The first thing he is aware of is pressure—firm, unchanging, unrelenting, strong almost to the point of being painful.  His body is pressed up against a rough, sloped surface, held in place by a smooth, steady, and eerily quiet wind that feels almost like the rush of a river current.

Pressed up? That's weird. Is there any ground below him? Does it feel like there's also gravity, but the wind is just stronger, or what?

The surface stretches away in three directions—left, right, and up—vast and gently curved like it might be the outer wall of a stadium, or the side of a rounded mountain.  There is ground below, almost within reach, covered in short, soft-looking blue grass bent almost sideways by the wind.  The ground itself slopes up and away from the surface, making the place where the grass meets the wall the lowest local point.  Further away are what might be bushes, or small trees—a tangle of rough vegetation, leaning over as if pressed down by the same invisible hand holding Alasdair against the wall.

This is definitely not what Alasdair expected to find when he broke the orb.

"Shit."

Also he didn't mean to break the orb before he got it back to the others.

"SHIT."

This was not the plan at all.

Could he still be in the right place? Is there any way at all that this is where he meant to go? Could he manage on his own?

Probably he needs to unpin himself from this... wind-trap... first.

Can he clamber down to the ground and keep a low enough profile to be able to move around against the wind?

Yes—barely.  It's like doing pushups the whole time, keeping his face from being scraped against the rough surface.

Great. He can move around.

Is there anywhere obvious to move to? He'd like to talk to someone, maybe, or find some buildings or any sign of civilization, and find out where he ended up. Any landmarks?

Even just a large tree or something that he could climb and get a look around would be good.

Up the gentle slope of the hill, the trees and bushes look the same as they stretch out both right and left.  With the wind blowing as hard as it is, it's not clear whether he could pull himself all the way to the nearest one, but it's not clear that he couldn't, either.

The wall isn't quite perpendicular to the wind—going to the left, he would be pushing "upstream."  Going to the right, "downstream."  It curves enough that, pressed up against it as he is, he can't see very far at all.  There aren't any obvious landmarks.  From where Alasdair is right now, the world is just grass, wall, hill, and deep blue sky.

Oh, and the sun, a fist or so above the horizon, almost directly uphill.

Well, all other things being equal, he might as well go downstream? He sets off along the wall to the easier, righthand side.

He is going to be seriously pissed if this is an unexplored dead-end world and not a hub. So pissed. Also he's probably going to die, hungry and alone. But there is a wall, right, and it doesn't look natural, so at worst this is maybe some kind of mining colony or something? Why is there so much wind? Is this place just naturally windy or was that engineered for some reason?

He's been breathing for a while now and hasn't passed out. So the air is good, at least? Does it taste funny? What color is the sun? Does the grass look edible? He really doesn't want to eat grass and die.

The sun seems to look "normal."  Or at least, its light is white with a smidge of yellow that could be appropriate for morning or afternoon, and it's warming the wind well enough that there doesn't seem to be any danger of getting too cold (yet, anyway).  The air smells fresh and almost sweet, with hints of forest-y, herbal-y scents from the upwind plant life.  The grass is ... hmm, looking at it more closely, is it grass?  It's some kind of plant, but it might not be "grass."  More like thousands and thousands of long, very narrow leaves, but unlike grass each leaf narrows to a thin wooden stem just before it plunges into the soil.  Weird.

As the wall curves, it gets easier to walk and easier to not-get-scraped-up-against-it, but all of the pressure that isn't pushing him into the wall is starting to push him along the wall.  So far it's not a problem, but...

Alasdair stops to reevaluate. It would suck to start getting blown along by the wind, dragged on his face across the ground. But he doesn't want to go upwind either, that would be exhausting and he's already conscious that he might be in a managing-calories situation. Maybe he should climb either the wall or the hill? Which one seems more likely to get him somewhere?

The wall seems to curve upward almost the same way that it curves to the right—like a section carved out of a sphere, maybe.  Climbing up is an option, but it looks likely to have the same issue of the surface eventually becoming parallel to the wind.  Every choice seems like a gamble, but sticking on the ground at least gives him access to the grass—easier to drag yourself back upwind with grass to pull on than to climb back down the wall if you go too far.

It's not too bad yet, in either case.  He could probably go as-far-as-he-can-currently-see, given the curve, at least two or three more times before reaching a point of no return.

Let's try going up the hill! Alasdair walks low, or even crawls if he has to. If it's too steep, he'll take it at an angle. Does he seem to be getting anywhere useful? Can he see anything new?

It's hard going, but after maybe fifteen minutes of struggle, he makes it to the first line of shrubs, a few hundred paces away from the wall.  Fortunately, they provide a bit of shelter from the wind, and for the first time he can sit and catch his breath without having to do anything.

Looking back, he can see that the wall is not a sphere, but a sort of curved wedge-shape, like the prow of a ship, or the snowplow of a giant train, or a pair of medieval shields held together at angles, or some kind of gigantic beak.  It's bigger than a stadium but smaller than a mountain, each of the two smooth curves large enough that, if they were flat, it would take him minutes to run from one end to the other.

He's not quite centered, so he can only really properly see the side he was previously crawling along.  But that's enough to see that the wall ends, in a curled catcher-ridge like some kind of gutter, and that there's a dark, doorish-looking rectangle down by the ground.  Past it, a line of ... hedge?  Forest? ... tangled foliage takes up where more wall would have been.

