The godrays pouring inside are shorter now.

The person is grounding themself now. Looking outside the window at the traffic outside.

There’s not a car in sight. It looks like a road, but there’s patterned concrete pathing in place of the asphalt. People instead of vehicles. Barring the tram line lining the center of the pathway.

They have never seen a tram line before, at least not in person. They’ve seen trains, occasionally, but they’ve never been on one. They were too far from the city to ever have an excuse to ride one as opposed to going by car. But here people aren’t doing that. The place seems walkable.

It’s not exactly the rectangular blocks of rectangular buildings kind of place, either. Sure, the cafe seems somewhat rectangular from the shape of the interior alone, but the streets are lined with some fairly nice looking houses. Every house has a unique yet complementary garden to the one next to it, planters hanging from the second story of a few with some flowers in them. It feels uniform, yet there is clearly individual expression here. It’s unique compared to what she’s seen before.

A woman places a large cup onto the table. A frappe.

“Managed to put together something from what I found in the back, surprisingly.”

The seated person takes their cup and sips from it.
They don’t say anything.

“Sorry if it’s not quite what you were looking for, the box of coffee beans got knocked to the floor at some point, it’s the best I could do.”

They put down the cup, and start fiddling with a stray strand of their hair, pulling a stray stem of something out and placing it lightly on the table.
“It’s good… thank you.”

The woman gives a warm smile, despite the lack of eye contact between the two of them.
Internally she’s thinking. Weighing up options. Whether or not she should ask the question piercing her mind more than anything right now. Why are you here? How are you here?

She ends up watching the other person for a bit. Seeing them slowly tidy up the leaves and twigs littering their hair. She comes to herself and thinks for a bit.
If they knew why they were here, they probably had a purpose. They don’t seem to have that. They just showed up, and when she spotted them in the store they just. Froze. They didn’t run. Didn’t hide. Didn’t look like they took anything. The register didn’t look robbed. The storeroom looked a little bit worse for wear, but it more looked like someone had fallen over in it rather than ransacked it. Plus, the smell of dead plants and the pile of wilting flowers seemed to match up with the strange amount of foliage caught up in this person’s hair.

Between all that, and her… prior knowledge of the storeroom, leads her to believe that, if anything, the person in front of her isn’t a criminal. At least, there’s nothing that should immediately strike her as proof of such.

Before she can air any of that, the person speaks up.
“sorry…”
She’s taken aback. “For… what?”
They slump back down into their seat. “I… don’t know… I…”
“Hey, it’s okay. I’m not gonna call the police on you or anything. I just…”

She sits up a bit. “Lets just start with introductions, alright? Then we can talk about… why you’re here.”
The person, after a second of staring at their cup, gives a small nod. That’s all that the woman needs to start.
“Right, so my name is Katherine. She/her.”
“i…” They sit up. “Anna. or Annabelle. …She/fae.”

Anna braces herself to get a strange look, but receives nothing of the sort. Katherine simply smiles back at faer.
“Nice to meet you!”

“Anyway,” she continues, “I’m gonna assume that you weren’t here to steal anything. Given that you didn’t steal anything. Not that I had much back there anyway, heh.”
Anna looks into her cup again.
“Do you remember why you woke up there? If you don’t want to tell me that’s fine, I’m just curious because like. This is the first time a whole person has suddenly appeared in the storeroom, heh.”

Annabelle continues to stare into her cup.
“I’m sorry, I… I don’t remember.”
“Okay… is there something you do remember? Like, from yesterday at least?”

The immediate answer Annabelle wants to give is ‘no’. She’s not known for exceptional memory, but something about the fog clouding the past feels different to her. So she pulls her thinking inwards.

She’s no stranger to having an odd way of thinking. Seemingly unfitting attributes connected to concepts. Constantly seeing faces in objects around her, even when others might not. Seeing between the lines of reality.

The way that she thinks about her own thinking is no exception. When she focuses herself inward, with the intent of calling forth memory, the depths of her mind seem to think that she’ll find a grand library of information. A place where one can browse through books, the pages holding the collective memory of all one’s permutations. Even if the person you think you are changes, you still use the same library.

She finds hers flooding.

Grand windows that would have brought in golden rays of early morning sunlight are instead cracked, leaking a thick, black liquid. The walls are stained with the waves of the rising tide. The bookshelves on the upper floors are knocked over, their knowledge scattered about, waterfalls of the invasive substance descending the staircases.

Her internal form is placed on a makeshift raft, comprised of a bookcase with the open end facing downward. It rocks wildly in the shifting liquid. A wave of it crashes into the side of the raft and splashes up onto her arm, covering it in a splash of the…

Ink.

Another wave crashes into the raft from behind, and sends her toppling forward.

She falls in.
Immediately she cannot see anything.
She opens her eyes in a rush. Her real eyes.
They feel like they burn. It feels like she’s crying.
She feels thick liquid rushing down her cheeks, pooling on the table underneath her head.
She’s collapsed forward onto the table? When did that happen? When did that happen?
What’s happening?

Immediately the rest of her senses rush back. She shoves herself upright with a deep inhale, before coughing the air back out again.

“Oh thank fuck you woke back up.”
Katherine rushes over, dropping the bag she was searching immediately.
“Are you okay? You just collapsed and you just started almost sobbing, and you weren’t responding, I wasn’t sure if I should like- or if I-”

Annabelle breaks into another fit of coughs, before looking up at Katherine again, tears continuing to roll down her cheeks.

Katherine takes a deep breath to calm herself down.
“Are you okay?”
Annabelle gives a shaky shrug.
Katherine thinks for a moment. “Do you need somewhere to stay for the day?”
Anna looks down towards the floor, but gives a small nod.
“Alright, let me clean this up, you can wait outside in the fresh air. Do you need help standing up?”