The last thing she remembered was going to bed the night before, and she had no sense of any time passing, the way that sleep usually felt like a long pause. No, it was just that she suddenly woke up on the sidewalk outside of her favorite coffee shop, at 2 PM, with a splitting headache. It was a small mercy that she was fully dressed, considering she woke up to a small crowd of anxious looking onlookers. As it transpired, no one had really seen what happened to her. The best guess was that she had fainted.
That would have been concerning enough on its own. She was close enough to the office that walking there first made the most sense. But the more she walked, the more she noticed...little inconsistencies. Her phone reception had flat-lined and wouldn’t connect to any wifi networks. None of the newspaper headlines made a lick of sense. The date was wrong. The advertisements on the top of the cabs were completely foreign to her.
She just barely managed to strangle her anxiety with a firm grip of investigative reasoning when she pushed into the office and found a stranger sitting there. Huh. That was...huh. Well aware that she sounded slightly off, still she managed to gently probe the apparently new hire about Matt and Foggy’s whereabouts. The other woman tensed when a crash came from Matt’s office, but Karen’s shoulders actually relaxed. Finally – something normal.
And then the door opened.
There was a long beat of silence as Karen stared across the lobby at...what? What? That was plainly Matt – there was no mistaking those slightly ragged edges around his affable appearance. But he was all. Tall. And red haired. And...freckly. A laugh escaped her mouth before she could even hope to stop it, genuinely startled and more than a little desperate. “Wow, uh,” she shook her head and looked away for a moment, her lips pressed together. Her mind was whirring at a hundred miles a minute. The black out, the head ache, the details that had gone askew, Matt that was plainly not Matt. Something had happened to her.
“Sorry, uh, sorry for barging in without an appointment,” she managed finally. Would this Matt know her? It would probably be better to start from scratch while she tried to wrap her head around the shape of the thing she wasn’t ready to acknowledge. Her hands were shaking a little, and she folded her arms quickly, as if that would do anything to hide her frayed nerves from him. “I’m Karen Page. If you have a few minutes, I’d like to consult with you in private.”
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The last thing she remembered was going to bed the night before, and she had no sense of any time passing, the way that sleep usually felt like a long pause. No, it was just that she suddenly woke up on the sidewalk outside of her favorite coffee shop, at 2 PM, with a splitting headache. It was a small mercy that she was fully dressed, considering she woke up to a small crowd of anxious looking onlookers. As it transpired, no one had really seen what happened to her. The best guess was that she had fainted.
That would have been concerning enough on its own. She was close enough to the office that walking there first made the most sense. But the more she walked, the more she noticed...little inconsistencies. Her phone reception had flat-lined and wouldn’t connect to any wifi networks. None of the newspaper headlines made a lick of sense. The date was wrong. The advertisements on the top of the cabs were completely foreign to her.
She just barely managed to strangle her anxiety with a firm grip of investigative reasoning when she pushed into the office and found a stranger sitting there. Huh. That was...huh. Well aware that she sounded slightly off, still she managed to gently probe the apparently new hire about Matt and Foggy’s whereabouts. The other woman tensed when a crash came from Matt’s office, but Karen’s shoulders actually relaxed. Finally – something normal.
And then the door opened.
There was a long beat of silence as Karen stared across the lobby at...what? What? That was plainly Matt – there was no mistaking those slightly ragged edges around his affable appearance. But he was all. Tall. And red haired. And...freckly. A laugh escaped her mouth before she could even hope to stop it, genuinely startled and more than a little desperate. “Wow, uh,” she shook her head and looked away for a moment, her lips pressed together. Her mind was whirring at a hundred miles a minute. The black out, the head ache, the details that had gone askew, Matt that was plainly not Matt. Something had happened to her.
“Sorry, uh, sorry for barging in without an appointment,” she managed finally. Would this Matt know her? It would probably be better to start from scratch while she tried to wrap her head around the shape of the thing she wasn’t ready to acknowledge. Her hands were shaking a little, and she folded her arms quickly, as if that would do anything to hide her frayed nerves from him. “I’m Karen Page. If you have a few minutes, I’d like to consult with you in private.”