He hasn't gained all that much height, but he can see other hills around to either side.  They're blasted stone on the windward face, with soil and grass and plants only where protected by the slope.  The wind must be really strong where it's not at least a little bit blocked.

Alasdair breathes out. He's not going to die! Well, he still might die. But not right away, and not without anything else happening first. He's not just going to starve to death while getting blown against a weird wall in a weird blue world. At least one additional thing will happen to him before that. Like maybe he'll go through that door, or maybe he'll set up camp downwind of one of these beak-hills.

A moment later, he sobers. This really does not look anything like a hub world, though, does it? Not only does he have to figure out where he is, how to survive here, and how to leave here, even once he's done all that he'll still have all of his old problems back. The orb was supposed to be their ticket forward, to progress and help, and instead it just took him here.

Nothing he can do about that now.

Can he scramble back down the hill at an efficient angle to get a look at that door thing? Can he do it kind of fast, actually, since he's going downhill and with the wind? Can it be... a little fun, maybe?

Whether it's a little fun depends on how much of a dealbreaker scrapes and bruises are.  It's easy going at first, but the point-of-no-return is definitely a good ways shy of the gutter-ridge thing, and it becomes obvious why the gutter-ridge thing is there when he tumbles into it.  Thankfully, it's some kind of softish, dense, foamy material, so it doesn't seem like he's broken any bones.

The door is unlocked, and swings inward, revealing an unlit chamber with a single table.  There's another door that looks like it leads further in, a basket of what look like baked goods of some kind, and a dangling chain stretching upward through a small hole in the ceiling.

Alasdair is 24% scrapes and bruises by volume, so scrambling down the hill is excellent, and he bounces off the gutter-ridge-foam with a grin. He might even climb back up and do it again if he weren't dying of curiosity about what's inside the door.

Baked goods? "Don't mind if I do," he mutters before stuffing one in his mouth. He doesn't bother to examine it first. He realizes that perhaps this is a growing-boy trap and if so he's not going to fight it.

But he's more suspicious about the dangling chain. What the fuck is that about. He peers upward, looking for clues, as he continues to tear off pieces of pastry with his teeth.

He tentatively tugs the chain, quite gently, while standing back as far as he can. He's seen those shows where a bucket of green goo lands on your head after you pull a rope and he's not falling for that.

There's a clanking and a whirring, as of some mechanism being spurred into motion, and a second later a quite-loud but also quite-pleasant sounding gonggg fills the chamber.  It sounds less like the sound was intended to be heard in the room, and more like a bell some distance away that happened to still be audible from where he's sitting.

Okay so maybe he should have investigated the second door first, but what's done is done. He'll stuff most of the pastries in his pockets, one more in his mouth and then... where should he go? He'd rather not just be standing there when... whoever... arrives. It would be better to observe from some nearby vantage point, but there's just not much cover.

Would it work at all to go back out by the foam catcher thingie and maybe scramble around to another nearby hill, or will he completely lose line of sight on the main door? Another option is to go through the second door, though that feels like walking further into a potential trap.

The other hills were mostly just vegetation and stone—the wall he's currently inside of was the only one in sight.  It might just barely be possible to climb back away from the gutter, but the wind was almost parallel to the wall at that point—probably it would involve at least a few minutes of lying flat on the ground and pulling himself along the grass, directly against the current.

He could maybe climb up inside the gutter ridge—with the wind blowing so directly into it, he could inch his way upward along the curve of the wall, higher and higher.  

And yes, he could try the inner door.

He's not sure how much time he actually has, so he'll try the door, carefully, and see if he can get a quick look before he makes a decision.

The door is locked.

Okay! Well, that settles that, then! Out he goes, and up the gutter ridge, until he's well above the height where people usually look when they're not really looking. And then he'll just brace himself and hang out for a while and see what happens.

It takes almost thirty minutes, but eventually there are sounds of motion from inside the room—the chunk of a lock turning, the sweep of the inner door opening, scuffing steps, a voice that sounds confused.  Eventually, the outer door opens, too, and a white and softly feathered head pokes out, bracing against the wind, and looks from side to side.

Another moment passes, and the creature steps fully into view, the wind pressing it up against the foam pad of the gutter.  It has two legs, two arms, wide eyes and a small beakish snout.  What isn't covered in white down is bronze and pebbled.

The creature pulls itself to the edge of the gutter, peers around to look downwind, scratches its head, mutters, and then goes back inside, closing the door behind it.

More evidence he's badly off-track and not in the right place at all. Where is he? How's he going to get out of here?

That creature did not look like a long-lost cousin, even a very genetically engineered one. It did seem to sort of make sense, though. The muttering and head scratching seemed like a thing a person would do. It didn't give off an air of danger or aggression. It looked more like a janitor or a lunch lady.

Alasdair thinks for a moment, but only a moment. This is just clearly, obviously, the only promising option. He's gonna go talk to the featherhead.

He scrambles back down the gutter ridge, bouncing from side to side until he's about eight feet above the ground and he just drops the rest of the way and lands in a practiced crouch. He goes back in the main door.

"Hello? You there?"