He's in a featureless desert.

A flying rectangle descends from the sky and resolves into a flying carpet with a purple woman on it. "You have Word of Recall or another teleport?"

He feels things! Somewhat surprising.
Does he still have all his limbs? Yes, uninjured even.
Does he still have his notebook? Obviously.
Does he still have his staff? Ok, yes, everything fine, he can now pay attention to other things around him.

"Sorry, what?!" he asks in Ankilian, his...native-with-an-asterisk language of the last 30 years.

Desert. He knows deserts! Deserts are not the best place to be in, usually. But not the worst, either.

On a deeper level...that’s somewhat unusual. This is the next worlf, he feels it. But instead of being ingrained in the world, becoming mostly a part of it, having a normal life and only vaguely having memories of being a multiversal traveler or a reincarnation of one, he just appeared. Popped out of the air. Being perfectly aware of the transference. With the same (relatively speaking. It’s different on an ontological level, of course) body and clothes.
The staff is here, but is it the same? It’s the same, as far as he can tell. He can sense the magic inside. So it’s a magical world, good.

...she shakes her head. "Taldane? Osiriani?" she asks. She could do a Tongues but she'd rather not waste a slot if he's doing fine and about to pop back to wherever he was aiming at in the first place.

"I am sorry, I don't speak your language". He says. Which is obviously a pointless thing to say, as she doesn't understand the language. It was a long time since he last needed to interact with people without a shared language, he's out of habit.

He tried to gesture. It mostly looks like flailing his arms around.

She's gonna... slowly and clearly cast Comprehend Languages, in case he recognizes it and can explain whether he needs a ride or not without her using up a Tongues.

She's not far better at gestures than he is! Or he is just bad at interpreting them.
Unless...well how statically probable it is that the same approaches to spellcasting...he was never good at statistics. But checking shouldn't be a problem.
He concentrates. Nothing happens.
He carefully presses on his eyes with one hand, tightly gripping the staff with the other. Tries again.
His magic-sight activates.
"Oh, thank the energies, it works!".
He looks at the woman. Yes, she did in fact cast a spell, he was right. Now it affects her...somehow. Different kind of magic, hard to say for sure what it does.

...

"Detect Magic."

Magic is flowing through his eyes.
His staff is magical, but doesn't seem to do anything.
There is some magical object under his shirt, likeways doesn't do anything.

"Doesn't really help in the current situation, though. At least I was correct that it was a spell, and now I know it wasn't cast on me. If it was it might have been a problem. My intuition tells me to say things now even if they are not understood, which is not hard to do. And I tend to often speak thoughts out loud anyway. Which is not uncorrelated with the fact my intuition tells me to, it very rarely tells me to do things I wouldn't usually do..." he trails off, visibly loosing his train of thought. He keeps flailing his hands around. That's just how he talks.

Suppose she gestures with raised eyebrows at the flying carpet.

"Ok, I'll go with the obvious though not certain interpretation. You are asking me a question, and the question is about the...blanket, which seems to fly, if I understood correctly what was happening around me. And if, further, the question is about whether I want to fly on it somewhere, I guess the answer is yes, if the alternative is staying in the desert." Though his subconsciousness screams there are many other different conclusions he could make. He is not, for example, very good at reading expressions, especially of weird purple people, to be sure that the exact form of raised eyebrows indicates a question. But it's not a very big gamble. Probably.

He doesn't remember if he saw purple-skinned people in any of his last lives. He likes purple. One thing good about this world already (if he is correct about it being a different world).
This an obviously-unserious thought, he doesn't decide which things are good by whether he personally likes them.

This suffices! She nods and hops back onto the carpet and waves him on. "Sothis," she says, pointing.

He sits on the carpet.

"Wait, so you do understand what I am saying? Nod your head" he slowly nods and points at his head "if you understand me. That's at least some useful channel of communication."

Nod nod. The carpet arises and heads for Sothis.

"And I would guess – without certainty – that the spell you cast is the reason you understand me. Which makes sense, I was just not thinking of it as something magic can do. Though of course if it's a different world the laws of magic could be different  – with a greater chance than the laws of basic nature  – and so different things are possible to do with magic. Or maybe it's just reading my mind. That I know is possible."

She shakes her head firmly at 'reading my mind'.

Raz would like to talk more, figure out a more efficient way for it in the situation. But the one-sidedness does make it harder, and he also pattern-matches to "previous cases in his life where people were annoyed by his behavior", which isn't certain but better to avoid. And his intuition tells him there is no hurry and a better communication option could appear later.

So instead he takes out a small but extremely magical book out of his clothes, and starts writing something in it with a weird pen.

She leans over interestedly, though she will wait to actually read the contents till he shows her.

"Ah? It's my notebook, write interesting things in it that I might otherwise forget. Which is most things, probably. Fortunately I am good at the noting!"
The handwriting is terrible, and the contents are nearly incomprehensible even with Comprehend Languages, full of random word combinations like "cocktail there demon", "Robert's weird", "mana of 1.5 Illamars", "children asking", "general reversed Shaving Principle" and "many fuzzy pies".

She giggles at "many fuzzy pies".

"I think it was Robert?" he mumbles half to himself, but clearly enough to hear "Most really weird things in my life were either Buss or Robert. Never met anyone else with such talent in magic combined with such lack of sense or ability to constructively do things that result in something better, instead of...random bullshit. Well, not counting the time he grew a brain-forest. That was weird, but certainly useful."

"Ew!"

"Illithids eat brains, but the one we met was a pacifist. Didn't want to harm anybody, but had to live somehow, right? How to solve the conundrum? Well, a passing insane sorcerer created a self-sustaining system of artificial brains for him! If something organic that grows can be called "artificial". Wish all my problems – all problems, really – could be solved like that.
It's mostly a question of...having the right tool for the job, in the right place in the right time. And the tool itself being in the condition to do the necessary thing, not just have the potential. Robert was a terrible tool, despite the huge potential, because he was basically allergic to logic or the concept of usefulness. I am not good at fulfilling the potential of usefulness either, but that's because finding the right place and time is hard."

"Ohhh," she says, when he explains about what the brain forest was for.