It's probably a coincidence that there's a knock on her door right then.

"GAH!" She flails wildly in startlement.

Okay, calm down, don't panic, probably there is a reasonable explanation for why her memory is so fucky. And a reasonable explanation for the knock. Everything is probably totally normal and not at all fucked up.

Moving even more nervously, she opens the door a crack and peeks outside.

"Bienvenida!" says a grandmotherly type holding a tray with something like a fruit cake and offering it up to her. She's the head of a small group of three women, and the other two are also holding trays with food—one of them looks like it has cream and potato and lobster and the other is a mix of grains and peppers.

...she squints suspiciously, then opens the door the rest of the way.

"Th...anks?" she says, accepting the fruitcake-like object.

"Aah, una simericana!" she says in Simpanish, but then she switches to a heavily accented Simlish. "Welcome, welcome to Puerto Llamante! We hope you come to like it here and call it home."

"...I hope so too, probably." That was a weird thing to say. Stop saying weird things. Why are they all so friendly? "Do you... want to come in?" She does not want them to come in, but she's not sure this is the type of social ritual where she gets a choice. How did she come by all these opinions about social rituals?? Don't think about it, just act normal.

"We would love to! Oh but where are our manners. I am Valentina Bonito, these are Fortuna Solve and Esperanza García."

    "Encantada," says Esperanza, ducking into April's house and followed by a quieter Fortuna, who merely curtsies a bit.

Her house is full of strangers now. This is the opposite of what she wanted. At least they brought free food.

She reluctantly follows them to her little breakfast table and attempts to make appropriately welcoming noises. Does anybody want a glass of water, that sort of thing. Oh and she should probably put most of that free food in the fridge but maybe the fruitcake can stay out to be eaten?

"Oh, we would not want to impose," says Valentina, who would love to impose.

Glasses of water can be provided to all the friendly neighbourhood impositions. Along with free fruitcake.

Technically she made the fruitcake so not that free but definitely a fair price for the goss.

"Tell me about yourself, dear," she says.

Well the fruitcake was free to April which is why she's so willing to share it.

"...my name's April and I moved here from," fuck, what town, what towns even exist, oh screw it, "Simerica because exploring ancient ruins sounds like fun." Wait, was that a bad thing to say? Are they going to judge her? She's so bad at this.

Valentina nods seriously while Esperanza makes an evil-warding gesture before explaining to Fortuna what was just said.

"It can be very dangerous," she says, and Fortuna ventures something in Simpanish that means something like "You might die."

Okay, that sounds like relevant enough information that she should get over herself and ask them about it.

"...dangerous how?"

"The ruins are old and full of traps."

"Do people get hurt there a lot?"

"Oh, yes. There are many stories of adventurers meeting their end there, looking for treasure and never returning," she says, adopting an ominous and somber tone that almost looks like she finds the stories delightful gossip.

...well if you insist, lady. "Oh? Tell me more!"

"Just last week, another Simericano came to the jungle in search of riches. He walked into the ruins and was not seen again!"

"Yikes. What was his name?" Did he have any stuff she could steal? No, bad April.

"I don't remember. Probably some Simerican name, like John Smith."

...that's fair but also her credence in this story has just gone way down. Or is everyone experiencing awful memory issues today? Well, not like she's going to be the first one to admit it.

"Does anybody go in to look for people when they disappear?" Never being seen again sounds nice, if only she didn't have to accomplish it by dying horribly in a hole in the ground.

"Very dangerous. None of the locals would risk it."

"That's fair. But it means you don't know what happens to them, they just vanish in there?"

"Adventurers have come back sometimes."

"Oh? Are any of them still around, could I meet them?" How did she end up asking the PEOPLE in her HOUSE to show her to MORE PEOPLE. Why is this happening. Why is she making these choices.

"I do not know if any are still around, no."

"Fair." Whew, social connection dodged.

"Adventurers come frequently," says Esperanza in an even thicker accent. "Very good for money."

