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She smiled at him, and said gently, “I meant every hour. Which, as I recall, is not much fun for anyone involved. But. I’ll ask, maybe the doctor will say something different.” It was better to be overcautious and fine than be undercautious and, you know, in severe pain due to being an idiot. Anabel appreciated both his concern and his caution around her; most people either pretended she was normal and fine, or else thought the gritty details of what exactly she was missing were their business precisely.

With a noncommittal noise, she hopped out of the car before answering. “It’s nice. I could do without the motion-sensing lights, because I spend a lot of time in one place not moving and it sucks to be reading and have the overhead turn off, but I fixed that with one of those little push-lights on the side of the fridge and a standing lamp near the couch, so it’s actually pretty convenient.” The location was awesome, too, mostly because of proximity to public transit and again. The laundry facilities. “If you really don’t mind, I’d appreciate it. Bus people can be creepy.”

The idea of life without Burrito Barn was a sad and lonely one. She sighed, and perused the menu board. “C’mon, Alaska, get your head in the game.” Anabel leaned against the wall, stood on her tiptoes for a moment, and then slouched back down. “I’ll take fast food chains with vegetarian options that aren’t salad for 500, Alex. Bet you can’t name many more than a very carefully chosen menu at three or four locations.”

She bit her thumbnail for a moment, and then said, “I’m getting braised tofu.”

"Thanks," she said, and she meant it, which was not always true of the things she said since her accident. She picked at the braised tofu on her salad, trying to think of a comparable counter offer. Perhaps... But who knew if he had a DS? "If you'd like, you could stop by sometime. Get a taste of the green living and admire my completionist approach to WiiSports."

"I am ashamed to know me," she said seriously. "Such are the times, when a skilled survivalist can bowl a perfect game and have little else to be proud of."

She leaned back in her chair. "So, anyway, dumb question but you're a DC native. D'you know what this symbol means?" In pen on the back of a napkin, she drew a female symbol with little horns. It wasn't a good drawing, necessarily, but it was communicative and when she held it up for Finn's inspection she really did look confused.

"Some old family stuff. There was a ring, some old old family tree genealogy papers, photos. That was in a bunch of them." She balled up the napkin and tossed it into the trash can. Then she sighed, disappointed, but shrugged. She had really hoped someone who had attended high school and maybe middle school--she wasn’t sure--in Destiny City would know more than she did. "Some weird journal... I was hoping it would be a little more meaningful. Guess it makes sense, though. If it's something common like that, it explains the dork in the fur cape wearing it."

“The journal says nonsense words,” said Anabel. “I’m not a linguistics major. And it’s definitely not any language I know the look of.” She wished she had the actual book, but, like, of course she didn’t. What she did have was a picture on her phone.

She pulled out her phone and flipped through the pictures, until she came to the one she was looking for. “That’s what it looks like. But, like, when I say common, I mean--how did you find that out? The internet? I kind of just thought it was local weirdness, like, a cult or those senshi terrorist guys. Stuff I need to stay out of, hey?”

Anabel shrugged. “And this ring.” She swiped sideways on the phone, haphazardly, to a rather plain golden ring. “My mother said it was pretty old stuff, like, the hinges had rusted shut, and you know, my family’s lived in the same house since the 1600s. It’s probably ancient and came over with them. Or, that’s the theory.” She turned back to her salad, somewhat disappointedly convinced that the Finn option was a dead end. Which was a shame, because he had a lot of the same traits as the dork in the cape--though clearly, they looked nothing alike.

“I mean, I guess the genealogy goes back pretty far. It stops in the 1800s, but my mom’s a kook for stuff like that, and she can trace Dad’s line back to somebody on the paper, so, whatever.” She sighed, gustily, and swirled her soda around in the cup with her straw. “I guess it was just a fun diversion?”

“That Mercury thing you said,” she said, “but with more… horns.” The picture didn’t look that low-res, but she guessed she was just so used to seeing the ring look the way it did that she saw things that weren’t clear to others?

That did not make any sense as a statement. She gathered up her trash into her bowl and said, “Kept me occupied until I was allowed to move my fingers enough to play Pokemon, anyway. Thanks for dealing with my dumb questions, Derouen.”