Somewhere else appears to be-

A cave, inside a different elaborate ritual circle, dimly lit by arcane torches on the walls. Large orrery-like constructions point wicked looking points of wood and steel at the center of the circle. One of them is cracked down the middle and smoking slightly. There's a deep smell of rot in the air.

Oh, and the black-robed and hooded cultists around her - some humans, some dwarves - are each accompanied by a retinue of ragged-looking undead, both humanoid and beastly. They look at each other in confusion and worry, where their apparent leader is sitting on the ground holding his head and groaning in pain.

"No death field?"

"Where did all the energy go, were the calculations wrong-"

"It's not an organized structure at all, another failure."

"But who's that?"

"You idiots, someone heal the boss!"

Lilian takes a look around. Ritual circle, check. Black-robes and hoods, check. Undead guards, check. Yeah, these are definitely bad guys. They will probably get slaughtered by a nascent hero within the week.

Her telepathy tells her that they are confused and disorganized. Nobody is taking charge either. Luckily, Lilian has become pretty good at improvising.

She puts on her most severe and condescending look and glances briefly from person to person while gathering energy. Then she lets loose a telepathic blast at the assembled cultists. Not enough to cause lasting harm, but enough to cause a migraine. Most of them clutch their heads in pain. A few of them sink to their knees before catching themselves.

Then she casts the Thaumaturgy cantrip and shouts with a booming voice:

"Mortals! Explain yourselves!"

Better to leave her instructions vague, so there is less room for her to make a mistake and give the game away.

The cultists all stare at her in shock, and start saying words Lilian doesn't recognize. Only now does she realize that the cultists can not understand her. They were not in fact speaking in a horrible accent, but actually aren't speaking common at all. She doesn't let it show, but this realization shocks her more than anything else. Being surrounded by murderous cultists happens a lot if you are Marked by Tonos. But finding someone who does not speak common? That doesn't make sense. Everyone speaks common.

Fortunately, by sheer coincidence (as if that could ever be the reason for anything, with her curse being what it is), Lilian had found just the right magic item for this situation a month ago when she fell into a hole and ended up discovering a long-lost tomb by accident. She reaches into her bag of holding, and pulls out the Amulet of Clear Speech. It must be ancient, because nobody nowadays had any reason to produce an item like that anymore.

She puts on the amulet and repeats herself.

"MORTALS! EXPLAIN YOURSELVES!"

Augh! That hurts! They stagger and waver.

"She attacked us! We should kill her!"

"No, what if she's strong? We should retreat!"

"ONE OF YOU FUCKING FOOLS HEAL- Fine, I'll do it myself!" The least-incompetent upright cultist walks towards the one moaning on the ground intent on using some sort of talisman he grabs from his belt.

Then they hear her translated shout and... Mill about uncertainly some more. 

"We're the society of-"

"No! Kevin! Shut your craphole!" Says the one who seems to be taking charge, pressing his talisman to the boss. "This isn't a summoning, it's a fucking mana field experiment, there's no possible way we meant to do this!"

"But it was supposed to make an intelligent-"

"Does she look like a being of pure magic?"

One of the others bows to her. "Dark Lady, I will listen to you, unlike these fools!"

Lilian takes note of what is being said. Not a summoning. Makes sense, since she was sent from the other side. Maybe whatever these people did just acted as a receiver?

"At least someone with some sense. As amusing as it is to watch you mortals falling over yourselves in your confusion, my patience is limited. So I will ask one more time: Explain yourselves."

"Oh dark lady, our humble plan is-"

"No, she's not ours! Fucking shut up!"

"-Self-sustaining necromantic field to feed on-"

"I swear I will kill you!"

"-Consume those who rebelled and have our revenge-"

A box near the cave entrance starts making noise. "By Samsin's beard, the perimeter alarm!"

"-will live like kings!"

It's difficult to tell what's going on, but the key words "feed on", "consume" and "have our revenge" confirm in Lilian's mind that these are clearly bad guys. And when an alarm is raised conveniently in such a conveniently timed manner, that can only mean that capital-H Heroes are coming.

When they get here, they need to view Lilian as a victim, not as the "dark lady". But at the same time, she has to keep up the act for as long as necessary to keep the cultists from attacking her. A plan forms in her mind. First step: Divide and Conquer.

"You annoy me." She says to the only sensible cultist of the lot. The one who realized that she is not one of them. Then she blasts his mind some more. This is straining Lilian's already depleted reserves quite severely, but with any luck she will be able to knock him unconscious.

