Train tracks: Oliver & Gwen
Gwen seldom left the facility. She was allowed to leave with special permission, but that required yards and yards of paperwork, and it required an ankle bracelet, and it required extensive edicts from her handlers about what she could and could not consume while she was beyond the walls and barbed wire of her home. It was a super hassle to get out that way, and she'd done it once or twice back in New York, but she didn't bother with it anymore. Here, she'd befriended the lead scientist assigned to her, and she knew the best ways to sneak out without detection, as a result. It involved a lot of specific memorization of schedules and shift changes, and it involved an intimate understanding of the flaws in the alarm systems and follow-spots, and it involved a little bit of help from inside. Luckily, Gwen possessed all required attributes to leave the facility for small periods of time. And, since she didn't want to lose this tiny bit of freedom, she didn't leave often. She could count on one hand the number of times she'd left those austere walls behind. Most days, she could be found wandering the halls of white. The lab was her playground, day or night, and she could go anywhere within the unit she called home. But tonight it was warm and clear, and she wanted to go out.
She didn't make it all the way into the center of town, though that wasn't a deliberate choice. She should have planned the outing better but, in her excitement to venture out, she'd neglected to peruse her map and decide on a location to visit. She wasn't very impulsive, and she couldn't figure out what to blame the aberration on. Possibly, it was just a result of being locked up too long. She was curious about the world beyond her home, and that led her to be sometimes foolhardy.
But the damage was done, and she wasn't going to dwell on her ill-planned excursion. She was going to enjoy the experience, and she would consider the shortcomings in future, when she was locked in her room with nothing to do, which kind of totally sucked.
She walked, and she saw the tail-end of the flower garden first. They were bright pastels and captivating brightness, and they called to her (which was totally cheesy, but an accurate explanation) from across the field. She knew they were man-made, drawn, even as she began her approach, but that only made her more interested in their existence. She crouched, dressed in the whites of a medical patient, pants and galoshes and a grey sweater with loud candy canes, and she dragged her fingertip through the chalk.
Movement caught her eyes down the track then, and she straightened and followed the promise of another person's presence. The reality that approaching a stranger might be a super-bad idea, that didn't even occur to her. As unscientific as it was, she didn't believe someone who drew such pretty flowers could be in any way dangerous.
She walked between the tracks, hopping from under-slat to under-slat, and she called out when she neared the young man with the blue shoes. "Hey!"