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In the middle of self-recriminations about preparing stupid spells, Blai appears in a cemetery.
It's dark, so it takes him a Light spell to notice that it's a cemetery, but while the range of headstone styles is unfamiliar the spacing and the inscriptions give it away. It doesn't look super actively haunted, so it's not an emergency, but he keeps one hand on his holy symbol and one on his mace as he picks his way across the grounds, looking for buildings or something.
Wow, he must be on at least another continent. "Comprehend Languages?" he says, since the name of the spell is just the words used to cast it and that might be universal.
Agreed: shrug.
She considers him for a moment longer, then makes an inviting gesture and takes a couple steps away to see if he follows.
Local adventurer tucks her wooden stake into her bag and takes him on a stroll through a pretty bewildering town. The buildings are often brick but have a truly absurd amount of glass and a few less recognizable materials, and there are raised paths lining the sides of the roads, perhaps partly explained by the alien vehicles traversing the middle bits at speeds ranging from brisk to alarming. All the signage is foreign, and some of it glows. Even the trash in the streets is foreign.
She's keeping an eye on him to see if he has anything to say or is likely to walk into traffic.
He is briefly about to walk into traffic but then discovers that traffic and does not do that again, instead opting to follow her just short of directly registering her footsteps. He looks at all the stuff, shining the holy symbol at things that are not lit enough, though really things are startlingly lit here.
Yeah that's about what she thought.
After a few turns they find themselves in a quieter residential neighbourhood, with numbered houses and no neon signs. A few turns after that, she strides up to the door of one of those houses, unlocks it, calls out a foreign greeting into the interior, and ushers him inside.
Over the course of the walk he says something a couple times - the same thing, accompanied by a gesture - but it's neither normal conversational volume nor directed at her.
Into the house he goes.
A subtle sensation as he passes the threshold might be magical in nature, or just a product of getting in out of the mild evening chill. The house is as relentlessly foreign as everything else he's seen so far, but does seem to contain chairs and tables, in addition to this lady trotting down the stairs and engaging in incomprehensible conversation with the adventurer who brought him here. Despite some differences in coloration and other details, they have a clear family resemblance.
Was that a Forbiddance? Kind of rude to make someone walk through a Forbiddance you can't warn them about but those monsters were awfully close to a city, maybe it's unavoidable as a security precaution or she subtly alignment-read him and knew he'd be fine? Or it was some totally other thing. He will make for a chair with a view toward not sitting in it if they make "what, how can you be so rude" faces at him.
What if, instead of making faces, she fetches snacks? Here is a tin of shortbread cookies. The probable lady of the house is munching one already.
The adventurer grabs a cookie too, though she doesn't take a bite right away, being still in the middle of (probably) relating the story of how she brought a weird guy who doesn't speak the language into their house.
Sharing food is an important aspect of hospitality and fellowship! It's in the Acts! He will accept a cookie if they're offering. - wow that's really sweet.
Blah blah foreign blah blah possibly miming how the fight with the vampires was going when she crossed his path.
Nodding along, interjecting occasional questions, setting the cookie tin down on the coffee table where they can all reach it and moving to sit in an armchair across from Blai. There's a chess set on the smaller table next to her, set up looking like someone was partway through a game and then bumped the table and knocked over half the pieces.
The adventurer catches that look and interrupts herself to gesture between Blai and the chess set with an incomprehensible question.
Her relative(?) perks up, evidently also interested in hearing the answer to Blai <-> Chess (?).
...he can set up the board into a fresh game? Actually he can start doing that, pause on the queen, and then set her on a random square and check if they do Crusading Queen moves here: yes, no?
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