From the Aether that surrounds this particular corner of reality is plucked a single soul. Although he is not a human, he presently holds human form, because that is the form he held when a hijacked teleport flung him into the Aether in the first place. 

He's in a big stone room, on a circular platform with a pit around it (about ten feet deep and maybe ten feet between the inside and the outside). There's a ceiling thirty feet up and a lot of faintly Egyptian-esque detailing, though there's nothing representational or hieroglyphic. There's a bubble of force with a big ghostly off-white living ball of claws about twenty feet away, with its own, deeper pit around it, corridors that lead past that , some more going the other direction on a level above. A few crystals in the walls here and there give off faint light.

Everything here is magic, the air excepted. Mostly excepted. Even this small dusting of rust on the ground by his feet is faintly magic.

He is instantly on high alert. Hostile magic redirected him here — it could be a trap, another assassination attempt — but he does not see a pile of explosives, a battery of heavy guns, or a half-dozen magical girls with deadly powers. As the seconds tick by and no imminent threats materialize, he relaxes minutely. 

The magic here is not the same as his, nor does it seem to be of Earth. The ghostly creature does not look like an Earth cryptid or monster. The detailing is unfamiliar. 

All of these observations suggest a similar conclusion: He's not on Earth any longer.

Counterpoint: Neither his spells nor the magic of any magical girl allow one to traverse the Aether. But he caught a glimpse of the magic that seized his own; it looked like that of a magical girl, but there was something to it which he did not recognize. A rare manifestation? A fluke? The work of a Netherling or Aetherskimmer? Something else? He commits the pattern to memory all the same. 

(If only he'd reacted faster — but magical girls have always been his superior in that regard. Even quickened spells take a second to cast, but their powers happen at the speed of will.)

After confirming the apparent absence of imminent danger, Ipaxalon takes a moment to bow his head and grieve, once again, for those he has known and loved who are now far beyond his reach. 

It is not a long moment, but it will have to suffice. Perhaps this world needs fixing, too. 

This place is fairly large, but still a bit tight for his natural form; he remains human and begins to examine his surroundings in greater detail. He nonetheless employs a rather implausible array of magical senses.

(When one is a powerful spellcaster with access to functionally unlimited diamond dust, one has the privilege of sitting down at the Permanency Restaurant and ordering the entire menu.) 

Questions of interest to Ipaxalon include: 

• The alignment of the ghostly creature (as determined by the net effect of suffering or eudaimonia, and of legibility or illegibility, it has generated upon this world, weighted by the depth of causal responsibility it bears for same);
• The general structure of the various magics that surround him (wards will typically share some common structure with abjuration spells, summoning effects with the teleportation subschool of conjuration spells, elemental magic with evocation, and so on); and
• Whether the detailing consists of a readable language, and if so, approximately what it says.

It doesn't seem to be aligned, any more than a rabid bear is. Nothing else nearby has an alignment either.

There is definitely some abjuration in the magic in the walls, and the bubble around his neighbor is evocation and abjuration. The rust dust has fading traces of transmutation. None of it is particularly normal for schools, and all of it except the bubble of force is heavily mixed with the universal school; for the walls it's most similar to permanency and the rust and some of the breeze blowing in (also traces of transmutation) looks a bit like wish. (Though the weirdest thing might be that the crystal lights are pure universal magic, no evocation like you'd expect for a permanent light.)

Almost none of the details have linguistic content, but there's a group of indents around his platform, the one with the bubble, and the third on his other side, and they're marked with runes. Which - sort of have meanings? They're kind of like 婷 - they have associated meanings, sort of, but that's not what they're usually for. But they come in a set, and the three platforms have approximately ABCDEF, GHIJKL, and MNOPQR around their edges. Around the bubble all six are missing and the indents are holes six inches deep; around the third, all six are present and the indents are full; around him, only one is empty.

Hmm. 

What are the full indents filled with?

He also has tongues, of course. Does the creature in the bubble have a language? 

They have small regular stones carved with the same runes, inset with crystal. They're turned slightly so you can't just pull them back out of the hole, but even from a distance it's pretty obvious it wouldn't be hard to turn them back; it's more like a child safety lock than a real lock.

The Havoc is... muttering? Whispering? But it's hard to make out the words, and it doesn't seem to be coherent. At least it isn't maddening gibberish, but that's the obvious analogy.

