Then a man eight inches taller than Carissa and looking vaguely like one of her former(???) coworkers will go back to the town center about half an hour later. It seems deeply unwise to let anyone know that she is new in town, and deeply unwise in general to be a woman if one can instead avoid being a woman, and deeply unwise to remain this confused.

Her top priority questions: 

- what is this stupid place

- why does it need a person from another universe

- is the fire preferred or dispreferred

- is the Church of Asmodeus here (really that one should be first, her bad for not putting it higher up)

- did everyone ELSE also get here via a TEA GOD

- does it have food and water and spellsilver and basic necessities like that 

- who is in charge and what is she supposed to believe about them

- what is the afterlife situation HERE

Okay sure sure but she's going to need to pick out a particular person to talk to and somehow introduce any of those questions.

They've got all kinds of people in the town center, including one of practically every kind of profession that Carissa finds legible and some she probably doesn't.  Though nobody here looks particularly like a priest of Asmodeus.

(Oh, and it doesn't look like this is some benighted non-Chelish area with Prejudices?  Men and women seem equally distributed between professions, including violent ones.  To a greater extent than Cheliax, even, with equally distributed male and female advanced fighters, or male and female probable-prostitutes.  There's also a distinct lack of visibly hurt people, like the sort of place that has channeled healing.)

The possible explanations for the sex ratios are an incredibly comprehensive tyranny or magic that changes everyone's sex trivially and probably involuntarily. Either way she approves.

She does not have money. She does not want to draw lots of attention to herself with weird questions. She does not want to be here, she wants to be back at the Worldwound where she belongs.

....fine. Nearest person who doesn't look like they could take her in a fight. "I'm looking for the Bog's Bed, which way is it?"

"The... Bog's Bed?  I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't know."

"It's a tavern. There can't be that many of them, and I wouldn't expect them to change their names too often. I am in Henset, right?"

"Oh no.  Oh dear.  I was trying to get to - Midvale - I don't even know where Henset is I must be in completely the wrong place right now -"

Great, mission accomplished. If only she had a Dimension Door she could sell the service of taking this poor idiot to Midvale. ....possibly she can do that with just a Minor Illusion, if everyone here is very stupid.

...Detect Thoughts.

She's trying to review in her head which of the recommended landmarks along the way she could've misidentified while flying here!  Under her own power.  For what was definitely not just a few minutes.

Also what was that Skill the strange woman just used, it was obviously a spell of some kind but it looked nothing like any kind of magic she knows and she couldn't figure out any affinity in the gathered mana at all.

They can see magic, so it's not worth risking. Too bad; she would feel much more comfortable here if she had some money. 

(She would never dream of just robbing someone. That's unLawful! She's a Lawful person! It is perfectly Lawful to say 'this is Henset, right?' and then sell transit to Midvale which in fact deposits the purchasers in Midvale, if they are gullible enough to believe you.)

She snorts in disgust and leaves.

Different disguise, different person. Question one answered, how about question two. 

"There was a man arrested here last night for being a public nuisance, screaming about the end times, do you know where they'd have taken him?"

"Do you know if he was screaming about the end times because he was drunk, or insane, or just, you know, couldn't handle the whole apocalypse thing?  Would they have triaged him to the drunk tank, a brain-healer's office, or a mind-healer's intake?"

Some of those words are not standard Taldane, though their phonetics fit with the rest of the Taldane language.  They seem quite understandable anyways!  Go figure.

She does not like this place. She doesn't yet know what to dislike it for but she doesn't like it. Also, she would like to stay far away from brain-healers and mind-healers. Those seem like powers to only have employed on you by people whose loyalty you've very carefully vetted.  

"Oh, I think he was just drunk. Though, you know, before the apocalypse he was a happier drunk." Is it a recent apocalypse.

"Weren't we all.  Drunk tank is halfway across town, if you have a flying Skill it's not far from the big iridescent dome, otherwise... keep walking in that general direction," she waves, "until you've covered half the distance from here to the wall, and then stop and ask for directions again, I guess.  You in Midvale for the big casters' tournament, or are you heading for that new dungeon that's popped up?"

