Lucien can mostly make a living off of doing divining for certain niche medical studies, but he can't do specific enough conditionals to get his grander ideas off the ground yet. Still, when portals start showing up he's well positioned to suggest to a few people that diviners like him could be useful for quickly figuring out what conditions on the other worlds are actually like.
Still, they're taking a chance on Lucien by approving his application to join the expedition, so he definitely really shouldn't be late for his first day of work. He also probably shouldn't be running along a poorly maintained trail in Bolivia, but between that and the possibility of being late he knows which he prefers.
Well, which he prefers right up until he's tripped on a branch and sent tumbling towards the portal.
This portal was not supposed to be one that let people through, what the heck?!
He drops about ten feet and hits solid rock. The sound of the impact echoes a bit; if he were a bat he might know anything about the shape and size of his present location but as it is there is no light at all.
Lucien lots out a short scream upon landing, which would also help if he were a bat.
He didn't hear anything crack, so that's good??? He sits u-nope not time for sitting up yet, it's time for curling up on the ground itself.
The cave does not object to this behavior.
The echoes die down. ...not all of the sounds are gone but that might be his imagination. Squelchy rustling? Distant footsteps?
It's pretty firm in this position. So to speak.
Then there are footsteps - muffled by the face-thing, so they must be pretty close - and a shout, and then Lucien's left ear is really really cold even with the thing on it, and it loosens for a moment, enough that he could gasp -
Not for long! It clamps down again. Then there's another flash of cold - and then it relaxes, and something yanks it away from his head.
He is going to be gasping for air for a good ten to twenty seconds this time.
"...gria." Sigh. "Uli." And then there's light, not much of it but enough to be blinding for a moment in the blackness.
When he's blinked the spots away, there's a purple woman with white hair wearing loose pale clothes cinched up around her arms and legs. The light is emanating from a cinch near her left elbow.
Wave wave.
"Dasar jiam." A complicated wave of the hand. She cups a hand over her ear and makes an encouraging gesture at him.
... well, the portal was in Bolivia.
"Hablo ingles?" he asks, putting his elementary school Spanish to use.
"Oh..." In retrospect it didn't make much sense for a purple portal person to know Spanish, even if the other end of the portal was in Bolivia.
"I um.... where is this?"
She points straight up to the ceiling. There is presumably a ceiling; there certainly isn't a sky. (The light doesn't really reach that far.) "Taldor?"
That is apparently a concerning thing to say. She cups her hand to her ear again.
He also finds this concerning.
"I'm from New York - uh, Earth. I think this is probably a different planet."
Shrug. ...she reaches into her backpack, and pulls out a big cloak, and makes to put it around his shoulders.
She then collects the corpse of the thing that was on his face, rips a little hooky appendage from it, and uses that to clip the cloak more closed at about waist height on him.
"-I um. Fell out of a portal that might let me get back home. If I can reach it."
She looks around. Waves her light-bearing arm a bit, then finds a pebble, says "uli" again while waving her hand, and winds up with the pebble glowing instead of the sleeve cinch; she offers him the rock.
"I-do you want me to throw the pebble at the portal?"
It has been a very long day. Except for how it's something like 9:10am and he woke up half an hour ago.
"Okay."
"Do you know if it would be possible for me to come back here later if I leave with you now."
Nod. Beckon beckon, this way. (She casts another spell occasionally as they go.)
Lucien follows, continuing to succeed at putting one front in front of the other, and not crying, and that's it, that's all he's really up to doing right now.
Eventually they start passing through caves that have people in them. His escort exchanges words with them. Sometimes they laugh.
The people who talk are all purple but they pass a group that includes a bulky blue guy with tusks, hauling a big sack of mushrooms, and one that includes some tiny people who'd come up to about Lucien's waist, bent over their own glowing objects and sewing. Some of the purple people are playing a dice game; some of them are performing mushroom-related actions of some kind that they don't linger long enough for Lucien to get a great sense of.
Lucien is confused about their being different types of suspiciously-human looking aliens, though probably this shouldn't be any more surprising than seeing one suspiciously human looking alien.
