There are of course both Akinese and Francois people in Hawaii but that doesn't quite look like any writing she recognizes... And why would Hawaii of all places have an advanced presumably-military orb research program?

There seems to be a festival going on. And she doesn't want to cause panic. If the other mage is willing to fly low enough to talk to people on the street, Tanya can land and be... approachable? To a reasonable distance, of course, and very preferably on foot.

Sinnah drops a coin and then flies off to some other part of town in response to something a passer-by said.

That person over there is doing a fire juggling and swallowing show in a bikini! With occasional magic signatures as she adds more fire! That one is selling fried fish from a wooden cart. That one is sharpening knives and that one over there s busking. A few people come up to her and try to talk, but they mostly only speak one of the languages the mage tried before, which she doesn't understand at all. They don't seem afraid of her, more curious.

Looks like roughly one in four people are ""in costume"". The ""giant birds"" are wearing clothes, mostly, on closer inspection, but the going style seems to be matching one's natural coloration.

Any of her soldiers would have flagged this earlier, but Tanya grew up in modern Japan and knows the best festival costumes are always a decade ahead of military capabilities, so it takes her half a minute to notice something odd about the giant birds.

...are those kites? They look so lifelike - wait. Is her magic detector malfunctioning again? Has she been strolling under a whole aerial mage parade without noticing?! Dying because the enemy glued on colorful feathers is absolutely unforgivable!!! It would not only lose the army a fine officer but make them laughingstock of the continent!

She rapidly takes off with decoys going several ways. She's going to circle around the fliers and then approach them from above and make sure one way or another what she's dealing with. If they drop the pretense of being limited to wing-flapping speeds she - won't attack first but she will get out of dodge as fast as she can while the superfast mage is on the ground.

If she's going to spawn tons of decoys and then maneuver around and approach from above they might feel kind of - threatened about that, given her general attitude here? Responses vary. Some decide to land. Some yell at her angrily in their unknown language. One of them tries to get above her, still at muscle-power speeds.

(The magic signature that's attached to her is still there. The magic signature that corresponds to the Very Fast mage is still there, down in town, her active baffle long since expired.)

So they are mages and her detector is broken, but also - no military aerial mage, when alarmed by an unknown possibly-hostile mage approaching, would respond in those ways. And no country that she knows of has that many civilian aerial mages, because the orbs are expensive (and mostly still classified) and most of the countries that have advanced orbs are at war and conscripting any mages who can fly. ...well, the Unified States are probably not conscripting all mages yet, and a bunch of rich kids who happened to be born mages could buy orbs and learn to fly (slowly and clumsily) and then go to a tropical island festival where they, additionally, learned how to operate very realistic-looking wings? Or the wings are illusions, because her detector is broken and it's detecting some things but clearly not all of them, but - 

- for the same people to have a flight orb enormously superior to any fielded in the Great War, keep it secret from the international press, and then openly use it where they think no-one would see them -

- and not to realize what a military mage appearing means for their scheme, even if they don't recognize her uniform, or else to be completely unable to deal with her appearance, and also for none of them to know any civilized languages (which rules out the Unified States anyway) -

None of this makes any sense!

What else could even be happening? She's seen some of it with her own eyes. She... admittedly hasn't seen the other mage fly at twenty thousand feet with her own eyes, that was the faulty detector. 

This started with a completely unexplained... hole in the air... that appeared suddenly and disappeared after she passed through. It was magical, unless that was her detector breaking (but to break her detector it would probably need to be magical anyway). Everyone else around her vanished and the terrain changed and there was sudden rain (and the other mage appeared). 

Are magical portals a thing? Why would that be a thing? Tanya has never heard of it! And that doesn't explain where she ended up, unless this is yet another world, which - Tanya feels like you can explain any observation by saying 'actually, I've suddenly been transported to another world, which differs from my own in precisely those details I don't understand'. But the fact remains she has no other explanation, so...

She gives up on circling overhead and looks for the most central and official-looking part of town. She's going to land again and try to find someone who understands her, or a halfway-comprehensible sign or something, and then she'll make them a big illusion of the globe and try to ask with gestures where they are on it.

At this point the town is getting a little bit riled up about her. There are people with medieval weapons - swords and spears and bow and arrow and crossbow - assembling. There are a good deal more magic signatures popping off, scattered around the town.

If she lands near the 'Bancue', a woman will eventually come out, stare at the globe for a few seconds, and then hold open the door to the interior of the place and point to a large wall map, with a huge inland sea carving a nearly straight line from northwest to southeast through a continent that otherwise looks sort of like North America, if you squint. It also has a big canyon running down the center of the continent, almost as if it and the inland sea were radiating from something up north.

...that's not anywhere on Earth unless that's not a continent but an island. It could be a pair of small-ish islands somewhere, she can't read the scale.

People probably do still use non-gunpowder weapons in parts of the world, just not the parts with developed flight and assorted other magical abilities. Or it could be part of the festival. Tanya isn't feeling very optimistic about it being part of the festival.

The Very Fast mage's magic signature is approaching again. From ground level, and not alarmingly fast. Is she gonna run?

...Tanya really doesn't see where there is to run to. She clearly can't shake her pursuit in this town just by powering down her orb and going down some streets at random. She'll step out of the Bancue and be extremely on alert and let the mage with the tail (costume???) approach her.

