Neo nods.

So does Hailey. And they head off in two groups.

The hatch at the top of the stairs is a little stiff, but the mechanism holding it closed responds to a firm tug and the whole thing creaks open in fairly short order.

The hatch at the bottom of the stairs doesn't seem inclined to open at all. There's a handle, but it's at an awkward angle for levering the thing open, and seems to instead operate a shutter that irises open and closed over the porthole in the middle.

Hailey fights the bottom hatch a little more with Neo's help, then gives up if that proves insufficient, and follows the other girls upstairs.

The first obvious thing about the world above is the wall of thick billowing fog that surrounds this hilltop on all sides, swirling unnaturally with tendrils of darkness whose movements have nothing to do with the wind. Now and then, a tendril reaches out of the wall completely and sweeps along the ground, twisting this way and that before retracting into the fog.

In a few places, the wall is low enough for someone at ground level to see over the top. Some of those views show nothing but sky; some show distant hills, shrouded in a dim and ominous haze; and one shows even more distant mountains, dark against the blue-grey sky.

The sunlight is bright compared to the shine of the Mana Font, but thin and grey by any objective scale.

Scattered across the hilltop are a few trees, a handful of bushes, and an enormous amount of rubble. What stood here once must have been a tower as grand as any cathedral; now all that's left are heaps of splintered timber and broken rock, some of it showing deep gouges like it was torn apart by some landscape-eating beast.

"Well that's fucking ominous-looking," Hailey comments to a chorus of nods. "We've definitely got a threat here. Might just be the fog, might be something bigger. Probably something bigger."

Neo points at the surrounding vegetation, and starts inspecting it for wand crafter viability and ingredient possibilities. The other girls swiftly join her.

All the trees look to be the same species, very generically deciduous without calling to mind any specific Earth species. There's one little sapling, barely two feet high, that looks like a viable candidate for the Wand Crafter creation procedure. Unfortunately it's close enough to the edge of the fog that it might be in reach of those ominous tendrils. They'd need to either transplant it under that threat, or coax one of the taller trees to produce a seed and start from there.

Apart from that, the vegetation is unfamiliar but not too diverse. There's some bushes with plump red berries, reminiscent of a blueberry if a blueberry were the colour of fresh blood and the size of a ping-pong ball. A few flowers whose ice-blue petals are cold to the touch, some of them even bearing sparkling drops of frozen dew. Some orange-red flowers with scalding-hot petals, and some tangly shrubs whose wavy leaves look tough and durable.

A red-eyed rat pokes its twitching nose out of its burrow. It looks just about like a normal rat, except for those gleaming red eyes and the fact that its body is the size of a hefty watermelon.

"Yep, that's a RUS. We need wands. We need combat capability. Maya, look up the vegetation here. Hailey, conjure a spear with Pocket Dimension. Neo, shovel, get ready to go for the sapling. Sable, stay back, you're our healer reserve."

She reaches into a pocket of her skirt and pulls out a spear of her own, eyeing the rat cautiously.

The rat squeaks and twitches its nose, then nibbles one of those red berries off a nearby bush.