Oh good. In that case she's going to head off again.

She has to cross one of those weirdly smooth stone roads (there's a wire strung along it on poles, but it's much too high to work as a fence).  In less than an hour she ends up on a slight grassy hill where she can see more of the surrounding terrain:  a cluster of villages ahead, a small lake and some bushes to the east, a very flat field with a tower next to it to the west.

Also the ??dragon?? is flying over again, closer than last time.

She can't hide from a dragon up here, so she'll have to just hope it doesn't notice her.

Her waterskin is getting pretty low by this point, so she veers towards the lake. (She's heard that pure water can make you sick if it doesn't come from a priest, but it's not like she can just ask a priest for water, so... hopefully that was just something the Asmodeans made up so that everyone would think they needed the priests around?)

The dragon once again flies away without appearing to take any notice of her.

She has to route around some houses, and part of the lake is fenced off for some reason, but if she doesn't want to jump a fence she can find a part that isn't.  It's all surrounded by reeds and hard to get to any clear-looking water though.  There are a few small wooden piers that would make that easier, but there's a man fishing off one of them and within clear view of the other two.

Well, that's not great. Can she tell anything about the man from where she's standing? A regular farmer might not turn her in, especially if he assumes she's got a legitimate reason to be traveling. 

He's wearing weird clothes - they're just cut completely differently from what she's used to, and there's something odd about the fabric too, and his shirt and hat are brightly colored in a way you wouldn't expect a regular farmer to be able to afford.  But then again, most of the people she's seen here were wearing weirdly bright things.  Except the black-uniformed man near the castle.  This guy here is clearly not wearing a uniform, at least.

He's old, his hair mostly grey, and acting pretty much like a normal farmer?  He looks kind of bored, isn't particularly alert.  He has some bags and baskets arranged like he's been here for a while.  Occasionally he takes a drink from a glass bottle.

Old is good, if he decides to make an issue out of her being here she might be able to leave faster than he manages to tell anyone. She'll head over to whichever dock is farthest from the one he's on and fill up her waterskin.

He watches her for a moment, frowning vaguely. 

"Good morning!  What're you doing with that water?"  He has to shout a bit because of the distance, but he doesn't sound annoyed or look like he's about to move from where he's sitting.

That's a really weird question, it's not like there are lots of different reasons for people to dip their waterskin in a lake. It's going to really suck if it turns out that the local lord has forbidden people from drinking from the lake on pain of death or something.

"Filling up my waterskin!" she shouts back.

(He will hear her speaking Polish.)

"Your what?"  Confused squinting.  "You know you shouldn't drink that, right?"

"This is my first time passing through this village, where do people around here get water to drink?"

Probably the answer is 'from the priest' but if he tells her to talk to the priest she can just pretend she's going to and not actually do it.

"From... the tap?  Or the well, I guess, if they haven't got a tap.  But if you want water to drink right away you gotta buy mineral at the store.  Your parents not teach you that?"

What's a tap? ...The priest here makes people pay for water?

Probably that's less important than figuring out how to answer his actual question without sounding incredibly suspicious.

"I'm not from around here, we didn't have a lake back home." She's pretty sure there aren't that many lakes in the area, so it shouldn't contradict anything else about her story, and she already admitted she wasn't local.

"It's not about--" he makes a frustrated noise and gives up on explaining the multiple levels on which one should know not to drink unboiled lake water.  "Where are your parents, anyway?  Or your teachers or whoever you're here with?"

"I'm sixteen," she lies.

"Sure, fine, and you're doing what exactly?"

"I've got business at the markets in Dekarium." That one she did have planned in advance.

... He doesn't know where that is, but he's not going to admit that to the weird stranger girl.  Sounds far away, though.  Maybe she's foreign?  She doesn't sound foreign, but what does he know.  And the airport is right there.

"Well, go get your train or whatever, and don't drink fucking lakewater!"

He turns back to his fishing, but looks over at her again a moment later.

Well, in that case she's going to leave, and hope he doesn't decide to tell the priest on her.

He doesn't look to be about to do anything any time soon. 

Where does she go next?

She's heading north-ish again, heading a little bit east to avoid the village if necessary.

...If she just eats the food she brought with her she's going to run out pretty quickly. Is there anything growing around here that looks like she could just eat it, without needing to do a bunch of extra work to it that'll slow her down? Like, apples or something, she's not going to start eating random plants she doesn't recognize.

Avoiding villages is getting increasingly hard, but the first problem with going north is that there is a large road with... fast noisy incomprehensible things... going along it, not constantly, but frequently enough to be kind of frightening.  There's a stream that the road goes over - she could go in it and under the bridge, if she doesn't want to get too close to the things?

Before that area there are some fields with young corn at the stage where it's pretty edible raw.  (You can kind of eat young wheat too, and there's more of that, but it's really a lot of work.)  No apple trees or anything of that sort around here.

Alright, in that case she'll take some young corn when no one's looking and head on her— what the Abyss are those??? She didn't know ??constructs?? like that even existed.

Well, she's definitely not going anywhere near the weird constructs. Going in the stream also seems like a bad idea, though, she doesn't have another set of clothes if these ones get wet. Is there room under the bridge to squeeze past the stream without actually getting wet?

It'll be a tight fit, but she can squeeze through the bushes on the bank where they go under the bridge.  (It won't be great for her clothes, but at least they'll be dry.)  The stream is also very small, she could take her shoes off hike and her clothes up to her knees and just get her feet muddy.

Either way, the ??constructs?? zoom past noisily and leave her alone. 

The little stream keeps going north, and following it makes her life easier - there's really rather a lot of villages here, one on the right before the big road and another one after, and a large one on the left, but they leave the stream with enough empty grassy space that she can walk along it and not have to get too close to any houses.  (Maybe it floods sometimes?)

It gets worse after about an hour's walk - a road along the west side of the stream, then another on the east side, and then a place with two big road-bridges going over it and some large buildings next to them.  Does she want to risk getting through there, or backtrack a while to the stripe of forest that went from the east to the west?

... One of the bridges has an even worse ??construct?? curving over it, like some kind of giant and disturbingly fast metal millipede, making a truly incredible racket!

Oh, if it's shallow enough that she isn't going to get her clothes wet, walking in the stream is probably a good idea — it'll be harder for anyone to follow her if she's not leaving a trail. ...She thinks. 

How late is it when she gets to the big buildings? Would she even have time to make it back to the forest without it getting dark?