The sewing looks lower tech, which isn't great.
They come to a long tunnel and pass people going the other way, some of whom his escort doesn't actually need to talk to at all!
And eventually they are going up and down the stairs and ramps in a bunch of twisty passages and come to a cave, with a tiny person cooking in the dim firelight. His escort makes a rag hanging from the wall glow and says something to the tiny person, who replies with a deferential head-bob.
And then down the hall to this terminal cave here, just a room, not very big, with a hammock and a bookshelf and some folded up furniture made of bones.
She sits on her hammock. It looks big enough to sleep on but it's also low enough that she can sit there. She cups her ear again hopefully.
"-I'm surprised that you nod, it seems like it would be cultural and this isn't even my planet, I'm pretty sure. I'm also surprised that your planet has people who look similar to my species, and mushrooms. Probably those are good signs for whether you will have food I can eat."
She points at the ceiling. "Taldor. Qadira, Cheliax, Absalom, Kelesh... debna. Human."
"I'm really surprised that you have place names that sound like the sort of place names that would exist on Earth, and also that you have humans.... I guess this could make sense if humans came here from Earth.... it can't have been the other way around because we have a fossil record of human evolution."
"-are you able to understand me because there are other people who can speak English nearby?"
"Are you able to understand me because you have the ability to understand every language?"
"Uh, in an amount of time less than the amount of time it took for us to get here from where you found me?"
"Will you be able to talk to me again before um, I have to sleep t-actually why am I not just using normal units. How many hours will it be until you can understand me again?"
Siiiiiigh. She cups her ear and says "Dasar jiam!" Then she puts her hand flat over her ear. "Pon po dasar jiam." Then she collects some silver coins from her storage trunk, lines them all up on the floor, and dubs each one individually "dasar jiam". She picks one up; she cups her ear; she puts it back in the trunk and then flattens her hand. Then she picks up a new one, and cups her ear again.
Oh no he is being exasperating. And also he keeps having to do things and he's terrible at that it turns out.
"Sorry. Um."
"Can you only understand what I say for a brief period of time a certain numbers of times per day?"
He did a good job and she is smiling at him about this and this is very good.
"Oh uh, that's not how omniglotism works on my world.... does yours work on writing?"
"-I have a notebook and pen in my backpack, would it help if I wrote out a bunch of words so you can point to ones you want to say instead of playing twenty questions with me?"
Lucien isn't sure what the shrug is about and starts writing down every word he knows.
Useful ones! Prepositions, conjunctions, common nouns like person, cave, danger, food, dom, sub, etc.
Huh. She will try to indicate with her slate and chalk that he should write small but otherwise she'll let him get on with it.
He can do so, organizing words as he goes, to make it easy to sort through. He's sort of deciding this system on the fly and probably he can do a much better job if he'd planned ahead of time how to sort words, oh well.
She puts her coins away and pulls out her folding chair and desk that are made of bones and unfolds them while he's at it. He is welcome to sit in the chair at the desk if he would like, it'd make writing easier.
If she gestures for him to use the chair he'll do it, otherwise he's fine where he is and will let her have the desk.
So long as she's not using it he'll sit at the desk, figure out a better organizational system, and write.
His list of words is now color coded, and neatly laid out on multiple pages.
She skims through it. Can she compose "stay here while I am gone for several hours"?
Yep! She doesn't even need to leave the first page for that.
"Is there food here that is safe for me to eat while you are gone?"
Yep, "bring" is on the second page.
"Okay, um. Thank you for being so helpful."
Lucien can clean his own bowl...but not in this circumstance so sure, the small person can have the bowl.
There are now five more pages of densely packed words, a pronunciation guide, a table of contents, and - mostly but not entirely redundant with the table of contents - an instructional flow chart to tell you what page and section various things are in.
...sigh.
She ushers him out of the desk chair; she has stuff to do with this scroll and this book.
She is not going to tell him right now! Instead she is going to do her inscrutable book thing.
