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Texting and walking was a real epidemic. Most had learned their lesson by this stage - running into a pole, missing a step on the subway stairs, walking into traffic - but Caroline had been effectively detached from the world for nearly a decade of the time that texting existed, so she had a lot of catching up to do.

Both hands and all of her attention were occupied with her phone, a pen and folded paper clamped between her teeth in the absence of anywhere else convenient to put it. Between her inattentiveness and general lack of visibility, disaster was probably inevitable.

At least she'd pretty much gotten the hang of emojis.

The collision was just about the least disastrous thing that could have happened, considering the circumstances. Of course, Caroline hadn't yet realized that she'd accidentally sent a text that included an eggplant emoji to her daughter instead of its intended recipient, but that could be taken care of later.

Rather, it would have to be taken care of later, because the sight of who (or what) she'd bumped into caused her to immediately drop the phone as her hands reflexively moved to a palms-up position of surrender, the pen and paper (a mission report from Christmas, incidentally) falling from her now agape mouth shortly thereafter.

Was this real? The things that weren't real didn't actually touch her, right? She'd felt it touch her, right? Her pulse raced as she closed her eyes and tried to push through her panic, opening them just in time to see him put his glasses on.

"Don't." Since that was the only word she wanted to say, she immediately locked up and couldn't finish her sentence. With a deep breath, she lowered her trembling hands and started again. "Don't--don't worry--it's okay, it's okay, I--hah--"

Another deep breath.

"My fault, anyway. I should--I'm the one to say sorry. Um. Need help?" She reached to pat him once on the shoulder, then again when his shoulder was solid, and the confirmation of his reality slowly began to calm her down. She even smiled at him, but that was largely due to the massively comforting knowledge that Victor couldn't make these creepy things any more.

"Where's your parents?" Speaking of. "Not all alone here, are you?"

A look of heartbreak became a look of confusion as Caroline felt something tugging at her feet - then it cycled back around to heartbreak when she realized what was happening. She'd offered to help, said it was her fault, was standing on one of his papers, and the poor thing wasn't even asking her to move.

"No?" Her voice wavered, even with just one short word. "No--you do. I'm your mama, I'm here."

With a welcoming smile, she extended her arms and waited for him to accept her hug.

After a more brief pause in return, she stopped waiting for the hug and just began to nod with understanding.

"Sure--yeah, good in theory. Nice and safe. Except...how will anyone be anything but a stranger unless you talk to them?"

Caroline seemed pretty proud of herself for that one, but it wasn't really the point. She waved her hand dismissively and moved on.

"Anyway, I'm not a stranger," she insisted. "Not technically! 'Cause I'm your mom. Your daddy tried to keep us apart, but--so, he's gone now. Don't have to worry! Now we can be a family. Did you know about the rest of us?"

Just in time, her phone chimed with a response from Mimsy, who was expressing her discomfort at something else entirely. Caroline ignored the message for the time being, opting instead to open her contact photo at full-screen.

"See, did you know you've got a sister?" She held the phone out for him to see the image of his 'older sister', who stared at him from the picture with an absolutely neutral expression.

A tiny sigh of relief was halted with another smile. If he didn't know about Mimsy, that had to be some points in favor of not being raised to be similarly terrible. Terrifying. Both.

The smile was slightly harder to maintain when the sight of her daughter seemed to very directly bring him to some kind of uncomfortable secret, but Caroline just went with the assumption that it was probably unrelated, and he'd just felt safe admitting whatever it was now that he'd found a parent.

"Okay. Sure--sure, go ahead," she reassured him. "Secret's safe with me. Promise. You're safe with me too--it's what a mom's for."

Caroline went pale.

"What?" She pulled back enough to look him in the eye, visibly as concerned as she possibly could be. "That's--don't worry. Listen, don't worry. I know what you're going through. Know how scary it is. I got--I was held against my will too."

A suspicion was growing that they'd been 'kidnapped' by the same person, which was actually impossible on so many levels. Primarily levels that branched from the fact that he wasn't really Mimsy's half-sibling.

"What do you need?" she asked, as gently as she could, keeping her voice hushed. "I'll help you. I'm here now--I can help you."

"Of course I am." Her brow was knit with worry as she tried not to think about how helpless he must have been feeling before now. "I'll help. I'll--we can get your bag back. And I know the way off. I know how."

Caroline took a deep breath and made a mental checklist. It shouldn't be too difficult, but she was committed to helping regardless. The confidence helped to steel her for her answer; it was getting easier to talk about each time she did, but it still was not pleasant.

"I stayed 'cause I was scared," she confessed. "Too scared to leave. And had no one to help. So that's...I won't leave you alone without anyone to help, okay?"

Usually, when Caroline spoke of wanting her freedom back, she received sympathy and camaraderie and support in return, but always with a pitying reminder tacked on about the inevitability of her death. It kept her grounded and mindful of the consequences of her choices - an important thing, as her reflex with the first viable plan available tended to be latching onto it.

But she had now received all of those things without the reminder, and any thoughts of her tethers here were irrelevant in the moment. She was running alongside him just as excitedly until they reached Mark's...whatever this was...at which point she just stared. Surprisingly, her reaction seemed to be a bit of envy; frankly, if 63% of her existence was not constantly going towards the maintenance of an appearance that was particularly beneficial to her, she very well may have been living in some sort of similarly disastrous hoard of wiring, electronics, and cannibalized portions of robots. If she had any real memory of her last weeks in Delta, she'd have realized she had actually already been living that.

"We'll get it. Don't worry. What's it look like?" she whispered, stretching up to see if she could spot anything obvious with the vantage point that her few extra inches of height difference allowed. It was a tremendous exercise in focus to avoid fixating on any one piece of electronics or machinery that could be useful in here, knowing that she'd go down an inevitable rabbit hole of mentally deconstructing it to decide what sort of new creation the pieces could be made into.