Maya isn’t surprised that she walked into a portal the way that she did. She was better than she was, but she’d never insist that she was good. She was, as she would always be, a little messed up.

She was just getting better at being okay with that.

She takes in what she saw, and what the robot bird said, and doesn’t seem to react to any of it. A lost vacant expression between stillness and frozen. She let the thing talk, then walked into the hall as if it didn’t matter. Where she then walks over to the nearest wall and sits on the floor with her head in her hands. Letting her mind comb over the insanity that is the past two minutes to figure out what of this insanity is real, and what of it is here.

A young woman looking small and still and terribly lost in a world she should not be in.

…But if she’s honest, no world is the one she belongs in.

Eventually even a girl as unsure of her mind as the next has to accept the practical. It doesn’t matter. If she’s dead, or in a coma, or a dream. If she spends her days rejecting the world around her she won’t get anywhere. So her only option, as ever, is to keep going.

And going requires food. Humans eat, or they die. It’s painfully simple how that goes. So she wandered off in search of food, and is fortunate enough to find it.

She hunts around for food that looks like food, food that looks like food for humans in any event, and while not her flavor of comfort food, it’ll fill her up and that’s as good as she can hope for here. It’s not bad, sure it’s weird, but it is as enjoyable a meal as she’d have hoped given everything.

Not that it plays on her face, her expression is as blank and distant as she was in the hall, and when she arrived. Whatever this is, this is a lot for her to wrap her mind around and it’s taking her some time.

The memory that comes to her, and whoever is nearest to her as a result of this meal involves a girl years younger than the one in the present. Blonde hair wavy and a pair of glasses framing a face somewhere in her early teens. She’s curled up on a sofa, with a boy, and a stuffed owl. Watching videos on a phone. He’s sweet, handsome in a country farm boy type of way, both dressed in the usual 20th century fair of jeans and tee shirts. The memory of Maya not giddy or excited, but pleasantly smiling in a way that feels alien compared to the girl in the present.

A girl who seems to crumble from the impact of that memory.