The most recent battle did not go well. For all the Enemy's long-range accuracy, the 13th should have buried them under a hail of arrows. Would have, if not for that damnable wolf.

Balcmog grumbles, and runs the whetstone along his sword-edge again. It is not a perfect sword, elegant and gleaming, such as the Enemy would make. But it's sharp, and he can put the pointy end in other people, and he intends to keep it that way.

And then comes the light.

He and his fellows cringe away from it, even though the epicenter seems to be a few hundred meters away, for it is a hateful thing, bright and hot against them.

    "You four: go investigate!" the captain calls.

And Balcmog goes gladly, for even if this is some foul trick of the Enemy, it is only through knowledge that they can hope to defeat it, and bring about peace.

There is a sourceless flash of blinding white light and a brief moment of utter silence and then -

She is disoriented, too low to the ground, her magic detection is overloaded and thinks there's magic everywhere (maybe it's right), the sun is too low in the sky and the magic signatures of her company are all gone.

Tanya shoots straight up for the cloud cover but she can do six gees at best and it will take far too long, she must assume the enemy has her locked down, tries to evade an attack she can't see - her reactions and mental processing were already sped up to the safe limit so she pushes them beyond that, gyrating wildly as she scans the sky around her - where is she where is she -

By the time the group of Orcs gets there, she is long gone. They spend a moment going over the area and poking through the grass with their swords, which gives her plenty of time to take in her surroundings.

She hovers over a green valley — although one that was probably greener before a large camp was erected in the middle of it, sight-lines roughly cleared with slash-and-burn. Two bonfires burn in the center of the camp, and the guards posted around the edge keep a weary, wary eye out. But they look to the horizon, and not to the sky; the morning sun, weak and cloud-strained as it is, seems to discomfort them.

A closer look at the guards reveal that while the camp may have made the valley less green, the army stationed there is doing their best to make up for it. The people throughout the camp are rough and deformed, their skin taking on a number of unhealthy complexions.

The valley is, perhaps, the least magical place in her sensory range. To the north, a stately forest radiates a quiet background murmur of magic. To the west, beyond the hills, a beacon of magic shimmers and pulses. To the east, a vast, slow drumbeat of magic swells and falls, almost too subtle to make out. To the south, a proud band of mountains towers over the crinkled landscape.

None of this makes sense.

The magical detection results are clearly bullshit. She's getting the same sense from her innate abilities, magic everywhere, but that must be some kind of novel residue from the spell that took her out. The more distant results are mediated by her orb and in her professional opinion mean it's broken, which is not something an aerial mage ever wants to learn while high up in the air and fighting for their life.

The terrain around her bears no similarity to the battlefield of a minute ago. Forests and mountains don't spring up out of thin air, no matter what absurdly overpowered spells you use. Everyone is gone, friend and foe alike, the radio is silent, she can't raise HQ - on a hunch she scans civilian bands and they're silent, the damn thing is fried too.

Tanya hides in a cloud, puts on a camouflage illusion, dampens the rest of her magic output as far as she can, drifts in random directions for ten minutes. The damned magic detector refuses to work.

She peeks out again.

Even if everyone was blasted out of the sky (and finished falling before she regained her senses?) there were visual observers over a mile out, there were men on the ground, trucks. Now there's a camp, if you can call it that; Imperial children do better play-acting. No (aerial) sentries, no trucks, no recognizable uniforms - she can't see any rifles and there are weirdly many swords. Even the Dacians were more modern-looking, at least they could manage nice packed squares! Was she teleported to some benighted Asian or African country - good grief, are those bows and arrows?

...is this some sort of encampment for diseased soldiers? No, that would be marked with the cross, anywhere in Europe. (Unless these are commies?)

She's going to have to speak to them, to find out where she is and what happened and get back home. Teleportation is completely unprecedented but she has no better explanation and 

As an officer of the Germanian Imperial Army, she shouldn't abduct and question a soldier from a nation they are probably not at war with. (Nations not at war with Germania! How refreshing!) But she can sneak up close under an illusion to eavesdrop.

If she's not in Europe, these people might not have a mage who could detect her, which means sneaking just above the ground is her best bet to avoid visual detection. She hates to give up the sky voluntarily, there could be an enemy mage hiding in those clouds, but the only alternative she sees is to fly in a random direction and then she'd still have to talk to people.

The sentries certainly don't react as though they can see her.

The camp is not peaceful — the inhabitants are tense, wary, and wounded — but it is relatively calm as people settle down for the day, and filled with a sense of determination.

What it isn't filled with is anyone speaking any European language. Instead, the camp's inhabitants seem to speak a dark, guttural language that sounds quite unlike any language with which she might be familiar.

...drat. Hopefully she's somewhere in Magna Rumeli and not actually on another continent? That would make it all the more important to be diplomatic.

She sneaks back out, drops her illusion, and walks from behind the nearest convenient hill towards the camp's main gate. When hailed she introduces herself as lieutenant colonel Tanya von Degurechaff of the Imperial Army, in a tone that suggests that if the sentries don't speak Germanian they ought to find an officer who does. Even if they don't recognize her uniform it clearly is one and she's holding a rifle.

The guards gesture for her to wait at a distance from the camp, two of them not-so-subtly keeping their longbows ready as the third runs into the maze of tents.

A moment later, a uniquely ugly man with protruding yellow teeth and a fancy hat comes and stands a few meters past the guards, facing her with a confident pose. A flare of magic flows from him, and his thoughts become known to her.

:Your dress is unfamiliar and your approach unexpected — when the Peace is reached, curiosity can be indulged; but in this time of War, such things must be a threat. If you speak neither Orkish nor the common tongue, then make your thoughts known in the way shared by all people, even Men.:

No (publicly) known magic enables or even suggests the possibility of telepathy. She refuses to believe that another nation would develop such a thing before the Empire. Even if someone did, they would keep it a closely guarded secret.

An army casually using magic telepathy, in public with strangers, in a war even on the other side of the world defies belief. By the time they had taught random officers in a disabled veterans' camp to use it for casual translation it would be front-page news from the Unified States to the Russy Federation. Every nation on three continents would be racing to ally with the brilliant researches who invented it, or else to kidnap those researches if they unwisely chose to ally with someone else.

...did that officer just say Orkish?

...

He is unusually ugly.

And those men are really carrying bows.

Tanya always knew Being X was a hack, but did he really just send her to some cut-rate fantasy world? 

"You idiotic imposter with your one trick!" she yells at the sky. "Nevermind worshipping you, you're not even worthy of basic respect! Human writers can do better than 'orks with bows'! Are you going to force me to worship you to escape a barrage of arrows now? I'm more threatened by a world that hasn't invented the flush toilet! Why does such an idiotic world even exist?! It is worthy of you but you don't have the power to create worlds, so you must have chosen a place where people are stupid enough to worship you! Humans are not stupid enough for you, we advanced beyond bows and religions so you had to find some 'orks'! But I am a RATIONAL MAN and I refuse to sink to your level!!!"

...oh right, there's a man - sorry, 'ork' - in front of her. Apparently she can think at him? Hopefully that will work because she has no idea how to cast it as a spell.

