She finds herself in a morgue of a rather different sort. It's a long white tent with a grass floor, on which rows of bodies have been laid out. Most of them are covered with their own blood- and mud-stained cloaks, but that doesn't hide the fact that a few over in one corner are smaller than the others, child-size. People in robes are moving among the dead, bending over each one in turn and chanting in an unfamiliar language.

A few feet away from Daria, a blonde man in armour is crouched down beside one of the bodies with his hand on the dead man's forehead, stumbling his way through the same chant. There's a sword at his side and a blue shield strapped to his back. Like the corpses, he looks as though he's just come off a medieval battlefield. 

His head snaps up when she appears, hand dropping to his sword-hilt, and he says something in an unfamiliar language. Judging by the tone of surprise, it's probably along the lines of "Whoa, where did you come from?"

"What the fuck. Did someone knock me out and transport me to some kind of, of, over-involved murder-LARP? Do you even speak Engli -" suddenly she freezes, and then trades indignation for sheer terror. "What did you do to Mariam."

The man scrambles to his feet and says something, still incomprehensible but he seems to be trying to calm her down. He reaches out as if to pat her awkwardly on the shoulder but then seems to think better of it. 

Turning away from Daria, he asks a question to the room in general. Various robed people give replies to the effect of "no", but one of them adds something that has the armoured man looking a little more hopeful and gesturing for Daria to follow him out of the tent. 

Yeah, no. "Where is Mariam? If you hurt her I swear to god you'll wish you were dead."

He gives her a look like a confused puppy that isn't sure why it's been whapped on the nose with a newspaper and glances around the room, as if to say 'can I get some help over here', with no success. 

He tries saying something in his language again; tries what maybe sounds like a different language, then makes talking/listening motions with his hands and gestures a little more insistently towards the tent flap. 

"Charades. Brilliant."

If he can bring her to someone who can explain what was going on, someone who could be bargained with or reasoned with or threatened... She moves to follow him, glaring. "If you try anything, I have a death-charge," she warns, snapping her fingers in an attempt to wordlessly convey the threat.

Either the threat doesn't register or he thinks he can handle it. Either way, there's no discernible reaction. 

They exit the tent and walk out into the midst of a military encampment. Most of the people walking around seem to shop at the same stores as her armoured guide, and the rest aren't wearing anything more modern. Her companion walks like he knows exactly where he's going, although there are a few awkward moments where he tries to go around someone in his way while they're trying to move to let him past. 

They arrive at a tent from which the unmistakable sound of swearing is rising, along with what sounds like either half a death metal band or someone torturing a radiator. Inside, bent over a part-disassembled suit of armour doing...something...to one of its gauntlets, is the source of the swearing, a dark-haired man with a neatly-trimmed beard and black smudges on his face and clothes.

He looks up, exchanges a few sentences with Daria's blonde guide, and grins. Touching one hand to the glowing blue gem strung around his neck, he holds out the other for Daria to shake. His fingers are black what looks like engine grease. 

... really extensive murder-LARP? With... LED jewelery.

She crosses her arms pointedly across her chest. "Are you the one that can tell me what the fuck is going on?"

He rolls his eyes and says something else in their incomprehensible language, wiggling his hand in her direction.

Finally noticing the grease stains, he wipes his hand off on his apron and holds it out again with a slightly pleading expression. He hasn't stopped talking for more than a few seconds since they got here. 

"That is so not my problem, it doesn't even rate at this point."

She turns on the man who brought her there. "I thought you were bringing me to someone who speaks English. I'll settle for - I'm an idiot." She digs her phone out of her bag, pulls up Google Translate, and shoves it at him. "Now explain."

He sighs, reaches out to brush his fingers against the hand holding the phone, and rattles off a string of words that make her ears pop. 

Incomprehensible babble "—think you'd never seen a wizard before, and what is this, some kind of magic item, what does it do—" He grabs the phone, since it's there, and starts examining it. 

"A wizard. I assume from that display you do not mean 'a necromancer with delusions of grandeur', unless someone's figured out how to extend the language effect without me noticing." She snatches her phone back, scowling. "That's my phone. It does a lot of things. If you don't know that I am... not where I was. Which I suppose answers the question of why I can't feel Mariam. Next question: where the hell am I?"

