodding? Let’s go with ‘sympathetic nodding’.

“So, you good to go? Basement’s kinda dirty, but it’s not like your fashion choices are gonna be super important...”

She shakes her head, and makes an inscrutably elaborate gesture.

“... charades are gonna take a while. Is it super important?”

She nods.

“Kay. Soooooo could you run through that again?”

Another inscrutably elaborate gesture!

(Her brain is still going bzzzzzz, bzzzzzz, bzzzzzz, in the background, and her everything hurts, and her arm itches and flickers, but she does still have a brain, and if she just stalls for long enough then maybe something will come to mind -)

“Uh. Timmy fell down the well. Sears has a discount, better buy, buy, buy - I guess I should, like, actually take this seriously - do you need to get something, or do you need to, like, do something?”

She nods, at ‘do something’, and holds up two fingers.

“Uh... not thinking of a ton of things. Kill someone? Mail a letter. Have sex - totes willing to do that one, by the way... go to the bathroom?”

She nods again, firmly.

“Guess it’d be pretty weird if you met the Lady and peed your pants while she was still... introducing herself. Sure. Whatever. Go ahead. It’s by the fire exit.”

She strides confidently towards the bathroom, and enters it.

And he’s just going to follow her and loom conspicuously outside the bathroom door, if she doesn’t mind. 

She’s not exactly in a position to complain.

She quietly hyperventilates and collapses shivering onto the floor. She washes her hands. She flushes the toilet. She fails to think of any incredibly clever ways to use the contents of the bathroom to escape.

She opens the door, and walks back out.

“Great,” he says. “So -“

He’s interrupted by a loud thud, and a loud, angry tirade in Russian, coming from the back room.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake -“ he starts yelling back in louder, angrier Russian, opens the door to the back room, and shuts it, with a louder, angrier thud.