And because she is a civilized, rational man, she will be polite and not assume anything about his intelligence. Yet. (Plenty of humans are idiots, it's only rational to conclude that about people you've actually met.)

:My apologies:, she tries thinking at him. :I briefly lost composure when I realized what may have happened to me.:

:I am Lieutenant Colonel Tanya von Degurechaff, of the Germanian Imperial Army's 203rd Aerial Mage Battalion, and I have become lost due to an enemy spell. May I ask where I find myself?:

It is said that He watches the fall of every sparrow, and this is true.

Luckily, he doesn't feel the need to provide commentary on them. Arda is just as it should be, and resounds to the greater glory.

That is ... actually somewhat plausible. Everyone knows the Enemy has a number of Maiar on their side, and considerably less common sense. But he can't afford to assume.

:I see. Well met, Lieutenant Colonel Tanya von Degurechaff. I am Captain Dorvulk, of the Free Peoples' Glorious Liberation Army. I'm afraid that we do not give out information about our exact location for reasons of secrecy, but we stand some kilometers south of Amon Rûdh. I have not heard of the Germanian Empire — from where does it hail?:

This is obviously going to fail but she'll go through the motions. Long meetings with superior officers have taught her to look perfectly serious no matter what she's thinking and hopefully her mindvoice will do the same.

:The Germanian Empire is in the western part of the continent of Europe. Our names for the continents are probably different, since we do not speak the same language, one moment.:

She gets some paper from her pack and draws a crude map of the continents and oceans. The Germanian Empire is here.

Dorvulk squints. That's ... kind of what the world looks like? If there were a big gap between Aman and Endor, and if the dark land didn't exist. But the shapes are similar enough that it might be a simple case of bad cartography — not everyone believes in universal education.

On the other hand, she's claiming to come from Beleriand, which is clearly nonsense.

:I see. That location seems to roughly correspond to our location here,: he responds. :Although the shapes are somewhat dissimilar. If the Empire is a large place, I can't believe that we wouldn't know of it, being so close.:

Only his experience with ósanwë keeps his suspicion that she has been deceived by agents of the Enemy out of his reply.

Of course the vile hack would put the orks where Germania used to be, to defile her adopted homeland. ...no, perhaps the magic sent her to the same location in an alternate world? 

Alternate worlds are nonsense, but so are orks. So was magic, during her first life. As a rational man, she does not deny the reality she sees.

It is a thin thread of hope. Hope that she can recreate the magic that sent her here and go back.

Tanya embraces her rediscovered sense of purpose. Back home (Germania has long since become home) her men are waiting, her loyal sword and shield, the people she put three grueling years of work into. Back home she has rank, recognition, a war to win and a reward to claim once it is won. Back home there is civilization, reason, progress. The Empire's leadership may be sick, but they are no orks.

:I, too, do not believe we would have failed to hear of any nation or army by that name close to us. There are certainly no armies still fielding bows anywhere I have heard of. To put it frankly, I suspect that I may be from another world entirely. Are people who look like you and the others here called orks? Are you a different species from humans, such as myself?:

She considered telling him about Being X - she doesn't care anymore about being thought mad - but she doesn't want to make him think she has a powerful enemy who might strike at any local allies she makes.

Dorvulk blinks. On the one hand, there are no other worlds, which is why it's so important to fix this one. On the other hand, it doesn't hurt to play along.

:I see. Indeed, I am a proud Orc, as are the majority of our forces. But the Liberation Army does not discriminate on account of species — we also count Men, as we call the people who resemble you, among our number,: he explains, stalling for time.

And then another flare of ósanwë hits him from inside the camp.

:If you are from another world, then this is most extraordinary, and quite possibly of great importance to the realities of our War. Since we are not the enemy of the Germanian Empire, would you be willing to come join our officers for dinner, under terms of truce?:

Tanya speeds up her thoughts as much as she can and tries to think this through without visibly taking a minute to deliberate.

If they want to capture or to kill her, an ambush in a prepared position in close quarters is their best bet. They might have realized they can't take her head-on at the gate and asked her to come inside for that reason. They could also drug or poison her food.

But she has to talk to some locals and get their help. And the quicker the better; she is well-trained in wilderness survival, but hunting and preparing alien animals is an unappetizing prospect. 

What has she learned so far? That they are telepathic, which is excellent for her prospects. That this telepathy is magical in nature (well, it would have to be), which implies they might have other magical abilities; this potentially increases the risks they pose to her and, again potentially, reduces her bargaining value.

The soldiers called an officer; they couldn't hail her telepathically themselves. So not everyone is able or trained to do this. This is magic used strategically, a resource allocated by this army, not a native ability of all orks. This organization speaks well of them.

A rational organization would not attack an unknown neutral party who might become an ally. But it might try to capture or coerce her to get a better bargain, if it did not expect reputational losses from doing so. Reputational losses which are very unlikely, since she has admitted no-one knows she is here. 

If she refuses their offer, her best alternative is to find a smaller, weaker group of people (which would still have to include a telepath mage). Essentially, to do to them what she fears they might do to her, to coerce them where she has the upper hand.

That is not a viable long-term solution; she can't live off enemy land (or its farmers) forever, and moreover she doesn't want to, she'd rather work with people than against them. In every negotiation, agreements necessarily conform to the relative power of the parties; even if she is free to leave she doesn't have anywhere to leave to. 

They are fighting a war, which implies an enemy, and likely one or more neutral parties besides. Ideally, she would learn about all of them before picking one. The locals will naturally try to make her commit before she learns anything, and to make it costly for her to change sides later.

If she flies away and finds the other side of this war, she will be in the same position except for having burned her bridges with this group. There is no prior reason to think another side would be better for her.

However, it is likely there are more than two groups, and it is likely that the first one she encounters is not the best one. A group which is not at war would be less incentivized to turn her to their use.

This is like the secretary problem, except she doesn't know how many groups there are and she can't perfectly evaluate this one before rejecting it. However, it is very likely there are at least three large organizations in this world and so she should reject at least the first group she meets, while trying to learn as much as she can.

She will try to learn more, but be ready to bolt at the first sign of danger.

:I thank you for your offer, but I am afraid I must decline. Given my sad lack of knowledge about your world, I do not know what the implications or consequences of accepting your invitation might be. I wish to learn more in order to orient myself, if that is not too great an imposition.: Wait, no, this world might not have the convention that being long-winded and indirect is polite and conciliatory -

:Could you tell me about this world in its broadest strokes? The nearby nations and their territories, which of them are your enemies, active warzones or other areas that I should avoid.: Hopefully he will be willing to share the kind of basic, completely public information that Tanya can learn from anyone she talks to.

He cocks his head.

:To the East lies the forest stronghold of Doriath, who shoot all the messengers who come to their borders. To the West, the kingdoms ruled by Finrod and Cirdan, with whom we are frequently in active battle. To the North, past the forest, lie the mountains, inhabited by Dwarfs. They forbid entrance to outsiders, but they won't actually shoot you if you only stop at their trade posts; with them, we are not at war. Further North lies Angband, homeland of the Orcs and a beacon of civilization. To the South, nothing but unclaimed wilderness and the Andram highlands that divide our present location from the sea.:

It's a bleak picture, surrounded by enemies, but Orcs have never shied away from adversity. The best of them will survive and help usher in the destined future.

