A man - or something that looks like a man, anyway - appears in midair and falls to the ground with an earthy thud. He catches an arm on some spines on the way down, but there's no blood, and when he stands and dusts himself off there's no injury or impairment.

The peculiar landscape stretches as far as the eye can see, except for a mountain range in the far distance. Maybe if he gets a higher vantage point?

A spindle-legged spider with a blood sac enough to fill a man a thirty times over looks at him, then loses interest and scuttles away.

There's big rock coated with glowing, swollen slime over there. It's surrounded by engorged pillow-shaped plants, each larger than a man, with their shallow roots suckling at the gunk. (They're full of fist-sized insects.)

That way is a tall, narrow tree(?) with a large patch of dead dirt around it and translucent fruits(?) at its crown. Its stem is adorned with long, upwards-pointing prongs that looks climbable. Its root network extends through the dead patch around it, and grows in an odd way where tendrils go deep, branch out, then rise back up to the topsoil layer.

Or, if he'd just like to pick a direction and start walking, the peculiar red brambles and stalk-grass seem to get thicker and taller towards the mountains, turning into patches of twisted fungoid forest. There are long-limbed things clambering between the stalks, camouflaged to the naked eye.

The other way is more clear and flat, though still vegetated with those strange plants and inhabited by even stranger fauna, like that shambling, six-legged creature with more mouth than face that's started lumbering at Kiraavi.

Huh. The tree won't be much help, but not none; he heads in that direction. He can probably outrun the creature if it comes to that, it isn't moving that quickly, and it's only moderately annoying if he can't.

The creature speeds up once Kiraavi is moving. It itself is not quite running, but its legs are the length of a man so that still makes it as fast as a human at a sprint.

Huh.

He runs for the tree. The creature is faster but he does have a lead.

When he steps in the circle of barren earth around the tree, razor-sharp spikes thrust out of the ground in the blink of an eye and impale him three ways.

Ah, so that's what that was.

This is highly inconvenient; now he's stuck.

The six-legged thing slows down as it approaches where he's impaled. It looks a little confused why this prey isn't screaming or gushing blood everywhere or such.

What happens if it tries to pull Kiraavi off the spikes? Because of the geometry of the multiple impalement, this is going to involve a bit of force and a lot more damage.

At the first really solid tug he bursts into a pile of road dust, with an especially incomprehensible swear.

The tree and all its spiny roots disappear, in a way that's a bit like melting but drier and dustier. After a few moments, the barren patch begins to spread, the leading edge moving at an easy walking pace, away from the mountain, narrowing to leave a dirt path free of vegetation.

?????

Okay, the creature is going to... leave. No thank you.

The narrow little path continues on its way, winding a bit as it goes to head in the direction with the thinnest vegetation a mile away. It doesn't seem to care what it encounters as it does so; plants and stone alike wither into dust, and animals are ignored completely.

The animals will stay very clear of it.

It'll be thirty miles or so before the path finds something that's not the local kind of horrible ecology. The environment fades into more typical grassland, and there's still some patches of lesser horribleness—just the red moss-grass and slime and smaller flora—but it's clearly the right direction.

He will stop winding about and go that way, then, away from the red.

grassland grassland grassland animals grassland grassland goblins?

They're camped near a hill cooking a rabbit over a fire, little green dudes with large ears and crude clothing and tools. They don't see the road when it's still a mile off.

People! Weird looking people, but definitely people!

He can see a mile away but he can't speak a mile away; he hustles in that direction instead.

The grass around here is a bit thick, and they're not paying that much attention to their surroundings, so they only notice the vanishing grass when it's a couple dozen meters away. Does he speak up by then?

Not quite. It's really better to be close enough that he doesn't have to shout.

They startle!

"Monster!" one shouts, pointing at the path.

        "Scatter!" a bigger one barks.

They flee in all directions. They've never seen anything like this before, but that's not a good reason not to run. That's how you die.

"Big tree!" the first one yells as they run.

"I'm not dangerous!" he shouts in a hundred voices speaking a hundred languages and yet somehow perfectly comprehensibly.

HOLY SHIT THAT'S TERRIFYING

They're going to run faster.

...okay.

He'll wait a little while - maybe a day - to see if they come back. It'd be much more efficient to have directions to someplace worth being than to keep making essentially random claims.

They don't come back. If he really wants to track them, some of them don't make it outside his mile-range sensory radius before slowing and heading somewhere to the right of the direction he was originally going in.

Huh.

Well, it's better not to scare people if he can help it. He'll angle to the left a few degrees and keep going.

grassland pond grassland grassland road!

It's a dirt road, but a nice and wide one, with evidence of tracks indicating it's still in significant use.

Ooh!

He'll give this one a couple days, too, once he's met up with it. Interesting as the new location is, all this territory-claiming is getting expensive.