It's fucking cold here.

There's a thin line of glow, on the horizon.

The terrain under her feet is Somehow Fucked Up.

(Yes, it's fucking cold, that's not really new, though usually one only has to endure it for minutes at a time, going from workplace to home and back. The heavy waxed boiler suit is not nothing in the face of such temperatures, but is also not really sufficient.)

...Teleportation?? To outside the City??

Maybe the creature was... An assassination attempt, like in the novels?

What do you do in this situation.

She takes a few deep breaths and has a careful look around, clutching the power saw and trying to look for... Anything significant on the horizon. Or high ground, even.

There's the glow!

There is also some blobbish sort of creature, hustling not very fast across the blighted landscape, off ahead and to her left. It hasn't obviously noticed her yet.

Monsters.

She will... Try to stay low? She drops prone and considers what part of her is most visible - her hair?  Tied up in a neat bun for saw-related reasons, right now, but she lacks a hat. Since she was being stupid and protective headgear is uncomfortable.

She watches it for a bit... And looks at the glow on the horizon. Does it seem like twilight sun, is it otherwise dark here?

The sun is actually behind her if she faces the horizon glow, quite low but a sun and not a line.

Oh, that makes a big difference, that suggests it's the lights of civilization! She should definitely head that way, before she freezes.

She tries to recall tidbits about tracking, hiking, and stealth from a few adventure novels... But they're novels. There's not really much of use. Maybe it'll help if she stays in the low ground, so she's less easily visible?? And keeps checking around every minute or two. And try to stay distinctly in the blind spot of the ?monster?.

The ?monster? notices her when she's made about five minutes' worth of progress toward the glow. It snarls and displays claws. It's really gross looking.

Welp.

"Stay the fuck back if you know what's good for you!"

She raises the power saw and revs it.

The monster considers this, though it does not obviously understand, and then shrugs to itself and charges.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Running would not help. Monsters frequently have inhuman speed, stamina, and strength. This creature likely has some sort of strong ability, and her intuition as the Spark starts to grind into motion says it may be related to toxins- But this is just a hunch, a vague guess.

The spark makes her faster. The Spark makes her stronger. They have tested this, there is empirical evidence of it! She wants to be home, to be safe, in the workshop, making something clever and cool and - And she will DIE-PERISH-CEASE if she does nothing, without the spark there will be no more. So pull on that well of fury and audacity and RAISE YOUR WEAPON.

"Taste the power of a TUNGSTEN CARBIDE BLADE at eight thousand revolutions per minute!"

And she also charges, somewhere between panic and rage, letting instinct guide the revving tool to tear into the monster in bloody chunks compromise the greatest structural weakness of the construct-

It's not that tough of a monster, it turns out. It does smell stupidly awful though.

She spends a while crying. And throwing up. And screaming about monsters. It attacked first, she would have been fine to just... Keep walking... She had to. It was too easy, when the Spark was up, when she was fire and fury.

...

It's still really fucking cold, though. She can't wallow here forever.

...Are monster parts useful in any way? If they can- If she just has a body this collection of parts to work with- Need any advantage you can take- A claw or something, at least, they're sharp-

Just keep walking. Towards the light.

The light gets closer, grudgingly, over a rather long hike. At least no other monsters notice her.

The light is a shimmering dome, it turns out, prominent next to the horizon but present across the sky when she's looking for it.

She's too fuzzy-brained to make any real conclusions about it.

Keep walking. Keep walking. She doesn't have any food, fuel, or drinkable water. Well. The residual steam in the power saw has probably condensed into an antifreeze-laced liquid, but that's still not safe to drink.

Here she is at the line. There's maybe a building, maybe a mile or two off that way. The air is thin and frigid and there is no wall, unless the glowing line counts.

......Poke? With the saw first, then a finger. And then she steps past it, out and in, a few times, trying to identify... Anything about it.

(The Spark is silent on the subject, interested but confused.)

The line doesn't do a bit of harm to her saw or her finger. It tingles faintly, when she steps through, but it admits her otherwise like empty air.

...The dome shape, plus a fort, plus monsters inside, suggests a containment field, going by story tropes. Not meant to keep her in, apparently. Or else some sort of enormous anomaly being studied or exploited in some way?

Well. Towards the building.

The last twenty minutes of the hike are still cold but the ground is less mysteriously fucked up under the layer of frost. Still not a lot of plants or anything but looks like a fundamentally reasonable wasteland.

She's getting rather too cold to appreciate its relative level of reason. The lack of a head covering is painful; She undid her hair and wrapped it around her ears a while ago but this is woefully insufficient and barely helped. She walks, rubbing her gloves together and trying to move fast to generate warmth.

There's archers, up on the walls, and one calls out in a language she's never heard in her life.

Yay! People!! Soldiers. Primitive ones, at that.

She fights the urge to wobble or sit.

She halts, and carefully sets down her saw, and displays the seized fleshy claw unfinished blade, and then sets that down too, and raises both hands high.

"I speak germanian as spoken in city Frostbound! Uh... Parlez-vous francois? God Save the Queen?"

They talk amongst themselves; a different one tries another language.

Nope.

She's going to... Sit down now. And hold the saw again, alternating looking at it and the walls. Stone walls, low-tech. She's considering... Reconfigurations to make it still spin... Without an active steam source...

Some people are now coming out of the fortress toward her.