It's not like she talks that much about her family, either. (Dad's a fucking jerk who barely talks to mom. Mom's a hothouse farmer who tries her best. No siblings. She misses some of her crafting-assistants from home though, they were almost like friends.)

For travel, she builds, with the affordance to purchase materials actually fit for purpose, a small bevy of travelling gear- A cold box and camp stove, a powered rope spool and hook, several additional lights, motion detectors...

And weapons. She has a launcher that will throw hand-sized bombs with options designed for shrapnel, acid, sticky goo, smoke, and fire. (The ammunition is expensive to make.) She has another power saw and has been practicing with it. She makes a single shot pistol as a holdout weapon, if Belmarniss wants it. She has light chainmail and a sort of wire shroud that will zap hostiles that touch her. She upgrades Shroomy several times, mostly to improve the battery and armor him up a bit.

They can do a test camp, just barely past the farm belt, to make sure they don't realize they've forgotten something as soon as they've moved out of the workshop cave.

Then they can sell off the strawberry (etcetera) machinery to a farmer in exchange for a lot of dried mushrooms and some cash, though Belmarniss does manage to find a farmer she likes well enough that she feels obliged to mention that they'll break down without alchemical-barbarian maintenance and Waltana might not ever come back to the area.

And they can start going up.

The city is probably not more than a mile or two underground. But there isn't exactly a staircase. There are routes, but they're not widely distributed in map form. Belmarniss has a loose idea of what direction to start from and from there their main guide is gravity, stymied at every turn by inconvenient walls.

She gives the growzaps a two years, maybe three or four, as long as you carefully follow these cleaning instructions and use this handful of spares for the delicate forking prongs when they inevitably corrode.

Well, she has a rock-capable saw and a rope launcher if those come in handy? It's not like they have any particular deadline. Waltana still spends much of their limited downtime writing out the principles of engineering and industry as best she can remember, even a few days difference in the big spool up could matter a lot. Chemical science is going to be the biggest hurdle, most likely.

The thing is, there has to be a traversible route to the surface (or several), because the raiders get there and back; throwing a grappling hook across an impassable gap or cutting a hole in a wall might find them a shortcut but it might also not, and bearing patiently up-when-possible through walkable caves will eventually work. Belmarniss considers it a few times but usually doesn't judge it worthwhile, though sometimes she'll cast Light on a spare crossbow bolt and shoot it beyond the range of her darkvision to get a look at whatever they're passing up.

There are monsters. Belmarniss just about solos a rust monster, yelping at Waltana to get their metal things to safety; Belmarniss is wearing much less of the stuff. They have to dispatch a pack of slurks and it takes a while to Prestidigitate all the goop off afterwards, but they can eat one afterwards for variety. They find an injured and slowly starving cave fisher; they can put it out of its misery and collect the loot from its lair off all its prior prey, though none of it's that interesting, mostly just clothes and a few coins.

The slurk goo and cave fisher glands will make very good sticky grenades, actually! If it doesn't make sense to sell them later instead. Her tolerance for grossness goes way up when there is something useful to be gotten.

--These guys could have been her. But they weren't, and now she's armed, and- Well, that's the past.

It's cheering that the monster goop can be rendered useful! Belmarniss will help put things together if that's useful.

It takes them three weeks to find sunlight.

Sun!!!

-Don't let your guard down, not at the moment of triumph, nope. Launcher remains at the ready as she checks out the surface terrain.

"Oh gods, I hate it, how do you live like this," says Belmarniss, burrowing into her hood. "Penumbra. Oh that's better. I guess at least it's colorful??"

They have emerged onto a hillside. It's not even that bright, the sun is at a reasonable morning or possibly afternoon angle and there's trees.

"Oh, it's much worse when there's snow about. Endless white glare in all directions. This is pretty!"

She wouldn't know an oak from an aspen, the trees won't be much help... Any water visible, or roads?

Nothing obvious! Just woods and birds and such. Some of the trees are stumps, so somebody cuts wood here.

"Remind me to make you tinted glasses," she says, sketching the shape of several nearby hills so they can find the cave again if they ever want to. "If we go downhill we'll find a river, probably, and civilization's all about their rivers."

"Downhill it is."

Down down down. There's not actually a stream or anything right at the bottom of this particular hill.

Most plains aren't perfectly level. She'll make an untrained Navigate check choose the most verdant-looking or most stump'd direction?

"I'm not really an expert surface navigator, I should mention. But someone's around," she indicates a stump.

"This close to the aperture that could be drow, there are occasionally fancy things made of wood down there and they don't have to steal everything if that's not actually easier."

"...Other option if looking for water doesn't pan out in a couple hours, I did make a compass, we just go in one specific direction and find something eventually."

"I'd had the idea that you could just follow the sky fireball, does that not work?"

She waves a hand wafflingly. "It does. Compass is more reliable and precise... If Golarion has the same kind of magnetic poles as I'm used to, which isn't a given. Let's check both."

What direction is the sun in right now, she checks, westish or eastish?

According to her compass, westish.

"Sun's heading down right now, and west is over that way, unless I missed something big. Probably we want to clear the immediate surrounds of the cave."

"Clear them? You don't think we should strike out in some direction and go till we're tired?"

"-Sorry, weird turn of phrase, I meant get away from them. As in 'clearance of a part from its neighbors'."

"Oh, gotcha, sure. - if I recall correctly, Taldor has its coasts to the... southwest, and if we wind up going west enough to hit the next country we get Andoran, which is probably also fine. Does southwest look good to you from here?"

She examines that direction for mountains on the horizon.

"...Looks good to me, and sooner started sooner finished."

Off they go southwest. Belmarniss is casting her surefootedness cantrip and her anti-sunshine cantrip nigh-constantly.

She leads to pick the smoothest and flattest path and keep them on the correct general direction, in her slightly-more-familiar-with-the-surface way, and smushes down any grass or brush to make it easier on Belmarniss. And tries to remember to also glance around once in a while.