- and disappears, psychic connenction rapidly fraying.
The greater part of Selivu is panicking a little, and is trying to shove as many psychic resources over the connection as possible.  The separated instance - now considered Seliun, as an individual - is panicking a lot.

They're in a pine forest, much like any other. It's not at this moment snowing, but there's snow on the ground, melting slightly in the crisp, clear sun of a late morning. Nobody seems to be around, nor are there any obvious signs of human habitation.

This is not where they were! At all! The cave was located in a desert!

At the moment their leading theory is some sort of strange natural magic phenomenon caused her to be teleported somewhere far away. Why here, they're not sure.

They'll take a moment to calm down and get oriented. It's strange and limiting to be in only one body. They have more like ten bodies worth of psychic energy, and they have some psychic weaponry, so they're not entirely unprepared, at least.

Time to follow procedure and get some scouts. Are there any animals in sight? Anything that could be a den? They also do a coarse psychic scan for minds in case there's something here they can't see.

There are a smattering of small birds and mammals in the forest, as you would expect, but the strangest thing in her senses is a bird's mind that seems noticeably too smart, even for the raven it most closely resembles. If the minds of the animals or mundane people are like air to move through, then the mind of this bird is like water, or perhaps some form of insubstantial fluff; it's not hard per se, to touch it or change it, but there is any resistance in a way there there normally isn't. The bird is not at a human level of intelligence, but it's expressing cautious curiosity about the strange appearance, ready to flee at the first signs that the stranger has noticed it or will take hostile action. It is readying some ranged attack capability of an unclear nature, without further investigation. 

Strange. Possibly further evidence for unknown magical phenomena.

They'll try to slowly increase their distance from the anomalous bird. While doing that, they'll spend a few minutes trying to add some of the more normal animals to a subnetwork under their control, then review the animals' memories and instincts for any information on the anomalous bird. They're probably not in any real danger, but provoking the bird in order to gain information directly isn't worth the risk.

They'll also send some animals out in all directions to see if there's any points of interest nearby.

The unknown bird feels smugness as it watches Seliun leave. The slowly growing cloud of enthralled lemmings and small birds she has following her remember those birds as a threat - the glint of metal and death from afar are a recurring understanding, but concerningly, their memories contain many other threats. Great lizards, larger than horses. Fire or ice wielded as a weapon by giant wolves. Numerous impossible things, especially for a collection of animals limited to a few hundred square meters of forest.

…disturbing. They would write it off as being some sort of hallucinogenic effect, but the details seem to be consistent among individuals. It could be a psychic effect changing the animals’ perception, but that’s almost as dangerous as if the effects were real. With that in mind, they’ll keep their mind guarded and try to keep the animals spread out to avoid attracting undue attention. 

At the same time, they definitely need to know more about the anomalous bird. They’ll try to brute-force takeover its mind. If it doesn’t work, they’ll try to crush it’s mind. Failing that, they’ll throw some birds at it from the opposite direction and gain some distance. If it works, they’ll see if the anomaly’s greater intelligence sheds any light on the situation.

The corvid's mind is easily defeated - reaching out and grabbing an object underwater is not that much harder than grabbing an object sitting in air, after all. Its last thoughts as a free being are of warning its family of some unknown threat. 

In the depths of it's mind, it's own nature is somewhat clearer. It is one of a species, it thinks, an inventory of loves and hates and suspicions of dozens or hundreds of others of it's kind (it has met more members of it's species than it has the capacity to keep track of productively), perhaps lacking in depth or sophistication compared to that of a human mind, but no less intensely felt for it. They are corvids, a little on the large side, with beaks and feathers of metal, the beak shining polished-steel, and the feathers mostly black but for a few red highlight-feathers - the metal feathers are razor-sharp, which both deters predations, and enables them to be thrown as a weapon, allowing the birds to attack from afar and be a threat to many of the dangers of the forest which are limited in their effective range - nearly as deeply-felt as the list of loves and hates is the mental inventory of forest threats which are not so limited in their abilities, which is disturbing long, ranging from a giant white-haired apelike figure who threw rocks to a giant lizard, only out during the warm summer months, which could spit globs of acid with remarkable accuracy, and several species of plant that will throw spines or spit seeds if provoked to do so.

It’s more intelligent than they suspected. Unfortunate - they try to avoid subverting intelligent creatures. They will consider erasing themselves from it's memory and letting it go later, but in the meantime, they can use it.

The biology here is very strange! The abilities represented seem like they would require a lot of energy. They wonder how the bird is able to grow metal feathers. The ranged abilities in particular are interesting, they would think that ranged attacks typically require intelligence.

