Everywhere I go I am 'Aloy of the Nora'

Sorry, Fandom. After several weeks of relative quiet in 4 Apocalypse, Aloy was... trying things again, with the computer system they had running now. Trying things that involved setting up a power grid on the ground floor, and since she wanted to make sure there was as little space between her new grid and her power source while she was testing it...

...the Sunwing was standing in the middle of the road, not far from her door, its solar panel wings firmly outstretched. The door was open, thick cables keeping it from slamming shut.

And she was in the hallway, meticulously fitting metal panels and circuitry into a very large hole in the wall.

Oh well.

[[ open! ]]

Getting a place to live in Fandom as an adult was almost as easy as Aloy remembered it being when she'd been a student. She'd walked up to Town Hall and asked about residences, and with just a promise that she'd get a job 'at some point in the near future so she could pay rent', they'd given her a key and directed her here.

Maybe if she'd been a woman from this time, she would have acknowledged that it didn't look fully like a home. The downstairs had been an office, and before that a gallery, and held that sense of a space meant for something else.

But Aloy wasn't a woman from this time. It was a place, with plenty of space, and a bed in the upstairs area that was about as comfortable as their base at home. She directed the Sunwing to the roof to recharge, and dropped her pack in the room with the bed.

Lots of space. Empty space, with just a sparse amount of furniture. Perfect.

She reached up for her Focus to inform Beta of her whereabouts.

"Right," she muttered, when that was done. "I think I can work with this."

[[ could be open if you're in the mood to go knocking on the doors of houses with large metal bird-dinosaurs sitting on top of them. ]]

Right! So! It's been a few years since Aloy's quiet stint as a student at FH, so I think she gets to have a longer one of these. It's just going to be full of incorrect shitposts from Tumblr. I'd say I'm sorry, but I'm not. (Everyone else in bullet points.)

( Meet Aloy, Despite the Nora, Now Several Years And A Very Grudging Lesson In Friendship Later. )

( And the rest: Lucifer, Margo, Jesse. )

Another day stuck on the island, another day with nothing to do.

So Aloy had elected to do something useful: she'd picked up a whole stack of books from the library, about the time, the place, and Portalocity itself.

She was now sitting on the floor, door half-open, picking through each book at the speed her Focus let her - though she was beginning to get the hang of just reading it off the page, too.

She'd be a while.

[[ open! ]]

She'd lost track of Rost.

Aloy hadn't realized she'd lost sight of the old man until she heard the inquisitive beeping of a little one, without a soft, "Caution, Aloy" to accompany it. She'd been busy; the little ones had wandered further into their hunting territory than they usually did. Whatever thought drove them had given them meandering paths, touch and go, right up against the border, then further in...

She'd watched with the Focus. How couldn't she? If the little ones were making their way here, how much longer until they reached the hut? Maybe, she'd thought, if she knew what they were looking for...

( And now Rost was gone. )

"Now what have I fallen into?" she wondered. (Rost would be worried, she realized. But when wasn't Rost worried?) She walked up to the arch, extending her hands to touch it. It was of exquisite, almost inhuman make, like everything the Old Ones had created. "But what do you do...?" she mused. "Ah. A button."

Most people didn't fall into strange caves and press strange buttons attached to strange portals leading to strange islands... but Aloy had never been most people.

[[ establishy! ]]