And the magic falls in what one could call a "direction", if one were feeling generous. It slips between realms, bounces off of worlds, and plunges through space.

Eventually, it hits:

...Cynthia, enjoying stretching in the sauna room. She loved the way her tired muscles almost felt like they were growing back with the heat and circulation after a particularly demanding workout and long shift at the hospital. She liked getting a massage of her own once in a while, or some music from her phone, but today she could just sit down and feel the pleasantness without total concentration on doing her work right and better, for once.

It latches onto her, in the way it was designed to do.

But whether through oversight, thinness in the dimensional barriers, or simply momentum, that isn't quite enough to halt its motion through the multiversal sea. It falls one universe further, and drags Cynthia with it.

Dragging her right into (the shallows of) a lake, in fact.

WHAT. She's not supposed to teleport into lakes in the middle of resting in her home sauna! Cynthia looks around in total confusion and shock, struggling to accept what's happening.

A foreign sensation nudges her, offering her the ability to accept what's happening.

She intuitively feels that she could accept or reject the offer, and that there is no downside to either.

No downside to either? Not even rejecting? Cynthia is feeling indecisive for a moment, before choosing to accept the power.

A dim spark settles within her.

It shows her the paths her thoughts can go down, to accept what's happening and regain her composure. It doesn't force, just makes the option available. All she needs to do to calm down is breathe like this, remember that, and so on.

Cynthia closes her eyes. Can she see... a different path? She's just curious to see what paths there are to see.

Does she want the ability to intuit the kinds of thought-shaping abilities that the gift can give her, perhaps?

Now that she has one spark resting inside her, she gets the impression that there are four ... 'slots', maybe, that the foreign sensation can put things in.

A fish nudges her ankle.

Cynthia is incredibly curious! Yes yes yes she wants to intuit the thought-shaping abilities the gift can get her! She just lets the fish bump into her, not really acknowledging it.

Another dim spark blooms to life. The two sparks seem to like one another, slowly orbiting around a common center point.

The gift can give her thought-shaping abilities to help her be happy, or sad, or content, or charismatic, or focused, or intellectually curious, or angry, or peaceful, or disappointed, or enthralled ...

In fact, it can give her an ability to bring her thoughts to the plausible human limits of pretty much any emotion or mental posture. No more than 2 more right now, though.

There's also the sense that she could ... merge the sparks within her, if she wanted to.

That sounds... mysterious and powerful, and Cynthia feels a bit uncomfortable by the idea of merging sparks of super-powerful emotions. She finally steps out of the water ("it's fine to not be fully dressed, it's pointless if she's running out for 5 minutes do some chore") and takes a few careful steps as she makes her way out of the water and up somewhere with a better view.

The shore is rocky and currently fairly damp, on account of the light drizzle that has been menacing the area all morning. But it's easy enough to scramble up the bank and under the shelter of some trees.

From there, it's also easy to spot a cluster of small buildings perhaps a quarter-mile along the shore. Smoke rises from a handful of chimneys.

Oh. Smoke. That's bad. She knows about the "huge value of tiny health improvements", so the fact that they're not doing everything they can to use something that stops them having smoke inside their own houses means that they're primitive or... that they're primitive. She's going to miss a sauna big enough to let her lie sprawled out on her stomach and the mini-pool.

There's a very faint sense of not being sure what she needs, easy to ignore if she doesn't focus on it.

Now that she's looking, she may also be able to spot that the houses are largely made of wood. So "primitive" seems apt. There are also people moving around between the houses. They don't seem to have spotted her yet.

Oh. Cynthia is feeling a bit nervous, but she has to go down there and won't be able to go down there better if she waits. So she just walk down and tries seeing the people more closely and to look friendly and not worth attacking.

The first person to spot her is a young boy playing naked in the mud near the closest house. He looks at her for a moment, cocks his head, and then calls something vaguely question sounding.

Cynthia waves back at the boy. If mud is the thing he thinks of as fun, that's quite a bad sign. And the chance of her knowing the language is zero! She keeps going and tries to think up what she could possibly do in this situation.

Does she want to be better at coming up with relevant ideas? Or good at guessing what people mean?

Relevant ideas are almost certainly less relevant than knowing the words other people are saying! She chooses guessing the things people mean.

A third spark blooms to life inside her. This one doesn't seem to like the others, and stands apart from them. There's also a feeling of approaching-fullness, and she intuits that she can only have one more ability at a time.

Casting her thoughts back over what the boy said ... it feels greeting-ish? And as though he wanted to know something about her that he found puzzling. It wasn't hostile or distrusting.

Drat! And she doesn't know what to say! She wouldn't even know it if she could talk the language!