skepticgirl_1 | and I don't wanna sit still

Usually I wasn't a big fan of field trips. They tended to be boring, awkward excursions that never taught us anything worthwhile and just gave people an excuse to socialize without the teacher being able to stop them. Which wouldn't have bothered me, in the past, had I had someone to socialize with, too. But when the new girl was going to be the gone girl in six months, no one really paid me much attention. That was fine by me. If only the field trips were interesting enough to distract me.

But this, this was different. I didn't have any friends in this class (yet), but I did have friends, and I could sneak peeks at my cell phone and send texts every so often. I wasn't doing a whole lot of that, however, given that this field trip was to a place called DARKLab. DARKLab. Had no one in marketing noticed this? Did the board of directors really think it was a good thing to say they controlled a dark lab? Either a whole lot of people had a very dark sense of humor or there was something going on here. I chose to investigate the latter.

Peeling off from my group was easy enough. There were too many of us for only a teacher and two parent chaperones who didn't know what they were doing with this many teenagers. I innocently slipped into a bathroom, waited for everyone to forget about me, and then headed straight for a door that said "Employees Only."

I stopped abruptly in front of the door because, of course, it was locked and, of course, it was a card key lock, not anything I could pick.

I hesitated and spun in a slow circle, wondering what alternative route I could use.

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There's another school group on a field trip today, but they get one of the interns to lead it. That's another perk of no longer being an intern, Gwen has found. Not that she ever minded the field trips, but most of the time, it was obvious the kids were bored and she was wasting her time on most of them. At best, they were just happy to be out of the classroom for a little while.

Besides, she has projects to tend to. She's been trying to stay on top of things even more than usual of late so she can justify working on her own experiments in the evening, which is really just a hunt for a cure for Kaine.

Still, it's no surprise when she finds one of the high schoolers in the hall, looking lost. It seems like there's always one. "You get separated from the group?" she asks.

Crap. I honestly hadn't thought it would take me this little time to get caught. At least I wasn't doing anything suspicious. I didn't have my hand right on the handle of the door clearly labeled "Employees Only" or anything, thank God. Just poor, stupid looking Lois, lost in a different way than this lady could guess.

"Yeaaaah," I said slowly. I wasn't a very good actress, for all that I probably should be, given what I wanted to do with my life. But thankfully I was honestly confused as to where to go.

"I went to the bathroom and they were gone."

That happens a lot with these tour groups. Sometimes the kids just wander off for the hell of it, even, though most of the time, she's pretty sure, they're more interested in just being off campus than they are in exploring. Someone going to the bathroom and losing the others happens pretty much every tour.

"Yeah, the tour can move pretty fast," she says. "Come on, I'll help you find them."

I stood there and watched as my dreams of sleuthing and being a spy were pretty much crushed. If only she had given me directions about how to get back in the general direction of where the group might have been. I could have "gotten lost" yet again and hopefully have found some way into the actual research labs. But instead I was going to be walked back. The humiliation.

"Thanks," I said, at least pretending to sound grateful for her help. And then realized this might not be a totally lost cause. "Hey, do you mind me asking-- what do you do here?"

"Oh, not at all," Gwen says. "I'm a lab tech. I help run tests and perform research, track results, all that." Not every experiment is going to be all that exciting, but even when it isn't, this is still her dream job. Eventually, she'll start running experiments of her own. Or, well, she'll start running experiments she's supposed to run on her own, instead of using the equipment after hours to try and find a cure for Kaine's allegedly incurable disease. "I work in the biochemistry department, so most of my time is spent researching different illnesses."

Cures or something else, I wondered. Or did they go hand in hand. Figuring out what would cure a stubborn, deadly disease would probably naturally lead to a way to make the disease even worse. Maybe even "good" companies had that kind of information at hand.

"Are you, um... from here?" I asked tentatively. I hadn't had many conversations with people native to Darrow because they gave me the creeps, but most people not from Darrow gave you some obvious hint pretty early on.

"From Darrow?" Gwen clarifies, and shakes her head. "Oh, no, I'm a New Yorker, born and bred. I've been here for ages, though. What about you?"

Most of the people who ask prove not to be from Darrow themselves, though there are the occasional curious locals. Gwen's been there, though, going to high school as the new girl who's not from around here. She made friends, but that didn't make it fun or easy.

"Oh, good," I sighed out. Of course it didn't mean that I had to automatically like her, or that she would like me, or that she was perfectly sane even. But it was way less creepy than the alternative.

"I've only been here about three months. From Metropolis. Have you heard of it?" I asked, a touch hopefully. It felt like no one here knew her home, which still struck Lois as unfair when Cindy had about four people vaguely related to her. It wasn't as if it were a small town.

"Sorry, no," Gwen says, shaking her head. She hates it when people haven't heard of New York; it makes everything feel a little off somehow, almost as if it's calling all her memories into doubt. But that's the nature of this place. People come from all over. At least Metropolis sounds like the name of an actual city on Earth.

"I wish I had. It's a lot to take in, being here. You settling in okay?" She's pretty young, though probably no younger than Gwen was herself when she first arrived here. She remembers it as incredibly overwhelming.

I was disappointed, but after three months, I was getting used to this particular brand of disappointment. I shrugged it off as best I could and moved on. One day, maybe I would find someone who knew my city. Maybe even more than just a spot on the map. A girl could hope.

"Eh," I said, timing the response so it sort of attached itself to the shrug, an end note as my shoulders dropped. "I was in the children's home at first, which sucked, but I found myself a guardian so I'll be moving out soon. That helps. But otherwise.. I mean, how's someone supposed to really settle in here? At no point does it ever get less weird. Does it?"

Gwen chuckles, shaking her head. "Nooo," she says. "I mean, some things do. Aspects of your life settle. You know, I have my job, school, my boyfriend, and that's all... normal." And she's grateful for that, she really is. She knows she could easily be back in New York, which, on one hand, she longs for; on the other, though, she fears that possibility, not sure if she'll remember the things she needs to know there in order to survive. "But every time I think things are getting normal all around, something happens to shake it all up."

It was reassuring to hear from someone who had been here for a while that things didn't get less weird. I hated the thought that at some point all of this might get normal for me. You stopped questioning things when they seemed normal, stopped investigating. And I couldn't ever stop that.

"So it's normal here?" I asked, a little skeptical. "I mean, you're working with a bunch of natives, right? That would be weird to me. And it's after all an experimental lab kind of thing. You've never had any weird stuff go down?" I realized that might have sounded too investigative, so I added, "Even like, a Darrow-only illness that you've never seen back home?"

"Oh, it is... so weird sometimes," Gwen says, pulling a face. "They're great people, most of them, but they're so... okay with everything? They don't find it weird. Or they think I'm weird for not being from here." So far, she hasn't had to deal with that much prejudice; it hasn't stopped them from hiring her, for one. But they do sometimes ask questions about it like she's somehow supposed to be representative of all non-Darrow natives, and it's awkward. "But the science itself isn't any stranger than back home. I mean, I was in high school at home, and I only interned at one lab, so I may not have the best gauge for that, but."

and I don't wanna sit still

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