Welcome to Gaia! ::

She had beamed brightly on recognition of who her passenger was, falling silent instead of asking her name, waiting for her to notice. And she hadn't, of course.

Elaine had let the silence continue at first thinking that it would be funnier to startle her when the inevitable realization came, and then in a disgruntled sort of irritation at the rudeness of being utterly silent to your Uber driver which she would have thought her friend superior to even if she was busy, and then a vague alarm if she was usually this unaware of her surroundings in a stranger's car. Maybe she was silent because she'd had bad experiences with drivers - being a pretty blonde by yourself could have this effect, as she knew all too well - but in that case, shouldn't she have been more alert?

So she'd paused a little longer than necessary at the stop sign, waiting to see if her passenger even registered the delay, and made an exasperated noise when she finally did, turning around to look at her over the back of the seat.

"Do you normally just blindly stumble into an Uber and sit there in silence?" she asked, in that chiding voice she sometimes got. "You're gonna get kidnapped or something. They didn't even make me do a real background check for this. I coulda been an axe murderer or something. I mean, yeah, I have a few thousand trips, but still. Tell me you're at least sharing your location data with someone on your trips."

She did not address the route. Sometimes the app avoided traffic in a very strange way, and she was more interested in Dispensing a Lecture.

She gave her an almost sad gaze from the front seat as they stopped again, as of a disappointed older sister.

"If you open the security thingie," she said at last, returning to driving, "you can assign my phone number so the next time you hop in while you're distracted it'll tell me where you are in case I need to rescue you, or possibly dole out vengeful axe murders in return."

And then, returning to the original interruption and glancing down at her phone: "It is weird that it's taking us all the way out here, but sometimes it reroutes if the traffic's crazy. Is there something happening at the university that's clogging up the roads, maybe?"

"You looked out for me first," she reminded her.

The sniffling was not unaccompanied by a twinge of guilt on Elaine's side. She was aware that she was at times a little harsh. But had she been able to hear Mel's internal reasoning, she might have been able to confirm it. Sometimes her own sister required a little bit of harsh handling.

"Weird," she said instead, wrinkling her nose. "Well, the fare hasn't gone up, so I guess we just get to be road trip buddies for a while."

But only a moment later, as the GPS told her to take a turn, she did, and they found themselves facing a dead-end road: the as-yet-uncompleted branch of some future planned community terminating in a makeshift gate and a couple of cones. The only thing there was a billboard, suspended just in view as it was angled towards a nearby artery for traffic.

It was one of several promoting tourism in the city, each featuring the tagline "regain your" and then a suggestion of how the attractions of Destiny City might help a flagging spirit to recall its imagination at local museums, or its excitement at a theme park.

Not this one, though. At this one a woman stood silhouetted before the illuminated glass of some aquarium or zoo exhibit.

REGAIN YOUR WONDER.

She looked at it in silence for a moment, and then, before she could turn back to her phone, it cheerfully announced: "You have arrived at your - you have - you have - rerouting. Make a U-turn."