They have trail rations: dry bread and meat and fruit, and lots of spices for flavor. "It's expensive to carry fresh stuff," Viatrix explains, "and game's poor here, we eat better when we visit cities." 

Otho is sitting in a quiet nook with a big book open in his lap and his fingers twitching spasmodically above it. He takes the occasional a bite out of anything the others put in his free hand without seeming to really register what it was; a small cake is followed by a sausage and then half an apple.

"Don't bother him," someone tells her, "if he loses focus he'll need to start over, it takes him an hour every morning. Other wizards learn to do it quicker but he just doesn't like to be hurried."

Viatrix appears bearing two steaming mugs. "Drink this, it'll wake you right up! What was all that last night? Your armor has a lot more, uh, moving parts inside than I thought constructs did." Not that she knows how to make constructs, but she helped, uh, deconstruct some golems before, and they weren't anything like that.

"Stimulant?" She accepts it. "Thaaaaat was, uh, the Spark. It's well known at home that Sparks have - episodes when they're working. The stronger the mania the better the result... I would HOPE that I can make use of it properly at least!"

Oh good, it's something she knows and is used to. "That's good to hear! I was a bit worried last night. So, what'd you make? I thought you were going to need a workshop before making stuff."

"Quite! And, well! I was reusing parts from other things, and that seems to have done well enough! The lightning blaster is no more and neither are the quaternary leg extension boosters. Instead, I can use the energy of lightning to create a hot plasma- There's nothing to hold it together for long but the rails will launch it forward until the resulting energy sphere loses cohesion and explodes in the air- Impact detonation as a convenient side effect. Those demon things are not immune to force and heat like they are lightning, are they?"

"You're describing something like a fireball, but with force as well as heat? That should work great! Only the strongest demons are immune to fire, and I don't think anything at all is immune to force. Except ghosts, probably." She looks briefly thoughtful. "How many times a day can you do that?"

"Great!" Huh, that's a bit of an odd framing. "...Well, as long as my core pressure is above twelve hundred, I think, though moving and the blunderbuss and everything else all draw from the core too. It'll take a bit between shots. After a dozen shots I might need to go in and clean and realign things, I suppose. And a dozen shots would be pretty draining on the core too. That's what I was doing with all that firewood by the way- Burning it to raise core pressure."

"A dozen fireballs! You hear that, Otho? Why can't you do a dozen fireballs per day?"

Otho has closed his book and is gulping down his tea. "I would," he says with dignity, "if we spent enough time fighting. Instead I waste my skills conjuring horses, only for us to turn around and ride back the very next day."

"We're not riding back, we haven't been to Kenabres yet! You're just grumpy because you didn't buy that flying carpet in Sothis."

    "The pursuit of knowledge is more important than the pursuit of flying. I made the right choice."

"Your new hairtie looks great," she says mollifyingly. To Waltana: "he's just annoyed because he spent all his spells on horses yesterday, and didn't have any fireballs left for the vrocks. We thought we wouldn't see demons until we reached the actual border. Now we have to spend a little more time going to Kenabres first. But that's fine! We were going to go there eventually anyway. Maybe afterwards we can visit the Lastwall border instead."

"Construct mounts- Or conjured mounts I should say- Are also really impressive! Not that I've seen them yet, but I can't do anything I haven't built something for. What's Lastwall?"

Nom, nom. Sausage!! Meat is a rare luxury, takes too much space. The food's not bad. The spices are neat.

She gets her map out again. "To the east of the 'wound is Mendev. To the south is Ustalav. But the south border is mostly held by Lastwall's army, even though Lastwall itself is way over there" - she points. "Ustalav doesn't have a proper army, for good and for ill."

"Lastwall's a Lawful Good country run by the church of Iomedae. They're nice people, by all accounts, overworked with a hundred pressing problems. It's said to be good for your soul to spend a season or two helping them."

"We came up the River Road to Egede, then went west until we got here. Now we can detour a bit north to Kenabres before going back to the border, and eventually down south to Nerosyan - that's the capital - and then we can go west to Lastwall's border, if we want."

