And Lync's experimental physicists, who have been very bored waiting for the crowdfunding of the latest particle accelerator to meet its goals, set off to investigate. 

The local king verifies that this wasn't an expected possibility, and assumes that someone was conducting high-energy experiments. This seems like an opportunity for a large payout from a patron or organization! She makes sure that the medical first responders are instructed to carefully document everything.

Where's the power supply? They hadn't been tracking it, but they assumed that there would be mobile solar panels deployed to support whatever scientific group was getting up to this silliness.

There... don't seem to be any more than the expected number of solar panels in the area, actually, which are being used in the expected camping and hermits-in-the-wilderness sort of ways. 

...weird. Then they start getting trace amounts of radiation??? Still far below dangerous to human levels, these are designed to notify the end-user at genuinely absurd distances. It was a bit of a boondoggle, frankly. But they could at least triangulate, right?

Nope, the radiation seems to have passed. So probably some sort of experiment, not an ongoing source. Even stranger. They head towards the source: the Minister of the Interior is apparently personally involved and has gotten them a more precise location. Also "more people are inbound", as vague as that is.

The more precise location...seems to be a cave? It looks like a pretty normal cave. There's a reasonable landing spot for the helicopter, so they get out and head inside. Nothing seems dangerous, so far, but they're loaded out with more of their monitoring equipment than usual. Still, they didn't move that quickly.

And inside the cave there is a quantity of what is recognizably scientific equipment. It is monitored by a short long-haired androgynous person wearing what is recognizably a sweater and sweatpants, sitting on what is not at all recognizably a chair, in a position so precarious that they might fall over if lightly tapped. They're taking notes on a rectangular electronic device in a script that is not recognizable at all.

The person, who is named Thuridan, looks up. What do they make of the situation?

"Is everyone OK? We're med-responders, from Fochor." There's time to be angry later, and he isn't even that annoyed: it's hard for him to take "less than a second of sensor flare" that seriously, even if he gets that some important people are annoyed and the damages will likely be high. So his voice is calm and confident: not concerned, because that might scare them.

Thuridan is in perhaps the unluckiest position a Lyncean can be in.

She's a voker. This isn't uncommon; somewhere between a tenth and a third of Lynceans are vokers, depending on how you draw the boundary. But she's not a voker for doorknob design, where there is little competition; she's not a voker for education or factory logistics or cooking, where there's always a need for an additional worker; she's not even a voker for poetry or pottery, where you can gain satisfaction by making the thing even if no one wants it.

No, Thuridan is a voker for physics, one of the most popular vocations, and she is very simply not smart enough to contribute. 

With the help of therapy, Thuridan has figured out a way to cope with this fact. She spends thirty hours a week studying physics and seventy hours a week cleaning houses, a high-paid profession which allows her to make a small contribution to the particle accelerator crowdfunding campaigns. She thinks about her current physics problem set while she cleans. She's considering hiring a matchmaker to match her with a woman of similar mind, so that they can quit their jobs and live on UBI and get sperm donations from top physicists and raise ten or twelve children who might be able to advance the frontiers of scientific understanding. 

So being the physicist nearest to the weird cave anomaly-- the one who can observe what's going on and babysit whatever machines they could scrounge up, before the real experimental physicists can fly in and take over-- is the single happiest moment of Thuridan's life. She doesn't want it to be an exciting new kind of radiation that will kill her but she's, you know, a little tempted. 

But Thuridan is not so excited by physics that she's going to completely ignore the strangers in the cave. She says "I don't speak that language" in Adamar, the only language she speaks, and fiddles with her handheld and has it say "I don't speak that language" in the eight most-spoken languages on Lync.

Then she snaps pictures of them, creates a new thread on the Weird Anomaly messageboard, and adds in the information that unexpected people have shown up.