She probably should talk to any other 'adventurers' who show up in the near future, but she can't bring herself to ask to be introduced to them in advance, so she just smiles awkwardly and eats fruitcake.

Fortuna continues not to speak Simlish so only occasionally speaks up. Valentina and Esperanza can keep an insipid, contentless conversation going when left to their own devices over the cake.

April stews in her own awkwardness and occasionally ventures a comment or question when a topic comes up that seems legitimately interesting.

They can say a sentence or two to reply to questions!

It's probably the language barrier. She should try to learn Simpanish. She is going to suck at learning Simpanish. She should try anyway. The language barrier will still be a problem but at least she'll be trying.

Anyway, does there ever come a point when these people decide to get out of her house?

Yes, once they've all had a couple of slices of fruitcake they excuse themselves and thank her for the hospitality and hope they didn't impose too much.

"It was fine," she lies, hopefully not too blatantly. "Thank you all for coming! And for the free food! I really appreciate the free food!"

"You are quite welcome! Make sure to come by the markets sometime!"

And off they go.

Her whiteboard does not seem to have arrived while she was in Small Talk Hell so she makes a spreadsheet on her computer to record and organize all her memories. It seems like she does in fact remember that whole ordeal approximately as well as she remembers the bits that came before it, right back up to the point where she... appeared in this house with no clear idea of where she came from or how she got here...

Hmm.

Hypothesis: all Simericans are like this? The ruins just sort of create them out of thin air? Probably there are holes in this theory, but until she finds them, she thinks she will not go adventuring, and will instead actually sit down and learn a programming language and try to write some mobile apps so she can acquire money with which to buy food and whiteboards. Oh, hey, if she was created ex nihilo moments before walking in her front door, where did the money in her bank account come from? Can she check some bank statements and find out where the money in her bank account did in fact come from?

She cannot! She does have a bank account, of course, but it has zero activity except for the purchase of this house. It does not seem to have an initial deposit either, but she does have a current positive balance of §4,870.

Sooooo score one for "the ruins created me out of thin air", then.

That's. A thing. That seems increasingly like it may have happened.

Well all right, mysterious creepy increasingly-plausibly-magical ruins, if you want to play it like that.

April is going to sit in her house and learn to code and see if she can make a mobile app within, like, a week. It doesn't have to be a great mobile app or anything, it just has to cause her to acquire Literally Any Income Whatsoever. She will eat her free neighbourhood welcoming committee food and be an incredible cheapskate about groceries and silently curse herself for buying that whiteboard although, also, once it arrives, it is definitely going to help her a ton with both learning to code and figuring out her whole Situation.

Speaking of the Situation, she starts a tab in her spreadsheet for recording skills that appear to have come preinstalled when she was created out of thin air. She speaks Simlish, she has a general idea of how computer programming should in theory work even though she doesn't know any specific languages, she has a general idea of how to cook a meal even though she doesn't know any specific recipes, she has a general idea of how to play a video game even though all actual examples of video games that she tries are terrible. She is literate. She vaguely intends to get around to trying "read a book" at some point just to see what she learns from the process, but that sounds like it will take valuable time that could instead be spent coding, or, say, beating up on the cheap punching bag that she buys on her second day of existence when she realizes that all this sitting still in front of a computer is making her vibrate out of her skin. She would go outside and jog but outside contains (a) people and (b) creepy ruins that may or may not have created her specifically in order to eat her later.

There are online tutorials to teach various kinds of programming languages!

...which are all kind of garbage? They're not didactic at all, most of them have a huge number of very basic exercises that one is apparently meant to repeat ad nauseam before a Sudden Jump in complexity that is not accompanied by actually teaching the new skills used by the new exercises.

...wow, that's terrible? Why is everything so terrible???

