"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" says a sapient being, hurtling down from the sky, trying to catch herself with hastily sprouted wings.

She manages to get air under them before she hits the treeline, and soars.

She is above a river, which winds its way toward something low and dark on the horizon to the east, and off into rolling hills in the west.

This is a big alucine. It'll have portals to somewhere she's heard of, she just has to find them - there's no way she's going to be able to locate the exact point in the sky where the one she came through let out, what idiot ostimancer puts a portal in the sky? She flies along the river, east, looking for a town.

The sun is low in the sky, afternoon turning into evening. Eventually she encounters the collapsed remains of a wall, curving around several collapsed buildings and with a few more collapsed buildings outside it.

Huh.

She lands anyway.

"HELLO? ANYBODY HOME?"

The street she lands on was once cobblestone, but a lot of the stones are now cracked or missing. A parrot, blue and green with large purple patches on its wings, flies up and circles her once, looking at her curiously.

"Hey bird." She'd been going to put her wings away if she found anybody to talk to but she'll probably fly on again in a minute, hardly seems worth it. Maybe it'll make her seem more interesting to a bird.

The parrot lands near her and hoots softly.

Do parrots usually hoot? Well, a parrot's better than nothing for company. She holds out a hand to it; she knew a guy with a cockatiel that would step onto his hand.

It looks at her hand, then at her, but doesn't seem interested in climbing aboard.

Will it let her pet it?

If she moves slowly, yes it will! It's soft.

How about picking it up?

It doesn't approve of this behavior! It hops out of her hands and settles a good ways off to eat some berries from a shrub growing out of the street.

Okay. Not a viable company substitute. She wanders the ruins a little.

The remains of a couple of towers stand on either side of the river where it flows into the city. One of the buildings near them is relatively large and intact, though most of the roof is still gone and the stone walls are still variously battered, cracked, and scorched.

Wow.

She goes into the relatively intact building to look around.

Yeah, a whole lot of stuff has happened to this building and it didn't benefit from most of it. It has a hallway with a few rooms branching off it. Small plants are growing on a lot of the surfaces.

Any stuff left behind?

This room used to be an office, with a metal fountain pen and chipped ceramic inkwell still lying on the floor. The second room she looks in has a strange ceramic tablet, engraved with a bunch of squares and rectangles. The smaller squares have unrecognizable characters on them; the larger rectangles have those characters strung together into unrecognizable words.

There's more to the building over that way, if she wants to keep exploring.

Might as well.

She finds a room that opens onto the river, containing a set of scales and a brass plate engraved with more of the unfamiliar writing. There's also a large, once-grand chamber with about half of a giant chandelier hanging from what remains of the ceiling and a small pressable-looking panel on the wall.

........press?

Some of the bits on the many ends of the chandelier light up! Several others explode! Bits of glass fall on the floor.

Goodness.

She departs the building and takes off and continues along the river, looking for a more inhabited city.