Good heavens. Where and when is she?

There are mountains in the distance, and the ocean somewhat closer. She is in what is properly called a dry Mediterranean forest - sparse pines fading away smoothly into scrub and grass - and absolutely all of the vegetation is native to the old world. A smallish river meets the sea nearby.

There is some kind of human habitation not far away. Very firmly delineated fields of wheat and vegetables grow in neat squares; a road runs beside the fields and then down to a couple of granaries, and then to a gatehouse such as belongs in the middle of a thick ancient city wall. There is not, in fact, a city wall. On the other side of the gatehouse is a single square loop of road, and built along the sides of this road there are an assortment of buildings including five temples (each with a statue in front), a theater, and a collection of small terracotta-roofed houses that, on close inspection, are in fact unfinished and would be easy to expand both outward and upward, but are done enough for now to keep the weather out. Opposite the gate to the farms is another gate leading to another road leading down to some industry by the river. There are a number of people out and about, including priests in white robes, a lady in green going door to door selling bags of flour, and someone very official-looking carrying a sword.

This doesn't look like the correct century or the correct country*. If she can return to them she will give her contact at the Department of Mysteries an earful. In the meantime, she conceals her wand up her sleeve and approaches the official.

"Good day to you. May I ask what town this is, and the current day and year?" Muggles, in her experience, will accept quite a lot of weirdness if you act like it's perfectly normal.

*Space is a kind of time, after all, or how would Time Turners put you in the same room while the earth is spinning?

"...I don't think I woke up this morning speaking English," he says, confused, "but good day to you too! This is Tingis in the year six hundred thirty five. It's the day before the ides of June. Do you need help getting somewhere?"

She's fairly surprised to get a shared language on the first try . . . and apparently so is he. That's not how magic usually works. But six hundred and thirty five is before even Merlin's day, and a great deal of knowledge has been lost since then.

"I'm new in town and interested in learning my way around. Is suddenly speaking new languages a usual occurrence here?"

"No, only from hearing people talk for months or going to school. I can take you for a walk around town now."

"I would appreciate that."

She's going to need to spend quite some time in this time period working on a way to get back, which means getting oriented and perhaps participating in local society. It's well before the Statute of Secrecy or even the pre-Statute period of increasing concealment, so she expects to have no trouble finding employment, but best to take the measure of the local magical community, if any, before attracting their attention.

He'll lead her around the loop of colorful mosaic pavement, explaining things as he goes. "Some of these houses have space for more people but I don't know which ones. The fountain you can see over there is where you can get clean drinking water. Those gardens are open to the public whenever you're not busy." He will continue in this vein until interrupted.

Hmmm, how to find out how much this person knows about magic without revealing how much she knows about it. "What sorts of people live here? What kinds of work are there to do?"

"Well, as you can see, the place isn't overflowing with patrician villas just yet. We've got an up and coming pottery industry and a library - no school for the kids yet but we'll have one soon - and we're working on building a bath-house - have you ever seen a Roman bath-house before?" He is of the opinion that bath-houses are an excellent demonstration of why it's a great idea to assimilate into Rome. It comes through in his tone.

"I haven't! A school and a bath-house both sound like excellent projects." You can't have too much education, and preindustrial muggles can't have too much hygiene. "Do most people here grow their own food and make their own clothes and so forth, or are there specialists in those as well?" She's hoping someone sells food, at least; it's not that duplicating a small amount of food indefinitely isn't doable, but when one is used to an army of house-elves with a massive kitchen duplicated food rather pales in comparison.

"The farms are through the gate over there, and at the market over there they’re packaging groceries for delivery. With an efficient, organized society and the blessings of Ceres almost no one needs to grow food. Everyone learns to spin yarn but it's mostly the job of people on shorter strings. They make enough for the rest of us."

"Ceres" sounds like a wizard operating openly. And possibly claiming to be a god. . . . Perhaps she should take advantage of not having introduced herself yet to go by an alias. "Say more about the blessings of Ceres? That sounds very convenient. And what does it mean for some people to be on shorter strings?"

"Well, you know, the gods want to be worshiped, so when we do, they reward us, like by making all the wheat on all our farms grow up overnight. And I mean... people who are almost catatonic can still spin if you put the drop spindle in their hand. You obviously are on fairly long strings yourself since you made it here by yourself."

She needs a good deal more information to come to any firm conclusions but she expects to end up disapproving of something here. "Do you know what causes people to be on short strings?"

"I guess some people are born that way."

Maybe it's not the "gods", then. "Do people always stay they way they're born, or are there people who are alright as children and then start having problems later? Or the reverse?"

"...Have you... never met people before?"

"I'm from very far away--perhaps you've heard of Britain, or Brittania? There nearly everyone can walk around and speak and go wherever they choose, and almost no-one is catatonic unless they've had something very terrible happen to them."

"Incredible," he says, pleased to have discovered an English word with the precise double meaning he wants.

Well she can hardly blame him for being skeptical, if her situation is as absurd to him as the reverse. "Yes, it's very convenient, except for leaving me ignorant of how things work in places like this one."

"Well, it's... hard to do things, right? Hard to get started, hard to stop, hard to do anything new. So you're better at it when you're better at everything else, you know, when you're not tired or hungry, when you're old enough you've learned how and not so old you've forgotten yet - do people where you're from get senile and then die?"

If nothing else gets them first, yes. "Yes, I'm afraid that's the same everywhere. But for people in Britain, doing things is easy unless the activity itself requires physical strength, or expertise, or some such thing."

"I don’t know whether to expect that to lead to the greatest society the world has ever seen or destroy everything in civil war."

"Both. But the wars end, and we keep going."