Rose has been running through the onion-skin layers of the twilight long enough to have seen a lot, and to know she hasn't seen everything. That she can't immediately categorize the ghost approaching her (not a road ghost, not a homestead, not a haunt) doesn't have to be alarming. Said ghost appears lucid and peaceful — at least for the moment — and that's a hell of a lot more than can be said for some.

"Hey." Rose offers a cautious nod, keeping her posture loose and nonthreatening. "Are you one of the locals?"

Through no choice of mine, the other ghost says, and Rose thinks: shit. She's been trapped before — drawn into an abandoned truck stop like a moth to a flame and locked in a Seal of Solomon — but she's yet to find any telltale arcane marks here. And while the twilight has plenty of ghost towns that would happily ensnare more residents for themselves, this is the daylight. A daylight town shouldn't be able to hold any ghost with enough sense to recognize that they're being held in the first place.

But Norah here seems sensible. And it sounds like she's been stuck here for a while.

"I'm Rose." Despite her own impatience for details, she does manage a wry smile over the unnecessary clarification. "And... yeah, I figured." Nothing wrong with being a little translucent if you're not the kind of ghost that regularly passes itself off as the living, but it's not exactly subtle. "Can't say I know what kind of ghost you are," she adds, figuring she might as well lay a few cards on the table. It doesn't seem likely that another ghost is the mastermind behind whatever the hell is going on here, and one of the first rules the twilight teaches you is that lies are for the living, not the dead. "I'm a hitcher, so I know you're not a road ghost, but that doesn't narrow it down much."

Her eyebrows creep up a little at Norah's snippy response. At first, the ignorance surprises her more than the defensiveness, but 'haunting place' does provide a little clarity. If any kind of ghost can fairly claim ignorance to what's going on in the rest of the twilight, it's a house-haunter. They don't get out much. And they skew close enough to homesteaders for more mobile ghosts (especially the ones that want to stay mobile) to keep a respectable distance.

They don't get out period, actually, which makes Norah's newfound freedom both interesting and potentially alarming. "You can leave?" Rose asks, sounding about as dumbfounded as Norah did a moment ago. It doesn't sound like said haunting-place was destroyed (a word which only means anything in the daylight, anyway), and it takes Rose a dragging second to imagine another reason why a house-haunter might find herself suddenly at liberty to wander. Her expression darkens. "Shit. Were you exorcised?"

Women don't often stop for her. Some combination of stranger-danger paranoia and a fear that whatever put her on the road might be contagious, that they'll end up in the margins by association. They especially don't stop for her in a 1937 Frazer Nash BMW, and Rose forgets herself enough to actually gape for a moment. It's a spectacle so far out of time that she really ought to be looking at a phantom rider, but no — the woman behind the wheel isn't a road ghost. And while the car looks well-loved enough to leave a ghost of her own, her tires sit firmly on the daylight asphalt.

Rose blinks, then looks down at her outfit as if she's only just realized how inappropriate it is, taking the moment to gather herself. "Not here," she replies with a small, sheepish shrug. "I was on my way to..."

She trails off, her smile fading and her gaze going distant. All she'd done was reach for the road, trying to gauge where she was and where she might reasonably be going to, to spin a quick lie about her last ride and why they'd left her here, but this road has next to nothing to tell her, terminates in nothing a few miles in either direction. She stands on a little orphaned tributary cut off from the rivers of asphalt that cross North America, dwindling too quickly into thick-baked mud.

Where the hell is she?

She tries to drop into the twilight, to find the nearest ghostroad and run. She doesn't go anywhere. The woman is staring at her in clear concern.

"I, uh," Rose balls her hands into cold little fists and loosens them, veering unsteadily off-script. "I think I might be lost?"

This isn't quite how these scenes are supposed to go. Rose isn't above accepting the living's pity, and she can't deny it now; if the twilight won't have her, then this is what she needs to do. Hell, she's already doing it: sliding into the passenger seat and taking the coat with soft but sincere thanks, feeling mortality settle into her limbs as she pushes her arms through the sleeves. The upholstery is warm beneath her — the car, like its driver, inclined towards sympathy — and it begins to thaw a little of the twilight chill out of her bones.

But she doesn't do lost, is the thing. It sits a little too close to 'pathetic' for her liking. She's supposed to know where she's headed, or seem like she does... but there's no scent of lilies and ashes on the wind, no sense of direction from the ghostroads. And while 'Darrow' sounds like it could be anywhere, she can't say she's heard of it.

"I'm Rose," she says, managing a smile, trying to claw her way back into an approximation of confidence. "Does the car have a name, too? She's pretty enough to deserve one." Loved enough, is what she really means, and she briefly rests her fingertips on the polished wooden window frame.

"I do," Rose says, an easy admission. "I used to fix them up after school, or over the summer — when I had the time." Which wasn't always. She'd grown up poor, and tinkering with cars was more of an indulgence than anything anyone in Buckley was prepared to pay her for. She'd had to turn to more appropriately feminine chores if she wanted to earn money.