Whatever, she can do this. She does basic exercises until she's sick of them, and then does advanced exercises and learns by trial and error and extensive use of her punching bag when there's a little too much error with her trial, and constructs the world's tiniest shittiest little web server just to prove to herself that this is a possible thing, and then, with this accomplishment under her belt, starts looking into how you make a mobile app. She was created with the firm knowledge in her mind that You Can Just Write A Mobile App If You Know How, and the equally firm knowledge that Then You Will Have Money. She wishes to check this knowledge against the reality of the world.

...actually, come to think of it, she should be tracking which of her preinstalled knowledge is subtly or gravely wrong. She starts a tab in her spreadsheet for that. Activities just sort of... suck more... than she was expecting? But that's subtle, it's not like she tried to turn on the stove and discovered that when you turn that dial a giant pit opens in the floor and swallows you, or something. She was totally right about her preinstalled knowledge that interacting with people is horrible but it's possible that she brought most of that on herself. So far none of her preinstalled knowledge seems to be giant-pit-in-the-floor level wrong, just why-does-anyone-ever-play-a-video-game level wrong and programming-tutorials-are-all-garbage level wrong.

Most of what little knowledge she does have seems to follow that pattern. If she remembers the name of a book author or programming language or song, those all seem to be real things she can find online. She knows about famous websites like Siimgle and Simmit and Simpedia and Simbook. Her basic expectations about physics bear out—she can cook, she can walk, she can catch thrown objects.

Online resources in almost full generality seem to mostly be garbage, though. Not all quite all the same kind of garbage but nevertheless.

Sooooo her top hypothesis here is that all Simerican adventurers are created out of thin air by the ruins so that they'll go explore the ruins and die. Or for some other sinister ruins-related purpose that she isn't thinking of because she's two days old.

Through a combination of grim determination and spite, she manages to crowbar enough meaningful programming experience out of shitty online tutorials to successfully Write A Mobile App, and, once she's done that, also manages to successfully establish its existence in such a way that people could give her money for it if they chose. It's not a very good mobile app, in her opinion, but she's met a lot of worse ones on the way to getting here. Honestly her dumb little game is in her opinion vastly more engaging than Blicblock. Everyone should give her all their money immediately.

Dare she hope that there are online resources that could help her learn Simpanish? Almost certainly not, but she goes looking just in case.

Well the resources exist. In the same way the programming ones do.

And money starts trickling in.

She... does not have the patience to learn Simpanish from incredibly stupid online tutorials. She managed it with programming, but human languages aren't nearly such fun toys. So much for that idea.

Okay, she can't keep hiding forever. Well, she could, but she doesn't want to. She takes another couple days to code a slightly better dumb mobile game, and then she sighs, and changes into workout clothes, and goes for a jog. She will NOT be exploring ANY ancient ruins today, thank you, she just wants to get a sense of the layout of the town.

Unfortunately her fears do come true: the outside does have people.

Ugh.

Can she just ignore everyone and go for a nice quiet jog around town?

Yep! She actually can, so it's not that bad. Some people who see her do smile and wave but it's not in a way that seems to be expecting an initiation of social activities and she can get a good understanding of the surroundings.

The little town she finds herself in registers to her recently-created brain as something called a "tourist trap", with quaint little shops and restaurants and hotels, in order to provide tourists (probably most of them from the United States of Simerica) a proper experience of Selvadorada. Would she like to buy a souvenir? Book a guided hike into the jungle? Have an Ethnic^tm lunch?

She would like to do none of those things! She would like to go home and eat something she cooks herself with the cheapest ingredients she could buy, and flop in bed for a bit to recover from how many human beings she just made incidental eye contact with, and then she would like to thoroughly document all memories of her little jog in her spreadsheet. Observation confirmed: leaving her house does not, by itself, make her memories fog back up into impenetrable vagueness. As far as she can tell, she has had full memory formation for the entire time she has existed.

She spends a few hours working on her next shitty mobile game, has dinner, goes to bed, and gets up bright and early the next morning to see if she can cover more ground with less smiling and waving if she goes jogging at sunrise.

There are fewer people but not zero people. None of them seem particularly offended if she just completely ignores them though.