There's that word again, Skill, as if people only fly around here if they have it as a native ability. She should probably not demonstrate flight; she doesn't know what else it'd mean about her in this magic system. "I hadn't even heard there's a dungeon that popped up," she repeats in carefully the same tone, "I've just been looking for my idiot friend, who is here for the caster's tournament. What's the word about the dungeon?"

Why would anyone deliberately go to a dungeon. Dungeons are places where you are tortured to death. 

"Oh, you hadn't heard?  Popped up around ten miles away two months ago, discovered a month ago, teleportation portal up as of just last week.  Nobody's reached the core yet but it's at least B-rank, and it sounds like this dungeon might be starting to figure out about how Transmuter Devices have changed market demand; fewer platinum or mithril drops, more Skill Gems and affinity metals and other things we can actually sell.  Lots of adventurer parties forming, if you're up for that while your friend's competing."

It's like something that's halfway to making sense, but doesn't quite. Dungeons...not in the sense of torture chambers, clearly, in the sense that people raiding an ancient tomb might cheerfully say they're going dungeoneering - pop up? Who pops them up? Maybe she just means the location is discovered? But why would the discoverer of a location advertise it to everyone instead of selling the information to the highest bidder who'd rather not have competition? And then she says "dungeon might be starting to figure out", as if it's intelligent, but why would anyone go adventuring in an intelligent sapient adversary that just showed up one day??? That's the most obvious trap she's ever heard of!!

"I dunno, maybe. I've never had that much luck adventuring with random strangers." That at least has to be a constant everywhere there are adventurers, that most of them suck.

"Well, you know the old saying: you are the only common factor in all of your failed relationships."  The adventurer gives a cheery wave and heads off, no longer looking quite as interested in Carissa.

Uninteresting is precisely the thing Carissa, or the set of distinct strangers she's pretending to be, are aiming for here! 

- what is this stupid place Midvale

- why does it need a person from another universe apocalypse, apparently

- is the fire preferred or dispreferred dispreferred

- is the Church of Asmodeus here (really that one should be first, her bad for not putting it higher up)

- did everyone ELSE also get here via a TEA GOD

- does it have food and water and spellsilver and basic necessities like that

- who is in charge and what is she supposed to believe about them

- what is the afterlife situation HERE

Different face! Different stranger! No one's acted like she's rude for demanding their time without payment yet, at least. Also no one's tried to rob or rape her. Really this is going unreasonably smoothly. "Is there an Abadaran bank here?" It's a safer god to ask about than Asmodeus.

"A what sort of bank, now?  All the banks are in the rich center of town, either way."

"The rich....center?" That's not how Corentyn's laid out; the rich people want to be far away from the smells and the docks. She doesn't actually know that much about how cities are usually laid out. It's hard to tell when she's confused because she's right to be confused and when she's confused about something completely reasonable. "Fine, which way is that?"

Are there, in fact, any churches visible, on her way into the rich part of town?

Not with an architecture she recognizes, at least?

Oh, and that teenage boy there looks like an obvious tiefling, what with the horns.  He sure doesn't look very... Evil, at the moment.  But he's dressed in red and black, at least?  And he's got kind of a collar going on but it does not really look very slavey, nor do the quality of his clothes.  

Carissa has no idea how slaves are identified in other places! It presumably depends on what's convenient and what's traditional and what's hardest for them to get rid of, which depends on the local healing magic. ...maybe that's how to identify the churches. 

She pulls out her knife and discreetly cuts her forearm. Puts her hand over the cut to stem the bleeding and also make it less obvious what a clean cut it is. "Where would I get magical healing?"

...the first person she asks about this will cheerfully just heal it herself!  This involves a brief incantation and some gestures that do not look like casting a pre-hung spell, nor like divine magic, nor like anything Carissa has ever seen before.