One or two clear enemies in front, with neutral and possibly isolationist parties on either side. She commends these orks for not being surrounded by enemies on all sides like Germania, and she commends even more the two neutral nations for staying out of it. Hopefully that situation will hold and she will accepted by one of those polities, or another one farther afield.

:If I may ask, what occasioned this war and what are the war goals or demands of either side?:

:Our demands include the right to freely settle and develop certain areas of land; our enemies have not issued official demands, although parley has been attempted. As near as we can tell, some on their side just want the land for themselves, and some want our wholesale eradication,: Dorvulk explains, his mental voice tired.

:The thing you must understand about Elves is that a hundred years is not a long time, for them. So when we expand into an empty and apparently unclaimed area, and start building towns and farms, and then a hundred and fifty years later an elf shows up, stating a prior claim to the land — despite there being no physical evidence of their habitation, or, indeed, any reason to believe they have not just decided to show up and claim it — and demanding that our fields and forges be dismantled and the forest restored, with no care given to the people that would displace ...:

Oh, there are elves fighting the orks. Lovely. Tanya wonders what kind of elves they are - she's vaguely aware there are different traditions, but she didn't keep up with popular Western culture in her first life and the conditions of her second made it seem like even more of a childish concern. Elves can be... light or dark, small or tall, fey who kidnap children or, uh... forest-dwelling expert bowmen?

Whatever. Being X is a hack so they'll presumably stand in pointed contrast to these orks, which means they'll be conventionally beautiful, inflexible and unable to accomodate a newcomer from another world, and generally irrational. And the Dwarves will be Jews in disguise and, uh... live underground and forge magic rings? Ugh, this feels horrible already. At least there are supposed to be humans around somewhere. Oh well, if worse comes to worst she can always come back to the Orks, it seems like they'll be able to part amicably after all.

:Do the Elves not claim any clear borders? And - how long has this war lasted?: Asking how static it is would be getting close to military secrets, but the overall duration might be a reasonable proxy: an army can walk the long way across Eurasia in eighteen months, as long as all it has to do is walk.

:Doriath's border is clearly defined, at least. The others are more nebulous. And the gap between the lands they claim and the lands they occupy can sometimes be significant,: he answers. :The war has been fought, cold and hot, for two gross years, or thereabouts.:

Tanya needs a moment to place the word. :Two... hundred and eighty eight years?!: That's ridiculous! The longest-named war on Earth was the Hundred Years War and that was already ridiculous all by itself!

...but no, he did say 'cold and hot'. There may not have been many 'hot' periods - this may not be a period of hot war, even - but people can hold grudges more or less indefinitely. One or both of these adversaries must have a natural defensive advantage, like England in the fourteenth century, or else they might lack a way to take and hold land, like premodern armies that pillage the land but can't reduce fortresses... Didn't the Roman-Persian wars last for eight hundred years, always returning to the same borders in the end, until the Muslim armies swept them both?

:How hot has the war been lately?: This is a clearly temporary camp, but that doesn't mean much.

:I'm not sure how you would rate it, but this location was raided by Finrod's forces yesterday.:

Which, if this is a trick of the Enemy, she would already know.

:I can't discuss any other operations that may or may not be in progress locally.:

:Of course - I did not mean to ask you about such.: Well, it's at least hot enough for cross-border raids, which - doesn't tell her much, really. :You mentioned humans; do they have their own polities as well?:

:They do, in the form of scattered small villages and petty kingdoms. Many of these choose to become vassals of Angband in return for knowledge and protection from attack, which is where the humans in our army mostly come from.:

Mmm. Well, that's reasonable. 

Tanya's not sure what else to ask about, given that she intends to eventually go her way. She wants to to know about local technology and science, about laws and societies, about beings masquerading as gods, but none of those are topics for a short conversation with obvious referents.

She wants to know if any of the locals have flight magic, but if they do it's obviously rare or secret or the camp would have aerial sentries, and she can't ask him about military secrets. (If some factions but not the orks have flight, they would have lost the war by now.)

She wants a map, obviously, that's probably safe to ask for. And she would love to have two weeks' rations but that would risk both deliberate and accidental poisoning, and she'd rather go hungry than get the runs while alone in the the wilds of a warzone on a strange planet.

:Would you mind showing me a rough map of the continent, or the whole world if possible?: She won't trust it, of course, premodern maps were atrocious, but it might be better than nothing. Whether a military officer has an actual map in easy reach or has to resort to crude drawings will also tell her something - although, to be fair, he might have good local maps that he will reasonably not show her.

:Certainly,: he agrees, before calling in the gutteral Orkish tongue to one of the guards, who rushes into the camp. The guard returns a few minutes later with a hand-drawn map:

(Click through for non-blurry version)

:We're here in Beleriand. You can see Doriath and Angband marked:

Tanya failed to anticipate a novel projection but of course that's her own fault. This might not even be a projection, it might be a half-globe as seen (imagined, she presumes) from space. More likely a projection, though, those two narrow stretched-out continents on the sides look like some kind of deliberate foreshortening effect. Unless they are opposite edges of the same supercontinent occupying the globe's other side?

On a local scale, though, the map is woefully undetailed. It's almost as if someone deliberately made a map with the minimum level of detail you'd need to show a visitor from another world! 

But assuming they didn't create it with magic on the spot, and given the clear effort that went into making and preserving it - and it definitely looks hand-drawn - she can't think of why anyone, let alone a small military camp, would have such a map? Unless...

The map puts all the regions Dorvulk mentioned - Angband, Menegroth - close together. It makes the whole region look small and inconsequential. No-one calling themselves the Free Peoples' Glorious Liberation Army would deliberately choose to do that, and she doubts this world is advanced enough for map-making conventions to be standardized worldwide. So this map must have come from elsewhere; perhaps as a trade item from a distant, much wealthier civilization, prized for telling the locals about the world beyond their ken, and then faithfully copied.

Some of the continent she's on is out of sight - or no, there's an annotation of a 'region of everlasting cold', which implies a pole which they perhaps cannot cross. But a third of the map is wasted on a featureless ocean in order to center it on the... Lands of Harad?

Tanya resolves to visit Harad.

:Thank you, that was helpful,: she says after studying the map for a minute. (Her orb recorded it much more quickly than that, of course.)

Now, how to extricate herself. She doesn't want to give away that she can fly, if at all possible, and she will in fact walk back out of their sight before taking off under an illusion.

But the fact that she's planning to travel far away (with few visible supplies), in possibly hostile territory, can't really be explained without knowing about that. And they'll see her tracks vanish; she can make an illusion decoy that'll keep walking away but not one that will make a track accounting for whole day's travel.

(Any rational commander will send scouts to keep track of her for at least a few hours and possibly much longer; that's not discourtesy, that's common sense.)

