Generation NeXt

"Yes, grandpa, you know I'm going to be careful, god, you'd think I'd never done a stakeout before," Jacelyn (better known to friends as J.C.) says as she walks towards a bus stop, rolling her eyes for her own benefit, "Okay. I know. I won't mess up. Bye."

She hangs up, readjusts her massive backpack stuffed with her homework and her carefully packed costume underneath it, and turns the corner of the block to find a sprawling garden. J.C. blinks and turns right around, not quite processing this right away, and finds yet more grass where the street.

The word she says next is omitted in the name of good taste, but it expresses deep distaste and a good measure of frustration. 21st century girl in the house, everyone.

J is actually talking to his mother on his communicator when the connection drops and he frowns - this is damn alien technology, it's not supposed to drop your calls unless you smash it with a sledgehammer. He fiddles with it for a moment, not bothering to look up as he walks, since he knows the way to where he's going by heart - but pauses (literally) when he bumps into ... a tree, and once his attention is lifted from the communicator he can hear— is that a river?

He groans, wondering if he hit something on his pinpoint wrong by bumping it but when he checks it doesn't show that he's gone anywhere and it makes him a little nervous - it gets worse when said pinpoint won't take him anywhere else, just giving him error messages he's never seen before. He's heard stories, from his mother, about places that you can't leave and he doesn't like that prospect in the least.

He starts wandering the grounds, and once he reaches the actual hotel he is thoroughly annoyed and well-acquainted with plant life. He sits, stubbornly, on a half-wall that's part of the architecture and just rubs his temples for a moment, muttering. "Shit, I'm going to get my ass kicked if I got myself stuck somewhere," a pause, "I wonder whose universe this even is." Ah, the important questions.