"...Hmm. Yeah, someone needs to keep the demons in, right? Damn, still stinks I couldn't get them yesterday. I wonder if I could sell powered wagons. Those aren't too bad. Or walker wagons."

"You definitely can! If not in Kenabres, then in bigger cities for sure. And helping people travel is good in itself."

"Ready to move out? We can talk more on the road, we have the whole day ahead of us!"

"Yeah, sure, lemme just scarf something down-" 

She's ready to march in another five minutes. The armor's gait is a bit different than before. What's the landscape like? She's used to endless ice and snow.

The snow looks pretty endless, but it did snow a lot yesterday! This snow has ground under it, and melts in spring, and there are rocks and trees sticking out of it. There are even a few animals in the distance.

They walk the first few miles, until they reach a river running in a deep canyon. The sky on the far side is banded in shades of blue, like an aurora squatting on half the horizon. "That's the Wardstones," someone supplies.

There's a cobbled road running along the near bank, snowed-over but well maintained, and they stop for Otho to wave his hands.

Two carriages appear out of nowhere, one after the other. They are built out of wood with metal wheels and looks completely unremarkable. Each also has a pair of horses harnessed, and their hooves trail off into half-transparent smoke. They hover over the ground, but manage to imply they're standing on it and just have invisible hooves for some reason.

Everyone piles into the carriages as if this is perfectly normal. A couple of men take the drivers' spots, but instead of picking up the reins they twist around to join in on the conversation. The coaches start rolling anyway.

"Now we probably have a boring day ahead of us, so you can ask all the questions you can think of, and then we'll tell more stories! If you want to rest or sleep, we can try to tie your armor on the roof and hope it doesn't break. Let's try to avoid that though, the spell doesn't don't last all day so we shouldn't make long stops."

"Oh yeah," Otho adds, "before I forget, the spell I used yesterday, Share Language, lasts a night and a day. I prepared it again and I'll cast it when this one runs out in the afternoon. You should look into learning a local language, it won't do to rely on a caster every time." And the spell has a cost of opportunity but he doesn't mind if it's just for a while.

Her armor leans into an almost-sliding sort of jog alongside the carriages. It's, annoyingly, just slightly faster than the carriage itself is- Which she solves by steering left and right a bit to stay in the same relative place. 

"I've never learned a language before. Not - deliberately, anyway? It seems like this effect ought to be helpful for that, maybe I should write down what I can tell about it while I still can, hmm? I definitely want to learn how you're doing all that, it does not seem to be the same thing I do at all but it's still giving me Sparky feelings! How did you get started, Otho? I assume many people learn this thing, from context clues."

"Not as many as could learn it, I'm afraid. There aren't enough wizards to teach everyone who could learn, and most people can't afford to pay for the tutoring anyway."

"My parents are traders, they could afford to send me to school to learn to read and write and count. I finished the three-year program in one. They paid to have me tested, I screened well on cunning, so they got a loan from the Bank of Abadar, because they knew I could repay if I became a wizard. I went to live with my uncle in Almas, there's a few wizards there who run a school, they rotate through because none of them wants to be teaching full-time."

"I studied there for three and a half years. After the first two I could pay my own way, doing laundry and such - there's a spell to clean things very quickly, and it's so simple that we can cast it as much as we want to, so a lot of people work as 'laundry wizards', there's always a market for that in a big city. After I could hang some real spells and had my own spellbook, I went home and helped my parents for a bit, paid back the loan."

"And then I went adventuring!" He grins. "Met Viatrix and her Spears a couple of years ago. They were heading for Absalom and Sothis, and I really couldn't pass up the chance. Then we went back north and up the River Road, like you heard."

"Is there a lot of fighting? Have you heard of Paris? I've never heard of Absalom or Sothis or Lastwall or Mendev or any of the places you all keep mentioning... Paris is the largest city in the continent of Europa."