The early hour and thinner crowds combined with her growing confidence in ignoring people lets her actually spend a solid couple of hours getting a sense for where everything is in town and exploring it in more depth. The marketplace is directly west of her house, and the touristy jungle exploration zone that she doesn't dare go anywhere near is farther west across the river from there, and then to the south there's some nice beaches with a view of a very pretty island just off the shore, and in every other direction there is not-touristy-just-terrifying jungle.

She's going to explore those ruins someday, because she's mad at them for creating her for their own sinister purposes and wants to beat them at their own game. But she doesn't want to explore them yet, not until she's properly prepared. Which means she needs to have an idea of what to prepare for. Which means (sigh) she should really be asking people. But she hates interacting with people, so instead, after her early morning jog she looks up Selvadorada online. Any useful resources? Okay, that would be a bit much to hope for. Any useless but at least somewhat informative resources?

In Simlish every resource she can find is either travel packages or dry historical and sociological facts.

Hey she'll take dry historical and sociological facts. She will pore over all the history she can get her hands on, just in case any of it has implications about what might be inside those ruins.

Here are some dry historical and sociological facts! The continent Selvadorada is on was colonised by people from mumble mumble another continent several hundred years ago (no it doesn't matter how many years don't look too hard). It already had people living on it though including some ancient civilisation that built those ruins. They were not ruins when they were built, to be clear, ruination is what happens after many years of abandonment.

There are many facts about how this is a reasonably poor country whose economy mostly relies on tourism and exporting some natural resources that other countries used to have but thoroughly destroyed or even some resources that no other countries have, at least not in such abundance.

Hence the tourists being 'good for money'. Well, great. She is not here to bolster the Selvadoradan economy, she is here to find out what game the magical ruins are playing and then win it.

Speaking of which, are her mobile apps bringing in enough money to comfortably keep her in groceries yet? If not, she should focus on writing more of them until they do. She's getting better; maybe she'll get lucky and one of her future, slightly less dumb little games will take off and get stupidly popular... but it would not be wise to rely on that. She should also look into other ways to support herself using remote work.

...could she move back home? Okay, technically no because she doesn't know where home is. Could she move to Simerica, though? She decides she's at least not going to look into it right away, not until she has a better handle on things. She's nervous that it might turn out that Simerica is not real and moving there is effectively just deleting yourself from reality.

To combat that nervousness, she should... okay. Okay, yeah. She should loiter around town waiting for other tourists or adventurers to show up so she can grill them about their origins. Except that that sounds like the worst possible thing, so instead of that, she's going to focus on making money for another few days at least because it's easier and more comfortable and involves less Human Interaction Ugh. Maybe in the meantime, hmm...

She gets out her whiteboard and starts another spreadsheet and spends an afternoon trying to develop a basic picture of the global economy from online resources. Does it look approximately like there is a real world out there in which countries exist and trade with each other and the universe does not secretly revolve around Selvadorada? Accounting for the frustratingly vague and incomplete nature of all online resources everywhere, of course.

The frustrating online resources do not paint anywhere near a complete picture of a realistic, functioning world, but Selvadorada is not in any way an exception to that—there is just as little detail about it as there is about anywhere else. Countries seem to exist and have governments and have economies and trade with each other but it's all very fucking vague.

As for her money making endeavours, she's currently breaking even on groceries and bills if she doesn't splurge or order takeout or go to restaurants or buy souvenirs. Other remote work positions are available, especially with programming skills involved. If she looks, she'll find that she has proper Simerican ID in her inventory plus a passport and an immigration visa to Selvadorada.

Okay. She looks into whatever remote work positions seem the most lucrative, and writes another dumb little mobile game, and creates a doodling app that lets you share your drawings with friends and remix each other's work because that sounds like the kind of saccharine nonsense that normal, socially focused people might enjoy, and at that point it's been two weeks and that's half a year and she is starting to feel like a coward, so she sighs and steels herself and heads out for another jog, this time crossing the river to investigate the tourist-focused jungle area.