While he is writhing in pain she addresses the other cultists: "You lot do whatever it is that you need to do.", she waves at them dismissively while pointing at the alarm.

Then she focuses on Kevin: "You. Stay and explain."

The sensible cultist flops over on the Dwarf he was pressing a talisman to. The talisman glows brighter.

Kevin starts babbling - necromancy is a stable structure made of fear and death and pain, that can 'infect' other magic and make it like itself - the Chelskans overthrew all the clans and kings and murdered tons of people - but if they can find the right formulas, they could create a huge mana field providing infinite magical power and - something something revenge blah blah.

Meanwhile, the rest of them scramble to position their minions in a defense of the cave entrance. One of them shouts loudly about preparing the secret escape tunnel.

There's a loud and hard to place roaring noise outside, audible over the variety of shuffling undead arranging themselves in ambush position. A small period of silence. And then a high-pitched tone sounds out, after which the opposition storms in. First they throw a salvo of metal balls that promptly explode in bursts of fire, lightning, and shrapnel, and then they come in wearing grey-green armor that shimmers slightly, carrying tubular weapons that go BOOM and shred undead bodies. The leader - a beautiful human woman scowling and screaming in anger - carries a flaming sword that she slices back and forth as well. Faint distortions assist the invaders against the undead blows, making their foes miss more often than not. It will take a bit for the heroes to get through the swarm, though.

The cultists are largely panicking at this point. That talisman seems to have been doing something though, as the Dwarf the competent one pointed out as the leader gets to his feet, takes one look around, and - does something that gets streams of faint red energy to move from his minions towards himself, making them scream in pain. "Well. This did not go as planned," He says to Lilian. "Interloper. I am Haldus Stonehold, of the Ironbone Hold, rightful ruler of these lands. I will see them become ours again. Have you any last words?"

Lilian mentally kicks herself for not getting rid of that ominously glowing talisman before it did its job. Magic does not need to glow in order to do its job. That means when it does glow, it's usually a sign that Tonos wants to draw attention to it.

Well it's too late for that now.

The woman who is leading the charge is beautiful and wields a flaming sword. Any doubt Lilian still harboured that the moral issues here might not be black-and-white go out the window.

And the cultist leader actually asked her for her last words? In the middle of combat? Classic. Well, Lilian is not going to disappoint.

"Catch!" she says, as she unlatches a small crystal from her belt and lobs it at the man.

It's probably a bomb. His eyes track it to dodge, and linger on it for a moment too long, perhaps, before he shakes himself out of the hypnotic pattern on the crystal. "Hmph."

It's almost an insult, really, trying such a distraction. But he has no time to wait here and respond to insult. He casually throws a small poisoned dart at the interloper before activating all his enhancements and grabbing the least-incompetent helper over his shoulders like a sack of potatoes, fleeing down the recently revealed escape tunnel at a far greater speed than such short legs should be able to manage.

The wall of undead is not posing much threat to the heroes. One of them is lying face down on the ground, but the thunderous reports of their weapons and their blades have made short work of the mob. Only the sickly-looking bear is still much of a threat, and it's already lost one arm to the woman with the burning sword. She decapitates it with a clean stroke and then looks deeper into the cave.

The remaining directionless cultists, the ones not too weak to stand after whatever draining Haldus did, look to her. "Dark Lady, what are we supposed to do? They're killing us all!"

She gives them a vicious grin and says: "I have a cunning plan. Fake your surrender. I will use magic to return your weapons to you later. Then we take them by surprise. Whatever you do, don't attack them before then."

Lilian, of course, has no intention of doing so. But avoiding a fight and taking all of the remaining cultists alive ought to earn her some points with the heroes.

She turns towards the woman with the flaming sword and says: "This is a misunderstanding. We surrender. Please stop killing us."

She drops her visible weapons on the ground and raises her hands in surrender. She has a lot of additional weapons hidden away that would take too long to remove.

The last few undead are down barely a moment later, and the squad advancing forward into the cave.

"Drop your weapons! Place your hands on your head! Make no sudden movements!"

Two soldiers point their tubes at the cultists, frightening them into submission

A soldier shouts, pointing down the tunnel. "Lieutenant Sokolov! Haldus is getting away!" 

"Shit!" the Heroine replies. "Volsun, Erengard, go after him!"

"Lieutenant," a bearded mountain of a man interrupts urgently. "We still need to secure the area and prisoners. Remember the objective."