Do any of the networked animals remember seeing humans, or have a sense of where humans might live? Failing that, any caves or other structures? It would be nice to have protections from the elements.

Apes often use tools, so it's not alltogether surprising that one has figured out "throwing rocks at birds". Most of the other forms of ranged attack seem to be innate, and thus presumably come with suitable instincts - the anomalous bird certainly does, for its feather throwing.  

None of the animals here have ever seen a human, though the anomalous bird is aware that it's one of the younger and less worldly member of the flock - a young male consigned to guarding the edge of their territory due to lack of success in internal conflicts. Perhaps one of the older corvids would have seen a human; it lacks the language to ask them.

Finding and subverting more of the corvids could be a potential path to finding humans and defending themself, but it would be risky, not to mention unethical.

It’s seeming unlikely that humans come through this area often, which it seems likely to be deep wilderness. They’ll operate under the assumption that they won’t be interacting with humans in the immediate future. They’re on their own.

They’ll start looking for a place to make camp, gathering sticks and any dry-looking grasses or mosses along the way for fuel for a fire. The birds can help a little, they’re probably used to carrying small sticks for nests.

Once it gets late, they’ll find north from the stars.

Unfortunately, the melting snow makes finding dry firewood difficult. Not impossible, though; not everything is directly on the ground, and the birds are well-aware of every shelter and hidey-hole free of snow in the vicinity. With a bit of time, they can retrieve sufficient tinder to set fire to larger bits of wood. 

Eventually, night falls. The stars are not the correct stars. 

…

It is known that the stars in the sky are the suns of other planets, incredibly far away. It is also known that the stars appear to move over time; the ancient Egyptians’ star maps look subtly different than modern ones. However, the stars of tonight are not supposed to be completely different from the stars of last.

It is too soon and too strange to start making hypotheses. It is clear there is high magic at work.

They hope the rest of themself is safe.

They will sharpen some sticks, then kill, roast, and eat whatever they have controlled that looks plumpest. They’ll also fill their flask with snow and place it near the fire to melt.

They will sit by the fire and meditate until morning. They do not need sleep. If they get cold they’ll use some lemmings for warmth. The birds, or whatever has the best night vision, can keep watch.

They’ll relax their control over most of the animals and let them follow their instincts. Keeping them on too tight a leash can cause erratic behavior. The corvid will stay subverted, though.

Dinner will be a rangy snow-hare, then. It's decent food, considering the lack of salt, etc, but rather lean.

Allowed to follow their instincts, but not to flee the scene, the animals will curl up and sleep, and take watch. 

In the night, howling is heard, but no wolves make themselves known at the campsite. Eventually, after a long and unpleasant night, dawn comes, and with it just a little bit more warmth. At least the weather is still clear. 

They stretch, drink some water, and kick the fire out. Today they’ll go exploring, looking for a better source of water and some variety in food sources. This area looks like it should have berries. They’ll also want to gather some resources for more permanent shelter, but they’ll wait to pick stuff up until they’re coming back.

They pick a direction and start walking. Some birds will fly in other directions to cover more ground. They’ll leave a lemming near camp to help them stay oriented.

The birds are aware of various creeks in the region, and of thier current state of frozen-ness (mostly very, though some have thawed a little). They also collectively are very aware of the many trees and bushes that would produce berries were it not so early in spring that even the blossom has not yet had time to come out. There might be some hardy bulbs and tubers worth digging, if they can distinguish what's good for various animals to eat from what's good for people to it. 

Regarding shelter, the animals know of a variety of caves, sinkholes, vents, and other points of entry into the ground. Most regard them with a deepseated instinctive apprehension, though the anomalous corvid also thinks of them as relaxing in some sense, like being near them satisifes a mild but significant craving.  

How far can Seliun get from the lemming while still remaining in contact with it?

They’ll dig up some tubers and bulbs as they find them to try later.

Seliun has their own newfound apprehension for caves, too.

There must be some source of energy common to these underground structures that the corvid and some of the other strange animals are able to harvest. Probably best to not use them for shelter unless they can verify they’re not currently inhabited by a predator.

Their range increases significantly the more minds they have anywhere in their network, even if they’re not particularly powerful minds. They’re guessing they’d maintain a strong connection until they got around 25 kilometers away. Proprioception across bodies fails to be useful as a method of location-sensing after a few kilometers though.

Travel proceeds as such, Seliun's caution keeping them away from many of the threats and anomalies of the forest for some time, as they wander through the thawing pines. 

