...a place.

It's a small place, and a dark place. The things will not have light here unless they brought their own.

There is stone here, and dirt, and water. The chunk of savanna wedges itself across a gap between two flat slabs of rock; the rest of the things scatter into a low untidy heap across one of its new neighbours. About ten feet in, a ragged wall of dirt halts the advance of the smallest and most adventurous items.

One that is more adventurous than the local average, but not particularly small, wakes up.

She is very confused about several things, such as where she is, who she is — well, that's concerning and distracting from her apparently inert environment for a while.

Eventually she notices that she is wearing things and clothing may contains useful objects and a practiced routine tells her to open this familiar pouch and pull out a flashlight.

The flashlight illuminates:

stone above;

stone below;

stone ahead;

rough dirt walls of unnerving regularity to the left;

a somewhat battered chunk of displaced grassland to the right;

miscellaneous interdimensional junk all over everything.

Past the savanna-bridge, the beam of the flashlight finds no wall, nor any other vertical thing. The floor goes on for a bit and then stops, with only blackness beyond.

Behind her, the dirt walls close in to form a sort of broad corridor, which bends sharply to what for lack of a better scheme we will call the west.

Okay. Nothing is happening. None of this junk — is hers? — well, looks obviously relevant.

She checks around the bend, first without the flashlight in case it would be noticed.

Without the flashlight: silence, darkness.

With the flashlight: silence, a winding passage with a stone floor and dirt walls.

She goes back to examine the landing site. (Ow.) She has no backup and no plan (?) so she should see what resources are available before stirring up trouble. Any of this junk have an identifiable use?

The junk includes (but is not limited to):

several sparkly rocks;

a single cinnamon heart candy, or something that strongly resembles one, sitting pristine on the bare rock floor;

several non-sparkly rocks;

an improbably intact rose, with pale blue petals and a snow-white stem;

a crystal vial of some liquid which could at least plausibly be water;

a scrap of old dried bark, worn and crumbling;

a bag of dice, half spilled across the floor, made of heavy black stone and engraved with unfamiliar symbols;

a tangled skein of pink acrylic yarn;

a bright brass coin with a stylized sunburst on one side and unfamiliar writing around the rim;

a bandolier of obsidian throwing knives;

a leatherbound book with no title on the cover;

an untidy pile of once-neatly-folded clothes;

a scattering of coal lumps;

a piece of furniture that might perhaps a chair for a nonhuman body plan;

and many items less identifiable.

Some of this is probably useless, some of this is Do Not Touch The Artifact. She pockets the coin and the dice as possibly identifiable. What's the book?

The left-hand page is a very short Table of Contents. The right-hand page is titled Introduction to the Exocontinual Manual.

In a language she's never read before.

She — does not drop the book in surprise, because flailing in the presence of weird stuff is a bad idea. (Why is it a bad idea? She cannot remember examples, only find these habits, protocols, procedures drilled until they are automatic.)

She puts it down and thinks for a minute, then picks it up again. Information is valuable.

The Exocontinual Manual is an information storage, gathering, and analysis device designed to adapt and become applicable to the circumstances it finds itself in. Those who find copies of it should consider it available for their use.

The introduction goes on to briefly explain its history (flung randomly across the multiverse by entities often known in their home world as “the Powers that Be”, among many other names; this particular instance seems to have encountered some kind of — glitch — but here is as good as anywhere), and describe its general and projected-for-this-instance capabilities.

The next section contains concisely-listed facts about the local environment, such as a catalog of the contents thereof. It has guesses about what's in her pockets. It's good at guessing. It also has some guesses about the junk, but with much less certainty since none of it is related to any of the rest of it. It tentatively labels some of the rocks, the heart, the rose, the vial, the throwing knives, and the chair as Magic.

A footnote directs her to the glossary, which defines magic as, in its terminology, any of several sorts of fundamental principles of universes which tend to form a recognizable cluster; most notably, they often seem to cause there to be significance to categories that are natural to local personlike minds (loosely speaking, non-reductionism), resulting in effects such as enabling resurrection from not even a corpse, making certain words or mental actions have dramatic physical effects, or many other possibilities.

…ooookay, allegedly friendly book. You seem useful. You can come along while she checks out the corridor further.

The corridor twists oddly. Some sections are built at too-sharp right angles, as though excavated with a guillotine; others curve in a more natural way, with their walls a little rougher and more worn down, although still very straight; and then there's a section that seems to be built on a hex grid, with the walls of its straight segments zigzagging accordion-fashion to follow the invisible lines, each cell of the grid being about three meters on a side.

That section bends around a single hexspace of dirt to turn back the way it came, and then segues into another rough curve, which finally opens out into a sharp-cut square chamber.

In the middle of the chamber there is... a thing.

It's low and mostly flat, set into the stone floor. It glints a metallic yellow in the beam of her flashlight. It looks like... a foundation, perhaps, or an armature, four broad ribbonlike arms splayed outward from a central well. If you considered the room as conforming to a square grid system, the thing would take up precisely the nine central squares of a 5x5 grid, with the round depression in the center taking up slightly more than one square and the arms reaching from there toward the corners.

It's also not in great shape. Its arms appear to be twisted and sheared as though mangled by some great force. An explosion could have done it, but an explosion would have left traces on the surrounding walls, and there aren't any. The entire rest of the room is pristine.

That sure looks like the sort of thing one does not go stand in the middle of for no reason.

Hey, book?

The book now has a map! It's on Page 2.1. Presumably if you're a contents-changing book, integer page numbers are awkward.

The map says that this thing is Quiescent Unknown Complex Magic.

Yep, definitely the sort of thing one does not go stand in the middle of for no reason.

She examines the walls for secret passages or something and then goes back to the room of junk to examine its weirder perimeter.

Standing on the side of the crevice where she first arrived, the far wall across the savanna-bridge looks like simple perfect darkness. The floor and ceiling and intersecting walls all go up to it and... stop. Stone and dirt gives way sharply to a black absence.

It's time for the time-honored experimental technique of chucking a rock lump of coal at it.

The lump of coal passes through that dark surface as though it isn't there, and then the lump of coal isn't there either.

The map helpfully acquires unknown-but-probably-extreme-hazard markings. It also notes that the chunk of savanna probably has magic.

It does not indicate the presence of any other possible exits.

Welp, time to poke some less-promising unknowns. How about those artifacts?

The book has a handy list with improved guesses, and drawings for identification.

1. Rock, with embedded unknown magic.
   
2. Rock, with embedded unknown machine.
   
3. Heart candy. Magic. Moderate confidence: produces a beneficial effect when consumed. Safe to handle.
   
4. Blue rose. Complex biological magic. Recommend avoiding skin contact.
   
5. Unknown machine, hidden under rubble.
   
6. Vial of liquid. Unknown magic. Safe to handle.
   
7. Obsidian throwing knives. Unknown magic. Recommend avoiding contact with blades.
   
8. Furniture. Unknown simple magic.
   

Unburying the fifth thing seems like a nice safe option.

The unknown machine hidden under rubble turns out to be... a sort of ray-gun-looking thing, fairly sleek but with discernible seams. That's probably ammunition or a power pack slotted into the grip, and the dial on the side might plausibly be for controlling effect strength in some way. There are little indicator lights, some green, some blue; one has the label SAFETY imprinted in the adjacent plastic in plain English.