Lilian can see the Heroine waver uncertainly. The roles here are obvious - grizzled mentor advising a young hotheaded heroine. The young officer wavers for a moment, then scowls and nods. "Very well, Sergeant. Volsun, Erengard, forget that! Back here! You two stand guard, sound out if the tunnel does anything. Squad B, secure the prisoners!"

The soldiers advance on the surrendering group, instructing them to kneel down and then lie face down on the ground with their hands on their head.

So far so good. Lilian complies with the orders. As a soldier approaches her, she warns him: "Do not touch any of these weapons, or the items on my person. Some of them are quite sensitive and will kill anyone who touches them improperly."

That claim should mark her as Somebody Important in the eyes of the soldiers, which makes it more likely she gets an opportunity for a private talk sooner rather than later.

She does not want to risk using telepathy to talk to anyone, because some people don't take that well.

Soldiers gently separate her from the others, who get efficiently handcuffed and manacled. The cultists don't meaningfully resist, whether trusting her to act or having just given up. A couple of the soldiers make a dark joke about the Intel guys having a better target now.

The veteran mentor and Lieutenant Sokolov have a whispered conversation, her almost-glowing bright blue eyes glancing at Lilian, then the Lieutenant smiles and approaches, hands held wide and trying to distract from what the sergeant is doing.

"Well, well. You don't fit any of our intelligence on these foul necromancers. Even I can tell something very odd is going on here. You may stand or sit or however you like as long as you don't reach for any weapons quite yet." She pauses a moment to let Lilian move. "I am Lieutenant Katarina Sokolov, acting on behalf of the workers and citizens of the Chelskan Common Union. Third company, first battalion, first special assault brigade." She lets her gun fall to her side on a strap, gives a bright smile and draws her right arm across her chest to her left shoulder while ducking her head. A salute of sorts. "Thank you for de-escalating. We don't have much to host you at the moment. We're on the far side of the southwestern barrier mountains now, but proper civilization is just a long hike away. Now, since the perimeter is secure and it's pretty much futile to try and track that damned Dwarf, perhaps you can explain how you got mixed up in this?"

This is about when the not-quite-a-Suggestion-spell from the sergeant hits, hopefully making it seem natural to be honest and open.

Lilian's telepathy allows her to recognize that the mentor is doing... something? Casting a spell has a distinctive mental pattern that she is able to pick out. Usually she would be able to tell the school of magic from the thought patterns alone. If it's a spell she has seen used often, cast by a person she is familiar with, she could even identify it exactly. But in this case, she has absolutely no idea what is happening, except that it's a spell.

This is par for the course. None of what she has seen so far is familiar. She is not a very good mage, but she is pretty sure that Magic Does Not Work That Way when it comes to just about anything the cultists said. The elephant in the room of course is that they do not speak common. The language that literally everyone in the world has been speaking for about forty thousand years.

Well, that's something to worry about later. For now, how to deal with the woman in front of her? Lilian had been worried before, because the flaming sword screams "paladin", and those can sometimes be difficult to work with. But instead, she seems like a reasonable person.

That's when the sergeant's spell hits. It does affect Lilian, but she notices it almost immediately. Her own telepathic powers are not a gift she was born with, but the result of getting too close to an Elder Brain. Lilian has a lot of experience with being on the receiving end of this type of magic. She notices that she feels compelled to be honest. Fortunately, she was planning to be honest anyway, so this is not an issue.

She stops. Was she really planning to be honest? Or is this a more subtle spell that makes her think that everything is fine?

Lilian is silent for a few seconds as the woman stands in front of her waiting for a response. Then she concludes that yes, she really was planning to be honest. It's a simple decision: This woman looks like a designated Hero. People who lie to heroes usually end up suffering for it. That's just how the world works when Tonos is involved.

"Greetings. I am Lilian Weaver. I would salute you back, but unfortunately it seems that I am very far from home, and I don't recognize the country, or the culture. I had a teleportation accident, you see. I think whatever these people were doing, it interferred with a portal, and I ended up here. By the way, tactically relevant information first: I convinced them that I was some kind of otherworldly thing and took command. I got them to surrender by promising that I would break them out later. They are waiting on my signal. I don't know if they have any valuable information, but if they do then I might be able to help you get it."

"Ah. Perhaps they will thank yu for it one day. We are on the continent of Tessaria, largely considered a barbarous wasteland by some, but I will tell you that thry are wrong. At least for the good valley of Chelska, where we have thrown off the chains of our oppressors and created a government for the people!"

