The book definitely has recipes for a few simple pasta sauces and in the worst case premade sauces for spaghetti are probably a thing, she's pretty sure.

Cool.

She showers and goes to bed. In the morning she calls a car a bit early and records the scenery outside on her phone the whole way and tries SO hard to stay awake. She even talks to the driver. What's the driver's name. Do they have parents.

The driver is called Jared Tower! He does not have parents. The frame skip happens anyway even though she's recording, and after it happens she is no longer recording. The video on her phone is consistent with her deciding to stop recording shortly after the frame skip "would have started" for no good reason, and her physical position in the car is consistent with time having passed and her having, you know, existed and moved during that time.

This frame skip is unlike the job day skip from yesterday, though, in that she gets actually no memories whatsoever from that time, not even vague ones.

Well. One of these days she will have to try taking a long walk in this direction and see what happens but it's not her biggest worry today. Her biggest worry today is holding on to her consciousness while she exits the car, seeks a croissant, and goes in to work.

Her day... does not slip! She can feel, actually, the tug of it wanting to slip, she could just sort of dissociate through it and let her day get away.

That's weird and concerning and she does not want to be one of these weird parentless people all the way through!

How does her job work.

She mostly has to help this one dude with his work by getting him coffee and organising his stuff, but occasionally she is also given pieces to double-check and suggest edits or corrections to. He sounds kind of prickly, though, and doesn't seem to love criticism that much.

Well, if he fires her, she can always go into fashion journalism! She's not going to spare the feelings of this robotdude when he does things that she has criticisms of! She can get coffee. She is fully able to organize. She fact-checks, she copyedits.

To be fair, he's not bad at his job, but he definitely makes grumbly noises about being corrected and even a couple of "well, actually"s.

Is he ever actually right when he "well actually"s.

One time he is on a technicality and the other he is not.

Well, if the system here is anything like meritocratic she'll have his job soon.

After work she goes to the grocery store and picks up pasta and tomato sauce and some frozen burgers and some buns and a bag of salad and a bottle of dressing and a thing of pineapple juice and a carton of eggs and a loaf of bread and some butter and a pack of bacon. She checks her Simmit post while waiting in line.

The Simmit post has acquired more votes and more replies, but not really any more insight.

However, while she's catching up with the new replies she gets a DM on her Simmit account saying, "Look behind you."

WELL THAT'S MIGHTY CREEPY.

She looks, though.

"Sorry, sorry, I thought it was going to be funny," says the person behind her, who's holding his own phone in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other but also lifting both hands up in an apologetic gesture. "I just got a peek of your post in your phone there and I guess you can say that whether people are people is something of a personal interest of mine."

"You spooked me!" she says accusingly. "- also reading over my shoulder is sketchy, you can just ask people 'do you have grandparents' like I do if you want to check them for being people."

"I kinda stopped doing that three quarters of a year ago when I found out apparently literally no one one was."

"- it's been that long?"

"Nearly a year, now, yeah. Just to make sure we're talking about the same thing, did you come to existence with only very vague memories that are not tied to any specific observable events, no family, no other loved ones, and no evidence that anyone had ever known you or of you prior to it...?"

"Yeah. I spent the first day of existing in the emergency room waiting area, I told them I had amnesia, they told me I was perfectly healthy."

"Ah. I didn't think of going to the hospital, I just posted stuff to Simmit and siimgled myself obsessively and then went to the Realm of Magic because apparently I had a lifelong dream of becoming a powerful spellcaster or something and having just moved to the one town that seems to have a portal there seemed like it might have something to do with the amnesia thing."

"Oh. I ostensibly wanted to be a journalist. - My name's Elspeth Cullen."

"Peter Tarleton. A pleasure to meet you."

It's Elspeth's turn at the till.

She pays for her food but waits for Peter. None of her stuff is frozen.

Neither is Peter's. He just sticks everything into his inventory after he's paid for it then steps outside the store.

"I... have to say your existence is, like, the opposite of existential dread and horror."