[ The migraine is to be expected. Even though she didn't get caught in the paraboloid's blast radius directly, that kind of proximity to any entroponetic tissue, no matter how compressed, is never good. Plus, the headphones she had with her were cheap pieces of shit. Her good pair is back in her lorry.

She must have passed out on the coast, off of Land's End. From the shock. Ruby tells herself it's shock, because shock is predictable, safe. Well-studied. You don't lose yourself to shock. That's the kind of thing you come back from.

Ruby lies against the rocks, curled up tight, the waves beating against her body. She listens to the white noise. It's the closest you can get to sounding like nothing. It sounds like

YOUR SLURRED, CROAKING VOICE REACHES FOR SOMETHING FUNDAMENTAL FOR CONNECTION WITH YOUR FELLOW MAN YOU RECITE THE BEAUTIFUL WORDS TO THE WEARY TRAVELER AND YOU HOPE THAT BY VIRTUE OF HIM FINDING MEANING IN THEM YOU WILL LEARN WHO YOU ARE

the fog rolling in. ]

[ Ruby ditches the festival. She didn't even want to take the bag, really, but people ask even more questions when you're naked. As good as it would be to capture the attention of some other -- of any other -- pretty girl, you've got to lay low. A bar is the perfect place to do it. Something about people caught up in their own private tragedies, except that's what she would say, so fuck that, actually.

She's happy enough to nurse her drink in private. Her beer's gone warm by now, but Ruby barely notices. She listens to the idle chatter, and she doesn't think of anyone.

Some people, however, don't know how to leave her the fuck alone. It's rare to see Sleepers in this place, the locals tell her. Ruby grunts something non-committal. They start asking all sorts of weird questions about her blood, and its color, and they don't believe her when she tells them it's red, duh, like everyone else's. She pricks her finger on the sharp edge of a knife to prove it. Anything to be left alone. Look at that paleblood, one says.

Ruby has just spent five days alone, on what she now realizes was a bit of a paranoid doom spiral, in an abandoned basement. Her hookup framed her for murder and her old boss is almost certainly coming after her. She's lost in a strange city, and a good driver never gets lost. She is at the end of her rope.

Her chair clatters to the floor as she stands up, abruptly, and says, a little too loud: ]

The fuck did you say was in my blood?

[ She goes back to the beach, after all that. It's safer there. She knows her coasts.

When she finds her lorry waiting for her, washed up on the shore, Ruby doesn't even bother to ask if it's real. She could use a lucky break, right now. Ruby (she'll need a new name, but not yet, give it time) crawls into the cab and sleeps.

After that, she'll stay there for the next few days. During the day, she stays in the cab, organizing it, mainly. Assessing the damage. How much intel did that cop find on her, anyway?

She emerges at night, under that bright moonlight. It's then that she does the work that she loves: sitting cross-legged on the sand, taking a metal rod to the strange light-up crystal, trying to pry it open and see how it works. Or working out thoughts in her journal, or coming up with cyphers to hide new, worse thoughts. She's at her most approachable like this, and if anyone happens too close, she'll just look up, give them a brief nod, and hope that it sends them on their way. ]