"This is probably going to sound odd, but I do not recognize the name Tessaria. In fact, the only reason I can understand you at all is because of this amulet."

She points at the Amulet of Clear Speech.

"Last time I checked, everybody on Hyd has been speaking common for roughly forty thousand years, ever since House Mardok's bards designed the language and spread it everywhere."

"A very impressive artifact if it is translating two ways for you. Forty thousand years? I have heard some wild tales of broken time after the cataclysm but that is the longest."

That word makes alarm bells ring in Lilian's head.

"What cataclysm?"

"Well, it was the Empire of Sun's folly. Truthfully, little can be said reliably about it except that it was ruinous to everyone and even time itself, and that they were likely attempting and failing a ritual of titanic scale... Different peoples recall vastly different courses of history, without records of contact with each other until recently, and they are all internally consistent. We Chelskans subsisted in the great valley for centuries until we were enslaved by Dwarves and eventually broke free, and the goblins out west rebelled from their lizardfolk slave holders and fled across the ocean, then lived free for mere decades before discovering others, and the nations of the continent's north remember confounding fog and harsh storms for a century until it cleared away. So I'm not terribly surprised if you know yet another course of history. But this is not the place for a long history lesson."

"... this does not match the demographics or geography I know at all. I really hope I'm wrong about this, but I have either travelled into the far future, or I'm on another world entirely. Let's see..."

Lilian reaches into the bag of holding on her belt, rummages for a bit, and then pulls out a large book. It's an atlas, clearly created with a printing press and containing high-quality maps.

"Do you recognize any of this?"

A fine book, but then, this person is clearly rich. Lt. Sokolov digs out from her backpack a dog-eared manual of her own with blocky print and the occasional displacement or smudge. Also mass-printed, but of remarkably low quality. A lot of their equipment seems oddly ramshackle like that, honestly. The armor is a series of metal plates sewn into rough fabric and hastily dyed green. The weapons have plain and blocky shapes, aside from the no-longer-actively-flaming sword Lt. Sokolov carries, the backpacks show obvious signs of patching.

Some quick comparisons of the maps shows that she... Does not seem to be in her original world. The whole world is only roughly mapped but given the observed curvature of the planet and long-range scry-surveying, the conclusion is inescapable.

"A wonderful opportunity for the advancement of science, I would say! I'm sure some brillian wizard would be able to get you home somehow, eventually. They say magic can do anything if you understand it well enough. Hopefully without draining the whole nation's mana supply!" So long as she can help the Union in some way first, of course. "So, given the mixed success of our raid I think we can take it upon ourselves to escort you to civilization, if you wish. There is little worth seeing within a couple hundred kilometers on this side of the mountains."

"Great. Just great. And the week started so well."

Lilian looks more annoyed than afraid. Long experience has taught her how to cope with being thrown into unknown situations.

"I would appreciate if you could show me the way to civilization. It wasn't the first thought on my mind, but yes, this probably is a great opportunity for science. From what I have learned so far, it looks like my magic is completely different from yours. I'm not much of a mage, but I dabble in many areas, and none of what I have seen here was familiar to me. I imagine we can come to some arrangement that will benefit us both."

Lilian considers briefly whether it is worth the risk to tell them, but in the end she decides that keeping it secret would cause more harm in the long term:

"One important thing you should know about me: I carry a magical mark of Tonos, the god of stories. It causes probabilities to twist, so that strange things keep happening to me. My friends and I usually end up benefitting from it in the long term, for example by finding interesting artifacts or learning fascinating lore."

She indicates the many magic items she is carrying as she says this.

"But it also means that you should be on your guard more than usual."

"Gods? If such beings truly exist this would not be beyond them. Thank you for the warning. New magic sounds useful but it is not my role to explore that, really. As for civilization, I hope you like hiking. We can use Martin's March to get to the trailhead in a day or two most likely, and then perhaps a truck into the valley."

"Wait. You say you are unsure if gods exist? How? That's like saying gravity might not exist. It's really easy to test. Just pray, and see if you get a response. I'm guessing that means this world does not have active gods. Or maybe their compact of non-interference is much stronger than the one on Hyd. I'm going to have to try praying to them while we walk. Or do you have transport?"

Lilian has a Broom of Flying. She elects not to mention this for now, because she has had some bad experiences with it. The stupid thing is almost certainly cursed. Also, it's always useful to have an ace up your sleeve.