The tourist-focused jungle area also has some hotels and markets, but given how it's the jungle area it's definitely trying to cater to the would-be adventurers and explorers that are about to go get eaten by ancient ruins.

Or, you know, the tourists who just want regular tours to the regular, safe ruins, the ones that have no treasure at all but also no risk of being skewered by a trapped floor. Those go there, too.

...hmm. Technically she could sign up for a regular tour to the regular safe ruins. This sounds excruciating, but she could do it. It seems like a place to start. She could (ugh) meet other potential adventurers and (ugh, ugh) make social connections.

Okay, fine. She will, very grudgingly, do that.

Here's a travel agency that probably sells such touristic packages! It contains numerous posters and pamphlets, a few flat screens showing videos of RADICAL and COOL and AWESOME experiences in the jungle, and some odds and ends she can buy like backpacks and boots and the like.

Also a smiling person behind a desk who can probably exchange goods and services for money.

Uuuuugh fiiiine she'll interact with a huuuman

"Hi, can I go on a jungle tour?"

"Hello, ma'am! Do you have any specific package in mind?"

"What are the options?"

They have pamphlets! So many pamphlets! Here's a sightseeing tour in a jeep, a sighsteeing tour on a jeep, a sightseeing tour that starts with a jeep part but then has a little bit of walking around very safe trails with fenced areas, a sightseeing tour that is all walking around fenced areas, a sightseeing tour that has one part that is not fenced...

At the "most dangerous" end they get a tour off the beaten path with a guide that goes into cleared areas of some ruins that have been made safe from traps and which at one point gets to a hidden waterfall and natural pool they can swim in for a bit before resuming the tour.

Yeah she's taking that last one.

Cool! That'll be §1,300, please, sign this disclaimer form that frees the agency of responsibility for any permanent damage incurred to her person up to and including death, see you tomorrow at 6AM!

Uuuuuugh she hates everything but FINE.

She pointedly goes to bed early despite the urge to stay up all night coding, and shows up the next day at 6AM.

There is a person who is clearly the Designated Tour Guide, you can tell by how he has Proper Tour Guide Clothes that also have the logo of the travel company attached to his jacket's breast pocket.

Also he's the only one there.

"Good morning! I'm Unther Cyan."

"Morning." She can't bring herself to call it a good one. "I'm April. Turnberry."

"A pleasure!" He's clearly not local, not only is his name unlike locals' but also his accent is noticeably different. "Ready to go?"

No. "Sure."

"We're going to the start of the trail by car," he explains, leading her to a jeep.

"Sure," she repeats. Why did she sign up for this again? Right, spite. Spite is why. Spite is going to get her through this extended interaction with another human being. Take that, creepy ruins that may or may not have created April out of thin air in order to eat her, she's going to endure social interactions in order to figure out your deal so she can defeat you.

Jeep! He opens the door for her but goes to the driver's side without waiting for her to get in.

Once driving, he turns the music on, loud and local, and hums along to it without actually having a conversation.

Oh good! She relaxes a little when it's clear she's not going to be called upon to exchange human sentences.

No human sentences if she doesn't start a conversation!

That is just how she likes it.

The trip to the relevant edge of the woods is short, and soon they're both off the car and he starts leading the way.

Her luck does not last that long.

"So, you're Simerican, huh?"

"...yes." Oh no. She's trapped.

"I'm Simerican, too. Where are you from?"

She doesn't remember and isn't sure there are... any... locations. What's a location that she remembers reading about in her futile quest for global economic knowledge that she's pretty sure was actually part of Simerica. "Newcrest."

"I'm from San Myshuno."

"Oh." Think of a remark. "It's really... big, right?" Think of a slightly less inane remark next time.

"Yep! It has lots of people."

At least he's being equally inane, so she's in good company. "What's that like?"

"I don't like it very much. I prefer being alone."

Oh, hey, a kindred spirit. She smiles tentatively. "Yeah, me too."