:I thank you for your time and your consideration. My own duty as a soldier is, of course, to return to my own world if at all possible. With that in mind, I cannot at this time accept your generous offer of hospitality. Perhaps some other day, when I learn more of this world and if I fail to quickly effect my return, I will contact you or another division of your army again. I will in any case remember and report that you and yours treated me peacefully and courteously, and return the favor if I am ever in a position to do so.: Will they let her walk away now?

He gives her a deep nod, just short of a bow.

:I wish you the best luck in arranging your return. Should your method prove repeatable, I hope you will convey to your Emperor's diplomatic corp an invitation to journey to Angband to discuss the possibility of further contact between our peoples. And should you be unable to find your way home, know that we always have use for men and women of courage and integrity in the Free People's Glorious Liberation Army.:

The captain makes no move to interfere with her retreat — although he does flare with silent ósanwë targeting several other spots in the camp.

Then she will return his near-bow and walk away, while unobtrusively bending light in front of her cheek to create a crude rear-view mirror and being ready to bolt at the first sign of danger.

If nothing interrupts her she'll walk briskly for an hour or so, until she's behind a couple of hills and is unobserved as far as she can tell.

Orcs do not have the perfect-to-extreme-distances eyesight of Elves, but their eyesight is still better than that of Men ... at least at night. But now it is mid-morning, and she has been leaving clear tracks, so her surreptitious followers are, indeed, hanging back around the curve of the hill.

Tanya finds a stream of water and walks on its bed down the hill, as if trying to obscure her tracks.

She illusions herself invisible, and at the same time creates an optical decoy that will keep very slowly picking its way down the stream-bed. It's another illusion and it can't make sounds or leave tracks without additional spells, and indeed it won't even keep following the stream or the ground level once she can't see well enough to direct it, but it might serve to confuse a well-hidden observer who was lying in wait for her.

And then she up, as fast as she can without making an undue whoosh. By the time she lets the decoy disappear, she's two miles up.

Does anything appear to go wrong with her plan?

A few minutes after her ascent, a group of three orcs quietly makes their way to the place where she entered the stream, and then begin following the stream down its length, presumably to attempt to pick up her tracks again.

They're not likely to decide she can fly, at least if they didn't already suspect it or know of others who can. She'll always have an illusion up while flying; she can sustain it indefinitely if she's not fighting or doing anything else, really.

High, high up in the sky is an aerial mage's rightful place. The only place she can try to relax when she's on the front. The sun blazes down in a blue sky. Other humans are maggots crawling on the distant earth while those like her rain down death at their pleasure.

This warzone is very quiet. No boom and whistle of artillery, no drone of airplanes, no sources of magic darting about. The ground below is practically pristine. No trenches filled with a morass of bloody mud, no moonscape of craters, no wheel-tracks and abandoned bodies marking trails across a giant steppe. Just... undisturbed, pristine, premodern greenery. The orks and elves must lack the industry and the population size to turn their earth into Hell.

She can almost believe it's better this way.

Pfft. Is that your angle? 'Industrial war is hell, better to live without medicine or factories as Being X intended?' No, Tanya is firm in her faith that humanity can improve its condition and solve its own problems. After all, it would be utterly irrational to fail to do so.

This is a warzone, if an oddly idyllic one, and she is not a party to these hostilities but she will not for an instant let herself forget that the locals are busy applying all their undoubted ingenuity to devise novel means of mass murder. This world has magic and could contain anything, really. What goes with orks and elves? Men with enormous swords fighting dragons and... dungeons? She hopes there are no demons and angels, at least, both would probably be very obnoxious.

Now then. She would like to visit the dwarves (north past the forest), who are neutrals and open to trade. In the longer term she'd like to visit Harad, but if that map was of a half-globe and the world's radius is the same as the Earth, it would take her several days to get there if she doesn't push herself.

She'll also need food at some point; she's had basic training in preparing game in the field (Eastern Command was willing to grasp at any straw) and though she has no actual hands-on experience, she can hack her way through butchering a large-enough corpse and she isn't going to undercook meat... but alien species are a completely new concern, not to talk of diseases and parasites. It might be best to wait a day or two, in case she can find more friendlies she can trust quickly, and then start introducing local meat slowly without waiting for her rations to run out.

North, then, over the forest. What does its magic aura look like up close? Does it at all seem like it stretches high up, should she go around it?

She'll also be on the lookout for more ork (and other) detachments, camps, roads, towns, farmsteads, etc., even though she doesn't intend to approach any in this area.

The magic of the unspoiled forest is wild and untamed: it does not take on simple shapes, but arranges itself in a grand figure of infinite detail, each organism in the forest adding notes to a glorious symphony of unimaginable complexity that links the entire woodland into a single beating pulse. The only discordant note comes from a fortified logging camp, filled with more Orcs, to the north and west, on the other side of the forest.

And it's only about half a mile (or, as the Orcs would say, 800 meters) tall in most places. There are swells and spires above some of the oldest-looking trees, but she should be perfectly capable of flying over it.

This is completely unlike any magic in Tanya's previous world! In fact she'll just go ahead and conservatively assume she fundamentally doesn't understand how magic operates here.

As far as Tanya knows, magic is the result of the application of a mage's will, limited by that mage's mana. Few people are born as mages and nobody knows why, or what mana is or how magic operates on the level of physics.

The direct use of magic has been practiced since prehistory and is borderline useless. The easiest way for a mage to boil a kettle of tea is to chop wood and carry water. The mages of ages past laboriously built elaborate apparatuses and complex chemical processes that could convert a spark of magic into something precise and repeatable... but they never significantly affected either technology or society. 

Until the invention of the modern computation orb. In just a few decades, applied magic went from the equivalent of abacuses to general-purpose programmable computers. Vast swaths of modern industry rely on mages as vital work force, to say nothing of the military, and they compete desperately to hire them. The Germanian Empire, the world's indisputable leader in computation orb technology, has even gone so far as to conscript sufficiently capable mages, giving its army and vital industries first right of refusal on their labour.

That was the happy world Tanya Degurechaff was reborn into, precious human capital that could rise in society even after being orphaned and abandoned as an infant... So of course some idiots with no understanding of basic game theory blew up a minor border conflict into a world war that has already ruined three major nations and is on track to destroy all the rest in the next few years. (Good riddance to the commie bastards, pity about the rest.)

What magic in Tanya's world decidedly did not do was appear somewhere all by itself.

It would take several hundred skilled mages with modern equipment to produce a total output of magic comparable to this forest, assuming they had a (completely ridiculous) spell that would produce such a complex and well-synchronized flow. Of course, having gone to such lengths, they would use the magic productively rather than just letting it swirl about. This enormous mass of magic must be actively achieving some goal that could not be done at lesser cost, or perhaps it is reactive or defensive in nature...

Is what Tanya would think, if she were in her old world. And then she'd give this forest a very wide berth, because the people behind this massive spell would surely have a lot of magical firepower reserved for unwelcome intruders.

But consider: there are orks logging a piece of piece of this forest. Perhaps they have negotiated with the forest-mages for access. Dorvulk didn't mention the forest as a separate faction, so it might even belong to them. But nobody in control of this much magic would be cutting down trees with manual labour, let alone burning them for fuel. That leaves several possibilities.