They don't look like the runes used by the giants of Jorvasten to empower themselves, ward their fortresses, and enslave their kin, and they don't seem to radiate dangerous magic either. (Well, not any more than the rest of the room.) The place is still making him tense.

At any rate, he's not going to disturb them. This place has Dangerous Forgotten Ruin written all over it. Possibly literally. His adventuring instincts may have rusted a bit in the last two hundred years of Earth life, but one lesson from decades of raiding rune giant strongholds that has not faded in the slightest is that you Do Not Touch The Unknown Runes Without A Damn Good Reason.

As for the imprisoned creature, if he can't seem to form a coherent thought into words in its language (?) even with tongues, he'll leave well enough alone for now.

He pokes the air above the pit and, if this does not trigger some horrendous trap, hops the ten-foot gap with ease and picks a corridor to explore. 

Oh, languages, plural. If he has the discernment through tongues he can tell that there's two different anatomies being represented among them, one more human and the other more bugbear-like, but that's probably hard since they're whispering.

No traps are in evidence. Whatever was supposed to trap something on his platform either never activated or burned out.

If he goes past the trapped thing, he'll find sliding doors, in smooth channels, mostly but not entirely closed. Through there are more corridors, which are smaller than the room he arrived in but built on the same scale - for something about human-sized, but on the larger end; it would be cramped for even a pretty small giant, and he could slither through in natural form but it wouldn't be pleasant.

Some of the doors have crystal runes next to them at about shoulder height, faintly glowing. Most of these are a rune that just means 'door,' and the few others are assorted adjectives. Others have an alcove which could hold something about head-sized, and these ones have divination magic.

The general magic aura of the whole everything continues basically unchanged. The air mostly isn't magic, but faint gusts of breeze come from the direction he's moving occasionally, and those bring the faint transmutation and universal again with them. If his ears are really good he'll notice that faint thumping like a trap door bouncing against the floor when it's dropped precedes each of these gusts by a couple seconds.

It's otherwise extremely quiet. He can probably go a couple minutes in this direction without hearing any signs of life. There's an occasional drip of falling moisture.

His hearing is excellent, yes. He continues heading towards the breeze; it might mean an exit. 

The thumps get louder and the gap between them and the breeze gets shorter. It opens up into other chambers, designed a lot like the first one but without anything like the containment bubbles.

There's one where one side of the room has a second level where the first twenty feet are made of a bunch of thin walls, slightly greener stone than the rest, all the same height and projecting out of the floor, and the other side has almost the same, except they're at all different heights and make up a long staircase. And another where the walls and ceiling open up, but the floor stays the same width as the corridors. To each side there's a pit, deep and dark enough that the bottom isn't visible. Looking up, the top of the shaft isn't clearly visible either. (This is true even if he has darkvision, if it's limited to the usual 120 feet.)

But if he keeps following the breeze, it just leads down the corridor. There will be some more noise, a few chambers down the way, when he's covered around half the distance to the thumping. Sounds a lot like the whispering ghost from before, but with even more voices, and more variation. There's another mostly-closed door, and it's coming from the other side.

That sure does look like it was designed by wizards. At least the geometry is behaving itself, unless they managed to fit a truly bottomless pit in that one room. (He hopes not. Bottomless pits are not a responsible architectural decision, no matter how annoying it is to haul refuse out of an unnecessarily large tower. They have an unfortunate tendency to implode.) 

This close to something that could be a threat, he casts freedom of movement on general principles. It'll last a good long while. He has other buffs, but they are shorter duration and he has a feeling this could turn out to be a very long day. 

How wide is the opening? He attempts to peer through to the other side.

The gap is most of a foot.

This room looks like a junction, probably. But more urgently, it's full of claw ghosts like the trapped one. Much smaller; these range from housecat to wolf in size, not dire bear. They vary in color, which seems to match size. The smallest are pure white, look the least agitated, and are the most numerous; there's six visible from here and it's probably not all. About a quarter are bright red, visibly agitated, and fox-sized; they seem angry, like caged predators, and there's a small aura of enchantment around them. And the largest - only looks like one, here - is blue with an aura of purple energy that looks like necromancy; unlike the little ones, it never stops moving, but it doesn't seem to be purposeful motion, just drifting around.

They float above the ground, but either they can't fly, or they really don't like doing so; none of them are hovering more than a few feet up.

