People watching.
With the weather cooling down, Lane had begun taking more of her lunch breaks outside than she had previously. The leaves hadn’t started to turn yet, but they would, soon enough, and she found herself taking daily photos of the same tree, from the same bench, every day, where she spent the hour sitting still as a stone. In a month or two she’d have a slideshow of the progression of the season. She wasn’t sure what she’d do with it, but it, and observation of the other noontime regulars and visitors, was something to put her focus on.
Apart from the fact that she was no longer human.
... Again.
Lane supposed she ought to be more upset. But perhaps dying and coming back at all had been enough of a shock, like plunging into a winter ocean and being smacked by a frozen wave, that she'd acclimated to any other sudden changes.
Perhaps, too, she’d always been like this: ready to search out the unknown and learn every secret it had to offer. She, too, was an unknown now, and it turned what could have been a horrifying change, like those of any of her fledgling friends, into something to study. As far as she knew (as far as the Traveler had conveyed to her), she was something entirely new.
Lane sipped her latte and eyed a passerby from her perch, where she sat . Were they human? Would she become human again, if she could? How many of the others in this park were, and how many asked themselves the same questions?
Her blue eyes landed on an older man across the way. He’d caught her eye early on in her lunchtime visits, with his own kind-looking eyes and the cheerful smile he seemed to procure for everyone, from the white-collar secretaries and staffers stretching their legs for the first time in hours to the finches hopping around the grass searching out seeds leftover from the morning feedings. It was a smile that seemed to have everyone, even the most exhausted desk workers, perking up the slightest bit.
Hm. She glanced down to one of the birds puttering around in the grass near her and snapped a corner off one of her crackers for it.