A better backpack! Good. Yes. She will take these things.

As she steps out of the front door, a dark shape to her left twitches -

- and her head moves without her permission to look at it.

She freezes for a moment, then steps back inside and slams the door.

She is now inside the house.

She looks at the crowbar in her hands.

She feels—not right. She should be terrified, and she is, but there are - sensations missing, distortions absent. And she did not imagine what just happened. She saw something out of the corner of her eye and looked at it, but she moved differently than she'd meant to.

It's absurd to think - but it's absurd that she was eaten by a Typhon south of Queen's Park and woke up standing in the middle of a residential street somewhere in the suburbs. She can't dismiss that as 'unexplained phenomenon, not enough information to speculate' anymore. Her thoughts and emotions and sensations work a little differently than they used to, as though she is running on a different substrate. She moved her head wrong, as though she wasn't the one moving it. She's - being mimicked. She's a disguise, a lure, a coffee cup.

...and the fact that she had this thought and then didn't immediately black out and wake up five miles away with no memory of having thought it means that the Typhon almost certainly can't literally read her mind. Yet.

This might mean she has the opportunity to kill a Typhon, if she's clever about it.

Should she?

...she isn't sure. Chipping away at the alien menace has never been so neatly and purely at odds with her own survival. And she doesn't know enough - doesn't know what it wants, doesn't know how often it's going to use her this way, doesn't know if it has alternate disguises available or how she might communicate with them if it did - no, on second thought, if it had had a human disguise when it met her it could've walked right up to her and eaten her as soon as it got close, no need for a fight. And now that it has her it cannot do that, at least not while using her personality for verisimilitude, because she is not going anywhere near another living human being if she can help it.

Okay. She is tentatively in favour of continuing to live. But she needs a better understanding of the parameters of her new existence. ...and she cares somewhat less about survival than she did before she was eaten by an alien.

She opens the door again.

The dark shape is still there. It stands on two legs, and is vaguely humanoid shaped, but taller, broader, with seething limbs that twist like they're made of smoke, and a pair of glowing eyes. It looks at Lauren, then flickers in place and re-appears several feet closer.

The Typhon moves her body again, this time to take off the backpack and deposit it next to the doorframe. Her eyes move to assess the area, and then -

- Lauren's location jumps, abruptly.

She's outside of the house, but there's no sign of the other Typhon.

...hm.

And where's the backpack?

Right where the Typhon left it, next to the doorframe.

She puts it on again.

That... definitely looked like her Typhon just killed, and possibly ate, another of its own kind. Lauren is tentatively in favour of this development.

She starts walking in an arbitrary direction. If she was still herself she'd be making an effort to go north, get out of the city, but now she thinks she'd rather stay in the danger zone where her new friend's available meals are mostly other Typhons.

Her new friend has no commentary about this state of affairs.

This arbitrary direction has more cars that almost certainly don't work; all three of them are in a rather nasty looking pileup. The door to one is ajar, with a corresponding pool of long-dried blood that implies someone managed to drag themselves out of the car, then probably died. There's no body to be found.

Well that's not something Lauren wanted to see, but she's seen a lot of things in that category this week. She goes around, keeping a careful eye out for mimics.

There's a bit of car debris that's got a mysterious twin, does that count?

Yes.

Well, there's a pretty good route to sneak around it, if she wants.

Yeah she's gonna do that. Not that she couldn't take it, but why risk a fight if she doesn't have to?

Someone disagrees, because without any warning her location jumps. To where the car debris twin was located. The bit of car debris is now an only child.

...okay then. That definitely just happened.

Note to self: mimics are snack material, apparently.

Apparently!

Up ahead there's... something that's glowing orange? And floating in the air?

What.

It's spread out and... web-like. It's like something a spider might make, if a spider did not need to moor its web on anything and wove it out of orange light. One of the larger, messier webs that a large colony of spiders might make between trees, not the little neat ones found in corners or windowsills.

But to learn any more, she'd have to get closer.

...yeah, speaking of unnecessary risks...

On the other hand, she's curious. And who could possibly be better placed to learn about the aliens than she is? Or worse placed for long-term survival, for that matter?

She cautiously approaches the floating web of orange light.

The entire light web is several meters long, though most of it is faint and wispy. At the central points the web pulses faintly and regularly, in a way that's almost reminiscent of a heartbeat. The web doesn't otherwise move, not even by the breeze. It's like it's frozen in mid-air.