Unfamiliarity

July 1995 - Part 3

An initial step-by-step guide for what Celine needed to do next slowly materialized at the forefront of her brain, forcing her to shift into her student mindset and forget her panic for a moment to instead view the situation like she would with any other school assignment or work assignment:

Step 1: Figure out the basics—shelter, food, and water.

After all, she needed to physically survive if she wanted to even ponder the logic of everything else in her predicament.

Luckily enough, she was also standing right in front of what she hoped was her solution: Back in (forward in?) 2025, Pym Technologies Headquarters stayed open 24/7 for employees who worked overnight, and the building also had a food court with free self-serviced vending machines—ticking off her food, water, and shelter worries in one go.

The biggest thing regarding shelter was the fact that Celine knew from when she'd first arrived in 1995 earlier in the day that her office on the 9th floor was virtually vacant, as was the entire floor practically, which meant that if she could make her way inside the building and up to her room, she was guaranteed at least a temporary shelter to stay at and hide in without notice for a few days while she figured out her next steps.

The only problem with that was—well, she was thirty years in the past after all, and there was a matter of whether or not her employee badge would even scan, seeing as it was a design three decades too early.

Nevertheless, it wasn't like she had another option, so Celine—after calming herself down considerably with a few breathing exercises that surprisingly helped—squared her shoulders, pushed the handle of the large revolving door at the entrance of Pym Technologies, and marched inside with her head held high and anticipation on full blast.

Just the mere walk from the door to the scanners next to the front desk was probably the most terrifying experience in Celine's life, if she had to be honest—the ten-second moment seemed to stretch into eons in her brain as she held her breath and tried her best to summon a casual expression to her face, avoiding eye contact with all the other occupants in the lobby. It was like wading through a pool of hyenas, and when the light on the scanner flashed green underneath her badge, she had to physically stop herself from collapsing right there and then in pure relief.

From there on, everything was somewhat blurred—Celine made it through the gates without a hitch, rode an empty elevator up to the 9th floor, succeeded in directly crossing paths with zero other individuals, barricaded herself in the room that once was and simultaneously would be her office, and slumped into the office chair, the whole time trying not to dwell on the complete absurdity of how normal and familiar the routine felt, despite her predicament being everything but.

She brought a hand up to her temple, blinking unseeingly at the wall as her mind ran at a mile a minute, Step 2: Contemplation executing immediately.

How did this happen? The singular question had probably reverberated around her head at least a million times at that point, but she couldn't help it, because she genuinely didn't know—how had she been sent back to 1995?

It was easier to first ponder the scientific, factual aspect of it all (or lack thereof, rather, seeing as honestly none of this made sense): Had she traveled to the actual past or an alternate timeline?

Celine wasn't well-versed in theories of time travel or anything of the sort, but after the logistics of the Avengers' Time Heist had been publicized in 2023 for bringing half the world's population back, there had naturally been a spike in public interest in time travel. Her exposure to the subject up until then had always just been from pop culture such as Back to the Future and Harry Potter, but once the scientific analyses of how Tony Stark sent the Avengers back into a new, alternate timeline had been published, that media logic had been effectively disproven.