One: the local mages (orks or not) command enormous amounts of magic and highly advanced spells, but cannot use them for any practical purpose.

Two: this spell is serving some vital strategic purpose that no mages can be diverted from. And they are crazy enough to let her get this close, where she can observe their work and report on it to their enemies (or even disrupt it) without asking her to go the long way around, or indeed trying to shoot her down from the sky. And also their forces are fighting a war with bows and arrows. This possibility can be dismissed.

Three: this magic is being wielded by an isolationist faction that is so technologically advanced that it simply doesn't care about the local orks and their enemies (and their bit of logging). 

Four: this magic is not being produced or controlled by people, but is a naturally-occurring phenomenon of some kind. Nature can produce things of stunning complexity. And if magic can exist without people, it is subject to evolution.

Any people faced with such an obvious resource would use it (and possibly use it up). Unless they don't know how. Unless they cannot even see it in any detail - just as Tanya could not without her orb.

Tanya could, in theory, go up to the flow of magic and try to manipulate it. Even though that is not a thing you are supposed to be able to do with magic that is not your own and even though the best she can reasonably hope for is to disrupt whatever organized thing it is doing.

Tanya is not an insane scientist, so she wisely flies the long way around this forest before continuing north.

Past the forest lies a verdant grassland, lightly dotted with the occasional small cluster of houses surrounded by outlying farms. The land is covered in bumpy hills that slowly grow larger until they merge with the mountains to the north.

No more camps of Orcs are in evidence, but there is what looks like a supply caravan wending its way south under guard. Other than that, the land is remarkably sparse.

The mountains themselves have even less evidence of habitation; any Dwarves living there apparently have very little need for surface structures. There is a stone tower built skillfully into the cliffs surrounding one of the passes that is visible from quite a distance.

Good, peaceful productive civilization! Or at least peaceful-looking productivity at the local civilizational level. Are the houses she sees on the way populated by orks or humans or some third species?

Either way, this bears out what she was told: this is a fertile land only freshly occupied. The elves may have claimed it, but they did not settle it recently or in large enough numbers to leave behind clear evidence in ruined roads and structures, let alone whole cities.

(Unless they're nomads? Farming peoples found it surprisingly difficult to push into the great steppes in Earth's history, despite much better organization and an overwhelming numerical superiority... This land looks suitable for crops, but Tanya is by no means an expert. Besides, the local crop species might be different.)

The stone tower is an obvious place to approach. (A flyer always has to be careful not to cross state borders accidentally.) She will again land out of sight, dismiss her illusions and approach on foot.

If the tower's lookouts are any good they will realize they didn't see her walk up the road from as far as they can see, but that would take her most of a day; if pressed she can say she walked under an illusion without revealing that she can fly.

The houses contain a mixture of humans and orcs, although somewhat more the latter than the former.

The approach to the tower is full of switchbacks. Partly because this is a mountain, and partly because it clearly forces people to either charge up a steep slope or pass through the tower's field of fire multiple times. The road does run past the tower in such a way that not every crossing needs to involve disturbing the people in the tower. But when she clearly seems to be approaching the tower, a slot opens at waist level, revealing a pair of flinty eyes.

"Drathek ve?"

Tanya approves! These are sensible people who have good defenses and are actually using them instead of fighting a war beyond their borders. (The layout also confirms that the locals are not expecting aerial assaults.)

"I apologize, I do not speak your language," she says and also tries to think at him. She doesn't know how the local telepathy works but she didn't need to use her magic to talk to Dorvulk, and there seemed to be an element of - intentionality? Not that she had the time to experiment. Hopefully this guard can call someone who can use it, just as in the other camp. A border post should find telepathic translation even more useful than a random army camp.

Thinking at the guard does not seem to produce any particular results.

"Pedil edhellen?" he tries, in what is clearly a different language, much more sibilant and flowing. "Khazâd. Sindarin. Khe ŋas."

She will try the various languages she knows, not with any expectation of success but to show willingness. Can she indicate with gestures that she would like to communicate mind-to-mind? ...head-to-head?

That gets an irritated head shake and — when they do, indeed, prove to have no languages in common — a series of exaggerated gestures instructing her to go away and come back with a "quendi".

Probably.

Cross-language charades is remarkably difficult through a low-to-the-ground slot in a heavily armored door.

This is a very reasonable yet also frustrating situation! This guard-tower has no telepath ('quendi'?) posted; visitors need to be one or to bring their own. This has always worked before, because people who didn't unexpectedly appear in a random location either know a local language or sensibly travel with a means of communication. (It's a good thing she doesn't have to present a passport or other proof of identity! ...Tanya very much hopes that won't be the next hurdle; border control isn't usually empowered to decide to admit a completely undocumented person on their own recognizance. Appearing inside a state's territory is much easier in this respect.)

If she draws a map of the local area, could he please tell her where she can find a 'quendi'?

(Tanya is by now very good at drawing accurate to-scale maps based on aerial observation.)

That is a weird thing to have to ask, but it's not like he particularly has anything else to do on guard duty. He uses a long poking stick to indicate a fairly general area back to the southwest, on the coast. And then he briefly pokes at the big forest to the southeast, for completeness, even though she'll probably have trouble even finding Doriath.

He repeats gesturing at the coastal area, because that's probably her best bet.

That's on the other side of the Free Peoples' (Glorious Liberation) Army territory, and in the approximate directions of the polities Dorvulk said they were at war with. (Also, how does he expect a lone human - a young woman at that - to cross several hundred miles and back? Is there faster transportation here than she's seen so far?)

This is puzzling because (quite apart from international relations) she knows there are telepaths much closer by. But maybe the ork telepaths are all engaged in the war effort, just as all A-rank mages were conscripted by her army, while their enemies have... telepaths for hire who are willing to travel across enemy territory just to be paid to translate something? No, she is clearly missing something here.

She tries to remember what Dorvulk called the enemy states. "Doriath?" she asks. "Finrod?" She doesn't know if she can correctly pronounce names that she only heard telepathically, or for that matter if those are names in a language spoken where she is now.

The guard nods agreeably. The forest to the southeast is Doriath, and the coastal area isn't "Finrod", but it's close enough that he's not particularly tempted to quibble across the language barrier.

"Angband? 'quendi'?" she tries next.

The guard freezes for a moment with a complex look on his face.

Eventually he settles on a kind of conflicted shrug, and then points her at the coast again. She's not wrong that there are Elves in Angband, in the same sense that there are prisoners in a dungeon, so he doesn't want to lie. But she should really not go dragging Orcs to the trade post.

Ugh. Fine. She can in fact fly to the coast and back again in a reasonable amount of time, and she can even carry a translator on her way back if she has to. Inconvenience and annoyance are no reason to make suboptimal choices.

She will try to thank the guard (bow?) and leave and spend over an hour quick-walking out of his probable eyesight before she repeats the illusion decoy trick and flies away.

She'll go for the coast next. Doriath was said to fire on messengers, which is completely at odds with rational self-interested behavior. Even her world's nations normally accepted a parley under flag of truce, and they had radio!