He smiles at her, too, and continues to lead the way silently for a bit.

Until they reach the start of the jungle proper and he starts leading her nonobvious places. "Watch where you step."

Oh boy. She watches her step very carefully, paying close attention to both what he does and what he seems to be indicating she should do. Her caution is probably excessive but, in her defense, her top hypothesis right now for how she came into existence is that magic ruins created her as a tasty snack. Caution seems prudent.

He seems to not be paying a whole lot of attention. On the other hand, he also seems to be moving in pretty practised and precise ways, seemingly knowing exactly how to avoid tripping and bumping into stuff without having to look at it to see.

Yes, see, that, that's the skill she wants and doesn't have. She tries to get a sense of how he's doing it. Probably it'll make more sense with practice.

There are some constants. Protruding roots: bad. Branches that are sticking out: bad. Bits of the ground that look like they have less grass on them: good. Bits of the ground that are stone, especially mossy stone: bad.

But overall it seems to just be, you know, see whether there are any places your limbs are going that are otherwise occupied and, if so, find different places for your limbs to go instead. Even if your limbs are better at occupying a space than a sticking-out tree branch, the branch will not give up without a fight and most people would probably rather there be not-a-fight.

This is a principle she can get behind. She is going to get SO good at not fighting trees.

After a short bit of this, though, she must have zoned out or... something... because she finds herself standing before a small circular plaza, or rather the ruins thereof. She's feeling winded and sore enough that she probably did walk all the way there, and her phone says a reasonable amount of time has passed.

Uh???? What???? The tour guide is still there, right???????

Yep! And does not seem at all confused by this. He starts explaining the purpose of the "plaza", which was apparently a sacrificial altar to appease The Watchers, although who The Watchers may have been and why they needed appeasing by sacrifices is not altogether clear. So says Unther.

Okay cool great. She does her best to act totally normal and not like she just walked through some kind of memory hole. (It's the ruins' fault, it's got to be.) (It MIGHT not be the ruins' fault, but if not the ruins then fucking who???)

Onwards! Another bit of walking—

—another memory hole—

—and now they've walked far and long enough to both be fairly winded and sweaty, but thankfully this memory hole has spat them out at the promised waterfall! It is reasonably short, only about twice as tall as Unther himself, and feeds into the natural pool there that is perfect for swimming. Aside from the surroundings of the waterfall itself, the pool is mostly calm and still, and one could very easily just lie in it and relax.

"We can stay here for a while, rest a bit. I brought food." And after Unther says that, he spins in the air and is now wearing swimming trunks. Into the water!

Excuse me, he fucking what.

He's wearing his swimming trunks now, the narration just said.

He swims over to the waterfall and finds himself directly under it, letting his eyes close and enjoying the impact of the water on his back.

April... was not aware you could change clothes by ROTATING, and is too nervous about looking weird in front of the tour guide to try it, and also too nervous about looking weird in front of the tour guide to change clothes the way she normally does. She waits awkwardly.

He seems entirely content to ignore her, actually. His eyes are still closed, and he's still enough that... he could... be sleeping????

That's fucking weird???

It is what it is, yo.

The place is very peaceful, and there are certainly plenty of places she can hide behind a tree to change if she wants.

After waiting a few more seconds to verify that he really does seem to be sleeping, she carefully ducks behind a tree and changes into her swimsuit, then takes an extremely brief dip in the water, then immediately gets out again and changes back, hopefully before he wakes up.

He does indeed seem unperturbed by her antics.

Great, okay, cool, now she can just. Wait here. For him to stop... napping. (Why is he napping???)

It's probably very relaxing after a long morning of walking!

After a few minutes he does open his eyes again then swims over to the edge of the lake and gets off the water. "Let's eat before continuing on our journey!" he declares, pulling a towel from his inventory to dry off before spinning back into his previous clothes.

Why the SPINNING. Can everyone do that except her?? Could she learn how to do it if she tried, maybe, and it just didn't come loaded the way walking and talking and using your inventory did?

