Rhonda scribbles her phone number on a scrap of paper and hands it to Xie Lian, then waves before teleporting off. 

"Does Jiejie want to rent a scooter?"

Giggle. "No, I can walk, San Niang."

Fifty thousand dollars was plenty for Xie Lian to buy a used camper. ...and driving lessons. It's parked by Golden Gate Park.

It only has one bed in it, but every time Xie Lian asks San Niang if she would prefer not to travel home after a late night of witch-hunting, San Niang says,

"San Niang would be honored to be Jiejie's guest."

And then Xie Lian is hardly going to have San Niang drape herself across the little kitchen table, and San Niang won't hear of Xie Lian doing it, so they wind up in the one bed that there is, which isn't very big, but Xie Lian's slept in smaller places and San Niang claims every morning that she has never slept better.

Wei Ying has been thinking very hard about her wish. 

Wishing to know all the things she wants to know is extremely appealing, but...even if she managed to wish to know everything about monsters, that would only tell her what was currently going on, not how to fix anything. And any given information is something she could learn, in time. She only gets one wish. 

She thinks about Noon. Thinks about her apparent control of her monster or monster lineage or whatever exactly it is that she has going on. Thinks about what she said about looking into factory farming. Thinks about the thing that ultimately made her decide to tell Noon where Xie Lian was, a hallway between Germany and New York. 

She still isn't at all sure that this is something it makes sense to trust Jun Wu's government with, so she keeps thinking about ways to phrase it to sound more innocuous. She isn't yet willing to just outright lie about her wish; it would make way too much sense for them to have lie-detecting magic. 

Meanwhile she keeps doing research. She corresponds with saberdancer and asks questions and pokes into Indonesian folklore when she runs out of better ideas. 

And she collects statistics on diseases and murders and suicides. 

She locates some news articles about a suspicious cluster of patient violence at a local hospital, and decides to head over to ask the doctors questions about it. 

The doctors cite patient confidentiality at her.

She's not asking about any specific patients! Just, like, an aggregate assessment of the ways in which the incident was weird. 

The doctors are much too busy to deal with this. One of the nurses, taking her coffee break to get off her feet for a minute, will talk, though. "Oh, it's not that weird for somebody to try to pull out all their own tubes when they wake up but it's very weird for them to pull other people's tubes."

She nods and writes this down and thanks the nurse, and when it becomes obvious that nobody else has the time for her, which is pretty valid, she supposes, she starts heading out through the parking lot. 

Somebody is being removed from an ambulance! He's struggling and when they try to transfer him he gets free - one paramedic flings up her hands in disgust, another blames her, screaming in her face, and punches her in the ear - the patient has a gunshot wound in his shoulder but still staggers toward Wei Ying.

Oh. 

Crap. 

She turns and runs away from him, at a diagonal--she knows she can see witches, if she finds herself inside one, but she doesn't know if that means it won't automatically eat her and either way she sincerely doubts that magical girl potential will give her any advantage whatever when it comes to the human violence that witches cause. Which means she needs to get away, and hopefully inform someone--thank you thank you saberdancer for being a TELEPORTER since she doesn't know anyone closer--

She can outrun him.

She makes it into the hospital courtyard, where a grandma with a cannula and a wheelchair looks like she's asleep till Wei Ying gets close enough, and then she lurches out of the chair and wraps her skinny arms around Wei Ying's neck.

CRAP. 

Wei Ying starts out more worried about hurting the grandma getting her off herself, but the grandma turns out to be surprisingly strong, and a broken arm is less lethal than asphyxiation, so she starts trying to break away in full earnest. 

The grandma is BITING HER EAR. The grandma's nurse is staring into space, apparently unconcerned.

Losing part of an ear is also less lethal than being strangled! Wei Ying finally manages to extract her neck from the woman's arms, and rolls away from the wheelchair, coughing, her ear throbbing and spilling wetness down the side of her face. Wei Ying does not have time to assess the damage, she sits up and starts to rise to her feet, scanning for any other possible avenues of attack. 

The grandma can apparently walk a bit and totters at her before she can assess the Littlest Cancer Patient under the willow tree for witchedness.

She can hear tires screeching in the parking lot ahead, and screams.

Oh that's not good. 

She makes it to her feet and dashes away from the grandma. She isn't too worried about speed, here, she's sure she can outrun her. What she's concerned about is edging along the wall so that she can maybe make it out without any of the screaming people or the people causing the screaming noticing her. 

She can mostly do this.

There's a janitor along one wall, taking an illicit smoke break in spite of the clearly posted signs declaring this hospital a smoke-free campus, and he looks at her fixedly when she turns the corner and they can see each other.

She gives him a nervous little wave.

He starts striding intently toward her.

--She attempts to run off in another direction.

The parking lot is... on fire.

There are sirens in the distance but not close enough to be imminently in rescuing distance.

The inside of this section of the hospital is - actually deserted, maybe everybody who could run ran out to join the parking lot conflagration.

That's probably not great on account of all the witched people. She checks her cell phone for signal with which to contact saberdancer and discovers that her phone cracked when she hit the ground getting away from wheelchair grandma and the screen is filled with random colors and shapes that don't respond to her poking at them.

She can hear the elevator ding, on her left. The burning parking lot is on her right.

There's snarling from the corridor ahead.

There is a single-occupancy all-gender bathroom behind her.