...she can't make it that far before dark, though, and she shouldn't push herself to exhaustion. She'll look for a place to spend the night, far away from people and roads and local magic, with clean water. Hunting game can wait until tomorrow; if she can find a quendi translator she should be able to trade for rations.

How is she going to pay the translator? Or convince them to trust her, a stranger proposing to take them to a distant country using a secret means of transportation? She will need to spend time with the Finrodians and find useful knowledge or skills to trade, even if she has no intention of settling down in another nation at war. And she'll have to tell them about her origins, she cannot come up with a plausible cover story, which means she will have to trust them. The trade will reveal at least some of her abilities, which will make it easier for them to betray and overpower her...

But it does not seem better to look for some other country. She doesn't even know where any other countries are! The only other option she can see is to find, kidnap and coerce a telepath into working with her, and she doesn't have a better angle on that than walking up to people and asking 'quendi?', which she might as well do in Finrod. Besides, she doesn't want to kidnap strangers instead of engaging in trade, she is not a bandit.

"Away from the local magic" is a hard criterion ... but it is thinner, at least, up in the mountains, away from the symphony of the trees. And the mountains do also offer a number of clean, crystal pools and springs, sending clear sprays of water tumbling over the rocks and joining together into streams, rills, and rivers.

A bit of searching from the air turns up a cave with shelter from the wind, easy access to a stream, and nothing in the way of people or magic.

She can sterilize water with magic and has a sieve that works on actual mud, but clean water is appreciated. (She sterilizes it anyway, of course, you can never tell what nasty parasites live in an innocent-looking mountain spring.)

The cave is useful; most people looking for her would try there first. She'll put a campfire in it (burned down to embers) and leave a conveniently misleading trail to the pool.

(Wind? What wind? She is an aerial mage and she is dressed for the Eastern front. 'Wind' happens when you're eight thousand feet up in a snowstorm, not snug on decidedly un-frozen ground.)

Mages can't use magic while they're sleeping; there are no magical tripwires or traps to alert her. (Military mages are not supposed to travel alone.) But she can find a perch that would be hard to reach without flying and tuck herself out of sight, and sleep lightly.

They say it's not paranoia if they're really trying to kill you. Most armies on the continent have been trying to kill Tanya for quite a few years, now.

The ones on this continent haven't picked up the habit yet.

Oh, the Orcs are trying to find her, but she successfully gave them the slip and they don't have a dense presence in the mountains anyway, because of the impassable terrain. So as the trackers who lost her righteously torture themselves (in a pro-social, rational, forward-thinking way: brains learn best from pain, so it's only logical to torture yourself when you fail, so that you do better next time), nothing comes to interrupt her sleep.

The morning dawns chill and foggy, the wisps of cloud clinging to the rock of the mountain like particularly stubborn soap suds to the pan.

Tanya can afford to dry and warm her clothes in a potentially magically-detectable fashion once she's awake. And well above the clouds. And ten miles away on a random bearing.

She should reach Finrod today. Is there anything of interest along the way?

A nearly overwhelming amount of beautiful, unspoiled wilderness, if that interests her. There are fewer Orc operations in this direction, and less settlement in general. The highlands below the mountains are green and endless, marching in rippling waves beneath her path.

... although from her extremely high vantage point, she can actually also spot a hidden city in the mountains to her North. Surrounded by towering peaks, the city is a fractal latticework of delicate stone arches, high-density suspended gardens, and artfully arranged waterfalls sending rainbows cantering across the white marble buildings. It's positioned in such a way that it is probably impossible to see from the ground, and no roads lead to it.

Tanya has never considered the possibility of a city being secret before. The world just doesn't work that way, not in any history she ever read. Nobody knew about the tribes in New Guinea until they overflew them, but those tribes didn't and couldn't build cities, their isolation made them far too small individually. A city requires a civilization to build and to maintain, and a civilization without modern construction machinery requires a large population which requires food and trade, and... 

Unless this is Genghis Khan's tomb on a truly colossal scale, with all the architects and builders killed to preserve its secret? And all the waterfalls and plants are automated - pah, that's ridiculous. Useless speculation.

It's a city and it doesn't look ruined. She will fly close enough to at least check if it's in fact inhabited and by which species.

It is inhabited, by tall stunningly pretty people with gently pointed ears who are probably Elves.

It's... a... city of... models, architects and the best urban planners since Vitruvius?

...

No. Stop. This world isn't like hers and it might have been specifically chosen to mislead her into wrong conclusions. These are people living in a city and that is all she knows. A city which has no obvious roads leading to it, but there are presumably mountain passes or tunnels or something, these people got here somehow and unless they collapsed the only way in behind them they are presumably at least aware of the world outside.

In fact, this mountain valley would make an excellent defensive position against a besieging army. Tunnels can be blocked and it's very hard to dislodge dug-in defenders from a mountain pass without artillery or fliers. Given time to dig in they could trigger avalanches, collapse any bridges, divert rivers... 'Having the upper hand' and 'the high ground' are so effective in warfare that they became general expressions.

Lookouts on all the surrounding mountains would make it impossible for an army to approach undetected, and they could contact the city by semaphore. An army could march from the city to the passes before the main enemy force could climb all the way up, and they would have short and secure supply lines...

(Why is she contemplating how to defend this city? Well, it's either that or planning to take it, and she really wouldn't want to play the invaders in these war games without artillery or fliers! Not that field artillery would win against stationary batteries dug in few thousand feet higher and sighted on the only approaches. No, the only way to deal with this place would be to starve it out, and if they're self-sufficient for food then... maybe try to poison them? Or bottle them up forever and wait for your technology to inevitably outpace theirs, a city cannot compete with a country plugged into the world trade, but maintaining that siege would be very expensive and hard to sell politically --)

...to enact an inner-lines defense strategy, the city would need good, military-grade roads to the passes. Can she find those?

Yes, actually. They might not be up to the standards of modern Earth, but there are wide roads leading from the city to three different potential passes. The roads are not paved, but they are crowned to deal with runoff, cobbled in places to deal with cross-streams, and trimmed with decorative stones in places where erosion might otherwise threaten a washout. They're better than the roads between villages that she has seen, but perhaps a little worse than the road that ran up to the Dwarfish tower, for military purposes. The grade is also a little steep — although considering the terrain, there might not have been much of an alternative, there.

Good, they are rational people. Who happen to also be very pretty and build very pretty cities, but still: reasoning, civilized beings.

Does she want to contact them? They don't seem to match any of the places she heard about. They are certainly not orks; they could be very pretty humans, but the humans she saw before (with the orcs) were quite plain.

That leaves elves. She was expecting elves to be smaller and more, well, gracile than the human baseline, which these people are decidedly not, and they barely qualify on the pointed ears front... But she is really no judge of elfiness. 

These people might have quendi among them. But if they really are trying to stay secret they won't agree to come with her to translate. And she wasn't referred to them, and Finrod is only half a day's flight away. And to approach them she'd need to fly back out and then walk up to one of the mountain passes, which is a spectacularly bad idea if there's any chance they're willing to kill to protect their secret. 

Tanya resumes her flight path west.

(The fountains really were very pretty.)