Perhaps it's the Sense Motive, or perhaps it's just the extreme Dangerous Forgotten Ruin vibes of this place, but Ipaxalon cannot help feeling that they're going to attack him on sight.

As much as he enjoys a good tussle, these beings are not obviously evil, he's a trespasser in their apparent domain, and he's not sure he can subdue them nonlethally. It's best if this doesn't come to a fight. 

There's still a chance he's misjudging things, though. He backs up a bit and casts the first nine-tenths of an invisibility spell. He'll finish it the instant there's any sign of hostility. Then he slides into the room and attempts to say "Pardon me, I seem to be lost," in their human-ish language; failing that, English will have to do. 

They actually start paying attention before he speaks, when he starts casting.

The whispers all get angrier, the big one stops being aimless and moves toward him, the reds surge forward, and the little wisps all file into their wake.

(Words like 'mage', 'destroyer', 'prey', and 'cursed' show up enough to be a theme.)

And yes, as soon as there isn't a door in the way they attack. Big guy seems to be a caster.

Then he will turn invisible and attempt to circle around them with supernaturally fluid grace, until he can dart down a new passageway. 

The invisibility does not seem to hide him but they do act slightly more hesitant. He's faster, but not much; several of the red things will get within aura distance, and the caster will throw projectile spells at him.

(They're trying to en-rage him and slow him, respectively, but he may not notice the specifics because they are unaccustomed to the existence of spell resistance and do not succeed at all.)

If he doesn't do anything else, he'll get a couple clawings on his way and pass through the necromantic* aura before he gets clear. But unless those're nasty, he will get clear.

(*actually, also some divination?)

Even in this form, he's moderately difficult to hit, between the bracers of armor that work even against incorporeal attacks and his skill at dodging. He takes his scrapes and moves on. 

Once he's clear, he takes a few moments to heal the scratches with cure spells.

As he passes through the necromantic aura, his freedom of movement ends, and the Malice acquires a shiny new abjuration effect that looks very familiar to arcane sight. It doesn't get any faster, though, so he still pulls ahead of them, and after a while they give up and stop pursuing.

The next stretch of corridors has some octagonal insets on the walls that have some crystals in their centers and strong conjuration magic. They have swirling energy inside them that looks somewhat like the bane, and there's divination magic laid out in a wide arc around each of them, along the floor. They're spaced out about every thirty feet here, though the first and the third from where he enters have the magic missing, the crystals cracked and half-shattered, and no swirling energy visible.

Spell stealing. Usually rare, dangerous to casters. Mostly an inconvenience to him — all his spells are replaceable, none critical — but it's still fortunate it got one of the non-permanent spells. Given the divination effect, perhaps a mind blank would block it in the future? He can experiment later, though. 

The conjuration effect makes sense if they're binding outsiders. Divination, less so. He'd have expected abjuration. Can he skirt the divination magic as he traverses the room? If not, best to spend the energy on a mind blank after all. 

If he's careful, he can definitely do that. It's pretty much just an alarm each.

There are more of those conjuration traps past this corridor, but they're thinner, in clusters about that dense but covering less of the other corridors. As he progresses it's becoming clear from the occasional thumps that whatever's producing the wind and noise is off to the right, and not very far to the right - maybe half again as far as the furthest wall he's seen in that direction, at most.

Which is relevant because after a few of these trapped corridors, there's a decision. He can turn left along a clear corridor that then turns forward, or go forward into a comparatively cramped chamber that looks mazelike. Goes up and down several times, a few bridges over visible-bottom-less pits, and a lot more doors than most. Most notably, straight ahead, there's stairs down, and a gap straight ahead, with a particularly large door with two of the empty alcoves. And next to it, a partially mummified corpse and a large yellow glowing crystal in a runic shape from the same alphabet as before, of appropriate size to fit in the alcove.

Why are wizards like this. They might have items that let them fly for hours a day, but their servants probably don't. (The magic seems different here, but still.) 

He goes forward. It's fine, he can make a fog cloud and just walk across the gaps. 

Who leaves a mummified corpse in the middle of a main junction. 

...is the corpse Evil and/or powerfully magic?

Nope, it's the least magic thing here. Utterly ordinary nonmagical mummification without wrappings or anything. The robes are still recognizable as clothes, not that there's any recognizable insignia or inscriptions.

The crystal's unusually magic, though. Unsurprisingly.