"Necromancer?" he repeats incredulously. "Delusions of grandeur? I haven't been so insulted since that hyenaman with the—" 

"Harding!" the armoured man snaps. 

"I apologise for him, my lady. We're in the main encampment of the Fallonese army in Estan, a few miles north of the Estan-Seredina border. I can, uh, arrange an escort to take you back wherever you came from..."

"I've never heard of Estan. No country on Earth is currently waging war with swords, and while I'm still hoping you're playing some kind of incredibly elaborate joke, I think getting home is going to be more complicated than that."

"I think she might be a little more lost than you're imagining, Roberts," Harding snarks.

He snags a large book out of an open chest in the corner and starts leafing through it with purpose. "Out of interest, what do people fight wars with where you're from?"

"Guns, drones, nukes, guided missiles..." She doesn't look like she wants to elaborate on any of those points. "Will you be able to get me home?"

Mariam can't feel her either, almost certainly, if Daria can't go home she'll just think she'd vanished, dead somewhere, no explanation no body no way to even call her spirit back...

"Weeell...Aha! Found it!" He sweeps a scattering of tools and parts off a section of his workbench and slams the book down in the newly cleared space.

"This," he says, stabbing a finger at the current page, "is the spell I need. Buuut I can't cast it yet." 

"Really? I thought the great wizard Edmund Harding, saviour of civilisation, could do anything." 

"Please tell me I don't have to go on a quest to retrieve the forgotten something of wherever before you can do your - spell, that would be worryingly fitting given that I seem to have been dropped on a fantasy novel."

"What? No, no, it's just not a spell I'm particularly familiar with; there's not exactly much call for interplanar teleportation in a war zone, surprisingly enough," Harding explains. "So, I'll need a few days to study up, make sure I can keep it all straight in my head. Otherwise we might be aiming for your plane and accidentally end up on the Plane of Fire instead. Which would be bad." He pauses, probably for air.

"I...probably didn't need to clarify that, but earlier you didn't know what a wizard was, so I thought I'd play it safe."

"I have no idea what any of those things are. ...Wizardry, huh. I don't suppose it's teachable?" 

"Sometimes?" is the not-very-helpful answer. Harding is half-distracted digging various items out of trunks. 

"I mean, I learned it, but some people can't be taught for whatever reason, and some people can, and it would take you longer to find out if you can even light a candle than it'll take me to learn Plane Shift, so unless you want to wait around..." 

Daria looks extremely conflicted.

"- Mariam'll be worried but if it's just a couple extra days it's worth it. New magic. There isn't any way to call me back, is there? Or open a permanent link?"

"Oh, yeah, if I can do it once I can do it every day," he assures her distractedly. "That is unless it needs some kind of rare materials we can't get on a battlefield for love or money—which I should probably check, come to think of it..." 

He checks.

"Ah."

She has no idea why she allowed herself a moment of optimism, this is exactly in keeping with the theme of the rest of this goddamn day.

"So there will be a quest to retrieve the forgotten something of wherever. Your credibility grows by the second." Her voice only shakes slightly beneath the sarcasm.

"No, not exactly." He doesn't seem bothered by the sarcasm. "Spells don't tend to ask for a specific instance of an item, just one that meets certain specifications—which is good, because otherwise you'd get rich wizards competing for all the rarest items and no-one else would be able to cast anything above the fifth tier." 

"Get to the point, Harding," Roberts puts in from where he's been standing quietly by the tent flap. He's clearly a little lost with all the talk of magical theory. 

"What do you mean, 'not exactly'?" 

Harding glares and jabs a finger in his direction. "You, shut up, I'm working here." 

He turns back to Daria. "I don't suppose you happened to be carrying a tuning fork when you were inexplicably Plane Shifted?" 

"No, why do you need a tuning fork? I can show you everything I have on me if it'd be any help, I have my work bag with me."

"Because the spell wants," he quotes, "'a forked metal rod attuned to the target plane'. Nothing here's going to be attuned to wherever you came from if you've never heard of this plane and we've never heard of yours, so if you haven't brought anything we can use..."

