All right. She heads back to her hiding place and spends a few hours mapping out the city in her head - she wants to go to a better neighborhood, where the security isn't so tight and the dumpsters are more generous; that might not be close enough for her to find it from here, but she should at least be able to work out what direction to go in and find a route - and then eats her dinner and curls up to sleep as the sun is coming up.

From what she can hear, it's quite likely she is in one of the "better" neighborhoods—there are squatters and dumpsters galore and there's that muffled thing at the edge of the city...

And there's weirdness. Weirdness everywhere. Some buildings have floors that, apparently, do not exist. As in, from the outside the building is perfectly normal, but from the inside there is a whole floor that is completely absent. Some buildings sound like different buildings got mishmashed, some buildings are not completely there, some buildings can't seem to decide what shape they are or how many floors they have. Especially near the muffled parts.

Well. She definitely doesn't want to go near the muffled place.

She wakes up around noon, eats the rest of her food, and listens some more, paying particular attention to how people handle the weird buildings - do they seem to be safe, aside from being weird?

As it gets to be evening she starts listening for security system passcodes for the grocery stores she visited yesterday and a few more she's identified since then.

The buildings that are wholly weird are avoided altogether. The buildings that have weird parts are lived in and people just go around the weirdness, used to it.

Not all stores have passcode-based security systems, but she can definitely get the passwords of the ones that do.

Okay. That's food sorted out, at least in the short term. The weird buildings are still worrying, but easily enough avoided.

She spends a couple more days there - gets ahold of a change of clothes, too, during that time - and when she has a little stash of food and feels like she has the hang of how the city works, she sets out in the opposite direction from the muffled place, hoping to find somewhere better to settle.

The city doesn't seem to get any less crazy as she moves closer and closer to the central urban area. If anything, it gets crazier, with even twistier roads and misaligned building. She continues to walk and—

—she trips on something that wasn't there—

—and finds herself elsewhere.

It's a hospital hallway, but shorter than it should be and all closed doors. And behind these closed doors it's—surprisingly hard to hear. Almost like the rooms haven't decided what they contain, but that's of course preposterous.

Hospital hallway.

And she can't hear her surroundings.

aaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

...did her hand just flicker a bit...

She's far too busy freaking out to notice such trivialities.

Her surroundings do not react to her freaking out.

But she starts hearing again. It expands from where she is, as this strange place settles on what it wants to be. It's not much, at first, very muffled like the edges of the city, but she can detect hallways and rooms. They are very much not hospital rooms, though. There is something that's probably a living room, and something that sounds a lot like an office full of cubicles, and the door adjacent to it leads to a police station in a way that should cause both rooms to intersect each other but somehow they don't.

AAAAAAAA

AAAAAA

AAaaa?

ah?

What the heck?

She scoots over next to the wall and sits up, leaning against it with her arms around her knees, and keeps listening.

Her hearing... definitely does not reach nearly as far as it ought to, and what she does hear is a non-Euclidean complete mess. There's one door that is absolutely and completely soundless, like there's nothing behind it. There are several rooms and hallways and mishmashes that make absolutely no sense. The intersecting office has a bathroom door that leads to a ballroom and another bathroom door that leads to a laundromat. Outside the window it sounds like there's a model of a city instead of an actual city. The stairs never end, and the elevator is an endless pit. Similar craziness touches wherever she can hear, and there is this one hallway which she might be distinctly sure loops around itself seven times without intersecting itself before leading to a restaurant's kitchen.

Okay but it's not actually a hospital wing with a bunch of closed doors, Jesus FUCK that was terrifying. (You're not allowed to close the door, when you're a patient, they want to be able to hear you. So a closed door means they're doing something they don't want people to know about: aaaah.)

She stays put and keeps listening, hoping to hear a way out - the soundless door might be one, she'll give that a try if nothing more obvious shows up - and also keeping an ear out for any people moving around.

If there's a thing she can be sure of is that there's no way "out" within her range. Only in, rooms after rooms after hallways after rooms after more rooms, all inside, twisting around themselves incomprehensibly.

And at the very edge of her hearing, past a non-Euclidean knot so convoluted even her hearing might not be enough to make it out, she can hear movement. It's not a human's movement, however. It's—something else. Like there is no one, or a hundred people, or three, all at the same time. Like the person has three heads and five eyes and one arm and seven hands and is smiling and screaming and crying and talking and walking.

She's curious. Not enough to go look, but enough to pause and listen to the - person? creature? - for a few minutes, and to keep checking back every so often while she tries to catalogue the place. (The rooms stay put, right? At least on the timescale she's working with? Not that she's going to trust that yet regardless, but...)

They do stay put. Quite put, actually—the air is pretty stale, almost like time passes more slowly in there, and everything is really, really still. No hint of insects or people or anything living really other than the occasional plant and that... maybe-a-person-maybe-not-who-knows.

Well, she's not moving without a good reason, and she's not seeing one yet. She keeps listening.

Eventually she gets hungry, and eats something from her pack. While she's eating it occurs to her to see if she can just go back the way she came; when she's done with her meal she tries that.

Nope. She cannot. She can't even hear the way she came, it's like she's somewhere else entirely even though it was a completely clear and continuous transition between the two places, like she'd walked into a hole in the air.

She couldn't hear this place before she fell in, either, or she wouldn't have. Oh well, it was worth a shot.

If she's going to be stuck here she's going to need more food sooner or later, what do her prospects sound like on that?

There is a kitchen a few non-Euclidean turns away that seems to be stockpiled with food, as well as this one dinner room that seems to have food everywhere—even on the ceiling.

She heads for the kitchen.

Past a bowling alley into a bathroom, a stall that leads to a garage, a hall of mirrors in all directions, that hallway that folds around itself seven times, and the restaurant kitchen. It's... pretty normal, relatively speaking.

Oh, good.

She looks around a bit - it wouldn't happen to adjoin a bedroom of some description, would it? - and settles in; her plan is to stay here while the food lasts.

It doesn't adjoin one, but there is a bedroom a few more turns that-a-way.

Of course, it happens to contain seventeen identical beds and the wardrobe is made of cheese.

...she'll haul a mattress to the kitchen.