Anyway. She makes enthusiastic noises about food. Can't go wrong with food. Okay, you probably can, but she hopes he won't.

Is she vegetarian? He has sandwiches and some of them have ham and some don't. He also has fruit juice and water!

She is not vegetarian and will happily accept ham sandwiches and fruit juice.

Then they can eat mostly in silence for a bit before they are ready to continue on their trek that may or may not include More Memory Holes!

April is rapidly developing a grudge against memory holes.

If she tries her very hardest to pay attention to her surroundings and continue having thoughts about them at all times, will that help anything?

It absolutely will not, no!

Their next stop is the ruins of a temple. It was probably very pretty at some point in the past, but right now it's merely as pretty as something that is the ruins of something that used to be very pretty. The temple is reasonably tall, with stairs leading up to the main building from the probably-it-used-to-be-a-garden place they're at right now.

She has SUCH a grudge against memory holes!!!

...the architecture here is real nice, though. Ruins and all. She can imagine what it might have looked like and it's damn impressive.

"This is the most dangerous part of the tour," says Unther. "The ruins have deep unexplored caves that I'm not allowed to show you."

"Understood." She will be following ALL safety guidelines, thank you very much.

Then he can show her around! The inner walls of the temple upstairs have carvings and drawings, though lots of them seem to have been lost to the ravages of time. They have best guesses for what each room was used for: this one was general worship, this one was for public sacrifices, this one was for public flogging, these here are for people who are temporarily sleeping at the temple, this is a healing area, this is a granary.

...there was an area for public flogging??? Never mind, she's not going to ask. Instead she takes notes and sketches the architecture.

Eventually Unther declares that they should start going back as it will soon get dark.

That's fair. April will accept this.

This way to the memory hole!

It is dusk when they get back to the jeep.

Memory holes are DEEPLY IRRITATING and April has a GRUDGE.

She's quiet about it, though. No point in saying anything when she doesn't even know if the guide is having the same experience, and if he's not, does she really want him to know that something weird and fucked up is going on with her?

He certainly seems okay with it, and hums happily if tiredly on the way back to the travel agency by jeep.

Well, that makes one of them.

Okay, maybe she should be a LITTLE less crankypants. Tomorrow she should do something fun. Tomorrow she should... um. What's a fun activity?? Why is she blanking so hard on this?? Surely she has ever had fun in her short and existentially terrifying life???

Fuck it. Tomorrow she's going to the beach.

The beach is closer to her new house than the travel agency was and furthermore she doesn't have an actual appointment there so she will not need to wake up at fuck-you AM for this.

O frabjous day.

Up she gets and off she goes, bringing her swimwear along even though she's extremely nervous about trying to change into it where anyone might be watching. Maybe she should've stayed home and tried to practice Clothes Change By Bodily Rotation. No, that sounds like pretty much the exact opposite of fun.

Beach! Does it have traits? Characteristics? Beachgoers? Sand, water, sun?

All of those! It has places she can rent beach towels from if she doesn't have her own, and also beach chairs and beach umbrellas, and it has a bunch of quaint little restaurants dotting the boundary between the beach and the grass-and-boardwalk where the village proper starts. It also has not-quite-restaurants that sell snacks and green coconuts you can drink fresh coconut water from, and a couple of popsicle sellers.

Also, the water has visible finned creatures swimming along close enough to shore you could just swim up to them.

...what... sort of finned creatures? Scary-looking finned creatures? Are people swimming up to them? How does that seem to be going for them, if so?

Not many people are currently swimming up to the finned creatures but the ones who are do not seem to be mysteriously disappearing or getting eaten or dragged into the depths!

Hmm. Suspicious, but she'll allow it.

She does not rent a beach towel, because she's a cheapskate; she just sits down on the damp sand and exists under the sun and beholds the water. Fun might not be quite the right word, but it does at least seem to be pretty relaxing.

It's early enough that the beach is not full, but that might be a temporary affair, given the increasing numbers of people arriving there.