Well.

Okay.

That's not weirder than her not being dragged back to the institution, but it's still very weird. And more surprising; she's used to people being fairly incomprehensible, but the sky has never seemed inclined to do anything more unusual than thunderstorms or hail. But it doesn't seem to be hurting anything, and she has more pressing problems.

She goes to sit up, and that's when she finally notices the plate of food. She startles and scoots away from it - trap? - but after a few wary minutes her hunger gets the better of her.

There is nothing remarkable about the food except that it's now cold.

She eats it all, and then curls up in a corner of the alley and waits to see if anything will happen.

They'll continue avoiding the block she's on. They seem to sing a lot. They don't attempt to contact her again. 

She naps. She considers trying to find her way out again, but... it's seeming more and more like she's actually going to be left alone here. It might be safer to stay.

She thinks about it for a while and decides that she needs to at least know how to get out, and what's there. And perhaps leaving will give her her power back. She starts walking again; if she keeps going in the same direction she'll have to find the edge of the city sooner or later.

She does, but it's walled.

She makes note of her starting point and follows the wall.

There are a lot of people. They still give her some space. Eventually she comes to a gate.

The crowd is small enough that she could probably go through without being overwhelmed - probably - but it's guarded, and she's not going to mess with that no matter how inattentive they look. She heads back to the last little nook she rested in to sit and think about what to do from here.

If she's going to stay, she needs a place, and ways to get food and water. And someplace to wash her clothes, and somewhere to charge her tablet and get wifi, ideally, but necessities first. The fountains seem like they'll do, for water, but she has no idea what to do about the other two. Usually she'd listen for them, but that's obviously out of the picture, and she hasn't seen any of the signs that the kinds of infrastructure she likes to hide in even exists here, much less any clues on how to get into them.

Maybe she just needs to explore more. She'll do that. ...later, though, she's pretty tired from all that walking, and this is a good enough hiding spot. She's not sleepy yet, so she rummages through her pack for one of the books she has with her, and tries to relax enough to focus on the plot.

Eventually someone will bring her another plate of food, set it down near her, and walk away.

She doesn't scream, but it's a very near thing. How did they find her? She'll have to find a better hiding spot. ...food first.

It still doesn't get dark. The people don't approach her again.

So weird. Is this some kind of... creepy tinker's creepy underground bunker, or something? The sky doesn't do that.

She finds another hiding place, this one more complicated to get to and harder to spot her coming and going from. She sleeps. She eats. She reads. Eventually she feels like she's up for more exploration.

All of the streets of the city seem to sell homemade artisanal stuff! People continue to peaceably give her space. 

Is any of the homemade artisanal stuff food? What she really wants is a grocery store, but she's not very picky at this point.

There are street vendors handing out various things; no grocery store is apparent.

Yeah, street vendors aren't really an answer to the question of whose trash she wants to try digging through. If there're no shops selling food, are there any restaurants?

There are some restaurants! ...there is no apparent trash.

...okay. (Not okay. Starving to death is bad and that seems to be where this is headed.) She'll... just....

Freak out about that a little bit, apparently. Not the screaming crying curling up in a ball kind of freakout, just the quiet sort where she's very still and unresponsive for a few minutes, because she can't quite cope with the world.

She makes her way back to the street from the alley behind the restaurants, and finds someplace to sit. She'll head back in a minute, she just needs to get her head together first.

No one interrupts her.

Which is bizarre and she doesn't trust it a bit, but she is getting the idea that it's going to keep happening.

She notices after a little while that they're not speaking English - with as messed up as her hearing is, she's not surprised she can't understand them, but the language sounds different even beyond that. So this probably isn't America? Unless it actually is some creepy tinker's creepy underground bunker or something. But that might explain why it's so weird here.

She goes back to her new hiding place and goes to sleep.

When she wakes up food's been left again.

She really wishes she knew how they were doing that. Until she does, finding better hiding places is just going to show them where all the good hiding places are.

She's sure they'll stop eventually - she won't be surprised if this is somehow the start of a program, actually, and just as soon as she decides they aren't going to stop someone will show up to make impossible or incomprehensible demands that she's expected to meet if she wants them to continue - but for now, it's one more meal between her and the looming emergency, so she eats, and then she goes back out to explore again.

Wind chimes! Silks! Hand-carved furniture! Jewelry! So much jewelry!

Continued lack of grocery stores. Continued lack of trash disposal from the restaurants. The street vendors are just a tease, now.

Around midday, by her reckoning, she takes a break to sit and watch a fountain for a while.