taxonomites | 003 ━ [ visual ] / [ location: the crashdown ].

"Little hot for a jacket, don't you think?"

Sometimes the natives made comments that were so coherent and like that of conversation she'd expect from a normal, living and breathing Human from Earth that it took Liz completely by surprise. She formulated a reply, but although it was sitting in her mind, she did not speak it. Talking to them was awkward, and she wasn't sure if she felt it was best to ignore them or if she was ashamed of herself for ignoring them. Liz was not the type of person who shunned others because they were different or strange, but there was something about the natives that rubbed her the wrong way. She couldn't quite put it into words...

As for the jacket, she was from New Mexico. The summer temperatures made the 'heat wave' Taxon had been experiencing these past months seem laughable. She found mornings to be too cool for her liking, and would often venture downstairs to get the Crashdown ready to open with a light jacket on over whatever she happened to be wearing. Today being the day she'd given herself off -- the natives could handle things, as much as they weirded her out, they were oddly reliable in their ability to keep this place up and running -- she was only hanging around long enough to get things ready before she headed out; maybe to the mall or the zoo, somewhere to get her mind off things that felt more like home and less some alien planet.

"Okay, I think that's it," she said to the native behind the counter in the pastel turquoise waitress uniform as she placed the last sugar dispenser on the table of one of the booths. "Should be ready to go."

The early morning hours fading and the temperature rising, Liz shrugged out of the jacket, revealing a tank top that, although it showed her mid-drift, was rather modest. Draping it over one arm, she made for the exit, but-- She froze.

In her reflection in the window, Max's silver hand print, almost unnaturally iridescent, could clearly be seen on her stomach.

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Piper hadn't meant to see the silver hand print on Liz's stomach, but when she heard someone on her tablet, she couldn't help but look. She was slowly getting used to the way things worked around here. Knowing that this was the primary source of communication aside from face-to-face contact, she kept the tablet close to her, just in case she heard anything about home.

"Are you alright?" It slipped out before she could stop herself, but the damage had been done. She could only hope she could offer some assistance to her if she needed it.

"What?" Liz whirled around at the sound of the voice, pulling her shirt down to cover a hand print that faded over a year ago. It was only the reflection, but she didn't understand how that was even possible.

It took her a moment to realize the voice had come from her tablet. She looked down at it, frowning in embarrassment at the image of the unfamiliar woman on the screen. "Oh. Sorry. I didn't realize this thing was on. You'd think I'd expect it by now. Kind of a common occurrence."

"Completely understandable. I hardly know how to operate it," she gave her a smile.

Piper didn't want to push, as she wasn't acquainted with Liz and she knew what it was like to want to keep things private, but she knew by now that what she saw wasn't the sunlight playing on the glass window. She saw something, and she knew Liz had seen it too. She just wanted to make sure she was okay. "Are you okay, though? You looked pretty shaken."

Liz knew how to operate the tablets well enough, but knowing how to work one didn't stop it from turning on of it's own volition. She hated that about them, how they so easily invaded one's privacy and there was something too Orson Wells about it that rubbed her the wrong way. If the tablets didn't function as the only reliable, stable means of communication in this place, she quite honestly would leave the thing shoved in a drawer somewhere.

"Yeah, that just kind of caught me off guard. The mirrors keep playing tricks on me." And she hoped to God it was one of those quirks of this place and not something going on in her head. Liz was a lot of things, but she wasn't crazy -- right? If this was some sort of freaky, alien side-effect of Max healing her, she was going to scream.

Piper would have tried to blow it up, but, she isn't too keen to piss off the hamster alien hybrid things just quite.

"Do the mirrors do that a lot? Play tricks?" Great, another thing to possibly watch out for. What was it with annoying things and mirrors? First, Aviva and her demonic mentor using mirrors to communicate, and now the hamsters. Was nothing as it seemed here?

"I don't know," she answered, tucking a strand of hair that had fallen out of the loose ponytail at the back of her head behind her ear. "I haven't really been here long enough to know. There's the glitches, but I haven't seen any of the extreme ones."

The mirror and reflective surfaces thing was starting to make Jenna jumpy. She kept seeing things, flashes of people who weren't there, and it was starting to make her feel like a startled teenager again. It was things like this - heartbreak, jealousy - that had driven her towards that path of irresponsibility. To have it all get blown up in her face again...

She missed them. All of them.

So when she came across the transmission, she assumed it was accidental. The girl looked like she was in shock, staring at the window. Whatever it was, Jenna figured she was just dealing with something similar.

"Hey," she called, wanting to offer some kind of condolence, but unsure if she should. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," Liz lied, pushing back the memories of the day she was shot. "I just thought I saw-- I'm fine. Just fine."

She wasn't, though, and she wasn't the ordinary girl she painted herself as. Maybe she'd been, once upon a time,but that day someone shot a gun off in the Crashdown changed that. Liz had died of a bullet wound to the stomach and had been brought back to life by the healing touch of an alien. A touch that left behind a shimmering, silver hand print that had taken some time to fade.

Yeah, Jenna didn't believe her for a second, fixing the girl with a pointed look. "If it's something with the mirrors or whatever, you aren't the only one who's been seeing weird things. It's happening to all of us. And if it's not, forget I said anything."

She fiddled with a strand of her long blonde hair for a moment. "You stay here long enough, you kinda start trying to make it better for everyone else, too."

"I'm not?" Liz breathed an honest sigh of relief. She was starting to think that maybe there was something wrong with her that was making her see these things she didn't give much thought to for a reason. It wouldn't have surprised her if that had been the case. Who knew what being brought back to life did to a person. "Oh, thank God. I thought I was seeing things without a reason to see things and it was--"

She pressed a hand to her chest, laughing at herself for getting more worked up than she should've. "Guess I'm not so used to all the goings on here, yet."

Jenna shook her head in response. "It's weird." She flapped a hand at her surroundings as though to say the whole damn place was strange. "All of this city is weird, but at least we're not the only ones going crazy with it."

She'd been seeing vampire veins. And Alaric. And old boyfriends. It's not really what she's been wanting to see.

"Sometimes I think you have to be here for a year to really get used to it." She wasn't used to it at all. And that included all of the vampire stuff.

A year. Someone had told her there were people who'd been trapped in Taxon for longer than that, and Liz couldn't imagine being stuck here forever. They would get out eventually, right? She'd seen stickier situations before, but she supposed even the seriousness of breaking into secret FBI locations and getting out alive weren't exactly on level with this.

"Have you been here that long?"

Jenna shook her head at that. "Nah, just a couple of months. It's long enough, really. How about you?" Hopefully, this girl hadn't been here long, either. It was bad enough knowing it was possible without actually living it.