Eventually, they stumble into sensing radius of one of those predators - a pair of great drakes, each about the size of a horse, thier back legs clawed and thier front limbs great membranous limbs. They sit together, either side of a dead moose, which they devour ravenously. They're obviously meant to fly, despite being much too large to do so, under a normal understanding of the biophysics of flight. 

Wow! Those are some weird looking lizards! They’ll do a slow, light scan of their minds to try to get a sense of their intelligence without disturbing them too much. If they killed that moose themselves, they’ll make excellent weapons. Maybe even mounts.

Now that they know they’re far from home, they’re going to have to be less squeamish about using somewhat intelligent animals as thralls, but they’d like to know what they’re going to do before they do it.

Fortunately, these drakes are dumb as bricks. If the mind of a human is like air to move through,  and the corvid is like water, then the mind of these drakes is like a sugar syrup; the resistance is high enough to be annoying, to slow access to the mind, but ultimately not a true barrier. 

And once they do have access, Seliun finds very little. They're not really stupid, ultimately, they have plenty of raw processing power, but they have one-dimensional, raptorial minds - like an owl or an eagle, all thier cognitive effort is spent searching the world for signs of food or danger. These two are a mated pair and love each other dearly, but they wouldn't consider any other drake anything but a threat. There's really not much they don't class as a threat or a meal, really. They're not really capable of planning, and their main emotions are the aching hunger of something that just woke up from hibernation and joy at having a good meal together. 

The resistance is unexpected. Before Selivu was created, some of the individuals involved in their creation were already weak psychics, and faced similar levels of resistance when trying to use psychic abilities on humans. That’s how far back they have to look in their memories to have a point of comparison. 

The resistance in combination with the low intelligence is even more unexpected. Intelligence and innate psychic ability do not increase in lockstep, but there is a correlation, generally. 

Unexpected developments aside, they’ll control the drakes and add them to their own subnetwork, separate from the other animals. It’s mostly for organizational purposes, it’ll make it easier to make the drakes do one thing and the rest to do another. 

They’ll root deeper through their memories a little for anything of note, then continue walking. The drakes can have their fill of their meal, however long that might take. They don’t want to have to worry about feeding them. They’ll want to investigate their flying abilities, but that can wait.

They’ll also cycle out their crowd of forest critters for new ones and read their memories. It very well could be that the other ones had only never seen humans because they only inhabit a tiny section of the forest.

The drakes finish eating pretty quickly, they're gluttons at heart. Seliun can presumably benefit from adding the (mundane, here) corvids that are attracted by the carrion, and who are lurking on the edge of the forest until the predators are done. 

The drakes are by far and away the widest-ranging creatures here, having on occasion flown dozens or hundreds of kilometres, and joy of joys, they're aware of a location that has a perpetual plume of smoke coming from what looks awfully like a chimney of some kind, deep in the forest. It's about 50 kilometres away, about 150 degrees off from their current direction of travel, quite outside the normal travel range of any of the smaller critters. 

They’ll add the birds, the drakes are hungry.

The chimney is… interesting. Promising. Weird.

They’ll head in that direction, drakes leading. They could send the drakes ahead and check it out that way, but they suspect a human body is best for whatever they’ll encounter there. Besides, the human body is best for conducting psychic abilities. They’ll plan on walking for about 5 hours today, weather permitting.

Ideally they would keep some record of the approximate area they appeared before abandoning it. They’ll have the lemming left at camp dig a large shallow circle in the dirt to help identify the site later, then release control over it. 

Travel is uneventful, for the first few days. The weather stays cold, but clear, no storms running through, which is fortunate. Not much wants to pick a fight with the drakes, and they can easily be fed mind-controlled deer or moose as such animals are found. 

On the third day of walking, Seliun stumbles upon a clearing, a little valley, through which runs a stream, just barely melted enough to flow, still with bits of ice and frost along it's edges. The ground is covered in a layer of bright green - plants not unlike bluebells, the first small herbs they've really seen in this world still slowly waking from winter, and every plant has a spray of flowers. Within each flower is a point of light, bright and rich and glowing blue or white or gold, suspended there by no clear means. There are a few bees about, but it's still the relatively cool morning and presumably more will arrive with the warmth of noon (or what passes for it in this cold climate). 

They’re quite pretty. They’ll - poke one of the lights with a stick to see if it’s safe, then put their hand near one. Are they warm?

It’s too bad plants don’t have minds, they would like to know what’s going on here. It seems like - natural magic, a low and simple magic. It would seem that magic is common in this place, as opposed to being a rare oddity almost everywhere back home.