Works for her.

The first thing she does when she gets there is climb to the top for a look around.

Is she looking for anything in particular? The better vantage point does not seem to be much more informative about how surrounded she is by sand and rocks and ruins, although it does sort of confirm that the closer ruins are to the north.

It also confirms that if she wanted to take shelter under this cliff she would not immediately be menaced by angry rhinos, which is a good thing to know. And it confirms that there isn't anything more interesting visible from up here, which is worse news but still useful.

Okay. Cautious thing or bold thing? ...bold thing. She can coast for a while on calculated cowardice but in a situation like this she doesn't want to coast, she wants to climb.

She takes a moment to pick up a couple of rocks and affix them to the ends of her staff, patiently molding the wood like clay until they're in there good and solid. Then she sets off toward the ruins, to see if there's anything interesting to be found there.

How about giant cobra whose head is about as large as her torso slithering towards her? That's not in the ruins, that's before the ruins, the cobra just happens to be wandering around the desert.

"Fuck you," she says to the giant cobra. "Fuck you and fuck this."

She lengthens her stride a little to try to make it past the cobra without a fight, but she's not going to bolt this time. She twirls her staff a few times to remind her hands of its new weight and keeps an eye on the cobra to track how well it's keeping up.

This cobra has rather a lot of practice slithering through the sands under its belt, so to speak; unless she actually bolts it will reach her.

"Fine."

Abruptly, she shifts from power-walking past it to charging directly at it, staff held ready to hammer it in the face as soon as said face gets in range.

It's surprised! Not for long enough that it is the easiest of targets but it is still a rather large snake with rather a lot of snake body to it, so she successfully clubs it across the head, which makes it do a rather screamlike hissy noise before it tries lunging at her.

She dodges to the side, narrowly escaping the lunge, and whacks it again.

There's a loud crack of crunched bones and the cobra looks visibly dizzy from it and does not immediately retaliate.

Too bad for the cobra, because now she is going to hit it until it stops moving and then make knives from its teeth and clothing from its skin.

Yeah the cobra is rather dead and has rather become tools for April.

Giant cobras turn out to have many useful pieces! She rips out its fangs and molds them into sharp knives, then uses those to somewhat clumsily hack off long strips of its skin, which she pinches together again like a chef sealing a pie crust and rubs with her hands to get the ick out of the insides. Once she's got enough of that to work with, she wraps some of it around her arms to make sleeves, and some around her waist to make a knee-length leather skirt, with a belt on top to hold sheaths for the knives.

At this point both her arms are red to the elbows with snake blood, and she is muttering a steady stream of curses about the heat and the materials and whatever unknown force brought her here in the first place. Nevertheless, she keeps skinning the snake, and confidently if messily butchers its remains until she has a heap of bloody bones and a snakeskin backpack full of meat. Then she rolls scraps of snakeskin into a long thin rope, lines up all the sturdiest ribs side by side, and weaves the rope through them to form a long string of snake ribs which she can then bundle up and tie to her pack.

"Okay, fire," she says, flexing sticky red fingers and grimacing. "Fire needs wood. Wood needs tree. Where tree?"

Trees abound! In the sense that there is one within a ten-to-twenty minute walk of anywhere on this desert, apparently. She can find the nearest tree to the northwest.

"There tree."

She goes where tree.

She demolishes the tree with excessive force, builds a fire, sits down, and starts banging rocks together and then working them a little with her hands and then banging them together again. Rock is much harder to shape than snakeskin and it takes her a while to get something that will semi-reliably yield a spark. After that, though, she has a tidy little campfire with which to cook her backpackful of snake steaks.

The fire is probably less-than-pleasant in the middle of an actual desert, but it does indeed provide her with cooked food.

She is not bothered by any animals much larger than they reasonably ought to be.

Then she can eat a slightly unreasonable amount of flame-roasted snake steak and then pack up the rest, dump sand over the fire, form some spare snakeskin into a pouch for her firestarters and hang it from her belt opposite the knives, and keep trekking toward that ruin.

The day starts to wane into night, and the scorching heat starts getting replaced with colder and colder winds. The sands are hot, but they release their heat fairly quickly, and while the sensation is perhaps a welcome change, it is still not altogether pleasant to travel through these extremes.

April keeps walking. She hasn't tested exactly how long she can go without sleep, but one all-nighter won't kill her and walking through the night will keep her warmer than not doing that.

It will keep her less warm than a fire would but she's probably sufficiently armoured that the walk will be alright.

The unreasonably aggressive fauna is less active but not not active at night, although none of it is particularly mega, that she encounters. As she continues north, one of the ruins she can discern resolves itself into what looks like... a statue? Humanoid? Fairly big, like three times as tall as a tall person.

Well that's a little suspicious. On the other hand, maybe the people are less hostile than the wildlife? It could happen. She can check it out and if the people turn out to be hostile she can hit them with her stick.

When she's close enough to see the people she will see a woman in simple grey furs knelt in front of the statue with her hands clasped in prayer while a handful of other people dressed similarly seem to be in the process of setting some structure up around her, although it is too early to say what this structure is. There is a campfire and some dried meat on a rack and a few buckets of water nearby, plus a few rawhide bedrolls on an elevated platform behind the statue.

She approaches cautiously, holding her staff in what she hopes is a nonthreatening way, and waits to see if anyone says hello.

Closer still, she might notice that all of them seem to be wearing identical bracelets of patterned leather with a large green gem on them on their left wrists. One of the people does notice her, and he grabs a stone axe from a pile of tools and weapons but does not raise it or use it to threaten her—merely grips it in readiness.

The others (except for the praying woman) notice this and also tense up, and the man who noticed her calls, "Hail, stranger."

Not immediately hostile, but definitely ready for hostilities.

—that isn't either of the languages she knows, and yet, somehow, she knows it.

Can she answer them in it? Let's find out.

"Uh, hello. Can you tell me where I am? I've been... lost in the desert a while."