"Absalom is the largest city I know of. It's not the biggest on the continent, because it's on an island, but there isn't a bigger city in Avistan and I don't know if there's a bigger city in the world. There are three hundred thousand people living in it. I've never heard of Paris or Europa."

"Me neither," Viatrix confirms. "Our names for the continents are Avistan, Garund, Arcadia, Tian Xia... Uh, Azlant... And this bit south of Tian Xia, some people call it a separate continent but I don't know its name. Can you find Europa on a map?"

"Probably? It has a large inland sea - though the area south of the sea is called Africa, I think. The maps you've showed me so far don't look familiar, though..."

"How big is it? Is there anyone on the map it would fit?"

    "Are you sure you're not, like, from another plane or planet or something?" Spell translation of 'plane': non-contiguous region of space.

"We might be missing an inland sea somewhere, I'm sure we're not missing a whole continent."

    "There definitely isn't an inner sea anywhere near here. There's just lakes. Any further north and it would freeze over."

"Are you sure you can find this Europa on a map?" Most people don't know the names of the continents. Most people aren't a band of traveling Desnans.

    "Can you draw us a map?"

"I'm not entirely sure, we only had so many books. Paris is two hundred miles and change from London, I remember, it was relevant in a war history about 'the most densely patrolled stretch of air in Europa', and London and Paris were close on the maps - maybe an eighth of the width of Europa apart. Oh, I saw maps, I think I'd recognize it?"

She scribbles down her best quick recollection, and hands it over, naming each thing she labelled as they peer at it.

They pass it around.

"A sunken city... somewhere in the Steaming Sea?"

    "No, no, over here in the Linnorm lands -"

"None of the rest matches. How about the VAMPIRES? If that's Ustalav, and the Ice Lords are the giants up in the Crown, then this 'Black Sea' is the Lake of Mists..."

    "Nidal is not the cradle of civilization!"

"That would make Belkzen the Wulfenbach empire?"

    "No, see, there are pyramids south, that's Osirion, so this has to be in Avistan -"

"I bet there are pyramids everywhere, they're the simplest shape for a big pile of rocks -"

Eventually they are forced to conclude that the map doesn't match Avistan, and probably not Tian Xia either.

"Either your map predates Earthfall," Viatrix says, "or you're not from anywhere around here." Or she saw a made-up map, but that would be rude to say.

The snowstorm she was lost in was very mysterious and messed with all her tech and probably super magic somehow... It must be another world.

"Another world! Bless Desna, patroness of travelers!"

They have a start-chart, and a schematic of the solar system showing the other planets, but no maps. "How many planets did your system have, and which was yours from the sun? Golarion is third of eleven, but the eleventh is kind of weird and might not be a planet in the usual sense. There used to be two more but they collided and now there's an asteroid belt."

"There are portals between planets, supposedly, but they're very secret and well guarded and I have no idea where any of them are. Everyone agrees the elves have a portal to somewhere, but we have no idea where to."

    "Boss, please don't tell me we're running off into the nearest snow storm."

"Only if it's super magic! Otho, what's your reading?"

    "I didn't detect magic on the snowstorm! I was busy with the vrocks!"

"...are you alright, though?" Viatrix asks Waltana more quietly, "leaving home not by choice and having no way back can be hard..."

"I don't actually know. The books weren't consistent. I've heard six, eight, nine, ten, and twelve. And... I don't know, but the only thing to do about it is move forward."

Moving forward it is, then!

They rattle along for a few hours, at a speed that's only safe because the horses don't get tired and the carriages will disappear anyway and can be abused, and anyway they're all adventurers and can survive a little crash. They meet two mounted patrols, one of them escorting a supply caravan. Word about the vrocks is passed on, and they get resigned headshakes in return: people who serve on the border are used to this, and it's nowhere near as bad as it was during the last crusade.

Eventually the road leads them to a city. The land around it has been cleared for half a mile out; charred wood and blackened stone is everywhere, the remains of buildings and trees and vehicles and less identifiable things all mangled together, and the walls are unbroken but scorched in many places. Armed men are pacing the walltop and there's a queue at the gates.