She dumps the contents of her bag unceremoniously on the ground, then picks through the inner pockets for the more delicate items. There are various chunks of metal and rock, string, wire of various thickness, feathers in plastic bags, carved wooden rings, a notebook, several stencils, small pouches with coiled hair, drawing implements, a small tool kit, and a lot of other assorted miscellany.

"Unless you can fork some of the wire and that counts, I don't think any of this works, but look for yourself if you want. Careful with it, though, some of the containers have breakable stuff."

"Sure, yeah, of course, I can be careful. I'm a wizard and an inventor, I work with breakable things all the time." 

As he talks, he goes straight for the toolkit. Anything in there that might meet a very generous interpretation of the requirements? 

Scissors? Pliers? Wire cutters?

"Yeah, one of these might work. Don't really want to find out what would happen if it doesn't, though." He looks speculative. "Fortunately,  I know a way we could find out whether it works..."

Roberts sighs. "The augers are not your servants, Harding. We need every prediction they can make for the good of the war effort."

From his tone, this is an argument they've had many times.

"Augurs? Do those do what I think they - no, not the point." Focus, Daria.

"If it's the only way I can get home I can help with the - good of your war effort. I like to think I'm not entirely useless." Hopefully they're not secretly evil, but she doesn't know how she'd even start checking that and if she diverts resources from one area and contributes to another she'll come out even. Probably? That sounds like the sort of reasoning Mariam would disagree with but Mariam's not here.

Roberts looks at her seriously. "We'd appreciate any help you wish to give, ma'am, but you're under no obligation to aid us. You're from another world: you don't follow any of our gods, and you're not a member of any of our military orders. Since you found yourself in a war zone by accident, I have a duty to see you safely returned to your home."

"That's not - it's not about obligation. Can I help make it faster, or not?"

"It's...not my call to make," Roberts says cautiously. "And even if you can help enough to free up an auger, you might not get the answer you want. I think your best option—"

Harding interrupts, "The gods didn't call you to think, my friend." He gives Daria a speculative look. "So what exactly can you do that would be worth more to this war than a casting or two of an augury?" 

'Gods didn't call him to think?' A religious order, maybe. Has she offered to assist in a holy war of some kind? No, focus - "If I say 'necromancy', what does that mean to you?"

"...you're a necromancer?"

Both men are instantly on alert. Roberts steps forward to put himself between her and Harding, one hand on his sword hilt. 

Harding reacts just as strongly, magic beginning to glow in his hands before he catches up with what she said and stops.

"...could you...repeat that? Might be a translation error, it sounds like your world's magic is different—" His tone says please let this be a translation error. 

- well, fuck.

"I do ritual based," she pauses, grimaces slightly, " - magic. The most intuitive applications of it rely on the imprints left behind after death."

"Imprints?" Just like that, Harding is back to nerdy fascination. "Are we talking ghosts, magical signatures...?" Brushing Roberts out of the way with a careless wave, he steps towards Daria again. 

"I'm not sure what you mean by magical signatures."

"And I'm not sure what you mean by imprints, that's why I'm asking!" 

"Right, but - ugh. An imprint is the impression you get from something connected to the person that they leave behind when they die. You can get information from them but the quality of it degrades over time. It's not a ghost, I would assume we don't have your type of magical signatures but I don't actually know what those are, so."

He listens intently to this explanation. 

"A magical signature is a unique synaesthetic pattern of magic connected with a particular person; everyone has one, at least in theory. You're a necromancer because you work with these imprints?" 

"Yes. That sounds like the energy source I use, I'd check but the middle of a war zone seems like a bad place to mediate."

"Eh, we're in camp, it'd be fine," Harding says dismissively. "More importantly..." He turns serious again. "Have you ever, or could you, raise the dead?" 

"I cannot return the dead back to life, no." I'm working on it, though, she doesn't say.

"What the necromancers here do is...more of a mockery of life. They animate a corpse with their magic and make it walk about to carry out their orders, with nothing remaining of the original personality or will."

"I can't make zombies either." It's not like she can attempt a reanimation without Mariam even if she wanted to.

He nods. "Then I'd say you aren't a necromancer as we define the term." Both men relax slightly. 

"...where were we?" 

"Getting me home."

"Right, yes. Augurs, war effort, otherworldly magic. So, if you can't raise undead, what can you do?"