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Vivian Angus wants, very badly, to go to her first lecture on Foundations of Cryptography. She's been so excited to get to start cryptography, she sat so patiently through the entirety of the prerequisite Computability and Complexity Theory, and she deserves a little treat after struggling through unfamiliar Arabic phonemes and confusing Russian verb prefixes all morning. Unfortunately, somewhere along the route she takes to walk to lectures, she... realised she couldn't figure out how to do that.
She knows the way to lectures. She has the route memorised. She could walk it in her sleep! But there's something she's supposed to do and she can't quite figure out why her gut is telling her not to move.
Vivi's smart. She can picture a map of Boston in her head, top-down, and she knows what the streets are supposed to be labelled; but when she looks at the terrain around her she can't quite get the map in her head to rotate right and match up to the streets she sees. Even so, she ought to be able to walk a road she's walked hundreds of times before, but - there's just something. She can't put her finger on it, and it's beginning to make her angry. She just wants to get to go to Cryptography, damnit, this shouldn't be hard.
She takes inventory of the world around her; there's a tree, but that doesn't particularly seem relevant to anything. There's cars moving in the road, but they're going a totally different direction to the direction she's going so she can't see how to use those to figure out where she needs to go. The sun is in a direction.... maybe east? Would it be east if it was morning? It ought to be, but it's afternoon, and is the building she's going to supposed to be east of her? She rotates that map in her head again, fruitlessly.
No, that's not helping. She's clearly stressed, or something, and not quite able to place herself with her usual - something. There's some adjective that normally she'd be able to come up with.
The space around her has markings. She does know the traffic code, she has her driver's licence even though it's never really relevant; her mom insisted she be able to drive an old-fashioned truck out around the family farm in County Sligo. There are arrows to point directions, but there's a lot of directions and she's pretty sure most of them aren't relevant to her. Some of the arrows on the road will be to tell people in particular lanes that they have to turn left, or they have to go straight on, and she's not driving or in a car. There's no signage for lectures are this way and she's sort of mad at herself for even having the thought, because of course there's no signage for lectures are this way, just lots of green lights and red lights and yellow lights.
It's so stupid that she's suddenly lost!
Maybe she can ask for help? Vivi's an extravert! She loves people! People will help. She turns to the person next to her - strange that there's also someone next to her who stopped in the same place she stopped, why would that be? - and tries to explain her emergency, and gets as far as: "I... cryptography. Want go.... go."
...she knows what she means, but it's like she suddenly has a stutter out of nowhere. The words don't want to chain together. Maybe she worked a little too hard on the Russian verbs. Is that any easier? "Uchit'sya... khochu." Nope, now the stranger is giving her a weird look and backing off a step, and Vivi doesn't understand what she did wrong or whether she caused that at all.
Vivi makes an irritated big gesture with her hands. "Want go!" she insists. Someone reaches out to put an arm in her way. She doesn't know why.
This isn't working; she should just go to lectures. Furious and uncomprehending, Vivi walks directly into traffic.