A couple more hours later, the scroll shrivels up dramatically, she sweeps the scraps into the chamber pot, she does a few more minutes of book things, and then, she turns in her chair and hold out her hand to him.
She says more words he doesn't understand and -
- then if he replays his audio loop, he understands them after all, they meant "Share Language".
"Bit of a waste of paper but I didn't realize you were going to carry on with it," she says, gesturing at his notebook.
"I didn't have anything else to do."
"Did you read something about how to give someone else your language?"
"I'm a psion who mostly does divination - which means I can find out the answers to the right sort of sufficiently general questions. But I get hungry if I do it too much."
"Whoa, I didn't think psions were real and never heard that they got unusually hungry."
"Well, this spell is new to me so it might have some kind of translation drawback but it could also just be that things are super different on your planet," she shrugs. "Uh, what are your most urgent practical questions?"
"How can I get a ladder and how can I make it safe for me to go back and look around for a portal? How long can I stay here?" Asking if they have vaccines, electricity, or trains isn't urgent or very practical even if it's probably more important than his comfort.
"I did not see anything that looked like a portal where you came from. Are you expecting it to be midair or along a wall? A ladder that can freestand is going to be more than twice as expensive as one that just leans on a wall."
"Midair I think, I fell out of it. They don't always look obvious from the outside. Do you know if I call sell things from my world for money?"
In his backpack he has: a notebook, a planner, a water bottle, a granola bar, a wallet, his phone and charger, five ballpoint point pens in different colors, a flashlight, and an umbrella.
"I also think my clothes might be unusually nice for Golarion."
"I don't recognize most of this stuff and I'm not an experienced fence. - and you definitely should not try to directly sell any of it yourself."
"I can show you what the things do if that helps? Why shouldn't I try to sell them myself?"
"'Cause you're a human. This is drow country. The place has drow, and slaves."
"I can escort you places, and I will do this if you have a plan that might work for getting you somewhere worth being, which 'haul a ladder to the cave where I found you' might qualify as. I am not trying to personally keep you as a slave because I do not suck and also separately am not stupid enough."
"Okay... thank you?"
Suddenly it is way more salient how cute she is, which really isn't the correct reaction to any of this.
"You're welcome. The notebook is definitely saleable, though I'm not sure I can get it to go for enough of a markup that it's not worth me just buying it off you, I go through lots of paper. Bottle will probably sell. The wrapper on the - food thing - is definitely suspicious, someone might get curious..."
"...yes, it's bad? I mean, if you want to skip out of here and tell random Chaotic Evil strangers that you're from another planet that's your lookout but I would expect the results to qualify as bad."
"-I am um. Not used to operating in societies were many people can be described as chaotic or evil."
"I was hoping once I was through the portal to return with science textbooks to advance this world's medicine and transporation and things. Are people chaotic and evil in a way that would make this difficult."
"There's probably a fine place for it up on the surface, you'd just have a time getting there."
"No. Some monsters are people but not all of them, it means the general category of wandering hazards that might attack if you went up to Taldor from down here."
Wow this place isn't very good.
"I... can probably avoid needing to go much of anywhere by figuring out telepathy, I guess."
"Probably not initially but it shouldn't take too long to get that working."
"Well, if you make it home bring more food with you when you come back, you're going to be dreadfully expensive to feed."
"Oh. I can um. Pay you back. In paper or other things from my world - we're a lot richer than here."
"I meant that once I get to my world I can get more paper and pay you back for the food."
"Paper's good. Spellsilver'll go farther at the same weight and less bulk."
"Weird. Well, if you don't have it you don't have it. Paper is good, surfacer food is good if you wanna trade it for mushrooms."
"Huh. I am still interested in them but less. I'm also tempted by the food thing but I try to avoid overspending on luxury snacks so I would not really want to pay you what it's worth and can probably flip it for more, unwrapped."
Nod. She can have all the aforementioned items.
"Is this going to be enough for you to buy me a ladder. And uh, for you to escort me with the ladder to the portal."
"I'm not going to be much help at carrying the ladder. How strong are you?"