She realizes that something went wrong somewhere around the third invocation to Yog-Sothoth. There is a lurch, and then a feeling that gravity is pointing in every direction at once and also no directions at all, and a shape that her mind insists on interpreting as a cube and a triangle and thirteen globes all at the same time, and then she is somewhere else.
She lands somewhere unusually hospitable, all things considered. There's breathable air, for example, which is extraordinarily uncommon from a universal perspective.
There are also trees, which appear to not only be the regular sort of trees that she recognizes from her home, but even the same species. It looks like they're in the Pacific Northwest. There are houses.
If she's lucky, she got thrown a hundred miles away and can call to get Prometheus's mysterious crypto billionaire funder to send a private jet to pick her up.
... Where did Tristan get rainbow hair dye. His hair is more often noted for being full of graveyard dirt and twigs. You'd think he wouldn't dye it if only because it would require washing it.
On autopilot, she says, "Can I borrow your phone, I'm lost and my phone is dead."
Observations: Tristan didn't recognize her. He has rainbow hair. He is in a house. He has a phone. He knows what an external battery is. That phone looks different than any smartphone she knows of.
Conclusion: that's not Tristan, it's his alt, and she's very very far from home and has even more reason than usual to be thankful for air and trees.
The first thing to do is to contact this universe's version of Prometheus, if it has one, so they can orient her.
...well, apparently Inaaya's luck ran out after the air and the trees and Not Tristan.
It's remarkable that Not Tristan is even recognizably human; from their interviews with sorcerers and Deep Ones and the K'n-yan they expected most alts to look like mi-go if not stranger. Normally alts aren't detectable without an invocation to Yog-Sothoth that, given how invocations to Yog-Sothoth have gone today, Inaaya is disinclined to do.
The question is whether she trusts him. Tristan is a sorcerer, but he is remarkably stable for a sorcerer; all he wants to do is hang out in the woods, study magic, put on the world's coolest haunted house once a year, and leave sacks of treasure he stole from graves on his descendants' doorsteps. She does, in a sense, trust him, in that she expects him to behave in a way she can predict and doesn't much mind. She doesn't know what he was like before his mind was ravaged by magic.
But she can't rely on finding an alt of Joan, or Tesfaye, or William, or Terrence before he was eaten by the King in Yellow, or someone else she trusts. And becoming a sorcerer doesn't normally make people more stable.
"Hello," she says, "I'm Inaaya."