"Can you understand me now?"

She's not speaking Germanian. It's just... Comprehensible anyway.

It's what now? Did Tanya mishear?

"I can. I am - very confused as to what's going on. And I apologize for trespassing in your airspace, it was entirely unintentional on my part" and only a sorry excuse for an aerial mage would ever need to say that. "Could you tell me where I am, please?"

"You're an otherworlder who popped out of a rift - those are known to temporarily connect other planets to Tirra with portals in a not very controllable way - on the planet Tirra, in the region known as Great Sea or sometimes the Northern Confederation though it's not actually very northern, specifically in the Coffee March, which is a protectorate of the Semaj commonalities which in turn is under influence of the City of Iron. We don't have airspace rules for the most part. -Well, 'we'. I'm an independent mage and inventor, I don't speak for the government. Can you teach me your style of performing magic?"

That's a lot to take in and it confirms Tanya's worst suspicions but, also, she is definitely not speaking Germanian! Her brain is insisting she is speaking a language Tanya has never heard before and also that Tanya understands what she's saying. Except for how she can't speak it herself or even repeat the sounds Sinnah is making, she isn't even sure how they divide into words, but when she hears Sinnah (and nobody else) speaking it she somehow understands her perfectly???

This is a bizarre experience. It's much more convincing than some wings and tails as evidence that Tanya is indeed in a new world. It's also terrifying because she has absolutely no idea what is or isn't possible anymore.

"...I could try? I don't have any of the tools that would be useful to start with, people can't start out doing the exact thing I'm doing" - that is, synchronizing to an advanced dual-core orb that Tanya is not about to give up - "and I'm not a magic engineer and don't know how to build them, but I could give you an overview and see if it fits in your - theory of how magic works - and then maybe we could reconstruct the missing pieces together." That is almost certainly a wildly ambitious over-promise but she did say 'maybe'. "Our theory of how magic works doesn't explain how you could possibly be doing - whatever you're doing that lets me understand you - but mostly in the sense that I don't know how anything could do that, magic or not. I'm not a scientist, though. I am Lt. Colonel Tanya von Degurechaff, aerial mage in the Imperial Germanian Army. Of the planet Earth." 

"I have never heard of such a 'rift' on my world before and I expect I would have if they were at all common. Do they - connect to the same planets repeatedly, on this world? Can they be manipulated to do so?"

"I would really really enjoy comparative magic studies amd exercises regardless of how well you expect it to work!!"

"-Ahem. I'm Sinnah. Rifts can sometimes be induced to open to the same place again, and sometimes do so naturally, but this is mostly the more stable ones. I do at least have extensive recordings of the rift you emerged from since I was in the area and noticed conditions were ripe for one. It was a very unstable one. I don't have my rift related reference books on me since I was travelling for a different reason and don't carry a library with me."

"It is good to make your acquaintance, Sinnah. I would be happy to teach you what I can about magic in exchange for you checking if I could go back to my world and facilitating it, or else advising me on who to talk to. Or if it turns out to be impossible, advising me on - what I could do in this world." People with clear desires that Tanya can supply are excellent and to be cherished and not let go of. Except - "is there some local authority that I need to check in with, as a new arrival?"

"I usually don't bother with that kind of thing, personally."

"...but there are authorities of some kind who would want me to do that? Or a law that says I should?"

Sigh.

"Yes. You'll want the same magic I just had cast on me so they can understand you. There's probably a Baron around here somewhere."

"...is there some reason you think I shouldn't follow the local law and cooperate with the authorities?" Or is she just an eccentric who 'doesn't bother with it' because the law has no reason to take offense at her.

"You're clearly powerful enough to not really bother if you don't want the benefits of being well regarded by the bureaucracy, and I am very impatient to learn magic, and people are prejudiced against kitsunes sometimes, but I can see I'm losing this argument. I paid three silver ecu for this spell- Actually I can just tag you with the herbs now that I can explain they're a conduit for my stupid idiosyncratic analysis resistant language spell, if you want that. It imparts temporary language knowledge."

'Powerful enough not to bother with the rules' and 'not being well regarded by the bureaucracy' are anathema to everything Tanya stands for!!!! (This is probably visible on her face.)

"I understand your impatience and I don't want to take any unnecessary detours, but I do think it is important to follow rules that are set for everyone's benefit. Especially if one is personally powerful enough not to." (Oops.) "If your spell has no other effects then yes, I would appreciate that." A spell for imparting knowledge makes no sense, which is the amount of sense of the existing situation anyway. "I hope this won't take long and I do intend to work with you once my - legal situation is settled. ...perhaps with your assistance the process might be faster?" Unless Sinnah is in fact not on good terms with the local bureaucracy, which would be worth finding out. "I don't really know what to expect; that's part of why I think it makes sense to have a process, to make sure everyone is on the same page."

"The most lawful expected thing to do if you were trying to cooperate given what has happened already would be... Go to whoever the local Baron and militia captain are and introduce yourself and apologize for alarming them and answer any not horribly intrusive questions they have next. You could also probably get an identification card with the travellers' guild. The guild is a structured way for young people to satisfy wanderlust without excessive risk, which over time becaume a de facto foundation stone of the bureaucracy. Cards tend to get tied to travel histories, bank accounts, and work histories."