No other mysterious hidden cities present themselves, but as she approaches the coast she does spot a normal, non-hidden city in about the right place to be Finrod. This city is an interesting study in contrasts: on the one hand, it clearly shares a similar architectural style as the city in the mountains. On the other hand, it's much more open, spilling out into the surrounding farmland. Some parts of the city seem to have recently been on fire, and are currently being cleared away.

There are a set of camps and guard towers ringing the inner core of farms, and a set of thick walls that appear to still be under construction around the city itself. Anywhere with in-progress construction is surrounded by delicately painted thin wooden screens, so the city still looks quite striking, even with the construction.

Tanya knows fire was a common hazard in premodern cities; she counts herself lucky to live in an age when rational urban planning and the fire engine made large-scale fires a thing of the past, absent fleets of bombers aerial mages.

They're building walls, with no old and destroyed walls in sight? That doesn't match the story of a three-hundred-year war. Perhaps they were raided recently and now they fear a reprisal. But the walls don't enclose the farmland; if the city is besieged it will starve.

So either they fear more raids, or - their main army must be deployed away from here. That makes sense, she doesn't know how important this city is or how far away it is from the frontlines. 

If their enemies can raid deep into their rear and they're unsure enough of stopping them to spend money on building a wall, even though the wall won't protect the surrounding areas, that bodes ill for them. ...no, politics would cause this either way; a civilian population will demand visible protection even if it doesn't make sense in the cold calculus of the greater war.

Is this city also inhabited by the very pretty maybe-elves? How many troops do they seem to have? What kinds of weapons are on display? Are there any war-engines, fortifications more complex than walls, prepared terrain to constrain and funnel the enemy?

Yes, the city is inhabited by pretty maybe-elves. The number of troops is harder to estimate, because approximately everyone appears to be armed, mostly with swords and high-draw-weight longbows. There are no obvious children.

There are no apparent war-engines, but a moments reflection about what the topography of the land would look like from ground level makes it clear that the irrigation channels and field-separating ditches and fences in the farmland have been arranged so as to make a direct charge on foot toward the city as annoying as possible. The road winds in toward the city in a sort of spiral.

That is beginning to make more sense: they evacuated the city of noncombatants following the raid and are now fortifying it into a defensive location. That is the rational response when your cities are attacked and you realize you cannot prevent a reprise, as long as you have enough depth to fall back to, but it requires colossal discipline on the part of the citizenry to carry out. It also requires titanic feats of organization and logistics, which in a premodern context inevitably means repression of your own citizens and a great many incidental deaths along the way when that organization inevitably falls short.

An army will drill for years to follow orders but also show initiative, it will draw up elaborate plans to move hundred of thousands of people around, and it will still be a marvel of modern technology when the trains run on time and they all arrive at the front in perfect synchronization. A civilian population, unused to following orders, unprepared psychologically for the reality of war, with political dissidents protesting against the government's failures (as if they could do better), with no actual trains and all supplies and services moving at horse-speed and no organized supply train, with not enough food or resources of every kind because all the resources are going towards the army desperately fighting to let the civilians escape in time...

The best-case scenario is that you will evacuate highly prioritized people - local politicians, scientists, workers in crucial professions - you will evacuate any crucial industries that may have been located here... All the while the rest of the population flees in panic into the countryside because they are, correctly or incorrectly, unwilling to wait their turn when the enemy might come back before the evacuation wagons do. The roads are blocked with dead horses and broken-down wagons and that impedes both the evacuation and the army so you force them off the main roads, the roads are lined with people wearily trudging on on foot and falling by the wayside with noone to count let alone bury them. Local-born soldiers start deserting to help their families so you rotate in an army raised in a distant region, which treats the locals harshly and makes them think you don't intend to protect them and makes people irrationally avoid the official evacuation process or even sabotage it by stealing or selling crucial resources, and the chaos only grows. But still, there are no dead animals or debris along the roads leading west...

...Tanya shakes her head. She is clearly wrong. The fire was more recent than the beginning of construction on the walls. The city must have been evacuated ahead of time as the war-front drew near, and done so in a calm and organized fashion. 

She commends whoever did it, the people who were willing to admit to their civilians that it was needed when the need was still distant and uncertain and who convinced them to leave their homes and livelihoods and the politicians who built a state where the citizenry trusted the government enough to let them do it. (Unless it was accomplished through brutal repression and they have had long enough to bury the bodies, which she is not ruling out.)

In any case, the city seems to be under military rule and said military appears to be reasonably organized and competent. She would have preferred to make contact with the civilian authorities - if nothing else, she can't very well offer to hire a translator who's enlisted in an army at war - but that was always unlikely, given the givens. She isn't going to bypass a military installation protecting a front at war to illegally reach their rear.

Tanya flies a bit back, finds a place to land and dismiss her illusions out of line of sight of anyone she can see, and repeats her routine of openly walking up the road. Is there someone obvious she should hail?

She is swiftly met outside the city by a swordsman on horseback, while one of his fellows with a bow hangs back. They wear light leather armor, embroidered with fine curling leaf-like designs.

:Hail and well-met, if friend you are,: the swordsman says by way of telepathy. :What business have you at Nargothrond?:

Tanya has plenty of time on the way to mull over her approach. How much to reveal, how quickly and how publicly?

She knows nothing about the internal organization of this army or the bigger polity behind it. There are likely to be individuals or factions who will try to monopolize access to her once her true value becomes obvious. All else being equal, it is better for her to deal with the official government (or whoever the strongest faction is in practice). Well, it would be even better to deal with private individuals or organizations competing in the free market, but she's a complete foreigner approaching a fortified city in a nation at war while knowing absolutely nothing about it, she knows better than to hope for a public announcement and a fair-value auction of her valuable extraworld knowledge.

This is an argument for revealing all she is willing to reveal in public, to make sure word gets spread quickly. (It will also cause word to spread to these people's enemies quickly, but that's not her concern.) The problem is that Tanya has no idea how to do that short of flying round and round the city, which would invite them to take potshots at a presumed enemy. She'll have to play it by ear.

:Greetings, quendi of Nargothrond. I am Lieutenant Colonel Tanya von Degurechaff of the Germanian Imperial Army. It appears that a hostile spell somehow transported me here, leaving me stranded. I realize this may sound absurd, but exchanging world-maps and other descriptions with other people I met has let me to conclude I am from another world entirely.:

:I have come here in peace, hoping to trade services with your people. In the short term for supplies and information; in the longer term, perhaps for translation services between me and people who, like the dwarves east of here, do not have quendi.:

That's ... not really the sort of thing the Enemy usually tries. But, then again, the Enemy is subtle and clever.

There's a flare of magic as he relays this back toward the city, before he resumes talking to her.

:The idea that there may be more worlds than this is an incredible one. But if what you say is true, we Elves — Quendi, we called ourselves, when we awoke under the stars; Edhel, we are now known in the common tongue of Beleriand — we Elves, I say, of Nargothrond, would be most happy to trade for supplies and information. Ordinarily, we would not ask a guest to pay for food from our table, but the world is at war, and our supplies are not as sure as they once were. I am sure we would be glad to hear what trade goods you bring, upon your back or in your head as they may be.:

He has an archaic and longwinded way of thinking, which comes across clearly in his telepathy.

