She blinks awake ... Ooh! A rift! And a calm enough one to see through.

And...

...Memories of Earth well up strong. Because that is a skyscraper in progress, and beyond it a city, more glass and steel and-

She goes through smart quick before it can close on her! (Invisibly. Because cameras exist.)

Hey Tamamo, are you listening? This could be important. You know those otherworlders that help introduce technology and stuff? Right? I found more of them!!

(Patience, kiddo. I'll be involved later, I'm sure, no need to rush to the ending all at once.)

She feels the distant divine presence of Tamamo glance at her, and then keep watching, the faint feeling of half an eye on her, clearly not intending to do anything right away.

Okay then... Okay. Wow.

First thing she does is, swap to biped-human form, because that's who cities are built for. Then look up through the construction and try to find the highest spot she could perch on... Then leap up to it, two or three stories at a time with supernaturally boosted parkour, and take in a big wide view of the city.

She can get up to the forty-eighth floor of this skyscraper, which is built in twelve banks of four, each rotationally offset from the bank below for little corner balconies. It's not very complete but it is structurally stable all the way up the dark maze of cables and crossbeams.

This is a pretty normal sized building for this city, with some things taller and some shorter (there are a couple structures that are only one story in the parts that aren't two, at the edges of a park, but everything else she can see is at least four). The biggest visible street has a few slow moving truck headlights but most of the streets don't look built for significant vehicle traffic. There's stairs down to a subway and some people walking around under the streetlights.

Gosh.

She tries to crawl through her vague memories for where this might be. Singapore has really immense density, right...? And they'll jail you for spitting chewing gum on the ground, she thinks.

What do any signs or writing look like? How's the weather?

There are light-up signs with letters made of simple shapes like boxes and triangles. Looks monolingual or at least monoalphabetical. It's cool and springy and partly cloudy.

It doesn't really look right for any of the east-asian languages she remembers. It's sort of in the general area. She's nnnnot a linguist though.

She's going to - invisibly - leap from the tower and really stretch the illusion muscles with an invisible but tangible illusory-paraglider. She'll get down to street level, and drop the last twenty feet or so after dismissing it midair. Maybe go for the park, maybe look for... Subway station? Those have maps, right?

The park doesn't have a map. Just plants, none quite familiar, and benches, and a playground with a zipline and a wobbly bridge between high play structures and one of those big circular swing things with room for six kids at once and slides.

The subway station has a subway map. This city has eleven lines. This station is the third station from the northeast endpoint of the light blue line.

Run along the tracks to a less crowded area that is a bad idea.

She's going to run along the streets and look for anything that is in English or looks like an embassy or something.

- Nope
- Nothing
- Triangles, squares, circles, crosses, V shapes pointing in various directions, squiggles.
- Those and nothing else.
- This might be a different language or just a wacky font.
- No such luck.
- There is no evidence that they have even identified the national flag!
- No.

This place is immense. It's kind of oppressive. It's also the middle of the night still... And she can't exactly enjoy fried chicken and video games or whatever else again if she doesn't have any fiat money or know the language.

There really should be some English around, it was the de facto world language... But she has been gone for decades, a lot can change in a century...

How was the park on greenery density? Probably insufficient for her purposes of somewhere to sleep. So she's going to pick a direction and quadrupedally run, and just keep going straight.

Eventually she hits neighborhoods of other character, including bigger parks, but not really dense plants per se.

The last subway stop connects to a surface train. The stops get farther apart, if she keeps going a few miles.

Yeah, she's already feeling uncomfortable and wants to interact with this place from a position of... Rurality.

Train tracks are open enough that she can run on top of them and really zip along and expect to be able to dodge any traffic.

...If the line isn't electrified or something.

It is! Probably she should not touch the tracks.

The suburbs give way to farms eventually. Grain. Fruit trees.

It was late evening when she left Tirra, so she's feeling quite tired by now as twilight starts creeping up. It's more comfortable out here, but not comfortably wild yet.

Any patches of not-actively-being-used plants out here? Those little long strips of woodland left up as wind-breaks like twenty feet across between fields sometimes? Failing that, a roof with a little secluded nook that seems unlikely to be frequently checked.

They have some windbreaks that also grow nuts or something, but occasionally there are truly otherwise useless shrubs serving this purpose.

She naps inamongst one of those for a while. Visible if you get close but her hearing is good enough to get some warning.

Before dawn the irrigation system soaks her.

ACK. They're wasting water on the windbreak?? Ehh forget the nap. She gets clear before getting completely soaked and goes to hang out in a road or something, damp, to think. They won't water the road. 

She's going to run out of energy being invisible all the time... But if she just hides away in the Woods Between instead (maybe she should have, she just tries not to spend all her time hidden away there) she won't be able to figure out where she is.

...Has she seen any animals out here in the agriculture zone? Other than, like, small rodents or birds. Farm animals, horses?

Not out at night, at any rate. There are barns that could have sleeping animals.

Mrrrrr tiiiiiired.

She goes back to the run, frustrated. They can't cultivate every inch of the planet, can they? Even in the Corn Belt or whatever. There's national parks and places that are just too expensive or not productive enough to develop.

Right?

If she keeps going she can find wetlands with bright red warning signs, and the landfill!

Eugh, more wet. Sure, wetlands are wild, but they're wet. And possibly some kind of toxic site, if there's that many signs...? She'd better avoid that, sounds unpleasant. And the landfill stench...

This has pretty quickly gotten less exciting than she thought. Because she's avoiding everyone. Which is her own fault.

...

She should have done this much sooner, but she starts 'saving' signs she sees as illusory text as she runs, and staring at them. And adding more that she thinks she remembers, mostly. Trying to pick out... Common words, or something.

A handful of short words are very popular on the alarming red signs and might mean "danger" or something like that.

A ways past the scary red sign zone there's some steep rocky mountainous areas.

Finally. Mountains are fine enough... Though some trees would be nice.

Of the 'curses' being a kitsune gave her, the city-aversion thing is probably the most inconvenient. It comes and goes, but it's strong right now.

She finds or maybe digs a spot to at least be kinda sheltered, a big rock on one side at least, to watch the stars and/or sunrise, and nap, and think in.

...Is this really Earth? With what night remains to her, she looks up at the sky... Does the moon exist and look right? Or, uh... Big dipper? That's the only Earth constellation she can actually remember.