They are in... a forest.

Well, it's like a forest. It has forest-like attributes. It's more like a forest than it's like any other normal kind of place. It contains trees, and grass, and moss, and... that appears to be it, apart from the group and what they brought with them. There's no sound except the sound they make, no visible motion except their own and the occasional sway of a branch in a gentle breeze.

The ground is flat. Unnaturally flat.

The trees are unnaturally uniform in size and style, and vary only within the strict bounds of their format, like they were created by a sculptor who was beautifully talented at detail work but had only a brief verbal description of how tree trunks work and a few good samples of bark. They stand in columns as straight as fenceposts, precisely two feet wide along their whole length, and their leaves and branches look more or less like normal leaves and branches but are placed with an odd carefully-varied regularity. And, speaking of carefully-varied regularity, they're laid out in a grid. Placed at random within that grid, but if you take a moment to see the pattern, there is no tree anywhere in sight that's so much as an inch out of alignment; each trunk precisely fills its two-foot square of ground.

There's a hollow in the otherwise flat ground, a short distance away. It is aligned with the grid. The ground dips by exactly two feet, into a four-foot-by-six-foot indentation, and the borders of that indentation occupy all and only the grid squares bordering the lower part. Within those borders, the slope is irregular enough to fool a superficial glance, but like the trees, the areas of sloping ground don't stray an inch outside their invisible boundaries.

Yttren is the first one to notice this--it's not difficult to notice, but everyone is pretty distracted by the corpse and the Toll. He rises to his feet, slowly, looking around. 

He frowns and reaches out to touch one of the "trees."

The "tree" is made of "wood", which resembles wood in the same sort of way that their surroundings resemble a forest. It is not actually alive and is not receptive to suggestions that it try acting like it.

That is one of the more disturbing things Yttren has experienced which, given some of the things he's experienced in the past few years, is really saying something. 

"Guys?" he says. 

"Yeah?" Kaleith asks, looking up, then blinks. "Uh..." 

"Yeah, exactly." 

This prompts the rest of the group to look up and make vaguely concerned noises about their surroundings. 

"So, uh, what's up with the trees...?" 

"I don't--they don't behave like trees and I can't make them." 

"Con...cerning..." 

"Better than more soldiers," Proust mutters. 

"And better than a desert, probably, and better than an active volcano, but while I endorse not being ungrateful this place's oddness may come with its own dangers and if so I do not wish to neglect them." 

"Fair," Proust allows grudgingly. 

"I don't see anything dangerous...we'll need to find food soon, though," she says, looking around. 

It is not immediately clear which direction they should go if they want to find food.

In the distance, a translucent green blob hops between the trees, sailing in improbably high arcs with every mighty leap; its body is an approximate sphere only a foot or so across, but at the apex of a hop it's easily six feet off the ground. On its current heading, it looks likely to pass close by the group without intersecting them.

"What is that," Delsmiar whispers. 

"You're the only way I can think of for any of us to find out. How bizarre...if we ever want to leave, and I think we do, we're going to need a strider, or at least someone with significant strider blood. And there's only one way to get one of those, so. Why don't the rest of you investigate while the three of us do something about that." 

"Your logic is sound," Leuska says, steering Delsmiar in the vague general direction of the hopping thing. 

Yttren starts poking at more trees, the halflings sticking close to him. Luvei attaches himself to the siren and the oracle. 

The green hopping blob is green, and translucent, and hopping. It takes no notice of its observers. It seems to be made of some sort of jelly-like substance, and has no discernible organs or other internal structures.

Some distance away, in the direction the blob was coming from, the trees seem to thin out. Perhaps there's food in that direction?

Seems worth investigating. 

The trees thin out, and there's a strangely regular border between the short grass of the forest and some much taller grass, and a little apple-sized miniature blob hopping out of said grass in arcs just as high as the green one's and even more ridiculously disproportionate to its body size. This one is on a collision course with Leuska.

She bats it away from her with her wing. 

It lands in the grass several feet away, spends a second vigorously wiggling, and then launches itself directly at her much faster and more aggressively than it was previously moving.

The heck? She slaps it much harder this time. 

It hits her with all the force of... an aggressively launched blob of goo. Goo splatters across her wing.

Some small round objects which definitely were not previously contained within the blob fall to the ground.