—something changes.

Yes, yes it does.

Her first impression is that everything's moved - the people, the buildings, the roads, none of it is where it was a moment ago - but that doesn't make sense, not all at once, not over the miles of distance that she can tell the change extends to.

More likely she's moved, somehow, and the building with her.

This is probably not a good thing.

She goes to the break room - she still hasn't turned on a single light; she doesn't need to - and sits and pays attention to what she's hearing, to get a more detailed picture of where she is now.

It's definitely a city.

It's definitely not New York City.

It's definitely not any other city she's ever seen or heard of. Buildings next to buildings, some aligned but many askew. Buildings that have nothing to do with other buildings, a twenty-story building next to a quaint little squat shop next to an empty lot. Roads that zig and zag and zigzag, traffic zigging and zagging and zigzagging with them. Sewers zigging and zagging and zigzagging, following no pattern or rhyme, lacking all sense and order and sense of order, sometimes looping around themselves, vanishing off into the distance. Subway stations here and there, connected in sequences just as tangled and chaotic in this spaghetti of a city.

There are people—not many people, not out and about, it's late, even here—and in fact, even fewer people than there should be, for the time, very few people indeed. People are inside, people don't leave, they return home from work and stay there.

There are people, and her building is between two other buildings like it'd always been there, and there are people driving, and some of them are driving towards her building.

Okay.

Okay.

This is alarming, but, okay.

She picks a nearby loop of subway and tries to trace a route to it, keeping an ear on the approaching vehicles as she does; she can hear the whole subway system at once, at least the parts within her range, but the maze is still a maze.

They get close before she has it fully worked out. She slips out the back door again, taking a moment to re-arm the alarm, and heads off to the nearest unused subway entrance.

There are sirens, which are not quite like the sirens she's used to, attached to the cars driving in the direction of her building. She slips off unseen and down the subway entrance easily, but she can naturally still hear the people arriving at the store and walking in, heedless of the alarm. Well—one of them walks in heedless of the alarm.

"Dammit, Lewis, I told you to stop just barging in like that, third time this week..." one of them complains.

"Sorry, sorry," says the not very apologetically sounding counterpart.

The third member of their little group is silent, and walks into the store.

People are confusing, but that's definitely weird. She keeps an ear on them while she walks, and ducks into the first sufficiently hidden nook she comes to so she can listen to the conversation without distractions.

Nooks: are aplenty. This city is almost nothing but nooks.

The quiet one quickly disables the alarm while the other two look around. "Looks like just a regular clothing store," says Lewis. "No one here, after hours..."

"Cubism?" asks the quiet one.

"No sign," answers not-Lewis.

"Alright, guess Resources is gonna want to annex this ASAP," says Lewis.

Well, that's not very elucidating.

She finishes working out the route to her chosen bit of subway and heads off again, still listening to them.

They don't actually talk much after that. Mostly small talk, about what bet they lost to be taking the graveyard shift today, about not-Lewis' daughter and Lewis' girl and quiet one's coming promotion. They catalogue every item in the store, then one of them radios someone: "Got a clothing store at 98th, no sign of cubism, no imports, everything catalogued. Over."

"Copy that," a voice from the radio answers. "Be there in ten. Over."

So, wherever this is, suddenly appearing buildings are common enough that they have a system for them. Okay.

She reaches her chosen hiding spot and starts cataloguing nearby resources, looking most urgently for grocery and clothing stores and someplace to get a mattress. (This isn't the first time she's had to start with nothing but the clothes on her back. Not even the second; it took a little while for her to resign herself to just how far she'd have to go to avoid having her hiding places found, and when they were, it always seemed safer to just let them go than to give anyone any more clues about herself. She'd hoped not to have to do this again, but it's an annoying setback, not devastating.)

As she reaches her chosen hiding spot, she notices... something. Close to the very limit of her range, the sounds get—weird. Muffled, perhaps, except 'muffled' is not quite the right word...

In any case, she can easily find a crummy grocery store and a clothing store that-a-way and perhaps that's a place that sells mattresses, in descending order of how close they are to her, with the grocery store being about half a mile in one direction and the clothing store one mile in another and the mattress place three miles in a third direction.

Weird muffled sounds can wait, her first priority is dinner. She sets out for the grocery store.

The city is really twisty. She has no trouble navigating, of course, but it's really really twisty.

She doesn't run into any people at this time, and even the people who got into the clothing store she arrived in have already left, being replaced by some other official-sounding people.

Of course she doesn't run into any people. It's not that hard not to, when you can hear where they are and what they're doing like she can.

She checks the store's dumpster, first; if she can get a couple meals' worth of food that way she won't bother breaking in.

One meal. Not a couple.

She can try someplace else tomorrow but she does need dinner and also breakfast first - ideally lunch, too, but that's not worth outright theft for. She checks for a security system.

Not much of one. This is a very crummy shop. Very crummy district, too.

She's not actually much good at disarming them, though. Her usual method is to wait until she hears someone put in the code and just copy them, so she doesn't have to.

She puzzles it over for a few minutes before deciding to just try a different store.

Another crummy store! This one has a lock and that's it.

...well, that'd be it for a regular person. She can hear the soft hum of electronics connected to the door.

Yeah, she's not messing with that. Dumpster?

Not much there at all.

She'll try another couple stores, and then head back if she's still not finding anything.

No stores seem to completely lack any security systems, as far as she can tell.

She prefers to avoid breaking into places anyway. (She will if she has to; nobody's throwing out coats in September.) Their dumpsters?

Somewhat better filled than the first two, she can probably scrape a second meal from them.