The elves call themselves quendi - does he mean they are all telepaths? Perhaps the orks and dwarves borrowed their word for it.

Everyone having telepathy would be incredibly convenient. Presumably it still costs mana, otherwise they would not have developed a spoken language at all, and so no writing and no civilization - have they got a spoken language, she was sure she heard some snatches...

Much more importantly, that implies they're all mages. If they learn even one more broadly-useful spell it could change this world. It might be a good thing her orb can't be easily copied, for reasons other besides her own irreplacement value.

:The value of my knowledge depends on what is known here already and on what is relevant and can be easily adapted; I have no way of estimating either yet. In particular, the only use of magic I have encountered so far is telepathy; if other spells are commonly used, they would affect the value of any non-magical techniques I know.:

Tanya is used to concise reports that prioritize important information and have a convenient summary in front. (How can you even be archaic when there's no actual shared language - never mind, not the time.) But 'archaic' and 'longwinded' are both synonyms for speaking in a polite register and she tries to imitate it on an almost subconscious level.

:In my own world, I made a study of various ways of organizing people and of managing those organizations and keeping them true to their founding purpose. Logistics, the organization of supply and the inputs and outputs of industry. Economics, the mathematics of supply and demand, markets and other allocation systems: (companies are not run as markets internally). :The logic of the ways individuals interface with such systems and act in response to incentives, and the rationally optimal ways to so act.:

:As a military officer, I have both taken part in and observed several theaters of war, but our military technology is very different from what I have seen here so far and my knowledge there may be of limited use.:

:It may well turn out that things I did not particularly study but happen to know will turn out to be the most impactful. I know or may be able to rederive very disparate technologies - ways to create labor-saving machinery powered by burning fuel instead of muscles, chemical fertilizers to enable better plant growth, life-saving medicines or treatment procedures, instant communications over large distances. Basic scientific theories, though I do not yet know which ones are both true of this world and still undiscovered by you. And mathematics, which is universal, although I sadly do not know nearly as much of it as I should like.:

This speech is delivered by a fifteen-year-old girl, short enough to repeatedly make people suspect stunted growth from childhood malnutrition, who does not look strong enough to carry the military kit that she is in fact carrying across many cross-country leagues of hostile territory (or possibly at all).

Said kit includes a submachine gun, a pistol, several grenades, high-altitude furs, goggles and a rebreather pack, a large well-secured backpack and plenty of pockets, as well as other, less visible things. Not that the locals should be able to identify any of those.

Well, Dwarves are that short and Ainur can look like anything they like. Perhaps she is some new kind of person? Certainly a child — even a daughter of Men — wouldn't have had the opportunity to become an experienced military officer.

:I am not sure that we categorize magics in quite the same way that you do,: her interlocutor remarks. :Because many useful magics are not so discrete and immediate as that thought implies. So it may take some discussion to find if your nonmagical techniques are relevant to us, but I find the prospect promising.:

:Do you know what you would ask of us in trade? Food and shelter we can provide, but perhaps you would prefer safe transport to Brithombar or some other place far from the advance of the Enemy? Or, if here you intend to remain, tuition in Sindarin?:

He's only stalling a little, by soliciting an opening position from her while the King is notified.

:I do not know enough yet to say where I would prefer to live. Certainly I would rather not live in a nation at war, let alone close to the front. Is Brithombar another city or a different polity?: If pressed, Tanya intends to say that her active commission in the Germanian Army precludes her from aiding any foreign military efforts lest she be perceived as committing Germania to one side of the war.

She considered also saying she must focus on pursuing leads for returning to her own world to discharge her duties there, a safely impossible goal that should honorably excuse her. The only problem is that she might be forced to invest most of her future wealth in some barely-credible research effort. Governments are allowed to fund moonshot research, since contact with a more advanced world obviously has immense public value; she just doesn't want to be forced to spend her own life on it, because even if it works and she returns home in some distant future she is likely to find -

:Any technology transfer is likely a long-term prospect at best; it will take days or weeks to choose a prospective avenue of approach, and during that time I expect to also learn more about the local situation. This would give us time to find a workable arrangement in case I make a long-term deal with your people but prefer to live elsewhere. In the meanwhile, I would not ask anything of you but food and shelter.: What she really needs is ammunition resupply but even with full cooperation from both sides leather-armor-and-longbows people will presumably take far too long to achieve modern bullet manufacturing tolerances, even aside from the required chemistry and metallurgy, not that she is an expert in any of those.

:And I will not need transport, only maps and directions. One of the spells known in my world is flight.: She demonstrates this by rising to hover at eye level with him. (Regulations unfortunately forbade her from doing this when talking to her superiors.) She will keep doing this at least until they go inside, to maximize the number of people who see her and the chance that the government will hear of it quickly.

:On the other hand, we had no idea telepathy was possible. I will want to learn a local language, but I do not expect to make enough progress in a few days to make that a priority.:

:If it would help, I have training as an aerial observer and can draw maps in the air or from memory. I can quickly carry messages and small objects to distant locations, assuming there are no aerial threats in this world I do not yet know of. I could lift one of your people to see from on high for yourself, and would recommend doing it to appreciate the options opened by aerial observation.:

She is of course not going to tell them she can kill people on the ground from a mile up; she doubts bows have that range and she demonstrably does not have a bow. If she takes someone up for them she'll let the wind buffet her enough to interfere with making good shots, just in case they decide she's a good vehicle for assassinating enemy leaders.

:It is both a different city and a different polity,: the Elf replies, thinking through her answer. :Far from the front and for now at peace, although the relentless advance of the Enemy will eventually endanger all.:

Flight is ... well, the gods have always said that all things are possible, with understanding, but practically this greatly increases the chance that she is one of the Maiar. And for one of them to be deceitful, that in turn makes her more likely to be an enemy.

Luckily, he is saved from having to make a decision by finally receiving a reply from his king.

:Brithombar lies directly to the west, on the coast,: which the Enemy already knows, :but his majesty King Finrod Felagund would like to invite you to meet atop yonder hill to partake of a light lunch and further discuss how we might aid one another.:

The King is here, touring the front! (Did he just hear about an interesting newcomer and decide to meet them himself and it was not in anyone's interest to caution him to leave it to the local professionals?) He will be under heavy guard and she'll have to be very careful not to spook them (and not to insult him), but otherwise this is perfect: Tanya is going to skip any faction rivalry and shoot straight for the top.

...unless they're afraid of assassins, and pretend the King is here to lure her in? That would be troublesome; she can't refuse a royal invitation and still pursue relations with these people, and they might have taken a look at her flight and decided to lure her to a place she can't easily flee from before striking. Well, they say it's a hill-top; she can only hope they won't strike first without warning as long as she evidences no assassiny intentions... She'll keep her barrier up and her flight spell ready, but there isn't a real reason to back out that wouldn't apply to any other city she might approach.

:I am honored; it would be my pleasure to meet your King. Could you please instruct me on the appropriate protocol on the way?: She is really not practiced at bowing in this body, ugh.